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Chapter Text

“They say there’s a correlation between generosity and guilt. But, if you’ve got the money…”
—Captain America: Civil War

December 2015

Pepper is one who finally forces him to read his email.

Tony never reads email unless he absolutely cannot avoid it. If someone needs something from him, they’ll find a way to get in touch. And if they can’t find a way to get in touch, then it must not be that important. His new AI, FRIDAY, has been pretty good at filtering out the unimportant crap, which has included every single email he’s been sent since he uploaded her to all his servers in May.

“Tony,” Pepper says, annoyed, as she stands at her vanity putting in her earrings. “That guy down in R&D is emailing my assistant now. Who is in turn emailing me. I know you hate talking to people, but honestly he said it’s been every other day for two months. About something to do with a…”—she turns, peering at the tablet laying next to her—“serum?”

Tony is leaning against the door jamb of the bathroom, brushing his teeth, so his response is probably unintelligible but he still asks, “Which division?”

Pepper looks up at him. “What?”

“I said which division?” Again, unintelligible.

She rolls her eyes. “Go talk to the guy so he stops bugging me about it. I don’t get paid enough to be your assistant anymore.”

Tony goes back over to the sink, spitting out toothpaste and wiping his mouth. “You make more as CEO than you did as my PA,” he says.

“The PA job was harder.”

- - -

The guy down in R&D’s Chemical Experimentation Division, aka ChemEx (Tony has no idea who approved that branding because it sounds incredibly ominous), is named Brent James. He looks like the kind of guy to have two first names. He’s so excited to see Tony he nearly falls out of his chair, but Tony doesn’t notice, because he’s too busy staring at the entire wall of insects.

“What the fuck?” Tony says.

“Mr. Stark. Hi. Wow. It’s so awesome to meet you in person,” Brent James says. He holds out a hand.

Tony eyes it. “Have you been touching those?” he asks, gesturing at the bugs. And, down along the floor, a few small lizards.

“Oh no,” Brent James says. “They’re highly radioactive.”

Tony stares at him. “We’re keeping radioactive bugs on the 46th floor now?”

Brent James stares back. “We’ve been keeping them here since 2012,” he says. “Sir.” He puts his hand down. “They’re part of the ongoing research into replicating the super soldier serum.”

Oh, Tony thinks. That.

He nods, slowly. “Right,” he says, vowels drawn out.

He’d forgotten that was even being worked on. It was more SHIELD’s project than his own. An initiative to redevelop the super soldier serum that created Captain America. Fury had approached Tony for funding and lab space, and Tony had agreed to assist. He can’t deny that he’d been interested in the outcome. His father had been obsessed with the idea, after all. But with SHIELD gone now, it is solely Tony’s project. No one else to hand it off to.

No real reason to keep working on it, either. One Captain Self-Righteous has been quite enough lately.

“I’m so glad you came down, sir,” Brent James says. “In the past, any animal we used—we were mostly using cold-blooded reptiles rather than mammals, because of the molecular structure of the formula and how it binds to the RNA, it has a better success prediction in our models and— Sorry. Anyway, we’ve recently had some success with using arachnids instead. And scorpions.”

“Scorpions,” Tony repeats.

Brent James nods, a slightly manic grin on his face. “Yes. We believe it’s due to the haemocyanin in their blood. This one here”—he walks over to a lab table, where a plastic terrarium is sitting out—“is the Steatoda nobilis, or the false widow spider. It’s been our most successful experiment yet. After an injection of the serum it has had a complete rewrite of its DNA! The spider has actually grown in size slightly and appears to have developed enhanced strength and agility.” After a moment, he adds: “It’s also radioactive now. We named her Tracy.”

Tony stares at the spider, which is hanging off a nearly invisible strand of webbing from the top of the terrarium, twirling slightly. “So you’re telling me you’ve created a… radioactive spider super soldier?”

Brent James nods.

Tony looks around the rest of the lab, taking in the other terrariums and all of the equipment. He nods slowly. Then he slaps his hands together, the noise sharp and loud, and rubs them as he says, “Alright. So shut this whole thing down. Immediately.”

Brent James’ mouth drops open. “What?”

Tony’s already turning away. “Immediately!” he calls over his shoulder.

In the elevator on the way back up the penthouse, he taps the edge of his glasses to activate the AI and says, “FRIDAY, please make sure everyone involved in that mess is fired. And then get a crew in there to clear everything out. Destroy it all. Turn it into, I dunno, a lounge or something.”

“Sure thing, Boss. Do you want to give them a severance package?”

“Probably should. People get bitter if you don’t.”

- - -

Two days later, Tony emerges from his workshop at past one o’clock in the morning to find Pepper still awake, sitting at the kitchen island wearing leggings and a robe and slippers and ranting at someone on speaker phone.

“It’s an invasion of privacy,” she’s saying, angry. Her assistant says something about CNN, and Pepper responds, “Tell them that is our official statement.”

“What’s official?” Tony asks.

Pepper looks up at him, but then back down at her phone. “Matt, I’ll talk to you in the morning. Try to get some sleep.”

“You too,” Matt says. “I’ll bring the good coffee tomorrow.”

Pepper snorts. “Thanks. Bye.”

Tony repeats his question once she’s off the phone.

“A kid on a field trip had a seizure today,” Pepper says. “In the lobby, where everyone filmed it. And now it’s on the news.”

Tony blinks. “Oh,” he says. “That… sucks.”

Her eyes narrow at him.

He holds up his hands, placating. “They’re okay, right? I assume I would have heard about it if some kid died in the building earlier.”

“At a hospital, as far as I know,” Pepper says. “An ambulance came. I haven’t heard anything else yet.”

Tony frowns, dropping down onto the stool across the island from her. “FRIDAY, you got anything?”

“The boy who had a seizure today is Peter Parker, age 14, freshman student at Midtown School of Science and Technology. He was visiting Stark Industries today with his science class, supervised by Floyd Conway, who has taught there for 11 years. Their visit focused on a tour of the R&D department.”

Tony twirls a finger in the air. “Yeah, yeah. Get to the relevant information.”

“Peter got separated from the tour group on the 46th floor and accessed a restricted construction zone for a new employee lounge. After an employee assisted him in reuniting with his tour group, he ate lunch in the cafeteria on the 32nd floor, and then collapsed and had a seizure as the group was waiting in the lobby for their school bus to arrive. An ambulance transported him to Bellevue Hospital, where he’s currently in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit.”

“ICU?” Pepper asks, worried. “How bad is it?”

“I can attempt to access further hospital records, if you’d like,” FRIDAY offers.

Tony shakes his head. Why does the 46th floor sound familiar to him?

Then he remembers the lab with the radioactive super soldier spider named Tracy.

Oh fuck.

He stands up, the kitchen stool nearly toppling over behind him.

“Tony?” Pepper asks.

Tony schools his face back into passivity. “I’ve got to check something in the lab. Workshop. In the workshop. Keep us updated on the kid, Fri. Find a way to pay the hospital bill. But, uh, make sure it can’t be traced back.” He nods at Pepper. “Least we can do, right?”

She nods. “Right.” Then she sighs. “Well, I’m going to bed. Don’t stay up all night, alright?”

He’s already halfway to the elevator. “Sure thing, honey.”

In the elevator, on the way down to the 46th floor, he taps his glasses. “FRIDAY, please tell me that fucking spider was dead before that kid went in there.”

- - -

The spider was not dead before the kid went into the lab. But it’s sure as shit dead now. Tony finds it smashed on the ground—stepped on, it looks like—and the terrarium it was in moved to a shelf by whatever construction crew was in here. The lid looks like it got knocked enough to unseal it, and the spider used whatever weird super strength it had to get out the rest of the way.

“Fuck,” he mutters, staring at the dead spider. Fuck fuck fuck.

- - -

The surveillance video from the lab on the 46th floor shows the kid sneaking in, though ‘sneak’ is perhaps not the right word for it. The construction crew had removed the door in preparation of starting work, but there isn’t actually anything marking the area as off limits yet. (Tony is going to fire those people too when this is over.) So the kid just walks around the corner, then stops short, staring at the wall of insects, almost the exact same way Tony had when he’d seen it.

There’s no audio, but Tony doesn’t need it to tell what the kid is saying: “Wow.”

The kid walks over to the insects, poking at one of them, and then takes his phone out, taking a picture. Then he kneels down, to look at one of the lizards that’s closer to the ground. One hand is on the floor, for balance probably, and it’s after a minute here that he suddenly jerks, yanking his hand up and stumbling to his feet. He cradles his left wrist with his right hand, staring at the floor, and then crouches down, looking at something. It’s the spot where Tony found Tracy the spider, squashed, earlier. The kid must have stepped on her when he stumbled.

The kid rubs his wrist, wincing. And after a look around the still empty lab, finally leaves again, back out the same way he came in.

Tony tracks him further, until he runs into an employee who steers him back to his tour group, and then along the rest of his tour. The kid looks fine for most of it. It’s not until they’re down in the lobby that he starts to look sick, and then he goes down fast, looking like he might puke one minute and collapsing to the floor and seizing the next.

Tony keeps watching until an ambulance shows up and paramedics cart the kid off.

He spins his chair around, once, twice. Then looks at the frozen video of the rest of the kid’s class huddled in a group watching the front doors the paramedics just left through. “How many people know about that lab and what what’s-his-name was doing in there?”

“Brent James had only one full time lab assistant, a woman named Amelie Holt, but also had an intern from Stanford last summer.”

“Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead,” Tony mutters.

“Boss?” FRIDAY asks, tone leaning into that curious cadence he’d programmed her with.

Tony tilts his head, but doesn’t respond.

Right now, it’s looking like the kid might be the dead one out of all of them.

- - -

Peter Parker does not die from being bitten by the radioactive super soldier spider, but it’s touch and go for about two days in the PICU there, and Tony finds himself looking into the kid’s background. He was orphaned at age four, is being raised by an aunt and uncle, and is currently top of his class at a specialized science high school in Queens. In the yearbook photo that Tony finds, he looks about twelve, with slightly curly hair and glasses and a nervous smile.

Tony hacks into the hospital system to keep an eye on his chart. The kid’s symptoms are all over the place: seizures, muscle cramps, fever, vomiting (including blood in one instance), nose bleeds, rash, hives… The doctors have no clue what’s wrong with him, because everything they think it might be and run a test for comes back negative. But on day three he makes a miraculous recovery, like he was never sick in the first place, and having ruled out everything else they diagnose him with adolescent onset epilepsy, give him a prescription for Lamictal, and send him home.

“Odds the kid is actually epileptic, Fri?” Tony says, tapping his fingers against his workbench and staring at the chart.

“He had no prior history of seizures before this week according to his other medical records,” FRIDAY says. “But it does often present between the ages of 12 and 15.”

Tony glares at the screen in front of him. “Yeah,” he mutters. But how many of those kids get bitten by a radioactive spider right before their first seizure? He stares at the chart for another minute or so, then sighs. “Kid’s alive and back home,” he says. “Pack it in. Let me know if anything else pops up on him though.”

“Will do, Boss.”

- - -

Not even a month goes by before FRIDAY pushes through an alert about Peter Parker.

“Is he back in the hospital?” Tony asks. More seizures, maybe?

“No. He’s at the 114th Precinct in Queens,” FRIDAY says. “He was witness to an armed robbery this evening at a bodega on the corner of 30th Avenue and 31st Street. His uncle, Benjamin Parker, died on the scene from a gunshot wound.”

Tony stares at the motherboard he was messing with, soldering iron buzzing in his hand. After a minute, he asks, “The kid is fine though?”

“Peter Parker is uninjured.”

“Um, let me know if there’s anything else, I guess,” Tony says. He frowns. Poor kid cannot catch a break, Christ.

- - -

March 2016

The first time Tony hears about Spider-Man is from Happy, of all people. A lot of the time when Happy is driving Tony listens to what he’s saying with one ear, focused on something else and only picking up key words or phrases to comment on. Today, Happy is ranting about how it took him twice as long to get to the Tower as usual, because there was some huge thing with the cops blocking traffic and he had to take Queens Boulevard. Which, well, that’s what Happy gets for living in Queens. Tony told him to get a place in Manhattan, but no. Happy insisted the rent was cheaper. And then Tony gave him a raise and Happy still wouldn’t move because then he said he’d already decorated. So now he’s still living in Hunters Point and complaining about the commute everyday.

Tony’s frowning at a text from Pepper. She’s mad at him about… well, everything, right now. Nothing is going well in that arena at the moment. But at this moment it’s something to do with him blowing off a board meeting. “I thought you always took the tunnel,” he says.

“I do,” Happy says. “It’s a much more direct route. But like I already told you, that new guy, Spider What’s-His-Face, fucked up all the traffic on 21st Street this morning. Last week, he was messing up some construction over in Elmhurst. I mean, that one doesn’t bother me as much, but I saw it on the news. And he leaves that gross web stuff everywhere he goes as he, like, flies around. You never know when you’re going to look up and he’s swinging down at your head. It’s disconcerting, is what it is.”

Tony looks up. “Spider What’s-His-Face?”

Happy nods. “He’s new.”

“How new?”

Happy shrugs. “Beginning of the year, I think.”

“And he… flies?”

“I guess? It looks more like controlled falling, if you ask me,” Happy says. “I’ve only actually seen him twice in person.”

“What else does he do?”

Happy glaces over his shoulder. “Why the sudden interest? You never care about the neighborhood guys. They’re all small fry.”

Tony shrugs. “None of the rest of them named themselves after bugs,” he says, trying to sound casual. Trying to sound like he does not have a bad feeling about this.

“Well,” Happy says. “I guess the traffic thing was really him helping. I’ll give him some credit there. He stopped a bus or something. But it caused a huge delay when the cops showed up and he disappeared.”

“Stopped a bus?” Tony asks.

“Super strength, I think. There’s been some other stuff about him on the news.”

“Huh,” Tony says. He’s already pulling it up on his phone.

Happy seems confused. “You… actually think he’s interesting?”

“No,” Tony says shortly, as a video on YouTube starts playing silently. The Queens Spiderman Saved My Car! A guy in what looks like a red and blue sweatsuit with a spider painted on the front, who’s wearing a red mask and black goggles, swings into the frame of a surveillance video, hanging off of what looks like some sort of white string, and throws out another white string to pull a man trying to break into a car off his feet. ‘Spiderman’ swings in close to the camera, affording a close-up view of his masked face, before the video cuts out and switches to the owner of the car who’s gesturing wildly.

Tony looks up, out the window at the passing scenery of the idyllic drive upstate to the Avengers Compound.

He really shouldn’t have removed the mini-bar from these cars.

- - -

‘Spiderman’, as the locals in Queens have dubbed him, or as he dubbed himself—Tony isn’t sure which it is—is definitely Peter Parker. FRIDAY finds surveillance footage of him changing into his sweatsuit onesie getup in an alley behind a synagogue. Tony doesn’t even have to zoom in that far to get a good shot of the kid’s face because the Chabad of Flushing Queens has excellent security and the tapes are high quality.

He hacks into their system and erases the fifteen minutes that the kid was there.

“FRIDAY, start tracking the kid.”

“Which kid is this?” FRIDAY asks.

“How many kids do you think I know?” Tony demands. “The fucking spider kid. What other kid is currently the bane of my existence?”

“Just checking, Boss,” she says.

“Let me know if he does anything really stupid.”

“Do you want me to define ‘stupid’ by the same parameters you use for yourself?”

Tony purses his lips, wishing for a moment that there was a screen or something he could glare at instead of just her voice coming out of his watch.

- - -

April 2016

Here’s the thing. Tony was not going to actually get involved with the spider kid. There’s not a reason to. He’s been involved quite enough as it is, seeing as it’s his fault the kid is some sort of freak of nature now. If not for Tony’s involvement, Peter Parker would be spending his evenings working on whatever homework they give out to high school freshmen and maybe trying to work up the nerve to kiss a girl or try weed for the first time or something. (Tony has no idea what kids do in high school. He’d been smoking pot and hitting on older girls at fourteen, but he’d also been in college and trying to piss off his father.) But instead, Peter Parker is putting on a mask and running around town fighting crime after school every day.

So, Tony wasn’t going to get involved. The kid doesn’t need him. The kid is doing fine with his little small-time vigilante thing.

But Tony’s curious. The kid uses this ‘webbing’ stuff to swing off of buildings and to tie up criminals with, and at first Tony assumed it was another weird ability that he’d been given by the spider bite. But then he watches some of the surveillance footage closer, and the kid has these sort of bracelets on his wrists, outside of the sweatsuit, that he’s using to shoot the stuff. So he actually ventures out one day and collects some of it to study.

It’s incredibly advanced. Adhesive enough to immediately adhere to a surface, but with enough stretch and tensile strength that it will support the kid’s weight. Not just the kid’s weight, he’s seen videos of the kid using it for other stuff too, like tying people up. And it dissolves after a few hours.

So Peter Parker is a genius too.

But Tony was still not going to get involved. Until Pepper decided she’d had enough of him, packed her things, and walked out the door.

After that, he gets really drunk, and really sad. Then he decides that being this sad is absolutely unacceptable so he fires up his workstation and starts building something, and a week later every liquor cabinet in the penthouse is empty and he’s created a brand new suit for Peter Parker.

He claws his way out of a hangover one afternoon to look over the specs. “When did I add an instant kill mode?” he asks FRIDAY.

“Around 4:30 AM this morning,” she says. “You thought it would be better than adding fangs to the mask for him to bite people with.”

Tony squints at the code. “He can’t have an instant kill mode. He’s ten.”

“Fourteen,” she corrects.

He waves a hand in the air, shooing her off. “DUM-E, coffee. Now.”

There’s a whirr as the bot heads across the workshop, and Tony starts adding some safety features to the suit.

- - -

May 2016

When things with the team go to hell in a handbasket, Tony would like to say he’s surprised. But he’s not, because everything in his life has been going to shit this year. Why not this, too?

Barnes is a murderous wildcard, and a blindspot the size of the sun in Cap’s eyes. After he makes a dramatic exit from what’s left of the UN offices in Vienna, Tony grits his way through the dressing down from Ross. They already got the news that Clint broke Wanda out of the Compound too, so this has gone from bad to worse.

He must look bad, because Natasha rubs a comforting hand against his shoulder and asks if he’s alright.

“Always,” Tony says. He sighs. “36 hours. Jeez.” That’s an impossible timeline.

Natasha crosses her arms. “We are seriously understaffed.” 

Tony leans back in his chair with a sigh. “Oh yeah,” he says.

Team Cap: Mr. America himself (who might count for two in a fight), a formerly brainwashed super assassin who could go off at any minute, Bird Guy, Legolas, and freaky Matilda.

Team Sanity: Tony, Natasha, Rhodey, and Vision (probably).

They’re outgunned, really, more than understaffed.

“Be great if we had a Hulk right about now. Any shot?”

Natasha gives him a rueful smile. “You really think he’d be on our side?”

“No,” Tony admits.

Bruce would very much not be on their side of this argument, even if their side wasn’t teamed up with Thaddeus Ross.

“I have an idea,” Natasha says.

“Me too,” Tony tells her. 

His idea is 14-years-old, but desperate times call for desperate measures, and that kid was literally genetically engineered to be an equal to Steve.

“Where’s yours?” he asks.

“Downstairs,” she says. Ah… the Wakandan prince then. He had shown some decidedly un-princely moves in that fight. “Where’s yours?”

“Left it in New York,” he says. “Might take me a day to pick it up.” 

From high school, he does not say.

- - -

Tony kind of hates himself most of the time. It’s not a thing that keeps him from getting up in the morning and living his life, but it’s there. Just… buried deep.

Some days it’s closer to the surface than others, and sitting on the couch in Peter Parker’s apartment, turning on the charm with his aunt, is one of those days.

He tells May Parker that Peter applied for a grant. Peter’s idea is very promising. Tony is very impressed by her nephew. He wants to talk with Peter about it further, see about having him come in for a couple days.

May Parker is a bit starstruck. She offers him tea and a truly awful walnut date loaf and is won over by being complimented on how great her kid is by someone rich and famous.

“He didn’t tell me about this at all,” she says.

Tony gives her his best PR smile. “Y’know, kids. He probably… um…”

He’s saved from finishing that by the appearance of Peter himself, finally home from school. The kid is more suspicious about the grant story than his aunt, but evidently willing to play along in front of her.

Then Tony gets him alone, and the kid denies being Spider-Man to his face. He’s a horrible liar. He caves in under five minutes.

Tony can’t help asking: “Why are you doing this? I gotta know. What’s your M.O.? What gets you out of that twin bed in the morning?”

He’s been wondering for months. The kid evidently hasn’t told a single soul that he has powers and is just using them to go around his neighborhood stopping low-level criminals, preventing car accidents, and helping little old ladies carry their groceries home while wearing a mask. It’s baffling to Tony, who’s used to a team of heroes with their names and faces out in the public. A team that only bothers with the big stuff.

Tony hadn’t kept a secret identity for more than 48 hours. Peter has been doing it for 6 months, and shows no signs of stopping.

He’s not expecting the kid to say, “When you can do the things that I can, but you don’t, and then the bad things happen… they happen because of you.”

Tony can’t look at Peter’s face then. Not when the kid is echoing what he’d said to Pepper just last month, when she’d asked why he couldn’t just stop, why he couldn’t even take a break from the Avengers and his suits, after he’d promised years ago that he was done.

Because if something happens, if that big bad comes swooping down from space again and he’s not ready for it… that’s on him.

- - -

He takes the kid to Berlin.

And Berlin… Well, Berlin is one of the worst days in Tony’s life. He spends a good portion of it pretty certain that he’s just gotten his best friend killed.

Rhodey isn’t dead, but he’s paralyzed from the waist down. Because the suit Tony built for him failed and dropped him like a rock. Another sin to add to Tony’s ever-growing list.

His vigil at Rhodey’s bedside is interrupted by Happy. “Boss, what do you want me to do with the kid?”

Tony paces the hallway of the med center. “Just… hang on to him.”

“He says he has school.”

Tony blows out a breath and runs a hand through his hair. Right. Peter has to go back to ninth grade. Fighting rogue superheroes in foreign countries on the weekend, algebra on Monday. This is the life Tony has led this kid into.

Thank god he isn’t a parent.

“I’ll meet you at Teterboro to take him home,” he says.

The kid comes bouncing down the stairs on the jet, holding his phone in front of him, and stumbles to a stop when he spots Tony leaning against the car. Happy follows behind him looking more tired than usual.

“Oh wow. Hi, Mr. Stark. I didn’t know you’d be here,” Peter says.

“How was the flight?” Tony asks.

“It was good. Awesome. The plane is so cool.” Peter grins at him. “Did you program it? It’s crazy that there are no pilots. Are you gonna start selling that?”

“It’s proprietary,” Tony says. “It makes most people nervous to have an AI in control.”

“Oh. I guess. It’s cool, though,” Peter says. “And AIs actually make less mistakes than humans so it’s statistically safer so it’s just a perception issue that everyone has about being in control of—”

“Are we going to stand and chit-chat on the tarmac all day?” Happy asks. He pops the trunk of the car open, tossing his bag inside. “Put your stuff in, kid.”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry, Happy.”

“Where are you in a hurry to get to?” Tony asks.

“Home,” Happy says. “Some of us like our homes.”

“Touché. C’mon kid, before he refuses to drive us.”

Everything about Peter, from his height to his wide-eyes to his cartoon t-shirts to his excited babble and the way he’s filming everything with his phone, seems to be specially designed to remind Tony that Peter is a child. A child whose life he has, if not ruined, then set on a path towards it. 

How long before Peter gets injured doing this? He’d taken some hits during the fight at the airport, but nothing too serious. The kid had bounced back fast. But he won’t always. Someday something is going to incapacitate or kill him, and his untimely death is going to be the direct result of going in that lab and crossing paths with that spider.

Tony didn’t just sign this kid’s death certificate, he wrote it up and filled it out.

Peter seems shocked that he gets to keep the suit Tony made for him, staring at Tony with wide eyes as he finally stops filming everything.

“Do me a favor, though. Happy is kind of your point guy on this,” Tony tells him. “Don’t stress him out. Don’t do anything stupid. I’ve seen his cardiogram. All right?”

Peter nods solemnly. “Yes.”

“Don’t do anything I would do,” Tony goes on, “and definitely don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” Peter blinks at him, frowning in confusion. “There’s a little grey area in there”—Tony holds up his fingers, about an inch apart—“and that’s where you operate.”

“Wait, does that mean I’m an Avenger?” Peter asks hopefully.

“No,” Tony says.

Peter won’t let it go though. “When’s our next ‘retreat,’ y’know? Like…” He makes finger quotes when he says retreat.

“What? Next mission?”

“Yeah, the missions,” Peter says.

“We’ll call you,” Tony tells him.

“Do you have my number?” Peter asks.

“No, I mean, we’ll call you. Like, someone will call you.” It will not be Tony. With any luck, Tony will be able to go back to watching Peter help little old ladies from afar.

“From your team?” Peter clarifies.

Tony doesn’t reply. There is no team left. 

He reaches across Peter for the door to open it and force the kid out.

And then Peter’s arm comes up around him, patting Tony on the back.

Tony grabs the handle, shoving the door open. “That’s not a hug,” he says, as he pulls away. “I’m just grabbing the door for you. We’re not there yet.”

All the color drains from Peter’s face, and he scrambles out of the car without another word.

Well, turns out embarrassing the hell out of the kid is how you shut him up. Noted.

“Are we done working with toddlers now?” Happy asks, after they leave the kid standing on the sidewalk.

“About that,” Tony says. “He’s part of your promotion.”

Happy looks over his shoulder. “What?”

“You wanted the asset management job. The kid is an asset. I need you to manage him.”

“I thought you were managing him.”

Tony shakes his head. “Nope, all you buddy. Congrats.”

“He’s not SI business,” Happy protests. “He’s Avengers business.”

“He’s your business now. Make sure he doesn’t fuck anything up too badly.”

Chapter Text

September 2016

Tony’s feeling a new lease on life. A new lease on everything. New lease on the Tower, new lease on his relationship with Pepper, new lease on a penthouse apartment together…

Pepper turns a circle in the middle of the living room, surveying the space. The click of her heels echoes in the empty space.

“It’s good, right?” Tony asks. “I knew you’d like this one.”

“You mean the realtor knew I’d like it?” she asks.

“Well, I hired the realtor, so.”

Pepper shakes her head, grinning. “I do like the windows,” she says.

Tony comes up behind her, arms circling her waist. “It’s a nice view,” he says, chin resting on her shoulder. “You can buy whatever furniture you want. All new stuff.”

“Or we could just keep some of the things we have,” she suggests.

“Where’s the fun in that?”

Tony’s phone starts ringing.

Pepper turns, pecking him on the cheek. “I’m going to go look at the rooftop again.”

“I’m sure it’s not important.”

“No one unimportant has your personal number,” she says.

Good point. It’s Happy.

“What’s up?” Tony asks, stepping closer to the windows to look down at the street below. This is still a penthouse, but it’s nowhere near as tall as the Tower.

“The kid quit marching band.”

Tony frowns. “What?”

“The kid. Your kid.”

“I don’t have a kid. I’d remember if I had a kid.”

Happy sighs. “Peter.”

“Oh, that kid. What about him?” Peter has been dutifully texting and calling Happy everyday ever since they’d dropped him off after the trip to Berlin. Tony has FRIDAY forward him the best ones. Last week Peter had rescued a bunch of ducklings from a sewer grate. It wound up on YouTube.

“He quit band,” Happy says.

“So?”

“So he quit his robotics club too.”

“Why do I care about his clubs, Happy? Actually, why do you care about his clubs?”

“You told me to manage him!” Happy says. “His grades are lower this year than they were last year.”

“Hap,” Tony says, “I meant manage Spider-Man, not manage Peter Parker’s GPA.”

“You didn’t specify!”

“Well now I have! Christ. Did he do anything stupid as Spider-Man?”

There’s a long pause. “No. He spent three hours yesterday directing traffic when the lights were out at an intersection.”

“Sounds like he’s doing great then,” Tony says. “Hey. So, new project for you. Pep and I found a place. I need the lab at the Tower packed up and moved. Most of it can go upstate—all the Avengers-related stuff—but there’s some stuff I’m gonna want over here. Any personal projects. The bots.”

“You want me to manage moving everything?” Happy asks.

“Yeah. Asset Management. That’s what you do now.”

“Yeah, of course,” Happy says, sounding pleased. “Sure thing, boss. I’ll handle it.”

- - -

“Okay, but how long do we have to stay?” Tony asks for what might be the fifth time, as he follows Pepper into the wedding venue. She’s dragged him all the way to India for the wedding of an old sorority sister of hers, and he can’t even remember the woman’s name. He’s pretty sure he’s never met her before. And Indian weddings always last days.

“For the entire thing,” Pepper says. “Stop scowling.”

“It’s hot,” he complains. “We don’t even know these people.”

“I’ve known Chhavi since I was 18,” Pepper says. “We were roommates freshman year.”

“Well, I don’t know her.”

“Tony, I swear to god—”

“Okay, okay.” He holds his hands up, placating. “I will smile and nod and make small talk. Anything for you, honey.”

Pepper shakes her head, dragging him further inside.

The problem with attending weddings is that the only thing people want to talk about at them is weddings. Tony usually avoids them like the plague, because someone always asks how long he and Pepper have been together, and then follows that up by asking when they’re planning on getting married. Which, if he’s being fair, is a valid question after a six-year relationship. But it’s the absolute last thing he wants to be asked right now, when they’ve only been back together for a month.

He bought a ring, before the mess with Sokovia and the Accords. He’d had Happy carry it around just in case the time was right, but it never quite was. And then it really wasn’t, and then Pepper left. And now…

He sits through the ceremony. He sits through the reception. He makes small talk with people whose names he doesn’t bother to learn. He does it with a smile, because Pepper has asked him to, and he asks her to do a whole hell of a lot more than this for him.

“Boss, urgent message about Peter Parker,” FRIDAY says into his ear piece, interrupting a conversation Tony is only half paying attention to.

He leans over to Pepper. “Be right back,” he murmurs. He gestures at his ear. “The office is calling.”

“Something serious?” she asks.

“It better not be.”

As he steps away, he asks, “What’s up, Fri?”

“Peter’s parachute deployed 36 seconds ago approximately 1,500 feet over the Hudson River after a brief fight with a man in a flying mechanical bird costume. He appears to have fallen in.”

Tony stops walking, staring straight ahead. “The fuck?” He can feel his heart trying to pound out of his chest.

“Peter’s tracker places him in the river. He has not yet emerged—”

“Deploy a suit to go get him!”

“Right away, boss.”

Tony waits, leaning against a wall and holding his breath, and then FRIDAY says, “Successful retrieval. It appears he’d gotten tangled in the parachute before falling in the water and was unable to swim to the surface himself. Or perhaps he doesn’t know how to swim.”

Tony taps the edge of his glasses. “Remote control of the suit,” he says, bringing up an overlay of the HUD and visuals from the suit on one side of his glasses. It’s nighttime in New York, compared to the bright sunlight here.

The suit is carrying Peter over to the shore, where there’s a park. He drops the kid to the ground and hovers in the air.

Peter clambors up onto the top of a jungle gym and starts babbling through an explanation about how he wound up in the Hudson River. The kid looks like a drowned puppy. “How’d you find me?” he finally asks, teeth chattering. “Did you put a tracker in my suit or something?”

“I put everything in your suit,” Tony says. “Including this heater.” He taps the screen of his watch, activating it remotely.

Steam rises from Peter’s suit as it dries, and the kid looks shocked.

“Whoa,” he says, still shivering. His teeth are chattering. “That’s better, thanks.”

“What were you thinking?” Tony demands.

Peter starts gesturing again. “The guy with the wings is obviously the source of the weapons! I gotta take him down.”

“Take him down now, huh? Steady, Crockett, there are people who handle this sort of thing.”

“The Avengers?” Peter asks.

What Avengers? Tony wonders. “No no no. This is a little below their pay grade.”

“Anyway, Mr. Stark,” Peter says, trying to wave him off. “You didn’t have to come all the way out here. I had that. I was fine.”

“Oh, I’m not here.” Tony taps the screen of his watch again, opening the faceplate of the suit so that the kid can see that it’s empty.

Peter looks completely confused.

“Thank god this place has wifi or you would be toast right now. Thank Ganesh, while you’re at it,” Tony tells him. There’s a server passing by with a drink, and Tony reaches out to grab it. He needs one after the heart attack this kid just gave him. Actually, he needs to get out of here entirely after this and go… lie down, or something. Recover. Pepper will understand. He looks down at his watch, sending her a text: Spider Kid just nearly offed himself. I need a xanax. Meet you at the hotel.

“Look, forget the flying vulture guy, please,” Tony tells him. He starts walking, heading towards the valet.

“Why?” Peter demands.

Tony starts yelling without meaning to. “Why?! Because I said so!”

There’s a woman headed straight for him holding out a mala, and Tony ducks his head as she places it around his neck. He smiles apologetically. “Sorry, I’m talking to a teenager.”

To Peter, he says, “Stay close to the ground. Build up your game helping the little people.” That was the whole plan for the kid. He’s not supposed to do anything dangerous. “Like that lady that bought you the churro,” Tony says, mentioning one of the highlights FRIDAY had forwarded from earlier that week. “Can’t you just be a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man?”

The valet isn’t busy, and Tony digs in his pocket for the card and his wallet to tip the guy.

“But I’m ready for more than that now!” Peter insists.

“No, you’re not,” Tony tells him. More than that is exactly what Tony doesn’t need a 14-year-old kid involved with.

“That’s not what you thought when I took on Captain America,” Peter argues.

Tony scoffs. “Trust me, kid. If Cap wanted to lay you out, he would’ve.” Like he’d laid Tony out in Siberia. “Listen to me, if you come across these weapons again, call Happy.”

Peter must pick up on the engine of the car revving as Tony hits the ignition, because he asks, incredulously, “Are you driving?”

Tony sighs. Clearly, what the kid needs is a distraction from the Spider-Man stuff. What are teenage boys interested in? Besides girls and cars? Tony had been in college when he was 14, so his experience is probably a bit skewed. But Peter does go to that special science high school.

“You know,” he says, “it’s never too early to start thinking about college. I’ve got some pull at MIT.” Before Peter can reply, he ends the call, disconnecting from the suit. “Send it home, Fri. And tell Happy to make sure the kid goes home tonight.”

“Will do, Boss.” Then: “Miss Potts texted you back.”

“How much trouble am I in?”

“She said she’ll meet you back at the hotel in another hour.”

Tony frowns, stopped at a light. “That’s it?”

“Do you want to text her back?”

He drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “Ask her if she wants dinner. Those appetizers weren’t doing it for me.”

He’s just left the car with the valet at the hotel when he gets a reply: God yes. Order room service.

Well, alright then. Maybe he’s not in trouble for ditching early.

Turns out, he’s in trouble because he forgot to tell her about Peter.

Pepper pours herself a glass of wine, then pours one for Tony, then sets about turning her salad into a wrap. “Who’s the spider kid?” she asks.

Tony makes a hmm sound around his mouthful of salmon.

“You said the spider kid nearly offed himself and it was giving you anxiety. Who’s the spider kid?”

Tony swallows. “Um, Spider-Man. New vigilante. He’s young so I’m… mentoring him.”

Pepper raises an eyebrow. “Really?”

“Do I not seem capable of mentoring the younger generation?”

“It’s not that,” she says. “You’re good with kids.”

Now it’s his turn to be skeptical. “I am?”

She smiles at him. “When you’re not pretending you don’t like them.”

Tony frowns at her. “I don’t like them.”

“Sure you don’t,” she says. “That’s why you’re mentoring the spider kid.”

“Well, I didn’t really get a choice with him. He kind of landed on my doorstep.”

“Oh? The stork dropped him off?” Pepper laughs. “What’s his name?”

“Peter Parker.”

She’s quiet for a minute, eating, and then says, “Why does that sound familiar?”

“No idea,” Tony says.

“No, I swear I’ve heard that name before—”

“It’s alliterative, so it’s probably just—”

Pepper’s brow is wrinkled, then it dawns on her. “Oh my god, that was the seizure kid! Last year! The one that nearly died in the lobby!”

She stares at him with wide eyes.

Tony stares back at her.

“What is going on?” Pepper demands.

“It turns out he has superpowers,” Tony says.

This is where he could admit it. Where he could tell someone else that the reason Peter has superpowers is because Tony fucked up. Because Tony gave a think tank some money and lab space and then left it unsupervised and they created an abomination and then let that abomination loose in a building where children take educational field trips.

He says, “I’m keeping an eye on him. Helping him out. Making sure he stays out of trouble.”

“Was the seizure because of these powers?” she asks.

Tony can’t look at her. “No, don’t think so,” he lies.

“Oh,” Pepper says. She takes a sip of wine, eyeing him over her glass. Her expression is a bit soft. “It’s good you found him.”

Tony nods, and says, “Yeah, isn’t it?”

- - -

“The kid ditched his Decathlon meet,” Happy says, next time he calls.

“His what?” Tony asks, voice muffled by the cufflink he has between his teeth.

“Academic Decathlon. I don’t know, it’s some smart kid thing he does instead of playing football. I figured you’d know what it is.”

Tony turns, looking up at the holoscreen where Happy’s face is projected. “Why would I know anything about high school? I skipped high school.”

“Well, the kid is skipping high school now, too,” Happy complains, “and I’m sick of it being my problem.”

“What’s he doing instead of going to school?”

“Rescuing people from the Washington Monument before it collapses.”

Tony blinks. “Wait, what?”

“Do you watch the news?”

“Not if I can help it.”

Happy throws his hands up. “Turn on the news,” he says. “The kid is all over it.”

Tony turns on the news. Sure enough, the big story is that there was some sort of issue at the Washington Monument and a group of high school students who’d just won the Academic Decathlon nearly fell to their deaths in the elevator, but were rescued at the last minute by Spider-Man. There’s video of the kid climbing the outside of the Monument and breaking in through a window at the top, and someone inside has video of him lifting a girl to safety with one hand while hanging upside down. Everyone is praising him as a hero.

No one knows he’s also a high school student, and should have been with the other kids instead of rescuing them.

In the grand scheme of things, pulling a rescue op for his friends is the sort of thing the kid should be sticking to. There aren’t any weapons involved in this, nothing Tony needs to notify the FBI and DODC about. Just the kid, helping his friends and neighbors. Even if it is outside his usual neighborhood and raising a few eyebrows for that reason.

And the kid is good at it. It’s clear from the footage that he’s thinking on his feet, adapting his plan when his first idea isn’t working. He uses the leverage of the helicopter to create enough force to break through the window. Disguises his voice since these are people who know him and might recognize him.

He does good.

Tony should probably tell the kid he’s done good. That’s what you do with kids, right? Positive reinforcement? It's the opposite of what his own father had done, but that probably means it’s the right thing to do when dealing with a teenager.

Maybe he can give the kid access to a couple of the fancier features of the suit. Some of the other webshooter combinations Tony built into it would have been useful during his rescue op if he’d known about them and had training. Peter will probably see that as a reward for good behavior. More positive reinforcement.

Kids are easy to handle. Tony’s totally got this.

Tony’s on his way to a happy hour meeting with the head of R&D, but he uses the time in the car to give the kid a video call. “Mr. Parker. Got a sec?”

It looks like the kid is wearing the suit, based on the extreme close-up Tony is getting. “Uh, actually I’m at school,” Peter says.

Tony frowns, because he’s pretty sure it’s after school hours, but lets it go. “Nice work in D.C.,” he tells him.

“Uh, okay.”

“My dad never really gave me a lot of support,” Tony says, “and I’m just trying to break the cycle of shame.”

Peter’s eyes are wide. “Uh, I’m kind of in the middle of something right now…”

“Don’t cut me off when I’m complimenting you,” Tony says. “Anyway, great things are about—”

He’s cut off by the sound of a horn on Peter’s side of the call. Peter’s eyes get even wider, his expression slightly panicked.

“What was that?” Tony asks.

“Uh, I’m at band practice,” Peter says.

“That’s odd,” Tony says. “Happy told me you quit band six weeks ago. What’s up?”

“I gotta go. Uh, end call.”

“Hey!” Tony protests, but the call has already ended. He tries calling back, but Peter doesn’t answer.

The kid actually hung up on him. No one ever hangs up on him! Tony is the one who hangs up on people.

“Where is the kid, Friday?”

“Peter is currently located inside the Embassy Suites hotel in Washington, D.C.”

Tony blinks, then says, “Friday?”

“He is at 900 10th Street Northwest,” she says.

“He’s not in D.C. anymore, Friday. Where is he really?”

“The tracker for his suit is located in D.C.”

Tony swipes up a holoscreen on his phone, and sure enough, the tracker on the kid’s suit is still in D.C. That little shit. He must have removed it and left it there.

“I’m gonna kill him,” Tony mutters. “Trace whatever that sound in the background was.”

It takes a couple minutes, during which Tony texts Happy and asks what he knows about the kid’s whereabouts—nothing, of course—before FRIDAY pinpoints the horn Tony had heard as coming from a ferry.

Tony stares at his reflection in the raised divider of the car. “A ferry?” he confirms.

“Yes, Boss.”

The only reason the kid has to be near a ferry is if he’s still chasing the weapons dealers that Tony told him to stay away from. There was a deal going down today on the Staten Island Ferry that the FBI is handling.

“Goddammit,” Tony mutters. He knocks on the divider, and it lowers. “Pull over,” he tells the driver.

He gets out, and has FRIDAY send a suit to him. Time to go see what stupid shit the kid has gotten into now.

- - -

Tony saves the kid’s ass, and the asses of an entire ferry full of people, and then flies off to deal with the kid instead of the FBI Director. He’d actually prefer law enforcement, for the first time ever in his life, but that's because when he lands on the roof Peter won’t even look at him at first.

Tony hovers behind him in the suit, waiting for the kid to turn around. Peter keeps staring out at the cleanup going on in the harbor. The longer he’s ignored, the more angry Tony gets. This kid has done nothing but ignore Tony and what he’s been told to do and now look at what he’s done.

“Previously on Peter Screws the Pooch: I tell you to stay away from this. Instead, you hacked a multimillion-dollar suit so you could sneak around behind my back doing the one thing I told you not to do.”

“Is everyone okay?” Peter asks.

“No thanks to you,” Tony says.

“No thanks to me?” Peter jumps up off the ledge, turning to stalk across the roof towards Tony. Angry. 

How dare this little punk be angry at him. Tony is the one who’s angry right now. Tony is the one who just had to pull off a last minute save the day because of this kid. Because Peter has no fucking clue what he’s doing and has gone behind Tony’s back, ignoring all the directions he was given.

“Those weapons were out there, and I tried to tell you about it. But you didn’t listen!” Peter gestures expansively, the mask of the suit fisted in his hand. “None of this would’ve happened if you had just listened to me.” Peter scoffs. “If you even cared, you’d actually be here.”

Tony opens the suit, stepping down onto the roof and stalking towards the kid, and Peter is so startled he stumbles back a few steps, his eyes widening.

“I did listen, kid,” Tony says. “Who do you think called the FBI, huh? Do you know that I was the only one who believed in you? Everyone else said I was crazy to recruit a 14-year-old kid.”

“I’m fifteen,” Peter says, as if that matters.

“No, this is where you zip it, all right?” Tony raises a hand, cutting it across the air sharply. “The adult is talking. What if somebody had died tonight? Different story, right? ‘Cos that’s on you.” He points to the kid. “And if you died, I feel like that’s on me,” he says, fingers bumping against his own chest, hard.

The problem, of course, is that Peter’s death is always going to be on him. Whether it happens now or ten years from now, thirty years… If Peter dies doing this, dies for anything related to these powers—which he probably will—then that’s on Tony. There’s no escaping that.

“I don’t need that on my conscience,” Tony says.

Not yet, at least.

Peter seems cowed by that. “Yes sir,” he says. “I… I’m sorry.”

“Sorry doesn’t cut it,” Tony says, still angry.

“I understand,” Peter says. And then, like a punch to the gut: “I just wanted to be like you.”

Like him. Tony is an alcoholic fuck-up on his best days. He’s not a role model for the impressionable teenage set. The fact that this teenager in particular sees him as one is… unacceptable.

Peter has strength and power but he also has an inherent sense of right and wrong that Tony has never had. Peter has a drive to help people and correct the wrongs in the world that he didn’t get from having his life flash before him and his sins paraded in front of him in a cave in the desert. He was just born with it, it just comes naturally to him, like breathing and blinking.

“I wanted you to be better,” Tony says.

Peter looks away, finally, his eyes no longer boring into Tony’s.

Tony looks away from him as well, out over the water. But that just means seeing the clean up operation again, and reminds him that once he’s done dealing with the kid he’s going to have to go deal with that mess.

Geez, the kid was without a tracker and constant supervision for what? 24 hours? And this is the mess he made? Tony really was crazy to recruit a 14-year-old. That had been an act of desperation. Letting the kid keep the suit was stupid of him. Of course the kid was going to fuck up. He should be at band practice, not chasing after weapons dealers.

“Okay,” Tony says. “It’s not working out. I’m gonna need the suit back.”

“For how long?” Peter asks.

“Forever.”

Peter shakes his head, eyes wide, begging, “No no no. Please please please.”

Tony grits his teeth. His left arm hurts, the pain radiating through his forearm and wrist the way it has ever since it had gotten sprained at Leipzig.

“You don’t understand,” Peter begs. “Please. This is all I have. I’m nothing without this suit.”

“If you’re nothing without this suit, then you shouldn’t have it. Okay?” Tony says. He plays that back to himself. “God, I sound like my dad.”

Peter has finally stopped begging. He’s quiet for a long moment, looking resigned. Then he says, “I don’t have any other clothes.”

- - -

Tony’s not willing to let the kid out of his sight at this point, afraid he’ll run off, so he drags ‘Spider-Man’ into a tourist trap outside Battery Park and procures the first t-shirt and pants he can find, grabbing large sizes and shoving them into Peter’s arms.

“I need shoes,” Peter says.

“Do you have shoes?” Tony calls over to the guy behind the counter, who’s staring at them blatantly.

The man points towards a back corner.

Flip flops, excellent. Tony adds a pair of those to the pile.

He turns Peter around with a hand on his shoulder, steering him back towards the exit, and tosses a bill he’s sure is large enough to cover everything on the counter. “Keep the change.”

“Where are we going?” Peter asks.

“To find you a halfway clean alley to change in,” Tony says. “I know you’re a fan of those.”

“There aren’t any alleys in this part of town,” Peter says.

“A parking garage then.”

“Those have cameras,” Peter protests.

“So do the alleys. Who do you think has been erasing all the CCTV footage of you in your skivvies?”

Peter stops walking, the eyes of the mask going wide as he looks up at Tony.

Tony nudges his shoulder to move him along. Everyone on the sidewalk is staring at them.

“Screw it,” Tony says. He pulls his glasses from his pocket, putting them on and tapping the corner to activate the HUD. “FRIDAY, get me a car.”

It’s an awkward wait for the car to show up, and Peter isn’t engaging in his usual babbling about everything under the sun. When the car does arrive, with its dark tinted windows, Tony gestures and says, “Your changing room awaits.”

Peter hesitates. “Mr. Stark, I’m really—”

“Just change, kid.”

Peter hesitates, but turns away, climbing into the car.

Tony leans against the side, waiting, and when the kid emerges he’s in pink pajama pants and a shirt that’s way too big on him. Well, it’s good enough to get him home. 

“I, um, left the suit inside,” Peter says.

Tony nods.

Peter shifts from foot to foot. “I just want—”

“Kid,” Tony cuts him off. “We’ve both said enough, okay?” The last thing he wants to hear is Peter apologizing, or anything close to it.

Peter still looks like he’s going to cry. Tony wishes he were anywhere else right now.

He probably deserves seeing the kid cry at least once, seeing as he’d missed watching him nearly die right after he got bit by the spider. 

“Do you need a ride home?” Tony asks.

Peter shakes his head. “It’s fine,” he says. “I can take the subway.”

“I can give you a ride,” Tony offers.

Another shake of his head. “No, thank you,” Peter says, looking at everything but Tony’s face.

“Okay,” Tony says, not wanting to push the issue too much. “Well…” He frowns.

“Bye, Mr. Stark.”

“Bye, kid.”

- - -

October 2016

The kid leaves behind a goddamn note when he stops Adrian Toomes from stealing a plane full of highly valuable equipment. “Found flying vulture guy. —Spider-Man. P.S. Sorry about your plane.”

Tony surveys the damage, the wreckage strewn across several miles of beachfront, with the note clutched in his fist. “Where’s the kid?” he demands.

“Uh, not here,” Happy says. He holds his hands up, before Tony can say anything else. Placating. “I’ve looked everywhere. He must have hightailed it out of here after he webbed the guy up.”

“What the fuck, Happy? What the ever-loving-fuck?” Tony asks. He paces. There’s sand in his shoes. There’s still a fire burning, further down the beach where the bulk of the plane fuselage is sitting. “The kid can’t fly. What did he do? How did he take down a goddamn plane?!”

“I have no idea,” Happy says.

“Well find out!” Tony yells.

“Boss—”

Tony holds a hand up, the gesture sharp. “I don’t want to hear it, Hogan.”

“Yes sir.”

“Get this cleaned up.”

“Yes sir.”

“And find the kid.”

“Yes sir.”

Tony stalks away, as well as he can in the sand. He can’t believe this got so fucked up. It should have been simple. Just moving equipment. On a stealth plane, no less. No one should have even known that plane was in the air.

How had Toomes known? How had Peter known?

He spends the rest of the night digging through intel, looking for the leak. During that, he finds the call logs from Peter’s friend’s attempt to reach Happy. To be fair, he’d probably have ignored him too. He can’t really fault Happy for that.

It’s his own fault, anyway, for not giving Peter any other way to get ahold of Tony for emergencies. The kid had only had Happy’s number. He’d called him, like always. But he’d done that a million times before, for everything under the sun. No wonder Happy had ignored it. Tony had told Happy to ignore the mundane stuff the kid called about.

The leak, it turns out, is in his own offices. A security guard who’d had access to lists of what was being moved had emailed the information to an outside address; probably someone who worked for Toomes. That goes back over a month ago, when they’d first started planning the move and begun working on scheduling. The guard had sent another email once the date of the flight was finalized.

The guard seems to think he’s gotten away with it. He’s at home in Hoboken when the local cops go in after him.

It’s not until morning that Tony gets word from Happy that DODC has contained the scene at Coney Island. It’s also morning when he gets a hit on Peter Parker on CCTV footage, heading into a Food Universe on 43rd Avenue. The kid looks fine. He’s buying bagels.

Tony tracks him as far as the nearby cameras will allow. The store is around the corner from the kid’s apartment, and it looks like he heads straight back home with his breakfast.

“Do you want to keep tracking Peter Parker?” FRIDAY asks.

Tony leans back in his chair, feeling more tired than he should after only a single night of missed sleep. “No,” he says.

Then: “But let me know if he goes out as Spider-Man again.”

- - -

Ross calls the next day, because that’s exactly the headache Tony needs, and after leaving him on hold for five minutes he answers with, “How’s it hanging, Thad?”

“Who the hell is Spider-Man?” Ross says.

Tony should have seen this coming, but he still stalls for time before he starts lying his ass off.

“Hello, I’m doing well. How have you been?” Tony says.

“I’d be a lot better if unknown vigilantes weren’t destroying ferries and wrecking planes all over New York.”

“He’s not unknown. He’s Spider-Man.”

“You had him with you in Germany,” Ross points out. “What’s his real name?”

He definitely can’t tell Ross that.

Peter has maintained his secret identity for nearly a year, including keeping it hidden from his aunt. He doesn’t seem to want to be out there, being recognized for his abilities. And Tony’s not going to be the one to out him.

He spins in his chair, and says, “No idea. I’ve never seen him without the mask.”

“You made him that mask,” Ross grouses.

“I made him a new and improved mask,” Tony says. “He always had a mask. And he’s not using the tech I gave him anymore, he’s back to fighting crime in his pajamas. So really, I have no idea who he is.”

“I refuse to believe that you’re working with him and don’t know his identity.”

“Well, start believing it,” Tony says.

He can tell Ross is fuming on the other end of the line. “You’re in contact with him?”

“Sometimes,” Tony says. “I know how to get ahold of him if I need to.”

“Well, do so. He needs to sign the Accords and be made official. I can’t have rogue super humans causing trouble in New York of all places. If he wants to work with you, he has to be in the Avengers.”

Tony grimaces. “There isn’t an Avengers right now, remember? We broke up.”

“Oh yes there is,” Ross says. “And currently the only one on the roster is you. So find Spider-Man and sign him up. We’re building out the roster.” Then: “And if he says no, then I don’t want to hear anything else about him again. If he doesn’t sign and then he shows up on my radar again, I’m bringing the full might of the U.S. government against him.”

“C’mon, he’s a kid,” Tony protests.

“How do you know that if you don’t know who he is?”

“He’s young. In college probably,” Tony lies.

“If he’s old enough to act like a superhero then he’s old enough for the Avengers,” Ross says.

Tony’s not so sure about that. Peter is as green as they come. He’s capable, but every interaction Tony has with him is a stark reminder that Peter’s frontal lobe is still developing.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he finally says, just to end this phone call.

Ross hangs up, and Tony spins in his chair some more, looking out the window at the view.

The Accords are the issue. They don’t allow for unauthorized superhuman intervention, and that’s exactly what Peter’s been doing. On a small scale, but still. If Ross is making a fuss about it, then even that small scale stuff is getting noticed in Washington. It probably hadn’t helped that the kid had broken a national monument.

He thinks about Wanda and Sam and Clint, all locked up in the Raft—Wanda in particular, bound up in a straightjacket.

He’s not going to let Peter get arrested for this. For one thing, he’s a kid, and for another, it’s going to make people start asking questions about where he got his powers. Tony’s hoping to take that secret to the grave.

He’s going to have to make the kid an Avenger.

- - -

Happy tries to resign.

“What’s this?” Tony asks, not taking the envelope Happy is holding out to him.

“My resignation,” Happy says. He tries to shove it into Tony’s hands, which he knows he hates.

Tony frowns, stepping backwards, away from him. “I don’t want that.”

“Yes, you do,” Happy insists. “I screwed up. I… I colassly screwed up. You gave me this promotion and I messed up the whole thing and—”

“None of the stuff got stolen.”

“Because the kid crashed the plane!”

Tony shrugs. “I’ve got plenty of planes.”

Happy shoves the resignation letter at him again. “Would you take this?!”

“No,” Tony says, stepping back again. “Go shred it.”

“Boss—”

“See, I’m still your boss.”

“Tony—”

“No, go back to boss.”

“—you have to either let me quit or fire me,” Happy insists.

“I don’t have to do anything,” Tony says. He reaches for the envelope finally, and Happy looks relieved for a moment, but then Tony rips it in half, tossing the remains of the paper onto the floor. “You can’t quit. I still need you to manage the kid.”

Happy blinks at him. “What?”

“I’m gonna make him an Avenger, but he’s pretty green, y’know? He’s gonna need a manager still.” Tony claps Happy on the shoulder. “That’s you buddy. You’re his buddy.”

“Tony, no.”

“I told you, go back to calling me boss. You still work for me.”

“The kid hasn’t called since the night the plane went down,” Happy says. “I think he’s mad at me. At us. He doesn’t want us managing him.”

“See, that’s where you're wrong,” Tony says. “I happen to know for a fact that he looks up to me.”

He says it jokingly, even though the fact of it still makes his stomach twist a bit. Peter does look up to him, or he did, before all of this. And Tony doesn’t deserve it in the slightest.

“I messed up,” he admits, earning an eyebrow raise from Happy. “I yelled at him, I took away his suit, I told him to leave everything up to the FBI, but then he ignored me and saved the day. Stopped a ton of my tech from winding up in the hands of criminals. Y’know that’s the whole reason I got into this gig, right? To stop shit like that.”

Happy frowns, then says, “He’s a good kid.”

Tony nods. “He is. And I’m gonna fix it. We’re gonna fix it. We’re gonna put him on the team, make him official. He was begging to be an Avenger like two months ago, he’ll be all over it.”

Happy doesn’t look as sure as Tony feels about it. “You might need, like… a grand gesture,” he suggests.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Tony says. “I’ve got that covered.”

- - -

Tony makes the kid a new suit. He stays up a couple nights in a row doing it, similar to the alcoholic binge that led to Peter’s first suit, minus the alcohol. And he has to say, it’s pretty awesome. It’s nanotech, and this time he gave into the urge to add extra spider legs to it, because why not live a little. 

The kid had flipped out over the first suit. He’s going to flip out over this one. Especially since this one comes with a seat on the Avengers’ roster.

That part of the apology Tony hadn’t planned on. But Ross has forced his hand, and he has no choice but to make the kid official or bench him. And benching Peter clearly doesn’t work.

The press has been told there’s an announcement coming regarding the Avengers’ future, and the only thing left to do is get the kid to the press conference.

But then Peter says no.

Peter spends a minute looking at the new suit, his usual excited and babbling self, and then he turns to Tony and says, “Thank you, Mr. Stark. But I’m good.”

Tony stares back at him. “You’re good? Good? How are you good?”

“Well, I mean, I’d rather just stay on the ground for a little while. Friendly neighborhood Spider-Man,” Peter says, throwing Tony’s own words back in his face, but looking like he means them genuinely. “Somebody’s got to look out for the little guy, right?”

Tony pulls his sunglasses off to stare even harder at the kid. “You’re turning me down?” he asks, incredulous. “You better think about this. Look at that.” He points to the new suit. Peter turns to look. “Look at me,” Tony says. “Last chance, yes or no?”

“No,” Peter says firmly.

Tony takes a beat, thinking of how he’s going to handle Ross, and then decides he can deal with that later. Because he can’t force Peter into this. If Peter doesn’t want to be an Avenger, then Tony isn’t going to make him be one. Tony’s forced enough of this life onto the kid as it is.

“Okay,” he says. “It’s kind of a Springsteen-y working-class hero vibe that I dig.”

Peter’s still staring back at him, so Tony gestures for Happy to approach. “Uh, Happy will take you home. Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Happy says. Then he tells Peter to go wait in the car so he can talk to Tony.

“Thank you, Mr. Stark,” Peter says again.

He’d wrapped his arm around the kid’s shoulders earlier, but that doesn’t feel appropriate at this moment. Tony holds out a hand to shake. “Yes, Mr. Parker. Very well.”

“See you around,” Peter says, jogging back down the steps.

Tony stares at the suit. He’d really thought that was going to work.

Peter turns back. “That was a test, right?” He points to the room full of reporters. “There’s nobody back there?”

Tony turns to him and rocks on his heels. “Yes, you passed.”

A grin lights up Peter’s face.

Tony waves him on. “Alright, skedaddle there, young buck.”

“Thank you, Mr. Stark!” Peter calls again, as he turns and jogs for the door.

For what? Tony hasn’t done anything worth thanking him for.

Happy shrugs at him. “Told you he’s a good kid.”

Tony claps his hand together, shrugs them. Nods. Peter is a good kid. 

Peter is a good kid and Tony cursed him with superpowers and because he’s a good kid he uses them to help people and doesn’t want any fame or accolades for it.

He’s already better than Tony’s ever been.

Now to deal with the room full of reporters…

- - -

Screw Ross, Tony decides. He has a drone deliver Peter’s suit—the first one, not the new nanotech one—back to the kid’s apartment.

Pepper catches him wrapping it up and writing a note on the front at the kitchen counter. She grins. “You look like you’re packing a school lunch.”

“This is a multi-million dollar one-of-a-kind, state-of-the-art, superhero suit,” he says.

“In a brown paper bag. Like a school lunch.”

“Well, he is in kindergarten.”

She’s still smiling at him. “I think it’s nice,” she says. She moves around the island, opening the fridge to grab a water bottle.

“What is?”

“This whole thing you have going on. Helping the kid. Mentoring him.”

“I’m not sure he wants to be mentored,” Tony says. “He’s got a kind of lone wolf thing going on. Not a team player. And I’m not sure I want to mentor. I’m very busy.”

“Happy said he looks up to you.”

“When did you talk to Happy about the kid?”

“Happy likes to complain about him too, but I can tell he likes him.” Pepper waves her water bottle at him, a tsk-tsk motion. “Neither of you are fooling anyone,” she says, turning to leave again.

“He’s an annoying kid,” Tony calls after her. “I’m just giving him this so he doesn’t kill himself.”

“Sure thing, honey,” she calls back.

- - -

November 2016

“By the way, the kid is coming over later.”

Pepper blinks at him, looking up from her tablet. She has her feet up on the ottoman. The ring on her finger is very shiny, which is… well that’s still kind of exciting, not gonna lie. “The spider kid?”

“He likes to be called Spider-Man. It’s an ego thing. They’re sensitive at that age.”

She smirks at him. “Oh, so you are mentoring him.”

“I’m checking on his suit,” Tony says, which is the excuse he’s been using with himself all day, ever since he’d texted the kid and extended the invitation.

“He didn’t take that suit—” Pepper starts.

Tony waves a hand in the air. “No no, not the nano one. The first one I made him. Cutesy spandex. The one I gave back to him a couple weeks ago. I just want to make sure he didn’t hack it again and try to remove all the safety features. With my luck he’ll take out the tracker and stick it on a lamppost somewhere and then wind up kidnapped and carted off to East Africa before anyone realizes he missed geometry.”

Pepper’s gaze is assessing, like she’s seeing right through him. Which has, of course, always been the case. All she says is, “Well, we can’t have that. You’d have to go rescue him.”

The kid is wide-eyed when Tony lets him into the workshop on the lower level of the new penthouse. “Wow Mr. Stark. This is awesome.”

It’s not, really. This workshop is a lot smaller than the one at the Tower had been, or his garage in Malibu. But it’s well stocked, at least. Perfect for retirement tinkering, Tony figures.

“Uh huh,” he says. “You can gawk after you give me the suit. I want to see how much damage you’ve done in a month.”

Peter’s face suddenly contorts in a complicated way, like he’s trying to not react but has a horrible poker face. It’s honestly kind of hilarious. Tony raises an eyebrow at him.

The kid swings his backpack around and starts digging through it. Tony tries not to think about the fact that the multimillion-dollar suit he made spends most of its time wadded up underneath textbooks and pens and crumpled bits of notebook paper. “So here’s the thing, Mr. Stark,” Peter says. “The guy came out of nowhere. Like really, nowhere! Not even Karen noticed him. But I totally managed to web him up and leave him for the cops anyway. So really I think I did fine. And it was healed up like two days later; I used some glue and butterfly band-aids. But it would be awesome if you could help fix the suit because I’ve been webbing it up everytime I go out but that dissolves after two hours and, y’know, it doesn’t look as cool.”

Peter hands over the suit. He keeps rambling, but Tony tunes him out. It takes him a minute or two to find the rip, approximately 3 inches long, and clearly caused by something slicing through the fabric because this thing is actually engineered to be sturdy as fuck.

Tony holds it between his hands, stretching it out. The rip is over the left thigh. “Did you get stabbed?” he demands.

“Not badly,” Peter says. “I just shouldn’t have pulled the knife out right away. I know that for next time now.”

Next time. Jesus Christ.

Tony lets the kid poke around at some nano tech to distract him while he repairs the suit and replaces the tracker that Peter removed again—this time in a harder to find and remove spot—distracted the whole time by the wondering how close the stab wound had been the to the femoral artery and how close the kid came to bleeding out in some filthy alley. Then he adds a protocol to send health alerts directly to FRIDAY on high priority.

“We should probably have some of your blood on hand at the Compound med center just in case of an emergency,” he says, before Peter leaves.

Peter frowns. “My blood? ” he asks. “Why?”

“In case you lose a bunch from a stab wound and need a transfusion,” Tony says. “Which is evidently likely to happen.”

“I think I’m type, um, A positive,” Peter says. He sounds unsure.

Tony nods. “Right. But you’ve got the weird DNA now. So, probably better to have your own on hand. Just in case.” They’d done the same for Bruce, back before he fucked off to god knows where.

Tony steers Peter towards the elevator. “Field trip upstate next weekend,” he says, before immediately regretting saying the word ‘field trip.’ Peter doesn’t seem phased by it. “Maybe don’t mention what we’re doing to Aunt Hottie.”

That Peter does look phased by. He steps into the elevator and turns to look back at Tony, a resigned expression on his face. “Please don’t call her that.”

“What?” Tony asks, smirking. “She is.”

Peter’s eyes narrow. “Do you want me to call your fiancée hot? ‘Cos she is. In like a MILF way.”

Tony blinks at him, his mouth dropping open slightly. Peter smirks.

“Get out of my house,” Tony tells him, pressing the button to send the elevator down to the lobby.

- - -

“Hey, kid,” Tony says, answering the call from Peter on video but not looking up from the circuit board he’s working on. “I didn’t give you my number just so you could call when you were bored in class.”

“Why did you give my kid your personal number?” May Parker asks.

Tony looks up. May Parker is facetiming him. From Peter’s phone. Peter himself is nowhere in sight. “Heeeey, Mrs. Parker. How are you? Doing good? Where’s my… favorite teenage intern?”

“Do you know a lot of teenagers?” she asks. “Are you, like, recruiting a whole team of them? Some sort of junior Avengers squad?” Her voice is tightly controlled, but her expression isn’t quite so much.

Tony presses his lips together. “Did he tell you?”

She huffs a breath out through her nose. “Oh no.” The no is drawn out. “I walked in on him. In the little superhero suit that you made for him. How long have you known about this? How long have you, the great Tony Stark, been keeping secrets from me about my own kid? ”

For a little over 10 months, he thinks. “He was doing it before I met him,” he says. Technically true.

That’s when she explodes. “You’ve been lying to me! About my kid!”

“Technically the kid was lying first—”

“Shut up!” She cuts him off, a hand raised is a sharp gesture. “You don’t get to lie to me about my kid, Stark. He’s 15. He does stupid shit. That’s what kids do. They screw up and they lie about it. You know who’s supposed to know better than that? Grown-ass men.” Her glare is boring into him, even over video. “You took him to Germany! To fight Captain America! And this internship crap? What is this? First he’s got an internship, which I know has been a total lie, and then he doesn’t and he comes home crying about it. Then he has it again but it’s really a front for you to, what, conduct weird experiments on him upstate? You’re encouraging him to sneak around behind my back. He’s out all hours of the night. His grades are dropping. He quit all his extracurriculars. He’s in trouble at school. He’s getting hurt. I was starting to think he’d gotten mixed up with a gang or something. But no, it’s all you. Telling him he can be a superhero.”

“Again, he was doing all of this before I met him. And when I told him to stop, he kept doing it anyway. I figured it was better to, y’know, help than not.”

May stops yelling, but that is arguably worse. “I don’t know how he got these powers, some spider bite or something. He said that’s why he was so sick last year. But he has looked up to all of you since he was eight. If you tell him to jump, he’s going to ask how high. He’s never going to tell you no. Even if he wanted to.”

Tony swallows. He doesn’t say anything.

“Stay the fuck away from him,” May tells him. She hangs up.

Yeah, Tony thinks. Fair enough.

Chapter Text

January 2017

Peter finally calls him again a couple months later. It’s really Peter this time, and not May Parker ready to cut his balls off.

“Aunt May says I can talk to you again,” Peter says.

“Are you sure?” Tony asks.

He hasn’t heard a peep out of Peter since that phone call from May in November, but Spider-Man had only been off the streets for approximately two weeks before going out again. So he’d assumed Peter had worked it out with her, and Tony was the one being left out of the equation. Which was fine by him, really. He didn’t need to be involved. He’d been too involved as it was. He could just keep an eye on the kid from afar.

Peter nods. “She’s cool with it now. I just have to keep my GPA up and stay in Decathlon.” He holds up his suit to the video, clearly trying to show Tony something on it but holding it so close that it’s just a blur of red and blue. “I know you’re probably super busy, but if you have a couple minutes, just like, two minutes really, I was hoping you could tell me how to fix this? I’ve been trying and my friend Ned tried too but nothing we’ve been able to come up with in the chem lab has worked and I can’t afford the better stuff to see if that works. I mean, I could probably if I knew exactly what I needed. I just don’t want to waste—”

“Kid, stop holding it right against the phone. I can’t see what it is.”

“Oh.” Peter’s face pops back up on screen. “I sort of, um, melted the foot of the suit. A little.” He holds up his fingers, an inch apart. “Just slightly.”

“Melted,” Tony says.

Peter nods, a painfully tight smile on his face.

“Do I even want to know how you did that?”

“So there was this fire—”

“Nope,” Tony cuts him off. He holds up a hand. “Don’t tell me.”

Peter stares at him.

“Will Aunt May let you come over this weekend?”

“I can come over again?” Peter’s eyes light up.

“If Aunt May signs a permission slip. I’m not in the mood to get my ass handed to me again.”

Peter winces. “She really is cool with it now.”

- - -

May must give permission, because Peter shows up that weekend and is just as wide-eyed looking around the workshop as he’d been the first time.

“Take a picture, it’ll last longer,” Tony says. “Actually, don’t. A lot of this is proprietary work. I can’t have it leaking when you post it on social media.”

“I wouldn’t post it on social media,” Peter says.

“I know for a fact that everyone under the age of 20 has a crippling social media addiction so I don’t believe that for a second,” Tony says. He holds out his hand. “Gimme the suit. Let me see how badly you damaged it.”

“It’s just a little melted,” Peter insists, as he digs the suit out of his backpack. It appears to have been wadded up at the bottom, underneath several textbooks, and Tony has to bite his lip to keep from saying anything about it.

The suit was a gift. The kid can do what he wants with a gift.

Peter yanks the suit out by one leg, and then holds the leg out Tony. “See, this part here. Like it’s still wearable but it’s tighter and it’s been giving me blisters and I can’t stick as well through it.”

Tony leans in, examining the melted foot of the suit. “Did you step on hot coals?” he asks.

“No, there was a house fire and—”

“I forgot, I don’t want to hear about the fire,” Tony says, cutting him off. “If I hear about the fire I’m gonna have to do something about the fire and I really don’t have the time.” He snatches the suit from Peter’s hands, then makes a shooing motion at him. “Go on, go… do your homework or something while I fix this.”

“Can I play with the holotable again?” Peter asks, his tone hopeful.

“Play?”

Peter nods.

“It’s not a toy,” Tony says. “It’s a multi-million dollar invention that can render models of microscopic nanobots, not to mention space and time.”

“I know, it’s awesome.”

Tony shakes his head. “Yeah, go play.”

Peter’s face breaks into a wide grin. “Thanks Mr. Stark!”

Tony waves him off and turns to his workbench, setting upon Peter’s suit to make the needed repairs.

When he hands it back two hours later, he tells Peter firmly, “Don’t melt it again. No more fires.”

“But what if there’s, like, a baby trapped in a burning house?”

“That’s what firefighters are for.”

“What if there aren’t any firefighters there?”

“Do you just lie awake at night dreaming up horrible scenarios and how you’d intervene?” Tony asks.

He does that himself, so he’s not sure what he’s going to say if Peter says yes.

Peter shrugs. “No, but things just happen.”

Things just happen. Tony frowns about that long after the kid has left for home. Things like getting bit by a spider, like having your DNA altered and gaining powers, like deciding to put on a superhero suit and try to save people.

None of those things wouldn’t have happened to Peter if Tony hadn’t been involved.

- - -

March 2017

Peter continues to destroy his suit in a myriad of inventive ways. Ways Tony never fathomed, and therefore didn’t put in safeguards for.

The worst, however, or what Tony hopes is going to be the worst, is when the kid calls him late one night, sounding out of breath.

Tony is in the middle of working on some upgrades for SI tech, so he has FRIDAY answer the call, but doesn’t look up from the circuit board he’s fiddling with.

“Oh, hey. Hi,” Peter says. He gasps a bit. “I wasn’t sure if you were gonna answer. I would have called Happy but he mentioned he was out of town this weekend so…”

“I made him take a vacation,” Tony says. “Mandatory. It’s his first one in five years. Don’t bother him while he’s gone.”

“Right, yeah. I won’t,” Peter says. He’s still gasping for air.

“Are you running?” Tony asks, finally glancing up from his work. There’s no holoscreen for the call, just Peter’s voice.

“Uh, no,” Peter says. “I mean, I was. I got away from the guy. But um…”

“What guy?”

“Oh, this skinny dude. He was robbing an ATM which I don’t know why people do that so much I swear it happens like, every other week, but anyway he was at the Chase on 31st and so I went in to surprise him but—”

“Kid, get to the point.”

“Right, right. So he had a gun. And I wasn’t expecting it because, like, ATM robbery. He wasn’t robbing other people so what was he gonna do, threaten the ATM into giving him money? That’s stupid. But he kind of shot me.”

Tony stares into the middle space over his desk, and then says, “Hold on, did you just say he shot you?”

“Kind of,” Peter says.

“How do you kind of get shot?!”

“Well he was surprisingly fast for such a skinny dude, like I know people say that about me but I’ve got powers and stuff, right, and I’m pretty sure this guy was just a normal guy. A normal guy who robs ATMs. And who shoots people. Because he shot me before I could get the gun away from him. I did after. And I webbed him up and I left him there for the cops so like I still stopped him but I’m kind of bleeding a lot and I think the bullet is still in there so—”

Tony’s on his feet, already moving towards his suit. “Where are you?”

“Um… Around the corner from 31st… on 36th Avenue.”

“Don’t bleed out before I get there,” Tony tells him.

“Yeah, I’ll try not to, Mr. Stark.”

Tony finds the alley Peter has hidden out in, and also finds that the kid is, indeed, bleeding out. From a bullet wound to the torso.

“Jesus Christ,” he says, kneeling down in front of Peter.

“Oh, hey Mr. Stark,” Peter says. His head is lolling back against the wall of the building behind him, mask still on. “You came.”

“Of course I came.”

Tony pulls Peter’s hand aside to get a better look at the wound. The bullet went in on the right side of the kid’s chest. He tilts Peter forward, ignoring the pained noises the kid is making, and finds an exit wound just under his ribs on his back.

“You need an x-ray to make sure it didn’t hit anything vital,” Tony says. “And probably a blood transfusion.” He can feel the blood soaking into the knees of his pants.

“Uh huh.” Peter nods. His head lolls against Tony’s shoulder.

Shit, shit. Where is going to take the kid? The Tower’s been sold so that med center isn’t accessible anymore, and the Avengers Compound is an hour north of the city.

“FRIDAY, call Helen Cho,” he says, moving so that he can see the screen on his watch. “And get me a car over here.”

Tony shrugs out of his jacket and wraps it around Peter, pressing it against both the entrance and exit wounds.

Peter cries out at the pressure. 

“Gotta stop the bleeding,” Tony tells him.

From his watch, Helen says, “Tony?”

“Hey, Helen. Please tell me you still have that private facility in the city.”

“I…” She hesitates. “What’s going on?”

“Yes or no?” Tony says.

“Yes, but—”

“Good, I’ve got a patient for you. Bullet wound to the torso with an exit wound. How fast can you meet me there?”

There’s a long pause. “Who is—”

“How fast?”

“15 minutes.”

“Great, see you there. End call.”

It takes the car longer than that to get to them, and Tony keeps pressure on the wounds, telling Peter that Helen is the best and he’ll be in good hands. The kid is a bit out of it, his attention drifting.

Tony pokes him in the arm. “Hey, stay awake.”

“‘m ‘wake,” Peter mumbles.

“Uh huh. Tell me about, um, that club thing you have at school.”

“You know about that?” Peter asks.

“Happy keeps me up to date. What’s it called?”

“AcaDec.”

“Aka Deck, okay, sure,” Tony repeats.

“Academic Decathlon,” Peter corrects, like he can tell Tony got it wrong. “It’s like… uh…” He trails off with a pained groan. “I don’t feel so good.”

“I know. Car is almost here. Then it’s a short ride to the clinic and the best doctor ever is going to fix you up.” He shifts his hold on Peter, checking on his bleeding, and presses the jacket against him tighter. “So, Academic Decathlon. That sounds super nerdy. Is everyone in it as nerdy as you?”

“MJ isn’t a nerd.”

“Who’s MJ?”

“She’s the captain. She’s really nice but, like, in a mean way. And she’s pretty. And she gets mad if I don’t study.”

“She’s pretty, huh? Her dad isn’t secretly a supervillain is he? This isn’t going to be a repeat of last year, right?”

“I haven’t met her dad,” Peter says. “I think he’s an accountant.”

“We’ll reserve judgment on whether or not he’s evil then. So have you asked MJ on a date yet?”

That seems to perk Peter up a bit, because he lifts his head, trying to look towards Tony’s face. “She’s not my girlfriend. She’s just my friend.”

“I asked you about her and you said she was nice and pretty,” Tony points out. “Is she not pretty enough? What’s the issue?”

“No, she’s, like, really pretty. But we’re just friends. I don’t— I haven’t— I’m not gonna ask her out.”

“Look, kid, you can’t let one bad date put you off the whole thing. I know the last girl’s dad turned out to be the guy who’s illegal operation you’d been trying to bust for months, but that could happen to anyone, honestly. I dated this girl once and then it turned out she wasn’t actually single and her boyfriend was a pro-wrestler who would have beaten me to a pulp if I hadn’t had Happy there to stop the guy. So dating is about taking risks. Because that girl was also an acrobat, so she was worth the risk. Maybe MJ is worth the risk that her accountant dad is secretly a mob boss.”

The car pulls up at the mouth of the alley just then, and Tony looks at it with relief. “Oh thank god. Your chariot awaits.”

Getting Peter into said chariot is easier said than done. The kid is nearly dead weight. Tony deposits him in the backseat and then slides into the driver’s seat. “FRIDAY, get us to Cho.”

Helen is waiting for them at her clinic, and stares at Peter, who’s still in his Spider-Man suit, with wide eyes. “Are you serious right now?” she demands.

“It’s a through and through, but I don’t know if it nicked anything internally,” Tony says. He’s practically carrying Peter. “Where’s the surgery room?”

“Back here,” Helen says, turning sharply on her heel and leading them further into the clinic. “How long ago was he shot?”

“I’ve been with him for about forty minutes. It wasn’t long before that.” They make it into the surgical suite at the back of the clinic and Tony helps Peter up onto the gurney. “Honestly, I think he’d be in worse shape if he had any internal bleeding.”

“Bleeding is supposed to be internal,” Peter mumbles.

“Blood is supposed to be internal,” Tony corrects. “Right now a ton of yours is external. So just lie back and let the good doctor here stitch you up, okay?”

Peter gives him a thumbs up.

“Can you get the suit off him?” Helen asks. “I’m assuming you made that and I can’t just cut it open.”

“I’d rather you didn’t,” Tony says. “I spend enough time repairing it as it is.” He reaches for the release mechanism on the suit to loosen it.

“Mr. Stark…” Peter says, grabbing his wrist. The eyes of the mask are wide, staring straight at Helen.

“She’s a friend, you’re fine,” Tony tells him.

Peter shakes his head.

“Okay, mask stays on then. C’mon, sit up so you can get the top of this off.”

“Mask stays— How am I supposed to treat him wearing that?” Helen asks.

“Figure it out,” Tony tells her.

Helen’s lips are pursed, and she’s glaring at him. But once Tony has the top half of the suit pulled down around Peter’s waist she steps in, pushing him away from the gurney and getting to work.

Peter’s lucky, the bullet didn’t nick anything internal, and all he needs is to be stitched up. Helen’s stitches are neat and precise, a far cry from what Tony probably would have managed if he’d attempted to patch the kid up on his own.

“Thanks,” he tells her, after she’s done and Peter is resting in the other room.

Helen turns that glare on him again. “Who is he?”

“Spider-Man. Did the mask and suit not clue you in?”

“You know what I meant,” she says. “I’m not an idiot, I can tell he’s a teenager. How old is he?”

Tony cannot tell her that she just stitched up bullet wounds on a fifteen-year-old. “Old enough,” he says.

“And what? His parents are giving permission for him to run around as a vigilante?” Helen crosses her arms over her chest. “Do you have any idea how many ethical violations I’ve committed tonight? Treating a minor without parental consent—”

“His parents consented,” Tony argues, thinking that May wouldn’t have had a problem with Tony finding immediate treatment for Peter tonight.

“Then that’s child endangerment,” Helen says. “I’m a mandated reporter.”

“You’re also the only person I trust to keep this quiet,” he says. Her nostrils flare, and he goes on, “You know how things are with this business. With being involved in this.”

“I didn’t sign up to treat children.”

“He’s eighteen,” Tony lies.

Helen looks skeptical. “Don’t call me for this again,” she says.

“Who else am I supposed to call? I’m looking out for the kid. If I hadn’t gotten to him tonight he’d have bled out in an alley. You want that on your conscience? Because I sure as hell don’t. So you tell me, who do I call?”

She leans back a bit, not looking at him.

“I called you because I trust you,” Tony says. “And I trust you with him.”

Helen isn’t looking at him. She busies herself tidying up the supplies she’d used. “He needs to rest for a week.”

“He has enhanced healing.”

“Even so, he lost a lot of blood. He needs rest to recuperate. Can I assume you’ll enforce that?”

“Sure,” Tony says. “I can do that.”

She nods. “Alright then.” When she turns back to him, she still looks angry. “I hope you know what you’re doing?”

“Don’t I always?” Tony says, when the actual answer is hardly ever.

Back in the patient room Peter is sleeping, still knocked out by the boatload of pain medication Helen had given him. Tony drags an uncomfortable looking chair from the edge of the room closer to the bed, and settles in, his feet propped up on the edge of the bed.

The kid looks even younger asleep like this, and not up and bouncing around, talking a mile a minute like he usually does.

Tony pokes Peter’s leg with his foot. “You can’t get shot, kid. You just gave me, like, 50 grey hairs.”

Peter doesn’t respond.

“The stabbings were bad enough, but guns? Getting shot in the torso of all places? An arm, a leg… but no, you went straight for the gut. Go big or go home.” He shakes his head. “That suit isn’t bulletproof. I’m gonna have to make you one that is. Clearly you need a lot more safety features than I anticipated.” Enough safety features to suffocate the kid in cotton wool.

Peter might complain about it, but that’s because Peter thinks he’s invincible. Tony knows better. And each injury the kid obtains while he’s out as Spider-Man carves the pit in his stomach deeper and deeper.

What if nothing is enough? What if Tony swaddles him in a titanium suit and puts him on the sidelines and he still gets hurt or killed? How is he ever going to explain to May Parker that it was his fault Peter’s life was in jeopardy in the first place?

He’s never going to tell May Parker what he’s done, he can admit that himself. Just like he’s never going to tell Peter.

The kid sleeps on, oblivious to Tony’s inner turmoil.

- - -

April 2017

“May Parker on the phone for you, Boss,” FRIDAY says, cutting into Tony’s music as he works in the lab.

Tony frowns into the middle space above his project. “How did May Parker get my number?”

“From Peter’s phone,” May’s voice comes over the speaker on the holoscreen above the workstation, and Tony jumps in his seat, looking up at the screen.

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters, one hand over his heart, which is beating a bit faster than normal.

May raises an eyebrow.

“Normally my AI warns me before putting calls through,” he says.

“Oh, well, normally my kid’s academic advisors sign their paperwork,” May says, breezily.

Tony frowns, feeling like he’s walking into a trap of some sort.

He hasn’t spoken to May Parker since she called to rip him a new one after discovering Peter was Spider-Man. Any communication between the two of them since has been with Peter acting as a go-between. All ‘ask your aunt if you can come to the compound next weekend’ and ‘my aunt says I have to be back in time for dinner Sunday’ and ‘don’t tell your aunt I said that.’ 

Also: ‘don’t tell your aunt you got shot,’ because then she might actually kill Tony.

He’s felt a bit like a divorcée, honestly.

May waves a sheet of paper in front of the camera. “Guess where I am.”

Tony squints at the background, but has no idea.

“Go on, guess,” May prompts.

“Nobu,” he says.

May’s brow wrinkles. “What’s that?”

“It’s a sushi place. In Malibu, technically, but I guess it's a chain so there's one here too.  Are you there?”

“I…” She frowns, confused. He’s thrown her for a loop. “No,” May says. She turns the camera and points it outward, panning around some dismally decorated hallway full of… lockers? “I’m at Peter’s school.” The camera is back on her face. “It’s parent-teacher conference day. And you didn’t sign the paperwork for his internship.”

Oh, right. That.

“Um,” Tony starts.

“He has to have an extracurricular,” May goes on. “He’s never going to get into college without any. And he quit everything else to help you. So the very least you can do is make it legit and sign the paperwork his school sent over.” She waves the paper in her hand again. “Or have your assistant sign. Or something. This isn’t that hard. He’s over there every other weekend practically. It’s not like you never see him.”

“I thought he was in Decathlon,” Tony says. “He didn’t quit that one, did he?”

May stares at him.

“What?” Tony asks.

“How do you know he’s in Decathlon?” she asks.

“He talks about the girl in charge of it all the time,” Tony says.

May’s eyes widen. “He what? He’s never mentioned her.”

Tony leans back, his chair tilting a bit. He crosses his arms. “He has a crush on her.”

“How do you know this?” May demands. “I don’t know this!”

“The kid talks constantly.”

“Not about girls he doesn’t.”

Tony’s expression turns a bit skeptical. May looks scandalized.

“I thought you two talked about… about the thing,” she says.

“Mostly,” Tony says. “It’s not like I asked to hear about his teenage drama.”

“I want to hear about the teenage drama,” she says, pouting a bit.

Which is how Tony winds up taking May Parker out for dinner at Nobu, where she promptly shoves a stack of stapled papers in his face to fill out and demands to know who else Peter has a crush on.

May, it turns out, is incredibly easy to talk to when they’re not arguing about the kid and are instead bonding over him. She also holds her own drinking sake with him.

By the end of dinner, they’re both a bit tipsy, and Tony calls a driver to come take her home. 

“I can take the subway,” May says. “I’m not drunk.”

Tony waves her off. He’s balancing the last of the paperwork on his forearm, scrawling his signature. “Here you go. Official Stark Internship for one Peter Parker. He’s now the only high schooler who’s ever made the cut. The graduate students will eat him alive if they ever find out.”

May takes the papers from him, tucking them into her purse.

“Y’know,” she says, “I thought you were gonna be an asshole.”

“I have it on good authority that I am an asshole,” Tony says. “I’m pretty sure there are several heads of state that would attest to that under oath.”

“Well, if that’s the case you might actually be doing something right.” She pats his arm.

Behind her, the car pulls up to the curb.

Tony walks her to it. “Adieu, Ms. Parker,” he says.

May just waves back at him, once, before the door closes.

- - -

May 2017

Pepper wields the camera with a grin. “It’s picture day,” she says, waving it at Tony.

Tony narrows his eyes at her. “I regret buying you that.”

“That’s a lie, you like having your picture taken,” Pepper says. She looks down at the camera, fiddling with some of the buttons. It's a high-end DSLR, with more features than she’s ever probably going to use. But she’d wanted a camera for her last birthday, so he’d bought her the best one. “Do you just need a picture of you two working together?”

“Yeah, so we can prove to his school that this internship is legit.”

Peter is across the room, and Tony waves him over. “Pete, over here.”

Peter frowns at the sight of Pepper and her camera. “I'm sorry, Ms. Potts. I don’t know why they asked for pictures. They’re asking for extra documentation from everyone with internships that give credit hours, I think, so it’s not just me but, I mean, I’m the only one here and this isn’t even really—”

Tony grabs the kid by the shoulders and turns him toward the workbench. “Look busy,” he says.

“Busy with what?”

“Just pretend to press buttons. Don’t actually press anything, though.”

Peter reaches out a hand tentatively toward the keyboard.

Tony takes a stance looking over his shoulder, and there’s a click of the camera as Pepper says, “Perfect!” 

After a couple more pictures of them “working” together, Pepper hands Peter the certificate Tony had drawn up certifying this internship.

Peter stares down at it. “You really made it an official internship?”

Tony nods. “You’re on the books and everything. That’s the same thing we give to the college kids who intern down in R&D. So your teachers can get off your back about proving it now and you can get your credit hours.”

“Thanks, Mr. Stark,” Peter says, flashing him a bright smile.

“Here, hold it up,” Pepper prompts. “And Tony, go stand next to him.”

The first shot they take is very formal. Peter’s holding up the certificate and Tony’s standing beside him, looking serious.

“You could look like you like each other,” Pepper says.

“Who said we like each other?” Tony asks. Then he sticks bunny ears behind Peter’s head, and Pepper snaps a shot before the kid can retaliate properly.

“That’s cute,” Pepper says, smiling. “I’m gonna frame that.”

- - -

August 2017

“So, sixteen,” Tony says, because FRIDAY reminded him that the kid’s birthday is this weekend. He spins his chair around to face the workbench the kid is sitting at.

Peter blinks at him. “Yeah?”

“Yeah? That’s all you’ve got? Sixteen is a big milestone. Sixteen means you can get your first car.”

“I can’t afford a car,” Peter points out. “And we live in New York, no one needs a car here.”

“I need a car here,” Tony says.

“Is that why you have, like, ten of them?”

“They’re not all for the same thing,” Tony explains. “You’ve got your daily commute car, your special event car, your pleasure driving car…”

“Most people only have one car,” Peter says. “One car is reasonable. Ten cars is excessive.”

“Excessive is my middle name,” Tony says.

“Is that why you put a million web shooter combinations in my suit?” Peter asks.

“No, I did that because I was bored and it seemed like fun.” He points at the kid. “You’re changing the subject. Cars. Driving. When are you learning how?”

Peter looks away, staring at some point on the wall behind Tony’s head. “Um, never.”

Tony stops spinning his chair. “What do you mean ‘never?’ You have to learn to drive. It’s an essential life skill.”

“I live in New York,” Peter repeats.

“And what if you leave New York?”

The kid shrugs.

“Hasn’t your aunt been teaching you? You’ve got a permit, right?”

Another shrug. “I do, yeah. But her car broke down so it got towed for being parked in the same spot for too long and we haven’t gotten it out of impound yet.”

Tony stares. “When was this?”

“Uh, like three months ago…” He catches the incredulous look on Tony’s face. “It’s New York!” he says again. “We don’t need a car!”

Tony gets to his feet. “Alright, up. Up.” He waves his hands at the kid in an upward motion. “C’mon.”

Peter jumps off the stool he was perched on.

Tony turns for the door of the workshop.

Peter hurries after him. “Where are we going?”

“To teach you to drive. I must have something worth under a hundred grand that you can crash.”

Peter stumbles into the door frame.

The kid doesn’t actually crash the Audi that Tony lets him drive, but that might because Tony drives them out to the Avengers compound before letting Peter get behind the wheel. There’s an enclosed road there with turns, a roundabout, and even a 4-way stop the kid can practice on. It’s perfect.

“You’re doing great,” Tony tells him, after Peter manages to back into and out of the parking spot.

“The cameras help a lot,” Peter says, gesturing to the dashboard. “May’s car doesn’t have any of this.”

“You can keep practicing with this one on the weekends and then take your test with it,” Tony tells him.

Peter turns to him with wide eyes. “Really, Mr. Stark?”

Tony nods. “Yeah, of course. You have to take the test using a car you’re used to.”

“You, uh… you don’t have to do that, sir. I mean, this car is really nice.”

“It isn’t that—”

“It’s got all this fancy stuff and it practically drives itself and—”

“It does drive itself actually.”

“Oh wow. Yeah. I could just drive May’s car, after we, like, get it fixed. And get it out of impound.”

Right, Tony needs to get on that too. Or just buy May Parker a new car entirely. “Kid, just nod and say thank you and then drive us to the gate. There’s a Starbucks on the main road and I’m due for a shot of caffeine. You can practice going through a drive-thru.”

“Thanks, Mr. Stark.” Peter’s smile lights up his whole face.

Tony gestures out the windshield. “Coffee, chop chop.”

“Right, right.” Peter moves the gear shift and presses the gas and the car lurches forward, but not quite in the way that it should.

“That’s first gear,” Tony says.

“What’s first gear?”

“You put it in manual.”

“I thought you said this car was automatic.”

“This car does both. It’s a sports car. Hit the brakes and shift back into drive.”

Peter looks panicked. “How is this a sports car?!”

“You’re doing fine.”

“I don’t want to be in manual.”

“I’ll teach you that next. It’s actually better.”

“It sounds harder,” Peter says, wary.

“It’s better, trust me. You can’t drive a sports car in automatic.”

“Who said I wanted to drive a sports car? Who said I wanted to drive at all? Maybe you should just drive.”

“I did. Now shift to drive, and let’s get some coffee,” Tony says. Then, under his breath: “Or maybe find a drive-thru liquor store.”

“I heard that,” Peter says.

- - -

December 2017

“Do you always listen to old music?” Peter asks one day.

Tony spins around on his stool, where he’s poking at yet another hole the kid has ripped in his suit. (“I was trying to crawl through this air vent because I heard these guys talking about a deal going down and it totally sounded like the mob, Mr. Stark, which would have been really cool actually, but I think it was actually just like a back room poker game or something so not as cool even it’s probably still illegal. But anyway, it got kinda narrow and there were some pointy screws and, like, I tried to go back the way I got in but then they heard me up there so, y’know, I had to bust through the ceiling and the metal was all jagged and—”) “What did you just say? Did you just call Black Sabbath old?”

“Is it from the 70s?” Peter asks.

“Yes.”

“That’s super old.”

“I was born in 1970.”

Peter’s face twists into a bit of grimace.

“Oh, shut up,” Tony tells him. “Listen to headphones then. It’s my workshop, I’m gonna play the music I like.”

“At least it’s not Christmas music,” Peter says, in a long-suffering sort of tone.

“Not a fan?” Tony asks. “I thought all kids liked Christmas. You get gifts from Santa and shit.”

Peter stares back at him with a flat expression. 

“What?” Tony asks.

“I’m Jewish,” Peter says, like this is something Tony should already know.

Tony blinks. He’d… honestly missed that, in all the things he’d learned about the kid over the last year and a half. “Happy Hanukkah,” he says.

“Thanks,” Peter says, flatly.

“Don't you get gifts for that?” he asks, curious.

“No, you do.” Peter shrugs. “It’s just not like Christmas. Like… Everyone thinks it’s ‘Jewish Christmas’ or something, and it’s really not.”

Tony nods again. “Uh huh,” he says.

“Also,” Peter says, “we’re, like, really bad Jews. Like, we’ve got a menorah but it was my grandma’s and we usually forget to light the candles after night two or three. And I didn’t have a bar mitzvah. Which is a shame, actually, because you usually get a bunch of money for that and that would have been really nice for my college fund.”

“Where do you want to go to college?” Tony asks, which is about the only part of that he understood.

“Oh.” Peter looks taken aback at the question. “Um, I dunno,” he says. He looks away, over at the flask that’s bubbling with his web fluid. It’s nowhere near done yet. “I’m still a junior.”

“That’s only a year until you need to apply,” Tony says. “You’ve got to have some idea.”

Peter scuffs the toe of his sneaker on the floor, and then looks up and says, “Okay, so my friend Ned and I have this whole plan, right?”

Tony nods and gestures for him to go on.

Peter seems to take that as carte blanche to start rambling. “Our top choice is MIT and we’re both gonna apply and then if we get in we’ll get a room together and it’ll be awesome. Aside from, like, the crippling student loan debt we’ll accrue. But if we don’t get into MIT, then we’ve got some backup schools too. And we’re gonna apply to all the same ones, so that way no matter what we’re sure to get into at least one of them together.”

Tony chews on the inside of his cheek. He’s pretty sure he’s mentioned MIT to the kid before. Had Peter come up with this plan before that, or after? Did he pick it because Tony told him about it?

Exactly how much of Peter’s life is dictated by Tony’s words and actions?

“MIT, huh?” he says.

Peter nods enthusiastically. “I mean, I can still be Spider-Man there, right? They’ve got crime in Boston too.”

“Yeah, sure. Might cut in on the parties though.”

“Parties?”

Tony tries not to grin. “Yeah,” he says. “Parties. College girls. Whole new world awaits you, kid.”

Peter just blinks at him.

Tony shakes his head. “What do you want to major in?” he asks.

“Oh, um, I dunno,” Peter says, hedging again. Tony waits him out. Peter eventually says, “I thought, maybe, chemical engineering?” It’s clearly a question, like he’s not sure that’s the right thing to have mentioned.

Tony knows, in that moment, that his expression is a little too soft. “You’d be good at that,” he tells him, honestly. Peter had made that web fluid in his school science lab without any help, and it’s one of the more innovative things Tony has seen from anyone, much less from a 14-year-old.

Peter’s face lights up at the praise, and Tony is reminded, like a sucker punch to the gut, of how much influence he has over this child. Of how much influence he has had on his life.

No one ever should have let Tony Stark within 100 yards of Peter Parker.

That night, Tony pours himself a scotch and tells FRIDAY to look up the cost of tuition and room and board at MIT.

“A four year undergraduate degree would cost roughly $310,000 without financial aid,” she tells him. “MIT’s website says that 85% of students receive some form of financial aid including scholarships and work-study programs.”

“I don’t want the kid to work while he’s in school,” Tony says. “He’s already working with the crime fighting gig. How much for a masters?”

A pause. “$200,000 assuming that he finishes in two years,” FRIDAY says.

“That include living expenses?”

“An estimate for them, yes.”

“Great. Throw in like five more years of living expenses in case he wants a PhD, some extra money for wild parties, and remind me about that when he graduates. It’ll make a killer graduation gift.”

“Sure thing, Boss.”

Chapter Text

May 2018 

Everything goes to shit in a spectacular fashion. One minute Tony is discussing wedding planning and dodging paparazzi in the park, and the next he’s fighting aliens on 6th Avenue.

He had plans for today. He was going to finish his jog, convince Pepper to have sex in the shower when they got back—maybe convince her it was a good idea to have sex of the baby-making variety sometime soon because lately everytime he sees a small child or an infant he’s filled with a desire to have one of his own that just won’t abate. The only time it goes away is when Peter turns up, having destroyed his Spider Suit in some new unholy fashion that also caused bodily injury to himself, and reminds Tony that children are evil and uncontrollable menaces to society. Then he was going to order a sandwich from Pastrami Queen, ignore his emails, work on the nanotech suit some more, pretend wedding planning was not a thing he needed to be doing, and end the day by taking Pepper out to dinner, which sadly would also be attended by her old college friend Chhavi and her husband but at least this time no one would ask Tony when he was finally going to get around to marrying Pepper.

But no, he’s fighting aliens. Again.

He hates fighting aliens.

Tony’s fighting the big one, alone, because Bruce is turning out to be more of a liability in this fight than backup, when the kid turns up.

“Hey man,” Peter says to the alien he’s currently holding back from flattening Tony into a pancake. Then, brightly: “What’s up Mr. Stark?”

Tony stares up at him. “Kid, where did you come from?”

“A field trip to MoMA,” Peter says, the last bit trailing off as the alien tosses him aside like a rag doll.

He’s back in the fight a moment later. “What is this guy’s problem?!”

Tony tries to think of how to put the entire Thanos situation into words Peter will understand. “Uh, he’s from space. He came here to steal a necklace from a wizard.”

The kid doesn’t ask any questions. He starts shooting webs at the alien, tag teaming him with Tony, and despite having never fought alongside Peter before, Tony finds that they work well together.

They’re still no match for the big guy. He’s resilient as hell and nothing seems to phase him. Tony wonders what his skin is made of.

When the skinny alien goes flying past, chasing Stephen Strange’s flying body, Tony doesn’t question it. He just sends Peter after them. Honestly, despite the magic tricks, he trusts Peter more in a fight. He’s seen how strong the kid is, watched tons of YouTube compilations of Spider-Man’s best fights! and Spider-Man stopped a train! He knows what Peter is capable of.

Strange is an unknown quantity. And an annoying one.

It’s not even five minutes later when Peter says over comms, “Uh, Mr. Stark? I’m being beamed up!”

Tony’s busy being nearly killed by the big alien. He doesn’t have time to parse through whether the kid is being literal or not.

He better not be being literal.

After the competent wizard finally takes care of the big alien, Tony jets off after the kid and realizes oh no, he was being very literal. Beamed up to the spaceship, the entire Star Trek experience.

The kid has gone silent on comms. A silent Peter Parker is never a good sign.

“Unlock 17-A,” Tony tells FRIDAY.

He’s been holding onto the nanotech Spider Suit from his original pitch to get the kid to join the Avengers nearly two years ago, but he’s made a few upgrades, things he added when he was bored late at night, and right now the circulated oxygen system in particular is probably necessary. Nevermind the parachute to send the kid back down to Earth. Luckily Peter’s wearing his current suit, so the new one can pinpoint his location using that.

Tony’s close enough now that he can see Peter’s location on his HUD. Clinging to the outside of the spaceship like… well, like a spider.

“Pete, you gotta let go, I’m gonna catch you.”

“But you said save the wizard,” Peter says, not letting go. He’s gasping. “I can’t breathe.”

“We’re too high up, you’re running out of air.”

If Peter replies to that Tony doesn’t hear it. He’s nearly there. Close enough that he can see when Peter loses his grip on the side of the ship and falls, which is right when the new suit impacts him and the nanobots start spreading out.

Peter bounces on the side of the ship a few times before catching himself, then stands up, seemingly unharmed, and proclaims, “It smells like a new car in here!”

Tony’s finally reached the ship himself, and is able to do something other than try madly to catch up. They’re in the upper atmosphere, Manhattan and the surrounding city and ocean getting smaller and smaller beneath them. He hasn’t flown this high in a long time. 

“Happy trails, kid,” he tells Peter. Then: “FRIDAY, send him home.”

The parachute is deployed from the back of Peter’s suit, and he’s pulled off his feet, whipping around the side of the spaceship with a yell.

It’s a better parachute than his other suit has. Meant for higher distances. He’ll be fine. He’ll make it back down to the ground, find his way home to his hot aunt, finish high school, go to college, and do just fine. Tony has taught him enough by now that he can fix his suit on his own.

The wizard, and the time stone attached to him, are still inside the spaceship.

Tony turns to the nearest wall, using his gauntlet to cut open a hole so that he can climb inside.

He could have been having shower sex. He could have been eating pastrami. But no, he’s on a spaceship.

A spaceship headed to an unknown destination.

Stark, you know that's a one-way trip?

Pepper calls him, and it reminds him sharply of the last time he went to space, and he’d tried to call her but she hadn’t answered. 

He picks up the call.

He can barely hear her. It’s full of static, choppy. “Tony, oh my god,” she says. “Are you alright? What’s going on?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he says. “I just think we might have to push our 8:30 res.”

“Why?”

“Just ‘cos…” He hesitates, looking around the inside of the ship. He’s entered it somewhere near the bottom. What look like the mechanics that keep it spinning are looming above his head. “I’ll probably not make it back for a while.”

“Tell me you’re not on that ship,” she says, like if there’s enough authority in her voice he’ll do it.

“Yeah.”

“God no, please tell me you’re not on that ship.” Begging, this time.

“Honey, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I don’t know what to say.”

“No no no. Come back here Tony. I swear to God. Come back here right now.”

“Pep—”

“Come back!”

FRIDAY breaks in then. “Boss, we’re losing her.” And then Pepper is gone, and FRIDAY as well.

And Tony is completely alone.

- - -

Tony is trying to think about how to go about killing the skinny alien while on said alien’s home turf when the kid turns up, hanging upside down from the ceiling like a goddamn freak of nature.

He stumbles back a step, his heart pounding.

The face mask of Peter’s new nano suit retracts. “I know what you’re gonna say,” Peter says.

“You shouldn't be here,” Tony says, pointing at him.

The kid is supposed to be on Earth with Aunt Hottie, going to high school. Not on a one-way trip to an unknown planet.

Peter’s doing that thing where he gestures a lot as he talks. “I was gonna go home—”

“I don’t wanna hear it,” Tony says.

“—but it was such a long way down and I just thought about you on the way—”

“And now I gotta hear it.”

“—and kinda stuck to the side of the ship. And this suit is ridiculously intuitive, by the way—”

“God damn it.” Tony mutters. They’re too far away now. There’s no way to get the kid home from here.

“—so if anything, it’s kinda your fault that I’m here.”

“What did you just say?” Tony demands, some of the shock he’s been feeling at the sight of the kid giving way to anger.

Anger at the kid for not following directions, partly, and also at himself because Peter has just put voice to the thing that Tony has thought all along: it’s his fault that Peter is here.

If not for Tony, Peter would be a normal kid, safe at home. Instead he has superpowers. And because Tony can’t leave well enough alone, because he can’t keep his distance and has instead felt the need to mentor the kid, Peter thinks he needs to use them to save the world.

“I just wanted to be like you.”

Peter has picked up on how angry Tony is, and starts stuttering, “I… I take that back. And, and now I’m here in space.”

“Yeah,” Tony says, stalking forward. “Right where I didn’t want you to be.” Peter is acting like this is another fun patrol around the neighborhood. Like he’ll swing around town, web up a few muggers, and then go home and eat whatever his aunt has burned for dinner that night. He’s not taking it seriously at all.

Tony leans in close, his voice low and serious. “This isn’t Coney Island. This isn’t a field trip. This is a one-way ticket. You hear me?” He pokes the kid in the chest. “Don’t pretend you thought this through.”

“No I did. I did think this through,” Peter argues.

“You could not have possibly thought this through,” Tony says, talking over him.

“You can’t be a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man if there’s no neighborhood,” Peter says, staring up at him earnestly.

Tony stares back. Does the kid think he’s going to find a new neighborhood on a new planet to be Spider-Man in? What the fuck?

“Okay that didn’t really make sense,” Peter acknowledges, “but you know what I’m trying to say.”

The worst thing is that Tony does know what the kid is trying to say.

What’s the point of doing what they do if you sit out the fights that matter?

And this one? This one matters the most. This is the fight. The big one that Tony has been dreading ever since he went through that wormhole and saw that there was something bigger out there, and that it could annihilate their little blue dot.

Thanos doesn’t just want to wipe out humanity, he’s gunning for taking out half of the known and unknown universe in one fell swoop.

Who are they if they don’t at least try to stop him? If they don’t give everything they have, if they don’t sacrifice everything, trying? 

They’re not superheroes. They’re not Avengers.

So yeah, he understands what the kid means.

He lets out the breath he’s been holding onto. “Come on,” he says, “we’ve got a situation.”

He points down to where the skinny alien is torturing Strange, trying to get the time stone away from him. “What’s your plan?”

Peter crouches down, looks at it for three seconds, and then hops back and asks, “Did you ever see this really old movie Aliens?”

Tony takes it back, he never wants to have children of his own.

- - -

The worst part is how well the plan works.

- - -

Torture hasn’t made Strange any less annoying. The first thing he does, before even standing, is demand that Tony find a way to turn the ship around.

As if it’s that simple when Strange is still wearing the time stone around his neck. Tony still thinks they should’ve found a garbage disposal to put the thing down. Destroy it, and they destroy Thanos’ means of destroying the universe. A simple solution. If Strange would just listen to him.

Except, as Strange is keen to remind him: “Unlike everyone else in your life, I don’t work for you.”

Tony’s been pacing around what seems to be the bridge of the ship, but he turns on Strange then. “And due to that fact, we’re now in a flying doughnut billions of miles from Earth with no backup!”

Peter raises his hand. “I’m backup!”

Tony waves a hand at him. “No, you’re a stowaway. The adults are talking.”

Strange looks between the two of them. “I’m sorry, I’m confused as to the relationship here.” He gestures between them. “What is he, your ward?”

Tony stares. Ward? What century is this wizard from?

Peter looks confused as well. “No?” he says. Then he steps forward, and says brightly, “I’m Peter, by the way.”

“Doctor Strange.”

“Oh, you’re using our made up names,” Peter says. “Um, I’m Spider-Man then.”

Strange looks annoyed, and Tony feels a bit affronted. Peter’s just being friendly. The only person who gets to be annoyed by him is Tony.

Strange wants to go back to Earth, and maybe they could. Probably they could. The controls are in an alien language but Tony is good with machines, with the kid here to help him he could probably turn the ship around, go back along the exact same trajectory, take them back to New York. He’s not sure he could land the thing again, but he could get them into the atmosphere, or near enough to a rescue.

He’s just not sure they should.

Ten minutes in the city with two of Thanos’ “children” had taken out Greenwich Village and SoHo. Thanos himself is likely to rain destruction down like they haven’t seen since the Chitauri invasion. Worse than that, if he was the mastermind behind it. So having this fight at home… it’s idiotic. It’s going to get the city destroyed; again. Get people killed; again. Tony can’t do it when there’s another option.

The other option being to let the ship sail onwards, let it take them to its destination. Take the fight to wherever Thanos wants to have it.

There are so many unknown quantities with that option, but at least they avoid the known death and destruction on Earth.

Strange clearly thinks he’s insane for it, and has no qualms saying so, but he gives in. He’s a huge asshole about it though. “You have to understand if it comes down to saving you, or the kid, or the time stone, I will not hesitate to let either of you die. I can’t, because the universe depends on it.”

Tony gives him a grim smile. He was expecting nothing less, but good to know that Strange will sacrifice literally everyone to save the stone. “Nice. Good moral compass.” He pats Strange on the arm. “We’re straight.”

Peter’s been watching them with rapt attention, and when Tony turns to step down off the bridge he stands up a bit straighter. Like he’s waiting for Tony to tell him what to do next or something.

But fuck if Tony knows. They’re headed for an alien planet, to meet the biggest bad guy they’ve ever fought, and the only team he has with him is a wizard who won’t destroy the thing the bad guy is after and a 16-year-old kid.

He’s fucked.

Peter’s also not really a kid. He can’t be, not on this mission. Tony can’t be watching him all the time, worried about him all the time. Peter has to be able to hold his own and take care of himself and Tony has to trust him to do it.

He reaches out, his palm flat and straight up and down, and brings it down on Peter’s shoulder to mimic a sword. First on the right, then the left. Knighting him. “Kid, you’re an Avenger now.”

Peter looks happy about it, which just reinforces to Tony how much Peter doesn’t grasp the gravity of the situation. He turns away, back to the controls of the ship, unable to keep looking at the kid and his youthful optimism.

- - -

The ship breaks apart during their crash landing, which means they are well and truly trapped on… wherever this is.

Maybe it’s habitable. Maybe Thanos wanted to have this showdown on a nice, paradise of a planet and Tony can beat him and retire on some kind of farm. Teach the kid how to grow strawberries and shit. He’ll have to learn how to do that himself first, but there’s an idea there. Something peaceful. Maybe this planet has farm animals. He always kind of liked petting zoos.

He doesn’t get a look at the planet until after they’ve been attacked by Quill and his alien tag-alongs and determined that the three of them are on their side, despite initial appearances.

It’s a desolate wasteland.

Lovely.

Quill is scanning it with some kind of device. “What the heck happened to this planet? It’s eight degrees off its axis. Gravitational pull is all over the place.”

Tony has moved past his space farm fantasy. He has to beat Thanos for that anyway. He tries to gather everyone together, form a plan of attack they can actually use. “We got one advantage. He’s coming to us. We’ll use it. All right, I have a plan. Or at least the beginnings of one. It’s pretty simple. We draw him in, pin him down, get what we need. Definitely don’t wanna dance with this guy. We just need the gauntlet.”

Peter’s nodding along, and even Strange seems to be on board, but Quill’s head is tilted a bit, and then the tattooed alien has the audacity to yawn.

Tony spins to look at him. “Are you yawning? In the middle of this, while I’m breaking it down? Huh? Did you hear what I said?”

“I stopped listening after you said, ‘We need a plan,’” tattooed guy admits.

Tony can’t right now. He just… can’t. Biggest fight of their lives, the teammates he trusts down to a 16-year-old kid, and he’s surrounded by idiots. Further conversation with them just continues to prove that, especially when they mention a “dance off to save the universe” and Peter mentions Footloose.

Bug Girl interrupts eventually, asking, “Does your friend often do that?” and pointing at Strange.

He’s sitting cross-legged, floating in the air, wrapped in lines of green energy and twitching. Tony stares for a moment, then hurries over.

“Strange, you alright?”

Strange snaps out of it, falling back to the ground with a small cry. Tony reaches out to steady him. 

“Hey, what was that?” Peter asks.

Strange looks up at them. “I went forward in time to view alternate futures. To see all the possible outcomes of the coming conflict.”

Well, that’s a… nifty skill, Tony supposes. He’s wished he could do that before.

“How many did you see?” Quill asks.

“14,000,605,” Strange says, as if this is a normal number.

Tony stares at him. “How many did we win?

“One.”

Tony falls back, sitting down heavily on a nearby rock.

“Well, that’s good, right?” Peter says. “We win one?”

Tony looks up at him. Peter gives him a very tight-lipped smile. “Just, uh, trying to be optimistic,” Peter says, with a small shrug.

“Yeah,” Tony says, getting to his feet again. He pats a hand on Peter’s shoulder. “There’s one where we win.”

“But not with your plan,” Quill says. He jerks a thumb at himself. “Don’t worry, I’ve got a better plan. It’s gonna work. I know Thanos a lot better than you do.”

Tony takes a deep breath, and is forced to concede that that may actually be true.

“Okay, let’s hear it,” he says.

- - -

The worst part is how close they get.

- - -

They’re so close to victory, so close to having the gauntlet off of Thanos’ hand, that Tony doesn’t care who’s plan this was or who takes the credit he just wants it to work, he just wants them to win, he wants this to be the one in 14,000,605.

But Quill fucks it up. He gets emotional, he gets upset. And maybe if Tony had found out in that exact moment that Thanos had killed his girlfriend he’d have done the same thing, but he’s not in that position so he’ll never know. All he does know is that they’re fucked, Thanos still has the gauntlet, and there’s a fucking moon being flung towards him.

Up until today, Tony didn’t know you could toss moons around. He’s learning all kinds of new things on this trip to space.

He throws everything he has at Thanos, but it’s not enough. 

It was never going to be enough. Tony knows that, as he gasps through the pain of his own sword through his gut and waits for Thanos to deliver the final blow. He knew as soon as he stepped on that spaceship that he wasn’t making it out of this.

Then Strange hands over the time stone in exchange for Tony’s life.

Thanos steps backward into a portal, off to collect the final stone—to doom them all, and Tony can only stare, feeling numb.

“Why would you do that?” he asks. His life isn’t worth what Strange just gave up. 

Strange just stares back at him steadily, firm in his decision. “We’re in the endgame now,” he says, cryptic as fuck.

Before Tony can ask for elaboration on what that means, Peter swoops down to land in front of him.

His mask retracts. “Mr. Stark, are you okay? I saw the moon hit you and—”

“I’m fine,” Tony says.

“A moon,” Peter says, in awe. “That was kind of awesome in a really horrible way. Are you sure—”

Tony waves a hand at him. “Help me up, kid.”

Peter holds out a hand to him, and then when he realizes Tony really meant help he leans in closer, wrapping his arm around Tony’s back and pulling him to his feet. “Are you sure—”

Tony pokes at the stab wound, sealed over with spray on bandage from his suit. “I’m fine,” he repeats.

“Where did Thanos go?” Peter asks.

Tony sighs, looking over at Strange. “Earth,” he guesses. “What’s left? The stone in Vision’s head?”

Strange doesn’t answer.

“Something’s happening,” the bug chick says suddenly, her voice high with worry. Tony and Peter both turn to look at her, and then she’s disintegrating, turning into dust right in front of their eyes.

Tony stares. What the fuck?

It takes only a second before she’s gone. The tattooed guy is next, and Quill looks panicked.

“Steady,” Tony says to him.

Quill looks back at him, his expression shifting to resignation before he too disintegrates. 

Is this Thanos? Is this the end? It must be.

Tony had thought it would be faster than this.

“Tony,” Strange says, and Tony spins around to look at him, finding him already half gone. “There was no other way,” he says, before disintegrating as well.

What the fuck? What the fuck? What is this, this one by one bullshit? Why isn’t Tony dead yet?

“Mr. Stark?”

He turns, and finds Peter staring down at his own hands, his face a mask of confusion. 

“I don’t feel so good,” Peter says, stumbling towards him.

“You’re alright,” Tony says, the denial coming to him fast despite having just watched nearly everyone else on this planet disappear. Peter can’t— not Peter. He can’t lose Peter.

“I don’t know what’s happening, I don’t know—” Peter falls into his arms, clinging to him, and Tony holds him close. Maybe if he holds on tight enough, he can keep him from falling apart.

“I don’t wanna go, I don’t wanna go. Sir, please,” Peter’s begging, his hands losing their grip on Tony’s shoulders despite his strength because his hands just aren’t there anymore, and it feels like the tighter Tony tries to wrap his arms around the kid’s waist, the faster Peter’s body disintegrates.

It’s happening slower than it did for the others. They were gone in seconds. Peter keeps falling apart and then knitting together and then falling apart again and Tony doesn’t know what to do.  

“Please I don’t wanna go, I don’t wanna—”

Peter’s legs collapse, and he falls, and Tony falls with him. His hand falls through Peter’s shoulder, his body mostly dust at this point, just holding its shape.

Peter looks at him, his eyes boring into Tony’s, and the last thing he says is, “I’m sorry,” before his eyes roll back and he’s gone, nothing but dust left on Tony’s hands and all over his clothes and in his hair and stuck to the blood on his face.

The only one left standing, other than Tony, is the blue cyborg, who simply says, “He did it.”

Tony hunches over, covering his face with his hands, then pulls them away, shakily, because they’re covered in dust. In Peter’s dust.

Peter’s dead, and somehow Tony is still alive, and it’s his fault, just like he always knew it would be. His fault for getting Peter involved in this. His fault for giving Peter powers and encouraging him to use them and getting him involved in fights he had no business being a part of. His fault for taking a normal kid and making him into a superhero and then getting him killed.

His fault for caring about the kid. For giving a shit about what happened to him. For not protecting him well enough.

But then, if Tony had really cared, would he have even given Peter a suit in the first place? Would he have let Peter play at being a superhero? Peter’s done nothing but collect injury after injury as Spider-Man, and what kind of caring person lets a kid do that? Stands by and watches it happen? Encourages it?

That’s not caring. That’s not love.

That’s just Tony using the soldier he created in the lab.

He should have left the kid alone. Told him to stop. Told him it was a freak accident that he needed to hide and pretend he didn’t have powers.

Maybe then he’d still be alive.

“Was he your son?” the cyborg asks.

Tony stares out at the desolate planet around him. He doesn’t answer.

After a long pause, she says, “Do you wish to return to Terra?”

What Tony wants is to be left alone.

“There’s no way back,” he says.

“Quill’s ship is not that badly damaged. My father was headed to Terra. I still plan to kill him. You may come with me if you like.”

Tony finally turns to look at her, but her face is expressionless, emotionless.

“Half of the Terrans will still be alive,” she offers.

Half… a 50/50 shot that Pepper is dead too. Rhodey. Happy. Going back to Earth is like opening Schrödinger’s box right now.

Tony doesn’t have high hopes for what’s inside.

- - -

June 2018

He spends the trip back to Earth pretending Pepper is alive inside the box. He has to, because otherwise what is the point? There isn’t one. If she’s gone too then he’s doing this for nothing, for no one. If he’s going back just to find her gone, then…

He can’t. She has to be there.

Then he nearly dies himself, but somehow, doesn’t.

He feels like a cockroach. Surviving despite everything, despite being stepped on and shot at and fumigated. Surviving when he shouldn’t.

Steve is the first person he sees when he limps off the ship, running up to him, looking fresh and clean when Tony hasn’t showered in a month. Steve gets an arm around his shoulders, helping him across the grass, and Tony can only stare up at him and say, “I couldn’t stop him.”

“Neither could I,” Steve says.

“I lost the kid,” Tony tells him.

Steve frowns, and it’s then that Tony realizes Steve has no idea who the kid is, because all he says is, “Tony, we lost.”

He pushes it away. Peter is dead but Pepper… Pepper is… “Is, um…”

Here, Pepper is here. “Tony oh my god!”

Pepper is in his arms. She’s real and she’s alive. He’s holding her and she’s not falling apart, she’s not turning to dust beneath his hands. She’s solid, warm. He squeezes her tight, breathing her in. She smells like fruit, that same shampoo she always uses.

“It’s okay,” he says. He presses a kiss against her cheek.

“Let’s get you inside,” Pepper says. “Are you okay? Where have you been?”

“Space,” he says, simply, not feeling up to explaining.

“You look awful.” Pepper holds his arm tightly, leading him towards the doors of the compound. Steve keeps ahold of his arm, like they think Tony is going to collapse.

“You look amazing,” Tony tells her. She looks tired, actually, she’s wearing sweats and doesn’t have on any makeup and her hair is down but she’s never looked more beautiful to him than right at this moment. She looks alive, and that was all he was hoping for.

“Inside,” Pepper repeats. “Come on.”

- - -

She takes him to a room with a shower, and gets him a protein shake, and it’s not until Tony’s sitting there on the closed toilet lid, waiting for the water to heat up, that he says, again, “I lost the kid.”

Pepper knows who he means.

“Oh, Tony…” She reaches out for him, and he rests his head against her stomach. Her hand cards through his hair, unmindful of the grease. “I’m sorry.”

“He was… he was so stupid. He shouldn’t have been on that ship. I told him to go back down to Earth. I told him. But he never fuckin’ listens to me. He acts like he knows everything. Like he’s invincible. Just because he’s got super powers. But he’s not and now he’s gone and it’s my fault he was there in the first place and—”

“Shh, Tony. It wasn’t your fault. No one could stop this. They had an entire army in Wakanda and couldn’t stop him. You were by yourself. It’s not your fault.”

He shakes his head, his forehead pressed tight against her belly. “Yes, yes it—”

“No,” Pepper says firmly. “Stop saying that. Don’t you ever say that again.”

“You don’t understand. If I hadn’t— the kid never would have—”

“You did the best you could for Peter. You didn’t force him into that fight and you didn’t kill him.”

He shakes his head again, because yes, yes he did. Tony gave Peter those powers and she doesn’t understand that that’s what got him killed.

“I did though,” he says, unable to keep this secret a moment longer. Unable to let Pepper go on comforting him and thinking he’s a better person than he is.

She’s always loved him in spite of how awful he is. She’s always known he was a horrible person and loved him anyway so maybe, maybe, she will still love him after this.

“No—”

“I’m the reason he had powers in the first place,” Tony says. “It was this SHIELD project, something Fury had me look into, and they made all these insects and reptiles and had them in a lab at the Tower. And the kid got into it on a field trip. That’s why he had powers. It’s my fault. If not for that he never would have even been Spider-Man, he never would have been involved.”

Pepper steps back, staring at him. “What?” she asks, stunned.

“I basically created him,” Tony says. “And then when I found out he had powers, instead of staying away from him, I got involved. I made him a suit, I encouraged him. I— He wouldn’t have done any of it if I hadn’t told him to. I told him to jump and he asked how high. He said he wanted to be like me. And I let him. And that got him killed. It… It made it worse. He suffered more than everyone else at the end. He knew what was happening and it… it took longer, because of his powers, and I did that to him.”

“Tony, you…” She pauses, processing for a minute, and then finally says, “It’s still not your fault he died.”

He shakes his head, unwilling to accept her absolution.

Pepper sighs, and runs a hand over his hair again. “Why don’t you take a shower? I think you’ll feel better if you get cleaned up. Eat something. We can talk more after.”

He nods, feeling a bit numb, and does as she says.

- - -

Later, after he yells at Steve and collapses, he wakes from a sedative induced sleep to find Pepper at his bedside, curled up in an armchair.

“Hey,” he says, his voice rough from sleep.

“Hey,” she says, softly. “How are you feeling?”

“Like shit,” he says. “But that’s how I’ve felt for a month, so…” He levers himself up, and Pepper gets out of her chair, helping him with the pillows. “Where’s Rhodey?”

She sits back down, her lips pressed into a thin line.

“What?” he asks.

“They went on a mission,” Pepper says. “They found Thanos.”

He jerks, because how the fuck did he sleep through that?

“Where?”

“I don’t know, some other planet,” Pepper says. “Rhodey should really tell you this…”

“Tell me now.”

“Thanos is dead. But he destroyed the stones, so they can’t… they can’t use them again. They thought they’d be able to undo it, bring everyone back, if they had the stones but… they’re gone. So…”

Use the stones to bring everyone back. It sounds like a pipe dream. It sounds like the kind of easy solution to large scale death that Steve would think is possible.

He sinks back into the pillows. “So that’s it then?”

Pepper nods.

Tony stares up at the ceiling.

So that’s it then.

Chapter Text

“Grief is not as heavy as guilt, but it takes more away from you.”
―Veronica Roth, Insurgent

August 2018

Happy is the one who brings up the Parker’s apartment.

“I talked to the landlord and they had automatic rent payments set up, so it got paid the last couple months, but he said it didn’t go through for August and he needs the place cleared out.”

“What?” Tony asks. “Does he have a wealth of new tenants looking to rent it out?”

Over half the population of New York City is dead. There’s no reason anyone needs that apartment right now.

“I know,” Happy says. “But… we should go over there, shouldn’t we? I’m not sure anyone else is around to do it.”

Well, that’s certainly the truth.

So Tony finds himself breaking the lock on the door and entering what feels like a tomb. There are no bodies to bury for any of the dead, only belongings, and so some people have been doing that. But there are so many people that the government had to quickly put a stop to individual funerals and burial plots, promising large scale memorials instead.

Tony feels weird going through Peter’s things. Even weirder going through May’s.

“I think, um… I think May would have wanted to donate most of this,” Happy says.

Tony frowns at him, turning away from one of the photos on the wall. Peter is about six in it, wearing a t-shirt with a cartoon Tony doesn’t recognize and standing in front of the dinosaur fossil at the Natural History Museum with a tall man. His uncle, probably. Maybe his father. Tony’s not exactly sure when Peter’s parents had died, just that it was when he was young. He looks impossibly young. “How do you know that?” he asks.

“I just… We talked, y’know, when I picked Peter up for things. And she called sometimes to ask about his Spider-Man stuff, if there was something she thought he wasn’t telling her, so we… we talked. And anyway, she liked to volunteer at a shelter, so I think she would have liked to donate things. I just… I think she would have liked that. The kid too. He was… It would help people. I think he’d like that.”

Tony stares at him, and Happy shifts his weight from foot to foot. “It’s just an idea,” he says.

“No, it’s, uh… it’s a good idea,” Tony says. “You’re right, the kid would have liked that.”

Happy nods, his expression clearing a bit. “Which room do you want to do first?”

Tony looks down the hall, towards Peter’s room. “I’ll… I’ll get the kid’s room. You take May’s.” He looks around the living room. “I think everything in here can go, aside from pictures, right?”

Happy spins to look around the room, and nods. “Yeah, probably. Maybe… I might keep a few of the books. We… we traded books sometimes. She liked to read a lot.”

Tony looks at the large bookcases, stuffed full of mismatched paperbacks and hardbacks in seeminging no order. Unlike his own bookcases, they’re not arranged for aesthetics.

“Take whatever you want,” he tells Happy. “Just… save the photos and stuff like that.” There are a bunch of pictures on the wall, and what looks like a shelf of old albums under the television. Tony wants those. Or at least he doesn’t want to throw them away.

The only pictures he has of Peter are those silly ones they took for his fake internship last year. Or stills from surveillance footage in the lab. Tony doesn’t take pictures of people. He doesn’t have pictures of anyone. If Pepper had been gone, he’d hardly have any pictures of her either.

Too late to start taking pictures now.

When he gets to Peter’s room, he finds himself lingering over every item. It’s all such a visceral reminder of what Peter was like. The Jurassic Park LEGO figure and the burned DVD of Star Wars and the Mets pennant and the classic Nintendo strewn in parts across the desk and the t-shirt on the floor with a stupid joke about electrons. He’s sitting on the bed, holding the t-shirt, and there are tears in his eyes because it smells like Peter. It smells like a dirty teenage boy and goddammit Tony misses that. He misses the kid rambling about some sci-fi movie while Tony fixed his suit or blushing when he talked about that girl he liked that he didn’t have the nerve to ask out or the way he lit up with a grin when he learned something new in the lab and Tony felt like maybe he’d done something right for once.

He misses the kid so much it feels like he’s missing a limb. Like he sawed his own arm off and has only himself to blame for the loss.

Happy finds him there later, crying over that damn t-shirt, and doesn’t say a word. He just leaves him to it. 

- - -

Tony was handling his grief okay before Happy dragged him over to that apartment. He was. He was handling it by drinking enough to stay numb to the entire thing, and by saying yes to whatever Pepper told him to do. 

But when he gets home from the Parker’s apartment, with two boxes full of Peter’s belongings, he doesn’t feel numb anymore. He feels wrung out and horribly sad and distraught because the kid is gone and the proof is right here in his arms. His arms that held Peter while he was dying, while he fell apart into tiny particles of dust, while he felt every moment of that, while he begged not to go, while he apologized for dying.

Tony sets the boxes down in the corner of one of the guest bedrooms, and then he goes to his liquor cabinet and works his way steadily through a very nice bottle of scotch, until he feels both drunk and distraught.

And then he goes down to his lab, and tries to invent time travel.

Maybe Steve had the right idea. Use the Stones to do their own snap, bring everyone back. Maybe it really is that easy. They’re just missing the Stones. The Stones are gone, here in the present time. So where can he get the Stones? Well, the obvious answer is the past. Or, a version of the past. Because if you just go take them from your own past you’ll create a paradox. Can’t have paradoxes. Paradoxes: bad. So how to go back and get the Stones and not create a paradox? Therein lies the question! Is he dealing with a superposition, or is he dealing with many-worlds? How to know for sure? He can render both. If he’s born with x probability and he goes back in time and kills his grandfather with x probability then he’s still born with x probability. Or he’s born, he travels back in time and kills his grandfather, and now he’s in the world where he was never born, and elsewhere the branch where he was born continues on without him. But which one is it? Which one is how it works? Can he force it into one or the other with his will alone?

He spends so much time down in the workshop, having FRIDAY run render after render, and working his way steadily through every bottle of liquor in the apartment until he has to order more, that Pepper evidently gives up on convincing him to stop herself and calls in reinforcements.

“What are you doing, man?” Rhodey asks, leaning against the workbench. He’s gazing up at the render in process.

Tony’s sitting on the floor, drinking straight from the bottle of whiskey. He points to the holograph with it. “Inventing time travel,” he says.

“Not drunk you’re not.”

“I’ve done my best inventions drunk,” Tony argues.

“No you haven’t.”

“I invented Iron Man while drunk.”

“No you didn’t.”

“I invented Spider-Man while drunk.”

“You didn’t invent Spider-Man.”

Tony points the whiskey bottle up at him. “You’re wrong. Yes I did. I paid for the whole thing and they made the radioactive super soldier spider and named her Tracy and then she bit the kid and gave him powers and then I made the kid a suit and took him to Germany and made him fight everyone. I invented him.”

Rhodey’s frowning at him now. “What are you talking about?”

“Peter,” Tony says.

“The kid, yeah. I got that part.”

“It’s my fault he even had powers.”

Rhodey still looks skeptical. He leans down, taking the whiskey bottle from Tony’s hand. “I think you’ve had enough to drink for today. Why don’t you go sleep it off, and then we can talk? Pepper’s worried about you. I’m worried about you.”

“I need to finish this,” Tony says, gesturing to the rendering.

“It can run while you sleep.”

That seems reasonable, Tony decides after a moment. “Okay,” he says, and lets Rhodey help him to his feet. He stumbles as they walk towards the door. “I think I nearly have it.”

“Yeah, sure man,” Rhodey says.

- - -

Tony does not nearly have it. And after Rhodey alone fails to drag him away from the workshop for longer than it takes to nap and shower and eat—and grab another bottle—more reinforcements are called in.

Bruce nods along as Tony explains his theories, and then pokes holes in all of them. Explains why all of them won’t work.

“It’s close though,” Tony argues.

“Yeah,” Bruce nods. “But close isn’t enough. C’mon, Tony. You know that.”

Tony stares back at him for a long moment, the blind anger at his inability to fix everything building in his chest, and then he turns and hurls the whiskey bottle he’s holding at the wall. It flies through the holo projection before impacting with a crash.

Bruce doesn’t even flinch, but Rhodey does. “Jesus, Tony.”

“What the fuck good is any of this” —Tony gestures around the workshop—“if I can’t fix anything with it?” he demands.

“It’s not any good,” Bruce acknowledges. “There is no fixing this. We lost.”

“Yeah, you were no help.”

That Bruce does flinch at. “I know,” he says.

“Look, Tony, you’ve got to stop,” Rhodey says. “This isn’t healthy.”

Tony turns on him. “Who are you to say that to me?” he spits. “You don’t understand. None of you lost a—” The word dries up in his mouth, leaving him choking on it.

None of you lost a kid.

Except, neither had he.

He’d lost the kid, but Peter wasn’t his kid. Peter wasn’t his son, Tony didn’t have that claim over him. He can’t say that.

Peter wasn’t his son, so he doesn’t know why he feels like this now that he’s gone.

“We all lost someone,” Rhodey says, gently. “Everyone on this entire planet is grieving. But this?” He gestures around the workshop. “This obsession with the impossible is just going to drive you insane. There’s no such thing as time travel. If there were, believe me, you’d be the guy to figure it out but there’s just not. You’ve tried for weeks and you’ve got to let it go. Spending all your time down here obsessing over it and drinking yourself to death isn’t helping anyone.”

Tony swallows hard, but it seems Rhodey has said his piece.

“Why don’t you come with me?” Bruce suggests.

Tony frowns at him.

“Get away from the city. Away from everything. I have some land down in Mexico. There’s just a small cabin there now, it’s pretty remote. It’ll give you some time to think without all of this” —another gesture around the workshop—“tempting you to work on things.”

“Mexico?” Tony asks, skeptically.

“I was planning on doing some thinking of my own,” Bruce says. “Hulk and I have some issues to work out. Clearly.”

Tony looks between them. “This was your intervention plan? Get me to agree to rehab in Mexico?”

“It’s not rehab,” Rhodey says.

“It’s just a break,” Bruce says.

“I’m not gonna quit drinking then,” Tony tells them.

- - -

September 2018

The small cabin Bruce had promised is actually a shack, and after asking if he can make some improvements and getting a shrug in reply, Tony sets to rebuilding the whole thing. Bruce helps, meaning that Bruce does a lot of it because Tony is still spending most of the day drinking. The manual labor actually does help though. It’s hard to be sad when his head is full of measurements and angles.

Instead he moves on to anger.

Tony bangs nails into place as he rants. “And maybe if Steve had fucking been there, everything in New York would have gone differently. Maybe if we’d had the whole team we wouldn’t have had our asses handed to us within about fifteen minutes flat while they made off with the magician. We would have stood a goddamned chance. But nooo, he was shacked up in Africa with his boyfriend when we all needed him most.”

Bruce brings over another stack of 2x4s. “Was Bucky really his boyfriend?” he asks curiously.

That throws Tony for a loop for a moment, and he turns to him, blinking. “I mean, wasn’t he?”

Bruce shrugs. “I wasn’t here. I have no clue.”

Tony reaches down to the ground for his drink, taking a long swig before he grabs the next board and sets it in place. “I am, like, 96 percent certain they were boyfriends.”

“I thought he and Nat had a thing…”

“I thought you and Nat had a thing.”

Bruce shrugs. “Before that, I mean.”

“Geez, was I the only one who didn’t have a thing with Nat?”

“Don’t be crass,” Bruce admonishes.

Tony lines up the nail, starts hammering again. “Call her and ask her,” he says.

“Oh, I’m definitely not calling her,” Bruce says.

Tony points the hammer at him. “Now who’s scared?.”

Bruce turns away, back to his own section. “It’s been years.”

“Yeah, years that she spent on the run.” Tony turns back, lining up another nail. “Because Steve is a self-righteous bastard who couldn’t compromise.”

“Do you really think it would have mattered?”

“Do I… Yes, yes I do. I think we could have stopped them right then and there if we’d had the whole team together,” Tony rants. “I wouldn’t have been in space with just a 16-year-old kid who had no business being anywhere near that fight.”

Bruce turns to him, serious. “We had an entire army in Wakanda and it didn’t stop him, Tony.”

“It was too late by then,” Tony insists. “He had too many of the Stones. If he’d never gotten the Time Stone then we’d have—”

“God, Tony, I can’t—” Bruce shakes his head. “I can’t do this with you. I can’t play what if.” He runs a hand through his hair, shakes it again. “Look, I know you’re pissed off. I know you want someone to blame. But all these hypotheticals? What good is that doing?”

Tony falls silent, because he knows it’s not doing any good. He’s just so fucking angry he’s looking for anyone he can blame.

The person to blame is himself, of course. The person he’s most angry at is himself.

He’s equally to blame for not compromising with Steve. He’s equally to blame for the Avengers breaking up. He can admit that, this long after the fact.

And he’s entirely to blame for Peter’s involvement.

He turns back to the bench he’s building, bringing the hammer down so hard he bends the nail instead of hammering it in. God-fucking-dammit.

- - -

“I’m sorry,” Bruce says, later that evening.

“About what?” Tony asks. He’s sitting on the steps that lead up to their half built bar, nursing a bottle of tequila.

“I know you’re still mad at Steve,” Bruce says. “And I don’t know what all went on. But if it’s just this Accords business, then I think you’ve got to let that go.”

“It’s not just that,” Tony says, thinking of how sharp the feeling of betrayal had been when he’d seen that video in Siberia. How it’d grown even sharper with Steve’s first punch.

“Well, okay,” Bruce says. “What else happened?”

Tony shrugs.

“Because you know by now that the Accords were crap, right?”

Tony narrows his eyes, turning away from the dark waves to look at him.

“Tony, c’mon. They were handing over control of who you could assist to the government.”

“They were making sure we only intervened when it was necessary. That we didn’t have untold civilian death on our hands.”

“And what about wthen they deem that you can only assist allied nations? That third world countries don’t need to be saved anymore?”

“That’s not—”

“That’s exactly how it would have gone, long term.”

Tony takes another drink. “You don’t understand. You ran away after Sokovia. You didn’t stick around for the aftermath.”

Hurt flashes across Bruce’s face, but it’s brief. “I know,” he says simply.

“We didn’t save everyone. Lots of innocent people died there. And that was on us. The Accords were meant to… rein us in. I know they weren’t perfect, but we could have worked on them. Steve wouldn’t even try.”

“What else happened?” Bruce asks again.

Tony shrugs, and looks back out at the waves. “He lied to me about some stuff. Things I can’t forgive him for.” A pause. “Nothing to do with the Accords.”

Bruce seems to accept that. He reaches for the bottle, and Tony hands it over. “You haven’t told me about the kid,” he prompts. “Peter, right? Sounds like you knew him pretty well.”

Tony chews on his bottom lip, then shakes his head. “I can’t…”

Bruce’s hand is on his shoulder. “It’s alright.”

“It’s really not,” Tony says. “None of this is alright.”

He ducks his head down, all of the anger he’s been feeling all day, all week, abruptly replaced by overwhelming grief. It hits him like an ocean wave, crashing over his head, taking his breath away.

He’d thought maybe he was past this. But maybe there is no getting past this.

- - -

Pepper turns up at the end of the month and surveys the tiki bar they’ve built from behind her sunglasses. “Nice work, boys,” she says.

Tony grins at her. “You’re practically glowing in this light, Miss Potts.”

Pepper ducks her head, a smile on her own face. “Come get my bag,” she tells him.

Later, sitting perched on one of the bar stools, Pepper looks out over the ocean and says, “It really is nice here.”

“It’s nice now,” Tony says. He’s standing behind the bar. “Bruce just had a shack when I got here. Now there’s a lab downstairs and this bar and some extra bedrooms.”

“You’ve been working hard then.”

“I kept busy.”

“You seem better,” she says.

“I guess.” He shrugs. He turns away to grab a bottle of rum off the shelf. “Mai tai?”

“If you can make it virgin,” she says.

He turns back, raising an eyebrow. “Planning to drive back to the airport or something later?”

“Or something,” she says.

“Okay, sure.” He sets the rum to the side, mixing together just the different juices. For himself he makes a real one. Then walks around the bar to sit next to her and sets them down with the flourish. “One virgin mai tai, for the lady.”

“You didn’t mix them up, did you?” Pepper asks.

“I… no? I put the blue umbrella in yours.”

She takes a cautious sip, a judging expression on her face. She still looks skeptical when she sets it back down.

“I swear that’s the right one. What’s the big deal?” Tony asks. He takes a sip of his own, assessing it, and yeah, it’s definitely the alcoholic one, made for an alcoholic by an alcoholic, with definitely more than an average pour.

“I can’t have alcohol,” Pepper says.

“Since when?” Tony asks. He takes another sip.

“Since I’m pregnant.”

He chokes on his drink. Full on sprays it across the front of his shirt in a coughing fit. Pepper pats his back as he recovers. Finally, he’s able to gasp, “What?”

“I’m pregnant,” she says again.

“Since when?”

“20 weeks ago.”

He stares at her, his mouth hanging open.

“Since May,” she clarifies. “Before, um… before you went to space.”

He keeps staring. He has no words.

Pepper is pregnant.

That is… well, it’s not impossible, obviously, but it’s… unexpected. They hadn’t been trying. They’d been…

“You were on birth control,” he says.

“Is this what you’re hung up on?” she asks.

“Okay, no, sorry. I’m just processing. I’m surprised. You surprised me. Wow. Uh…” He honestly doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say right now. “I don’t know what to say,” he admits.

“Say you’re coming home,” she tells him. “Because I need you to be here for this. I don’t want to do this by myself.”

He stares down at her stomach, which actually does look a bit more rounded, now that he’s looking for it. Not by much, but a little. “I… yeah, of course.”

“And we’re still getting married,” she says.

He looks up at her face. Pepper’s staring right at him, her eyes squinted a bit in the bright light. She reaches for his hand.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Of course.”

“Good,” she says. Her fingers squeeze around his.

“I love you,” he says.

Her smile is brilliant. “I love you too.”

He’s about to kiss her when Bruce interrupts, bounding up from the beach, dripping water. “Pepper! Hi!”

“Hi Bruce,” she says, waving with her free hand.

Bruce grabs a towel, drying off, and asks, “When did you get in?”

“About an hour ago,” Pepper says.

“Can I tell him?” Tony asks.

“You really can’t keep a secret, can you?” she says. “I should have known. You never have been able to.”

“This is me,” he points out.

“It’s fine, it’s late enough.”

Bruce is watching them with a bemused smile, and Tony turns a bright smile on him. “Pepper’s pregnant!” he announces.

Bruce’s eyes widen. “Oh wow! Congrats!” he tells her. “Is it yours?” he asks Tony.

“Is it—” Tony gapes at him. “Is it mine? Of course it’s—” He looks at Pepper. “It’s mine?”

“Oh my god,” Pepper says. Then, a beat too late: “Yes, it’s yours. Honestly.” She rolls her eyes.

Tony turns a glare on Bruce. “Why would you ask that?”

“I mean, you were gone for a while,” Bruce points out. “You were in space.”

“Amazing,” Pepper mutters. She takes a long sip of her virgin mai tai and then looks disappointed at it.

“I wasn’t gone that long,” Tony argues.

Bruce looks unconvinced.

“Y’know what,” Tony says, pointing at him, “you don’t get to be godfather.”

“That was an option?” Bruce asks.

“No,” Pepper says.

“Not anymore,” Tony says.

“It was never an option,” Pepper insists. “We’re not Catholic.”

Tony turns to her. “I’m Catholic,” he says.

“Since when?” she asks, exasperated.

“My mother was Catholic.”

“When was the last time you were in a church?”

“Well, I’m pretty sure I was baptized—”

“Pretty sure.”

“And I just think maybe we should also baptize—”

“You have got to be joking.”

“I’m serious.”

“You found out two minutes ago! And now you’re worried about baptisms!”

“What else should I be worried about? I can make a list!”

“It’s gonna be a long one!”

“I can start with you not telling me for four months!”

“I thought it was stress! I’ve had a lot to be stressed about!”

Bruce backs away slowly. “I’m just gonna… go…” he says, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.

Tony and Pepper both ignore him, continuing to yell at each other.

- - -

Later that night, Tony lies next to Pepper in bed and stares at her profile, glowing in the soft moonlight coming through the open windows. “We’re really having a baby,” he says.

She turns to look at him. “We really are.”

“I’m not good with kids,” he says.

She frowns. “You’re great with kids.”

“What on Earth gave you that idea? I’ve never held a baby,” he says.

“You were the one who wanted a baby,” she points out.

“I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“Well too bad because you’re getting one anyway.” The frown is set firmly on her face, but softens a bit. “You were good with Peter.”

That cuts like a knife. He turns away, flopping over onto his back and staring up at the ceiling.

There’s a long silence between them, before he finally says, “I got Peter killed.”

“That wasn’t your fault.”

“Fine, if that wasn’t my fault then I gave him mutant superpowers and a superhero suit and let him run around the city fighting criminals when he was 14. Did I tell you he got shot last summer?”

“What?”

“He nearly bled out in an alley. So yeah, I’m great at taking care of kids.” He grins, but there’s no mirth behind it. “Still want to do this?”

“Did you take care of him when he got shot?”

“I… Yeah.”

“Alright then,” Pepper says. “I expect that if this baby ever develops mutant superpowers and gets shot then you’ll do great. You’re prepared.”

“That’s not even remotely funny.”

“I didn’t say it was.”

She reaches for his hand, lacing her fingers with his. “I don’t know what I’m doing either, Tony. This is new for me too. And I’m scared too. But we can be scared about it together.” She squeezes. Then: “Besides, I have it on good authority that everyone fucks their kids up a little. So we just have to try to not do it too horribly.”

He smiles at her for that, but really it just makes him think about his own parents. His dad had fucked up a lot, to be honest. Tony doesn’t want to repeat his mistakes either.

- - -

February 2019

Morgan Hope Stark arrives exactly on time. February 20, 2019, at 2:05 PM. Tony cuts the umbilical cord and watches with fascination as they lay her on Pepper’s chest. She’s the tiniest human being he’s ever seen, but she’s alive and breathing. When he holds her later she’s solid in his arms, ten fingers and ten toes. Her chest rising and falling against his arm with each breath.

He doesn’t want to set her down. The nurse tells him he can put her in the bassinet, let her sleep, lie down and get some rest himself. But Tony can’t let her go. He sits in the recliner in the corner of the room, while Pepper sleeps across from him, and watches Morgan’s eyelids flutter. 

He just wants to feel the weight of her against him. The last child he held in his arms crumbled into dust and he couldn’t do a single thing to stop it from happening. He needs the reassurance that she’s not going anywhere.

- - -

The city is still a mess post-Decimation. There’s trash piled up everywhere because none of the systems are working and people are scavenging what they can from the empty homes left behind by those that are gone now. It’s no place to have a new baby. So when Tony and Pepper leave the hospital, it’s not to return to their penthouse apartment, but to drive upstate to a secluded lake house that they’ve been renovating.

It’ll be the perfect spot to raise a kid. Quiet, tranquil. Lots of room to run around and play. Pepper has already started a vegetable garden.

Peter would have hated it, Tony thinks one evening, when he’s sitting in the living room, rocking Morgan to sleep. He loved the city and all the craziness that came with it. It would have been impossible to be Spider-Man out here; there’s no crime to fight, no skyscrapers to swing off of.

But that’s kind of the point. Tony’s done with that life. And Morgan will never put on a superhero suit and get into fights with aliens who want to wipe out half the universe. She’ll never launch herself into dangerous situations she can’t really handle.

She’s going to live a very long, very happy life, free from all of that, and die an old lady asleep in her bed surrounded by her family. Tony’s going to make sure of it, if it’s the last thing he does.

He’s going to get it right this time.

- - -

October 2023

It’s been a quiet couple of years of rural life by the lake when Steve or Natasha turn up on Tony’s doorstep, and the problem when having friends like them is that he knows, as soon as he sees them, that they’re not here for anything good.

And sure enough, they’re here not because they want to catch up, but because Scott Lang has popped up out of the quantum realm after five years and they’ve come up with some hairbrained “time heist” idea to reverse the Decimation.

They pitch the idea of going back into the past to retrieve the Stones before Thanos ever got to them as if Tony hasn’t already thought of that. As if he hasn’t already run the simulations, backwards and forwards, trying to find a way to reverse things. A way to fix everything.

A way to bring Peter back.

Scott talks to him as if Tony hasn’t lost anyone. As if Tony came out ahead. And Steve looks at him imploringly, “This is a second chance,” he says.

“I’ve got my second chance right here,” Tony says, holding Morgan in his arms.

Morgan is his chance to do everything right, to correct his wrongs. He can protect her from the things he let Peter walk into unarmed.

“Can’t roll the dice on that.”

He puts Morgan to bed that night and she asks for a story, and he tells her one about Spider-Man. Spider-Man versus the Vulture, the sanitized version, where Spider-Man tracks down the Vulture’s illegal activities and finds out he’s hijacked a plane and takes him down. He leaves off the crash, instead having them duke it on the plane itself and then land safely.

“Did you help him, Daddy?” Morgan asks.

Tony smoothes her hair out of her face. “No, I wasn’t there. This was just Spidey’s case.”

“But you were friends with him?”

“Yeah, I was friends with him.”

“What did he do after he landed the plane?” she asks.

“Well, then he webbed the Vulture up for the police, and went home and went to bed because he had school the next morning.” He pokes her. “Spider-Man knew a good night’s sleep was important.”

That’s a lie, of course. Peter had stayed awake into the wee hours patrolling all the time. Tony doesn’t actually know if May had enforced a curfew or not, they hadn’t talked about it.

Peter had probably ignored her, if she had.

Morgan rolls her eyes.

“Go to sleep now,” Tony tells her, getting to his feet. He tucks the blankets in tighter, until she has to wriggle free.

When he’s doing the dishes later, his eye catches on the photo he keeps on the shelf of himself and Peter. It’s an outtake from when they’d taken some shots for the kid to prove to his school that his internship was legit. Peter is holding the internship certificate upside down, and they’re both giving each other bunny ears.

Peter’s grinning ear to ear. Tony looks too serious. He should have smiled.

Backwards and forwards…

Upside down.

He has just one room serving as his office here at the lake house, not an entire lab, but it has a large holodesk, and he pulls up one of his old models from years ago. It was the closest he ever got to figuring it out, but he’d never been successful.

He adds a few values factoring in some of what Scott had told him today, and runs it again. “Try that,” he tells FRIDAY. “Probably won’t work but let’s see if bug dude actually knows anything.”

“Just a moment,” FRIDAY says, as it renders.

Model Failed.

“Well, that was expected,” he says. He walks around the desk to get a look at the rendering. Tweaks a few parameters. “Okay, give that a whirl. I doubt it’ll make a difference but…”

Model Failed.

He knew this was a pipe dream. It was a pipe dream five years ago, and it’s still one now.

He chews on the inside of his cheek, staring at the model. He thinks about the picture of Peter in the kitchen.

“Okay, okay. I’ve got a mild inspiration here. I’d like to see if it checks out. So I’d like to run one last sim before we pack it in for the night. This time in the shape of a Mobius strip, inverted please.”

“Processing,” FRIDAY says.

“Right,” Tony reaches for the hologram, tugging at one corner. “Give me the eigenvalue of that particle factoring in spectral decomp. That’ll take a second.”

“Just a moment.”

He reaches for some of the dried blueberries sitting in a bowl on the desk, popping a couple in his mouth. “And don’t worry if it doesn’t pan out, I’m just kinda…”

“Model rendered,” FRIDAY says.

Model successful.

Tony drops back into his chair in shock, staring up at the hologram.

“Shit!”

No. No way. It’s impossible.

Impossible.

Except it’s right here in front of him. He’d spent so long working on this, right after the Decimation, and never cracked the code, and now, five years later, here it is. Solved.

Time travel.

The solution.

He can fix everything. He can bring everyone back. He can bring Peter back.

Well, maybe. Maybe he can. There are a lot of parts involved in this plan that could still go catastrophically wrong.

But he owes it to Peter to try.

He owes Peter that shot more than he does the rest of the world, the rest of the universe. It’s hindsight, and having his own kid, that let him see clearly how badly he fucked things up with Peter. He’d tried his best, given the circumstances, but the circumstances were still that he never should have been involved in Peter’s life to begin with.

It all went back to that spider in the lab. His creation, however indirectly. His creation that he never had taken full responsibility for until it was too late, until the kid was dead.

He owes Peter a second chance.

- - -

Epilogue

There’s about a minute of peace after Bruce uses the Stones before chaos erupts. Or blows up. Launches a missile at them. Tony’s not interested in arguing semantics. The only thing that matters is that he’s standing across yet another battlefield, looking at Thanos once again.

Tony'd thought he was the cockroach, surviving despite all the odds. But Thanos is giving him a run for his money.

Tony has the wild thought that Bruce fucked it up. That he brought Thanos back along with everyone else, which shouldn’t be the case because Thanos didn’t turn to dust. Thanos had his head chopped off after the fact. And then the only reason he can come up with for Thanos’ presence is that he fucked it up. This is the consequence of traveling through time. This is Tony’s own demons coming back to haunt him.

Nothing is ever allowed to go according to plan.

They’re losing badly when the reinforcements show up. Which is when Tony realizes that the whole thing actually did work. The army that’s appearing on the battlefield is made up of everyone that was lost five years ago.

As nice as having their own army to help fight the massive alien one Thanos’ brought is, Tony’s on the lookout for one person. He eventually runs into the kid when Peter webs up a large alien and yanks him away from Tony.

“Holy cow!” Peter says, reaching out to help Tony to his feet. “You will not believe what’s been going on. Do you remember when we were in space? And I got all dusty? And I must have passed out because I woke up and you were gone. But—”

Peter keeps rambling, but Tony’s just staring at him. The kid is standing in front of him, breathing hard and covered in dirt and gesturing wildly and looking so fucking earnest. Looking so fucking alive that Tony can barely believe it. He didn’t think it was really going to happen.

He’d done all of this, figured out time travel and gone on the mission and nearly gotten stuck in 1970 and sacrificed Natasha’s life to see this kid standing in front of him alive and well again. And here he is.

And Peter is still rambling about something to do with wizards.

Tony steps forward, and Peter steps back, and Tony steps forward again, his arms out, making his intentions clear. He grabs the kid around the shoulders, pulling him against his chest, as Peter asks, “What are you doing?”

Tony doesn’t answer. He just holds him as close as he can when they’re both wearing armored suits. Presses his lips against the kid’s hair.

Peter stays solid in his arms this time.

The battle raging around them fades away for a moment, and Tony feels at peace. This was the goal he’d set out to accomplish. This feels like fitting a piece of his heart back into place, after walking around without it for five years.

He did it. He’s finally done something right for this kid, something truly right instead of laying the path to hell with his good intentions.

Now if he can just keep doing things like that…