Chapter Text
The Avengers training facility at the compound is quiet when Tony arrives the next day. He’d specifically instructed FRIDAY not to let the others know he had made the trip—not because he wanted to avoid them, exactly, but rather because he did not want to be disturbed for what he was about to do. As for Peter, it hadn’t been hard to hide his plans from the kid when said kid hadn’t even asked why he needed to head out for the day—instead grumbling something about not needing a babysitter when Happy coming out came up. But Tony saw right through that, even getting a smile out of the teen when he’d grumbled right back about how he better not return to find any pranks had been planned while he’d been gone—shuddering at the memory of the 17th century replica antique guillotine they’d made together behind his back the month before. Despite all Tony’s efforts he never quite got those ketchup stains out of his shirt, nor the years back of his life he’d lost at the shock of thinking he’d just seen Peter literally lose his head.
Tony knew that there was no way he could truly mimic the horror Peter must have endured those days he was wholly without his senses. At least, not unless Tony felt like shooting himself up with a toxin that might very well kill a non-enhanced being like himself. But there was one way to simulate the same effects. Namely, the isolation tank in the physical therapy room.
Why Steve had added it to the new facility and then kept it maintained, Tony wasn’t sure. After all, the only person who had used the tank in the old compound had been Natasha. At the time he could only figure it was out of some mix of nostalgia and grief on the Captain’s part. Now, however, he could only be belatedly grateful that Steve had made the purchase.
While Tony knew that isolation tanks were used as a form of therapy, for the life of him he’d never seen the appeal. Now, stepping into the tank in his swim shorts, he finds himself even less interested than ever—in fact, nearly apprehensive.
But for Peter, he has to try.
Carefully he lays down in the water—only ten inches deep but packed with enough Epsom salt that he floats effortlessly in it—and with one last look at the bright fluorescent lights of the PT room, he pulls the tank lid closed.
Immediately he’s ensconced in pitch black, but what really gets his attention isn’t the darkness, it’s the lack of sound. He’s been swimming before, had his ears drowned out by water as they are now, but even then, this is different. There’s no muffled noises, not even his breathing can be heard—the tank’s inner walls built to absorb even the largest of soundwaves.
At first it wasn’t so bad, Tony’s mind simply taking in the sensations—or lack thereof. And maybe in another life, it would have been relaxing, therapeutic even, as it apparently had been for Natasha and still was for many others. But this wasn’t another life, and things soon took a quick downturn.
Floating there in the silent dark, trapped in a tank, it dawns on Tony all at once that he feels completely out of touch with the outer world. Which only leaves space to do one thing: think about himself. And alone in his mind, considering his own life, with absolutely no stimuli—well, it wasn’t relaxing. Not when he was also out of touch with his own body.
His own body, which he also couldn’t feel any longer—as though it had been stolen away and separated from his brain, all nerve endings carved out of his lobes. He tries to flex his fingers but even that feels like nothing, like doing nothing, like being nothing.
Tony’s never felt so detached before, and only rarely so at mercy. And all it takes is that one realization for terrifying memories long pushed down soar to the forefront of his mind against his will—all the times in recent memory when he’d been made acutely aware of his helplessness and limitations.
Waking up in a cave, in the worst pain of his life during open chest surgery, only to pass out again from the sheer horror...
Walking through the desert, thirsty beyond all measure and certain he was going to was marching nowhere but to his inevitable death...
Going through the wormhole, and then blacking out as the bomb blew—certain that it would be the last thing he ever saw...
Dying of palladium poisoning and have no choice but to accept the inevitable...
Seeing Happy in a coma and knowing in his bones that it was his fault for failing to protect his friend, no matter who he publicly blamed...
JARVIS shorting out on him just off a highway on a cold night in Tennessee...
Pepper falling into the fire...
Rhodey falling from the sky....
The look of true sadness—but no real regret—in Steve’s eyes when he admitted his deep betrayal, how he’d chosen his old best friend over his new one...
Peter begging for his help...
Peter dying in his arms...
Floating hopelessly through space in a dying ship, just like he was floating now, never finding peace again, dying without knowing if his loved ones were alive, just floating and floating and floating and–
Tony bolts up and slams the lid of the tank wide open, breaths coming hard and fast and heaving. There’s a pressure in his chest that won’t let up and even though he wasn’t even fully immersed he feels like he had been just drowning, unable to get any air, unable to do anything.
Distantly he realizes he’s having a panic attack, and with shaky limbs he hauls himself out of the tub—landing on the ground of the PT room with a thump. Dripping wet and feeling entirely all too exposed despite being alone, Tony closes his eyes and tries to force himself to focus.
Only his old techniques—ones he hadn’t had need of in years up until now—keep it from getting worse. He doesn’t know how long it is after that he opens his eyes again, looking around the room before glancing back up at the tank warily.
“FRIDAY?”
“Yes, boss?”
Still trembly from the leftover adrenaline, he scrubs a hand over his face. “How long was I in there?”
“Seven minutes, boss.”
“What?”
Shock doesn’t begin to describe Tony’s response to that revelation. It had felt like hours—how had it only been minutes? And god, if that’s what it had been like for him, then what had it been like for Peter—Peter, who had enhanced senses, who felt, heard, saw everything a hundred times more than a normal mortal—to endure actual, real, true sensory loss for days ?
It’s unfathomable to even conceive of after what the hell Tony just went through, and suddenly he understands far better than he ever could have imagined why Peter had been so withdrawn, so quiet, so unwilling to dwell on such a harrowing ordeal.
Tony understands and yet at the same time—he has more conviction than ever that he can’t let Peter go on like this indefinitely. He has to get through to the kid.
Yet he can only hope that from now on, he’ll have a better grasp on how to help when the right opportunity presents itself.
As it turns out, the right opportunity proves to be quite difficult to find. After what ended up being a very uneventful day senses-wise for Peter—leading to him excitedly telling Tony he thought he was cured before he had hardly gotten out of the car—the kid had lost his smell and hearing that same night. Even if they could have had a proper conversation at that point, Peter had been far too withdrawn for one. The sullen mood had continued even after the two senses returned, the kid hardly grunting in response to anything Tony said. He wasn’t hurt by it—he knew the signs of deep inner turmoil too well to be, plus he had a five year-old whose moods swung far wider than Peter’s possibly could—but as the next few days passed it did make him steadily more concerned that he’d run out of time before they had to leave to really talk with the kid.
But then, on their sixth day at the cabin, it lands right at Tony’s feet—but only right after Peter does first.
They’re in the kitchen cleaning up after lunch. Tony’s on dish-washing duty, while Peter dries and puts everything away in the various cupboards and drawers. The kid has just moved out of his sight with their drinking glasses when he hears Peter yelp suddenly—twisting around just in time to see the kid’s knees hit the floor, the two glasses falling out of his grip and rolling away.
“Pete, you alright?” Tony asks, concerned. Peter doesn’t answer, just stays on the floor on all fours, but Tony doesn’t miss the way his fingers dig into the wood, nor the way his limbs start to tremble. He carefully grabs Peter’s shoulders and starts to yank him up when the kid makes a snarling sound.
“Don’t,” he grits out, and Tony freezes, only to finally put it together.
“Is it your sense of touch?” he asks, then when Peter doesn’t answer, starts to pull him back up again. He manages to get the kid upright, but Peter doesn’t so much as look at him—his whole body now shaking with tremors as he slowly raises a hand to his face and touches it.
“I can’t—I can’t–”
“Hey bud, it’s okay,” Tony is quick to reassure, stretching a hand out so it hovers over Peter’s shoulder—unsure if any further touch would be unwelcome when the kid can’t even feel it. “How about we go sit on the couch, huh? We can watch some TV until it passes. Listen Pete, everything’s going to be—”
“Stop! Just stop it!” Peter yells then, before jerking away from Tony and toward the sliding glass doors that lead to the porch. He stumbles again—Tony assuming he’s only managing to walk at all due to muscle memory— and just barely catches himself on a counter with an arm.
“Kid,” Tony tries, “here, let me just–”
“You can’t help!” Peter cries. “Nobody can help! You don’t get it, none of you get it, you don’t–”
The kid cuts himself off when he reaches the doors. It takes him four tries before his fingers catch on the latch, and he slams the door open hard enough that Tony thinks it’s a wonder the glass doesn’t crack.
Tony watches helplessly as Peter staggers outside, pausing only long enough to slam the door closed behind him with one hand while he holds himself up with the other, before he lurches out of sight—Tony hearing the sound of one of the porch chair’s legs scrape against the wooden floor as Peter presumably falls into it before everything goes silent.
Tony stands there in the kitchen, rubbing the back of his neck a few times as he considers his options. Eventually he goes to pick up the glasses, putting them away and returning to the remaining dishes. As soon as everything is cleaned and put away, he goes into the living room and grabs a blanket—it is still early spring, after all, and the kid went out there without shoes or a jacket—and heads for the porch.
As expected, Peter is sitting in the furthest chair from the doors. He doesn’t look at Tony as he comes outside, eyes wet and staring out at the lake instead, although it doesn’t look like any tears have fallen either.
As casually as he can Tony walks over, draping the blanket over Peter and tucking it all around him before plopping down in the chair next to him. Together they sit in silence, Tony waiting for Peter to say something and release the tension first. He doesn’t have to wait long.
“I’m not sure why you brought the blanket. I can’t even feel the cold right now.”
“Maybe you can’t, but your body feels the effects,” Tony replies lightly. “Also I gotta say, walking when you can’t feel your legs? Talking when you can’t feel your lips? That’s pretty damn impressive, Pete.”
“It’s not like paralysis,” Peter says quietly after a few moments. “More like a total numbness. My body can still obey what I tell it to do, it’s just really uncoordinated.”
The two of them sit quietly again, listening to the waves lapping against the shore.
After a minute or two, Tony clears his throat. “Y’know, I once designed a weapon that could induce paralysis.”
Peter turns to look at Tony, surprise evident in his gaze. “You did?”
“Only temporarily, but it packed a punch,” Tony clarifies. “It was a hand-held device I called a sonic taser. You put it just inches from the back of someone’s neck, and with the right frequency depending on their size they’d be rendered unable to so much as twitch.”
Peter continues to stare. “No offense, Tony, but that’s some serious Dark Arts shit.”
Tony smirks, chuckling grimly as he looks back toward the beach. “Yeah, the federal government thought so too. Wouldn’t touch ‘em after they got a demonstration. But you know who did keep one of the prototypes? Obie. It’s how he was able to steal my arc reactor right out of my chest back in ‘08.”
“Right out of your chest?” Peter exclaims, eyes wide.
“Yup.” Tony grimaces at the memory of Obie’s cold words that night. “Up to that point I don’t think I’d ever felt so helpless and scared before, except maybe when I woke up mid-surgery in the cave. My whole body felt like it didn’t belong to me, and long after Obie was dead I still had nightmares about it—about being alone and trapped but in my own flesh and bones. It’s part of why I got so obsessed with adding absolutely every single gadget and trick I could think of to my suits, and eventually yours.” He pauses, biting the inside of his cheek as he turns to face Peter again, who is still staring back at him intently. “What I’m trying to say, Pete, is that I know I’ll never really understand what you went through. But if you want to talk, I’m here, not just because I care about you but because I know what it’s like to feel helpless in your own body or at least”—he taps at his chest right over his arc reactor scar with two fingers—”how it feels to be tethered to something that’s a physical part of you, that’s sacred to you, but that gets violently ripped away anyhow.” Another long pause. “So I really hope you choose to talk to me, or if not me then someone else. Because I gotta say, it’s really damn hard to watch one of the two kids who carries what might as well be my actual beating heart around, struggle on his own when he doesn’t have to.”
With a sniff Tony turns away to stare out across the lake once more, trying to give off a casual vibe even as he waits impatiently for Peter to respond. But as the minutes pass and the kid doesn’t say anything, Tony feels his hope fall again—knowing that if that speech didn’t get through to Peter, nothing else Tony could possibly say will.
“They didn’t even tie me up.”
Tony looks back at Peter, who for his part is fixated on his lap. He keeps his voice carefully neutral as he says, “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” Peter replies, jaw working. “I guess they were that certain I wouldn’t get out, and the first couple days—now that I even knew it was just days, it felt like weeks or even months—I guess they were right not to. ‘Cause I was so lost in my… my own head, that I didn’t even think of trying to get away from wherever I was.” He takes a deep breath, looking up at Tony with tears in his eyes. “I tried so hard to be strong, Tony… but—my danger sense, or spidey sense or whatever you want to call it—it never went away. It was like this constant buzzing in my mind, telling me to run one moment then be still the next, back and forth and back and forth and it wasn’t making any sense? It was like it wanted me to stay and go at the same time. It wouldn’t even let me sleep. And it wasn’t until the day I escaped that I realized… it was trying to tell me to get out of myself. And when I figured that out, and I knew it wasn’t something I could fix, well…” Peter shrugs. “I guess that’s when I finally found the edges of my body and started to fight my way out. I still don’t really remember it, but it was like—one moment I was trapped, and the next I just knew I was outside. And I just kept walking and walking and I guess my sixth sense knew well enough to help me find help because eventually it led me back to you guys. But… now it’s like it’s confused, or something.”
Tony’s brow furrows. “Confused?”
“I don’t know how to describe it,” Peter admits. “But that same buzzing to get out of my own skin keeps coming back at random times, even when I have all my senses. Even when I’m sleeping. And the woods”—Peter raises a hand, motioning to the forest and beyond—”it seems to hate those too, I can’t even think about going near them without this terror taking me over. I’m just so tired of being scared, but…” He trails off, sniffling and wiping at his face as best he can manage with numb fingers. “I don’t know what to do about it, or how to fix it. Even when I know I should feel safe I don’t, because… because I don’t know what to trust anymore.”
“I’m sorry, Pete,” Tony whispers as soon as he realizes the kid is done talking, feeling gutted by his words. “I had no idea.”
“It’s okay,” Peter replies, wiping at his cheeks clumsily. “But that’s why I didn’t say anything, ‘cause I knew that… that you guys couldn’t help, I guess. And you and May and everyone else, you guys always want to help. And I didn’t know how to give that to you.”
Tony wants so desperately to argue, to say that they could help. But even though it might be at least partly the truth, he finds he can’t. Because what Peter is wrestling with, he knows now, is ultimately a part of himself—something literally coded into his DNA. And while Tony and May and others can listen, it’s Peter alone who will have to find a way through to the other side. But all the same, a vote of confidence couldn’t hurt.
“Listen, kid,” Tony says. “I won’t pretend to know what you’re going through, but I will say this. I don’t believe for one second that your spidey sense has turned on you. If it’s confused, then that’s probably because you yourself are grappling with what ‘safe’ means for you right now.” Tony moves his hand from Peter’s neck to his shoulder, gripping tightly. “But even if you don’t trust it, I think you still need to try to trust yourself. Try to trust that your instincts will guide you, spidey sense or not. Because no toxin, not even the one that took away your other senses, can take away what you know to be true in your gut.” Tony pulls away, then points a finger at Peter. “So next time that happens, I want you to close your eyes and focus not on what your spidey sense says, but on what you feel to be true. Because I bet once you start trusting you again—just Peter Parker’s regular instincts—the spidey sense will fall back in line.”
“You really think so?” Peter says hopefully.
“I do,” Tony replies, putting as much conviction into his tone as he can muster.
Peter nods silently in response, eyes flitting back in his lap, as if considering something. Tony waits patiently, feeling greatly relieved the kid had finally opened up even if it hurt his heart to hear at times.
It’s only when more than ten minutes have passed and Tony feels a shiver of cold up his spine that he finally says, “It’s pretty chilly out, Pete. What do you say we go back–”
“If I propose a possibly really crazy idea, do you promise not to say no?” Peter interjects, a small smirk pulling at the corners of his mouth.
“Depends,” Tony slowly replies. “Are we talking the so-crazy-it’s-truly-asinine kind of idea, or the so-crazy-it’s-actually-secretly-genius kind?”
The smirk lifts into a genuine smile.
Tony sits on a stump by Morgan’s play tent, nervous and twitchy. He had tried first staying inside the cabin, and then inside the porch, but not being able to see the eastern treeline—where he’d last seen Peter before he’d disappeared from view—had made him too anxious. Now here he is staring out into the woods, wishing far too late he’d pushed harder for Peter to at least wear a smartwatch for Tony to track his vitals and location with. But Peter had insisted that he needed to do the entire thing alone—that having any tech whatsoever would defeat the purpose—and at the time, Tony had reluctantly agreed.
Now, what had seemed like a “so-crazy-it’s-actually-secretly-genius” plan didn’t feel so brilliant. Not when Peter still hadn’t emerged after disappearing into the forest over four hours earlier with the plan to literally get lost miles away and then try to find his way home again—all while wearing his special noise-canceling headphones, having a blindfold covering his eyes, and when he still hadn’t recovered his sense of touch.
There was less than an hour until sunset, which was when they’d agreed Tony was allowed to call the cavalry at the compound to begin an overhead search-and-rescue. And while Peter might survive that ordeal in the end, there was no way Tony would survive the wrath of May Parker.
And so it is that Tony’s foot is tapping so rapidly and loudly against the dirt and grass that he nearly misses the twig snapping somewhere out of sight. He stands up and stares into the darkening treeline, nearly sitting back down again when there’s no movement and stewing once more in his worry when he spots it out of the corner of his eye—a figure emerging from the northern edge.
Tony couldn’t feel more proud as he watches Peter enter the yard, hands out in front of him but otherwise seemingly relaxed, and still wearing the headphones and blindfold. The kid walks a few more steps forward before coming to a halt, canting his head to the side as if listening to something. Then in a swift movement he tears off his blindfold, a blinding smile taking over his features when he spots Tony waiting for him just yards away.
“I did it!” Peter exclaims, pulling off his headphones and walking right into Tony’s arms for a hug.
“You sure did, kid,” Tony replies into his ear, clapping his back and giving him a second tight squeeze before letting go. “How’d it go?”
“You were right,” Peter says with a shake of his head, still grinning. “I just let some weird mix of my gut and my danger sense lead me, and it brought me back here. Barely even stumbled the whole way.” His face turns pensive. “I still don’t get how it knew where to take me, but it did.”
“Well, if staying in the forest is technically a danger, and this is the closest place of safety, it’s possible that your sixth sense was just following where your gut told you you needed to be,” Tony hypothesizes. “But what really matters is that you trusted yourself, and you let that guide you.”
Peter’s smile softens. “Yeah, I guess I did. Thanks, Tony.”
Feeling a surge of pride and love, Tony puts an arm around Peter’s shoulders. “Murdock’s got nothing on you, Pete.”
“Who?”
Tony waves a hand dismissively. “Not important. Let’s find something to eat, shall we?”
Together they head inside the warm cabin, leaving the darkness of the woods behind.