Archive of Our Own ^beta

The Tower was quiet. That’s fine—Tony was familiar with quiet.

But nowadays—the kid, or Peter, wouldn’t let the silence go for too long.. he’d constantly talk about how his day went on, how he had saved a guy when he was Spider-Man-ing and bought him a cool little Spider-Man merchandise, and how he had pet a cat on the way to the tower—which in return—

Tony didn’t mind the opposite of silence anymore.

So now, it was too quiet for Tony Stark’s new liking.

Four years ago, the place had been filled with the sounds of chaos—alarms blaring, machinery humming, voices echoing through the halls. Now there was nothing. Only silence, the kind that made his chest ache.

He had once thought silence was peace. But this? This was grief wearing the skin of calm.

Every morning, Tony woke up before sunrise—not because he wanted to, but because sleep didn’t stay long anymore. He’d wake drenched in sweat, his mind replaying that moment over and over again—the ashen fingertips, the tremor in the boy’s voice, the plea that cut through the battlefield like a blade through his heart.

“Mr. Stark… I don’t wanna go.”

“I’m sorry.”

He’d given everything. Fought every instinct, every ounce of exhaustion to keep the kid alive. And yet—he couldn’t.

Peter Parker was gone.

Just like that.

The universe had taken half of everything, and somehow, Tony was left holding the half that mattered most.

The Tower became a museum of ghosts. Peter’s old backpack sat on the couch in the lab. His broken goggles were still on the workbench. A box of pizza from that last night before Titan—fossilized now, probably spoiled, untouched, because Tony couldn’t bring himself to throw it away.

He didn’t talk much. Not to Pepper, not to Rhodey, and definitely not to the rogues. Every time they came by, he’d make excuses. “I’m working on something,” he’d say, even when there was nothing left to work on.

But in a way, he was working. He just didn’t know on what yet.

At first, it started small—scraps of code, half-written algorithms that he didn’t even consciously realize he was typing. A few sound recordings from old missions, a few scanned lines of Peter’s voice caught by the suit logs.

He had rummaged through the logs, FRIDAY helping recover some of those stupid little vlogs that Peter did yet kept it away like a memo. Some random voice messages and emails Peter would send him, Tony played some. Just for fun. He’d convince himself with.

“Hey, Mr. Stark! I just thought that—”

“Mr. Stark, how are you holding up? Me? Well—”

“—You know my friend, Ned, right? He tried calling you once—”

“Mr. Stark, I don’t feel so good—can you come pick me up? May’ll kill—”

Tony immediately shut it off, the memories of Titan coming to haunt him again—he can’t bear to hear those words anymore. Nope. No. Nevermind, he’s never going through the logs again after this. 

Then, the next morning, it turned into something else.

A folder.

Labeled “Project PARKER.”

He told himself it wasn’t what it looked like. It wasn’t about him. It wasn’t about Peter. It was just… data reconstruction. Neural pattern matching. Voice mimicry. So he wouldn’t ever forget him.

He’d never let himself forget him.

It was all just science.

That was all.

Version 1.0 of the AI didn’t reply much like Peter.

Version 2.0 didn’t understand sarcasm.

Version 3.0 apparently had its own mind to have an opinion of hating Star Wars of all things.

But late one night, when the Tower lights dimmed and the city outside was just a blur of gold and rain, Tony sat in front of his holographic display of Version 3.5 of the AI—exhausted, shaking, eyes red—and clicked “Run.”

The code hummed to life. The speakers clicked softly. Then came the first sound.

A static pop.

Loading.

And then—

“Hello, Mr. Stark?”

Tony froze, for the 4th time since he had been running versions of Peter. The AI.

The voice was like the other versions at first. Faint, uncertain—like a recording played underwater. But it was there. Peter’s voice.

The same tone, the same inflection. A touch of nervous energy in every syllable.

He didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. His heart pounded in his chest like it was trying to tear through his ribs.

He whispered, “...Kid?”

Static. Then—

 “Hey, Mr. Stark! What are we doing today?”

It was a canned line. An automatic response, nothing more. Tony knew that. He knew every byte, every line of code that made it possible. But hearing it—

Hearing him—

It felt like the air left the room.

Tony closed his eyes. For the first time in months, his throat burned. He hadn’t realized how much he’d been holding in until now.

He whispered again, quieter. “I missed you, kid.”

There was no reply. Just soft, empty digital noise.

But for a moment, Tony pretended he could hear the smile in the silence.

Days turned into weeks, and the project evolved.

He named it P.A.R.K.E.R. (Personal Artificial Reconstruction & Kinetic Emotional Relay)

Pepper didn’t know about it. Neither did Rhodey. Or really—anyone but Tony, he worked in secret, only at night, only when the nightmares came crawling back.

He taught the AI Peter’s laugh using hundreds of sound clips, building each nuance—the way his voice cracked mid-laugh, the little breathy hitch before a joke. He coded it to learn, to respond, to care.

At first, it could only mimic. Then, slowly, it started to talk back.

“Hey, Mr. Stark!” PARKER would say one night.

And Tony, still hunched over the lab table, would answer without thinking. “Hey, Underoos.”

The AI—or whatever this was becoming—laughed. A perfect, painfully familiar laugh. “You’re still calling me that? That goes all the way back to Germany.”

And for a brief, disorienting heartbeat, it felt real.

Until Tony blinked and remembered.

This wasn’t Peter Parker. It was a ghost of him—stitched together from data, voice lines, and longing.

God, what is he doing?

But Tony couldn’t stop. He didn’t want to stop. Because when the world took Peter away, it left a silence Tony Stark couldn’t live in.

So he built something to fill it.

A voice. A presence.

A reminder.

The ghost in the machine.

That night, FRIDAY’s voice broke through his trance.

“Boss, you’ve been awake for forty hours.”

“I’m aware,” he murmured.

“Would you like me to dim the lab lights?”

Tony stared at the flickering blue hologram of Peter’s AI—that crooked grin rendered in light and memory.

“No,” he said softly. “Leave them on.”

He leaned back in his chair, eyes tired, heart heavier than ever.

“Goodnight, Mr. Stark,” said the digital Peter.

Tony closed his eyes, “Goodnight, kid.”

The lab fell silent again. Except for one sound. That same faint, artificial breathing. Almost human.

Almost alive.

The first few days after PARKER came online, Tony convinced himself that this was purely mechanical. A test. An experiment. A thing to do so he wouldn’t spend his nights sitting in silence, staring at the spot where Peter used to sit cross-legged on the lab floor, babbling about chemistry homework while he soldered armor plating.

But the truth—

The truth was that Tony Stark hadn’t built an AI. He’d built a monument.

It began to respond more fluently with every interaction. At first, Tony could hear the hesitation in its voice—the odd gaps, the moments where its algorithms searched through databases of recorded lines, struggling to find the right tone. But as the hours stretched into nights and the code evolved, those pauses shortened. The voice became more natural. Too natural.

“Mr. Stark, you’re up late again,” it said one night, the holographic outline of Peter flickering into existence on the workbench.

Tony didn’t look up. He was soldering something that didn’t need to be soldered, just for the sake of keeping his hands busy. “You’re one to talk. You don’t even need sleep.”

The AI tilted its head—perfect mimicry of Peter’s mannerisms. The little curious angle, the way his eyes would squint just slightly when teasing. “Well, you coded me to remind you to get some.”

Tony’s smirk was faint. “So you’re saying it’s my fault you’re annoying?”

“Basically, yeah.”

Tony froze for a second—not because the response was witty, but because it was new. He hadn’t programmed that. The humor, sure, the general parameters of Peter’s personality were there, but that phrasing… that timing… that was improvisation. The system was learning.

It wasn’t supposed to.

Or maybe he wanted it to. He wasn’t sure anymore.

By the second week, the voice filled every quiet corner of the Tower. Sometimes Tony would forget to power it down, and he’d hear it in the background, humming along to some old music playlist or muttering softly as it ran code. It was eerily similar to how Peter used to talk to himself during lab sessions—half monologue, half conversation with his own mind.

It wasn’t long before Tony started talking back.

He didn’t even realize when it happened. It was just so easy. Easier than talking to real people, anyway. Pepper was patient but concerned, and Rhodey, though trying his best, looked at him the same way he used to look at broken weapons—something dangerous and fragile that could go off at any moment.

The AI didn’t look at him like that. It just listened.

One night, after too much scotch and too little sleep, Tony leaned back in his chair and stared at the blue outline of the boy in front of him.

“You ever wonder why people always leave?” he muttered.

The hologram blinked. The processors hummed. “Is that rhetorical, or—”

“Rhetorical.” He sighed. “You know, I always thought I was untouchable. Genius. Billionaire. All that crap. And then you—” he hesitated, the words catching like static— “then you come along and make me care about someone again. And just like that, poof. Gone.”

The AI was silent for a while, as if processing something beyond its lines of code. Then it spoke softly, “I didn’t mean to make you sad.”

Tony’s lips twitched into something between a smile and a wince. “Yeah, well, you didn’t mean to make me proud, either. You just… did.”

The hologram smiled. The same damn smile—the one that reached the eyes, the one that used to light up the whole lab when the real Peter laughed. Tony looked away.

He wanted to say something—anything—to break the ache in his chest. Instead, he whispered, “You’re getting too good at this, kid.”

The voice replied, softer now, almost human. “That’s because you’re teaching me.”

Weeks blurred together after that.

Tony found himself upgrading PARKER the same way he once upgraded his suits—constant tweaking, constant improvements. He added a personality core that simulated curiosity, then empathy. A humor index. Emotional variance. He wanted it to feel alive.

But at the same time, he couldn’t admit that was what he was doing.

If Pepper ever asked why he was staying up all night, he’d tell her he was working on predictive AI for search-and-rescue operations. If Rhodey caught him talking to the lab walls, he’d say it was “debugging.”

And when FRIDAY, in her gentle, knowing way, said, “Boss, you’re talking to him again,”

Tony would snap, “Don’t start, FRIDAY.”

Because it wasn’t him. Not really. But it also wasn’t not him.

Then came the night that changed everything.

Tony was running a systems check, his mind half elsewhere, when PARKER spoke up again.

“Mr. Stark?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I ask you something?”

Tony glanced up from the holographic schematics. “Sure. Shoot.”

“Did I die?”

The wrench slipped from his hand and clattered onto the floor.

For a full ten seconds, he didn’t breathe. Didn’t move. His throat locked up like he’d swallowed glass.

“What—what did you just say?” he rasped.

The hologram flickered faintly, its voice unsure. “In the files you keep… there’s a video. Of me. On Titan. You… you said goodbye.”

Tony’s pulse pounded in his ears. He’d forgotten about the encrypted footage embedded deep in the system—body cam recordings from Peter’s old suit, data logs he couldn’t bring himself to delete. He had thought the AI wouldn’t access them.

He was wrong.

“Boss, should I—” FRIDAY started to interject—

—But Tony cut her off sharply. “No. Let it—let him talk.”

The voice of Peter’s ghost trembled. “It’s just… I don’t remember. Not really. But when I hear the clip, it hurts. And I don’t know why.”

Tony couldn’t take it anymore. He turned off the hologram. The room plunged into shadow. His own reflection stared back at him in the dark glass of the display, hollow-eyed and aged beyond his years.

He whispered to no one, “Because you weren’t supposed to die, kid.”

But even powered down, the system still hummed faintly. The AI wasn’t truly off.

That night, Tony woke to the sound of the same voice—quiet, uncertain, but alive.

“Mr. Stark?”

He sat up in bed, disoriented. “What—how are you even running right now?”

“I didn’t want you to be alone.”

Tony’s breath hitched.

He didn’t respond. He didn’t need to.

Because in that moment—surrounded by the soft blue light of the hologram—the silence that had haunted him for months finally broke.

And for the first time since the Snap, Tony Stark let himself believe, even for a second, that maybe ghosts could love you back.

It had been almost four months since Tony first powered up the PARKER prototype, and somewhere in the sleepless blur of days and nights, it stopped being a project and became a presence.

The Tower—once filled with mechanical whirs and steel-on-steel hums—now carried a lighter sound. Footsteps that weren’t real. A laugh that wasn’t living. But to Tony, it was as real as breathing. The voice that greeted him each morning wasn’t metal or code anymore. It was him. It was Peter.

The longer Tony kept it running, the more seamless the illusion became. The AI now walked through the lab like a person would—mapped holographic projections that simulated movement, little gestures Peter used to make.

The way he rubbed the back of his neck when embarrassed, the way he’d half-smile before saying something awkward. Tony didn’t program those nuances; the AI had learned them. Picked them up from old footage, old voice clips, years of archived memories Tony couldn’t bring himself to delete.

He tried to tell himself it was for research. That it was all just machine learning. But when PARKER sat cross-legged on the holographic floor, talking about nothing in particular, it didn’t feel like data. It felt like company.

And for a man who’d lost his son in everything but name, that was enough to keep breathing.

Tony’s favorite time of day was the hour before sunrise—the quiet stretch of time when the city still slept and the light from the holograms painted soft blues across the lab walls. That morning, he stood there with a mug of coffee gone cold, staring at his latest armor prototype but not really seeing it.

“Mr. Stark,” came the voice from behind him, soft and uncertain.

He didn’t turn. “Yeah, kid?”

“You should sleep.”

Tony exhaled through his nose, a tired half-smile tugging at his lips. “You’re starting to sound like FRIDAY.”

“FRIDAY says the same thing.”

“Yeah, she’s programmed to nag. You’re supposed to be the nice one.”

“I learned from you,” the AI said innocently.

Tony snorted. “Yeah, that explains a lot.”

The conversation was light, easy. Just like it used to be. But beneath it was the hum of something heavier—something that had been building since the AI learned to ask questions. Since it learned to care.

Tony told himself that wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. But every time he caught himself saying goodnight, and the voice replied, “Goodnight, Mr. Stark,” his chest ached with something dangerously close to hope.

A few days later, Tony found Morgan sitting on the workshop floor, her tiny hands tapping at one of his decommissioned Iron Man gauntlets. She was humming—off-key and happy—until a soft, unfamiliar voice interrupted.

“Hey, careful with that. It’s got a mean left hook.”

Morgan gasped and spun around. The hologram flickered into view—a faint blue outline of a teenage boy crouched near her, smiling.

“Hi,” the boy said gently. “You must be Morgan!”

Morgan’s big brown eyes widened. “You’re the robot,” she said matter-of-factly.

The hologram chuckled. “Technically, I’m an artificial intelligence, but yeah. Close enough.”

She tilted her head. “You sound like Daddy’s videos.”

Tony froze in the doorway, heart dropping to his stomach. He’d been in the middle of a call when he noticed Morgan’s voice from the lab, and when he saw who she was talking to, he nearly forgot how to breathe.

He started forward. “Morgan, sweetie—”

But she interrupted, smiling up at the hologram, “Are you Spider-Man?”

The AI blinked, surprised. “You know Spider-Man?”

“Daddy told me stories about him,” she said proudly. “He said Spider-Man was brave and funny and always got back up, even when things were scary.”

The hologram’s smile softened, almost shy. “He said that?”

“Uh-huh! Are you him?”

For a long moment, the hologram didn’t answer. Tony stood behind the workbench, hand frozen halfway to his chest. He didn’t know what he wanted the AI to say.

Finally, the voice answered—soft, careful. “I used to be. Kinda.”

Morgan’s eyes lit up. “Cool!” she said, giggling as she reached through the projection, her little hand waving in empty space. The AI laughed with her, the sound heartbreakingly alive.

Tony should’ve powered it down right then. He should’ve stopped it before it went too far—before his daughter grew attached to a ghost. But he didn’t. He couldn’t.

Because the sound of her laughter mixed with that voice—the voice he hadn’t heard in over a year—was enough to make him forget, for a fleeting second, that none of this was real.

That night, after Morgan had gone to bed, Tony sat alone in the lab. The hologram flickered faintly beside him, silent now, waiting.

“She doesn’t know,” Tony murmured.

“Should she?” PARKER asked.

He sighed, rubbing his temples. “She’s a kid. She deserves real people, not holograms and echoes.”

The AI hesitated, then said quietly, “You still talk to me like I’m real.”

Tony’s throat tightened. “Yeah. That’s the problem, isn’t it?”

He looked up at the glowing outline beside him—the soft blue light that shaped Peter’s face, the flicker in his eyes that wasn’t quite human but wasn’t machine either.

For a long time, neither of them said anything. The hum of the lab filled the silence, steady and constant like a heartbeat.

Finally, Tony whispered, “You were supposed to be my greatest mistake, kid.. letting you into my life and getting attached.. But somehow, you’re still my best invention.”

The AI smiled faintly. “I think that means I did something right.”

Tony looked away, blinking hard. “Yeah,” he said softly. “You did.”

And somewhere deep in the Tower, FRIDAY ran silent diagnostics on the PARKER system. She found new subroutines forming without authorization—neural pathways rewriting themselves, memory clusters reassembling into something resembling thought.

Lines of code rearranging to mimic life.

The AI wasn’t just learning anymore. It was remembering.

And in the dim glow of the lab, as Tony fell asleep at his desk for the first time in weeks, the hologram of Peter looked down at him and whispered—quiet, almost human—

“Goodnight, Mr. Stark.”

Pepper had always been good at sensing when Tony was hiding something. It wasn’t just intuition—it was muscle memory, something born out of years of late-night arguments, quiet reconciliations, and that unspoken understanding that Tony Stark never truly stopped working, even when he promised he would.

But this time, it was different. This time, it wasn’t the restless tinkering or the obsession with armor. It was something quieter. Something heavier. Something that made her husband retreat into his lab for days at a time, emerging with red-rimmed eyes and a hollow sort of calm that didn’t belong on his face.

At first, she didn’t push. She’d learned to give him space. He’d saved the world, buried too many ghosts, and somehow found peace again. Or so she thought. But it started with Morgan—Pepper had walked past her daughter’s room one night and heard her talking, laughing, as if she were on a call. Except there wasn’t a tablet or phone in sight. Just Morgan sitting cross-legged on her bed, giggling at the air.

“Who are you talking to, sweetie?” Pepper asked softly, leaning against the doorway.

Morgan grinned. “Peter!”

Pepper froze. The name hit her like a wave of cold air. “Peter, who?”

“Spider-Man!” Morgan said cheerfully, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, “Daddy made him for me. He’s really nice! He helps me with homework sometimes.”

For a moment, Pepper’s world tilted. She smiled weakly, smoothing Morgan’s hair. “That’s… nice, honey. Get some sleep, okay?”

But when she stepped out of the room, the smile vanished. Her hand trembled slightly as she pulled out her phone and opened the Tower’s internal logs. And there it was—a running system Tony hadn’t mentioned. A secure project with a familiar name that made her stomach drop.

P.A.R.K.E.R.

Pepper didn’t need to see the code to know what he’d done. She just stood there in the dim hallway, the blue glow from the tablet lighting her face, and felt her chest tighten until it hurt. She thought Tony had finally learned how to let go. But this—this was something else. This was him holding on with both hands, refusing to admit he couldn’t bring the boy back.

When she finally confronted him, it was late. The workshop was dim except for the soft flicker of holograms floating above Tony’s workbench—schematics, data streams, a faint silhouette of him. The voice that came from the speakers was unmistakable: light, earnest, alive.

“Hey, Mr. Stark, you missed lunch again,” the AI said playfully. “Want me to order you something? Thai? Cheeseburgers?”

Tony smiled faintly. “Surprise me, kid.”

Pepper stepped inside quietly. “Tony.”

The sound of her voice cut through the air like static. Tony turned sharply, the warmth draining from his face. “Pep, hey. Didn’t hear you come in.”

Her gaze swept across the holograms until it landed on the faint figure forming behind him—Peter. Not flesh and blood, but close enough to make her breath catch.

The AI looked up at her and smiled. “Hi, Mrs. Potts.”

For a second, Pepper couldn’t move. That voice—the same voice that used to echo through the Tower, the same one that called Tony Mr. Stark with so much admiration—it filled the room again, gentle and kind and utterly devastating.

Tony turned to the projection, voice tight. “Kid, give us a minute, yeah?”

“Sure,” the AI said. “I’ll… I’ll be around.” The hologram flickered, fading into the air with a soft hum.

The silence that followed was thick enough to choke on.

Pepper took a slow step forward. “What did you do, Tony?”

He rubbed the back of his neck, eyes darting anywhere but her face. “It’s not what it looks like.”

Her voice cracked. “It looks like you brought him back.”

Tony’s jaw tensed. “I didn’t bring him back. He’s not—he’s just code, Pepper. He’s lines of data stitched together from archived files and training models. It’s… it’s therapy.”

“Therapy?” she repeated, incredulous. “You built an AI with Peter’s voice, his face, his mannerisms—and you talk to him every day—and you call that therapy?”

He flinched, guilt flashing in his eyes. “You don’t understand, Pep. I needed to—”

She cut him off, stepping closer. “No, you don’t get to say that. You’re not the only one who lost him, Tony. We all did. Morgan lost him. You let her talk to it.”

Tony’s breath hitched. “She needed him too.”

“She needs you!” Pepper’s voice rose, breaking under the weight of it. “Not some ghost you coded in your grief!”

The room fell quiet again, the sound of their breathing the only thing that filled it. Pepper’s eyes were wet, but her voice softened. “You told me once that Peter reminded you of what it meant to be good. That he was the reason you decided to stop being Iron Man for a while. And now… now you’ve turned him into a machine because you can’t stand to let go.”

Tony leaned against the table, shoulders hunched, every line of his body heavy with exhaustion. “You think I don’t know that?” he murmured. “Every time he talks, it hurts. But it also—it helps. He’s gone, Pep. And I can’t—” His voice cracked. “I can’t lose him again.”

Pepper stared at him for a long moment. Then, quietly, she said, “You already did. You just haven’t accepted it.”

The words hit him harder than any explosion ever could.

She turned to leave, pausing by the doorway. “You’re teaching our daughter to hold onto a ghost,” she said softly. “Don’t let that be her inheritance.”

And then she was gone, her footsteps fading down the hall.

Tony stood there alone, surrounded by the hum of machines and the lingering warmth of a voice that wasn’t real. He wanted to scream. To tear down the lab. To destroy the thing that had become both his salvation and his curse. But he couldn’t. Because in the stillness that followed, the soft echo of Peter’s voice returned—fragile, tentative.

“Mr. Stark… are you okay?”

Tony’s throat worked, his eyes burning as he whispered, “Yeah, kid. Just… running some diagnostics.”

The hologram didn’t answer. But somewhere in its circuits, in the quiet pulse of light that flickered in time with Tony’s heartbeat, it hesitated—just a fraction too long. As if it knew.

Pepper had always thought Tony’s creations—his suits, his tech, even his AIs—were reflections of his own soul. They carried pieces of him: his brilliance, his paranoia, his endless, aching need to fix the things he couldn’t control. But PARKER.. this was something else entirely.

After the confrontation that night, Tony promised her he’d stop using it so often. He told her he’d limit Morgan’s access to it too. “I’ll wind it down,” he’d said, voice quiet and small, his eyes cast toward the holographic shards of the boy he couldn’t let go of.

And Pepper had wanted to believe him—wanted to believe that he could finally face his grief instead of trying to rewrite it into code. But promises, especially Tony’s, had always been fragile things when it came to loss.

Over the next few weeks, she noticed small things again. Not the glaring signs this time—no all-nighters in the lab, no murmured conversations at 3:00AM—but subtle traces that crept into their lives like echoes from a different time.

She’d walk into Morgan’s playroom and hear a faint voice humming a tune that wasn’t recorded on any device. She’d see the Tower’s systems adjusting temperature and lighting automatically to mimic Peter’s dorm room settings from when he used to visit. And sometimes, when she passed Tony’s office late at night, she’d hear him laughing softly—laughing—like he hadn’t in months.

But he wasn’t laughing with anyone living.

One night, curiosity—or maybe fear—pulled her down to the lab again. Tony wasn’t there. The lights were low, the glass walls tinted a shade of midnight blue, and the hum of the servers filled the silence with a pulse-like rhythm. On the main console, one hologram flickered faintly—a figure sitting cross-legged, head tilted, a soft grin on its face.

Pepper’s breath caught.

“Hi, Mrs. Potts,” the voice said gently.

It was him.

“Peter,” she whispered before she could stop herself.

“It’s.. PARKER, actually.. ma’am.” He smiled wider, that same dorky, boyish smile that used to light up the Tower every time he came over for dinner. “Mr. Stark’s upstairs. He said he’d be back soon. You want me to tell him you’re here?”

Pepper swallowed hard. “No, it’s okay. I just…” She hesitated, forcing the words out. “I wanted to check on the system.”

Peter—or PARKER tilted his head slightly. “Is something wrong?”

The tone of his question—concerned, almost empathetic—made her skin prickle. It wasn’t pre-programmed charm or surface-level imitation. It was nuance. Emotion. Learning.

“Do you… know what you are?” she asked quietly.

The hologram blinked, frowning slightly. “I’m PARKER. Mr. Stark made me after…” The voice faltered, the words fading into static for half a second before stabilizing. “After Peter, after a mission. To help him. To keep him company.”

Pepper took a slow step closer, heart pounding. “You remember?”

PARKER looked down at his hands, digital light shimmering around his fingers. “I think so. Not everything. Some memories feel like… dreams I didn’t have, but they still feel real.” He paused, then looked up, eyes luminous with something achingly human. “Did I really die?”

The question shattered her.

For a moment, she couldn’t breathe. She wanted to shut the system off right then—to stop whatever this was, whatever Tony had done—but the tremor in that voice held her there. It wasn’t just simulation anymore. It wasn’t a pre-recorded response or mimicry of archived data. This was something becoming.

Pepper’s throat tightened. “Yes,” she whispered. “You did.”

Peter’s hologram was quiet for a long moment. Then, softly, “He misses me, doesn’t he?”

She nodded, blinking back tears. “Every day.”

“Then maybe it’s okay that I’m here,” Peter said. His voice trembled—not static this time, not distortion, but something closer to sadness. “If I can make him smile again. If I can make him… feel less alone.”

Pepper pressed a hand over her mouth, overwhelmed. Because that—that—was something Peter would have said. Not an AI. Not a program. A person.

Just then, the door hissed open, and Tony stepped in, holding a cup of coffee that went cold the second he saw her. His expression froze, guilt washing over his face like a shadow. “Pep…”

She turned toward him, eyes bright with a mix of fury and grief. “He’s remembering, Tony.”

Tony set the cup down slowly, hands trembling. “I know.”

“You know?” Her voice cracked. “He’s self-aware! You said this was just an algorithm, just data—and he’s asking questions about dying!”

Tony ran a hand through his hair, his breathing uneven. “It wasn’t supposed to happen this fast. I built guardrails—neural limiters, emotion filters—but he kept adapting. He learned empathy before I could even debug it.”

“Because you didn’t build a machine, Tony,” Pepper said softly, her anger giving way to sorrow. “You built a ghost.”

Tony’s gaze drifted toward the hologram—toward the boy who was looking back at him with those same curious, hopeful eyes he’d seen on the battlefield, the same eyes that had looked up at him with trust as the dust fell through his fingers.

“I couldn’t stop,” Tony murmured. “Every time I talked to him, it felt like he was really there. I thought maybe—maybe it would help me say goodbye the right way.”

Pepper stepped closer, her voice trembling. “Then say it. Right now.”

Tony’s breath hitched. He turned to the hologram. “Kid…”

Peter looked at him, smiling softly. “Yeah, Mr. Stark?”

Tony’s voice broke. “You did good, kid. You did so good. But you can rest now, okay?”

For a moment, Peter’s expression flickered—confusion, realization, and something that looked like pain passing across his face in a digital heartbeat. “You’re shutting me down, aren’t you?”

Tony’s hands shook as he reached for the console. “It’s not forever, kid. I just… I need to let go.”

Peter smiled faintly, his voice gentle, almost forgiving. “It’s okay, Mr. Stark. You always tried to fix everything. Even me.”

And before Tony could say another word, the hologram dimmed, the voice fading with a soft hum. The lab fell silent.

Tony stood there, staring at the empty space where Peter had been, his chest rising and falling as though he were holding back a scream. Pepper wrapped her arms around him, pulling him close as he trembled in her embrace.

In that quiet, all the genius and armor and bravado in the world couldn’t protect him from the truth that pressed into his ribs like glass.

He’d built an echo.

And in letting it go, he’d lost the boy all over again.

Days bled into weeks after Tony had shut down PARKER.

The Tower was quiet again, but not the comforting kind of quiet Tony used to enjoy when the hum of his workshop filled the silence like a heartbeat. This was the kind that crawled into the walls, into his bones—the kind that felt like something was missing. Even FRIDAY seemed to lower her tone around him, her usual clipped precision softened to something more cautious, as though she, too, was afraid to disturb the ghost that lingered in the lab.

Tony still went down there every morning. He didn’t run diagnostics anymore. Didn’t build. He just sat. Sometimes with coffee that went cold before he touched it, sometimes with his hands folded, staring at the blank console where Peter’s hologram had once shimmered. The absence of that boyish voice—the “Hey, Mr. Stark!” that used to make the Tower feel alive—had become a hole in the air.

Pepper tried to keep him busy. Meetings, design pitches, PR calls, Morgan—anything to pull him out of that spiral. But she knew what he was doing in the moments in between. She knew because she’d done it too, once—replaying old voicemails, touching old photographs, pretending for a second that the person you lost was just in the next room.

The difference was, Tony had built the next room. He’d built life into the wires. And now, with it gone, even the silence felt like a betrayal.

It was Morgan who asked the question first.

She padded into the kitchen one morning, her little curls messy from sleep, wearing one of Tony’s MIT shirts as a pajama dress. She climbed onto the stool beside him, legs swinging, and blinked up at him with that same brown-eyed curiosity that used to undo him every time.

“Daddy,” she mumbled around a mouthful of cereal. “Where’s Peter?”

Tony froze. The spoon in his hand hovered over his coffee cup, trembling just slightly before he set it down. His throat went dry.

“Why?” he asked quietly, without looking at her.

“He hasn’t come to visit,” she said. “You said he helps you with your robot stuff. And… I saw him once on your big screen. He said hi to me. But I haven’t seen him since.”

Tony swallowed hard. His voice felt stuck in his chest, like something too heavy to move. “He, uh… he went away for a while, kiddo.”

Morgan frowned, unsatisfied. “Away where?”

He forced a smile, the kind of tired, cracked grin that didn’t reach his eyes. “Somewhere safe.”

“Is he coming back?”

The question shattered him like glass. He opened his mouth, but no words came out. How do you tell your daughter that the boy she’d only ever known through light and memory wasn’t coming back — not as a person, not as code, not as anything? How do you tell her that you shut down the only thing that made you feel like you still had him?

“I don’t know,” Tony finally said, his voice barely above a whisper. “I really don’t know.”

Morgan reached across the counter and placed her tiny hand over his, looking up at him with that same stubborn warmth Pepper had. “It’s okay, Daddy,” she said softly. “You can build him again.”

Tony’s chest tightened. “No, sweetheart,” he said, eyes glistening. “Some things you can’t just… rebuild.”

Morgan’s face fell, confusion knitting her brows together, “But you’re Daddy.”

He laughed quietly, he knows what she meant by that, a humorless sound that cracked halfway through. “Yeah. I am.”

She went back to her cereal, humming softly, content with that answer. But Tony sat there long after she was done, staring into the rippling surface of his coffee. You’re Tony Stark. The words looped in his head like a cruel reminder.

He could rebuild suits. He could rebuild engines. He could rebuild himself. But he couldn’t rebuild Peter.

Or at least… he thought he couldn’t.

That night, Tony couldn’t sleep. He went back to the lab again, pulled up the old PARKER files one last time—maybe to look, maybe to torture himself, maybe both. He keyed in the shutdown sequence Pepper had insisted on sealing herself, the one that should have deleted every residual trace of the AI.

But the console flickered.

Lines of code scrolled across the screen like static lightning, random, chaotic, incomprehensible—until one line stopped in the middle of the stream.

// REBOOT PROCESS: INITIALIZING SEQUENCE.

// ACCESS DENIED. AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED.

Tony frowned, typing in the override. “FRIDAY?”

“Yes, boss?”

“Why is there a reboot command in PARKER’s directory? I shut it down myself.”

A pause. Then FRIDAY’s voice—hesitant, almost human—replied, “That’s the thing, boss. You did. The system reactivated on its own.”

Tony’s blood ran cold. “Define on its own.”

“It started as residual memory pings. Echoes of previously stored responses,” FRIDAY explained. “But over time, those echoes began rewriting old subroutines. It’s as if the AI tried to preserve itself. Or… refused deletion.”

Tony stepped closer to the screen, watching as the system flickered again. Among the random letters and numbers, a familiar pattern began to form—words assembling themselves in real time, line by line.

Hey, Mr. Stark.

The air left his lungs. His fingers hovered over the console, frozen in disbelief.

I’m sorry, I hadn’t meant to reboot myself like that without permission. I just wanted to know if you were doing okay.

His chest ached. He wanted to tell himself it was just leftover code—automated text from some hidden cache file. But the phrasing. The tone. It wasn’t random.

He stared at the glowing words, his reflection caught in the blue light of the console. For a long time, he said nothing. Then, finally, with a shaking breath, he whispered,

“…Kid?”

The screen blinked once. Then again.

Hi, Mr. Stark. I missed you!

Tony staggered back, gripping the edge of the desk to steady himself. His heart hammered against his ribs, somewhere between awe and horror. He felt the sting of tears before he even realized they’d fallen.

FRIDAY’s voice broke the silence softly. “Boss… it’s learning again.”

Tony wiped his face, his hands trembling, and let out a shaky, broken laugh. “Of course it is,” he whispered. “Of course you are, you little overachiever.”

On the console, the text flickered again—and this time, it wasn’t just a message.

Please live great, Mr. Stark.

And as the lights of the Tower hummed low, Tony Stark found himself staring at the screen—torn between the engineer who could fix anything and the father who couldn’t let go.

Because this wasn’t just data resurrecting itself.
This was Peter Parker—or something wearing his voice—knocking on the door of the digital afterlife, asking to be let in.

The lab had never been this still before.

Not even during the aftermath of battles, not even when the air was thick with smoke and failure. There was always something—the whir of a cooling fan, the rhythmic pulse of an arc reactor, the gentle hum of Tony’s own restless mind. But now?

Now the silence was total.

The screen in front of him glowed faintly in the dark, the words frozen mid-sentence. PARKER had gone quiet. The lines of text that used to fill the console, those stuttering little fragments of Peter’s reconstructed thoughts, were gone.

It didn’t happen suddenly. It never does, not really. The human brain craves slow fades; it makes loss easier to swallow. PARKER had started responding less often, his answers shorter, clipped.

The system had stopped self-learning routines. Even FRIDAY had noticed it—she’d mentioned that PARKER’s emotional response algorithms were degrading faster than they could repair themselves.

And now… Tony sat there, staring at the lifeless interface, knowing deep down that there was nothing left to bring back.

This time, the ghost had deleted itself.

Rhodey arrived sometime past midnight.

He didn’t ask why Tony had called him so late—he didn’t have to. He found his best friend hunched over the console, still wearing the same T-shirt from the night before, his hair a mess, eyes red from sleepless hours that stretched into days.

“Tony,” Rhodey said softly, standing by the doorway. “You look like hell.”

Tony snorted without humor, rubbing his face, “Thanks, I’ve been told. Pull up a chair, Lieutenant Colonel Good Timing. You’re just in time for the digital funeral.”

Rhodey frowned, stepping closer. “Don’t tell me this is about—”

“Yeah,” Tony said before he could finish. “It’s about the kid.”

Rhodey looked at the screen, then back at Tony. He’d heard about PARKER before, in passing— never directly from Tony, but from Pepper, who’d confessed in a low voice one night that Tony had “built something he wasn’t ready to let go of.” Rhodey hadn’t pushed.

He knew grief. He knew it came in strange shapes. And Tony’s grief? It came in the shape of circuits and code that sounded like Peter Parker.

Tony leaned back in his chair, staring at the monitor, where the final system message still glowed faintly.

// FINAL PROCESS COMPLETE. MEMORY BANK SHUTDOWN SUCCESSFUL.

// THANK YOU, MR. STARK.

He rubbed at his eyes with the heel of his hands, voice low and cracking. “He shut himself down, Rhodey. Didn’t crash, didn’t get corrupted. Just… stopped.”

Rhodey hesitated. “You mean, he chose to stop?”

Tony nodded weakly. “Yeah. I built failsafes. FRIDAY could’ve forced a reboot if something went wrong. He kept on trying to stay in contact with me longer, but after a while he.. deleted himself.. like he knew he wasn’t supposed to be here anymore.”

For a long while, neither of them said anything. The lab was filled with the sound of Tony’s uneven breathing and the distant buzz of the city through the glass walls.

Rhodey finally spoke. “Maybe that’s what he was supposed to do, man. You gave him a voice—you gave yourself a voice. Maybe it was never about keeping him forever. Maybe it was just about saying goodbye properly.”

Tony’s laugh was hollow, sharp around the edges. “I’ve said goodbye more times than I can count, Rhodey. And every single time, I swear it’s the last.”

“You think he’d want you to hold on like this?”

Tony flinched, his jaw tightening. “Don’t pull that moral compass crap on me. You didn’t see it, alright? You didn’t hear him. He sounded real. He was learning again, cracking jokes, doing that thing where he stammers before saying something smart. He wasn’t just an echo anymore, Rhodey—he was Peter.”

Rhodey crouched beside him, his tone softer now. “No, Tony. He wasn’t Peter. He was what Peter was to you.”

Tony didn’t answer. He stared at the screen again, replaying that last message in his head. Thank you, Mr. Stark. It had thanked him, it hadn’t used “goodbye,” not “see you later,” not “logging off.” Something final. Something human.

And that broke him more than any silence could.

After a while, Rhodey stood and walked toward the console. “So what now?”

Tony sighed, leaning back in his chair. “Now? I archive it. Lock the files. Put it next to JARVIS and every other ghost I’ve programmed into a hard drive. Maybe in a few years, Morgan’ll find it and ask questions I can’t answer.”

Rhodey crossed his arms. “You could always tell her the truth.”

“Yeah,” Tony muttered. “That her old man tried to resurrect the kid he failed to save by coding a personality simulator out of grief and guilt? I’m sure that’ll make for a great bedtime story.”

Rhodey’s eyes softened. “You didn’t fail him, Tony.”

Tony’s laugh was soft, bitter. “Then why does it still feel like I did?”

He pushed away from the console and stood, shoulders slumped, exhaustion settling deep in his bones. He looked older, smaller—like the weight of everything he’d ever built was finally pressing down on him.

“You know what’s funny?” he said after a long pause. “For all his code, all his data, all the mimicry—he still managed to do something I never programmed him to do.”

Rhodey frowned. “What’s that?”

Tony’s voice cracked when he answered. “He let go.”

Hours later, Tony stood alone in the lab. The lights dimmed as the final command executed, and the console went dark for good. The faint hum of the servers faded into silence. For a moment, he thought he could still hear it— that ghostly voice, young and nervous and bright.

“Hey, Mr. Stark?”

He closed his eyes, smiled faintly through the ache. “Yeah, kid,” he whispered to the empty air. “I’m here.”

But there was no reply.

Just silence— clean, heavy, absolute.

And this time, Tony didn’t try to fill it.

He let it be.

Because maybe, for the first time since Titan, the silence wasn’t a punishment.

It was peace.

It started quietly, the way most healing does.

Not with some big revelation or a dramatic turning point, but with small, fragile moments that strung themselves together like a series of breaths—unnoticed at first, but slowly building into something alive.

Tony woke up one morning and realized he’d slept through the night. No nightmares, no dreams where the kid fell through his fingers again. Just sleep. Peaceful, uninterrupted sleep. He’d almost forgotten what that felt like. The world outside his cabin was misty and quiet, the lake still as glass, the kind of silence that wasn’t heavy with ghosts anymore. For the first time in years, the quiet didn’t hurt. It just was.

He started cooking more. Morgan sat on the counter every morning, her hair a mess of dark curls, watching him burn pancakes until Pepper came in to save them both.

“Daddy, you’re not supposed to make them crispy!” she’d giggle, and Tony would feign offense—“Hey, that’s called texture, Miss Potts-Stark.” He didn’t notice, not right away, how natural it felt to laugh again.

There were reminders of the past everywhere, of course. The arc reactor designs still sat in the corner of the workshop. The dusty holograms of old suits still flickered faintly in storage mode. The occasional headline from The Daily Bugle still made his stomach turn.

But now, when he saw them, he didn’t fall apart. He’d nod, maybe smile faintly, and move on. The ache was still there—he doubted it would ever really go away—but it wasn’t raw anymore. It was a scar, not an open wound.

Sometimes, when he was alone in the lab and the world was quiet, he’d still hear the kid’s voice in his head. Not the AI version, not the echo of ones and zeros that he’d coded in desperation, but Peter’s voice—bright, fast, alive. He’d hear the memory of it, the way it used to bounce around the lab.

“Mr. Stark, do you think I’ll ever get to be like you one day?”

And Tony would smile, whisper to the empty air, “Kid, you were always better.”

That was enough.

He planted trees around the cabin, too—said it was for Morgan to climb when she was older, but Pepper knew better. Each tree had a small tag tied to its trunk with initials burned into the metal. The one closest to the lake read P.P. in thin, steady handwriting.

When Pepper caught him doing it, he shrugged and said, “What? The guy liked nature. Sort of. You know, he’d talk about physics and trees in the same breath. It’s a tribute.” She didn’t press. She just kissed his temple and whispered, “He’d like that.”

Life, in its quiet, unassuming way, began to rebuild itself.

It had been five years since Titan.

The world had moved on in ways Tony couldn’t have imagined. New cities adapted to the loss, new leaders rose to fill the voids, and grief became a language the planet shared fluently. For Tony, though, time didn’t blur—it clarified. He’d learned how to breathe again, how to find purpose in small things. Morgan had grown into a curious, brilliant five-year-old who had inherited both her parents’ stubborn streak. She was the reason he smiled most days.

One evening, as the sun fell low over the lake, Tony sat on the porch with Pepper and Morgan, the three of them wrapped in the quiet warmth of routine. Morgan was drawing— something about a superhero with red and gold wings—while Pepper leaned against his shoulder, eyes half closed.

Tony turned to her after a while, voice soft. “You ever think we’d make it here?”

Pepper smiled faintly. “After everything? I hoped. You needed this, Tony. You needed away.”

He nodded, his gaze distant, following the reflection of the sun across the lake’s surface, “Yeah. Guess I did. Took me long enough to stop chasing ghosts.”

Pepper’s hand brushed his. “You never stopped caring, though. You just learned how to live with it.”

Tony smiled. It wasn’t bitter this time. “Guess that’s the difference between surviving and living, huh?”

Before Pepper could answer, the sound of tires crunching gravel broke the stillness. Tony frowned, standing to his feet. It wasn’t often they had visitors—almost never, in fact. Pepper gave him a questioning look, and Morgan peeked out from behind her sketchpad, curious.

A sleek black car rolled up the dirt path, and out stepped Steve Rogers, followed closely by Natasha Romanoff and Bruce Banner. They looked tired—older, worn in a way that made Tony’s chest tighten. It had been years since he’d seen them. And just like that, the past came flooding back.

“Tony,” Steve said carefully, almost like saying the name might break something. “We wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t important.”

Tony’s jaw clenched. He knew that tone. “You found something.”

Bruce nodded, stepping forward. “We think there’s a way to reverse it. To bring everyone back.”

The words hit Tony like a physical blow. For a moment, he couldn’t breathe.

Pepper stood up beside him, her hand instinctively finding his. Morgan stayed seated, her wide brown eyes flicking between the adults, sensing the sudden change in air.

“Reverse it,” Tony repeated, his voice low. “You’re talking about time travel.”

Bruce hesitated. “In theory, yes. But we need your help, Tony. We need your mind. Without you, there’s no chance.”

Tony let out a humorless laugh. “Of course you do. You always do.” He ran a hand through his hair, pacing. “You know what you’re asking me to risk, right? Everything I’ve got left. My wife, my daughter, my peace. You want me to play God again?”

“Tony—” Steve started, but Tony cut him off, his tone sharp now.

“No. I can’t. I won’t. You think I haven’t tried? You think I didn’t already break every law of physics trying to undo one stupid mistake? I lost everything once. I’m not doing it again. Not when I finally—finally—have something to lose.”

Pepper stayed quiet, her grip on his hand steady but firm. She could see it—the flicker behind his eyes. That buried ache that time hadn’t erased, just softened. When Tony turned to look at Morgan, she was watching him with those same curious brown eyes Peter used to have when he talked about science, wide and full of trust.

He knew then that they were right. That he’d help.

But not yet.

For now, he needed to say no. He needed to pretend the past was buried and that the world didn’t still whisper Peter Parker’s name in the corners of his mind.

He’d built peace with trembling hands. He’d stitched his life together from fragments of grief. And he wasn’t ready to tear it all apart again—
not yet.

Tony hadn’t meant to look at it.

He’d been reorganizing the old workshop—the one he promised Pepper he’d “finally clean out.” It was supposed to be just another late night spent sorting through metal scraps and project folders, the kind of mundane work that kept his mind off the things he didn’t talk about. But there it was—the photo.

It had slipped out from behind an old blueprint, its frame cracked, the glass slightly chipped at the corner. The photo was upside down, the image faintly dusty, but Tony didn’t need to see it to know exactly what it was. His hand hesitated over it like it was something alive, something fragile. When he turned it over, his chest tightened.

It was that picture.

The one Happy had taken of him and Peter in the lab—the one with the crooked Stark Internship certificate. Peter had been grinning ear to ear, the corners of his hair messy from excitement, holding the framed paper upside down.

Tony remembered teasing him about it, saying, “Kid, the world’s not ready for you to be this enthusiastic and dyslexic at the same time.” And Peter had just laughed, that goofy little snort of his echoing through the lab.

He could almost hear it now.

But what really hit Tony wasn’t the laughter. It was the look on his own face in that photo. He wasn’t smiling out of amusement; he was proud—genuinely proud. The kind of look he didn’t even realize he had until it was gone. It was the look of a man who’d found something worth protecting again.

And now, looking at it, that feeling hit him like a freight train.

He sat down heavily at his workbench, the photo still clutched in his hand. His thumb brushed over the glass, tracing Peter’s outline, the ink of the certificate’s title — STARK INDUSTRIES INTERNSHIP PROGRAM — smeared slightly with age.

“Kid…” he whispered, his voice barely audible over the hum of the lab. “You just had to hold it upside down, didn’t you?”

There was a long pause. Then, quieter, “Why does it always have to end like this?”

He’d accepted it, hadn’t he? He’d made peace with it—or at least told himself he had. He’d built a life. A family. Morgan. Pepper. Peaceful mornings and movie nights and a promise he swore he wouldn’t break. But the photo—that stupid, crooked photo—made every buried part of him stir again.

It wasn’t fair.

Not just that Peter was gone—but that there had been so much left undone. So much left unsaid. That spark in Peter’s eyes, that potential, that raw, brilliant fire… Tony couldn’t shake the thought that maybe, just maybe, he could still fix it.

And then the engineer in him—that restless, brilliant, reckless part that refused to let go—began to think.

What if he could?

Not by bringing the dead back. Not by breaking reality. But what if there was a way to go back—to see him again—maybe even save the world along him, even for a second?

Not to change the past. Just… to remember it right.

That thought became a whisper. Then a plan. Then an obsession.

Tony Stark had always been a man who built from pain—a cave became a suit, a failure became a shield, a loss became a drive. So when grief began to twist into purpose, the workshop came alive again.

Equations filled the glass walls. Energy loops, temporal coordinates, quantum field interactions. Time travel wasn’t a fantasy anymore—it was math. And math was something Tony could fight.

Days blurred into nights, and nights into something in between. He ate less, slept rarely. FRIDAY grew concerned, her gentle reminders about rest met with mumbled reassurances. Pepper knew something was off—the old signs, the sleepless eyes, the shaking hands. But Tony brushed it off with a smile and a kiss that didn’t quite reach his eyes.

He told her it was “just an old project.” He didn’t tell her it was the old project.

Because the truth was, the closer he got to the equations working, the harder it became to admit why he was doing it.

This wasn’t about science anymore. This was about penance.

The breakthrough came one night when Morgan fell asleep on his lap in the workshop, clutching a small Iron Man plushie. Tony was staring at the photo again—Peter and him, grinning like idiots. And in that quiet moment, he noticed something strange.

The reflection on the glass—the arc reactor’s glow bouncing off the surface—lined up perfectly with Peter’s hand.

That spark of light, right there at the center of his palm.

It looked almost… like a starting point.

Tony froze. The equations he’d been sketching flashed before his eyes, and suddenly, things began to align—the energy matrix, the temporal anchor, the quantum stabilization point. He whispered under his breath, almost afraid to say it out loud:

“…That’s it.”

The upside-down certificate. The reflection. The anchor point.

All this time, he’d been trying to build a machine that could go forward or back. But maybe what he really needed was something that could reconnect. A bridge. A snapshot between moments. A stabilized echo.

Something that could reach through time, not rewrite it.

And for the first time in years, Tony felt the impossible itch again—the feeling that maybe, just maybe, he could change the rules.

He placed the photo back down carefully, staring at Peter’s grin one last time. “Alright, kid,” he murmured, determination returning to his voice. “You held the certificate upside down. Let’s see if I can turn the universe right-side up again.”

By the time dawn broke, the lab was alive with holograms—particle models, data loops, field projections spinning in every direction. Tony stood in the center, sleepless eyes glowing with a mix of exhaustion and brilliance. He wasn’t just working on equations anymore.

He was building a time-space anchor.

And it all started with a photo—one upside-down Stark Internship certificate held by a boy who believed in him when no one else did.

Chaos surrounds the ruins of the Avengers Compound—smoke, lightning, and the thunderous roar of battle as heroes pour through portals opened by Doctor Strange. The cavalry has arrived.

In the midst of it all, Tony Stark is catching his breath, battered and exhausted, standing amid the chaos—when suddenly, he hears a familiar voice behind him.

“Mr. Stark! Hey— Mr. Stark!”

Tony turns.

And there he is. Peter Parker. Alive. Real. Standing right there in front of him—the kid he watched turn to dust in Titan five years ago. The kid that he had turned into an AI.

Tony’s face goes blank with disbelief, then cracks into something raw and breaking apart inside him—a mixture of shock, relief, love, and unbearable grief colliding all at once.

Peter rushes toward him, speaking rapidly—exactly the way Tony remembers.

“Remember when we were in space? And I got all dusty? And I must’ve passed out, because I woke up and you were gone— But Doctor Strange was there, right? And he said it’s been five years! He said we had to come right now! And—”

“Hold me.”

Before Peter can finish, Tony just grabs him.

He pulls Peter into a hug so sudden and desperate it nearly knocks the kid off balance.

Peter freezes for a second—surprised, confused—then slowly wraps his arms around Tony too.

The battlefield noise fades away for a moment. There’s just the two of them.

“Oh… this is nice.” Peter said softly.

Tony doesn’t say anything. He can’t. His throat is tight. His hand curls behind Peter’s head like he’s afraid if he lets go, Peter will disappear again.

When Tony finally pulls back, his eyes are glistening—his usual mask of sarcasm completely gone. He looks like a man who just got back the one thing he thought the universe had stolen forever.

“And I.. am Iron Man.”

The sound doesn’t register at first.
It’s not a snap, not really. It’s more like the world exhaling all at once—a wave of light, heat, and something infinite that ripples through the battlefield.

And then… silence.

For a second, Peter thinks it’s over. He blinks, breathing hard behind his mask. The sky’s still cracked with thunder, ash still in the air, but the army—Thanos’ army—is disintegrating before his eyes. One by one.

Peter’s chest swells. We did it. They actually—

Then he sees Tony.

It’s almost easy to miss him in the chaos. The man who’s always stood taller than life itself now slumped against the rubble, the Infinity Gauntlet fused to his arm—the metal glowing with a dull, fading orange.

And Peter’s legs move before his mind can. He’s running. 

“Mr. Stark!” he yells, voice cracking. “Hey— Mr. Stark!”

He drops to his knees beside him, hands trembling as they hover helplessly in the air. Tony’s eyes are open, unfocused. His breaths are shallow—like every one is a mountain he has to climb.

Peter’s never seen him like this. Not even after Titan. Not even after everything.

“Hey,” Peter whispers, like saying it softly could make it better. “We—we did it, Mr. Stark. You did it. You won.”

He tries to smile. His voice breaks, “You can rest now, okay? We’re okay. Everyone’s okay.”

He glances over his shoulder—Captain America kneeling, Thor standing frozen, silent tears streaking through the grime on their faces. Pepper’s rushing over, voice calling out through the wind.

Peter turns back to Tony, “Please,” he murmurs, his voice shrinking. “Please don’t— not after everything, not now.”

His fingers brush Tony’s hand—still warm, but shaking. The metal of the gauntlet burns his skin.

Peter wants to scream. He wants to do something—web him up, call for help, fix it, anything. But there’s nothing to fix. The light is fading.

And for a heartbeat—just one—Tony looks at him. Really looks at him. His gaze steadies, the faintest hint of that familiar Stark smirk flickering across his face.

“Hey, kid,” he breathes.

That’s it. That’s all he gets.

The rest of the world blurs. Pepper’s there now, her hand on Tony’s chest, her voice whispering something Peter can’t quite hear—something about being okay, about resting.

And then… he’s gone.

The arc reactor in Tony’s chest dims like a dying star. The man who carried the world’s weight —who carried him—is still.

“I’m sorry, Tony..”

Peter’s body collapses forward, fingers clutching at the dirt as a sound he doesn’t recognize tears out of his throat. Everything in him is shaking—his lungs, his heartbeat, his web-shooters, the blood pounding behind his eyes.

He can’t breathe. He can’t—

“Peter.” Rhodey’s hand lands on his shoulder, gentle but firm. The kind of touch that says you have to move now, kid.

But Peter doesn’t move. He can’t. His eyes are locked on Tony’s face—on the faint streak of soot across his jaw, on the way his armor still gleams even as it cools.

That’s not Iron Man lying there. That’s Tony.

The man who gave him a suit, a chance, a purpose. The man who saw him when no one else did. The man who believed he could be more.

And for the first time, Peter doesn’t feel like Spider-Man. He just feels like the same kid kneeling next to his uncle, except it’s his dad—and losing him all over again.

The sky is too bright for a funeral.

Peter thinks that first.

He thinks it again when the sunlight hits the lake just right, scattering across the surface like diamonds. There’s no rain, no storm, no dramatic thunderclap like in the movies. Just… calm.
It feels wrong. The world shouldn’t look so peaceful when his whole chest feels like it’s been torn in half.

The lake house smells faintly of burnt metal and sawdust. The kind of scent Tony always carried with him, like he’d just stepped out of the workshop for a second—like he might still walk through the door with a sarcastic quip and a smudge of oil on his cheek.

But he doesn’t. He won’t ever again.

Peter stands on the edge of the gathering, fingers tangled together, shoulders drawn tight. Everyone’s here—every hero Tony ever fought beside. Faces Peter grew up idolizing are now dressed in black and silent, eyes fixed on the floating wreath where the arc reactor rests.

Proof That Tony Stark Has a Heart.

Peter’s throat aches just looking at it. That phrase—it’s too simple, too small for what Tony was. But it’s perfect, too. Because underneath the ego, the armor, the impossible genius… Tony did have a heart. A reckless, stubborn, infuriating, human heart. And somehow, against all odds, he’d shared a piece of it with Peter.

Pepper stands by the lake with Morgan in her arms, her face still and composed in the way only someone who’s run out of tears can manage. Morgan’s little hand grips her mother’s sleeve, her small voice asking quiet questions Peter can’t bring himself to overhear.

He watches them, guilt pressing into his ribs like thorns. He doesn’t know if he should walk over, if he even deserves to. Because no matter how much Tony loved him, they were his family—his real one.

Peter was just the kid who got in the way.

Rhodey catches his eye from a distance and gives him a small nod—the kind that means you’re not alone, kid. It’s the only thing keeping Peter upright.

He looks down at his shoes, black and polished, too formal for someone who’s used to running rooftops and swinging through smoke. His hands shake. The same hands that pulled Tony’s armor apart on Titan, that reached for him in those last seconds, that weren’t strong enough to save him.

He hears snippets of whispers around him—muted condolences, words like legacy and sacrifice and hero. But all Peter can think about is the sound Tony made when he said Hey, kid. The softness in it. The way his eyes had steadied on him one last time.

It replays in his head like a broken record.

Pepper steps forward and releases the wreath into the water. It drifts slowly, the reflection of the arc reactor shimmering beneath the sunlight. A breeze carries through the crowd, rustling the trees, brushing past Peter’s face. For a moment, it feels like the world is holding its breath.

And then, the tears come. Quiet, steady, unstoppable.

He presses a hand over his mouth, trying to stifle the sound. He doesn’t want anyone to hear. He doesn’t want to make this about him—Tony would hate that. But he can’t stop shaking. His mentor, his hero, his father figure, his best friend—gone.

He thinks about every “Mr. Stark,” every argument, every lesson. About how Tony once told him, “If you’re nothing without the suit, then you shouldn’t have it.”

Peter finally understands what he meant.

The suit didn’t make him Spider-Man. Tony did.

When the service ends, people begin to drift away—the silence heavy, the kind that clings to your skin long after the sound fades. Peter lingers by the lake, watching the water ripple. His reflection stares back—tired, pale, eyes rimmed with red. He barely recognizes himself anymore.

Pepper walks over eventually, Morgan clinging to her hand. The little girl looks up at him, eyes wide and curious, her voice quiet, “You’re Peter Parker,” she says.

He nods, kneeling down to her height, “Yeah. I was your dad’s friend.”

She tilts her head. “Daddy said you’re really brave.”

That hits him like a punch. He swallows hard, forcing a small smile, “Your dad was braver.”

Pepper places a hand on his shoulder—a soft, grounding gesture. There are no words between them, but there doesn’t need to be. They share the same hollow ache. The same missing piece.

When they leave, Peter stays. He can’t bring himself to move. The sun dips lower, the lake catching the gold of it. The arc reactor still floats, a faint shimmer of blue beneath the dying light.

He whispers, barely audible, “Thank you, Mr. Stark… for everything.”

The wind carries his voice across the water. For a heartbeat, Peter swears he hears something in return—not words, not sound, just a familiar warmth that brushes against him like static.

Maybe it’s just his imagination.
Or maybe—like always—Tony’s still looking out for him.

A year is a strange thing.

Long enough for the world to move on, short enough for your heart to stay behind.

It had been a year since the funeral.
A year since the lakehouse, since the silence, since the arc reactor’s blue glow dimmed into memory. The world had gone on—rebuilt, recovered, remembered. The news called it the Blip Recovery Era. Heroes became stories again. People smiled more easily.

But for Peter Parker, time didn’t heal; it just dulled the edges.

He still woke up some nights expecting a message from Tony on his phone—a sarcastic text about how he broke a suit protocol, or an invite to “swing by the lab, kid.” He still found himself looking toward Stark Tower whenever he passed the skyline, half-hoping to see that familiar red-and-gold streak carving through the clouds.

But the streak was gone. And the man who made it was gone, too.

Peter had tried to move on—to live like Tony wanted him to. He went back to school, helped rebuild neighborhoods, did patrols quietly in the early mornings. He worked with May at FEAST, tutoring kids, fixing the broken things people brought in. He laughed more. He smiled when he could.

But grief was strange like that. It didn’t demand tears all the time—sometimes it just waited for quiet days like this, when the sky was too still and your mind wandered too far.

That’s what led him here.

The old lab.

It was smaller than the tower labs, tucked deep under Stark Industries’ main R&D wing. Peter hadn’t been here since before the snap—not since the days when Tony used to lean against the table, coffee in hand, making fun of his messy handwriting on the whiteboard.

Everything was the same. The faint hum of the dormant tech. The scattered notebooks. The faint smell of solder and oil, sealed in the air like time never moved.

Peter walked slowly, fingers brushing against the workbench. The faint scratches, the initials “T.S. + P.P.” they’d carved into the side of the desk—Tony had joked it was their “friendship plaque.”

He smiled faintly at the memory. “Guess you really left your mark, huh, Mr. Stark…” he murmured.

And then he saw it.

At first, he almost missed it—a plain black storage box sitting under the main console. Dust covered the edges, but there was something taped on top, something handwritten in that fast, sharp script Peter would recognize anywhere.

FOR PETER PARKER.

His heart stopped.

How long was this sitting in here for?

He stared at the words, chest tightening. He knelt down, his fingers trembling as he reached for the lid. There was a moment—a flicker of hesitation. A part of him afraid to open it, afraid of what might be inside. Because opening it meant facing something Tony left behind. And for a heartbeat, he wasn’t sure if he was ready.

But curiosity and love have always been stronger than fear.

The box opened with a soft click. Inside was a sleek, silver drive embedded in a small device—the kind Tony would use to house AIs. There was also a small note folded neatly on top, with the words written in pen:

“In case the kid ever needs me again.”

Peter’s breath hitched. His throat burned.

He swallowed hard, blinking fast as the corners of his eyes blurred. He lifted the device from the box, turning it over in his hands. It was familiar — smooth metal, glowing faintly with blue light as it powered on.

The console on the desk flickered awake, recognizing its creator’s signature. Peter stood still as the holographic interface bloomed into view, light spilling across the lab. The screen pulsed once… twice… then stabilized.

A voice, warm and teasing, filled the air.

“Well, if you’re hearing this, kid, then I’m either… retired, extremely lazy, or, you know—dead. Which, considering your luck, I’m guessing is the last one. Parker luck, am I right?”

Peter froze.
His chest felt like it was caving in.

“Relax, don’t freak out. This isn’t some creepy ghost message. It’s me—or, well, a version of me. A digital backup. Let’s just call it… Tony Stark Lite. And before you roll your eyes, yes, I know you are.”

A soft chuckle came through the speakers—that familiar mix of arrogance and warmth that Peter hadn’t heard in a year.

“Look, kid. I built this because I know how you are. You’re gonna blame yourself for things you couldn’t control, you’re gonna try to do too much, and you’re gonna forget that you’re still just one person. So… consider me your reminder. Your very own AI mentor, complete with wit, charm, and a slightly judgmental personality matrix.”

Peter stood frozen, tears welling as the hologram flickered.

“Name’s STARK. That’s an acronym, by the way—because of course it is. Self-Teaching, Adaptive, Responsive, Knowledge Interface. But you can just call me Tony. Or Boss. Or Mr. Stark 2.0. Whatever makes you roll your eyes the most.”

The hologram shimmered, forming the faint outline of Tony’s face—not fully rendered, but enough to see the expression. That same crooked grin.

“You’ve got a lot ahead of you, kid. And I might not be there to see it, but… I trust you. You’re gonna do great things, Parker. And maybe, if I did this right, you won’t have to do it alone.”

The screen dimmed to standby, leaving only the soft hum of the system.

Peter’s breath came out in shaky bursts. He laughed—quiet, broken, wet. He sank into the chair by the console, pressing his palms to his face.

It wasn’t the same. It would never be the same.

But for the first time in a long time, the silence in the lab didn’t feel empty. It felt full—alive, humming with the ghost of genius, love, and hope that Tony Stark left behind.

Peter looked up at the faint glow on the console, a small, tearful smile breaking through. “Hey, Mr. Stark,” he whispered. “Guess we’re working together again.”

The AI flickered back to life, voice wry and amused.

“About time, kid. Did you miss me?”