Chapter Text
“Hey Tony? I’m coming in. I’ve been sent to stage an intervention.”
This is all the warning Bruce gives before entering the lab where, supposedly Tony is ‘working on something’; the point that he’s been ‘working on something’ for more than 48 hours without human interaction, though, is the point where his loved ones draw the line. Last time was Pepper, before that was Rhodey’s turn. Now it falls to the other member of the Science Bros. He’s honestly surprised Peter hasn’t got on him, since it’s one of their lab weekends if he remembers correctly.
“Stay. Wait, don’t— okay, fine, just...” he hears Tony hissing, voice as frazzled as his appearance when he comes into Bruce’s view. Confusingly, he doesn’t seem to be talking to the other scientist. But he does spin around and plaster on a smile as if that distracts from the disaster zone.
“Hello, good evening!” Tony pipes, rubbing his wrist nervously.
“It’s 10AM,” Bruce says.
“Is it? Huh, would you look at that, isn’t time funny.”
“Tony. What have you been doing in here? You know we worry about you when you—”
A small yip interrupts whatever he was going to say next. Tony freezes. Bruce looks around.
“Was that a 'yip'?” he asks. “I think I just heard a 'yip'.”
Tony begins shaking his head like he can bat the suggestion away. “Whaaat?” he scoffs, clearing his throat and making a high-pitched ‘a-hem’ that attempts to cover a second yip. “No, nope, no yips here.”
But Bruce is already taking a turn around the trashed room in spite of Tony’s protests. There are take-out boxes, empty or part-empty and stinking (so at least Tony hasn’t been starving); crumpled paper and newspapers strewn over the floors (?), a torn-up shoe, and at least three open bottles of Nutella with spoons stuck into them that Bruce can see between the stacks of notes and scientific journals open on every clear surface.
And over on the ratty couch, a pile of blankets moves.
Bruce stares, hand raising slowly to point at the shifting mound. “What...”
With a third yip, a small face shakes its way free and stares up at him with big brown eyes.
There’s a pregnant pause where the three of them stare at each other- Tony in defeat, Bruce in bewilderment, and the puppy innocently looking between them.
As far as mysterious moving piles in Tony’s lab go, this isn’t the worst thing it could be. As someone fond of animals, Bruce is pleasantly surprised if still full of questions. He approaches the couch and offers a hand to the pup to sniff, which it does with a bit of shuffling forward.
“...Can I ask?”
Tony clasps his hands in front of his chin like a prayer, giving in. “You probably should.”
The corgi pushes its white-tipped muzzle into Bruce’s palm and he scratches it behind one big ear. “Whose dog is this, Tony?”
“Ehhhh, mine? Temporarily?”
Taking the small animal under the arms, Bruce lifts the puppy fully from its hiding place, setting its stubby tail to wagging and its eyes to shining. He smiles at it, then raises his eyebrows at his friend. “You’re gonna have to expand on that… Did you get it for someone? Is it a gift for Peter?”
The dog yips again, ears perking at the name.
Coughing a laugh that sounds hysterical, Tony says, “Okay- okay, don’t call the loony bin on me until I’ve explained, but… that dog? It is Peter.”
Now, Rhodey would tell anyone who would listen that Tony was a mess in his MIT days for many reasons but one of which was for pranking- often with the roommates using one another as the subjects of said pranking. This is where Bruce’s mind immediately goes, but that was years ago. The next explanation is that Tony’s mental health is doing a fun spiral but this is outlandish even for him.
Plus he’s been searching his friend’s face thoroughly, not bothering to hide his extreme skepticism, and Tony in this moment in all his frazzlement is as emphatically sincere as he ever is.
Bruce drops the animal.
He doesn’t mean to, but he isn’t paying attention to his grip when the pup suddenly wiggles impatiently. Tony yells out and lunges forward to scoop the little body out of the air by Bruce’s feet. “What the heck, man?!”
The corgi, only startled by its plunge to the concrete for less than a second, lights up upon finding itself in Tony’s arms with vigorous tail wagging and several dodged attempts at landing a doggie kiss on the man’s face.
“Kid, you are going to hate your life if you do this, mark my words,” Tony warns, holding the dog’s muzzle shut with one hand and glaring into the eager little face- though the expression cracks quickly into something forced, mouth like an upside-down C as though to ward off smiling.
“Tony,” Bruce says, not totally convinced but definitely swayed by the familiar way Tony interacts with the dog (Peter?). “What did you do to your intern?”
The humor recedes from Tony’s expression, replaced by a small glare toward his friend. “You think I did this? Why on earth- how on earth?” he snaps.
“Well, I don’t know! I’ve seen stranger transformations!” Quite personally, he might add.
The pup reacts to the change in tone with a quiet whine and wilted ears, and Tony glances at it and sighs, shifting his hand up to rest on top of its head. “We’re good, you’re good,” he soothes quietly, lowering it to the floor so that, now happy again, it touches down on scuttling paws. Tony then tiredly plops onto the couch beside Bruce and stares as the pup goes trotting around their legs and then off to explore, sniffing at various aspects of the messy lab.
“I’m still figuring it out,” he begins, “but this is what I know.”
…
2 days earlier
…
Tony would like the record to show that for all his genius and experience and planning ahead, he has no idea how Peter gets himself into these situations. There are things you can’t predict, things you shouldn’t have to predict, and this was one of those.
It all started with the alert from FRIDAY that Tony will soon start to think of as a reminder to take his Xanax: “Incoming call from the Spider Suit.”
He pauses in his paperwork, a flare of anticipatory fondness alighting as he waves a hand for FRIDAY to pick up. Rather than the kid’s voice, however, he gets that of “Karen”.
“Good morning, Mr. Stark!” she greets chipperly. “How are you doing today?”
He rolls his eyes. Trust Peter to turn his AI assistant into a mom. “Peachy, where’s the kid?”
It takes her a second to process his response (no doubt a far cry from how her sweeter user usually responds). “I’m calling to inform you that something has happened to Peter. I can’t find him.”
“You can’t… find him?” he repeats, standing slowly to pull up the suit’s log. “What does that mean, are you playing hide-and-seek?”
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you what has occurred. There is no viable explanation at my disposal.”
According to the Spider suit, he’s been on patrol for the last hour and a half and the tracker puts him in his and May’s apartment...the suit having not been turned off since he got back. His vitals however are unavailable, which is the only concerning thing. That and the fact that Peter isn’t speaking up despite apparently being in the suit still.
“Karen… did Peter fall asleep without changing, is that it?” he asks. “Early turnin for a teenager, I admit, but nothing to get worked up about.”
A pause. “I can’t find him,” she says again.
Tony rolls the words around in his head, tapping a foot indecisively. May’s at work on Fridays now, he knows, so… “I’m gonna have to come down there myself, aren’t I?”
…
“Knock, knock,” Tony calls, letting himself into the Parker home without waiting for a response. He may or may not have forged himself a spare key (don’t worry about it). “Game’s up, kid, you’re freaking out your AI and thus me.”
The space is empty and quiet at first. Then a noise starts up from Peter’s room.
It sounds like… Barking?
“This better not be a repeat of the Sandwich incident of ‘19,” Tony comments, shoving open the kid’s door. And by that, he means the stray dog Peter found on patrol, dubbed ‘Sandwich’, and proceeded to adopt for a total of 2 hours before May got home and shut that dream down quick. Tony dealt with the fallout including pleas of ‘can’t he stay at your place, Mr. Stark? I’ll come by every day and feed him and walk him, please-” to which Tony (luckily on a phone call so he didn’t have to say it to the kid’s ironic puppy eyes) shut the dream down for the second time. “Sorry, kid, I’m not a dog person. They shed. They slobber. And I will saw off my hands before I use them to pick up poop.”
So Sandwich was taken to the shelter, much to the angsty displeasure of one teenage vigilante.
Tony wonders if Peter has taken it upon himself to retaliate.
When he opens the door there is no Peter inside but sure enough, there is a small animal in the kid’s room, yapping away. It’s tiny save for massive upright ears; definitely a puppy, with brown fur and splashes of white on its snout and feet. The oddest part of finding it is that it’s dragging around the Spider suit- the neck of the suit encircling its waist and dragging on the floor like an overlong gown.
“Ugh, get out of there, fleaball, you’re corrupting my tech,” Tony says, snagging the foot of the spider suit and tugging it off the little creature. The dog yelps as it pops free, shaking its head spastically and looking up at Tony as the man folds up his creation over one arm.
Catching it's oddly intent gaze, he pauses. “What?”
It yips, hopping on its feet. Comes toward Tony.
The man backs away. “Nope, no, I don’t like you,” he informs, looking it over. “...However small and tender-looking you may be. Do you know where Peter is? Peter, the kid who swept you off the street and will soon be sweeping you into an adoption center despite what he may want?”
This may have been the wrong thing to say, because the puppy’s response is to start barking like crazy again, coming forward and propping its front legs up on Tony’s shins despite his repeated attempts to shove it off.
It’s got brown eyes, Tony notices. Intelligent-looking brown eyes. And Tony doesn’t have experience in this arena, but he’s pretty sure dogs don’t roll their eyes like this one does, in a very frustrated manner. Like Tony is missing something obvious from its point of view.
So then it trots off into the living room.
“And where do you think you’re taking all those germs?” he calls after it, following.
The little dog is by their refrigerator, pawing up at some magnets. They’re the kind of magnets that are each a single word and come in big sets so people can spell sentences out however they want. There are several random sentences arranged between May and Peter, ranging from silly to practical to affectionate, but all of them are lost when the creature readies its little body and then leaps suddenly higher than Tony thought possible, swiping a handful of magnets to the floor.
“Hey, hey, hey!” It repeats the action even as Tony protests, stepping back only as the man bodily puts himself between it and the fridge. “What’s the big idea, pipsqeak? Now I’ve gotta pick up this mess or it’ll be blamed on me by association. See, this is why I don’t...”
The rest of the sentence is forgotten as he notices what’s happening: he’d thought the puppy was scrabbling at the magnets like playthings on the linoleum, but as he watches, certain words are batted apart from the rest and… organized? Its furry head is looking over the mess as if searching for what it wants, even using the tip of its nose to flip some overturned words for reading.
And as crazy as the thought is, Tony watches the behavior for a moment in interest without intervening. Just as the dog seems to finish, looking up at him in earnest, Tony sidesteps and reads the little sentence:
BOY TURN DOG
Oh.
It’s been a quiet week, Tony concedes. I was probably due for something like this. So he looks the dog in the eye and asks, with extreme and uncharacteristic caution, “...Peter?”
An insistent yip accompanied by vigorous head nodding.
Tony closes his eyes as if in great pain. “If my mentee has turned into a dog then I’m gonna need more proof.”
Tiny feet scramble again and when Tony looks down, the little animal is seeking out tiles for a new sentence. He sections off “you” and “are” and “iron” before the dog stops. The word “man” is there, within pawing distance, but the little white muzzle scrunches up, eyes closing before a grand sneeze wracks the boy’s body.
The boy, now.
Because somewhere in the span of Tony blinking, the cogi sneezed back into Peter Parker, curled up on his hands and knees on the floor.
This certainly banishes the off chance that the letter thing was a crazy trick someone taught a very smart dog, but at what cost?
“Gah!” man and teen yell at the same time, the latter scrambling back to grab a kitchen towel in an attempt to cover himself while the former spins to give the poor kid some privacy.
“Peter, why?” Tony groans.
“I don’t know!” Peter cries.
“Is it over?”
“How should I know?”
“How should-” Tony throws his arms out, still turned away. “You’re the only person here who should know, Underoos! Now put on some underoos!”
There’s the sound of Peter immediately darting into his room behind Tony’s back, and the door shuts with some force to it. Tony waits until less than a minute later when it creaks open again and Peter’s voice croaks, “You can look now.”
He does. Then they stare at each other, both yielding to the silence of two people who have more questions than answers.
Peter eventually breaks it by saying, “I’m really glad you came. You’re more understanding than May, she’d probably have tossed me in the street if she came to the same conclusion you did about me bringing home… me.”
Tony pinches the bridge of his nose. “Why don’t you start from the beginning.”
…
“My gosh, what happened?” Bruce asks in real time. “Was it a wizard? Alien magic?”
“No idea,” Tony tells him with clear exasperation at the words as he says them. He sighs, absently lowering a hand to watch the dog immediately trot over and lick his palm. “We still don’t know who or what is responsible, nothing is for sure.”
“Why is he a dog again? Does he know he’s a dog again?” Bruce asks, eyeing the dog he now knows is Peter Parker with new hesitance.
“It’s - He’s been changing back and forth, with bigger time intervals in between as they go. He seems to remember less and less each time. Like some werewolf plot except instead of killing people, he’s down to play fetch.”
Bruce hesitates before asking, “Should… shouldn't he have little boxers on, or something?” He knows he prefers it when the Hulk leaves his shorts on. He knows well the feeling well of waking up with a blackout memory and a slew of embarrassing things to own up to.
Tony explains, “His vitals do something funky right before the shift, Friday’s monitoring - I throw him that towel over there when he's about to get human again.”
Bruce nods slowly. “And the Nutella scattered everywhere?”
“Listen, I’m getting there. One thing at a time,” Tony snaps, startling the dog. He sees and immediately softens in apology, offering his hand again. The dog eases forward, resting its chin in his palm and wagging its stub tail when the man reaches to pick it up and settle it in his lap. Bruce waits out the exchange, finding it odd and yet not odd. It’s like looking into an alternate universe and seeing Peter and Tony’s relationship slightly altered.
After rubbing the little body’s back into a curled-up position, Tony looks at his friend in all seriousness. “Bruce,” he says, blinking eyes which look suspiciously close to tears all of a sudden - something that happens less rarely when the man is tired and stressed but still only in front of a few people. “I’m afraid my intern is actually turning into a dog who won’t turn back, is that wild or what? It’s been hours now with no change and... what am I supposed to do if...”
“Tell me the rest and maybe I can help figure it out with you,” Bruce says, pouring as much reassuring calm into his expression as he can. “We’ve got a lot of PhD’s between us, after all.” He feels genuine concern for his friend but at the same time can't help but think how hilarious this will be after it's all fixed.
That pulls a thankful smile. Tony nods, looking down at the dog now dozing adorably on his knees, as goes on with the story.