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The power went out at 6:52 PM, which Tony noted with the same grim precision he’d started applying to every unwelcome medical timestamp in his life, because of course it did – of course the storm chose the exact night Peter had started running a fever to knock out the cabin’s electricity along with every road in a forty-mile radius.
“FRIDAY, status.”
“Backup generator failed to engage, sit. I’m reading a fault in the fuel line, likely frozen. Cell service is down across the region – the storm’s taken out two towers. I’d estimate road clearance in eighteen to twenty-four hours, assuming the plows can get out at all in these conditions.”
“So we’re stuck.”
“Correct. I’d also note the cabin’s heating system runs through the same electrical circuit as the generator, so without power, ambient temperature will begin dropping within the hour.”
Tony looked over at the couch, where Peter was curled under two blankets, cheeks flushed with a fever that had crept up steadily since lunch, shivering in a way that had nothing to do with being cold yet and everything to do with his body fighting something it hadn’t fully identified.
“Wonderful,” Tony muttered. “Absolutely wonderful.”
This was supposed to be a low-key weekend – a cabin trip, deliberately off-grid enough that Tony’s phone would stop buzzing every four minutes, deliberately close enough to the compound that if anything went wrong, help was twenty minutes away. He had not accounted for a storm system that turned ‘twenty minutes away’ into ‘completely, catastrophically unreachable’, not for the fever that had shown up sometime around noon and gotten steadily less ignorable ever since.
“Hey.” Tony crouched by the couch, pressing the back of his hand to Peter’s forehead. Warm. Warmer than an hour ago. “How are you feeling?”
“Cold,” Peter said, teeth chattering slightly. “Which is weird ‘cause I know I've got a fever, my brain knows that, but my body's not really- not really getting the memo.”
“That tracks. Fever chills. Your body’s trying to raise its own temperature, so everything below that new setpoint feels cold even when the room’s not actually cold yet.” Tony tucked the blanket more securely around him. “Though I should mention, the room actually is about to get cold too, because the power just went out and apparently so did the generator, so we’re looking at old-fashioned analog winter survival for the next day or so.”
Peter blinked at him slowly. “That’s- that’s not great timing.”
“No. No, it is not.” Tony was already moving, mind sorting rapidly through the actual, physical resources of a cabin he’d bought mostly for the view and never once considered from a disaster-preparedness angle. Firewood – there was some, in the shed, enough for maybe a night if he was careful. Blankets – plenty. Actual medical equipment – nothing beyond a basic first aid kit, because the whole point of the cabin was supposed to be not needing the compound’s infrastructure. “Okay. New plan. I’m getting a fire going in the main room, and then we’re camping out down here together, because I’m not letting a fourteen-degree bedroom happen to a kid with a fever.”
“You don’t have to make it a whole-”
“I do, actually, because the alternative is you shivering alone in a cold room while I sit in a slightly warmer room feeling guilty about it, and neither of us wants that version of tonight.” Tony was already hauling logs in from the shed, moving with the brisk efficiency of someone converting fear into productive motion, which had always been his most reliable coping mechanism. “Talk to me about symptoms while I get this going. Anything besides the fever and the chills?”
“Head hurts. Throat’s kind of scratchy.” Peter’s voice had gone smaller, the particular smallness that came from being sick somewhere unfamiliar and slightly frightening. “Is this gonna be okay? Like, actually okay, or are you just saying that?”
Tony paused, log halfway into the fireplace, and looked back at him – really looked, registering the flicker of real fear underneath the fever-glassy eyes.
“It’s going to be okay,” he said, and meant every word of it even as his own pulse was doing something considerably less steady than his voice. “It’s a fever and a bad storm, not a crisis. You’ve had worse fevers than this recover fine with nothing but rest and fluids, and I’ve got both of those things even without power. The storm’s inconvenient. It’s not dangerous, as long as we keep this room warm and keep you hydrated, and I intend to do both of those things very aggressively for the next twenty-four hours.”
“You sound like you’re trying to convince yourself too.”
“...A little,” Tony admitted, because lying to Peter had never worked especially well and tonight didn’t seem like the night to test that theory. “I’m used to having options. Med bay twenty minutes away, Cho on call, FRIDAY running diagnostics. Right now I’ve got a first aid kit, a fireplace, and my own two hands, and that’s genuinely a scarier position for me than most of the actual emergencies we’ve been through, if I’m honest. But scared doesn’t mean unprepared. I know how to take care of a fever the old-fashioned way. I just don’t love not having a backup plan.”
The fire caught within a few minutes, and Tony spent the next hour engineering what he privately thought of as an aggressively overbuilt blanket fort – every spare blanket and cushion in the cabin dragged into a nest close enough to the fireplace to catch the heat, Peter tucked in the middle of it with a cup of the electrolyte mix Tony had, thankfully, packed on reflex out of two years of habit.
“This is genuinely the nicest blanket fort I’ve ever been in,” Peter said, some color coming back into his face now that the room had started warming, “and I say that as someone that makes a lot of blanket forts with Ned.”
“High praise. I put real engineering thought into the cushion-to-blanket ratio.” Tony settled beside him, close enough to monitor without hovering, and pressed the back of his hand to Peter’s forehead again – still warm, but no worse than before, which felt, in the moment, like a genuine victory. “How’s the fever feel? Better, worse, same?”
“Same, I think. Maybe a little better since the fire got going. Mostly I just feel really tired.”
“Sleep, then. That’s not a bad thing right now – your body does its best work fighting this stuff while you’re resting, and there’s genuinely nothing more useful either of us can do until you’re through the worst of it.” Tony adjusted the blankets, tucking them more securely, the domestic simplicity of the motion at odds with how tightly wound he still felt underneath it. “I’ll keep the fire going. I’ll wake you up for water every couple hours. That’s the whole plan, and it’s a good plan, even without the usual backup.”
Peter’s eyes were already drifting shut, exhaustion and fever pulling him under fast now that the cold had eased and the immediate fear had settled. “You’re gonna stay up the whole night, aren’t you.”
“Probably, yeah.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t have to. I’m going to anyway, because there’s a very small, very specific kind of terrifying feeling about being somewhere with no signal and no roads and a sick kid, and the only thing that makes that bearable is staying awake and watching you breathe until the fear quiets down on its own.” Tony’s voice had gone rough at the edges, more honest than he usually let himself get out loud. “You go to sleep. I’ve got the fire. I’ve got the water. I’ve got you.”
“Love you too, you know,” Peter mumbled, already half gone, the words slipping out with the loose honesty of exhaustion and fever rather than any deliberate decision to say them. “In case that wasn’t… obvious.”
Something in Tony’s chest went entirely, quietly still.
“Yeah,” he said, once he trusted his voice again, throat tight in a way that had nothing to do with the smoke from the fire. “Yeah, kid. I know. Right back at you. Now sleep – I promise I’ll still be right here in the morning, storm or no storm.”
Peter slept. Tony kept the fire fed through the night, checked Peter’s temperature on a rotation strict enough to make Dr. Cho proud, and watched the snow keep falling outside the window in thick, relentless sheets that no longer felt quite as threatening now that the room was warm and the kid in the middle of the blanket fort was breathing slow and even, fever finally starting, by the gray hours of early morning, to break.
By the time the plows finally cleared the road the next afternoon, Peter’s fever had dropped to something manageable, color back in his face, appetite finally returning enough to eat real food instead of just the electrolyte mix – and Tony, exhausted and unshaven and thoroughly out of coffee, decided that this particular cabin trip had gone, on balance, about as well as a snowed-in fever crisis with zero backup infrastructure possibly could have.
“Same time next year?” Peter asked weakly, from the passenger seat, as they finally pulled out onto the newly plowed road.
“Absolutely not,” Tony said. “Next year we’re going to a beach, where it’s warm and sunny or something.”