Chapter Text
People die every day. Tony knows this.
They die from car accidents, falls, substance overdose, strokes. Shootings. Homicides. Natural causes. Unnatural ones. Slow, terminal illnesses with family already mourning around them in their last days. Or quietly in their sleep, having lived to a ripe old age, perhaps alone in a nursing home somewhere but as satisfied as they’ll ever be with the decades they’ll leave behind them. Or--or--and this is the one that gets Tony every time--the sudden blips of fate that just happen in the middle of the goddamn day.
Like the slip of the coffee mug from your hand when you’re having a perfectly normal morning.
Like the twisted ankle that gets you on a Tuesday afternoon on your way back up the same driveway from the same mailbox you check every day.
Like the lurch of your heart behind your ribs just a second too late after you realize you missed a step and now you’re hurtling into uncertainty instead of your usual trip to the basement to fetch the laundry.
None of these things are fatal, and yet.
And yet.
The rage they bring at the sheer inexplicability and pointlessness of it all is a touch too familiar. Tony knows it, too, the moment he finds himself in the middle of tying a perfect Windsor knot in the mirror and wondering if Peter next door is going to need help with his own tie in a minute.
His first thought: Peter’s first time wearing a tie shouldn’t have to be like this.
His second thought: No, is it his first time? Wait. He doesn’t know. Shit. He has no clue.
And the third: It may still very well be his first time tying one on his own. Or at least trying to.
The clouds shift abruptly away from the sun, and the beams spill in through the window unchecked. Inconsiderate. Tony feels his hands shake, because how fucking dare it be July?
People die every day. Tony knows this.
And yet somehow, people never show in the movies the sweltering heat at the funeral, the indescribable sacrilegious feeling of attendees in short sleeves or no sleeves at all, the low-grade buzzing of insects outside that only serve as another cheap reminder of how incredibly short and how fucking random life is.
In the movies, people always die in winter. Or the coolness of a rainy season, or at least the decency of a time when it’s still manageable to wear a full suit and tie.
Because how could anyone in real life deal with actually dreading summer in their memories instead of the universally detested snow and mud and freezing cold?
Peter’s suddenly there, hovering at the threshold of Tony’s bedroom. It turns out he does know how to tie a tie on his own: poorly. Tony crosses the few steps between them without a thought, but as he reaches up a hand to tighten the knot and straighten the fabric, he finds his own muscles hesitating.
Better to leave it like that, though for the life of him he doesn’t know why.
His hand doesn’t know what to do. It’s poised over Peter’s shoulder now, too wary, too long.
“I was just checking if Happy was coming, because I didn’t see the car from the other window,” Peter says without preamble.
Tony flexes his hand that’s still in the air and ends up cracking his knuckles as he brings his fist back down to his side. “Nope. We’re taking a different car.” At the slight squint of Peter’s right eye, Tony clarifies, “I’m driving. Happy’s coming on his own.”
There was a time it would have been appropriate to touch Peter. Back at the hospital, in the vending machine room when Peter started crying silently for the first time that night because the little pack of Famous Amos cookies got stuck between the shelf and the glass on its way down. Tony had moved to catch him, embrace him, but Peter had shifted in the opposite direction at the exact same second and made his way jerkily to one of the sticky vinyl chairs on the other side of the room. Tony had definitely dropped the ball on that moment. Because the longer he’d stood there watching the moisture stream quietly from Peter’s eyes and did nothing except mutter “It’s okay, kid, let it out, let it out. It’s gonna be okay,” the chance to hug him flew farther and farther away. And now the minutes had stretched into hours into days, and still Tony had failed to follow through with any physical contact. Not for lack of desire, but--something else.
And Peter certainly hadn’t asked.
--
Tony supposes he could at least credit himself for reaching into the vending machine to snag the offending pack of cookies and handing it to Peter. Peter had taken it with a voiceless mouthing of thanks, opened it and proceeded to chew through it with a wet and methodical crunch, timed with the hitch in his lungs, that sometimes still haunts Tony to this day.
--
If there’s anything that simultaneously awes and horrifies Tony about Peter, it’s the kid’s ability to act as if nothing happened at all.
It’s not an act. Peter has always been too bad of a liar for that. What worries Tony more is that it’s real, that it’s actually a product of Peter’s denial--dissociation--God, he doesn’t know. Most of the bad things begin with D.
“You know, most kids don’t do Calc II problems for fun on a Sunday night in the middle of”--he winces to himself--“July.”
“Thanks, Mr. Stark,” Peter says, as he reaches for the outstretched glass without looking and closes his hand around the iced tea. He scrubs at the graphing paper for a few more seconds before setting down his pencil and taking a long draught. Finally he raises his gaze to meet Tony’s.
“I’m not most kids, you know. The whole web-spinning and gymnastics on skyscrapers kinda cancels that out.”
Tony offers a quiet snort. He slouches forward on one elbow on the table and leans over to peer at Peter’s notebook. “What are you working on, anyway?”
A beat of silence. Peter shifts just a centimeter away. It’s subtle, but in the quiet of the dining room away from the hum of the bots and in light of the nameless guilt that screams constantly at the forefront of Tony’s mind, it’s all too palpable.
“This Calc II reviewer May bought me from Good Will before she--” Peter rubs his thumb against the bit of plastic that’s peeling off the corner of textbook cover and switches tack in the same breath. “--before the end of the semester. We both thought it would be good to, uh, y’know. Go through it before I go to college. Or something.”
“Or something,” Tony repeats, not without audible fondness. “So. Plowing randomly through parabolas on a summer night. That’s--that’s definitely something.”
“Hngh.”
“Building bots get too boring for you?” Tony knows the answer to this already. He knows it. But he’s grasping at something, anything, to close the distance that he never knew had sprouted between the two of them, but is undeniable to him now.
“Doesn’t feel right,” Peter mutters.
Tony’s not sure he heard the kid correctly. “Come again?”
The boy repeats, still mumbling but a little louder, and ever refusing to look directly at him: “Doesn’t feel right.”
“Huh. Guess I heard you right the first time.” Tony hooks a foot around the nearest dining chair to slide it closer to himself and plops down. He kicks a bit back and forth, playing a futile kind of footsie against the scuffed toes of Peter’s converse. The boy kicks back lightly, once, and then grows still again.
Tony raises a brow. Folds his arms and shoots Peter a look when the latter refuses to speak. “So,” he prompts him. “Care to...unpack that?”
“I don’t, like, I mean…” Peter drops his head into his hands, obscuring his face completely.
“Hey,” Tony says softly. His vocal cords suddenly feel rough and unused. “Hey. Hey, hey, hey. It’s okay. I’m sorry I pushed.” He dips his head down, goading Peter into looking up to meet his eyes, but the boy stolidly fixes his gaze on the tiled floor.
“It doesn’t feel right because I...because building robots and designing stuff and--all that. I was doing all that when things were…”
Tony can almost hear him swallow. The man suddenly finds the tabletop extremely interesting. He digs his thumbnail into the crack of the joint on surface and scrapes along it, back and forth.
“...Things were okay.”
Tony hears his own voice emerge as if it’s no longer his own. It’s soft, impossibly soft. Since when was he capable of such gentleness?
“I get that,” he whispers.
Peter snaps the calc reviewer shut and starts shuffling it back and forth across the table between his hands. “Mr. Stark?”
“Yeah?”
“When your--when she…”
“...When my mom died?” Tony fills in for him.
The overgrown locks at Peter’s nape rasp against the cotton of his t-shirt as he nods vigorously. He opens and closes his mouth a couple of times, but nothing else comes out.
“I didn’t do much building either, kid. If that’s what you’re asking me. I mean, technically you could say I did, but I was blowing up more robots than I was creating them. Rhodey and me--we almost fought one day when he came in and found me drunk off my ass and surrounded by piles of junk metal. I don’t know, that’s what he told me went down. I dunno. I mean, I believe him. ’Course I do. I just...don’t remember. He was worried out of his mind about me, because he never knew me to be the type to just smash or set fire to stuff I’d designed from scratch.”
Peter slides the reviewer farther down the table until it reaches Tony. The man halts its trajectory with the flat of his palm, then pushes it back. They continue playing their weird version of badminton with the battered calc book for what seems to stretch into several minutes, the only noise around them being the imperceptible hum of FRIDAY’s speakers and the blue lights above.
Tony can almost feel the shudder in Peter’s lungs when the kid breathes again. When did he ever stop?
“I built a lot when Uncle Ben died,” Peter whispers. His tone is so shaky that Tony feels the sudden urge to scream at the stars for what they’ve done to the brilliance of this boy. “I--I built robots, or like, what I thought could count as robots. That’s when I started dumpster diving and going through computer junk shops and stuff. It was kinda addicting, actually. Ned was happy, though, ’cause for about a month straight he said I didn’t process anything. Like a zombie or something. He was so fricking happy he even gave me fifty bucks to keep buying scrap materials.”
“I remember.”
Peter’s head jerks a little in his direction at that. Tony doesn’t elaborate--there’s no need to, when Peter’s sharp brain can put the pieces together and come to the conclusion that Tony and May had been talking privately far more than they let on.
“You think it was a distraction?” Tony prods.
The kid shrugs. “It kept me up at night with something to do other than remember…it, over and over again. ’Cause trying to sleep didn’t erase those images anyway.”
Tony swallows. Neither of them are strangers to PTSD: different brands, different triggers, both chasing the elusive cloud of sleep at the same time that they curse it.
“So I dunno why I can’t build now,” Peter goes on. “It’s what I used to do. It’s the only thing I could do, back then, like, fixing things. Creating something instead of ruining it, or rather, uh, being able to bring something back to life--” Abruptly he stops.
Half a beat later, Tony hears the sharp intake of breath.
No. No, no. No no no no don’t even go there--
But Peter does.
He utters, “Oh,” like the tragic solution to a Rubik’s cube, like the long-lost ending line to a eulogy returned too late, and the ring of his voice falls like glass.
Tony could swear he’s acquired superhuman hearing. The feel of their heartbeats is hot and oppressive in the air between them. What does he do? He hates this silence where Peter stews with the unknown depths of his shame, but he hates the talking even more when all the lies and self-blame come spewing out of the boy’s mouth.
What does he do? What does he do?
“Peter,” Tony says, slow and sad. And that’s when everything comes bubbling to the surface.
Probably the worst of it all is that Peter still doesn’t make a sound as he cries. The tears come hot and fast and they patter on the mahogany table--like the disjointed rhythm of the strange storm that comes while the summer sun still burns in the sky, and it makes you wonder what angel died that God had to break the forecast and scream His grief at the earth--but hardly a sob escapes Peter’s chest. His shoulders quake, and God, he looks so thin, so young, no--so aged before his time. The thought crosses Tony’s mind: how many nights and weeks and years and lifetimes has this boy wept from loss that he’s finally learned to keep his peace as he grieves?
Tony wants him to scream. He wants to grab the kid by the shoulders and yell at him to let it out, to throw shit at the wall and storm off and take out his anger on the new tentative father figure in his life who he has every right to fear may not be around for much longer.
Peter drags a wrist across his nose with a sniffle. “I’m sorry,” he croaks.
“Don’t be.”
“No. I mean.” His breath hitches. “I’m sorry I couldn’t bring her back to life.” And then he buries his face in the crook of his arm against the table.
It’s the most mind-blowingly irrational kind of apology Tony has ever heard, and yet, and yet--something scares him to the very depths of his bones about the way each word resonates with him. The way it makes sense.
What does he do?
“Pete?” Tony glances down at Peter’s right hand, the one still lying loosely on top of the math book on the table. His heart lurches with his hesitation. He could count two beats, four, five, and then he finally makes his decision and reaches for the kid’s hand.
It’s cold. Shockingly so. And so small, with an untold strength that he can sense in those fingers, but so heart-breakingly small. Peter doesn’t miss a beat and immediately curls his hand back around Tony’s.
It takes another five minutes for the trembling in Peter’s shoulders to subside. In all those five minutes, Tony doesn’t dare loosen his grip on Peter’s hand. Neither does the kid let go.
Peter's t-shirt rustles as his head moves. He's unburied his face from his arm and turned it to rest on his cheek instead. When he blinks up at Tony, the sheen of the wetness over his eyes is blinding.
“Mr. Stark?”
Tony blinks back. His gaze is transfixed on the steady drip of tears from the corner of Peter's eye across the bridge of his nose and into his hairline.
“Yeah, Pete?”
“Thanks.”
“I'm sorry, kid.” He doesn't know why he says it, but something makes him certain it needs to be said.
More moisture glistens in the upturned path of gravity along Peter's cheek.
The tiniest of shrugs.
“S'okay.”
“No, it's not.” Tony squeezes Peter's hand ever so gently and wonders why they've never held each other like this before. “But it will be.”