super super. peter parker

𝗧𝗪𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗬

"Mr Stark actually listens to this while working?"

Friday answered in confirmation as Eddy continued to shout along to the jumbled words with half of them being wrong. The work that flashed blue in the middle of the room was left abandoned as he used his thick socks to slide across the floor as he danced.

"Eddy, what are you doing?"

He jumped as Happy's low voice rang in from the doorway. Eddy stopped, face flushed, as the older man leaned his head through, eyebrows raised. He was dressed in the same suit as always, despite being out of hours.

His eyes flickered toward the blue holograms. "Research?"

Happy paused, and then shook his head before he stalked off toward the stairs, an old paper under his arm.

The music seemed to blur into the background as Eddy flicked through the documents and traced contrasting, red lines across the boundaries of the vast map. As his work progressed, Wanda's face slipping into the piles of immaterial images and papers, his mind began to wander toward the past weeks, as it often did.

Sometimes it was difficult to stay grounded within his current time when the past had once been his present. Even when in school as the teachers rambled, he thought of Peggy and of the war or of Howard Stark and the inventions that he would try to aid him with. It happened most often in history, for obvious reasons.

"Friday..."

"Yes, Mr Carter?"

Her voice made it too easy to ask for exactly what he wanted to.

"Pull up files on Peggy Carter please," he said, and Friday obliged, displaying the images he'd asked for.

Peggy's face was first and foremost, dressed in the face and army suit that he remembered her best in: hair curled and pinned, lips coloured like crushed cherries and wine, and badge pinned proudly to the lapel of her blazer. He blinked, frozen still for a moment. This was his Peggy, the sister he would return to, who was still alive and missing him. With a shake of his head, Edward reached his hands wide, spreading the bunched images of the documents out.

"Zoom in here," he said, pointing to a file that had the potential to document familial relationships. He saw his brother's name. "Follow that through. Michael Carter."

Friday went through the motions to follow his orders silently. In the few minutes it took to flick through the file, the room seemed to darken until only the holograms lit the air. His brother's face replaced that of Peggy's. He was young, face mottled with the signs of early adulthood, but impossibly handsome either way. Michael looked too much like their father- his face was soft and kind but his mind was quick and sharp. Then again, the whole Carter family seemed to hold those qualities.

"That can't be right," the words left his lips before he could even process the dates that his eyes skimmed through.

Written in bold, white lettering was the words Deceased, 2000. Only sixteen years ago, and yet Eddy remembered the day the family had received the notice to say that he was missing in action. Peggy was in her wedding dress, teardrops staining her laced shoulders. He remembered the funeral with the body-less coffin. They said their goodbyes while Michael lay to rest in the cold trenches of a foreign country. Michael Carter had died in the war.

"All the information on Mr Stark's database is of top quality sources. It is extremely unlikely that it is false," Friday said surely.

"But it has to be!" Eddy shouted, throwing his hand down on the empty bench. He sighed, brushing off the edge of disbelief that'd tainted his expression. "Pull up all files on Michael Carter, please, Friday."