Marley stared down at the package. With the bomb in it. The cardboard box with the bomb in it. It was a package. It had an Amazon label on it. And it had a bomb inside. She opened her mouth—to say what she didn't know—and couldn't make a sound.
There was a bomb sitting on her kitchen counter.
01:43
"Hey, Marley?" Beck's voice floated out from the hallway, and she came in carrying Marley's computer a moment later. "Your LGBT blog just got an anon that says 'Enjoy the surprise, I hope you die.' Is that something we should be worried about? Should we tell Tony or Steve?"
01:32
Marley couldn't move or speak.
"What's wrong?" Out of the corner of her eye, Marley saw Beck put the computer down. "You look like you've seen a ghost. Not to be cliché."
Another pause, in which Marley tried to breathe but didn't. She could only watch the clock tick down. Beck said, in a dark, wanting-to-be-wrong tone, "Is that the surprise?"
"I think so," Marley whispered, finally wrangling control over her voice. She looked up at her friend. "It's a bomb."
"It's a bomb?" Beck shouted. She spun and ran to the doorway and bellowed, "RHODEY! STEVE!"
She ran back to Marley. "Get away from it—"
01:09
Beck dragged her away from the box. Rhodey came sprinting in, looking highly alarmed. "Beck? What is it?"
"Bomb," Beck said, letting go of Marley to point at the box.
Rhodey's eyes bugged. He lunged to the box. "Shit! F.R.I.D.A.Y., let everyone know there's a bomb in the kitchen. And get Wanda in here ASAP." He looked at Marley and Beck. "You two get out of here. Go to the western edge of the woods and stay there."
West—as far away from the kitchen as possible. Some strange part of Marley wanted to stay, to help—but she knew she'd be useless. Beck hauled her out of the kitchen into a dead run. By the time Marley had the wherewithal to say something like Be careful to Rhodey, they were out of earshot. They had a minute, tops, to get out of the building and to the western edge of the woods. She didn't think they were fast enough to make that happen, but she'd always had a bit of a skewed sense of time, so who knew?
How much of the building would the bomb take out? What if it killed everyone? Shit. She was going to be the girl who killed the Avengers. Who killed Tony—her own father. Tony. "Tony," she panted at Beck.
"He'll be fine!" Beck didn't look back. Marley was simultaneously pissed and grateful that she didn't. Pissed because it was her father and everything was her fault and Beck would be heartless not to let her go back—and grateful because Beck was stronger than her and knew to keep them from going back and getting in the way. Because they would get in the way. The Avengers were a well-oiled machine; they had each others' backs, and knew their duties without needing to be told.
They burst through a door onto a metal and glass deck a story off the ground. Beck, hand still a vise on Marley's arm, made a beeline for the stairs. Marley wasn't wearing shoes. She was half afraid the deck would crack beneath her feet and leave shards of glass in her heels. She'd always been afraid of glass in her feet for some dumb reason.
They charged down the stairs, both of them nearly tripping in their haste, and broke into a sprint across the lawn. Marley threw glances over her shoulder at the other side of the compound as they ran—the bomb was bound to go off soon.
They were halfway to the edge of the woods when Marley threw a look back over her shoulder and saw a streak of red dart into the sky above the compound—Wanda's power. She slowed, wrenching her arm out of Beck's grasp, and turned to watch. The red fire pushed the Amazon box into the sky, and it had to be a good hundred feet off the ground when Wanda shot after it—with the unmistakable red and gold of the Iron Man suit close behind. Marley felt her stomach drop to the ground. No, she thought, and didn't know who or what she was directing it at.
Package and then Scarlet Witch and Iron Man disappeared into the clouds.
Marley wanted to scream.
"Marley, come on," Beck said, tugging at her arm. Marley stood her ground, eyes fixed on the spot where her father and her friend (and crush) had vanished into the sky to fix her mistake.
This was her fault. If she'd just told someone about the death threats, Tony would have made them stop somehow, and this stupid package wouldn't have come, and—
The sky lit up with fire.
Marley sucked in a breath. A wave of heat hit her, sending her stumbling back a step. By her side, Beck did the same thing, grabbing her hand.
An agonizing minute passed.
The suit dropped through the clouds, a controlled but fast descent. Wanda was clinging to him piggyback-style, and that was all Marley needed to see. She ran for the compound, and this time it was her dragging Beck.
By the time they reached the kitchen, Wanda and Tony were there, Tony out of his suit. He was wearing a sweatshirt and jeans—he didn't like wearing jeans in the suit. (He'd told her on the roadtrip.) He looked unharmed, if a little ruffled. Wanda, in joggers and a plain T-shirt, had a few smudges of dirt on her face, but she looked fine too. The other Avengers had gathered in the kitchen with Rhodey—Steve, Sam, Nat. No one looked happy. One of the big windows had been opened—how they got out of the room, probably.
"Is everyone okay?" Marley said.
"We're fine," Wanda said, with a half smile. "Nothing was in the blast radius, not even a bird."
Marley took a relieved breath. Beck squeezed her hand. "I'm sorry," she said.
"As you damn well should be," Tony snapped.
Marley flinched. She should have seen this coming. She shouldn't have been so comfortable here. A screw-up and she was done. That was how it always worked. Tony was going to detail all the ways she was a failure—a long list, but the other foster families had always managed it—and send her off to boarding school or something.
Beside her, Beck had tensed up like she was about to go toe-to-toe with Tony. She'd never been there for one of these conversations. Enjoy the show, Marley thought.
She didn't say anything to Tony, just let his glare hit her. She wouldn't cry; she'd gotten so good at handling this conversation that to cry would be more surprising than it would for her to not.
"Get out," Tony said, voice a shard of glass.
Just like that. She thought he'd be more one for a speech, but okay.
And then she realized everyone else was filing out of the room. He hadn't been talking to her. Beck squeezed her hand again and followed Steve out. Marley didn't stop looking at Tony, though she could feel Steve's Eyebrows of Disappointment leveled at her as he left. It stung. He'd never used them on her.
Tony waited until everyone was gone before he spoke again. He lifted Marley's computer from where Beck had left it, still open, and flipped it to face her.
enjoy the surprise i hope u die!
"When," Tony said, dangerously calm, "were you going to tell us about this?"
She tried to figure out what to say. I did, I showed you one. When it got serious. That's the first one. What do you mean? It's my computer, I don't have to tell you anything. "I—" she began.
"Before you lie and say that this was only the second one and the one forcing you to come out was the first—" He leaned over and tapped a few keys, and the dozen screenshots of the threats she'd taken before deleting them had all and going to him about the one that mattered. He pinned her with a stare. "Choose your next words very carefully."
For once in her life, Marley didn't have a clear read on the situation. Was he going to kick her out? Was he pissed because she hadn't told him, or that she hadn't told him and it nearly got someone killed? Was he just yelling at her? There was no way he was just chewing her out for this. She couldn't get a read on the situation and couldn't figure out what to say to diffuse it.
"I didn't think it was serious," she said at last, and hated how small her voice sounded.
Tony's eyebrows shot up. "You didn't think it was serious? These are death threats, Marley. This is your life we're talking about."
"It was on my LGBT blog," Marley said. Still meek, dammit, but she wasn't going to break his stare first. "I thought it was normal. You know, because half the people in the world are homophobic and half of those people are willing to hurt someone over it?"
"No—don't play smartass with me." Tony pointed a finger at her. "You don't get to defend this. You don't get to try and make me see reason. You should have come to me immediately."
Marley gritted her teeth and tried to find some anger to use, to strengthen herself. She found it in her uncertainty—what was his end goal with this conversation? Just get to the point. She felt a few walls rise, walls that hadn't come up in a couple weeks. Her voice was strong and pissed when she spoke. "If I don't get to defend myself then why the hell did you give me a chance to?"
"Because I've changed my mind," he ground out. "I'm the parent, I'm allowed to do shit like that." He pushed the lid of her laptop closed with a definitive click. "I don't care what your reasoning was; I don't care why you didn't say anything. The point is you didn't say anything, and that almost got you killed."
"In what world?" Marley said incredulously. "There were two minutes on the timer. That was plenty of time for me to get away."
"And if there hadn't been?" Tony snapped. "What if there had only been a minute on the timer? What if you had come in when there were fifteen seconds on the clock? You would have died. No question. There was enough explosive material in that bomb to incinerate an entire Boeing 747. Wanda practically had to put it in space. If it had detonated while you were within two hundred feet of it you'd be dead, no question. Severely injured if you were lucky."
Marley swallowed. She was firmly intrenched in that state where you're being yelled at and are trying to tune out of whatever the scolder is saying but all it's doing is making you more attentive, and she was close to tears.
Tony seemed to realize that, because he softened a little. "Living with us isn't like living with a foster family, Marley. We take death threats seriously. We have to. We can't pick and choose which ones we think are serious and hope that no one dies. We have to respond to every single one, because we have no way of knowing which is actually going to happen. Does that lead to some boring missions? Yes. But it also leads to us saving lives. Sometimes the death threats are directed at us, and sometimes they actually happen. But we're ready." He passed a hand over his face, looking tired as fuck for a split second. "All I'm saying is—just tell us if it happens again. You got extremely lucky today. That's not going to happen again. Okay?"
Marley nodded. "Okay."
"You're also grounded." Tony tugged her laptop across the counter to him. "No electronics except for TV. I'll ask Pepper to sort out the schoolwork you can do without a computer." He held out his hand. "Phone, please."
Marley pulled her phone out of her back pocket and put it in his hand. She honestly wasn't even upset. She'd be fine with being grounded for years. She was just relieved she was getting to stay.
Tony put her phone on her laptop. He stood there for a moment, then came around the counter and gently, carefully pulled her into a hug, giving her plenty of time to back out. She didn't. She hugged him back.
She wasn't sure what to do when he left. She had a strange feeling she should have gotten more upset about being grounded—but she was tired and hungry and too relieved that everyone was okay and too relieved that the conversation hadn't gone the same way so many others had. She made a sandwich and sat at the counter eating it, staring at the packing slip that had come with the bomb.
The packing slip.
The packing slip could be traced to whoever sent the bomb.
She bolted to her feet, snatching the slip up. Beck had said something earlier about Steve taking her back today on a Quinjet. The new one, she'd said. Marley knew which one that was.
She had a strange feeling as she ran for the hangar that she was doing something incredibly stupid. That she should bring the slip to Tony, because she'd just gotten in trouble for not telling him.
But this asshole anon had nearly killed her father and her crush and her best friend and everyone else in the compound. Which meant it was personal.
This asshole anon had tried to kill her, and he should have made sure he got the job done. Because now she was coming to return the favor.