Chapter Text
Tony prided himself on being very observant. He could spot a loose screw from a mile away and a negative sign that hadn’t been carried over in seconds. When it came to machines, he had eyes like a falcon. When it came to people, however...
“Where’s Happy?” he asked Pepper as she brushed her hair in front of the mirror.
The Are you fucking serious? look she shot him sent a chill down his spine. “His girlfriend of three years just died. I gave him the week off.”
“Oh.”
Tony hadn’t known about that. He did know Happy had been seeing someone, but, three years already? Time flies.
“When did it happen?” he asked Pepper, his voice wavering despite himself.
"Two days ago. And no, we decided not to go to the funeral. May Parker was a much-loved figure in Queens. She ran F.E.A.S.T.—you know, the non-profit. We didn't want to draw attention by being there. But we did send flowers and made a very generous donation."
“Oh.” Tony was particularly articulate that day.
He felt like shit. How had he missed it? He was sure he hadn't received a message or a call from Happy, but it was true he hadn't seen him in a few days. He'd just figured Happy was out sick, and hadn't bothered to check.
Maybe he’d told them in an email. Tony barely read those.
“He sent an email,” Pepper confirmed.
"Should we... should we visit him?" Tony wondered aloud. He felt a bit responsible. He and Happy weren't the type to sit down and talk about feelings, but Happy was still one of his closest friends.
"No, it's better if we don't. I already asked. Turns out, May Parker was the guardian and sole family of his nephew, Peter. It's still unclear what'll happen to the kid, but for now, Happy has him. He told me he doesn't want to overwhelm the boy with strangers, and he doesn't want to leave him alone, either."
Tony nodded slowly. He hadn't even known Happy was basically a stepfather—stepuncle?. He suddenly felt like he didn't know a thing, and ignorance wasn't a feeling he was used to. It made his stomach churn.
Pepper crossed the room and rested a hand on his shoulder. "Tony, if you want to send your condolences, you can. But don't overdo it, okay? Right now, Happy's priority is the kid, and he needs space.”
That wasn't how Tony operated. If there was a problem, he solved it. When Rhodey needed new legs, he built them. When Pepper's aunt faced eviction from her childhood home, Tony bought the whole block.
He was a throw-money-at-the-problem-and-make-it-go-away kind of guy. Sitting around and doing nothing? Not an option. He hated having a problem he couldn't solve. He hated feeling powerless.
Fortunately, the opportunity to help came sooner than expected.
“Tony, I know you’re very busy, but please, I need a favor.” Happy’s call came out of nowhere, and Tony shot out of his chair like an alien spaceship had just landed in Manhattan. “They want to take the kid from me, Tony. They want to take Peter. They can’t have him. I can’t lose him.”
Happy was panicking. In the twenty years he'd been Tony's bodyguard—and later his head of security—Tony had never once seen him lose his composure. Even when their car was bombed in Afghanistan, Happy hadn't so much as broken a sweat.
"CPS says I'm not fit to be his guardian," Happy explained, once he calmed down a little. "Apparently, I can’t offer a safe and stable environment."
Happy hadn't said it, but Tony was pretty sure he was the reason why. "No problem. Let me make a few calls. Stay put." Tony sounded far more confident than he felt.
A few hours and a few bribes later, Happy was the official legal guardian of a seventeen-year-old. Tony felt very proud of himself—the helplessness that had been eating away at him was a little more bearable now.
Happy sent him a brief thank-you message, and Tony didn't hold its brevity against him. He couldn't begin to fathom what Happy was going through. Just imagining losing Pepper was enough to leave a hollow feeling in his chest. He shoved the thought aside.
Happy’s leave took two weeks.
When F.R.I.D.A.Y. told Tony that his head of security had just entered the building, Tony was half tempted to greet him with a joke—something about being lazy for skipping two weeks of work.
However, as soon as he saw Happy, every joke died on his lips. Happy looked ten years older. He was paler, his tie was crooked, and Tony was almost certain he’d lost a few pounds.
When Tony asked the very general and non-committal question of How are you?, Happy immediately launched into talking about the kid. That was how Tony knew things were truly bad; Happy never spoke about his personal life at work.
“He isn’t speaking to me. I mean, he is speaking, but not about anything that matters. I have a feeling he’s just... going through the motions.”
Tony had no idea how to handle that kind of conversation. He fixed things, not people. He wasn’t good at giving advice or offering support, and understanding other people’s feelings was even further outside his wheelhouse. So he decided to keep his mouth shut and let Happy unload everything that had been weighing on him as the elevator carried them up to the penthouse.
“He has the SAT in a few months. The kid is scarily smart, y’know? May was so sure he’d get into MIT. He has perfect scores, and he’s just so quick-witted. I swear, sometimes I feel like I’m talking to you when I’m talking to him.”
Every parent thinks their kid is special, Tony thought. He was grateful some of Pepper’s sensitivity had rubbed off on him, because he managed not to say it out loud.
Happy just kept talking about the kid, and Tony wondered when was the last time he’d spoken to another adult. What had he even been doing with himself for the past two weeks?
“But what if he does badly on the SAT? And honestly, who could blame him? I doubt the MIT admissions department will care much about his personal circumstances, though.”
Tony hummed. He was pretty sure he could get Peter into MIT without him ever taking the SAT, but he kept that to himself.
“He just lost his mother for the second time.” Happy sounded devastated. “He has no one left.”
“He has you,” Tony pointed out.
Happy gave him a little smile. “Yes, but at the end of the day, I’m still a stranger. May and I had been talking about me moving in with them for a while, but... well, she was worried about how Peter would take it. He’s a good kid. You have no idea how good he is. He always greeted me with a smile, but May used to say that Peter puts other people’s feelings before his own, so even if he wasn’t comfortable with me being there, he would never show it.
“In any case, he’s been spending half his nights at his friends’ or his girlfriend’s apartment. I’m just grateful he at least has someone he can rely on besides me. He says it’s fine if I sleep in May’s room, but—I feel like I’m trespassing. So I’m sleeping on the sofa.”
“Friends are a necessity at his age,” Tony said, mostly because he felt obliged to say something.
Happy made a face Tony couldn’t quite interpret. It was somewhere between anger, frustration and sadness. “The light in his eyes... it’s gone, Tony. It’s gone.”
Tony had absolutely no idea how to comfort his friend. He considered giving him a hug, but the thought of it felt awkward. Fortunately, the elevator reached the penthouse at that very moment, where Pepper was waiting for them with open arms. She immediately rushed over to Happy and pulled him into a hug.
Good. She could take it from there.
There was a rhino running wild through the streets of Queens.
Well—a guy in a rhino suit made entirely of concrete, technically. In this day and age, an actual rhino would've been weirder.
Captain America gave Tony the news over the comms. "Small-potato stuff, to be honest. No need to dispatch more than one of us. But it's in Queens, so I figured you'd be interested."
Queens was Spidey's turf. It had become an unspoken agreement that anything happening there, Tony handled. He was the Avenger with the closest relationship to Spider-Man, after all.
When Tony had recruited Spider-Man to help apprehend Captain America in Germany, he'd been surprised to find the guy was younger than expected. He'd assumed thirty, but after talking to him and seeing him up close, he'd revised that down to closer to twenty. It left Tony with a nagging sense of responsibility—he was the one who'd dragged the guy into a superhero brawl in the first place.
Over the past three years, something like a friendship had formed between them. Spider-Man was funny, quick-witted, creative in a way that reminded Tony uncomfortably of himself—and it showed in how he fought. He was also very strong. Getting stronger, too, if Tony was right and his powers hadn't finished developing. Give it time, and he'd probably outpace Cap. Maybe even Thor.
The one thing that still bothered Tony was that Spider-Man insisted on keeping his identity a secret. He guarded it more fiercely than Tony could quite understand. He'd invited the guy to the lab more than once, mostly out of curiosity, wanting to pick his brain. Spider-Man always turned him down. He never said why, but Tony had his suspicions: keeping his identity secret meant keeping his distance.
(That stung a little.)
F.R.I.D.A.Y. informed him that Spider-Man and Rhino were fighting beneath the elevated train tracks on Bessemer Street. Smart. The vigilante was probably trying to keep Rhino away from civilians, leading him toward Forest Park, where he could finish the fight without putting anyone else in danger.
Iron Man wasn’t in any particular rush to get there. F.R.I.D.A.Y. had assessed the situation as a low-level threat, which meant Spider-Man was more than capable of handling it on his own. Iron Man was mostly there to say hi—and to keep the press from asking why the Avengers had sent no one to the scene.
He was almost there. He could see the red and blue blur in the distance—the guy was impressively swift. The suit zoomed in on the scene without prompting, and so Tony could see—
What the fuck. Spider-Man was demolishing Rhino.
Rhino was already on the floor, flat on his back, and showed no signs of trying to get up. Most likely, he was unconscious. Unfortunately, from that distance, Tony couldn’t tell if the guy was breathing.
And despite that, Spider-Man still jumped onto the train tracks, shot his webs at the asphalt, and launched himself slingshot-style against Rhino’s chest.
The concrete suit cracked open like an egg.
Tony pushed his thrusters to full speed as Spider-Man leaned over Rhino and tore the suit apart piece by piece with his bare hands. The guy inside the suit was not unconscious at all—his eyes were wide open, and his mouth was open in agony, but no sound came from his throat.
That was a bad sign.
“Spider-Man!” It was the first time Tony had ever shouted at him like an angry father, but the vigilante didn’t stop. He didn’t even seem to notice Iron Man’s presence.
By the time the pieces of Rhino’s suit lay scattered across the asphalt, Spider-Man’s hand shot down and grabbed Rhino by the hem of his shirt, lifting the 280-pound man off the ground as if he weighed nothing.
“Do you even understand what you’ve done?!” He sounded angry—no, not angry, feral. “Someone could have died! Someone’s mother! Someone’s child!”
Hearing that fury from someone usually so cheerful sent a jolt through Tony.
What was happening? This went beyond having a bad day.
“Sir, the suspect has been identified,” F.R.I.D.A.Y. said. “His name is Aleksei Sytsevich, and he’s a known low-level member of the Bratva in New York.”
“So he’s not the mastermind behind all of this?”
“No, sir. It doesn’t seem so. I’m also detecting five broken ribs and a punctured lung, among other injuries. His life is currently in danger.”
“Five—?! Oh, God.”
Whatever had gotten into Spider-Man, Iron Man had to act fast. This was not like him at all. Spider-Man had never deliberately put anyone in danger—quite the opposite, actually.
“Spider-Man,” Iron Man called, landing nearby and walking a few meters toward him. “We’re done here. I’m taking him to a hospital.”
Spider-Man didn’t answer.
“Hey.” Tony moved into his line of sight. “He’s going to die if we don’t get him help.”
For a moment, Spider-Man just stared at Rhino. His fists were still clenched around the hem of his shirt, holding him off the ground.
“Kid.”
That finally got his attention. Spider-Man looked at him, and Tony was struck again by how wrong this all felt. Behind the mask, it was difficult to make out his expression, but there was none of his usual playful energy in his posture.
“Let him go,” Tony said, keeping his voice low. He didn’t want to fight him. He trusted Spider-Man would come to his senses soon.
Spider-Man said nothing.
Tony waited.
Nothing.
Slowly, Spider-Man’s fists loosened. He let go of Rhino, and the man dropped heavily onto the asphalt. Tony winced at the impact.
“Thanks,” he sighed.
He crouched beside Rhino and carefully lifted him into his arms. The man was surprisingly heavy even for Iron Man’s suit, and the movement earned a faint, agonized sound.
“F.R.I.D.A.Y., lead me to the nearest hospital.”
“Queens General Hospital is four minutes away, sir.”
“Take us there.”
Tony rose into the air.
“Spider-Man—”
He glanced back.
The vigilante was gone.
“I want you to give a tour of the lab to Peter’s class,” Pepper said, staring straight into his soul as Tony munched on avocado toast for breakfast.
He needed to clean out his ears ASAP, because there was no way he was hearing that right.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“I’ve been talking to Happy,” Pepper explained. “Peter is... not improving. Happy is worried. The kid is withdrawing more and more with each day.”
“And you think a field trip will alleviate his pain?”
“Nothing can alleviate his pain. But the kid needs a distraction. And, according to Happy, he’s a bit of a science nerd and apparently looks up to you.”
Somewhere in the back of Tony’s mind, a little voice was calling him a bad friend. Happy and he hadn’t really had a proper conversation since Happy had poured his heart out to him in the elevator a few days ago, and Tony had thought he was just getting back to his normal, grumpy self. Apparently, that wasn’t true. It was just that Happy had chosen a more understanding ear than Tony’s: Pepper’s.
His first suggestion was to call in another Avenger—Cap, for example, was great with kids, and Tony was sure he’d handle a grieving child much better than Tony ever could. However, Pepper insisted that the kid was all about science. He wasn’t some Avengers fanboy, and calling Cap wouldn’t be the same. The kid apparently deserved a unique experience.
As a result, the Academic Decathlon team from Midtown School of Science and Technology arrived at Avengers Tower on Wednesday morning.
To be honest, Tony had been a little impressed when Pepper told him which school Peter went to. It was even more impressive that he was there on a scholarship. Happy had no reason to worry about the kid doing badly on his SATs; Tony was pretty sure he’d have no trouble getting into MIT.
When eight overexcited kids entered his personal lab, Tony had to fight the urge to grimace. It was the same feeling he’d gotten when Rhodey had drunkenly puked all over his first McLaren. His property, defiled. He had half a mind to tell the kids to wash their hands and take off their shoes before entering, but he stopped himself.
The cover story was that the school had been chosen at random to visit Avengers Tower. It had been Happy’s request, meant to keep Peter’s connection to him—and, by extension, Tony—hidden, because that was what Peter had been doing for the past three years.
The kid went to a school full of nerds and somehow never flaunted his very direct connection to Iron Man? He really was something else.
For that same reason, Happy wasn’t there. It was just Tony, with Pepper hovering on the sidelines to make sure he played nice.
Tony gave them a brief presentation on what he usually did in the lab and the kind of projects he worked on for the Avengers. One of the kids—an annoying girl wearing a Greta Thunberg T-shirt—asked what the difference was between making weapons for the Avengers and making weapons for the government, a question Tony chose to ignore. Other than that, the kids were surprisingly well-behaved.
“Bruce’s inhibitor works through RNA interference,” Tony explained. He was improvising, coming up with something to say about each Avenger one by one, but Bruce didn’t really use technology for fighting, or do much fighting at all, really. The only scientific thing that came to mind was his inhibitor.
“Basically, we engineered a synthetic RNA molecule that attaches itself to the messenger RNA responsible for producing one of the proteins involved in his transformation. In plain terms, it’s a brake. His cells get the message to start turning him into the big guy, and the RNA gets there first and tells them, Yeah, no. We’re not doing that today.”
The kids laughed. Everyone except one.
It hadn’t been difficult to figure out which of them was Peter Parker. He was the one who didn’t seem as excited as the rest, the only one who didn’t laugh at Tony’s jokes. They hadn’t been formally introduced, but it was obvious which kid had just lost his whole family.
Tony was pretty sure Peter was only half-listening to him. Instead of being impressed by the intricacies of the Avengers’ gear, his attention seemed drawn to the random assortment of gadgets scattered across Tony’s workstation.
Some of the gadgets on that table could probably tear his whole arm off, but Peter hadn’t tried to touch anything yet, and Pepper had one eye fixed on him from across the room, so Tony relaxed. He didn’t want to scold the kid in front of his whole AcaDec team anyway.
“These little things are called Widow’s Bite gauntlets,” Tony explained, pointing toward the slim black gauntlets mounted on a stand on the wall. “They look small, but they pack enough of a punch to make a grown man regret having a nervous system. They generate high-voltage electrical discharges, mainly. They can also deliver a concussive blast, depending on the setting.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Tony noticed Peter had stopped in front of the blackboard he’d left in the corner of the lab. He’d pushed that particular problem aside a few days ago because he’d gotten stuck. He’d been trying to develop a better lubricant because the joints in his Iron Man suits wore out too quickly. However, he’d hit a wall and decided to move on to other projects until inspiration struck.
“The trick is the energy density,” he continued, “you need enough power to produce the discharge without turning the thing on your wrist into a very expensive grenade. Natasha’s gauntlets use a compact capacitor system that stores the charge and releases it in a fraction of a second.”
The visit lasted almost two hours, and in all that time, Peter Parker didn’t ask a single question or seem remotely interested in anything Tony had to say. Hadn’t Pepper said the kid looked up to him? Where had she gotten that information? Because it certainly didn’t seem like it.
When Tony bid goodbye to the AcaDec team in front of the elevator that would take them to the ground floor, his smile was strained. He was a failure of a friend, he knew that. Happy would come out of hiding at any moment and ask how it had gone, and Tony wouldn’t have the heart to tell him that all he’d accomplished was boring Peter out of his mind.
“Don’t take it personally,” Pepper told him. “The boy is going through a rough patch. He seemed interested enough in your ongoing projects. Maybe next time, you can talk about those instead.”
Half of those ongoing projects were highly dangerous and highly illegal, which was exactly why Tony didn’t want to talk about them.
Anyway, to distract himself, he did what always made him feel better: work. He’d already lost the morning, and he had a lot to catch up on. So, he changed out of his suit, put on his comfy jumper and sneakers, and went straight to his workstation, the one Peter had seemed so interested in.
He was tinkering with a new wrist-mounted scanner when he noticed that the blackboard in the corner—the one with the incomplete formula for the lubricant agent—had red marker on it.
He got up and approached.
Someone had modified the formula.
Tony stared at it for a moment.
His original formula had been close, but not quite right. The lubricant worked beautifully at normal operating temperatures, but once the suit's joints reached extreme heat, its viscosity dropped and the protective effect began to deteriorate. He’d been trying to find a way around that for weeks.
The new version was subtle. Whoever had changed it hadn’t rewritten the whole thing. They had altered the molecular structure just enough to address the thermal instability.
Tony grabbed the marker.
He ran the numbers again.
Then again.
The new compound should have a lower friction coefficient at normal temperatures while maintaining its viscosity much better under sustained heat. Not perfect—there was still some thermal degradation—but significantly better than his previous version.
Tony slowly lowered the marker.
“What the hell...?” Tony stared at the altered formula. “F.R.I.D.A.Y.!”
“You don’t have to shout, sir,” the A.I. replied calmly.
Tony didn’t feel calm at all.
“Pull today’s footage. Who tampered with my calculations?”
F.R.I.D.A.Y. did as instructed. A video appeared in front of him, recorded by a camera in the corner of the lab. It clearly showed Peter Parker staring at the same blackboard for a solid five minutes before grabbing the red marker from the table and scrawling something across the board.
Then he simply walked back to the group as if nothing had happened.
What the—?
“How old is the kid?” he asked.
“According to his birth certificate, Peter Parker is seventeen.”
“Is he smart?”
“His grades at Midtown School of Science and Technology have never fallen below 98 out of 100. No student at the school since its foundation in 1962 has achieved a comparable academic record.”
Unless the formula had been a fluke—which Tony highly doubted—Peter Parker had no business being in high school. The kid was a chemistry prodigy, at the very least. How the hell had Happy—Happy, of all people—managed to end up with a kid like that?
There were very few people in the world who could outthink Tony Stark like that. Bruce, Pym, the girl from Wakanda—and the list ended there. And none of them were anywhere near as young as Peter Parker. Tony couldn’t wait to find out what else the kid could do.
When Tony made the proposal to Happy, his head of security stared at him in disbelief. “You want to invite him back?”
“Yes. Tomorrow morning. Bring him here at nine.” Tony hoped he didn’t sound too eager. He wanted to meet the kid properly this time. He wanted to pick his brain.
“Why?” Happy asked, and Tony was mildly offended by the question. Was it really so out of character for him to want to spend some time with another person?
“The boy took a single look at my fluorinated polymer lubricant formula and came up with a solution for the thermal instability in less than five minutes. He didn’t even have all the variables—he just looked at the molecular structure and figured out where the viscosity was going to break down under high temperatures.”
Happy stared at him. “You’re serious.”
“Painfully.”
“Tony, the kid just lost his mother.”
“I know.”
“And you want to bring him here to play with your toys?”
Tony groaned. “C’mon, didn’t you say he was a science nerd? What better could I offer him than a whole day with the greatest inventor alive?”
Happy still didn’t look convinced. “You’re genuinely interested in him,” he said, as if he could hardly believe it.
“I am, Happy.”
It took Happy a few moments of consideration before he finally made up his mind. “Fine. I’ll pass the invitation along and let him decide. But if he comes, it’ll be on Saturday. I’m not letting him skip school.”
“The kid doesn’t need classes! Bring him tomorrow.”
But Happy wouldn’t budge.
Tony spent the rest of the day putting together a selection of his ongoing projects to show Peter. In a way, it was a test—a chance to see just how much the kid knew, and where the gaps in his knowledge were that Tony could help fill.
He spent the whole afternoon on it, and it was well past dinner—which Tony had skipped—when F.R.I.D.A.Y. announced that Steve Rogers and Bruce Banner were requesting access to the lab.
Tony let them in, but didn’t look up from his workstation to greet them.
“Tony, we need to talk about Spider-Man.”
That snapped him out of his reverie. “Is he hurt?”
There had been another alarm in Queens a few hours ago, but Tony had more pressing matters to deal with than to go check on the vigilante. The last time he’d seen him, he’d seemed a little off, that was true, but Tony knew the guy. Whatever had gotten into him that day was probably just the result of a fight with his girlfriend or something. Everyone had bad days.
“He’s the only one who wasn’t hurt,” Cap said, his tone grave—grave enough that Tony immediately regretted not going to the scene himself after the incident with Rhino. “A fight broke out near a subway station. Spider-Man went after the guy underground, and the whole platform ended up collapsing. He tore through the tracks, smashed three support pillars, and brought half the ceiling down. Luckily, the station had been evacuated, but if it had been running normally…” Steve shook his head. “There could’ve been dozens of people down there.”
“Was anyone hurt?” Tony asked. His voice shook a little. Just a little.
“Just Scorpion. Spider-Man drove his own tail through him. He almost bled out.” Bruce was the one who said it. He stood beside Steve, just as tense and serious.
Tony looked at them both, his jaw tight. Okay, so, he’d underestimated how bad of a week Spider-Man was having, but... that didn’t justify the accusatory looks Steve and Bruce were giving him.
“Spider-Man was just defending himself,” he argued. “And he must have known there were no civilians around. You know he has that... spider-thingy. He can tell when there’s trouble.”
“There was no need to bring down half the subway station,” Steve replied, his voice hard. “And there was definitely no need to take such extreme measures against Scorpion. Besides, Clint got there as Spider-Man was leaving—he said Spider-Man seemed off.”
“Off how?”
“Tense. Angry. He didn’t greet him.”
Tony refused to let his worry show. Not while Captain America watched him with that stern, disapproving look that made it painfully clear there would be consequences.
“Give the man some space,” Tony shot back, immediately getting defensive. He agreed that something needed to be done, but there was no need to point an accusatory finger at him—Tony didn’t even know his real name!—or blow things out of proportion. “This is his first strike. He has a clean record. He’s been working with us for years and has never given us a reason not to trust him.”
“No—that’s the problem, Tony. This is not the first strike. It’s the third.”
Tony raised an eyebrow. Third? He only knew about two incidents—Rhino and Scorpion.
“Last week, he smashed a lamppost into the front of a police car. The car flipped with the officer still inside. And the other day, he sent Rhino to the hospital with five broken ribs and a punctured lung—but you already knew that, didn’t you?”
The accusatory tone in Steve’s voice was impossible to miss. It was so palpable that Bruce stepped in before Tony had a chance to react.
“The leading theory is that something about his mutation is going wrong.” As always, Bruce spoke with the calm, measured tone he used when he was trying to make something sound less alarming than it actually was. “He’s an enhanced, type A, with a genetic mutation of unknown origin and at an unknown stage of development. It’s uncharted territory for all of us. We have no idea what something like that could be doing to his mind.”
Absolutely not, Tony thought before Bruce could deliver what he really wanted to ask.
“I would feel more comfortable if you could convince him to come here and run some tests.”
“No. Absolutely not.” Tony replied. “We already discussed that. He said no, and we promised him we’d never force him.”
He wasn’t willing to budge, and, to be honest, he thought Steve was being incredibly hypocritical. He had been the one to oppose the Accords a few years back. He had fought against forcing enhanced individuals to come forward. And now he wanted to betray Spider-Man’s trust simply because the guy had brought down a subway station?
“Yes, but that was conditional on him not becoming a threat,” Cap argued. “And from the way this is going…” He paused, his expression softening. “Tony, you need to understand why we need to take precautions.”
“But—”
“Talk to him,” Steve continued. “Find out, at the very least, what’s going on. Whether it’s his mutation, an emotional crisis, or he’s simply gone to the dark side. We all agree you’re the best person to handle that.”
Tony didn’t like the sound of that “we” at all. It made it seem like the rest of the Avengers had already discussed the matter and come to him with a decision.
Still, he had to admit a conversation with Spider-Man was long overdue. Fighting them on it now would accomplish nothing, so he nodded.
“I’ll have F.R.I.D.A.Y. set up an alert for Spider-Man sightings. I’ll talk to him as soon as I find him.”
Steve seemed appeased by that promise, although Bruce was less so. Bruce probably wanted to take a closer look at Spider-Man’s mutation. Tony had to give him that: he was right that a mutation of unknown origin could be dangerous, both to Spider-Man and to everyone around him. Bruce knew that better than most.