Chapter Text
Going back to school was weird.
The first day back, Peter was basically a celebrity. Everyone kept asking about his mysterious illness (which absolutely no one believed was real), and if he knew what had happened to Mr. Grace. Because of course they realized Peter and Mr. Grace’s disappearance might be related, and they wouldn’t budge no matter how many times he told them it was just a coincidence.
After a week they had mostly calmed down, though Flash kept shooting him accusing looks, as if he was the reason his favorite teacher was gone. And God, the sub was so boring. To be fair, she was probably fine, but she had some very big shoes to fill, and sadly she did not.
He missed Grace. The man had to stay behind to deal with the fallout of SHIELD’s fall, something Carl told him would probably take a very long time. The chances of Grace being able to go back to teaching were very very low. Carl sounded legitimately sad when he had said it, something Peter empathized with greatly. That was heartbreaking to hear.
Probably the worst part was the thing with Tony.
On the one hand, Peter felt a little betrayed. The man hadn’t been who he thought he was. While he knew he used to build weapons, it was more of a vague, abstract idea of something that happened before he was even bored. It had been a bad thing, but he stopped, and now he was a hero.
Project Insight had forced him to confront the idea. Mr. Stark had been a weapons manufacturer, and the only reason he stopped was because they got into the wrong hands. As soon as he felt that he had a good grasp on who to give them to, he went right back to making weapons. And that was without factoring in his betrayal.
Peter liked to think he had become pretty close to Grace in the weeks since he found out about Spider-Man, but it was still only a few weeks. And yet he still knew there was nothing Grace would like less than for someone to build a bomb in his name. Even back when he was still only his teacher, he could have guessed. But Tony, after four years of dating, hadn’t. After knowing Grace had sacrificed everything to save the world, after reconnecting and seeing how proud he was of the Taskforce’s way of handling things, he hadn’t.
Hadn’t known or hadn’t cared?
Did that change anything?
Peter liked Mr. Stark. He thought he was fun to be around, and a good mentor, and his work with the Avengers was very important, but he could no longer see him as an infallible hero. Every time he thought about him, all he could see was the launch of the Hail Mary. He had been a little kid, he didn’t understand what it meant, but he still remembered Uncle Ben and Aunt May, crying while looking at the TV. It was the only time he’d ever seen Uncle Ben cry. He said that his tears were the least the astronauts giving their lives to ensure Peter had a future deserved.
The astronauts had given their lives for the world. Even now, still alive and back on Earth, Grace continued to give his life for the world. He had to quit teaching, the thing he loved doing, to take care of the Taskforce, because the world would fall apart without him.
And Tony had been the one to push him into that position. Push him to suicide.
That was far more tangible than ‘used to make weapons before he was born’. It shouldn’t feel as bad as it did. Making weapons was, objectively, worse than hurting Grace’s feelings. But it did. He wasn’t proud of feeling that way, but he was. He explained it to himself as the tangibility, the fact that he knew Grace meant he could see the direct consequences. That was just the way human brains worked, he rationalized.
If Grace had started teaching a different school, or if he never found out he was Spider-Man, would Peter be as horrified as he was by Project Insight? It would have just been another vague, unspecific Bad Thing, he wouldn’t have gotten the gravity of it. He would have chalked it up to ‘good intentions, bad execution’ and left it at that. He would have never thought to re-examine his opinion of Mr. Stark as a mentor, as a hero.
One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.
He didn’t want to be like that. He believed that every life was equal, that they all had value just by the virtue of being alive. He didn’t want to be one of those heroes who got so big they stopped being able to see the little person.
He didn’t want to be an Avenger.
Not that the Avengers were bad, or they weren’t needed, but… They dealt with cosmic threats. They couldn’t stop to think about the old lady who died because she couldn’t afford her medicine, or the kid who died when one of the un-detonated bombs in Laos was jostled too much and blew up. He wanted to fix the little things, the problems that fell through the cracks because they weren’t urgent or new, because they were deemed an acceptable compromise, because they weren’t easy to punch in the face.
He grabbed his phone, scrolling through his contacts until he found who he was looking for.
Peter knew what kind of hero he wanted to be.
The Taskforce had an office in New York. Who knew? Not Peter, that’s for sure. It sure would have made things easier.
“We actually only just got this location” Grace was explaining as they walked through the still-being-constructed office building “We thought that maybe we should diversify and expand a little, fill in all the holes SHIELD left behind. It’s gonna be a very busy few years, let me tell you. I am so glad none of the Avengers turned out to be secretly HYDRA, that would have been a PR disaster, and Stratt already has too much on her plate as it is.”
“What are you working on?” Peter asked, dodging a pane of (very thick, probably bulletproof) glass being carried by two burly men.
“What aren’t we working on?” Grace snorted “We’re still finding HYDRA cells trying to maintain whatever control they still have. There’s a famine in Yemen which of course only got worse after the funding cuts to humanitarian aid, because we wouldn’t want a right-wing government to try to help other people, would we? And, oh, yeah, Loki escaped Asgardian prison so that might become a problem I guess. So, pretty slow week. At least we finished decontaminating the Potomac.”
Peter smiled “You decontaminated the Potomac?”
“Astrophage residue’s dangerous and we didn’t block the construction of a data center for nothing, did we?”
They finally arrived at an office that was a little more built than the rest. There was a desk and a computer, at least. The nameplate read ‘Stratt’, but Grace sat as if it was his.
“So, what’d you need the Taskforce for?”
“I want to help.”
Grace smiled “You don’t have to”
“I know. I want to anyway”
Grace told him that, normally, the Taskforce would never take a minor, but since he had superpowers and experience as a hero, they could do a sort of internship. Twice a week, after school, he would swing by the newly opened New York office and help Grace out with whatever was needed. In the meantime, he would learn ways of helping other than ‘punch really hard’. One time, he was treated to a rather spectacular screaming match between Grace and a UN representative who had decided that letting Cuba starve under the continued US blockade was acceptable. That had been really fun, especially since that weekend they got in a jet, and later a boat, and broke the blockade themselves. It had been difficult to explain the tan in school, but worth it.
One day, three weeks after Project Insight went down, Grace got a call in the middle of teaching Peter about space bacteria. He looked at the caller’s number, frowned, and picked up.
“Yes?” He said “Oh. Now? Okay, yeah. Yeah, I’ll be there. Thank you.”
“Everything okay?”
Grace started putting his papers away “Stark woke up.”
“Oh. Are you going to visit him?”
“Yeah. Wanna come?”
Peter swallowed. He might be angry at Mr. Stark, but he was also deeply, profoundly worried. “Please.”
“Of course. I’m sure he’ll be happy to see you.”
“You fucking idiot!”
Peter had never heard Grace curse, but it was the first thing that came out of his mouth when they saw Tony laying on his hospital bed.
“What a warm welcome” Tony’s voice was hoarse, but steady. “We did it, right?”
“Yeah, we did. Only you decided to blow up instead of waiting thirty more seconds, and I had to deal with the fallout alone for the past three weeks!”
“If I took thirty more seconds, the debris would have fallen on the highway”
Grace flicked Tony’s forehead “Okay, so maybe you didn’t have thirty seconds. Still, you scared me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know you are.”
There was an awkward silence for a few seconds.
“Hey, kid.” Tony said, noticing Peter “How are ya?”
“Fine.” He sat in one of the uncomfortable hospital chairs next to the bed “Keeping busy with school and stuff”
“Don’t say ‘and stuff’, just say you’re keeping busy with school.” Tony said “Are you keeping up with your Stark Internship?”
Peter winced “I… I haven’t really been going. It’s just that, with SHIELD falling and you here… I dunno”
“Ah, so Ry poached you already. Good to know.” He winced as he tried to sit up straighter. “It’s probably a good idea for you to join him.”
Grace rolled his eyes “Peter’s not abandoning you, dumb-dumb. You were in the hospital, that's why he didn’t show up to your place.”
“He’s not?”
“I’m not?” Peter was just as surprised as Tony. He thought he had made his choice pretty clear.
“Peter, no one’s asking you to choose a side. We’re not enemies. You can come to the office on Thursdays, help me yell at some politicians, and to the Tower on Saturdays as always.”
“But I -
“But you” Grace interrupted what Tony was going to say “Have actual combat training. As long as the kid’s Spider-Man, he needs to know how to handle himself in a fight. Besides, my lab’s not equipped to make the kind of tech he needs, and we can’t spare an engineer.”
“Oh” Peter was glad he was sitting down, because the room was spinning a bit. He hadn’t even realized how stressed he had been about picking a side until it was clear he no longer needed to.
“You’re not forbidding him from seeing me?” Tony coughed “I might be a bad influence”
“No, Stark. Peter’s smart enough to know what he can and can’t pick up from you. Besides, something tells me you’re not building any weapons of mass destruction for a while”
“Nope. Never again, I promise. Taking responsibility for my actions sucked.”
“Poor baby. First time he deals with consequences.”
Tony barked out a laugh “I can finally understand you. Fixing stuff is horrible, I’d much rather not break it in the first place”
“And that is prevention. I win”
“Yeah, yeah. Laugh it up. Soon, I’ll be out of this bed and I’ll be the one giving a cool speech about non violent solutions.”
“Please do, we need more people” Grace sat on the edge of the bed and patted Tony’s knee “You know this doesn’t mean I’m taking you back, right?”
Tony sighed, the good mood evaporating “I know.”
“I’m never gonna be able to trust you, and you’ll be so guilty over everything you won’t be able to relax. We’re not good for each other”
“Yeah. I understand.” Tony grabbed Grace’s hand gently, bringing it to his lips “I’ll miss you.”
“I’ll miss you too.”
“I’ll never stop loving you, I think. It’s been twenty years.”
“Let me tell you a secret” Grace’s eyes were filling with tears, but he was smiling warmly “I never stopped loving you either. But you know we shouldn’t be together.”
“I know. Friends?”
“Goodbye Tony.” He leaned down, lips barely brushing Tony’s before he straightened back up “I’ll see you in the movies”
Then, he left.