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iron--spider · 2 months

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this is supposed to be a vacation

for @meilz

by @iron--spider

Tony loves this kid.

It’s a montage at the beginning of a movie—Tony was crazy about Peter almost immediately, couldn’t accept it, his own damn daddy issues courtesy of Howard Stark, then he had to accept it because the kid kept trying to die, then things settled, they worked together, then they unsettled and the kid dissolved in Tony’s hands, and a year of heavy-drinking and nearly exploding himself in the lab wound up with all the dissolved people undissolved and the kid back and Tony in a hospital bed. Three-week coma. Whole screaming celebration when he woke up loud enough to bust his eardrums and restart his heart.

But Peter was there. Peter was there.

Time slowed to a crawl, sped up and slowed down again, and Tony tried to recover. He knew Peter and his friends went on that European trip—he encouraged it even though Peter was worried about leaving after everything. May and Happy chaperoned, and then everyone nearly died because Quentin fucking Beck decided to roll out of Tony’s past to try and kill off someone he loves. He failed, because Peter is Peter, and Fury and Happy shut down the false allegations Beck tried to put out there before he was arrested, and everybody came home.

It’s been about two months, since then. And Tony had just gotten back on his feet a week or so before Peter left, and he’s even steadier now. Getting steadier by the day.

But he loves this kid. More now, than ever. The son he never had. He loves May, he loves the kids that come along with his kid, he loves everything Peter has to say and everything he doesn’t, he loves keeping an eye on his missions, he loves the way he fits so snug into Tony’s little family.

And he loves him enough to know when he’s crashing. When his eyes are tired and his patrols aren’t as succinct and punchy as they usually are. When he needs a vacation from his recent vacation. As if nearly being killed by some asshole in London is the vacation any of them need.

So, Tony makes a couple decisions.

After all the shit they’ve gone through, what the hell could go wrong with a break?

Peter knew Tony was planning something, because he isn’t secretive when he’s excited, and he found out what he was planning when Tony asked if Ned and MJ’s families would mind if he took them out of the city for a few days.

And about a week later, they were heading upstate to Mohonk Mountain House.

And Peter hasn’t been complaining, at least not to Tony, but his tiredness has been bone-deep since he got back from London. Since before that, really. Coming back from the dead can do that to someone, and he doesn’t even like to call it dead, and apparently they were all tiny particle souls inside that infinity stone but it doesn’t matter because that’s a whole other can of worms and he gets more tired and more weary every time he even thinks about any of that.

He swung right into a wall the other day. Slap right into it. He almost broke his nose again. He feels like that might have been the moment Tony decided on this vacation—Peter could tell by the look on his face when he told him that he’d crossed some kind of line.

They walk inside the main lobby of Mohonk and Peter keeps hearing Ben’s voice in his head. You’re gonna catch flies, Pete. But he can’t stop gaping at everything. Like…he’s been in a Hilton and this is so much better than a Hilton.

“This place looks straight out of a Hitchcock movie,” May says, and she knocks Tony on the arm.

Tony laughs, and Pepper turns around, raising her eyebrows at May. “Let’s just hope we don’t have any Hitchcock-type events happen while we’re here.”

“What would that mean?” Ned asks, catching up to the group and trying to whisper in Peter’s ear. “You’ve seen Hitchcock movies. I remember you watched that weird apartment one a hundred times.”

“I love that movie,” Peter says. Rear Window. He never wants his leg to be broken. He knows he’d go insane just like that.

“You haven’t seen Psycho?” MJ asks Ned, hoisting her backpack higher on her shoulder.

Ned hums a little bit. “No. I know about it though. No crazy Grandmas for me.”

“That’s not what happens.”

Leather couches and tall ceilings and intricate carpeting and columns and everything somehow looks really rich but really comfortable at the same time—

“No,” Tony says, turning around and pointing at them. “No, no, and no.” He points at May too. “No. No Rear Window, no Psycho, no Vertigo—maybe a little bit North by Northwest—no, you know what, no. Not that either. This is going to be the lamest movie you’ve ever—this isn’t even gonna be a movie, there’s no—there’s no plot, this is just—a family video. A home movie. That’s it.”

Family video feels warm, and Peter grins.

“Of course, Mr. Stark—”

“It’s gonna be fine—”

“Absolutely nothing—”

“Listen, I’m hitting that buffet—”

“I’m just gonna sleep,” Peter says, as they approach the huge front desk. “Just the entire time.”

Tony smiles softly at him, and he winks. “You deserve it,” he says, and Peter can tell that he means it.

They hear crashing, something that sounds expensive hitting the ground somewhere behind them, and they all turn around and see a bunch of employees running around to try and take care of it. A whole big production and two guys trying to hold up a big bear statue that’s trying to fall over.

“Okay, step to,” Happy’s voice says, and Peter hears him before he sees him, and then he breezes by, striding out in front of them. “Let’s go, come on, follow me, let’s get this in the books—”

“Oh, there he is,” Tony says, patting him on the shoulders. “There he is.”

Peter and May could never afford a vacation like this. They could never even afford to imagine something like this. Peter feels like they would have charged him if he’d even looked at photos of this place. A big, historic, mountain resort in upstate New York, on the edge of a cliff overlooking a lake?

But now they’re here. They’re here with Tony Stark and Pepper Potts. Peter was able to bring two friends. Happy drove them all in a big plush rental van. They’ve got a line of suites on the sixth floor and they had steak and lobster for dinner on their first night.

It feels unreal. But things feel unreal a lot. Especially things involving Tony, involving Spider-Man. Any of it. Like he’s having a long, prolonged dream before Ben wakes him up for school.

Peter stands on one of the terrace balconies with Tony while the others are arranging activities for tomorrow, and he stares off at the lake and the way the moon hits it. Light rippling on the water.

“You really think you’re gonna sleep the whole time?” Tony asks, leaning on the railing. “Because nobody would judge you for it. Kayaks can wait. Ballroom dancing can absolutely wait, as can all of May’s Dirty Dancing comparisons, because I can feel them building up, like an aura around her—”

Peter snorts. “No,” he says. “But I probably will mostly just…relax. Take it easy. Just sleeping, no alarms—”

“You deserve it, like I said,” Tony says. “It’s thrilling to me that you’re even giving yourself a break.”

“Look who’s talking,” Peter says, giving him a look. “You were trying to get down to the workshop when your arm was still holding on by one string of muscle.”

Tony’s entire face contorts. “That is a terrible, disgusting image, Mr. Parker—”

Peter snorts again, choking on his laughter.

Tony knocks him on the arm. “You’re awful, a menace, making fun of an injured old man—”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but it’s true,” Peter says, swatting him back, and still laughing. “You’re the one who needs—needs this. Like Happy always says, I’m a ‘spring chicken’, I—I can bounce back.”

“I had enough bedrest for the next ten years,” Tony says, and he’s giving Peter that look again. Concern. Like he’s trying to read his mind. “You—I know you like to act like it all doesn’t affect you, but you were going through hell on the daily before that purple asshole snapped his fingers. Then there was all that, and the right after that, and the coming back from that, and me wasting away in front of you—and then Quentin Beck flaunting his dickheaded tendencies on your school trip—that was supposed to be your relaxing time and it got away from you too and I just—like I said, you deserve your time. You need it. Don’t—you’re not selling yourself short if you say you need some rest. You put everybody first all the time, yourself last—you deserve to relax, that’s all.”

Peter blows out a breath. He doesn’t even really try to deny it in his head anymore. He doesn’t try to compare himself to other people who have it worse. He’s tired. He’s beat. He feels older than he is.

Tony clicks his tongue and looks out at the lake. “I know this place is kind of old, kind of dated, rooms kind of look a little bit like grandma was head decorator, but—I, uh—I’ve got fond memories here. Mom used to bring me, when Howard was, uh…in some of his dicier moments. And sometimes we’d just relax, too. Recover from…knowing him.”

Peter is just kind of staring at him, because it always takes him off guard when Tony starts talking about Howard. They’re close enough now that he hears stories about his personal life all the time—his growing up, his insane college years with Rhodey, meeting Pepper meeting Happy and everything in between, but Howard is still…something they don’t really talk about, past flippant comments about Tony striving to be a better father figure than he ever was.

“Then I’m glad you brought us here,” Peter says, his voice cracking a little bit. “I’m glad you brought me here.” And in his head he hears I’m glad you brought me back. Because he thinks about that all the time.

Everyone’s back because of you, Peter. He never gave up on bringing you back. It was about saving you.

Tony looks like he’s about to say something else when there’s a bunch of rustling in the trees below them, and a loud thump, and more rustling. They both peer over the railing, and Peter can see the trees moving, but not anything else.

They share a wary look.

“Probably just a skunk,” Tony says.

“Oh, great.”

“Or maybe a band of feral cats.”

“Okay that’s better. Hopefully not too feral. Like, I hope they’re receptive to petting.”

They keep staring down at the trees, but it all seems quiet again.

Tony and Pepper have one room, Peter, MJ and Ned have the one in the middle, and May and Happy are on the end in a single room together even though Peter is refusing to acknowledge what that means or what might be going on in there. Tony mentioned that the rooms were dated, but they feel more like what a royal castle might look like inside, and for the longest time Peter is worried about wrinkling up the sheets. And then eventually it’s Ned’s snoring keeping him awake.

And then, when he’s finally mostly asleep—

“Peter.”

MJ’s voice. Peter’s in the bed with Ned and she got the other huge bed all to herself, but she sounds like she’s right next to him. He turns over onto his side, towards her voice, and then she’s—

On the ground right next to his face—

He startles a little bit, and she grabs his hand.

“MJ what—”

“There’s someone in the room.”

She’s whispering, and his heart speeds up a little bit. What the hell? There’s no way.

“Are you sure it’s not Happy?” Peter asks, as Ned lets out a rip of a snore. “Sometimes he likes to do perimeter checks—”

“It’s not Happy!” she whisper-yells.

Peter blinks, and she’s already pulling the sheets off him and yanking him out of bed, and he feels like he’d be more paranoid if something was actually happening, like he’d feel it pulsing and burning in his head, and she’s tugging on him and they’re stumbling over to the wall and—

“MJ—MJ—”

She flips on the light—

And Peter only sees him briefly—a man, standing over by the bathroom, and Peter barely gets to see what he looks like before the lights go out again.

But he wasn’t Happy he wasn’t Tony he wasn’t supposed to be here, and Peter’s heart rockets into his throat and he hears MJ gasp and he hears feet moving and Ned is still snoring, and Peter rushes towards where the man was and tries to catch him tries to fight, but he only meets open air.

MJ yanks the door open and she’s already running out into the hallway, yelling Tony’s name, yelling for Peter to follow her. And the hall light is streaming into their room now, and Peter looks around, breathing hard, trying to find the guy—

Nothing. Nothing.

Nobody’s here.

Ned is still snoring.

Tony stands next to Peter while the manager shows them the video footage. He watches their doors, completely still and closed from the hallway cameras, and then he watches MJ race out, and Tony and Happy run in a few minutes later. Followed by Pepper and May a few minutes after that. And then Ned finally looming out into the hallway, still half asleep.

“As you can see,” the manager says. “No one entered the room.”

Peter can feel Tony’s anger simmering beside him, and he takes it as a compliment that Tony is all-in on believing that they saw someone, even though he didn’t see him himself.

“Can I get the outside view again?” Tony asks, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Of course, Mr. Stark.”

They switch to the outside view again, which they’ve already seen about three times. The cameras aren’t great out there, and Happy found out they’re in the process of an upgrade. Peter can see their floor from a distance, he sees a little flash of light that they can’t identify, and then nothing else. No one scaling the building. Not in a way they can see, anyway.

“When will the upgrade be complete?” Tony asks, his tone clipped.

“After your stay, sir, unfortunately.”

Tony huffs, and doesn’t say anything else, and he turns and takes Peter’s arm and leads him to the door. They walk out into the hallway, where MJ and Ned quickly back up.

“Don’t need to listen through the wall,” Tony says.

“Uh, we weren’t,” MJ says. “We were just—”

“Looking at the wallpaper,” Ned says. “It’s—so cool.”

“Uh huh,” Tony says. He moves so they’re in a little circle, and he grips Peter’s shoulder. “Do you want to leave?” he asks, looking around at the three of them. “Because we can leave. We can go somewhere else, figure something else out. Or we can move rooms, we can go down to the Grove Lodge so we can all be closer together—we can do whatever we want.”

Ned’s eyes go wide. “I mean, I didn’t see anything, I was sleeping—”

“It’s fine,” MJ says, fast, glancing at Peter. “I feel like we—Peter and I must have been—I mean, we’re—everything that happened, we’re always thinking about it, and Mysterio was about like—making us think we were seeing things that weren’t there or were there but different—it’s fine. Joint hallucination. Or maybe I made him think he saw something because I was saying I saw something.”

That would normally be a Tony joke cue, but he just looks at her intently. “You don’t have to make excuses,” he says. “I don’t want you guys feeling…unsafe. Despite the presence of, uh—enhanced individuals. Unnamed.”

“It’s okay,” MJ says, and she looks at Peter and nods.

Tony looks at him too. And Peter knows that if he said anything about being worried, Tony would move them in an instant.

What the hell did he see?

Were they really just tired?

Did he think he saw something because MJ thought she saw something?

“It’s okay,” he says, slowly, because…he isn’t entirely sure. But MJ seems sure and Peter doesn’t want to blow up the trip if they were just in a PTSD-addled nightmare. It is their first real vacation since that shit with Beck happened, it still feels like a knife in his gut sometimes.

“You sure?” Tony asks, and he shakes Peter’s shoulder a little bit.

Peter looks at MJ, and she nods at him.

“Yeah,” Peter says. “I’m sure.”

They go back to bed after that without any more incidents, but Peter mostly stays awake, staring off into the darkness. MJ is awake too, through a lot of the night, and they text because Ned is sleeping and snoring like there’s nothing wrong and there’s never been anything wrong, ever.

I wouldn’t let anything happen to you.

I wouldn’t let anything happen to you either. Nerd :)

Over breakfast, Tony lets them know that Happy is setting up Friday to do sweeps and is doing his own personal perimeter checks.

“I want him to enjoy his break too though,” Peter says, pushing his waffle around on the plate.

“He’s enjoying it,” May says, through a mouthful of eggs.

Peter frowns at her. “I don’t like that. I don’t—I don’t need—”

She shrugs. “Well.”

“Okay, Miss Kiss and Tell,” Tony says, laughing as Pepper sits down next to him. “But it’s good. He’s on it, and I’m on it too.”

“Here,” MJ says, coming back from the buffet and sitting down next to Peter. She puts a cinnamon bun on his plate, smiling at him. “They just brought them out. Ned is trying to barter for more.”

“They can’t deny him,” Pepper says. “It’s all inclusive.”

“Exactly,” Tony says. “And after last night, we should be getting extra—I still think they sent someone in to check on something and didn’t want to admit it. I’m not gonna go all I’d like to speak to the manager on them, even though I did—do that—but either way—”

Peter hasn’t landed anywhere on it yet. He keeps trying to think back on it, trying to remember exactly what he saw. His spider sense, newly minted, is usually pretty bang on if something isn’t right, if he feels like he’s in danger, but he’d just woken up, he’s foggy in the mornings sometimes—

He figures his mind was just playing tricks on him. But MJ too?

She rubs his leg, like she knows he's agonizing over it, and he reaches down and holds her hand.

“Okay,” Ned says, walking back over holding a plate. “They let me take five of them. They’re all really warm and gooey, I feel like this is a promising start to the day.”

Peter isn’t exactly a spa guy, so he doesn’t join May and Pepper when they decide to go there, even though he feels like it might help him if he ever figured out how to relax. But going there is supposed to help him relax, so how can he ever relax enough to get to the point of going there—either way, he goes out onto the lake with Tony and Ned and MJ.

MJ and Peter both get their own kayaks, and Ned and Tony are in a canoe.

“He wouldn’t get into one of these,” Tony yells. “Honestly, if Happy’s not still doing security shit, he’s probably golfing. He’s terrible at it and he never likes to do it when anybody he knows is around. I’ll message him in a little bit and make sure but that’s probably where he is. Ned. You have to keep that thing on just in case we turn over.”

Peter snorts, looking back at them, and he sees Tony adjusting Ned’s lifejacket on his shoulders.

“Happy’s just afraid of racing,” Peter yells, cutting his oar through the water. “MJ remember when—”

“Yes,” she says, a little out ahead of him, and she’s already laughing. “I don’t even know why he was trying to chase you in New York traffic. While you were swinging in the air above him. You didn’t have any cars in your way, nothing was stopping you—”

Peter snorts again, bending over and laughing a little bit. “He was so mad. He didn’t talk to me for a week. He made me talk to Friday specifically.”

“I gave him shit for that!” Tony yells. “He shouldn’t have been trying to chase you. The gas leak had nothing to do with you. He’s always tossing blame around willy nilly.”

“Yeah he still blames me for the time those columns collapsed on that old garbage building,” Ned says. “A line of code can’t do that, that building was old I didn’t do anything there was no way he should have yelled at me at all let alone for twenty minutes—”

“He’s just dramatic,” Tony says.

“He just gets worried,” Peter says, glancing over his shoulder at their boat. And Ned makes big eyes at him, because yeah, uh, they’ve seen why he gets worried. They’ve dealt with why he gets worried. And now, after last night, Peter feels like he’s making himself worried. He needs to stop, they’ve already moved past it, they’re still here, it’s all fine.

“Yeah, I imbued him with a worrying virus that will never be cured,” Tony says. “And now the next generation has to deal with it. Here we are.”

Peter shakes his head, smiling. He’s gotta relax. The sun is shining on the lake bright and beautiful, and May is actually getting a massage for the first time in years and everything is fine. It’s fine.

He hears Tony chastising Ned again about his life jacket, gently, and Peter starts rowing out and around the outside of the lake. They’re the only ones out here right now, and he wonders how long that’s gonna last. He wonders if that’s something the resort set up, because it’s Tony, because of what happened last night, because Happy’s been intimidating people, and Peter simultaneously appreciates it and balks against the special treatment. But he’s with Tony, he should know it’s gonna happen.

He feels like he’s going a little faster than he should be going based on the way he’s rowing, like he’s really moving along. He glances over at MJ and she’s even further away from him, moving in the direction of the hotel.

“We’re not racing yet!” he yells, and he feels like Happy—constantly worried. But he’s worried about her in a different way and actually starting things with her in Europe made the whole thing worth it in a way, and now they’re together and it’s amazing but he’s just so worried all the time.

And now he’s stopped rowing all together, and he should be slowing down, but he’s still moving. Moving….fast. Maybe even getting faster.

Should that be happening? He doesn’t really kayak. He shifts around a little bit and looks down, and feels a little bit tucked in here.

“Hey!” Tony yells. “You’re moving like you have a motor on you!”

Peter’s brows furrow, because he is, and he’s not rowing, and he should have lost any propulsion at this point, and he looks up and he sees MJ looking back at him, and she’s not moving anymore, and he glances back and both Tony and Ned look concerned—

And he gets the worst feeling in his chest, like an alarm, like his spidey sense but more warped and panicked, and he tries to get up without toppling over, because the kayak is still moving for no reason, speeding along and it’s going faster and faster. He drops his oar, and balances precariously for a few seconds before he leaps into the water.

Bubbles all around him, and muffled calls of his name—

And he’s only submerged for a couple seconds, because of the life jacket pulling him back to the surface, and he comes up just in time to watch the empty kayak lift up into the air, careening into the forest and disappearing into the trees.

And he floats there, treading water, staring.

“What the fuck?” Ned yells. “Peter? Peter?”

“Peter!” MJ yells.

“Pete, we’re coming!” Tony yells. “Hold on!”

But Peter is just sort of. Staring. Staring off, at where the kayak disappeared. He stares over there. He stares.

No thoughts, just. Insane.

“Was that supposed to happen?” Peter asks, his voice squeaking. “Is that—MJ you should probably—you shouldn’t be in there if you’re not, uh, prepared to go—flying—did anybody see it explode? Did it explode? Or did it just shatter, uh, well, wooden—wooden kayak, was it wooden? Or plastic? Either way I bet it’s not a full kayak anymore—”

He feels himself being lifted out of the water, and it’s Tony pulling him into the boat. He doesn’t know how they got here so fast but to be honest a kayak just went full fighter jet on him so he can’t be that confused.

His shock has him gripped and he just sort of lays there like a rag doll as Tony and Ned pull him up, and he sees MJ rowing over to them. Thankfully, she’s still in her kayak, and it’s not—flying through the air.

“Hey, hey,” Tony says, once Peter isn’t in the water anymore. He’s got both arms around him, and Peter is laying against his chest, and Tony is patting his cheek and trying to peer around and meet his eyes. Ned has his hands on Peter’s knees and he’s just staring at him.

“I just got a defective one,” Peter says, pointing over at the forest. “It’s okay. It was just—a flying one, we didn’t make sure we didn’t get a flying one. I hope MJ doesn’t have a flying one and it’s just not like. On a time delay I don’t know. MJ, just—hurry over here—” He waves her over. He wants her to hurry up.

“Peter,” Tony says, and he pats Peter’s chest. “Are you alright? Did you twist anything when you jumped out, can you breathe—”

“Are kayaks supposed to do that?” Peter asks, feeling like he can hear his own voice echoing everywhere. “I didn’t think that was, uh, the case—”

“It’s not the case,” Ned says. “No. It’s not. It’s not the case.”

“Peter.”

MJ finally rolls up alongside them—

“I think you should get out of there,” Peter says, pointing at her. “It’s unsafe—”

“Something is going on,” MJ says, and she’s not looking at Peter. She’s looking at Tony.

Tony loves this kid, and this is supposed to be a fucking vacation. Tony loves this kid, and he believed him when he thought someone was in his room, even if the hotel was trying to sway them away from the idea. Tony loves this kid, and he just had to watch him abandon his kayak because said kayak was lifting off and destroying itself somewhere on the property. And kayaks don’t just fucking do that.

Tony stands close to Happy, well into his personal space. He’s got his hands on his hips, like a stern stance is gonna bring him any closer to an answer, and Happy sighs.

“I’ve done ten sweeps,” he says. “There’s nothing going on. There’s nobody here that isn’t supposed to be here. We even looked at the remains of the goddamn kayak and I didn’t find anything wrong with it.”

“There was something wrong with it,” Tony says. “It was flying. It was flying, speed wise, without Pete even rowing, and then it was flying, literally, after he had to abandon ship.”

“I know. It was in a million pieces.”

Tony sighs. They moved down to the Grove Lodge after it happened. Nobody told Pepper and May why, because Peter was insisting on not telling May, and he was also insisting on not leaving even though Tony wanted to leave, because if they left then they were leaving danger behind for the poor unassuming Mohonk guests. And if they leave, danger will probably follow them anyway, and Tony doesn’t know what move to make.

He’s upset, because this was supposed to be a relaxing break for all of them, but especially for Peter, after everything he’s goddamn gone through. He’s upset because this place felt like his place, his haven, a place where he could get away and be secluded and safe, and now something is pursuing them here. Something is trying to hurt them.

“You haven’t found anything?” Tony presses. “Nothing?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary,” Happy says, and he glances back at the front door of the lodge again. “I’m still looking, I’m not giving up, and I think we should be better located down here because we rented out the whole house and I told them not to come in for room service or cleaning or anything. I know we lose the nice high-up view—”

“It’s fine,” Tony says, crossing his arms over his chest. He’s afraid to even be discussing this in public. Anybody could be anywhere listening.

He doesn’t like feeling like he can’t protect these kids.

“It looks like they’re targeting Peter,” Tony says, as quietly as he can. “And I can’t tell if that’s because of me, that they think—I mean the whole goddamn world thinks he’s my love child at this point, thinks May is my secret mistress or the sister of his secret mother, God knows, I don’t know what the most recent story is. But I can’t tell if they’re targeting him because of me or because of the other thing—”

“And the other thing is worse—the spider thing—”

“I didn’t specify on purpose, Hap,” Tony says, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Right, right—the innocuous other thing—”

“We’re lucky we got out of Europe with the other thing intact—”

“Yeah,” Happy says, shaking his head, and Tony wishes he had been there with him, had been there period. He would have torn Beck in half had he laid eyes on him.

Why do they always target people he loves? Why not him? Blow him up. Kidnap him. But he guesses he’s been there already. He guesses they’ve done all that and it’s old hat to these assholes to go to him directly.

But this could be about Spider-Man too. There could be people that know who he is. People always find out, no matter how hard Tony tries, and Peter has made plenty of his own enemies. His own gallery of rogues looking to take him down.

“Just don’t tell May, if she asks,” Tony says.

“Oh, and don’t tell Pepper either?” Happy asks, in that stupid voice he uses to make fun of Tony. Tony glares, and Happy glares back. “They know by now something’s going on. They’re not dumb. They’re just not saying anything. But May will beat someone to death with anything she can get her hands on and so will Pepper, so maybe we should be sticking close to them.”

Tony sighs. “I just wanted—”

“I know—”

“And now—”

“I know,” Happy says. “We’re on it. We know it’s real, now, even if these people won’t cop to anything. I’m in their walls. Literally. Maybe I’m doing some things I shouldn’t be.”

Tony steps up onto the porch. “Don’t even tell me.”

“I won’t. But maybe I am.”

“Ned, why are you in here while I’m in the bathtub?”

“She’s in here!”

“I’m dating her.”

“Wow, that’s great,” Ned says, not making any move to get up from his spot on the gold lounge chair. “That’s great, I see how things are going. I see what direction we’re heading in.”

Peter scoffs. He warmed up a long time ago, and he’s getting really pruny, but he doesn’t want to get out just yet. He feels like something is gonna happen if he gets out. Like it’s all gonna start up again and maybe the house is gonna explode or their fridge is gonna grow arms and start trying to fight them or something.

And he isn’t lazy. He’s always ready to fight.

Maybe he’s a little lazy. But not usually. He thought Europe was gonna be a Spider-Man free trip and look how that turned out. And he thought this was going to be calm and relaxing but now it’s become suspicious. And worrying. And he’s torn between leaving and staying and telling May and not telling May and he doesn’t know if she’s in danger too and sometimes he feels like everybody would be safer if he lived out in Alaska somewhere and nobody knew him.

Peter sighs, and MJ rubs his shoulder. Ned is still giving him that look and Peter ignores that look. He’s never been in a little claw-foot tub like this before. Tony doesn’t even have these in the compound. And a bubble bath? He hasn’t had a bubble bath since he was a kid and Ben was still alive. It almost distracts him from… whatever the hell is going on here.

“We’ve got two more days,” MJ says. “And we’re sticking it out.”

“We’re sticking it out,” Peter says. “I got my webshooters, I guess I’ll wear them if we go hiking tomorrow.”

“Someone is gonna push you off a cliff,” Ned says, raising his eyebrows.

“We’re all going together, so nobody is gonna push anybody,” MJ says. She leans down and presses a kiss to the corner of Peter’s mouth. “Okay let’s leave so he can—get out.”

They both get up, and Peter watches as they argue.

“Oh, you’re not gonna help him?” Ned asks.

“Oh, you’re not?” MJ replies, nudging him as they move towards the door. “I thought that was your job, guy in the chair—”

They have dinner in the main building, and Peter watches his back. He only jumps once, when someone drops a tray full of plates, and he winces at the shattering and runs over there to help clean it up before they usher him away. They visit the horses in the stables, and Peter checks every nook and cranny to make sure somebody isn’t hiding in there. They watch May and Happy bust into the late jazz class that’s going on in the ballroom and Peter forgets to do anything because he feels like his face is going to catch on fire from all the blushing.

And he remembers to be paranoid when they get back to the Grove Lodge, and he can tell May is suspicious and they’re all watching him like hawks and he gets worried that Tony is the real target of whatever is happening here and he’s just a distraction.

He can’t let anything happen to Tony. He can’t let anything happen to any of them.

Or maybe nothing is happening. And nobody was in their room. And the kayak was just—Parker luck. Too much strength, or something.

He wakes up around three in the morning because he can’t stay asleep, and he sits down in the ‘great room’ and stares out into the darkness of the night.

“Don’t jump,” Tony’s voice says, but Peter jumps anyway, twisting around and seeing him on the stairs. “You jumped! I said don’t jump! You heard me, I said it—”

Peter snorts, shaking his head. “You can’t just tell me not to jump and expect me not to jump—especially if you’re stepping out of the shadows—”

“There’s no shadows,” Tony says, stepping off the landing. “No shadows. I’m fully illuminated—”

Peter sighs. “You can’t sleep either?”

“Nah,” Tony says, walking over quietly. “Sleep and I, we have a very contemptuous relationship.” He shakes his head. “I just feel like shit because you can’t have a normal vacation. Whatever the hell is or isn’t going on here. You just deserve—Jesus, a full day, at the least, without something happening you have to question.” He sits down next to Peter and lets out a sigh.

“It’s not your fault. At all.”

“I mean—it might be. We’ve seen Europe as an example of very much my fault.”

Peter narrows his eyes at him. “That wasn’t your fault either. You know it wasn’t your fault, idiots blaming you for their own stupidity is not your fault—”

A huge crash outside. It sounds like one of those big weird planters falling over and knocking into the other planters and then it sounds like a bunch of feet shuffling and this isn’t Parker luck, this isn’t a hallucination, this isn’t a kayak doing non-kayak like things—

They both leap out of their chairs. The noises don’t stop and Tony is immediately stepping in front of Peter and holding his arm out, as if to shield him.

“Kid, go back upstairs—”

“No,” Peter whisper-shouts, grabbing his arm as the two of them move forward very, very slowly towards the back porch doors. “You almost died recently—you’re wearing pajamas and a house coat—”

“You don’t even know what a house coat is—”

Another crash, more skittering feet, and Peter focuses—he can hear separate heartbeats from the hearts he loves in this house. Two of them.

“Tony I’ve got my webshooters on—”

“That doesn’t matter you’re wearing pajamas too you’re not prepared—”

And when they’re just close enough to open the door, there’s a flash of bright white light. And Peter closes his eyes against it, and he can feel Tony turning around, trying to block him from it, and it must be more than just light because he hears a loud bang and the windows are shattering and it feels like a cataclysmic boom is pushing them through the air. The two of them fly backwards, and hit the far wall, and the last thing Peter hears before his head snaps back too far is

GOD DAMMIT ALFIE YOU’RE TWO SECONDS TOO EARLY WHY ARE YOU ALWAYS JUMPING THE—

Peter gasps awake. His gasp echoes, and he sits up, and looks around, and he’s…nowhere.

He scrambles to his feet. He’s alone, and he’s nowhere, there’s nothing but blackness and his ears are popping like he’s high up and he sees—

He sees—

A kayak? Flying through the darkness?

He watches it, cascading like a majestic bird, and he stares at it, and then it just—blinks out of existence. Like it was never even there.

Maybe he’s just dreaming. Maybe he never even woke up and went downstairs and talked to Tony. Maybe none of that happened at all. Maybe he’s still asleep and Ned is snoring somewhere and MJ is saying not beets in the salad in her sleep again and maybe—

God dammit, Alfie, I swear. I swear I’m gonna whack you in the head.

Peter spins around, in the complete darkness. He can see himself, his own body and his hands and his pajamas and his webshooters, like he’s got a spotlight on him. “Hello?” he calls. “What the hell is—whoever that is—”

And then the London Bridge appears huge and massive above his head and he starts to duck, nearly collapsing in on himself, and there’s no way this is actually happening this isn’t real and he shoots a web at it and it goes right through it and it hits—somewhere—somewhere in the darkness, it sticks, it—

ALFIE I THINK THEY’RE BOTH—

I KNOW IT I CAN TELL OKAY I’M NOT MORONIC—

It clicks in Peter’s head. This is someone using Beck’s tech. It’s someone using Beck’s tech. That’s what this is. This is some idiots using his tech and not knowing how to use it properly and—

Peter starts yelling. “Whoever you are, you’re—you’re not good at this—this isn’t gonna work out for you—”

The bridge disappears, and Peter starts running. His spidey sense is going berserk, and he can’t tell where the danger is, what direction, how far. He can’t tell what’s underneath his feet, it feels—crunchy, and a little old, maybe? All he knows is he needs to get the hell out of this illusion. It feels unstable.

He starts shooting his webs everywhere, and most of them fly away without hitting anything, and that makes him wonder where the hell he could be with so much space—

STARK IS DOING SOMETHING WITH HIS AI—

Peter’s heart lurches.

“Tony!” Peter yells, still running, and he holds his hands out and tries to find something, anything, and he shoots webs fucking everywhere, and then—

SHIT—

He runs right into someone. And they push him off, and then he gets a brass-knuckled fist to the face before he can get a hit off of his own. He stumbles backwards through the sharp pain, wrestling with the instinct to just fight even though it’s only darkness all around him and he can’t see who the hell he’s fighting with.

Instead, he spits out a line of blood and keeps running.

Pulsing, face pulsing, beating with ripped skin and metal—

A massive kayak blips into the air briefly, and then it disappears.

Peter narrows his eyes, shaking his head, and what the hell is with the kayak—

He runs smack into something, like a train going accordion against a wall, and he stumbles backwards again, clutching at his crushed nose and trying to stay on his feet. The punch and the goddamn running into whatever that was has him dizzy, has him mangled and seeing stars in this manufactured darkness and then he hears Tony hollering his name at the top of his lungs—

“Peter! Peter!”

He sounds like he’s behind him—

“Tony!” Peter yells, all nasally. “Tony! Hey I’m over here—”

He turns around, changing his trajectory. And the darkness blips, breaking in large pixels, and Peter keeps running towards Tony’s voice and the darkness blips again, turns bright white, and then—

The illusion, or lack of one, breaks all at once, and Peter can see—

He’s on the roof of the main Mohonk building—he can see the lake, and the forest, and the mountains, settled in the calm of the night that feels decidedly not calm for him in particular, and he skids to a halt because he’s nearly running off the roof—

And he feels someone grab his arm and tug him back, and he spins around and it’s Tony, thank God it’s Tony—

“Hey!” Tony yells, and Peter looks at him and grabs his arm and they both look up and—

There are just two guys standing there. Two guys, both on the shorter side, definitely unkempt, and they’re holding a little gray box and they’re both just hitting it and hitting it and hitting it—

Peter aims his webs and just starts shooting. He feels like he shoots the most amount of webs he’s ever shot. The two guys fly backwards and get stuck to one of the upraised red parts of the roof, and they’re both gritting their teeth and trying to get out like they’re Scooby Doo villains.

“They must be associated with Beck,” Peter says, trying to catch his breath. His entire mouth tastes like blood. “They’ve gotta be.”

“I figured, with their shitty illusion attempts,” Tony says, and he sounds angrier than Peter’s ever heard him. He glances at Peter, starts to glance away, but then he looks at him again, fast, his brows furrowing severely. “Jesus Christ, you’re—bleeding everywhere—”

“Yeah, it feels—it doesn’t feel good—they didn’t hit you?” Peter asks.

Tony takes Peter’s chin gently, tilting his head and wincing. “No,” he says. “They didn’t goddamn hit me—”

“Well, the nose was from—running into something—I think that, uh, I think that’s a chimney over there, I think I ran into it—you didn’t run into anything—”

“No, I didn’t—”

“Oh, that’s great—”

Tony looks like he’s about to breathe fire, and he lets go of Peter and starts stomping towards the webbed bad guys.

“Why the hell would you be loyal to a moron like him?” Tony asks. “Beck? He couldn’t even keep a job at Stark Industries—”

“Yeah, buddy, because you stole his idea,” one of them hollers. They’re both still wiggling around, trying to get out.

Tony sneers. “He worked for my company executing an idea I designed and commissioned and decided to weaponize it when it was created to help deal with trauma and mental health—have you never had a job, an occupation—you know what, I don’t care, I don’t care—”

“Well he didn’t say that, he didn’t say any of that exactly,” the other guy says, the one with the longer hair. “He just said—”

“Nothing he says is true,” Peter yells, wincing when he touches his nose. “That guy is a liar, and a freak, and you believed him enough to follow us on vacation and—screw up every attempt you made to kill us—it was one of you guys in my room—”

“No, that was just testin’, that was just—we was just testin’, it was—you guys acted really dramatic—”

Peter scoffs. “Dramatic?”

And the two guys start giving each other nasty looks, even though they’re webbed shoulder to shoulder. “Maybe if you hadn’t dropped that dart gun in the lobby when they first got here—”

“Maybe if you hadn’t fallen out of the tree—”

“Maybe if you had made the goddamn kayak explode instead of fly—”

“Stop!” Tony yells, cutting his hands through the air like an angry teacher. “Stop. Stop. I’ve never wanted to hear Boston accents less. Stop. You’re arrested. We’ve arrested you.”

“You can’t do that, the Avengers aren’t cops,” the shorter one says. He’s got a tattoo on his neck that says GOLDBARES with a Haribo bear icon and Peter squints at it and he feels like his entire face hurts worse just from seeing it.

“You’ve committed several crimes,” Tony says, still pointing at them. “It’s—my personal security already—”

There’s a click. A very loud click. And both guys clam up real quick.

“What was that?” Tony asks.

Peter’s spidey sense is—ratcheting up, clear into his teeth—

“Tony!” he yells, because it feels like something is coming, and, just like in the Grove Lodge, there’s a big boom and they’re blown backwards by a seismic wave—

And they’re launched off the roof, and it feels like they’re moving in slow motion, through the dead dark of the night and the reflection of the lake, and Peter screams like a moron. He just screams, and then he shoots a web right at Tony and pulls him in with it, and then he shoots a web at the building and swings back around with him.

They don’t land well, because Peter’s brain is on the backburner and there’s nothing on the front, and they roll in a heap, Peter tucking his face into Tony’s shoulder. When they come to a halt Tony pulls back, sitting up and touching Peter’s cheek.

“You in there?”

“I’m in there. Here,” Peter says, and he feels like he’s bleeding worse, somehow. “Did they blow up? Did those guys blow up? It sounded like they blew up.”

“We didn’t blew up we’re still over here but maybe I wish we woulda blew up because—”

And they start shouting at each other, but Peter tries to tune them out.

“Thank God you brought those things,” Tony says, tapping Peter’s wrist. “Thanks, bud.”

Peter blows out a breath, shaking his head and still just. Laying there. “Oh yeah, no problem. All good, just—completely normal.”

Tony sighs, and his eyes cut to the side. “Any other late traps ready to explode?” he yells, over his shoulder.

They stop arguing with each other. There’s a brief silence.

“Uh. I honestly got no idea. We just brought the whole bag of tricks, I don’t know. There’s shit everywhere.”

Tony looks at Peter, slowly shaking his head.

“Fantastic,” Peter says. “Wonderful.”

“So, you weren’t in there watching us when we were getting our nails done in the spa?” Pepper asks. “I thought it was weird. I told May it was weird. That was these guys—”

Tony scoffs, and he feels like he instantly gets a headache, a migraine—

“Of course I wasn’t—of course—you thought I was just standing there? Staring at you in the spa? You didn’t think that was out of the ordinary—”

Pepper gives him a look, and Peter laughs from the hammock behind them.

“Yeah, when I went to get my nails done later you kept walking in and out,” Happy says. “But I thought you were just—I don’t know what I thought. But then you told me about the kayak thing later and I thought—well—I attributed it to that.”

“Happy went and got his nails done,” Ned whispers, somewhere behind Tony, too. “We could do that?”

“Who’s stopping you?” MJ says, quiet.

“Well, the whole—the whole situation stopped me, I guess, but I didn’t really think about it—”

“I’m glad it wasn’t you staring at us,” May says, standing near the railing and peering out into her binoculars. “Pepper said it was normal, but it was concerning me.”

Tony glares at Pepper, but she just bats her eyes at him like the picture of innocence.

“Sometimes Peter does that to me,” May says. “Just stares at me from behind a Lucky Charms box in the kitchen. That’s how I know something’s wrong.”

Tony snorts, and he turns around as soon as Peter starts protesting.

“I do not!” Peter says, shifting around in the hammock. “I do not do that.”

“It sounds like something you’d do,” Ned says.

“You’ve done that to me,” MJ says, clearing her throat.

Peter huffs, and everyone laughs at him, and Tony tries not to laugh too hard, because this started with his own wife acting like she thinks he’s capable of acting like some weirdo who stands around staring at people.

Tony sighs. He turns around, walking over and peering down at Peter. He braces his hand on the tree his hammock is attached to. “How’s the nose?” Tony asks.

“Broken.”

“It’s not broken anymore, we reset it.”

“It knows it was broken. I know too.”

He’s still got the butterfly bandages on the bridge of his nose, and it’s bruised and angry looking. He’s got a burst blood vessel in his eye, and the white part is dipped with red. Tony feels like shit because he got out of the whole ordeal relatively unscathed. Just a few bumps and bruises. Some whiplash. But Peter broke his nose again.

They hiked up to the Sky Top Tower, and the kids wanted to hang out once they got up here. They all thought Peter had earned the hammock. Happy refused to come, and he’s in charge of the security situation, anyway, so he couldn’t exactly abandon it to do a hike he didn’t want to do.

They had to clear the whole damn resort out to get rid of any remaining traps and illusions. Tony had to bring in a whole team. Rhodey made fun of him on the phone when Tony told him, laughing for a good five minutes.

And sure, it’s stupid. Those guys are stupid and they had no idea what the hell they were doing, they couldn’t even attack properly. But that’s what happens when stupid people follow more powerful stupid people. They hold grudges. They make up shit in their heads. They cause problems.

And it’s never really funny when Peter is bloody at the end of it.

“I feel like I’m sinking,” Peter says, his brows furrowing.

He reaches out his hand, and Tony takes it, and he pulls him out of the hammock as MJ and Ned push on his shoulders. Peter groans like he’s a hundred years old, and Tony claps him on the shoulder.

May looks away from her binoculars. “How you doing, honeybunch?”

“Fine,” Peter says, letting go of Tony’s hand. “Incredible. Amazing.”

“Just a normal day for a hero,” Pepper says. “MJ, you’ll get used to it, May, you’ll never get used to it—”

“And Ned,” Ned says to himself. “You will be there every step of the way.”

Tony looks at Peter, and he wants to apologize. For all of it, for being a hero at all, for the goddamn radioactive spider at Oscorp and everything that came after. For stupid morons like Quentin Beck, who know the quickest way to hurt Tony is to attack this kid he’s nearly adopted as his own.

He doesn’t know what the hell to say, because Peter wouldn’t accept his apologies anyway. He never would. Peter is just appreciative of every moment. Even if the moments aren’t ideal.

“We’ve got the whole place to ourselves,” Tony says. “How about we have a pie bar when we head back down there? I can tip the kitchen staff two hundred percent when I ask. I don’t think anybody would be pissed off.”

He sees May smiling softly at him over Peter’s shoulder. Trust in her eyes, even after all this bullshit.

“Can there be…at least four key limes?” Peter asks, raising his eyebrows.

“Four or five,” Tony says, ruffling his hair. “Or six or seven. Depending on the number of ovens in the joint.”

Peter grins at him, still bright and lively, despite everything.

Maybe they can salvage this vacation yet.

#it’s I #my fics #thank you thank you for this one

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iron--spider · 3 months

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2016 → 2017 → 2018 → 2024

#cryin

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iron--spider · 3 months

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Tom and Robert Downey Jr at the 29th Annual Critics Choice Awards

#I love them so much #and they love each other

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iron--spider · 4 months

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still standing

for webshootrs

by @iron--spider

a follow-up to more peril in thine eye

Peter wakes up somewhere dark.

Halfway in halfway out of wherever deep place he was inside his mind—still sludgy—

And he thinks he hears laughter—

He feels his synthetic eye trying to adjust to the darkness, and he blinks and he blinks and there’s something swirling in his head, something something, not just the normal Peter something, and it reminds him—it reminds him of—

And the way it reminds him simmers in his head and he’s somewhere dark and he was not somewhere dark before at least not as dark as this, he was fighting in an alleyway who was he fighting where he was he fighting—

And he isn’t moving, even though his panic is getting bigger, because whatever is swirling in his head is making him swirl too, down down down into more dark deeper dark—

And before it’s just dark just quiet he thinks banned name that’s a banned name don’t even let his name into your head not at all—

And he wakes up again, and he feels even worse, a dizziness that’s big in a bubble all around him, and it’s like he’s moving slow but he’s probably not moving slow, and when he presses his hands to the ground he feels the cold brick against the palm of his hand and he feels that texture all over his body pressing and he hears dripping somewhere, dripping in one spot from a pipe and he tries to—no reminders—he tries to—he squeezes both eyes shut and the synthetic eye is still having a hard time adjusting to the pure darkness of wherever the hell this is, and—

Dripping, dripping, dripping—

He feels hands cupping his face, and his first instinct is to flinch away, because he doesn’t know where the hell he is what the hell is going on but he knows it’s bad—but he knows it’s Tony with him because he can feel the iron hand and he knows it’s real he knows it is he—

“Hey, hey—”

And he holds onto him a certain way, always has since everything happened, since he realized Peter would always be wary, even with all of it in his rearview mirror—

But this feels like a car crash now—

“Kid,” Tony says, and he’s holding his face gently.

Peter can’t find words. He feels like there’s cotton in his mouth, like he’s floating, like—

“You’re drugged,” Tony’s voice says, and the words are floating in the air, and Peter feels like he’s sagging into Tony’s hands.

He feels his own heart speeding up, the panic roaring again—

“I’ve got you, okay?” Tony says, and he sounds farther away, because Peter is spiraling again, he’s drowning again, he’s drowning and falling away and he needs to get up he needs to get out he needs to get them out he needs to—

Can’t be happening again can’t be can’t be—

And he floats for what feels like a long time. Deep inside his own head, and he knows what’s happening and he doesn’t, and every time he remembers he knows it’s like he’s been struck by lightning, and he hears the laughter again—

And his is a banned name, and Peter’s recovery has been a squiggly line a line with starts and stops and up’s and sharp downs but his is a banned name, and he’s been out of Peter’s head for a while now for a good long peaceful while, there was that bump in the road with the dreams that didn’t feel like dreams that he worried were more, but that’s been a while ago now, a while, no more dreams like that no more moments like that, but Peter hears rumbles of laughter now—

And he’s in and out, and every time he’s in he knows, he knows, he hears the dripping and feels the smallness and feels Tony holding him close, and as he spirals to out again he hears the panicked horror of Tony’s heart—

And he’s out again and swirling in deep darkness and he knows they’ve been taken—

Taken taken taken and he’s still fucking here they’re still fucking here because they drugged him with something that knocked him on his ass—

And he rises out of it a little clearer than he’s been—

“Don’t sit up too fast,” Tony says, and he’s holding him by the shoulders.

Peter’s synthetic eye adjusts quicker this time.

The place they’re in is small—wet looking brick all the way up, walls short enough that he thinks they wouldn’t be able to stand up straight if they tried. Tony has him smushed up in the corner and there’s only about two feet before the door, which looks like reinforced steel.

Not a big warehouse. Not big and loud and billowy, full of knives and cages and things to hurt—

But this probably isn’t the whole thing. There’s probably more.

Peter closes his eyes, swallowing hard, and his mind starts making mazes.

He hasn’t had to deal with this since everything happened. He hasn’t been taken again, they’ve avoided it, somehow, with extra paranoia and caution, but here he is, here they both are, and Peter doesn’t even know how the hell this happened. He was—he doesn’t even remember, the drugs are still laying into him like a thousand cuts, over and over, and he’s trying—he’s trying—he’s trying to keep his head on straight—

Tony can tell he’s starting to separate, starting to—think too much, and his whole body tenses up when he thinks too much—and they’ve been over that, how to conquer it, how to stay on top of it. Focus, focus—

“Focus,” Tony says. “I’ve got you, I’m here with you—”

“That’s bad,” Peter breathes, thinking of him in danger, too. Tony isn’t enhanced, he’s easily breakable, he already lost a goddamn arm—

“It’s good, we can work together,” Tony says. He’s holding Peter’s elbow and his far shoulder, and he tugs him against him. “Take a breath. Just take a breath.”

Peter’s head is spinning, he feels like he’s—spiraling down too far too fast—no no, he can’t—

He focuses on the dripping, even though it’s the closest thing to the warehouse, the biggest reminder, the closest similarity. But he focuses on the sound, and closes his eyes, focusing, focusing. Matt’s voice and Tony’s voice, mixing together.

Focus. Listen. Breathe.

He hears heartbeats, a couple rooms over. Hears the movement of something heavy, being pushed. He hears the air curving into the corners of the room they’re in—the cell they’re in—can hear fans vibrating somewhere. Muffled voices, but he can’t make out the words—

Tony’s hand is on his chest, and Peter focuses on that too.

Wasn’t he—wasn’t he just chasing those guys who were trying to break into that lab in Hell’s Kitchen? Wasn’t that all he was doing? And now he’s—now he’s here, and Tony’s here too, they got Tony too, which makes it a two-pronged attack, in different locations—

Why the fuck, what the fuck—

“Your hands are free,” Tony says. “Okay? Your hands and feet are free. There’s nothing on you.”

Peter nods, swallowing hard. “You?”

“Nothing on me either,” Tony says.

Peter nods again. He can feel himself teetering on the edge of the cliff in his head, and he thinks about just letting himself fall. The panic has him in its teeth, and there’s still that rumble of laughter in his head, deep underneath everything else, the way it sounded when he was approaching Peter slowly, with that look in his eye—

Focus. Focus. He’s gotta focus.

He reaches up, gripping his forehead, because his head is still pounding. “God, whatever it is they got me with it’s—it’s really—doing a number on me—”

“Just try to breathe,” Tony says, squeezing Peter’s shoulder. “I was at the Harlem campus getting supplies for the re-up tomorrow. The one time I wanna go pick out my own shopping—”

Peter laughs a little bit, surprised at himself, and the movement makes his head throb.

It’s better, because Tony’s here. It’s worse, because Tony’s here. It’s worse because Peter doesn’t know what the hell is going on, doesn’t know why they’re here, doesn’t know what these people want, doesn’t know who these people are—and does it ever matter who they are, what they want? Some people try to grab Spider-Man just to say that they did—

Can you get yourself out of this? Can you? Is this a step back or a step forward? You can never tell, can you?

Peter is always testing himself. Testing his limits, testing how far he’s come. What still affects him, what doesn’t, what he considers a good day, what he considers bad—and today was good. No bad dreams, his head wasn’t foggy, things at school were good, he’s actually getting used to college, he feels prepared to transfer to MIT next year with Tony’s help, and things were—things were—

Peter cracks his jaw, and in his rundown of everything that’s happening, it hits him—he doesn’t have his mask.

“Shit,” he breathes, touching his own nose. “No mask, they—they know my face.” He hardly recognizes his own voice.

“But that doesn’t mean they know who you are,” Tony says, fast. “They aren’t necessarily tech whizzes, kid, we don’t know what they’ve got, we can’t jump to worst case scenario yet. And I’m not using your name.”

Peter nods, trying to regulate his breathing. He needs to stop equating this in his head with that—with his experience, his month-long living hell that felt like years and left too many marks on him. Too many he’s had to acknowledge, had to handle, had to live with. He used to get snatched over and over before that, before Beck—

And banned name, banned, but he’s thought it, it’s out, and there’s B-E-C-K in his head in red fireworks—

He squeezes his eyes shut, tries to get rid of it. It’s just a name, a name of a dead guy, and even though that carries its own shit since Peter is the one that made him dead, he hears over and over again in his head he’s gone and he deserves to be gone. He has no power over you anymore. He’s gone. He’s gone.

And Peter doesn’t want to compare this to what pre-Beck Peter would have done in the same situation, but he’s already making the comparisons, the pro and con lists, and all of his thinking is wobbly and uneven and he still feels inches from throwing up.

“Okay,” he breathes, and he pushes himself to his feet, rocking the earth to its core when he moves too fast. He braces his hand on the wall, and tries to start looking around. There’s not much to look at, it’s so damn small—brick on brick, no windows, one dingy light bulb, a grate in the ceiling too small for either one of them to get through—

“Okay,” Peter says again, and he turns and sees Tony standing up behind him, and Peter grabs onto his arm and helps him up without even thinking about it. Then he focuses, watches him wince. “Are you hurt?”

“No,” Tony says. “Yes—I don’t goddamn know, something’s always hurting somewhere—kid, okay, when you and I go missing, people are looking, we have eighty-seven protocols in place for the second we go off the grid whether it’s legit or not, we just have to hold tight here—”

Peter knows that. He knows about all the protocols, and they’ll be on the SPIDEY app too as missing founders, and he feels dizzy, thinking about being ‘missing’ again, thinking about Tony being ‘missing’, that not knowing, their families not knowing—

He knows MJ and May panic every time he’s even seconds late in getting home, in answering a text, in picking up a call, and when they can’t track him—

“Pe—hey. Hey.” Tony is gripping the back of Peter’s neck with his good hand, and—

And Peter realizes he was starting to spiral, starting to—fall into it—and he can’t do that, he can’t. He has to stay focused. He tries to remember his mantras, his dailies, how far he’s come, he tries to hone in on all of that and not think about anything that came before it—

But he just hears the dripping, he just hears—

And then there’s a hissing.

They both look up at the grate at the same time, and they see the gas coming in.

“Goddamnit,” Tony says, and he’s already crowding up against Peter, like he can protect him from it, and Peter can hear his heart like it’s on a loudspeaker, and his own, too, booming in his ears—

And he’s breathing fast, and he shouldn’t be breathing at all—

Dead, dead—

And his panic is too big to be something real, this unwieldy force all around them, like a vacuum into a dimension where he can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t move—

You’re Spider-Man, you’re Spider-Man—and he thought that so many times when he was in the warehouse, too, when Beck had beaten him down into something unrecognizable—and in his most heightened moments, when he’s most affected by his time there, he can’t believe it was only a month, just a month to change his life in thick strips—

And now he’s here facing whatever this is and Tony is trying to cover Peter’s face even though it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter it won’t matter, and Peter tries to count tries to focus tries to surface, tries to remember he’s come so far and he can do this he can be quippy slippery Spider-Man—he can get out of anything, he can, and why does his own inner voice sound so doubtful—

It’s already hitting them both, darkness pinpricks and acid bites drawing him back—

“Tony—”

And Peter wakes up somewhere different.

“—where’d you hear that?”

“It’s the word on the street. And I paid good money so it better be true. We don’t need this guy bouncing off the walls like a trapped squirrel.”

“I don’t know. Might be fun. Keep your mask on, dipshit.”

They stop talking, and he hears shuffling, walking, and he realizes he can’t move.

That sends a shock through him, and he tries to wade through the fog, come up to the surface, blink back the memories trying to superimpose themselves on top of whatever the fuck this is—and he opens his eyes—

Tony is across from him, still knocked out, tied to a chair, his head hanging down awkwardly. Peter starts to breathe harder, because he’s up against a pole, and definitely wearing vibranium cuffs. There’s some sort of steel band around his middle, holding him flush against the pole, but that feels like it’s got some more give. This is a bigger room than the cell from before, but still small, all brick.

And someone with a green mask walks around and stands in front of him.

“Sleeping Beauty’s finally awake.”

Beck said things like that. He might have said that exact thing, and it makes Peter’s head spin to hear it.

This guy is using a voice changer, and he wasn’t before, when he and the other dickheads didn’t know Peter was listening. Peter tries to wrack his brain, tries to remember that voice, think if he’s heard it before. But his brain is a wildfire of too much and not enough, and he can’t nail anything down. Not right now.

He’s panicking. It’s big again, the shadow of it trying to fill up all the empty space in the room. He tries to look over his shoulder, tries to see if any of the other guys are still in here, but as soon as he moves the guy in front of him launches at him, holding him by the throat.

“You think you can just do anything, don’t you?” the guy says, squeezing, and Peter struggles to breathe. “You think you’ll always come out on top—you think that Spider-Man will never meet his goddamn match—”

Peter falls into one of the little caves he’s carved out for himself. And for a second, he doesn’t know which one—

He hears himself talking. “Listen—buddy, I did not—consent to your—little kinky games—”

The guy lets go before Peter can finish his sentence, and gasping for breath takes precedent. But then he’s taking a blow to the face that’s complete with brass knuckles, and he’s a piece of throbbing pulp for a second there, stars dancing in his eyes.

“You don’t know who you’re playing with,” the guy says. “You two, you took down the wrong operation last month. Flying around just the two of you, not a care in the goddamn world—it was too easy, wasn’t it? Well now look at you. Not so easy anymore. Wish that goddamn asshole could have killed you when he had you, but we’ve got you now. Both of you and your special little relationship.”

Peter retreats into another cave. Camouflage. He coughs a little bit, everything still stinging, still hard to breathe. “If you’re talking about that hot dog stand, there was salmonella—”

He gets hit again, the opposite cheek this time, and he can feel his tooth knocked out of its socket. He spits it out, along with a line of blood, and he just sort of sags there against his bonds. The cuffs are vibranium. He can tell, because they’re not breaking. They’re not breaking.

Not since—not since then—didn’t want to ever, ever, but now, and when he moves and he can’t move and—

Calm, calm—

“You fucked with the wrong operation,” the guy says again, as Peter squeezes his eyes shut, “and you two will know from now on just who the Kingpin—”

“Hey, dickhead!” Tony’s voice yells, and Peter’s heart plummets. “Yeah, uh, what’s the problem? You put me in a chair because I’m an older guy, huh? Because that’s—that’s ageist, boys, you guys should be above all that—”

Peter’s panic reaches a new height now that Tony is awake, now that he’s talking and trying to get the bad guy away from Peter, and Peter is panicking so much that he devolves—

—he can only hear a high pitched ringing in his ears—not Tony’s voice, not whatever the dickhead says when he leans in close to Peter again, and he still can’t hear anything but that high pitched squeal when he takes two gut punches in quick succession—they’re enough to bend him over but he can’t bend, because of the band around him and the goddamn handcuffs, cutting into his skin now in red-ringed slices—and he tries to breathe and—he tries to breathe and blink and he glances up and his panic is so fucking big that he feels like he’s gonna pass out—

And he means to say don’t hurt him and he feels himself form the words but he can’t hear them, can only hear this ringing this loud shrill ringing—and he looks up enough to see the guy wailing away on Tony, and Peter feels himself screaming, feels himself yelling blood-curdling renditions of the word no over and over, can feel it ripped from his throat between gasping and gasping for air—

And then another guy rounds the corner, shoves a cloth in his mouth, and starts tasing him—

And the electricity surges, and he can’t even scream right, and he still can’t hear, just the ringing, but that, it’s getting louder and louder, and his vision cuts, in the moments he’s got his eyes open—and the left eye goes dark. Stops working.

Stops working. Dark. Not working.

Reminds reminds reminds him—

And Tony—he’s still—and another—and they’re hitting and hitting and—

The guy in front of Peter repositions the taser, gets Peter in his neck, and then there’s only darkness.

And his darkness is high pitched. Darkness, black, and that ringing. That ringing.

He wakes up again, still blind in his left eye, and that gives the memories life. They swoop with dark wings. He can see Beck approaching him. He can see the city the way it was, when he was escaping, half and half.

Tony gave him the choice, with the new eye, but now it’s not working, now it’s—now—

He can hear again.

“Hey. Hey. Kid, listen to my voice. Listen to me. Wake up, buddy. Wake up, show me you’re okay, please. I need you to be—hey hey hey, there you are. Can you hear me? Pe—kid, focus. Focus on my voice, come back, come back to me now, hey? Okay?”

Peter coughs, and he can hear that too, and he’s still got the goddamn cloth in his mouth. He tries to shake it loose, and he has to nearly hack it up to be able to spit it out. It falls, unceremoniously, at his feet, bloody and wet. He realizes he’s still leaning forward, pulling against the cuffs.

His whole body hurts. He’s aching, he’s pulp, he can feel himself bleeding, still twitching, and Tony—

He blinks up. Tries to get his feet under him better, and he nearly slips, but the band keeps him upright and held against the pole. His hands feel slippery in the cuffs when he’s not pulling against them, and it’s almost like—it’s almost like—

“Talk to me,” Tony says. “Hey, hey—”

Peter looks up at him. He’s bloody too, and his right eye is swollen shut from taking too many hard blows. There’s blood dripping from his nose and staining his shirt.

He’s hurt, he’s hurt—it’s bad—

Peter’s panic tries to roar up again. Tries to make itself big, tries to drown him out, and he’s gotta focus, he can—

“I’m okay,” Tony says, before Peter can even ask. “I’m okay, this isn’t even as bad as my worst day in the ring with Happy. Promise, promise I’m fine. Don’t think about me, are you—Jesus Christ, I’m gonna fucking kill them—”

Peter rattles his hands a little bit, and the cuffs slip back and forth. It feels too good to be true, it feels like something he might be imagining, but they feel like, they might be—

“Tony,” he breathes. “I think I can…I think…”

He’s afraid to say it out loud, because they’re probably listening. They could be anywhere, they could be right outside the door—

And he can hear laughing. That laughing.

It’s not real. It’s not.

“You can—”

“Eye’s not working,” Peter whispers, cutting him off. He closes both of his eyes to try and reboot it, but it’s still all dark.

“Shit,” Tony breathes. “Might have been the electricity, I’m not sure, goddamnit—just don’t—it’s okay, just breathe, just stay—just try and breathe—”

Peter feels like he’s shaking too much. He thinks about all the times he was snatched before Beck. He shouldn’t be thinking about it but he is anyway. Most of them were in and out, like a video game mission, and half the time he knocked everybody out as a goodbye present—

But he feels like he can’t move—even though the cuffs are loose.

And they are loose.

He rattles a little bit more, feeling it out, and Tony watches him. “I feel like I can maybe…”

And he thinks about when he escaped the warehouse. Thinks about how much it took to get out, and how Beck dragged him right back, and how it felt like he was gonna get away until the door locked behind him again, until there was a noose—

And his panic—what if, what if now—

This just started, it just started—

And what if—

What if they got out—but then they took Tony back and—

What if Peter couldn’t find him again—

Nothing can happen to Tony. It can’t. Peter can’t let it. He has to be strong enough not to let it. But he doesn’t know what move to make which way to go if he’s capable of going any which way and can he breathe, can he breathe—

“Look at me,” Tony says, gently.

And Peter does, trying to keep breathing. Trying to swallow his panic, trying to tamp it down, trying to make it small. Blink away the shadows.

“You can do anything,” Tony says, nodding at him. “You can. You’re capable of anything, and everything, and I know what you’re trying to tell me. I know what you’re saying. If you think you can, you can. And I’ll back you.”

Does he really know? Does he know Peter thinks he can get free? The memories of the escape keep playing on a reel, over and over, and he’s panicking again. He pulls a little bit on the cuffs and he knows they’re slipping, he can feel that they’re slipping, because he’s bloody, because they’re too big, and he pulls and it’s tight but he’s not gonna fucking deglove his hands like that Stephen King story, he feels like he’d know by now if that was gonna be the case—and he nearly pukes just thinking about it but he keeps pulling—

And they’re tight over his thumbs, and he tries to make his hands smaller, and Jesus, everything hurts, and he grits his teeth—

“You’re okay,” Tony breathes, and he coughs a little bit. “You are, you are. You’ve got this. You’re so goddamn strong, kid, you’ve got this.”

And the escape makes clouds behind his eyes again, and he thinks about stopping. Thinks about just wilting here, and not trying, and waiting to be rescued.

He’s afraid. He’s so afraid. He doesn’t wanna be and that makes it fucking worse. He thinks of that mask the guys were wearing, thinks of running and that guy and his dickhead friends running him down. Stringing him up, getting cuffs that fit better, cuffs he can’t get out of. Thinks of them hurting Tony in front of him to teach him a lesson.

But they have them now. They’re hurting them anyway.

Peter isn’t resigned, isn’t having that hero moment, but he blinks away Beck’s face and the noose and the memories and worst case scenarios and pulls anyway, and he cries out and grits his teeth—

“It hurts,” he groans, before he even means to, and he should feel lucky that the cuffs are loose enough to do this but he knows luck isn’t always luck and it doesn’t always end up in luck either, but he keeps gritting his teeth and pulling and—

One cuff slips off before the other, and both he and Tony gasp in surprise—Peter quickly pulls his hand around and works the other cuff off, dragging the harsh metal along his fingers—

“Jesus—you got it you got it—”

And it comes off a second later, and he’s in fucking disbelief—

And he doesn’t have time to be in disbelief, because they’re probably watching, and he needs to get Tony free, and he tries to—he falls into another one of the caves he’s carved out, and his vision narrows down—

He reaches up and breaks the band around his middle, and he nearly collapses down without it holding him up—and he feels every blow, every jolt of electricity they sent through him, and he staggers over to Tony without thinking of what might happen what could happen what is actually happening—

“Okay, okay,” Tony says, as Peter rushes around behind him and starts undoing the ropes, and the few cuffs they chained around the iron arm to reinforce it. These aren’t vibranium—they didn’t think they needed to use it with Tony.

Peter has tunnel vision, but his focus almost seems fake, manufactured, and before he knows it he’s gotten Tony free and Tony is hauling him up to his feet—he braces his arm around Peter’s middle, gently, and he ushers them over to the far wall, closer to the door.

Tony turns towards him, touching Peter’s cheek with his free hand. “Are you okay?” he whispers. He tugs him into a gentle hug before he gets an answer, a hug that shows he’s hurting and that he’s worried about how hurt Peter is.

Tony pulls back again, looking at him intently. He props him up, trying to hold his gaze. Words pile on top of each other in Peter’s head. Different caves blink their lights on and off like they’re waiting for him to come home, and every day since he got out of that warehouse is highlighted and scrutinized in his head.

“Not really,” he says, before he decides on it.

Tony nods at him, and his swollen eye looks so bad. “But can you—”

“I can keep going,” Peter breathes. “I can—break the door, but do we know if—I mean, they’re not in here yet—do we know what they’re even trying to do—”

“Haven’t seen hide nor hair of ‘em for the last hour so, nothing in here that shows they’re watching but we know that doesn’t mean they aren’t—from what I gather they’re connected to that arms warehouse we busted last month, I guess it was bigger than we guessed—”

Peter can’t even process that right now. He leans on Tony a little bit, but tries not to, because he knows they were beating the shit out of him, too. “This is the only way out,” he whispers.

“Yeah,” Tony says, nodding. “No windows, no vents.”

“And that’s the door they’ve been using,” Peter says, his panic simmering.

Tony nods again. “They clearly don’t know we’re out,” he says. “Or they would have busted back in here—or sent more gas in—”

“You think they just want to torture us?” Peter asks, swaying a little bit. “Probably they—if they know that we’re in their way, and they’re trying to be some sort of—new criminal network, they—I doubt they’d—let us back out, if they have us. Let us live.”

Tony blows out a frustrated breath, like he doesn’t want to acknowledge any of that, or the position they’re in. And Peter knows he’s stubborn and never likes to look at the odds, but this is different, things have been—different, since everything happened. And this is as close to a worst case scenario as they can get, and Tony knows it, and he also knows what goes on in Peter’s head from day to day, and he knows what’s going on in it now. It’s a trainwreck, a kaleidoscope hellscape of chutes and ladders and panic monsters and starts and stops with no map and no arrows and no help along the way—but Tony still knows what’s going on. He always does.

And he’s the outstanding factor, here. Peter can’t square with the fact that Tony is here too, Tony is in danger too, and that makes all of it that much worse. He doesn’t know what he would have done on his own. Might have given it up, taken it all, might have turned into a Spider hulk and smashed the building and everything in it into smithereens.

But Tony is here. Tony keeps bringing him back to earth. He’s panicking and he’s on the edge but he has to get Tony out of here.

“I’ll break the door,” Peter breathes, staring at the handle. “And then we’ll just—face whatever it is—out there, we’ll just—blow through it—”

“Can you fight?” Tony asks him, holding him a little tighter. “You took a lot of hits there, and the taser—”

“Yeah,” Peter says, even though he still feels the tremors, and his face is pulsing, and he knows he’s got broken ribs. It doesn’t matter, he has to fight, he just knows he has to—

And is that the difference between now and a month after escaping? Knowing that he can face whatever it is, because he has to?

“Eye still out?” Tony asks, and Peter nods. “Well, we’re both down one. It’s fine, we’re—we’re in sync. We’re a team, we’re a good team. Two eyes for two people. It’s fine.”

“Yeah,” Peter says, trying not to sound too—how he probably sounds.

He swallows hard, and they nod at each other, an unspoken sort of moment. And they move over there slowly, and Peter takes a hold of the door handle, trying his best to focus, to listen. His senses are going haywire, probably worse because he still can’t see through the synthetic eye, and his hearing is almost crystal clear. He doesn’t hear anything coming. Nothing close by.

He feels like he’s about to fucking vomit, but he breaks the door handle.

Tony braces his hand on the door as they open it, so it doesn’t make any noise as they slip out into the hallway.

There’s nobody there, nobody anywhere Peter can see, and he still can’t hear anybody either. He feels exposed, in a situation like this without the synthetic eye, and he tries to remember everything they all told him, before, when he was still recovering. He tries to remember things Matt said, when it was all new.

His panic blooms, anyway. Slowly, that same shadow, growing longer and longer behind him.

They press themselves against the wall, like that does anything, and Tony stays in front of Peter, with his arm thrown out across him, like he’s fully suited up and not in jeans and a Snoopy t-shirt. It’s all brick out here too, and Peter can’t even imagine where the hell they are. He vaguely hears car horns, somewhere. There’s shelving up ahead of them, and what looks like a chainsaw and some lawn tools laid out on it.

They approach it slowly, and Peter can hear their heartbeats, loud and off kilter, and he can hear the beginnings of the high pitched noise somewhere in the back of his head.

His whole left side is dark.

And he tries to listen, tries to listen for air changes, for more outside noises, and Tony turns and moves around the wall and into the room—

“No one,” Tony says, as Peter follows behind him. He feels like a moron for standing behind him, and he moves up alongside him, glancing behind them to make sure he didn’t miss a door. There’s a desk, an old looking computer, a few chairs like the one Tony was tied to—

“We need to go,” Peter breathes, because he’s starting to panic again, it’s starting to get the best of him again, and he tries to focus, tries to carve out a spot to focus.

There are two doors, one straight ahead and one to their left, and they have to pick one, and there’s no fucking way these guys cleared out and they’ll have an easy escape, no way—

They’re gonna swarm soon, they’re gonna swarm—

Worst case upon worst case sprout up like weeds in Peter’s head—

“Let’s go left,” Tony says, still with one arm outstretched in front of Peter, like they’re in an eternal car accident and he’s shielding him from more damage. “More likely to be another hallway—”

And Peter doesn’t know why he thinks that, but he follows him, anyway—

And that door is unlocked—

And it is a hallway, and there are a ton of fucking doors in here. It feels like a horror movie scene, that stillness before everything happens, and he and Tony don’t slip all the way out just yet, they’re just—peeking out, and Peter thinks he thinks the room at the end of the hall might be a way out, but he can’t see all the way out there to know, not yet. He can hear voices now—they sound like they’re on the right side of the hallway—maybe, maybe—

And he listens and tries to clock how many people are in the building and he tries to hear breathing and heartbeats and voice patterns but his head his head—

“Okay,” Tony says, and they start moving out into the hall, and Peter knows there’s no way they’re making it out of here just by tip-toeing out, there’s no way, it’s not that easy, it’s never that easy, it was never even that easy in the before times—and he hates that his life is divided like that, the before and after—

And they get past one set of doors before they hear one of them opening behind them—

“Run,” Tony says, and he grabs Peter’s arm.

“Hey they’re out here! They’re out here!”

And it feels like the place explodes—

—they start running and they get past another set of doors before all of them are opening, and then there are at least six guys on them, and one of them knocks Peter in the head from his left side, where he can’t goddamn see—

He crashes into the wall, and he throws an elbow back, colliding with someone’s throat, and he knows it’s not Tony because he sees him throwing someone to the ground and slipping away from another one’s right hook, and seeing that lights a little fire in Peter’s heart—

He can hear an open window somewhere, to his right, somewhere in the bigger room—

Car horns and a light breeze and freedom—

And Peter dodges a punch too, grabbing the two that are attacking him and slamming their heads together—and he reaches and grabs Tony’s arm and tries to tug him closer, because they can make a run for it, they can—

“Release the goddamn gas, Jason, we can breathe through it, they can’t—”

Panic in a shadow so big that Peter nearly buckles under the weight of it—

And he doesn’t know who says it, and the attacks start again in earnest, and his hand slips from Tony’s wrist—

And he gets hit in the face and he staggers backwards, further down the hall, away from where they came—

“Shit, shit—”

“God fucking dammit—”

“Hold still, asshole—”

“Here, here—”

“Fucker—”

Words and curses and a flurry of punches and blood, a tangle of limbs—

And Peter sweeps the legs out from the one in front of him and he’s about to charge at the one attacking Tony, when a chain is looped around his neck—

And Peter reaches up to grip it, immediately, to keep space between it and his skin so he can breathe—

“There we go there we go,” a voice says, directly behind him, hauling him into the bigger room in the front—

And the gas is coming out and Peter scrambles, and he knows they’re gonna get them again, they’re gonna get them again, they already have, and the guy tries to loop the chain again and choke him, and Peter throws an elbow and hits him in the gut—they both double over and Peter holds his breath—he reaches back and grabs the dickhead and throws him over his shoulder, and the chain yanks Peter along with him—

And the floors are wooden in this room and his feet nearly punch through—

wooden…wooden…

“Peter!” Tony yells, and he’s finally used his name, and Peter can’t tell if that’s concern for him or him needing help and he can only hold his breath for so long, and the gas is already here and filling up the room and trying to drag him under again—

He has to think he has to think he has to save Tony—

Tony, who always protects him, always, always—he’s here too and that’s why this is different, that’s why—Peter has to keep pushing, has to keep trying—

He grabs the mask off the guy lying beside him, wrenching it off his face, and he lets out the breath he was holding—

“Tony!” he yells, looking down the hallway, trying to see around the dark patches on his left—

He throws the mask, hoping, praying—

And he sees Tony catch it, he catches it, and he’s still fighting with two—two guys—

The gas, it’s—

Peter tries to push away from the guy on the ground, who’s gasping now too, trying to hold on to him, still trying to get the chain around his neck—

Peter pushes at him, throws a wayward punch, but it’s—he’s—

It’s dark—

He wakes up and he’s being dragged—there’s yelling—

He blinks, sluggish, slow-motion—

Someone drops his arms—

He crumbles—

He tries to sit up, throw a punch—tries to hit—tries to hit something—

People are falling, the guys in masks—

Looks like a black and white movie—

“Tony?”

Was that him who said that—

Warbling, darkness on—going in and out—he’s still here kidnapped taken but there’s—there’s more there—who else there’s—

Someone else grabs him, yanks him to his feet, and they’re trying to put handcuffs on him again—

“No, no,” Peter says, and he does get a punch off, a good one, and he feels the jaw crunch under his knuckles, and he punches again and again until he slams this guy’s head against the wall, and he crumbles, and they’re back in the back hallway he thinks and—is there yelling it all sounds—underwater—

His neck hurts, he’s—he tries to walk but his vision is—

Dark on the left dark on the left—

Stumbling over—bodies and debris and masks and guns and—

More people and they’re like ghosts and—

Gotta get to—the front, gotta—

Yelling, there’s yelling—

He trips, and falls again, crumples in a big heap—

He’s in that first room they found, and he starts crawling towards the hallway, and the place is rumbling with footsteps and people and big weapons he hears bigger weapons, and he tries to blink to focus but he feels drunk and—close to vomiting and is that just the panic is it—

Doesn’t matter have to get out have to get out none of it matters where’s Tony where’s Tony where’s—

Someone tries to grab his feet, pull him back, but they drop him just as quickly—

And then new darkness is coming just as swiftly—and does he hear gas coming—more—

Holds his breath again—

“There he is—Peter!”

Darkness, before he can—

He is laying. Moving but not moving. Jumbling.

“—okay, boot again. No, don’t force—you can do it while he’s using it. We’ve discussed this. Update number five, stay on top—you are usually on top—okay. Okay—that’s fine. Good, okay, that’s fine—no, he’s not sleeping, I want him to wake up. Friday, please relax, are you trying to give me—I know. I know that—have you been talking to Rhodey lately? Jesus Christ—”

Peter opens his eyes. He can see out of both of them.

Tony is hovering over him, and he smiles broadly. “There you are,” he says, cupping Peter’s cheek. “Is it working again? Can you see? How are you feeling?”

Tony’s eye is still swollen shut and he’s got cuts all over his face. It makes Peter dizzy.

“Are we safe?” Peter asks, and he feels like he’s slurring. “Are we—feels like we’re moving—”

“We are in a SPIDEY van—we’re safe, we’re out, we’re—heading back to the tower—let me know how you are, Pete—”

“Eye is working,” Peter says, but the movement of the van is uh…uh…He reaches up and covers his eyes. He feels like he’s on a rollercoaster. “These vans need to be upgraded. This is not a smooth ride.”

“I know, bud, it’s in the works across the board,” Tony says. He pushes his hand through Peter’s hair gently. “Just relax for a second here. We’re almost back. How are you feeling other than the bumpy ride?”

Peter is a swirl of something, rummaging in his head and his gut, careening back and forth like an out of control ping pong ball. “Feels like they might have—injected me with something else—more than the gas—”

“They did,” Tony says, “but we ran scans and it was just a stronger knock-out agent, but shit’s always weird with you—I didn’t see anything life threatening—”

“Not life threatening,” Peter says, swallowing hard. “Just a—day in the life—”

Tony scoffs, and he ruffles Peter’s hair again. “Okay, just—we’re almost back, do you think you need oxygen? Your levels are a little low—”

“It’s okay,” Peter says, slinging his forearm over his eyes. “Are you okay? Are you okay?”

“I’m okay,” Tony says, holding onto Peter’s arm. “I’m okay. As long as you’re okay.”

“Okay,” Peter breathes. “Don’t lie.”

“I’m not,” Tony says. “Promise you.”

Peter groans. He can feel the tires and the rough road, can hear the driver’s breathing, can hear radio communication somewhere up there too. He can hear Friday talking in Tony’s ear. Peter wants to know more—he lost sense of what the hell was going on when the assholes swarmed them in the hallway, but he doesn’t have it in him to ask yet.

“No med bay,” he finds himself saying, even though he doesn’t really know why. Sometimes he’s okay with being in there, but right now the memories are…pressing.

“That’s fine, easy,” Tony says, and he’s talking in that way where he’s trying to keep his voice steady. Peter feels like he can hear everything Tony isn’t saying. Everything he wants to say.

He’s never been in the back of one of these SPIDEY vans. He knows this is what rolls up when they find someone—nobody wants to pay ambulance bills, and SPIDEY vans are free. But it feels weird, in too many different ways. It’s not warm and comforting. It’s a little too close to a “kidnapper van”. He’s not uncomfortable, but it does sort of feel like he’s laying on a slab.

Tony sits back in one of the chairs that’s stuck onto the wall, but he leans forward and keeps holding onto Peter’s arm. “It’s okay,” he breathes. “Almost there. We’re okay.”

Peter doesn’t realize that he drifts. Sleep darkness is different than knocked-out darkness, or drugged darkness, and he’s been working on his dreams lately. They don’t try to eat him anymore, like they used to, but he wants them to be good. So he tries to imagine something before he goes to bed, some kind of scenario that can imprint itself into his mind and carry on when he drifts off. He didn’t do that here, in the back of this van, and he gets a garbled, short version of what they just went through. Chained to that pole. Them beating Tony up. The gas, the masks, the half-blind fight. And one of them steps up close to Peter while he can’t move, while he’s pulling against cuffs he thinks he might be able to slip off—

“You’re always gonna be here. You’re never gonna get out.”

And it’s not Beck, but it’s his voice. His voice, through new roots and disturbed earth. Through a distended, broken jaw. Through days of death and moldering—

“Hey. Hey, Pete, wake up.”

He sits up too fast, neatly bonks heads with Tony, but Tony gets out of the way quick enough and latches onto his shoulder.

“Hey, hey,” Tony says, and he tries to stay in Peter’s line of sight, and Peter focuses on him. The dream and everything clinging onto it dissolves.

“Hey,” Peter says, trying not to collapse back down again. “Are we—”

“We’re back—how you doing? You all in there?”

That’s always a loaded question, and it especially is right now, and he doesn’t know how to answer it. He’s in here, obviously, but so is…a lot of other stuff.

Or is it? Does he just expect to be going insane after what they just went through, so he’s leaning into it and going insane? Or is he actually going insane because of what they just went through? Is ‘going insane’ the right term for what’s going on in his head right now? Is anything going on? Is what’s going on what he expected to be going on in a situation like this? Did he ‘expect’ anything? He anticipates things, problems, Spider-Man missions gone wrong, and sometimes he thinks about the Beck situation being duplicated precisely, or half, or even just down to a few terrible details, and he thinks about it for hours on end sometimes and then not for a couple weeks and then two days in a row and—

“Hey,” Tony says, to get Peter’s attention again because yes, okay, he’s—there’s definitely something going on in his head.

“Yeah,” Peter says, and he braces his hand on Tony’s iron arm and starts to turn around. “Let’s, uh, let’s get inside—”

“Good idea, just what I was thinking—”

And Tony helps him get out of the van.

And it’s tunnel vision again, on their way in, not something Peter chooses but almost a mode he shifts into automatically. Like he’s in a bubble, like his hearing is muted—Tony brings him around to the back entrance, Happy is there to meet them. He’s saying something, he tugs Peter into a hug and he’s saying something about the dispatched teams and Tony says something back, and they’re both holding onto Peter for a second there in the elevator, and then they get out and Sam is there, and Pepper and Helen, and Peter feels like he’s dipping further into his own head, into one of those caves. Because they’re all talking to him and he can see their mouths moving and he can feel them hugging him and can see Helen asking him things and running scans but he can’t—he just can’t—

And does he actually feel this way or does he feel like he should feel this way, is it worse or better than he was expecting—

“Gimme a second,” he says, or he thinks he says—

“Here, here,” Tony says, and he’s guiding him down the hallway to his room, the room he stays in when he comes here, which is really more often than not—

And the three of them appear with a sort of light attached to them, an aura that doesn’t hurt, and his hearing keys in a little bit—

And then he’s in a bouquet of May and MJ and Ned, Tony’s hand still on his back—

“Hey baby, hey baby—”

“Peter when you think about it that was actually so badass like we saw the footage—”

“Lemme see you, lemme—”

And he pulls back so he can look at them, and MJ is cupping his face in her hands, and her eyes are searching, tracing over his face. “You’re good,” she says, not like a question, an entire reassurance. “You are.”

“Uh huh,” he says, trying to stay where he is now, because he can hear straight, and maybe it doesn’t all hurt so much.

“We’re good,” May says, rubbing Peter’s arm, and Peter sees her make a very obvious face at Tony, and Tony nods at her, and Ned is nodding at them both.

“Your eye,” Ned says, and Peter snaps over to look at him, but Ned isn’t talking to him, or even looking at him.

He’s looking at Tony.

—and it’s sort of bad because Peter realizes he’s gotten used to Tony’s eye being swollen shut, because it’s been like that for hours now. And Peter swallows hard, and shakes his head, and looks at Tony again now that other people are looking at him and seeing him and seeing them both, and he reaches up and covers his eyes again. His head starts spinning, spinning, and he can’t hold onto any of it except a strain of guilt, some strange relief, a streak of panic, and he can feel them all latching onto him again.

“Okay, let’s head into his room for a second here,” Tony says, and he’s squeezing Peter’s shoulder and getting him to walk. “C’mon, it’s alright—let’s get out of the hallway—”

“I’m sorry,” Peter says, before he means to say it, before he even knows what he’s apologizing for. Crying. Not being fast enough.

“Nothing to be sorry for—we’re gonna talk here,” Tony says.

And Peter feels MJ reach down and thread their fingers together, and he clings to her hand, and Jesus Christ he doesn’t know what the hell is going on in his head, and for a moment it feels like it did in the beginning, right after all the banned name bullshit, and he knows recovery is not a straight line but he shouldn’t be back at the beginning after a situation that they escaped from, that lasted a matter of hours, and it was like Ned noticing Tony’s swollen eye made everything bigger again—

And Peter wants a reset button. He’s always wanted one, when he feels things slipping into somewhere else, somewhere he might not be able to rescue them from, and he doesn’t want to need one and he doesn’t want to not need one—

He’s Spider-Man. He wants to be perfect.

But was he ever that? Even before?

They sweep into the room and start arranging things.

“Soft mulberry,” Tony says to Friday, turning on the TV.

They knocked out the far wall this past summer so Peter’s room could be bigger, and Tony keeps talking about doing even more renovations to make it even bigger so it’s got a kitchen and two bathrooms and it would essentially be an apartment inside the tower, but they haven’t done that yet. But MJ and Ned push the big loungers over, and Peter sits on the edge of the bed. May and Tony immediately sit on either side of him. Like sentinels.

“I’m fine,” Peter says, rubbing at his eyes. “I’m fine.” Synthetic eye is still working well. He can see. He can. Both eyes.

Better than Tony. Swollen eye. Swollen shut. Peter couldn’t stop that from happening. He just had to watch.

Everyone kind of sighs, and then Peter hears Leia trilling, her feet hitting the ground as she rushes him. She leaps up into his lap, and bumps her head into his chin, and he starts petting her, glancing up at Tony.

“Are you okay?” Peter asks, and he’s already tearing up again, just looking at him. “This happened to you too, you need to, you need—Helen needs to look at—”

“I’m fine,” Tony says, scoffing at him. “I’m fine, I told you that. You don’t need to worry about me, how are you doing, huh?”

May ruffles his hair, and MJ rubs his knee, briefly petting Leia, her hand on top of Peter’s. Ned clears his throat, and they just kind of sit there for a couple long moments, while Peter tries to…settle.

They all know that it’s significant, that this happened. That’s why they’re gathered around him right now, staying close, trying to act normal even though they aren’t acting normal.

Normal. No such thing as normal. Only moments of quiet, moments of stillness. Not pursuing anybody, not running from anything. Maybe homework. Maybe laughing. Maybe Ned dropping a LEGO T-Rex that took them three weeks to build. Maybe that.

“You guys, uh,” Peter croaks. “You guys already saw—you saw footage—”

“Happy picked the three of us up when the alerts went out on you guys,” MJ says, still rubbing Peter’s knee. “SPIDEY is incredible, Peter, it’s—I know we’ve seen what it can do for these kids but seeing it work for the two of you—I know we’re always worried but—”

“You guys never felt lost,” May says, fast. She knows what that word means to him. She knows that’s something he never wants to be.

“Happy and Rhodey were saying this was like…some new syndicate or something,” Ned says. “I was looking over their shoulders, I was getting all the guy in the chair info—they were letting me, I wasn’t—I wasn’t spying, I was concerned, a concerned party, obviously, but it’s like—they’re some new underground thing and you guys didn’t even know it when you first encountered them before—but that made them mad or something—really mad—they have some powerful like leader or benefactor or something—someone that gives them money—”

“Some rich guy,” MJ says.

“A guy that’s rich that’s in charge,” Ned says.

And Peter snorts before he means to, and he doesn’t even know if he means to, and then he’s laughing again and sort of tearing up and he shakes his head and covers his face. He feels Leia turning over in his lap, rolling a little bit, and he can feel Tony and May getting more nervous on either side of him.

“Okay, baby—”

“Peter, let’s just—”

And Peter finds a middle ground, somewhere in his head, like he’s swinging down Flushing Ave and he hits a branch or something and he rolls along the sidewalk but he finds his feet under him again, even though his head hurts and his legs are wobbly and he isn’t seeing straight—

“Lemme just—lemme just wash off real quick, and change, and Helen should—look at both of us—and then we can just—”

He’s getting up, holding Leia and putting her on the bed behind him, and all four of the rest of them are getting up too, and looking at him like they think he’s about to dissolve into about a million pieces—

“It’s okay,” he says, without thinking about it, and he keeps saying things without thinking, and does that mean he means them more or means them less, he doesn’t fucking know—

And he can hear them gearing up to ask him if he needs help, as if he’s two years old and doesn’t know how to shower on his own, and he remembers the stained glass pain of Tony and May being as gentle as they could that first night, washing his hair and making sure the water didn’t get in his eye socket—

And his head is swimming right now, but he’s not there, it’s not—it’s not like that—

He sees Ned hit Tony in the shoulder, and May and MJ share a loaded look, like they’re all reining each other in.

“I’ll get Helen to head this way,” Tony says, “I’ll have her check me out, and we’ll—”

“—we’ll find out what’s going on with the teams,” MJ says, and she holds her head high. “I’ll just—I’ll—I mean we’ll, we’ll reach out, and contact the strike team—we’ll see if they’ve—we’ll see if—”

“We’ll see if they’ve struck,” Ned says, nodding at him.

“They were the ones that were there, Ned,” May says, giving him a kind but pointed look. “That helped get them out.”

“I know but like—a restrike—another strike, a stroke on like—a double strike somewhere else—”

“Right, right—”

And Peter nods, and nods, and feels like he’s being pulled in about seven different directions, but he half-stumbles over to his bathroom—

“Okay, you—you do that, keep an eye on all—potential strikes, I’ll be alright, I’ll be—just give me—”

And before he knows it he’s standing under the water.

And he doesn’t usually worry about the synthetic eye with water anymore, and he still doesn’t now, even though it just went through a trauma. Along with him. His trauma.

And he stands there under the warm spray and wonders when that trauma is going to explode in his chest. He feels like this should have set him off, maybe for good, a cascading burning fireball consuming everything around it, but it hasn’t. It hasn’t. Nothing has yet, none of the triggers, none of the memories, none of the close calls, and not this, an actual kidnapping, and a bad one, at that—

And he opens his eyes, leans back against the wall, the steam rising up all around him.

He rubs his neck, feels the pain in his side, and knows now his aches and pains are new ones. There aren’t any more scars left over from what Beck did to him. Not any he can see, anyway. Not any he can feel all the time.

And even with new aches, new pains, new worries, a new aftermath, he’s still—he’s still standing here.

“I’m still standing here,” he whispers, and hearing it out loud makes it feel more real, almost. The tile underneath his feet. The wall behind his back, his own breathing. Heartbeats in the surrounding rooms waiting for him.

“I’m still standing here,” he whispers again, and he feels like some part of himself, in his worst moments, locked away in that warehouse, can hear that phrase. He can hear himself saying it.

And it’s real. Both times. He’s on the other side of it.

He dries off and gets dressed, and Tony is waiting on the other side of the door with Leia draped across his shoulder. He’s just standing there, holding his tablet, and MJ and Ned are setting up trays with food by the lounge chairs and trying to act like they’re not jumping at the fact that Peter is back in the room. He can hear May and Helen talking in the hallway.

“Hey,” Tony says, in that fake nonchalant voice that he still tries to put on even though Peter can always clock it. “I’m uh, I’m good, Helen said it, she said it, my eye’s just—superficial, Rocky shit, it’s actually very masculine, and I only have a slight concussion, which is also very manly—she’s, uh, anxious to get at you—”

Peter really looks at him, trying not to agonize over it and nearly failing. “But how do you—how do you feel, really—”

“Pete, I swear to you, I’m not lying when I say I’m alright. I can take a couple hits, you know? Always have been able to. And I know you don’t want me to,” he finishes, before Peter can say anything. “Same to you, huh? But we got through that together. If you hadn’t thrown me that mask—”

“You protected me the whole time—”

“Not enough—”

“Yes you did,” Peter says, fast. “Just by being there. Even if I didn’t…want you there. Bad and good at the same time.”

Tony nods at him, and Peter nods back, and all of that is just something—that’s always gonna be what it is. They’re always gonna be racing to try and keep each other safe.

“You,” Tony says. “Tell me about you. How are you feeling now? Do you feel steady?”

Leia trills at him, waving her head around from her perch on Tony’s shoulder. Peter sees MJ and Ned trying to carry on a conversation, but they keep stealing looks at him, and he feels his chest go warm.

“I’m still standing,” Peter says again, because he likes the way it sounds and the way it feels to say it. “Physically, and, uh—mentally.”

Tony stares at him for a second. “Uh—yeah—yeah, yeah, you are. You are, absolutely, you are.” He nods at him again, enough that he shakes Leia, like he sees this as a moment to jump on. To underline.

Peter feels himself smiling. “I was just—I was just—I don’t know, yeah, it was hard, it sucked, and my head is—foggy and messy, but I’m not—I’m not—crumbling, I guess. I thought I might be, when something like this happened—”

“—and it’s not gonna happen again,” Tony says, turning and facing him. “The team that found us, that extracted us, they’re already starting the search for more of these guys, and Rhodey and Nat are doing the questioning and you know how good they are at the questioning, and whatever dickhead is at the top of this, we’re gonna find him, and we’re gonna take him down—”

“I know,” Peter says, swallowing hard. “And I’m quaking a little bit at—the thought of getting taken again but I—I’m not—it won’t stop me. I know you said it’s not gonna happen again and I believe you and I always believe you even if you’re wrong—”

“Hey, I’m never wrong—”

Peter snorts, looking down. “I know. I know. But it doesn’t—I don’t know, I’m—” He clears his throat. His mind is still a beehive of contradictions and machinations and his own voice and the ghost of other voices, bad and good, but his own voice saying about a billion different things that don’t make any sense. But he just keeps hearing still standing still standing still standing. “I just thought maybe after all of that happened I would fall apart completely and I kept expecting to fall apart and I—didn’t. I haven't yet.”

Tony smiles at him, gently. “And it doesn’t look like you're going to.”

Peter blows out a breath. “It doesn��t feel like I’m going to either.”

Leia takes a step forward onto Peter’s shoulder, so her front feet are braced on him and her back feet still perched on Tony.

And Peter wonders if he still might fall apart, one day, if something worse happens. But the wondering won’t stop him from pursuing this, or anything else, or upgrading SPIDEY’s vans. Or anything else. Anything else.

He feels like he knows that now, for real. Solidly. And he doesn’t know why.

“This girl is using us as a bridge right now,” Tony says. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed. But we are nothing but her stepping stones—”

And Leia meows, scurrying across Peter’s shoulders and leaping up onto the shelf. She glances back at him, as if to make sure he doesn’t need her, and she seems to decide that he doesn’t. Not right now.

Peter snorts, watching her find her favorite place in the corner. She blinks at him, her eyes shining.

“We okay?” May’s voice asks, and Peter turns again and sees her and Helen walking into the room.

“We’re okay,” Peter says, without going around and around about it in his head. He wants to know all the details about what happened and who they’re dealing with, all the questions Rhodey and Nat are asking, he wants Helen to look at Tony again while he’s in the room so he can know the actual situation, and he wants to make sure there’s not another shoe that’s gonna drop when he least expects it.

But it doesn't feel like it. It really doesn’t feel like it.

“Well, I’ll make sure of that,” Helen says, sweeping into the room. “Butch and Sundance over here.”

“Listen, we’re Spider-Man and Iron Man, we don’t need any more monikers, Redford and Newman have nothing on us—”

“Now you listen, Pepper is coming in here and I know you can’t keep up your tough man exterior around her—”

“Hey he’s tough he’s Iron Man I grew up with Iron Man I should know I’ve seen it from a special perspective—”

“Ned you always know exactly what to say—”

And Peter smiles, at the way all of their voices mix together, and MJ gets up and takes his hand and tugs him closer, right into a kiss she presses to his cheekbone. And he smiles into it, full of warmth and delicate certainty and a new upswing. Maybe a new swing out and away from downswings.

MJ squeezes Peter’s hand, and Tony reaches back and grips his shoulder. It feels soft and bright in here.

“Okay,” Peter says, facing the group of them. “I’m ready.”

#iron dad #irondad fic #most recent commission!

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iron--spider · 4 months

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Hey Oh let's go

#obsessed #art

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iron--spider · 4 months

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earth- 199 99?

#this is my favorite universe #gorgeous #art #irondad

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iron--spider · 7 months

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definitions are changed

by @iron--spider for @meilz

Rhodey hasn’t been able to get a hold of Tony all day.

And he’s dealt with that in the past. Plenty of times. Too many to count.

It isn’t an immediate red flag, like it might have been in the old days, but it gives him pause. Almost everything Tony does gives him pause. Because he’s always doing some shit.

But Rhodey goes about his day—does some paperwork, attends the virtual visit with his doctor, finishes filing the new entrants for Stark’s Displaced Blip Persons program—and he doesn’t really worry. He doesn’t really think about it.

…he does think about it…but not actively. Passively.

And when he realizes he isn’t worrying, he starts worrying. Like an on and off switch flipped by an iron hand.

He sits down in the living room and tries Tony’s cell again, gets the same three rings and snarky answering machine.

Rhodey clicks his tongue.

Tony’s probably fine. Rhodey thinks about calling Pepper, or even Peter, but he tells himself, once again, that he’s probably fine.

Probably.

Tony nearly died after all the bullshit, and Rhodey could say that about various moments of Tony’s life, sure, but this last one was the closest they’ve ever come to losing him permanently. And Rhodey knows what that’s like—on a smaller scale, but still. World nearly ended, Tony nearly gone along with it, and he’s been—calmer, since the dust settled. More behind the scenes, on most things. Not risking life and limb as much as he would have before everything went down.

“So where are you?” Rhodey says to himself, looking at his phone.

It isn’t like they had plans. They live together, technically, at the new facility, and he normally knows where Tony is and where everybody else is, but he’s overthinking this. He’s definitely overthinking this.

And he continues to do that.

He checks Friday’s list of who’s on the grounds. Just to be sure.

Happy’s here, at Security Central. Pepper is not here, but the calendar says she’s in Jersey today with Natasha, which tracks. Bucky and Sam are here, Thor isn’t here but he’s scheduled to be here tomorrow, but no Tony, and…no Peter.

Red flag.

Rhodey clicks his tongue again, seeing both of their names grayed out.

Correlation.

Chaos.

Rhodey can almost hear them laughing. He can almost feel the destruction in their wake. Peter is like a little version of Tony, and just as insane, if not more so, and he makes Tony more insane than he already was, in a different way, and Rhodey always thought a lot of things blew up when he worked with Tony, but Peter and Tony? It’s outrageous, it’s—it’s always something—

They’re sweet, sure, if sweet is a fireball cascading through the sky and Iron Man flying after it and Spider-Man trailing after him shooting webs at the fireball—

Rhodey sucks in a breath. Tries to turn his brain off.

Maybe they’re out to dinner? Maybe they’re at the workshop in Queens? Maybe they’re playing Mahjong with May, sometimes they have those weird tournaments. Maybe Tony’s touring MIT with him again. But Rhodey would probably know about that, he went with them last time. Maybe they’re—working on something—

Maybe they’re not even together. Maybe they’re both off being normal somewhere separately.

Rhodey bristles, for a minute.

Then he picks up his phone and texts May.

Seen your nephew today?

He doesn’t know why his brain is jumping to conclusions. He isn’t the one with the Spidey Sense, that’s the damn kid—but maybe he has a Tony sense, after his years of experience, and maybe it’s been heightened since the kid came into Tony’s life, since the kid was unceremoniously yanked from Tony’s life, since Tony spent a year and a half running himself ragged trying to move time and space to bring him back.

And he did it, didn’t he? Twisted the fabric of the universe to bring the kid back, and everyone else along with him.

And he hasn’t really let him out of his sight since…

He’s my kid, Rhodey. He is, not my blood, but he is—like you’re my brother, that’s my—that’s my—he’s like my son, he is. I can’t—there can’t be a world without him. Not while I can do something about it. Not while I can still try.

Tony likes to bury his sentimentality sometimes, but it works its way out with the people he loves most.

He’s a big marshmallow.

May answers and Rhodey grabs his phone. Not since this morning, he was on some mission with Tony. He didn’t tell you?

And Rhodey doesn’t have a second to process that before someone is literally bursting through the main door.

And that someone is the tiny, previously mentioned spider person, and he immediately falls flat on his face, on top of the door, which is no longer connected to the wall. He scrambles a little bit, briefly, as if he’s forgotten how to move his limbs, and Rhodey jumps up before Peter even braces his hands on the ground. Or on the door.

“What the hell?” Rhodey almost yells, weaving around the couch to get to him. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

Peter is all dirty and dusty and his mask is only half on and his hair is sticking out in tufts from underneath it. He’s moving like a brand new baby giraffe, like he can’t pull himself back up, and Rhodey reaches him and hauls him up by his arms.

The kid looks around, his eyes wide like he doesn’t know where the hell he is.

“You destroyed the door,” Rhodey says, glancing over his shoulder. “Did you forget how to use doors, Parker?” He shakes his head, holding onto him. “It’s on the ground now—where’s Tony? What have you two been up to now, Jesus—”

Peter blows out a breath, looking around, and he finally meets Rhodey’s eyes.

He grins at him. “Hey. Hey! What’s up?”

Rhodey’s eyebrows furrow. “What’s—what’s up? Did you just ask me that? Don’t tell me you’ve been drugged again. That would be upwards of eight times this month—hey, earth to Peter—”

Peter blinks at him. “Not, uh—um, Rhodey. I need—we need…your assistance, just a small bit of your assistance—” He takes one step and nearly collapses, and Rhodey catches him before he can fall again.

Rhodey is getting a little worked up. What the hell is going on? “We, okay, we, I heard we—”

Peter shakes his head. “I’m not even that messed up I’ve just been running for a long time and my legs are sort of jelly, I ran out of webs a little bit ago so I had to like, run, a lot and for a little bit—a while—”

Rhodey takes him by the shoulders, ushering him over to the couch, and he sits him down on the arm of it.

Peter blinks. “I shouldn’t be sitting.”

“You need to sit,” Rhodey says, standing in front of him and keeping him there. “Okay, speak.”

“Speak?”

“You forgot the meaning of the word?”

Peter nods, and shakes his head, swaying. “We need your help, we, meaning—”

“You and Tony—”

“Yup, me and Tony, we uh, well—”

Rhodey narrows his eyes. “Pete, I’m gonna need you to focus here, where is he? Where’s Tony?”

Peter looks at him. He grimaces. He smiles, he laughs, breathlessly, and he glances off towards the open doorway that he opened when he destroyed the goddamn door, and this face journey isn’t giving Rhodey any indication as to where Tony might be.

“Peter—”

“Okay, uh. Okay, The story—the story is—”

There are way too many low level bad guys in the new world. Peter likes to call it the new world—the post-blip world, the world Tony and the rest of the Avengers saved, the world Tony brought Peter back into with a snap and a breath he thought he would be his last. Peter doesn’t like to cry in front of people, especially in front of super people, but he collapsed against Tony on that battlefield and cried and cried when he thought he was gonna die, and Rhodey had to pull him off and get him back together.

But Tony didn’t die. There were bedside vigils and close calls and so many whispered promises and it all added up to something, and he didn’t die.

And now they’re in the new world.

And Tony mostly stays behind, on Avengers missions. The voice in Peter’s ear, when he’s with the team, and they cut off onto private channels plenty so Tony can talk just to him, and Peter bounces back and forth between getting distracted by Tony’s presence and being coached by him. But either way, Tony usually doesn’t come on missions in the flesh unless he’s really worried something is gonna happen. And Peter doesn’t wanna sound selfish, or like he thinks he’s fancy or anything like that, but usually that fear Tony has is something happening to Peter.

Which, like. Fair.

It grates on him sometimes, but more often than not it’s nice, that he cares so much. His words echo in Peter’s ears, and he knows why.

I can’t lose you again, alright? So if I think you need me, I’m gonna be there.

And Peter takes that to heart. And he’ll protect him too.

But the new world has a lot of new jerk bad guys festering underneath all the rebuilding and relocation and integration, and there’s an entire syndicate of enhanced morons coming together to form their own anti-Avengers in Queens. In Peter’s own backyard! It makes him a little insane, how close it’s all happening to May and MJ and Ned, especially after everything they’ve been through. None of these guys are anything like Vulture, not anything like Thanos, or even the fishbowl guy that terrorized the Stark campuses across New York a couple months ago, but they’re still—a threat. They can still cause a lot of damage. They’re getting too organized, they’re helping each other, they’re giving each other resources. They rob banks, they hit FEAST centers, and they aren’t above hurting civilians to get what they want.

Peter knows firsthand what they can do.

And once Peter found it, Tony insisted on going with him to sabotage their hidden home base.

And it went fine, at first. They’ve been monitoring their movements and they know when there’s nobody around, and when they went in it was just their security on duty, which are just a couple NYU frat guys who have no real idea what’s going on and what they’re getting paid for.

They were able to override the cameras for the areas they’d be working in. Just like in Speed. Peter’s idea. Except they did it better than in the movie. No disappearing purse.

“You’re just walking along in the suit,” Peter said.

“We’re in a hallway. You want me to fly?”

“I mean, you’re clomping. You’re just. You’re clomping down the hallway.”

“You’re skipping!” Tony said, gesturing to him. “You’re skipping in a bad guy lair. Does that seem inappropriate? Sources say yes.”

Peter snorted, and Tony grinned at him.

(— “and we were on our way out, we were literally leaving” —)

They kept walking. Peter knew the layout of this place like the back of his hand at that point, and they were only a few turns away from the spot they came in at.

“You got the cluster bombs going off right now, right?” Tony asked.

“Yup,” Peter said, and Karen gave him all his stats. “Few more in ten. And the scramble is already happening, so all the information should be wiped by—”

“Looks like midnight to me,” Tony said.

“Karen says we’re synced,” Peter said. “And the frat guys just got the burger delivery and they’re distracted by the driver so we’re—good on that front too—you didn’t need to come with me on this one, you know? It was pretty, uh—free and clear, with all the research we did, and we knew none of them would be here because they’re out there trying to—cause antics—”

“And Bruce is monitoring them to make sure no actual antics are caused,” Tony said, and he smiled at Peter again. “I didn’t want you going in it alone, just in case something went wrong or—one of them came back, or if you needed help. I know most of these guys are lame as hell, but some of them are, uh—and you know the one in particular—”

“I know, I know,” Peter said, because he did know. Personally. And he didn’t like to think about it.

“So I wanted to back you up,” Tony said, nodding at him. “Just in case. Make sure it’s all good.”

And Peter knows Tony wants to back him up, and protect him, especially after the shit that's happened, but sometimes it still shocks him to be in it, to be faced with it. He closed his eyes and laughed a little bit, continuing to walk. He was glad he had his mask on because he knew his face was red, and he wished he could stop being surprised by how much Tony cared about him because they literally spend most of their time together and it’s pretty normal and commonplace but here he is, tearing up over it again—

“Well, that’s uh, that’s—I mean, it was easier, to set the traps and stuff, with you here, but that’s uh, that’s—that’s really—”

And Peter glanced over at him and he was gone.

Gone!

(— “oh so he disappeared is that what you’re telling me he disappeared into thin air that’s what we’re dealing with” —)

“Tony?” Peter asked, spinning around on the spot. “Tony?”

How? He was alone, all of a sudden, when seconds before—and was this something more sinister than—Tony was in an entire Iron Man suit that isn’t exactly inconspicuous—was it aliens was it one of the guys was he invisible and following them—

(— “okay I don’t need to hear your entire thought process where was he did you find him why are you here without him come on Peter” —)

“Tony?” Peter asked again, and he heard a crash. A crash that sounded like it was below him somehow, and he stared at the ground. “Uh. Tony?”

“Peter!” Tony’s voice yelled. From. Somewhere.

Peter just stood there. He spun in a circle like a cat, looking around, glancing—around, and below, and around, and—

“I fucking fell! Through the goddamn floor!”

He sounded so far away, and Peter started looking down. Why did he have to be looking away when this happened? He could have seen where he went but nooo—

“Which floor?” Peter asked, his eyes wide.

“Which—the floor!” Tony yelled, and Peter tried to follow his voice. “The floor we were walking on!”

“I don’t see any holes—”

“There wasn’t a hole there was—one of the panels must have—I don’t know I didn’t have time to analyze the situation as I was falling into the abyss—”

“Karen do you like—see any of the panels that sticks out like the things in cartoons in the background like the thing that looks different and is drawn different because you know it’s gonna move—”

“What are you saying?” Tony yelled, and he sounded closer. “What are you talking about?”

Karen highlighted the panel Peter was standing on top of. Peter kneeled down and started banging on it. “Hey! Hey! I’m on top of you!”

“Do not say that,” Tony said, and he sounded very far away even though he wasn’t really far away. Was he?

“Karen how deep is it?” Peter asked. “Is he in danger? Well, we’re in a bad guy place—is he in imminent danger—”

“Peter, step back!” Tony yelled. “I wanna try something. Step back, step—take a bunch of steps back—”

Peter sighed, and stepped back, trying to keep a mental note of which panel is the right one. And he stepped back and stared and waited. And he might have heard a couple little noises but they didn’t sound like anything.

“What are you—wait, why can’t you connect through coms to talk to me?” Peter yelled.

“Not working—repulsors not working either, some of my—some of my suit capabilities are being blocked—can’t fly out—”

He was yelling and yelling louder and Peter felt antsy, because this was easy and then it wasn’t. He rushed over and laid himself out and started trying to peel up the panel.

“Can’t fly out—still trying to fly out can’t fly out—Friday stop—stop updating me on the weather—”

“They must have—some kinda something some kinda—blocker or something on that level—you’re in—” Peter was pulling and gritting his teeth so hard that it felt like they might bust, but the panel wasn’t budging.

“What are you doing?” Tony yelled. “Don’t hurt yourself. Pete! Don’t hurt yourself. Jesus I shouldn’t even be using your name—”

“I’m not hurting myself I’m just trying to—”

He pulled so hard that he lost his grip and flew backwards, hitting the wall. He was starting to panic, and he tried to relax, but that’s impossible sometimes—he almost feels better when he’s the one that’s in trouble, because when Tony is in trouble Peter never feels capable enough to fix it, even though he has to fix it or he would go nuts, and Tony being in danger is worse than Peter himself being in danger because he’s Tony and how can Tony be in danger—

(— “Jesus Christ, Peter” — )

Peter scooted back over and tried to start prying again. He wished he had some grenades or something.

“Spidey, scan the area, make sure they aren’t back yet—”

Peter could hear the coms trying to connect, Tony’s voice trying to come through, and what the hell was going on? Why was there a blocker underneath the floor? They got in and out easy as pie, nobody detecting them—

But maybe this was detection—

And that would mean they know—

Peter checked the stats. “Nobody’s here yet and those guys are still out front talking to the drivers,” he said, gritting his teeth again and trying not to lose his grip this time.

“Can’t believe I fell through the goddamn floor like we’re in a Looney Toons episode—okay, kid, we gotta figure this out—”

Peter knew they were gonna be back soon—

“Okay, so we have to go get him,” Rhodey says, clapping Peter on the shoulder.

“You didn’t let me finish—”

“What else happened?” Rhodey asks, fast. “Big grand goodbye? Did he tell you to come get me? Did anybody ambush you?”

“No, it was—I mean, yeah, we said goodbye, it was—it was scary and upsetting, it sucked, he couldn’t get it—I don’t even know how he got in or if it was on purpose I don’t even know it just happened out of nowhere I don’t even know if it was a trap—he said he loved me he said be careful—it’s still crazy to me when he says he loves me I mean obviously we love each other like family you know but still it’s sometimes like whoa—that’s Tony Stark—”

Rhodey scoffs at him, and he’s trying to plan in his head. “Yeah, right, we know he loves you—so nobody ambushed you, why are you so dirty and messed up?”

Peter glances away. “I mean, like I said that was just from—I ran out of webs, I came a long way back and like I got tired there’s a lot of emotions at play here and I was running and emotional and I almost got hit by a bus and—”

“Okay,” Rhodey says, still holding him by the shoulder.

He knows about these guys, Tony has talked to him about these guys and how concerned he is about them and how they’ll affect Spider-Man. Rhodey thinks he remembers Tony saying one of them was…a Rhino guy? A bunch of goddamn misfits and they’re gonna kill somebody, whether on purpose or by accident. Tony tries to act nonchalant, but Rhodey knows how worried he gets. Peter tries to take on more than he can handle. A lot like…someone else.

Rhodey clicks his tongue. “I’ll transfer the information from Karen to me, you can stay here—”

“No,” Peter says, leaping to his feet. “No, I’m not staying. I’m not staying here.”

Rhodey huffs at him. “Kid, you’re messed up—”

“I’m not messed up. I’m not.” He’s shaking his head, and he always looks young to Rhodey, but with that look on his face, and his hair all wild, he looks like a child in a costume. “I’m just dirty, I’m just—I was just—”

“You destroyed the door. You knocked it down.”

“I mean sometimes I’m just running, sometimes I’m just moving fast and things get knocked over, sometimes that happens, sometimes people get knocked over, good thing you weren’t standing there—”

Rhodey closes his eyes, hangs his head. “Peter, what the hell is Tony gonna say when I roll up back into this bad guy lair with you with me after you already escaped—”

And Peter is taking Rhodey by the shoulders now, as if he thinks he’s got the upper hand. “We did not escape because we were never captured—we invaded them—and I know Tony’s still there I know I know but honestly I wouldn’t even classify this as him being captured but anyway you’re gonna help me yay okay let’s go we’re wasting time let’s go—”

He brushes past him before Rhodey can even look up, and Rhodey moves after him and grabs his shoulders and spins him around so Peter’s facing him again. He did it almost on autopilot, like Tony’s spirit possessed him briefly and imbued him with fatherly instincts.

“New suit, Mr. I’m Just Running. Mr. I’m Moving Fast. Gonna go in there completely useless, Jesus, new web cartridges too, Christ—”

Peter nods, a little manically, and Rhodey wonders if they did get into some shit and he’s leaving it out. But he shakes his head and follows him in the direction of the workshops.

“Is this how you and Tony get around? You use him as a surfboard?”

“Only when I’m out of webs,” Peter says, perched on Rhodey’s back as they fly in stealth mode.

“You are not out of webs. You just restocked. You’re up to your eyes in webs.”

“Since we’re in stealth, can people see me? Are you completely invisible? Does it look like I’m walking on air?”

This is something Tony’s talked about. When Peter says things that are random and silly but also, what the hell is the answer? Rhodey knows he’s not completely invisible in stealth, but to people who are looking—but does he want that to be the answer—

Peter sighs, and he shifts so he’s literally sitting on Rhodey’s back and his legs are hanging down.

“Kid, this is—this is strange, you’re—I mean, what if I have to change trajectory—”

“It’s fine I’ve got good balance,” Peter says. He kicks his feet a little, and Rhodey narrows his eyes. “I’m worried. I’m worried about Tony.”

“We’re gonna go get him,” Rhodey says, setting his jaw and glancing at the time to their destination. “It’s gonna be okay. This is nothing for him, the shit we’ve gotten into? This is nothing. Just a little break.”

“I just—it’s just—it’s just like, when it’s me that’s hurt or lost or stuck or whatever it’s like okay, sure, makes sense, I’m younger and I’m always learning—I am expert level at a lot of things, most things, but I’m still learning—”

Rhodey finds himself smiling a little bit. “Uh huh.”

“But when it’s Tony…I don’t know, he’s—he’s just—I know he’s not invincible but he feels invincible and I just, it just—”

“I know,” Rhodey says, hit with a wave of sentimentality. “I know. It’s hard to, uh, see him in trouble. He’s like a little brother to me, like a dad to you, either way—”

“You shouldn’t see your dad hurt,” Peter says, and his voice is rough, like he’s tearing up.

“It’s fine,” Rhodey says, fast, because Peter’s gotta get his head in the game, because he might not be focusing properly if he’s getting emotional about it. And if he starts getting too emotional, Rhodey might, and that’s not good for anybody. “He’s probably just lounging around in there. He’s not hurt, it’s fine. We’re gonna get him.”

And Rhodey does get it. He gets all that. He loves Tony to the ends of the earth, he drives him insane but he never wants anything to happen to him. And maybe he underestimated just how much Tony means to Peter. He knew, he knows, but maybe it’s deeper than he realized. He knows what happened to Peter’s father, his uncle, and how close he was to his uncle. He knows he almost lost Tony, too.

They’re on the same wavelength. At least with this, anyway.

“The guys are back to their little evil lair,” Peter sighs. “Little, midsized, I don’t know—”

Rhodey narrows his eyes, and Peter’s AI, Karen, is quiet for a second.

And then, after a moment, the information comes through on Rhodey’s HUD.

“Looks like they haven’t found him yet,” Peter says. “Maybe they won’t, maybe that’s—I mean, they’re not super smart, maybe this is just an actual like, problem—that piece of tile opens up into—maybe it’s not an actual trap—”

“I doubt that,” Rhodey says, looking at the blueprints they have of the compound. “It definitely sounds like a trap—”

“And I still can’t connect to him—which I guess is probably good because it probably definitely means that they haven’t found him yet—”

Rhodey gets the indication that they can’t connect to Tony, a few long moments after Peter mentioned it, and he narrows his eyes. “Do you have some kind of backdoor code that allows you to get information before other people—”

Peter shifts into a perch again on Rhodey’s back. “Um, hm, you know, I don’t know—”

“Peter.”

“Yeah, yes. I do, I did that. So I can take care of things if I’m the cause of the problem—that sounds a lot more, uh, martyr—martyr-like—that’s not the purpose, I’m—”

“It’s incredibly dangerous,” Rhodey says, scoffing. “Peter, you’re—ten years old—”

“That’s a massive exaggeration—”

“Someone else, one of your other team members, in this instance me, could be more equipped—oh shit—”

The cloud comes out of nowhere, and he twists and avoids it, and clouds always fuck up the stealth and usually he gets indications when he’s about to fly through a bigger one and he was avoiding them fine and he wonders if Peter’s little time delay had anything to do with missing it and he hears Peter fall off and into the open air, yelling, and his heart nearly bursts out of his chest—

“Oh shit—”

And Rhodey is about to rocket down but Peter shoots a web and latches into Rhodey’s ankle.

“Are you good?” Rhodey yells, a little too loud, into their com connection. He looks down, sees the kid twisting around and spinning like an actual spider. “That was stupid. That was so stupid, I’m sorry, I knew you were there, I didn’t think—”

“Killer cloud!” Peter yells, trying to climb his way back up the web. “It’s gonna kill us! Red alert, code red!”

Rhodey rolls his eyes, and takes off a little faster. “Stay down there. Your surfboard privileges have been revoked—”

“I didn’t do anything wrong, I was just existing—”

“And don’t tell Tony about that, what just—what just occurred—”

“Oh I’m gonna tell him and he’s gonna be mad—”

Rhodey sighs. It’s bad, because he knows it’s true.

“Stop stomping.”

“I’m not stomping. You need to respect your elders.”

The place is overrun with assholes. They’re dealing with the aftermath of what Tony and Peter did to their place, which was essentially exploding a bunch of their weapons and scrambling their hard drives, and Rhodey guesses that was a good plan, maybe a lead-in to making it easier to catch them. He feels stupid right now, because a bunch of these dickheads who have been causing problems are here right now, with a bunch of their powerless employees (probably hangers-on, wanting to have powers, and they are probably giving themselves powers and that’s probably why half of their powers are shitty and why half of them are landing in the hospital asking to speak to Bruce Banner—Rhodey remembers Tony telling him that story—)

And Peter rushes out in front of Rhodey, and looks both ways, and then he’s running away from him—

“Okay, dummy, you came and got me for a reason, you can’t get him out without me, that was the entire purpose—”

But Peter isn’t saying anything, just rushing out ahead trying to get to the spot where Tony is first, and for what reason, Rhodey doesn’t know.

Rhodey keeps looking at the map they’ve got, every time Karen pings another guy to keep track of and avoid, and he keeps wondering if Peter has a more updated version of events.

Friday is still unreachable. Rhodey knows these assholes aren’t Thanos, or even the Mandarin, or Whiplash or anybody else Tony has faced, but he’s still filled with dread and the kind of anxiety that Tony is normally known for, not him. Is it because he hasn’t heard Tony’s voice? Is it because Peter is bounding out ahead of him like a golden retriever puppy? Is it because he knows if anything happens to Peter in Rhodey’s care that Rhodey would hear about it from Tony for the rest of his life?

“It’s right here,” Peter hisses, like someone is close by and listening, even though Rhodey knows Tony and Peter’s traps destroyed most of the security cameras. “I think. Wait. I marked it with a little web.”

“Because that’s not obvious—”

“It’s little—” He’s crab-walking along the floor like a lunatic, but then the eyes on his mask get all big and he slams his hands on the ground. “Here it—Tony! Tony, it’s me! It’s me and I’m back and I brought Rhodey!”

Peter is already trying to peel at the side of the floor panel, like he didn’t try that before and knows it won’t work, and Rhodey rushes over, quick as he can, and he’s definitely stomping now.

He hears Tony’s voice.

“Rhodey? Don’t let him fall in too, kid, this is a trap for us iron people—”

“I’m not gonna fall in too, you moron,” Rhodey says. He hears Tony laugh, which lights a fire under him, and he starts burning around the edges of the panel. “Find a good spot in the middle somewhere, I’m gonna drop this panel on your head—”

“Oh, nice, just what I wanted—”

“I need one of these little burner guys in every single one of my suits from now on—”

“Pete, step back, come on—”

“Okay okay—”

And Rhodey burns around the entire outside of the panel, reaches the beginning of his line, and it falls in.

And there have been plenty of moments in Rhodey’s life when a lot of things are happening at once. And a lot of those moments involve Tony, and his chaotic energy, going all the way back to MIT and shit exploding before it ever had a right to explode, but he guesses Tony touching anything gives it a right to explode—

But this one startles Rhodey, for some reason—maybe because getting Tony back was so built-up in his head because Peter’s anxiety is big and ballooning all around them—

But there’s a spray of bullets, and the lights flicker, and there’s—sparks of electricity? And a rolling wave, and some other shit, because somehow the two of them were so focused on finding Tony that they didn’t realize the conglomeration of dickheads were converging on their location, with their mishmash of powers and assholery—

And Peter cries out, slipping forward a bit and nearly falling into the newly opened panel—

And like a phoenix rising, Tony shoots out of the ground, grabbing onto Peter on his way out, and he flies down the hallway.

“Shit,” Rhodey breathes, a few bullets ricocheting off of his suit as he follows in Tony’s wake—

“Rhodes, can you make a big old hole in the wall there for me—”

“Coming right up,” Rhodey says, and he aims with both hands and fires two high caliber repulsor blasts at the same spot, and the wall blows out, lending them a new exit.

And they fly out, spiraling into the air like two comets finding their way back into the sky.

“Peter,” Rhodey says, hearing the last vestiges of the assholes firing at them and yelling obscenities. “Shit, uh, we should probably send someone—”

“A bunch of someones are coming,” Tony says, and when Rhodey looks over, he’s clutching Peter close. “I don’t know why the hell we were even playing spy games, we should have just—”

“They’re not all there right now,” Peter gasps, and he groans, wrapping his arms tighter around Tony’s neck. “Rhino’s not even—they’re not all—that was the thing, we were gonna—we were gonna take them out in stages, and it would be harder after—after the first stage—”

“Well, now the first stage is a bunch of explosions and a rescue—Friday, tell me what’s going on with him—”

“I can tell you what’s going on with me, I got shot—”

“He’s not wearing one of the bulletproof suits?” Tony asks, and he’s got the nerve to glance over at Rhodey when he asks it.

“I didn’t dress him,” Rhodey says, speeding up a little bit. “He was ready to run out guns blazing in his other suit, which he somehow shredded just coming home all freaking out—”

“I didn’t mention that—when I was coming to get you—some of our traps went off early and maybe on my way out I ran through some of them—”

Rhodey scoffs, rolling his eyes so hard that it hurts. “Yeah, okay, there you go, there we have it, the truth comes out—”

“Rhodey, he’s been shot—”

“Okay, so, he still did something stupid, and lied, and he knows which of his suits are bulletproof and which ones aren’t—”

“We were moving quickly,” Peter says, and he coughs a little bit. “I was worried, I know you were worried, not as much as me though—”

“You don’t need to worry about me,” Tony says, and Rhodey sees him kicking Friday into the highest gear. “I was relaxing—”

“What did I tell you?” Rhodey asks. “What’d I say?”

Peter coughs again, laying his head on Tony’s shoulder. “Losing a lot of blood. Definitely dying.”

“You are not,” Tony says. “Friday?”

Rhodey can’t hear her response, and he sighs.

Peter better not be goddamn dying. Not after something stupid like this. He’s done stupid shit in his life but this particular thing was really stupid, and if Peter died at the end of it, Tony would never forgive himself. Tony doesn’t forgive himself when Peter gets a goddamn hangnail, so this would be—worse than that. By far.

And Rhodey wouldn’t be happy about it either.

“Pete, hang on,” Tony says, and Rhodey sees him cradling the back of Peter’s head. “We’re not too far—”

“Did you know,” Peter says, “that Rhodey made me fly the entire way hanging by a web that was attached to his ankle—”

Rhodey scoffs again. “Wow—”

“Rhodey, come on—”

“Wow—”

“He’s fine,” Rhodey says, standing shoulder to shoulder with Tony outside of Peter’s med bay room. “He’s fine. Right as rain.”

Tony glances at him, his eyes narrowed. “He got shot in the back.”

“In the shoulder—”

“He uses his shoulders a lot.”

“Who doesn’t?” Rhodey asks, raising his eyebrows. “Maybe if someone didn’t fall into a hole like the fucking Wily Coyote—”

“It’s Wile E. Coyote, the ‘e’ is his middle initial—listen, this was a lot more Bugs Bunny,” Tony says. He sighs big, and looks back over towards the closed door, where Helen is talking to Peter.

Rhodey sighs too.

“You should have just let SHIELD take care of that place,” he says. “You didn’t need to go in there with this multilayer three-pronged attack on this week’s episode of the Iron Man and Spider-Man show. I mean yeah, there are a bunch of them, and it’s concerning, and I know how you feel like you need to take care of shit on your own sometimes, but this is the new world. I know Peter calls it that, and I’ve started calling it that too, because in the new world Tony Stark is more cautious. I get a lot less ulcers now, knowing that most of the time you’re on a couch or behind a desk. Or at worst, behind a computer screen. When I see Peter rolling up knocking doors down because you fell through the floor in some cartoon situation on a side mission, it feels a lot like the old days. And you’ve been through too much shit to be reverting back to the old days. This nearly-dying situation was different than the other nearly-dying situations.”

Rhodey tries not to speechify, but that one got away from him. He sighs again and leans against the wall, and Tony looks at him.

“He knocked a door down?”

“He did. Living room on the fourth floor. I haven’t done anything about it yet. Happy’s probably seen it by now.”

Tony nods. He cracks his jaw and looks down at the ground. “Uh, couple months ago, remember when I went to the lakehouse with the kid and May?”

Rhodey does. They were gone for almost a month, Pepper was ferrying back and forth up there, saying things were fine. Rhodey was busy, and he asked a couple times, but all he got was fine, yeah. It’s all fine. “Yeah,” he says, tentatively.

There’s new tension in Tony’s shoulders. “Well, uh—that Rhino guy, that’s one of the members of that asshole club we just blew through—he nearly broke Peter’s back.”

Rhodey feels chills go through him. “What?”

“Pete didn’t want to tell anybody, and he didn’t break it, it was just a nearly, but he was really hurt, and emotionally, uh—it wasn’t—it wasn’t great, it was—it was hard for me, to see him like that. And then as soon as we get back, he starts going after them harder, and we had a couple blow-ups, because it was insane to me, that he was doing that after what just happened to him, and yes, I know, me, me, me, mini-me, but still, I just—yeah, it felt personal, with me and this place and this guy—and he wasn’t even fucking there tonight for the strike team to get—but maybe I wasn’t thinking, maybe I was thinking a little bit too much, but I’ll always remember how hurt Peter was and the pain he was in and I knew he was just gonna keep running at them anyway and I wasn’t gonna let him do it on his own. Not him. Not—my kid.”

Rhodey nods at him, and almost doesn’t know what to say. He feels a little sick about it, but he tries to stay present.

“And don’t get on me about not telling you, I was gonna, eventually, but things just, you know, things happen, they keep happening—”

“Yeah, I sure know that,” Rhodey says. He watches him, the way his eyes search the ground, avoiding his gaze until he looks up again. “He’s okay now, though. It was essentially a graze.”

“It was not a graze,” Tony snaps.

“You woulda called that a graze in the past—”

“Yeah, okay, well, yeah, for myself, maybe—”

“But when it’s a spider baby, things are different, huh? Definitions are changed?”

“Definitions are changed,” Tony says, definitively.

Rhodey snorts. “The two of you are truly two peas in a pod. He was all worried about you on the way in, all antsy about it—”

“Oh, you weren’t antsy about me being stuck in an enemy lair? How the tables have turned—”

“I knew what was going on,” Rhodey says, knocking him on the shoulder. “It was truly some Looney Toons shit. Probably some old trap they didn’t even realize was there—”

“You didn’t know that, none of us knew that—”

“But it was true, right? I had a feeling, when Peter described it to me—and his narrative detail is great, by the way, we should do Spider-Man Story Time for kids at some of the local bookstores—they’d eat it up—”

“I’ve thought that,” Tony says, smiling fondly. “That’s so funny, I’ve thought that, and now you’re saying it, so it’s a sign we need to set it up—”

“Yes—but the way he described it I knew you were fine. Not great, but not injured, not in imminent danger. I know some of these guys are genuinely dangerous, like the Rhino asshole you’re talking about, but it feels like the vast majority of them are morons.”

Tony blows out a breath, nodding. “I know Pete gets worried. I know. I get worried. We’re both worried, and it’s just—”

“It’s sweet and I like seeing it,” Rhodey says. He shakes his head. “I mean. I don’t like seeing you worried. But the two of you—I like that you have—I like that you’re in a dad position. It’s nice—”

Tony cracks his jaw. “Pep and I just never—”

“I know,” Rhodey says, stopping him before he can get into that, “but you’ve got it with Peter. And he needed it and you needed it and it’s nice. You put up a front and a lot of people take that at face value, take you as that, all your quipping and dumb one-liners—”

“They aren’t dumb, they are carefully crafted—”

“Yeah, I know, I’m well aware, but a lot of people just see that, and think that’s who you are, when really you’re marshmallow fluff. Completely and totally, and especially for certain people—considering I’m one of those people—but I know Peter loves being one of them too. And it’s sweet. As annoying as the two of you can be.”

Tony scoffs, pushing off the wall. “He’s annoying.”

“You’re both annoying. And maximum annoying when you’re together.”

Tony glares over his shoulder, and he knocks ever so slightly on the door before he’s pushing it open.

“Jesus, what if he’s changing—”

“He shouldn’t be changing, he should be in pajamas, in the bed, right, Peter—”

And when they walk inside, Peter is halfway out the window. He’s wearing Tony’s hoodie, and a pair of jeans, and Helen isn’t even in there at all. Tony makes a small noise, like he’s been shot, and he glances at Rhodey as if he’s making sure he’s not insane, and then he looks back at Peter without getting confirmation because he already goddamn knows.

“What are you doing—”

“Why are you up—”

“Are you out of your damn mind—”

“After everything we just went through—you just got shot—”

“Peter, honestly—”

“And where is Helen?” Tony yells, his hands on his hips, and Peter is just frozen there, one knee in the window frame. “Where did she—what did you do to—”

“I didn’t do anything to!” Peter yells, getting down. “She left through the interior door,” he yells, gesturing to it. “And then I got up, and put some clothes on, and I—”

“And you were gonna leave, and escape, and go live on Governors Island—”

“No, no, I was just going to go around, and go up a floor, and come back down so you didn’t see me, because Tony—”

“Eventually, I was going to see you, Peter, this plan was flawed—”

“A lot of that going around lately,” Rhodey says, before he means to, and Tony shoots him a look. Rhodey clears his throat.

“May can’t keep coming here and seeing me in the med bay,” Peter says, crossing his arms over his chest. “Like, we had a whole talk, about the new world, and being more careful in the new world, and now here I am, again, and this one is so stupid, and MJ is coming with her this time and she said if I keep getting hurt that she’s gonna start a rumor that she’s Spider-Man and that’s gonna put a lot of scrutiny on her that I don’t want her to have and I know she’ll do it.” He swallows hard. “So.”

“We already told May something happened,” Rhodey says, throwing his arms up.

“But not—not—I mean, something could be anything, doesn’t have to be like—I mean, something could be the roof caving in, and me being a hero—”

Tony scoffs. “We can’t—quickly cave in the roof just to back up a bullshit story—”

But Rhodey knows he would, if it came to that, and he knows that for sure.

Peter rushes over, and grabs Tony by the arms. He doesn’t even look that bad, only a little pale, but Rhodey knows even the slightest bit of paleness is enough to win Tony over. Especially with their whole heart to heart in the hallway, and Peter getting hurt at all—the odds just aren’t in his favor.

“Please,” Peter says, the final nail in the coffin. “Let’s just—come up with something—no med bay, let’s meet her in like—the lounge—nowhere near the door, the broken door, which I’ll fix, let’s just—come up with something—”

“There was a chemical leak,” Tony says, almost deadpan. “That you discovered, and you saved a whole pool of interns. We can meet May and MJ in the living quarters upstairs and we’ll—order pizza. No med bay.”

Peter takes a tiny moment to process that he actually just won this battle, despite trying to escape through the window, and his face breaks out into the most beautiful, shiny smile. Enough that Tony smiles too, and Rhodey finds himself smiling, even though he’s almost nauseated by the ridiculousness of them.

Peter hugs Tony tight, and Tony hugs him back, careful of his right shoulder. He pats his back, closing his eyes, and Peter pulls back, still grinning at him. “Thank you thank you thank you. I’m gonna go up there now and set the scene. And I’ll order the pizza. Thank you thank you.”

He looks at Rhodey before he leaves, and winks at him, over the top and exaggerated and not at all subtle. He nearly skips out of the room, and Tony stands there, his shoulders wilting.

“Don’t say it—”

“And pushover of the year goes to—”

“How’d I know you were gonna say it—”

“He was trying to climb out the window,” Rhodey says, as the two of them head into the hallway. “Did being stuck under the floorboards for a couple hours scramble your brain?”

“They weren’t floorboards, this wasn’t a haunted house, this was highly sophisticated—”

“I hope you’re not arguing semantics with me,” Rhodey says. “Not you, of all people—”

“Peter!” Tony calls, because Peter is still racing down the hall within eyesight. “Be careful—and make sure to get eggplant on Rhodey’s pizza. He loves it! He loves it so much!”

Rhodey pushes him with his elbow, and Tony pushes him back, grabbing him around the middle and pulling him into half a bear-hug. Rhodey snorts, wrapping his arm around him.

“Thanks for taking care of him, you know, up until the whole getting shot thing—”

“That was on you, you were back in charge then,” Rhodey says, gripping his shoulder. “And when the next missions start, with the den of assholery, let me help the two of you, huh?”

“Oh, War Machine wants to join?” Tony says, letting go of him.

“Yeah,” Rhodey says. “I do. I wanna have your backs.”

Tony grins at him again. “Noted,” he says.

And hopefully he is actually noting it. Because Rhodey does want to be there, to cover the two of them while they cover each other. He’s known Tony for a long time, most of his life, and he loves him beyond.

And he does love the way he loves this kid.

He can’t let anything happen to either one of them.

“Extra eggplant!” Peter yells, before turning the corner. “Got it!”

Rhodey rolls his eyes, and Tony giggles. An inside joke, over thirty years old, and he still goddamn giggles about it.

“They’re all going onto your plate,” Rhodey says, pushing him again.

“Just like last time.”

#my fics #tis I #this was so much fun 🥰🥰

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iron--spider · 8 months

Text

performance review

https://archiveofourown.org/works/49261927 by iron_spider “Don’t start running,” Bucky says, holding his hands up like he’s trying to appear non-threatening, “you know Stark has alarms set up for every time your heart rate goes above normal—” “That’s not true,” Peter says, even though he firmly recalls that time he got frustrated during homework and accidentally shut the facility down. “It’s absolutely true,” Sam says, and he snatches the folder out of Peter’s hands. Peter sighs. “Come on, guys,” he says, trying to snatch it back, and he thinks about trying to web them, because he does have a webshooter on, but that would make this whole thing a lot more dramatic than it needs to be. “It’s not like he’s gonna—have promotions or—fire people or anything—” Words: 3778, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English Fandoms: Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Categories: Gen Characters: Peter Parker, Tony Stark, Sam Wilson (Marvel), James "Bucky" Barnes, Happy Hogan, Pepper Potts, James "Rhodey" Rhodes, Thor (Marvel), Natasha Romanov (Marvel), Stephen Strange, Steve Rogers, May Parker (Spider-Man) Relationships: Peter Parker & Tony Stark Additional Tags: Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Not Spider-Man: Far From Home Compliant, Not Canon Compliant With Movie: Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), Tony Stark Has A Heart, Precious Peter Parker read it on AO3 at https://archiveofourown.org/works/49261927

#tis I #my fics

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iron--spider · 8 months

Text

someone else living in his skin

by @iron--spider for @shoyzz-art

Peter slides up alongside Rhodey, and Rhodey startles.

There’s a cacophony of twinkling glasses and chairs being pulled out and whatever weird jazz music playlist Tony’s got playing, and all of it seems loud, in Peter’s ears. Shaking his nerves.

“Jesus Christ,” Rhodey says, pinching the bridge of his nose. “What are you doing? I thought you were putting out table numbers—”

“Do you think he’s acting shifty?” Peter asks, calmly as he can.

He’s calm. Why wouldn’t he be calm?

His eyes are locked on Tony.

They’re in the middle of setting up this mini gala event, the opening for Stark’s new research facility in the Lower East Side. It’s gonna create hundreds of jobs and scholarships and internships and it’s gonna be a really good thing, partnering with the museums and businesses in the area. Peter’s actually really excited because he’s got the title of ‘Lead Researcher’ for the intern pool, whatever that winds up meaning from day to day, and he thought Tony would be really excited too. He loves celebrations, he loves new opportunities and helping people, but—

But for the last two days he’s been…different.

He’s been…off.

But Peter’s calm. He’s calm about it. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t be calm.

His eye is just twitching a little bit.

Rhodey looks at Tony, and then he looks at Peter, and then he looks at Tony again. He narrows his eyes, like he’s trying to assess the situation.

“He’s just—I don’t know,” Peter says, blowing out a breath. He wrings his hands together and cracks his jaw.

“Is this a spidey sense thing?” Rhodey asks, crossing his arms over his chest.

Peter shrugs, still watching him. Tony is sort of looming around—straightening a table cloth here, pushing in a chair there, glancing over his shoulder like he thinks someone is watching him. He’s sweating more than normal.

“A little bit of that, a little bit of—just—he’s acting weird,” Peter says. “Not acting like himself, I guess ever since the other night when that guy tried to break in—”

“But we dealt with that,” Rhodey says, looking at him. “It was in and out—cops came, got the guy—”

“Right, I know, but it’s been since then he’s just been like—I don’t know,” Peter says, blowing out a breath. “Like he—the other night, he forgot that I already graduated, he was asking me when I was gonna graduate—”

“We all forget that,” Rhodey says, raising his eyebrow at him. “You’re perpetually twelve—”

“You didn’t even know me when I was twelve—”

“You’re twelve now—”

Peter sighs. “Well, he normally remembers, and he was the one at my graduation screaming and yelling and making a big scene so, that’s not really—easily forgotten, and he was being weird about Spider-Man the other day—”

“Weird how?” Rhodey asks, turning towards him completely, now. “Because he’s always weird about Spider-Man. Every other day he’s messaging me like how do we convince Peter to retire?”

Peter clicks his tongue. “Asking me things he knows. Like how I make my webs and which suit is my favorite and—I don’t know, stuff like that. Weird stuff.”

“You’ve been staying at the compound since that guy tried to break in?”

“Yeah,” Peter says. “Me and May both, the apartment has that infestation, everybody’s out for at least a week.”

He clears his throat. The guy trying to break in was weird—he seemed normal, no powers, no real intentions, he got pretty far but was taken down fast, and he didn’t seem at all—fazed, by any of it. He was even polite.

Maybe it got under Tony’s skin? A lot of stuff like that does. They’ve been through enough, with the dying, coming back again two years later, him nearly dying trying to fix it all—a petty thief trying to get into an Avengers compound is just the kind of irritation that might set him off. Last straw kinda deal.

Rhodey stares over at Tony again, and Peter looks too. Tony is being twitchy. He’s talking to waiters and he’s got his hands behind his back and his fingers are twitching.

“Has Pepper said anything to you?” Rhodey asks.

“Has Pepper said anything to you?” Peter asks, raising his eyebrows. “Because she’s more likely—I mean, with me, we talk about MIT, when I start, how my summer’s going, we talk about, um, TikTok recipes, we talk about MJ, and Tony in the capacity of like, Iron Man, and Spider-Man, or his birthday, or Christmas, but not like—I’m just saying, she’s more likely to—have said something to you, or Happy, than me.”

“No, she hasn’t, but now that you mention—and he is acting weird right now—and yesterday he did get off the phone fast, different from how he normally…” Rhodey trails off, shaking his head.

“Maybe he’s sick?” Peter asks, worrying a little bit more now. He thought maybe he was overreacting, he thought Rhodey would brush him off and he’d feel better and then Tony would magically start acting normal again after the conversation. “Nervous? He doesn’t usually—”

“No,” Rhodey says, shaking his head. “Not nervous, these things are—easy, like the back of his hand—sick, maybe, but I thought he was well beyond hiding sick from us, so I hope not—” He looks resolute, all of a sudden, and he claps Peter on the shoulder. “I’m gonna go talk to him. We’ve got an hour or so still, of set-up, so let’s just—just keep on putting out the numbers, doing everything on your list—”

“Okay,” Peter says, nodding, and Rhodey pats him on the shoulder again, moving past him. Peter watches, nonchalantly, as Rhodey walks up to Tony, taking his arm and sort of moving him across the room.

And it’s probably fine.

Rhodey’s gonna talk to him, figure it out, and it’s gonna be okay.

Peter keeps repeating that to himself, as he does his little jobs, and he marks them off his list in his notepad—table numbers, check, badges at the door, check, banners, check, taste test the hors d'oeuvres, mostly check, and he totally had that spelled wrong in his notes and it’s fine—

And when people start to arrive, he realizes that he hasn’t seen Tony or Rhodey since—Rhodey left to go talk to him.

And he gets a little nervous and he looks around, trying to scan the room—not completely full yet, and nothing’s started, but Pepper is here and he sees Happy—

—and May makes him jump when she shows up behind him.

“What’s wrong, honey?” she says, giving him that look, that look that’s gotten sharper and even more severe with every one of his near death experiences.

So he decides not to tell her what’s going on in his head. Which is usually the opposite of what she wants, but this probably isn’t anything, so. “Nothing,” he says, clearing his throat, still trying to scan around. But Tony and Rhodey aren’t here, not anywhere he can see.

“That’s not your nothing face,” she says, rubbing his arm. “Do you have a job you’re supposed to be doing? Is your brain tingling?”

He narrows his eyes at her. “No, it’s—no, it’s not—I gotta, uh, one second—can you make sure you get me one of those little wonton things? Or like three of them? I keep seeing them on the trays and I haven’t gotten to try one yet—”

“You’re concerned about that?” she asks, her eyes still worried and distrustful.

“Yes,” he says, grinning at her quickly before he starts to go looking.

Part of him feels like he should say something to Pepper, but he doesn’t want to stress her out—and like, it’s probably nothing, everything is probably fine, and he makes a beeline for the door that leads to the little backstage area.

“Tony?” he says, and the crowd noise goes muffled when he lets the door swing closed behind him. It’s so quiet back here—he doesn’t even see any of the employees or the guys that do the lights or any of Tony’s security—there wasn’t even anybody at the door when he scanned in.

He hears what sounds like something—brushing against the ground—

“Tony?” Peter asks again, glancing around. “Rhodey? Are you guys, uh—I feel like we’re getting ready to—”

Peter turns another corner and stops dead.

Rhodey is on the ground, knocked out, and Tony is dragging him by the arms. He looks up, and sees Peter there, and the look on his face—he doesn’t—Peter’s brain is going a mile a minute and he’s already surging forward to help but the look on Tony’s face—it registers somewhere in the back of Peter’s mind…

“Oh my God, what—what happened?” Peter asks, rushing over and kneeling down next to Rhodey. “What happened, what did—”

“Uh, he fell,” Tony says, and he kneels down next to him. He nods, and widens his eyes and shakes his head, and he doesn’t seem nearly as concerned as he usually would be. Tony normally loses his mind when Rhodey so much as gets a paper cut, so this is…this is…

“How?” Peter asks, looking at Tony and back at Rhodey again. “He was just—”

“I don’t think he ate enough,” Tony says.

Every alarm bell is going off in Peter’s head. They’ve been going off tonight, and for a couple days, honestly, if he really thinks about it, but it’s loud now. He feels like time is slowing down, like his vision is getting narrow, like all of his senses are on high and zeroing in.

And it feels wrong. The shift in the air and his own suspicion, it feels wrong. What would be wrong with Tony?

But that’s where this is going.

It’s focusing on him.

Peter looks at Rhodey, and there’s a bruise on his cheek—

And Tony is clenching and unclenching his fist—

“Tony?” Peter asks, slowly, glancing up at him. His brain isn’t working. It isn’t working and it’s working too fast and he feels like he’s trudging through sludge. Every move is the wrong move.

And Peter looks at him in a certain way. With suspicion. And he hates it, and he feels sick, but he can’t shake it—

And Tony doesn’t answer him. He just looks at him, and the light that’s usually behind his eyes is gone, and his expression is one Peter doesn’t recognize.

Like someone else is living in his skin.

And just as that thought takes hold and sends chills down Peter’s spine, setting off a whole new line of panicked questions in his head, Tony clicks his tongue. And he sighs.

“Shit,” he breathes. And it’s his voice, of course it’s his voice, but it sounds twisted, and different, and before Peter can even react, before he can pounce on the alarm bells and the way his senses are narrowing and signaling, Tony surges forward with a stiff arm to Peter’s throat, and knocking him to the ground.

Tony punches him, with his full strength behind it, and Peter is so shocked that he doesn’t even block, and he tastes blood immediately. He winces, gasping, and he blocks the next one, and then Tony is grabbing his forearms and tossing him across the room.

Peter hits a thing of shelving, and a bunch of buckets fall down on top of him, and through the pandemonium, he sees Tony running away from him.

“What the fuck,” Peter breathes, and he scrambles to his feet—

And Tony would never hit him, ever, not ever, and Peter’s head pounds, with the force of the punches, with the alarms going off, with fear and worry, and is this a clone, is it mind control—either way he has to get him, there’s a reason, but what is it, what is it—

And if he’s a clone it’d be different, but if it’s mind control, Peter might be able to get through to him, he might be able to break it—

And Peter scrambles to his feet, wiping the blood from under his nose with the back of his hand, and he starts taking off in the same direction Tony did—

And he can’t even call his name before he’s taking the full force of a repulsor blast.

He’s knocked backwards again, slamming into the wall, and he can feel it cave in against his back with the strength of the hit. He coughs, gasping, and his jacket is smoldering and his skin underneath it is too, and he sees Tony standing there with the repulsor aimed at him—he’s only wearing one, and Peter rolls out of the way, narrowly avoiding getting hit again and trying to catch his breath.

He’s not thinking, because nothing makes sense, and Peter just rushes at him and tackles him to the floor—

And Tony punches him again, with the iron hand this time, and Peter’s neck twists hard with the hit—his jaw cracks, blood in his teeth—

And everything in him is screaming to fight back, fight back, but it’s Tony, he—he can’t—he can’t hurt him he fucking can’t hurt him—

And he grimaces, metal in his mouth, and grabs both of Tony’s wrists, mid-flail, and pins him to the ground—

“Doesn’t fucking matter, it’s set,” Tony hisses, and he doesn’t even sound like himself, and the way his face is contorting, he doesn’t look like himself either. Peter’s heart is in his throat, and he dodges another repulsor blast that Tony manages to get off, and Peter covers the repulsor with his hand and twists Tony’s fist and focuses—

“What is? What is?” Peter knows it’s not him, not right now, not really, but he can’t help— “Tony, Tony, are you in there? Are you in there, can you hear—”

“It’ll still do damage where it is—they’d never scan Tony Stark himself at one of his own events,” Tony says, and he grins, manic. “Good way to get it done, huh? One big blast, kill him, ruin his reputation at the same time—”

And Peter’s mind drifts again, like a lifeboat at sea, and he remembers Tony saying earlier that he wouldn’t need his webshooters here, but he packed them anyway. He remembers him with a gym bag, a duffel, he remembers oh nothing, just a few extra lights, and May is here and Rhodey and Happy and people are starting to arrive and Tony himself—Tony himself, and he’s not a clone, he’s not, they’re—they’re trying to kill him, it’s—it’s mind control, it has to be, they used him to smuggle a device in, and they’re trying to kill him—

Peter’s mind drifts, and guides him, and every time it feels like a pull, like a bunch of arrows, but this is more powerful than he’s felt in a while—

And Tony knees him in the stomach, knocking the wind out of him again—Tony grabs him by his shoulders and Peter wrenches away, and they both stumble to their feet again and for a minute they’re in a boxing match, except Peter keeps getting hit, because he’s pulling his punches, because it’s Tony, it’s Tony—

“Stop, stop, stop, you’re—”

Another blow across his cheek, breaking the skin, and he hears a high pitch in his ear, and Tony grabs him by the throat and shoves him against the wall—

And Peter gasps, and pushes him, hard, and Tony trips back and nearly falls and even the way he’s moving right now doesn’t seem like him—

And Peter rushes away and tries to run, his head drifting, pulling him, alert, alert—

Webshooters, backpack, the duffel—they were together, he left it—left it with their stuff, back here, when they—when they got here—

And there are arrows in his head and they’re pulsing and buzzing like neon signs, and he knows he’s going the right way—

But he’s being pulled back to the ground by his ankle, and his head cracks on the tile, and it’s stars and metal and arrows and buzz buzz, how much time is on the clock, we don’t know, we don’t even know it’s a bomb, we don’t even know if it’s counting down, but it sure as shit feels like it—

And he tries to scramble up again and his spidey sense can usually help him from all angles, but it feels off, here, and he knows it is when Tony hits him in the face again, when he grabs him and throws him—and punches him again, rattling his brain in his skull—

And it’s because it’s Tony, because he’s not—he’s not a threat, but he is, he is, right now he is—

“Tony!” Peter yells, because maybe he can get through, maybe he can— “Please—”

And he dodges out of the way of another hit, and stumbles up against the far wall in the narrow backstage hallway—

“Tony, this isn’t—it’s me, it’s Peter, Tony, you have to fight this!” he yells, and he starts running again—again—

“He’s not home!” Tony sing-songs, laughing. “Should have known you’d be fucking trouble, a stupid fucking kid is Spider-Man—”

And Peter runs from him, and sees the fire alarm on the wall, and he grabs it and pulls it as he passes it by—

And the alarm goes off in the real world now, in tune with the one in his head, flashing red and white. He hears Tony curse and yell behind him, and Peter has to—he has to—

Doesn’t fucking matter, it’s set—it’ll still do damage where it is—

It has to be a bomb, it has to be—

And he grits his teeth—Tony is still on his heels, and tears sting in Peter’s eyes along with the heartbeat thump of the pulp his face is turning into, and he sucks in a breath and dodges another repulsor blast—

He has to get him to stop, stop, stop trying to stop him—

And he turns around, and tries to hold back and focus at the same time—

“I’m sorry, I’m—I’m so so sorry—”

And he punches him once, and then again, directly in the face, and Peter knows how strong he is and he tries not to hurt him too badly, and Tony crumples and Peter catches him, guiding him to the ground—

And even though the arrows and the alarms are buzzing and jolting in Peter’s entire body now, he sniffles through the blood and makes sure Tony is still breathing, makes sure he still has a pulse, and he is, he does, and Peter squeezes his shoulder and he can’t think about after, not til they get there—

“I’m sorry,” he breathes, squeezing his shoulder again. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”

And he gets up and he doesn’t let himself look back and he starts running again—

And he’s limping now, and he doesn’t know where that came from, and he finds the place where they stored their bags—

And alarms in his head, and the fire alarm in the building, and lights flashing on and off and he can hear the insanity in the main ballroom, and he finds the duffel and rips it open and—

It is a bomb.

And it’s got a five minute counter.

Peter scrambles, his head pounding pulsing sick, and he gets his webshooters out and puts them on and grabs the entire duffel bag and slings it over his shoulder.

And he makes a break through the nearest emergency door.

And he gets a running start and leaps into a swing, and his whole face hurts and the emergency in his head is steeping him in a bubble now, because the source is with him, and the danger is still back there, because he doesn’t know if knocking Tony out broke the mind control or if he’s gonna wake up still trapped as an angry Terminator—

And Peter swings, trying to launch himself higher and higher, and he can hear the timer clicking and he keeps track of the count and he can’t be a second off or this is gonna go south—

And it might not work anyway—

And this is dire straits, but Peter finds himself thinking of normal things, and they rise above the noise in his head and the oncoming sirens and he doesn’t feel calm, exactly—his face is pulsing with the pain of the hits he took and he feels like he lost a couple teeth, and his shoulder feels like it’s not in the socket properly every time he swings higher, and his leg is in fire and his spidey sense is an orb of panic, encasing him in a snow globe, but—

He thinks of watching that African Grey Parrot with MJ and Ned the other day, for two hours straight, wiping out the entire YouTube catalog of all his antics. He thinks about the yoga class with May at Bryant Park they got with that Groupon and the seven chai lattes she had lined up beside her mat like bowling pins. He thinks about touring the MIT campus with Tony and the way he introduced him to everybody and said this kid is gonna be the best student you ever have. Sharing french fries at Sebastian’s Cafe. I’m so proud of you.

And he hears the beeping speed up, and he’s thinking of all of that and everything else and why did I wear these shoes why not the brown ones as he tosses the duffel into the air at the arc of his highest swing, and it explodes above him in a mess of orange fireball and knocks him right out of the air—

Tony wakes up broken apart.

He doesn’t open his eyes right away. He’s not in the vice grip anymore, not locked into some subconscious pit in his own body while some asshole takes the reins, but he feels like—he feels like the asshole could take over again at any minute, like he’s still in his head somewhere. Dormant, waiting for a moment of weakness so he can shove Tony back down in his cage—

His hands are cuffed together, and he’s—he’s cuffed to something—

He groans, rattling his hands a little bit, and he wakes up and—

Rhodey and Pepper are there. He’s on the floor, and cuffed to a pipe in the wall, and they’re sitting in front of him, and they both look wary and he doesn’t fucking blame them, and his head is pounding and his memories are slapdash watercolor but—

“It’s me,” he breathes, his throat hurting. “It’s me, it’s me—”

“There’s something wrong with you,” Rhodey says, and he exchanges a look with Pepper. He’s got a butterfly bandage on his cheek and Tony thinks that’s me, my fault and what else did he, what else—

“No, I know,” Tony says, squeezing his eyes shut, and his head is pounding and it feels like someone shredded him from the inside out, and—

Tony, you have to fight this—

He remembers, barely—the NYPD taking that guy away, laughing at the idea that they had to ‘save Iron Man’, and he was alone that night and still skeeved off over the whole thing and then he felt the pinch on his arm and felt the thing burrowing and he panicked and he couldn’t even panic for long enough before he seized, before he fell inside himself—

“Thing in my arm,” he croaks, still squeezing his eyes shut tight, because light hurts because voices hurt because everything hurts, and he’s trying to put together the puzzle of his memories and he feels like he might throw up because—because he’s here now but the other guy—he’s here too, he’s still in there, he’s still—and any moment he could— “There’s a thing in my upper arm, left arm—you need to—dig it out, I think it’s right below—right under the skin, it’s like—it made me—made me susceptible, created a link, I don’t fucking know, get it out. You need to get it out.”

“Tony, what—”

Pepper’s voice.

“Pep, he’s—”

“It’s me right now, get it out of my arm or it might not be me in—” He opens his eyes too fast, and really feels like he’s gonna fucking throw up, and they’re both looking at him like he’s the biggest piece of trash they’ve ever had the misfortune of knowing, and that makes him sick too, and what did he—what did he do, what—puzzle pieces, shifting, falling off a glass table—

And he feels his hands breaking skin—

“Jesus Christ,” Rhodey says, and he shifts around and moves over to Tony’s left side, pushing up his sleeve. Tony isn’t even sure where the hell they are right now—he was deep inside, dark and dank and paralyzed in his own body—

“Jesus,” Rhodey says again, and Tony cranes his neck a bit and sees it, feels Rhodey running his finger over a little bump in his arm about the size of a nickel—

“Cut it out,” Tony says, closing his eyes again. “I’m serious, find a knife, cut it out, that’s—”

“Tony,” Pepper says, and she’s rubbing his knee—

“Pepper,” Rhodey says, in that warning tone he has, and the fact that he has to warn Tony’s wife not to touch him is just—

“Cut it out, Rhodey, I’m serious—”

“Alright, Jesus Christ, alright—” And he scrambles away—

“Sterilize it, Rhodey,” Pepper calls after him, looking at Tony again. Her face is streaked with worry, and she looks at him with wariness and pity and love all at the same time. “Tony, why didn’t you—you couldn’t say—”

“I was here but I wasn’t,” he breathes, and the cuffs are hurting his wrists, and everything is fucking hurting, and what did he do what did he do how the fuck long has it been. “Someone—someone got me, I let my guard down and someone—”

It was so easy. The guy used himself as a distraction, as bait, and then he—he did whatever the hell he did and then he was in Tony’s head—

“Okay, okay,” Rhodey says, rushing back around the corner again. “Close your eyes, Tony, if you are—Tony, goddamnit—”

Tony swallows hard, nodding and closing his eyes, and he winces, holding onto the pipe as Rhodey cuts into his skin. He does it fast, and Tony grits his teeth, and he feels Rhodey take the thing out and then he hears him stomping and stomping and stomping—

Feels like plates falling and crashing to the ground inside Tony’s skull.

He doesn’t get it all, but he gets flashes—the bomb under his hands, Rhodey confronting him, Peter—

Peter.

He remembers hitting him. Over and over, and is that the same hit or—how many times did he—

Peter hitting the wall, and Tony recoils, a tremor running through him, and what did he, what did—

“Where’s Peter?” he asks, looking back and forth at them. His arm is throbbing, everything hurts, he’s frail and sick and he’s probably gonna fucking puke but he doesn’t care. “Where’s Peter, where is he?”

They both just stare at him, and kind of look at each other, and Tony’s heart sinks.

“What, did I kill him?” he asks, his voice breaking. He grabs onto the bar he’s cuffed to, feeling like he needs to hold on. He’s terrified. “What, what? Where is he?”

“Tony, you were…” Rhodey starts, shaking his head. “You—the kid knew you were acting weird and I went to confront you and you knocked me out—and I guess—Jesus, I guess you were—are, I don’t goddamn know—being mind controlled, and you brought a bomb in here—we’re at the gala, for the new facility—and Peter sussed you out and you two got into it and he knocked you out and I guess—knocked this guy’s control on you loose enough—but he—he took the bomb and—he had webshooters and he—”

Tony closes his eyes, white noise eating into his vision, and he feels like he’s gonna pass out. “Is Peter dead?” he breathes, shaking.

“We’re trying to find him,” Pepper says, and she rubs Tony’s knee again. “Some people got footage, he tossed it into the air and he was blown back and now we can’t—Happy is out there looking, Sam and Natasha are looking, we’ve got emergency deployment teams looking—”

“Uncuff me, please,” Tony half-whispers, because his voice gets caught in his throat. “I need to help, I need to—I need to help look for him—”

“Tony, you’re—”

“He’s not in my head anymore,” Tony snaps, looking at Rhodey. He doesn’t know how the fuck he can prove that, but he can feel it now. It’s different, he’s—he feels ill, and weak, but he doesn’t feel trapped. He doesn’t feel like the ground is about to fall out from underneath him. “And you need to find someone to get that dipshit, he was supposed to be in jail, but right now, I’m—I’m in here alone, okay? I wanna help look for Peter, I want to—please let me, please. You can stay with me, but I need to—just—please. Please.”

Pepper and Rhodey exchange a look, and Tony keeps getting flashes—his fist connecting with Peter’s face, grabbing him and throwing him against the wall—and he shakes them off, swallowing hard. “Please,” he breathes.

Rhodey heaves a sigh. “Lemme get the key.”

Tony watches the footage from the quinjet while they scan over the city. He was ruthless, relentless, and he watches himself grab Peter by the throat, toss him every which way, hit him and hit him and hit him again. He made him bleed, over and over, he shot him and burned him up and dragged him to the ground, and Peter barely fought him. He actively avoided it, and got worse because of it. Tony keeps watching, and before long Clint is walking over and taking the phone from him.

“It wasn’t you,” he says, giving him a pointed look. “Alright? You know that. It wasn’t you.”

“Sure looked like me,” Tony says, getting up and walking back over to Friday’s main control panel. Peter wasn’t in a suit, so this is harder than normal.

“It wasn’t,” Clint says, sitting back in the pilot’s seat. And he doesn’t say much else about it, but Tony knows he knows firsthand what he’s going through, what this feels like. And it helps a little bit, but not much. The images are imprinted in his head.

He loves Peter. May trusts Tony with her nephew, her surrogate son, the person in her care, and it’s gotten to the point that it’s just a given that Peter is safe with Tony, that Tony’s always gonna help him and protect him. But now there’s this. Now there’s Tony punching him and hitting him and choking him and making him bleed, and he looks down at his hands and they shake.

Nobody else was hurt, he didn’t do anything else, but that’s because Peter took the bomb. He took that on himself, Tony’s mistake, Tony’s problem, and he put himself in danger to solve it and save everybody. And now they can’t find him.

Tony wavers back down into the closest seat.

“Stop beating yourself up,” Pepper says, walking out of the back compartment and sitting down next to him. “It wasn’t you. You’re a victim here too.”

“I hurt him, whether it was…me in charge or not,” Tony says, his eyes straining with tears as he looks at her. “These hands hurt him. And I almost…blew up the goddamn gala, if it wasn’t for him noticing—”

“I didn’t notice,” she says. “I should have—Rhodey should have—”

“You guys are busy,” Tony says, looking at the screen again. He’s got a social media tracker up too, and so many people are talking about what happened. Peter didn’t have a mask on, but thankfully, there’s no good footage of his face.

Everyone is calling him a hero. Because that’s exactly what he is, what he always has been.

“You need people to look out for you too,” Pepper says, running her hand through his hair. “We should have done better, but Peter’s got that little…alert system in his brain, and he’s intuitive, and he knows you. He loves you, he worries.”

Tony shakes his head, looking down at his hands again. He knows May is with Happy, searching, and he can’t even imagine how she feels right now. He feels fucking sick.

“You need someone to check you out too,” Pepper says, still touching him gently, and he doesn’t deserve that either. “Probably have a concussion.”

“Not til we find him,” Tony croaks. “Doesn’t matter.”

“Tony,” she says, but he shakes his head. He’s supposed to be better than this. They defeated a fucking Titan, they defied death and time and saved the goddamn world. And he lets a petty thief mind control him? Take away his agency? Hit Rhodey, threaten an event with innocent people, hurt Peter, badly, put him in harm’s way—

“Tony,” Clint says. “I think we got something.”

Peter needs to get up.

He’s been laying here for forty five years he’s an old man now—

He needs to get back he needs to fix Tony so nothing else happens he needs to protect him and get that guy that did this it must have been that guy that’s when it started and he doesn’t know how he did it but he mind controlled him somehow—

Peter coughs, twisting onto his side, and he spits out some blood, and a tooth, and he hopes it’s his wisdom tooth that’s been bothering him the top right one—

He got exploded, that’s right—

And his face hurts, and where the repulsor got him is burning and he feels like he’s wheezing and he falls back on his back again and he feels like he’s on fire a little bit and is his left eye closed or welded closed or gone forever and his leg—twisted—

And just a second just a second—

Black again, in a wonder wheel of spiraling stars—

“Hey, hey. Pete.”

He opens his eyes. Tony is there, cupping his face in his hands, and Peter smiles a little bit, dizzy.

“Is it you?” he asks, or thinks he asks. He can’t hear his own voice. Tony sounded muffled too, but he nods at him.

“It’s me,” he says. He looks so sad. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Peter closes his eyes again, because they’re so heavy. “It’s okay,” he says, and he feels like he’s being lifted up, and he doesn’t remember anything else after—

He opens his eyes. He feels like he’s moving, and he recognizes the tiny medical room in the quinjet. Tony is right next to him, and he stands up when he sees Peter’s awake, and is Peter awake? He feels…crazy, he feels…

“Tony,” he says, and he tries to sit up. “Is it you? Is it you? Are you—”

“I’m not gonna hurt you,” Tony says, stepping closer. He still sounds muffled, and faraway, and so does everything else. But he looks like himself. He’s not off anymore. “I’m not gonna hurt you again. Jesus, Pete, I’m so sorry—”

Peter shakes his head, blinking at him. “You didn’t, you—it wasn’t you, you didn’t—”

“I did, technically,” Tony says, and he just stands there and he’s got tears in his eyes and he isn’t really looking at him. He’s close, but he’s keeping his distance. “We’re on our way back, to the compound, May and everybody else is meeting us there—you, uh, you saved everybody, you’re burned in a couple places from the blast and my—goddamn repulsor, but Helen’s gonna—when we get back, she’s going to—”

He sighs, stops talking and rests his elbows on the bar of the bed, and hangs his head, like he’s ashamed. Peter hasn’t ever really seen him like this, and his brain still feels like it’s swiss cheese but he sits up a little bit more. He covers Tony’s hands with his own and squeezes them, and tries not to think about how much everything hurts.

“You wouldn’t be mad at me if this was opposite,” Peter says, staring at the top of his head. “You wouldn’t. You wouldn’t blame me at all and I don’t blame you either so. So. Just don’t even, I mean. Just don’t.”

“You can’t even talk straight,” Tony says, still not looking up.

“That’s most of the time,” Peter says, still holding onto his hands.

Tony sighs. “I put you in danger and I hurt you. I watched the footage, it was a fucking nightmare, and you let me keep hitting you because you know how strong you are and you didn’t want to hurt me so you just let me keep hurting you—”

“It wasn’t you,” Peter says, trying to be assertive, and he’s so tired, he’s so, so tired. He leans forward, resting his head on Tony’s shoulder, and he closes his eyes. “It wasn’t your fault. It isn’t. So stop. I know you won’t and you’re gonna live in this and punish yourself forever but like, don’t. Don’t do that.” He sighs, leaning into him. “Did you guys get the bad guy—”

“Sounded like it,” Tony says, and he’s still hanging his head, and Peter sighs. “I think so. I gotta check in with Rhodey again. Make sure nobody else got mind controlled.”

“So it all worked out,” Peter says.

“You nearly getting exploded is not it all working out.”

“I didn’t get exploded I only got slightly singed and nobody else got exploded and you are no longer mind controlled so. Win to me.”

Tony sighs again, and he gently, very gently, wraps his arms around Peter and hugs him. “I’m gonna jump off a fucking roof,” he says. “I never wanna hurt you. Never. I can barely remember it, I’ve got flashes—”

“Don’t try,” Peter says, reaching up and holding onto his arm.

“—but I saw the footage—”

“Forget it,” Peter says. “Erase it.”

Tony shakes his head. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have ever—allowed it to happen in the first place, and I still don’t know how the hell it did, and I’ve just got—a lot of work to do, to make sure it doesn’t happen again. I can’t let myself get taken like that, used like a fucking goon against people I love. Jesus Christ. You’re hurt because of me.”

“Nope,” Peter says, because he doesn’t have the brain power to try and fight him harder, even though he knows it’s gonna be a guilt battle probably for the rest of their lives.

“Pete,” Tony says, still holding onto him.

“Nope,” Peter says again, and he drifts. Spidey sense is dormant. He’s a piece of raw meat but he’s—safe.

And Tony isn’t there when Peter wakes up again, back at the compound. May is there, and after she hugs him and kisses him about a hundred times, she breaks out the Tupperware, containing all the little appetizers from the gala that never was.

And Tony stays missing in action the next couple days, even though everyone else comes by to see how Peter is doing. Rhodey implies that Tony paid a special visit to the asshole that did this, but he doesn’t go into detail on what the encounter entailed. The guy did have hidden powers, clearly, and Doctor Strange even gets involved trying to figure out how he did it, what exactly that thing was that they pulled out of Tony’s arm.

But three days later and Peter still hasn’t seen him again.

“Maybe he’s busy,” Ned says, as he and Peter and MJ walk up and down the hallways. Peter broke his ankle, somewhere in all the insanity, and pulled a muscle in his calf. He’s been trying to walk around a lot during the day, even though he’s still on bed rest.

“He’s not busy,” Peter says. “He’s avoiding me.”

“Well, he beat the shit out of you, and he feels bad,” MJ says.

Peter sighs.

“I’d feel bad too,” MJ says, “even if I was mind controlled. It still sucks, I mean, when I saw him his knuckles were still all bruised. Just a constant reminder of what someone made him do.”

“You saw him?” Peter asks, looking at her.

She looks a little bit like she wants to take a back, but she nods. “Yeah, uh, earlier. When I got here, when I was talking to Pepper.”

“Did you talk to him?” Peter asks, as they turn around at the end of the hall. He’s trying to sound nonchalant and failing spectacularly.

“Not really,” MJ says, taking Peter’s hand. “He wouldn’t really even look at me, I can tell he—he’s just really guilty. He feels really bad.”

“Peter doesn’t want him to feel bad,” Ned says.

“Yeah, but once you feel bad, you feel bad,” MJ says, “it’s not like it magically goes away because someone says that it should.”

“Maybe we can magic him,” Ned says. “Doctor Strange, you know. He could do that.”

“Yeah, let’s just hack into his mind again,” MJ says, widening her eyes at him. “I’m sure that’s the right course of action.”

Peter sighs again. “I don’t know what to do,” he says. “He could do this forever. And ever and ever.”

“Well, definitely as long as you’re all bruised up,” MJ says, reaching over with her free hand and brushing her thumb over Peter’s cheek.

And two more days go by without seeing Tony, and it’s almost time for Peter and May to head back to their apartment, even though May said they could stay at the compound as long as he wanted to.

And Peter decides to do something.

“Friday is he still there?” Peter asks, making his way down to the workshop.

“Yes, Peter,” Friday says, in Peter’s ear.

“And you’re not lying to me?” Peter asks, rushing down the stairs, quick as he can with a bum leg.

“No, Peter,” Friday says. “I am not permitted to lie to you.”

Peter smiles to himself. He knows he still doesn’t look wonderful, but he looks a lot better than he did, and either way he can’t take this anymore. And he gets down to the workshop in what feels like record time and he scans in without trying to make a lot of noise, and when he opens the door he sees Tony at the back door as if he’s trying to escape.

“Stop!” Peter yells, his hands up. “Stop! Don’t leave!”

Tony whips around, his eyebrows furrowed. “Kid?” he says, already walking back over in his direction. “Are you okay?”

“No!” Peter says, a little more forcefully than he intended to.

“What’s wrong?” Tony asks, gently, weaving around the work stations and reaching his side.

“You’re ignoring me!” Peter says, and he sounds like a small, stupid child, but he doesn’t do anything to change that. “And I don’t like it.”

Tony’s face falls, and he nods, glancing away from him. “I’m not…ignoring you, I just—I felt like—”

“I know you feel bad,” Peter says, sucking in a big breath. “And I know me telling you not to feel bad doesn’t change the fact that you feel bad, but I seriously don’t want you to feel bad, because now this whole like—keeping yourself separate and out of my sight thing feels like you’re punishing me.”

“I’m not,” Tony says, fast. “I was just—”

“You don’t need to punish yourself either—”

“I wasn’t really…exactly…c’mere, come sit down—”

“I’m okay,” Peter says.

“I know, I know, I wanna sit,” Tony says, taking Peter’s arm and tugging him over to the closest workstation with two rolling chairs. They sit down, and they both sigh, and Tony keeps talking. “I was just, uh—I sent out messages to everyone involved at the gala explaining things a little bit, and I got everything rescheduled on my own, and I, uh—met up with the asshole at Riker’s and attacked him and nearly got arrested myself—”

Peter leans on the workstation, running his hands over his face. He can imagine that, and he doesn’t like it.

“—and I’ve been building some new security protocols, and working on another nano suit for you that’s a lot like my watch gauntlet that can—stay on your person, read your heart rate, come to you if you need it—but I’m trying to make sure it only comes in the correct instance, and not if you like, see a cute dog—”

Peter laughs a little bit, shaking his head at him.

Tony smiles softly. “But I’ve been doing all that, along with maybe, slightly punishing myself by—staying out of your way—”

“You’re not in my way,” Peter says, feeling a little bit too emotional, maybe. “You’re not. You never have been. Never will be.”

“You don’t know that—”

“Tony—”

“What I mean is…old man, long shadow, you know, I’ve been there—”

“You’re not your dad,” Peter says, shaking his head at him. “You’re a good—you’re a good father figure, you’re a…good father.”

Tony brightens up a little bit, and his nod almost looks like a question. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Peter says. “No matter what.”

Tony nods again, more solidly this time. “One more thing—”

“No more saying sorry,” Peter says, shaking his head. “You told me I can never say sorry again, well now, you can’t either so, how about—”

“Thank you,” Tony says, and Peter stops talking. “Thank you for—realizing that something was wrong, thank you for figuring it out, thank you for knocking me on my ass when I wasn’t me, thank you for—saving everybody and me too, in the process. Thank you, Pete, really. Thank you.”

Peter’s throat goes tight, and there are tears in his eyes, and he nods again. “You’re welcome,” he says, holding his chin high. “Any time.”

“And I’m sorry,” Tony says, fast, rolling forward and wrapping him up in a big hug. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Last time, I’m sorry. Okay I’m done. I’m so sorry. Okay I’m actually done.”

Peter snorts, hugging him too, burying his face in his shoulder. “No more mind control,” he says, letting the apologies drift into the air unanswered.

“Oh no, never again,” Tony says, rubbing Peter’s back. “And I figure, when you’re—when you’re tip top again, we can get into the ring, and I’ll feel better if you get a few good shots in, and I’ll forget about the whole thing if you break my nose—”

“No,” Peter says, shaking his head and still holding onto him. “I’m not doing that.”

“Too afraid to box an old man, huh?”

“My old man, maybe,” Peter says, feeling particularly sentimental.

And Tony laughs, in a rush of breath, and holds him reverently for a second. He pulls back, and pats Peter’s cheek. “We’ll see,” he says. “Might get Rhodey in there too, to make it fair—”

“He’ll probably take you up on that,” Peter says, getting to his feet. “Okay, lemme see the suit, remember I get last say in design decisions—”

“Oh, you aren’t going for bright yellow?” Tony asks, resting his hand on Peter’s shoulder as they head over to the main workstation. “You don’t like that?”

“Better than that time you tried to integrate green and made me look like a Christmas tree,” Peter says, grinning at him.

“Hey,” Tony says, typing in a few commands and bringing up the specs. “I thought that was very festive.”

And they start working, and Peter remembers feeling safe, before, when they were on the quinjet and his brain was still scrambled. But he feels like they’re on the other side of it now, for real.

Safe. Really, truly safe.

#tis I #my fics

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