Work Text:
“I don’t want to talk to you,” Peter says. He’s been hiding for the better part of an hour, sitting in the cabin’s laundry room, wedged between the washer and the dryer. Something about the sounds coming off of them calm him, weirdly. The swish of water, the rumble of the motors, cotton rubbing cotton, the button on a pair of jeans dinging the side of the barrel.
“That’s bullshit,” Tony says. “You always want to talk to me.”
As true as that usually is, this time it rings discordant and tense. Peter clenches his jaw. “Not really,” he says. “You just sorta’ assume that.”
“Of course I do. I make for lovely conversation.”
“Eh.”
Peter closes his eyes. A bit of soft light warms him, glowing ochre and gold on the insides of his eyelids like the sunset on the East River. Familiar, and yet. Orange, orange, orange, every time he closes his fucking eyes. He opens them fast, wraps his arms around himself. Glares back up at Tony.
Tony sighs. “Are we really fighting over this, kid?”
“Yes,” Peter snaps. “Yes, we really are. Geez, what kind of—of course we’re fighting over this.”
Tony watches him. After a moment, he sighs again, the type that heaves his shoulders: Atlas, exhausted from moving mountains. And he deserves it. He should be exhausted, all silver-streaked in the low light. A distinct tilt to his shoulders. Leaning leftwards.
Peter looks away.
Tony comes and sits on the hard floor in front of Peter, almost knee to knee. He winces when he touches down, and Peter can imagine the discomfort. The lingering aches, these weeks later, because even Helen Cho’s regeneration cradle can’t fix nerve damage this deep. Can’t fix Tony’s bum hip, or the nearly blind right eye behind the frames of his glasses.
“Lay it on me,” Tony says, palms flat to the floor as if he needs the grounding. “Right now. Just you and me. Let it all out.”
Peter wants to say, you don’t really mean that. He wants to say, you don’t want to hear it and I don’t want to say it. He wants to say, no, because I still have to protect you. Especially now. I owe it to you. I owe you everything.
Instead, he says, “I’m pissed at you.”
Tony flicks an eyebrow, but it isn’t unkind. “A good place to start,” he says.
“I’m pissed at you because you could have died,” Peter continues. With every word, his chest aches worse, like those sinkholes in Florida that swallow neighborhoods down like a gulp of crushed up popcorn. He knows grief, and this isn’t it, not really. This is different. More sour. He’s mourning for something he never lost.
He carries on.
“I’m pissed at you because—because you almost died, because I sat there and,” Peter tries so hard not to gasp, not to stutter, to, instead, be fierce with conviction, “I saw your arc reactor turn off, I watched that happen, and I—“ he grits his teeth and spits it out like cherry pits and blood, “—I can't do that again. Not for you.”
He carries on.
“I’m pissed at you because you almost died and— look at you!” Peter has never sneered in his life, but this is pretty close. “You’re not even sorry. You’re not even sorry, are you,” and Peter scrabbles his fingernails against the floor, because Tony is just sitting there, pleasantly blank and fucking earnest, and Peter wants to wipe that look off his face, “you’re not. You’re not sorry. You almost died and you told me, to my face, Tony!” Peter is shouting. And then he isn’t. Like wind catching a sail and then stopping, the gust runs out of breath and he falters to something that could only generously be considered a whisper. “To my face, you told me it was just for me. You would’ve died for me.”
Until he can’t.
He presses his palms to his face and tries to collect himself.
Tony doesn’t wait. He’s always been impatient. “I did,” he says simply.
Peter has no more energy to holler. He wants to. But he can’t. “You did it for me, instead of the billions,” he says.
“I did.”
Peter drops his hands and stares at Tony. His eyes hurt, just looking at him. Frail and fractured and so goddamn pleased with himself. “That’s awful.”
“It is,” Tony agrees. “Selfish and horrible and a load of other shitty things. And it gets worse.” Tony scoots nearer. His knees are warm against Peter’s. His hand searches but Peter keeps his own behind his back, turns his face as if to shield himself from the blow he knows will strike him senseless anyway. “Pete. I’d do it again, a hundred times. Fourteen million. Fuck the billions of lives. I care about you more. I’d save you every time.”
Peter takes a breath. There are no words for the feeling in his chest, the thing snaking through his stomach and into his throat. “I hate that,” he says, meaning it with every ounce of breath inside him. “I hate that. In no world should that—be the way things are.”
“Well,” Tony says, and Peter hears the one-shouldered shrug more than he sees it. “In this world, that’s the way it is. No givesies backsies.”
“Can you—take this seriously?” Peter spits out. “For once. Take something seriously.”
“No,” Tony says, still water and breezeless air. “Because that’s what we do, isn’t it? You and me? We make light of it. We have to.” Tony nudges him. “What else would we do?”
Peter looks at him. He wants to tear his hair out. “We think about the repercussions of our actions,” he says.
“And what were the repercussions of mine?” Tony says. He raises his hand and ticks it off on his fingers. “Getting my kid back. Reviving billions of lives throughout the universe, thus restoring interplanetary order. Undoing a mass genocide.” He flicks his eyebrows up. “Sounds good to me.”
“You’re forgetting some,” Peter whispers.
“Oh, am I,” Tony says. “Enlighten me.”
“You—lose an arm,” says Peter, voice trembling. “You lose the sight in your right eye. You give yourself a limp, probably permanently.”
“Semantics,” Tony says.
“I wasn’t done,” Peter says dangerously. “You, in front of your wife and your best friend and your team, with your really young and really cute kid at home, choose to pursue a suicide mission to save one life. The life of one fucking—poor orphan from Queens—“
“We do not weigh lives like that,” Tony says, and there is the frustration Peter has been trying to tug free. There. Tony is not lost; his Tony is not buried inside this new, staid one.
“Then why are you weighing yours like that?” Peter snaps. “Tony, your life matters. It matters to so many of us. Start treating it like it does.”
“Pete,” says Tony.
“You—you can't do that,” Peter says. “You didn’t think about anything. A plan in case someone had to snap, for the medical repercussions. You could’ve set something up. Had a fuckin’ AED ready for when your shitbag of a heart stopped. You didn’t think how—“ Peter is the foam off the sea when it smacks the shore, “—mad I’d be to watch you do it, how pissed I’d be with you if you—left me behind—“ Peter is losing traction, now, less the waves and more the sand swallowed by them, “—Tony,” he says, because that’s what he’s meant the whole time, really, that’s the only thing that matters to him, “Tony. Tony.”
And Tony is still staring at him. Soft-eyed and little, sad smile. Eyelashes and wrinkles and scruff, like he’s always been, even if he’s greyer, worn, warmer. He’s still there. Still there. “You can say it,” he says. “What you really mean.”
“Tony,” Peter says. “You fucking scared me. You can’t do that. You can’t do that.”
“C’mere,” Tony says. “Jesus, get out of the dusty corner, Peter. Come here.” He slides to the side and leans against the washer, holding his good arm out. Peter pries himself from between the thumping machines and into Tony’s side. When Tony’s arm drapes over his shoulders, it’s like remembering he’d forgotten. Like a drink of juice after the shakes, or closing the window when the wind is too sharp. He presses his face into Tony’s shoulder and he smells like hospital—like he hasn’t been able to wash that off yet, like it runs deeper than skin—but he also smells like his stupid cheap cologne, and a bit like frozen french toast sticks.
“What would I do,” Peter says, “if I didn’t have this anymore.”
“You’d get by,” Tony says softly, “like you always do.”
Peter starts to pull away, but Tony holds him closer yet. He drops his chin over Peter’s head. “You’d be sad, probably. Gee, I hope you’d be sad, at least a little. Some light mourning, perhaps a pastiera in my honor. Don’t let May make it, though, have mercy on la mia misera anima.” Peter hates him. He wants to smile. “But you’d be okay. You, and Pepper, and Morgan, and Rhodey. Even if I were gone, you’d have each other, so you’d be okay. Really.”
“I wouldn’t be,” Peter says, but it’s more petulant now than anything. Tony had been right. He’d just needed to get it out of his system. “I wouldn’t be okay.”
“You would be,” Tony insists. He starts to rock them a little, just side to side, barely. Like the traffic lights in August, when it’s storming on the coast. A lullaby familiar to him. “It would suck. I’m not saying it wouldn’t. It sucked when we—mourned you, but we had to move on with our lives, right? You’d want us to try and find happiness again? To—not forget you, obviously, but start to move on?”
Peter shrugs, but says, “Of course.”
Tony hums. Peter feels it vibrate against him. “You’ve always crawled your way through anything, right, kiddo? You make it through, every time.”
“Yeah,” Peter says, small, “but I don’t want to do it again.”
“And I don’t want it for you,” Tony says, as if it’s that simple. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m a stubborn mule of a man. Anyone will tell you that. I just did tell you that.” He takes a breath, holds it, then lets it out. “But, sometimes, we need a little push. A little something to keep us coming back. You follow?”
“Um,” Peter says. “Not really.”
Tony snorts. “Shit. I just mean—kid,” he sounds so warm. Peter doesn’t know how, after he fucking yelled at him, but it’s balmy and he wants to recline into it, like Forest Park on the sunny days, when the grass goes warm enough to feel it through the cotton of his t-shirt. “Kid. There was no way I was gonna let myself leave you right after getting you back.”
“That’s a stupid chance to take,” Peter says.
“Sure was,” Tony says proudly. “But I’m a damn good gambler.”
“I don’t want you risking your streak,” Peter says. “Your record. Your—score? I dunno how gambling works.”
Tony laughs, then, really, right from his chest. He smiles a lot, but his laughs have always been rarer, and Peter holds onto this one. Tries to remember it, store it, play it back later the way May wipes her favorite records before putting them in their sleeve.
“Peter,” Tony says. “I hope you never learn.” He pulls back enough to meet Peter’s eyes. He’s just as intent then, just as open as he’d been when Peter was ribbing him something fierce.
Peter takes a breath that stutters in his chest and Tony squeezes his shoulder. “I’m just real lucky to have you,” Peter says, voice husky. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if I came back and you weren’t here.”
Tony’s hand slips up from Tony’s shoulder to cup his face, thumb brushing the corner of Peter’s jaw. “Hm,” he says. “No more risks. I’ve got everything I need right back here.”
“Yeah?” Peter says. He doesn’t believe it, not completely, but Tony’s word has some worth to it still. He’ll probably try, for a while. Until the next great disaster, when he comes flying in with a repulsor surgically attached to his arm stump, yelling Geronimo!
Tony wrinkles his nose, as if he knows as well as Peter how thin the promise is. “For you, kid? I’ll do my best.”
Peter leans into Tony’s palm and closes his eyes. “I guess that’s all I can ask you for.”