Peter woke up and had no idea where he was, body haunted by ghosts of fingers scrambling over his skin and eyes filled with savages in the shadows on his wall. Everything had been shifted two feet to the left and he was alone, painfully alone in a world that had been tipped on its side and he was the only one upright anymore. Breathing was tricky. He managed quick pulls of air sharp enough to hack his lungs to ribbons, and the ribbons formed bows to wrap around the gifts of his choking coughs. His muscles had forgotten what moving away from danger meant; they just tensed and flexed awkwardly, and the attempts he made at pushing himself closer to the wall just made him feel weak and helpless. Peter wanted to scream, but if respiration hurt then he couldn't imagine the agony of vocalisation, so instead he bit holes into his tongue and cried into his pillow.

He woke every morning, without fail, at seven o'clock on the nose. It was out of necessity as much as habit; who knew what would happen if someone came to retrieve him and discovered that he was lazily sleeping the day away? The mere thought made barbs of anxiety catch in his chest, driving in further with the rapid bah-bumb of his heartbeat, so he forced himself to wake with the sun. Peter wasn't able to get up, though, for a painful twenty minutes after he jerked awake—until his brain told his body to relax because he was in his borrowed bedroom, where no-one was sneaking around his room in the dead of night or the bleary stretches of dawn. It helped, but not much.

Finally, he remembered Tony's oh-so-casual question on the lift the day prior—if the people-finder worked for Tony, who's to say it wouldn't work for Peter as well? He pushed himself to a sitting position, shaking rather horribly, and cast his eyes around the ceiling before asking if anyone else was awake and about.

He washed his face, used the toilet, and wrestled on clean clothes to give himself time to feign calm before padding silently to the kitchen, where the people-finder had said he'd find Clint. The something-like-a-man in question was sprawled out atop the refrigerator with a bottle of water in his hands and a smattering of bruises obscuring the right half of his face.

Peter swallowed hard and reminded himself firmly to ignore the injuries as he climbed onto one of the stools, gnawing absently at his sleeve. It was just something one didn't talk about, especially given the non-reactions to the man-who-hits. He decided, in the end, to clear the sleep from his throat and ask, "Why are you on the fridge?"

"Why are you on the stool?" Clint fired back tiredly, cracking open his left eye. It was a fair enough question, he thought—but maybe Clint thought Peter wasn't supposed to be on the stool the way Peter thought Clint wasn't supposed to be on the refrigerator. He slid down carefully and stood on his tiptoes instead, tapping his fingers lightly across the island as he stared up at Clint.

"How did you even get up there?"

Clint managed to open his other eye and rolled them, taking a sip of his water as he resigned himself to wakefulness. "I flew. I'm talented that way."

"People can't fly." He should know—when he was four, he'd jumped off of the shed at the group home in an attempt at flight only to be rewarded with a broken wrist and two hours of a simultaneously furious and distraught Miss Baker.

"Batman can fly."

Peter frowned, shaking his head vigorously. "Batman can't fly; he just has a special cape. And, besides, you're not Batman."

"How do you know?" Clint grinned, lopsided due to the one-sided swelling.

"'Cause Batman's name is Bruce Wayne, and yours is Clint."

"For the comics, sure, but why would I give my secret identity away to comic-book makers?" Tony shuffled in then, rather remarkably resembling a zombie with half-blinking eyes and steps that left his feet not quite leaving the ground, and bypassed them both in favour of acquiring a cup of coffee.

"Don't let him lie to you, Pete," Tony yawned as he waited for his cup to fill. "He's a bird, not a bat."

"Birds fly too."

"Birds are not bats, and you are not Batman," Peter said sternly, crossing his arms on the granite.

"Then I'm Birdman!"

"Birdbrain," corrected Tony as he pushed one of Clint's legs out of the way to open the refrigerator. Peter craned his neck to follow the movements—shredded cheese, eggs, broccoli, butter, milk, bacon, followed by a glass bowl, a whisk, and a frying pan, all set in a neat pile on the counter—and flinched slightly at every unnecessarily loud noise Tony made, which wound up being most noises.

"I think you're supposed to crack them first," he said quietly when Tony set the pan on the stove and put a pair of eggs inside. The response was to loudly whisk air in the glass bowl. "T-Tony? Sorry, but I really don't think you're doing this right."

"Nope, this is precisely how breakfast is made." He was really very certain that it wasn't, but Peter managed to hold his tongue by picking at one of the small holes his teeth had made in the sleeve of his shirt. "Steve! Good morning."

"That's the fourth time you've said 'good morning' to me today." Steve patted Peter's shoulder as he passed, nicked the mug from Tony's hand to take a sip of his coffee (blatantly ignoring the squawk of protest), and raised his eyebrows at the sorry attempt at food-making.

"I retain my right to say good morning so long as it is morning-time and not awful, and it's currently both. Besides, zao shang hao just doesn't have the right ring to it." Tony sat on the stool beside the one Peter had been using upon receiving his coffee back, gesturing vaguely to Steve as if to say See? I told you this is how breakfast is made. The boy shook his head in response, hesitantly edging up onto the stool to see if Tony would shout. He didn't.

The following twenty minutes found Natasha appearing silently beside Peter (and he didn't nearly scream, because that would be childish and six years old is not an age where one is allowed to behave as a child, thank you), watching with interest as Steve magically produced omelettes, and Bruce edging in to procure a mug of tea. Natasha agreed on Tony's assessment of Clint's superhero title being Birdbrain, while Bruce maintained a wall of indifference by never looking up from his tea.

Somewhere along the way, Tony had pressed a cup of orange juice into Peter's hands. He was staring into the liquid with interest, wondering what Bruce found so consuming and whether or not it was exclusive to tea, when Steve slid him a plate. While he wasn't particularly hungry—it wasn't as though breakfast was a luxury Peter was often allowed—there was always that nagging question in the back of his mind of when will my next meal be?, so he managed to clear most of it off before nudging it toward Natasha and returning to his juice.

That was when Clint, unknowingly prompting chaos, announced that he was going to play the Xbox and Peter, bewildered, asked if they actually had one. This led to the revelation that Peter, despite being a young boy in a modern era, had never actually played a video game. Ever.

So he found himself planted in the living room with a funky-looking controller in his hands, an erroneously titled game (combat wasn't really spelled with a K, was it?) on a nearly obscenely large television screen, and five shocked adults behaving like children around him (well, okay, it was really three—Bruce, while clearly surprised, kept himself distant across the room, and Steve mumbled something about finally someone else who doesn't know how to technology). Clint called the first round and switched easily between screens until selecting a ninja in a black and yellow outfit ("SCORPION!") as his character, directing Peter until the boy chose a similar ninja in blue.

When the actual round started, Peter just stared at the screen with a perplexed frown, testing the buttons several steps away from Clint's character. "I don't understand," he sighed, cautiously setting the controller down on his lap. "How come my guy wants to fight yours?"

"They just… do," Clint shrugged. He vaguely recalled there being some sort of archenemy backstory, but wasn't certain enough to say for sure why the two ninjas were at war. "Is it important?"

Peter chewed his lower lip and nodded, so Clint pressed a combination of buttons sending them back to the character selection screen and chose the Joker. That was a story Peter knew—Batman was his selection, along with a mumbled "bats aren't birds"—though he was fairly certain that the Joker never managed to beat Batman in any of the stories he had heard second-hand from Wade.

Watching the people proved much more interesting than watching the game itself. Steve pressed the buttons with a great deal of care, constantly glancing down to check what he was doing, and gave up his controller with a shrug and a smile when Superman thrashed the Green Lantern. Natasha looked far more focused on the job at hand—each move was done precisely, nothing at all like the random mashing of buttons Peter had preferred—and managed a "FLAWLESS VICTORY!" with an inappropriately clothed woman called Kitana. Clint relinquished his controller to Bruce with an exaggerated pout and made a point to nudge Natasha with his foot every several seconds.

By the time they switched to Mario Kart (around lunch, when Bruce and Tony cheerfully announced that they were off to science), Peter had won a single match. He may have won more if he hadn't insisted on picking villains and purposefully losing so they "got what they deserved," but he was very proud of his one win. Mario Kart levelled the playing field significantly, considering Clint and Natasha were too busy trying to hinder the other to pay much attention to Peter or Steve. That eventually dissolved into the former pair wrestling over a stolen controller, so Steve suggested something a little less competitive. LittleBigPlanet did not fit that description in practice, but it was wildly fun.

Apologies for my slow writing pace. I'd like to promise an improvement in the future, but I've met myself a time or two and I'm fairly certain that I'm not going to magically write faster. Welp.