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Before Peter, the lab had been a lot messier.
Not that Peter was, in and of itself, a very tidy person, but there had definitely been a shift at some point. It wasn’t really clear when.
Tony had always had a lab of sorts- from the time he was young, he’d been strongly encouraged, if not outright told that he was going to follow in his father’s footsteps and the natural progression from that seemed to be that he would need a space to create, to formulate, to learn. To take over.
His first lab had been almost clinical in appearance, not really an ideal place for a child to grow up but a great place to create a circuit board at age four, a robot at age seven, and so on.
His father didn’t come to his lab and he’d liked it that way. There was a separate kind of peace that came from having a place all to himself. Let his mother investigate his bedroom upstairs, let her paint the walls that garish green his thirteenth year, let Dad rail against his attitude all he wanted at dinner. When he came downstairs, he knew he was safe. For a while at least.
But then his parents had died and he’d shut the lab up for good, taking his bots with him and a few other momentos, and he’d never gone back. He’d moved as far away from the old mansion as he could actually.
But the creative instinct had come back to him in Malibu, peeking out under all the grief and pain and booze and he’d started over.
Create, break, repair. That’s how his life had been going up until that point.
‘Why don’t you come back, Tony?’ That’s what Natasha had said in the aftermath of his Malibu home tumbling into the sea. ‘We’re starting up something new.’
So he’d come back. Back to New York, back to shitty weather in the winter, back to good bagels and pigeons and coworkers that thought he was a textbook narcissist but still liked to nap with their head in his lap…
And he’d liked it. Nat would sit on his desk while he worked, Steve sketched from the couch. Rhodey brought him sandwiches when he got in too deep to what he was working on…
But they’d left.
And with Rhodey in DC more often than not, he found himself back to where he’d begun. Crates with half finished projects, broken glass by the windowsill, some electrical wires. Dum-E and U creating their own kind of mayhem. He slept some nights on the couch with his Black Sabbath sweater thrown over his shoulders for warmth and then resolved that he could never do that again. The couch was not comfortable for sleeping.
He slept sprawled on his desk instead.
And if he sometimes knocked a mug of cold coffee off the desk that was no big deal. He’d toss a rag down, sop up what he could, and get a different mug down. He wondered where this never ending supply of mugs seemed to be coming from, but he chose not to question it.
And then-
The kid had happened. He’d been desperate, yes, a little distracted, exactly, and more than a little short sighted and he’d brought a fourteen- what?- fifteen year old to Germany to fight his former closest friends. In his defense, he’d never thought they would hurt the kid. And they hadn’t for the most part.
But the kid had imprinted on him like a baby duckling and… Weapons smuggling, many texts- so many texts- a misstep or two with the hot aunt- and a crashed plane later, he found himself staring around the lab. Peter’s hot aunt had agreed not to kill him if he made the kid’s internship legitimate. The kid would be there, starting next week.
So he’d sighed and prioritized the obvious dangers. Remove the glass shards. Make the windows and doors at least somewhat accessible. Probably should have taped off that wire last month when he’d noticed it…
He wasn’t even sure the kid had noticed his efforts, but he’d bounced in there with about seven times as much energy as Tony felt he’d ever had and thought, apparently, that everything Mr. Stark -he couldn’t believe someone called him that, especially to his face- did was cool.
And that’s when the lab had started to change.
The kid needed a workstation, he told himself, and so he’d had to haul off some of the old junk (he put this in a separate room. Just because it was junk didn’t mean it wasn’t still useful). He shoved Pete’s new station under the window, thinking the kid probably liked the view. Since he was out there swinging around New York all the time, he might like to see it from above. How Tony saw it.
And once he’d set up the station by the window, it seemed clear to him that the windows had never been dirtier. So he’d squeegeed the windows off one weird night in November when his anxiety wouldn’t quit on him anyways.
‘How do you know which mug is the one you’re drinking from?’ Peter had asked him one day. Tony had just blinked at him. ‘I just know,’ he’d said. Which was a lie- he didn’t always know and had gotten some nasty shocks along the way, sipping old, cold coffee. He dumped out all the old mugs that night into the sink. And because Pete had offered to wash- Tony washed them instead. The kid had brought him a canister of hot chocolate mix a week later. The cheap stuff they sold in grocery stores. Jesus. Talk about your gateway drugs.
‘Are you going to bed too?’ Pete had asked him, the first weekend he’d stayed over. He’d shook his head. ‘Oh. Then I can stay up longer too, Mr. Stark-’
And when the kid had fallen asleep fifteen minutes later, he’d sighed and shut down the lab. Had dragged the kid up to his room in the penthouse, across from his own. Had fallen asleep in his own bed for once.
Pete had stuck by him through the winter and into the spring, coming to his internship nights three times a week and bringing with him a slurry of pizza, homework, and teenage debris. Tony had put up a menorah at Hanukkah for him and Pete had insisted they get a small Christmas tree a couple of weeks later.
Tony found enough of Pete’s socks and sweatshirts laying around the lab somehow that he’d started to naturally add them to his own laundry. For all of his efforts, Peter started stealing his hoodies. Tony would have objected more except-
Except for the first time he’d seen Pete wearing his old college sweater, the sleeves rolled up because they were way too long, the first time he’d seen that, it had done something funny to his heart. He didn’t know how to deal with that.
So he’d bought supplies for the kid’s webmaking instead of addressing it- weirdo- and updated the couch to something that was actually comfortable. Petey continued to fall asleep on the couch on weekends he stayed over, wrapped in some blanket they’d appropriated from upstairs. Tony would wake him, send him to bed, and head to bed himself.
Tony began setting aside projects. Engines he thought Pete might be able to repair, gauntlets that he wanted to rewire, a car that he thought the kid could drive someday if they put some work into it…
Pete was surprisingly organized when it came to projects and he’d created a system that even Tony could follow.
They’d put Of Mice and Men on as an audiobook one day in March because Peter said that it was required reading and they’d spent the day organizing his projects, putting away supplies, and cleaning up his tools. Tony had teased the kid endlessly when the ending of the book made him cry. But he’d slung an arm around the kid’s shoulders and thought about kissing his hair and even if the thought had scared him, he’d thought it.
He downloaded an audiobook version of Jurassic Park instead.
If Peter noticed the changes around him, he never mentioned it.
Tony liked it that way. Everyone else was always so weirdly observant of him, narrating his choices back to him like he was clueless to his own actions, but then there was Pete, who would bring him a mug because he thought it was funny or who pinned photographs from his class at school to the mini fridge, all the while chatterboxing about something Ned had said-
“You cleaned up in here,” Steve said.
“The kid likes it this way,” he mumbled, passing a hand over his eyes. “I-I do too.”
The captain was silent next to him, looking out at the lab. He seemed to be mentally cataloging each change- it had been years since he’d come back after all- “We’re going to get them back, Tony. We can’t stop until we do.”
“We lost, Steve.”
Before Pete, the lab had been a lot messier.