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It is indisputable that Doctor Ryland Grace loves his students fiercely.
He knows he goes way beyond what is considered a teacher's expected duties. Regularly. He also knows that not all of his colleagues appreciate or approve of it, but he couldn't care less about what some old fart who doesn't even like their job thinks. If he did, he'd still be working in academia. The mental and physical well-being of his students matters to him as much as their education does.
Still, Ryland never planned to become the co-parent slash accomplice for a teenaged superhero, but, like most things in his life, nothing ever seems to go according to plan.
His peaceful reality shatters on a random Tuesday when he catches Peter Parker changing his clothes in the janitor closet. He's walking towards the teacher lounge, intent on working on some assignments that were long overdue some grading, when he hears a crash inside.
Unfortunately, Ryland is very aware of what his students like to use the janitor closet for. Even more unfortunately, he's morally obligated to send them back to class even if it means risking getting an eyeful of two of his students making out.
If only that had been it.
Instead, upon opening the door, he finds himself face to face with one Peter Parker in the middle of undressing himself. That would already have been weird in and on itself. But the situation turns even more bizarre when he notices the discarded red spandex suit on the floor.
"Mr. Grace?!" Peter exclaims.
Ryland shuts the door on his face.
Okay, he thinks to himself. You could be mistaken. I mean, come on, there's no possible way that Peter Parker is—
Except.
The more he thinks about it, the more sense it makes.
The unexplained absences. How he started falling asleep in his class when he'd been nothing but a model student beforehand. The lack of any asthma attacks for the last few months. The sudden disappearance of his glasses. The so-called Stark internship.
Aw, dang it.
Peter Parker is Spider-Man. His fifteen-year-old dorky student who can barely pass gym class is out there regularly jumping off of buildings and getting shot at.
He holds his face on his hands and takes a deep breath. There's no section in his teaching protocol that talks about what to do when you find out one of your underaged students is a superhero, which means Ryland is going to have to make this up as he goes.
A couple of minutes into his internal freakout, Peter finally reappears from inside the janitor closet. "Is there any chance you could just act like you saw nothing?" he asks.
Ryland sighs. "I really wish it were that easy."
Peter's face is growing increasingly panicked. "Oh my god Mr. Grace you can't tell anyone."
The speed with which this sentence is blurted out would've startled anyone else, but Ryland's become pretty fluent in Peter-speech by now. "Peter…"
"I'm serious, Mr. Grace!" he insists. "If people found out I could get stuck in a lab for studying! Or worse, they wouldn't let me be Spider-Man anymore!"
Well, someone clearly needs to sort his priorities.
"Peter, calm down," he says. "If you keep yelling like that, the entirety of Midtown Tech will find out and then it won't matter if I tell someone or not."
His student seems to realize then that he's been yelling, covering his mouth with his hands, the panicked look very much still present on his face.
Truth to be told, Ryland finds himself in a bit of a conundrum. On one hand, the responsible thing would be telling someone about this. Fifteen-year-olds like Peter should spend their nights watching movies and building Legos with their friends, not punching criminals on the face. On the other hand, he doesn't know who he would tell. Peter does, unfortunately, have a point. The world isn't nice to mutants. Telling someone could mean ruining Peter's life.
He can't on good conscience allow Peter to keep putting himself, and maybe even others, in danger. But perhaps exposing his secret is the more dangerous option here.
He sighs again. "I'm not going to tell anyone," he says. Peter's face visibly brightens up—
"Yet."
—then deflates again.
Ryland considers his options again. "Does anyone know about this?" he asks. "And I mean an adult, not just Ned."
"Aunt May knows!" Peter replies.
That's—
A surprise. Ryland knows May Parker well. She's a good woman, a responsible parent. She always makes their teacher-parent meetings and conference despite her busy schedule. She seems like the last kind of parent who would let their child run around at night fighting thugs.
"Okay," he says. "I'm not gonna tell anyone. For now. But I want to talk to your aunt about this, and I want to know exactly how this," he gestures vaguely at Peter, "came to be, and why she's been letting it go on for so long."
Peter only looks a bit relieved, but nods anyway. The bell rings then, interrupting them, and Ryland ushers Peter to his class.
So much for his free period.
Peter informs him that May Parker would be stopping by to meet with him on Friday at 4pm. Ryland hasn't been this stressed out about something in a long time.
Despite having a couple days to think it over, he still hasn't reached a solution for his moral conundrum. He hopes this meeting will shed some light on what the right course of action for this bizarre situation is.
May Parker is late, which gives Ryland even more time to spiral.
It's not strange for Peter's aunt to be slightly late to their meetings. Again, she works like crazy, so Ryland has never minded. Even if it's driving him a bit crazy at the moment.
The knock on the door startles him a bit. Peter Parker peeks his head into the classroom. "Mr. Grace? Sorry we're late."
"It's okay, I understand your aunt's schedule can be a bit—"
Except when he looks up from the paper's he's been grading, it's not May Parker who's standing there.
Admitedly, Ryland's brain short-circuits a bit.
Tony moterfucking Stark takes his sunglasses off before addressing him. "There was a bit of traffic on the way here."
Ryland just stares.
"What the fuck," he says. Then corrects himself. “Fudge! I meant fudge.”
Tony Stark looks amused. Peter looks like he'd rather be anywhere else. "I'd introduce myself, but I get the feeling you know who I am."
Tony Stark is in his classroom.
Okay.
These are just things that happen to him now.
"Uh, Mr. Stark. To what do I owe the pleasure?" he replies. He's trying to sound calm. He's pretty sure he's failing.
Because Tony Stark is in his classroom.
"My intern here informed me of the… situation. May was busy, so I offered to come instead," he replies. The both of them sit down on the chairs he'd placed in front of his desk for this meeting. "Mr.Grace, is it? Peter said you wanted to talk. Go ahead."
Ryland had rehearsed a hundred different things to say. Of course, he'd done so with May Parker in mind. Peter's aunt had never been anything but kind to him, so he'd been open to hearing her out.
Tony Stark sitting in his classroom like he owns it, smug grin plastered on his face, makes his left eye twitch. In fact, it brings up some less-than-pleasant memories.
"So, Mr. Stark," he starts. "How long have you known that Mr. Parker was engaging in vigilantism?"
"Almost a year now, I'd say" he replies. "I made him that suit, you know? Top-notch, state-of-the art Starktech."
Oh, lord. He's bragging. Ryland might just barf and end this meeting prematurely. "Let me get this straight," he says. "You've known Mr. Parker has been putting himself in increasingly dangerous situations since he was fourteen-years-old. And instead of stopping him, you decided to encourage it?"
"Wait, Mr. Grace, that's not—"
Stark cuts him off. "Not now, Underoos, the adults are talking. Where are you going with this, Mr. Grace?"
Ryland narrows his eyes at the man. "It's Dr. Grace, actually," he corrects.
He isn't in the habit of making people call him by his proper title, anymore. Mr. Grace suits him well enough. It's what's his kids call him, and it feels closer to who Ryland is now. Doctor Grace is somene he thought he'd left behind. But there's something about Stark that makes his skin crawl. He feels like he's being undermined.
"Are you aware this could be considered Child Endangerment, Mr. Stark?" he continues. "I was hoping to speak with May Parker about this. I won't presume I know her that well, but I've always gotten the sense she was a responsible parent. Letting her nephew go out at night to… fight crime, putting himself and others in deliberate danger, without supervision? All of this just didn't fit with the image of her I had in my head. But then, maybe I was just missing you from the equation."
And, boy, this is starting to feel like the UNESCO conference all over again. He's perfectly aware of who he's talking to. Tony Stark could easily ruin his life, take everything Ryland had built since he left academia away from him with a snap of his fingers. But the words keep tumbling out of his mouth.
He simply—
Can't.
Stop.
Freaking.
Talking.
"Would you so kindly illuminate me and give me one good reason as to why you've let this go on for so long?" he finishes.
For a couple of seconds, there's complete silence in the room. Peter looks horrified, which makes Ryland regret the way he's gone about this. He'd wanted to wipe the smirk away from Stark's face so bad, that he'd forgotten it's his student's whole life on the line here.
"Easy enough," Stark says, shrugging. "He was gonna do it anyway. So I gave him the tools to do it safely. Well, as safe as possible, that is."
Stark's answer effectively shuts Ryland up. The man takes his silence as a sign to keep going. "He does have supervision, by the way. I armed his suit with an AI on par with my own that monitors his vitals and sends me regular updates on Pete's status. I even added curfew reminders for good measure. May was especially happy about that one."
"Oh," is all Ryland can muster up the strength to say, quickly losing all the steam from before.
"Listen, Dr. Grace. I understand how this looks. But I've seen what happens when you try to get this kid to stop helping people, and I'd much rather know he's out there armed with my technology than risking him going out without the suit and getting hurt with no way to contact me."
There's definitely some history there. But Ryland is more focused in the way Stark is talking. It almost makes it seem like he cares. And with the way Peter is looking at his mentor, he thinks he might not be so far off.
This changes things.
He'd assumed, in bad faith, that Peter Parker was just some kind of investment to Tony Stark. Perhaps that's not the case at all.
He pinches the bridge of his nose and sighs. He's sighed most in the last three days than he has in the last month, and he teaches teenagers. "That does sound like Peter. He has a bit of a stubborn streak, doesn't he?" he admits. Peter gasps in fake offense.
Stark snorts. "You don't know the half of it."
Ryland turns to his student now. "Peter, I think you're a good kid. I understand that you want to help people. But you're still a kid. It's not your responsibility. You should be focusing on your grades, your friends! You should be stressing out about getting into college, not about whether you manage to save someone's life or not."
"I'm sorry, Mr. Grace, but I won't stop," Peter replies. Ryland's never seen him that serious before. "I know I'm just a kid, but I'm a kid who can bench-press a building. I have the power to help people when no one else can. If I do nothing and then someone gets hurt, then I feel like it's on me. If I can do something to help, but then I don't and someone gets hurt or worse, I don't think I could live with that."
Hearing that, Ryland feels all the fight leave his body. He'd already known Peter was an incredibly noble kid who would grow up to be an incredibly noble man. He saw it every day in his interactions with his classmates, in the love and respect he holds for his aunt, and even in his dedication to his studies and love for science. This went beyond that.
Ryland guesses that if someone in this school was gonna get stuck with superstrength and supersenses, he's glad it had to be Peter Parker.
Stark breaks the silence. "See?" he says. "There's really no way to argue with that."
Ryland laughs a bit. "Yeah, I guess there really isn't."
What follows is an explanation on Peter's powers, because he really needs to know how they came to be. Call it scientfic curiosity.
If anything, the answer leaves him even more confused.
"You got bitten by a radioactive spider," he says. Peter nods. "On a field trip," he continues. Another nod. "A field trip I was a part of," he finishes. This earns an awkward smile from Peter and an amused laugh from Stark.
Ryland's going to end up with heart problems by the end of this meeting.
"Okay," is all he can muster up the strength to say.
"That was more or less my reaction," Stark admits.
With that cleared up (even if it didn't actually clear up anything), Ryland focuses back on Peter's studies. "I'm going to trust that Mr. Stark here and your aunt have your safety covered," he says. He's still not so sure about that, but from what he knows about Starktech it does tend to be pretty reliable. Even if he's trusting Mrs. Parker's instincts more than he trusts Stark himself. "So let's talk about your studies instead. Some things need to change."
He is first and foremost a teacher, and he'll be darned before he lets a brilliant mind like Peter Parker's go to waste because he's been foresaking his studies in favor of superheroing.
"Oh no," Peter mutters.
"Oh, really?" Stark turns his head towards his intern. "I was under the impression Peter was doing just fine in his studies."
"I mean," Peter says. "I'm not doing badly."
Ryland raises an eyebrow at him. "Constant late submissions. You flunked your latest Spanish quiz. Always falling asleep in my class," he lists. "I've been lenient because I thought something must be going on," and, boy, was he right." I intended to bring it up to your aunt, but this will do as well."
"It seems like I forgot how teenagers are," Stark says. He's keeping a straight face, but his tone sounds amused. "Sneaky. I guess I have no choice but to keep a closer eye on Pete here. I did promise May that I wouldn't let Peter's grades drop."
He picks up a piece of paper from Ryland's desk and scribbles some numbers. "My personal phone number. So you can keep me updated on the kid's progress," he says, flashing Ryland a smirk. "Or yell at me a bit more. I wouldn't be opposed to that either."
Ryland avoids the man's gaze as he takes the paper from him. "Um, sure," he says. "Let me walk the both of you out."
Thankfully, the building is fairly empty at this time of day. No one is around to see Ryland walk Tony Stark out of the building, which he's thankful for.
There's a black car waiting for Stark and Peter. "That would be our getaway car," Stark says. "It's truly been a pleasure, Dr. Grace. I hope we can continue to work together to ensure Peter's academic future."
Peter is already walking towards the car, waving at the driver, who pointedly doesn't wave back. Stark turns to look at Ryland instead. He picks up his glasses from where they're hanging from his ear (he hadn't even realized they were there, dang it) and adjusts them properly on his face. "Text me."
Then he walks away.
Ryland simply stands there, dumbfounded. He isn't blushing. He's not.
Back in the car, Tony sits on the passenger seat. He feels Peter's gaze drilling a hole through the back of his head.
"Mr. Stark," he says. "You can't fuck my science teacher. You can't."
Tony bites back a shit-eating grin. "Language," he replies.
The meeting had been interesting. He'd walked in with the intention of threatening Peter's teacher into silence, so it had been quite a surprise to end up being the one threatened instead.
His phone screen flashes.
Hello, this is Ryland Grace, it reads.
Quite a surprise indeed.