"Lights will guide you home 
And ignite your bones 
And I will try to fix you" 
- Coldplay

  "Grey ?" Harper whispered, still tied up. "That can't be right..."

  "It is," the woman laughed as she kneeled in front of her. "I'm your mother, Harper, your true mother."

  "My mother is dead." It was like she was spitting her words.

  Helen Grey slapped her biological daughter in the face. Iron Man took a leap forward but was immediately threatened by all the guns around him. He watched his daughter, who was being held prisoner, and his protege. Tony was thinking as fast as he could if a way of getting them all to safety.

  "Poor little thing," she breathed in her face. "When Smith told me about his own vendetta, who do you think convinced him to see the bigger picture ? Who do you think gave him his first-born for that bigger picture ?"

  "My mother died the day she decided to use me as a weapon."

  Harper's face was as hard as a stone and so was her voice. Peter, his back stuck to hers, managed to get a hold of her hand between the chairs. She linked her fingers to his, thinking he was trying to support her. Well, he was, but Peter moved his girlfriend's fingers on the rope that tied them and tapped it slightly. Harper got the idea. As she looked at that woman who dared calling herself her mother, she gave her finger the exact amount of energy they needed to burn the rope.

  "My mother died in the flames I created."

  She had to be careful : if she wasn't powerful enough, the rope would burn slowly and either the smell or the smoke would alert Helen. If she was too powerful, the rope would break instantly and would probably burn of Harper's and Peter's skin at the same time.

  "She died when she turned me to a monster."

  "You're right," Helen Grey said. "You never had a mother, didn't you ? I'm only the one who gave birth to you. I knew what I'd do with you the second I knew I was pregnant. Oh, if only you had seen your father's face when he burned, along with our house... You were so mad at yourself ! It was almost...tenderising."

  Her last word was full of disgust.

  "And then, Smith did the rest when I stayed in the shadow. I couldn't wait to see this. You went to Tony Stark's, just as I had planned."

  "See ? That's where you're wrong : I have a mother."

  "If you're talking about Potts..."

  "That's exactly who I'm talking about. Pepper is my mother. She raised me, just as my father did. And whether you like it or not, your plan didn't make me that weapon of mass destruction you wanted. You wanna know why ?"

  "No. I really don't care, actually."

  "Whatever. If I became who I am today, that's because your twisted manipulations gave me a family."

  "You call that..."

  "A family who loves me. Peter, go !"

  Peter spread his arms violently and broke the remaining strings of rope. He turned around, starting a riot downstairs : Tony and the others took this opportunity to strike. Helen ducked right on time to avoid one of Peter's webs. She leaped over a desk and started yelling names that the teenagers couldn't recognise. Three of her men ran to them and each of our heroes took care of one soldier. Once they were both harnessed, they noticed that their main rival had disappeared with the help of the third man. Without waisting time, they joined the adults, who were fighting with their heart and soul, and they fought alongside them, just like full Avengers. The fight lasted for a long hour and when they were able to finally snap out of it, eighteen bodies were lying on the ground. The fight was barely over that Tony was already running to his daughter's side.

  "Dad, I'm so sorry, I wanted to..."

  She was weeping buckets without even noticing it and he couldn't do anything else but hold her tightly in his arms. He kissed her a few times on the forehead before studying her from head to toe. 

  "Are you hurt ? Oh god, your shoulder... Bullet ?"

  "Yeah, I...I wasn't quick enough. I'm so sorry..."

  "Hush, enough," he whispered. "We'll talk about all of this at home. First, we need to fix you up, okay ?"

***

  Harper had fallen asleep on the metal table as soon as they'd gotten the bullet out of her body. When Pepper came into the room, after she finally convinced Tony to take a shower (he wouldn't agree to leave his daughter's side), she was quite surprise to see that Peter Parker hadn't moved an inch. He directed a pair of reddened eyes at her.

  "Is everything okay, Peter ?" she asked in a worried voice.

  "I'm so sorry, Ma'am, I couldn't... I should've protected her and stop that from happening. I..."

  "Hey, she's fine," she tried to comfort him in spite of her own worries. "If you hadn't been with her, who knows what else could've have happened ?"

  Peter sighed as he looked at Harper again. She was still peacefully asleep.

  "How...how did you know where we were ?"

  "The Principal called Tony to tell him Harper wasn't at school. He figured that's what she was going to do."

  "And that woman..."

  "Tony told me," Pepper interrupted him. "We thought she was dead until some time a go. I can't even imagine the horrible things she told her."

  "She didn't let her get to her," Peter said as a faint smile appeared on his lips. "She showed her what she's made of."

  Harper started waking up slowly and grinned in pain as she sat up.

  "Here's the sleepy head," Peter joked.

  "Mom !"

  That was the first word to come out of her mouth and Pepper quickly wrapped her arms around her daughter. It reminded her of the very first time Harper had called her mom. She must've been around ten : Pepper and Tony weren't even together at the time. Tony was traveling and Pepper had just read Harper a bedtime story. Fairytales soothed her when she was feeling anxious at night. Pepper was getting ready to leave the room and turned off the lights.

  "Good night," she'd said.

  "N'night, mom," had she heard back.

  The memory made her tear up : Harper had grown up so quickly. She was in high school, dating her first boyfriend, had the same taste for justice than her father and above all, she had the same tendency to run head first into danger. Pepper cherished her more than her own life.

  "I'm glad you're okay," she said, relieved to see her daughter smile. "How are you feeling ?"

  "My shoulder hurts a little but...I'm okay."

  Peter looked at her with worried and thankful eyes. In his eyes, Pepper noticed the spark she could've recognised anywhere : it was the look of someone in love.

  "I'll leave you guys alone, alright ? Your father's in the bathroom, I'll tell him you woke up."

  "Thanks, mom."

  She squeezed her one last time before she left to join her husband and the other Avengers. Harper turned to face Peter, sitting in front of her.

  "You're good ?" she asked.

  "Better now that you're awake."

  "I'm sorry I dragged you into this," she said. "I got you tied up and you might've been hurt and..."

  "Am I ?"

  "No."

  "No, and even if I was, it wouldn't be your fault. I chose to go there with you. How are you feeling ?"

  "I just said it just hurts a little."

  "It's not what I asked. I mean... How are you feeling ? Like, emotionally speaking ?"

  "Oh." She lowered her gaze. "I guess you're referring to the fact that my biological mother is alive and thinks of me as a monster. Well, I think I'm okay with that."

  "You're sure ? It's okay to be shocked, Harper, or even sad. It's normal."

  Harper finally locked eyes with Peter when he sat next to her on the table. With infinite gentleness, she placed her fingers in his neck and stroke his jaw with her thumb.

  "I don't wanna be sad."

  "Why ?"

  "I don't want Mom and Dad to think I'm sad because of them."

  "I don't see why they'd believe that."

  "When I saw my...my birth mother, part of me thought that if it weren't for those damn powers, she would've been the one who'd have raised me."

  "And what did you think next ?"

  "That if it were the case, I would never have met my parents. I would never have had this wonderful family and...I wouldn't have met you."

  She closed her eyes for a second and when she opened them again, Peter's gaze were piercing her soul like a needle, as if he knew all of her secrets.

  "You can be sad, Harper, it doesn't mean you...you push them away. You're allowed to be vulnerable, damn it. You're human."

  "I doubt that sometimes."

  "If you weren't human, do you think you'd feel like this ?"

  She hadn't looked away from him and confused questions were shooting through her head. In this mental chaos, however, was one absolute certainty, something so abstract and yet so convincing to her.

  "I love you, Peter. I love you like I've never loved anyone before that."

  She said it. Those words had been saved for her parents until then. The few seconds that passed by were the most cosmic seconds of her short life. Peter leaned in and brushed his lips against hers.

  "I love you, Harper Stark," he whispered. "Don't you ever forget it."

  He closed the remaining distance between them and gave her the most loving kiss she had ever got from him. He placed his hand in her neck and the other next to her, on the table. He kept her against him once they broke from the kiss. He felt her lips in his neck, her hair under his chin, the heat of her body against his chest. He could've stayed like that forever.

  "Well, don't mind me."

  They got away from each other surprisingly fast. Tony was standing in the doorway and he was watching them with an amused smile, arms folded on his chest. He gave them the famous 'We need to talk' look. He walked to them silently, dragged a chair on the ground and sat on it, backwards, with his arms resting on the backrest. 

  "What you did today was extremely reckless," he said on a lecturing tone. "You could've been hurt even more badly, or you could've got yourself..."

  'Killed.' Tony thought the word and Harper guessed it. Yet, he couldn't say it : a world without Harper was a world he couldn't bare to imagine.

  "I don't want this to happen again. Never. Next to time you have a brilliant idea like this one, you come to me. We'll talk about it, I swear. But you can't afford to act like you did."

  "But Dad, you would've done the exact same thing."

  "I now. Trust me, sweetheart : sometimes you think you have the best reasons in the world to do what you do. But looking back, you realise it was a very bad idea."

  Tony's tone wasn't a lecturing one. On the contrary, he spoke with a caring and protective voice, a tone that was only preventing and fatherly.

  "I'm sorry I scared you like that," Harper said. "I won't do it again. If there's another thing like this one, I'll come to you right away and...I'll try to avoid dragging Peter in it."

  "Promise ?"

  "Promise," she said solemnly.

  Tony Stark smiled one last time to his daughter and squeezed her tight. Peter didn't know what to do with him self and Tony laughed at his aghast expression.

  "You can have her back in a minute, kid, don't worry."

  Peter's cheeks turned red and Harper... Let's just say she was happy to be hiding in her father's shirt.