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“Pete, where are you?” Tony asks, pressing the phone to his ear as he walks down the sidewalk. “Are you sure this isn’t a go in guns blazing situation?”
“No, no, no, absolutely not,” Peter says. There’s a lot going on in the background of wherever he is, supposedly the Hi-Collar on 10th street, and usually when Tony gets calls this late, it’s Spider-Man shit. But Peter said for Tony not to suit up and to come as fast as he could, and for some reason, Tony listened.
Why is he listening to a teenager? Why is he letting a teenager dictate his actions? Peter literally has him at his beck and call, and this whole thing could literally be him tricking Tony into hanging out because I’m bored and I stopped all the crime.
An actual thing he said out loud, once. Tony was mad that he laughed.
“Pete, I’m gonna need some more information,” Tony says, feeling like an imbecile for taking so long to insist. “I’m walking all around out here all over God’s green earth—”
“I’m in the restaurant! In the back most booth. Hurry, because it’s gonna close soon, they close at one!”
Tony lets out a very measured, very irritated sigh, and finally he sees the place coming around the corner. “Alright, alright, I see it. What are you doing over here? Info. Stat.”
“Uh, you’re gonna see.”
“Peter, I swear to God, if I come in there and find—”
“I don’t know how that sentence is gonna end but there’s no way you can guess this.”
“Guess,” Tony says, marching inside and waving at the lady at the front. This place is way too hopping for almost one in the morning. Tony likes to avoid his sleeping in the comfort of his own home. “I didn’t know we were playing a—”
He stops. He sees him. Both of them hang up.
Tony gets closer. He feels like he might just be hallucinating. There’s no way he’s seeing what he thinks he’s seeing. He rubs at his eyes, but no, it doesn’t change. He’s seeing exactly what he’s seeing.
“Who is that?” Tony asks, pointing, trying to ignore the ringing in his ears.
“Uh, I don’t know her name,” Peter says. He’s bouncing a beautiful baby girl on his knee, arms wrapped protectively around her. She can’t be any more than a year old. “I was out, doing my thing, you know, when I found her—”
“Stop,” Tony says. He holds up his hands and sits down in the booth across from him. The baby looks serene and happy, in her little pink outfit, and she pats her hands on the table, leaning forward. Tony just keeps staring. “Stop.”
“I stopped.”
“How do you just—how do you just find a baby?” Tony asks, incredulous. “I don’t understand.”
“Because you’re not letting me explain,” Peter says. The baby babbles a little bit and looks back at him, and Peter smiles at her. “It’s okay, pretty girl, don’t worry.”
“Peter.”
“Okay, uh,” Peter says, holding one of the baby’s hands. He’s got an array of Japanese food sitting on the table, like he was trying to see if the baby could eat any of it. “Well, it’s not really a long story. I had just stopped a mugging and I was gonna go see if I could go get a hot chocolate and then I found this baby. Just. Crawling in the alleyway by herself.”
“Were there any screaming mothers present?” Tony asks, leaning forward, feeling like he’s going half insane. “Anyone yelling hey, spandex boy, don’t take my baby!”
Peter glares at him, and the baby laughs, leaning back against his chest.
“I’m sorry,” Tony says, his heart going half wild in his ears. This was not what he expected at all. A dead body would have made more sense. He braces his hand over his eyes and tries to think like a rational person. “I just didn’t think I’d be becoming a grandfather so soon.”
Peter snorts and laughs and Tony looks back up.
“I wasn’t sure what to do,” Peter says. “I mean, I can’t keep her.”
Tony scoffs. “Uh, yeah, that’s a given, and also, not how this works.” He sighs again, drawing in a breath. Rational. Rational. “Okay, you stayed in the same area, right? Where you found her?”
“Literally one alleyway away, I stayed close,” Peter says. “But it’s late and I had to, you know, change—”
“You could have stayed Spi—” Tony looks over his shoulder, to make sure nobody’s listening. “Well. You could have stayed as you were.”
Peter sighs and lifts the baby’s hand up and down, glancing off towards the front door. “I don’t know. I was worried it would attract too much attention. Like maybe if someone had like, kidnapped her or something, they’d see me and try to fight me and I couldn’t protect her.”
The baby yells and dances around, clapping her hands together. She doesn’t seem too distressed, but Tony doesn’t know how babies work. He knows they’re definitely not happy all the time, so they’re lucky she’s not crying.
“Alright, uh, well, let’s go to the police,” Tony says. “I’ll pay your bill, the precinct is close—”
“That’s what we’re gonna do?” Peter asks, holding the baby tighter, like Tony is trying to yank her away from him. “That’s what I called you for? Cause I coulda just done that.”
Tony narrows his eyes. “What did you want me to do? Magic? Because I think there’s another guy for that—”
“You’re basically the police!” Peter says, eyes wide.
“I’m not, I’m just a rich person,” Tony says, taking out his wallet.
“You’re a superhero,” Peter says.
“So are you,” Tony whispers, taking out a hundred dollar bill. “But we can’t go dragging a baby a million miles away from where you found it, this isn’t wartime or something like Sokovia where people were separated from their children—”
“But shouldn’t we, in particular, be able to do something?” Peter whispers. “Like maybe I, you know, become the other guy again, and you hold onto the baby and I go swinging around knocking on doors and stuff?”
“Police have better options for all that,” Tony says. “Cut down on all the—swinging time.”
Peter sighs, and he’s never looked more disappointed in him. “Fine, but if we’re going to the police station, we’re staying with the baby.”
“Fine,” Tony says, pulling himself out of the booth. “I’m parked on the street a little ways away.”
Peter stares up at him. “We’re as in, me and you both staying with the baby.”
The baby gurgles and blows bubbles and sucks them back into her mouth.
“Yes. I understand English, unlike our little powder puff friend here.”
Peter sighs again and gets up, awkwardly putting his backpack on, one-handed, and adjusting the baby in his arms. She’s chunky and she kicks her little legs out and keeps reaching up, pawing at Peter’s chin. She looks at Tony and yelps, reaching out for him. Peter gasps, grinning, and Tony starts heading for the exit.
“She wants you to hold her!”
“She just likes my facial hair,” Tony says, walking ahead and holding the door open for the kid and the...other kid. “Dad must have some.”
They get outside and Peter shoves up close to Tony, standing on his tip-toes and knocking their shoulders together. Tony narrows his eyes down at him and sees the baby reaching up, making little curious noises until her small hand comes in contact with his chin now, too.
“Yup, you’re right,” Peter says, stepping back a little bit after a moment. “Can you communicate telepathically with babies? Can you ask her where her parents are?”
“Yep, they live in that apartment building right over there,” Tony says, pointing.
Peter glares at him.
“What? Don’t ask questions you don’t want fake answers for.”
The baby laughs at him, making little stilted movements back and forth in Peter’s arms. She’s got a few curls of blonde hair, and her little headband squashes them down.
“See, she thinks I’m funny,” Tony says, knocking Peter on the shoulder. “Lighten up, webs.”
Peter sighs. “I’m just worried. I really hope she wasn’t taken or something. By some stupid guys that lost her and now they’re running around looking.” He cracks his jaw. “Maybe I should have stayed as—you know who. I just don’t know if it would have drawn too much attention, or if I’m more of a target like this—”
“I’m here now,” Tony says, patting him more gently on the shoulder. “So nobody’s gonna try shit. C’mon. Car’s this way.”
~
Tony feels strangely like he’s letting the kid down by not immediately being able to solve this, and he does send up some flares with his contacts in the city, hoping something hits before the police can do their thing. But meanwhile, he sits in the back room of the police station with Peter, and the little girl Peter is having a hard time not having a name for, while the cops call people and search and put out APBs.
“I just think it’s stupid that we—I mean, like, you and the others, can’t instantly solve something like this,” Peter says, glancing around like he’s checking for security cameras.
“I can already see the words ‘Stark Kidnaps Baby’ scrawled across the front page of the New York Times if that kid got anywhere near a building that I own,” Tony says.
Peter’s holding the baby up on the table, and she keeps clapping her hands together, but more and more slowly as time goes on, like she’s getting closer to sleep. Tony had a blanket in his car, for some reason he figures was probably related to Peter, and Peter’s got her sitting on it, ready to wrap her up once she starts to fade.
“People should trust you more,” Peter says, already taking her off the table and bundling her up against him. “I mean. I did. I do. And May did too. Does.”
Tony smiles warmly at him. “Your aunt doesn’t trust me at all, kid.”
“That’s not true,” Peter insists. “She does. She always has. Trust me, Iron Man was always my favorite growing up and May, uh—would not have encouraged that if she didn’t like you or trust you. She’s just—she’s got a hard exterior. But she’s gooey on the inside.”
Tony snorts. “Well, there are some things I can’t do, I guess. I have ways to track people and find things but babies are harder. They can’t tell us anything. So we’ve just gotta go the tried and true route and let the cops figure things out. That’s what you would have done if you didn’t know me, right? And this happened? Call the cops?”
“Yeah,” Peter says, tentatively, but Tony is almost positive he might have tried to figure shit out himself, if he was still Spider-Man in this scenario. Peter sighs, and rocks the baby a bit, awkwardly but gently at the same time. “I guess a lot of people just like superheroes when they need them,” he says. “Which sucks.”
“Yep,” Tony says. “But it’s fine, you know? We do what we can.”
“I’m glad you’re here,” Peter says. The baby still stares up at him, her small hands squeezing the blanket, but she looks close to falling asleep.
“Even if I couldn’t do much?” Tony asks, leaning on the table.
“You just make me feel safer,” Peter says, chewing on his lower lip and not looking at him. “You always have, so. You probably always will.”
It’s just about the nicest thing anyone has ever said to him, and Tony clears his throat, wishing and wishing and wishing he could be anything like the man this kid thinks he is. He wishes he could move buildings for him, and read babies’ minds. Maybe then he’d be worth something.
Before Tony can let out a very-choked up snarky remark, the baby’s face crumbles and she starts crying.
“Oh no,” Peter says. “Uh oh.” He adjusts the baby a little bit and looks up at Tony with wild eyes, in a panic. “Uh, uh, she hasn’t cried yet. I don’t know what to do with the crying.”
Tony clears his throat and scoots closer, and it sounds like her wails are bouncing off the walls, getting louder and louder.
He flashes back to times past. To a gentle hand running through his hair, and her smile hovering above him as she sang. She did it for as long as he can remember, even when he didn’t want her to anymore because he was too old. Now he misses it. And he misses her. His heart aches for when she was here, and for all the love she gave him. With every look and every word.
Tony wants to be just like his mother.
He leans in close and nearly bumps heads with Peter as they both look down at the baby. Then he starts to sing. “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy when skies are grey. You’ll never know dear, how much I love you, oh please don’t take my sunshine away.”
She quiets down and Tony goes through it one more time, and when he finishes she’s quiet again, cooing, reaching up and grabbing at his goatee.
“Well, that was nice,” Peter says, grinning.
Then the door slams open.
“Oh my God!” a woman says, rushing into the room with two officers. “Oh my God, that’s my Angelica, yes, that’s her.”
Peter immediately gets protective, like he isn’t sure she’s telling the truth, and Tony stands up, his hand on the back of the kid’s chair. He looks at the cops. “Uh—”
“We confirmed everything,” Officer Ryan says.
Then the baby sees her and perks up, reaching her hands out, writhing in Peter’s arms. “Mama! Mama!”
“Oh, okay,” Peter says. “Well, that’s what I really needed.”
“My father was watching her but he fell asleep, and when he woke up she was gone, she was gone by the time I got home,” she says, shaking. “I have no idea. I have no idea, but God, thank you, both of you—oh my God, wait, you’re—you’re Tony Stark—”
Peter hands the baby over to her, and he looks down at his feet.
“It was Spider-Man, that found her,” Tony says, nodding. “Handed her over to us, had to go—stop a mugging he heard a couple streets down.”
“That’s amazing,” the mother says, already pressing kisses to her baby’s cheeks. “Tell him thank you, too. I owe him. I do, I’ll track him down, pay him back somehow.”
“He doesn’t need that,” Peter says, shaking his head and crossing his arms over his chest. “He’s—I’m sure he’s just happy that the baby—that Angelica is safe.”
“Well, I’ll track him down anyway,” the mother says. Her hair is the exact same color as the baby’s, and he can see their resemblance in their faces, too. “And buy him a pizza. Two pizzas! Three or four!”
“He’ll like that,” Tony says, grinning, trying not to look at Peter.
The baby twists around in her mother’s arms, and beams at Peter, smiling wide. Peter smiles back, and waves, and looks a bit like he’s sad to see her go.
~
The kid starts to fall asleep in the car on the way back to his apartment, and Tony sighs to himself, catching sight of the time. Almost four in the morning.
“Sorry I kept you out so late,” Peter says, curling up with the blanket they were using for the baby. “I just…you know.”
“It’s fine,” Tony says, wiping at his eyes. “I’ve got a couple meetings tomorrow I didn’t want to attend, and now I have a real excuse.”
Peter yawns big, his eyes getting droopy.
“Go to bed, sunshine,” Tony laughs. “So I don’t have to carry you upstairs when we get there. You’re too heavy.”
Peter hums. “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine—”
Tony shakes his head, smiling a little bit. “—you make me happy, when skies are grey—”
“—you’ll never know, dear—”
“—how much I love you—”
“Oh please don’t take my sunshine away…I love that song…” Peter practically falls into a snore, and Tony reaches over, making sure his seatbelt is buckled tight.
“Night, night, Spidey,” Tony says, ruffling Peter’s hair as he drives off through the green light.