Chapter Text
On Monday, Happy brings Peter upstate. There is a room full of reporters, cameras charged and ready to roll, waiting to snap pictures and take videos of the newest Avenger. And then, to Tony's surprise, Peter backs down and tells him he doesn't want it after all. Tony doesn't question it, but he should.
Instead, when Peter starts to leave and turns back to ask Tony if it was a test, Tony tells him it was. It becomes one, then. Not a test for Peter, but a test for Tony.
He uses the confusion to propose to Pepper in front of all the questioning eyes.
Peter leaves and doesn't come back.
It takes weeks before Tony notices something is wrong.
The thing is, Peter may not want to be an Avenger just yet, but the rules are the same. He still has to check in with Happy, who checks in with Tony. It's the usual goody-two-shoes stuff. Peter gives an old lady directions, saves a cat from a tree, stops a thug from stealing a car. Tony keeps tabs on him, keeps a distant watch to make sure he doesn't split another ferry in half.
Peter knows what he's supposed to do, but one day, he stops calling. He doesn't text. He doesn't show up on the radar at all. There's radio silence for three days and then he is back like nothing happened. Through Happy, he asks Tony if he can come tinker in the lab in the compound.
“I'm working on a new web shooter,” he says, and Tony is distracted, busy with engagement parties and wedding plans and get-togethers with people he doesn't know or care about.
“Tell him it's fine as long as he doesn't break anything,” he tells Happy. “He breaks it, he buys it. Wait, do I pay him?”
Happy rolls his eyes.
Peter is there the next day after school, backpack clutched tight in his hands. Tony catches him on the way to the basement levels.
“Hey, Mr. Stark!” Peter says. “Thanks for letting me do this. I just – uh, you know, don't really have access to cool tech like this.”
“You still don't,” Tony says, pressing his thumb into the keypad by the door. It lights up with recognition. Tony hits the down button. “I don't want you making anything freaky, got it? No one-handed robots, no gadgets to taze bullies.”
Peter frowns. He holds his bag tighter. He doesn't look embarrassed like Tony is hoping he will. “Of course, Mr. Stark. I just had a new design for a web shooter that I wanted to play with. Do you wanna see?”
“Maybe later.” Tony leads him through the winding hallways and toward one of his smaller, more personal labs. He presses his finger against the scanner outside. “And how many times do I have to tell you to call me Tony? Mr. Stark is my dad.”
“Oh.” Peter follows him into the room. He smiles a little as he looks around, and then, as if he's forgotten he's supposed to be surprised, his eyes go wide and his jaw drops. “Wow. This is great.”
“Uh huh. Eat your heart out. Happy will come get you in a couple hours.”
“Thanks, Tony.”
Tony checks the time. If he didn't have a meeting in five minutes, he might have noticed that, despite the many, many times he's asked Peter to call him by his first name, Peter never has before this.
But he doesn't pay attention. He dashes off to his next commitment.
Peter shows up every day after school and Happy is agitated.
“Why am I playing chauffeur?” he asks.
“Because that's what I pay you for.”
“This isn't my job, Tony.”
“Chill out,” Tony says. “You can still climb the pole to success while you pick up the kid. You don't have to pick and choose.”
Happy purses his lips. “I hate you.”
“I know you do.”
When Tony wanders down to the lab, Peter is huddled at a table, his back toward the door. Tony clears his throat and Peter jumps, shoving something into his pocket. He spins his chair around.
“H-hey, Tony,” he says.
Tony arches an eyebrow. “How are the web shooters coming along?”
“Great. Uh, they're good.” Peter swipes the heel of his hand under his nose and reaches back to grab a thick, black bracelet. He holds it up. “Still working on the design part.”
“Set it down,” Tony says, and waits until Peter does before he approaches and picks it up. At Peter's curious look, he says, “I don't like being handed things. It's a whole character arc we'll get into later.”
Peter nods. He drums his fingers along his thigh while Tony examines the shooter.
“You're being unusually quiet,” Tony says. “Scared you did something wrong?”
“What?” Peter's fingers stop. “No. I … I haven't gotten very far into it, is all.”
Tony can tell. There's nothing even remotely new to the tech he's holding in his hands. It's the exact same web shooter it always has been.
“I thought you had an idea,” Tony says. He drops it back onto the table and picks through the tools sprawled out.
“I do. It's just taking a little figuring out.”
“Sure.” It's hard to say, but Tony is sure something is off. Has Peter's hair always been this slicked back and styled? Has his face always been this blank of excitement? Tony can only remember a pink cheeked kid who hovered nervously around him. This Peter doesn't seem nervous at all.
It's weird.
Tony may not be the best at social cues, mostly because he doesn't normally care to figure them out, but this one he can't ignore. He can feel it in his bones.
Something is wrong.
“Does the kid seem off to you?”
“The kid always seems off to me,” Happy says as he types away on his tablet.
“Well, duh. But I mean a new kind of off. Wasn't he always running his mouth?” He'd left Peter with only a few words. Peter had almost looked glad that Tony was getting out of his way.
“He's been less chatty, sure,” says Happy. “But I'm not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth. He's a teenager. They're strange by nature.”
“Right.” Tony remembers being fifteen. Everything felt like the end of the world back then. He'd wanted to be understood, wanted to lash out against his dad, against anyone who tried to tell him what to do. He was smart, an MIT freshman with a big mouth, but he was so, so young.
“So you think it's some kind of rebellion thing?”
“I think it's some kind of hormone thing,” Happy says, not glancing up. “He's always been moody.”
“Has he?”
“Uh huh.”
“Well.” Tony clicks his tongue. That should be enough of a reason. Hormones and growing up and all the awkwardness of puberty. He should let it go.
He doesn't.
Spider-Man disappears. The more time Peter spends at the compound, the less he spends patrolling. Tony has FRIDAY track the last time the vigilante was spotted in Queens. It's been weeks. Weeks since Peter put on the suit, weeks since he started working on his web shooters and has only managed to change the clasp on the back.
Tony decides enough is enough. He's waited this long for Peter to get it together, has let himself be swept up in the all wedding madness with Pepper, but now he's teetering on the edge of frustration and is about to tip over. He pulls up security footage of his lab and combs through hours of Peter hunched over a mess of wires and broken bits of plastic. Whatever he's working on is always hidden somewhere else when Tony comes down to check on him. Tony can't decipher what it is.
“FRI, can you grab anything from that?”
“I'm afraid I'm unable to get a good view,” FRIDAY says. “Peter is blocking a majority of it.”
That's not an accident, Tony realizes. That's strategy. The kid is purposely hiding this from him.
“Is this still a hormone thing? This seems more like a gateway to drugs thing.”
“Should I prepare the Captain America PSAs?” FRIDAY asks.
“Absolutely,” says Tony. “One hundred percent. Have them ready for me in the lab. And bring up the changing body one too. It's a personal favorite of mine.”
“Will do, boss.”
“Um, Tony, is there a reason Steve Rogers is talking to me about puberty right now?”
Tony sighs and closes the door behind him. “FRI, you were supposed to play the drug one first. Puberty was the follow-up.”
Peter eyes him carefully. “Drug one?”
“Let's have a chat, kid,” Tony says, kicking out a stool. He sits across from Peter.
“I'm not doing drugs,” Peter says. “Do you honestly think I'm doing drugs?”
“I honestly can't figure out what's going on with you. I get the new look.” He motions toward Peter's hair, toward his plain shirt without any nerdy graphics on it. “Reinventing yourself as you get older. That's all good and dandy. What I don't get is how you've spent so much time down here and have done nothing to your web shooters.”
He's trying to give Peter an opportunity to tell the truth. Trying to give him an out. But Peter doesn't falter in his lie, and that bothers Tony more than anything else.
“I tried a few things and they didn't work.”
“Yeah? Well, let me see them. Maybe I can help.”
“You can't,” Peter says quickly. “Uh, I mean, I threw them away already.”
Tony sits back. “You threw them away?”
“Yeah.”
“Instead of re-using the expensive parts I nicely let you have access to, you threw them away?”
“Um.” Peter stares down at his hands. He doesn't apologize. He doesn't do anything at all.
“All right,” Tony says, rising to his feet. There's a bitterness in his voice he can't disguise. “Next time, don't throw out my stuff without asking,” he says, even though he knows that's not the problem. The problem is Peter is lying. There was never anything to throw away. “You're done for today. Go get Happy to take you home.”
Peter looks up, startled. “Tony –”
“Now, kid.”
Peter doesn't move for a long moment. He's shifting his gaze between Tony and the table. If he wants to sneak out whatever he's working on, he'll have to do it in front of Tony, right here and now.
In the end, he decides against it, snatching up the web shooter as though it's what he really wants. He grabs his backpack off the floor and slinks out.
Tony wastes no time digging through the drawers.
“Okay,” says Happy after Tony has sorted through the clump of materials and is trying to figure out what they are. “You were right.”
“I'm always right,” Tony says.
“Are you gonna shut up and let me tell you what you were right about?”
Tony turns his attention away from Peter's mysterious project and faces Happy. “Okay, blow me away.”
“The kid,” Happy says. “You were right about him being off.”
There's no satisfaction in the words. Plenty of times Tony has had feelings about people that never lead anywhere. To hear them echoed back now in confirmation doesn't make him feel any better.
“What'd he do?”
“He told me you thought he was doing drugs,” Happy says, yanking his phone from his pocket when it starts to ring. “Is he?”
“I don't know.”
“Anyway.” Happy shuts the sound off. “He was grumbling the whole way home and saying some not very nice things about you and when I told him to knock it off, he jumped out of the car.”
“What was he saying about me?” Tony asks. Happy gives him a skeptical look.
“He jumped out of the car, Tony. While it was moving.”
Tony presses his palm to his forehead and threads his hand back through his hair. “Okay, yeah, that part is weird too.” It's all beyond weird. Tony isn't quite sure what to do with him. He isn't quite sure what to do with anything anymore.
“He has a friend, right?” he says. “The one who called the night Peter took down my jet?”
“Yeah, what about him?”
“Can you get me his number?”
Happy doesn't ask why. He just unlocks his screen and starts flipping through it.
Peter's friend is named Ned, and he talks so fast Tony can barely follow along. Ned reminds him a lot of the way Peter used to behave around him, so when Tony halts him in the middle of a sentence and asks if Peter is acting different lately, he's not surprised that Ned sputters and pauses.
“Different?” Ned says, his voice jumping an octave. “Different how?”
“Out of the ordinary. You know, not like himself? I don't know how much more obvious to make it.”
“Well, I – I mean –”
“You're not gonna lie to me too, are you, kid?” Tony says. “Cause I'm getting way too old to berate teenagers.”
Ned gets quieter, serious. “Peter lied to you?”
“He also jumped out of a moving vehicle. You can't tell me you haven't noticed he isn't swinging around saving little old ladies like he used to.”
“I've noticed,” Ned says. “I just thought … “ He breathes out into the speaker of his phone, a shaky, unsure sound. “Sometimes he gets into a funk. It's … it's just a thing that started happening after his uncle – well, you know. But this time ...”
“It's different,” Tony finishes.
“It's different,” Ned agrees. “He's never not wanted to do Spider-Man stuff. Now all he wants to do is work in your lab. I thought maybe he needed a break. But he's missing practices and skipping school and stuff.”
Tony nods to himself. The last time Peter was doing suspicious things like this was when he was trying to prove himself to Tony. When he wanted nothing more than to be an Avenger. But he made the decision on his own. He told Tony no and stood strong.
So what is this?
“Keep an eye on him for me,” Tony says. “And don't tell him I called you. I'd rather not have another outburst.”
“Okay, Mr. Stark,” Ned says. He hesitates a moment. “You'll figure out what's going on with him, right?”
“I'm gonna try my best, kid. Promise.”
Tony does try his best, but his best, it proves, isn't enough to unravel what's going on. Peter shows up at the lab the next day and he doesn't acknowledge what happened the last time he was here. He just greets Tony with a smile and heads downstairs with an annoyed Happy.
Tony gets a little manic. He convinces Peter to put on his suit, under the guise he wants to run some updates and needs to check things out, and then has FRIDAY run a diagnostic test on Peter while he's in it. He checks his vitals, he runs a blood test – a small, little poke so small Peter doesn't even feel it – but nothing comes back wrong. There are no drugs in his system. Nothing toxic. Nothing unbalanced. Even his hormone levels are normal.
Peter settles back into his tinkering with the suit still on.
“Boss, I think perhaps Peter is just experiencing emotional turmoil,” FRIDAY says. “Stress can cause outbursts in people of all ages. I can recommend a therapist if needed.”
“Yeah,” Tony says, sighing. “I doubt he's gonna be open to that.”
He watches Peter on the security camera. The kid is working away, fingers fluttering, head whipping back and forth to the piece of paper next to him and the copper in front. Tony couldn't piece together what he found after he found it. It's was all a disjointed clutter of nonsense.
On the monitor, Peter catches the edge of his thumb in between the blades of a wire cutter. Tony can see blood bubble to the surface, but Peter doesn't notice. His vitals don't change either.
“FRI,” Tony says. “Do me a favor and send a shock through the suit.”
“A shock, boss?”
“Yeah. Just a mild one. Something to get his pulse up for a second.”
Tony observes his reaction. When nothing happens, he asks, “Did you do it?”
“Yes, boss.”
“Send another. Stronger.”
Still, nothing happens. Peter doesn't jump or stop moving. His pulse is strong, his blood pressure is just right.
Concern settles in Tony's chest. Down in the lab, he doesn't announce his presence. He picks up a small screwdriver and, before Peter can turn around, throws it at him. The theory he's brewing in his brain, the theory that tells him Peter won't reach out and catch it, comes true. It hits Peter in the back of the head. FRIDAY displays the same normal vitals on the inside of Tony's glasses.
Peter's reflexes are non-existent. Peter isn't feeling the pain he should be feeling.
He faces Tony with a furrowed brow. Something flashes in his eyes, so fast Tony almost misses it, but he sees it. Another color. Blue, almost like ice. Then brown filters back into his irises where it belongs.
Tony has seen this before, only once, but he knows now why Peter is different. Why he's been behaving the way he has. Because this thing in front of him, this thing wearing Peter's face, using Peter's body and voice?
It isn't Peter at all.