This will be a lengthy fic! Expect plenty of hurt/comfort - lots of sweet scenes sprinkled throughout a lot of angst. This is an eventual Iron Dad fic, but Tony takes a while figuring things out. It's just as much a story about Tony figuring out how to be a good dad as it is a story about Peter overcoming a troubled, violent past.

Enjoy!

The boy lying in the creek bed was not dead. That could soon change, if he remained there much longer. The shallow rivulets which streamed around him carried away much of his body warmth. Cold, numb fingers twitched as the boy sank deeper into unconsciousness, to the sound of cicadas screaming in the trees around him. There was an urgency in their song. But the boy slept on.

When he was little, he would do silly things to make people laugh, like hop into the shower fully clothed. "I'm doing my laundry, too!" He wanted to be helpful, and he wanted to make them smile. And they would. They would shriek with laughter and swat at him playfully.

"Peter! You silly boy! Get out of there. You're soaked!"

Peter. That was him. Yes, his name was Peter.

Peter could feel the cold water trickle down his face, soaking into his clothes, weighing him down like a hug. He smiled.

"Get out! Peter, get out!"

Water pooled and tickled his nostrils. He snorted, coughed, and a blinding pain shot through his side, turning the sunny, pleasant bathroom white-hot. His vision became an overexposed photograph burning into his skull. He coughed and sputtered again and tried to sit up. Hard rocks shifted beneath his palms.

Wait. That wasn't right. Where was he?

Peter rose to all fours, crawling and swaying like a sad imitation of a dying horse. He forced his eyes open a sliver, expecting the bright light again, but it was soothingly dark.

He was outside and it was nighttime. Noises filtered through his water-logged ears and his sluggish brain. The growing hum of summer night noises pressed all around him, knocking on his cranium like the worst alarm clock ever invented. He took a ragged breath and tried to stand, but the world tipped precariously around him. So he sat right into a shallow eddy of water flowing through the gravel.

Peter took slow breaths and tried not to groan at the pain. He knew now that he should be quiet, though he couldn't remember why. He felt a growing sense of unease, and it pressed him to silence.

He took quiet stock of what he knew. He was in a creek bed. It was nighttime. It was summer. He knew it was summer because of the deafening chorus of insects, frogs, and bats all around him. This was not a fact plucked confidently from a mind that remembered the calendar date. Peter had no idea what month it was.

"Well, crap." His voice rasped quietly. He tested his voice again, just to hear himself. Just to hear something familiar in a frightening world that was suddenly very unfamiliar.

"Where am I?"

The pain in his head, which had started as a polite, tapping throb was now an impatient stabbing. Stooped over, not quite upright, but fortunately no longer lying in the creek, Peter took some tentative steps.

He had no idea where he was. He had no idea where he had come from. And to be honest, he was pretty shaky on who he even was. His name was Peter. That was what the laughing, joyful person had called him in his dream. Or maybe it was a memory?

"Peter," he tested the name on his tongue. It was as good as any other option. And it did seem to tickle bits of his brain with a light feather touch of awareness. Something close to recognition. "Peter." He whispered again, ever mindful of the urge to be quiet and inconspicuous.

"Come on, Peter," he spoke to himself in a rallying voice. "Where are you? Why are you here?"

The creek bed ran through little rolling hills and sparsely wooded valleys all around him. The stars were bright, but the moon was just a Cheshire cat's grin, smiling ominously down at the lost boy. It looked like he was in the middle of nowhere.

"No," he whispered to himself, "Not exactly the middle of nowhere." There was a definite hum of vehicles in the distance. He tried to isolate the sound. There was a road, several miles ahead of him. Through the trees. It was not a busy road. But he caught the sound of an occasional passing car.

With a bit of direction to his presently unmoored life, Peter started walking toward that humming road. It was slow, uncomfortable progress. His whole body hurt, and his clothes clung wetly. He felt muddy water slowly drip off him with every step, but he soon became aware of another, sticky trickle along his neck.

Peter reached up and traced the sticky path of what must certainly be blood, and his fingers landed on a hard plastic casing tangled into his hair at the nape of his neck. No, not tangled, embedded. He ripped it out, feeling the pinch of pain where it released his skin, and palmed the little container. It was a clear plastic vial of some sort, no bigger than his thumbnail with sharp, needle-like barbs.

Peter glanced down at himself in the thin moonglow, searching for a pocket to save the strange little case. He stared down at a ragged, and torn gray jumpsuit. There was blood on it. His. And maybe someone else's?

There were lots of pockets on the jumpsuit to choose from, at least. He patted them down. They were all empty. A patch on the chest pocket caught his eye. He stared at the black, six-tentacled skull. That prickled his brain a bit, too.

"Hydra," he murmured to himself, feeling a wave of nausea roll his stomach and snatch the breath from his lungs.

And then a different, prickly feeling overcame him, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. Someone was in the shadowy trees watching him. Perhaps, on a different day, Peter would have stood his ground and fought. But on this night, awash as he was in disorientation and pain, Peter fled.