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It takes Peter five minutes to fall in love with Tony Stark. It takes him one minute more to want to marry the man.
He has to wait two full hours for Tony to pop the question.
“Fuck, kid, where have you been all my life?” Tony says between kisses, trailing his mouth down Peter’s bare torso. Nipping, biting, licking. They’re already in bed together and it doesn’t feel rushed. Hell, if anything, Peter doesn’t know how they held out so long.
“Waiting for you,” Peter says, words absurd and absolutely truthful.
“I found you, now. You’ll never get rid of me, baby. Darling. You perfect, perfect kid.”
“Tony—”
“Marry me, Peter. Please. I know it’s crazy but—”
“Yes.”
Tony’s lips seal his own, as if afraid he might take the words back. But Peter has never meant anything more.
It takes Peter five hours to remember he’s already married. Five hours and one second to remember that Tony is too.
“How did I forget?” he says, voice breaking. He and Tony are still in bed, still clutching at each other. “How could I— what’s wrong with me?”
“Nothing. Nothing.”
Peter had only moved closer to Tony when the memory of his whole life came rushing back, and what did that say about him?
“I'm— Tony, I’m on my honeymoon.”
“Good,” Tony says vehemently. His tone brokers no argument, which Peter already knows means he’s desperate to believe it himself. “That’ll make it easier to get it annulled.”
“You think?” Peter feels his hopes rise, and then the guilt sweeps back in. “I’m such an asshole. How could we do this to them?”
“These things happen, darling. Sweetheart. Peter. Baby, tell me you’re not changing your m—”
“No. Never.” Peter pulls Tony in tighter, as if he were the one threatening to leave.
“That’s all that matters,” Tony says, voice confident again. “I’ll make it work, you’ll see. It’ll be fine. Pepper will be fine. She’ll understand. And Henry—”
“Harry.”
“Whatever. He wasn’t right for you, anyway. You deserve better. You deserve everything.”
“I just want you.”
“You have me.”
It takes sunlight bursting through the window of the Malibu hotel to remind Peter that he doesn’t actually live anywhere near Tony.
“I’m not usually like this,” he says. They’ve moved out of bed to the breakfast nook, bodies still draped across one another.
“It’s fine,” Tony says, raising a strawberry to Peter’s lips. “So, New York, huh?”
“Yeah,” Peter gets out, between bites. “Queens, originally. My aunt still lives there.”
Tony hums, eyes still trained on Peter’s lips. “I was born in Manhattan.”
“Really?”
“Yup. I still have the family mansion on fifth avenue. We don’t have to live there, though. SI has a tower in midtown. You’d probably prefer a high-rise.”
Peter smiles so hard his face hurts.
It takes another hour for Peter to work up the nerve to tell Harry the news.
Tony had wanted to do it for him, of course. Had wanted to send a bellman for Peter’s things, insisting Peter never needed to see Harry again.
As if the sight of Harry might make Peter change his mind — which was stupid. Peter had to nip that fear in the bud now, less Tony worry about it the rest of their lives.
We have the rest of our lives, Peter thinks, and can’t hold back his grin. He’s so happy he wants to burst and, weirdly, he’s looking forward to sharing the news with Harry.
Harry, who has been one of his best friends since college. Harry, who has always supported him and fought for him. Harry, who has always been Peter’s friend, first and foremost.
He’d see how happy Peter was and would understand. He'd be happy for Peter.
Right?
Harry does not understand.
He laughs at first. Then his confusion turns to hurt, turns to anger. He throws his ring at Peter, screaming and crying and threatening Peter with lawyers.
Peter cries too, but the tears don’t stop him from zipping up his suitcase.
Peter calls May from Tony’s plane, on his way back to New York to finalize his annulment.
“I’ve done something that’s going to sound crazy, but it isn’t,” he says. “It’s the best decision I’ve ever made and I know it’s going to be hard but I’ve never been happier and just– I really hope you support me with it even if you don’t understand, because I’m not changing my mind, ever, you know?”
May is quiet for a long moment.
“I’ll always be on your side,” she says, but her voice is cautious. “What happened?”
“I don’t know where to start but I– I…” Peter looks across the cabin at Tony, who’s swiping through resumes of NYC-based interior designers while on the phone with lawyers, and his heart wants to leap out of his chest.
“I fell in love,” he says, smiling.
May doesn’t really understand either, but she doesn’t try to change his mind.
A large, burly man is waiting for them on the tarmac.
Tony seems confused to see him, but smiles nonetheless. “Well, isn’t this a happy surprise — literally. Hap, this is Pet—”
Hap cuts him off with a fist to the face. Tony’s body crumples as it hits the ground, the smell of blood fills the air, and Peter sees red.
As Hap pulls his fist back to deliver more damage, Peter grabs it mid-air. Holding it in place is easy — what’s hard is resisting the urge to crush the bones beneath his grip.
“Nah, I don’t think so,” Peter says, barely holding his anger in check.
Hap stares at Peter for a disbelieving half second, before yanking his fist back. He turns his glare on Tony, who’s still sprawled on the ground.
“You’re a selfish piece of shit, Tony Stark.” Hap spits out the words. “Your mother would be ashamed.”
Then he turns on his heel and leaves.
Pepper, apparently, wasn’t ‘fine’.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Peter says, holding ice to Tony’s eye. The cut at his eyebrow has finally stopped bleeding, but the skin beneath it is turning a weird shade of red that Peter doesn’t like the look of.
Tony shrugs. “She’s not fine right now,” he says. “But she will be. We made a very detailed prenup and she’ll get a massive payout under the infidelity clause. She’s pretty pissed at the moment, but she’ll forgive me. I’ve done worse.”
“How long were you married?” Peter knows they still are — not even Tony’s lawyers move that quick — but can’t bring himself not to use present tense.
Tony is his now.
“Five — no, wait — six years. Our anniversary was last week.”
Peter doesn’t know what to say to that. Feels the panic, the guilt that he’d first felt — hell, only a few hours ago — return.
Tony pries the ice pack from Peter’s hand, tosses it across the car, and pulls Peter into his lap.
“It’s okay, baby,” Tony says. “It’s fine. You’re fine.”
“It is not fine.”
“It will be—”
“It won’t. I— I’m a home-wrecker.”
“Fine.” Tony smiles, wide and manic. “Then you’re the most brilliant, incredible, perfect home-wrecker on the fucking planet. Wreck me any time, baby.”
Peter’s mouth twitches with a smile, despite himself.
“We’re crazy, you know that, right? This is crazy.”
“All my best ideas are.”
It takes Peter 28 hours after agreeing to marry Tony to remember he’s Spider-Man.
“It doesn’t have to be a big deal,” he says, and wonders at the fact that it isn’t a lie. “I love it and, like, it’s my responsibility but– but it doesn’t have to be the most important—”
“You’re adorable,” Tony says, pressing a kiss to his clavicle. “Absolutely adorable. Strip for me.”
“No, uh, really. I’m not joking,” Peter says, yanking off his shirt and making quick work of his pants. “I’m Spider—”
“I know, Pete. I told you, I’m a big fan.” Tony tries to slide to his knees, but Peter stops him with a hand on the shoulder.
“What do you mean you told me?”
Tony frowns, puzzled.
“At the bar. I told you I was a fan of your work.”
“My… app development, right?”
“You develop apps?”
“Yeah, uh— yeah?”
Tony looks at him, incredulous. “I called you ‘webs’, said the Avengers could do with someone of your skills, and you thought I was talking about an app?”
“Hey,” Peter says, slightly affronted. “Webs has transformed community organization in New York City—”
“You named your app Webs?”
“We have over 400,000 five-star reviews—”
“How you’ve managed to keep a secret identity all these years is a mystery.”
It takes Harry an hour after getting the annulment notification to out Peter to the press.
SPIDER MENACE UNMASKED!!!, screams the cover of the Daily Bugle, and Peter wants to throw up.
Tony doesn’t, though.
Instead, he buys out every newspaper in the United States, solving the financial crisis of the free press with the sweep of a hand, and forces them all to churn out daily “Spider-Man rescued my cat” features.
Peter is too in love to worry about the ethics of that.
It takes them a week to refit the Stark Industries Tower with a penthouse, two days just to stack up the boxes of Tony’s engineering equipment, and five seconds for it to feel like a home.
“Are you sure this is okay?” Tony says, surveying the maze of unopened boxes. “I can always put my workshop on another floor.”
“So that I never see you again?” Peter jokes, soothing the words with a kiss. “No, this is perfect.”
It takes Rhodey seconds after Peter is out of the room to start berating his best friend.
“You couldn’t have found a twentysomething that didn’t want to wait for marriage?”
Tony snorts.
“Trust me, honey bear. We have not been waiting for marriage.”
“You know what I mean.” Rhodey’s sigh sounds long-suffering. “Pepper would have forgiven you a mistress. You could have been honest with her about that. You didn’t need to give up—”
“I gave up nothing I didn’t need.”
“Hey.” Rhodey’s voice turns sharp. “That’s my friend you’re talking about.”
“She was my wife.” Tony’s voice is just as hard. “I’ve loved her for years and I would maim, steal and kill for her — you know that. Pepper deserves the world.”
“Then what the fuck are you doing?”
Peter hears Tony shift with a shrug.
“It’s not that complicated. I love Pepper, sure — but I love Peter more.”
“You barely know him.”
“I know him in my bones, Rhodey.”
“You know him with you dick—”
“No,” Tony interrupts. “I know it sounds like romantic Disney bullshit, but I knew he was for me the moment I laid eyes on him. It was like putting on the Iron Man suit that first time. I just knew it. He sat there in a hotel bar, on his damn honeymoon, rambling about the best way to train neural networks and the whole time I was in fucking freefall trying to work out how to keep him.”
“You’re infatuated.”
“Completely,” Tony admits. “But that doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Pepper doesn’t deserve a husband who won’t love her completely and Peter– Peter is no one’s mistress. He’s it for me.”
“Jesus…”
There’s a long silence, just the sound of them sipping their drinks.
“Fine,” Rhodey says, at last. “I still think you’re crazy, but that’s hardly news.”
“Good. Because I want you to be my best man again. This is the last time, I promise.”
It takes weeks for Tony’s divorce to go through.
Weeks of him sneaking off at night to take calls from Pepper. Calls that start off apologetic, promising Pepper the world, if she’d just, “please, sign the papers”. Calls that get increasingly frustrated and angry, and end with arguments over things they’d been fighting about for years. Arguments about her miscarriage and his drinking and her brother and his sexual preferences and on and on and on.
Until they’re a week away from the wedding, and Tony’s still married, and the bags under his eyes are dark, and Peter knows he’s one step away from doing something desperate.
“We could always postpone,” Peter tries, one night. “A winter wedding could be nice.”
“No.”
“But Tony—”
“No. You’re mine, Peter Parker. You said so. I’m not postponing anything just because Pepper won’t see reason. She’s being s—”
Peter shuts him up with a kiss before he can say something he’ll regret.
The next morning, while Tony’s with his lawyers drafting up some new deal that Peter already knows Pepper won’t take, Peter gets on a plane and flies to Malibu.
It takes Peter seconds to understand why Tony still loves this woman.
“I don’t want your apology,” she says.
“Good. Because I’m not here to give you one.”
Whatever she was expecting, it wasn’t that.
“Then why are you here?”
“I’m here to tell you it’s okay.” He sits across from her, on the other side of a dark wooden desk in a cold metallic room. Her office screams money and power and ruthlessness — but all he sees is a woman afraid.
He understands perfectly. She’s letting go of Tony Stark, after all.
“Tony’s going to be okay with me,” he continues. “I’m going to give him everything he needs, even the things he doesn’t want. I will follow him into battle and hold him after his night terrors and sing along to his loud music. And I won’t keep him out of your life, because I know he still loves you, even if it isn’t in the way you guys planned.
“I know this seems crazy and reckless and selfish — and it is. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t right. And I know you don’t know me, and I’ve given you no reason to trust me, but I promise you — you can. I promise you, Pepper Potts, that Tony will be in good hands. And that if you let him go, I won’t let him fall. I promise.”
The words sit between them for a long moment, but when Peter reaches a hand across the table, Pepper takes it.
They both cry.
He leaves California with signed divorce papers.
Peter had thrown up before his first wedding. He’d been jittery and nervous, and had literally paced the walls of his dressing room, rambling at MJ and Ned about marriage being a flawed institution, and what kind of Gen Z gets married at 25 anyway, the tax benefits were barely worth it.
His second wedding, though, feels like floating.
“Dude, if you smile any harder, people are going to think you’re high,” Ned says.
“He’s right,” MJ says, straightening Peter’s tie and brushing away invisible lint from his shoulders. “It’s creepy.”
“I’m getting married,” Peter says, as if that were an answer.
It is to him, after all.
It takes them two minutes to walk the aisle of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It’s an absurdity, given the Catholic Church’s stance on gay marriage and divorce, their own stubborn atheism, and the vibrant red and blue suits they’re wearing.
But Tony’s mom was buried there and maybe, Peter had said, this way it was almost like she’d be with them. (Tony had kissed him, eyes damp, and sent word to the Vatican that Iron Man was expecting a special dispensation.)
If Peter had been paying attention, he would have noticed that half of his guests were wearing the same thing they wore to his last wedding. He might have seen Happy sneak in at the last minute, looking uncomfortable, but there, at least.
He sees none of that, though. All he can see is Tony.
The vows are just a formality.
He’s already promised Tony forever.
For Peter’s second honeymoon, Tony takes him to space.
“You just want to make sure I don’t run off with the first guy I meet at a hotel bar,” Peter jokes, strapping himself into the co-pilot seat of the spaceship.
Tony’s cheeks color.
“As if,” he scoffs, playing it down. “But the next guy to propose to you had better offer an entire galaxy, or it’s going to be a real blow to my ego.”
“I hope so, since I’ve already seen plenty of stars,” Peter says. He ignores Tony’s double take, and pays unwarranted attention to the safety checks, readying the ship for take-off. When Tony looks ready to burst, he continues, “There was last night, and then this morning in my dressing room, and then at our reception din—”
“You’re such a little shit.”
Peter grins. “I’m just saying — I could have blown your ego just fine from home. But space is pretty cool, I guess.”
“My husband, ladies and gentlemen.” Tony laughs.
His husband.
For the first time, Peter feels like they have all the time in the world.
(Twelve weeks earlier)
It had been Harry’s idea to fly to Malibu directly after the wedding. They caught the last flight of the night and spent seven restless hours in a plane with six unhappy infants, four obnoxious businessmen on conference calls, and a twenty-strong bachelorette party roaming the aisles.
By the time they stumbled into the resort at 1 am, Harry was too exhausted to even consider the honeymooner’s welcome drink the hotel had prepared. He pecked Peter on the cheek, told him to enjoy the drinks for the two of them, and went to bed.
Leaving Peter alone at the bar with a bottle of champagne, two glasses and an empty seat next to him.
“Well, look who decided to swing into my neck of the woods,” came a voice from behind him. A hand rested on the back of his chair and the scent of someone expensive dripped over his senses. He looked up and—
Holy shit.
“Oh m— Mr—Mr. Stark, sir, I wow, uh, wow,” Peter struggled for coherence, his vocabulary having disappeared at the sight of Tony Stark.
“Call me Tony.”
Mr. Sta– Tony was wearing a tuxedo, bow-tie undone and hanging loose, and his collar unbuttoned to reveal a glimpse of olive skin. Peter’s gaze unintentionally fixated on Tony’s exposed throat, before looking up to find clever eyes watching him back. His face flushed, but he couldn’t look away. He could never have looked away.
Tony held out a hand for a shake and when their fingers met, time slipped completely.
“Peter,” he replied, his voice almost breathless. The bar was filled with soft murmurs of conversation and occasional bursts of laughter — but Peter heard none of it.
“I know, Webs. I’m a big fan.” Tony’s hand was still in his, one finger gliding up over his wrist. “Are you waiting for someone?”
Peter glanced at the champagne and glasses in front of him, with no memory of where they’d come from.
“I—” Peter stuttered. If there was ever a moment when he should have thought of Harry, this was it. Instead, what he said was, “I’m all on my own.”
The invitation in his voice was unintentional, but he meant it nonetheless. Peter saw his thumb rub a slow circle into the back of Tony’s hand and didn’t stop it. And when Tony’s eyes flicked down to their joined hands and his mouth twitched in a smile, Peter only held on tighter.
“Well, then.” Tony slid in next to him, and their fingers instinctively intertwined. “Let me fix that.”