Archive of Our Own

The first time they meet, Spider-Man catches his shoe on fire, destroys a hotdog stand, and faceplants into a billboard on his way out.

Tony turns to Rhodey, solemn, and says, “That kid’s gonna rule the world someday.”

It’s their third mission in two weeks, and Rhodey’s got that look on his face he gets whenever he’s trying really hard not to punch Tony. Admirable, Tony thinks. One day he’ll do it and Tony will probably laugh.

For now, Rhodey just sighs, says, “I’m leaving,” and flies away.

It’s a good idea, so Tony does it too.

- - -

While he’s not a patron saint of all saints, Tony still keeps a couple nice cards in his deck for special occasions. 

He looks at the five Iron Man suits towering behind him – donated to the New York Hall of Science, in part because they’d kindly asked for a contribution and also because Pepper threatened to destroy them herself if he didn’t get rid of them soon – and tells himself, if nothing else, surviving this interview should be reason enough to get those burgers he likes downtown after they’re done.

In front of blinding camera lights and at least one prehistoric flip phone, reporter Tasha Williams says, “Since the invention of this armor, you’ve been the target of numerous attacks from people trying to steal your technology. Are you at all worried about leaving your toys out for other people to play with?” 

She’s got a degree in communications from Harvard, dozens of pristine journalism awards, and she thinks, and has for a long time, that Tony is a complete idiot.

“Well,” Tony says, careful, because he knows Pepper is watching him somewhere and might actually kill him if he says what he really wants to, “I don’t think it would surprise anyone to know we took out the parts that might be harmful or valuable to anyone.” He laughs, a forced sound, to settle the mood. “Trust me, there’s nothing worth stealing there.”

Sugar sweet, Tasha says, “It’s a lovely donation. What was in it for you?”

It’s the symbolic equivalent of throwing down a gauntlet. Shots fired. Tony’s cheap, plastic smile feels like it might melt off his face. It’s not a lie when he says the whole thing is about the kids. It’s always been about the kids, about inspiring them to create something. One day one of them might look at his armor with a glint in their eye and a dream in their heart and spark a technological revolution greater than anything anyone has ever seen. It’s all the truth, all the real and disgustingly nice parts of him he keeps hidden behind nine hundred dollar sunglasses, but he’d be hard pressed to say he’s not milking it right now to see what Tasha will do.

“Christ, do I sound amazingly self-congratulatory even for me?” he jokes, and Tasha smiles, her red lipstick staining her mouth like blood. 

She goes in for another attack. “Well, let me ask you this –” and Tony’s not sure whether it’s a blessing in disguise or a complete catastrophe that this is the exact moment he spots something in the crowd.

“Hold on,” he interrupts. There, tucked between teenagers and photographers, a man is glaring up at him. That’s nothing new on its own. People are often glaring at Tony in any and every setting, but less often do those people have blue lights crackling around their skin.

“Oh, come on,” Tony says to himself, and then to the man, who rips open his coat in a dramatic reveal of a homemade arc reactor plastered on his chest, and then again to his wristwatch carrying the few pieces of armor he keeps concealed on his body. “Fantastic.” 

Active duty non-combatant, he’d told Pepper. Looks like Tasha might be right for once – Tony really is an idiot. 

It all happens in the smallest of seconds after that. Tony makes a dive for Tasha just as the light radiating from the guy edges out and forms into long tendrils that crash onto the stage. Someone in the crowd screams. Fast, Tony asks, “You all right?” and when Tasha nods, says, “Okay, then now would be a good time to run, yeah?”

He taps his wrist. Tasha’s just barely down the stairs – the metal hand of Tony’s suit is expanding, circling his fingers, the guy is right there, he’s not gonna make it in time – and then a familiar voice yells, “Presenting ... my foot!” and Spider-Man comes swinging in from the sky and just barrels his way into the guy like a tiny monster and knocks him over. 

“Whoa, cool,” he says, unconcerned, after he’s landed in a crouch on the ground and Tony has frozen in place, a little amused and a lot lost. “Are those whips? How’d you make them?”

The guy snarls. “You will die in blood,” he bites out, and aims one of the whips at him.

“Okay,” Spider-Man allows, flinging himself up, twisting over the guy in a move that screams second nature. “That wasn’t one of my best one-liners.” 

Tony feels a sudden unspoken soft spot for him, the same kind he felt for Rhodey the first and only time he’d tried using a catchphrase and it had blown up in his face. 

“The problem is I have nowhere to workshop this material, you know?” Spider-Man continues. “Maybe I should join an improv group. I could – whoops!” he says, and goes crashing into the collection of Iron Man suits from a well-timed snap of electricity. 

Tony sighs. “And I had such high hopes too after that terrible opening line.”

As it stands, Indiana Jones wannabe isn’t interested in talking, but he is good at dodging Tony’s blasts, which is the worst, because, as Tony keeps agonizing, he didn’t come prepared for a fight. It means he’s all offense and no defense. Like a moron, his brain helpfully supplies. Pepper is never going to let him live this down.

“That’s an interesting accent. Mind telling me who sent you?” he asks, trying to stall, to distract long enough to get the advantage. 

The guy, all first-time actor intensity and gravelly voice, says, “God,” and there’s just no way Tony is going to die at the hands of someone who seriously just said God. What the hell?

He revs himself for another attack, but just as the whip snaps toward him, just as his brain sings moron moron moron, Spider-Man, dressed now in the top half of an Iron Man suit and looking absolutely ridiculous, jumps in between them and catches the full force of the blow. The resounding snap of 2.0 Indiana Jones’s attack rounding back on him cracks through the air. The arc reactor shatters.

Impressed, Tony says, “I take it back,” and hops off the stage. “Well done.”

Spider-Man claws at the Iron Man chest plate, yanking it over his shoulders. “Am I on fire?” he yells.

“You’re not on fire,” Tony says. 

“I think I’m on fire!”

It doesn’t seem like Indiana Jones will be getting up anytime soon with the way he’s sprawled out over the pavement, so Tony turns toward Spider-Man and says, “How’d you know to do that?”

Spider-Man squirms. “Oh. Um, well, I know your Mark Nine armor has a built-in 54-zglat Starktech energy fluctuation shield,” he says. “And I, uh – woo – I just thought I could use the armor shield as, you know ... a shield. Kind of surprised it worked.”

There’s a distinct wobble in his voice that makes Tony think he’s gonna cry, which – no. Absolutely not. No thank you. It’s probably, above all else, just the static shock of all that electricity lingering behind – it was a big hit, after all, he'll give him that – but Tony doesn’t think he could handle tears right now.

“How’d you know all that?” he asks, aiming for diversion and pulling the Iron Man helmet from Spider-Man’s head.

Weakly, Spider-Man says, “I’m – yeah, big fan.”

Tony takes him in, eyes narrowed. “How old are you?”

“Um – how old do I look?” Spider-Man counters, which means young. Another thing Tony would rather not deal with right now.

“You did good,” he says instead, and Spider-Man nods a few times, shaky, unstable, sinking like his legs are giving out.

“I think I need to lie down.”

“Yeah,” Tony says. It’s been a day. “You lie down.”

- - -

The next time Tony sees him in person again, it’s near a coffee shop in Brooklyn. He and Happy are heading back to the car after the longest meeting Tony’s had in his entire life, and Spider-Man swings by, catches sight of them, makes an immediate bee-line back in their direction and says, “Hey, Mr. Stark!” and then brushes the toe of his foot against a drain pipe and tumbles across a rooftop.

Happy says, “Who’s that?” while Tony sips his coffee.

“Spider-Man.”

They share a collective moment of silence before Happy shrugs and says, “I like him,” and gets in the car.

- - -

(“Okay,” Happy says, months later when they’re standing in the flames of Coney Island, flashlights illuminating a handwritten note pinned to a guy bound with webs against a storage crate. Found: flying vulture guy. Love, Spider-Man. P.S. sorry about your plane!

“Yeah, I think I like this guy,” Happy decides, and glances, sidelong, at Tony. “Am I fired?”

A plane carrying millions of dollars of Stark Technology in route and hijacked without any of them having a clue except Spider-Man. Tony likes this guy a lot too.

“We’ll see,” he says.)

- - -

In retrospect, it’s not as if Tony hasn’t known about Spider-Man since practically the day he first debuted. After the Great Battle of New York – “Please,” Rhodey had begged him. “Stop calling it that. You’re embarrassing me” – Tony set up an active log to track all extraordinary events happening within the city. So it’s not like he didn’t know about the guy parading around in red and blue pajamas, it’s just that he didn’t know how young he actually was.

And that, in retrospect too, should have been obvious by the red and blue pajamas.

Mental math tells him Spider-Man, aka Peter Parker of Queens, New York, is freshly turned sixteen, which means he was fourteen-going-on-fifteen the first time they met, and that is so wildly upsetting to Tony he has no other choice than to call Rhodey at three in the morning to complain.

“I thought he was in college,” he says. “Do you know how embarrassing that is?”

“No,” Rhodey says, sounding tired. “Because it’s not embarrassing at all. Because literally no one cares. You didn’t buy him a drink or something. It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to my pride,” Tony insists. “I have PhDs, Rhodey. And I couldn’t tell that he was fourteen.”

“I’m hanging up.”

He’s got a file of information about Peter on his screen. Born to Richard and Mary Parker, both deceased, under the care of May and Ben Parker, the latter also deceased. A rough life, but a good kid, if his records mean anything.

“Says he goes to Midtown,” Tony reads. “That one of those genius schools?”

“Yeah,” Rhodey says. “School of science and technology. You did a speech there a couple years ago.”

Tony clicks through the file. A smart kid, then, by his grades, but Tony has seen Spider-Man on more than one occasion hanging out with Matt Murdock and Wade Wilson, who fall into the categories of not the best idea and a terrible, horrible idea, respectively. 

Distracted, Tony mutters, “Aw, you know me so well.”

“And I hate myself for it every day,” Rhodey says.

One time in college, Rhodey sat vigil at Tony’s bedside for a week after Tony inhaled chemical fumes in a disaster of an experiment and developed pneumonia. He’d raided every vending machine on the second and third floor of the hospital to sneak Tony his favorite candy to cheer him up. Sometimes, to this day, Tony still finds candy he didn’t buy in odd places around his house.

“Love you too, Rhodes,” he says.

Rhodey’s such an old man, he really is a second away from ending the call. He grumbles, “Yeah, love you. Go to bed, Tony. Jesus,” and then he’s gone exactly like Tony expected him to be.

Tony shakes his head, and to his screen, to the picture of Peter Parker and the picture of Spider-Man, says, “Fourteen years old. Damn it.”

Behind him, Dum-E whirls to life. Tony rolls his eyes. “Okay, okay. Bedtime.”

- - - 

He has no idea how it happens, and at some point along the way he honestly doesn’t care anymore. He’s at a benefit with benefit people and their benefit clothes and someone starts talking to Tony about the aliens invading New York – the goddamn aliens, like it’s some dinner conversation – and the next thing he knows he’s scaled six flights of stairs without stopping to breathe and he’s on the roof and he’s not alone. 

Near the edge, legs flung over the side, Spider-Man is laid out on his back, the red and blue of his suit vibrant against the gray concrete, the gray sky.

“You alive?” Tony asks, nudging an empty can aside as he makes his way over.

Spider-Man – Peter – startles, flipping around onto his elbows to look at him. “What the f – oh, Mr. Stark. You scared me.” He laughs, hoarse. There’s that tremor in his voice again, like he’s going to cry or he already has. “What’re you doing here?”

Tony sits next to him, throwing his legs over the side too. Down below, cars whizz by, honking, people hollering out windows. Queens at its finest. “Was gonna ask you the same thing.”

“Oh,” Peter says. He’s quiet a moment. “I was listening to your speech.”

Right. Tony’s speech. The one he’d given at the start of the evening to a room full of college students with stars in their eyes and a new grant under their belts. Tony loves funding projects for schools, but he hates the speech part, all the false words and cliche metaphors – seriously, Tony had been bribed by a professor to slip in something about Newton’s Third Law, and isn’t that ironic? Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Mention aliens and he runs.  

But more importantly – “Hang on, you were listening up here?” He’d given that speech on the second floor. The PA system is no joke, but even people in the lobby couldn’t make out what Tony was saying.

Peter pulls his legs under him. He looks so small now that Tony knows how old he is. “Um. Yeah. Enhanced senses and all that.”

“Yikes,” Tony mutters. “Concerts must be a bitch.”

“I – uh, I guess,” Peter says, and hesitates, unsure, directing Tony fleeting looks. “Are – is everything okay?”

“Why do you ask?” Tony counters. Peter isn’t close enough to know his tells yet, to get annoyed with him answering questions with more questions. One day he might grow older and grow tired of Tony the way many people do, but for now Tony can breathe in the unknown parts of himself between them.

“Cause you’re up here instead of downstairs,” Peter says, and Tony doesn’t want to dignify that totally fair response, so he replies, “So are you.”

Without missing a beat, Peter snorts out, “Yeah, but I’m not getting paid to be here.”

When Tony laughs, it's more sincere than Peter's was, but that’s not saying much. He has to be careful. Peter is still young, young enough to be influenced by the world and by his words, and if Tony doesn’t watch out, his construction of affairs could inadvertently rebuild the bridge he’s been burning behind him and invite someone to follow in his footsteps.

“It’s just dumb superhero things,” he decides to say, but he knows it’s too vague when it comes out. God, teenagers thrive on vague.

“I’m a superhero,” Peter says.

“Yeah, but you’ve got that small, friendly neighbor thing going on,” Tony tells him. “So you haven’t hit the point where it’s not charming anymore.” When had Tony hit that point? When the aliens attacked, most likely. Or inside a cave in Afghanistan, perhaps. He’s feeling very whiny today. “You’ve probably never hurt a fly in your whole life.”

Peter goes rigid at that, holding himself still. Tony knows for a fact Spider-Man has never hurt anyone, and there’d been no mention of Peter ever committing any kind of crime in his files. Still, he doesn’t actually know much about Peter personally, and he can’t say for sure where his reaction came from or why. He doesn’t like it either way.

“What’s your deal anyway, kid?” he asks. “What gets you out of bed in the morning? What makes you put on those pajamas every day?”

“They’re not pajamas,” Peter says, indignant, but the bite of his words trail off into something more somber. “I – I just want to save people.”

“Why?”

“Because –” Peter stops, starts again, stops once more. The eyes of his mask move like they’re mimicking his own. They search the clouds, the street, and settle again on the horizon. “Because,” he says, softly, “I have these new powers, and I'm still me, but I'm – I'm not. I have a responsibility now." He sounds so serious, way too heavy for his age. "Mr. Stark, when you can do the things that I can, but you don’t, and then the bad things happen? They happen because of you.”

And – ah – that's it. A little glimmer into Peter’s reaction. He’s lost a lot too, and maybe Tony has higher hopes for him than he does for himself, but right now, sitting on this roof, they’ve got enough in common they both understand what those words mean. Newton’s Third Law. Every action has a reaction. Good or bad.

“Watching out for the little people,” Tony says. “Doing your part. I get it.”

Peter leans back onto his hands, more relaxed, as if some weight as been lifted from his chest. “Yeah. Yeah, just looking out for the little guy. Friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.”

He’s got a bright future ahead of him yet. Maybe they’re both just burning bridges. 

“Wait,” Peter says, all at once. “I have an idea. Stay right here,” and throws himself over the side of the building. 

It's so out of the blue it takes Tony a few valuable seconds to scramble forward and make sure Peter isn't a pancake on the sidewalk. He's already caught himself on a web when Tony makes him out, but Tony wouldn't put it past himself to have a heart attack still. “What the hell, kid?” he says. "A little warning next time you're gonna completely lose your mind would be nice."

“Stay there!” Peter calls, and swings away.

Five minutes later, he comes looping back with two hotdogs wrapped in tinfoil and eagerly shoves one into Tony’s hands, pulling his mask to his nose to inhale his own because, as it turns out, he’s a little gremlin.

Tony raises an eyebrow. “A hotdog?”

“Best hotdog in all of Queens,” Peter corrects around a mouthful. “My friend Ned and I always get them when one of us is down or stressed or something. It’s the best pick-me-up.”

Tony peels back the tinfoil. He’s always hated Newton’s Third Law. He despises speeches. He could go the rest of his life without hearing about aliens from other worlds ever again and be just fine.

But this? This is pretty nice. He could do with more days like this.

"Cheers," he says, and eats his hotdog at a regular pace, like a normal human being.

And Peter laughs, for real.

- - -

The thing no one told him when he was a kid and played make-believe superheroes with his make-believe action figures is that in real life, being a superhero is pretty fucking boring most of the time.

Tony’s glad for that, if not for the peace and false sense of security it gives him, but he also owns a company, and tells a lot of people what to do, and sometimes he sits in meetings for days making trades and talking exchanges and buying and selling tons of junk. It pushes him all through the city, a constant vanguard of modernists and inventors leading him to pale-colored conference rooms and through obscenely designed and horrendously unsafe laboratories.  

All that’s to say Tony is tired most of the time. It’s probably what sparks the insane flash of jealousy when he sees Spider-Man riding on top of a train in Queens, and what makes him almost decide to step in front of a car when he spots him coming out of a bodega with a sandwich and a backpack and just no care in the world.

“Listen,” Rhodey tells him earnestly, a few days later when Tony has dragged him along to a meeting because he threatened to commit arson if anyone forced him to attend another one of these things alone. “I’m gonna need you to shut the hell up.”

“I forgot you’re so old you don’t remember what being young feels like,” Tony says, sighing a drawn-out and dramatic, disappointed sound. “You need to connect with the kids these days.”

Rhodey waves his coffee at him as they push through the front doors out onto the snowy sidewalk. “You need to stop saying things like that.”

“Why? Jealous of my ability to retain youth?” Tony asks, and from behind, hears someone say, “Oh, excuse me, sir, you dropped this” and comes face to face with one Peter Parker, clad in a dark burgundy jacket, his curly hair wild in the chill of the winter wind and eyes slowly widening in horrifying recognition.

“Oh no,” he croaks, hand extended, palming the black glove Tony must not have tucked into his pocket all the way. 

Next to him, a boy around his age with a hole in the knee of his jeans wheezes, “Oh my God.” The girl to his right shoots him a look.

“On no?” Tony parrots. “Don’t usually get that kind of greeting, gotta admit. First time for everything though.”

Shell-shocked, Peter just stares at him, and he’s not handing over the glove but he’s not moving either, and Tony remembers, belatedly and wonderfully, Peter doesn’t know Tony knows who he is. It’s the perfect set-up for Tony to wreak some havoc, really stir the pot, so to say, but Peter’s cheeks are turning beet red fast enough on their own already for Tony to be able to top it.

“Well,” he prods. “You gonna give that back or should I say my goodbyes and wish it a good life?” 

Peter jumps. Actually, physically jumps. How fun. “No, yeah! Yes, here,” he says, and thrusts the glove at Tony. “Okay, bye!”

He grabs the other boy by the arm and pushes, turns to pull him desperately when he doesn’t move. “Dude, dude! That’s Tony Stark!” the boy whispers, to which Peter rushes out, “Ned, shut up. MJ, please, let’s go, please,” and the girl glances at Tony, sizing him, her confusion a rival to his own but ultimately not enough to interest her and she just follows them both away without a word.

“That the kid?” is all Rhodey asks after they’ve rounded the corner and Tony can no longer hear Peter’s friend yelling, “Tony freaking Stark! Peter, what’s wrong with you?”

“Yup,” Tony replies. “In all his glory.”

Rhodey hums a little, and because he’s so cold sometimes, says, “Wow. Can’t believe you couldn’t tell he was fourteen” and takes his stupid ten dollar latte and his stupid face and leaves to find their car.

- - -

“If you’re messing with me,” Tony warns. “I swear I will get even in the worst way possible.”

In his earpiece, Happy huffs. Something shuffles like papers on his end, loud, like he’s struggling to hold them together. “I’m reading the reports as they come in,” he says. “You think I have time to make this up? You’ve got me working twelve hours a day. Seriously, Tony, who needs this many copies of The Shining? You got something you want to tell us?”

“It’s decadent,” Tony says. The word of the day on Pepper’s desk this morning. Tony likes the way it rolls off his tongue. “I’m decadent. And if you ruin any of them, I’m sending your resume to a temp agency,” he adds, and disconnects the call for good measure. 

He can feel Happy rolling his eyes from across the city, but it whisks itself away into the air when he hears a friendly, “Oh, hey, Mr. Stark.”

Only a few months have passed since the last time Tony saw Peter, frantic and panicked and tripping over himself to get away. There’s something different about him now, something taller in his spine, and though he’s still wearing those same old ridiculous red and blue pajamas, he seems older, at the tail end of a growth spurt that didn’t change his height but filled out the lanky, awkward limbs of a boy turning into a teenager into a man.

And that’s wrong, because Peter is still very much sixteen, not an adult at all, and he’s standing now by an equally sixteen, not-an-adult Johnny Storm. 

“Kid,” Tony greets, and nods to Johnny, more out of obligation and less because they actually like each other, which is up for debate most days. “Storm. Didn’t know you two were friends.”

“We’re not,” Peter says, just as Johnny slings an arm over his shoulder and declares, “We’re besties.”

Peter plucks Johnny’s arm off him. “No.”

Unbothered, Johnny beams at Tony, winking like they’re sharing a secret, its shape unfurling in the twist of his lips. “We’re still working on labels.” 

“Nope,” Peter says, and, flicking his gaze to the bank behind him, to the shopping mall down the street and back to Tony again, asks, “What’re you doing here?”

“Contemplating my life choices,” Tony admits, but realization settles after his words, and he can tell now that Peter isn’t the only one who looks to be staking out their surroundings. Johnny is casting subtle, short glances around them too, smiling and waving when he catches the eye of one of the girls who has stopped nearby to giggle and point and the whole group of them who squeal at his attention. 

“Gonna guess you also got a call about suspicious activity,” Tony says, because he really doesn’t want to say what the witnesses were calling it. A man with a pumpkin head. Some days he feels so old.

Peter steps a little closer, holding himself taut with the obvious fear someone might overhear. “Yeah, Johnny said Reed got a call about it,” and Tony can’t help the way he repeats, “Reed ?” like he’s surprised Peter is on a first name basis with Reed Richards but literally ran away from Tony on the street.

“Um, yeah,” Peter says. The blush in his voice covers for the fact he’s got a mask on. It’s nice that some things don’t change. “Uh, anyway,” Peter presses forward. “We just came to check it out, but we haven’t seen anything yet.”

Annoyed again, Tony says, “Yeah, me either.”

“Pretty sure it’s just some kids playing around,” Johnny dismisses. “Not like this dude is the first person to ever put something weird on his head. Did Reed ever tell you about the time Spidey didn’t have his mask so we had to give him a paper bag?”

“Oh?” Tony says. Sounds like they’re friends today after all. “Do tell.”

Sudden, Peter jerks his head to the side. “Wait.”

“Okay,” Johnny starts, “So we were doing this totally awesome experiment and –”

“Johnny,” Peter snaps, and his tone, sharp and on edge and so not Peter-like, is enough to make Johnny fall silent. 

Tony says, “Kid?” while Johnny says, “What’s wrong?” and Peter isn’t looking at either of them but instead into the middle distance where the sun has lowered itself to the tops of the highest buildings. He’s quiet so long, so tense and unmoving, that Tony almost stops Johnny when he moves to touch his arm. 

“Something’s coming,” Peter says. Johnny falters, lowering his hand. “Get everyone out of here. Now.” 

But because Johnny is a terrible listener, he flames on – one of the girls shrieks, another yells, “This is the best day of my life!” – and follows after Peter when Peter webs himself up into the sky.

That just leaves Tony, with his fancy new suit and promise to Secretary Ross that he’s not non-combatant for the time being, to sweep one look at the girls, announce, ”Show’s over. Everyone inside. We’ve got company” and then stand awkwardly as people sulk off, waiting to see what Peter saw. 

Half his attention stays on the civilians. He ushers the stragglers into subways and hotel lobbies and has Friday keep first responders on standby while twenty-something-year-olds complain about being late for work and some of them just leave anyway. The other half of his attention glues onto Peter and Johnny, hovering in the air. 

“Friday,” he says. “Patch Spidey and Storm onto the comms.” 

Friday does. Cautious, because Peter is still tense, Tony says, “Spidey, what’s the word? You got anything up there?”

“Something’s coming,” Peter stresses. “I can feel it, Mr. Stark. I don’t know – whoa! What the hell is that?”

That ends up being a small, orange orb that zips past Peter at remarkable speeds. Even from on the ground, Tony knows advanced, illegal tech when he sees it.

“It’s a drone,” he says. “Someone must be controlling it.” What he doesn’t say is be careful, there’s probably more, and he should, because there are, there always are, and a second after he thinks it, Peter whips around, shouts, “Johnny, look out!” and shoves Johnny out of the way of a man on a hoverboard with a pumpkin head.

There’s no time to think about the absurdity of it. Peter has moved Johnny, but he’s still in the path of the oncoming attack, and pumpkin guy hits him, hard, tossing something small and ball-like into his face that explodes in a puff of dust as he flies by. Peter coughs, loses the grip on his web, and falls – falls and falls and falls, achingly slow motion and painfully alone. Tony knows he’s too far and it happened too fast for Johnny to comprehend and there’s nothing either of them can do when Peter slams into the ground and doesn’t get back up.

“Shit!” Tony hisses. More drones are following in pumpkin head’s path, shooting lasers now – of fucking course – coming after him, after Johnny, who cries, “Spidey!” and lunges toward him.

“Stop,” Tony demands, activating his repulsors and blasting the drones away. He takes off into the sky too, leading a new fleet in the opposite direction of the civilians below. The lasers hit everything. Fire escapes snap free of their bolts and list sideways. Bricks crumble. Tony aims his palm at the three bots plunging toward Johnny and blows them to pieces. 

“But Spidey –” Johnny starts.

“Is alive,” Tony finishes, before he even knows it’s true. For a long time he’s been messing with the mechanics of nanotech, molding it into outlines of things he recognizes, and it’s still a work in progress, but the pieces from the housing unit on his chest that form into their own self-powered unit and take off toward Peter make Tony feel mildly better. Once they connect, he’ll be able to read Peter’s vitals, to make sure his heart is still beating.

For now, he says, “But he won’t be for long if you go down there with that battalion on your back. Spider-Man just saved your life. Don’t make him regret it.”

It must be as awful for Johnny to hear as it for Tony to say, but it’s a ruthless truth. They’re being targeted, and if Peter isn’t already dead, he will be if they go for him.

Johnny’s flames burn brighter, hot enough Tony starts to feel it in his suit. 

“I’m going after that son of a bitch,” he says, burns at least ten drones to ashes, and zooms off.

“Heartbeat detected, boss,” Friday informs. Through Johnny’s end of the connection, an unfamiliar voice, high-pitched and panicky, says, “Get away from me!”

“Is that our bad guy?” Tony asks, and Johnny says, “Yup. Gonna melt his face off.”

One of the drones chasing Tony breaks from the pack. If pumpkin head is the mastermind behind all this, his control of the dozens of drones is incredible, especially under the fury of a flaming teenager.

The free drone – oh god, it’s shaped like a pumpkin too, what the hell – nosedives for Peter, and Tony has a split second of total fear and a slightly longer second where he hopes Johnny does actually melt this guy’s face off.

Both are short-lived and end when a gunshot rings out and the drone sputters and drops. 

“Well,” says Sam over the comms. “What’d we miss?”

“Jesus Christ.” 

He’s standing at the corner of 32nd, flanked on either side by Steve and Natasha, who look as ready and poised to fight as they ever have been. 

“What took you guys so long?” Tony asks. “You stop for donuts or something?”

“Yeah,” says Natasha. “They had a deal going on. We got you one.”

Ever professional, Steve cuts in with, “What’s the situation?”

“Situation,” Tony says, “Is I got a guy on the ground and some drones that look like they’re about to start trying to kill him. Name’s Spider-Man. Red and blue onesie. Can’t miss it.”

“I’ll get him,” Sam decides. “I can run rescue.” He’s used to that, saving people, rescuing instead of fighting. It’s the backbone of his being, pararescue, recovery, and it’s fine and dandy all of the time except this time, when Tony needs him in the air and tells him as much. 

“Could use your top-secret, fancy wings up here, Wilson.” 

So Steve says, “I see Spider-Man. You two get up there and help Stark,” and Tony doesn’t feel any more relieved than he did five minutes ago, but it’s something. Steve is a good soldier and a good man and an awfully infuriatingly good leader and there’s really not much else to it. 

“Great,” Tony says, still checking Peter’s vitals on the inside of his helmet. “Then Wilson, do your thing, birdman. Nat –” he finds her already perched on the second story of a building, eyebrows raised, looking at him. “You keep that donut safe.”

She salutes him with a wicked grin, dives off the roof, and roundhouse kicks a drone into oblivion. 

With the three of them working together, the drones are taken out in minutes, and Johnny returns fisting the back of a weeping pumpkin head’s shirt and dumps him off on the closest hero he sees – Sam – and starts toward Peter. 

Pumpkin head wails, “It’s not fair! There was only supposed to be one of you! I’m not even the real guy!”

“Sure,” Sam agrees. “Obviously. You guys all knew he wasn’t the real guy, right? I think we all knew.”

Infuriated, pumpkin guy says, “You’ll all be sorry!” and slams his wrist into his thigh. Tony calls it a tantrum in his head, but like most things he thinks in his head, it turns out to be wrong, and the tantrum is a pre-planned and likely last-ditch backup to activate one more drone.

This one heads straight for Steve, who was told the fight was over, who has his back turned and is helping an old man who hurt his leg because he’s such a fucking kind person all the time and Tony will be damned if this is how he goes out.

He dives after the drone, opens his mouth to warn Steve, and then, from nowhere, something slams into that awful orange ball and jams the firing system. It slows, and Tony’s able to destroy it from there before it can advance any further. 

On the ground, Peter is standing, wobbling, his arm stretched out in an almost aborted motion, and it clicks in Tony all at once that Peter’s web is what hit the drone.

“Holy shit,” he laughs. “Nice job, kid,” and Peter laughs too, all breathy and muffled, and collapses.

- - -

For special people with special powers like Peter, Tony has a system in place called “Nice Guys Finish Last.” It’s a campy, droll name he came up with for Steve a long time ago, and it means there are always people trained to deal with superhumans in the hospital, usually people who work under Helen Cho in some aspect because they’re the easiest to deal with and don’t mind signing NDAs.

In the case of Peter, it means he’s tucked away in an expensive, private corner of the hospital where celebrities and politicians are treated, and that Tony and – god help him – Johnny are stationed in a waiting room by themselves when a doctor comes in to tell them Peter is stable and awake.

Johnny stands rapidly, so fast Tony barely catches him with, “Ah, hang on a second, Hothands. You should probably let me go in there first.”

“Why?” Johnny demands. 

Tony is much too tired to deal with sixteen right now. He says, “‘Cause Spidey has a secret identity and I’d rather not be the one to spoil it. Seems like a milestone he should reach on his own.”

Johnny’s lips purse together the way they do when he’s about to say something particularly annoying. “See,” he drawls, “From my point of view, I’d be the one spoiling his identity by letting some random guy go in and see his face. You catch my drift?”

Tony absolutely does not catch his drift or even have a clue what that means, but Johnny gives him a sudden honest, raw look. 

“Do you know who he is?” he asks quietly. 

“I might,” Tony says. 

“I might too,” Johnny confesses, and then quickly, hinting on suspicion, says, “Say it on three?”

“What are you, six?” Tony asks, rubbing his eyes. “We’re not saying it on three. We’re going to be adults and write it down. Just the initials.” He pats at the pockets of his blazer and finds them empty. Oh yeah – Pepper doesn’t let him carry anything on his person anymore after the pickpocketing incident back in ‘08. “Okay, new plan. You say one initial and I say the other,” and it’s that Johnny doesn’t ask who gets to say which one that already makes Tony think he’s telling the truth, because it doesn’t matter what order they go in.

Tony says, “P,” and Johnny says, “P,” and he’s right, he knows, and Johnny stares at him for a second, understanding, but still feels the need to add, “My P stands for Parker.”

“Yeah.” So Johnny knows his secret identity and Peter calls Reed by his first name and that’s totally fine. Tony should probably figure out how to get in contact with Peter’s aunt anyway. “Go see him, Storm.”

Johnny doesn’t need to be told. He’s practically out the door.

- - -

The problem with Newton’s Third Law and why Tony hates it lies in the part of laws people tend to forget: they’re not always right. They don’t always account for the unaccountable.

Spider-Man is off the streets for nearly two weeks after his injury, and when Tony finally gives in to his own curiosity to find him, he’s on the same roof he was the last time Tony had been moody about Newton and he's laying facedown on the concrete, head pillowed on his arms, mask slipping to his nose. 

Tony has had it rough dealing with Secretary Ross and his bristling looks and the stern “We need to talk about this, Tony” voicemails he's been leaving. But Peter got the real short end of the stick. He’d taken the brunt of the attack, and while he’d been spared of any serious injury, he still walked with a limp for a week after their battle and had to be in the ICU for three days while they figured out what was in the bomb thrown at his face. It hadn't been easy.

“Your phone’s going off,” Tony says, over the buzzing coming from Peter’s – pocket? Hood? Tony doesn’t know where he stores anything in that horrid suit.

“I know,” Peter says into his arms. 

The buzzing keeps going, relentless. “You wanna get that?” Tony asks, easing himself to the ground beside him. “Sounds important.”

“It’s Johnny,” Peter says. “It’s not.”

Somewhere, between visits and research, Johnny had swindled Tony’s contact info out of a third party source and texted him all of six times before Tony blocked his number. Eventually he’ll try again and realize he can get through, because Tony isn’t always mean even when he'd like to be. He figures if Johnny is actually worried about Peter, he’ll come to Tony next, or go through Reed to get to Tony, but since that hasn’t happened, it’s most likely that Peter is fine.

“You all right?” Tony asks, just to double down on it.

“Uh huh,” Peter says. 

Tony wants to say he’s not sure that’s true, he remembers their last conversation on this roof and the way Peter told him the reason why he was a superhero without telling him why at all. But Peter is older than he was that day, and older than he was at fourteen, and he might not yet be an adult, but one day he’ll become the best of them.

“I’m just restless,” Peter says on his own. “Ready to get out there again. Doc says I gotta wait a few more days though.”

And this is the unaccountable, the reason Tony hates laws. Because Newton’s Third Law says for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. But Newton’s Third Law doesn’t mean things don’t break. It doesn’t mean everything is indestructible.

“Feel like a hotdog?” Tony asks, and smiles when Peter lifts his head.

The problem with Newton’s Third Law is this: it doesn’t account for how things come back together.

- - -

So the first time they meet, Spider-Man catches his shoe on fire, destroys a hotdog stand, and faceplants into a billboard on his way out.

This time, the first on the record, Tony is sitting inside Peter’s apartment on a pure white couch with May Parker, eating banana bread which was somehow, impossibly, made without bananas, while Peter gapes at them from the entryway for a solid thirty seconds. 

“Ah, Mr. Parker,” Tony says. “Nice to see you.” 

Peter chokes. “W-what? I – what?”

“Tony here was just telling me about the internship,” May chimes in. “How come you didn’t say anything?”

“Right, the –” Peter looks between them. From the corner of Tony’s vision, May mouths something that’s either Tony Stark! or what the fuck? Tony can’t tell. “The internship. I – wait, what?”

Bad at lying, Tony notes down. That’ll be interesting. 

But May, apparently not bad at lying and great at reading between the lines, takes this as some invisible sign and stands. “Well, I’ll let you two talk,” she says. “It was very nice to meet you.”

“You too, Ms. Parker,” Tony says, and to Peter, “Can you believe she’s somebody’s aunt? Incredible.”

Peter’s ears go red. He’d probably keep stuttering unintelligibly if Tony gave him long enough, but something about the way May disappears down the hall has him deflating in on himself, releasing a wounded noise. 

“What’re you doing here?” he asks.

“Ah, ah,” Tony says. “Me first.” On his phone, he’s prepared a montage of clips Rhodey hand selected because “you’re not cool enough to know what’s cool, Tony. Let me do it.” It’s a highlight of impressive moments, stopping cars from crashing into busses, giving tourists directions, scooping little kids out of intersections before trucks can hit them. The original draft had a clip of Peter shoving Johnny out of the way during the Great Pumpkin Fight – “Tony, I swear to god ” – but that one was still too fresh for Tony and probably too fresh for Peter, who has only just gotten back to patrolling and who had worn his mask every time Tony came to visit in the hospital, still under the strange impression Tony had no idea who he was.

“Question of the rhetorical variety,” Tony says, projecting the video above his screen. “That’s you, right?”

It’s so, so sad that Peter can even pretend anymore. “Uh, no,” he says. “Nope. That’s – not me. Never seen him before.”

Tony cuts the feed. “Yeah, rhetorical question, remember? I know it’s you, kid. So do you want an internship or not?”

Peter blinks, offensively slow. “What?”

“How do you climb walls anyway?” Tony asks. “Adhesive gloves?”

“No, I –”

“And those goggles, yikes.” Tony shudders, mock offended and just a little serious. “You need an upgrade. Systemic. Top to bottom. Does Aunt Hottie know?”

Knee-jerk, Peter says, “Know what?” and like a puppet with its string cuts, goes sinking down onto the other end of the couch. He buries his face in his hands. “Yeah, she knows,” he says miserably. “How’d you find out?”

Tony feels a little sorry for him. “Not for your lack of trying,” he says. “But does it really matter?”

Peter runs his hands back through his hair. “I guess not.”

And that seems to make him feel worse – Tony thinks if he hunches over any more he might disappear into the floor – so Tony sets his empty plate on the coffee table and says, “You know what I think is cool? Those webs. Tensile strength is off the chart.” He knows that one for a fact too. He’d taken a sample of them from the drone Peter took down. Spent as many days with it in the lab as Peter spent in the hospital. “Who manufactured them?”

“I did,” Peter mutters, flushing. 

“Then come intern for me,” Tony says. “Smart kid like you, lots of toys to play with. I think you could invent something revolutionary.” And that’s the thing – it has always been about the kids, about giving them a platform, a space to believe so one day they could create something to spark change. But Tony has been thinking about laws lately, about equal reactions and how things shatter with pressure. He's been thinking about Peter’s impulsive nature, that hardwired, heroic drive wound through his bones, the one that means, beyond everything else, Peter will always jump in front of other people. It’s crazy. It’s naive and it’s foolish and it’s exactly the reason Tony can’t let anyone force it away from him.

One day someone will look at Tony’s tech and they’ll change the world. One day is happening now.

“Why me?” Peter asks. “I’m just – I’m not special. I’m just Peter.”

“I think we need a little more ‘just Peters’ in the world, kid,” Tony says, and means it, more than he’s meant anything in a long time. “You’re already out there saving lives. I just want to give you a place where you can keep going.”

And so, when Peter starts his internship the next week, Tony officially introduces him to Rhodey, to Steve and Nat and Sam, who are training their newest generation of heroes, and he watches the way Peter bubbles excitement and nerves with the other interns and at lunch time accidentally pours water into his cereal and eats it anyway because he’s too embarrassed to get a new bowl.

“Yeah,” Tony says to Rhodey. “That kid’s gonna rule the world someday.”

And he totally means it too. Disgusting cereal and all.