Archive of Our Own

Something is wrong. Very, very wrong.

Peter recognizes the dull buzz of unease even as he comes to, a painful pulse behind his eyes. His mind feels fuzzy, like those hardcore naps where you wake up not knowing where you are or what year it is. It's a little disconcerting, how disoriented he is.

“Pete? Hey. You with me, kid?”

Peter groans. Tony's voice is loud, right in his ear. Even now when he stays over at the Starks' lake house on weekends and the man wakes him up with a holler of “Roo, breakfast is ready!” or Morgan lets out one of her piercing five-year-old little girl screeches, it never sends a shooting pain that resonates throughout his entire skull like this just did.

He slowly blinks his eyes open, face scrunched up in pain and confusion. It's pitch black.

Calloused fingers haphazardly tap against the cheek that isn't pressed up against soft material. “Don't panic, okay?”

“Mr. Stark, that's a great way to make me freak out,” Peter manages to mumble. He tries to shift so he can roll over, but it's difficult to move. He feels constrained, like he's trapped in a tight space. Something hard is pressing into his back.

Confusion envelops him, prefacing a hum of panic. What is happening? “Mr. Stark? What—what's…?” He feels more than hears the man let out a careful breath. A frown furrows his eyebrows as he attempts to assess his current position. “Am I…are you holding me?”

“Unfortunately, I don't have much of a choice in the matter,” Tony answers. The joking tone falls flat, but his arms tighten around Peter, one hand brushing comfortingly down the boy's back.

For a moment, Peter wonders if he fell asleep on the couch during movie night—wouldn't be the first time that's happened. It's a little embarrassing, but he can't deny that it's kind of nice being so close to the man who's become a father figure to him. It sort of…sort of reminds him of Ben. Makes him feel safe.

As he comes more fully back to himself though, it quickly becomes clear that this is not an average weekend at the lake house. Peter realizes he can't really move at all. “Where are we?” he asks hoarsely, the stuffiness of the air beginning to make itself known. He doesn't remember where they were or what they were doing before this. Something isn't right. Maybe he's dreaming?

Tony clears his throat before speaking. “Can't be certain, because I've never been the main subject at a funeral before, but I think we're in a coffin.”

Peter's heart stops. Surely this is a joke, right? Or maybe he misunderstood. All the breath leaves his lungs in a big whoosh. “What?” he squeaks.

“You have to stay calm, kid. We need to conserve our oxygen.”

Stay calm? How is he supposed to stay calm after a bombshell like that? His brain tries to process what he's just been told. He lifts a hand and blindly reaches it up above his head, pushing against what evidently is the lid of a coffin. It doesn't give at all.

Suddenly, everything feels a lot more constraining, and the soft cushioning surrounding him is a lot less comfortable. It's Toomes and the warehouse building collapse all over again. Unable to move around, literal tons on top of him. It feels like the walls are closing in on him, pressing down, squeezing him, making it impossible to breathe. It may have been more than two years since that happened—well, technically seven thanks to the Blip—but the memories rise up as fresh as if it was yesterday.

Desperate to move, to get out, Peter flings his limbs out as much as he can, beginning to thrash as he bangs wildly at the sides and top of the box. He needs to get out get out get out—

“Ouch, hey—kid!”

Peter jolts, nearly knocking his head against the pillowy top of the coffin. His entire body is trembling with a mixture of adrenaline and terror.

“Hey.” The voice is softer this time. One of Tony's hands slides upward and cups the back of Peter's head, gently but firmly guiding it down against his chest and holding him there to stop his squirming.

Peter stills at the contact, relaxing somewhat as the man's fingers begin to comb through his sweaty curls.

“I know this is scary, but if we want any chance of getting out of here, we have to stay calm and focused.” Tony pauses. “Slow breaths, Pete.”

Peter inhales shakily, doing his best to keep his breaths shallow. Their air is already very limited, and two people sharing the oxygen in one coffin cuts their remaining time in half. This is so not good. He tries very hard to make himself sound sure when he speaks, but the words come out small and afraid. “How—how are you not freaking out right now?”

“I had some time to come to terms with it before you woke up. Already had my freak-out moment.”

Peter can tell by the undertone in the man's voice and the rapidly-beating heart under his ear that Tony is still a little panicked. And who wouldn't be? Peter’s been in some deadly situations before. Quite a few, actually, not to mention he has actually died before—although morbidly enough, that instance didn't require a coffin. But for some reason, this feels different. He doesn’t know if it’s because there’s an adult with him, or if their predicament is really just that hopeless, or if his previous experience with being trapped in a tiny space with seemingly no way out is clouding his brain. Maybe all of the above.

He closes his eyes, wishing this was all just a bad dream. “What—why—who—?”

Tony's voice hardens slightly. “Some idiot whose idea of revenge is burying people alive.”

Peter's slow-moving mind digests that tidbit of information. “Someone wanted to—?”

“Don't worry about it. We need to figure out how to get out of here.” He tsks. “If only I'd brought my handy-dandy shovel.”

Peter recognizes the deflecting sarcasm in the man's voice, covering up the stress and worry underneath. He swallows. “So we…we're like, actually buried? Six feet underground?”

Tony snorts. “Well, I don't know that they specifically measured, but that’s about the gist of it.”

“I don't remember what happened,” Peter says softly.

“Yeah, he drugged you pretty good,” Tony says, but he doesn't offer any additional information. “Lightweight.” 

Closing his eyes, Peter tries to picture where they were when they were grabbed, how someone had gotten the drop on him. Nothing. His fuzzy mind is too preoccupied with their current dilemma to focus on anything else.

Tony hums. “You know, this is not exactly what I mean when I say you'll send me to an early grave.”

Peter groans. “That's not funny.” It really, really isn't. “Can you call—do you have your phone?”

“Wouldn't that be convenient? Nope. He took our phones, watches, everything. There's no way to contact anyone up there or have them track us. I don't even know where we're…buried.”

Of course not, because nothing can ever be that easy. Peter wants to ask for more details, wants to know who's messed up enough to do something like this, but there are more pressing matters on his mind. Like trying not to hyperventilate, which is taking a lot of effort. “Somebody has to be looking for us, right?”

“Well, I can think of a couple people who probably wouldn't mind leaving me down here.”

Peter lets out a squeak at that.

“Sorry. The thing is, I don't know how long it's been,” Tony admits, sounding unsure in a way that's unusual for the billionaire. “And even if they know we're missing by now, the guy who nabbed us probably covered his tracks. We can't bank on being found before…” He clears his throat, unwilling to finish the morbid sentence. As if the whole situation isn't morbid in the first place.

“Okay, so, so—what? We don’t have much time. I could probably break through the lid, but if we're, y'know…buried…all the dirt will cave in and we’ll just suffocate even faster—”

“Calm down,” Tony says for the hundredth time, and it's almost aggravating how calm he is acting about all of this.

Peter has no idea how the man is managing to keep his cool. He briefly wonders if it's because they're together. If Tony was by himself in here, he might not be so composed—he's putting on a brave front for Peter, like he always does.

If Peter were any less stressed, he would appreciate the sentiment. But as it stands, he's barely keeping himself together right now and is having a difficult time tamping down on the pure anxiety and fear that's been coursing through his veins since he woke up here. His claustrophobia is growing by the second. The space is large by coffin standards, but with two people shoved into a box meant for one, it's more than a tight fit. Peter is practically on top of Tony. He's got one knee digging into the man's hip and an elbow in his ribs, while the top of the coffin brushes at his back. He feels like he's wedged in the middle of a layer cake.

“Mr. Stark, I wanna get out.” Peter is well-aware that he sounds like a toddler, but he's still trying to come to terms with this whole situation. He's uncomfortable, and he doesn't want to be in here anymore. “Please.”

“I know, Roo,” Tony says. “We will.”

“How?”

The man is quiet for a moment. “How fast do you think we can dig through the dirt?”

“What?”

“If we tie our shirts off and put them over our heads, we can protect our faces and conserve some air—hopefully enough to get us to the surface.”

Peter shakes his head against the man's chest. “I don't know—”

“It's not like we have any better options, kiddo. And the air is getting real thin in here.”

“Yeah, well, you're the one using it all up,” Peter grumbles, letting out a yelp when Tony pinches him in the side for that remark. When his next inhale doesn't manage to fill his lungs satisfactorily, he knows their time is dangerously short. 

Fear sparks in chest again, but he tries to shove it aside. “Okay, all right, let's do it.” He feels around the top of their prison again, shoving a bit against it. “I can—I break through this,” he says, trying to channel all the confidence he can muster into the words.

Tony pats his back encouragingly. “All right. Yep. I trust you, buddy—you've got this.”

Even though the man can't see him, Peter nods, something warm momentarily overtaking the fear in chest at the faith Tony has in him. This is their only chance to escape alive, and they have to take it and hope it works.

The first challenge, however, is getting their shirts off to use as masks. Thankfully, the blazer Tony had been wearing this morning was removed at some point before they were sealed in the coffin, so both of them are only wearing t-shirts. Still, confined in such a small, pitch black space, removing the articles of the clothing is no easy task.

Tony slowly helps Peter maneuver until he's directly on top of him, fully chest-to-chest, and then moves him down a bit so that his feet are nearly touching the other end of the coffin.

“Okay,” Tony says, his breaths shallow, “now put your hands over your head.”

Peter obeys, squirming and sliding until he's able to wiggle his arms above his head.

Tony reaches down, grasping the hem of Peter's shirt and tugging it up. It takes a lot of wiggling and maneuvering, but they finally manage to get it off. The whole process is quite possibly one of the awkwardest moments of Peter's entire life, except that right now, neither he nor Tony could care less—not when the situation is a matter of life or death. They just do what needs to be done.

“Okay, my turn.”

Getting Tony's shirt off proves to be much more difficult, as the man is lying on his back and unable to move around in the confined space as easily as Peter. It takes some time—more than they can spare, if the thick, hot air surrounding them is anything to go by—and they end up having to rip the shirt a bit to get it off, but eventually they get it done and tie the bottom opening of both shirts into tight knots.

“Ready?” Peter asks, trying to ignore the lightheadedness he feels and pulling his shirt over his head. A very much less glorified version of his Spider-Man mask. He'd give anything to have that with him right now.

“All you, kid,” Tony replies. His voice is weak, evidence of the lack of air surrounding them.

“Okay.” Peter takes as deep a breath as he can manage—which isn't saying much—knowing it might be the last one gets. He pulls his arm back as far as he can manage before slamming it upward. There's a sharp crack as the wood splinters. Peter punches again and feels some dirt begin to escape through the cracks.

He pauses, feeling the weak wood above him, his heart thundering in his chest. This is it—do or die.

“Pete?”

Suddenly, all Peter can think about is all of the things he didn’t get to say to Ben before it was too late. “Uh, Mr. St—Tony—I really hope we make it out of here, but if we don’t, I just want you to know I really, really appreciate everything you've done for me. You—you're” —he swallows back the emotion building in his throat— “you're super important to me. Th—thank you for everything.”

Tony makes a pained sound in the back of his throat. “Roo, please don't—”

Peter doesn't give him a chance to finish before he gives the lid one final hit, throwing all of his superhuman strength into the punch. It caves in, giving way to loose dirt that drops down on top of them with a vengeance.

Adrenaline pumps through Peter's body as he begins to dig his way up, shoving as much dirt as he can down toward the bottom end of the coffin to create more space above them. He can feel Tony doing the same, the man’s fingers hooked firmly around one of Peter's belt loops to avoid them getting separated or blocking the other's path as they dig.

Peter hopes to everything that they aren't buried deep or at a weird angle. He also hopes that whoever did this to them isn't waiting at the top just in case something like this happened.

Even with the shirt protecting his face, it's nearly impossible to breathe. Peter's chest is tight, and he wills himself to go faster, to get them out of here before it's too late.

He jabs his hand upward hard and suddenly, miraculously, realizes there’s no more resistance. Air blows across the tips of his fingers. The surface. They've made it to the surface!

Determination fills Peter, and he scrabbles more frantically at the dirt, feeling a little bit like a zombie as his head finally breaks through. He crawls out of the hole, wrapping a hand around Tony's wrist and pulling the man the rest of the way out along with him.

He rips off his makeshift mask and tosses it aside, coughing and gasping as fresh air hits his face and fills his lungs. Sunlight blinds him, and he blinks rapidly, trying to place their surroundings. Everything is spinning, and he’s not sure where they are, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone else in the general vicinity as far as he can tell.

A few minutes pass, both of them choking as they desperately attempt to replenish their air supply. Then Tony turns to him and says between heavy breaths, “You know, the cushions in that thing were actually kind of comfortable.”

It's not that funny, it's really not, but a hysterical laugh tears its way out of Peter's mouth. Now that they're out, the weight of what they just went through, what almost happened to them, is hitting him all at once. “Mr.—Mr. Stark.”

“Come on, you called me Tony not two minutes ago. Let's keep with that trend—just maybe not only in deadly situations.”

The words barely register. Peter doesn't even know how it happens, but his next laugh is more of a sob, and then suddenly it’s like a faucet that he can’t turn off. He tries to stutter through his tears. “I—I—we almost—”

“Hey, whoa, hey.” Tony immediately leans over and pulls him into his arms, hugging him fiercely. “Okay, we’re doing this now. I know, it's okay, Roo. It's okay. You—we're fine. You did it. You got us out.”

Peter shudders, melting into the man's welcoming embrace as he chokes out another sob. Maybe it's whatever drugs are still coursing through his system, maybe it's the realization that they almost died and the overwhelming relief that they're out. He isn’t entirely sure, but he can feel the shock begin to overtake his body. He's shaking again, and even Tony's arms around him aren't stilling the constant shivers that are wracking his small, dirt-caked frame.

“Okay…we need to—we need to get out of here. Fast. Make like bananas and split.”

Peter huffs, the light words working as intended. He can still feel the in and out of Tony's heavy breaths as the man holds his head against his sternum, fingers absently scratching at his scalp. “Where—where are we?” he manages between his own little gasps.

“Not New York City, I can tell you that much.”

Pulling away from Tony a bit, Peter glances around more speculatively, taking in the empty field beyond where they sit. It looks like they're in a big garden or rows of newly-planted crops, so the fresh dirt covering their…grave…doesn't really look anything out of the ordinary. He shivers again.

“Can you walk?”

“What? Um, yeah, yeah.”

“Come on, then.” Keeping hold of Peter's arms, Tony stands, pulling Peter up with him. Both of their legs are a little wobbly, but they manage to stay upright.

Peter sucks in a deep, steadying breath, beyond grateful for the fresh air that fills his lungs.

“Here,” Tony says, untangling their now stretched-out, dirt-caked shirts.

Peter silently takes the piece of fabric and tugs it over his head, not even having the energy to complain about how it was one of his favorite science pun t-shirts. He sticks his arms through the sleeves, limbs stiff and sore from being constrained in a tiny space for so long and then the exertion of digging his way out of the grave.

Once that's done, he takes a moment to glance around and really take in their surroundings. The field they’re in is big, and there are no houses or roads in sight. Just lots and lots of grass—and then a thick line of trees to the west. It's an uncommon scene, as Peter is much more used to the bustling streets of New York City, skyscrapers and streets and crowds of people as far as the eye can see. The Starks' lake house is a nice change in pace to that life, but Peter isn't so sure how he feels about being stranded in the middle of nowhere like this.

“Let’s move,” Tony says with a slight jerk of his head, already starting for the trees.

“Where?” Peter asks as he follows the older man, trying to clear the fuzziness that seems to be taking over his mind.

“Far away from here.”

“Yeah, but like…we’re in the middle of nowhere.” He draws out the last word.

“I’m pretty well aware of that, Captain Obvious,” Tony retorts. “Which is why we need to be moving and looking for a road or a house, not wasting time talking.”

Peter nods, picking up his pace a bit. “Yeah, right. Okay. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? What are you sorry for?”

“Just, uh—I’m not…everything feels a little…weird,” Peter says slowly, rubbing at his eyes and only succeeded at getting more dirt in them from the way it’s smeared on his fingers.

Tony hums. “Shock will do that to you.”

“Oh.” That makes sense, Peter supposes.

They trudge along for what feels like hours, finally coming to a road. It’s completely empty, but Tony seems to be confident that if they follow it, they’ll come across a car or somebody’s house eventually.

Peter isn’t sure if it’s exhaustion or something else, but he’s struggling to keep his eyes open as he trails after Tony in silence. He can feel his pace slowing the longer they go on.

“Hey, c'mon—keep up,” Tony says suddenly, startling Peter by clapping his hands together twice in rapid succession. “You're walking like an old man.”

“You're the old man,” Peter mumbles under his breath.

Tony hears him anyway. He cranes his neck around, eyebrows raised. “You wanna say that again?”

“Uh—no. 'M really tired,” Peter complains instead. It’s not a lie—he’s been trying to force his eyes to stay open for the past who-knows-how-long. Everything is kind of fuzzy, and he's not sure if it's a result of whatever drugs he was apparently given or if it has to do with the fact that he was literally just buried underground and almost suffocated.

“I know, kid, but unless you want to take a nap in the dirt, sleep is not exactly an option at the moment.”

“Ha.” Peter snorts, blinking heavily. “We were sleepin' in the dirt.”

“I’m glad you find that so funny.”

“I don’t find it funny. At all.”

“Well, good, because I don’t either.”

Peter frowns, mind already wandering in another circle. “I don't like that.”

“Don't like what?”

“The…the dirt.” His mouth is moving as slow as his brain. “Dirt is—it's bad. And, and dirty.” He snorts a laugh at his own pun.

Tony gives him a sideways glance, continuing to tramp down the old road. “Okay, buddy.”

Peter feels like if he was any more aware, he'd be offended or at least exasperated at the patronizing, slightly concerned tone coloring Tony's voice. He knows something isn't right, and he feels detached from the situation. Maybe because if he was any more present and thinking about what just happened in the last hour, he'd be freaking out. But as it stands, he doesn't really have the ability to care right now.

A strong arm suddenly winds its way around his shoulders, and Peter sinks gratefully into the supportive hold that Tony offers. He isn't entirely sure what happens after that, but he must zone out or pass out or something, because next thing he knows, they're standing at the front door of a farmhouse. A middle-aged woman wearing an apron, her hair pulled back in a messy bun, is gaping at them.

Peter's muddled mind thinks it must be because they're coated in sweat and dirt and look like they've just gone five rounds with a grizzly bear, but then she stutters out, “You—you're—you look just like Tony Stark.”

Tony clears his throat. “Yeah, you know, I get that a lot. Listen, I hate to bother you, but my kid and I are in a tight spot” —even in his current state, the humor of the words isn't lost on Peter, even though his brain short-circuits on the “my kid”— “can I borrow your phone?”

“Oh! Um, of course.” The woman looks slightly suspicious of them, and Peter can't blame her. She doesn't offer to let them come inside, but she tells them she'll be right back with a phone for them to use.

Peter blinks after her. “Morgan's not here,” he says absently.

Tony whips his head around, brows furrowed in confusion. “No—thank God.”

Now Peter is confused. “Then who's your kid?”

Something along the lines of amusement grows on Tony's face. “Well, seeing as you're the only kid in the near vicinity, deductive reasoning would lead you to what conclusion, brainiac?”

“...Me?”

“Ten points for the miniature spider genius,” Tony cheers, turning back toward the door just as the woman reappears and hands him the requested phone. “Thanks.”

Huh. Peter chews on that for the five seconds his brain allows while he watches the man next to him. “Who're you calling?” he manages to ask through his fogginess. He shakes his head, wondering why it's so hard to focus.

“Happy.”

“You know his number?”

Tony snorts, tapping something into the phone and putting it to his ear. “You'd better be glad I'm not like young kids these days who don't memorize important numbers because you can just save them in your phone—hey, Hap? What…no—what do you mean, ‘who’? Yes, it's me.”

Peter halfway tunes out the conversation that follows, though Tony seems to be keeping things vague and short, asking for Happy to come pick them up. Maybe since the woman is still standing in front of them. Might freak her out a little to find out the two dirt-caked people at her door were buried in a coffin less than an hour ago.

“We're okay,” Tony is saying. “Kid's pretty shaken. And hopped up on whatever they gave him.”

Peter wants to protest, but he doesn't even have the mental capacity to complain that he's being talked about as if he's not standing right here. Another wave of dizziness washes over him, and he stumbles to the side.

Tony catches him effortlessly with one steadying hand, the other holding the phone to his ear as he continues to speak. “Yeah, okay. Thanks, Hap. Make it snappy, huh?”

“Are you all right, honey?”

Peter blinks hard and stares at the woman from the farmhouse who is eyeing him with concern. 

“What?” he asks, barely able to hear himself. Is it just him, or is the sky getting dark? He hears another worried voice, this one with a deeper tone, but the words don't register at all. 

He wants to answer, wants to ask what's going on, but all that comes out is “I'm your kid…”

Everything seems…distant, far away. Huh. Weird.

He feels like he's floating. The darkness overtakes him before he realizes he's falling.

***

It's dark. So dark.

Heavy air floats around him, the sheer weight of it suffocating. He's alone, and no one is coming to save him.

“Help!” he screams again and again, banging and clawing at the thick walls surrounding him. Even with all of his strength, the material isn't giving. 

He begs for help until his throat is raw and his lungs can't seem to pull in any more air. Terror sticks its talons deep into him, taunting him with the thought that he'll die alone here and no one will ever find him.

The walls are slowly closing in, and he gags, clutching at his throat. He can't…he can't breathe.

Can't breathe can't breathe can't breathe—

Peter jolts awake with a gasp, his hands wrapped around his own neck. His fuzzy mind recognizes the way his face was pressed into his pillow, preventing him from getting a decent breath.

He sits up in a hurry, chest heaving as he glances around the dark room and attempts to regain his bearings. He tries to focus, stilling enough to make out the four other heartbeats in the house. Which means Tony must have gotten back at some point after everyone else had gone to bed.

I'm okay, he thinks. It was just a dream. Just a dream.

Despite that relieving knowledge, the lingering remnants of the nightmare refuse to abate. His heart continues to pound, sweat beads on his forehead, and his hands are shaking badly. After a few more steadying breaths, Peter decides he can't stay in bed. Even though the full-sized mattress has plenty of room and isn't at all closed in, he just…he can't be in here right now.

It's quiet in the lake house as he stumbles out of his room and down the stairs. The soft light exuding from the lamp in the living room calms his nerves a bit. He breathes out. 

“Pete?”

Peter nearly shoots up to the ceiling like a startled cat at the unexpected voice. His heart rate doubles again. 

“Easy, kid.” Tony frowns, standing up from the recliner and making his way across the room. He stops in front of Peter. “What's wrong?”

“Uh, um—nothing. Nothing.”

“Right, just taking a casual stroll at two in the morning. Try again.” The man's gaze drifts downward and his frown deepens. Reaching out, he catches Peter's chin in one hand and tilts it upward. Gentle fingers ghost across the exposed skin of his neck, which Peter knows is probably streaked with angry red lines from when he had been clawing for imaginary air.

“I'm okay,” he tries, although the raspiness of the words betray him.

“You're shaking.”

Peter blinks down at his trembling hands. He tucks them under his armpits and clears his throat. “Just, uh, just a bad dream. Needed some air.” He winces at the choice of words. “But I'm fine.”

Tony grunts, releasing Peter's chin and grabbing a blanket off the back of the couch before strutting toward the front door. “Come on.”

Peter trails after the man without question, stepping out into the night air. It's cool, but not too chilly. He sinks down onto the top step of the porch stairs and lets Tony wrap the blanket around his shoulders before the man eases down next to him.

They sit in silence for a few minutes. Peter's eyes are burning with exhaustion, but he's too wound up to even think about going back to sleep right now. The feeling of walls closing in on him is enough to keep him from being able to relax. It's only been a little over a day since their brush with death. Peter was apparently pretty out of it most of that time—or so he was told—due to a combination of shock, prolonged air deprivation, and the drugs lingering in his system. He's feeling much better now—physically, anyway—but clearly the mental effects of their experience haven't gotten out of his system yet. That will probably take quite a while longer.

A heavy hand lands on the back of his neck, beginning to work out of some of the knots and tension in his shoulders.

Peter relaxes a bit, leaning into the contact. “Is…did you get the guy who did it?” he asks cautiously, thinking back to yesterday. He remembers Tony hanging around the hospital while May hovered worriedly throughout the night, but the man had left sometime in the morning to “take care of some business.” It was pretty clear what that business was, but even when Happy had returned later to drive him and May up to the lake house for the weekend—as had already been the plan before chaos had ensued—he hadn’t gotten any further updates on what was going on. He’d been too exhausted to really care about being left out of the loop.

But now…

“Yep.”

A weight Peter didn't realize was there lifts from his shoulders. “Who was it?”

Tony glances at him from out of the corner of his eye. “Name was Beau Miller.”

“Did you know him?”

“No. But he certainly knew me. Hate is too nice of a word.”

“Why?”

Tony sighs, a remorseful expression crossing over his face as he drops his hand from Peter’s back and gazes out into the dark yard. For a moment it seems like he isn't going to answer, but then he says,  “Lost his wife when the aliens attacked back in ‘12. Things went…way south after that. He just lost his job and got turned out of his place, blamed it on the Returned.” He shakes his head and continues, “Blamed me, really. Wanted revenge. Thought a good way to do it would be to make me suffer by having to watch someone I cared about die—while I suffered the same fate, of course.”

“Oh.” Peter isn’t sure if he should be flattered that he was chosen as that someone. “I'm glad it was me and not…” Pepper or Morgan, he doesn't add aloud.

“It shouldn't have been any of you,” Tony says sharply. He scrubs a hand across his face. “That was—if you hadn't been able to…”

Peter learned a long time ago that the what-ifs aren't worth dwelling on. May says they just make a person feel more awful. He knows there's so much guilt in Tony's shoulders—always has been. The man takes so much upon himself, even the stuff that he shouldn't. It's understandable, but it hurts to see.

He shifts a bit, leaning so that his head rests on Tony's shoulder in hopes of providing some sort of reassurance. “I’m okay, though. We both are.”

Tony stills. “Yeah,” he mutters, reaching a hand up to rest on top of Peter’s head for a moment.

“What a crazy way to get revenge, though. You have to admit that it’s—that’s creative.”

“Hm. Let’s just say that it was a first for me. And hopefully the last.”

Peter laughs quietly. “Yeah. It was…really weird. Even though I’ve technically died before” —he can feel Tony flinch under his ear— “I didn't remember it. And I, y'know, obviously wasn't in a coffin then.” He suppresses his own shudder, grinning faintly to cover it up. Tries hard not to think about coffins and corpses.

“Pete.”

“Sorry,” he apologizes, knowing how the man gets about flippant referrals to him getting dusted. “I just…I don’t like being trapped in small spaces.”

“That makes two of us,” Tony says, but the way he tightens his arm around Peter’s shoulders shows he knows exactly what Peter is thinking about.

They sit like that for a while, lost in thought as the night air wafts over them, encasing them in the soothing chirp of bugs and frogs from within the trees.

Peter can feel sleep tugging at him, and he thinks he's finally ready to give in to its pull. We're okay, we're not down there anymore. I can breathe. I'm not trapped. He repeats the mantra in his mind as his eyes drift shut, focusing on the up-down motion of Tony’s breaths and the oxygen-rich air surrounding them. Safe. Safe. Safe.

“I'm way too old for this,” he hears Tony mutter sometimes later, the words a vibration against Peter's ear. “C'mon, Roo. Bedtime.”

“Hm.” Cracking his eyelids just a smidge, Peter goes pliant, letting himself be tugged to his feet and supported as they make their way back inside.

Tony somehow manages to drag him up the stairs and deposits him into his already-unmade bed. “Goodnight, bud,” he whispers, drawing the covers up over Peter’s body.

“Night.”

It’s quiet for a moment, but even with his eyes closed, Peter can still sense Tony’s presence as the man lingers next to the bed. 

“You gonna be okay?” Tony finally asks, his words ghosting across the dark room as his fingers reach out and brush Peter’s hair from his forehead, the gesture soothing and paternal.

Somewhere in his sleep-muddled mind, Peter recognizes the significance and depth behind the simple question. He knows if he asked, Tony would stay in here with him all night, no questions asked.

'Cause he's Tony's kid.

And that knowledge is all he needs. “Yeah,” he mumbles, blinking up at the shadowy figure next to his bed. “Are you?”

The man snorts a little, but his tone is sober when he answers. “Yeah, kid, I’ll be good.”

And it’s a relative term—and Peter knows it’ll take more than a little chat on the front porch in the middle of the night to cure the trauma yesterday caused—but they’re both alive and home and safe and together, and that’s all they really need for now.