Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Day -29

Tony is tired of answering questions about— No, scratch that. He is tired of being asked questions about the Accords, about Germany, about the Iron Patriot, about the mass outbreak from the Raft. He stopped answering those questions a long time ago.

And yet, he realizes as he surveys this morning’s paper, the world somehow keeps finding a way to quote him in their articles. Quotes he doesn’t remember—he can’t imagine coming out of his mouth. About ‘possible ramifications’ and ‘strategically vital assets’ and ‘signaling change in supranational policy’.

Here is what he does remember saying to reporters:

“Mr. Stark! Mr. Stark! What’s it like being the only Avenger left standing?”
“What’s it like being the one asking these dumb fucking questions?”

And:

“Mr. Stark! Mr. Stark! Is it hard to negotiate the terms of the Accords with most of your team absent?”
“Is it hard taking pictures with that broken camera?”
“My camera is not—hey, give that back!”

Rogers, Barnes, Wilson, Barton, Maximoff and Lang went rogue. Romanoff joined them. She had looked apologetic about it, at least. Vision disappeared soon after Germany. He hadn’t looked anything about it, because he left the tower during the night without a word. Bruce is still MIA. Pepper didn’t quit SI but did move out of the penthouse after their break-up. Rhodey is here, though, and he can walk from his bedroom to the living room all by himself now, so, sure, pretty much ready to be deployed again. They are all shifting positions, rearranging themselves like atoms after a chemical reaction.

The only Avenger left standing.

Well. Right. There is Spider-Man. That’s… something. That’s something. The teenager who can catch a bus with his bare hands, but who also teared up when Tony told him he could keep the suit. Tony doesn’t deal well with tearing up, gives him the heebie-jeebies, and yet people keep doing it around him, like those cats who always want to sit in cat-haters’ laps.

Peter Parker, Tony discovered soon after meeting him, has one of those faces that you shouldn’t look directly at. Too many emotions on display, it’s almost painful. Like looking directly at the sun. This is why Tony wears sunglasses when he talks to people.

He exhales noisily and swigs down the last of his coffee, tasting grounds. He thumbs at the morning paper to read the obituaries: his favorite Monday morning activity and the main reason why he still insists on getting his news on paper. Nothing simultaneously cheers him up and calms him down like reading about other people’s misfortune. Look at these suckers. ‘Live life to the fullest’, is written in cursive front under the portrait of a Ms. Ridnour.

Don’t tell me what to do, dead person. “FRIDAY. I’m taking up smoking. Tell my secretary to get me some cigarettes.”

“You don’t have a secretary.”

“Tell HR to hire me a secretary.”

Day -24

“The kid keeps leaving me voicemails,” Happy says. He is driving Tony down the highway, rain pelting down, everything is slate grey. “Addressed to you. Something about a lady buying him a churro, grand theft bicycle... Can’t he just get your number?”

“Since when do I give out my number to the plebs?”

“He’s Spider-Man.”

“Which makes him, I don’t know, semi-plebeian.” Tony sighs, tapping one finger against the airplane-shaped air freshener dangling against the window. “The kid is cute, but he’s a lot. I pay you to deal with shit so I don’t have to. If there’s an emergency, drop me a message. Other than that, figure something out.”

“You never answer your phone.”

“That’s my point. So we understand each other.”

Happy pulls up the divider. He used to get fondly exasperated at Tony’s antics. Lately, it’s just exasperated. The same thing happened with Pepper a while back, and it didn’t end well.

Day -18

India is just as depressing as New York, he can’t get away from it. It’s warmer, there are more colors, people are more cheerful — though that might just be because he is at a wedding and the alcohol is flowing like the Niagara falls — but all it does is create a sense of distance between himself and the world. He barely knows anyone and he didn’t pop enough pills to have the nerve to meet new people, so he meanders around aimlessly, making sure to always have a drink in hand.

He spends a good amount of time pretending to be interested in the intricate stone carvings of a fountain, while pondering the meaninglessness of existence. Who was it, that guy who wrote that life was nothing more than a sequence of anonymous screams in a desert of indifferent—

“Spider-Man has been submerged in the Hudson river and is not resurfacing,” FRIDAY reports in his earpiece and Tony almost trips into the fountain. “What? Vitals?”

“Not yet concerning, but oxygen deprivation is a future concern.”

He clenches his jaw, stepping back and throwing a look around at the other guests. Most still ignore him, though the groom’s older sister is looking his way, standing on the broad steps with her arms folded. Tony turns away. “Can’t have that,” he says calmly, though his heartbeat is in his ears, and he taps at his watch. “Deploy a suit, get to the scene stat.”

“Already done.”

“Why’d he jump in?”

“Karen informs me he was dropped into the river by a man with a mechanical winged suit.”

Tony ducks behind a wide pillar. “Christ, he’s off having all the fun without me. That hurts my feelings. How far away are you?”

“Six, five, four, three—diving.”

“Get me a live feed to that suit.”

There is nothing but roaring water for several seconds, and then the spluttering and coughing of a teenager. Tony breathes out and stands a little straighter, lightly clasping his hands in front of him. It’s important, he knows, to never ever seem caught off guard. “Hello, Spider-Man. Making waves, are we?”

Peter starts a long and rambling explanation that in fact explains very little, about glowy thingies and taking people down which is— definitely not going to happen, shit.

“But whyyy?” Peter whines in response.

“Wh—because I said so!” Tony snaps.

The groom’s sister is suddenly in front of him, expression stern, and lifts a bright flower garland with both hands. Tony bows his head and mutters an apology as she places it around his neck. ‘Because I said so’. Ugh. That used to be his dad’s favorite phrase. That, alongside ‘I’ll give you something to cry about’.

Day  -17

Pepper turns up in the penthouse one afternoon, on one of those days when Tony isn’t wearing pants. She takes all his cigarettes and flushes them down the toilet.

“Whatcha do that for?” Tony asks when she steps back into the room.

“I don’t want you to die.”

“Are you sure? Because I think it would save you a lot of time.”

“Are you hiding cigarettes anywhere else?”

“No. And I hadn’t actually smoked any. They’re pretty gross, turns out. I wonder if they’re, yaknow, bad for your health.” Tony slouches lower on the couch. “Are you moving back in? Wanna get married? Come on, Pepper, I’m nothing without you.” He squints up at her. She did something with her hair but he isn’t sure what it is.

“Rhodey practically begged me to come up. He says you’re backsliding.”

Rhodey is such a good wingman. “When am I ever not?”

She sits, her gaze analytical but without judgement. “What are you sad about?”

“What am I sad about?” he echoes scornfully.

“Did you ever call that therapist I recommended to you? Dr. Yune? She specializes in— well, you can call her day and night.”

Specializes in particularly lost causes, is what she means by that. “Did you do something with your hair? And you’re wearing a jean jacket, you never wear a jean jacket.”

“Tony.”

He lays his head back, lets it loll to one side. “I don’t know what you want me to say. My life has been such a series of fortunate events, lately. Why wouldn’t I be full of good cheer?” He pokes her leg with his big toe. “Will you stay for dinner?” He moves the muscles that make him smile. “Please?”

“No,” she says. “But if you come down to my office tomorrow, with pants and after a shower, I’m happy to grab lunch together.”

Day -15

Spider-Man blows up the Washington monument.

“He didn’t blow it up,” Rhodey says as he replays the news footage for the seventh time. “He saved people.”

“From the bomb he put into his friend’s backpack.”

Rhodey wraps his hands around his knee to lift his right leg and stretches it out on the coffee table. He breathes out, tracing his fingers along the edge of the metal brace. “He needs a little encouragement,” he says. “He’s a kid. You should be nice to him.”

Rhodey right now reminds him of a younger Rhodey, sitting in his dorm room and correcting Tony's essay under the dim light of his desk lamp, while Tony launched paperclips at his head from across the room because he had never learned how to properly cite his sources, or how to ask for help, or how to be a good friend.

“Would it kill you to be nice?” Rhodey says.

“I don’t know if it would, but why risk it?”

“You should connect more,” Rhodey says. “It might be good for you.”

“You don’t want things that are good for me. Come on. Superheroes thrive on self-loathing and self-destruction. It’s our modus operandi.”

“I heard Happy say the kid quit band, he’s obviously got a lot on his plate. Next time you talk to him, tell him he did a good job.”

“My dad never gave me any encouragement and I turned out fine.”

“’I turned out fine’ is the number one argument made by people who did not turn out fine.”

Day -8

Spider-Man splits a ferry in half.

Tony should have never accepted this babysitting gig. Spider-Man is slowly turning into the antagonist of his story.

He finds it unusually difficult to conceal his anger, and he hates it. He hates that he can’t just be blasé about all this, because why does it even matter, really? He kept his cool when he got kidnapped, and kidnapped again, and when they bombed his mansion, and when his robot creation almost destroyed the world. And yet somehow here he is, losing his cool, yelling at his teenager on some gritty, urban rooftop.

By the time his heartbeat settles enough for his watch to stop its little warning-beep-beeps, he is standing on a streetcorner with a spider-suit in a paper bag, watching the kid walk off with drooping shoulders and Hello Kitty pajamas.

Day -7

He has locked himself in his workshop, shoved the paper bag behind a crate and poured himself a whiskey. He still feels the mental hangover. Happy is disappointed in him. Rhodey is disappointed. Pepper is disappointed. Hell, how does she even know who Spider-Man is? And how did they think this was going to end?

I just wanted to be like you.

It’s a very familiar feeling, falling out of favor. Sometimes familiar is comfortable. Compliments don’t do jack shit for him. When people most disapprove of him, that’s what fuels him, that’s when he is in his element, that’s when he doubles down. He isn’t sure what doubling down would look like in this situation, though. Put some other kid in the Spider-suit, maybe. He snorts into his glass.

He did expect someone to come down, expected a knock on the glass partition at some point today. The knock comes early in the evening and he looks up from his dri—work, from his work… and it’s not Happy, or Rhodey, or Pepper.

Vision is standing behind the glass. He is holding Wanda Maximoff by the hand. Tony’s throat goes dry and he stands abruptly, sending his office chair into a spin. He stares. Vision nods. Wanda waves. Both of them smile, equally amicable.

Tony carefully sets his glass down. “FRIDAY, a head’s up next time?” he asks gruffly, but he does approach the door and taps the sensor to open it. He takes a wary step forward through the doorway, sticks one hand in his pocket and makes sure to slouch. “I don’t see any white flags waving, what am I working with here?”

“We are seeking refuge,” Vision says, quite formally. He is wearing a green sweater with geometric zigzags. Wanda has an adidas-hoodie and a beanie. They look… very ordinary.

“Who is we? Are there more of you downstairs?” It would be just like Rogers to send these two on ahead as a human buffer.

“No. Us. Us two.”

Tony sniffs, looks them both up and down again, then cracks a grin and spreads his hands. “The prodigal kids return. Take any bedroom you like. Don’t make yourself at home because we’re moving upstate in about a week. And if there is anything you need, anything at all, then please feel free to fix your own problems and don’t bother me. Mi casa es mi casa.”

Day -4

Happy keeps calling him about moving day, asking nonsensical questions that Tony doesn’t know the answer to, like ‘what is in the box labeled booby traps?’, or ‘why did the box labeled booby traps just explode?’, so Tony has started ignoring his calls even more than usual.

The blackout curtains have been installed in his new bedroom upstate, which means the place is officially inhabitable.

Day -1

Brazil is just as depressing as New York, and India, and every other place he has been lately. But the Brazilian president is one of the few world leaders in favor of a full pardon of the rogue Avengers, so Tony has been here for the past two days, chatting him up like a stooge, shaking hands whenever a camera is nearby. Political puppet shows.

Turns out the Brazilian president likes Spider-Man, which is unfortunate because Tony hasn’t thought about Spider-Man in almost a week and it’s been a very pleasant experience. But he flashes a smile, the way he is supposed to, and says “I’ll invite him along next time.”

I just wanted to be like you.

“The others, too,” the president says, and winks twice. Tony grimaces and stays quiet. Most people are quite convinced that he knows damn well where all his teammates—his former teammates are. Since Wanda’s return to the tower, that has become slightly less untrue, but only slightly. Wanda spends most days hiding in her room and Tony does the same, so knowing where she is and knowing where she is at are two very different things.

He goes to bed early. It’s a thing he tries, sometimes: sleeping at regular hours, convinced that the problem is a lack of sleep. He’ll try it for a few weeks and then suddenly pull a few all-nighters, convinced that the problem is actually too much sleep. Rinse and repeat.

He wakes up Sunday morning to headlines about an earthquake in Indonesia, a plane crash on Coney Island and a Formula 1 feud. He also spots four more missed calls from Happy so he does the only logical thing and turns on airplane mode, chucks the phone aside. The breakfast buffet is a higher priority. Most important meal of the day. Pepper would be proud.

He won’t actually go wheels up until after lunch, but out of an abundance of caution and no other reason at all, he leaves his phone on airplane mode all morning.

He hates flying. Well, he hates someone else flying him. The lack of control. But he swallows a beta-blocker on the runway, so this should be a breeze. He naps on the plane and is disoriented when they touch down on a dimly lit landing strip with an unfamiliar outline of dark buildings in the distance. Right. Upstate. He checks his watch. Almost midnight. Tomorrow is a Monday. He hates Mondays.

It's a twenty-minute walk from the landing strip to his bedroom — christ. He hates walking, it’s for poor people. He needs to think of something, something like a travelator between all the important points in his new home. The landing strip, the workshop, his bedroom, the espresso machine.

He’ll get right on that tomorrow, he thinks as he kicks off his shoes and dives into bed, still in his frumpled Brazil-suit.

Day 1

He wakes up at seventeen minutes past midnight. Pepper is calling him. Though his phone is still on airplane mode, so she used some sort of override code. Tony needs to change those up. He stares at the display and contemplates if he should choose Pepper or choose death. He sighs and thumbs at the screen to accept the call.

“You weren’t answering your phone,” Pepper immediately says, quite loudly and angrily.

Tony rolls over onto his stomach and pulls the blanket over his head. “So?”

“Spider-Man crashed your private jet on Coney Island Saturday night. More than twenty-four hours ago, Tony, and you were unreachable.”

“I was coming back from Brazil. Wait. What? Is the kid—”

“He’s okay. Your cargo is not.”

“What the fuck.”

“Why didn’t you respond to our messages?”

“I didn’t get those, I don’t think. Too high, I guess.”

Even the way she breathes is impatient. “Just to clarify; were you too high or the plane?”

“I did pop a plane pill, actually, in fact. And I was getting breakfast. You were supposed to be proud. Hn. I forgot to brush my teeth.”

“It’s been mayhem, Tony.”

“What happened?”

Pepper breaks it down for him. Saturday night, Spider-Man and the mechanically-winged dude — that Tony very extremely expressly told Spider-Man not to go after — decided to use his plane as their boxing ring: his plane full of cargo ranging from very, extremely valuable to very, top secret, which then crashed on Coney Island. “Happy had been trying for days to get on the same page with you about—"

“Don’t start,” Tony grouses, poking the mattress with one finger. “Don’t—Don’t put that shit on me, ma’am Potts. He’s forehead of security, why the hell should I need to hold his hand through a simple moving day?” He yawns. “What the ff-fuck, since when is he so incompetent?” He rolls over on his back and rubs at his chest.

“You are lucky to have Happy as your right-hand man,” Pepper lectures. “And your left-hand man. I know you’re rolling your eyes right now, stop it.”

Tony stops rolling his eyes. “I looked into the winged guy, he was small fry, way below our paygrade. This should not have happened; this should not have been possible. And what’s wrong with that kid, anyway, is he braindead? Why— I thought I was rid of him. Do I superglue his front door shut? Do I shackle him to one of those, those metal balls prisoners have on their feet in old-timey movies?” He can’t actually think of any movies, which is odd, because the metal ball is definitely a thing, a very real thing.

“Can I just trust that you’ve got this from now on?” she asks in clipped tones. “Because none of this is actually my job anymore, nor was it ever.”

There is a sudden tightness in his throat and he swallows it away. “I’ve got this.”

“And I know it won’t help, me saying this, but don’t do anything you’ll regret.”

Not an easy task, because depending on his mood, Tony tends to either regret nothing or everything he ever did.

-

“Yes, hello Tony,” Happy says. “No, I’m not in bed right now, it’s no problem that you’re calling me in the middle of the night.”

Tony pads across the cold tiles of his kitchen, barefoot. “Do you want me to just ignore your calls again? Because I will.”

“Glad to hear confirmation that that was all on purpose.”

“Didn’t say that. How’s my cargo?”

“Mostly fine. Everything accounted for, except I’m still sorting through the documents to make sure none, you know, fluttered around the whole city. Like we threw a classified-documents ticket parade. It’s great; they’re all top-secret documents so I can’t get anyone else to sort through them for me, I get to do that all by myself. It’s been a fun few days.”

Tony starts pushing his way through his liquor cabinet to find something that will mix well with beta blockers. “Can you go yell at the kid for me? Pretty please? I’m too tired to deal with this.”

“Yell at him?” Happy sounds confused for some reason.

“We lost an entire plane with precious cargo.”

“That’s not the kid’s fault, it’s mine.”

“Yeah, don’t worry, your incompetence is not lost on me.”

“And you haven’t been dealing with the kid at all, Tony, you’ve barely spoken to him during this whole so-called mentorship. You just dumped a million-dollar suit in his lap and then logged off.”

“What are you talking about? I’ve never been more on top of anything in my whole life. It’s stressing me out.”

“I’m not talking to the kid for you. You do it. Be a grown-up.”

“You know, I accept a lot of crap from you,” Tony says, turning a bottle to read the label. “But if you fuck up like this again, I will fire you. You can get a night-shift as a parking lot attendant or something.”

Silence on the other end. “I accept a lot of crap from you, too,” Happy then says, very low. “A whole damn lot, Tony, we all do, because we know you struggle. But we all have a line, somewhere. Rhodey has one. Pepper had one. I don’t want to tell you want to do—”

“Sounds good, great talk.” He hangs up and pops the cork.

-

It’s actually pretty evident, what he needs to do about the kid. Once it occurs to him, it seems like the most obvious thing in the world.

He makes it until six AM before he drives out to Queens. This is about when normal people get up on a Monday, he assumes, based on absolutely no research.

So maybe it isn’t, because he pounds on the door for about three minutes before a disoriented but alarmed looking May Parker pulls it open until it bounces against the door chain. She wipes her hair away from her face. “Mr. Stark?”

“We need to talk. Urgently. Crisis meeting.”

“Hang on.” The door shuts. The chain rattles. The door opens. May looks up at him, less disoriented, more alarmed. “What’s wrong?”

“You’re in my way.”

She jolts aside and he stalks in, scuffing his shoes against the floor. He wants to kick something, kick a hole in the wall, he wants to hurl something, he wants to slam a door behind him. He swings his arms a little, agitated. Circles the room twice.

May waits in the doorway. “What’s wrong?” There’s a bit more bite in her voice.

A second door swings open, hinges creaking and Peter steps out; eyes narrowed, shoulders squared, like he’s ready to kick someone’s ass. He instantly hunches when he sees who it is, like a soufflé deflating.

He’s—wearing the damn Hello Kitty trousers as pajamas. As if that whole thing was just a big fat joke to him.

Tony sets his jaw and points a finger in Peter’s direction. “We need to get on the same page about him. No— You need to get on my page so I can get the hell off it, it’s not my page anymore, not my problem. Never should have been.”

May stares at him unblinking.

He keeps circling the room, kicking the back of the couch. “If he wants to keep swinging around, I don’t care, his decision, I just want to be left out of it, the stupid mistakes, the freak accidents.”

“What are you talking about?” she says, loudly.

“Mr. Stark, don’t tell her!” Peter yelps, eyes wide.

Tony pauses in front of May. “Your kid is Spider-Man. Your kid. Is. Spider-Man. I really feel like a competent parent would have sussed that out by now, but hey, what do I know.”

Peter shrinks back against the wall, seems to draw into himself, sucking in a breath, expression utterly betrayed.

“And he crashed my plane Saturday night. Don’t worry, not gonna sue you, I’m a very reasonable person. Just a little bit of, of keeping him in check before he gets himself killed, that would be stellar. Because I already kicked him out of the whole fake internship, so I really shouldn’t have to deal with this anymore. Same page? My page, your page?”

He doesn’t look in Peter’s direction anymore. His face is like the sun again, probably, emotions shining far too brightly. May Parker has gone deathly pale. If she’s going to be dramatic about this, Tony really doesn’t want to deal with that, either.

“You—knew—” May starts, and yeah, okay, this is going to be a blame game. “You knew— about that— from the beginning?”

“Let’s not fault me for your personal incompetence. Consider this a favor, please and thank you, and keep the kid on a leash.” He slips his sunglasses back on and points in Peter’s direction without looking at him. “Kid. Stay away from … anything Stark related. 150 feet distance at all times. Don’t make me put that on paper.”

He leaves.

-

FRIDAY, delete Pepper’s override codes for my phone,” he says as he drives back.

“I strongly advise against that.”

“Duly noted and do it anyway.”

“Yes, boss.”

-

Rhodey is on the couch with Wanda when he gets back to the compound. He is watching her cutting price tags off shirts, his gaze warm, as if she’s endearing. It looks too homely. Tony watches them from the doorway for a moment, cautiously, then almost jumps when she suddenly lifts her gaze to look at him. There’s something about those eyes, she freaks him out.

But then her face melts into a soft, polite smile and she lifts the shirt in her hands and says “I went shopping last night.”

She’s only twenty-something, Tony reminds himself. That does something to him, brings something like a sliver of protectiveness. But look how things went the last time he took a young ‘un under his wing.

“Tony, are you good?” Rhodey asks. “You don’t look so good. You look like you’re in the Tony-zone. That’s not a good zone to hang out in, man.”

“He is in turmoil,” Wanda says. Yeah okay, back to freaking him out.

“Life is a shit-tornado,” he says, gaze wandering back to Rhodey. “You broke your spine and you still refuse to acknowledge it. I don’t get it.” He crosses the room to them, dragging his feet, and crashes into the armchair; he doesn’t sit, he crumples.

“How was Brazil? I think Happy was trying to reach you.”

Tony blows out a breath. “He crashed my plane. I think I might fire him.”

Rhodey laughs, then takes another look at Tony’s face and frowns. “Don’t even think about it, Tony.”

“You know what I’d like, I’d really like a head of security who just does what he’s told, doesn’t fuck up and doesn’t give me shit. I’d really like that.”

“Happy gives you shit because he cares,” Rhodey says sharply. “And you’ve been very good at pushing people who care out of your life lately. You want to surround yourself with people who just nod and smile at everything you say? I promise you it would be detrimental.”

“Right, right, right.” Tony wipes a hand down his face. “Everyone has a line. You have one too, Happy told me. Where’s your line, Rhodey, honey?”

“I don’t follow.”

“Or maybe you’d already be out of here if you didn’t need my tech to walk?”

Rhodey’s eyes are clear and unwavering in a way that is slightly terrifying. “Wanda, could you give me a moment with this asshole?” he asks.

“It won’t help,” she says serenely. But she gets up and leaves.

“Yeah, fuck you too,” Tony mutters. He grabs one of the pillows and hugs it to his chest.

Rhodey waits for her to disappear down the hall. “Take Happy out for a cup of coffee,” he says. “Tony. You’re spiraling. You need other people.”

“People are garbage.”

“That shouldn’t stop you.”

Tony drags a hand through his hair. “I don’t think I’m spiraling, it’s just this particular Monday. No one likes Mondays, right? I’ll be better tomorrow.”

“Just remember not to make any rash decisions while you’re in this headspace.”

“Bit late for that.” He wonders what conversation May and Peter are currently having.

Those cursed Hello Kitty pajamas, he sees them every time he closes his eyes.

-

He promised Rhodey to call Happy, but Happy calls him first. Tony is in the workshop, smashing metal parts together until his fingers cramp up from how tight he is holding the hammer. He sets it down, shakes his hand. The pain brings him down the earth a tiny bit. He’s feeling moderately better about life.

That goes away fairly quickly. His phone buzzes. “I just had a freaked-out May Parker on the phone,” Happy says. “What the hell did you say to her?”

Tony clenches the phone between cheek and shoulder to wipe his hands on a tea towel. “That’s on you, don’t know what to tell you. I gave you the chance to talk to them for me.”

“She’s quite furious.”

“Can’t imagine why, I did her a solid favor.”

“Can you call her back and talk things out like a normal human being?”

“Ah, no… I… don’t want to. And you’re not fired, by the way, so deal with her, please.”

“Tony. I quit,” Happy says. “I’m serious. Do you hear me?”

Cold spreads through his chest and down into his stomach. “Hand in your keys at reception.” He hangs up.

-

He spends the rest of the day smashing more stuff on the table in his workshop, and then smashing the table until the wood splinters apart. He smashes a holoboard open. He hammers some dents into a chest-plate and then hammers them out again. He strips the tech out of Spider-Man’s suit, ripping it apart; feels very satisfying.

He can’t find his favorite screwdriver anywhere, which blows. May have gotten lost in transit. May be buried in the sands of Coney Beach, currently. That’s Spider-Man’s fault, too. Tony should sue. Ten million in emotional damage for losing my favorite screwdriver.

As he catches his breath, standing in a holy mess of wood splinters, loose screws and broken glass that, he doesn’t even know where that came from—he catches sight of Wanda, standing behind the glass partition on the bottom step of the stairs. She looks like she has been staring at him for a good while, looking perfectly relaxed, her gaze fastened on him, piercing him like a scalpel. “FRIDAY, tell her to go Slenderman outside someone else’s door.”

He doesn’t hear FRIDAY say anything, but Wanda turns serenely and drifts away.

When evening falls he realizes he hasn’t slept since that restless nap on the plane. He empties his cup of coffee into the sink and crashes on the sofa in the corner of his workshop, stomach growling furiously.

Day 2

He wakes up when his phone buzzes. He grapples blindly through the dark, cursing under his breath, and squints at the display. Pepper is calling him. It’s seventeen minutes past midnight. “FRIDAY, didn’t I delete the override codes?”

“Not according to my data, boss.”

He grunts and accepts the call.

“You weren’t answering your phone,” Pepper immediately says, quite loudly and angrily.

“What is it this time?”

“Spider-Man crashed your private jet on Coney Island Saturday night. More than twenty-four hours ago, Tony, and you were unreachable.”

“What? Pepper, we already went over this.”

“What?”

“We discussed this whole thing last night.”

“How could we have discussed it, Tony? You haven’t answered your phone in more than twenty-four hours!”

“I told you, I’ve got this. I just spent my entire day dealing with Happy and dealing with the kid, can you let me sleep, please?”

“I don’t know how many anxiety pills you took, but I talked to Happy only an hour ago and he hasn’t heard from you in three days.”

Tony is only half-listening to her, because something else isn’t right. He grasps at the blankets with a furrowed brow. He’s in bed. He’s in his bed. He’s pretty damn sure that he crashed on the sofa last night. What the fuck, did someone carry him to bed? Did someone change his clothes?

Pepper is still talking, he realizes. “I have to call you back,” he says, cutting her off mid-sentence, and he chucks the phone aside, pushing himself up. “FRIDAY. Who dragged me up here?”

A pause. “Please clarify your question, boss.”

“How did I get to my bedroom?”

“You went straight to your bedroom after getting off the plane. You took your usual route through the eastern stairwell—”

“I went to sleep on my sofa in the workshop.”

Another pause. “Your plane landed less than an hour ago and you have not spent any time in your workshop last night, boss. I detect higher levels of atenolol and metoprolol in your system which might be contributing to your disorienta—”

“No. No. What the fuck.” He kicks the blankets away and pushes his fingers against his eyelids. “FRIDAY. What day is it.”

“Technically, Monday morning, though some people might consider it Sunday evening.”

What the fuck.

He stands, staggers, muttering ‘what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck’ under his breath as he stumbles down the hallway, supporting himself against the wall until he can burst into Rhodey’s bedroom. “Rhodey.” He crosses the room, trips over some shoes, Rhodey has too many shoes for a man who can barely walk. He hangs over the footboard of the bed, shaking his friend’s leg. “Rhodey, Rhodey, Rhodey, Rhodey.”

Rhodey blinks his eyes open, rubs at his face and looks at him. “I can’t feel anything in that leg,” he reminds Tony, voice raspy. “Welcome home, how was Brazil?”

Tony just grips the leg harder with helpless terror. “Did we talk yesterday? Did we talk about how people are garbage?”

Rhodey stares at him, blearily, the look in his eyes making it clear that he hasn’t fully landed on this plane of existence yet. “What?”

“Mr. Stark is distraught,” FRIDAY happily supplies.

Rhodey mutters something, then rolls his head to look at the clock on his wall.

Tony snaps his fingers. “Honey, I’m serious, look at me, look at me. Answer my question.”

“No. We didn’t talk. You were in Brazil.” Rhodey pushes himself up on his elbows. “Are you good, man? You don’t look good. You look like you’re in the Tony-zone, which is—”

“—not a good zone, I know.”

“When’s the last time you got some sleep?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know, Rhodey, because time stopped making sense,” he sags to the floor and presses his face through the spindles of Rhodey’s footboard. “Do you ever take beta blockers?”

“Nope,” Rhodey pushes himself up a bit higher and leans over to flick on his night light. He takes another look at Tony, eyes narrowed. “Did you mix them with alcohol or some stupid shit like that?”

“I— Yeah, I did. Unless yesterday never happened, in which case I didn’t. But if I didn’t, it wouldn’t explain why yesterday never happened.”

“Let’s start with a glass of water,” Rhodey says. “Grab my braces.”

-

“The universe is fucking with me,” Tony says. “More than usual.”

Rhodey sets a tall glass of water down in front of him, on the kitchen table. “Yeah?”

“Today already happened. Yesterday. So what is happening? I mean, it’s the same day, is what’s happening, but what is happening?”

“Drink that water. Breathe.”

Tony downs half of it in two swallows and puts it back down. “I’m not insane. It happened.”

Rhodey sits. “Okay,” he says easily, leaning forward, hanging heavily on his elbows. “You always talked about inventing time travel. Did you fuck around with a particle accelerator?”

“No.”

“So what happened yesterday? Yesterday-today, I mean.”

“Uh, I don’t know. Pretty shitty day, actually. Couldn’t find my favorite screwdriver.”

“Are you sure you’re not just insane?”

Tony pinches the bridge of his nose. “No,” he then says. “Admittedly.”

“Because you’ve been spiraling for a while, Tones.” Rhodey’s voice is gentle.

“I have not been spiraling, I’ve been fine.” He downs the rest of the water and forcefully sets the glass back down.

“I really think you should get a few hours of sleep, and we’ll talk in the morning.”

Sleep is most certainly out of the question. But he needs to figure some shit out by himself, without worried people breathing down his neck, so he says. “Yeah. Good idea.” And he helps Rhodey back to bed.

-

The spider-suit is lying on one of his workstations, fully intact, mocking him. The table. The holoboard. Tony feels dread sliding its way down his spine. He pushes the holoboard off the table and lets it shatter to the ground, just because he’s feeling petty. He steps closer to the suit and lets the blue-red fabric slide through his fingers.

He digs out his phone and calls.

“Mis’er Stark?” Peter mumbles, confused.

“Real quick. Did we talk today? Or yesterday, whatever?”

“Sir?”

“Did I come to your house and did we talk?”

Peter sounds anxious. “I don’t understand.”

“Does your aunt know about Spider-Man?”

“What?” Peter’s voice drops to a whisper. “No. No, no. Mr. Stark, what’s going on?”

“Well, you crashed my plane, for one. You could have died.”

“I’m sorry,” Peter murmurs. “I was just… I just had to… Please, can we talk?”

“You’re fourteen. There’s no possible cause that you should need to risk your life for, least of all some dumb cargo getting stolen by some small-fry petty thief.”

“I’m fifteen.”

“Oh, right, then forget what I said and go full kamikaze. You’re a dumbass. And I’m a dumbass for ever getting involved. What day is it where you are?”

“Monday…?”

“Okay, just checking.” He hangs up.

-

He still can’t find his favorite screwdriver.

-

He doesn’t feel as comfortable just barging into Wanda’s room, so he lingers outside her door until it’s somewhere close to 7 AM and she shuffles out in pajamas. She jolts back when she sees him. He’s the one catching her off guard for a change.

“Did you do something?” he asks, twirling his fingers around. “To cause all this? You’re something like a witch, right?”

She wipes her face with sleeve-covered hands before giving him a long look. “You are in turmoil,” she says.

“Yeah, no shit.”

“Have you tried meditating?”

“I just need to know if you messed with my head.”

“I can not fix your mental anguish,” she says. “Only you can.”

“Big whoop.”

“I can make you some jasmine tea?” she suggests.

What the hell, maybe it helps.

He follows her to the kitchen. “Don’t tell Vision,” she says, smiling, and puts two mugs full of water in the microwave.

Jarvis was the same, when Tony was little. There was one correct way to make tea, and he spent many patient hours teaching Tony until he had the ritual down to perfection. Jarvis certainly wouldn’t have approved of the prepackaged tea bags Wanda breaks out.

Stupid.

The microwave beeps. Wanda slowly slides the steaming mug his way. She throws a tea bag down for him, before curling the string of her own teabag around her finger. “It’s important to stay hydrated when stressed,” she says serenely as she dangles the bag into her mug. She blows gently. “I had a neighbor who didn’t, and then his ribs fell out.”

“What do you mean his ribs fell out?”

“They fell out of his body.”

“What are you— How do ribs fall out, Wanda?”

“I think it was a problem with his circulation.”

Tony slaps his hands down against the table. “WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?”

She smiles into her mug.

“Are you testing me?” Or maybe he actually is losing his mind, maybe that’s what this is. That thought is reassuring, somehow.

“You are a dandelion seed under a slab of concrete,” she says. “You have life in you. You just have to find a crack. Find your way to the sun.”

“I’ve tried crack. Didn’t work well for me.”

She tuts and sips her tea.

-

He spends the rest of his morning researching wormholes and temporal time dimensions and relativity. Rhodey turns up around lunch time and asks if he is feeling any better.

“Yup,” Tony says, turning away, because saying anything different would be counterproductive right now.

“Not freaked out anymore?”

“Nope.” Yesterday is slowly starting to feel more and more like a hallucination, even this whole morning was strange, felt off, and he isn’t sure if…

“Good. Is that Spider-Man’s suit?”

Tony doesn’t turn back around. “Is it red and blue? Then yeah.”

“Did you get back in touch with him?” Rhodey sounds high-apple-pie-in-the-sky-hopeful.

“No. It’s here because I wanted to strip it for parts.”

Rhodey says nothing.

Tony remembers sharing that first video with him, of Peter catching a bus with his bare hands. His own sense of wonder about it all, his giddiness. And this at a time when he wasn’t doing too hot: fresh out of his break-up with Pepper, right after the tragic explosion in Lagos, pre-Germany, but things between the team were already tense.

He is getting the impression that Rhodey expected Spider-Man to be a magical fix to Tony’s mood. But the reality is that Tony got too enthusiastic too soon and threw himself into a mentorship that was clearly an all-around bad idea.

“I really need to work, Rhodey.” He needs to make sure tomorrow will actually be tomorrow.

“Join us for dinner,” Rhodey says. “Vision makes superb chili.”

Tony hums. Jarvis used to make really good chili, too.

-

Pepper gave him Dr. Yune’s business card the day they broke up. Great parting gift. You’re dumped, and by the way, you’re insane, too.

Tony threw the card away. Then fished it back out of the trash and tucked it between the seat and the back of the sofa.

He digs it out, now, stained and creased, and runs his fingers along the edges. He wonders how far gone he’ll need to be before he’ll talk to a shrink about his predicament.

-

“You hung up on me,” Pepper says accusingly as soon as she answers the phone.

Tony leans back on the sofa, tapping the business card against his knee. “A million apologies. I was sleep-drunk.”

She hums, sounding unconvinced. “Did you talk to Happy yet?”

“I did. …Oh no, I guess I didn’t. I mean, technically, he quit. Just because he doesn’t remember it, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“Where are you today? At the tower?”

“Yes. I’m working.” He can hear the keyboard clattering, now that she mentions it. She’s probably got him on headset, so he can ramble on while she makes listening noises and answers her emails.

“Listen. You know me better than I know myself. Have I ever hallucinated an entire day, just created an entire day that didn’t happen?”

She is quiet for a moment. “Tony, I would really like you to talk to Happy about that plane crash,” she then says. “And to me, strictly about anything SI related. We agreed, Tony.”

“Can you please just answer my question, just this once?”

“It’s always ‘just this once’.” She exhales noisily. “And I keep getting—Yes, I mean. I remember a birthday party when you didn’t want to get out of bed because you insisted we had already celebrated it the day before. You said there were clowns and zebras.”

Tony feels himself relax. “That’s true. That’s true, that happened, I remember that. Why—Why did I think that?”

“You took something for the anxiety. Probably a little too much of something. And drank a little something too.” And she adds, in a gentler voice: “You were nervous about so many people coming over.”

“Did I take beta blockers?”

”I don’t remember, ask FRIDAY.”

That would have been JARVIS.

-

A large pot is simmering on the stove. Vision is at the table, slowly leafing through a very thick cookbook. He is looking particularly human today. “Good evening, Tony,” he says in his mild, even voice. He looks up at Tony with pale eyes.

Tony pauses, lightly resting his fingertips against the table. “Why’d you learn to cook chili?”

“I didn’t learn it, I knew it.”

Tony slowly pulls out a chair across from him and sits.

“Would you like a spot of tea?” Vision asks.

It’s a strangely, painfully familiar question. Tony shakes his head and cuts his eyes away, clenching his jaw to keep himself in check. “You eat, do you?” He looks back at Vision.

Vision closes the book and slides it to one side without breaking eye contact. But his face is a calm sea, it’s pleasant. “I can if I want to. I’ve learned it’s a crucial part of many social interactions.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

Vision inclines his head. “Indeed.”

Rude. “So we’ve never really talked much. How much of JARVIS is still up there?” He makes a circling gesture at Vision’s head.

“Much. But my memory functions differently, now. It’s as though things get muted and muddled as they get further away. I have begun to experience the passage of time.”

That makes one of them, at least. “So do you remember a birthday party where I refused to get out of bed and I was hopped up on probably some unwise combination of meds, drugs and or alcohol?”

“2008,” Vision says.

“Do you remember what I took the night before?”

“Afraid not.”

“Bummer.”

“I remember you were anxious. Humans find a lot of emotions scary, do they not?” Vision has an expression that Tony would call ‘benevolent’.

JARVIS was software; Tony entrusted it with his most personal thoughts and failures. Now that software has taken human form and is living in his house, cooking him dinner. It makes him feel exposed, and he doesn’t particularly like it. “’Pointless’ is a much better term.”

“Hm. I find them rather fascinating.” Vision rises gracefully from the chair and turns to stir his chili.

-

There’s four of them now, Tony fully realizes for the first time when they have dinner all together, with lots of ‘how was your days’ and ‘pass the salts’. But Wanda and Vision are officially in hiding. Rhodey complains about his PT as he ladles more food into his bowl. Tony is still the only Avenger left standing.

The chili is good, though. Tastes like home.

-

He stays up on the balcony, because going to sleep feels risky. All bets are off. He sits and watches his digital watch slowly tick up to midnight—

Day 3

—He wakes up when his phone buzzes. He is in his bedroom. It’s seventeen minutes past midnight. Pepper is calling.

Chapter Text

“No!” he yells into the phone. “No, no, no, no, leave me alone!” He hurls the phone across the room where it hits and shatters the mirror. He wildly kicks at the blankets to untangle his legs, he hears something rip. A very physical, solid panic ricochets through him. “FRIDAY, what day is it?”

“Technically Monday morning, though some would—”

Tony curses and rolls out of bed, hitting the floorboards.

“…Tony?” He can hear Pepper’s voice from the speaker. This is probably not even the weirdest way he’s ever answered a phone call from her.

-

He summons the suit and shoots up into the air, starts flying west.

“May I enquire your planned destination, boss?” FRIDAY asks.

“Nope.”

“Miss Potts is calling you again.”

“Block all her calls, delete her override codes.”

He needs to get out of reach, whatever this thing is, he has to shake it off, so he flies and flies and flies, heartbeat in his ears. He just needs to go, he just needs to go, go, go. He sweeps across skyscrapers, canyons, winding roads with creeping cars, lakes, villages where houses sit like little shoe boxes.

He hits the west coast before sunrise and lands heavily on a deserted beach, boots sinking into the loose sand, the great ocean stretching out in front of him.

Whoever is behind all this shit, good luck finding him here. “FRIDAY. Direct me to the nearest getting drunk, please.”

He gets drunk until he passes out.

Day 4

He wakes up when his phone buzzes. He is in his bedroom. His mirror is unbroken. It’s seventeen minutes past midnight. Pepper is calling.

He flies south. Longer, much longer. The sun is high in the sky when he hits the southern tip of Argentina. Maybe he should keep going, hit Antarctica.

Can’t get drunk on Antarctica, though.

Day 5

He tries flying east, into the wide blue yonder. He crosses the endless waves of the Atlantic. He flies and flies until he reaches Perth, Australia, which FRIDAY tells him is the point on earth that is furthest away from New York.

Day 6

He wakes up when his phone buzzes. He is in his bedroom. It’s seventeen minutes past midnight. Pepper is calling.

“No!” he yells into the phone. “Still no! The universe is fucking with me and I will not stand for it!”

-

“Rhodey.” He moves across the room, trips over the same damn shoes again. He hangs over the footboard of the bed, shaking his friend’s leg. “Rhodey, Rhodey, Rhodey, Rhodey.”

Rhodey blinks his eyes open, rubs at his face and looks at him. “I can’t feel anything in that leg,” he says. “Welcome home, how was Brazil?”

-

“Are you sure you’re not just insane?” Rhodey asks, setting a glass of water down for him.

Tony ignores the glass and rummages through his liquor cabinet instead. “You know, that’s a really insensitive question to ask, actually.”

“Insensitivity is often the only way to get a response out of you. You don’t engage in a conversation unless it’s to argue with someone.”

“I’m in fact a very agreeable person. So. You’re wrong.” He pulls out the bottle of scotch he drank a few days ago after taking beta blockers. The bottle is full and sealed.

“Don’t drink that.”

“I already did, so I won’t.” He puts the bottle in the sink and presses his fingers against his eyelids. “Okay.” He looks up at Rhodey. “Tell me something no one knows about you, so that when tomorrow is today again, I can prove to you that you told me something yesterday, which is also today, that you don’t remember telling me.”

“Is this all just a prank to get me to tell you something embarrassing?”

“Not at all, but embarrassing would be good. A two birds with one stone kind of outcome.”

“I’ll tell you something, if you drink this glass of water and breathe.”

Tony downs the whole thing in four gulps, sets the glass down and exhales noisily. “Fine. Fine! Let’s go see a shrink and figure out if I’m insane.”

“It’s almost one AM.”

“I got one I can supposedly call day and night.”

-

“Here’s something you don’t know about me,” Rhodey says as they wait for Doctor Yune to arrive. Tony tried to convince him to go back to sleep, but Rhodey insisted on waiting up with him. “I’ve been dating someone. Online. Thought that would be weird, but it’s rather convenient, actually.”

“Okay, that’s a terrible example, because if I say that to you tomorrow, you’re just gonna think I’ve been stalking you.”

“Hm.”

“Do you think I’ve gone crazy? The first time, I thought I might have gone crazy, but by now I’m pretty sure I haven’t. I’m pretty sure this is actually happening.”

“If this is actually happening,” Rhodey says, “then you’re probably the only person who can figure out a fix.”

-

Doctor Grace Yune is young. Very young. Probably even younger than young, because the round glasses and sturdy heels most likely make her seem older than she is. Though she also has a backpack that makes her look like a high-school senior.

“Twenty-nine,” she says when Tony asks, seeming unfazed by the question.

“Lordy.”

How can someone with that little life experience possibly help him get a grip on this madness?

Out of the backpack comes a notepad and a pen, and a book, a huge book. DSM-5. Tony has heard of that. It has all the problems people can possibly have in it. And it’s a really, really thick, heavy book. Makes you wonder if anyone out there is actually normal. “You carry that around, huh?”

It’s three AM. Rhodey finally went back to bed. Tony’s first ever session with a shrink takes place right there in his kitchen, with a bowl of fruit and a cheese grater on the kitchen table between them.

She lines everything up in front of her. “So,” she says. “How are you doing, Mr. Stark?”

“Well, not good, because I’m seeing a shrink.”

“Is there something wrong with that?”

“Obviously, yeah.”

She pushes her glasses higher up her nose with the back of her pen. “Admitting you want help is a very good first step.”

That sounds cliché. Tony was hoping to avoid clichés; they are for the inexperienced.

“What do you want to work on today?”

“I keep reliving the same day over and over again. This is my sixth Monday. It has been Monday for six days.” He looks down at the DSM. “Is there an entry on that?

She looks at him. She clicks her pen and opens her notepad. “Is there a history of mental illness in your family?”  

“My mother married my father. An indication of some insanity there, beyond a shadow of a doubt.” He sees a numbered list of questions on the pad in front of her. It doesn’t inspire much confidence. He feels that a good therapist would just be able to wing it.

“How long have you been feeling like it’s Monday?”

“Six days.” He already said that. She’s not only young, she’s slow, too.

Her pen slides up the paper to the first question. “And how have you been feeling about all that?”

“Not great,” Tony says, slowly and quite sardonically. “Really not great.”

“How do you typically cope with stress?”

“I don’t follow."

She writes something shorthand on her pad. “Let’s go back to … what you consider your first Monday. Was there any specific event that spurred this anxious feeling?”

“I didn’t say I was anxious,” he says, tone on the edge of impolite.

“Oh,” she says, a bit flurried. “How would you describe the feeling?”

“There’s no feeling. It’s just stupid.”

“Is there any specific event that spurred this, this, things being stupid?”

“It always starts when I wake up because Pepper calls me.”

“Pepper…?”

“My ex. Keeps trying to talk to me about the plane crash on Coney Island. I think they just reset it at midnight, though, I don’t think there’s a big… karmic event.”

“They?”

Tony vaguely waves his hands around. “The gods of time. I don’t know. Whoever they are, they got a pretty sick sense of humor.”

Grace looks at him with her head slightly cocked, like she thinks he’s crazy, which is not a good sign from a therapist. “I read about the plane crash. Is that causing a lot of stress in your life?”

“Listen, I don’t really want to talk about feelings. I just need to know whether or not I’m crazy, so I can rule that out. You know. Nervous breakdown, something along those lines.”

“I don’t do diagnoses,” she says. “You’ll need a psychiatrist for that.”

“Fuck. What are you, a career counsellor?”

She frowns a little, and clicks her pen. “Why? Are you experiencing stress at work?”

Tony pushes his chair back. “This was a mistake.”

What the hell was Pepper thinking?

-

He calls Happy.

“Finally,” Happy says. “I’ve been trying to reach—”

“I need you to drive me to the tower.”

“What?”

“I have to talk to Pepper.”

“Tony. It’s five AM and I’m drowning in plane crash-paperwork,” Happy says. “And you two broke up, you have to give her some space for once.”

“That paperwork is your own fault. And I just need to talk to her, strictly about business.”

Happy breathes quite loudly for a few seconds. Tony hears papers rustling. “Tony, can we talk about the kid?”

A pang in his chest again. He doesn’t know where those keep coming from. “What about him?”

“Are you going to talk to him?”

“At the rate it’s currently going, it doesn’t exactly matter whether I do or don’t. It also doesn’t matter whether you quit or not.”

“What?”

“Just drive me. Be here at six.”

-

Tony is restless in the backseat. Opens and closes the window. Taps his finger against the airplane-air-freshener.

“Stop kicking my seat, Tony.”

“Or what, you’ll quit?”

“Why do you keep saying that?” Happy’s voice is tight, not confused. Not a ‘why would you even think that’-voice, but more a ‘how did you know I was planning to’-voice.

“No reason at all.”

“Will you go talk to Peter today?”

“I would if I thought there was any point.” He needs to get himself out of this time loop. Then he can go lecture the kid and reveal his identity to his aunt and get rid of the rest of his problems and finally be able to just—just do nothing for once, stay in bed all day.

-

He is waiting outside Pepper’s office when she arrives at work a little after seven AM. Even from way down the hallway, he can see the way her shoulders tighten when she spots him. “Don’t get uptight,” he says loudly, voice echoing down the hallway.

“Good morning to you, too,” she says serenely as she approaches. She lets her keys dangle from her hand, opens the door. “I’m glad to see you are alive, after your rather worrying reaction to my phone call last night.”

Still not the weirdest way he’s ever answered a phone call from her.

Pepper steps into her office without looking back or inviting him in, but she does leave the door open. Tony pushes himself up and follows her inside. She has moved to the window, rolling the rotating wand to adjust the angle of the blinds, letting the early sunlight in. Her office is all soft, warm colors, yellows and oranges, and chestnut wooden shelves.

Tony plucks his sunglasses from his top buttonhole and slides them on. “Why the hell did you recommend that dandiprat Doctor Yune? She’s barely out of her diapers. Was she really the most qualified you could find?”

Pepper sits at her desk, behind two neatly arranged stacks of files. “No. She was the most available. When did you meet with her?”

“This morning, 3 AM.”

“Point in case.” She plugs her phone in and lays it to one side. “I’m very glad to hear you decided to seek out a therapist, though.”

“Yeah, see,” he collapses down in the swivel chair on the other side of her desk and digs his heels into her carpet as he swivels left, then right. “I’ve been reliving the same day over and over. I think it’s midnight when it resets. I keep waking up, and you’re calling me about the plane crash. Today was the sixth time.”

“I have been trying to call you for a while, Tony. Happy, too. And we’ve tried to get Peter some—”

“Pepper, that wasn’t me being dramatic. I’m literally reliving the same day over and over. Today is Monday. Yesterday was Monday. The day before was Monday. It’s a time loop, Pepper, and ironically, I don’t have time for that shit. So please, can you call someone to get it fixed? Because it feels like it might be a paperwork error or something, you know.”

“I don’t remember yesterday being Monday.”

“That’s the point. I’m the only one that remembers. As far as we know, of course. There could be some poor sod in, in Egypt somewhere going through the same thing. I mean, why me? I’m a respectable member of society.”

She taps her nails against her desk, purses her lips. “Have you been messing around with time travel?”

“Not lately.”

“Flew through any wormholes? Fought aliens?”

“No.”

“And what did Dr. Yune say?”

“I don’t know—That I should think about switching careers or something. She’s useless. Do you think I’m just crazy?”

“That is one of the possibilities. Do you think you’re just crazy?”

“Tell me something no one knows about you, so that when tomorrow is today again, I can prove to you that you told me something yesterday, which is also today, that you don’t remember telling me.”

She stares at him.

“I just don’t want to come across as a stalker, so don’t tell me anything about your dating life.”

“Wasn’t going to.” She exhales and moves one stack of files a millimeter to the left, lining it up with her mousepad. At the top of the pile is an intern contract, Tony suddenly notices, with Peter’s name in the top right corner. “Spider-Man is my favorite superhero,” she says. “There’s something no one knows about me.”

Tony sniffs, starts bobbing his right leg up and down restlessly. “Well, you’ve always had bad taste.”

She frowns at him.

“Listen I don’t, uh… I don’t really know how to fix all this.”

“Talk to him,” she says.

“The time loop, Pepper! How to fix the damn time loop, not the stupid kid — Fuck!” He angrily sweeps the stack of files out from under her hands. The files slide off the table and flutter to the floor in a waterfall of paper.

“Tony!”

“Never mind, because guess what, it will all be back in place tomorrow.”

She crosses her arms and glowers.

Tony deflates. “Yeah, okay, sorry,” he mutters, and slips to the floor to rearrange them all back into a pile.

Pepper comes around the desk to help. “I don’t know how to help you,” she says. “We’ve seen stranger things, I’m not saying I don’t believe you. I mean… I don’t, really. I’m pretty certain you’re just stressed. I’ve learned to take your words with more than one grain of salt. But it’s only at about an eighty-eight percent certainty. Either way, I don’t know how to help you. Whether it’s—Well, either way.”

Yes. Tony is going to have to fix this one alone. “Thanks for the twelve percent trust,” he says.

-

Rhodey is on the couch with Wanda when he gets back to the compound. She is cutting price tags off shirts. “I went shopping last night,” she says.

“How are you doing man?” Rhodey asks. “How was Grace?” He tactfully doesn’t say ‘your shrink session’ in front of Wanda. It doesn’t really matter though, whether he would or wouldn’t. Tomorrow is today again, and everything from today won’t have happened.

“Hey. Are you okay?” Rhodey asks. “Did you sort things out?”

“I—No. I’m gonna lock myself in my workshop until I crack this thing.”

Wanda frowns. “You should talk to people.”

“Won’t help.”

-

He spends the rest of the day researching temporal loops, skipping dinner and ignoring anyone who comes down and knocks on the glass partition. Wanda comes down three separate times. Tony really doesn’t know why she has taken such an interest in his daily life.

Day 7

He locks himself in the workshop, researching temporal loops and ignoring anyone who comes down and knocks on the glass partition.

Day 8

He locks himself in the workshop, researching temporal loops and ignoring anyone who comes down and knocks on the glass partition.

Day 9

He locks himself in the workshop, researching temporal loops and ignoring anyone who comes down and knocks on the glass partition.

Day 10

The knocking is really getting on his nerves. He angrily taps the sensor to let the door slide open. “What?” he snaps.

Wanda scowls right back at him. “You’re not supposed to just stay in here all day. Vision is making chili.”

“Buzz off.”

Day 11

He wakes up when his phone buzzes. He is in his bedroom. It’s seventeen minutes past midnight. Pepper is calling.

He rejects the call and turns over in bed. “FRIDAY, can you retroactively disable these override codes? So that if tomorrow is today again, I can just sleep?”

“I’m not sure what you mean, boss.”

Tony mutters a few curse words under his breath.

He doesn’t have to see anyone. He can just lock himself in his workshop all day. It doesn’t matter what he tells people, anyway. Hardly anything matters, at this point.

His phone buzzes again. All right. All right, he’s still got the—the thing that Pepper told him that no one knows about her. Maybe she’ll believe him, then.

But what would be the point? She can’t help him.

He still answers, though. “Hey.”

“You weren’t answering your phone,” Pepper says, quite loudly and angrily.

“Hmmf.”

“Spider-Man crashed your private jet on Coney Island Saturday night. More than twenty-four hours ago, Tony, and you were unreachable.”

“Are you still working right now? Sunday evening, past midnight? And then you come back in at 7 AM? Do you even sleep at all?”

“I’m Stark Industries’ CEO, of course I don’t sleep.” He can hear impatient noises of papers rustling.

Strictly speaking, Tony hasn’t slept either, for several days now. He doesn’t feel like he hasn’t slept in days. Maybe all that resets, too.

“Ugh,” Pepper says. “And I can’t find his internship contract. I don’t get it. It was right on top of the pile.”

Tony flops over onto his back. “What?”

“Peter’s contract. I got it out to— I put it on my desk, right on top of the pile, and it’s gone.”

“What? It was there the other day.”

“It wasn’t actually, I just put it there earlier tonight. Tony, Happy has been trying for days to get on the same page with you about how to handle all this. And the boy—we’re not even sure how he is doing, someone needs to go check in on him.”

“I will definitely do all that,” Tony says, “tomorrow.” His mind is racing. If the day resets, how can a file be missing from her desk now when it was and will be there at 7 AM? And why is it Peter’s internship contract, of all things, that disappeared from his space-time discontinuum? “I’ll come over in the morning,” he says. “Help you find it.”

-

 “Stop kicking my seat, Tony.”

“You deserve it,” Tony says. “For your planned betrayal.” He props his elbow on the edge of the window, then freezes. “Where is the air-freshener?”

“What?”

“The air-freshener in the shape of an airplane, you had it right here by the window. Where is it?”

“I’ve never had an air-fresher in the shape of an airplane. And the car smells fine, so I don’t know what—”

“No.” His throat is dry, there is a strange pressure building in his ears. “It was—FRIDAY?”

Her voice sounds from the car speakers. “Yes, boss.”

“There was an air-freshener shaped like an airplane right here.”

“Not according to my data, boss.”

“Fuck you,” Tony manages, gripping the front of his shirt with one hand. “You’re… You’re all screwing with me, this is…”

“Tony,” Happy sounds concerned. Oh, now he sounds concerned.

“The day looped,” Tony says furiously. “Things can’t just be gone. That is not in the terms and conditions.”

Happy mutters ‘fuck’ under his breath and pulls over. Tony feels the sharp turn, the car jolting to a halt. His fingers dig into the fabric of the chair in front of him. The door opens and Happy squeezes into the seat, his hands landing on Tony’s shoulders. His voice sounds distant. “Jesus Christ, Tony, breathe.”

“Oh, what do you care, Judas?” Tony snaps, but he does breathe. Slowly sucks the breath in and lets it back out, the way he’s been practicing his whole life, from the first moment he learned to deal with his panic attacks quietly and politely.

I’ll give you something to cry about.

“That’s better,” Happy says.

“I’m fine,” he says. “Get your hands off me. Don’t patronize me. I’m fine. Just drive.”

-

Pepper isn’t at her office yet when he arrives. He overrides her security codes to barge in anyway. The two stacks of paper are neatly in place, precisely where they were yester-today. But the internship contract is not on top. Tony leafs through both stacks of paper, twice.

By the time Pepper arrives, Tony is crawling around her office, cheek brushing against the carpet, to inspect the inches of space underneath her desk drawer and file cabinets.

“My god, Tony, it’s fine,” she says, throwing her keys on her desk. “I can just print another copy.”

“That’s not the point.”

Peter’s internship contract is gone. The little airplane is gone. The time gods are sending him a very clear message. Whatever is happening to him right now, the clues are being laid out in front of him. All of this is definitely connected to the plane crash on Coney Island.

-

Of course Peter is one of the last people to exit the school, after most of his peers have already cleared out. Whatever, it’s not as if Tony is in a rush or anything. His time used to be valuable. Now, he can’t seem to get rid of it.

The kid carries his backpack high on his back, hands wrapped around the straps, eyes on his shoes as he skips down the front steps of Midtown Tech. Tony steps out of the car, rests his elbows on the roof.

He went over the entire list of cargo that was on the plane. There was some weird shit on there, some alien stuff, some Asgardian stuff. Nothing immediately jumped out at him as something that could have jumpstarted a time loop, but something must have, this must be it, this must be how he fixes it.

Peter comes to a slow stop when he reaches the sidewalk, and then his head sways up and he looks dead-straight at Tony.

Freaky spider-powers.

Tony beckons with a crooking finger. Peter visibly swallows and meekly takes a few steps closer, hands tightening around the straps of his backpack. He moves clumsily and awkwardly for someone as agile as Spider-Man. His shoes look a size or two too big on him. He’s wearing some dumb shirt with two atoms talking to each other.

“Get in, loser, we’re going shopping.”

“Uh,” Peter says, alarmed, looking like he’d rather do literally anything else.

Tony drums his hands against the roof of the car. “Chop chop.” He gets in without another word.

It takes a few long seconds, but eventually the door on the passenger side opens and Peter slides into the seat, dropping his backpack between his feet, leaning away from him with a blank smile. “What’s… What’s up Mr. Stark?” Up close, Tony spots glitter in his hair. Looks like this kid’s been having the time of his life while Tony is going through his never-ending nervous breakdown.

“Well. You crashed my plane, which fucked up my life.”

“Right,” Peter says, fiddling with his own sleeves. “Sorry.”

Tony checks his mirror, then pulls into traffic, almost clipping the taillight of the car in front of him. “Despite that extensive apology, I feel like you owe me some help setting shit straight. So we’re not actually going shopping.”

Peter actually perks up at that. “What can I do?”

It reminds Tony of Germany. Driving from the hotel to the airport with a suited-up, overexcited Peter; going over the plan — when I call your name, nab the shield. Peter had been disgusting amounts of excited.

I just wanted to be like you.

“I need a debrief on everything that happened Saturday night on that plane, down to the smallest detail. But start with any … particularly noticeable colorful explosions. Pink stars. Silver rays.”

“Like fireworks?”

Tony doesn’t know what it would have looked like, when this, whatever, magic slash alien boobytrap was set off. But it must have looked like something. Time loops don’t just happen quietly, there has to be at least a little drama. “Yeah, like fireworks I guess.”

Peter stops fiddling with his sleeves and starts fiddling with his hair, plucking out some glitter. “I don’t know. There were kind of a lot of explosions, Mr. Stark. Everything was on fire.”

“You’re a dumbass. You could have gotten killed.”

“I had to stop him.”

“You had to nothing,” Tony snaps. “I could have tracked him down in no time, the FBI was already hot on his tail. Without causing the entire media circus or activating Ground Hog Day.”

“Huh?” Peter says, stupidly.

“When we started up that whole mentorship thing I didn’t think my main job was going to be to keep you from getting blown up on a plane or torn in half on a ferry.”

“We had a mentorship?” Peter asks, quizzical.

“Excuse me, I was giving out solid life advice for months, what else did you think that was for?”

“I don’t remember any advice,” Peter says, plucking more glitter out of his hair. “Um. Sorry. Mr. Stark, I really am sorry. I was just trying to do the right thing.”

“Yeah, well. The road to hell, and all that.” He has definitely been on the road to hell for a whole lot of Mondays by now. “And ‘sorry’ doesn’t buy me a new plane.”

“I’m sorry,” Peter repeats, sounding more distressed. “I don’t have—”

“How much debt do you think your aunt would get into if I sued you for that property damage?”

Peter sucks in a breath. Tony doesn’t glance his way. No doubt Peter’s emotions are all over his face again. “Please, please don’t—" Peter starts, voice wobbly.

“Fuck’s sake, don’t start crying,” Tony says, frustrated. “I’m not suing, unless you start crying right now. How’s that for a deal?”

Peter takes a few breaths, his fists clench then unclench. “Where are we going?” he finally asks in a steadier voice.

“Upstate.”

“Like. Upstate, upstate?”

-

“How is Colonel Rhodes doing?” Peter asks, jogging to keep up with him as they move down the broad, marble-floored hallways towards his workshop.

“Learning to walk and poop unaided, so you might consider him reborn. Toddler stages. He’s going to make his first public appearance soon, make all those journalists who claim the Avengers have fallen apart eat their words and their microphones.”

“But you kind of are the only one left, right?”

“I’m the only one right, left.”

“I could be an Avenger,” Peter says. “Uh, if—if that helps.”

“It really doesn’t.”

Down the metal staircase with broad steps they go, and the workshop comes into view, doors sliding open as they approach. Tony waltzes on through. He hears Peter’s breath hitch. The kid doesn’t ask any questions, though. He just pauses behind Tony when Tony stops in the middle of the room.

Tony turns and Peter looks back at him with trepidation, his arms folded cautiously across his chest. He looks like he expects Tony to now demand a pound of flesh.

“FRIDAY, bring up a holographic image of that plane.”

It appears over a nearby worktop.

“Get over here, kid. Show me where your point of entry was.”

Peter slowly approaches. “It… all happened pretty fast, you know, Mr. Stark.”

“You want to be an Avenger? Learn how to debrief after a mission. Think, Parker.”

“Okay.” Peter inches closer, running a hand through his own hair again and sprinkling glitter all over the workshop floor. “Okay. Well. I guess I—He definitely entered through the bottom. He used some—I think, purple alien tech. Like a high-powered plasma cutter.”

“Describe it,” Tony says, reaching for a pen.

The two of them settle around the worktop and Tony asks and asks, writes, sketches.

After a few hours, he has a whole pile of notes which—what is he thinking, these will all be gone by tomorrow. He sniffs, thumbing at them. He glances up at the clock. “I’ll order us some dinner,” he says, begrudgingly.

“I have to get home,” Peter says, eyes nervously darting over Tony’s expression. “Aunt May expects me—"

“Give her an excuse. I need you here until midnight.”

“I… have school—”

“Forget school, doesn’t matter. Give her an excuse or I tell her you’re Spider-Man.”

Panic blazes across Peter’s face and Tony swiftly looks away from him. He rustles with the piles of notes. Slides them to one side.

“Okay,” Peter says, tone strangely even. “No. I’ll—tell her I’m staying at Ned’s place.”

“Great. Was that so hard?”

He spends the rest of the evening going over every detail of the plane crash with Peter. Peter is quiet, compliant, answers every question in halting sentences. But nothing noteworthy stands out.

There has to be something to this, though. Peter has to lead him to the answer, somehow.

Day 12

So the next day, he actually takes Peter to the shoe store. “Get in, loser, we’re going shopping.”

“Uh,” Peter says, still looking like he’d rather do literally anything else.

“Chop chop.”

Peter slides into the seat, dropping his backpack between his feet, leaning away from him with a blank smile. “What’s… What’s up Mr. Stark?” His hair sparkles.

“Seat belt,” Tony instructs. He pulls out of the parking space, almost clipping the taillight of the car in front of him. “FRIDAY. Plot a route to Simera Shoes.” A navy-blue line rolls out across the map on his screen.

Peter sits next to him, head ducked, tugging at his fringe. “Uh. Why are we going shopping?”

“Because you look stupid in those shoes.”

“I don’t have money for different shoes.” Peter’s voice shoots up.

“Don’t be a dumbass,” Tony says irritably.

“Mr. Stark, this is really weird, because you fired me, actually. And. Um. Should we talk about the plane thing?”

“We should,” Tony says. “We should. Go on and talk.” Maybe he shouldn’t push for details today, but see which ones come pouring out naturally when Peter isn’t scared half to death — even if he deserves to be.

“I crashed it,” Peter says.

“You don’t say.”

“It was pretty scary.”

Great. Apparently what comes pouring out is teenage anxiety. Planes crash sometimes, no need to be a pussy about it.

“And I thought someone was probably going to call me yesterday, like, one of your people, but no one did. So I was spiraling pretty hard. And today was a sucky day, too, with Liz leaving and Flash being an asshole.”

“Your hair looks like you had fun.”

“Oh.” Peter raises a hand to shake through his hair. “Is there still…? Yeah, no. MJ made team captain and Flash was being a dick about it, so I told him he was being a dick about it, and then he glitter bombed me after last period. I was in the bathroom for, like, fifteen minutes trying to get it all out.”

Tony barely understood any of that. “Flash?”

“He’s…” Peter clearly struggles to find the right words, and finally settles on: “difficult.”

Imagine that.

“Is all your stuff okay?” Peter asks. “I think I kept everything, like… I got it all wrapped up for you.”

“I’m so grateful.”

“Mr. Stark, are you mad at me?” Peter sounds miserable and Tony doesn’t want to deal— he just doesn’t want to deal with this sort of crap. Why is he stuck in a seemingly infinite time loop where his only way out is through this awkward kid with his bright emotions, this very annoying and fidgety nail in his coffin?

“I’m not mad,” he says evenly, feeling furious. “Can you just … tell me more about the crash?”

Peter prattles on a bit about how the Stark-jet has an invisibility mode (“which is kinda awesome, Mr. Stark”) and about fighting his girlfriend’s dad (“which is really not awesome”). He seems more relaxed by the time they get to the shoe store. Definitely more relaxed than he was last night. “And then the plane was heading straight for this whole residential area, so I just yanked a bit at one of the wings and, yeah, that fixed it.”

Lordy.

It’s a high-end shoe store with odd-shaped benches and diagonal shelves. “I really don’t need shoes,” Peter says. “And I don’t know what we’re doing here. Is this a test?”

Tony doesn’t entirely know what they’re doing here, either. “Just find a pair you like, fuck’s sake,” he says. “And tell me more about the crash.”

“I always wanted shoes with little lights in them,” Peter says. “Little lights that move when you walk.”

“That’s stupid.”

Peter ducks his head. “I know. I just wanted them when I was a kid.”

He tries on about eight different pairs as he drifts from topic to topic. As Tony hoped, new nuggets of memories about the crash slowly float to the surface of Peter’s mind. None of them seem like a very solid lead to follow. But there might be something to this method.

Day 13

“Get in, loser, we’re going to the aquarium.”

Day 14

“Get in, loser, we’re going to the beach.”

Day 15

“Get in, loser, we’re going to the planetarium.”

There’s some sort of horrific kids’ event going on at the planetarium.

“Are you two here for the magic show?” A clown with a pink, flowery shirt asks when they get their tickets.

“Piss off,” Tony says.

Day 16

“Get in, loser, we’re getting some pancakes.”

Every single invitation leaves Peter as bewildered as the last one. The day either goes acceptably or disastrously, depending on how well Peter keeps his shit together. Option A, Peter keeps getting on Tony’s nerves with his barrage of apologies and questions, they end up arguing and Tony drives home with Peter sitting quietly in the passenger seat like a kicked puppy, emotions shining brightly on his face. Or option B, Peter manages to keep things civilized, keep his emotions in check, volunteers a few new facts about the plane crash, and at the end of the day he awkwardly thanks Tony for his time.

Either way, Tony has yet to learn anything useful that will end his misery. And he’s getting tired; his motivation, his fuel, his hope that this strategy would yield results is slowly dwindling away. This is all beginning to feel very pointless.

“Mr. Stark, shouldn’t we talk about the plane thing?” Peter asks meekly from the passenger seat.

Tony keeps his eyes on the traffic, swerving between lanes. “Just pancakes, today, please. That’s it. Just put on your happy face, and we’re getting pancakes.”

“I don’t have a ‘happy face’. I just have my face, my Peter face.”

He parks the car right next to the entrance of a place called ‘Flipper’s’. The parking lot is deserted and the lights inside are turned off.

“I don’t think, uh….” Peter says.

“Giddy up.” Tony gets out. He marches straight up to the door and bangs loudly on the glass window. After a minute at least, a shadow moves inside, and someone leans around a corner, face set into a frown.

Tony waves with one hand, keeps banging with the other.

She approaches, unlocks the door at the bottom with her foot and opens it an inch wide. “Sir?”

“I want pancakes,” Tony says.

“As you may have deduced, sir, we’re closed on Mondays. But if you come back tomorrow, we’ll be happy to serve you.”

She wants to shut the door, but Tony slams his hand against it. “No,” he says. “No, we are not coming back tomorrow. I want pancakes today. This is the only day I want pancakes.”

“Mr. Stark,” Peter says. Tony can hear the embarrassment in his voice.

It only fuels his determination. “I’ll pay you ten thousand dollars to make us some goddamn pancakes,” he says.

-

They get their ten-thousand-dollar pancakes, sitting in a booth away from the windows, in the otherwise deserted restaurant.

Peter looks miserable, but too apprehensive to say anything about it. He ordered his pancakes — apple and cinnamon — with a ducked head and flushed cheeks, and now eats with small bites, legs nervously bouncing up and down under the table.

Tony eats his own pancakes with gusto. There’s no point to anything anymore, and all he has left is plain and simple hedonism. “More whipped cream?” he asks, shaking the can he’s had brought out.

“No thank you, sir.”

Tony hums and adds a jiggling mountain of whipped cream to his own stack of pancakes, going round and round and round. Peter looks on with wide eyes, then cuts his eyes away when Tony shovels a spoonful into his mouth, the way you look away when your old grandma spit-dribbles soup all over her blouse.

“I still say this is all your fault,” Tony says through a mouthful of pancake.

“What is?”

“Everything wrong with my life, essentially.”

Peter looks up at him through his sparkly fringe, then looks away again. Looks like today is going to be option A; they’re going to end up with Peter all teary-eyed, trembling lips—

“Mr. Stark,” Peter says firmly. “You’re being an asshole.”

Tony pauses, fork lifted halfway towards his mouth. Some whipped cream droops off and splatters against the table. “Who, me?”

“If you don’t want to talk about the plane crash, then I don’t see what we’re doing here. This isn’t how—how superheroes behave. Even, like, super rich and famous ones.”

Oh, jeez. “Ugh, you’re making me lose my appetite. I’m trying to carpe my diem over here.”

“You can’t just do whatever you want.”

“Yes I can,” Tony says. “Because nothing matters.”

“It matters to me.”

“It won’t tomorrow.”

“And it should matter to you, too,” Peter ploughs on, determined. “Because you’re an Avenger and people look up to you. You’re supposed to be, like, kind.”

“Kindness makes you vulnerable.”

“And vulnerability is a strength,” Peter says. “And when we went to Germany you told me about that mother who lost her son and all that stuff about how important accountability is for people like us.”

What is the point of accountability when your actions have no actual consequences? What is his MO, what drive could he possibly have left in his life? It has been sixteen Mondays and he hasn’t gotten an inch closer to solving this thing. Frankly, he lost the hope that he would solve this thing a few days ago.

He slides his plate away and looks back at Peter, sitting there with his face set in a slight frown. He sighs. “Let me take you home.”

“No thank you sir,” Peter says politely and serenely, wiping his hands with a napkin. “I’ll take the bus.”

Day 17

He calls Grace Yune at 2 AM, huddled underneath his blanket. “What did you mean when you asked me how I typically cope with stress?”

“I’m sorry. Who is this?” she asks.

“I mean. How can you even cope with stress? Don’t people just wait for it to be over?”

“If you tell me your name,” she says, “and your billing address, I’ll be happy to walk you through some breathing exercises.”

“I’m already pretty good at breathing. Been doing it all my life. I just sort of feel like everything is pointless.”

A pause on the other end.

“Is there a history of mental illness in your family?” Grace asks.

Tony hangs up and lets the phone flop down to the mattress.

He is never going to fix this. This is never going to get fixed. He irreversibly broke the timeline.

Chapter Text

Day 18

Tony is slowly turning into the antagonist of his own story.

Rhodey and Happy find him face down on the couch, two empty bottles on the floor. Happy curses softly when he almost trips over one. Tony doesn’t lift his head, he presses his cheek against the couch and smells the whiskey on his own breath.

“I don’t know what to do about him, lately,” Rhodey mutters.

“He seems—Is Pepper available today?”

“I don’t want to bother her with this. It’s not her job to keep dragging him from a pit of his own mess, she broke things off for a reason.”

“It was entirely mutual actually,” Tony murmurs groggily.

“Shit. I thought you were out cold,” Rhodey says. And then, begrudgingly, “sorry about that.”

“About what, being badly informed?”

“I’m getting you to bed,” Happy says, tugging sharply at the back of Tony’s sweater. “Come on, boss.”

Day 19

He stays in bed all day.

Day 20

He stays in bed all day.

Day 21

He stays in bed all day.

Day 22

He wakes up when his phone buzzes. He is in his bedroom. It’s seventeen minutes past midnight. Pepper is calling.

“Can you not call me?” he asks her. “For once? For one Monday can you just magically decide not to call me? Just let me stick to what I’m good at. Ignoring messages and getting sandwiches named after me.”

“What? Tony. Happy has been trying to reach you for days to get on the—”

“Pepper, come over,” he pleads. “Come over and let’s hook up, that’s the only way I’m going to get any joy out of any of this. I’m nothing without you.”

“No one says ‘hook up’ anymore.”

He pushes his face into the crook of his elbow. “How would you know? And I didn’t hear a ‘no’.”

“No.” Pepper says. “Did you ever call that therapist I recommended to you?”

“The one who is so available? Are you suggesting I hook up with her instead?”

“I’m sending Happy by to check on you,” Pepper says firmly.

-

The check-up goes quite disastrously, with lots of insults and cynicism and a bit of elbowing in the gut. All of these from Tony’s end, of course.

Happy quits again. It’s whatever.

Day 23

The Mondays are still piling up. Nothing matters, which means he shouldn’t have to do anything at all. He used to love the idea of doing nothing. He would have killed for an excuse this good to stay in bed all day. Turns out doing nothing is boring and stupid, and also makes it difficult to avoid thinking about that deep chasm in his chest.

He has gone beyond the end of his tether, has been pulled apart at the seams, and it’s still Monday. What now?

He roots around his bed sheets for his phone. 11:06 AM.

He slowly swipes his thumb across the screen. His background is a picture of the beach he went to with Pepper, when things were good between them. He should change that.

Except it would reset by morning. Ugh.

He pushes himself up and throws his legs over the side of the bed.  He thinks about options as he wriggles his feet into his slippers. What if time keeps looping for the rest of eternity? And what if he can never fix it? What would that mean for the way he is supposed to live his life?

-

Wanda and Vision are in the living room, sitting very close together on the couch. Tony vaguely wonders what those two have even been up to since the Raft outbreak. But not enough to actually ask. “Coffee?”

“No thank you,” they chorus.

Tony sniffs and pulls the pot closer. “I meant, is there coffee?” There isn’t. He holds the pot upside down. Blast.

“We have tea,” Vision says. “Fresh ginger.”

“Blasphemy.”

“Are you still upset?” Wanda asks.

Tony balks, then throws a frown her way. “I’m not upset. Why would you say that?”

“You are sad,” she says. “I sense it. And you have never learned how to express that emotion.”

“And you’re stupid,” Tony tells her, slamming a button on the coffee maker.

“Are you going outside today?”

Tony rolls his shoulders, cracks his neck. “Yup. Going back to the scene of the crime. Coney Island. I just—” he huffs, and adds, petulantly. “I don’t want to talk to Happy.”

“I’ll call you an Uber,” Wanda says, taking out her phone.

“I can drive.”

“Trust me.”

-

He is never trusting Wanda again.

A deep red car with faded paint and cloudy windows is waiting at the bottom of the front steps. Tony slides into the passenger seat and looks straight into the face of May Parker. He blinks, surprised. She blinks back, clearly less surprised. Most likely, Wanda did give her the courtesy of a heads-up.

She looks quite relaxed; baggy, sand-colored sweater, loose ponytail, one elbow propped up against the window. “You summoned me?” she asks.

“I… didn’t know it was going to be you.”

“Huh,” she says. “Well, great. I was worried there was something up your sleeve. Good to know you’re more baffled than I am.”

Tony settles into his seat, knees almost knocking against the glove compartment. He can’t remember the last time he was in a car this cheap.

“Where to?”

He just wants a distraction, even if it is pointless. Pointless distractions have constituted most of his life, so in a very real sense, not much has changed. “Coney Island Beach.”

“Hoping to catch some waves?”

“Spider-Man crashed my plane there. I’ve always been a disaster tourist.”

“That checks out.” She starts the car. “Hold on to your butt cheeks.” She slams the car into reverse. Tony jolts forward, the seatbelt catching him. The tires crunch on the gravel until May can swerve onto the country road towards New York. “So,” Tony says, rubbing at his chest. “You’re an uber driver?”

“At the moment.”

“Gig economy.”

“’Tis.”

Tony looks at her, the way she relaxes back against the seat, one hand on the wheel. “Be honest. Am I currently in the doghouse with you?”

“For?”

“The internship. The— Ending the internship, specifically. Creative differences.”

She hums, pursing her lips. “It’s a shame that all didn’t work out. Peter was upset, but that is to be expected. He wouldn’t tell me what happened. But Peter is smart. His world is bigger than your internship. I assume you had good reason, and that you handled it gracefully.”

“Why would you assume that? Don’t you know me? Rumor has it I’m an asshole.”

She doesn’t laugh, just slightly lifts her eyebrows. “Are you volunteering to be in that doghouse?”

“I love to disappoint. And it also won’t matter, so…” He shrugs. “What’s the kid been up to?”

-

By the time they arrive at Coney Island Beach, Tony has learned that Peter absolutely refuses to eat peas, talks in his sleep, always has to have the car radio volume on an even number, and that sometimes he comes with her on her Uber shifts just to keep her company, doing his homework in the backseat.

Tony remembers doing his homework in his dad’s office when he was little. It wasn’t for good company; it was so his father could breathe down his neck about every single number or letter he put on paper. The bar was on Mount Everest. The air in the office was always stifling and when Tony was younger he was terrified of making even the smallest mistake. When he got older, he started making them on purpose just to see his dad get all riled up, because then he’d get thrown out of his office which gave him the opportunity to wander around the Stark building, perhaps sneak into his father’s workshop.

“Do you mind waiting?” he asks. “I don’t know how long I’ll be. Meter running and everything, I don’t know how Ubers work.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

He unbuckles his seat belt.

He kicks some sand around on the beach. Some patches are still charred black, but nothing else indicates that a plane crashed here less than two days ago. The waves of the ocean match the white noise that has been in his brain for the past few Mondays.

This seems like another dead end. He isn’t even sure why he came here in the first place. He really doesn’t believe he’ll be able to fix this.

But what else is he supposed to do with his time?

-

May drives him back to the compound. He tips her generously. He could pay her millions and it wouldn’t matter. It’ll just be back in Tony’s account tomorrow. It feels wrong, somehow, that he’s not actually compensating her. “I hope today wasn’t… aggravating.”

“No,” she says. “You’re not bad company.”

Not bad company. This May, tomorrow, will never have existed. This experience will mean nothing to tomorrow’s May. But right now she is very real, right in front of him, with feelings and worries. What Tony does won’t matter tomorrow, but it matters right now, right in this moment.

“Thank you,” he says. “You have a, uh, not a bad nephew.”

May glowers with pride.

-

A large pot is simmering on the stove. Vision is cutting up fresh oregano with slow, precise movements. “I’m making chili for dinner,” he says in his mild, even voice. “Will you join?”

“I know,” Tony says. “I mean. Sure, what the heck.” He looks at the ingredients all neatly laid out, evenly spaced apart. He sits and leans his chin on his hands. “You don’t look much like him, you know,” he muses.

Vision looks up at him with eyes pale and steady like frozen lakes.

“The original Jarvis. The human one.”

Vision looks down at the cutting board again. “I am an amalgamation of many entities, who were in turn amalgamations of many entities. So I imagine I’m reminiscent, but not much more.”

“You are reminiscent,” Tony confirms. “Feels odd.”

Vision silently scrapes the chopped oregano into a bowl with the back of his knife. There is a small frown line between his eyebrows. “What do you mean when you say ‘feels odd’?” He asks, slowly. “I have taken an interest in the way people talk about their emotions. How does it feel when something feels odd?”

“You don’t actually feel anything, it just is odd.”

“Ah.” Vision sounds eloquent even in the single syllable. He sets the tip of his blade against the chopping board and twirls it slowly, studying Tony some more. “You don’t feel anything.”

“Can you add a bit of mustard in?” Tony asks. Jarvis used to.

Day 24

Rhodey is on the couch with Wanda. He is watching her cutting price tags off shirts. Wanda smiles at Tony and lifts the shirt in her hands, says: “I went shopping last night.”

Tony hums and sags down on the couch. He leans his cup of coffee against his stomach and watches the steam curl up.

“Are you all right, man?” Rhodey asks. “You look a bit tired.”

“Fine. Just thinking about what I should do today. I don’t know. It’d be nice if it were a good day, for once.”

“A good day does sound nice,” Rhodey agrees.

He digs his heels into the carpet to keep himself from sliding down further and gazes broodingly at the blue skies outside. Perpetual blue skies. “I keep fucking things up. I fucked up so many things, lately.”

Rhodey tilts his head. He doesn’t contradict him, just says: “Your heart is in the right place.”

“I mean. It literally isn’t. I had surgery for it and everything.” He stretches with one arm. Yawns.

“You are sad,” Wanda says. She is folding the shirt neatly, tucking in the sleeves. “And you have never learned how to express that emotion.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know why I’m like this. Some people are just assholes, you know. No reason for it.”

“That’s too easy,” Rhodey says. “That’s the kind of stuff you tell yourself so you don’t actually have to think about changing your behavior, and you can stay in your comfort zone.”

“I’m never in my comfort zone. I’m not comfortable anywhere. Do I look comfortable to you?”

Rhodey looks at him — slouched down, practically sprawled across the couch — and says nothing to that. “Friday, can you list five reasons why someone would continuously attempt to provoke negative reactions out of other people?”

“Certainly, Colonel. One. Individuals with low self-esteem may subconsciously seek out negative feedback because it aligns with their own self-view. Two. Some people might provoke negative reactions as a way to get attention, especially if they feel unnoticed or neglected. Three. By provoking negative reactions some people feel they are controlling the rejection they anticipate. Four. Engaging in situations that provoke negative responses can be a way of releasing internal tension caused by complex emotions like sadness. Five. Some people are just assholes.”

Tony claps a hand over his heart. “FRIDAY, you deserve a raise.”

“You programmed her that way,” Rhodey accuses.

“You’re right. I deserve that raise.” He roughly scrubs his face with his sleeve.  “It’s just been a mess, I think. The thing with Pepper. The thing with Rogers.” It doesn’t even matter, that he’s bringing this up in front of Wanda. He doesn’t even feel unsettled about it. She’ll have forgotten by morning. He can talk more freely than ever. He can talk about things he’d usually never say out loud. Things he has never said out loud before: “He almost killed me, you know.”

“You wanted to kill, too,” Wanda says, matter-of-factly.

Tony looks at her. She is rolling a pair of socks up together. “I see it in your mind,” she says. “You desired to kill Barnes. An innocent man. Would you have, if Steve hadn’t stopped you?”

Tony exhales. “I’m not proud of that.”

“I don’t think Steve is proud, either.” She holds the next shirt up and smiles. “Look.” It has a picture of a tall hamburger. “Very American. And look.” She holds up the next one. I survived my trip to NYC.

“I like that one,” Tony says. “Good choice. I’ll get one that says I survived my trip to Germany.”

“Me too,” Rhodey says.

Tony’s heart skips a beat but he snorts at the same time, lifts a hand and punches his friend in the shoulder.

Things can get better, probably.

-

Tony has had a security detail for as long as he can remember. When he was a kid, his security guards were on a rotating schedule and hated babysitting him, because Tony kept running away and hiding from them.

After he took over the company, Obie hired his next three personal bodyguards, but they all quit within a month. Because Tony kept running away and hiding from them.

One of those times running and hiding, Tony darted out of the back seat of a limo and ducked into a shady café, promptly started a bar fight. One guy managed to get him out of there unscathed — didn’t even spill any of his drink — and then yelled at him in a back alley for a few minutes for being a fucking dumbass. That guy was Happy Hogan.

The bar is still in business. New owner, new logo, same name, same vibe: moody, with burgundy walls and dark wood tables. Tony sends Happy a picture of the sign over the entrance and a how fast can you get here?

The answer is: in twenty-eight minutes.

“I thought I was going to walk into a bar fight,” Happy says, out of breath, sweaty. He didn’t even put on a suit. Probably dropped everything as soon as he read Tony’s message. Tony wouldn’t have pegged him for a jeans-guy.

He sucks at his bright yellow drink through the curly straw. Never too early for a mango martini. “I considered it. But I’m not as young as I used to be. Don’t want to throw my back out. Or yours. Or—give you a heart attack, I guess, sheesh, should you be sweating this much?”

Happy flicks at the ball cap Tony is wearing. “That’s supposed to work?”

“It did, so far.” Even the waiter serving him didn’t look twice.

“I’ve been trying to call you for days.”

“I know. If you’re thinking of quitting right here right now, hear me out first.”

The wooden chair creaks when Happy sags into it. He yanks a paper napkin from the dispenser to wipe his face. “Don’t I always hear you out?” The napkin still has the old pub logo on it. They’re probably using them up.

“Not really. Sometimes you do the… bzzz.” Tony mimics the divider going up in the car.

“True. So, I’m hearing you out.”

“Okay,” Tony leans back, clasping his hands together behind the back of the chair. “I’ve been thinking about the meaning of life.”

“Oh, dear,” Happy says calmly.

“It’s funny, you see. When there were actual consequences I acted like there weren’t. But now that there aren’t, I’m slowly starting to get a bit, you know…” he makes a circular gesture.

“I don’t follow.”

“I think it’s because I finally actually hit rock bottom, and then discovered that, in factuality, it’s quite tedious down there.”

Happy purses his lips, he’s starting to look concerned. “What happened in Brazil, Tony?”

“Oh, no. My behavior was exemplary down there. I even ate breakfast, once. President really likes Spider-Man.”

Happy looks at him, expression difficult to read. “Who wouldn’t.”

“Sure, so uh—”

The waiter comes by to take Happy’s order. Decaf latte. Gross.

“So,” Tony resumes, tapping his fingers against his own glass, restless. “That’s the deal. I’m trying to figure out life. You seem to have all your ducks in a row. So let’s hear it, what’s it all about, what do you got?”

“All right,” Happy says, leaning in. “If I engage in this… whatever this is, for the next five minutes, can we agree to talk about the plane crash after?”

Tony gives a curt nod. “Wow, yes. The plane crash. Definitely haven’t talked about that enough.”

“And if I’m getting this right, you’re asking me about the meaning of life?”

“Sure. But give me an abridged version. The cliffnotes.”

Happy leans his chin on his hand, scrutinizing him from across the table. “If working for you taught me anything, it’s that life is just about embracing the chaos. You know, in the greater scope of things, nothing we do matters.”

“That’s depressing.”

“No it’s not. It means there’s no pressure.”

“I like a bit of pressure, though.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Hm,” Tony looks down at his glass, slowly swirls his martini around.

“I think what you actually like is a distraction and a challenge. It happens with people with a high IQ, they get easily bored and quickly lose focus. It gets mistaken for ADHD a lot.”

“Did you read up about this stuff?”

“Pepper recommended a book to me.”

Tony squints. “You guys have like a—a support group so you can all help each other deal with me? Are you going to stage an intervention? If you are, please make t-shirts. I want those t-shirts.”

Happy rolls his eyes and then sits back, pulling his hands back so the approaching waiter can set down a cup of decaf ooze. Happy snatches up a packet of sugar and slaps it against his other palm before tearing it open. “The recommendation was pre-break-up,” he says. “Which isn’t to say she—Well, no. Let’s not go into it.” He pours the sugar into his coffee and stirs brusquely.

“If it’s meaning of life stuff we’re discussing, let’s just agree that I’m… I’m nothing without her.”

Happy frowns without looking up at him. “Listen, Tony. I think it’s pretty simple. If you’re nothing without your girlfriend, you shouldn’t be with her.”

Tony sniffs and looks away, squinting against the dim lights. The damn cigarette smoke in this place is stinging his eyes.

I’ll give you something to cry about.

“So. Plane crash?” Happy asks tersely.

“Yeah. What do we do about that damn kid?”

“Talk to him?”

Tony lets his head fall back and groans. “Why do people keep suggesting that?”

Happy tugs him forward by the arm. “Don’t do that, people are gonna recognize you.”

Tony huffs and hunkers down in his seat, pulling his cap down. “I thought I was rid of him, and now the universe has decided to pull me into this endless cycle of people telling me to talk to him.”

Happy wipes his hands together. “Don’t go against the universe.”

“The universe can eat my shorts. Seriously. It’s an asshole.” He wraps his mouth around the straw again, making sure to scowl as he drinks.

Happy takes a slow sip of his coffee. Looks at Tony for a while. “If it weren’t for him coming in clutch, you would have lost that entire plane, Tony. And you would probably have fired me, so I owe him. And you owe him too, because you’d be pretty lost without me, let’s be honest.”

“Not as if you haven’t considered quitting, anyways,” Tony says, broodily.

Happy’s mouth twitches into a crooked frown, he inhales—

“Don’t—” Tony stares at his glass, feeling strangely resentful. “Just tell me the truth right now. Don’t tell me you never consider it.”

“I consider it all the time, Tony. And then I worry that impulsively I’ll actually do it, because I know I’d regret it a day later. Because sadly, this job is my life.”

“Sadly.”

“Yes, it’s very sad, let’s not pretend it isn’t. Like those pictures of dogs sleeping on their owner’s grave. I am that dog, and you are the grave, you’re the damn grave, Tony. And if I ever did quit, I would still want to be there as your friend. If you’d have me.”

The unexpected turn into tenderness makes Tony’s heart pound. There is a chasm somewhere in his chest that opens up in moments like this, but he is afraid to get near it.

“You know why it’s hard to work for you sometimes?” Happy continues.

“Because I’m an asshole?”

“No. Because you act self-destructively and it’s difficult to be around. Makes me feel powerless.”

Tony slurps up the last of his martini. “Try a support group.”

Day 26

He is waiting outside Pepper’s office when she arrives to work a little after seven AM. Even from way down the hallway, he can see the way her shoulders tighten when she spots him. That was always a thing; it always hurt to know he was making Pepper’s life so much more difficult. He tries to pretend he doesn’t care— doesn’t even notice. Ignorance is bliss, and feigning ignorance is a weak imitation of bliss, which is as good as he usually gets in life.

“Don’t get worried,” he says, voice echoing down the hallway.

“I’ve been trying to call you,” she says as she approaches.

“Yeah.” Seventeen minutes past midnight. He turned his phone off and went back to sleep. He’d already decided he would come see her today.

She lets her keys dangle from her hand, opens the door. “Are those for me?” She looks down at the plastic clamshell container of red grapes in his lap.

“Special delivery. Gas station grapes. The kind with all the toxins on them.”

He follows her inside. She rotates her blinds, letting the sun in. “Are you aware that your plane crashed on Coney Island beach?”

“Very aware. The awarest.”

She looks back at him, raising an eyebrow. “But you didn’t think it was worth picking up your phone over?”

“I wasn’t aware — at that time. Which isn’t an excuse, trust me, I know I suck.” He places the grapes on her desk.

“Have you talked to Happy, then?”

“I will. I’ll talk to him, I’ll deal with it, the plane crash, it’s all the way at the top of my list of priorities. Check’s in the mail.” He takes the swivel chair and looks at the two neatly arranged stacks of files in Pepper’s desk. Peter’s internship contract is back at the top of the pile. At this point it’s… whatever. “Question.”

Pepper visibly braces herself. “Hm?”

“What, do you think, is the meaning of life? What’s your reason to get out of bed?”

“Ah.” Her shoulders relax. Apparently an existential crisis doesn’t seem like much compared to Tony’s usual. “Put some good into the world,” she says, taking her own chair. “Help people out. Even the ones who are particularly exasperating. Or perhaps, especially them.”

That was definitely a dig. Tony suppresses the urge to stick out his tongue at her, since he feels like that would somewhat prove her point. “What if the good you put into the world would be meaningless by tomorrow?”

“Then I’d just do it again tomorrow.”

“Sounds exhausting.”

“No one ever said life was easy.” She plugs in her phone and leans back in her chair, steeples her fingers together and looks at him in that particular way of hers.

“Marry me, Ms. Potts.” Tony says, because he can’t stop himself. “I’ll take your last name.”

“You know how our wedding would go? The officiant will say ‘repeat after me’, and you’ll say ‘don’t tell me what to do’, push over a vase of flowers and run out.”

“I didn’t hear a ‘no’.”

“No.” she says. “But I do love you, Tony. Probably shouldn’t be saying that, but it’s true. We didn’t break up because I fell out of love with you.”

Tony’s lip curls in self-contempt. “You should, though. I suck. You should fall in love with someone better”

“I’m afraid it’s not up to you to decide who I fall in love with.” She leans in and pulls the grapes closer, snapping the plastic container over. “Do you know why it was hard to be your girlfriend?”

“Because I act self-destructively and it makes you feel powerless?”

“No, because you’re an asshole.” She pops a grape into her mouth. Her eyes twinkle.

Tony almost asks her to marry him again, but he gets a hold on himself just in time.

Day 27

Peter carries his backpack high on his back, hands wrapped around the straps, eyes on his shoes as he skips down the front steps of Midtown Tech. Tony steps out of the car, rests his elbows on the roof.

Peter comes to a slow stop when he reaches the sidewalk, and then his head sways up and he looks dead-straight at Tony.

Tony drums his hands against the roof and sends him a bright smile. “Get in, loser, we’re going shopping.”

“Uh,” Peter says, alarmed, looking like he’d rather do literally anything else.

“Chop chop!” He gets in.

After a few seconds, Peter slides into the seat, dropping his backpack between his feet, leaning away from him with a blank smile. “What’s… What’s up Mr. Stark?” His hair sparkles.

“Seat belt,” Tony instructs. “FRIDAY. Plot route to Simera Shoes.” A navy-blue line rolls out across the map on his screen.

Peter stares at him, wary, tugging at his fringe. “Woah,” he says. “Déjà vu.”

Tony was about to pull out of the parking space but freezes. “What? What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. Nothing. Just normal déjà vu. Are we in the matrix?”

Tony breathes out slowly, then pulls out of the parking space, careful not to clip the taillight of the car in front of him. “How are you?” he asks neutrally.

“I don’t know sir. I kept waiting for someone to call me about the plane crash, and no one did. I was spiraling pretty hard this weekend.”

“I was in Brazil.” Not that he would have called otherwise, because he sucks.

“Oh. That’s great. Uh. Great, great beaches, probably.”

“I don’t like beaches. Smell of fish.”

Peter laughs nervously. He is still plucking glitter out of his hair.

“Hey,” Tony says. “What’s the name of that piece of shit who bullies you at school? ‘Speedy’, or something?”

“Flash,” Peter says, before going tense, shoulders hiking up. “I mean—No one is… Why would you say someone is bullying me?”

“Someone glitterbombed you.”

“That was a prank. Friendly prank.”

“Okay,” Tony says easily, but he’s got the name ‘Flash’ locked in. Target acquired.

“Mr. Stark, why are we going shopping?”

“I’m buying you shoes. The best shoes you can find. Shoes with LED lights. And you have to wear them today, don’t… don’t wait until tomorrow.”

-

He gets someone to line them all up for Peter, eight different pairs of light-up shoes. Shoes with pulsing lights around the edges, shoes with rainbow lights in the soles.

“Are we going to talk about the plane crash?” Peter murmurs when the store clerk is out of ear shot.

Tony shrugs with one shoulder. “If you want.”

“I thought you were gonna be way more upset about all that.”

“Nah.” Tony sits on the shoe fitting stool, elbows leaning on his knees as he watches. Peter tries on a first pair with wary movements, his eyes flitting back and forth between Tony’s face and his own feet.

Tony doesn’t want to be the one who puts that mistrust in Peter’s eye, or that tightness in Pepper’s shoulders. He doesn’t want to suck so much. “Hey. What’s the meaning of life, do you think?”

Peter is the first person to look surprised at that question. The complete eyes wide, mouth dropping open. Just goes to show how much Happy and Pepper are used to his shit.

“You know. The big answer to the big question. You’re a smart kid. What do you got?”

Peter looks down to tie his shoelaces. “This is a test, right? The shoes, and the weird questions?”

“Yes. You haven’t passed yet.”

Peter sits back and wriggles his toes inside the shoes, then stands, rocking back and forth on his feet. “I don’t know, Mr. Stark. I sort of think the answer is changing all the time, you know? Like Ditto, from Pokémon. So you might figure it out, but then in the next moment, it changes. So there is one answer that is right, but there isn’t an answer that is right all the time. You have to keep looking for it.”

“You’re saying the meaning of life is a Pokémon.”

“Yeah.” Peter smiles. A more genuine smile than anything Tony has seen from him so far. “You got anything better?”

“How are the shoes?”

“Pinch a little.”

“I think it’s good when they pinch a little at first. They stretch with wear.” Or they would, if time were linear. “Try on another pair anyways.”

Peter sits back down on the bench in front of him and toes the shoes off. “Mr. Stark, can you be honest with me? What are we doing?”

“I don’t know. Bonding. Apologies if I suck at it. Quick recap of my childhood. My mother tried very hard, but never quite understood me. My father, I think, could have understood me, but never tried.”

That chasm in his chest is creaking. I’ll give you something to cry about.

“That’s really sad, Mr. Stark.”

“It’s not. Just a bit stupid.”

“No,” Peter says firmly. “It’s sad.”

Tony hums. “Yeah, okay. Maybe.”

Peter shifts on the bench, tracing the ridges between the floor tiles with his big toe. “Why are we, um, bonding?”

Tony shrugs again, aiming for casual but it feels stilted. “I just wanted it—to be a good day.” He slides the next pair of shoes closer to Peter with his own foot. “You’re a good kid,” he says. “I’m sorry for being so damn useless. Sorry I took your suit. I mean. You had it coming. You screwed the pooch hard. Big time. But then you did the right thing. I was wrong about you. I’d tell you to go find a better mentor, but I know your options are limited.”

“You’re pretty cool, Mr. Stark,” Peter says encouragingly.

This kid’s capacity for compassion is a little intimidating. “You’re a pretty big nerd, though. You double-knot your shoelaces. So the bar is low.”

-

When he gets home, Wanda is in the kitchen, nuking more jasmine tea in the microwave. “How are you?” she asks chipperly.

“I suck,” Tony says, “I’m a terrible person.”

She slowly turns the teabag over between her fingers. “Hmmm,” she says.

-

He has FRIDAY play him a video of Ditto the Pokemon who is, as it turns out, a shapeshifting, pink-purple-ish blob with quite a vacant expression. There’s your meaning of life, right there.

Day 28

He wakes up when his phone buzzes. He is in his bedroom. It’s seventeen minutes past midnight. Pepper is calling.

He answers. “Hi there, Ms. Potts.”

“You weren’t answering your phone,” Pepper immediately says, quite loudly and angrily.

“Yeah. I’m sorry. How are you?”

“I’m— I’m all right. But Spider-Man crashed your private jet on Coney Island Saturday night. More than twenty-four hours ago, Tony, and you were unreachable.”

“I’ll deal with it,” Tony says. “Promise. You should go home, it’s late. Practically Monday.”

Chapter Text

Day 29

“Basically,” Tony says, slowly doodling on his notepad, “I need to figure out what’s wrong with me. From my understanding, that’s where you come in, right?”

“Admitting you want help is a very good first step,” Grace says.

It’s almost three AM and there’s no one else Tony can bother at this time, so he figured he might as well call Dr. Yune again. What, with her being so available.

“You think there is something wrong with you,” Grace clarifies.

“Yeah. Uhuh. And I would like a simple, nice and simple solution.”

“All right. I can walk you through an exercise.” She sounds brisk, cheerful even. Like she just learned this new trick in therapy school and is excited about getting to use it. “Do you have paper and pen?”

“I do.”

“It’s called cognitive restructuring. Pick a situation. Any situation. And write it down.”

“Okay,” Tony says. He props up the notepad against the pillow next to him and writes Talked to Peter at shoe store.

“Did you write it down?”

“Sure did.”

“Now write down a thought you had in that situation.”

I want to be a better person, Tony writes.

“Now write down a more balanced, alternative thought.”

“An alternative thought?”

“Yes. A more balanced one.”

“I don’t follow.” Gods, therapy is hard.

“For example, if you argued with a friend, and your thought is that your friend now hates you, a more balanced alternative thought would be that your friend might be upset, but he doesn’t hate you and you can get past this together.” She sounds like she is reading out loud at this point.

“Right. I don’t think I picked the right sort of situation at the start.”

“Any situation is fine.”

“Look. I don’t really want to change my thoughts, in the first place. I want to change my personality.”

“It’s important that you trust the process.”

“You know what. I’ll call you back tomorrow.”

Day 30

“It’s called cognitive restructuring. Pick a situation. Any situation. And write it down.”

Tony writes down Happy says he quits.

“Now, write down the thought you had in that situation.”

Happy hates my guts, Tony writes.

“Now, write down a more balanced, alternative thought.”

Happy only hates my guts sometimes.

“Now, how does that feel?”

“Um.” Tony scratches his chin. “Not sure,” he admits.

“You don’t feel better?”

“…I’ll call you back tomorrow.”

Day 31

“Do you have paper and pen?”

“I do, but—”

“It’s called cognitive restructuring. Pick—”

“No. Sorry. I don’t think that shit works for me. Can I ask you something?”

“Certainly.”

“How long have you been out of therapy school?”

She takes a beat before she answers. “I graduated a little over a year ago.”

“Why do you want to be a therapist?”

“I was already doing it for most of my friends anyway. Figured I might as well get paid.”

Tony snorts. “See. That was funny. I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, partly because you won’t remember tomorrow, but lightening the mood is important. Any other exercises up your sleeve that you can throw at me?”

“Um. None that I can…”

“We’ll talk later,” Tony says. “Maybe.”

Day 32

He takes Peter to the beach again, because he feels like it.

It still confuses the hell out of Peter, of course. “Why are we here, Mr. Stark?”

“Shooting the breeze. I enjoy your company. Teach me something about Pokémon.”

Turns out Peter knows a lot about Pokémon.

Day 33

He has been making an effort to spend time with Rhodey and the others, but he can’t, he really can’t have chili for dinner again. He invites Happy to go out for pizza instead. It’s really fancy pizza, but it’s pizza. Happy doesn’t know what half the cutlery is for, but also doesn’t care; he sweeps them all into the center of the table with a bit of a patronizing look and eats with his hands, so Tony does, too.

“If I went to therapy,” he says as he picks the capers off his pizza, “what do you think I should be treated for?”

“Maybe for ordering pizza with capers when you’re planning to take them all off anyways.”

“It’s a serious question.”

“It wasn’t entirely an unserious answer because it is a bit weird, Tony. But, I don’t know.” He takes a long swig of his wine. The waiter had come to the table to show him the label, but Happy had wafted a hand, saying ‘just pour it’ with an irritated expression. “Are you going to therapy?” He asks.

“I’ve been trying, but I don’t know where to start.”

Happy picks at his teeth. “I think generally, you know, the shrink does tend to take the lead during your sessions. And they always ask about your childhood, though maybe that’s just in the movies.”

“I like capers, by the way. I just eat them separately.”

Day 34

He finds a proper therapist, balding man in his fifties, lots of life experience under his belt, who is willing to pencil him in that afternoon for a hefty fee.

He does ask a lot about Tony’s childhood. He doesn’t have the DSM on display, or a pre-written list with questions and exercises. He just listens very intently and nods a lot.

Tony finds that he prefers Grace, actually. Clumsy-ing their way through this mess together.

Day 35

“So, are you dating anyone?” he asks Rhodey when they’re having a beer on the balcony.

At least the weather is nice. Permanently blue skies. Imagine having endlessly looping Mondays where it just rains.

Rhodey lifts an eyebrow, resting his bottle against his stomach. “No. What makes you ask?”

“Oh. No reason. Just thought it would be nice. I promise I wouldn’t make fun.”

“Hm.”

“Do you remember my parents?”

Rhodey looks surprised. “Yeah, I remember them.”

“Do you remember if I cried when they died?”

“I don’t think so. You just sort of shut down. Disconnected.”

Tony wipes the condensation of the bottom of his bottle, says nothing.

“You’ve never talked about this.”

Tony purses his lips, scratches at the label of his beer bottle with one thumb. “I suppose it’s just… difficult to grieve them. Him, particularly, when I know he would have been annoyed about it. He would have gone ‘stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about, people die, don’t be a pussy about it’. And I thought I was fine. But then I went and almost killed Barnes.”

Rhodey nods slowly. “Yeah,” he says.

They drink in silence for a little while.

“I actually am dating someone,” Rhodey says.

Day 36

“What do you think your friends think of you?” Grace asks.

“I think they think I’m an asshole, but they’re nice and I’m useful, so they put up with it.” Somewhere along the way, he made the mistake of surrounding himself with nice people.

“Why would they think you’re an asshole?”

“Because they are good judges of character.”

That’s the thing about time loops. You can tell your shrink anything you want, anything you wouldn’t normally say. She won’t remember it tomorrow. It’s strangely freeing.

“Have you ever cried in front of them?”

“Oh, no. I’ve had my tear ducts surgically sealed off with Botox.”

There is a moment of silence as she clearly tries to figure out if he is kidding.

Day 37

He takes Peter to the planetarium again.

“Are you guys here for the magic show?” the clown asks.

“….No?” Peter says.

“Yes!” Tony says.

Day 38

“I brought you coffee,” he says. “Or rather, something almost entirely unlike coffee. Decaf latte with sugar.”

“Huh,” Happy says. “That’s—thanks. Tony, we really need to talk about the plane crash.”

“Hm,” Tony says. “Do you think the kid would make a good Avenger?”

The old spider-suit is still downstairs, in his workshop. He’d like to upgrade it. A bit sturdier, something that would hold up through a plane crash. But that’s not an easy task when every bit of work you do gets undone past midnight.

“Maybe he would,” Happy says. “If he had a good mentor.”

“Agreed.”

Day 39

He gets himself invited to Grace’s practice for the first time. It’s a rented little space in the same building as a travel agency and a wedding planner. Her waiting room has just enough space for two blue chairs and a square wooden table covered in flyers about mental health.

Grace walks out just as he picks one up randomly. He quickly puts it back down, but she noticed.

“It’s a pamphlet about child abuse,” she says.

“Huh,” Tony says.

“For people who were abused as children.”

“Huh,” Tony says.

“Do you want to take it with you?”

“Is that a trick question?”

-

He feels inexplicably drained after this particular session, and decides to order an Uber.

“You summoned me?” May says, rolling her window down.

“I knew it would be you.”

“I suspected as much. Something up your sleeve?”

“Not at all. Just a bit of decent company. Do you mind?”

“Not unless you mind getting your ears yapped off about my brilliant nephew.”

Day 40

There are days, lately, when Peter is a bit more mellowed out. Which is odd, because time resets for him. It must be something in the way Tony approaches him. They’re back at the aquarium one Monday when Peter randomly asks: “if you could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be?”

“You, of course,” Tony says. “And preferably, alive.”

Peter chuckles. “Imagine getting pancakes together and me sitting across from you, like,” he crosses his eyes and lets his tongue dangle out.

“What about you?” Tony asks.

Peter instantly sobers. “My uncle Ben,” he says, and then flushes a bit, as if he hadn’t meant to say that so readily. His eyes go soft and moist around the edges and he ducks his head.

“Good choice,” Tony says, and Peter’s shoulders relax.

Day 41

He works on a new Spider-suit. He got an idea and couldn’t not try to build it. Who cares that it will be gone by tomorrow. He’s having fun today.

Day 42

“Why are we going to the beach?” Peter asks, shifting nervously in the passenger seat. His hair sparkles in the sunlight.

“It’s a nice day.”

“Aren’t you mad about the plane?”

“The… Oh. Nah, kid. That’s ancient history.”

“It happened last Saturday.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t remember what I had for dinner last night, so…” It was probably chili.

Peter tugs his sleeves over his hands, his legs wobble. But he smiles.

Day 43

“I think daddy dearest probably would count as abusive by modern standards. Back then people didn’t worry about it as much. This is back when people still sent children up chimneys.”

It’s three AM again, and Grace is the only person he wants to bother at this hour.

“What makes you say he was abusive by modern standards?”

“Just that he disliked me, and didn’t hide it. I don’t think he ever hit me. I wouldn’t be surprised if he did, I just don’t particularly remember it.”

“And how does that make you feel?”

“Uh. Sad.” He’s just saying it because he knows that’s what she wants to hear.

“It’s good to acknowledge these feelings,” she says happily.

“Uh-huh.”

Day 44

It’s been a few Mondays since he actually read the obituaries. He folds the paper in half and leans back against the kitchen counter as he reads. Names and dates, achievements made and family left behind. There’s one obituary for a dog, Remembering Daisy. He remembers the way he’d snorted about it the first time he read it. Her favorite activities were stick collecting, shoe chewing and sunbathing. I will miss her forever.

His eyes become misty and he blinks, shakes his head, before tossing the paper back on the kitchen table. What the hell, he’s welling up over dog obituaries now? What is this therapist doing to him?

Day 45

He tries to hear a little more each time Peter tells the story. He is slowly reconstructing the evening backwards. The crash before the fight on the beach. The fight on the plane before the crash. The warehouse before the plane.

“And he was like,” Peter deepens his voice, “Hey Pete, didn’t hear you come in.”

“He didn’t actually call you Pete, though, right?” Tony clarifies. “I mean, this guy doesn’t—”

“Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, he’s my friend’s dad, he drove us to prom.”

“But you were just you in the car. You weren’t…”

“No. I mean, yes, but he totally found out who I was.”

Tony feels sick. “You never told me that part before.”

Peter looks at him strangely. “This is our first time talking about it.”

“Jesus. This is the sort of stuff you lead with! That guy knows your identity?”

“I’m sure it’s fine. You know, he wasn’t— I think he kinda liked me, despite almost killing me, you know, so he might not tell anyone.”

“I need to lie down,” Tony says, and then he does, in the middle of the store, surrounded by light-up shoes.

Day 46

Adrian Toomes is being held in a federal detention center in Brooklyn.

“Well, well,” Toomes says through the phone, leaning forward, his elbows touching the glass partition. “The merchant of death himself. What’s wrong, lost a plane?”

“You know about Peter,” Tony says. “I’m here to establish how much of a threat you are.”

Toomes grins slyly, makes his voice sound bored. “You know about him too, do you? Is he your little sidekick? You’re not being very subtle, not very strategic.”

“Guess what, it doesn’t matter. I just need to feel you out, as many times as needed.”

“I think I’ll sell his name to the highest bidder,” Toomes taunts. “The kid will have to surround himself with security guards for the rest of his life. Put him in an ivory tower, Stark.”

Tony leans closer, studying Toomes’ face carefully. “It could get him killed, yeah. His aunt, too. Does that make you happy? Do you like the idea of getting Peter killed?”

“You may want to lower your voice,” Toomes bites out, his eyes flitting around the room. “Or it will be on your head when other people find out his identity.”

“That worries you, does it?”

Toomes pokes one finger against the glass. “You’re an asshole, Stark. I’d happily support anyone’s crusade against you. But your little protégé’s identity is fine. My beef is not with him.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Toomes shrugs. “Not my problem.”

Day 47

“Well, well,” Toomes says through the phone, leaning forward, his elbows touching the glass partition. “The merchant of death himself. What’s wrong, lost a plane?”

“Yes,” Tony says, keeping his voice low. “And as good as it is to see you behind bars, I know someone else was involved. I’ll willing to pay handsomely for any information you can give me on the one people call ‘Spider-Man’.”

Toomes’ face falls carefully blank. “I know nothing about him. We weren’t exactly allies in this.”

“Which is why I’m sure you’d have no qualms handing over whatever you do know. I want to get my hands on that mutant, Mr. Toomes, whatever it takes. Name your price.”

“You’re eager.”

“His blood is valuable.” Tony makes an effort to use his most chilling, detached voice.

A muscle jumps in Toomes’ jaw. “I don’t know anything about him.”

“I’ll have the charges dropped as well, of course.”

“I don’t. know. anything. about him.”

“Two million.”

“I don’t know.”

“Ten million.”

“Stop. You’re wasting your time here.” Toomes’ face is carved in stone.

“I can see that.” Tony exhales slowly. “Thank you for your cooperation.”

Crisis averted.

Day 48

How on earth is he supposed to keep Peter from stumbling into stupidity like this? He’s only— shit, fifteen. And Tony can do better, he can do better. But he’s still just… Tony Stark.

He should probably order an Uber.

-

“May,” he says, as she navigates them through Manhattan. “Peter is Spider-Man.”

“What the FU—” she slams into the green van in front of them and the airbags erupt from the dashboard.

Day 49

“May. Could you pull over in that parking spot right there, right over there?”

He waits until she has come to a full stop. Looks her in the eye. “May. Peter is Spider-Man.”

She jolts, glasses sliding down to the tip of her nose. “What the fuck?”

“I’ve known for months and never told you. I took him to Germany to fight Captain America. He got punched by a literal giant. Um. What else…”

Her hands curl around the steering wheel. “Get out,” she says.

“I just thought—”

“GET OUT!”

Day 50

“May. Peter is Spider-Man.”

She jolts, glasses sliding down to the tip of her nose. “What the fuck?”

“I’m sorry. He didn’t want you to know, I tried to respect his wishes— Well, no, it suited me, actually, let’s be honest. I was wrong.”

“What the fuck?” she says.

“I’ve kept him safe.”

“You’ve kept him safe?”

“Yeah. I’ve been—”

“Get out,” she says.

Day 51

“Get out.”

Day 52

“Get out!”

Day 53

“Get out!”

“May—”

“GET OOOUT!”

Day 54

He’ll circle back around to all that at some point. Maybe there won’t be a magical way to tell her. Maybe she’ll just be… furious. For a few days. And they’ll have to find a way to move past it.

He needs a quiet day, so he takes Peter to the museum of natural history. Peter is particularly drawn to the Hall of Human Origins. “Where do you think I fall in the story of evolution?” he asks. “With the sticky fingers?”

“You’re a hybrid puppy. You fall between a neanderthal and a Japanese wolf.”

“I would totally want hybrid puppies,” Peter says. “With little tentacles, oh my gosh. I would raise them in my bedroom, build a nest under my bed.”

Day 55

He takes another quiet day, working on the Spider-suit again. He’s got the steps mostly memorized, he can practically create the whole new suit in just a day.

Day 56

He wakes up when his phone buzzes. He is in his bedroom. It’s seventeen minutes past midnight. Pepper is calling.

“You weren’t answering your phone,” Pepper says, quite loudly and angrily.

“I know.”

“Spider-Man crashed your private jet on Coney Island Saturday night. More than twenty-four hours ago, Tony, and you were unreachable.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I was… being self-involved.”

“Are you back in New York?”

“Yeah. Just got back, just about an hour ago.”

“Please call Happy.”

“Okay,” Tony says. “You know, I, I hate that I make your life so much more difficult. I care about you so much. I pretend like I don’t care, because I don’t know, didn’t know how to be different, you know. So it’s easier to pretend like the way I am is fine.” Vulnerability is at the core of every relationship, Grace told him in one of their 3 AM phone calls.

There is a long pause. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, fine. Don’t worry. Just ruminating.”

“You don’t always make my life difficult,” she says. “But if would be nice if you called Happy about the plane crash.”

“I will. I promise.”

“All right,” she says. “Thank you for — saying those things. That was sweet. I wish you could see yourself the way I see you.”

Day 57

He slides into the passenger seat.

“Don’t do that,” Happy says tersely. “How am I supposed to pull up a partition between us if you’re not in the back?”

Tony wiggles a thermos in his face. “Decaf latte with sugar.”

“Hmpf,” Happy says, but he takes it. “Thanks.” He shifts gears. Tires crunch on the gravel until Happy can swerve onto the country road towards New York.

Tony leans back in his seat and watches trees whizz past. “Hey,” he says. “Tell me something no one knows about you.”

Happy raises both eyebrows. “That certainly doesn’t sound like a trap.”

“It’s not a trap. It’s bonding. Come on. I know your coffee order. I know you wear jeans.”

“Hey. That’s classified.”

“Sorry, gig’s up. So what else is classified. Your favorite ice cream flavor? Your blood type? Your Instagram handle?”

“You want to know my blood type?”

“Not really, unless it’s classified, in which case yes.”

Happy sips his coffee. He has a certain expression on his face that makes Tony think that if he just waits, just a little longer—

“You remember that disastrous birthday party in 2008?” Happy asks.

“Yeah. Zebras and clowns.”

“I don’t remember zebras and clowns, but I remember you told me the punch was non-alcoholic when it really, really wasn’t. I got tipsy, which meant it took me far too long to notice you had gone missing from your own party. And then you started texting me clues to find you.”

“You found me.”

“In the storage closet with a bucket over your head.”

“I don’t remember a bucket.”

“And we sat down between the cleaning supplies, you said you wanted a blow-up hot tub for your birthday, so we went online and bought one. And then you said you wanted a pet, so we ordered you a FurReal friends robot puppy because they were on sale everywhere. And then you said you wanted to marry Pepper Potts, so we bought a wedding ring.”

“I don’t remember any of that.” He does remember having the puppy sitting in a corner of his workshop. It could sit and bark and give a paw. Dum-E didn’t take a shine to it; pushed it off the desk more than once.

“It came in the mail a week later. I’ve been carrying it around ever since.” Happy pats his pocket. “Right there.”

Something like grief, regret, wraps itself suddenly around his chest, his throat, and squeezes. An unpleasant sensation. “You dumbass.” He blinks rapidly. “Why would you do that to yourself?”

“Nothing wrong with getting your hopes up.”

He leans his head back and breathes out slowly. His eyes burn. “She still loves me, she told me the other day. It’s just too hard to be with me. Don’t know if that’s better or worse.”

“You’re a good person, Tony. All you need is a little less self-loathing and you’re all set.”

Tony hums, a hot pressure building up behind his eyes. He squeezes them shut.

“Jesus,” Happy says suddenly, in a strange voice, and he swerves the car onto the roadside verge before bringing it to a stop. Tony opens his eyes, half-expecting something to block the road, but he only sees Happy, staring back at him, quite intently. “Are you crying?”

Tony swipes at his cheeks and studies his hands. “Oh. Yeah. I do that now. Wanna yell at me?”

Happy stares a moment longer, then grabs a fistful of his shirt collar and yanks him closer, one arm coiling around Tony like a boa constrictor, constricting his breath, and then he pounds Tony on the back, painfully rough.

“Is this supposed to be a hug?” Tony complains. “Ouch, you’ll perforate my lungs.”

“Shut up,” Happy grumbles. He leans back and studies Tony, face set in a deep frown, and then lets go of his shirt, leaving it rumpled and bunched up awkwardly at Tony’s shoulder. He turns and starts the car again. “Did you ever call that therapist Pepper recommended?”

“There’s an idea,” Tony says, smoothening out the wrinkles.

Day 58

“There is this deep chasm inside my chest,” he says, pressing his fingers against his sternum. “That I try to ignore, because when I think about it, it gets wider and I think it would just crack me open if I gave it a chance.”

“What would that look like?” Gace asks. “Cracking open?”

“Like losing my mind. Not like I haven’t, already.”

“And how does that make you feel?”

He sighs. “I think I’m just sad. And I have never learned how to express that emotion.”

“You know,” she says, musing, “I know that tendency, of avoiding painful feelings because it seems like you can fall into some scary-ass bottomless pit. But that pit is not bottomless. And when you allow the pain, you transform it. I mean, it’s still pain, you know? But it becomes part of you somehow and that makes it less scary and more … something that really just makes you whole. A whole person. And it feels very good to feel whole, including the pain. It feels better than just happiness.” She clears her throat. Rustles her papers. “Sorry, that was … not on my checklist.”

“Imagine that,” Tony says.

Day 59

He arrives at Peter’s school an hour earlier than usual and sends the kid a message. Car out front, get your ass out here, I’ll make sure you don’t get in trouble.

Peter appears a few minutes later, scanning the row of parked cars before approaching him. Tony leans over to open the door on the passenger side.

“Mr. Stark, hi,” Peter says nervously as he gets in. His hair is glitter-free. Tony got him out in time.

“Hey kid. No worries, nothing bad going on. Just swooping in to rescue you.”

Peter huffs out a laugh, though his eyes remain wary. “From what?”

“Mediocrity. Want to do something fun today?”

“Do we have a mission? Avengers mission?”

Tony carefully pulls out of the parking space. “Are you an Avenger?”

“I mean. You fired me.”

Tony gently nudges the kid’s arm with his knuckles. “How could I possibly fire you? I have no say over you. You’re your own man, right? Isn’t that what you learned this weekend? Actually it turns out me taking your suit was the perfect sort of tough love moment that you needed, right? To urge you on, right? Don’t you think?”

Peter stutters a bit.

“Let’s just say it was,” Tony decides.

“I could be an Avenger,” Peter says. “I would totally say ‘yes’ if you asked me.”

Tony wonders if that would be a good idea. It doesn’t feel like such a good idea, it feels like something May would kick him out of the car over, twice as hard. But Spider-Man is one hell of a superhero.

“There’s no mission,” he says. “We’re going shoe shopping.”

-

The store clerk lines them all up again. Eight pairs of shoes with lights in them.

“Why are we here, Mr. Stark?” Peter asks as he tries on the first pair.

“Bonding. I’m getting better at it, don’t you think? I’m pretty cool.”

Peter’s head bobs up and down. “You are pretty cool.”

“I was pretty useless, before. You deserved better.”

Peter frowns a little and ties his laces. “You’ve always been cool, Mr. Stark.”

“Nah, kid. You’re just too damn good for this world.” Damnit, he’s getting choked up again. And Peter notices, clearly. “Sorry, kid. Didn’t mean to freak you out.”

“You’re not, sir,” Peter says, very, very earnestly. “It’s okay.”

It is, maybe.

Day 60

He wakes up when his phone buzzes. He is in his bedroom. It’s seventeen minutes past midnight. Pepper is calling.

He answers. “Good tidings, Ms. Potts.”

“You weren’t answering your phone,” Pepper immediately says, quite loudly and angrily.

“Yeah. I’m sorry. How are you?”

“I’m— I’m all right. But Spider-Man crashed your private jet on Coney Island Saturday night. More than twenty-four hours ago, Tony, and you were unreachable.”

“I’ll see what I can do. How’s… Are you still happy with the job?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You work a lot. That worries me.”

“I love my job, Tony.”

“Okay,” he says. “That’s good.”

She sighs. “How was Brazil?” she asks, sounding mollified.

“President really loves Spider-Man. So you and him have something in common.”

She sounds amused, now. “I’ve kept my love for Spider-Man very on the downlow.”

“Intelligent guess.”

“Speaking of Spider-Man—”

“Yeah, I’ll talk to him to. He’s a good kid.”

“Seems like it,” Pepper says.

Tony doesn’t really feel like hanging up, this particular night. And it seems, neither does Pepper. She prattles on a bit about work and Tony listens, one arm curled around his pillow. “I have the kid’s internship contract right here, you know,” she says at one point. “Still haven’t formally terminated it. Anticipating that you might change your mind?” she sounds almost hopeful.

“Marry me, Ms. Potts.” Tony says, because he can’t stop himself. “I’ll take your last name.”

She breathes out her laughter. “Hmm. Deja Vu. You know how our wedding would go? The officiant will say ‘repeat after me’, and you’ll say ‘don’t tell me what to do’, push over a vase of flowers and run out.”

“I didn’t hear a ‘no’.”

“No.” she says. “But I do love you, Tony. Probably shouldn’t be saying that, but it’s true. We didn’t break up because I fell out of love with you.”

“I know,” Tony says. “I love you to.”

There is a long silence that somehow feels loaded and comfortable at the same time. Maybe that’s what Grace meant by things being ‘whole’.

“We make a pair, huh?” he says eventually.

“Did you ever call that therapist I recommended to you?”

“I did. Talked to her a bunch, actually.”

She makes a surprised little noise.

Tony blinks at the clock, then blinks again when he notices the time blinking back at him. They’ve been talking for over an hour. “Hey, have you actually been to the compound?”

“A few times, while it was under construction.”

“It’s all constructed now. Can I give you a tour in the morning? I’d like to.”

“All right,” Pepper says after another brief silence. “Yes, sounds good.”

“Good. Go home then, Ms. Potts. It’s late. Practically Monday.”

-

He spends hours in the workshop, putting a new Spider-suit together all the way from scratch, once again.

He ventures into the living room when he needs coffee. Rhodey is on the couch with Wanda, watching her cutting price tags off clothes. She smiles at him, lifts the shirt in her hands and says: “I went shopping last night.”

“You like American stuff?” Tony asks. “I’ll take you to the Statue of Liberty sometime.” He sags down on the couch and yawns.

“Hey,” Rhodey says. “How are you doing? You look all right.”

“Yes,” Wanda says. “Not as ghoulish.”

“You didn’t look ghoulish,” Rhodey says hastily. “Just … tired.”

“No, he looked ghoulish,” Wanda says, and smiles brightly.

“I invited Pepper over,” Tony says. “If that’s going to be an issue, you and Vision should probably hide in your bedrooms.”

“Oh, she already knows about them,” Rhodey says.

That adds up. The Tony Stark support group has been gossiping, clearly.

-

Pepper wants to see the workshop first. That surprises him, because it always seemed like that was her least favorite place at the tower. She would always just hover near the doorway without coming in, as if afraid Tony would ask her to do open-heart surgery on him. Again.

“Wow,” she says when she sees the half-finished Spider-suit.

“Yeah, I don’t know. The kid says he wants to be an Avenger.”

“He’d make a good one.”

“You think so?” he asks. “Yeah. I think so. You approve of that?”

“You know how generally laid-back I am about health and safety matters.”

He looks at her, at her mouth twitching with wickedness, her dimples appearing.

“The honorary kind of Avenger,” she says. “The kind you don’t just throw into dangerous missions unprepared.”

Would Peter actually say yes if it came down to it? “Did you ever talk to the kid? As Peter, I mean.” It’s strange to see her have a certain affection for, maybe protectiveness of, someone she barely knows.

“Just when I signed the contract with him. Will you go talk to him today?”

“Definitely. Yeah. I’ll pick him up from school, take him to the planetarium or something. They have a magic show. Peter pretends it’s too childish for him but I think he secretly likes it.” Tony plucks at some of the wires still sticking out of the suit. “Maybe I’ll finish this. If I get it done in time, he might even be able to use it for a patrol tonight. He’s really a good kid, I owe it to him to be less miserable.”

“You owe it to yourself, Tony.”

He glances back to find Pepper looking at her in that particular way of hers. He’s suddenly pathetically grateful that she’s here. “Anyway,” he says a bit gruffly, gesturing at the workshop as a whole. “What do you think?”

“Like you didn’t even move at all,” she says.

“I wish. Can’t find my favorite screwdriver.”

“The one with the blue handle? We packed all your ongoing projects separately, in those white plastic containers. Might be in there.”

It is. Tucked snuggly between two hard drives.

“Christ, you’re a marvel,” he says. “It’s very hard not to kiss you right now.”

“Let’s not,” she says.

“I won’t. I’m just letting you know it’s very hard.”

-

Vision and Wanda are on the couch, sitting very close together. “Coffee?” Tony asks.

“No thank you,” they chorus.

“Fresh ginger tea?” he tries.

“Sounds lovely,” Vision says.

It’s muscle memory, it all comes back to him. The only right way to make tea. Grating the ginger, boiling the water in a saucepan, straining it, a splash of lemon juice. He hums under his breath. Pepper has gone to the couch to chat quietly with Vision and Wanda, and Tony thinks he would like something like this: having people around he cares about, making tea for them whenever he wants.

He brings a teapot and cups to the coffee table and pours the tea there.

“That is excellent,” Vision says approvingly.

Tony smiles wryly and shakes his head.

“What?” Pepper asks.

“He makes me think of Jarvis sometimes. Human Jarvis. It’s lovely, and also a little sad.” He sits, crossing his legs, and blows on the tea.

“What do you mean when you say you feel sad?” Vision asks slowly. “I have taken an interest in the way people talk about their emotions. How does it feel when something feels sad?”

“Uh,” Tony looks down at his teacup, watches the steam curl up. “I think it most feels like something tugging or tightening.” He presses his fingers against the lowest tip of his sternum. “Right here between my stomach and my chest.”

“Hm,” Vision says, tapping a finger against his cheeks, ruminatively.

Wanda sips her tea, smacks her lips. “Well done,” she tells Tony.

-

Pepper has to take a few phone calls, but then she returns to his workshop, turning the phone over in her hands as she looks at him a while longer.

“Can I ask you a favor?” Tony asks. He is hand stitching the nano sensors around the eye sockets of the Spider-mask because it’s quicker that way than if he’d program the sewing machine for this particular task.

Pepper steps closer to the table. She looks at the silvery thimble on Tony’s thumb.

“I’m thinking,” Tony says, because what the heck, he’s just running it up the flagpole. See how the world would react, potentially, “of adding the kid to the team. For real. Honorary Avenger, like you said.”

They can invite a bunch of journalists, see how they run the story.

“Talk to the boy’s parents,” she suggests.

“I will.” He doesn’t feel like actually explaining Peter’s backstory. It doesn’t really matter either way, whether he tells May. It’s an experiment. “Could you call a press conference for this afternoon? Big announcement?”

“Tower of Compound?” She is still looking at his hands.

“Compound.” Tony wriggles his fingers. “You like the thimble? Makes me look like marriage material?”

“The fresh ginger tea made you look like marriage material,” she says. “The thimble just makes you look plain adorable.”

-

He calls Happy. “Can you pick up the kid from school, bring him to the compound?”

Happy sounds puzzled. “What kid?”

“Peter Benjamin Parker.”

“Oh,” Happy says, and laughs a bit. A strange, not entirely familiar sound. “He’s ‘the kid’ from now on, is he?”

“No one else gunning for that title.”

“I’m drowning in plane-crash paperwork.”

“Bring it to the compound, I’ll help you.”

“You’ll help me,” Happy repeats slowly, “do paperwork.”

“You caught me in a generous mood. It runs out at midnight, so make the most of it.”

Happy hums.

“So. Peter Benjamin Parker. Yay or nay?”

“Are you going to yell at him about the plane crash? Because as kids go, he’s a good one, Tony.”

“I am not going to yell. I’m going to give him a suit, because he’s my kid now, and I need him to be safe.”

“You’re acting odd.”

“I am not, how dare you. I need time to finish the suit, or I would’ve gone and picked him up myself.”

“All right,” Happy says. “If those are the terms, I’ll go pick him up after school.”

“Actually. Make sure to drag him out of there before his last period. Don’t care how you do it, hide in the bathroom stalls if you have to. It’s a matter of life or glitter.”

-

He finishes the suit; well, practically finishes. The gloves need a little work, but he can make some final adjustments before actually sending it home with the kid after the press conference. Journalists have trickled in over the past hour and FRIDAY informed him Happy’s car has pulled up by the south entrance.

He finds the two of them in the lobby. Peter, wide-eyed, shoes still two sizes too big, fiddling with his sleeves.

Happy seems oddly reluctant to leave Peter alone with him.

“I gotta talk to the kid,” Tony insists, wafting his hands in a shoo-ing gesture.

“I’ll be close behind.”

Lordy. “How about a loose follow? Boundaries are good.”

He turns away from Happy and towards Peter — who looks mildly terrified and almost flinches when Tony reaches up to lightly punch him in the shoulder. His hair is glitter-free. Tony is happy to spend the rest of his eternal Mondays keeping them that way.

He steers Peter down the hallway, one hand on his back. “Sorry I took your suit, kid. I mean. You had it coming. Actually it turns out it was the perfect sort of tough love moment that you needed, right? To urge you on, right? Don’t you think?”

Peter stutters a bit.

“Let’s just say it was,” Tony decides.

“Mr. Stark,” Peter starts, nervously. I really—”

“You screwed the pooch hard. Big time. But then you did the right thing. You took the dog to the free clinic, you raised the hybrid puppies… All right, not my best analogy. Let me speak more plainly: I was wrong. I think with a little more mentoring from yours truly, you could be a real asset to the team.”

“To the—” Peter says, “to the, to the, to—to the team?” his face is shining bright as the sun.

“Yup. Anyway, there’s about fifty reporters behind that door. Real ones, not bloggers. When you’re ready why don’t you try that on—” he taps his watch and a silver metal panel slides up to reveal the new Spider suit, precisely as dramatically as Tony had hoped for “—and I’ll introduce the world to the newest official member of the Avengers: Spider-Man.”

Peter’s mouth falls open slightly. He drifts towards the suit like a magnet pulling him in. The metal detailing was slightly unnecessary, perhaps even cumbersome, but Tony wanted to make sure it would look like a whole new suit.

Particularly if they’re going public with this whole thing, officially affiliating Spider-Man with the Stark brand. People expect a certain panache. It’ll be fun.

And then Peter turns to him. “Thank you, Mr. Stark. But. I’m good.”

“You’re good,” Tony says, stunned. “I’m—How are you ‘good’?”

“I’d just… rather stay close to the ground a little longer. Look after the little guy.” And he smiles, bright and uncomplicated, like he just turned down a Twinkie rather than a spot on a super-secret boy band. Tony feels that odd twinge of fondness he also felt when Peter got himself soaking wet head to toe at the beach that one Monday, when Peter looked at himself in the mirror wearing light-up shoes for the first time, when Peter gasped quietly throughout the magic show at the planetarium.

When he devised this experiment, he had been curious to see the reaction of journalists, he hadn’t even allowed room to consider that Peter’s own reaction would be anything other than rousing enthusiasm.

This kid. He’s something special.

He shakes Peter’s hand. Happy tells the kid to wait in the car and Peter practically skips away, half-stumbling over his too-big shoes, not a care in the world. He turns one final time. “That was a test, right? There’s nobody back there?” With an expression like he thinks he just caught Tony dead to rights.

“Yes,” Tony says. “You passed.”

-

No twinge of fondness from Pepper, clearly. “Did you guys screw this up?” She asks when she exits the conference room and finds them entirely Peter-less. “I have a room full of people waiting for some big announcement, what am I gonna tell them?”

“We’ll think of something. How about— uh, Hap,” he snaps his fingers, “you still got that wedding ring?”

Happy lets out his breath in a sharp gust of surprise. “Do I—What, are you kidding?” He starts patting all over his pockets. “I’ve been carrying this since 2008.” He snatches the ring out of a pocket, holds it up.

Pepper looks at It. And then at Tony. Really? Again?

“It would buy us a little time?” Tony attempts.

She hums, raises an eyebrow in unmistakable challenge. And then she takes a step forward, closes the space between then, all the space, her fingers catching his wrist, her lips brush against his. And Tony realizes that the last thing they need right now is to buy time.

Before his brain can catch up with reality, Pepper is already gone again, heading back for the door, shaking her head and muttering as she goes. “….can’t believe you had that thing in your pocket this whole time.”

-

“Do you regret that?” Tony asks, after.

Pepper made up something about … a new damage control policy … preservation of Chitauri technology. Tony barely even heard her. He’d spent the entire press conference grinning like a fool, hiding his mouth behind his hands. He can already envision the headlines tomorrow, speculating about his impending nervous breakdown.

“I might, tomorrow,” she says, but her expression is soft and teasing.

“You might not,” Tony says, because she won’t, after all. But he wants her to feel all right about herself today.

“I don’t regret it,” she says. “But I’m not sure what it means, either.”

“That’s okay. As long as you’re okay today. That’s— We can let it sink in and talk about all that tomorrow.”

“Sounds good.”

“Will you stay for dinner? Vision is making chili.” He’s had so much damn chili, lately.

-

He should have let the kid bring the suit home; he thinks of it way too late. Peter could still have taken it for a spin this evening. “FRIDAY, can we set up a drone delivery?”

He wraps the suit in an unassuming paper bag. He tries to write a note to the kid to go along with it, explain things, but all his attempts fall short. They come out sounding far too corny, too sentimental, too affectionate for a kid who thinks he barely knows him.

He crumples them up and simply writes This belongs to you on the outside of the bag.

-

They all sit out on the balcony and drink wine. Even Vision, who after three cups starts singing shanties and refuses to acknowledge that he is drunk. “I simply don’t have the capacity,” he says. “Hey ho and up she rises, hey ho—”

It’s very unlike Jarvis. It’s the best thing Tony has seen Vision do his entire existence.

Pepper and Rhodey sit close together, giggling and gossiping. Wanda quietly leans back in her chair, nestled in a big puffy coat, and watches them all with those eyes of hers, like a cat. A very contented cat.

-

Pepper heads home near midnight. Tony retreats to his own room and collapses on top of his covers without even taking off his shoes.

-

He wakes up when his phone buzzes. He is in his bedroom, lying on top of the covers. Daylight is streaming in through the gaps in the black-out curtains. He can hear rain pattering against the glas. It’s almost 8 AM.

Happy is calling.

Chapter Text

“May just called,” Happy says. “She’s… quite angry.”

“Oh,” Tony says stupidly. He has climbed out of bed and pulled aside the curtain. It’s drizzling rain. Sharp sunlight peeks past purple clouds. He traces a raindrop with his finger as it slides down the window. He blinks, drawing in a slow breath.

“Apparently she caught Peter walking around his bedroom in the suit. Can you talk to her?”

“I… Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Definitely.”

“Tony, are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he says, sniffling, wiping his cheeks. “Yeah. Uhuh. Are you okay?”

“What the hell, Tony?”

Tony lifts his shirt to wipe his nose. “Hogan, honestly, where are your manners?”

“I’m coming over to check on you.”

“…Thanks.”

-

All right. Now that his actions have consequences again… what all did he do yesterday?

God. Thank Christ the kid had the good sense to say ‘no’ to becoming an Avenger.

He stands on the balcony under the overhang as the rain patters down gently, and calls May Parker.

“How dare you,” she rants as soon as she comes to the phone. “How dare you!” And she launches into a tirade, barely pausing enough for Tony to get a few apologies in. A tirade that includes listing all the prisons she thinks Tony should serve in, and all the worst qualities in the dictionary that somehow all fit him.

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re not. I don’t believe that for a moment. This means nothing to you. If Peter got hurt, it would just be collateral damage to you.”

“It wouldn’t.” Tony leans back against the door, the metal knob digging into his spine. “If Peter got hurt I’d go to fucking pieces over it, May. I just don’t know what the right way is, because if I protect him, that makes me responsible, but if I take that protection away he’s still going to go out there and just, just get himself hurt. If you can stop him, that wouldn’t even be such a—a bad thing, maybe. But I don’t know if you can.”

“I’m not going to stop him,” she says, sounding exhausted. “There’s no point. And I’m proud of him. I just want to be in the loop when it comes to my own damn family.”

“In the loop. Yeah. I’m sorry.”

“How am I supposed to know what the right thing is? I want to tell you to stay the hell away from him, but if that leaves my boy without back-up…”

“I want to do it together.” He pushes himself off the wall and starts walking around the balcony in a slow, meandering circle.

She sounds skeptical. “Why now? That didn’t occur to you until yesterday? Just because I found you out…”

“Yesterday is a while ago.”

She huffs. “You’re a piece of shit, Stark.”

“I know. I can be better.”

It’s quiet for a moment.

“You sound sincere,” she says, “but that’s the thing about you, Tony Stark. I’ve seen your press conferences. You can be perfectly charming when you want to be. To further your own agenda.”

“I’m not doing this for me. There’s nothing in it for me. Expect, perhaps, a bit more positive energy in my life.”

“Why do it, then?”

“Well. Your kid taught me superheroes are supposed to be kind.”

She is quiet again.

Tony wraps his arm around the pillar on the balcony corner and looks out across the jagged landscape of rooftops, rain blowing into his face. “Hey. Can I ask you about something else?”

“Absolutely not,” she snaps. But after a beat, begrudgingly: “Well, yes, I suppose.”

“Do you know if Peter is getting bullied at school? Some kid named Flash?”

She blows out a breath. “I’ve heard the name and had my concerns. But Peter is very… He tends to keep things from me if he thinks they’ll upset me.” Her voice turns wry. “Which is why I count on the adults involved to keep me abreast.”

Tony tries not to wince.

“I’ve talked to teachers a few times, but they say the same thing. That they notice tension but don’t see any outright bullying happening. Did he say something to you?”

“He let something slip, he probably doesn’t even remember.”

“Could you ask him for me sometime? Maybe he’ll talk to you more than me.”

Tony holds his breath.

“Hello?” she says.

“Oh—Yeah. Yes. I mean, sure.” Okay. She’s letting him talk to Peter. He isn’t going to ask are you sure. “I could pick him up from school?”

“We talked pretty much all night,” she says. “It was… rough. I gave him the day off school. He’s napping.”

“Can I drop by, later?”

“You’re pushing your luck.”

“That’s my expertise.”

He hears her teeth click together. “I’ll be there the whole time,” she warns.

“I’ll bring dinner.”

-

“FRIDAY. Remind me what day it is?”

“Tuesday, boss.”

What a lovely sound. Tuuuuesday. “Did I have anything scheduled anywhere this week?”

“All clear, boss.”

The leftovers of last night’s chili are in the fridge. There are wine glasses and empty beer bottles in the sink, half-empty bags of peanuts and chips left rolled shut. Right, that’s right. When you make a mess in the evening, you have to clean it up in the morning. That’s the normal way of life.

It takes a while to empty the dishwasher; it’s been so long since Tony did anything productive in this kitchen that he doesn’t remember where the bowls with the blue dots came from, or the measuring cup, or the— something metal with two handles and little holes that he doesn’t know the name of.

Happy walks in when he is standing next to an open drawer with a hand full of clean cutlery.

“Hi,” Tony says.

Happy crosses the room, walks right up to him, until he’s standing very close. He frowns as he scrutinizes Tony’s face. “Are you all right?”

“You know. I’ve been dying to know. What’s your blood type?”

“Tony.”

He looks down puts the forks with the forks and the spoons with the spoons. “Pepper kissed me.” Embarrassingly, he can feel his neck heat up.

Happy exhales in a way that almost sounds like a laugh. “Yes. I was there.”

It’s Tuesday, and Pepper kissed him yesterday, which means something today. “I can be a good boyfriend,” Tony says. “Don’t know if she’ll believe it.”

“It’s more important that you believe it.”

“Maybe.” He holds up the something metal with two handles and little holes that he doesn’t know the name of. “What’s that?”

“Garlic press. Did you talk about it? You and Pepper?”

“A little. I suggested we should sleep on it, that she might feel different—tomorrow. Which is today.” He chucks the garlic press next to the wine opener and closes the drawer.

“So you’ll talk more today,” Happy concludes, quite decisively. “Shall I drive you to the tower, later?”

He wants to hug Happy, but he doesn’t think it will go over well.

-

Tony talked to a woman once who had served eight years in prison. She said the first thing she did when she got out was buy bubblegum; she’d missed the flavor so much. Tony has been stuck, but he hasn’t particularly missed out on anything. He is not sure how to celebrate.

He sits on the balcony again, leaning against the railing and overlooking the city. It’s still raining, not much more than a drizzle, but it doesn’t take long for his shirt to get soaked through. Watching the rain is like watching fireworks when he was a little kid. That sense of wonder. “I’m okay,” he says when Rhodey opens the door with an inquiring expression. Tony wipes the droplets off his chin. “Just I wanted to feel the rain. I think I missed it.”

“I suppose Brazil is toasty, this time of year,” Rhodey agrees.

“Hm-hmm.”

Rhodey hobbles forward and sits. He wraps his hands around his knee to lift his right leg and stretches it out on one of the lower slats in the balcony guardrail. He breathes out, tracing his fingers along the edge of the metal brace. Rain patters against his shoe. “I don’t feel anything in that leg anyways,” Rhodey says when he catches Tony frowning at it.

“Doesn’t mean this is according to doctor’s orders, is it?”

“I forgot you were such a doctor-abiding citizen.”

 “Hey. Have you been dating anyone, lately? Online or otherwise?”

Rhodey rears back a little, blinks at Tony, then frowns. “Have you been stalking me?”

Tony tucks his face against his arm to hide his smile. Rhodey’s frown deepens, but into one of those fake-angry glowers that really means he is just amused. He evades the question, though. “So, no Spider-Man, huh?”

“Not on our team,” Tony says. “I don’t know. I think we have to wait for him to invite us to his team. He’s the future.”

“Did you see the footage of the Coney Island plane crash?”

Tony lifts his head off his arms, gives a questioning glance.

“There’s some going around on news platforms. You can see what went down.”

Tony already heard what went down, twenty times at least. But Peter does seem like the type of kid who would downplay the gravity of a situation, both because he doesn’t want others to worry and because he genuinely doesn’t seem to think almost dying is a very big deal.

I think he kinda liked me, despite almost killing me, you know.

The footage unnerves him. Rhodey replays it about seven times. Hearing Peter talk about it, so blithely and brightly, does not compare to actually seeing it all go down in a flaming pit of hell. He turns away from Rhodey’s phone, tucks his face against his arm again. “Looks like I’m now officially mentoring a little kid who would probably walk straight into a burning building if he thought it would make someone’s day better.”

“He just needs a little encouragement.”

“Not sure if encouragement is the right word. He needs someone who will keep him just on the right side of sensible, and somehow I’m going to be that person. It’s Tuesday, and the universe is still a dumbass.”

Rhodey gives him the stupidest corniest look ever. “This is going to be so good for you.”

-

He’ll be dropping by the tower to talk to Pepper soon. And the Parkers are expecting him around dinnertime. He’s hopeful, nervous, dreading it, excited.

“Tea?” Wanda asks, drifting around him in the kitchen.

“No amount of tea is going to mentally prepare me for the rest of today.”

“Something stronger then.” She moves away but returns soon with a small paper bag that she had apparently hidden somewhere in Tony’s kitchen. “Sjokjajca,” she says, and tilts the bag to let a few round, marble-sized chocolates roll into Tony’s hand. They are soft, fudge-y; you can pinch them flat between your fingers. Tony leans back against the fridge and pops one in his mouth. The flavor is very strong, almost makes him sneeze. Maybe it’s a bubblegum-adjacent sort of experience. Wanda watches him. “Good?”

“It’s a cacao assault on the senses. I might be offended, haven’t decided yet.”

“I’m afraid they contain a quick-working magical poison to which only I have the antidote,” she says, very evenly. And then she sniggers. “That was a joke.” And pops one into her own mouth.

“You are a little scary, you know.” He rolls the rest of the chocolates around in his hand a bit before tossing them all into his mouth. He wipes his hands together and looks at her. “What kind of stuff can you do, anyways, what gobbledygook do you specialize in? Are magic potions an actual thing?”

“I wonder,” she says.

“Do you have a user manual, something?”

“It’s work in progress.”

“Is a bunny from a top hat within the realm of possibilities?” Peter had liked that, at the planetarium.

“I cannot create life.”

“I suppose that would be a lot,” Tony agrees.

“I can make something disappear. I can make people remember things they did not witness. I could make something disappear from reality and make everyone forget it was ever there.”

“Okay,” Tony says. “Don’t ever do that.”

“I’m quite good at card tricks.”

“I might allow that.”

She neatly folds over her packet of Sjokjajca. “I don’t think Tony Stark likes things that have a user manual.”

“Tony Stark prefers a challenge,” he agrees.

“Good,” she says brightly. “I thought you would.”

-

 “Hello? I’m looking for a therapist who specializes in particularly lost cases?”

“Oh,” Grace says, sounding flustered. “Is this a crisis situation? Are you having thoughts about self-harm?”

“Christ, no. No. Everything’s fine, Grace. God.”

“Who is this?”

“Tony Stark. Can you pencil me in for 3 AM tomorrow? That was also a joke. Unless 3 AM works for you, in which case it also works for me.” Lordy. This is now going to forever be her first impression of him.

“I can do 3 AM,” she says. “Or two fifteen in the afternoon.”

“At your office?”

“When the client is famous, I exclusively do home visits,” she says, and then clarifies, “that was a joke.”

Tony laughs.

-

He brings Pepper the finest grapes he can find on a Tuesday afternoon. Organic, hand-picked, in a little wicker basket.

The door to her office is open. She is in an online meeting, headphones on, but she waves him in. He takes the swivel chair, holding the basket of grapes in his lap. The stacks of files on her desk are gone. He sits and listens to her side of the conversation, something about … a new damage control policy … preservation of Chitauri technology. And he thanks his lucky starts that it is not up to him—that it was never up to him to decide who she falls in love with.

Tuesday. Tuuuuuesday.

He smiles down at his knees. He might be losing his mind all over again. It’s good, though. Nothing wrong with losing your mind now and then, separating yourself from all rational thought, jumping into that chasm and then slowly reeling yourself back in.

“Are you all right?”

He looks up. Pepper has taken off her headphones and laid them to one side. She is watching him.

“I just really love Tuesdays.” He sets the basket on her desk and slides it closer to her. “Go out to dinner with me, Ms. Potts,” he says. “We’ll put the reservations on your last name.”

She says yes.

-

He considered going past the shoe store to buy a pair of light-up shoes; he knows exactly which ones Peter liked the most. But it might come across as an attempt to buy their goodwill so he sets the idea aside for a later date.

A later date.

He’ll have time to buy shoes for Peter, and Peter will get to wear them. They’ll pinch a little at first, but they’ll stretch with wear, the way shoes are supposed to.

So in the end, he simply turns up at May Parker’s apartment with a white paper bag full of take-away sushi. She opens the door until it bounces against the door chain. Her gaze is surprisingly neutral. It has been almost twenty-four hours since she found out. She may have moved past the kick-you-out-of-my-car stage. Tony has never gotten this far before.

He takes off his sunglasses. “How is Peter?”

“Catching up on his schoolwork. And currently eavesdropping, most likely.”

“I’m sorry,” he says again, for good measure.

She sighs, her hand twisting around the doorknob. “Ms. Potts called me this morning. We talked for a while.”

“Oh. She didn’t say.”

“And Mr. Hogan called me this afternoon. We talked for a while, too.”

“And they painted me in a flattering light, did they?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” she starts, but then doesn’t continue, the words just hang in the air for a bit.

“Do you like avocados?” Tony asks.

“Hang on.” The door shuts. The chain rattles. The door opens wider. Tony steps inside and follows her down a narrow hallway into the living room.

Peter sits at the table, assignments scattered around him. He warily looks up at his aunt, leg bouncing up and down under the tale. He’s wearing the Hello Kitty pajamas. That wasn’t exactly Tony’s finest mentoring moment. It’s strange that the kid would even want to hold on to those.

“I didn’t eavesdrop,” Peter says, focusing his attention back on the compass in his hands. He hasn’t made eye contact with Tony yet. He has clearly had one hell of a day.

May huffs.

She caught Peter walking around his bedroom in the suit. That means the kid tried it on; that he was happy to have it. Tony approaches the table and sets the paper bag down, watches the kid sit there with his shoulders hiked up to his ears and attempt to draw a perfect circle. He isn’t sure how to reassure Peter in a way that won’t ruffle May’s feathers so he stands there, vacillating, and Peter speaks up first, in a low voice, miserably: “I’m so sorry about this, Mr. Stark.”

May huffs, louder, and turns away.

“Yes, your aunt berated me rather mercilessly,” Tony agrees. He dares to pull out a chair and sit. May is opening and shutting kitchen cupboards with quite a lot of force.

“I wasn’t careful enough,” Peter says, still low.

“That just shows that you’re only sorry you got caught,” May says from the kitchen, loudly, in a tone of voice like this isn’t her first time today saying it.

“Well I am,” Peter says, flicking the compass away, folding his arms on top of the table and burying his face in them. “I am sorry I got caught, the suit was awesome, and now everything is going to get messed up.”

“It’s not messed up, kid,” Tony says. “We just all have to get on the same page. And your aunt is responsible for you, so she has to be calling the shots, but I can work with whatever.”

May returns to the table with plates. “Move your stuff, Peter,” she says, not unkindly. “Let’s eat.”

Peter swipes everything together and dumps it under his chair, his face still tight. Tony tears the paper bag open and pulls the trays of sushi out. The tension is still palpable as they distribute the food around, start tucking in.

“All right,” May says, spearing some pickled radishes on her chopstick, and she starts on her list of demands and stipulations about check-ins, curfews, and safety measures. Peter slouches lower and lower in his seat as she speaks.

“Can we get on the same page about all that?” May asks, looking at him across the table. Her voice is even, she is calm, watchful.

Peter picks individual rice grains out of his sushi, scowling so heavily that his face looks ready to cave in. He has no reason to assume that Tony would be in any way willing to comply, to play things by May’s book. He’s probably expecting to be dropped like a hot potato. If it were last Sunday, Tony would have. He would have laughed in May’s face, slid on his sunglasses and waltzed out.

“I’d need to take the suit back with me,” he says, “to make few more adjustments, get everything set up the way you want it to be.”

“Yes…?”

“I can color inside the lines.”

May gives him a long, searching look. “Can you?”

“Not always. But for Peter, yes.”

Peter goes bright red, from his neck to the roots of his hair.

“What do you think, Pete?” Tony asks him. “Can you work with everything we’ve discussed so far?”

Peter nods jerkily, his head going in a sort of swaying, circular motion. He still doesn’t look at anyone. He pokes a hole in a piece of avocado with his chopstick. When Tony looks back at May, she is almost smiling. “One last thing,” she says.

“Uh-huh?”

“Your employee, Mr. Hogan, pulled my kid out of school yesterday before his classes had ended, for no apparent reason. Don’t ever let me hear about you pulling something like that again.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“He was hiding in the bathrooms,” Peter says. He’s still looking down at his sushi, but he’s smiling.

“Huh. I mean. I told him to, but...”

“Mr. Stark. A grown-ass man hiding in the bathrooms of a high school,” (“language!” May chides) “that’s like, how people get arrested.”

“It was semi-metaphorical, didn’t think he’d actually do it.”

Peter finally looks up at him. It’s a bit of a scrutinizing look and Tony feels the strange need to hold himself perfectly still, as if he has come across a wild deer in the forest that might run at the slightest movement, as if he needs to project not a threat not a threat not a threat with every fiber of his being.

Peter rolls his chopstick between his fingers as he observes Tony. “Do you want to play Octodad on my PS4?” he asks.

That question startles a laugh out of Tony.

“Na-ah. You two are doing the dishes,” May says, throwing her napkin down on her plate. “Because you’re both in the doghouse.”

So Tony and Peter do the dishes while May stretches out on the couch, feet up on the arm rest, and plays Octodad. Peter has to explain to Tony how to do it, glassware first, let the cutlery soak, it’s been a while. Peter washes and Tony dries. When they finish up, they join May on the couch. Tony is terrible at the game — Honestly doesn’t understand how people do this to relax.

“You play like Peter,” May says.

“How’s that?”

“As if any of it actually matters.”

“Excuse me,” Peter says, slamming the buttons. “But I’m trying to avoid getting cooked up by chef Fujimoto. This is life or death, May.”

They pause the game so May can grab the trail mix, and Tony uses that moment of reprieve from the insanity to reflect on the fact that he is actually here, playing video games in this apartment, and that May Parker’s capacity for forgiveness is a little bit intimidating.

Tuuuuesday.

“Hey,” he says softly. Peter tilts his head a little to indicate he is listening, his cheek pressed against the back of the couch. “I finally saw the footage of Coney Island. What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking we probably wouldn’t crash. Actually I wasn’t, uh… you know how you sometimes just operate on that part of your brain that was, like, originally reserved for hunting woolly mammoths?”

“That’s an exceedingly verbose way to say ‘I was a fucking dumbass’.”

Peter laughs. He rolls his head to the side to smile at Tony. “You know, Mr. Stark. I thought you were gonna be way more upset about all this.”

“It’s been a long day,” Tony says.