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Spider-Man lands on the penthouse balcony with a wobble, and Tony wastes no time ditching his drink on the mini bar and stepping into the blistering New York winter to greet him.
His heart skips a beat, starts pumping faster, when he notices the rips in Peter’s suit. Chunks of fabric are missing from his left leg, and there’s blood oozing from a few nasty, deep-looking cuts on his calf.
“Christ, kid, what happened to you?”
“Oh, um, hey Tonnnyy,” he says. He’s still wobbling around, which doesn’t hit Tony as the strange part. He’s injured. It’s his slow, slurred speech that worries Tony. “I, uh, I got some woundssss.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” says Tony. He stares at him. Something is wrong, something besides the blood pouring from his leg.
“I think – I think I’m gonna puke,” says Peter. He collapses to his knees, crouching over, and using his hands to prop himself up into a good heaving position.
“If you’re going to throw up all over my balcony,” starts Tony. “You could at least take you take your mask off so you don’t choke on your own vomit.”
Spidey’s eyes go comically wide. “What?”
Tony marches over to where Peter is bowed, rips the mask from his face, and promptly steps several feet back, just in time for the kid to start upchucking everywhere. He cringes, and looks away. Stays back. He doesn’t want to fixate on the mixture of blood and vomit pooling near Spider-Man’s feet.
There’s something spacey about Peter’s eyes that tells Tony he’s got every right to be annoyed about what’s happening here.
“Peter,” says Tony, from a safe distance, after he watches him wipe chunks of undigested food from his mouth. “Are you drunk?”
“Who? Me?” asks Peter. He tries standing up, but ends up losing his balance completely and tumbling down, though he does at least still have good enough sense to roll away from the puke and the blood. “Definitely not drunk. Not me. Not ever. Just hurt and bleeding.”
Tony releases a resigned sigh and lets go of his plan to have a relaxing evening. He dodges the gross bodily fluid on his way to give Peter a hand up. After some more wobbling, Peter stands with Tony’s help and is confirmed to be a liar. His breath smells like vomit, and a little bit like alcohol, but mostly vomit.
That along with all the slurring is enough for Tony to be confident about his accusation.
“Hasn’t anyone ever told you not to drink and swing, Spidey?”
Tony receives only a groan for a response. He chuckles, remembering his and Rhodey’s own college days, and arranges his arm so it stretches across Peter’s back, supporting him. They walk together into the penthouse, though it’s Tony doing most of the work, and it isn’t easy, half-carrying a grown college-spider-boy into his living room.
They’re both out of breath by the time Tony gently pushes Peter off him and into the fluffy couch cushions.
“Ohhh, this is so cozy,” says Peter. He pushes his head back and looks as if he’s trying to disappear into the furniture. “Thanks, Mr. Stark.”
“Mmhmm,” says Tony, but he’s scanning the trail of blood that’s now staining his living room floor.
He’d have to call the cleaners. Again. His place is so often bloodied by Spider-Man’s injuries he wouldn’t be surprised if the conspiracy clowns started believing Iron Man became a serial killer in his retirement.
“Stay there,” orders Tony, after providing Peter with the trash can that normally lives by the bar. He disappears down the hall, into a closet, and grabs the first-aid kit, but when he returns, the kid isn’t on the couch where he left him.
Tony closes his eyes, and curses under his breath, then hears a rustling noise coming from the kitchen.
He follows another trail of blood until he’s in his kitchen, where he arrives just in time to witness Peter holding a tub of ice cream in one hand and a spatula in the other. He’s using it to apply clumps of mint chocolate chip to his leg wounds.
“Pete, what in God’s name are you doing and why?”
“It um, feels nice,” says Peter. He straightens out, drops the spatula on the floor, and holds out the ice cream tub. “Do you wanna try it?”
“Okay now I’m gonna throw up,” says Tony, eying Peter suspiciously, a tad more worried now. He was a handful when he’d been drinking, but he’d never gotten this weird before. Had to be a side-effect of losing all that blood. “How long have you been bleeding?”
“Dunno, quite a long time, I think.”
“Excellent, great time keeping skills, Pete,” says Tony. He steals the ice cream away from the menace, stashes it in the sink, then grabs a hold of Peter’s arm, leading him back into the living room and back on the couch. “I gotta get you to the medcenter.”
“I really, really disagree,” he pouts. It’s there, just for a flicker of a second, the younger Peter Parker he met in Queens, and Tony’s tossed backwards in time. “This is nothing. My healing factor will take care of me.”
“Yeah, sure, and how does alcohol affect your healing factor?” asks Tony. “On a normal day your skin would have stitched itself back together by now.”
“Normal is so boring, Tony, Harry was right.”
“Harry Osborn? I thought I made my complete displeasure about the two of you hanging out clear.”
“Oh, you did,” says Peter. “But he’s not so bad.”
“And he’s got nothing to do with you drunk off your ass and bleeding all over my penthouse?”
Peter rolls his eyes dramatically and pushes his head back into the couch cushions. “Noooooo, no way, it’s just normal college stuff. Oh, and I think at some point there was a green guy.”
“Bruce?”
“Noooooooo,” says Peter, shaking his head, and having the audacity to laugh while he was in that condition. “Way less jolly the Brucie bear. Totally ruined this sweet party Harry was throwing. Got all bent outta shape for practically no reason, coming through the windows like it was his house gettin’ all wrecked by college students.”
“Should’ve known not to ask questions.”
“Kicked his ass, though.”
“Good job,” says Tony. “Looks like he got a couple of good hits on you, too.”
“Nahh, these are self-inflicted,” he explains. “Swung into a billboard on the way here. Even went splat, like a bug.”
“God, kid, way to make an old man go gray faster,” says Tony, fondly. He didn’t know how it was possible, but Peter Parker aged him and kept him young all at the same time. “Sure you don’t need the Medcenter?”
Peter nods, violently, and Tony has to grab his forehead to get him to quit.
“Yeah, don’t? I don’t need you puking again,” says Tony.
He lets go when he’s satisfied Pete won’t turn back into a bobble head, then gets to work cleaning his wounds and wrapping it in a bandage. Peter grows unusually quiet while Tony works, not even bothering to complain about stinging, and when Tony looks up to make sure he is still conscious, he notices that the kid is in deep thought.
“Holy shit,” says Peter. “I think Harry’s dad was the green guy.”
“Norman Osborn?” asks Tony, with a chuckle, finishing up dressing the wound. “He’s definitely always green with jealousy when he’s around me.”
“No – no,” says Peter. “This is serious. Seriously he’s the Goblin.”
Tony begins packing up the first aid kit. “You’re drunk, Pete, sleep it off before you start your detective work and making wild accusations.”
“I wonder if Harry knows his father is a supervillain.”
Tony sighs, and stands up, realizing that Peter isn’t going to let go of his theory. “All the more reason to stop hanging around him. Apple never falls far and all that.”
“Is that what people said about you and Howard?”
“Dipshit,” says Tony, but silently agrees that Peter does have a point. Maybe he should give Osborn spawn a chance. “Alright, drunky, do you want to sleep or watch a movie?”
“I wanna watch a movie while I fall asleep.”
“Good choice,” says Tony. He drapes a blanket over Spider-Man, chucks a few pillows at him, and he prays to the stars that he doesn’t throw up again.
“Thanks for not being a supervillain, Tony,” says Peter, while his eyes start to drift shut. “And for the band-aids.”
“Anytime, Pete.”
Tony smiles, wishing Peter’s wounds were small enough to be covered by band-aids, and shakes his head.
While Peter snoozes in and out of a drunken sleep, Tony flips through Netflix and tries to find something suitable to watch. He lets his mind wander back to Norman Osborn, and whenever or not he’s taken up some incredibly questionable side hobbies over the years.
Tony decides that Peter must be right. Only Norman Osborn would be tacky enough to fly around New York City in a costume that hideous.