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Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20.
He’d believed in this cause for so long. Believed that by making weapons he was changing the world for the better.
Sure, he’d been changing the world. But not so much for the better. Peter was right. He was just a warmonger. He was a bastard that didn’t deserve to have his life, his family. He didn’t deserve Peter or Rhodey or Pep or Happy or May or Ben. His head had been so far up his ass for so long that he couldn’t see what his teenage son had been seeing for years.
He was wrong. And now is the time to make up for it. There’s no way he can let himself lose to these terrorists. If he does, Stark Industries will go on as it has been – his name and his wealth and everything he’s ever worked to build in his life will continue to encourage war and death and destruction.
And he wants to see Peter again, even just once. He knows what it’s like to feel like your dad would rather throw you out than look away from his experiments, and it’s not a happy place to be. He wants to tell Peter, face to face, that no matter what, Peter’s safety has always been his priority. Not SI, not his inventions. Peter. He doesn’t want Peter’s last memory of him to be a fight and a sucky fifteen-second voice mail. He doesn’t want his last memory of his family to be of his son, angry and hurt.
Someway, somehow, he’s got to do this. He’s going to win this, and go home, and do all the things he should’ve done but never had the guts to do.
===
Tony is free.
He didn’t think it would happen, but finally, he’s free. It came at a high cost – Yinsen, who was a far better man than Tony would ever be – but Tony is a selfish bastard and can’t help but be glad anyway. Yinsen would say that it doesn’t make him a bad person to want to see his child again, to make sure his child is safe, but Tony doesn’t know how much of his relief at being free is for Peter and how much of it is because he just hates being boxed in and told what to do.
He’s an awful human being, really, so it’s probably the second reason.
But he wants to try his hand at being at least a halfway decent one. Even if he’s still a helluva selfish sonuvabitch now, he wants to stop being so much of one in the future. In the near future, hopefully.
The first thing he does is stop weapons productions. He sees Obie’s disapproving face stand out from the crowd – but he doesn’t care. Obie is wrong. What SI’s been doing is wrong. It’s time for him to step up and man up – to be his own person instead of a little boy afraid of daddy’s shadow. Howard Stark would never be proud of him, anyway – but there’s still a chance Peter Stark might.
===
Tony’s knees want to give out when he finds out Obie’s been a dirty man all along. This is the man he’d assigned as Peter’s co-guardian in case of his death – at the man’s own insistence. “It’s not right, Tony, to just leave him with the help.” Obie told him. “Or your PA, for that matter. You have to be prepared.”
He’d always thought that he could trust Obie. When Howard Stark died, Obie was the only constant in Tony’s life, the only person Tony felt he could rely on. Betrayal is an awful feeling. At least he’s always known his dad to be an asshole – no pretences there. But Obie... it sucks to find out at this point in his life that Obie only stuck around ‘cause he was the best at making WMD’s. And he practically bashed Peter’s face in that trust. How many times has Peter told him Obie isn’t to be trusted? How many times has Tony forced Peter to interact with Obie, respect Obie, follow Obie’s advice?
It probably says something about Tony that once again, his fifteen-year-old son knew better than him. First with the weapons, and now with this. He should probably just make some sort of Peter-AI to stand in as his conscience and judge of character.
His chest hurts and he can’t breathe, and darkness creeps in at the edges of his vision, and as much as he just wants to lie down and get it over with, he can’t give up. Obie’s going to kill Pepper, and who knows what he’ll do to Peter. He can’t give up. For Peter, for Pep, and for everyone else who’s always believed in him despite the odds. He owed it to them to live and fix his mistakes.
===
It really is kind of funny how life likes to screw things over. For most of his life, all Tony ever wanted was to just... fall asleep and never wake up. He had done everything in his power to achieve that – never slept, never ate, never saw the sun – and none of them worked. And yet, now that he doesn’t want that to happen anymore, now that he is happy with his family and with his goals, dying becomes a distinct possibility. Probable, even. Just when he thinks everything’s over – when he’s shaped up, Obie’s gone, and Peter is happily settling into life in a public high school – shit like this happens.
This, he supposes, is karma. Living all the bad years with no repercussions – he supposes he’s got to pay for them somehow. The easiest thing to do now is disengage. As much as it’d hurt everyone for him to be a screw-up all over again, it’s better than having to watch them mourn him. Better angry than hurt.
It takes depressingly little time to settle his affairs. Peter’s guardianship relegated to May and Pep, check. Pep promoted to CEO, check. Get random PA to replace Pep, check. Alienate everyone who ever loved him, giant shiny glittery check.
Of course, with life having the sick sense of humour it does, that’s precisely when what is possibly hope for his survival lands straight on his lap. In the form of a one-eyed scary motherfucker and a Russian superspy posing as a PA, go figure.
===
After the whole Palladium-Vanko fiasco (as it will be called forevermore in the Stark household), the first thing Peter does when they see each other is punch him in the face. Which, Tony supposes, he deserves. And then Peter hugs him, which is... possibly something he doesn’t think he has a right to, but hey. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth and all.
“God, and you got mad at me for risking my life to fight a giant lizard. You are such a hypocrite, I don’t even.”
“Sorry kiddo.” Tony says, and hugs right back.
They stay like that an embarrassingly long time, just standing there in the middle of the living room with Pep and May and Happy and Rhodey pretending not to watch in the background, and when they finally step back, Peter shamelessly rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands, looks him in the face, and says,
“We love you, you know? Even if you are an idiot. And even if you screw up and we get so mad at you we stop talking to you, it’s not like it’s gonna hurt any less if you die or something. So just... stop doing shit like that, okay? Seriously, dad. I’m the one who’s supposed to be having the messed up angsty teenage years thing going on. This is so not cool.”
Tony makes a strangled noise somewhere between crying and laughing, grabs Peter, and pulls the kid into another hug.
“Yeah, sure kid. I’ll try being the responsible adult.”
Peter snorts, and it sounds funny because he’s still half crying. “Baby steps dad. Just don’t be an angsty self-sacrificing asshole, and we’re good.”
They are saved from the drama by Pepper’s laughter, and Tony acts offended, and things eventually degenerate into a strange dog-pile group-hug thing, and Tony is sure this is the happiest moment of his life, right here.