Chapter Text
“Stark Tower is about to become a beacon of self sustaining energy.”
Peter faintly registered his father talking with Pepper一as they all prepared to light up Stark Tower for the first time, but his entire attention was glued towards the city-scape as he waited impatiently for the Iron Man suit to make its grand reappearance.
Maybe it stemmed from that night he spent at the Stark Expo, but Peter was absolutely enamored with anything and everything having to do with his fathers suits. He had spent countless hours in the lab with Tony, just watching him tinker and repair the armor sets. He knew them all, piece for piece, and scrap for scrap. If given the chance, he knew he could probably even build his own from scratch.
It was tempting, as he knew that Tony kept a bountiful pile of scrap material in the corner of his lab. But he knew his father would never approve. Even broaching the subject had nearly caused the man to have a paternal melt down. But Peter knew his time would eventually come. He was only ten, after all.
Peter gasped, as the red suit came into view. “There he is!” he exclaimed.
“Hi buddy!” He saw his father wave. “Do me a favor, and help Pepper light up the tower.”
Running over to where Pepper was standing by the balcony, she gave him the great honor of flipping the comically large switch his father had installed, and they both watched in awe as the entire building came to life around them.
“How does it look?” Peter whispered, unsure if his father could even hear him.
“Like Christmas,” Tony replied. “But with more… us.”
Peter couldn’t help the smile that lit up his face, as Pepper started talking quickly and naming off some of the logistics they would still have to deal with. Peter opted to ignore her, and waited with baited breath as his father flew closer.
“Pep, you’re killing me,” Tony said, flying up the side of the building. “Remember, enjoy the moment?”
Tony landed on the upper balcony一the one they had specifically designed for the suits, and walked down the long platform as the suit was taken off around him. The circle of machinery that encapsulated his father seemingly consuming the pieces around him.
“Sir,” Jarvis said, as Peter watched the suit disappear into the floor, “Agent Coulson of SHIELD is on the line.”
“I’m not in,” Tony said, walking off the platform. “I’m actually out. It’s family night.”
Peter ran up to his father, launching himself into the older man's welcoming embrace. “You did it!” he exclaimed, hugging Tony around the neck. “We got the tower to work!”
“All levels are holding steady,” Pepper supplied. “I think.”
“Of course they,” Tony told her, walking over with Peter wrapped around him. “I was directly involved in it. Which brings me to my next question, how does it feel to be a genius?”
“Well, I really wouldn’t know?” Pepper smiled.
“How bout you, Pete?”
Peter giggled, as the man shifted him in his arms. Despite being so old, Peter was tiny for his age. Which is how his father was able to hold him so easily without getting tired. Whether that was because of his natural development or Peter’s unknown… heritage, was still a mystery to the both of them. However, Tony was not about to pass on any opportunity to hold his son close while he still could.
“You’re the genius, not me,” Peter replied. “I just brought you snacks.”
“You both should give yourselves some more credit,” he turned to face Pepper. “Just as Peter is 100% my baby, Stark Tower is like… 12% yours.”
Pepper’s face fell. “12%?”
“An argument could be made for 15!”
“12% of my baby?”
“Well I did all of the heavy lifting. Literally, I lifted the heavy things-”
Pepper walked over to the table and started pouring out two glasses of wine. Tony put Peter down so the boy could run over to the table where they had set out a celebratory Capri-Sun for him, and walked over to join Pepper.
“I promise, the next building is going to say Potts, on the tower,” Tony promised, as he accepted the glass Pepper handed to him.
“On the lease,” she replied, as they clicked their drinks together.
“Hey!” Peter exclaimed, as he struggled to poke the straw into the juice box, “Wait for me!”
Tony laughed, putting down his drink so that he could help his son get the straw into his juice pouch. The damn thing was resilient, but with Peter’s watchful eyes observing him he was able to puncture the small bag and hand the drink off to the eager boy.
“To us,” Tony said, as the thing of them clicked their beverages together.
“Sir,” Jarvis interrupted. “The telephone. I’m afraid my protocol is being overwritten.”
Tony sighed, as the familiar voice of Agent Coulson flooded the room. “Mr. Stark?” he said. “We need to talk.”
With a smirk, Tony put down his glass and picked up his phone to answer. “You have reached the life model decoy of Tony Stark,” he said, as Peter attempted to muffle his giggles. “Please leave a message.”
“This is urgent.”
“Then leave it urgently.”
All three of them turned to look as the elevator doors slid open, and a man Peter only briefly recognized walked out. He was holding a briefcase and laptop, and there were dark bags under his eyes. Peter immediately felt uneasy.
“Security breach!” Tony exclaimed, his arm instinctively wrapping around Peter’s shoulder.
“Phil,” Pepper said, standing up to go greet him. “Come in!”
“Uh, his first name is Agent.”
Peter, of course, knew that Coulson was with SHIELD. However there was something about the man that was strangely familiar to him. Over the past few years he knew that his father had been in contact with many affiliates of the organization一the most obvious being Nick Fury. He had seen them in their Malibu house or at those long, boring meetings his father had occasionally dragged him too.
But he was sure that if he had ever met Coulson, it hadn’t been for an extended amount of time. So why was he so familiar?
“I can’t stay,” Coulson told them, his eyes quickly flitting over Peter before he drew his attention back to the adults. “Fury wanted you to look this over. As soon as possible.”
Coulson tried to hand the briefcase and laptop over to over, but Tony held up his hands defensively. “I don’t like being handed things.” he said.
“That’s fine”, Pepper said. “Because I love being handed things. Here, let's trade.”
Pepper traded her glass of wine for the briefcase, before handing it over to Tony and taking his drink instead. Peter, feeling slightly left out, traded his Capri-Sun with a confused Coulson, who stared down at the juice pouch in confusion. Peter sniffed the alcoholic drink, and recoiled at the strong scent that filled his nostrils, before handing it over to his father.
“Official consulting hours are between eight and five, every other Thursday,” Tony told him, discreetly swiping the wine from Peter’s outstretched hand.
“This isn’t a consultation-”
“Is this about the Avengers?” Peter asked quickly, jumping up and down on the balls of his feet. “Which I definitely don’t know anything about.”
“The Avenger Initiative was scrapped, Pete,” Tony told him, opening up the laptop and clicking through the many files. “And if I remember correctly, I didn’t even qualify.”
“I didn’t know about that either,” Peter quickly replied.
“Yeah apparently I'm volatile, self-obsessed, don’t play well with others,” Tony said, placing his arm on top of Peter’s curly locks as the boy tried to swipe him away.
“That I knew,” Pepper smirked.
Agent Coulson scuffed. “This is about personality types either, this is serious Stark-”
“Pete, Ms. Potts, a moment?”
Tony pulled them both aside as the three of them looked over the laptop Coulson had brought them. In Peter’s opinion, it just looked like a bunch of jargon. While english may have been his worst performing subject in school, he was still a fairly good reader. And even with all that he still couldn’t make out most of the documents his father was pulling up.
“I thought we were having a family moment,” Tony sighed, quiet enough so that Coulson couldn’t hear him.
“I was having 12% of a family moment,” Pepper replied, making Peter giggle. “This seems serious. Phill seems pretty shaken up.”
“Why is he Phil?”
“What is all this?” Peter asked.
“This is uh,” Tony said, expanding the screen so it took up nearly all of the balcony space. “This.”
Peter looked around in awe at the multiple screens that now littered the room一each one displaying a different video or file. It nearly made him fall over as his head shot from picture to picture, trying to take it all in.
There was a large green man wrecking havoc among the streets of New York City, and Peter briefly membered hearing about that event on the news a few years ago. There was also Natasha, the scary woman who had been at the Stark Expo, a man who held a bow and arrow, and… Captain America.
“I thought he was dead,” Peter said, pointing to the screen that held all of Steve Roger’s information.
“You and the rest of the world,” Coulson told him, walking closer to the group. “A group of our men fished him out of the ocean about a year ago. Somehow the super-soldier serum allowed him to survive in the ice for nearly seventy years.”
Peter looked up at his father, who had gone a pasty white. “Oh,” was all he could say.
“I’m going to take the jet to D.C. tonight,” Pepper told Tony.
“Tomorrow,” Tony supplied.
“You have homework,” Pepper said. “You have a lot of homework.”
Peter's attention was drawn to a picture of a man with long, blonde hair, who was wielding a hammer that could shoot lightning. His synopsis didn’t supply much information, just that his name was Thor and that he came from a place called Asgard.
That’s when his eyes shifted down to a very family news article.
Alien Attack in Puente Antiguo, New Mexico.
It was the same article he had obsessed over only a few nights prior. That also explained why Agent Coulson had looked so eerily familiar. He had been the SHIELD Agent who Peter had spotted in one of the article's photos.
“Peter, do you want to come to D.C. with me?” Pepper asked him. “Something tells me your father isn’t going to be a lot of fun to be around for the next few hours.”
Despite the fact that Peter had never been particularly fond of planes, he knew he couldn’t leave now. Not when he was so close to answers.
“No thank you, Pepper,” he said. “I’ll stay and help dad.”
Pepper raised an eyebrow, most likely not expecting that answer. “Ok, but what about when Tony needs to go see Mr. Fury about the file?”
“It’s fine Pep,” Tony replied, tucking Peter against his side. “I’ll just have Happy watch over him here. You know he loves the kid.”
“Well ok then,” Pepper said, pulling Tony closer. “Work hard.”
They started to kiss, and Peter attempted to squirm away in disgust. Except his attempts were in vain, as a second later Pepper knelt down to his level and gave him an equally sloppy kiss on the cheek.
“So any chance you’re driving by LaGuardia?” Pepper asked Coulson, as they walked towards the elevator.”
“I can drop you there,” Coulson replied.
“Oh fantastic!”
Pepper and Coulson continued to talk until they got into the elevator and the doors slowly closed shut. Tony’s gaze stayed put on the screens, as he reached his hand out and picked up a holograph of a blue cube一flipping it over a few times in his hands before turning towards Peter.
“Well I guess you’re my assistant for the night,” he told the boy, a small smile on his lips. “What do you say we get to work?”