Chapter Text
Sydney finally gets to her break. It’s been more than five hours since she last saw the boy, which is honestly criminal of her boss to schedule her break so late. At least she has a whole hour to eat and catch up on gossip. After finishing her food, she peaks her head into the room where she left him. There’s no one guarding the door and the room is empty, although there is a book on the table next to a chair that wasn’t pushed in. Hmm, maybe he was moved to a different room? Darn, now she needs to find someone else to ask.
She goes to the break room to look for someone who might have some information about him. There are a few police officers in the break room. They might know, but they also might not be allowed to tell her about anything considering his paperwork was definitely fake, which is illegal. The next person she sees is a social worker. Bingo.
She walks over to the woman and casually asks, “Hey, Lauren! How’s your day been?”
Lauren sighs. “Chaotic. The usual. How about you?”
Sydney smiles. “Boring. The usual. Except this one boy. The birth year on his passport and birth certificate didn’t match up. Which was strange. He also didn’t have a visa.” Lauren nods along, clearly interested in her story. “So, I flagged him in the system and showed him to a waiting room. He didn’t speak that much. He seemed shy. I wonder what happened to him?”
There, the seed was planted. Now she just hopes Lauren takes the bait.
“Well, that young man actually ended up on my case load,” Lauren starts, hesitantly. Sydney cheers inside her head. This is just what she needs to learn more about him.
Lauren continues. “I can’t really give out too much information, but it’s clear that he didn’t have the best childhood. He has to wait here while we get his paperwork settled, so I left him in the interrogation room with a book. Hopefully he took a nap, he looked really tired.”
“Is that the same room I brought him to earlier?” Sydney can’t help but ask, especially since she just checked that room and it was empty.
Lauren nods. “Yeah, why do you ask?”
Well, that’s not good. “Because I just checked that room twenty minutes ago and no one was in it. Was someone supposed to be guarding it?”
Lauren jumps up. “Yes. He’s an unaccompanied minor in a country he may or may not be legally allowed to enter. He shouldn’t have been authorized to leave that room, for both our sake and his.”
Lauren speed walks over to the room she left the kid in. Sydney follows close behind. She might not have any authority, but there’s no way she’s missing this drama when she still has over half an hour left on her break.
Lauren finds the room just as Sydney told her, empty with the boy nowhere to be found.
“I swear I left him right here,” Lauren says.
“And you locked the door?” Sydney asks.
Lauren nods her head. “It’s an interrogation room. It locks automatically from the outside. He shouldn’t be able to leave without someone opening it for him.”
“Could the security guard have opened it?” Sydney questions.
“It’s possible,” the social worker reasons.
She quickly leaves the room, with Sydney following, heading for the security station. When they get there, she asks one of the guards, “Did anyone authorize Harry Potter’s removal from interrogation room 3B?”
The guard shakes his head. “No, Officer Stanley should be waiting outside the room.”
“Well, he’s not there, and neither is the kid.”
The guard speaks into his radio, using code. He gets back a response before speaking to Lauren. “Officer Stanley says he was never assigned to that post. But I clearly remember that he was.”
“Look him up in the system. See if anyone else was authorized on his case.” Lauren doesn’t like this. First, the kid makes it here without proper documentation to even leave England, and now they might have lost Tony Stark’s son. This is not good. Someone’s getting fired, and she’s going to ensure that it is not her.
The guard looks frantic, clicking and clicking the refresh button, as if waiting for the information to change.
“That’s weird,” he says. “There is no Harry Potter in our system. There never was.”
“What?” Sydney responds, startling Lauren who forgot he was there. “I flagged him on the computer. I scanned his passport. What do you mean he’s not in the system?”
“I don’t know,” the guard responds. “I can’t find him.”
They all look at each other for a second, and then it feels as if the pressure in the room drops. Lauren feels an intense pressure behind her eyes, so she closes them, pressing the palm of her hands into her eyes. Just as fast as it started, the pressure returns to normal and Lauren opens her eyes. She sees Sydney look up at her watch.
“I think my lunch break is over,” Sydney says. “See you later!” She leaves without another word.
“Weird,” Lauren says, as Sydney walks away. “I don’t remember why I’m here.”
“Me either,” the guard responds. “I think your lunch break ends soon, too. You should probably go. I need to do the rounds.”
Lauren nods. “See you around.” Lauren goes back to her office, looking through her ever growing pile of cases. Just another day.
“Tony, what the hell is this message JARVIS sent me?”
Tony is jolted out of his thoughts by Pepper entering his workshop. He turns to see her, smiling at the confused expression on her face.
“Pepper, love of my life, I have some news to tell you.”
“I think you already did. JARVIS told me and the lawyers to look into custody law? Did you knock someone up?”
Tony laughs. “Yep, I did Pepper.”
“Well, we need more information.”
Tony gets up and hugs Pepper. He’s in a hugging mood today. “I told J to tell you, but apparently I wasn’t specific enough.”
JARVIS’s voice speaks from the ceiling. “Sorry sir, I thought this was something you would want to tell her yourself.”
Tony chuckles. “Always looking out for me. Thanks, J.”
He lets go of Pepper and waves her over to the computer screens. “Let me show you what we’re working with. A kid appears at JFK having flown from out of the country apparently claiming I’m his father. They agreed to do a paternity test to prove it, and if it passes, they’ll ask me to be his guardian. I have JARVIS keeping me updated.”
“This is a lot, Tony,” Pepper says when he’s done.
“I know.”
Pepper scoffs. “This is a real-life kid, one that you’ll have to take care of.”
“I know. But we don’t even know what the results of the DNA test say yet. He could be lying.”
“But what if he isn’t?” Pepper shoots back.
Tony looks at Pepper. He looks in her eyes, trying to convey his feelings without words. He sighs. “I know, okay. I know. Even yesterday I would never have thought it, but the moment JARVIS told me, it’s like I had a feeling I know what the DNA test will say.”
“This is a lot of information to process, and you only just found out.”
“I know.”
“You keep saying that,” Pepper teases.
“I know,” Tony replies dumbly.
Pepper laughs. God, Tony loves her laugh. He’s glad she isn’t freaking out, because if she was freaking out, he’d start freaking out. “I ordered a bed frame.”
“What?”
“I know it’s a bit early, but I can feel it in my gut that they’re my kid, Pepper. So, I’m all in.”
“You’re all in? For real? This is a lot of responsibility, Tony.”
“I know, and I am scared out of my mind, but I have to do it. Kids don’t just illegally enter a country for no reason. Something is going on, and I intend to find out. But the kid will be protected. If someone sent them here, or they just needed somewhere to go, I’ll provide a safe home for them.”
They sit in silence for a moment. Tony waits for Pepper to judge his words. Finally, she speaks. “We’ll provide it for them.”
Tony smiles. “We will.”
“Come up to dinner Tony,” Pepper says in a soft voice.
“But-” Tony gets cut off.
“No. You need to eat. You can’t take care of a kid if you don’t take care of yourself.”
Tony groans, “I’m going to have to stop drinking, aren’t I?”
“If you don’t think you can trust yourself, then maybe it would be a good idea.”
“I trust myself.”
Pepper frowns. “If you trusted yourself, you wouldn’t have brought it up.”
Tony sighs. “Yeah.” He looks down at his hands. “I just don’t want to turn into my father.”
“And you won’t,” Pepper replies without a moment of hesitation. “You are so much more than him. The fact that you are worried and self aware enough to know what drinking does to you means that you are a better man than he ever was.”
Tony hugs her again. “Thanks, Pepper. Don’t know what I would do without you.”
“I know, Tony. Now, let’s go eat before you get sucked back into the rabbit hole.”
It’s moments like these that Tony is glad he has Pepper. She keeps him grounded, even when the world does its best to rip him off his feet.
“Any updates, J?” Tony asks as he enters his workshop. Pepper had let him go back to his lab after dinner knowing she couldn't stop his inevitable all-nighter to find his child.
“They are no longer in a customs waiting room,” replies JARVIS.
“Well, where are they?” Tony asks, his heart thumping dangerously loud in his head.
“I am uncertain,” JARVIS responds, almost sounding hesitant.
Tony scoffs. He left for less than an hour and the kid disappeared? “How can you be uncertain? I built you to be certain.”
“It seems that all information about them has been deleted from Customs and Immigration’s database. I am looking for other sources of information.”
That’s not good. Someone else has a vested interest in his child and dammit if Tony isn’t going to do everything to protect them. “Pull up the video feeds. Look for anyone who entered customs and get me all their information.”
“Of course, sir. It will take some time.”
“That’s fine,” Tony replies, barely looking up from his screen, “I’ve got other things to do in the meantime.”
Once Tony locks onto a project, it’s hard to get him to stop. He’ll comb through hours of security footage and code as many search algorithms as it takes to find his child. He doesn’t know how long it’s been when JARVIS speaks up again.
“It seems the other workers at the airport also don’t know where they went. They are looking for the kid now.”
Well, things just got more interesting. His child illegally entered the country and then broke out of containment in the airport. There’s no telling where Tony will find them. He dives back into his screens. Who needs to sleep when there’s his child out there to find?
“Sir, there is some interference with the security cameras.”
“What kind of interference?” He knew he should have contracted with the government to give them an upgrade on their security.
“They appear to have glitched for five seconds before returning to normal. There is no video recording of those five seconds. The workers stopped looking for your child and moved back to their regular duties, almost as if they forgot about them.”
“What kind of magical bullshit is going on here, J?” Tony yells, frustrated.
Who else is so invested in a child of Tony’s that they could have found out so fast and removed all data so cleanly. All Tony knows about the kid is what JARVIS could find, which includes nothing about a name, gender, age, or how the hell they ended up in airport customs. Okay, he can work with this. The kid came through customs at JFK airport sometime in the last day. All he has to do is look through the confidential flight logs of passengers under the age of 18 coming from a different country and cross check them against another confidential list of people who went through customs. Easy peasy.