Chapter Text
STARK TOWER - 2015
When Peter comes to, the first thing he registers is that his bed is ridiculously comfortable. A soft, contented sound slips out as a result, and that leads to what Peter pegs as a chair shifting aggressively enough to make a sound against the floor.
Why the hell is someone sitting in a chair by his bed?
Peter opens his eyes to find himself an answer to that question, and with an unusual amount of grogginess, he discovers Tony on one side of him and May on the other, twin sets of huge, dark eyes staring at him in wonder.
That’s kind of a lot of pressure, but despite it all, the first words that come out of Peter’s very dry mouth are straight to the point: “Were you guys watching me sleep?”
May moves first, and Peter finds himself being crushed in her embrace, tight and a little harried but no less loving for it. “Don’t you ever do that to us again,” she hisses over his shoulder, and Peter’s arms raise hesitantly to wrap around her in return, rubbing her shoulder blade where he can reach.
“I—uh—I’m sorry?”
He’s trying to remember what he might’ve done to warrant this kind of reception, but while he can recall something, he needs someone to spell it out for him, the memories too hazy to bring into focus on his own.
May still hasn’t let go, and her hair is soft against Peter’s cheek. “You better be,” she whispers fiercely, and Peter’s eyes slide to Tony in a silent question before May tugs herself back to press no less than three kisses to his face she cups in her hands. Peter lets her without protest, and as soon as she’s gone, Tony replaces her.
His hold isn’t as soft as hers, is coarse and earned over time instead of May’s natural affection, but it’s a different brand of home nonetheless. Peter doesn’t complain about it either, not when, now that he’s focusing, he can hear their hearts beating a touch too fast.
“You scared the shit out of me, kid,” Tony mumbles when he falls back into his seat, bags hanging, dark as bruises, under his eyes.
It’s pretty telling that he’s cussing in front of Peter around May, who he normally is on his best behavior for.
Peter looks from Tony to May and back again. “What happened?” he asks, and he hopes the depths of his confusion shine through his tone. “I remember some of it, but it’s really—uh—blurry? I’m gonna’ need some help filling in the whole picture.”
Tony laughs, but the sound is thin, incredulous. “That tracks, I guess,” he replies, scrubbing a hand down his face. “When we got to you, you were drugged to the gills on the ground of an alley. There was a beat-up guy on the wall nearby, and a kid laying a few feet from you. He told emergency responders that he’d been a hostage for the other guy so he could get to you.”
Peter paints the scene Tony describes in his mind, and as far as he can tell, it sounds accurate. His lips pinch and brows furrow, trying to summon more details. “The man on the wall,” he begins tentatively, “he was a doctor, right? He was—”
The memories rise fast and sudden, torrential—syringes, blood, scalpels, blood, scars, blood—
“Oh my God, he was HYDRA.” Peter’s head jerks up in a tight, fearful motion, staring at Tony. “He had—he had a copy of your words, and he was going to use them to—to—”
He can’t remember, exactly, but he knows it was bad, knows that he was handing himself over both for the kid on the ground and because he threatened to do something to Tony with his triggers.
“You don’t need to worry about it,” Tony assures him, but no, no, empty attempts at soothing him aren’t going to work here.
Peter shakes his head quickly. “No, really, he had another book, it was yellow and had the check and—”
“It was fake.”
The panic drains out of Peter just as quickly as it arrived.
(The world spins around in circles, and later, Peter will look back on the moment and acknowledge how strange it is to have revisited the same experience from a few months ago, the fear that he didn’t do enough to keep Tony’s words out of HYDRA’s grasp.)
“What?”
“It was fake,” Tony reiterates. “It was a good imitation—a really good imitation—but Bucky found it when he showed up with me because you wouldn’t pick up my calls. The guy got the outside right, but the pages were all blank.”
Peter stares, unable to find anything to say, and May cuts in with words he doesn’t have. “That other boy is okay, too. An ambulance got there around the same time Bucky and Tony did, and they got him fixed up. SHIELD took the man into their custody. Everything turned out okay, honey.”
“You did it,” Tony adds, and as Peter, gobsmacked, looks between the two of them, past concern, he sees pride written all over their expressions.
It’s a lot to process, if he’s honest, because what the two of them have described has made things a whole lot clearer, beginning with the fact that the terror Peter felt at HYDRA being able to sink their teeth back into Tony was unwarranted.
In and of itself, the news isn’t particularly earth-shattering. But if the doctor had wanted, he could’ve shot the kid and told Peter help wasn’t coming unless he agreed to go with him, could’ve gone about it a thousand other ways. Instead, he went for the jugular.
There’s more than one disturbing element to the picture forming in Peter’s head of what happened, but Peter finds himself viscerally unnerved that the doctor recognized that the most effective way to force his hand would be to threaten someone Peter loves.
The image is murky of Peter letting him tranquilize him, of the doctor threatening Tony and watching him cave just like that, but it’s there and horrifying nonetheless, ready to drag Peter down if he’ll allow it.
But Tony’s words from a second ago echo in his ears—“You did it.”—and Peter manages to muster a smile. “Yeah, I did,” he affirms softly, mostly to himself.
He lets the fact wash over him, the realization—lucid, this time—that he’s stronger than what HYDRA has to offer, and despite everything, including the considerable harm he suspects he did to the doctor’s body but finds it hard to feel regret about, the smile grows to a grin. “Shit, I did.”
May smiles too, the motion a little watery but still happy. “Watch your mouth,” she protests feebly, and Peter snorts at the mundanity of it, only for his attention to be drawn by Tony clearing his throat.
“If you’re feeling up to it, I know about six other people who’d like to see that you’re doing okay.”
Peter takes a moment to think about it, the group of nine of them, counting May, Tony, and him, and then he thinks of those forever gone from his life and the splintered pieces they left behind. There are no replacements for all that Peter has lost, but there is something new and beautiful in it, the always chaotic, occasionally prickly, surprisingly close-knit lot of them.
He nods. “Bring them in,” he agrees.
(Over a decade from where his story with Tony began, Peter finds himself, despite the pain sprawled in heaps across its pages, loving the inevitable outcome of it.)
//
STARK TOWER - 2015
“Seventy-six percent,” Tony tells Rhodey, his foot tapping on the ground.
Rhodey hums, sitting on a nearby table. He’ll have to go back to work soon—already, he’s been flying out for a few days here and there, working up to leaving for a longer bout of time, though Tony insists that he’ll always be welcome at the Tower—but for now, they’re sitting in the lab, watching some harebrained idea from the 80s come to life. “It’s gonna’ be weird to hear his voice again,” he admits, more casually blunt than anyone else with him.
Both Tony and the boy he once was love Rhodey for a lot of reasons, but that’s one of his favorite things about him. Rhodey knows he’s different now, isn’t the teenager from his memories, but he doesn’t care, only changes as much as is necessary as they pick up where their old friendship left off.
Tony nods, though he doesn’t look his way, watching the progress bar inch its way to completion. “You met?”
“A few times.”
“I brought you home?”
“Nah—he came to visit.”
“Makes sense.”
Rhodey heard him talking about upgrading the Tower’s AI and said Tony had ideas from way back when scrawled in journals Rhodey salvaged from their apartment, but he didn’t think it could come this far. It’s a little out of his element, true—HYDRA had him work with hardware more often than not, and by hardware, he means a lot of weaponizable materials—but it’s fun to make, even better with Rhodey and occasionally Peter helping.
Tony’s having more fun with life in general, these days, and it’s so much better than he thought it would be. Still, the idea of reconnecting with someone the past him loved, even if his memories of the man are hazy at best, is exciting, and Tony eyes the progress bar again.
Eighty-four percent.
It’s going fairly quickly, but JARVIS is a lot of information to absorb.
“It’s wild to think that you’ve come this far from DUM-E.”
Huh?
Tony raises a brow, glancing to Rhodey. “From what?”
Rhodey blinks, and he looks at Tony for a second like he’s the idiot before his expression straightens out. “Sorry, I forget sometimes,” he leads into it, and then, “DUM-E’s the name of a bot you created at MIT. Your first AI, technically, but JARVIS is way more advanced. I still have him in storage, actually, if you want him, but you always said he was a lousy helper.”
Rhodey tells him as much with a twinkle in his eye, and Tony makes a note to figure out the joke, or at least, what about DUM-E makes Rhodey wear that fond, almost-exasperated look. For now—
“And why did I name it that?”
Rhodey snorts. “Because you knew the media—and Howard—was going to go ballistic over it, I think, and you thought it was funny to call the most advanced AI in the world stupid.”
Tony can’t stop himself from smiling a little because it is funny, okay? Except when he does, he finds Rhodey staring at him like—like—
Well, Tony doesn’t know. His gaze is all soupy and his lips are curved in a quiet, unconscious sort of way, and it’s all too soft an expression for anyone to direct towards him bar Peter, maybe.
“What?” he asks, frowning.
Rhodey holds up his hands placatingly, shaking his head. “Nothing, Tones. Don’t worry about it.”
(It’s a lot rarer, these days, for Tony to be happy over something stupid like the dumbass name he gave his bot, and Rhodey cherishes what shows of his old sense of humor.)
The frown deepens. “Tell me,” he tries to insist because yeah, maybe he wants to pummel Natasha sometimes—and he knows the feeling is mutual, for that matter—but he’s just as bad as her when it comes to being out of the loop. He could probably get Rhodey to crack. Something tells him he has before, anyway, but—
Beep!
Tony’s head snaps toward the computer, and sure enough, the progress bar is full—one hundred percent.
Tony holds his breath, but tentatively, he speaks to the room and the mics stashed around it. “JARVIS?”
“At your service, sir.”
Tony’s listened to videos of the man JARVIS is based on—it’s where he got his voice, after all—but the sense of warmth he got from watching him there didn’t prepare him for this, the feeling, however illogical, that Edwin Jarvis is physically present.
“Shit, Tones,” Rhodey breathes in awe, staring at the ceiling even though Tony’s told him and everyone else that an AI isn’t actually up there. “I knew you could do it but wow—wow.”
Yeah, Tony thinks, at a loss for words himself, wow.
Tears begin to roll down Tony’s cheeks. He doesn’t get why, really, but he hopes it’ll come back to him. In the meantime, Rhodey gets up and comes to wrap an arm around his shoulders, and Tony likes the feeling of resting his head on Rhodey’s body.
Life for Tony isn’t always as straightforward as this, unhindered incredulity and more than a little giddiness, but when it is, Tony finds himself liking it. It’s different than the lack of options with HYDRA, vastly better. This is a situation he’s created, and it’s one where he’s also decided to let himself bask in it. It’s his, and the Soldier—a creature fiercely protective of his light, a constant source of pain, because it was the only thing he owned—wouldn’t have believed it possible.
“Peter’s going to think this is the coolest shit,” Tony manages after a long moment, and Rhodey laughs.
Tony’s right about that. At the time of launching JARVIS, Peter’s out with May and Natasha looking for some new clothes to wear to the school he has plans to return to in a few weeks—to wear on the commute from his apartment with May, too. His old clothes don’t fit horribly, but they’re a little too big with him still struggling to fill out again post-HYDRA. He comes back from the trip pale—Tony, for one, suspects it can’t be easy to go into a dressing room and stare at the scars lying under the high-coverage clothes he favors nowadays—but when Tony tells him to ask the room about the weather, his face lights up at the crisp, accented answer he receives.
“Holy shit—you got him up and running!” he enthuses.
“Peter,” May reminds him, gone to the pantry to find something to eat.
He throws her a cursory, bashful smile. “Sorry,” he apologizes quickly, and then his attention is back on Tony. “Is he going to run SI now?”
Tony shrugs. “I’ll have to test him out some more, but hopefully, yes. He’ll do better than the current model, anyway.”
Peter agrees, and then Tony fades into the background, too, because he’s busy shooting off a thousand different questions at JARVIS and responding with delight as they’re answered not only accurately but with a personality to match.
It’s something of an out of body experience, still, having his inventions received with something other than dry expectation, and inwardly, Tony preens at Peter’s and eventually everyone else’s fascination with JARVIS.
Peter was the first person to be innocently interested in anything of the Soldier’s that day he found out about the arc reactor, and seeing him so excited just makes Tony’s anger towards the doctor who tried to take him away burn that much hotter.
He tries not to think about it too much—not the man himself, anyway, who’s still recovering from the shit Peter put him through because he was too drugged to remember how to control his strength.
He’s talked to Bucky about that one, the sheer power Peter’s too good to let loose normally. “He broke most of his ribs with one punch,” Tony had explained a few days after the incident had passed, long enough for Peter to feel comfortable going out as Spider-Man again and also long enough for Fury, through methods Tony doesn’t care enough to ask after, gets the doctor’s side of things and tells them to Tony when he won’t leave it alone. “Grabbed him by his shirt and broke his collarbone in the process. The asshole’s lucky he doesn’t have brain damage.”
The two of them saw the damage first hand when they arrived to find why the fuck Peter wasn’t responding to any of his calls, saw the wall splintered where Peter had pressed the man against it.
(Even after all their time with people allowed to be stronger than anyone needs to be, the sight unnerved both of them, evidence of someone as young as Peter losing it.)
Tony will never forget what it was like to see Peter laying on the ground, eyes glazed and face slack. For a second, seeing the blood everywhere, having the metallic stench in his nose, Tony thought he was dead before he caught the muted thump-thump-thump of Peter’s heart.
It wasn’t the first time he’s been around a questionably conscious Peter, but he hopes it will be the last.
Fury has the man locked up tight, or at least, that’s what Bucky tells him when it’s late at night and Tony goes up to the gym to do something other than lay in bed and grind his teeth in fury.
He’s had more than one dream about showing the doctor exactly what it means to mess with his fucking kid, but he’s been trying to tamp down on his more violent urges. He’s yet to feel even a sliver of regret for how he handled Stane or Pierce, but he recognizes that hurting people to solve his problems is not a great thing. It’s easier to ignore the urge with everyone around, anyway, following Bucky’s lead as he uses his metal hand as delicately as possible, seeing Rhodey brighten up a room with a smile or May quietly bulldoze her way through any inconvenience in her path.
He knows Peter’s getting better, too. He struggles in different ways than Tony, ends up falling back on the bare minimum he needs to scrape by whereas Tony turns rough and mechanical on his bad days, but progress is progress.
And when Peter comes to him and asks if he can take him by his friend’s—Ned’s—house after Midtown lets out for the day, Tony is so, so proud.
He texts May, who’s at work, before they leave, and though her response is succinct, probably tapped out fast on break, when Tony watches from the curb as Peter collapses into an unfamiliar boy’s arms, he thinks he understands the depth of what she means by Thank you. He needs it.
He turns the car off and lets the two of them take as long as they need, and all by himself, no one knows about the tears—becoming more common and less mortifying the more time that passes—that prick the back of his eyes at how it resembles what he has with Rhodey. He can hear the two of them crying, though he makes a point of tuning out their conversation to the best of his ability. He knows how draining reunions of that caliber can be, despite how good they feel, so when Peter slides back into the passenger seat, Tony expects a quiet drive back to the Tower.
Still, he makes sure to ask him what he wants as they drive away and Peter—probably without realizing it—presses a hand to the window and watches his friend until he fades into the distance. “Where to?”
But Peter surprises him, even as he stares seemingly innocuously at the passing scenery. “How about patrol?”
Tony shoots him a look after shouting at people being idiots at a four-way stop—goddamn residential areas. “Patrol? You sure? You look a little worn out.”
Peter nods decisively. “Yeah, patrol.” And then, doing a bad job of subtly looking at Tony out of the corner of his eye—“You could come with, if you want.”
Tony’s brows furrow. “I thought you didn’t need to be followed anymore.”
Has he missed something? Has Peter not been doing as well as he thought? Has—
Peter shakes his head. “Not with you following me. Come with, like you could help Spider-Man—help me—do my thing.” A beat. “If you want,” he tacks on once more.
Tony mulls it over, the sounds of the car beneath them purring in the ensuing silence.
He doesn’t know why Peter would be inviting him along, now. Spider-Man is his thing, and Tony doesn’t think he’d want it having anything to do with HYDRA, so why would he invite Tony—
Tony’s mouth goes dry, and his fingers tighten incrementally on the wheel.
He’s not HYDRA anymore, is he? Neither of them is.
(Neither of them has been for a while, and after seeing Ned, someone so distanced from the pain that’s been snapping at his heels for so long, Peter wants to give Tony the same opportunity to be utterly disconnected from it all.)
Tony nods. “I’d like that,” he agrees, and after they get back to the Tower and change into clothes more fitting for such an excursion, Tony finds out what it’s like to have people look at him and his enhancements and see someone to like, not fear.
He ties a ripped shirt around his head to mask everything on his face below his eyes, and instead of it being like his muzzle, there’s a freedom in the fabric flapping in the wind as he climbs after Spider-Man, separating Tony Stark from a different, freer version of himself he didn’t know existed.
He drops in on a scene with Spider-Man, and people don’t see him as a Soldier, a threat. They don’t know about his body count or the reactor or any of the suffering he’s gone through. They see another protector, and as a woman thanks them for saving her purse from a thief, as they leave a would-be robber on a wall to, in Peter’s words, “dwell on his actions”, as they walk a little kid, around the same size as Peter when Tony first met him, home, Tony understands why Peter loves what he does so much.
It’s nice to be a billionaire, true. There’s a sense of purpose there, but it’s not this, the satisfaction of just being good.
And when, at last, they head back to the Tower because Bucky calls and says Sam and May have teamed up to make dinner, Tony finds himself unbelievably grateful that Peter would share something so—for lack of a better word—sacred with someone like Tony.
He’s always been a good kid, always been Tony’s, even if neither of them realized it, but sometimes Tony thinks about where he would be without him and is dumbstruck at the idea of still responding to HYDRA’s beck and call.
Peter and Tony have always saved each other, and that’s something HYDRA never could’ve predicted—their Soldier, having forgotten so much else, being retaught how to love.
Tony also recognizes, however, that they couldn’t have done it without the rest of them, and after dinner, he, feeling unusually off-kilter with the depth of his appreciation, admits it at large. They’re all sitting around the living room, talking to one another about anything and everything the way they’ve somehow learned to do, and when there’s a lull, he blurts it out: “You know, I know it hasn’t always been easy. Not with me, because I can be an asshole, and—uh—definitely not with where I came from, because those guys are even bigger assholes, but thank you all. For everything.”
To that, he receives a lot of responses—a gentle smile from Pepper, a reliable stare from Steve, a raised brow from Sam—but Bucky speaks first, a gentle tease to his voice. “You know, I think that’s the most emotion I’ve seen you willingly show in one go.”
Tony goes from observing the room as a whole to glaring at Bucky because okay, so what if it is, he’ll rescind his thank you to him if he’s going to be rude. That’s what he was planning on saying, anyway, with an appropriate amount of dramatic flair, but he’s distracted, and Peter, the shithead, takes him by surprise. “The first person to hug him gets five dollars from me.”
Tony’s eyes widen, and his attention snaps to Peter. “No—no, if anyone touches me, I will ki—”
Rhodey, directly to his left, cuts him off, swamping him in a tight embrace that Tony could get out of if he tried but doesn’t because—sue him—it feels nice, not that he’ll admit it. “Shut up, Tones,” he says, and then the others close in, varying degrees of tactile but all there, eclectic and cluttered and perfect because Tony never thought he’d enjoy something so pure so much.
(Never thought he’d get the chance.)
It’s a community of his own, something he made out of ashes and likes despite the mess it might make from time to time. It’s everything Tony needs, and he goes to bed that night with an echo of the warmth of it all nestled next to his heart, a twin flame to the joy he got out of what Peter showed him as Spider-Man. It’s a previously unimaginable reality, that fighting doesn’t have to be something to dread or pour too much of himself into, and Tony wonders if he can find himself a future within it.
There’s Peter and Spider-Man on one hand, SHIELD on the other.
Tony’s rested and grown, and now, he thinks there’s a place somewhere for every version of himself available, should he pursue it. Tony Stark, billionaire, is focused on using his wealth positively, and Tony, a boy turned as brutally as possible into a man and alive in spite of it, can use the abilities he’s received along the way to do the same, no matter how hard it is to find a balance between the two, no matter how his mind will fight him along the way, no matter how long it takes.
Over a decade ago, Tony began to worm his way free with the sight of a little boy and his brown, brown eyes, and if he made it this far off of something that should’ve been so little, he’s certain there’s no stopping him now.