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Chapter Text

Tony would deny it at gunpoint, but he’s really, really into Christmas.

He plays it off by pretending he’s humoring Pepper, or saying that it’s just a part of the long game in constantly improving Stark Industries’ PR, but every year the place is so aggressively decked out that it looks like Frosty the Snowman vomited all over the tower. Christmas lights on the ledges outside. Trees in the lobby and every main room. Carols blasting in the halls. Rhodey dressed up as Santa Claus for the employees’ kids at the company Christmas party (which, granted, took an egregious amount of blackmail to accomplish, but is worth it every year).

And then, of course, the prolific Christmas Eve Eve dinner on December 23, in which Tony invites (read: demands the attendance of) friends, company execs, and whichever people are calling themselves Avengers to a feast so prolific that they once almost had to roll Thor out of the front door afterward.

A feast Tony is more than a little hesitant to be planning this year, all things considered.

But there are still plenty of people looking forward to it, and this is the last Christmas he’ll have the tower at his disposal. No point in wasting it, even if they are down a few people (and aforementioned people are considered war criminals now in at least a dozen countries, if not more). That, and Tony was actually looking forward to inviting Underoos and his aunt to the shenanigans. Most of the adults are too stuffy to say anything more than “beautiful decorations, Tony,” whereas the kid will probably flip his ridiculously earnest shit.

He is attempting to finalize the menu for the whole shebang when aforementioned kid happens to interrupt — or at least, the AI Tony installed in his suit does.

Tony’s wristwatch buzzes at him, something he only lets it do if Pepper, Rhodey, May Parker, the kid, or the kid’s AI is attempting to contact him. This time, unfortunately, it’s the latter.

“What’s shaking?”

FRIDAY answers on behalf of the kid’s AI: “The systems in Mr. Parker’s suit are reporting a code yellow.”

Tony closes his eyes for a moment, because honestly, there aren’t enough colors in the goddamn rainbow to anticipate the kinds of shit this kid gets into. Code yellow he knows, at least, means that the kid is unconscious but not in any kind of mortal peril.

“Get me coordinates.”

He’s in Queens, not too far off from his apartment. Tony tries calling him first, because nine times out of ten it’ll jerk the kid back into the land of the living, and he’ll stammer some kind of excuse for what happened and be on his way (at which point Tony will check on his vitals for the next hour because, super healing be damned, the kid is terrible at assessing his own damage). This time, though, is the unlucky tenth time when Peter doesn’t answer, leaving Tony no choice other than to suit up.

He wishes the kid weren’t knocked out cold, because otherwise the scene he stumbles on would be more than a little bit funny — one Spider-Man in a back alley, tangled in someone’s still lit Christmas lights, conked out behind a dumpster.

“Kid.”

Peter flinches, but doesn’t actually say anything. Tony disengages the suit and pulls off his mask, knowing that alone will wake the kid up like a livewire and feeling a little bit bad for the panic he knows he’s about to cause. Sure enough, Peter’s eyes fly open momentary terror, his arms jerking against the tangle of Christmas lights before his gaze finally settles on Tony’s.

“Oh, shit.”

“That about sums it up,” says Tony, trying to figure out where Peter begins and the Christmas lights end. “What happened, you get into a turf war with Frosty the Snowman?”

“I …” Peter licks his lips, still blinking himself back into consciousness. “I got tangled in someone’s Christmas lights.”

Tony holds in a laugh. Bleeding teenager , he reminds himself. Not funny . “I don’t even know if I’m supposed to l lecture you.”

“Might as well,” says Peter, as Tony rolls him over in an effort to detangle him.

“Well, now you’ve ruined the whole thing by sounding so miserable.”

“Woo. I’m having the time of my life. Please lecture me, Mr. Stark.”

“Save the sarcasm for someone who isn’t rescuing you from becoming an anthropomorphized Christmas sweater, why don’t you?”

He gets a begrudging laugh out of the kid then, as he rolls him back over and manages to get the last of the Christmas lights unwrapped from one of his ankles. The kid groans and pulls himself up into a sitting position, blinking at Tony like he really is waiting for a lecture.

Jesus. He feels like the Grinch.

“C’mon, kid.” Tony stands up and offers his hand to hoist him back up. “Go grab your backpack. Your services are needed.”

“Huh?”

“You’re going back to the tower with me so we can scrape some of that blood off your head before your aunt murders us both, and because you’re going to help me decide on a menu for the annual Stark Industries Christmas dinner.”

“Did you say Christmas dinner?” Peter asks. His brow furrows. “How hard did I hit my head?”

“This is serious business, kid. I expect your full attention. Y’know. When you’re slightly less concussed.”

Half an hour later Peter’s perched on the couch in the rec room, wearing one of Tony’s admittedly vast collection of ugly Christmas sweaters (to be fair, Tony doesn’t wear them — Rhodey’s an ass and keeps sending them every year as gifts) and nursing the hot cocoa that Pepper decided he needed the moment they walked through the door.

“Cancel the whole menu,” says Peter, who has an alarming amount of whipped cream on his nose. “Just have Pepper make this.”

“Noted. It’s all you’re going to be allowed to drink there, anyway.”

“Ha.” Peter’s eyes widen. “Wait, I’m invited?”

“Jeez, kid. Yes, you’re invited. You and your terrifying aunt.”

“Whoa.”

The kid’s eyes light up so absurdly that Tony has to look away for a moment, struck with an unexpected pang. It’ll be different this year. But the kid doesn’t know that. And for that alone, he supposes, it’s worth going through with it.

“Just, uh — hands off the Christmas lights.”

Peter’s grin is so wide that it seems impenetrable to sarcasm. “Can do.” And then, a beat later: “Aunt May will probably want to make fruitcake.”

“Aaaand invitation revoked.”

Peter sighs into his cocoa. “Fair.”

Chapter Text

“No.”

“Tones.”

“No. First of all, this seems like a trap. And second of all — ”

“You said we would celebrate when I was done with PT. This is how I want to celebrate.”

“By humiliating me in front of half of New York?”

“That's just an added perk.”

The thing most people don’t know about Tony’s (ex) buddy Rhodey is that, as a kid, his mother enrolled him in ice skating lessons. Apparently it’s this whole big thing in his family — something Tony would use to openly mock him more often if Rhodey weren’t so annoyingly confident about it that it’s kind of like trying to mock a wall.

Tony, on the other hand, went to exactly one ice rink as a child, for the birthday party of one of his father’s employee’s sniveling kids, and fell on his ass one time before swearing off it before life. A hasty vow, but one he has been steadfast in keeping for the last fortysomething years.

Enter Rhodey, Ice Skater Extraordinaire and, apparently, World’s Most Disloyal Friend.

The truth is Tony would go inside of an active volcano to celebrate Rhodey gaining most of the use of his legs back if he had to — but to be fair, even an active volcano would be less perilous and less humiliating than the Rockefeller Center ice rink smack dab in the middle of the holiday season. He figures he has approximately eight seconds before someone starts snapping pictures, which means he has approximately nine seconds before a tweet about him eating it on the ice goes viral.

After what he put Rhodey through, though, he supposes he deserves a hell of a lot worse.

So off he goes on a Sunday afternoon, grumbling as Rhodey cheerfully offers to buy him butt pads on the way downtown, about to make a public ass of himself in the name of friendship.

Once he’s there, he’s maybe five percent less resentful of the whole thing. He spends most of his time upstate now, and it’s been a few years since he’s gotten a good look at the giant tree in Rockefeller Center in all of its environmentally draining glory ( why nobody has approached him about powering that damn thing is beyond him, really). There are kids running around with sticky fingers from the bakery down the street, and Christmas carols getting piped through speakers, and people stumbling around each other as they whip out their phones to take selfies. It’s irritatingly contagious, even if he did just get led here as a sacrificial holiday lamb.

They’re waiting to get on the ice —  waiting , when Tony could have easily just rented out a place upstate and avoided all this nonsense — when Rhodey says, “Uh, isn’t that your intern?”

“Don’t have any interns.”

“Then what do you call that kid who keeps following you around the tower with a Stark Pad yammering all day?”

Tony follows Rhodey’s eyes and sees none other than Peter Parker, decked out in a too-big down coat and a ratty pair of rental skates. He looks surprisingly uncertain about the whole skating thing despite his literal superpowers, which makes Tony feel minutely better about his situation for the split second before he remembers that the kid is definitely going to spot him, and Tony is not fast enough to skate away from his aunt.

Only it isn’t his aunt who skates up behind Peter and tweaks his shoulder. It’s a girl.

“Aw. He’s on a date,” says Rhodey.

“What? No he’s not. He’s a toddler.”

“Yeah, no, that kid is definitely on a date.”

“He’s not old enough to drive .”

“I’m sorry, what exactly is your relation to this kid again?”

Sure enough, the girl not-so-gently reaches out and yanks Peter by the hand. At first Tony thinks they’re actually going to skate that way like they’re in some kind of goddamn Hallmark commercial, but it turns out she’s just pulling him further into the crowd in the middle of the ice, apparently impatient for him to get his sea legs.

But Rhodey’s right. Light bullying aside, Peter Parker is definitely on a date.

Oh, shit. They haven’t even had The Talk. The “Here’s What Happens When You’re A High Profile Vigilante/Superhero And Want To Have A Dating Life” talk. Not that Tony is exactly the best equipped to give it, since Pepper has been kidnapped more times than Tony’s proud to admit (to be fair , that last time had absolutely nothing to do with him, mostly).

They finally get on the ice and Tony immediately grips the wall, losing sight of Peter and his mystery date.

“Don’t be a chicken.”

“Don’t be a bully.”

“You can’t hug the wall, Tones,” says Rhodey, who is already gliding like he belongs in Disney On Ice. Tony isn’t sure whether to be relieved or annoyed. “There are actual children who need it.”

Tony removes his hands from the wall, but only because there is, in fact, an aggressive-looking five-year-old headed their way.

“See? Not so bad.”

“Shut up.”

“We can even go say hi to your … not intern?” asks Rhodey, nudging him slightly.

Tony sways and almost topples over. “Do that again and I will engage my suit in the middle of this rink and make such a spectacle of myself that you will regret being born.”

“Noted.”

Tony doesn’t actively decide to avoid Peter, but he and his — peer? study buddy? Tony refuses to associate the word “date” with anyone who eats their lunch out of a paper bag — are in the middle of the rink, and somehow they don’t cross paths for a good twenty minutes. It looks like it’s going to be inevitable, though, when the same insistent hand yanks Peter’s again, and the girl leads him to the same wall that Tony’s been hovering beside.

Except Peter doesn’t notice them. In fact, it seems like he doesn’t even have peripheral vision anymore. He’s staring at the girl so dopily that Tony’s pretty sure the giant Christmas tree could go up in flames and the kid wouldn’t even flinch.

What happens then is probably Tony’s fault. The girl turns and all but shoves Peter into the wall, then grabs him by the collar of his coat. There’s a beat when Tony’s not sure if she’s about to beat the shit out of the Peter or kiss him — and judging by the look on the kid’s face, he’s not so certain either — but then her face softens and they’re both leaning toward each other and uck , the last thing on this earth Tony wants to see is two prepubescent tongues clashing in broad daylight, but then — 

But then Peter’s eyes widen like Christmas tree lights, looking right at Tony. “Oh no.”

For a second the girl only stares at him, the two of them frozen in an almost-kiss.

“Oh no?” she repeats. “Parker. At least six months of unresolved tension leading up to this moment, and two inches from my face you say oh no? ”

“Uh … wait, no — MJ — ”

The girl follows the kid’s panicked eyes to Tony and a now wheezing Rhodey. Tony lifts his hands up because for once , he didn’t actually do anything. But the girl’s eyes narrow at the two of them so savagely that Tony feels like he did.

“Enjoying the view, pervs?” she yells.

Peter’s mouth drops open. “No! MJ! He’s my — boss, or something? Shit — ”

Before Tony can say anything or fully come to resent the dozens of heads that just turned to stare at them, the girl grabs Peter by the elbow and starts pulling him off the ice.

“Uh, where are we going?” Peter stammers.

“To make out under the tree, you dope.”

“R-right,” he says, letting her continue to drag him. “Um — bye, Mr. Stark! Nice running into you?”

Tony lifts a hand and waves him off. “What are the odds ‘enjoying the view, pervs’ doesn’t end up quoted in a headline on The Sun in the next two hours?” he mutters, watching his fellow skaters pull out their phones and start snapping pictures.

Rhodey claps him on the back. “Extremely slim. Also, we can get off the ice now. My day can’t possibly get any better than this.”

Tony, as it turns out, is wrong about the headline. It ends up being “Tony Not So Zamboni,” accompanied with a picture of him slipping just before he got off the ice — which wins half a point for originality and no points for actual sense-making, but is still better than getting nationally accused of stalking two high school sophomores.

They end up passing the kid on their way out. Peter doesn’t notice them, looking comically bashful and staring at the girl like she lassoed the moon. He kisses her on the cheek, all hesitant and nerdy about it, and she smirks slightly in response.

“Do not make fun of that infant,” Rhodey warns.

“You suck the fun out of everything .”  

Tony looks away, but not before the girl turns her back to them and not-so-subtly lifts a middle finger in their direction. Maybe Tony doesn’t have to hit so hard on the whole “Dating Vulnerable People Without Superpowers” lecture after all.

Chapter Text

Bruce tells Tony not to ask questions. Tony makes it approximately two blocks.

“Okay, to be clear, I haven’t been below 14th street since the year I thought it’d be cool to grow a mullet.”

“Tony,” says Bruce, his tone warning.

“And yeah, it’s good to see you — thanks for those postcards you never sent, by the way — but you can’t just appear out of nowhere dressed in Stephen Strange’s clothes after stealing the Quinjet and ghosting on us and not expect me to have a few questions.”

Bruce sighs. “It’s a long story.”

“Well, it’s fifty blocks to the tower. We’ve got time.”

“Ha. Yeah. We’re hailing a cab.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, I have a car. I’m just not taking you to it until you explain why you were cavorting with a magician — ”

“Actually, I was with Thor — ”

“Are you kidding me? Is everyone hanging out without me?”

This gets a light smile out of Bruce, which is the closest to normal he’s seemed since Tony set eyes on him half an hour ago. He supposes, for Bruce’s sake, he should drop it. The thing is, the more he grills Bruce over his impromptu prolonged vacation in space, the less likely it is Bruce will start asking him questions about the star spangled pain in Tony’s ass and where exactly all their mutual friends have gone.

“I promise I’ll catch you up on everything,” says Bruce. “I just need to … I don’t know. Shower. Be a human. Check on my research — ”

“Or maybe a certain redhead?”

“ — and do a quick Google search of the last few years,” says Bruce, pointedly ignoring him.

Tony winces. “Uh. Maybe you skip that and try coming back in 2020.”

“Why?”

“Nothing.” They’ve reached Washington Square Park, but at the edge of it is an absurdly long line that wraps around a building and bleeds into the next block, packed to the gills with people. At the beginning of the line there are even a few tents.  “What the hell is this all about? Is there a boy band in town?”

“Again, I have literally not been on this planet for years, so I can’t help you there.”

Tony blinks. There’s an eerily familiar mop of messy hair in his sightline. “Wait. Hold on.”

“Where are you going?”

“Stay here for a sec,” says Tony, walking to the front of the line.

Sure enough, there is one Peter Parker, dressed in that same ridiculously large, ridiculously ratty down coat Tony saw him in at the ice rink yesterday. Tony is only just recovering from the statistical impossibility of running into the kid in Manhattan two days in a row when he notices that even though there is an open chemistry textbook propped in the kid’s lap, his head is resting against the building and he is very much asleep.

Tony nudges the kid’s knee with his foot. Peter blinks awake and throws his hands up so fast that people on both sides of him in line flinch, and Tony slightly regrets it.

“M-Mr. Stark?”

Tony sighs. “Please tell me whatever you’ve parked yourself in line for here is worth it.”

Peter immediately sucks his upper lip into his teeth the way he only does when he’s about to lie. Tony raises a warning eyebrow at him, but before it can land, Bruce interrupts.

“Why are we harassing a teenager?”

Peter’s mouth drops open like a fish. “Dr. Banner? ”

Tony waves him off. “Okay, okay, we get it, you’re a nerd. Now what exactly is happening here? Are you waiting to get raptured?”

“Uh …”

“We’re waiting for the latest Stark Phone,” says the guy one spot ahead of Peter in line, looking at Tony like he’s a ghost.

Tony scowls. “Wait, wait?” He looks at the kid, who has closed his chemistry book in a resigned, miserable kind of way. “Kid. Kid . If you wanted a damn Stark Phone, you could have asked. Take ten, for Christ’s sake.”

“I’m not — I don’t need a Stark Phone,” says Peter weakly.

“Then what are you doing sitting on the pavement? Enjoying the view?”

“I’m Bruce, by the way. Nice to meet … what is happening here?”

Peter’s eyes dart between Tony and Bruce for a moment before he lets out a slight huff of a sigh. “I’m — I’m a line holder.”

“Excuse me?”

Peter stares down at his lap. “I’m getting paid to hold someone else’s place in line.” When Tony doesn’t immediately answer, he looks up and says defensively, “It’s good money! And I can do my homework while I wait! I got an A on my Spanish quiz last week from all the study time I had.”

“Wait — let me try to catch up with your insanity here —  how long, exactly, have you been freezing your ass off in random lines for lazy consumers?”

“A month or so.”

“Kid.”

“Dr. Banner, I’m a huge fan,” says Peter, ignoring Tony’s incredulity. “I — I know it’s been awhile since you published anything, but I’ve read all your work on gamma radiation, and my science fair project was based on that paper you published about applications of 3D printing in biochemical — ”

“Get up,” Tony interrupts, jerking his thumb toward the street. "You’re not doing this. This isn’t a thing.”

Peter’s brow furrows. “I can’t just leave . I have an obligation. The guy’s not coming to take my place in line for another two hours.”

“Call whoever it is and tell him I’ll ship him a Stark Phone to him tonight. Jesus, kid. How much are you even making doing this?”

“Seven dollars an hour,” says Peter proudly.

Bruce lets out a low whistle.

“Right?” says Peter, mistaking the meaning of it and thinking Bruce is impressed. “Easy money.”

“Yeah, no, this ends now. Get up, Little Match GIrl. You’re coming with us to the tower.”

Peter’s face twists in such palpable conflict that Tony might as well have asked him to choose which of two strangers he wants to live or die. “I — I can’t. If I leave in the middle of a shift I won’t get any other line work.”

“You’re not doing any other line work.”

“But I — ”

Whatever the kid’s going to say, he clams up, and fast. He stares back down at his lap again, but not before Tony sees his entire face go crimson.

“I … wanted to get Christmas presents for people, is all.”

It takes approximately half a second for Tony to feel like utter shit for pressing the point, and another half of one for Bruce to glare at Tony like he’s the goddamn devil. Which is just typical, because naturally Bruce would take the Peter’s side before he even knows the kid’s name, or even acclimates back to his own home planet. The kid’s Resting Kicked Puppy Face strikes again.

He doesn’t want to insult Peter by acting like money isn’t a big deal, because he knows how proud he and May “I Will Kill You If You Let Harm Come To One Hair On My Nephew’s Head” Parker are. She’s already forbidden Tony from compensating Peter for his “internship” as it is. So he thinks on his feet.

“Okay. You come to the tower with us and work for two hours. I give you your fourteen dollars in exchange for your, uh, services. The asswipe who left you here gets his Stark Phone, and everyone has a very merry Christmas. Sound good?”

Peter blinks up at him in surprise. “Really?”

“Yes, really. Now please, let’s leave. Bruce here hasn’t had a New York slice since you were in middle school. Or possibly used a modern toilet. I honestly don’t — ”

“ Tony .”

“I’m Parker, by the way,” says the kid, a doofy grin blooming on his face. He stumbles to his feet and extends his hand for Bruce to shake. “Er, I mean, Peter. Parker. I’m Peter. And — embarrassed, now.”

Bruce smiles the first genuine smile Tony’s seen out of him in years. Like, before he disappeared off the literal face of the earth. Maybe before Tony even met him. He supposes, though, that that is the kid’s irritating second superpower.

“I have a fan,” says Bruce, looking at Tony in disbelief.

“Yeah, yeah, you can sign each other’s backpacks on the way uptown. Let’s bounce.”

The instant they get in the car Peter starts talking a mile a minute about research that manages to go over Tony’s head (not that he wouldn’t be able to catch up, given five minutes with a Stark Pad and an actual crap to give about aforementioned research). The worried creases in Bruce’s forehead fade and that nervous twitching of his hands dies down, and by the time they reach midtown he and Peter are talking over each other so animatedly that Tony honest to god feels like a third wheel in the backseat of his own car.  

“Oh. What did you need me to work on, Mr. Stark? Something in the lab? Or with Miss Potts?”

“No. You’re going to sit and drink your juice box and spend the next two hours telling Dr. Banner here everything that’s happened since 2015.”

“... Huh?”

“We had a deal, kid. Earn your keep.”

Tony leaves, then, mostly because Bruce and Peter are talking so much that it’s making his head spin, and partially because he wants to prep a room for Bruce in the tower or upstate, depending on exactly how antisocial he’s feeling now that he’s back. He checks to make sure all of Bruce’s abandoned projects are still in order the way that they left them, and has FRIDAY put in a grocery order for the healthy garbage Bruce likes to eat despite being about as immortal as a mortal man can get. Then he quadruple checks the trust he set up for Peter that he won’t be able to touch for another decade, just to make sure that the legality of it is airtight and nobody will be able to stop him from accessing it if Tony gets blown to pieces between now and then.

In the meantime, he hits up Pepper for cash — god knows he doesn’t keep any around himself — and comes back into the kitchen two hours later with fourteen dollars in change.

“This is fifteen dollars,” Peter protests, handing a single back to him.

“Oh no. Now I’m broke. Guess that’s the end of Stark Industries,” says Tony, ignoring his extended hand.

Bruce looks more than a little shell-shocked. “Wait. He didn’t finish telling me about the election yet.”

“Then he’ll come back tomorrow, won’t you, Underoos?”

“What did you just call him?”

Peter shakes his head, just once. Tony isn’t looking at him, but he doesn’t miss it, even out of the corner of his eye.

“Inside joke. Mean one, actually, what can I say?” says Tony, extending out his arms. He glances over at Peter. “You. Skedaddle. Happy will take you home.”

“Right. Thanks, Mr. Stark. Nice to meet you, Dr. Banner. See you tomorrow!”

Tony had been kidding about the kid coming back, but he doesn’t have any plans, anyway. At least he doesn’t have any plans that he can’t go ahead and cancel. He kind of has his hands full with the whole “Bruce is back from the almost dead” thing as it is.

“Uh … so Peter is your …”

“Intern,” says Tony firmly, before Bruce joins the ranks of the dozen or so people who have already asked if some baby mama got in touch with him fifteen years after the fact.

“Thought you didn’t have any of those.”

“Yeah, well. The times are a-changing.”

Bruce smirks at him. The kind of smirk that Tony usually resents; the kind of smirk that implies Bruce knows something he doesn’t. “Yeah. I guess so.”

Chapter Text

Bruce, unsurprisingly, is not taking too well to the planetary adjustment. Once they get over the debacle of the presidency — a conversation that takes about three hours and involves a rotation of explaining from Tony, Pepper, and a very irritated Happy — he has about a thousand more follow up questions.

“You and Cap aren’t talking anymore? There’s another Harry Potter book? What kind of a superhero name is Spider-Man? Why the hell are these tweets so long? ”

The next day, Tony leaves him to his room so he can pester FRIDAY about the mindfuckery of the last few years. He’s rounding the hall when he runs into one hell of a security breach. Well, two security breaches, really — although one is decidedly more pathetic looking than the other.

“I found this on your lawn,” says Natasha, pushing forward a sopping wet, freezing cold Peter Parker.

At first all Tony can do is blink. He hasn’t seen Natasha in months. And while he certainly hasn’t held any grudges against her since the Germany fiasco, he hasn’t been entirely certain how she feels about him .

That becomes slightly irrelevant, though, when he registers that she still has her fingers bunched so tightly around Peter’s waterlogged coat that it’s dripping water on the floor.

“I — I — didn’t know if there was a doorbell or something?” asks Peter, his teeth chattering. “I tried to call you, but — ”

“We ran into each other first,” says Natasha.  

Tony cringes. He’d forgotten the kid was coming over, which means he must have taken the subway and walked through the hailstorm outside. He’s about to chastise him for it, but the last thing he wants is questions from Natasha about Peter Parker — the less attention he can draw to the rain-soaked elephant in the room, the better.

“Huh. I don’t know if blonde suits you,” says Tony, narrowing his eyes at her.

“I don’t know if gray suits you .”

“Not that I don’t miss these customary bruises to my ego, but what exactly are you doing here? Because I have, uh … other guests that you might — ”

“I know. Bruce was the one who called me. We all need to talk.”

Tony blows out a breath. “Right.” He has a feeling this is not the kind of talk he’s going to particularly relish. “Let me deal with my — intern. I’ll meet you in the conference room.” He waits until she’s gone, and turns to the kid. “Go find Happy and get out of that coat, would you? You look like a — ” Sad orphan, he was about to say, but that’s a little too on the nose. “Drowned rat,” he amends.

Peter’s brow is puckered in that anxious teenage way it sometimes is. “I can come back later if you’re busy — ”

“Uh, what is that you have in your hands there?” asks Tony, referring to the somewhat ripped plastic bag bursting at the gills with pine needles.

Peter looks down at the ratty plant. “A Christmas tree,” he says. “May hasn’t had enough time to get one with her schedule, so — ”

“Are we looking at the same thing? Is one of us on drugs? Because that’s not a Christmas tree. That’s a twig at best.”

Peter shrugs. It occurs to Tony that that’s the exactly kind of tree that one of those sellers lurking outside the subway would offer to a kid who only has fourteen dollars in his pocket, and he decides to stop making fun of it. For now.

By the time he heads into to the conference room, Bruce and Natasha aren’t alone. Vision he isn’t necessarily surprised to see, but Wanda’s been in and out of the compound upstate and fairly uncommunicative, so her quiet presence is a tad jarring.

“Jesus. Why do I feel like I just got pulled into the principal’s office?”

Bruce offers him a tight smile. “You caught me up on everything down here. Now I have to catch you up on everything up … ” His eyes tilt up toward the ceiling.

Well. That can't be good. 

For once, Tony clams up and listens as Bruce recounts what little he remembers of the years he’s been gone, and what happened in the immediate aftermath — the battle with Thor, the destruction of Asgard, the massive warship that intercepted them as they fled.

“We managed to escape, but not without some significant losses. And they’re going to be back.” It’s Vision, curiously, that Bruce is looking at. “They’re looking for something called infinity stones. And we have every reason to suspect that our planet might get targeted next.”

It feels like ice water in his veins, freezing his lungs, paralyzing him in his seat. Tony stares at Bruce for a beat too long, letting the words slam into him over and over, hitting him in too many directions. The end game. The other side. The fucking hole in the sky that swallowed him up and spat him back out.

He knew this would happen. Somehow that doesn't make one damn difference. 

“Which is why we need to set aside our personal differences, whatever they may be,” says Natasha. Her eyes flicker to Bruce, but there’s nothing bitter in it. Only resigned. “I’ve already reached out to Steve and Sam. Anyone that I — ”

“What, you think a shield and some bird wings are going to hold up over the next aliens intent on rampaging the Earth?”

“I think we’re not going to be able to do anything if we’re still divided like this.”

Tony’s too wired to argue. It feels like someone has taken a wrench and tightened every one of his bones. “Fine.”

“Not fine,” says Natasha. And only then does Tony understand — he’s the only one in the room that this is news to, because he’s the reason why they gathered in the first place. He’s trying to scramble for a reason why when Natasha says, “This … Spider-Man you’ve taken under your wing. He’s presenting some problems.”

“Excuse me?”

“You signed the Accords, Tony. And every damn one of us is on public record now, for better or for worse. And now you seem to be alarmingly close to one of the most high profile, illegal exclusions to the same law that you pushed for harder than any of us.”

Tony doesn’t know what to do except deflect. The truth is, he was hoping — however naively — that it wouldn’t come to this. If the kid had accepted his offer a few months ago to join the team, he’d have gone public right then and avoided the whole mess of whether or not he had to do it while he was technically on his own.

But that, incidentally, had not ended the way Tony had planned.

“You talk like I acted alone,” he says through his teeth.

“No. I talk like a person who wants this team back together. And Steve and Sam aren’t going to be on board with coming back, or working along this Spider-Man of yours, if you’re — ”

“No, no, no, hold it right there. He’s not working with us. He’s not an Avenger, he’s not — ”

“None of us are Avengers now,” says Wanda bitterly.

“He’s small time. A self-operating vigilante. He’s not going to — ”

“A vigilante fit to the gills with Stark-designed tech,” says Natasha sharply. “Don’t think I haven’t done my homework on your protege.”

His jaw is tight. He knows now, just by looking at Natasha, that she’s seen the kid out on his patrols; that she's maybe even been following him. The smallest silver lining he can find is that she evidently doesn't know his civilian identity, or they wouldn't be having this conversation in the first place. 

“He’s different. He’s — ”

“A threat to our ability to get the team back together,” says Natasha. “And he will be involved in whatever is coming. All of us will.”

Tony shakes his head. “You don’t understand.”

“Because you won’t tell us anything about him. And that alone is a cause for concern.”

The argument escalates. Tony doesn’t even process half of what is said, just remains as firm as possible every time Peter — every time Spider-Man — is brought up. He knows it seems hypocritical, especially without any of the relevant, damning facts, but those are facts he can’t give. He can’t compromise the kid.

And it doesn’t matter anyway, because aforementioned kid will be nowhere near whatever the hell is headed their way.

“You have to decide what’s more important to you,” says Natasha quietly, as the meeting breaks up. “Whatever it is you’re trying to protect by not giving away some vigilante you plucked off the street, or the safety of the goddamn earth.”

It’s a ridiculous exaggeration of the consequences, and Tony knows it. When push comes to shove, if something threatens humanity — hell, if something threatens anyone — Steve would put aside their differences fast enough to give them all star-spangled wedgies.

That being said, even Tony has to admit that their ability to work as a team will undoubtedly be compromised in the face of whatever it is that’s coming if they don’t find a way to work together — and soon.

Tony walks out with the weight of all of it on his shoulders when he remembers that the same kid he’s spent the last hour going to bat for is very much in the tower. He waits for a few moments to collect himself, and asks Bruce if he still wants to talk to the kid. Bruce seems relieved at the suggestion, telling Tony to send the kid to the kitchen like last time, because apparently he already has their mutual favorite snacks memorized.

They leave the room, then. Bruce makes some offhand remark about Tony’s Christmas spirit being more aggressive than ever when he sees the pine needles scattered on the ground outside the room, but Tony barely hears him. Natasha’s cryptic last words are pressing on him like a bruise.

“Kid isn’t with you?” Happy asks, when Tony tells him to send Peter down.

“Why would you think that?”

Happy frowns. “Pepper sent him to ask you something about the Christmas party. I assumed he was with you.”

“Uh, no. I have seen hide nor hair of him. FRIDAY?”

“Mr. Parker left Stark Tower approximately forty-five minutes ago.”

“What …”

Pine needles.

Tony pinches his eyes shut, the sinking sensation pitting his stomach before realization fully hits him. The kid came looking for him. The kid with ridiculous supersonic hearing came looking for him — and if there’s any question of whether he overheard all the shit that Natasha said about him, the proof is in the pine needles scattered on the floor from clutching his dilapidated, sorry excuse for a tree.

Sure enough, there’s a trail of them from the conference room to the elevator and right out the front door.

He calls the kid’s cell phone and it goes straight to voicemail, which can only mean he’s already underground.

He waits an hour and calls it again. It rings, but no answer. He waits another three hours until he sees that the kid’s in the suit and nosediving off buildings in Queens and calls a third time, letting the kid’s AI patch him through.

“So. How much of that did you hear?”

The kid doesn’t even bother to lie. He lets out a breath slower than any Tony is used to hearing from him, and says, “Enough.”

Tony paces the room. He’s been trying to get in touch with the kid all day, but now that he has him he doesn’t know what to say.

“I’m sorry,” Peter blurts unexpectedly. “I’m — I’m really sorry, Mr. Stark. I didn’t mean to — ”

“Don’t be sorry. Stop being sorry,” says Tony. For fuck’s sake. He’d expected the kid to be mad at him. Somehow this is worse. “They were out of line.”

The kid doesn't answer for a moment. When he does, his voice is small. “Were they?”

Tony pinches the bridge of his nose between his fingers. “I was the one who pulled you into this, kid. They’re not going to do anything over my head. They can’t.”

“But whatever’s coming …”

Tony doesn’t know what to say to that. He never has. Not since he woke up, heart in his throat, head pounding, blinking up at the Hulk and into a world that a moment before he could never have fathomed.

“I — I’m sorry, Mr. Stark. Gotta go. Robbery a few blocks up.”

“Kid — ”

The line cuts out. Tony sinks into a chair, crushing his eyes shut, the Christmas lights from the tower still burning into the insides of his eyelids. 

"Shit." 

Chapter Text

Tony kind of hates that he’s low key memorized the kid’s decathlon practice schedule, but it is what it is and it’s also the reason he doesn’t feel bad texting to let the kid know Happy’s going to pick him up after school.

Not at school today , answers Peter, with a green emoji wearing a mask.

You’re turning into the Hulk?

No just sick , Peter answers.

Yikes. Tony didn’t think that was a thing that could happen to people with ridiculous healing factors. He scowls at the screen — either the kid is lying or he’s the kind of sick that transcends his weird spider mutations, and inconveniently enough, those are both cause for concern.

Mind if I join you?  

Peter’s typing, and then not typing, and then typing again. I don’t want u to get sick , he writes.

Tony rolls his eyes. Be there in an hour.

He takes the car by himself, because the place is crawling with Avengers and ex-Avengers and he doesn’t want to draw any more attention than strictly necessary. Already Natasha’s been asking about his waterlogged intern — ”Since when did you start hiring fetuses?” she asked, making it clear that she was every bit as instantly endeared to him as Bruce was — and while Tony knows it’s only a matter of time before she makes the connection between Peter Parker and Spider-Man, he’d like to make that window as long as possible.

The kid, as it turns out, was not exaggerating. He answers the door wrapped in a sweater, his ratty down coat, and an aggressively Christmas-y blanket draped around his shoulders, his nose redder than Rudolph the goddamn reindeer.

“You’re here,” he says, blinking at Tony with red-rimmed eyes.

“And you look like you were bitten by a festive zombie. What the hell happened?”  

Peter shrugs. “I get colds sometimes,” he says, his throat thick. “After it rains and stuff. It’ll be gone by tomorrow.”

Tony cringes. It’s a little bit his fault the kid was running around getting pummeled by literal ice falling from the sky yesterday.

“This happens regularly? ”

Peter shrugs again, and doesn’t look like he’s up to doing much more than that. He listlessly heads back to the couch, as Tony takes in the Parker apartment for the second time.

It’s different, being here now that he actually knows the kid — everything seems to hold a different kind of weight, cast itself in different colors. The framed pictures. The old drawings and the birthday invitations and postcards magnetized to the fridge. The Star Wars DVDs all lined up in careful order by the television, next to a whole bunch of rom coms from the ‘80s and ‘90s. The sad little Christmas tree from yesterday, now wilting under the weight of multicolored lights and ornaments, with what appears to be the insignia for the Rebel Alliance perched at the top in lieu of a star.

“About yesterday.”

Peter coughs into his elbow. “What about it?” he wheezes.

“You’ve forgotten that whole super classified, adult conversation you invited yourself into?”

Peter presses his eyes shut and blinks at him. “I’m honestly not even sure if I’m dreaming this right now, so.”

“Uh. Should we be calling your aunt?”

“Nope. No,” says Peter, burrowing further into the couch and waving a vague hand at him. “‘S gonna be fine.” He frowns and then, before Tony can express any doubt about that, his face falls. “Oh … oh. I remember now. Oh, man.”

Tony squints at the kid and his ridiculously pale face. “We can talk about this when you don’t look like you were slapped around by the grim reaper,” he offers.

Peter shakes his head. “Nah, no, let’s — talk about it.”

Tony would wave him off, but the truth is that he doesn’t exactly feel comfortable leaving the kid to his own devices right now, anyway. At least not until he doesn’t look like a light breeze could murder him. He settles onto the other side of the couch, blowing out a breath and trying to decide how exactly he’s going to approach this.

“You know that — whatever you heard back there. It’s not your fault. It’s not on you. The whole — mess we made of things. That’s on us.”

Peter watches him so carefully that it’s a little chilling. Usually by now the kid would have interrupted him at least twice.

“And I know that it’s important to you, keeping your civilian identity a secret. Hell, it’s important to me, too.”

He resists the urge to say all the things he might say: But I could protect you, if you came forward. But it doesn’t have to be this big, scary, overblown thing. But you could just give this up for a bit, until you’re eighteen and not a giant gray area when it comes to you and the law.

Instead, he says, “That’s well and good. I respect it. But I suppose I have to ask — is there a reason you don’t want the other Avengers to know?”

Peter burrows further into the couch, closing his eyes for a moment.

“Because you know — you can trust them. I know it might not seem like it, with the team fractured the way it is, but you can.”

“I do,” says Peter. The words come fast — too fast. Another brutal reminder of just how far to the ends of the Earth Peter would go for his childhood heroes, even when by all accounts they should have disappointed him by now. “Of course I do. I just … I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

“Who do you think is gonna get hurt, kid?” Tony asks.

Because that’s just it — they’ve been over this. May already has her own security detail. If need be, the kid will finish up his classes with a tutor to keep the school off anyone’s radar. There’s no angle of this that Tony hasn’t anticipated for him. He’s lived through enough shit himself to know all of the infinite ways it can go wrong.

It takes so long for the kid to answer that Tony’s afraid he might have fallen asleep on him.

“My, uh — my uncle. D’you know how he died?”

Tony freezes. This right here is not his strong suit. Mechanics and alien energy sources and battle strategy, sure. But this …

“Yeah,” he admits, after a moment. He’d looked it up before he first met the kid. Three gunshots — two to the abdomen, one to the chest. Broad daylight. Only a few blocks from here. Peter, apparently, was standing right there.

Peter shakes his head. “You don’t, though. Because … that’s not the whole story.”

Tony is probably going to regret this. “So tell me.”

Peter’s eyes are clear, now, even if the rest of him still isn’t.

“A week or so after I got my powers, we were crossing the street. Me and Ben. And a car was gonna hit us, and I didn’t think, I just — I just put my hand out. It was — it was going really fast and I didn’t know what else to do, I wasn’t — expecting it to just … stop.”

Peter’s not quite looking at Tony. He takes a breath, steadying himself, and goes on: “Well, Uncle Ben pulled me out of the street. We talked and I — I told him what happened. About the spider bite. About the crime-fighting, and stuff. It was nice to finally tell him. He was getting upset that I was sneaking out so much.”

Tony feels like he just swallowed a rock. He wants to tell the kid to stop, that he doesn’t have to explain. Already he can see whatever it is playing like a reel behind the kid’s eyes. Tony’s afraid if he closes his own, even for a second, he’ll see it too — the footage from that night the Winter Soldier killed his parents. The footage he sees every night when he falls asleep. Over and over and over and — 

“We were … gonna talk to May. Figure out what to do. And then — and then the next day, he was walking me home from school again, and … some men tried to grab me.” Peter’s eyes are shining. “They were there the day before. They’d seen what I could do. They wanted to use me. And i could have fought them off, I really could have, but Uncle Ben shook his head at me. He told me no . And I listened to him. Because I didn’t think — I just didn’t think that they’d ….”

A thick tear leaks down Peter’s cheek. The apartment is suddenly so quiet that Tony almost forgets to breathe.

“They killed him. Because of me . Because someone knew what I could do.” For the first time since he started talking, Peter stares right at him — raw and helpless and younger than he’s ever looked. “Someone’s always gonna get hurt.”

For a split second, Tony regrets everything. Not just coming here today, but involving Peter in any of this. Regrets banging down his door and asking him for his help when he should have marched in and told the kid to stop right then . Should have been the authority figure who realized this was too damn much for a teenager to take on and put an end to it before it even started.

Peter swipes at his eyes, and there’s that slight glint of defiance in them when he looks back up — and just like that, Tony knows. Knows it the way the kid’s uncle must have, from the second he found out. Nobody was ever going to be able to stop this kid. Whatever it is in him, it’s deeper than any words could ever reach.

“Okay,” says Tony.

Peter blinks at him, his gaze unsteady. “Okay?”

“Okay. We don’t tell the others.”

“But they’re gonna …”

“I’ll deal with it,” says Tony, holding a hand up to stop the kid. And for once, it works.

Peter sags into the couch, resting his head against a cushion. “Sorry,” he murmurs again.

“Cut that out.” Tony tears his eyes away from the kid, his throat tight. There’s too much to say and no room to say it. Not here. Not now.

“What is this?” he asks gruffly, gesturing at the television.

Peter turns his head toward the screen. “Elf.”

He honestly can’t tell if that’s the actual title of the film or if the kid is so zonked out on Robitussin that it’s the only word left that he knows. “I already hate it,” says Tony, grabbing the remote control and hitting play.

He has every reason to leave. The kid practically doesn’t even know he’s here. He keeps doing this thing where he falls asleep for a few minutes, wakes himself up coughing, and then blinks at Tony like he thinks he might be dreaming him up. Will Ferrell’s shenanigans play out on the screen in vain. Even when Tony’s staring at the screen, he isn’t really watching, his thoughts everywhere else — at the tower, where his old teammates are waiting for an explanation. In the sky, where a threat is lurking. On this couch, where there is a kid he has done and will do anything in his power to keep safe.

By the time it starts to get dark outside, some of the color is back in the kid’s cheeks and he is so thoroughly out that Tony doubts he’s going to wake up again anytime soon. That, and he knows May is going to be home any minute. Any lingering worry of Peter suffocating from the common cold can officially be put to rest.

He heads out the front door, but not before his eyes graze a picture. It’s May, and a much younger Peter, and a man with a broad smile and curly brown hair that looks just like him. It isn’t that, though, that makes Tony pause — it’s the coat the man is wearing. The same ratty, oversized one that Peter’s been schlepping in all winter long.

Tony stands there for a moment, his hand still on the doorknob, hanging his head.

Someone’s always gonna get hurt.

Chapter Text

“Oh, boy.”

Tony looks up from his coffee to see Pepper frowning into a Stark Pad and scrolling down.

“What?” Tony prompts her.

She doesn’t answer right away. Her lips keep pursing and twitching like she can’t decide if she’s worried or amused. In other words, a look she usually reserves for right before she tells Tony off for something that he knows, ultimately, he’s going to get away with.

Except by the time she looks up at him, her eyes are more wary than accusatory. “Um — so — Steve Rogers is back in town.”

Tony’s eyes narrow. “And you know that because …?”

Pepper sighs, and hands him the Stark Pad. A headline glares off the screen: Spider-Man vs. Captain America: Battle of the Boroughs!

Cue the actual heart attack. Tony knows for a fact that, Germany aside, Steve could rip Peter Parker to pieces in an instant. Even if their strength is comparable, the kid’s still laughably clueless about how to use it (an issue he’d be more than happy to correct, if May would let him borrow the kid for more than eight seconds at a time).

But when he scrolls down, he sees what appears to be Spider-Man getting knocked down by the force of a flying … snowball? The footage is shaky, a Facebook Live video taken from someone’s cell phone, but the goings on are unmistakable.

Spider-Man and Captain America are engaged in a full-fledged snowball fight in the middle of Prospect fucking Park.

Not only that, but they both appear to have literal armies of civilians behind them joining in the melee.

“You’re gonna regret this, punk!” Steve calls. Even in the graininess of the feed Tony can see the broad grin on his face. “This is my turf .”

“Then defend it, old man!” Peter crows.

This earns a few whoops and low “ ooohs ” from the crowd.

“Didn’t anyone ever teach you to respect your elders?” calls another voice.

The camera whips around to reveal none other than Bird Brain Wilson himself. He’s left the mechanical wings at home, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the last damn straw.

“Tony,” Pepper warns as he abruptly gets up from his seat.

He doesn’t answer.

“What are you going to do, fly in there and — ”

“They’re using him,” says Tony, his jaw so tight that he’s practically spitting the words.

Pepper puts her hands on her hips. “They’re throwing snow at each other.”

Tony’s too tense to even shake his head. “They were war criminals last week. They need to get back in public favor. They’re using the kid because he already fucking has it.”

“Well ... maybe this is a good way to bridge the — ”

“Not if it exposes the kid, it’s not,” he cuts her off. “Spider-Man is a local news beat. Thousands of pictures of him on the internet with the first anyone’s seen of Captain America in months? It’s going to go so viral that there’s not a goddamn person in the world who won’t know his name.”

Pepper doesn’t have an argument for that. If anything, it riles him even more.

“Just — take a beat,” she says. “This can wait a few hours.”

It could if it were anything else on the line. But it just had to be the kid.

And yes, the logical part of Tony knows that the damage has already been done. But logic isn’t quite as loud as everything else — the anger, the indignation, unexpected hurt of Steve rolling back into the city and not even bothering to say a goddamn word to him about it, let alone accosting the kid.

It’s a spit in his face, is what it is. Captain America and Spider-Man may not have had that much of an introduction in Germany, but there’s no way Steve didn’t know the two things he must be leveraging right now: that Tony holds himself responsible for the kid, and that aforementioned kid still looks up to Cap like he hangs the fucking moon. Forget the snowball fight — Peter would have robbed a bank with the guy if he’d asked.

Tony has every intention of disengaging the suit before he interrupts the circus down below, but in the few minutes it takes for him to get to the park the crowd has somehow tripled; there’s only a small circle in the middle where people are watching Cap and Spider-Man duke it out, everyone cheering and laughing and having a goddamn ball. Tony blinks, taking in the scene, and something in him just snaps .

“THIS IS FOR QUEENS!” Peter is calling one second, cranking a handful of snow behind his head, and then — ”Wh-whoa! Whoa! Hey! PUT ME DOWN!”

Tony doesn’t answer him, hooking the kid by the arms and pulsing up above the crowd so Peter’s dangling over it, looking down. People immediately start breaking out into screams and cheers at the sight of him. Jesus Christ, can’t they tell he’s trying to discipline a teenager here? He can barely hear his own voice, let alone Peter’s squeaky protests.

“M-Mr. Stark! What’re you …?”

“Who threw the first snowball?”

Peter wriggles like he’s trying to free himself, but then looks down in the general tree-lessness of the area down below him and thinks the better of it.

“Um — Cap did. Wh-why?”

Tony unconsciously tightens his grip on Peter’s arms, only realizing it when the kid inhales sharply and flinches.

“I — I’m sorry. Are you mad? Oh, man, you’re mad. I’m sorry. I thought — with everything going on, since you guys were worried about Cap and the Falcon not trusting me and all, that — that this would be good. Is it not good?”

Some of the cheers have died down. Tony can hear himself think again, and he doesn’t like it. Because there’s not a damn word that’s about to come out of his mouth that doesn’t sound like something that would come out of one Howard Stark’s.

And damn if he doesn’t remember being the one in Peter’s spandex-clad, ridiculously bright shoes, wondering what the hell he’d done to deserve it.

Peter lowers his voice, his body no longer flailing but totally rigid. “What do you want me to do?”

Tony gnaws on the inside of his cheek. Pepper’s right. Publicly interrupting this isn’t going to do anything but make it worse — not just for the team, but for the kid, too. The kid who still thinks of the Avengers as his heroes, and probably thinks this snowball fight is better than Christmas and getting his driver’s license and a Star Wars premiere all rolled into one.

It’s rare that the kid lets himself be a kid these days. Especially when he’s in the mask. Tony can begrudge Steve and Sam whatever he damn well pleases, but he can’t begrudge the kid that.

So he clears his throat. Swallows it down. “I want you to stop throwing like an amateur ,” says Tony, “and start webbing up those snowballs for maximum impact before you let them loose.”

Peter gasps. “That’s genius.”

“I’ve been known to have a good idea or two before.”

Tony sets him down, and then the crowd is cheering again, some of them already yelling “ Fight! Fight! Fight! ” Peter scrambles back toward the fray with a quick glance back at Tony, and Tony rolls his eyes at him to go. He can’t see the kid’s face, but he doesn’t have to — he grins one of those absurd, full body grins, and then he disappears into the crowd faster than Tony can blink.

Before he’s ready for it, Steve is right in his line of sight and stepping forward to face him.

And Tony sees, right then, in the beat before he lifts his faceplate, that this isn’t a manipulation. This is a peace offering. An olive branch. It's just Tony's damn luck that Steve happened to pick the wrong one. 

“Tony,” says Steve, with a careful nod.

Tony doesn’t nod back. The snowball fight rages on around them. He supposes if there’s anything left to air out, they might as well do it now, in a place where neither of them would ever be willing to come to blows. But when he takes in a breath to do just that, every word that he’s saved up in himself for months seems to die halfway up his throat.

“The beard,” he says after a moment. “Really think you’re gonna be able to pull that off standing next to me and Thor?”

Steve’s lip twitches on one side, almost imperceptibly.

Tony takes a step forward and lowers his voice, and the almost smile fades from Steve's face. “From here on out — whatever the hell it is that we end up doing — leave Spider-Man out of it.”

Both of their eyes flit over to Peter, who has what appears to be an entire third grade class crawling all over him and one kid on his shoulders, leading a parade of miniature humans into battle against Sam.  

Tony turns back to Steve, and sees the unasked question in his eyes. And in that moment, it’s not just that Tony needs Steve to understand. It’s that he trusts him — at least, he trusts him with this. Trusts him enough to go behind the kid’s back, just this once.  

“He’s only a kid.”

It takes a moment for Steve to understand. They’ve all been calling him kid since from the moment Spider-Man showed up in Germany. And then Steve’s eyebrows lift, and he seems to realize the magnitude of it — realizes what Tony actually means by kid .

“Tony …”

Tony turns his head almost unconsciously, immediately finding Peter in the crowd. “That’s my only term. We keep him out of it.”

“We can't keep him out of anything,” says Steve. “Wasn’t that the whole point of the Accords?”

Tony narrows his eyes when he looks at him, but Steve isn’t angry, isn’t accusatory. His eyes are already brewing with the same worry that Tony’s been living with now for months.

“He’s — unprecedented. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” says Tony gruffly. “But for now — ”

“Leave him be.” Steve punctuates the words with one of those firm, Captain America nods. They both know this is far from the last conversation they’ll have about it, but that’s all Tony needs to hear from him for now.

They turn, then, because it’s suddenly gotten quiet — a little too quiet. Tony decides right then and there that if the kid is planning a sneak attack on him that he will disown him in the time it takes for the first snowball to launch, but apparently the kid has some sense of self-preservation, because his not-so-covert attack is aimed somewhere else. 

“Avengers, assemble!” says Peter to the group of little kids flanking him — no, an entire skinny-limbed, gap-toothed battalion.They’re all grabbing heaps of snow in their mittens and slowly advancing on Sam. “On my mark. Three, two — charge! ”

The park erupts in little kid screams then, as the group of them charges Sam, who obligingly and theatrically pretends to go down as the pack of munchkins overtakes him. People are laughing and pulling out their phones and breaking into miniature snowball fights all around them. Honestly, Tony hasn’t seen this many happy people clustered in such a small space since the peak of his clubbing days in the ‘90s, and everyone was on a hell of a lot more drugs than he's assuming they are now.

Steve tilts his head toward the crowd, a quiet offer to join in the madness. But Tony’s not there yet.

He points at Peter. “Bring him back the way you found him,” he warns.

Steve salutes him, half sincere and half mocking — and for a second, he's not Captain America. He's Steve. He's Tony's teammate. He's someone who is going to help him set this right. 

Tony probably shouldn't let himself feel the acute relief of it; he probably shouldn't let himself assume anything about this encounter at all. But for now the kid is safe, and for now he can trust that he's not the only one who wants to keep it that way. That's more than Tony could say even an hour ago.

"Aw, c'mon, Mr. Stark! A little help down here?" Peter calls, seeing that Tony is poised to leave. 

Tony lowers his faceplate. "You dug your igloo, kid. Now you have to lie in it." 

And if Tony just happens to blast his repulsors and melt a good chunk of the available snow on Steve and Sam's side of the park as he heads out, well, that’s nothing more than a happy accident.

Chapter Text

Tony barely sleeps — just watches as the news notifications come in. Captain America this, Spider-Man that. He sleeps fitfully for an hour or so and wakes back up when Pepper does, then promptly holes himself in the lab for the rest of the day, successfully managing to avoid Natasha, Bruce, Vision, and Wanda, all of whom do not seem inclined to leave his tower anytime soon.

When he finally emerges from the lab, he catches the sound of a conversation in the bio facility down the hall.

“... kinda weird, though, right? I mean — does your body have to get used to like, being a human body, after all that time of not being one?”

“Yeah, you’d think that — but it gets back to normal after a few minutes.”

“Whoa.”

“It’s the rest of it that, uh … well. It’s weird. Losing two years of your life, I guess.”

Only then does it hit Tony exactly what’s happening. After days of radio silence, gentle prodding from Natasha, and decidedly less-than-gently prodding from Tony, Bruce Banner appears to be spilling his guts out about his prolonged planetary departure to a fifteen-year-old punk kid.

“But you still have the team, right?” Peter asks. “Everyone here — Mr. Stark and all the others — they missed you. They were still here waiting. Right?”

“Well. Not the team it was when I left,” says Bruce, the words wry.

Peter’s voice is unexpectedly solemn. “But still your friends.”

“Yeah, Pete. Still my friends.” Bruce is quiet for a beat, and then says, “Speaking of friends … you’re not, like, getting hazed, right?”

“No, Dr. Banner. Just, uh — it was dodgeball day. In gym.”

“So someone clocked you in the face with one?”

Tony takes this opportunity to clear his throat and interrupt, before the kid spins yet another barely believable web of lies about his extracurriculars. Bruce and Peter turn at the sound, and sure enough there is quite the shiner taking up a significant portion of the kid’s face. Tony tries not to cringe, knowing that when it initially happened it must have looked a lot worse.

“I’m sorry, is this a Stark Industries property or a frat house? Because I do not recall summoning you here, and yet,” he says, gesturing to the mess Bruce and Peter have created out of the microscopes and samples.

“Oh — Wanda invited me.”

Tony blinks at him. “Wanda invited you.”

Peter nods. “To decorate gingerbread cookies.”

“I’m sorry, when, exactly, did you befriend Wanda?” asks Tony, deciding to leave out the secondary question of when Wanda was body-snatched by Martha Stewart aside.  

Peter furrows his brows. “Um, a few months ago? Sometimes we play video games whenever you have to take conference calls and stuff.”

To be fair, sometimes Tony does get tied up when the kid’s visiting the compound or the tower. That said, Tony figured he was doing what any normal teenager would do in his shoes and poking his nose in parts of the facilities he didn’t belong. Which, he supposes, Wanda kind of is .

“Huh.”

“I’m gonna head up to meet her now, if you want to, uh … join.”

“I’ve got stuff to do. But let’s walk and talk. Internship stuff.”

Peter’s face pales a bit. “Right. See you, Dr. Banner.”

“It’s Bruce.”

“His real friends call him Elphaba.”

The door slides shut before Tony can hear Bruce’s groan. Tony checks to make sure they’re still alone in the hallway, then puts a hand on the kid’s shoulder as they walk toward the elevator.

“Hope all these headlines haven’t gotten to your head yet.”

Peter laughs a little breathily. “Um. Yeah. I wasn’t expecting that,” he says.

Tony grits his teeth. Of course he wasn’t. Yet again Peter has been an unwitting pawn in something much bigger than he is; this time the consequences are a lot worse than a slight concussion in an airport hangar and a black eye.

“Just wanted you to know we’re staying ahead of it.”

Peter nods, and Tony cuts a quick glance at him. For the first time, he sees a flicker of doubt cross the kid’s face. It hits Tony in an unexpected place. The conversation they had in the Parker apartment two days ago is still a little too close to this moment now, the friction of it so overwhelming that Tony doesn’t really know what to say.

“Right,” says Peter, hoisting his duffel bag higher up on his shoulder.

“You planning on looting the place?” Tony asks, looking at the size of the bag, grateful for some kind of distraction.

“Huh? Oh. No, no, I’m staying with Ned for a few days.”

Tony vaguely remembers this name belonging to the person who calls on Peter’s behalf every now and then when the universe feels like threatening Tony with a minor heart attack. “And exactly what kind of bribery did it take to get your terrifying aunt to agree to that this close to Christmas?”

Peter winces. “Well — she’s staying with a coworker. The pipes in our apartment building froze and burst, so we got kicked out until maintenance can fix it.”

Tony blinks at the kid. “Wow. This is impressive.”

“What is?” asks Peter, justifiably wary at the sarcasm he can already detect in Tony’s voice.

“That I’ve been on this earth for as many years as I have but I’ve literally never been more insulted in my life.”

Peter searches his face. “Wh-what …”

“ Kid . I have an entire tower of empty rooms, one of which was already reserved for you before you decided you were too cool to be an Avenger. The utter ridiculousness of the two of you not staying here cannot be overstated. Honestly, I’m hurt.”

Peter’s jaw drops. “Wait — seriously? Are you sure?”

“You continue to insult me. Wanda, you dropped this,” says Tony, steering Peter over to her once she comes into view. Well, what little of her is in view in the veritable forest fire that has become his kitchen — he doesn’t even have to have Wanda’s annoying psychic abilities to know that Vision was in charge of the baking process, and somehow has managed to burn all the cookies to a crisp.

“маленький паук,” she says affectionately, swooping in as if Tony isn’t even there and as if the four of them are not in peril of suffocating to death from all the smoke. She tussles his hair, earning a laugh and a bleated half-protest from the kid. “You sit down. We’ll start when the second batch is ready.”

Peter heads toward the table, and Tony touches Wanda’s elbow. She stops, reluctantly, and looks at Tony with the usual disdain she reserves especially for him.

There’s no point in beating around the bush. “So you know?”

She levels with him, her eyes fiery with defiance. “Since the moment he first walked into the compound,” she says.

Tony doesn’t know why he didn’t anticipate this. Probably because he hasn’t known half the time when Wanda decides visit the compound. He’s never had to wonder whether he can trust her with this because he’s never even factored her into the equation.

She must pick be probing in his head again, though, because her expression unexpectedly softens. “He does not know that I know,” she says. “And I have no intention of telling him.”

Tony lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. A breath that, all things considered, he was probably better off holding until Vision opened a damn window.

He expects the conversation to end there. He and Wanda have not exactly been on the best of terms since Germany. But she leans forward then, her eyes piercing him in a way they never have before, somehow even more eerie than when she is working whatever magic it is she possesses and Tony has yet to fully understand.

“He is good,” says Wanda lowly. “He smiles. He laughs.”

Tony watches her carefully. Knows she isn’t finished.

“But he is afraid. All the time, afraid,” she tells him. “Heavy with fear, and with pain.”

It isn’t news to Tony, but it punctures him just the same. “I’m doing everything I can do keep him safe.”

Wanda considers this. Considers him. Under any other circumstance Tony might scowl and mouth off about the blatant privacy invasion, but he wants her to know that she isn’t the only one on the kid’s side.

“Good,” she says, after a moment. “Someone should.”

“I don’t understand,” says Tony. “The meeting — with Natasha — you seemed all for exposing him.”

Wanda nods. “To our own, yes. He needs it.” She sucks her lips into her teeth, watching as Vision frowns into the charred remains of his vaguely gingerbread man-shaped cookies. “He just doesn’t understand yet.”

“He needs time,” says Tony, not sure if he’s agreeing with Wanda or arguing with her.

Wanda closes her eyes, looking a lot older than she should. “You heard Dr. Banner. We’ve run out of it.”

Just then a pan clatters to the floor so loudly that there is no ignoring it. Wanda and Tony’s heads swivel around to an equally stunned looking Vision and Peter, the two of them standing over aforementioned pan and a veritable graveyard’s worth of burned, broken gingerbread men.

Peter opens his mouth first: “Five second rule.”

Tony looks away, half to make sure Pepper isn’t witnessing this, and half because he wants plausible deniability if Wanda and Peter start upchucking from floor-related food poisoning three hours from now.

“Call your aunt, kid,” says Tony on his way out.  

Peter grins at him through a mouthful of horrifically burnt cookie. “Can do.”

Tony stares at him a beat longer than he should, Wanda’s words still echoing between his ears. But louder than that is the sound of the kid’s laughter echoing through the tower, the sound of his yelp when Wanda tweaks him on his side, the unabashed grin on his face when Vision asks why Peter and Wanda are debating over who has a better “selfie arm” for pictures to immortalize this grisly gingerbread scene.

Peter may insist on keeping the mask on to protect his identity, but Tony knows the truth with or without Wanda’s help — the kid’s wearing one all the damn time.  

Chapter Text

The next day is a Saturday. Correction: the next day is the Saturday. As in the one day of the year that Tony refuses, on principle, to leave the tower.

Now, Tony tries his damndest not to reduce himself to being one of those “get off my lawn” type of billionaires by using the word millennial at all, but this is the one day a year that he figures he and every other person in the city of New York, regardless of age, societal standing, or financial bracket, is allowed to say the word with disdain. Because if there is one thing millennials have certainly ruined sometime between Tony living in Malibu and returning to this garbage-soaked island, it’s the one Saturday in December when they descend into the city en masse and unleash a horror even the Chitauri can’t match.

Tony calls it an abomination. The millennials call it Santa Con.

“Oh, boy,” a woman groans from the kitchen. Tony frowns for a moment, not recognizing the voice right away. “It’s starting just a few blocks from here this year.”

Tony walks through the open door to find May Parker in a pair of jeans he strongly suspects are holdouts from the ‘90s, squinting through her enormous rimmed glasses over Rhodey’s shoulder at the Stark Pad in his hands. The whole scene is so weirdly domestic and the lighting in the kitchen is so balanced that it looks like he just stumbled into a stock photo shoot of a middle-aged couple in a Folgers commercial.

Tony blinks that thought right the hell out of his head and compartmentalizes his best friend and Peter Parker’s aunt where they belong.

“And it’s going to be below freezing most of the day, which mean there’s going to be ice vomit all over the sidewalk,” Rhodey mutters.

“So we’re all in agreement,” says Tony. “Nobody leaves this tower until tomorrow morning, when the drunk Santas have been scraped off the street.”

May looks up at Tony with a wry smile. “Peter didn’t get the memo.”

Tony scoffs. “Rookie mistake.”

Of course, it isn’t one. Nothing spells out “boy scout vigilante” quite like Santa Con — an event hosted by the city once a year that involves young people getting dressed up like Santa and bar hopping until they either vomit, pass out, get carted off by an EMT, or a combination of all three. The worst part is that in the wake of all the businesses complaining about the plastered twentysomethings and existentially fraught thirtysomethings staggering into their premises, the event has declined to reveal what part of the city it will take place in until literally the night before — and naturally, the one winter Tony actually decides to spend in the city, it would be happening right outside his damn door.

Tony sighs, pouring himself a cup of coffee. Kid’s gonna have his work cut out for him today, that’s for damn sure.

“Oh, thank you, James,” says May.

Tony turns to see Rhodey topping off May’s coffee cup. He raises an eyebrow at Rhodey that Rhodey pointedly ignores, and May seems to be pre-ignoring, already knowing better than to make eye contact with him.

Ugh. It’s honestly rude of Pepper not to be here to for him to aim said eye contact at right now, all things considered.

He’s about to go hunting for her when the FRIDAY pulls up a display screen in the kitchen with the kind of alert Tony can’t ignore — the kind of alert he wishes he weren’t getting in front of May. Rhodey recognizes the distinctive pattern of the emergency protocol alarm and looks up from his Stark Pad in anticipatory concern.

“Tones?”

“Bomb threat,” says Tony, scanning as fast as he can. He closes his eye for a brief moment, because of fucking course . “Whoever it is … is dressed in a Santa costume.”

“You’re kidding ,” Rhodey mutters.

May’s face has gone white.

“Let’s suit up.”

“Are you kidding?” asks Rhodey, genuinely confused. “This is hardly an Avengers level threat.”

It took one sweep of May Parker’s eyes on his for it to decidedly become an Avengers matter. Tony’s eyes linger on hers for a moment, and Rhodey follows his gaze and the crease between his brows softens immediately.

“The kid’s down there, huh?” he asks.

“Might be,” says Tony. “You in or out?”

“In,” says Rhodey instantly.

May stands up from her seat. “If you see him — ”

Tony nods shortly, cutting her off before she can say anything to give Peter’s secret away. He feels like a jackass as soon as he does it. She knows better than anyone how guarded the kid is. “I’ll send him back here,” he says.  

May’s eyes are grateful, but wary. Tony turns before the image can take root in his brain.

The truth is, the kid’s faced a lot worse than this — and without backup, at that. But he supposes what May doesn’t know can’t hurt her. So if they’re going to pretend Peter can’t handle a bomb threat on his own for her peace of mind, then Tony supposes that’s what they’re going to pretend.

That is, until they run into one Agent Romanoff on their way out, kicking her leg over the seat of a motorbike.

“Wait — tell me you’re just doing some last minute Christmas shopping.”

Natasha raises an eyebrow at him. “No, I wear my other Kevlar-enforced skin suit for that.”  

“You super spies and your fashion,” Tony mutters, as he engages the suit and watches Rhodey out of the corner of his eye do the same. “You sure you wanna join this one?”

“Sure I’m sure. I want to see your pet spider in action.”

Tony turns to her sharply. There’s already that bare hint of a smile on her face, the kind he only ever sees when she knows something he doesn’t.

“After all, he’s already on the scene,” she says idly.  

Natasha doesn’t need to see beneath Tony’s mask to know she’s gotten under his skin.

“Good,” says Tony. “Then you’ll see he’s every bit as equipped as — ”

Natasha responds by revving the engine of her motorcycle and taking off.

Great.

When he does get airborne he barely makes it thirty feet in the air before he has eyes on the veritable clusterfuck that is midtown Manhattan. It’s a sea of cheap red and white polymers, intoxicated adults stumbling in crowds and small clusters, clutching paper bags and hollering. Not to mention there are enough Santas making out below to merit a new genre of porn, and it’s not even two o’clock in the damn afternoon.

Tony has FRIDAY connect him to the AI in the kid’s suit, who cheerfully reminds him to address her as Karen for reasons beyond Tony’s ability to fathom.

“Kid, I’m putting you on the main comm.”

“Oh — okay?”

“That means no calling me Mr. Stark, or everyone’s going to know you’re a rugrat.”

“What am I supposed to call you?”

“Red Leader.”

“ Really? ”

“No, Jesus, call me by my god-given name.”

“But I — ”

BOOM .

Tony can’t even tell where the explosion is coming from, but it’s enough to knock a few Santas to their knees even from whatever distance he is.

“Kid?”

He opens his main comm only because he has to, his chest already tightening when the kid doesn’t immediately respond. It only takes a second for input from the rest of the team to flood his ears, out of sync and out of rhythm after all these months apart.

“Kind of device do you think —

“ — emergency vehicles can’t get in with all the — ”

“Tones, it’s 49th and — ”

“I see it,” says Tony. “But — ”

“It’s homemade,” the kid cuts in, surprisingly confident — confident enough that he stops even Tony in his tracks. “He threw it into the crowd but I webbed it into a dumpster. Nobody's hurt, just — ”

“Wait, who is that?” asks a voice that Tony immediately recognizes as Steve’s, but is too keyed up to process right now.

“Um — it’s Spider-Man?” says the kid. “And anyway, the guy ran back into the crowd, I tried to follow him but the blast shot me back — ”

“Are you okay?” Tony asks.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine — ”

Tony has eyes on him now and can tell that he’s lying, but at least doesn’t seem anything more than a little banged up. And then, irritatingly enough, the all-American pain in Tony’s ass is running up the opposite block, reaching the kid before Tony does with his friend Sam in tow.

“Did you see which way he headed?” Steve asks.

“Yeah,” says Peter, pointing. “I think west down 49th, but he might’ve — ”

Steve nods and starts heading that way, making eye contact with Tony. “You got eyes up there?” he asks.

Tony’s jaw tightens. “If it’s one of homemade contraptions it’s not going to pop up on my scanners. But I can neutralize it with the repulsors if there’s another one.” He turns to the kid. “You — stay here.”

“Wait, what?”

“Corral and calm the drunk Santas while we take care of this.”

“Rhodey’s already on it,” says Natasha, who apparently has made it a one-person mission to wear away Tony’s last nerve today. “See if you can ID the guy, Spider-Man .”

Natasha says the name like it’s a joke. And to be honest, the name is ridiculous. But Tony is suddenly so defensive that he might have invented the awful moniker himself.

Peter doesn’t wait for any kind of further permission, just takes an unsteady step and then shoots a web and launches himself back into the chaos. Tony follows, somehow both surprised and unsurprised to find that, on just the other side of the street from where the explosive went off, everyone is still raging completely unaware. Even the few people who are screaming and running from the commotion blend so thoroughly into the packed crowd that it’s hard to tell who’s scared and who’s just drunk off their rocker.

“Jesus,” Natasha mutters. “I’ve been in the middle of foreign military coups less horrifying than this.”  

Tony tries not to tail the kid too aggressively. Natasha may be focused on the task at hand, but that doesn’t mean that she won’t be cataloguing every beat and measure of this encounter for later and sizing Spider-Man up — the last thing Tony wants to do is give the kid away by acting like a literal helicopter parent.

That, and as much as he hates that yet again he is forced to rely on Steve, he knows that Steve will be keeping an eye on the kid from the ground, too.

“What are we looking for?” asks Steve.

“Well,” says Peter, his tone a little wry, “he was wearing a Santa suit.”

“Imagine that,” Sam mutters through the comm.

“I’d say, um, medium height? Brown hair? I didn’t see much, but — ”

Just then a blast of sound so aggressive that Tony almost mistakes it for another explosive rattles the the area — but this time, when everyone throws their hands up and screams, there are giant, drunk grins on their faces. Only after a moment does Tony recognize the opening lines to Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You , which some overgrown punk has started blasting from a speaker he evidently dragged out of a bar.

But it only gets worse.

Every drunk Santa opens their mouth … and starts to sing .

Tony wonders for a fleeting moment just how much of an obligation they have to keep these idiots alive when they are murdering his eardrums , but that thought is swiftly interrupted by more chatter on the comms.

“Sam, give me a boost so I can get a better view of these assholes,” says Natasha.

“On it.”

There’s back and forth on the comms for the next few minutes, and Mariah Carey does not spare them one small mercy in the duration of it, nor does the crowd below. Sam and Natasha are scanning the sky, Steve is on the ground, Tony’s bracing himself for another explosive any moment, and the kid is …

“Hold on. I think I’ve got him,” says Peter, after a good two minutes of silence.

Natasha’s voice is terse. “Give me a location.”

“Um — 48th and 7th, right next to the — ”

“Do not engage,” says Natasha. “You’re not trained in any of the protocol to — ”

“I won’t, just, um — I’m gonna web up and point him out for you, okay — ”

“You’re sure this is our guy?” Sam asks.

Peter hesitates for a fraction of a second, and Tony watches as the guy he’s zeroed in on suddenly looks up, makes direct eye contact with Peter, and immediately starts rifling through his giant red coat.

Fuck .

“It’s him,” says Tony, jetting down toward him.

The next five seconds are a slow motion horror reel. The man turns and hurls something in his hands — something with a trajectory right toward Peter. Before it even leaves the man’s fingers Tony knows there’s no way he’s going to be able to intercept it; before it even leaves the man’s fingers he knows that even if the kid manages to web it, there’s no safe place on the street to ricochet from there.

He sucks in a breath to remind the kid to toss it to him, where he can safely neutralize the explosion — it would be just like a kid as reckless as Peter to try to take the blow for himself, instead of — 

“Tony!”

For an almost inscrutable beat Tony is thrown by the sound of Peter saying his actual name, but then he sees the kid has webbed up the explosive and projected it right toward his ready arms. The timing and the aim is close to perfect — he alters the repulser setting and has the explosive neutralized within the next second, a faint pop replacing what might have been street-wide chaos.

By the time Tony looks back down Steve has the guy with his arms pinned behind his back, and Sam is swooping in with Natasha to help. The kid is still clinging to the side of a building, looking up at him like he’s waiting for a cue.

Tony pulls himself out of the general comm. “You okay, kid?”

“Yeah,” says Peter. “You?”

Only when Tony hears the palpable anxiety in the kid’s voice does he realize — Peter was frozen because he was worried about him .

“Just dandy,” says Tony, flying toward him. “You did good.”

Peter relaxes a bit then, just in time for Natasha to interrupt: ”Wow. Gotta hand it to you, newbie. How did you know it was him?”

Peter laughs a bit under his breath. “I was listening to everyone in the crowd, and … well, he was the only one who wasn’t singing along.”

There’s a pause, then, where nobody on the comm seems to breathe — and then Sam busts out into laughter so sharp and contagious that everyone else can’t help but follow suit.

“What?” asks the kid, just barely keeping himself from stammering. “You can’t listen to that song and not sing it! Unless you’re like, an actual super villain, or something — ”

This only serves to make everyone laugh even harder, to the point where even the guy they’ve apprehended is looking at them like they’ve all lost their minds.

“Okay, okay,” says Natasha, wheezing out her last laugh as she cocks a gun and holds it to the guy’s head so he doesn’t get any ideas about trying to wriggle away. “Good work, spider dude.”

Tony wishes the begrudging respect in her voice were more of a relief. That he could take it in good faith and know that it meant that this was the first step toward her trusting the unknown entity that was Spider-Man, and trusting Tony’s reasons for not telling her anything more about him. But he knows her too well. Knows that if anything, this has only fanned the flame of her curiosity; now that he’s proven himself worthwhile in the heat of a crisis, she’s not going to rest until she’s uncovered the rest.

Tony holds in a sigh. He needs to talk to the kid.

But not today, maybe. Not today, when the kid shows back up at the tower an hour after everyone else does and May hugs him so hard that he winces. Not today, when Tony sees the kid give into a limp the moment he thinks he’s alone in the hall. Not today, when despite it all — the hurt and the worry and the secrets big enough to eclipse everything else — the kid is grinning from ear to ear, happy to have fought alongside his heroes and won.

And not today, when for the first time in almost a year, Steve comes back to the tower with them, with Sam in tow.

He and Tony don’t talk — there’s nothing either of them really has left to say — but it’s a step forward. And Tony knows, just like a lot of things in his life that are changing right out from under him, that the kid is the one to blame.

Chapter Text

“Please, for the love of all that is holy, tell me that Vision had no part in whatever you’re putting in that tupperware.”

Peter looks up from a pile of misshapen chocolate chip cookies.

“Nope, they’re safe,” he says, holding his hand out to offer Tony one. Tony raises an eyebrow at him and Peter just short of rolls his eyes and sets it on the table for Tony to take. And then, just after Tony pops one into his mouth: “But Captain Rogers helped.”  

Tony stops mid-chew.

“He was up early!” says Peter defensively. “And he had a really cool butter hack from his mom in the — ”

“Not that I’m really one to judge anyone’s sleeping habits, but why exactly are you baking enough cookies to feed an Asgardian army at seven in the morning? Don’t you tweens have off from school today?”

Peter caps the tupperware. “Yeah. But Aunt May works the holiday shifts so the younger nurses can go home, so we always — ” He pauses so quickly that it’s like a CD skipping a beat, like he doesn’t even realize he did it. “It’s kind of a thing, bringing cookies and stuff. So I’m gonna walk over.”

“Walk? To Queens?”

“No, uh — Aunt May works up at Lenox Hill on the Upper East Side.”

“Why would she …”

Peter busies himself a little unnecessarily with the tupperware, inadvertently answering the question for Tony. It makes sense. There is probably a lot more money there than a hospital in Queens. Still — the commute must be a bitch and a half. Staying in the tower is probably the closest to work she’s ever been.

“Eh, I need to get my steps in. I’ll come with you.”

Peter looks up at him in surprise. “It’s like two miles.”

“This may come as a shock to you, but I’ve survived worse.”

That, and Tony doesn’t have to reach too hard to know who the “ we ” Peter unconsciously corrected himself over must be. Seems like this might not be the kind of trip the kid’s too eager to take alone.

“That is, unless you’d rather hang out with your new buddy, Broad Stripes And Bright Stars.”

Peter huffs out a laugh. “The Avengers are more high school than actual high school .”

On the way there they mostly talk shop. The kid animatedly describes a near-explosion in his chem lab when Ned tried to prank him by adding sparkles to his latest improvement on his webs. Tony tells him about the time that DUM-E nearly set Pepper’s hair on fire. Peter goes on some tangent about the decathlon team trying to throw a surprise party for the member who has a birthday on Christmas, and Tony talks about a New Year’s Eve party from long before Peter was probably even a twinkle in his parents’ eyes (the kind of party that, admittedly, May would not be super pleased for him to recount).

He’s almost surprised when he blinks and finds himself standing outside the hospital, Peter walking in and waving at the people at the front desk to grab a visitor’s pass.

Peter heads to the nurse’s station and Tony follows, only to be so immediately accosted by the Chief Of Something Or Another that Tony wonders if there’s some kind of rich person screener that goes off whenever someone enters the building. He’s tied up for a few minutes — regrettable, because the cookies are actually damn delicious, regardless of Steve’s interference — before he’s released and goes back to find the kid.

But the kid’s already made another friend, it seems. There’s a toddler propped up on his hip and the two of them are staring into the nursery, where a bunch of newborns are squalling.

Tony wonders if there is a single demographic of human that the kid can’t befriend in eight seconds or less.

“Hey.”

Tony turns to see May Parker in the scrubs she left in this morning, a small smile tugging at her lips.

“Thanks for — well.”

Tony shrugs. “Didn’t want the kid to get lost on Park Ave. Some rich aging socialite might have mistaken him for a shih tzu and kidnapped him.”

She lets out a breathy laugh. “No, I mean for … taking us in the past few days.” She hugs her arms to her chest. “It’s already been — well, rough, of course. But it would have been a lot worse if we’d been separated during it.”

They both turn and stare down the hall, where the toddler in Peter’s arms is peeling with laughter.

“Yeah, well.” He’s about to say something sarcastic. There are about three different things he can think of to say right on the tip of his tongue. But then the kid turns and sees them staring and grins at them both and unhelpfully knocks the words right out of him. “It’s nice to have someone who doesn’t hate me hanging out in the tower.”

May snorts.

Tony lowers his voice. “You raised a good kid.”

A beat. 

“I mean, he’s a punk, but. You know. A good one.”

May surprises him by reaching out and putting a hand on his shoulder. “Thanks for keeping him safe.”

She’s gone, then, before Tony can respond — for someone who hasn’t known him very long, she’s a little freakily in tune to his general inability to handle anything that borders on sentimental. Tony takes a few steps toward the kid, aware that half the maternity ward is staring at him.

“What about that one?” says Peter, pointing at a baby.

“No,” the toddler in his arms squeals. “My sister is over there .”

“You sure she’s not that one?”

Another giggle. “No! Right there! ”

“Oohhhh, that one,” says Peter, pointing to a baby clear on the other side of the nursery.

“No, silly! She’s that one!”

“Are you sure? Because that one over there looks just like you.”

Tony clears his throat and the kid turns around to look at him, as does the bright-eyed toddler in his grip. She blinks at Tony like he’s the third wheel here, her eyes narrowing at him in distrust.

“I like your shirt,” says Tony.

Her little eyebrows furrow at him a bit. “It’s Spider-Man,” she says, looking down at the logo.

“Yeah. He’s my favorite, too.”

Peter’s face turns fire hydrant red in a matter of seconds. It’s still that approximate shade of red by the time they leave the hospital (although all the of aggressive cheek-pinching from May’s coworkers may also be to blame).

“I didn’t even know there was Spider-Man merch,” says Peter.

“Most people would be looking into litigation options right about now, you know.”

“But it’s so cool .”

On the way back they cut through the park, avoiding the tourist foot traffic on 59th. The usual clusters of people have surprisingly thinned out. It’s a cold day — colder than when they left, and apparently just cold enough that, for a long stretch of the park, it’s just Peter and Tony and the wind whipping at their backs.

Tony supposes he can’t put it off much longer.

“Look, kid. Yesterday was … you did good.”

Peter’s ears are already perked, like he’s bracing himself. “But?”

Tony shoves his hands further into his pocket. “Thing is … well, you know what Natasha's made of. And it’s only a matter of time before she figures out your whole thing, if she hasn’t already.”

Peter doesn’t say anything, just walks with his eyes on the pavement ahead.

“As for the rest of the team … I think they need some context, kid. At the very least they need to know you are a kid. I’m not saying you should go out and rip your mask off in the middle of Times Square and yell your social security number or anything, but I think they should know, because otherwise they might put you in situations that they wouldn’t have otherwise.”

“You mean situations like whatever’s coming.”

Tony cuts a glance at Peter, expecting the kid to look apologetic, but his face is already set in a resigned, grim kind of smile.

“I was only standing outside the door for a minute the other day, but I heard enough,” says Peter.

“Well — un-hear it. You’re not going to be a part of it.”

Again, the kid doesn’t say anything.

“I need some kind of verbal or nonverbal confirmation that you understood that.”

Peter looks at Tony, and already Tony hates what is brewing in the kid’s eyes, hates whatever is on the other side of it. He can practically feel some kind of a fight coming on like the air pressure dropping just before a storm.

But when the kid speaks, there’s no charge in it. He says the words with a ridiculous kind of calm: “Natasha was right. I can’t duck out of it. Nobody can. It’s like I’ve always said — I have these powers for a reason. If I just sit there and do nothing …”

Tony shakes his head. “This is one of those ‘rules don’t apply’ situations. Level with me here, webs. Powers or no powers, you are legally a child . And this kind of shit — it’s not a game. It’s not fun. It’s life or death. Most likely death, if we’re getting real here.”

Peter scowls at that. “You think I don’t know that?” he asks. “I’m not — I get what’s at stake , Mr. Stark. I know what might happen, but I’m — I’m not scared.”

“It absolutely should scare you. Jesus, is your teenage invincibility complex even worse than I thought?”

Peter shakes his head, and seems to mull over his own words for a moment before he speaks. “No, I just … I’ve lost a lot of people. You know how it is.” Peter shrugs like he’s trying to shrug off the weight of the conversation, like he just looked down and realized he was a little too far out of his depth. “Dying doesn’t seem so scary. It happens all the time.”

Tony grabs him by the crook of his arm. Peter stops in his tracks, his eyes turning to Tony in alarm.

“You’re not going to die. Do you hear me?”

Peter’s eyes widen on his. “Mr. Stark — “

“I don’t know where this — whatever the hell this bullshit is coming from — “

“You’re not — I just — I know this isn’t a game, Mr. Stark, is all I’m saying. I’m not going into this thinking it’s … ”

Tony tightens his grip on the kid’s arm. “You’re not going into it at all.”

Peter grits his teeth. Looks Tony square in the eyes. “Okay.”

Tony stares at him for a beath. “Okay what?”

Peter pulls his arm out of Tony’s grasp. “Okay,” he says, still infuriatingly vague, walking toward the tower without even checking to see if Tony’s following.

“Jesus Christ .”

“I’ll tell Natasha and the others after Christmas, if you really think we should,” Peter says, as if he didn’t just piss Tony off enough to turn him into a goddamn live wire mere seconds before. “But it’s not going to change anything. Because whatever’s coming — it’s bigger than me. Bigger than all of us. You know that better than anyone.”

The look the kid levels with him then is too familiar for comfort — the blazing eyes, the certainty in his jaw, the way he suddenly seems more grounded than he ever has. For a moment it’s not the kid looking back at him. It’s Steve.

“Yeah, well, guess what, kid?” says Tony. “When the time comes, you won’t be the one calling the shots. I will. And if you think I’m entertaining this pseudo-death wish of yours for one damn second, you’ve got another thing coming.”  

Peter shakes his head. “I’m just one person — "

“You wanna say that to your aunt’s face?” Tony asks. “Huh?”

“No," says Peter, affronted. "I want her to be safe.”

“Then stay the hell out of this. That’s how you keep her safe.” Before the kid can suck in enough air to interrupt him again, Tony says, “Because if this whole thing goes south? If we really do end up getting slaughtered against whatever the hell this is? Someone has to pick up the metaphorical sword we leave behind. Someone’s got to be there when we can’t. You have to fucking stay alive. That’s how you keep people safe.”

He thinks for a moment, when the kid goes stiff, that he might have gotten through to him. But Peter’s voice is hauntingly quiet when he speaks again.

“Why do I always have to be the one who gets left behind?”

The words nearly knock the air out of Tony's lungs. They keep walking, but they're barely making any progress now. It's a fifteen minute walk through the park, but it feels like they've been here for hours; like they're never going to leave. 

"Look ... kid. I know it's hard. That's not going to change. I wish I could say that it does."

Tony's fists harden at his sides. He's angry, but there's nowhere for it to go, nothing he can blame. It's a feeling Peter must know all too well — shaped by the countless circumstances that put him where he is now, all of them so unlikely, and all of them completely out of his control. 

"But if your uncle were here right now — I promise you he'd be saying the same damn thing. And I think you know that." 

Peter stops, then. He doesn't turn around, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, like he can't decide what to do next. 

"And you're allowed to be scared, you know," says Tony. "I sure fucking am, for one." 

"Yeah?" 

"Shitless, if you must know." 

It takes a few seconds. "I didn't think you were scared of anything." 

There's plenty Tony could tell him he's scared of. He doesn't even have to close his eyes to see it — the cold, unforgiving vacuum of space; the look in Bruce's eye when he told them the extent of what exactly they might be up against; the moments he hasn't been able to stop the people closes to him from getting hurt. He seems to collect new fears as the years go on: Happy in a hospital bed. Rhodey on the ground. Pepper falling into the flames. 

This fucking kid, determined to put himself in a hundred thousand places he doesn't belong. 

"Nope. I just put on one hell of a good show," says Tony. He takes a step forward then, clapping a hand to the kid's back. "But you already know a thing or two about that." 

Chapter Text

People start arriving for the Annual Stark Christmas Eve Eve Party as early as noon in various groups. Maria Hill shows up with a bottle of vodka approximately the size of the Hulk’s fist. Helen Cho arrives in a pair of heels so sky high that Tony’s afraid he’ll snap his neck making eye contact. The Stark Industries tech division arrives with their usual brand of awkwardness, half of them in ugly Christmas sweaters and the other half in suits, both groups looking at each other with a slight air of betrayal. The marketing and PR teams are so loud Tony can practically hear them from the street. By three o’clock the place is a veritable circus.

But despite the influx of guests, something is still … off. Natasha and Bruce are lingering at the bar, Natasha looking tense and Bruce shifting awkwardly. Rhodey and May are lurking in a corner smirking about something and vaguely reminding Tony of the cool kids who smoked under the bleachers in the scant amount of time Tony actually spent in high school. Sam and Maria have already broken into the vodka. The kid is alternating between hovering around Vision and a surly looking Wanda and asking Tony for the eight hundredth time if he can help with anything. Steve has yet to grace anyone with his presence, if he plans to at all.

Then Darcy arrives in her usual windswept manner, scans the sorry looking room, takes one look at Peter and says, “Oh, thank god , a millennial,” before promptly yanking him by the arm and dragging him away.

“Gen Z,” Tony corrects her.

Peter’s eyes widen. “Be cool.”

“How much experience do you have with Hallmark movies?” asks Darcy, without introducing herself.

Peter cuts a glance toward his aunt. “Way too much. Why?”

“Questions later. We have work to do.”

It doesn’t take Darcy too long to sniff out Wanda and decide to rope her into whatever young person shenanigan she has planned (a feat she manages if only because Wanda is a little too stunned by an actual peer dragging her by the arm to protest). Tony watches them go, looking around the room and feeling strangely friendless for someone who arguably has an army of friends within a hundred yards.

The next hour proceeds so awkwardly that Tony regrets making this the ten hour affair it certainly didn’t need to be, especially with Pepper wrapped up on the phone with some last minute end-of-quarter nonsense. The caterers arrive and need instructing, another few Stark Industries employees trickle in, and Tony stands by the bar and fights the urge to hide in his workshop until everyone leaves. 

“Attention, attention.”

Tony looks up to find that Darcy has found a stool to stand on, and that Peter is awkwardly hovering behind her with a nervous expression that looks so much like one of May Parker’s that Tony has to hold in a laugh.

Darcy clears her throat again until she has commanded the attention of the near one hundred people in the room, with a frankly confusing amount of confidence for someone who, as far as Tony knows, has not stepped foot in this tower for years. 

“Seeing as we have three hours left until dinner, interested parties may proceed to the rec room to participate in my proudest creation to date: a Hallmark Christmas movie drinking game. Beer and wine have already been pilfered from the bar, and the rules are posted on a board beside the television. You have ten minutes before I hit play.”

Tony should probably put a stop to whatever this is before the kids embarrass themselves, but to his surprise, a sizable portion of the party follows Peter, Darcy, and Wanda into the rec room, where the trio appears to have commandeered a Sharpie and a large poster board that is propped up next to the screen.

May pushes her glasses further up her nose and squints at it. “Oh my,” she says. “We’re all going to die.”

“Peter here is an infant, so he’s going to be refereeing,” says Darcy, pointing at the list. “That means when Peter says you drink, you drink.”

“How do you win?” asks Sam, confused.

Wanda holds up what appears to be a cocktail glass full of Maria’s vodka. “You don’t.”

“Which one are we watching?” asks May.

“ Christmas My Heart ,” says Peter, pulling it up on the DVR.

Tony scowls. It’s not just A Christmas Heart  on his DVR list — it’s a dozen other titles, all some variation on the words Christmas , Royal , and Love . He can practically feel cavities forming in his mouth just skimming the list. “Who on earth recorded these?”

“I find them intriguing,” says Vision, without a trace of irony.

Tony glances around the room. Most of the Stark Industries employees have elected to stay out in the main area, but the people he actually knows — the people he used to call teammates, or allies, or even friends — are all in here, cozying up on couches and chairs and grabbing cans of beer and glasses of wine. He blinks in surprise, not sure where to sit or even if he should, when Rhodey pats the empty space on the side of him that May isn’t already sitting on.

“Okay,” says Peter, as people finally start to settle. “The rules are you have to drink one sip anytime someone says Christmas, drinks hot chocolate, makes a reference to Scrooge or the Grinch, or wears plaid. Two sips anytime someone mentions a dead relative, falls down or trips into a hot person’s arms, has an unexpected talent or hobby that reveals their more sensitive side, or says they’re getting sick of life in the big city. Three sips if someone makes a Christmas pun, gets caught under the mistletoe, gets trapped because of snow, or has to share a bed. And down your drink if someone’s faith in Christmas is restored, someone gets engaged, or Santa mysteriously disappears after giving sage advice.”

May’s head is in her hands. “I feel personally attacked.”

“This is fifteen years of vengeance long overdue. Darcy, if you’ll do the honors.”

“Okay, everyone. Last chance to back out. Hitting play in three, two … one.”

What happens over the next hour and a half is nothing short of horrific. Brain cells die. Wills to live are lost. Blood alcohol concentrations soar. By the time the lights come up, Peter looks like an exhausted conductor of the New York Philharmonic, Wanda is wiping away a tiny, begrudging tear, May and Rhodey’s knees and arms are touching, Sam is blinking like he just witnessed a car crash, Bruce is near catatonic, and Natasha and Maria are laughing so hard that there are streaks of mascara running down their faces.

That, and somehow in the middle of this shit show Steve must have snuck in, and is now standing behind everyone like a brooding bearded ghost of Christmas past.

Darcy stands up and grabs Peter by the wrist, holding up his arm. “A round of applause for our maestro.”

This earns some semi-drunken hooting from the group. Peter beams and does a quick little bow.

“The caterers should have appetizers out by now. Please, for the love of god, go soak up some of the alcohol in your systems,” says Tony, rising to his feet.

The cluster starts to disperse in various degrees of intoxication. May’s still sober because she’s working the late night shift, so she and Peter help corral everyone back toward the main room, May tweaking Peter on the side until his laugh echoes all the way out into the hall.

Tony releases the breath he was holding and turns to the back of the room. Steve lifts his eyes at him, half obscured by shadow.

“I met Peter yesterday," he says. 

“I heard.”

Steve holds Tony’s gaze. In that beat there is a quiet understanding — an almost painful one. Tony forgot what it was like to be able to read another person this well, to be able to anticipate them like this.

“You said he was a kid,” says Steve, “but I didn’t realize … just how much of a kid.”

Tony expected Natasha to be the first one to put two and two together. He underestimated Steve’s soft spot for the little guy.

He braces himself, then, for what’s inevitably coming. Steve and his usual self-righteousness will spend the next ten minutes cutting him to pieces. Telling him how irresponsible and thoughtless it was, dragging Peter into this. Start yet another round of this fight that seems to end and not end and will probably be going on for the rest of their damn lives, in some way or another. 

“He’s lucky you found him.”

Tony’s too stunned to react. Steve just nods at him quietly, crossing the room to leave.

As he passes Tony lifts a hand and puts it on Steve’s shoulder.

“I’m glad you’re here.”

Steve smirks, but visibly seems to relax for the first time since Germany.

“It’s good to be home.”

The rest of the dinner goes without a hitch — or if there are any hitches, Tony doesn’t notice them. He’s flanked on either side by Happy and Pepper and sitting across from Peter, May, Rhodey, and Bruce, and the Christmas lights are twinkling and everyone’s talking over each other and laughing and by the time the dishes are getting cleared it’s dark outside and they’re all so full that May says someone is going to have to roll her to work.

Tony’s chest is unexpectedly warm as everyone starts to grab their coats and call it a night. May ruffles Peter’s hair and tells him she loves him and will see him in the morning. Vision and Wanda say their brief goodbyes and tell Tony they’re heading back upstate. Darcy claps him on the back and says “cool party, old man,” the Stark Industries employees all start summoning Ubers, and the rest of the team starts heading to their quarters.

Pepper snakes her fingers into his and presses a kiss to his temple.

“I’d say it was a successful night.”

Tony allows himself a moment of smugness. “You’re just saying that because you’re tanked.”

Pepper bumps her shoulder with his. “C’mon. We’re gonna prank call some of Pete’s friends in the rec room.”

“How, exactly, do you plan on doing that?”

Pepper shrugs. “Something about Captain America and PSAs. I trust they know what they’re doing.”

Tony raises his eyebrows. “I feel like someone should be the responsible party to whatever is happening here. Join you in a minute.”

Tony shakes all the hands and says all his goodbyes and oversees the beginning of the cleanup before he heads back to the rec room. From the open door he can see Peter holding up the phone to Steve’s face, Pepper’s hand clapped over her mouth in silent laughter, and Steve looking chagrined as he sets his shoulders in his most aggressive Captain America pose and says something Tony can’t make out into the speaker.

It’s almost like looking into a dream. Like it shouldn’t be possible. It’s been months of silence and tension and doubt, and Tony assumed it would take a lot more than time to fix what they had fractured — but here it’s like the universe has already pulled a 180 on him again, this time faster than he can keep up.

It’s not about who was right and who was wrong anymore. There’s no room left for that. But if Tony’s keeping score, the one thing he knows Steve is wrong about is this: Peter isn’t lucky Tony found him. Tony’s the one with the luck.

Chapter Text

What Tony remembers is this:

An alarm goes off at three in the morning on Christmas Eve. Tony has identified it before his eyes are fully open; Pepper is already halfway out of bed. Tony summons a suit.

“What’s that?” Pepper asks. 

“Intruder in the building. It’s probably nothing.”

It’s definitely something.

“But I need you to get in the closet.”

“ Tony .”

“Please.”

Pepper hesitates. A door slams in the hallway. She still doesn’t move.

“Pepper, now ,” says Tony. She lingers up until the moment Tony adds: “FRIDAY, activate Baby Gate protocol.”

They both know what that means, only because Pepper has spent a judicious amount of time talking Tony out of his nicknames for the various protections he’s set up for Peter, for the sake of what’s left of the kid’s ego. He’s grateful for all of his planning now — whatever is happening out there, the door to Peter’s quarters will be locked from the inside and out. Nobody will have access to the room, and Peter won’t be able to leave it — barring, of course, him needing to evac the tower, in which case he’ll still have access to the windows.

And Pepper’s “closet” has an elevator that leads straight to the tower’s hidden back door. The sooner she can get to it, the better.

Tony’s gauntlets connect with his fists. Someone yells something in the hall. And then …

And then Tony is waking up to darkness. His head is pounding. His hands are … stuck together. He peels them apart, and sees the remnants of what can only be the kid’s webbing starting to disintegrate around his wrists. Webbing that takes two hours to even start to break down.

Shit. Shit .

He stumbles to his feet, feeling for his gauntlets, his watch, anything , but there’s nothing on him. How is it possible there’s nothing on him?

“FRIDAY, what the fuck is going on?”

It takes a beat for FRIDAY to respond. “A neurotoxin was released in the tower approximately two and a half hours ago. It appears to have altered the behavior of anyone who came into contact with it to resort to extreme and unprovoked violence.”

The webbing. The missing gauntlets. The Baby Gate protocol . It’s all churning in his clearly concussed head, sinking in his stomach, but not quite connecting the way that it should. He stumbles to his feet, not sure which questions he should be asking.

“Pepper,” he manages. “Where’s Pepper? Call Pepper.”

She picks up on the first ring. “Tony?”

“Pep, what’s — ”

“Oh, thank god. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine — ”

“Nobody’s made contact yet. Has the neurotoxin worn off? Are you alone? Be careful if you aren’t, until we hear from the others we can’t be sure if it’s still affecting them — ”

“Where are you?”

“Out front. I called Maria. We’re trying to get to the bottom of this. Tony, where are you right now?”

“I gotta go.”

“ Tony .”

He disconnects the call and stumbles out into his workshop, still flexing and unflexing his fingers. The gauntlets . He tries to summon them, but nothing happens.

“That protocol was overridden by Mr. Parker approximately two hours ago.”

Tony’s blood runs cold.

“Where’s Peter?”

FRIDAY directs him out to the main lounge area. He steps out of the workshop and straight into hell.

The hallway is littered with broken objects, the wall streaked with blood, water gushing from some unseen pipe. The lights are still dim from the emergency protocol going off, the place looking like a haunted fucking mansion. Tony tries to pick up the pace but it’s barely manageable between the pulsing in his head and the obstacle course that used to be his tower.

“How did he get out?” Tony mutters. “How the hell did he get out of his room?”

“Mr. Parker appears to have broken the sealed off air vent to gain access to the rest of the building,” says FRIDAY.

Which means Peter wasn’t affected by the neurotoxin.

Which means Peter must have launched himself into the Avengers version of the motherfucking Hunger Games.

“Kid? Kid? ”

He sees Steve before he sees anything else — Steve, crouched down by the Christmas tree. There are some unsightly repulsor-shaped burns on him, but he’s moving, he’s talking, he seems fine. And then Tony hears the gasping from the corner.

“It’s okay, Peter. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Peter’s answer comes out in a wheeze. “I — I know, but — b-but I — ”

“You need medical attention. And until we get it I need to apply pressure to that wound.”

“Just — stay there — for a second. I just …”

Before he lays eyes on the kid he can see the red puddle of blood oozing on the floor, giving the eerie sense that the Christmas tree in the main hall is bleeding. Then Tony looks and sees the crumpled heap of a person below it and his heart seizes in his chest.

“Jesus Christ,” Tony mutters.

The kid is blinking at him, but he shouldn’t be. Nobody who looks like that should be conscious. His left eye is already purpling and one of his legs is jutted out an awkward angle, the blood so thick on the floor that Tony honestly can’t tell where it’s coming from. There are bruises in a ring around his neck like someone grabbed him and held him there, blood trickling out of his mouth, and a primal kind of terror in his eyes that strikes so deep in Tony’s bones that for a moment it almost paralyzes him.

He doesn’t realize he’s started running until the kid full body flinches, and then Tony realizes — the terror. It’s because of him .

“Hold on, Tony,” says Steve. “He’s — still a little wary of us.”

A little wary might be the understatement of the goddamn century. The kid is practically catatonic and won’t even look them in the eye.

“S-sorry,” says Peter.

“No. No apologizing.” He turns to Steve, his chest so tight he can’t believe he has the air to talk. “We need Bruce.”

“I l-locked him in a closet with Rhodey,” says Peter, through a hiccup of pain. “Bruce d-didn’t Hulk out, and Rhodey didn’t have his suit, but they were t-trying to fight you guys, and they were ba...ad at it, so I tranq’d them and … ”

“We need to find the others,” says Steve quietly.

“Um — Nat-tasha and S-Sam are in the k-kitchen … I … think they’re okay.”

“Did you go toe to toe with everyone? ”

Peter still won’t look at him, but his eyes fill with tears. “You guys were going to kill each other.”

Tony swallows the urge to scream. “FRIDAY, tell Pepper to call Helen Cho. Steve, go find Bruce.”

“On it.”

Tony crouches down about as far as Steve was, but it’s apparently still too close. The kid turns his head from him, at least turns it as much as he can — every slight movement seems to pain him. Tony doesn’t need a medical degree to know that the kid’s dealing with at least several broken ribs, judging by the sound of his wheezing, if not a hell of a lot worse.

And the blood. Jesus , the blood. Steve was right. He can’t afford to lose any more of it.

“Kid, I’m gonna come over there, okay?”

Peter nods just slightly. But then Tony crosses some of the distance and, so suddenly and unexpectedly that Tony nearly trips in an effort to stop himself, the kid crushes his eyes shut tries to back further away from him.

“Sorry,” Peter manages, choking on a breath. “Sorry, sorry, I’m … I just need a second.”

“I know. But we don’t have one. You’re bleeding out.”

Peter grimaces. “Natasha kind of stabbed me.”

Now that he’s closer Tony can see the burn marks littering the kid’s hands and arms. He doesn’t have to ask who did that.

No wonder the kid’s scared shitless of him.

“I’m sorry. Fuck. I’m so sorry.”

Peter shakes his head. “N-Not your fault,” he says, his throat thick.

“I should have …”

He doesn’t even know what he should have done. He can’t even wrap his damn brain around what happened . He keeps thinking he can shut his eyes and blink himself out of this nightmare. He’s tried to prepare for every possible angle — the monitors, the protocols, the fail-safes in the suit — 

But here it is, anyway. The nightmare come to life. The broken teenage boy bleeding out on the floor.

Tony edges closer. A little closer. Peter’s eyes are still clamped shut, his body shaking, but Tony can tell at least that he’s still conscious and that’s all he can really ask for right now. When he finally reaches the kid he slowly reaches his hand up and sets it on the kid’s shoulder.

Peter jerks away, but he’s not strong enough to do anything more than that. Tony keeps his hand there, waiting for Peter to relax under his touch, but he doesn’t. If anything, he’s gasping harder.

“I’m gonna have to put pressure on that wound.”

Peter nods, and then — ”W-wait.” He opens his eyes and looks down at something crumpled in his fist. “I — I need my mask back on.”

Tony blows out a breath. “Okay. Sure. We’ll put it back on in a minute — ”

“No,” says Peter, “ now .”

“It’s just me, kid.”

The answer nearly splinters his heart. “I know. But I … ”

He doesn’t finish the sentence, but he doesn’t have to. Tony’s fingers feel clumsy as he takes the tattered mask from the kid’s hand and helps him tug it onto his bruised face. He knows it’s only going to be a matter of minutes — seconds, if he gets his way — before someone rips it right back off to treat him, but it’s not about protecting his identity right now. The kid doesn’t want anyone to see him cry.

“I’m doing this on the condition that you stay conscious. Understood?”

“Y-yeah.”

Tony holds his hands to the stab wound. It takes less than a second for his hands to turn crimson. He has no idea what he’s doing here, just that it isn’t enough. Where the hell is Steve?

Peter slouches a bit and Tony reminds himself to keep the kid talking.

“Do you want to tell me what happened?”

“I — I don’t really know. The door was l-locked and I could hear you guys screa … eaming, so I — and then …”

The kid’s working himself up too much. “It’s okay. We can Spark Notes this later.”

“Y-you were right. Everyone was going easy on each other in Germany.”

“Well, hell, kid,” says Tony, trying to distract him. “It looks like you just took down the Avengers single handedly. Not bad for sophomore year.”

Peter wheezes out a pained laugh. “Mostly I j-just ran and dodged things. N-not so well at the end, though.”

“Yeah. Nat got you good, huh?”

Peter turns his head away. Natasha evidently was not the only one who “got” him.

“Holy — what is Spider-Man doing here?”

Speak of the devil — in comes Natasha herself, with a limping Sam in tow. Before Tony even registers what’s happening the kid is shrinking in on himself so violently that Tony loses his grip on the wound, even more blood spurting onto the floor.

Sam’s voice is low. “Tell me we didn’t do that to him.”

“How the hell did he get in here?” Natasha demands. “Was he the one who released the — ”

“Don’t even finish that sentence,” Tony snaps. “You’d be dead if it weren’t for him.”

“How do you — ”

“Where the hell are Steve and Bruce?”

Sam runs a hand on the back of his neck. “Is that blood? Holy crap. Holy crap . What happened? Is he gonna be — ”

“Has someone contacted Fury?”

“Everyone pipe down ,” Tony yells. “We have a bigger priority right now, and it’s making sure this kid doesn’t — kid? Kid .”

Somehow over the course of the last thirty seconds of yelling, Peter has gone completely limp. Tony takes one of his hands off the wound and sets it on the kid’s shoulder.

“Hey,” says Tony, shaking him. “ Hey . You had one fucking job here, kid.”

Peter doesn’t so much as flinch, his head lolling onto his shoulder like a ragdoll.

“Shit.”

“Let me take a look at him,” says Sam.

Tony moves to the side for him, but only just barely. His heart is in his throat, his knees rooted to the floor. The kid isn’t wheezing anymore. Tony can’t even tell if he’s breathing. Sam puts a hand to the kid’s neck.

“Weak pulse,” he murmurs. “I’d move him, but I don’t want to mess him up if his back or neck got hit.”

Natasha’s gone pale. “I still don’t understand how the hell he got in here. How anyone did.”

“He’s the only reason we didn’t fight each other to the death,” says Tony through his teeth, “so you’d better be damn grateful he did.”

And then, finally , Steve shows up with a very bleary and battered looking Bruce and a boggled looking Rhodey in tow. The scientist takes one look at the bleeding vigilante propped against the wall and that’s all it takes to snap him back into the land of the living, his eyes widening with enough alarm that, if possible, Tony’s panicking even more now than he was the second before.

“Okay. Okay. Someone, uh, get me a stretcher and a neck brace to take him to the medbay. You said Helen’s on her way?”

Bruce cuts in and Sam steps back, but Tony doesn’t move, paralyzed with his hands pressed into Peter’s abdomen like he can will the catastrophic damage away. Bruce doesn’t even say anything before he starts to peel back Peter’s mask. Tony braces himself — surely some kind of instinct will kick in, and the kid’s eyes will fly open in horror the moment the mask starts to shift — but it’s worse. Bruce pulls up the mask and the kid just lets him.

The moment it’s off Tony hates himself for letting Peter put it back on. The kid’s face is so ashen he looks like a corpse, the blood starting to bubble at his lips.

“Oh my god. Peter? ”

Tony forgot, in the heat of his panic, to account for this. Bruce whips around to face Tony, his eyes wide, all of his composure out the window.

“Peter’s — Pete is Spider-Man? ”

“Can we hit the brakes on this conversation for a time when he isn’t bleeding out on the floor?”

Rhodey is past shocked and all the way to livid. “Tones, what the actual fuck? ”

Out of the corner of his eye he can see Natasha with a hand pressed against her mouth. A beat later she turns and looks away.  

“Oh my god,” says Sam lowly. “He — he said last night he was fifteen . Spider-Man is a fifteen-year-old kid? ”

Bruce has recovered enough from his shock to start assessing the damage. Tony can see the gears turning in Bruce’s head, can feel the heat of his alarm like it is bleeding into his own.

“I need to figure out if he can feel his legs before I move him,” says Bruce. He presses a hand to the kid’s forehead. “Pete. Hey, Pete.”

Peter winces, his eyes cracking open. He sucks in a sharp, pained breath, and then seems to register the group of them all at once. A low whine escapes him before he can stop himself, and he tries to scramble back, only to be met with more wall. HIs eyes are wild, connecting with each of them in fleeting, terrified beats.

“M-my mask. Wh-where’s my … why isn’t my …”

“Pete, I’m gonna need you to take a breath. You’re safe now. Nobody’s gonna hurt you.”

Tony can’t listen to this. It feels like metal shrieking in his ears. He was supposed to keep the kid safe. He was supposed to make sure a conversation like this one never happened.

“I — I … I’m sorry. I — maybe if — shit.” Peter’s eyes pinch shut. The next words are thick in his throat. “I — I’ll be fine. It’ll heal. C-could you maybe just … I’m fine to b-be alone.”

“You’re not,” says Tony, hoping to knock some sense into the kid. “We’re too far gone for super healing now. Bruce is going to take care of you.”

Distantly, Tony registers Natasha’s shadow leaving the room.

“P-please,” says Peter. “I can’t …”

“He’s scared of us,” says Sam, taking a few steps back.

Tony’s words come out in a snarl. “No shit .”

Tony’s starting to think the kid is never going to let anyone get close enough to actually help when, finally, he hears Pepper’s familiar footfalls on the hardwood floor. Just behind her is Helen Cho, clad in a ridiculous pair of Christmas pajamas but looking no less determined and authoritative than she does in a lab coat flanked by an entire team.

She does one quick scan of the room and says, without missing a beat, “Everyone clear out.”

“But — ”

Helen levels him with a look so quick and severe that it stops Tony in his tracks.

“I’ll stay with him,” says Pepper.

Tony is about to point out the absurdity of this —  he’s the one who’s close to the kid, who knows what instrument he dropped in that stupid band class, who knows which side the kid favors in a fight, who has accidentally committed the kid’s favorite fucking ice cream flavor to memory — but then he takes a step back and lets Pepper take his place and the kid heaves out a breath of a relief that’s a little too close to a sob, falling into Pepper like she’s a goddamn lifeline.

“C’mon,” says Rhodey. “We’ve got to get in touch with May.”

“Right.” It sounds like someone else is talking, like someone else is following Rhodey out of the room and down the wrecked hall. He stops, then, and shakes his head. “No. No. We’re going to find out who fucking did this.”

“Tones.”

“He shouldn’t have — fuck . He was here for a goddamn Christmas party.”

He doesn’t realize he’s shaking until Rhodey puts a hand on his shoulder.

“We have a lot to discuss about this. Like, as a team and as friends.” Rhodey’s jaw finally loosens when he says, “But Tony. Whatever you’re thinking of doing right now, it’s not the time. That kid needs you.”

Tony’s fingernails cut into his palms. “That kid’s fucking terrified of me.”

Rhodey claps the hand on his arm before pulling away. “So do what you do best, Tones,” he says. “Figure out a way to fix it.”

Chapter Text

“The neurotoxin was alien in nature. It didn’t match any known element or unknown element we’ve encountered to date. Fury has two theories.”

It’s been been seven hours since Tony woke up to find the tower in pieces and the kid in even more of them. Seven hours of surgeries and fielding questions from the press and hounding Hill and Fury for any information they might have; seven hours of Bruce hunched over in the lab trying to identify particles in the toxin and May pacing up and down the halls and members of the shifting nervously outside the medbay; seven hours of Natasha disappearing off the face of the earth.

Seven hours of Tony reviewing the footage from last night again and again and again.

“Tony?”

Tony blinks himself away from the screen, back to Maria Hill.

“Right. Theories. Go.”

Maria offers him a tight, almost sympathetic smile before continuing. “Given what Bruce told us and what intelligence we’ve managed to gather, we have reason to believe that either the party involved was trying to get the Avengers to eliminate each other to neutralize the threat — or identify the strengths and weaknesses of the Avengers by observing their raw abilities in a closed location.”

Tony closes his eyes for a moment. “If that’s the case, they just identified the kid as threat number one. There’s going to be a target on his back larger than the fucking sun.”

Maria lets out a low hum of acknowledgment. “It’s almost unbelievable, how he managed it.”

“He didn’t manage it,” says Tony through his teeth. “We almost killed him.”

“You heard Helen. He’s going to be fine.”

Tony turns away from her, back toward the screen where he’s paused the footage. He’s been watching it in short bursts. He has to pause it at the brutal parts, and the problem is, there are too damn many of them. It’s two and a half hours of security tape and Tony has only managed about half.

He only has to have seen the first ten minutes to know that there’s no way in hell that kid is going to be fine .

Steve has already gotten all the way through it — how, Tony doesn’t know. But Helen needed someone to go through everything and check for potential injuries she might have missed, things that might have already healed over and healed incorrectly that she’d rather take care of while the kid was out then have to go back and take care of later. Steve dutifully watched through the whole thing in the medbay, then left looking more ragged than Tony’s ever seen him.

“Barton and Fury are on their way. Wanda and Vision are coming down from upstate. Be ready for a meet at five.”

With that, Maria is out the door, off to deal with the hundreds of thousands of dominoes that last night must have triggered. Whatever just got set into motion, it’s bigger than the Avengers, bigger than what’s left of SHIELD — they can’t contain it. It’s going to be out in the open in a matter of hours, and people are going to panic.

Tony grits his teeth and turns his attention back to the screen.

The footage starts in Peter’s room. Tony has audio — can hear the screaming from the hallway, the thuds and the cracks and the bone connecting to skin. It takes the kid five minutes to figure out where the hidden, closed off air vent is and shimmy himself out of it. It takes about a second after that for Steve to start beating the hell out of him.

Steve is distracted just long enough by Tony’s arrival that the kid launches himself back into the air vent. Steve and Tony apparently went at it from there. The next time the kid shows up in the footage, he’s in the workshop, presumably trying to figure out a way to disable Tony’s suit, when in the periphery he must spot Rhodey and Bruce getting their asses handed to them by Natasha and Sam — he manages, somehow, to lure the former two into one of the labs, slam the door on Natasha and Sam, and tranq them before shoving them into a closet.

It only gets worse from there.

Natasha’s the one who breaks down the door with one swift kick; Sam has him airborne and knocks him into the ground so hard that he doesn’t get up for a moment, and Natasha immediately aims a few swift kicks to his head and his gut. He manages to web himself up to the ceiling, but can’t get away from Sam up there — he hits him with a tranq and ends up toppling back to the ground in the process, where Natasha rolls to his side and stabs him in the gut with such efficiency that Tony almost misses it in the footage altogether, and has to rewind to confirm it happened.

Somehow the kid still manages to tranquilize her after a few missed shots and at least twenty minutes of him evading her on the ceiling, dripping blood all over the tiled floor of the labs, the walls in the hallway, the kitchen chairs. He stumbles back to grab Sam and drags him into the same closet he deposits Natasha in, then, clutching his abdomen, hauls himself back to the workshop to try to figure out how to disable Tony’s suit.

He passes Tony and Steve going at it on the way, and stays hidden in the shadows. It’s then that he must realize the thing that almost gets him killed: that if he disables Tony’s suit, Tony won’t be any match for Steve. If he disables Tony’s suit, Tony’s as good as dead.

And so the kid does something infuriating, something that should be impossible — figures out how to rig the AI in his own suit to disable Tony’s.

The kid finds Tony and Steve again, and whatever he configured must require him to get a sensor on Tony’s arc reactor — within five seconds of Peter’s arrival, Tony’s already blasting him with repulsor fire. The kid cries out and tries to shield himself from the blows, but he doesn’t fight back, getting closer and closer and closer to Tony until finally whatever it is seems to trigger; the suit folds into itself, leaving Tony in his clothes.

Peter webs him up and all but kicks him into the closet.

But then he has to deal with Steve.

The next hour of footage is horrifying to watch, like a sick game of cat and mouse all over the tower. Tony recognizes what’s happening within a minute — that the kid could easily duck into an air vent or fling himself out of a window and escape, but that he isn’t willing to leave the other unconscious Avengers alone in the tower with Steve. Every time they get close to one of the closets he’s locked the others in, Peter finds some distraction to lead him away — and that distraction costs him. Toward the two hour mark Steve clocks him with the shield and knocks him off the ceiling, breaking the kid’s leg and effectively trapping him.

He watches as Peter backs up, stumbling into the wall. As he opens his mouth and, for the first time in the entire hours long ordeal, starts to beg.

“Cap. Cap. You’ve gotta wake up,” he gasps. “This isn’t you.”

But Steve can’t hear him, his eyes as listless and blank as everyone else’s were before him. Then Peter does something Tony has never seen him do before in a fight — he pulls off his mask. His eyes are wide and desperate.

“Please don’t. Please don’t. Please do — ”

Steve has the kid by the throat and pinned against the wall so fast that Tony can’t even brace himself for the sight of it — for the sight of Peter’s face turning red, his hands clawing uselessly at Steve’s grip, his legs kicking out from under him and then slowly going limp as Steve presses harder against his throat.

Just when it looks like Steve is going to crush the life out of him, he drops his grip. He stumbles back. He blinks, and the color returns to his face, and Tony watches as he slowly comes to terms with his surroundings — as he takes in the blood on his hands, the carnage of the room, and the gasping, heap of a person on the floor at his feet —

Tony turns it off. He knows what happens next. He doesn’t need to relive it — he doubts there will ever be a memory that stays so painfully fresh in his mind for the rest of his life.

He turns to leave the room and nearly smacks right into Bruce.

“Pete’s awake. Well, out again — but he was.”

“Yeah?”

Tony takes a step to head for the medbay, and then stops in his tracks. Bruce doesn’t have to ask why.

“He’s … claiming he doesn’t remember any of it,” says Bruce.

“He was already talking? ”

“Well. Not much.”

“Just enough to lie, apparently,” says Tony.

Bruce furrows his brow. “You think so?”

Unfortunately, he knows so. It would be an indisputably Peter Parker move to pretend he didn’t remember it. Tony may sweep his problems under the rug, but the kid would happily sweep his under a volcano — especially if it meant sparing the people around him. Naturally, after just short of getting murdered, the kid would be worried about other people feeling guilty more than he is with dealing with his own shit.

“Tony … how long has he been doing this?” Bruce asks.

“Eight months.”

Bruce’s next question is so careful that it takes Tony a few seconds to understand what he means by it. “How … exactly … did he get those abilities?”

Tony blinks at him. “Jesus, you think I had something to do with that?”

Bruce immediately takes a step back. “Well — he was in Germany with the others, and he’s so young, I didn’t know if — ”

“I pulled him into that circus in Germany, but I didn’t — shit. I found him. I didn’t have anything to do with the rest of it. I’ve just been trying to stop him from getting himself killed.” Tony runs a hand through his hair for about the hundredth time that day, his fingers still unsteady, everything about him on edge.

“Sorry,” says Bruce. He sounds like he means it. “I haven’t been back long. I couldn’t figure out why you were so —I mean, honestly, I thought it was either that, or he was some secret kid of yours come out of the woodwork. It’s clear how important he is to you.”

Tony’s voice is rough. “Yeah, well. That’s his fault. Not mine.”

Bruce nods one of those quiet nods of his, like he’s reading more into the beats between his words than the words themselves.

“Let me know if he wakes up again.”

“You’re not going in?”

Tony winces. “No. Not yet. Kid probably needs … time.”

“He was fine around me and Rhodes — ”

“You and Rhodey maybe got one light slap in each. No offense.” Tony straightens his shoulders and walks out — if Bruce isn’t going to leave him alone, he’ll just have to be the one who does the leaving. “The rest of us …”

Bruce doesn’t try to follow Tony out.

“You should have told me.”

Tony’s just tired enough that he nearly jumps the fuck out of his own skin at the sound of Natasha’s voice. He turns to see her standing directly beside him and wonders, not for the first time, how the hell she got into his workshop without making a sound.

When he looks up at her she’s more livid than he’s ever seen her, her nostrils flaring, her eyes rimmed red.

“Honestly … I thought you knew.”

She shakes her head sharply, just once. “Don’t you dare put this on me. I didn’t have a clue. You know why?” she demands. “Because I didn’t even let my brain go there. Because I trusted you, Stark. I never thought in a million years you would be letting a child play soldier — ”

“I don’t let him do anything, he already — ”

“ — and here you are, letting me put him in even more danger because you wouldn’t just fucking tell me . I thought we were supposed to be a goddamn team . I thought we trusted each other.”

Tony doesn’t know what to do except put his hands up. “I do.” he says, maybe a little louder than necessary. “But the kid … he didn’t want anyone to know. I promised him.”

Natasha sucks in an another angry breath, but she doesn’t have anything to say to that. When it comes to other people’s secrets, they’re one in the same.  

“He’s just — so damn small ,” says Natasha. It sounds more critical than concerned, like this is a state of being that needs correcting. “Like he shouldn’t even be allowed to get on roller coasters, let alone swinging from goddamn buildings.”  

Tony offers her a grim smile. “He could use some instruction on actually learning how to fight.”

Natasha doesn’t smile back. Her eyes are hard. “He’s going to need it.”

To anyone else, the timing would be uncanny. The kid’s awake, but every time Tony heads to the medbay to see him, he’s out again.

Tony knows it’s anything but a coincidence.

The kid needs time, but they don’t have it. The tower floods with people — a panicked, furious Wanda, who all but knocks Tony over to get to Peter’s bedside. A stern, somber-looking Nick Fury. A pissed off, begrudging Clint. And everyone else, moving through the compound like zombies, making shifty, fleeting eye contact with each other as they head to the conference room and shut the door.

Rhodey’s late. Tony knew he would be. He heard May’s muffled crying in his shoulder from down the hall.

“I wish you’d been more forthcoming with me about this.” Fury’s eyes bore holes into Tony’s. “It’s going to be a bitch and a half, keeping Ross off the kid’s trail.”

Tony’s so relieved to hear those words come out of Fury’s mouth that he almost can’t let himself believe them. It can’t be this easy — he hasn’t had to fight anyone. Hasn’t had to convince anyone. The importance of it is already settled in the quiet in the room, a shared burden between everyone sitting in it.

By the end of the meeting, they’re all in agreement: They will destroy the footage from the tower last night. They will concoct some believable lie to the public about what happened. Peter will have a security detail assigned to him at Midtown during the school day, that he won’t know about. And Fury will keep tabs on him the way he’s quietly kept tabs on everyone else.

And when whoever it was who planted the toxin shows up — be it Thanos, or one of his cronies, or any other threat that demands all Avengers on deck — the kid will be left out of it.

Tony can hear the intentional breaths of half the people in the room turning to address him when the meeting adjourns, but he blows past everyone before they can flag him down. He heads straight to the medbay, where — unsurprisingly — Peter appears to be conked out again. May is curled up in the chair beside him, actually asleep. Tony lets himself in, not missing the quick beat where Peter’s fingers seem to twitch at his sides.

He sits on the empty chair on the other side of Peter’s bed.

“I know you’re awake, kid.”

Peter releases a breath Tony hadn’t even realized he was holding, his eyes peeling open. One of them is still tinged purple around the edges, but healing. His gaze flits to Tony for a moment, but then immediately looks away like the sight of him burns.

Tony suspected as much. It doesn’t make it hurt any less.

The kid is surprisingly coherent when he speaks, considering the bruises Tony still sees around his neck and the volume of drugs they’re pumping into him right now.

“What’s going to happen now?”

Tony’s entire body is stiff — it feels so natural to lean in, to say something in the neighborhood of reassuring, but he knows if he gets any closer to the kid it’ll be anything but.

“You’re going to heal up and your aunt is going to force feed you fruitcake and you’ll wish that you didn’t,” says Tony.

It earns him a twitch of a smile.

“And — the whole team just met. And I mean the whole team , plus or minus a demigod. Haven’t managed that since I got rid of the beer tap.” He waits for a moment, as if Peter’s going to look at him, and continues on when he doesn’t. “Your secret’s safe with them. It was always going to be. But now they’ve got the threat of Nick Fury willing to kick their asses over it for extra measure.”

Peter stares listlessly. “And the others? Everyone’s — they’re all okay?”

No. “Yeah.”

“Are you okay?”

Tony’s not sure if he’s ever felt worse. “Kid, you’re the one I’m worried about.”

Peter’s eyes water so unexpectedly that Tony almost stands up to grab a doctor. “Is it gonna be — different now? I mean … Captain Rogers won’t even look at me. And — and Dr. Banner was all freaked out, and Wanda’s been crying, and you …”

“Hey — ” Tony starts, leaning in, but then Peter flinches.

“Shit. Sorry. Sorry,” says Peter, his eyes wide.

Tony freezes, halfway between the chair and the kid. He wants to get up and leave. Do anything he can to stop the terror still brewing in the back of the kid’s eyes. But he knows if he does he’ll only make this worse.

“Enough with the sorry. This is a thousand other people’s faults before it’s yours.” Tony stays right where he is. “And yeah. Things are gonna be weird for a bit. They always are.”

Peter doesn’t say anything. It seems like it’s taking most of his focus not to flinch again. Tony doesn’t push it by coming any closer.

“And we’re all in agreement. Whatever it is that’s coming — you’re benched.”

The room is quiet for a moment, the kid’s eyes tracking the bedspread, still looking everywhere except for Tony.  

“Shit,” he finally settles on.

“Sorry, kid. It’s a bajillion against one.”

“So I got kicked out of the Avengers before I even joined? ”

“Nobody’s kicking you out of anything,” says Tony.

Peter raises his eyebrows. “I don’t get it. Two months ago you offered me a spot on the team, and — ”

“Two months ago the worst threat we were facing was weapons dealers. Now we’re looking at the biggest threat we’ve ever faced. And after last night — that same threat is looking right at you.”

Peter doesn’t ask Tony to explain. Evidently, Bruce or someone else already has — that in disabling all of the Avengers last night, Peter didn’t just save him. He also put a neon sign above his head as the first one who needs to be neutralized when this all comes to a head.

“So no. You don’t get to be a part of the team right now.” Tony leans forward just another inch. Peter doesn’t wince this time. “Because one day, you’re going to be leading it. And now I’m not the only one who knows.”

Tony is used to Peter bouncing right back up from fights. He didn’t even need medical after downing a goddamn plane on Coney Island. But it takes a solid two days before Peter even gets the all clear to leave the medbay, and another half of a day for Peter to actually do it.

Tony can’t decide what’s worse — the lengths Peter is going to avoid the rest of the team, or the lengths they’re going to avoid him.

He spends most of the day with Vision and Wanda. He doesn’t seem to have much trouble around Bruce and Rhodey, either. But every now and then — when Steve is unexpectedly the one whose head pops out from behind the open refrigerator door, or Natasha sidles past on her way to the gym, or Tony calls his name from across the hall — the kid gives into one of those full-body flinches that seem to paralyze every person in the room.

It’s gotten to the point where Pepper had to actively talk Tony out of programming FRIDAY to correct the kid every time he apologizes for it.

“Time, Tony,” Pepper reminds him. “Everyone just needs time.”

It’s easy for her to say, since the kid has been following her and May around like a shadow person ever since his release. He’d go back to Queens, but Fury and Hill both agreed that until they could dig up more intel on what happened, they’d all be better off here — granted, with more security protocols in check than Tony’s ever seen in his damn life.

But Pepper’s right. Slowly, but surely, they start to find some new version of normal again. Peter makes himself a grilled cheese sandwich with Sam sitting on a stool by the kitchen counter. Natasha asks a rhetorical question to FRIDAY that Peter unexpectedly gives a cheeky answer to. Wanda turns on a movie for her and Peter to watch, and when a few of the others trickle in, Peter doesn’t wince. On New Year’s Eve Tony is tinkering in the lab when Peter knocks and asks if he can come in, and the two of them work silently side-by-side for a good four hours without incident.

They have a makeshift Christmas on New Year’s Day. Sam and Steve cook, Wanda and Peter bake, Rhodey mixes the drinks, and May and Vision are banned from the kitchen for the safety of every living thing in the tower. The festivities are quiet and slow, but it gets everyone in the same room again, and that’s better than any Christmas present Tony could have asked for.

That is, until Peter somewhat shyly informs him that he has a present for him, too. Tony opens the shabbily wrapped square to reveal what seems to be a refurbished beeper from the ‘90s. He hasn’t forgotten Peter’s dumpster diving tendencies, but he raises his eyebrows in question at the kid anyway.

“I, uh — I fixed it back up and rigged Karen to sync up with it,” says Peter. “I figured — I always have a way to reach you if I’m in trouble. And now if you ever need me for anything, you have a way to reach me, too.”

Tony doesn’t mention that he has the technological capability to override just about any phone on the planet to take his calls. And he certainly doesn’t mention that he hopes that there is no version of this world where he has to use this. But even if he wanted to, his throat is suddenly a little too tight to manage it.

He clears it, standing abruptly. “I got you something, too,” he says. “Follow me.”

Tony takes him to the door outside the workshop, and nods at the pad outside the door.

“Put your finger on it.”

Peter does, and the workshop doors slide open, and Peter gapes at him in disbelief.

“ Just so you can work on stuff with the suit. And, you know, pick up DUM-E’s slack. Everything you do in here will be monitored and recorded, so don’t — ”

“Mr. Stark. Mr. Stark . This is the coolest thing that will ever happen to me.”

“Can’t wait to tell that to your future partner.”

“Ned’s gonna flip his shit — ”

“Ned’s going to keep his paws off Stark tech until he’s legally hired here — ”

“ — do you think we could install a strobe light? For, uh, safety reasons.”

“If you can dream it, kid, you can do it. This is out of my hands now.”

He sets the kid loose around the lab for a few hours, until they’re interrupted by an incoming call from Fury. Everything’s been set up at the kid’s apartment in Queens and the security detail prepared for when he gets back to school. He and May are free to leave.

It feels like the ground is a little less steady than it was as he heads down to the lobby and sees the two of them off. Tomorrow the rest of the team will clear out. In another few days the tower will be empty. In two weeks OsCorp employees will be moving in. It’s the end of a hundred things and the beginning of things Tony can’t fathom — things that Tony is more afraid of than not.

The day before they’re due to vacate the tower, Pepper drops off a piece of mail for him in the lab with a return address in Queens.

Hey Tony,

You can’t tell Peter I gave these to you. He’d “literally die”. But I was cleaning out some old boxes for the new year, and I thought that if anyone would appreciate these, it would be you.

Thank you for looking out for Peter. Merry Christmas.

May

P.S. — If you can survive a hostile alien attack, you can be a little less dramatic about my cooking.

Tony shakes the rest of the contents of the envelope, and out spills a cluster of drawings in various degrees of crumpled. They’re all in crayon and sloppy, near indecipherable handwriting, but the weird ache in his chest identifies it for what it is before his brain catches up: drawings that Peter made over the years of his heroes.

The first one is the roughest one. Wrinkled paper and scrawled crayon. If he squints under the figures he can make out the words —  Peter, Mom, Dad, Iron Man, and Captain America.

Tony leans back in his chair. He doesn’t even know if he can look at the others. He’s held a lot of fragile materials in his life — dangerous compounds, volatile chemicals, tech that threatened to burst into flames at any moment — but he doubts if he has ever held anything that felt quite as fragile as this.

It’s a new year. A fresh start. A terrifying unknown. But it’s anchored in something deeper than Tony ever knew; something that took root long before Tony planted it. Suddenly, the future doesn’t seem as scary as it did before. It’s as simple as this, and as simple as it’s always been: the world needs heroes. And those heroes will always rise up to meet it.