Archive of Our Own ^beta

It’s a little past midnight and Tony is three drinks in, bent over the craps table, and surrounded by the usual dazzling array of rich, attractive assholes. There’s a twinge in his back that says he’s been leaning over the table for too long and a dull pressure in his head that he knows from experience is the nascent edge of a brutal headache. 

After the last roll, he’s pretty sure he’s down by a few thousand bucks. He pushes away from the table and downs the rest of his drink. He could swear that he remembers this being fun.

As he meanders his way over to the nearest bar - maybe he can outdrink the migraine and be too far gone to remember it tomorrow - his phone buzzes. And then buzzes again. And then a third time, and he’s convinced the buzzing takes on a pointed, insistent tone. He winces when he sees that it’s Pepper. He already knows she’s asking him why he’s out getting drunk when he’s supposed to be on a plane to New York at 6 am tomorrow. 

He’s putting the phone back in his jacket pocket, texts unread, when he feels someone staring a hole into his back. The muscles in his neck and back tighten instinctively, as he turns, fight or flight mode kicking in in his brain - even as he tells himself, even as he knows it’s almost certainly just a member of his inexplicably adoring public. 

When Tony spots the culprit, he feels like the compulsively suspicious basket case the media says he is.

The kid leaning against the wall is immediately visible in his casual clothing, cute and probably barely old enough to be drinking the cocktail in his hands. Tousled, curly brown hair, big brown eyes. He’s blatantly staring at Tony. He’s staring so hard he forgets to keep drinking his drink, and the straw falls out of his mouth a little. Tony feels his own mouth curling, amused despite himself. He catches the kid’s eyes, raises his eyebrows, and jerks his head a little to tell the kid to come join him.  These days, the clean-cut college look doesn’t do much for him, but this kid looks like he could convince Tony to make an exception.

He needs something to distract him. 

The kid startles hard, eyes widening. Oh, he really is cute. He glances around like he’s looking for anyone watching, then hesitantly makes his way over. 

“See something you like?” Tony asks.  He can feel his posture changing on autopilot as he says it, eyes narrowing, head tilting to the side. It’s such an easy persona to slip on - like the jacket in the back of your closet that’s ugly as sin and ten years out of date, but that you keep around because it fits and you can’t be bothered to buy a new one. (Or something like that. Tony generally doesn’t do his own clothes shopping.) The kid flushes like he’s been caught out, as if he wasn’t painfully obvious enough already. He’s nervously twisting the hem of his t-shirt with the hand not holding the drink. He sticks out like a sore thumb.

“Uh, well, Mr. Stark, I actually-” he stutters.

“Call me Tony, sweetheart,” Tony says, stepping a little closer to him. It’s funny - the way the kid stares at him with starstruck awe is both gratifying yet depressingly, easily predictable. And the next step in the dance is- “What’s your name?” The kid swallows hard.

“Tony,” he says, with a slight catch to his voice, mind clearly racing, eyes darting all over Tony’s face. “Right, uh, I’m Peter. Uh. I just wanted to ask you about your, uh, about the new hydroponics program that Stark Industries just launched-”

“Huh, seriously? That’s the line you’re going with?” Tony says skeptically, already tired of the whole thing. He hates when people try the ‘I’m just such a big fan of your work’ opener. It always backfires on them when they obviously have no idea what they’re talking about.

Peter looks embarrassed, and a little deflated.

“Never mind. Sorry, this was a bad idea, I shouldn’t have-” he says, grimacing. He leans back a little, like he’s about to bolt.  Maybe Tony should’ve just indulged him.

“Aw, no, come on, I’ll talk to you about hydroponics if you want. What, did you read the white paper?” Peter doesn’t respond. He’s staring at Tony’s chest. Or – not his chest, exactly, but right where the arc reactor is underneath his suit. Maybe a coincidence, but - it sends a weird, uncomfortable prickle up Tony’s spine that he doesn’t like at all.

“Hey, kid, you okay?” Tony asks, reaching up to touch his shoulder. Peter’s hand flicks out, almost too fast, and grabs him by the wrist before he can make contact.  He jerks his gaze up and there’s a wild look in his eyes. Tony instinctively tries to yank his hand back, but Peter’s got it in a vice grip.

“Sorry,” Peter says again. “This was stupid. I shouldn’t have come here.” He hesitates, like he’s going to say something else, but he just snaps his mouth closed instead. He drops Tony’s arm and backs away fast.

Weird. Very weird. Tony’s alarm bells always go off when someone’s acting weird around him, these days. He turns to his security to point him out, but they’re nowhere in sight, and his nerves start to spike. He grabs his phone and mashes the panic button hard, backing up until his back hits a wall.

By the time they come running over, the kid is long gone. Useless. What is he even paying them for? They’re not supposed to listen to him when he tells them to leave him alone.

This is why he never lets Happy take the night off.

“No, it’s fine, just kidding,” he says, on the come-down from his slight overreaction. He can see the looks they’re giving each other. “Just testing you guys. Gotta keep you on your toes.”

He looks down and realizes he’s compulsively clenching his left hand, sharp pain running up and down his arm. Get it the fuck together, Tony. Some nerdy groupie doesn’t understand boundaries and suddenly Tony’s flipping out in the middle of the casino.

 He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, forcibly dragging himself back into the present and away from the dark corners that are always lurking in the back of his mind. Fun. This is fun. He’s having fun.

He goes back to get another drink.

At the end of the night, he collapses into the backseat of his car and has his driver take him back home. Alone. Disgustingly sober, because he had in fact developed a full-blown pounding headache while he was still lucid enough to care. He doesn’t go out like this much, any more. But he’d been trying to relax for once in his life - he’s been too wound up lately, too tense, in a funk for no real reason he can pinpoint.

It hadn’t gone great, obviously. Once he had calmed down it had been obvious that the kid was probably just a socially awkward fanboy who wanted to gush about how cool and smart Tony is, and Tony was an asshole (because he’s always an asshole) and then had a freak out in public (because on top of that he’s also a paranoid basket case).

Sometimes he’s exhausted by being himself.

His phone buzzes.

The third round of autonomous vehicle testing is complete, sir. Transmitting results now.

He opens up the files JARVIS sends him, but five seconds of squinting at the results leave his head swimming. Maybe tomorrow, then. He steadfastly continues to ignore the unread chain of texts from Pepper. He doesn’t even know why they still think they need him in the room at those meetings.

He smiles wryly and closes his eyes, drops his head against the back of the seat. Christ, his headache just won’t go away.  He fumbles around in the seat pocket and dry swallows a few painkillers. This shit makes him feel old. Wide-eyed twenty somethings make him feel old. He is old.

He’s old, his life is old. He drinks too much, he sleeps too little. He picks up someone he’s never going to see again. He spends three days straight locked in his workshop making some world-changing trinket - an upgraded arc reactor or a breakthrough in quantum computing. He finally collapses into bed when his body gives out, and in the pitch black silence the weight of his own mind crushes him as he sees the list of problems that have yet to be solved.

You’re just one man, Tony, Pepper would always say, back when she was still around in the middle of the night to say things like that (before Tony had finally, inevitably drained her patience dry). But it doesn’t matter. It will never be enough.

In his worst moments, his exhausted mind chasing sleep like a white rabbit, sometimes he wonders – if Yinsen could see what he’s done with his life, would he have still thought it worth jumping in front of that bullet for him? Would the scales ever be balanced?

Tony grimaces internally, irritated by being so embarrassingly self-pitying even inside his own head, and tries to catch some sleep.  

Eventually, the car stops, and he’s pulled out of his half doze. He opens his eyes and looks at the clock on the dashboard - it’s nearly 4 am. He looks around. He’s not at home. They’re up high on an overpass that he doesn’t recognize - it’s not the main road, and they’re not alone.

There are two cars about 20 feet up and off on the shoulder, and a truly flattering number of men waiting for him.

The driver doesn’t look particularly concerned. Tony doesn’t recognize him. He’s some new guy. Tony’s never letting Happy take a night off again.  

Fuck.  Why hadn’t he been paying attention-

The driver turns around, gun in his hand directly aimed at Tony’s face. Tony instinctively flinches, head slamming against the window.

“Get out of the car, Mr. Stark,” the driver says, not particularly pleasantly.

“I don’t know if you heard, but I’ve been out of the arms race for a few years, it was kind of a whole thing,” Tony says, breathing through the adrenaline and blinking the spots out of his vision, going for his phone, hand shaking. One tap and JARVIS will initiate the kidnapping protocol, have a trace on his location and a SWAT team out here within 15 minutes.

“Don’t bother,” the driver says. “That useless piece of crap won’t help you.”

Tony’s so offended he almost forgets to be scared. He looks down. The phone is bricked, completely worthless.

That shouldn’t be possible. He’s Tony fucking Stark, people can’t hack his phone.

“Get out of the car. I’m not going to ask again,” says the driver.

Tony looks at the gun in his face. He gets out of the car.

He’s immediately grabbed by one of the goons, hands cuffed in front of him, pushed out into the open. Another car has pulled up behind them, boxing him in. The bridge they’re on must be more than twenty feet in the air, and there’s nothing below but solid pavement. Nowhere to run.

JARVIS should get an automatic alert if the tracker in my phone goes off the projected course, Tony thinks, somewhat hysterically. Should’ve thought of that before. I’ll have to program it in for the next kidnapping.

The goon holding him starts to pat him down. Tony’s not armed, obviously – that’s what he pays other people for. When he reaches the pocket of Tony’s suit jacket, though, the goon raises his eyebrows and pulls out a screwdriver.

“It’s not that I’m happy to see you, there really is just a screwdriver in my pocket,” Tony says on autopilot. The goon rolls his eyes and drops the screwdriver back into Tony’s pocket, dismissively. He shoves Tony forward, making him stumble.

Tony’s palms start to sweat. His mouth goes dry. At the end of the day, without his security team or his tech to protect him, he’s just a man pushing fifty, squishy and easily killable, with a big mouth and a charming personality. He had gotten lucky, in Afghanistan, lucky that Rhodey’s search team had somehow, miraculously found him there, in a cave that looked like a thousand other identical caves. He knows that otherwise he would have died in that cave, like he’ll probably die here tonight. 

He had, somewhere in the wretched animal part of his brain, always known it was going to end up like this. Even he can’t cheat death twice.

One of the goons steps forward and spreads his arms, grins mean and ugly. He’s a hulking brute, probably twice Tony’s size, with a nose that looks like it’s been broken more than once. Tony’s familiar with the type. The rest of the men keep their guns trained on Tony. They’re all wearing honest-to-god body armor – and it all really does seem like overkill for little old him.

"Tony Stark,” the main goon says. Tony mentally dubs him ‘Main Goon’. Not up to his usual standard, maybe, but there’s only so much he can do under pressure. “The man himself, more or less. There's something we'd like for you to build for us," he says.

Of course. Isn’t there always.

"But you have to kidnap me to do it?” Tony says, raising his eyebrows. “I'm getting the weirdest sense of deja vu. You know, not sure if you heard, that plan didn't work out so well for the last guys who tried it."

He's just running his mouth - because he’s incapable of not running it - but he's still surprised by the condescending laughter it provokes.

"Didn't work out so well? You mean you got a lucky rescue. You won't be getting one tonight." The guy looks him up and down, smirking. He slaps Tony on the cheek, not meant to hurt but to humiliate. Tony grits his teeth and refuses to react.  

“You know I have an entire security team following behind me, right-”

"Your security? Please. Their driver already took care of them.” The guy looks Tony up and down, shaking his head in faux disappointment. “Look at you. Tony Stark hiding behind hired guns,” he says, condescending. “It's so disappointing to have to settle for the knock off instead of the real deal. But I suppose this one's better than nothing. At least he's still alive." More snickers from the peanut gallery.

Tony doesn't know what the fuck their deal is, but he doesn't like it at all. There's a clawing, panicky feeling of helplessness pressing in on all sides, clouding his vision. He glances again at the railing, and the sheer drop onto solid asphalt. Maybe he'd get lucky. 

Yeah, lucky, maybe he'd immediately break his neck instead of needing to be put out of his misery. 

His hands are cuffed. The driver has a gun to his head. His phone is useless. He knows what will happen if he goes with the man in front of him.

No way out.

Main Goon pulls a device out of his pocket, some sort of scanner, and starts waving it over Tony.

Tony breathes deep, in and out. He’s not going back to another cave to build weapons for another lunatic. He’s not.

There’s a faint scuffling at the very edge of his hearing. 

“Your car’s rigged to explode,” Main Goon says, motioning at the driver with his free hand, who pulls out what looks suspiciously like a detonator. “We’ll shove a corpse in there and they won’t even be able to identify the poor fuck by his dental records. The entire world will think you’re dead.”

Tony flicks another glance at the side of the bridge.

It would be suicidal.

Main Goon narrows his eyes suddenly, looks at the device in his hand.

“Something’s broadcasting,” he says abruptly. “Something on Stark.”

He barely registers it.

He can’t go back.

“That’s impossible,” the guy holding him protests, as Main Goon pushes him out of the way, “we should be blocking anything they could have access to here-”

Main Goon grabs Tony’s arms and plucks something from the left cuff of his suit jacket. 

“This tech isn’t local,” Main Goon says, eyes darting around. “Someone’s been tracking him.”

Tony’s attention gets pulled back from mindlessly staring down the barrel of his own mortality. He squints at the nearly-microscopic tracker. Looks like everyone’s outclassing him in the tech department, today. 

There’s another, louder scuffle, and then a thump. If Tony has to guess, it sounds remarkably like a body hitting pavement.

Main Goon raises his gun, pointing it at something behind Tony.

“Who’s there?” he demands.

The gun is snatched out of his hand by – something – something white – and he curses furiously.

“Are you fucking kidding me? Spider-Man’s here?” the guy holding Tony yells, and shoves Tony out of the way to duck in front of the car. Tony lands hard on the pavement, scraping his hands bloody. He crawls over to the concrete barrier on the side of the overpass, ducking the bullets whizzing overhead as the goons all fire into the night at-

“Spider-Man?” Tony whispers to himself, slightly gleeful.

‘Spider-Man’ is covered head to toe in a gleaming, form-fitting suit, red and blue and just a touch of gold. Tony stares at him, wide-eyed, incredulous little smile on his face. An actual fucking comic book superhero, with his very own superhero suit.

Amazing.

He lands on top of Tony’s car hard, denting the roof, making Tony wince – he should probably be worrying about other things right now, but, well, it is the Bugatti - before flipping off and knocking out the guy cowering in front of it, weaving and ducking and swinging out of the way of the gunshots aimed at him, effortless as a dancer. The goon squad seem to have briefly forgotten about Tony entirely.

And Tony should probably be taking this opportunity to run for his life, but he’s rooted in place, struck by what he’s seeing. The suit is- it’s a fucking beauty. Gorgeous, gleaming like metal, perfectly engineered, and the strong, flexible curve of it around Spider-Man’s body is striking and alien, almost like – but there’s no way.

He looks a moment longer, and realizes it must be – that suit is nanotech.

That shouldn’t even be possible. As far as Tony knows, he’s the leading authority in nanotech right now. Nanites have always been a pet project of his, a pipe dream he fiddles with when he’s bored, but to see them in use like this, up close and personal – it’s unreal.

“You guys are a long way from home!” Spider-Man says, and kicks a guy in the face. Comic book quips to complete the package-

He frowns. Does that voice sound familiar? Tony squints harder at him, tilting his head. He doesn’t have much to go on, but he thinks maybe the ass looks familiar too. Which doesn’t narrow it down at all, considering - but what an ass it is.

Spider-Man’s strong as well as fast, inhumanly so – he grabs one of the guns by the barrel right as the goon tries to shoot it, and it crumples in his hand like tin foil in a way that makes Tony’s mouth go dry. His mind is whirring. Is it the suit? Or the person in the suit? Had someone finally recreated the super soldier serum?

One of the gunshots goes astray and hits the concrete barrier near Tony, way too close for comfort, making him flinch involuntarily. He forcibly jerks himself out of his reverie. Right. Escaping. He’s not dead yet. He starts to slide away from the firefight, back against the wall.

Spider-Man kicks a guy so hard that his body flies clear across the fight and slams into the barrier six inches to Tony’s left, hitting it with enough force that it breaks the metal edge off of the shoulder of his body armor and sends it flying. Tony winces in reluctant sympathy. Unconscious Goon’s unconscious hand falls open, dropping his gun onto the ground. 

Spider-Man’s handling the fight well, but he is outnumbered, and Tony doubts he’ll make it long on foot and handcuffed if any of these guys are still standing at the end of the fight.

“And I was so close to getting out of this without dying,” he mumbles to himself.

He takes a deep breath and picks up the gun. It’s awkward to hold while still handcuffed, but he tries to focus and aim at the nearest goon. No one is paying him any attention. Hopefully all of the firing range time he’s begged for with Rhodey will actually come in use.

He fires. His aim is perfect, and the bullet hits center mass – or it would have, if a blue force field straight out of Star Trek hadn’t shimmered into life and deflected the bullet away.

Well, shit.

They’re not ignoring him anymore.

“Fucking- grab him and get the gun!” The Main Goon yells. “We need him alive!”

Tony clutches the useless gun and stumbles backwards as they start to advance on him, tripping over the debris on the ground, and wonders how much mileage he can get out of holding his own life for ransom, if they need him alive that badly. Spider-Man turns and looks at him too (multitasking by punching out another goon as he does it), the expressive eyes of his mask widening in alarm. (Now, why would you build in the functionality to convey emotions through the mask, what purpose would that serve-)

Tony steps on something hard and sharp, and when he looks down he realizes that the metal shoulder pad that he thought to be a poor aesthetic choice on the goon’s part is actually, on closer inspection, what looks to be a tiny, compact generator.

He frowns, staring at it. Could that be the source of the force field? He can’t quite remember if the force field looked like it had emanated from the shoulder. He instinctively crouches down to examine it further, and only belatedly realizes he dropped the gun to pick it up.

Well, it’s not like he can shoot anyone right now, anyway. 

Main Goon must finally run out of patience dealing with Spider-Man, because he drops his gun to pull out – another gun. This one is weird and sci-fi looking, though, and when he pulls the trigger at Spider-Man out comes a fucking laser.

Hydra laser guns, very retro. Yeah, at this point he’s definitely hit ‘hysterical’. 

It blasts Spider-Man right in the back, but it bounces off his suit like it’s nothing.

“Seriously, man? I’ve gotten some upgrades,” Spider-Man says, turning back, starting to jump over to him. “You should just- whoa.” He skids to a stop. Tony follows his line of sight. The driver is slumped against the car, holding up the detonator for the bomb.

“Back off, Spidey!” he yells, waving it around. “Let us have Stark or I’ll blow everyone up!” 

Even through the mask Tony thinks he can see a determined, stubborn set to Spider-Man’s jaw.

“Not going to happen,” he says, and he shoots out another – web? Are they webs? He’s themed, that’s so cute – to grab the detonator. The driver tries to dodge out of the way, but he trips and stumbles and drops the detonator instead.

It’s like the world slows to excruciating slow motion as he sees the guy fall, sees the detonator drop in front of him, and for a moment Tony thinks his last ever coherent thought will be are you fucking kidding me he fell on the detonator-

But Spider-Man is already leaping over to him, inhumanly fast – enhanced strength, enhanced speed, maybe enhanced reflexes? some sort of innate sixth sense, or does the suit have a computer feeding him information - grabs him around the waist, yells “Hold on!” and flings them both off of the side of the bridge just as the world explodes around him. Tony loops his arms around the slippery metal line of his shoulders and clings hard, mindlessly clutching the generator in his bound hands. The last thing he sees is one of the goons holding up a laser gun and firing it directly at them, but before he knows it he’s over the edge and in the air.

Tony is falling, and falling, and falling, and then suddenly he’s – caught, and swinging sideways, and then up again in an arc, and when he finally hits the ground it’s at a far closer distance than he thought. He tumbles out of Spider-Man’s arms, face down in the dirt on the side of the road. The generator bounces out of his hand and lands a few feet away. He takes a few huge, gulping breaths, his brain working hard to catch up with the fact that he’s still alive. When he finally opens his eyes, he’s a few feet away from Spider-Man, who – huh. Those are definitely webs hanging from the other side of the now destroyed overpass. Biological, or artificial? They must be absurdly strong to hold up under not just their combined body weight but the cumulative momentum of… falling off of an exploding bridge…

Tony digs his fingers into the dirt and distantly registers that he’s shaking with adrenaline.

Spider-Man runs over to where Tony is sprawled on the ground, grabbing him and rolling him onto his back (Tony’d protest, but his shaking limbs feel like they have the structural integrity of Jell-O at the moment). As he does, Tony can hear him chanting oh my god holy shit oh my god.

The nanites of the helmet section of his suit retract down to his neck, and the sight of his pale, earnest face is so incongruous that it takes a moment for it to click - it’s the kid from the casino. That’s why he sounded familiar. His eyes are huge and concerned, and Tony’s head hurts trying to reconcile him and his earlier nervous stuttering with the guy who just effortlessly beat up a squad of heavily armed kidnappers.

"Oh my God, Tony, please be alive, oh my god," he says, ripping Tony's ruined shirt down the middle in one smooth motion and not quite seeming to register that Tony is, in fact, very much still alive. He stops short when he sees the bulletproof vest. Tony's worn one in public ever since his rescue. It had worked this time, too – it melted into a disgusting mess, but he’s pretty sure it saved him from that laser blast. It must have hit him, but he hadn’t even felt it. Spider-Man rips the vest off too, tearing it like tissue paper, and stares at Tony’s chest underneath, scarred and not-so-whole but undamaged from today’s activities, at least.

Call him paranoid, because he is. Paranoid and alive. 

Spider-Man reaches down and touches the trembling pads of his fingers to the arc reactor, still breathing hard. Tony jerks back instinctively, so hard he thinks he pulls something, scrambling backwards. The kid jerks back too, startled, and finally seems to snap back into the present, focusing in on Tony’s face.

"Sorry, sorry, I didn't mean- I just- you're okay? I thought I saw it hit you?” He asks, in a panicked rush.

“I’ve been better,” Tony says, struggling to sit up, breathing through the fading panic. “But no, no bullet holes or… laser beam holes. Looks like the vest did its job.” He stares at the kid. One unruly lock of hair has flopped into his eyes. “Spider-Man, huh. Are you even old enough to call yourself that?”

The kid flushes.

“Wow, you’re welcome.” He looks down and notices Tony’s hands are still handcuffed together, and makes a discontented noise. He picks up one wrist and then the other, and breaks each cuff off – not breaking the chain, or the weak point at the lock, but straight up just brute force pulling the cuffs into pieces at the thickest part of the steel. His movements are gentle, but the metal bends like clay in his hands. “But yes, actually. I am.”

Tony stares at the misshapen lumps of metal as the kid drops them to the ground. He blinks a few times.  

“Tony? Are you sure you’re okay?” Tony looks back up at him. His face hurts, and he suddenly realizes it’s because he’s grinning wildly.

What a fucking marvel.

“Kid,” he says. “That was fucking amazing. You’re amazing.” The kid is, briefly, completely speechless. “And- is that suit made of nanites?”

The kid – Peter, that’s right, Tony remembers now - looks surprised.

“Yeah. You- you know about nanites?” he asks.

“Sure,” says Tony. “I’ve written the fucking book on nanites. Well, uh, more like the pamphlet on nanites, if we want to be weirdly accurate with the metaphor. They’ve never been more than a side project of mine. I never thought they’d be cost effective to scale up like that. I couldn’t figure out how to…” He pauses and rubs his jaw. Thinks for a second, mind racing. “Time travel?” he says.

Peter blinks at him.

“What?” he says.

“Just thought I should clear the air of the subtext here.” Tony waves a hand from where he’s still half sprawled on the ground up to the burning bridge above them. “Laser guns. Nanites. Superpowers. Are. You. A time traveler?”

Peter looks at him for a long moment, then nods like he’s making a decision, and leans in close to whisper:

“I really shouldn’t be telling you this. You can’t let anyone know.” He’s very solemn, and Tony’s heart picks up a little. “I was sent here from the future on a very important mission.” He pauses.

“Yeah?” Tony asks, thrill racing up his spine. 

“I need to prevent your time-traveling future self from-” He pauses again. Bites his lip. Tony feels himself lean in, involuntarily.

“From?”

“From giving you the sports almanac that you make your fortune off of.” Peter widens his eyes at Tony, mostly guileless but with a mischievous little glint lurking at the edges. “Oh my god, it’s already too late!”

Tony stares at him for a beat, and then he can’t help it – he starts laughing. At his helpless little snort, Peter’s wobbling mouth breaks into a crooked, delighted-looking grin, and Tony feels himself become hopelessly charmed against his will.

“I resent the implied comparison, you little shit,” he says, narrowing his eyes. “As if Biff Tannen could ever. Fine, don’t tell me.”

“I really shouldn’t,” Peter says. “I mean, you shouldn’t have seen me at all. I’m not supposed to… interfere, with anything, with your life here.”

“I always did think the Prime Directive was bullshit,” Tony says. “Please interfere with my life here. Especially when it involves saving me from getting kidnapped and murdered. Which, by the way, I did mean to thank you for that. Pete, you saved my life. I owe you one. A very large one.”

Peter’s looking at him strangely, with those big, wide eyes of his. Tony doesn’t think he’s saying anything unwarranted, since he did literally almost die - but cut him some slack, he’s only been in this situation once before.

He may still be running entirely on adrenaline. He’s not particularly looking forward to the come down.

“You knew they were looking for me, right?” Tony asks. “So you slipped the tracker on me in the casino.”

“I was just going to bump into you with it, you weren’t supposed to actually notice me beforehand,” Peter says, slightly embarrassed look on his face.

“Shouldn’t have been staring quite so hard, then,” Tony says. “Hydra sleeper cell?”

“What?” Peter says.

“You know, because of the laser guns? Very World War II vintage. Dad had a few as souvenirs.”

“I mean, I guess that’s not… impossible?” Peter says. “But that’s not why- no. Thank you for helping, by the way. Back there.”

“If by helping you mean that thing where I nearly got myself killed, thanks. I’ve had a lot of practice. Don’t try and distract me - my next guess is going to be that you’re engaging in some insanely elaborate LARPing, just so you know, and it’s only downhill from there,” Tony says.

“How do you even know what-” Peter cuts himself off, running a frustrated hand through his hair. “Never mind. Look, I’m going to… take care of the rest of them, okay? You don’t have to worry about this anymore.”

“I’m going to assume you know enough about me to know that telling me not to worry about something is not going to work,” Tony says. Peter smiles a little at that. He stands up and holds out a hand to Tony, pulling him up effortlessly.

“Wow, you are strong,” Tony says. “Is that because of our planet’s yellow sun, or…?” He goes to pull back his hand and realizes he can’t. Peter’s clutching it in a vice grip. It’s painful on his scraped-bloody hands, but it’s- it’s also kind of nice.  

“Tony. Seriously. Can’t you just… go back to your life and let me handle this? Your normal, peaceful life that doesn’t involve getting shot at by laser guns and nearly dying?” Peter asks, resigned. He doesn’t seem to realize he’s still holding Tony’s hand.  

“Uh, no,” Tony says. “Actually, I can’t. Sorry. They just tried to kidnap me. I think I deserve at least some explanation.” And- also- he doesn’t know how to say it to this kid he’s only just met, that sometimes his normal, peaceful life feels like a long, slow death by suffocation. Peter looks at him for a long moment.

“Well-” he says eventually, before being cut off by a cacophony of police sirens piercing the silence. Apparently that car bomb hadn’t been particularly subtle. Peter jerks back, pulls both of them further into the brush and trees by the side of the road, and finally lets go of Tony’s hand. Tony winces and flexes it a few times. “Shit. I should- I need to get out of here. I shouldn’t have stayed this long. I need to find-”

“Wait!” Tony says, too desperate. The idea of never seeing this extraordinary mystery again, never finding out what’s going on here, having him slip through his fingers and being left with nothing but a few tantalizing minutes – it’s intolerable. “Wait, seriously, don’t leave. You- uh- come home with me.” Peter stares at him. “I mean- come back. With me. To my house. You don’t have to tell me anything, or – you just look exhausted.” He does, actually, now that Tony can see him up close. There’s the strain of fatigue around his eyes, and those big bruising shadows someone gets when they haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep in God knows how long. Tony’s intimately familiar with the look. “And, hey, who knows if there’s more of those guys out there? Kinda seems like I need a new bodyguard.”

Peter bites his lip. Tony’s eyes are drawn to it, involuntarily. That fact that on top of everything else he’s so easy to look at doesn’t hurt.

“You should work on your pick up lines,” Peter says. He smiles a little when he says it, but his eyes are big and hungry looking, like for some reason he feels the same desperate, clawing feeling Tony does. “But. Crap. You’re right. I can’t leave you alone when we don’t know if- and I definitely can’t let the cops see me. We need to get off of the main road, and start moving soon in case they have back-up.”

“I don’t suppose that thing flies?” Tony asks. Peter closes his eyes briefly, smiling to himself.

“No, it doesn’t fly,” he says, wryly. “The tech for any sort of flight capability would ruin my aerodynamics. You saw the webs – I can get around fast by swinging, normally. Just, uh, obviously it doesn’t really work when all you have to swing on is… trees.”

“I admire your commitment to personal branding, but it seems like flying would be more convenient. I bet if I could take a look-”

“Oh, now I see it. You just want me for my nanite suit,” Peter says, then stops and pulls himself up short, turning away and fumbling with something on his wrist. “I, uh, anyway. We should get going.” He doesn’t meet Tony’s eyes. “Karen?”

“Yes, Peter? How may I be of assistance?”

The voice is coming from the suit.

“Do you know where we are? How can we get to Tony’s place from here?”

“Calculating route now,” Karen says. Peter lifts his hand up and a hologram pops up from his palm. It’s a map of the area, with a route picked out in blue. “If you cut through the nearby state park, you can reach your destination in two hours, at a brisk walk.”

“Thanks, Karen. Okay, we’ll go back to your house, and then I’ll… figure it out from there, I guess.”

“Is that a souped up Alexa, or do you have an actual AI in there?” Tony asks, beyond intrigued.

“Like you said earlier, I resent the implied comparison,” Karen replies. “I’m a fully functioning artificial intelligence.”

Amazing. Amazing. The type of portability for an AI like that- JARVIS can connect to Tony’s phone, obviously, but for it to have that level of control of the suit-

Tony realizes he’s leaning over to stare at where the hologram is springing up out of Peter’s hand, and pulls back to look at Peter’s amused face.

“Why can’t you let the cops see you?” Tony asks. “Are they in on it?”

Peter looks vaguely embarrassed.

“No, it’s just- I stole a car to follow you guys?” he says, voice going high at the end like it’s a question.

“Oh my god,” Tony says, delighted.

Peter flushes very slightly and looks down at what must be a control panel on his forearm. He taps a few things, and a shimmering blue wave sweeps over him and Tony.

“That should hide us from any cameras or other monitoring systems, just in case. It won’t do anything if someone sees us in person, but I’m hoping no one else is walking around in the woods at 4 am.”

“Depends on how wild the parties are tonight, I guess,” Tony says, turning to go back over to the road. He walks back and forth a few times, ignoring the confused noise Peter makes and peering into the dirt, looking for - ah, there it is. He scoops up the broken hunk of metal that he had saved from the bridge explosion.

“There you are,” he says. Peter looks at him skeptically.  

“Well?” Tony says, holding his arm out, “Lead on, Macduff.”

As they start walking, he takes a look at his slightly dubious prize. He’s pretty sure it is, in fact, a tiny force field generator - but one that’s half smashed to pieces. He turns it over and over in his hands in the eerie blue light of the holomap, trying to take apart the design in his mind. 

“You know, it’s actually ‘Lay on, Macduff’,” Peter says awkwardly, breaking the silence after only a few minutes. Tony looks up and raises his eyebrows at him, slightly incredulous. Peter flushes a little, rubbing the back of his neck. “Oh, uh, sorry, I just took a Shakespeare class last semester for one of my gen eds, so. It’s all kind of still stuck in my head.”

“You’re in college?” Tony asks, amused. “So is the time-traveling superhero thing just a side gig, or what?”

“I’m not a time traveler,” Peter says, not actually contradicting anything else in the statement.

“What’s your major? Do they have college majors in outer space?” Tony asks.

“I’m not from outer space,” Peter says. He pauses. “Chemical engineering.”

“Oh my god,” Tony says, pointing at him accusingly, “you were actually asking me about my hydroponics.”

Peter looks embarrassed.

“Well. Yeah,” he says, slightly defensive. “I, uh, it was the first thing that popped into my head.” He even flushes a little. "I did actually read your white paper, you know. It's- what you’re doing is- it’s revolutionary. It's so cool."

“You’re such a nerd, kid,” Tony says, fondly. He remembers being that excited about this shit – not when he was Peter’s age, obviously. When he was Peter’s age he had already progressed to only getting that excited with the help of illicit drugs. But- after his grand self reinvention. Back when he was high on his new purpose in life. Back when he thought he could save the world with a few cutting edge patents and some feel-good corporate initiatives. “But it is pretty cool, isn’t it? And here I was thinking you were just incredibly bad at flirting.”

“Oh, no, I am also incredibly bad at flirting,” Peter says, then immediately looks like he can’t actually believe he said that out loud. It’s cute. He’s cute. Tony had already registered him as cute back in the casino, but now that he knows cute can punch through solid metal like it’s tinfoil and has an intimate working knowledge of cutting edge nanotechnology, it’s a lot more dangerous.

 “You’re the most remarkable person I’ve ever met,” Tony says, a little too honest. Peter flushes, again. “How’d you get into the heroic rescue business so young?”

“Oh, well, you know,” Peter says, kicking a rock and flicking a glance over at Tony. “I had a good teacher.” He looks away sharply and pauses. “But, actually, about the hydroponics…?”

Tony smiles. There are worse ways to pass the time.

“Sure, kid, hit me,” he says.

Here’s the thing, the real fucking killer, on top of everything else:

Peter’s smart.

Tony watches Peter soak up the information like a sponge, first as he goes over the basic outline of the program they give to buyers, then as he gets deeper and deeper into the weeds of the engineering specifics, racking his brain to recall all of the fiddly little details. At one point Peter incredibly, honest to god starts arguing with him, and – even more incredibly – might not actually be wrong. Tony realizes he would need to go pull up the schematics to check, which is a beautiful, novel feeling, and he makes the executive decision that the conversation is on hold until they have actual data in front of them to fight about.

It’d be nice if Tony had someone like Peter working for him in R&D, and not the morons he currently has to deal with.

(And, the far worse, completely unexpected thought: all of the other times it would be nice to have someone like Peter around.)

Unfortunately, it doesn’t kill nearly as much time as Tony would have liked. They’re still in the middle of nowhere, and he had gotten annoyed at the broken generator a dozen hills back. Tony’s in great shape (equal parts vanity and paranoia, just like most things about him), but it’s ‘goes to the gym’ great shape, not ‘loves taking brisk walks in the dead of night’ great shape. 

At this point he almost wishes they had stuck to the road and taken their chances hitchhiking. It doesn’t get particularly cold in Malibu, not even in January in the dead of night, but it’s still cold enough that his suit jacket isn’t hacking it, especially when the shirt underneath is hanging in shreds. He pulls it closer around his chest and shivers.

Peter looks fine, though. Maybe that thing has a space heater in it. Note to self: wear a self-heated suit jacket, for the next kidnapping attempt.

Hmm. There’s probably a niche market for that, actually. Tech bros with too much money to burn eat that type of shit up.

“So, Shelob, did the name come first, or did you get your freaky spider powers and then decide to be spider themed?” He’s even got a spider pattern worked into the design of the suit. The whole thing has a faintly unreal edge to it, like a child’s daydream. Something too novel, too special to actually exist in the real world.

“Are you always this…”

“Obnoxious?” Tony offers.

“I was going to say curious.”

“Only when I’m fascinated by someone,” Tony says, to see the now-predictable blush on Peter’s face.

Tony probably shouldn’t be openly flirting with the guy currently saving his life. Well, he’s definitely past the point where he should be flirting with college students at all - there are concert t-shirts in Tony’s closet older than this kid - but, hell, that seems like the least of his worries right now.

“You’re… not exactly what I had expected,” Peter says, looking at him out of the corner of his eye.

“That’s a good thing, I hope,” Tony says, even though – well, realistically, it generally isn’t.

“It’s not good or bad. Just- you’re just different,” Peter says.

Tony’s not really sure what to do with that one.

“So, crime fighting, huh,” he tries again. “You rescue a lot of kidnapping victims?”

Instead of answering, Peter stops sharply, arm thrown out to block Tony’s way, and Tony nearly runs right into his back.

“What’s going on-” Peter turns around and slaps a hand over his mouth, shushing him loudly. Tony holds his hands up in mock surrender, and Peter slowly lowers the hand.

“Listen,” Peter says, in a barely audible whisper. Tony strains his ears and, after a moment, can hear the faintest, barest hint of what might be someone moving around in the woods ahead of them.

“Rich hikers taking in the pleasant four AM weather, I’m sure,” Tony whispers back. “Guess we were right to be worried.”

“They probably sent in backup when the guys on the bridge didn’t report in,” Peter says. “If I tell you to stay here while I take care of them, are you going to try to do something stupid and heroic?”

Peter really does have a bizarrely high opinion of him. Tony can’t say he’s generally known for being heroic.

“No, nope, absolutely not, I’m going to stay here like the useless rich, old kidnapping victim I am,” Tony says. Peter scrunches his face up at that, as if he had actually wanted Tony to argue with him.

“You’re not that old,” Peter says awkwardly. So generous. “Uh. If I don’t come back-”

“Whoa, whoa, no, come on, Spider-Man, what do you mean if you don’t come back, of course you’re coming back. I’ve seen you deal with these morons already.”

That makes Peter smile again, pleased and crooked.

“Well. Okay. See you in a few minutes, then,” he says, giving Tony a charmingly awkward little salute as he trots off through the brush. He switches off the holomap and Tony is plunged into complete darkness.

Well. Nearly complete darkness. In the dead of night, with no other light source, the soft blue hum of his arc reactor glows like a beacon. He swears under his breath, trying to button the ruined shirt and jacket over it as best he can. 

Peter’s footsteps are swallowed up in the dark, and Tony immediately regrets staying behind. Even though he logically knows he’s maybe thirty minutes away from a major highway, the pitch black quiet makes him feel like he’s stranded in the middle of nowhere. He breathes through the stitch in his side, and sticks out his hands until he finds a tree he can slump against. When he gets back home he’s adding more endurance running to his workout regime.

As he stands there, his eyes start to play tricks on him, straining hard to make out any pattern in the dark, and he closes them until they can adjust. He sticks a hand in his pocket and mindlessly runs his fingers over the jagged, broken edges of the generator.

It really is kind of insane to be throwing all his chips in with this kid he’s just met, when he has absolutely no idea what’s going on. The rational thing to do would have been to wait and let the police find him, then hire the best 24/7 protection money could buy and wait this whole thing out.

But. Well.

He can admit it, out here in the dark – he’s been lonely. It’s been years, since the breakup, but- he had kind of started to like having someone around, like that.

And it’s just- nice. Nice to talk to Peter. He’s… interesting, in a way so few people are.

He can hear Pepper’s voice in his head already – you followed some lunatic into the woods because he was interesting?

“Well, sure, Pep, you know I like a man who can rip an iron bar in half with his bare hands,” he says to himself.

He strains his ears to hear anything, and he thinks his ears pick up the faint sound of fighting in the distance. He can’t tell who’s winning. He picks the debris out of his bloody palms and tries not to think about what would happen if Peter doesn’t win. Doesn’t win because he’s outnumbered, because he doesn’t have anyone to watch his back, because Tony’s a useless piece of shit incapable of helping him.

His shivering has picked up a little, and he doesn’t think it’s just from the cold. Yep. There’s the adrenaline comedown.

He reminds himself what his therapist said about catastrophic thinking. Is it kosher to say “his therapist” when she’d quit in frustration after five sessions because “therapy only works when there’s a good faith attempt on the part of the patient, Tony”?

He stands there and aggressively doesn’t think about anything. After a few minutes, the sounds stop, and the woods are silent again.

He hears footsteps, and then “Karen, can you scan the suit for damage?”

Tony lets out the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, and consciously unpeels his right hand from the grip it has on his left wrist as Peter emerges back into view. He leans back against a tree and tries to look cool, calm, and collected.

Peter gives him a thumbs up as he walks over. As his mask retracts back his hair is even more hopelessly mussed than before, but he otherwise looks completely fine.

“Good day at the office, honey?” Tony asks, consciously trying to smile. His voice is mostly steady.

“You know, same old, same old,” Peter says. “I feel like I kind of expect better from elite kidnappers?” He’s jittering a little with what must be post-fight energy.

“Go team,” Tony says, and holds up a hand for a high-five. He winces when Peter slaps it with too much force, irritating the scrapes.

Peter notices his wince and looks down at the abraded surface of Tony’s palms.

“Oh! Sorry, I didn’t realize - give me your hands?” he asks. Tony does, instinctively. Peter holds up his wrist in that strange motion of his, and shoots some of that webbing onto each palm, far more gently than how he had done it earlier. It feels cool and pleasantly tingly. Tony flexes one hand, and notes how thin and flexible the webbing is, already dry, better than any bandage.

“That’s… remarkable,” he says. “It’s different from the type you used earlier?”

“Yeah, these are antiseptic. They’re still kind of a prototype – I’m still trying to perfect the formula.”

Tony looks at him.

“You designed the formula yourself? You know you could get rich off of patenting something like that.”

“What, really?” Peter asks.

“With that level of tensile strength? And the medical applications? Absolutely. …Hey, you looking for a job after college?” Tony’s joking. Mostly. Well, if Peter turns him down, then he’s joking.

Peter looks incredibly flattered, as if for some reason he’s actually interested in giving up the kidnapper-fighting superhero gig to work in a lab at Stark Industries.

“We should go back to where I left those guys. We need to take care of the bodies,” Peter says instead.

“Sounds good,” Tony says.

“Okay. Cool.”

“Are you… gonna let go of my hands, Pete?” Tony says, amused. Peter flushes red and drops them like he’s been burned, and Tony kind of wishes he hadn’t said anything.

They enter into the clearing with the ex-goons, four bodies sprawled on the ground. Tony whistles, low and impressed. Peter goes over to the nearest one and starts searching through his jacket pockets.

“There are definitely more of them somewhere,” Peter says. “I’m trying to figure out where their base is.”

“Once we get back to my place, we’ll be fine. They’ll never be able to get through my security,” Tony says.

“Are you sure about that?”

Well. They had managed to remotely hack into and brick his phone without him even noticing – which still stings to even think about.

“Rephrasing: once we get back to my place, we’ll be fine, because I’m pretty sure you’re capable of defending that place single handedly. What’s the going rate for bodyguards, these days?”

“I’m working pro bono,” Peter says, laughing.

“Ah, of course. You’re so generous to charity cases.”

Peter straightens up with some sort of device in his hand – an odd looking phone, Tony sees as he walks over. Peter pokes at it hesitantly, frowning.

“Karen, can you…?”

“I’m sorry, Peter, I was not designed with advanced hacking capabilities. It wasn’t considered necessary.” 

“Great,” Peter murmurs. “Of course he didn’t- ugh.” And then, “It’s okay, Karen, thanks anyway. I guess if I-”

“Or I could take a look?” Tony interrupts.

“Yeah, uh, I probably should’ve thought of that first, huh,” Peter says, handing it over.

It’s a little tricky to get in, but more because the architecture is unfamiliar - not like anything he’s seen before - than because of any real security on the thing. Tony cracks it within a minute. When he gets in, the home screen pops up with all the usual icons. He flicks past WhatsApp, Candy Crush (“Seriously? What year is it?”), Tinder (“Seriously? On your evil work phone? So unprofessional.”), until – Hmm. That’s interesting. He opens up the unlabeled file folder and up pops-

Himself.

Himself, but not himself. The man in the picture looks like him, more or less, but there’s something about the hair or the eyes or the lines around his mouth that gives it a distinct uncanny valley effect.

He swipes the screen. Another picture of himself pops up, and this one he recognizes from a keynote he gave a few months back. Actually him, this time. Seeing the pictures side by side make it even clearer that the first picture is- off. It’s not him.

I suppose this one’s better than nothing.

“So, call me crazy, but this sure seems an awful lot like…”

“You’re not crazy,” Peter says. He looks at the two images on the screen for a long second, then back up at Tony. And then, after a long pause, he takes a shaky breath. “Do you know anything about the multiverse?”

“Apparently I just learned it existed,” says Tony, bizarrely unsurprised. At this point, what was one more thing on top of everything else? “I know the theory, yeah.”

Most of the theory he’s heard was from a delusional coke fiend Tony had met in Hong Kong decades ago, who had spent an entire night talking about how someone called The Ancient One had inducted him into her cult and shown him the secrets of the universe. But, you know. He has the general gist of it.

Tony shakes his head in wonder. The multiverse. That’s something he had never seriously considered except for when he was blasted out of his mind.

“Yeah, so. Those guys. They’re from my dimension. Uh, the Tony Stark from my dimension invented a… specific technology, that they wanted to get their hands on. I guess they figured that if you could invent it once you could invent it again, you know?”

“So you’re here to stop them?” Tony asks.

Apparently he hadn’t lived up to the hype of his predecessor, if the reaction from the goons had been anything to go by.

“Not exactly,” Peter says, his gaze drifting back down to the picture in front of him. “I mean, I am, obviously, but - they’re just taking advantage of the real problem. I’m mainly here to fix the dimensional rip that they used to get here. Normal people shouldn’t be able to travel from one reality to another like this – otherwise you’d probably have noticed all of the extradimensional travelers by now, right?”

“Sure,” Tony says absently, barely absorbing it. Peter’s nervously tapping the side of the phone with his thumb.

“But something happened a few months back – some sort of tear in the fabric between worlds. It’s been a nightmare dealing with all of the people taking advantage, but we finally pinpointed that the source location was somewhere in this reality and I- uh, I was sent out here to fix it.”

Peter hasn’t taken his eyes off of the screen.

“So, what was it? Alcohol poisoning? Overwork-induced heart attack?” Tony asks.

 Peter jerks his head up, finally turning off the screen. He opens his mouth but doesn’t answer, like he can’t quite make himself say it.

“Come on,” Tony says. “I figured it out. I can read the room.”

“It- Neither,” Peter says. “He died a hero. You, he, he was a hero.”

“You’re a passionate fan of clean energy, huh? Let me guess, unfortunate solar panel accident?” Tony asks, looking at Peter wryly. Peter’s mouth twists, and he looks away from Tony, staring into the distance.

“Don’t, that’s not - I really shouldn’t be telling you anything about this,” Peter says, which Tony has already learned means Peter’s definitely going to tell him.

“Look, if you’re worried about changing the timeline or something, I’m not planning on trying to ape the guy. I can guarantee you that this Tony Stark is not the heroic death type.”

“Stop talking about yourself like that,” Peter says. God, what the fuck had Other Tony been like to cause this kind of devotion? Tony kind of hates the guy already. He has a vague image in his head of an absurd Cap wannabe whose jaw is somehow, inexplicably stronger than his own.

“What, was I running around punching people in a nanite supersuit?”

“The first few dozen versions weren’t made of nanites,” Peter says, smiling reluctantly. There’s a fond look on his face, like he’s picturing Doppelganger Tony in his head, running around in a- in a-

“That’s ridiculous,” he says flatly.

“Why?” Peter looks genuinely confused.

“Because I- I tried that, okay?” Tony says, feeling like it’s being dragged out of him, from somewhere ugly that’s been buried a long, long time. “In Afghanistan. I tried. I had this- stupid idea that I could just – what, build myself a flying metal suit of armor? Rescue myself? But you know what that was? It was a- a fucking child’s fantasy. A coping mechanism to ignore the fact that I was going to die. If I hadn’t been rescued-”

As he says it, the words turn to ash in his mouth as realizes he’s parroting something he’s heard before – when he had tried to explain it to Obie after his rescue, incoherently, half dead from the gunshot wounds and broken ribs, fresh off of deliriously destroying SI’s biggest revenue stream from an impromptu bedside press conference. Obie had smiled condescendingly, patted him on the shoulder, said – What, Tony, you thought you could escape in your flying metal suit of armor? Really? It’s a good thing you were rescued, or-

“If you hadn’t been rescued, you would have had to figure it out, or you would have died. So you figured it out.” Peter pauses. “I mean- he figured it out. Not you. You know what I mean.” Yeah. Tony knows what he means, all right.

“And then, what, he decided to take up superheroing like he thought he was Captain America?” He can hear the scornful edge in his own voice and hates it.

“Uh, that’s… really not the comparison he would have liked, but. Yeah. Basically.”

“Until it killed him.”

“It was worth it, to him.” Peter looks down at his feet. “Not- not everyone is lucky enough to have their death be for a reason.”

It’s too much to process. For some reason, the only thing he can think, twisting around in his head, is so the suit would have worked.

“The suit would have worked,” he says, very low, barely audible.

Peter smiles, wistful.

“Oh yeah. It would have worked.”

They strip the bodies of anything that might be incriminating re: interdimensional travel and the existence thereof. Peter dumps the laser guns and weird phone into a pack he puts on his back.

“Karen, can you download all of the info on there?”

“Of course, Peter. The pictures, too?”

There’s a pause.

“No, you can delete the pictures. It’s fine.”

Tony leaves him to it, and starts examining the body armor. If nothing else, the bad old days did give him a pretty comprehensive knowledge of this sort of thing. The armor looks completely unremarkable, except that each set has the same tiny generator embedded in the shoulder. 

Conveniently, they seem to be attached to the rest of the get-up with four Phillips head screws. Tony carefully unscrews each device, then goes over and drops all but one in the pack Peter has.

“Where did you even- why did you have a screwdriver with you in a casino?”

“Why wouldn’t I have a screwdriver with me in a casino? I’m always ready to screw,” Tony says blandly. “I was fixing one of my robots earlier. That idiot fell down the stairs again.”

“Hey, DUM-E’s trying his best. You should really be nicer to him,” Peter says. The intimacy implied in the statement makes Tony feel – he doesn’t know how it makes him feel. His workshop has always been his sanctum, the place no one but those closest to him have ever been allowed in.

He pictures Peter in there with him, perched on a stool, maybe- fixing something on his nanite suit, showing Tony what he’s doing. Maybe they’re snarking back and forth as they while away the night in there, Peter babying DUM-E when DUM-E fucks up. Tony’s an insomniac who could go for days, but when he notices Peter yawning adorably, so hard he can barely focus on the work in front of him, he’ll calls it quits and they’ll go up to the master suite together, and watching Peter sleep like the dead next to him will almost be enough to make Tony able to close his eyes-

“So,” Tony says brightly, clapping his hands together. Thoughts like those are far more dangerous than a little flirting. “I hope you’re ready for some more scenic Malibu hiking.”

Peter doesn’t seem to want to talk much about Perfect Dead Tony or Perfect Dead Tony’s super suit, and Fucked Up Alive Tony is more than fine with that. He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want to think about what that Tony, Tony who died a hero, had done with his life after his escape. It was probably a little more impressive than wasting his revolutionary breakthroughs in AI on self-driving car prototypes.

Doesn’t want to think about all that hero worship Peter has for martyred Tony Stark, being dumped on him as the next best option. He swallows it all down, bitter and unpleasant.

Instead, Tony does what he does best – deflects. He kills time on leg number two of the excruciatingly long walk by badgering Peter with absurd questions and amusing himself watching Peter’s increasingly poor attempts to keep his mouth shut.

It is actually interesting, too. The scientist in him is having a field day, trying to tease out the differences between their worlds from every scrap of information he gets. 

“So how many superheroes are we talking about, exactly? Do you guys have your own little club?”

As they talk, he pulls out the broken generator and idly compares it to the new, presumably still functioning one. There’s not much he can do with them like this, but with a second model to examine he thinks he’s almost figured out how they work, at least. 

“Is that douche Elon Musk trying to be a shittier, less attractive version of me over there, too?”

How they work, as far as he can tell, is stupidly. Thinking back to the fight on the bridge, the field only activated when they got shot at – no reaction at all to the punches and kicks from Peter. What moron designs something like that?

”Nanite super suits, laser guns, multiverse hopping, what else have you got? Flying cars? FTL travel? Aliens?”

He tosses them up and down a few times, juggling a little. Give him half a day and he could make something ten times as impressive. Next gen body armor that would blow anything the military has out of the water.  

“…Wait, when you say ‘yes to aliens’, are we talking like little green men, Vulcans, incomprehensible eldritch horrors from beyond the stars, what?”

His mouth twists. Not that there’d be any use for it. He’s not in that game anymore.

“Did Starbucks do that whole unicorn Frappuccino thing with you guys, too? What was up with that?”

Not that he wants to be, obviously. He’s spending the remainder of his life making up for the damage he had caused, back then. It’s just- it’s just-

“So, what’s the family think of the whole reality hopping, super-heroing deal?” Is he awkwardly feeling out the existence of a significant other? Maybe. But Peter frowns at that one, shoulders curling in like he’s protecting himself from a physical blow, and doesn’t say anything. 

Whoops. Tony swerves. 

“Speaking of aliens, they making a bunch of shitty new Star Wars movies in your reality too?” 

“Hey, just because they’re not perfect doesn’t make them shitty, I liked them! They’re fun!” Peter protests, smiling again. There we go, Tony thinks, much better.

“Oh, fun, I see, they must have made different movies over there,” Tony says archly. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be defending them to my face like this.”

“Okay, just because you’re old and think the really old ones were perfect-”

“The really old ones?”

They slip into an easy, meaningless argument, which would be nice, except – he starts to get the sense that Peter already knows what he’s going to say. There’s a strange feeling gnawing at Tony that he can’t quite place.

“You two were close?” Tony asks, abruptly, and realizes he’s just interrupted a slightly lengthy tangent where Peter was explaining how it actually totally made sense if you play something called Fortnite. So much for not asking about Perfect Dead Tony. Peter stops mid-thought and looks at Tony.

“Oh, yeah, uh, yeah, we were… friends,” he says.

“That’s a suspicious pause if I’ve ever heard one. Like… friends, or…” he trails off, raising his eyebrows meaningfully, only half joking. Peter goes bright red and sputters a bit.

“What! No, uh- no. He- he was engaged, it wasn’t like that- he was my mentor and, you know, I’d like to think we were friends too, by the end-”

“I’m sorry, engaged?” Tony interjects. Peter blinks, confused. 

“To Ms. Potts,” he says, as if it was obvious. “I mean. And they got married too. Obviously.”

Wow. Poor Pepper. And poor kid. He can picture it, Peter a few years younger, learning all about superhero-ing from Perfect Dead Tony, following him around like a puppy with the world's most obvious crush.

Married. Christ. Looks like her white-knuckled sense of obligation won out over any sense of self-preservation when there was more guilting her into staying than Tony just being a dysfunctional, obsessive alcoholic.

Or maybe he and Pepper had actually managed to work it out between them, over there, and Perfect Dead Tony was just more successful at that too.

“Yeah, I, uh. We’re not married here. Really, really not married,” Tony says. 

“Yeah, I know,” Peter says, not quite looking at him. “I looked you up, remember?”

“Right, right, targeted by dimension hopping supervillains, etcetera,” Tony says.

“They’re not supervillains, they’re just like, barely a step above normal criminals.” Peter says, looking vaguely offended on the behalf of actual supervillains. “But, that’s, uh, that’s not really why- I… guess I just kind of… wanted to know what you were like.” He trails off.

“Sure, no, I get it,” Tony says, and that weird feeling in his chest is back with a vengeance. “He’s dead, you’re not ever going to see him again, but you can at least get the store-brand knock off for a little bit.”

Oh. The weird feeling is jealousy. Of himself.

"That’s not - you aren't him." Peter says, vehemently.

"Yeah, I know, I keep getting reminded of that." Tony says.

"No, that's not what I- you're not that Tony Stark, but you're still Tony Stark. You're not a substitute, you’re yourself. You- you're brilliant. Your work is amazing. I mean, come on, New York’s arc reactor power grid? The hydrogen powered cars? The advancements in geothermal energy? I’ve- you know I’ve read all your work. You're a hero too. You are." It’s – sweet. He’s very sweet. Tony looks at his painfully earnest little face and wants to ask if he’d looked up anything else about Tony’s shitshow of a life.

"Bet he looked a little cooler doing it, though," Tony says instead.

"Well, maybe a little," Peter says, a tiny, reluctant smile at the edges of his mouth. “You- you know that anything less than literally single handedly saving the world isn’t a personal failure, right?”

“Obviously. Even my ego isn’t that big,” he lies. “I just see room for improvement.”

Peter looks hard at Tony.

“He didn’t...” His mouth works a little, like he’s trying to spit something else out. “He didn’t do half of that, you know. He didn’t have time to care about hydroponic systems.”

Tony’s spared from figuring out how he’s supposed to feel about that. The holomap starts to flutter erratically, and Peter lifts his hand up in alarm just in time for the hologram to give out entirely. The world around them goes dark.

“Shit,” Peter says. “Uh, Karen?”

“I’m sorry, Peter, your last fight sent the nanites out of alignment again. You’ll need to recalibrate them manually.”

“What? Again? I thought I had finally fixed that.”

“Apparently not,” says Karen.

“You know, I swear you were nicer to me when I was younger. Sorry, Tony,” Peter says, the nanites on his arm already shifting as he looks down at them, “This will just take a second, I need to-”

“Coax them back into place, yeah, I know,” Tony says, glad for the reprieve. He takes in the surprised look on Peter’s face and says “What? I’m not completely clueless. I do know how nanites work, I just never was able to put them into production. Economically, the return was never going to be there.”

“Ha, yeah, these suits weren’t exactly designed to turn a profit,” Peter says, holding out his arm for the recalibration. No, Tony thinks, they clearly weren’t. They were designed with the idea that the person inside was worth far more than the millions of dollars poured into the suit that protected them.

He thinks he can guess who built this one.

The recalibration is easy, but it takes a few minutes, Peter murmuring instructions based on what he’s seeing on his HUD. It’s a good thing Tony’s there, and at least for this knows what he’s doing – he can’t imagine Peter trying to fix the suit one handed, all alone in the field. It’s honestly ridiculous that this is something Peter has to deal with at all – multimillion dollar piece of technology, but it’s so fiddly parts of it start to fail when you hit them the wrong way? He itches to take it back to his workshop, disassemble it and figure out where the flaw is.

He realizes he’s just standing there, holding Peter’s arm up. He should let go.

Instead, his other hand reaches out to touch two of his fingers very gently to the thin nanite layer covering Peter’s wrist. He starts to carefully move it, on the lookout for any imperfections, but he only gets a fleeting impression of the cold, smooth metal before the nanites are melting away under his fingers, exposing hot, bare skin. He looks up. Peter’s eyes are dark and surprised.

“Sorry,” Peter says, flushing a little. He doesn’t take his eyes off of Tony’s. “The neural feedback is… it’s not always something I can consciously control.”

“Incredible,” Tony says, only mostly about the suit. He can feel Peter’s pulse under his fingers. He strokes them down gently and feels the tremor shake through Peter’s body. “So it’s not just manual commands? They’re actually hooked into your subconscious? How does that work?”

Peter wets his lips and absently sways towards him. There’s something in his eyes like adoration, desperate and hurting. Tony’s an egotistical piece of shit, because he can’t help but like seeing it, even when he can’t tell if any of it at all is meant for him.

“You really miss him, huh?” Tony asks, voice low, stepping closer to him. He’s still petting Peter’s jackrabbiting pulse point, can’t seem to make himself stop.

“It wasn’t - I was sixteen when he died. You, he, he definitely never…” He’s still looking at Tony with the same desperate sort of hunger. “You know it’s not- it’s not a bad thing that it’s different with you. I couldn’t- you actually treat me as an equal, as-” He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, then takes a few steps back, breaking the mood.

"My- Mr. Stark- he's been dead for three years. And I still miss him, of course I do, but- I have to hope he’s finally at peace now, right? And he... you're not him. I mean, you’re him, but- you’re really, obviously not him, too. You know? But the thing is, you're still Tony Stark. I don't think there's a Tony Stark in any dimension in the multiverse that I wouldn't-" he falters. "-care about." He looks very, very earnest.

"That's a dangerous thing to say, kid," Tony says, trying to smile. He turns away, finally, and starts walking again, hands in his pockets. "There could be all sorts of ‘me’s out there. What if you met crazed supervillain Tony Stark?”

"I would send crazed supervillain Tony Stark to supervillain jail." Peter says as he catches up to Tony, with a stubborn glint in his eye. “But it would be for his own good. I’d visit him on the weekends.” Tony instinctively opens his mouth and Peter says “Don’t say conjugal visits, supervillain Tony Stark doesn’t deserve it”. Tony laughs a little, under his breath.

The night is still and quiet. Peaceful. It’s really not so bad, being out here like this, the part where he nearly died aside. The company’s nice, at least. They’re walking close enough that their arms nearly brush. Tony has the stupidest urge to reach out and grab his hand.

"But, uh. I won’t be meeting any other Tony Starks,” Peter says, softly, breaking the silence. “The dimensional instability is definitely here. I'm not going anywhere else."

"So you’re stuck with me until you go back home, then," Tony says, secretly a little pleased. It feels selfish and greedy, that he wants Peter around so badly despite barely knowing him. But Tony’s always been a selfish guy.

 Peter doesn't say anything. He looks a little shifty.

"Okay, what? What’s with that look?”

“What look?” Peter says, guiltily.   

“Peter.”

"It’s. Fixing the instability will cut off my only way to get back home,” Peter says, not looking at him. “We have no idea if there’s any other way of doing it – we’d never been able to access the multiverse before now, until this started happening. I'd need to invent a whole new form of dimensional travel to ever get back home.”

Tony stares at him.

“You knew this before you came here?”

“In order to fix this one of us had to volunteer to be the person stuck on the other side, so.”

“And you planned on- what, exactly, after fixing it?” Tony asks, struck. He stares at Peter’s profile. He wonders, suddenly, if he would have had the guts to do the same. To look something like that in the face and know what was coming, but do it anyway because it had to be done. 

Peter shrugs. He looks incredibly uncomfortable, and Tony is struck by a horrible, horrible thought.

“‘Not everyone is lucky enough to have their death be for a reason?’” he offers.  

“That’s- I wasn’t planning on dying,” Peter says, defensive, face pale. His eyes cut away nervously.

“Uh huh. It just maybe wouldn’t be the worst thing in the entire world, to go out a hero?” Tony asks, needling. Peter’s shoulders tense up.  

“Well, actually, yeah, if I did die doing this, at least it would mean something,” he snaps. “It didn’t- it didn’t mean anything when my aunt and my best friend died in a fucking car crash and I couldn’t- the only people I had left and I couldn’t even-”

“So you think this will somehow make up for not being able to save them? Newsflash, kid, you can still do good without going out in a blaze of glory-”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, asshole,” Peter yells.

They stare at each other. Peter’s breathing hard, glaring at him. 

Tony closes his eyes and laughs a little at himself. 

“Point taken,” he murmurs, and he can feel the tension draining away. When he opens his eyes again Peter looks embarrassed and surprised at the outburst, like he hadn’t meant to yell quite that loudly - but his jaw is still set stubbornly.

“I don’t have a death wish,” he says. “ I figured I’d work out how to get back eventually. With my powers - survival is easier than me than it would be for someone else. But I had to fix this. It had to be me. Everyone else had someone they were leaving behind.”

Tony admires the single minded determination, but it’s also kind of absurd to be on the receiving end of. He thinks Pepper and Rhodey must be out there right now, laughing their asses off and not knowing why.  

"Okay, kid, hear me out here, just a suggestion, you could not try to invent new radical breakthroughs in interdimensional physics while living on someone's roof and dumpster diving, or whatever you were planning on doing,” Tony says. It feels like the worst kind of injustice, that Peter has no one to leave behind, no one in his corner. “I have a lab. I have several labs, even, an entire company of them. Stay with me while you’re figuring this out. Use whatever you need. Do a little crime fighting at night, if you want?" Tony hopes he wants. He wants to see him in action again. He's probably never going to get tired of it.

Peter looks tempted. He opens his mouth to reply. Tony cuts him off.

“If the next words out of your mouth are going to be ‘I really shouldn’t’, I’m going to assume I’ve already won,” he says. Peter shuts his mouth with an audible click and smiles ruefully. “Called it. Look, I can hide you from the CIA or SHIELD or Paul Blart Mall Cop better than anyone else, if that’s what you’re worried about. I can help you with the science, if you want me to. I’ll even stop bothering you with questions about whether or not I’m prettier than my superhero counterpart.”

“I think you’ve pulled ahead of him in People’s Sexiest Man Alive wins, actually.”

“Well, hey, that’s something – seriously, come on, what is it? I swear I don’t snore that loudly. Unless – wait, did you look up yourself, too? Are you going to screw things up for him if anyone sees you in public? I don’t know, make him start disappearing from any pictures?" he asks. It feels so strange, now, that he could have been living in a world with someone like Peter and have no idea he existed. But Peter shakes his head.

“No, he- that won’t be a problem. He died years ago.” And then, much lower, half to himself: “In my world it was my uncle who died, not me.”

It leaves Tony strangely shaken. This brilliant, brave man who’s unlike anyone Tony’s met in his life. Now he knows for sure he’ll never meet anyone like Peter ever again, when he leaves, because the Peter of this world is already dead. It leaves him feeling hollow and strange, that only now does he know to mourn him.  

“I… thank you, Tony,” Peter says, snapping him out of it. “I’m not… I did have a plan, kind of. I thought maybe I’d see if I could find this universe’s Ancient One, that lady Doctor Strange mentioned. I feel like if anyone would know another way to travel back to my reality, it would be her.”

What.

“I refuse to believe those are real people,” Tony says. “No.”

“Doctor Strange wears a cape and calls himself a Master of the Mystic Arts,” Peter says, completely straightfaced.

“Are you fucking with me, kid?” Tony demands.

“So you totally believed me when I was telling you about aliens-”

“Aliens are science, not this Harry Potter bullshit.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Peter says, finally cracking a smile.

They walk silently for a while, Peter staring at the ground while Tony connects a few dots in his head.

“Your aunt and uncle," Tony says, “they’re your closest family? Were?” At Peter’s nod, he says, “You could see them here, right? If you wanted.”

"What? No!" Peter looks horrified, finally whipping his head around to look at Tony. "They lost their Peter. I'm not him. I'm- I'm not going to just show up like some sort of, of replacement pet goldfish, and be like 'hey Ben, May, it must have been super traumatic for your kid to die, but like, I probably have some of the same memories as your Peter did, want to talk about them?' That would be sick."

"But you said it yourself, didn't you?” Tony says. “That’s not how you see me. No, you're not their Peter, and they’re not your aunt and uncle, but you're still Peter. How could there be any Peter in the multiverse that they don’t love?"

Peter turns away sharply, but not before Tony sees that his eyes are a little wet. He thinks maybe he’s sticking his nose somewhere he shouldn’t.

“Sorry, I’m a jackass, feel free to tell me to go to hell-”

“No, it’s just. It feels masochistic, to let myself get attached to anyone here.”

“Attached like taking up an offer to crash on the proverbial couch?”

“That too,” Peter says, looking at him, biting his lip. Tony thinks he can nearly feel the air shiver between them, the moment balanced on a knife’s edge. Peter opens his mouth, starts to say something-

-and suddenly leaps at Tony, tackling him to the ground, and narrowly avoiding getting his own head shot off by a laser blast.

The screaming match probably hadn’t been the best way to keep a low profile, in retrospect.

Peter jumps back up, leaving Tony sprawled on the ground. He looks caught, unsure - his eyes zero in on the spot in the darkness where the blast came from, but he doesn’t move. He rocks back and forth on the balls of his feet, fists clenching, standing over Tony like a guard dog. 

“Go,” Tony says, wheezing, pushing himself up on his elbows. “It’s fine. Go.”

Peter darts off. Tony ignores his parting hissed command to stay down and heaves himself back upright.

He’s so distracted, staring into the dark that Peter disappeared into, that it comes as a complete shock when he feels the cold press of metal against his temple.

“You know, I really should have seen this coming,” he manages to get out, before a gag is shoved in his mouth. He hears the guy holding him laugh, and a second one steps out from the trees, a vicious looking knife in his hand. 

They wait. 

“Come on out, Spidey. We know you’re there. You wouldn’t want anything to happen to Stark, would you?”

Don’t come back, Tony prays, don’t come back, don’t come back, and his heart drops down to his stomach when Peter walks slowly into the clearing, hands raised. Peter’s eyes flick back and forth between the knife, and the gun, and Tony’s face, clearly calculating if he has time to do something stupid and heroic.

“Don’t even try it,” the guy holding Tony sneers.

The other goon grabs an unresisting Peter in a stranglehold and puts the knife up at his throat.

“I know you have super strength,” he says, “but if you want Stark to keep both his kneecaps intact, you won’t struggle.” Other Goon sees Peter’s eyes go wide, sees Peter’s body go lax in surrender, and knows he’s won. He drags the knife slowly up Peter’s neck and face, pressing in just enough to draw a thin, barely there trickle of blood. Tony can see Peter’s barely repressed flinch. Peter’s staring directly at him.

“Huh,” Other Goon says, mean smile curling around his mouth, “you really are that pathetic. In that case - this is for all my dead friends, you fucking brat.”

In one swift, violent motion the blade in his hand slams hard into Peter’s gut, sliding straight through the nanites, and Peter lets out a horrible, blood-curdling scream and doubles over, clutching at the bloody wound is his side. Tony instinctively jerks towards him, before he’s pulled back hard by his goon.

“Specially treated vibranium. Amazing, isn’t it? I’d really hate to kill you,” Other Goon says, “you could be so useful. But unlike Stark, we don’t actually need you alive. So remember to behave.”

There’s a stubborn looking glint in Peter’s eyes as he lifts his head up, visible even through the haze of pained tears, that says he doesn’t particularly want to behave. But he doesn’t fight back. Tony knows from firsthand experience that Peter could take out both of these guys singlehandedly – but he won’t, he can’t, because Tony’s in danger if he does and Tony is fucking useless.

Tony stands there, tries to control his breathing, tries not to have a panic attack as the sound of Peter’s hurt, involuntary little whimpers fill his ears. Here is again, completely helpless, completely unable to save himself or anyone else. He is absolutely fucking sick of the sensation.

He shifts, feels something in his jacket pocket.

It’s the screwdriver.  

He blinks. He blinks again. Time slows down to a crawl as he registers that both of the goons are wearing the same force field generators as the others had been. He’s about ninety percent certain he’s figured out how they work. Well, eighty or eighty five percent, at least.

He’ll have to take those odds.

Someone here has to do something stupid and heroic.

Tony starts moaning loudly from between his clenched teeth, in what he considers to be a truly Oscar worthy piece of acting. He stumbles and doubles over exaggeratedly, putting his hands on his stomach. With the way his jacket shifted, one hand is right over the pocket with the screwdriver.

His goon scoffs in disgust, keeping the gun pressed against the back of his skull (don’t think about it, don’t think about it) but moving his body away very slightly.

“Seriously? This is pathetic,” Other Goon says. “Are we sure this guy is anything like Tony Stark?”

Tony grabs the screwdriver as he takes a few loud, gasping breaths. He clutches it firmly in his hand. He moans a little more, for good measure.

His goon makes an irritated noise, losing his patience, and grabs Tony’s shoulder to yank him back upright.

Perfect.

Tony spins around, using the momentum as his goon pulls him back, and jams the screwdriver into the socket on his shoulder, and prays to god that- bingo. The force field generator short circuits and the goon screams in agony, dropping his gun and clutching at his shoulder. Tony swoops down and grabs the gun, and before he can think about it he shoots him twice in the chest. Center mass, just like Rhodey taught him.

He rips the gag out.

“Anything like Tony Stark? I am Tony Stark, asshole.”

While he’s distracted, Peter easily and effortlessly overpowers his own goon, knocking him out and webbing him to the tree. Then he wilts a little, clutching his side, letting out a pained little noise. Tony runs over and grabs him with shaking hands, holding him up so Peter can loop one arm around Tony’s shoulders and slump, boneless, against his side. 

“You’re- Pete, you’re okay? You are not allowed to die on me, Peter, come on,” he babbles.

“Wasn’t planning on it,” Peter says, low and muffled into his shoulder. “You know you’re supposed to say the one-liner before you shoot them, right?” Tony laughs, a little hysterical with relief, and clutches him where he’s trembling against Tony’s shoulder.  

Finally, Peter takes a few shuddering, fortifying breaths, before pushing himself up a little straighter, wobbling slightly. He twists his wrist and sprays some of the antiseptic webbing onto the wound.

“I heal fast. Don’t worry. Happens all the time,” he says, tilting his head up to meet Tony’s eyes and giving him a reassuring little smile. He’s still slightly breathless, but he looks studier already, in a way that probably shouldn’t be possible for a normal human. He’s- god, he’s indescribable. Tony uses his thumb to wipe away the forgotten tears under Peter’s left eye.

“You’d think they wouldn’t leave a vulnerability like that in their armor, wouldn’t you,” he says, a little distracted. If he thinks about Peter bleeding out in front of him or the way it happens all the time he’s going to lose his shit. “It’s embarrassing. Give me a few hours and I could make something twice as good. Actually. Hey. Hey- you want force field armor? Little add-on for your suit? That’d probably be a good idea to help prevent future stabbings or, I don’t know...”

Peter is staring at him.

“What? Is that weird? Too much? I’ve been told I can be too much-”

Peter reaches up, grabs him by the lapels, and kisses him, suddenly, a little clumsy. Tony instinctively responds, kissing back, but after a moment he can feel the pleading desperation in it and has to push Peter away. There’s something soft and vulnerable in Peter’s eyes, and it makes Tony want to curl around him and protect him from the world. As if he needs it.  

“Deactivating the armor like that. That was amazing,” Peter says.

“I’d pretend to be modest, but, yeah, that was a pretty brilliant move on my part, wasn’t it,” Tony says. “I kind of like this whole ‘saving people’ thing.” He runs his hand through Peter’s hair, softly, moves away that stupid curl in the front that keeps getting in his eyes. Peter leans into it instinctively. Tony is so, so, so fucked.  He lowers his voice. “How much of that kiss was actually about me, honey?”

“At least half of it,” says Peter. “But it was for you. I know I shouldn’t, I told myself- but- you’re just, you’re so- can’t it be enough, at least for now?”

“I’ll take it,” Tony says. They definitely shouldn’t, on multiple levels. But he’s never been good at resisting things he wants. “But you should know I get pretty greedy about this sort of thing. I don’t like sharing, even with myself.”

Peter smiles, a little hesitant.

“Yeah?” he says. “Good. I’ll hold you to that.”

“Good,” Tony echoes, stupidly. He kisses Peter again. And again. And again, until Peter makes a pained little noise and breaks off to grab at his side.

“Shit, sorry,” Tony says, “I’m fucking this up already, aren’t I?”

“Nah, you’ll have to try harder than that,” Peter says, flushed and breathless. “But. We do actually need to get out of here. And then I probably need to, uh, sit down at some point.”

“Right, right,” Tony says. “Places to be, worlds to save. The life of a superhero never stops.” It sounds… pretty great, actually. He could get used to it. Get used to saving people. Preferably with less of Peter getting stabbed – but hey, that’s what the force field armor he’s about to invent will be for. He wonders if Peter needs any help with that whole crime fighting thing. “Is that a yes to staying with me?”

“Are you asking me to move in before the first date?” Peter says.

“You mean this didn’t count?” Tony asks. “I’ve heard hiking is a good first date option. Nice. Low pressure.”

Peter grins at that.

“Yes, fine, I’ll move in with you, if you really need something to do that badly,” he says, the sarcastic tone of his voice belied by the almost giddy look on his face. “I’ve heard the Malibu house was pretty nice. You’re going to regret this. I’m going to be in your hot tub, like, all the time.”

“Was pretty nice? Was?” Tony says, exaggerated. Peter’s eyes go wide and he physically claps his hand over his mouth. Tony laughs, and kisses the back of his hand, right over his mouth, and lets him go. For the first time in a very, very long time, he feels dizzy with the promise of the future.

He doesn’t think he’s done enough to deserve that look in Peter’s eyes. Not yet, at least. But he has time.

Peter turns away to examine the guy he webbed to the tree, crouching down and rifling through his pockets. Tony takes a moment to appreciate the way the suit accentuates his truly remarkable thighs, and then takes another, longer moment to appreciate the genius in the way the nanites start stretching and melding to cover the wound in his side.

Amazing.

It's strange, though. All his theoretical, late night projections had indicated a much faster activation speed. He wonders- was there some variable he hadn't accounted for, or is there an inefficiency in the suit that he could improve on? Of course, he'd need a crash course in nanomachinery before he'd be able to improve anything on the suit himself, but-

"-and then once we crossreference the data, we should be able to figure out where they’re- Tony? Are you listening?"

He jerks his head up to meet Peter's eyes. Peter doesn't look annoyed at all, just a little amused.

"Sorry, sorry," Tony says, coming over. "I definitely wasn't." He can't stop looking at the suit. God, what a marvel.

"Hey, kid, do you think I could take a look at the suit in my workshop? I won't even touch anything again, but if you could just give me the specs-"

"You can touch all you want," Peter says as he stands up, then flushes bright red as if he hadn't even meant the innuendo. God, he's adorable. 

“Oh, can I?” Tony says with a grin, pulling Peter close again, running one hand up the curve of his spine.

Peter pulls up the holomap again, and it shows that by now they’re nearly at the edge of his property. The sun is just about to rise. Tony wonders if the police have ID’d the wreckage as his car yet, if he’s going to have to diffuse his own kidnapping crisis when he gets home. Probably. He has no idea what the fuck he’s going to tell anyone about any of this – he won’t breathe a word of the truth to anyone if Peter doesn’t want him to, but in that case he better start preparing himself for the midlife crisis intervention he’s going to be on the receiving end of for deciding to cohabit with a twink he’s known for several hours. It’ll do wonders for his image in the tabloids.

To be fair to his friends, he probably deserves it either way. He’s already dreading Peter eventually leaving, once they figure out a way to travel to his home reality without destroying the fabric of space-time (and he knows they will – between him and Peter, he’s already willing to bet on pretty much anything). It’s kind of insane, how fast he’s fallen. He’s already rehearsing his arguments to convince Peter to stay just a little longer. Never let it be said that Tony Stark does anything by half measures. 

He shouldn’t get ahead of himself, though. After all, first they have a world to save. Reality hopping bandits to round up. Maybe he’ll go save a kitten from a tree or something, too. That might be nice.

And, most importantly-

"Okay, I know you said your suit can’t fly, but I bet a different design could have flight capability, right?” Tony asks, pulling back from the kiss he’s somehow, unconsciously found himself in again. “Maybe add some thrusters? You think that could work?"

Peter should have some back up.

Peter smiles brilliantly as he laces his fingers through Tony’s.

"Yeah, I think it could work."

Oh, good. Tony thinks so too.