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“Incoming call from May Parker.”
Tony set down the welding torch in his hands and flipped up his visor, frowning. He’d been aware that May Parker had somehow gotten his number (he wasn’t entirely sure how, but he was certain there were either threats or stern looks involved) right after she’d discovered Peter’s spidey little secret, receiving a very loud and very angry lecture about children and safety only hours later over the phone. She hadn’t initiated any contact since, for which Tony was eternally grateful. She was hot for an aunt, sure, but he just didn’t know how to deal with the pit of heavy parental responsibility she tried to drag into every time they had a conversation. It made him uncomfortable for reasons he couldn’t describe.
He was slightly surprised, though, that she hadn’t called him after the big fight he’d had with Peter. To be honest, he’d been fully prepared to receive a furious phone call that would rip him apart, but none came. After a couple of weeks had passed, Tony figured it would never come, whether because the kid had told her not to, or maybe hadn’t told her what happened at all, he would never know.
Tony felt bad. He really did. He knew he’d overreacted that night. But Cap was still a sore spot for him, and his feelings towards Barnes were something he didn’t even want to try to dissect. When Peter had started defending them, it just hit him hard.
And honestly, he’d been scared.
He knew it was probably irrational, but when Peter started showing the slightest inclination of siding with them, Tony had been terrified he was going to lose him too.
He’d lost too many people in his life. His parents, Jarvis, Steve and half of the Avengers—Pepper too, for a while, though things were slowly repairing on that front. It seemed to be a curse that everyone he loved would eventually leave him.
He didn’t know if he could go through that again. So he didn’t let Peter leave. Instead, he pushed him away.
It was the wrong thing to do, and Tony realized that in hindsight, but he didn’t know how to fix it. Emotions were clearly not his strong suit, and he definitely wasn’t good at apologies, so he just…ignored it.
He threw himself into his work instead. Pepper had been nagging him to be more involved with Stark Industries recently, and he still had a long way to go in picking up the pieces of what remained of the Avengers. It wasn’t difficult to distract himself.
But then, while he was in the middle of upgrading one of his suits, May called. After months of silence from the Parker family.
“Put her through.”
“Is Peter with you?” May said as soon as the line connected, frantically and without preamble.
“No…” Tony began cautiously.
A sound that might have been a choked sob, “Oh god.” A beat. Then, “Please Mr. Stark, you have to help me find him!”
Her hysteric tone set a flash of panic off in Tony’s chest, but he forced his voice to remain calm and steady as he responded. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
“He didn’t come home after detention today, and I thought maybe he’d gone out patrolling after, because he does that sometimes, but then it was dinner time and he still wasn’t home, and he hadn’t texted me, and when I tried to call his phone his principal picked up and said he’d forgot it at school, and then I went into his room just to make sure he didn’t actually sneak back in through the window, and I saw his suit sitting on his desk! Which means he isn’t patrolling, and he doesn’t have his phone or his suit and none of his friends have seen him, I don’t know where he is and after everything that’s been happening recently…”
“Breathe, May,” Tony instructed, “I’ll get all my resources on it and…I’ll go out and look for him myself, okay?”
“Thank you,” she said, “I tried calling the police, but they said I need to wait more than just a few hours before I could make a report. But this isn’t like Peter; I know something is wrong.”
“I’ll do everything I can to find him,” Tony promised. The call ended a moment later, and Tony stood up and fully removed himself from his welding area to make his way over to his computer. May was right; this wasn’t like Peter. Happy had just reported to him recently that he’d talked to the kid about this “New York Butcher” business. That Peter had been keen to pursue it and thought that he had a few leads going.
Happy slipped that he’d mentioned Tony’s name. That the kid had retaliated hard against that, obviously still angry about their whole argument (not that Tony could exactly blame him) and not wanting to do anything that “Mr. Stark” wanted him to do. That he had reluctantly agreed to drop his investigation only after Happy had pleaded his own concern for the boy.
But had he really dropped it? If Peter knew Tony was keeping tabs on this Butcher stuff, he could have suspected that Tony would be tracking his phone and suit to make sure he stayed out of it. He could have ditched them both on purpose, possibly brought his old suit out again to do some investigating in secret. A flash of anger coursed through Tony’s body, and he clenched the wrench he was holding so hard his fingernails left indents in the rubber handle. Why couldn’t the damn kid realize that Tony was just trying to do what was best for him? Why didn’t Peter ever listen to him? He thought this sort of thing would get better after everthing that happened with the Vulture, but apparently not.
“FRIDAY, pull up any street footage you can find of Peter Parker starting at,” he glanced at his watch, “Five this evening. Focus on anything within a twenty-block radius of Midtown High School, and move out from there if nothing shows up.”
A minute of silence while FRIDAY searched. Then, “Here is the most recent footage of Peter Parker, from a security camera on 5th Avenue.”
Despite FRIDAY’s best efforts at cleaning it up, the footage was still pretty grainy. But when Peter flashed into frame, there was no mistaking him, tousled brown hair and worn NASA t-shirt giving him away immediately. He was walking quickly, clearly in a rush. Then he suddenly froze, cocking his head in a gesture of concentration. After only a second, he took off running, disappearing from frame. The whole thing lasted no longer than ten seconds.
He’d been walking home. Tony knew that much from FRIDAY’s supplied maps and his own knowledge of Queens. He’d been walking home, with his school things and school clothes, no Spider-Man hoodie or goggles in sight. Whatever attracted his attention had been sudden and unexpected, and it was apparently urgent enough to make the kid run. Of course, he could have been snooping around with an insanely good poker face…
…Or he could have stumbled into trouble.
The anger faded away, leaving Tony with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach that he expected wasn’t going to go away soon. One way or another, he knew he had to find the kid.
FRIDAY’s footage at least proof that he was still okay as of…5:42 pm. That gave Tony a place to start.
“Load the coordinates of that location into my suit,” he ordered. With the press of a button on his watch, the pieces of his Iron Man suit came snapping onto his body. It was more conspicuous, but it would be faster than trying to dodge through rush hour traffic, and he could always change out of it in an alleyway or something once he landed.
It only took him minutes to reach 5th Avenue and disassemble his suit into a small briefcase. He threw on a baseball cap and a pair of sunglasses before stepping out of the alley he had ducked into. Cliché for sure, but combined with the grimy shop clothes he hadn’t bothered to change out of, most people on the street wouldn’t recognize him. Until he knew exactly what was going on, Tony was going to treat this situation as delicately as possible, and subtlety was definitely the way to go.
His first stop was the shop whose security camera had captured Peter. It was a jewelry store, practically a shack when compared to, say, Tiffany’s, but high end enough to have a few security cameras around. He went right up to the clerk at the counter, ignoring the judgmental looks thrown at him by the fancy-dressed couple looking at some rings.
“Have you seen this boy recently?” Tony asked, whipping out his phone and pulling up a picture to show the clerk. In it, Peter was holding an unlit blowtorch and was covered in white foam, Dum-E standing just to the left of him with an empty fire extinguisher in its claw. The bot might have been a bit…high strung that day. The kid looked somewhere between being completely embarrassed and bursting out into laughter when Tony took the picture of him with empty threats of “future blackmail”. As he pushed the phone forward, the clerk looked surprised by the question for a second, then pushed his glasses up his nose and leaned in closely to stare at the picture.
“Hmm…no,” he said after a moment.
Tony shoved his phone back in his pocket. “But he passed by here two hours ago.”
The man frowned, “I’m sorry, but I don’t make it a habit to watch the people walking outside the store. I have actual customers to deal with.”
Tony pressed further, “Did you notice anything unusual happening at that time? Strange sounds, weird people, anything?”
“I’m afraid not.”
Thanks for nothing, he nearly said, but instead, he turned around and stormed out in a huff.
Tony knew he had to act fast. It was getting late, most of the stores would be closing soon, and then he’d really be out of leads. He went up and down the street, asking every shop-owner and lowly cashier he encountered if they’d seen Peter. Each one gave him the same answer: no. New York was home to over eight-million people: why would they remember one kid?
He was starting to get really frustrated when he reached the end of the block and noticed a hot dog vendor starting to close up the umbrella on her cart. He made his way over in a few strides, clearing his throat and drawing the woman’s attention.
“Excuse me, did you happen to see a kid around here about two hours ago? Yay tall, stupid science shirt, looks like this?” he asked, pulling out the picture on his phone once again.
The woman squinted at the screen for a moment, “Oh, yeah.”
“Wait, really?” Tony asked.
“Yeah, thought the kid was going to knock my cart over, he was running so fast. Like he left the stove on or somethin’. He yours?”
“Something like that,” Tony responded, stomach flipping over in surprised anticipation. “Did you happen to see which way he went?”
“Turned right at the intersection here. Disappeared from view after that, so I can’t really tell ya’ anything else. Sorry.”
“No, that’s a big help. Thanks.”
“No problem,” the woman said, reaching for the strap to secure her umbrella. Tony had already started to turn away when the woman tossed over her shoulder, “I hope you find your kid!”
Tony slipped a Bluetooth earpiece out of his pocket and clipped it onto his ear. “Okay FRIDAY, I know you got that. Got anything new for me?” he asked desperately.
“Yes, actually. I’m receiving reports of a woman found stumbling down the street earlier this evening. She fainted shortly after being discovered and has been unconscious in the hospital since. Her location is within a reasonable vicinity of the direction Peter headed off to.”
“Good, that might help,” he muttered. “But she’s still unconscious?”
“According to the records I can access, yes.”
“Then I’m going to keep asking around while I still can. Let me know if anything changes.”
“Will do, Boss.”
It was almost another two hours before the woman regained consciousness. In that time Tony must have canvassed every single person within a mile’s radius of where he first started, but besides a couple undetailed reports of “he looks familiar…”, he came up with nothing fruitful. When FRIDAY informed him that the woman had woken up, he was at the hospital within minutes, and with a couple of ID flashes and well-placed doe-eyes, he quickly found himself in her room.
Catherine Pope. That was her name. Tony wasn’t usually good with names, but he remembered Catherine Pope’s, because the woman behind the name could be the key to everything.
Upon his entrance, Catherine Pope looked at him blearily for a moment. Then, as if registering just who exactly was standing in the doorway to her hospital room, her eyes went wide, and she reached for the nurse’s button at the side of her bed. “I’m hallucinating,” she muttered in mild shock.
“No!” Tony said, his voice stopping her hand abruptly as she once again was staring at him. The fierce-looking nurse that had let him into her room had warned him not to agitate her, or “I don’t care if you’re the Dalai Lama himself, I will drag you out of that room by the ear!”
“I mean, you’re not hallucinating. My name is Tony Stark. I’m actually here. For real.”
She stared at him dumbly, “Why?”
“I’m looking for someone. A kid. His name is Peter, and he was last seen around where you were found.”
“I…I don’t…”
Tony pulled out the picture on his phone again, crossed the room in a few short strides, and held it out to her. “He looks like this.”
A spark of recognition flashed in her eyes as she leaned in closer to look, bringing one IV-connected hand up to stabilize the bottom of the phone. “Peter? That’s his name?”
“You’ve seen him?” he was growing more urgent by the minute.
“Yeah, he…oh god,” she said, face twisting up in remembrance. Tony slipped the phone back into his pocket and placed a hand on her arm, snapping her attention back to him.
“What? What happened? Do you know where he went?”
“I was taking a shortcut home,” she said instead of answering. “Down an alley. Kind of stupid, but I’ve done it so many times before, and it wasn’t even dark out yet…”
Tony perched himself on the edge of the chair placed next to her bed. He knew he’d just have to hear her out.
“He surprised me from behind. I screamed and struggled, but then he grabbed me and covered my mouth. He started to inject me with something, and everything got slow and fuzzy.”
Her hand brushed a spot on her neck—the injection site, Tony thought—and he made a note in his head to get whatever information the doctors had on the drug that was used on her. It could be important.
“And then a boy showed up. That boy—Peter,” she said, glancing down to the now darkened phone still held in Tony’s hand, “and he distracted the man, and they fought. I barely knew what was going on around me anymore, but I was able to get away…and I think the man took Peter instead.”
“What did he look like?”
“I don’t…I don’t know. He…he was wearing a hoodie, and his face was covered. White? He was white, I mean. Maybe brown eyes? He was taller than me…I’m sorry, I really didn’t get a good look.”
“That’s okay,” Tony said, though he felt anything but okay as he stood up to leave, “You’ve been a big help. Thank you.”
“If you find him, can you thank him for me?” Catherine asked in a small voice to Tony’s turned back. “I mean, if-if he’s okay.”
Tony left the room without a word. He couldn’t trust himself to say anything in response.
The events of the past few hours were clear to Tony now. Peter had heard a woman in distress, and without his suit, without his phone, and without a second thought he went to help her, purely out of the goodness in his heart. He had no idea what he was going up against. He’d been overpowered and kidnapped. He may or may not be alive.
With a renewed speed fueled by anxiety, he made his way directly to the nurses’ station, “I need whatever information you have on the drug that was in Catherine Pope’s system,” he said to the first star-struck looking nurse he saw. “Samples, if you have them. For official business.”
“Of course, Mr. Stark,” the young woman said, slightly flustered as she picked up the telephone to make the appropriate calls.
“Oh, and all of Ms. Pope’s medical bills are on me.”
Hours had passed by the time Tony got the requested samples, went back to his lab, and ran them through his own vigorous battery of tests. In the end, he was able to trace its unique formula back to research being done in a special department at Oscorp that was tasked with developing new substances for use in the medical field, in this case, a type of anesthesia. He ordered FRIDAY to hack further.
“The project was initiated a year ago, and was being spearheaded by scientists Valarie Rusalka, Mohammad Haik, and Solomon Boone, though Boone was removed from the project preceding his termination from the company six months ago, and was replaced by—”
“No, wait, tell me more about that Boone guy. Why was he terminated?”
“Give me one moment to search through Oscorp’s human resources files…”
Tony paced the lab anxiously. Every minute that went by was another minute that Peter was missing, possibly (probably) in danger…
“It appears that Boone was terminated for unethical experimentation and misuse of company property. After receiving multiple complaints about inappropriate comments and violent inclinations, the Oscorp’s IT department searched through Boone’s work computer and found logs of unsanctioned experiments he’d been performing on lab animals with chemicals and substances of his own creation.”
“And what’s he been doing since?” too many dots were connecting, there were too many strange circumstances about this guy—it had to be a lead.
“I found employment records as a clerk at a corner store in Brooklyn starting five months ago. I also have an address he’s registered under for an apartment just three blocks away.”
Tony was already starting to suit up before the AI could finish. “Okay, FRI, you know what to do,”
“Sending the address to you now, Boss.”
Tony approached the apartment building cautiously, heart hammering in his chest. Would this be it? Would Peter be here? On his flight over, he’d had to deal with more panicked texts from May Parker, begging him for information. All he could reply was that he was working on it.
He didn’t want to give her any false hope.
Upon reaching Solomon Boone’s front door, he was dismayed to find that a thermal scan taken through the walls turned up empty—no one was in the apartment. Still, he made quick work of lockpicking the door and practically threw it open, desperate to find something that would help him in his search.
The apartment was a small studio, but it was dense with clutter. Papers and books covered every surface, most of them centering on chemistry, biology, and anatomy. Snack food wrappers, the remains of long-since-eaten microwave meals, and empty cans of soda and energy drinks lay scattered amongst the research. A pile of dirty mugs sat in the sink, and the pot on the counter beside it was coated with burnt coffee. The bed in the corner of the room was unmade and covered with almost as much junk as the rest of the apartment, only a small clearing on one side indicative of the fact that anyone slept there at all.
It all uncomfortably reminded Tony of how his workspaces tended to get when he was in the midst of a big project.
He pushed those thoughts away as he started to search for anything that could be of use, pushing aside chip bags and skimming through page after page of notes, turning over everything to make sure not a single detail could escape his notice. It was while he was searching the man’s desk that he discovered a map under a few layers of junk, and his blood ran cold. He’d suspected, feared that this would happen, and now he knew for a fact it was true.
Circled on the map, without any notes or context, was every single area that a victim had been kidnapped from by the New York Butcher.
The only other marking on the map was a single dot just across the border in New Jersey, and Tony flipped his Iron Man visor back down to allow FRIDAY to analyze it.
“That mark appears to approximate the location of a hotel that went bankrupt and was abandoned about two years ago. I’ll load the address into your GPS.”
Tony muttered a word of thanks and headed out the door only when he was completely sure there wasn’t anything else of immediate interest. For a second, he thought this was too easy—then he noticed that there didn’t seem to be any sort of computer in the apartment. For a relatively young man who worked in a STEM field? That was unusual. But Tony knew that Oscorp was as paperless as Stark Industries, and though he couldn’t be sure, he suspected that the man’s undoing through his computer might have led him to believe his information was safer on paper, despite it being in the unguarded open of his apartment.
In any case, he left the building and took off at top speed for the abandoned hotel marked on the map. By this point, he had worked through the night, and by the time he landed at his destination the sun had already reappeared in the sky, bringing with it the orange glow of morning.
This had to be it, he thought as he advanced toward the front doors of the hotel. This had to be it, or else he didn’t know where to look, he might never see Peter again and oh god, the last thing he’d said to the kid was that he was done with him, called him an ungrateful brat—why did he do that? He never should have, it didn’t matter if he was angry, he never…
The doors were boarded shut. Tony blasted them open with a single repulsor. Dust filled the sun-streaked air, glittering gold in the light, and suddenly there was Peter.
He was covered in blood and sweat, his clothes hanging off his frame awkwardly as if he’d struggled to put them on. Tremors racked his body even has he stood in place, and deep bags hung under his eyes, matching the purple bruising on the rest of his face.
He stared at Tony, unblinking, frozen in shock. And all of the fear and anxiety that Tony had been harboring suddenly exploded to the surface and re-manifested themselves into relief and concern, and he tore himself out of his suit, desperate to make sure the boy was actually there, that he wasn’t just a figment of Tony’s fractured imagination.
Peter let out a sob before Tony could reach him, “I didn’t go after him, I swear,” he said, starting to try to explain himself in a voice that was hoarse from screaming. It all went in one ear and out the other as Tony finally reached him, wrapping him in a hug that was more sincere than just about anything he had ever done in his life.
“Thank god you’re alive.”
He then held Peter at arm’s length, demanding that he never apologize because what did he have to be sorry for? He’d been kidnapped, tortured, and almost killed for saving a woman’s life. This was not his fault. But Peter was still frozen, eyes wide as he could only stutter out, “I killed him,” and Tony couldn’t help but pull the boy in again, muttering words of comfort and reassurance as the pieces fell together in his head.
This was not Peter’s fault. It was Tony’s. He’d abandoned the kid after trying so hard to keep him safe, and Peter had nearly died as a result. That could never happen again. He was going to change. He was going to fix everything.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Tony held Peter in that embrace for what seemed like an eternity, then held him as they flew back to the compound. He held his hand as the doctors started to look him over, and then held it again when Peter was unconscious in recovery.
He swore, for as long as they both lived, that he was never letting go again.