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it’s no surprise that tony feels unfit to be a parent.
it’s the abuse, he thinks, all the years of it looming over his head. the pain he’s endured, the sorrow his father brought him. howard wasn’t great. at all. and sometimes it scares him how much he resembles his father.
once, he yells at peter after a failed mission. peter risked his life for him. and he yells at the kid, because he’s a screw-up and he’s all messed up inside, but peter doesn’t deserve that at all, and tony remembers all the times howard yelled at him for menial things and he wants to scream, to drown in liquor and disappear.
instead, he apologizes to peter.
howard never once said “i’m sorry” to tony, so he thinks this is progress, even if he’s scared shitless. he’s not ready, not even close to ready, but he’s there when peter gets his first hangover during junior year and doesn’t want to go to his aunt, and he’s there when peter needs to study for his entrance exams. even though he’s terrified and a mess and the thing you should never want as a father figure.
but peter sees him as such, so he has to do it for him.
sometimes he tells peter he’s proud of him. howard didn’t do that either. score!
once, peter comes to him and talks like he’s scared of him. he moves like he’s holding his breath, and jitters through the lab, pacing the ceiling. he tells him, voice shaky, he’d kissed a boy that day. he was scared. he’d liked it. he’d liked that boy for a while now.
tony just raises an eyebrow and reminds him he’d been married to captain america less than two years ago (shield on his chest — friday gone, all alone. shield on the floor — steve gone, all alone.) and dated at least ten different male celebrities, “including that thing with brucie.” peter feels better once tony tells him that no, he’s not garbage, and yes, it’s okay to love whoever you want to love.
he remembers having a conversation like that. he remembers hearing words that weren’t as kind. he remembers the fear, the pain, the shame. he remembers wanting to disappear since he was fourteen, up until he met rhodey and felt at home. he feels comfort in the fact that peter, at least, will not feel so bad about those issues. so. progress.
when the rogues return, tony locks himself down in the lab for two whole days — when peter manages to find a loophole in tony’s system and sneaks in through the vents. he finds his sorta-dad sobbing his life out.
he brings him pizza and ice cream and they binge watch adventure time (which is, in tony’s humble opinion, a masterpiece). when they come out the next day, he feels a little better, even if he can’t stand the idea of even glancing at steve grant rogers (shield on his chest — cross my heart and burn it down) yet. barnes (december 16th 1991) is a little better. at least he didn’t lie about it. and he’d apologized.
the next thing he knows there’s an alien ship overlooking new york, and an invasion looming over earth. and peter slips from his fingers and gets on the ship, and he almost has a heart attack when peter runs out of air.
howard was once the king of the world — tony had had to take over the empire and remake it to serve the people it had sworn to protect, to stop the flawed system it had been built around. so that makes tony a king, right?
he thinks, as he ‘knights’ the boy with shaky hands and grim eyes, peter must be the prince then.
he can’t let the only prince die in the war, he decides right there and then.
and maybe he is unfit to be a parent. maybe he shouldn’t be saving the world, maybe he shouldn’t have existed at all, let the world destroy itself and burn away.
but he’s not going to make peter pay the price he had to pay.