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As a kid, Peter had thought algebra would be hard, but that was only because he hadn't yet understood what it was. (Like a comic book superhero tracking down a villain in the shadows. Find the elusive x! ) When he'd gotten to it, it’d been like learning any other new thing: riding a bike, building a radio. He’d been prepared, or hadn’t needed to be; school, which was for kids, presented everything in a linear progression, so that no one was supposed to feel afraid or overwhelmed.
Precalc comes easily to him this year. He can picture everything in his head, angles and equations all falling into place. This is the most frightening thing, he thinks, that other kids must know.
It’s two months after homecoming night and— and Toomes, and everything. The city’s grown quieter. Peter’s grown to like sitting on rooftops high enough to give him a good view of the city, his arm hooked around his backpack, just to breathe in air that’s traveled a long way to get to him.
One day after school, he finds a bunch of tattooed muscle-y dudes beating each other up in an empty lot.
“Hi guys,” he says brightly, dropping down into the midst of the fight. Someone crashes into him from the back. He staggers forward a little before regaining his balance, and webs the nearest guy to the ground.
“Holy shit!” someone yells. “It’s the— the fuckin’ spider dude, clear out, get the fuck outta here!”
“Jeez,” Peter says, pushing him against a chain-link fence and webbing him up. “You mind keeping it PG-13? I just, you know, the bad words? Sometimes it’s a bit much, you know— whoa, hey, no!” He flips toward a couple of guys trying to hightail it out of the lot. “No one’s getting out of here!”
But after he’s webbed them all to the ground or the fence or the warehouse wall, he skedaddles out of there pretty fast, leaving a nice you’re welcome note to the police.
“Your daily agenda lists a Spanish quiz during sixth period tomorrow,” Karen informs him cheerfully as he’s jumping across a rooftop. “Would you like to do some quick review while you find your way home?”
“Ugh,” Peter says. “Fine.”
“Excellent. Devising study session. This will take approximately thirty-four seconds.”
“When did Mr. Stark put this in my suit?”
“Mr. Stark added several upgrades when your suit was confiscated after the events on the Staten Island ferry,” Karen says. “This function is known as the Study Buddy.”
“Oh. That’s cool.”
“You also now have seven-hundred twenty-nine webshooter combinations.”
Peter groans.
By the time he gets home, his head is swimming with preterite and imperfect conjugations.
“Hey May,” he calls, ripping his mask off.
She sticks her head around the kitchen door.
“Hi,” she says. “How was school?”
“Fine. Got a lotta homework.”
“Yeah? Make sure you get that done.” Before you go out again, she doesn’t say, but he knows it’s there.
“I will.” He smiles at her, heading for his room. “Don’t worry.”
Homework takes a lot shorter than it used to, now that he’s got something to look forward to. Or, well, something bigger to do. He breezes through trig equations and stoichiometry, takes notes on Gatsby. It’d be better if he didn’t have to, only May’s said that he has to keep at least a B in all his classes if he wants to keep on doing— this. And he does. Maybe on bad nights he doesn’t think it’s fun anymore, but he needs to so badly— please, please, you don't understand, I’ll do anything —
But it isn’t something you can take away. He’s Spider-Man whether he's got a Stark-designed suit or not, whether he’s got a curfew or not, whether he’s signed the Accords or not.
You can make me try and forget all about it, he’d said to May, the first night she’d known. I know how it’s— Mr. Stark tried, okay? And it worked, and I just went to school for a couple weeks and it was chill and I didn’t go crazy, but like it or not I’ve got these powers and things just can’t keep happening because of me—
And she’d said, Oh. Oh, hon.
When he suits up after dinner, Aunt May rests a hand on top of his head and rubs it through the fabric of his cowl, gentle, protecting.
He’s spent by the time he gets home. But sleep comes spasmodically, like he’s falling half the night: no mattress under him, roof collapsing above his head.
“You okay?” May asks at breakfast.
“Tired,” he mumbles into his cereal.
Her eyes crease at the edges a little. “Yeah, hon? How’d you sleep?”
“Not great.”
She stops stirring her coffee and goes to stand in front of him. She touches him on the shoulder like she’s about to hug him, but instead slips her hand around his head and pulls his forehead to her waist, the way she’s been doing since he was a kid and first came to her and Ben.
“You wanna tell me about it?” she asks softly.
He shakes his head.
“Okay, hon. That’s okay.”
After a moment, she lets go.
Can he say that things are back to normal now? What’s the baseline for that after being bitten by a radioactive spider?
“You know,” Ned says at lunch the next day, “there are spiders out there that you’re related to.”
Peter laughs. “I guess.”
“Can I meet your in-laws?”
“Spiders don’t have families, dude.”
“Hey, don’t dehumanize spiders.”
“I’m spiderizing spiders,” Peter says. “Which is what you’re supposed to do to spiders.”
“I just think it’s cruel that you view your relatives like this,” says Ned. “You still don’t like spiders, not even after they gave you all your cool powers?”
“I don’t not like them. They’re just kinda freaky. They’re spiders.”
“Would you still kill a spider?”
“Sure,” Peter says.
“Dude.” Ned puts a hand over his heart. “That’s homicide.”
“It’s not that deep, please,” he says, finishing off his turkey sandwich and dusting the crumbs away. “I’m gonna see if I can sneak into the chem lab.”
“Ooh, are you making more webs? Can I come with you?”
“Sure, I’ll show you how it’s made.”
“Awesome,” Ned breathes, and Peter feels a giddy rush swelling past his sternum, because dicking around with science is fun; it’s what teenagers do. In his head, he’s almost got a handle on the value of that. It’s not like he forgets what he makes the web fluid for. But the moment of freefall, just before you hit the water: it’s dilated into ten million individual moments, and in those moments there is time to feel so many different things, there is time to forget, there is time to laugh.
And school is, well, it’s school. He’s still trying to salvage his first marking period grades, but books are the one thing in his life he’s always been good with. There’s always something to fall back on. To remind you of yourself.
There’s decathlon practice, too; they’ve got a regional competition coming up next month, and MJ’s making them lock it in tight.
“Can’t we take it easy with this?” Flash complains after she roasts him with a dead-eyed stare for answering two questions wrong in a row. “Like, didn’t we win nationals at the beginning of the year? We’ve got this.”
“Clearly you don’t, Flash,” she says. “And imagine if a team of national champions lost because of you.”
Flash reddens and scowls.
Next to Peter, Ned whistles softly.
“Okay, moving on,” MJ says, flipping to the next index card. “Ned. This Jamaican native was a major figure in the 1920s Harlem Renaissance and advocated for black separatism, notably founding the Black Star Line which promoted the return of the African diaspora to their ancestral lands. He is considered by Rastafari to be a religious prophet.”
“Oh, um, Marcus Garvey.”
“Yup. Peter, name—”
Peter’s phone rings.
“Uh.” He grabs it out of his pocket as MJ stares him down. He hears Flash snicker. “Sorry, I’m gonna—”
“Abby,” MJ says, already moving down the line. “Name a type of gene mutation that does not change the length of a chromosome.”
It’s a private number. Peter picks up anyway: “Hello?”
“Hey kid,” says a familiar voice.
“Mr. Stark!” he says, maybe a little too loudly. Everyone cuts him a glance.
“Yup, it’s me, just a different phone. I notice you’re not currently doing your whole friendly neighborhood spi— hold on, I hope you’re not on speaker, please tell me no one’s listening in. God knows I raised you with more class than that—”
“No, I’m not,” Peter says, moving to stand at the back of the classroom. “I’m, uh, at academic decathlon practice. And stop saying that you—”
“Oh, extracurriculars. Good for you. Colleges love that. You having fun?”
“Sure.”
“Great, great. Listen, your school calendar says there’s a staff development workshop the first week of December, so you guys have a four day weekend. You wanna come up to the compound for a couple days, do some tinkering? I’ve got some ideas for your suit, you probably do too.” In the background on Mr. Stark’s end, Peter can hear faint talking and laughter. A restaurant, maybe, or a party? "And I could get Rhodey or Vision to teach you some hand-to-hand, unless you're currently shitting your pants at that, in which case I'll find some way to persuade you into it anyway. Because no offense, kid, but you fight like a drunken kangaroo."
“Thanks,” Peter says. “Wait, this isn’t gonna be like the other time I went to the compound, is it, because my answer’s still no.”
“No, I promise there will be no, ah, Avengery tests of character this time,” says Mr. Stark. “Just you, me, and a multimillion dollar suit I’ve entrusted to a twelve-year-old.”
“And here the world was thinking that you were getting more responsible in your old age, hah.”
“Don’t make my own quips for me, it’s rude. Yes or no, Peter? My time’s valuable, gimme an answer.”
“—Sure,” he says. “I gotta ask Aunt May, though, and she’s not too hot with you at the moment ‘cause— well, you know. I know you guys talked it out, but still.”
“Relax, I get it. I’ll talk to her about it too, don’t worry. I’ll be very persuasive.”
“Oh god,” says Peter, but he’s grinning.
“You’re breaking my heart, kid. All right, that’s a yes, I’ll get Happy to text you the details. He’ll pick you up after school on Wednesday. See you in a week.”
“Yeah, see you. Bye, Mr. Stark.”
“Bye. Have fun at nerd club.”
Peter returns to his seat. Ned looks absolutely triumphant, but somehow Peter doubts it’s because of Marcus Garvey. Flash looks like someone took a shit in his Jordans. Peter doubts that’s because of any decathlon-related reasons either.
“Peter,” MJ says in her driest tone, “if you aren’t too busy having your labor exploited by American capitalism, tell me which period of music French composer Camille Saint-Saëns belonged to.”
Happy does not, in fact, pick Peter up on Wednesday. Instead, when he and Ned walk out of the school building, there’s a small crowd gathering next to a convertible orange Audi R8 idling in the fire lane. A man with a familiar goatee and rose-colored sunglasses is sitting in the driver’s seat.
Peter’s brain short-circuits for a second.
“Peter,” Mr. Stark calls. “Got your stuff? Great. Hop in.”
“Holy fuck,” Ned says. “You didn’t tell me he was gonna—”
“I didn’t know,” says Peter. “Holy shit, dude, I gotta go. See you Monday.”
“You are so telling me everything,” Ned says, patting him on the shoulder and letting him go.
Almost as soon as Peter slides into shotgun, they're speeding off.
“Good week?” Mr. Stark asks.
“Um, yeah. Yeah.” Peter fumbles with his backpack, slipping it off and shoving it under his feet.
“Cool. What’d you do?”
“Uh, I stopped a mugger and a gang fight. And then these kids asked me to get their frisbee from a tree in DeVoy Playground, and I wasn’t busy, so, I mean. Happy gets all of this, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah. Of course. I meant non-Spiderling duties. How’s school? How’s your maiden aunt? You got a girlfriend yet?”
“What? No.”
“Man, it sucks when the girl you like is related to your arch-nemesis, isn’t it? My first girlfriend too— daughter of SI’s biggest competitor, my old man was so pissed when he found out. Anyway, what I’m saying is, I relate. It sucks. It’s not great. But you did great, kid, I know I’ve said that before, but you did great.”
“Thanks,” Peter says dryly. “Also, can I just say? Too soon, Mr. Stark. Too soon.”
“I’m trying here, gimme a break.”
ned (3:08 PM): flash saw
ned (3:08 PM): actually like half the school saw and like at least half of that half took pics (including me lbr ok sorry) so don’t be surprised if like. the bugle or sth picks up on it
ned (3:09 PM): headline tomorrow:
ned (3:09 PM): FATHER AND SON: HAS TONY STARK FINALLY LOST A PATERNITY SUIT?
ned (3:09 PM): but more importantly flash saw and i think he went to the bathroom 2 weep
ned (3:09 PM): or maybe he shat himself
Peter has been to the Avengers Facility only the once: it’s a sleek, industrial thing. It’s supposed to be all official and impersonal and whatever, he knows, but there’s Mr. Stark all over it. Like— like— how Avengers Tower used to say STARK, and even when there was only the A left, everyone still called it Stark Tower. They made jokes about when Tony Stark would get around to finishing his own repairs instead of sticking his nose, not just his money, into the Department of Damage Control’s business.
Mr. Stark’s gone quiet, which is something completely alien to Peter, because he knows Mr. Stark and, well, he talks. All the time. Sometimes Peter’s in awe of how he’s always got something to say. Now he thinks about maybe saying something to fill the silence, like this place is super cool, did you design it yourself because it looks like you and that's really cool —
But as soon as they walk in, his heightened senses tell him that the residential sector is empty. Mr. Stark looks tight around the eyes.
Never mind, then. More than anything, Peter knows better not to dredge up a touchy subject.
He follows Mr. Stark through the atrium and common area, down a hallway of identical, unlabeled doors. Halfway down the hall, Mr. Stark stops abruptly in front of one of them, and if not for Peter’s enhanced reflexes, he’d have knocked right into him.
"Welcome to Stark B&B, kid," Mr. Stark says, rapping his knuckles against the door. "These are your quarters. Don't go into any of the others or you might see Vision naked— actually, I don't know if he technically wears clothes or not in combat, so maybe that’s not a viable threat— scratch that, you might see Natasha naked, and that might just be the last thing you'll ever see."
"That's reassuring."
"Don't worry, I'm kidding." He looks down at his own feet, flashes a quick, jerky smile. "You won’t be seeing her around here, seeing as I don’t even have any clue where she is."
"Oh," says Peter. "Okay."
"Yeah. Why don't you put your stuff down and take a quick look around your quarters? Tell me if anything's wrong, if you need anything. Then dinner, and then we can head down to the labs afterward if you want."
He feels his mouth curl into a grin. "Hell yeah."
"As you wish, Mr. Parker. Kitchen's this way, there's pizza."
"So, kid," says Mr. Stark, tearing into his second slice. "Talk to me about the suit. We'll make a list for when we get downstairs."
"Uh, okay," Peter says, wiping his mouth self-consciously. "So I don't have any complaints function-wise. Mobility and webshooters are great, uh, there's a lot of different types of webs, jeez. I like the sugar-glider thing. And the spider drone? So helpful. It's great, Mr. Stark, thank you."
"Don't worry about it, suit's yours," Mr. Stark says dismissively. "Suggestions, come on. What do you want?"
"Well— I mean, Instant Kill Mode? Really?"
"Yeah." Mr. Stark grimaces. "It's a precaution. Last resort. Don't use it."
"Why does Karen keep suggesting it to me?"
"Karen, huh. Where do you come up with these things, seriously."
"In a DoDC deep storage warehouse?"
Mr. Stark closes his eyes. "Peter."
"Yeah?"
"Please. Don't you get how the whole vigilante thing works? No, wait— don't answer that. You're gonna give me a heart attack, Jesus Christ. Leave the rhetorical questions be, leave me some plausible deniability as to what incredibly dangerous and possibly illegal things you do."
"Plausible deniability," Peter echoes slowly.
"Yes. For my sake."
"Three words: Baby Monitor Protocol."
"Shut up, you insolent teenager."
He shuts up.
"Really, though, okay, word of advice from the man who pioneered the field— Karen's an AI. She's a learning program. The more you talk to her, the better she is at understanding what you want. See, watch this— Friday?"
"Yes, boss," the ceiling responds. "I've just sent a report to your mobile phone on the Senate committee hearing you were no doubt going to ask me about later."
"Why's she Irish?" Peter asks.
Mr. Stark puts down his pizza slice and gazes upward like he's praying. Or begging for salvation. "Let's— spider suit. Please."
"Yeah, okay. Hey, can we chill a bit with the Enhanced Interrogation Mode voice modulator? Like, it's really not helpful."
Mr. Stark grins. "Anything’s better than hearing your prepubescent Mickey Mouse voice."
"Hey!"
His voice cracks. Mr. Stark dissolves into laughter.
He could probably have wet dreams about the engineering lab for the rest of his life just from the first eyeful he gets.
“Holy fuck,” he whispers, coming upon a workbench.
“Yeah, this is a step up from dumpster-diving, isn’t it,” Mr. Stark says, his lips twitching.
“This is… oh my God,” Peter says. “I’m allowed to work in here? With this stuff?”
“No, of course not, get the hell out of here,” says Mr. Stark. “Seriously, kid, why do you think I let you down here in the first place? Give me your suit, I’ll hook it up to the computers so we can play around with the settings. In the meantime— Friday, give Mr. Parker a brief technical tour of the lab? Show him the station where he can cook up some of that web formula; your HUD monitors say you’re running low.”
Friday finds him an actual tub and a proportionally-sized rebar piece as a stirring rod. Mr. Stark watches Peter dump a carton of salicylic acid into the tub and says, “If your aunt calls me to complain that she keeps on having to buy you more spot gel every week, I’m gonna have to actually start paying you an intern salary so you can buy it yourself.”
“That’s a threatening threat.”
“What, you think I’m not threatening? I’ll show you threatening. Go to your room, young man. You’re grounded.”
“You know,” says Peter, covering his nose and mouth as he pours in toluene, “I’m sure you’re actually pretty good at the whole threatening thing, given that you were Iron Man for like, seven years, so I appreciate the family-friendly version.”
He stirs the contents of the vat a couple times, then steps back to let it react. Across the room, Mr. Stark’s standing in a circle of holographic displays, fiddling with the carbon fiber fabric of the suit. His eyes are on Peter, expression solemn and heavy.
“I always forget that you’re more perceptive than the press,” he says.
Peter shrugs. “They’re okay, s’long as the spin’s not too much.”
“There’s always spin.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Seems like Spider-Man’s been getting plenty of media attention lately,” Mr. Stark says, tilting his head.
“Yeah, but they’re not exactly writing about me as a person,” Peter says, siphoning his fluid into a webshooter cartridge. “Did you know that the Times ran an op-ed about me after the thing at the Washington Monument? Like I guess it was about, like, enhanced vigilantes as a whole and the impact of the Avengers on such individuals or whatever, but they talked a lot about Spider-Man. Said that I’m an embodiment of a greater societal phenomenon.”
“I know,” Mr. Stark says softly.
“So I guess… I mean, it’s not like they can do a profile on me. So I can’t exactly get mad at them for writing stuff that isn’t all that accurate, ‘cause like… I don’t own Spider-Man. I don’t stick my name next to his. Media’s only as perceptive as you let them be.”
“And what, you don’t wish you could control the narrative about you?”
“Sure I do. I practice interview questions in the shower like everyone else does.” He laughs a little. “I’d be the fan favorite Avenger. The relatable one.”
Mr. Stark’s lips are twitching again. “Sure you would. Why not, then? Why didn’t you?”
“Wasn’t a test, huh.”
“No. It wasn’t.”
Peter wets his lips. “I guess we’ll see how long I can hold out. But maybe people’ll find out before that, I don’t know. I’ve been told that I’m bad at keeping secrets.”
Mr. Stark isn’t looking at him anymore. “C’mere, pick up that mic. Let’s figure out how you want the voice modulator to sound. You want a voice for just regular day-to-day Spider-Man? Helps with the whole secret identity thing.”
“Might be helpful,” Peter says, shrugging.
By the time they reemerge from the lab, Peter’s “obsolete brick of a phone” has been confiscated and replaced with the newest generation StarkPhone, with Karen custom-installed on it. He can hear voices and the sound of the TV coming from the lounge.
Mr. Stark touches him on the arm.
“You okay with this?”
“Uh, who…?”
“Rhodey— ah, Colonel James Rhodes. And Vision. They can keep a secret, if you were wondering.”
“...Okay, then.”
Peter winces a little as Mr. Stark cups his hands together and shouts, “Rhodey! Got someone I want you to meet!”
They round the corner to find Colonel Rhodes and Vision sitting on the couch. Vision’s in the middle of setting up a Wii.
Colonel Rhodes grasps the couch arm and uses it to slowly stand himself up. His legs are braced in exoskeleton prostheses.
In his peripheral vision, Peter sneaks a glance at Mr. Stark, but Mr. Stark’s expression reveals nothing.
“Rhodey, Vision, meet Peter Parker. He fought with us at Leipzig.” Mr. Stark closes a hand around Peter’s shoulder and nudges him forward a little. “Peter, this is James Rhodes and Vision, you know who they are.”
“Call me Rhodey,” says Colonel Rhodes, reaching his hand out. Peter steps forward and shakes it. “It’s nice to meet you, Peter. I’ve seen you on the news, you got some nice moves.”
Peter grins. “Thanks,” he says, glad his voice doesn’t crack. “Nice— nice to meet you, uh, Rhodey.”
Vision shakes Peter’s hand silently; it isn’t until he steps back and looks Peter up and down that he says, in a measured voice, “In the interest of honest communication, Peter, would you tell us how old you are?”
“I’m, uh, sixteen in two months.”
Suddenly, Colonel Rhodes is glaring— not at Peter, but at Mr. Stark.
“Kid,” Mr. Stark says, “easiest way to sound super young is by stating your age in terms of how old you’re gonna be.”
Colonel Rhodes glares harder.
“In my defense,” Mr. Stark says loudly at the ceiling, “we were backed into a corner and I didn't expect things to escalate that badly. And hey, the kid did great.”
A furrow appears between Colonel Rhodes’ eyebrows. “He’s not thinking of recruiting you, is he? To the Avengers?”
“No, course not,” Mr. Stark says smoothly. “He’s not a legal adult, can you imagine? His aunt would have to sign off on missions. Plus, the, uh, child soldier thing, pretty sure that’s a human rights violation, big no-no for the Avengers especially now that we’re UN-sanctioned—”
“I got homework,” says Peter, straight-faced. “And an eleven-thirty curfew.”
Mr. Stark checks his watch. “Yup. Speaking of. Skedaddle to your quarters, young man.”
“Aw, come on.”
“You’ve got four whole days, stop whining. Go, or I’ll call Aunt May.”
Peter wanders into the kitchen at eight-thirty the next morning to find Colonel Rhodes playing Super Mario Galaxy.
“Morning, Peter,” he says, pausing the game when he spots him. “There’s eggs in the pan, help yourself to whatever’s in the fridge and the pantry.”
“Thanks.”
Once Peter’s got himself settled with breakfast, Rhodey says, “So Happy tells me that the Coney Island incident was you.”
“Uh.” He laughs nervously. “Yeah.”
Colonel Rhodes whistles. “That was a hell of a wreckage. Glad you got it away from the city.”
“Yeah.”
“What’re your powers? Superstrength, sticky hands and feet, what else? The webs?”
“Uh, I got superstrength, agility, enhanced senses and the, uh, climbing walls thing. The webs I just invented.”
“You invented them?” asks Colonel Rhodes. “So you’re an engineer?”
“I guess so.”
“Explains why Tony likes you so much."
Peter blinks. “Really?”
“I mean, he doesn’t tend to voluntarily spend time with kids. You probably remind him of himself or something. At least, I can see it.”
“Wow,” says Peter. “Thanks.”
Colonel Rhodes nods. Then he points to the ceiling. “That’s a ten foot jump. Think you could make it?”
Peter grins and sets down his plate. “Easy.”
He jumps. Abruptly he finds himself clinging onto the ceiling, looking down at the room.
“Jesus." Colonel Rhodes shakes his head. "How’d that happen to you?”
“I, uh,” Peter laughs sheepishly. “Long story. Got bit by a radioactive spider. So I guess I’ve got a bit of spider DNA now.”
He lets his legs dangle for a moment before he jumps down, hitting the floor with barely a sound.
“Tony wants me to help Vision coach you at hand-to-hand.”
“Yeah, he told me.”
Colonel Rhodes rifles through the drawer of the coffee table in front of him and pulls out a second Wii controller and a copy of Mario Kart. “What do you say I test you this way first?”
Peter grins. “You’re on.”
By the time Mr. Stark shows up in the common area, hair mussed and dressed in a ratty AC/DC T-shirt, Peter and Colonel Rhodes are four races in. Peter’s won every single one of them.
“Whatcha doing there, Rhodey, corrupting my intern?” Mr. Stark says, pouring himself a cup of coffee.
“Oh, yeah? You wanna talk about who’s a worse influence, Tones? He says you put an instant kill setting on his— shit!”
Rhodey’s bike falls off the course.
“No foul language words,” Mr. Stark says, sitting down on the armchair next to them. “Mr. Parker, I’m deeply wounded. I thought we came to an understanding about the suit settings.”
“Doesn’t mean I can’t talk about it,” says Peter.
“Rhodes, budge over. I can’t believe you’re in seventh. That’s pitiful.” Mr. Stark grabs himself a controller.
“No, that’s okay, I’m ready to accept defeat,” Rhodey says, standing up slowly. “I think I’ll head for the gym.”
“Take it easy, buddy,” says Mr. Stark, patting him on the back. He turns to Peter. “All right, you and me. Rainbow Road. Let’s go.”
They go. Mr. Stark is briefly in first place before Peter hits him with a blue shell and passes him.
“Dammit, Peter!” he yells. “This is so unbelievably disrespectful. You’re fired.”
“No, I’m not,” Peter says as he crosses the finish line in first.
Mr. Stark sighs. “No you’re not.”
Sure enough, a couple hours after lunch, Vision finds Peter in his room and asks if he’d like to spar.
“Do I have a choice?” Peter asks, just to see if he can.
Vision has the barest hint of a smile on his face. “Perhaps if you had a serious and viable excuse.”
“Yeah, no. Should I change?”
“Would you prefer to wear the suit?”
“Yep.”
“I’ll wait, then.”
When Peter’s got the suit on, Vision leads him down a couple floors to a room with reinforced walls and padded floors that seems to be reserved solely for sparring. Peter supposes that in a team of highly trained and-or enhanced combatants, you’ve gotta have accommodations in place if you want to practice fighting and leave minimal structural damage behind. Rhodey’s already there, sitting in a chair in the corner. He waves a hand in greeting when Peter and Vision enter.
“The nature of hand-to-hand combat is such that there really is only one way to improve at it, and that is to engage in it,” Vision says calmly, walking to the center of the room. “Learn by doing. So make your move, Peter.”
Peter eyes Vision up and down. He’s almost twice as large as Peter is, definitely stronger. Probably no defensive weaknesses. His stance is wide.
This is gonna be fun, he thinks, and starts with a punch to Vision’s sternum.
It doesn’t connect, of course. Vision blocks his fist with a forearm and strikes at his gut with the other, which Peter knees out of the way. Suddenly he’s racing with adrenaline, heartbeat racing and hands tingling.
Unsurprisingly, he ends up on the floor.
“Not bad, you've got the basics,” says Rhodey. “It’s good that you’re in shape for this, and that you’re fast, but that was sloppy. A normal human wouldn’t be able to keep up with you, even if they were trained, but in the world we live in, who knows who you’ll encounter. You’ve gotta learn to tighten up your moves, keep every part of your body working in sync. When you’re busy throwing a punch, where are your feet? What are they doing? Remember to keep moving, don’t stay in one place. Try again.”
He nods. This time Vision strikes first, aiming a kick to Peter’s ribs. He dodges before it can connect, jumps onto the ceiling, and uses it to push off and wrap his thighs around Vision’s neck. Before he can do anything, though, Vision throws him, and he falls to the ground, winded.
“Again,” says Rhodey. “That was creative, but you gotta think faster than that.”
So they go again. And again. And again. Peter loses count of how many rounds they go, but after an hour he’s drenched in sweat and aching. Vision looks as unperturbed as ever.
“I think that’s enough,” Vision says, handing him a bottle of water. “Good work today, Peter.”
“Thanks,” he says, breathless. “I never really beat you, though.”
“Are you kidding me?” Rhodey asks. “Vision’s a literal synthetic life form powered by magic. You got some good hits in, you’re doing great. Remember what I said about keeping track of your entire body. We’ll go again tomorrow. Go cool down, take a break.”
Mr. Stark lets him back into the lab after he showers. He hunkers down at his nice little corner workbench with his new phone propped up on a stand. When Karen talks, a green noodle-y soundwave animation wiggles itself up and down on the screen, which he figures he’ll get used to at some point but for now is still funny.
Something strange happens after that: his world becomes small, like the radius of what he can see and hear and smell has shrunk to just the couple of feet in front of him. And in this muted little world, he works for— what is probably a long time, because every so often he’ll shift and become aware of the stiffness in his neck and shoulders— but what feels like a natural stretch to his pretty conked-out internal chronometer. The entire time, he's thinking about how to do what he wants to do, like there’s schematics in his head that he can manipulate and open up and pick apart just by imagining it. And then his hands follow up with the tools and parts on the table while his brain’s busy mapping out his next couple steps. Maybe he goes a little outside of himself from thinking too hard. At one point he reaches for a screwdriver and finds his hand resting on a plate of neatly cut sandwiches. He eats them while taking apart his webshooters; they might be beef pastrami, he thinks.
Some time later Mr. Stark taps him on the shoulder, and he falls back into regular space. The lab seems very loud and very quiet at the same time.
Mr. Stark’s looking at him like he thinks Peter’s cute.
“All right, kid. Let’s take a breather, you’ve been working since four. Head to bed.”
Peter looks up from his dissected webshooters. “But—”
“Ah ah ah, no buts,” Mr. Stark says. “God, I sound like my mom now. Bed. Good night, kid.”
When Peter first got his powers, he’d tried to hold onto up and down. It had made him dizzy to know that the ground didn't always mean down and the sky didn't always mean up and that the ceiling made as good of a resting place as any. But he learned to imagine himself aerodynamic and light-bodied as a bird, flying in wide arcs, buildings looming above him and nothing under his feet and—
The drop of gravity: unmuted. It feels swooping, sick, not like webslinging, not like wall-climbing; no lifeline here for him to cling onto.
Something ugly in the back of his mind awakens, rears its head and crawls out of its hidey-hole. It can’t be far behind him. He has to fall faster. Faster to keep ahead, faster to make it out, faster to not get smothered, faster faster faster faster faster fasterfasterfasterfasterfasterfasterfaster—
.
.
.
The bedside clock reads 3:24 am when Peter slips out of his suite.
As soon as he steps out into the hallway, he hears someone moving around in the kitchen— it's quiet and it's meant to be, but darkness amplifies noise. Back home in Queens, he'd be listening to the sound of water moving through the building's pipes, but of course, there isn’t any of that here. Tony Stark would never build a place without thick walls and soundproofing.
He walks towards the kitchen, fingertips tracing along the wall like he's a little kid. There's a light on over the island, and a figure nursing a glass— Mr. Stark, hunched over, back turned.
"Hi," Peter says quietly.
Mr. Stark jumps a little, jerking his head around to look at him. "Jesus, kid. You're almost as bad as Natasha."
He grins unsteadily. "Must be a spider thing."
"Couldn't sleep?"
"I was," Peter says. "Don't know why I woke up, but I couldn't fall asleep again."
Mr. Stark nods at this. "You need anything?" The shadows under his eyes are purple, but whatever’s in the mug in his hands isn't alcohol— fruit, milk: a smoothie, smells like.
"Nah, I just— yeah. You?" He feels wrong-footed asking this; suddenly, strangely, he thinks that if English had a second-person formal, he'd be using it.
"Same thing. Can't sleep."
Peter busies himself making a cup of hot chocolate. For a few minutes, it's quiet in the kitchen except for the clinking of ceramic and metal, the whir of the microwave.
Finally, when he sits down and wraps both his hands around his mug, he says, "This didn't happen.”
Mr. Stark raises an eyebrow, but stays silent.
He swallows hard. His breathing's starting to go shaky. "Not before Uncle Ben and not before Toomes— I don't even think about it much when I'm awake. Just can't seem to sleep easy. Even when I don't dream about them it's— it's like they're gonna catch up and they're always there and I can't get out, and—and I won't ever do enough to—"
"—Kid," Mr. Stark says softly.
"I'm really tired," Peter whispers.
Next thing he knows, he's being wrapped up tight in a hug, Mr. Stark running a hand through his hair and across his back.
"Breathe," Mr. Stark says. "Nice and easy there. You're safe, okay? You're okay."
Peter lets out a shuddering breath. "I— sorry, I'm—"
"Don't apologize. You're fine."
He feels tears starting to prick on his eyes. God, this was so embarrassing, crying in front of Tony Stark like some stupid fucking kid, like he isn't the goddamn Spider-Man. He's supposed to stronger than this, isn't that the point?
A single sob wracks his body. He breathes, arrhythmic and shaky, until the tightness in his chest subsides little by little.
He grasps Mr. Stark's shoulder and croaks out, "I— I think I'm good."
Mr. Stark lets go, leans back to look at him. "You sure?"
"Yeah." He looks down. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to. To do that."
"No, look at me," Mr. Stark says fiercely. "Look who's out here, awake at ass o'clock, same as you. I get it, kid, really, swear to God. There's nothing, nothing, to be ashamed of. You haven't even turned sixteen yet and you're dealing with some screwed-up shit that no one should have to— you know what, okay. Sit tight, it's confessional hour."
Peter huffs a laugh, wipes at his eyes a little.
"So, right. Remember the first time we met, and you told me about, about taking responsibility and taking care of the little guy when you can?"
Peter nods.
"I didn't know— that is, I didn't really get that until I was in my late thirties. After Afghanistan. Didn't understand that I had the responsibility of being held accountable for my own actions, or— or my own inaction, or that with the amount of power, privilege, whatever you call it, that I had, I could be helping the world in a big, direct way.” He taps his fingers against the table impatiently, like he’s waiting for the words to come to him.
“I couldn't see— didn't wanna see— what was going on in the world because it wasn't happening to close enough to me. And then it was, and then I knew I had to get off my ass."
He's silent for a few moments, looking off towards the kitchen sink. There's a pile of coffee grounds in the basin. "Point is, before that I never lost a wink of sleep over any of it. I knew my weapons were killing people. Americans, non-Americans, didn't matter. Civilians. What matters is that I was forced to care, and I shut it all down. And I've been trying to save lives ever since."
Peter nods again. He thinks he knows what Mr. Stark's trying to get at.
"It's a hard thing, a painful thing, to care about so many lives that aren't your own. Because you know how many of them out there are good people who just want to live, who've got families, and—”
Mr. Stark scrubs a hand over his face. He looks stripped back, bare, like Peter’s finally gotten to see him up close.
“Sometimes it gets real hard, kid. One thing you gotta remember is that you're just as important as any of them. You got that?"
"Yeah," Peter says. "Yeah, I do."
"You're doing good. I'm proud of you. If it ever gets too hard, tell me, okay. Or Aunt May. The whole lone gunslinger act isn't fun, I know. I've tried it. If you need a partner, a team, I'm with you."
"I know," says Peter, quiet. "I— thanks."
"You're a good kid," Mr. Stark says, clapping him on the shoulder. "You need anything else?"
He shakes his head. "I think I'm going back to bed."
"Yeah? Good idea. Me too, probably. Night, Peter."
"Good night. Tony."
Back in his suite, he flicks on the lamp and sits in bed with the covers drawn up to his stomach.
Come on, Spider-Man, he thinks. Nothing to be afraid of. Safest place in the world here.
Over and over, until he can bring himself to turn off the light, until sleep slowly comes back to him again.
In the morning he’s all right.
He and May spend Christmas Eve alone at home with the roast beef that she, much to both of their surprise, doesn’t burn. He falls asleep with his head pillowed on her lap watching Home Alone and wakes up sometime in the middle of the night wrapped in the spare quilt from the linen closet.
In the morning, they pack their bags and drive upstate. May’s lips are slightly pursed the entire time, but as soon as the compound comes into view she looks a little awed.
“So this is where the magic happens, huh?” she says.
Peter drops his chin to his chest and laughs.
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah.”
Tony’s standing at the main entrance in a suit, waiting to greet them.
“May,” he says. “Good to see you.”
She grins sardonically at him; still, it’s tinged with warmth. “Mr. Stark, thank you for welcoming us.”
“My pleasure.” He turns to Peter, eyes crinkling a little. “Kid.”
“Hi,” he says, smiling back. “Good to be back here.”
At dinner that night, he meets Pepper Potts for the first time. She's very tall, although not as intimidating as her Time magazine covers would have one believe. Tony’s gaze follows her around the room. At the dining table they sit close together.
She and Peter have very friendly conversation, especially with Tony and Rhodey around as mutual familiar faces, but sometimes she looks at Peter like she's surprised to see him.
At one point she asks him if he's got any plans for college, and he says, “Oh, yeah. I mean, on the one hand it'd be great if Spider-Man could be a full time thing, but on the other I’d like to know enough to be able to do my own suit maintenance, you know? No offense.”
“None taken,” Tony replies. “Right on, kid.”
Ms. Potts looks a little floored. Suddenly, Peter realizes: she's unused to being around kids, or unused to seeing Tony around them. Maybe both.
May laughs. “You can't steal my kid, you know.”
“Can't I?” Tony fixes her with a faux-challenging look. “It’s gonna happen, May. Someday I’ll hire him as a real intern and suck out his life force and feed its energy to Stark Industries. And then— boom, nephew gone, just a corporate drone left.”
Ms. Potts smacks him on the arm lightly. “Tony!”
Tony raises his hands in a placating gesture. “Relax, that's gonna take a couple years at least. He's gotta get into MIT first.”
“Oh hell yes,” says Rhodey.
“You could at least let him decide for himself,” Ms. Potts says exasperatedly.
“Oh, he can decide all he wants,” says Tony. “As long as it's on MIT.”
“I don't know, I was kind of thinking of Harvard,” says Peter, trying very hard to keep his face neutral. “Or Caltech.”
There is complete and utter silence at the table.
“Rhodey,” Tony says, “Can you believe—”
“I know. Peter, you can't say things like that.”
“Kid, we are so deeply offended.”
Ms. Potts smiles at May. “I'm very sorry for them.”
“Oh no,” says May. “Someone needs to give Peter the college talk, and he gives me attitude every time I try.”
“May!”
“See?” she says, and Pepper laughs, her eyes on Tony.
“I think I know exactly what you mean.”
That night, Peter wakes up at one in the morning and can't figure out why until he sits up and his stomach elicits a whale call of a growl.
He gets out of bed and goes to meet the Avengers compound at night once again. He doesn't notice Tony in the kitchen, standing next to the coffee machine, until he's nearly halfway to the pantry. Less awake, maybe, or less of a compulsion towards hypervigilance this time.
“Hi,” he says.
Tony nods at him. “You okay? Need anything?”
“Nah,” he replies. “Just really hungry. My, uh, my metabolism’s kind of all over the place. It's a spider thing.”
“Spider thing,” Tony echoes, visibly trying to muster up some level of warmth at the phrase, but there's a distant, haggard look to him that makes Peter wonder just how many nights a week he spends out here.
“What about you?” Peter asks. “You— you okay?”
It's pretty scary, honestly, how fast Tony can make his face go blank. Like he can only afford to be sad for half a moment at a time.
“I'm good, kid,” he says. “Haven't even called it a night yet, don't worry about me.”
“Okay,” Peter says softly. He ducks his head into the pantry to find some cereal.
Cheerios. Good enough. He grabs the box.
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Tony pinch the bridge of his nose and gaze down, body slumped, at a stack of paper nearly two inches thick.
“What’s that?” he asks as he passes Tony to retrieve a carton of milk. The topmost page has been thoroughly underlined and annotated in Tony’s tight scrawl.
“It's—" Tony sighs. “The Sokovia Accords. I'm in the middle of an extensive, word-for-word review.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. I— I don't— I’m getting it done, kid.”
“Do you…” Peter fumbles for the right words. “Do you regret fighting for them?”
Tony looks at him strangely. “I don't know. Sometimes. I'm glad they exist— they needto, but— I just hate what it did to us. I mean, Rogers fucked up hard. But our side— I was never a saint, what I did isn't exonerable.” He grimaces. “Jesus Christ, Wanda Maximoff’s barely a legal adult. And I gotta hold myself accountable to what it did to her. And to you. Christ.”
“For what it's worth,” Peter says slowly, “I don't regret fighting for the Accords. We— we learned about them in school. I had to read a section for APUSH.”
Tony smiles slightly at him; not mocking, but genuine.
“And yeah, they're not perfect. They do need amendments. But it's better than nothing else.”
“Not for Wanda,” Tony says. “Not for Natasha, or Cap— Christ, not for Clint or his wife and kids.” He squeezes his eyes shut for a second, then immediately opens them again and exhales loudly. “Don’t— don’t pay attention to me, kid. I'm just an old man with some dumb problems. It's not supposed to be this way.”
“Pretty sure being upset’s kinda warranted,” says Peter. “But you— you know, like— you don't really have to… be anything to me, right?”
Tony stares at him, a hint of a furrow between his brows.
“Like,” Peter says, trying again, “We’re just some guys hanging around… like, it’s not like that. You don’t have to make it about me. Sometimes, I dunno, maybe it’s about you.”
Tony laughs. “You seriously wanna enable me like that?”
“That’s not the point. I’m saying, like, you don’t need to have a role in my life to be in my life. Maybe that’s just how it is with you, you know, like you gotta be an engineer or a billionaire or a superhero or whatever, instead of just some dude named Tony. Maybe that’s what you gotta do, but I don’t know, I’m just a kid from Queens, and, uh, I guess Spider-Man’s just me. And I— I like being here, Tony. That’s all.”
Tony looks lost in thought. Then, suddenly, his gaze snaps up to meet Peter’s.
“When’d you start calling me Tony?”
“Since, uh. Since I destroyed you at Mario Kart,” Peter lies, laughing.
“You little shit,” Tony says, clapping him on the back. “After all I’ve done for you, huh?”
Still laughing, Peter lopes down the hallway and back to his room. As soon as he collapses into bed, he's out like a light.