Chapter Text
“No, no, no, no!”
Peter’s voice broke beneath the shriek of tearing steel. The ferry’s cargo hold had become a steep, flooding channel, its deck listing beneath his feet while black harbor water poured through the widening rupture in the hull.
The first wave struck the parked cars with enough force to shove them sideways. Tires squealed uselessly against wet metal, bumpers collided, and a taxi spun until its rear end slammed into a support column. People clung to posts, railings, door handles—anything fixed enough to keep them from being swept toward the open water—while the current tore loose bags, broken glass, and pieces of luggage from their hands.
Above him, passengers screamed as the upper level tilted. Shoes lost traction on the sloping deck, and bodies slid toward the center of the vessel, crashing into benches and one another as the gap between the ferry’s two halves widened.
Peter fired another web. The strand caught, stretched, and snapped almost immediately.
“No!” he cried out.
He leapt before he had time to calculate whether there was anything left for him to catch. His right hand closed around one trembling web line while his left wrist fired toward the opposite half of the ferry. The fresh strand struck steel and held. Peter swung into the space between the two sections, kicked one foot against the edge of the starboard deck, and spread his arms until his shoulders screamed.
As he hung there, the ferry pulled in opposite directions around him. Webbing cut across his palms, even through the suit, while the muscles along his arms and back tightened until they felt ready to tear loose from the bone. The water below churned through the widening gap, dark and cold and full of debris. Somewhere behind him, a woman was shouting for her child. Somewhere above, another support cable snapped with a crack that sounded like a gunshot.
Peter gritted his teeth and pulled. He had stopped cars. He had caught falling elevators. He only had to hold the ferry long enough for the passengers to get clear. He only had to keep the two halves from separating. He only had to be stronger than several thousand tons of failing steel, moving water, and momentum.
The web in his left hand began to fray.
“No, come on,” Peter gasped, though he could barely hear himself over the metal groaning around him. “Come on, come on—”
Another strand snapped above his head as the ferry pulled harder. Pain shot through both shoulders, sharp enough to whiten the edges of his vision, and Peter’s grip slipped several inches. His feet scraped over wet steel. The gap beneath him widened.
He was losing it.
The realization arrived with a cold certainty that frightened him more than the water below. He had no other plan, no untouched reservoir of strength, and no clever piece of Stark technology waiting to fix what he had started. He could hear the suit reporting structural failure, web degradation, and impossible loads, but Karen’s voice had become meaningless beneath the screaming passengers and the brutal strain in his arms.
Peter pulled until a cry tore out of him. Then, without warning, the pressure eased. The web lines slackened in his hands. The ferry’s two halves, which had been dragging him apart an instant earlier, began moving toward each other. His boots slipped free of the deck.
“What the hell…”
A red-and-gold figure rose beyond the shattered window.
Iron Man hovered above the water with both hands braced beneath one half of the ferry, repulsors blazing from his boots. Sleek drones swept in around him, locking clamps against the opposite section. Their thrusters ignited in sequence, pushing the separated halves toward alignment.
Tony turned his helmet toward Peter.
“Hi, Spider-Man. Band practice, was it?”
Peter stared at him. Relief hit first, so immediate and overwhelming that his knees nearly buckled beneath him. Mr. Stark was here. The ferry was moving back together. The people trapped above him were going to survive.
The shame followed before Peter could take a full breath. He had come because Peter had failed.
The armor turned away, carrying one half of the ferry while the drones supported the other. Steel shrieked as the sections met, the noise rattling through the seating area and setting Peter’s teeth on edge. A man pressed against the intact side of the cabin raised both arms.
“Yeah, Iron Man!”
Other passengers joined him, cheering through their shock while Peter stood among the wreckage with cold water dripping from his suit. Nobody looked at him. Nobody should have looked at him. Iron Man was the one holding the ferry together, sealing the split, and calling in enough equipment to accomplish in seconds what Peter had nearly died trying to do alone.
Peter forced himself to move. He shot a web through the broken window and swung down into the cargo hold, landing beside a row of crushed vehicles. The space smelled of salt water, gasoline, hot metal, and the bitter smoke left behind by the alien weapon. Water sloshed around his boots as he picked his way past a bent support column.
Iron Man hovered near the rupture in the hull, welding the ferry’s interior structure back together with a concentrated beam. Sparks struck the water and hissed out.
Peter lifted his mask as he approached, needing Tony to hear him without the suit between them.
“Uh, Mr. Stark?” His voice came out thinner than he intended, but the man did not turn. “Hey, Mr. Stark. Could I do anything? What do you want me to do?”
The welding beam shut off.
“I think you’ve done enough.”
Tony’s voice came through the helmet speakers, flat and stripped of the humor that usually softened his teasing insults. Before Peter could respond, the armor’s repulsors flared. Tony shot upward through the damaged deck and disappeared into the smoke.
Peter stood ankle-deep in harbor water with his mouth still open. The way Tony had said “enough” made his stomach drop.
Instead of responding, Peter pulled the mask back over his face and climbed. The upper decks looked worse now that he was no longer fighting to keep them together. Railings had folded inward, windows had shattered, and web strands covered the ferry and snapped loose whenever the wind caught them. Passengers huddled beneath emergency blankets while rescue workers moved between them. Helicopters circled overhead, their rotors beating smoke and mist across the listing vessel, and boats crowded the water on every side.
Peter climbed to the top platform of a mast and crouched there, too high for the police officers below to reach him easily and too exposed to hide from what he had done.
He had tried to tell Tony.
That fact kept pushing through the guilt, sharp and stubborn. Peter had called Happy again and again. He had sent messages, photographs, and videos. He had warned them about the weapons before Washington, after Washington, and every time he saw another piece of alien technology appear on the street. Nobody had listened.
It was not fair for Tony to arrive at the end and behave as though Peter had created the entire situation. He looked toward the skyline, but the suit had disappeared.
By the time he left the ferry, anger had begun to overtake the fear.
He found a quiet rooftop several blocks from the waterfront and swung to its edge, where he could face the harbor. The ferry remained visible in the distance, surrounded by emergency lights that flashed across the dark water. Peter pulled off his mask and dragged in a breath of cold air, his damp hair clinging to his forehead.
Iron Man swept over the roof and landed with enough force to scatter gravel around his boots. Peter straightened. The armor seemed larger away from the ferry, where there were no collapsing decks or terrified passengers to divide his attention.
“Previously on Peter Screws the Pooch,” he began, “I tell you to stay away from this. Instead, you hacked a multimillion-dollar suit so you could sneak around behind my back doing the one thing I told you not to do.”
Peter’s stomach clenched. Tony had not shouted, but every word arrived with the hard precision of something rehearsed during the flight from the ferry.
“Is everyone okay?” Peter asked.
“No thanks to you.”
“No thanks to me?” Peter repeated.
Anger surged through him, hot enough to drive him off the edge where he had been perched. He jumped down onto the roof and stalked toward the suit. His legs trembled from exhaustion, and his shoulders still burned from holding the ferry, but the unfairness of the accusation carried him forward.
“Those weapons were out there, and I tried to tell you about it. But you didn’t listen. None of this would’ve happened if you had just listened to me.”
The words came faster as soon as they started, driven by the fear and anger that had been building every time Happy ignored another call.
He knew he should stop. Tony’s helmet had tilted half an inch, which was not much movement but somehow conveyed the exact moment Peter had crossed from defending himself into making matters worse. He could not stop, however, because the ferry had almost sunk and the man standing in front of him was still treating him like an inconvenient voicemail.
Peter’s voice rose. “If you even cared, you’d actually be here.”
The suit began to open and Peter froze.
The face plate opened first, before the red-and-gold chest plates separated, folding away from the arc reactor before the armor split along the shoulders and thighs.
Tony stepped down onto the rooftop in a dark suit and a fitted black shirt, leaving the empty suit standing behind him.
The words Peter had been prepared to throw at an empty suit died in his throat. Tony was here. Not speaking through a remote connection. Not attending a wedding and sending a programmed suit to rescue Peter and scold him from afar. Tony Stark himself stood on the rooftop, his hair windblown and his face more forbidding than Peter had ever seen it.
Peter backed up before he could stop himself, but Tony marched forward toward him.
“I did listen, kid. Who do you think called the FBI, huh?”
Peter’s indignation faltered at that proclamation, but Tony did not give him time to recover.
“Do you know that I was the only one who believed in you?” Tony continued to scold him. “Everyone else said I was crazy to recruit a fourteen-year-old kid.”
“I’m fifteen.” The correction escaped automatically, and Peter regretted it the instant Tony’s eyes narrowed.
“No, this is where you zip it, all right? The adult is talking.”
Tony pointed toward the harbor. From this distance, the ferry looked almost small, although smoke still climbed from its upper decks and emergency helicopters continued circling above it.
“What if somebody had died tonight?” Tony demanded. “Different story, right? ’Cause that’s on you.”
Peter’s stomach roiled as he considered that. He remembered the woman calling for her child, the passengers sliding down the deck, and the web line fraying between his fingers. He had focused so completely on stopping Toomes that the people around him had become part of the obstacle rather than the reason he wore the suit.
The billionaire stepped closer, and his voice dropped. “And if you died, I feel like that’s on me. I don’t need that on my conscience.”
The anger in Tony’s face changed as he spoke. His brows remained drawn and his mouth held in a rigid line, but Peter saw something raw beneath the fury, something that had not been visible through the helmet.
Tony had been frightened. Frightened because Peter had nearly died and Tony believed the responsibility would belong to him.
That knowledge made Peter flush to the tips of his ears as it stripped away the last of his arguments.
“Yes, sir,” he said quietly. “I—I’m sorry.”
“Sorry doesn’t cut it,” Tony said, his voice stern.
Peter lowered his gaze. He could hear the harbor behind him, the buzz of the helicopters above the ferry, and the din of New York City below, but nothing compared to the roar of pulsing blood in his own ears.
“I know,” Peter said quietly. “I know it doesn’t.”
His words were genuine, but it sounded small in comparison to the twisted metal as the ferry split in two. Peter could hear that inadequacy in his own voice as clearly as Tony could.
“I really am sorry,” Peter added. “I know I messed up. I know it was bad, but I can fix it. I’ll stay in Queens, I’ll turn the tracker back on, I’ll call Happy before I do anything—although maybe not Happy specifically, because that hasn’t been working great—but I’ll call somebody. I’ll do whatever you say.”
Tony pinned the teenager in place with a stern look as his jaw tightened. “That’s the problem.”
“What is?” Peter’s chest tightened.
“You’ll do whatever I say now, because the boat is in two pieces and I’m standing in front of you.” Tony pointed toward the ferry before crossing his arms over his chest. “Tomorrow, when the smoke clears and you’ve had eight hours to convince yourself you almost had it handled, we’re right back here.”
“No, we won’t,” Peter protested.
Tony’s closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “We were in Washington four days ago.”
“You told me I did a good job there!”
“That was before I realized that you caused the problem, kid.”
At that, Peter looked away. A Coast Guard helicopter circled above the ferry. Emergency lights flashed red and blue across Tony’s face, catching the lines beside his eyes and the rigid set of his mouth.
“I just wanted to be like you,” Peter said finally.
Tony’s expression changed, although not in the way Peter had hoped. For a second, the anger gave way to something closer to pain.
“And I,” Tony said, “wanted you to be better.”
Peter watched him and tried to determine what would happen next.
In the film playing inside Peter’s head, Tony would hold out a hand and demand the suit. Peter would surrender it, return to Queens in the old red hoodie and goggles, and spend the next several months proving that he could still help people without Stark technology. It would be terrible, but straightforward. Losing the suit would give Peter something specific to regret and something equally specific to earn back.
“I gave you the suit because I thought it would keep you alive while you learned,” he said. “Not so you could bypass the learning part and jump straight to dismantling federal operations.”
Peter looked down. “Are you taking the suit?”
Tony studied him for several seconds before asking, “You think that fixes this?”
“I don’t know,” Peter said.
“Let me rephrase then. You were doing this before I gave you this suit. You think if I take this version, suddenly you stop climbing buildings, stop chasing car thieves, start telling your aunt what you are out doing every night?”
Peter hesitated, unable to meet the super hero’s eyes, because he wouldn’t be able to lie, but telling the truth felt infinitely more dangerous.
Tony gave a humorless laugh. “Excellent. Strong rehabilitation plan.”
“Then what do you want me to do?” The teenager’s voice was desperate.
“I want you to understand what almost happened.”
“I do.”
“No, you understand that the ferry broke.” Tony stepped closer again. “You understand that you lost the fight, and I showed up to finish it. That’s not the same thing.”
“I know people could’ve gotten hurt.”
“People did get hurt.”
Peter’s head shot up as his face went vaguely green.
“Minor injuries,” Tony explained. “No fatalities. You got lucky.”
Lucky.
Lucky that Tony had arrived, lucky the passengers had held on, lucky the flooding cargo hold had not become a tomb before the ferry could be stabilized.
Peter’s eyes stung, and he blinked hard.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, although he still knew it was inadequate.
Tony’s face remained stern. “I heard you the first time.”
“What am I supposed to say?”
“Nothing, for the next thirty seconds. Try it as an experiment.”
Peter’s face flushed and he looked at the ground again.
The billionaire’s gaze moved over the suit, pausing at the torn sections, the grime pressed into the red fabric, and the damaged web shooter on Peter’s wrist. After a moment, he turned toward the waiting suit, but instead of stepping into it, he touched the control on his wrist. A small compartment opened along the suit’s side. The movement made Peter’s pulse skyrocket.
“I’m going to allow you to keep the suit,” Tony said, handing a functional web shooter to the teenage superhero. “But the tracker goes back on and stays on. Training-wheel protocol is restored. Karen reports directly to me, and if you override anything, leave Queens, or decide another government operation needs your personal touch, we are going to have a much more unpleasant discussion.”
Relief flooded his veins so quickly that Peter’s knees felt weak. He nodded rapidly. “Okay.”
Peter knew he should feel grateful. He was keeping the suit, receiving another chance, and hearing the rules directly from Tony rather than through Happy. Yet Tony had not relaxed. The tension remained in his shoulders and across his jaw, and something in the deliberate way he spoke suggested they had not reached the actual consequences of Peter’s judgment…or rather lack thereof.
Tony looked toward the edge of the roof. “We are gonna head out and finish this conversation somewhere private.”
A chill moved through Peter that had nothing to do with the wind.
“Uh—Mr. Stark, this is private,” he gestured at the empty rooftop.
“There are six news helicopters within camera range, and the man in the building across from us has been pretending to water the same dead plant since I landed.”
Peter glanced toward the nearest apartment window. A curtain closed sharply.
“What happens somewhere private?” he asked.
Tony’s attention returned to him. “You find out how far ‘sorry doesn’t cut it’ extends.”
Peter’s stomach dropped all the way to the bottom of the building they were currently standing on.
“Mr. Stark, you’re being really vague.” It wasn’t quite a whine, but Peter still winced internally at the childishness of his tone.
Tony stepped backward into the Mark XLVII suit. The plates began closing around him, concealing his face one section at a time.
“You’ll find out when we get there. Mask on.”
“That is an extremely villain-sounding answer.”
The faceplate sealed. “Get airborne, Spider-Man.”
Peter obeyed.