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eternally--mortal · 10 months

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One of my many time travel headcanons slots into the irondad—spiderson corner of the Marvel fanverse. I love Spider-Man and his stories, but I also suffer from visceral second-hand embarrassment and second-hand pain of seeing someone neglected or abandoned or alone, so most of my voluntary interactions with the Spider-Man/Marvel fan sphere come from the warm and fuzzy and emotionally rewarding sections with Tony and Peter becoming family. I know there are some arguments about how realistic that may or may not be to the movies, but I don’t really care. I love that those fan fictions and fan arts exist and I embrace them because they’re my favorite way of intaking that particular corner of media. So if you’re on that same page with me, enjoy my little private time travel headcanon:

In a Universe where Tony survives, Beck would have to curb his plans. They wouldn’t have formed the same way. For one thing, the drones and the glasses wouldn’t have been accessible through Peter / Tony’s will. For another, Peter would have been immediately more obviously tied to Tony, because Tony wouldn’t want to let him out of his sight after saving the world for Peter. In this version Tony and Pepper essentially adopt Peter and share informal joint custody with May. Peter gets to be Morgan’s older brother and he eventually sees Tony as his dad. They take their time to adjust: Peter has time to settle after the snap and find a new equilibrium, and the group of them develops a normal family routine. There’s definitely an optional version of this where Harley’s there as well because I have a soft spot for that, but this is mostly about Peter and Morgan (sorry Harley. You’re awesome, I just didn’t imagine you in the bulk of this story).

Beck’s team takes longer to get their shit together—partially as a plot device to allow Peter to adjust enough to call Tony “dad” and partially because Tony isn’t dead in this version, so their plans have to be different.

When the public figures out that Tony has a ‘son’—one that’s just as smart as he is—Beck and his crew decide not to go directly after the drones. They go for the kids instead. They figure ‘hey, if the rumors are true and the brat is just as smart as Tony, he can build whatever we want him to. If not, we can use the kids as leverage to get what we want.’ They go after Peter and Morgan and steal some of Tony’s super-secret-recently-invented time travel technology and hop around the space time continuum for a little bit. They don’t realize that Peter is Spider-Man because they’re convinced he’s Tony’s son and have fixated on that rather than on the fact that Peter might be a superhero (since Tony so obviously considers him a son they didn’t do as much digging into ‘why on earth would Tony Stark take interest in this random kid?’). But Peter doesn’t know whether he should play his hand as Spider-Man. They keep him separated from Morgan most of the time and he has to keep her safe because they’re threatening him with her. Peter doesn’t want to take the risk that he’ll escape and they’ll portal away with Morgan somewhere/when where he can’t find them.

Beck and his crew haven’t tried to reach out to Tony yet. They’re pretty confident that they can use Morgan to get whatever they want out of Peter instead. And besides that, Beck really just wants to make Tony suffer, so he figures taking his kids somewhere unreachable is the best way to do that. But he also wants to be able to watch Some version of Tony, just to remind himself of whom he’s torturing. So after hop-skip-jumping their way through the time stream, Beck takes them back in time to just after the Avengers saved the world from Loki—or some other convenient time within the span of movies. There’s some flexibility there. (The watches work for all of these trips. It’s possible that Peter and Tony revisited the tech to eliminate Pym Particles as an energy source. Maybe Beck’s team of engineers found another power source. Or maybe they just have a huge stash of particles. I don’t know. I didn’t really think about that part of the story. This is really mostly just background.)

Peter wants to lessen the risk of being more permanently separated from Morgan, he wants to make it easier for Tony to find them, AND he likes that they’re in a time period where he can reach some version of the Avengers. So he sneaks out while they’re trying to make him build something and he sabotages all of the time bracelets so they can’t be used again.

The real meat of the story comes with the back-in-time Avengers. Tony gets an odd transmission that he can’t open (because Peter sent it to JARVIS in the hopes that His version of Tony would find it and see it in the future and would know when and how to come back and get them). Then the Avengers run into the future version of Tony who shows up in the past. Younger Tony gets super suspicious, and he and the other Avengers assume that this is some super villain using a copy of the Ironman suit.

Beck’s crew may also have done something to get them on Team Cap’s radar, and Cap may be investigating some of their movements as potential remnants of Hydra or something else equally suspicious. Especially since Beck’s crew may have been too bold entering into this part of the timeline when they assumed they’d have access to an escape (before Peter broke the bracelets).

Finally the Avengers have a run-in where they see Tony’s face. Maybe they even catch him and drag him back to Avengers Tower (which of course he would know how to control / escape). He won’t tell them what’s going on because he takes one look at his younger self and sees a traumatized man with narcissistic tendencies who is Not ready to be a father. So he just tells them that Beck “stole something from me” and to “not get involved.” He plays up some of his familiar bravado and ego so they won’t dig too far into what exactly Beck might have stolen.

Meanwhile Beck is getting fed up with Peter, for obvious reasons. They’re trying to get him to fix the bracelets on Top of everything else they wanted him to do, but he keeps stalling for time. Beck keeps almost catching him recording covert videos, and before Peter has the chance to upload and send any more of them, the crew packs up and ditches the base where they were originally holding the kids. Peter and Morgan are now stuck in the past together, but Peter’s finding fewer and fewer opportunities to escape with her without revealing himself, and now that they’re in the past he’s afraid that Beck might discover his identity and go after Peter’s younger self as well before he even has the spider bite. Besides that, none of Beck’s team realizes how much food Peter needs to eat to stay functional. And when he’s difficult they do things like withhold food (which is a problem for his metabolism), withhold heat (when he can’t thermoregulate, so it’s basically like drugging him because it makes his body think it has to hibernate), actually drug him, etc. He’s hedging between causing problems to make life difficult for Beck, playing at good behavior in order to get more time with Morgan, actually practicing semi-good behavior to buy some time for Tony to come get them, and trying to formulate a better escape plan. And when Beck relocates them to an old Hydra base, Peter decides not to take any risks about showing off his spider powers.

The Avengers team breaks into Beck’s old base after the relocation. Cap is convinced that Tony made some stupid world-ending tech that’s going to get them all killed and that That is what Beck stole. That, or it’s just the time travel tech. To be fair, Tony is also pretty convinced that it’s some sort of tech, and he’s fairly invested in finding out what future-y stuff his older self is being so cagey about. They find evidence of a lab with mechanical parts (tools and pieces that they gave Peter to try and get him to build things, etc.). But Nat comes across a room with a blanket in the corner and a couple crayon drawings and does the whole “Guys, maybe we’re on the wrong trail here” bit about how maybe they don’t really know what’s been stollen. Tony gets what he can out of the computer and takes it back to the tower to decode.

A week later he’s de-encrypted the files enough to access some of the videos that Peter made and saved behind some walls of coding.

There are little snippets that show Peter stalling for time, ones that show some of the repercussions of his sabotaging the watches, etc. There are videos that show how much Beck’s team is treating him as a stupid normal kid and trying to manipulate him in a variety of ways—sometimes with Morgan, sometimes with violence or bribery.

A video where Peter wonders if he should be building something to appease them because they’re not feeding him and he needs to see Morgan, and how he wants to hold out, but Dad he’s not sure he’s going to be able to if it means Morgan might get hurt. How he promises to take care of her.

There are videos of Peter being a little shit and pulling tricks behind Beck’s back to mess with the tech.

A video of Peter looking a little better and Morgan sitting there assisting him and handing him the right tools before he can finish asking for them. They sing a little Italian at each other (in this version May taught Peter some Italian and Tony taught Morgan and Peter some as well). Morgan tells Peter “that’s not the way Daddy builds it.” And Peter has to tell her that they don’t have dad’s stuff at their disposal. (They’re sneakily building an E.M.P. instead of whatever Beck wants. That’s why Peter had to stash the thumb drive so it wasn’t hooked up to the computer system. Unfortunately Beck gets wind of it and figures out what they’re doing before they can use it. He’s noticed the Avengers sniffing around which is why they ditch their original base.) There’s definitely a moment in a video somewhere where they’re talking about Pepper (calling her ‘mom’) and how she would be able to stop Beck maybe even more easily than Tony—Peter says it as a Half-joke to make Morgan feel hopeful—and Peter says “can you do your mom impression?” And Morgan’s face transforms into this little deadpan look and she goes “No, Tony.” And they both laugh and joke about how Pepper would just tell Beck “No” and take them home. And then we see Beck storm in and discover the E.M.P. and throw it into the corner where it smashes (which is how the Avengers find it when they investigate), and we watch Morgan get dragged off screaming and Peter screaming back for her and trying to talk down Beck while Beck is pulling the whole ‘I thought letting you work with your sister would make you behave, but obviously I can’t trust the two of you together’ bit. He says shit like ‘you’re a worse brat than your dad’ and insults their whole family and says some nasty things about Tony and then about Peter and Morgan all while he’s ordering his people to shut the place down and clear out. Beck figures out that Peter’s been recording all of this after his team drags the kids out and he leaves a nasty message for Tony about how he’s going to pay, blah blah blah, how he’s never going to get his kids back. Something dramatic.

Obviously there’s some backlash in the team to Tony finding out that he’s a dad or that he’s going to be. They try to do some calculating to figure out when he’s going to have Peter (since they assume he’s a bio kid), but some of that is messed up by the fact that they don’t know about the snap or the five years that Peter lost. It’s generally chaos. They’re also a little more rushed to figure this out now that they know that there are kids involved. (They also don’t realize that Peter has powers, but it shouldn’t really matter because he’s a kid anyway.)

(At some point there would also be a conversation later when they meet up with Older Tony where someone suggests that Younger Tony just deal with Beck in the present time to avoid all of this so that Older Tony can explain how time travel doesn’t work like that and that This future version of Beck is already set the way he is, likely on a deviant path from their own Beck.)

Beck super mad that the time watches are broken and that the Avengers are on their tail. He rigs up the Hydra base and uses some of his hologram tech to manipulate the kids into thinking they’re being rescued when they’re not (either just to be an asshole or to try and get Peter to fix the watches through manipulation), or to show Peter a hologram of Morgan when she’s not in the room and vice versa to mess with them. At one point he possibly makes Peter think he’s shooting Morgan or something as a form of punishment for Peter not cooperating. There’s a large variety of evil that Beck is frankly willing to dip into to psychologically mess with these kids (and Tony by extension).

Older Tony and the Avengers end up working together to go save Peter and Morgan, which could honestly go a variety of ways. But I like the idea that Peter and Morgan are integral to the escape somehow, by building something or by Morgan remembering something important or by Peter using his smarts or his powers just a little. Younger-Tony gets handed Morgan (by another hero, against his will) at one point while Older Tony is in another room on the other side of the base trying to negotiate with Beck who’s threatening to kill Peter (something like that), and Morgan calls him Mr. Stark or Tony instead of Dad or Daddy because “You’re not my Dad yet” and makes a comment about how there isn’t enough gray in his hair. And he’s not really sure how to respond to her so they’re kind of strangers to each other.

Morgan possibly mentions something about ‘why didn’t you bring Uncle Bucky?’ and Steve just about has a heart attack, and Peter has to defuse it like ‘I don’t think they know about Uncle Bucky yet.’

Beck and his crew are taken into custody. Peter and Morgan get some time in the med bay for recovery. We get to see them interact with JARVIS (which is a little odd because they usually just have FRIDAY). The Avengers get to see Tony being a dad—even if he’s a little cagey about it around the super hero team. There are allusions to him being married to Pepper (without them directly saying it). Peter and Tony fix the time watches (without letting JARVIS see the schematics, because we can’t have an earth-conquering robot knowing how to traverse space-time), and they go home. (Either that or we involve Harley, who’s possibly been home with Pepper this whole time and did not get kidnapped because having all three kids would have driven Beck over the edge. And Harley took care of the technology from his end and ended up altering the tech to open a doorway instead of just using the watches. Not canon compliant, but I don’t know that I mind it as an option. Because, again, The Feels are more important to me for this particular story.) There’s definitely a little moment somewhere in their stay at the tower in the past with the Avengers where Peter wants to drink coffee or something and Tony tells him ‘thanks, no, I’ll take that’ and then asks Morgan to do a Mom (Pepper) impression, so Morgan turns to Peter and goes “No,” and Peter responds with “traitor” or something. I don’t know I think it would be cute.

And then there’s just the aftermath. Peter has Aunt May and MJ and Ned waiting for him when he gets back home. There’s family time with Pepper (and maybe Harley???). All those good vibes. Back in time there’s an acknowledgement of the fact that Tony is a whole-ass person who will grow and develop. Cap wants to go look for Bucky. And the seed has been planted that something is going to go wrong with JARVIS. Tony wonders if Peter’s out there somewhere and was possibly a child of one of his one night stands. Things like that.