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The trouble is, Peter still addresses him the way a kid addresses an adult.
Hey, Mr Stark, can we just have those ice cream sandwiches for dinner—y’know, the ones I saw stashed in the cold-storage?
Hey, Mr Stark, do you ever have to clean bugs off the Iron Man suit?
Hey, Mr Stark, can Dum-E come over and sit by me?
Tony wishes he were joking. He is not joking. These are the sorts of things Peter says to him, sometimes, albeit in his plucky, self-aware, Gen-Z-kid kind of way—like he knows he’s leaning into his age. (Let the record show that Tony’s answers to said questions were ‘yes,’ ‘yes,’ and “Stop feeling bad for him; he’s in that corner because he broke my $800 Meola lamp,” followed moments later by, “Alright, fine; Dum-E, go keep Peter company.” So clearly Tony is bad at both telling Peter no, and making mature, adult decisions.)
But the trouble is—
Guess what happened at school today, Mr Stark!
They had another bit about you on SNL last night, Mr Stark. This one wasn’t even that bad! I think you’re winning them over, Sir.
I swear, Mr Stark, I’m not—(in the lab, hunched on a swivel stool, yawning over one of his web-shooters)—not even tired yet.
If he asked Peter to call him Tony, would he? And even if he did, would that be any better? Or would that just make it worse? Asking the kid to change so that Tony can feel a micron less twisted about this— sick, horrible thing he’s got. Fuck.
~
This is not okay. Nothing about this is okay.
Because Tony can’t even think the word ‘cradle-robber’ anymore without feeling the nauseous prickle of panic. It’s just a figure of speech, but lately it doesn’t feel nearly far enough from the shit that’s in his head.
Peter’s baby-fine hair. Youthful blush. Chewed up pen caps all over the lab. Frosted Flakes in the snack cupboard. Neutrogena acne-gel spot treatment in the guest bathroom (that stuff is trash; Tony needs to get him something better).
Tony remembers the alluringly deer-like teen-movie starlet who repped Neutrogena for a while, twenty years ago, back when Tony actually went to Hollywood parties voluntarily. He remembers her because he let her have his deck chair at a Y2K bash, and she giggled so genuinely at his flippant jokes for the entire rest of the night. He remembers looking at her in the quivering light off the heated outdoor pool and pointedly deciding, Nah, I won’t, because she was nineteen, and so fresh, and just too unguarded for his bullshit.
And now—
Fuck.
Fuck.
Peter is not nineteen. Not for another year and a bit.
~
Last month, while Tony was working and Peter was tinkering with his web-fluid a lab floor above, Tony managed to slice his palm open fixing one of the old, retired suits.
He’d washed out the cut and was sitting drinking a very medicinal, very pain-alleviating scotch, preparing himself to track down some gauze, when Peter walked in with a first aid kit and an intent expression. “Hey, Mr Stark,” he said, innocently enough—and then sank immediately to his knees in front of Tony’s chair.
“Kid, what—” He said, feeling wrong-footed, caught. This was unexpected. Tony had not expected it.
Peter already had the med kit open beside him and he was inspecting Tony's hand.
He tried reflexively to pull away and couldn’t. His hand was stuck to Peter’s palm. Peter was sticking their hands together. “Uh, what are you doing? Kid? Hey—”
“Just hang on…one…second, Mr Stark,” Peter said without looking up, dabbing ointment onto Tony’s palm with his free hand. He was doing it improbably gently for someone with super-strength.
“Pete— kid— you really don’t need to—” Don’t need to what? ‘Get on your knees for me’? ‘Fix me’? Just call him ‘kid’ again,Tony, that should help.
“I want to, Mr Stark.” Peter’s voice was like his fingers, gentle. Tony couldn’t look at him. He looked at the ceiling instead. There were no cracks, of course. This whole place was ridiculously structurally sound. What a fucking joke.
Peter had been an entire buzzing city away for three long weeks—by deliberate design. Then he’d finally been here, and Tony had stayed a floor away from him the entire day. And now, suddenly, they were a ruler’s length apart. Less. Because Tony’s fucking hand had slipped. And because Peter had super-hearing. Or was it the blood that tipped him off? Some spiders could smell blood. Could Peter smell blood, if the volume of blood was substantial enough?
Oh good Christ that was not. hot. What the fuck was wrong with him?
The world seemed to be expanding, and also contracting slightly, and Peter was on his knees at the center of it, trying not to breathe too much on Tony’s wound. So improbably kind.
Clearly the scotch and blood loss were not helping this situation. Tony needed to say something, something dismissive, to discourage Peter from this ‘Take Care Of Mr Stark’ tack he had—for some incomprehensible teenage reason—seized upon. “Kid, come on, quit it,” he said, not nearly mean enough. His voice felt wobbly, wrong. “Seriously, Florence Nightingale, thank you for your services, alright. Now get up.”
But inexplicably, Peter wasn’t listening. Peter, who Tony had learned was always listening—if perhaps not always well—wasn’t listening. He just reached for the butterfly stitches; didn’t pause for an instant.
“I’ve done this tons of times, Mr Stark, don’t worry,” he said, keeping his eyes down, still working mostly one-handed. “It’ll just take a second, I promise.”
“Okay, but, see, easy solution here: why don’t you give me those, and then I’ll do it, and you can just get up.”
At this, Peter finally paused. Looked up. Met Tony’s eyes squarely, dead on.
Holding Tony’s gaze, he said, very clearly, “I’m good where I am, Mr Stark.”
After a moment, a quiver went through his expression, like something enormous being held at bay—but he didn’t look away. “I’m perfect right here, Sir.”
~
After Peter had placed the last butterfly stitch and sat back on his heels, he said, uncomfortably, “You…know I wasn’t sticking our hands together this whole time, right? Only when I put the ointment on.” A beat, and then—“I-it’s just, I know it’s sort of a weird thing to do, and I’ve never really done it to any friendlies before, and I wouldn’t usually do it at all—but I was just worried you’d jerk away and I’d accidentally poke my finger into the wound or something, which would’ve really sucked, so I just thought it’d be better if I—”
“Yeah, kid,” Tony said quickly. “I knew.”
~
(It was a lie. He’d thought he was trying to pull away the entire time.
But as soon as Peter said it, he knew it was true: he never tried. Not really. Not after that first, brief, initial resistance.)
~
The problem is not that Peter addresses him the way a kid addresses an adult.
The problem is that, appallingly, he doesn’t want Peter to stop.
He wants to stop himself; has to. But not Peter.
Peter, who moves around Tony’s spaces like a frenetic wind-up toy, but who’s aerial acrobatics are so joyous and perfect it’s like the city belongs to him. Peter, who sometimes suggests things in the lab that Tony himself has barely even begun to think about. Peter, who says “Mr Stark?” twenty times a day, as if he wants any answer Tony could possible give him.
Tony doesn’t want any of it to stop.
He just wants to watch Peter go.
~
After the butterfly stitches, Peter had finished by wrapping a roll of sterile gauze around Tony’s throbbing palm. He'd circled and circled Tony’s injured hand with his own, unspooling the fine white mesh as he went, and the gentle, soft loops he’d made were almost hypnotic.
For a moment, it had felt like a handfasting.