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When the feeling leaves you
It moves so slow
Like the loose change from your front pocket
You don't even feel it go
When the bitter creeps in
To bite you whole
A spectre unreflected, oh
It keeps you cold
—The Oh Hellos, Cold
Peter knows that he’s supposed to be resting. That’s what happens after you’ve been batted around a German airport by a giant Ant-Man.
(Giant-Man? Peter’s not quite sure what to refer to him as other than the fact that he now knows all too well what the spiders at school feel like when someone whacks them with a flyswatter, his insides battered to pieces, his ribs likely bruised, his insides burst like a supernova.)
But when the inside of the suit lights up in a distress signal indicating that Tony Stark's heartbeat is going off the charts, that's bound to distract a guy.
Peter doesn’t know if Tony Stark meant to cause any sort of audio link between their suits. Likely, it was supposed to be severed when the fight was over.
But he can hear something. Tony Stark’s voice saying “You seem a little defensive,” voice ratcheting up.
And then, a moment later—
“At ease, Soldier. I'm not currently after you.”
As in—Mr. Stark’s with Bucky Barnes? With the distress signals pinging from his armor’s readings?
From the conversation Peter can hear, things are tense but not dangerous yet, but Mr. Stark’s going in solo with two people he just fought, and so he needs someone in his corner, right?
Peter knows that he’s not supposed to move. Iron Man himself grounded him, told him not to move, told him that he was too injured to fight. He’s pretty sure he’s got a concussion rattling about inside of his skull.
But War Machine is more than grounded. Half of the team were detained or are missing. Black Widow is apparently a traitor, though the details on that one seem a little fuzzy. Vision could help, maybe, but he left when the others were taken away in hi-tech handcuffs, something almost grave in his android features, and Peter’s got no idea how to contact him—all he knows is that most of everyone is gone from this side of the world.
But him? He’s still in this hotel, and he's closer than anyone else is who could be trusted, and, well—
Peter knows that he’s not Ned when it comes to coding and hacking, but he can do a thing or two about using the fact that Iron Man’s coordinates are currently fully displayed on Peter’s suit and the fact that there is a private jet that Peter was supposed to get on with Happy Hogan at the end of the day and, well—
Mr. Stark can't get mad if Peter rearranges the destination just slightly, right?
---
Peter exits from Mr. Stark's jet to a blindingly white world.
His senses are too much on a regular basis. That's why he put the goggles in the "pjs" that he wears when swinging around Queens. He needs something, anything, to cut out some of the overstimulation that hits him through his cornea to the retina and beyond. If it wasn’t for the tinted lenses of the suit that Mr. Stark provided him, Peter would barely be able to keep his eyes open against the sheer brick to the face that the snow-white is causing his brain.
But he can hear the sounds of the fight in the cave, the sound of metal arms against armor, of shield against armor, of armor against armor, and the alerts on his suit as to Mr. Stark's vital scenes are going insane, and so Peter beelines out of the jet into the cave itself, just in time to see Captain America carve his shield into Mr. Stark's chest, right through the arc reactor, pinning Mr. Stark to the stone floor like a dead insect on a collector’s wall, dissecting him like an animal.
And it echoes through the cave like a fucking gunshot, fracturing, splintering, lightning cracking through the clouds, the atom splitting down the middle, Ben Parker falling against the concrete of the alleyway, his nephew failing to stop him from dying.
And in an instant, Peter sees—
Blood pooling on the ground behind Ben’s head, a stain spreading out in a poisonous bloom across his shirt as someone screams, as tears carve their tracks down Peter's cheeks, as he can’t save him—
Spider-man doesn’t have blasters. He doesn’t have anything but his webs, and he is running on fumes, his own ribs feel as cracked as Mr. Stark's, but that doesn't stop him from whipping around and shooting webs out of his shooters, catching Captain America and the Winter Soldier both against the side of the cave.
And he can hear the voice of the man who has been on PSAs his entire childhood, the man who is supposed to stand for honor and integrity and loyalty, protesting and trying to fight the webs while a voice just as thick with a Brooklyn accent, but softer, quieter, tries to tell Steve Rogers that he should just let the kid check on Stark—
But Peter can’t focus on either of them.
All he can focus on is Tony Stark’s cracked helmet, the rasping rattle of the breath in his throat, the high-speed pitter-patter pace of his heart battering against his ribs, the single drop of blood on his mouth.
Peter can hear it all. He can see it all.
And he has to get that fucking shield out of Mr. Stark’s chest.
Peter might not be a super soldier. He might just be some kid from Queens.
But he has one last squeeze of strength left, hopped up on the adrenaline roller coaster rush of Tony Stark bleeding out beneath him—
So Peter grabs the edges of the shield—a shield that has only ever been wielded by Steve Rogers, by Captain America— and pulls.
Mr. Stark groans as he does so, this pained, shrapnel sound that bangs against the insides of Peter’s ears, and the backs of Peter’s eyes burn.
Mr. Stark isn’t supposed to sound like that. He isn’t supposed to sound like he’s dying. He isn’t supposed to sound like the death rattle within Ben’s chest, but with every movement of the shield, Mr. Stark sounds just a bit worse, and it's taking everything Peter has not to cry because if Tony Stark dies—if Peter ends up with one more ghost—if he has to watch one more person he looks up to breath his last right in front of him—
Peter has to get it out. He has to release it from the weight crushing the armor to Mr. Stark ’s chest, the weight breaking his heart, the weight on his own chest.
Peter's breath is dragging harsh against the inside of his throat. He is having a hard time breathing through the thin, cold Siberian air, worse than any NYC blizzard, because at least there, Peter is on home turf, and here, he is alone in a cave with two super soldiers and a superhero that is on the verge of death—
But he manages to do it, tears freezing against the inside of his suit as he does so.
Peter’s not made for this. Spiders don’t do thermoregulation.
But he does try to save the little guy. The humans without powers or armor or anything to save them.
And with the armor carving in on itself, the shield pressing down on Mr. Stark's all too human chest, the almighty Tony Stark is just that.
Then, finally, Peter does it. With one final rock back of the shield, he yanks the shield out of Mr. Stark’s chest with the last of his strength, tossing it to the side.
And then Peter falls to the ground next to him, on his knees, breathing in jagged, ragged gulps of air.
He can’t lose someone else. He can’t—
He can’t have another ghost on his conscience.
And Peter can’t be the person that watches Tony Stark die.
“Please, sir,” he begs, reaching out a trembling hand to Tony’s shoulder, and some part of his brain goes thermodynamics, thinks transfer of heat seeking equilibrium, and knows that if he touches cold metal it will leech the thermal energy from his body, especially because some days, Peter Parker is more spider than boy, and he knew that coming to Siberia would be a dangerous prospect for someone that cannot thermoregulate properly, but he can’t do this. He can’t watch this happen. “Come back, don’t die—” Peter’s voice chokes on the words, the plea, the prayer: “Please, I can’t watch anyone else die—”
“I’m here, kid,” Mr. Stark rasps, voice quieter, smaller, than Peter’s ever heard it in videos and press conferences and the like, the croak in his voice painful to listen to. He’s fragile. So much more fragile than Peter has ever seen Iron Man, seen the man in the armor, seen the man without his suits and his sunglasses, face bruised, ribs surely bruised.
In this moment, he’s Tony Stark, not the man, the myth, the legend, genius playboy billionaire philanthropist, but rather just a man in his fifties who just took two super-soldiers and an an adamantium shield to the chest.
And if Peter’s own chest is aching like this, then he can only imagine what Mr. Stark is feeling, cold beneath nothing more than an undershirt and pants inside of the Iron Man suit which is warped and caved in and the bits pressing in on against his sides the only real protection against the cold that he actually has.
But Mr. Stark is talking. He’s taking in breaths, as ragged and harsh as they are echoing in Peter’s enhanced eardrums.
And that’s something. God, that’s something, because it means that Tony Stark is alive, that the shield didn’t cut through his chest, that a literal heart break didn’t kill him.
“But they—" Mr. Stark turns his head, just barely, and the hiss that escapes his lips could wake the dead. “You knew he killed my father, Rogers, and you protected him, you didn’t tell me—"
Peter doesn’t know all of the context of what is going on, and to be honest, he doesn't think that he needs to.
All he knows is that the shield is out of Mr. Stark's chest.
The shield is out of his chest, and his lips might be tinting blue, and they need the quinjet, but his chest isn't sliced open, isn't bloody, there is no gunshot wound, there is no ghost—
And all of a sudden, Peter feels the cold as the adrenaline crashes. As he collapses. As he slumps forward, barely managing to catch himself with open palms against the cold stone beneath him, and his suit can only do so much. There's some thermoregulation in it, he thinks, but not—not quite enough, because spiders are so bad at thermoregulation, araneae need more than homo sapiens do, and his mind is stretching, is spiralling, is freezing over—
“Kid?” he hears Mr. Stark's frantic voice say, but Mr. Stark isn’t moving, Mr. Stark can’t move, he’s trapped in the prison of his warped, ice-chipped, shield-dissected armor, and Peter’s vision is fracturing into silvery flashes, blinding as the snow beyond the cave, and nausea is convulsing at his throat, and he knows that you’re not supposed to fall asleep when you’ve got a concussion but he’s so, so cold, and they’re both going to die here, in the cold, bruised and broken and unheard—
Peter doesn’t want that to happen, of course. He wants nothing more than to reach in deep, to the energy reserves, to the roots in Queens, to the warmth of Aunt May and Ned’s smiles, to everything that he loves, everything that has kept him going for so long—
But he has nothing left to give. No strength left to reach for.
All Peter has is the certainty that he did the right thing. That he managed to get the shield out of Mr. Stark's heart.
And as he moves, something grinds against itself inside of his chest.
Something in his ribs cracks open, exploding within him, and he falls. He falls, backwards, forwards, he has no idea, he has lost all sense of balance, all sense of warmth, all sense of equilibrium. He is in Siberia, he is in Germany, he is anywhere but home, he has nothing more than the black cat he sees in the distance, stark against the white snow outside of the cave, the only creature left in the entire open, empty world that isn't currently webbed up or trapped by a caved-in suit of armor.
And the last thing that Peter can say—and he’s not even sure if he gets the words out before he falls—is a plea to: “Please. Help him. Save—"
Peter doesn’t know if the name that slips from his lip is Ben or Mr. Stark. He doesn’t know if he manages to say anything at all. If ghosts are nothing but wishes, meant to melt the moment that the frost touches your tongue.
All Peter knows is that when his back meets the cold stones, he doesn’t know anything for so long after that.
---
A king arrives into a cave to find a boy with blood on his mouth and bruises on his skin, lips tinted blue, the mask of a spider-man suit half-peeled back from his face by the scrabbling, weak, twitching. fingers of a half-conscious inventor, just as bruised, just as bloodied, just as wounded, pleading with him even as the inventor fades in and out of consciousness.
And behind them all, Steve Rogers and James Barnes are webbed up by Spider-man—a child, it turns out, a teenage boy fading out quick beneath the press of a climate colder than anyone could be used to in a suit as thin as his—and while Steve Rogers protests, James Barnes just watches, gaze cool and dark as the further reaches of this very cave.
It would be so easy to take justice here and now, but T'Challa is not a man who can be allowed rash decisions. He is a king, now, whether he wishes to be or not, it is his mantle to carry to be responsible, to think things through, to get the justice that is owed and not an inch more—
And there is a plea before him.
“Please,” Tony Stark says, fingers flexing, twitching as much as they can towards the boy, but he's trapped, the armor too heavy for an unenhanced man to move when the engine has been destroyed, and he is desperate to keep this child from becoming a ghost, desperate beyond anything rational, “Get him onto a quinjet. You can't—you can't let him die. Please.”
It is a far cry from the Tony Stark that T’Challa has seen in his press conferences, the man with the sunglasses and the designer suits without a care in the world beyond his inventions and the bottle. That sort of man would not beg. Would not pray.
And yet, here he is, despair painted clear across his face, need overweighing want, desperate to see this boy returned home.
And T'Challa doesn't know how things ended up here, with Tony Stark and the boy on the ground, but considering the caved-in nature of Iron Man's armor, the way that Tony Stark can't quite twist far enough to clutch the boy's face, the way that the two super-soldiers are webbed to the cave wall, the temporary truce that T'Challa last heard that Tony Stark made with Captain Rogers and the Winter Soldier must have dissolved at some point along the way.
And now, watever fury Tony Stark might have carried has bled out, replaced only by the cold fear of a place as frost-tipped as this taking away the boy.
And in a moment, T’Challa sees Shuri on the ground next to him. He imagines what it would be like to clutch, to grasp, to find himself incapacitated and prone on the ground, unable to move, pleading and praying for her life.
And his own fury cools as well.
King T’Challa does not wish to fight these sorts of wars. He wants his father to have justice, but he also wants to put his ghosts in the ground. T’Challa wants to see James Barnes and his other associates taken care of, whoever commanded them taken care of, but in no world does he want to see this child die.
It is too cold here in Siberia for the flies to attend the dead. For the corpses to gain rot. A body could be preserved here for centuries, the host for ghosts. Years from now, someone could return to find the body just as bloodied and bruised as it is now, frozen forever at the fracture.
And T’Challa will not let this child—or, he must swallow and think, any of these others—join the grave. He will not let this teenager become a ghost.
Maybe he can embrace the dawn here, and make sure that everyone ends up where they should.
But in between one breath and the next, before T’Challa has the chance to declare what, exactly, he is going to do, Tony Stark’s breaths slow, dragging out into the shallow breathing of the unconscious.
Tony Stark passes out, and it is up to T'Challa to decide what to do next.
---
Tony wakes up in the middle of a storm of panic shredding through his chest, the arc reactor going atomic between his ribs.
He can feel the cold down to his bones. The bitter bite of betrayal on his tongue.
The revelations about Steve. About HYDRA. About Bucky Barnes.
And now, out of it, he can understand, just a bit, that Bucky Barnes was mind-controlled, that it wasn't his fault, that Bucky didn't quite deserve Tony to lose his mind and attack, but Steve Rogers is a different story. Steve Rogers chose to keep his parents’ murder from him, and then shoved his shield in Tony's chest, and more than anything, Tony remembers—
“Peter,” he gasps, because he remembers the kid collapsing, face going as white as the ruined snow outside of the cave, collapsing to the ground with frost gathering on his eyelashes and the strands of his hair, all because he followed Tony into a battle that he shouldn't have.
That kid is a hero. The sort of hero that none of them have been in so long. Throwing himself in between Tony and Steve, prying the shield out of Iron Man's chest, doing what he could to relieve the ache in Tony's heart.
(And Peter snuck here in the first place in order to do it. A kid after Tony’s own heart, really, except far better than Tony could ever hope to be.)
But what he sees in front of him here, in this rather high-tech medical bay that certainly rivals if not perhaps outpaces the one in the Avengers Compound, is not the collapse of a boy that has thrown himself into a situation far beyond his responsibility, but is rather Peter Parker sitting on the chair next to Tony's hospital bed, looking rather normal in a graphic science t-shirt and new jeans, but with some sort of high-tech gloves around his hands that glow down clearly carefully calculated lines down the back. (Tony doesn't have enhanced senses, so he can't quite guarantee that the gloves are specifically built to carefully distribute warmth across Peter's fingers, but he wouldn't be shocked if that was the case.)
And Peter is giving Tony a small, awkward smile and reaching out to take Tony's hand in his own tentative hand—and yes, the gloves are carefully spreading warmth throughout Peter's likely still healing knuckles, if he managed to catch any frostbite in Siberia—as he says, "Right here, Mr. Stark." The kid seems relieved that Tony is awake, just as much as Tony's own chest unfurls when he sees Peter, clearly warm and recovered in a way that Tony only could have dreamed of when Peter collapsed next to him in that cave.
Tony sighs in relief. The kid is okay. The kid, who never should have followed him into that cave, is okay, and Tony can let the panic that he felt when Peter collapsed slowly start to melt away between his ribs.
Peter’s face is sharper than Tony ever could have predicted when he says, “They scooped up Captain Rogers and Mr. Barnes. I know you trusted them and wanted them free, but after what they did to you—" His face pinches and he swallows. "Prince T’Challa—I guess King T’Challa, now, though government was never my best class, Mr. Stark, I’ll admit the truth to you—is handling all of that now, though, Mr. Stark, where the Rogue Avengers are going, he said something about rehabilitation, which I think is good, I think people should get a chance to change, but I made sure that he promised that he wouldn’t let the Winter Soldier or Captain America near you, sir, because I think what they did to you was rather shitty—" Peter’s cheeks flush. “I mean, I know those PSAs from Captain America would say something about good language, but—"
“Call me Tony, kid,” Tony says, off-hand, caught off-guard by the sheer force of the kid’s cascade of words, hard not to let himself be swept along by Peter’s easy enthusiasm as if Tony’s last memory of him isn’t him freezing, unconscious, in a Siberian cave, more frost than human being. “And I know it makes me a bad adult to say so, but I could not give a shit what kind of language you use in front of me. You saved my life.”
It’s a stark admission to make. The sort of thing that Tony doesn’t say lightly, because how could he say it lightly? How could he ever let someone have that over him, that they saved his life, that he would be a ghost without them?
But in that Siberian cave, if Steve had gone even a few inches further with that shield, if Steve had left that shield in his chest, if Steve had left him to freeze in the depths of Siberia, with who knows how long until someone showed up to bring Tony back—
Peter blushes. “I didn’t save your life, Mr. Stark, sir, I just—got rid of that shield.” His expression twists, and it’s a nasty thing to see on his face, that fury, but Tony can’t blame him.
Yeah, sure, Tony might have survived that. He survived building an arc reactor with Ho Yinsen, carving it into his own chest, and stumbling out into that desert on his own. He’s made of stronger stuff than people give him credit for. He might not be a super soldier, but his will and stubbornness is made of adamantium just as much as Steve’s shield is.
But he thinks—
Tony would not have made it out of there without a broken heart.
The Captain America shield went straight through the arc reactor in the suit. If the suit was still hooked up to the arc reactor in his chest, he would have been done for. A corpse, wrapped up in the frost.
"Still, kid," Tony says, and he knows that his tone is fervent, but he can't find it in himself to be apologetic as he says, "Thank you."
Peter swallows as if he wants to protest again, but thankfully, he doesn't, instead saying, "Um—you're welcome, Mr. Stark, sir."
Tony rolls his eyes. "Seriously, like I just said—just call me Tony, kid."
Peter swallows. "Okay, Mr.—I mean. Tony." It clearly takes some effort to use Tony's first name, but he does it, because Tony asked.
Tony smiles at that. It's not often that he makes a new friend. That he finds that he can trust someone. And even in Germany, he hadn't been quite sure, when it comes to this kid, but after Siberia—
Peter has entered a very exclusive circle of trust that up until this point was limited to exactly three people—Pepper, Rhodey, and Happy—and he isn't likely to leave it any time soon—
The door opens to Prince T’Challa—King T'Challa, now, Tony supposes, considering his dead father, and how many people in this room carry ghosts of dead fathers on their shoulders—and Peter immediately moves to his feet. "Your Highness—I mean, Mr. Your Majesty, sir—"
T'Challa almost seems amused by Peter's haste to bow, as he just nods at Peter, gesturing for him to sit back down, and Peter responds immediately. "Mr. Parker, you know that you have been given permission to just call me T'Challa—"
"Yeah, but you're a king—"
"And you are a good person with a good heart," T'Challa says, "It's not often that I meet many of those on my rare trips outside of Wakanda."
Tony cannot help but agree with T'Challa's assessment of Peter's character, but that doesn't meant that he doesn't blink in surprise when T'Challa looks to him. “You are here in Wakanda, Tony Stark, to be attended by our best physicians, as a thank you for what you have done to bring the King’s killer to justice," T'Challa informs Tony, and his tone is pleasant, respectful, but Tony's heart is still spiking because—"You shall be heading home once you are considered strong enough to be transported and all signs of hypothermia and frostbite are gone from both of your systems."
Because, well, shit, Tony just dragged a teenage boy along to three different countries—hell, three different continents, he is going to be in absolute dogshit when he gets home for kidnapping a child, because no one is going to believe that Peter was the one that followed him to Siberia, because no one is going to understand that Tony realized that he’d made a mistake bringing Peter to Germany and had tried to ground him, to send him home, but he should have known better than anyone how stubborn and rebellious teenagers can be, because he would have done the exact same thing himself at that age.
But it seems as if all of that precious media training isn’t doing its job correctly, that the easy confident mask that Tony wears out and about is slipping here in this infirmary, that Tony’s panic must be showing plain on his face, cracking open his expression, because Peter jumps in to assure him, as if Tony isn’t the adult in this situation.
“Don’t worry, Happy knows,” Peter informs Tony, more cheer in his voice than Tony ever could have predicted.
But it's not Happy that matters, dear lord, it's—“What about your Aunt, kid, you were supposed to be home—god, what day even is it?”
“You’ve been unconscious for three days, now. Medical coma while they did surgeries on your chest,” Peter says, and he almost looks chagrined as he admits: “And I was also under for like, a day, as they gave me some nutrients and painkillers and other stuff to help my body heal itself. The spider venom has, like, a major healing factor and anything. The bruised ribs and the hypothermia's gone, and the frostbite's nearly gone, as well, and once you're good enough for your arm to be stabilized in a sling, well—" His faces opens bright as he says, “We’ll be back in New York soon, end of the week, probably."
Something about Peter's earnestness is doing something to the inside of Tony's chest. To the fact that somehow, it seems as if things have actually gone right. “Who’s keeping you out of trouble here in Wakanda, kid?"
"He has been spending time with my little sister," T'Challa says, "Shuri is a technological genius in her own right, a great pride to the crown and her own name, and she has been trading ideas with young Mr. Parker here."
"Tell me why I'm not shocked," Tony drawls, "You can't help but be a nerd, can you, kid?"
"You're the one who gave me a scholarship for being a nerd in the first place," Peter says, "This really shouldn't be that great a shock, Tony."
Tony arches an eyebrow. "Touche, kid."
Is this what Tony's life might become? Arguing with a teenage boy who is more a nerd—and unashamedly so—than Tony was when he was the same age? A kid that has all of the best parts of Tony and none of the worst? A kid that is reckless and clever and too big-hearted for his own good?
Tony is still hurt over everything that happened with Steve Rogers, his own guilt over what happened to Rhodey, all of the fallout from the Avengers falling apart. There are so many things that have to be picked up and put back together and some things that will never be put back together, he doesn't think. Even if they're stitched together, they might not heal right.
(And if what Tony saw through that wormhole is still coming towards them, then he doesn't know how much time they have left to heal everything and actually figure out a way to make things work.)
But in this moment, both he and Peter are warm. They are not breaking brittle over the bite of frost through flesh at the end of the world. There is a chance to get things right.
And so Tony squeezes the kid's hand, feeling the warmth pervading both of their bones, and offers him a smile.
And Peter Parker grins right back.