Chapter Text
The funeral reception is depressing, and not for the obvious reason.
The waiter is standing by Tony’s chair, asking if he wants the guinea fowl or the truffle omelet, but Tony is too busy glaring at the gaggle of absolute vultures currently circling the only son and heir of the tragically deceased Parkers.
“He’ll have the omelet,” Pepper says, before tugging gently at his sleeve. “Tony.”
“Bodies are not even cold yet, Pepper.”
“They’re just offering their condolences.”
“While handing out business cards?” Tony narrows his eyes as Ramona Tadesse puts a hand on the kid’s shoulder and leans in to talk into his ear. Tadesse owns a chain of hotels and restaurants, what does she even want with Parker Inc., a company aimed exclusively at medical technology? She leans back and Tony watches Peter chuckle politely and nod. His face is like an empty sheet of paper.
The Parkers didn’t have any other family, someone mentioned it in the speech.
This kid is on his own, at seventeen.
Tony was nineteen himself when his parents passed away and left the entire company in his hands. At the time, he would have insisted that he was handling the whole thing with absolute maturity, dignity and grace. Looking back he knows that’s where the spiral into reckless madness began.
“What do I do, though?” he wonders out loud. He wants to go over, but he also knows himself well enough to realize that if he goes over, he’ll likely start a scene. At a funeral.
“He seems fine,” Pepper says. But then she sets her glass down and says “Oh, that’s it” when Adrian Pebley of all people, practically a loan shark, starts waving something around that had better not be a contract but certainly looks like a contract from a distance. She stands and Tony watches her weave her way through the crowd.
She inserts herself into the group with all of her usual firm grace, pulls the attention towards herself, all faces turning her way, like sunflowers to the sun. Except Peter Parker, who looks away, then edges away. Pepper says something, waving a hand, and the others laugh. Peter takes a step back, and another. Once he has extracted himself far enough, he visibly exhales and scans the room. And then turns to seat himself for dinner, wisely choosing a spot between one elderly, long-retired couple and another elderly, long-retired couple.
Tadesse and Pebley glare once they notice, but glare is all they can do.
-
“I had that,” Spider-Man says as he lies there, sprawled against the rooftop. “I totally had that handled.” He sucks in a breath in a way that sounds painful. Coughs. Wheezes. Presses a hand against his ribs and winces.
“I’m… I’m so convinced,” Tony says. Him and Steve arrived at the scene just in time. He plucked the kid off the street not half a second before that lunatic half-rhino guy elbow-dropped the exact spot, leaving a tiny crater in the asphalt right where Spidey’s head would have been.
He steps up to the edge of the roof just in time to see Steve getting thrown into an abandoned city bus like a ragdoll. “Wow. Cap’s struggling.”
“Of course he’s struggling!” Spider-Man says indignantly as he rolls over to push himself up on hands and knees. “You think I’d be struggling if he wouldn’t be?”
Below them, Rhino-guy is stomping, puffing. The guy is not yet the size of the Hulk, but he’s got an actual horn sticking out of his ugly face to make up for it. The intersection is a mess of dented cars, broken glass, a leak has sprung somewhere and water is slowly oozing across the asphalt.
He lets himself drop off the building and swoops back into battle, sweeps and turns, rams into the guy’s back. He lands an iron punch, Cap lands another one. It doesn’t slow Rhino-guy down: Tony is grabbed by the leg and swung into a lamppost, his HUD lights up with red exclamation marks. “The integrity of your chest plate has been compromised,” FRIDAY says cheerfully.
Across the road, Steve goes flying yet again. And then a shadow moves against the sun, Spider-Man swings back in, and there’s webbing— so much webbing, coming out rapid fire, thwomp thwomp thwomp thwomp thwomp, a mountain of it plastering Rhino to the ground.
The mountain of webbing wriggles a moment longer. Then stops.
Silence.
“OH YEAH SPIDEY!” someone hollers from a balcony overhead. A woman, covered in plaster-dust, hanging over the railing over her balcony.
Spider-Man looks up and does a happy little wave. Tony hovers closer, retracts the helmet. “All right,” he admits. “You had that.”
“That was emergencies only though.” Spider-Man looks down at his hands, shakes them, pokes at a web shooter. “I’m all out now.” He looks up at Tony and Steve. “Can I get a ride? Anyone?”
“My suit can’t…” Tony says
“The Quinjet isn’t…” Steve says
The kid’s shoulders slump. “Never mind.”
“Hang on kid. We’ll call you a cab.”
He checks the billing of course, when he gets home. Doesn’t say where exactly the driver dropped Spidey off, only the total distance. That’s still a clue, though.
“Add it to the file, FRI.”
They gotta add up to something, eventually.
-
Peter Parker asks for an appointment to talk business.
He is doing the rounds. Tony has heard he already visited at least four other companies in the past week, probably more. The kid did two press conferences and an exclusive interview with Business Insider, assuring everyone that the company is in good, stable hands. The article gave Tony the basics. Peter Parker is seventeen, already in college studying biomedical engineering, now the youngest current owner of a market-leader company, and it’s not reminding Tony of his own childhood at all, nope nope.
Tony meets him in Pepper’s office, since he doesn’t have one of his own. It’s his first time really talking to the kid and he’ll admit he’s curious. Peter Parker shows up in a blazer with jeans, business casual, a perfectly polite smile but tentative handshake.
“Work on that,” Tony says. “Handshakes should be firm and brief if you want to impress anyone.”
“Thank you for the feedback, sir,” Peter says. “If I may return the favor: that shirt is on inside out.”
Tony looks down. “Good catch, kid.”
They sit. Peter immediately starts talking about— some project on biowaste Parker Inc. is doing that Stark Industries apparently has a stake in that Tony had completely forgotten about but that is still, Peter assures him, entirely on schedule.
“Well, great,” Tony says. “So, uh. Who’s taking care of you?”
“Excuse me?”
“My condolences on Mary and Richard. Who is taking care of you?”
“I’m six months off my eighteenth birthday,” Peter says, which doesn’t answer the actual question. He smiles again, perfectly pleasant, and it’s freaking Tony out.
“Don’t you need a guardian?”
“Are you offering?” Peter asks.
“No, I’m just saying—”
“I’m touched by your concern, Mr. Stark,” Peter says, words that are way too big and formal for a kid this scrawny. “But rest assured that I have everything handled. Would you like to see the latest blueprints on that waste-to-energy toilet?” He already has them out on the table before Tony can think of a reason to say ‘no’, and then starts asking a bunch of questions that are clever enough that Tony doesn’t lose interest for an entire twenty minutes.
When the kid leaves, he shakes Tony’s hand again. Firmly, this time.
Tony returns to the desk and leans back in Pepper’s chair, folds his hands together and closes his eyes. He needs a moment to process his own thoughts before he makes the request he is about to make. “FRIDAY. Either tell me I’m being crazy or do a voice match between this kid and Spider-Man.”
“How about both?” FRIDAY suggests.
-
It’s a quiet evening, none of the other Avengers are at the tower. Serves his purposes just fine. Pepper gets home just as he is dumping a panful of spaghetti into the colander in the sink, steam rising around him. She chuckles and wafts it away before pecking him on the lips. “I thought we’d have leftovers for dinner.”
Steve is going through a Mexican-cooking phase and made some kind of quesadilla-monstrosity that was— way better than Tony was willing to admit, especially considering the man’s general lack of actual skill in the kitchen.
“Yes but the thing is. I already ate it all at lunch.”
She goes hunting for cutlery in their gigantic mess of a drawer. “How was your day?”
“Oh, super regular.”
She squints at him, immediately suspicious, because she has good instincts. “Say more.”
He turns and leans his back against the counter, crosses his arms. “I know we’ve been thinking for a good while now about adopting a baby or perhaps a toddler. But have you considered a seventeen-year-old business magnate with enhancements instead?”
She stands there with a handful of forks, looking at him. “Is this about Peter Parker?”
“It would appear so.”
“Enhancements, you say?”
“I do say.”
She hums, and continues setting the table. “Did you have that talk with him today?”
“I did. We spent almost half an hour talking about actual shit.”
“Doesn’t he have a guardian? Someone who stepped up?”
“He was exceptionally vague about it, so I think ‘no’ is a safe answer.”
“There’s gonna be someone. Legally.”
“Yeah, probably. Legally. On paper. I meant more, like, an actual person. Actual parent.”
“Well, we may want to make sure,” she says. “Before we even start talking about this.”
They have in fact been talking about this — or roughly this — for a few months, now. They tried getting pregnant for about a year and began to worry one of them might have a problem. And then they saw a doctor about it who clarified that they both, in fact, had a problem. Slow swimmers, meet blocked fallopian tubes. “It won’t be impossible,” she had said. “But very, very unlikely.” Leaflets about adoption have been piling up around the living room, serving as coasters, bookmarks.
Tony stirs the spaghetti into the sauce. “I just feel… You know. When I look at that kid I just feel…”
“I know,” she says.
He sighs heavily. Shakes his head. Looks back at her. “Did you know poop is seventy-five percent water?”
Over dinner he recounts, in as much detail as he remembers, the conversation he had with Peter, and the conclusive voice match FRIDAY presented him with afterwards.
They try to move on from the topic, but keep drifting back to it. “Do you think his parents knew about Spider-Man?” Pepper asks as they load the dishwasher. “Do you think he’s still taking all his college classes right now?” as they pick a series to watch. “Do seventeen-year-olds have a bedtime?” during the biggest action scene of the episode, right at the climax, which shows she has been paying as little attention to the story as Tony himself.
And the next morning, Pepper sits at the kitchen table with her hair in disarray, watching Spider-Man compilations on her phone, looks up at Tony when he enters and says, “I couldn’t sleep all night.”
“Are we insane?”
“Well, yes. But that’s why it could work. If he needs someone we might… I mean, wouldn’t we be the best choice?”
“What do we do?”
“We can’t just keep theorizing about it endlessly if it’s not even an option,” she says. “Because for all we know his… his deeply cherished primary school teacher has welcomed him into her home with open arms and is making him waffles right now, we have no information to go on. So we talk to the kid?”
“But we can’t talk to the kid unless we’re sure that we have something to offer him. We can’t come in like, we might want to adopt you, still on the fence about it.”
“True.” She wipes the hair out of her face. “All right. All right, very well. Endless theorizing it is. That’s what I always do, either way, so, I’m gonna—do that. Brain… In the brain.”
“Call in sick?” Tony suggests.
“Oh, is it showing? Is it showing that I’m losing my mind?”
Tony holds up his index finger and thumb, close together.
She sniffs and starts combing her fingers through her hair to tame it. “What about you? No worries and thoughts? That hardly seems fair.”
“This isn’t the kind of thing I can think my way out of, is my experience. I go by feeling.”
She nods slowly. She pats one hand against her stomach. “I think I want to go by your feeling, too.”
-
Tony is back in a familiar rabbit hole, researching adoption when Steve rounds his desk, drapes one arm across his monitor. “Rhino guy escaped,” he says. “As he was being moved.”
“Can we just stop moving criminals? Somehow that’s always when they— And no one is catching on. Just leave them where they are, Jesus.” He taps his watch. “Where is he at?”
“They’ll contact us if he turns up.”
“If he turns up?” Tony echoes, dropping his hand down. “Don’t tell me they actually lost him? How do you lose a grisly, loud, 12-foot-tall abomination like that?”
“Dove off the bridge into the river and wasn’t seen crawling back out. For all we know he drowned, but with our usual luck…”
With their usual luck, the guy has laid eggs in a sewer pipe somewhere and ten more versions of him are about to hatch.
“Can I ask … why?” Steve asks, tapping the monitor. The picture of a smiley family around a table.
“Don’t touch my screen with your Cheeto fingers. You know we want to adopt.”
“Is there progress?”
“There’s… this kid.”
Steve hums. He has always been abundantly interested in this whole endeavor, more than any other team member. I like kids, he had said awkwardly when Pepper first brought it up, months ago. It’s probably how Steve saw himself, saw his future, pre-freeze: he would come back from the war, settle down, buy a house in the suburbs and have about nine children.
“What are Cheeto fingers?” Steve asks.
“FRIDAY. Put Cheetos on Cap’s list.”
-
“So what do we even do?” Pepper asks. “Call Ivy and ask if he’s up for adoption, like a dog at the pound? Like his picture is on a website somewhere? Gosh, this is weird.”
Ivy from the adoption agency, who has been patiently walking them through all the inns and outs of adopting a baby, sending them all the leaflets.
“How about we call Ivy, to ask Ivy who she thinks we should call first?”
“Call Ivy,” Pepper says. “And say, ‘hey, we actually want to adopt that kid who’s been on TV all week if he’s not taken’.”
“Peter is on TV?”
“I don’t know, probably. I don’t watch TV. But I mean, he’s in the papers.”
“I think we can call Ivy. If we phrase it in a way that doesn’t make us sound insane.”
“However we do this,” Pepper says, “let’s do it delicately.”
-
If you were to ask Tony to list examples of moments where he tried to handle something, when he really should have left it to Pepper, he would easily be able to fire off a top ten. The disastrous birthday card he sent last month to the New York Times’ editor-in-chief would certainly be up there.
If you were to ask Pepper the same thing, she could probably fire off a top one hundred.
Does this stop Tony from going up to Peter Parker during the startup pitch event?
(That question was, of course, rhetorical.)
The event is in a waterfront hotel in Chelsea, and though Tony had expected Peter to attend, had been looking around for him, it is not until about half an hour in that he actually spots him. The kid knows how to make himself near-invisible.
Peter is standing — hiding — next to a large fern by the window, the program rolled up in one hand, slowly letting his fingers slide up and down the lanyard holding his name badge. He glances toward a nearby clutter of people as if considering joining the conversation, then looks away and unrolls the program to study it.
He looks awkward and lost and like he would rather be anywhere else, like he wishes to disappear into the salmon-colored curtain behind him.
“Which of these have no alcohol?” Tony asks the server behind a long, very long table of wine glasses.
There is a flash of surprise on her face, soon hidden behind a polite, neutral mask.
Sure, sure. Tony has a history of getting drunk at these events. It’s been a while, but rumors stick. Especially when there’s video evidence — so much video evidence.
“Pregnant,” he says, patting his stomach.
She smiles perfunctorily and points towards a clutter of glasses on her left. Tough crowd.
Tony picks two up and carries them across the room, steps around the fern. “I recommend everything but the pitch from Ted Maydan,” he says. “That man starts a new business every year.”
Peter looks up from the program he had, again, been studying. Looks at Tony, then at the glass being held out to him. His face remains rather expressionless.
“Actually,” Tony continues. “I’d really recommend not going to any of the talks at all and staying out here on the floor where everything is much more interesting.”
Peter takes the glass, now with a smile that looks— about the same as the one from the wine server.
“How have you been, kid?”
“The company is doing very well, thank you, sir. We’ve secured additional funding for the waste-to-energy toilets. Stock prices are back up after the recent dip.”
“Wow,” Tony says. “This is depressing.”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, great. Good stock prices are… good. Funding is good. How’s the experiments with the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio in the whole poop-story?”
Peter seems almost grateful for the question. “When we use saw dust as the matrix, we can get up to 92 percent of the fecal nitrogen to decompose to ammonia. Thermophilic conditions, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Unfortunately, the bacteria we need for ammonification are mostly absent in thermophilic conditions, so if we could just find a way to—"
“Hey,” Tony says. “Remember when I said you needed a guardian, and you asked if I was offering?”
Peter mercifully stops talking about human feces for a moment, and stares.
“What would you say if I was offering? And by I, I mean we. You may already have a perfectly lovely guardian stepping up, but just in case you don’t, you know… we got excellent Wi-Fi and I make a mean artichoke spinach lasagna. You could move in today.”
Peter has gone very pale.
“Too much?” Tony says. “Too overwhelming?”
Peter grips the salmon curtain tightly with one hand. He swallows, and again, and then finally manages in a shaky, tight voice: “Of all the manipulative tactics people have employed over the past weeks to get their grabby hands on my company…”
“What?” Tony says.
“…this has to be…”
“No, kid.”
“…the absolute…”
“It’s an offer. Look. Listen.” Tony looks around to make sure no one is paying attention to him and then says, in an undertone: “We know you’re Spider-Man.”
Peter sucks in a breath, then narrows his eyes and spits, venomously: “Are you blackmailing me?”
“Boy is this not going well. No, kid.”
“Every single one of you seems to believe I am a gullible dumb little kid you can pull in any damn direction, but I assure you that I’m not. So back. off.”
And the kid slips past him, disappearing into the crowd.
-
“And then I didn’t see him again,” Tony says. “I think he left.”
Pepper has her head in her hands.
“We had a pretty nice talk about poop, though. Good, uh, good connection.”
Pepper makes a noise, something between a growl and a sigh.
“Thoughts?” Tony says, curling his hands around the armrests, steeling himself.
Pepper sits up straighter in her own armchair and swipes her hair back. “Well. It would be easy to call you a dumbass. But honestly, it sounds like it would not have gone over well, no matter what. He’s just not going to trust us right now. He’s probably dealing with… too many of us.”
If they were willing to stoop low enough to crowd the kid at the funeral, they’ll be willing to employ all of the dirtiest tactics you can imagine.
“And they’re all being overly friendly,” Tony mutters. “That’s how it was for me, at least. Invited me to all the parties, all convivial. Here kid, welcome to the big leagues, have a beer, have a joint, have another, bet you can’t chug that, bet you can’t jump off the balcony into the pool, bet you can’t. And then I’d see pictures of myself passed out on the carpet in People Magazine. And they all pretended that they didn’t know who took them.” He flaps a hand. “I’m not saying any of that to excuse my old behavior.”
Pepper moves to his armchair, wriggles into the empty space and hugs him. “Little Anthony…” she says, patting his chest, like she is talking directly to Tony’s younger self.
“He might be fine. I might be projecting.”
She keeps patting. “You’re definitely projecting. And he might be fine. That doesn’t change how we feel about all this, right?”
The kid reacting the way he did; that shows that he is fully aware of how little he can trust people. That he has probably already seen it up close and personal: how the people who are most cordial to him are also the ones most likely to stab him in the back.
It’s such a messed up position for a kid to be in, and Tony knows he can help, damnit, but he can’t think of a way to do it without messing everything up further, scaring the kid off even worse than he already has.
Peter doesn’t think about it until he’s in the bedroom, slumped down on top of the covers. And then the images start to circle around his brain. The high ceiling of the hotel lobby, the crowd, and then suddenly Stark standing right in front of him, We know you’re Spider-Man, the fear, crawling up his throat.
He was gonna use this evening to quietly catch up on his emails so he could start the morning with a clear inbox. But his mind is too addled to focus right now.
He rolls over onto his stomach and breathes in through his nose, long and deep. The first weeks, he felt like he could still smell mom and dad in the pillows, but that feeling is disappearing, even when he bunches all the blankets together and presses his face into them.
Spider-Man and Iron Man have worked together plenty. He likes Iron Man. He does. Iron Man is how a superhero is supposed to be, putting his own safety on the line to help others without a second thought.
So maybe the offer was genuine.
Doesn’t make it any less insane.
He rolls onto his side, looks at the white mountains formed by his parents’ blankets, thinks about going skiing with mom and dad when he was— he doesn’t remember. Little. He isn’t even sure if he actually remembers the event itself, or just the home videos.
He lifts his hand and lets it flop down on the tallest part of the blanket-mountain, watches it implode.
“You won’t believe the day I had,” he tells the nightstand. It does not respond.
He doesn’t mind falling asleep, but he knows how hard it will be to wake up, that moment each morning, of just drifting without any thoughts, before his current reality slams into him all over again.
Speaking of reality punching him in the face…
Maisie is calling him. “How was the event?”
“Great,” Peter says. He doesn’t dare to say that he ducked out early, shirked his responsibility.
“Good,” she says, and talks a bit about legalities. He knew she wouldn’t ask further. She’s efficient but laid-back. Everything you could want in a... an interim parent. His parents had stipulated it in their will, that their personal assistant of twelve years would take responsibility for Peter, until a suitable long-term guardian or other permanent placement can be identified. In this case, suitable and permanent means Peter turning eighteen.
He has known Maisie since he was a little kid and she first snuck him candies when he came to visit mom and dad at work. At the very least, he trusts her. Which is more than he can say about anyone else on this planet right now.
Christ. Stupid Stark.
He rolls over and tries to sleep, but the city is loud, his brain is having trouble filtering it out.
“Sometimes,” Pepper says as she carefully places a twenty-seventh bolt on her bolt-tower, “I think I’m one of those people who peaked in primary school.”
This is what she likes to do on weekends. Come into Tony’s workshop, and fold origami swans out of his blueprints, or make statues out of discarded metal scraps. She’s been doing it long enough that Tony now has a designated Pepper-crate where he keeps discarded bits. She used a wrench and some paperclips last week to make a grasshopper. It wasn’t half bad, in Tony’s opinion. “I think we all peaked in primary school. It’s just downhill after that.”
“You’re so right.” Her tower topples over, bolts roll all over the desk. Pepper quickly swipes them all together before they can bounce off to the floor.
“A steadier base would help,” he suggests.
“Or superglue.”
The difference between them, in a nutshell. Tony wants the optimal solution. Pepper wants the practical one.
“Will you come downstairs for lunch?” she asks. “If I lure you out with a PB&J?”
“FRIDAY, what’s the opposite of ‘tempting’?”
“You need to touch some grass,” Pepper says. “See some direct sunlight. You don’t even know what the weather is like, your shutters have been down since the first century BC.”
“FRIDAY, what’s the weather like?”
“It has been steadily raining since 4 AM, sixty-six degrees Fahrenheit,” FRI says. “And some options are: off-putting, uninviting or unappealing.”
“Sounds like I wouldn’t get to see any sunlight either way.”
Pepper slides off her chair and walks to the door, smirks over her shoulder. “Guess I’ll ask Steve to join me. He loves PB&J.”
Tony sets his screwdriver down with a clang and follows her out.
Steve isn’t even around, anyway, he remembers too late, when he’s already sitting at the kitchen island spreading butter on toast. There was a possible sighting of their favorite Rhino-hybrid during the night so Cap and Romanoff are back in Queens all day to follow up. Great day for it.
“Do you think I should drop by Queens later, see if anyone needs an assist?” he asks.
Pepper blows on her tea. “Since I’m not well-versed in Avengers business, I assume you’re asking me this because you have ulterior motives related to a certain webslinger in the area.” She sips and sets her cup back down.
“I might run into him. Fly into him.”
“Which would be a good idea?”
“Of course it’s not a good idea, but you’d be surprised how often dumb ideas work out for me.”
“True.”
“I’d be very suave about it, invite him over for a cup of coffee. I can be good at—people. If I want to be.”
“Remember the birthday card you sent last month to the New York Times’ editor-in-chief?”
“Calling her grey hairs ‘wisdom highlights’ may have been a little socially awkward.”
“Also, she had in fact died a month before,” Pepper adds dryly. “That part was awkward.”
“I hadn’t updated my social calendar.”
Pepper squeezes a sachet of apricot jam onto her toast and spreads it around with her fork. “I’ll call him,” she promises. “Today, tomorrow. Let’s see how he responds to me, you’ve had your turn. And if he’s clearly uneasy about it, we need to— I think we’d need to let it go, Tony.”
-
Pepper stays upstairs after lunch and Tony is about an hour into composting-toilet-research when FRIDAY overrides all his screens for an emergency alert. Tony watches the words jump out at him at the same time as FRIDAY blares them down the speakers and all the air leaves his lungs.
He is on his feet, out the door, twists his ankle as he turns a corner. He hobbles down the stairs, cursing. He’s just made it into the hallway by the elevator when Steve bursts through the door from the staircase, Spider-Man limp in his arms. He does not acknowledge Tony for a moment, whizzes past at super-soldier speed, kicks another door open and is gone.
A trail of blood splatters. When Tony makes it to the med wing, Steve is in the hallway, alone, wiping his face. Nurses walk at a brisk pace, their it’s-not-looking-good-pace, in and out the room at the other end, the heavy door opening and flapping shut. More blood everywhere, smeared on the floor, all over Steve’s hands and clothes.
“What happened?” Tony asks. He feels queasy. The pain in his ankle isn’t making it any better. His hand finds the back of a chair and he sits.
“Impaled on the horn then thrown off the overpass. That’s a 20 feet drop at least. He lost a lot of blood, has been out cold. And I—” Steve lifts his eyes from his own hands to look at Tony, his face full of distress. “We couldn’t… More people were going to get hurt. I could tell the kid was in a bad way but we didn’t have time to move him right away.”
“All right. Okay.” Tony pats him roughly on the elbow. “That part of our job sucks, but we do what we can. Rhino guy is secure?”
“Yeah.”
“No one died?”
Steve shakes his head, inhales and exhales. He crumples into the chair next to Tony.
Natasha and Pepper arrive at a brisk pace, talking in undertones. “Did they get a heartbeat?” Nat asks Steve when they’re within earshot.
“Yeah.”
“Huh,” she says, and Tony can hear from that single syllable how low her hopes had been. “Does anyone know if there’s… family we should be calling?”
This is going to be an issue.
The issue, that they start debating endlessly, is this: If they inform anyone about Peter being here, they’ll also have to inform them why on earth Peter is here, and not in a regular hospital. Which means telling them Peter is enhanced. And they have no idea if… whoever is currently legally responsible for Peter can be trusted with that information.
“I say we keep quiet,” Tony says. He can feel anxiety crawling up from his stomach into his chest, taking a hold and squeezing.
“But he might be here for days,” Natasha says.
“So they might worry for a few days. Better than the kid having the rest of his life in shambles because his so-called legal guardian leaked everything to the press.” He pulls up one leg, rubs his sore ankle, wobbles it.
“Won’t his legal guardian be someone who stepped up because they care about the kid?”
“Oh, sure. Good ol’ Obie Stane was the one who stepped up for me. Probably would have become my guardian if I had been a little younger. And he ended up trying to kill me.”
“Don’t you think your life has been a rather singular experience?”
Tony points at the door. “You think Spider-Man’s life isn’t? I promise you that plenty of people who claim to care about him have ulterior motives, and I know the kid knows it, too.”
“Let’s at least give it a few hours,” Pepper suggests, at this point just to calm things down. “Until Helen has given us an update.”
-
The update comes after almost four hours. Tony had just stepped out to grab everyone some dinner. He comes back at the same time as Helen does, through that heavy door across the room.
“His body is doing tremendous work,” she explains once they’ve gathered around her. “I’ve never seen anything like it, this kind of regeneration. It made surgery tricky, but it will likely save his life. It really is fascinating, we’ve charted the— I digress. He broke his back in two places, cracked three ribs, and the impalement perforated his lung badly. He is now out of danger, but I couldn’t possibly predict how his recovery will go.” She wipes her face with the back of her wrist.
“Can we see him?”
“Not for a few hours.”
“You taking a break, now?” Tony asks.
She nods. “Rachna has come in and will monitor him.”
“You guys have this, then,” Tony says, pushing the tray of food into her hands. “I’ll get us something else.”
Late that evening, near midnight, they are allowed into Peter’s room, and Tony realizes this is the first time Steve and Natasha actually see the kid’s face. Not at the best time. Peter is about as white as the sheets, even his lips are pale, his eyelids are dark. Vivid bruises are blooming all along the right side of his face and arm. The blankets are bulking oddly around him.
Steve lays a hand on top of Peter’s head, face set into a frown. “I’m sorry kid,” he says quietly.
Tony tugs the blanket down a few inches to get a better look at the back brace keeping the kid from falling apart like humpty-dumpty. He could probably make something better if he puts his mind to it for a day or two…
He tucks the blankets back around Peter, leans his hands on the bed frame and looks at the others. “He’s in the best possible hands.”
“He is,” Natasha says. With the sort of missions she throws herself into, she has been in this bed more than once.
They stand and watch, in the reflective sort of silence that seems to be mandatory in hospital rooms. But eventually, they each find their part to play. Tony retreats to the workshop to study back braces. Natasha contacts SHIELD to get an update about their Rhino. Pepper finds the kid some clothes for when he wakes up.
Steve stays.
-
Tony finds him still by the kid’s side when he returns early the next morning. Steve looks a little paler, but smiles when he sees Tony. “Look,” he says.
Tony looks.
Peter’s bruises are entirely gone and the kid has a much healthier color. Like it’s been weeks rather than one night.
“Wow,” he says, stepping closer, feeling a whole lot more space in his chest, suddenly.
“Yeah.”
“Have you seen Pepper?” She was already gone when he woke up, and he assumed she’d be in here, checking on their kid.
“She just left. There was a PR incident, I believe.”
Tony didn’t even tweet anything lately.
He finds a white, plasticky chair in the far corner of the room and drags it back to the bed, sits down on Peter’s other side. The last time they had someone in a hospital bed to watch over was when Clint got his concussion. His wife and kids came over and it was nice, actually, to have a family around. Have kids around.
“Helen just took more pictures, too,” Steve says. “She’ll be around in a bit to let us know the results.”
“Can you imagine if his spine just heals?”
“Knock on wood,” Steve says.
Tony looks around and leans in to rap his knuckles against a nearby cabinet. He plants his elbows on his knees and looks back at Peter’s face.
“It’s always the good ones who are orphans,” Steve says.
“I’m an orphan,” Tony says.
Steve grins in his usual handsome way. “I stand by what I said.”
“You know, we offered to adopt him.”
Steve looks stunned, mouth dropping open, before quickly schooling his features into something politely neutral. “Wow.”
“By which I mean: I offered, in my usual tactful way.”
“Oh no.”
“I mean, I was genuine,” Tony says. “Genuine as hell. But I think I’m sarcastic so often that my voice has just essentially grown to always have that undertone.”
“But Pepper did know about it, I assume?”
“Oh yeah. We’ve spent a lot of time discussing it. Just seems like it would have made sense, you know.”
“It would have. Is it off the table?”
“Not from our end. But we’ve sort of put ourselves in the position where the more we try to talk to him to more freaked out he’ll probably get. Pepper was going to try and talk to him either way. Before this happened.”
Steve nods slowly. “My mom got very, very sick when I was sixteen,” he says. “Too sick to really care for me. My dad had left a few years before. What age were you?”
“Nineteen.”
“Bucky’s parents took care of me a lot, but it wasn’t easy to accept that kind of help. It just felt like something so much bigger than me. And those were people I knew, people I trusted. So I can’t imagine, for this kid…”
“Trust is an issue,” Tony agrees. “I mean. The whole thing about foster care, adoption, was that you bring a kid into your home, sometimes you’ve never even met, you don’t need to. You agree to foster because you’re ready to help whatever way they need.”
“Often it’s easier to offer that kind of help than to accept it.”
“That’s the thing about adopting a 17-year-old business owner rather than a baby, huh? They’ve learned not to trust people.”
Helen arrives with a clipboard in hand. She isn’t wearing full scrubs, just the plain white coat that means she has been doing office work and research this morning. “He’s doing well, so I’m allowed to be excessively fascinated about this,” she says, and lays down one picture on the bed, then a second. “That’s his spine yesterday, that’s his spine this morning.”
Tony has trouble pointing out the difference between the pictures. “Can you talk me through it?”
“His spine has healed entirely. Ribs, too.” She points at a black spot that doesn’t look any different from any of the other black spots. “I still see tissue damage on the lung, but we won’t need to keep him sedated much longer, so we’re going to steadily reduce the medication.”
“It’s looking good?”
“It’s looking great, in fact,” Helen says.
The door opens and Pepper comes in, phone in hand. “It’s not looking good, Tony.”
It’s not anything Tony tweeted. It’s ‘Peter Parker recently orphaned business magnate gone missing’- articles. More than one. They’re not headlines, at least, but they’re there.
“Well, that was gonna happen,” Tony says. “Guess the upside is, there’s people around him who worry enough to call the police. What am I saying, maybe they’re just hoping he’ll be found dead in a ditch.”
Pepper swipes through more articles. “The current most common theory is abduction. Kid in a vulnerable position, worth a lot of money. They’re not technically wrong. Legally, what we are currently doing is abduction.”
“Just another Tuesday,” Tony says. “Pep, the kid’s doing well, Helen is taking him off sedation. If we’re lucky, he’ll wake up in a few hours. And then we can all talk strategy, we can talk to him, figure something out.”
“If he doesn’t freak out seeing you.”
“…Maybe I shouldn’t be in the room.”
Pepper drags a hand through her hair. “I’d rather have you around. And he’ll probably freak out either way?”
-
He in fact doesn’t. At all.
Peter opens his eyes at some point mid-afternoon, as the sunlight is pouring straight into the hospital room, falling onto his bed. Tony is the only one in the room, watches it happen: the eyelids drifting open, Peter staring distantly at the wispy clouds outside before his eyes suddenly focus and flit around the room before landing on Tony’s face.
“Hey, kid,” Tony says.
Peter looks at him. He rolls his head a little, glancing down at the blankets, then back at Tony. “Hello, sir,” he rasps.
“Remember what happened?”
Peter slowly blinks. “Messed up.”
“Kid. No you didn’t.”
“Not dead.”
Tony smiles. “No. You’re not dead. Are you in pain, though?”
Peter slowly shakes his head. Then backpedals, making a wibbly-wobbly gesture with one hand. He closes his eyes again.
“You broke your back in two places and perforated your lung, but both healed pretty good, so don’t worry about moving around.”
“How long.”
“About twenty-four hours. We haven’t called anyone. So if you need—”
“Caught the guy?”
“Yeah. Let’s hope they do their job keeping him contained this time.”
Peter hums, one hand exploring the edges of the wrappings around his chest. He opens his eyes again to look at Tony. “I apologize, um. For snapping at you. When.”
He says it in that painfully earnest way that is becoming familiar to Tony. “Don’t worry about that for even a second, I fudged that.”
“I don’t think you’d…” Peter says, and then closes his eyes again. Tony gives it a good thirty seconds before he concludes that the kid has fallen back asleep.
-
Pepper is by Peter’s bedside when he next wakes up. FRIDAY informs Tony that the kid is awake, much more alert and speaking with her and Helen.
He powers down the machines in the workshop and goes downstairs, quickly washes his hands and changes his shirt and socks before heading back to the med wing.
Peter is actually up and about, sits on a low stool tying his shoelaces. He’s wearing the clothes Pepper found for him. “—anything we need to corroborate,” Pepper is saying. “Or just think of a strategy together.”
“It’s fine, I’ll think of something,” Peter says. “That I partied too hard and crashed at a friend’s house or something. No one is going to particularly care, believe me.”
“Someone can drive you—"
“Probably not a good idea for people to see me get dropped off in a Stark car. I’ll find a bus.”
“All right,” Pepper says, voice full of resignation.
Tony feels like something is slipping away from him too fast. How banged up Peter had looked just yesterday, he was fully prepared for having the kid in his care for a few days at least. But instead Peter is standing up, pushing his hands into his back to stretch it, like all he did was pull a muscle. He looks at all of them. “Thanks,” he says. “A lot. Um. I… I know you guys are good people.” And then he says, “well, anyway…” in that tone that means he’s about to walk out of here.
It feels like if he doesn’t say something Peter will disappear into spreadsheets and status updates forever and they’ll have missed their chance. Tony is waiting for that brilliant idea to come to him, something he can say that won’t be the wrong thing to say; for Pepper to say something, anything.
But she just says, “Let’s order you a cab.”
-
“Order you a cab,” Tony says, lying face down on the couch, miserable. “Really.”
“Yeah, that sucked,” she agrees readily.
“Could this whole thing be more tragic? ‘No one is going to particularly care’. What the hell. That’s the saddest thing I’ve heard in my life.” He rubs his cheek against the fabric of the couch, inhales into cushions.
“Pushing him would not have gone over well.”
“Probably,” Tony concedes grumpily. He hooks his arm around a pillow and breathes out. “I’m too invested in all this.”
“Don’t say it like that. The way you get invested is one of your best qualities.”
He just wants to help.
It all dies down quick enough, Peter knew it would. He just says that he stayed at a friend’s house and turned his phone off, and Maisie says “well I thought it would be something like that, but it’s always best to be sure.” And then starts talking about the stock market again.
So that’s good. That’s a relief.
Random invites pick right back up. There’s a car double parked right in front of his house when he gets home one afternoon with a bag of takeaway sushi under his arm. “Mr. Pebley is inviting you to dinner,” the driver says, already holding the car door open.
Peter plucks out his earphones. Looks at the car, then the driver. “How long have you been standing outside my front door?”
“He says he won’t take no for an answer.”
“Are you going to abduct me?”
“Well. No.”
“Great,” Peter says, and heads inside, letting the door fall shut behind him. He toes off his shoes and exhales. He puts the brown take-out bag on the dinner table and gets a single plate, eats in silence.
“You won’t believe the day I had,” he says to no one. Unsurprisingly, no one responds.
He really needs to sell the house, he’ll talk to Maisie about it. Find a place that won’t drive him insane. Tall order.
He’s on the couch, trying to put a dent in the emails that piled up recently, when his work phone rings. Unknown number. He blocked most of the actual vultures, so he picks up.
It’s Pepper Potts. “Just making sure you’re okay.”
“I am. I’m okay.”
“Are you taking it easy?”
Peter watches an alert for a new email pop up on his screen. “I’m… sitting down.”
She hums. “That’s exactly how Tony always avoids my questions.”
“I don’t actually need to take it easy, you know, I’m…”
“Yes,” she says.
A beat of silence.
“Listen, Peter, I just wanted to talk to you about… what Tony brought up at that event, the possibility of, of us providing a family—”
“We don’t need to talk about it.”
“—I understand that at the time it felt sudden and probably surreal, but I’d like to actually discuss with you—”
“Ms. Potts. Please.”
“—If there’s anything we can do to support you through all of this.”
“Please,” Peter says. “Please. Can we just agree not to bring this up anymore? I’m not… interested. Is that the right word? I… I have everything settled the way I want it.”
“Of course,” she says. “Just allow me to say, if you ever need help or advice for anything—”
“Yes, okay.”
“And we won’t bring it up,” she says.
“Out of curiosity. Did he even run it past you before he sprung that on me?”
“We had discussed it, yes. Pretty extensively. Me and Tony have been looking into adoption for months at this point.”
That… seems odd. “Really.”
“Is that so surprising?”
“Well. I mean. You’re pregnant,” Peter says.
Dead silence on the other end.
“Sorry, that’s probably weird, me just saying that. But I can hear that stuff. The heartbeat, you know. Very tiny. But very steady. Only five, six weeks, I think.”
“What?” she manages weakly. “Are you… Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure. You should still check, of course.”
“Oh gosh,” Ms. Potts says. ”Oh Gosh I—"
“So congratulations,” Peter says. “Good luck with all that.”
He hangs up.