Chapter Text
He doesn’t get the call; Pepper does. In fact, even Rhodey knows before him, given his residence with Tony at the compound while they get his legs right. If things had been different, and he hadn’t just had his face beaten in by someone who he considered one of his closest friends, then maybe the way things unraveled would have been different.
But, they aren’t. Tony can hardly stand or sit or do anything in the same space for more than ten seconds at a time. He knows he’s on a manic trip - he’s trying his best with Rhodey, but even his oldest friend is finding his presence trying as of late. His mood swings are intense, even for him, and it’s not fair to let Rhodey bare the burden of them, hence why he makes himself scarce from all other life forms as much as possible, but it’s a vicious cycle of the guilt and need to help his best friend walk again weighed with the need to spare him from Tony himself.
It’s a dark couple of months, all to say that Tony isn’t in the right head space to be given such colossal news. Not that there would have been a good time.
He knows something is up; Pepper goes from irritated with him to calm and understanding, even when he says particularly harsh things that would have been sure to get a rise out of her before. She doesn’t say anything for awhile, then one night he gets caught in-between her and Rhodey ushering him to the table for dinner. It’s formally set and everything for him already, not something they often do, so he knows.
“Just tell me. Whatever it is. I can’t deal with you two making faces behind my back anymore,” he snips. God, he sounds ugly. He doesn’t want to hear himself talk either.
Pepper sighs, looking down at her hands on the table. Maybe she’s looking at that ring and wondering why she bothers. Rhodey looks morose - he’s got that long and sad face on that is reserved only for Tony’s poorest behavior.
“Tony.” He can see the gears in Pepper’s head turning, as if she hasn’t practiced whatever it is she’s about to say already. “Some news has some up the channels in the company. Apparently, the board was trying to squash it before it reached you or me, but…”
Great. They’re trying to bar him out again. Well, they’ve dealt with it before.
“There’s a kid. With a paternity test.”
Oh.
Oh.
“Pep, we’ve been here before,” Tony says carefully, but he knows already. With that gut clenching and sinking feeling, he knows. Why else the charade?
She just gives him her gentlest smile. “I sent Happy to get a confirmation in person. He sat there with him while the blood was drawn, and it was Helen, Tony. There’s no mistake or falsifying this one.”
Wow, the list of people who know about this before Tony grows longer and longer.
Wait -
“Him? It’s a boy?” Tony isn’t sure why it matters - his kid or not, this is a disaster waiting to happen.
Pepper nods. “His name is - ”
Tony stands abruptly, the chair making the most heinous sound on the floor. “Don’t.”
“Tony.” Rhodey crosses his arms, like he’s there for crowd control. Which he is, sort of.
“I don’t want to know.”
“Honey.” Pepper just looks sad, and Tony knows this could be the last straw between them. She’s put up with so much of his shit, and a legitimate paternity claim on top of everything going on right now is sure to be the final blow.
Idly, he realizes she’s wearing a sleek black dress. A funeral dress, he thinks. A dress to wear when you put something to rest.
“I can’t.”
Tony thinks of his mother’s face, both the face he remembers from his earliest childhood, but also the face he saw at her funeral. They kept his father’s casket closed at his funeral; he wasn’t spared the less violet death. He then thinks of Steve Roger’s face and his own face after he looked in the mirror post Siberia.
He can’t even imagine what combination of his face he’d see in this kid.
Tony thinks about running straight to his liquor cabinet in the lab; he thinks about locking himself in his bedroom. He does neither. Instead, he gets in the first car parked in the lot and takes a drive. Best to put the distance in-between himself and the others for the moment.
He knows that his thoughts should be full of what-ifs and how’s and a host of paternal guilt, but surprisingly, they are not. Part of the reason they built the compound where they built is because of the pretty scenery, so Tony drives those back roads, twisting and turning, for hours, and there’s scarce a thought to be had in his head for once.
Mercifully, they give him space the rest of the day, even when he returns to the compound. It’s dark and quiet all the time now since the team splintered, but this evening it seems especially dim. Tony faceplants into his bed when he returns and doesn’t need to tell FRIDAY to dim the lights. The next morning though, there’s a gentle hand running through his hair. He hasn’t bathed in a couple of days, and it’s that thought that really wakes him up.
“Pep?” he asks, trying to subdue his usual morning ire. She usually don’t try and talk to him before caffeine has time to kick in, but she’s sitting on the edge of the bed, dressed and ready to go somewhere.
“I’m going into the city to meet with him,” she says. “He agreed to come in and talk with a few people.”
It takes him a second, then yesterday catches up to him. Tony looks away from her sharply. Right.
“I know you don’t feel ready to come with me, and I’m not going to push it right now, but I wanted you to know that certain people will be present there. I couldn’t shut down the entire board.”
Certain people being lawyers, she means.
“Apparently, he’s agreed to sign some things.” Pepper sighs, twisting her engagement ring around. When he doesn’t respond, she stands gracefully and clicks away.
He assumes that means this kid is willing to sign away his connection and claim to Stark Industries at the very least, but there are all sorts of things he knows they’ll try to make him sign.
Just how old is this kid? Suddenly, Tony feels existential dread coming on in a whole new way. There was no mention of a guardian signing, just the kid. Christ. It’d be one thing to find out there was a toddler somewhere, even though he knows that it’s impossible anymore since he’s been with Pepper, but it’s a whole other thing to find out about a kid that’s old enough to sign his own legal paperwork.
He lies around in bed, wrestling with the words on his tongue. He could ask FRIDAY; she surely has all the information, but he doesn’t. He does, however, get up and shower. He puts on one of his favorite pinstripe suits, similar to one he wore when he came to power in SI. His motions are made up before his mind.
When he comes out of his room, Rhodey is waiting, dressed more causally in a leather jacket with car keys hanging off his fingers. “You ready?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
They drive in silence all the way into the city. Rhodey knows better than to say a single thing about anything - one word will tip Tony into a downward spiral and he will call his suit and fly right the fuck back to the compound. Rhodey pulls up parallel to the tower and idles the car, waiting for Tony to get out. Tony thinks about commenting on how smoothly he drove here - previous attempts had been jerkier with his new legs.
He gets out without a word, and Rhodey immediately takes off. Tony stands there watching, aware of some people on the street noticing his presence slowly. He sees a young man, early twenties, with a dark cap pulled on over his head and some sunglasses and thinks - that could be him, for all he knows. Anyone out here could be mine.
Inside, he grabs an elevator and FRIDAY automatically takes him to the correct floor. He wonders if she warned Pepper he was coming after all. When he gets out, the halls are quiet. In his ear, FRIDAY tells him which conference room it is, and that they’ve already been in there for an hour.
It takes longer for him to get his feet moving now that there are no immediate prying eyes watching him. The conference room in question is a larger one, and it spans across the building with floor to ceiling windows on one side and glass on the other, so that as Tony approaches he can see everyone inside.
He notices Pepper first - she’s put herself at the head of the table. She’s got a bold red lip on, which he knew she would, because she once confided that the darker her lip color the more in charge she felt. It’s a nice thing to be able to predict, right now.
The kid is easy to pick out. First of all, he’s sitting next to Pepper, and Tony is sure that his fiancé put him there to protect him as much as possible, whether it’s from himself or from the lawyers. Second, the kid sticks out like a sore thumb with his baggy jeans and hoodie. He’s sitting with his back to Tony, but he can see some shaggy curls and a slight neck with poor posture.
Tony walks up until he’s directly behind the sitting kid right on the other side of the glass. Some of the businessmen in the room begin to notice him, conversations around the room growing quiet as they watch him watch the kid. It’s a ripple effect that ends at the head of the table. First, Pepper notices him, her face almost stricken. Then -
Then he turns. This nameless kid to Tony turns and looks at him.
He feels nothing for a moment. Then, his heart explodes. The thumping and rushing of blood to his head is so intense that he clutches at his reactor and wonders if he’s actually having a heart attack. He stumbles back away from the glass, Pepper rising on the other side in concern. He tries to wave it away, but he ends up retreating with his tail between his legs, finding an empty office space and putting a door in-between him and everyone else.
Deep breathes, FRIDAY reminds him. It’s bad enough that she suggests he sit with his head between his legs, and his legs are such like jelly now that he has no choice. When someone politely knocks at the door he’s leaning against, he slams a fist back against it to hopefully warn them off.
When he can’t hold it in anymore, he gasps for breath, and it sounds like he’s dying. It certainly feels like he is. He can’t suppress the groan anymore, and he hopes whoever it is out there is gone now and can’t hear him.
God, those eyes - he wouldn’t be able to mistake those eyes for anyone else’s, and neither would anyone else in that room. Not just because they’re the same color and shape as Tony’s - that anyone could see, but also because Tony recognizes the look in them. That dead, been dead look. It’s a look born out of something lacking, and because Tony doesn’t know anything about this kid he can only assume his lack of a father in his life might be the cause of it.
No one bothers him again in that room. Enough time goes by that the meeting must be long over, but Tony sits there on that floor and catalogues the little things he could notice about the kid. Besides the eyes, the kid had a lot of curls, a few freckles across the high parts of his cheeks, indicating he might have been tanner in the past than he currently is. Scrawny over all, although he tries to hide it under the baggy clothing. His complexion isn’t super similar to Tony’s, but it would have been a near match to his mother’s.
He must be around around eighteen. Old enough that lawyers can ask him to sign those papers, but not much older, because in reality he looks about fourteen.
Once again, when Tony opens the door, Rhodey is standing almost directly outside of it. He’s ditched his leather jacket and rolled up the sleeves on his button down under it. “You’re lucky I can still keep tabs on you even through a door, otherwise there would have been an EMT up in here.”
“Did…” Tony trails off, looking down the hall where the conference room is. “Did you see him?”
Rhodey shakes his head.
“He’s gone?”
He nods.
Tony nods.
“Right.” He feels like collapsing on this side of the door again, now that no one else is around.
“You ready to face the music or you wanna run back to the compound?”
“I don’t -” Tony gasps for air, and Rhodey makes to move for him.
“Hey, hey, take a breath and hold it for a second, okay?” Rhodey doesn’t actually touch him, which he’s grateful for. He tries, he really does, but it feels like a losing battle. “Yeah okay, I think we’re done here. Let’s head back.”
“No. No, I’m staying in the city.”
“Really?”
Tony has been hiding at the compound since Siberia despite loudly protesting its lack of style or comforts before all of that. No one has been able to drag him out of it for months.
He doesn’t say anything else, he just slides along the walls until he’s back at the elevator, FRIDAY ushering them up into a living quarter for him that he hasn’t used in two years. Putting a place for them in where they worked didn’t exactly impress Pepper at the time, but he finds it just the same when he exits the elevator.
Rhodey doesn’t follow him past the kitchen. Tony disappears into the master bedroom and closes the door softly. “Okay girl - it’s time.”
FRIDAY pulls it all up for him; Peter Parker. Age nineteen - barely. Born right here in New York state, and raised here all of his life, it looks like. Mother - Mary Fitzgerald. Wow. It takes him awhile to rack to head for that name. The kid graduated from Midtown the previous May; Tony wonders if he naturally came by his enthusiasm for STEM or if he felt the pressure from his biological factors. Of course, he can see Mary died when Peter was very young. His listed guardian is May Parker, an aunt by marriage.
May Parker has a listed address in Queens. Tony wonders if that’s where Peter lives; he can’t find any other address for him.
Through the aid of tagged social media, Tony finds pictures of Peter, mostly from the last few years. There are a few through Midtown he finds too. Academic decathlon photos, one from a marching band even, though Peter’s face isn’t really recognizable in the sea of faces and poor image quality. None of these pictures really seem to match the kid he just saw. They’re the same boy, clearly, but there’s something missing in these photos.
He puts all the information away; his heart feels like it’s functioning almost normally again. He hasn’t had anything to eat in over twenty-four hours, and it’s actively hurting him now, so he emerges to grab his friend and leave for dinner.
Pepper finds them at the low key spot Rhodey picked; she slides into a cramped seat next to Tony and picks off of his plate. For the moment, no one says anything and it feels okay to be outside in the real world.
Rhodey takes off after dinner. Pepper walks back to the tower with him, arm-in-arm. “As soon as some of these legal papers are filed, it will be unavoidable. It’ll get leaked, Tony.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Regardless of what relationship you want, he’s going to need some help for awhile. He’ll need protection. You know it’s possible someone might try something, and you don’t want that hanging over your head.”
“Given the fact he isn’t here, I’m assuming you still have Happy tailing him, regardless of whether the kid knows it or not.”
“Well, I wasn’t going to leave him completely exposed.”
“You’re a saint, Pepper Potts.”
“Tony.” She doesn’t follow him into the building. She stops where they are, even as Tony continues walking. “You’re going to stay here?”
“This was our baby, wasn’t it? Once upon a time?”
“Tony.”
“Guess this one is just 100% mine.”
“Tony.”
She’s getting further and further behind him, fading into the background. All of her red lipstick is gone now.
“You did good today, Potts.”
Once he’s back upstairs, Tony remembers how much he hated these living quarters too; of course, nothing has ever felt like home like Malibu did, but that’s all gone now, and it’s only because it was the first place he built for himself after his parents died and left him all their property that he really liked the house. Truth is, nothing ever feels homey to him. He hasn’t the foggiest idea how that should feel.
Peter didn’t sign every paper put in front of him today; Tony looks over the forms he did and did not sign. He has relinquished the rights to claiming any part of the company in any event, but he didn’t sign documents that mandated he desist in contacting Tony further.
The kid hasn’t been trying to contact him though. Turns out the kid had a standard paternity test run after he turned eighteen - indicating he had no idea who his father was all his life - and it was the lab technician in a hospital that got the results and tried to do something with it. His lawyers were able to easily squash that, but apparently after that the news got around to different board members.
The kid never actually did anything with the results himself though. He didn’t come to the tower demanding to be seen, he didn’t run out to a paper or news channel, the surest and fastest way he would have gotten Tony’s attention. He’s been sitting on these results for months now.
Tony doesn’t let this information inform him on anything Peter Parker though; there could be any number of reasons for that, but by the end of the night he knows he will search out Peter sooner rather than later. Happy won’t be enough protection when the story breaks, and they need to make sure that the kid is safe no matter what. Tony owes him that.
The next morning, Tony makes himself get up and make a complete breakfast at a respectable time. Today, he dresses in joggers and a hoodie, grabs a baseball cap to throw on. He’s ready to hit the streets incognito, but turns out he doesn’t need to. Peter doesn’t exactly come to him, but May Parker sure does.
So does the rest of the world.
The story didn’t even last the night; everyone else gets to find out Tony Stark has a son in just the forty-eight hours after he finds out.
The crowds outside the tower are mostly news outlets, some independent reporters, or even Christine Everhart and a few other periodical publications, but there are clearly just some curious New Yorkers gathered with them as well. It’s enough of a mob that extra security has already been called and gathered in front of the building. Tony stands in the otherwise empty ground floor entrance and looks at them on the other side of the glass, cameras frantically flashing at him and wonders where Peter Parker is and if this is why he didn’t do anything with the paternity results.
May Parker stands at the front of the mob, trying to fend off some of the people trying to push past her. She looks frazzled, and there’s no way Tony would have recognized her from the DMV photo FRIDAY pulled along with Peter’s info, but she succinctly informs Tony that facial recognition has positively identified her.
Tony asks one of the security officers left inside to grab her for him.
When she comes in from outside, she brings some of that chaotic feeling with her. She’s flustered, trying to fix her hair behind her, and maybe didn’t expect to actually see Tony, judging by the look on her face.
“Mr. Stark,” she says. “I’m looking for my nephew, Peter Parker. Is he here?”