Chapter Text
“Now, we get to see something very special. We are on our way,” Stacy chimed as the elevator door closed, “to Mr. Stark’s personal lab!”
The elevator broke into excited chatter, but Ned looked at Peter, confused. “I thought you guys were working on classified stuff? How can we go in there?”
“Yeah, we are. I don’t know. Maybe Tony cleaned? He never cleans though.”
“They all had to sing massive NDAs.” MJ pointed out with a smirk. I heard some of them talking about it, they were mailed to their houses and had to be mailed back. Probably so they didn’t notice we didn’t have some.” She shrugged, turning away from the pair.
Well, that did make sense. The Avengers were being very liberal with their appearances and relationship with Peter, and even if that wasn’t the case, simply existing in the tower put you at risk of seeing something you weren’t supposed to.
The elevator let out a quiet ding; the volume was still thoughtfully lowered due to Peter’s presence, which had been implemented after a particularly bad day made Peter curl up on the floor of the elevator and boycott movement when the ding being slightly too loud sent him into sensory overload.
“Welcome to the personal lab of Mr. Stark. Peter, would you like to activate the lab?”
Well at least they made her ask first for the tour group.
“No, definitely not Friday!”
“As you wish, Peter.”
He breathed a sigh of relief. A lot of the robots and various equipment activated immediately whenever he or Tony stepped into the lab, but that included screens with very classified documents – NDAs or not, regular high schoolers shouldn’t have access to those – and some robots – he would never name names, but he did shoot a relieved glance at DumE – that tended to cause trouble, and several pieces of equipment that were extremely dangerous even with training. He’d rather his classmates survive this trip, at least if he could help it.
“Alright, Midtown! You can take a look around! Don’t touch anything and be very careful. I haven’t been in here before, but I’m sure if you have questions you can ask Peter!” Peter shot her a glare at that, but she just smirked back with great amusement. He would definitely have to get her back during the next intern prank war.
Luckily, most of his classmates were too busy staring in awe at the projects around them (and, he suspected, still a bit scared of doing anything to him after the Avengers’ demonstrations) so he figured he had at least a couple minutes of peace.
He wandered over to his designated workbench, which sat right across from Tony’s with a large bench joining the two spaces where they often collaborated. He smiled softly at the half formed robot that still sat on the bench from a couple days ago, a project they were both working on to help scan civilians for injuries as they were evacuated from disasters. It had been Peter’s idea, and Tony had beamed with pride when he suggested it, immediately gathering supplies to start it.
He picked up the large glass dome that they were using as a prototype tester as the face of the robot and held it up in one hand to keep it out of the way of the wires he started fidgeting with.
Ned came around to the other side of Peter. “Woah, what’s that? Is that something you’re working on with Mr. Stark?”
“Yeah, we’ve been having issues with the scanner though. I think something got damaged when we… were doing a test.” they didn’t know that it was actually because they had been eating at the work bench (despite how many times Pepper had begged them to actually take a break to eat their meals) and had started a bit of a food fight, sending crumbs and, admittedly, some sprays of soda, into the robot in the fray.
“What is it?”
Peter was surprised to find that it was MJ looking down at it this time, intrigue subtly crossing her face.
“Oh, it- it’s nothing. It’s just a little robot thing we were making. It’s still just a concept so it’s not working or anything yet, but we want it to be able to scan civilians for injuries during disasters and Avengers fights and stuff like that,” Peter stammered, suddenly losing all confidence in his idea.
MJ gave him a slight smile. “Cool.”
“No, not cool!”
Peter felt a rough shove to the shoulder of the arm he was holding the glass head cover with, making him drop it. The glass shattered into several shards on the metal table.
Peter turned around, unsurprised to find Flash glaring at him. “Come on, dude. Just give it up. I work here, get over it. Plus, this isn’t just my project, it’s Tony’s too and now we have to get a new face.
“No! No you can’t do this!” The anger on Flash’s face, for a moment, revealed genuine anguish. Peter just stared back. What the hell? He had never seen Flash like this before, no matter how many years the guy had been picking on him. He almost felt… sorry for him?
“You don’t get to pretend that this is my fault! I saw you with Black Widow, you can fight! You probably know when I’m coming! You choose to let me! Why don’t you ever fight back? Why do you just let me hit you if you know you can beat me? Why do you get to work here and know the Avengers and get to call Mr. Stark ‘Tony’ and do all these projects?”
Flash was getting closer and closer, voice raising to a full shout, shoving him back a few times. When Peter was a few inches from the table, Flash’s voice starting to crack, he pushed Peter harder, who stumbled back in surprise. This confrontation was truly startling, to the point where Peter couldn’t even focus on how weak he was supposed to be, letting himself get pushed back. He cringed a bit, though, when he felt his arm slam down right on a large shard of glass, but he simply slid his arm to hide it behind his back and remained in shocked silence as Flash continued.
“You are nothing special, what gives you the right! How did you do it? How did you do it and I couldn’t? And why do you just let me pick on you?! Fight back! I said fight!” flash pushed him again, tears glinting in his eyes, “back!”
“...Flash?” Peter whispered. “What…”
“You have everything and you let me bully you and now everyone knows you have more than me and just let me bully you and now I look pathetic!” he shouted again, voice hoarse.
Peter kept his voice gentle, afraid this was something deeper than it appeared to be. “I’m not going to fight you Flash. I know you haven’t been nice to me, but if I don’t let you go after me, you’ll go after someone else. So, I let you go after me because I could handle it.”
“No! Stop doing that! Stop pretending to be such a righteous, amazing person! You are pathetic! You have to be! There has to be something wrong with you!”
“I’d beg to differ.” Everyone, including Flash whose mouth was open to continue shouting, froze at the familiar voice.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the kid, except his obnoxiously unhealthy selflessness which has given me all of these, though I still gotta admire it.” Everyone turned and stared at Tony Freaking Stark as he gestured to his grey hairs with a grin.
“You, however, Eugene. You have a lot to work on.”
Flash stared at the man, eyes wide and rimmed with red from barely held back tears.
“Clearly theres… something going on here,” he waved a hand at the boy “that you need to work through, and I’m sure Peter wishes you the best in that because he’s just that good of a kid, but that is not an excuse to pick on people, especially Peter.”
Tony moved past the frozen Eugene and came to stand between him and Peter, gesturing towards his arm.
“Let me see.”
“It’s fine, Tony. It’s nothing.”
Tony looked down his nose with a stern gaze at Peter until he sighed and held his arm out to Tony.
“Jeez kid. We really gotta childproof this lab.”
“Shut up.”
The classmates he could see around them shot him terrified glances of did he seriously just tell Tony Stark to shut up, but Tony just grinned back at him, ruffling his hair.
Tony gently turned his arm over, taking a better look at the large shard of glass sticking out of his arm. There was blood pooling on the table and dripping down his arm, enough to make a nearby boy pale, and another girl looked just about ready to puke.
“Hm, do you think you need to go to Bruce?”
“I would love to go talk to Mr. Banner, but this is fine, really.” Peter responded, voice low. Tony didn’t look terribly convinced, but before he could stop him, Peter reached up and quickly yanked the glass out of his arm.
“Fucking Christ Peter! You have got to stop doing that!”
Peter just shrugged and grabbed a box of gauze from a drawer under the bench – they had learned to keep roughly twenty first aid kits spread throughout the lab after many similar incidents – and wrapped his arm up tightly.
“See! It’s fine. Chill out, Tony.”
“Fine, but you do that again and I’m reducing your lab time.”
Peter grumbled back under his breath something about “unfair” but Tony couldn’t catch the rest of it.
“Alright, now that that’s taken care of,” Tony turned back towards the class, arm around Peter’s shoulder, “now to deal with you.” He looked pointedly at Flash, who had managed to make himself look slightly more put together, but was still obviously mid-Avengers-driven-crisis.
“Tony, no. It’s fine.” Peter hissed at his mentor.
“No, it’s not. I don’t know why you think it’s okay to bully a smart, kind, selfless kid, maybe it’s because you know he’s better than you in every way and you're jealous or something, but it’s not okay. You can wait outside the tower with security until the class is finished. Now, Peter is very nice so for his sake, I won’t blacklist you from every college in the world that is any more than decent, since the kid believes in redemption, but you will never be allowed back into any buildings I own or am at all involved in, much less ever be hired here. You can start your ‘journey of self improvement’ away from me and my kid, and you can start it by leaving him alone. Capiche?”
Flash opened his mouth but his voice was clearly lost to him, just nodding his head weakly and letting himself get let out of the room by a security guard.
“Okay, now that that kid is gone,” Tony exclaimed, squeezing Peter’s shoulder and pulling him closer to his side, “you all get a special Iron Man Q&A, so ask away.”
The room stayed staring at him for another moment, fear trembling beneath the surface throughout the group, but eventually a hand rose tentatively. Tony nodded at them.
“Did you just call Peter your kid?”
Peter immediately froze, feeling his face go bright red. Tony had referred to him as his kid sometimes, and Peter even called him Dad at times when they were alone, but he didn’t know how to explain that relationship to other people.
“Yes, I did. While not technically – and by that I mean biologically or legally – my kid, we have a bit of a father-son relationship and I do see him as my kid. I consider myself lucky to have that relationship with such an incredible kid.”
Peter was still bright red, but a smile had grown on his face and he let himself lean into Tony a little more.
There was a quiet moment as everyone processed the relationship before them, until another shaky hand raised.
“Do you both really train with Black Widow?”
Tony chuckled. “Wow, you got to see Nat train?”
“Yeah, she and Mr. Rogers decided they needed me to do a demonstration with them.” Peter grumbled.
“Okay, well, then you saw. Peter does in fact train with the Avengers, as do I, though I really don’t like it very much, I’m quite lazy.” he joked, waving a hand. “But Peter, here, is great with his training. Helps us feel better that he can take care of himself. Anyways, does anyone else have any Iron Man or Stark Industries questions? Don’t be scared, I don’t bite.”
The group spent the rest of the time with Tony, and sometimes Ned, MJ, and Peter – when the questions applied to them and Tony encouraged them – answering questions from the class, eventually falling into a comfortable air as they made jokes and got into more silly or passionate questions mixed in with the scientific questions. By the time the class left, the trio staying back with Tony for a previously arranged movie night, he noticed that his classmates weren’t staring or whispering anymore, simply passing him with nods of respect or friendly smiles that they used to avoid out of fear of Flash or unfamiliarity with Peter.
“So, was the trip as bad as you expected?” Tony teased, arm still around him.
“No, I suppose not,” Peter smiled, leaning back into Tony’s side.