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“Okay,” says Peter. “Okay. Okay. Don’t freak out.”
“Um?” says Tony. He drops his screwdriver onto the desktop and stands so he can see the kid better. He's hovering in the entryway to the lab, shifting his weight foot to foot like some sneaky little criminal. This change in angle is really— quite enough to see what’s the matter, so very enough that it’s too much, and Tony almost chokes on his tongue. “Kid what the fuck,” he says, clambering straight over the table, kicking loose screws and metal scraps out of his way as he hastens to Peter’s side because there is a very inauspicious and inexplicable pool of blood on the linoleum and, really, Peter should not be bleeding this fast from any wound, ever, but especially not right now, at half-past-two in the goddamn morning with no one but the moon to watch.
“Two bullets,” Peter says, cutting to the chase, which is impressive, considering it's him. He points at his left calf, then yanks his mask off. It gets caught on his ears like always, and his hair stands on end, staticy and sweaty. Tony can see the redness in his eyes now, the pallor of his cheeks, like wet parchment plastered over a marble statue. Jesus.
“Alright,” Tony says. “Turn around for me, slowly, kiddo, turn around— did I not just say slowly?” Tony snaps as Peter lists sideways, woozy, but Tony steadies him anyway. “Okay, that’s fine, whatever, Iron Man demoted to the Human Crutch, we can do this. Come here, we’re moving now, we’re sitting you down.”
Peter groans and slumps as Tony slips his arm around him, trying to shoulder as much of Peter’s weight as he can manage. Tony’s brain is literally restarting right now, complete reboot, system failure, and Peter is streaking blood all along the floor, it’s on Tony’s socks, shit. Shit.
“The— kit, first aid kit,” Tony says, “I’ll get that once you’re down. Okay? You’re fine. You’re so fine it’s boring how fine you are.”
“Are you gonna have a panic attack?” Peter grinds out. “‘Cuz— bad timing, dude.”
“Dude, don’t test me,” Tony says. “You know what? Floor. Fuck the bench, we don’t need a bench, who needs a bench. Floor, right here. Down, boy.” He squats with Peter, using his free hand to try and manhandle Peter’s leg straight out, to keep from jostling it as they settle.
Peter hits the ground hard on his ass and his jaw clenches. “Shiitake mushrooms,” he says. “Sugar cookies.” A long, gritty whine.
“Must be bad if you’re pulling out the big boy swears,” Tony says. He’s sweating, he’s literally dripping sweat. “Hey, okay, go belly down. Tummy time.”
“I’m not Morgan,” Peter says, but he does as Tony asks, laying first on his back, then flipping over, his chin dropping heavily onto the tile. There’s blood everywhere. The lab is gonna smell like bleach for weeks once Tony cleans this.
Tony takes Peter’s ankle and bends his leg in an L. “Shin up. We’re stopping the blood from bleeding.”
“Just get the needle, Florence Nightingale,” Peter says tersely. He is startlingly pale and Tony is distracted and nauseous and proud of that reference for a moment before he remembers he’s supposed to be moving and— doing things. Stitching the kid.
He scrambles to his feet and hastens to the first aid cabinet, grabbing gauze and the suture kit and a bottle of disinfectant. “Are they still in you?” Tony hollers over his shoulder, knocking tubes and pill packets out of the way, looking for a painkiller, a topical numbing agent.
“Who?”
“The bullets, dumbass,” Tony says. He valiantly stops himself from smacking his head onto the cabinet door.
“Oh. Yeah. One of ‘em is, um, broken, I think, so that’s fun.”
“Ave Maria,” Tony says, crazed, grabbing as much as he can in the circle of his arms and just ferrying it to Peter’s side, “piena di grazia, il Signore è con te. He ain’t with me, though, ‘cuz my kid is spraying blood all over my nice lab. Staining my good flannel pajama pants. Hey, start wearing the metal suit, kid. I made you a bulletproof suit and you don’t wear it.”
“Too flashy,” Peter says, waving a hand. “Friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, not bachelor party performer.”
“I resent that commentary upon my design choices,” Tony says. He tears the rip in Peter’s suit open wider. His hands are all slick with blood and the fabric almost slips from his grasp. He’s shaking like a gong just after getting smacked. “Hey, wait, what the fuck? Your calves are built, Pete. Look at you go. Muscles so thick they kept you from getting through and throughs.”
“I never skip leg day,” Peter says. “Also, I used to do ballet.”
“I recall. Prep for the ouch,” Tony says. He sets Peter’s shin across his lap, elevated just enough that he can see the pair of holes but not so close that blood will spurt into his eye. “I’m swiping disinfectant around the wound in three, two—”
“Ow ow ow ow ffffresh eggs.”
“You can say the fuck word,” Tony says, grabbing a handful of gauze and mopping the blood and peroxide away from the two deep, blackish punctures still sluggishly oozing. God, they’re lucky Peter didn’t try to remove them in the street or something stupid. Knowing him, he’d contract sepsis. Or AIDS. With his free palm, Tony rubs the bend of Peter’s knee as soothingly as he can. “This situation warrants many fuck words.”
“I’m saving them for later,” Peter says, his breaths more like gasps at this point. Like a half-drowned baby chihuahua.
“I’d like to buy a curse word, please,” Tony says. “This is where I’d get to hear the list of curse words I could buy, and I’d choose a zingy one.” He pushes his glasses further up his nose with his shoulder, tweezers in hand. “Kid, we’re going in bare, we’re going— full archaeologist on this shit, okay? I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, this is about to suck so bad, but we don’t have any enhanced painkillers here. Okay, heeeere’s Johnny—”
“I figu— youch,” Peter yelps, going board-stiff to keep from flailing. He buries his face in the bends of his elbows. His whole body trembles and Tony has to cuff his ankle with his free hand just to steady it enough to do his digging.
“You gonna use a fuck yet?” He turns Peter’s calf. “Ah, I see you, you ugly little bugger,” he says, and pulls a bullet shard out, trying to ignore the fact that this is his kid’s leg he’s excavating. This piece is pretty big, which is good, because hopefully that means there aren’t too many little bits floating around in Peter’s gastrocnemius. “Ah!” he says again, and gets another. He’s shaking so hard it looks like he’s doing jazz hands. “Eureka.”
“Your commentary… leaves something to be desired,” Peter pants.
“Breathe. If you need a break, you let me know,” Tony says. He tries to make his voice soothing but he honestly sounds like a carnival barker, an octave too high and reedier than he’s ever been. Like second puberty. God, what a nightmare that would be. “Big piece, big piece,” Tony says, grappling the tweezers around the stubby bullet, trying to tune out the keening whine building in Peter’s chest by saying, “I know, I know, you’re doing great, buddy, almost done, you’re almost done,” like he’s a skipping record. He gets the bullet hunk out and drops it on the floor with a clink. Immediately he takes his thumb and presses a wad of gauze into the wound. The bleeding will start to slow, now, as the flesh begins to knit closed. Tony, unfortunately, is rather familiar with Peter’s freaky healing powers by now.
“Awesome,” Peter says, frighteningly close to hyperventilating.
“Pete, I need you to slow your breathing,” Tony says. His left arm hurts. He spends a fraction of a second imagining the terrible black humor of him having a heart attack over top of Peter’s bled-out corpse and then nearly pukes so he starts stroking Peter’s knee-bend again to calm them both. “Blood pressure is up, you’re gonna bleed like a horse.”
“What’s that saying even mean,” Peter says, scrabbling his suited fingertips across the floor. He starts fingerpainting stars and flowers in his blood smears, which really tells Tony where his head is at.
“Horse big, bleed lots,” Tony offers, before squinting at Peter’s leg, twisting it to get a better angle as Peter lets out a steady stream of “shine a light”s. This way, gravity should be on their side, helping the thing slip out. “Okay, kid, the big kahuna. One try, like that operation board game that screamed at you if your hands got shaky.”
“Jus’ get it outta’ me.”
“Three-two-one-go,” Tony says, then does some fancy squeeze maneuver that, along with the tweezer tips, gets the bullet out.
“Crap!” Peter yells with vitriol.
Tony, adding a second wad of gauze to Peter’s calf and holding them down with the heels of both hands, says disappointedly, “The whole world of swear words before you and you chose that one.”
“I’m under duress,” Peter says petulantly. His voice is all thick and Tony is so, so afraid that if he were to look, he’d see tear-glazed cheeks. A nightmare, he says. This was a fucking nightmare. Terrible nightmare, grisly, bloody nightmare. Never again.
“Sure you were, kid,” Tony says. “Alright. Cool. Bullet part, done. Now I just gotta knit you up. You want any fun patterns? Embroidery? Happy is teaching me. I can do daisies.”
“Just stitch me up normal,” Peter says. “Next time you can make me into a vintage tapestry.”
Tony lifts one hand to dig through the first aid kit for the needle, graciously pre-threaded. “Two stitches per piercing, buddy, that’s all.”
“You promise?” Peter says softly, and Tony’s innards go whirring through a blender. Tony smoothie. Jesus. This kid is gonna break him.
“I swear,” Tony says. He runs his knuckles against Peter’s calf, then says, “alright, game time,” and lifts the gauze. The bleeding is already surprisingly, miraculously slowed, and Tony says a second little hail Mary for it. He’ll never not be grateful and astounded for the kid’s healing thing.
The stitches go in easy, the wounds even and relatively clean for what they are. Tony wraps them both in gauze and bandages, careful to keep Peter’s leg elevated as best he can.
“Done,” Tony says.
Peter lifts his head and peers backwards over his shoulder at Tony. His eyelids flutter as if he can hardly stay awake any longer. “You look like garbage,” Peter says. “Hot garbage. Garbage that’s been floating in the East River for at least three weeks. In August.”
“I just saved your leg, stronzetto,” Tony says. He wags a bloody finger at Peter, then shakes his head, looking down at the mess of gauze and tape and cut suturing thread around them. He begins to collect it. “No gratitude these days, not even when lives are on the line. Absolutely preposterous. I have no hope for your generation.”
Peter, cheek squished on the tile, answers with a room-shaking snore.
“Are you drooling already?” Tony mumbles, impressed. “Shit. Like a fuckin’ lamp, you go out.”
Tony tosses his trash, washes his wildly shaking hands four times- until he’s sure he’s only imagining Peter’s blood beneath his nails- then sticks a couch cushion under Peter’s leg to elevate it. He leaves Peter there otherwise, limbs akimbo, until he’s finished wiping up all the floors. And the doorway. And the elevator.
“Little shit,” he says fondly, before collecting Peter as best he can in his arms, grateful his kid is built sort of like a lanky, underfed cricket, so he can still manage his weight. He drops Peter on the lab couch, tucks a blanket around him, grabs some super-strength pain relievers and a glass of water to sit at Peter’s side, wedges an ice pack against his calf to prevent swelling, and raises both of his legs on a pillow stack just to be super careful.
Tony sighs, shoving his hands into his pockets. The kid is gonna give him a fucking coronary one day. Until then, though. Tony softens, listening to the sharp puff of Peter’s sleepy exhales, staring at the smattering of freckles in sharp relief against his nose. Until then, he’ll let the kid rest.