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Everything that could go wrong, did. Or maybe not everything… he still had the kid. Tony closed his eyes with a grimace of pain and let himself fall, with the heaviness of someone dragging a foreign body, against the cold metal side of Nebula's ship. There were no seats, except for the pilot's: a decision as practical as it was cruel, worthy of its former owner. Nebula was no more. Like so many others, she had vanished into thin air as if she had never existed.
Tony would have laughed if it didn't hurt so much, he had no place to rest his injured back, his bones, or his mind. But the kid was there, in the captain's seat, and that was enough. That was enough to keep him breathing, even though each breath tore through his chest like a red-hot steel rod.
He gritted his teeth, tasting the blood coating his tongue as a reminder of how real and brutal it was. It had been the worst possible scenario, amplified to the point of grotesqueness. Thanos had won. Everyone had fallen. Or disappeared. Tony didn't know what to call it... what to name the void.
The magician —for God's sake, the magician— their only ticket home, had burst into ash before his eyes, without a final word. Quill, his eccentric companions, all erased from existence like someone blowing on a dandelion and watching its remains fly by, unable to catch them. Tony didn't even want to think about how things were at home, Pepper, Rhodey, the Captain— no.
But amidst the rubble of shattered hope, Tony could only think that he was alive. The kid. Bruised, twisted from exhaustion, his pride as tattered as his suit, but whole. Alive.
He could hear it from where he stood: Peter Parker's wobbly fingers trying to understand the language of that intergalactic ship, forcing it to take off from that filthy planet, while he, Tony Stark, surrendered to a handful of stolen minutes of pain, after having been crushed, literally, by a damn moon.
Suddenly, silence, that crouching animal that rarely brings comfort, slipped between the ship's compartments and nestled in his chest like an omen. He strained his ears, searching for something beyond the hum of his own blood, rushing through his temples with the urgency of a stampede.
It was barely ten seconds. Ten seconds of emptiness that were enough for his mind, cruel and adept at impossible scenarios, to show him visions of Peter dissolving into nothingness. Ten seconds in which his already worn soul seemed to give way to the final collapse. Then, like an unnamed miracle, like the first dew that touches the earth after a fierce drought, he heard footsteps. Slow, uncertain, but footsteps nonetheless. The sound grew louder, filling the silence as if mending it with fine thread.
The ship wasn't big, not big enough to get lost, but labyrinthine enough that it would take a teenager —even one with superpowers— a while to find his way back. Tony held his breath, as if doing so might speed up the encounter. And finally, the boy's small figure appeared at the entrance to what he had, without any irony, dubbed the self-pity room. Only then did he breathe again. Peter was there. Broken, perhaps. But alive. Irrefutably, blessedly alive.
Tony frowned as he saw the kid limping. It was a barely perceptible gesture, but enough to trigger the high-pitched howl of alarm inside him. Logic told him that, after what had happened, Peter must have been hurt. It was to be expected. Thanos hadn't shown even a shred of mercy. And yet, hours had passed since the battle —if such a display of tragedy could be called that— and with the healing factor Peter carried as a cursed gift, he should have been better by now. But he wasn't.
And there was something about the image of that young body staggering, that clumsy limp that he tried to hide between hesitant steps, that made a thick acid rise in Tony's throat. It wasn't just anger. It was desperation encapsulated in helplessness. He needed to fix it. No matter what. With hands, with words, with technology, or with miracles.
“You’re hurt,” he said, his voice breaking the silence like a stone thrown into a sleeping pond.
Peter raised his head in surprise, as if he hadn't realized until that moment that Tony was still there. The kid's cheeks were tinged with that sweet blush that, in the past, would have made Tony smile with the arrogance of someone who knows he is being looked at as if he were a rare, bright comet that crosses the sky once every thousand years. But there was no room for smiles now. Now there was only the rumble of a bitter certainty: he had taken him there. To that desolate planet. To that killing field. And if Peter died, if he broke even a little more, it would be his fault.
“Just a couple of scrapes,” the kid murmured, his voice soft and trying to disguise the trembling. Tony raised an eyebrow, creating the perfect mask of the skeptical adult on his face. “Broken ribs, maybe?” Peter added, as if lying could disguise the truth.
Tony didn't respond immediately. He looked at him as if trying to calculate how many cracks could fit in such a young body before it collapsed. “And you still haven’t healed,” he said at last, his voice deep, dry, as if each word weighed more than his back could bear.
“Huh... maybe it’s the air in this place,” Peter whispered, looking down. He stamped his feet as if he’d just discovered he had feet. His movements were those of a teenager who didn't know what to do with his body or the pain that inhabited him. And Tony, for a fleeting moment, wished he could wrap him in some kind of shield, one that would protect not just his skin, but everything in him that was still innocent.
He sighed, and the gesture hurt him more than he was willing to admit. As if the air weighed on his lungs, as if he had to convince his body that it was still worth it to pretend strength. He stood up with the same effort it would take to drag a cathedral through the ruins of the soul, driven by pride and the ancestral fear of crumbling in front of other eyes, especially Peter's.
“Maybe it’s a punctured organ,” he muttered, and inside, the plea was clear: don’t let it be that, don’t let it be that, please.
Peter shrugged with the practiced lightness of someone who has learned to minimize pain like someone keeping a secret. “It will heal,” he said firmly, as if the verb heal were under his control, as if he could handle anything.
But then he looked at him. And in that look, Tony recognized something that paralyzed him more than any wound, the reflection of himself, broken, dragged to the edge. It was the look you give a wounded horse on the plain, about to be slaughtered out of compassion. Perhaps that was what he was. A doomed creature still breathing out of sheer habit.
“For a moment I thought–” Peter’s voice didn’t finish the sentence. He broke into a sigh, a barely contained gesture that brought a hand to his mouth to catch the sob before it burst. Tony felt something ancient inside him —something he'd thought dead, buried deep in his years of guilt and loneliness— awake. Instinct. Urge. Devotion.
“Hey, hey,” he gasped, his voice like a rope thrown into the wreck. He reached out a hand toward him, without the strength to stand up, but with the whole world holding onto that trembling gesture. Consolation wasn't his language, but that gesture, more than words, was a naked plea, come closer, please.
Peter let out a heart-rending sob and took a step, as if advancing a meter would defy the laws of physics. As if he himself were afraid of falling apart at the touch. But he did. He knelt with the awkwardness of a broken heart, and his fingers sought Tony's with an urgency that ached.
The pressure was so great that Tony thought his bones would give way, but he didn't complain. Not when the boy, his boy, allowed himself to be pulled toward him, as if finally giving up the battle against himself. A blink. And suddenly, Peter Parker was curled up in his lap. As if he'd always belonged there.
And for a moment, just a moment, time stopped. The universe, with all its cruelty and emptiness, paused to silently watch as two souls embraced, hoping to avoid disintegrating.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry–” Peter whispered, his voice seeming to come not from his throat but from some damp cavern inside his chest. He cried as if his soul were slipping through his eyes, pressing himself against Tony with the urgency of someone who wants to disappear into another body, to merge, to stop being one and become part of a refuge.
Tony ignored the white-hot blade piercing his side. “Why in the world are you apologizing, kid?” he asked in a tone that was meant to be firm, but couldn’t quite hide the tenderness.
“I—I should have done more,” Peter hiccuped. The words broke like dry twigs. “I almost lost you. I almost lost you, Mr. Stark. If you had—if you had—”
“Shhh,” Tony tried to soothe him, his voice a clumsy caress, an improvised lullaby for a lost child. “I'm here, aren't I?” he murmured, and inside he wanted to believe it too. “We're both here. We're going to be okay. We'll figure this out.”
Peter raised his head, as if emerging from an ocean, and his eyes —large, overflowing, innocent, and broken— searched him with an intensity that took his breath away. His face was a sweet mess, tear streaks, his nose as red as a lantern, and his lips swollen from crying. And yet… yet, he'd never looked more beautiful.
Then the thought struck like thunder: he was kissable. Tony blinked, his heart pounding against his chest like a prisoner. A mental short circuit. A sin about to take shape.
“I should have killed him,” Peter blurted out suddenly, trembling. “I could have activated Karen’s kill mode, I should have—”
“Enough.” Tony interrupted him in a harsher, almost cutting voice. “You did the best you could. If anyone failed, it was that fucking bastard from Missouri, or wherever the hell he said he was from. If that asshole hadn’t–” He stopped, his eyes closed, breathing heavily. The rage was there, lurking, waiting for its moment. But he couldn't allow that. Not now. Not with Peter falling apart in his arms. “We can't change what happened,” he finally said. “But I can tell you that you were magnificent out there. Although I wish you hadn't come at all.”
Peter pressed his lips together, and silence replaced the crying. “I couldn’t leave you alone,” he whispered, tensing in Tony’s arms. “If I had to do it again I wouldn’t even think about it. I’d do it all over again.”
Tony closed his eyes. There were so many possible answers floating in his throat like knives. But he swallowed them all. If Peter's adoration for him was even a fraction of the unspeakable, painful, guilty affection he felt for that kid, then he understood. He understood it to the depths of his soul. But he was also the adult. The responsible one. The one who should remain silent.
“Let’s try to focus on healing. Think about how to get back home,” he finally said, burying what he felt with an invisible shovel.
Peter settled back into his neck, as if that place had always been his nest. He sighed, his warm breath prickling his skin like it was the first day of winter in a nameless city. “I don’t know how to start the ship,” he murmured softly, exhausted. “It’s a strange language.”
Of course it was. And not only that, but the ship, like them, was also damaged. The battle had left its mark. And it spoke a language neither of them could decipher.
"Friday is toast," Tony said, with a crooked, resigned smile, like someone reviewing aloud the list of tragedies so as not to forget any.
“What are we going to do?” Peter asked, his voice trembling like a candle about to go out.
Tony wished, with a desperation that emptied his chest, that he had all the answers. The scientific ones, the practical ones, the emotional ones. The ones that save lives and the ones that sustain hope. But the truth, as stark and dark as the emptiness that surrounded them, was that he didn't have the slightest fucking idea.
Being the most brilliant man on the planet was of no use when his brain was filled with debris. All he could think about was ruin and silence. Hopelessness had settled in every available corner of his mind, like mold in an abandoned house. But he couldn't say that to Peter. Not to the boy who looked at him with the eyes of someone who looks at a ruined god and still chooses to believe.
Instead, he buried his nose in Peter's messy hair. He inhaled deeply. Despite the dust, the dried blood, and the strange air of that nameless planet, Peter's scent was still there. Unmistakable. Real.
"For now..." Tony murmured, his voice low, as if speaking in his sleep. "We cuddle.”
And Peter, without saying anything, pressed himself against him as if that gesture was his only way of praying. Tony closed his eyes. Maybe they didn't know how to get back. Maybe they were lost. But at least, for now, they were together. And sometimes, that was the only thing that kept the universe from falling apart.