It was a Friday.
Peter was walking through the school hallway listening to a conversation between three students near the water fountain.
"Did you see the news? That guy is incredible!"
"He was in my neighborhood last night! I actually saw him! He stopped these two guys who were breaking into a car and it was unreal!"
"That is nothing." The third student held out his phone.
"Look at this. A mysterious figure stopped a car in motion being driven by thieves, with lines coming out of his hands. He stopped it with his own strength."
"I love the design. It looks like it came straight out of a 1930s action novel."
"And here is a video of him swinging between the buildings."
Peter kept his face neutral and kept walking.
Gwen found him two minutes later in the corridor.
"Hi, Peter."
"Hi, Gwen. Everyone seems very excited about the masked man."
"I have to admit it is genuinely remarkable," she said, falling into step beside him.
"Someone going out into the streets to help people and confront criminals. It has to be either someone incredibly brave or completely out of their mind."
"Sometimes bravery and foolishness look identical from the outside,"
Peter said, with the specific calm of someone who has thought about this question extensively.
"You just have to know what you are looking at to tell the difference."
Gwen considered this and did not disagree.
....
After the final bell, Peter was a few steps from the school exit when his phone vibrated.
Susan Storm [2]
Hello Peter
Come quickly, I have news. Do not keep me waiting. :p
He read it, smiled at the screen in the way people smile at messages from people they find genuinely entertaining, put the phone away, and hailed a taxi.
"Baxter Building," he said.
------
He took the private elevator to the second-to-last floor, walked the familiar corridor to Susan's laboratory, and knocked on the open door with his knuckles while leaning against the frame.
"Excuse my intrusion, beautiful lady?" He gave a mock bow. "You summoned me?"
"Enough, Peter," Susan said, with the specific exhausted tone of someone who is not actually exhausted and is enjoying themselves considerably.
She was moving around the far side of the lab table.
A note on Susan Storm, for context.
When Peter had first arrived at Baxter she had been operating under a quiet but persistent belief that no matter how much she achieved, she would always be measured against Reed Richards and found insufficient by the comparison.
It was the kind of belief that does not announce itself loudly but shapes everything from the inside.
Peter had noticed it within the first week, addressed it directly because he found indirectness inefficient, and spent the following weeks demonstrating through the specific evidence of her own work that the comparison was both unfair and wrong.
The results had been visible.
Susan had started finishing things she had previously left half-done because she was afraid of what finishing them would reveal about their quality.
She had started disagreeing with other researchers in meetings rather than deferring.
She had started coming to Peter's lab not because she needed something but because she wanted to be there, which was a different thing entirely.
"The staring and the teasing should stop," she said now, with a smile that was doing considerable work to remain professorial.
"On second thought." She paused. "I will allow you to continue with the second one."
"I have absolutely no idea what you are referring to," Peter said, crossing the lab and sitting down.
"I was being entirely professional."
"You were absolutely not."
"I was lying," he said pleasantly. "Gorgeous."
"Pervert."
"You said to continue. I did not make the invitation." He shrugged.
"Why did you call me?"
She sighed, which was a sound he had learned to interpret as genuine fondness rather than actual exasperation, and sat down across from him.
"It is a shame you are underage," she said.
"Since when has age been an obstacle to anything?"
He raised an eyebrow. "You know I am considerably more mature than my age would suggest. At least, that is what I prefer to think."
"That is true," she said. "Why should age matter?"
A pause. She reached across the table and produced a card, which she slid toward him.
"Dad asked me to give you this. As of today you are officially part of Baxter's main research staff."
Peter looked at the card.
"This is not possible," he said.
"A full staff position requires unanimous board approval. They would need to have seen something that impressed them significantly."
"They saw what you are capable of with limited resources when you demonstrated the formula,"
Susan said.
"And then the cancer treatment launched and the Baymax units launched, and the board's position shifted from interested to committed.
They concluded that with greater access and fewer constraints, what you could produce was worth considerably more than the cost of giving you those things."
She leaned forward slightly. "Dad agreed with them. So did I."
Peter turned the card over in his hands.
Baymax deserved a moment of acknowledgment here, even just internally.
The original concept was one of his favorites from the animated film, a medical care robot built around the philosophy of putting the patient's needs at the absolute center of every decision.
The version he had built was not identical but operated on the same principles, and the version he had built for the house had the additional capability set that he had not mentioned in any public documentation.
The one in the kitchen had already stopped two separate situations that May had not known were situations because it had handled them before they developed, which was exactly the intended function.
"I understand now," he said, looking up from the card.
He became aware that Susan had relocated during the few seconds he had been looking at the card.
She was now seated on his lap, which was a position she had arrived at without announcing the intention.
"Damn," he said, keeping his expression controlled through the specific discipline of someone who is having a physiological response they find inconvenient.
"Miss Storm, you move fast."
"I am just playing," she said, close to his ear, in a tone that suggested she was mostly but not entirely joking.
She pressed a kiss to his cheek and settled against him with the comfortable certainty of someone who has made a decision and is not second-guessing it.
"You have helped me with so many things since you joined. Me, and Dad, and the work.
You kept me company when I needed it and helped with my projects when I was stuck and made me feel like what I was doing was worth doing.
I asked Dad for this and he did not argue. He agreed immediately."
"You did not need to do any of this," Peter said, maintaining a strained smile because something in the vicinity of his lower spine was developing strong opinions about the current arrangement and those opinions were not helping.
"It has always been a genuine pleasure to help the Sir Storm and a beautiful and completely unreasonable woman like you."
"Flattery," Susan said, running a hand through his hair, "will get you absolutely everywhere, Mr. Parker."
She stood, returned to her chair, and sat back down. Her face was red in a way she was not addressing.
"That is all. You can stay or go home, as you prefer."
"Yes, ma'am."
He stood, came to attention with the precision of a soldier at inspection, and did not particularly attempt to conceal the evidence of his previous two minutes.
"I will see you later."
"Goodbye," she said, waving, and then turned back to her work and said, at a volume she probably thought was not audible:
"He is hiding a great deal in those clothes."
He did not respond to this because there was no response that would have been appropriate, and took the elevator to the sixth floor.