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“Mr Stark, hey!”
Peter’s voice echoes around the lab as soon as the call connects, buoyant and bright as always, and Tony can’t help but smile.
“Well if it isn’t my favourite young adult!” He glances up from the nanobots he’s spent the past few minutes trying to bribe back into their housing to the hologram in front of him only to find Peter’s camera isn’t turned on. Given the whooshing air roaring lightly in the background of the call, understanding why doesn’t take much of a leap. “FRIDAY?”
“Operation Spider-Cam activated.”
The hologram flashes for a second, indistinct images of the city flickering past much too rapidly for Tony to focus upon before FRIDAY settles on a camera. It’s a little grainy, admittedly. Not one of the better ones she’s hacked.
Shame.
A second later, Peter swings into view, a blur of red and navy blue against the pixilated city of grey.
“Ah, there you are, kiddo.” Tony watches as Peter leaves a web at the height of a swing and turns a somersault purely for the camera’s benefit before casting his next web. “So, how’s it going?”
“Uh-huh, good. I stopped a mugging and a bike theft and rescued a balloon from a tree and then some drunk dude tried to steal a whole churros stand which was kind of whack. The stand tipped up when I took out the guy and the chocolate sauce went all over the sidewalk, but the owner was really nice about it. The lady who slipped up on the sauce was less nice, but I’d already put down one of those yellow slippy floor signs so it’s not really my fault. Anyway, the churros guy said he’d give me a cone on the house next time I see him so that’s pretty cool.”
“Sounds like Spider-Man has had an eventful afternoon,” Tony says, biting back a laugh. “And how’s Peter? That Spanish quiz go okay?”
“Oh, si, si. Salió bien. Señora Pérez said I had a good grasp on more casual use of the language. I had a history quiz too, and then in chemistry-” Peter turns another corner, swinging wide out over a street and passing so close to a bus Tony swears the kid is trying to torture him- “in chemistry we got to make keyrings out of circuit boards using lithography, so that was cool. Oh, and Ned’s new Lego Millennium Falcon arrived today.”
“That’s one of those things with four legs, right?” Tony asks, smirking down at his hands as he stabs at the home-call button for his nano-bots with a screwdriver. Peter sighs down the phone line, probably glares in faux irritation too.
“We’re going to build it this evening after he gets home from robotics club,” he carries on, stubbornly ignoring the teasing. “There’s 7,500 pieces and 10 minifigures, it’s insane. There’s a big star destroyer model coming out soon, too. Ned says he’s going to pre-order it at the weekend so that’s cool. It’s not as big as the Falcon but it’s still got- bees!”
“Bees?”
Tony looks up at the hologram in confusion just in time to see Peter’s red and blue free-swinging form fractions of a second away from a small, greyish cloud faint enough on the stolen CCTV image that had Peter not yelled, he probably wouldn’t have noticed it. There’s a decidedly unmanly squeal down the phoneline as the swarm and Peter collide, followed quickly by a series of yelps over the sudden hum of aggravated buzzing.
“Peter!” Tony says, alarmed, as on the screen, a flapping Peter slips from his trajectory, tumbles briefly but terrifyingly through the air high above the dusty tarmac of the city with his hands flapping and arms pinwheeling before he haphazardly catches himself on a neighbouring building. He narrowly misses taking out a street sign in his lack of control as he swings away with more momentum than aim, and eventually rolls to a stop on the tiled rooftop of a particularly run down looking apartment block across the street.
“Ow, what the hell?” he exclaims before Tony can say anything, jumping to his feet and dancing irately around on the spot as though suddenly sporting a suit made primarily of fire ants. “Idiot insects, no wonder they’re frigging endangered.”
Tony laughs, half in relief and half in genuine amusement despite his heart still dancing up a lingering storm of dissipating adrenalin and panic against his ribs.
“Oh, buddy. How many got you?”
“Ugh, I don’t know, five or six?” Peter rips off his glove mid jig, grimaces at his hand, and then plucks out a stinger from the back of it before moving to rub at his shoulder with a low whine of a groan. “Ohh, I killed so many bees.”
Tony laughs again, raising an eyebrow despite the one way video feed at the kid’s frankly backwards priorities.
“A second ago you hated the bees.”
“I never hated the bees,” Peter retorts, rubbing aggressively at his side. “They’re great pollinators and so vitally important for food production and they make honey which is great for weirdos like you who like it. And they’re cute. They’re stripy and fluffy and- Oh, shi-oot. Ow that really hurts.”
“You alright there?” Tony leans a little closer to the hologram just as Friday zooms in a little more. The image is pixilated to hell, and with Peter still fully clad in his suit save for one slightly blotchy hand, besides the flurry of aggravated movement, there isn’t much to see.
“Yeah. Yeah. Just- ow.” He winces another exaggerated moan, abandoning itching his un-suited hand to rub aggressively at the side of his head. “There’s one in my ear. How is that even possible?”
Peter sounds such a perfect combination of confused and exasperated that Tony has to bite his lip to contain another laugh.
“Well, I didn’t exactly design that suit with the intention of you going bee-keeping in it,” he teases lightly instead, watching as Peter frowns up at the nearest camera as he itches and very likely gives an eyeroll the eyes of his mask don’t quite convey.
“Oh, I’m glad you didn’t,” he sighs in mock relief, scratching aggressively enough Tony can hear it through the suit’s microphone. “You’d have done a crap job if you had. Zero stars, utter failure, would not recommend.”
“Hey, language, you heathen! That’s a dollar to your swear jar.”
“And three dollars for yours if we’re really doing this, Mr Stark.” There’s a smirk in Peter’s voice as he lifts his mask slightly and scratches at the irritated neck below with his un-gloved hand. “Don’t think I didn’t hear exactly what you said only a few minutes ago just because I was busy being viciously assaulted by tiny, fuzzy, gravity defying assholes.”
“Says the human who swung uninvited into their airspace.”
“Says the man whose wife made him a swear jar because their kid’s first word just happened to be shit,” Peter quips back indignantly, pausing his irate itchy jig to raise his brow beneath his mask at the camera.
“Two dollars.”
“Not my kid, not my jar.”
“Your sister, definitely still your jar.”
The eyes of the suit, already narrowed in concentration, roll a little, but otherwise, Peter doesn’t reply. Suddenly sitting criss-cross applesauce on the grimy tiles, he’s got his mask up as high as he can reasonably pull it without revealing his face, exposing his chin and cheek and a few tufts of curly brown hair as he distractedly picks at the reddening skin of his ear. Likely, he’s trying to get out another stinger, and seeing as he’s looking all the more focused for it, Tony decides to give him a minute to sort himself out.
Besides; his nanobots. They’re probably on a mission to form a coup at this point.
It wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened, he recalls with a shudder. The first rebellion had taken him nearly a week of sleepless nights and coffee-filled days to contain and had left a flooded lab filled with the devastating remains of broken metalwork and blue screened computers in its wake. He’d been forced out of the lab for days afterwards, half to allow Pepper’s fumigation team to deal with the vibrant pink powder and the sea foam DUM-E’s hoard of fire extinguishers had left behind, and half because after 145 hours and six minutes of stressful wakefulness, he might have slightly been suffering from a touch of sleep-deprivation induced psychosis.
Containing the second rebellion hadn’t been much more of a success on his part either.
His wardrobe alone had taken weeks to repair.
“Hey, Mr Stark,” Peter says through the speakers, his voice high and curious and a little calmer than before. “Do you remember how the bite, like, got rid of all my allergies?”
Tony rolls his eyes as he glances back up to the hologram, shaking an advantageous bot away as it makes a break for his sleeve. On the screen, Peter’s still sitting on the rooftop, his mask pulled up and one glove off and his phone held in his hands like the typical screen addicted gen-z teenager he is.
“Kid, if I wanted my intelligence insulted, I’d be on the phone to Bruce. Of course I remember. Peanuts, tree nuts, shellfish. Got rid of your asthma, too.”
“Right,” Peter agrees lightly, and out of the corner of his eye Tony catches him bobbing his head in agreement for the camera’s benefit despite still staring intently at his phone. “So, I think maybe that might not be true?”
Tony pauses his shaking, only for the bot to launch another enthusiastic and this time successful bolt towards his sleeve.
“What?”
“Bees.”
“Bees?” he repeats distractedly, reaching for his cuff button in search of the tiny robot tickling the inside of his elbow as Peter on the screen scratches at his own skin.
“Yeah, Tony, bees,” he says, almost casually. “As in, I think I’m allergic to bees. Or-or their stings to be precise.”
Tony flicks at a bot, then stops as what’s Peter’s said sinks in. He looks up sharply, finds the screen before him and Peter still sat in the middle of it. Peter’s still on the rooftop, red and blue and vibrant, legs criss-cross apple sauce and phone in his hands, but now he’s ignoring the screen in favour of looking straight up at the camera. Despite the mask, Tony can read the badly repressed panic on his face as easily as if it were written in front of him in bold, four foot high lettering.
Realisation hits like an icy shower, sharp and horrible and suffocating and so much later than he thinks it should have done.
“And you couldn’t have led with that?” Tony half snaps, half asks, stumbling to his feet and shaking the remaining few rebellious bots off his hand and honestly not caring if they decided upon a band new democracy with Morgan’s remote control Ewok in charge in his absence at this point. He’s expecting a laugh in response, forced and a little panicked rather than filled with any real humour, the sort Peter normally gives when Tony scolds him for his frankly shitty self-preservation skills during what are realistically dire moments, but this time he doesn’t.
“Tony?” Peter says instead, and it’s just his name, four letters and almost casual in its tone, but Tony can tell just how bad it is from the wobble Peter’s still trying very hard to hide. “Tony, I don’t feel so good?”
“I know,” Tony tells him calmly as he runs for the door. “Just stay there, Pete. I’m on my way.”
***
By the time Tony makes it to the rundown apartment block in what has to be one of Queen’s dodgier areas, Peter’s in the middle of a fight with a dude wearing all green and wielding a machete which, really, given who Peter is, is unexpected in a way that should be entirely shouldn’t be.
On a normal day, the fight would be more than one sided, a flailing human with unarguably zero style or hand/eye coordination against a smart-assed enhanced kid in a multi-million dollar super suit, but even without the visuals in his helmet, Tony knows Peter’s flagging. It’s only been a few minutes since the stings, even less since Peter noticed something was wrong, but already his oxygen stats are now hovering lower than Tony could ever be comfortable with, dipping before recovering with each wheezy inhale in a backwards two steps forward, one step back kind of pattern, and as a result, his movements are clumsy and uncoordinated, his strength lacking.
As he watches from afar with his repulsors on max but still too much distance between them, Peter stumbles out of the way of the blade a fraction of a second later than Tony’s fragile heart is comfortable with, but then manages to get a web near enough on target to pull the punter over before anything more can happen. The guy hits the floor hard and Peter nearly does too, his delicate balance thrown by the manoeuvre, but by what Tony thinks is more luck than anything else, he just about manages to stay upright.
His raspy breathing wheezes rapidly through the coms as he stumbles dazedly, his balance shot and his knees buckling from exertion, and his O2 stats dip and dive spectacularly enough to earn him a whole series of 10’s in competition, and then, just to make matters worse, as the kid collides with a lamp post in his vain battle to stay upright, the machete dude scrambles back to his feet.
Blade in hand and eyes furious, he swipes at the air where Peter stood just fractions of a second before, missing by a hair’s width as the kid scrambles out of the away just in time. Dizzy and weak and quite literally suffocating, Tony’s throbbing, terrified heart reminds him, Peter’s balance looks about to give, thrown by his sudden movement, but somehow it doesn’t and somehow, from there, he throws himself back into the fight.
The man takes a punch, weak but on target, then another, and then another, and for a second, Tony thinks maybe this is going to be okay, maybe Peter, even with half a dozen bees on his conscience and his oxygen stats alarmingly down the pan might have this fight, but then the man, furious and yelling but still stumbling around with webbing caught around his ankles, somehow manages to catch a flagging Peter with his blade.
Though the wound is minor, a scrape at worst, there’s still a choked off rattle of a gasp through the coms, shortly followed by another as Tony finally boosts over the last remaining rooftop and takes the guy to the floor in one repulsor-powered tackle. He overshoots entirely, leaving the perpetrator behind in a cloud of dust and litter. He rolls as he lands, and Tony rolls too, skidding across the tarmac with his momentum and taking out two trashcans and very nearly a fire hydrant before he gains enough control to blast back to his feet.
The machete wielding man is up again already, a graze on his forehead and a taco bell wrapper stuck on his shirt, but before he has time to do anything other than let out the first screamed syllable of what Tony’s sure would have been a polite and well formatted sentence, there’s a thwipping sound from behind him. It’s soft, almost inaudible over Tony’s pounding heartbeat and the roaring of the repulsors holding him up, but familiar as both.
A ball of white shoot out of Peter’s wrist as he stands across from the dude looking stronger than he did before, hits hard enough to propel him back into a wall and stick him there resolutely and accurately enough to cover his lips but not his nose, and just for a second, Tony once again thinks everything’s okay.
“FRIDAY, call the cops.”
Then the stats on the inside of his helmet flash red.
And Peter stumbles.
He sways viciously on the spot for a second, the eyes of his mask white and wide and panicked, and lifts a shaking hand to pull at the fabric around his throat.
The next breath that rattles through the com can barely be called a wheeze, and inside the HUD, Peter’s O2 stat flashes an even more vibrant scarlet. Beneath the mask, his mouth opens, his lips moving in a silent plea for help.
Tony grabs him under the arms and takes off without a second thought.
***
Peter stumbles when they land on the nearest roof FRIDAY can find without overlooking cameras, his knees buckling and weak and his balance as off as a new-born giraffe on a merry-go-round. Terrifyingly, it’s only Tony’s arm still tight around him that keeps him from dizzily toppling back over the edge.
“I got you, I got you.”
Peter’s hands are weak against his arm as they push away, fighting for space and air, and they tremble violently when he lifts them to pull at the seam between the mask and his suit. Uncoordinated, they pluck at the fabric, ineffective and weak, and immediately Tony gives in and pushes them away to pull off the mask himself.
Beneath, he finds Peter wide eyed and blotchy skinned. His parted lips are swollen and terrifyingly blue.
“Shit, kid.”
Peter lets out a little strained sound of panic in agreement. His chest heaves ineffectively inside the suit and the tendons in his neck stick out like rails beneath his pale skin as he tries desperately for air his swollen airways just won’t allow.
Even without the HUD still so helpfully displaying Peter’s frankly dire stats, Tony knows the situation’s bad and worsening, and from the utterly terrified expression Peter is pulling as he ineffectively wheezes, he knows the kid knows it too.
Unless something significant changes soon, this might just be how he goes.
Tony catches him when, moments later, his balance gives out entirely, immediately collapses down to his knees with only a fraction of control in his haste and pulls Peter up to lean him against the suit. The kid is terrifyingly pliant in his hands, limp as a ragdoll. His head lolls back against the chest plate as though his neck is made entirely of rubber.
“Good thing I thought to bring you a present, hey,” Tony says, jokes out of panic and because his fear response is more than warped after years of risking his life in little more than a tin can, as he disintegrates most of his armour and plunges his free hand into his pocket.
The EpiPen he finds there, Pepper’s spare stolen from her bedside cabinet and drawn out and de-capped with trembling, panicked hands, slides easily through the thin fabric of Peter’s suit in much the same way the bees’ stingers must have and then into the muscle of Peter’s thigh.
The button depresses with a click, loud and forceful and then, for a long, dreadful second, nothing changes.
Peter keeps barely wheezing. His lips stay blue. Tony’s heart beats a terrifying staccato against his ribs because after everything Peter has been through, this cannot be the way they lose this kid. Bees and anaphylaxis and epinephrine useless against an enhanced metabolism.
An allergy.
Just an allergy.
But then there’s a gasp. A rasping breath slightly more effective than before. A resulting rise of Peter’s chest.
Another follows, then another, and another, and then very suddenly, Tony feels shaky and lightheaded and a whole lot weaker than before.
Relief, he’d guess. The adrenalin crash.
With his heart still throbbing in his throat, he watches the kid’s eyes close in utter bliss as each gasp of precious air comes with less resistance than the last. The terror etched onto his face dissipates and the blue fades a fraction from his lips, and only then does Tony release the breath of his own he hadn’t realised he’d been holding.
“Jesus kid, bees? Seriously?”
“I still can’t believe I killed one.” Peter’s voice is rough and wheezy and weak but still more beautiful a sound than all the songs of all the Sirens put together. “Several, in fact.”
Tony looks down at Peter, at skin still too pale behind the blotchy rash and fading blue, and at the still lingering swelling of his lips and throat. The kid’s chest still heaves with more effort than it should ever take for him to breathe, and yet, he’s still worrying about the bees.
A laugh, breathy and broken and shaky with lingering panic and adrenaline escapes him at the utter idiocy of his child.
“Yeah I’m more hit up about the fact they nearly killed you.”
“They didn’t though. I’m okay.”
Tony begs to differ, and so do Peter’s vitals when he checks. He thinks even Peter doesn’t really believe a word he’s said, if the still widened eyes and now strengthened grip he’s got on Tony’s sleeve are anything to go by.
“You alright to fly?”
Peter must be feeling rough still because he nods and swallows and then shakily sits up enough to pull back on his mask. It stays half up, covers to just above his still parted, still heaving lips. Tony doesn’t need to ask to understand why.
He’s uncharacteristically quiet as he allows Tony to pick him up and doesn’t complain when they take off with him still held bridal style rather than latched onto the back of the Iron Man suit by the palms of his sticky hands. Embarrassing, he’d call it usually, demeaning, but now he just rests his head heavily on Tony’s metal shoulder and tucks his face in against the chest-plate. He’s exhausted, clearly, and pale beneath the hives and still wheezing slightly through lightly blotchy lips, but he’s breathing at least, alive, and Tony concentrates on that as he navigates the high up maze of the city.
A choked off noise, a cough maybe, comes as they’re flying over the Hudson, far away from the rooftop Peter nearly fell over and the police scuttling around the white-streaked, green-clothed machete wielder likely still glued to a wall, and his eyes instantly instinctively flick back to the barely tolerable but at least no longer scarlet and flashing stats in the corner of his HUD.
“Peter, you okay?”
“What? Yeah.” Peter rolls his head up from the metal he’d had it buried in as he rasps, reveals an expression that’s pale and blotchy and quipped up into what Tony can only describe as a smirk. “It was just funny, is all.”
A laugh, then, not a cough. The little shit.
“Uh, funny?” Tony raises a brow beneath his mask. “I would just like to remind you that nothing funny has happened in the last few minutes. Nothing at all. None. Nada. You almost died, Peter.”
Peter sighs, long and rough and dramatic, and flaps his swollen hand dismissively.
“Yeah,” he drawls slowly, “but I’ve nearly died before. This definitely wasn’t the worst. Didn’t even pass out.” He pauses, purses his lips as though in thought, the eyes of the mask narrowed and teasing, and then, very suddenly, Tony realises where this is going. “Actually-”
“No,” he objects sharply, shaking his head at the audacity of this kid, because even for him this is too soon, only for Peter’s smirk to grow.
“If anything, Mr Stark-” he continues, blasé.
“You’re not funny, Peter.”
“-If I were to grade it-”
“No, cease and desist. You're a menace.”
“-I think I’d have to give it a-”
“Peter!”