Ned Leeds vs. The Global Media
Stark Compound – Private Wing
Sunday, 1:17 a.m.
The supercomputer purred like a living thing.
Ned Leeds sat cross-legged in a rolling chair that cost more than his family's car, surrounded by three lawyers, six monitors, two empty candy bowls, and an amount of coffee that would have killed a small horse.
His fingers flew.
Code scrolled.
Shifted.
Whispered.
Ned blinked hard. "…Okay, I swear it's talking to me."
One of the lawyers leaned in, eyes wide. "Is that… normal?"
Ned squinted at the cascading data. "I think it's just pattern recognition. Or the caffeine. Or both. Probably both."
The task Tony had given him was simple in theory and monstrous in execution:
Erase every trace of the Asgardian crash.
Scrub satellites.
Redirect chatter.
Kill conspiracy threads before they learned to walk.
By sunrise, Ned had done it.
By breakfast, he was polishing it.
By lunch, the spaceship crash existed only as a blurry "possible meteorological anomaly" and three deleted Reddit threads titled ALIENS??? that now redirected to cat videos.
The lawyers stared at the screens like they were watching a god work.
"This is… unprecedented," one whispered.
Ned yawned, rubbing his eyes. "Yeah. Turns out if you collapse the metadata early enough, the internet just… shrugs and moves on."
Another lawyer cleared her throat. "We should release something. A distraction. Something big."
Ideas flew.
"Celebrity scandal?"
"No."
"Market manipulation?"
"Too risky."
"Stark divorce rumor?"
Ned's head snapped up. "Absolutely not."
One junior lawyer hesitated. "…What about a Stark scandal? Something controlled?"
All eyes turned to him.
The room went quiet.
Ned looked back to the screen.
The code shifted.
Flowed.
Patterns aligned.
And for one brief, terrifying moment, Ned understood it.
The code suggested something.
Something… loud.
Something human.
Something that would drown out everything else.
Ned's lips parted.
"…Huh."
The lawyers leaned forward. "What?"
Ned didn't answer.
His fingers moved.
Not fast.
Automatic.
A press release template opened.
A simple statement.
A truth.
TONY STARK CONFIRMS:
Peter Parker is his son.
Edward Leeds is his son's brother.
Ned stared at it.
Blink.
"…That makes sense."
He hit SEND.
Silence.
Then chaos.
Within seconds, every major news agency lit up.
STARK CONFIRMS SECRET FAMILY
WHO IS PETER PARKER?
GENIUS HEIR TO STARK INDUSTRIES
BROTHER CONFIRMED: EDWARD LEEDS
INSIDE THE STARK FAMILY
Stark Industries PR did what Stark Industries PR always did.
They amplified.
New tablets.
New watches.
"Designed with help from Peter Parker."
Human interest stories.
Family legacy.
Genius lineage.
The story went nuclear.
Ten minutes later, one of the lawyers screamed.
"Oh my GOD!"
Another choked. "That wasn't approved!"
Phones rang.
Emails exploded.
By the time legal tried to pull it back, it was already everywhere.
It was canon.
Ned blinked slowly.
"…Oh."
The sugar crashed.
The caffeine burned out.
The room tilted.
Ned slid sideways out of his chair, face-first onto the desk, snoring instantly.
Nothing woke him.
Not shouting.
Not alarms.
Not the global meltdown he had just caused.
Twenty-six hours without sleep finally won.
Somewhere across the compound, Tony Stark was in a high-level meeting, blissfully unaware that his entire life had just been rewritten by a sixteen-year-old fueled by Skittles and forbidden knowledge.
Friday's voice echoed softly through the system.
"…Boss is going to be so mad."