Chapter Text
Peter hung up the phone with a sigh. "Any luck with you?"
Ned shook his head. "The last one had someone looking for a Newfoundland. Got my hopes up for a second until they mentioned that their missing dog was male."
Peter banged his head on the table. "Karen, how many more shelters?"
"That was the last one in New York City. Would you like to continue the search past the city?"
"No, but keep searching the internet for mentions of her." The dog rested her head on Peter's lap and he stroked her head while she drooled on his pants. Ned came over as soon as he was up and they had been calling shelters all morning in hopes of finding the owners of the dog Peter found on patrol. So far they'd called almost every shelter on the map, including Long Beach Humane Society Kitty Cove, but they were all dead ends. (The last one was an expected dead end, but you can never be too careful.)
Ned rubbed his eyes. "Do you want to take a break and go to the dog park or something?"
"You wanna run around with your doggy friends, Ned? Pee on a tree?" Peter teased.
"Hey," Ned sniffed, feigning hurt. "I miss my friends, okay? I haven't seen them in a long time.”
Peter laughed. "Well, we can't bring our new friend. There's rules at a dog park, and we don't even know if she's spayed or how well she's trained. We don't even know how she behaves around other dogs."
"Alright, alright," Ned relented. "But I still miss my friends."
Peter chuckled. "I'm starving, do you want anything?" Ned shook his head.
May would never admit it, but she was extremely grateful for Tony's tendency to leave money lying around. Raising Peter had been hard enough by herself, but when he got his powers, his enhanced metabolism nearly ate them out of house and home. (May had to buy many things in bulk. How he ate almost a full box of Frosted Mini Wheats a day was beside her.)
When Peter returned to the dining room table with his nachos, microwave corn dog, and Gatorade, Ned was watching Netflix on his phone. He turned it off when Peter sat down. "So what are you going to do?"
"Hmm?" Peter said with a mouthful of chips and cheese.
"About the dog. Are you going to keep her?" Ned clarified, taking a chip from Peter's plate.
"No… I don't think this building allows dogs. And May would die if we had to feed this beast." Peter whistled and the beast in question trotted over to him. "Oh, look at that. She comes when you call. Are you trained, girly? Yes you are! You're a trained trash dog! What a good trash dog you are, aren't you!" He cooed at her while rubbing her ears. She barked and licked his face.
Ned, watching in amusement, cleared his throat. "Well, you seem pretty attached to her already."
"What! No," Peter denied. "I'm just giving her love."
"What'd you name her?"
"I haven't named her!" He said indignantly. Ned gave him a disbelieving look. "I didn’t! Seriously— ”
Peter's phone rang loudly, causing them both to jump. “Oh shoot, gotta take this, sorry,” he said, absolutely not sorry. He picked up the phone without checking who it was and gave a small start. “Oh, hey Tony. What do you need?"
It wasn't that Tony didn't talk to Peter ever, but the man was so busy that a quick text was usually the way they communicated. And they saw each other every Tuesday and Thursday (sometimes Sunday) and talked then, so a phone call was a rarity.
"I need your suit, Pete." His eye roll could practically be heard through the phone.
"W-what?" Peter's mind flashed back to when Tony took his suit and he had to fight Vulture in a hoodie and sweatpants. He had no desire to relive that experience.
"You were going to come to the lab today so we can update your suit real fast since I have the full day tomorrow booked. Did you forget?" Tony asked.
Peter cursed. "No, I didn't forget. Just got distracted."
"Distracted?"
"Yeah! She's really cute. I'll tell you about her when I get there."
"Oh, a her? Do you need to stay?" Tony hinted, a suggesting smile creeping into his voice.
"No," Peter dismissed, oblivious to Tony's train of thought, once again distracted by the dog. "Ned will stay here for a bit and watch her."
"Um— " Tony started, but Peter cut him off without realizing. "I've gotta get in the shower. I'll be over by noon."
"Alright," Tony replied slowly, still confused.
"See you then!" Peter ended the call and bounced up to Ned. "I've gotta go to the lab, will you watch M— uh, the dog?"
"What were you about to say, Pete?" Ned leaned back, eyebrows raised.
"Hm?" Peter pretended not to understand, inching around the corner. "What d'you mean?"
"Before you said 'the dog,' what were you going to say?"
"I can't hear you!" Peter said, shutting the bathroom door and muffling his voice.
"Tell me, Peter!"
A series of incomprehensible noises sounded from the bathroom followed by the shower starting, drowning out anything Peter might say. Ned grumbled and scrolled through his phone.
The dog sat by the bathroom door and scratched at it and whined. Ned tried to call her over. Her head turned momentarily, but otherwise she ignored him.
"C'mere, girl!" He whistled again. This time there was no acknowledgement of him, but she barked at the door. It opened to accommodate her and she disappeared inside.
Ned rolled his eyes. They'd only known each other for a day, but Peter was better friends with that dog than any human. It would break both of their hearts when Peter had to give her up.
Peter swung into Tony's lab at noon. There was spare clothes in the desk drawer that Peter left there for when he came after a patrol. He pulled on the "I survived my trip to Stark Industries" t-shirt and jeans over his suit. The nanites crawled smoothly back into his web shooters, and he set them on Tony's desk, who was nowhere to be seen.
"FRIDAY, where's Tony?" He asked, pulling out the plans for the update and studying them.
"Mr. Stark is currently on a very boring phone call with a person he does not like. Considering his previous behavioral patterns he will hang up at anytime in the next minute. I have alerted him that you have arrived."
Peter chuckled. He enjoyed watching Tony be sassy to people he didn't like. His favorite was when General Ross called Tony and he put him on hold, or tried to break his record on how long it took to call him back.
Sure enough, the door to the lab opened within a minute and Tony walked in, groaning loudly. He put a hand on Peter's shoulder. "Never own a company, kid. It's exhausting."
Peter laughed. "Wasn't planning on it," he assured his mentor. Tony sat down with a final groan and grabbed Peter's web shooters. "Good," he grumbled. Peter's face held a grin and they worked quietly for a minute until Tony broke the silence.
"So, who's the girl?" Peter hummed in inquiry, his tongue poking out in concentration to his task. "The girl you were talking about. That distracted you." Tony clarified, and Peter laughed again when he realized what Tony thought was going on.
"It's not a girl, Tony," he corrected.
"A boy?" Tony revised, his confusion growing when Peter snickered.
"It's a dog," Peter said simply. "I found a huge Newfoundland yesterday during patrol. Ned and I spent all morning calling shelters to see if anyone is looking for her, but so far no luck."
Tony spun his chair to face Peter and the teen followed suit. "You spent… you know Karen can do that for you, right?"
"What?!" Tony nodded.
"Just tell her what you want to know and she'll call them and ask. She can mass call, too, so she'll do dozens in the time it takes to do one." Tony's favorite expression to see on people's faces is the "I just wasted hours doing something a robot could've done in seconds." It'd happened a surprising amount of times in Tony's career. Never got old.
"Well, we did it, so… yeah," Peter muttered.
Tony laughed but urged him on. "So what are you going to do about the dog? Keep it?" Peter looked at his hands sadly.
"Probably not. I don't think our building allows dogs… and it's a huge dog. Took up most of my bed last night. It'd be like feeding a whole other child, and she'd have to go to the vet, and go on walks, and uh, poop." He took a deep breath. “So no, um, she'll probably… go up for adoption. Yeah." He blinked rapidly, and turned back to his laptop in an attempt to hide the tears pricking his eyes. But Tony noticed.
He was already coming up with a plan.
Peter left an hour later with his upgraded suit and finished science project, planning to patrol for an hour or two. Tony went to work immediately.
"FRIDAY, text May Parker and tell her to call me as soon as possible. Find out who Peter's landlord is and get me on the phone with him. Do I have Peter's friend Ted's number?"
"If you mean Ned" —Tony waved that off — "then yes, you do have his number. The landlord of Peter and May's building is Barry McClain. Would you like me to call him immediately?"
"Yes.” Two phone calls, two excited fans, a promise to pay a $250 pet fee, the information that Peter’d named the dog, and a plea to go to a landlord’s son’s school fundraiser (that he’d declined) later, Tony had nearly everything he needed.
FRIDAY informed him that May’s break was in fifteen minutes. The last piece of the plan he’d devised rode completely on his intern’s aunt who didn’t like him very much. The odds were not very much in favor of him winning this, but he had to. It was for Peter. And if Tony knew one thing about May, it was that she cared about Peter more than anything in the world. They had that in common.
Tony pulled up the security feed from the night before. “Scan the footage. Tell me everything that Peter calls the dog.”
“Peter calls the dog ‘girly,’ ‘doggy,’ ‘trash dog,’ ‘cutest thing ever,’ ‘fluffy monster,’ ‘bad b—’”
“Yeah, is there anything that’s not an adjective?” Peter had an endless vocabulary, especially when it comes to adorable dogs, and Tony felt he would be there a while if FRIDAY listed every descriptive word that could remotely apply to his new dog.
“Peter called her ‘Millie’ after waking up due to a nightmare.”
Tony shot straight up. Peter had nightmares? Why didn’t he tell May? Or him? Worse, why didn’t Tony think to ask him? No wonder the kid was so tired all the time. The nightmares combined with his alter ego, not to mention the stress of graduating this year, must be taking a toll on Peter’s health. And Tony didn’t even know. Didn’t guess, even though the kid had died . He’d died in Tony’s arms, turned to dust. If Tony got nightmares about that day, why shouldn’t Peter? Tony was supposed to be one of the smartest people in history, and he couldn’t even figure out when one of the people closest to him was struggling. Tony felt so guilty and angry at himself that his heart physically ached.
“How often does he wake up because of a nightmare?”
“About twice a night, and he usually gets up after the second.”
Tony knew exactly how it was not being able to just rest properly. All you want is a good night’s sleep. He knew the pain… the sleepless nights. And he didn’t want Peter- who he thought of as a son!- to go through what he did after Afghanistan, after the wormhole. Just thinking the word made him shudder. Tony cursed profusely. This was bad. This was really, really bad. He rubbed his forehead and swore again. “The kid… pull up the footage of him waking from the nightmare, FRI.”
He didn’t know why he wanted to see it.
The video was hard to watch. Tony looked at Peter thrashing in his bed and was reminded of himself, after New York. He’d almost hurt Pepper after subconsciously calling a suit in his sleep, and the littlest thing would send him into an attack.
Did Peter have attacks? Why did Tony never notice?
Tony's head swam and he put his face in his hands. Everything about this was awful. He looked up noticed Millie for the first time.
She'd been sleeping on the floor next to Peter's bed, but now, her huge form rested on Peter, and he'd stopped thrashing and woken up. "Thanks, Millie," he muttered deliriously, and went back to sleep.
The billionaire's gears started turning. He leaned forward. "Replay the video, and pull up the kid's vitals alongside the video."
This time, Tony studied the dog while monitoring Peter's vitals. Before the visual evidence of his nightmare came to show, Millie was sitting up, alert, aware of what was going on in Peter's brain. She was anxious, pacing back and forth, and after Peter started to thrash around, she jumped on his bed and gently eased herself onto his chest. His breathing and heart rate slowed, and after waking briefly to thank Millie, he slept soundly for the rest of the night.
This dog, that Peter found behind a trash bin, had been the only thing that could help him.
Before, Millie had been a want, a wish even- Tony wanted Peter to have this dog. Peter wished he could keep her. But now she's a need . Tony needs Peter to have the dog. And Peter needs her- he does. Somehow, Tony knew that.
And that's what he told May.
"So, May, I know I'm not your favorite person. And I know you think I'm a bad influence on Peter. But this dog? Millie? She's the best thing that could happen to this boy right now. He needs her. And you know it."
Tony waited with baited breath. He'd never talked so sincerely to anyone except Pepper. And he hoped that May sensed that. Because everything was riding on her saying yes.
"You know I can't pay the vet bills and food costs."
"Covered," Tony assured her, his heart racing with the possibility of this all working out.
She sighed. "I… okay. Alright. He can keep her."
Tony’s heart did the biggest victory dance of its life.