an: I spent a long time on this chapter, mainly because it is very MJ and Tony centric, and I had a hard time trying to come up with an interaction between them that felt real. I debated for a long time on posting this, but eventually figured I'd let you guys decide if you liked it or not. Big shout-out to Toni42 for giving me this idea (that I ended up modifying a bit) and to EVERYONE who has followed/favorited this story, you have no idea how much it motivates me to write more.
4. / The New York Post
It started with white block letters on the front page of the New York Post.
"Genius, Billionaire, Superhero... and Secret Dad?"
Behind the headline was a grainy photo of Tony and Peter leaving a restaurant, Tony's hand placed protectively on the kid's shoulder, while Peter's hand was covering his eyes in an attempt to block out the flashing cameras.
MJ was the first one to tell Peter. Actually, she didn't tell Peter so much as cryptically glare at him for the better part of a school day.
"Does MJ seem more annoyed than usual today?" Peter asked Ned, nervously furrowing his eyebrows as she stabbed a piece of lettuce with her fork, brought it to her mouth, and then stabbed another one, never breaking her icy deadlock with Peter throughout the whole process.
"I'm not annoyed. I'm trying to figure out whether you're actually dumb or just morally unsound," she says, still stabbing her lettuce and glaring from a table over.
Ned and Peter exchanged an uneasy glance.
"If this is about that comment I made earlier about Star Wars being better than Star Trek, I just meant that, in my own personal opinion...," he trailed off because MJ was giving him I look that screamed "for the love of God stop talking".
"No, you moron, I was talking about this," she said as a wad of paper came flying toward Peter's face.
The New York Post.
"You read this kind of stuff?" He asked, eyebrow raised.
"No. I tear it up and use it as bedding for my hamster. It's both therapeutic and functional."
Ned stared at MJ with a look that was both mildly intrigued and wholly terrified as Peter's eyes scanned over the front of the tabloid, widening as he read the headline.
"I thought it was bad enough that you were interning with him but at least I get that, it'll get you into MIT and basically anywhere you want to go, but—," her sentence was cut off by a loud squeal.
A loud squeal named Ned.
"Oh. My. God. Tony Stark's your dad?! Peter this is so cool!"
It took Peter a full second to come out of his daze before he was shaking his head and saying, "Ned, no, Tony Stark is not my dad. The press follows us sometimes when we go out, they're just looking for headlines."
Ned's face fell briefly before lighting up again.
"You and Tony Stark go out?! And there are paparazzi there? Peter you've reached the peak of coolness."
"Oh, you're right, it's so cool to be best friends with a man who was too busy defiling feminism and drinking away his daddy issues that he didn't even know his company was funding terrorism across the globe."
"He's not like that anymore," Peter argued, but MJ was having none of it.
"I don't care how many times he's saved the world. The world didn't need saving until he asked for a fight by broadcasting his suit of armor; all he's ever done is clean up his own messes. And he goes home at the end of the night and locks himself in his ivory tower while the rest of us wait to be attacked by aliens. Again."
Her attack on Tony left Peter feeling exposed and gutted, as if it were a direct attack on Peter himself. He wanted to argue with her, to refute everything even though some of her claims are valid, and it just adds to the chaos in his mind.
The sight of an emotionally unstable Peter and a visibly heated Michelle is enough for Ned to know that he needs to say something. Immediately.
"Michelle, you know, Tony and Peter are pretty close and, yea, he's probably done some shady things in the past but, I mean, St. Augustine was like the medieval equivalent of a frat boy and he's a saint now so maybe we should take it kind of easy on him," he rambled, desperate to break the tension.
"So what? He tells you he's changed and you just take his word for it? Were the tabloids right for once, is he really playing house with you now? Iron Man wasn't enough for him so he's going to try to be Iron Dad, indoctrinating some kid off the street to take up his mantle?"
Peter's eyes are red. Ned can tell, even though he's looking at the floor. Weirdly enough, though, are that MJ's eyes are red too, her cheeks pink with a simmering heat.
"He's not becoming my stand-in dad, he's just, we're just...," he stammers, biting his lip, "look I don't know how to explain it, and honestly, why do you even care? You don't know him, MJ."
"I know enough," she whispers, voice low. "Maybe I'm wrong about everything else. But don't you dare try to argue with me about this; I know he took a fifteen-year-old kid to some petty fight against a team of superheroes, superheroes that very well could've killed the kid. Then, as if he didn't learn his lesson, he let said fifteen-year-old take down an arms dealer, alone. Tell me, Peter, does that sound like something a good dad would do? Like something a good person would do?"
"Wait," Ned says. "Peter, you told her?"
But Peter's face has gone slack and his hands are quivering.
"No."
"Oh," Ned says, looking a little confused, until the realization hits him. "Oh."
"Michelle, how, uh, how do, how did you," Peter can't form words in his brain let alone an audible sentence.
"Don't insult my intelligence by asking me how I know. The point is that I do know and the bigger point is that Tony Stark risked your life to win an argument and I won't forgive him for that."
It made sense now. Peter's head stopped spinning for a moment.
"I know it sounds bad, and May was so mad at him for a while too, but he's not—the situation was a lot more complicated than that. Mr. Stark's a lot more complicated than that."
Actually, he thought, the two of you might have a lot in common, with the whole hiding-emotions-behind-sarcasm thing you do.
"It doesn't seem that complicated."
He didn't know why this bothered him so much, why he felt this overwhelming need for her to like him.
"I think you should give him a chance," he said, an idea forming. "I think you'd change your mind if you just met him. I'm going over for dinner to celebrate this new tech I helped him with, maybe you could... I mean, if you're not busy, uhm, come with?"
She cocks her head to the side, an incredulous laugh escaping her throat, "you think I want to go-," but she stops at the wounded look on his face.
"I just want you to meet him, and if you hate him after that, that's fine. Please?"
Her eyes rolled all the way to the back of her head, but after a beat she huffed, "fine."
"Peter, I hate Tony Stark too!" Ned exclaimed, lower lip pouted.
"Calm down Ned, you can come over with me this weekend. Tony's going to get an early copy of the new Jurassic Park."
"Awesome."
The lunch bell rang, and Michelle slung her shoulder bag across her body.
"Be at my house at 6:30, Parker."
He was at her house at 6:15, wondering why he'd felt the need to take a shower, change his clothes, and spray some on some of that cologne that Stark had given him.
"Kid, you smell like you just walked out of a gentleman's club circa 1970. Here, take this," grabbing one of several bottles from his own collection before scrunching his nose and dousing it on Peter. "Better."
He was still smiling at the memory when MJ knocked loudly on his window, nearly causing his head to hit the ceiling. He jumped out of his side of the car, running over to hers and opening the door.
"Think I couldn't handle my own door?" She said, eyes glinting in the waning light.
"No, of course not, May just said," MJ clapped her hand over his mouth.
"I was kidding. I know you're nervous because you ramble when you're nervous. Don't be."
He let out a nervous breath he'd been holding.
"If anything, Stark is the one who should be nervous."
He gulped, suddenly regretting the entire idea, but he put the car in drive and tried not to think about everything that could go wrong.
"Hey Pete," Tony greeted as he walked in the door, "and Pete's plus one."
"It's Michelle," she said coolly.
"She's a friend from school," Peter added, red seeping through his cheeks as Tony glanced between the two of them.
"Right," he said. Peter didn't come over for dinner very often, and it definitely wasn't a habit of his to bring a girl over.
"Well, kid, why don't you show your friend around, and I'm going to go check on the boss lady. Happy should have dinner finished in a few minutes."
Tony vanished up the stairs, looking for Pepper, and MJ whirled around to face Peter.
"You might as well give me the tour."
Peter weaved them through the facility, pointing out rooms as he guided her around, but she didn't care about the state-of-the-art robotics lab or the numerous training centers. She was much more interested in one of Peter's sweatshirts, slung over a chair in the shop, and a quilted blanket that could only have come from May Parker's apartment draped lazily on a couch. She also didn't fail to notice a new Spider-Man suit in one of the labs, clearly being updated and improved, or the newspaper and magazine clippings on the wall—united by a common theme.
They were all about Peter.
A smoke alarm ripped MJ from her observation, the blaring sound followed closely after by a loud string of expletives.
"Happy isn't the greatest cook," Peter explained with a grin, "I'm going to go make sure he's okay, but um, you can keep looking around. I'll be right back."
She wandered a few more halls before a pair of footsteps sounded behind her.
"Any fatalities?" She asked, turning around, but Peter wasn't the one standing there.
"Oh. You're not Peter."
"And you're not Pepper," he replied, following her gaze to the Spider-Man suit.
"It's a new model for one of the Avengers," he answered the silent question.
She eyed Peter's sweatshirt again.
"Peter's been helping you work on it?"
His eyes narrowed for a second, trying to gauge how much to give away.
"Yes. It's good engineering experience and the kid's a genius so it helps my guys too. I consider it a win-win."
"You can quit the BS;" she says, "I know there's no Stark internship."
Tony just rubbed his temples, "for a kid hell-bent on keeping a secret identity, he really is the worst at it."
"What is this, really? Helping him with a new suit, inviting him over for dinner, putting his picture up on the wall? Is this your twisted idea of atonement; does helping him now help you sleep at night for recruiting a kid to fight your battles, for leaving him alone when he could have died?"
"I'm not going to lie to you—mostly because, for a fifteen-year-old, you're oddly terrifying," he says, trying to fend off her biting accusations with feigned aloofness.
She crosses her arms over her chest, seeing right through him.
"Enough with the stalling."
"The short answer? Yes, all of this," he says, motioning to the suit, to Peter's things scattered about, "it does help me sleep at night."
"And the long answer?"
Tony sighed, running a hand through his graying hair. He didn't want to have this conversation with himself, let alone a stranger that looked at him like the only thing standing between Tony and certain death was a kid from Queens with a penchant for dressing up in red spandex.
Maybe it would do him some good to voice his demons.
Or maybe she'd just kill him and he could avoid his problems in the afterlife.
"I screwed up by taking him to Germany. Not because he couldn't handle it—that kid is one of the strongest of all of us—but because it wasn't his battle. He was perfectly content with being that 'Spider-guy from YouTube', helping out the little guy, until I took that away from him and told him he wanted more."
He wanted to stop, to keep it all in, but his hands were sweating now and that dull, fuzzy pain took over his chest. He needed to voice it—not for her, but for himself, for his own sanity.
"I lost sight of a lot of things in the fight with Cap, and maybe it was justified, and maybe it wasn't, but the one thing I'm sure of is that I pulled him into a world that he didn't need to be a part of yet."
Inhale; one, two three.
Exhale; one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
He gripped the sleeve of his shirt, twisted it in his hands, using the motion to rein himself in.
"I spent so much time pretending to be his parent, telling him when and how to use his powers, trying to mold him to me. But he's always been better than me. He showed me that when he turned down my offer to be an Avenger."
The trembling came in waves now, and he bit down on his bottom lip as he leaned against the wall, grounding himself.
"The long answer is that this is me doing the thing I should have done all along: accept Peter for who he is and to be there for him, supporting him in whatever capacity he needs, in whatever form that may take. For some ungodly reason the kid still stands by me, even though, at the end of the day, he deserves more than anything I have to give him. I'm just trying to be better, to be just a fraction of what he sees in me. That's what this is."
MJ had a feeling that Tony Stark wasn't accustomed to baring his soul like he had just done. She felt like an intruder, like she was eavesdropping on his confessional. He looked like a man in desperation, resolute to finish a mission in which he was licked from the start. His eyes were wet and beaten down, and she felt at a loss.
She stayed there for a few minutes longer, until his breathing steadied and the color showed through his cheeks again.
"I still need to find Pepper, but do you want me to walk you to the kitchen?" He said, as if the events of the last ten minutes hadn't happened.
"No, that's okay, I think I'll find my way back."
Michelle found Peter, and a few minutes later Tony and Pepper joined the kids and Happy at the countertop, eating store-bought pizza off of paper plates. He smiled and embarrassed Peter in front of MJ, all signs of his anxiety attack meticulously concealed, looking every bit the self-composed, unflappable billionaire genius that he was.
He was a remarkable showman.
When she was eerily quiet on the way home, a nervous Peter looked over at her.
"Do you still hate him?"
"He's made some big mistakes," she says, and his heart falls.
"But he cares about you a lot. And... I guess that's good enough for me. Besides," she said, a small smile creeping across her face, "everyone loves a good redemption story."