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“Kid, no.”
“What?”
“You can’t make friends with supervillains. Rule number fifty-eight.”
“That’s a rule? I feel like that’s not a rule.”
To be fair, he’d just made it up. How was Tony to know it needed to be an actual rule? Who else would think to befriend Loki? It should have gone without saying.
“Everybody needs friends, Mr. Stark.”
“He destroyed New York.”
“He said he’s sorry.”
“He did not say he’s sorry.”
“He promised not to do it again.” Peter shrugs. “Basically the same thing.”
“It is not—” He takes a deep breath. “Kid. He promised—” he inserts heavily exaggerated air quotes “—not to attack us again because he had to. It was either promise to help us, or languish in a deep, dark, magic-free dungeon for the rest of his days. What would you choose, if your mind tended toward supervillainy? Which it doesn’t. At all. So I don’t know why I bother asking the hypothetical.”
“I believe him.” The kid sticks a potato chip in his mouth, unfazed.
Tony pinches the bridge of his nose. “A little help here?” he says to the room. They are discussing this in the midst of assassins, for crying out loud. Surely one of them could try to scare the kid into sanity.
“He’s your kid,” says Natasha, unconcerned. She moves a rook, and Clint scowls at the chessboard. He doesn’t bother to acknowledge Tony’s plea for help.
“He’s not my kid.” Tony throws up his hands. What’s the point of having other Avengers in his super swanky superhero sanctuary of a living room if they’re not going to bother to help him talk some sense into a superpowered sixteen-year old with a heart ten sizes too big?
“You recruited him,” Nat points out. “Makes him yours.”
“Is that a rule? I feel like that’s not a rule.”
“Seriously, Mr. Stark, Loki’s cool. It’s not like he’s teaching me how to blow stuff up or anything.”
Tony glares at the kid and deadpans, “I feel better already.”
“You can come hang out with us too if you want. I’m teaching him how to play checkers.”
Tony doesn’t even know what to say to that. So he doesn’t. He calls on Thor to intervene, which is how he somehow finds himself drinking beer with a Norse god while watching his teenaged mentee happily play board games with the god’s skeezy supervillain brother.
He really doesn’t know how his life came to this.
“She’s not even a villain! You can’t enforce rule fifty-eight—which is so not a thing, by the way—on one of the good guys!”
“She could fry your brain without breaking a sweat.”
“So could you, with your repulsors! Doesn’t mean you’re going to.”
“Peter.”
“Mr. Stark.”
He scowls. The kid has his stubborn face on, the one that means he’s not going down without a fight, and to make matters worse, Tony already knows he’s going to lose this one. Wanda isn’t a bad kid. Even Tony likes her, most days. Doesn’t mean he wants an all-powerful, brain-scrambling mutant around his kid. Just because she’s not a villain now doesn’t mean she’s never been a villain or couldn’t be one again.
“We only had coffee.” Peter rolls his eyes. “In the common room. She’s fun to talk to. Has some good stories. It’s not like we’re partners in crime now, getting set to rob a bank next weekend.”
Tony narrows his eyes. “You don’t drink coffee. May won’t let you, not after that one time.”
“Yeah, no.” Peter shudders. “That was awful. I’ve never felt so jittery befo…” He trails off after a glance at Tony’s face. “Anyway. Not coffee, coffee. It’s an expression. ‘Get coffee.’ You know, like sit and chat with someone over a hot beverage. Doesn’t even have to be hot. Well, it was. It was hot chocolate. Mine, not hers. I think she actually did have coffee. There was a lot of cream and sugar in there though, so I don’t know how much she actually likes coffee. I offered her some of my hot chocolate, but—”
Tony crosses his arms, which turns out to be an effective way to get the kid to stop talking. He almost smiles. Doesn’t, though. He’s not a total pushover.
Seven seconds later, he sighs. “Just don’t rob any banks in the general vicinity of New York.”
Peter holds up a hand, solemn, as he promises, “No New York banks.”
After that, he sees Peter chatting over hot beverages with Wanda nearly every weekend.
“Steve said I could.”
“Since when do you take orders from Steve?” He is not jealous. Not even a little bit.
“He’s Captain America,” says the kid in his best duh voice. He swivels in his chair to look at Tony over the mess of lab equipment between them.
“He dresses like a grandpa and has horrible taste in music.” Maybe a tiny bit jealous.
Peter shrugs. “I like grandpas. They’re cool.”
“Your opinion doesn’t count.” Tony flicks his fingers in the air. “You like everybody.”
“It’s not like we’ll be there long.” The kid is whining. He hates it when the kid whines. His eyes get all big and he pouts adorably, and Tony hates being reminded that he isn’t immune to adorableness. He studiously keeps his eyes down and away from any adorableness. “It’s just for the afternoon. Please, Mr. Stark? It’s a mission with Captain America!”
“It’s a trip to the beach. Not a mission.”
“With Captain America.”
“Who else?”
“Oh. Uh, Nat. Maybe…maybe some others? Not sure…” The kid’s tone gives him away. He’s a terrible liar. Tony looks up, narrows his eyes, and sure enough, the kid is sweating. He’s enhanced; he only sweats when he’s been fighting for more than thirty minutes or lying for more than three seconds. He straightens, gives the kid the look. He’s proud of having cultivated the look. It only took him a few months of hanging out with the kid on the weekends to figure out how to break him.
“OkayfineBuckytoo,” Peter says in a whoosh.
His face tightens. He looks down, fiddles with a wire. Hopes he’s not about to electrocute himself, because he’s certainly not paying attention to what his hands are doing at the moment.
“You…uh, you forgave him, right?” the kid asks hesitantly, and Tony both loves and hates that Peter is the only one who can ask him about Barnes without being on the receiving end of his wrath. Well, him and Pepper. Maybe Rhodey, on a good day. Definitely no one else. “That’s…Nat said you guys forgave each other. And you let him live here, so…” He fidgets with his web shooters. “I figured you can’t be too mad at him if you let him live here.”
The kid knows what happened. Mind-controlled assassin, car crash, murder, the fight with Steve, Barnes’s exorcism, the team’s reconciliation. Not all the details, not exactly what Tony saw on that video, not a play by play on his fight with Spangles, not how many tests Tony ran on the creepy metal-armed cyborg before he would let him anywhere near the compound, not how hard he works to avoid being in the same room as the man who killed his parents…but the kid knows the basics. Just enough to satisfy his curiosity, just enough to know not to ask Tony to talk about what happened.
Talking to Barnes is another matter. Peter can’t help it; the kid collects ex-villains like other kids collect stamps.
…Do kids collect stamps these days? He doesn’t know. Not important.
What is important is that Peter wants to spend the afternoon at the beach with the Winter Soldier.
“No.”
The kid stops fidgeting. Through the corner of his eyes, Tony sees him sneak glances at him. Sees the disappointed stoop of his shoulders. But he doesn’t ask again.
An hour later, Tony says, “Nat will be there?”
The kid sits up straight. “Yes? I mean, yes.” His right leg starts to shake, up and down, up and down, like it’s the only way to channel a sudden influx of energy.
“Fine.”
“Fine? I can go?” His voice squeaks. It’s not adorable. Not at all.
Tony nods. Peter beams. By the time the kid leaves, Tony can’t help it; he’s smiling too. A tight, strained smile, but a smile.
His smile isn’t strained or tight when Peter returns that evening, beaming through sunburned cheeks.
“Kid, no.”
“I’m not doing anything!”
“Doesn’t matter. You’re not making friends with Hammer.”
Peter pulls a face. “What? Ew, no, he’s gross.”
Tony studies him for any signs of sweat.
“Mr. Stark. Even I have standards.”
And, okay. That’s fair.
He doesn’t see Peter fall.
He’s tried to keep an eye on the kid, but the fight is too fierce, the dust too thick. He keeps an ear out instead, thanking the God he rarely speaks to outside of alien invasions that Peter is so talkative. As long as Peter is breathing, he is talking, and as long as he is talking through the comms, Tony knows he is breathing.
It takes him too long, several minutes at least, to realize that Peter is no longer talking. When it registers, he panics, then immediately tamps down his panic. It’s probably not very good for his heart, and it makes it hard to breathe. Whatever. He’ll breathe when he ascertains that the kid’s breathing.
“Spidey? Your location.” No answer. He barely dodges an alarming-looking laser beam and takes out some weird robot thing without looking too closely at it. They’re all the same by now. Ugly and rudimentary. His tech is way better. “Anybody got eyes on the kid? Skinny thing, red and blue spandex, talks incessantly?”
Isn’t talking now. Isn’t talking now. Over and over in his head, until he’s taking out the practically prehistoric bots with a fury. The faster he beats this enemy back, the faster he can look for the kid.
“I have eyes on the kid,” crackles a voice through the comms. Barnes. Tony’s chest tightens. Team reconciliation or no, he still hates hearing that voice. Has an inkling that Barnes knows it, too, because the creepy cyborg only speaks through the comms when he absolutely has to. Never tries to talk to Tony in person. “He’s fine. A little beat up, but fine. His comms are down. Getting him to safety.”
“Well. There goes our steady stream of entertainment,” jokes Clint. “This fight just got boring. Let’s wrap it up, go home, catch a movie. Who’s in?”
“Steve doesn’t get to pick this time,” chimes in Sam between blasts.
“Black and white movies are movies too.” Tony can practically hear Steve’s smile from here. If he cared to pay attention. He’s still scanning the ground for a glimpse of red and blue. Barnes’s word isn’t quite enough to quell the panic.
“Barely,” shoots back Sam, and he gets in the last word, because the subpar robots have just realized they’re losing and are pretty upset about it.
He fights. He also tamps down the impulse to ask for particulars on Peter's condition, mainly because he'll have to talk to Barnes in order to get an answer. Also because lately the other assassins have started to treat him like he's the kid's dad or something. He’s even caught Steve looking at him with something nearing respect when he's around Peter. The kid is seriously hurting his street cred.
So when the fight ends and the dust clears and he sees Peter in one piece next to Barnes, he tamps down the desire to punch the cyborg in the face merely for existing and instead calmly asks the kid for a status report.
Peter knows him well enough to interpret “status report” as “tell me this instant you're not bleeding internally, or so help me God, I'm flying you to the nearest hospital before your aunt murders me with a kitchen knife.” They're good at the silent communication that way.
“I'm good, I'm good!” Peter stops. Thinks. Probably considers what happened last time he lied to Tony about how badly he was injured. Decides to revise his answer. “Okay, well, I might have a few bruises, and kinda sprained my ankle—which is already healing by the way—and one of those crazy laser things might have grazed my head a little. But it messed with the suit more than it messed with me,” he insists.
“Alright. To the jet,” Tony directs, because the kid doesn’t seem too injured, but he’s also not going to take his word for it, and he long ago set Rule 31: No Taking Off the Spider-Man Mask Outside Unless it’s Literally a Matter of Life and Death Because Who Knows When Somebody’s Lurking in the Bushes with a Camera. Barnes proves he has at least some brains by backing up and letting Tony help the kid to his feet. Peter only wobbles and limps a small amount as they make their way to the jet.
Turns out, the kid didn’t exaggerate too much. He could have been more forthcoming about the amount of blood oozing from the nasty graze behind his ear, but Tony decides to let it slide.
He doesn’t thank Barnes for finding the kid. Or for getting him out of the line of fire.
He does decide that it’s not a bad idea for the kid to at least not make enemies with psychotic, murderous ex-villains. They can sometimes come in handy.
“I swear we didn’t rob a bank!”
It’s not how he expects to be greeted walking into his own lab, especially on a school night, but it’s not the strangest thing he’s heard. He can roll with it. He’s more concerned by Wanda’s presence, as only Pepper and Peter are allowed access to the lab when he’s not there. He’d never expressly come out and said no visitors. Didn’t think he had to. He’s about to create Rule 74, when his eyes latch onto the fact that Peter is a) still in his Spider-Man outfit from the neck down and b) standing next to a rather large pile of small glittery rocks on his worktable. Not to mention that he’s not due back at the compound for three days.
“It may or may not be diamonds,” blurts Peter in a rush. “I’m guessing not, because one of them moved and then shocked me when I touched it, and do diamonds do that? And Wanda’s getting some creepy vibes off them, and Bruce isn’t here or we’d ask him, but we thought you could take a look to make sure I didn’t accidentally bring back alien eggs to the compound, and we all get taken over like that creepy old movie with the spaghetti monsters?”
He has no idea what the kid is talking about. And he’s still not comfortable with Wanda in his lab. Though, if he’s honest, it has more to do with anyone besides Peter and Pepper being in his lab when he’s not around than specifically about her. She’s really not a bad kid when she’s not frying brains.
He approaches the diamond-like objects carefully and can’t hold in an eye roll when he has to tell Peter to “please don’t stand so close to the possibly dangerous, possibly alien eggs.” The kid obediently backs up a couple steps. Wanda subtly angles her body so that she’s in between the kid and the table. Peter probably doesn’t even notice. Tony amends his earlier thought. She’s a good kid. He might let her into his lab again after all.
“Where’d they come from?” he asks.
Peter shuffles nervously, and Tony knows he isn’t going to like the answer.
“Out with it, kid. Rip off the band-aid.”
Peter sighs. “It wasn’t my fault.”
“Okay…” He tries to sound reassuring, he really does, but that’s more Pepper’s thing. He’s too busy wondering if he should get Friday to call his lawyers or get set to ground the kid into next year. At least he looks healthy enough to not need a hospital. So yeah, if he sounds a bit more like his old man than he’d like, it’s not really something he can help in this moment. When the kid shuffles his feet instead of answering, he tries—probably unsuccessfully—to channel Pepper and says a tiny bit more gently, “You already got the bank robbing out of the way. Can’t be much worse than that, can it?”
“I might maybe have ripped off a mobster?”
Tony blinks a few times. He has no words.
“I didn’t mean to!” The kid finds enough words for the both of them. “How was I to know that weird dude heading into a creepy warehouse was there to meet some mobster guys? They didn’t even look like in the movies! They’re supposed to be dressed up in suits and bowler hats. With cigars! And no, it’s not like I think everything’s like in the movies, but—well, it would have prepared me a bit more if in this case, the movies were a little more like real life! At least the creepy warehouse was totally like that one movie I— Anyway, that’s so not the point,” he waves his hands in the air by his head and gets back on track. “I followed the weird dude because I had a feeling. Spider sense, you know. But I was careful, stayed in the rafters, and these totally normal-looking guys are sitting there, and they’re not doing anything, right? Just chatting, like they’re not sitting in the middle of the most creepy warehouse that’s totally a setting for a horror movie, and weird dude starts talking to them, and I’m listening in, and I’m thinking it’s probably a drug deal, and then they’re talking about killing somebody, like a hit, and I maybe freak out a little bit, but I keep my cool, right? I figure maybe I should just call the police, because it’s not like I can bust them doing anything, they’re just talking, so I make to leave, but before I can, they’re pulling out this bag of diamonds, and I realize they’re paying the dude and he’s about to leave. And that’s when I realize there are more guys in the warehouse than just those three, and I’m kind of, like, totally surrounded? They didn’t see me!” he rushes to assure Tony, probably because his eyebrows are disappearing into his hairline. “Well. Not then, anyway. I kind of, like, maybe tripped..? On my way out.”
“You tripped,” he repeats. It’s the only thing he can think to say. “You never trip.”
“Yeah, well, I dunno, try being sixteen and nervous and surrounded by mobsters and hit men!” He throws up his hands, then must think better of it because he steals a nervous glance at Tony and goes on, “It was a little trip. But it, uh—made a big noise. So there I am, trying to get away from the hit man, who thanks to me didn’t quite manage to get paid, by the way, so he’s probably not in a good mood, and the totally normal-looking mob guys are half scramming out of there, half coming to find me, and I made it out a window, and I didn’t mean to find myself alone in an alley with the guy with a bag full of sparkly alien eggs, it just happened!”
He doesn’t know if it makes him a bad mentor that he can’t decide whether to laugh or to ground the kid from Spider-Manning forever. He probably shouldn’t laugh at his kid nearly getting riddled with holes by a bunch of maybe-mobsters. Definitely shouldn’t. In fact, he’ll probably be freaking out about this later. For now, all he can do is try not to laugh.
Worst mentor ever.
“And this guy—who totally looks like he’s in some preppy college band, by the way, not hanging out in creepy warehouses paying hit men, totally not like the movies—just, like, throws the bag at me and starts running away. And he makes it, like, five steps before I think he realizes he wasn’t supposed to throw the bag of diamonds at the Junior Avenger, and starts to call for backup to get the bag back from me. And I’m not gonna fight off a dozen mobsters all by myself when I’ve got a Chemistry test to study for, May would kill me. So I…um, took off. With a bag of diamonds. And was going to drop it by the police station with a note, but then it moved.” He contorts his face to convey how creeped out he is. “And I opened the bag, and one of them shocked me, and no way am I leaving weird alien rocks at the police station without checking it out first, so I called Wanda and she came and got me, and I asked her to do her sensing thing, and she did, and it has creepy vibes.”
“Very creepy vibes,” Wanda confirms, the first thing she’s said since Tony arrived, and he’s gratified to note that he’s not the only one trying to keep a straight face.
“So here we are. Yeah.” Peter sucks in a breath. “What do you think they are? And how much trouble am I in?”
The kid narrows his eyes when Wanda starts to laugh, and Tony can’t hold it in any longer either. He might be the worst mentor ever, but at least he’s in company. And he figures it’s at least not the worst thing in the world for the kid to have friends with superpowers. Especially when the sparkly diamond rocks actually do turn out to be alien eggs.
“But Loki will be there.”
“Kid, you do know that’s the opposite of making your case, right?”
“He’s got magic. He won’t let anything happen to me.”
He lets his silence speak for itself, and Peter sighs dramatically and leans back into his seat, staring at the moving scenery outside the car. Usually Tony doesn’t mind Peter’s chatter, but right now, the silence is a welcome reprieve. The kid has been after him all day to let him join Thor and Bruce on a mission to find some space rocks somewhere or other—to be honest, Tony doesn’t know what or where exactly, he wasn’t paying attention when Bruce told him about it. He’s the man’s friend, not a saint, and he was trying to brainstorm a solution to his acceleration problem in the newest Iron Man suit at the time—and he still doesn’t really care about the details. He knows enough.
Send the kid on a road trip with Thor, Loki, and the Hulk?
Not in this lifetime.
So when he gets the call from Bruce three days later that Peter’s been injured in New Mexico, he’s glad he has a couple thousand miles to calm himself down before he murders a spider.
He doesn’t know where to start. Ditching school? Lying to his aunt? Lying to him? Lying to Bruce? Crossing the country as a minor without parental permission? Jumping into a canyon in the middle of the desert to collect rocks?
“That actually wasn’t what hap—” The kid wisely stops talking after taking a good look at the fury on Tony’s face.
“Grounded,” he gets out, and his face must be something to behold, because the kid doesn’t even try to argue. He’s not taking the suit—he learned his lesson there—but, “no patrolling and no lab for six months, and when I tell May about your delinquent misadventure with Jolly Green and the demigod twins, I’m sure she’ll be happy to add a few more things to the list.” He’s tempted for a split second to take it back, because the kid looks like he might cry, but no. Grounding is the least the kid deserves after pulling a stunt like this. Puppy dog eyes aren’t going to work this time.
“Possible release after two weeks for extremely penitent behavior,” he adds. There. Still harsh, but not like he sucked the kid’s life away. Which he should, he really should, because running away to New Mexico is hands down the worst thing the kid has ever done, and that’s counting the Great Lab Debacle of Christmas 2016.
He slumps into a chair next to the kid’s bed. In a hotel, not a hospital, praise be to the God that he’s been talking to a lot more since this kid came into his life. He is suddenly and utterly exhausted, and he’s certain that it shows in every line of his face. God, he must look ten years older than he did last year. He makes a mental note to decline the next magazine cover photo offer that comes his way.
“I really am sorry, Mr. Stark,” Peter whispers.
“You will be,” Tony answers gruffly, but he can’t help reaching for the kid’s hand, squeezing it to make sure he’s real, that he’s okay despite the bandages on his head. Peter looks like he wants to say something but is rightly concerned that it might be the end of him. “Get it out,” Tony says. “I’ve already decided not to murder you tonight. Take advantage of my generosity.”
Peter manages a ghost of a smile, then says seriously, “Loki saved me.”
Tony groans. His head drops to the bed. “Don’t tell me that, kid. I don’t want to like the supervillains. That’s your thing.”
The kid pats him comfortingly on the shoulder. “I know. Can we do away with the rule now?”
“Why?” Tony sits up, glares at the kid. “Are you suddenly in a rule-following mood?”
Peter has the grace to blush.
“It’s still a rule, kid.”
“Even if they’re not technically villains anymore?”
And what can he honestly say to that? It’s not like he’s been enforcing the rule anyway. If the supervillains seem a little less like villains through Peter’s eyes, and if they keep saving his scrawny behind because he’s impossible not to love, then what’s the harm in a loophole?
They agree to amend Rule 58: Don't Make Friends with Supervillains Who Are Actively Trying to Kill You.
It works out well, especially when the sparkly alien eggs hatch and Wanda manages to stop Peter from smuggling one out as a pet. Or when the embarrassingly low-tech robots make a reappearance and Peter is so fascinated by Loki’s magical forcefield that he almost forgets to thank him for saving his life…again. And that, after Barnes had already shoved him out of the way of the first potentially fatal prehistoric bot laser.
And if one day Tony surprises the hell out of the Avengers by sitting down to breakfast only two seats over from Barnes, well. It’s not important.
He can break his own rules sometimes too.