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“Def Leppard.”
“Boo. That’s gotta be the third time you’ve said that. Change your playlist.”
“What? I like Def Leppard!”
“And I like Led Zeppelin, but I don’t constantly shove that down your throat when we’re playing Playlist Shuffle.”
“I’m pretty sure you said Black Sabbath twice, Mr. Stark.”
Tony raises his index finger pointedly. “Twice. Not three times.”
“Fine,” the kid huffs. He scrolls through his lists and hits ‘Shuffle’ for the next one. Some god-awful, cheery voice blares from his phone, regaling the benefits of dry shampoo. “S-sorry.”
“What the hell? Why do you have adverts?”
“I’ve got the free Spotify.”
“That is so depressing. You’re a Gen Z kid, why don’t you have premium?”
“Um, my free trial ran out? And then the 99-cent promo expired three months ago, and there’s no way I’m letting them automatically charge May’s card ten bucks a month.”
“Hold on, gimme that. And finish this.” Tony holds out his left hand for Peter’s phone, and with his right he tosses a fry in the kid’s direction. Peter catches it with a bored look and a roll of his eyes. Tony clucks his tongue at him. “Don’t eyeball me. That would have been way more impressive if you’d caught it in your mouth.”
“That’s just feeding you free material to compare me to a puppy. Again. Yeah, no. Not today, Mr. Stark.”
The kid’s got a fair point, but no way in hell is Tony going to admit that. “You can thank your genes for that. I’m just being observant. Here, done.” He slips the phone back to Peter, who takes it with a suspicious look around the fistful of fries in his mouth.
When Peter taps at the screen again, his eyes widen comically. “You--you just bought me Spotify Premium?”
“Prepaid for a year, so remind me again in twelve months to renew it. Use it wisely, young padawan.”
Peter rolls his eyes yet again and tosses a fry Tony’s way. The man makes a point not to even lift a finger to catch it and simply looks down at the offending snack with disdain as it bounces off the front of his cat-print t-shirt.
“Okay, so this is...my...more contemporary list, I guess you could say? Ah, it’s Woodkid up next.”
“Woodkid?”
“Yeah. It’s called ‘Run Boy Run.’ Hey, wanna hear a little bit, Mr. Stark?”
Tony shrugs. “Sure, why not.”
The car’s rear speakers boom to life with a steady synthesized beat and a rhythmic clap. One of Tony’s eyebrows shoots upward as the baritone voice takes over. Definitely not the genre he originally put the kid down for, but now that he’s listening to the crest of violins amid the climax of kick drum, he realizes he’s not that surprised.
He must have either spaced out or really been into the song, because the next thing he knows, the final beat has ended and Peter has hit ‘Pause’ on his playlist.
“Did you like it?”
Tony rubs his chin. “Yeah, kiddo,” he answers honestly. “That was a...an interesting set of instruments. I don’t have anything contemporary.”
“That’s okay, let’s just keep going with your original playlist! That’s, like, super long. Longer than a CVS receipt.”
Tony snorts despite himself. “Ah, it’s ‘Back in Black’ by AC/DC again.”
“Again?!”
“I put it in twice. Don’t give me that hypocritical look, young pomsky.”
Peter throws up his hands. “Happy! He compared me to a puppy again, right after I specifically asked him not to. Tell him to stop, Happy.”
Happy doesn’t miss a beat. Without even glancing in the rearview mirror, he lets the glass divider slide up.
“Happy? Happy!”
Tony sniggers unabashedly beside him. “Listening to you is below his pay grade, buddy.”
“I’m taking your onion rings,” is the kid’s vicious retort.
“Oh, you are, are you?”
“Uh-huh. I’m taking all of them.”
--
Three rest areas and two gas stops later, they finally roll up in front of the hotel. Happy parks under the canopy and springs out to get them checked in ahead of time. Tony takes his time stretching, suppresses a yawn, and glances over to his left at Peter. The boy is slumped to the side, neck cranked at an angle that makes Tony wince, his temple smooshed against the window. His breaths are slow and rhythmic--a sure sign that he is still dead to the world.
Tony decides to clamber out and grab some of the luggage from the trunk. He hands one off to Happy, who has just reappeared through the sliding doors; then he pops his head back in through the open car door.
“Hey, kid. Wakey-wakey. Kiddo. Rise and shine. We're here.”
When the boy doesn’t respond to his voice or his finger snapping, Tony gives his shoulder a gentle shake. Peter comes awake with a mumble, blinking groggily. “Wha’?”
“Hey, bud. Sorry, but I didn’t want you to fall straight through when I opened the door on your side. We’re here now at the hotel. Happy’s already got us checked in and our things are upstairs.”
“Mm...tha’ was fast…” Peter stretches, and his joints make a concatenation of alarming pops. As he sits up, Tony is overwhelmed with alarm at how stupidly cute he looks with a track of drool down his chin and the curls standing straight up where they’d been pressed against the window.
“Yeah, sure,” Tony acquiesces. “Six hours can go by pretty fast when you’re working that motormouth nonstop.”
Peter becomes marginally more awake at the jab and even manages a half-hearted eyeroll as he stumbles out of the car after his mentor.
--
Tony glances up from his laptop with a quirked eyebrow when Peter reemerges from the bathroom in under ten minutes. “Showered that quick?”
“Gotta save on water, Mr. Stark.”
The man isn’t exactly sure which part of that statement to tackle first. “You know it’s paid for, right?”
The boy reddens slightly at that. “Oh, right. Uh, habit.” He finishes toweling off his curls so they’re not plastered to his forehead and dripping rivulets down his face. Tony continues to watch in undisguised amusement as Peter folds first his bath towel, then the face towel, into neat thirds and stacks them at the foot of his bed.
He’s about to make another comment referencing Peter’s obvious inexperience at staying in a five-star hotel, but at the last second he thinks better of it and returns his attention to his hologram presentation being projected from the screen of his laptop.
“Called Aunt May yet?” he asks offhand, not looking up.
“Yup. Did it before my shower. She still feels crappy, but she said her temperature’s gone down and Ruth came by to feed her properly.”
“Good,” Tony says sincerely. “That’s great.”
Peter clambers into his bed with an unintelligible noise of assent. The two spend the next several minutes in a comfortable silence, Tony rearranging small details of his presentation and Peter scrolling through his various social media on his phone. When Tony sneaks a glance from the corner of his eye at the tired grin on Peter’s face, he figures the kid is talking to his best friend. Ed or something.
When Peter finally sets down his phone and plugs it into the lamp on the bedside table, Tony fully expects the kid to chirp Good night and dive under the covers. Instead, Peter scoops up the remote and starts flipping through the channels at a low volume.
Peter speaks so suddenly then that Tony has to suppress a start. “Lemme know if I’m disturbing you, Mr. Stark.”
The man waves a hand dismissively. “You’ve got the super sensitive hearing, not me. Carry on. Just don’t stay up too late.”
“I won’t.”
The kid settles on a rerun of The Princess Bride and slouches into a near-reclined position against the pillows. He shifts around with an unreadable expression on his face, but after about ten minutes of fidgeting, he apparently gives up on finding a more comfortable position and simply fixes his gaze on the TV.
Or rather, he appears to be gazing at the TV. When Tony gets up and passes in front of Peter’s bed on his way to the bathroom, he can’t shake the feeling that Peter is simply staring ahead at the wall and running the movie as white noise in the background.
The kid is obviously tired--his slumped posture tells as much--but he seems to have no intention of actually drifting off to sleep. Tony briefly considers asking him what’s up, but then immediately rejects the notion at the mere remembrance of how heart-to-heart talks give him hives.
Half an hour later, Tony shuts his laptop and clicks off his lamp. “Well, I’m getting some shuteye, kid. You gonna join me?”
Peter glances at him with a recondite expression. “Sure, Mr. Stark. In a minute.” Out of consideration, he turns off his own bedside light.
The pulsing blue glow of the TV screen hardly bothers Tony; on the contrary, he finds it reminiscent of the nightlight that his mother gave him when he was ten and which he always loved to watch as it lulled him to sleep. The exhaustion of the day’s travels begins to seep fully into his bones now, and he pillows his head with one arm and rolls his face to the side, ready to slip into a dreamless darkness when--
“Mr. Stark?”
“Yeah? What’s up?”
“It’s not gonna rain tomorrow, is it? D’you think?”
Tony squints up at the ceiling in the dimness. Why isn’t the kid just Googling this information? “Probably not. Why’d you ask?”
“Oh. Uh, no reason in particular. I don’t think I brought my umbrella, that’s all.”
“Hngh. It’ll be fine.” Tony passes his free hand over his face to cover a yawn. “Worse comes to worst, Happy probably has one.”
“Oh yeah, you’re right.”
“Mm. Night, Peter.”
“Night, Mr. Stark.”
The muffled noises of the final battle from the movie blend into the background. There’s that telltale pinging sound of the TV being shut off. Sure enough, when Tony cracks open one eye, the room is bathed in a faded black. He hasn’t heard the overly starched sheets crinkle from Peter’s bed, so he wonders idly if the kid has even moved into a more comfortable position yet or if he’s simply dozed off. The A/C unit next to Tony’s bed decides this is the perfect moment to kick in, and the low buzz interrupts his train of thought. A few seconds later, the blind slats over the window start up a rhythmic rattling that almost resembles the patter of rain.
“Mr. Stark, do you think the weather gets affected in alternate universes?”
Huh. So the kid is still awake.
“Uh…” Tony Stark, resident genius billionaire philanthropist antihero of New York, isn’t sounding very much like a genius at half past hell o’clock at night. “What d’you mean?”
“Like, I was just thinking about how in alternate universes, each individual choice spawns millions of possible consequences and subsequent choices. So, like, could weather be a factor? Weather patterns are always at least indirectly affected by humanity’s habits as a whole, right? Like, thinking of pollution and stuff. So all that considered, is it possible that in an alternate universe, it’s actually raining over there right now while it’s dry over here?”
Christ, it’s too late for this kind of philosophizing. Tony has the sudden and very urgent epiphany that the powers that be were merciful in not giving Peter Parker a sibling.
“Or maybe,” Peter muses on, “it’s also possible that there’s no such thing as global warming at all in another universe. Maybe humanity’s found a way to self-industrialize without self-destructing. Maybe the polar caps aren’t melting in that alternate universe.”
Tony lets out a long, low, patient breath through his nose. “Maybe you’re on to something, kid.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah,” Tony humors him. “And you’ll be on to something better in the morning if you go to sleep now.”
The boy huffs out a breathless little laugh, as if it was yanked out of him in his surprise. Finally, thankfully, the sheets rustle and Peter slides onto his side.
Then--
"Mr. Stark?"
Oh, frick. Not again.
"Mm?"
"Did you know snakes can get sniffles?"
Tony briefly considers smothering himself with a pillow. "That's...an oddly specific piece of trivia, kiddo."
"I volunteered at a vet clinic in freshman year. You'd be surprised how many people own albino garden snakes..."
Tony hates himself for it, but sheer fatigue pushes him to tune out the rest of Peter’s spiel. He picks up tidbits--the most vicious Pomeranian ever, oh, did you know parrots can mimic profanity? this one guy asked if it was okay to bring in his cousin’s llama for a checkup--until Peter’s tone dips upward with a sudden “Uh, sorry for keeping you up, Mr. Stark. I swear I’ll be quiet now.”
“Mm,” Tony mumbles. “’Sfine. Jus’ get some rest.”
The kid whispers, “Okay, Mr. Stark.”
And Tony’s consciousness melds with a blissful oblivion.
--
A bang jolts him awake.
Tony’s eyes snap open. His heartbeat is already racing and his veins are coursing with adrenaline. “Peter! Are you--”
“Ow, ow, ow. Sorry, Mr. Stark! I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you. Just--just go back to sleep. I’ll clean this up. Don’t get up! I’m so sorry, again, Mr. Stark, sir.”
Now Tony’s far more curious than annoyed. “What was that?”
A small beat of silence. “The door to the suite. I tried to catch it in time. Sorry.”
There’s something strained in the boy’s voice that doesn’t sit well with Tony. He only hesitates one more second, then pushes himself up and swings his legs over the edge of the bed, clicking on the bedside lamp as he does so. He winces at the sudden stab of light to his eyeballs.
“Kid, where are you?”
The boy’s voice drifts back to him in an odd bubble. “Bathroom.”
“You all right? Need help cleaning up?”
“N-no! No, it’s all right, it’s just water!” Peter’s voice pitches up at least an octave, and now Tony is definitely concerned. He pads across the room and down the hallway to the bathroom, where halogen light is seeping through the crack underneath the door. The knob is locked. Nonplussed, he jiggles it.
“Everything’s fine, Mr. Stark. Just go back to bed!”
“Then why is the door locked?”
“Uhh...for privacy?”
Tony takes a moment to answer. He glances at the carpet in the foyer, and only then does he register the plastic cup overturned on the floor with ice cubes strewn about it.
The kid has either developed a specific brand of teenage clairvoyance, or he knows Tony well enough to shout through the door at that exact moment: “Don’t touch anything, Mr. Stark. You might slip or something. I’ll take care of the cleaning up. Just go back to sleep.”
Tony raps a knuckle against the door. “I thought you were cleaning up in there?”
“I, uh…I am?”
“Open the door, kid.”
“I swear, everything’s fine.”
“That’s what you always say right before everything goes to shit.”
“Mr. Stark, just stop worrying about me, I’ll be out in a minute.” Something clatters in the sink, and Tony catches a quiet oh, shit through the door, quickly followed by fuck, fuck, fuck, I’m an idiot.
“Peter, I can hear you, you know.”
Tony can practically feel the kid freeze up inside the bathroom. Under any other circumstance (read: not as sleep-deprived), he would have laughed.
Three seconds pass: one for a moment of indecision, another for guilt, and a final one for resignation. Then the knob rattles, and Peter quietly swings the door open. His eyes are wide, frenzied, and definitely too alert for this wee hour of the morning.
“Mr. Stark,” he whines. “You don’t just force somebody to open up when they’re in the bathroom. They could be, I dunno, taking a dump. Or masturbating.”
Tony folds his arms and leans against the doorway with an eyebrow raised. “Were you masturbating?”
“...No! I’m sixteen.”
“That's a real solid argument you got there, buddy.”
Peter lets out an impatient huff. “I'm still in one piece, Mr. Stark. You can go back to bed.”
“Yeah, well, considering it's you, 'in one piece’ is setting the bar pretty low. Lemme see your hand.”
“How'd you--”
“Ah-ah, no hiding behind your back. Left hand. Now.”
Reluctantly, Peter complies. Tony’s seen a bucketload of shit in his life and then some, but he swears his stomach performs some serious gymnastics at the crimson mess all over the kid's hand.
“What the hell, Peter. You're bleeding.” In his shock, Tony's tone comes out more annoyed than anything else.
“I did say I was in one piece, though.” Peter is vibrating with the all-too-innocent hopefulness of a golden retriever.
“Yeah, barely. What'd you do to this poor hand, throw it in a meat grinder?” Tony's already stepped into the bathroom, crowding the kid backward against the counter, and he gently steers his hand to flush it under a stream of lukewarm water into the sink.
“I was holding my iced water and my phone and didn't realize the door was gonna bang shut until it was too late.”
“So your first instinct was to drop everything on the floor and stick your goddamn hand in the doorjamb.”
“Hey,” Peter objects. “I didn't drop the phone. I have some priorities, Mr. Stark.”
“Clearly, Mr. Parker, those don't include your health.” Tony turns off the tap and reaches over with one hand for the first aid kit that Peter already pulled off the shelf before Tony barged in.
“Hold you hand up for a minute, Underoos. Keep it palm down, flat and level to the ground.”
Peter obeys. Tony swabs at the scrape with the hydrogen peroxide, blots it dry, and then digs around for the sterile gauze to wrap it up with.
“Mr. Stark, did you know you can see a totally different set of constellations out here than in New York? I mean, granted, it's always smoggy back home, but--”
“Christ on a bicycle.”
Peter grimaces. “Sorry, I ramble a lot when I'm, like, nervous or something.”
“I know, kid. I know.” Tony snips off some surgical tape and seals the bandage with a pat. “Flex it a little for me?”
Peter obeys with a rather poorly suppressed wince. “Thanks, Mr. Stark. It feels great.”
“Uh-huh. Because sticking hands in doorjambs and then passing off their injuries as masturbating is totally what the cool kids do nowadays--”
“Ned got detention for watching porn,” Peter blurts out.
Either Tony must have ascended to an alternate dimension somehow, or his exhaustion is seriously messing with his comprehension. “I’m sorry, he did what now?”
A flush blooms immediately from Peter’s neck to the tip of his ears. “I--I mean, Homecoming night? When he was chair-manning for me--with the Vulture--” He deflates a little when his mentor continues to stare at him as if he’s grown two extra heads. Which, considering that Cerberus must have been a puppy at some point, Peter doesn’t doubt it could be crossing Tony’s mind right now. “He got caught hacking stuff in the school computer room, so he panicked and said he was watching porn.”
“Oh, Jesus. Thank God. Thought I was gonna have to give you a serious sit-down for the birds and bees talk.”
“Mr. Stark. Nobody calls it the birds and bees talk anymore.”
Tony fixes him with a look. “And nobody tries to hide their injuries from me and gets away with it. Okay?”
“...Okay.”
Tony claps him on the shoulder to steer him out of the bathroom and through the foyer back to the bedroom. On the way there, he bends down to pick up the ice cubes, pile them in the plastic cup and chuck the whole thing into the nearest garbage can. “Good. Good talk. Now please go to bed before I actually call Happy in here to restrain you.”
“Yes, sir,” Peter says meekly.
The kid climbs into his bed without another word. Before Tony can comment on how he looks about as stiff as a ramrod when he lies down, the man finds himself yawning and hurtling back into a peaceful darkness.
He doesn’t quite know what wakes him up next. There’s no banging, no light from another room or the TV. The A/C unit is still chugging doggedly on and the blinds are still rattling. Tony rolls over to his other side to tap his StarkWatch for the time. 3:37 a.m.
The glow of his hologram clock illuminates another figure that makes him yelp. “What the fricking--kid. What the hell are you doing up in bed?”
Even in the dimness around them, Tony can make out Peter casting him a sheepish look from where he’s seated cross-legged amid a sea of duvet and rumpled sheets. The boy lowers his hands from--well, whatever the hell they were doing just now in thin air--and rubs the back of his neck reflexively. “Sorry, Mr. Stark. I didn’t know I was disturbing you. I was pretty sure I was being quiet.”
“Being quiet doing what?” Tony props himself up on an elbow to squint at him better. After a second, he decides to turn on the low flashlight on his StarkPhone and twists his wrist to activate the function.
Peter blinks rapidly in the glow. “Uh...practicing the clarinet.”
That has Tony’s full attention. “Practicing the what now.”
“Th-the clarinet. Y’know, I used to play it in band, before I quit? At the time I was--”
“Yeah, yeah, I heard you the first time.” Tony glances around. Is there some new kind of electronic technology he’s not aware of that allows wind instruments to be practiced silently? “Where’s the clarinet?”
Even in the bluish haze around them, Tony could’ve sworn Peter’s face is beet red again. He gestures vaguely with his hands, fingers poised as if curled around an imaginary instrument. “I didn’t bring it. I was just, uh, was just practicing the fingering. Brahms, Sonata 2 in E-flat.”
For the love of all things holy.
Tony sits up properly with a groan. “Kid. Good God.”
“...I can, uh...I can go do this in the bathroom if it’s disturbing you…?”
“Noo, no. You are not practicing an imaginary clarinet at quarter to four in the morning in the goddamn bathroom.”
Peter drops his hands into his lap.
Tony scrubs the sleep from his eyes and pats the spot at the edge of the bed next him. “Okay. Come on. Sit yourself down here, kiddo. You’ve got some explaining to do.”
Slowly, Peter unfurls his legs and crosses the room to sink down tentatively a few inches away from Tony.
Tony pats his knee, perhaps a little harder than necessary. “Now then. Explain.”
“Uh.”
“C’mon, Parker. Why aren’t you sleeping?”
Peter rubs his jaw and makes a series of futile little gestures with his hand. “Maybe--maybe I slept too much in the car. I dunno, I just can’t.”
“Okay, well.” Tony holds up a finger. “That’s a problem, because you’re gonna have to get up in a little under three hours again for a full day of walking, listening to lectures and meeting important people at dinner. You may not feel tired now, but you’ll be dead on your feet in twelve hours.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Mr. Stark. I just lie there and nothing wants to shut off. My brain is, like, constantly thinking of--of--stuff I’ve read, did I leave a charger plugged in the wall at home, that equation I could never balance last week--”
“--How often albino snakes get sniffles?” Tony supplies helpfully.
Peter groans and slumps forward over his knees. “I’m sorry, Mr. Stark,” he mumbles into his pajamas. “You should be the one getting rest and worrying about your presentation tomorrow.”
Damn straight I should be, Tony thinks. He doesn’t verbalize it.
“Oh-kay. So you’ve got insomnia. This is, this is a thing, a thing with you, apparently. Honestly? I’m surprised. ’Cause you’re the kind of kid who could tip over unconscious on command. Remember that time when Rhodey was telling you his second favorite war story and you just faceplanted there in the middle of his--”
“Nope. No. We are not talking about that time, Mr. Stark.”
“What? You should be grateful I’m not pulling up the security footage on cloud right now.”
“Mr. Stark.”
“Let an old man live. It isn’t every day you see a superhero teenager get pancake syrup all over his face.”
“I faceplanted in my physics book, not in the pancakes.” Peter gives a self-righteous sniff. “Okay, maybe a little. But it was definitely just my chin that got syrup on it.”
“Eep.” Tony mimics the god-awful blare of a security alarm. “Deflection detected.”
“You’re the one that started reminiscing about my sleeping habits, Mr. Stark.”
“Or lack thereof.” Tony points two fingers in his direction. “Ever taken sleeping pills?”
Peter shakes his head. “Never needed them. Not really.”
“Huh.” Tony rubs his jaw. “I got my own with me, but they’re prescription and I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that it would be irresponsible of me to share them with you. So, what gives? You think you need me to run down to the drugstore and get you an OTC or something?”
“Probably wouldn’t work,” Peter murmurs. “Metabolism.”
Tony swears silently. “Warm milk?”
Peter rolls his eyes in his mentor’s direction. “I’m pretty sure that only works on cats.”
“What, so you don’t think you share certain feline traits? Climbing walls and being all clingy--”
“--I am not clingy.”
“C’mon, kid. Give me something to work with.”
Peter draws his gaze away, and his shoulders and chest expand as he sucks in a deep breath.
Oh geez, Tony thinks. Here it comes. Heart-to-heart incoming. Mayday. Mayday. Abort--
“I guess it’s just sleeping in a hotel that bothers me?”
Tony furrows his brow, still suspicious of whatever angsty history is lurking just around the corner, biding its time to burst out of the kid. “New environment and all that? If it’s too cold, I can turn off the A/C.”
“Yeah, no. I like the air. It’s okay.”
“So what is it?”
Peter gnaws at his lip. Tony raps the side of the boy’s leg gently with his knuckles.
“It kind of reminds me of the time me and May stayed in a hotel for two weeks, I guess?”
“For vacation? What’d you do that’s so terrible, talk the ear off the bellboy?”
“I--we stayed there while we were looking for an apartment.”
The grin freezes on Tony’s face. Definitely not the answer he was looking for.
“This was, uh, two months after my uncle di--passed away. The rent at our old place was way too high for only one working adult, so we, uh...we had to...we were told to leave.”
Tony rubs at his eyebrow. Translation: evicted.
“Good thing it was summer, though,” Peter goes on in a disturbingly cheery voice. “At least I didn’t have to worry about homework. Or carting around textbooks in the car.”
“Sold ’em on eBay?” Tony asks casually, striving for normalcy.
“Yup. Sold ’em on eBay.” Peter flashes him a toothy grin.
“Two weeks is pretty good to find a place in Queens, though, isn’t it?”
“Three,” Peter corrects him. “When you’re spending your last week in a car, it really motivates you to find another place, fast.”
Tony doesn’t quite know what to say. On one hand, he’s shell-shocked by the kid’s candidness; on the other, something tells him that the quiet dignity in Peter’s voice would not meld well with any expression of sympathy, no matter how well-intentioned. So instead, Tony claps a hand on his shoulder in his classic gesture of I know we’re supposed to be talking about feelings right now, and I’m the king of sucking at feelings, so I’m going to be gruff and indirect in expressing how awesome you are.
“Sounds like a distraction is in order,” Tony murmurs. “What can I do to help you get to sleep? Take your mind off things?”
Peter balks.
“...Please don’t say more stories about the exotic pets you worked with at the vet clinic.”
The kid’s eyes sparkle so damn fast at that that Tony has to feign a cough into his fist to disguise how his own visage melts into a smile. “So you were listening to my stories.”
“Story.” Tony holds up a finger. “Singular. Uno. I conked out after the snake.”
“Hm.” Peter taps his chin. “Maybe we should play Twenty Questions.”
The man cocks a brow at him. “You sure that’s gonna lull you to sleep?”
The boy exaggerates a grimace. “You’re right, I’ll probably discover something about you that’s gonna scar me for life and then the trauma of that’s gonna keep me up for the next seventy-two hours.”
“Hey.” Tony cuffs him gently at the back of his head. “You already did enough traumatizing for the both of us tonight, what with your oh-so-heroic sticking your hand in a doorjamb.”
Peter lets out an angsty teenage moan and tilts sideways to bop his forehead softly against Tony’s shoulder. The man chuckles as he rests a hand over the flattened curls at the back of the boy’s head.
“You could probably bore me to sleep with a story or something,” Peter mumbles into Tony’s shirt a moment later.
Tony squints at the crown of Peter’s head. “You implying my voice is boring? Young man, I’ll have you know the sound of my voice is unparalleled by--”
“--A ten-year-old leaf blower?”
“Jesus, kid.” Tony lays a hand over his heart. “You know, there’s a special place in hell for Teletubbies who talk back to their elders.”
Peter snickers shamelessly into Tony’s shirt.
As Tony stares down at Peter’s slumped form with what he will later deny at all costs was a fond look in his eyes, he can’t help but picture a fourteen-year-old version of the kid sprawled across the back seats of a station wagon, surrounded by worn suitcases and stacks of boxes full of books and photo albums.
And then his train of thought leads him back to the car ride earlier, and his mind sparks with an idea. He reaches over for Peter’s phone on the table and flicks through the apps until he finds Spotify. The boy leaned against him stirs a little with an inquisitive noise in the back of his throat, prompting Tony to make an unconscious shushing sound under his breath. Finally Tony finds what he’s looking for: a suggested playlist of calming white noise.
Gentle, fragmented harp strums begin to filter through the room. Almost immediately, whatever tension was quivering between Peter’s shoulders bleeds out, and his full weight sags against Tony’s shoulder.
“Mm...thanks,” Peter mutters.
“Don’t mention it,” Tony whispers back.
It’s soothing to him, too. He wasn’t expecting a soft voice to accompany the music, but he finds he doesn’t mind: the act of deciphering the murmured lyrics has a calming effect on him as well.
Sleep, my love
It keeps the path low
And time will fade
At least we’re strong…
And in your fight
You hold so tight
You won’t notice
The fall, I’m sure
And in your light
My brightest thought
Will build the rest of the tour…
Tony holds himself as still as possible and waits, watches, listens for Peter’s breaths to slowly even out. The track turns to a simulation of rain, to a slow violin by train tracks, to disjointed piano against the rustle of leaves. Tony doesn’t dare move the kid--not for fear of waking him, but for shattering this--it--this something in the air that was born of that first song. And then the thought rises unbidden to the forefront of his mind, that as he sits here and breathes in sync with the sleeping sunrise, one arm leaning on the goose down pillow against the headboard and the other serving as a cushion for the kid’s soft cheek, that he wouldn’t have it any other way.