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Tony Stark figured that his playboy antics were bound to catch up with him one day. He’d had some close calls when he was younger — because when someone’s twenty-something and had sex without a condom for the first time, they couldn’t exactly think of anything else better than the pull-out method — but after one scare from a girl named Lina, well, Tony became a lot smarter and a lot safer handling his trysts.
However, even that hadn’t primed him for being another statistic of ineffective birth control. No one was ever really prepared to hear that they were going to become a father in the best of circumstances, least of all Tony, who had at least one new person every month warming his bed. His thirty-seventh birthday had just passed when a woman — Meredith, no, Mary — that he’d met months previously at a tech conference in Queens came to him and said that she was carrying his child.
Obadiah threw down the gauntlet immediately, ordering a non-invasive paternity test that, ultimately, deserved a Maury-level announcement of You Are the Father! because Tony was suddenly ten weeks away from meeting his son. It wasn’t long until piles of protective legal documents were thrust unto Tony, but he’d refused to sign them before getting the full story out of Mary.
“My… husband wanted me to get rid of…” She bit at her bottom lip, worrying it between her teeth. “I couldn’t, obviously, but the next best thing is putting the kid up for adoption and — and you deserved to know, at least. Before it happened, I mean.”
The words were falling out of Tony’s mouth before he could help himself: “I’ll… I’ll take care of him.”
“What? You want to keep—”
“He’s my son, too. My responsibility. And…” Tony hesitated, feeling the prickling nerves under his skin. “It’d kill me knowing my kid’s in the system when I could’ve done something about it.”
Over the course of almost three months, Obie would constantly tell Tony that he’d made a selfish decision, that he had thrown away the chance to bury the story, that Stark Industries would never recover from the potential public backlash. Even though his choice was definitely a gut-decision, he thought it was far from selfish; Tony wanted to lie in the bed he’d made, wanted to start being a better person, wanted to be an even better father than Howard ever was. (Pepper, bless her heart, had his back the entire time.)
All of those fears and doubts plagued his mind the closer his son’s due date approached. Tony had made the right commitments, right? Choosing to care for his son was the correct decision, right? God, he only hoped that he’d never regret it — and when Mary finally gave birth to their child, it took all of two seconds for Tony to know that he would never regret anything if it involved that kid.
Peter Benjamin Stark was born in the late-morning in early August, with the sun high in the sky and shining through the blinds in the private hospital room. He had short tufts of brown curls on top of his head, thin brows that matched the arch of Tony’s. Peter was so small, swaddled in a beige blanket and wearing a cute little purple hat that the nurses put on him. Tony held him close with one arm, the pinkie finger of his other hand being held tightly in Peter’s much smaller fist.
Tony Stark had never known true, unconditional love. He thought he had it from his mother, or even his butler Jarvis, or sometimes from his best friend Rhodey. But none of that had ever felt like this did: A pure, bright force that dug deep into Tony’s chest and stayed there, pulsing with each of Peter’s heartbeats. The smile on his face was burning his cheeks, but it was worth it, just sitting there and counting the tiny fingernails on his son’s tiny hands.
He had never loved anything as much as he loved Peter. He had never wanted to live for anything as much as he wanted to live for Peter; that was the only thought that continuously ran through his head not even five months later, when his convoy was attacked in Afghanistan and he was taken hostage by terrorists. Tony never pictured himself to one day have a magnet in his chest powered by a car battery, but then again, he’d never pictured himself as a father either. It was something that he and Yinsen bonded over, the thing that pushed him to continue his fight to get home: “Embrace your son, Stark. Protect him. Don’t waste your life.”
The media circus was a blur after Tony was rescued — being interrogated at the CIA office in Germany, announcing the end of weapons manufacture by SI, driving by a Burger King for a cheeseburger — and all he really wanted to do was get to hold his son in his arms again.
Peter had started crying when Tony finally came home, not out of fear but out of relief, if the way he clung onto Tony’s neck was any indication. Tony couldn’t help his tears, either, holding nine-month-old Peter in a tight hug as they lay in bed. (He had missed almost three months of his son’s life, and he would never, ever let that happen again.) When Peter calmed down enough, waterworks still wet on his cheeks, Tony tugged his snot-drenched shirt over his head and dried the tears from his baby’s face.
It was then that Peter’s eyes widened, full of wonder and curiosity. It was in that same moment that Tony realized what he was staring at: The miniature Arc Reactor sitting inside of Tony’s chest radiated a brilliant blue light, washing the walls in its color. There was a moment of anxiety that shot through him when Peter reached out for the device, but his son’s hand was gentle as it prodded at him, fingers splaying across it and barely reaching its edges. Peter thumped down on it, forcing a gruff “Pete, no,” to leave Tony’s mouth, which caused the little one to giggle like he had no regrets. It brought a soft smile to Tony’s lips.
Tony watched him quietly, seeing his little eyelids flutter; he wanted to take a picture, to capture it forever in his mind, and savor this single moment of reprieve. They stayed like that, with Peter resting on Tony’s chest as he listened to the nearly silent hum of the Arc Reactor, until the kid’s eyes finally stayed closed.
