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Sometimes, Tony forgets just how much the kid has been through.
When Tony met Peter, he had been a fifteen year old kid living on the streets on the run from CPS because he refused to go into the system, to become a statistic–and yet Tony still visited him all the time, because he found the kid quite endearing, wise beyond his years, an old soul. Tony met him again when he was kidnapped and Peter had resented him for not looking for him (even though he had, he had ) and then got himself shot. But Peter went through more than that even before Tony met him. His parents died, then his aunt and uncle, and somewhere in the in between he was bitten by a radioactive spider (from where, exactly, Tony didn’t know) and then was kidnapped, shot, and then thrown into a life full of luxury he had never known before, on his third set of parents.
This takes Tony aback–he’d never thought about that before.
Peter’s been through three sets of parents.
And although there were the five stages of grief and it seemed Peter had had enough time to experience them all, nobody ever really stops grieving. Not really. There is no schedule, no set time period, no natural order.
Because grief is not linear.
So he’s not exactly surprised to enter Peter’s door and find him lying down in his bed quietly crying, tears streaming down his face, holding a photo in his hands, and a couple more in his lap.
“Hey, kiddo.”
Peter sits up, his red-rimmed eyes meeting Tony’s concerned ones, and then wipes the tears on his Midtown hoodie.
“Oh. Hey, Mister Stark.”
“Hey, yourself.” Tony smiles softly. “You okay?”
“I’m okay,” Peter tells him. “I’m just thinking. About . . . before.”
“Before everything?”
Peter nods. “Yeah.”
“Those photos?” Tony asks, gesturing to the small pieces of film in different shapes and sizes.
“Yeah. I tried to save them all from our old apartment, but being homeless doesn’t go easy on pictures.”
“I’ll bet,” Tony says. “could I see some of them?”
He expects Peter to tell him no, but, if anything, his eyes brighten just the tiniest bit. “Sure.” he says, scooting over and patting a spot on the bed. Tony moves to sit where Peter had gestured.
He picks up one photo out of the stack. It’s of four adults, one of them holding a small baby.
“This is one of the only few I have of my parents in it,” Peter explains, then starts pointing at the different people. “That’s my dad, Richard, and his brother, my uncle Ben.” Richard Parker? he thinks, but doesn’t say anything. “That’s my mom, Mary,” he continues, pointing to a woman smiling at the baby. Mary Parker? “and that’s my aunt May holding me.”
“You’re very tiny,” Tony observes.
“I was always small for my age before the bite.” Peter tells him. “Did you know my aunt May resented me at first?”
Tony looks at him, a little stunned by that comment Peter had made so offhandedly. “No, I did not.”
“She did,” Peter says. “she didn’t like, hate me or anything, but she resented me a little bit. Around the time I was about to be born, she and Ben found out she couldn’t have kids of her own.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, so it took her a little while for her to warm up to me. But when she did, she treated me as if I was her own.”
Tony smiles. “I bet that was nice.”
Peter smiles too. “It was.” he sniffles.
“Hey, Pete?”
“Yeah?”
“You know, I think we both forget how much you’ve been through in just a short amount of time.”
Peter sighs. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“Peter, hey. Look at me.” he says, and the boy does. “You’re allowed to grieve, okay? For as long as you want. Nobody is going to be mad. Grief doesn’t happen in a particular order, okay? One day you could be so angry and hate the world and the next you could be so depressed it’ll feel like you’re back to square one. But there is no square one–not with things like this.”
Peter looks at him. “Really?”
Tony nods. “Grief isn’t the same for everyone, but I don’t think anyone ever really stops grieving. And I’ve been in your exact spot before.”
“Really?”
“Yep. I still get sad about my mom all the time. And sometimes I grieve you because I forget you’re here and alive, and it’s hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that you are. Both of those things happened years apart from each other, and I still grieve you both.”
“But I didn’t die , Mister Stark.”
“You almost did,” Tony whispers. “And even if you didn’t, you didn’t experience my end when you went missing. I nearly went insane trying to find you while also lying to Pepper and Rhodey about what I was doing. I even lied to Happy, and he dropped me off around your block most of the time. Then, when I did find you by getting kidnapped myself, kid–I was relieved and horrified and grateful and scared and confused all at once.”
“Did you go through all the five stages of grief in one day?” Peter jokes, but it falls flat.
“I did.”
“Those are some wise words, Mister Stark.” Peter tells him.
“It took me a while to learn that myself.” Tony explains. “But I’m glad I did.”
“Why?”
“I used to deal with grief in very unhealthy ways. I see stuff nobody should have to see with our line of work. So it reminds me that, even though I’m Iron Man, I’m also a human. Just a person living his life and trying to make up for past mistakes, even though I still make them every day.”
“We’re all people, in the end, after all.” Peter says. “My uncle used to brag about me, you know. He said I was going to change the world.”
“He’s right.”
Peter’s lips flicker upward a bit. “He used to tell me not to let anything get to my head, though. Something he used to say all the time–May, too, actually–he’d say: ‘With great power, there must also come great responsibility’ . And I never really understood what he meant. Not until I got these powers.”
“I see where you’re coming from, kid.” Tony says, even though he’d technically had great power even before he became Iron Man.
Peter turns to him. “When you can do the things that I can, but you don’t, and then the bad things happen, they happen because of you.”
“That’s why you do this?”
Peter nods. “Ben and May were always helping people. I like to think that, in a way, I’m honoring their memory by using these powers for good. Plus, New York is a little crazy, and nobody ever really looks out for the little guy. Especially when the big things happen. So I try to stick to doing things like giving directions, or getting cats out of trees, or once I even helped an elderly couple carry their groceries to their car. I wasn’t even in the suit for that.”
Sometimes, Tony forgets that, despite everything Peter has been through, he’s still just a fifteen year old kid just trying to help make the world a better, safer place, so that kids like him will have a better, safer place to live and grow up in–to leave the world better than he found it.
“You know, there’s something Vision says a lot. He told me this when he caught me thinking about my mom one day.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, he would say, ‘what is grief, if not love persevering’ . I’m not sure where he learned that, seeing as he doesn’t understand emotion very well.”
“Sounds like that’s his with great power quote.”
“If you want to see it that way.”
Peter nods. “Didn’t you program Vision?”
“I helped.”
“Hm,” Peter replies. “Maybe there is hope yet.”
“Hey!” Tony says, faking offense. “Anyways, my point is, grief isn’t linear. You’re allowed to grieve the rest of your life if you need to. Nobody is going to blame you.”
“Thanks, Mister Stark.”
“Anytime, kid.” Tony says, wrapping Peter in a one-armed hug, who nuzzles his face into Tony’s shirt. “Anytime.”
“Do you want to see some more pictures?”
“Sure, kid.” Tony replies. “Maybe soon, I’ll pull out some pictures of my mom.”
“Really?”
Tony nods. “And maybe her cookbook. I like to cook her recipes, sometimes, when I’m feeling down in the dumps.”
“I wish I could do that. May couldn’t cook if her life depended on it.”
“There wasn’t one thing that she could cook well?”
“Takeout,” Peter replies. “Ben did most of the cooking. Especially after she burnt microwaved ramen once. Or when she almost exploded the microwave trying to heat up pizza.”
“How did she almost explode the microwave heating up pizza?”
“To this day, I have no idea,” he laughs. “and I was around five or six when my parents died, so I can’t remember much about their cooking.”
“What’s something your uncle used to make a lot?”
Peter ponders this. “Anything Italian,” he replies. “My aunt May was Italian.”
“I can do Italian.” Tony says. “I can speak some Italian, actually.”
“Really? Me too.” Peter informs him. “Aunt May taught me some.”
“We oughta use that to our advantage one day, huh, kid? It’d be hilarious.”
“Oh, I just know my aunt would love that.” Peter laughs. “Sometimes, when she would fuss at Ben, she would start yelling in Italian without meaning to. Ben would just listen and let her get it out, even if he didn’t understand. And then he’d look at her and say ‘Um, English, please.’ and she’d laugh so hard she wasn’t mad anymore.”
“That’s kind of funny, actually.”
“They were the best. They taught me to never go to bed mad at someone you love, because you never know what could happen. They taught me a lot of things.” he looks at Tony. “Ben would’ve loved you. You know, after he stopped being in overprotective dad mode over me.”
“It’s hard not to be in overprotective dad mode with you.”
Peter gives him a look, but then his gaze softens. “Thank you, Mister Stark. For everything.”
He doesn’t have to explain–Tony understands.
“You’re welcome kid. I’m always here.”
“Me too, Mister Stark. Me too.”