Threenager by happyaspie
Part 76 of Tony Stark is a Good Mentor
No Archive Warnings Apply || Rated G || Chapters 1/? || De-aged Peter Parker, Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Summary: While on patrol, Peter is struck by a spell that turns him into a toddler. Or mostly into a toddler. His memories, intellect, and experiences are still intact. Unfortunately, that makes being trapped in a toddler's body, with a toddler's motor skills that much harder. His legs are too short, and his fingers are too uncooperative. He can’t ride in the car without a super claustrophobic car seat. He can’t even wash his hands without help and it's frustrating. Between the teasing, Tony does his absolute best to help.
[except below the cut]
It was after ten in the evening and Tony was in his bed for once. He wasn’t sleeping. He was leaning up against the headboard, glasses perched on the end of his nose, thumbing through a magazine. They’d done an interview and photoshoot with him several months prior and it had finally been published. He didn’t like the photo they’d picked for the cover. His smile was off and a few errant strands of hair had fallen limply against his forehead. He hoped the article would make up for it.
He was about halfway through the two-page spread when his phone began to ring. Blindly, he reached over to the bedside table and wrapped his fingers around the device. He didn’t bother checking the caller ID as he brought it up to his ear. There was no reason to. It was his personal phone and only a handful of friends and colleagues had the number.
“This is Stark,” he mindlessly greeted, the phone tucked neatly under his chin.
“Oh Thank God you actually answered!” a high-pitched voice rang out from the other end of the line.
Tony sighed, wondering which one of his imbecile contacts had allowed their toddler to play with their phone. “Hey there, Little Buddy. Does your mommy or daddy know you have their phone?” he asked, bringing the chipmunk-like chatter to a halt.
“Come on, Mr. Stark! This is serious!” the voice squealed. Though, all of the R’s and L’s were either missing or slurred into W’s. “I’m kind of in a bind here and I could really use your assistance.”
The first thing to pop into Tony’s head was how the vocabulary didn’t quite match up to the voice. Before he could stop himself the words, “Wait. How old are you?” slipped out of his mouth.
The tiny voice growled. Vaguely, Tony wondered why he’d not already hung up.
“It doesn’t matter! I really need you to hear me out here, Mr. Stark!”
“Yeah, okay,” Tony interjected. “That’s enough phone time for you today, Kiddie. Mr. Stark is going to say ‘bye-bye’ now.” Before he could press the end call button, the voice on the other end of the line grew increasingly frantic.
“No, Mr. Stark! Wait! Please! It’s me, Peter! Peter Parker! I need your help!”
As the voice pleaded, Tony pulled the phone away from his ear to verify who he was speaking to. Sure enough, the name Peter Parker was displayed across the screen, along with the cheesy photo he’d set to go with the contact information.
“Peter?” he questioned, still not quite believing. ”Why the hell do you sound like a nineties cartoon character?”
His inquiry was met with silence. He was right on the verge of probing for more when he heard Peter gather a deep breath.
“Well, I was on patrol, right?” Peter said. “You know, just swinging around minding my own business. Then some weird guy with a big floaty book popped up out of nowhere! I tried to get away from him but then he threw this yellowish-orange glowy light ball thing at me, and he shrunk me! He shrunk me, Mr. Stark! And I- I don’t have any other clothes.”
When the rambling finally came to an end, Tony reached up and pinched the bridge of his nose. “You don’t have any other clothes,” he blandly repeated. “You just told me some random guy shot you with an unknown substance and you’re going your biggest concern is, ‘I don’t have any other clothes?’”
“I’m pretty sure being naked in the middle of New York City is actually a very big concern, Mr. Stark!”
Seeing as that hadn’t even crossed his mind, Tony sighed and pulled up the Spider-Suit's last known coordinates. Thankfully they weren’t far. “Alright. You win. I’ll be there in twenty.”
[continue reading on AO3]
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Tony brings his baby kid, peter to the park for the first time and meets other moms or dads
Wow I've been sitting on this for *checks notes* a month and a half, whoops. Got around to finishing touches today and so here you are, finally!
It got long-ish [~2500 words] and you know meeee i had to add a twist c;
de-aging irondad spiderson fic, all fluff, just a lil pinch of angst like salt in a pastry, enjoy
thanks and much love to @shivanessa for looking it over and giving me some quality suggestions c;
⎊
They were fucking around with Pym particles when it happened.
"Shit! Pete?"
Tony pushed chunks of broken glass aside with one foot and stepped closer to the last known location of his teenaged lab partner as the vapor finally began to clear. Finally, Tony found him.
"Uh oh."
The top half of a literal baby, maybe one year old-ish, was poking out of the collar of the shirt Peter had previously been wearing. It looked at its own pudgy hands with an eerie amount of understanding for such a young face. Then it crossed its arms and glared up at Tony.
"Ummmm, next particle shipment is in three days, right, FRIDAY?"
"Affirmative, boss."
The baby flung itself backward, smacking the ground with its arms up in exasperation and defeat. Which really looked weird for a baby to do.
"Tell May I'm keeping Peter until Tuesday and to get him off school Monday. And put an order in for some baby food."
The baby flicked him off and Tony finally lost it, laughing so hard he nearly keeled over.
Peter wasn't used to being so tiny. Everything looked big. His body felt weird, uncoordinated. Like all of his muscle memory was off kilter. He found he couldn't talk, tongue too clumsy to form the words he knew.
Frustration reigned. He was going to be stuck like this for three days. And of course Tony was laughing hysterically about it. Peter knew he would probably find it funny, too, if he wasn't currently going through it. Right now, though, he was stripped of his speech, his agency and his weekend plans and he found no humor in it. Indignant at Tony, Peter wriggled out of his oversized t-shirt and made to crawl away, careless of the bits of broken glass all around him.
Tony's laughter ended abruptly, "Kid, the glass!"
Peter didn't care. His knees got cut up as he kept crawling away, anger muting the pain. He didn't have a plan yet. Maybe crawl all the way to his room, under his bed, curl up and throw himself a pity party. Alone. Yeah, that sounded pretty good. He made for the door of the lab-
-and was scooped up by two big hands around his middle. Peter let out an indignant wail as his limbs lost contact with the floor, flailing uselessly.
"Kid, calm down!"
With some difficulty, Tony rearranged the squirming baby to face him, holding him up and away from himself as Peter kicked the air.
"Hey! Stop that!" Tony shook him lightly, "Hold still and listen would you, Pete?" Peter went limp after one final kick and pouted valiantly.
“It’s only three days, so stop being a baby about it.” Peter glared at him. Tony tried really hard not to laugh, and mostly failed.
“Look, I’ve got you, okay, kid? It’s gonna be fine. Just work with me here. And please don’t go crawling through glass, for fuck’s sake.”
Tony walked them over to the first aid kit.
“Now, I’m patching you up. Are you gonna cooperate?” Peter rolled his eyes but nodded. He’d calmed a little, and his knees were starting to sting.
“DUM-E, blood on my floor, handle it. Glass, too.” He called absently. The bot chirped and wheeled over to comply.
Tony found some clean scrap fabric– spider suit fabric, coincidentally– to sit Peter on so he wouldn’t be directly on the cold metal workshop table. He picked a few tiny bits of glass out of the small cuts with sterile forceps from the kit. Fortunately, the wounds were shallow, only from scrapes against small sharp pieces. Still, Tony frowned. Sure, he’d seen the kid hurt worse before and come out okay– granted it still sucked every time– but to see him bleeding as a literal one-year-old baby was a new kind of disturbing. Peter was always getting hurt on his watch.
Soon the glass was all removed, the wounds cleaned and bandaged. Tony stood Peter up on the table.
“Sit tight. Do not fall, got it?” Tony narrowed his eyes at him, pointing, “just, don’t even move. Heaven knows this workshop isn’t baby proofed.”
Peter rolled his eyes, then simply stared back with crossed arms.
Tony swiped the scrap of fabric and slowly stepped over to a different table, eyes still on Peter. He feinted looking away slowly only to snap back to Peter, as if the kid was going to move as soon as he took his eyes off him just to be contrary.
Tony grabbed a laser tool and with a few folds, trims and laser stitchings, fashioned some simple underwear.
“Underoos for Underoos!” He declared, holding them up with a grin.
Peter fought his smile but Tony saw it.
Once Peter was no longer in his birthday suit he thanked Tony with a simple gesture, fingers touching his own chin and then extending forward with the palm up. Tony had been the one to introduce him to some american sign language and he was glad he knew some basic expressions he could use in this situation. Tony mirrored the gesture in acknowledgement.
“So, you’re understanding everything, right? But you can’t talk?” Tony asked.
The kid nodded. For a moment he attempted to say something, but managed little more than humming and babbling. He shook his head and pointed toward a nearby monitor, made a grabbing gesture at it. Tony pulled it over for him.
Peter pulled up a keyboard interface and set to pointer-finger typing. Even this was tricky. Mentally he knew where the letters were but his fingers fumbled often, and being literally smaller than he was used to wasn’t helping either. Eventually his message was finished: remember everything but muscle memory reset
“Huh. Okay, we can work with that.”
Tony tapped his chin thoughtfully and meandered over toward the pile of Peter’s teen sized clothes. He picked them up, shook the glass from them in DUM-E’s general direction and laid them on one of the tables to deal with later. He grabbed Peter’s nanoparticle housing unit which he usually wore at his belt.
Tony sat in the office chair by some of his programming consoles, placing the housing unit into a receptacle at the workstation.
“FRI, get with Karen and desync abooouuut 10 moles worth of nanites from the Iron Spider, then copy over the wrist holo display and UI to the new sub-unit. And pull up a copy of the mother code for me. Relabel it…” Tony spun in the chair to look at the baby sitting on a table as he casually swung his legs, looking at something in his little hands, “Spider-baby protocol.”
Peter took the screwdriver he’d been fidgeting with and threw it in Tony’s general direction.
It sailed across the room much faster than Peter had intended, Tony ducking away from it as it flew past his head and impaled itself into one of his glass displays, which promptly flickered out. Tony hadn’t quite been directly in the line of fire, but if he had…
Tony turned his shocked gaze away from the cracked display back to the kid, who’s wide eyes and hand over his open mouth screamed ‘oh shit.’
“Jesus Christ, kid. Can we not, with the attempted murder?”
Peter signed ‘sorry,’ rubbing his heart three times clockwise with a closed fist, gaze serious and somber.
“Apology accepted.”
Then Peter realized what had happened, and what it meant, eyes widening again. His eyes flicked to his own designated work table, where one of his web-shooters was half disassembled, but the other was still untouched. He glanced back at Tony, calculating.
Tony recognized the mischievous gleam in his eye.
“No. No! Don’t even think about it– Peter!”
Peter had slipped off the table and dropped to land on his feet– wow, he was small now. He took half a second to refamiliarize with his balance before padding over to his work table.
“Do not-”
Tony was halfway to him when Peter hopped to reach over the edge of the table and grab the web-shooter. He quickly flicked it against his wrist where it automatically attached itself.
“Your skull is not hard enough right now to be swinging around!”
Tony was reaching out to grab for him just as Peter shot a web at the ceiling and yanked himself airborne with a gleeful shriek. He stuck to the ceiling for a moment, looking back at Tony all the way down on the floor.
“Get down here!”
Peter didn’t. Instead he scuttled around the ceiling and swung from the rafters, cackling all the while.
Tony tapped his arc reactor twice.
⎊⎊⎊
“Stop squirming!”
“What’s going on here?”
Peter and Tony froze, turning to see Pepper had just stepped into the workshop, a folder in her hand.
Tony, wearing one nanotech gauntlet and both boots, was hovering near the ceiling. Peter dangled upside down from his leg currently clutched in Tony’s gauntlet, the web-shooter confiscated in Tony’s other hand.
“Um. This still isn’t the worst thing you’ve caught me doing.”
“Is that a baby?”
⎊⎊⎊
After they’d spent some time figuring things out, Tony took Peter to the park.
It was a sunny afternoon. The kid was nestled into one of Morgan’s older strollers and Tony was dressed discreetly: hoodie, hat and a pair of less flashy (but no less teched out) sunglasses. Peter was holding an Iron Man plush (Tony had offered him a Spider-man one and Peter had pointed at this one instead. Tony had had to hide his face for a minute after that.) and wiggling his feet as Tony rolled him along.
Peter plucked a flower from a bush as they passed. He held it close to his face to examine it. It was still strange being so small again. His own fingers were tiny, the petals looked huge cupped in his hand. Suddenly a bee perched on his flower. He watched it work through the pollen, fascinated, until it flew off again. He watched it go.
“Mind if we stop a bit?” Tony rolled Peter up to a bench in front of a fountain. Peter poked at the band on his wrist. The word ‘okay’ appeared on the display of Tony’s sunglasses, so he took a seat on the bench.
There were ducks floating in the fountain, pigeons on the paths, little sparrows, too. People passed by walking, jogging, biking. There were dogs of all shapes and sizes.
A droplet symbol appeared on Tony’s glasses and he immediately grabbed the cup from the holder in the stroller handle and placed it in the holder next to Peter. The kid signed his thanks and grabbed the cup to drink.
“Oh, what an angel!”
Tony glanced toward the woman who was settling on the other end of the bench, a stroller and (sleeping) baby of her own parked beside her.
“He sure is.” Tony said with a bit of a smirk. Peter was a good kid, but he was also a little gremlin who’d given him the runaround for the better part of the morning. The woman gleaned none of his tone.
“How old is he?”
“Oh, 15,” Tony met Peter’s eyes, “months.” The kid’s eye twitched. He poked at his wristband. ‘16*’ appeared on Tony’s glasses. Tony grinned.
The woman cooed. “This one here is almost two years. Is he your first?”
“Second. I have a little girl, too.” Tony said warmly.
The woman’s gushy answer was interrupted by her baby waking up and fussing. Attention immediately drawn, she fawned over them and set them up with a bottle of formula. In the meantime, Peter asked for a snack via his bracelet, a fish symbol appearing on Tony’s glasses. Tony pulled out a container, unscrewed the lid and set it in front of the kid, who happily munched on the goldfish crackers with his few teeth.
Once her baby settled, the woman glanced back over. She'd been about to speak but stopped as she did a double take at Peter. The baby was easily popping crackers into his mouth, distinctly making no mess while her own baby– ‘older’ than him– was already drooling milk on themself.
Peter returned the woman’s stare, making eye contact for several seconds. Without looking away he pushed the empty container toward Tony. As Tony took it back, Peter turned to sign his thanks, and Tony mirrored it with a soft smile. The woman gaped.
Peter sent a pedestrian walking symbol to Tony’s glasses.
Tony smiled casually at the woman’s flabbergasted expression, “Yeah, my little genius, this one. Well, time for us to get going.”
The woman watched them go. She saw them pause for a moment in front of a busker playing violin. She watched as the child dropped a flower into the violin case and the father chuckled and tossed in a few bills.
She shook her head, bafflement giving way to a small smile as she dabbed at her own little angel’s chin.
⎊⎊⎊
Peter crashed hard after their outing, accelerated metabolism and tiny body catching up to him. Minutes after Tony got some more substantial, but very mushy, food into him he all but passed out.
Tony brought him to his room in the tower and settled him carefully into his bed. He spent a good twenty minutes rigging a railing system that would activate if Peter got close to the edge of the relatively huge bed, and set FRIDAY to monitoring.
With one last fond look at his tiny spiderling, sleeping soundly, Tony gently shut the door.
⎊⎊⎊
When Peter wakes up he doesn't know where he is. Dark and unfamiliar shapes, covered in inky blackness, loom over him. His body feels strange. His heart feels like it's hammering faster than it should be, even stressed, and with his heightened hearing it's the loudest thing in the room.
He knows he should be somewhere in the tower, that's what would make sense, and so he calls for FRIDAY. Except his mouth doesn't move right, tongue twisting and lips lagging, so the sound he produces is more a mangled groan than a word. It's wrong. He must have been drugged. He must be having a stroke.
He cries out, and the fact that the sound he emits is that of a crying baby only adds to his upset.
Suddenly, warm light pours over him as a door opens. He recognizes Tony as soon as he enters, his bare footsteps urgent but soft on the carpet. The mere sight of him is a relief to Peter, though remnants of his distress still linger.
Tony picks him right up and pulls him against his chest where Peter immediately clings to his black tank top. A kiss is pressed to the top of Peter's head and everything about the man's presence is a comfort. Tony's arms, strong, huge, wrap gently and completely around him, all-encompassing. He's warm and he smells familiar. Ear to Tony's chest, Peter hears his voice hum soothing all around him, his heart beating calm and steady.
Peter is so relaxed he barely notices when Tony shifts to sit and then to lie down in Peter's bed, the kid still glued to his chest. Tony's hand cradles the boy's head, running through the feather soft hair there as they both drift to sleep.
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