Chapter Text
2006
It's raining. He can hear it hitting the window. He's not sure this apartment is better than the storm outside.
"I have to get up early tomorrow morning. You can sleep in if you want, but I'd like you to be up by nine—nah, let's make it nine-thirty. Is that all right?" Mr. Coulson asks.
Leo's not sure why he keeps asking questions, but it's not like Leo has to answer, right? "That's okay."
"Do you want to shower now, or in the morning?"
"I can shower now." He keeps his voice soft and unassuming.
Mr. Coulson is still working on his shoes. "Then in that case, I'll change into night clothes now—" the shoe finally slips off his foot "—and then you can have the shower."
"Okay."
Once he's alone under the hot water, Leo has a chance to contemplate just how bad this situation is. Sure, Mr. Coulson is nice to him now, but what about tomorrow morning? What about the days after that?
How many ways can I escape?
"—no way I'm making him go back!" Leo pulls the covers up over his head instinctively, heart suddenly pounding.
He can't hear the response, so he chances climbing out of bed and creeping to the kitchen door. Mr. Coulson is pacing the floor, probably on the phone with someone. He's definitely angry, but as long as he's not mad at Leo, Leo is sort of okay with that.
"My apartment, where else?" He sighs. "Yes, I have an apartment. Where did you think I lived?" Pause. He shouts, "I'm not a robot!" and his tone is just so scandalized that Leo stifles a giggle. "Look, sir, no matter what the baby—junior agents say, I'm not actually a robot."
Leo is just starting to relax when Mr. Coulson starts yelling. "Sir, I don't care what you think! He deserves a chance!" His voice goes quiet and hard. "If you can't understand that, then consider this my resignation." The phone slams into the receiver, making Leo jump and race back to the guest room he's sleeping in.
"I probably shouldn't have done that," Mr. Coulson mutters to himself before calling, "Hey, Leo, are you up?"
Leo burrows into the covers.
He hears the door creak as Mr. Coulson peers into his bedroom. "It's time to get up, kiddo."
He considers pretending to be asleep, until Mr. Coulson comes in and sits down at the end of the bed. "Hey, I have to head into work for a few hours today, so I need you to get up, okay?"
"Okay."
In the kitchen, Leo claims the chair closest to the door, in case he needs to bolt, but Mr. Coulson is between him and the door, blocking his path. "Do you want cereal or oatmeal?"
"Oatmeal."
A steaming bowl of sludge is slid in front of him. "Here's some brown sugar, if you want." A pair of thumps tell him that Mr. Coulson is putting his shoes on. "Are you doing okay?"
Mr. Coulson tightens his tie for what seems like the fiftieth time. Leo mumbles something—he's not sure what—and scoots his chair further away, still sitting on its edge.
"Well, if you need anything, let me know."
Leo nods numbly, waiting for Mr. Coulson to do anything but smile and nod and look calm. So far, he hasn't, but it's a matter of time in Leo's experience.
Once the door clicks shut behind him, Leo stops trying to keep his hands from moving. First it's twist ties pulled from the pockets of the too-large army jacket he got from a dumpster, then it's a pencil he found on the ground. Emboldened by the adult's absence, he finds pipe cleaners in a drawer and rubber bands under a desk, and uses them to make a helicopter that keeps flying into the walls, like the nice lady agent who kind of looked like Mom showed him on the plane ride here.
"Having fun?"
Leo jumps and tries to hide his helicopter under the desk and still his body at the same time. Neither quite works.
"I just forgot a few things." Mr. Coulson nods toward the kitchen. "If you need something to fidget with, I have a few bouncy balls in the junk drawer. What's your diagnosis?"
Leo hesitates. "ADHD."
Mr. Coulson nods. "Got it. Do you take meds for it?" His only answer is a headshake. "Okay, so I don't need to worry about that. Oh, and by the way—can I see what you made?" Leo shakes his head again. "That's fine. Is there anything you'll need for the next few hours that you haven't already mentioned?"
Another headshake.
"In that case, I will be home in—" he checks his watch "—about three hours."
"Okay," Leo says softly.
2007
The first few weeks pass quickly.
Mr. Coulson spends most of his time at the apartment. Leo doesn't know how he can afford to take this much time off work, but Mr. Coulson says he has "a lot of leave built up," whatever that means. Sometimes, when he has to go to work, he sends people to babysit—like Clint, who has calluses up and down his forearms and makes the best snickerdoodles, and Natasha, who a) is a total dork and b) says she can kill someone with her pinkie. (One time a man named Lance comes over, and the two of them successfully prank half the people on Mr. Coulson's floor. That's the last time Lance gets to babysit him alone.)
The ground rules change over time—"don't leave the apartment without telling me" eventually becomes "don't leave the building without telling me," and "check in every half hour" stretches to one hour, then two, then three and four and stays there.
It's been four weeks, and Mr. Coulson finally has custody. They go out for ice cream to celebrate, and it becomes a tradition, just for the two of them, getting ice cream every Tuesday.
It's been eight weeks, and the partial hours that Mr. Coulson's been working come to an end, so Leo has to go to school, even though the school year's halfway over.
The teacher won't let him get up and walk around in class (though that changes after the first set of parent-teacher conferences), not that he was expecting it. His classmates tease him for starting late, for wearing an Army jacket with someone else's last name, for his height and his ADHD and the way he holds a pencil. His first day of school is a long one, and it's a relief when Bobbi comes to pick him up and take him home.
(It's the first time he really thinks of the apartment as "home.")
The first time he meets Director Fury, he nearly runs from the room. It's only Mr. Coulson's hand at his back that keeps him in place.
Fury's gaze is cool over his steepled hands. "You're probably not a spy," he decides, and Mr. Coulson laughs out loud.
It's been almost three months, and Agent Coulson takes Leo out for dinner for his birthday. "I have something for you," he says, pulling a folder out of his briefcase.
"What is it?" Leo asks.
"Take a look." Agent Coulson slides the folder across the table. Leo opens it, and his breath catches.
"What—"
"Happy birthday, Leo."
The adoption paperwork almost gets knocked to the floor as Leo tries to hug Agent Coulson from across the table.
It's been over half a year, and they're back in Houston. It's a sweltering hot day, and they duck into a small ice-cream shop, relaxing in the blast of cool air.
A girl about Leo's age slams her way in soon after them, asking to try a flavor before she orders. She starts in one corner and works her way through the tubs, slowly and methodically.
"Are you really going to try every single flavor of ice cream?" Leo asks in amusement.
"Yupperdoodles!" she replies cheerfully, licking the spoon clean.
"If you keep this up, we're going to run out of try-it spoons," the woman behind the counter tells her.
Her name is Piper, and they spend the weekend playing video games (she blue-shells him twice), shooting hoops (he wins, surprisingly), and trading life stories. She was born just outside of Tulsa, he learns, and she grew up on a Cherokee reservation with her father and grandfather until her dad got his first big role. She doesn't know who her bio-mom is.
He tells her about his mom, and foster care, and living on the streets, and shows her the scars from when he lived with the Bensons and then the Garcias, and the places where his fat deposits are still growing back after his body ate them trying to stay alive, and tells her that he doesn't know who his bio-dad is. (On Sunday, they take the city bus a few streets over and several miles away, and Leo brings her to the literal hole-in-the-wall where Mama Tiger and her kids live, where he lived for a while before he met A. C. After Leo makes the introductions, Mama inspects Piper from head to toe and says she approves of Leo's new best friend. Leo barely manages not to fist-pump).
And he tells her about his powers. About the Dirt Lady, and how they got his mother killed.
She tells him to go fill up a glass of water and dump it on his head.
Minutes later, as Leo is toweling off his hair and sneaking awed glances at her, she tells him that she's been able to make people do things for as long as she can remember. She's just as terrified of her own powers as he is.
(They decide, right then and there, that they're going to teach themselves how not to be afraid.)
After a few weeks, when filming's wrapped up, Piper and her father go home. Leo and A.C. go home as well, because while Leo isn't tired of visiting his cousins, he is tired of trying to avoid the rest of his bio-family at the same time, and that thing that A.C.'s working on that Leo isn't supposed to know about is almost done anyway, so they might as well go back to D. C. Piper doesn't get to visit them that often, because she lives in California with her dad. (He sounds kind of neglectful, and Leo is really glad that A. C. isn't like that.)
"Hey, elf-boy, watch where you're walking."
"Watch where you're walking," Leo almost retorts, but he decides spending the energy isn't worth it. Instead, he gathers up his books quietly, until a blonde with a visitor's pass slams the bully up against the wall.
Well aware that everyone's watching, Leo quickly complains, "Come on, Aunt Bobbi, I was just going to let him go."
Bobbi steps back and lets the bully drop to the ground, quietly saying, "If you touch my nephew again..." She lets the threat hang in the air, unfinished, before stooping down and picking up Leo's water bottle.
She hands it to him, loudly admonishing, "Shouldn't you be carrying all this in your backpack? I know the instructor's covered how not to give yourself scoliosis."
"He might've. I probably wasn't paying attention," Leo admits. He dodges easily when Bobbi pretends to cuff him upside the head. "Why are you here?" he asks under his breath. "I though Lance was picking me up today."
"The Director wants to see you," Bobbi mutters back.
Leo nearly stops walking. "You know if you hit me every time I'm impertinent, I won't have any brain cells left," he complains out loud. "Why?"
"Something about your new friend," Bobbi says equally quietly. Out loud, she says, "You're always impertinent."
"Exactly." This isn't the first time he's held two conversations at the same time with the same person—one for the passersby, and one for themselves alone—but it's the first one that's dropped two bombshells so close together. "What does he want with Piper?" he whispers.
"I don't know," Bobbi replies, and that's the last of that.
"Piper Quinn McLean, ten years old," Fury says, spreading files out on his desk. "Father is an actor, mother is unknown. Born March twenty-third, 1997, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Lives in Malibu, California, with her father. Most recent level of education: fourth grade. Current level: fifth grade, which she is completing at a boarding school in Los Angeles. She has been expelled from both of her previous schools, one for 'assaulting' an older student, the other for theft, which, interestingly, wasn't reported until two weeks after the fact." Fury flips the paper over. "Looks like you've got a miniature Steve Rogers, here; the fight apparently started when the student in question made multiple offensive remarks about one of Miss McLean's classmates. Miss McLean took exception to this and broke the student's nose."
Leo opens his mouth, but Fury cuts him off. "Most recent vacation—if you can call it a vacation—was accompanying her father to Houston, where he was filming on location. She gets bored, she wanders off, she decides to get ice cream, then she meets you." The director stacks the papers, sets them aside, and steeples his fingers, staring at Leo. "Normally, SHIELD doesn't care who its agents' kids become friends with. You're a different story, considering how high up Coulson is. Now. Do you trust her?"
The question catches Leo off guard. "What?"
"Do. You. Trust. Her."
He says without thinking, "Yeah, of course," and realizes that it's true.
"Do you think she'll want to join SHIELD?"
"I can't say, sir."
"Then ask her, kid." Fury's good eye is twinkling. "Fifth grade is a bit young for that kind of decision, but tell her we've got a spot for her right next to yours, if she wants it." He looks Leo up and down. "If she's anything like you? She'll make a damn fine agent one day."
2008
Tony Stark is missing, and there's a monster stalking orchestral concerts all over the Tri-State area.
"I may be gone for a few days," A. C. tells him, and he is. When he comes home, as usual, there's not much he can talk about, but he accidentally lets slip that the woman who was being stalked is rather attractive, and, well, Leo just can't let a comment like that slide by.
"So she's cute?" he asks, sitting on the counter while A. C. assembles a sandwich on the cuttingboard.
"She is," says A. C. mildly, scooping mayonnaise onto the bread and spreading it with a spoon.
"Do you think she's pretty?"
A. C. doesn't look up. The glare from the window reflects off the sink on his other side and straight into Leo's eyes, so he can't lean closer. "I do," he agrees.
"How old is she?"
A. C. does look up, now. "Why the twenty-one questions?" he inquires. His hands are still moving, layering lettuce on top of the mayonnaise and cheese on top of the lettuce.
Leo leans as far forward and sideways as he can without falling off, finding an angle where the glare isn't as bright, so he can look right into A. C.'s face and grin at him.
"D'you like her?" he whispers conspiratorially.
A. C. swats at him—thankfully with the hand that isn't holding the knife—and tells him to get off the counter. "Isn't it about time for you to leave for school?"
Leo twists around to look at the clock on the stove. "Shit you're right!" he realizes, and leaps to the ground.
"Language!" A. C. calls as he dashes down the hall to the front door, jamming his feet into his shoes after his toes run into them.
"I know!" he calls backs. His coat isn't on the hook where it should be—it's behind a few others, and seriously, a mostly-two-person apartment should not have this many coats.
"Study group is tonight?"
"Yep!"
"It's at the Sununus, right?"
"Yeah, it is!" Backpack, backpack, where is his backpack... Bingo! It's lying on the floor; the closet door had blocked it from view.
"Say hi to John and Catherine Grace for me!"
"I will!"
There's his binder! Leo stuffs it and the papers falling out of it back into the canvas bag he carries it in, before slinging the bag over his arm and running back into the kitchen.
"Have fun, study hard, don't kiss anyone who has their own security detail..."
"That was one time and we were playing Spin the Bottle."
"Aren't you supposed to be studying at these things? Hey. You." A. C. pulls him into a hug as he slides past, ruffling his hair and releasing him so Leo can grab his lunch before he dashes back to the door.
"It was getting late and we were bored!" He glances at the time. "Gotta go! Bye!"
"Don't blow anything up!" A. C. calls after him.
"I know that, Dad!"
It's not until Leo's sprinted out the door of the apartment building and is running down the sidewalk that he realizes that a) he just called A. C. "Dad" for the first time, and b) he grabbed the wrong lunch.
Oh, well. If he didn't hit me for breaking that vase that one time, he probably won't hit me for stealing his sandwich.
Bahrain... Bahrain is bad.
Leo isn't allowed to know what happened.
He's barely allowed to know that Agent May—Aunt May—is coping badly.
But he does know a bit about trauma, and a bit about PTSD, and a lot about pain, so three or four times a week he bikes, and takes the subway, and takes the city bus to her house with a box full of everything that he and A. C. and A. C.'s girlfriend Audrey and Miranda-across-the-hall have baked for her in the last couple days, and he stays with her while she shops for groceries and goes for her run in the park.
And later, after they get back, after the groceries are put away, he sits next to her on the couch while she watches TV, while she lets herself break, and he talks.
It starts off easy. Weather ("It's been a really nice month." "Mm-hmm." "Want to go to the park? See if I'm small enough for the little-kid equipment? I bet you I'm not." "Mm-nmm."), the election ("I'm thinking Obama is going to win, but I'm hoping for either him or Clinton. Who are you rooting for?" "Clinton." "Cool."), and school ("I got an A on my geography test!" "That's nice."). Simple stuff like that.
Then Leo starts bringing up the stuff A. C.'s told him about work—how Uncle Clint and Aunt Natasha are doing, that Aunt Bobbi and Uncle Lance are getting a divorce, the mob of stuffed animals that's beginning to take over Sitwell's office and sanity. (The updates on that always get her to smile.)
He calls her Aunt May, most of the time, and calls her Aunt Melinda once before she tells him to never call her that again. He counts that as a win.
Eventually she starts talking, too. Leo's monologues become full, two sided conversations.
A lot of times, they talk about scars: the scar on May's knee from when she jumped out of a tree at age five, the line on Leo's finger from when he got too close to one of his mom's tools at age four, the bullet wound in May's thigh, the dent in the back of Leo's head. Aunt May looks downright murderous when he tells her about that and starts muttering about finding and strangling that particular foster dad. Leo reassures her that he's fine, now, and that said foster dad is in jail and will be for a long time. (He's still scared, a little, of A. C. May squeezes his shoulder. She doesn't need to tell him that that reflex will fade. He already knows that; he's just scared that he'll need it again someday, long after it's gone.)
And then she tells him about Bahrain.
As much as she can, at least.
She can't talk about much.
But what she can talk about—what Leo is allowed to know about—is bad.
It's not much.
But it helps.
(Soon enough, she's back at work, this time in Administration. Leo stops visiting quite as much afterwards. When she and Andrew start the divorce process, though, he comes back. He always will, for family.)
SHIELD brings Tony Stark home, with all the fanfare associated. With A. C. in California, Leo is stuck staying with Miranda-across-the-hall—not that's she a bad babysitter, or a bad person, but she smells way too much like oranges for some reason for Leo's liking. (For Saturday and Sunday, her old college roommate comes down from New York, bringing her son with her, but not her husband. Percy is seven months older than Leo, kicks everyone's butts on the Mario Kart Wii that Leo's neighbors down the hall just bought, and takes an incredibly long shower on Saturday night—apparently he always does. He's ADHD, like Leo is, and dyslexic as well. It seems like a really crappy combination, and Leo says as much.)
(Leo also shows Percy better ways to cover up his bruises with his mom's makeup, just like one of his foster-sisters taught him, once. Neither of them bring it up later. Percy's mom doesn't know anything about it.)
Sunday evening, all four of them cram onto Miranda's couch for Tony Stark's press conference—his second since coming home, and the first since whatever-it-was happened at the main Stark Industries building.
Because it's Stark, the press conference eventually turns into an utter train wreck. By the time the questions start, Stark has dug himself quite the hole; Leo is popping popcorn into his mouth like there's no tomorrow.
(He can just see A. C. face-palming off camera. It's hilarious.)
"The truth is... I am Iron Man."
Leo and Percy whoop and holler, Miranda cheers, and Sally laughs. Leo think that he just might have found a new favorite superhero.
(Well. Second-favorite. Captain America is still better. Don't tell Coulson, but Leo's love of the Captain? It's all A. C.'s fault.)
2009
The first time A. C. brings his girlfriend home, Leo is in his room with Piper, trying to build a scale model of a nuclear reactor out of Legos and Tinker Toys. (Leo isn't sure where the grease is coming from, but it's coming from somewhere, and he's had to wash his hands five times now.)
He can hear Ms. Nathan—not quite Audrey, yet—comment that the apartment seems a bit too big for a bachelor living alone, and A. C.'s awkward non-attempt to explain. Leo and Piper are listening at the door to the living room, so they're ready when A. C. says that they can come in.
"Leo, this is Audrey, my girlfriend. Audrey, meet Leo, my son."
Leo ignores the thrill of pleasure and fear that races through him at "my son"—no way out now—and gives Ms. Nathan an awkward smile, telling her he's adopted as he walks into the room.
She's not his mom, she's never going to replace his mom, and it makes things a bit awkward, though only for him, it seems, as A. C. and Ms. Nathan keep making heart eyes at each other and Piper looks on with a smile. But Ms. Nathan turns out to be a pretty good cook, and a lot better at algebra than he is, and when he stuffs himself into a dress shirt and tie for his middle school's spring concert, she's there in the third row, camera in hand and a big smile on her face. She's not even trying too hard—she doesn't seem to be trying at all, as if she took one look at him and decided, Yes, this small child is mine now, but it takes the end-of-year science fair for him to decide that she's his, just as much as Piper and A. C. are.
(He has to admit, her facing down those bullies for him is kind of an epic moment, especially since she holds them off long enough for A. C. to arrive and put the fear of Phil Coulson into them. His project is a bit damaged, but it never really measured up to last year's robot chicken anyway. And, even better, he'll never have to see those bullies again starting next year, because next year he'll be in training to become a SHIELD agent and they'll still be stuck in the black hole of middle school.)
The low, hulking building of D. C. Junior takes Leo's breath away. As the group of new students walks through the halls (their guide seems to be a little awestruck by A. C.), it's more because of the history that they'll soon be a part of than anything else.
They meet Ms. Weaver, their head-of-year; Donnie, a quiet nerd headed for Sci-Tech; Kelly, a cheerleader at her old school, headed straight for Ops; Angie from Richmond, Terrence from Derry, Clara from Baltimore, Janelle from Gander. There are twenty students in their grade, and more at campuses in Seattle, Atlanta, and San Francisco.
(Somehow, Piper uses her Jedi mind trick to snag them a dorm room together. "These aren't the droids you're looking for!" Leo yells after Ms. Weaver, laughing hysterically. Piper hits him with a pillow.)
After they get their schedules, and A. C. heads home, and they get the standard warning of it only gets harder from here, Leo flops back into the bed that's going to be home for the next four years. “This is where it all begins,” he tells Piper, happily.
“It all starts here,” Piper replies, grinning. “We’ve almost made it!”
The weeks start slow and pass quickly, in a blur of history, hand-to-hand combat, weapons theory, politics, and foreign languages, mixed in with normal middle-school subjects like English and Math and Science.
A small class like theirs makes for fast friends. One-off quips become running jokes faster than Kelly can sneeze at cat hair: that Angie is secretly a werewolf, that Leo and Piper are secretly twins who were separated at birth, that one of these days someone is going to fall out of one of those wobbly English-classroom chairs. Wednesday nights find all of them crowded around the TV in the common room watching movies and singing along to the soundtrack—whoever forgets the most lines has to vacuum up the popcorn. (One Friday in October, Piper actually does fall out of her chair. Leo never lets her live it down.)
What started out as hints and hunches starts to shift into something bigger, when Piper hits her knee on her desk and Leo feels the pain, when Leo's happiness at an experiment turning out right carries over to Piper on the other side of campus. On Wednesday Night Movie Night, they sprawl half on top of each other, like whatever concept of personal space they had has disappeared.
Something's changing between them, Leo knows, knows it in his bones. He and Piper start staying as close together as possible, like it's them against the world, worried that whatever-this-is will break them; she even comes with him to church on Sundays, as Father Mazzare tells them, week after week, that he still can't find anything, any modern references to this thing. There's no way to measure it, no way to quantify it, no validation or confirmation to be found for what Leo and Piper know in their bones. The only guide there is seems to be what they can figure out themselves.
Then January comes, and their link becomes the least of their worries.
2010
Piper's words are terrifying.
"HYDRA still exists. It's inside SHIELD. And I know Sitwell is Hydra too."—and sometimes he's Uncle Sitwell, and that hurts almost as bad as any foster-parent's blow.
Almost as bad as the knowledge that no one is going to listen to them.
They're twelve, going on thirteen, and they're too young for anyone to take seriously.
Then the Stark Expo happens—then the proposal and Oaxaca and the wedding happen—and it's almost driven out of their minds, and sheer denial blocks it off, never to be thought of again.
Then Lena happens, his baby sister comes into their lives, and everything come rushing back.
The Stark Expo comes first.
It's May.
Not too cold, not too warm as the four of them stand in the crowd, watching Stark himself on one of the big screens, since they can't see the stage.
Leo's half keeping an eye on the festivities and half on the program he's got running on his laptop, scanning through internal memos and stored security recordings so he can piece together just how deep the rot inside SHIELD goes. That means that he's not paying attention when Stark's Law ("If it's possible for anything to go wrong, it will, usually in the most spectacular possible way") goes into full effect.
Everything happens fast after that. Aunt Natasha goes undercover. Leo is ordered to spend his afternoons after school at the R&D labs, fetching and carrying for the Nerd Squad he'll someday be one of. He's not told what they're working on that's so important. Overheard discussions indicate that they're looking for a cure for something, so Leo keeps an eye on the news, waiting for mention of a new pandemic. (There's nothing. The only reference to any epidemic that he hears about is all about the swine flu from last year. It must be something else, then.)
Stark's birthday party, he hears, is explosive—pun intended. A. C. goes back to babysitting Stark—apparently Aunt Natasha's done her job. Then the bombs go off at Stark Expo, and suddenly Leo and Piper are literally in Tony Stark's mansion, and for the first time in four months they're not thinking about HYDRA and its tentacled grip, because this, this is so much easier to think about.
Tony is delighted when he learns about Leo's fire powers. He insists immediately on testing everything he can ("You're not allowed to become a supervillain, Tony." "But Pepper!")—blood, skin, DNA, everything.
Leo's muscle and epithelial tissue are resistant to fire and all forms of heat; his connective tissue is not: a blood sample boils readily, and when Tony tests one of Leo's baby teeth, it chars just the same way as a normal person's bone would. ("Hey, A. C., did you give Tony one of my baby teeth?" "No, why would I? Why would he need it?" "All right, Tony, spill. Where did you get the tooth from?" "Oh! I, uh, I asked your grandfather. Hope you don't mind.")
When they get around to testing his DNA, they get... a big fat load of nothing.
More than that, they find out that Leo is an almost exact genetic copy of his mother.
("Where did you get a sample of my mom's DNA?" "Asked your grandfather." "What.")
(On the bright side, this puts Leo back in contact with the older members—with one obvious exception—of his bio-family, as two days later he gets a letter from Sammy Valdez, Jr., asking why Tony Stark wants to know if he knows who his grandson's father is.)
Except then Tony wants to test Piper, too, and it gets the same result, that she and her father have almost identical DNA. Tony gets that spark in his eye, the one that means that he has An Idea, but then Pepper arrives and tells him that a product that's in beta testing is malfunctioning, which distracts him long enough that he loses his train of thought. Then, weirdly, she turns around and winks at them, and then leaves with Tony without another word.
By the time June rolls around, he's gotten used to having JARVIS's voice in his ear. Piper is quietly learning how to fly the suit Tony made for her, which her nerdy butt has named the Silver Dragon. ("Like the restaurant in Hell's Kitchen?" "That's the Royal Dragon, Leo.") Rumors start buzzing about Stark's young protégé, quickly and efficiently shut down by Stark Industries' PR department.
Back home, in Washington, A. C. sits down next to Leo on his bed with a serious expression. "You like Audrey, right?" he asks, acting like he's worried for some reason.
Leo shrugs. "Yeah, she's awesome."
Suddenly shy, A. C. pulls a box out of his jacket; Leo's eyes bug out. "I, uh, I may have asked Pepper for advice on this."
"Dude, is that what I think it is?"
"It is, and don't call me 'dude'." He puts it in his lap; opens it, and shows Leo. "And yes, it's an engagement ring."
"So? When are you going to ask her?"
"Well, that all depends on you."
"What do you..." The penny drops. "You're asking me for permission to marry your girlfriend?"
A. C. looks at him, a puzzled expression on his face. "Well, yes, this does directly affect you. And you are the most important person in my life; don't be surprised if..."
He's cut off by Leo throwing his arms around his neck, with what feels like it has to be the biggest grin of Leo's life stretching across his face. "Marry her," he says into A. C.'s shoulder, then pulls back and repeats, "Marry her," slightly louder.
A. C. is smiling too. "So I take I have permission?"
"You definitely have my permission."
"Want to go do it now?"
"What—like, now-now? Jeez, you're impatient, lemme just find the camera..."
A. C. pauses in the doorway before he heads to the living room, where Audrey is sitting on the couch. "Oh, and by the way, I want you to be my best man."
"Wait a minute, I thought Uncle Nick had dibs!"
Leo and Piper get out of wedding planning, just for a week, when his grandfather invites them to go visit some of Leo's more distant relatives—his third cousins or something—in Oaxaca.
Everything changes in Oaxaca.