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The man didn’t ask for anything. Didn’t have a sign or a cup or his hat off and upside down on the ground in front of him. He was just leaning against the wall of a little delivery drive between stores near Grand Central. Something about his look, maybe the amount of snow he had on his cap, said he’d been standing there for awhile. He was wearing an old, frayed woolen top coat. The sort worn over a suit. Beneath it only a ratty t-shirt and baggy jeans. None of which would keep the man warm enough. Not when it was already in the teens and going to drop below zero that night.
Peter took a twenty out of his wallet and put it back. He folded the bill so it could be passed discreetly, but had the value showing. He didn’t want any other homeless people to see how much money the man had. Peter had read that thievery and violence was endemic to that class. He stopped just before he got to the man, standing off to the side of him, not directly in front, not threatening.
“For whatever, dude,” he said, holding out his hand as if to be shaken, but with the bill showing. The man shook his hand and nodded his thanks. “You need to get to a shelter. The city’s opening warming centers.”
The man scoffed. “It’s safer out here.” He started to walk away. “Thanks for the donation,” he said with another nod.
“How much to get an SRO for the night?” Peter asked, falling in to walk beside the man.
“Only by the week and only if there’s room and only if you have about a hundred.”
“The money’s not a problem…”
The man muttered, interrupting, “Wouldn’t think so.”
Peter passed it off. He was exceptionally well dressed. A coat like the man himself wore, only not frayed and this season’s style. Beneath it a suit. He’d been heading back to his hotel after a meeting, or else he’d be dressed down, Silicon Valley style.
“Okay, then let’s solve the other problem.” Peter always thought in terms of problem solving. Breaking a matter down into segments, creating an algorithm to work towards a solution. “Availability. How do we do that?”
The man shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Got a real California boy genius problem solver here. We walk, rich kid, we walk. Spoil those Louboutin’s with the salt and slush.”
Peter furrowed his brow. “How do you know I’m from California. I don’t tan.” The man smirked and kept on walking. There was something familiar about the expression.
Against his better judgement, Peter kept walking beside the man, even as he led him down a winding path, the blocks getting progressively worse in appearance. It was a very long walk. “What’s your story?” he asked just to fill the silence.
“Want me to sing for my supper? Don’t think so.”
“You weren’t panhandling.”
“Not there. Too close to the terminal. They move you on immediately if you put your hand out. Holding up a wall? You can get away with that for a bit.”
“Why waste your time there, then?”
The man shrugged his head to the side and spread his arms a little, hands upturned. Again, Peter was struck with an odd familiarity in the gesture. He watched the man move, falling a step behind to see his walk. Unlike most homeless, there was no slouch, no shuffle. He walked upright, steadily forward, with surprisingly confident, hurried steps.
The man gave a little chuckle and fell back to walking beside, not ahead, of Peter, but didn’t change his gait. “My time to waste,” he said. They walked silently for another block. “How was the 7 line to Queens today? Riding for old times’ sake instead of taking an Uber?”
Peter reached out and took the man’s sleeve, stopping their progress. “Do you know me?”
“Peter Parker. ParkerSoft.” The man brushed Peter’s hand off his sleeve and kept walking. “Another block. They usually have rooms.”
Peter stopped them again. “Do I know you?”
The man smirked again. “Nope.” He started walking again. “‘I don’t associate with Star Wars twerps and noobs’,” he said, giving Peter the same line he’d sent when the kid was a ten year old exploring corners of the web he didn’t belong in.
That time Peter grabbed the man’s arm, turned him away from the street and pushed him against the wall. “Holy fuck, you’re Iron Man!”
The man snorted. “WAS Iron Man. Now? Just being near that particular brand of phone,” he nodded towards Peter’s pocket, “is a violation of my supervised release.”
“Shit. I remember reading about your trial. Iron Man is Tony Stark.” The pieces were all falling together. The place where the man was leaning had a good view of Osborn Tower, formerly Stark Tower. And the phone in Peter’s pocket was made by Stark Industries.
“That, I still am, for all the name’s worth.”
“It’s still worth something.”
Tony laughed. “The board locked me out. And even if they hadn’t? Try running my business without going near a computer. Tony Stark’s as dead as Iron Man. You getting me this room or what?”
“Come back to the Langham with me,” Peter said excitedly.
He shook his head. “I mean it, kid. I’m not going back to prison so you can tap my brain and get me to do some work for you,” Tony said.
“I thought if you got caught at your level of hacking, the FBI or the NSA offered you a job.”
Tony laughed uproariously. “Still a noob. You believe that shit? The only thing they offer you is a six by eight room for fifteen years. And not at some country club estate.”
The problem solving wheels were spinning in Peter’s head. “Okay. Room first.” Peter grabbed Tony’s hand in his and headed into the SRO’s lobby. He paid for a month.
“Lose your bag, kid,” Tony said before they left the desk. “You’ve got my phone, you’ve probably got the tablet and I know you’ve got the laptop with the severely dumbed down version of JARVIS in there. He, I most definitely am not allowed near.” Tony smirked again. “’Course neither is anyone else.”
Peter put his phone in his messenger bag, and with a couple hundred incentive, left it with the desk clerk, hoping it would still be there. If it wasn’t and someone tried to access any of his electronics without his biometrics, everything would erase and the batteries would overheat, literally frying everything inside. He followed Tony up the stairs to his newly rented room. He plopped himself into the one chair in it.
Tony sat on the end of the sagging double bed. “So… TANSTAAFL. What do you want from me for the room?”
“I don’t want anything.”
Tony snorted. “If you didn’t want anything, you’d’ve upped that twenty to a hundred and walked on to your next meeting.”
Peter fell silent. “I want to test the limits of your cage. See what I can do to get them expanded.”
He chuckled harshly. “Easy for you to say from where you’re sitting. Before I lost it all, I threw everything I had at this problem. I had the best lawyers. Paid politicians at the highest level in my pocket. I was too damn high-profile for them to do anything. All the favors suddenly dried up because everyone knew I’d be in prison and be unable to make good on any deal. I’m worthless, Parker. This is it.” Tony spread his hands expansively, taking in the small room. “The limits of my cage, as you put it. It’s bigger than six by eight. And I can walk out that door whenever I want. After fifteen years, I count myself ahead.” He leaned forward, his hands on his knees. “I have nine more years of my ten supervised release to do. I am not spending that time back in prison. The limits of this cage don't get tested.”
“I thought you completed your sentence; you were free.”
“Fuckin’…” Tony shook his head. “Yeah, I got sentenced to fifteen, served fifteen. I got caught in defense systems. Federal time. No parole in that system. And after? They can do whatever the fuck they want to you. God, you’re naive, Parker.”
“Okay. So there’s no getting around the electronics restriction…”
“Nope.”
“Do you need access to code?”
“You are a piece of work,” he said shaking his head. “I am not coding for ParkerSoft. You can’t afford me,” Tony said, arrogantly.
Peter shrugged and looked around the room.
“Bye, Parker,” Tony said, standing up and heading for the door. “Better hope they never catch the Spider. Or I’ll be sharing a street corner with you.”
Peter’s eyes went wide. “How did you…”
“Oh for fuck’s sake.” Tony turned and leaned his back against the door. “You were ten when I met you in the warez channels. And as you got older, you went everywhere bragging about every system you walked around in. You wrote lazy, distinctive code — still do. Anyone who looks at your old code and compares it to the shitty apps your company puts out would catch you in a minute. You don’t get it. I didn’t get it. How… ephemeral… this all is.” He crossed his left arm low across his body, holding his wrist.
“There’s nothing solid in the world, no matter how much we pretend there is. There are a million ways for you to end up like me, even if you never get caught. ParkerSoft has employees living in their cars, and you won’t even let them stay safely in your parking lots much less pay them a living wage for the area. Stark had them too. Living in places like this because the cost of living in New York is mad. At our lowest level, we had people taking sponge baths in McDonalds and sleeping wherever they could.
“I had no idea. Even if I did, I would’ve thought it was their own fault for lacking ambition or skill. You need to get it through your head. This is it for me. Maybe in nine years, if I live that long, I can manage to build a little something again to carry me through my sixties. Probably not.” He sniffed, scrunching his face.
“Then why not work for me?”
“Because, kid, I don’t trust you. You are going to brag about having Iron Man or Tony Stark writing your code. You can’t shut your fuckin’ mouth. I’m too big a get for you to just sit on that information.
“Second, not only can’t you pay me what I’m worth, you can’t pay me at all. I can’t have income without a job. I can’t get a job. Getting this place? I can say I got lucky panhandling. More than that?” Tony shook his head. “Not risking it.”
“C’mon, Tony. It’s a system. It can be gamed,” Peter said, enthusiastically. “You and me? Best in the business.”
Tony snorted at the kid putting himself in his category.
“Don’t judge me by my apps. That’s money.”
“What else do you have to judge you by? Certainly not your hacking skills.”
“I do games…”
Tony rolled his eyes. “Everybody does games. Thrill me.”
“Security.”
“Walk me through it.”
Peter explained the companies that he personally provided security for and how he did it. Tony grudgingly gave him a side nod. He went back to sit on the bed. “Interesting, but, eh… not exactly…”
“I’ve reverse engineered JARVIS,” Peter spluttered out.
“The OS on your computer may have his name but…”
“Not the OS. That was just the starting place.”
“Impossible.”
“Okay. I haven’t done it completely…”
“No shit.”
“But I’ve gotten farther than anyone. JARVIS is the big get our world right now. Has been since you went away. No one else has gotten past the OS.”
“But you have,” Tony said skeptically.
“I have his visual manipulation systems. The true natural language, not the crappy OS version.”
“Personality?”
Peter shook his head. “None of his personality or on-the-fly problem solving. Not…”
“So none of what makes JARVIS, JARVIS. Just a slightly more advanced OS that you’ll never be able to use because Stark still owns the rights to him even if they can’t get to him.”
“I’m looking to put together a buyout of Stark. Not just their computer division. The works.”
“You don’t have the resources, kid.”
“It’s not worth what it used to be.”
“I know exactly what my company is worth. Without me, it’s been rushing for the bottom. Pepper can’t salvage it, even though she’s good.
“Exactly. A decent offer, the board wouldn’t turn it down. They’re looking to cash out while what’s left is still worth something. A little manipulation…”
“You’ll get caught.”
“No I won’t.”
“Not gonna argue with you. You still don’t have the resources to buy Stark, even at a bargain.”
“When I turned twenty-one five years ago, I inherited my parents’ estate. Including my father’s chemical patents.”
“Okay,” Tony said, nodding once. Richard Parker had done some groundbreaking research. Stark had tried to hire him and failed. “But none of what you say, none of your ‘gaming the system’ gets me out of my situation. You can’t ‘game’ your way out of supervised release.”
“Your connections, give them to me.”
“Wow. You’ve got balls, kid. Anything else of mine you want in exchange for a three fifty a month room?”
“Yeah.”
Tony snorted. “Go on. Tell me. You want me to code. You want JARVIS. You want my connections. What else?”
Peter stood up and walked closer to Tony. “I want you to put me on this bed and fuck me brainless.”
Tony threw his head back and laughed. He looked up at Peter, ran his gaze up and down him, then laughed some more.
“What!” Peter said, offended at the apparent rejection.
“I’m far more than twice your age. I look like shit. I haven’t had a shower in a year. I’m fifteen kinds of filthy. And you want me to fuck you. What the hell kinda kink you got, kid?”
“You are still as fuckin’ gorgeous as ever. And brilliant. But I can’t fuck your brain. There’s showers down the hall, the guy said.” Peter took off his overcoat. “I’ll wait.”
“And you get to fuck your sexual-awakening crush. Bet you had pictures of my Iron Man icon on your wall along with the Death Star.”
“Nah, but I did have Tony Stark’s Rolling Stone cover,” Peter said, grinning.
“Shit. You always this direct?” Tony asked.
Peter shrugged. “In business or fucking, it gets me what I want or gets me out quickly. You’d know. I took the play from your autobiography.”
“Kid, you’re killin’ me,” Tony said with another shake of his head. “Fuckin’ fanboy since you were ten. Why the hell should I put you in this bed?”
“I’d imagine you haven’t had any for awhile,” Peter said slyly.
“I’ve always liked them young and pretty and I’ve stayed in shape. This past year, not so much. Before? Plenty.”
That took Peter aback.
“Christ, Parker, I never raped anybody,” Tony said, seeing Peter’s reaction. “Stop watching bad movies.”
“Well?”
“I am not fucking you.”
“Okay.” Peter said down on the bed, next to Tony. “Can I take you to dinner?”
“You get nothing for it.”
“I’m okay with that.”
Tony looked at him skeptically.
“I’d just like to get to know you,” Peter said.
“Still a fanboy.”
“A little, maybe, but I’m a bit old to be just that. You’re hot and I’d like it if you fucked me. You’re brilliant and I’d like to get to know you.”
“Gonna take me on a date, kid?”
Peter smiled. “Maybe.”
“The clothes will still reek, but I’ll take a shower.” Tony smiled. “You figure out the best place that will let someone dressed like me into it. I’ll let you buy me dinner.”
“Unh unh. You’ll let me take you on a date.”
Tony laughed genuinely. “Okay Pete, I’ll let you take me on a date.”