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Peter had been working on one of the projects from R&D they were taking a look over before approving for manufacture when the spanner he’d been holding in his hand fell to the floor. Tony was immediately off his stool in alarm, rushing over to him to make sure it hadn’t landed on his foot and caused an injury or anything.
It hadn’t. The spanner was just lying sideways on the ground, and Peter was staring at it.
“Sorry,” Peter winced, his face flushed as he looked at the floor. “Accident.”
Then he turned to Tony. The kid’s eyes were wide, and for a second Tony worried Peter thought he was going to get in trouble for it, but then he figured it was probably just shock.
Still. The kid didn't really do that—drop things. It wasn't the sort of thing that happened to super humans—certainly had never happened to Steve, who’d always been perfectly poised to hold anything. Their own personal coat hanger. That had been when he’d lived in the Tower, anyways.
“Sorry,” Peter repeated, and turned back to his work, his face flustered and slightly red from the whole incident.
They’d only been in the lab for about half an hour, mostly existing in peaceful silence. Tony had had several meetings that day and Peter didn’t overly seem in the mood to be talking, either. They’d just been getting on with the things they wanted to be doing, and it had been perfect.
“Don’t you need that?” Tony asked, a fond smile on his face.
It was a dick move, in retrospect. Clearly Peter hadn’t wanted to pick it up, and especially not right there in front of him, but he’d assumed the kid had forgotten about it. It was kind of an important tool for his project, and Pete only had the one spanner.
Something flashed across the kid’s face, and he nodded jerkily. “Right. Yeah. Right.”
He got up from his stool, blinking rapidly and then shuffled over to where the spanner was, crouching down slowly, his face angled away from Tony, picked up the spanner, and stood up with it in his hand.
And then he collapsed, falling to the floor not two seconds after standing up properly.
Tony was there to grab his head before it crashed to the hard ground, but he hadn’t expected it and therefore the rest of Peter’s body was going to have bruises. Tony, too, was going to be injured in the morning, because he’d essentially rugby tackled his way into catching Peter’s head.
“Ouch,” Peter mumbled, and he was clenching his teeth in pain.
“Yeah, ouch,” Tony breathed, holding the kid’s head still.
“No, Mister Stark, my stomach…it hurts,” Peter said—and it was more of a groan than a sentence, really, slurred words as he reached down to the midsection of his body with one hand.
Tony hadn't thought there’d been any specific impact to that area, so he frowned and tilted his head round to look at it, “You oka—holy FUCK.”
The fall had meant that Peter’s shirt had lifted up to his stomach, revealing what should have been bare skin, but was instead a cacophony of blood. Blood that had come from a wound that made Tony’s own stomach twist violently. The hand Peter was covering it with was coated in blood. It looked like a murder scene.
“Peter that’s a stab wound…you got stabbed?” Tony said, aghast. The kid had come to a lab session just…like that? Without getting any form of medical attention? And he just hadn’t mentioned it? He had to be in unbearable pain!
“Lightly stabbed,” Peter corrected him, holding his index finger—still coated in his own blood—up.
“That doesn’t make it any better!” Tony spluttered back. He glanced at the wound again, ignoring the fact that he wanted to run away as fast as possible (he’d never been good with medical stuff, that had always been Bruce’s area of expertise). “What did you do with the knife, Peter?”
He knew enough to know that you weren’t supposed to pull out whatever you’d been stabbed with. That was generally seen as a bad move.
“Think I took it outtt,” Peter whispered, letting out a breath slowly. It was clear he was in pain—picking up the spanner from the floor had properly exacerbated the whole problem, Tony winced.
“Pete,” Tony mumbled back, “We’ve got to get you to the Medbay. FRI, can you call Bruce, get him to bring a stretcher? Should I do anything to stop the bleeding?”
“He is on his way, I am relaying information about the situation now,” FRIDAY told him. “Keep pressure on the wound.”
Tony did so, manoeuvring himself into a more comfortable position and then his gaze slid back to Peter. “And then we, Mister, are going to have to talk about not hiding stab wounds from me. Ever. I’m going to recode Karen to ensure that you can’t. I didn’t even know you were patrolling before this.”
But Peter wasn’t in a lucid enough state to be computing what Tony was saying, because he held up the spanner triumphantly and grinned at him from his laying position. He gestured to the spanner with his head as though it was a prize he’d just won.
“The nice man gave me his knife, look, and I think I can keep it.” Peter’s face went puzzled for a second. “At least…I don’t think that he wants it back.”
Christ, he thought his spanner was the knife.
“Peter, that’s not even a knife that’s a spanner,” Tony corrected patiently, taking the spanner off of him. “You took the knife out.”
“I did?” Peter asked, blinking repeatedly. “Huh.”
He was delirious, obviously. An effect of the wound. That could happen. Tony sure hoped so at least. He didn’t know enough about stab wounds to know if it was a regular thing that happened. Hopefully most people didn’t hallucinate that spanners were knives, but then again, Peter was Spiderman, so maybe it screwed with that and made hallucinations or something.
Hell, Tony wasn’t qualified for this, he was a mechanic.
“You said you did,” Tony grumbled. “I’m presuming if I ask who stabbed you you won’t be able to tell me his name?”
“I can!” Peter grinned up at him. “He’s the nice man who gave me his knife.”
The nice man who gave him a knife. How wonderful. What an apt description.
Then something occurred to him. Tony just stared. “Peter, when you say he gave you his knife…did he give it to you by…stabbing you with it?”
“Yup,” Peter replied, popping the ‘p’ sound and dragging it out. His forehead was sweaty, presumably from the pain of the stomach wound.
“Jesus christ,” Tony hissed. His heart was racing, and it felt like he was on the verge of a panic attack—or maybe a heart attack, it was difficult to tell the difference, he’d had a lot of each of them over the years.
Then Bruce appeared with a stretcher, pushing it through the doors to the lab and didn’t even stop to take in the situation.
“Thank god,” Tony was relieved there was finally a responsible adult to help him with the situation. There was only so much he could do. He had the wrong kind of PHDs for this. “Bruce, he got stabbed.”
“I can see that,” Bruce muttered as he helped lift Peter onto the stretcher with Tony’s assistance.
“Keep pressure on the wound.” He instructed Tony when Peter was settled, then turned to focus on the patient. “Peter, kid, we’re just going to go and get this treated, alright?”
Peter pouted, and made a little frowning expression. “Okay! I’m bringing the gift the nice man gave me along, is that okay Mister Doctor Banner Sir?”
Tony looked down sharply at Peter’s hand to see that he’d somehow grabbed the spanner again, like it was his new favourite object. He clearly still hadn’t figured out that it wasn’t the knife. Although maybe that was for the best—with an actual knife, he was likely to injure himself, whereas the spanner wasn’t going to cause any actual harm.
Still, it was best that he didn’t have it, just in case.
Bruce looked more than a little confused.
“Don’t ask,” Tony shook his head in response, teasing the spanner away from Peter with his spare hand. Peter made a little whining noise, so he ended up having to replace the loss of the spanner by letting Peter hold his hand for the duration of their journey to the Medbay. It made for an awkward positioning, one hand keeping pressure on Peter’s stomach and the other with his hand holding Peter’s own. It was a lot like when the Avengers had played Twister, except normally with Twister there wasn’t as much blood.
(Except if Natasha was playing, then nothing was off the cards, she was brutal).
Eventually they reached the Medbay, and Tony was happy to pass it off to the experts. As much as he loved the kid, there was no way in hell he was going to be assisting in the medical procedures he’d have to go through in any way. He washed the blood off his hands thoroughly—once, twice. Again.
“It’s not fatal,” Bruce told him, doing the same in the bathroom sinks. He, too, wasn’t exactly up to do surgery, even though he probably could. He was Bruce, he almost certainly had a PHD in medicine. “It wouldn’t be, even if he wasn’t superhuman. He’s going to be fine.”
“I know. I just…can’t believe he didn't say anything,” Tony said, staring into the mirror. “Not a thing. We were sat there for half an hour in the lab, Bruce. Half an hour. You think it’d come up.”
“Well,” Bruce flashed him a small smile, poking him with his now clean hands. “I wonder where he gets that from.”
Tony shook his head, closing his eyes. It did, in fairness, sound like something he would do. “This is why I shouldn’t be allowed to mentor anybody.”
“Hey, don't beat yourself up about it. You’ll talk, set boundaries. He’ll figure out it’s not okay to give you an almost heart attack collapsing in the lab and starting to hallucinate spanners as knives.” Bruce shrugged.
Tony let out a half-laugh at that, and opened his eyes again. “Right. Yeah.”
“Best of luck. Parenting seems hard.”
“Hey—” Tony objected, about to lecture Banner because he was not a parent, absolutely not, nuh-uh, nope, not at all—but the man had already scattered out of the toilet, and there was no trace of him.
Tony let out a bitter laugh to himself. Parenting. As if.
—
Peter had to have stitches—a lot of stitches, granted—but no serious surgery. His blood replenished itself fast enough that he didn’t need to have a transfusion either, which just meant he was super lucky that it hadn’t pierced any of his crucial organs.
Still, he was unconscious for a good several hours whilst his body put itself back together, and Tony stayed to watch him, considering what he was supposed to say when he woke up. He’d contacted May—and she’d promised to have a discussion with him about the whole situation as well. She’d wanted to run over to the Medbay—because her kid had been stabbed—but she had a shift of work that was unmissable and, as Tony assured her, Peter was in fact alright.
There was a shifting noise suddenly and Tony glanced over to see Peter’s eyes flickering open.
“Hey,” Peter whispered. “Am I—Where am I?”
“Hey kid. We’re in the Medbay,” Tony told him. His voice was soft—he couldn’t help it. The kid was in the hospital. As much as he wanted to be annoyed with him, it was hard.
Peter frowned, seemingly unsure of why he was in a hospital bed and trying to put together the pieces. Tony plastered on a fake ‘cool’ voice. Time to be the stern mentor.
“You got stabbed in patrol and forgot to mention it to anyone. Namely, me.”
“Ah,” Peter winced, closed his eyes again. “Yes. I remember now.”
“Then you started picking up a spanner and telling me all about the nice man who gave you his knife,” Tony reminded him, voice devoid of emotion.
“Thanks,” Peter said, and was silent for a moment. “For the record, I am sorry that all happened. Little bit embarrassing on my behalf.”
Tony shook his head, sighing. “Why didn’t you just say something instead of working yourself to death in the lab?”
He wouldn’t have minded, that was the thing. He would have in fact preferred it if Peter hadn’t pretended to be fine. They had medical facilities for a reason, and it wasn’t like Peter could go to a normal hospital. Heroes had stuff happen to them, Tony got it. And he probably would have still flipped out and gone ultra-protective, but he wouldn’t be annoyed.
“I only collapsed once,” Peter defended.
“Peter.”
The teenager was the one to sigh this time, and he made hand gestures as he spoke. “I didn’t want to cause any trouble! You have your own stuff going on, I didn’t need to get you involved. It would have healed—advanced healing, remember?”
Tony rolled his eyes. “Yeah, it would have healed all infected and incorrectly wrapped once you inevitably tried to bandage it with stuff from home.” He paused, and then asked. “Didn’t Karen try to inform me?”
He’d programmed a high-tech AI into the suit to monitor Peter at all times, and was only just realising that she hadn’t said anything. Surely immediately after Peter’s suit was breached, there would be some kind of notification sent to him?
“It’s optional,” Peter informed him. “I said no.”
Oh, hell no.
“That,” Tony raised an eyebrow. “Is changing. Effective immediately.”
As much as the kid deserved freedom, he’d just revoked the privilege to having that option by not mentioning the fact that he got stabbed on patrol.
“Mr Stark,” Peter whined.
He shook his head and held out a finger. “Nope, not a word from the guy who collapsed and bled all over my lab floor with his hidden stab wound.”
“I’m sorry,” Peter mumbled, and his face had fallen. He looked genuinely upset.
“It’s fine, kid,” Tony quickly amended. “Seriously. I don’t mind. Just tell me next time when there’s something wrong with you, promise?”
“Yeah,” Peter nodded. “Yeah, I promise.”
“Thank god,” Tony muttered. “Save me the heart attack next time.”
“You had a heart attack?!” Peter looked horrified, eyes wider than Tony had ever seen them be.
He’d been joking. Mostly.
“No, no,” Tony shook his head in correction, patting a hand over his chest. “No heart attacks. All fine and dandy here.”
Peter shut his eyes and took a deep breath of relief. “Good.”
Tony grinned. “Maybe a heart palpitation, but those two are mighty different.”
“Mr Stark!”