Chapter Text
Tony Stark was ending a relationship when a comet came on TV.
Manhattan had been blessed with one of its rare genuinely beautiful mornings. Sunlight was climbing the glass faces of the surrounding towers one floor at a time when the woman emerged barefoot from the bedroom, found the dress Tony had tossed over the arm of the couch the night before, and slipped it back on. The only thing she couldn't manage herself was the last few inches of zipper down her back.
She stopped at the kitchen island and, without asking, picked up the coffee Tony had just made.
Tony glanced up.
He let her have it.
“I met someone.”
“Congratulations.”
Tony sat on the other side of the island reading an email Pepper had sent at some ungodly hour of the morning. His thumb moved once across the screen. His eyebrows drew together by approximately half a millimeter.
The woman took a sip of his coffee and waited.
Apparently, that really was all she was getting.
“That's it?”
“You want me to cry?”
“A little.”
“Sorry. Morning's booked.”
She laughed.
She wasn't offended.
That was one of the reasons they'd managed to have a perfectly good time together for as long as they had. Neither of them had ever mistaken dinner, alcohol, sex, and several extremely enjoyable weekends for destiny. Tony liked her enough to let her steal his coffee. She liked Tony enough to remember to take the heels she'd abandoned beside his bed last night.
She set the mug back on the counter and went to retrieve her purse.
“You make a really good ex.”
Tony didn't look up. “Thank you.”
“That wasn't a compliment.”
“I withdraw my gratitude.”
She made it all the way to the door before stopping.
“Tony.”
“Hmm?”
“Have you ever actually been in love with anyone?”
That got a pause.
Not a long one.
Tony returned his attention to the email, deleted an entire paragraph that had no business existing, and started typing over it.
“Do I count?”
“No.”
“Then you're setting unreasonable parameters.”
She leaned against the doorframe, studying him as though the question had only just become genuinely interesting.
“I'm curious. You've met everyone. Men, women. Probably aliens.”
“Definitely aliens.”
“So what kind of person does it take to make Tony Stark actually fall for someone?”
The television changed behind her.
The financial report disappeared, replaced by breaking footage from NASA: deep black space, a comet trailing white across a simulated path through the solar system. The anchor calmly went through the latest observational data before adding that, according to current trajectory calculations, the probability of impact with Earth was so low as to be statistically negligible.
The woman glanced over her shoulder.
“Sounds like the comet has a better chance of hitting Earth than you have of falling in love.”
That finally got Tony to look up.
“What?”
She pointed at the television.
Onscreen, a thin white trajectory passed harmlessly by a blue Earth.
“Sure.” Tony smiled. “When the comet hits Earth, I'll think about it.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“Asshole.”
“Sorry. You liked me anyway.”
The door shut behind her while Tony was still smiling.
Within minutes, he'd forgotten the conversation.
The comet went with it.
A week later, he met Peter Parker.
Tony knew before he even walked into Conference Room Three of Stark Industries' Advanced Energy Division that this was not a meeting that required Tony Stark.
Pepper disagreed.
She had disagreed with impressive efficiency, first reminding him that it was his company, his clean-energy initiative, and his R&D division, before dropping the presentation into his private inbox with a cheerful:
Have fun.
Tony made a mental note to propose cutting the CEO's salary at the next board meeting.
At 10:15, he pushed open the conference-room door.
The low murmur of conversation died instantly.
Tony was used to that.
He took off his sunglasses, handed them casually to Happy behind him, and walked through a chorus of Mr. Starks before dropping into the chair at the head of the table.
“Relax. I'm the one who's late. You don't all have to look like I just caught you cheating on a test.”
A few people laughed.
The room loosened.
The presentation resumed.
Within five minutes, Tony was wondering why he hadn't faked an illness.
Or, better yet, simply arrived later.
The air-conditioning was set several degrees below what any sane mammal required. The projector hummed overhead. Beyond the glass wall, people passed occasionally with tablets and folders tucked under their arms while the head of R&D stood beside the screen discussing phase-three material testing, a red laser dot crawling over dense columns of data.
Tony had already read the numbers by the time he'd sat down.
A few minor errors. Nothing fatal.
The figures in the lower right corner, however, were enough to turn phase three into an eight-million-dollar fireworks display.
Tony leaned back and rolled a pen between his fingers while his brain automatically ran through the next several steps.
The prototype probably wouldn't explode.
Probably.
It would survive the first few cycles, start overheating at peak output, and eventually fail at the single most expensive and irritating component to replace.
Eight million.
Maybe nine.
Tony was deciding whether to point it out now or let them actually fry a prototype and save the security footage for the company holiday party when a quiet voice came from the far end of the table.
“That won't work.”
The department head didn't hear it. He was still talking about thermal tolerances.
Tony's pen stopped.
“What won't work?”
So did the laser pointer.
The conference room went dead silent.
Tony followed the voice.
Several unfamiliar faces sat at the far end of the table, most of them young, wearing badges in different colors. One of them—a kid.
No.
Young man.
—was looking down at a tablet, scribbling something at alarming speed with a stylus, apparently unaware that the muttered comment he'd just made had been heard by the person in the room with both the best hearing and the longest memory for disrespect.
The coworker beside him elbowed him.
He looked up.
Tony noticed his hands first.
Long fingers wrapped around the stylus. His corner of the table was a very specific kind of disaster: what looked like chocolate milk, several brightly colored pens, sheets of paper covered in equations, and a phone buried underneath everything else, one corner of the screen cracked.
Then the badge.
Crooked.
The lanyard twisted against the collar of a pale blue shirt, the ID itself flipped completely backward.
Tony's gaze continued upward.
Young.
That was the first thought.
The second arrived faster.
Pretty.
Pretty wasn't a scarce resource. Tony Stark had seen enough varieties of it to populate a small country, and he'd never felt the need to romanticize the concept.
Pretty was pretty.
This particular young man had enormous brown eyes, currently even wider now that he'd realized the entire room was staring at him. A clean line to his nose. A particularly nice mouth. His hair looked like someone had made a sincere effort with it that morning, an effort several unruly curls had abandoned sometime before lunch.
“Nothing, Mr. Stark.”
Nice voice, too.
Sweet enough that it seemed physically incapable of belonging to the same person who'd just announced that won't work.
Tony set down the pen.
“Excellent.”
The young man visibly relaxed.
“Then you won't mind explaining nothing.”
The relief vanished.
Someone beside him quietly closed their eyes.
Tony watched the tips of the kid's ears turn red.
“I didn't mean the whole project won't work.” He glanced at the screen, then at Tony, cleared his throat in a valiant attempt at composure, and sat up straighter. “I meant—if phase three actually runs with those numbers, you're probably going to have a thermal problem.”
The department head cut in immediately. “We've already run thermal simulations.”
“I know,” the young man said automatically.
Then, apparently remembering who he was talking to:
“Sir.”
The corner of Tony's mouth twitched.
“Keep going.”
The young man's attention returned to the screen.
“The simulation treats the material coefficient as constant, but once the operating temperature starts climbing, it'll affect—”
He grabbed his pen and wrote several numbers rapidly across the page in front of him.
The nerves began to disappear.
“Thermal expansion hits here first. Not immediately. That's actually the problem—the first few cycles could look completely normal. By the time the readings start going weird, this connection point is probably already—”
He frowned, searching for the word.
Tony prompted, “Already what?”
The young man looked up.
“Dead.”
Someone failed to suppress a laugh.
He smiled too, apparently realizing that dead was not considered acceptable engineering terminology.
“I mean. Failed.”
“I liked dead,” Tony said. “Faster.”
The smile stayed in his eyes.
Tony looked at him.
“Name.”
“Peter Parker.”
“Position?”
“Assistant Project Engineer.” Peter hesitated, fingers worrying absently at the pen. “Contract.”
The last word came out noticeably quieter.
Tony's gaze dropped to the backward ID badge.
“Come here, Parker.”
Peter blinked.
“Me?”
Tony looked around the room.
“Unless there's another Parker planning to save me eight million dollars.”
Peter immediately gathered up his papers and stood.
His knee hit the underside of the table.
“Shit—”
His head snapped up.
“Sorry.”
Tony finally laughed.
“Was that for the table or for me?”
Peter's ears went even redder.
“Both?”
“Come here.”
Tony had only shifted aside to give him access to the tablet.
It wasn't until Peter was standing beside him that he realized the guy only looked skinny from across the room. Up close, there was nothing fragile about him. His sleeves were rolled to the elbows, revealing lean forearms, narrow wrists, and several small abrasions across his knuckles.
Peter leaned over the tablet.
Close enough for Tony to realize he wasn't wearing cologne.
Laundry detergent.
Something faintly sweet.
Probably the chocolate milk.
Tony Stark realized he was smelling an employee.
That seemed less than ideal.
His brow twitched.
Peter, oblivious, pointed at the screen.
“Here.”
He spread two fingers over the display to enlarge the graph, bracing his other hand against the table. There wasn't much room, so his shoulder brushed Tony's arm.
The first time it happened, Peter immediately shifted away.
“Sorry, Mr. Stark.”
“You dropped this condition.”
Peter stared at the screen.
“No, I didn't.”
“You didn't?”
“I put it in later.”
“Then your result doesn't hold.”
“It does,” Peter shot back, immediate and certain.
A beat later, he seemed to remember exactly whom he'd just contradicted.
His lips parted.
Tony turned his head.
They were already standing close. At that distance, the movement brought their faces near enough that Peter went completely still.
Tony was quite certain Peter's eyes landed on his first.
Then slipped lower.
His mouth?
Good.
Normal human response.
“Sounded pretty confident a second ago.” Tony slowly raised one eyebrow. “What happened?”
Peter looked at him.
His skin was fair enough that Tony could watch the color travel from the tips of his ears into his cheeks.
Tony knew this reaction.
He knew it extremely well.
He could practically predict what would happen if he leaned in another inch—
Peter suddenly lifted one hand and pointed past Tony's shoulder.
“You're blocking the projector.”
Tony stared at him.
“…”
Peter leaned around him to look at the screen.
“That line.”
Tony moved aside in silence.
Peter, apparently unaware that anything whatsoever had just happened, went straight back to the math. His pen moved quickly over the page. Halfway through a calculation, he stuck the cap between his teeth and frowned.
This time he stayed quiet for longer.
Then, abruptly, he turned the tablet toward Tony and planted a finger on one of the equations.
“You were wrong too.”
Several engineers who had been pretending not to listen became very still.
Peter either didn't notice the shift in atmosphere or had forgotten he was supposed to be afraid of it.
He started working through the derivation again, speaking faster as he went, gesturing with the pen. Tony watched the equations at first.
At some point, without noticing exactly when, he started watching Peter instead.
Peter's face did a lot when he talked.
His eyebrows jumped when a new idea occurred to him. His nose wrinkled briefly whenever he caught himself saying something imprecise. And when he reached a point he was genuinely certain about, his eyes lit up.
Tony found himself wondering whether they looked like that under other circumstances.
The thought arrived without warning.
“—so if you substitute that directly, of course you're going to lose a step.”
Peter finished.
Then realized Tony hadn't answered.
“Mr. Stark?”
Tony looked back at the screen.
The math was right.
So was Peter.
“You're right.”
Tony had seen every possible reaction to praise from him.
Modesty. Flattery. Carefully rehearsed nonchalance. People already halfway into the clever line they'd prepared in case Tony Stark ever noticed them.
Peter just stared.
And, annoyingly, he was unfairly pretty when he did it.
Disbelief came first.
Then his entire face lit up.
He was clearly trying to remain professional, but his mouth refused to cooperate.
“Really?”
Tony looked at him again.
“You need that in writing?”
“No, I just—”
Peter laughed.
“Thank you, Mr. Stark.”
He looked down.
Still smiling.
Tony's gaze settled on his mouth.
He wondered what it would feel like when it wasn't talking about simulations.
Peter leaned closer to the tablet, the movement loosening his collar enough to expose a sliver of collarbone.
Tony's eyes followed.
Then returned to his face.
Excellent.
Everything suddenly made sense.
He wanted to sleep with Peter Parker.
No comets. No destiny. Just sexual attraction.
Tony knew sexual attraction.
Tony was excellent at sexual attraction.
Finding a perfectly reasonable explanation for his inexplicable interest improved his mood considerably.
“Parker.”
Peter looked up.
“Are you free tonight?”
At the other end of the conference table, someone's paper stopped rustling.
“Hmm?” Peter blinked. “Tonight?”
“That's generally what tonight means.”
“Oh.”
Peter actually thought about it.
Tony waited.
He rarely had to wait for this particular answer. Usually by this stage, the remaining questions involved restaurants, alcohol, and which one of them would lose patience first.
“I need to rerun this model.”
Tony waited for the rest.
There was no rest.
Peter simply looked at him with complete sincerity.
“That's it?”
Peter hesitated.
“…Was there something else?”
For the first time in his life, Tony Stark wondered whether he'd somehow become too subtle.
“If everything goes well, I should have it done by noon tomorrow—”
Tony leaned back in his chair and pressed his tongue briefly against the inside of his cheek.
Okay.
Not a rejection.
The kid hadn't received the signal at all.
Fine.
Next time, Tony would turn up the gain.