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Tony Stark knows very, very little about Pokémon cards.
He knows a lot of things. He is Tony fucking Stark after all. He hasn’t gotten this far in his life without knowing a lot of things. That’s just a fact. But he’s not an asshole, and he knows when to admit when he doesn’t know something. It’s not really that big of a deal to him that he doesn’t know what a Pikachu looks like or that he hasn’t ever even owned a Pokémon card. He’s never really understood the appeal of collecting cards in the first place, but that might be due to the residual trauma surrounding a certain Howard Stark and a certain baseball card collection that no longer exists.
In fact, for most of his life, he hasn’t spent much time thinking about anything collecting-card or Pokémon related at all.
Until Peter Parker comes into his life, and he starts hearing words like energy type and shiny card and special attack when Peter is on the phone with his friend Ned. Tony has F.R.I.D.A.Y. to inform him that Peter is discussing Pokémon cards, but that’s about the extent of it at first.
It isn’t until he’s known Peter for a bit longer that Pokémon cards come up again. Peter is over at the Tower one day doing homework before lab time when Tony notices that he’s looking a bit thin.
“You’re looking a little–” Tony immediately stops himself, because he is not going to comment on how thin a teenager is looking. Even if he’s a little worried. He clears his throat. “How are the school lunches at Midtown?”
Peter, who’s immersed in his homework, doesn’t take his eyes off his textbook. “The school lunches are fine.”
“And have you been… buying the school lunches lately?” Eating , is what he really wants to ask, but he settles for asking Peter if he’s been buying lunch at school. “May is giving you the money I set aside for food?”
Peter looks up, his full attention on Tony now. “You’ve been giving May money for food?”
Well, shit . Tony had no idea Peter didn’t know about the money for food.
“Well, shit,” Peter says out loud, looking guilty, and Tony sighs.
“So where’s the lunch money going, then?” He asks, and even to his own ears it sounds a little too parental of a question.
Peter drops his eyes back down to his homework. He shifts in his seat, clearly hesitant, but then he surprises Tony by getting out of his chair and going over to where his backpack is sitting. After rifling around inside for a minute, he pulls out a plastic bag full of colorful cards, holding them up for Tony to see.
“Tell me what I’m looking at?”
“Uh. They’re Pokémon cards,” Peter explains.
“Interesting. You play a game with those?”
“They’re not for me,” Peter says, blushing all the way to the tips of his ears.
“Well, of course not,” Tony replies. “I figured Ted was the Pokémon guy.”
“What? No! No , Ned doesn’t– it’s not–”
“It’s okay, Pete. No need to be embarrassed. We all have our things in high school. What I’m wondering is, why are you spending your lunch money on them?”
“They’re for the kids!”
“The kids at your school?”
“No, the little kids. Like, when I’m out, you know…Spiderman-ing.”
Tony chuckles at the way Peter almost whispers the word. He motions for Peter to hand over the bag of cards, and when Peter does he opens the bag and looks inside, inspecting them closely while Peter continues.
“Little kids love me. They always have. They give me their drawings and like, weed-flowers that they pick, and–”
“Weed flowers?”
“Oh, not, like weed weed. Weed doesn’t have flowers. I mean, I don’t even know what weed looks like! I Googled it once, and I don’t think I saw any flowers–”
“Very convincing, Pete,” Tony interrupts, laughing. “You’re not in trouble for knowing what weed looks like. But get to the point?”
“Oh, um, okay. It’s what I call the flowers that are actually weeds. You know, dandelions and stuff. Little kids give them to me all the time.” Peter shrugs. “Anyway, this kid wanted to show me his Pokémon collection one day, and I told him I used to collect too when I was a kid. The next day, that kid called the police and caused a scene just so he could see Spiderman again. So after that, I started stopping by this one park every week just so I could trade cards with him. There are like, twenty kids that show up sometimes.”
“I didn’t want to actually trade my own Pokémon cards, though. They were Ben’s. So I keep those in a safe place. And I save up my lunch money to buy new cards.”
“Pete, the way you get from point A to point B is so fascinating sometimes. I’d look to see what’s going on in that brain of yours.”
“Uh…thanks?”
“So. How much do Pokémon cards cost? Because you have super-metabolism, and you’re not going to be skipping any more lunches. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“How much, Pete?”
Peter shrugs. “Uh, it kind of depends.”
Tony pulls his wallet out of his pocket and takes out a one-hundred dollar bill. “How much would this get you?”
Peter’s eyes go wide, but he’s too stunned to answer, and Tony pulls out another bill. “Is $200 enough?”
Sometimes, Tony likes to fuck with the kid. It’s too easy. So when Peter still doesn’t reply, he pulls three more bills out of his wallet and stuffs all of the money into the bag of Pokémon cards. “If $500 isn’t enough, you let me know, okay?”
Peter accepts the bag back with a slow, dumbfounded nod.
That evening, Peter goes home with a pocketful of cash and a stomach full of pizza, and after he leaves Tony spends way more time than he’d like to admit on eBay looking at the price of Pokémon cards. Even if he still doesn’t fully understand the hype around collecting and trading cards, he gets why Spiderman is so beloved by the city of New York, and he’s happy to keep funding that. He’ll learn a tiny, tiny bit about Pokémon cards if it means Peter is happy.
He still has no fucking clue what a Bulbasaur is, though.