There is a boiling point for the whole thing, but it starts like this.
Tony is a smartass, he knows it.
He knows it, and takes pleasure on making other people notice, if there wasn't enough attention on him as it already was. He can remember people pointing at him when, as a fifteen year old, he moved to the MIT dormitory while sporting sunglasses and two teachers trying to keep up with his fast strides, throwing compliments right and left and making it as clear as possible that they would do anything for his dad to even know their names. There would be a problem with that, he obviously said, because he had forgotten about their names himself.
So the teachers dislike him even before he goes to the first class, and at least half of the male students population dislike him when he comments on the already smelly air inside the dormitory, loudly wondering if anyone there was aware of personal hygiene or if it was something they had learn from a textbook too. He has an uptight looking roommate, one that nods sternly but otherwise does not even blink when he finds out that the boy prodigy is going to sleep on the same room as him for the next couple of years, but James Rhodes cracks a smile when he sees the ACDC concert ticket that Tony uses as a book mark, and the teenager supposes it's a good sign when the guy laughs two weeks in when 'Rhodey' just slips out of Tony's mouth as he asks what they are going to have for dinner.
He would probably never forget the fact that he was the first person he managed to get on his side through his charms and sly comments, instead of his money and the Stark name.
The other guys were not as easily charmed.
"You walk around like you own the place" Says a guy with both ridiculous and irritating curly red hair one day, almost spitting on his face. The color it's awful, and Tony has an itching to reach up and tug at it, just to see if it's a wig that can come off. He would be doing the guy a favor, and he says as much, but it's the thing that got him in this position in the first place; cornered besides a stone staircase inside the campus.
"I am pretty sure my old man's name is on some placard around here, so technically, I kind of do-"
"You know, the magazines always forget to add some things. 'Tony Stark, the brat who would be nothing without his daddy'"
"Oh, so you read those? I am betting you were looking for the hair style tips and tricks section. Try them on yourself often, for what I can see"
Tony is smart, but it doesn't mean he manages to say smart things most of the time. That's what Rhodey usually says when he has to stop teachers from expelling the teenager and when he has to stop himself from smothering him on his sleep, and Tony can say that he agrees with at least thirty percent of that statement- Speaking of which, he sees Rhodey running towards them from over behind the two guys surrounding him at the same time he sees the curly haired one's face turning as red as his head. He also sees how his other arm raises and how his fingers curl in a fist, and knows that well, at least he can sue him if he breaks his nose.
Then there is a splash, and the guy looks like a drowned cat. Droplets of water hit Tony's face as he stumbles to the ground, because the guy releases his shirt as he jumps back and actually squeals
"Oh dear, how clumsy of me"
Tony looks up and up and up, until he can see the person standing on the stairs. There are hands and arms leaning over the railing, brown her falling over a thin shoulder, an amused smile screeching even more when the guys spluttered and curses, and brown eyes taking in the whole scene with great pleasure. He takes one look at the girl and he knows she is, maybe, as young as himself, but maybe it was the laughter already bubbling out of her mouth what made her look like the kind of person MIT didn't exactly welcome with open arms. It reminded him of himself.
"Fitzpatrick!" The curly haired guy shot, red on the face and neck and looking more like a tomato with every passing second "What the hell are you doing!?"
The girl didn't even flinch at the loud sound of the other guy's voice, instead, she pointed her finger at a direction that looked as random as any to Tony "You might want to dry off darling, I think I saw the your Robotics teacher walking just around that corner, and we don't want him thinking you went for a swim on the fountain again, do we now, Neal? I heard he is the one signing your recommendation letter"
Neal splutters and turns even redder than before and tries to curse, but he is trying to do that all at the same time he quickly walks away, his sidekick trailing behind him, so it doesn't really have an effect in any of them. Rhodey helps him get to his feet, but Tony is already looking up at the girl while dusting off his clothes, taking in her laugh as she steps away from the railing and starts to walk down the stair.
"Yeah, thanks, but I could have handled it on my own"
"I know. But then I would have missed all the fun" She skipped the last step, walking towards them not a second after she landed on the floor, hands dusting off her arms from the time she had been leaning against the railing. She is taller than him, but not taller than Rhodey, but when he looked down there were no heels on her feet- Actually, he was a hundred perfect sure those were men shoes in a very small size "You two gentlemen have a name?"
"James Rhodes" Rhodey, of course, is the first one to answer, because his mother has shaken manners into the core of his very existence, and also because he is starting to step up as the babysitter Tony apparently needed "And this is-"
"You heard how they called me, you know my name"
He hears his friend curse at him, muttering something about manners and whatnot.
Tony really doesn't care.
"Actually, I believe I know your dad's name, not yours. Seems like a pretty big difference right there"
It was unnerving, to be honest.
It was unnerving because she had not even looked at him while saying that, still rolling up the sleeves of her shirt as if honestly were the kind of thing you said to the son of a billionaire who had been the talk of campus since he got there, but it was the first time in his life he heard something remotely similar to that statement. So the teenager blinked at her like she had grown another head, he blinked at her busy hands and he blinked at her brown hair, he blinked until her sleeves were settled satisfactorily and she returned his gaze, obviously waiting for an answer and surely expecting a smart comment of some sorts.
He opens his mouth and expects the same.
"Tony"
Rhodey blinks in surprise.
Tony wonders why he even answered.
The girl smiles.
"Mary Fitzpatrick. Lovely to meet you both"
When he was proven right, Tony was not surprised.
Mary wasn't fifteen like him, but her seventeen was enough of a difference between most of the students of their university. Tony knew this because he saw how people looked at her when she walked through the campus as if she had not seen more than one girl waiting for the best moment to push her around, or splash the skirt of her dress as he had seen so many times before- It was, after all, a smaller and less intense version of how people usually looked at him before he got into a fight, or just after answering correctly during classes, two things that seemed to go hand in hand these days. There were just so much of whispering and gossiping he could handle until he rolled his eyes so profoundly they almost rolled their way out of his face.
Immature, the lot of them.
So he just scoffs and goes on with his day, because it's very much no his problem. Rhodey seems to disagree, as he constantly does, because there are such things as gratitude and human relations and a bunch of other stuff he stresses on. Tony does not have the interest to care.
Until he does.
He walks by the Biological Engineering department on his way to skipping yet another useless class when he catches sight of long brown hair braided around an almost tiny head, just inside an AP classroom. It is not her hair what makes Tony stop and look, nor it was the red clothe tied around her curls. It was the fact that Mary Fitzpatrick sat at the very front of the glass, eyes framed with glasses, and without a single soul seated in a radius of at least four desks around her. This, though, didn't come off as such a surprise given the fact that, as far as he could tell, she was the only girl inside the classroom.
And now, she was the only one answering a question.
She also was the only one being glared at.
When the class is over and she walks out, Mary finds him lying across a bench besides one of the buildings.
"What does your dad do?"
She doesn't even blink.
"Translation"
"So why do you do science?"
Now, she does blink, and after that, she laughs.
"Art was never really my thing"
They eat ice cream after that. Rhodey joins them after the third time they sneak off campus, and it doesn't really stop nor gets limited to ice cream after some time. Tony charms their way into the kitchen and they manage to not burn it down the few times they use it, and Mary knows how to talk to the librarian so he lets them use one of the bigger study rooms for more time than they should be allowed to use. On winter break he is sipping juice in the living room of his house, no parents or particularly meaningful Christmas decoration in sight, when Jarvis walks in and hands him a postal card with a drawing of snowman and a stamp of Queens- She is over at her grandmother's, and has decided that cherries are better than strawberries.
When they go back to MIT after the break, Tony gives her a box of strawberries and his home's phone number, because 'what I am even supposed to do with a postal card after I've already read it, Fitzpatrick? You are more practical than that'. Mary makes smoothies with the strawberries, and even though it ends up on some asshole's hair and clothes, Rhodey thinks it's the best use that smoothie could have had (Secretly, Tony does bring cherries inside the campus, but he does not let it be known until Mary is too stressed over her tests and does not notice what he was been eating until she has gone through two entire boxes).
When Tony gets drunk for the first time at the tender age of seventeen, Mary throws freezing cold sprite on his face while Rhodey stumbles out of the way, and she does not even blink at his coughing until he is sober enough to see that she is silently crying, still holding the glass in one trembling hand. Mary cries like he has seen his mother only cry once- There is no redness on her cheeks, there is no sniffing, and the tears looks like pearls falling from her eyes. Is single handedly the most beautiful thing he was seen in his life, and even though it wasn't love at first sight, it counts enough for Tony to never drink again when Mary is close enough to see him getting wasted.
When Mary graduates, she wears a blue dress.
Tony wears a blue tie.
Rhodey insists he must be the one taking the pictures, so he doesn't get any blue clothing. Tony makes sure to replace all of his boxers with blue ones the day before.
"We will make this world a better place" Says Mary when she can finally kick off her heels, walking over the side of the campus' main fountain with diploma in one hand and shoes in the other, because it's not like she can get spelled from doing anything anymore. She kicks out some water, and twirls around "Aren't we, Tony?"
He thinks about weapons. He thinks about bombs and guns and wars.
"Yeah"
That's the only thing he can say.
It's not the last time he sees Mary. She calls frequently, and does nothing more than to laugh and buy him an ice cream when he tells her he is already halfway through his first PhD's classes- When he goes to study abroad, he makes two phones, because he doesn't trust normal house phones to be as efficient as he wanted and needed them to be for this particular task. One is blue, and one is pink, and there is absolutely no doubt in his mind when he uses one of Howard Stark's military connections to get the pink phone all the way to Afganistan, where Rhodey was deployed a few months before. The guy is not amused, but Mary is very much so, and Tony listens to her own Master Degree story three seconds after a girl slapped him and stumbled out of his bed and room, because there is an other of priorities in his life and remembering that her names was Candice is quite enough, so he obviously opts for picking up the phone rather than cuddle and whatnot.
It's a warmth he doesn't necessarily miss when he steps out of the plane on December 10th, and sees Jarvis owning Mary at Go Fish, the cards over the hood of the very expensive car that takes them right into his mother's sitting room. Rhodey will be there tomorrow, because of course Howard Stark has arranged a trip for his wife and him the day after his oh so beloved son comes back from studying abroad. When the man sees Mary the morning they leave, as his mom is playing the piano and Tony is nursing a headache due to jet lack, she is sitting crossed leg on a coach playing a game of chess against herself- He remembers his dad asking if she was Williams Fitzpatrick's daughter, and he remembers Mary apologizing for not sending an invitation to the funeral. He also remembers not asking anything else about it, because it wasn't a piece of information even his dad had felt like talking about.
"Hello, Miss Fitzpatrick"
"Good morning, Mr. Stark"
It's too cold to go swimming, so they stay inside and Rhodey makes his mom's hot chocolate, which tastes better than anything Tony and Mary combined can come up with besides instant noodles and strawberry smoothies, so they pretend they are surviving on that until Jarvis comes and calls them for lunch. Rhodey plans on leaving in a week, then it becomes 'a week and something' for no apparent reason more than the fact that they eat so much they wake up with stomachache, just to eat some more and lay on the living room's floor, legs and feet resting on the sofas.
The phone is not the thing that wakes Tony up.
Mary's head is nestled on his stomach and Rhodey's head has positively cut the circulation on his right arm, but that's not what woke him up either, but he stays there and does not move for quite a while. Jarvis is the one who opens the door, that he can see from where he is on the floor, but Obadiah is the one who strides in- Voices come from the other room, and he is not entirely sure why there is an army of lawyers in his house when he has just woken up from eating his weight on ice cream, the tubs and boxes scattered all over around them, but he knows he wants to go back to last night when the only thing to worry about was how to hide the stain of chocolate ice cream on the coach from Jarvis.
He does not remember much about the funeral.
At least half of it can be attributed to the more than half bottle of whiskey he downed in less time than it took him drink a cup of tea, and so, there is little recollection of what happened between the moment he stepped towards the mini bar and the moment he was expected to step out of the limo and into the church, which was ironic, because his dad had never believed in anyone besides himself. But he does remember little bits and pieces, that is how he knows Rhodey does not, in fact, go back home, and nor does Mary.
This is how he knows that he was basically dressed by Jarvis.
This also is how he knows that when Obadiah stepped forward and between Tony and his friends, Tony looked up and said "If you make take them away, I will punch someone in the face"
Mary does not tell him not to drink, she does not join him either. But she does sit with him on the floor with their backs against the sofa, without saying a word until she pointed towards her feet. She is barefoot and is wearing blue socks, matching the socks Tony did not realize he was wearing. He stares at them for the rest of the night.
Tony does not remember if he cries.
Mary does not tell him if that was the case.
Rhodey pretends he was asleep on the coach all along.
It's also how, maybe, Mary pretends to be working on some projects when Tony calls her from the other side of the world, saying that sleep is for the weak and she was by no means a weak woman, and that he might as well talk because she can also multitask and she was up anyway. That's how he pretends he has an incredibly important thing to report instead of complaining about the lack of variety of smoothies that are offered in the places near his dormitory. It's not whiskey what makes him forget most of the time what the calls are about, or how many times he calls until he sees the phone records, but most often than not Vodka and Rum have to do with it.
Tony also does not remember how much time he had originally said it would take him to finish his PhDs, but when he does finish them it's still not the time to take over Stark Industries, and, he supposes, that's the kind of thing that calls for newspaper articles. The articles themselves, he also supposes, are not what makes his ego grow too much, regardless of what might seem like judging by the cocky smile on each and every of those pictures, but Mary thinks they are, as she cuts them off the newspaper and arranges them inside the same albums she storage Tony and Rhodey's first graduation picture- The albums are neatly arranged, and through the years, they grow in number and thickness. After a while, it goes from a joke between them to the place Tony places the photo of a Mary wearing a newly acquired white coat, working for a laboratory whose name Tony saves for future reference. He makes her wear it when he takes her out of dinner for it
Because time does not stop, and it keeps going until Obie is showing him his new office in Malibu. It does not stop and keeps going until it's time for Jarvis' relatives to be the ones comforted, as Tony pays for the only funeral he is willing to see through without a drop of alcohol in his system. It does not stop until, a few years later, Rhodey has at least one more medal than he did when he was first deployed.
It does not stop until Mary is dressed in a different kind of white.
To the end of his days, Tony considers that day to be the most mature one of his life. There wasn't a single drop of alcohol in his system as Mary straightened his tie, the only blue piece of clothing in the whole ceremony that matched her earrings and her necklace, and grinned from ear to ear, shaking her feet from under the skirt of her pristine dress, moments before he had to offer her his arm and give her away.
That's what happens, he guessed, when you are still the best friend after ten years (Ten years, three months, seventeen days and nine hours, but who is counting?)
"Do you think someone would notice if I walked down the aisle barefoot?"
He raised an eyebrow.
"Would it matter if they did?"
She snorts, and it doesn't even sound like a snort to his ears.
"This is why I love you, Tony"
I love you too.
It wouldn't be the first time he said it.
But this wasn't, no matter how much he wanted to change the scenery, one of those days in which they drove through the city, rating ice cream parlors and discussing 'how many PhDs are enough, Tony?' while simultaously agreeing that green was very much not his color. This wasn't a graduation ceremony, in which they matched shoes and suits and colors just to laugh at however looked at them in the wrong way. This was not one of those moments in which she would smile ever so slightly, shake her head, and say 'I know'- Because Mary knew it, just like Tony knew that her kind of love was never going to be the same as his. Just like Tony knew that it didn't matter that it wasn't, because in that little world of drives and ice cream and graduation pictures, Mary was still his, in the same way Rhodey was, the same way his father never let himself be.
This was her wedding.
And because it was her wedding, Tony could only say "I love me too"
That, too, wasn't the last time he saw Mary.
Over the years, the newspapers try to make something big out of it.
But the thing they didn't know, was this: Tony has a habit of collecting family, like one would safeguard a rare collection of stamps or cans or whatever other collectable object. He also has a habit of building them, Dum-E being the moving and beeping proof of that, but he has not yet found a way of creating humans, so he finds the few that tolerate him and not his money, takes a hold and does not let go- He tries to explain this to a not so recently hired Happy one time as he accompanies him to buy Mary's birthday present, because it was not the kind of thing you delegate to other people, but its also the kind of thing that makes his bodyguard ask 'With all due respect, sir, why do you do this to yourself?'. And there is no way of answering that without sounding horrible, but he was an awfully egoistical son of a bitch, and so Tony answered sincerely that even if Rhodey got married tomorrow, more significantly than some woman's husband, he was Tony's.
And Tony took care of the things he loved. His mother's piano, Jarvis and his grave, Rhodey and his loyalty, Mary and her support. 'Someday you might as well be included in that little list' He had said, and laughed at Happy's facial expression.
This is the reason why he all but kicks down an office door before walking towards the biggest desk in sight, newspaper in hand, completely ignoring the gasps and screams and stares of the rest of the people inside that office. He slams the newspaper on the desk, leans forward to an increasingly pale man, and points at the picture on the front page, displaying a laughing Tony escorting an equally laughing Mary.
"You can call me a play boy all you want, it wouldn't be inaccurate" It wasn't a whisper, but Tony Stark didn't need to scream to get his point across "But if you ever call that woman one of my lovers again, I am going to end you and your shitty newspaper, do you understand me?"
It's not the first time it happens.
But it's the first time it happens after Richard has basically smuggled himself in their world. So Tony does the next most rational thing and picks up the phone.
"This is Richard Par-"
"I swear this is not-"
"Tony?"
"It will be off every single newspaper by tomorrow mo-"
"Tony, I can almost hear you having a heart attack. Calm down. Do you want to come down and have some breakfast?"
"You haven't seen it yet?"
"Come on, of course I saw it. It made for a wonderful paper plane, we will show it to you when you come. Pancakes okay with you?"
He does not want to like Richard. Tony only wants to be civil, to get along sufficiently so to not make Mary suggest for a second time in their lives that maybe it was easier for both of them if she just stayed away, but he does not want to like him. Tony thinks that the thing he hates about Richard the most, is the fact that he cannot hate him at all, this being the conclusion he came to when Mary tells him that Richard has, in fact, refused to sell their research to Oscorp even though it's soon to be CEO, Norman Osborn, was his college friend.
"There is no point on the privatization of health" Was his very simple answer, while he sorted through an arrangement of papers on DNA and cross species and cure for hereditary deceases, as Tony did nothing but to munch on a stolen waffle. That and thinking that weapons maybe weren't the only way to protect people, and that maybe it was time to invest on another field.
Richard does not become Tony's, but he is Mary's, so that's close enough.
When Tony hires Pepper as his personal assistant, after she makes herself noticed by pointing out a mistake made by Tony himself while working as a simple secretary, Tony sees Mary chatting with the strawberry blonde just outside his office while handing a box that surely contained a cake, but when he tries to grab the box, Mary waves his hands away.
"No, this is not for you, this is for Ms. Potts"
"Me?"
"You are taking care of this one over here" Mary smiles, laughs, and points at Tony "It takes a lot. You are a very strong woman"
It's good, he thinks, that Pepper likes Mary. It's good because when Mary tells him she is pregnant, it takes Tony three days to get sober, and another two until Pepper finds him in a bar before dragging his ass out and throwing him in his backyard's pool. Even though Rhodey had been the one doing the dragging and the throwing, it was Pepper Tony could remember, standing behind his best friend with arms crossed over her chest and disappointed written all over her face.
"She is not three months pregnant, and she has been crying her eyes out for the past five days because no one could find you. I am not letting a baby die just because you cannot pull it together"
Tony thinks Richard is definitely going to punch him. He is waiting for it, almost willing it to happen, when the guy opens their apartment's door to see Tony standing outside with a basket of sweet potatoes, broccoli and every single vegetable Pepper said was good for pregnancies- The billionaire takes off his glasses before it can happen, and prays he pisses the nose, but Richard takes one look at him before throwing his arms around Tony.
"You and I are going to talk about the benefits of a healthy liver after this"
To be honest, Tony would have preferred to be hit, maybe that way, he would have pain as a distraction to Mary's running nose and tears. The tears are still beautiful, but he is not exactly in the position to be captivated by them like a teenager all over again, so he does the next sensible thing and things besides her on the coach where she has stayed silent the whole time. The man places the basket on her lap, and takes out of his pocket the few baby pamphlets he stole from the only drug store he has stepped in since he was in college. There is a crappy cartoon of a pacifier drawn on the cover, but it's something to look at, and for that he is grateful.
"What is it? A boy? A girl? A lobster?"
Mary smiles, sniffs, laughs and shakes her head.
"I don't know yet"
She eats half of the stuff that is in the basket, and he feels compelled on apologize to her husband when she throws it all up not ten minutes later.
He goes to two doctor appointments, because Richard is away on conferences and he calls Tony to demand a detailed report of every single thing said and done during the consultation. Mary laughs through the whole thing, snatching his sunglasses one more than one occasion with an amused grin on her face.
"Can you make a mini pair?"
"Why would I want to make a mini pair?"
"Well, for Peter, of course"
"So a boy. Mazel tov"
"Oh no, she is a girl"
"Are you going to be one of those parents who ruin their kid's life with innapropiate names?"
"Oh, you bet. Wait until I decide on a second name"
Tony, logically, knows how babies look like. He catches a glance of them once or twice as Happy drives him around, but there is never enough time or interested (mainly interest) for him to actually interact with anyone under thirty. So as they stand in the a store littered with tiny little things and tiny little clothes and ridiculously big stuffed animals, he is left to stare at a pair of tiny shoes while wondering just what on earth they make them if children weren't even supposed to be walking at the age the label says. He would know, because Mary made him sit with her as she read maternity book upon maternity book.
To his right, Rhodey pulls out a stuffed giraffe.
"What about this one?"
Tony does not get to answer before his phone starts ringing.
"She is here!"
She weighted around five pounds, had much more hair than Tony though was physically possible for a newborn, and made Mary smile like he had never seen anyone smile before.
"She is beautiful"
Mary is tired, but she has not let any nurse take the bundle away from her. Tony has not discarded his shoes, but he is still sitting right beside her on the hospital bed, legs thrown over the covers.
"She looks like a little grandma"
"Then she is the most beautiful grandma I have seen in my entire life" Mary snorts and Tony says it's unbecoming of a mother, so she snorts again and straightens as much as she possibly can in the surely uncomfortable hospital bed. She is not going to stay there much longer, and so he doesn't ask for a better room- He is also grateful, because he prefers to steal from Richard's food than the hospital one served besides the bed. He wrinkles his nose at what he supposed was mashed potatoes "Come on, hold her for a while"
He immediately shakes his head and points at his suit.
"No thank you. Armani"
"It wasn't a question"
Tony, logically, knows how babies look like. He remembers the tiny clothes on the store and the tiny socks and the tiny shoes and he thinks that they would all be too big on the human he is currently holding. It feels like he is holding nothing at all, and it's a terrifying thought for anyone, even someone that didn't want children of his own like Tony Stark- Peter does not wake up and barely moves, but he does curl in on herself even more, very tiny fists covered in tiny gloves that don't look small enough to fit properly. He looks at her face, while praying to however is listening to him that she does not actually shower him in bodily fluid, and wonders if her eyes are green like Richard's or brown like Mary's, and that's how said man finds him when he walks inside the room with a new bag of clothes and even more stuffed toys.
Tony feels like he felt when the whole newspaper thing tried to make a big deal out of their friendship.
Because this was his baby and the woman whose bed he was currently sitting on was his wife, and yes, she has his something too, but it was maybe a little bit too much even for his own standards. The billionaire tries to avoid the other man's eyes as much as possible as he turns towards Mary.
"Ehhh, how do I put her down"
But Richard is the one who laughs. He laughs, drops the things he is carrying on one chair in the corner of the room, and walks close. But he does not take his baby- Instead, he fixes the blanket around her, and laughs again.
"I think no place is safer for her right now"
Tony groans, because he is trying to be the good guy here.
"I respectfully disagree"
It is put to the test a second after that, when Peter suddenly moves and squirms and jerks her little arms out in a very uncoordinated way. Tony is frozen in place, not moving an inch and thinking that maybe if he didn't breathe either his arms would stay in place and not let her fall, but the kid keeps on moving until she turns her face towards his chest, an arm raised in what has to be an uncomfortable angle. He is three seconds away from commenting on her early appreciation for contortionism when he caught eye of the tag carefully fixed around her small wrist.
It's an ugly shade of yellow, and it's a very little, unassuming object. But it's the thing written on it what has him staring at it as if were the first time in his life he saw letters.
'Peter Antonella Parker Fitzpatrick'
"Well, what do you think, Anthony?"
"Oh, shut up, Filomena"
"Not my name"
"It should"
Richard just laughs.
The thing is, Tony does not have to like Peter.
The crying at night, the diapers, the bottles, the nights spent cradling her to sleep instead of doing something productive helped the idea, and for once he didn't envy Richard when he tried to figure out how to make the little being burp. But the thing also is, Peter is Mary's, and Mary still is Tony's, so he doesn't have to like the kid, but he still is around her more time than what he spends listening to his board of directors. It's definitely more time than what he spends listening to Obie when he goes on and on about lousy details he has no intention of even remembering, something his friend and colleague reminds him of way too often, but it's not Tony's fault.
It's his very own brand of masochism what forces him to be there when she learns how to sit. The kid grows fast, and the thing also is, Peter does not cry. If she falls, she wails, and if she gets hurt, it's also the same case, but if not then she prefers to use incomprehensible sounds to communicate instead of tears and screaming, which Tony is grateful for every time he is nursing a headache and too hangover to care if the kid sits on his stomach or pulls at his facial hair. He is not too sure of how old she is, because he doesn't keep track of it like he does with Mary's birthday, but she is still wearing diapers when he knows the lack of crying is not exactly the most uncommon thing about the brat.
"If she is just any normal kid, living on to go to a normal school and having normal grades, its okay. It really doesn't matter if she is a genius or not" He remembers Mary say more than once, because science magazines are having a field trip with the whole thing, wondering and theorizing about the result of the marriage between two of the greatest DNA researches of their times. Tony has seen the darker comments, nonsense about breeding and Peter being talked about more like a test subject than like a child, and he knows he does not only have his own fame to worry about, but at least Mary is not dealing with it alone "She is a healthy child, she is safe, and that's everything we could ask for"
But he is there when it happens. He is there because it's his office and he has realized that he has the child nearby, then Obie and the rest of the board avoid the room like the plague. Mary is using his desk and working on some papers, so she does not get to be the witness of the whole thing. Tony hands the brat a box, the lid sporting holes of different shapes, and puts the piece where she can get them without him having to stay away from the blueprints he is eyeing- Peter grabs a little blue plastic square directly out of his hand, tries to squeeze it where the triangle shaped parts should go, and blinks at it for a second before she slips it through the right squared hole and successfully inside the box.
Tony has to make a double take.
He hands her the triangle piece.
She squeezes it on the circle, but then slips it through the right shape.
Then she stares back at him, waiting for the next piece.
"M?"
"Yeah?"
"You said it was okay if you got a normal kid, right?"
"Yeah"
"…You might not have gotten what you asked for. Maybe you should make a complaint and return the package"
Peter slips the plastic circle through the right hole on the first try, and even from his position on the floor, he can hear Mary's pen dropping to the floor even though the girl is giggling in amusement.
The kid gets older, and Tony realizes he is still waiting for Richard to snap at him. When Rhodey comes by, wearing more medals as time goes by, Tony knows his best friend is also waiting for it to happen, ready to put himself on the line if necessary. He is still waiting for the guy to start laughing a lot less merrily, and to just plain out ask him to stop appearing around his girls anymore. But not even when the kid starts to walk and screams an 'ONY!' instead of a 'papa' for the first time, the day never comes and Richard's smile never flatters. He keeps on talking with Tony about their research over coffee, and keeps on asking him to drink coke instead of vodka with him when it looks like things are not going well, he still asks Tony to hold Peter when Mary is out with other friends and it's his turn to wash the dishes, and he still calls Tony to ask if he would like to have breakfast with them.
But Tony keeps waiting. The thing is, it gets hard, and because it gets hard, he knows is going to hurt more. So he enjoys what time he has left before everything comes to an end.
He doesn't expect them to knock on his door one Wednesday night.
"Richard?"
"We have something to do" It wasn't the explanation Tony wanted and needed at that moment, but it was the only explanation they gave as the couple walked into his house, with a bag that was without a doubt Peter's being left on top of a coach. It was the only explanation he got, and it was nowhere near enough to explain why they looked like they were in such a hurry "At first, the plan was to leave her with Ben and May, but this is the safest place I can think of and there is no time to get Peter to Queens. We already told them"
"What is going on?"
There is silence after that.
The kid is sleeping soundly in her dad's arms, and the brown curls shine under the lights of his living room, and seems completely oblivious to the heavy silence that has befallen on the three of them. Tony realizes Richard is clenching his jaw and that Mary is trying to tear her eyes away from her daughter, as if she were starved of her sight, as if she was not going to see her ever again and tried to burn the image in her eyes. None of those thoughts helped his situation nor the feeling that was starting to appear on the bottom of his stomach, it didn't help how Tony suddenly felt cold and how all of his alarms went off. It didn't help, because Mary looked like she was going to cry, and he had no idea why.
"Tony" But before he could say anything she spoke and turned to him, eyes shining and lips shaking. Her hands were shaking too, and he realized it because she reached out to take his own hands, squeezing them in place like she had not done since she graduated that first time from college. It was different from how she had taken to link her arm with his after becoming someone else's wide, and it was different than how Richard squeezed his shoulder as he laughed at something lame and nowhere near funny. Mary looked into his eyes and didn't even seem to blink "You have to promise me something"
He felt his throat closing up, because he had no idea of what was going on and he had no idea of what made her even say that. He wanted to get the truth out of them and to laugh because of course he could fix it- Because Tony could fix anything, he could help them with anything and he could make everything better for Mary.
"I don't like where this conversation is go-"
She squeezed his hands again.
"Please"
There were a lot of wrong things with that single word.
There were so many that he couldn't even count them.
So at the end, he just nods.
Mary looked relieved, to the point he could have sworn a tear did escape the corner of her eye, but he was not entirely sure because that's the moment she pulled him into a hug, arms circling his neck and holding on tightly. He hugged back without even really thinking about it, wondering why Richard looked like he wanted to scream, because Richard never screamed, he hugged back and wondered why it hurt.
"Keep her safe"
"M-"
"Do you promise me?"
He had never promised her anything in his life.
"I do"
He had never had to do it.
The phone call comes the next day.
"Kiddo?" Tony is holding a cup of coffee, standing beside the little girl drawing in the middle of his living room. He doesn't have low tables or furniture that is not pointy in all the places a kid could get hurt from, so he has learned a long time ago that it was safer right in the middle of the floor where there were no nearby objects that could suddenly cut very tiny hands. Peter has crayons and papers arranged on her left size by color and size, and a plate of unfinished waffle bits on her right, because Tony is too lazy to cut any of her food so he orders her portions already in the adequate size and ready to eat "Where did you get the idea for this?"
Peter stops drawing, looking up from the (very familiar looking) robot, and as she beams at him he realizes that at least three other drawings are about the same thing.
"From your lab!"
Tony chuckles.
"Thought so"
He hopes Mary does not know this. He hopes she doesn't because he doesn't want to explain to her why or when her child had been inside his lab instead of as far away from explosives, weapons and heat as physically possible, as she had very specifically asked of him the few times she had left the baby for Tony (Pepper) to look after. He doesn't want to explain why there is a baby proof area in a corner of the lower floor.
"Do you have a name for it?"
"I think Mark is pretty"
"It has a nice ring to it. What color do you think would suit him? I am thinking red"
Peter's smile, if possible, widens even more.
"With some gold!"
Tony tries to hide his own grin with the cup of coffee.
"I like how you think, kid"
Because Peter doesn't cry and she likes Dum-E and she likes dolls but no more than she likes JARVIS and she doesn't get scared by the loud music he listens to, so she is an okay child. Rhodey had warned Richard more than once that it was enough how the kid kept on doing things before of her time, 'We don't need another one building an engine before even starting elementary school' he said 'We shouldn't let them hang out so much' he warned, as if that was what Tony and Peter were doing when sitting in the same room- And maybe it was true the engine part, in a way, because they didn't need another kid doing that. So maybe, if he had the time and if he was sober enough and if he happened to not be busy at the moment, she could teach her how to build a computer instead.
He hears the heels before he sees Pepper. He is amazed at how she doesn't fall, how she doesn't trip and how she always looks like wearing heels does not, in fact, hurt like hell, so he is ready to give his compliments when she turns the corner and faces them both. But then he sees her red eyes and the tiny little tears and the phone in her hand, and he cannot do anything else than feeling nothing was going to be okay.
"Tony" The man had met Ben and May Parker after Peter was born. A good couple, living in Queens just like Mary's grandmother. But the May he remembers was always smiling, always happy, not sobbing like she was currently doing from the other side of the line as he holds the phone. There is something taking a hold of his leg and when he looks down its Peter pressing a hand to his side, looking at him with wide brown eyes and a robot drawing on one hand "Tony, Richard…. Oh god, Tony, Mary- They-"
The cup falls and cracks on the floor, but it avoids the girl entirely. Pepper yelps, but she is still crying so she says nothing, and no one moves to do anything at all, and Peter keeps looking at him.
She has her mother's eyes.
This, Tony thinks, is the boiling point.