A/N: And here we have my latest project: a slightly unrealistic story about Peter and Tony, with an attempt at a sort-of plot, because I love them and Infinity War broke me. Be prepared for Peter being adorable, Tony being Tony, angst, and a healthy dose of whump. (Healthy for whom, you may ask. Not for Peter, that's for sure.) It's set as if Civil War never happened, so Peter is about the same age he is in Homecoming, and has a pretty good grasp of his powers.

If you've read my previous stories, you should know how this works - if I get the interest, I keep publishing the chapters, so please review. I have more than seven chapters written out so I would really appreciate it if my time hasn't been wasted. I'm begging here.

Title and chapter titles from Icarus by Bastille. It's a good song.

Chapters tend to be around 2.5-4K words, depending on how I'm feeling. This one's a little shorter and acts as a sort of prologue, if you will. Also, there are extracts from later chapters at the start of each one, just to give y'all an irritating teaser of things to come.

I'll update more or less weekly. The next chapter might come a little sooner so I can work out a regular posting schedule. See you then. If you like it. Please like it.

ICARUS

1

LOOK WHO'S DIGGING THEIR OWN GRAVE

He doesn't know how long he lies there. Hours, maybe, but when he blearily cracks open his stinging eyes and coughs out a lungful of smoke, nobody is there to help him. He heaves himself into a sitting feeling, ignoring the dizzying swoop of nausea and lightheadedness, and squints in a futile attempt to see through all the smoke and dust.

Nothing.

He coughs again and tries to suck in some clean air, but it burns and makes him cough more and isn't very clean at all.

He half expects to see someone running towards him at any moment, taking him to an ambulance, giving him an oxygen mask, taking him to a hospital, but there is absolute silence.

Peter shifts nervously from foot to foot.

Now's his chance. He tries not to let the smashed, blackened metal scattered around freak him out too much; he doesn't sense any danger and even if he did, Tony Stark's robot would probably kill the weird android before it could do anything anyway. Besides, small armies of robots with alien-enhanced technologies are not an irregular occurrence here in New York.

He had been on his way from school, but he heard the commotion from a couple blocks over and ran to see what was going on. His Spiderman suit was tucked safely in his backpack, just in case, but he had a feeling that he wouldn't need it. He was right, as it turned out. The Iron Man suit has done a pretty good job of dealing with the issue, though it is fairly obvious that Tony Stark himself is not in there. Such a small crew of robots is hardly a cause the scientist needs concern himself with - particularly since they barely seemed to do anything, save for run over the foot of an overly curious old man who got a little too close. Someone obligingly called an ambulance for him, but now that the initial excitement of the whole scene has worn off, Peter is one of the only ones left.

Well, him and the Iron Man suit.

Here goes nothing. Peter has been carrying the plans in his schoolbag with him for a while now, meaning to maybe drop them at Stark Tower and see if anything became of them. Though, of course, he imagines that Mr. Stark gets stuff like this all the time, so perhaps the whole idea is pointless. But Ned wants him to, and who is he to refuse to do a friend a favour?

"Excuse me," he calls, voice a little quieter than he would have liked, but at least he's actually capable of forming words.

Somewhat surprisingly, the Iron Man suit looks up. Crap. He hasn't thought this far ahead.

"I - er - well, you see, I - um - "

"Can't write autographs in the suit. Sorry, kid."

Peter wonders idly what technology Mr. Stark uses to make his voice sound like he's actually there. Supposedly, he has a ton of artificial intelligence technology, so perhaps that can transmit a sound just like his voice. Whatever he does, it isn't particularly helping Peter, who manages to remove his backpack and start fumbling around for the crumpled blueprints.

"No - er, no. See, we were studying Mr. Stark's suit in class and I noticed that - well, from the videos we looked at, anyway, and I'm sure he knows better than I do - but, I - um, I noticed that the suits seem to lose a lot of heat energy from the repulsors? So I was just, you know, messing around, and I did a little digging, and I - well, I'm rambling now, but do you think you could give these to Mr. Stark? Just so he could have a quick look?"

Lazily, the robot takes the plans from his outstretched hand and opens them up.

"Oh, it's okay, you can just give them to - "

Peter curses his stupidity to high hell as the faceplate of the suit lifts and the front splits apart to allow a man to step out. "M-Mr. Stark? Crap - I'm so sorry - I didn't mean to bother you, sir. I thought ... "

Mr. Stark, with his suit folding up automatically into a briefcase behind him, completely ignores Peter, which is probably for the best. Peter stands very still and tries to ignore the fact that he just said the word crap in front of his ultimate inspiration. And the fact that his ultimate inspiration is here. Right in front of him. Reading something that Peter wrote.

You're all good you can do this you're Spiderman don't freak out everything's fine don't freak out.

The Spiderman thing, nerve-wracking though it is to try and keep his identity a secret as well as not dying, really has been a major boost to Peter's confidence in recent months. Gone is the scrawny kid who wants to do stuff to save the world but can never quite manage it - here is a new Peter Parker, one who can fight and help people and oozes confidence from every pore. In his suit at least. Though he will admit that it lacks the aesthetics of other superhero suits, his cheap, plain red and blue tracksuit that he wears to fight crime instils in Peter a certain feeling of invincibility, of inability to be defeated. And for all the health class talks about loving yourself no matter who you are, he has to admit that the cool, suave façade of Spiderman is vastly preferable to weirdly smart, small, skinny Peter Parker.

Mr. Stark continues to read. Peter evaluates the merits of turning on the spot and sprinting in the opposite direction until he falls off the face of the Earth. It's a good thing the Earth is round, because if it wasn't, he would be well on his way.

"What's your name, kid?"

He jumps, startled. "P-Peter."

"Peter. Huh. You got a surname?"

"Parker," he mumbles, cheeks hot, palms sweating.

"And what school do you go to?"

"M-Midtown. Sir."

"Good school. Thanks for these." He waves the papers. "See you around, kid."

Without another word he flies off, papers in hand, leaving a shocked teenager staring open mouthed after him.

That was Tony Stark, Peter thinks, mind drifting and a little useless with the shock of it all. Maybe this is some kind of weird dream. Or he's on a wild acid trip because Flash slipped something in his water bottle at school or something. Although, from what he's heard, acid trips are a little more ... psychedelic, and less like an extraordinarily clear simulation of some distant fantasy he once vaguely played out in his head. Ned is going to be astounded. Not that he did much of the actual work on the design; he mainly provided slightly distracting background music and watched over Peter's shoulder, interrupting from time to time with excitable comments such as, "Peter, you are awesome."

A flush still burns his cheeks. He can't work out whether he should be overjoyed, or horrified at his own social ineptness. Nor can he decide whether to skip patrol tonight to go and tell Ned about what just happened, and doubtless spend the majority of his evening celebrating by watching Star Wars, or to tell his friend about the whole experience at school tomorrow, which would probably hurt Ned's feelings, but might save a few friendly citizens from losing their bags, cars, or worse.

At length, he deliberates on the best course of action, and - remembering that Ned's parents have confiscated his phone because he got a B in Spanish - decides to call Ned. In the morning, he'll tell him at school and pretend to have forgotten that the phone was confiscated. He feels a twinge of guilt at this, but reassures himself with the knowledge that if Ned knew Peter was Spiderman, he would be fully on board with Peter's ... extracurricular activities. (Not that swinging round the city saving lives is part of Midtown's curriculum. That would be pretty cool, though.)

He types out a quick message: Dude, the craziest thing just happened. Call me.

Then he leaves a voicemail for good measure and ducks into an alleyway to pull on his costume. Its bagginess is not a good thing in terms of aerodynamics, but at least it means that he doesn't have to strip to his boxers in the street. The head of a decapitated robot stares at him as he changes, which feels wrong on many levels, but he doesn't want anyone to know he's been here, so he leaves it. The creepy people in expensive suits will come and tidy it up in a couple of days. Peter can remember watching them through his window after the aliens invaded New York.

He makes sure that his bag is stashed where it can't be seen and that his web shooters are correctly attached to his wrists before he leaps up into the air. Safety first, right? After all, it's no use being able to fight the bad guys if you miss a building when you've punched someone in mid air and then fall 50 storeys into a river but the water isn't deep enough so your head hits the bottom and you die anyway. Not that Peter has ever dreamed about something so oddly specific happening to him. That would be weird.

Peter engages in an idle daydream for several minutes as he swings through the streets, in which Tony Stark loves Peter's designs so much that he uses them and then invites Peter to join the Avengers as a cool scientist guy, with none of them knowing that he's actually secretly Spiderman as well.

Then he comes across two screaming women, one of whom may or may not be attempting to steal the other's bag. Trying to work out the best course of action, he shoots a web which sticks to the handbag and jerks it up into the air, out of reach. A perfect solution.

Well, it would be a perfect solution, except neither woman is prepared to relinquish her hold on the bag, and, shrieking, they are launched up into the air with the bag. Peter's swing is interrupted by the extra weight and he ends up dangling helplessly with one arm holding himself by two lines of web to two buildings and one arm holding the women off the ground. The webs holding him creak dangerously. "Well, crap," he says, though it is mainly directed at himself, as the two women do not stop arguing after the initial shock wears off, even as they hang thirty feet above the ground and clutch at a single handbag for dear life. This must be quite some fight.

Honestly. People have no respect for superheroes these days.

Peter contemplates his predicament for several long moments while his shoulders threaten to pop out of their sockets. Then he manages to awkwardly shoot another, longer, web at the handbag, release his hold on the original web, and drop the handbag, with the women attached, until they are bouncing on the elastic webbing about a foot off the ground. Both release their hold on the bag, relieved, and land on the street without pausing their shouting match. Then they start to walk away.

"Hey, wait, your bag - " Peter starts to shout, but his webs, having been relieved of the weight of two grown women, ping back to their usual length and he flies up without warning into the air. The wildly swinging handbag manages to knock down a small child wondering along the street with his father. Oops. He manages to right himself, and swings down to the ground, picking the child up before he or his father have even noticed anything has happened. The child stares up at him, eyes watering.

Well, crap, Peter thinks again, but he doesn't say it out loud this time, because there's a kid in front of him. Instead, he rummages around in his pocket, digs up a single chocolate, hands it to the child, and sprints off after the still arguing owner of the handbag.

It's a cheap knockoff Chanel, he sees. Probably not worth fighting over anyway. Then he curses himself for thinking like Aunt May and swings off.

He passes several hours like this before calling it a day and returning to the alleyway he left his bag in. It hasn't been stolen, which is good, and he shrugs off his old tracksuit and shoves it to the bottom of the bag. Then he emerges, running his fingers through his dishevelled hair. It's by now seven in the evening and May will be at this point aborting her attempt to cook dinner and calling for takeout. He feels a little guilty for staying out this late each night - saying that he is at various different places each night won't work forever, and if he, say, loses track of time, and she calls Ned's mother to tell him to come home? Well, then he's screwed.

Not to mention the fact that he hardly ever sees his best friend any more. Peter spends almost every evening after school out patrolling, giving various excuses - I have family coming to stay (to which Ned was too polite to reply, Peter, you live with your entire family); I don't feel too good tonight; I'm grounded, sorry. And Peter misses Ned - he really does - but his friend is safe and not about to be mugged or stabbed in a back alley, and people out there ... well, they could die. And if Peter is able to stop that, and he doesn't? That's his fault. He might as well have killed them himself.

Peter enters his apartment in a daze of thought. "Hey, Aunt May," he calls, carefully shutting the door behind him and then entering his hopelessly untidy bedroom. He tosses his school bag on his bed and gets out his Spanish homework.

"Hey," May replies, from a cloud of smoke in the kitchen. "Good day?"

"Yeah, I guess."

He closes his bedroom door in an attempt to shut out the smell of burning, and sits down. The words might as well have been in Greek, for all they meant to him. Every minuscule word on the page seemed to blur into one meaningless smudge of black.

He is so screwed. When is the last time he's managed to sleep for more than five hours in one night? Being a superhero all afternoon means he has to do his schoolwork late at night, and then he's tired, and then it takes longer, and then he struggles to get to sleep at the best of times because he's so stressed out and wired up from patrolling.

To outsiders, being a superhero sounds all romantic and perfect, but in reality ... it's exhausting.

And, somehow, really, really lonely.

Peter gives up on his homework, sets an alarm for 4 in the morning to finish it before school, and slumps onto his bed, fully clothed. His meeting with Tony Stark is all but forgotten. For once, he falls asleep within minutes.