Blood Brothers || Marvel AU

𝐈: 𝐍𝐞𝐠𝐨𝐭𝐢𝐮𝐦 𝐢𝐧 𝐮𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐥𝐢𝐬

BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND, 1919

An infant whimpered and moaned as a pair of agitated workers moved it through the narrow halls, apt to fit fewer than four bodies within. Inside the cramped laundry washed, damp sheets wave in lines, fume hisses from the endless engines, and a heavy thud of a steam hammer includes itself to the turmoil from an adjacent forging and pressing firm.

Two figures-a tall, balding male and a short, languid girl-dart their way past the chaos.

"Hurry, or they'll kill us all!" the father murmured to his daughter, exhorting her to hasten her pace. The girl barely kept up with his pace and almost falls over.

Chinese children grown seven to eleven weakly scrub the hefty wet sheets on steel washboards. Elderly women use irons much too heavy for them to carry alone, some with babies in slings on their backs. An aged man dozes off from exhaustion on an ironing board, his face inches away from the shallow stream of vapor running from the iron itself. A dozen urgent conversations in the same language blare through the dense fog.

The duo reached a girl just old enough to handle the newborn baby's weight and handed her the weeping toddler while she seethes in Cantonese. An elder gawked at the couple, bewildered.

"Where are you going?"

"He has asked for her." The father didn't trouble serving any attention to him as he searched through the drawers. His trembling palms scooped a velvet bag gently and placed it in his pocket.

The erstwhile tried demanding on for a specific answer. He received none, simply a few horrified glances through a billow of vapor.

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The typical Small Heath tenement court was nothing out of the ordinary. The yard is a mere hundred feet long and dissected by a cobbled street. Two four-story tenements exchange glances across the cobblestones. Laundry lines are strung across the courtyard and soaked sheets flap in the breeze.

Dozens of children of various ages are playing on the cobblestones, all barefoot and dressed in smutted rags. Women are hanging or bringing in their laundry, calling out to one another, their voices echoing off the tenement walls. Laughter and yelling fill the air.

A little boy pulls open the door of an outside lavatory, exposing an elderly man inside to general hilarity. The place remains littered with stray cats and dogs snooping around every crack and crevice for any leftover food. An illegal gin still drips its lethal liquor into a stone jar behind a blackened brick wall.

The women are all dressed in billowy gowns, with colored calico headscarves wrapped around their heads.

In spite of the poverty, a powerful sense of tremendous energy and vigor remains present rather than despair, even with the constant thumping roar of heavy engineering plants.

Right when the sound of clacking hooves reaches the streets, all laughter dies in a matter of seconds. The children, who once were prancing about with joy, freeze instantaneously at the noise. Whispers spread like wildfire throughout the mothers. Washing's abandoned inside the baskets, and they turn towards the children to summon their own.

A masculine silhouette on a dazzling white horse trots into the courtyard, drawing a dozen pairs of eyes with him. He's dressed in a dark grey suit-apparel beyond unusual for a man riding a horse-and his boots are polished with not a single speck of dirt visible. A Stetson Hatteras flat cap angles over his brow, with generous folds of cloth hanging over his ears. The peak casts a shadow over his gloomy eyes.

Y/N Parker has arrived.

What remained of the crowd blocking his path disbands in an instant and rushes for cover, yet he doesn't even bat an eye. Their behavior was nothing out of the ordinary-not in his eyes.