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Peter Parker was having one of the worst days of his life, and that was saying a lot. He’d had a lot of bad days through the years — the day his parents died, the day he got bitten by the spider, the day Ben died. Peter had been through a lot of shit, but as he sat in his calculus class, head aching and senses shot to hell, he thought that surely, surely it could not get much worse.
He’d woken up late in the morning, had had five minutes to pull on some clothes and get out of the house. That meant that he’d had no breakfast, which was a crucial meal for a normal human but even more crucial for an enhanced individual because his metabolism was like, crazy fast. So that hadn’t been a good start to the morning, and it had been exacerbated by the fact that immediately when he arrived, he’d encountered his least favourite person at Midtown (and that was saying a lot).
Flash Thompson.
“Ayyy, Penis Parker, you made it in today!” Flash said, grinning at his cronies, who were also smiling like lunatics. Their favourite hobby was to pick on Peter. Peter’s favourite hobby was to avoid them.
“Not today, Flash,” Peter muttered, his voice low and head throbbing in pain. He was just a snap of his fingers away from punching his bully in the face. It would cause irreparable damage because Peter was pretty fucking strong, but the lord was testing him and he didn’t have the willpower to resist.
Flash raised an eyebrow at him. Peter just shook his head and walked on, hoping Flash would leave him alone.
“Don’t be a spoilsport, Parker,” Flash said, grabbing his arm.
Peter tensed up: he didn’t like it when people he liked touched him, yet alone someone who spent his whole life thinking up new insults for him. And someone touching him on a sensory overload day? Not fucking on.
“Hey, dickwad,” MJ had ran up to them, and gave a pointed glare to Flash. “I need to talk to you about our tutoring session tomorrow.”
Thank god for MJ.
Flash let go of Peter’s arm, his face going a bright shade of red. Flash never had liked it when the fact that he had to be tutored by a fellow student was brought up. Principal Morita had tried to get Peter to be the tutor, because he was the smartest in the class, but even Morita (and he was fairly stupid at the best of times) had established that that pairing was never going to end well. So he’d gotten MJ to start tutoring Flash in return for an agreement that the whole school would start using sustainable materials in as many areas as they could.
“Fine,” he hissed and stared back at Peter as if to say ‘this isn’t over’. Peter gave MJ a weak smile as a thank you. She waved a hand at him as she towed Flash off to talk about tutoring.
So, Peter’s day had not been off to a good start. He’d walked into school and immediately had been harassed by his bully. It only minorly improved when he eventually found Ned, who immediately recognised it as a sensory overload day and didn’t rant at him like he normally would in the morning. Instead they sat in quiet, Peter pressing his fingers to his temples and closing his eyes. Anything to get away from the hubbub of the kids who were chatting and talking and throwing things across the room. If he could have done, he would have taken the day off, but his attendance was abysmal as it was, and there wasn’t really anywhere for him to go, because he didn’t have keys to the apartment (he’d lost them alongside his latest backpack). They were having a new set made, but it meant he would have to wait until May got off work.
Even though Ned knew all of this, he still tried to convince him. “Dude, I really think you should go home,” he said, a worried look dancing across his face without any attempt to hide it.
“I’m fine, Ned,” Peter said, and even he had to admit that it sounded like he was the opposite of fine. But he was fine. He felt like shit, but hey, he’d been stabbed before. He could handle one day of high school when he had sensory overload, it was nothing in comparison to the stab wound.
They had a test in English first period, and whilst Peter had definitely written the correct stuff in his essay, he’d left his book at home. Which meant he had to remember all of the quotes from the book off memory, and that really wasn’t good for his headache. Whenever they did tests the room was always quieter than normal lecturing from the teacher, but it did mean that Peter spent the hour listening to the scratchy noises of biros writing on paper. He spent half of the hour with his face on the desk to try and get his hearing under control. His teacher, luckily, hadn’t noticed a thing.
As the day continued, Peter took a turn for the worse. During recess, he started to get a sheen of sweat across his forehead and when he looked in the mirror he saw that he’d turned pale — paler than he already was, at least.
“Are you okay, Peter?” His chemistry teacher asked after their lesson, and he just smiled weakly and nodded. It had been the hardest lesson to sit through so far, because they’d had a lab to do, and Peter had almost collapsed into the bunsen burner as he completed it. He felt drowsy, his vision partially blurred and his senses worse than ever before.
Ned looked worried as they walked to Calculus. “Dude?”
Peter stumbled into the wall of lockers, narrowly avoiding a door that swung open. “I’m—I’m fine.”
“Let’s just go to the nurse, Peter,” Ned encouraged, but Peter shook his head.
“I can’t, Ned!” Peter insisted. “I have to be in school, and ‘m not supposed to get random people to check on me, in case they find out…y’know.”
“Dude, I seriously think—” Ned continued, but they were walking into the classroom and Peter basically collapsed into his seat with relief that yes, he’d made it. He didn’t sit next to Ned in Calculus, some other kid he was vaguely acquaintances with—Abe—who was also on the decathlon team, and as Peter sat down, Abe silently shuffled to the other end of the desk (as far away as he could get).
“I’m not sick,” Peter clarified, holding back a cough. Abe just stared at him as though he was crazy.
Mr Harrington started the class and Peter forced himself to open his eyes and watch as the man drew equations (which were all slightly incorrect, but hey, Peter wasn’t in the mood to discuss the intricacies of particle motion, average velocity and displacement). He could do it. Calculus was the last lesson before lunch, so he was convinced that he could stick it out long enough to make it to the end of the day.
Maybe.
Peter was normally the best student in the class in Calculus. It wasn’t intentional, because he didn’t like to draw much attention to himself even though Calculus and math in general was one of his favourite subjects to study, it was more that and Mr Harrington liked to pick on him because he knew Peter was capable of doing it (because he did well on the tests). And no-one ever volunteered to answer.
However his proficiency in math was his downfall on this particular day, because teachers didn’t seem to care that Peter was rather clearly not capable of answering questions. They didn’t see sick kids. Teachers seemed to adopt the principle that if the kid was in the lesson, they were capable of doing the complicated maths equations. Well. He said complicated loosely. The equations were supposed to be complicated at a high-school level, but Peter was decent at math.
Tony had once gotten him to sit an MIT admissions test, just out of curiosity. He’d passed. Actually, he’d gotten all but one of the questions completely right. So that was nice to know.
Peter was pretty sure he could do Mr Harrington’s derivative questions in his sleep, and lucky for him, he was correct. The state he was in with his senses in overload and a headache (the intensity of which could rival that of the experience of being stared down by Pepper Potts, which was terrifying) had reduced his basic motor functions so much that it felt like he was asleep. But his hypothesis was right.
Peter answered every single question correctly, and Mr Harrington asked him a lot of questions. If some of the answers were slightly slurred, then hey, he had to be given some slack. He’d been up until three am saving people from getting mugged. There was this whole crime family that he’d been stalking for the last couple of weeks as well, which probably hadn’t helped with the whole senses thing.
Mr Harrington asked him a question, and Peter answered, kind of hoping that he would stop being picked on.
“Um, seven,” Peter said, rubbing his eyes. Mr Harrington turned back to the board to scribble seven where it was supposed to go.
“What’s wrong with you?” Flash whispered, poking him in the back when the teacher wasn’t looking. Because Flash sat directly behind him in Calculus, of course he did. It was fate. “Are you on drugs or something?”
Peter decided not to dignify that with a response, mainly because he thought if he had to turn around, it might be too much.
Mr Harrington displayed his work to the rest of the class. “Copy it down because examples like these will make up the basis of your revision for your end-of-term exam.”
The rest of the class began scribbling rapidly, even Flash. There had been rumours that if his parents didn’t see a significant improvement in his grades, then he would get his car taken away from him, so now Flash was (mostly) concentrating in his classes.
Peter’s pencil, however, paused before scribbling it down.
He frowned, because the last thing he wanted to do was to correct the teacher’s work. It made absolutely everyone think you were an asshole, and would place the attention on him. But if the work was going to be in their end of term assessment….he didn’t want people writing the wrong thing.
“Sir,” He said, stifling a cough. “I think it’s, um…,” Peter searched for a better word to use than wrong, but his thesaurus brain wasn’t feeling particularly awake, so he just said the original one. “Wrong.”
Mr Harrington arched an eyebrow, surveying his own work. He seemed satisfied with it, and after a quick glance over which apparently revealed no mistakes to him, he asked Peter what he thought was wrong with it.
“You need to change the function to show that the independent variable and the instantaneous acceleration don’t overlap,” Peter said blearily, like it was obvious. It should have been obvious. Tony would have seen it in a second. But then again, his calculus teacher was certainly not the genius billionaire that his mentor was.
“Parker,” Mr Harrington scratched the back of his head with the hand that was holding the chalk, covering the back of his head in chalk dust. “What do you mean?”
Peter gave up on explanations. Clearly his words weren’t doing it — Mr Harrington was being thick as a board. Peter had started his point, so he had to finish it.
“May I?” Peter asked, holding a hand out for the chalk. He pulled himself out of his chair, feeling the eyes of the class watching as he did so. As he got up to walk to the front of the room, Peter’s legs almost gave out and he had to cling onto the table to steady himself. Mr Harrington, oblivious, noticed nothing wrong. But Peter righted himself and walked up to the teacher, grabbing the chalk, and started to make the necessary corrections.
“Oh,” Mr Harrington muttered beside him.
It was increasingly hard to lift his hand, to push the chalk to the black board. To hear it as it scraped down the board. He shuddered, goosebumps rising on his skin. He’d always hated the sound as a kid, and it had gotten significantly worse with the bite enhancing his hearing. He took in a sharp breath as he drew the last mark on the board, equation fully corrected, and then coughed. Violently.
He coughed so loud that he had to double over, and now Mr Harrington looked concerned, of course he did. The teacher stepped towards him, but Peter held a hand out.
“I’m fine,” he spluttered. “I’m okay.”
About five seconds later he collapsed to the floor because there was nothing to keep him standing. `There was a distant part of his brain that recognised that he was doing this in front of the whole class, but he couldn’t bring himself .
“I’ll call reception,” Cindy Moon said, getting out of her seat and bolting out the door.
“So dramatic,” Flash muttered, and Peter shot a glare at him. He couldn’t see Flash’s face, because his vision was completely blurred and senses heightened and he could feel everything (the fibres of the carpet, the sweat trickling down his forehead and hear everything, the heartbeats racing, the drip drip drip of the sink no-one ever full turned off, the mutterings of all of his classmates in fine detail) and it was all so much.
Then Mr Harrington leaned down from his position, and he was still towering over him because Peter was on the floor, so vulnerable, he had to move, had to get out, and then Mr Harrington placed a hand on his shoulder and Peter gasped, scrambled backwards, as far as he could go, as quickly as his weak arms could possibly drag him back, until he hit the wall. His vision still askew but blinking fast, eyes wide in shock, in horror, and now everyone was watching him and Flash was calling him a freak and then—
“Back off,” and there was Ned, holding one hand out against Mr Harrington (who had tried to approach again), holding his other hand out to the classmates who had crowded around him to see what was happening. His best friend shot a glare, warning everyone to get away from Peter. He was stern, serious in his attitude, more adult than the class had ever seen him be.
Ned knew how to handle Peter when he got like this. He’d been there for many of Peter’s panic attacks. This wasn’t that different. Peter reached a hand up to his forehead — barely able to do even that — and winced as he realised that he was warm. Fever, probably. Shit.
Ned was keeping them all back, but the eyes were still on them. Peter made a deliberate glance to the door, and Ned nodded silently, reaching over to Peter with a hand, ready to help him off the floor. Anywhere would be better than the classroom with the stares.
“Mr Leeds, I really think—“ Mr Harrington attempted.
“Don’t.” Ned said, repeated. “Don’t.”
Mr Harrington didn’t try it again.
“I’ll take him,” Ned explained, and then proceeded to basically drag Peter out of the room, because Peter could not take his own weight anymore, not really. He felt so weak. How was he supposed to be a superhero if he was so weak?
“Jesus, dude,” Ned panted as they were halfway down to the nurse’s office. They didn’t talk about where they were going, but Peter could guess. Ned had been telling him to go to the Nurse’s since the morning. It wasn’t exactly like Peter could haul himself anywhere else. “You are so heavy.”
“You offered,” Peter muttered as rebuttal, but it wasn’t the strongest point he’d ever made, Ned still chuckled, though, between the heavy breathing. Peter’s head felt like it was spinning, like he was on drugs. He wasn’t.
Ned carried Peter all the way to the nurse’s office, who stood up as she saw Peter, helped lead him over to the class. Cindy Moon was standing there, watching Peter with a concerned glance. Peter shut his eyes and let out a deep sigh.
“Thank you, Mr Leeds, Miss Moon, I believe I can take it from here,” the nurse said softly, and Ned glanced at him as if to check he was okay to leave. Peter nodded back at him, so Ned slinked out of the room.
“Right, Mr Parker,” the nurse said. Her name was Miss Miller, and he’d always liked her. She talked in a soft voice no matter the problem, and had helped heal various scrapes from Flash before the spider bite. Now he just let them heal up because of his fast healing, but Miss Miller had been great. “I’m going to take your temperature.”
That would have set off the alarm bells normally, because Peter ran on a slightly higher temperature than most people. But if it gave off a freakish reading this time, she would just presume he had a bad fever. Sure enough, the reading came back higher than average, and she tutted.
“Definitely a fever,” Miss Miller said as predicted, handing him a wet towel to cool his head down. “I bet you have a headache as well, huh.”
“The worst,” Peter groaned in agreement.
“Okay, I’ll call your Aunt,” Miss Miller told him, picking up the phone and finding the number on the computer system. Peter shut his eyes, knowing it would go to voicemail.
May was working. There was no way she was going to be able to pick him up from school — she couldn’t pick him up at the normal time school closed, let alone before lunch. Sure enough, the number rang through and he could hear May’s voicemail distantly. He’d have to just stick out the rest of the day, work through it. Peter took a deep breath and thought about sitting up, but his head was suddenly flushed with a throbbing pain. He laid back down again.
“Okay, um,” Miss Miller paused. “She didn’t pick up, so I’m going to call your other emergency contact, see if they’re around.”
“I only have the one emergency contact,” Peter muttered, hand over his face to try to soothe the pain in his forehead. “It’s fine. I’ll-I’ll be fine.”
Peter didn’t think he would be fine, but he had to be. He could be strong — he was Spiderman, that was like his one job. He was a superhero, he could last the rest of the day.
“Um,” Miss Miller interjected, seemingly confused. “We actually have a second number listed here?” She said it like it was a question.
Peter cracked open an eye. He couldn’t see the screen, but that couldn’t possibly be right. Peter only had one emergency contact, because he only had one adult in the world that cared about him enough to be put down as one of his guardians. Sure, Happy picked him up from school sometimes, but that was a completely different thing, it was just for lab stuff with Mr Stark, that didn’t count. There was no way Happy Hogan was down as his emergency contact, and that pretty much ruled out the list of adults he regularly interacted with.
So no, it had to be wrong. The nurse must have read a different contact.
Unless.
There was, of course, the possibility that Aunt May and Ned’s mom had come to some sort of mutual agreement that Mrs Leeds would be put down as Peter’s other emergency contact, considering May was normally working. Huh. Peter mentally shrugged. He liked Mrs Leeds, and he didn’t mind if she picked him up from school. The last thing he wanted to do was interrupt her day and inconvenience her by making her come and pick him up from school because he was sick, but he knew Ned would insist that it was no problem. The Leeds family had always been there for the Parkers, though everything.
Yeah, that would make sense. Peter felt himself drifting off slightly, not really listening as Miss Miller called the second number and had a chat with the person on the other end of it. It sounded like a confirmation, like Mrs Leeds was going to come and pick him up.
“Okay, Peter, he said he’s coming to pick you up now,” Miss Miller said soothingly. “Stay awake for me now.”
Peter frowned, but it was confused and hazy. Had the nurse said he? No, surely she meant she. It was Mrs Leeds, right? Ned’s mom was coming to pick him up. Yeah. She must have just messed up her words. Peter blinked as the nurse passed him a new cold towel, and draped it over his forehead, wincing at the cold. He was bad at thermoregulation, after all.
Time passed. Peter didn’t know how long, and he didn’t care. His head was still hurting so much, and he was drifting in and out of consciousness, feeling remarkably unwell. He felt really dizzy.
The door to the office swung open and then came a voice that Peter hadn’t expected to hear until their next lab session, “Peter?”
Tony Stark’s voice was laced with worry, with an ounce of concern as he seemingly searched for Peter. Peter’s mouth fell open in shock, and he sat up, trying to hide, trying to get away, because no.
No.
Mr Stark couldn’t see him like this. Not so ill, so frail, so weak. Surely Mr Stark would take away the suit if he saw how weak he was?! And that couldn’t happen, Peter couldn’t let that happen, the suit was his everything. He loved going out as Spiderman. And if he lost Spiderman then he would lose Tony too, and he didn’t want to do that, because he liked their lab sessions, liked spending time with the man.
His brain wasn’t processing the fact that somehow, at some point (and Peter had no idea when), Tony Stark had been listed as one of his emergency contacts, and the phone number seemingly was his personal cell phone, because it had taken him less than half an hour to arrive at his high school.
Tony Stark was picking him up from school because he was sick.
That wasn’t possible, wasn’t feasible, so how, how was it happening?!
Miss Miller greeted Tony, standing up. Peter stopped squirming away, because there was nothing he could do. He was too weak to be able to leave, too exhausted to try and look strong. Mr Stark was just going to have to see him as he was.
“Where is he?” Tony said, sounding almost as tired as Peter. He seemed stressed, but Miss Miller pointed him in the direction of Peter, and his demeanour softened.
“Hey, Underoos.”
That nickname, Peter wanted to sob. Tony knelt down next to him. Tony pressed the back of his hand—cold, a nice kind of cold—to Peter’s forehead and winced. “Wow, you’re not doing so good, huh?”
“M’alright,” Peter said, closing his eyes. “You didn’t have to come get me.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Tony told him. “As long as you don’t start passing out on me.”
“Okay,” Peter mumbled, his eyes fluttering back open. Tony smiled at him and turned to focus on the nurse, who was looking at the pair of them with a soft smile herself.
“I’ll take him home,” Tony told her. “Thank you for looking after him.”
“It’s my job,” Miss Miller said. “Do take care of him. If his fever was several degrees higher I would suggest going to hospital.”
“I’m sure it won’t come to that,” Tony smiled back, one of his signature smiles he reserved for the public. He gently lifted Peter into a standing position, realised that it wouldn’t work, and then lifted him in his arms carefully. Peter was in Tony Stark’s arms—christ.
As Tony carried him out to his car, Peter vaguely remembered that Tony couldn’t take him home because that was completely ridiculous and he was a billionaire who undoubtedly had important things going on. It crossed his mind, but he was so out of it that he didn’t protest.
“Mm, ‘m sleepy,” Peter mumbled as Tony put him in the passenger seat of his car and started to drive away from school.
“You can sleep if you want, bambino,” Tony said back, quietly. He had the radio set to a classical music channel. Classical music always sent Peter to sleep, not that Tony could possibly know that. Peter hadn’t thought that he’d cared so much to pick him up from school.
Peter wanted to stay awake, mostly to ask Tony what bambino meant—but he was so sleepy that he just tucked his head on the car door. Before he knew it, his eyes were shut and then they’d arrived at the Tower.
Tony spent the rest of the day—all of the afternoon and evening—making sure he was alright, setting him up on the couch in the penthouse with a plethora of blankets and snacks. He was like a mother hen, always hovering and checking on him. He hadn’t expected Tony to act anything like that—obviously they’d spent time in the lab before, but the man was acting like…well, a parent.
He’d carried Peter all the way to his car, and he was listed as an emergency guardian on his school record. Peter just…hadn’t realised he cared as much as he clearly did.
“Don’t you have meetings?” Peter asked, curious as he finished a bar of chocolate.
“Cancelled them,” Tony told him nonchalantly, staring at the TV.
“What?” Peter exclaimed, sitting up more. “You can’t do that just for me—you should have just hung up on Mrs Miller, I’d have been fine—you can go to your meetings, you don’t have to sit and watch me whilst I’m like this!”
Tony shot him a grin. “Kid, they were only board meetings, nothing important, and besides, I’d rather be sat here with you than talking about statistical reports of the last quarter.”
“Oh,” Peter breathed. “Right.”
It was—nice—he realised, to be sat there with Tony for that afternoon, even if he spent most of it coughing and feeling under the weather. The headache had stopped when he’d gotten to the penthouse, so that had just been as a result of being in the school environment.
“Thanks for picking me up,” Peter mumbled when the episode of the show they’d been watching finished. “I appreciate it—and I feel a lot better now.”
“Anytime, kid,” Tony grinned again, this time the grin he had just for people he knew—Peter had seen the difference between the public smile and the people smile. “Anytime.”