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Avengers Initiative had started sooner than it was planned (a lot sooner, actually) because of the fact that Loki, God of Mischief stole the Tesseract from the SHIELD facility, along with kidnapping Dr. Selvig and a SHIELD agent. That being the case, the superheroes gathered at the Helicarrier. They were in the lab at the moment, Tony Stark and Bruce Banner looking at their monitors, shifting and solving some wide algorithms and equations. Steve Rogers reading a book while sitting on a not-so-comfortable chair. Clint Barton almost laying at the bean bag chair, nobody knew how ended up there and observing two scientists, not understanding a bit. And Natasha Romanov next to her fellow spy, cleaning her knives.
“The gamma readings are definitely consistent with Selvig's reports on the Tesseract. But it's gonna take weeks to process,” said Banner, breaking the silence and everybody looked at him.
“But…” started Stark, finishing one of his equations. “If we bypass their mainframe and direct a reroute to the Homer cluster, we can clock this around six hundred teraflops.”
“Tera-what?” said almost pale Rogers. He saw too much of the XXI century today.
“A teraflop is a measure of a computer's speed and can be expressed as a trillion floating-point operations per second,” muttered Natasha under her nose, not so much interested in hearing the science bubble.
“It just means that there is a chance in doing it faster,” explained Barton, rolling his eyes, but nobody saw that anyway.
“Oh.” left Captain’s mouths and then doors to the lab opened.
Inside the room ran a young, brown-haired boy with a smile on his lips. He could’ve been maybe eight and when he looked at the side of the room where only Natasha, Clint, and Steve were visible, he just froze.
“Who are you?” asked calmly Barton.
“Um, My name’s Peter. It’s, uh, it’s really nice to meet you.” the boy said shyly.
“And what are you doing here, Peter?”
"Exactly, Eyepatch was supposed to watch you.” Tony cut in, because of what the kid looked at the other side of the lab, noticing two scientists.
“Dad!” Peter almost yelled, happily, confusing everyone in the room.
“Come here, buddy.” said billionaire, stretching out his arm and Peter approached him quickly. “You can sit here, alright?” the man pulled a chair closer to the place where he was standing and the boy sat down.
“You’re a father?” blurted out Rogers, because he was reading Stark’s files on his way, flying in the Quinjet and there wasn’t anything about a child.
“No, a mother.” the engineer looked at him coldly and then turned to his son, giving him his full attention. “Now, what are you doing here alone?” he leaned against the white table and scanned Peter.
“We’re playing with uncle Fury in hide and seek!” explained the boy excitedly.
“Are you now? And he said yes to do this, just like that?”
“Um.” the boy turned from his father and looked at the superheroes in the room but they didn’t seem like much help, they were just observing.
“Pete.” was all Tony said and Peter looked at him again.
“Okay, so maybe Uncle Furry hasn’t actually agreed to play hide and seek, but when he’ll turn from Ms. Hill and realize I’m not at my chair then he’ll just figure it out, right?” the kid explained and Clint laughed at that. “I was just bored!” added the boy and the billionaire only sighed.
“JARVIS, text Fury, say that I have Pete with me.” he said and after hearing ‘right away, sir.’ returned to his work.
“So, Peter, how old are you?” asked Rogers.
“Ten!”
“Nine.” corrected Tony, changing the order of several diagrams at the screen in front of him.
“But almost ten!” the kid looked at the engineer.
“Saying that you’re almost ten is just a louder way to say that you’re nine.” explained the man, lifting his hand from the computer and squeezing his son’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, tesoro,” he added, leaving his hand in place.
“Can I help with something?” blurted out the boy quickly, not realizing that Clint was opening his mouth to ask him a question. Junior was too preoccupied with watching what Dr. Banner was doing. "It’s so boring here and everyone is busy.”
“You like quizzes. We can check how is that big brain of yours doing, huh?” said older Stark, doing some equation he started seconds earlier. “When I’m done with this, the algorithm will work by himself and then we can watch some movie together, how’s that sound?”
“Great!” yelled the boy excited and because of that, Tony smiled and ruffled his hair.
“Alright then, what are you thinking about?”
“Can it be about the homework that uncle Phil gave you? That’s what you’re doing now, right?” the boy looked curiously at the nearest hologram.
“Yeah, okay, we can do that.” replied the engineer. “The Tesseract. Iridium, what can you tell me about the Iridium?” he asked, glancing at his son quickly and returning to his work again.
“It's a stabilizing agent.” said the boy, watching what his dad was doing.
“Yeah, but you see these people-“ Tony gestured to Clint, Natasha, and Steve. “they aren’t geniuses like you are. You have to explain it to them.”
“Do they even want to know?” Junior whispered shyly, looking at his father.
“I assure you that we do, Peter,” answered Steve before Tony even had the chance.
“See, cucciolo?” Stark looked at the kid again, wearing a reassuring smile, and kissed the top of the boy’s head. “Go ahead.”
“Uh, well, that means that the portal won't collapse on itself. It did at SHIELD’s facility in dad’s homework,” explained Peter, looking at Captain America, who nodded as if to let him know that he understood now.
“Good, and two little things?” Tony said, not looking up.
“Oh, yeah. Also, it means the portal can open as wide, and stay open as long, as someone wants.”
“Brilliant.” the engineer squeezed the kid’s shoulder. “And a power source? A high energy density, something to kick start the cube?”
“Um, they gotta heat the cube to a hundred and twenty million Kelvin just to break through the Coulomb barrier.”
“Unless Selvig has figured out how to stabilize the quantum tunneling effect.” the billionaire said and Peter frowned.
“But that can’t be good. If he could do that he could achieve Heavy Ion Fusion at any reactor on the planet.” the boy said conflicted and missed the impressed facial expression on Black Widow’s face (and let me tell you, you don’t see it often).
“Yup, you still got it,” replied Tony nonchalantly but everyone could hear the pride in his voice.
“You’re really smart, Peter,” said Bruce Banner, smiling slightly at the boy.
“Um, thank you Doctor Banner.” answered the boy as he leaned on his dad and the man wrapped his left arm around him.
“Alright, stop looking at him like you haven’t seen a genius before. Pete’s a shy child.” he pointed his finger not exactly knowing at who and narrowed his eyes until they returned to their previous activities and then he looked at his son again. “Can you go to that locker and open it, tesoro? There are some granola bars there if you could grab yourself one or two and eat them, please.”
“I’m not hungry.” said the boy, messing with some equation he found on not used by anyone screen.
“Did Fury give you something?” older Stark raised his eyebrow.
“No, but I-“ started Peter, before he was interrupted.
“Those are chocolate granola bars.” said billionaire, easily like it would solve all his problems.
(And it probably would, seeing as Peter started making his way to the locker.)