Chapter Text
1. Fall / Tony Stark
Peter walked down the crowded New York street with a bagel in one hand and his phone in the other. His headphones filled his head with the sound of soothing music while he read the assignment his teacher had posted. Stupid chemistry, stupid school, he now had to cancel his evening patrolling plans to make time to get his homework done before fighting petty crime in his part of town.
He stopped at an intersection, waiting for the light to change.
Peter had found that he, very often, felt out of place while walking around the city. He would walk around looking like the most average teenager in the entirety of New York and still feel like he looked incredibly out of place. Something about the way he moved, or maybe the way that his senses made him extremely aware of everything surrounding him, but the truth was that he felt like he stuck out like a sore thumb.
The way that people always talked about Spider-Man also served to make Peter's sense of discomfort even greater. He would walk back to his house from school, stopping every now and then to grab some food or maybe say hi to one of May's Hair Club friends, and he would always find himself with the image of Spider-Man, or a conversation about him, in his hands. He was often reminded by the sweet old ladies at the fruit stand that Spider-Man was very popular with kids his age when they insisted on handing him a red and blue plastic bag to carry his satsumas in. Or when he stopped to grab some Pizza at the joint one block away from his apartment, and he was offered the chance to win a free slice if he could prove he was a true Spider-Man fan.
Most infuriating, and shameful, were the afternoons in which he would see an image of Spider-Man on the cover of newspapers. In those instances not only did he look ridiculous in his almost pyjama like costume, but he was more often than not reminded that he was not yet considered a hero by everyone. Today was one of those days.
Peter looked down at the forgotten page of The New York Times that stamped itself on his feet. From the cover, he could see a picture of his latest acts of pseudo-heroism. He had stopped a bus with his bare hands and had been so delighted by his strength that he had completely ignored the fact that his feet had created enormous dentures on the street. He sighed and kept walking once the light changed; trying, and failing spectacularly, to get the headline 'Spider-Man, the Lastest in the Long Line of Wannabe Avengers' out of his head.
He walked into the electrics store then, stuffing the last of his bagel into his mouth and smiling at the woman behind the counter, "Hey Donna."
Donna smiled, looking up from the circuit board she was working on, "Hey Pete, here to pick up the console?"
"Yep," he leaned into the counter, looking down at Donna's work, "having fun?"
Donna looked down and frowned, "Not really, but you gotta do what you gotta do."
She walked into the back part of the shop, leaving Peter alone with the soft creaking of the air conditioning and the mumbling of the television. He looked towards it, the small screen hiding in between buckets of cables and screws. The reporter was talking rapidly about the latest events of the Security Council, the images varied between the stills from the speech of the King of some small African nation and the stern and snobby face of the French President.
"-even after long hours of debate and reform of the tenth draft of the Sokovia Accords the French President is refusing to give the 'Yes' vote when the final stage comes near."
There was a pause, and a short clip of the French President's speech started rolling. He was a funny, ugly looking, man, short enough to have the podium cover most of his body, yet he radiated every bit of leadership that someone would expect a president to do, "The last few months have been a clear demonstration of how slow a decisions can be when taken by such a large council as the United Nations. France is not willing to put its people's lives at stake because of other countries' unwillingness to act."
The image cut back to the reporter, "International tension keeps rising over the accords situation, and experts are beginning to say it is a lost-"
"There's a quite heated debate going on, isn't it?"
Peter shrugged and collected the console, "I guess. I'm kinda impartial towards the Accords."
"Really?" her eyebrows shot up, "I thought you kids loved your superheroes."
"I mean I do love superheroes," Peter said, "but I feel like they could use some ground rules, to serve as a guide more than anything."
Donna nodded, her curly hair bouncing as she moved her head, "Sound logic. Tell your Aunt I said hi."
"Will do," He plugged back his headphones back in and walked out of the store, "Bye Donna."
The rest of the walk was uneventful; kids were running and playing around, teenagers talking and milling, there was loud music coming from one of the corners of the park in which a group of girls always practiced their dance moves after school. He turned a corner, the street of his house was not as bustling with activity as the other, but there were still some people walking around. A girl walking a dog and a woman pushing around a carriage while talking through the phone. He was so distracted he could have missed the fancy car parked right outside his apartment if he had not run into it.
He rubbed his leg where he had slammed against the metal, and whistled in appreciation. The Corvette looked pristine, not a scratch or smudge on the paint. He looked around, and once he noted that no bodyguard had come to scold him because of bumping into the car, he ran his hands over it. Man, if he could just get his hands on one of these.
There was a loud crash from something overhead, and Peter snapped out of his daze. He hitched his backpack further up his shoulder and walked into the building. The path was practised, and like every other day, he trecked up the stairs, nodding to his neighbours and smiling to the ones that acknowledged him. He opened the door to his house, "Hey, May!"
"Oh, hey," he hears her answer back, "how was school?"
"It was okay," he left the console on a table, walking over to his kitchen and grabbing a pear, "there's this crazy car parked outside-"
And it was like his brain had stopped functioning. For a second he thought that maybe he was just hallucinating, or that finally, he had found one of the adverse side effects of the spider bite because sitting in the couch of his living room was Tony Stark.
It took him a second to realise that Tony Stark had said something to him, another incredibly long one to process that his mouth had been working without him approving of it in the first place. In the end, he just tried his best to sound composed when he said 'Hey, I'm Peter' and still failed at not making a fool of himself.
He tried to open his mouth, and when nonsense came out May stepped in for him, "Peter, why didn't you tell me you had applied for the internship?"
"Or for that matter passed," Mr Stark continued, "we had been exchanging emails for a long time now, why didn't you tell your Aunt?"
"Well I-" He looked at the man, the look on his face spoke a thousand words, and all of them were some variation of follow along, please, "I thought, well, I thought it would be good too, um, to surprise you. I love how much you love surprises. Anyway, what type of internship did I apply for?"
"That's what I am here to discuss," the billionaire grabbed something from the plate that was lying on the tea table and gave it a bite, "So, Mr Parker, do you have a room we can talk, in private?"
And that's how Peter ended with Tony Stark sitting on his bed with a hand on his shoulder while Peter felt his heart shatter. He should have seen it coming when Iron Man turned up on his doorstep. His nice suit, perfect looking goatee, and ridiculously expensive everything. He was here to tell Peter to stop. He was here to give him the 'Let the big guys fight those battles. You should focus on school' talk.
"So you want to look out for the little guy," Mr Stark told him, squeezing his shoulder soft enough for Peter to barely feel it, "you want to do your part, in making the world a better place, and all that."
Peter nodded and wrung his hands, "Yeah, yeah, just looking out for the little guy."
Mr Stark wrinkled his nose, he gave a heavy sigh and squeezed Peter's shoulder again, "I don't need much from you, Peter. I really don't."
Peter sighed, ready to defend himself when the time came.
"But I have seen what you can do," he hesitated, "we have all seen what you can do, and we are more than impressed."
Mr Stark took his hand off his shoulder, Peter looked up to find he had taken off his glasses and was cleaning them with the bottom part of his shirt. "Peter there is a fight coming. A big one, nasty one, one that we cannot be ever fully prepared for, and we need all the help we can get, if not for the big battle then to defend the little guy. To make sure we can keep as many people safe as possible."
"Is that what you want me to do?" Peter asked, "Help you protect the people you can't?"
Mr Stark snapped his fingers, "Smart boy."
There was a second of silence in which Peter tried not to think about what Mr Stark was asking him to do, what it meant for future. He just kept waiting for the genius to explain more, to say something else.
"Alas, Cap wouldn't let me do this unless we could ensure that you were safe," Mr Stark placed the glasses back, "like I would ever do something so irresponsible." He reached into the pockets of his jacket, and took out a card, offering it to Peter, "We start tomorrow."
He started at the identification badge with wide eyes; there was a picture of him probably taken from his school yearbook, his name printed in bold black letters, and the words Alpha Five right below that.
"See you at four, don't be late," the billionaire stood up and walked towards the door before stopping, "And for the love of God don't bring the onesie with you."