Chapter Text
When the students can go home after the school trip, Peter and Ned sit together on the bus, until Ned has to get off at his stop. Peter rides the rest of the way alone and gets out at his bus stop. He quickly goes home, where he does his homework before cocking something to eat.
After he’s done, Peter get’s his onesie out for his daily patrol and swings out his bedroom window, when he’s masked up. He shoots the web across the street, where it attaches to the side of a lamppost, and uses his arms strength to pull himself over to the other side. There he lands on the roof. He looks down into his neighbourhood to make out, if there is any civilian in need of his assistance.
For a while, it looks like it’s once again a pretty boring afternoon, nothing seems to happen around here, and Peter decides to slowly swing his way around the city, to look out for troubling parties.
So, he shoots some webs to swing himself along the big buildings, that give Queens it’s distinct identity and ends up on top of a small bakery. From there he can watch the busy street and perhaps help one elderly or two, he thinks to himself.
It only takes about fifteen minutes, until Peter spots an older woman, walking with a walker. She has two bags hanging from the handles of the walker, that seem pretty heavy, but Peter continues to just watch her, for now. She doesn’t seem to be in immediate need of some help, so the young boy let’s her be.
After some more time, Peter sees a small child trying to cross the intersection, but being unable, due to a broken traffic light and the heavy traffic that’s been going on on this street. Peter jumps down from the bakery roof and jogs towards the girl.
“Hi, would you like some help crossing this intersection?”, Peter asks and hold out his hand for the little girl. She has two small ponytails with blueish ribbons and she’s wearing a raincoat over her clothes. At his words, she looks up at Peter and his outstretched hand and a small smile builds on her face. “Yes, please”, she reveals a gap between her front teeth.
Peter takes her hand in his, feeling the warmth that’s radiating from it, and together they carefully cross the street. When they get to the other side, Peter let’s go of the little girl’s hand and turns to her. “Do you live around here? Do you get home alone, fine?” The little girl has a beautiful smile, when she answers, „Yes, my family lives just around the corner”, and she points to a house. Peter looks at it and then nods appreciatively.
He accompanies her to the doorstep and then bids his goodbye and swings away. He pulls himself up onto a roof and looks around, trying to make out if there is anyone else nearby who might need his help. But he doesn’t see anyone. So, he decides to swing back home. He needs to get there before May, so she won’t notice his absence and somehow questions him.
When he’s swinging back home, he still watches the streets and corners in the dark, in case there’s something going on. He’s still on his way, when he runs out of web. He didn’t know this was something that could even happen, so he’s really surprised when his left wrist just doesn’t shoot any webs anymore.
Peter had to take a short swinging break on top of a sunroof. He tries to figure out, what’s going on with his webs, but can’t find anything wrong with the slits on his wrists, so he’s entirely unsure of what to do now. He tries to squeeze his wrist, but nothing happens and the normal white web stuff, doesn’t come out now. So, he decides to get down from the building he’s currently on, to walk home. He wants to get the mask off his face but can’t risk it now.
Twenty minutes later, he crawls up the side of his apartment, until he gets to his window, to climb in. Once inside, he pulls the window back down, get’s out of his sweats and hoodie and stuffs them away into the box.
He cracks open his door to listen if May got home, while he was out, but luckily, he doesn’t hear anyone, besides his laboured breathing. He smirks, proudly and shuffles towards the bathroom to shower the struggles of the day away.
When he get’s back out of the bathroom, he walks through the apartment, sitting down on the couch, turning on the TV. He watches some boring cocking show for a few minutes, until he changes the channel to a news report.
On there, is a reporter in front of something, that must be a green-screen, showing a video of Peter as the Spider-Man swinging around Queens, helping civilians and doing little stunts. He didn’t notice anyone taking videos of him, so he’s very surprised by what he sees on the news right now. The news reporter, a young man with the name Carl Grey, is telling the viewers about the new sighting of a new Super-human which the public seem to call Spider-Man.
Peter sits up excitedly. This is the first time, since he became Spider-Man, that news are talking about him and he wants to soak up every moment of it. Peter gets out his phone to look at the internet and basically Youtube, to assess which kind of videos about him have been posted on there.
He finds very few, as he’s only now being very active, like being out every or every other day, instead of his earlier tries, where he’d only gone out into the city like once a week. Back then, he had to get used to his powers and the things he could do with them. While he watches, the idea of taking photos of himself, while being on patrol, comes back into his mind.
Peter turns off the television and goes to his room. Somewhere, he’s sure, must be the camera his uncle had gifted him years ago. He shovels through the things in his room, trying to find the place where he must’ve put the camera previously.
A few minutes later, he looks in one of his drawers, where he finds the little camera. It’s the perfect size. Very small, so very transportable, when Spider-Maning. He puts it into his wardrobe, next to his Spider-Man costume and closes the door.
Because he doesn’t have anything to do for the rest of the day, he decides to go to bed for a quick nap, until May get’s home when they’ll eat dinner together. He drops his clothes down on the floor and crawls under the covers. He closes his eyes and within an instant he’s deep asleep.
…
Tony is in his lab, working on different small projects, when he get’s interrupted by FRIDAY, reminding him of a meeting. “Thank you, FRIDAY”, he praises the AI and moves to put his working tools onto the table next to his project, that’s scattered all over his workbench, preventing him, from putting his tools there.
He turns towards the sink, to wash his hands, that are pretty stained from oily substances and dirt and then walks out of his lab. He uses the lift to make his way up to his Penthouse, where he showers quickly and throws on some new clothes.
Instead of choosing a well-fitted suit, or something his dad would’ve chosen, Tony slips into something comfortable; dark pants and a grey sweater, which has some sort of print on it. Tony doesn’t care much about it, he just slips on shoes and makes a beeline for the lift, to take him to the conference room, where he has his next meeting.
FRIDAY brings him down fast and without any stops in between, as usual. Tony thanks her, when he gets out, and then searches for the room, where his meeting will be. Pepper Potts, his CEO and girlfriend, is coming his way, having some documents under her arm. While Tony usually is ill prepared to go into any meetings, the woman he appointed CEO at some point in the long period of knowing each other, is always over prepared and has all the stuff together, that could be needed for conferences like these.
When she reaches his side, she takes the documents and shoves them into his waiting hands. While she’s doing that, she’s explaining to him, what the conference is about, and what’s in these documents, as well as what he needs them for. Then, after she did that, he turns to the door and leads the way into the room. Pepper Potts follows him and sits down to his left side, after they greeted all the present representatives of different firms.
Tony doesn’t really like meetings like these, but he knows that he has to attend some, in order to keep Pepper happy and the business running. Pepper takes a lot off his hands, and regarding their relationship over the years, it’s only fair to attend to some important meetings. They’ve had it hard enough already.
The meeting takes its course and Tony and Pepper are doing their best to make everyone involved as happy as possible, without stepping out of their way to do so. This was something Tony had learned from his father; not to give in when people became complicated, but instead to diplomatically solve the presented problems, until everyone was at least decently satisfied with the outcome.
After two hours of back and forth, some deals are made, and Tony decides for this meeting to end. He thanks all the representatives for their attendance and clears out the room with Peppers help.
Together they make their way up, to the penthouse, where they step into the living room-space and sit down on some armchairs. “Would you like something to drink?”, Tony asks Pepper and swiftly moves to stand up again. “Perhaps a cup of tea”, the woman says and smiles slightly.
So, Tony moves to the kitchen and prepares both of them something to drink. For his girlfriend he prepares a steaming cup of her favourite sweet tea. After he poured the hot water, he adds two sugar cubes and then moves on to his own drink. He takes out a bottle and pours himself a glass of scotch.
He returns to Pepper and puts down the drinks in front of them. When they sit together, sipping their drinks, both of them drift towards sentimental memories. Their son had never been here. Tony built the Tower long after he disappeared. The mansion in Miami is vacant and run by some of the old household staff, while Pepper and he rarely retuned there. It is just painful looking at the rooms and places they shared for so long with a third family member, someone who was so very important to them.
Theo’s room has been closed for such a long time. Inside is a room like any other now, without a trace of a child. At some point during the years after Theo’s abduction, Tony and Pepper had cleaned out the room, thrown away all the things that got destroyed and put away those that weren’t. Pepper had decided to lock to door for good and she keeps the key in one of her jewellery drawers.
The once beautifully decorated, comforting, warm home, turned into a place they didn’t want to return to. A place where they were being plagued with memories of a young child playing there, that never returned home to them.
Pepper and he lived at the Stark Tower, most of the times. It is most convenient that they have their workplace here. It’s just too easy to wake up here, get ready for the day and then go down to the conference room, or the CEO’s office, where Pepper was most of the time, or to drive down to the lab, where Tony spent almost all his time.
Tony knew at some point they would probably return to the Malibu mansion for good, staying at the Tower was something that was originally thought to be a transitional solution. They kind of got stuck here, but Tony had been thinking of building a new home or returning to Malibu for quite some time. They had previously rented an apartment, but when Tony got kidnapped in Afghanistan, Pepper had made arrangements to be close to something she associated with Tony, so she stayed at the Tower, and he just moved in too, when he got back.
At first, it was a big thing they needed to get used to, but after some time it got easier.
“Pepper, i’ve been thinking about this”, Tony begins the conversation. “I know you probably don’t want to move back into the mansion. But I feel like we overstayed our stay here. Look, this has never been something that we seriously considered a long-time solution, and I feel like now is a good time to start thinking about what we should do. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, but we need to talk about building a new home. We’re long back together, i’m not going anywhere, and if you feel the same way, I want us to build a new home.”
When he looks at his girlfriend, he sees that she has tears in her eyes. “I don’t want to move back into Theo’s childhood home. Tony, I just can’t do that. I can’t even look inside the room. If you feel like we should settle down in a new own home, let’s look for an apartment to rent, yeah?” She sniffles lightly and closes her eyes.
Tony sips his scotch and watches his girlfriend. He knows how much this still hurts her, hurts both of them. He knows that she sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night, to slip out of bed and roam the penthouse to find a spot to think and cry. This happens often around the weeks approaching the date of Theo’s disappearance, and also the weeks before and after his birthday. He knows she’s mourning the loss of their child everyday. But around special days, Pepper is especially vulnerable and likes to deal with it alone, without the public eye hover her shoulder. That’s also the reason why she doesn’t go out when the dates are imminent. She hates paparazzi taking pictures, in a time, when she’s clearly grieving.
“An apartment could be nice”, he answers her and smiles tiredly. “I’ll ask Friday to make some calculations, and then we can decide between her results, what do you think about that?” Pepper simply nods and Tony makes himself a mental note to present Friday with that task.