Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

He has to leave.

He swallows, grabbing a few things and putting them in his smelly suitcase. He's choking back sobs, trying to stay quiet so Chase won't hear him.

“Adam, watch out!”

Bree is dying. Because of his stupidity.

He looks over, just in time to be pushed away by the blur that is Bree. He hits the ground, watching her get hit by the blast.

A sob escapes, and he grips his head, temporarily pausing his packing. Of all the times he can remember something.

He hears the lab doors open, and he keeps his head down, not looking up as he hears his little brother scrambling in. 

“Adam? What are you doing?” 

The strong one doesn't look up, continuing to pack. “Going.”

“Where?”

“Away.”

“...Why?”

Adam finally looks up, and Chase has never seen him quite this distressed before. His eyes are glowing red, signifying he's going to glitch if he doesn't calm down.

“How's Bree?” the elder one asks instead of answering him.

Oh, he… Oh.

Chase walks up to his brother, who is looking expectantly at him. “She's in bad shape right now. But we think she'll be okay.”

Another sob, this one wracking his body. Adam wraps his arms around himself. 

For a minute or so, the only sound is the large one's crying and the whirring of the machines in the lab. 

At least that Adam can hear. 

Chase can hear much more; he hears the hitched breaths as Adam tries and fails to compose himself. He can hear little hisses of air being released from some machine or another, can hear the power pellets they still occasionally eat being synthesized above their capsules.

Can just faintly hear the machines hooked up to Bree in the next room, monitoring her vitals and keeping her stable. 

He knows how Adam feels. He knows what it's like to blame yourself over a team member getting hurt, knows what it's like to have one of his siblings’ blood on his hands. He’s mission leader, after all.

His arms wrap around Adam.

The strong man tenses. Chase wonders if this was really the right thing to do, if maybe he read the situation wrong and his big brother didn't want to be comforted and rather wanted to be left alone, but then he feels two muscular arms around his torso, squeezing just enough to not crush his lungs.

“It's not your fault, Adam,” he wheezes. 

He practically feels Adam getting ready to retort, and he tightens his arms around him to shut him up. “It's not. I'm the smartest guy in the world, I think I'd know.”

A snort comes from his brother, then another hiccup. “But if I'd been paying attention…”

“It's okay. She'll be okay, up and at ‘em in a few weeks!”

The elder one still looks dubious, but Chase gives him what he hopes is a reassuring smile. “Honestly, Adam. I know a thing or two about blaming myself for this kind of stuff,” he says somewhat quietly, and Adam files that away to talk about later, but the genius continues, “but I promise. It’s not your fault.”

Chapter Text

“Where we goin’?” a 5-year old Bree asks, following behind her big brother. They’re in the lab, one of the few room’s they’ve ever been in. There was also the bathroom, the gallery on the floor below, and… 

She shakes her head of the faded memory of that pain-filled laboratory.

“Upstairs!” 6-year old Adam claps his hands as he answers her question, marching up to the elevator. 

The little girl gasps. “But… Mr. Davenport said we can’t!” She remembers clearly, the stern voice telling them over and over again that they couldn’t leave this floor (or the gallery floor, if they ever wanted to see his small but growing collection of self portraits), that it was too risky if they didn’t know he had company over.

“Think about it, Bee!” Adam turns to look at her, eyes twinkling with excitement. “It’s like an adventure! A journey!”

They’d recently learned that word. Journey. One of the few Adam had picked up on quickly.

Still, she shakes her head. “I dunno! What if we get in trouble? What if…” She thinks, then gasps, a genuine worry filling her. “What if we do get caught and—and we get taken by the gov—gover’men! And they do tests like D—”

Bree cuts off when she sees the tears welling up in her big brother’s eyes. She takes a deep breath. She looks up at him. “Let’s just stay down here. Besides, if we’re up there, you can’t break Chasey’s puzzle again!” she half-jokes, but at the way Adam’s eyes light up, she knows she’s hit the nail on the head.

“Yeah!” he exclaims, running towards the table by the rock wall, where Chase has been pointedly ignoring them and working on his 1,000 piece puzzle. 

Bree gives a small laugh, then looks towards the elevator, easily accessible and ready to be used. Then she heads towards her brothers. 

These two alone are more of an adventure than any journey they could take.

Chapter Text

You remember what you were thinking, all those years ago. You remember how twisted your thoughts had been, how he had twisted them even more, bending your morals even further than they’d already been bent. Nearly shattering them. Hurt them. Hurt them. Hurt them hurt them kill them kill them k

(You never really wanted to, deep inside. You were almost iffy on kidnapping them.)

You remember trying to kill them. Your own children. Adam, Bree, Chase; even Leo, who you’d recently grown closer to.

You see their faces when they wake up from a nap on the couch sometimes. The barely contained screams, muffled sobs, and when you walk away you usually hear a quiet, comforting voice soon after. 

(You never comfort them.)

(Sometimes they have no one to comfort them.)

Sometimes they all sleep in one capsule. Even Leo, which makes it a tight fit. They don’t seem to mind.

(You start laying out plans to build them bigger capsules. You just need to ask Donnie for permission.)

But you don’t ever say that you know these things. You know it’s your fault; you know it’s his fault too, for all the wounds, all the battles, all the traumatic experiences for making them this way. 

But whenever they complain - occasionally, because they know the topic makes you feel bad - you still jump in and take the blame, no matter much they protest. 

Not Krane. Krane hadn’t created them. Krane hadn’t raised them for their first few years, which Chase admitted to you once that he still occasionally had flashbacks to (bionic memory drive, which Donnie had forgotten to wipe when he took them). Krane had been a random, madman of a billionaire who had wanted bionics all to himself - the world, all to himself. 

(Maybe you still love him. Maybe that’s why you protect him still, even though he’s dead.)

No, you convince yourself more than your children, Krane wasn’t the one who traumatized them like that. You, Douglas Davenport, are to blame for your childrens’ trauma.

Chapter Text

“Get that out of your mouth, Kaz.”

Said pyro looks over at his bionic boyfriend, then down at the lollipop stick in his mouth. “It’s candy, I’m supposed to have it in my mouth. Where should I put it, up my-”

“No, Kaz!” Chase yells, playfully exasperated as Kaz cracks up. “But you already finished the candy, why would you keep the stick in your mouth?”

The superhero’s laughs die out and he continues gnawing on the stick. “Why not? It’s just something to chew on, and it’s not like ingesting a little paper will hurt me. Or anyone above the age of four, for that matter.”

“But-”

“Doll, you don’t have to be able to explain everything,” Kaz promises, gripping the genius’s face gently. He shakes it a little. “Especially something as trivial as this.”

Chase takes a deep breath, then nods. Kaz lets go, and he goes back to working on whatever gadget he’d been tinkering with (Kaz heard something of a duplicate wormhole transporter earlier), and the younger boy goes back to gnawing on the lollipop stick, almost gone now.

Chapter Text

Bree’s vision swims. She's on the ground, her cheek on the cold stone of Mission Command. 

A groan escapes her as she tries to push herself up, only for her cheek to hit the ground again. 

“Bree!”

Another groan comes from her, and then she feels someone grabbing her arm. She lets herself be dragged off the floor, and she blinks dazedly at the sight that meets her.

Has Skylar always been so pretty?

She leans her head on the alien's shoulder, and it sounds like Skylar's apologizing, but all Bree can concentrate on is how pretty she is.

So she interrupts her, her voice lilting a bit. “You're pretty…”

Skylar stops short, looking down at her girlfriend. “I really did hit you hard.”