close_to_the_ground | For Mr. Stark

For Mr. Stark - Construction

"Hey Mr. Stark!" Peter calls as he bounds into the apartment. It's construction day and painting day. Or something. Whatever, Peter's in clothes he doesn't mind ruining (that is all of his clothes, honestly) and a pair of sneakers and comes bearing chocolate croissants freshly baked by Greta. He knows Mr. Stark will bitch about the carbs but Peter knows he'll like them. Tony works way too hard not to let himself have something good. Besides, Peter more than owes him. He's responsible for Tony having to ruin a two million dollar suit, having to have his Porsche's interior redone, having to replace all his bedding again and not to mention how much all that medical equipment has to cost.

Anyway, Peter also realizes that with all the drama about The Gardener, Peter's not sure if Tony is taking care of his own health things. Once he'd felt like himself again, Peter couldn't shake that worry. He's not like Peter, he's not just gonna bounce back. Tony doesn't have a Tony to take care of him. He's just got Peter.

"I brought you some food."

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Tony packed the rolled up drop cloth into a spare bag he'd brought with him and picked it and the paint can up to move them to a broken down cardboard box he had sitting in the foyer by the elevator and incinerator chute.

He let Peter's questions wash over him with the unusual patience he stored just for him, only answering when he was done.

"First if all, don't ... don't say Chitauri, it really makes me freak out. Seriously."

He warned again, with a slightly too-intense look over his shoulder. He'd been better about it for a time, but that was before he'd been forced to watch every fucking nightmare he had come true.

"And I know a lot of things. I even know a lot of things you don't know. And guess what? Don't feel that compelled to share them. Sorry for your luck today."

All that for a drop of blood.

Peter nods, equally serious, as he stores that away. No chitauri. Got it.

"Hey, hey but if there is a big bad coming, I need to know, right? Does Dr. Strange know? Can he tell me? If I know then maybe I can help you get ready. I can help you with the nanofactory and whatever you want to build with it."

"If there is an immediate Big Bad with an actual name, maybe. Maybe you should know. But this is Darrow and we have no way of knowing what's coming next, except that something is, eventually, going to come."

Tony dropped off the paint cans on their designated area and regretted for only a minute doing the remodel himself. God, he loved making a mess, but he hated cleaning up.

He gave Peter's shoulder a grip.

"But when you need to know, you'll know. And don't bother the Doc, okay? He's got his work cut out for him, he thinks if he just throws enough shit at the wall, eventually something's going to be able to get us back home. And he's a wizard, so who am I to argue?"

Tony reconsidered. Who was he to argue? Fucking Tony Stark. Except he would lose, so: "On second thought, bother him to your heart's content. He called me a mean name."

Peter rolls his eyes but he doesn't argue but he doesn't promise anything, either. It's not a lie if he doesn't promise anything. Maybe.

"Do you think if we did go back home, that you would go to the future since you remembered stuff and I'd go back to that crashing plane? That'd suck. I mean, the Tony back home wouldn't be you, you know? You'd be in the future, doing future stuff with a different me."

"Do you really want me to answer that?"

He looked at Peter with a regretful expression. Tony had no optimistic answer here. Steve might have, but Tony's cynicism was too much a part of him. Steve also didn't have four doctorates or an understanding of theoretical physics.

And Tony had promised Peter, no dying and no lying. He wasn't about to break it now, because if you couldn't keep to a promise to a kid, what could you keep?

"But yeah, it would suck. It would blow. And various other thinly veiled sex metaphors."

He moved toward the master bathroom to wash off his arms. And face. Possibly also one of his ankles. Red was more his color than blue.

Peter hesitates, hovering outside the bathroom door before taking a step inside.

Whatever it is, it seems bad or at least Tony doesn't want to talk about it.

"If you don't want to tell me or lime, don't want me to know, then I shouldn't, right?" he asks, half to himself. This is one of their problems. It's frustrating to just believe Tony knows best, just because.

"So, okay. I'm, I mean don't. I trust you. Just, if it's something bad and I can help prevent it, maybe then."

"It's not that simple," Tony said, repeating again almost to himself more than Peter. "It's not that simple."

"Just because I ... just because I don't think you should know something, that doesn't mean you should or shouldn't. Because in the long run, that's not for me to determine. And that's where I screw up, Peter. You wanna know why Wanda gets mad at me and the Avengers went circling down the drain, that's the answer right there. People deciding what other people deserve to know."

Tony shut his eyes and tilted his head to the side. He felt drained and exhausted.

"I'm just a guy, Peter. I'm human, I make mistakes. Even when I'm your parent. Even when I'm Iron Man."

Tony looked down at his hands and frowned. He'd scrubbed at the paint so hard with the lava soap bar, he'd made his skin bright red.

"Come on and get cleaned up," he murmured.

But that's the thing, Peter doesnt know. He doesn't know if he should know. He really, really just wants Tony to be the bad guy or the good guy and decide but maybe that's not fair.

"Sometimes I would think about whether I'd have wanted to know of Uncle Ben was gonna die, even if I couldn't stop it," he says, scrubbing his hands in the sink and running a wet hands through sweaty curls. "Like, maybe I'd have appreciated the time with him, more or something. But I think it would have just made me sad and anxious. So, so okay. I don't want to know. Not right now, anyway. But I'm sorry you have to know, if it's bad."

Tony sat down heavily on the wooden toilet seat cover, listening to Peter's answer. It was the easiest for now. They could go over everything, eventually. Once Tony had a chance to really understand it himself.

But God, he was still trying to understand what happened in Sokovia. When would he ever digest any of it all?

"Come here," he said, and pulled Peter close enough to tug him into a hug, nevermind that they were covered in paint. He gave him a squeeze, a pat on the back. He was warm and alive and solid, didn't melt away at his touch, and he smelled like paint fumes and not the ozone strangeness of an alien atmosphere and blood.

"You know what. No matter what happens, even when I'm so angry at you I can barely see straight, this is how I feel about you."

And he'd waited just too damn long to say so once before, and he'd lost his chance.

Peter clings back, like always, but maybe a little more desperately this time because something has gone wrong back home and Tony doesn't want to tell him. So it's the worst kind of bad.

And Peter cannot lose another parent.

"Me, too, Mr. Stark. I wouldn't want anyone but you to take care of me, you know that, right? This isn't like, just because I need someone. I want to be here."

"You don't have to tell me that," Tony said as he pulled away again, with odd reluctance, mixed with aching relief. He was still there, hale and whole and not floating away, like in his nightmares.

He patted Peter on the chest, where his spider emblem usually sat.

"I know."

Tony stood with a sigh and moved toward the bathroom door. He leaned a shoulder on it.

"Now get washed up, Jesus. Before you get blue paint on my floor. I'm going to go sort the trash and take care of the mess, and then we should think about what you're going to do to fill your new found free time."

Edited 2018-07-22 05:33 (UTC)

"Can we stay in tonight and just chill out?" Peter asks, tugging his paint stiff shirt off and waiting till Mr. Stark leaves to chuck it on the floor like he knows he's not supposed to.

"We could watch a movie and maybe I could stay over on the couch. And, uh, I kind of need you to come to an orientation thing at school so we could talk about that. You have to like, meet other parents. So, yeah."

"So what you're saying is be on my best behavior, and only hit on the single moms. Got it," Tony called out from the bedroom, where he was gathering up the rest of what mess was left.

He spent the next five minutes sorting everything out into the proper chutes; recyclables, compost, paper, metal. The leftover supplies went into the service elevator by the chutes.

Panoptes, of course, had a recycling quota to meet.

"We can watch a movie under the condition that we order pizza with it. And the pizza is cheese and thin crust, because I can't do pepperoni."

After he was done, he snuck another croissant in what he hoped was secrecy and then tossed himself onto the sofa over the back, landing with a satisfying bounce and reaching for the small stack of magazines on the table. A monthly journal of robotics.

Edited 2018-07-22 05:44 (UTC)

"You can hit on the single dads, too," Peter says, snickering as he closes the door. "No judgement here!"

He showers quickly poking around at all Mr. Stark's fancy shampoo and soap and stuff.

"Full disclosure, I eat an entire pizza by myself," he says, jogging out in a pair of spare pajamas he probably took from Tony, anyway, and flipping over the back of the couch. "Hey, they're showing the Kill Bill movies back to back. Wanna watch those?"

Tony laughed into the pages of his magazine despite himself, surprised at the comment, though maybe he shouldn't be. Peter had figured out already that Tony chose to be picky in areas that weren't gender. When he chose to be picky at all.

"Yeah, well, I came of age in the Eighties. Stuff was different back then. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. PEGGI, make that order two pizzas. Get the kid whatever he wants. And a Greek salad for the side."

He tossed the magazine aside because reading time was now over. Peter asked twice as many questions as usual during a movie.

"Anyway, I love a good Roaring Rampage of Revenge."

"Thin crust supreme PEGGI, please," Peter says, flopping out on the wide, soft couch before turning the tv on.

"You know, before I met you, there's no way I could picture you just hanging out on a couch like this. Actually, kind of after I met you, too. It's awesome."

"Uh, I had couches," Tony said defensively, before counting out loud the number of them that had been in the house in Malibu.

"Five. Five couches. Sometimes I even sat on them."

But only sometimes. Usually, when he wanted to watch television, he did it from the garage, tinkering with one project or another.

"And I ate Burger King. And put my britches on one leg at a time, just like everybody else. "

Tony turned the television on and switched to the tv guide page.

"Yeah, Mr. Stark You're just like the rest of us with your five couches and your mansions," Peter snarks, leaning over to try and grab the remote from him.

"Maybe closer now, just got the one penthouse. But this is a really nice couch. I spilled milk all over ours a few years ago and it never really smelled right, again. So, what kind of normal people stuff should we do this week? I guess I gotta go school supply shopping. Could use a new backpack."

"Uh, my point is I'm still human and I like Netflix as much as the next moron," Tony said, wrestling over the remote for a half-second just to be a shit. He gave it up easily. If it turned into an actual struggle, the kid with the sticky hands was going to win, hands down. Hands on? Whatever.

"We'll go get your stuff. You need clothes too. I'm just going to give you a few hundred for that to get it done on your own, because I'm anticipating those arguments and I don't even want to hear them, honestly. Take the girlfriend if you need moral support. Also, no drinking milk on the sofa, ever. Ever. That's a new rule. No drinking milk anywhere but in the kitchen."

Edited 2018-07-23 10:35 (UTC)

Peter rolls his eyes at the milk thing because that was before he had awesome reflexes and plus he's not going to stand in the kitchen to drink milk.

"I don't need any money for clothes, but thanks," he says, flipping through till he finds Kill Bill Vol 1 about halfway through.

"I've got some cash from that allowance thing the city does and there's a second hand shop with some good stuff. I'll just mess up new clothes. But maybe we could go get some notebooks and I don't have a good graphing calculator, anymore. Maybe we could use the money for that, instead?"

This was difficult. This was strange to navigate. Tony felt so sure about himself when they were dealing with codenames and costuming, but the issue of money was weirdly fraught. He wondered if his father had ever had trouble with it, having a kid around to support. The financial part. But no, that relationship had been too strained for Tony to ever ask for more than what Howard currently thought he deserved, and by Peter's age he was living in Boston anyway.

Tony sighed at Peter's beaten tennis shoes.

"I'm always going to ask. But I'll try not to ever insist," he finally decided. "If you feel like you have your clothes handled on your own terms, that's fine. I'll put it toward your laptop and calculator. But a few hundred isn't going to make or break me for the month. And I'm not the sort that believes that making you support yourself this young will do you any moral good."

Tony pinched his nose.

"I think I'm saying I don't understand your decision here but I'm going to respect it."

Peter looks up when he realizes Tony is having some kind of weird crises and grins, shoving at Tony's leg with his foot.

"I know you're really generous with your money, Mr. Stark. I mean, my suit alone has to cost more than I'll ever see but that's Spider-Man, you know?" he says, slumping sideways on the couch and stuff a fancy throw pillow under his head.

"Peter Parker just needs normal stuff. And trust me, a brand new graphing calculator that I didn't have to buy from some shady Chinese website is like, Christmas. Plus, used stuff is softer, anyway. Can't stand practically anything but soft cotton with the weird spider sense stuff."

"Please don't order from shady Chinese websites anymore," Tony said, cringing, despite the fact that Peter was, as always, raised too well. Practically all the work was already done, he could handle the future. Maybe.

It was supposedly what Tony Stark did.

"Explains why you like my bed so much." And the suit. It didn't have a weave at all. "God, you're a little weirdo. Never change."

"Ha!" Peter scoffs, not even bothering to raise his head because of how ridiculous Tony's statement is.

"You won't let people hand you things. And your soap costs like a hundred dollars and you won't let me use your knives. You are totally more weird and that is saying something. Because I'm part spider. But you probably shouldn't change, either."

"Yeah, well. When you're rich they spell it 'eccentric.'" He couldn't even argue. He knew he had some tics. What had Nat called it? Right. Compulsive personality traits.

"Pizza's here," PEGGI announced, and Tony nearly fell over himself reaching for his phone. He opened up a holo display window and positioned himself in front of the camera, nudging Peter with his foot to get in the picture.

The pizza delivery guy looked dumbfounded on the other end of the video.

"Yeah, hi. We're too comfortable to come down so I'm going to have to ask you to leave the pizzas with the robot, thank you. Your tip is in his drawer."

Tony had sent down his little white trundling cabinet on wheels, the housekeeping robot, to pick the food up.

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