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The first time the three lifechanging words and eight earth shattering letters slip out of Peter’s mouth it’s hard to say which one of them is more shocked. Sure, it takes Peter all of three milliseconds to turn beet red, stutter a hasty reply and all but flee from the scene of the crime but it takes Tony half an hour to even move from his spot by the sink.
When he eventually does, it’s to pour his cold coffee down the drain and look at the coffee grounds in the sink for another ten minutes wondering if there was a way that they could tell him where to go from here and how his life would look like from now on.
(Turns out they can’t.)
Finally, it’s F.R.I.D.A.Y. who pulls him from his thoughts with a reminder of a meeting he has been planning to ignore. Her voice is laced with thinly veiled amusement. He ends up going to the meeting, surprising Pepper and probably two third of the attendees with his presence and none of them when he doesn’t pay attention.
Instead he has his tablet on his lab and absentmindedly starts doodling until his doodles suddenly take on shape and make sense and, once the meeting is over, he rushes to the lab and frantically searches for a project Peter has been talking about the last two days and buries himself in the work until the lines blur into each other and he falls asleep with the sound of Peter’s voice from this morning still in his ears.
“Mister Stark? Mister – hey!” Tony blinks awake just as Peter interrupts his own yelling with a snort. “Are you drooling on my project?” He swears he can hear the rapid clicking of a smartphone camera.
He’s now openly laughing and Tony can do little more than look back and forth between the teenager, filled to the brim with sass, and the notes at his side, really more of a tangle of words and numbers at this point. He feels warm and fuzzy and horribly inept. Instead of dignifying Peter’s words with any kind of response, he simply holds his tablet out to him, hoping he’d understand.
“I had an idea,” he says simply when Peter just raises an eyebrow at him and then closely watches the kid as his eyes start flying over the many paragraphs and circled notes and technical drawings. Once he’s done his eyes fly up, wide with excitement and only matched by the broad smile on his face.
“Thank you,” he says and Tony thinks Peter might’ve been thanking him for more than the improvement on his physics project.
The second time it comes up, is in the middle of the night a few weeks later.
Tony is working late, the cold blue light of his laptop illuminating his tired features in the middle of the living room. He’s so immersed in his work that he only notices a window opening to let in a somber teenaged vigilante superhero when he drops down next to him with a heavy sigh.
Immediately all warning bells in Tony’s head go off but he tries to keep his heart rate down, breathing even and watches Peter take off his mask. There are dried tear tracks on his cheeks but no indication of shock or physical injury. As he puts his laptop away, Tony silently catalogues every inch of the suit and looks for any indication of what might have happened. There’s blood. At least not enough in the right places to be his own but some on his hands like he tried pressing down on someone else’s wound that had stopped bleeding before he came in.
“There was a kid,” Peter starts eventually, voice raspy “and his dad. They reminded me of… of Uncle Ben.” His voice doesn’t break but when he pauses to take a deep breath Tony can’t help but hear the stutter and the gulp when he swallows back tears. “And I thought of myself, y’know?” he says and doesn’t really meet his eyes but flails his arm in his direction until Tony grabs his hand and holds onto it.
“Losing someone you love is… it’s draining,” he says after a long pause and, as if somehow those words and Tony’s silence break the dam, he continues, “And I can’t do it anymore. I can’t. I can’t lose anyone else. I can’t lose May. Or, y’know, you. I refuse to.”
It’s the almost childish refusal to accept something inevitable from a kid so much older than he should be that breaks Tony’s heart but he has never been able to handle broken hearts well. He has never been taught to console someone or reassure someone and, so far, it has never been this important to not screw up. He’s momentarily stunned.
Instead of making a promise he can’t keep that lays so invitingly on his tongue, he squeezes Peter’s hand and pulls him into his side – all overlong limbs, bloody suit and sweaty curls. With his free hand he starts combing through his messy hair, slowly and methodically untangling each knot. “You should sleep,” he tells him softly and pulls him impossibly closer when he melts into his side, “I’m here.”
And that’s all he does. He stays right there.
After that it becomes somewhat of a habit for Peter to casually drop the words that, for Tony, are still as big and incomprehensible as they were the first time.
“Do you know why you’re my favorite person ever?” Peter asks him with a wide grin, chucking his backpack into the corner of the room furthest away from him. He looks expectantly up at Tony who’s at his usual spot on the opposite side of the kitchen counter.
“Because I give you food for free and otherwise you’d forget and starve?” he plays along and pushes the plate of scrambled eggs with bacon towards Peter who barely even glances at it.
“No,” he retorts, sounding as exasperated as Tony feels. “Guess again.”
“Food before whatever bribery you’re trying to pull off,” he replies with a grin, staring the kid down unapologetically.
Peter mumbles something sounding a lot like “Whatever” but he dutifully starts shoveling the egg into his mouth and so Tony relaxes his stance and watches on in amusement.
“Now guess again what I love most about you?” he says the second his plate is empty, still chewing around the last pieces of bacon.
“Mmh,” Tony pretends to think long hand hard about that, “I’m guessing it has nothing to do with the fact that the first trilogy has been available on a certain streaming platform since midnight and you’re very certain that I’m a pushover for you.”
“You knew!” Peter’s eyes light up with excitement. “So can we—”
“Homework?”
“Done.”
He meets his eyes for half a minute, until Peter can’t possible stick out his bottom lip any further without cutting it off. Then he sighs, because who is he trying to kid. It’s definitely not Peter.
“Fine.”
The first time Tony says “I love you” is in the middle of one of their working sessions on a Wednesday.
He has been staring at the same circuit for almost half an hour without actually trying to solve the fairly easy problem that keeps it from working. On his own desk, half way across the room Peter is diligently working on his web shooters and designing new combinations, amicably chatting with Karen while he does so.
“Hey kid? You got a minute?” he asks when he realizes that not saying anything will keep him in this stuporlike state for at least another day, without knowing what exactly he wants to say anyway.
“Sure. What’s up?” Peter looks up happily as if he had no doubts in the world and it confuses Tony more than the inner turmoil he has been trying to manage for the past 2 hours.
“You know about… about what that kid said,” he stutters and stops.
“Oh, you mean Flash?” He rolls his eyes and completely blindsides Tony again. “I think he has a daddy issues. Don’t worry about him.”
“I’m… not, “ he furrows his brow and tries to understand what he’s missing that Peter is his normal happy self while he himself is trapped in a never-ending vortex of self-doubt. He’s turning and overturning the words in his head but there’s no better way so…
“I’m worried about you,” he finally spits out and keeps talking before Peter can interrupt him and stop him from ever saying anything about it at all. “He said that you’re a burden to everyone who takes care of you. And that no one will ever really love you and that I, especially, am just looking at you like a nice little side project. I know you’re acting like everything is fine but I can’t just let that stand. And, frankly, I don’t give a fuck, whether he has mommy, daddy or doggy issues. He’s wrong. On all the levels.”
“I know I don’t tell you this like… ever,” he lowers his voice, “and that’s not because it’s not true but because I have my own daddy issues but, see, that’s the issue. That is not your problem, it’s mine. And you deserve to know that I love you and I’m sorry for never letting you know. I’m a deeply –”
He’s interrupted by a high and happy laugh.
“But I know that, Mister Stark,” Peter tells him with a soft smile, “You don’t have to say ‘I love you’ for me to know that you do. And after everything you’ve done for me an idiot like Flash is not going to make me doubt that.”
“You’re really a lot better about being a healthy grown up than I am, aren’t ya?”
Peter shrugs, a mischievous glint in his eyes, “I think that’s not the only thing I’m better at than you.”
“Oh you—”
“Oh and Mister Stark? I love you, too.”