Work Text:
Peter doesn’t want to seem like a whiner. No doubt, there are a lot of reasons why it’s awesome to be a smart, responsible guy with superpowers.
Even he can admit that the muscles are nice. The healing factor is very nice—super thoughtful of that spider to bequeath it to him or whatever.
Flexibility? Big ups.
Off-the-charts strength and speed? So much fun (it’s been over a decade since he accidentally broke a faucet or a subway car door or another person’s hand, after all).
Enough energy to actually accomplish the things his above-average intelligence equips him to do, like earning a second PhD—biomolecular engineering this time—while also TA-ing a few physics classes and serving on the Avengers roster? Amazing.
Whatever his Peter Tingle is? If everyone could stop calling it that, he’d have no complaints.
Hyper-sensitivity, though? That part is—if you’ll excuse his language—a big bag of ugly dicks.
Because here’s the thing: Peter can’t come.
Well, no, that’s overly dramatic and not even accurate. He can. He even does sometimes—just not from anything another person does to him; he always has to make it happen for himself. Even then, he’s extremely particular, and what he’s particular about varies from moment to moment, and it’s tricky to stay in the right headspace for long enough to tip himself over the edge.
Yes, the spider bite deserves a big chunk of the blame for this. There’s a reason why a normal dial goes to ten instead of eleven. Eleven is not actually better most of the time, but especially when it comes to this stuff.
His overactive senses mean that sex with a partner is simply too much for his brain to properly process: Things that apparently feel really good to other people get processed as too much for him, an overloaded circuit. Intense sensation doubles back on itself, stymied by his brain, like he’s the victim of some rare and totally rude form of auto-immune—his body attacking its own pleasure. There’s no electrical panel in his body where he can reset a tripped breaker. And sometimes he’s less an overloaded circuit than just a jumbled heap of sparking wires: Flashes of intense pleasure turn to pain before fizzling out entirely.
At best, it takes him a really fucking long time to finish after his partner already has. At worst, he gets completely turned off all of a sudden right when things are supposed to be getting good. Sixty to zero. A windless day upon the sea.
The one thing he can do is try to limit the amperage, which is why he prefers to handle himself himself. This is especially handy (lol) because his desire for sex hasn’t been hampered much by his issues.
Back in Peter’s early twenties, when all of his partners were one-night random hookups or fuckbuddies like Wade, this issue of his was a bit of a bummer, sure, but it wasn’t that big a deal. It mostly made him get creative, and he liked focusing on the other person anyway, liked mentally getting off on their enjoyment if nothing else, so yeah, not a huge loss. He spent a lot of time watching sex ed videos that definitely weren’t written with highly sensitized enhanced humans like him as the target audience but that he identified with all the same. It was comforting, at least, to reassure himself that an orgasm wasn’t the be-all-end-all of every sexual encounter, and to learn that he wasn’t the only person in the world who preferred their own touch to that of another. He made his peace with it, sort of. He learned not to expect orgasms outside of his precious alone-time, and sex with other people could be about… all sorts of other things.
But it turns out that sex in a committed relationship is a beast of a different color, and when that relationship is with Tony Stark? Well. Now sex is where he sees all his damage writ large.
It also doesn’t help that every once in a while, the reality becomes too much for Peter. He sees it all from too close up and too far away at the same time. His Tony morphs back into Tony Stark: The man he’s idolized for as long as he can remember. The hero who saved New York, saving Peter’s life and the lives of everyone he cared about. The inventor of fucking time travel. The entire universe’s pinch hitter. The man who redefines the realm of possibility on the daily without even trying all that hard.
He’s also the man who helped Peter, who saw enough potential in him to seek him out and elevate him to the level of an Avenger despite many good reasons not to, who chewed him out for stupid behavior and didn’t give approval easily, who was aloof and unavailable until it suited him not to be, who didn’t know how to show care and affection proportionately. The man who, in spite of all that, somehow wound up loving Peter and taking the gigantic risk of making it known, first to Peter himself and soon after to basically everyone they knew.
So yeah, the Tony-Stark’s-dick-is-in-my-ass of it all can be hard to overcome sometimes, no matter how accustomed he’s become to Tony being a regular person in his life over the course of the past decade and his partner for the past four months.
And it’s taken a lot of conversation—heated, awkward, painful, tricky conversation—for Tony to stop believing that Peter is just trying to protect Tony’s feelings by shifting all the blame onto himself.
The man has clearly been using every hard-won ounce of emotional maturity not to take Peter’s issues personally, but all the therapy in the world can’t cure Tony from being who he is (nor would Peter want it to). The man still takes his perceived failure as a challenge. Board-certified sex gods don’t become thus certified without learning how to put in the work, after all, and the more Tony wants to make it happen for Peter, the more Peter’s pleasure gets lost in the anxiety rattling around his brain until he’s not just the guy who can’t come like a normal person, he’s also the guy who can’t make his partner happy, can’t put his partner at ease, can’t be fixed even by Tony Stark.
And maybe it took Peter going to therapy for him to realize that the way he thinks about his body during sex isn’t far off from the way he thinks about it when he’s on patrol or in battle. It turns out that the gaps and cracks in the deepest, most firmly held beliefs he has about his elemental self might have a little something to do with why he became a superhero who regularly sacrifices his own happiness, pleasure, and safety for the wellbeing of strangers.
Because while altruism and responsibility might be pretty amazing qualities for patrolling in the neighborhood and fighting on the battlefield, the roots of those values don’t do much to help him own his body. They don’t wire him for pleasure. They don’t get him off.
And just maybe, in spite of all this frustration and all this therapy, it’s still hard for him not to see his inclination to self-sacrifice and self-effacement as a positive thing overall.
He still doesn’t want to throw that inclination away, no matter how fucked up it might be on multiple fronts.
So it would be fair to say that it’s not just the hand he was dealt by that radioactive spider that makes sex tricky. He’s got a whole bag of issues, and sometimes it feels like someone zapped that bag with an undetectable extension charm when he wasn’t looking.
And being with Tony, really making a go of it, means facing those issues and working through them alone and together, because apparently that’s how sexagenarian divorced dads with an unlimited therapy budget and dense layers of PTSD handle things.
All that to say, he is not expecting this morning to go as well as it does.
For the first time ever, their day starts quietly.
Given their respective responsibilities, Peter and Tony rarely have the chance to wake up in the same bed at all, but it’s all the better this time because there’s no emergency calling them to immediate wakefulness, no packed schedule worrying them with its demands. Peter sent off his final dissertation chapter to his supervisor for comment before Tony picked him up last night, and Tony has nothing pressing from the Avengers or Stark Resilient at the moment. Even Morgan, whose social calendar leaves very little room for anything other than cello and tae kwon do, has the weekend off from rehearsals and competitions. They’ve got two full days together at the lake house to do whatever they want.
(And yes, sure, obviously he loves Morgan to pieces and is really glad to have settled into his role as another caring adult in her life, and he’s excited to have time with her; still—and call Peter selfish if you must—a lot of what he wants involves only him and Tony.)
Peter rouses first and, finding Tony still asleep beside him, carefully rolls over to grab his phone from the nightstand and immerses himself in hard-hitting meme research for ten minutes or so before he feels Tony stirring.
He catches the man’s smile when he half-turns towards him.
Tony looks peaceful. Content. His eyes still heavy and hazy from sleep.
Peter tips his chin back, and their lips meet without either of them seeming to think about it, casual and familiar, and then Tony’s arm wraps around him from behind and Peter’s hand reaches for Tony’s bicep, lands there on the densely corded muscle, and a switch is flipped inside him—in the good way.
After the last time they had sex, over a week ago now, featuring ninety minutes of repeated attempts that only ever got Peter about sixty percent of the way to the finish line, he’d told Tony not to worry about it anymore, not to try at all to make Peter come, because maybe then Peter could stop worrying about it himself, could stop feeling like he’s a disappointment, defective, wrong. And maybe not feeling that way would help him relax into something approaching normal function.
(Maybe. Eventually.)
(He’s not quite at ‘hopefully’ yet.)
Tony seems to have kept Peter’s request in mind, or maybe his continued sleep-haze is just dulling his usual dextrous intensity, because the way he slides his hand down Peter’s hip is new. There’s no urgency there, just appreciation. He’s not trying to get Peter going with teasing touches, just feeling him, confirming that he has Peter’s lines memorized. And yet, underneath that, there’s still somehow an unmistakable current of intent, that this will lead onward if Peter wants it to.
It’s a mystery to him how Tony can manage to touch him with what feels like proprietary confidence while also seeming to ask permission with every touch.
The man is constantly making things that should be contradictory compatible.
“What time is it?” Tony whispers, snuggling up against Peter’s back.
“Almost seven-thirty,” Peter replies, matching Tony’s hushed tones even though there’s no need. The bedrooms are perfectly soundproof, so Morgan won’t hear a thing from her room down the hall. It feels nice, though, keeping quiet. It lulls him back into a sleepy state. It makes this moment between them feel secret and precious and breakable, gives limits that take the pressure off his imagination.
“The teenager won’t emerge from her lair until at least ten.”
That hand smoothes a steady path up along Peter’s hip to the top of his thigh and back again, keeping to the territory covered by Peter’s boxer briefs.
“Are you saying we could sneak out for breakfast without her?”
He feels Tony’s low answering chuckle against his neck, right below his ear, the spot his lover has claimed as his own since day one of this thing between them. Like he can’t help himself now that he’s landed in that spot, Tony brushes a kiss there. His hand strays from its path just a little on the way up, his fingers pressing in towards the little smooth area beside Peter’s gradually hardening dick. Peter buzzes pleasantly at that, still feeling hypnotized rather than on edge like usual.
There’s a chill in the air around them, but under the duvet he’s perfectly cozy, his skin pebbling from slowly building arousal rather than cold.
“Yes?” Tony breathes against him a few moments later.
The word zings through him, loaded as it is. That most basic question will never not be tied in his memory to the first time Tony kissed him, when, having declared his feelings in only mildly confusing terms—the piece he remembers most clearly is when Tony gave a nod to Peter’s fully developed frontal lobe—he stepped into Peter’s space in the lab. “Yes, no, maybe someday but not today?” Peter had barely let him finish the question before whispering his answer with tightly closed eyes. He’d been shocked and confused, but his mouth ran ahead while his brain struggled to figure out what the actual fuck was happening.
“Yes,” Peter replies again now, his own breath sounding heavy, and to punctuate the point further he intercepts Tony’s patient hand and uses the motion to pull Tony’s body fully against him, nestling his ass against the older man. It always takes time for Tony to catch up in the hardness department, given he’s got more than three decades on Peter, but the novelty of this quiet morning seems to be affecting him, too, as it’s more than morning wood that Peter feels now as he languorously circles his hips.
Fuck me, he wants to say, hard but slow. But he doesn’t want to break their hallowed little cocoon to fetch supplies from the drawer or change positions to do proper prep. He wants to float here. He’s half tempted to forgo prep entirely and just see what his body would do when faced with that near-impossible stretch and nothing more than a little spit. Maybe if he made it a bit more painful his body would turn the pain to pleasure instead of the other way around. But this moment feels sacred enough on its own that he doesn’t need to up the ante.
Slowly he drags the hand he claimed, hooks Tony’s thumb on the waistband of his underwear, drags it further until Tony gets the picture and smoothly divests Peter of his only clothing before doing the same for himself.
They’re skin to skin from head to toe now, still safe under the soft duvet with its weight holding them down ever so slightly. Peter wets his right hand and reaches back for Tony’s hardness, slicks it up, and settles that glorious cock between his own ass cheeks before gripping Tony’s hip and pulling him in even closer.
“Like this. Come on.”
Tony doesn’t need the encouragement, of course, but from the little punched-out noise he makes it seems that he likes it. He sets to slowly and filthily grinding against Peter, the firm ridge of the underside of his dick glancing against Peter’s hole, which had already begun to ache from neglect and desire in the few short minutes it took to get to this point. Tony rearranges them to settle his limbs more comfortably for the long haul. He curves around Peter, licks and kisses and nuzzles at that special spot on Peter’s neck, stoking the fire that’s growing inside Peter and safeguarding him from whatever might break the spell they’ve fallen under.
Tony is almost always loud, demonstrative, responsive, but the silence of the morning makes him muffle his responses against Peter’s skin, turns his usual bawdy groans to whispered swears, hot breath ruffling Peter’s hair, making the whole thing feel at once illicit and holy.
It’s easy to lose himself in the feeling, novel as it is. For once, feeling is the part that’s working just fine, maybe because his prostate and his dick are currently being left alone. Those uninterrupted grinding thrusts keep up a steady thrum of tension around his entrance without overwhelming him with too much sensation at once, while the soundtrack of reverential filth that Tony provides gets his brain going in the right direction.
Indirect stimulation is definitely a game-changer.
Peter should’ve asked for this ages ago.
Still, there’s a tiny part of his brain that threatens to break through the haze, and it’s getting stronger the more awake he gets. It wants to tell him that this never happens, so why should he think it would continue. It wants to alert him to his morning breath. It wants to be sure that Peter understands just how broken he is and what an inconvenience he is. It wants to remind him that he has eighty-seven pages of his dissertation left to format, including several dozen footnotes that might still contain little jokes to himself that he forgot to delete, and is it possible to get your PhD candidacy thrown out if your dissertation panel doesn’t find your puns amusing and oh yeah never mind the anxiety is officially breaking through now—
“You’re the best thing I’ve ever felt. Even like this. You’re still so fucking perfect.”
Tony pants the words against Peter’s shoulder before biting into it, unwittingly pulling Peter out of his mental spiral and back into his body. Peter barely restrains himself from crying out, gasping instead. It speeds up his breathing in a way that his whole body responds to, ramping up the pleasure until it reaches a delightful plateau. This is as far as he usually gets, although the plateau is rarely this high. Tony’s words have the added benefit of reassurance, telling Peter it’s more than okay to be doing this, that he’s not cheating Tony out of something better, that what works for Peter is good enough.
Peter licks his hand again, but this time reaches it down to his own dick and grips himself firmly around the base. He rotates his hand, careful to avoid the head, and in the ensuing wave of sensation he can almost see a gauge slowly ticking upwards: six… seven… eight…
“Fuck, shit, sorry,” Tony gasps, pausing to slick himself up again with his own spit.
Peter can’t help but laugh a little because of course, this might be a hallowed moment, but it’s still happening in real life, and his life to boot, so nothing is ever actually that easy.
The hair on the back of Peter’s head ruffles with Tony’s answering breathy laughter. “Oh, so you’re laughing at me now? You little shit.” And he shifts himself around again, his purpose clear once Peter feels a firm grip on both his ass cheeks, squeezing them together like a vice around Tony’s cock. He’s pinned against the mattress now, his own cock crammed against the ultra-soft sheets, as Tony increases the speed of his thrusts.
This is the point where the older man would normally check in with Peter, try to elevate Peter’s experience with the aim of getting them to finish near the same time. When he does so, it almost always has the exact opposite of the intended effect, alerting Peter to what Tony thinks he should be feeling, how close he ought to be by this point, and since in reality he’s always so far from it, his disappointment in himself rids him of whatever level of pleasure he’s actually experiencing, guaranteeing that he’ll never be able to finish at all.
Today, though. Fucking hell.
Tony doesn’t check in, doesn’t reach around for Peter’s dick. He just plows on, breath getting heavier, moans threatening to rip free in full voice. Unable to fit his hand underneath himself and resume working his dick, Peter contents himself with turning his head and looking back at Tony for the first time since their wakeup kiss. Head thrown back, muscles flexed, sweat glistening on his neck, he’s overwhelmingly beautiful, lost to his own pleasure in a way that Peter can’t even envy because he’s too proud of being responsible for it.
“Peter, Peter, Peter.”
Tony’s hips speed up further, and with no help from his spider precognition Peter knows what he’ll say next.
“Fuck, Pete, I’m gonna come.”
And Peter groans, full-throated, as if he’s the one hurtling unstoppably towards the edge, and seconds later he feels the slick warmth of Tony’s spend spread from his hole all the way up to his lower back, slathered by Tony’s final sharp thrusts. He feels Tony’s thick, impossibly hard cock twitch against his hole, and it almost feels like the clenching of his own orgasm. He’s still keyed up, but somehow it’s more satisfying than anything.
He lies there, eyes closed, breathing hard, while Tony partially collapses against his back, barely holding himself up on his elbows. Once they’ve both caught their breath, Peter starts to shift his weight to indicate his intention, and Tony gets the picture and rolls off of him so they can face each other. Peter briefly considers jerking himself off, but the secondhand satisfaction is really working for him this time, suspending him somewhere between blue balls and baseline with no sense of urgency. He bravely ignores his continued hardness and the mess on his backside in favor of cuddling up with his lover.
They’re both having trouble keeping their eyes open. The afterglow enfolds them both, and it seems like they’re going to drift off again. Peter accesses a new level of contentment from the realization that Tony isn't overthinking this or beating himself up for pursuing his own pleasure.
Forcing his eyes open, Tony mumbles, “Was that what you had in mind?”
Peter honestly can’t remember if it is, but he’s sure of something that matters more.
“I loved it,” he whispers. “I love you.”
As he dozes, Peter lets his scattered thoughts swim around, and when they coalesce, they feel a lot like hope.