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Content Warning: Mentions of suicide.
Boil
"Cell phones off during the exam! And I mean off, not set to silent or vibrate! All bags, backpacks, and purses are to be left at the front of the room!"
The order, repeated for the fifth time since Peter had walked into his school's gym, came from an unfamiliar man standing at the front of the gym. He wore a grey suit with a pink pocket square. A thin pencil mustache dusted his upper lip and he carried himself with an air of self-importance despite his young age and regrettable choice in facial hair.
Peter really hoped he was temporary, like maybe a representative of the school board sent to oversee the entrance exams. If he was a new full-time teacher at Midtown, senior year was already looking bleak.
Pencil 'stache's words rolled off his sluggish mind like oil on water. Peter was running on little sleep, as was typical of any exam day, and at 7:50 in the morning he could still feel the faint remains of sleepy fog clinging to his brain. The gym was organized with rows of folding tables and chairs (two chairs per table with a wide gap between them to discourage cheating) and he sat in one of the middle rows. His elbow was propped on the table with his cheek smooshed against his fist while he stared vacantly out the open double doors. For the past ten minutes, he had watched as small groups of students entered through those doors in odd spurts. Some Peter knew, other's he didn't. His heart leapt whenever he recognized someone's face, despite having never spoken more than two words to them.
The bright sun shine outside made Peter's eyes water and the scent of freshly cut grass wafted in with the breeze. Framed in the doorway, Peter could see the field. It had been mowed. The shoes were gone. If Peter had been living under a rock since April, he wouldn't have guessed that anything of any great importance had happened. His stomach twisted painfully as he thought of how easy it was to cover up and move on…
"Hi, Peter."
Peter turned his head forward and dropped his arm on the table. Mr. Harrington held a couple stacks of tests and scantron sheets in his arm. He and a couple other Midtown teachers were milling around, distributing tests on tables. He slipped one dauntingly thick test with the blank back side facing up, and one scantron in front of Peter.
"Hey, Mr. Harrington," Peter said with enthusiasm that surprised him. Mr. Harrington wasn't even close to being Peter's favorite teacher, but he was here and alive, and Peter felt irrepressible happiness at seeing him again.
"Are you having a good summer break?" Mr. Harrington asked with disarming cheerfulness. Dumbstruck, all Peter could do was stare stupidly at him.
"No," he said bluntly. "No, I'm not."
Abashedly, Mr. Harrington's eyes dropped. His grip on the tests in his arm grew tighter. The smile he shot Peter was tight and uncomfortable, but at least it was genuine.
"Sorry, of course not. That was a silly thing to ask. Safe small talk is deeply ingrained in us teachers." Peter nodded his head, expecting that to be the end of it. At the other end of the table, the boy sitting there sat up straighter. His hand drifted across the table in anticipation of the test, but Mr. Harrington didn't seem to notice. Instead he nodded thoughtfully to himself and continued: "Yeah, I lost my wife. I know it's been hard on everybody."
Peter's shoulders bunched uncomfortably. Why was he sharing this with him of all people? It felt grossly inappropriate for him to hear something so private, but then again…
Peter remembered the drawing. The dog doodle of no real dog. The lack of personal items on Mr. Harrington's desk. Maybe Peter was now the person who knew Mr. Harrington better than anyone still living. Just as Mr. Stark now held the longest living memory of Peter, despite only knowing him for two years. Maybe he was now that person to Mr. Harrington.
God, he really hoped he wasn't. There had to be someone else. If for no other reason, Peter really didn't want to hold that sort of significance to a person that he didn't even really like to begin with.
"You should get a dog," he blurted out before he could stop himself. Mr. Harrington's eyebrows rose and he nodded to himself again as he moved to hand a test to the other boy at the table.
"S'not a bad idea," Peter heard him mumble to himself as he walked away. Peter watched him go, and he silently marveled at the change that MJ could inspire even when she was long gone. He wondered what she would've thought of it. She would probably be pleased while pretending to not care.
"Hey, Peter Parker!"
Peter sat straighter and his head snapped to attention. At the far end of the gym and ahead of him by a few rows, Gwen Stacy's short, blond pigtails bobbed from the force her enthusiastically waving hand. Her broad grin, which Peter thought was entirely too perky for this time of day, grew even wider as she took in Peter's cocked head and furrowed brow.
"Gwen?"
"Any talking will result in an automatic zero on the exam!" Pencil 'stache announced loudly to the room while staring sternly at Gwen. She shot him a sweet smile.
"Good thing there's still five minutes until it starts then."
Pencil 'stache face turned sour and Peter had to cough to cover up his short, surprised laugh. The boy sitting at the other end of Gwen's table made a shushing noise at her. A few weak chuckles from other students echoed off the walls and Pencil 'stache's frown deepened.
"Let's not find out if it's possible to get detention before you're even enrolled in the school," the boy muttered under his breath, low enough that only Gwen (and Peter) could hear.
"Oh, c'mon. It's just irresponsible not to knock a middle management tyrant off of his high horse. Especially when he's clearly power drunk," She hissed back. Peter covered his smile with his hand. The boy turned to look at her, but Peter could only see the back of his head.
"Pick your battles. I don't want to roll up here solo on the first day of school because you lack impulse control."
Gwen shot him an affronted look that had Peter stifling a laugh behind his hands.
"You will have three hours to complete the exam! If you finish before that time, you may leave quietly through those doors!" Pencil 'stache pointed to the double doors. Ms. Dell was nudging the wooden wedge door jams out of the way with her toes and the doors fell shut. "You may turn over the exam and begin now!"
Peter heard the flurry of paper flipping as he turned over his own. He walked his fingers over the edges of the pages, doing a quick page count. His heart jump started.
Eight pages printed front and back except for the final page which was one-sided. Fifteen freaking pages. The school district's run by sadists, he thought as he furiously scribbled his name and student number at the top of the page. He didn't even need his enhanced hearing to hear the collective groans, gasps, and a couple of choked sobs.
But it didn't take him long to fall into the rhythmic work; question and answer. Time suspended in the haze of pure science. He was in his element.
At 10: 50, with ten minutes to spare, Peter gave his test one last appraising skim through. Satisfied with his answers, he stood and handed in his test to Pencil 'stache. His polite smile was met with a look of dull apathy that Peter recoiled from. He collected his backpack from the front of the room and muttered a soft 'bye, sir' to Mr. Harrington as he passed by him. His surprised smile and appreciative nod made Peter feel light, but then a snarky 'shush' was thrown at his back by Pencil 'stache. Peter's step faltered for a second as he pressed his eyes closed. He repressed the urge to make a shushing noise of his own. Please don't be a new teacher, he pleaded silently as he opened his eyes again. As he neared the doors, he saw a girl who was sniffling with tears running down her cheeks. Her hands flipped through pages in a frenzy, and Peter's heart went out to her. He wanted to tell her that it would be okay, but he didn't lest he be shushed again.
He pushed open one of the double doors and the sudden exposure to sunlight blinded him. Tears rapidly filled his eyes and he furiously blinked to clear them. He wandered over to the parking lot. Mr. Stark had said, when he had dropped him off, that he'd pick him up around eleven.
As he approached the lot, he saw Gwen sitting on the hood of a car. She was decked out in varying shades of light blue today, and everything was devoid of wrinkles or stains. It was enough to make Peter feel slightly bum-like in his science pun t-shirt, which was clean but having fished it out of a pile on his bedroom floor, it was somewhat shabby. The same boy that she'd been talking to earlier stood at the driver's side. Now that he was standing, Peter could see how tall he was. He was just as well dressed as Gwen, but in a different sort of way. Wrapped up in a dark blazer, he carried himself with an air of confidence and formality even in such a casual setting. He leaned with his forearms against the roof of the car. His wrists were slack and a cigarette sat pinched between the knuckles of his index and middle fingers.
"… know I got that part about exponential decay wrong," Peter heard the boy say hurriedly. His body stood very still but his voice crackled with stress.
"I'm sure it's fine," Gwen said kindly, albeit with a hint of exhaustion. Peter recognized the vicious worry-reassurance cycle running between them, and he wondered how long they had been looping through it.
"Number thirty-six, the one about the decay rate of copper, I put down that the amount of the half-life would be 1,355 grams, but that's wrong." The boy rambled, pausing to inhale deeply. Smoke seeped out of his parted lips before he blew out the bulk.
"So what if you got it wrong? It's one question." Gwen gave a carefree shrug that had no effect on the boy.
"It was supposed to be 1,500 grams," he muttered and his head dipped lower. Dark brown bangs fell into his eyes. "I knew that too. What the hell was I thinking?"
"Relax," Gwen sighed. He barked a dry, humorless laugh. The sound made Peter's stomach swoop uneasily.
"You've known me for four years. When have I ever been relaxed?" He looked up, and Peter was close enough to see the calculating scrutiny in them. Gwen sighed again and glanced absentmindedly around the lot. Her eyes caught Peter's and she looked almost relieved. "God, Dad'll kill me if I have to repeat a grade-"
"You'll be fine. You're smart, remember?" She said while waving Peter over. To his surprise, his feet moved him forward. Why he felt compelled to join them in spite of his apprehension was a mystery to him.
The boy finally noticed Peter coming closer as he neared the passenger side of the car. He took another drag from his cigarette and the harsh, toxic smell of it made Peter's nose reflexively wrinkle. He quickly smoothed his features so as to not offend, but the boy noticed and an annoyed frown pulled subtly at his mouth. It clashed with Gwen's welcoming smile, and Peter, unsure of whether he should stay, kicked a pebble of asphalt with his toe.
"I'm not stalking you," Gwen teased, and Peter glanced up again. "This is purely coincidental."
Just like that, the mood lightened. Even the boy, though clearly confused, smirked at her tone. Peter, feeling more at ease, asked what he had been wondering since he heard her call his name.
"What are you doing here? I thought you said that you go to Brooklyn Visions Academy?"
"We did," Gwen confirmed, gesturing between herself and the boy. "But Visions is a charter school and the government funding got cut."
"Oh."
That would explain why there were so many students in his grade that he didn't recognize. With all of the changes happening in the world, school closures must've slipped through the cracks for local news coverage. At least, Peter hadn't heard of it despite his near obsessive upkeep with current events. In comparison to other local breaking news, this was relatively minor, but still it felt strange to be left out of the loop. Especially when this particular loop affected him directly.
"I would've mentioned it before, but you seemed distracted," Gwen added lightly. Peter heard an echo of the concern she'd worn at Central Park. The boy's narrowed eyes darted between them, but then Gwen's sunny disposition returned. She threw up her hands and asked rhetorically: "Why have a bunch of half-empty schools when there could be a few running at full capacity?"
"I guess that makes sense…" Peter mused, though he felt an odd twinge of sympathy for them. It was difficult for him to return to Midtown without his friends, but at least he had the option of returning.
"Midtown has the best SAT scores of all the local STEM schools," the boy's bored voice drawled. "So it gets to stay open and rake in the concentrated funding." He tapped his cigarette and the lengthened ashy tip fell to the ground. Gwen's face scrunched up in annoyance.
"That's hardly fair with Peter skewing the student average." She griped. Her good-natured tone was sullied with a tinge of bitterness, which Peter found to be completely unwarranted.
"I thought you said you were over the decathlon thing!" he exclaimed, and her frown became more pronounced at the reminder. "You said you don't hold grudges-"
"I know what I said," she grumbled. The boy narrowed his eyes in suspicion.
"Decathlon thing?" His eyes snapped wide as a flicker of understanding crossed his face. "Oh, you mean the winning streak demolishment of 2017?"
Peter blinked.
Gwen looked like she'd been shot.
"You named it?" Incredulous betrayal laced her words and the boy's eyes lit up with the same smug satisfaction that Peter had seen in Gwen's a few times.
"Yes."
"What's this demolishment business?" she blustered. "It was a hiccup at best! Don't exaggerate."
The boy eyed her evenly, though Peter could see a hint of a smirk pulling at the corner of his mouth.
"Demolishment is both appropriate and memorable. And it's hardly an exaggeration when I had to listen to your whining for over a week. Anything that causes such extensive bitching deserves to be named for the sake of posterity."
Peter laughed, though he knew he shouldn't. Gwen threw him a warning look, which managed to shut him up. She drummed her fingers on the hood of the car.
"My God, you're so dramatic," she huffed and with a roll of her eyes, shook off her sullen mood. "To answer your question: Yes, that's the one," she jerked her thumb at Peter, "and this is the demolisher." The boy raised a brow at her. Her expression became unsure. Brows pinching together she muttered: "Demolisher? Demolitionist?" She made an aggravated groan and shrugged. "Whatever. Stop nitpicking. I just wrote a three hour long test. You can still hear bacon sizzling." She touched the tip of her index finger to her temple and twisted it back and forth like a drill bit.
The boy smiled at her and the glimpse of unmitigated happiness that Peter saw there made him feel like he was witnessing something private. The boy's face subdued itself blandly and he turned back to Peter.
"Clearly, she's over it."
For a second, no one said anything. Peter gripped his backpack strap and hiked it up higher. After a moment, Gwen's groan broke the silence and her head fell back.
"The commute to school is gonna suck," she moaned. Peter winced sympathetically. He actually lived much closer to the school now than he did before, but he still wasn't looking forward to the public transit commute every weekday. At least Gwen and her friend had a car. "Seriously we're gonna have to make this drive from Brooklyn 190 more times, give or take a snow day or stat holiday," she whined to the boy, who didn't seem at all bothered.
"What'cha gonna do about it?" He raised his nearly burnt out cigarette to his mouth.
"Home school?" Peter suggested with a shrug.
"Not at my home," He muttered ruefully around the stubby yellow bit and took another long drag. His tone was worrisome and Peter's first instinct was to ask what he meant by that and if he was okay. But he didn't really know him well enough to ask something so personal. Actually, he realized with a jolt, he didn't know him at all. Not even his name.
"Ummm, I-I'm Peter," he stuttered. The amused look that Gwen sent him, coupled with the boy's passive expression, made Peter absentmindedly grind his toe into the pavement. The boy's face didn't change, but his eyes took on a somewhat disparaging quality.
"Uh-huh. Peter Parker, I managed to put that together myself."
Oh, yeah. Gwen had kinda yelled his name earlier. A flush started to creep up his cheeks and Gwen shot the boy a withering glance. He remained unaffected by it, and she turned back to Peter.
"This is Harry," she said while nodding at the boy. "Sometimes he's amicable and other times he's down-right pleasant, but today he is neither." She smirked and Peter felt some of his nerves melt away. "And you, my friend, really need to work on your introductions. I hate to break it to you, but you finesse those into conversation with the ease of a dry slip-n-slide."
Harry laughed and Peter heard a hint of malice in it. He was no stranger to being made fun of, but the disparity between Gwen's teasing and Harry's open mocking was glaringly obvious. Peter, a little flustered but not unbearably so, felt his cheeks heat up.
"Oh. Uh… y-yeah. Okay," he mumbled, at a loss for words. Gwen laughed and the sound made an infectious smile spread over his face. He heard tires crunch over rough pavement. Looking to the parking lot entrance, Peter saw Mr. Stark's car swerve in.
"Is that your ride?" Gwen asked. Peter nodded, taking a step away. He waved over his shoulder as Gwen called: "See you in September!"
With his hand on the door handle, Peter hesitated for a split second. My friend, she'd called him. That seemed… premature. They barely knew each other. A sharp, unpleasant feeling shot through him. One that made his heart seize in protest. He bit his lip and threw a glance over his shoulder. Gwen had already turned back to Harry. Under her attention once again, his lingering distaste faded from his face.
Huh. So she was one of those people. The kind who could see potential friends in most people, and then would actually befriend them. The kind that approached people without over thinking it. Peter found that sort of confidence to be elusive and intimidating at the best of times and terrifying at the worst. Ned and MJ hadn't exactly been the most social of people either.
Gwen's presumption irritated him, he realized as he pulled open the passenger door, though he couldn't exactly say why. Dropping himself into his seat and shut the door firmly, he glanced up and was met with Mr. Stark's knowing look. Confused, Peter looked around nervously, even though he was the only other person in the car. He curled his arms around the backpack on his lap.
"What?"
"Got yourself a girlfriend already?" Peter's eyes widened and he started to stammer out denials, which just made Mr. Stark smile wider like he had confirmed a suspicion. He nodded his head appreciatively and added: "Not bad, kid. You haven't even officially started senior year."
"She's not my girlfriend!" he finally managed to get out. "Jeez, Mr. Stark."
"You sure?" Mr. Stark shot him a quick, teasing look as he turned the car down the aisle for the exit. "Your rosy cheeks tell a different story."
Peter suddenly became aware of the residual blush colouring his face. Traitorously, it darkened at the observation.
"Mr. Stark…" he whined. There was a hidden plea in his voice that went ignored.
"She seems to be real chummy with tall, dark, and brooding over there," Peter shot one last glance at the pair as Mr. Stark turned on to the street. "Better watch out."
Peter rolled his eyes. Irritation crackled under his skin and he tried his best to suppress it. Mr. Stark was just kidding around, Peter knew that, but still he found himself wondering from time to time why he even wasted his breath speaking.
"Are you done?" he asked flatly.
"For now." They stopped at a red light and Mr. Stark sent him a serious look. "If you start hanging out with those two, you better not pick up smoking."
"I won't."
"Seriously, if destroying your alveoli is a requirement for running in their circle, don't. I hear cancer can put a real damper on your life expectancy."
"Okay."
"Just say no. That's all I'm saying."
Peter was tempted to roll his eyes again but while Mr. Stark was watching him, he didn't dare.
"My healing factor would probably take care of it anyway," he said as the light turned green. The car jolted forward for a split second before the speed evened out.
"Peter!"
Wide eyed and shoulders creeping up to his ears, he threw up his hands in surrender.
"I'm joking!"
"You better be!" Mr. Stark shot him a brief hard look. "Take it from someone who knows, kid. It's hard to shake off a dependency on a substance."
Oh.
Peter did feel bad for forgetting about that. To be fair, Mr. Stark's struggle with alcoholism wasn't a frequent topic of discussion (or really, something that they'd ever talked about), but still that was an insensitive joke for him to make.
The air grew heavy. Peter chewed his bottom lip and Mr. Stark sighed.
"Y'know, all this talk of cancer is starting to put me off of ice cream."
Peter perked up.
"Ice cream?"
Mr. Stark smirked and flicked on the turn signal.
"Thought that might grab your attention," he said with a smile. "After that, I was thinking we'd ride the sugar high and get started on a new project."
Peter frowned.
"What about Morgan's crib?"
"Oh, that's still a work in progress, but I've moved it to the back burner." Mr. Stark scoffed then. "No baby of mine's gonna sleep in some subpar, ill-equipped, store-bought crib. But we still got half a year before that's needed. I know the intricacies of nesting aren't exactly riveting to teenaged boys."
Peter's brow pinched. He saw Mr. Stark's hands grip the steering wheel tighter.
"I mean, no not really, but-"
"We'll build something fun," he rushed out as though Peter hadn't spoken. "Something that we want and not something that we need. I promised you controlled chaos, didn't I?"
"Yeah, I guess you did-"
"So, well do just that," he turned into the parking lot of a Dairy Queen. Killing the engine, he turned to look at Peter with bright, excited eyes. The intensity slammed into him full force and he nearly flinched. "We'll go wreck the lab and build something that Pepper will definitely disapprove of. I don't know about you, but my inner mechanic has been itching to build something stupid and unnecessary but undeniably awesome. Something that doesn't really need to exist but does because I say so."
Peter blinked. Mr. Stark's energy was tangible and he knew that he should be excited too. That's usually how this worked. Normally, he was susceptible to this sort of high energy. It would suck him in without fail, but now… there was a rift. A chasm to cross. On the other side, the thing that he would be putting all this effort in to getting to… it didn't evoke the same excitement that it used to. It was exhausting just to think of it.
"Seems messy," he muttered, not knowing exactly what he was referring to. Mr. Stark's brows knitted together in the middle and his eyes took on a desperate glint.
"That's what we got Dum-E for. It might take him a million years, but he gets the job done eventually." His joke came out all wrong. Too tense. Too forced. Peter frowned again. "And since when do you care about being messy?"
He needs this, he realized. This wasn't for Peter at all. For whatever reason, Mr. Stark needed chaotic fun like how they used to have before the world fell apart.
Play along.
Quietly and with little conviction, the order came to him. With some strain, Peter smiled as best that he could.
"You calling me a slob?"
Some of the tension left Mr. Stark's body as his deadpan eyes settled over Peter.
"If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, and constantly fails to put my tools back where they belong…"
Peter sighed through his nose. He couldn't argue with that, and Mr. Stark knew it. He was bad about leaving things lying around. It wasn't his fault, he just got distracted easily.
Play along!
The command came a little more firmly that time. Peter undid his seat belt to busy his hands and avoid Mr. Stark's gaze. When he looked back up, Mr. Stark's poorly disguised apprehension greeted him. It made his stomach twist, and wildly, he blurted out the first idea that came to him.
"Well, I've always wondered how lightsabers would work in real life."
Mr. Stark was already shaking his head before he'd completed his sentence.
"Nope. Next."
"Why you gotta hate on Star Wars, Mr. Stark."
He looked mildly offended at that. Peter laughed, albeit weakly, and he was surprised by how naturally the sound came.
"I don't hate on Star Wars. I'll have you know that the original trilogy - you know, the good ones, - were thoroughly enjoyed in the days of my youth. But, y'know, I got older and out-grew them. Then George Lucas couldn't tell when was a good time to call it quits and now we live in a world with Jar Jar Binks." He shook his head, thoroughly dismayed, and then made a visible effort to refocus himself. "Look, I just want you to pick a project that won't slice off and cauterize a couple fingers by the end of the week."
Well, that was a fair prediction. Not that Peter would ever admit it. He had his pride as Spider-Man to think of after all.
"Enhanced senses, super sweet balance and agility, weirdly accurate danger tingles; do these things mean nothing to you?"
"They don't when pitted against roughly 1.7 gigajoules of thermal energy. Pick something else."
Over blizzards, they had come to a compromise: the little lightsaber bread knife from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It wouldn't run hot enough to permanently maim a person… just bread. Peter had expressed his worry that it would make the bread catch fire instead of toasting it, but Mr. Stark had dismissed his concerns with a roll of his eyes.
'I would've thought you'd have more faith in me by now. Of all the things that could stump me in my career, this little, rinky-dink toasting knife will not be it.'
It had taken a lot of effort to bite his tongue. The, I find your lack of faith disturbing, remained unsaid, and Peter repressed his disappointment that such an opportunity had been wasted.
In Peter's opinion, the knife checked the boxes for stupid and unnecessary, but was a far cry from the undeniably awesome project that Mr. Stark had wanted to build. Given time, Peter probably could've thought of something better, but there had been a sense of urgency to Mr. Stark's bearing. The way he spoke, with his quips coming out faster than usual. His movements seemed hurried, like he was holding himself back from rushing Peter out the door.
In short order, they had returned back to the apartment and set up camp in the lab. Led Zeppelin blared in the back ground (or was it ACDC? Rush? Greta Van Fleet? That last band was recent, but they all sounded the same to him. Not that he would ever dare to say that aloud. He suspected that Mr. Stark's shame for him would become debilitating if that ever came to light).
With music pounding and a whirl wind of activity surrounding him, Peter realized that he didn't have the endurance for this. With such relentless eagerness crashing on him, he felt like a buoy floating in riptide. The temptation to leave nudged at the back of his mind, but he owed it to Mr. Stark to at least try. For hours, they'd poured over calculations. When finished, that had morphed into drawing up schematics.
Without warning a switch flipped, and Peter's focus drained. His eyes grew vacant as he stared at the circuit map that he'd just finished. With piercing clarity, he remembered that none of this really mattered. It was inconsequential. Today would be the same as tomorrow, and none of the things that he did would bring him closer getting May back. If such a thing were possible. It was all just time filler, and there was no way to enjoy it with this burden hanging over his head.
"Getting tired already, kid?" Peter looked up. Mr. Stark's keen eyes were regarding him closely through the holographic projection of rough blue prints. "Don't know why I'm surprised. You had an early start this morning. 6:30 wasn't kind to you, huh?"
An impenetrable stillness had settled over Peter. Fighting through it, he shrugged weakly.
"I can keep working," he offered, though fatigue showcased his reluctance. Mr. Stark seemed to deflate incrementally, before he straightened up and clasped his hands in front of him loudly.
"Nah. We'll pack it in for today and pick this up tomorrow. No sense working tired. That's dangerous."
A flurry of thoughts came to Peter's mind. The first being that it was rich to hear Mr. Stark say that working while tired was dangerous. That put a toe over the line bordering hypocrisy. Following that, he thought that since they were still in the planning stages, nothing was remotely dangerous about it.
He said none of these things. Exhaustion tamped down his voice mercilessly. Instead he murmured 'Night, Mr. Stark', as he left the lab.
Lying in his bed with the sun shining brightly through his window, he realized belatedly how stupid that was to say when it was still afternoon.
A few days passed.
Peter threw himself completely into patrolling. It took all of his concentration. All of his drive. He'd wake up, suit up, leave, and return at the end of the day sapped of every ounce of energy. Expelling that much effort day after day left room for nothing else.
A few dinners were skipped, but no one said anything. Then Saturday night came and Peter crawled through his window at 11:55, dutifully obeying the rules but missing the time he and his family usually spent together. For that, he received a few side-eyed looks from his guardians. A few gently concerned questions, which always left Peter feeling… off. Still, he didn't feel too badly about it all because so many others were barely treading water.
Robberies.
Muggings.
They came at him non-stop these days. Before, patrolling had some down time. There were breaks to walk on tight ropes. To save cats from trees. To catch his breath.
Nowadays, there didn't seem to be any room for breathing, and Peter wasn't too eager to find room for it either. That took time away from the work, from the people that he was meant to be protecting, and that was the only thing that mattered.
There was plenty to do, and Peter was determined to make his help an inexhaustible resource… but at times, what was required of him was overwhelming.
"Things'll get better. You'll see. You just gotta hang on," he said gently but firmly enough, he hoped, to hide how his stomach was turning. He waited for the ambulance to arrive while the man he had encased safely in webbing stood eerily still. Peter was fairly certain that his webs, plastering him against the fence lining the Brooklyn Bridge, were the only thing keeping him upright.
Peter could leave - his work here was done – but all he could think of were those two robbers from his first night out. The ones who had waited out his webs when no one had shown up.
The stakes were higher here. If no one came and his webbing dissolved and this guy made another attempt to jump off the bridge, Peter wasn't sure how he'd be able to live with that. So, he stayed. He'd reapply webbing all day if he had to.
The man stayed silent, and Peter felt a little guilty for the relief he felt. The others that he'd stopped would sometimes yell at him until the ambulance arrived. He could've done without that. He tried to not take their words too personally. He was in no way qualified to deal with them anyway. Talking to them would probably only make things worse. So he said his 'things'll get better' platitude, and despite all that had happened he still whole-heartedly believed it.
This wasn't sustainable.
Peter took a moment to survey Brooklyn from the west facing side of the bridge. From the buildings that were partially destroyed by low flying aircraft to the few cars that remained abandoned in the streets. This couldn't be all there was from now on.
Flashing red and blue lights were nearing the bridge and Peter sighed in relief. Climbing a suspension cable to the top of the supporting pillar, he waited for them to pull up in front of the webbed man. One of the paramedics glanced up in time to see him leap from the top.
It was early still. His eyes flickered to the clock in his periphery: 5:30. But suddenly, he was the buoy in riptide again. One thing would come, and then another, and despite his best efforts he was one person shouting at a storm.
His webs carried him home.
Tony stirred some cream into one of the two cups of coffee in front of him. Black and caffeinated for him, creamy decaf for Pepper. Running Stark Industries was a real headache these days. With the mass hiring and training and trying to keep the deteriorated infrastructure running with so many missing pieces, it was a wonder that Pep hadn't thrown in the towel yet. And then there were pregnancy hormones adding another layer of headache to her day. Since May, her post-work wind down wine had been replaced with decaf coffee, and Tony felt that it was a sorry replacement. Even so, the sad little cup of mediocre coffee gave his wife some joy in her day, so he made sure a cup was ready for her when she got home. Not that she always wanted it, but it was the thought that counted. He looked up to the microwave clock as he heard Pepper's house key turning in the lock.
5:30.
Of all the things that Tony had thought that he would one day become, a house husband wasn't one of them. Still, he had found it to be an unexpectedly sweet gig. Maybe it was the decades of near-manic workaholic lifestyle finally catching up with him. Maybe it was because the universe had slapped him in the face so hard that his dad's old saying: 'No amount of money ever bought a second of time.', finally got knocked into him.
He was done with that now; wasting time. He had wasted so much of his time with Peter, and even more so with Pepper. Years sprinkled with missed chances to know his family better. There were too many moments to count. Moments where he should have asked questions and actively taken an interest in their lives. But he rarely did, and never deeply enough. He had realized that the other day when Pepper had been casually scrolling through birthday cake recipes, trying to find a clear winner that the kid would like.
'Does Peter like chocolate cake?' she'd asked. Tony had almost answered 'yes' on reflex when he had the startling realization that he didn't actually know if that was true. The kid ate anything that was put in front of him without complaint, but that wasn't the same as liking something.
Being a stay at home dad was second on the list of things he'd never though he would be, and truth be told, he wasn't sure if he qualified as one just yet. One kid was still in the oven and thus unknown to him, and the other, though he was hesitant to admit it, he might only know superficially. On top of that, Peter was around so little these days that Tony doubted that he saw him as a parental figure.
Tony sure didn't feel like one.
He felt with every day more distance pushing him and the kid apart. No matter how he tried to bridge it, it didn't seem to make a difference and he worried that he never would be more than just a mentor to the kid. It was a hard pill to swallow, but the facts were what they were: Peter was almost seventeen. In the tail end of his teen years and nearing adulthood, Tony might be jumping in too late in the game for him to really matter to the kid in that way.
Peter was avoiding him. That was obvious. Tony tried to not take it too personally, but the blatant rejection stung. He told himself that the kid was working through his grief in his own way and it was fine. Tony was adamant about letting him do whatever he needed to do to get through this (much to Pepper's disapproval). Plus, he was fairly certain that indifference was encoded into adolescent DNA. He remembered how he'd been at that age, and based solely on that example (because he had no others), his logic checked out.
Give it time, he repeated to himself time and again whenever he thought of what a shit job he was doing as a kinda sorta dad to the kid. He ignored the twinge that had recently sprung up in him. The one that feared that Peter had no real need for him other than for practical reasons. He needed a home and food and all those necessities, but maybe not a dad. If an arm's length mentorship was all they had then that was fine. Or it would be once Tony had time to adjust to the loss. And it was a loss, because Tony knew that Peter had liked him before… and then for some reason he didn't.
Lifting the two cups, he turned to see Pepper standing between the kitchen and living room. A tired air exuded from her. She had already kicked off her shoes and greeted him with a smile and a kiss when he pressed her cup into her hands.
"Thanks," she muttered and lead him over to the kitchen island. Resting her brief case on the marble counter, she sat down wearily on one of the bar stools. Tony took the one beside her. "So, good news," she patted her brief case, "the owner accepted our offer."
"Which one?"
"The lake side property. The garage is still holding out for a higher offer." She rolled her eyes, though Tony knew she was used to this by now. People expecting ridiculous amounts of money just because his name was attached to the transaction. Whatever. Time was of the essence here. He only had a few more days, and he'd throw obscene amounts of money at the guy if it sped this along.
Of all his irons in the fire, that hadn't been the one worrying him. What worried him was how to bring up the subject of moving out of the city to his extremely temperamental kid without it going sideways. He leaned his elbow on the counter and lifted his mug in a sort of cheers gesture.
"Now we just gotta find a palatable way to tell the kid what's up and things will be hunky-dory."
Pepper's red lips pressed into a line. That line never meant good things for Tony.
"About that-"
"I'll level with you Potts, I got nothing," he said quickly before she could say whatever it was that Tony wouldn't like. There was no stopping it, but the argument sometimes leaned in his favor when he managed to get his side out first. "I'm kinda relying on you to be the angry kid whisperer here. You seem to have a real knack for getting him to understand exactly what you mean. I get things twisted up in translation."
Her brows shot up, though he couldn't imagine why she'd be surprised to hear him say that.
"Oh, no! You're not going to foist this one off on me."
"But you're so much better at making him talk," Tony urged and took a fortifying sip of his dark roast. "You know, like, real words with genuine thoughts attached to them. Not just the angsty grumbles that I get."
"Good communication isn't witchcraft, Tony." Pepper sighed around the lip of her mug. Tony scoffed but held back his snappy comeback, since his wife already looked so much more tired than she had a second ago. "And anyway, you'll need to learn sometime. Someday, Morgan will be an angsty teenager too."
He frowned but steadfastly ignored that comment. Angsty Morgan was Future-Tony's problem. Right now, Current-Tony was dealing with an angsty Peter and it was no cake walk.
He sighed.
"I wanna know what he would really think about it but he just seems so disinterested in everything."
Pepper's expression softened with pity. She was the only person in the world that he could tolerate that look from, but that didn't mean that he liked it.
"Tony-"
"I know what you're gonna say," he interrupted, not in the mood to hear the he needs time spiel. "Apathy is indicative of depression and of course the kid's depressed. I'm not helping things by trying to force his recovery and he needs time to feel how he feels."
Pepper's face slid into neutral, as it did whenever she was unimpressed by him.
"Well, what do you need me around for when you already know what I'm going to say before I say it?"
Tony's chest tightened.
"Don't even joke, Pep. I always need you around," he said, perhaps too sharply. Pepper smiled sadly at him. Setting down her coffee mug, she reached across the counter and took his hand in hers. Her wedding ring pressed against his palm.
"Yeah, you're stuck with me now," she said with that unique brand of fond exasperation that was reserved solely for him. His chest still felt a fraction too tight, so he pressed a kiss to the back of her hand to rectify it. That did the trick. Her sappy smile dissolved into a smirk, and she added: "While we're spending the rest of our lives together, you might want to take some time to tweak your spousal telepathy, because you were completely off. I wasn't going to say any of that."
Dropping their linked hands onto the counter, he shot her a coy smile.
"Yeah? Well don't keep me in suspense, spit it out."
She rolled her eyes upwards for moment, as though to say to an invisible spectator 'You see what I have to deal with?', while conveniently ignoring the fact that she had signed up for this circus.
"I was going to say that bringing up the land purchase right now might be too much too soon."
Tony frowned. Releasing Pepper's hand, he rubbed the back of his neck while his mind spun out a dozen possible scenarios.
"You think so? I don't know…" He stared into his cup intently as though he could pull some top notch parenting tips out of its depths. "We wouldn't be moving there for at least a year. Not until Peter graduates from high school."
"Yes, but we just moved into this apartment last month," she countered. Tony could already hear her patience beginning to thin. There must've been an extra helping of bullshit dished out at the office today.
"Right, but he knows that time is consistent, flows in a linear fashion, and next summer's a long time from now. I haven't even drawn up the blueprints for the house. Hell, there's still trees on the site that need to be cut down."
His mind wandered back to the lake side property that he and Pepper had visited a few weeks ago. It was beautiful but completely unlike anything that Tony was used to. The rustic environment was more like what Pepper had grown up in while living in rural Colorado. That was all Tony needed to know to sell him on the idea. The learning curve would be steep for him, no question about it. But he knew that his own upbringing in an empty New York City mansion with an absentee family had yielded an arrogant jerk with a drinking problem. He wanted better things for his sons. Both of them. Even if Peter wanted to bail out the second he turned eighteen, Tony would make sure he would be leaving better than when he came in.
"Unless you want a house built around a tree," he teased to distract himself from the sad direction his thoughts were going. "That'd be kinda cool, but it would threaten the integrity of the structure after a few years-"
"Tony."
"A tree house like that would be the stuff of fairy tales. Or Tolkien. Gotta say, Pep, I'm not sure that I'm willing to go full social reclus, oddball hermit living in the woods. Not yet, anyway. Time enough for that when I'm senile."
"Tony-"
"Tree houses are for kids anyway. I'll build one for Morgan when he's old enough."
For a moment, he could see it so perfectly. A tree house with laughter ringing from within it. Web hammocks strung between tree trunks. His boys playing. Peter would be an adult by then, but Tony knew that he would be down to rough house with Morgan. He could admit that he didn't know everything that there was to know about Peter, he did know that he was the kind of person who would never be too old for fun.
"Just trust me on this one," Pepper interjected, popping his little daydream. "Dropping this news on him when he's still trying to figure out how to live with us is going to be too much. We'll tell him later when he's gotten more comfortable around us."
The smile, remnant of his vision, slid from Tony's face.
For two months they'd lived together, and Peter still wasn't comfortable with him.
For two months, Tony had made the kid his top priority. He'd thrown in everything he could, and then some more, into his care and wellbeing but it still wasn't enough. There were moments that equally terrified and frustrated him, when he was sure that Peter wasn't really there. The lively nature that Tony was used to would evaporate and an un-Peterlike stillness would overcome him. Tony couldn't even say in those moments that the kid was ignoring him because that would imply some sort of conscious intention to do so. No, it was more like Tony ceased to exist to him and that unnerved him more than anything else.
Tony was the fix it guy. He had been for most of his life. With pliable metal, he could heat and shape and force it into working again, but children were… trickier. There was so little he could do to fix Peter, and the things that he could do he had to think and rethink to near neurotic levels. The stakes for his decisions were dauntingly high. A machine could be scrapped if he messed up too badly, but the mistakes he made with Peter could affect him for the rest of his life. It wasn't that Tony was new to the whole responsibility gig, but the weight of his future screw-ups in this matter kept him awake at night. And he was screwing-up. It happened in unforeseen ways. No matter how Tony tried to prevent them, invisible instances slipped through the cracks and only became noticeable to him after the damage was done.
Maybe the issue was with him. It could be that he wasn't a good fit for whatever it was Peter needed. The thought left him feeling a little breathless. He downed the rest of his coffee just to occupy his mind for a moment. Pepper sat quietly, her calm eyes taking in his anxious fidgeting.
"Be honest, Pep. Do you think it's me? Am I too much?" His voice came out hard to cover up the helplessness he felt welling up. But of course, Pepper's watchful eyes saw right through it. Pity saturated her expression, but she said nothing. Her gaze flickered and Tony could see her mulling over her own response. Carefully crafting her words so that she could undoubtedly say, in the nicest way possible, 'Yes, Tony. You're the problem'. He couldn't stand to hear it. In the decades that he'd known Pepper, her unbiased and objective view had never been wrong. Hearing her agree with what he feared would make it far too real. So instead he said before she could speak: "I just don't get it! He seemed like he was doing better, but now he's more withdrawn than ever and I don't know what went wrong!"
They had sat right there at that same kitchen island only a few weeks ago. He and the kid had done the good communication thing that Pepper, and a litany of grief counseling books that Tony had read, were so keen on. Tony had thought that it had gone well. Peter had seemed happy by the end of it. Was he not? Should he have stayed instead of going to bed? Was Tony really that shitty at reading people?
"I've noticed that too. He's clearly not coping as well as we'd hoped," Pepper murmured thoughtfully, and Tony felt immense relief that he wasn't the only one confused. "I still think that we should get him into therapy-"
"And I already told you that he won't do it," Tony sighed, not wanting to go through the whole rigmarole again. "I'm not going to force him into something that he doesn't want to do. That's especially ineffective in therapy. What's that saying about horses and water?"
Pepper closed her eyes tiredly, as though looking at him was too much effort. When she opened her eyes again there was a steady focus in them.
"Well, getting back to your first question: I don't think this is about you."
Tony let out an unintentional sigh of relief. Of all the times that Pepper had said that to him, that was perhaps the most welcomed. If the shrewd look in her eyes was anything to go by, she knew it too. But Tony was never one for sappy confessions so instead he shrugged indifferently.
"If I had a dime for every time I heard that one…" Tony drawled sarcastically. "I'd be a slightly richer man than I am now. Like, maybe slap an extra couple hundred bucks on to my net worth."
"You asked for honesty," she reminded him bluntly, not falling for his act. "And I meant what I said. You're trying to fix this in the way that you would want it fixed and not in the way that Peter would. You're wired differently. You fix things by doing, and you do things a mile a minute when you're stressed. Right now, I think Peter needs you to fix things by just being."
She took a sip of her coffee, watching Tony carefully over the rim. His joints suddenly felt very stiff.
God.
How could something as basic as the order to do nothing be so intimidating? What was wrong with him? That should be the easiest thing in the world. What the hell was he even doing? He had no business trying to parent a grief-stricken teenager. If something as simple as 'let him come to you' had him panicked like there was a gun to his head, he was really up a creek.
But this was about Peter – one of his boys – and for his sake he had to at least try. Comfort zones be damned. He took a deep, cleansing breath that did little to help him.
"So, I should slow my roll?"
"Yes." Pepper nodded emphatically, clearly delighted that he'd finally caught on. Tony tapped his fingertips on the marble.
"I'm not great at that."
"I know."
"And I wanna do right by him."
"I know that too."
Stilling his hand, he allowed his masking sarcasm to fall. The look he shot his wife must've appeared as lost as he felt because she took his hand again.
"Keeping secrets kinda feels like the opposite, y'know?"
To his surprise, Pepper hummed in agreement and squeezed his hand. She looked unsure, and the uncertainty on her face was disturbing. Out of the two of them, Tony was the hot mess and Pepper was his rock. She was the one with good and moral judgment. If she was second guessing herself, maybe they were both up a creek. After a second of silent deliberation, her expression became confident again.
"It's just for a couple months until things get… easier."
Tony sighed and eyed his empty mug. He had the vague wish for it to be filled with something stronger, but a second later his shame banished the thought. Squeezing his eyes shut, he pinched the bridge of his nose.
"God, Pep. Nothing about this is easy. Not a damn thing."
Tony expected her to say something encouraging or comforting. It was just her way. Whenever he was overwhelmed, she was right there telling him to buck up, in some varying degree of politeness dependent upon the situation. But he was met with silence. It stretched on and when he opened his eyes he was instead met with Pepper's distracted and troubled gaze.
"I know," she muttered, and the quiet admission made dread creep over him. It occurred to him in that moment that Pepper, who was almost always two steps ahead of him, was on equal footing with him in this matter. With the ground crumbling around him, he wished that one of them could stand somewhere solid.
The next half hour that followed, Tony received the daily debriefing of what was going on at Stark Industries. It had been the same every work day since he made Pepper the head of the company.
'You still need to know what's happening, Tony. Even if you're not the CEO anymore.'
'Can't say I agree with you there, Miss Potts. See, that's why I gave you the keys to the castle. So you can do what you do best; running it in tiptop shape. Meanwhile I can do what I do best-'
'Drink and antagonize people?'
'Okay, so you're still upset about the whole birthday fiasco. I get it. I might've been an ass.'
'Might've?'
'Mistakes were made and I said I was sorry-'
'No, actually. You didn't.'
'Didn't I? Well, I'm saying it now.'
'We'll have brief daily meetings-'
'Pep…'
'Where I'll fill you in on the big stuff-'
'You're killin' me.'
'And I still expect you to attend at least two board meeting per month.'
'This isn't how I imagined your boss lady glow up going. How about twice per month office sex? I feel that would be a more effective morale booster than stuffy board meetings.'
'Whose morale?'
'Mine… and yours too. Not to toot my own horn, but I'm pretty great in-'
'Sorry, my terms are non-negotiable. Just the draw backs of dating the CEO of your company. Deal with it.'
She had been right of course. She always was. Even so, Tony couldn't help but lament all the collective wasted time he had to listen to rising and falling stock percentages, mergers, and transactions. But it was necessary that he keep an ear to the ground. Responsibility and whatnot. It was an acquired tasted that he'd refined over the years. With the daily business put to rest, he and Pepper had settled themselves more comfortably on the couch, getting in all the quality time they could before the kid came home.
It wasn't long after that Tony's phone pinged with a notification from Karen, and his stomach dropped.
Peter has taken off his suit. Last recorded vitals indicate emotional distress (heart rate 120bpm). Last known location: the top of the Chrysler Building (405 Lexington Ave.)
He barely caught sight of Pepper's bewildered face as he sprinted for the door.
"Where are you going?" She called after him. He wrenched it open without turning to look back at her.
"It's Peter! I gotta go!"
It was all a blur. Running into his lab. Slapping an arc reactor to his chest. Feeling the nanotech suit build around him as he took to the sky. He weaved through buildings, thrusters burning at full power, with his heart pounding so loudly in his ears that he could barely hear the wind whistling.
The Chrysler Building, one of Manhattan's tallest structures instantly came into view when he leaped to the open air. Agonizingly slow minutes ticked by as he gradually grew close enough for his AI to make herself useful.
"FRIDAY! Gimme a magnified visual of the Chrysler Building's roof! Do you see Peter on it?"
Promptly, FRIDAY cropped and zoom in on the iconic conical roof. The spire tapered in layers to the needle and Tony's eyes searched frantically over the glittering sunlit metal.
There was no one.
He couldn't breathe.
But then, a small, subtle movement near the top caught his eye. If he'd blinked, he would've missed it.
"There appears to be someone sitting just below the needle," said FRIDAY. Tony's breath came out in a rush. His smooth flight path stuttered under the force of his sheer relief before he regained control again. "From this angle, I'm unable to discern their identity."
It was Peter. It had to be. If there was any fairness left in the world, he'd stay where he was until Tony could get him within the safety of his reach. And of course he would stay, because Peter would never… he couldn't… Tony would've noticed if things had gotten that bad for him.
In seconds, he was upon the building. The back of a figure came into view, obscured by the thick pole he rested against. Tilting his body, Tony fish-hooked around the peak clumsily and came to a jerking halt in front of Peter.
For a split second, they just starred at each other. Peter sat stripped down to his underwear with his spider suit folded and held on his lap with one arm. His web shooters encircled his wrists and a thin, shimmering line shot out of each one, connecting him to the roof on either side. He had given himself a fair bit of slack so he could move his arms freely. Spread out from where he sat, a thick layer of opaque webbing crept across the metal. Tony recognized it as one of the 576 web combinations that he'd installed: the webbing coated in aerogel. He'd designed it to protect him against heat. The kid had laughed at him before and said that he'd over done it. Who's laughing now?
He didn't look at all surprised to see Tony. The angry pinched expression that Peter wore was different from the one that Tony had become used to. Any time that Tony had seen the kid angry before, it was muddled with a measure of guilt or shame. The roiling fury that he saw flittering across his features made all the other instances pale in comparison. It crackled like static but was dampened by a profoundly wounded air. The hurt, deeply etched into the few lines of his young face, made Tony flinch in his armored encasement. He had the sudden intense desire to hunt down whoever had caused this, but he shook it off. First things first:
"Kid, what're you doing up here? Why're you out of your suit?" He spoke as calmly and gently as his still racing heart would allow him. It didn't seem to matter. Peter's bearing turned predictably cagey and defensive, and Tony was just so tired of this.
"I'm not hurt."
Tony let out a frustrated sigh. That was a step up from insisting that he was fine when he wasn't but only marginally so. He had to hand it to the kid, he picked up on his pet peeves quick.
"Karen said your heart rate was spiking…" he trailed off. He waited for Peter to take his prompt and explain the rest, but his expression became increasingly guarded. His mouth pulled into a defiantly silent frown. Tony pressed his eyes shut for a moment and drew a long breath. "That doesn't answer my question."
The hard look that Peter hit him with was miles apart from the boy he knew.
"Karen was bugging me."
The venom he shot was paralyzing, and Tony knew who it was directed at. If he were standing instead of hovering in the air, he might've staggered back a step. He wasn't an idiot. He knew that Karen was a middle… AI. She was the liaison. The buffer between himself and the kid while he was on patrol. He could read between the lines.
Peter had been avoiding him, but this was taking it to a whole new level. Certain protocols in his suit would ignore his request to be left alone if he was in some sort of danger. If he truly needed help, Karen would alert Tony without hesitation. Peter knew this. Climbing out of his suit, and endangering himself in the process, in a last-ditch attempt to reject Tony's help was…
Heat churned painfully in his stomach as he swallowed the insult. Pepper had said that this wasn't about him, but he thought - as his eyes flicked to the suit bundled in the kid's lap - that this may be one of the few instances when she was wrong.
"You know you can just mute her, right? Or take your mask off. You didn't need to strip."
The sarcastic bite in his voice rivaled the kid's, but the ensuing flinch that it caused made Tony instantly regret his tone. He was supposed to be the adult here. He had told Pepper that just days ago when he'd worried that his unchecked bitchiness had caused the kid to run off. As the adult, he was supposed to be above of anger when the kid did stupid shit. Admittedly, throwing a temper tantrum on top of a tower with only minimal safety features enabled really took the cake as far as stupid shit went. His priority right now really should be to get him down to a non-lethal height, preferably to their home. Humor usually did the trick. The kid was always more open to suggestion when Tony managed to get a few laughs from him.
"Did the siren song of a ridiculous claim to fame call to you?" His joke came out hard and metallic through his closed helmet. He would've lifted his face plate so the kid could be eased along with his teasing smirk. But while he was able to keep the anger out of his voice, he wasn't sure he could keep it off of his face. "The first person to sit on top of the Chrysler Building wearing nothing but skivvies. That's one for the Guinness Book of Records." Nothing. The Peter that he knew would've blushed and whined, but the demeanor of the Peter before him remained unchangingly stormy. And Tony, feeling well out of his depth, began to spiral. "That doesn't sound like you. To be honest, that sounds more like me. Well, the me of yesteryear. Past me wasn't too big on propriety. Shocker, I know. Past me also couldn't pass up a dare, and that's a bad combination-"
"I thought you weren't going to be Iron Man anymore."
Tony blinked, surprised by his accusatory tone. It rang with the sort of righteousness that accompanied calling someone out in a lie. While he had no idea what that was all about, the implication (coming from his own damn kid no less) that he was a liar did succeed in making his hackles rise.
"Well, I didn't suit up for a job," he snapped. "I just tend to get a bit antsy when my kid climbs up a 'certain death drop' sized building and then goes off the grid. Thought I'd check in."
The kid's face fell, washing away all traces of his temper. Along with it, Tony's heart drop.
What went wrong? He wanted to ask, but didn't because he had a feeling that it wouldn't be well received. Seems like nothing he did or said was ever well received.
'There's really no shame in it, kid.'
'I know.'
'Seriously, I've been going to therapy since my first encounter with aliens. It's really not a big deal.'
'I just don't want to go, Mr. Stark.'
'No one would think less of you if you went to a couple sessions.'
'How many times do I have to say 'no' before you to stop pushing me?'
Tony had long ago accepted his own inadequacy. Too many times, he had measured up short of what others needed him to be. It was humbling to be an incompetent hero to the world, but he could live with the disappointment of strangers. It was utterly devastating to be an incompetent father to his boy, and he wasn't sure if he could live with this failure. Something had to give. He felt like he was throwing water by the thimble-full on a house fire because he couldn't find buckets.
"You didn't have to come get me," Peter muttered with some bitterness. He looked around himself sadly, as though he were just realizing now what this all might look like to someone else. It made Tony want to both hug his stupidly ignorant kid and bang his own head against something hard repeatedly. Instead he felt a short and breathy, incredulous laugh being pulled from him.
"Yeah, I did, kid. Don't know if you got the memo, but I'm sorta responsible now for your wellbeing. I got the paperwork to prove it and everything."
He meant it as a joke based on truth, but the way that Peter eyed him skeptically made Tony's stomach sink. It wasn't that his mistrust was unwarranted (Tony had been waiting since the day they'd met for Peter to become disillusion with him), but he wondered what had been the tipping point. It couldn't have been this. Nothing he said was a lie. Maybe he would never find out. A cowardly part of him hoped that he never would.
But there were priorities here that he needed to consider. He reminded himself forcefully that his ki-, Peter was sitting, nearly naked, on a roof that was too high off of the ground for Tony's liking. That needed to be dealt with first. He swallowed around the lump in his throat.
"I'm not too keen on testing your natural sticking abilities against the effects of gravity," he reminded Peter and was pleased at how strong his voice sounded. "Get in the suit."
Peter frowned, because of course he wouldn't just do what he was told for once. He lifted one of his wrists as if to show off the web shooter resting there.
"I got my web shooters."
The kid had a lot of damn gall. Tony would give him that. He rolled his eyes (even though Peter couldn't see it) and repeated to himself, like a mantra, that he was above anger.
"Yeah, I see that," he ground out. "This still isn't a safe stunt to pull. Not unless you managed to unpack the parachute from your suit and stuff it up your-."
"Alright, alright. Chill."
The tiniest of quirks pulled at the corners of Peter's mouth. The sight of the small smile was enough to extinguish Tony's knee-jerk reaction at being told to chill. It was good to know that the mental image of floating down to earth like an upside-down V was enough to crack through the façade of the most determined of sour-pusses. Nothing beat a good old-fashioned ass joke. Tony allowed himself a brief moment of self-congratulation.
It was short lived as Peter moved to stand on the aerogel coated edge of the tiered roof. Tony's heart skipped as he quickly landed next to him. One hand held tight to the base of the tall needle, the other clamped on to Peter's shoulder as he wiggled his way back into his suit.
"Now, see, telling someone to 'chill' usually has the opposite effect," he informed him gruffly. Peter severed the webs binding him to the roof so he could pull his arms through the sleeves, and Tony's hand reflexively gripped tighter. Peter winced but didn't protest. "Lucky for you, I'm chill by nature. And I'm guessing that your patrol has been rough, so I'll let that one slide. But maybe you should think about dropping the attitude, kid."
"Sorry," he muttered, and for the first time in the years that he'd known him, Tony doubted his sincerity.
"Are you?"
He caught a glimpse of Peter's jaw clenching just before he pulled his mask over his face.
Well. Tony was having none of that. With the kid safely in his suit, Tony dropped his arm to his side.
"You know what? I think you're done for the day. The citizens of New York will have to get over their disappointment that you're turning in early."
Peter turned his head to look away. Tony was about to give him the old 'look at me when I'm talking to you', while feeling every bit like the dinosaur that he was becoming, when he noticed that the kid wasn't looking away from him. He was looking toward somewhere else.
Tony followed his line of sight. The most notable thing to draw his eye was the Empire State Building. That couldn't be what the kid was looking at. It wasn't new to him; he wasn't a tourist. He looked around at the area. Beyond it was Greenwich Village.
It all clicked.
He reached out his hand again and lightly shook Peter's stiff shoulder.
"C'mon, kid. Let's go home."
The shoulder under his hand grew stiff, but he didn't move. Tony knew what he was seeing in the distance: the donut ship that had been hovering over those streets. The destruction that had came with it. The beginning of the end. He shook his shoulder harder and finally, Peter turned away. He pulled himself quickly out of Tony's grasp, and without a word jumped from the roof.
Thwip.
Tony heard a web shoot out and he watched him go. Swinging in rising and falling arcs, he moved in the general direction towards their home. Tony stayed rooted where he was. The hard exterior of his suit hid the turmoil within it.
It had suddenly become indisputably clear that he had over stepped. He wasn't Peter's dad, and what's more, Peter had never asked for him to even try to be that person. He had projected himself into Peter's life despite his own reassurances early on that it would be wrong to try to pass himself off as the kid's parent. He seemed to have forgotten that somewhere in their time of living together.
It was all so evident now that Peter only needed him to provide a solution to a permanent error. He saw a lasting and determined hope in his eyes whenever he asked him for the millionth time to recount the events that had happened with Strange. That same determined hope was so endearing and uniquely Peter. It was one of his best qualities, but now, Tony wished he could bring himself to give up. Recognizing the end and knowing when to quit would save him from long and drawn out suffering.
Tony couldn't give him the solution that he wanted and so, Peter was pulling away. The kid seemed to have figured it out, finally and after years of disappointment: Tony wasn't all that people had cracked him up to be. It was just horrible timing that he was figuring this out at the exact moment when Tony desperately wanted him to stay. There was a clock winding down. Tony could feel it looming over him. He was frantically running from its shadow while trying to catch and keep his kid.
His effort might all be for nothing.
Tony watched the speck of red and blue finally disappear from his sight and his throat tightened. His son was pulling away and all Tony could do was watch him leave.