Work Text:
Tony may be fully aware that he co-parents a very weird and very nerdy spider-child, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t still pause in mild shock in the doorway of Peter’s guest bedroom in the cabin at the sight of the teenager curled up under his Uncle Ben’s t-shirt quilt with a dog-eared book balanced between his knees. Maybe it’s a little irrational. Still, considering it’s merely hours after the kid’s high school graduation ceremony--y’know, a totally casual celebration in honor of finally being able to put four years of reading behind him--Tony thought the boy might be up to a little more, well, diverse extracurricular.
“At first I’d think you’re just admiring my intellect from afar,” Peter mumbles without looking up, “but standing there for more than two minutes just feels creepy.”
Tony uncrosses his arms, peels himself from the lintel and shuffles forward into the circular glow cast by Peter’s bedside lamp. He kicks at the rounded twine ottoman next to Pete’s mattress, contemplative for a second, then sinks down on it (thank God for Pepper being able to think of comfort and class at once) and leans forward with his elbows on his knees. “Whatcha reading?”
Peter raises the book in answer. “The Miseducation of Cameron Post.” His eyes flit across the page a few more times, absorbing the last few lines of the chapter, and then he softly tucks in the corner to mark his place and shuts the book in his lap. After barely a second of fidgeting, he reaches over to his side to grab that stupidly cute stuffed blue wombat that Ned had given him way back when and begins to toy with its ears.
“Sounds like one of those wildly mistitled books that’s actually very deep and not boring,” Tony concedes. He reaches over Peter’s knees with a sniff and, after shooting the kid a look for consent, picks up the paperback and turns it over in his hand. “Emily M. Danforth,” he mutters, more to himself. He cracks it open to the first chapter. “The afternoon my parents died, I was out shoplifting with Irene Klauson…”
Tony has to interrupt himself with an ironic, bittersweet little smirk at that and sets the book down again on the mattress by Peter’s left hand. He really shouldn’t be surprised by Peter’s choice of reading material. A moment later, the unshakable conviction hits him that neither should he make a verbal comment about--about it, the parallels between the boy and the protagonist of his book, the themes he glimpsed from the blurb on the back that of course would have some connection to Peter.
“Oh, gee, Mr. Stark, please don’t stop on my account. I know I can’t handle the suspense.”
Tony rolls his eyes and snatches up the book to whack the side of Peter’s knee with it lightly. “That’s not how you treat your mentor who out of the lovingkindness of his heart reads you tragic bedtime stories.”
The kid wrinkles his nose. “You have the worst pacing ever. You stop at weird places and put on this, this, I dunno, accent and--”
“Excuse you, I have the voice of a radio host and the most brilliant pacing ever. Remember To Kill a Mockingbird?”
“I fell asleep to that one.”
“My point exactly.”
“You were supposed to keep me awake for that one, Mr. Stark. So I could focus on the dialogue and finish my report.”
“Uh, first of all.” Tony whips up a finger in the air. “I called them bedtime stories for a reason. And second of all, it’s not my damn fault you pulled two all-nighters in a row before coming to me for help all shaky and weeping because you could barely focus on the words in front of you anymore.”
Peter folds his arms in front of him, smooshing the stuffed wombat between them and his chest. “I don’t weep.”
“Oh, sorry, you emote.” Tony reaches over to ruffle the fur at the top of the wombat’s head. “What’re you doing up reading depressing coming-of-age stories to Dodo, anyway?”
“Toto,” Peter corrects him. “You know it’s Toto.”
“I know. It’s more fun to see you get all sniffy about it.”
At a loss for a snarky comeback, Peter takes Toto the wombat by the paw and lobs it at Tony’s chest. Tony catches it with an exaggerated oomph, pretending to be nearly bowled over by the impact, and grins back cheekily at the kid’s patented eye-roll.
Peter opens his mouth, draws a breath--deeper than normal. He stops. Clicks his jaw shut again. Tony raises first one brow at him, then two, knowing that as the seconds of silence stretch between them, the topic that Peter is trying to broach with him is getting more profound. Tony folds forward on his elbows and knocks Toto’s snout against the stubble on his chin, waiting. Listening. It’s a game of holding the quiet and allowing the kid to untangle his thoughts against the wall of fear: not fear of any adverse reaction from Tony himself, but of the panic that bubbles up inside him at hearing the actual words spoken aloud for the first time. It’s a game that Tony doesn’t always beat perfectly--he’s had his fair share of pushing the boy too far, too fast, of alienating him--but he would like to dare say he’s gotten dramatically better at it over the years.
“Can’t really sleep.”
Tony glances over at Peter’s phone charging to the side on the nightstand. The screen displays 1:39AM. “I can see that,” he says mildly.
“Mr. Stark, I--” Peter leans back with a thunk of his head against the headboard and drags the heels of his palms over his brow, his eyes, his cheekbones. He doesn’t draw his hands all the way down his face, but keeps them there just barely concealing his eyelids as they flutter in time with his breaths. There’s a stray thread hanging from one of the cuffs of Peter’s sleeves that Tony is suddenly dying to snip.
Tony hesitates just a fraction of a second. Then he inhales once, deeply. “Take your time, kid.”
“Mr. Stark.”
“Yeah.”
“Mr. Stark…”
“I think we’ve established the last couple years that’s your name for me.” The corner of Tony’s mouth quirks upward. Even Peter, despite himself, shakes his head from behind his hands, the reflex reaction of an exasperated teenager at his insufferable father figure.
“I wanted to ask you something.”
“Hm. Okay. Lemme ask you something first, though.” Tony boops Toto’s snout against Peter’s knee in an attempt to draw the boy’s attention. “Is this a conversation you prefer not to have face-to-face for a reason? ’Cause I know I complain an awful lot about you showing your face in my kitchen and eating me out of house and home, but I’m preeeetty sure serious talks involve a decent amount of eye contact.”
There. A little pushing, a little humor thrown in. A subtle tone of pleading for the kid to just open up and trust him, whatever the hell it is that’s on his mind, but still showing him the way out. Because Tony sure as hell knows he would have liked the same door to be shown to him at his age, when he was prodded from the safety of his corner and thrust into the scalding exposure to emotions and loss and helplessness. He would have liked to have options.
Tony counts a couple more seconds--maybe two, maybe five--and then slowly, Peter lowers his fingers from where they’ve been pressed up against his eyelids. He lets his hands drop completely into his lap and occupies himself then with twisting the stray thread around the tip of one finger, winding and unwinding and winding and unwinding it repeatedly.
“Atta boy,” Tony says softly. He tries a rusty smile.
“Do you think I would still be trans if not for Sk-Skip?”
Well, they do call this particular emotion blindsided for a reason. The tiny grin freezes on Tony’s face and then dissolves completely. He sucks in a breath through his nostrils--painfully--and straightens. Lays Toto down with gentle movements on top of the nightstand, then stands from the ottoman with that loyal crick in his knees.
Tony stands over the boy for a moment before rapping a knuckle against the kid’s knee. “Move the leg, ’cause I’m gonna sit here.”
The ghost of a nostalgic smile flits across Peter’s expression. He scoots to one side and lifts the corner of the quilt to allow Tony to slip in beside him, then takes great pains to floof the extra pillow behind Tony’s back. The man shoots him a look of gratitude.
“Is this about the book, Peter?”
“Uh.” Peter scrubs at his eyebrow with a fist. “Not exactly. I mean, um, obviously it’s got similar themes, but it’s not like the book got me thinking about this. More like the other way around.”
Translation: this question has been stewing in Peter’s mind for days, possibly even months. Dear Lord, Tony thinks. This kid.
“So let’s backtrack a bit. What got you thinking about this?”
Peter wobbles his head back and forth until the vertebrae in his neck click. He cracks his knuckles next. It’s clear to Tony, who now speaks silent Peter Parker body language fluently, that the kid is buying time. Picking his words with caution. “I don’t think anything got me thinking about it, in particular,” Peter manages at last. “It’s like--it’s like, I don’t think I can remember a time when I wasn’t thinking about it. At least in some way or another. If that makes sense?”
“Yeah. Yeah, it does.” It does, and it hurts my heart, just like the three million other ways you make me ache from joy and wistfulness when I look at you.
“Mr. Stark.” It’s low, raspy, the syllables broken. Almost like the plea of a man on his last prayer before he sees the dark reaper come. “What if--what if it’s his fault? What if I wasn’t meant to be this way? Like--like this? What if I would’ve been happy and whole and, and, and normal if not for him--”
“I’m gonna have to stop you there,” Tony says, not unkindly, but with enough firmness to get the kid to stop rambling himself into an anxiety attack for the moment.
Peter snaps his mouth shut with a sharp inhalation.
“The truth is, you would have been happy and whole if not for him,” Tony says slowly. He barrels on through the quickening in Peter’s breaths. “Happy and whole because you wouldn’t have had to go through that kind of trauma that no person on this goddamn planet should have ever had to go through. But. And there is a but, kiddo. Listen to me carefully.”
Peter nods after a beat, still refusing to look up directly at his mentor.
“You coming to the realization that you are a guy, that your soul is male, is not the same as not being happy or whole or normal. Okay, right, well, sure, maybe not normal, because let’s face it, statistically the majority of the world is cis. Which is probably why it sucks balls, to be honest.”
Peter huffs out a laugh at that. It sounds surprised and almost painful. Tony shifts to massage Peter’s knee out of reflex.
“You don’t suck balls,” Peter mumbles. There’s an unwilling little smile tugging at his lips.
Tony cocks a brow at him for the sake of the drama even though he knows the kid isn’t looking. “Oh? And you would know this how?”
That gets the boy to jerk his head up at him quickly and shoot him a look of confusion. A single heartbeat sounds and then realization at the innuendo dawns on Peter’s face. “Oh my God. Oh my God, Mr. Stark, get out.”
Tony indulges in a cackle as Peter playfully pummels his bicep with a fist. There’s no real force behind the punch, though he goes along with the pretense anyway and gives a series of breathless hoots until Peter looks marginally remorseful about the whole affair and lays off him.
“This is my cabin, you do realize that, right?” Tony nudges him with an elbow. “But seriously, squirt, I mean it. Don’t try to--don’t try to blow me off here. What he...what he did to you… Obviously, what you went through would’ve made you feel unhappy and maybe a little bit broken on the inside. But not because it’s connected to your gender or your identity or your, or your name in any way. Y’know what I mean? Christ, I hope I’m explaining myself right.”
“You are,” Peter assures him. “I just...I’m having trouble believing it.” At Tony’s quietly stricken look, he tacks on: “Don’t take it personally.”
Tony breathes in and out a few times to regroup. “Wish I could make you believe it right now,” he admits.
“Yeah,” Peter breathes back. “So do I.”
“What do you think’s stopping you?”
There’s no answer for almost a full minute. When Tony glances to the side, he finds that Peter is biting down on his bottom lip with such force that it’s turned white and his jaw is quivering with the effort of holding it together.
“I just--” Peter’s voice comes out pitched up nearly an octave too high, and it digs another crack into the fragile glass of Tony’s heart to hear that tone. He goes back to rubbing tiny circles over Peter’s knee through the worn fabric of the t-shirt quilt.
“It’s just. I’ve never not had this question on my mind, y’know? And it happened when I was nine”--Tony’s heartbeat stumbles; it will never not stutter at the mention of Peter’s age when this all went down--“and like, I never got a chance to think about this whole...gender thing without h-him in the picture. It’s just distant memories of meeting Ned when I was really young, and then having my first babysitter, and then--and then.” Peter audibly swallows. Try as he might, the wobble of his tone refuses to obey him. “It’s like a time marker, you know? H-he--he became the frame of reference of everything in my life. Before Skip, after Skip. And the problem is that...almost everything significant that ever happened to me, happened to me after.”
Tony can taste bile at the back of his throat. He closes his eyes for a moment and struggles to focus on the whine of the cicadas outside the window. If he concentrates hard enough, he thinks to himself, he can probably hear the hum of the lamps all around the cabin, the lapping of the lake under a sleepy moon. The tragic song of the stars whose light reaches them years too late on earth from the skies.
“Maybe he ruined something in me,” Peter says. It comes out more like a gasp. “Maybe, maybe he touched something and my brain couldn’t handle how unclean it felt after that. Maybe he made me hate being a g-girl because that was the first time I ever knew what the real difference between a guy and girl was all about and it made me, it made me hate myself. It made me hate how weak I was and how that was all I was worth to anybody. Maybe--maybe he made me want to be a guy instead so nobody could ever touch me that way again.”
Tony’s hand on Peter’s knee stills. Curls almost into a fist.
“So now,” Peter chokes out, “so now my brain can’t focus on anything except cutting off the parts of me that he touched until nothing’s left and I’m a completely different person.”
“Buddy,” Tony finally manages to get out. It’s every bit as strangled as his kid’s voice.
“Maybe I’m wrong,” Peter rushes on. “Mr. Stark...am I wrong?” For the first time in forever, he turns his head to the side and his gaze bores into Tony’s, filled with desperation and misgivings, blazing with so much pain that Tony half-regrets his earlier jest about eye contact.
Tony opens his mouth. For once, nothing comes out.
“Please,” the boy pleads. “Tell me if I’m wrong.”
“I don’t know.”
Peter deflates easily, as if this is precisely the answer he’s expected all along. He licks his lips and rubs a knuckle under his nose. Slowly, hesitantly, he brings his head back down again, millimeter by millimeter, until it’s nestled against the curve of Tony’s shoulder. Peter’s breaths are slow and measured--overly so--and they tell Tony that the boy is forcing his own body back to normality.
And so it hardly startles Tony anymore when he becomes aware of the sudden dampness that floods his sleeve.
Peter doesn’t apologize for crying, not this time. He doesn’t even sniffle or make a sound for a long while.
“That’s the same answer that I came up with ages ago,” Peter whispers, picking up the thread of the conversation as if they’d never dropped it in the first place. “And I haven’t been able to come up with anything else since.”
“Kid?”
Peter’s unruly hair tickles Tony’s shoulder as the kid glances up.
“Come here.” With his left hand, Tony reaches over to pull Peter’s head down until his cheek slots into the space at the crook of Tony’s neck. The man looks over to ascertain that his right hand hasn’t moved an inch from Peter’s knee.
Tony goes on talking in a rough whisper. “I hate what he did to you,” he breathes into the top of Peter’s hair. “I--I hate it. I hate it. I wish there were words in the English vocabulary that were worse than that because, ’cause there’s really nothing that could express how I feel about him. About it. What you went through. If I’d known you at that time and I’d been given the choice to die to keep you safe from him, believe me, kid, I wouldn’t have thought twice. But…”
It’s Tony’s turn, now, to select his words carefully, to turn them over like pebbles and test the accuracy of their aim in his head. He grabs Toto off the nightstand again and presses it into Peter’s hands when he notices the kid fidgeting again with the thread of his sleeve.
“What would you say if I proposed something, Peter?”
Pete shifts his head upward inquisitively.
“What if I told you...that ‘cutting off those parts,’ like you said...what if that wasn’t about getting rid of him, but coming closer to finding you?”
Peter doesn’t say anything for a long time. In some ways, Tony never expected him to. He waits--he listens--he watches for Peter’s breaths, he anticipates the almost inaudible hitch in his lungs, and he counts the jumble of beats before the impact of what he’s said finally hits Peter and the dam comes crashing down.
Tony knows that this is the part where Peter won’t want to speak for ages. He won’t be able to. And so he keeps talking, keeping his tone low, and he never ceases the circular motion of his thumb on Peter’s knee.
“I bet you hear this a lot, but I believe in telling people this every chance you get. You’re brave. You’re brave for coming out--coming out at, what, twelve? Christ, you were so young… You were brave for telling the people you cared most about. You were brave for choosing to present the way you felt was most like you. That takes some sticking to your guns, kid, trust me. And obviously, swinging around Queens and saving people day after day after day--putting your life on the line time and again--obviously that’s brave of you. But you know that already, I think. At least I hope so.” Peter offers a wet giggle: a tiny one, but it’s there. “I think you also deserve to hear this, though: you’re brave for facing stuff like this. For thinking of these, these questions, for asking yourself this and not backing down even if it hurts you. This stuff that’s been rolling around that genius head of yours? It’s heavy shit, Peter. It’s about facing what you hate about yourself and trying to figure out if--if who you are has the right to be affected by what you’ve been through.”
Somehow, that makes Peter cry even harder.
“Lemme tell you something, Peter. And this is going on the record, goddammit. I want you to remember this. You are a brave kid. You were a brave boy since the day you were born. You were a brave boy when you faced Skip. When you told Ned. You were a brave boy when you asked May if she could call you Peter. You were a brave kid then, and you’re even braver now, to ask me that question that’s been eating at you for years. And I--”
Okay, wow. Tony didn’t mean to get choked up at the climax of his speech, but he is Tony Stark after all, and he doesn’t do anything if it doesn’t involve some flair.
“I am so proud to have had the opportunity to be in your life, because I know you are going to grow up to be the bravest young man I know.”