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Way before Steve met Tony, back when he was still working odd jobs around the clock and driving late night cabs with Peter sleeping in the passenger seat, he and Peter started collecting lucky pennies. When they got to a hundred, they were going to buy a lottery ticket with it and win.
Neither of them really thought they'd win anything. There weren't even that many pennies laying around for them to find. It was just a way to keep going when all they had was each other.
“Daddy,” Peter said one afternoon when he was five years old and they were on the floor of their apartment together, working on a colouring book the local library gave out for free.
“Yeah, Petey?”
“When we win the lottery, let’s go to the toy store and buy another stuffie so Theodore can have a friend.”
Then Steve met Tony when he was working the early shift at a café on Park and Tony kept coming back for the same cup of coffee, and now Peter’s teddy bear has all the stuffed friends its little heart could ever want.
-
Peter is thirteen when he runs all the way home from school with a penny he squeezes so tight it leaves a mark in the palm of his hand.
“I found the hundredth one! Dad!”
“No way.” Steve ducks out of the kitchen and catches the penny Peter tosses to him, both of them as excited as the first ninety-nine times. “Where’d you find this one, Pete?”
“I was just tying my shoe and saw it in the grass,” Peter says breathlessly, kicking off his shoes and dropping his backpack on the floor. He goes off on a rapidfire tangent as he heads for the snack pantry and Steve listens and smiles, the weight of their hundredth penny in his hand, his chest warm and aching because he just never thought they’d be so lucky.
They’ve been hunting stray pennies in New York for nine years and now they’ve found their last one. Steve has always been hellbent on making sure Peter had a roof over his head, food in his belly, and enough money in his college savings plan so he could get the education he deserved, but he couldn’t even bring himself to imagine having a man as wonderful as Tony in his life who has never had the barest reservation about treating Peter like his own son.
Steve’s already hit the jackpot.
That’s how Tony finds them when he comes home from work, Steve and Peter on the floor of the living room, poring over the pennies spread out across the coffee table.
“What’s going on here?” Tony asks, kissing the top of Steve’s head and reaching across the table to tuck a stray curl behind Peter’s ear. “Did we rob a piggy bank?”
“These are hard-earned,” Peter protests as Tony settles onto the floor with them. “We’ve been collecting them since I was four, right?”
“Right,” Steve says. “The plan was to find a hundred pennies and buy a lottery ticket with them, and Pete found our hundredth penny today.”
“I see,” Tony says, and his smile makes Steve’s heart swell. “Big spenders.”
“Hey, the bent one!” Peter picks up a penny that’s nearly folded in half. “We found this on that rainy day, remember? We got totally soaked.”
“I remember,” Steve says, then explains for Tony. “We dropped off my cab and we were waiting for the bus to come. It just kept getting delayed and Pete was so miserable until he saw this penny wash up near a storm drain.”
It’s a distant memory now and all Steve really remembers is how warm Peter had been in his arms, but he sees Tony’s expression go soft and sad. Peter is with them and it isn’t the right time to get into that conversation, so he just squeezes Tony’s hand and shows him a different one to tell him— it wasn’t all bad.
“Pete was convinced we found a diamond penny,” Steve says, holding up a penny with a bit of silver clinging to it as Peter laughs. “I think some aluminum foil must have gotten fused to it, but he was learning about rocks at school and brought it in for show and tell. I hear it was a hit.”
“I think we’ve got a hundred here,” Peter announces proudly, pushing handfuls of pennies across the table toward Tony as if for his approval. “Only took nine years. Not bad.”
“Alright, let’s go get that ticket, Pete,” Steve says. Peter cheers and is off like a shot to get his shoes on, and Steve turns to Tony. “Hey, everything alright?”
“Perfect, honey,” Tony says, pulling him in for a kiss that would have been inappropriate with Peter around. “Don’t worry about me. I just wish I met both of you earlier, made things easier for you, helped look for pennies. And I would’ve liked to be there when Peter was learning about rocks, you know?”
Steve must have maxed out all of his luck to have a kid as bright and compassionate as Peter and meet someone as incredible as Tony all in the same lifetime.
Steve bumps his shoulder with a little grin. “He’s in junior high. He’ll still learn about rocks.”
Tony laughs, and then his gaze drops down to the pennies still laid out on the table. Steve watches curiously as Tony picks up a few unremarkable pennies, no special anniversary designs or bends in the metal or bits of colour stuck to them, and looks to Steve for the go-ahead before he gently pockets them.
“Kid, you’re missing a few here,” Tony calls out, and Peter runs back in from the foyer. “Must have miscounted. You’ve got ninety-six here.”
Peter groans. “I counted those, like, three times!”
“We’ll just have to keep looking,” Tony says.
“Might get there faster with three of us looking,” Peter agrees distractedly as he starts recounting, and Steve smiles into Tony’s shoulder.