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Tony’s day starts with a lecture from Obadiah Stane. Something about irresponsible behavior and fireworks should never be lit inside the house, Tony, my dear boy, and something else about problems with the accelerated wave explosion capability of their new rockets.
Nothing new.
Tony’s day ends with a knock against his window.
Happy Hogan, Pepper Potts, paparazzi, fans. All those possibilities flit through his head.
Then he remembers that his office is on the 64th floor of Stark Tower, and his heart does a funny thing in his chest. He slowly turns in his desk chair.
There is a brown-haired teenager plastered against the side of his building. He is staring back at Tony, looking about as shocked as Tony feels. As if he ended up here totally by accident. And he’s… he’s not even standing on anything and Tony can’t see any wires. The boy is just sticking to the glass like a persistent dead fly against the windshield.
“Please let me in?” his muffled voice comes through the glass.
“Right,” Tony says, his voice remarkably calm considering his brain is very clearly malfunctioning. “Right.” He steps forward and opens a window, before backing away again.
The death-defying teenager shuffles to his left until he reaches the open window and hauls himself inside, landing ass-first on the carpet. He doesn’t scurry to his feet, but instead draws up his legs and clenches his arms around them, warily looking up at Tony. “Thanks-- Thanks, Tony.”
“What,” Tony says, “is happening?”
The boy flinches and digs his fingers into the sleeves of the blue cardigan he is wearing. It is way too big on him, making him look smaller than he probably actually is, and Tony really should be calling security at this point. But he doesn’t. Because he doesn’t understand what is happening, and that’s not a regular occurrence for him. So he needs to get to the bottom of it.
“I…” the teenager hesitates for a moment, then reaches inside his blue cardigan and takes out something round, made of metal and glass, roughly the size of a tennis ball. “We were in your workshop, and you gave me your cardigan, and I touched this weird thing and then there was all this light. And I ended up here.”
All right. The boy is clearly out of his mind.
But also, he can stick to glass and climb 64 floors like it’s nothing.
Tony is still undecided on whether he should call back-up or keep this prospective lab-rat all to himself. He crouches in front of the boy. “I didn’t understand that. Which means you didn’t explain it right, because I’m a genius.”
The teenage nutcase swallows. “I didn’t mean to… You always said not to touch stuff in your workshop. A lady downstairs said it’s 2005!”
Still a raving lunatic.
Tony decides to focus on the part that actually interests him. “How did you climb 64 floors like that?”
The boy turns distressed eyes on him. “I’m from the year 2017.”
“Well, that sounds exciting, bud,” Tony says in his most kindly voice. He doesn’t really do kids. Or whack jobs. So a combination of the two is a challenge. “And how did you climb 64 floors like that?”
The boy closes his eyes, heaving in a shuddering breath. “You don’t believe me.”
“Of course I do. I’m just really curious about that interesting ability you got there.”
“I’m … I’m not crazy. I’m from the year 2017, and you’re my… my friend. And we were working together in the workshop and you gave me your cardigan to wear because I was cold,” he pulls at the fabric of the blue cardigan.
“Really? I must say I have hideous fashion taste in the future,” Tony says. “How – did – you – climb – 64 – floors, boy?”
The boy’s voice is becoming wobbly. “You wear it all the time because it was a gift. T-Tony, please. You have to help me.”
“Tell me how you climbed 64 floors, and I’ll see what I can do.”
The teenager exhales slowly, clenching and unclenching his hands. “Fine. Fine. If that’s what it takes.” He sits up a little straighter and gives a miserable shrug. “I’m enhanced.”
“How’d that happen?”
“I’ll tell you if take a look at this.” The boy holds out the round metal thingy.
Tony sighs and plucks it from his outstretched hand. It looks unlike anything he has ever seen before, but that isn’t saying much. If he’d pop down to a local antiques store he could probably find trinkets like this for a dollar or two. “All right. I’m looking at it. Being really extremely serious about it. Hm. Terribly interesting. So. How did you get enhanced?”
“You’re not properly looking at it! I know you! You get that same look on your face when you tell me you had seven hours of sleep when we both know you had none. You’re supposed to … I don’t know … recognize it! Know what to do!” The boy angrily shoves his hands into the pockets of that hideous cardigan. Then blinks. Then takes out a piece of paper. He glances down at it, eyes widening. “Oh,” he says. "Oh."
Tony snatches the piece of paper up, turns it over, and his heart stops in his chest.
It’s a photograph of Tony himself when he was about sixteen years old. With his parents. A picture that he knows is not publicly available. “Where did you get this?” he demands, his voice suddenly shaking. “Who do you work for? What kind of set-up is this?”
“It’s in your pocket! I told you this was your sweater.” The boy’s face goes weirdly sympathetic. “I didn’t know you carried that picture around all the time.”
“Shut up,” Tony bites out as his brain frantically tries to make sense of the situation. The boy clearly has abilities of some kind. As if he’s had a dose from the Super Soldier Serum, like old Rogers. Or exposure to high levels of gamma radiation, like that Hulk-fellow. What the heck, maybe time travel could be thrown into the mix, too. “What’s your name? How old are you?”
The boy deflates a little, seeming more reassured now that Tony believes him. Which is absolutely not the case. “Peter Parker. Sixteen.”
“How did you get enhanced?”
“A radioactive spider bit me.”
Hm. More along the lines of the Hulk, then. “You claim we’re ‘friends’.”
“I mean,” Peter wraps his arms around his knees again, slowly rocking from side to side. “I don’t know how to call it. Yeah. Friends.”
“I don’t have friends, boy.”
Peter’s eyes fly up to meet his. “Yes, you do! What about Rhodey?”
“What do you know about Rhodey?”
“He’s your friend. You met at MIT, and you call him Rhodey-bear and last summer we all went kite-flying at the beach- - Oh, I guess you don’t know about that. Um, let me think. Oh! You once went on a holiday to Italy together where you almost convinced Rhodey to let you adopt a goat.”
Tony had changed his mind at the last minute, after the goat he had so carefully selected to be blessed with his ownership peed on his expensive trousers, that furry little devil.
He scrutinizes Peter’s face, then drops his eyes to the time travel tennis ball in his hand. “I have no idea what this is even made of. Where to begin to-“
“Maybe Friday can help us?” Peter suggests hopefully.
“Who is she?”
Peter blinks. “Um. Your AI?”
“JARVIS.”
Peter’s face is blank for a moment. “Oh, right,” he then says. “In 2017-“
“DON’T.” Tony barks and Peter jumps. “Don’t tell me anything, Mr. Parker. No one knows what could happen to the integrity of the timeline if I knew even the slightest bit of information. Haven’t you seen back to the future?”
“Did that come out yet?”
“It’s 2005, not the eighteenth century.”
“Right.” Peter tugs at his blue cardigan again. “So … That means you believe me, then?”
“I am willing to suspend my disbelief.” Tony says, clenching his fist tighter around the time travel tennis ball. “Until I figure out exactly what is going on.”
He folds the picture of his parents away into his own pocket and stands.
Peter gingerly climbs to his feet, too. “Tony?”
“It’s Mr. Stark to you, boy, I don’t know you.”
Peter flushes. “Sorry. Um. Mr. Stark… I’m really hungry? I mean, I ate right before I… time-travelled. But somehow I’m hungry again.”
Tony reaches out to press a button on his desk. “My PA can fix that.”
Heels clack against the marble floor, and Pepper leans into his office. “Yes?”
Tony waves his hand in the boy’s direction. “This is Peter Parker. He’s a teenager, and therefore hungry.”
“Hey,” Peter tells her, his smile suddenly all weird and soft.
Tony doesn’t stop to think what that means. “Can you order him a cheeseburger?”
“And what will you be having, Mr. Stark?” she asks.
“Coffee.”
“With?”
“More coffee.”
“I’m ordering you a salad,” she briskly informs him before exiting again.
Tony curses under his breath. “Should have gotten a big mac while I could. Don’t know why she insists on keeping me alive and healthy.”
Peter just smiles more and ducks his head.
Tony sinks down into his chair and waves for Peter to sit, too. “Let’s say I believe you. You came from the year 2017. It is now 2005. When were you born?”
“2001. …Sir.”
“So there’s a four year old version of you walking around this city. That’s … . Okay, that’s fine. Your parents won’t accidentally recognize you.”
Peter suddenly stills. “Oh,” he breathes, a haunted look creeping into his eyes. “I forgot about that. My parents. They’re here.” He swallows, tugging at the buttons of his cardigan. They have a little wave-motif on them that he runs his fingers across. “And … And they wouldn’t recognize me.”
“That’s not carte blanche to go visit them. You’re staying inside, you hear me? We’ll get you back to where you belong and you can go back to annoying them in your own timeline.”
“I … Yeah.”
-
By the time their food arrives, Tony is no closer to figuring out what the time travel tennis ball is supposed to do, exactly. “You’re claiming my future self made this?”
“Dunno,” Peter says around a mouth full of cheeseburger. “It was just sitting in your workshop. I never saw it before. That’s why I picked it up.”
“You make a habit of touching stuff in my workshop?”
Peter colors a little and ducks his head. “I’m just interested.”
“Maybe my future self sent you back in time to teach you a valuable life lesson.”
“Well, you could have just said something,” Peter complains. “Give me a lecture or something, instead of sending me to prehistoric times!”
“I haven’t done anything yet, boy! Why do I even let you in my workshop?”
“I told you, we’re –“
“Yeah. Friends.”
“You don’t need to look all disgusted while you say that.”
Tony huffs and turns the time travel tennis ball over in his hands again.
“Are you gonna eat that salad? Sir?”
“You’re worse than Pepper.”
“No, I just meant … Can I have it?”
-
It’s a familiar feeling, being down in his workshop at two a.m.
Having an object in front of him that he can’t begin to comprehend, no matter what experiments he lets loose on it, is very far from familiar, though.
The time travel tennis ball has a round, glass bauble surrounded by thin rods of metal that grip around the glass orb like ivy plants. There is a small arrow carved into the metal on one side. Nothing else telling.
One thing he certainly did establish is that this time travel tennis ball is not a trinket you can find for a dollar at the nearest second hand shop. The object seems to have a magnetic pull that is throwing some of his instruments out of whack, and the way the light refracts in the glass center is highly unusual, too. It’s something… not entirely out of this world.
Or maybe technology has advanced so far in 2017 that this bauble is some sort of energy source that has in fact become common.
He can ask Peter. But he also can’t. Because any information the boy tells him about the future could endanger the stability of their timeline.
Peter is still up in his office, asleep in the armchair. Because Tony isn’t sure where his dumb future self went wrong, but he sure as hell is not letting some child walk around his domain and smear his filthy teenager germs all over every surface.
He sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. He has tried every experiment he could think of that wouldn’t damage the object. The only option left is to try to dismantle it and see what results that yields. But he might permanently break the object, without any guarantee that he’ll understand it any better.
Does he care? Is it his concern whether or not the boy makes it back? Destiny delivered to him a unique opportunity: a hitherto unknown technology. The weapons he could make if he managed to somehow harness it… Weapons no one in the world would be able to replicate! Stark industries would finally have full monopoly. Their stocks would soar. More private planes, more million dollar paintings, more gold toilets to puke into.
But using technology from the future is a dangerous game. And with every second Peter Parker spends in 2005, the risk of somehow upsetting the time-space continuum grows.
Tony sighs and lays the object aside for a moment. He needs more coffee.
Stark tower’s kitchen is a few floors above him. He might as well check on the kid while he’s at it. He takes the elevator up to the 64th floor and pushes into his office. Looks around. Looks again.
His office is empty.
Peter is gone.
The blue cardigan is hanging over the back of a chair.
Tony curses loudly and stomps back to the elevator. Weird time travel orbs are one thing, but having to babysit a teenager? He’d rather sit through a full weekend's worth of board meetings. He slams the button for the tower’s parking garage. Either this whole thing was a set-up and the boy is now merrily on his way to report back to whatever organization sent him in here, or…
Or the fool is doing the only thing he showed any interest in doing after his arrival. Visiting his family.
He digs out his phone to boot up his AI. “JARVIS, what information can you find on a Peter Parker, born in 2001?”
“Peter Benjamin Parker, born August 10, 2001. Son to Mary and Richard Parker. Resident of Nansen Street 92-04.”
“Send the route to my GPS.”
He silently fumes as he drives. If he doesn’t find the boy here, he will move heaven and earth to track him down. Him and whatever shady organization sent him. And he’ll run all of them into the ground. And if he does find the boy … he’s gonna take a page out of Howard’s book for the first time in his life and give him an earful.
Nansen Street is dark and deserted, as any street ought to be at almost four AM. Tony pulls up in front of Mary and Richard’s house. He sees no one at first glance, but the boy can apparently stick to walls, so he might be hiding in a more unusual place.
Tony turns off the engine and steps out of the car, sharply gazing up and down the street. He then cranes his neck and looks up, squinting against the street lights, but it is difficult to see whether-
A dark silhouette moves in his peripheral vision. A scrawny figure drops down from a street light and hits the pavement, only a few yards away from Tony’s car.
Peter Parker rights himself, his expression wary but resigned. As if he already knows what’s coming. As if he has been yelled at by Tony a million times before, for being stupid and reckless and impulsive.
“Get in the car you little shit,” Tony hisses, marching forward until he can grab the teenager by the arm. “Don’t you understand - - Do you have any idea - - Just get in.”
Peter lets himself be manhandled into the passenger seat. Tony locks the door before slamming it closed on his side, then moves around to take his seat behind the wheel. “What the hell is wrong with you? Are you braindead? Are you trying to rip the fabric of the universe apart?”
“I’m sorry.” Peter says, curling in on himself. “I just wanted to see. I didn’t talk to anyone. No one saw me. I didn’t even see them, the curtains were closed.”
Tony exhales slowly. He thinks he recognizes the undercurrents in Peter’s voice. A deep longing. A sadness. But he doesn’t ask. Because he doesn’t want to know. He can’t know. “Put on your seatbelt. Don’t wander again, because I swear I’ll lock you in a closet.”
“Yes sir,” Peter’s voice is almost a whisper.
-
“… But my cardigan- your cardigan is still upstairs. And it’s cold down here.”
“Tough luck. We’ll get it in the morning. Together. You’re not leaving my sight for even a second. Apparently, you can’t handle it. You can sit over here on this piece of floor while I work on your stupid time travel tennis ball.”
Peter eyes the patch of floor Tony pointed at with some hesitation before sitting down, cross-legged. “Did you figure anything out, yet?”
“Nothing.”
Panic brews in Peter’s eyes. “But you always figure everything out in a few minutes! This one time when I crashed your plane-“
“DON’T tell me!” Tony snaps, because hell, he does not want to know the end to that sentence.
Peter huffs and rubs his arms, his gaze slowly drifting around the workshop. “Can I sit on your couch? Sir?”
“Can you make it over there without touching anything?” Tony mocks.
Peter flushes again and stares down at his knees.
Tony sighs. The boy’s personality is a weird mixture between nervous and brazen that Tony hasn’t really figured out yet. “You were supposed to say ‘yes I can’,” he says, waving a screwdriver around. “Go on. Sit.”
Peter moves to the couch and curls up on his side, his back pointedly turned to Tony.
-
Tony dares to leave Peter alone, sleeping on his couch, around seven a.m. He quickly grabs a hand full of candy bars and another thermos full of coffee in the kitchen and makes his way back.
The boy hasn’t moved. His breathing is still deep and even. Tony sets the food down on a nearby table and approaches him, tentatively poking him on the arm. “Mr. Parker?” Poke poke.
The boy murmurs something and turns onto his back, blinking sluggishly. “Hmmm…. Tony.”
“Mr. Stark.”
Peter frowns for a moment, puzzled. Then, a closed off expression appears on his face and his eyes skitter away from Tony. “Right.” He pushes himself up. “Did you-ou-“ he pauses to yawn. “-fix it yet?”
“Have breakfast first,” Tony suggests, tossing some candy at the boy.
Peter picks it up with a frown. “What’s this?”
Tony glances over to check. “Ah. Starburst. My personal favorite.”
“Do you always have candy for breakfast?”
“Hey, I had a salad last night. I’m allowed to indulge.”
“I had your salad last night.”
“Just eat something.”
Peter picks at the wrapping. “This is … pickle flavored? Seriously?”
“Some of us have a finer taste pallet, kid.”
Peter smiles at that and ducks his head. “You always call me ‘kid’.”
“That’s nothing special. You are a kid.”
“You say it in a certain way. I like it. But I hate when you call me Underoos. Can you not?”
“Don’t tell me stuff like that, kid. I told you. Not even mundane details.”
“Sorry.” Peter pops a pickle starburst into his mouth and immediately winces. “Ugh. So sour.” But he eats a few more pieces, then runs his tongue across his teeth. “Um. Mr. Stark? I kinda wanna brush my teeth now.”
That seems like a reasonable request.
“We’d better move this party to my house.”
-
“I haven’t been able to find any useful clues about the inner workings of your time travel tennis ball.” Tony reveals as they drive to his mansion.
Peter’s face falls. “But … But what are we supposed to do?” He’s wearing the blue cardigan again, hugging it around himself.
“Keep trying,” Tony says. “All I found out so far is that the object has a very peculiar magnetic field.”
Peter breathes out. “All right. So maybe it’s like when an electron is submitted to combined magnetic and gravitational fields and it changes the direction of the rotation, which theoretically generates the conditions for travelling back in time?”
“Um.” Tony says. “What?”
-
Well.
The teenage nutcase is in fact a bona fide genius.
Tony is beginning to understand his future self a little better. He can’t stand kids. But he can tolerate a smart one.
They have set up camp in the living room. Peter is scribbling out endless calculations with a concentrated frown on his face. His hair is damp from the shower and he is wearing one of Tony’s clean shirts underneath the blue cardigan (that is apparently also Tony’s, and Tony’s head is beginning to hurt).
Tony turns back to his own workings. An attempt to create some type of x-ray machine that might allow him to see inside the time travel tennis ball and figure out what the hell is going on in there. It will take a few days to build, which is a problem. Who knows what kind of damage this kid can do in a few days? Tony doesn’t actually want to lock him in a closet, but there might not be any way around it. “I can’t believe technology like this already exists twelve years from now.”
Peter glances up. “Um. Well, I don’t want to give away future-earth-spoilers. But let’s just say … there’s a possibility that this particular technology is not from earth.”
“Fabulous.”
“It lit up after I touched it.”
“What?”
“Yeah. A sort of white glow.”
“You could have mentioned that before!” Tony growls, picking the object up again and peering into the glass bauble to find any evidence of luminous materials. “Do you usually pick up objects that look like they’re about to explode?”
“Well, there was this one time when my crush’s dad turned out to be an evil weapons-dealer and he had these glowy-- Oh. Hang on, I guess I shouldn’t tell you.”
For once, Tony has to bite his cheek to keep himself from asking for more details.
They work all day. They try everything and get nowhere.
“I don’t get it!” Peter exclaims, throwing his pen down in frustration. “It’s magnetic but it doesn’t behave by any of the laws of magnetism and none of my calculations are coming out right.” He furiously rubs his eyes with his sleeve.
Tony glances at the clock. It’s past midnight already. “You need to get some sleep.”
“I don’t want to sleep!” Peter bites out, snatching his pen up again. “I won’t be able to anyways! I want to fix it! I want to go back!”
Tony steps closer and wrestles the pen from his hand. “I want you back, too. But as long as you’re here, you follow my instructions. If I tell you to sleep, you sleep. And DON’T snap at me!” he emphasizes when Peter open his mouth again.
Peter hunches. “I wanna go home,” he says, dragging his sleeve across his eyes again. “I miss … I miss you. What if we can’t figure it out and I’m stuck here? Where am I supposed to go if every time I talk to someone I’m a risk to the whole universe?”
“Even if that happens, I’ll make sure you’ll be okay, Peter,” Tony promises. “I have, uhm, some really nice private islands where you could live without a care in the world, and you’ll never have to talk to anyone.”
“I don’t want to live by myse-e-elf on an island,” Peter cries out.
“I’ll … visit?”
“But you don’t e-even like me. And I don’t want to wait an-nother twelve years until you’re the man I know.”
Tony can tolerate smart kids. But not crying ones. “Peter. Go to bed. Now.”
He points to the couch and Peter obediently trudges over, shoulders drooping miserably. He sniffles as he kicks off his shoes, sniffles as he pats the cushions and sniffles as he lays his head down. A single low sob escapes him, but he bites his own hand and curls up on his side again, pinching his eyes closed.
Tony sighs and turns away.
He works a little while longer, ordering some extra parts he’ll be needing for his x-ray machine. When he glances back towards the couch, it seems Peter has drifted off to sleep, after all.
Tony could use a shower, too. And a change of clothes. After instructing JARVIS to warn him as soon as the boy stirs, he slips from the room.
He shuffles through his bedroom, kicking off his shoes and socks as he goes. As he worms his way out of his jeans, he remembers the picture of his parents in the pocket. He takes it out and stares at it for a bit. He was about sixteen when this picture was taken. He wasn’t overly fond of his parents. But they were all he had in the world.
If he’d somehow landed himself in Peter’s position, he would absolutely terrified, too.
He chucks the picture onto his desk, but it slips off the edge and flutters to the ground. Tony kneels to pick it up, then does a double take when he spots words scribbled on the back.
He squints and moves closer to the light, holding the paper up to his face. ‘Time portal.’ It says. ‘Two way. Point arrow towards sun. Press thumbs against glass.’
And, below it: ‘Be nice!’
Tony recognizes the handwriting, but doesn’t want to think about what that means.
Could it be this simple? Could the kid have actually carried the damn instructions for his damn time travel tennis ball in his own damn pocket?
Shower first. Clear his head.
He shrugs out of his shirt and turns the shower on, a little colder than usual.
His options are limited. He can’t exactly do a test run with a time travelling device; that would only create a larger risk to the space-time continuum. Is he supposed to just tell the kid to follow the instructions, and hope for the best? What if he sends Peter to yet another point in time?
Well, the instructions say ‘two-way’. That implies a certain bridge between the moment Peter appeared in his timeline, and the moment he disappeared from. If it really is two-way, it seems logical that Peter could use it to return to the exact moment he disappeared in 2017.
Time travel. Logical.
Tony turns the shower off and shakes his head, sending droplets everywhere.
He dries off, dresses and returns to his living room. Peter is still on the couch. There is a frown on his face as he slumbers, and his shoulders look tight. Cold?
Tony turns to a nearby closet and rummages through a heavy drawer until he finds his checkered plaid. He shakes it out and carefully lays it across Peter’s prone form.
There. He’s being nice.
He crouches on the floor next to the coffee table. The time travel tennis ball is sitting on top of a stack of books. Tony picks it up and turns it over in his hands again, careful not to touch his thumbs against the glass. He finds the unassuming little arrow engraved in the metal. Point it towards the sun. The sun is on the other side of the earth right now, but JARVIS could probably help him point this device in the right direction.
He gets to his feet with a grunt and places the orb back on the coffee table.
He opens his laptop, pulling up a live simulation of their solar system. The sun is currently sitting right above … a patch of ocean south of Pakistan. It won’t be easy to hold the time travel tennis ball at precisely the right angle, but they should at least give it a try. If they can’t get it to work, they can attempt this again at dawn, when the sun is visible in the sky.
He retrieves a plastic bag from the kitchen drawer and begins assembling the few possessions that Peter has strewn across his mansion. And he grabs a banana from the kitchen. When he is sure he has everything prepared, he approaches the couch and tentatively pokes the kid.
“Mr. Parker? … Peter?” Poke poke.
Peter jumps awake this time, though his bleary eyes stay unfocused. “Oh. What time is it?”
“Still the middle of the night. I just want you to try something for me.”
Peter is suddenly wide awake and pushes himself up. “Did you figure it out?”
“I don’t know,” Tony says, not wanting the kid to get his hopes up. “I’m just … running with an idea. Sit up for me, kiddo. Hold this, and poke your thumbs through those metal bits so they’re touching the glass. Yes, like that.”
He then presses the plastic bag under Peter’s arm. “Your clothes.”
“Oh,” Peter says, clutching the bag. “So this is- - You really did figure it out!”
“This is just in case it works, all right? You can keep my shirt. It’s not that much of an issue when you take stuff from the past to the future. But you can’t leave stuff from the future in the past, so you’ll have to take this with you.”
Peter looks down, releasing the orb for a moment to run a hand down his shirt. “Okay.” He looks up at Tony with a smile. “I’ll return it to you in about twelve years.”
Tony gives a terse nod, his throat suddenly inexplicably tight. “I put the picture of my parents in there. Oh, and there’s some Pickle Starburst in there, too. Take that to my future self. Just in case the company gets any strange ideas about discontinuing the flavor.”
Peter lets out a nervous chuckle.
Tony tucks the banana behind Peter’s other arm. “And take this, in case you get hungry again.”
“Thank you, Mr. Stark,” Peter murmurs.
“Thank me in twelve years, if this works. See that little arrow? I need you to aim that more or less… at this bit of the carpet.”
Peter gives him a puzzled look, but does as instructed, awkwardly holding the orb between his hands as his arms still clench the plastic bag and the banana. Nothing immediately happens.
“Move it around a little,” Tony encourages. “But slowly.”
Peter does, his hands trembling with anticipation.
The glass orb suddenly begins emitting a soft, white light and Peter sucks in an excited breath. “Oh – oh, that’s what it did last time.”
“Hold on tight, then.”
Nervous eyes fly up to meet his. “I… I’m…”
“You’ll be okay, Pete,” Tony promises.
And then the kid is gone.
-
-
-
It’s another ten years before Tony meets Peter again. Caves and robots and explosions and gods and aliens and Pepper. None of it is enough to make him forget the teenager who turned up on the 64th floor of his tower.
It’s getting harder to actually picture the kid’s face, though. Sometimes he sees a face in the crowd. And he wonders.
And then Spider-Man pops up on his grid, and Tony doesn’t think much of it, but people are breathing down his neck, so he breaks enough privacy laws until he can put a name and a face to their local crimefighter.
A name and a face. The name and the face.
So this is it.
He doesn’t act on it.
For the first few minutes or so.
-
Peter is fourteen. Not entirely the same person who climbed his way into Tony’s office ten years ago. But a prelude to it.
His parents passed away years ago. So has his uncle.
“Quick question of the rhetorical variety.” Tony takes out his phone and displays a holographic video of Peter, dressed in some sort of clown outfit with goggles, which is most definitely not what Tony had expected the super-hero suit of a teenage genius to look like. “That’s you, isn’t it?”
Peter stumbles and stutters his way through an explanation, and he’s exactly how Tony remembers him.
-
“Mr. Stark, what’s this? Training wheels protocol?”
“That’s the protocol you can turn on when you want to restrict certain functions in the suit.”
“Ah,” Peter says with a nod. Stares at his screen a while longer. Frowns. “It’s turned on right now!”
“Your point being?”
Peter blinks at him. “… How do I turn it off?”
“Simple. By finishing all training modules.”
“But Mr. Stark-!”
“Nope.”
“But I’ve been- And I-“
“Nope. And nope. You’ll get full access to the suit’s features when I feel you can be sensible.”
“But I’m already the sensiblest!”
“I have a multitude of examples against that point.”
“Name one!”
Tony shakes his head, smiling at a particular memory that lies in his past, but Peter’s future. If he tells the kid about it, he will change the future and therefore the past and therefore the present. Or has it already changed?
His head is hurting again. It has been doing that a lot.
“You fell asleep on top of a train and it took you all the way to Vermont,” he choses as an example instead.
Peter mulls that over in his head for a while. “Yeah, okay,” he then grumpily concedes.
-
It is no surprise at all when May frantically calls him only a few weeks later. When he arrives at her apartment, there are still electric sparks jumping away from the taser webs that cling to the ceiling. Peter is sitting on the couch, being his embarrassed self. May just throws up her hands and tells Tony to deal with it because she needs to go down to the laundry room.
“How much trouble are you in?”
Peter hunches his shoulders. “A lot?”
“Bingo.”
“Can you please just turn the training wheels back on? I don’t want 576 web shooter combinations.”
“Why would you need me? You turned it off by yourself, didn’t you?”
“Hadafndepme.”
“Run that by me again?”
“I had a friend help me.”
“You had some sweaty hormonal teenage friends,” Tony repeats, “put their grabby hands all over your billion dollar suit? Why was I never informed that your friends know about your alter-ego?”
“Just the one! And Ned is my best friend and he would never betray me. And he’s really good at keeping a secret, Mr. Stark! Please don’t erase his memories or anything.”
“You’re giving me grey hairs, kid. Get your suit out here, I’ll reset it.”
Peter shuffles to his bedroom, but lingers in the doorway. “Can I keep Karen?”
“Excuse me?”
“The lady in the suit. I like her.”
“Do I look like I’m in the mood for rewarding your behavior?”
Peter ducks his head and escapes into his bedroom, returning a moment later with his suit, which he begrudgingly hands over. Tony takes out his laptop so he can hook the suit up to it, while Peter sits in an armchair, his legs nervously bobbing up and down.
Tony slams a few keys on his keyboard, frowning at his screen. Looks like the kid didn’t just hack the suit, but also uploaded… “what all this?”
“Family pictures,” Peter says, tugging at his sweater like he always used to do - will do? - with Tony’s blue cardigan when he was nervous. “Karen can make, like, a little display.”
There is that same undercurrent of longing in his voice that Tony has heard before. But why can’t the kid damn well look at his pictures on his own computer? How are pictures of his dead uncle supposed to help him during a mission?
He sighs and rubs his temples for a moment before getting to work. The silence stretches for several minutes. A few times, Peter looks like he considers getting up to do his own thing and leave Tony to his work. But it seems he doesn’t really dare.
Tony finally unhooks the suit from his laptop, and deposits it back into Peter’s lap.
“Ned was a lot faster,” Peter snidely informs him, teenage pout firmly in place.
“I had to reprogram it so you and your little friends can’t break through again.”
“Oh.”
“Also reprogrammed Karen so she’s not part of the protocol anymore.”
Peter freezes. “You killed her?”
“First off, she’s an AI, Underoos. Can you kill your microwave? Then you can’t kill an AI either! And second off: No. I just meant I didn’t put the restrictions on her software, so you can still use her.”
“Oh,” Peter breathes. He blinks a few times, then hugs the suit to his chest. “Thank you, Mr. Stark.”
He’s getting far too soft. “Call me Tony, kid. Now clean this room before your aunt gets back, and she might let you off the hook. And I mean spotless!”
-
“You know, we actually met once before,” Peter tells him with a small smile over lunch one day, and Tony stiffens.
“Did we?”
“Yeah. I was about… I don’t know… ten? When I visited your expo. The one with all the robots.”
“All my expos have robots, kid.”
“The one with the robots attacking people.”
“Ah. That was just the one.”
Peter nods as he plucks a bit of lettuce from his sandwich and pops it into his mouth. “One of the robots attacked me, but you blasted it away. It was so awesome.”
“That’s one way to describe it.”
“Maybe it was meant to be. Us meeting.”
Tony gives a non-committal hum and escapes the situation by taking an extra large bite of his sandwich.
-
There is apparently some type of emergency in the sorcerer’s dimension.
“Your compound is the safest place I know,” Stephen Strange tells him. “I only need you to keep this thing safe for a few weeks.”
This thing is the size of a tennis ball, made of metal and glass. And it’s coming into his life much earlier than Tony had anticipated. Peter is only fifteen. Tony has a feeling this thing will be in his compound a little longer than a few weeks.
“How does it work?” he asks.
“A combination of magnetic fields, solar energy and ancient magic. Please make sure to always pick it up by the metal.”
“What happens if I touch the glass?”
“Probably nothing. But if you’re extremely unlucky in your aim, you might just open a two-way portal through time.”
“So. Time travel is a thing now.”
“It’s not for time travel.” Strange sternly tells him. “It is a portal through which you can double yourself in time.”
That’s all very much potato potahto to Tony.
Strange explains about the ancient magic, and the effect of the solar pull on it, and no, Mr. Stark that is in fact not glass, it’s a different mineral, much closer to quartz, and all Tony can think about is that he doesn’t want to keep it in his house.
He doesn’t want Peter to go through … what he already went through. Although in Peter’s head, he didn’t go through it yet, but in Tony’s head he did. And if Peter doesn’t go through it, will it change his past and therefore his future?
His head is hurting again.
“I’ll take care of it,” he tells Dr. Strange.
-
“Tony, are you awake?”
“Does the pope shit in the woods?”
His mattress shifts. “Uh. Probably not?”
Tony opens his eyes. “What.”
Peter is sitting next to him on the bed, on top of the covers, with an earnest expression. “I think my crush’s dad might be an evil arms dealer.”
“Who let you in here?”
“Pepper, who else.”
Tony closes his eyes again. “No one is allowed to interrupt my afternoon naps. You are now officially blacklisted.”
“You weren’t even sleeping.”
“I was resting my eyes.”
“But, Tony,” Peter pokes him. “I think my crush’s dad might be an evil arms dealer.”
“Yeah, heard you the first time. Come back when he’s an alien robot-sorcerer or something.”
“Tony.”
“All riiiight, I’m up. I’m up.”
-
Tony is there when Peter wakes up in the medic wing. His arm bandaged, bruises still covering the right side of his face.
“W’happened?” the kid murmurs fuzzily.
“You crashed my plane on Coney Island. Didn’t I tell you to leave Toomes to me?”
Peter hums and squints at Tony. “You look like shit.”
Tony quirks an eyebrow. “Shall I get you a mirror?”
“Nah. That’s okay. Is May..?”
“On her way.”
“And Mr. Toomes?”
“In custody.”
“His family? Liz?”
“The police will inform them.”
“And all the weapons in his evil lair-“
“Already took care of it.”
“Wow,” Peter breathes. “How do you always fix everything so fast?”
Tony tugs at a strand of his hair. “Not always. You’ll see. You did good, Underoos. I’m proud. But for the love of God – please a little more sense of self-preservation next time?”
Peter just pulls a face at the nickname.
-
Peter turns sixteen, and Strange still hasn’t come to reclaim his time travel tennis ball – … or his doubling-in-time-two-way-portal-tennis-ball, whatever. And Tony wonders. When, how, why will it happen?
Rhodey gives Peter a kite for his birthday and invites him to the beach. Tony, Pepper and May tag along. They go to Tony’s private beach along the shore line of Coney Island creek, with a lovely view of the strip of land where Peter crashed a plane half a year ago.
Peter doesn’t even seem to remember. “Tony. Help me build a sandcastle?”
Tony mostly helps by rubbing sand into Peter’s hair until the kid scrambles away and hides behind Pepper.
-
For his birthday, Pepper gives him a dark blue cardigan, with little wave patterns on the buttons. It is hideous. Tony almost tears up as he thanks her.
-
Pepper forces him to clean his workshop.
“Once a year, Tony,” she had told him. “I really don’t think that’s a lot to ask. Just pass a vacuum cleaner through there once a year.”
Tony eyes a stack of forgotten books in the box he found behind one of his desks. He grunts as he lifts it onto the table to inspect them closer.
His understudy shuffles into the room. “Hey Tony.”
“Hey kid. How was school?”
“Good. Can I help?”
“Nah. Just do whatever you want.” He takes a few books out. They don’t seem that important, but he must have stored them away for some reason. He leafs through them, looking for clues.
Something slips out, onto his desk.
It’s a picture of his parents. One that Tony doesn’t even remember keeping stored away in here. The last time he saw this picture was…
In his old office. Twelve years ago. When a lunatic teenager whipped it out.
“It’s cold in here.” Peter complains behind him.
Tony breaths in, his eyes still on the picture. “You can wear my cardigan,” he says.
He knows what needs to happen. He folds the picture in half, quickly jots down some notes, and slips it into his pocket before taking his cardigan off. His dumb past self will do what is necessary, and bring his kid back to him.
He steps closer to Peter and lays the cardigan across his shoulders, squeezing a little. “There.”
“Thanks, Tony!” Peter chirps, poking his arms through the sleeves.
Tony smiles and turns away again, listening to Peter padding around his workshop. This next part is all up to the kid.
He is feeling remarkably peaceful. There is something comforting at knowing that everything is somehow beyond your control, and all you have to do is let things unfold as they are meant to unfold.
“T-Tony?”
He turns.
Peter is standing next to Dum-E, wide-eyed, holding the glowing orb. He tries to shake it off, but the thing seems glued to his hands. “I can’t – I can’t let go! I just wanted to-“ he yelps as the light grows brighter. “Tony, help?”
Tony steps closer. “You’ll be okay, Pete,” he promises.
And then the kid is gone.
And then Tony panics. Because there is no way that this is working out the way he planned it to. He must have changed the timeline somehow and maybe he just sent Peter off to his doom and he’ll never ever see the kid again and May will kill him and then revive him just so she can kill him again and-
Peter pops back into existence. Wearing a different shirt, hair in disarray, shoulders tense, clutching a banana to his chest as if it’s his lifeline. He holds his breath as his wild gaze seeks out Tony. When he finds his mentor, his shoulders sag and he blinks. Once. Twice.
Tony exhales slowly, then sends him a gentle smile. “Hey kid.” He steps forward and sets a hand on top of Peter’s head. “Did you bring my pickle Starburst?”
Peter’s mouth drops open.