Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

To be fair, when Tony first designed the prototype for the perhaps unfortunately named Baby Zapper, he ran himself through an exhaustive list of potential repercussions before putting it in the hands of any teammates. Being in the company of a smart mouthed teenage vigilante with enhanced senses and no regard for authority was, admittedly, not one of them.

That aside, the whole idea of the Baby Zapper was a little — well, off-brand. Tony isn’t exactly a person in any position to justify breaking a party. Which is why he hasn’t put aforementioned Baby Zapper on any kind of commercial market, nor would he ever plan to — first off, it would be literal chaos, and probably super constitutionally unsound, and either parents would be up in arms about its existence or liberally abusing it and quite frankly Tony already has enough strangers yelling at him on a daily basis to deal with that.

See, the whole concept of the Baby Zapper (really, who lets him name shit so liberally?) is that once it’s activated, it emits a high-pitched, nearly inaudible shriek of a noise that compels anyone under the age of 18 to leave the area immediately. It’s not actually harmful to the punks, just irritating — and seeing as the under 18 set are the exact demographic of People Who Tend To Linger Around Dangerous Situations Despite Their Imminent And Impending Dooms (thanks for that, Chatsnap or whatever the hell it was kids were taking “Look at me, I’m in the middle of a disaster!” selfies for), it’s necessary as all hell.

Particularly today when, yet again, there is what appears to be a gang with super enhanced weapons tearing up midtown and literally every minor equipped with a cell phone has decided that now’s as good a time as any to test their mortality by getting super, duper close to it.

Tony activates the intercom on his suit.

“There are a few more on 32nd,” Rhodey reports, “taking care of it now.”

“See any more airborne?” asks Tony.

“Nah, just us. The hell with all these kids, man?” says Rhodey. “I swear to god they’re multiplying. I can’t get any clean shots.”

“School just let out,” says Tony. He blinks, wondering why he knows that, and then —  

“Hey Mr. Stark! Incoming!”

Ah. There it is. He sees webbing cut through his line of vision before he actually sees the kid flying in behind them, just as he knew he would.

“Listen, Webs — ”

“How can I help?”

By leaving this to the goddamn professionals, Tony almost snaps, but last he checked he’s not exactly getting paid for this, either. Besides, there’s no point in telling the kid to leave — the best Tony can do is give him a task that will keep him out of the thick of things until the coast is relatively clear.

“Get your teenage brethren the hell out of here. Web up their phones if you have to. Can’t have ‘em in the line of fire.”

“On it,” says Peter, descending down to the street.

“I’ll help,” says Rhodey, without elaborating.

Tony watches out of the corner of his eye as the kid starts corralling his peers, then starts focusing on the armed goons that need neutralizing yesterday. He manages to fry at least one piece of tech before he’s interrupted by a graceless teenage squawk over the comm system.

“You okay, kid?”

“Um — yes, yeah, ah, but — shit, where’s that noise coming from?”

“What noise?”

“The one that sounds like the screaming of a hundred thousand unholy — ”

“Tony, on your right!”

Tony doesn’t need the warning, he’s already got the guy on lock. One blast is all it takes for his tech to be reduced to smithereens; it’s a wonder to Tony that criminals even try this kind of shit at all. Are people really this desperate for attention? Tony has daddy issues the size of Texas, but even he’s managed not to debase himself as thoroughly as this.

“Wow, that shit works like a charm. The punks are out,” says Rhodey, as the kids start to file out of the two block radius where the action is happening.

“Nice work, Underoos.”

“What?”

“I’m kind of a one and done on the praise thing, kid, so — “

“What?” Peter asks over the comm, louder this time.

“Need a hand? … Or a wing?”

Tony’s shoulders tense before the man even comes into his viewfinder — the Falcon himself, swooping in out of seemingly nowhere. Tony knew that he and Steve and the others had been released a few weeks ago and hasn’t exactly kept up with their whereabouts, but he wasn’t expecting anyone to show up mid-battle like Germany was just some weird collective lucid dream, either. 

“Not really,” says Tony. There is a brief moment the considers softening the words, but the image of Rhodey plummeting from the sky is a little too fresh in his mind. “What are you doing here?”

“Light tourism,” says Sam.

“Could use an extra set of eyes over here, man,” Rhodey says to Sam over the comm.

“Wait, what?” says Tony, as another few men bust seemingly out of nowhere to keep up the fight. “Are you two just good now, or — ”

“Yeah, Tones, we talked a while back.”

“You’re making it difficult for me to nurse a grudge and you know how I treasure my grudges.”

“Someone taking care of the civilians?” asks Sam.

“Yeah, we got Sticky McGee on it down there,” says Tony.

“Oh, man. I didn’t hallucinate the whole Spider-Man thing?” asks Sam, looking down below.

“If only. Kid, you still good down there?” asks Tony. He can see the Peter moving down below, but there have been suspiciously few overeager interruptions over the comm, especially considering Sam’s emergence from the ether.

No answer. “Is his comm disabled?” Tony wonders out loud, zeroing in on another would-be attacker.

“All comm systems are currently online,” FRIDAY reports.

Tony squints down at the ground. Peter must just be distracted, then — he’s still ducking and weaving and herding some of the slower movers, but miraculously all of the younger set seems to have disappeared. Good. One less thing on their conscience in case this all goes to shit.

Between the four of them they manage to get the area cleared and the threat neutralized within the next few minutes. They all land where the men and women are clustered in a heap with their dismantled weapons in various degrees of groaning and unconscious, and Tony claps his hands together in finality.

“I’ll let you do the honors, kid. Web ‘em up. We can leave these guys to the NYPD.”

Peter is standing right next to him, but he doesn’t move, doesn’t even react.

“Hey,” says Tony, waving a hand in front of his face.

“DID YOU SAY SOMETHING?” Peter yells, turning to look at him.

“Uh, that was aggressive,” says Sam.

“Yeah, I said multiple things. Can you not …”

“SORRY, I CAN’T HEAR YOU — UH — COULD WE MAYBE FIGURE OUT A WAY TO STOP WHATEVER THAT NOISE IS?”

“What noise?” Tony demands.

For a second he feels a twinge of annoyance, thinking it’s some kind of joke, but Peter laughs a little weakly, like Tony’s the one joking. The slight movement gives him away — he’s gone completely rigid, his hands shaking.

“Whoa, is he alright?” asks Rhodey.

Tony walks in front of the kid, syncing Peter’s vitals to his view screen. The AI in Peter’s suit reports, “Peter is currently experiencing severe sensory overload, due to the initiation of Baby Zapper protocol.”

“Shit. Rhodey, did you turn on the Baby Zapper?”

“Um, did someone say Baby Zapper?” says Sam.

“Course I did, how else were we going to get rid of — ”

“Turn it off, now.”

“On it.”

A beat later Peter sags with relief, nearly stumbling to his knees. Tony catches him just before he goes down in a breathless, heaving heap.

“Oh thank god,” says Peter, trying to scramble for balance, pushing himself off of Tony. It doesn’t quite work — he’s still swaying enough that Tony has to reach out and steady him with two hands on his shoulders.

“Give yourself a second, kid — “

“What the — what hell was that?” asks Peter, his voice still a little too loud. “It felt like someone was excavating the inside of my ears — ”

He starts pawing at the seams of his mask the way Tony has noticed he does when he’s overwhelmed. “Not here,” says Tony. “Hold on a sec.”

He grabs him then and hauls him up to the nearest rooftop, where there won’t be any nosy eyes or cameras. He hears Rhodey and Sam follow and braces himself for what will no doubt be an extensive firing of questions.

“I’m fine, I’m good,” says Peter, wriggling out of Tony’s grasp the second he sees the rooftop edge. “And hooray we did it so I’m just uh, gonna go home now — ”

“Not so fast, kid,” says Tony.

“What the hell, man?” Rhodey is asking before he even manages to land. “You swore upside down and backwards that that system was harmless and it only worked on kids — “

“Yeah, well, apparently not so harmless to kids with supersonic spider hearing,” Tony mutters, reaching to pull off Peter’s mask.

Peter takes an unsteady step back, dodging him. “Nah, I’m fine, Mr. Stark, it’s good now — ”

“Wait, exactly how old is this punk?” Sam demands.

“Hold still,” says Tony, with enough authority that the kid freezes, maybe even winces a bit. He pulls off the kid’s mask and sure enough he’s whiter than a sheet, his pupils so dilated that they look like black moons. He blinks rapidly, trying to focus on Tony’s face but not quite succeeding.

“Hooooly shit,” says Sam lowly. “There’s a Teletubby under there.”

“Tony, are you serious?” Rhodey hisses. “He’s what, twelve?”

“Fifteen, and — and fine,” says Peter, turning a furious shade of red and grabbing the mask back from Tony. “I’m gonna go back to patrolling — “

“Oh, shit, the Teletubby’s bleeding.”

He is, and it’s kind of gruesome — there are twin trails of blood coming out of the kid’s ears. Tony grabs the kid by the chin and tilts his head to get a better look, Peter scowling as he does it.

“No you’re not, kid,” says Tony, “you’re coming back with me to get that checked out.”

“And you’re going to explain why we’re letting a child fight armed criminals with us,” says Rhodey, his eyes widening as he takes in the blood.

“And maybe why you let me and half a dozen other people kick Dora the Explorer’s ass in Germany?” says Sam, with a hint of worry breaking through his sarcasm.

Peter huffs out a laugh. “That ass kicking was not one-sided, if I recall — ”

“How can you, when you were born yesterday?”

Tony finishes a quick vitals scan of the kid and says, “How’s the sound hitting you now? Too loud? Too quiet?”

Peter shakes his head and says, “So fine, Mr. Stark, it’s the most fine, now can I — ”

“Can it, kid. Now where’d you stash your backpack? We’re going to the compound.”

Peter takes a few steps back, clearly embarrassed. “No we’re not, no we’re — I’m really fine, I’m sure it looks worse than it — “

“Whatever this is you’re doing right now, kid, I suggest you cut it out,” says Tony through his teeth. “You’re already on my shit list. You know better than this. If you’re in a situation you tell someone or you get yourself the hell out of there, you hear me?”

“Yo, Tony, maybe you should — “

“How am I supposed to trust you out on your own every night if I can’t even trust you to tell me when – ”

“Tony,” says Sam warningly. 

Only then does Tony see that Peter’s eyes have abruptly crushed shut. A beat later he clamps his hands over his ears, looking like he might just go down a second time. “Sorry, Mr. Stark, sorry, could you just — it’s … still kind of loud.”

Tony deflates in an instant, punctured by his own guilt. “Yeah. Sorry. Shit,” he says, hovering in front of Peter a little uselessly, in case he starts to sway again. When he doesn’t, Tony turns to Rhodey and says, “Until further notice we’re shutting down the Baby Zapper.” Then he turns to Sam and says, “And you — if you’re gonna mercilessly tease an impressionable teenage boy, I expect you to be more creative than Nick Junior’s lineup. Do better.”

It’s the closest thing to acknowledging his apologies for Rhodey that Sam’s ever going to get, and he seems to understand that, offering Tony the slightest smirk and a careful nod.

“And you,” he says, lowering his voice, so it doesn’t irritate Peter’s ears any further than the cacophony that is the city of New York undoubtedly is. “We’re texting your aunt, getting your backpack, and we’re going upstate, no ifs, ands, or impertinent teenage buts about it.”

Either the pain or the general embarrassment finally makes the kid relent. “Yeah, okay,” he says. “My backpack — um — it’s webbed up in the alley outside of Midtown Comics.”

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that until I can be slightly kinder about it,” says Sam, saluting them both before he takes off. He pauses for a moment, taking stock of Peter. “Take care of yourself, Spidey.”

Rhodey is a little less generous, piping up after Sam departs. “This is all kinds of fucked up,” he says. “Also, for what it’s worth, sorry, kid.”

“Don’t apologize,” says Peter at once. “You didn’t know.”

“No, no, not about the Baby Zapper. I mean about having Tony as your … mentor, or whatever this is. I mean, damn.”

“You’re dead to me,” says Tony, as Rhodey shakes his head one more time and flies away. “Okay, kid. Got enough of your wits about you for a flight upstate?”

“Yup, ready as I’ll …”

There is no ever be, because in the next second the kid winces, slackens, and passes out so fast that only then does Tony realize he was fighting for every second of consciousness between Rhodey turning that damn thing off and this moment now. Tony catches him easily, glad for the kid’s sake at least that he doesn’t have an audience. He hooks one metal arm under his knees and the other under his head, securing him soundly before he reengages the thrusters.

"If you think that was bad," Tony mutters to the kid's unflinching form, "just wait for the earful you're gonna get from me later." 

Of course, he knows he won't. It'd be the pot calling the kettle a stubborn loner with very little sense of self-preservation. Maybe this is karma for all the times Tony was bullheadedly determined to go it alone; whatever it is, Tony has a feeling tinged with no small amount of guilt that this is far from the last time the kid will be paying it. 

Chapter Text

Tony kind of feels like a shithead for not noticing it sooner, but honestly, it wasn’t exactly on his shortlist of Things To Anticipate Going Wrong With A Teenage Vigilante (under which he should probably have highlighted “never listens to a goddamn word you say” in all caps). The first red flag isn’t even a flag, really. It’s just the kid, standing outside of a coffee shop and shivering his ass off in the November chill. 

“How long have you been out here?” asks Tony, giving him a once over. 

“Oh, just, like, a minute,” says Peter. 

“You look like an Otter Pop. Get inside.” 

Tony wouldn’t normally be meeting the kid for coffee in broad daylight, but he’s in Queens to check out a venue for a demonstration and the kid’s suit needs some repairing, and he figures it makes more sense to touch base with him here instead of dragging Happy all the way out here to pick it up himself. That, and it’s been about a week since the whole Baby Zapper incident, and Tony doesn’t exactly trust the kid to give him an accurate assessment of his recovery. 

Peter looks okay, though. Mostly just excited, in that baseline way that he normally is, even if he can’t seem to stop shivering for the life of him. 

He passes Tony the suit in a beaten up department store bag he must have taken from his aunt, and Tony picks it up distastefully and puts it on the chair next to him. 

“Now, I can promise to have this back to you in 24 hours if you promise me something back.” 

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” says Peter, clutching his hands to his hot chocolate like it’s tethering him to the earth. 

“No patrolling in your pajamas.” 

Peter waits for a suspicious beat, and then nods. “Course not,” he says, a little too casually.  

“Or any other red and blue paraphernalia. In fact, no patrolling with or without any garb. No Spider-Manning, no webbing, no crimefighting. It is absurd how clear I have to make myself on this, but you seem like a champ at finding loopholes.” 

Peter can’t hide the little quirk of his lip. “Takes one to know one?” he says, following it up with a shiver so aggressive that his elbow knocks into the table. 

“Jeez, kid, are you really that cold?” 

Peter purses his lips, shrugs one of those noncommittal shrugs of his and says, “Hey, did you know Happy’s a Yankees fan?”

“What’s wrong with the Yankees?”

Peter’s jaw drops.

“Oh, kid, don’t tell me you’re one of those people with aggressive opinions about sports. Even if you are I can’t take you seriously with that whipped cream mustache on your face.”

Peter swipes at his face with his coat sleeve. “My opinions aren’t aggressive, they’re just right. And you have a guy on the wrong team in your employ, Mr. Stark.”

“Eh. He also binge watches Downton Abbey, so I wouldn’t put too much merit in his tastes.”

“What’s wrong with Downton Abbey?”

“Word to the wise, kid: quit while you’re ahead.”

Tony fixes the suit up that night, and then, miraculously, he doesn’t get any pings from the AI in it for a full three weeks. It’s peace and quiet and altogether a little too suspicious, considering how green the kid is and how recently he seemed hellbent on skipping the whole high school thing altogether (which, to be fair, Tony can’t really say much about, considering the two seconds he spent in it himself). 

Then on Saturday, when he checks in on the overview report that the suit sends him every week, Tony notices something more than a little off: the kid’s time in the suit has more than doubled. Possibly even tripled. He’s spending 12 hours a day in it on average, and during school at that. 

Tony mulls it over and decides the best course of action is just to call the kid himself. Peter picks up on the first ring. 

“Hey Mr. Stark. Do you need me for something? Is there a mission?” 

“No, kid, stand down.” 

“Did you butt dial me?” 

“I’m offended that you think Stark Phones are capable of something as 2014 as ‘butt dialing’. Also, we should work on your clearly dwindling self-esteem, because yes, I meant to call you.” 

“Oh, cool cool, what’s up?” asks Peter, with a nervous little lilt in his voice. 

“Maybe you can tell me that. Any reason you foresee your third period English class getting held hostage by Freddy Krueger?” 

“Um. No?” 

“Then why are you suited up under your clothes 24/7?” 

“Oh,” says Peter. There’s a pause on the other end, and the muffled noise of a video game playing in the background. “Um — no reason.” 

“Kid, I know you’re at home and you’re literally wearing it right now.” 

“I just — um — I guess it’s just in case?” 

Tony sighs. “Listen. You gotta church and state this shit. Er — stuff. Your life is your life, and your crimefighting is — well, not your life, at least not at this age. If you wanna go pro and do all the sports drink endorsement deals and make an obnoxious career outta this when you turn 18, go ahead and float that boat, but right now you have to, y’know, be a kid.” 

There’s a beat. “You really think people would pay money for me to drink Gatorade?” 

“Hit rewind and find the point I was actually making.” 

He can hear the grin in the kid’s voice. “Church and state. Gotcha. Okay. I won’t, uh, wear the suit outside of patrolling anymore.” 

“Sounds good,” says Tony, hanging up the phone. 

The kid actually listens for once — the suit comes off immediately after the phone call, and stays off unless he’s patrolling, and that’s the end of that. At least, Tony thinks it is. A few weeks later he and Rhodey happen to be in the city for a meeting that ends a half hour before the kid gets out of school, so Tony decides to swing by and surprise (read: embarrass the hell out of) him. 

He’s not obtuse enough to drive up in a sports car and induce heart attacks in a bunch of underage nerds by getting out of the car himself, so instead he opts to scar Peter for life by driving up in a moderately nice car and letting Rhodey flag the kid’s attention. 

“I don’t see him," says Rhodey, scanning the front doors of Midtown High. "Also, I feel super creepy right now.” 

“What’s creepy about picking a kid up from school? You totally look like someone’s dad.” 

“I feel like a child predator. Does this kid even remember what I — “

Tony lets out a sharp whistle when he sees a familiarly tousled head of hair come into view. Peter and about a dozen other students turn to the sound of the noise. Peter squints in Rhodey’s direction, but even after he apparently recognizes him, he freezes for a moment like maybe he shouldn’t. 

“Get in the car, pumpkin,” Tony calls in a high-pitched voice through the slit in the window. 

Rhodey turns back to the car window. “Not cool, man.” 

Peter scrambles down the steps, casting sidelong glances at his classmates. 

“Dude,” says Peter, his face redder than a stop sign. “Are you hazing me?” 

“Yeesh, I forgot how pint-sized he is,” says Rhodey, easing himself back into the passenger seat. “We were in the city. Tony thought you might want a ride home.” 

Peter’s face lifts a little bit then, some combination of embarrassed but pleased. “Oh,” he says. “Uh — thanks.” 

“Buckle up. If you can, over … jeez, kid, how many sweaters are you wearing?” 

“Um …” 

“Honestly at this point the sweaters are wearing you.” 

“Leave him alone, Tones, maybe that’s just how the hip kids dress these days.” 

“Yeah. I’m hip. I’m cool,” says Peter. 

“Okay, let’s not get carried away,” says Rhodey. 

“Hey. Be nice to my minion.” 

“Minion?” echoes Peter. “I don’t even get, like, mentee?” 

“We can discuss your promotion once you can legally operate a motor vehicle, kid,” says Tony, just before he floors it. 

Tony notices Peter unconsciously burrowing into the aforementioned sweaters in the rearview mirror, as Peter stares gleefully out the tinted window and says, “Whoa, this feels like a total jailbreak.” 

“Pretty sure it’d be hard to actually make a break for it in … seriously, kid, are you wearing three sweaters under your jacket right now?” 

“No,” says Peter defensively. “One’s a shirt.” 

“It’s forty-five degrees outside, not negative forty-five.” 

Peter breaks eye contact in the rearview. “Whoa, is this a mini fridge? In your car?” 

“Astutely observed. Feel free to not take any of the alcohol out of it, ever.” 

Tony’s not exactly an expert in the science of interpersonal interactions, but even Rhodey can tell the kid is pivoting off the sweater subject a little too aggressively, casting Tony a look. Peter spends the rest of the drive talking back and forth with Tony about a prototype he’s working on to improve tensile strength of his webs as Rhodey occasionally interjects with a dry comment, and nobody says anything else about SweaterGate as Peter thanks them and waves goodbye from the sidewalk. 

Still, it doesn't sit well with Tony. Not after he parts ways with Rhodey, or after he heads back to the compound, or even when he's trying to tinker in the lab later that night. If it were anyone else, Tony might wonder if it's some kind of drug thing, but Peter's so clean he makes whistles look dirty. Still — twice, now, Tony realizes, the kid has totally deflected from Tony's questions about his getup, and Tony can't shake the feeling that there is something he's missing, if he'd just let it click.

It hasn't clicked by the next morning. Tony schedules an appointment to look at another venue at an absurdly early hour, rising once before even Pepper cracks her eyes open, telling himself that it's not at all an excuse to make a pitstop at one Midtown High. 

It isn't hard to spot the kid, who's already late and half-running to the front doors when he sees Tony and barely skids to a stop without barreling straight into him. Not that it would do either of them any damage, because with the innumerable layers, Peter is more padded than a cotton ball. 

“It’s — it’s seven in the morning,” says Peter, looking at him like he’s a hallucination. 

“What, you think I’m a vampire?” 

“Hah,” says Peter a little weakly, clearly trying to gauge whether or not he’s in trouble. 

“Kid, listen," he says, cutting right to the chase. "This … bajillion sweaters thing isn’t normal. What’s going on?” 

Peter casts his eyes at the sidewalk. For a moment he doesn’t say anything, but then he mumbles, “I’m just really, really cold all the time.” 

“Don’t B.S. me, Parker.” 

“I’m not,” says Peter, looking up earnestly. “I — I don’t even know what the deal is. I’m freezing all the time. At home, at school — I don’t know what it is about this winter, it’s just really, really cold.”  

“Kid, it’s not even winter yet — ” And then, finally, something absurd clicks into Tony’s brain. “Spiders can’t thermoregulate.” 

Peter frowns. “Wha — oh.” His eyes go wide, and then his brow furrows again, and then his face settles on some expression that seems totally at a loss. “That wouldn’t — I mean, I’m a human person,” he says, looking down at himself like there might be some reason for doubt. “Right? That wouldn’t …”  

“Apparently it would,” says Tony. “Jesus, kid. It’s almost December. Were you going to say anything to anyone or just let yourself turn into a popsicle?” And then, before Peter can respond, the realization slams into him like a brick wall: “That’s why you were wearing the suit all day. The heater.” 

Peter kicks at some invisible object on the sidewalk. “Kinda.” 

“Jesus, kid,” says Tony, pinching the bridge of his nose between two fingers. When he looks at Peter again he looks a little nervous, like he’s expecting a lecture. And honestly, he damn well deserves one. When was he going to learn about he had to tell people when there were problems? 

But he supposes as far as “sound the alarm” goes, being unusually cold all the time isn’t exactly something that would come to mind. It also occurs to him, seeing the way the kid won’t quite meet his eye, that he’s more than a little embarrassed about the whole thing as well. He’d have to be, if he was so intent on not saying anything even after Tony called him out on the suit a few weeks ago. 

A few weeks ago. Has the kid been walking around freezing his ass off and looking like a sentient thrift store ever since? 

Tony sighs and Peter braces himself. “What time do you have lunch?” 

“12:30,” says Peter, through chattering teeth. 

“Meet me out here.” 

Peter swallows, hard. “That’s so cryptic.” 

Tony raises his eyebrows in acknowledgement and then abruptly turns on his heel to leave, before one of the bushy-tailed nerds in Peter’s class stumbles on them and recognizes him. He doesn’t even need until 12:30; he has three versions of black under armor with the same heat tech as the kid’s suit ready to go before he even finishes his second cup of coffee. They’ll have to find a more permanent solution than that at some point, but that’s more of a Banner problem than a Stark one. He’s not going to let the kid turn into a polar ice cap in the meantime. 

Peter looks a little bit like he might cry when Tony hands him the glorified pajamas a few hours later. 

“Repeat after me,” says Tony. “The next time fucked up shit happens to me, I will tell an adult.” 

Peter hesitates for a moment, and then dutifully starts, “The next time f—“

“It genuinely worries me how easily manipulated you are. Yikes, kid,” says Tony. “Thank god the good guys found you first.” 

Peter bursts into one of those borderline blinding, over eager grins. “Debatable,” he says. And then, with a sincerity and relief that immediately makes every bone in Tony’s body uncomfortable, “Thanks, Mr. Stark.” 

Tony considers ribbing him one more time to avoid acknowledging that very real and present nagging worry that has started drilling a Peter-shaped hole into his brain, but instead he claps him on the back and offers him a gruff, “Of course.” 

Chapter Text

“Wow,” says Bruce, looking over a tissue sample of Peter’s under a microscope lens. “This is truly bizarre. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.” 

Tony cranes his head over to the other room, where he can see Peter doing his chemistry homework through the window of the door while he waits for Bruce to get a bird’s eye view on this whole “human DNA infused with shit from a radioactive spider” thing. He can never quite tell if the kid is listening or not, since he didn’t exactly ask him what for a measured radius of his hearing skills, so he tries to steer Bruce away from saying anything the kid might not want to hear. 

“Ha, I wonder if there’s some kind of epidemic,” Bruce murmurs to himself, squinting. 

“Epidemic?” 

“Oh, I don’t know. I just heard about this crazy — I mean, some hero called Spider-Man or something, in Queens? Wonder if he’s got the same deal. Did someone just like, let loose an entire crate of radioactive spiders, or … oh, wait, didn’t he turn up in Germany, too?” 

Peter glances up from his textbook and makes direct eye contact with Tony, which is the only confirmation he needs that the kid has 100 percent been dropping some eaves. 

“About that …” says Tony, as he raises a “well, what do you want me to do about it?” eyebrow at Peter through the window on the door. Peter nods slightly in permission, and Tony says, “Uh, that is Spider-Man.” 

Bruce looks up from the microscope, his face already resettling into that exasperated expression he seems to reserve solely for Tony. 

“He’s a kid?” Bruce asks, like he just had a movie ending spoiled for him and he wants it to be something different. 

“Yeah,” says Tony, waving at Peter through the door. “And he can hear you, so.” 

“Jesus,” says Bruce, turning to look at Peter, too. The kid’s face is sheepish. Bruce acknowledges him awkwardly before turning back to Tony and saying, “Are you insane?” 

“Yes, but possibly not as insane as the kid. Only time will tell.” 

Bruce shakes his head and asks, “How long has it been since he was bitten?” 

“Last April.” 

He sees the kid’s head quirk back up in surprise out of the corner of his eye. 

“Has anybody actually checked him out since then? I mean … like an actual doctor?” 

“I’m guessing no,” Tony admits, “considering the whole radioactive DNA thing.” 

Bruce sighs another one of his world-weary sighs and says, “Someone should … I mean … let me at least take a look at him. Run some tests. I think I have a few solutions for the thermoregulation we can explore, but if there are going to be other issues like that down the line, we should try to anticipate them. Safety first and all that.” 

Tony can’t help the defensive twinge he feels at the remark. “What do you think all the bells and whistles on his suit are for?” 

“Sure, you’re protecting him from the outside,” says Bruce in his conciliatory way. “Someone’s gotta keep an eye out on the inside, too.” 

Tony grunts in acknowledgement. He doesn’t want to admit that up until this point it didn’t really occur to him to do just that; he knew about the healing factor, and tried his best to make a suit that could compensate for Peter’s sensory enhancements, but that’s about as far as he got before he called it a day. Now in the aftermath of both the Baby Zapper and the kid becoming a distant cousin of the iceberg that sank the Titanic, it seems a little careless. 

An hour later when Bruce is done running tests, Tony is pretty sure, judging by the slightly gobsmacked expression on Bruce’s face, that the kid got in about a hundred more questions than he did. 

“Powers aside, Tony, that kid is Science Bro material,” says Bruce, after Happy shuffles Peter back out. 

Tony doesn’t know why he feels a slight pride at those words, because he damn sure isn’t responsible for it. “Yeah, he’s a bigger dweeb than you, for sure,” he says, watching through the windowed wall as the car pulls away.  

“Remarkable healing factor, too. Some pretty bad abdominal bruising and a fractured clavicle, but by the time we wrapped up they were almost undetectable.” 

“Come again?” asks Tony, his voice sharp. 

Bruce frowns a bit. “Well, I assume stuff like that comes with the territory,” he says, glancing back at his notes.  

“Yeah, but the territory shouldn’t be happening when he’s supposed to be in school,” says Tony. “And Happy picked him up straight from there.” 

“Am I really witnessing Tony Stark get mad at a teenager for cutting class?” 

“Damn skippy you are.” 

“… How long was I gone?” 

Bruce spends the rest of the afternoon poring over his samples and taking notes, and Tony spends the rest of his trying not to pick up the phone and yell at the kid. He’s not sure why he checks when he’s 99.9% certain the kid was cutting class, but he pulls up the log from the Baby Monitor anyway — hell, maybe it was justified. Maybe it was something that just plain couldn’t have been avoided. Maybe — 

Maybe he wasn’t in the suit at all. 

The Baby Monitor feed doesn’t have any entries later than 1 a.m. from the night before. Which can only mean … something happened to Peter at school? 

But that’s ridiculous. He had a broken collarbone. That’s not a thing that just happens at school, let alone a magnet school for nerds. 

Which means that the kid was out fighting crime during school without the suit? 

Tony’s had Google alerts on the kid since before he even met him. If he were out in those pajamas, Tony would know. Honestly, these days, if anything weird goes on in the world of underground vigilantes, Tony knows. 

“Question,” asks Tony, when Happy returns later that evening. “When you pick up the kid …” Well, actually, he’s not sure where this question is going. “Is he flanked by other nerds?” he eventually decides. 

“Kid makes me pick him up around the block. Doesn’t want to draw attention to himself,” says Happy. His eyes narrow. “Did he do something?” 

“Possibly. Probably. I don’t know.” 

The problem is, he’s afraid that he does. 

“Listen, this might not be as effective as we want it to be because I wanted to err on the side of safety, but if this works it should be easy to put into the form of an injection you’d only have to take once a week or so,” Bruce explains to Peter the next day. “Then we find a longer term solution.” 

The kid’s sitting on one of the tables in the lab, looking at the needle poised in Bruce’s hand. Tony is watching from a few feet away, hovering for no real reason, pretending to be engaged with something on his phone. 

“Sweet,” says Peter. “And thanks so much again, Dr. Banner, I mean wow, this is — it’s just — really cool of you.” 

“You hear that? A teen thinks I’m cool.” 

“Don’t let it go to your head,” says Tony. “No, seriously. Has anyone ever told you it’s unusually large?” 

“I’m in the business of unusually large,” Bruce mutters wryly. 

Peter’s eyes spark with interest, but he doesn’t pry, even though it’s clear from the look on his face that it’s just about killing him. 

“If you could just lift your shirt sleeve,” says Bruce. 

“Oh, yeah, sure,” says Peter, hiking up his shirt and the heat tech Tony made from him underneath it. 

“Yikes, kid. Maybe the other arm, then?” 

Tony glances up just in time to see the ridiculously fresh, mottled bruise on the kid’s arm before Peter pulls the sleeve down abruptly, the blood draining from his face. 

“Uh,” he says. “Actually, um — ”

“Now, kid,” says Tony. 

A phone starts ringing, then, and Peter dives for it before Tony and Bruce even realize what’s happening. “Hey, Aunt May,” says Peter, deliberately not looking at either of them. “Oh, right now? I mean, yeah, sure. I can have Happy drive me back.” 

“Oh no you don’t,” says Tony under his breath. 

“Yeah, back in an hour Aunt May, love you too, bye,” says Peter, hopping off the table. 

Tony’s first instinct is to grab his arm to stop him, but the bruises are still fresh in his mind. “Kid, you can’t just leave. Banner didn’t sit here and develop this serum last night so you could run off and — “

“I,” Peter starts, evidently with nowhere to go. He stands in there staring at them and not quite staring at them, and for an absurd moment he looks so cornered that Tony thinks he might actually make a break for it. 

Then he slumps. “Okay, fine,” he says. “Sometimes I leave class to, uh — patrol. Without the suit. I know you know when I’m wearing it, so I … I’ve been using my old one.” 

He’s lying. Badly. Tony makes a mental note to give him some pointers on that, because it’s all well and good now, but it’s going to bite him in the ass in a situation when lying actually counts. 

But right now Tony’s too angry with him for aforementioned lie to think that far ahead. 

“Go ahead and inject him,” says Tony to Bruce, turning his back on them both and heading for the door. 

“Mr. Stark — ”

Tony raises a hand up to silence him before leaving the room. An hour or so later Bruce awkwardly shuffles into the lab, without Peter in tow. 

“Did it work?” Tony asks gruffly. 

“I think so. Kept an eye on him for a bit to make sure it didn’t backfire or anything. He’s on his way home now.” 

This is the part where Tony’s supposed to thank him, or maybe the part where he's supposed to explain away the outburst. He's still too angry to do either. 

“Other things, other things … his blood sugar level is, like, insanely low. He needs to be eating about twice what he’s taking in now, if not more. I grabbed some of your granola bars from the kitchen — “

“Oh, good. Problem solved.”

“Tony.”

Tony blows out a breath. There’s too much to consider. Too many ways this kid can fuck himself up, and Tony doesn’t even know where to put the net to catch him.

“Listen, I don’t know Peter. Seems like a good kid. Smart kid,” says Bruce, with a caution that is already grating at Tony even though it shouldn’t. “But he’s all worked up now that you’re mad at him.”

“I’m not mad at him,” Tony snaps. “I’m …” Worried. Frustrated. Considering taking up meditation so I don’t scream into a trash can.

Bruce clears his throat pointedly. “As far as teenagers go … probably not, like. The best strategy.”

“Oh, suddenly you’re an expert on teens.”

“Well. If not an expert on that, then certainly an expert on misdirected anger.”

Tony groans. “You just had to play that card, didn’t you?”

Bruce shrugs. “In the words of Kermit the frog, it’s not easy being green.”

Tony wakes up in the middle of the night with the idea so present on his mind that it’s almost as if he didn’t sleep at all; he carefully pries himself out of bed without waking Pepper and pads over to a monitor, hacking into the security cameras set up in Midtown High within a minute. 

He has FRIDAY run facial recognition, and another minute later he has spliced video of every time Peter Parker’s face has shown up on a Midtown High security camera in the last 24 hours. He fast forwards through the kid at his locker, gesticulating with embarrassing enthusiasm about something with his friend Ned; through the graceless run-and-skid a few hours later when he’s evidently late to class; through what even in high speed looks like a woefully inept encounter with a girl Tony is pretty sure he’s seen in the kid’s decathlon competitions.

And then, at 2:45pm, he sees footage of Peter walking purposefully into a bathroom; a moment later, two skinny kids stumble out, one of them hovering for a moment looking nervous and scared and the other one making a break for it. Five minutes pass. Two more kids walk out; one Tony vaguely recognizes, looking shifty and ill at ease, and the other the taller, more muscular counterpart to him, cracking his knuckles and laughing about something. 

The bell rings. Students flood out to go home. Tony fast forwards to a half an hour later, once the crowds of students have thinned to nothing, and sees Peter finally leave the bathroom, checking both ways to make sure the coast is clear before visibly limping down the hall. 

Tony stalks out of the room, muttering, “FRIDAY, pull up the Baby Monitor,” as soon as the door is closed behind him. Sure enough, Peter is on patrol, perched on some dizzying height in Queens. “Call Peter Parker.” 

It takes a few rings for Peter to answer. He sees the screen on the Baby Monitor shift, as if Peter is heaving a sigh, and then, “Mr. Stark?” 

“What the hell is your problem, kid?” 

“Oh, man. Um. Well. Not sure where you want me to start — “

“Cut the crap. Those bruises on your arms. The literal broken collarbone from yesterday. Why the hell are you letting run of the mill bullies beat the shit out of you?” 

Peter blows out a breath. Doesn’t even bother asking how Tony knows, or try to call his bluff. “You know it’s like two in the morning?” 

“I asked you a question, Parker.” 

He can almost hear Peter’s wince on the other end of the line. He lets out a weak laugh. 

“What’s so funny?” Tony demands.

Peter hesitates for a moment, and then says, “That’s exactly what they said when they were, uh, ‘beating the shit’ out of me’.” 

Tony closes his eyes for a moment and tries to check himself. He wishes that particular dig would do something to puncture his fury, but it doesn’t; if anything, he’s even angrier now than he was before. 

“What is this, kid? Some form of repressed masochism, Fight Club bullshit? If you’re this eager to get pummeled at school, how am I supposed to trust that you’re not — “

“Jeez, no, Mr. Stark, I’m not — “

“And don’t try to tell me this is about you not being able to pull your punches, I did not put you through training on controlling your abilities so you could sit here and tell me you’re too scared to defend yourself from some punks with learner’s permits — "

“That’s not — could you — listen to me for a sec?” Peter says, in a rare moment of role reversal, when Peter is suddenly the one impatient with him. Tony grunts in acknowledgement, and Peter says, “Look, it’s not that I can’t defend myself. It’s that if I do they’ll go hit Abe or Mitch or one of the other guys instead, and they don’t have crazy mutant healing powers. They’ll actually get hurt.”

“You’re getting hurt. Do you not count? Are you not a sentient being with nerve endings and bones, or did I miss the memo?”  

“It’s them or me, what am I supposed to do?” 

“Tell a goddamn adult,” says Tony, just loudly enough that he sees someone startle behind him — Pepper, who must have heard him through the door. Her eyebrows are raised in a question that Tony is too worked up to answer. “Honestly, kid, how many times do I have to spell this out for you?” 

“I’m not going to rat out someone else,” he says. “I already wrecked Liz’s life, I can’t — "

“Who the hell is Liz?” 

“Toomes’s daughter,” says Peter, “and she’s in Portland now. And it’s Flash’s cousin beating people up, but Flash would get in trouble too cuz he’s always there, and then he’d get suspended, and never get into college, and I can’t do that to him and his family after what I did to Liz and hers, I just can’t.” 

Scratch the heart attack. This kid is going to give him a brain aneurysm. 

“Peter. You didn’t do anything to anyone,” says Tony. “They made shit decisions and deserve whatever shit comes along with them.” 

“But Mr. Stark — “

“I have a feeling I don’t want to hear whatever’s on the other end of that sentence. Whoever is doing that belongs in juvie. And clearly you belong in therapy for whatever ridiculous martyr complex you’ve somehow developed” — Pepper pointedly clears her throat — “if you think that any of this is okay.” 

There’s a beat. “I’m not sorry,” says Peter stubbornly, and Jesus Christ if it doesn’t feel like he can hear the ghost of Howard Stark laughing his shoulder right now. 

Speaking of, it's unfortunately tempting to borrow from the man’s repertoire right now. You will be, he could say. I’m taking away the suit, he could threaten, even though he learned the hard way the consequences of that particular punishment. 

Instead he says, gruffly, “We’ll talk about this tomorrow.” He hangs up before he or the kid can say anything else; he knows whatever he says next he’s going to regret. Peter isn’t the person he’s angry with. Okay, he is and he isn’t, but Pepper’s mere presence in the hallway is enough to remind him that talking about it when they’re clearly both too riled to hear each other out isn’t going to do any good.

By morning Tony has all kinds of plans, varying from getting the kids suspended to hurtling into the school in full Iron Man glory and scaring the shit out of them himself. Before he can start thinking straight enough to decide on one, though, FRIDAY informs him of an incoming call from May Parker. 

Tony braces himself. While charming in person, the only times he ever gets a call from May is when he’s about to endure five to ten minutes of uninterrupted, frankly impressive yelling. 

Her hello is actually a friendly one for once. If anything, it makes Tony even more suspicious. 

“I thought I should let you know, I’ve got a pretty testy kid here that I kept home from school today.”

Oh, shit. Tony did not consider after that less-than-cordial conversation last night just how un-fully formed the frontal lobe of Peter’s teenage brain is, and it would be just too like him to take all that hotheaded anger and accidentally slip up on a patrol. Tony braces himself to hear what part of the kid has been knocked out of its usual order, not expecting what May actually says next.

“I thought it would be for the best to let him cool off … since I called the school yesterday while he was out, and those kids that have been harassing him are suspended until further notice.” 

Tony isn’t sure whether or not he’s supposed to cop to knowing about this; it occurs to him, the way it should have last night, that May was the first person to call, not Peter. 

“I’ve known something was up for weeks,” she says, preempting him. “It took me a a bit because Peter wouldn’t say anything, as usual. He’s not happy about me calling. We talked this morning after he’d calmed down, and he mentioned that you’d said something, too.” 

“How’d you find out?” asks Tony. 

“He’s my kid,” says May, with an affectionate kind of resignation. “I always know when something’s off. Usually I try and wait for him to open up, but … well. It’s harder these days. This time I cornered his friend Ned, and he cracked like an egg.” 

“Huh,” says Tony, neglecting to offer up the information that he may have hacked a high school’s data frame and broken several laws to come to the same conclusion.

May’s voice is a little softer next time she speaks, almost guarded. “I appreciate you looking out for him, Tony,” she says. “I really do. But if you keep an eye on him out there in your world, I can keep an eye on him just fine from here.” 

“Of course,” he says.

“And I think … it would help if we kept each other both in the loop. I understand some things are classified, and when he gets older there’s a whole world I’m not going to be allowed to know about, but right now — right now …”

“He’s your kid,” says Tony.

“Right,” says May, with a relief that almost embarrasses him; with an implication that she was afraid he might not understand, and she’s grateful that he does. “And in the future, if you think there’s something I should know about — well — I’d appreciate a two-way street on this.”

Tony nods to himself. “More than reasonable,” he says. “And, uh, speaking of, I may have sic’d Bruce Banner on him just to get a handle on whatever that bug bite did to him.”

There’s a beat. “Gonna have a hard time convincing our insurance company to cover examinations from the Hulk,” says May wryly.

“Ha. It was high time someone … equipped check him out. I’m sorry I didn’t think of it sooner. Or, uh, tell you about it.”

“I’m glad he has someone in his corner,” says May. And then, after a moment: “But yeah, it would be great to be in the loop on that kind of thing. I’m in a little bit over my head here.” She takes a breath, and Tony can just detect the shake of it, the uncertainty. “I mean, honestly, I was almost relieved. Bullies? Bullies I can handle. Bullies I can do something about. But the rest of it …”

Tony’s about to deflect with some kind of joke the way he always does, and can tell from the break in her sentence that she’s expecting it, too. He surprises them both when he says, “Yeah, I know.”

For a few moments neither of them seem to know what to say, until she clears her throat and says, “Well anyway, he just singlehandedly destroyed an entire box of Cheerios, so I think it’s safe to say he’s not holding any grudges on being ratted out.”

“I’ll shoot him a text later,” says Tony. “And I’ll send you Banner’s file on the kid. We’ve really only cracked the surface — just some preliminary things we wanted to keep an eye on — but if we find anything else of interest, you’ll be the first to know.”

He's significantly calmer after he and May wrap it up on the phone, but still decides to wait for Peter to cool off a bit before sending him a message. Turns out Peter beats him to the punch — sends him an emoji of a person and what might be a loudspeaker and another person, followed up by a text that reads, "me, telling an adult". Tony sends back the emoji with sunglasses on it because he refuses to debase himself with lesser ones that don't represent his brand. He notes that Peter sends no apologies, but he wasn't expecting one; frankly, he'd be disappointed if he did. 

Chapter Text

“Don’t be a scaredy cat, kid,” says Tony, talking to Peter with half his focus and acknowledging Pepper’s pointed “we sit down at the dinner table, Tony, or at least pretend to for the first three minutes before one of us is distracted by something” look.  

“Wait, wha — Mr. Stark, I literally just shut down a bank robbery,” says Peter on the other end of the line. “Also Ned and I watched The Conjuring last week and only had to pause it three times. I’m not a — ”

“Total and complete wuss, who won’t even take the credit for his own medical breakthrough,” says Tony, sliding into his chair.   

“Accidental medical breakthrough,” Peter corrects, mumbling.  

“Empires are built on accidental breakthroughs.” Tony winces a bit, because truth be told, they fall just as quickly on them — he would know — but the last thing he wants to do is rain on the kid’s parade. “Besides, you’re on the decathlon team. You’re a champ at public speaking.”

“Yeah, but — that’s about facts. Other people’s facts. I don’t even know half the words for what I did, I just … messed around in chem class until — ”

“That’s what you’ve got old Bruce-y for. He’ll be up there with you, with all his medical jargon and fancy science talk and economic know-how. Speaking of Banner, you still got that wrist sensor on, right?”

“Yeah,” says Peter sheepishly. And then, for about the fifth time since they strapped it on him: “Did you have to put Hello Kitty on it?”

“She suits you.”

“No comment.”

“Make sure you keep that on, Banner’s still trying to get the dosage right,” says Tony, referring to the thermoregulation formula Bruce developed for Peter. The way they have it worked out now Peter can take it once a week, but it’s led to a few unexpected spikes in his temperature, so there are definitely — for lack of a better word — bugs to work out, before they start working toward more long-term versions. In the meantime, the sensor keeps tabs on his internal body temperature when the suit’s off, because Tony doesn’t trust the kid to self-report and after last month’s little show, neither does Bruce.

“Yesterday an old lady asked where she could get one for her granddaughter.”

“One entrepreneurial pursuit at a time, kid. We’ll get on that just as soon as we finish up the conference. See you in two days.”

“See you,” says Peter, somewhat miserably, before the AI in his suit hangs up.

“Are you scarring that poor boy for life?” asks Pepper mildly, as she raises a spear of asparagus to her mouth.

“Oh, absolutely. A little more every day. But not with this specifically,” says Tony, as she raises her eyebrows at him. “Remember a few weeks ago, when we got called in to stop those creatures that landed in D.C. and the kid had the audacity to get shot?”

“I remember you staying up all night to reconfigure a fabric for his suit that wouldn’t be penetrable by that planet’s specific brand of ray gun, yes.”

Tony clears his throat. “Well, apparently his healing factor doesn’t work against that particular ‘brand of ray gun,’” says Tony, somewhat defensively, “but before we got to him he webbed himself up, and it did a surprisingly good job of staunching the bleeding. Bruce was impressed. Took him down to the lab a few days after school, tweaked it a bit, and now they have a patent for it. Kid has a massive revolution in emergency medicine on his hands, and one that can be mass-produced and sold pretty cheaply, at that.”

Pepper’s smirking.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she says. “You just really, really want Pete at MIT.”

“What? No. I mean, he’s going and that’s final, but he’s free to make his own decisions.”

“Uh-huh,” says Pepper, still smirking at him.

“Look, spider-themed extracurriculars aside, the kid is smart. This’ll be far from the last time he’s presenting at a conference. He’s gotta get used to … this whole part of it. And Banner’s with him, I’m not throwing him to the wolves.”

“I know,” says Pepper, and then he realizes that she wasn’t calling him out on anything in the first place. That she looks pleased, almost maternal, in that way that they both have been reluctant to define in any actual words since a certain smart-mouthed teenage vigilante tumbled into their lives. “Just maybe hold off on calling the dean until Pete’s actually seen the campus?”

Tony hates himself a little that he immediately puts that trip on his mental to-do list. “Pfft,” he says. “I’m not calling the dean. The dean will be calling me .”

The truth is, he is proud of the kid. Which makes almost no sense because god knows he is in no way responsible for his smarts or uncannily moral upbringing. If he can’t be responsible for that, though, he will damn well be responsible for Peter taking credit for his own accomplishments — especially since this is the first one he can actually make public without the kid becoming a bonafide lab experiment and lighting up the monitor of every SHIELD agent in the country.

But the kid only seems to get more resistant to it the closer to the conference they get. When Happy calls him the night before to hash out details for when he’s picking him up, he unexpectedly patches Tony through on the call.

“What’s up, kid?”

Peter’s voice is hesitant, like he wasn’t actually expecting Happy to put Tony on the phone. “What if I — uh — just sat out tomorrow, and Dr. Banner talked to them about it?”

“Give me one good reason.”  

“I’m just not feeling … great? I think I’m coming down with something.”

“Yeah,” says Tony wryly, “sounds like a real perilous case of cold feet.”  

He only says it so flippantly because he can literally see Peter’s temperature on a display right now — it’s elevated, sure, but it has been all week, courtesy of Bruce’s latest iteration of the thermoregulation formula.

“Maybe,” says Peter, a little uncertainly.

“Look, kid, if you’re that nervous, it’s not the end of the world if you let Bruce take the reins. But I think you’ll feel pretty damn good about it if you give it a go,” he says, trying to take as un-Howard of an approach to this as possible. “And then who knows? Maybe you’ll get addicted to that feeling, and you’ll have more massive breakthroughs, and speak at conferences all over the world, and then Parker Industries will swallow me whole and I’ll be forced to close up shop and sell the company for parts and move to a flyover state where I’ll resent you deeply for the rest of my days.”

“Wow, Mr. Stark. That … escalated quickly.”

“Dream big, kid. Now get some sleep. Big day tomorrow.”

When tomorrow comes, though, Peter shows up looking every bit as rattled as he sounded on the phone the night before. There’s a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead, and he keeps making brief eye contact between Pepper, Happy, Bruce, and Tony, as if one of them will miraculously say something to get him out of the presentation up until the very last moment, when they’re hovering on the side of the press stage.

“I, uh, think I have the flu,” says Peter.  

“Nah, kid, trust me,” says Tony. “It’s just nerves. You stop getting ‘em altogether the fifth or sixth time you do one of these, you’ll see.”

Peter smiles weakly, a little pale in the face but his eyes still bright. “Yeah?”

“If you forget how to speak, I’ll pick up the slack,” Bruce assures him. “But you’ve got this. Just remember how we practiced it.”

“Yeah,” says Peter, squaring his shoulders, his voice about an octave higher than it normally is. He clears his throat and says, “Yeah, yeah, like we practiced.”

“Just imagine everyone in their Hello Kitty pajamas,” says Tony.  

Peter raises his eyebrows at him.

“Too soon?”

“Always,” Peter deadpans.  

Bruce looks between the two of them, and then half-sighs, half-asks, “Do I even want to know?”

“No,” say Peter and Pepper at the same time, in varying degrees of irony, just before the polite applause cues them onto the stage.

“Go get ‘em, punk,” says Tony, slapping Peter on the back. Peter’s so uneasy that he actually looks a little bit green, and almost stumbles a bit at the contact. For a moment Tony wonders if he is going to deeply regret pushing him into this admittedly nerdy, niche brand of spotlight, but after a few steps and wary blinks out toward the crowd, Peter grins and waves and is every bit at ease as he is at those decathlon meets Tony has started dragging Happy to attend with him.

And, as Tony knew it would, the whole presentation goes without a hitch. Peter is endearingly confident and awkward and humble, almost like the junior version of Bruce, the two of them never quite as animated as they are when they’re talking about one of their projects. Peter talks about a mile a minute, but it’s okay because he’s fifteen and it’s his first rodeo and Tony can tell he has the whole audience rooting for him from the moment he opens his mouth. Besides, even if Peter had blown it, their work speaks for itself.

“What did I tell you?” asks Tony when they walk off the stage to thunderous applause.

Peter still looks shaken, but markedly relieved. He grins at Tony. “I hear there are some really awesome national parks in Arkansas,” he says cheekily.  

Tony bites out a laugh. “Better get the Parker Industries domain name before you start talking a big game, kid. You hungry? Happy’s out for another hour, but he can get you home after that.”

“Actually … I … could I maybe just chill with my homework for a bit on the couch or something?” Peter asks. “I’m really tired.”

Only when Pepper’s brows knit, honing in on Peter, does Tony notice that the kid really has taken on the pallor of death warmed over.

“You alright, Peter?” Bruce asks, a hand on his shoulder.

“Yeah, yeah,” says Peter, straightening up. “I just … must be from staying up last night. Nerves and all,” he says, nodding at Tony.

Tony looks him over — the shadows under his eyes, the way he’s suddenly slumping right back into himself like he’s been waiting to do it all day. “Forget the couch, kid, you know you’ve always got a room here. We’ll come get you when Happy’s back,” say Tony, putting a hand on his back and leading him out the door and over toward the living quarters.

“Great work today, Peter,” Bruce calls after him.

Peter turns just long enough to offer a wobbly grin. “Thank you for all your help, Dr. Banner.”

Tony notices that the usual spring is missing from the kid’s step, that for once he has to slow down to match pace with him. When he turns to look at him he sees Peter’s hand skimming his right side; Tony snaps to attention in an instant and says, “Is that blaster hit bothering you?”

“Huh? Oh, no, that’s practically gone,” says Peter. “Just, uh — habit.”

Tony wouldn’t be inclined to believe him, if the kid weren’t regularly checking in with Bruce since the incident. He leaves the kid at the door of his quarters, watching as he slides his backpack off and makes his way over to the desk, then heads back down to shake a few hands and be however present he has to be at this conference until he has somewhat satisfied the public.

An hour later when Happy arrives, Tony tells FRIDAY to send Peter back down. 

There’s a beat. Another beat. “Mr. Parker is not responding to my alerts,” FRIDAY reports.

“Huh,” says Tony. “Teenagers.”

He climbs the stairs to go get the kid himself, feeling markedly uneasy. Maybe the kid fell asleep. He feels a little twinge of guilt that he must have been so worked up that he really didn’t sleep the entire night before, but it’s like Tony said — once he gets the first few of these under his belt, he’ll be a pro at it. At least the first time he did it he had a massive, Hulk-sized safety net.

Tony knocks on the door. “Kid?”

Then, to his surprise, FRIDAY opens the door without prompting. It takes him a moment to spot Peter — he’s at the desk where he left him, but his head is fully resting on it, his eyes closed.

Tony whistles at him to get his attention from the doorway, but Peter only winces slightly, otherwise unmoving. Tony takes a few steps closer then and sees that the kid is about a hundred shades paler than he was when he left him, and that his hair is matted with sweat.

“Kid, hey,” says Tony, crossing the distance with a speed he wasn’t sure he was capable of without the suit. He puts a hand on Peter’s shoulder and shakes it, trying to ignore the slight panic thrumming under his skin. “Peter.”

After a beat that goes on way too long Peter blearily opens his eyes, and immediately scrunches his face in pain.

“Hey, Mr. Stark,” he says, or at least tries to — it must sound pathetic even to his own ears, because he clears his throat and winces again.

“FRIDAY, send Bruce up here,” says Tony, lowering his voice to say, “You gotta tell me what’s going on here, kid.”

Peter tries to hoist himself up from the desk and Tony can feel him shuddering under the hand he still has on the kid’s shoulder. “Shit,” he mutters candidly.

“Here, just — lean on me, okay? We’re gonna move to the couch.”

The kid nods, the next wince clearly one of embarrassment as Tony half supports, half drags him over to the couch a few feet away, where Peter goes down immediately like a ragdoll. Bruce walks into the room a moment later, his eyes visibly widening as he sees the kid half-conscious on the couch.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Just had FRIDAY run vitals,” says Tony, showing him the display.

Bruce sucks in a breath through his teeth. “This temperature spike is insane. Why didn’t we — ”

“He took the sensor off for the presentation,” Tony mutters.

“Okay. Okay,” says Bruce, getting his bearings. It isn’t lost on either of them when Peter’s shaking hand skims his right side, lingering for a moment before settling back down on the couch. “Pete, I’m gonna take a look at that blaster wound, okay?”

“‘S fine, though,” Peter manages. “I just …”

They take a look at his side, and the kid’s right — the skin is still faintly mottled where the blaster shot hit him, but decidedly healing. It doesn’t look any worse than Bruce reported a few days ago, when Peter came in for a quick examination of it.

“But that doesn’t rule out some kind of delayed radiation poisoning,” says Bruce, half out loud and half to himself. “Unless — I mean, I don’t think anything would have gone wrong with the injections I’ve been giving him, we’ve been so careful …”

Peter’s eyes are sliding shut again. Tony snaps his fingers in front of his face without thinking, the panic louder than his self-awareness; Bruce shoots him a look, but Peter’s eyes flutter back open, and it’s worth it.

“Sorry, sorry,” Peter mutters.

“Hey, don’t apologize,” says Tony, as Bruce’s frown deepens. Bruce experimentally touches the faded blaster wound at Peter’s side, and Peter immediately sucks in a breath.

“What on earth could …”

Tony hears Pepper clear her throat behind them, and only then does he realize she must have followed Bruce up the stairs. Her face is wary, pinched with worry. She seems to hesitate for a moment, until Tony just barely nods his head at her.

“I know I’m the least qualified person in the room to be diagnosing anything,” she says, “ but … is it possible that he has appendicitis?”

Bruce blinks at her for a moment, and then: “Shit.”

“What? No,” Peter says, the words slurred. “Can’t have ‘ppendix … I’m Spider-Man.”

“Sorry, tough guy,” says Bruce ruefully, pressing a hand into Peter’s abdomen. “I’m about 99% sure she’s right. And judging by the looks of things, it’s already ruptured.”

“Kid,” says Tony, completely at a loss, “why didn’t you — ”

Fuck. Fuck. He did say something. Multiple somethings. He’s been saying things for the past two days.

And Tony dismissed him. The one fucking time the kid actually sounded the alarm about something, Tony fed him a line that was essentially two notches away from telling him to “man up”. If he’d just listened — if they’d caught this two damn days ago, instead of now, when the kid looks like he just stumbled out of a crypt — 

“Yes, yes, I’ve already made the call. We should have a specialist here in the next twenty minutes,” says Pepper, who is evidently answering a question that Bruce must have posed to Tony a few seconds before.

Shit. He didn’t just goad the kid, he mocked him. Called him names. Effectively took the place of the very bullies who were coming after Peter a few weeks before.

“What specialist? ” says Tony, ripping his eyes away from the clouded pain of Peter’s face. “It’s going to take an insane amount of anesthesia to put this kid under, I don’t want him waking up on the table with — ”

“Tony. Tony ,” says Bruce, putting a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll be right there monitoring him. You can be there, too, if you take it down a notch.”

Right. Tony takes a breath. He can’t get worked up about this, can’t freak out the kid — except that the kid doesn’t even appear to be conscious anymore, looking entirely spent, like the life has been sucked out of him. Christ . He went patrolling yesterday. He went to school . What kind of stupid, stubborn willpower did a kid have to have in order to —

“... call May, or do you want to do it?”

Tony only catches the tail end of what Pepper is asking him, but he nods. “I’ll call her,” he says. He leans back down and presses a hand to the kid’s forehead, eliciting the tiniest wince of acknowledgement. Tony’s not even sure if he can hear him when he says, “Peter, you’re gonna be fine, okay? Annoying the shit out of Happy in no time, I’m sure. I’m calling your aunt and she’ll be here when you wake up.”

All he manages to get out of the kid is a slightly incoherent, “But ‘m S-Spider-Ma … n.”

“That you are,” says Tony with wryly, “if only because nobody gave you a long talk about the permanency of brands before we found you.”

He gets a small smile out of that before Peter’s out for good, but before Tony can feel the height of his own panic, the regular med team has walked in and someone’s conversing with Bruce and the next thing Tony knows, the kid’s on a stretcher getting wheeled away. Tony doesn’t immediately follow; he has a call to make, and some level of calm to achieve before he trusts himself to be in that room.

May, for once, seems to take the news in stride — it occurs to him that with a kid like Peter, this is probably a very small-scale emergency. He sends Happy to go get her and they’re practically wrapped up by the time she arrives, with Peter still conked out and a Hello Kitty band-aid secured over the very small incision (courtesy of Bruce, who in recent weeks has joined Tony in the light hazing of their new junior Science Bro).

Tony is hovering outside the door when the kid wakes up and can hear the muffled voices from inside, can hear what must be Bruce explaining to Peter what happened and some words of comfort from May. Then Bruce pokes his head out of the door.

“You can come in,” he says, puzzled that Tony already hasn’t.

Tony blows out a breath. “Course I can,” he says, “I own the place.” But he still hovers there for a moment, rooted to the spot, trying to conjure the proper words for an apology. As terrible as Tony feels about the whole thing, he’s never been good at those.

But Peter’s eyes are bright (and clearly drugged) when Tony walks in, and he waves at Tony with the unself-conscious cheerfulness of someone who’s just run into him on the street.

“Hey, Mr. Stark,” he says animatedly.

“Hey, kid.” The relief of seeing the kid awake and alert almost makes his chest feel concave. “Good to see you up. How are you feeling?”

“Dr. Banner saved my appendix!” he reports, with an embarrassing amount of enthusiasm. “It’s in a jar.”

Not quite an answer, but he’ll take it. “Kid,” he says, “if you ever show it to me, it will be the last thing you ever do.”

“You’re missing out,” says Peter, without missing a beat.

“And you need to get some rest,” says May. “We can horrify people with your detached organs tomorrow, okay?”

Peter grins. “Buzzkill.”

Tony stands there for a moment, the apology or whatever shape it is taking at the base of his throat — but Bruce is leaving, and May is leaning down to skim Peter’s hair, and it’s clear that this is his cue to go, too. He does, feeling vaguely unsettled; he wanted to square things away with the kid, wanted to make him understand that he regretted the way he’d handled things, the way his old man always did after he’d pushed Tony too far.

Tony understands, then, that the apology isn't for Peter. It's for him. He  is the one who needs forgiveness, some kind of absolution — Peter is clearly just fine without it.

And if Tony really means the apology he wanted to give, then he'll do what Howard never did — he'll change. He’ll make sure that this kind of thing never happens again. He'll never be standing outside another door like this one, wanting to apologize for something stupid he’d done; he won't let it happen at all.

It occurs to him that this is a lofty promise for a kid he’s only known for a matter of months, and it strikes Tony in some unexpected place, just how quickly the kid has wormed his way into his life. How it seems unfathomable that this time last year Tony didn’t know him. How quickly there are parts of him that make room for Peter in ways that he didn’t imagine he could make room for someone, in ways he always thought he wouldn’t be equipped.

Bruce claps him on the back. “Stop beating yourself up,” he says, in that infuriatingly intuitive way of his.

“But it’s my only hobby.”

“Find a new one.”

The thing is, Tony realizes as he glances back at Peter’s door, that he already has — for better or for worse.

Chapter Text

“I was having what was, quite frankly, a delightful dream where Wi-Fi went down universally and both so-called heroes and villains were forced to take a breather for a week, and now you have interrupted it. Which is to say, kid, you better make this call worth my while.”

There’s a beat of silence, then, and it only takes that one beat for Tony to regret every word of what he just said. He braces himself — at the very least, he has the small comfort of hearing the kid physically breathing on the other end of the line — but Peter’s voice is unexpectedly steady when he finally speaks.

“Sorry,” he says, his voice casual. “I, uh — it can wait.”

Tony sits up in bed. “ What can wait?” he asks, looking at his wrist. It’s seven o’clock on a Saturday morning. In other words, not prime time for receiving any kind of call from one Peter Parker, who he knows from experience sleeps in on weekends sometime past noon.

“Um,” says Peter. Like he’s about to spill the beans. Like there’s some dam he’s been blocking, about to give way, that he’s holding back with every last shred he’s got. “Uh — really, nothing, I’m sorry, I’ll see you — ”

“Peter.”

The shaky little breath betrays him, even if his voice comes out steady. “I, uh … my aunt didn’t come home last night.”

Now Tony’s awake.

“And it’s probably nothing,” says Peter, who clearly doesn’t believe the words coming out of his own mouth, “except that it’s never happened before? And she’s not answering her phone, it just goes to voicemail, and I checked her work and she's not there, and I just — uh — I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have called you, I just didn’t know who else to — ”

“No, no, you did good, kid, I’m the person you call when this kind of thing happens,” says Tony, easing himself out of bed, blinking the sleep out of his eyes. “When’s the last time you heard from her?”

The momentary relief in Peter’s voice is almost heartbreakingly palpable. “Um, last night?” he says, for the first time since Tony picked up sounding like the 15-year-old that he is. “We ate dinner together, and I went on patrol, and I came back and she wasn’t here, so I called her, but it just keeps going to voicemail, and I’ve just been waiting ever — I mean, she’s not home yet.”

“And you’re at your apartment right now?”

“Yeah,” says Peter quietly. “And I — I mean, I tried Ned’s mom first, I’m really sorry, I don’t want to bother you when you’re — ”

“It’s not a bother, kid. You gonna be okay for a half hour or so?”

“Yeah, yeah, um — ”

“Okay, be there in 30.”

“Wait, what? Oh um, Mr. Stark, you really don’t need to — ”

Tony feels bad for hanging up on the kid, but he has to — only because when he hears the kid’s voice, he can hear the underscore of panic so freshly that it might be his own. He knows what must be running through the kid’s mind: Toomes gave up his civilian identity. Someone with a grudge wants to hurt him. What better way to do that than to go after one May Parker, Peter’s only family left in this world?

Tony immediately covers all of the bases he can think of. He calls the number he has for May Parker, which sure enough, goes straight to voicemail; it isn’t a Stark Phone, so he can’t tell if it’s turned off or if it’s out of battery. He runs a facial recognition scan for all security footage within a five mile radius of the Parker residence in Queens, but immediately loses her after it starts to rain and she pulls a hood up over her head on her way to the train the night before. After that, Tony is out of tricks; he is somehow furious with himself for it, wanting some way to fix this, wanting to not show up to Peter’s empty-handed.

Especially because he knows that the fear he heard in Peter’s voice is not unfounded. Tony may not know May, but he knows enough. Knows enough to know that she would never, ever leave Peter with even a shadow of a doubt about her safety. The two of them are way too close for that.

Which can only mean that something bad has happened to her. Something that the kid is nowhere near qualified, with or without his abilities, to handle on his own.

Tony doesn’t bother with a car, engaging the Iron Man suit and flying directly to Queens himself. He tries not to make a big show of it — the block’s pretty empty when he lands outside the apartment building, at the very least. He doesn’t bother waiting for Peter to buzz him in, using the tech in his suit to override the lock faster than it would have taken for him to wait.

When he makes it up to Peter’s floor and knocks on the familiar paint-chipped door of his apartment, it doesn’t fling open the way Tony is expecting. In fact, it doesn’t open the way he is expecting at all — because the person who opens the door is May Parker.

“Tony?” she asks, her face knit in utter confusion before she can recover. “What’re you …”

It doesn’t help that Tony is every bit as stunned to see her as she is to see him. “Morning, May,” he says, trying to collect himself. Out of the corner of his eye he can see Peter, standing in the kitchen and looking a bit stricken, his posture ramrod straight but the rest of him otherwise looking whole and normal and unharmed.

Tony quickly assesses the situation, clears his throat and says, “Peter didn’t tell you? He forgot some of his injections at the compound, so we scheduled coffee.”

May’s eyebrows furrow. “Peter doesn’t drink coffee,” she says. But she looks distracted, worried — she glances back at Peter, and then at Tony, and something seems to register then.

“Oh, honey,” she says. “Did you … when I didn’t …”

“What? No, uh, he was just — I didn’t tell you he was coming?” Peter asks.

In a rare instance Tony has the wherewithal to shut his mouth, his eyes flickering between the two Parkers, whose faces have both turned frankly alarming shades of red. Peter won’t look at either of them, and May’s eyes are on the floor.

“I’m so sorry,” May murmurs after a moment — not to Tony, but to Peter. She crosses the room to him, turning her back on Tony, who’s still standing in the doorway. “Oh, Peter, I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize …”

“No, no, don’t be — you thought I was at Ned’s — ”

“And I just let my phone die, I didn’t think that … ”

“May,” says Peter, with this little laugh that sounds like it hurts , “it’s fine, really, I figured it was something like that, I — ”

May cups Peter’s face in her hands, and there’s a split second when Peter’s expression almost seems to crack right down the middle before he recovers.

“I am so sorry,” she says again, like maybe she’ll never stop saying it. “I never would have stayed out if I’d known you were going to be here waiting up for me. I am so, so sorry if you thought … that I made you think that …”

Peter shakes his head then, vehemently, knocking her hands off of his face in the process. “No, no, it’s okay,” he says. He’s shaking. They can both see it, even if he won’t cop to it. “It  happens. Phones die. It’s — it’s just, you know, one of those things,” he says, with such aggressive false cheer that Tony can practically see May start to splinter.

“You were right to call Tony,” she says, her hands still hovering over Peter like she still wants to reassure him in some way, but doesn’t know how. “If that kind of thing happens — and I promise you, honey, it won’t — you were right to call him.”

Tony takes a step back from the doorway, as if it can make this any less uncomfortable than it already is, as if he can erase himself from this scene and free both Peter and May from the very clear guilt they’re both working through right now. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t work.

“I didn’t, uh …” Peter tries to lie, finally looking up at Tony with an expression so sharp and so needy that it forces Tony back into action.

“Right, coffee. C’mon, kid, I don’t have all day,” says Tony, as if Peter’s eyes aren’t red-rimmed and his hair rumpled and May doesn’t look as if she is one light breeze away from bursting into tears. He looks at May pointedly and says, “I’ll have him back in an hour. Sorry for the disruption.”

She casts him a look that oscillates somewhere between misery and gratitude, nodding to him as Peter all but races across the apartment to get out the door. Then he stops, suddenly, and turns to hug his aunt, kissing her on the cheek.

“Peter,” she says quietly, as he pulls away.

But Peter only smiles at her with an almost practiced ease and says, “Back in a few.”

The door shuts behind them, and the smile falters and then falls a moment later, Peter settling back into the same shellshocked expression he had when Tony first opened the door. Tony puts a hand on his shoulder and guides him over to the stairwell, pretending not to notice that Peter is still shaking under his touch.

“I’m sorry,” Peter mutters as they get out of earshot of the apartment, “she got there a minute or so before you did, I was about to call you but she was so surprised to see me that — ”

“It’s fine, kid. I’m glad you called me,” says Tony, resisting to urge to add, You know you can always call me, right? Because he hopes the kid already knows that. He hopes he doesn’t have to say that kind of thing, after all these months of pulling each other in and out of scrapes.

“She thought I was at Ned’s,” Peter babbles, “and I guess that makes sense, I was supposed to go to his place for a movie marathon tonight, she must have gotten the dates mixed up, but it’s good, I guess? I mean, I think she was out on a date. I’m glad she can, uh, do that still, and that it must have gone well. And stuff.”

Tony doesn’t take his hand off the kid’s shoulder even as they start to descend down the stairs.

“Anyway,” says Peter, like a runaway train, “I’m sorry you came all the way out here, and that I woke you up, I mean, false alarm, right?” He tries to laugh, and when it comes out all wrong he covers it up by adding quickly, “You don’t, uh, really have to get coffee with me, I’m sure you’re busy — ”

“You’re right. Nobody in their right mind would give you coffee right now. We’re getting some food in you,” says Tony decisively. “And then you’re coming back home and taking a nap.”

Peter lets out a scoff that he can’t quite commit to.

“Seriously, you look like someone just put you through a blender,” says Tony, squeezing the hand that’s on Peter’s shoulder. Peter casts him a side-glance, but doesn’t protest as they make their way further down the stairs. “That, and I wasn’t all B.S. up there. You clearly forgot to inject yourself last night.”

Only then does Peter blink, and seem to make the connection between that and the fact that he’s shivering almost violently.

“Oh,” he says, “I didn’t even …”

“I have a spare,” says Tony. “Here, kid.”

Peter accepts it, but after a moment it’s clear that his hands are shaking too much to steady it. Tony takes it back from him and looks at him for permission; Peter nods, and Tony injects it into Peter’s upper arm himself, careful to do it the way he watched Bruce do it when he first showed them.

It works instantly, the same way it always does. The shivering stops another second later, and Peter’s jaw loosens and his body slumps a bit in relief.

Only this time there’s this quiet, heavy beat where Peter seems to stop breathing, and he blinks once and suddenly there are two thick tears running down his cheeks.

For a moment, Peter seems more surprised than Tony is — then he’s stumbling back on the landing on the third floor stairwell, swiping at his eyes and staring down at the ground and muttering, “Shit. Sorry. Shit.”

The attempt to calm himself down is prolifically unsuccessful, the kid’s voice cracking on the last shit , his eyes streaming so thickly that he physically turns away from Tony and seems to stare a hole into the corner. Tony only glimpses the kid’s face for a split second before he moves away, but that’s all he needs to see — that split second of raw, uncompromised grief, of a kid who already lost his parents and the closest thing to a father he ever had and just spent an entire night grappling with the idea that he might have lost someone else, too.

Tony doesn’t forget what the kid’s been through, but he sometimes takes it for granted. Peter is all buoyancy and excitement and strings of emoji at two in the morning, all smiles and nerdy t-shirts and reckless decision making. It shouldn’t be a surprise, learning how much of it is an act; how not unlike Tony and most of the people he knows in this business, there is a much thinner line between the front the kid puts up for the world and what’s brewing under the surface than he’d ever want anyone to know.  

“Hey, kid. It’s okay,” he says. He’d come closer but he can tell the kid is embarrassed. He knows that feeling all too well.

Peter takes a breath, the kind you take when you’re about to collect yourself, but then his shoulders pitch forward again and the words are coming out too fast:  “I don’t know why I — jeez, I’m really, I’m — ”

But the more he tries to pull himself together, the worse it seems to get. The kid is shuddering now, his breath hitching and coming too fast. Tony decides they’ve officially reached the fuck it level of potential teenage humiliation, and takes a few steps forward, putting an arm around the kid’s shoulders to brace him.

“Let’s sit down for a minute, okay?” he says, guiding him toward the stairs.

Peter blinks long enough to steady himself and follow Tony to the stairs, where they perch themselves at the top. As soon as they’re somewhat settled there Peter swipes at his eyes with the heel of his hand like he’s angry with them, like the tears are happening to somebody else and he doesn’t want to be the one dealing with them.

“It’s stupid,” says Peter, who is still barely comprehensible. “Everything’s f-fine, I just — ”

“It’s not stupid, kid. And you’re not fine. You had the shit scared out of you.”

Peter’s face nearly crumples again at that, but he manages to recover. “If something happened to her …I mean, she’s my only — I don’t even know what I’d do if … ” The words come out in a gasp. “And I just kept thinking — after everything she’s done for me — it would be m-my fault if …”

Tony can’t quite make out whatever he tries to say next, but he doesn’t have to understand the words to get the gist of them; it’s the exact thought that has haunted him for years.

“Just breathe, kid,” he says, tightening the arm around his shoulders. “We can just sit here for awhile. We’ve got nowhere to be.”

It takes a few minutes for Peter’s breathing to even out a bit, for his eyes to stop streaming. Even then Tony can hear the rattle of fear in his lungs, can see the wince in Peter’s eyes as the next wave of whatever thought spiral he is in hits him again. Tony waits, because what he wants to say is important, and the kid needs to be in the right state to hear it and make it count.

“Okay, settle in,” says Tony, “because if you forget anything I say here, I’m going to tattoo it to your face. Got it?”

Peter nods.

“The first thing you should know is that nothing’s gonna happen to May because of you. I should have said something to you much sooner, but I’ve got this place rigged like you wouldn’t believe,” he says, gesturing vaguely at the walls. “May also has a panic button on her person at all times. I guess that’s the kind of thing adults don’t tell you when they don’t want to freak you out, but clearly we both made a shit call on that.”

Peter’s eyes widen in clear surprise, and for a moment Tony braces himself for some well-deserved teenage indignation. Instead Peter lets out a watery, “Thanks, Mr. Stark.”

Tony clears his throat, nodding. “The second thing you should know is you’re allowed to be scared. Hell, you’re supposed to be,” says Tony, feeling the echo of his guilt from forcing Peter into that conference a few weeks before when he was clearly nervous. “But sometimes the scary shit isn’t the — bullet-dodging or the free-falling or the god only knows what other kind of mayhem you get into when I dare turn my back. The scary shit is … stuff like this. With the people you love.”

Tony has to blink it out of his own eyes, then — Rhodey on the ground, unmoving. Pepper inches from his grasp, slipping and falling into the flames. Peter — reckless, ridiculous, stubborn Peter — and the bloodstains left on the rubble of a warehouse collapsed mere hours before.

“And because I know it’s crossed your mind, if something ever did happen to your aunt — and again, it won’t — you know that, without question, you always have a place to stay with me. As long as I’m alive. Hell, long after that.”

He feels Peter go rigid under his arm again, and has to say quickly, “Oh, jeez, kid. Nothing’s going to happen to — ”

But Peter’s staring straight at him now, with those red-rimmed, wide eyes that have seen too much, that can see right through him. They both know Tony is on the verge of making the kind of promise he can’t keep.

“What I mean to say is … you always have somewhere to turn. If it can’t be May and it can’t be me, I will damn well make sure that there is always someplace for you to call home.”

“I’m not — I’m not worried about having a place, or … or being taken care of,” says Peter quietly. There’s an eerie kind of calm in his voice now, an eye in this reluctant storm. “I’m scared of — of losing someone else.”

For a moment it’s all Tony can do to just nod; he doesn’t know what he can say to help. It’s a fear that can never be undone.

And it’s a fear Peter will realize one day, whether he likes it or not. Tony has known it in his bones for months, even if he is only acknowledging it in its fullest form now — Peter is the future. One day, possibly sooner than Tony thinks, he’ll be gone. Their entire fractured little team will be gone. May will be gone, too. And there will be Peter, already heavy with the burden of it on his fifteen-year-old shoulders, like he is anticipating it long before it comes to pass — Peter, who will lead. Peter, who will feel the same weight of responsibility Tony feels right now, who will reach out for some kind of guidance, some kind of compass, and realize there is nothing left but his own.

At the very least the kid is better off in that regard than Tony ever was; he is so inherently good that Tony hasn’t even for one second worried about what that distant future will look like, when it’s in Peter’s hands.

But that future is hopefully a long ways away from now. That future is a scared kid sitting on a stair step looking at Tony like he’s a person who has answers that Tony never quite prepared himself to give.

“Thing is, kid,” says Tony eventually, “it’s a fear you learn to live with. Sometimes you can’t let yourself think about what could happen, or what’s going to happen, or what you can and can’t change. Because otherwise it eats you up, and you forget to enjoy the time you do have.”

The words settle in the air for a moment, and Tony worries, in an oddly self-conscious way, that it isn’t enough. But Peter nods his head once and seems to take it to heart.

“And you have time , kid. You’re fifteen ,” says Tony, nudging him a bit. “You’ve got nothing but time.”

Peter lets out a breathy little laugh. “I dunno, Mr. Stark,” says Peter. The tone of his voice changes a bit — a little lighter, a little less thick. “I’ll be sixteen in a few months. Practically an old man.”

Tony puts a hand to his chest. “Um, ouch ,” he says. He waits for a beat, to make sure the kid really is ready for the whole joke and play this off portion of accidentally breaking down in a stairwell, then adds, “You don’t get to pull the senior citizen card until you have at least one back problem. Get in line behind the rest of the team.”

Peter's smile is watery, but seems to be genuine. “... Is that why you recruited me? So someone would take care of all you guys in your old age?”

“The jig is up,” says Tony.

Peter considers this. “Eh. I’ll be rich by then,” he says cheekily. “You’re all going into homes.”

“You’re mean when you’re hungry,” says Tony, clapping him on the back and easing himself to his feet. He offers the kid his hand. “C’mon, let’s get some food in you before you become Hulk Junior.”

He can’t decide whether he’s relieved that the kid seems to be up to bantering, or worried that there’s still more left to say. But Peter takes another shaky little breath like he is expelling the last of this morning’s upset, taking Tony's hand and clambering back up to his feet with his usual teenage gracelessness, and Tony reminds himself to heed his own words — they have time. This may be the first conversation they have in this vein, but it certainly won’t be the last.

"And kid?" he says. 

Peter looks up at him, his eyebrows raised expectantly. 

"Don't hesitate to call me. Ever. Okay?" he says. "That's our whole schtick. We've got each other's backs." 

Peter nods, and says another thank you that Tony isn't sure if he deserves. Tony follows him down the stairs and out into the cold morning and tries not to think about the day that Peter calls with the kind of problem that Tony doesn't have the power to fix.  

Chapter Text

Tony hasn’t brought up the idea of Peter joining the Avengers since Peter walked his little plot twist right out the front door, but he doesn’t discourage the kid when he brings it up, either. There’s this sort of acknowledged idea of “someday,” which Tony imagines will either be when the kid finishes high school or college or at some point in between then, depending on the state of the world and how reckless Peter is feeling at that particular time in his life.

In the meantime, Tony slowly, and occasionally accidentally, starts introducing Peter to the rest of the team. Or, rather, the team starts introducing themselves to him — once some of the bad blood has coursed its way through and some of them actually start talking to each other on a tenuous basis again, everyone has questions.

Natasha, naturally, was in no mood to wait for introductions.

“Ran into your kid the other day,” she tells him, just as she’s about the leave the compound. Her business there is brief — she has, unfortunately, taken on the brunt of “mediator” duties in the months following the fallout in Germany — so when Tony hears the words uttered so casually on her way out the door, he almost spits out the smoothie he was enjoying.

“Peter Parker, is it?” she asks.

Tony rolls his eyes “Show off,” he mutters, putting the smoothie down. He drums his fingers on the table, trying to decide how he’s going to react to this. He knows he shouldn’t be upset. He trusts Natasha. But there is still some distant cousin of anger, a pang of protectiveness that she must pick up on, because she offers him the slightest reassuring nod.

“So, did you scare the shit out of him?”

“Only a little,” says Natasha, with the first smirk he’s seen out of her in months. “Ran into him walking around Queens.”

Tony doesn’t even bother to ask what she was doing there; she’s been flying so under the radar that he’s surprised to ever see her at all. “And?”

“I just said, ‘Hey, Spider-Man.’”

Tony raises his eyebrows. Natasha raises hers right back.

“He might have been wearing civilian clothes at the time.”

“Jesus. Thank god you never went to high school. There’d be entire teen movies based on you.”

Natasha lets out a tight laugh, and then softens. “He seems like a good kid.”

“What, you take him out for ice cream?” asks Tony, because he doesn’t want to seem defensive by asking point blank if she talked to him any more than that.

“Nah, just followed him on his patrol.”

Tony looks up at her sharply.

“Just out of curiosity. He didn’t even notice,” says Natasha, raising up a hand. “Sheesh, Mama Bear.”

Tony doesn’t like the idea of someone being able to follow the kid anywhere, even if it is just Natasha. It’s a grating reminder of all the things that Tony can’t anticipate, of the things that all too often in their line of work can fall through the cracks.

“If you had any questions about him, you could have just asked me.”

“You know that’s not my style,” says Natasha. “I assume you’re the reason the kid’s records are mysteriously difficult to Google?”

“Why are you doxing my intern?”

“Intern, now?” says Natasha, folding her arms over her chest. When Tony doesn’t loosen up, she says, “Same reason you were. It occurred to me that he’s a 15-year-old kid with mutant powers running around Queens like the Energizer Bunny, and I wanted to make sure … given the Accords and everything … that he’d be safe when he inevitably went public with his identity.”

She says the words carefully, like they might upset Tony. Like she suspects Tony will do the thing he admits he is tempted to do — keep Peter under the radar illegally for as long as he can.

“Yeah, well,” says Tony, “I’ve got it covered.”

And he does. With May’s permission, he’s essentially taken Peter’s birth records and legal guardianship documents fully offline. A stranger would be hard-pressed to connect him to May Parker, or find any past or current address the two of them ever lived in. Tony was thorough enough that Peter Parker, aside from his academic accomplishments and recent patent, looks like an orphaned ghost.

“Good,” says Natasha, and Tony resists the urge to say, Who’s the Mama Bear now? because oddly, since May and Peter Parker fell into his life, he’s been learning about a little thing called tact. (Or at least humoring it; god knows over the years Pepper has tried.)

Wanda, on the other hand, is far less discrete in her mother henning of Peter. She meets him the day after his appendix comes out, when he’s wandering the kitchen with a cup of vanilla pudding Tony didn’t even know was still produced after the ‘90s. Peter doesn’t so much tell her that he’s Spider-Man as Wanda, ever suspicious, pries into his thoughts with no warning and extracts it from him; Tony’s about to intervene, but then her face softens like she’s just seen an entire litter of puppies get set loose in a bouncy house, and Tony decides the “please don’t violate the subconsciouses of my houseguests” lecture can wait.

Wanda’s facing the window, watching Happy pull out of the driveway with Peter in the backseat, when she addresses Tony.

“You will bring him here more often,” Wanda tells him. “He will train with me.”

Tony blinks. “Uh.”

“Also, we’re out of cranberry juice,” says Wanda, pulling her hair back into a ponytail and walking away. “It’s his favorite.”

She says it with the vague air of a threat, and Tony is honestly impressed by how immediately Peter has won the favor of the only person in this compound more guarded than Tony in eight seconds flat.

But it spurs an unexpected stream of events into motion. Within a week the kid is training with her on weekends and two days after school (and sucking down a frankly alarming volume of juice). Within another two, she and Vision and Peter and occasionally Bruce are hanging out in the kitchen after their sessions, Peter doing his homework and slyly asking Vision questions whenever he doesn’t want to commit to an actual Google search (“You’re gonna regret that when your teacher’s looking for a bibliography, Pete,” said Bruce warningly, putting an end to it, mostly). Occasionally Natasha drops by, warily at first — Tony isn’t sure how she and Bruce left things, and doesn’t want to ask — and suddenly Tony finds himself coming up from his workshop some nights to full on cacophony.

It reaches peak absurdity when Pepper lets herself into his workshop and says, as if it is a completely normal happening, “Hey, we’re starting the Star Wars marathon in a minute. Save you a seat?”

“Uh,” says Tony, who literally is down to his elbows in wiring, “pass.”

“Oh, come on. I made brownies.”

“That is frighteningly domestic. Also, wait,” says Tony, side-eyeing her. “You’ll make brownies for the kid but in how many years of knowing and loving me, haven’t made me them once?”

“I made brownies for the movie marathon,” says Pepper, with a smirk. “And you’re forgetting that there were very different start dates to the ‘knowing’ and the ‘loving’ segments of our relationship.”

“Fair enough.”

He eventually wanders up sometime in the middle of A New Hope to find that, miraculously, nearly all of the couch space in the rec room is full. Wanda is firing off questions right and left (“This is supposed to be in the past? But we have not yet perfected travel even near lightspeed in the present?”), Vision is laughing quietly at bizarre intervals, Bruce is half-watching as he works on something on his laptop, Natasha and Pepper are discussing whether or not the compound has its own vulnerable “ exhaust port” to look out for (“Sure,” says Pepper, without missing a beat, “Tony’s ego”), and Peter is shoveling a mountain’s worth of popcorn into his mouth and looking more content than most kids do on Christmas morning.

“Psst,” says a voice, and only then does Tony see that Rhodey, who was supposed to be meeting him for actual strategic reasons , god dammit, has somehow gotten sucked into this, too. Rhodey motions to an empty lounge chair next to him, which Tony begrudgingly takes.

“This is nice,” says Rhodey lowly, his eyes a little bit mocking but the words sincere.

“When did I become a glorified R.A.?” Tony grumbles, reaching over Rhodey to grab the Twizzler that is poised mere inches from his mouth.

Rhodey gives him a “really, man?” look and says, “Pepper’s the R.A. You’re the weird dean who pops in from time to time.”

Then Wanda shushes them, because she is apparently taking her Star Wars education quite seriously. Tony surprises himself by settling in and actually staying in one place that isn’t his workshop for a few hours, consuming an unprecedented amount of junk food as the night stretches later and later, until Natasha and Pepper’s chatter dies down and Bruce shuts off his laptop and Peter has fallen asleep on Wanda’s shoulder. There’s a moment when the credits start rolling on Return of the Jedi when Tony looks around and their little brood and feels a pang halfway between nostalgia and contentment, stuck between the calm of this moment and the old moments like it that all seem a little bit tainted now. It’s almost paralyzing. And whatever it is, it’s all Peter’s fault.

“Hey, hon,” says Pepper, putting a hand on Peter’s shoulder. “Movie’s over.”

Peter blinks himself back into the room. “Huh? Oh,” he says, his whole face blooming red against the glare of the television. “Wow. Uh. Sorry, Wanda — ”

She waves him off affectionately. “Not to worry, sleepyhead.”

And then Peter stretches and yawns and so does everyone else in turn, and the whole thing is so startlingly domestic , everyone getting up and turning their heels to the stairs to actually sleep in the quarters that Tony set out for all of them in more optimistic seeming days. Tony can’t decide whether to be relieved or not — mostly because he can’t quite wrap his head around it. He is so used to factors he can control, can plan for in advance. He’d never planned on some kid coming in here and knocking them into a different orbit.

Of course, Peter’s never been some kid. Not from the moment Tony met him. He isn’t sure why he’s so surprised at the way things have turned out; he guesses he just wasn’t expecting anything to change so soon.

It’s not all sunshine and Star Wars marathons, of course. Every now and then they see Sam outside of the compound, but it’s been months since anyone has seen Steve, and nobody’s being exactly forthright about his whereabouts. There are reminders, at unexpected moments, of old grudges — Natasha dyeing her hair yet again without explanation, looking decidedly more on edge than she did the week before; Wanda and Vision in steely quiet in the kitchen one afternoon, after some disagreement they won’t share with the class; even things that sometimes go right over Tony’s head until he sees a bewildered look on Peter’s face, who seems to pick up on anything and everything even if he has absolutely no context for what it means.

At some point Tony’s going to have to sit him down and tell him. All of the gory details, all of the past shames and triumphs and tiny little slivers in between that keep them all at arm’s length, that make things as innocuous as sitting down for pizza seem like goddamn miracles. He tells himself he has time before he has to, but that’s the thing with Peter — everything tends to happen way ahead of schedule.

Case in point: the imminent return of the aliens who party-crashed in Washington, D.C. last month.

“For once it wasn’t New York,” Tony mutters, “but then they just had to come back and do the most cliché fucking thing on the planet.”

Pepper has one eye on the live feed and one on Tony as he suits up. “Just a head’s up,” she says quietly, “it looks like Captain America’s already on the ground.”

Tony’s jaw tenses. “Rogers that.”

FRIDAY keeps him debriefed on the situation as Tony flies in; apparently whatever gateway they’re coming through only works in water. Last time it was the Potomac, this time it’s the Hudson. They’ve already steadily worked their way into midtown, where they appear to be wreaking havoc in small groups, the same way they did before. Tony blinks away the image of the kid with a blaster shot in him and is grateful that it’s eleven o’clock in the morning on a Tuesday, and that this whole thing will be over before he catches wind.

“Roll call?” asks Tony on the comms when he’s close.

“Hey, Tones,” says Rhodey, “I’m about five minutes out.”

“On the ground,” says Natasha.

“Slightly above her in the sky,” says Sam.

Tony is genuinely surprised to hear Clint’s voice: “Got here just in time for the show.”

And then, finally, a terse, begrudging, “Also on the ground.”

Tony doesn’t answer for a moment, steely at the sound of Steve’s voice in his comm. He didn’t realize Steve had even bothered to keep it.

“Any word on Wanda and Vis?”

“En route from D.C.,” says Rhodey.

“Good,” he says. “Well, we know their tricks so this should be quick and — ”

“New tricks,” grunts Natasha. He hears the click- thwack of something getting its ass handed to it.

“Such as?”

“Energy pulses,” says Sam. “Nobody’s been hit by one yet, but some of them are doing some major structural damage. It seems like there are different types — like some are more powerful than others, or — ”

And then, just like that, Tony’s comm goes silent.

“FRIDAY, what’s happening?” he says, his blood running cold.

“An unknown frequency has disabled the speakers in the comm system,” FRIDAY reports.

Okay. That’s shitty, but significantly less shitty than All of your friends and ex-friends are dead in a heap. Tony explains the situation to Rhodey, the only person he can still communicate with, as the two of them convene on the scene.

And oh, what a scene it is. Already he can see Steve and Natasha on the ground, half fighting off the disgusting creatures and half aiding in the evacuation efforts. Clint is perched at the Pulitzer Fountain in the open, painfully exposed, shooting arrows in every direction. Tony sees Rhodey fly in ahead of him, and then — 

Fuck. Fuck. It’s happening all over again, and Tony can’t make it to him in time — Rhodey’s falling from the sky, one of the steady pulses of energy Sam was referring to barreling right into him. The suit is offline and plummeting — Rhodey only just manages to disengage and deploy a parachute before Tony’s heart works its way back up his throat. He sees Rhodey’s head turning, sees him looking for him to warn him, but Tony has already stopped dead in the sky.

If he goes down there, it’ll take his suit offline, too. And then he’ll be useless to everyone .

“Okay,” he mutters, “I guess I’m on evac and perimeter patrol, then.”

The silence in his comms is deafening. He hates this feeling more than anything — hovering here on the fringes of this disaster, knowing he is powerless to do anything to help. It is a feeling he has worked tirelessly his entire life to prevent. It claws at some vulnerable part of him that he has done everything in his power not to acknowledge, makes everything feel less steady, less in control.

He can see the team all down below, congregating by the fountain. Even Sam’s been grounded. Shit . Tony does what he can, and starts to take aim from a distance at the airborne creatures, picking them off one by one before they get out of the general five block radius they’re terrorizing.

“...’lo? Can anyone hear me?”

Shit .

“Yo, Karen, is there something wrong with my comm?”

Tony doesn’t say anything at first, because he’s not sure what he can say. He pulled the kid into D.C.; he can’t very well tell him to buzz off when the same aliens are attacking their home turf. But Tony hadn’t anticipated D.C. getting as out of hand as it was, as out of hand as it’s about to be here.

Peter clears his throat. “Hello? This thing on? Guys — ”

Only then does Tony see that Peter is not, as he assumed, approaching the fight, but has already somehow shot right past Tony’s radar and straight into it. Shit .

“Kid, wait — ”

The energy pulse hits with such precision that there is no doubt in Tony’s mind that one of those filthy things targeted him from blocks away. He hears Peter let out a yelp as the blast knocks him off course, but then, miraculously, he can still hear the kid’s ramblings: “Holy crap are they invisible now? What the hell just pushed me?” says Peter, shooting a web and latching himself to a building. “Did I hallucinate that — ”

“ Kid ,” says Tony loudly, because he just can’t quite bring himself to say Spider-Man over the comm when Peter is anything but. “Can you hear me?”

“Wha — Mr. Stark? Yeah, sure, where’re you — ”

“How the hell is your tech working?” Tony mutters, half to Peter and half to himself. He’s more relieved than anything, which is why it takes him a beat to realize: “The new fabric. I made it resistant to the blasters.”

“Huh?”

Even with the magnification from the suit, Tony can’t see half as well as he wishes he could from the sidelines. “Those pulses are shorting out our tech,” says Tony. “I can’t get on the scene without the suit getting disabled, but yours is resistant to whatever it is they’re throwing at us. I need you to get to the ground and get Rhodey out of there, okay?”

“On it,” says Peter, without missing a beat.

Tony wouldn’t have asked, but he knows for a fact that Peter is essentially bulletproof in that suit — well, blaster-proof anyway. Pepper might have chuckled at his overreaction at calibrating a new fabric for the suit after the shit show that was D.C. a few weeks ago, but damn it all if it wasn’t paranoia well-spent. Besides, Tony can’t tell if the mechanisms on Rhodey's legs are working down there, and he hasn’t been through near enough PT to get out of the scene on his own yet — for once, Tony is actually relieved to see Peter in the middle of chaos. This is something Tony can’t compromise.

He keeps an eye on the kid and Rhodey for the minute or so it takes Peter to web him out, then sees Peter heading right back toward the center of the chaos.

“What are you doing, kid?”

“Cap waved his arms at me to come down?” says Peter. “I mean, I think at me. I’m the only one in this general direction, so — ”

“Just — make it quick. Whatever it is. Get out of the thick of things.”

There’s a minute or so when Tony doesn’t hear anything on the comms, but the AI in the kid’s suit doesn’t alert him to anything, so Tony continues his campaign to take the creatures out at long range and account for any slower civilians getting caught in the fringes of the crossfire. Then, finally, he hears a prepubescent voice clearing itself into the comm, clearly prepping itself to tell Tony something he doesn’t want to hear.

“Okay, so — turns out everyone can still hear me on their comm. They can receive the messages I put through the general channel even though they can’t transmit.”

Tony pinches his eyes shut, all too aware of what the kid is about to say before he says it.

“So Cap is, uh — he told me to get high up where I can see everything and call the shots.”

He can hear the slight terror in the kid’s voice — not at the idea of being in the thick of the battle, but at the idea of being in charge of it. And honestly, the idea of it kind of terrifies Tony, too. It’s probably too much, and it’s definitely too soon. And he doubts that if Steve actually knew how young the face under the Spider-Man mask is, he would have made a different call. But this is not the time for Tony to accidentally undercut what small modicum of confidence his teenage protege has.

“Well, get to it,” says Tony.

There’s a beat. “Right,” says Peter, with a grit and determination that sounds borderline ridiculous coming out of his fifteen-year-old mouth.

What Tony keeps to himself is that there are only two reasons he is halfway okay with this — the first being that he, unlike the rest of the team, still has a direct line to Peter. If the kid massively screws up a call, Tony will be able to cut in and redirect him. The other being that, so long as Peter is on sentry duty and calling the shots from above, he’s relatively out of the fray. If anything, this is the best case scenario.

Just in case, though, Tony uses the override in the baby monitor protocol to hear what Peter’s saying even when he isn’t broadcasting to the general channel on the comm.

“Karen, get me eyes on the civilian count in the park,” he hears Peter mutter to himself. And then louder, with the kind of earnest confidence he had at the medical conference all those weeks ago: “Okay, guys, the southeast corner of the park is fully evacuated. If we can move the fighting in that direction we can contain some of the damage to the unevacuated buildings.” There’s a brief pause, and then: “Natasha, there’s a band of them on your right. Sam, if you run up 57th you can help her head them off. Clint — what do you mean, how do I know your name? You’re an Avenger — anyway, there some aliens pulling shi — er, wreaking havoc on 59th and heading your way. They’re aerial. On your, uh, three o’clock.”

Tony had been preparing himself for a “you got this, kid” or some equivalent micro pep talk, but Peter, it seems, never needed one in the first place.

“Captain Rogers, it looks like your shield is knocking the pulses off course — they seem to be coming from the especially ugly looking dudes, the ones with the teeth? If you can catch the pulses fast enough and throw the shield into the wave it might disrupt it?”

Tony can’t hear anyone’s responses, but he sees the calls executed immediately, with a seamlessness that, hostile alien attack aside, pinches Tony with a pride he didn’t ever anticipate feeling so soon. Yes, it is utterly ridiculous that they’re all being forced to take orders from a kid who still has to get permission slips signed to leave his school campus — and if Tony has his way, this will be the last time something like this happens for at least ten years — but the kid’s taking it in stride, just the way Tony knew he would.

“Karen, can you monitor the timing of the pulses?” says Peter to himself. “I think they have to recharge them. If we can figure out how many seconds … thanks, Karen.”

“M — er, Tony,” the kid correct himself, “they’re starting to span out south. Do you — ”

“Eyes on ‘em, kid,” says Tony, turning around and seeing the group of them that have just start peaking over the skyline. It takes him mere seconds to lock his aim on them and fire, and by then Peter has already shifted his focus.

“Okay, guys — there’s a two minute, five second recharge on the pulses, and four of the ones with devices are still airborne. Clint, if you grab the one near the park edge and Natasha takes care of the one going down 58th … we’ll be down two. Trying to get eyes on the other two ag —  agh . Again,” Peter stammers.

Tony whips around. “Kid, what happened?”

“Karen, web grenade,” says the kid, his voice tighter than it was a few moments ago. There’s a thwip and a pause and then he’s back on the general comm again: “Okay, the third one’s taken care of.”

“FRIDAY — ”

“Sensors in Spider-Man’s suit indicate that two puncture wounds to the left leg and one to the abdomen,” reports the AI, without further prompting.  

“Captain Rogers,” says Peter, perfectly composed in the comm, “the one by Natasha will send another pulse in 15 seconds unless she — oh, she’s got it. Okay, Clint, you’ve got 30 seconds before yours goes off. Still trying to get eyes on the fourth one.”

“Peter,” says Tony, trying to focus in on the kid’s position from a distance, “time to tap out.”

Peter, evidently, ignores him. Even with magnification at full capacity Tony can’t quite get a lock on him, not without risking his suit getting in the way of the pulses — and while every logical nerve in his brain reminds him that he will be of no use to anybody if he tries to fly into the thick of things, it’s especially hard to remember when he hears Peter’s breathing start to turn into a slight wheeze.

“ Peter .”

“Just a sec, it’s fine, just a sec,” the kid says quickly into the one-on-one comm. Before Tony can say anything back, he’s cut off by Peter in the general channel again: “Okay, Clint’s got the first one — I still don’t have eyes on the fourth … There’s a few coming toward Sam and a few civilians up on Fifth, Captain Rogers, if you can get over there — ”

‘Kid, listen — ”

“ — Natasha, one of the aerial ones is heading tow — oh, okay, you see it, sweet, sweet.”

“What did we talk about interrupting when an adult is — oh, fuck . Did you mute me?” asks Tony, livid beyond belief. “If you  muted me, kid, you’re not gonna hear the end of it until — ”

“I didn’t mute you, Mr. Stark,” says Peter, his voice sounding thicker than it should. “I’m just — trying to focus.”

“Stop trying. Tell the others I told you to step out. I can see your stats, you’re losing blood and fast. What the hell hit you?”

“I — I don’t know, but I’m fine , and we have to find the fourth — ”

And then, just like that, they find it — or rather, Tony does. In his distraction he misses it in his viewfinder completely, and the pulse from it hits him dead on; the suit is immediately disabled, the screen blank, and Tony plummeting from the sky like a rock.

“ Mr. Stark! ” Peter screams.

“FRIDAY, initiate reserve battery.”

Silence. Silence, and pavement , coming up fast. Tony tries to engage the parachute, but of all the fucking times, it seems to be jammed.

“Mr. Stark is — can anyone get to — he’s falling, it hit him, he’s going down.” Every last shred of Peter’s composure is gone; just like the rest of the team, the only ability Tony has is to hear whatever is transmitted on Peter’s comm, and right now hearing the agony in the kid’s voice he wishes more than anything that he couldn’t.

It’s okay , he wants to say, as he hears Peter’s breath hitching. Calm the hell down, kid, I’ve survived worse than this . And he has. And he will . It’ll hurt like a bitch, but — 

“ No! ”

Impact is brutal. That’s all that Tony registers before he blacks out.

When he comes to, it’s to a sound he never thought he’d ever hear come out of Peter’s mouth; he can hear the angry thwip, smack, thwip of webs being thrown, can hear the ragged, thick breaths in between Peter’s attacks.

“Karen, taser web,” Peter bites out.

Tony blinks himself back into the world, where he’s fallen somewhere along the paved roads that weave around Central Park.

“I can’t get him, I can’t get him , Karen, he’s still pulsing those things and he — he hit Mr. Stark, he hit him, and I — you’re sure you can’t get a read on Mr. Stark?”

It takes Tony too long to move, to get his wits about him again. His head is pounding, his entire body feels like a bruise.

“They killed him. They probably killed him, oh god, oh god — shut the hell up about Instant Kill, Karen! I can’t — I can’t … just get me eyes on that — that —  fucker ,” Peter says, the word heartbreakingly juvenile coming out of his mouth. Tony can hear the tears in his voice, the tortured pauses between his words. It tightens some part of Tony’s heart, pulls him out of his fog so immediately that for a moment it feels as if he never fell at all.

“Kid,” he says — his voice is hoarse, barely audible. “Kid, it’s fine.”

Peter can’t hear him. Tony can’t transmit. Fuck . He disengages the suit manually, sucking in greedy breaths when it finally releases him, the pavement and the sharp air cool on his back.

“Mister, uh, Iron Man? Are you okay?”

A cluster of young guys are standing over him, still dressed in their suits from work — finance bros, Tony assumes, still trying to right himself.

“Give me your phone,” he says to the one who’s making eye contact with him.

“R-right.”

Tony calls Pepper to have her send as many unmanned suits to his location as she can, trying to focus even though he still has the earpiece embedded, listening to Peter’s alternate hiccuping rage interrupted by the moments he gets back on the general comm and pretends that he’s not falling apart at the seams.

“The fourth one is still airborne,” Peter says into the comms, his voice breathy and clearly pained. “I — I haven’t been able to spot it since it hit Iron Man, I — there it is. ”

Tony has only managed to get himself into a sitting position when the kid says it; Peter is basically a fleck on the horizon in the distance, where he’s still perched on top of a building and giving commands down below.

“It’s coming toward me,” says Peter, a frustrating, ridiculous pinnacle of calm on the general comm, even though every time he pulls himself off of it Tony can hear his pain so viscerally it might be his own. “I’ve — I’ve got it.”

Tony watches, squinting from a near impossible kind of distance, as the kid shoots what must be a web grenade up at the airborne creature; when that fails to work, in the next beat the kid aims a web up at the hovercraft, and — shit, shit — seems to be getting pulled along right with it, higher and higher up into the air.

“Crap,” he hears Peter saying to himself. “Wow, crap, okay, I gotta just — unstick myself, and — or not. Thanks, Karen. That’s — super inconvenient and good to know, I guess.”

Tony doesn’t have to hear the AI in Peter’s suit to know what it must have told him; the craft Peter is lodged to pulled him above Central Park in an instant. Even if Peter let go he’d end up freefalling into the park, without anything to pull his webbing against to stop his fall. Tony’s suit might have kept him alive during that kind of plummet, but Peter’s body alone certainly would not.

“I — I can’t let it pulse again, or it’s gonna hurt someone else. Not after what it did to Mr. Stark. I just — I gotta … ” He hears the strain in Peter’s voice as the kid leverages himself upward, using his momentum to pull himself up and onto the alien’s craft. It’s moving too fast for Tony to really see what’s happening, except for his stomach to lurch when the thing clearly lunges at Peter, teeth bared, and the craft that it’s operating starts to teeter and spiral to the ground.

“ Ah . Did you just try to bite me?” A pause. “Oh. Poisonous teeth. Th-thanks, Karen, I’ll, uh … shit. I’ll avoid that — shit, shit , we’re going down, shit — ”

“ Fuck ,” Tony mutters, scanning the sky for the unmanned suits Pepper sent. He knows it’s too early to expect them, but the kid is both emotionally and physically compromised and clearly not exercising anything remotely close to sound judgment right now.

And the kid and the creature on the craft are plummeting, falling out of the sky like debris — Tony’s breath is caught in his throat, looking around for someone, anyone, sure that at any moment a team member will catch him — but there isn’t anyone left. All their tech has been grounded.

Then Tony hears a sound he knows that he won’t forget for the rest of his life: a scream that rips up Peter’s throat, so agonized and so senseless that for a moment Tony is certain that Peter hasn’t survived whatever is on the other side of it.

Then he sees Peter’s figure slide off of the already falling craft, sinking past the horizon and straight toward the ground, and that moment stretches into an infinite, unbearable string of them. The scream dies abruptly, too abruptly, even though Tony can still hear it ringing in his ears. He starts to run — stupidly, uselessly — watching the kid fall faster and faster until, like a dream, something suspends his motion with jolt just before he hits the ground.

Tony looks around wildly, his eyes latching onto Vision, who has flown in with Wanda in tow — Wanda, who is now struggling from a distance to ease Peter back to the ground.

It should be a relief, but Tony’s still hearing that scream play over and over in his mind. More alarmingly, he’s not hearing anything through the comm he still has pressed into his ear. No adolescent stammering, no cursing, no …  

Vision and Wanda have reached the kid now; Vision eases Wanda to the ground, but Wanda doesn’t release her hold on the now hovering Peter. Through some insane adrenaline and stumbling Tony has reached the edge of the park and 59th street, where they’re coming closer into view, close enough that Tony had see that the kid is hovering in all the wrong angles.

“No,” he hears Wanda saying before he can fully reach them. “No, no, no, no …”

She’s already tugging at the kid’s mask, and Tony says nothing to stop her — more upsettingly, Peter  says nothing to stop her.

And then Tony sees it — the blood staining the grass a few feet under the spot where he is hovering. Tony follows it upward to the the space just under Peter’s collarbone, dangerously close to his heart, that’s been pierced by something too thick to not do catastrophic damage. It’s still sticking out of him on either side, glowing eerily — Tony’s seen the material before, he knows what it is, but his brain is scrambling, locked on Peter’s pale, slack face —

“The pulsar,” Tony breathes. The kid’s been stabbed through the chest with one of the devices that’s been sending the pulses at them.

And it’s still on.

Wanda eases the kid to the ground with shaking hands, Vision propping him up so it doesn’t jostle the pulsar. The kid’s eyes are wide open and heartbreakingly alert, latching onto Wanda’s.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” says Wanda, trying to swallow her panic back. “You will be fine.”

“Ha,” Peter says. Tony can tell he means to be reassuring about it, but he can’t even pull in enough air to do that.

“There is a medical facility on 68th street,” says Vision quietly. “I can — ”

“Not unless we want to level that hospital and everyone in it,” Tony mutters, finally finding his voice. “Kid, look at me.”

Peter blinks at him, his eyes red-rimmed and wide. His mouth unhinges. “I thought … I thought you were …”

“I’m gonna disable this thing and we’re going to get you out of here. Understand?”

Peter shakes his head. “Pl-please, Mr. Stark, you gotta — everyone’s gotta run,” he wheezes. “It’s gonna g-go off again in another minute, and — ”

“For once in your goddamn life, listen to me, kid,” says Tony. “I’m going to disable it, and you’re going to be fine .”

Peter tries to shake his head again, but his whole body is already shaking, trying to absorb the impact of what’s happened to him. Tony tries to focus on the task at hand, but for a split second all he can see is blood — the tears in the suit in Peter’s leg, in his stomach, the first hits from when Tony told him to get himself the hell out of there. Why the hell couldn’t he just listen?

He knows why. He wouldn’t be Peter Parker if he had. But fuck , if Tony doesn’t think fast, he’s not going to be anything at all.

“Please,” Peter says again, his voice strained, his chest shuddering with the effort to speak. "Go."

“Shut it,” says Tony. He knows what to do. He’s tinkered enough with this particular breed of alien tech. But Peter’s shaking and Tony’s hands are shaking and it occurs to Tony that it may not even do him any good, that the kid was as good as dead the moment this thing lodged itself in him.

He’s close. He hopes.

“There’s too much blood,” Wanda murmurs, tears in her throat.  

“What part of shut it is lost on — ”

Peter sucks in a breath that shudders through his whole body. “It’s — it’s heating up, it’s recharging, please , you have to — please, Mr. Stark, go — ”

“ No . I’m not giving up on you, kid, and you damn well better not be that quick to give up on yourself.”

Peter’s face finally cracks, then — Tony only sees it for a fleeting moment before he’s wrists deep in the pulsar again, trying and failing not to jostle it too much as Peter’s blood seems to cascade from it. It’s not the face of someone who’s in pain, or someone who’s scared to die — it’s the face of someone who is wrenched with guilt, the kind of guilt Tony knows all too well.

He must look to Wanda then. “Make him leave,” he tells her. “B-before it’s too late, you all have to … you have to …”

Out of the corner of his eye Tony can see Wanda shake her head, can see her press a comforting hand against Peter’s forehead and push his hair back.

“Tony will fix it,” she tells him, “and if he doesn’t — I will stop the pulse myself before it hits him.”

“Y-you can do that?”

“I promise.”

Only then does Peter seem to slacken just slightly, enough for Tony to dig and find the infinitesimally small core that powers the pulsar. He pinches it between his fingers and it burns like a mother fucker . He knows he has to be careful taking it out, knows that one graze against the foreign metal might set it off, knows that they’re running out of time .

Because as well and good as Wanda’s little promise to Peter is, they all know the truth: even if she does manage to stop the pulse in its tracks before it hits her and Tony, she won’t be able to do anything from stopping it when it originates right out of Peter’s torn up ribcage. If it goes off, the kid gets cut to ribbons before they even have a chance.

“What happened?” Natasha’s voice is sharp, and Tony can hear the underscore of panic in it as she runs up to them. “Why hasn’t someone called for medical? What ... oh, kid.”

Tony tries to ignore her, sweat collecting at his brow as he eases the burning core out. “He’s going to be fine ,” he says through his teeth.

“Tony …”

And it’s out . Finally. He looks up at Vision, who already has a hand extended to take it; the pulsar might be deactivated, but the core will continue to burn now that it’s in the open air, and needs a safe place to explode.

“We got it, kid. It’s deactivated.”

“G-good,” says Peter.

Tony almost wishes he hadn’t looked up. The kid’s face is white as a sheet, his lips tinged with blood. Tony can practically see death rattling in the slow blinks of his eyelids, in the hazy look in his eye.

“Where’s his mask?” Tony demands.

It’s Clint who hands it to him, all the traces of laughter from earlier wiped off of his face. Tony doesn’t even know when he got there, just hears the murmur to Natasha: “He’s so young. How did he … ?”

Tony’s pulling the comm out of Peter’s mask. “FRIDAY, override Spider-Man's AI,” Tony demands. Before it can acknowledge him, he says: “Get me vitals on the kid and a course of action here.”

Vision’s back. He doesn’t reach for Peter — Tony tells himself it’s because they’re hesitant to move him, not because of a truth he doesn’t want to acknowledge: they’re already too late.

FRIDAY starts with recommendations first: don’t remove the pulsar, tourniquet the other wounds before moving him. FRIDAY doesn’t offer any survival odds because Tony specifically wired the AI in the kid’s suit to never give them in situations like this. He figured if the kid was ever in a situation like this, he wouldn’t need additional reason to panic.

In a quieter part of his mind he knew the deeper truth to that: he was hoping the kid would never be in a situation like this, and didn’t want to jinx it by even anticipating it.

When FRIDAY finishes listing off the extensive and gruesome damage — splintered ribs, a collapsed lung, more blood loss than Tony thought was possible, and fucking radiation poisoning to top it all off — he sees that Natasha’s already gone to work on the first few wounds, applying tourniquets with steady hands and a grim kind of focus.

“Is  he …”

Tony barely registers Steve’s voice when he approaches with Sam in tow.

“Oh my god,” says Sam in an instant. “What did those fuckers do to him?”

“Should … see the other guy,” Peter wheezes.

“I — I thought he was another super soldier,” Steve is saying. “He’s just … a kid. He’s a kid? ”

“I can st-still hear ,” Peter informs them, with a wryness he shouldn’t be capable of right now.

“ Tony , what were you — ”

“Not now,” he tells Steve, the words so biting that both Steve and Peter flinch.

Then Peter does something Tony will never forgive him for: he lets his eyelids start to slide shut.

“Look alive, kid,” says Tony, snapping his fingers in front of him.

Peter’s eyes squeeze in pain then in the brief moment it takes for him to collect himself as he comes back around. “Uncool.”

Only then does Tony sees the shadow of one of the unmanned suits Pepper sent; it immediately informs him that Helen Cho is en route to the medical facility in the tower, which still hasn’t fully been cleared before the lease expires in a few months. Tony can’t decide whether or not he’s grateful for this small miracle, when it becomes increasingly, painfully clear that they are running out of time — that there wasn’t any time to begin with.

“Kid, I’m gonna suit up and fly you to the tower, okay?”

Peter doesn’t answer him.

“He’s going into shock,” says Natasha.

Peter’s eyes are glassy, his breathing too shallow, too fast as Tony stands and lets the suit swallow him. From this angle he can see the blood still pooling out of Peter’s back — too much. More than Tony’s ever seen.

He shares the images from his viewfinder with Helen, in some effort to prepare her, trying not to wonder if it will even make a difference.

Then Wanda levitates the kid up into Tony’s arms as Tony tries not to feel the weight of the gazes of all their worried teammates. It takes them a few moments that they don’t have left to spare to settle Peter in a way that doesn’t disturb the pulsar still jutting out of him.  

Then Tony takes off, Vision and Wanda behind him; he gets some notification that Natasha has accessed another unmanned suit and figures the others are also en route. Peter seems to come back to himself a bit as they ascend, long enough to say, “Shit. Shit . I screwed up.”

“You didn’t screw up, kid. Now stop talking.”

“I did,” says Peter, and then it seems like the magnitude of it is finally hitting him. He turns his head and glances down at the city sweeping underneath him. “I … oh my god. I — I don’t — ”

“Peter. I know you’re scared,” he starts.

“I’m n-not — ”

“We’re going to be in the tower in a minute, and we’re going to give you something to knock you into next Tuesday, and you’re going to wake up fresh and shiny and — ”

“Mr. Stark.”

There are so many layers to that Mr. Stark that it’s all Tony can do to not shut his eyes as pretend it isn’t happening as the tower comes into view. It’s an admission. An apology. Something final and grim.

Tony gets to the medical bay before Cho and her team. There’s a brief moment before Vision arrives and Tony is stricken, unsure of what to do, and Peter opens his mouth and says the possible only thing that can make this worse.

“You should — probably c-call my aunt.”

Tony eases him onto a cot, holding him upright. “We’ll call her when you’re out of the woods, kid.”

“N-no, Mr. Stark …” says Peter, his eyes wide and pleading on his. “I … I have to talk to her now.”

Tony turns his head away for a moment so the kid can’t see him. Peter’s been through more scrapes than either of them can count without asking for this. If he wants to talk to May, it can only be to say goodbye.

And even though Tony hates himself with every fiber of his being for doing it, he tells FRIDAY to call May Parker.

“Hello? Tony? Is Peter with you?”

Tony only looked away for a second to make the call, but that second was too long of one — Peter’s out. Peter’s …

Not gone. Shit. No. Not gone . He can’t be —

“ Tony? ”

There is a split second Tony hopes against hope that the sound of May Parker’s panic will stir Peter back into consciousness, but it doesn’t. Tony uses the arm that’s still propping the kid up to shake him, but he doesn’t stir, so far deep that he … that he …

Tony disconnects the call.

“Peter,” he says, shaking him a little harder. “ Peter .”

Nothing. Just blue lips tinged with red blood, pale skin marred with bruises that will never heal, eyelids that will never flutter open.

Tony wants to sink to his knees. Wants to scream . Instead he just stands there, still propping the kid up, muttering no, no, no like it is some sort of ritual, some sort of spell that can bring the kid back.

Because the kid wouldn’t die on him. He wouldn’t fucking do that to him. Peter may disobey right, left, backwards, and into the next fucking dimension, but he always listens when it counts. And Tony needs him to stay the fuck alive . He wouldn’t just — he can’t just —

The doors finally open then, revealing Helen Cho and a medical team who are here too goddamn late.

Someone pushes Tony aside, and half a dozen voices escalate and pitch, barking orders, calling out instructions, their hands all over Peter and their determination entirely misplaced. Tony already knows the kid is gone. He felt it in that moment before they burst in, felt it so plainly and so impossibly that it feels like a crumbling brick in his foundation, a broken piece of him that will knock everything to the off course for however long he lives.

For so long now he has thought of Peter as the future , as the leader that picks up where Tony and the others left off. But it isn’t that future that disappears before Tony’s eyes. It isn’t the Avengers, or whatever the hell they could they couldn’t be; it isn’t Peter’s steady, guiding hand some twenty years from now, vanishing into dust; no. It’s worse than that. It’s more personal. It’s watching this bright-eyed, curious, ridiculously optimistic kid and all of his potential — the life he never led, the love he never felt, the aggressively large brood of children Tony would have rolled his eyes at but knows Peter would have had — disappear in one moment, in one stupid, fatal mistake.

Tony should have left him be. No — Tony should have … should have pulled him out of the streets the moment he found him. Made up some bullshit about teenage vigilante-ism being punishable with prison time, or offered him an actual internship in exchange for dropping the mask, or doing anything, literally anything to prevent this — this —

Fuck . He can hear the flatline; someone has pulled him out of the room, but they can’t pull the noise of it out of the tower. It’s Steve’s arms bracing him, keeping him from bursting back in there, and for what? So he can confirm what he already fucking knows?

Tony may be a powerful man, but even he can’t bring back the dead.

You have time, kid. You’re fifteen , Tony had told him mere weeks ago, when the world seemed like a sounder, less cruel place. You’ve got nothing but time.

Back then it was a promise. Now it’s the worst lie Tony has ever told.

Someone knocks him out with something. He’s certain of it, and doesn’t even bother asking who the hell did it as he comes to, his eyes snapping open so immediately that he’s expecting himself to still be standing outside of the hospital room.

“Hey.”

It’s Bruce sitting on other end of the couch, Bruce whose tired eyes find some place for Tony to land.

“The kid,” Tony blurts, his tongue thick. “He’s …”

“Not out of the woods,” says Bruce, “but alive.”

The relief is dizzying, almost crippling; for a moment Tony can’t even decide whether or not he believes the words coming out of Bruce’s mouth. After watching the kid stop breathing, after listening to that flatline and waking up in clothes still stained in buckets of the kid’s blood, who the hell would?

“Helen’s a miracle worker,” says Bruce, looking toward some middle ground away from Tony. It’s only then that Tony acknowledges that he isn’t the only one scared shitless by this; that the entire team has probably been waiting with baited breath to make sure Peter pulled out of this alive.

“And I’m a monster,” says Tony.

“Not to be a dick, but that’s kind of my thing,” says Bruce mildly. And then, after a beat: “He’d be dead a dozen times over if it weren’t for you, Tony. You know it. I know it.”

Tony doesn’t even bother shaking his head. “He shouldn’t have been a part of this in the first place,” says Tony, thinking of every fragile, seemingly innocent thread that led them here. The serum that made Steve, appropriated into a spider that bit a kid; the same kid, so jacked up on Bruce’s research that he all but stampeded his classmates to get in on the limited person field trip to OsCorp; a billionaire with absolutely no regard for how fast that kid would escalate his own heroism, would carve a place into all of their hearts.

They were all responsible, in some stupid way. He tries not to think of the Avengers-themed sheets he found tucked into the closet of the kid’s bedroom that first day they met, when he all but peer pressured the kid into flying to Germany . They’ve all acted as unintentional stars, setting Peter on a path to where he is today — a path to greatness. A path to unfathomable pain.

“I need a drink,” Tony mutters.

“You need to take it easy,” Bruce corrects him. “And, uh, maybe avoid the main halls for a few hours. A woman named May Parker is … displeased.”

“Ah.”

“She couldn’t find you, so she started yelling at Cap.”

“I kind of hate how badly I need security footage of that.”

It’s too soon to joke, though. The words sound too grim on his lips. Tony sighs, dragging his hand down his face, wondering if he’ll ever shake off the exhaustion from this.

“I don’t suppose I can wait ‘til the kid wakes up, tell him the mutant powers were all a crazy drug-induced fever dream and make him go back to his regular life as a teenage nerd, huh?”

Bruce offers him a sympathetic smile. “I suppose not.”

None of them have been in the tower for months, but wordlessly they all hunker down and seem to take up space in their old respective spots in it and wait. Wanda makes herself scarce; Tony sees her wandering the halls with red-rimmed eyes and Vision loosely following her in that meaningful, slightly socially inept way that he does, but whenever she gets caught hovering outside of the medical wing she leaves just as fast. Natasha and Sam both make like they’re not hovering by leaving the tower during the day, but always end up coming back in varying intervals, checking in on them and quietly spending the night. May Parker holds a constant vigil in the med bay, making an unexpected friend of Steve, who apparently took her misdirected verbal pummeling in stride and has, for whatever reason, decided to stick around, too.

Three days pass before Dr. Cho decides it’s safe to pull Peter out of the medically-induced coma. Even after that, it takes another day for him to wake up. The place is practically a sty by then — littered with pizza boxes and device chargers and books someone brought May to read that she’s been picking up and putting down without actually opening for the last few days. Peter blinks a few times and goes, “Whoa, did I miss the apocalypse?” before anyone even realizes he’s up.

May is on her feet so fast that she manages to make the sofa chair push out from under her.

“Peter,” she breathes, a hand immediately on his cheek.

The kid winces as he blinks himself a little more awake. He takes in May’s face and Tony can practically see the gears turning in his head, reliving the battle that got him into this mess, before he blows out a breath and an, “Oh, shit.”

“That about covers it,” says Tony.

Peter’s eyes flit over to his then, full of a relief that hits a little too close to home.

“You’re okay,” says Peter.

Tony scowls. “No,” he says, “I’m not. I’m answering to karma from a former life in the form of stubborn, self-sacrificing teenage boy with no regard for — ”

“No, no, I mean … I remember it got you, and you fell out of the sky, and …”

May’s eyes sweep over to Tony’s with a question in them, but they both know she already has an answer. Of course Peter got hurt after getting worked up about Tony. Of course he always gets hurt getting worked up about anyone .

It doesn’t make Tony feel any less shitty about it.

“I love you,” says May, in this sweet, tear-clogged voice, her hand still on Peter’s cheek, “but you’re grounded until you’re 30.”

“But I — ”

“Make it 40,” says Tony.  

Peter tries to laugh, but it comes out as a wheeze. They both tense a bit at the obvious pain in his expression, but before anyone can offer him anything, he says, “Could we maybe negotiate to next week?”

People come and go over the next few hours. Tony only half-hears Peter stammering with excitement at actually meeting Steve in the flesh instead of mid-battle, but there is no mistaking the sound of Wanda yelling at him that if she ever scares her like that again, she’ll bring him back from the dead so she can kill him herself. (She also leaves juice and some cookies Vision “baked,” which takes a considerable amount of the threat’s bite away.) Bruce and Sam and Steve watch reruns of Bill Nye The Science Guy with Peter even though Tony makes a show of rolling his eyes out of the back of his head, Natasha clucks that it’s a shame his healing factor won’t leave him with any gnarly scars, and Rhodey makes his presence known by wandering in and out and saying things to Tony like “Doesn’t have have homework? ” until he has made an ally in May, too.

Tony is on the fringes, part of the madness but not. He busies himself by talking to Pepper or ribbing Bruce or avoiding Steve, by checking on Happy’s work with the move out process, by trying to do anything he can to pull himself out of some circuitous part of his brain that keeps showing him a dying Peter like a horror movie stuck on a reel.

He needs to talk to the kid. Peter knows it’s coming, too. Tony doesn’t even know what he’s going to say, doesn’t think there’s anything he can say — he can’t stop him. He can’t scold him. The worst part of all of this is that he didn’t do anything wrong .

Aside from scaring everyone who cares about him within an inch of their lives, that is.

When everyone’s headed to bed for the night and May is grabbing a cup of coffee, Tony finally gets a chance to talk to the kid alone. He stops before walking through the door, seeing the way the kid’s eyelids are already sliding shut, seeing the haze of exhaustion and the residual pain finally settling on his face.

Tony waits until the kid falls asleep to walk into the room, pull up a chair, and slump down into it in defeat. There will be no words. There will be no lecture.

But he knows one thing for sure — there will also be no damn chance of something like this happening again. Of all the promises Tony has made in this life, this is the one he knows he can’t afford to break.