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It was the middle of December and the temperature had decided to take a sudden nose dive into the negative numbers. Not that those kinds of things would stop Peter from patrolling. Seeing as Tony had helpfully provided him with an in-suit heater, he was sure he would be fine and for a while, he was. Though once the sun had completely set, the wind started to become so bitter that, eventually, the heater could no longer keep up.
Seeing as the icy negative fifteen-degree weather seemed to be enough to deter any major crime from taking place in the borough, Peter began to swing him towards his warm bed. The first thing he noticed as he stood inside his closet shimmying off the suit was that it wasn't particularly warm in the apartment. It wasn't cold... it just wasn't as warm and cozy as he'd imagined it would be. So, once he was in a pair of joggers and a t-shirt he walked down the hall towards the thermostat. He wasn't surprised by the display saying that it was sixty-one degrees in the house. The entire system was old and a little touchy. It wasn't unusual to have to knock the desired temperature up a few degrees in order to get the unit to kick in. Therefore, he hit the up arrow a couple of times, went back to his room to crawl under the covers, and fell instantly asleep.
A few short hours later, he woke up to the sound of May getting ready for work. Though, having not gotten to bed until late he didn't bother to climb out of bed. He did instantly realize that his room was still cold and looked towards his window to make sure that he'd remembered to close it. When it was indeed locked shut, he sighed and pulled his comforter up a little more tightly under his chin. He wasn't worried. If it was really that cold in the apartment, May would turn up the heater before she left.
Except, the next time he woke up he could no longer ignore the chills that were dancing up and down his spine. He lay there for several minutes waiting to hear the hum of the heater begin to blow warmth into his room but it never did. So, with a huff, he pulled the blankets over his shoulders and sat up. May was long gone for her first shift of the day and he was going to have to finagle the stupid thermostat himself. However, once he placed his socked foot onto the laminate flooring, he sucked a hiss in through his teeth. The floor was so cold that it burned but he powered through and hurried towards the thermostat in the hall that showed the temperature to be a chilly forty-six degrees.
As he stood there hopping from foot to foot to avoid having any kind of prolonged contact with the floor, he tapped the arrow to send the desired temperature up well past eighty. Though he knew it wouldn't do any good. Something had finally given in and it was broken. There wasn't much he could do outside of requesting maintenance and he could do that from his bed.
After leaving a message with the landlord, Peter tucked himself back down under his covers. It crossed his mind that maybe putting on his Spider-man suit and swinging across the city with the heater running might warm him up but one look at the outside temperature had him changing his mind. Even with the sun up, it was still below freezing. Besides, he was already back to warming up under the blankets and the Spider-suit was all the way on the other side of the room.
For quite a while, Peter patiently waited for someone to come to fix the heat but they never arrived. In fact, between the thin walls and the drafty windows, he could feel it becoming even colder in his room. His nose was frozen and he could feel it starting to run as a result. To make matters worse, his stomach was starting to protest his lack of breakfast. However, rather than get up, he grabbed at his phone with his suddenly uncoordinated fingers and attempted to leave another message with the landlord, only this time it seemed that the message box was full. Clearly, he wasn't the only one being affected by the cold snap.
Groaning in annoyance, Peter opened and closed his hands a few times to try and warm them up as he tried to decide what to do next. He considered trying to call May but there was no reason to do that, really. He'd already called to request the repair and it wasn't like she could do anything else. Calling her would just make her worry. Then he thought about going over to Ned's house because surely it was toasty warm in there but then he remembered he wasn't even home. Unlike him, he was still in the Robotics Club and would be spending the weekend at the school working on all the last-minute programming. Then, as he was flipping through his contacts list, his thumb landed on Tony's name... and that had him thinking.
The man was a genius. He knew how to do everything from fixing old car engines to creating an arc reactor and an Iron Man suit out of a box of scraps. Surely he could fix a broken heating unit. That and he had told him many, many times that he should call him if he ever needed anything. He'd never really specified what 'anything' meant but he figured that by definition, 'I'm cold and you know how to fix things,' fell into that category. So, with only slight hesitation he decided to send him a message. If nothing else, but to feel out the situation.
'Hey, Mr. Stark. Are you busy?' he typed out knowing that he probably was and that he'd just asked the stupidest question of all time. The man was a superhero who owned a gigantic tech business. Of course, he was busy. Then, just as he was about to retract the question he received an answer.
Tony, who had been in his workshop all night, literally knee-deep in a new Iron Man suit, smiled down at his phone when the familiar contact popped up on his screen. Peter rarely texted him before noon and he found himself curious as to what the kid was up to. 'I'm always busy. Why? What's up?' he typed back in return before his brain filled him on at least three thousand reasons why the kid could be texting him at nine o'clock in the morning. Especially on a weekend. Those were the days the teenager spent the majority of his time Spidering all over the city. 'Are you okay?' he added while simultaneously pulling up the information from the Spider-suit.
Still feeling slightly apprehensive about asking his mentor to come over to his house, of all things, he decided to once again remain somewhat vague. 'I was sort of hoping that maybe you could come over to my apartment and help me,' he replied not realizing that by leaving out all context he was sending his mentor's heart rate through the roof.
A glance at the tracking information on the suit verified that it was inside the Parker's apartment as Peter had indicated. However, the suit didn't seem to be on and the last activity that had been recorded was from the night prior. Upon further inspection, he saw that all of the vitals were within a normal range, short of a slight drop in body temperature and that there was no other indication that anything calamitous had happened. That was all well and good but at the same time, he knew that the teenager had been known to mess with the coding to prevent him from getting certain kinds of notifications. However, what was most worrying was that he'd straight-up, asked for help . He never asked for help. He could be bleeding out in an alley and would still insist that he had it all under control. He wouldn't put it past the kid to lay in his bed overnight, nursing a life-threatening injury, on his own, and then casually text him when he finally decided that maybe he didn't have it all under control, after all. That was all it took for him to call in a functional suit so that he could take off towards Queens. 'I'll be there soon, kid. Hang Tight.'
Being utterly relieved that help was on the way, Peter threw the comforter over his head completely and inadvertently drifted back to sleep. He never once considered how odd it was that his mentor had so quickly agreed to come over help him, despite having no idea what he needed help with.
While Peter was curled up in a tight ball, sound asleep in the little pocket of warmth he'd created for himself, Tony was flying towards him. He'd spent the first few minutes of the trip having FRIDAY go over the Spider-suit's video monitoring in an attempt to narrow down what he would be dealing with upon his arrival but the AI found nothing. He was trying to decide if that was more or less concerning when the familiar building finally came into view.
Deciding that it would be suspicious for Iron Man to go running through the halls of the Queen's apartment, Tony ditched the suit on the roof and began to climb down the fire escape that led into an alley, cursing himself the whole time for not thinking to put on a coat before he left. However, between the frigid air and the nagging worry, he managed to make quick work of the ricketty ladders and was soon inside, taking the stairs two at a time all the way up to the Parker's seventh-floor apartment.
Once he was outside the door he didn't even bother to knock, instead, he took the key that May had entrusted to him for emergencies and walked right in. He was unsurprised at the lack of activity in the large open room. Peter hiding an injury from his aunt would be a given. He wouldn't want her to worry. The fact that she'd already left for work was to be expected. Then, rather than announcing his presence, Tony bounded down the hall and threw Peter's bedroom door open steeling himself for the worst, only to end up face to face with a wide-eyed, sleep disheveled teenager looking back at him in surprise.
Having been abruptly pulled from his sleep by his bedroom door squeaking open, Peter rapidly sat up and pulled the light blue comforter off of his head while being careful to keep it tightly wound around his shoulders. "Mr. Stark!" he half croaked in surprise when he saw that it was his mentor and not his aunt standing in his doorway. He didn't know how long he'd been asleep but apparently, it had been long enough for Tony to dive all the way there from Manhattan.
For several seconds Tony stood there and took in the kid's appearance. Well, what he could see of him anyway. Which wasn't much. All that was exposed was his head but his hair was a tangled mess, his nose was red and he could see him shivering where he sat. Upon further scrutiny, he realized that there were no signs of blood anywhere in the room and that all in all the kid didn't seem to be in any kind of distress. With that realization, he allowed himself to relax and it was then that he realized how cold it was in the room and involuntarily shivered. "Do you always keep your room this cold?" he asked as he crossed the room, carefully stepping over the various legos and school books that were strewn across the floor.
"N-no," Peter replied through chattering teeth. "The heater's broken and the landlord hasn't sent anybody by to fix it yet," he added before running his hand under his nose with a loud sniff. "I'm f-freezing."
After standing there for several more seconds the dots slowly began to connect and Tony huffed a laugh. "Is that why you called me?" he asked with amusement. "You're cold?" added, though he realized it was more than a little chilly in the apartment. It was near frigid.
"Well-" Peter replied with a small, although it be a bit sheepish smile tugging at his lips. "You said I could call you for anything, right?"
"I did," Tony replied seriously. He'd been trying to drill it into the kid's thick skull for months, that he not only could but definitely should call him whenever he needed help with anything. Whether it had to do with Spider-man or not. Though, he'd assumed that whenever that first call for assistance came in, it would be over something a little more- detrimental. Not that he minded in the least but that wasn't going to stop him from giving the boy a hard time. "I just wasn't expecting it to be because you needed me to put an extra blanket on your bed and tuck you in."
"Actually I was kind of hoping you could fix the heater, Mr. Stark," Peter replied as another violent shudder wracked through him. "-but an extra blanket would be nice too."
Tony then crossed into the room and patted Peter's leg so that he could sit down beside his shivering form. As he did so, he was more surprised than he probably should have been when the kid immediately leaned over onto him in an attempt to sap up his warmth. "Are you really that cold?" he asked with a chuckle as he wrapped an arm around the boy's blanketed shoulders. "How long has the heat been out?"
"I've been cold all night," Peter replied with a contented hum, as the man started to run his hand up and down his back. "The heater in the suit, which is super awesome by the way- thank you, Mr. Stark- wasn't keeping up once it got really, really cold so I came home and I think the heater was already broken then."
"So, you never warmed up? Geez, kiddo. Come here," Tony replied with genuine sympathy as he opened his arms up so that Peter could fall fully up against his body. They sat there for several minutes, Peter trying to absorb as much heat as possible from his mentor's warm embrace and Tony trying to come up with a plan that didn't have him sitting there acting as a human heating pad all day. "Alright, here's what we're going to do. We're going to move you out to the couch so that I can make you something warm to drink and then you're going to point me towards your tools so I can take a look at what's going on with the heater, yeah?"
"Mm-hmm," Peter replied though he made no effort to remove himself from the comfortable position he was now in. That is until the man stood up and began to pull him to his feet.
"Come on Linus Van Pelt, get your blanket and start walking. I'm too old to carry you," Tony said once he had Peter standing reluctantly beside the bed.
"You're not that old, Mr. Stark-" Peter said in return, though he'd meant it as a compliment and not as a request.
Tony laughed as he continued out of the room shouting, "Still not carrying you," over his shoulder as he went.
After a very quick stop in the extremely cold bathroom, Peter settled on the couch and was handed a mug of hot tea. He took one small sip and then another, sighing as the warm liquid coated his throat and began to warm him from the inside out. "This is really good. Thank you, Mr. Stark."
"You're welcome. Now, where can I find some tools," Tony asked and once Peter had pointed him in the right direction he got to work. First, he looked over the thermostat and then moved on to the heating unit itself. He had it apart in no time and was quick to diagnose the problem. "Looks like the capacitor's blown. That's why the fan won't cut on. Other than that, it looks okay."
"You can fix that, though, right?" Peter asked as he craned his neck around to where Tony was standing at the sink washing his hands.
"I can, but we need to get a new capacitor," Tony replied with a casual shrug of his shoulders. "They should have one at the home improvement store around the corner. You coming with?"
"Sure," Peter replied because that sounded better than sitting, cold and alone, on the couch while he waited for the man to get back. He was also sure that whatever fancy car the man had driven over would have seat warmers. Then before anything else could be said, his stomach grumbled so loudly that he was sure they could hear it three apartments over. "Can we get some food too, please?"
"Of course," Tony replied with a chuckle. "I already messaged someone to bring me a car. It should be here any minute," he then said. He'd actually done that the second changing the batteries in the thermostat hadn't done the trick and he was sure he would end up needing to go to the hardware store. Then he glanced over to see the look of confusion on his mentee's face he rolled his eyes. "What are you looking at me like that for? I didn't drive over this time."
"Then how did you get here?" Peter asked with perplexity. There were only so many ways one could get to Queens from Manhattan and he couldn't imagine the man taking the bus or subway.
"Before I answer that-" Tony began as he pointed an accusatory finger in his mentee's direction. "-let me make it very clear that you were being oddly cryptic and I thought you were dying," he said with seriousness but rather than looking any kind of remorseful, he saw a smile spread across the teenager's face.
"Mr. Stark! You flew here in an Iron Man suit?" Peter squawked with delight. While he felt just a tiny bit bad that he'd scared the man enough to make him think that he needed to rush to his side in an Iron Man suit, he was also extremely amused. It was sort of nice to know that his mentor cared that much about his well being.
Rather than playing into the kid's obvious enjoyment of the situation, Tony placed his hands indignantly onto his hips. "I repeat... you led me to believe that you were dying," he stressed but even he could admit that maybe he'd overreacted just a little. It wasn't like he'd taken any amount of time asking what was wrong. The kid had said he needed help, his brain had demanded that he jump into action and his body had followed through.
"I'm sorry," Peter said though he continued to practically cackle at the mental image of Iron Man busting through the Tower's ceiling, jetting full speed across the city, and landing on his building's rooftop.
Tony took a moment to wait out the teenager's continuous giggling, before even attempting to reply and when he did it was with playful sarcasm. "Yeah, you look it."
The trip to the store was quick, the fast food was warm and soon the two of them were back in the apartment in their previous positions. However this time, Peter had a small electric heater sitting on the coffee table in front of him, blowing warm air in his direction. He'd been hesitant to accept the purchase when Tony had picked it up but now that it was there and cutting through the chill in the room, he was happy to have it. Even if it did take the man no more than twenty minutes to replace the part.
"Thank you for coming and fixing everything, Mr. Stark," Peter said once, Tony had successfully turned on the heater with a celebratory, 'Yay' and was sitting down beside him on the couch.
"You're welcome, kiddo," Tony said before leaning back on the couch and watching whatever nonsense show the kid had turned on while he was doing all the work. Not that he was upset about that. He was just glad that the kid, who had buried himself in his side the second he'd sat down, was finally starting to shuck some of the blankets that had ended up piled on the couch and was no longer sniffling every three seconds. It wasn't until another thirty minutes had passed and he was really starting to feel the rise in temperature that he said anything to the kid who was still pressed tightly up against him. "You do know that the heater's been running for the last half an hour and it's no longer cold in here, right?" he questioned as he poked the boy's side in an unsuccessful, though admittedly unenthusiastic, attempt to get the boy to get off of him.
"I know," Peter replied before happily scooting just a touch closer, making Tony smile.
" Alright, just so long as you know. "