"Mr. Stark," Pepper said, peeking her head around the open door of his lab. "You have someone asking to speak with you."

Tony glanced up from his current project and cocked a brow at his ever-so-faithful assistant. "That's great, Ms. Potts, but as you can see…" he said, sweeping a grease-covered hand across his table, as though hundreds of pieces of machinery were a testament to his very busy schedule. "I am unfortunately otherwise occupied at the moment."

Pepper nodded and bit her lip in the way she did whenever she was nervous. Which was rare, so seeing her do it immediately brought Tony's interest up from a 5 to a 60. "Of course, however, I would really recommend meeting with this particular person."

"Oh," Tony said, smile slowly stretching across his face, and he leaned back in his chair, raising two legs off of the floor. "And who would this 'particular person' be?"

"A… very pregnant woman. She says her name is Mary Parker."

The smile slipped from his face and he came crashing back to the ground.


Tony's mind raced as he followed Pepper to the conference room where the woman, Mary, was waiting for him. Possibilities ran through his mind as he tried to find the one where this conversation didn't end terribly for him.

Maybe she wasn't really pregnant. Maybe the kid wasn't his if she was. Maybe she needed money. Maybe she wanted to talk about funding for a project. He didn't really remember much about her, truth be told, but he remembered that she was an intelligent woman that worked in some sort of lab. Maybe she was just here to fuck with him to as payback for not calling her.

Maybe, maybe, maybe…

"She's in here, Tony," Pepper said, though it was unnecessary. Tony could very clearly see her through the glass walls of the conference room. It was the first time he had seen her in about eight months, but she hadn't changed much. Well, other than the…

Tony gulped. Well, she was definitely pregnant.

Mary's swollen stomach seemed to swallow her as she paced about the room, hands resting on the bump as though she were drawing comfort from it.

Pepper nudged him, making him realize that he had frozen in the middle of the hallway and was openly staring at her in a mixture of awe and terror. "Go. In. There," she hissed at him, giving him one last meaningful glance before hurrying back down the hallway.

Tony only stared for another second before taking a deep breath and walking to the door. He had been in plenty of sticky situations before, and he knew that making assumptions wasn't going to help him get out of this. Not that there was anything for him to get out of. Not yet anyway.

"Mary," Tony said as he moved through the door, all pleasant smile and charm, as though he weren't currently on the verge of a panic attack. "How can I help you today?"

Mary whirled to face him, and Tony wondered if moving so quickly was healthy for the baby—he really could not stress enough how little he knew about infants—but his inane thought process was quickly halted by the look on her face. As though she couldn't believe he was dumb enough to say that. Not a look that he liked to see.

"We need to talk, Tony," She said, hands still placed protectively on the swell of her stomach.

Tony nodded, still nothing but professional as he held out a chair for her and gestured for her to take a seat. Once she had, with an irritated huff and an annoyed look at him, Tony took a seat for himself. "Yes, I did gather that from your sudden appearance. You look great, by the way," he hinted, eyes resting meaningfully on her stomach. He wasn't usually so averse to beating around the bush—in fact, he was often a fan of drawing things out as much as possible—but this was an instance where he was eager to cut to the chase.

Mary, thankfully, took the hint. "Thanks, I hear pregnancy has a way of making you glow. Though all I notice is that carrying around an extra fifty pounds is uncomfortable and makes it difficult to sleep."

Tony clenched his jaw, wishing she would just get to what she came here to say. Though he probably deserved the cold treatment. He wasn't used to seeing his… lady companions after the night was over though, so this was new territory for him. "Well, I suppose congratulations are in order. How far along are you?"

She maintained eye contact, blue eyes piercing through him as she said, "Eight months."

"And it's…?" Tony trailed off, stomach dropping as his eyes moved back to focus on hers.

She sighed, hand moving off of the table to rest on her round stomach once more. "Yes, Tony. He's your son."

He felt numb. He felt untethered from reality as he scrambled to process what she had just said. He felt like he needed a drink.

"I know that I should have come to you about this sooner, but I… I knew that you wouldn't want children. And I wanted to think that I could do this on my own. Raise a child and be a scientist. And I can, Tony. I will. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that you have the right to at least know about him. To have the option to be in his life, if that's what you want."

Tony's eyes snapped up to hers, everything rushing back to him once the initial shock had started to ware off. "If that's what I want?" he echoed.

Mary nodded, eyes fierce and determined as she stared him down. "But only if you're going to commit to it, Tony. I know the kind of reputation you have—hell, that's how we ended up here. So, there will be no absentee, alcoholic father that comes in and out of our lives as he pleases. If you decide to be a part of our son's life, it's all or nothing Tony. I won't accept anything else."

Tony understood what she was asking. Understood it well. If he were going to be a father, he would be a father. He wouldn't be allowed to make the same "parenting choices" that Howard did. All or nothing.

It was a commitment that Tony wasn't sure he could make. Howard had left a lasting mark on his life; would he be able to do any better than his father? Shouldn't they discuss things further? Wasn't that how this usually worked? Was he even sure if the kid was his?

These were important questions, ones that he should at least ask. But he didn't, because the only answer that mattered had been apparent from the moment Mary asked if this, his son, was what he wanted.

"Okay. Yeah. What do I need to do?"

Mary smiled, her eyes softening and her shoulders relaxing as though she had been carrying more than the extra baby weight up until now. "There's a birthing class that I'm heading to in an hour. Do you want to start there?"

Tony's eyebrows shot up, the immediate answer of course being no, but he had already made his decision. And he had always been a believer in diving right in, so why the hell not?

"Just lead the way."


In the end, he only had three weeks to prepare for his new life as a father. Pepper, Rhodey, and Happy took the news better than he expected—in fact, he suspected that they had been preparing for something like this to happen for years. They helped him baby-proof his house and buy everything a child could want for. Helped him gather every bottle of alcohol he owned and pour them down the drain. Helped him just get his shit together in general.

He often caught them smiling at him time when he would talk about his unborn son, as though they were seeing him for the first. He knew they were proud of him for making the decision to be involved, to put his hang-ups behind him and make the right choice. It was a new feeling, and one that he hoped he could live up to.

The call came in the middle of a meeting, and he left without so much as a goodbye, calling Happy to drive him to the hospital, and then driving himself anyway because Happy drove too slowly.

He wasn't in the room while Mary delivered their child, per her request. So, he was pacing in the hallway, scrolling on his phone occasionally, calling Pepper or Rhodey others, but always moving as he waited. He had never been a patient man, and he almost couldn't believe that this was happening, that he was being given this opportunity to be better than his father, until he could hold his son in his arms.

He wasn't ashamed to say that he cried when he did.

"His name is Peter," Mary said, looking exhausted as she gently placed the tightly-swaddled baby in Tony's waiting arms three hours later. "Peter Parker."

They had discussed that before—that the baby would take her name. It had always been Mary's intention, when she planned on raising him on her own. And Tony felt no connection to the Stark name, no need to carry on that legacy. Besides, fuck the patriarchy, right?

"Hey, Pete," Tony cooed, not knowing why he was making the sounds he was but leaning into it. "God, aren't you something?"

Peter was small, smaller than Tony had anticipated with his limited (i.e. nonexistent) experience with infants. He worried that one wrong move would end with him ruining yet another thing important to him, but as he looked down at his son's resting face—unquestionably the most beautiful thing he had ever seen—he knew that he would never let anything bad happen to this kid.

He was his son, and he would make sure that he knew he was loved and protected. He would be better, for Peter and for himself.

"He's perfect," he breathed, letting a few more tears fall, uncaring of who saw as he rocked his son in his arms.

A/N: So, I've been wanting to write something like this for a while, and I finally made the leap to do it. I hope you liked it! I'm still unsure if I want this to stand as just a short oneshot, or develop it further into a story that spans across the movies. So any thoughts or opinions would be appreciated!