Work Text:
The thing about Peter's blood was that Tony already had a sample of it.
He'd taken it eight months ago, while the kid was unconscious after misjudging a gap between two buildings on the Lower East Side and introducing his face to a fire escape at approximately forty miles an hour. It had seemed perfectly logical at the time. Peter was out cold, Tony had a kit on hand, and he'd wanted baseline data.
Peter had woken up, noticed the bandage, and spent forty-five minutes making noises about medical ethics until Tony pointed out that he had absolutely no legal standing to complain about anything, given that he was also a minor who regularly threw himself off skyscrapers without a license.
The point was: the sample existed. The data existed. Everything was fine.
The problem was that something had clearly changed.
Peter had been running a low fever for two weeks. He wasn’t sick or injured, just warm like someone had nudged his internal thermostat up a degree and forgotten to mention it. His healing on a laceration from three weeks back had clocked in twelve percent slower than baseline. It was a small margin, easy to miss. Tony had not missed it, because Tony did not miss things, a fact he found both professionally useful and personally exhausting.
So when Peter dropped through the lab window on Friday afternoon, mask half-off and suit quarter unzipped, Tony looked up from his bench and said, "I need more blood," in the same tone he might say hand me that wrench.
Peter stopped mid-dismount. "Hello to you too?"
"Your baseline's shifted. I need a new sample."
"You stole the first one."
"You were unconscious."
"That's not better!" Peter pulled his mask off the rest of the way, expression caught somewhere between offended and unsurprised, which was a look Tony had come to think of as his natural state. "That's actually worse."
"It was a medical necessity."
"It was a crime."
"Sit down, Pete."
"I've got stuff to do."
"Like what." It wasn't even a question. Tony had already turned back to the supply cabinet, scanning for what he needed. Collection tubes, tourniquet, alcohol swabs. He laid them out on the tray with the brisk efficiency of a man who had already decided how the next ten minutes were going.
"Stuff," Peter said firmly from behind him.
"Sit down."
Peter sat down with the energy of someone lodging a formal protest with a governing body. Tony heard the stool scrape against the floor and counted it as a win.
He turned around, and reached for the needle.
Peter stood back up.
Tony stopped. He looked at the needle and then looked at Peter. "What?"
"You're not— " Peter was staring at the needle with an expression Tony couldn't quite read. "You're not a phlebotomist."
"I have a medical degree."
"Honorary. From a university that is probably named after you."
That was genuinely a fair point. Tony chose not to acknowledge it. "I have also performed surgery on myself in a cave. A blood draw is well within my capabilities."
"That's not a point in your favor!" Peter's voice had gone slightly higher. "That's not — that's not reassuring at all!"
"It will be fine."
"I want Bruce to do it."
Tony looked at him.
Peter looked back, arms folded, jaw set, fully committed to this position in a way that suggested no amount of arguing was going to shift him off it. There was something slightly manic about his eyes, almost desperate.
Tony, who prided himself on reading people, did not read it.
"Fine," he said, with great dignity, and picked up his phone.
Bruce arrived four minutes later, coffee in hand, wearing the expression of a man who had learned not to ask questions until he'd assessed the situation personally.
He assessed the situation. Tony was leaning against the counter with his arms crossed. Peter was perched on the stool like a man awaiting sentencing.
"Blood draw," Tony said.
"He wanted to do it!" Peter said.
"I could have done it," Tony said.
"He wanted to do it himself," Peter told Bruce "and his only experience was in a cave. A cave."
Bruce set his coffee down. "Okay." He moved to the supply tray without ceremony, snapping on a pair of gloves and reviewing what Tony had laid out with the quiet efficiency of someone who had done this ten thousand times. "Sit still, Peter. This won't take long."
Tony watched Peter track Bruce's hands as he prepped the supplies. Watched the slight shift of his weight on the stool. The way he'd gone quiet.
He almost said something but decided against it.
"Other arm," Bruce said, and Peter offered his left with the mechanical compliance of someone operating on autopilot, not entirely present. Bruce looped the tourniquet around his upper arm, easy and practiced. "Take a breath."
Peter took a breath. His free hand found his own knee and gripped it.
Bruce swiped the inside of his elbow with an alcohol wipe, uncapped the needle, positioned it — and Tony, who had been watching Peter's face in the way he'd never quite managed to stop doing, watched all the color drain out of it like water through a drain.
"Peter," Bruce said, with the careful tone of a man who had noticed something. "You alright?"
"Yep," Peter said, from very far away. He was staring at a fixed point somewhere to the left of Bruce's ear, sweating slightly, fingers white against his kneecap. "Fine. Why?"
Tony opened his mouth.
"Great," Bruce said calmly, and put the needle in.
Peter's eyes rolled back. His head dropped. His entire body went boneless all at once, and he leant sideways off the stool with the slow, inevitable momentum of a felled tree.
Tony caught him.
Not gracefully, it was more of a lunge than a catch, both hands grabbing fabric, the two of them doing an ungainly shuffle before Tony managed to get Peter's dead weight braced against his chest, one hand cupped around the back of his head. The kid was completely limp, warm and boneless, nose somewhere in the vicinity of Tony's shoulder.
The lab was very quiet.
Bruce looked up from the collection tube, which he had somehow not dropped. "Does that happen a lot?"
"I don't know, I've never done this when he was awake before!" The words came out louder than Tony intended. He lowered his voice, mostly on instinct, even though Peter was very unconscious. "He’s fine right? Just normal human thing not spider-dna messing around?"
"Vasovagal syncope. He'll be fine." Bruce capped the tube with a composure that Tony found both impressive and slightly irritating. "Can you ease him back so I can get the needle out?"
Tony eased him back. He kept a hand spread flat between Peter's shoulder blades, steadying, while Bruce worked efficiently and pulled the needle free and pressed a cotton ball to the crook of the kid's elbow. Peter's head lolled against Tony's forearm, he looked about twelve.
It took less than a minute for Peter to come to, though it felt like an eternity to Tony.
Peter's face moved first, a slow twitch like a signal coming back online. Then his head turned, and then his eyes opened, blinking up at Tony with the muzzy, slightly confused quality of someone surfacing from somewhere very deep.
He blinked a few more times. Took stock of the ceiling. Looked at Tony.
Looked at his arm the lack of needle, just the cotton ball and the beginning of a bruise.
Then his eyes moved to the tray, and found the collection tube sitting there, dark red, full. And Peter Parker — who had been stabbed, shot, thrown through walls, bled on more rooftops than either of them could count, who regularly took hits that would hospitalize a grown man and walked them off before the ambulance arrived — leaned sideways and threw up over the edge of the stool.
Tony stared.
Bruce handed Peter a cloth with the detached efficiency of a man who had seen stranger things, which to be fair he had. Peter took it without looking up. After a moment he straightened and tipped his head back against the wall. He let out a long breath through his nose. His eyes closed, his hands loosening in his lap. The posture of a man making peace with something.
Tony stood in front of him.
"The fuck," he said, "was that."
"I'm scared of needles," Peter said, to the ceiling.
"You're—" Tony stopped. "You didn't think to mention that."
"It didn't come up."
"It didn't—" He gestured at the tray. At the needle. At the extremely visible needle that had been sitting on the extremely visible tray since before Peter had even sat down. "You didn't think that when you saw the needle, the conversation could have naturally moved toward — hey Tony, quick heads up, I faint at needles?"
"Oh." A beat. "I guess so, yeah."
"You guess—"
"Tony." Bruce materialized at his elbow, pressed a water bottle into his hand, and fixed him with the mild, unimpressed look that he'd apparently developed specifically for these occasions. "Give him that and stop yelling."
Tony gave Peter the water bottle. He did not stop yelling, but he did significantly reduce the volume, which he felt deserved some credit.
Bruce collected his coffee, collected the sample, and left them to it with the air of a man who had thoroughly earned the rest of his afternoon. The door swung shut behind him.
Tony pulled up a stool and sat down across from Peter, because this felt like a conversation that warranted being seated.
Peter sipped his water. His color was coming back. He had the slightly dazed, slightly sheepish quality of someone who had just done something embarrassing in front of people they respected, and was now waiting for the aftermath.
Tony looked at him for a long moment.
"You," he said, slowly, "fight guys with guns."
"Regularly," Peter agreed.
"Last month you got hit by a car."
"To be fair, it was a slow car—"
"And a little needle—"
"They're not that little—"
"Pete." Tony spread his hands. "I saw it. It was little."
Peter's jaw set in the particular way it did when he had no good response and knew it. He stared at the middle distance for a moment, then seemed to arrive at some internal decision, and looked back at Tony with the energy of someone playing a card. "You're scared of the dark."
The lab was very quiet.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Tony said.
"Pepper told me." Peter's mouth curved. "The lamp in the workshop for when you fall asleep on the couch."
"That's for ambiance."
"The nightlight in the bathroom."
"That's a safety feature."
"F.R.I.D.A.Y. told me you make her keep the arc reactor display on at 30% brightness when—"
"F.R.I.D.A.Y.," Tony said, with great precision, "and I are going to have a very serious conversation about confidentiality."
Peter was smiling now, the embarrassment burned off entirely by the far more entertaining prospect of this. "So you can't make fun of me for the needle thing—"
"I can absolutely still make fun of you for the needle thing, those are two completely unrelated—"
"They're really not—"
"One of us is a fully grown adult with several advanced degrees—"
"Honorary—"
"—and a rational, understandable appreciation for adequate lighting, and the other one passed out and threw up because of an object that is three inches long."
Peter opened his mouth, then closed it again.
He looked briefly like he was trying to find the counterargument, and coming up short.
"...That's fair," he said, finally, with the defeated air of someone conceding a point they'd really hoped not to concede.
Tony nodded. "Thank you."
"You're still scared of the dark though."
"I prefer illumination, it's a design philosophy."
"Uh-huh."
"I'm going to have Pepper confiscate your lab access."
"You're not going to do that."
He wasn't going to do that. Peter knew he wasn't going to do that, and Tony knew Peter knew, and they both knew that the whole thing was essentially theater at this point. It had the comfortable, worn quality of an argument that wasn't really an argument, more of a ritual. Something that existed not because either of them needed to win it, but because it was theirs.
Peter finished his water. He was quiet for a moment, turning the empty bottle in his hands and then he said without looking up, "Sorry I didn't warn you. I didn't — " A pause. "I don't really love people knowing about it."
Tony looked at him. The kid was still a little pale around the edges, hair pushed back where Tony had moved it out of his face without really thinking about it. He looked young. He always looked young, and it always caught Tony off guard, the gap between what the kid could do and how small he still was.
"I know," Tony said. "It's fine."
"You're still going to make fun of me for it."
"Extensively." He stood, ruffled the back of Peter's hair in a way that he knew would be found deeply annoying, and picked up his own cold coffee from the bench. "But I'll warn you before the next blood draw. Deal?"
Peter smoothed his hair back down while glaring at Tony. "Deal."
"Great." Tony pointed at the stool. "Now sit there for another ten minutes before you try to leave. Doctor's orders."
"You're not a doctor."
"Honorary."
"That doesn't—"
"Ten minutes, Peter."
Peter sat. He was quiet for a moment, and then he said, "The lamp in the workshop is really for ambiance?"
"Yes."
"The nightlight too?"
"Safety feature."
"And F.R.I.D.A.Y. keeping the—"
"We're done talking," Tony said, and turned back to his bench.
Behind him very quietly Peter laughed.
This was the thing that Tony had not accounted for when he’d started taking a more active role in the kid’s life. He’d expected the stress of it, the worry. He’d even expected, to eventually care about the outcome. To have some professional investment in Peter’s continued survival and general wellbeing, the way you might care about any asset you’d spent considerable time and energy developing.
He had not expected it to feel like this. Like something that lived in his chest and made his hands move before his brain caught up. Like something that made him lunge across a lab to catch a kid who was already falling. Like whatever had happened in his chest during the thirty seconds Peter was unconscious, which was staying firmly unexamined and unspoken.
He was still thinking about it when Peter announced in a tone that wasn’t missed by Tony, that he was going to buy him a Spider-Man night lamp. So he’d feel safe, and not alone in the big scary night. And Tony, who had just had something of a private emotional revelation about the depth of his feelings for this kid, found that what he mostly felt in that moment was an extremely strong desire to put a needle near Peter and enjoy the silence for five minutes.