Chapter Text
“But why do you have to go? It’s Pepper’s birthday and you need to stay here and help us celebrate,” Peter’s arms are hooked around Tony’s forearm and his socked feet are sliding across the floor as he hangs off Tony’s arm in an attempt to stop him, “Daddy, can’t you make someone else go?”
“But then Uncle Rhodey will be all alone,” Tony ignores his son’s antics as they reach the stairs, simply lifting his arm higher and heading down the stairs, Peter’s feet dangling above the stairs as he tucks his legs close to his chest. Peter started giggling as Tony tried to carefully navigate the stairs, “And Pepper has plans today, I’m sure they don’t involve the two of us bothering her.”
“Don’t listen to your Dad,” Pepper is standing at the bottom of the stairs holding Peter’s jacket and backpack, “You are never a bother, Peter.”
“And I am?” Tony reaches the bottom of the stairs and shakes his arm until Peter drops down to the floor, still giggling, “I’m hurt, Miss Potts. And after I got you such a nice gift too.”
“What did you get her, Daddy?” Peter asks, raising his eyebrows cheekily and widening his eyes, “Cause I don’t remember you going with Uncle Happy and me to buy her birthday gifts.”
Tony stammers for a moment before narrowing his eyes at his son and patting him on the butt, “Go put your shoes on you menace.”
“Do I have to go to school?” Peter changes tactics, “I could go with you and Uncle Rhodey instead.”
“Not even close to an option,” Tony shakes his head, scratching the back of his head as he glances around the living room to see if there’s anything else that Peter may have left laying around the night before. He turns to look at Peter, satisfied that Pepper had gathered up all of Peter’s school things (probably before the reporter had been escorted out of the house), and sighs when he sees the pout on Peter’s face. He crosses to crouch in front of his son, “I’ll only be gone for three days and then we can do something to celebrate Pepper’s birthday, okay? We’ll take her somewhere really nice and let her have some time to relax, yeah?”
“Fine,” Peter nods before throwing his arms around Tony’s neck and squeezing tightly, “You promise you’ll only be gone for three days?”
“I promise,” Tony says, squeezing Peter back just as tightly, “You’ll be here with Pepper the whole time and with Uncle Happy and you can call me whenever you want to. Okay?”
“I don’t want you to go,” Peter whispers, “I don’t like it when you’re not here.”
“I know buddy, but it’s just three days. That’s all.” Tony releases his son and pushes him gently in Pepper’s direction so that he can put his jacket on and take his backpack and lunch box. “It’s only three days.”
Except, it’s not only three days. It’s not a week, or three weeks, or a month. It’s three months that Tony is kept in a cave system in Afghanistan pretending to build a missile while instead building a mini arc reactor and a suit that will take him back home to his son. Peter is the first thing on his mind when he wakes up and the last thing on his mind when he goes to sleep, but when Yinsen asks if he has a family, Tony lies because no one knows that Peter exists except for Rhodey, Happy, Pepper, and Obie and he has to keep it that way to protect the most important thing in his life.
He frees himself from captivity and crash lands in the desert before he begins walking and hoping and praying to every god he can think of that he can make it to civilization before he dies from the heat and dehydration. He promised Peter he was coming home and he’s going to keep that promise, even if it took him longer than it should have to fulfill it. Then Rhodey is landing in a helicopter and he’s being examined by a military doctor before he’s on a plane towards home. He can’t contain his anxiety and his excitement. He’s going to see Peter again. He can’t focus on anything that Rhodey has been trying to tell him, but it can wait. Once he’s home with his son, then he’ll worry about Rhodey and Stark Industries.
Pepper and Happy are waiting for him when he lands and he wonders why they didn’t pull Peter out of school to come see him. He briefly wonders if Peter is angry at him for breaking his promise, but he shakes that off as he remembers that no one knows Peter exists and even a reunion on a military base isn’t something that should be risked. Pepper’s eyes are red rimmed and he can see tears still glistening in them as he approaches two of the people he trusts most in the world.
“A few tears for your long lost boss?” He grins as he reaches them and expects Pepper to reply with something cheeky or sarcastic in her normal way. But she swallows hard and Tony shifts uncomfortably as she stares at him, “What? Do I have something on my face?
“Tony….” Pepper’s voice is raw, raspy like she’s been crying for three months, she’s stronger than that and she wouldn’t have fallen apart in front of Peter. It’s why Tony always trusted her to take care of him when he couldn’t. It’s why she was his godmother. She sniffs hard and Happy places a hand on her shoulder. Tony takes a step back, suddenly less confident that Peter’s absence on the airfield has something to do with privacy.
“Where’s Peter?” He asks, his chest tightening and breathing becoming harder. Tears start to fall down Pepper’s cheeks and he shakes his head, grabbing her roughly by the arm and regretting it immediately, “Pepper, where is my son?”
“It’s a long story….” Happy speaks up, but Tony holds up a hand to stop him.
“I don’t care if it’s a long story, I want to know where my son is.” He barely manages to keep from yelling and he barely manages to keep from collapsing to the ground as his breaths become shallower and shorter. He registers that Rhodey is behind him, holding him up so that he doesn’t collapse. He looks at Pepper again, “Please, Pepper, tell me where Peter is.”
“Child Protective Services took Peter into their custody a week after you were taken,” Pepper’s voice is shaky as she speaks and she’s still crying, “I tried to keep him with me, but you hadn’t updated your will to name a guardian if something happened to you and they wouldn’t let him stay with me. They sent him to live with a foster family in Santa Monica and I managed to get visitation with him because I was petitioning the courts to get custody of him and also taking the classes to be a foster parent if that didn’t work. I should have seen it, Tony, I’m so sorry I didn’t see it….”
“Didn’t see what?” Tony is reeling, he’d meant to update his will for years. Pepper and Rhodey had been pressuring him to make sure that Peter was taken care of since the day he’d gone to pick his son up from the hospital, but Obie had convinced him to wait because he was young and he didn’t need to stress. But Obie had been wrong. Pepper is sobbing now, her body shaking and her hand over her mouth as she tries to finish her story.
“If I’d just seen how little he was acting like himself. He wasn’t himself anymore. He was withdrawn and tired and he didn’t talk to me much anymore and I thought it was because he missed you and just wanted to come home. But it wasn’t. If I’d just realized sooner….” Her story is coming out in gasping breaths, “Six weeks ago, there was a fire in the foster home. The foster parents got out, but none of the kids made it. The Fire Marshall determined that the fire was caused by an exposed wire in the hall outside the kids’ rooms and that their doors had all been locked and they’d all died from smoke inhalation before the flames had consumed them. The foster parents had been shooting up in the living room when the fire started and they didn’t even attempt to let the kids out…..The autopsies showed signs of severe abuse and neglect on all of the kids….If I’d just realized…..”
Tony pulls Pepper into his arms as she sobs and they collapse in a heap on the ground. He’s not mad at Pepper. He’s mad at himself for leaving and at Obie for convincing him that he didn’t need to update his will and at the two people who’d locked his seven year old son in a bedroom and left him to die in a fire. But he’s not mad at Pepper. He knows that she loves, loved, Peter just as much as he did. Pepper’s been there since the day Peter came home from the hospital, hell Pepper was more of a mother to Peter than the woman who gave birth to him had ever been. He thinks about telling her that it’s not her fault, that he knows she did everything she could and that he doesn’t blame her. But instead, he buries his face in her hair and just cries.
Tony will try to convince the police to investigate the cause of the fire and the two people who his son had been left with. But nothing will be found until, three months after Obidiah Stane’s death, Tony is going through all of his finances and files and finds the correspondence and money trail that show Stane had hired someone to set the fire and make sure that Peter James Edwin Stark didn’t survive the blaze. When Tony tells Pepper, the two of them will sink onto the couch, hold each other, and cry until the sun comes up the next day.