Tony didn't want to do this.
But he was watching someone's newest attempt at an enhanced assassin raise her gun and he knew for a fact that Peter just wasn't fast enough; they'd trained together long enough for him to understand that. The kid had precognition. He wasn't bulletproof. He was already bleeding; the fight hadn't been kind to him.
They were a battlefield apart. In that moment- those fractions of a second- everything seemed to slow down, even the dust swirling in the smoky air.
It was cold- they were firmly in Siberia here- and it wasn't the kind of place where Tony would let his protégé bleed out. He was suddenly and crushingly aware of many things- how breakable Peter still was, how far they were from emergency medical care, and just how much damage one little piece of metal could really do.
Tony was a futurist and Peter a future; an ideal incarnation of selflessness and intelligence, one who currently had the barrel of a gun pressed to his temple and an arm around his neck. Peter might run the risk of turning out like Tony, but he wouldn't get the chance to fuck up if he turned out dead.
Tony made the decision in that frozen moment, suspended above the battlefield he'd been shooting into, focusing solely on the distant dot of red. He couldn't look closer. He didn't want to watch.
"FRIDAY," he said. "Activate baby gate. Karen, advanced combat mode."
Before he'd even finished the sentence, Peter twisted out of the headlock.
"Peter, place the palms of your hands over her temples," Karen said, in both Peter's ear and, surreptitiously, Tony's. Peter hadn't been alerted to the switch in modes; the 'baby gate' function offered an instant, silent override. In Tony's zoomed-in vision, Peter obeyed. Made himself safe. The shocks and the sonics would be enough, together. The woman put her hands over Peter's-
And a bullet tinged off Tony's shin, and he dived back into the fray.
"Why?!"
Peter felt like he'd been the one getting shocked; as if all the air had been forced out of his body.
"Karen- what the fuck- why?" he was choking on the words, each syllable catching in his throat. His hands were shaking. The cold air was suddenly syrupy, difficult to drag through his mask. Karen didn't answer.
He didn't look down because he couldn't, not right away.
Steam.
Faint, feathery tendrils of it drifted skywards, white against the-ice blue expanse above them, like breath in winter.
Even through the mask- even with every sense dampened- he could smell it. Blood, shit and something else, oily and stale. When he finally cast his eyes downward, the answer was puddling out from her ears and freezing to the ground.
Her face was still contorted, the lips still frozen in a tight grimaces, her glassy gaze on the sky.
Peter made the mistake of letting his fingers touch, and something pulpy stuck them together.
Maybe he'd triggered it. Maybe some yet-undiscovered gesture command, something he'd done carelessly to set off the shock and the accompanying screech. This was what the training wheels protocol was for.
The revulsion twisting in Peter's stomach built to an excruciating peak. He had to get his mask off-
Looking at his hands for the first time was what did it- the smears of pink and black where the current had made flesh singe off and stick to his gloves. Every joint between his shoulders and his fingertips seemed to lock, frozen by the worming awareness of what it was.
Quickly, retching gave way to a gush of hot vomit. It blossomed out behind the mask, and the fear of drowning pushed him past caring about the gore slicking his fingers. There was no neat way to shed the mask; he just wanted to be out of it quickly.
He regretted it immediately. The air was a scorching, shredding thing, a punch of cold to the insides of his lungs.
Without the lenses of the mask as protection, everything was thrown into sudden, sharp relief.
The corpse- because that was what it was now, a corpse - had burnt, peeling palms. Her face was blotched, her skull dented horribly at the temples, red skin bubbled into patches of blisters. Where his hands had been.
The sky began to scream.
Peter pressed his hands over his ears, heart racing. Droplets of vomit had frozen on his eyelashes, forming blurry, yellow orbs in his vision. His breath was white against the cloudless sky, coming in quick, stuttering gasps.
"Kid?" Tony's voice was a distant echo as he descended, blocking out the sun. "Jeeze, you got puke in your hair- most people don't manage that without at least a few tequila shots beforehand. You okay?"
Peter had never been less okay in his life.
His throat burned. The world was maelstrom of details- a scratch on the shoulder of Tony's suit, the crunch of snow as he stumbled back, a shred of hamburger meat caught between his lower lip and gums. The woman. Her eyelashes; she'd worn mascara to her own murder; she was dressed wrong- in a cotton t-shirt with tiny pink roses, out in the permafrost- and she was dead. Her hair was blonde, near-white, fanning across the snow and signed where it'd overlapped her fingers.
Just as Peter shook his head, the shoe dropped.
Natasha had never seen the bubble burst in person.
Everyone had that moment: the loss of a specific form of innocence. It was a hellish, jolting thing- if you were old enough. It'd been one of the umpteen reasons she'd started so young. Past a certain point, you had to work through empathy.
She had empathy, of course. Delicate, cultivated, clinical empathy. Something she'd crafted to fill the void others had sculpted into her psyche.
She was starting to regret that effort now.
In the dark, weeping. Soft and stifled, but still hellishly loud in the cramped backseat.
It was that or the group they'd just broken up, in terms of empathy. And here was not the place for the breakdown the latter would necessitate.
There were no street lights, not out here, in the expanse of tundra between tiny towns. They'd started near Norilsk, and even the airport was hours away. The sky was an infinity of stars, spilling out just enough light for Peter to be silhouetted. He'd shed the suit, thankfully, and was huddled in too-big stock sweatpants and a matching shirt, his body tight and defensive.
Everything about him seemed raw.
Natasha knew, in theory, how to offer comfort. Comfort was cheap, easy, and got people on your side. That wasn't the problem here.
This was her first glimpse, in a long time, at this moment made real.
She hadn't broken like this. Some had, and there was a nagging muscle-memory of a reaction telling her to clap a hand over his mouth and shut him up. There was always consequence to crying.
Instead, she...tried. Reached a hand across the space between them, and squeezed his. He snapped to attention, a subtle twitch of the warm, slim fingers against Natasha's own. His acceptance of the gesture came with the prickling static-electric sensation of the powers he used to cling, as if he was tethering them together.
Natasha had spent years learning the motions of every social scenario possible. But there was an awkward edge here- normally, she didn't have to handle the risk of sincerity.
"Do you want to talk about it?" she cautioned.
"I don't understand why he did that," Peter's voice was small, harsh, bogged down by frustration and swallowed tears. "I didn't- I didn't need to kill her!"
They'd kept the rest, for rehab. Some of them would be successes.
"Don't tell Tony," Natasha said, all but fellating his perspective. "But I agree."
There was a shift, then. The slightest suggestion of a smile on his face; bitter vindication.
"He could have just…" Peter trailed off. His free hand formed a fist, clenched and unclenched a few times. "I don't know."
There was something so much worse about it being done to you. Done to him , of all people. Natasha had been different. She had been lucky You couldn't take what was already gone.
"Capture was an option," Natasha said, carefully. "Stunning her was an option. He overreacted."
She'd found the place where things 'hit close'- the point where utterly different lives overlapped in experience; where pain was momentarily mirrored in another person. It wasn't an alien emotion, nor was it a pleasant one.
"I knew- he put instant kill mode in my suit," Peter babbled. "I knew about it. I shouldn't have let her… threaten me. That sort of thing… worries him."
There was an uncomfortable familiarity to it; similarities in the substructure of the way they interacted. Natasha made herself ignore it. Focus on the moment, the darkness and the bumpy roads and the faint smell of the public-bathroom soap Spider-Man had cleaned his hair with.
Peter let go of her hand. Cracked his knuckles. Made abrupt, desperately defensive eye contact.
"I can sort of see where he's coming from," he said. Convincing himself more than her.
Waking up from nightmares was, in itself, a nightmare.
There was a five-minute window where Tony just stared at the ceiling and tried to separate reality from the lingering image of the dream, to breathe around the choking stress of it.
He couldn't remember if the gun had gone off.
It hadn't, logically it hadn't, but there was a memory- vivid and sensory- of a world where it had. The sound of the gunshot ringing out across a sea of snow. Fluorescent red blood against the white.
A small, limp body, domed by the monolithic emptiness of the sky.
Just as real as any other memory.
There had a been a time where the only death Tony dreamed of was his own. He missed that.
The original purpose of the baby monitor protocol had been just that- monitoring. He'd looked through Peter's eyes, with the intention of keeping track of his actions; keeping him out of trouble. Stepping in when things started to go wrong, when one of the limits he'd set was exceeded.
Fat lot of good that'd done.
The footage wasn't pleasant. Not whatsoever. Tony'd watched it all the way through, twice. Every time since, he'd stopped when he'd seen enough to feel reassured.
Now, as the light of dawn burned through the too-thin curtains, he watched it again. Repeatedly.
"Peter, place the palms of your hands over her temples."
Peter hadn't been talking to him since. Even Happy hadn't gotten a word from him. Neither had any of his little friends, and Tony was watching his phone to make sure. There was footage and GPS records of him in the shitty, pre-tech suit. The thing he'd made from gym clothes and sloppy hand-stitching. Because he was apparently suicidal.
Or making a statement. Biting the hand that fed him. Acting out, like the child he was.
"Peter, place the palms of your hands over her temples."
The rejection stung. It had the tone of ingratitude; self-destruction as a way of arguing without confrontation. Tony had replied from an equal distance; shuffling his hours at the actual internship so he couldn't stay out late, pointing him out to close co-workers. Keeping him out of the compound. The kid had been through a lot. He needed some degree of downtime, or he'd break down completely.
"Peter, place the palms of your hands over her temples."
A line had been crossed. That at least was obvious. But the motivation behind that standard was...an issue. It proved that Peter shouldn't get to draw those lines.
It made sense to be upset. Traumatised, even. Freezing Tony out was excessive, though, and it meant that he couldn't help- and things like this hit him incredibly hard, still. They both knew that. There'd be nightmares, anxiety attacks, most likely; the fallout of big, new traumas like this one. And Peter would be completely alone in dealing with them, without Tony there. It was incredibly petty; Tony found falling apart out of spite to be unbecoming of one of his projects.
It was always hardest, the first time around.
"Peter, place the palms of your hands over her temples."
Peter didn't seem to understand that sometimes, there were necessary evils. That sometimes, there were no good choices. It was either the youth, the martyr complex, or a symptom of the two combined. Something that, hopefully, he could be trained out of.
For the time being, though, it was terrifying.
Tony paused the clip he'd been keeping on his phone. Extracted himself from the mire of his sheets.
He knew exactly what would have happened if he hadn't stepped in. His future would be dead. He'd lose everything he'd invested in the kid.
Peter had a problem with thinking in the long-term, Tony realised. He'd considered one death, in that one moment- not the hundreds he would prevent, now that he'd survived. Why couldn't he grasp that? What needed to be done, to fix that sloppy thinking?
Their attachment was exhausting. It meant constant, constant worrying; even in the downtime he couldn't shake the concern. Because his protégé was still out there, every day. But without any of the protection. Something was going to go drastically wrong at some point. It'd been less than a week, and Tony already felt like he was going to keel over from the tension of it.
He needed a point of contact. Because Peter Parker was a beautiful, breakable, senseless thing, and Tony didn't want to see him crumble. And without contact, he had no way of telling what or whom he was getting mixed up in. He couldn't keep the kid safe- in these vast swathes of separation, anyone could snatch him up.
Natasha, for example, who'd glared at Tony like he'd murdered her child before she stalked off with Peter. They'd been texting, practically non-stop. Natasha was trying to sway Peter to her side- and Tony was trying to dissuade him.
It was consuming him. He'd been looking into attendance records, and Peter was at least still going to school. But he'd been ditching classes, and Tony had no way of knowing if he was safe. If his battle wounds, both physical and otherwise, were healing well.
He needed to do something.
They needed to talk. And for once in his life, Tony knew exactly what to say.
Peter felt sick.
Not in the sense of emotion-induced-nausea, for once- just... unwell.
He was standing in front of Gramercy Tavern, waiting for Tony.
A minor- in his opinion- laceration from their last big battle was somehow still bothering him. It was just to the left of his bellybutton, only a few inches long, and had started oozing pulpy yellow stuff in his last class of the day. He'd patched it up with surgical tape and a pad, because he'd already had the tape, but not enough money for dressings. Hopefully it wasn't too noticeable under his closest-to-fancy shirt.
Gramercy Tavern charged a hundred and twenty-nine dollars for three courses.
Peter had only come because he owed Pepper a favour. He didn't see any way this could end well. There was no nice way to talk about murder.
He'd dreamt of that moment, over and over, sometimes multiple times in one night- always from the moment the woman started spasming in his hands. Last night, it'd been the worst incarnation- the one where he didn't quite kill her. Where she struggled upright and asked him why he done it, and he didn't have an answer.
She couldn't even have killed him, really- he was so much stronger. The gun was at the wrong angle. She'd only got the upper hand because he slipped up.
Peter watched the cars creep past, modulated his breathing so nobody else could tell what he was thinking. That was a new fear; that they somehow knew , that something in his body language betrayed his body count. Ned said he was different, now, noticeably. It showed that something had happened. But was it obvious, what that something was? When would the shoe drop? When would someone ask?
Tony Stark had made him do it.
That was what Natasha had said, anyway, before the fatal text from Tony. Don't talk to her ; immediately after Peter had done exactly that. The chance of peace with Tony didn't outweigh the fact that Natasha was the only person who really understood what had happened, but he'd bricked Peter's phone remotely before, and the threat was always there.
This was all… hard. For both of them.
Considering Peter was the one who'd committed murder, Tony seemed pretty upset.
He'd never spoken first. Not until now- not until the day after, when he'd cracked the barrier between them with Kid, where are you? And never stopped. Peter had laid in bed and listened to his phone vibrate every hour, then every half-hour, then go silent.
He hadn't told May. He couldn't tell May. She couldn't know the commonality between him and the man who had made their lives had fallen apart.
May'd been getting contact, too. Because Tony was worried; what Peter was doing was hurting him.
Peter wasn't oblivious.
He was angry.
Tony arrived with something like revulsion on his face; he removed his gold-edged sunglasses and inspected Peter rather than offering a greeting. The scrutiny triggered something unexpected- even to the superhuman side, Tony Stark registered as a threat.
"Let's be civil with each other," Tony said, guiding Peter through the door with an arm around his shoulders. "I know you're upset. But I need you to hear me out."
Peter felt like he might vomit. There was a heavy tension to the contact- just a little more force than necessary.
"I know you didn't want to do that." Tony said, as they were seated, beneath the looming black lines of a chandelier. "But I want to talk about why. Are you open to that?"
There were dark bags under his eyes, the contrast violent in the bright lights.
Peter nodded.
The architecture of the place was interrogative. Looming arches, crossed with black iron grids at the top. Peter suddenly understood the judgement; he was obnoxiously underdressed. There were eyes on them, flitting from Tony to him.
He was marked, dirtied by the act; he had to be. It was such a fundamental change- it couldn't be possible to hide it completely.
He slouched low behind his paradoxical menu. None of it made sense, but puzzling out the combination of flavours was sort of a distraction.
"Do you want me to choose for you?" Tony was trying to sound gentle. "I've been here before."
Peter handed his menu over, trying not to seem completely clueless. Let Tony order.
"I still don't...get it," the words were the closest he could get to a compromise. "Why did you have to..."
Do that to Karen, go that far, panic- Peter didn't know which to say.
"Because you're very, very important to me. I care about you." Tony said, bluntly. He wrinkled his nose. "Jesus, that was soppy. I'm gonna have to do something totally debauched and inappropriate for your innocent ears to cleanse my palate."
"I- I don't think you understand how this-" Peter cut himself off before he could sound too weepy, draw even more attention. "I can't- I can't live with that, y'know? I just- I saw her die with her head in my hands and you want me to just...accept it?"
It was all jumbled nonsense, because there was no conceivable way to force the volume of feelings he had on the situation through the narrow field of his vocabulary.
"Look, kid, I understand," Tony spoke softly. "I really do. I've been there."
Tony had killed people.
It was a heady realisation, even though it wasn't a realisation at all. The reality wasn't new; the empathy was.
Two identical plates arrived. Peter toyed with his beef tartare, until he became aware of how closely Tony was watching. He impaled a few chunks of raw meat on his fork, and ate them.
"Mr. Stark, you can't honestly expect to justify murder to me," he said, and regretted it almost immediately.
"You can't honestly expect me to justify your death to anyone." Tony snarked back. Peter must have flinched, because he overcompensated immediately. "Sorry, sorry. Just… try and look at this from my perspective."
It sounded almost like begging.
The ferry. This was the same.
If you die, that's on me .
"Let's do a thought experiment, okay?" Tony said. That gentle tone was back, verging on condescending. "Let's say I didn't do what I did. She shoots. You die. What then?"
"May-"
"Waits for you to come home. And you don't. And one of us has to tell her what happened."
Peter was suddenly aware of how blinding the white of the tablecloth was, the scrape of cutlery against plates; every word in the background hum of chatter.
It sounded selfish, phrased like that.
It was just a matter of phrasing. Probably.
"I'm- I could have won," Peter said.
Tony shook his head.
"Maybe you don't realise it," he said. "But you came very, very close to losing your life out there."
It'd felt easy enough. So had the Vulture, at first.
He'd sparred with Natasha; she couldn't have been that much worse than Natasha. There'd been a similar resistance in her limbs.
But they'd not known exactly how enhanced she was. Or how hard she was trying.
"There were other options," Peter insisted. It was the first thing he'd said with any form of confidence.
"Riskier options." Tony countered. He sighed; an old, exhausted sound. This was draining him. "Look, underoos, I'm doing everything I can to keep you safe, because I don't want to be the one to tell people you got yourself killed. It's hard enough without you ignoring me."
The one-sided, backlogged conversations were still stacked on Peter's phone, waiting for him to pay them any attention whatsoever.
"The things I've been doing to try and get any contact from you-" Tony pinched the bridge of his nose. "It was terrifying to have you disappear like that, you know that? I thought- well. That you'd done something...stupid. Or you were going to. That I saved your life for nothing."
It'd been six days.
Six days of no real closure.
Six days of the nightmarish limbo Peter had only felt once. During the invasion.
"You're amazing, Spider-Man." It was almost a whisper; steeped in the air of exclusivity. "Nobody should have to lose you. Sometimes, that means prioritizing your own life. You can't help anyone if you're dead."
"I know," Peter said. He wanted desperately for this to stop. "I- I'm just - it's sticking with me. I- I can't sleep."
The truth of it helped him fall apart convincingly.
"We'll work on that," Tony said. He softened, the anger that had tinged his speech fading out completely. "I just need you to communicate. This could all be so much easier than you're making it."
"It's just…"
Peter knew he was being irritating, at this point. How deliberate this all must look.
He averted his eyes.
"I don't. I'm not okay with...stuff like that?"
Tension snagged the muscles around Tony's eyes.
Peter yielded.
"...First aiders do this, Peter," Tony said. "Firefighters. Doctors. Every single other person in the world who saves lives puts effort into keeping their own. Your death would lead to hundreds of others, because you wouldn't be there to prevent them any more."
Silent, Peter stabbed at his second plate- identical to Tony's, swordfish and apricots and slivers of almonds, pale yellow and arced like fingernail clippings. He desperately didn't want to eat it, but the faster he did, the faster this would end. The faster he could go home.
"If-" he swallowed the snarky end of the sentence, tried not to focus on his shaking hands. "If I'd been...you wouldn't have 'stepped in' if I could have gotten out of it, right?"
"I didn't want to say that," Tony said it quietly. The tone was one of pity. "I don't want to blame you for this. But..yeah, most likely."
This was what he'd meant by 'I wanted you to be better' . Peter failing lead to stuff like this. He… provoked . He knew Tony well enough to be more careful.
It wasn't justified. But it wasn't Tony's fault, either.
"I'm sorry."
"It's okay," Tony shrugged, all shadows and glowing faux-candlelight. "You should start wearing the suit again, though. It's safer."
The suit- or Tony's take on it- was currently bundled under Peter's bed, crammed into a shoebox. He hadn't been able to touch it.
Inside the bunched-up fabric, something was starting to stink.
"Okay." Peter said. He'd never feel safe in the thing again. He didn't feel safe in Gramercy Tavern, either.
There was something repulsive about… playing along like this. It felt manipulative. But it also felt like a chance of escape.
He wanted to protest. Ask why Tony hadn't gone for something less lethal. Why people had to earn the right to survive. But he didn't want to risk losing what little ground he'd gained.
In future, he'd just need to be more careful. To stop the unforgivable from happening again.
Eventually, the meal was over, as was the argument.
Peter left before Tony did, because he was given the chance to. It was twilight outside; the air was just cool enough to make him shiver.
He looked up at the sky; remembered the wormhole that had yawned open above Manhattan. Tony flying through. It wasn't hypocrisy, not really- it was recognition of a mistake.
They'd mended the rift between them as best as they could. Everything was the closest it would get to normal, and Tony was probably lining up even more extravagant apologies as Peter walked home.
This was the best Peter could hope for, so why didn't he feel any better?