Chapter Text
It all started with a late-night phone call. It was about 11pm and Tony was in his lab packing stuff away as he wouldn’t be in there for a while. Pepper was in their baby’s room, half asleep in the rocking chair as she nursed their newborn, Morgan.
Groggy and lethargic from his first week as a father, Tony was tempted not to answer the ringing phone, but the fear that it might be some sort of emergency won out. He couldn’t remember ever being this tired, and that was coming from a man who used to go days without sleep, and practically lived off of coffee. The thrill and exhaustion of his daughter’s birth followed by a week of getting use to the new routine of having a baby around had really done him over.
“Tony Stark.”
“Hi, yeah, we have a kid here who needs somewhere to stay tonight, can you do it?”
“Sorry, what?” His sleep-fogged brain cleared as he tried to deduce who could be on the other side of the phone, since they hadn’t bothered to give a name. Given the fact that they were asking him to take in a kid, Tony could only guess that it was someone in relation to social services.
“We have a kid in need of an emergency placement, like, now. Can you do it?”
Okay… so more than likely social services. Why the hell were they calling? They hadn’t heard off of them in months, after they’d said that they wanted to wait a few years before fostering to look after their daughter.
“We’re not an approved placement.” He informed the man on the phone, because surely this had to be some sort of mistake, he couldn’t figure out how them getting called out of the blue to take in a kid would make sense otherwise. “We said we wanted to wait a few years, we just had a baby so we can’t have another little kid running around.”
“He’s fourteen, so you don’t really have to watch him, you just need to give him food and a place to sleep.”
This felt like a trick somehow… Last year he and Pepper had been having a tone of arguments about what they wanted to do now that things had calmed down after the fight against Thanos, which they’d won after Thor struck him in the head with his hammer. Pepper wanted to settle down, she was tired of living in fear for his life, and Tony… Tony was ready to settle down too. Something he’d never thought would happen. They were older, so they figured maybe having a baby wasn’t the best way to go about starting a family, they didn’t want to risk having any complications with birth. They thought about fostering, because why wouldn’t they want to provide a home for a kid in need? They had more than enough to share. But then Pepper had gotten pregnant and just like that all of their previous reservations about having a baby had faded as they prepared for their baby girl’s entrance into the world.
“We’ll take him off of you in a few days, just one or two nights max, we’re just looking for a place to leave him while we find somewhere more permanent that’s capable of dealing with his kind of trauma.” The social worker continued, breaking through Tony’s spiralling thoughts. Trauma?
“If he needs help, what makes you think we can handle it?” He asked instead, as he knew he’d personally hate it if some stranger was prying into his issues.
“It says you’ve suffered from PTSD, so already you’d be better than most at dealing with him if you have experience in what he’s going through. Not that he’s really a behavioural problem, very withdrawn actually. Literally all you’d have to do is provide him with a bed and feed him.”
Really going above and beyond for this kid, weren’t they? Also, PTSD? What the hell had happened to this poor fourteen year old to curse him with that? He didn’t like the way the man said ‘dealing with him’ as though the kid having issues somehow made him a burden, and he was also mildly annoyed at the way the social worker was generalising the mental illness. He was sure what haunted his mind was vastly different to what plagued this boy’s one, but still, he found himself soften as he empathised with this poor kid whom he didn’t even know.
“We just moved into a new house, our guest room isn’t even set up yet.” He said, to convince himself more than anyone. Because no, he couldn’t do this, they couldn’t do this. Not right now. This had come at perhaps the worst time, what with everything going on in their lives right now.
“Do you have a mattress, or a sofa?”
“Yeah…”
“That’s good enough, look, I can’t sit around and chat, do you want the kid or not? Because he’s about to be discharged and currently he has no where to go. So if you don’t want him I’ll have to call a bunch of other people.”
Something about the way he phrased that made Tony feel immensely guilty. It was probably how he said ‘don’t want him’, because it’s not like he had anything against the kid, he hadn’t even met him, he just couldn’t take him in right now. He knew that, so he didn’t know why he felt a sense of panic as the social worker talked about moving on to other people. Maybe it was the way the social worker’s uncaring attitude made him worry about what place he’d dump the kid in if he said no, or maybe it was the pure fact that he was childish and someone threatening to take something away from him made him want it more. Who’s to know?
“What do you mean by discharged? Where is he?” He asked to both buy some time to reasonablise saying either yes or no to taking the boy in, and out of mild curiosity.
“ER, don’t let that scare you off though, he got into a bad time with his last foster family, ended up with a few bruises and a broken bone. They just need to finish doing the rape kit and then he’ll be on his merry way.”
Holy shit! Excuse me?
“What’s his name?” He asked through gritted teeth as he tried not to lash out at the man and his nonchalant attitude, mind made up on keeping the boy.
“Peter. His name is Peter Parker.”
“I’ll take him.” Pepper is going to kill me.