Chapter Text
Tony and Peter pull up to the cabin just as the sun is hitting the treetops. It had been a quiet drive up from the city, Peter not speaking more than two words after the first ten minutes—not even to complain when Tony asked FRIDAY to play Twisted Sister’s greatest hits album. It had been a deliberate and frankly transparent attempt to prod the kid into conversation on Tony’s part, but Peter hadn’t even twitched when the opening riffs of We’re Not Gonna Take It came through the speakers.
It had been enough of a sign to Tony that the kid really didn’t feel like talking, and he hadn’t so much as breathed heavily in turn the rest of the trip. Though it worried him that Peter was being so silent, he had learned long ago that pushing the teen too hard rarely produced positive results. He just had to hope the kid would open up in his own time—if not with Tony then at least with May, who Peter had promised to call twice a day while they were upstate.
Tony puts the car in park then takes out the keys, staring out at the familiar view of his old home. He and Pepper had moved back into the city just before Morgan had started kindergarten, a decision that had rested just as much on Tony wanting to be more available for Peter as it had been about their daughter’s educational opportunities.
Too bad the proximity hadn’t made a damn bit of difference when it really counted, Tony thinks grimly. He shakes his head tightly then, willing away the guilty thoughts as best he could when he turns to look at Peter. He’s surprised to see the kid staring right back at him, face blank.
Tony grins. “What do you think, kid? Good place to rest up until you’re all better, yeah?”
Peter remains expressionless but for the tiniest of eyebrow furrows, and Tony bites the inside of his cheek to stop himself from grimacing at the look of near-confusion on the teen’s face. He nearly sighs in relief when Peter finally nods at him before getting out of the car and closing the door behind him. Tony is quick to follow, the two of them going to the trunk and taking out their luggage along with several bags of groceries.
Peter gets to the front porch before Tony, quickly inputting the door code and heading inside. Tony hears FRIDAY greet him but the kid doesn’t answer her either, and now he lets the smile finally fall.
By the time Tony gets inside the kid had already dropped the groceries he had carried in on the kitchen counter and disappeared up the stairs to his bedroom, though Tony didn’t miss the lack of a door click from the floor above.
Peter needs lots of space in a few different ways right now, he supposes—wondering if the boy’s claustrophobia had returned in full force in the week since…
Again Tony pushes the negative thoughts and memories away, instead setting himself to the task of putting away all the food only to get started on dinner, having no doubt Peter must be famished. He’d barely touched his lunch at the apartment after all, and Tony knows for a fact the kid usually can’t get enough of May’s eggplant parmesan.
Only when the table is set and the pan of chicken and rice is laid out between the plates does Tony go over to the bottom of the stairs.
“Food’s on, kid!” he calls up before going back into the kitchen and pouring two glasses of water, bringing them to the table. He sits down, waiting for Peter to appear—but there’s nothing. Not even the footsteps of the teen walking around.
The kid probably had his noise-canceling headphones on, Tony thinks as he gets up again, taking the stairs two at a time—something Pepper had told him sternly that he was only allowed to do when Morgan wasn’t around to try to imitate him, not feeling particularly partial to the idea of her daughter ending up with a nasty back eye or broken nose from face planting on the wooden steps, something Tony could very much agree with—and heads straight over to Peter’s room.
“Pete, what’s–”
The rest of the words die on Tony’s lip as he takes in the scene before him. The kid is sitting on the edge of his bed, elbows on his knees and head lowered into his hands. He’s trembling slightly, and Tony can see his back hitching with stilted breaths. Peter’s crying, he realizes.
“Peter?”
The kid doesn’t so much as flinch at Tony’s voice, giving no indication he even heard him—which, Tony realizes with sudden clarity, might be because he really didn’t.
“Kid? Look at me,” he says softly.
Again there is no response, and Tony’s heart drops.
He’d been snatched from right under their noses.
It hadn’t even been all that complicated of a kidnapping—the unknown assailants opting for a simple but effective plot. Just a dart to the neck while Peter was wrestling out of his suit in an alleyway, and he was soon unconscious and quickly carried to a van. Tony watched it all on the baby monitor footage after finding his discarded tech—tech which had done nothing to protect the teen when it mattered most, just like Tony himself—in a dirty puddle.
What had ensued were over two agonizing days in which Morgan had cried herself to sleep every night, Pepper had barely gotten a wink, and May and Tony hadn’t even bothered to try to rest no matter how much Rhodey, Steve and the others suggested it.
During that time Tony found himself wishing more fervently than ever before that Natasha was still alive—certain she would have seen something in the scant clues that the rest of them were missing.
Then, finally, a break came in the early hours of the third day. A report of a young man—barefoot and wearing nothing but dirtied, bloodied scrubs—found stumbling out of the woods by a concerned driver passing by, just off Highway 70 in western Pennsylvania. The presumed teenager came with the officers who responded to the call without resistance, but appeared to be completely unaware of their presence, nor was he responding to their questions.
Brown hair, brown eyes, five-foot-nine, 155 pounds. The physical description alone would have been enough to convince Tony to send Rhodey or one of the others to check it out. But then came the kicker: the only words the boy had spoken were May, Ben and, occasionally, Tony.
The quinjet was on its way within minutes.
Tony had hoped, even as he and May had raced through the corridors of the rural hospital Peter had been taken to, that once the kid saw his aunt that everything would be alright. That whatever damage done from the torture Peter had been subjected to which had led to the sparse, cursed words written about him in that police report could be mended simply by their reunion.
But all it had taken was watching May gather Peter into her arms and start whispering into his ear only for the kid to have no reaction—seemingly blinded, deafened, and unable to feel his aunt’s touch—and Tony’s hopes had sunk deep into the ground.
Hearing Peter’s attending doctor go over the list of mostly superficial injuries only to conclude with multiple injection sites in the crook of both elbows had confirmed what Tony had both assumed and detested: something external was the likely cause of Peter’s complete sensory loss. Which, as it hadn’t worked its way out of his enhanced system yet, probably meant that nothing short of a one-of-a-kind antidote would fix it.
It had taken every bit of Tony’s legal pull and sway to convince the hospital to release Peter into his aunt’s care that same night, and only after it was made clear that they would be exchanging one place of medical care for another. And so, not an hour after arriving, they had been back on the jet and on their way to the rebuilt compound’s medbay.
Knowing he wouldn’t stop until a cure was found hadn’t made it any easier for Tony to stand by as Peter started to silently cry halfway through the journey, eyes still open and unseeing even as May tenderly kissed his brow, tears eventually running down her own face at his lack of response to her presence.
Tony hadn’t waited around even long enough to see Peter settled in his medbay room before taking off to his labs—Helen hurriedly sending over samples of the kid’s blood. Once the substance—a toxin with a chemical make-up not far removed from Tetrodotoxin B—had been isolated, it thankfully hadn’t taken more than half a day for Bruce and himself to formulate a likely antidote that would negate the effects.
The two had hurried back upstairs and immediately handed it off to Helen, who had administered a small experimental dose into Peter’s IV. And then they all sat down and waited to see if it had worked, five, ten, fifteen minutes and counting.
At the twenty minute mark May climbed onto the bed and cocooned Peter in her arms once more, holding her nephew close and stroking his cheek, brow, hair, arms, palms—anything to let Peter know she was there with him and to bring him back. And so it was that she was gently grazing her fingers back and forth from his shoulder to his wrist when Peter jerked, the entire room gasping as he suddenly moved his arm to grasp at her hand tightly.
Tony had stood up just in case Peter’s grip was too tight but halted when May gave him a tight headshake, carefully moving her own hand to clasp Peter’s and give it a few squeezes.
“May?”
His aunt’s name was spoken so softly that it was barely audible, and Tony wasn’t certain if it had been said with any awareness, despite it being the first word of any kind Peter had spoken since just before he’d started crying on the quinjet. Luckily May clearly knew the difference, and Tony watched as she moved Peter’s fingers up to her face, the teen soon twisting around in her arms and running both hands along her cheekbones and through her hair.
“May,” Peter said with more certainty after a while, his voice a croak from either disuse or—Tony silently cursed—screaming over the last few days, but the way his body relaxed as he curled himself around his aunt told the group everything they needed to know. Peter finally knew he was safe, and for the first time since FRIDAY had alerted Tony that the kid was missing, he let himself relax a little too.
To everyone’s disappointment, it soon became obvious that Peter wasn’t entirely physically mended yet.
While the antidote was working, it unfortunately wasn’t going to be the quick fix Tony and Bruce had hoped. Over the next day the adults observed as each of Peter’s senses came back only to flicker out again. And while during the next week the length of each sensory blackout lessened from a day or longer to hours or even minutes, Bruce calculated it would be another week or two before he was fully recovered.
The task of discovering the identity of the kidnappers was equally frustrating. Peter had apparently woken up following the attack in the alley without any sensory input, if “woken up” was even a term that could be applied to having come to consciousness but with all loss of any grounding senses. As for how he had come to appear near the highway days later, all Peter would say was that he was certain he had escaped and not been let go. The Avengers had thoroughly combed the area around where the kid had been found but there had been little to indicate who had taken him or for what purpose—just a four-room underground concrete bunker a few miles from the highway that had been completely cleared out.
Although Tony was eager to find out who had taken Peter and why, he found that his attention was more focused on Peter himself. The kid was unnaturally quiet, refusing—or maybe unable—to go into any details about what had occurred during his kidnapping. Having his senses constantly going in and out was also giving him some terrible headaches that he complained of more than he spoke of anything else. Helen treated them as best she could, though she privately confided to May and Tony that she wasn’t certain if they were a physical reaction or in fact psychosomatic in nature.
But what Peter hid behind a fake smile and few words during the day became all too painfully brought to the surface at night. The teen seemed to have near-constant nightmares, multiple times waking May—who had taken to sleeping on a second medbay bed next to Peter—with strangled screams that spoke of a horrific terror. Yet even then, trembling and sweaty, he would refuse to talk, instead just shaking his head at his aunt’s questions and turning over on his side away from her. Tony could tell how much it broke May’s heart that Peter was so closed-off, seeing the helpless look on her face when she’d informed him each morning about Peter’s nightly episodes.
And so the status quo remained a week into Peter’s recovery, when May had taken Tony aside to let him know she could no longer put off going back to her work as head facilitator of the homeless nonprofit FEAST. Tony had fully expected her to announce she was taking Peter home, only to be quite surprised at what she said next instead.
“I was thinking, what if you took Peter to the cabin?” May asked, Tony raising his eyebrows in response.
“The... cabin?”
“I just… I don’t think the city is the best place for him right now,” May confessed with a resigned look. “For one, I’ll be gone during the day and I really don’t want him to be alone in case something happens. Then there’s the noise, the lights—I can’t imagine any of that will help his headaches if he’s going from not being able to see or hear anything to being able to see or hear absolutely everything to a degree none of us can possibly comprehend. Besides, if Helen’s right and the headaches don’t have a physical cause, then the cabin could be the best place to work through things. It’ll be quiet and secluded but still completely safe, y’know?”
It wasn’t a bad plan, Tony thought, and especially now that he and Pep had moved back into the city so Morgan could attend school. Peter would be away from the compound and its many Avengers as well, something the kid seemed to crave whenever he was injured or weakened in any way, no matter how often they all reassured him there was nothing to be embarrassed about. Plus it would mean he could get outside once in a while instead of being cooped up in a cramped apartment 24/7. So yes, it wasn’t a bad plan—and yet...
“You know I’ll take him there if it’s what you want, May,” Tony finally replied, “but don’t you think he should really have you nearby? I don’t know if I’m exactly… qualified to be the person to help Peter handle this.”
“I don’t think any of us are exactly qualified for any of this, Tony,” May said ruefully. “But what I do know is that the only thing that truly perked Peter up this week was when I brought up the idea of going to the cabin with you, and that alone is enough to tell me that this might be what he needs right now.”
Well, there wasn’t any arguing with that, Tony supposed. “Alright, if you think so. We can head out tomorrow, same time as you.”
Looking at Peter sitting on his bed, back hitching with silent tears, Tony can’t help but wonder again if May putting him in charge of looking after the kid through the rest of his recovery had been a mistake. After all, just how long had Peter been hiding his loss of hearing and Tony hadn’t even picked up on it? Probably since shortly after they left the compound, he figures—thinking back to the way the kid hadn’t protested him playing the teen’s least favorite among all of Tony’s beloved heavy metal bands.
“Ah, Pete,” Tony whispers sadly to himself. Before Peter can look up and catch him, he slowly backs up and out of the doorway, heading back downstairs. The kid had left his bedroom door open, sure, but that doesn’t mean he had wanted Tony to see him in such a vulnerable state.
He goes to the kitchen and grabs his phone, opening up his text messages. Soup’s on he sends to Peter, hoping the boy’s phone is both on vibrate and on his person.
His hopes are answered quickly when he hears footsteps above not a few seconds later, Peter going into the bathroom for a few minutes before showing up at the table, eyeing the pan of chicken and rice before sitting down across from Tony.
They stare at each other for a beat before Tony motions to the pan, only for Peter to surprise him. In a voice just a tiny bit louder than usual he says, “I can’t hear anything.”
Tony freezes, carefully watching the way Peter is warily observing him, as though braced for some long emotional talk. Ironic, Tony thinks grimly, since a real conversation would take a bit more doing to achieve than either of them are used to.
“I know,” Tony finally replies, speaking the words just a beat slower than normal to make sure Peter has time to read his lips. The kid doesn’t say anything else, but he does look slightly relieved when he grabs the ladle for the rice off the tabletop and begins adding heaps of it to his plate—Tony using tongs to serve them both the chicken.
The rest of the meal proceeds in silence. Tony watches Peter closely while pretending he’s not watching him at all—not that it seems to matter, as the kid keeps his own eyes firmly fixed on his plate. The carefully blank expression on his face reminds Tony all too much of that night in the hospital in Pennsylvania—Tony finding himself pondering for the thousandth time how in the world Peter, without any senses whatsoever, had made it out of that bunker and stumbled miles through the forest. He’d made it to safety, made it home, and yet.
Seeing his mentee now, Tony can’t help but think that while Peter would recover physically from this ordeal, if he didn’t manage to find a way to get through to the kid soon… emotionally speaking, well.
It might be like he never escaped those woods at all.