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“What, did you guys get a flat tire? I could’ve sent someone to pick you up, you know.” Tony let the doors of the Tower lobby close behind him and took a few steps out onto the vast front sidewalk, briefly shielding his eyes from the afternoon sun.
Peter looked up from where he approached a few yards away, hands grasping the straps of his backpack. “Oh hey!”
“Yeah, hey. So why the hike? I sent Happy out with a car, why aren’t you in it?”
“We’re exercising!” Peter responded happily.
“We?”
Peter reached Tony’s side and turned, blocking the sun from his eyes as well as he searched the street. “Well. I guess it’s not really exercise for me. Happy is exercising.”
Rush hour hadn’t started yet but the roads were still busy enough that it took Tony a few seconds of squinting to pick out his head of security walking among the other pedestrians of the sidewalk. Though he was still a distance away, the intensity of the scowl on his face could be felt clear across the street.
Tony drew a breath in through his teeth. “Maybe you oughta keep on marching, kid, he looks out for blood. How did you even get him to agree to that in the first place?”
Peter was full on grinning as he watched Happy trudge down the sun-washed road in his suit. “Ms. Potts overheard him say that he needed to get back into a regular fitness routine. She also said that he might need some help motivating.”
A few people on the sidewalks had begun glancing their way. Some whispered to each other, others just stared for a few extra seconds in their commute. It wasn’t unusual for Tony Stark to be seen in the city, but idling outside the Tower’s front door in lounge clothes wasn’t exactly the image that he was known for.
“So- what, you just pulled some epic puppy dog eyes on him and that was that?”
“Uh, not quite,” Peter said as he turned back to Tony, smile turning into more of a guilty grimace. “I kinda asked him to stop for an iced tea partway here and then just… didn’t get back in the car.”
It only took Tony a half second to picture the scene they must have made on the street before he was laughing. Happy could be a force to be reckoned with, almost as stubborn as Tony himself. But Peter was Peter, unyielding in the face of negativity and almost painfully supportive.
Barring himself and Pepper, if it had been anyone else but Peter Happy would have left him on the side of the road. But for as much as he griped and grumbled and claimed that “babysitting was below his pay grade”, there was no denying that the eye rolls and sighs had become less genuine irritation and more fond exasperation.
Although his current, albeit still somewhat far away, expression suggested otherwise. Seeing that it would take another minute or so for his brooding head of security to catch up, Tony gave Peter a quick once-over.
“What’s with the shiny new backpack?”
Peter looked at the straps on his shoulders and furrowed his eyebrows. “How could you possibly know that this is new?”
Tony slipped his hands into his pants’ pockets and scoffed. “I’m one of the most brilliant minds, if not the most brilliant mind of all generations, and you don’t think I have the observational skills to notice when my own protege has a new backpack?”
Peter’s ears grew a soft pink as Tony spoke and his mouth dropped open. “N-no, I do! I mean you do! I wasn’t saying that- I mean-”
“Relax, kid,” Tony chuckled, dropping a reassuring hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Don’t hurt yourself. You left the tag on.” He flicked the little piece of brightly-colored cardboard dangling from one of the backpack’s zippers.
Peter dropped his head with a long, dramatic groan, and his ears went from pink to red. “Oh God, no. No wonder MJ was looking at me weird all day!”
Then suddenly his head snapped up, a completely different expression on his face. He swiveled his gaze down the road once more, then to either side of them.
“He’s almost here-” Tony started, assuming Peter was checking on Happy, but was cut off when the boy flung his arms around him in a tight hug.
He had no time to be confused, no time for his typical internal panic and uncertainty that inevitably ended in deep self-reflection and a study of his own youth and unstable relationship with his father…
Because it wasn’t a hug. Just as Peter’s arms latched around him he heard a sound that ignited panic for an entirely different reason - the sound of a silenced gun being fired and the focused thwock of the bullet hitting a target.
Peter jolted and all the air in Tony’s lungs rushed out as though he had been the one hit. He immediately wrapped an arm over the boy and they scrambled for the lobby doors. He looked back once to see Happy running toward a blur of movement on the opposite corner of their building, hand up to his ear presumably to call for backup. Confident that the shooter was being dealt with, Tony turned his full attention back to Peter.
He slammed the doors open with his shoulder and shouted at the first startled employee he saw to get their medical team to him within the next thirty seconds. Peter had mostly been able to keep his feet under him up until that point but now that they were inside his legs buckled and he slid to his knees.
He was saying something, but Tony’s thoughts were jostling around in frantic circles and the words bounced away before his mind could grasp them. He dropped to his knees and pulled Peter’s backpack off of his shoulders, wincing when he saw the small bullet hole in the middle of his back and the growing blood stain around it.
“Jesus, kid, why did you do that?!”
“Don’t get worried, Mr. Stark, I’m okay!” Peter’s face was pale but he patted Tony’s knee in consolation. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“Shut up, you were just shot!” He could take the time to rethink his harsh word choice later, but right now Peter was bleeding out in his lobby. “Lay down.”
“I don’t need to, I had homework today,” Peter protested, but nevertheless let Tony guide him down onto his stomach.
Tony covered the wound with his hands and pressed down hard. “Okay, just- don’t move, the med team will be here soon. You’re gonna be okay.”
“I know, it’s okay, I think I did it right. Can you check my backpack?”
“I think I’m gonna go ahead and keep holding your blood inside your body, okay kid? We can deal with your homework later. One major crisis at a time.” He pushed down a little harder and Peter let out a sharp grunt. “Sorry,” Tony murmured, but kept the pressure steady. His fingers were tingling and he pulled in a deep breath when he realized he hadn’t done so in some time.
“But I’m okay, it didn’t hit anything vital!”
“You don’t know that. It might not hurt that bad right now but you’re probably in shock.”
“But if I did it right, the bullet should have gone through my physics textbook before hitting me!” Peter reached for the strap of his backpack and slid it closer, then fumbled awkwardly with the zipper, hands trembling. “It’s… check it, the book is over two inches thick, if the bullet hit that first then it should only be about a half an inch inside me.”
A part of Tony already planned to disregard everything this dying child said because he was just shot and must be in shock. But another part of him was racing through the calculations of the speed of a bullet from a standard silenced handgun traveling through a two inch textbook. Given the distance they had been from the corner of the building, if that had indeed been where the shooter was…
He kept one hand pressed onto the wound but used the other to hold the backpack steady so Peter could get the zipper open.
Within a few seconds he was pulling out an absolute monster of a textbook. Sure enough there was a tiny bullet hole blasted straight through one of the upper corners.
“Oh, sweet!” Peter exclaimed, glancing up at Tony. His features were tight and he was breathing a little irregularly, but the relief in his eyes was overwhelming. “Look! I’m not gonna die!”
Tony just stared, a dizzying combination of disbelief and relief slowly washing the edges of his panic down to a more manageable level. The bullet really wouldn’t have had enough forward momentum to hit anything vital if it went through that book first. It should just be a light flesh wound, something Peter could easily heal from within a day or so once the bullet was removed.
“Oh, man, my new backpack though,” Peter continued, poking a finger through one of the holes in the canvas bag.
Blood was no longer oozing out from between Tony’s fingers and his mind was beginning to reorient itself once more but as it did, the reality of what Peter had done began to sink in.
“Peter don’t you ever put yourself in the path of a bullet again! Do you hear me? Especially one meant for me!”
He heard the quick patter of approaching footsteps and knew the medical team had arrived but kept his eyes trained on Peter’s, determined to draw a promise out of him. But the boy just gave him a wry smile and tilted his head.
“Listen, Mr. Stark, if it’s between you or my homework, I’m going to sacrifice my homework every time. I did that for Germany, you know.”
“You know that’s not what I meant, kid.”
The nurses arrived before he could get the response he wanted, but he managed to get a quick hair-ruffle in before stepping back to let them work. He put his hands on his hips and let out a long puff of air in an attempt to settle the adrenaline still coursing through him.
He needed to get in contact with Happy and the security team but he stayed and watched until Peter was safely on a gurney and being wheeled toward the elevator, then stooped to gather the teenager’s books and bag. He didn’t look forward to having to explain to May why there was a bullet hole in the kid’s brand new backpack. Or in the kid’s textbook. Or in the kid.
He ran his finger over the hole in the physics book and shook his head in amazement. For Peter to have done those calculations in the split second between him seeing the shooter and the bullet leaving the chamber…
Okay, so maybe Tony wasn’t the most brilliant mind of all generations.