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The comms cut out at 11:52 PM.
Tony noted the exact time because he’d been watching the feed idle in the corner of his vision anyway – Peter’s vitals ticking along steadily, heartbeat a little elevated from a light patrol, nothing that raised a single flag. Then Karen’s audio spiked with a burst of static, the vitals monitor flickered, and everything went dark.
No signal.
“FRIDAY, get Karen back online.”
“Attempting reconnection. Karen’s last transmitted location was the warehouse district near the East River. I am unable to reach either the suit or Peter’s phone.”
“Try again.”
“Attempting.”
Tony had built enough redundancy into that suit that a total comms blackout should have been close to impossible. Which meant either something had fried the suit’s systems hard enough to take Karen fully offline, or something had happened to the kid wearing it, and Tony’s brain – which had spent the last eighteen months constructing an elaborate architecture of he’s fine, he's resilient enhanced teenager, this is normal teenage superhero stuff – chose that exactly moment to collapse the whole structure at once.
“Suit up.”
“Sir, might I suggest waiting sixty seconds for the reconnection attempt before-”
“Suit. Now.”
He was in the air in under two minutes, which was either a personal record or the fastest he’d moved since the wormhole, and he honestly couldn’t have told you which. The city slid by underneath in smears of light, and every single one of them looked, for one gut-lurching second each, like it could be a fire, an explosion, a kid lying somewhere he shouldn’t be.
“Location,” Tony bit out.
“Still triangulating off the last unknown signal. Warehouse district, sector seven.”
“That’s not a location, Fri, that’s a neighborhood.”
“It’s what I have, sir.”
Tony had spent the better part of his adult life being good in a crisis – genuinely, clinically good, the kind of good that came from decades of learning to compartmentalize terror into something he could weaponize instead of drown in. It had never once occurred to him that the compartmentalizing might simply stop working the day the person in danger was fifteen years old and called him Mr. Stark in a voice that still cracked sometimes.
It stopped working now. Spectacularly.
He landed in the warehouse district already running scans, and every empty street he passed felt like an accusation. Twenty minutes. Twenty-five. He found the wreckage of what looked like a small chemical operation, evidence of a fight – a punched-through the wall, a scorch mark, one discarded and thoroughly web-slung crowbar – but no Peter, no suit, nothing but the kind of ominous quiet that made Tony’s chest feel like it was being slowly compressed in a vice.
“Karen. Karen, if you can hear me, ping anything. A heartbeat. A pixel. I don’t care.”
Nothing.
Thirty minutes. Tony had, over the course of building an entire company and surviving several apocalypses, developed what he liked to think was a fairly sturdy relationship with his own mortality. He’d made peace, mostly, with the idea that he could die doing something stupid and heroic and that would be fine, that would be fitting, even. He had never – not once, not even during the worst of it – made peace with the idea of Peter Parker not making it home. He discovered this now, viscerally, standing in a gutted warehouse at midnight with his hands shaking inside the gauntlets for the first time in longer than he could remember.
Thirty-five minutes. He was composing, against his own will, the sentence he’d have to say to May. He got as far as there’s been an accident in his head and had to physically stop the thought before it finished, because if he let himself finish it he wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep flying straight.
At thirty-nine minutes, Karen’s audio crackled back to life mid-sentence, tinny and apologetic.
“-stems appear to be rebooting now. Apologies for the interruption, Mr. Stark, that was a more significant power surge than anticipated.”
“Karen.” Tony’s voice came out in a register he didn’t recognize. “Where. Is. He.”
“Peter is currently three blocks north of your position, proceeding on foot. Vitals are stable, though I’m reading some irregularities I’d like to flag-”
Tony didn’t wait for the rest of the sentence.
He found Peter exactly where Karen said, walking with a limp he was clearly trying to disguise, one ar, cradled against his ribs, mask pushed up over his nose so he could breathe easier, looking, on the whole, like a kid who’d had a genuinely bad night and was doing his best to get home before anyone noticed.
“Mr. Stark? What are you-” Peter’s face, visible from the nose down, did something complicated when he registered the state of the suit, the fact that Tony had clearly flown here at speed. “Wait, are you here here? Did something happen?”
“Did something happen,” Tony repeated, landing hard enough that a manhole cover rattled, and heard his own voice crack right down the middle in a way that horrified him almost as much as the last forty minutes had. “Your comms went dead for forty minutes, kid. Forty minutes. I have flown over every warehouse in a two-mile radius composing what I was going to say to your aunt.”
“Oh.” Peter’s face fell, all the deflecting energy draining out of it at once. “Oh, no, I’m sorry, there was this whole thing with an EMP-adjacent device and it fried Karen’s transmitter and I didn’t even realize the comms had actually gone all the way dark until I was already walking back, I thought maybe it was just choppy-”
“I need you to understand something,” Tony said, and his voice was shaking now, no point in hiding it, “because I don’t think I’ve said this clearly enough and I am going to fix that tonight. When your comms go dark, I don’t think ah, probably fine, kids these days and their spotty tech. I think the absolute worst thing my brain is capable of producing, in vivid detail, on a loop, until I have visual confirmation that you are standing up and breathing. That is not an exaggeration. That is Tuesday for me now.”
Peter, mask fully off now, looked stricken in a way that had nothing to do with his ribs. “I didn’t- I didn’t think about it like that. I just figured you’d assume I was fine, ‘cause I’m usually fine-”
“You’re a fifteen-year-old who fights actual criminals in a onesie made of my old prototype fabric,” Tony said, “‘usually fine’ isn’t a category I’m capable of applying to you at midnight when you go dark for forty minutes. I need you to understand that. Not as a guilt thing. As a- as a fact about how my nervous system currently works, apparently, since about eighteen months ago.”
“Okay.” Peter’s voice had gone very small. “Okay. I’ll- I’ll get a backup com thing. Something that doesn't run through Karen, so if she gets fried there’s still a signal.”
“We’re building six of them,” Tony said immediately. “Redundant, EMP-shielded, embedded somewhere they can’t be knocked out in one hit. Tomorrow. Tonight, we’re getting you back to the tower and looking at those ribs, because you’re holding your arm like something’s cracked, and then you’re going to sit on my couch under approximately four blankets while I have a small, private nervous breakdown that you are contractually obligated to pretend not to notice.”
That got a shaky, watery laugh out of Peter – small, but real. “Deal.”
Tony got an arm carefully around him, mindful of the ribs, and started the slow walk back toward a street wide enough to fly out from. Peter leaned into it more than he probably meant to, exhaustion and adrenaline crash catching up all at once.
“For the record,” Peter mumbled, “I really am sorry. I didn’t think about the- the forty minute thing. From your side.”
“I know, bud.” Tony’s voice had settled some, the shake receding now that there was a warm, breathing, definitely-alive kid tucked against his side. “That’s kind of the deal with worrying about someone. You don’t usually get a vote on how bad it gets. Just gotta let the people who love you carry it anyway.”
Peter didn’t say anything to that, but he didn’t need to – he just held on a little tighter as Tony got the suit’s thrusters spooling, and let himself be carried the rest of the way home.