Archive of Our Own ^beta

Tony’s phone lights up on the desk, flashing with MJ’s name.

He wouldn’t say she calls him a lot. She’s definitely more of a texting person, like most of the kids, or a video call if she’s rushing somewhere between classes, and she’s like Happy when she does that. All forehead. Peter is more of an everything type of communicator—phone calls, texting, video calls, video messages, voice messages, secret Karen to Friday messages, and seeing MJ’s name reminds Tony that he hasn’t heard from Pete yet today.

It’s about four in the afternoon, and Tony sees the time stagnant just above MJ’s name, and he narrows his eyes before reaching for his phone. He knows Pete is busy—he’s in his sophomore year at MIT and he’s got his fingers in as many pies as Tony would have expected, and more, if Tony’s being honest with himself. And he’s still keeping up Spider-Man, because of course he is, and he doesn’t have his guy in the chair to help him because Ned’s prank application to Yale was actually accepted and his grandmother couldn’t not let him take that opportunity.

Not that Peter ever lets anyone help him, anyway. Everyone was lucky enough to walk away with their lives after all the Thanos bullshit was resolved—they got a lot more than bumps and bruises but they’re all alive, so Pete has plenty of help at his disposal. He seems to shut down when they step in with help without him asking, but he never fucking asks to begin with, so it’s this terrible circle, around and around and around.

Tony worries. Of course he does. And not only has he been keeping up with his Spider-Man duties, he’s been out there more than he ever used to be. And Tony doesn’t know how the hell that’s possible.

And he’s not living with MJ until next semester, and she’s so bright and busy that those two have to schedule their time together. It reminds Tony of him and Pepper, before the end of the world, and his heart hurts for Pete.

He swallows hard, and grabs his phone before it slips to voicemail.

“Hey,” he says, fast. “Everything alr—”

“Hey, no, I don’t know where he is,” MJ says, in a rush of breath. “I don’t know where he is, Tony, and I know I have access to that tracking thing, but it feels weird for me to do that, and it doesn’t feel weird for you to do that, so you should do that. And find him and tell me what’s going on.”

“Okay, calm down,” Tony says, getting up and stepping back from his workstation.

“You know you can’t tell me to calm down, because I’m calm, and I’m always calmer than you because you’re like, inherently, not calm. At all, about anything, but especially about your family—”

“Okay, this is not calm,” Tony says, starting to pace, even though he’s not calm either, she’s right.

She sighs loudly in his ear.

“When was the last time you saw him?” Tony asks, one hand on his hip, and the bots follow his movements. “I know you two are busy—”

“We are, we’re so busy, and it’s so bad, and it’s even worse this year than it was last year,” she says, and she sounds like she’s somewhere out where it’s windy, and she might even be running. “And he insists on—whatever, it doesn’t matter, we had a date, a scheduled date, that we scheduled and prepared for and it was one we planned out and had to move around a couple of times because of my internship and my hours and one of the times he was out all night—it doesn’t matter, we kept missing it, and it was thing, it became a thing, it was a thing and he didn’t show up and now he’s not answering. And I figured he could, you know, be out there doing what he does, but he’s not answering and usually he answers when I call multiple times in a row. And he’s not, he—he hasn’t.”

“Okay,” Tony says, and he shifts into that mode he has in reserve for situations like this. “Okay, I’m gonna check—”

“I’m heading to his apartment to make sure,” she says, and she sounds like she’s climbing stairs. “I know I’m probably being—I probably should have waited to call you until I checked here but—”

“It’s okay,” Tony says, and he sits back down, ready to track Peter’s suit. “It’s alright, I’m glad you called me, we can—we can figure this out—”

“He just, you know—you know him,” MJ says, and Tony does know him, and he’s been a little worried about him lately. More than a little worried. Sometimes he knows that busy is too busy, and Peter takes everything to heart and prioritizes everything but himself and he doesn’t want any fucking help and May is off in Kokomo with Happy for the next week or so, so she’s not available right now—she would be, in a pinch, because they’re all always available for Peter if he needs them or even if he doesn’t—but that’s him, he’s—

Things have been harder. He doesn’t really talk about it, when they talk, when they meet up for lunch, in all his little back and forths, but Tony knows and he can tell and no matter whether Peter wants help or not, Tony should—

Peter’s suit tracking is offline.

Has been for—a day and half.

“Jesus, Tony,” MJ says. “His phone and his—keys are still here. In his apartment.”

Tony feels like he’s freezing over, like he’s gathering all the February cold from outside and pulling it into his body. He stares at the lack of suit tracking and listens to her breathing and falls into a time when Peter wasn’t here, and he does that a lot, he does that in every universe where he had to experience it, and he blinks and sort of hates himself and feels sick. Sick in waves and jumbles and a newfound ache all over.

“Tony,” MJ says, startling him back into himself. “Tony, he’s—he doesn’t do that, he’s always got his phone. He always does. Do you—do you see anything with the suit, is it—is he in it, or like—is he—”

“No, he’s not,” Tony says, thinking of his empty apartment, thinking of the last time he was there with him, the last time he was here with him, the last time he talked to him. He talked to him yesterday, he—he was busy, he was in the middle of two projects and he’d helped the fire department save a couple people and he was still on that crime syndicate thing he’d been working on and he still hadn’t caught that electric asshole but he was working on that too—

Tony’s sweating now. Something foreboding.

“Okay, yeah, I’m not calm,” MJ says, and he can almost see her standing there by herself.

“Me either,” Tony says, his eyes burning. “I’m coming over there.”

~

Tony doesn’t really think until he gets there. He’s got about ten different things he can set into motion but he doesn’t want to start panicking before he needs to be panicking. Even though he is panicking. It’s just a silent panic right now, a stormcloud clinging to his forehead, and its lightning and thunder only gets worse when he comes face to face with MJ.

She hugs him like she’s worried.

She pulls away, and she looks at him from under furrowed eyebrows. “Have we, uh—have we activated, the uh—”

“Nothing’s activated yet,” Tony says, sucking in a breath, his hands on his hips.

“How do we even call him?” MJ asks, and she’s mimicking his stance and his movements, because she’s panicking too. It’s been hours already, even though he gets here a little faster than a fucking commercial plane, it’s still been too long, with Peter gone. “He’s never done this before, I mean, I know you know. Things have been a little different, a little—I mean—”

“I know how college is,” Tony says, swallowing hard, “but with him and everything he does, Christ—”

“I know, and we all try to—”

“Help, I know,” Tony says. He swallows hard, and looks around, panicking a little bit more. “Okay, uh, we’re gonna—”

She twists her hands together, anxiety coming off of her in waves. “Tony, like a month ago, he got really bad at a party.” She says it fast, like she’s confessing something. “Really bad. Like. Very very drunk, holding a rum bottle, tequila shots down his shirt—”

“Peter?” Tony nearly exclaims, leaning forward.

She nods. “He doesn’t usually—”

“No, he doesn’t usually,” Tony says, feeling his mouth go dry. He can’t even imagine that. He doesn’t even really want to ask details.

He thinks of himself. That alcohol-soaked version of himself.

“But he got really bad and was really—really sort of—I wouldn’t say depressed but it wasn’t good either, and he was just saying things and freaking me out but of course he tells me not to tell May or tell you or Ned—”

“And you listened to him?” Tony yells.

She gives him a look.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry for yelling,” Tony says, and he runs his hand over his face. “He’s just—we’ve just got—”

“He could be anywhere, he could be doing anything,” MJ says, shrugging. “Maybe…maybe he’s in another suit. I know he’s got more than one.”

“Right,” Tony says, trying to think about that too.

“And some of them don’t have trackers in them—”

“Yet,” Tony snaps. “That’s only for safety. Not me being overbearing.”

But if wanting to know where his kid is when he might be injured or dying is overbearing, then he’s overbearing. He doesn’t care.

“But he could be in one of those,” MJ says, nodding. She crosses her arms over her chest and keeps nodding. “Right?”

“He could,” Tony says. “Maybe.”

They stare at each other for a few seconds. They know they’re on the edge of activating a search team, which would be stupid if he was out doing his normal thing and just forgot his phone, or held up in a lab somewhere finishing a project or doing his tutoring or volunteer work or any of the number of things that he’s got going. They could activate a mini-militia because they’re worried. They could do a whole ton of stupid shit because they’re worried.

“He’s been worrying you lately, hasn’t he?” Tony asks, his voice wavering.

“Maybe,” she says. “I don’t—is he worrying you?”

“He always worries me,” Tony says.

“Because that’s just who you are—”

“Yeah.”

She sighs. She glances off to the side, and he sees her notice a pile of books, and messy notepads beside them. “He’s been busy. We’ve both been busy, and it’s sucked, and half the time I just wanna quit it all and take a semester off and try to get him to do the same thing because he’s just—I mean, he deserves some time off. I hate not seeing him as much as I used to when we were at home, we just—we both bit off more than we can chew but he’s—he’s Spider-Man, too, and that’s its own—good, and horrible thing, at the same time—”

MJ doesn’t usually get worked up. That’s one of the reasons why Tony loves her for Peter, because she’s generally level-headed and keeps him down to earth, and evens him out when he’s the one getting crazy, and the only thing she really gets super animated about is him. But Tony can see her worry all over her. Set in tense shoulders like jaws.

“Okay,” he says. “I’m gonna—we’re both gonna stay here tonight.”

“Okay,” she says, nodding again. “I can make up the couch, we actually—washed the sheets from last time—”

“Okay,” Tony says, and okay okay okay. “If he’s not back in the morning, then we’ll—pull out all the stops and start doing the crazy shit. And I’ll find him and we’ll have—an intervention.”

“You think he needs an intervention?” MJ asks, her eyes going big. “I don’t think he’s doing drugs—and the party was just the one thing—he’s not, he’s not like that, you know that—”

Tony shakes his head. “No, more like—a sort of—stop this, slow down—type…intervention,” he says, because his mind is going all over the place and he feels insane and he wishes Peter would walk through the fucking door already.

“Right, right,” MJ says, a little faraway sounding. “I have a few things I need to cancel—for tomorrow, because I wanna be here—I shouldn't tell Ned yet, right? Or try to—you’re not gonna call May and Happy?”

“Not yet,” Tony says, even though he’s not even sure about that. “Tomorrow, we’ll—know more—”

He wants to trust him. This is him trusting him. He’s had to trust him since he moved away a lot more, and for a while he was coming out here periodically and annoying the shit out of Peter because he was being a helicopter parent, but he stopped doing that because he was trying to trust him.

It’s not that he doesn’t trust him. He does, he knows that he always makes the right decisions and does the right thing.

Well, almost always.

Usually.

But Peter is an emotional person, he’s sensitive, he’s—susceptible, Tony gets that, he’s empathetic and wonderful and too caring and way too responsible sometimes, to his own fucking detriment, and what if he’s lying in a ditch somewhere? Because he let it all go to his head and overwhelm him? Because he did too much?

Tony doesn’t even know the exact situation yet, because Peter isn’t here and MJ doesn’t know either. But they’ve got no suit tracking, a phone and keys at home. No note, no nothing. It isn’t the best thing to be left with. And Tony knows they’re gonna take the night and wait it out and he doesn’t know if that’s the right thing to do, either.

Hours and hours and hours passing when he could be needing help.

Is that what it is, to trust someone? To let time pass when they might need you?

He feels sort of sick.

Not sort of, very. He feels like he could projectile vomit at any minute and he has to make sure he finds the goddamn kitchen trash if he’s gonna do that.

“Have you eaten yet?” he croaks, realizing that MJ is going through her own head drama by the look on her face. “You guys were gonna—I’ll make you something, okay?”

“You?” she laughs, and he narrows his eyes at her, heading towards Peter’s kitchen.

He doesn’t think about the trash.

“Yes, me,” he says. “And you two need to move in together already—I keep getting your apartment layouts mixed up in my head. Which one of you has the newest microwave—”

“That would be me—”

“Of course,” Tony says, trudging onto tile floor.

He decides to make her grilled cheese.

~

Tony stays up all night waiting, and he knows MJ is doing the same in the bedroom. He can see the orange light underneath the door.

He drifts, and worries, and the worry permeates through his skin and makes him cold, makes him hot, sends him into one of those fugue states when he doesn’t know where or when or how he is.

He thinks about how he and Pepper never had kids of their own, thinks about whether or not she actually regrets that even though she says she doesn’t. And he doesn’t really either, not really, because he learned a long time ago that family doesn't mean blood, and he has Peter, and that’s as deep and all-encompassing as any blood relationship can be. He wonders why it gets deeper in moments like this, when the worry is drowning him.

Of course that’s the way shit is, isn’t it? When it feels hopeless and helpless, that’s when you love them more. That’s when you want to tell them. When you can’t.

He thinks about May and how she lost Ben, and this new thing with Happy. He’s always wanted Happy to have someone and he couldn’t have really thought of anybody better, even though Happy always looks at old photos of big, strapping Ben and wonders what May sees in him compared to her late husband. Tony thinks about calling them and telling them about whatever the hell is going on here, and the hours click down and nothing changes and he thinks about that more and more. He hates telling May something is wrong with Peter, and even something being wrong is better than this.

Peter’s gone. How can he say that? How can he say that out loud? How can he be here waxing poetic in his head about being this kid’s father when he’s out there gone and Tony’s just laying here living with it?

He drifts. And falls into dark spaces and falls through the air and hears Peter screaming and sees the Avengers struggling and Pepper and Rhodey and Happy and May all disappearing into thin air. And when he sits up at 6:30 in the morning, MJ walks out into the living room and Peter still isn’t home.

They square up with each other.

“Okay,” MJ breathes, paler than usual.

“Yeah,” Tony says. “Yeah, now I’m panicking.”

So they open up all the insane shit.

MJ calls Ned, but holds off on calling May. Tony activates everyone in the city, which is Natasha, Clint, Sam and Bucky, and they start combing the New York areas. Tony tracks every suit he has access to, and he traces Peter’s previous movements before he left his phone behind. He was going to class, he stopped a few mini-events on campus including a fallen tree situation and a stolen bike situation (backed up by MIT students’ tweets correlated with Peter’s stagnant location), and then he went to class again and stopped by his two internships and then he just—

Sat there.

In one particular, nondescript spot.

“He wasn’t doing anything?” MJ asks, looking at the list of movements on Tony’s laptop.

Tony narrows his eyes. “Not for a full—where is this?”

“That’s—that’s a taco place right off campus,” MJ says. “We go there a lot—”

“Okay,” Tony says, clicking his tongue and trying to keep up with the timeline. “Yeah, he was sitting there for—three hours, Jesus. And he missed calls and texts in that timeframe—”

MJ leans on his chair. “And then he came home and—”

“Left the phone,” Tony says, sitting back in his seat. “Must have been on purpose. Had to have been on purpose unless he just—unless he just wasn’t thinking—”

None of it makes him feel better, and all of it makes him feel sicker, and he’s starting to feel a little insane and desperate. Peter doesn’t do this shit unless he’s out hurt somewhere, or fucking kidnapped or something.

Tony takes to the streets. He doesn’t want MJ to do the same, but of course she doesn’t listen to him, so he has Rhodey link up with her and they stick close to campus and start their own search.

Tony follows Peter on the CCTV cameras, and backs up everything he tracked with his phone and Twitter. It’s something he shouldn’t have access to, but he does, and he retraces everything and follows his movements from the moment he left his apartment, after he left his phone behind.

It’s not an easy thing to do, because there aren’t cameras everywhere and he loses him multiple fucking times, and he keeps having to reset himself and start again.

“It isn’t Electro,” Steve says, on the phone, in the ear that Friday isn’t occupying. “He’s still hold up at that Oscorp plant, I touched base with the SWAT team that are outside, they’ve been outside there for days and he’s still in the building. I checked and found his heat signature.”

Tony sighs, nodding, and hangs his head. He clutches the phone to his ear. “Okay,” he says. “Uh, thanks—thanks for checking on that.”

“Rhino is still locked up, and he’s easy to check in on because he’s got that lawyer that’s pushing the case real hard, so he’s in and out and has a schedule we can follow—he hasn’t been out of the state of Pennsylvania for the past three months. I checked on that too.”

Tony cracks his jaw, and listens to Friday recalculating and searching the CCTV from where they last lost Peter. “Okay,” he says. “And, uh—”

“Goblin’s still in the wind,” Steve says. “That’s always, uh, an option, but there’s been no sightings of him and every time he comes out is so theatrical, I feel like Twitter would have picked up on it if he came back out. You know how they are. Twitter.”

“Yeah,” Tony says, remembering that Spider-Man hate thread that popped up a couple months back.

“And you’ve got alerts on him, right? Goblin?”

Tony nods. “And the others too, but I’m just—I must have missed something, right?” he asks, and he spins around on the spot, looking down the cross streets. Still nothing from Friday on which way to go.

He feels sick, he feels like he’s gonna fucking—puke. It’s almost dinner time. Has he even eaten? Pepper gave him that coffee cake earlier when he saw her. Did he eat it? He can’t even fucking remember. He remembers the crumbs. Did he eat it or did it crumble in his hands?

He wishes he could fucking establish what the hell this is. Peter fucking disappeared off the face of the earth and Tony can’t tell if someone took him or if someone hurt him or if—or if he just left. The first two options put him in danger and everyone else too. The heroes he’s got on this search and his own wife and Peter’s girlfriend and friends.

But if Peter just left—if he just—

What would cause him to—

“Listen, we’re all on this,” Steve says, in that grounding tone he utilizes so often. “We’re gonna find him, alright? We are. You are, and he’s gonna be okay. He’s a strong kid, he’s a smart kid, whatever this is, he’s gonna be fine.”

~

Tony follows Peter on the cameras and loses him, he follows him and loses him, he has to reset twice and he nearly pulls out his own hair and he meets back up with MJ and Rhodey and Pepper at one point and they eat standing in a circle on the sidewalk and—

And he can tell they’re all on the edge of completely fucking losing it.

He politely asks MJ to go back to Peter’s apartment to try and get some sleep. She declines. He asks more politely and a little more desperately and she declines again. With the same raised eyebrow and with the same thinly veiled panic.

So Pepper stays with her, with the intent of ushering her back there in a roundabout way. Pepper’s good at stuff like that. Half of the time Tony doesn’t even know she’s doing it when she starts doing it to him. But MJ is infinitely more stubborn than him, and more suspicious, somehow, so he doesn’t really know how Pepper is gonna get away with it.

And he keeps following Peter. He finally gets on a good trail with the cameras and he sees him on foot and he gets five miles away from the apartment, and at one point, on the camera at the corner with the park, Tony gets a good look at his face.

He isn’t crying, or hurt, at least visibly, and he’s almost—he’s almost dead-eyed. Just staring, and moving, like a goddamn robot.

“Where the hell are you going, Pete?” Tony breathes, still following him. He hones in and tries to read his mind, tries to get into his head, tries to fucking astral project into his body at that point and get him to ask for help.

Help for what?

What the hell happened?

Was someone stalking him, did he get some kind of fucking—blackmail message from one of the assholes they know? Was it a new asshole? What the hell would they have to blackmail him with? Is it a dirty cop? Is it something fake that he has to disprove? Is he trying to save someone?

Did he hear something? Sense something?

Or is it all just—something else? Is it something else?

Is it everything all at once? All of it, raining down on his head? And if that’s the case why didn’t he ask for help, why didn’t he share with someone who loves him, fuck’s sake, so many people love him—and Pete’s a talker, Pete’s a chatterbox, and they’ve been talking, and yeah he’s been stressed, and is it Tony’s fault for not reading between the lines and realizing how bad it was? Is it? Is he just going insane and jumping to conclusions—

But how can he not, with the circumstances? With the lack of Pete to explain it, with Pete disappeared period—

the silence is worse the silence is worse

Because this isn’t something Pete would do. It’s not. Not on purpose. Not unless something was really—really fucking wrong.

Tony loses him again, of course, around one in the morning, and he sits on a bench with his head in his hands while Friday recalibrates and tries to find him again on nearby cameras.

Tony groans. He squeezes his eyes shut tight and clenches his jaw.

He’s gotten the panic attacks under control since the battle of Loki’s bullshit all those years ago, with medication and years of therapy and an incredible amount of exposure to shit of that nature, especially the dusting and how long it took to fucking fix it and everything in between, everything they couldn’t fix as a result of all of it—but he sort of feels a panic attack coming on now. A race car spinning out and kicking up smoke inside his chest and all his air is twirling in a little tornado right down the fucking drain and his head is pounding, an earthquake, and—

“Boss, Peter’s Stark watch has come online and connected to an unknown network,” Friday says.

Tony nearly bursts out of his own skin. He sits up, eyes straining. “Where?” he asks, dry-mouthed, hardly sounding like himself. His vision is whiting out, just—splat on the surface of the sun.

“Still zeroing in—but it seems to be in Strafford County, New Hampshire—still looking for a more precise location—”

Tony gets up, walking in one direction with a kind of purpose that burns in the arches of his feet. “Where is my least ostentatious car located?”

~

Tony is half insane. Worse insane than before. A different kind of insane. It buzzes in his fingertips and it makes him feel faster.

Friday keeps zeroing in, and he drives there, and he sends out a message to everyone else that he may have something and to stand by. He’s still boiling with the guilt of not telling May yet, and with the situation as a whole, and he has to focus or he’s gonna be the one needing a team to come out and get him because he’s gotten in a fucking accident.

He can’t do that. He has to be careful. He has to get to him.

Tony should have already thought of the watch. He completely forgot, he didn’t even think, he didn’t even realize. He should have, he has to re-register it as one of Peter’s devices.

He clicks his tongue, breathes in and out, taps on the steering wheel like a maniac.

Friday narrows and narrows and eventually says the network the watch connected to was some back alley garage that’s only open on the weekends. It’s in a really shitty part of town, in the worst county in the state, and Tony never really imagined New Hampshire as dangerous but then again, for being so close, he doesn’t ever really think about New Hampshire at all.

But when he finally rolls up, he sees the garage, which clearly hasn’t been through any type of maintenance or upgrades since its inception, and he sees a shitty little motel across the street from it. The kind that looks inherently moldy and the kind whose Tis burnt out and whose L is too bright and buzzing loudly.

Tony drives up alongside it, his heart slamming up a storm in his ears. There’s nothing else around but the garage, and a closed drive-through corner store, and he looks at the map on his phone and there isn’t an actual neighborhood for a couple miles.

Does someone have his watch? Is he actually here? He should be, the CCTV matched up to a point, when Friday gave him the info Tony had her keep checking—why the hell is he here? What’s going in, what the fuck is going on, did he come here on purpose did someone draw him in is someone being held here is he being mind-controlled—

“Fri, did the watch connect automatically or did he connect on purpose?”

“The connection was triggered by the emergency order that you sent out for Peter yesterday,” Friday says. “It was one of your backdoor applications and was meant to reveal his location in case he was in danger.”

“Can you find the precise location of the watch itself?” Tony asks, breathing hard through his mouth. “Is it trackable?”

He doesn’t even remember when the hell he gave the kid the watch. He’s always giving him things and half of them track his location or his vitals and maybe that’s shitty maybe it’s not, he doesn’t know, and he’ll beat himself up for it later.

“It is trackable to a point, and it is indicating that it is inside the motel,” Friday says. “But it cannot tell us precisely where.”

Tony’s already getting out of the car.

He’s hazy and not sure-footed and he feels like he’s wheezing—

The entire motel is just a line of nine rooms, and he hovers around the front office wondering if he should go in there and interrogate the shifty-looking man behind the desk. His heart is beating so loud in his ears and he feels fucking ill and he walks away from the office before he decides to go inside, because he has no idea what the hell he’d even say or what he’d even tell him.

The glass on the office door is broken and taped up in spots with packing tape—

“Fuck,” he breathes, trudging back and forth in the pebble parking lot, and there are only two cars here, and did Peter walk the entire fucking way, he lost him somewhere on the cameras, Friday was keeping track but Tony doesn’t know til where, and did Pete get in someone’s car? It doesn’t matter if he’s Spider-Man, it doesn’t matter, he’s still a kid—it doesn’t matter if he’s in college, he’s still a kid—

Why does this feel more dangerous than fighting supervillains? Or the end of the world? Why does this feel like the ground is opening up beneath him?

Tony only sees light under a couple doors. This place reeks, it’s half-breaking down, it reminds him of the kind of places where bad things happen, where people go to molder and fester and rot, an end-of-the-road last ditch effort, and he feels insane, worse insane than before, because he’s supposedly so close and yet Pete isn’t within sight—

And why would he be here, why—is it worse than he thought? Tony’s mind falters and breaks down and he imagines the kind of things that he never thought were possible, like a needle in Peter’s arm—

No, no, no way, no how, he couldn’t be, he couldn’t, but why the hell is he here—

“Fuck,” he breathes again, and another panic attack starts building and digging in inside his chest—

And he takes a couple steps towards the first door, number two, where he sees a light on, and he’s about to kick it down, no matter who the fuck is inside, he’ll deal with that later—

“Boss,” Friday says in his ear, stopping him. “We are close enough to the watch now that it will emit a signal call if activated. Do you want to activate it?”

“Yes,” Tony says, hardly knowing what the hell that means, and he tries to fumble with his phone just in case it’s something he needs to look at. “Yes, activate—”

He hears it. A brief, three-chime call, somewhere close. Spi-der-man.

He swallows hard, blinking through the haze of his hysteria. It was near the end of the—

“Fri, do it again, please,” Tony says, surging in that direction.

Spi-der-man.

He’s running now. Number seven. Number seven. That’s where it was, that’s where it came from.

He skids to a stop at the door and presses his ear against it. “Peter?” he yells, and he knocks a couple times. “Peter? Hey! You in there?”

No answer.

“Friday, do the thing again—”

Chime chime chime. Inside this room, for positive, for absolute sure, and he swallows hard again, stars shimmering in his eyes and eating away at his vision for a moment.

He’s in there. Or at least the watch is in there. Tony might be able to confirm by looking at cameras around here but he didn’t see any cameras and where did Friday stop looking where did she lose him and the whole place looks like somewhere Norman Bates might take up residence and Tony is so close he heard the goddamn sound and it can’t just be his watch it’s gotta be him—

“Peter!” he yells again, being too loud and too obvious. “Peter!”

He reaches down and grabs the door handle to jiggle it and pull on it, but the door falls open under his hand.

He stumbles inside the room, shocked. He nearly falls over his own feet and his mind isn’t catching up with the fact that he’s fucking in here already, and he has to quickly recalibrate—

He shuts the front door—

The room is musty and muted and mustard-colored, ancient, like it was designed in the 60s and left as it was. He’s in the front hallway and there’s an open closet to his left, with two empty hangers and a broken pole, and there’s a bathroom right next to him with the light on and he doesn’t investigate the rest of the room because he has to follow the light—

“Kid, I’m sorry about your modesty but I’m coming in there,” Tony says, again, hardly sounding like himself, and he hopes Peter knows it’s him and not some random fucking guy busting into his shitty motel room—

And he slams the bathroom door open and it hits the wall and the lights are buzzing in here too and there’s a toilet and a single standing sink and a bleary mirror with a crack through the middle and a tub and—

Peter is there.

He’s there.

He’s in the tub, fully-clothed, staring straight ahead.

Silence surrounds him like it’s his own atmosphere.

Tony stops, for just a second, because he’s so shocked—it feels like it’s been years, since he’s seen him, and this is the last place—the last place he imagined seeing—

He keys back in.

“Pete,” Tony breathes, and he rushes over, kneeling next to the tub.

Peter doesn’t even look at him. His knees are pulled up to his chest and his jeans are torn and dirty and his jacket is half falling off his shoulder. His hair is a mess and there’s a bloody bruise on his cheekbone, and his left eye looks blackened.

He’s not even looking at him. He doesn’t even seem to realize he’s there.

His eyes are dead. Nearly glazed over.

Tony’s heartbeat is rattling his entire body.

“Peter,” Tony says, scooting forward, touching his knee. “Peter, look at me. Look at me, buddy, hey. Hey. It’s Tony, I’m here. I’m here.”

“From my initial scan, he has a black eye, a broken wrist, two broken ribs, a twisted ankle and some lacerations,” Friday says. “But I would know more if—”

Tony barely hears her. He’s trying not to panic. “Pete, hey, hey, buddy, please,” he whispers.

He leans in, reaching and touching his face. He holds his face in his hands, tracks his thumbs back and forth softly.

And for a moment, Peter doesn’t react.

But then his eyes slowly, slowly find him.

He focuses.

“Hey,” Tony whispers, and he keeps brushing his thumbs back and forth across his cheekbones, being careful of the wound. “Hey, hey.”

Peter looks at him, really looks at him like he’s taking him in and realizing that he’s there, realizing that it’s him, and his eyebrows furrow. And at first, Tony’s worried that he’s mad, that he’s pissed off that he found him and that he’s invading his space, but then—

Peter’s entire facade breaks. Like a curtain dropping.

His face crumples, and he sobs, turning and hiding in Tony’s palm. Tony’s heart plummets, because it’s coming into focus now—not the why of it, but the full extent of Peter’s feelings, and he shakes his head and runs his free hand through Peter’s hair.

“No, no,” he whispers. “No, you’re okay. You’re okay.”

Peter sobs harder, and this one wracks his shoulders, and he’s moving now, ducking his knees underneath him and scraping on the tub. It makes noises like a sinking ship.

Peter’s trying to get closer, grabbing at Tony’s wrist, and Tony can’t really handle that for too much longer.

“C’mere, c’mere,” Tony breathes. He hooks his hands underneath Peter’s armpits and hauls him out of the tub, as gently as he can, trying to remember what Friday said was ailing him.

Physically, anyway. There’s a lot more going on, that much is clear, and his heart aches as Peter’s crying gets worse.

“I’ve got you,” Tony says, and Peter falls against him, and Tony wraps his arms around his middle and gets him out of the tub completely, feet and all. Peter clutches at him, burying his face in his shoulder like he’s afraid he’s gonna go somewhere, like he’s afraid he isn’t real and he’s gonna disappear, and Tony hugs him and holds on tight and sort of just—slides back down to the floor.

“I got you,” he says again, and Peter adjusts and pushes closer and just hugs him like he didn’t think he’d ever see him again.

Tony has no fucking idea what’s going on, why he’s like this, and it doesn’t feel like the moment to ask. He just grips the back of his neck, the back of his head, and rocks him back and forth a little bit. He hasn’t held him like this in a long time, not since he came back from the dead and was reckoning with that, and Peter has been trying harder and harder to have that tough outer shell.

Reminds Tony of himself, at a certain point. When he needed help the most.

Why didn’t he notice? Why didn’t he realize Pete was doing it? Why didn’t he realize what it meant?

“I’m here, bud,” Tony whispers, rubbing his back up and down, trying to make him feel protected, trying to make him feel safe. “Whatever it is, it’s—I can help you, okay? I can help you. I can, I’ll do anything I can do—anything I can to help you.”

Peter sobs harder, and he shakes his head this time. It’s scary as hell that he hasn’t said anything yet, and Tony tries to stop his head from just—running through all of this, trying to put it together like a fucking puzzle. He has to be present, just—let it play out. No matter how scared he is.

He nearly hits his head on the sink behind them.

“Hey,” Tony whispers, holding onto Peter’s shoulder, and the back of his head. He ruffles his hair a little bit. “Hey, let’s get out of the bathroom, huh? Let’s just—get into the—main area there, out there—c’mon—”

Pete doesn’t say anything or hardly react to that, he just holds onto him and lets Tony drag them both to their feet.

“C’mon, I gotcha,” Tony says, holding onto him, standing back up. “I gotcha, it’s alright.”

Peter is leaning on him heavily, and Tony gets a good grip on his waist and starts to walk with him, as if he’s injured. He tries to look at his face, but he can’t, because Peter is still mostly buried in Tony’s shoulder.

“Alright,” Tony breathes, and when they hobble into the hallway he reaches over and locks the front door, and pulls on the handle a few times because he doesn’t fucking trust it. But he has to, because he feels like Peter is wilting, and he’s starting to get more hysterical and Tony can’t just be hauling him around the entire fucking room if it’s gonna get worse.

“Alright, alright, alright,” Tony breathes, and the rest of the room isn’t any better than the outside or the bathroom, and he sees Peter’s backpack over by the air conditioning unit by the window, all the contents spilling out.

“It’s okay. It’s okay, Pete—”

He sits them on the edge of the bed and Peter twists further into the hug, holding him so tight that Tony can scarcely breathe.

He tries to settle, tries to—focus—

“Talk to me, Pete, please,” Tony says, knowing he needs to tell everyone else, knowing he needs to figure out what the hell is going on. He peels him back a bit, not forcefully but with a little bit of effort, and he holds his face in his hands again. Peter holds Tony’s wrists and squeezes his eyes shut tight, and it’s getting scarier and scarier.

“No one hurt you, right?” Tony asks, a little desperately.

Peter shakes his head.

Tony talks fast, all his fears spilling out. “No one’s following you? No one made you come here? There’s no one—no one coming back? No one—making you stay here, doing something to you—blackmail or something, holding someone—”

“No,” Peter croaks, and he shakes his head again. He sobs and breaks and leans forward, resting his head on Tony’s shoulder.

One word, and it just seems so—

Tears brim in Tony’s eyes now, and he looks up at the ceiling and grips the back of Peter’s neck. “Kid, Pete, you’re—you’re scaring the shit out of me, yeah? Please just, please—tell me, tell me what’s—what’s going on—”

“I just need help,” Peter whispers, sobbing again, and it sounds painful and it cuts through his sentence and makes rough edges. “I need—I need help, I just need—I just need help—”

Tony’s desperation reaches its peak, hearing that, and he gathers him closer, and Peter clutches at him like he’s his last lifeline.

“I can help you,” Tony says, softly, not knowing with what, not knowing what’s wrong or what’s hurting him or what’s gotten him to this point. “I can help, okay? We can all help, but I can help you—I can help you get back and then I can help—we can all help. With whatever it is. No matter what, okay, Pete? Okay? No matter what it is. We can help you. We can help.”

~

Peter cries so hard that he sends himself to sleep.

Tony knows he’s sleeping, when his breathing evens out, and he doesn’t even wake up when Tony moves them both up against the wilted, plastic pillows. He sighs, and Peter settles into Tony’s embrace, turning into him and resting on his shoulder and just sleeping as hard as he can.

It doesn’t help, with Tony’s anxiety about the whole thing. Being here doesn’t help either. Peter asked for help, sure, and said that he needed it, but he didn’t specify why, he didn’t say why he was here, he didn’t say what the hell was going on. And Tony’s mind goes to the other side of the universe and back trying to figure it out.

After about an hour, Friday starts talking, shocking Tony back to life again.

“From what I can tell without a normal scan, his body has been deprived of sleep for some time now,” she says, “but I’d know more if we were home and I could do a more complete assessment.”

“Working on it,” Tony whispers, rubbing Peter’s shoulder. She’s doing all her assessing through his phone right now, he’s not even wearing the glasses. Does he even have them with him? Are they in the car? Jesus. He clears his throat. “Let, uh—let MJ know I found him, and he’s alive and—generally okay, and tell her I’m gonna—get him home as soon as I can. I’m not sure when the hell that’s gonna be, but just—tell her—tell her I’ve got him and he’s—alive, safe—and I’m working on it. Tell her to tell everybody else who’s looking, too.”

“Got it,” Friday says.

Tony cranes his neck to try and look and see if any of that whispering woke Peter up, but it didn’t. He’s still breathing deeply, his eyelids fluttering, his brows furrowing a bit like his dreams are bothering him.

He’s twenty-one now. He was fifteen when Tony met him—technically met him, considering the expo revelation, little boy in the Iron Man mask—and Tony remembers every single moment. It all becomes clear, like a reel playing out on the wall in front of him, mixing with the awful fucking wallpaper in here. Their greatest hits and their worst too, and everything in between, and he can hear his voice for the past year becoming more strained. They still talk a lot, but it was different. He just wasn’t clocking the changes.

He has to be better. He has to be.

~

He drifts, too, while Peter sleeps. Kind of like he did in the apartment while he was waiting for him to come home, but better and worse at the same time. Better, because Pete’s here and he’s got hands on him and he knows where he is, but worse because of the guilt of not knowing the issue, the guilt of the others not having that relief too, especially MJ, and May and Happy being almost entirely in the dark about the whole thing.

He wonders if May has noticed Peter faltering. He wonders what she thinks. She hasn’t mentioned anything, and they talk all day every day.

Tony stares over at the main hallway like someone is gonna bust in here. He has to keep reminding himself that they’re in New Hampshire and not fucking Bogota, but this motel is sub-standard even for motel standards, and he doesn’t know how Peter can get any legitimate rest somewhere like this.

Why here, why did he stop here, where the hell was he going? What was he doing, why is he hurt at all? Tony didn’t see a suit when he caught sight of his backpack, but he didn’t get to take a good look. He can’t really see it from here.

Peter stirs a little bit. He groans and turns his face further into Tony’s shoulder.

“Hey,” Tony whispers, ruffling his hair again, gently. “Hey, you.”

He doesn’t know the time. There are no fucking working clocks in here.

“How’d you—how’d you find me?” Peter asks, so quiet that Tony can barely hear him.

“Uh, after a bunch of misfires and dead ends, your—the watch you’re wearing had some sneaky backdoors locked into it. And that’s how I found you.”

He sees Peter pick his wrist up and look at the watch. Almost like he’s seeing it for the first time.

Tony decides to try. “Can I take you home now, huh? Drive you back, talk on the way? If my car’s still parked outside?”

Peter hums a little bit, and Tony sees him shift his jaw, and then he picks his head up and looks at him. His eyes are red and swollen, and the cut on his cheek looks a little inflamed. Tony himself flares up with the need to fix it all, looking at him straight on, and he’s been driven by that this entire time but looking at him in this moment, he just wants to needs to has to fix it, at all costs.

“I can’t go home yet,” Peter whispers.

Tony feels an internal server error. “What?”

Panic streaks across Peter’s face, and his eyes get teary again. “I can’t,” he says, shaking his head. “I just, I just, I—I can’t, not, not yet, not just yet—”

“Okay,” Tony says, fast, his heart finally catching up to it all. “Can I—can we go to a safe house? Because I have one—right over the border, in Maine, and I think we could get there pretty quick, and it’s all stocked up, and a lot—better, comfier, safer, than this, uh, establishment—would that be—would that be alright, until you’re ready? Until you’re ready to go home.”

Peter’s eyes search Tony’s face and Tony can recognize the guilt in his expression, too—an emotion they’re both all too familiar with. An emotion Tony would rip from Peter’s orbit if he had the power to do it.

But then who would he be?

“Yeah,” Peter breathes. “Okay.”

~

Peter moves slowly, delicately, like he’s worried about every new step. Tony helps him put his stuff away in his backpack, and Tony puts it on his own back so Peter doesn’t have to. Tony holds the door for him as they’re walking out, and he keeps an arm around him as they head to the car. Like precious cargo.

There isn’t anybody around still, and it’s about seven in the morning or something like that, and this place feels like a liminal space. Like some abandoned Target in an alternate dimension. It doesn’t feel real.

They get in the car and Tony locks the doors and puts the coordinates in for the Maine house, and they take off without another word.

Tony’s antsy. Peter is always talking and his silence is huge and loud in its own right, like a yawning void coming from that side of the car.

And then the kid puts his head in his hand and leans on the middle console.

“It’s okay,” Tony says, reaching across and gripping his shoulder. “It’s alright.”

“Did, uh, did you tell, uh, MJ—”

“Yeah, I did,” Tony says, and he hasn’t looked at anybody’s responses to him yet. He needs to send out another message.

Peter sucks in a wavering breath, and he’s gripping his forehead so tight that his thumb is losing its color. “I need to, uh, I need to—say I’m sorry, to her, and I need to—I just don’t—I don’t know how to—”

“MJ is one of the most…practical, and understanding people that I know, and she loves you,” Tony says, still holding onto him. “I’m gonna message her in a bit, and we’re gonna—we’re gonna take a beat, we’re gonna recoup, and then we’re gonna—get you to the point where you can get home, okay?”

Peter lets out another shaky breath, but he nods.

“Just relax,” Tony says, “easier said than done, I know, but just—just try to relax, we’re—it’s not gonna take that long. I’ve got you, I’ve got you now.”

He wants him to talk, he wants him to—tell him what’s going on, why he needs help, what he needs help with, and all of those wants keep repeating themselves in his head over and over, half rock song, half mantra.

But Peter stays silent, and Tony slowly realizes that this is gonna take a little longer than he might have anticipated. It isn’t the aftermath of some battle or stitching up a wound, it’s—it’s something else. One of their human moments, he suspects, and not the superhuman—and he tries not to hate all the normal things that might have put Peter in this headspace.

They drive in silence.

~

It doesn’t take long to get there, and maybe he’s speeding a little bit. Maybe he’s going insane with the not talking and the one word answers. Maybe he’s always been insane and this is making him a little more insane. He’s a fixer and he can’t fix and it’s breaking him.

This is Peter. It’s important. He’s so important.

Tony goes through a few old security checkpoints before making it to the house, which is wedged in a little woodsy, hilly area at the back of a tiny neighborhood. He’s been to this one a couple of times throughout the years, in peril more often than not, but sometimes not. Once with Pepper, on an anniversary. Once with Thor, when Thor was strung out and hurting. Twice with Natasha and her little sister that Tony only recently found out about. But he hasn’t brought Peter here yet. Peter’s only been to the safe houses in New York, so far. And that one time in Arkansas, with the clown situation that they don’t discuss.

This whole thing seems so—scary. So on the edge. Like Tony could screw it up with the wrong word or the wrong step.

He has to stay focused.

He runs around and opens Peter’s door for him once they’re parked, and Peter peeks out into the world like he’s surprised it’s all still standing. Tony gets that. He’s been there before.

“Alright?” Tony asks, the stupidest question in the world, and Peter lets out a wavering breath and steps out of the car without responding to it.

“Okay, here,” Tony says, grabbing his backpack again when Peter gets out of the car. “Here we go.” He takes his arm, like Peter needs help walking around, and he leads him up the pathway to the front door. “Here we go, here we go.” He sounds stupid, and a little manic, and Peter’s silence always unnerves him and he keeps thinking that over and over, he’s worried and unnerved and worried and stressing and worried—

He puts the code into the front door pad, and the door opens, and he reminds himself to focus.

“Here, c’mere,” Tony says, flipping on some lights. “This is one of the nicer ones—Pep sends a team out every so often to keep them up, sometimes the team stays over, but then they’re cleaning up after themselves—you know I employ good people—”

“I remember the one in—Harlem,” Peter says, as Tony walks him over to the couch. “It was nice. The lamps were—the lamps were nice.”

The lamps.

“The lamps were nice,” Tony says, fast, because what the hell is he talking about and why does it make Tony tear up a little bit to hear him say something normal like that, and he helps him sit down and Peter lets him keep helping him and Tony doesn’t know if he needs help and yes he needs help he asked for help but what kind of help, he hasn’t said yet, and Tony’s sweating like he’s been working out or something and he sighs and cracks his jaw. “This couch is nicer though, it’s one of the better ones we picked up with all our home decorating—and a very nice blue—” He leans down and pops the lounger on the thing and guides it out so Peter’s legs don’t go flying up, and he keeps thinking focus focus focus.

“Alright,” he says, and he leans down without thinking and presses a kiss to Peter’s forehead, “gonna go make you some, uh, maybe some soup. Not that you’re sick, that’s just the first thing in my brain—” Tony ruffles his hair, and grabs the blanket from the back of the couch. Peter watches as he shakes it out a little bit, away from him, and then he drapes it over him. “Just relax, just—sink into the couch, a lot better than that goddamn—motel—no judgment—a little judgment—”

He gets a small smile for that, which seems like a victory.

“—and yell out if you need anything, there’s cable and streaming, you know that, I remember the 911 binge—” He clears his throat, and Peter looks up at him. “And I’m right here, okay? I’m right here, for anything.”

“Okay,” Peter breathes. Like he might actually believe him.

~

Thank God this is an open concept house, so Tony can keep looking over his shoulder from the kitchen to see Peter over on the couch. He gets to cooking, and shoots another couple messages MJ’s way, and she’s concerned, of course she fucking is, and he can tell she’s trying to be patient. Trying, key word, and he wouldn’t be surprised if she showed up here. He wouldn’t blame her at all.

Tony gets the way the kid is feeling, though, and he’s felt that way before himself. Feeling like it’s impossible to let anybody see him, feeling so low that being around people you love feels like you’re bringing them down, too. He stirs the noodles and hates the idea of Peter feeling that way, because all Peter does is lift them all up no matter how he’s feeling himself—and isn’t that part of the problem? Isn’t that the whole damn issue?

He can’t bully him into it. He can’t. He can’t sit there at his side and beg him to tell him all the details, he has to—he has to say it himself. This shit is overwhelming, the type of shit that sends you off into some drug-addled, moldering motel in New Hampshire, and Tony can’t just—dig it out of him. He has to wait, he has to be patient, he has to—he has to let him come out with it on his own time.

Which he hopes is soon, because he has to get him home. He knows he’ll do better at home, but he doesn’t know how the hell to convince him of that.

He can hear the water boiling and his own breathing, the birds outside calling to each other. A stray car engine starting up down the road. The swivel of his own neck every time he turns around to look and make sure Peter is still there.

He’s spooning the meal into bowls, and this time, when he turns around, Peter is standing behind him. He’s leaning on the island like it’s hard to stand on his own, and Tony’s heart sinks.

He looks tired, bone-deep. There’s different lighting in here than there was in the motel and Tony feels like he’s really seeing him, really looking at him—he looks thinner, weaker, weary. How long has he been looking like this? Tony’s seen him recently. Has he not been looking at him close enough?

“I’m just, uh,” Peter says, voice wavering. He shakes his head, and looks away, and then he looks at him again. Tony’s deathly afraid he’s gonna spook him, so he doesn’t say anything. “I just—it wasn’t so bad in the beginning, at all, I mean—it was fine, it was—college, and stuff, it was hard being away from you and May and Ned but we all still talked all the time, and we got to see each other a good amount—”

“Uh huh,” Tony says, stupidly.

“—and MJ and I were better in the beginning, about seeing each other, there was the fight about living together but we got over it, and then we both started—it was harder when I was juggling all the classes and then I took the internships too, and the job at the warehouse—”

Tony’s inclination is to say you didn’t need to do that but Peter knows that and they talked about it at the time and it wouldn’t help anything anyway.

“—and it all just—with Spider-Man stuff, too, on top of it all, and going back and forth to New York and back to Boston and some in Vermont to make it look—not so, you know, obvious that Spider-Man picked up and went to college, I just—I started, I mean, I wasn’t really sleeping anymore, and my, uh, my healing—my healing has sort of—taken a turn, I didn’t wanna tell you that, or anybody else, because—”

That hangs in the air.

“It’s what?” Tony says, because he can’t stop himself.

Peter glances away. “I, uh, it’s—it’s just taking longer for me to heal, from everything—little things, and big things, it just—it takes longer, and it’s—I know, I know—”

“It’s okay,” Tony breathes, quickly, except it’s not, except it’s not—

Peter clears his throat, and Tony can see tears shining in his eyes. He steps to the side and falters a little bit and Tony races forward and grabs his arm. He wavers and nods and sucks in a big breath, and Tony pulls out one of the dining room chairs and helps him sit.

don’t panic, don’t freak out—

Peter keeps talking. “So that’s, uh, I’ve been trying to work on that, too, and it’s, uh—held me up,” he says, resting his elbows on the table. “And I’ve—it’s just been—everything so much every single day, and I’ve started—missing things and—failing tests and—being—uh, harder on myself and it’s just been—it’s been—I’ve been barely present, like I’m not even—in my own moments, sometimes…” He trails off, and looks away, clutching his hands together. “I miss—I lose time, I—I’m not really sure—”

“Pete…” Tony says, softly, and he feels sick. He sits down too, because his legs are shaking.

Peter meets his eyes. “I don’t wanna say I’m depressed because like—I have so much, I do, I have the best friends in the world and the best family and the best girlfriend and I’ve gotten so many second chances when so many people haven’t—and so many people love—love and support Spider-Man and saying—saying I’m depressed sounds stupid and like I’m—like I’m ungrateful—”

“No,” Tony says, shaking his head. “No, no, everyone—you’re the least ungrateful person there is, buddy, you—” His breath catches, thinking about all this. His Peter, depressed, and he didn’t know. He didn’t clock it. He feels like his face is betraying him, giving away all his horror, and he shakes his head again. “No. No.”

Peter blows out another breath. “And I started drinking at parties and lying to MJ about it—saying it was just fun when really I was trying to—sort of, block it all out—and she only knows about the once when it’s definitely been, uh—more than the once—and it’s worse because I’ve been hiding it. And sometimes it’s not at parties, sometimes it’s alone, in—in my apartment—”

Tony thinks about that and flashes to some of his own past moments, alone in his place lost in a bottle, and imagining Peter in the same sorrow and struggle makes the world turn upside down—

“But, uh, last month, uh—last month—” Peter’s voice catches again, and he closes his eyes.

“What is it?” Tony asks, gently. He probably shouldn’t even ask that. He’s lucky he’s getting what he’s getting. ‘Lucky’, even though it feels horrible, and he’s in mental anguish, and he still doesn’t know how to fix it.

Peter sighs, and he keeps working his jaw back and forth. “I lost someone.” He lets it sit there for a second, like he hasn’t said it out loud before this moment. “I didn’t mean to lose someone. It was so stupid, it was just—a purse snatcher situation, and they were—it was so stupid, I webbed the guy and I got the purse back and I gave it back to the lady and she was so—so happy but she was sort of scared and shaken and she fell—she was an older lady, not that old, and she—she tripped, and I wasn’t expecting it, so I didn’t catch her—I was off—off my game, because of all—everything I said, and she hit her head—it was so, it wasn’t—it didn’t feel like anything, not a big deal, and she seemed fine at first, but I left her at urgent care anyway—I thought it would be fine, I thought it’d be fine—but when I checked the next day—”

His breath catches again and he shakes his head and covers his face with both of his hands.

One of Tony’s tears finally falls, and he shakes his head too, and he gets up and walks around to the other side of the table and he sits next to him. He wraps his arm around his shoulders and tugs him against him. He just wants to hold him close, he just wants to fix this, take it away—how the fuck does he make this better?

“Pete,” he says, voice wracked with emotion. “Pete, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“She was—a mom—and her daughter was—was pregnant—and I got crazy and obsessive and started stalking their socials and it just—it was—it was my fault, and it—it wasn’t even in the paper, or anywhere on the internet, it was so small but she—her life wasn’t—wasn’t small, and it was—in my hands and I just—it was an important moment and I—I—everything I let build up, it—it built up and it fell on her—”

“No,” Tony whispers, rubbing his arm up and down. “No, kid, no—that coulda happened to anybody. Anybody. Me, Rhodey, Steve, Sam, Nat—anybody. That even could have happened to Pepper or MJ. That’s just—it was a freak thing—”

“I’m supposed to be better,” Peter says, looking at him, tears tracing down his face now. “I’m supposed—I’m people’s hero, and she—she was so excited Spider-Man—Spider-Man saved her,” he says, and he tilts his head, anguished. “And then he didn’t. He didn’t save her. I just—everything else was already so hard and I felt like—I felt like I was doing something wrong, I had to have been doing something wrong—”

“No, okay?” Tony says, leaning in closer to him. “No way. You—you expect so much of yourself, and you’re still just one person. You’re an exceptional person, you’re one of my favorite people in the entire goddamn universe, Pete, but you can only handle so much, okay? We can all only handle so much, no matter who we are.”

“But she needed me,” Peter breathes, sobs cutting through his words, and he leans down and rests his forehead on his hands on the table.

Tony grips his shoulder and rubs his back, feeling half in his element and half out of it. He’s used to trying to make things easier for Peter, but he’s never been this bad before, and it sort of feels like he’s too late. But he knows he can never give up on him, ever, not ever, and he’d work at trying to soothe his heart until the end of his fucking days.

“You guys need me,” Peter sobs. “I’m letting—I’ve been letting MJ down, and you, and May—”

“No way,” Tony says, shaking his head, even though Peter isn’t looking at him. “No. You’re always—MJ adores you, she has—very understandable disdain for most people but she adores you, and May will be your number one cheerleader forever, like, forever ever, and me?” Tony laughs a little bit, resting his chin on Peter’s shoulder, still rubbing circles in his back. “You’re the world to me, Pete. You know that. You’re my kid, you’re—I’m so proud of you every damn day—”

“Even now?” Peter asks, still keeping his head down. “Even after everything I just—everything I—”

“Yes,” Tony says, definitively, making sure he knows he means it. “Yes. Yes, always. I know it’s—awful, what happened, but sometimes things just—happen, and you can’t blame yourself, you just can’t, you can’t live that way. It isn’t fair to you. And I don’t remember seeing that one, that woman—I try to—keep track of the people you interact with, if I can—”

Peter sniffles, and looks up at him. “You do?”

“Yeah, I try to,” Tony says, wiping some of Peter’s tears away with his thumb. “Try to pay some of their medical bills if they have any, make sure they can get a hold of Spider-Man with their thank you’s if they want to—”

Peter smiles a little bit. “I always sort of—I always sort of wondered. I should have known.”

Tony smiles back at him, and Peter sighs heavily, staring down at the table like his whole body is too heavy to carry with him anymore.

Tony tries to—kick himself into gear. Problem solver. This is Peter, Peter is important, and Tony has to help him. He asked for help, he told him the situation, he opened up—

God, he’s been in such pain. Tony’s been behind, he’s missed it, he messed up. Even if Peter is good at hiding shit, and pretending things are okay, Tony should have been able to see through it. Knowing how much he’s been hurting, all this time—it makes Tony feel dizzy.

“Okay,” Tony says, squeezing Peter’s shoulders. He gets up, and he walks over and he gets the bowl of pasta, which is probably a little cold by now, but it’s alright. He pours him a glass of water, and he walks the meal over to him and sets it in front of him. He sits down next to him again, and pulls some of the napkins out of the holder in the middle of the table. “Okay, Pete, we’re gonna—tomorrow, we’re gonna call up the bigwigs at MIT and we’re gonna do a pause for a semester or two—”

“I can’t,” Peter says, practically begs, “I’m in the middle of so many things—”

“It’s alright,” Tony says, trying to sound calm and on top of it. “We can mark all of them, your progress, and you know I’m friends with everyone there and I’ve got a lot of sway—you won’t lose your place anywhere, I promise, we’ll keep everything in order, I’ll log everything for you.”

Peter sighs a little bit, his eyelids heavy, his brows pleading. “What about the—”

“Internships, I can deal with them too, I can hold your spot for you, and the jobs you’ve taken—kid, I’ll find them someone else, someone that needs a job—I know they won’t be as good as you, but a lot of kids need little side jobs like that but they don’t know where to look because they’re distracted by other things. I’ll find some kids, help them out, help the places out too.”

Peter sighs, and scoops up a couple pieces of pasta.

Tony runs through the list in his head. “We gotta look into the healing, but I have a feeling it’ll, uh, right itself once you—slow down a little bit. And I’m talking like, full out, spider spa week, Pete—”

Peter scoffs, taking a sip of his water.

“I’m not kidding,” Tony says, shaking his head. “I’m so serious, you’re rundown, you’re ragged, we need to look at all the physical stuff and build you up again. No Spider-Man shit for a bit here. There are plenty of heroes who can pick up when you’re not putting down. We can get someone for you to talk to, someone we trust that will protect your identity, someone that understands and can help and can look at the whole thing—everything you take on, including the Spider-Man stuff, and help you figure out how to juggle it.”

Peter sighs. “Okay, I—not doing Spider-Man stuff, I mean—it sort of feels like I’m neglecting—”

“No,” Tony says, still shaking his head. “We all take breaks. You know we all take breaks, you’ve witnessed these breaks.”

“Yeah, after you guys almost died,” Peter says, giving him a withering look. “I just, I—nothing has really happened to me—”

“Pete, please,” Tony says, dipping his head a little to look at him. “Anything that makes you feel this way is something that happened. Jesus, you—” He’s about to say Jesus you scared me but he stops himself, because he feels like that’s guilting him, piling on, but Peter nods at him, like he knows what he was gonna say.

He cracks his jaw. “I know, I—I shouldn’t have—”

“I get it,” Tony says, gripping his shoulder. “Sometimes things, they just—come to a head, and you’re just—half outside yourself—”

Peter stares down at the bowl, moving the pasta around, mixing the sauce. “I—it does feel like that, I—like I was watching myself, and I was thinking too much, and I tried to do some Spider-Man stuff but not in my suit, and it didn’t work out—”

“Pete,” Tony says, his eyebrows furrowing.

“I know, I know,” Peter says. “And then I just sat in front of Greedy Taco for what felt like forever and ever and I felt like I couldn’t move and I was just thinking about everything and I missed a tutoring appointment and that made me more insane and I could hear things and people that needed help a couple miles away and I felt like I should go—and then I sat there and missed the internship get-together and I kept thinking about Angela—the lady that—yeah, and I just—I just felt like—I was thinking about everything and all of it and I felt—I just felt—I didn’t feel like me anymore—like it all just sort of hit me and it felt unfixable and over and I couldn’t—let MJ see me and I couldn’t tell you or anybody else because me—I was gone, it just felt like I was gone, and I just—started walking and just—couldn’t stop.” He sighs again, and he glances at Tony, his cheeks flushing red. “I barely even remember getting that room. I don’t know why I stopped there. I definitely don’t remember getting into the tub.”

“You’re not gone,” Tony says, shaking his head at him. “You’re not. You just need—you just need help, to slow down, get back on track, to help yourself. You’re always thinking about everybody else and helping everyone else and you’re leaving yourself behind.”

“Well, school and—the internships and stuff—”

“That’s what you think is expected,” Tony says. “It’s almost like you’re doing all that for us, too. What you think you’re supposed to be doing, what you think is expected of you—”

“I love MIT though, it’s just—I just—maybe put my fingers in too many—pies I guess. I don’t know, I don’t know, I just—everything is just so—it feels like being under that building again, like what happened to me with Vulture. So many things have happened since then, but this feels like that—I’m just walking around and going through the motions but I’ve got—all of this is on top of me and I’m just gonna—it’s gonna knock my legs out from under me—it did. It did, it did do that.”

“I’ve been there,” Tony says, squeezing his arm. “Too many times. I don’t want you to be there, I don’t want you to have to deal with—I don’t want—I hate that you feel like this, I hate that it got to this point, I want—I know it’s not about trusting us or not trusting us—”

“It’s not,” Peter says, shaking his head.

“I know, I know,” Tony says, because he doesn’t want to guilt him. “But I just want—I want it to be automatic, Pete. When you’re out there and you know you’re in deep shit, you usually call me. But I want you to do it before deep shit. I want it to be—just a natural thing, for you to call me, to call MJ and May, whatever it is, no matter what—”

Pete tilts his head a little bit, wincing.

“I know, that goes against your little lone hero thing—”

“I mean, no—”

“You’ve never wanted to—put your problems on somebody else,” Tony says, “even before Spider-Man. But Pete, I want—all of us want—and it’s not about our wants but we do want—we want to be there for you. Whenever you need somebody, no matter what, so it doesn’t get to this point. And everybody always needs somebody and we don’t want you ignoring your needing of somebody just because you don’t want to—burden anybody.” He sighs, and meets his eyes. “You’re never a burden. Ever, ever. You never will be. You’re a delight, kid.”

Peter snorts, smiling a little bit.

“We always wanna be with you, we always wanna help you. We always want you to want us to help you, Pete—just think of it that way, that you’re doing it for us. Doing us a favor.”

Peter laughs a little bit, and he rubs at his eyes. “Okay, okay.”

“I know it’s not gonna change overnight—”

“Yeah—”

“But we love you so much,” Tony says, his voice wavering. He ruffles Peter’s hair a little bit. “Okay? We love you so much.”

“I love you too,” Peter says, leaning closer. He looks like he wants a hug, and he hesitates for a second, but Tony doesn’t let the moment linger. He scoots closer and wraps him up in his arms, and Peter sucks in a breath. “I love you so much,” he says. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—scare anybody—”

“I know you didn’t,” Tony says, clutching at him. “But we’re gonna be on you, until it’s ingrained in this little head of yours. We’re gonna be on you every five seconds until you start asking for help with the tiny things, like tying your shoes or pouring a bowl of cereal.”

Peter snorts. “I’m not an invalid.”

“You know what I mean,” Tony says. “If you want help, you can have it, you can ask for it, and if you need help you need to ask instead of trying to balance all your plates on one little balancing stick because then they’ll break. And we could have helped you hold them up.”

“Your metaphors,” Peter says, resting his head on Tony’s shoulder.

Tony holds the back of his neck. “I’ll try to be more aware, too, I’ll try to—be better, and figure it out in case you can’t bring yourself to say anything, I just—I just never wanna—have to track you to a shitty motel room again—worrying that you were doing drugs—”

Peter pulls back to look at him, incredulous. “Did you really think—”

“No. Maybe. No. I don’t know.”

Peter sighs, and hugs him again, which is a little surprising. “Okay,” he says. “I don’t want—I don’t want that to even be a thought that’s crossing anybody’s mind.”

Tony holds him, and thinks about the look in his eye, when he found him. How faraway he looked, and how tired and beaten down and raw he looks now. Even his grip, in this hug, he doesn’t feel—as strong as he once did, and that’s scary, that’s fucking terrifying.

“Just let us help you, Pete, alright? You asked, I’m here, we’re all—we’re all always here, okay—”

“Well, not always,” Peter says, his voice breaking. “You can’t promise that, always—”

Tony can tell what that means. “Now, we’re not getting into the death conversation, not right now,” he says, narrowing his eyes. “You know I’m working on immortality. I’ve got spreadsheets and everything.”

Peter snorts. “Okay,” he says.

“Okay, okay?” Tony asks, raising his eyebrows. “You’re gonna let us help you, you’re gonna—try to make some changes, let us in, do a little—soft reset?”

“Yeah,” Peter says, his voice going muffled as he turns his face into Tony’s shoulder again. “Yeah, I need help. I need help.”

Tony lets out a sigh that felt like it was filling his chest like an over-inflated balloon. “You’ve got it, Pete. You’ve got it.”

~

And they hug for a little while after that, and Tony holds him like he thought he’d lost him, like he did lose him in a few other universes and he can feel the ramifications of that shooting through space and time like shards of ice off the edge of a building.

And Peter eats, and they sit around and talk, and then, a couple hours later, he lets him take him home.

They don’t make a huge deal, because Tony doesn’t want to overwhelm him with a huge deal right off the bat, but when MJ sees him walk through the door she nearly tackles him, jumps directly into his arms, legs around his waist, the whole deal. She kisses him all over his face until he laughs and kisses her back, and Tony finds himself just—relieved, for now.

~

~

It’s been almost four months. Tony is sitting in Peter’s dining room with May, and they’re shoving a bag of Doritos back and forth at each other. It’s crumbled and nearly empty and on its last legs.

“The 14th doesn’t work,” she says. “We’ve got the taco people coming out that day and it’ll take forever to build that bar, we can’t do another event that day.”

“You can’t fit in the new Captain America before or after the taco bar?” Tony asks, raising his eyebrows. “That’s not very patriotic.”

“Why are you doing Sam’s PR anyway?” May asks.

“You asked me to get Sam—”

She scoffs at him. “Maybe we can get Steve because he’s retired—”

“No, don’t undermine Sam,” Tony says, pointing at her. “It’s him now. He’s wielding the shield. Steve’s just a guy, Sam’s Cap. Like a new James Bond.”

“He wasn’t even Team Iron Man,” she says, narrowing her eyes at him, and he can tell she’s playing with him and he’ll have to get Happy to rib her about it later.

“There are no more teams, Miss May,” Tony says. “Kumbaya, end of the world, all that—”

“Okay,” May says, smiling, sassy and almost evil. “Check on the—”

The bedroom door opens, and Peter comes shuffling out, rubbing his eyes. He smiles over at them, shaking his head, and he always lights up the room when he walks into it.

“There he is,” Tony declares, stupidly, but he isn’t embarrassed.

“I thought I heard you two out here,” Peter says, walking over to them.

“We were keeping our voices down,” May says, as Peter leans in and kisses her on the cheek. “Even for a—hyped-up-sense spider baby.”

“Mhm,” Peter hums, and he walks over and drums his hands on Tony’s shoulders, and Tony reaches back and squeezes his wrist. “You’re early,” Peter says.

“We’re not early,” Tony says, looking at his watch, looking at the time on the computer. “You’re just sleeping in late—which I love to see.”

Peter shuffles into the kitchen, laughing a little bit. “You made coffee?” he asks.

“Yes I did, and I got oat milk, and I was gonna—start breakfast before your aunt and I started arguing here,” Tony says, giving her a look, and she blows him a kiss as he backs his chair up and heads into the kitchen.

After the whole situation, Tony cleared Peter’s schedule for two semesters, and was able to keep his place in all his current programs for when he wanted to return. It didn’t take much, considering his standing with everyone at MIT, and even though he could tell Peter’s initial response was guilt, he could tell that it was a weight off, too.

He fixed the internships in the same way, especially the ones that he needed to go with his classes, and he did what he said he was gonna do with Peter’s two jobs, stocking at the warehouse and assisting the tech lab, and he placed kids there that had the chops but were struggling to find the right places for them. He did the same for the kids Peter had been tutoring, and made sure they found someone that could help them almost as much as Peter did.

MJ took a couple of weeks off from her obligations too, with Tony’s assistance, and Tony brought them both home for a bit. May and Happy came back, Ned came to visit, and Tony just tried to make a very calm, very loving, very controlled environment back in New York. He had Helen check Peter out and fix him up, and she did come to the conclusion that the stress and strain had been halting his healing. So they worked on that, with time and patience, and they did actually do some Avengers team bonding spa days. With one steam room mishap courtesy of Thor, which resulted in a lot of laughter from Peter, which—felt like therapy for all of them, in a way.

And Tony brought in some experts in their field to talk to him, had them sign about seven layers of NDAs to protect Peter’s identity and his thoughts. May stressed the patient-doctor professionalism, but Tony was still worried, so he still had them do—a little more than would normally be usual.

And Peter was a bit—he wouldn’t say timid, exactly, but he was definitely—wary. But he got there, and a few times they sat in with him. Tony and May here, MJ and Ned there, MJ alone once or twice. And that helped, he seemed to talk more freely, and even though it was hard to hear how he was suffering and not coping and piling on and on and on—the fact that he even wanted them there, during a session like that—it felt good. It felt like trust was renewed, like they were gonna work through this.

Tony knows they’re going to, he knows they are, even though he flutters around and worries and does too much to make up for when he wasn’t doing enough. He knows they’re going to get to the other side. It’s Peter, there’s just no leaving him in a bad position.

And Tony’s gonna be more vigilant now. They all are.

Of course, nothing is ever an easy fix—Peter has tried to sneak out as Spider-Man more than one time, and Friday was the one to inform Tony the first two times, but thankfully, before anything went wrong. Tony counted it as a good thing that Pete didn’t disable those backdoor alerts that will let Tony know what’s going on with him, and on his third try as Spider-Man even though he wasn’t supposed to be going out as Spider-Man, he called Tony himself after he’d been out for about twenty minutes.

And that was definitely a good sign.

Tony makes team-up’s, now, when the kid is really feeling antsy about not doing his Spidey duty, and they go out together—sometimes they hang in New York, sometimes they go a few states over, sometimes they focus in Boston, but Tony always monitors his vitals and his mood and listens to the cadence of his voice to make sure he’s catching everything. And he gives him full reports about what the other heroes are doing when Peter stays at home, and he’ll never forget Sam and Bucky’s dramatic retelling of the drug bust on the High Line, and the way Pete’s face looked while they were telling it.

Tony keeps an eye out. He watches, he listens, he asks. He never wants it to get that way again. He’ll never fuckin let it.

He nudges Peter with his hip in the kitchen, and Peter nudges him back.

“Can’t believe you’re becoming an oat milk girl,” Peter says, and he snorts, grinning at him.

“It’s better for you, aren’t we all about things that are better for you?” Tony asks, raising his eyebrows at him and watching him get it out of the fridge. “And it tastes better. Along with being good for you.”

Peter snorts again, and Tony walks over and grabs the fridge handle before it closes, and Peter lightly punches him in the arm. Tony grabs the egg carton and the turkey bacon, and he’s gotta look around for the English muffins.

“Did MJ text you where she wanted to go?” Peter asks, pouring his coffee in the spider mug Nat got him when all of this started. “She told me she was gonna.”

“Yeah,” Tony says. “Happy’s gonna go pick her up after her class and bring her back and then we’ll head out.”

She’s taken an easier schedule too, and she and Peter are moving in together next semester. Tony insisted on paying for something a little nicer, and more central to campus and all the places they go most often. Tony doesn’t really want Peter starting back on the internships at all, but he needs to at some point, so he factored that into the location, too.

They’re doing a picnic and the aquarium today. That’s it, just—relaxing.

He wonders sometimes if he’s going overboard, but he’d rather be going overboard than—having to track Peter to a dingy motel and finding him dead-eyed in the tub. Yeah. Never that. Never anything close to that. Never again.

Peter clicks his tongue, next to him, and he takes out the pan and turns on the stove top.

“I noticed the cookie dough,” he says, quietly.

“Oh, did you notice it?” Tony asks. He gets his groceries sometimes. Not all the time, but sometimes, and he got some more last night.

“We gotta eat that before May sees it,” Peter says, glancing at him. “You know how she gets, and I don’t know if I’m prepared for cookie May at this date and time. Either we just eat the whole tube raw or we bring in some kind of distract—Happy could try, but I don’t know if he’s well versed enough in the lore of—”

“I can prepare him,” Tony says.

“You weren’t thinking when you got that,” Peter says, raising his eyebrows. “You were just—you just made a decision, and now we all have to—deal with it—”

Tony snorts, grinning at him, and Peter smiles back, big and wide.

He’s moving better now, and his shoulders are less hunched, and he’s—he’s not all the way back, but he’s better. It’s getting lighter, it’s getting airier—Tony remembers so many moments in his childhood when he was afraid to ask for help, so he didn’t, and his father kept beating him down literally and figuratively and he had to grow a hard outer shell in the face of it. He never asked. His dad made it so he couldn’t, and his people had to break him of that.

He’s not that type of father. Not to his kid.

“C’mon,” Tony says, “help me break a few eggs here before Miss Lady in the other room starts throwing another fit about the FEAST schedule.”

Peter snorts, still smiling brightly. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll help you.”