This is the way the world ends...

[smarterthandad]

WHO: Valeria Richards, Peter Parker, Tony Stark
WHERE: Avengers Mansion
WHEN: Backdated to 01/05, sometime in the afternoon moving into evening.
WARNINGS: Probably pretty emotionally heavy but nothing worse than that unless idk Spidey tries to throttle Tony (you know you've considered it, Peter.)
SUMMARY: Science says we're fucked and science doesn't lie; maybe Peter and Tony will finally deal with their issues.
FORMAT: Prose

This was not the kind of news one delivered over the phone. Valeria took her tablet and slid off the grownup-sized chair where she'd been kneeling to work, padding down the quiet hallway in search of one of the Mansion's handful of residents...preferably Peter, if she were to be honest with herself. Tony was a friend of the family, but Peter was on the Fantastic Four, which made him actual family, whether or not he quite realized it.

She had tried at least a dozen theoretical formulations to get out of the conclusion her intuition had reached days ago. Reed wouldn't have been happy with that, but Reed Richards didn't have much moral high ground on avoidant behavior. Besides, he wasn't here, and she was exploring this problem alone, more or less. Peter was just an ordinary genius, while Tony was on her level but not a theoretician. And she was working almost blind. So really, it wasn't surprising she wasn't at her most efficient.

Even a supremely gifted three year old was not going to handle the impending end of reality with flawless grace.

Comments

[incywincyhero]

Peter was in the kitchen, having excused himself from the lab a few minutes previously to put together a tray of ham sandwiches, coffee (for himself and Tony), and milk (for Val). Every minute counted, but supergenius brains and superhuman metabolisms needed refueling. As Peter fell under the latter category more than the former, at least in this crowd, it was up to him to play Aunt May and make sure everybody stayed more or less functional.

None of this was running through his conscious mind as he spread mayo and peeled meat slices out of the packaging. Instead he was outlining the next set of simulations to run, calculating whether he could use the processing time to cook up more webbing, considering whether the value of more webbing wasn't its physical utility but the psychological boon of having busywork to stave off the panic beginning to gnaw around his gut.

Peter almost slammed the door as he shut the fridge, but slumped forward instead of turning away, leaning forehead against cool metal.

He had to keep it together. The team was down to two Avengers and a toddler, and though he was probably the Least Valuable Player -- he didn't even have the mental energy to brood over ranking after the toddler -- that membership card still counted for something. He might not have the fate of the universe in his hands but he would damn well look after those who did.

Pulling away from the fridge, he turned away to retrieve the tray, then stopped as he saw Valeria in the doorway. "Hey, kiddo. I've got dinner ready if you want to sit down and eat. How's it been going on your end?"

[smarterthandad]

Val was a flawless liar, good enough to fool Sue. In 15 years she was going to be devastating at poker, assuming any of them lived that long. Unlike the last time she had been facing the end of the universe, however, now she didn't see any reason to hide her real feelings, and she looked up at Peter with an uncharacteristically solemn expression.

"...It's not a singularity."

[incywincyhero]

"Okay," Peter said. He sucked in a deep breath and kneeled, so that they were eye level. "Normally I'd say that's good news, but something's telling me you're not finished."

[smarterthandad]

"Vacuum collapse." She held up the tablet with her calculations, converted from her legible but childish handwriting to a compact mathematical typeface by a program of her father's.

[incywincyhero]

The words didn't sink in immediately because he was reading, then reaching out to take the tablet from her hand and prop it on his knee, then reading some more. Then went back to the beginning and read it all again, because even if he'd yet to catch out Val in an error, there was a first time for everything.

But there were no mistakes, and there might never be a first time for much of anything.

"Val," he swallowed, feeling it click in his dry throat. "We should go talk to Tony."

[smarterthandad]

With her hands clasped behind her back where she could nervously twist her fingers unseen, she watched Peter review her work.

"It took me so long because I didn't want it to be true. I'm not usually that illogical." Valeria could defeat her father's security, teleport the Baxter Building to Latveria, and outmaneuver Victor von Doom, but she still didn't understand much about about emotions.

[incywincyhero]

Peter feels his heart break a little in his chest as he tugs Valeria into a loose embrace. Sue or Reed should be doing this, is the thought that floats across his mind. It's tempting, at that moment, to let himself sink, but all he needs to do is consider who he's hugging and the desire passes, or at least gets shoved back into the crevices of his mind. Now more than ever, he needs to keep his cool -- at least until this is all over. As for afterwards, well, it may not matter.

"It's okay to find this scary, you know," he tells her, before he leans away without letting go. "I'm pretty scared right now, if we're being honest."

[liverletdie]

Tony wasn't really the kind of person well-suited for babysitting. Honestly, there was little he could do for a three year old and Peter Parker, who more often than not could honestly have some of the traits. Or at least in Tony Stark's eye.

He stepped in on a scene that he didn't really know what to do with. Valeria being hugged by Peter. Well, touching as it was, they had to get back to work. If he were a lesser man, he may have thought that he was driving the two of them too hard, but... well, there were things that needed to happen, and things that needed done.

Making each other feel better didn't really accomplish either of those things. "Alright, is the touching moment over? Can I come in, now?"

[smarterthandad]

Not really having expected affection, Val tensed up, but then returned the embrace, small arms wrapping around his neck because she couldn't reach all the way around his shoulders. Peter, in his Spider-Man persona, had picked her up plenty of times back home, but it had always been because she was too short or too slow. The occasional hair-ruffle notwithstanding, he was Franklin's friend, not hers.

...She shouldn't have thought of her family just now. Val swallowed, pushing back her troublesome emotions someplace they couldn't get in the way and make her useless. Maybe it wasn't healthy, but when your entire psychological defense mechanism against the insane universe you live in is the conviction that your family will always stand between you and it, thinking about how they aren't around isn't good for your equilibrium when the apocalypse is looming.

"The bubble is expanding so quickly our nervous systems won't have time to register the change when it reaches Earth." That passed as reassurance in Valeria's world--the concept of her own death was too abstract for the idea to affect her as strongly as the thought of suffering. The annihilation they were facing would be so swift and complete that pain didn't even figure into it.

When Tony came in and proceeded to act like Tony, she scowled at him over Peter's shoulder. Sometimes she questioned her father's taste in friends...which was pretty hypocritical from the girl with the crush on the Wingless Wizard's clone.

[incywincyhero]

Peter scooped Valeria back up and stood, half-turning as he did. "If you're going to be like that, I'm going to eat your sandwich," he said, light tones at odd with the warning look he sent Tony.

Which wasn't to say that he didn't feel better having the other man there, but heck if he was going to admit it.

"All right, what's the game plan? We're not packing it in just yet."

[liverletdie]

Tony didn't really know what to do in these sorts of situations, honestly. Peter could hug Val all he wanted, but he thought the girl would be fine, either way. She had the intellect to put up with it, so what was the point in trying to comfort her? It just created a false sense of security, probably for both Peter and Valeria. Sure, he knew what purpose it served, but right now, Tony Stark was in more machine than man mode, working, processing, his motions less shifty. When he stood still, he didn't fidget. Every motion was the most efficient way from point a to point b. It looked natural, but it really looked too natural, the way he moved.

He crossed the kitchen, grabbing at the sandwich. "The game plan is that we get back to work, honestly. We've still got reams of data, and probably enough problems that we're going to need to hurry this up. I've got my suits out there right now, but it's honestly getting worse by the moment."

And that was the crux of why Tony was being very Tony. He could normally fake it enough with smiles and pretending to not be so blasé about human needs and emotions, but when push came to shove, when it came down to the wire, he would always, always, always lose sight of that, and go back to pure logic. It was the best, and only, way he knew how to deal with these problems. Internally, and externally. Dealing with them mentally was a matter of simply pretending that they weren't problems. Eventually, they went away.

[smarterthandad]

The interchange between Peter and Tony gave Val long enough to compose herself and grab her tablet back from Peter. Not that she couldn't think about a dozen things at once, but the more mental effort she was spending on theories and probabilities and logistics, the less she had to spare for emotions she lacked the maturity to handle.

"None of Dad's countermeasures for vacuum collapse will work for us," she said, starting to scribble numbers on the screen as she spun her intellectual dynamos back up. "They all require more infrastructure than we have in place. Uncle Doom almost certainly has some too, but I don't know any details, and if it's something Dad hasn't already thought of, it'd likely involve magic."

She didn't bother to double check her math before pushing it to the Stark servers where Tony could see it. It was just a four-dimensional integral, the sort of thing she solved as an afterthought the way normal person might calculate a tip at a restaurant. "Extrapolating the trend, we have around 48 hours to invent and deploy something entirely new."