Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Peter’s life could be divided neatly into periods, just the way he’d been taught in history class. B.C.E, C.E., B.C., A.D. Acronyms upon acronyms that really just meant everything was happening, and then this moment happened, and everything kept happening but it was all different. Peter has his own acronyms—B.D., A.D.

Acronyms were always hard to remember, hard not to get jumbled, but Peter thought his were pretty straightforward—Before Dust, After Dust.

Peter remembered that, when he and Ned had first become friends, and were still sharing snippets of secrets like gold, showing the value of the tenuous friendship they were building, Ned had admitted that when he’d first read the acronyms B.C. and A.D. in a book, sometime when he was in elementary school, he had become firmly convinced, like many of his classmates familiar with the basic rationale for that particular moment, that these must mean Before Christ and After Death. Ned confessed that he’d spent almost an entire week attempting to figure out the exact length of Jesus Christ’s life so that he could know what year it really was before his mom found their computer search history and explained the concept to him.

Peter and Ned had laughed at the stupidity of youth (relative youth), but now, Peter felt sorry for elementary school Ned. Peter’s acronyms had their own gap, a moment that stretched, rolling over seconds and minutes and years, instead of doing what moments were supposed to do, snapping right into the next one.

(Peter didn’t call his eras B.S. and A.S. because 1) he felt interminably old some days, like he had lived lifetimes upon lifetimes, but he never felt old enough that he didn’t read that as bullshit and ass, and 2) he had only just begun not to flinch at the sound of a snap. He felt like he was personally disappointing Albus Dumbledore for not having his very own ‘fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself’ moment, but. He’d been trying.)

To everyone else, the period of time in the murky moment between B.D. and A.D. was set—five years, three months, 9 days, 7 hours and thirteen minutes, someone on the internet has calculated.

(Peter thought that at least one of his own minutes was not, in fact, spent dusted with the rest of half of all life in the universe, but instead clinging desperately to the back of Mr. Stark’s Iron Man suit, trying to hold himself together at the molecular level, but hadn’t told anyone that and didn’t plan to. He wondered if Mr. Stark had ever looked up the same math, had ever done the same mental calculation and determined that he and Peter had stolen one whole minute together back from Thanos, from the power of the Infinity Stones.)

To Peter… Well, as the good Doctor would put it (a reference that he’d call a really old show just to watch that look of delighted exasperation flicker across Mr. Stark’s face), to Peter, it all just got a little wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey. He’d told them when he’d first gotten back that he didn’t remember the in-between, the Dust, that he’d gone from staring at Mr. Stark’s face on Titan to Strange’s whirling portal, and that had been true enough at the time, but he kept having… snippets, moments come back. Sometimes enough snippets came back that they coalesced into an entire conversation, more and more of them, spreading like a culture in a the Petri dish of Peter’s memory. And the conversations in the Dust didn’t seem to correlate in any linear way Peter could identify with the time outside of the Dust. He felt like Nat was there from early on, felt like he spent so long talking with Spider Mom (as he’d privately resolved to absolutely never, ever, call her to her face, no matter what magic or science might bring her back to him), only to find out once he’d returned to Earth that Natasha hadn’t been dusted at all, and the time since her death was barely a splash in the B.D. to A.D. pond. But he could have sworn that they’d spent weeks in the little Moscow townhouse near the Moskva.

(When he first started remembering and he thought he was going crazy, he tried cooking Russian food he learned from Natasha to see if his memories were just bullshit fabrications, synapses firing at random. He’d heard of people able to speak languages they’d never learned after brain injuries, but not of anyone who’d been newly able to produce a passable borscht.)

To try to help sort it all out, he’d started keeping lists. Of what was B.D. and what was A.D. Trying to figure out from there the moment that things flipped from one way of happening to another. His third-favorite Indian restaurant, for example, was B.D. The moment on that one was easy—Mr. Banerjee had not, in fact, been one of the people gone during the Blip. He’d just had a heart attack three years and eight months or so afterward, and closed down his restaurant to move to live with his daughter who was a doctor in Boston. Nightmares were both B.D. and A.D., but he could identify some varieties that were wholly A.D. They began that first night after the battle, so for that one he had put the moment as ‘return to physical consciousness’. It unsettles him how dramatically unscientifically vague that is, like he’s an old-timey doctor speculating about whether the soul lives in the spleen or something, but he’d done the best he could.

There is one item that is emphatically in the A.D. column, but whose moment he has been utterly unable to pinpoint. T.T.S.S. It stood for The Tony Stark Situation, and was, admittedly, not a very good acronym. In all other matters, Peter would’ve deferred to Mr. Stark himself on acronyms, but T.T.S.S. was decidedly not something he could consult Mr. Stark on. Peter was barely able to explain what T.T.S.S. was to himself, at least when he tried to put it into words instead of gut feelings. It wasn’t like he hadn’t had a crush on Mr. Stark B.D.—far from it, as many dearly departed socks and tissues of his puberty could attest to, but that had been just that—a crush, a fluttery feeling in his stomach when he thought about Mr. Stark in the Iron Man suit, Mr. Stark sitting on his bed, maybe leaning over to kiss him.

This was—wild, uncontrollable, embedded in him at a molecular level. He dreamed of Mr. Stark at night, and he spent his days trying not to think about the man. The thought of Mr. Stark kissing him didn’t just leave him feeling light and fluttery, it felt like a punch of heat to the gut. When he was in the lab, or they were training together, the awareness of Mr. Stark’s body near his was constant, as if they were physically touching. And the way he’s in the shower twice a day or more, his hand frantically stripping his cock to the memory of falling apart in Mr. Stark’s arms, except that in those moments Mr. Stark grips him, kisses him, holds him together with his unstoppable will and his brilliant brain and then takes him back apart with his hands and his body, and Peter is coming all over the shower tile? Definitely A.D.

Peter’s sitting cross-legged on a beanbag in some hippie coffee shop MJ had insisted they come to, across from MJ while Ned shifts uncomfortably on the edge of his square of couch, hovering awkwardly just above them.

“So, spill the beans, Parker, how does it feel being free?”

Peter doesn’t exactly feel free, and that one was definitely B.D., definitely dated to the moment he’d been bitten by a radioactive spider and realized he had super powers, maybe even dated to the moment his Uncle Ben hadn’t come home and Peter had realized he had to be responsible for Aunt May now, but he knows that MJ is just referring to high school.

“It’s good, it’s really good actually. I have a lot more time to focus on learning about the things that I really want to learn more about, and not sitting through another year of gym. I’ve been talking to a few schools—well, Mr. Stark has been talking to a few schools—about me being able to start early, maybe do some sort of part-time arrangement with Stark Industries.”

MJ pulls a face at that, but Peter keeps going.

“I’ve already been able to spend a lot more time in the lab, which is good because,” he lowers his voice, as if the bored-looking man at the coffee counter across the room with his nose buried in a biography of Malcolm X is going to eavesdrop, “it means I’ve been able to work on the suit a lot, make some improvements, work on different types of webbing. Mr. Stark’s been really helpful.”

Ned nearly bounces off the couch cushion. “Holy shit, holy shit, you are just… hanging out… in Tony Stark’s lab… with Tony Stark?”

Peter wants to flinch. It’s the type of sentiment that, B.D., he would’ve returned in kind, with seemingly limitless enthusiasm, the idea of hanging out with Mr. Stark all day in his lab making him feel like his blood had turned carbonated, everything fizzy and sweet. Now his reaction is torn somewhere between the leaden weight of responsibility, pure excitement over scientific inquiry, and the molten heat of that hours of proximity to Mr. Stark now sparks in his gut. Luckily he’s spared the need to say much more than a feeble “Well, he’s not always there—” before MJ cuts him off.

“Are we seriously still hero-worshipping Stark?”

“MJ, the man invented time travel. Time travel! Like a freakin’ sci-fi movie!”

“Guys,” Peter interrupts. “Can we not do this again? Please?”

MJ makes a noise of grumbling assent, and Ned settles back against the couch.

“Oh, hey, random question,” Peter says, avoiding MJ’s stare with forced casualness. “Do you remember who the first person you touched after you came back was?”

“Yeah, my mom,” MJ says with a shrug.

“The pizza delivery guy. Why?”

“Erm, you guys haven’t felt—anything different about them, right? Or more like, there’s something different about you around them?”

Ned frowns, while MJ’s face manages to go even cooler, if possible.

“Uh, Pete, man, I don’t even think I follow the question.” Ned’s voice is gentle, gentle in a way that is distinctly A.D.

Peter flushes, and looks at the worn varnish on the table in the spaces between his fingers.

“You don’t… like him, do you? The pizza delivery guy? Like, want to date him? Or more?”

“Are you asking—no, I do not want to bone the pizza delivery guy! Jesus, Pete.”

MJ raises an eyebrow, eyes narrowing slightly. He is reminded forcibly of Natasha when she was understanding more than he thought he was saying. “Does that mean there’s someone you want to bone?”

Yes, Peter thinks but doesn’t say. Yes, I want, I want desperately for Mr. Stark to just touch me, and I want so damn much that I need to find a reason why and my brain is fried and my current best theory is that I imprinted like some sort of horny duckling on the first person I touched.

“No! More like May wants to date our delivery guy—not bone, we do not talk about my Aunt May boning anyone or anything, we don’t even say those two words in the same sentence anymore—and I was hoping I could tell her it was a magically bad decision, instead of just regular bad decision.”

Ned snorts and he and Peter laugh together, and MJ just shoots him a look that makes him wonder if she got her own few weeks in Moscow during the Dust.

Later that week, he’s back in the lab, and Mr. Stark is there, and he has never felt so aware of every inch of his own body. He is bent over a worktable, soldering iron in hand as he attempts to help Mr. Stark out with a hardware-side problem. It’s not his usual thing, but he’s been trying to get better at it—he has an idea or ten for improvements to Mr. Stark’s suit, for once. Definitely A.D., though some of the scientific knowledge he’s applying to come up with these feels distinctly like it might have been acquired during the Dust. While he’d been able to get an at-best rudimentary understanding of vibranium B.D., the properties he’s manipulating now come to him in flashes of Wakandan-accented English.

His mind is straying, and his attention must too, because his precise soldering is getting loose, and now Mr. Stark is stepping up behind him, raising a hand to wrap around his wrist and steady his grip, and at the first brush of one of Mr. Stark’s thick fingers, calloused from the shop and striped with grease, Peter shudders, barely managing to keep ahold of the soldering gun.

Mr. Stark freezes behind him, suddenly still as a statute.

“We okay, kid?”

“Y-yeah, Mr. Stark,” Peter croaks out, trying to focus on the visual stimuli in front of him, anything but the too-close-too-far heat of Mr. Stark’s body near his, “Just… ’s just the senses. Eleven, remember?”

Mr. Stark gives his wrist a reassuring squeeze before slowly sliding away. “Eleven. Right. Sorry, kid.”

“It’s okay, Mr. Stark,” because the last thing Peter wants is for Mr. Stark to stop touching him, “Just… maybe a little more warning, next time.”

Mr. Stark nods, and, true to his word, carefully walks Peter through each adjustment he’s making to his grip, each support he’s giving, until Peter is done and exhaling.

“That was great, kid, I know it didn’t feel like it but that was real delicate work, detail stuff. You hungry? Wait—who am I kidding, you’re always hungry. Anyway, I got Thai. FRI?”

Before Peter has fully recovered from the intimacy of the preceding moments, Mr. Stark is pushing him to the couch and fold-out table in the corner of the lab, where FRIDAY, with help from a drone, has managed to deposit take out Thai from his favorite place in Queens.

“Thanks, Mr. Stark, I actually am starving, now that you mention it,” he says, reaching for a container greedily.

“No need to thank me, Pete. You’re in my lab at—FRI, time check?—quarter past eight on a Tuesday night, dinner is the least I can do for you. Speaking of in my lab at quarter past eight on a Tuesday—”

Ah, Peter thinks. Here it is. He braces for it to come, the it’s too much, kid speech, the I can’t keep doing this speech, the I want to go home speech. Because that’s another thing that’s definitely distinctly A.D.—Mr. Stark with a home instead of just a tower and a compound, Mr. Stark and Ms. Potts finally definitely on, Morgan. He knows he can theoretically identify moments for each of those things, but he hasn’t been able to make himself think about that yet. It had been doubly new, to feel that pain together with other hurts large and small as he’d pieced together what had happened in the time between B.D. and A.D.—doubly new because it was the first he was hearing of it, and because of the way this hurt was tinged new the same way his feelings for Mr. Stark were new, deeper and sharper and hotter.

(What was the moment, while Peter was dead, while Peter was dust, that Mr. Stark realized he loved Ms. Potts so much he wanted her forever? To make a new life together? While Peter was dead, was dust.)

He’s overheard enough conversations to understand that Ms. Potts wants them to move back to the cabin in Georgia, likes the space and the quiet and the free time to raise Morgan, thinks Mr. Stark should go back to at least semi-retirement, says you’ve done enough, Tony in a pleading, exhausted voice that never fails to make Peter feel like she’s reached inside his ribcage and written his guilt on his heart. Because he also understands that the reason why they’re still here, in Manhattan, in the tower Mr. Stark had bought back and and re-done, is because of Peter. It’s been six months, and he doesn’t mind that Mr. Stark’s finally tired of upending his life for Peter, because he’d thought this would happen much sooner.

“Kid?”

Peter blinks slowly at Mr. Stark in front of him, realizing that the face is knit in concern. “Oh, sorry, spaced out for a minute. Was just… thinking about math,” he says, lamely, but the worry slides off of Mr. Stark’s face to be replaced by a wry grin.

“Occupational hazard. I was saying, are you sure your aunt is okay with you spending this much time here? I mean, I know if it was too bad I’d have a very angry May at my doorstep, but I don’t want her even moderately peeved, okay? Especially because I’m sure she thinks I’m doing something more like teaching than what I’m currently doing, which is letting you have free run of the lab and occasionally poking at what you’re doing to satisfy my own intellectual curiosity. It’s very different than high school,” he finishes with a soft note in his voice.

“Yeah, well, Mr. Stark, I’m very different.” Not a great line, definitely sounds petulant, borderline emo. He keeps his face hard and indifferent, though he’s inwardly cringing, too busy being happy that this isn’t the talk he’d feared to really process and respond to anything more than his initial peeved irritation at the reference to high school.

“Hey, Pete, I know—you know that no one was more on your side about finishing Midtown early than I was, you’d been lightyears ahead of that curriculum for ages as it was, but… you used to care about all the other high school stuff, the dances and the dates and the… pep rallies? Do they still hold pep rallies?”

From the look on his face, Mr. Stark has no real doubts as to the celebration of pep rallies, but he waits for Peter, letting them fall into easy, old rhythms together. Peter takes the outstretched hand with a laugh and a snorted you’re not that old, Mr. Stark.

Then, collected, he continues. “I know, Mr. Stark, but it just didn’t feel… right. I don’t think it’s childish, because I totally understand, I kind of remember how important it all felt, but when I think about it now, it’s just… remembering how it felt to feel that way. I don’t actually feel that way anymore. The first few weeks back kind of felt like I was playing a part, Peter pretending to be a real boy or something.”

Mr. Stark flinches at that—not a lot, so quick that a human wouldn’t have been able to see the flicker of micro expressions across his face, the barely-there shift of his shoulders, but Peter is not human.

“Anyway, Aunt May knows how I feel, and she’s okay with me spending as much time here as I want. I mean, as long as it’s okay with you, sir. I mean, it’s your lab, so, it’s more like as much time as you want, not me, I just.”

Peter’s stammering gives way to an unbearable few seconds of strained silence while Mr. Stark tries desperately to swallow whole the dumpling he’s just popped into his mouth.

“Pete—kid—I—listen, you will never overstay your welcome here, because your welcome? It is infinite. You could live in this lab for all I care. Actually, don’t do that, speaking from personal experience, you should take much better care of yourself. I do care about that. But, seriously, kid, I want you to spend as much time here as you want. Don’t think of it as just my lab, it’s yours too. Mi casa es su casa, et cetera.”

Much later that night, when Peter is curled up in his bed in Queens, he will replay Mr. Stark saying your welcome? It is infinite over and over in his mind, lets his brain go fuzzy with sleep until the word welcome fades into a sleep-hazed blur, an amorphous concept that stretches and flexes to encompass every infinite emotion between Peter and Mr. Stark.

In the spirit of making himself at home in the lab, as Mr. Stark has been urging him to do every day for the past two weeks, he brings a record player, an old-school Victrola he scored from a pawn shop B.D. and had whipped into perfect working condition A.D., along with a stack of his Uncle Ben’s old records.

Over the sound of Tony Bennett crooning about the ever constant moon and his foolish heart and Peter’s soft singing along, out of tune and half-mumbled, he hears the door to the lab open and Mr. Stark take a few steps in, and then Peter can hear the moment he stops, the sharp intake of breath and the sudden staccato thump of his heart. Peter wishes he was turned around, facing the door, because he can’t tell from just the sounds of his breathing and his heart whether Mr. Stark is mad, and if Mr. Stark is going to be mad at him for bringing the record player into the lab, he needs a few moments to prepare himself.

“Going old school, kid? Or did you think I wouldn’t know how to work the app?” Mr. Stark says, his voice a little throaty and tight in an emotion that Peter doesn’t understand but that doesn’t sound like anger, so Peter turns around.

“Sound quality’s better,” he says with a shrug as he tries to peel the remnants of his latest new web project off of his hands.

“That’s supposed to be my line, you can’t start stealing the old man lines,” Mr. Stark grumbles, “FRI, you hear that? Pete thinks we need to update the lab’s speakers,” even as he crosses the lab to stand by Peter’s side, hand reaching out to help Peter before stopping just short. “Need a hand?”

“Yeah, please,” Peter says, steeling himself for the brush of Mr. Stark’s fingers carefully against his own fingers, his palms, gently peeling the tacky material off of him. To distract himself, he continues, “It’s not that the speakers aren’t amazing in here, Mr. Stark, but… there’s…” He trails off, watches Mr. Stark gently brush a finger across the line of his palm on its way between the boundary of his skin and the web fluid. “With the senses thing, I can… sometimes I can actually feel the sound, not just hear it, and the sound… feels better from records.”

Mr. Stark’s face remains carefully impassive, as if Peter has not just told Mr. Stark he feels sounds, and Peter thinks the subject’s dropped as Mr. Stark finally manages to pull the mass of web fluid off of his left hand with a triumphant shout. Peter busies himself by cleaning the dried mess from the work table while Mr. Stark hands the fluid that he took from Peter’s hands to DUM-E for disposal. Mr. Stark is halfway across the lab at his own workstation, already manipulating a complicated-looking schematic that’s hovering over the table, when he brings it back up.

“Tony Bennett, huh? Is it because he did that album with Lady Gaga? Because that was very good, and not at all just a way to let you know that I’m still hip enough to know who Lady Gaga is.”

Peter snorts. “Lady Gaga’s old news, Mr. Stark.” He snickers as the man makes an indignant noise from across the lab, and Peter lets himself melt into how good this feels, how comfortable it is with just the two of them in Mr. Stark’s lab. “Besides, no reason in particular for Tony Bennett. I don’t really have any records of my own, these are just Uncle Ben’s old ones.”

There’s a moment of quiet where Peter can hear Mr. Stark mumbling something about quantum recalibration under his breath, and then, “So, no records of your own, then?”

“Nope,” Peter says, popping the p as he looks over the formula he’d used for the last batch of web fluid, tweaking amounts and temperatures with a frown on his face.

“Okay, then,” Mr. Stark says, before falling into companionable silence.

The next day, when Peter drops into the lab late in the morning, after a long night spent patrolling and a too-short nap, he finds a new stack of records next to the Victrola, carefully placed just to the side of Ben’s old records, and he has to hold on to the side of the table as he bites the inside of his cheek hard enough to stifle the sudden urge to cry. There’s a bunch, all kinds of music, even that silly Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett collaboration, but at the bottom of the stack are four or five classic rock albums, the kind of music that Peter knows Mr. Stark listens to when he’s alone in the lab, so it’s with a smile that he reaches out and puts one on.

The music breaks over him in waves while he works, throbbing under his skin, tiny vibrations like a faintly skittering touch as he tries to concentrate on the formulas in front of him. And no—that way lies madness, thinking of this as a touch, because if he does that, he’ll think of Mr. Stark’s touch, the music’s touch, the same. Trying to ignore the heat pooling low in his gut, he steps away from the work table while his newest mixture rests, suspended over controlled heat, and lays down on the sofa in the corner. The song has turned slow and meandering, more like gently lapping tides than waves of attention, and Peter’s breathing slows, his eyes fluttering. Then the sound pauses, and when the next song comes on, a steady familiar drumbeat, clanging guitar chords reverberating through the space—and of course Mr. Stark would give him this album to listen to. The music sends goosebumps sparking over his body, he feels like his pulse is throbbing in beat with the guitar, focused not in his heart, not in his gut but lower, and Peter is suddenly glad he’s wearing sweatpants to the lab because if he were in jeans the sudden tightness would be uncomfortable. He tries not to let his mind wander the path his earlier thoughts had, but it’s impossible, listening to this song, knowing that Mr. Stark left this album for him, knows he can feel the music, left this music for him to feel, and Peter realizes that his own hand is trailing down his chest and stomach now, leaving shivers in its wake. Did Mr. Stark think about this when he left these records? Wonder how the sound would feel to Peter? How his song would feel vibrating through Peter’s body? Sound waves crashing against Peter’s skin? Peter’s hand is down his pants now, his other shoved against his mouth to stifle gasps and whimpers as Peter imagines that it’s deliberate, imagines Mr. Stark touching him, fucking him to the faint strains of now the time is here, Iron Man all around him, inside him, and Peter comes with a choked off groan into his sweatpants.

He lays there, panting, as the record goes silent, waiting to be flipped to the other side.

“Fuck,” he says, letting the word spill out into the silence. “… FRIDAY?”

“Yes, Peter?” he hears, her electronic voice as calm and steady as if it were any other day, any other moment, and not after he’d just jerked off on the couch in Tony Stark’s private lab. Advantages of an AI assistant, he thinks hysterically.

“I don’t suppose I have clearance to have the last few minutes of security footage deleted, do I?”

“I’m sorry, Peter, but you do not.” He swears under his breath—he hadn’t thought he would, but it was worth a try. “Only Mr. Stark has that level of clearance. Would you like me to contact Mr. Stark about deleting the footage?”

“No! I mean—no, no need to bother him, uh—or worry him. Not a big deal, no. Please don’t bother Mr. Stark with it.”

“Understood, Peter.”

The next day, Peter walks into the lab to see a box of tissues sitting on his lab table, on top of a note that says Third drawer on the left. Es su casa. Opening the drawer, Peter finds another box of tissues, a bottle of lube, and a box of condoms. Half of him wants to sink into the ground beneath him in a puddle of shame, would be happy to be dust because somehow Mr. Stark knew what he’d done and he was never going to be able to look the man in the eye again, especially with this—Mr. Stark trying to do the cool dad thing, the wink and an elbow thing, as if Peter is thirteen and just figuring out masturbation and Mr. Stark listened to a parenting podcast about not shaming his sexuality or something. If Mr. Stark comes in and actually tries to give him the birds and the bees talk, Peter may actually need to come up with a chemical solution that will dissolve him into nothingness to avoid revealing just how ashamed he actually is. The other half of his brain can’t stop thinking about the fact that this means that Mr. Stark knows, which means he knows Peter has masturbated in the lab, which means he has thought about Peter masturbating, about Peter’s hands on his own cock, even if only in a flash of momentary annoyance or humor, and he bought this stuff, brought it here while explicitly thinking about Peter touching himself, bought it for Peter to touch himself with.

Mr. Stark does not come in that day at all.

Which is good, because Peter uses three tissues (teenage superhuman, okay?) and some of the lube thinking about touching himself with things Mr. Stark bought for him.

Everything falls into something of a routine, after that.

Peter has finally gotten enrolled part time at Columbia (“Not MIT?” “No, Mr. Stark.” “Are you sure? If it’s about a place to stay, I can make that happen, kid.” “No, no, it’s not that Mr. Stark. I just… I want to stay close by, just in case, you know?” “… I know, kid.”), so over the months his days have fallen into a rhythm—patrolling, nap, classes, lunch, nap, lab, dinner and home, start all over again. Mr. Stark doesn’t usually come into the lab until Peter’s gotten a solid couple of hours in on his own. Peter doesn’t know if it’s in deference to Peter’s own, earlier indiscretion, or if he’s spending time with Ms. Potts and Morgan, and he doesn’t ask. He just takes the gift at face value, puts on a record and uses the time to himself, usually listening to one of Mr. Stark’s albums (never again the Black Sabbath album).

He should’ve known it would happen sooner or later—he knows he’s not getting enough sleep, is actively trying not to let himself fall into REM sleep, and yet there’s no better combination for inducing sleep than the insulated safety of the lab, the bone-deep satisfaction and comfortable fuzz of a brain-wringing orgasm, and the soft sounds of Led Zeppelin rolling over him.

For once, he doesn’t shout himself awake—it’s Mr. Stark, kneeling beside him, face pale and drawn as he shakes him, hard. “Kid, wake up, Peter, please, it’s just a dream, I’m here, it’s a dream.”

Peter swallows, once, heavy, throat aching in a way that he knows from experience means he was yelling in his sleep. “Mr. Stark?”

“Yeah, Pete, it’s me, it’s me, I’m here,” Mr. Stark says, still sounding shaken, voice trembling, hands no longer shaking him but instead just resting on Peter’s shoulders, squeezing gently, as if he is the one who needs reassurance that Peter is here, instead of the other way around.

Peter comes back to full awareness with a cringe, trying to pull away from Mr. Stark’s tight grip to bury his suddenly-red face in his hands.

“Oh my god, I am so sorry,” he mutters through his palms, wondering if somewhere, FRIDAY and Karen are marking off spaces on their bingo cards of ways Peter can embarrass himself in front of Mr. Stark.

Mr. Stark’s hands release his shoulders, in a way that to Peter’s desperate brain feels reluctant, feels like Mr. Stark’s fingers trail against his skin until the last possible moment, like Mr. Stark is trying to wring every bit of touch out of the gesture he can, and then he’s settling into the other end of the couch, face serious.

“There is absolutely nothing to be sorry about, Pete. Nothing. Not falling asleep in the lab, not having nightmares, nothing. You are not the first person to fall asleep in this lab, and not the first one to get nightmares in here. Absolutely nothing to apologize for, nada, zip, zilch. Okay? Got it? Because we are not moving off of this topic until you’ve got that, okay?”

“Okay, Mr. Stark. I got it.” Peter lowers the hands from his face, just slightly. “What… what was I yelling? This time?” Mr. Stark’s face goes carefully blank, as if he is about to lie and tell Peter that he didn’t hear or that it had been nothing. “Don’t lie to me, Mr. Stark. Please,” he ends with, to soften it, and watches the distance melt off Mr. Stark’s face.

“My name.”

The way he says it sounds heavy, and unbearably sad, and Peter doesn’t stop himself from reaching out put a hand on Mr. Stark’s knee where it’s stretched next to his own foot.

“You were… saying my name. Screaming for me. Asking me not to let go. Not to go.”

Mr. Stark isn’t looking at Peter anymore, is looking over his shoulder, but his eyes are unfocused, like he’s remembering something. Peter doesn’t have to try hard to imagine what he’s remembering—not with the way his gaze has gone haunted.

“It’s okay, Mr. Stark. I know you’re here now,” Peter says, squeezing gently at his knee to try to regain his attention, bring Mr. Stark back from the bad memories—he knows from experience that nothing good comes of lingering on those. Mr. Stark’s eyes come back to Peter, first to his hand, then to his face, flicking down with a hint of guilt before they fix on meeting Peter’s gaze.

“How… how long has it been like that? How often?”

Peter gulps again, and this time it’s his turn to look diligently at the middle distance just over Mr. Stark’s shoulder as he tries for an unaffected shrug. “How long? Since I got back.. How often… well, I don’t… most times I dream, but—” Mr. Stark makes a pained little noise at that, and Peter stammers to comfort him. “—it’s fine! I just don’t let myself hit REM sleep that often, I take lots of little naps, they say that’s better for you anyway—”

“No, nope, no way,” Mr. Stark says, already climbing off the couch and starting to pace the lab. “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet, that is not better for you, Pete. That is… untenable. And trust me, I have pushed the fucking limits of tenable.”

Peter shrugs. “I tried taking some of the stuff to help you sleep, but my metabolism just burns through it in an hour or so. It’s fine, Mr. Stark, I even went ahead and got May some heavy-duty noise cancelling headphones so I don’t wake her up anymore.”

Another one of those grunts, as if Peter’s words have just punched Mr. Stark in the gut. He hears Mr. Stark’s weak swallow, sees the tension in the line of his shoulders. He feels terribly guilty.

“So, what you’re telling me is that basically every time you sleep, really sleep and not just nap or doze, you dream of—of that, you dream of Titan, and you yell for me until you wake up alone?”

Mr. Stark sounds like it is torture just to say the words, but they are accurate enough, so Peter nods and says, “Close enough.” He doesn’t say—it’s not always of Titan. Sometimes it is A.D., sometimes it is the moments when I thought that I’d come back from dying in front of you just for you to do the same to me, and I am begging you not to go.

Mr. Stark makes another of those wounded noises, and when he spins to face Peter he looks gutted. “You—stay here. I—I will… I’m gonna fix it, okay Pete? I’m gonna fix it.”

He turns on a heel and strides out of the lab, and Peter knows that he should do as Mr. Stark asked and just stay put, but he is certain that Mr. Stark is on his way to call his aunt, to call Nick Fury, someone, and tell them Peter is sick, Peter can’t patrol, Peter needs help, and Peter doesn’t want to have the only things that make him feel any better, feel normal at all—patrolling and the lab with Mr. Stark—taken away from him. He doesn’t bother with the elevator, heads instead for the emergency stairwell and just webs his way up, listening for the sound of the elevator rumbling along in the shaft next to the staircase before it stops at the penthouse. He pushes the door just gingerly ajar after a couple of minutes, but it turns out he doesn’t need to creep any further into the living space to eavesdrop. He barely even needs his superpowered hearing, because Ms. Potts has met Mr. Stark in the living room, it seems, and their voices are raised.

“Tony, are you kidding me? Of all the irresponsible—he needs his family, his friends, a sense of normalcy, not to be cooped up in a tower and a lab so that he can spiral to his heart’s content, just like you,” Ms. Potts is saying, and Peter flinches at the venom he can hear in it. There’s a beat where she pauses, exhales, and then is saying in a gentler tone, apologetic, “I didn’t mean that, Tony. He’s not you. And I know that’s not what you want for him, I know you think this is the right thing, but…” A moment, where he can picture Ms. Potts pressing her fingers to her temples the way she does when she is seriously frustrated with Mr. Stark.

“Pep…” Mr. Stark’s voice sounds even rougher than it did in the lab, and Peter realizes that he might’ve been seeing the Mr. Stark that was holding it all together for his benefit, “he dreams he’s dying and asking for me and I—and I’m not there, I’m not there for him when he needs me again, and again and again, and—”

“Oh, Tony.” Ms. Potts’ voice is soft, but he can hear a note of tension. “Being there now won’t change what happened, Tony. And I know it’s hard, but… this just confirms for me that this? This idea? This is about you, not Peter.”

“At least—at least let him decide, Pep, please? Let me give him the option. And if he says no, I’ll—I’ll respect that, okay? I’ll back off. It’s just—you didn’t hear him—”

There’s a wet quality to Mr. Stark’s voice, and then it all goes muffled, as if Mr. Stark were pressing his face into something, and Peter lets the door swing shut and webs his way back down to the lab. He’s still there, sitting on the couch staring at the pattern of scratches on the floor when Mr. Stark comes back in, not a trace of the emotion he’d betrayed earlier on his face.

“Okay, kid, so. I have some options for you.” Mr. Stark isn’t looking at him, is pacing the length of the lab again, talking fast and gesturing big. “Option one—I find you someone you can talk to about this stuff. I’ll talk to Wilson about it, gotta be someone you can tell the truth to without compromising your identity.”

Peter starts to open his mouth, but he’s barely gotten the beginning of a protest out before Mr. Stark is turned around, facing him, mouth set in a thin line. “No interruptions, no protests, okay? Just listen for once.”

Peter snaps his mouth shut.

“I’m sure you were about to say something like, But Mr. Stark, health insurance, will a superhero therapist be in my network? The answer is it does not matter, because this one is on me. All on me, kid, don’t even start with me. It is my fault you were up there, I told you after the ferry shitshow that if civilians died, that was on you, and if you died, that was on me, and, kid, this is on me. This is all my fucking fault, alright, so just let me—let me handle this, let me do this.”

Peter is trying to talk over him now, but Mr. Stark’s just raising his voice, not yelling but talking louder, the pacing getting faster, and Peter can see that Mr. Stark doesn’t have himself together any more than he did upstairs, crying into Ms. Potts’ shoulder. This is the other side of the coin, the Tony Stark pushing himself to create more and more, sleep less, do more, the mania, the up before the down, the high before the crash.

“Please don’t me mad at me for saying this, oh my god, but, just shut up, Tony!”

The silence is deafening.

“… what did you just say to me, kid?” Mr. Stark isn’t facing him, so Peter only has body language to go on, and Mr. Stark—Tony—is holding himself terribly still. Peter closes his eyes and takes a deep breath.

“I said, shut up, Tony. I get that… I get that you feel that way. I don’t want to—invalidate your feelings.” He hears the soft flutter of a scoff from across the lab, and lets himself smile a little. “Yeah, this wouldn’t be my first therapy rodeo. So—not invalidating your feelings, but, you have to understand, sir—even if I’d never met you, I’d still be in the same place. Or, honestly, probably worse off. Because do you think that if I’d never met you, and had just been Peter B. Parker, Midtown high student and friendly neighborhood Spiderman in a low-tech onesie, I’d have seen aliens land in New York, in my New York, and stayed away? I mean, god, if it hadn’t been for you I probably wouldn’t have been dusted, I’d have died trying to fight aliens in a onesie!”

Mr. Stark makes a noise that sounds like a whine at the word died, but all he says in response is, “So you admit the old suit was ridiculous?”

“And besides, if it wasn’t for me being there, for me meeting you, you’d be—I mean, I wouldn’t have been there to—”

Peter trails off. He and Mr. Stark have never talked about this—the moments after Mr. Stark had snapped Thanos and crew into nothingness. Everything about it seems raw, too raw for words, but Peter had to bring it up, because it is the most important thing for him to make Mr. Stark understand. Peter would suffer through the Blip a million times over if it meant that in the end, he was there to make sure Mr. Stark made it through alive. He still doesn’t understand anything himself—Dr. Strange isn’t exactly big on explanations, and Peter’s memories feel like snippets that have yet to coalesce themselves into a coherent conversation. He just remembers being mid-fight and suddenly, a feeling like every hair in his body was standing on end, like everything around him was silent, like the moment when you’re balancing a pencil on its point and everything is still for a fraction of a second before it all starts to tilt and fall, and he remembers Mr. Strange’s voice, in the back of his mind, calm but certain, forceful—you’ll know the moment, and in the moment, you need to go to Tony Stark, and hold on to him, and, listen to me, Mr. Parker, you need to keep holding on, no matter what, alright?—and he’d been sprinting across the field, rocketing past fighting aliens to try to get to Mr. Stark, just in time to see the snap, to blink and see Mr. Stark staggering, leaning, sliding down, to get there and hold on.

He’s tried to figure out when that memory of Mr. Strange telling him what to do comes from, but it’s just one of the many floating memories of Dust. There are others, but he can’t tell if they’re from the Dust or B.D. I’m confused as to the relationship here. What exactly is your relationship with Mr. Stark? Tell me about Tony Stark.

There’s just silence between them, and Peter waits for the other shoe to drop, for Mr. Stark to kick him out of the lab, out of the tower, take the suit again. But then Tony just huffs a pained-sounding laugh.

“Tony, huh? Are we on a Tony level now, then?”

Peter gulps. “I’m sorry Mr. Stark, I just—it just slipped—I—”

“Don’t be sorry, Pete. You’re—not wrong. You deserve that.” Peter isn’t sure what Mr. Stark means he deserves—the name, or the admission. There’s another beat, in which Peter can hear Mr. Stark—Tony—breathing deeply, in and out, faint whistle on the exhale—just like blowing through a straw, and then he’s sagging against the console.

“So that’s option one. Payment terms TBD. Just that—everything stays the same, but you got someone to talk to. Option two—you come and stay here, in the Tower.”

Peter barely hears the next words out of Mr. Stark’s mouth, he’s so overcome by the rush of adrenaline and gratitude that rushes through him so intensely it’s like he can actually hear it ringing in his eyes. Tears prick at his eyes, and suddenly his nose feels warm and there’s a pressure behind his eyes and tries to sniffle unobtrusively, but he apparently cannot, because all of a sudden Mr. Stark is on his knees in front of him, hands hovering a few millimeters from where Peter’s own hands are pressed to his face.

“—Pete? Did I—I’m so sorry, Peter, you don’t have to, it was a dumb idea, hey, everybody’s gotta get ‘em sometimes, I was way overdue after that whole time travel thing, let’s just forget I ever offered, okay? Just—please don’t cry, Pete, please—”

Peter lets go of his own face and reaches out to grab Mr. Stark’s hands, where they’re in front of his. “No! Please, no—please don’t take it back, I—” He feels his breath come faster, welling up in his chest, and then Mr. Stark has turned his hands around so that he can slot his fingers between Peter’s, squeezing tight until Peter’s forced to refocus.

“You gotta talk to me, kid, tell me what’s going on in that head of yours.”

Peter closes his eyes, counts out his breath to the match Mr. Stark’s steady, practiced inhale-exhale.

“I—I thought you were going to take the suit away again, and you didn’t and I just—I can’t believe you want me to stay. Mr. Stark, it’s like—it’s literally a dream come true, and I just. I just got overwhelmed. Good overwhelmed though.”

“Good overwhelmed. I can handle good overwhelmed,” Mr. Stark exhales in front of him. After a few long seconds of breathing, Peter exhales heavily, tension rolling off of him, suddenly slumping back against the couch, the exhaustion feeling bone-deep. The movement tugs at where his hands are intertwined with Mr. Stark’s, and with a jolt Mr. Stark lets go, wiping his hands on his jeans and avoiding looking at Peter.

“We good now, kid?” The kid somehow feels pointed, but Peter’s sure that’s his own, broken old brain, misinterpreting, overreading.

“Yeah, thanks Mr. Stark.”

Mr. Stark shoots a weary grin at the spot just to the left of Peter’s ear. “So much for Tony.” When Peter just spends several moments trying to figure out what to say to that, Mr. Stark—Tony—goes on. “So, we’ve covered option one—therapy, nothing else. Option two—you stay here. I can—we can come up with a better system for dealing with the nightmares than what you’ve got going on right now, we can use FRIDAY, but option two is entirely conditioned on you talking to someone about this. Got it? Option three—which is an option but one which I feel it’s important to say I will disappointed in you if you choose, is—nothing. If you feel like you’re not ready, okay, we’ll leave it, but Pete, kid, you can’t keep going on like this. You know that, right?”

“I know, Mr. St—Tony. I know.”

“I am giving you these choices because I don’t want you to see this as me—this isn’t me taking the suit, okay? It’s not like that. Promise.”

“I know.”

“I’m going to hug you now. Is that alright? I know I’m not a hugger, but I feel like this moment calls for a hug.”

Peter doesn’t wait to give him an answer, just leans forward and wraps his arms around the warm torso in front of him, buries his head in Mr. Stark’s neck, inhales the scent of him, grease and expensive cologne and sweat, loses himself in the way that Mr. Stark’s arms wrap around his back, hesitant and then relaxing forward into the hug. They stay that way for a beat too long, just long enough for Peter to almost tilt his head to nose at Mr. Stark’s neck, to almost curl his fingers into Mr. Stark’s t-shirt, to fill his head with almosts.

And then Mr. Stark is pulling away, giving the space just past his shoulder another shaky grin. “Head home, kid. Talk to your aunt. Talk to your friends. Tell me what you decide.”

Peter is on the verge of protesting that it’s barely even six, plenty of time left to work, but he feels shaky and tired and suddenly desperate to lay in his bed with his blanket pulled up and over his head, so all he says is, “Can I have a car to take me back?”

In the car on the way to Queens, with no driver to overhear, Peter tries out the name—Tony. Lets it roll around in his mouth, feels it foreign and illicit, a thrill zipping through him every time he whispers it into the dark of the backseat. Tony—Tony and Peter, not Mr. Stark and kid, that’s definitely A.D.

His first night living in the tower, May comes over and Peter makes dinner for everyone—Tony and Pepper (Please, Peter, call me Pepper. No need to be so formal when you’re practically family.) and Morgan and May.

May coming wasn’t even a condition; it was Peter’s idea. That first night, when he’d gotten home and told May everything, about falling asleep in the lab, about how little he was really sleeping, how bad the nightmares had gotten, she’d cried and he’d cried and then they’d ordered Thai food and cried over it some more, and then they’d sat cross-legged on either end of their tiny couch and talked, really talked, until she agreed that option two was best.

“I want you to be wherever you can be healthiest and happiest. And if Stark can use his fancy gizmos and gadgets—” “Oh my god, May.” “—to help you, then I am on board with that.”

Movers had come to pack up all of Peter’s stuff (three boxes worth) and take it over to the tower early in the morning, and he and May had spent the day unpacking his new room (enormous, requiring way more than three boxes worth of things to fill it) and just… talking, in a way they hadn’t in months. After a while, he’d shooed May into the living room with Tony and Pepper and Morgan and set to work in the kitchen. A thank you gift, he’d told them.

“Tony, where do you keep your measuring cups?” he called out across the space, to where he could hear the hum of conversation in the living room. Tony—each time he called him Tony was still a secret thrill, an indulgence he’d never imagined he’d be able to sprinkle throughout casual conversation like each time the word Tony fell from his lips and Mr. Stark turned around with a smile on his face wasn’t more precious than gems.

“That’s what FRIDAY is for, kid,” he heard Tony call back.

Laughing, he said, loud enough for Friday to hear but soft enough that the people in the other room wouldn’t, “FRI? Can you ask Mr. Stark where he keeps his measuring cups?”

“Of course, Peter. The measuring cups are in the second drawer in the cabinet next to the refrigerator.”

“Right, thanks FRI. But can you still ask Mr. Stark?”

“Alright, Peter.”

As he pulls a quarter cup out and starts measuring, he hears FRIDAY, in the other room, say, “Mr. Stark, Peter Parker would like to know where you keep your measuring cups,” followed by a a round of laughter. He’s still grinning when he hears footsteps approaching the other side of the island.

“You could’ve told me you were such a little shit before you moved in,” he says, but his tone is warm, fond, and Peter knows without looking that he’s smiling. Something about that, about all of this—he and Tony, standing in the kitchen, laughing and smiling—fills Peter with a warmth every bit as intense as the fire in his gut when Tony touches him, but all glow, no heat. He goes to swallow and finds he’s swallowing against a tightness in his throat, so he gives himself a moment of unnecessary flourish with the mixing before he turns around.

“If you needed me to tell you before now I was a little shit, I have been sorely misled about the genius of the great Tony Stark.”

Tony is making a mock offended face, but Peter is laughing, and that makes Tony laugh too, and Peter nearly forgets all about the food until he sees Pepper come to linger in the doorway.

“Tony, c’mon, stop distracting the cook. Can’t you see the kid’s working?”

Peter doesn’t think he’s imagining the tightness in her voice, but he can’t quite figure out why it’s there. He figures it must have something to do with him, though—Peter here, when Pepper didn’t want him to be, Pepper here, in New York still, when she doesn’t want to be. Peter turns back to the food with a cold tendril of guilt spearing its way through the warmth he’d felt earlier.

It’s almost two weeks since he started living at the tower that he has his first nightmare.

He’s not sure whether to feel disappointed or relieved. On the one hand, he’d been hoping hat somehow it had been enough to come to the tower, to be in a different place, one that smells like Tony, that looks like Tony, to see him every morning getting coffee and every night stumbling down the hall with Morgan tucked in his arms. On the other, he’d begun to fear that they’d think he’d been faking it.

Figuring out how he feels about the nightmare itself can wait, though, because the only emotion that he feels upon waking up is gratitude. Tony is there, pulling Peter up to a sitting position so that he can wrap his arms around him, rock him softly back and forth, murmuring reassurances until the tension leaves Peter’s body.

“Okay now?” he murmurs into Peter’s hair, and Peter exhales the last of the nightmare, inhales the smell of Tony’s shower gel, and nods.

Tony moves to drop his arms, and Peter suddenly feels the cold air rushing in to fill all the gaps where Tony’s arms had been, imagines that it could reach into him and fill the gaps between his molecules, push them apart one by one until he is floating away like nothing more than specks of—“Don’t go,” he says, plaintive but too panicked to be embarrassed.

Tony sways where he stands for just a moment, a moment where Peter is convinced Tony is going to disappear into one of the shadows in the corner of his room, like he was never there at all, and then he’s leaning down to rest on top of the covers next to Peter, arms wrapping tight around him. “Don’t worry, I’m here, it’s okay sweetheart, I won’t go,” he murmurs into Peter’s hair, and Peter keeps that word—sweetheart—clutched close to him the rest of the night.

Peter manages to sleep through the rest of the night undisturbed, and the sleep feels deeper and more peaceful than he can remember getting A.D. In the morning, he wakes to the sight of Tony’s t-shirt, twisted so that it’s stretched too tight across the shoulder Peter’s head is currently buried against. He’s still under the covers, and Tony on top of them, but Peter’s managed to wrap his arms and a leg around Tony’s body, as if even in sleep Peter was afraid that Tony would go. It’s moderately embarrassing, made wildly embarrassing by the fact that Peter can tell by his breathing patterns that Tony is awake, made horrifically embarrassing by the fact that Peter can feel his own erection pressed against Tony’s hip.

Peter tears himself away from the older man and across the room to the bathroom door with full superhuman speed, slamming the door shut and turning on the tap to hide his rapid breathing.

A few moments later, he hears a soft rap against the door.

“Pete? … I’ll see you at breakfast.”

Peter turns the tap off so that he can hear Tony hesitate outside the door, then turn away and leave the room. He spends twice the time he normally does in the bathroom, half of that extra time spent talking himself down and half of that time spent furiously masturbating to the thought of waking up and lazily grinding himself to orgasm against Tony’s hip, letting Tony ghost kisses along his brow and whisper “it’s okay, sweetheart” against his skin.

He is five minutes late to breakfast. Tony doesn’t say anything about him being late, or about what he felt this morning, and Pepper doesn’t say anything about Tony spending the night in Peter’s room. Morgan has much to say on the topic of dinosaurs, which takes up most of the breakfast conversation.

Peter’s been living in the tower for a month and a half when Pepper leaves.

It’s been the best month and a half of his life. There is breakfast in the mornings before he heads to class. Pepper’s the earliest riser, gone before Tony or Peter are even awake, then Peter, who always fixes a plate and a mug of coffee for Tony so that, when he stumbles into the kitchen, bleary-eyed and cursing, all he has to do is slide into his spot at the bar and, zombie-like, eat and drink what’s been placed in front of him until he’s awake enough to shoot Peter an appreciate smile. There is homework done on the enormous sofa in the living area, talking very seriously to Morgan about what he’s studying and what she’s learning. He lets her write his name on top of one of his practice sets once and tells her that she’s the first six year old to submit any work to Columbia. There’s hours in the lab, mostly with Tony nowadays, always with music playing from the record player in the background, Peter singing along loose and out of key and too content to care. And there’s nights with Tony, Peter waking from his nightmares to soft reassurances and Tony’s warm body to tuck against, to hold him together when he feels like shaking apart.

Pepper told Peter that she was taking Morgan on an extended getaway to the Georgia cabin, but Peter doesn’t need to have overheard any fights to understand that there is no return date for this getaway. Most of the day passes the same way the others have passed, but there is an undercurrent of tension, of quivering in the air. Peter remembers that animals can usually sense natural disasters before they strike, and wonders if spiders are the same way.

When he finishes cooking dinner and finds Tony on his hands and knees, swearing as he tries to reach a secret stash of liquor, he asks FRIDAY to call Colonel Rhodes. When he tells Tony that dinner’s on the counter, that he’ll eat in his room, the look on Tony’s face is like ice to his gut.

He doesn’t eat the food, anyway. Just curls up on top of the covers and closes his eyes to try to force his way into sleep. Peter’s whole life, he has known that good things don’t last. It’s why he has always tried to see the bright side of every situation, to grab onto the good things and cherish them while they’re happening, before they go away. So he repeats to himself that he will be fine, when this is done. When Tony inevitably leaves to go to Georgia, and Peter goes back to Queens. He does not cry himself to sleep.

He’s woken up by a tingling sensation that ripples down his spine—an awareness. He’s not alone. He opens his eyes, and sees Tony, standing near the side of the bed. Peter can see his hands trembling in the dim light.

“Tony? I—was I having a nightmare?” Peter doesn’t feel like he was having a nightmare. He doesn’t always remember them, but he usually at least can feel the remnants shaking through his body, the elevated heart rate, the heavy breathing, clammy skin.

“No,” Tony says, swaying in place, as if he’s trying to decide whether to lean towards Peter or away as Peter scrambles to his knees. “Fuck.”

“Are you… are you drunk?”

Tony’s laugh is bitter. “You have no idea how much I wish that were the case, Pete.”

Peter isn’t sure what to make of what’s going on, but—he can hear the tension, the edge in Tony’s voice, thinks he knows exactly what tightrope Tony is walking in his mind right now, so Peter says, softly, “D’you want to come to bed, Tony?”

Peter can see the shiver run through Tony’s body in front of him, sees the trembling in his hands intensify. “I—I can’t—fuck!” Tony swears, running a hand through his already tousled hair, and then, so soft even Peter almost doesn’t hear it, “Yes.”

Slowly, as if Tony is a horse he’s afraid to spook, Peter shuffles to make room for Tony in the bed and peels back the covers, slipping inside and holding the blanket up for Tony to slide beside him. The older man does, even more slowly than Peter had moved, each of them hesitant, careful.

In the darkness, still not touching each other, just laying side by side, Peter says, “I’m sorry.”

He feels Tony jerk beside him.

“Sorry? For what?”

“I’m the reason Pepper and Morgan are gone. I’m the reason you’re stuck in New York, stuck with me and my problems and my nightmares.”

“Oh god—no, Peter, hey—” and now Tony has turned to wrap his arms around Peter and draw him into his chest, shushing softly, and Peter realizes he’s crying. “Pete, listen, this is not your fault. This is my fault, all of it, don’t be sorry, Peter, please. You have nothing to apologize for, you’re perfect, sweetheart, Christ, you’re perfect.”

They stay that way until they fall asleep, pressed chest to chest, limbs entwined, Tony whispering affirmations against the crown of Peter’s head. Peter, thankfully, doesn’t have any nightmares. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t dream.

His dream starts out the same way the nightmares do, on Titan, but this time, just like he’s fantasized about, when he starts to feel himself turning inside out, breaking apart from the inside, and he turns to Tony, he’s there, wearing not his Iron Man suit but a Black Sabbath t-shirt and his pajama pants, whispering you’re perfect, sweetheart, I’m here over and over as he wraps his arms around Peter and kisses him, holds him together and then they’re naked, the heat of warm flesh pressed against warm flesh as Peter loses himself in kisses, in rolling his body and rutting against Tony’s above him, next to him, below him, until Peter hears his name as if from a distance. He keeps going, keeps chasing the rising crest of pleasure, even as half of his brain is heading towards the voice calling his name, Tony’s voice, but not in the dream, Tony is starting to sound more strained, more tense, less sensual. When Peter’s eyes flutter open, he is staring into the flushed face and blown pupils of Tony Stark, and he realizes what he’s doing, just in time to grind into Tony’s hip one last time, knee moving just enough to brush what is unmistakably Tony’s erection, and that’s all it takes—the knowledge that he’s been touching Tony, the real Tony, here in bed with him, and that Tony is hard, and the last bit of friction, and Peter comes with a cry, a groaned Tony.

Tony’s breathing is heavy, even though his body is still. Hesitantly, and in silence (Peter feels certain that breaking the silence will break whatever spell has come over the both of them), Peter reaches one hand down to brush across Tony’s straining sweatpants. For once moment, just one perfect moment, Tony arches up into the touch, breathing Peter’s name into the space between them as if it’s sacred, before Tony freezes and pushes himself out of the bed, rolling to the floor in a tangle of blankets.

“Wait, Tony, wait—” Peter says, scrambling to stand, to get to Tony, but the older man is already halfway across the room by now, shaking so hard Peter can see it from the bed.

“No, no—fuck, fuck! I—I’m so sorry, Pete, I’m so sorry.”

“No, Tony, you don’t have anything to be sorry about, it’s okay, it was my fault, it was my dream, I—”

“No, no, stop—shut up, kid, just—stop. Shit. This is my fault, this all my fault, this is bad, this is very bad. Fuck. I—I let you—I wanted—I can’t do this.”

Tony is out of the room before Peter can untangle himself from the blankets and pull his pants on. He thinks about chasing directly after Tony, but he gives himself five minutes to clean up the sticky mess he’s made of his boxers, figures Tony will take the time to splash some water on his face, beg FRIDAY for a mimosa, prepare his lecture speech.

When Peter makes his way to the kitchen, there’s a plate of food and a cup of coffee in front of Peter’s normal spot at the bar, and Tony’s space is empty.

FRIDAY informs him that Mr. Stark is headed to Georgia.

Chapter Text

Peter’s first therapy appointment since Tony left, and he’s spent fifteen of his forty-five minutes with his lips pressed tightly together, watching his therapist watch him.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t think he’s going to win this round. He’s already practically squirming in his chair, despite his stubbornly crossed arms, whereas May looks placid, calm, like she sits in frustrated silence for hours every day. Then again, maybe she has—he remembers when Tony had first introduced them, made a point of mentioning that she was a May too (like Aunt May, except… Agent May), and that she was uniquely qualified to be Peter’s therapist because she was a former SHIELD agent, familiar with supers, top-level clearance, who’d retired and turned to therapy because, as Tony put it, she’d seen some shit, and with enough martial arts training to effectively restrain him should something go wrong (Tony had winced, looking apologetic to even have had the thought, but Peter was grateful). Peter had planned on going to a couple of sessions, maybe rehashing some of the same stuff he’d talked to his old therapist about, about his parents and Ben, because trying to explain to someone who hadn’t been there—ex-SHIELD or not—about Titan, about space, about all of it, felt like trying to explain algebra to a hamster—it was that completely out of a normal person’s frame of reference.

Peter still hadn’t really explained about Titan, but he’d talked about more than he’d planned, and he’d stuck around—is still sticking around. He blames it on the fact that Agent May reminds him of Natasha.

When he’d walked in today, Agent May had wanted to talk about Tony leaving. Peter doesn’t even know how she’d found out about that, though he has a sneaking suspicion it’s related to Colonel Rhodes’ unexpected visit the day after Tony left. When Peter had refused to talk about Tony leaving, she’d said that was fine, but that today they were talking about Tony Stark—anything about him.

They’ve been sitting in silence ever since.

Peter knows that this should be easy, that he should just be able to open his mouth and talk about so many things—innocuous things, like growing up a nerd from Queens and idolizing the playboy genius billionaire philanthropist who’d turned hero, like being grateful about how Mr. Stark had found him, given him the suit, taken him under his wing, turned him from a do-gooder with a little extra juice to a real hero, given him the chance to make a difference. Maybe even added a bit about how he felt frustrated when Tony treated him like a kid, despite the fact he’d proven time and again that he was a teammate, not a child. But the idea of opening his mouth to talk about Tony at all feels like danger, like taking a step out onto a frozen pond at the beginning of spring—one wrong move, one misstep, or even just sheer coincidence, a confluence of innocent factors, and he’ll be turning his heart inside out in front of Agent May, telling her absolutely everything. And he doesn’t want to do that.

“Are you even an actual therapist?” Peter snaps. He knows he’s losing the game, breaking first, but he can’t help it.

“I am, Peter. But why do you ask that question?” Agent May sounds as calm and measured as ever, clearly not bothered by Peter’s silent treatment or his petulance.

“—What?” Peter had been expecting her to turn back to Tony, so he doesn’t catch, at first, what she’s actually asking.

“I said, why do you ask that question in particular?”

“Uh—” Peter pauses, thinking. He doesn’t really know, hadn’t really been thinking about anything in particular when he’d asked it, but he knows that it wouldn’t be the first time that he’d had a reason, deep down, that Agent May had helped him uncover. “I… wanted to know if this was—official, or just something through Mr. Fury, you know? Like… a real doctor and patient?”

“We are a real doctor and patient, Peter, and I take this doctor-patient relationship as seriously as I do any other client, superhero or not. Why are you concerned about that?”

“I guess I just—didn’t know what you told Mr. Fury, or the rest of the Avengers, or Mr. Stark, about our sessions.” Peter is fidgeting in his chair now, facing the uncomfortable feeling of being slowly unraveled—Agent May has found the loose string, and is tugging at the thread to get the very heart of where Peter’s issues are tangled. Her face, on the other hand, is carefully blank.

“I’d never break your trust and our confidentiality, Peter. At least, so long as the safety of you or others isn’t in danger. Is there something you want to tell me that you don’t want any of those people to know?”

“It’s not—it’s not like that!” Peter says, suddenly scrambling to make sure that Agent May understands it’s not like the clear implication he can hear hanging in her voice—that Mr. Stark isn’t safe for him “It’s more just… embarrassing? Maybe? At least… private.”

Agent May lets him sit in the silence of that one for a moment, until it stretches long enough that he continues.

“It’s just that—you know my nightmares? I’m—I guess I’m just worried that with Mr. Stark gone, things’ll get bad and I won’t be able to sleep again.”

“Mmm,” Agent May hums, “and why is that? I thought you said you’d been sleeping better.”

Peter licks his lips nervously, feeling his gaze darting around the room to avoid looking at Agent May but unable to stop himself, to focus and not wear his anxiety so plainly. “Well, because—because—in the nightmares, you see, I’m… I’m dying, or, really, dissolving, and like, I can feel it, and it’s like on Titan, I’m going to Mr. Stark, and asking him to hold on, to—to keep me from falling apart, you know? Or—sometimes it’s when I’m back, after Mr. Stark used the stones, and—and he’s, he’s, you know, and I’m yelling for him to hold on, not to go—and so—when Mr. Stark was there, he’d wake me up from the dreams, and that’s how I knew it was alright, because he was there and then he’d stay and the only way I could fall back asleep was knowing he was right there with me soyeahthat’swhyI’mworriedIguess?”

Peter’s heart is thumping in his chest, face warm with the flush of embarrassment, and he can’t bring himself to look at Agent May and see her reaction. This is the first time he has talked to her about his nightmares, either what they’re about or how he’s been coping with them.

“Peter,” Agent May says, and her voice is uncharacteristically soft, though her words are not. “I like you. You’re a smart guy”—guy, not kid, Peter thinks frantically, in the space between now and the shoe dropping, because Agent May has never treated him like a child—“and you like me because I don’t bullshit you. Do you think that what you’ve described is a healthy way of dealing with your nightmares?”

Peter grips the arms of the chair so hard he can feel the wooden frame creak under the fabric cover.

“At least it works,” he says through gritted teeth, before taking a deep breath and loosening his grip. Agent May just gives him a moment. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—that was—I’m sorry. It’s just… I get that you’re judging me, but—it works, okay? And anything has to be better than going back to not sleeping, right?”

“I’m not judging you, Peter. We all do what we need to in order to deal with what we’ve seen and experienced, and you’ve seen and experienced more than most people could dream of. What I am here to do is help you come up with better ways of dealing with that.”

“What’s wrong with what we were doing? Why do I need to come up with something better? Why is it unhealthy?” Peter can tell that his voice is somewhere between petulant and pleading, like if he can just get Agent May’s blessing that what he’s doing works, is good for him, then he can wave it in front of Tony’s face and somehow get Tony back—back to New York, back to the tower, back to him.

“How much time did you spend with Tony Stark on a normal day, Peter?”

Another squeeze of the arms of his chair. He thinks he hears something internal start to crack.

“I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

At this, Agent May smiles faintly. “We’ll get there, Peter.”

Peter inhales through his nose and exhales through his mouth, relaxes his grip on the chair. “Not… too much. We’d have breakfast together in the mornings, maybe hang out while I did reading or homework if I had time before class, then a few hours together in the lab in the afternoon and evening after my classes, dinner together. Maybe in the same room while I was doing reading for class, help me with my practice sets. And… y’know, if I had a nightmare… he’d… stay.”

Agent May keeps eye contact with Peter.

“And what if you wanted to do something different, Peter? Can you tell me about a time when there was something more important to you than your routine with Tony Stark?”

Peter frowns. “It’s—it’s not like that, Agent May. I could always do something different if I wanted to, but the point is that I don’t, I like my routine.”

“What about spending time with your other friends? Your Aunt May? Have you been spending time with them lately?”

“Yes, of course I have,” Peter says, but it’s reflexive and Agent May knows it, just tilts her head slightly and waits for Peter. He can feel himself clenching his jaw and forces the muscles to relax. “OK, well, not as much I should, or as much as I used to, B.D.” He can see the question in Agent May’s eyes and he says, “B.D.—Before Dust. It’s… I just… it helps me keep things straight. Funny little acronym. But anyway, yeah, so things aren’t the way they were B.D., but it’s better, since I moved into the Tower. Honest!”

Somehow, without changing her facial expression in any way that Peter can tell, Agent May is radiating skepticism.

Peter takes a deep breath, tries to sort the feelings out into words as they spill out from him—like falling through the ice on that frozen pond. “Everyone expected things to just go back to the way they were before, or close to it. Half of my class had been dusted too, my Aunt May, my best friends. So, yeah, a bunch of people wanted to just try to… slot back into life as we’d known it, B.D. But I’m not B.D., I’m A.D. After Dust. That doesn’t make any sense, does it? Ugh, it’s just, like—I felt like I was suffocating, like I was playing the part of a kid who could go to school and do his homework and care about prom and Spanish tests, and then come home and sit across from my Aunt May and talk about my day at school when inside of that guy was the Peter Parker who went to freaking space and fought aliens and died and didn’t care about any of that stuff anymore. So I felt like I just had this great big… secret, weighing me down. But Mr. Stark helped convince my aunt to let me graduate early, and I like being in the lab, like feeling like I can be working on something to help for the next time something big comes. It makes me feel like I’m suffocating less, which makes me feel like I can talk to people more. I… the first time I told my Aunt May about my dreams? Really told her how bad it was? Was when I was asking her about moving. I feel like I can do that, now, without putting it all on her. So, yeah, we’re not… B.D., but we’re… getting there. Getting better.”

Peter’s running out of steam, can’t tell whether he’s sinking under the ice or pulling himself back out, so he stops talking and just glances up at Agent May just in time to see a line of tension he hadn’t realized she’d been holding disappear from her face and her posture.

“Good, Peter.”

After he gets back from his appointment with Agent May, he’s too drained to feel anything but desperate for bed, but by the next day, after a nearly full day of going about his business alone in the tower, nothing to do but think of the past, think of that night, think of Pepper leaving, Tony drinking, Tony fleeing, he’s back to being angry.

Angry with Pepper, sure, angry with Tony, definitely, but mostly angry with himself, because when push comes to shove, Peter has no one to blame for this good thing leaving but himself. Maybe Tony had been the one to come to his room, to let Peter dream like that, but Peter had woken up and hadn’t stopped himself, had waited until the initial moment was past, and there was no question that he wasn’t asleep, that he knew what he was doing, and had reached out and had touched—had pushed Tony’s boundaries past the breaking point.

So Peter is doing the only thing that he can do when he’s like this, can’t settle, angry and restless and above all sad—he’s patrolling. He’s already been out for 4 hours and change, has stopped two carjackings, four muggings and an armed robbery, and he still feels like he’s itching for a fight, but the city that never sleeps is finally starting to quiet down, so Peter is just perched on a high-rise, arms and legs crossed as he frowns at the city, when the call comes in.

“Peter, incoming call from Mr. Stark,” Karen says amiably in his ear.

He hesitates, but—it’s late, and if Tony is calling him, maybe it’s something important. As if he’d ever ignore Tony Stark’s call.

“Thanks, Karen.” He hears the subtle shift in the ambient sound in his suit that lets him know they’re connected. “Tony?”

“Pete,” he hears Tony breathe, a hint of—relief?—that’s gone before he can really clock it, and Tony’s tone is back to the fake too-casual, too-loose tone that Peter absolutely hates to hear directed at him. “Did I wake you?”

“Uh, nope, I was up. What did you want?”

It’s harsher than he usually is with Tony (way harsher), but—well, he’s angry. He’ll regret it in the morning, he’s sure, but it’s not morning yet.

“Wrong answer, kid. This was a test, you’re supposed to be asleep. It is—2:37 a.m., way too late to be picking up calls from wayward old men.”

Peter thinks about picking up the old man bait that Tony’s laid out for him, falling back into their old pattern as if nothing has happened, as if it’s not almost 3 in the morning and Tony’s calling him from another state, but he just… sighs. “Seriously, Mr. Stark? A test?”

“Yikes, back to Mr. Stark,” Peter hears from the other end of the line, and he feels a twinge of guilt.

“I should get back to—”

“Wait!” He hears the sound of Tony swallowing heavily over the connection, and stops. “I mean—how are you doing, kid? Really. I’m… I was—I worry about you.”

The admission feels like it’s ripped from him unwillingly, so Peter sighs and settles into the gravel on top of the high-rise, spreading his hands to sort through the pebbles and toss them across the roof.

“… Thanks, Tony. I’m—things are fine. Thanks for letting me stay in the tower, by the way.”

Peter does not mention how awful it had been, to spend half the day worrying that someone was going to be by to ask him to pack his things any moment, pacing and unable to focus, until he’d finally texted Tony, only to receive a message back from Happy that Peter was free to stay in the tower as long as he’d like. Happy. As if they were back to the days when he was 15, a kid to be babysat.

“Of course—shit, Pete, I—that’s kind of the point of the whole su casa thing. I wasn’t kidding—that place is as much yours as it is mine, now, Pete. I’m not going to kick you out of your home.”

At the word, Peter tenses, drawing in breath and letting the words spill out before he can regret them. “So if it’s as much yours as mine, is it—is it home for you too?” He knows that Tony will hear the question unspoken beneath the one that is—is the tower home, or is Georgia? Are you coming home? Coming home to me?

There’s a long pause in which Peter can only hear Tony breathing, before he answers, speaking much too quickly for the long pause that had preceded it, “I’m a billionaire, kid, home is anywhere I want it to be, you’ve seen the tabloids, us obnoxious rich people always jetting off to one island or another.”

Peter can feel himself starting to shake in his suit, so he grabs onto a piece of gravel and resumes tossing them across the roof. The next one he overthrows, and it hits the ventilation duct on top of the building across the street so hard it dents it, and Peter winces.

“So you’re not coming back, then.” He means it to be a question, but he suddenly feels too hollow to even bother forcing the intonation into his voice.

“No—kid, no, it’s just a vacation, just a little getaway we needed, okay? I’m not—”

“So when are you coming back?” Peter shoots back, feeling himself start to shake harder. The next piece of gravel he picks up, he doesn’t even bother throwing—he just clenches it in his fist so hard he can feel it start to shatter into dust.

“I—that’s not my—I don’t—” Tony stops stuttering his way through half-truths and Peter can hear that his breathing is shaky and shallow. He wonders, briefly, if Tony is crying. “I’ll be back, Peter, I promise you, okay? I’ll come back. You—you gotta believe me, Pete, I promise.”

Peter clocks the use of the word ‘I’, not ‘we’, but doesn’t mention it.

He thinks about what he could say next, lets the words roll around in his mouth (I want to believe you, of course I believe you, you are Iron Man but more than that you are Tony Stark, come back to me, please, I miss you, I need you, I just want to see you laugh over coffee in the morning again or make fun of my singing, please). He swallows them all down.

“Would it be okay if Ned came over to the tower sometime? Agent May was suggesting that hanging out with my friends more at the tower, on totally A.D. turf, might be good for me, feel less pressure to have things go back to the way they were before.”

“A.D.?” Tony asks, and Peter curses internally. Trust him to pick up on that slip. It’s not that Peter doesn’t want to tell Tony about his system, but—talking about B.D. and A.D. means talking about the in-between, the moment, and that’s painful enough for both of them that Peter doesn’t feel ready yet.

“Uhh—oh, shit, I think I see a little old lady getting her purse stolen. By—wow, those are some big thugs, gotta go Mr. Stark!”

“Pete—wait!” he hears before he disconnects the call and slumps back onto the roof, blinking up at the sky above him. It still blows his mind how much clearer the sky is over New York than it had been when he left—five years of diminished air pollution to thank for clearing the haze.

“Incoming call from Tony Stark,” Karen chirps in his ear.

“Decline the call, Karen.”

“Are you sure, Peter?”

Peter winces. Now his AI’s backtalking him and questioning his decisions.

“I’m sure, Karen.”

He stares at the sky for a little longer, traces out the shapes of the Big and Little Dipper, is looking for Orion’s Belt when Karen’s voice rings out again.

“Text message received from Tony Stark. Should I read it?”

“Yes, please, Karen. Thanks.”

“Message received: You’re welcome to invite whoever you want to the tower. Lab still requires security clearance, but if you need it waived I’ll make it happen. Go save the old lady, Spider-Man, and then get to bed. Even heroes gotta sleep.”

Peter has identified three more constellations before he realizes he’s crying.

Tony comes back three weeks later, except he hasn’t come to stay. A Wakandan delegation is arriving in New York for the UN General Assembly meeting, and, officially, Stark Industries is collaborating with the Wakandan International Outreach Center. Unofficially, of course, there’s a meeting at the tower later in the day.

Because it’s official SI business, Tony and Pepper had arrived, together, bright and early the morning before the press conference announcing the collaboration. Peter is sitting at the breakfast bar, poking at a bowl of cereal and some eggs as if he can force his normally insatiable appetite to come back to life, listening to Pepper and Tony argue. He can tell that they don’t realize he’s awake yet, because they’re arguing about him, heading down the hallway from the elevator towards the living room and kitchen.

“And why not? I don’t see why this is a problem, Pep—”

“Because, Tony, officially he’s an intern, for God’s sake!”

“So? An intern who’s smarter than any of the SI scientists we’re trotting out!”

“Tony, stop—I know what this is about, and you know what this is about, and there’s no use pretending that this is about whether he deserves to be at a press conference.”

“Goddamnit, Pepper, you know that no one deserves more to be the face of the technology of the future, it’s a fucking farce without—”

They’ve finally gotten close enough that Peter thinks they’ll be able to hear him, and he doesn’t think he can handle hearing Tony compliment him any longer, can handle trying to square the obvious admiration in his voice with the fact that he’s gone, so he sets his fork down with a clink that seems to resound in the sudden silence that follows it.

“It’s okay, Mr. Stark. Pepper is right—for all anyone knows, I’m just a college intern. Wouldn’t want anyone to look too close or dig too deep and figure out the other reason I’m at Stark Industries.”

“Peter—hi,” Tony breathes, looking pained and hopeful at the same time.

“Oh, Peter—we—hello. Sorry, we didn’t realize you were up yet,” Pepper says, giving him an apologetic smile that only shows the slightest hint of her discomfort.

Peter just shrugs, and goes back to spearing bits of egg in the hope that he’ll build up the motivation to actually eat them soon. “S’okay, Pepper. Didn’t sleep well, so I just got up early.”

It’s only by virtue of his super senses that he can hear Tony exhale sharply, but he ignores it.

“Well, you’ll definitely be here for the other meeting,” Pepper says, blithely skating past Peter’s comment about his sleep.

“Of course,” Peter says, dropping the fork back to the plate and watching the eggs, still uneaten, spill back onto the glossy ceramic in messy spatters. “I’m actually going to head to the library this morning—got a midterm coming up I want to get ahead on studying for.”

He doesn’t wait to hear any answer, just puts his mess in the dishwasher and heads for his room so he can pack his things up.

He remembers when he was younger, watching on TV a program about this guy who was walking a tightrope over Times Square. At the time, he’d been enthralled, had thought about how amazing it must feel to look down from that height, to feel like you were soaring high above everyone, flying when everyone below was earthbound. Now he knows what that feels like, and instead he thinks about how scared the man must have felt—to be only human and yet to feel the thinness of the wire beneath your feet, the bitter cold of the wind whipping around you that high up. Right now, Peter is firmly on the ground, and yet he’s never felt closer to that tightrope walker.

He doesn’t really need to study, but he does it anyway. He’d gotten invited to a study group, upperclassmen who were shocked to learn that the quiet kid who consistently got the highest grades on tests was younger than the rest of them, graduated early and still not even declared a major. Peter doesn’t know if he particularly likes them, doesn’t know if they’ll become friends like Ned and MJ, but they’re nice enough and they study hard and Peter feels more prepared than he ever really has for school, even with the patrolling and the time spent in the lab. So he’s been ready for this midterm for weeks already, and yet he sits in the library, running through yet another problem set paying half attention.

He stops pretending to study to watch the press conference. Pepper is beautiful and gracious as ever. Peter tries not to notice that Tony doesn’t look happy at all.

After that, he heads home, showers and tries to look nice to meet the Wakandan delegation. He knows that this is just the unofficial meeting, the one that’s more about Tony Stark as Iron Man than about Stark Industries, but a part of him can’t help but think about showing them all what could have been at the official conference, a Peter who’s not just a bouncing intern in a cheap suit.

When FRIDAY lets him know that the group is on their way up, he goes to the entrance hall to meet them, tries to look like he’s doing something more important on his phone than sending Ned memes about all the Star Wars movies they’ve missed in the time they’ve been gone. He hears the ding of the elevator and looks up, pasting a smile on his face as he watches Pepper and Tony exit the elevator, followed by a tall, imposing-looking woman who radiates competence and a confident-looking girl not much older than him, tapping furiously at a tablet she’s carrying.

“Ah, good, you’re here already,” Pepper says upon spotting him, and reaches an arm out to take his elbow and pull him toward the Wakandans. “Shuri, Okoye—let me introduce you to—”

The younger girl stops tapping on her tablet in time to look up and let out a small shout. “Peter Parker! It is good to see you again, Spider Boy.”

And with that, his name in her accent, bits and pieces clang back to him and shape themselves into something solid. “Shuri?” He takes a step towards her, out of Pepper’s grip and into the warm hug that Shuri is suddenly wrapping around him.

“You… remember?” he says, quietly, hesitantly, and she grabs onto his biceps, tightens her grip.

“No one ever believes me when I tell them I’m extraordinary,” she answers, just as quietly, with a little eye roll, and Peter is glad she is holding onto him because he suddenly feels his knees grow weak, with the knowledge that he’s not totally crazy, he wasn’t just hallucinating all of it, that someone out there remembers too, has a span of time where everyone else seems to have a single moment.

“I’m sorry, you—know each other?” It’s Pepper, and Peter wants to laugh at the uncertainty in her voice. He likes Pepper, he does, but after the month he’s had, he’d be lying if he said he doesn’t enjoy her thrown off her perfect game for once.

“In a manner of speaking,” Shuri says, looping one arm through Peter’s elbow and giving him a conspiratorial grin. Beneath the mischief, though, he can sense that she’s letting him take the lead—that these are his people, Pepper and Tony, and so it’s his secret to tell or not. He shoots a glance behind them at the tall woman—Okoye—who just gives him a solemn nod.

“Could we maybe do that then? The speaking?” Tony this time, and Peter feels a tightness in his chest at the lost look on Tony’s face, the tension, the way his eyes linger on the place where Shuri’s arm is wrapped around his, and all thoughts of white lies fall out of his head.

“We met in… during… er…” He gives Shuri a short glance. “I’m not sure what you call it, how you think of it, but I just usually think of it as in the Dust.”

She gives a little shrug. “Good enough.”

Tony is just blinking, and Pepper is frowning, so Peter continues. “I—I haven’t exactly told you guys, because I—well, I kind of thought I was maybe going a little insane, but I remember. Not everything, not yet, but… I remember… things, from the time I was gone. I didn’t at first, but as time has gone on, I’ve started to. That’s where Shuri and I met and talked. It wasn’t… I know I told you guys it felt like one moment I was on—in space, and the next it was like waking up, and Dr. Strange was there, opening the portals, but—that’s not quite right.”

Peter watches closely as Tony takes a step back, arm reaching behind him for the wall. “I need a drink—of water,” he quickly amends at Pepper’s sharp stare, and the group takes that as their cue to move to the kitchen, where Peter quickly pulls together a handful of snacks while Tony leans against the sink, staring dazedly into his cup of water.

Shuri takes a look at the snacks and laughs. “No pierozhkis?”

Peter flushes, but shakes his head slightly when he feels Tony’s stare on his back. Not every revelation at once, today. Not with Pepper and Shuri and Okoye here.

So Shuri moves quickly on to the topic of their actual meeting, discussing vibranium shipments, plans for an extension of Earth’s defenses using Wakandan technology, and Peter—lets himself participate. It is nice, to feel like he’s not just a kid at the adults’ table, when Shuri turns and asks his opinion, when Tony listens, when he makes a suggestion and they all nod, serious as if he’s giving orders. The only one who looks vaguely uncomfortable, he notices, is Pepper, who is hanging back watching the four of them with a troubled look on her face.

Things are winding down when he turns to Shuri and says, “Oh, before you leave, I was hoping you could take a look at something I’ve been working on in the lab. Is that—is that alright?” He turns to Tony, remembering the lab’s security protocols.

Tony is smiling, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Not a problem, Pete, I’ll tell FRI to let the princess in. Let me just get out of the monkey suit and I’ll meet you down there, okay?”

“No! I mean—er, it’s kind of a—secret project?” Peter says, feeling himself start to blush as people’s attention turns to him.

“A secret project? Uh, sure—you can have those. Your lab too, kid. I’ll just, uh—eat… this… hummus.” Tony’s voice is doing that thing again, the fake thing, the too-light, on-the-edge thing, but Peter just grabs Shuri’s hand and starts heading for the lab.

They’re silent until they get inside, where FRIDAY thankfully lets them both in without incident.

“So, uh… this is the lab,” Peter says, waving his hand expansively. “It’s… I… Man, I am so glad you remember,” he finally admits, exhaling deeply.

Shuri just gives him a smile. “And I was glad to hear that you were able to save your Tony Stark.”

“He’s not—” Peter tenses, tries to bite back the pang that hearing it said like that causes, knows that’s not what Shuri meant, even if he wishes it was, wishes it could be that way. “He’s not my Tony Stark.”

He hears Shuri give a soft huff, but she doesn’t push it, just says, “Well, then what’s this secret project?”

So he walks her to the corner, brings up the schematics. “So I just—I’ve done preliminary tests, obviously, and everything is working the way I expect but you’re way better with vibranium than I am, and before I showed anyone I just—”

Shuri’s already bent over the schematics, an excited gleam in her eyes, and they’re there like that for at least an hour when FRIDAY cuts in to say that T’Challa has called, his UN business done and ready to meet Shuri and Okoye.

“Ah, that is my cue to leave.” Shuri seems to regret her statement, lingering at the workstation for a minute, tapping at a few more things.

“Thank you so much for taking a look at this, you have no idea how much I appreciate this,” Peter says, honest and earnest, looking at the prototype in front of him.

“It was my pleasure, Peter Parker,” Shuri says as they head for the door. Before they leave, she stops, turns to look at the space where the project was hovering just a moment before, and shakes her head. “He’s not my Tony Stark, he says.”

Peter’s back in the lab with takeout for dinner and a Black Keys album on the record player when Tony walks in, all forced casualness and concealed tension.

Peter swallows the bite of burger he’d just taken and looks up. “What’s up, Tony?”

“Can’t a guy come by his own lab?”

Peter raises a brow, about to ask if this means that Tony and Pepper are staying, at least for the night, when Mr. Stark wanders over to one of the workbenches and starts fiddling, and, with the fiddling, talking.

“So… the princess of Wakanda, huh? Way to go, Pete, didn’t know you had it in you. Or rather, I knew you did but I didn’t think you knew you did—wait, forget I said that, that was inappropriate. Anyway, you, princess, scientist, Dust. It’s cute. It’d make a good romance story, maybe I’ll call Hallmark and pitch it myself. You know, when you’ve done everything, invented time travel, what’s left to do? Maybe it’s write screenplays.”

“It’s not like—” Peter protests, but Tony is talking over him, his fiddling somehow getting more aggressive.

“No, no—kid, I had my fair share of secret projects, scare quotes very much intended, back in my younger days, though I didn’t usually wind up actually taking them to my lab. But, admittedly, mine were never quite as smart as the princess there, so I can’t really blame you. I hope you remembered the third drawer on the left, stay smart, kid, and—”

And Peter can’t take it anymore, because he knows Tony is irritated at him for having a secret project, for not telling him about remembering the Dust, for cutting him out of the loop about the project, letting someone else into the lab, their lab, but it sounds like he’s jealous and Peter can’t take listening to it any longer, letting some part of his brain think that maybe Tony is jealous, that Tony thinks of him like that, despite all evidence to the contrary, so—he snaps.

“It was supposed to be a surprise!” The volume of his own voice surprises him, startling Tony and echoing in the lab. “For you!”

“Wh—what was?” Tony has stopped, hand still halfway in the drone he’s been disassembling out of nervous habit, watching Peter storm over to the corner.

“The secret project! It actually was a secret project, and it was for you, you… you… idiot!”

“Did you just call me an idiot?” Tony says, faintly, but then Peter opens the compartment and Tony drops the drone. “What—kid, what is that?” His voice sounds throaty, and Peter shuts his eyes tight and rocks back and forth on the balls of his feet.

“It’s a suit. A new suit. I—don’t worry, I didn’t touch the old one, in case you don’t like—but—I made some… upgrades, to your suit.”

“You… made some… upgrades? To my suit?” Tony’s voice is tight and wavering, and Peter squeezes his eyes shut tighter.

“Yeah… yeah. Like I said, you don’t have to—”

“Let me see,” Tony says, so Peter pulls it up on his tablet and walks over to Tony, handing it over wordlessly and then, crossing his arms, stares down at the half-destroyed drone on the workbench.

“Holy—kid, this is—how did you come up with—Pete, I could go ten rounds with the Hulk in this thing and walk away without a bruise.”

“Yeah, that’s kind of the point. I had the idea ages ago, but it took me a while to come up with a way to use the vibranium more efficiently.”

Tony has reached out to grab one of the chairs and stumble into it, still staring at the tablet, blinking.

“… Why?”

At that, Peter blinks and looks up. He can’t read the emotion on Tony’s face or in his voice, but it’s there, something big and complicated and it makes Peter swallow anxiously.

“I—Pepper and Colonel Rhodes aren’t the only ones who want you safe, Tony, I do too, but I know that—that you can’t just stop being Iron Man, or that even if you say you will something will happen and you won’t be able to stay out of it when you can help, I get it, so… I figured instead of trying to get you out of the suit, I’d make the suit safer. I mean… that’s what you do for me, right?”

When he looks back at Tony, he swears there are tears in the man’s eyes, and for a minute he thinks it’s going to be okay, that maybe things will be—if not the same, better between them, but then Tony’s talking and—it’s not what Peter’s expecting.

“What—what am I supposed to do with this?” Tony is saying, his voice thin and wobbly, as if he actually is trying not to cry. “How am I supposed to—?” He looks up at the ceiling, licks his lips and opens his mouth but nothing comes out, at a loss for words momentarily. “This—the suit—and the science, and… the record player in the lab, and the breakfast and the—I can’t.”

“You—you don’t like it?” Peter whispers. He feels like his heart has collapsed in on itself, like the rest of his body is bound to follow any minute, to collapse into the empty space at the center of him.

“I—that’s not—but I… how am I supposed to handle this?” Tony is still looking at the ceiling, as if for patience or guidance, and Peter turns away to press his hands against his face and fight back tears. Tony didn’t like it—doesn’t like the suit, and, apparently, the record player, the breakfast. He’s been… tolerating Peter, resenting the intrusion into his life, the steady erosion of Tony’s space and life and now Peter has come along and touched the one thing that is central to Tony’s identity, the Iron Man suit, and Peter feels so stupid.

“It’s fine, it was a stupid idea, it’s fine,” Peter mumbles, and he can barely process that he’s started walking, heading for the bathroom, until he gets there and locks the door behind him. He leaves the lights off, but he turns on the tap and lets himself sob, leaning against the sink until he can’t anymore.

When he leaves the bathroom, finally, feeling wrung out and limp, the lab is empty. Tony is gone. Back to Georgia, back to his real life, the one he wants, the one he’d have if he didn’t have a traumatized kid attached to him and desperate for him, Peter thinks morosely.

He tries to work, tries to tinker with his own suit, but his hands feel simultaneously heavy and shaky, his brain an unpleasant dull fuzz of exhaustion. He thinks about calling Agent May, picks up his phone and sees it’s past 10 p.m., thinks better. He thinks about laying on the couch and masturbating, seeing if that’ll make his brain shut up long enough for him to fall asleep, but—if he’s honest, it’s been so long since he thought of anything but Tony that he doesn’t know what he’d even imagine. The thought of porn makes him feel dirty and the thought of fantasizing about Tony just makes the hollow spot in his chest ache.

So he says, “FRI? I don’t suppose there’s… like, weights or something in here? A punching bag?”

“There is indeed, Peter,” FRIDAY says, and Peter knows he’s anthropomorphizing the AI, but he thinks he hears a softness in her voice that isn’t usually there. A few seconds later, a panel in the ceiling that he didn’t know was retractable has retracted, and a punching bag hooked to a metal arm is being lowered.

“That’s neat,” Peter says, softly, to himself, mostly to feel normal, as he strips out of his dress shirt to his undershirt and takes the belt off of his dress pants and then steps up to the punching bag. They usually make him wear wraps, as if his healing factor won’t heal any scrapes or splits or bruises in hours anyway, as if he’s normal, but just him, in the lab, he leaves his fists bare, and steps up to the bag.

He wonders if Tony is the reason this punching bag is here—must be—wonders how recently he’s used it, or if it’s just a relic of a long time ago, an old Tony. B.D. Tony. He wonders about what kind of demons Tony used to exorcise on this punching bag—Peter knows the man has enough of them, has been through hell and back time and time again just to come back to save them all. He punches while he thinks about Tony’s life between B.D. and A.D.—Tony who’d always said they weren’t soldiers, they were a team, who’d lost Captain America and the rest of them over the Accords and had had to go into space to fight Thanos with no one at his side but a freaky wizard he didn’t even like and Peter, a tag-along kid he’d just wanted to stay safe, and lost them both. He punches until he doesn’t feel angry anymore, just feels sad, because Tony deserves the life he wants, even if it’s a life where Peter’s not hanging around, where Tony’s not tearing apart his life and his marriage out of a sense of misplaced guilt. He punches and he punches and he punches, until he realizes he’s crying again and then he forgets to hold back at all, and the punching bag goes flying off its metal arm and crashes to the floor of the lab.

He’s staring at the punching bag, breathing heavily, when he hears the door to the lab open.

“Well, fuck me—ow!”

He turns around, swiping at the tears on his face furiously, to see Tony coming into the lab, but he didn’t need to have worried. Tony is looking down at a box, clutching his shin and stumbling deeper into the lab.

“Are you drunk?” Peter says, trying to make some of the old anger come back.

“Yes, I am drunk, thank you. And to answer your next question, no I absolutely should not be here. Me being here like this is breaking at least three of my own protocols. FRI?”

“Being in the lab alone with Peter Parker at 11:03 p.m. while drunk is breaking 7 protocols, sir.”

“See? Seven.”

Peter can’t really process what’s happening in front of him, the quips, the protocols, any of it, so he just says, “Why are you here?”

“I… am here to apologize, kid.”

Peter winces at that. “You don’t have to, really, please—” He doesn’t think he can handle listening to Tony apologize, treat Peter with kid gloves when all Peter wants is for Tony to be happy. He’s already cried twice today, miraculously not in front of Tony either time, and he really doesn’t want to go for a third.

“No, I do, because, listen Pete, I—I tried to do the right thing, really tried, but I couldn’t shake the idea—I thought about you, sitting down here thinking that you’d done something wrong, that I didn’t like the new suit or the coffee or the record player or—any of it, and being sad, and, god, Peter, that kills me. It shouldn’t but it does, so I’m here saying the thing I should absolutely not be saying, that is absolutely not smart for me to say, which is why I’m drunk, but—”

Peter becomes dimly aware that he’s shaking slightly, even as Tony keeps walking toward him, and closer, Peter can see that Tony’s eyes are red and swollen, as if he’s been crying too.

“Pete, I lo—I love it all, you in the lab, the suit upgrade, the record player, breakfast in the morning, your textbooks on the coffee table, even your terrible taste in movies. It—I couldn’t possibly not like those things. I like them too much, and that is the problem, Pete, don’t you see?”

Peter swallows heavily, shaking his head, because he doesn’t see. “So why did you leave, then?” He can hear his voice going thin and high, knows his face is getting red, but he can’t stop himself. He just barely manages to stop himself from saying why did you leave me?

“Peter—God, kid, I—” Tony’s even closer, now, close enough to reach out and touch and he starts to, one hand hovering in the air between them as Tony rocks on his heels before dropping it. “You—you really don’t get it. And why should you? It is—I am—of course you wouldn’t, you’re too good, fuck.”

“No, Tony, please, I—please just tell me, I can’t—I hate not knowing why you’re gone, I want to understand it because it doesn’t matter, I—I trust you and I’ll still like you no matter what, I promise, just let me—”

Peter is all raw nerve, open and exposed and waiting for Tony, too tired from the rest of the day to care about shielding himself and his heart.

“I didn’t want to leave, kid, I never want to leave you and that’s the problem,” Tony says, stepping forward raising a hand to trace his fingers along Peter’s cheekbone. “I—no one’s ever upgraded the suit before, no one’s ever—and seeing you in the lab, singing and happy and—it’s like a vision of a life I can’t want and don’t deserve and—but Jesus fucking Christ, Pete, you’re seventeen and I am—old enough to be your father, a narcissist and a terrible human being, and I shouldn’t but I still want, and then, sleeping in your bed at night? Hearing you dream about me—not the nightmares, but—that, that was dangerous, because it proved that I definitely cannot be the adult in the room around you, okay? I cannot trust myself, not around you, and you—Peter, you deserve so much better.”

Peter’s heart is rabbiting around in his chest, newly alive and not hollow and filled with hope like spring, so he says, “Tony—shut up, Tony,” and grabs him and kisses him.

The moment their lips meet, Tony makes a sound like Peter has punched him, and for a moment it seems like he’s going to pull back, but Peter just holds on tighter and then Tony is all over him, his hands running up and down Peter’s sides, across his back, through his hair with a roughness that makes Peter whimper, like Tony can’t believe that Peter is real, is really here. They manage to stumble, together, back against one of the lab tables, and Tony is pressed against Peter, and Peter can feel him, hard against his leg, and Peter feels frantic with it, senses at—fuck eleven, senses at eleven hundred, fizzing and crackling like electricity everywhere they are touching, at the scent of Tony’s cologne, the ambient smell of hot metal in the lab, even the taste of scotch on Tony’s tongue, and he knows he is close, so he loosens his grip on Tony’s shirt and slides his hands, down, ignoring their trembling to undo Tony’s jeans. Tony stills at that, tenses, but he groans desperately when Peter manages to wrap a hand around him.

“Is this—” Peter whispers against Tony’s skin.

“Yes, God—yes.” Tony sounds wrecked, and Peter shivers as he starts moving his hand, and it’s rough and it’s fast and they didn’t even make time to grab the lube from the third drawer but Tony is shaking in his arms, moaning Peter’s name over and over and kissing every inch of Peter he can reach, his lips and his neck and his jaw and his cheek, his hairline and his temple, until Peter whispers back, “Tony,” in a strained tone as he ruts against Tony’s body, and that’s all it takes for Tony to shudder, coming with a gasped curse all over Peter’s hand. The sight of it, of Tony in his hand, coming all over his hand, Peter’s hand, is enough to send Peter over the edge with him.

They’re panting, still wrapped up in each other, when FRIDAY’s voice rings through the lab.

“Pepper Potts is attempting to gain access to the lab.”

At that, Tony jerks back, eyes wide as he looks down at himself, at Peter. “Shit,” he whispers, then, louder, “Shit shit shit fuck shit. I need to—”

Peter is shaking, Pepper’s name crashing over him like a cold wave. He remembers going to the beach with Aunt May once, feeling invincible and weightless in the water, until a particularly big wave had hit him unexpectedly, tossing him through the cold water, water rushing up his nose, the acid sting of saltwater in his sinuses, coughing and trying not to cry as May waded in to save him.

“Are you—are you going to tell her—about us?”

Tony is still swearing, fumbling the button on his jeans back up. “Am I—? No, Pete, Christ, I—this was a—there can’t be an us, it doesn’t matter how I fe—you’re seventeen, and—your aunt trusted me to let you move in here, and I—shit, shit.”

“What about how I feel?” Peter says, feeling the newborn hope in his heart die, “Does it matter how I feel?”

“Pepper Potts has entered the lab,” FRIDAY informs them, helpfully, as the door slides open and a furious Pepper storms into the lab.

“Unbelievable, Tony, unbelievable. I—are you drunk?”

Tony looks ashamed and heartbroken and Peter grabs onto the lab table so hard he feels the metal start to warp under his fingers.

“And you—Peter—” Pepper turns to him, and he waits for her to angry, to dress him down, she’s never liked him and now he knows why, but instead she just says, “sweetheart, did—did he hurt you?”

And just like that, the anger is back, because Pepper clearly knows something happened, has known the way Tony felt the whole time, and—and she thinks that Tony could hurt him, thinks that Peter is just a kid and Tony is someone he needs protecting from, and Peter suddenly wishes he had ten more punching bags he could tear from the ceiling.

“I can’t—do you honestly believe that Tony would ever do anything to hurt me?” Peter says, and he’s glad to hear that his voice sounds strong, deep and clear and furious, and it takes Pepper by surprise, because she blinks, recoiling slightly.

“Not—maybe not intentionally, but if there’s—something you didn’t want to do—”

Peter laughs at that, cold, and he doesn’t feel quite like himself, but it feels good not to feel like the Peter who’s hurt and tired and heartbroken. “Maybe you missed the memo, Pepper,” he says, her name pointed, like a barb, “but I’m not a kid, and there aren’t many people who can make me do anything I don’t want to do.”

He tightens his hand on the table one more time, teeth gritted as he thinks about how fast everything has gone to total shit, how angry he is, how tired he is of being treated like a kid who doesn’t, can’t know what he wants, when he died, when he remembers, and then he steps away from the table to head for the door to the lab, leaving Pepper and Tony staring at the disfigured metal table in his wake.

“Holy shit, Ned, holy shit, I—oh my god, I’m gonna die, they’re gonna kill me, I can’t believe I did that.”

Peter is sitting in Ned’s bedroom in the Iron Spider suit, trying not to hyperventilate, while Ned stares at him with wide eyes.

He’d left the tower immediately, and he’d intended to patrol, but as soon as he’d gotten a block over all of the rage had left him, and he’d felt the sour tang of regret, panic. Pepper and Tony were really going to kick him out this time, and he’d deserve it, and he knew he was spiraling, so he’d gone to Ned’s, and then he’d told him everything. Everything.

“They’re not gonna kill you, Peter, but. Oh my god, you—I can’t believe you—wow. Peter, you are so badass.”

Peter cringes, ducking his head. “I lost my temper, oh my god, I yelled at Tony Stark and Pepper Potts, that is so not cool.”

Ned isn’t looking at him, is looking at the wall. “I still can’t believe you’re in love with Tony Stark.”

“Wait—I’m not—I didn’t say—!” Peter flubs, hands waving exasperatedly, and Ned finally looks at him.

“Seriously, dude? You are so in love with Tony Stark. And—holy shit, I’m sorry, I’m coming back around to processing the fact that you remember stuff from the Blip.”

Peter buries his face in his hands, trying to breathe the way Agent May had taught him, and let the familiarity of Ned, of Ned freaking out over something, the familiar tones of his voice, lull him back from the edge. “It’s not—I think it’s maybe because of the Blip? Or because of what happened right after? I—it didn’t feel this way, with Mr. Stark, B.D.”

“Whatever you say, dude.” Ned does not sound convinced, but he also sounds like his sleepy brain is working through too many things at one time to stick with one. “One question, how come you remember and I don’t?”

Peter shakes his head, not looking up. “Dunno.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I mean I don’t know, Ned! I just—did?”

“Well, why don’t you ask?”

At this, Peter does look up at Ned, exasperation on his face. “Ask who?”

“The wizard dude. You know, the one you said did the sparkly portals and told you to go to Mr. Stark while you were Blipped. I mean, the dude clearly knows what’s up, if he was telling you stuff during the Blip he expected you to remember.”

“I—Ned, he’s like this crazy scary wizard dude, he didn’t even like Mr. Stark, I can’t just go marching up to his door and say, what, ‘hey, I’m Peter and I can’t stop thinking about my mentor and I think it’s magic and I’ve probably just ruined my whole life, but you need to give me answers’?”

“We could workshop the speech, but basically.”

Peter drops his hands from where they’ve moved to clutch his knees to gesture wildly in front of him at Ned. “What about crazy scary wizard are you missing here?”

“Dude, yeah, but you’re Spiderman.”

And, well, looking at Ned’s face in the dim light filtering in from the window, remembering the way he’d bent that table, feeling tired and desperate and confused—Peter thinks, yeah, okay.

Chapter Text

Peter leaves when Ned is supposed to be waking up for school, and makes it back to the tower as morning light is starting to filter through the floor to ceiling windows. He half-expects to be shut out—but he’s not. The apartment is quiet as he walks in, the only sounds his own soft footsteps.

In the kitchen, he notices a mug of coffee and a plate sitting under once of those fancy hotel covers in front of his spot. Sliding onto the stool, he lifts it and finds an enormous omelette, with SORRY written in messy sriracha. Under the plate is a note, in what’s unmistakably Tony’s handwriting, an even more manic scrawl than usual—“I know I need to make it right, kid.”

For a moment, Peter just waits for the tears to come. He’s done enough crying over the past day and this moment is enough of a squeeze on his tender heart that he thinks it’s inevitable, but—they don’t come. Then he thinks about tossing it in the trash, or writing back “no” in angry sriracha letters himself, but—he takes a sip of coffee and just stares at the omelette. In the soft dawn, after spending the night with Ned, he feels softer too.

So he takes a bite.

And another, and another. It’s delicious, and when he’s done, he takes a picture of the empty plate and texts it to Mr. Stark.

The response is nearly instant. Does an apology eaten mean an apology accepted?

Peter frowns slightly, looking down at his phone, thinking about the night before, the note, Ned. It means it’s a start.

I’ll take a start.

Peter swallows heavily, takes his plate to the dishwasher and sips his coffee while he looks out the window, marvels at the city in the morning, the way the light slowly illuminates each building and street, the remnants of the streetlights just beginning to flicker out with the coming sun, the early risers already out, jogging through the park or taking out their dogs or on their way to their jobs, teachers and Wall Streeters and trash collectors and all the people in between.

Thanks for not kicking me out of the tower, by the way, he sends, and if he isn’t surprised when he doesn’t hear back immediately, the morning makes him feel like he doesn’t have to be angry, either.

His newfound calm takes him all the way through classes, the subway ride back to the tower, and through the front door—right up until he sees Pepper Potts sitting on the sofa, glasses on, tapping at her phone with concentration.

“I am so sorry Ms. Potts,” spills out of Peter’s mouth before he even really makes the decision to say it, and he is half waiting for her to call her suit and blast him, or yell at him, or tell him to get his things.

She turns, and the look on her face isn’t angry when she sees him edging into the room—it’s a rueful smile. “No, Peter, I’m the one who owes you an apology.”

“Uh—no, actually, I’m pretty sure I’m the one who needs to apologize—” Peter has made it into the living room, and Pepper gestures at an armchair across from her and gives him a firm smile, even if her eyes are still sad.

“I’m beginning to realize I’ve been going about this all wrong, Peter.”

“All—what?” Peter says, dropping into the armchair hesitantly, perched on the edge and wearing his backpack.

Pepper’s expression is still warm, but turns weary. “We’ve been—I’ve been—thinking of you and treating you like you’re a child. But, as you’ve made perfectly clear, you’re not a child any longer, you’re… a teammate. An adult who’s been through more than I’ve been giving you credit for.”

Peter is struck with an overwhelming sense of surreality. He’d—betrayed Pepper’s trust, really, and then yelled at her, both while he was a guest in her home, and her response makes him feel like he’s slipped inadvertently into another dimension—which, past events considered, is a more plausible scenario than he’d like to think. He shifts uncomfortably on the very edge of the seat.

“Ms. Potts, I really appreciate that but… I still don’t think I understand what you’re saying. I mean, I—Tony and I—we—I really really think I owe you an apology.”

Pepper stops him with a small gesture of her hand, and gives him another sad smile.

“I always thought I was Tony’s great love story,” she starts, and Peter tenses.

“I thought I was there to work at trying to make him a better man.” Something of Peter’s reaction must show on his face, because Pepper interrupts herself to say, “I know—Tony’s always been a good man in the most important ways, but I thought if I could get him to listen to people more, settle down, focus. I mean, I spent years trying to get him to pay attention to the company, like that mattered, or trying to hang up the suit. And then he found you, and—it wasn’t like it is now, not at the beginning, God no, but—he always wanted to do right by you, Peter. He wanted to be a good role model, a good mentor—I think he wanted to live up to what you thought of him, not as head of Stark Industries or as the whole billionaire playboy genius philanthropist thing, but in all the ways that really mattered, in who he was as a person. He wanted to be better for you, without you doing anything at all. ”

Peter flushes, eyes dropping as he tries to hide the shameful pleasure he takes in this knowledge from Pepper. She’s recounting her own failure, and that’s a sour note, but it doesn’t overpower the sweetness of knowing Tony thought that highly of him.

“And then, when they came to ask him about time travel…” Pepper huffs a soft laugh. “He turned them down, at first, you know? And then… For a half a minute, I thought he wouldn’t do it. He hesitated. Not because I’d asked him to stop, because, God knows I tried to get him to stop for years and he never listened to me then, but because I thought the price—the risk of losing what we’d built, losing what everyone had built in those five years, losing Morgan—might finally be too much. I didn’t know if there was anything that would be worth the risk.”

Peter is sitting carefully still, because he and Tony have never—they have never talked about this, about Titan, about the Blip, about the rescue mission, and he suddenly feels like his chest is too tight. It feels a bit sacrilegious to hear about it from Pepper, but he is also desperate for any crumb of information, to understand what she’s saying.

“And, of course, he did it, and he went back upstate, and you know the rest. But you know what I found, after he left, when I went into his study? An old picture of the two of you, one of those silly ones from the Berlin trip. We used to keep it in the kitchen, which means he must’ve taken it into his study. And I—it was like, oh. This great big moment of oh. Because I realized that if there was one thing Tony would risk tearing apart the space-time continuum for, risk everything for, it was you.”

Peter doesn’t realize he’s crying until he has to sniffle, realizes that the tightness in his throat and chest have spilled over into tears, and he ducks his head away from Pepper to swipe at the wetness on his face with the back of his hand. She, kindly, doesn’t comment.

“When you came back, you were different. I understand, now, that of course you were—you’d gone through more than I could imagine, and then there’s the remembering, but—at the time, I just knew that you seemed different, more like an adult, and it made something different between you and Tony.”

She actually looks away from him for the next part. “I knew before he told me—and he did tell me, we’re years past keeping secrets—but it was… terribly obvious how strongly he felt for you, the ways it was different than before the Blip. I knew you were different, but I thought—still, you were just a traumatized kid, a teenager, and I told Tony so. I—I was harsh, but you have to understand that when Tony is spiraling, he—he fixates, and so, the attachment, the hours in the lab, the moving heaven and earth to get you graduated early, to get you into Columbia on whatever terms you wanted, moving you into the tower with us. I thought it was like after the Battle of New York. I thought you were his new project, and I thought he was doing everything he could to get you closer to him.” Pepper’s voice turns soft. “There are… words for that.”

Peter swallows heavily, and he realizes dimly, as if from far away, that his hands are shaking. Terribly obvious how strongly he felt for you, Pepper’s voice echoing in his mind. That, he figures, is the reason for his momentary delay in processing what it’s obvious Pepper is implying she thought, especially clear now that he can see the slight embarrassment on her face.

“I swear it wasn’t—Ms. Potts, Tony—that probably saved my life, I mean, I felt like I was drowning and Tony was the only one who understood—oh god, I mean, I can see how you might think but seriously, I swear—”

“Peter—Pete, I—Peter, I understand that now,” Pepper interrupts his frantic rambling with a strength of tone that reminds him she’s been CEO of Stark Industries for years. “I just—I know this may seem odd, but I do care about you, Peter. I’ve always wanted you and Tony to be happy and healthy. So I hope you understand that I thought I was keeping you both safe and healthy.”

Peter nods, trying to ignore the grimy feeling in the back of his throat at what Pepper has been implying. “But… you wanted to apologize?”

Pepper takes a deep breath. “I did. Because I don’t think I’ve been giving either of you enough credit. Tony, for not being the same man he was in his worst moments, and you, for not being a naive kid anymore. And… honestly, I… seeing you two together in the lab—” Peter makes a soft, strangled sound in the back of his throat and Pepper’s eyes widen—“not last night, but—just when you were working, or at dinner, or… especially when the Wakandans were here, it was like—seeing both of you with a partner, a real match. You meet each other in a place I don’t know that anyone but the two of you could. I mean—you upgraded his suit, Pete, that’s—” She huffs a laugh, losing some of her composure to run a hand through her hair.

“I know it must be hard to believe I can be so—dispassionate about this—” Peter is only seventy-five percent sure what the word dispassionate means, since it’s been almost six years, technically, since he took his SATs, but he gets the gist, and he’s aware his brain is racing and panicking to avoid processing what’s going on in front of him but he can’t stop it. “—and it’s, honestly, surprising to me too, but…” She spreads her hands, shrugging helplessly. “I’ve known how Tony has felt about you for… months, really. And I am beginning to see how you feel about him, and… I don’t think I could hate you if I tried, kid.”

Peter’s mouth feels numb, his lips and tongue slow and clumsy as he says, “I… are you saying what I think you’re saying, Ms. Potts?”

“Yes, Pete, I am.” She stands up, crosses the room to lean down and plant a gentle kiss on his cheek.

He sits, dumbly, on the edge of the armchair for a few stunned seconds, as Pepper crosses the room and heads for the door.

“Oh, I almost forgot—there’s paperwork for you on the island.” Only with his enhanced senses can he hear, as she continues to the elevator, her soft laugh. “Still handling the paperwork, Pep, after all this.”

He waits until his stomach is growling and the light streaming in from the windows is growing red-tinted and dim to head into the kitchen. He’s spent the rest of the time sitting in the living room, letting his conversation with Pepper whirl through his mind. He—it sounds like she—he can hardly believe what he thinks she said, but for some reason the thing that stands out the most in his mind is what she told him about Tony, about his picture in the study.

It was like, oh.

Peter had never thought about that particular moment before. The moment when Tony decided to invent time travel. He’d assumed that as soon as Scott Lang had come back from the quantum realm, with the prospect of a solution within reach, Tony had figured it out, had worked immediately. He hadn’t really thought about the risks involved in all of it, how scary it must have seemed not knowing it would all work out in the end.

If there was one thing Tony would risk tearing apart the space-time continuum for, risk everything for, it was you.

His stomach growls again, actually starting to hurt a little bit now, and Peter drags himself off of the chair, lets his backpack drop and heads for the kitchen. He has no idea what kind of paperwork Pepper has brought him—half of him still thinks maybe he’s being kicked out of the tower, maybe Tony’s going to stop paying for Columbia, maybe even he’s going to stop his half-fake internship. When he finally opens the folder and looks at the stack of papers, it takes him three tries to understand what he’s reading.

He calls Tony immediately, who picks up on the first ring.

“It’s too much, Mr. Stark.”

Tony’s voice is strong, but he can still hear some hesitance in the way he says, “I thought we were at Tony, kid.”

“Yeah, well, I reserve the right to call you Mr. Stark in extraordinary times, and, sir, you really can’t mean this, it’s way too much.”

He looks down at the papers, noticing that they’re shaking slightly in his trembling hands.

Over the line, he can hear Tony’s swallow. “Well, how else am I going to get you to understand me when I say the tower’s yours, too?” Peter hears a panicked half-laugh come out of his own throat, and Tony quickly steps back in. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, bad joke. It’s not—Pete, it was all drawn up already because it was supposed to be for your birthday. You turning eighteen. I just… made some tweaks, your aunt signed, but it’ll all be yours when you turn eighteen.”

Peter takes deep breaths, and turns to the back, where, yes, he sees his Aunt May’s familiar signature.

“What did you tell her?”

He can hear the shakiness of Tony’s breath even through the phone speaker. “The truth, kid. That this place is as much yours now as it is mine, that I want you to feel that way, and feel secure about it. That I’m not interested in you feeling like I’m holding the power to kick you out at any moment over you, or even having that power in the first place.”

“But Mr. St—Tony, I’m not sure I’m reading this right, then, because this says it’s mine, all of it.”

“You’ve got it right, kid.”

“But that means—all of that about it being yours too—this means I could kick you out.”

Another of those shaky breaths, and a moment’s hesitation from Tony. “That’s right, kid, you could.” There’s a thick silence, and then Tony continues, voice just a bit thin, “Not the suits, though, there’s a clause that says you can’t keep those.”

“I—it’s—why?”

For a minute he thinks Tony’s going to avoid the question to make another joke about the suits, but then he says, “Because I need to make sure you feel like you’re not… dependent on me, that if you want distance you can get it.”

“I don’t want that, Tony, that’s not what—”

“I hear you, Pete, I do,” Tony interrupts, his voice louder now, stronger, “but I need you to have that option, okay? I need it.”

Peter is quiet for a long moment, considering. “Okay… Okay.”

His stomach growls into the silence.

“Yikes, Pete, I heard that from here. Haven’t you eaten yet?”

“Uh, no, I… got distracted.”

Peter feels like he can see Tony’s wince. “That’s my line, kid. It’s almost 9, and you’ve got a superpowered metabolism. I’ll have FRIDAY get you something, okay?”

“You don’t have to, Tony, really, I can make a sandwich.”

“Too late, Chinese food is already on its way, and if you don’t eat it it’ll go to waste, and we don’t want that, do we?” Peter snorts a little laugh, and he hears Tony exhale. The next time he talks, he sounds like he’s smiling. “Let it be my treat, please?”

“Okay, if you insist.” Peter’s smiling too now.

“Bye, Pete.”

“Bye, Tony.”

When Peter wakes up around 4 in the morning, gasping for air and reaching out for Tony, he goes to sit on the roof of the tower—his tower, now—to think. About the dreams, about Tony, about what he’d heard from Pepper yesterday. And he keeps coming back to his conversation with Ned. With how they’d ended things.

He’s barely even aware as he webs his way over to Bleeker Street, stowing his suit and walking up to the front door in sweatpants and a joke pi t-shirt. It’s only after he’s knocked on the door that he stops to wonder what on earth he’s doing, and whether he’s really doing it.

The decision confronts him quickly, as the door swings open to reveal the magician himself.

“Oh, it’s just you,” Strange says, frowning slightly and moving as if to shut the door.

“Mr. Strange? I mean—Dr. Strange? Sir? Wait!”

The wizard stops and turns back to Peter, one eyebrow raised. Even though he’s still, he’s radiating impatience. Peter had thought his grumpy demeanor could maybe mostly be chalked up to the fact that he had been, well, a prisoner on a space ship, but it’s looking like this is just Dr. Strange’s personality, he thinks as he fights a nervous laugh.

He smooths his suddenly sweaty palms on his pants and draws in a deep breath before he lays it out. “You gotta tell me what you did to save Mr. Stark.”

If Strange is surprised, it doesn’t show on his face. He just continues to look bored and vaguely disapproving. “It’s magic, Mr. Parker. I should’ve thought that explanation would be sufficient.”

He starts to close the door again, but this time Peter lunges forward, stepping into the doorway and putting his hand on the side of the door facing him. “Yeah, but like… why me? Why did you need me? And could it have—how did—did the magic affect me?”

At this, Strange finally looks different, levels him with an assessing stare. Peter feels like he’s being evaluated, somehow, and fights the urge to squirm.

Finally, Strange says, “you really want to understand?”

“Yes, sir, definitely sir. Please.” Peter tries to come off as respectful and eager. He thinks he might be overdoing it, given the twitch of a smirk at the corner of Strange’s mouth, but the older man just gestures him into the brownstone.

“Then come with me.”

Peter follows him through what feels like a labyrinth of rooms, ogling the displays of strange and mysterious-looking objects, shrinking back when Strange turns around to pin him with a sharp stare and a barked “don’t touch anything”. He feels like a kid in a museum, and is glad when he’s finally seated in a mostly normal looking sitting room, on a nice leather couch. It’s only mostly normal, because the tea is making itself in front of him, and he swears he can hear books talking to each other in the back of the room, but he just politely takes the tea and doesn’t mention the books. Dr. Strange is sitting across from him, staring at him over steepled fingers, before he finally leans forward and exhales sharply.

“The Infinity Stones were—are—objects of immense power. The power to unmake and make the universe.”

Peter nods, ever the diligent student. He has gleaned at least this from what he remembers of conversations on Titan, and Avengers briefings afterward.

“But even they are bound by some limitations—basic limitations, basic rules of the universe as we know it. You’re aware, I’m sure of the laws of conservation of mass, of energy. In alchemy, the principle is known as the law of equivalent exchange.”

Peter fidgets slightly, looking down into his cup. “Uh, sir, you know that… alchemy’s not… real, right?” Strange fixes him with a stare that manages to convey exasperation without actually requiring much movement of his face, and Peter’s eyes widen. “Right—oh, oh, wow, that’s cool. Holy shit that’s cool.”

Dr. Strange lets loose another of those exhales that feel like a stifled sigh. “As I was saying… the stones operate on the same principles. And any time they are used, the energy they put out into the universe is immense, hence the often dramatic costs for those who use them. But there is also, there for those who are familiar with the stones, enormous potential energy—not just of the stones, but, in this instance, of all the things that existed and then were no more.”

Peter’s vaguely aware that his mouth is falling open, understanding begin to dawn on him, but he stays quiet.

“Saving Tony Stark was beyond my power—beyond anyone’s power, individually. But not beyond the power of that potential energy. I just used my connection to and understanding of the Time Stone to give that energy form, direction, purpose.”

“Uh, okay, I was kind of with you until the last sentence.”

“Magic, Mr. Parker.” There’s a hint of amusement in Dr. Strange’s exasperation now, which Peter takes to mean he’s starting to grow on the man. He wonders whether he should introduce Dr. Strange to Agent May sometime—he imagines that they could have an entire conversation through minuscule facial movements, and fights the urge to giggle at the mental image.

“Got it, got it. So… what about me?”

“What about you, Mr. Parker?”

“Well… I remember, you in the… in the Dust? Like, in the time between Titan and coming back. I remember us talking, and you telling me to… to go to To—Mr. Stark. I remember that. And other stuff too.”

At this, finally, real emotion shows on Strange’s face. He looks intrigued. “You remember? Interesting… but not my doing.”

Peter’s face falls, frustration and confusion warring. “Wait, what? C’mon Mr. Strange, you gotta have at least an idea. And… and why would you tell me that stuff about Mr. Stark if you didn’t think I’d remember?”

Strange frowns.

“Think of that as… like an instruction placed under hypnosis. Specific, focused, and you only had to remember for a short time after coming back. As for you remembering the rest… well… it’s possible that those with a certain strength of consciousness may recall their time more than others. And you are superhuman.”

“Wait—hold on.” Peter puts a hand up, closing his eyes to try to focus his racing thoughts. “So, first, why is there even stuff to remember? I was dead. And, then, wait, two—Shuri remembers, and she’s not superhuman.”

“Keep up, Mr. Parker.” Peter frowns at that, but Dr. Strange just keeps talking. “Equivalent exchange—matter cannot be destroyed. You were not destroyed, just transformed, and at a moment when you were not, according to the laws of your own brain chemistry, dead. As for the Wakandan girl…” He shrugs. “Strong of will, strong of mind. The royal family of Wakanda is not unfamiliar with the idea of a realm beyond consciousness.”

Peter waits, but Dr. Strange stays quiet. “That… that’s it? Nothing more definitive than that? Just… I’m strong of will?”

“Yes, Mr. Parker. It is magic, as I keep reminding you.”

“But—that still doesn’t explain why I’m different?”

Strange stops at this, looking at Peter as if he’s seeing him for the first time.

“Different physically?”

“Er, yes?” Peter squirms slightly—he’d hoped that they wouldn’t get into this. It’s one thing to tell Ned about the overwhelming intensity of his new emotions for Tony Stark, and it’s another to tell that kind of thing to a wizard you’ve met twice-ish, one of which was in space and the other of which was in a… metaphysical paradox.

“Interesting. Here, punch this.” Strange stands and moves towards Peter, moving his hands and tracing a floating circle, outlined in green sparks, which moves to hover in the air in front of Peter. Peter punches, only to find his arm trapped as the circle holds his arm in place somehow and then moves up and down, like a scanner.

“No, no, not like—my powers are still the same. Maybe getting a little stronger as I train and get older, but that’s… that’s not what I meant.” Peter flails his other arm, tugging and trying to swat at the little scanning circle.

Strange fixes Peter with a hard stare, under which Peter feels himself begin to blush.

“I meant… I—maybe it’s not exactly, or entirely, physical. It’s… I feel differently about people. Some people. One—one person.” Peter is sure now that he’s absolutely tomato red, blushing so hard he hopes he’ll just spontaneously combust, since that might be less painful than being stuck in this awkward position, with Dr. Strange staring him judgmentally.

At once, the stare softens. Dr. Strange makes a small motion with his hands, and the glowing circle disappears, leaving Peter free to sink back onto the sofa. He resists—barely—the urge to draw his knees up to his chest and wrap his arms around them. He settles for sitting on his hands, avoiding Dr. Strange’s stare by looking intently at the teacup in front of him.

“Mr. Parker… I know that in the past few years of your life, the world has been moving and changing on an… unprecedented scale. Magic, time travel, aliens, radioactive spiders. But we are all only human.”

There’s an awkward pause between the two of them—Peter’s not sure where Dr. Strange is going with this, but the wizard is looking at him intently, as if he’s supposed to be understanding something, so he just nods, and Strange continues, still giving him that intense gaze.

“Did you know that, once, in order to defeat a terrible magical entity, I created a time loop? I lived centuries, and died thousands of times—hundreds of thousands. But when it was all over and done with, to the people outside of the loop, I was only a few minutes older. And I haven’t gotten my drivers license updated to say I’m 492, instead of 42.”

Another pause hangs in the air between them, and Peter’s not sure if he’s supposed to speak. “Um. That’s… really cool, Mr. Strange, but I don’t see—”

Apparently, he wasn’t—it was for dramatic effect, or because the wizard was thinking, or something—because Strange starts talking again, over his awkward stumbling. Peter cuts himself off hurriedly, trying to listen, because Dr. Strange clearly thinks whatever he’s saying is important, even if Peter is pretty sure that Ned was wrong and he’s just a crazy wizard dude.

“And even after all of that, the thing that changed my life the most was… a car crash.” Dr. Strange pauses for effect again, but this time Peter can feel the weight behind his words, lets the moment stretch between them as he takes in the thought. “492 years, untold deaths at the hands of an inter dimensional being of darkness, and the thing that feels most important in my life is something that happens to thousands of people every day. What I’m saying, Mr. Parker, is that you died, and you don’t have to look hard into the stories of people who only went through near-death experiences to understand how that can change a person, can change their perspective, reveal things previously hidden or denied. Completely non-magically.”

For a moment, Peter just stares at the teacup, feeling… a little stupid, but oddly calm about it. All of that magic, the aliens, the space ships, the time travel, and—maybe Dr. Strange is right. He stops and thinks about it, really lets himself think about it—not the fact that they were on an alien planet, not the fact that he was dissolving into particles, he puts all of that to the side and thinks about their moment—their minute. He remembers the chill that had rippled through him, right to the bone, the deep-seated certainty that something was wrong. He remembers the terror shooting through him, not just at what was happening to him, but the fear that he’d turn and see Mr. Stark had turned into dust with the rest of them. He remembers—for the first time—the sharp stab of realization that he would happily die if that were the case, if Mr. Stark were gone too. How much he’d, in those last moments, just wanted to touch Tony—his last minute of consciousness, knowing he was dying, and his last thoughts hadn’t been for MJ or Ned, or Liz wherever she was now, or even his aunt, but—on an alien planet, surrounded by the remnants of strangers, all he’d wanted was for Tony to hold him, to keep him with him, to stay—he’d have given anything to get to stay with Tony. He’d trusted Tony, he’d cared about him, he’d been sorry—his last words to him—not for sneaking on the ship, or for failing, but for all of the days he’d wanted to have with Tony that he’d thought were gone.

His hands are trembling, and he realizes that Strange has helped him to his feet and is steering him to the door, gently but firmly. Peter swallows, trying to get his thoughts under control—God, of course Dr. Strange is showing him to the door, he’d been on the verge of a breakdown on the man’s couch, next to his magic teapot. They’re almost there when Peter has a sudden thought, and comes to a halt, back straightening and resisting Strange’s push.

“Wait, Mr. Strange—there’s still one other thing. Why—why did you need me, to help Mr. Stark? If it was all magic and manipulated energy and stuff?”

The wizard allows the stop, and lets his hand drop from Peter’s shoulder. He’s got that intense look on his face again, the one he was wearing earlier, and Peter has realized it reminds him of when he knows Agent May is figuring out more from his answer than he intends to give. When Strange finally speaks, it sounds like he’s chosen each word carefully, even though the words themselves don’t seem special.

“I just needed Stark to hold onto life long enough to complete the spell. It’s much more difficult and obnoxious to bring someone back from the dead. I needed someone there telling him to hold on. ”

Peter’s thoughts are still half back on Titan, feels like he’s barely keeping his head above water as the riptide of thoughts try to drag him away from whatever Strange is saying to him. “Why me, though?”

All Strange says, though, is, “Why you, indeed, Mr. Parker.”

Peter shuts his eyes, not understanding at all and trying not to cry, or throw one of the insufferable wizard’s artifacts in frustration. “… I… I’m asking you. You were the one who picked me?”

He opens his eyes just in time to see Strange actually rolling his eyes at Peter, and it’s almost a relief that the cold man can do something as mundane as roll his eyes. “And I’m telling you that you know the answer, and it’s for you to figure out on your own. It’s called the Socratic method, Mr. Parker, what are they teaching you at Columbia? Speaking of Columbia, we’ve spent too long talking. I believe you’re about to be late for class.”

Doors apparently being passé, Strange instead moves to trace a circle in the air in front of them, and a glowing portal appears, hovering for Peter to step through. Much to his horror, Peter’s fairly certain it shows the boys’ bathroom in the science building.

“I—wait!” But Strange is pushing him through the portal, and then it’s closing behind Peter, leaving him to reach out for empty air. He goes into one of the stalls and sits down, letting his head fall between his knees and his hands clasp behind his head as he fights tremors of emotion wracking his body. He hasn’t slept well in weeks, isn’t even sure if the tossing and turning he’s done over the course of the last two nights counts as sleep at all, so maybe his judgment is a little impaired, but he thinks back to the things he’d finally let himself remember in the parlor on Bleeker Street, the intensity of the way he’d felt, reaching for Tony and knowing he was dying, and he’s making his way out of the bathroom, up to the roof of the science building through the emergency stairwell without half a thought to the class he’s missing.

“Karen?” he says once he’s on the roof, pulling his earpiece into place.

“Yes, Peter?”

“Where’s Tony right now?”

“Mr. Stark is currently at the Stark residence in Georgia.”

Peter pauses, mind whirring. “When’s the next flight out of New York that could get me there? Any airport.”

“The next flight with available seats that you could catch, taking into account current traffic conditions and TSA guidelines, is in five hours from JFK to Atlanta. You will then need to drive for two and a half hours.”

Peter groans. Seven and a half hours, and he doesn’t even actually know how to drive—he’s a New Yorker. Then, he has a moment of what he’d like to think is genius.

“Karen, can you call Shuri?”

“Dialing.” There’s a long pause, then the sound of ringing from the other end of the line, and a familiar voice saying, “Who are you and how did you get this number?”

“Oh my god, wow, that worked, hi, it’s me, it’s Peter—” Peter says, words rushing out of him, and the adrenaline and the lack of sleep and the emotional high are definitely all converging now, but this feels important so he pushes through it, rides the wave.

“Peter Parker? What’s up, Spider Boy?” Shuri at least sounds happy to hear from him, so Peter decides this plan isn’t maybe as crazy as he initially thought.

“Hey, so, uh, have you—is all that UN stuff over already? Have you left?”

“Mmm, we are leaving this evening. Why? Does the suit not work? I don’t have much time to stop by the lab, but I could trouble shoot over the phone. Really, though, it should be working, unless you changed the calibration of the—”

“No, no, that’s not it,” Peter says, rushing to interrupt before they get sidetracked. “I actually, I need, uh, a ride? Sort of? To Georgia?”

There’s a moment of silence on the line. “Does this have to do with your Tony Stark?”

Peter sighs, figuring there’s not much use pretending when he’s begging to be flown halfway down the coast just to see the man. “… Yeah, it has to do with my Tony Stark.”

He’s not expecting to hear Shuri squeal excitedly from the other end of the line. “I told you,” he hears her saying to someone else on her end, and then her voice is clearer again, speaking to him. “My brother and I would be delighted to show you Wakanda’s finest and fastest air travel. Where are you? We should pick you up now. At the tower?”

Peter pauses, looks down at his rumpled sweatpants and wrinkly shirt, runs a hand through his still sleep-messy hair. Nothing in his backpack but a couple of textbooks and the Iron Spider suit. “I’m… on top of the science center? The Northwest Corner building? At… school?”

If he expected Shuri to be fazed, she is not. “Ooh, brother, we can consider this a fly-by college visit. And Peter can tell me all about Columbia while we are flying, isn’t that right, Spider Boy? Then you will be satisfied I have looked into this school.” Peter hears something that sounds like grumbling but Shuri speaks over her brother, saying, “Stay where you are, we’ll be there in a flash!”

True to her word, Shuri and T’Challa had arrived in a cloaked ship only minutes later. The Wakandan had asked him a few cursory questions about school, about Columbia’s engineering department and course offerings, but had quickly seemed to pick up on Peter’s mood and left him to sit in the cockpit near a sweet-faced guard whose name he’d learned was Nakia, watching the landscape through the occasional gap in the cloud cover. Nakia had been kind enough to leave him to his silence, but when they’d landed she’d given him a hug, whispering “Good luck” in his ear. He’d tried to force his scattered mind to make a mental note that Shuri was clearly a gossip, but it had clearly been a losing battle as he trudged up the long gravel drive, hands flexing compulsively on the straps of his backpack.

He sees Morgan first, playing in the grass outside of a garage that must be Tony’s workshop here, faint strains of music coming from the open doors and mixing with the sounds of nature around them—the whisper of trees rustling in the wind, water lapping at the shore of a lake, the chirp of insects. The music is softer than Peter expected, and it’s not until he’s a few feet closer that he recognizes it—not ACDC, or Led Zeppelin, or Black Sabbath, but Tony Bennett, crooning about love left in San Francisco. He’s close enough now that Morgan hears his footsteps, and she looks up with an excited squeal once she recognizes him.

“Petey!”

And then Peter hears, clear as day from inside the garage, Tony’s voice—“I know, sweetheart, Daddy misses Petey too, but we’ll visit him soon, I promise.”

He should say something, but his heart is too busy skipping a beat, and his mouth is suddenly dry, all of the adrenaline that had been fueling him suddenly locking him in place, so it’s left to Morgan to say, “No, Daddy, it’s Petey!” And then she’s taking off down the slight slope, running to fling her little body at him, and Peter catches her in a hug, letting her embrace ease some of the trembling from his jangling nerves and emotions. His face is still buried in Morgan’s hair, so he hears Tony come out of the lab before he sees him, hears the sharp inhale, the syncopated skip of his heart.

“Peter?”

He puts Morgan down, and finally faces Tony. “Um, hi.”

Tony’s in jeans and a t-shirt, old and grease-stained and sweaty and so beautiful it hurts. Peter takes a shaky step forward, and Tony, never taking his eyes off of Peter, says, “Morgan, sweetheart, can you go inside, please?”

“But Petey just—” the little girl starts to protest, and Tony interrupts.

“Petey’ll come inside and play later, promise, but only if you’re good and go inside now. Why don’t you ask Marta to make you a snack?”

After a few moments, Morgan’s gone, and Tony and Peter are close enough to touch, if one of them were to reach out. There are a few moments of silence, and then it’s Tony who starts—

“The tower was too much, wasn’t it? I knew it, I always go overboard, I’m sorry, I—it’s a thing I do, I’m working on it, on the list for my next session with Agent May—oh, did I tell you I started seeing the scary May for therapy too? Needed to talk to someone, get my head on straight, but needed to talk about—well, about you, figured one fewer person who knew your identity would be better, but, shit, maybe it’s weird if we have the same therapist, maybe that’s uncomfortable. If it is, if you’re uncomfortable, just—just tell me and I’ll work something else out, but I—I do want you to know I’m seeing someone—a therapist kind of someone, not a—not the other kind of seeing someone, I mean—shit, this is not going well already, I—”

Peter finally manages to find his voice, and takes another half-step closer to Tony. “Tony, I—I came here to say something, and I—I don’t know if I’m brave enough to say it twice, so, please, sir, if you could just… let me get it out the first time?”

Tony drops into silence, wide eyes meeting Peter’s as he nods, looking like he’s bracing himself for the worst. Peter takes a deep breath, pulls the swirling thoughts that have been racing through his head for hours, since that moment with Strange in the parlor, and, if he’s honest, since earlier, since at least his conversation with Ned, lets them coalesce and then exhales.

“I love you, Tony Stark.”

Tony lets out a shaky breath, and when Peter looks close he can see tears beginning to glisten at the corners of his eyes.

“I love you, and I’m in love with you, and I just need you to know that. I—we haven’t talked about it, but I’ve known, on some level, since—since Titan, since we lost and I was dying and my last thought was that I was sorry I couldn’t stay with you, because in that moment that was the one thing I wanted to do more than anything else in the world, was stay with you.” Now the tears are coming to his own eyes, and his voice is going thin and reedy, but he needs to keep talking. “That was the moment. It was B.D., it had nothing to do with magic or dust or aliens. You see, I’ve been doing this thing to keep everything straight—there’s B.D., Before Dust, and A.D., After Dust. And I couldn’t figure out when how I felt about you changed, and I was afraid—I’d had a crush on you forever but this was so different, like, from algebra to quantum mechanics different, and I—but the moment, the moment that changed things was that I died, and right before that I knew who the most important person in the world to me was.”

Tony is openly crying now, but, true to his word, he’s staying quiet, letting Peter get out what he needs to say. “And… I thought there was no way you could feel the same, or even like, a shadow of the same, but—god, Tony, you wouldn’t believe the conversations I’ve had over the past couple of days, and I—did you invent time travel because of me? You can—you can answer that one,” Peter says, stumbling over his words, but Tony is answering immediately.

“Yes. It was the stupidest, most selfish thing I’ve ever done, and that’s—saying a lot. They came, and I told ‘em no. Cap did his moralizing thing, Natasha made her pitch, and I made my big grand speech about how I had gotten a second chance and I couldn’t roll the dice on it. And then I—I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I saw that stupid picture of us and I thought—sure, we took a stand and we lost and I’d come to terms with that, but I couldn’t ever come to terms with failing you, Pete. So I risked everything on a stupid time heist, nearly died, and if I had it would have been worth it to have saved you.”

Standing there, Tony looks so soft, so broken and exposed and open, that Peter can’t help but close the distance between them, reaching up to wipe the tears from his eyes.

“Just one more question—at the end, you held on, for Strange to save you. Why?”

Tony shudders, so Peter wraps his arms around him, buries his face into Tony’s shoulder and holds him tight, like this time Peter is the one holding Tony together. “Because you told me to, and I—I knew how much it hurt me to have—on Titan, when I wanted you to stay and I couldn’t stop it—and I didn’t want you to ever feel that way.”

Peter clutches him tighter, leaning up to press a soft kiss anywhere he can reach, and he feels another shiver run through Tony.

“Pete, I—if it’s not already obvious, I am recklessly, stupidly, embarrassingly totally in love with you, but I—it doesn’t change the fact that you deserve so much more than what I can give. I am—I’m not a good guy, Pete, and you are—the best, you deserve the world, someone younger and with much, much less baggage and—honestly, ask anyone, they will tell you I am liable to fuck absolutely everything up, that you should absolutely not think so highly of me.”

“You’re not, Tony, I promise, I—” Peter draws back to put his hands on either side of Tony’s face, “I’ve looked up to since I was a kid, but getting to know you, all of you, the bad parts that you don’t show everyone else, just makes me love you more for understanding how hard you fight every day to try to do the right thing. Even—all this, you’ve been trying to do what you thought was right, and—maybe I’m not 492, or even really 22, but I’m not 17 either, I’m not a kid, and I know you, and I know what I want. Please, Tony?”

He leans forward to press their foreheads together, letting Tony’s shaky breaths ghost over his his own, lets them stand together until Tony leans forward and presses the softest of kisses to Peter’s lips. “You might regret this, Pete, but—I’ll give you whatever you want, for as long as you want it.”

Peter gives a little hiccuping cry of joy, presses his own answering kiss back against Tony’s lips. The Tony Bennett album kicks over to a new song, and Peter starts swaying, lets them dance, kissing softly every few lines.

“You know you’re somehow the mature one here, right?” Tony says into Peter’s cheek, huffing a laugh. “You had the dramatic entrance, and the speech, and all those good lines about the bad parts. Do I have princess Shuri to thank for that stuff too?”

“No, that’s actually—” Peter pauses, wonders briefly how this will go over, but is too flush with comfort and warmth and happiness, wrapped up in Tony’s arms, knowledge and promise between them, to worry. “Natasha.”

He feels Tony stiffen, leaning back slightly. “Kid?”

“Yeah… I—” Peter buries his head in Tony’s shoulder again. “Like I said, I thought maybe I was going crazy, until Shuri, so I didn’t say anything, but—she was there. I guess the stones… we—we got weeks together. You can’t tell anyone this, but I think of her as my Spider Mom. She liked you a lot more than she showed, you know. We talked about you.”

“About… this?” Tony breathes against him.

Peter laughs softly, shaking his head. “No, not… quite. But I think she probably knew. That’s another thing, good luck lying to me from now on.”

Tony groans into the top of Peter’s head. “She’s created a monster.” But then, he presses a soft kiss to Peter’s cheek and they start to dance again, Tony leading them in something more like a dance this time, though they still don’t pull far enough apart to quite manage it. “Spider Mom, huh?”

After a long minute, he laughs softly. “I think you know what this means…,” he says, and his tone is light but Peter can feel the tremble in it, some kind of nervous hesitation, “you have to continue the legacy. Gotta get Morgan to call you Spider Dad.”

Peter lets it hang in the air between them while a grin grows on his face, and something that had started to grow in his heart the moment Tony had told him he loved him unfurls into full bloom, and his chest feels so tight with happiness that he can’t even speak for a moment. But then he’s pulling back, and the worry on Tony’s face melts away when he sees Peter grinning.

“Tony, you’re a genius, and I have to go tell her right now because I want to start being Spider Dad like, ten minutes ago.”

“Are you sure this is all you want for your birthday?”

Tony sounds skeptical, a little put out, but Peter just nods, tugging him further into the lab. “Yes, for the gazillionth time. And besides, I’m still counting the tower towards birthday presents, so anything else would be way too much and then I’d have to tell May on you. Agent, not Aunt. Though maybe both.”

Tony puts his hands up in surrender. “Yikes, pulling out the big guns with both Mays. Okay, okay, I got it.”

Peter turns back to Tony from where he’s at the record player, sorting through the albums until he finds the one he wants. “Besides, this is way better than anything you could buy me.” Tony starts to open his mouth, a sly look on his face, and Peter interrupts him to continue, “and this is something you, and only you, can give me.”

Tony shuts his mouth at that, while Peter drops the needle on the Victrola, and Black Sabbath starts playing. Peter shivers as the sound breaks over him, half from the sensations and half from sheer anticipation, amplified by the way he can see Tony’s eyes grow darker as he steps forward to pull Peter close to him.

“So you can really feel it, huh? That sensitive?”

Peter nods, not trusting himself to speak with the way that Tony is tracing his hands ever so lightly up and down Peter’s arms, just enough pressure to add to the sensation of the music, making his body spark at every little brush. Tony reaches down to tug Peter’s t-shirt off, making a soft noise of appreciation at the pale, toned skin on display.

“God, you’re beautiful. I don’t think I tell you that enough,” Tony says, leaning down to brush his lips across Peter’s collarbone, his shoulder, fingers skating up and down Peter’s abs, and Peter can’t help but whine in response.

“Tony—you tell me that—at least ten times a day,” he says between gasps as Tony turns his head to run his stubble over Peter’s sensitive skin.

“Mmm, you’re right. Not nearly enough,” Tony says, and Peter means to argue, he really does, but then Tony’s leaning down to take one of Peter’s taut nipples in his mouth and trace his tongue over it, and there’s a new guitar riff, and instead Peter just sways on his feet, holding onto Tony as if for dear life. Peter can feel the dark chuckle of Tony’s laugh against his skin, and then he’s being led to the couch, Tony pulling Peter onto his lap, swallowing Peter’s hungry gasp at the feeling of Tony’s erection against him with a deep kiss. They go on like that for what feels like hours, Tony kissing Peter deeply and teasing him with the barest of touches, until Peter is squirming, desperate. It isn’t until the song ends that Tony relents, nudges Peter to reposition him while he strips them both.

“You were the one who cared so much about timing, Pete, where’s your sense of patience now?” Tony teases, and Peter retaliates by wrapping a hand around his cock. Tony bites back a groan, head falling against the back of the couch. “Careful, baby, you want this around for a while longer.”

“I know,” Peter says, bending down to place one chaste kiss to the head before he turns and reaches for the third drawer. “So smart to put this in here… how’d you know, by the way?”

Tony’s eyes don’t look away from where Peter’s slowly stroking his own stomach, fighting the urge to palm his cock, even as Tony takes the lube and pops it open. “You really didn’t think FRI would mention that you’d asked about deleting security footage? I figured you’d broken something in the lab, asked to replay the tape—Christ, Pete, I gotta say, that nearly broke me.”

Peter hums happily at that, leaning back against the armrest and spreading his legs, tilting his hips back to give Tony access. “Wish it had, we could’ve been doing this so much earlier,” he says, relaxing into the slick slide of Tony’s fingers against his hole, spreading his cheeks, tracing the rim before they slip in, ever-so gently, stretching him as he shivers and groans. Tony takes his time, spreads lazy kisses up and down Peter’s torso in time with his gentle exploration and the soft, slow meandering of the music, until he has three fingers in that just brush against Peter’s prostate on every thrust and Peter is nearly sobbing with frustration.

“Tony, please,” he begs, and Tony just crooks his fingers again, eliciting a high-pitched whine from the back of Peter’s throat.

“Ah-ah, baby, you were the one who wanted to wait, you know when you’ll get it.”

“Want it now, oh god, Tony, please, sir, please Mr. Stark,” Peter gasps, and watches as Tony drops his left hand from Peter’s waist to wrap the base of his cock in a tight grip, choking off a groan.

“Christ, Pete, there’s a kink I didn’t know I had,” Tony says, a bit too breathy to sound like a quip, and Peter is relishing the desperate look on Tony’s face, the dark purple flush to his cock and the precum dripping from the tip, knowing he’s affecting Tony as much as this is affecting him, when the record finally moves to the next song. As soon as Peter hears the telltale drumbeat, he shudders, sensation going bone-deep, before he uses his strength to flip them, pushing Tony into the couch and hovering over him, rolling his hips so Tony’s cock slides through the slippery mess of lube between his cheeks.

“Oh, fuck, that’s one I did know I had,” Tony says, voice raw and hoarse as he continues mumbling, head slamming back against the armrest every time Peter lets his cock catch on his rim, “walked down here drunk that night after the Wakandans came and thought I’d walked into a wet dream, you in your sweaty undershirt in the lab, tearing down that punching bag. Took everything in me not to bend you over a table then and there.”

“You should have,” Peter says breathlessly, and then slowly sinks down onto the tip of Tony’s cock, whimpering at the sight of Tony’s eyes rolling back in his head below him, at the feeling of Tony’s fingers gripping his hips so tightly he’d bruise if he were anyone else, at the rolling guitar crashing over him.

He waits for the next verse to start, dropping to take Tony to the base in time with the clashing noise of the music, feels it rip through him, doesn’t realize he’s literally shaking until he hears Tony say, “fuck, Pete, fuck—move, baby, you okay?” He just nods, eyes hazy with pleasure, and starts rolling his hips in time to the music, panting, letting his head loll back and listening to Tony’s gasped praises.

Finally, he rolls them over again, right before the music picks up, groans as Tony leans over him, hands on either side, just like he imagined—over him, inside of him, all around—shudders into the sensation of his cock rubbing against his own stomach where Tony’s got him bent practically in half, and he forces himself to look up and meet Tony’s eyes, dark and wide and wild with pleasure.

“Ruin me, Mr. Stark, please.”

He can feel Tony’s cock jerk inside of him at that, and it’s like a tether snaps, and Tony’s fucking into him so hard he sees stars, keeping up a steady stream of praise in Peter’s ear, telling him how good he is, how beautiful, how perfect, his Peter, how much he loves him.

Tony’s hips start to lose their rhythm, to get jerky and sloppy, and he leans back to haul Peter further onto his lap, pushing even deeper somehow and changing the angle so that he’s hammering Peter’s prostate with every thrust, and Peter keens, back arching impossibly as he feels all the sensation building, concentrating, feels like everything from the very first time he heard this song in the lab and made himself come thinking of Tony all the way until now, all of it coming together for this, and he hears, over the music and the rushing of his own blood, Tony say, “God, beautiful,” and that’s all it takes for him to come all over his own stomach. It’s only a few more stuttered thrusts after that that he feels Tony come inside of him with a deep groan that sounds like it was ripped out of him.

Tony slumps against the back of the couch, still buried inside Peter, taking great, heaving breaths, and Peter listens to their breathing in the silence that comes with the end of the record before he huffs a quiet laugh.

“What?” Tony says, rubbing a reassuring hand against Peter’s thigh.

“Happy fucking birthday to me.” Peter knows he sounds a little delirious, feels a little delirious, but Tony just laughs, leans down to nuzzle against his cheek.

“You’re ridiculous. Love you, kid.”

“Love you too, Tony.”