A/N: This centers more around Tony missing his mom than Howard Stark's A+ parenting. It was kinda hard to write, so feedback would be appreciated x

When his phone rings he considers, for at least two heartbeats, ignoring the call. It's F.R.I.D.A.Y. who ends up answering the phone for him with only a slightly judgmental jab in his direction. Most of all his A.I. sounds worried, though, and maybe a little helpless. He should stop trying to program himself friends, he thinks, they're still just ones and zeros not people.

It hits him how much he misses J.A.R.V.I.S. and the thought makes his mind spin more and more and more until it stumbles and screeches to a halt at Pepper's voice.

"Tony? Are you there?" Her concerned voice echoes through the speakers in the cold lab and he's not sure how he feels about it. He's not sure whether he wants to be alone or wants to be held, whether he wants to break down or soldier on.

He's tired of existing. Just tired.

"Physically?" he asks, trying to gather even an ounce of normalcy in his voice, "I'd say that's an affirmative."

There's a sigh on the other end of the line and he hears shuffling. She's probably in her hotel room, getting ready for bed since it's night on her side of the world.

Tony pictures her with her back propped up against the headboard, dressed in one of his shirts that hangs loosely around her shoulders, hair hanging loosely around her make-up-free face. When he concentrates he swears he can smell the faint smell of her moisturizer.

"How are you doing?"

He thinks about the question for a bit.

He has slept a total of two hours last night and has been up since 6, trying to get some work done in the lab, which he hasn't. Instead he has been sitting in the same spot for almost three hours now, mind going in circles, heart beating too fast, throat a little too tight and his thoughts have wandered to the inconspicuous cabinet in the living room a little too often.

"I've been better, I've been worse," he ends up saying, leaning back until he's lying down flat on one of Peter's blankets that the boy has taken to wrapping around his body whenever he has been in the lab for the past two days. Eyes closed, he tries to focus on how the soft fibers feel on his rough hands because focusing on that pushes his self-destructive needs a little further out of reach. It might just be far enough.

"Maybe this was a bad idea. Do you want me to come back? I can get the –"

"Pepper," he interrupts her gently, "don't. It's okay. I'll be okay. I mean –" He screwes his eyes shut and scrunches his nose when he feels the telling tickle in the tip of it. He is not going to cry. "I shouldn't be such a baby about this."

Stark men are made of iron.

He's weak. He has always been weak. A shame to the Stark name. A failure. A misstep. A diss-

"You're not being a baby about anything, you're grieving. You're allowed to grieve." When Pepper says it, he's almost inclined to believe her, simply because she's the smartest woman he knows and she's usually right about everything. Still, she doesn't get it either.

"I've been grieving for almost thirty years," he snaps, wincing inwardly at how harsh his voice comes out but too messed up to take it back, "I should be over it. It's – it's been ages, Pep, why does – why does it still hurt so much?" At the end of the sentence is voice isn't much more than a whisper until it breaks and deafening silence takes its place.

Stop crying, Anthony, it was just a stupid bot. It wasn't even smart, just a dummy. No one is going to miss it.

Once again Pepper is his lifeline in a hopeless situation, pulling him from the deadly vortex that is the darkness of his mind with a few well-placed words.

"You haven't ever really dealt with your grief, Tony," she tells him. "You'll get through this, you're strong and once you've made? You'll be that much stronger."

And, rationally, he knows that he'll probably survive this, he does, but feeling like this makes him wish that he could continue not dealing with it for the rest of his life. It hurts. Whatever Pepper says, he's not strong and he won't ever get through this. How could he when his heart feels like a single open wound that just keeps getting infected?

"Do you want me to come home?"

Tony shakes his head. He regrets the motion as soon as his head starts spinning and when he opens his eyes his vision is blurry. Huh, seems like he's crying after all.

"Tony?"

"Yeah," he rasps, "no. Finish your trip and then come home. I'll – I will be fine." Somehow.

There's a pause and he wonders whether she is going to hop into the private airplane to come back anyway. It's something he would do in her position. But Pepper isn't as impulsive and she trusts him a lot more than he does himself. So she just sighs an okay and it goes quiet between them, her even breathing the only sign that the call is still connected.

It's calmingly familiar and he matches his breathing to hers until their in synch. He feels a little less alone, a little more hopeful that he just might make it through the day after all.

"I've heard Peter made you make him hot chocolate," says Pepper eventually, her voice cutting through the silence gently.

(He knows what she's trying to do. He plays along anyway.)

"Wha –" Tony sits up, eyes wide, looking scandalized and it's a welcome change to the painful lethargy he has been feeling all day, "The menace told you about that?"

"Oh, he told me alright. He sent me pictures, too," she teases, her grin evident in her tired voice, "Think I can get one for Christmas, too?"

I'm here, it's going to be okay.

"Traitor," he mumbles but it's missing any real heat. The thought of Peter and Pepper and hot chocolate on Christmas Eve makes his heart melt and his head light. "But I think we can have that arranged."

I know. I love you.

"When's he coming over again?"

A genuine smile spreads on his lips, faint as it may be. "Wednesday, probably. Still gotta talk to May about presents. Oh, by the way, we're going to Queens on Christmas Day, May's cooking."

Pepper laughs and Tony feels a weight being lifted from his chest as they continue to chat. Breathing becomes easier.

Thankyouthankyouthankyou

A knock on the door of his lab pulls him out of his thoughts.

Tony groans when he moves his head, joints cracking and creaking from spending too long sitting at his desk, hunched over blueprints that have long since become nothing more than a blurry mess of blue and white in front of his eyes. He's dead on his feet at this point and the calm he has felt after talking to Pepper has evaporated somewhere during the third hour.

He's desperately craving a drink and the only reason he hasn't gotten one yet is probably due to the fact that he just refuses to get up in general. Not for food, not for tools, not for drinks, not for anything. It might seem a little radical but he doesn't trust himself. If he's too weak to move, he's too weak to get drunk. Easy logic, nice plan.

What is, however, not part of his plan is the bright, teenaged Spiderling waving at him through the glass panel with a smile too big for Tony's migraine.

The billionaire cocks his head to the side as he looks at his mentee, thoughts a little sluggish and slow.

"F.R.I.D.A.Y.," he asks, "Is Peter outside the lab?"

In the time his A.I. needs to answer, he has almost convinced himself that the teenager he's seeing is nothing more than a figment of his imagination. When she confirms it, a little belatedly, that just confuses him more.

"Why is he knocking? Has he forgotten his PIN?" he wants to know, eyes never leaving the kid who's bouncing on the balls of his feet as energetic as usual. A thought hits him and makes him sit up straighter. "Is he hurt?"

"My preliminary checks have shown no signs of outer injuries." A pause. "Mister Parker would also like me to inform you that he has not forgotten his PIN but, I quote, is just being nice by not bursting in."

Good. That's good. That's at least enough to not fall into panic quite yet. Would've been a shame, after he made it to almost 4 pm without falling apart.

Peter knocks again, inexplicably still smiling, and, upon not coming up with a good enough reason to decline he tells F.R.I.D.A.Y. to open the door to let him in.

The second the kid has moved over the doorstep he realizes that that was probably only half of the reason. The other half of the reason, the more important part of why Peter Parker is in his workshop today of all days, is that Tony genuinely enjoys his company. It calms him, gives him something to focus on that is not his own anxiety.

He's still tired, though, and still sad and angry and he's still craving a drink. With Peter here, though, other emotions rise to the top – worry and fear. Worry about the kid's wellbeing and fear for pushing him away when he's like this. Peter knows him, knows more than one part of him, sure, but he's never seen him on the 16th and he can't help the part of him that is screaming at him to get as far away from the kid as possible.

As happens so very often when the teenager is concerned, though, the urge to protect and take care cancels out his self-doubt.

"What are you doing here, kid?" he asks him when Peter's comes to a stand a few feet away from him, giving him an once-over.

Tony can only imagine what he must look like right now. Hair unkempt, clothes rumpled and backs under his, probably puffy, eyes.

Somehow the kid looks past all that and smiles at him, that shy tentative Peter Parker smile that he loves so much. "Uh, I wanted to, uh, to ask you, uh, if – if you want to have a snowball fight."

The billionaire blinks.

Once, twice, three times. Then he rubs his eyes, shakes his head and gives himself a pinch in the bicep. When he opens his eyes again, Peter is still standing there in front of him, patiently waiting for an answer.

"There's no snow outside," he states finally because he's not sure what else he's supposed to say. He's not working on full capacity and if the request was a weird new code for something else than he doesn't get it.

"I, uh, I know that," Peter acknowledges with a timid nod, hands fidgeting with the sleeves of his favorite hoodie, a behavior he usually exhibits when he's nervous. "But, see, it was supposed to snow last night, ya know?"

He heard that forecast but he's still no closer to figuring out where the hell Peter is going with this and his head is starting to throb again. "So?" he probes, rubbing his temple with firm, cold fingers, trying to sound as calmly and patiently as possible.

Apparently he does miss some kind of code that the kid wants him to get because he sighs and his shoulders slump slightly. "I, uh," he sighs as he tries to explain, "I thought you could use the distraction because you seemed a little, uh, a little off the past few days and I thought a snowball fight would be perfect to take your mind of – well, everything, I guess. And then it didn't snow like it was supposed to and I still wanted to help but I didn't know how and, uh, I might've panicked but – uh, yeah, I think I just wanted to say that I'm here if you need a distraction from," he waves his hand in the air, "this."

As if that just clears up anything at all.

"Did Pepper set you up to this," he frowns, "Because you really don't have to be here. You said you wanted to spend the weekend with May." Please stay.

The kid looks adorably affronted at the suggestion, making the tiniest of smiles curl on Tony's lips that he tries to bite back. "No, she didn't. I'm here because I want to be here and Aunt May is having friends over so, really, you'd be doing me a favor if you took me in until they're gone."

He's gotta hand it to the kid – he's smart. He knows exactly which buttons to push to make it look as if he's actually the one needing Tony because he has realized early on that Tony Stark does everything in his power not to accept the help he's being offered. This way? Tony's helping Peter and there's nothing that could ever keep him from helping out his kid. Not grief, not insomnia, not even his own messed up mind.

He's still pressing index and middle finger of his left hand to his left temple because even though Peter's here and he feels his mind and body slowly relax at the concept of not being alone, his head still feels like it's going to crack open any second.

"So," he says, grimacing slightly at the pain that shoots through the side of his head at the movement, "Think we can find a way to have a snowball fight without snow?"

Peter's answering grin lights up the whole room and his words render Tony speechless. "Of course we can. You're Tony Stark, there's nothing you can't do."

Their constructed arena is pretty damn improvised.

They empty out one of the gyms and install a simplified obstacle course that leaves plenty of options to hide behind and sneak up on each other. There are a few open spaces, every hard surface is equipped with bumpers to cushion potential falls and run-ins and the softballs that are going to be serving as their missiles are neatly stacked on either side of the room.

It looks like a very unceremonious laser tag hall but it should serve its purpose.

They're both standing in the doorway, admiring their handiwork. Well, Peter is admiring their work and Tony is looking for things he might've missed that he can improve but he keeps getting distracted by the sheer happiness in the kid's eyes. It's enough to dim down his headache into something more bearable.

That's when it hits him what's been missing and despite how awful this day has started out, he starts grinning. "You know what would make this even more awesome?"

"There's literally nothing more awesome than this, Mister Stark," the teenager tells him matter-of-factly because that's just how damn pure he is and it only makes the hole in Tony's heart ache a little bit more, a good pain. An 'I'm sad but I'm not alone so I might going to be okay' kind of pain that hurts so bittersweetly because he's leaving something in his past to embrace his future.

"Not even," he stops for a dramatic pause and drops his voice to a whisper as if he's letting him in on a life-changing secret, "snow?"

His eyes turn impossibly bigger until Tony is sure if they widened anymore they would definitely pop out of his head.

"I might have something lying around that could be used as artificial snow."

"You have what?" He all but yells, "why?!"

"Kind of a long story," the billionaire waves off, "Come on, let's get the snow so I can start destroying you in it."

"Oh, you're on."

They end up playing for two hours.

Two hours in which Peter is using every trick up his enhanced sleeve to get the better of his mentor who, in turn turns to F.R.I.D.A.Y. more often than not to make it more difficult for the teenage superhero to crawl up the walls and to prove that he has a few tricks up his genius sleeves, too.

Two hours of running around and making a mess and tripping on the slippery floor and throwing insults at each other.

Two hours in which Tony's heart is light with the absolute certainty that his kid is having a good time and there's simply no room for sadness.

Two hours in which Tony doesn't think about his mother once.

Two hours that end up making him laugh harder and louder than he has in weeks – full body-shaking laughter where he has to bend forward, hands resting on his knees to catch his breath because Peter is so unbelievable pure even in his attempt at mockery.

He has to agree with Peter, this truly is the most awesome thing in the entire galaxy and when the kid slumps into his side tiredly after all is said and done and just curls up, head resting on his shoulder, the only emotion Tony is able to discern from the mess of hysterical goo in his chest is fondness.

Oh, and love. Unconditional, cavity-inducingly sweet love for the teenager in his arms. It's so colossally powerful and raw that it leaves him speechless not because he didn't know before but because he has had no idea of the magnitude of the feeling before.

So he does what his dad never did and tells Peter.

A little breathless, a little awkward, a little emotionally stunted but honest and sincere and he hopes the teenager understands what it means.

"I love you, too, Mister Stark," the kid mumbles into his side drowsily, "I think your parents would be proud of you, you know? You're doing a pretty good job taking care of me."

Oh Peter.

God damn Peter freaking Parker, and his ability to leave Tony speechless.

"Oh yeah?" he croaks out, "Thank you. I'm very proud of you, too." And then, because it feels right to share and because it's the truth, he adds, "My mum would have loved you."

"I know," he hears him grin, "'S 'cause 'm awesome."

You really are, kid.