Chapter Text
Tony should take the call, but he doesn’t.
It isn’t the first time Steve has reached out to him since Siberia. Tony, for the most part, has ignored him; any conversations they couldn’t avoid he has conducted through staff members. What was the point in being a billionaire if you couldn’t occasionally throw that money at people to handle your star spangled problems for you?
Then Steve calls again. This is unprecedented. Tony lets it ring twice, and then, against better judgment, he picks up without saying hello.
“Tony?”
“Speaking,” he says curtly.
“I think I … found something of yours.”
“Define something, Rogers. I’m in a meeting.”
“I found Spider-Man. Or at least … a kid dressed up as Spider-Man. I’m not entirely sure.”
Tony abruptly stands up from the conference table, exiting the room and leaving a dozen stunned state officials in his wake.
“What do you mean, you found Spider-Man?”
“Actually, more like I caught him. Falling off the Cyclone on Coney Island.”
Tony grits his teeth. It can’t be the kid. He took away his suit specifically to avoid things like Peter falling off the Cyclone on Coney Island, which is a string of words paired together that can’t quite make sense in Tony’s brain.
“I mean — I’m not sure if it’s him. He’s just … he looks like he’s in middle school.”
Fuck. That can only be one Peter Parker. Tony is already pacing down the hallway, blowing past Congressional security, summoning his car.
“I wouldn’t even think to call you, but — well. The beach is on fire and there’s a downed Stark jet in pieces all over it.”
It all snaps into place with alarming speed — moving day. The arms dealer Peter was going on about. The jet, filled to the gills with weapons so lethal that god only knows what kind of havoc they could wreak if put into the wrong hands.
If you’d just listened to me, Peter had protested. Tony bites back his remorse, trying to focus on the task at hand. He’d listened, sure, but not nearly well enough if it came to this.
“Is he conscious?”
“No, but — ”
“I’m in D.C. I’ll be there in 20 minutes.”
“I’m going to take him to my place.”
“No,” says Tony through his teeth, as he engages his Iron Man suit and braces himself for take-off, “you will stay right where you are.”
“I’m not going to stand here and let this kid bleed on a bench.”
Tony can hear the judgment in Steve’s voice. It doesn’t do anything to worsen Tony’s guilt, because god knows he already has enough of it. It does pluck the familiar Steve Rogers-shaped nerve, though, which thrums in him like a second angry, beating heart as he soars over Washington, D.C., rushing northward.
He almost says something biting back, but he can’t afford to. “How bad of shape is he in, exactly?” he asks.
Steve seems to appreciate the magnitude of his concern at once, even if Tony would rather not voice it. “I think he’s gonna be fine,” he says immediately. “But whatever just happened, it did a number on him.”
Tony closes his eyes for the briefest of moments mid-flight. He hates that, underneath the mountain of all of his anger, he knows that he can still trust Steve with something as important to him as this.
“Give me an address.”
Steve obliges, and Tony engages the thrusters on his suit to their fullest capacity. He tries not to, but the flight gives him plenty of time to think — to think about the danger Peter must have put himself in, to think about how much safer he would have been with the full capacity of the suit that Tony took away, to think about how close the kid probably came to mortal peril if there’s a downed jet on Coney Island.
He hadn’t meant to be out of touch for so long; taking away the suit had never been a permanent punishment, but a lesson. But Tony’s schedule got away from him. He’d left the kid hanging for much longer than he had ever intended. He had no way of anticipating the consequences of that in their fullest form until now.
Because of course the kid was always going to keep up the heroics, with or without Tony’s help. He’d done it before and he would do it again. He doubts if there’s anything that would stop a kid like Peter Parker, orders from prominent billionaire tech geniuses be damned.
It feels absurd to knock at the door of the nondescript apartment that Steve’s address leads him to, but he can’t exactly bust in, either.
Steve opens the door, and Tony is a little taken aback by his appearance. The other man was only cleared a few weeks ago, but he looks almost … unkempt. The beard and the weary eyes might look ordinary on any other New Yorker, but on America’s Golden Boy they look like a borderline cry for help.
“Where’s the kid?” Tony asks, blowing past Steve.
He doesn’t miss Steve’s slightly indignant exhale. “On the couch,” he says, pointing. “I patched him up best I could. He’s been in and out.”
Right now Peter is decidedly out, looking every inch the kid that he is with his skinny frame splayed out on Steve’s couch cushions and bandaging on his forehead and midsection where there are significant rips in the ridiculous 100 percent cotton getup that Tony first found him in when the kid popped up on his radar online.
“How … how old is he, exactly?” asks Steve.
Tony can tell he’s trying not to pick a fight about it, but he ignores him anyway, leaning down next to Peter. “F.R.I.D.A.Y., run vitals,” he mutters, putting a hand on the kid’s forehead.
Steve was right. No permanent damage done. A concussion, a couple of cracked ribs, previous signs of internal bleeding that already corrected itself thanks to the kid’s healing factor. For the first time since he heard Steve say the word Spider-Man on the other end of the line, he breathes easily.
He reengages his suit, scooping the kid up like the rag doll he is. Peter flinches and mutters something incomprehensible into the metal of Tony’s suit, but his eyes stay closed. Even as Tony’s leaving the apartment, he’s ten steps ahead of himself — getting the kid to medical, getting his friend Ned to call his aunt as an alibi, calling Happy to make sure all the highly lethal weaponry from the jet is accounted for before Tony inadvertently ends up with more blood on his hands.
He walks past a silent, watchful Steve without incident, but pauses at the door.
“Thank you,” he says, begrudgingly.
Steve has never been one to lord something over anyone. He nods.
“The kid,” he asks, tentatively. “What’s his name?”
Tony’s first thought is to ignore him and head out the door. Steve has no business knowing Spider-Man’s identity — but then again, neither did Tony in the first place. And he knows, in that bitter corner of his heart, how much Peter idolizes Cap. If he cuts off Steve’s access to Peter, it’ll be for his own sake, not for the kid’s. Somehow it doesn’t sit right with him.
“Peter,” he says. And then, after a moment: “Parker.”
Steve nods solemnly. Tony should be glad, maybe, that the kid might have someone else in his corner, but he still can’t quite see past the aftermath of Steve’s betrayal to appreciate it.
A few hours after Peter is settled into a guest room in the not-quite-yet-emptied Avengers tower, he blearily wakes up and blinks around at the unfamiliar setting. In true zero-to-sixty teenage fashion, Peter jerks up in an instant, like a battery that recharged all at once.
“What — how did —” His eyes widen when he sees Tony sitting there. “Oh, shit.”
“You’re fine, kid,” says Tony. “You’re at the tower.”
Peter turns a furious shade of red. “Oh man,” he says. “The jet. Did — ”
“Everything’s accounted for. Everyone’s safe. Thanks to you,” says Tony, who was, in the meantime, debriefed on the situation with all the details they could manage. He can’t quite decide what to do, so he pats the kid on the shoulder a little awkwardly. “You did good, kid. Now get some rest.”
Peter nods rapidly, sinking a bit back into the pillows. Tony wonders for a moment if he’s too worked up to get back to sleep, but his eyelids are already heavy, resisting whatever confusion he has written all over his face.
“I … I had this crazy dream that Captain America was on the boardwalk,” says Peter. “And then I was, like, in his apartment.”
“Oh, that wasn’t a crazy dream, kid. That happened.”
Peter’s eyes widen. Then he says, in the most grim, resigned tone that Tony has ever heard him use in the few months of knowing him, “Please, Mr. Stark. You have to kill me.”
Tony can’t lie to himself — it stings a bit, how immediately and wholeheartedly Peter is concerned about what Steve thinks of him. He knows he doesn’t have exclusive rights over being the kid’s hero or worrying about his welfare, but given the rest of the circumstances, this feels like an unwitting blow.
Tony makes himself swallow it down, clapping Peter on the shoulder again. In the morning, he’ll talk to Peter what happened; in the morning, he’ll figure out what their next steps are; in the morning, he’ll try to tell Peter he’s proud of him in a real way, and not the stilted way his own father always did. But right now, Peter is a kid who needs to sleep.
“I would,” he says, as Peter’s eyes start to slide shut again, “but I don’t want to beat your aunt to the punch.”