Chapter Text
A little girl with mousy hair and sticky out ears crept down a creaky staircase. She made it all the way to the living room without being spotted. And when she was, she simply laughed toothlessly at having been caught and launched herself onto her grandfather's lap.
“Hello there, Tabby,” a wrinkled face and smiling eyes peered above her. “I might just have to start calling you my little tabby cat if you keep this up every night.”
Tabby didn’t like cats so much. They didn’t like it when she tried to play with them, and once, one had even scratched her. It hadn’t drawn blood, but she’d still been scared.
She shook her head from side to side. “Ew, no! I wanna be a honey badger.”
Her grandfather barked out a surprised laugh. “Well, I won’t stop you. Now, did you want a bedtime story? Baby badgers need their sleep if they want to grow into big, healthy badgers, you know.”
“I want a different story this time,” Tabby crossed her arms. She was bored of princesses and dragons. “Tell me something real.”
Suddenly, her grandfather looked all worried, like he did when was making an important decision. Adults had to make those all the time, he’d once told her. As he thought, his shaggy eyebrows descended lower and lower towards the bridge of his nose, furrowing into a v shape. Finally, after five dragging minutes (Tabby knew not to interrupt her grandfather when he was like this), he spoke.
“How about a story about a curse?”
Tabby felt a pin prick of fear at the word, but she was almost six now, she was meant to be brave. “What kind of curse?”
Her grandfather repositioned her on his lap, his age weathered hand taking up almost the entirety of her back.
“A curse passed down through a family like vines. Jumping from mother to daughter, over and over again.”
“And what is it?” She asked him, resisting the urge to burrow her head into his lap again.
Then, instead of looking worried, Tabby’s grandfather just looked so, immeasurably sad.
“The power to bring back what was once lost. But at great cost, always at a great cost.”
……
“No, no, no, Tabitha. Tabitha, seriously, stop it. Wake up, Tabitha. Why didn’t you tell me this was the price? Why did you lie? Please, Christ, Tabby- stay here, wake up.”
Tony’s vision was blurred.
The heavy fire of guns came from all around him, and he crawled blindly for cover.
The desperate voice next to him was sludge in his ears, and he phased back out again, half conscious and half aware of moving, only to come sluggishly back to himself when rough hands shook him.
“Tony, stay still, I’ve gotta get us off the ground. Stay.”
A part of him wanted to protest at being talked to like a dog, but he’d save it for when he could see in a straight line. Still, he kept up his writhing, he didn’t know whose hands he was in, after all.
“You- you’re not getting- getting me,” he slurred, trying to inject some sort of authority into his voice.
And then he successfully lurched sideways, away from his captor. Just in time for a bullet to explode next to his ear drum. No, not a bullet- a grenade. He was quickly lurching in the opposite direction.
The hands were back, yanking him under his armpits and away from the explosion that whited out his vision. Just when he was starting to get it back.
“Get away,” he pawed uselessly.
“Mr. Stark, please,” the voice suddenly begged, making Tony freeze.
He stumbled blindly alongside the voice while the pieces clicked into place inside his battered head. With a Herculean effort, Tony blinked his spotted eyesight as clear as he could and glanced up from where his cheek was planted on this mystery person’s firm shoulder.
The white eyes of the Spider-Man mask looked back at him.
“Kid,” he sighed in relief, slumping back down again. He could trust Peter to get him out of this. Now, he could sleep.
“No, no,” a hand was patting at his cheek, but Tony barely felt it. “Up and at ‘em, just for a minute.”
Darkness swept him off his feet, tumbling into the unknown.
…….
Tony’s return to consciousness was like the painful, unexpected ripping off of a bandaid.
“You’re such a whiny little smart ass,” a gruff voice argued. “I got you guys out of there. End of story.”
“Are you on drugs? Are you actually on drugs? Oh sure, I didn’t need my ear. Who needs two ears? Eat shit, Frank, you’re the one who brought the grenades. How many times do I have to tell you to stop bringing the freaking grenades? I’m starting to think you just want to see me dead.”
“Oh, please, get real. You lost half your ear at most. At most. You’re just lucky-”
“Will you two shut up?” Tony finally snapped with a croak. His head was killing him, and the choppy stink of fish and sea water wasn’t helping the nausea side of the equation one bit.
Silence rang out, and Tony used it to prop himself up into a sitting position. He blinked grit from his eyes and took in the slightly weaving world around him. He was in some sort of cargo vessel, but it clearly wasn’t operational, with dark rusted walls and only two inhabitants.
And then he remembered how he’d ended up here.
“Peter!” Everything spun on its axis and he was being poked back to centre with a wrench. It was the first voice, a man around his age wearing leather and a grim face, who came to his sort of aid. Not Peter, who hadn’t moved an inch to help him, remaining stoic and blank, still entirely suited and masked up.
Tony knew the suits he’d made for Peter inside out and upside down. He’d poured over them, had needed Pepper to drag him away from them on more than one occasion. He knew every single stitch and every pull of the fabric, they were practically his lifeblood. And this suit? It wasn’t one of his.
And then he was being jabbed again, and his eye twitched at the annoyance. “If you touch me with that thing again, help me God, I’ll throw you overboard.”
“Frank, what? Why are you doing that?” Peter finally spoke, not to him, but to the leather guy. Frank.
“Trust me, Parker, you don’t want to touch him either, he could have-” Then Frank covered the side of his mouth and whispered the rest of his sentence exclusively to Peter. Tony vaguely picked up the word parasite.
Whatever it was he’d said, however, made Peter press a careful hand to his temple in clear aggravation at the man, avoiding his bandaged ear, blood still leaking through white gauze.
Concern rippled through Tony at the sight. Had Peter actually lost his ear? If so, why was he not laid up alongside him? And why did neither of them even seem to care?
“Pete, why is your mask still on?” He asked instead. If Frank was calling him Parker then he presumably knew the boy beneath the mask. Tony needed to see Peter’s face, see that it was truly him. He was no stranger to waking up in random places, courtesy of his formally daily blackouts, but this was worse, everything felt alien. And having Peter so near but so far at the same time was nagging at him. It made him uneasy.
He felt just as lost here as he did staring at the picture of the dead boy that lived above his sink.
“Because he’s got one hell of an ugly mug,” Frank jumped in. “Trust me, this is better for all of us.”
“Would you take a hike, Frank? Go do whatever it is you do when you’re not up my ass. Make some chilli or something, be useful,” Peter snapped.
Frank launched the wrench at Peter, who unphasedly sidestepped it with practiced ease, letting it clank loudly against a metal pillar. It wasn’t enough to dampen the sound of Frank’s tirade. “Or how about you show me some goddamned respect, you mother-”
When the two of them were finally alone, Tony looked Peter up and down, mask and all. He’d waited for five years to get the kid back. Question time could wait.
Without a second thought, he grabbed Peter and wrestled him into his arms, the boy’s spine going ramrod straight in surprise.
“This is a hug,” Tony prompted him. “Take part.”
Stiffly, Peter’s arms came up and joined in. It felt like only five minutes since Tony had hugged him on the battlefield, blood caked and damaged suits melding together. That Peter had melted into his arms like putty, and Tony had felt his soul click back into place.
This Peter had grown taller than him.
“I died.” Tony knew it, he remembered it. Death couldn’t be taken away so easily and it rang through his bones, that wasn’t his question. “How long?”
Peter breathed out a heavy, thick sigh, and finally spoke directly to him. “Why don’t you sit down?”
Immediately, Tony was shaking his head. “I don’t want to sit, just spit it out, I can handle it.”
“Tony-”
“Kid,” Tony was on the verge of losing it here. He just needed to know this one thing, and Peter wouldn’t even take off his mask. “Please.”
“Seven years,” Peter answered at a barely there whisper. “It’s been seven years.”
And then Tony did sit. Seven years? That meant Peter was twenty-three, twenty-four? And Morgan. Where the hell was Morgan? She was almost a teenager, he’d missed her childhood.
But he couldn’t concentrate on that. Not yet. “And you, what, grave robbed me? I’ve seen enough zombie movies to know this is no go territory. What have you gotten yourself into here, Parker?”
Peter put his hands up in surrender, and gave him the rundown in a clinical, detached tone. “Your body had enough radiation from the stones inside it to light up a nuclear power station. It wasn’t so much a grave robbing as it was pulling off a heist- you were under tight lock and key. A girl called Tabitha brought you back, but, uh, there’s no hidden t&c’s, she knew what she was getting herself into. It was a life for a life, simple as that.”
“It’s not,” Tony’s throat went dry, “simple.”
Someone had died to bring him back and he didn’t even know what she looked like. How was that fair?
Peter just inclined his head at him, and a swell of desperation rose up inside Tony. When he usually felt like this, he’d retreat to his lab and tinker until the joints in his knuckles started to ache. Sometimes even longer.
Now, all he had was a kid who wouldn’t take off his mask and a girl who’d laid down her life for him.
“Why?”
Peter let the question hang for a moment, before turning his back and walking away. “It’s probably better to just show you.”
Tony wondered how well it’d be taken if he just snatched the mask off himself.
Like an adult, Tony managed to hold himself back, and he followed Peter to the hull of the rusted husk of the ship, where he was handed a pair of partially cracked binoculars.
“You shouldn’t have,” Tony tried to joke, but Peter wasn’t having it, merely jabbing a finger beyond the rippling water, and rubbing at his arms in agitation.
Somehow, Tony knew he didn’t want to look. That what he was about to see would change everything.
He just wanted to rest.
He brought the binoculars up to his eyes anyway.
It took him a moment to make heads or tails of the picture before him, bathed in the oncoming night as it was, but when Tony’s vision adapted, he almost dropped the binoculars in shock.
Prisoners trudged in chained lines through the burnt and dilapidated streets of lower Manhattan. From Tony’s vantage point, he could see hundreds, thousands more all across the city and further, with twinkling orange lights clipped onto the backs of their necks and cutting through the darkening sky like tortured stars.
He legged it to the other end of the ship, needing it to tell a different story, but only found more of the same. Carnage. Panic stripped him bare, his lungs burned.
These people weren’t human anymore, they were caged animals. His insides twisted and hardened in his stomach like black tar.
“Who- who did this?” Tony felt the question slip out.
Finally, Peter slowly pulled off his mask, revealing impossibly older, guilt ridden eyes. Tony almost flinched.
The kid came to stand by his side, jaw set into an unforgiving clench, and looked far beyond Tony, far into the distance, as though willing his next words to be false.
“I did.”
…..