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“Peter?”
Tony whispers the word as if it is the most fragile thing in the entire world. As if a name so pure and unbroken being uttered by a man so drastically different, imperfect and unwholly, could destroy the very existence of the person it belonged to. Because the name ‘Peter’ belonged to one person and one person only and that was Tony’s Peter. Nothing else, no one else mattered.
The absence of an answer only digs the dagger of denial further into Tony’s heart, his brain holding onto the way his clenching heart aches as it wraps itself around the intrusion, quickly accepting it into his life. Because if what had just happened, had really just happened, then denial would be a familiar friend in Tony’s life from this point onwards.
“Pete?” Tony tries again, scrubbing his face furiously when a single tear drops onto the body in front of him, tainting the purity, seeping into the suit that is stained with a darker red than its signature colour, the blue accents turning a sickening purple.
He thinks that if he has to say the name one more time without an answer, his voice will cease to exist.
And yet he does it anyway.
“Peter?”
…
“Buddy?”
…
“Kiddo?”
He cycles through all of the different nicknames that he had once said with such fondness and hidden love. His voice cracks and breaks under the amount of love he now forces into it, channelling an emotion that he had never thought himself capable of feeling through the barely audible words escaping his mouth.
Words.
That’s all they are now.
Tears pool on the ground, the unwavering reality of the situation taking a hold of his bones and splintering them with each sob.
He carefully, oh so carefully, commands his shaking limbs to obey him. His arms move towards the child in front of him, laying limply on the ground. He wraps his failing arms around Peter Parker, pulling him up and off the ground so that he is now leaning heavily against Tony. They are chest to chest, Peter’s head dangling lifelessly over Tony’s shoulder. He can’t see his eyes this way. Can’t see the two voids where life once danced happily, laughing and teasing Tony for the way his joints crack when he moves. There’s no laughter when Tony’s elbows crack as they pull Peter in closer. No laugh as Tony’s heart repeatedly cracks, over and over, into smaller pieces with each passing second.
He can hear his own heartbeat, a torturous reminder of the unfairness of it all. His heart, the one that fails him constantly with stutters and false alarms, is the one still beating. Irregular, dysfunctional, a broken machine that cannot keep him going. He cannot hear Peter’s heartbeat.
He holds the kid, cradling his head with one hand and supporting his back with the other. He turns his head and buries it in Peter’s matted hair, almost able to smell the shampoo he bought him earlier that week if he tries hard enough. He has to try because if he doesn’t, the smell of blood will overwhelm him and he’ll just stop working right there. He’ll malfunction and no one will be able to fix him, not ever.
He cries. Harder than he’s ever cried in his life. He’s about to throw up, he can taste the bile rising in his throat and he hopes to god that he chokes on it. He thinks of the way he mourned his parents after finding out that they had died and he knows in his heart that it cannot ever compare to the way he feels now.
Tony Stark is no stranger to pain. He lives every day of his life in pain, pain when he breathes, pain when he moves, pain when his heart beats. But he has never encountered pain like this. The all-encompassing agony that is pulling his very muscles apart, intercepting the electrical impulses that are being fired around his brain and electrocuting him with them, holding him hostage in this world where Peter Parker no longer exists.
He cannot think of a singular reaction to a situation like this. It has haunted him in nightmares for years now, his greatest fear, and yet he has absolutely no plan of action. Because Peter is dead and there is no order left and everything is over. Everything is gone and there are no steps he can take to fix things. There is no plan of action because Peter’s heart has stopped beating and he has no pulse and his body is starting to lose its warmth and there is nothing he can do. He cannot check the wires and he cannot oil the parts and he cannot reboot the system and there is nothing he can do.
So he cries. He cries because there is nothing else he can do and he cries because of the fact that there is nothing else he can do. He cries because he doesn’t know what else to do because everything he did was for Peter.
There’s someone behind him. He knows it because he can feel their hand on his shoulder but he can’t acknowledge that because right now he’s pretending that the warmth from the hand is Peter breathing against his shoulder.
Somebody is talking as well. But Tony doesn’t know what they’re saying or who is saying it. It could be Rhodey or it could be Steve or it could well be Tony but all that he knows for sure is that it isn’t Peter, can’t be Peter and will never be Peter again so it doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter.
They’re going to take him away at some point. He’s not sure who he’s referring to, Peter or himself. Either way, they’ll be taking a corpse. They’ll take away an empty shell of a human being, devoid of any life and he doesn’t know whether it’ll be him or Peter.
He holds on tighter, the cold of Peter’s body biting him and stabbing him and killing him and oh god he’s going to die, he just knows it. There’s no making it out of this one. Peter is dead and there is no way Tony can just keep existing in a world without him because it’s only been a little bit and that’s far too long already. He can feel his body shutting down on him and Peter’s only been dead for moments. He can’t come back from this one.
He feels, a phenomenon that he wasn’t sure was possible anymore, someone grab at him from behind and suddenly he’s being pulled to his feet. Everything has been moving in slow motion up until this point because he had to savour every second with Peter and he couldn’t bear to consider the next second whilst the one he was living in was dragging on for an eternity already. But now, now everything is moving far too quickly. Thoughts flying through his mind at a mile a minute, panic taking root in his arc reactor and spreading out through his veins, more deadly than the palladium poisoning he had back in 2010 ever was. Peter is being removed from his arms, from where he had been clutching onto him like a lifeline, and he lashes out, snarling animalistically as he tries to fight off whoever is trying to take his kid from him.
Once again, time and time again, his body fails him. Not updated enough, not enough upgrades, not strong enough, not running smoothly enough. He should’ve incorporated a suit into his very bloodstream, using the iron in his blood, using the minerals in his body to create himself into the perfect suit. He is not strong enough. He is not strong enough and Peter is pulled away from him.
Tony yells, incoherent sounds that couldn’t be translated into English if he tried. He tries to blindly get back to his kid, trying to get there in time because maybe he can save him, if he can just get to him and he’s falling and Peter’s falling, he’s falling from the sky itself and it’s so so high and he falls and Tony doesn’t get there in time and- So he tries to get there now, pushing whoever is restraining him right now away so he can just get to his kid and he can’t see because his eyes are burning with the sheer amount of saltwater gushing from them and he knows his face is covered with a mixture of tears and snot and he’s sure he threw up at some point but he doesn’t care because they’re taking Peter, they’re taking Peter, they’re taking Peter and there’s nothing he can do about it-
He can’t breathe, and he hates himself for even thinking it because Peter can’t- Peter actually can’t breathe, but Tony’s starting to genuinely believe that he can’t and that he never will and god he hopes that he suffocates. He hopes he suffocates in this world where everything he needs to survive has been sucked from the atmosphere. Peter is gone and so is the oxygen and so is everything-
The last thing Tony feels is a prick in his neck, vaguely aware that it is supposed to be sharp but by this point he is completely numb to any physical pain that isn’t directly generated from the mental torture and agony that he is experiencing right now. Right now, forever. There is no difference anymore, he’ll never stop feeling this.
His vision starts to darken, black ebbing in from the corners and all he can think is, thank god, it’s over. He can go home. He can leave behind this world of loss and this world that steals children from parents and he can be with Peter again.
He falls to the ground as the drugs make their way through his system. He prays to god that they gave him too much.