Chapter Text
Stark Tower, Peter describes as the offices from Severance meet a modern art museum. His dad Wade sees pictures on the internet and describes it as something an interior design student would get a passing grade on. It isn’t where Peter was born, and it isn’t where Peter was raised, but for a short time in between, it was where Peter lived. A home… no. A house… by definition- technically.
Peter’s mother Mary was pretty, she was a scientist in Stark Tower. A late afternoon tryst led her to Pepper Potts, Tony’s new girlfriend, asking for a meeting with the genius. “I need to tell him I’m pregnant.” She blurts out. Pepper agrees to inform her beau and boss.
After a meeting with the legal team, Tony is adamant he can not be a good father to a child, but he will provide financial support. He sets us a college fund for the kid he insists he does not want to know the name of nor be present for the birth of. That’s the way things stand- till one day he gets a call, the kid's mom and adoptive father perished in a plane crash. The kid can either go into foster care or go with Tony and by extension Pepper, who by this point have married in a very public fashion.
“Hey, Pep. Got a call from a social worker today.” Stark says with slight apprehension in his voice.
Her head perks up, that's an unusual tone for her husband to take. “What’s up?”
“Remember the son I told you about? The one I signed away all my rights to? Apparently, his parents died and they need to know if I can take him in.”
Well, that’s not what she was expecting. A son? How old would he be now? 5? Can she handle being a mom? To a traumatized 5-year-old orphan to boot?
“Do you… want to?” ‘Please say no’ laces her thoughts, hopefully not her voice.
“I don’t know, I have to don’t I? I mean how much shittier a parent could I possibly be? I abandoned the kid when he was born, now he’s an orphan and I’m gonna do the same thing?”
Damn, he’s right. Pepper resolves to be a good mother to this kid, he deserves that at least.
“Yeah, you should do it. I’ll make the call.”
-
It’s a Tuesday morning, Tony and Pepper have taken the morning off. Michael, the social worker, brings the 5-year-old to the tower. Peter Parker is his name, they’re informed. Tony figures one day he’ll change it to Peter Stark. For now, he shows the boy, who’s hiding behind the social worker, his new room. There’s not much in it right now, but Tony and Pepper didn’t know what the boy liked. The boy hasn’t said a word, but Tony needs to get back to the lab and Pepper has a flight to Hong Kong in 3 hours. They leave him to his own devices in his room, have FRIDAY lock the doors so he doesn’t leave, and go about their day.
-
Peter sits alone in an empty room, save for a bed with plain blue sheets, and a desk with nothing on it. Peter misses his old room, in his old apartment with his parents. He has Star Wars posters, Legos, stuffed animals, and all the memories that he made in there.
Now, he’s here, in an empty room, being cared for by two people who didn’t want him, and who went back to work, leaving him to cry in his room alone. He can’t believe this is going to be the rest of his life.
-
In the coming weeks and months, Peter tries desperately to connect with Tony and Pepper. He can’t bring himself to call them Mom and Dad in the beginning, but he gets so desperate to be accepted he forces himself to anyway. It doesn’t help.
He comes downstairs to find they’d already eaten dinner, they say they forgot to tell him. Pepper is out of town often, Tony spends hours in the lab, and Peter wanders aimlessly around the tower looking for them. Sometimes the other Avengers are there, they say a few words, and then it's as if he was never there.
-
Happy drives him to school each day, but keeps the divider up. It’s a part of Peter’s new routine- wake up with an alarm, begin the day sad because his mom used to wake him up, get dressed, get a granola bar, get sadder because his dad used to make him breakfast, continue sulking in the car until he gets to his new school. He misses his old school, with his old friends, but now he’s going to a science school which he likes. Tony doesn’t know he likes science, he never asked, but at least it all worked out.
He has a new friend, Ned, who’s nice. They’re best friends now. He spends a lot of time with Ned and his parents. Sometimes he swears the Leeds’ know him better than the Starks. They remember he’s allergic to strawberries. They ask him how he’s coping with the move. But he can’t spend all his time there, he doesn’t want Ned to know how much he hates his life. So most of the week, he is in Stark Tower. Yay.
-
One night, Peter is sitting in his room, folding his clothes over and over again out of pure boredom, when he hears Tony’s voice over the intercom.
“Hey Peter, we’re eating dinner.”
It's not necessarily an invitation, but it’s way more than Peter usually gets. He’s ecstatic. He runs out of his room and to the dining room, where he sees Tony and Pepper. He climbs into his chair and scoops some pasta onto his plate.
He looks up, Tony and Pepper both look concerned. His excitement comes to a screeching halt.
“Hey, Pete.” Tony begins. “I got a call from a social worker today.”
Peter doesn’t know what to feel. Are they sending him into foster care? Did they find some distant relative to send him off to?
“I have another son.”
Peter wasn’t expecting that.
“I didn’t know about him, but his mom was raising him alone in Tennessee. She didn’t tell me about him, but she passed a few weeks ago and they tracked me down and we did a paternity test and he’s mine. He’s going to come live with us.”
Peter wasn’t expecting that either.
-
Harley shows up on a Wednesday. He’s six, a year older than Peter. Harley is a big jumping bean, excited to see the tower, and wanting to see Tony’s lab, already asking Pepper if he can fly to London with her later in the week. Basically the complete opposite of Peter. Tony and Pepper seem thrilled by this. Peter just feels more and more left out.
Tony takes Harley down to the lab, Tony never even asks Peter. They eat dinner together, something Peter only knows because he sees 3 empty drink cups in the trash in the morning. Peter made himself a peanut butter sandwich for dinner.
Tony begins making Harley breakfast, and Peter eats his granola bars.
-
One night Peter gets angry. Despondent. He sees his family- Tony, Pepper, Harley, and all their Avenger friends sitting around talking and eating. No one invited him. Why won’t they notice him? Would they even notice if he left? He decides to test this theory. He figures FRIDAY will stop him, alert Tony, or lock the doors or something. He walks to the elevator only a few feet from his parents, but they're so distracted by their conversation they don’t notice him. The elevator opens with no problem, he steps in and presses the button for the ground floor, waiting for the other shoe to drop. The elevator starts descending, eventually reaching the lobby. It’s late, everyone has gone home, Peter walks out the sliding glass doors without issue to enter the cold Manhattan concrete jungle. He doesn’t have a plan, he didn’t think he’d get this far. He walks around the side of the building to the back, where the dumpsters are. Surrounded by the sounds of sirens and indistinct chatter of the few passers-by he's encountered, they all look at him and keep walking.
He sits on the dirty pavement next to a filthy dumpster, illuminated by a lone lamppost and the faint lights of the upper floors of Stark Tower.
He sighs and begins looking around, playing with his hands. Eventually, they’ll realize he’s missing, and they’ll feel so bad, and they’ll realize they haven’t been paying attention to him, they’ll learn the error of their ways, and we’ll all live happily ever after. So, 5-year-old Peter Parker sits alone in a Manhattan alleyway, waiting to hear someone start shouting his name, panic in their voice. He knows it’s mean but it’s the only way. So he keeps sitting. And sitting. He doesn’t have the greatest concept of time, but the streets get emptier, bars in the distance start to close, and it’s getting colder. He’s tired, and he has school in the morning.
Defeated, 5-year-old Peter Parker walks back in through the sleek doors of Stark Industries, presses the button for the top floor, and walks in to find the lights off and everyone asleep.
He cries himself to sleep.
-
He wakes up, remembers his life is not a nightmare he’s able to wake up from, and goes about his day. He walks out to see Harley, Tony, Pepper, Steve, Bruce, Clint, and Natasha eating breakfast.
“Hey, Pete.” Tony says.
“Hey.” He says back.
He walks past the pancakes to get his granola bar. He might have had some pancakes if somebody had offered him some, but he wasn’t going to just take some. He could have asked, but he just couldn’t bring himself to after last night.
He and Harley ride to school together, the divider down now so Happy and Harley can talk and Peter and sit in silence and listen to them. He could chime in, and sometimes he does, but he just feels like he brings the conversation to a screeching halt.
He goes to school, talks to Ned, eats the lunch he packed himself, goes wordlessly into the car to be driven home, and immediately retires to his room so utterly reminiscent of a jail cell. He lays in his bed, staring at his blank walls, all so impersonal.
He hears Harley telling Tony and Pepper about his day at school, Tony and Pepper talking about their work, they’re laughing and telling stories and Peter just lays in his room. He gets angrier and angrier until he storms out of his room to the common area. Everybody stops talking to stare at the boy.
“Hey guys.” He says, trying to stay calm.
“Hey, Peter.” Says Pepper, forcing a smile.
He sees they’re all uncomfortable now that he’s here. Peter tries to casually pivot to the kitchen like that’s where he was going all along, grabbed a fruit snack, and went back to his room. He throws the fruit snack on his desk and breaks down in tears.
-
That night as his family and the Avengers eat dinner without him he hears them talking through the walls.
“Where’s Peter?” Harley asks innocently. Holy crap, somebody realized he wasn’t there? That’s a first. Granted, it was his 6-year-old half-brother, but Peter will take the win.
“Probably in his room, where he always is.” Replies Tony flippantly.
And just like that, Peter’s excitement deflates again like a balloon being curb-stomped.
“That kid is never around. He’s a total hermit.” Clint says casually.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had a single conversation with him.” Natasha says.
Tony looks up from his plate to chime in. “Join the club.”
Changing the subject, Harley begins inquiring about the standing plans to go to the Bahamas over spring break, a trip Peter was neither informed of nor was likely to join if the weekend trips to Martha’s Vineyard are any indication. Peter either doesn’t care, or cares so much he can’t feel it anymore, and he doesn’t know anymore.
Either way, that night when everyone is watching the latest Tom Cruise movie and eating popcorn, Peter mourns his lack of invite in an increasingly familiar way. He walks out of his room, walking with purpose trying not to arouse suspicion, takes the elevator down to the lobby, and sits by the dumpsters hoping somebody will notice his absence.
He’s begun bringing books down there to entertain himself, today he’s reading about oceans of the world. He always checks out books from the Midtown school library, he’s lucky the librarians let him out of the elementary school section and into the one for middle and high schoolers. This is how he obtained the other book he brought down, a textbook for introductory middle school chemistry.
He tries not to think about the fact that tonight, like most nights, he will be out here in the dark for a few hours, a few people stopping to ask if he’s ok before he realizes his parents are asleep didn’t realize he’d left, and he goes back up to his room. It’s routine now.
He likes his time out here alone. He always has a jacket, a knife, a snack, and his books. It’s peaceful.
He’s deep in his escapist non-fiction paradise when a man walking by stops in his tracks. He looks down with concern to see a small boy huddled in a jacket far too big for him with his nose in a book, sitting in an alleyway in bad weather in the middle of Manhattan. Something was wrong with that picture.
“Hey, are you okay?” The man says.
Peter looks up from his book, used to the line of questioning. The man staring back at him is tall, built, and looks like he means business.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” That’s usually enough for people, not wanting to get involved.
That wasn’t enough for this guy though. “Where are your parents?” He continues.
“Home.” Peter says, wanting this conversation to come to a merciful end so he can go back to his book.
“Do they know you’re out here?”
“I don’t think so. If they do they don’t care.” Peter says, his eyes going back to his book, not wanting to talk about his lovely little life.
The man leans down to get on the sitting boys' level. He looks legitimately concerned. “Kid, are you okay?”
He’s annoyed he’s being pulled away from his book but is also a little reservedly gratified by someone seeming to sincerely ask him if he’s ok.
“Yeah. My parents just don’t always notice when I’m gone, so sometimes I come out here.” It’s a sanitized version of the truth, but the truth nonetheless.
“Well, they’re probably really worried about you. Can I walk you home?”
‘How do I tell him I am home?’ Peter thinks.
“It’s okay,” Peter says. “I’ll go home now.” He begins gathering up his books.
“What’s your name?” The man says, getting up.
“Peter. What’s yours?”
“Wade.”
Peter begins his short walk around the side of the tower, leaving the man behind.
“See you around, kid.” The man says. Peter feels a hope in his chest he hasn’t felt in a long time. Like someone cares about him. Somebody would notice if he was gone.