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He wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t felt so bad. As it was, he couldn’t help but feel that he’d made a terrible mistake.
But-
He’d woken up feeling sore and achy. His body hurt. Somewhere in the night, his head had been filled with sand. He tried to get ready for school and gave up at some point in the middle of it all, leaving the top half of him in his school clothes and the bottom half in sweats.
“I can do this. I’m basically an adult,” he muttered, popping bread in the toaster. “May says… brat diet when you’re sick. I can do that. Bread, rice… ah, what’s a? Ah, forget it- toast. I’ve got this, Peter. Don’t need anybody.”
May was gone for the next five days, off with her friends on a rare girls weekend that Peter didn’t have the heart to take away from her. Even if the heating in their apartment was janky at best and-
And Peter was sick. Which he felt was unfair. He thought that after the spiderbite, after nearly dying of a dramatic fever, after getting stabbed at and shot and torn apart, he thought-
What?
‘You don’t get sick anymore,’ he reminded himself. And wandered off to the living room to watch Netflix.
It was getting harder to think with each passing hour. He’d already thumbed through his phone contacts four times. He couldn’t call May. Wouldn’t. She had three close friends that he’d normally have called if she’d otherwise been busy. They were all on the trip with her. Figured.
Briefly he considered Ned. He was pretty sure that Ned didn’t have any more clue than he did how to take care of a cold, but at least he’d keep Pete company while he died and… and he probably would tell his mom about Peter being sick and she’d call May. And May had been dubious about leaving him in the first place…
MJ would probably actually know what to do in case of sickness, but he wasn’t sure if they were that close yet. She’d lately taken to sitting at the same table as them at lunch and she sometimes cracked jokes at him, but he wasn’t sure that meant she was willing to come over and watch him hurl into the toilet for the fifth time that day.
He dismissed an entire list of classmates, acquaintances, and former coworkers- sort of- from that brief time that he’d tried to make a career of selling knives.
Somewhere in the middle of the day, when he was half delirious on ginger ale and ramen, he made the fatal mistake.
He called Mr. Stark.
He picked up after the third ring.“Aren’t you supposed to be in school, kid? Your aunt leaves you for one week and you start skipping on the first day? Maybe I am a bad influence.”
“Mr. Stark,” he whined. He felt that he could cry. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”
A pause. Then- “What’s happening, kid?” His voice was sharper, less amused now. More stressed. Peter would have felt bad, normally. He found that he didn’t quite give a shit at this moment.
“Mr. Stark, I think I’m dying.”
A muffled curse and the sound of the ambient noise on the engineer’s end of the call changed. “Did you go out patrolling?” the engineer asked in a low, harried voice.
“No-”
“Something happen at school-?”
He thought his head might be melting. When had the apartment gotten so warm? “Honestly, I want to die. It’s never been this bad before-”
“Jesus, Peter, what did you do?”
He stretched out on the couch. Tried to at least- he missed the landing and tumbled to the ground, knocking over the coffee table. Banged his hip on the way down. He moaned. “Sick,” he mumbled. “Been throwing up. For hours, Mr. Stark-”
The sudden thought occurred to him- Mr. Stark was working! He craned his neck, making a soft hurt noise, and looked at the clock by the DVD player. Shit, he’d probably called the billionaire during an important meeting or something. ‘Moving money from one side of the globe to the other,’ he thought wildly and let out a weird laugh. What was that? Maybe he could still cover it. “Mr. Stark? I shouldn’t have called- I’m sorry- I’ll just go-”
“No no no,” Mr. Stark said loudly and Peter winced, furrowing his brow. There was something in Mr. Stark’s voice that he didn’t hear too often. He couldn’t place it right now. “No, Pete, stay on the line with me. I’m coming right now, kiddo. You did good, calling me. I can fix this.”
‘That didn’t make a lot of sense,’ Peter thought, staring up at a crack in the living room ceiling. He was pretty sure he had the flu and you couldn’t really fix the flu, you just had to wait for it to go away… “I don’t think this is fixable, Mr. Stark,” he slurred. “I’m going to go to sleep now. Sorry for calling. Did you have a meeting? I think you can go back to the meeting-”
“Buddy, I am not going to any fucking meeting when you’re on the line sounding like you’ve got one foot in the grave!”
He whined; Mr. Stark’s voice was uncomfortably loud in his ear and he held the phone away from his head, wondering if it was worth it to try to climb on the couch again. Maybe he should just stay here. Until he died or got better. Whichever.
“Peter!”
“Mister Stark?” Had he been sleeping? It felt like he had. “Why’d you call?”
“You called me! I’m landing on the roof of your building now, be at the front door-”
“Oh, I can’t do that,” Peter said, carefully spelling out the argument in his head. “I’m on the floor and I can’t get up. The door’s all the way over there.”
“Alright, alright, I’ve got the spare key. May- May gave it to me for emergencies. Peter, focus.”
The door to the living room was shaking. Pete could hear the sounds of someone grinding a key in the lock and swearing loudly. The hand holding up his phone was so heavy. He dropped it beside him, feeling his stomach roil.
And then-
It banged open. “What’re you doing here?” Peter asked stupidly, looking up at a frantic looking Mr. Stark, standing above him. He glanced at the phone in his hand and then held it up to show the engineer. “We were just on the phone.”
“Are you high?” his mentor asked incredulously, shutting the door with a snap. “Don’t answer that- I’m just stressed! Peter, Petey- buddy- what did you do?”
He blinked stupidly. “I’m sick,” he reiterated. Hadn’t Mr. Stark heard him? He could swear he’d already said that before.
“I know, I know, but I need to know what you did,” Mr. Stark groaned, shoving the coffee table aside. He pulled Peter into a sitting position, fingers flying over him, checking his wrists, his neck, peeling back an eyelid. All of this disagreed very strongly with Peter’s stomach-
He threw up in his lap. “Oh, that’s really gross,” he complained, leaning weakly on Mr. Stark, who, to his credit, didn’t shirk away from him.
“Did you take pills? Peter, I need you to focus!”
“Medicine?” Peter blinked slowly. “Nah, I didn’t take any medicine. I don’t know what to take. May usually handles it- she’s a nurse.”
“Wait, wait, wait-” He’d never seen his mentor look quite like this, half crazed and half relieved. He cupped Pete’s face, squeezing his cheeks in a way that Peter tried to lightly protest- which his mentor ignored. “Buddy- kiddo- you didn’t take anything?”
“I had some ginger ale-”
“You didn’t try to hurt yourself?”
“I wanted to sit on the couch but I missed, that was stupid of me-”
“You scared the fuck out of me!” Peter flopped his head in Mr. Stark’s general direction. The engineer was wild eyed, trembling, his lips were pressed thin and Peter had never seen them so white, and- oh. “I thought you were killing yourself!”
“I think I have the flu,” Peter said, because what else would you say to that accusation.
“The flu?” Mr. Stark’s voice insinuated that Pete had just said something dirty about his mother. “You- you think you have the flu, do you? Jesus Christ, this is why I can’t be a dad-” Cupping Peter’s head roughly, he kissed Peter on the forehead, his lips lingering on the teen’s forehead. He sighed, the air blowing against the teen’s fevered brow in a way Pete kind of liked. “Yeah, you’ve got one hell of a fever, kiddo- stay here. Jesus. Jesus Christ.”
Propping Pete against the couch- Peter thought he could have left him in a more dignified stance- Tony pushed to his feet, muttering under his breath. He grabbed a roll of paper towels and the trash can, coming back to sponge the sick out of Peter’s lap.
Oh, yeah. He’d kind of forgotten that. “Am I going to die?”
“Not if I have my way, Mr. Parker. The only way you’re going to die is if I kill you for giving me a heart attack.”
“None of that really makes sense,” Peter mumbled, letting the engineer hoist him to his feet. “I think I could fight you off- What’re you doing?”
“I’m texting your aunt that you’re sick- you’re coming back to Stark Towers with me.”
Peter shuffled ungainly back to his room, peeling the gross sweatpants off his legs when he reached his closet. He glanced around for an idea of what to do with it-
He was seriously considering balling it up and sticking it in his closet when Tony appeared on the threshold. “Give me those. Throw the whole ensemble into the hall actually. I’ll put this in your washer and then we’re going. Get changed.”
And it was only hours later, after he’d taken a fever reducer and eaten actual food that he had some clarity. “You thought I was killing myself?” he asked incredulously.