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Thumping tenor of ACDC, the scraping sound of the screwdriver against the repulsor he was working on and other than those familiar sounds, complete, blissful silence. Until, of course, JARVIS interrupted with an announcement.
“Sir, you have a phone call on your personal number,” came his AI’s voice, jolting Tony out of his work binge and he put down the screwdriver, resting the gauntlet on his workbench.
“Is it urgent?” Tony asked, considering. It wasn’t often he got calls on his personal number—only several people had access to it. Rhodey, for one. Pepper. Happy. People he trusted.
“Unknown number,” JARVIS told him. “I can send it to voicemail if you wish, sir.”
Tony’s eyebrows raised. How the hell had an unknown number gotten a direct line to his personal phone? He felt the urge to check Twitter—had someone leaked his number online? No—JARVIS would have said something by now, he kept an eye on that sort of thing.
It was probably a call centre, or something. Tony was overthinking it.
“Eh, what the hell,” Tony shrugged. He’d put down his screwdriver and was invested now. “Put it through.”
There was the tell-tale click of JARVIS connecting the phone call through to his mobile, which Tony put up to his ear. He waited for the caller to make the first move, which they did.
“Hey,” The mystery person breathed. “Uh, sorry to bother you—”
Tony took the phone away from his ear to stare at it. Because that was a child’s voice. A teenager, at most, his voice still high, not having dropped. He was speaking to a goddamn child. Tony couldn’t remember the last time he spoken to a child, except maybe Harley all those years back. And this wasn't Harley. Harley would never have said sorry to bother you, that was far too polite to be the boy from Tennessee.
Tony said nothing, but the boy continued to talk anyways, stating his intention. Tony put the phone back to his ear.
“I was wondering if you could give me some advice on how to bandage uh—a stab wound?”
“Call 911, kid,” Tony told him sharply, and considered putting down the phone.
“That’s what I’m—ouch, ouch—doing.” The boy must have moved, or something, because he made a groaning noise that came through the phone. Then he breathed out—loudly and repeated himself. “That’s who I’m calling, right?”
So the kid thought he was 911. That was just great.
“Uh,” Tony blinked, forming the words to tell him that no, he wasn’t actually an emergency services operator, or anything like that. How exactly was he going to break it to a teenager with a stab wound that he’d connected directly to Tony Stark’s personal line? Hold on—stab wound?
“Wait, kid, did you say stab wound?” Tony asked, alarmed.
How the fuck had a teenager been stabbed? That wasn’t the kind of thing that happened in fights with your mates—or bullies. At least that hadn’t happened when Tony was a kid. Had someone mugged him? What kind of asshole would mug a teenage boy and then proceed to stab him?
“Yuppp,” The kid drew the word out. “Bad man stabbed me. Not a good day. Should have dodged it. Stomach hurts now.”
Tony’s jaw dropped open slightly. “Someone stabbed you in the stomach?”
Shit, shit, shit, stomach wounds were bad. Tony knew that from experience. He’d been impaled with various sharp objects in the stomach many times in his line of work as an Avenger, and he knew how bad they were. He could have severe organ damage—so many vital things were in that area of his body.
The kid made another pained noise, and Tony kicked into action.
“Look—” Tony stammered. “Kid, do you have anyone there with you? Anyone to help you out? A parent, guardian, just someone?”
This could be bad. Really bad.
“My aunt’s working,” He told Tony, his voice pitched high. “And she can’t know.”
“Kid,” Tony said, disapprovingly.
“She can’t.”
Great, he was working with a stubborn teenager. Wonderful. That was just perfect.
Tony had had enough stab wounds in his life to know what to do in this kind of situation. He wasn't qualified like a 911 operator would be, sure, but he didn’t think the kid was actually capable of hanging up the phone and being able to call someone else, so this was on him. Shit. This was on him.
He was now responsible for the life of a teenager he didn’t even know the name of. Maybe he should have let the phone call go to voicemail in the end.
No time for that.
Tony blinked. It would be easier to work with him if he at least knew what to call him. “Hey, kid, what’s your name?”
“Peter,” the teenager whispered. “Peter Parker. I live in Apartment 5A, 456 Maguire Street, Queens, if you need to check my address.”
Right, 911 Operators tended to check on that kind of thing, making sure people were real and all of that. Peter was a New York kid, that made sense. Most likely a mugging, then. It made Tony’s stomach twist. All of the good the team of Avengers had done over the last several years, and there were still people like that out there, even in the city they were based in.
It made him grateful there were other heroes in New York—no, shit, seriously not the time to be thinking about swinging heroes he wanted to make contact with when he had a kid on the other end of the line suffering, wanting advice.
“Okay, Peter, we’re going to walk through a couple of steps now,” Tony breathed, refocusing on the situation at hand.
“Alright, sir,” Peter coughed. “Go for it.”
“I’m going to talk you through stopping the blood flow, and then we’re going to get someone sent to you,” Tony told him. He could get JARVIS to send an ambulance there, right? He had his address. Just as he was about to order his AI to do exactly that, though, Peter interjected.
“No ambulance,” Peter said, his voice strained. “That’s—I don’t need that. I’ll be fine. Just walk me through the steps to do it myself. I don’t need anyone.”
“I think I should get an ambulance sent to you, Peter,” Tony replied, worried. 911 operators were definitely supposed to order ambulances and professional medical help to teenagers with potentially fatal stab wounds, right?
“No ambulance,” Peter insisted. “Ambulances are—ouch, fuck—a no-go, trust me. I’m fine.”
He definitely wasn’t supposed to trust the word of a teenager who’d been stabbed and was likely barely conscious, but fuck it, Tony himself didn’t like it when people went back on trust. So he was going to listen to the kid, and not order an ambulance to his apartment.
Which, in retrospect, had probably been a bad plan.
“Fine,” Tony coughed. “This might be a stupid question, but did you leave the knife or object…in the wound?”
“Uh,” Peter swallowed, loud enough that Tony could hear it through his phone. “I—I took it out. Was that wrong?”
Yes.
“No!” Tony said instead, his voice high-pitched. “I wouldn’t—um—recommend it, but—don’t put it back in! Uh, we’ll work with it. So, you’re going to want to keep pressure on that wound. Like, serious pressure. We want to slow down the blood flow.”
“I’ll leave the knife in next time,” Peter murmured, his voice quiet.
Tony’s eyebrows shot up. Why the hell did he think he was going to be stabbed more than once?!
“Hold on, just let me adjust the phone one second so I can speak to you whilst keeping pressure on this,” Peter huffed, and put down the phone. There was a scratchy noise as it connected with some kind of surface.
“Jar, am I doing alright?” Tony hissed, covering the speaker so Peter wouldn’t hear.
His AI was quick to respond. “According to Google, sir, and several other medical sources, you are following the correct advice.”
Great. He was doing just wonderfully, following the advice of Google in order to save a kid’s life over the phone.
“Now, kid,” Tony said when Peter’s voice returned to the phone, telling him he was back. “I need to know how much it’s bleeding, and how you’re feeling. Aside from the pain, do you feel dizzy at all? Sick? Thirsty?”
“Um,” Peter paused to think about it. “A bit?”
Shit, he was probably going to go into shock. This was a serious wound. Pressure wasn’t going to be enough.
“Okay, I’m going to have to talk you through making a tourniquet,” Tony’s heart was beating fast. He’d made tourniquets for himself before, as temporary stop-gaps before he could get back to the Avengers medbay, and he’d even done them on other people as well, but never had he tried to teach someone to make one over the phone.
He quickly briefed Peter on the basics of tying a bandage like that. He was picturing it—trying to imagine how it was going to work on his stomach. Probably not very well, being realistic. Especially given that Peter was likely in unbearable pain.
“I kind of bandaged it,” Peter told him, his tone of voice uncertain, as though he wasn’t sure how effective his bandage was going to be.
“Okay,” Tony blinked. “That’s good. Keep pressure on it. We don’t want—just keep pressure on it, alright?”
There was a silence.
“Peter?” He checked.
Another silence.
Tony coughed. “Peter, are you still there?”
That time, there was a response. It was not exactly the one that Tony had wanted.
“Hey, Mr 911 Operator, I think I might be dying?” Peter told him, his voice high-pitched and nervous.
“Shit, okay, kid, uh, hang on,” Tony stood up, running a hand through his hair. “Hang on just a second.”
But Peter was done listening.
“Thanks for trying,” The teenager was clearly on the verge of tears, if not already crying. “And for not calling an ambulance. ‘ppreciate it, sir.”
Then there was the familiar noise of someone hanging up the phone.
Tony clutched at his phone, yelling into it: “Peter. Peter.”
He was gone. Bleeding out, alone on his floor, with a shitty tourniquet and no-one else but Tony Stark knew.
“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.” Tony stressed, raking his hand through his hair again and staring at his phone. Then he breathed, and stared at the ceiling. “JARVIS?”
JARVIS always knew what was happening.
“He is going into shock, sir.” The AI informed him. “It will most likely kill him, especially from the extent of the blood loss he is likely facing.”
“Should I order the ambulance now?”
Tony didn’t care about breach of trust, because to hell with it, the kid was dying, all bargains he’d made went out the window.
JARVIS was not, however, in agreement with him. “By my calculations, the ambulance will not reach him in time to save him, sir.”
“Then what the hell should I do?” Tony yelled, frustrated.
“I have to admit, sir, I don’t quite know.”
Even his omniscient fucking AI didn’t know how to save this kid. If even the ambulance couldn’t make it in time to save him, what the hell was he supposed to do? He was a genius billionaire who had access to a flying suit of armour, but was he meant to fly there and drop him off at the nearest emergency room? No way in hell was he trusting some random doctor. Fuck, it wasn’t like he had a private hospital just for he use that he could exploit—oh.
He did, actually. They had an Avengers Medbay for that specific function, and they mostly treated superhuman heroes, but he’d be damned if his highly-trained medical staff didn’t know how to treat a normal teenager with a stab wound.
Tony cocked his head, already speeding toward the armour. “Is Dr Cho still in Medbay?”
“She is,” JARVIS affirmed.
“Tell her not to leave yet,” Tony donned the suit, and it encased itself around him like his second skin. He breathed out deeply. “I’ll pay her triple her wages if she stays tonight. Set a flightpath for Apartment 5A, 456 Maguire Street, Queens.”
Fuck it, this was what he was doing this evening, he guessed as he ran out of the workshop to the take off platform in the Tower. Saving someone’s life. It sure as hell wasn’t what he’d expected to be doing.
The responsible thing to do would have been to send an ambulance to Peter’s house, really, he thought as he flew over to Queens. Someone who was much more qualified to deal with the situation. Or hell, even to get in direct contact with Dr Cho or Bruce, get them to help, but he didn’t have the time for that. Time was of the essence.
He flew down to the apartment, repulsors burning as fast as he could, and scanned for heat signatures to determine which room Peter was in, and JARVIS quickly found where he was.
“I’ll pay for the window,” Tony muttered under his breath. It was the fastest way in. Sure, he’d pay for the window later, when the teenager who lived in the room wasn’t y’know, bleeding out on the floor.
He landed on the balcony and vaulted through the window, crushing it with his metal hand and shaking the glass off as he crawled into the kid’s room. Tony immediately caught sight of the boy he’d been speaking to over the phone and stepped out of the suit, leaving it behind him by the window.
He looked about fifteen, with brown hair that reminded Tony a hell of a lot of himself as a teen, but that didn’t matter. Peter was somehow conscious, and looked utterly awful—Tony wasn’t going to lie. He was sweating from every pore of his body, and his t-shirt was absolutely coated in blood. Tony could see the remains of the tourniquet, which was too loose to be effective. He had one hand pressed to his stomach, but he was leaning on the other elbow to stare up at him, blinking.
“You’re…Tony Stark,” Peter slurred. “Why’s Tony Stark in my bedroom?”
“Mr 911 Operator, speaking,” Tony shot him a smile, and a wave, as though the kid wasn’t dying and this was some kind of sick Make-a-Wish meeting.
Peter just gaped at him, and then stared at his stomach. Tony rushed closer to him, kneeling down next to the pile of blood on the rug and winced at the wound. It wasn’t as bad as that one time Steve had been impaled out in the field, but that had been Steve, not a kid. In fact, it was almost better than he’d expected it to be, like maybe it had already started to heal or something.
But that was ridiculous. He was probably just used to seeing bloodier wounds on super-soldiers, which wasn’t a great thing to compare it to given that they were mostly in battles with aliens.
“Look, so, kid, I’m not exactly qualified to do this,” Tony flustered, his hands dancing all over the place. “I need to take you to a hospital of some sort.”
“No hospitals,” Peter shook his head, and gasped out his next words because of the pain the movement had caused him. “Insurance. Expensive.”
“You’re forgetting who you’re talking to,” Tony muttered without thinking about it. He’d been trying to talk to the kid about taking him to the Avengers Medbay, not bragging about how rich he was. “I can’t leave you like this, it would be morally wrong. Captain America would kill me. I’m taking you to the Medbay we have at the Tower. We can call your Aunt—”
“Don’t,” Peter hissed. “Can’t tell May I’m injured.”
“Christ, you are stubborn, aren’t you,” Tony shook his head, slightly astounded. No hospitals, no contacting his guardian.
Teenagers, huh?
There had been no objection to Peter being treated in the Avengers Medbay though, which Tony took as a win. “I’m going to fly you back, and that—I’m not going to lie—is probably going to be brutal for you. I’ll try and be nice, but it’s a bumpy ride at the best of times when you’re not injured. But we’ll get there and then we can get Dr Cho to treat you and fill you up with a bunch of drugs—oh. Huh.”
Tony frowned. He was pretty sure that they only had high-strength drugs in the Avengers Medbay, which you definitely weren’t supposed to give to normal teenagers who hadn’t had super serum injected into them or weren’t literal Norse gods. Tony, too, had his own set of pills, and even those weren’t regular painkillers. They all needed a bit of extra kick to them after getting beaten up by aliens.
So Tony spun, desperately searching for a place where supplies would be, figuring the kid would want some Advil or, y’know, some seriously strong pain killers when he woke up. He had to have some, right? Peter wasn’t exactly conscious enough to protest as he walked away, heading for the bathroom where they were sure to keep medical stuff.
And he walked in on—well. It looked like a murder scene. There was blood everywhere, and Tony had no idea how Peter had been planning on hiding this from his aunt, because it actually looked like he’d killed someone and hadn’t gotten around to cleaning it up. There were bloody handprints all over the sink, and the edge of the bath, and everywhere, really. Tony’s gaze was suddenly drawn to a bunch of clothes in the tub because they were covered in blood with a huge gaping hole and was that a mask?—
—Oh. Shit, Tony thought as the realisation hit him swiftly. That kid, bleeding out in the other room, wasn’t just some kid. That kid was Spiderman, as evidenced by the crappy suit with a stab-wound sized hole in it in his bath-tub. Tony had been keeping tab on the swinging dude who helped out New Yorkers, if he was being honest. He kept tabs on most wannabe superheroes, even if it typically turned out to be nothing. Most of the time it was CGI stuff on YouTube, but the Spider guy had seemed real. Tony had seen him out swinging, once, a dash of red and blue in the sky when he’d been walking the city one day.
Tony’s fingers had itched, and since then, he’d desperately wanted to give Spiderman an upgrade for his suit, but Spidey was anonymous and pretty difficult to contact. Tony was being respectful. He wasn’t going to breach the safety and security of an anonymous superhero. At least, until he called Tony up on his phone—half-dead—and gave him his address.
Tony let out a bitter chuckle. What were the chances?
Well, that made a hell of a lot more sense why he’d been stabbed. Spiderman was up all night looking after problems like that—muggers throughout the city. Tony had been thoroughly impressed with his work, really, but he hadn’t realised that the web-slinging masked hero was actually some random fifteen year old. Hell—this kid had barely started high school. Tony shuddered at the thought of it.
He had all of these realisations in about a thirty second time period, staring at the suit in the bathtub, before he snapped into his senses, grabbed all of the painkillers he could see as well as a carrier bag to hold them in. Tony also locked the bathroom. Probably better that Peter’s aunt didn’t wander in there and see that disaster. When he sent someone to replace the window, he’d have to send in a cleaning crew as well, because christ.
Tony sped back into the room and put the suit back on, ready to make a move. Peter had passed out since he’d left, but he was still breathing soundly and the bleeding had slowed, which Tony assumed was a good thing. “JARVIS, scan him.”
JARVIS knew he didn’t want to hear about the kid’s vitals—it didn’t mean shit to Tony—so he just told it as it was. It was actually a pretty similar scenario to how it was when the Avengers got injured.
“He’ll be okay as long as you get him to Dr Cho, sir,” JARVIS’ voice rang direct into his ears. “The wound is healing on its own. He seems to have some kind of advanced healing mechanism?”
“Yeah, he’s Spiderman,” Tony whispered, picking Peter up and being careful not to jostle him too much. Gentle, gentle.
He tried to be careful as well as fast as he flew back to Avengers Tower, but it was inevitable that it was a bit of a rough flight when he had a passenger. Luckily, Peter seemed to have passed out for good, because he didn’t wake up at any point during the journey. It stressed Tony out, because he felt like dead weight, but he could feel the kid breathing and knew he was going to recover just fine.
Tony landed as gently as he possibly could on the landing zone.
Then he carried Peter in his arms—his actual bare arms, without the suit—in a cradled position, keeping him from any harm. Dr Cho should have been confused at the sight of Tony Stark carrying some random teenager, but clearly JARVIS had spent some time debriefing her on the situation, because she was ready and didn’t blink an eye.
“He’s Spiderman,” Tony told her. It was a secret identity, but she was legally obliged to keep secret identities quiet. He paid her for that reason, treating superheroes so they didn’t have to have a doctor who would freak out at the fact that they were heroes. “He has an advanced healing factor, so watch out for that.”
“Should I give him Steve’s drugs?” Cho asked, without blinking an eye at the new piece of information. That was why he’d hired her—always practical.
“Uh,” Tony hadn’t considered the possibility that Peter, as a superhuman himself, probably could handle the zuped-up drugs. “No, don’t. We don’t know his limits.”
Bad idea to dose a kid up on drugs like that.
“Alright. Thanks, Stark, I’ve got this from here.”
Tony didn’t want to leave him, but he knew Cho, and was happy to leave the kid in her capable hands. Tony trusted her to work on himself, which was a privilege most doctors never got. So he trusted her with Peter.
He sat back, exhausted, and considered sleep, before realising that his brain was working too fast for that and he wasn’t going to be able to sleep until he knew the kid was alright and on his way to total recovery. But he wasn’t going to go down to the workshop, either, so he pulled out his phone and started making some adjustments to the preliminary suit design he’d had for the masked hero.
Tony was an inventor before he was anything. Of course his interest was piqued by the fact that he knew who Spiderman was, and it spurred him into making a suit that was made out of better fabric than a flimsy cotton hoodie from Target. At least so Peter couldn’t get stabbed.
That was how he passed his time—first in the waiting room outside the surgical suite, and then in Peter’s room until about nine in the morning when the sun was actually up and he’d made about seven variations for the kid to choose from. If he wanted it, of course. Tony was deliberating making another when the kid’s eyes shot open and darted around the room, adjusting to it. His gaze landed on Tony almost immediately, and his mouth fell open in shock.
“Oh my god,” Peter stuttered. “You’re actually—holy shit. You’re here. I didn’t dream this. Mr Stark—it’s an honour, I—I—wow.”
Tony nodded, and swallowed harshly, unsure of what to say. He smiled at the kid, gave him a little wave like he had before. It was kind of surreal. He didn’t know the kid, not really, but he felt like he did. And he felt weirdly protective over him, too. There were a thousand things he wanted to say, but didn’t know how to voice them at all.
“Can I just ask…where am I?” Peter asked, still looking around the room.
“Avengers Medbay,” Tony told him. “Private healthcare. I brought you here after everything last night.”
Tony watched Peter mouth the words “Avengers Medbay” silently, his eyes wide. Then he whispered under his breath, “Ned is going to freak.”
Peter shook himself, and then looked at Tony. “That’s—you didn’t have to do that, I would have been alright,” He took a deep breath, and stared into his lap. “It might be a long time before I can pay it off. Like, after college kind of long.”
God. The kid thought he was so much of an asshole that he was going to make him pay for saving his life.
“Free of charge,” Tony waved it off, thinking: Free of charge for teenage superheroes who have hearts of gold and a tendency to get stabbed, at least.
Peter gaped at him. “That’s—Mr Stark, sir, thank you. Are you—wow.”
Then he was pulling down the bedsheets and paused to look at the t-shirt he was wearing. It was a new one, without the excessive amount of blood the other had had on it. Tony had been in possession of a box of trial Iron Man merchandise shipped to him for review, so he’d given Cho one of those shirts for Peter. The kid blinked at it.
“This is cool,” He commented, and then pulled up his new shirt to look at his bandage. There was no blood leaking through it or anything, and he reached at the tape to pull it back.
“I wouldn’t—” Tony suggested, but Peter had already started, and had revealed a mostly pink scar, which was absolutely not what a fatal stab wound should look about eight hours after it had been bandaged up.
“Hey, look at that,” Peter grinned, staring at the mostly healed wound as though it was only a minor surprise. “I’m going to live!”
Tony, on the other hand, was gaping at it. “That’s—it healed that quickly?”
He knew the kid had advanced healing, but holy shit, that was fast. Maybe even faster than Steve’s healing factor.
Peter’s head jerked up and his eyes widened again, as though he was a kid who’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “Uh, no. It’s just like before. Uh—ouch. Damn, this hurts a lot.”
Right, they’d never had the conversation about how Tony knew who he was, so Peter would be in defensive mode about the whole advanced healing thing. Better to get that one out of the way, so they had everything laid out on the table.
“Hey, relax,” Tony shrugged, holding his hands out in a pacifying kind of way. “I know you’re Spiderman.”
“You do?” Peter’s eyes went—somehow—wider than before. “Oh my god, you—oh my god, oh my god.”
“Well,” Tony paused. “You did leave your suit in the bath, out on display. I didn’t go looking, or anything.”
“Shit,” Peter groaned. “In my defence, I was dying.”
Tony shrugged, pulling a frown. “I gotta say, kid, not the best move for a hero with a secret identity.”
“Yeah, well, you can’t talk, you told everyone your secret identity on your very first press conference about it,” Peter snapped back, and then his face blushed and he started babbling an apology. “Mr Stark, I am so sorr—”
Tony snickered a laugh at that. Damn. Kid had snark to him. He kind of loved it. Tony had liked hanging out with Harley when he’d been in Tennessee, but it still came as a surprise to him that he was actually enjoying hanging out with Peter. He didn’t really talk to that many people, especially not in that kind of demographic.
“So. Spiderman,” Tony commented, and Peter’s eyes lit up at being addressed by the name of his alter ego. “Fancy a new suit?”
At that stage, Tony had no idea that his relationship with Peter Parker would go on to become that of a mentor & mentee, or even—years down the line—more of a father-son kind of bond. He was simply offering to make him a suit and give him a helping hand in the world of being a superhero.
But, hey, sometimes wrong number calls just worked out that way, fate throwing two people who needed each other in their lives at that given moment in time. And if Peter ever got stabbed again whilst on patrol, then maybe he’d call Tony…but this time, deliberately.