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“Peter, you have to go to sleep.” Tony groans, rolling over from where he’s flopped on the couch to stare at the wide eyed and sufficiently bushy-tailed child running wildly around the living room.
“NEEVVERRR!!” Peter shouts, like it’s a deeply moving war cry.
Tony groans louder, burying his face into the pillow.
“I knew I shouldn’t have given you some of my coffee.”
“But you DID!”
“I suck.” Tony announces before Peter jumps on top of him and Tony almost dies from his knee stabbing right into his back.
“No! You’re the best! Stop being self- self-” Peter frowns and then starts smacking Tony’s shoulder, “Tony!!”
“Deprecating. Stop being self-deprecating.” Tony answers, with about as much enthusiasm as a funeral procession.
“Yeah! Deprecating!”
Peter readjusts himself so he sits neatly on Tony’s back, his free leg swinging cheerfully in the air. “Tony, you should play with me.” He declares, pulling on Tony’s ear, moving his head this way and that.
“Nooooo sleeeep.” Tony moans, batting his hand away.
“Don’t wanna!”
Tony sighs, taking a deep breath before jerking upwards so that Peter flies back. Peter shrieks as Tony pounces on him, swinging him up over his shoulder like it’s nothing. Peter’s head swings from where he’s slumped over Tony’s back and he kicks his legs, “I’m getting a head rush!! I’m DIZZY!!”
“You literally don’t even know what a head rush is you big baby.” Tony retorts, but he slides Peter down so that he’s carrying him properly, Peter’s arms now wrapped around his neck.
“See? You know how to sit still when you want.” Tony says, shifting Peter around to open his bedroom door.
“I’m waiting for a surprise attack.” Peter whispers.
Tony snorts, “Oh really?”
Peter brings a finger to his lips, “Lesson number one. Stay very very quiet. Lesson number two, you make everyone think you’re gonna listen so when you don’t listen, it’s a surprise.”
Tony drops him unceremoniously atop the bed and Peter falls with an oof. “And who taught you that? Ned?”
Peter wrinkles his nose, “No. Teen Titans did!”
“I’m telling May that show’s inappropriate.” Tony drawls, pushing Peter’s head onto the pillow with one hand.
And like a game of whack-a-mole, Peter darts up and Tony stuffs him back down until Peter finally lies down. “Okay, you win.” He says, burrowing under the covers.
“Oh thank God. I was seriously considering knocking you out with your Darth Vader doll.”
“It’s not a doll.” Peter grumbles.
“Alright. Sure. Okay. Good night you little hell raiser.” Tony leans over to ruffle Peter’s hair before leaving his door open just an inch and flopping back onto the couch hoping to knock out himself until May and Ben get home.
In hindsight, that was his first mistake.
Two minutes later, the quick pitter patter of little feet is all the warning he has before Peter crashes atop of him again cackling as Tony screeches. “Peter!!”
“Ambush!!”
“I will literally eat every single ice pop in that freezer- don’t test me.”
“You’ll get a stomach-ache.”
Tony strains his neck to make sure that Peter sees the void in his eyes, “Peter. I don’t fear God or death, you think a stomach-ache’s gonna stop me?”
Peter makes a face like that’s the silliest thing he’s ever heard, “Last week you got so scared that I was choking that you said you’d go to church every Sunday if God let me live.” Peter peers up at him, brows furrowed like he’s discipling him, “Did you break your promise to God Tony?”
Tony clicks his tongue, waving a hand in the air, “Children should be seen and not heard. Not get off squirt and let’s try this again.”
(and for the record, he did go to church. Because Tony Stark isn’t a liar thank you very much)
“But I don’t wannnaaa.” Peter whines, even as he crawls off Tony anyway.
“Look no one wants to sleep. I barely ever wanna sleep.” Tony says, sitting cross legged across from him, “But apparently, our bodies will literally break down if we don’t. You think you can be a Teen Titan if your body breaks down??”
Peter frowns, “No.”
“And you know what else? Without sleep, your brain works slower. How are you going to impress Ned with your fast math if you can’t even remember what multiplication is let alone do it.”
Peter gasps, “You can’t forget math! It’s math!”
Tony has a haunted look in his eye, “Oh yeah? Tell that to first year me after four days of no sleep and pure Red Bull.”
Tony reaches out for Peter’s face, squishing his cheeks together, “You want to impress Ned right?”
Peter nods between his hands, lip curved in a pout.
“Then you gotta sleep right?”
“But I’m not tired!”
And suddenly, Tony knows exactly what to do. “Don’t worry kiddo, I have a secret sleep trick.”
Peter looks skeptical and rightly so honestly. “Really?”
“Really.” Tony confirms, “Now come on, I’ll tell you all about it if you go to bed and don’t get me in trouble with Ben and May.”
Peter mulls it over, rocking back and forth on his heels before he sighs, “Fine. But I want a cookie first.”
Tony rolls his eyes, “Yeah. Nice try short stack. Now march on to bed.”
Peter sticks out his tongue but does as he’s told, running into his bed while Tony trudges along behind him. He closes the door three-quarters of the way just like Peter likes it and motions for him to get under the covers. “Okay first,” Tony says, “you have to get all tight and cozy under there. The tighter it is, the less opportunity you have to escape.” He elaborates, very, very seriously.
Peter rolls his eyes as Tony tucks him in, making sure that every inch of the blanket is firmly between the mattress and the box.
“Second, I set the stage.” Tony stands up, back towards to Peter before he spins around dramatically, doing jazz hands, “Space!” he announces, “The mysterious void we all live in.”
If Peter’s eyes could get any rounder with curiosity it would probably be illegal from how cute it was. “Since the beginning of time, humanity has always wondered, where do we come from? Where are we going? Well,” Tony grins, “lucky for you, I’m about to get into a very long, very technical explanation of how exactly this universe came into being.”
An evil glint pops in his eye, “So buckle in kiddo.”
“It all started with the Big Bang…” And just like that, Peter’s eyes begin to flutter and Tony’s almost done explaining the science of atoms when he peeks over to see Peter’s breath even and steady, eyes fully closed.
He’s been at it for almost half an hour, and is honestly surprised the kid lasted so long. But finally, the evil had been defeated and he was now free to curl up and take a cat nap of his own before Peter makes a humming noise in the back of his throat, curling around tighter. “Fin’sh the shtory.” He slurs and Tony gapes at him like he’s some sort of talking fish.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me.” He whispers under his breath before he sighs and settles back onto the desk chair, “All the elements that exist in the world were created in the hearts of dying stars. Like I said, helium and hydrogen were created right after the Big Bang once all the dust settled in the universe.”
“And remember, stars are just all this space stuff compressed together into this ball of fiery gas. So when you have a star made of mostly hydrogen, it becomes a nascent star that has all the gas compressing on itself. All the atoms start colliding into one another over and over and that produces so much energy that it gets so hot that they stop hitting each other and start fusing together. And boom, you have helium.”
“But everything in the universe has to die sometime, and when a star dies, they become red giants and all the helium atoms inside start fusing together to make carbon. And then bigger stars start making heavier atoms. Like with supernovas,” he elaborates, “when those explode, they release a whole ton of energy and neutrons, so you can make the heavy stuff like iron and uranium.”
Tony looks at Peter, something soft in his eyes, “And that process happened over and over again until we had all the naturally produced elements in the world. And then those elements were used to create the planet and then the plants and the animals and even you and me. All the carbon and oxygen and iron and potassium and everything else inside of you was made from the universe’s oldest stars.”
And this time, Tony’s sure Peter’s asleep, but he rolls over, blinking his eyes blearily, “Everything is made from stars?”
“Pretty much bud.”
Peter presses his lips together, mulling that over for a second, “Do you think maybe we’re from the same star?”
Tony chokes a little, feeling weirdly caught between that big-eyed crying emoji and also that drop in your stomach before you dropped on a roller coaster. The answer to that kind of question is impossible to know. How can you trace your cosmic heritage? Isn’t it just enough to know that we’re all made from the same pieces? That we can all become suns?
But instead he says, “Anything’s possible Pete.” Because he knows that would make him happy.
And just like Tony thought, Peter smiles that soft lovely smile, “That would be cool. I hope we are.”
And Tony looks at him and thinks maybe they might be. Maybe he was always meant to find Peter in that park. Maybe there was a celestial thread interwoven in their atoms. Maybe there are some people you can’t help but encounter and love and be loved by. How could the universe have ever known, that from the heat of a supernova, a warmth like love could grow from the living remnants of a star’s ashes.
“Well, there are twenty-one elements inside a human body, I think the odds are pretty good that we at least share one.”
“That’s good. I like being the same.” Peter says sleepily, eyes drifting closed once again.
“Yeah,” Tony whispers, “me too bud. G’night.”
And he leans over to rustle Peter’s hair, pinching his cheek fondly. He laughs quietly when Peter swats his hand away, turning over to his other side, eyes closed.
-o0o-
May and Ben come home an hour and a half later to find Tony working quietly on a physics paper. “Hey you two,” he greets, “good night?”
May smiles warmly at her husband, “He still knows how to show a lady a good time.” She teases.
Tony laughs, getting up and packing his stuff away. “Was Peter good?”
Tony winces, “I might have given him too much sugar, but I wrangled the little brat into bed eventually.”
May gives him a look, “Tony we talked about this.”
“I know, I know, I need to stop being a sucker for the cute face.”
Ben pats him on the shoulder consolingly, “It’s okay son. He gets me every time.”
Tony pulls on his coat, ready to head out the door when May stops him, “Before you go, any new weird obsessions our kid’s going to have now?”
Tony blinks innocently, “I have no idea what you mean.”
May crosses her arms, lips pulled in a wry smile, “Oh don’t you? You mean the robots, and the superheroes, and that week he only wanted to eat cheeseburgers.”
Tony kinda wants to laugh but decides to go for an awkward whoops, was that me? Expression instead. “I promise, everything is completely, and totally, utterly fine.”
May gives him a look.
Tony looks back.
“Your faith in me is comforting May, honestly.”
-o0o-
The next day, May sends him a text that has him laughing so hard he can’t stop. It’s a picture of Peter smiling wide, holding an astrophysics textbook next to a clearly unimpressed and bothered May.
My faith in you is exactly where it should be
This is apparently his new bed-time story book
If I see you on the street Stark you’re d e a d
When the clock hits 9:00 p.m, Tony’s phone rings from Ben’s number and he has a feeling what it’s going to be about before he even swipes accept. “Tony!” Peter yells, “May started crying when she was reading about planetesimals and I thought I should ask you instead! Can you tell me more stories about the universe?”
And Tony sets down his wrench and pulls off his goggles and lies on the floor of the lab, smiling into the phone. “Sure kiddo, but you gotta promise to be good to your aunt and go to sleep okay?”
“Kaayyy!”
“Alright, so if you thought stars were crazy, just wait till I tell you about planets…”