Chapter Text
Peter Stark wasn’t born a Stark.
He wasn’t even born Peter either, but that is a story for another time.
Peter used to be a Parker. As his dad did before him and his grandparents before that. His dad once told him that their family name hadn’t always been Parker and that somewhere along the way his grandparents had to give their names up in exchange for their safety. Neither his dad nor his mom ever told him the why; they only said that it was a story that he was too young to know about it yet. Because it was a story not only about their family but about hundreds of families that had lost their homes and names to a very bad and terrifying war.
“It is a sad story,” his mother told him once upon a time. “A very sad and bad story that you need to wait to hear.”
She promised that she would tell him everything about their family once he was deemed old enough to not have nightmares afterwards.
Peter’s mother never got to see him grow up to be ready to understand the story, but he learned about it anyway. Peter didn’t learn about his family story, but he learned about all the other ones. He learned about it from textbooks, old newspapers, and from all the research he did — Peter spent so many hours going through websites, dusty books and mouldy archives. He knows what everyone else knows, or at least should know. Knows about the war, about the Shoah, the Porajmos, about the pink triangles, and so much more. However, Peter never learned about the Parkers that aren’t always Parkers, because his parents died before they ever had the chance to see him old enough to hear about it.
They died when he was too young to remember them the way he believed he was supposed to.
Mary Parker was Peter’s mom. She loved him very much from the moment she learned she was pregnant. For the first two years of his life, Mary was Peter’s entire world. Then she married Richard, and the family of two grew. They are the happiest family in the world, for about a year until Richard passed away.
Car crash. Peter was in the car with his dad, and so were his grandparents. The boy was the only survivor.
Richard Parker was kind, smart, and had a terrible sense of humour. Peter loved him very much.
Peter wasn’t his biologically, but he was Peter’s dad, and nothing would change that.
After Richard passed away, things got a little hard for the once more family of two. Mary tried really hard; she worked double shifts and stayed up at night with Peter during every nightmare (he would woke up sobbing, mumbling about being trapped in the car wreckage).
Mary did her best and pushed herself way beyond her limits, and then she got sick.
Because the human body might be amazing, but there's only so much it can do before falling apart.
The second time Peter met his father, he was in a hospital waiting room.
Peter disliked hospitals. He understood why they existed but still disliked them anyway.
Peter went to the hospital the first time when he couldn't breathe. He was two and terrified. The doctor was a nice old lady with pepper-salt hair and a kind smile who gave him a lollipop. She also explained to him what asthma was and that sometimes breathing would be difficult, but he could always use his inhaler to breathe again.
The second time he went to the hospital was after the car crash. He had a concussion, a punctured lung, and a broken leg in two places. Peter spent weeks in the hospital, and then he was forced to come and go for months after that as he went through the aftermath of the crash and recovery. His limp never went away, and his asthma got worse.
By the time Peter was four, he already had a strong aversion to hospitals. However, the day that made him loathe hospitals was the day his mother, who was his only family left, was rushed through those corridors.
It was a Tuesday. Mary got home after a twelve-hour shift in time to get Peter ready for day care. They were in the kitchen, laughing and dancing. She was making pancakes, and Peter was finishing his super important drawing of a Jake Spidermonkey, when she fainted.
They were just existing, laughing, and being happy, and then she fainted.
Peter cried, calling her name and begging her to wake up, but she would not wake up. He vaguely remembers making a call to 911 like his mom had taught him and the red lights of the ambulance that came to take his mother away.
Everything about that day was a blur.
The impersonal and uncomfortable waiting room. The frenzy of doctors, nurses, and patients going up and down the corridors. The long wait where no one told him anything because he was just a child. The not-so-nice woman from the CPS that kept asking mean questions about his mommy.
Once his mother finally woke up two hours later, she told him everything would be fine and that the faint was just a fluke and would not happen again.
It wasn’t a fluke.
Peter still doesn’t know if his mother was lying to him or herself that day.
When Peter was five, a year after his mother got sick, she sat him down and explained everything to him.
“I wish I had a hundred years,” she said, very quietly. “A hundred years I could give to you.”
Peter cried and kept on crying.
Six months. It was all they had left together, according to the doctors.
Mary would never live to see her baby boy's first day at school.
Three months after finding out he was losing his mom, Peter found out he had another dad. One that never cared about him, one that didn’t do anything for him or his mother, one that would get to keep him when she wasn’t around any more.
For Peter, it wasn't fair. It wasn't fair that he had to lose the dad that chose him when the one that didn't want him was allowed to keep him. It's not fair that his mom was sick and dying because she worked too much when his supposed father had never bothered to see if they needed anything.
Peter was five, and he hated hospitals because that was the place where good people went to die.
Peter was five, and he hated the doctors because he had yet to meet one that didn't lie through their teeth.
Peter was five, and he hated his father because he never cared and still got to keep him because he was the only one left.
Peter was five, and he hated his mother because she was dying and leaving him all alone in the world.
Peter was five, and he hated himself because sometimes he would lie in bed and just ask someone, anyone, to make it stop because he was five, just five, and had already buried all his family, and even though his mom was still alive, he was already done with mourning her and just wanted it to end.
He just wanted it to end.
The rage, the sorrow, the pain.
The grief.
The emptiness.
But it didn't, so Peter pushed forward. Day after day in an endless circle that no five-year-old should be able to understand, Peter raged and screamed and yelled and cursed his father, and the doctors, and the world every step of the way while his mom held onto him tight and dried his tears.
“You be as angry as you need to be,” she said. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Not the adults, not your father, no one. And if you need to break things, then by God, you break them good and hard.”
Anthony Edward Stark, a.k.a. Tony Stark was not someone anyone would consider to be ‘father material’. He was an alcoholic and drug addict, a whore with no sense of responsibility who would sleep with anyone attractive enough to hold his attention for more than three seconds.
He was also someone terrified of the prospect of being a father.
Needless to say, he didn’t handle the whole ‘surprise fatherhood’ in the healthiest way possible.
The first time Tony learned about the kid’s existence was before there was even a child.
Once Mary found out she was expecting, she thought the decent thing to do would be to let the father know. Unfortunately, Tony wasn’t a decent person and was not happy with the news, going even beyond and making his displeasure very clear by offering to pay for an abortion she didn’t ask for. Mary punched him in the face and broke his nose good, then she told him that she would take care of her child, and he could go to hell.
Mary never sought Tony out after that, until she got sick.
The first time Tony met the kid, it was in a hospital waiting room.
Five hours earlier, Mary had died due to complications of her illness.
Mary Parker died on a random Friday, and Peter Parker died with her.
Letting Peter Stark usurp his place.