Chapter Text
Peter knows Tony’s standing behind him before the man even opens his mouth to speak. He doubts that stealth was ever Tony’s purpose, but it surprises the boy, still, how quietly his mentor ascended to the roof and took measured steps toward him without saying a word.
“Spider-babies probably get pneumonia from standing out in all this rain. Lack of thermoregulation and all that.”
Peter continues to swing his legs over the edge. “Spiders don’t have lungs,” he says without turning around, and he can already picture Tony’s left eyebrow shooting up.
“No,” Tony concedes. “But you do.”
Peter picks up on the rise and fall of Tony’s chest as the man finally approaches near enough to crouch just beside him. Why Tony decides to squat instead of taking the comfortable seat just to his left, Peter doesn’t know. Perhaps he prefers to keep both feet on solid ground.
Peter could laugh to himself at that. Iron Man, inventor of flying titanium alloy fighting suits, preferring to stay on the ground.
It certainly says something to Peter that Tony’s heart isn’t galloping out of his chest at the mere sight of the kid balanced casually on the edge of the roof of a cathedral. He ponders that for a moment in silence to himself. It feels foreign, almost daunting, to be on the receiving end of that kind of trust.
“Wanna tell me why you’re not answering your aunt’s texts?”
Peter bites his lip and unsticks his left hand from the stone shingle to fish around for his phone. He holds it out halfway, as if expecting Tony not to actually take it. He’s right.
“I texted her,” Peter says, looking up at Tony in the eyes for the first time.
Tony’s gaze flits down noncommittally to the StarkPhone and then back up to the boy’s face. The kid shrugs and reaches back to place the phone somewhere behind him.
“You texted ‘I’m fine and I’ll be home before curfew’,” Tony quotes at him. “Now I’m not usually pedantic, but by Wordy Italian Aunt’s definition, that is not texting back.”
Peter runs the tip of his canine tooth again over his bottom lip. He could pierce it if he bit down on just the right pressure point, he thinks. He’s almost forgotten what his own blood tastes like. His mind swerves clear of the endpoint of that thought process and directs his gaze instead to the toes of his high-tops. The narrowest bit of his shoelace is wider than the honey yellow blur of the taxi cab below.
Tony lets out something like a huff. “I always wondered how you could stick to stuff in the rain. You...you can stick in the rain, right?”
In answer, Peter lifts his left hand again and proffers it to Tony, palm facing up. Tony shifts from his crouch to sit on his bottom next to the kid and takes the offered hand without a question. He brings it up to eye level. Frowns.
“Look again,” Peter whispers. As he speaks, he wills his sticking powers to activate.
Tony squints harder--and then starts, almost dropping Peter’s hand in his lap. “Holy…”
“A little creepy, huh?”
Tony throws him a dry look. Years of attention in the public limelight have taught his facial expressions to be swift and resilient, if nothing else. “I think creepy used to describe you is definitely stretching it. But having actual extendable spider hairs on your fingertips isn’t exactly children’s book material.”
“I think of them more as barbs, actually.” Peter wiggles his fingers in front of Tony’s face and lets his mouth lift upward in a lopsided smirk. “Hairs sounds a little too soft for what they actually feel like.”
“You can’t actually scratch people with that, can you?”
Peter’s face turns a worrisome shade of contemplative at the jest. “Not that I’ve tried…”
“Stop that. You’re a Hufflepuff.”
Peter rolls his eyes. He sticks his hand to the bicep of the nanotech Iron Man suit.
“Get off me, Underoos.”
Peter’s half-smile morphs into a full-grown grin at the mixed message contained in the nickname, which Tony only ever utters in moments of ultimate fondness.
“I’m serious. Next time I’m going on a dinner date with T’Challa, I’m stealing his sister to design me a Spidey-sticky-proof metal alloy. Then who’ll be the one falling on his butt when he tries to embarrass me for Twitter?”
“The sticky video was for Instagram,” Peter corrects him, pulling back with his classic squinty-eyed offended look. “Jeez, not everyone’s main social media platform is the same as yours, Mr. Stark.”
Tony levels him with a look. “Spidey may be all about Insta-hoot but I know for a fact that Peter Parker lurks all over my Twitter.”
The flush that rises unbidden like a tide from Peter’s neck to the tip of his ears is enough of an answer for him.
Tony shrugs off Peter’s hand from his bicep, but decides to soften the gesture by laying his arm across the kid’s right shoulder. It’s swift and casual, and he’s careful not to press his hand too close to the boy. His forearm--up to his wrist--making contact with Peter is enough emotional vulnerability for one rainy evening, thank you very much.
“So.” He clears his throat. “Explanations for not texting Aunt May. Perching up on the roof of a church like a pigeon. General over-the-top teenage shadiness. Go.”
Peter turns to the side and rummages with something crinkly hidden there by the billowiness of his hoodie. “Donut?”
Tony stares at the frosted french cruller in the kid’s hand. What the hell? And on that note, he decides, what the hell. He grabs the offered pastry and chomps on it. “Gotta say your taste in snacks has gotten classy, but you’re still evading.”
“Like a pro?” says Peter hopefully.
“No,” says Tony. “Not like a pro. If you were a pro, you’d be polishing off these donuts while decked out in your Spidey suit. Which, by the way, you should not do, because I know just how much you love those powdered monstrosities.”
Peter squints, once again offended. “You love powdered jelly donuts too.”
“Yes, but I have a metal suit, not a spandex one.”
“Which conveniently goes in the wash, Mr. Stark.”
“I’m actually appalled that May lets you do the laundry. You know nothing about removing powdered sugar stains.”
“And you do because--?”
Tony gestures airily with his free hand. “Not the point of this conversation right now. Stop stalling and tell me why the hell you’re on top of a church roof and getting your aunt worried. And make it quick, so I can go back to my Project Runway episode. I was just getting through Season 5.”
On second thought, it was probably a poor decision on Tony’s part to name-drop one of Peter’s favorite classic shows as a means to get him to focus on the topic at hand. Thankfully, however, Peter gets the hint and gives a dutiful bob of his head.
“May wanted to go to mass this afternoon.”
Tony cocks his head so suddenly that Peter can practically hear the bones creaking. “So you decided to go to church...on top of the church.”
Peter sighs, long and hard and a little painful through his nose. “I happen to like the view from here, regardless of it being a church.”
“Hngh.” Tony tosses back an aborted nod. “Even when it’s raining.” He doesn’t phrase it as a question. Questions don’t work as well with Peter Parker as rambled observations do.
“Yeah.”
“I guess you do get a fantastic birds’-eye map of the city without having to exert the effort of flying,” Tony admits. “Or in your case, swinging around.”
See? He understands.
“Jeez, kid,” Tony tacks on in a mutter. “I don’t even know how your arms take all the abuse, day after day. At this rate, you shouldn’t have shoulders anymore.”
Peter jostles him in the side with a nudge. He swoops over to bite off a sizable chunk of the remaining french cruller in Tony’s hand. “Gotta stick to my brand, Mr. Stark.”
“What, being an extra little shit? You do that all by yourself without the spandex, y’know.”
Peter scratches his eyebrow with a middle finger.
“Very mature, Parker.”
“Says the guy who promotes eating powdered donuts in an Iron Man suit.”
“You know, there was a time Peter Parker actually respected me. Today is no longer that time.”
“I mean...” Peter’s head flops against his mentor’s shoulder. “...You’re not wrong.”
“’Course I’m not.” A pair of sunglasses materialize out of nowhere--nanonites, probably--and Tony whips them on with perfect timing. “I’m Tony Stark. I’m always right.”
“Oof, I’m so disappointed Mr. Rhodey and Ms. Potts aren’t around to hear you say that.”
The corner of Tony’s lip twitches. “You’re totally texting Rhodey about this later, aren’t you?”
“Why ask me if you already know you’re right?”
Tony pretends to shove him off his shoulder. Peter simply sticks a hand to the back of Tony’s neck with a single peal of laughter.
“Remind me not to replace the next backpack you lose on patrol. We’ll see who’s laughing then.”
Peter throws himself backward with a roll of his eyes. He pillows his head with his hands and shifts his thigh to the left to nudge the side of Tony’s leg. Unconsciously, Tony’s hand comes down to rest on the kid’s knee.
“It’s hard to go to church, sometimes,” Peter admits after a few beats of companionable silence. The faint pattering of raindrops has slacked off into a drizzle.
“Why’s that? Not your cup of tea?”
“It used to be. I used to--I wouldn’t say I liked it, but it used to be easy.”
Tony seems to chew this over. “I went through a period in the nineties where everything I believed in seemed meaningless.”
Peter probably nods. Tony can’t be sure, since his eyes are transfixed on his own thumb rubbing figure eights over the frayed knee of the kid’s jeans.
“It still isn’t easy, even now,” Tony goes on. “You keep--you keep thinking about all the things that He’s supposed to be powerful enough to do, but chooses not to do anyway.”
Peter forces out another noisy breath through his nostrils. “I stopped believing two years ago.”
Tony doesn’t have to bend over backwards to do the mental math. Many things happened to Peter Parker when he was fourteen. Monumental things, things whose weight is too recondite to be described even in the vocabulary of an adult who has been well acquainted with storms and the sting of acid rain in his eyes.
“Maybe ‘stopped believing’ is a little too harsh. I dunno. I guess. You could say it just...got hard to keep believing at that point? Because I actually try. It’s not like--I don’t...God.” Peter sounds like he’s scrubbing a free hand over his brow and his eyes. His voice barely bubbles back up to the surface when he speaks again. “It’s not like I want to push Him away...you know? I don’t have anger. I don’t, I don’t--I don’t think I could hate anybody, except maybe myself. I just--” A quiet hitch in his lungs. “I wanted Him to embrace me, but He never did.”
Tony’s thumb stills in its figure eights. The grace of his hand wants to curl into a fist.
“And to me, that felt the same as pushing me away.”
“Because when it’s God pushing you away, how do you come back?” Tony finishes for him in a whisper.
“Yeah. Kind of. Exactly.” The energy in Peter’s hand rubbing his eyes over and over is frenetic, silently discordant.
“Bad things happen to good people,” Tony mutters with little conviction. “It--it happens all the time.”
“That doesn’t make it any easier to understand.”
Tony makes a noise in the back of his throat. Maybe it’s assent, maybe it’s merely acknowledgment.
“May has a gift, I guess. She’s able to believe without understanding. I mean, she--she picked up the rosary and the little prayer book the day after...he…” Peter swallows. “Died.”
Tony tilts his head up at the sky at that. One of the clouds--cumulonimbus--is rolling back before the sheet of tentative rose gold that scuds over the heavens in its face. It’s funny, he thinks, how he can almost understand exactly where May is coming from.
“You’d think she’d’ve burned all that the night she saw his body. I mean, that’s the normal reaction, right? I thought...I thought--”
There’s that familiar coloring of shame creeping into the kid’s tone. Tony’s stomach wrings itself a little. Pushing down the bitterness in his throat, he glances back at the boy over his shoulder.
“What did you think, buddy?”
Peter pushes himself back up into a sitting position. He curls his legs into a criss-cross in front of him; it isn’t lost on Tony how careful he is not to disturb the man’s hand still resting on his left knee. Tony helps him a little by not lifting his fingers from where they’ve created a little pocket of warmth in the folds of Parker’s jeans.
Peter murmurs: “I always thought May would be the kind to get angry at God. She’s--she’s sweet, and good, and passionate, and--and--at the same time, she’s always ready to hurl this ball of anger at anyone who hurts the ones she loves.”
Tony chuckles. “I know.”
“I know.”
Tony shifts so he can rest his back against the top of the buttress. Regrettably, he has to release his hold on Peter’s knee, but he taps his chest to retract the nanonites completely before swinging his jean-clad legs up to rest over the kid’s. A smile jerks across the boy’s face, as if caught unawares. He runs one of his narrow fingers over Tony’s red Converse--a memory of the day they’d gotten matching pairs at the outlet mall upstate and sketched hideous Avengers designs in Sharpie all over the fabric.
“Maybe May understood something the day he died,” Tony says. “Understand, as in...she understood the limit of what there is to understand. And how little you can control.”
Peter unknots and re-knots the shoelace on Tony’s left shoe. “Is that why you believe?”
“Maybe. Sometimes I don’t know. I just do.”
“Because there’s nothing else holding it all together.”
“Maybe,” Tony says again. He fixes a look then on the side of Peter’s face, a look so intense and unreadable that the boy has to glance up to meet his mentor’s eyes. The next several words feel nearly like a vision. As if they oughtn’t to be uttered, yet both Peter and Tony know they are true, and so there is no choice left but to say them aloud--out here against the low whistle of the wind and a damp sunset rolling in their direction.
Tony unknots the shoelace on his other shoe. “You’re one of the things that hold my life together, Pete. You, Pepper, Rhodey, May, Happy. Only people can hold a life together. So what’s the point of believing in a higher power if I’ve got you guys, right? If I--I decided a long time ago...if I don’t believe, then I have no choice but to think that chance brought you all into my circle.”
Tony draws a deep breath. Peter starts to re-knot the shoelace with slow, shaking fingers.
“I don’t think I could ever trust chance to keep you all around me. Only God could do that.”
Peter doesn’t know how to feel about that statement. There are layers he wants to peel back--things that surprise him, please him, or rub him the wrong way--but today is not the day for that.
“I understand what you’re saying,” Peter huffs out. “Like, I get it. But I don’t...I can’t. It doesn’t feel right for me.”
“And that’s okay, bud. I promise.”
The air is sucked out from Peter in a rush. It should feel like relief. So why does he feel desperate? Aged? Boneless?
“I want it to feel right,” he chokes out. He doesn’t remember when the back of his throat got so wet and clogged up. “I want it to. Eventually. I don’t like this, Mr. Stark. It’s like--it’s like--”
Tony nods once at him and continues staring at him to continue, the picture of patience.
Peter rambles on. “Ned and I had a fight once. We were in seventh grade. We didn’t talk to each other for, like, two weeks. Which sounds so stupid now that I say it aloud, but...that made it to my list of worst times ever.”
“It’s not stupid. That does sound rough, kid. I know you guys were close.”
“It was stupid,” Peter contradicts him, without any heat behind it. “We weren’t actually anywhere near as close then as we are now. But it was like...okay, you know how when you date someone and you form a really strong connection, and then you have to break it off, and it feels like, oh my God, how did you ever survive without this person in your life?”
Tony’s mind flits to the broken shape of Pepper’s eyes as she cried.
“But then it’s super ironic, because, like, you also think to yourself, you survived without this person before in your life. So you gotta keep telling yourself that it’s not ideal right now, and maybe you changed because of them, but you will go back to surviving without them again. Still, you got a taste of life with them, and you have to be honest and admit to yourself that it was so much better with them in it.”
Damn. Tony uncrosses his ankles and pushes the soles of his Converse against Peter’s thigh.
“Maybe that’s a little dramatic,” Peter backpedals. “But like, it was similar with Ned, I guess. We were fighting over something so freaking stupid, and then suddenly we weren’t talking anymore, and I had all these thoughts about how I survived before without him, but trying to do that again absolutely sucked and there was no reason in the entire world why I would have to go back to that.”
“So you went back to him and talked to him.”
Peter confirms: “So I went back and talked to him.”
Tony strokes his chin, trying to follow the metaphor Peter’s used to represent another metaphor. “You feel the same way about God?”
The kid’s answering nod is shaky. Lacking any confidence or eye contact. “I could survive without Him. So many people do. But life could be better with Him in it. It should be better with Him in it--you know? I just feel that, you know? But I don’t know how to go back and talk to Him. The two weeks...the two weeks, it’s turned into two years.”
“Maybe you need to figure out what started your fight with Him.”
“That’s the thing.” Peter stops playing with the shoelaces and drops his head into his hands. “We’re not fighting. I don’t know what’s wrong. He was just there, and then suddenly--suddenly He’s not.”
Those three words, those three simple words, feel like the arc reactor being wrenched from Tony’s chest all over again.
He pokes his toe again at the inside of Peter’s leg. “Why do you think He’s gone?”
“Because I’m unremarkable. Ungrateful. Neither good nor bad, just somewhere in the middle...which is the worst place to be.”
Tony’s chest is swirling with emotions. Where does he even begin to address all these untruths? But the thing that astonishes him the most is the lack of Peter mentioning how he is to blame for Ben’s death. Some progress, and yet it’s progress pained and hampered down by all the other lies that crowd the kid’s brain. Lies that are perhaps a thousand times worse than the original one.
“Because I try to fight crime as a way to pay for my guilt,” Peter goes on. “Because I only scratch the surface of this thing called redemption. Because I think I’m doing a lot, but it’s never enough, because it’s not done with the right intentions.”
And then he tacks on in a whisper: “Because I’m gay.”
“Oh, kid.” Fuck. Fuck.
Peter has the courage to look up at him, and his eyes are shining and wet. Tony thinks just then that this is the bravest his kid has ever been.
There are questions there, yearning to burst from the depths of Peter’s eyes. Questions too broad for words, too excruciating for tears. Too complex to be appeased with an embrace.
Why did He make me this way?
Why am I wrong?
Why is it never enough?
And the worst of them all: why didn’t He make me so it would be easy to love Him?
“Peter,” Tony says. “Come here.”
He does. He untangles his legs from Tony’s and inches up the edge of the roof on his knees until he’s facing Tony, just half a breath away. Tony closes the gap by drawing him into his chest.
“I’ve never told a soul about this, but...in 1992, I had a relationship with a guy.”
There’s a sharp movement of Peter’s damp curls under Tony’s chin as the boy jerks his head up at him. Tony was expecting the shock. He may have told Peter he’s bisexual, but finding out he actually acted on his attraction to men is quite another matter in itself.
“I grew up Catholic, just like you.”
Peter hums in remembrance.
“That’s probably part of why I was so adamant about keeping it a secret. Or maybe it was more because my parents had just...died. I was spiraling. Rhodey knew it; Obi knew it. The press knew it. Everyone knew except my own damn self. I was drinking, partying, sleeping around. Mixing pills with alcohol. All somewhat out of character, but not unexpected for the brat who inherited a multi-million company.” Tony snorts humorlessly. “But letting anyone know about my relationship with a guy? That...that was different. That was off-limits.”
Slowly, Peter curls an arm across Tony’s stomach. Perhaps he understands.
“They’d take it and turn it into another meaningless tabloid about Stark’s heir gone off the rails. ‘Experimenting,’ you know? Just another symptom of celebrity arrogance gone wrong. I--” Tony stops himself before the choke can cloud his voice. He resumes in a lower tone. “It wasn’t--that. I was scared, Parker. Because it meant so much more than that to me.”
“’Course,” Peter murmurs. “It’s a part of you.”
“Well, that. But also because he actually meant something to me, you know?”
Peter has a flash of clarity. “You didn’t want them tossing it back in your face when it was actually different from your drinking and the women or, or the drugs. He wasn’t...a coping mechanism.”
Tony shakes his head. “He wasn’t.”
“He was more like your tether in the middle of it all.”
“Would you look at that, kid. There is a poet inside that spandex, after all.”
Peter digs his fingers into Tony’s ribs. The man yelps breathlessly at the tickle. “What happened to you and him, Mr. Stark?”
Tony’s mouth twitches. “I didn’t make him understand why I kept him a secret.”
The mist is quiet. The sunset has come upon them with an abruptness of furor, like a wrath for being shrouded so long. The bloody waves of light are spilling too fast across the sky.
“He could have tried to understand, even if you weren’t able to express it at the time. You were...what, twenty-two?”
Tony grunts in confirmation. “It wasn’t his job to understand, Peter. He was just supposed to love me, and I was supposed to love him. And loving him meant telling him how I felt. Every part of it.”
Peter’s chewing his lip. Tony knows it without having to look down at the boy across his chest.
Tony may not be crying, but the warble of his voice tells a different story when he speaks up again. “He was good for me. And he was good. He was the one who helped me understand I didn’t have to throw away what I believed in because of what I had with him. I mean, granted, it took me probably another decade at that point to actually get it, but at least he got the hammer going in my thick skull.”
“You do have a thick skull sometimes,” Peter grumbles.
“I take offense at that, Underoos. I have a thick skull all the time.”
Tony can practically hear the eye-roll in the kid’s tone. “I wonder sometimes what I idolized in you as a kid.”
“A question for you to answer, kid, not me. I’m just the washed-up has-been engineer playing with million-dollar titanium alloy toys in his tower.”
“I would love to take a dissertation to your face with, like, ninety-five theses on why you’re wrong,” Peter retorts, “but I’m more invested in the story. Why did you...why do you say you didn’t have to throw away everything you believed in?”
“The existence of God isn’t locked up in my orientation, Pete. In my identity. It’s the other way around. If I weren’t so jaded at that age, I would have told him I thought he was sent to me by a higher power. I believe it now, but it doesn’t matter because...he never got to hear it.”
“He probably understood more than you were able to say.”
“I guess. I hope so.”
“Is it...is it weird if I say at least you have Pepper now, Mr. Stark?”
“No.” Tony shakes his head vehemently. “Not weird at all. That’s part of the reason I believe God out there isn’t all that bad. Second chances are rare, Pete. Rare. And Pepper? She’s like a second first chance.”
“Yeah,” Peter whispers, almost to himself. “Yeah.”
Tony squeezes the kid’s shoulder with his hand. “But, listen, Spiderling. I meant what I said. Second chances are rare. You got something to say to Ned? You gotta say it. Don’t even stop to think for a second about how wrong you think this makes you in front of some higher being’s eyes. You just take stock of your blessings and you seize them. Don’t let go. They may not come back again. And then...and then eventually, everything else you’re struggling with? It’ll work out.”
Under any other circumstances, Peter would probably have reddened at the mere mention of Ned’s name. But his mind is laden with the abundance of words his mentor has laid upon him. Words. Words. Someday, he thinks, they’ll have acquired meaning.
“Thanks, Mr. Stark.”
“I mean it.”
“I know. Can I ask you something, Mr. Stark?”
Tony knocks his chin against the top of the kid’s head in silent permission.
“What was…his name?”
Tony stops for a second, and then the next thing he knows, he’s fighting back a breathless laugh. When he finally answers, Peter understands.
“His name was Jesús.”