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When Tony wakes, he is hollow.
You do feel something - you feel empty, his therapist once told him when he struggled to describe his utter lack of emotion on a bad day, but empty isn’t the right word for this. Empty implies he was full when he laid down to sleep and has woken to find himself depleted. That isn’t the case. He was devoid yesterday, too, and the day before that. Empty implies that he’s transparent like a drinking glass, see-through - he isn’t.
He forces himself out of bed, body leaden, and makes his way downstairs. Pepper and Morgan sit at the table with their respective breakfasts. Morgan’s plate is accompanied by a small cup of milk, Pepper’s by a large mug of coffee. They greet him happily, as they always do, as they always have, and he can’t help but think he’ll never again comprehend what it’s like to be so genuinely happy with such ease, though he knows he will. He was happy last week. He was happy when the tear-away calendar on the fridge displayed May thirty-first.
June is not a happy month. It used to be. It was two years ago. It wasn’t last year. It isn’t now.
It’s a bad day, Tony has been told he’s supposed to say. Why didn’t you tell me? Pepper will ask when the pendulum inevitably swings from feeling nothing to feeling absolutely everything all at once in a single, brief gust of panic and misery.
Tony smiles back at his family. He wraps up it’s a bad day like fine china bundled in linens and stuffed away in a drawer for better days, days that aren’t so dreary. He hopes those better days will find him. He believes they will. He has to believe they will.
If he doesn’t believe it, he will slip. He knows this. If he lets out one inkling of bad day, the rest will come pouring out in a flash flood of grief - he knows this, too. Tony trusts his feelings. He has to trust his feelings. If he doesn’t, terrible things might happen. This, he knows better than anyone.
It began, as most tragedies do, with a gut feeling.
“You’re being ridiculous,” Pepper said, and Tony pinched the bridge of his nose just beneath the reading glasses he was apparently old enough to require. “Peter’s practically an adult. He’ll be fine.”
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this, Pep. You of all people should know better than to write that off.”
“I’m not writing it off-”
“-kind of sounds like you are-”
“-it’s a school trip, Tony-”
“-that doesn’t mean anything.” Tony grit his teeth and felt a headache ignite behind his eyes. “You know that doesn’t mean anything. How are two run-of-the-mill teachers supposed to keep Spider-Man out of trouble?”
“Spider-Man? That’s what you’re worried about? I thought he promised May he was only bringing the suit in case of an emergency.”
But Pepper didn’t get it. She loved Peter, but she didn’t know him like he did. Not as truly. Not as deeply. She had yet to grasp how reckless, how compassionate, how self-sacrificial the kid tended to be. As far as Peter was concerned, a little old lady’s stolen purse very much qualified as an emergency.
As far as Tony was concerned, a bullet or stab wound was far from a fair trade-off for the return of a stolen purse - but he’d never been able to reconcile Peter to such points of view, just like he couldn’t reconcile Morgan’s love of spaghetti with her hatred of fresh tomatoes. His kids were stubborn like that.
“That doesn’t mean anything, either.” Tony sighed and dropped his head into his hands. Seconds later, Pepper settled next to him on the couch, a supportive hand laid on his shoulder. “How would you feel? If it was Morgan, I mean. Would you want your teenage vigilante across the pond with a supersuit? Without you?”
“I think I’d be nervous,” Pepper said, slow and calculated, “but I wouldn’t stop her. Especially not six months out from her eighteenth birthday. Kids have to grow up at some point, whether we like it or not.”
Tony couldn’t help but think her opinion on the matter would change if - God forbid and, frankly, over his dead body - Morgan one day decided to take up the Stark mantle of superheroism. For now, though, he placed a hand overtop hers and conceded: “Yeah. You’re probably right.”
“Probably? When am I ever not right?”
Tony allowed himself to fall into the ease of their banter, allowed himself to smile, allowed himself to step back from the crashing waves of don’t let him go, don’t let him go, don’t let him go.
The waves crashed anyway.
“May and Happy might be a few minutes late,” Pepper says from the doorway of the lab. Her voice is uncharacteristically quiet, her smile small and uncertain. She glances toward her feet as if in search of eggshells. “They want to stop on the way and grab a bottle of wine.”
“I’ll cover it,” Tony says reflexively.
“You know May won’t accept that.”
“You know I won’t accept her not accepting it.”
Pepper relaxes a little at his light-hearted tone. She rolls her eyes and takes a few steps into the room. There is no eggshell crunch, and Tony can read the relief written all over her face, just like he knows she can read bad day on his. Thankfully, she doesn’t bring it up - likely in order to avoid the complete breakdown they both know is waiting in the wings.
“You two are more alike than either of you know,” she says.
Tony tries hard not to think about the one terrible way in which he and May are now more alike than ever. He clears his throat and pats the second stool beside him, an offer Pepper gladly takes him up on. Said stool has been more vacant over the past year than Tony ever wanted it to be. He tries not to think about that, either.
He can’t think about it. He can’t think about the kid, can’t imagine him here in the lab, can’t allow himself to hear the phantom laughter that sometimes still bounces off these walls when he least expects it. If he thinks about it, he might cry, and if he starts crying now, he may very well never stop.
But the tears turn out to be, just like all the other awful things he’s ever known, inevitable.
The tide turns about an hour after dinner, once Morgan has been tucked into bed and the wine is gone. And this is how Tony knows the tears are coming: for the first time in six and a half years, he downs a glass of alcohol, and nobody bats an eyelash.
May cries first. They’re all four gathered around her phone, laughing at a video she has saved of a young Peter trying on his new Iron Man helmet in the middle of a Party City store, and her chuckle breaks off into a sob halfway through. She throws a hand over her mouth. Happy wraps an arm around her shoulders and Pepper lays an empathetic hand on her knee.
“I’m sorry,” May says just as Tony mutters a broken shit and drops his burning eyes into his palms. “I’m sorry. He’s just...I’m…”
“Don’t be sorry,” Pepper whispers. Her other hand plants firmly between Tony’s shoulder blades. The dig of her wedding rings is a comfort. “Either of you. You have no reason to be sorry.”
“I should have protected him,” Tony says. “I was supposed to be there. Fuck. I’m sorry, May. I’m so sorry. I was supposed to protect him.”
May takes a deep, hitched breath. “So was I. I shouldn’t have let him go. I knew something bad was going to happen. He shouldn’t have been there alone.”
The room lapses into silence, broken only by the occasional sniffle - mostly because there’s nothing left to say. Their should have’s and shouldn’t have’s are of no use now. It’s too little, too late.
It’s been three hundred and sixty-four days since Peter Parker went missing. Two hundred and seventy-two since he was presumed dead. An eternity since this ocean of grief first drew them in.
They should have been there, but they weren’t. They shouldn’t have let him go, but they did.
Peter should be alive - but he isn’t. No amount of tears will change that.
They cry anyway.
Tony’s fears materialized alongside news of a mysterious water monster in Venice.
“Tell me you weren’t involved in that shit,” he said the instant Peter picked up his call, forgoing the pretense of greetings. “For fuck’s sake, kid.”
“I wasn’t-”
“-you know what? No. Nevermind. Don’t tell me that. You’d be a liar.”
“That wasn’t me.”
“Liar. I called it.”
“Tony,” Peter said with that signature teenage huff. “I swear, that wasn’t me. I wasn’t even there. I saw it on the news, just like you.”
Tony glanced up at the television. The fish bowl over the unknown hero’s head made him feel inclined to admit defeat.
But the waves crashed.
Don’t let him go. Don’t let him go. Don’t let him go.
“Pete,” he said, and it came out more strained than he’d intended. “I swear, if you’re lying…”
“I’m not. But, uh - if, hypothetically, I was - how would you finish that threat?”
“I’d call May.”
There was a weighted pause. “Noted.”
“Kid, just…” Tony ran a hand through his hair and tried to ignore the tightness in his chest. “Just be careful. You’re supposed to be on vacation. Don’t go throwing yourself into any heroic bull, alright?”
“Yes, Mom.”
“You’re a mouthy little shit, you know that?”
“I learned from the best.”
After a few minutes of significantly more mundane how’s-your-trip-going conversation, Peter hurriedly hung up with a half-baked excuse of dinner plans that Tony just barely believed. The news moved onto less outlandish things, and he muted it.
He scrolled through his contacts, let his thumb hover over the name May Parker, then set the phone aside. He was probably overreacting. Peter was fine.
Everything was fine.
It’s funny, Tony thinks, how the universe likes to play these sorts of tricks on him.
(It’s not funny. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts. But he has to find it funny. He has to laugh. He doesn’t want to cry.)
Exactly one year after the fact, once May and Happy are back in their Queens apartment and the tears have tapered off, he takes a call at four in the morning, heart in his throat and hands trembling. Steve says through the speaker, voice clear but clearly shaken: “Don’t freak out - but you need to come to the compound. Now.”
Tony’s first thought is that he needs to implement some sort of standardized what not to do when you call Tony Stark at four in the morning training for the rest of the team, rule number one being not to start the call with the phrase ‘don’t freak out.’
His first word is a groggy, “Shit.”
“It’s nothing terrible,” Steve says. “Not really. But it’s an emergency.”
“Is everything okay, or is it life-or-death? Pick one, Rogers.”
Tony spits the words out like venom, but Steve barely falters. “It’s...complicated.”
Like that makes him feel any better. Like that even slightly assuages his fear that he’s just lost or is about to lose somebody else. It’s complicated - isn’t it always?
Beside him, Pepper sleeps. Down the hall, Morgan snuggles her plush Mickey Mouse, none the wiser to the darker workings of this world. Tony would give anything to keep it that way.
He says, feeling as though he’s about to come apart at the seams, “I’m on my way.”
“Don’t freak out.”
Tony was out of bed in an instant, feet on the cold floor and mind abuzz before his eyes were fully open. He pressed the phone tight against his ear. “That’s not the most comforting way to start a pre-sunrise phone call. Happy, what the fuck?”
“I told you not to freak out.”
“I’ll take that into consideration,” Tony said tersely. “Tell me what you want me to not freak out over first.”
The wooden floorboards creaked beneath him as he paced. Pepper shifted in her sleep and he forced himself to still, anxiety and adrenaline parading across his skin like fire ants.
“I’m in a jet on my way to the Netherlands,” Happy said, tone belaying that he wished it wasn’t something he had to say. “The kid...well. He got himself into some trouble.”
“Fuck. Fuck.”
“Yeah, remember how I told you not to freak out? This would be the time to apply that.”
“What the hell is he doing in the Netherlands?” Tony hissed. “I told him to lay low. Shit. Is he okay?”
“Mostly, I think. He sounded pretty shaken up.” Happy paused. It was an invitation extended for Tony to yell, rant, or ramble. Tony did none of those things. Instead, he stood and stared at the first tendrils of light as they spilled around the edges of the curtains, jaw unhinged. “Tony? I kind of need a reaction here.”
“Panic.” Tony cleared his throat. “I would say panic is my reaction.”
“Don’t panic. I’m handling it. This is nothing to un-retire Iron Man over.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“Yes, you would.”
He would. For Peter, for Morgan, for Pepper - for any of them. In a heartbeat, he would.
“I should call May.” He held the phone between his jaw and shoulder as he reached his prosthesis, somehow all at once bone-weary and primed for a battle he hoped he wouldn’t have to fight. “Let me know once you’ve got him.”
“Will do.”
“Hap?”
“Yeah?”
Tony swallowed hard around the burning lump of emotion that rose in his throat. “Give my kid a hug for me. Tell him - tell him I love him.”
“You can tell him yourself when I bring him home.” The steel confidence in Happy’s voice was falsified, Tony knew. “Take care of yourself. I’ll call you later.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
History would later mark this as the moment that the truth, in spite of his insistence on shoving it away, resonated in his bones, eternal and unshakeable:
Peter wasn’t coming home.
Tony pulls out an old trick that he knows from experience will infuriate his wife, but that he deems necessary all the same: he places a hastily scribbled note with a vague explanation of his whereabouts on her nightstand, and he leaves.
The night is black and the crickets are still singing when he starts the car. He’s wearing an old sweatshirt, worn jeans, and tennis shoes - a far cry from his usual attire when he has to leave the lake house. The air is cold. He is alone, unsupported, free-falling through this horrible thing called emotion. None of it feels real.
His hands shake the entire drive, even though he white-knuckles the steering wheel in an attempt to still them. Tony tries to shut out the wonderings of who, where, how, but the harder he pushes them down, the stronger they rise. Those thirty minutes feel like an eternity. By the time he pulls up to the compound, he’s abandoned all efforts at quelling the panic.
He knows, at least, that Steve and Rhodey are okay, because they’re waiting for him on the steps when he gets out of the car. He hugs Rhodey a little tighter than he probably should, and Steve much tighter than he ever has.
“Who’s hurt?” Tony asks the instant they part, because somebody’s hurt is the exact genre of worry etched into both their faces.
“Nobody,” Rhodey says - but then he pauses and takes a deep, unsettled breath, like he has news he isn’t quite sure how to break. “Well. Not really.”
Steve nods gravely. “Like I said, it’s-”
“If you say ‘it’s complicated’ again, I swear, I’ll punch your perfect teeth in. Who. Is. Hurt?”
They share a knowing look, and for just a second, Tony fears he might actually end up punching somebody’s teeth in.
“Let’s go inside first.” Rhodey’s voice is full of unwanted sympathy. He grips Tony’s good shoulder. “You might want to sit down for this.”
Tony says, words instilled with a deathly sort of calm, “You might want to tell me right fucking now.”
And Tony knows that look, that steel sadness, that if you only knew in his best friend’s eyes. In the end, Rhodey is right: he should have sat down.
“We found Peter, Tones. He’s here. He’s alive.”