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Peter had worn glasses for almost as long as he could remember.
Even his memories from before he needed glasses were blurry. The last time he could remember seeing unaided was when Ben took him out to Finger Lakes National Forest to see a meteor shower. He was six then, maybe seven. They’d set up camp in the big clearing beyond the trees, and Ben handed him his big birding binoculars to see what was happening up there a little better. And all at once, Peter fell in love with space. Streaks of light crossed the sky, visible even without the binoculars. He made all sorts of wishes that night, none of which he could really remember now. Just seeing the sky provide a natural firework show had been magical enough.
And then, six years later, Ben was gone.
When Peter got bitten by some weird Oscorp spider, he’d experienced a lot of biological upgrades, so to speak. He was stronger. He healed faster. And there was this... sixth sense he developed. It was like another way of seeing everything around him. Instead of vision, though, it was data. Like his brain produced a map on its own. It reminded him of Toph, from Avatar: The Last Airbender. How she’d stomp and use her seismic sense to “see” things around her. At first, he thought that’s where their similarities ended.
Then his vision started to get worse.
It was slow in a day-to-day sense, but quick when it came to an ophthalmological perspective. Peter’s vision deteriorated, so he got new glasses. But within a couple weeks, his vision started to get blurry again. By the time Peter had flagged it as a problem, Tony Stark was somehow involved in his life, which was totally awesome and so scary.
When Peter had mentioned his worsening vision in an offhand comment to Tony (who Peter was still accidentally calling “Mr. Man” at the time. An anxious, humiliating mixture of “Mr. Stark” and “Iron Man”), the billionaire did a full workup on him. CAT scans. MRIs. Ocular pressure measurements.
What Tony found concerned him in a way he wasn’t ready to be honest about yet.
He’d just met this kid, so why did he care so much? At this point, Peter was barely anything to him. But somewhere, something was pulling him toward Peter’s orbit. The kid was kind, and strong, and fucking brilliant in a way that was rare even for superheroes who’d been in the game long enough to know better than they did. Peter matched his genius, which Tony found amusing. It also made him proud, for some reason? It wasn’t like Tony had planted that seed of intelligence. He wasn’t going to pretend he had. But whatever Peter was doing to him, it was... changing Tony.
He understood the world better because Peter was in it.
So when Peter came to him with a problem this big, Tony put everything he had into solving it, even as the situation worsened. The man spent countless evenings trying to figure out a solution. A way to fix Peter. But, as hard as both of them tried, they couldn’t crack the code. The running theory was that the hormones from the spider had affected Peter’s biology in ways that weren’t all amazing. But there was no way to stop the bad evolutions made to Peter’s body without stopping the good parts, too. He ran tests, made small devices that canceled out the spider hormone. But they just made Peter less of himself, which neither of them wanted. Tony told himself he wasn’t experimenting on Peter. He was helping him.
For weeks, he’d been losing more and more sight. Right now, the world was mostly blobs and light and dark for Peter. By now, May was in the loop about the whole Spider-Man thing, so she wasn’t completely blindsided (for lack of a better word) by Peter’s dwindling vision. She understood why he wasn’t able to see the board at school, or her face when she told Peter she loved him. She was able to make the proper accommodations at his school and give his teachers an explanation that didn’t technically feel like a lie. Meanwhile, Tony made it as easy on the pair as he could. He had the best specialists, the best geneticists working with Peter. Not just random doctors, either. People Tony trusted, who he had worked with for years. He’d even gone to school with some of them. But nothing could slow down the deterioration, or stop this process from being agonizing for everyone involved. No kid, no child should have to watch their world slowly fade to black. It was cosmically unfair.
Then, one evening, something seemed... different about Peter. He was bumping into things and missing his chair when he felt for it. Tony caught on immediately. Of course he did. Because, at some point, Peter had become something more than just a sidekick or an intern. He was his own person, with interests and feelings, of course. But he was also Tony’s Peter.
“Alright, piccolo. Spill.” Tony said without looking up from the blue HUD in front of him. “Why are you running into things around here like you’re visiting for the first time? What’s going on with you?”
There was a long silence, then Peter replied. “Because I can’t see anymore.”
Tony’s blood ran cold.
“I woke up this morning, and it was just... all black.” A shaky sigh. “I knew it wouldn’t stop getting worse, but I wasn’t expecting for the lights to just... go out like that.” Peter wrung his hands, trying to think about anything other than how dark it was now.
Tony was on his feet before he realized he was moving. “Alright. We’re going up to the Medbay, then. I’ll call in Cho, and Atkins, the ophthalmologist we’ve been working with, see what we can do about—”
“No.” Peter said, hands clenching into fists. “No more doctors.”
“But, Peter, kid, we have to—”
“Does what I want mean jack shit to you?!” Peter snapped, sounding angrier than Tony had ever heard him.
And that effectively shut him up.
“We’ve been working for a fix for months.” Peter continued. “And we still have yet to come up with anything that could’ve slowed it down. I let you bring in doctors, strangers, to look at me, to run blood tests, and scans, and still we have nothing.” Peter’s fists were shaking now. “For months, you’ve treated me like some project. Like a problem to be fixed. And I let you because... because I trusted you!” The kid’s voice wobbled, and Tony’s heart crumbled into pieces. “And I still trust you, I just... I want to choose what happens now.”
Peter could feel his face getting warmer. “I know you just want the best for me.” He said, deflating a little now. “But... I wanted a say in what we did. And when I tried telling you that, it just kinda got cast aside.” He looked away, because while he couldn’t see the world getting blurrier, he could feel his eyes burning as they filled up with tears. “This isn’t easy for me. In fact, it’s the least easy thing that’s ever happened to me. The world going dark is... it’s not really something you can fully anticipate or prepare for. Sure, it’s been bad these past couple months, but... at least there was still something to see.” Peter felt the hot tears roll down his cheeks. “And now it’s... it’s so dark. And I’m scared. I...” Words failed in the face of his raw terror. That feeling of missing a piece of himself. “This just happened, Mr. Stark. Yesterday, I could... I could still see some things. But now all I have are memories of what they looked like.” A sniffle. “I just... need some time.” He turned to face Tony again. “Even if I do end up deciding to agree with you, can’t I have a while to, I dunno... decide what's done about it? Do you really get to decide how we fix it before I even process what happened? To try and remember what the stars looked like for a little while?”
Tony was silent for almost a full minute (which was a record in and of itself) as he pondered the many ways he’d fucked up since he met Peter. After another long pause, he sighed. “You’re right.” He replied. No nicknames, no terrible one-liners, just the facts. Peter deserved that.
Tony then proceeded to be more honest than he’d ever been with anybody.
“I... god, I’m sorry, Peter. You’re not some faulty wiring or computer error. You’re a person. You have thoughts and feelings, and I’ve been treating you like shit because I was scared. Not a good reason, because there is no good reason to treat people the way I’ve been treating you since I found out about this.” Tony sighed and crossed his arms because this felt way too vulnerable. “And that’s just it. That’s the nuts and bolts of it. I was scared. Still am. And when I get scared, I reach for tools. I try to fix things, even if they don’t need to be fixed.” The older man reached out to gently rest a hand on Peter’s shoulder. “I should’ve been asking you what you wanted to be done with and for your body. And I shouldn’t have assumed you wanted the same things I did, because you’re not me.” Then Peter could hear the smile in Tony’s voice. “That’s one of the best parts about you, Pete. You don’t think like I do. And I admire that about you.”
Peter’s head tilted up toward the sound of Tony’s voice. “…Really? You’re serious?” He was still angry (reasonably so), but hearing that from Tony soothed something in him like a balm on a burn. All his life, Peter had only wanted to be like someone else. Someone stronger, someone stronger, someone better. But now, Tony Stark himself was saying he liked Peter… because he was Peter? It didn’t make sense. “But… I’m not— “
“Yes, you are.” Tony cut him off. “Full disclosure: you are everything I wished I could’ve been and more.”
Now that left Peter speechless. Tony continued. “You’re nice to people because that’s who you are, and not just because flattery gets you places. You’ve schooled me on things I thought I knew. And now I know you can set a boundary with someone you admire.” Tony huffed out a laugh that sounded astonished. “That sounds like a pretty kick-ass guy to me.”
Peter was silent for a couple more seconds. “Wha... you mean that? You aren’t just like... saying that to make me feel better?” Tony actually chuckled aloud in response this time. “C’mon, Pete. Do I really seem like I say things that usually make people feel better?” Tony was conscious about what words he used now that Peter’s sight was gone.
And now it was Peter’s turn to laugh a little, the flush in his cheeks rising towards the tips of his ears. “Right, okay. Thanks, Mr. Stark.” He turned his head to look down at his lap. “Like I said, I know you just wanted to help. But, you... I dunno.” Even now, Peter hesitated to criticize him.
“I treated you like a project instead of a person.” Tony supplied, and Peter nodded. “Yeah, I get that now. That was shitty of me.” The older man responded, sounding genuinely despondent. He really did feel bad about hurting Peter like that. “I assumed, since you were a kid, that you didn’t have the same autonomy as someone I cared less about.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry, Peter.”
“I know. It’s okay.”
“It’s really not.”
“I know.”
There was a long moment of silence between the two, before Tony spoke up again. “So, what do you want to do now, Parker? What’s next?” For the first time in six months, Tony was giving Peter the chance to make the bigger choices. He deserved that.
Everyone did.
Peter blinked back his remaining tears, taking in a shaky deep breath. “I’m not sure.” He responded honestly. Tony nodded, then remembered Peter couldn’t see that anymore. “Yeah. Okay. That’s fine, we can work with that.” Then Tony tapped his fingers against where the arc reactor used to be. A nervous habit he couldn’t seem to get rid of. This, the standing around and being there instead of fixing it, was admittedly very hard for him.
But Peter was worth the effort.
He always was.
“Uh...” Tony started, then rested a hand on Peter’s shoulder. Hopefully the right words would start coming soon.
“This sucks.”
Okay, not his best work, but it seemed to crack something open in Peter. The kid let out a wet chuckle. “Yeah, it does.” He nodded, leaning into Tony’s touch. Tony suddenly felt like there was a rock in his throat. Something in his brain shouted, “hug him!”
So he did.
Tony lowered himself onto the bench next to Peter and wrapped his arms around the teenager’s lean, strong shoulders.
And as soon as he did, Peter whimpered and hugged back. Clung to him like he was the only real thing left in the world. For a while, there were no words. Just relentless sobbing and the occasional sniffle.
For the entire time, Tony didn’t offer a solution. He just held Peter and weathered the storm with him. And when Peter had no more tears left to cry, Tony suggested they watch The Force Awakens, this time with audio description. That made Peter smile a little again. “Yeah,” he nodded, standing up with Tony at his side. “That... that sounds nice.”
Tony didn’t exactly guide him to the door, per se. But he did keep him from bumping into things this time.
And, in doing that, he suddenly understood his role in Peter’s life.