Chapter Text
Just another day, just another evil being for the Avengers to be fighting against. This week it’s a malicious, self-serving wizard who is attacking the Sanctum Sanctorum. Tony figures Strange and Wong probably have it covered, but the fight’s tearing up Greenwich so all available Avengers - in this case Clint, Nat, Steve & Tony - are called out. Tony isn’t surprised to see Peter swinging around helping secure the perimeter upon their arrival, and pulls him into the comms.
“How’s it looking down there, Spider-Man?”
“Hey Mr. Stark! Looking good, just trying to help get everyone safely out of the way.”
“Good job, kid. Keep that up and leave the evil-sorcerer-fighting to us, okay?”
“On it, Mr. Stark!”
Tony flies down into the action, where he can see Strange and the wizard hurling spells at one another. No Wong, he notices right away, only to hear some static on the line as Natasha chimes in.
“I found Wong, he’s injured and unconscious. Clint, can you meet us one block east?”
“Copy that, Nat.”
Tony watches as the quinjet flies up and away. He sees Steve on the ground, slowly trying to come up to the wizard from behind, only for the man to turn around and fling a giant arc of blue at him. Steve gets the shield up - offering some protection - but still goes flying, smashing through the window of a Starbucks. Tony decides then it’s about time he got in on the action, and shoots multiple repulsor blasts at the wizard, who deftly sidesteps them while still tussling with Strange. Suddenly, a giant blast of yellow arcs over Strange, his body seizing and freezing up as though he is covered in ice before he has a chance to deflect it.
He falls to the ground just as Tony lands, his suit clanking on the asphalt. “Alright, playtime’s over, baby Saruman.”
Tony hears Peter laugh through the comms, but the wizard doesn't appear amused. “Hello, Stark. I was hoping you might come to fight me. Strange may be the Sorcerer Supreme but he is still rather untested, whereas you have fought valiantly many times and against many foes.”
“Yeah yeah,” Tony replies, putting his repulsors up. “I got a better goatee than him too. Enough chit chat. I have a movie night with my kid scheduled and I am not missing it for some Voldemort wannabe.”
The wizard cocked his head, a mischievous smirk forming. Before Tony could react he was hit with the same yellow arc Strange had been. While he himself didn’t freeze up, the entire suit shut down, everything going silent and dark.
“Shit. FRIDAY, FRIDAY you copy?”
No answer. “Shit.”
The wizard calmly walks over to Tony, the smirk now a full grin. “I wasn’t aware you had a child, Stark. Tell me, how will he react when he finds out his father is dead at the hand of the greatest sorcerer who ever lived?”
Tony rolls his eyes but tries to ignore him, frantically doing anything he can think of to get the suit rebooted. Just as the wizard reaches him and begins to cast another spell, Tony hears the sound of a whoosh to his left and then-
“You keep your hands off Mr. Stark, jerk!”
-the kid is swooping in, kicking the wizard in the chest who then goes flying over a pile of rubble and out of sight.
“Mr. Stark! Are you alright?”
“Yeah, Pete, I’m good, but the suit is dead in the water. Can you tell Clint to have FRIDAY send another suit for me? And I’m going to need you to break this one open.”
Tony hears Peter say something to Clint before he moves in front of the suit, pulling off the chest piece. Tony feels both heavily exposed and much safer as Peter rips off the entire front of the suit piece by piece so that Tony can step out.
“You good, Mr. Stark?”
“Yeah, kid, but we need to find cover, I have a feeling that wizard will be - “
Tony doesn’t get a chance to finish his thought, as Peter without warning grabs him around the waist, whipping him around to face the other way as though shielding him from an attack. Half a second later comes the arrival of literal tons of projectiles from the rubble pile the wizard had landed on the other side of. Peter leans over Tony, doing his best to cover him from the debris. The noise the metal and cement makes as it lands all around them is cacophonic. Tony feels himself pushed to the ground, Peter on top of him, as more keeps coming. He covers his head with his arms in an instinctive attempt to shield himself.
As the last of the rubble lands, for a moment Tony isn’t sure whether he’s gone deaf or if everything has just gone silent. But then he hears a whimper, and his world narrows down from the fight and the wreckage to just the one person he can’t live without.
“Peter,” Tony says, trying to lift himself out from underneath the kid. But Peter doesn’t move, just whimpers again. “Peter. I need you to get off me so I can look at you, kid.”
Peter’s breath is coming fast and shallow, but Tony feels him nod against the back of his neck, and a moment later Peter twists off Tony and onto his back. Tony doesn’t waste any time getting to his hands and knees and then he’s leaning over the kid.
It doesn’t take him long to see what’s wrong either, and for a moment he’s pretty sure his heart literally leaps into his throat. Because there is no way there is a two-foot long pipe stuck through Peter’s middle right flank right now.
Then the kid makes a choking noise and Tony no longer has time for denial.
“M-mister-”
“Okay kid, I gotcha. I gotcha, it’s going to be okay,” Tony reassures, caressing the kid’s temple as he tries to assess the damage. Judging by the position, Tony guesses the pipe has gone straight through the lower right lung or the top of the kid’s liver, and going off the wheezing sounds Peter’s making he’s going to guess the former. But right now it doesn’t matter which one, because either way the kid needs to get to the Tower medbay yesterday.
Tony adjusts so that Peter’s head is in his lap, then lifts the kid’s right arm and presses where he knows the comm button sits. “Clint, I need you down here right-the-fuck-now, Spider-Man is down, I repeat, Spider-Man is down.”
“Nearly there, Tony.”
“Tell Cho to prepare the medbay for surgery, he’s been impaled by a fuckin’ pipe-”
Nat chimes in. “ETA 30 seconds, Tony.”
Tony drops the kid’s arm, turning back to where Peter is still wheezing, then coughing and god, Tony can see blood seeping through the mask near his mouth. He can’t see the kid’s face, but he knows he’s looking at Tony with terrified eyes. Tony badly wants to lift the mask, to give him the comfort he is clearly so desperately in need of, but he can’t risk the wizard -
“What do we have here?”
Tony glances up to see the aforementioned asshole staring down at them, looking worse for the wear but currently wielding all the control.
“Poor child. You care deeply for him, do you not? It’s a pity he won’t survive his injuries once I’m done with you both.”
“Don’t touch him,” Tony bites out, leaning as much over Peter as he can, knowing there’s nothing else he can do except hope backup is imminent.
“You’re a formidable opponent, Stark,” the wizard sighs as he starts whipping his hands around, clearly conjuring another spell. Tony shields Peter as best he can manage, doing everything in his power to cover the kid from any damage the sorcerer is intent upon.
“But I cannot have you or this bug meddling any longer,” the wizard finishes, making a final motion with his arms.
“Tony!” he hears someone, maybe Steve yell close by, but before he can look he’s bathed in red light and everything goes dark.
--
When Tony’s eyes blink open, it’s to a brightly lit room. “Jesus,” he mutters, blinking twice before closing his eyes again, his hands moving up to rub at his throbbing skull. Lids still firmly shut, he takes stock of himself. Besides the pulsing headache, he seems to be uninjured, if a little sore. He’s laying on something soft, with a pillow cushioning his head.
“Okay, not dying, and not being tortured,” he mumbles, giving himself another ten seconds before he slowly cracks his eyes open.
The bright light that assaulted his vision before has receded to a more manageable setting, which he sees now emanates from a lamp on a side table next to the bed. Beyond that is a small bureau dresser, and a door in the corner opposite him.
“Where…?” he mumbles, now slowly sitting up. “What the hell happened?”
Slowly his mind starts putting the pieces together - I was with Peter, we were fighting a… a wizard? And then the wizard shut down my suit and Peter came and Peter - Peter - oh god -
Tony is on his feet, swaying and lunging towards the door.
The door swings open to a larger room, broken into two distinct sections. On one side is a living area, with two couches, a table with a lamp, a television and a desk with a phone on it. On the other side is a small kitchenette area. The whole place looks oddly familiar, but it’s not decorated like any place Tony has ever lived before. Far too simple, and far too cheap.
As Tony looks around he comes to a more important realization, however. There are no windows. No vents. No way in or out.
Tony puts that thought aside for now, seeing two more doors yet to check. The first is a bathroom, complete with a shower and a few towels, and Tony feels his earlier panic building up again. Still no windows or vents.
“C’mon kid, please be here, please,” he says as he opens the second door, to see it’s another windowless bedroom, bathed in darkness but for the light from behind him.
Sure enough, there on the bed is a lump facing toward the wall, and as Tony draws nearer the lump takes the shape of a very familiar spiderling.
A sigh of relief escapes Tony, but it’s short-lived as he has yet to see Peter move.
“Peter?” Tony says, leaning over the edge of the bed and shaking Peter’s shoulder gently. “Kid? Kid, can you hear me?”
Please be okay. Please be okay. Please be -
“Yngghhh,” the lump groans, shifting onto its back to glance up at him with barely-cracked eyelids.
Despite his overwhelming concerns - he has no idea where they are, how long it’s been since the battle, or exactly how badly injured Peter is yet - Tony tries to soften his features into a semblance of reassurance. “Hey kid, how’re you feeling? How’s your side?”
The kid doesn’t answer right away, seeming to take stock of his surroundings. Tony takes advantage of the pause in conversation to check out Peter’s right flank, lifting up his shirt - how did he get changed into jeans and a t-shirt? - and is very surprised to find that it’s already healed up, not even a nasty scar left to mend.
“What the…”, he mutters, trailing off. Just how long have we been here?
Peter mumbles something, too soft for Tony to catch, and Tony pulls the t-shirt back down, lifting one hand up to comb through Peter’s hair while the other checks his pulse.
“What’s that, kid?”
What Peter says next knocks him off his feet. Hell, maybe even punches him all the way to New Jersey.
“Dad? Where are we?”
--
Tony can’t see his expression, but he’s sure in this moment it’s quite comical. He immediately puts both hands up to the kid's skull, feeling for bumps. “Peter, are you alright? Did you hit your head in the fight?”
Peter gives him a questioning look. “Uh, no? What fight? Last thing I remember is lying down to take a nap at the mansion and then I woke up here, but somehow I don’t think we’re in Malibu anymore, Toto-”
“Malibu?”
Peter rolls his eyes. “Yeah Dad, Malibu. Y’know, where we live during the summer?”
Tony feels a panic attack starting to come on now. He takes a closer look at Peter, and while it is Peter, it’s also obvious now that it’s not his Peter. Where his Peter is all hard muscle, the result of the mutation, this Peter still has some baby fat. His hair is more closely cropped, clearly styled, and now that Tony looks him up and down he realizes that the kid might be in jeans and a t-shirt but they definitely didn’t come from May’s favored thrift store.
Tony takes a deep breath. “Peter, I’m not your father.”
Peter frowns at him, then grins. “Very funny, Dad. Is this like, some elaborate prank? Are you trying to get back at me for the soap incident last month? Because I only shared that video with Flash and like, two other people-”
“No kid, I’m sorry, but this isn’t a joke. I don’t know what’s going on, and while I might be Tony Stark I’m not your Tony Stark, and I’m definitely not your dad.”
Peter’s mouth shuts so fast Tony hears his teeth click. Tony can see his eyes watering up and then dart up and down Tony, probably also taking stock of the small but undeniable differences between his dad and the man beside him now. “Well, crap.”
--
“My mom’s name was Mary. She died in a plane crash when I was three,” Peter says to fill the silence. The two of them have been sitting on the couches the last hour, both lost in thought.
Tony had spent the majority of the day surveying every last inch of their prison. With Peter’s help he moved around all the furniture not affixed to the walls, searching for any evidence of a hidden door or some other entry/exit point. To Tony’s complete frustration, nothing was found. Even more confounding, there were no mics or cameras; it truly seemed it was just the two of them, entombed in what qualified as a luxury Super 8 hotel suite, albeit one with cement walls. He was just glad there was running water and a large stock of food in the kitchenette. He hoped there was some way for air to replenish, but between four rooms of oxygen that wasn’t yet an immediate concern.
He’d tried the phone, but all he got was static. The television only had two channels, both of which played nothing but reruns of long-canceled shows. Tony considered tearing apart the two electronics to build some kind of communicator, but both devices were dinosaurs - hell, the phone was a rotary - and it wasn’t worth the time, at least not yet.
“Mary, you said? Were we married?” Tony asks when Peter doesn’t continue.
“No. I think you got me on weekends or something until she died,” Peter replies. “You never really talk about her... Do you have a Mary?”
“No,” Tony answers honestly. “But my Peter does. Or, did. His Mary - his mom - died too though, a long time ago now.”
“Are you still like, a billionaire? Do you own SI? Do you still make weapons?”
Tony laughs. “Yeah, kid, still a billionaire, and SI still exists. I used to make weapons, but no longer. Have you ever heard of Iron Man? Or Spider-Man?”
Peter shakes his head.
“How about the Avengers?”
“No, who are they?”
“They’re, uh, just some important people, back where I come from. Kind of like superheroes.”
Peter nods, but doesn’t say anything further. Tony eyes him, and takes note that his hands are trembling. He knows the kid must be scared out of his mind, but he also knows he’s not his dad, and any offer of comfort might be unwanted. He decides to try a different route.
“I found some cards and games in the desk drawer. Did your dad ever teach you cribbage?”
--
Three games of cribbage later, two of which Tony lost on purpose, the kid’s far more relaxed. He lets out a big yawn, and Tony looks at the clock on the wall, sees it’s only a quarter past nine.
“You getting sleepy, kid?”
Peter rubs at his eyes. “Yeah, guess so.”
They both stand up at the same time, Tony following Peter past the living room toward Peter’s bedroom. Just as Peter is about to pass through the doorway, he abruptly turns around, wrapping his arms around Tony and burying his face into his chest. Tony’s taken aback for a second, but then leans into the hug.
It might not be his Peter, but it’s still a Peter who needs affection, and Tony will never deny any Peter that. “Hey, hey, it’s going to be okay. I’m going to figure this out, I promise, and we’ll get you home to your dad.”
There’s a few beats, a small sob, then, “You’re really not my actual dad, are you?”
“No,” Tony answers honestly, “but I wish I was, kid. I really do.”
“Buddy,” Peter mumbles into this chest, then lets out another small sob. Tony rubs his back.
“Don’t think I quite caught that, kid.”
Peter leans his head back, his red-rimmed eyes making every one of Tony's protective instincts flare up. “You don’t call me kid, you’ve never called me kid. You always call me Peter, Pete or buddy.”
“Ah, I see,” Tony sighs, resting his head on top of Peter’s. “Okay, buddy, how about we both sleep in my room tonight? I’d rather keep you close by where I can see you, make sure you’re safe.”
Peter laughs a little, the vibrations of which Tony finds instantly calming. “Now that sounds like my dad. And okay.”
Ten minutes later the both of them are sprawled out on Tony’s bed, Peter already fast asleep. Even with the different haircut, Peter still has that one curl on his forehead that just won’t stay in place, and Tony brushes it back, stroking his temple.
As he drifts off, he sends up a small prayer to a god he doesn’t believe in that wherever his Peter is, he’s safe and sleeping as soundly as this one.
--
Tony wakes up to someone poking at his side. He sits up, immediately looking at the other side of the bed. The empty other side of the bed. “Kid?”
“I’m over here, perv.”
Tony twists around to the other side, only to find two web-shooters aimed inches from his nose. A teenage girl with wild curly hair and very familiar brown eyes stands before him in a Spidersuit, her pose threatening.
“Who are you? And where’s Ms. Stark?”