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Peter feels broken. He breathes.
Tony’s hair is a mess. He’s a mess, hair be damned. That’s the first thing Peter thinks, the first thought to make any sense out of the fuzzy jumble in his brain, and it glows like a neon light.
He almost laughs, because huh, that sounds exactly like something Tony would say.
That Tony Stark, he might be rubbing off on you a little, May whispered to him one night weeks back, laughing for all the world like it was just a joke. Apparently it’s coming true.
He’s in pain, but it’s a fuzzy, unfocused kind of pain. He sees red in the sky and ash on the wind, and Tony is there, Tony is looking down at him, for all the world as though he really is broken. As though he's- he's-
“Mr. Stark,” he gasps. Cuts off. Breathes again. “M-Mr Stark—hi. H-hey.”
His speech is stilted and Tony is so quick to drop to his knees, to cradle Peter, to lean close and whisper a gentle shh . “Don’t speak,” he murmurs.
Hm.
Something must be very wrong.
Tony is not this gentle. With Peter. With anybody. Well, maybe a bit with Peter but only a little, and not like this. Tony’s acting like something wrong and Peter’s got no clue what’s going on—so it’s obvious what Peter’s next step is.
“M’fine,” he grunts (he’s clearly not) and tries to sit up.
Big mistake.
He gasps. Something gurgles in his throat and chokes him, and holy crap that can’t be good, and holy shit he can’t breathe oh god oh god, and Tony’s on him in a second, gentle hands—gentle, gentle, so gentle, why’s he doing this, what is wrong—holding him and pushing him so softly back to the ground. Lowering him. Supporting him. Peter goes slack, lets Tony do his thing.
He’s too tired for this, he’s just decided. Yes, he is staying on the ground. No more sitting up.
“Hi,” Peter says again.
Tony’s face cracks apart. He tries to pull it back together for a smile, but it looks painful and feels wrong.
“Hey, kid,” he says, and sounds like he’s been crying.
Peter is:
- Bleeding internally.
- Going to be fine, seriously, Tony, calm down, they’ve got good doctors
- Somehow back from the dead.
That is a lot. He has missed a lot. What the fuck.
It’s no wonder Tony’s such a mess. Such a distraught, overprotective mess.
Peter Parker might have a little bit of work to do. Maybe even more work than Spider-Man. No, scratch that—definitely more than Spider-Man, May’s made sure of that, Peter’s grounded from all patrolling for two weeks as punishment for running away to an alien moon to save the universe.
(And he didn’t even manage to get that right, the saving the universe part—with a bitter twist in his gut Peter remembers, one more second, just one more second and he’d have had it, he’d have had that gauntlet off, he was so close, they were so close—)
It’s Rhodey who told him, informed him in oh-so-slow, cautious words that Peter was in no uncertain terms a zombie. (“You’re not a zombie, Peter.”) (“I’m back from the dead, right? Either I’m Jesus or I’m pretty much a zombie. And half the universe can’t be Jesus so I guess that just makes me a zombie, doesn’t it?”)
Anyway. Arguable zombie-ness aside—
He does remember. Once Rhodey breaks it down it all comes back, those final, fleeting moments where the world crumbled, he crumbled, he cried and he begged and it hurt like hell. Peter does remember.
And once all that’s out of the way, settled in his brain, the memories there to stay for better or for worse, one thing makes itself abundantly clear.
Peter needs to talk to Tony.
Tony needs to talk to Peter.
Obviously this means they are both going out of their way to avoid doing exactly that.
It’s a mess. They’re both messes. “You’re a mess,” Peter hears Pepper tell Tony one night as he’s wandering the halls of the compound.
He doesn’t mean to eavesdrop, usually doesn’t even like to, but—they’re in the other room over and it’s hard not to hear with his senses up to eleven like they always are.
He picks up his pace, hurries away, toward the stairs, back to the lab, where he’s supposed to be—the whole reason he’s staying the night—because May said she’d let him stay over to work on the suit as long as he promised 1. no patrolling and 2. that he’d get (some) homework done—
But he doesn’t get far enough to miss Tony’s reply.
“I know,” Tony says quietly, voice broken. “The kid… I can’t, Pepper. He’s—I watched him, I felt him die, I...”
“I know,” Pepper says softly.
Peter shuts the door to the lab, maybe a little harder than necessary.
Once it’s shut he breathes again, and then he leans his head back against it and closes his eyes.
See, it’s not that they don’t talk. They do. They talk like they always have, and therein lies the problem.
They talk like nothing’s changed, they talk like this has not fundamentally altered the way Tony looks at Peter, the way their little solar system spins—like everything’s normal—and like they’re both fine. And it’s all lies. Because Peter sees him when Tony thinks he isn’t looking. Sees the brokenness hiding there. And he knows, knows so much it hurts, that nothing’s fine at all.
They talk about anything and everything, about all of it except for the one thing they need to discuss most. Tony lets Peter in the lab and they work for hours on end, exchanging notes and suggestions and jokes (that fall flat) and smiles (that never touch their eyes). They chat about school sometimes, about the upcoming science fair.
“Going for something cool? Something that’ll shock people?” Tony says, poking Peter’s shoulder with a screwdriver. “With these, kid, wow factor is the way to go. You know you can always try cool things with light, holograms and reflection, stunning visual displays… the judges’ll go crazy for that.”
Peter slides a piece of glass off the nearest workbench and lifts it, lets it catch the light. It’s a stray piece, broken, trash unless he really gets creative. But that’s something he’s always been used to.
“I haven’t done a whole lot with light before,” he says, already conjuring up ideas.
“Well there you go, kid,” Tony says, winking, and slides his glasses back on. Turns away.
It doesn’t feel quite normal. Almost, but it’s not. Peter doesn’t really know how to say it, but there’s an emptiness there. There’s a missing piece, a chink in the armor that he feels with every step.
It’s something he isn’t sure he knows how to get back.
Peter stumbles into the living room bleary-eyed and confused. School was rough. Everything is too much. Everything is too much, it's all up to eleven, he doesn't think he can handle this. The sound, the lights, the smells, the—
"Hey, Pete?" It's Tony, in the kitchen. "You okay?"
“Yeah, it’s just…” Peter shakes his head, all but collapses on the couch. The living room and kitchen are one room, one big, wide open space, separated by the bar. Tony leans over the counter and frowns at him. Peter squeezes his eyes shut (too much, too much) and turns away.
“Kid?”
Peter hears the slide of Tony’s shoes on the tile as he turns, hears him step a little closer, hears every breath he’s taking, he hears everything, everything, it’s all so loud and he can’t make it stop—
Head in his hands, vision beginning to swim, Peter says in a whisper, “I don’t feel so good.”
The mug shatters on the floor.
The sound is deafening. Peter startles violently and whirls around—something’s wrong. Something is wrong something is very very wrong—Tony is gripping the counter, face pale, mouth halfway open. Frozen. Looking like he might fall over any second. Shit. Shit!
Pushing back the pounding in his head, Peter jumps to his feet and stumbles over to Tony. His eyes are glassy, like he’s a thousand miles away. “M-Mr. Stark, oh my god, what’s wrong, are—are you—Mr. Stark? Mr. Stark—”
He puts his hand on Tony’s shoulder. He’s gasping, heart racing, and Peter can hear it, he can feel it—he knows in an instant that this is some kind of anxiety attack. He feels like he's going to throw up. “Mr. Stark, I—sit down, you gotta sit down, or something, I don’t know,” he doesn’t know, and yeah Peter has these himself but that doesn’t mean he knows how to deal with them, “c-c’mon Mr. Stark, it’s—it’s okay—”
He doesn’t know what’s happening. Or, he does, but he doesn’t know why.
Did Peter say something? Did he…
Tony leans against him heavily. Holding Peter like he might crumble. Like he might crumble… the words echo in Peter’s head, uncomfortable, almost painful.
Peter breathes. The lights are too bright, like needles in his eyes. It hurts. Every sound grates on him, crawls into his head and screams. He closes his eyes, and he breathes.
Tony, still leaning on him, tries to.
They stay like that for several moments until Tony's breathing is a little closer to normal. Finally—still gripping Peter’s arm for dear life—he mutters,
“I’m—I’m going to go work in—the lab.” His voice is strained, tight, choked.
Peter nods, reluctantly sitting back, unsure of what to do as Tony lets go of him and stumbles away. Before he leaves the room, though, he pauses, bracing himself against the doorway.
“Don’t… don’t say that again,” he says, voice breaking. “Please. I…”
Peter frowns, mind running back—what did he say? What—
It finally hits him, then—knocks the wind out of him with the force of it.
Oh.
Oh.
I don’t feel so good, he’d said.
As the words run through his head, Peter feels sick, remembers them as they left his mouth back on Titan. I don’t feel so good…
I don’t want to go. Please, I don’t want to go—
“I…”
Peter halts. Swallows.
Doesn’t say another word.
Tony walks away—stumbles away, more like it, and the mug is still shattered on the floor, and Peter is left standing, an ache in his heart that makes him want nothing more than to rip it right out.
“You need to talk to him.”
Pepper’s skin is soft on Tony’s as she runs her hands down his bare chest. She lays her head on it, pressing her ear against his body and closing her eyes. A heartbeat thrums there, steady and strong.
She thinks, not for the first time, that Tony’s heart has seen more than anyone’s should’ve.
“I know.”
There’s something off in his voice—something, Pepper realizes, that has been there since 2008 and never really did leave him, even when all anyone thought of Tony Stark was that he was doing just fine.
Peter is on the floor, covering his ears. Too much. It’s all too much.
Tony’s drunk in the kitchen, and he hates himself for it, hates how irresponsible this is, what a fucked-up father figure he’s turning out to be. Because that’s what this is, isn’t it? That’s what this is.
Peter shouldn’t see him like this.
He stumbles, drops something and it crashes to the ground. Peter starts to cry. He sits there on the floor in the living room, with his knees tucked into his chest.
“You died,” Tony says.
“I know,” Peter says.
Minutes pass. Tony drops his forehead onto the counter and lets out a loud, broken sob.
“You died,” he says, and his voice is warped and distorted. “I lost you, Pete, I lost you, you crumbled, you turned to fucking ash because I failed you, I fucked it up…”
He failed the whole goddamn universe and nothing can ever be right again.
Peter buries his head in his knees.
Too much, Peter thinks, desperate. Too much, it’s too much, I can’t, I can’t, I’m sorry—
I fucked it up, Tony thinks, aching. I failed you.
He wakes up with a pounding headache the next morning. He remembers every second and he hates himself.
Tony apologizes. He sounds almost as broken as he did when he was drunk.
Peter grabs a bottle of wine out of the refrigerator and throws it hard at one of the windows, sending it smashing straight through. Tony is too shocked to say anything. Peter doesn’t speak to Tony for twenty-four hours.
The time passes in a blur, and Tony wonders if he’s really done it now, if he’s broken this, the one good thing he thought he'd been able to save.
Early the next afternoon, Peter sends him a quick text. I forgive you.
Tony’s quick to respond. It won’t happen again.
He thinks—and he’s not sure but he thinks he might mean it this time.
Howard Stark was no kind of father. Tony’s going to be better. He has to be better. Because Parker luck be damned, Peter deserves that much.
It doesn’t happen with a lot of words.
Tony’s a wordy guy. He knows how to talk, how to chat up a pretty girl (or boy) at a party, how to sweet-talk the press (which never fixes much, but he likes to think it helps).
Feelings, though.
They’re not…
His thing. They never have been.
Maybe it’s Howard Stark who set the ball rolling, or maybe it was his father before him, or maybe it’s a chain that dates farther back than Tony’s eyes can reach. Or maybe—and this, he thinks, is the most plausible answer—it’s Tony himself and it always has been, and there’s no one else to turn around and blame.
So it doesn’t happen with a lot of words, with a heartfelt conversation of confessions and promises. It’s simpler than that. And maybe—
Maybe for them it’s better. Maybe he’s doing this right. Tony knows he wants to get this right, needs to get this right—this isn’t something he can fuck up. Not this one. Not this kid.
Tony stops Peter in the hallway one day, as Peter’s just bursting in after school, waving his phone around, something about his Aunt May giving him permission—
Tony halts it all right there.
He takes Peter by the shoulders.
Looks him in the eye and says, “Kid, I—you have to know this. You—I love you, okay?”
He pulls Peter into a hug—a real one, not grabbing the door for him, not a desperate last-ditch attempt at keeping him from turning to ashes, no bluffing, no tears, no terror, none of that bullshit—this is a real hug , this is Tony pulling Peter close and pressing the kid into his chest and carding his hands through the kid’s hair because this is his kid, this is something important, this is something he is going to protect.
"God, I'm so glad you're back," he whispers. "I thought I'd lost you. I thought I'd lost you for good."
In the end they need to do a bit more talking than that. (“You need me, kid, I’m here. I’m here. No more getting wasted in front of you and—and any of that shit show. I’m here for you.”)
But all the hard stuff, that’s over with, that’s out of the way. And in the end it wasn’t hard so much as it was a relief.
Peter starts doing it more often—hugging him. It catches him off guard, but Tony learns that he likes it.
It doesn’t come easy, but they need it. They both do.
They’ll figure it out.