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Admittedly, the cup of black coffee and half a season of Brooklyn Nine Nine probably hadn’t helped Tony relax before bed.
The billionaire's sleep was plagued by his worst memories, flashing through his subconscious like he opening credits of Mission Impossible.
His nightmares had only intensified after the Snap.
There he was, before Iron Man: squandering his fortune on gambling and private planes; spending his nights with girls he didn’t recognize the next morning, or sitting up alone and burning with something he couldn’t explain.
And there was Obadiah's face, one of the few he thought he could trust, leering almost pityingly at Tony as he felt his limbs freeze up. The wrenching feeling as his arc reactor was torn from him. The cold, unforgiving floor on his empty chest as he crawled towards the spare.
The panic.
And- he was in space, the deadly power of a nuclear bomb carried over his head, watching the New York sky swallowed up by black, eyelids fluttering closed as he fell and fell and fell-
And Rhodey fell and fell-
And the face of a kid, hair tousled, eyes ridiculously wide, mouth stuttering out a “Uh, hey- Mr-Mr. Stark!”.
That same kid's prone body on the airport floor, mask crooked on a pale face- breathing? Alive?
Slipping from an alien ship- “Pete, you gotta let go, I’ll catch you,” - and this time, not falling-
But he is falling now, falling into Tony's arms, stumbling, quivering, eyes filling with panicked tears, the beat of his heart racing against Tony’s stomach but slowly getting fainter, choked sobs muffled against Tony's shoulder as he carded his fingers through Peter’s hair, murmuring “You’re alright,” even as he felt the soft curls under his fingers disappearing, leaving only dust-
After the Staten Island ferry incident: “Yes, sir, I- sorry, I’m sorry, I'm-“
“Sorry doesn't cut it.”
The kid's last words: “I’m sorry.”
And then Tony wished it hadn’t been like this. As he cradled his dust-covered hand, he realised his worst fear had just come true. Everyone he loved had gone- even the kid, the one who would be so much better than Tony, who could really live up to something, who deserved a long, happy life – everyone had gone, and he was the only one left.
Him, the darkness of Titan, and the dark stain on his palm that was the only thing left of his kid.
“Mr. Stark, I don’t feel so good...”
“I don’t- I don’t know what's happening-“
Mr. Stark-“
“Save me!”
“Hey, Mr. S-“
“I don’t wanna go, I don’t wanna go, please, Mr. Stark, I don’t wanna go-“
“Tony...”
“I'm sorry.”
“Tony!”
The jarring sound of his first name being spoken by such a high-pitched voice jerked him out of the darkness with a gasp.
Looking wildly around for the source of the voice, he saw a rectangle of light streaming in from the open door of his room. A gangly shadow was pressed against the doorway.
Suddenly, Tony was all too aware of the sweat pooling in his collarbone and running down his back, sticking his t-shirt to his back, and his erratic breathing. He was sprawled on the floor.
Wait, the floor? Why?
Shit. Not in front of the kid-
Peter had a huge navy blue sweater on; he pulled at the hem with frantic fingers. Staring intently at Tony, assessing, he whispered, “What happened?”
Tony's head was still spinning. “How long have you been there?” Hurriedly, he raised himself up onto his elbows, sucking in a breath that sounded more like a learner driver changing gear.
“A couple minutes,” Peter mumbled. He seemed to be deliberating over whether to cross the threshold of Tony’s room.“You – you wouldn’t wake up, Mr. Stark.”
“Mr. Stark, I don’t feel so-“
The crappy-driving quality in Tony’s voice still hadn’t ceased. He leaned his head against the side of his mattress as he said, “Well, thanks for helping, kid, but now is not the best time. Just go back to sleep, okay, it’s a school day tomorrow, right?”
But Peter was mulishly stubborn, a trait Tony was sure he'd only encouraged in the kid.“I’m not leaving, you know.” He crossed his arms and looked down at Tony, who was still on the floor, in a terrible but adorable attempt at an authoritative stance.
The kid's voice was softer when he said, “Can I come in?”
Tony buried his face in the mattress and sighed. “Sure.”
“You want some light in the room?”
Either it was a coincidence, or Peter remembered the darkness of Titan, knew about the suffocating black of the wormhole.
That kid was so damn perceptive. It made Tony ache.
When he saw Tony’s small nod, Peter raised his voice just slightly to say, “FRIDAY, lights on.”
Tony's panic had engaged something in Peter which was at odds to anything he’d normally associate with the kid. Peter's face was sympathetic but neutral, mouth set in a determined line, as he butt-shuffled closer to Tony.
During their conversation, Tony had only gotten worse. Maybe it was partly shame at the kid seeing him like this. A huge weight was constricting his chest and the feeling in his left arm was a distant memory.
Tony always knew before the tension came when it would-
Almost always.
It hit him like a ton of vibranium bricks: sending his hands to the corners of the mattress, clenching the material, and his face twitching into a grimace; forcing a groan from his throat. He was still pressed against the side of his bed, only now his legs had curled up under him and were jammed in a fetal position.
“Fu-“ he choked, but caught himself.
“Mr. Stark, I don’t care what you say around me. Whatever makes it better.”
“Mr. Stark, I don’t feel so-“
And then Tony was left in a vacuum.
Arguably, this was the worst part. When, suddenly, he forgot how to breathe, and the only thing he could hear was “I don’t wanna go, I don’t wanna go...”
Peter had extensive Google knowledge in how to stop panic attacks. None of the techniques usually worked on him, so he had no idea if they'd work on Mr. Stark, but he had to do something-
Did he mind being touched?
Oh, screw it.
Slowly, carefully, Peter put his hands on Tony's shoulders.
The gesture seemed to jerk Tony out of whatever was stopping him from breathing, and he gasped audibly.
“Hey, Mr. Stark, I’ve got you...”
It was murmured, muffled from the mattress Tony had his face smashed into. “Don't say that.”
“What?” Peter began to lightly run his hands up and down the sides of Tony's tense arms.
“Don’t – just call me Tony, kid.”
Oh. That.
Biting his lip, Peter continued, words tripping slightly over Tony's name. “Tony, I think it'd be better if you turned around. You can see the light that way, and it might be easier to breathe. Could you do that?”
“Mh-hm.” Tony was scarily tense, veins twitching under his skin. He didn’t move.
“Would it be better if I turned you around?”
The billionaire hung his head. “Yeah.”
Peter took Tony's right shoulder, and reached for his left hand, but when he began to pull Tony around, the man hissed in discomfort.
“Oh- I’m sorry.” Taking the right hand and left shoulder instead, Peter succeeded in getting Tony to face him.
Tony thanked the stars Peter hadn’t thought twice about the hand.
But his eyes were still jammed shut, and he couldn’t seem to open them.
The small, calloused hand remained in his, fingers skimming his palm. “Okay, that was good, that was really good. Now we're gonna get rid of all that tension, okay?”
Tony wanted to laugh at how much like a yoga instructor he sounded. Instead, he winced.
”Don't worry, you're gonna breathe with me. Yeah. Uh- in...”
Tony heard rather than saw the kid's exaggerated breath, and tried to imitate it, but something got stuck and he just- couldn’t.
Peter continued nonetheless. “And out.”
Tony had no breath to get out.
At the next “In...”, Tony felt the kid squeezing his hand. “And out.” The grip released a little.
On the one hand, Tony hated that he’d put the kid through this, hated that he'd had to see this. Usually, when this happened, he'd go downstairs and build something until the day came again and the light returned.
Or drink a pack of red bull and binge watch some trashy show or other.
It reassured him that he was still the same old Tony Stark, just a guy with a fucked-up sleep schedule. Not some broken thing that couldn’t deal with everyday life.
Nothing drowned out anxiety better than alcohol, but that was the one thing Tony had sworn off after he'd taken Peter under his wing.
On the other hand...
Just hearing the kid's constant voice, feeling real hands circling his arms without fading away, calmed his racing heart.
Tony would ask Peter later where he'd learnt all that stuff to deal with panic attacks, because it was impressive.
He was selfish, so selfish. But knowing that Peter was there, that he wasn’t going to go until Tony told him to, was enough to begin to dissolve the tension coursing through his body.
It was one of the first times anyone else had seen him panic.
How appropriate that it was the kid who's apparent death was the cause of said panic.
All of a sudden, Tony saw a crack of light through his closed eyelids.
And then he could see again.
The sudden burst of light he was met with drew a sharp inhale from his chest.
There was Peter's tired-looking face, messy hair falling into his eyes as he held Tony's shoulder and hand, staring, lost-looking, at the billionaire's face. He started as Tony met his gaze.
“There, Mr St- uh, Tony, you're back!” The kid seemed pleased with himself, but the bags under his eyes and the furrow in his brow attested to something else.
In an uncharacteristically paternal moment, Tony looped his free hand around the small of Peter's back and pulled him into a hug.
They were still on the floor; it was an awkward sort of side-hug with Tony's legs stretched out along the floor and his back against the bed, with Peter round to his right.
Peter loved it anyway.
Finding himself slipping down Tony's chest, he reached his arms up and scrabbled for purchase, one arm looping around the side of the man's neck and the other coming up over Tony's shoulder.
Tony couldn’t breathe.
This was it-
Peter was fading away-
Grip loosening-
Gone, and Tony was alone.
Stumbling-
Clinging to Mr. Stark-
Fighting, trying so hard, but dying all the same-
Endless dark, lit only by the little lights in his suit-
Nothing, no ground or air, just blank, just-
Spider-sense all over the place-
Hugging shaking arms to his drawn-up legs, panicking-
No-one there to calm him down as he cried-
When the display on his suit informed him that it was the 10th of August, singing himself happy birthday with a voice raw from yelling for help-
Alone.
Peter couldn’t breathe.
No no no no no, he thought.
He yanked his arms away from Tony as if they'd been burned.
Looking up for a second at the billionaire, Peter saw countless unreadable emotions pass over his face.
Trying to make amends, Peter whispered, “I’m sor-“
Oh, crap.
Would he ever stop screwing up?
He'd scuttled back a little way from Tony.
There was a moment of silence, and then the shadows in Tony's eyes coalesced into something which looked like sadness.
Tony held out his arms almost desperately. “Come back, Pete.”
Peter stayed where he was at first, not wanting to encroach on Tony's space. But something in the man's eyes told him that he was what Tony needed right now.
The kid near fell back into Tony's arms. Tony could see his little head trembling. Instinctively, he wound his hands into Peter's hair, somehow knowing that despite the shiver he felt run through the kid's body, it would comfort him.
And it did. Peter slid down a little again, the side of his face coming to rest above Tony's heart, making a small noise of pleasure. He slung his arms loosely around Tony’s torso as the man continued to thread his fingers through the soft brown waves.
With every laboured inhale, Tony noticed Peter's head rise a little on his chest, and saw his back raise shakily along with the rhythm.
Tony hadn't realised he was such a good hugger.
Without thinking, his left hand strayed to Peter's back, gracing over the sharp bumps of his spine to trace patterns softly into the skin.
Tony’s sigh at the grounding feeling of Peter solid beneath his hands was mirrored by Peter's exhale of relief.
“That good?” questioned Tony quietly.
Peter’s face coloured a little. “Yeah,” he admitted.
“We’re both pretty messed up, huh?” Tony huffed out a laugh as he brushed the kid's hair back from his face.
“Were you alone? On Titan?” The question was abrupt; Peter tilted his head to look up at Tony.
The panic was there, but instead of speaking, he wrote the answer on Peter's back: “YES.”
Smiling self-deprecatingly, Peter whispered, “Yeah. Me too.”
Tony hadn’t heard about this yet. He’d wanted to wait until the kid was ready. “You wanna talk about it?”
The trembling in Peter’s head returned as quickly as it had gone; Tony resumed playing with his hair.
He understood.
“Okay, it’s okay. We can talk another time.”
A faint nod of agreement against his chest.
There was another comfortable silence.
Tony could've stayed like that all night, propped up against the side of his bed, legs out, Peter sprawled on top of him, a hand in the kid's hair and the other around his back, the top of Peter’s head brushing his chin.
It was Peter who broke the quiet this time. “How did you do it?”
“Do what?” Tony’s head was bowed; his voice was a little muffled against Peter's hair.
“How did you get everyone back?”
“You know that, kid- I went back to Earth and me and-“
“No. How did you... Do it? Get through it? Have the hope to- to keep going, keep trying to save us all?”
Tony stiffened a little at this. If he answered the question truthfully, he would be baring his soul to the kid.
But they'd got so much closer since the-
Since the Snap.
Tony remembered the moment when Peter came back.
One moment, it was just him and Steve, stopped in their tracks as they felt – something – change in the air.
And then, all of a sudden, Peter appeared in the distance, bursting out of thin air like an explosion of unweieldy limbs, a little trail of dust in his wake.
He was the first to come back. He'd fought to escape from wherever he'd been, thinking of Tony-
And there he was, back in New York.
It had taken Tony a few seconds to process that it was really Peter there, not one of his hallucinations again or the voice in his ear that constantly chanted “I’m sorry...”
He'd reached the kid just as he fell down, overwhelmed with the sudden onslaught of sensory input – light and noise and the ground beneath his back and the sky above and the smell of the Thai shop nearby and a voice other than his own, yelling , “Kid? Peter!”
Then someone – Mr. Stark – was there, cradling his head before it could hit the ground, a hand around his back, grasping at him through the metal of his Iron Spider suit.
Peter's eyes were blown wide, breaths short and shallow as he struggled to adjust. He whimpered a little as his hands clutched at Tony, both with panic and with relief.
His first word was, “What?”, reminding Tony of when he first met the kid in person.
Tony's eyes were misty with the first tears he'd shed for years.
“Hey, Pete. You're here. You're back now. We won, kid. We won.”
Face crumpling, Peter fell clumsily into Tony, whispering incoherently.
“You’re alright? You're not hurt?” Tony asked, worry furrowing his brow as he checked Peter over.
“No, I just- it was... really scary in there.”
Tony, at the time, didn’t care to think about what “in there” meant. All he needed was to know that Peter was there, and he was safe.
They spent a long time like that, on the ground, Tony talking softly to Peter, telling him about everything that happened while he was gone, waiting until he was somewhat adjusted to the world again.
When the rest of those who'd disappeared in the Snap returned, similar symptoms of confusion and shock were reported, but Peter's Spider-Sense meant the sudden change in environment was similar to stepping out of a vacuum into a nightclub.
When Peter could talk and stand again, Tony put a steadying arm on the kid's shoulder and caught his elbow in his free hand. Now Peter's gaze wasn’t trained on him, he let the tears fall.
He'd done it. He’d saved everyone. He’d saved Peter. They'd won.
Back in his bedroom. Peter staring up at him.
Oh, screw it.
“You kept me going, kid. The thought of you stuck somewhere was the reason why I did what I did. I just – I couldn’t sit by while there was the smallest chance of you surviving.”
Peter's widening eyes were still on him.
“Really?” he breathed, voice thick.
Tony brushed his thumb over Peter's cheek, nodding to enforce his reply. “Yeah.”
The kid hesitated before he spoke next.
“I... I have something I wanna say, but- I’m not really sure, uh, how.”
Tony tamped down a smirk at Peter's rambling, and said, “Okay... You wanna draw it on me?”
“Uh, what?” Peter blushed delicately, squirming a little on Tony's chest.
“You know, like I did with you.” Tony shot Peter a meaningful glance.
“Oh, yeah, okay, sure,” he stuttered, taking Tony's arm. “Could you... Could you shut your eyes?”
“Sure.”
With his eyes closed, Tony could easily single out the feeling of Peter’s index finger dancing over his arm, could identify the words “I LOVE YOU TONY” being written there.
Tony felt like crying, but for some reason he laughed instead.
Gathering the teenager up in his arms, he murmured, “I love you too, Peter.”
It'd be okay in the end.