Work Text:
Peter had a system.
Take the Tylenol before the first period so nobody at school clocked the fever. Web-sling home the long way so the wind on his face made his eyes water for a reason that wasn’t this. Tell May he’d eaten at Ned’s. Tell Ned he’d eaten at home. Go to bed early enough that nobody asked why he looked like he’d been hit by a bus, and set an alarm early enough to look normal again before anyone saw otherwise.
Three days. He could do three more if he had to.
He did not, in fact, have three more days in him. He found this out at 4:47 PM on a Wednesday, on the floor of the workshop, staring up at the ceiling with absolutely no memory of choosing to lie down.
“-Peter?”
Tony’s voice. Peter blinked. The lights overhead were too bright, refracting into little rainbow halos that definitely weren’t supposed to be there. His head was doing something enormous and slow, like it had been stuffed with wet cotton, and somewhere distant his own heartbeat was going too fast, thready and quick in a way that felt less like tired and more like wrong.
“Hey. Hey, eyes on me. What happened?”
“‘M fine,” Peter said, except it came out slurred, more air than words, and he heard how bad that sounded even through the fog. He tried to sit up. The room tilted violently sideways and he had to slap a hand down against the floor to keep from listing all the way over.
“Yeah, you’re not fine, you went down like a sack of bricks two feet from the desk. Don’t move.” A hand landed on his shoulder – Tony’s hand, warm even though Peter’s hoodie, and it took him an embarrassingly long moment to place the sensation as too warm, which meant he himself was running hotter than usual, which meant-
Oh. Oh, no.
“What’s your name,” Tony said, businesslike, though there was an edge underneath it Peter didn’t have the bandwidth to identify. “Full name.”
“Peter Benjamin Parker,” Peter mumbled. “You know my name, why are you-”
“Because your pupils are doing something I don’t love and I want to know if you’re tracking with me. Congratulations, you passed. Now, how long have you felt like garbage?”
Peter’s brain, unhelpfully, chose that moment to short out entirely on the question of how do I lie about this, which meant the truth came out instead, thin and cracked. “Since Monday."
There was a beat of silence that felt loaded enough to have its own gravitational field.
“Monday,” Tony repeated.
“It’s not a big deal-”
“You’ve had three days of whatever this is, and you decided the plan was what, exactly? Show up to my workshop, catalog my inventory of used bots, and pass out on my floor without saying a word?” His hand slid from Peter’s shoulder up to his forehead, and Peter felt him go very still. “Christ, kid, you’re burning up.”
“I have a fast metabolism,” Peter tried, which had worked on May approximately zero times and worked on Tony even less.
“You have a fever of what feels like a hundred and three, and a heart rate I could probably use as a metronome for a punk song. That’s not metabolism, that’s your body waving a very large flag.” Tony’s other hand came up under Peter’s jaw, tilting his face, checking something – pupils, probably, or just looking at him, really looking, the way he did sometimes that made Peter feel simultaneously very safe and very seen in a way he wasn’t always ready for. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
And this was the part Peter hadn’t planned for, because he’d spent three days engineering a system for hiding it, and he had exactly zero contingency built in for a moment where someone asked him why with that much quiet in their voice.
“Because-” His throat did something complicated. His eyes were stinging, and it wasn’t just the fever anymore. “Because May’s already stressed about the rent thing, and if I told her I was sick she’d take off work to stay home with me and we can’t afford that, and if I told you, you’d- you’d think I couldn’t handle patrol, or handle any of it, and I just wanted-”
“Wanted what?”
“To be one more thing,” Peter said, and it came out smaller than he meant it to, cracked right down in the middle. “Everybody’s got enough going on. I didn’t want to be the thing that made it worse.”
Tony didn’t say anything right away. Peter, mortified, tried to blink the wetness out of his eyes before it could actually fall, and mostly failed, and the failure made everything feel about four hundred times worse, because now he was crying on the floor of Tony Stark’s workshop about a fever, which was objectively the most embarrassing possible outcome to this entire week.
“Kid.” Tony’s voice had changed – dropped the businesslike edge, gone quiet in a different way. “Look at me a second.”
Peter looked. Tony’s face wasn’t doing the thing Peter had braced for – no exasperation, no I told you you couldn’t handle this. Just something steady and a little wrecked around the edges.
“You are never, and I mean never, going to be one more thing to me for being sick. Do you understand that? That’s not- that’s not how this works. That’s not how I work, and if that’s the math you’ve been running, we need to redo it right now, because you got the equation wrong.”
“But you already have Pepper, and the company, and-”
“And I also have you,” Tony said, sharp enough to cut through the fog in Peter’s skull. “That’s not a subtraction problem. You don’t get bumped off the list because May’s stressed about rent or because I’ve got a board meeting Thursday. If you are sick, or scared, or you web-slung into a dumpster and you’re too proud to say no, you tell someone. You tell me. I would rather build you a blanket fort in this exact workshop and reschedule six meetings then find out three days later that you white-knuckled a fever alone because you didn’t want to be a bother.”
Peter made a sound that was half a laugh and half something rawer, and pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes. “That’s- a lot of feelings for a guy who yells at me for touching his tools.”
“I contain multidudes,” Tony said, and there was warmth in it now, easing the tightness that had been sitting in Peter’s chest since Monday morning. “FRIDAY, what’s the kid’s temperature actually reading.”
“103.2, boss. Heart rate elevated but within range given the fever. I’d recommend against further movement without assessment.”
“Wonderful. Great. Very cooperative body you’ve got there, Parker.” Tony shifted, got an arm carefully under Peter’s shoulders, and started easing him up – slow, giving him time to protest, which Peter didn’t, because honestly the floor had lost most of its appeal several minutes ago. “We’re doing this the boring way. Couch, fluids, thermometer that isn’t a robot voice, and you’re going to tell me every single symptom you’ve been sitting on since Monday, because I will find out from Karen’s patrol logs anyway and I’d rather hear it from you.”
“You’re gonna tell May.”
“I’m going to call May,” Tony corrected, hauling Peter up with a steadiness that made it clear he’d braced for dead weight, “and she’s going to come here, because she deserves to know her kid crashed out on my floor, and because I guarantee you she would rather take the day off than find out later you hid a hundred-and-three fever from both of us for three days out of some noble idiot idea that you’re a burden. You’re not subtracting anything from anybody by needing help. Get that through your thick, fever- addled skull.”
Peter, half-carried across the workshop with his head lolling against Tony’s shoulder in a way he’d have been humiliated by if he’d had any energy left to spend on humiliation, mumbled, “...’m not thick-skulled, I have a robot exoskeleton for a bone density joke somewhere, gimme a sec-”
“Delirious and setting up bad jokes. Incredible. May’s going to kill me for letting this go for three days.” But there was no real heat in it, just something close to relief, the particular relief of a person who’d caught someone right before they hit the ground and hadn’t quite let go of the adrenaline yet.
He got Peter onto the couch in the corner of the lab – the one that was technically for visiting board members and had, in the eighteen months since Peter started coming around, become almost exclusively Peter’s – and pulled a blanket down over him with more care than the gesture strictly needed.
“Sleep,” Tony said. “I’m calling May, and then I’m getting you actual medicine instead of whatever homeopathic willpower you’ve been running on. And Peter-”
Peter, already half under, cracked one eye open.
“Next time. You tell me before the floor becomes involved. Deal?”
“...Deal,” Peter mumbled, and let his eye fall shut again, feeling – for the first time in three days – like he’d actually put the weight down instead of just shifting it to somewhere he thought nobody would notice.
Tony’s hand stayed on his shoulder a beat longer than strictly necessary before he pulled out his phone to call May. It wasn’t a subtraction. Peter was starting, slowly, fever and all, to believe it.