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.
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.̸
̸.
̴P͡e̷t̨e̡r̷…̷
̛͢.͘҉
̡.͢͝

 

“Peter!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Pietro, please —!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

H̍̕e̛̍̎̄̅̕r̡̛̍̎̄̕͘e̛̍̎̄̕

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Don’t make me do this, kid.”

 

 

W̴̢̙̞̎e̶̻̞͕͐͑͌'̶̲̭͉̋r̴͈͉è̵̟͍

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Gͧͤ͗eͦ͂̉͆ͦͥ̑tͬ̅ͤ ͂̉͒̀bͤ̽ͦâ̈́ͭ͛̚c̊ͨ̋̂́̈k͑̍̐̂.͎̘̙̖̹̜̙.͈i̼͕͙̩n̗̳̱̜ ̗͇̖̖̰̹̥t̩̟̥̙̞̳̼h̩̖ẹ̳͙̱ s̝̘̼̣̠̞̳u̺̻͓̼͓i͖̬t̖̟͚̠̠͓”

 

 

 

 

W̵̳͆́̄̅ẹ̶͙̥̲͙̥̭͔̭̘́̈́͛́̓̉̾̓ ̸̪̈́͐̋̽̈́̽͆̽̃̊͘̚͠͝

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“͙̪Y̘͓̼ͅoͅu.͉͚̝͉͙.̙.͇̞̖dͅo̼̪n’̫t͎͈͔͔͖̬.̹̯..̠̟̠͇̳̰̞co̰͈̼ͅͅn̫̫͉͚̻̳̜t͎r̺o͓͙͚̜̫̭ͅl̘ͅ m͚e̖.̞͈̪̰̱”̟

 

 

“No…”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"...but I sure as hell care about you.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I’m sorry, kid…”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Peter’s eyes flew open.

 

 

 

---

 

 

“I’m just saying,” Clint’s voice barely kept up with the speed of his own boots, each step pounding against the sterile, white floor of the compound’s medbay. If he walked any harder, he’d have left scuff marks in his wake. “I know for certain, not a doubt it, that I had six arrows when I left here. Bruce counted. I counted — and I never miscount. How many times have I miscounted, Nat? Never, that’s how many.”

Natasha kept walking without so much as sparing him a glance.

“Mh-hm.” Despite the tightly controlled chaos around them — the sound of numerous staff members working nearby, panicked and hushed — but-not-quite-hushed — chatter from the SHIELD personnel flocking every corner of the medbay — Natasha’s throaty hum was still somehow heard over even the sound of Clint’s combat boots smacking against the floor.

They both walked in a hurry, both side by side, at a pace that parted the crowds in the hallways like seamlessly. 

Natasha kept her gaze locked straight ahead, weaving through the nicks and crannies of the infirmary without giving herself time to blink.

"I had four arrows after the initial attack, did I not?” Clint wasn’t asking her, but still, he threw her a glimpse to gauge her reaction.

Her expression hadn’t changed, not even a twitch of the eyebrow. If her face were anymore stone-cold, he’d have to assume she was a walking robot version of Natasha as opposed to the real thing.

"Yes, I did, I had four.” He answered for himself, not that Natasha seemed disappointed in missing the opportunity to speak.

They turned a sharp corner and nearly bumped into someone along the way, a short haired woman wearing a lab coat too long for her frame. Natasha didn’t even look at her as they both side-stepped in opposite directions and kept their brisk walk ahead.

"The first and second were derailed. Third was, and I speak literally on this, thwarted, ” Clint recalled, a slight edge of irritation lacing his tone. “The fourth one — ha, yeah, the fourth was another victim to his freaky sixth sense. And obviously, goes without saying but I’ll say it — the fifth was the one that so wonderfully tried to make love with the inside of my eye-socket.”

The comment was just enough to gain Natasha’s attention. She threw him a quick glance, her neck craning to the side as her brows furrowed in disgust.

As if needing to provide her proof, Clint pointed a callused finger to the cut along his cheekbone. The blood had long since crusted over, with a purple bruise starting to shape along the gash.

She might’ve rolled her eyes at him as she turned away — Clint wasn’t fully sure, too preoccupied to bother paying attention.

They both turned a wide corner that showed to have no outlet, a complete dead end to the medbay and what it contained. The sight ahead would’ve almost taken them aback, had they not been prepared.

“That left me one still remaining. I still had one left. So when — and I’m asking this Nat, I’m really looking for answers here — when did he take it?”

It felt as if the air of the infirmary had somehow gotten thicker as they both walked towards what was ahead. A huddled group of people stood near the last remaining room in the medbay, shut off with glass doors that were sealed tight.

Judging by the large ‘Isolation’ signs plastered on every empty space that was available, combined with yellow tape blocking off the entrance way, it was safe to assume those doors were locked and secured.

A flicker broke the steely gaze that had held Natasha’s face captive nearly all night.

Clint noticed. He was smart enough not to make comment on it.

“I don’t know,” Natasha answered succinctly. She crossed her arms over her chest, making contact with the leather of the Black Widow suite she still donned. Aside from them both stocking away their arsenal, they had yet to change outfits since arriving back to the compound. It had been the least of their concerns. “Perhaps the best answer comes from the source.”

They stopped a few feet short of the group ahead. The lack of sound from Clint’s boots was eerily noticeable the moment he came to a halt.

Up ahead and in the huddle of people, they watched as three employees wearing lab coats dispersed with alarming speed. It left just two, standing by the quarantined hospital room with a vibrating tension that could quake the entire compound.

Just like both Natasha and Clint, one of the two people still wore his gear from earlier. Sans shield and gloves.

Briefly, Steve met Clint’s gaze with a fleeting glance of his own, an acknowledgment of their attendance. Almost immediately, he turned back to the short, black-haired woman he’d been speaking to.

They both seemed to be in a heated conversation. Clint’s steps slowed even further, but it had nothing to do with Cap, or the doctor, or any other lingering staff that passed by.

Behind both Steve and the doctor, and seen through what wasn’t covered in an array of hazard and caution signs, Clint could make out a figure hunched over a hospital bed. Just barely, as the multitude of machinery cluttering the inside had all but taken over the room. If he looked hard enough and squinted his eyes, he could make out the underarmor t-shirt lined with red, worn by a man with a head of messy hair normally kept pristine and flawless.

Far down the hallway, Steve seemed to notice what Clint saw. A fleeting look crossed over his eyes, a depth to his blue irises that deepened the color, sending signals of a troubling change to the climate ahead. As if he was warning Clint of what they all already knew.

That was Tony inside.

And if they were smart, they wouldn’t go near him.

“Yeah...well…” Clint trailed off, forcing his eyes away from what he could see inside of the room. It was almost as if he had some kind of twisted fear that Tony might catch him staring. Like he’d become a male maedusa who would turn them into stone just by seeing their presence.

Honestly, Clint thought, it would be the better of outcomes. After what happened in Queens, there was no telling what to expect going forward.

But one thing was for certain — they had pissed off Tony. And not in a way that would be easily forgotten.

"Maybe I’ll ask him later,” Clint finally muttered, forcefully craning his neck to the side in an attempt to crack a stiff muscle. A sigh broke his lips as he stretched the stiffness out of his shoulder. “Time and a place, you know.”

Natasha let out another hum. With it, she kept walking.

“Good call.”

The unspoken didn’t need to be said. This wasn’t a time for petty bickering between the team, for pointing fingers and pinning blame. It would have to wait until later.

Especially after what they encountered on the bridge.

The hallway seemed to stretch longer as their footsteps slowed. Halfway down the corridor and Clint threw Natasha a look.

"You know," he started up. “I would’ve been able to target Peter if it weren’t for all this...Steven King muck and gunk body snatching hooplah that’s happening.”

Natasha quirked an eyebrow.

“Are you saying that because you don’t think I believe you?” She paused, long enough to earn a look from him. “Or are you’re trying to make yourself believe it?”

Clint frowned.

“I would’ve.” A beat passed. “I never miss.”

He may have sounded too defensive for his own good. Natasha pulled her eyes away from what was up ahead, a smirk parting her lips open just slightly.

“Sure.”

She quickened her pace, and Clint had to hurry his to keep at her side.

“I always get my target,” he insisted, downright defended. Flat out affronted at her disbelief. There was no hiding it from his tone this time, not as Natasha’s eyes flashed to his with a shadow of a smile creeping along her mouth.

“You sure do.” Natasha’s grin grew uncharacteristically large. “Just like Budapest.”

Like an anvil falling from a rooftop, Clint’s face fell at record speed. His glare was hotter than the fluorescent lights beaming from above.

“My target in Budapest was a very different story.”

A gentle fist bumped against his shoulder, knuckles that gently pushed him off balance and broke his pace.

“Yeah…” Natasha nodded, walking ahead of him with a grin. “I sure was.”

There wasn’t an opportunity for Clint to argue, let alone consider a comeback.

The shouting from ahead stole the air that either of them could breathe.

“This isn’t an infection, it’s a full blown contagion!”

“I understand, Helen, but —”

“No, Steve, there is no but!”

Both Natasha and Clint stopped just a few feet short of where Steve stood, and across from him a much shorter, very hot-tempered woman. Despite Roger’s being twice her size and having the strength to lift a bison over his head, she somehow managed to look the most threatening of them all.

“I have to inform SHIELD, this has to go through protocol —”

“If it goes through SHIELD, they take Peter.” Steve lifted a hand towards her, slow and gentle, lessening the hostility with docile movements. “They take Peter and...and we don’t know what happens after that. We don’t know what they do.”

Clint’s eyes darted between the two, whereas Natasha’s stayed strictly on Cho’s. The doctor’s expression dampened just enough that the heat from her eyes began to fizzle out.

Natasha wasn’t the only one to notice. Steve pointed his hand away from Cho, and to the room they stood next to. Firm and stiff fingers, all five of them, pointed directly at the glass doors separating them from what was inside.

“You know SHIELD as well as I do, Helen.” His tone grew darker, along with the weariness that wore on his face. “Their priority isn’t to save the source of the problem. It’s to eliminate it.”

Helen shifted on her feet, pursing her lips with a voice that fell slightly accusatory. “Maybe that’s what needs to happen here.”

“Hey, whoa!” Clint interjected, taking five leaps to cross the distance separating them. “That’s — that’s a kid in there! That’s a child you’re talking about!”

Steve bit back a sigh, and the same hand gesturing to the doorway of the hospital room quickly swung in Clint’s direction.

It kept the archer from moving forward. It didn’t, however, keep the disgusted outrage off his face. If he looked anymore fulminated, they would’ve easily thought Cho was talking about one of his own kids.

Helen snapped her head in Clint’s direction, looking torn, tired, and embittered.

“Yes, I know , but —”

"Like hell you do!” Much to Steve’s dismay, Clint pushed past the arm that kept him rooted in place. It swung back and against Steve’s hip like a wet noodle.

It went without saying that the super soldier could have tossed him across the room like a rag doll had he really wanted to. Instead, he let Clint barrel forward, the only threat he posed being the wagging finger that said more than his mouth ever could.

"Absolutely not, we’re not discussing that! What happened to Hippocratic oath, what happened to — to do no harm?”

Steve mumbled something unintelligible, nothing that any of the three could make out as he titled his head back and briefly stared at the ceiling tiles above.

Forcibly, Helen scrubbed at her forehead, her eyes crinkling tight as she massaged the tips of her fingers into the skin of her temple.

"It's not just Peter in there anymore. This is a matter of parasitism, fatal parasitism,” she argued, staunchly. “Whatever thing has infected him...it could take us all out in a matter of minutes.”

“We’re not going to let that happen,” Natasha spoke up, arms folded over her chest, eyes deadlocked on the doctor.

Helen turned to look at her, a coldness seeping through her eyes.

“You may not have a say.” Her voice held more concern than it held irate. She turned to the men, eyebrow cocked high. “As it is, you barely got him back here. And most certainly not in one piece.”

Steve’s head fell to the side, looking off kilter where the only things in his line of vision were intimate objects incapable of making judgment towards him. His jaw clenched and cracked, teeth grinding against one another with the tension that burdened his shoulders.

It was unsettling just how many times he’d seen things go to hell, and go to hell awfully fast. More than he could count, which was unfortunately impressive considering his young lifespan. Times where one action would turn on its head, create a massive slew of problems that would snowball with overwhelming speed.

It was safe to assume tonight would become one of those times.

Eventually, he shifted his gaze, returning to Helen with an unshakeable pose.

“Helen, we know what this is,” Steve insisted, the gruff tone to his voice nearly overtaking the voice of reason he so desperately needed to be. “We know what we’re dealing with — we have someone on the way to help us. But we can’t do anything if Peter isn’t here. And you know once they take him, we won’t be allowed near him. No one will.”

For a short-lived moment, the sounds of the medbay intensified. The lightest beeps of machines and murmurs of staff were overwhelming loud.

With a breath lifting his chest, Steve squared his shoulders and stood his ground.

“I promise you, we’re going to handle this.”

Helen shifted on her feet, high-heels clicking against the cold floor with resounding effect.

"Like you handled Ultron?”

Steve nearly gaped. “Now, wait a second —”

“This is my entire team you’re putting at risk, Captain.” The veneer of her professionalism was nearly lost, the building pressure of the dilemma threatening to burst at any second. “This entire department, this entire compound — the entirety of SHIELD itself. Do you understand what I would be risking — what we all would be risking? It is not just Peter’s life we’re talking about. It’s all of us.”

Steve floundered for a response.

Ultimately, he closed his mouth, swallowing past the hard knot he hadn’t realized began to grown in his throat.

Eyes stared at him, from every angle. Helen, Clint, Natasha — they watched, they waited, they anticipated his next move. His next action. His next decision.

He breathed in deeply, an exaggerated movement pronounced even more by the size of his frame. And yet his own eyes failed to match the intimidation of his figure.

"I know we’re asking a lot of you,” he started, his voice growing quiet the more he spoke. “And I won’t stand here and promise you an outcome one way or the other. I know we’re not perfect. But the safest hands are still our own.”

Steve stepped forward, taking Helen’s elbow gently in his grasp.

“We know how dangerous this is. That’s why you gotta help us.”

Helen looked down at his grip, not in offense, but rather to break the moment and take pause for herself. By the time she looked up, her demeanor had changed. Softened. She exchanged brief glances with the others, as if evaluating their thoughts strictly on their expressions.

A sigh broke her lips.

"What if I can’t?” Helen craned her head up, looking to Steve with honest, raw incertitude. She wasn’t angry. She just needed to know. “What if SHIELD finds out despite everything I try?”

Tension stole the room. Steve’s hand dropped away from Helen, though it never fell in the process. Almost immediately, he intertwined his arms across his chest, his eyes wandering away from the doctor.

“It’s not me you’ll have to answer to.”

Helen followed his gaze, as did Clint and Natasha. They looked to the side, past the ropes of hazard tape and through the isolation signs plastered on the glass observation window.

They all saw the same thing.

The same person.

Still, Steve nodded ahead, gesturing to who sat inside.

“It’s him.”

 

---

 

 

The brightness of the cell phone began to hurt his eyes.

Tony blinked a few times, trying to focus on the text messages that had slowly morphed into unreadable splotches of black and white. The conversation was getting away from him, and he wasn’t sure what else to say that didn’t include a long string of colorful words so diverse, it would put a rainbow to shame.

 

 

He settled on that.

Concentration was no longer something in the realm of possibilities for him — focusing on any conversation just wasn’t going to happen. Not with the flickering, bright aura floating in the corner of his eyes. What had started as miniature spears prodding at the back of his head was evolving into something harsher; sharp-edged daggers that jabbed nerves he otherwise didn’t know existed.

Without so much a second thought, he swiped on the screen of the device, dimming the light with a touch of his thumb. It was low enough that he could scarcely see the clock on his lock-screen, the numbers indicating a taunting, unmerciful three-am.

Three in the goddamn morning.

Despite how stiff his joints felt, Tony tossed his phone away, his shoulder all but screaming at the sudden and unthinkably jarring movement.

What a cluster-fuck of a night.

A radiating, resounding throb shot down his arm, fizzling away at the tips of his fingers. It was hard to say what all had caused the most of his pain — could have been face-planting onto a car, or finding himself up-close and personal with the anarchic, supernatural magic that knocked him out six ways to Sunday.

Perhaps it was the toe-to-toe fight with a sentiment life form that nearly closed his windpipe for business, almost swallowed him whole like he was some TV dinner fresh out of the microwave.

It was kind of hard to knock that one as a possibility.

Tony rubbed absentmindedly near his throat, callous fingers tracing the round nodule of his adam’s apple.

There was no forgetting just what it looked like up close. The grotesque, repulsive…

Thing.

His phone rattled as it tumbled onto whatever plywood the end-table was made out of. Expensive furniture, he was sure. He just didn’t care.

With a sigh that could have broken his back, he leaned forward, two fingers pinching tightly at the bridge of his nose.

There wasn’t going to be enough Advil in the world to get rid of this migraine.

The continual, absolutely relentless beeping from countless machinery certainly didn’t help. Infusion pumps, electrocardiograph signals, monitors that tracked every heart beat, pulse, tick of increase in blood pressure — they littered the room and stole every inch of space that surrounded him.

It didn’t matter how hard he tried to block it out — he’d learned a long time ago it was a fruitless effort. More energy would be spent focusing on what he was trying so hard to ignore, and it’d only add to the ache that gnawed at the back of his head.

Tony squeezed the bridge of his nose, hard, until he could no longer feel the crooked bone that had been broken and healed too many times to count.

Too many nights spent in these Medbay rooms, listening to the same sounds pierce the air. Over and over again, until the little rings and chirps became embedded in his mind, heard even in the deepest troughs of his sleep.

Hadn’t they just been here?

The hollow feeling in his chest returned. No matter how hard he tried to stave it off, it kept coming back. As if the hole of his arc reactor had never been closed off.

Tony peered one eye open, too tired to manage anything more. The scene ahead hadn’t changed, not since they arrived back to the compound. He could wish a thousand times over that things were different, that the sight in front of him was something different — anything different than what he knew it to be.

Nothing had changed. He still sat bedside in a cramped medbay room, never leaving the stiff chair that added to the ache of his bones.

And Peter still laid in that bed next to him. Unmoving. Just like he’d been since they left the shores of the Queensboro bridge.

There wasn’t a tint of black in sight.

Not on him, not near him. Not a dab or stain that would otherwise indicate danger, suggest a threat, even cause concern.

The young, baby-faced skin that he saw with his own eyes, saw right in front of him ooze in parasitic oil, had since returned to normal — return to something human.

Of course, being human came with its flaws. Machines that preserved life told him all about that, the equipment occupying the room a harsh reminder that they were far, far from the reach of normalcy.

The fingers pinching at his nose let loose and an open palm ran the length of his face. It was all too familiar. It left a bad taste in his mouth, a bitter film soaking through his taste buds at the memory of sleepless nights spent wondering if the same kid would make it to the next day. The next hour. The next minute.

And here they were again. Mere months later, barely half a year had gone by since a psychopathic Russian nearly swept them away in the waters of the North Atlantic ocean.

Just when Tony was starting to wonder if they’d ever catch a break — if he’d ever catch a break — a sound tore through the cadence of electronic whines.

The machines still beeped; infusion pumps still dinging, monitors still chiming.

But alongside it came a fresh noise.

Vocals, stifled, but there nonetheless.

“...think ’m gunna be sick.”

Tony pursed his lips, feeling beneath his fingers the skin of his mouth tightening into a thin line.

Still, he kept his hand cupped around his chin, with one finger pressing harshly against his cheekbone. He could almost feel just how deep the bags under his eyes had become. It seemed as if the crevices were growing heavier with each passing day.

“There’s a bucket on your left.”

His voice was stoic and dry, if not bordering blasé, drained of the compassion that coursed through his veins but couldn’t disgorge from his mouth.

High-strung emotions blurred together in a continuum, unable to distinguish one from the other. They fused together into a mass of fragility, one that threatened to shatter like glass if he dared cross that line.

He couldn’t afford that – not right now. Indifference was what he clung to.

A rustle of blankets sent the silence away, labored breathing and confined grunts somehow growing tenfold in volume.

Which made the clatter of metal that abruptly sounded all the louder.

Peter froze the moment his hand met resistance. His eyes opened, all the way, flickering with sluggishness as the remnants of a drug got a foot hold.

A clang echoed. Then again, when he tugged his arm for a second time.

The kid’s eyes narrowed, his brow creased at the confusion. Half-lidded eyes stared in a muddled daze at the soft padded straps keeping his arms in place. There was just enough give that he could reach for the aforementioned bucket close by, but distraction had since stolen the need for it.

Tony watched, hand still against his mouth, covering what little expression may have crossed his face.

“Told them those things would be useless,” he mentioned, almost nonchalantly, too casual for his own liking. The exhaustion that coated his throat was enough to speak what emotions he wouldn’t let rise. As if there had been an argument that occurred before Peter woke up, and judging by the sound of his voice, Tony hadn’t won.

Peter’s eyes flitted to him, wordlessly questioning what he saw. The haze of sedation slowly began to clear way; just enough that as Tony stared back, he could gradually see the brown irises on his face. The ones that he’d become so familiar with.

But there wasn’t enough time to make an assessment, not before the kid looked away. He craned his neck down, gawking at the restraints wrapped snugly around his wrists.

Peter tugged again, this time weaker than before. Barely pulling at the railing of the hospital bed. And again on the other side, looking left and right, to each arm bounded and out of reach.

The scrub top that clung to his skin began to tremble alongside his muscles, the cotton fabric shivering against his shoulders.

Tony sniffed, hard, and swiped his thumb across his nose.

“They know you’ll break through them if you really wanted to.” He shifted to the side, letting his elbow lean against the armrest of the chair. “Hard fact to dispute, what with how you almost tore through Vibranium’s third-removed cousin like it was silly putty.”

Peter looked down below, the lines on his forehead deepening as he steadily became more aware of his surroundings. The restraints began to shake alongside his arms, a harsh shudder that quickly became something more.

“Turns out I don’t have much pull in these neck of the woods,” Tony continued on as if nothing was happening. Talking like it was a Tuesday afternoon, and Peter had just asked him for help with an equation to one of his many homework assignments. “Who would have thought. Feels a bit vindictive, if you ask me. Medical staff never did take a liking to my presence. But apparently my clout does nothing here. Doesn’t matter that the building is in my name —”

“What happened?” Peter couldn’t keep the panic out of his voice, gurgling alongside the bile that tickled in the back of his throat.

Tony cocked an eyebrow, looking exhausted and authoritative all the same.

“Give it a few minutes,” he insisted, his voice raggedly. He noticeably sunk in the chair. “It’ll come back to you.”

The unrelenting pings sounding from nearby machines seemed to multiply, as if there was dial that someone had unknowingly brought to its highest volume. Each beep, each whir and hiss that echoed through the room crawled straight underneath Tony’s skin, quickly bringing his irritation to a boil.

It was the sight of Peter that kept his vexation at bay. A shortness of breath crept into his chest when the kid turned to look at him — really look at him, and keep his gaze there. The effects of an unwanted tranquilizer were finally tapering off, though clarity was long to be seen in his eyes.

The same eyes that Tony saw with his very own drown in darkness, pupils that were charred to a crisp — burned black with caustic scum. Mere hours ago, he didn’t know if he’d ever see those brown irises again.

He ought to be thankful for it. A small part of Tony knew that, deep down inside, realizing that the situation just hours ago could’ve very well ended in a causality. Ended with a death that this time around he’d have no other option but to accept as the truth. No magicians or psychopathic Russians to change the reality he lived in, no second chances gracefully laid at his doorstep.

And yet looking at Peter, he began to wonder exactly what causality had been avoided.

Pings and beeps informed Tony of what he already knew. Life support had a sound, and it told its story loud and clear. For what it didn’t say, the bloodshot, yellow tinted eyes staring back at him said the rest.

Peter heaved in a breath far too heavy for his small frame, dry and cracked lips peeling apart as he found his voice to speak.

“Did — did you drug me?”

Sweat rolled down his forehead in large beads, dripping along his neck where the veins protruded and spasmed, matching each beat of his erratic pulse.

The color to his face was gone; Tony noticed that long before Peter woke up. The warm, beige undertones of his skin had grown a waxy, lifeless gray. Even his lips were ashen, paler than the white walls surrounding them.

And his eyes were yellow.

A deep, canary hue had drowned the whites, seeped along the lids, leaving no space untouched. Bleeding bile into his tissue from a liver that no longer functioned.

That much was new to Tony, something he didn’t get to see as the effects of the tranquilizer wore off. As Peter laid unconscious in the Quinjet, soon to be brought straight into the medbay. Locked under quarantine from panic-stricken staff that were clueless as to what to do with him.

He was a smart man. He knew on an intellectual level what was going on. The machines told him, the doctors told him, even common sense reiterated what didn’t need to be said aloud.

But seeing it for himself...

Tony remained distant, unreadable — though there was a faint vertical line between his eyebrows. A flicker of something crossed his face, and disappeared no sooner than it came.

His lack of an answer was answer enough.

Peter jolted in the bed.

“You drugged me!?” Involuntarily, he tugged at the restraints, the bed-railings shaking at the sudden movement. The heels of his feet dug frantically into the mattress as he fought, and failed, to sit upright.

There wasn’t a single beat that passed.

“I did what had to be done,” Tony snapped fiercely, a flash of anger ripping through the masquerade of indifference. Quickly, his veneer was starting to splinter at the seams. “Don’t think for one second that you weren’t given plenty of opportunities for a different outcome.”

Peter gaped, mouth ajar, breaths coming in large puffs. Air pulled in simultaneously through his mouth and nose, in a way that made the nasal cannula wrapped around his face all too constricting. Far too bothersome.

He went to yank it off, his shoulders buckling harshly as his arms meet resistance halfway up. Super strength be damned; in this moment, the kid posed no threat on his own. Tony was positive that had Peter not been cuffed, his sweat soaked palms would’ve kept him from getting a good hold on anything he touched.

And it wasn’t just confined to his hands. Peter’s whole body was drenched in sweat, the scrub top darkening in color, his already greasy hair sticking to his forehead in sloppy, unruly patterns.

He seemed to notice none of it. Not the state of his physical being, not the arsenal of medical equipment around him. Eyes wide and yet furrowed at the same time, Peter stared ahead, hunched over as he struggled to take in everything.

“I can’t believe…” His voice fell into a croak, too hoarse to produce working syllables. “You actually —”

A different tune sang from one of the machines nearby, right as Peter let out a sound far too akin to choking.

As quickly as the words left his mouth, he whipped to the side, twisting haphazardly and leaning over the bed-rail with a wet, rasping gasp.

The next guttural of an inhale would be his last. The sound of liquid splashing into a plastic bin was quick to overtake the cacophony of equipment. It didn’t stop there; one gag after another, the vomiting went on.

A claw gripped at Tony’s chest, as hard as he pressed the souls of his feet to the ground beneath him. His knees bent as he instinctively went to stand, stopping short of actually rising from the chair.

A heavily isolated room, quarantined from everyone and everything — staff had only agreed he could remain inside if he promised not to touch anything.

Including Peter.

Tony wasn’t sure which was worse. The sounds of heaving that wracked Peter’s back, shaking his body; waves of spastic purging that kept him from being able to catch his breath.

Or the inability to so much as offer a reassuring hand through it all.

Up til now, the anger he felt had been cultivating in steady waves. Continual, gradual, but steady.

Tony could feel the moment it spiked, all but imploded into a raging storm.

It came at the same time Peter spoke, his words garbled with the contents that leaked from his mouth.

”You actually drugged me…” Peter coughed, weakly spitting the remains of his stomach into the bucket beside him. Collapsing back on the bed, his eyes fixated on the ceiling. “I can’t believe it.”

Tony pursed his lips together, his hand still resting along his mouth. He scrubbed at his goatee before finally moving it away, exposing the entirety of his face. Stress lines seemingly deepened underneath the bright, florescent hospital lights.

He had to swallow past the knot in his throat before speaking.

“I can’t believe it came to that in the first place.” There was an undertone of anger in Tony’s words, an edge so sharp it could cut through wool.

Nothing was done to hide it.

Peter seemed to take notice. He turned his head, albeit slow and shaky, looking at Tony with jaundice tinted eyes and a face of outrage that dripped with the sweat of his sickness.

“Mr. Stark...you can’t just —!”

“Zip it, kid.”

The authority in Tony’s voice was enough to silence an army.

Peter froze, what little movement his body made coming to a halt. Even the shivers that rocked his shoulders found a way to stop; as if a shock-wave had blown through the room and taken hold of everything in its path.

Tony glared, intently and stringently, matching Peter’s wide, frenzied eyes with his own.

“You lost the right of privilege to personal boundaries a long time ago,” he hissed, the anger woven through his voice bone-chilling to even his own ears. “Right around the time you so conveniently... left out how your impromptu trip to OsCorp was more than just a study session with some old friend.”

It came suddenly, without any warning. Embers finally lit into flames, and Tony wasn’t about to try and smother the fire.

Peter tried to speak; it was evident in how his bloodless lips parted, his larynx working forcibly against his throat. And yet as a fog of confusion cast over his eyes, the most he could manage was one sound.

“...what?”

The heart monitor in the nook of the room began producing louder noises, more frequent, picking up signals from the many wires strung across Peter’s chest. Beeping, ringing — like a ticking time bomb certain to detonate at any second.

The only thing closer to exploding was Tony.

Rage, hurt, resentment — they surged to the surface no quicker than an erupting volcano, an onslaught of insurmountable, mixed and unhinged emotion that he was failing to keep at bay.

Asking him to do so was an impossible task. He couldn’t — not as he looked at Peter, saw first hand the death that clung to his skin, reflected in his eyes. It wafted in the air with a distinct, curdling smell.

Suddenly, he felt sick to his own stomach.

“FRIDAY,” Tony didn’t dare break eye contact with Peter. “Bring up the recently viewed files from Canon EOS-1DX Mark II. You know the ones.”

For once, there wasn’t a response from the AI. It only made the shrill beeping all the louder, the abnormal rhythm of Peter’s heartbeat producing a stressful background noise in lieu of any dialogue.

While there was no Irish accent that answered Tony, what came in its place was far more telling.

An image lifted from the screen of Tony’s cell phone, the device placed heedlessly on the end-table near the head of where Peter laid.

It was a picture. Holographic and yet bright, vivid even. It divided the space between them, blocking Tony’s view of Peter, and vice versa. Though it was translucent, the details were crisp and precise. Had the image not emit a glow of technology, it could have very well looked like the scenery was as real as everything else surrounding them.

Pinching his fingers together tightly, Tony expanded the transparent picture until it spread across the length between them. There was no hiding from it, no disputing what they saw.

A beat passed.

One more after that.

Tony had seen the image a thousand times by now. Memorized it, analyzed it, studied it. He saw it with his eyes open and with his eyes shut. He would say that he even saw it in his nightmares, but there had been very little sleeping since he first came to bare the burden of what the photograph meant. What horrors it would tell.

For Peter, it was his first time exposed to it.

It seemed to take a solid minute for him to process what he was seeing.

Tony could tell the very second it clicked.

“You went through my stuff!?” The bed rattled as he jerked forward, tugging at restraints that kept him bound.

Tony arched an eyebrow, fixing Peter with a pointed look.

“I’m sorry...are you actually not understanding the gravity of this situation?”

Peter shook his head, strings of sweat flying off his face as he scrambled to sit further upright.

“You stole my camera —?!”

“You lied!”

Tony yelled, so loudly that it was a wonder the various equipment surrounding them didn’t tip over onto the floor. The echo of his voice thundered along the four walls, encroaching whatever false pretense had been playing between them.

It was gone — the nonchalance, the causality, the desperate attempt at remaining aloof.

Tony was mad.

Downright pissed.

And Peter, without a single doubt in his soul, knew it. His bloodshot eyes grew wide, lingering on where Tony sat. Where the man’s fiery glare burned with heat that made the air hard to breathe, dense and suffocating against the soft tissues of his lungs.

There was no relating the moment to a time when he’d had ever been this mad. Not at Peter. Not the Ferry, not after Peter’s identity was revealed to the team. Not even in the locker room just days ago.

There was simply no comparison.

Tony looked away, just briefly, as if to gather the composure he failed to retain.

“Studying,” he scolded, the words seeping through clenched teeth. “The day you took this picture, you claimed all that you did at OsCorp was study. You explicitly said that you didn’t get into trouble.”

Peter swallowed, hard, his face noticeably paler than before. “I didn’t get into troub —”

“Can it, Peter!”

The twig of what little restraint he had left snapped, never heard over the roar of his own voice.

Tony threw his arm in the air, breaking through the pixels of the translucent hologram.

“You’re not blind! You have an IQ over two-hundred — don’t play dumb with me! This picture — this wasn’t just you studying with Osborn’s son!” Tony pointed a stern finger at the image — through the image — where glass panels of incubators reflected the sight of a black substance. The glob of unknown had been slightly blurred from spasmic motions. “Studying doesn’t equal out to sneaking into some highly secure, off limits laboratory within the headquarters of a far too deleterious corporation that nearly got you and I both killed!”

Peter’s mouth closed suddenly, his lips pressed against one another as they stayed firmly shut.

For a moment that felt too long, Tony didn’t say anything. He leaned forward in the chair, his finger continuing to shake as it pointed through the hologram.

The brief pause of silence did more to intimidate Peter than any words could have. The rage he saw now, the unadulterated fury that took the room by storm — Peter sucked in several heavy breaths through shaking lungs, but otherwise stayed quiet.

Tony’s hand clenched into a fist, temporarily disintegrating the hologram until he let it fall down onto his kneecap.

“Lying is not a good look on you, do you know that?” His chest expanded, yet the breath he took in never came out. “When you said you were ‘studying’ — what, is that some hip, teenage lingo for rubbing elbows with the one and only Norman Virgil Osborn? Hm? Didn’t have any desire to gloat about your VIP meet and greet with Stormin’ Norman himself?”

Peter blinked, hard, squinting past the sweat that poured off his forehead and drowned in his eyelashes.

The confusion that latched onto his face was enough to stir something in Tony. Something temperamental, fueled by the turmoil raging within.

“Do you not realize that you’ve fraternized with the enemy?” Tony didn’t wait for an answer. “You discussed details of your life, details about Stark Industries — about the internship that he’s now questioning, digging into — you have this man associating you and Spider-Man, do you understand that? Are you comprehending any of this, Parker!?”

His shout could have very well done the same damage as the repulsor blasts that came from one of his many Iron Man suits. It tore from his throat, rumbling through the air like boisterous thunder even Thor would be jealous of.

And yet, as if his hearing was damaged, it barely fazed Peter.

The hologram flickered away, bits of pixels dissipating like glitter strewn about the floor. It cleared way for Peter’s face, no longer hidden beneath the picture he had taken with his own hands.

He looked towards Tony, staring at him as if he’d grown six heads.

For a brief moment, Tony began to wonder if he had.

“How do you know all this?” Peter asked, weakly, the effrontery of his question stifled by the hoarse croak to his voice.

Tony’s heart skipped a beat. The incredulity etched deep into his face, into every wrinkle he was sure Peter had caused over the last year.

“How do I —?”

Peter’s expression twisted further. “Is there any part of my life you aren’t spying —?”

“No,” Tony cut him off, sternly. His face grew hard, defatigation aging him by at least ten years. “You are done using that word, I am done hearing it. Up until this moment, up until you put us through the roaring waters of shits creek without so much a damn paddle to save our asses, I have had implicit trust in you! And that has been a terrible decision, really. Consider yourself an anomaly, Parker, because you’ve officially made it to my list of biggest regrets. I never thought leaving you to your own devices would cause this much trouble, but damn it to all, the ramifications of trusting you are well off the charts of what I could have ever anticipated!”

The words stung, for both of them.

Almost immediately, Tony looked away, scrubbing at his face and taking extra time to rub at his eyes. He didn’t look back at Peter after speaking, not as his throat worked in a ways that seemed abnormal, one too many hard swallows convulsing his larynx. As if a rock had jammed itself halfway down his windpipe, and no matter how hard he tried, there was no dislodging it.

Peter watched, his chest noticeably rising with a fast and hard pace, expanding like a balloon about to burst.

Though Tony had looked away, Peter couldn’t. Not even as the silence stretched on, not even as the bite of Tony’s words roused something vehement inside of him.

“Trust?”

A huff blew through his lips.

“Trust?” Peter asked again, dragging the word out. His heels slipped on the bedsheets as he tried to sit up, his one knee buckling and sending him back into the mattress. The grimace that followed couldn’t be seen over the indignation enshrouding his face. “Okay, so...you trust me enough to tell me why you guys have been after OsCorp?”

Tony’s head snapped up.

Peter flinched.

“Watch it, kid,” Tony grumbled, his spine stiffening as he sat up further in the chair. “I’m telling you right now. You want to play with fire, you will get burned.”

The sheer, unmitigated, down-right terrifying authority that dowsed every audible length of Tony’s voice should have been enough to leave an absence of air in Peter’s lungs. It should have terrified him, sent him right back to Staten Island. To a time when a scolding from Tony Stark was enough to devastate every fibril of optimism and confidence within him.

It should have.

“Just say it — you don’t trust me!” Peter shifted harshly onto his elbows, the clacking of restraints unheard over his shout. “You never have! The suit, Aunt May, the watch — now the camera! You don’t trust me unless you have a source on me at all times! You have to know everything, all the time!”

“If I didn’t take that camera, you wouldn’t be alive right now!” Tony scolded.

“Says who!?” Peter yelled right back. “I was doing just fine by myself! I could handle it, I could —”

“Parker, you’re not thinking straight!” Tony’s roar tapered off, swallowed whole by the reality of what was in front of him. What was very much undeniable and borderline catastrophic. “Whatever this thing is, the way its infected you — its crawled right into your head! Its affecting your judgment, your perception, your subconscious —”

“I’m fine!” Peter’s insistence barely reached over the croak in his throat. He began blinking rapidly, a mist glossing over his eyes, similar to the sweat the tricked off his skin. “You – you drugged me! I’m — I was fine!”

“For Christ’s sake, you’re not fooling anyone with the machismo act! You were sick the night I came by and took that camera, sick days before that —” Tony cut himself off, pinching roughly at the bridge between his nose. He squeezed his eyes shut. “You activated your panic watch, you called for help —”

“I didn’t!” Peter started to argue. “I didn’t touch it, I swear I didn’t —!”

“Whether you remember it or not, you did.” Tony’s words thundered right over his.

“And so what!?” Peter screeched, his voice breaking. “If I did, so what!? Accidents happen, accidents happen all the time!”

Tony balled his hands into fist, so strenuously that his knuckles cracked underneath the pressure, joints that popped with release. He looked away, just for a second. A brief moment that felt too long in breaking eye contact with Peter.

Hope was a fickle thing, fleeting thing. And it threatened to abandon him completely at the mere sight of the kid — let alone the disjointed, blundering nonsense that spewed from his mouth. A poor attempt at gaining the upper hand in an argument he had no chance of winning.

If it weren’t for the desperation that clung to him, stuck to him like unbreakable glue, Tony might’ve given up then and there.

“Yeah...accidents happen,” he repeated, turning back to Peter with a coldness that imbrued his eyes. “Just like Principal Morita, right?”

Peter stayed quiet.

The persistent sound of tapping overtook the room. Tony had one finger released from the clench of his fist, tapping incessantly on the armrest of the chair with a calloused finger only a mechanic would have.

“Who do you think is keeping Captain Stacey off your back right now?” The tapping got louder, faster. “Who do you think is protecting you from attempted murder charges on your principal?”

The words slid out of Tony’s still clenched teeth, sounding rough and abused.

Still, Peter stayed quiet.

Tony’s eyes narrowed, and like the turbulent tide his emotions were, desperation suddenly turned to rage.

“Peter!”

“Yeah, I get it, Tony!” Peter shot back, enough aggression in his tone to shake the entire room. Pessimistic sarcasm latched onto his every word, ruthlessly ripping from his throat. “Everything is because of you! You’re great, you’re fantastic! You do it all! What more do you want me to say!?”

What came out as a shout ended as an echo, dismantling only once it bounced off the walls and dissipated in frequency.

Tony’s head whipped up, his neck at a very real risk of breaking from the sheer force of whiplash.

Peter said nothing else.

The silence was cutting. The room buzzed around them, technology humming at work. The sudden lack of dialogue created a bottomless disharmony from the myriad of machines.

Tony’s hands, still balled into fists, began to unravel. All too similar to his nerves.

“What did you call me?” he pushed the words out.

Peter stared back at him, a look on his face that stripped Tony of every last vestige of exhaustion burrowed deep on his bones.

Something inside of him broke. Something deep, far out of reach, something Tony didn’t even know existed.

It didn’t crack, it didn’t splinter.

“Did you just call me Tony?”

It shattered. And he felt it.

Peter paused; hesitated a second too long.

“I…” he trailed off, a warble in his voice breaking his false sense of fortitude. “I — maybe? I think?”

Tony threw him a disbelieving look — eyebrows in danger of disappearing into his hairline.

Peter was quick to amble on. “Haven’t — haven’t you’ve been...trying to get me to call you Tony? What’s…what’s the big deal?”

The hasty, frantic attempt to divert fault was only met with a hard look from Tony. He opened his mouth to answer, but faltered. Barely a second passed before he closed his lips, spreading them into a thin line.

The scans could tell him everything he needed to know on a scientific level. The data could prove the facts, the doctors could diagnose every inkling of illness that stemmed from the poison consuming Peter —

— but nothing, absolutely nothing, spoke the truth louder than the kid himself.

“Pete…” Tony’s brow creased as he swallowed hard to push down the lump swelling painfully in his throat. He lifted a hand that did nothing but gesture in Peter’s direction. It shook, both on purpose and yet somehow also not. “This isn’t you.”

There was emotion in his voice, wetting his words as they dangled in the air. If his lips hadn’t moved, neither of them would’ve been sure it was him who spoke. Though it sounded every bit of Tony, the heart and sorrow he wore so outwardly on his sleeve was foreign.

Unprecedented.

Peter could pretend he didn’t notice. But as his chest stuttered, so did his words.

“Mr. Stark…I'm — really, I’m—”

“Don’t even think about —”

“I’m fine —!”

Tony shot up from the chair. “You took down half the Avengers in the middle of Queens, you are clearly not fine!”

Peter’s jaw fell lax, no longer taut and clenched, slackening until his mouth parted completely and the lightest pink of his tongue could be seen.

Silence.

It stretched on longer this time. Far longer, a moment somehow turning into a millennium. Or perhaps Tony just felt that way because he was on the receiving end.

He watched Peter’s face fall flat, both his mouth and brain shuddering to screeching halt.

It was almost eerie, downright uncanny as Tony saw first hand clarity return to Peter’s eyes. They were bloodshot, broken, but aware. Like clouds receding from a storm.

“...wait, what?” Peter blinked owlishly, his brows scrunching up with confusion. His breath quickened and his face blanched, losing what little color was still remaining in his cheeks.

There was no concocting the panic that struck him, though Tony wished it was all a rouse. A part of him wished the kid was playing dumb. Feigning innocence, like any angry teenager in trouble would do.

But of course, Peter wasn’t just any teenager.

“Look around you, kid.” Tony said, no small amount of force behind the words. His hand motioned to the rooms layout, but his eyes stayed locked on Peter. His glower didn’t lessen. “Look and tell me what you see. Maybe you can’t hear me right now over the sound of that dialysis machine, but —”

“I don’t —” Peter’s head swiveled, jerky movements that hastily took in his surroundings. “I don’t…remember —”

Tony wasn’t shy in gesturing to the multitude of equipment around them. “— or who knows, maybe it’s all the antibiotics and blood pressure vasopressors they’re pumping into you. Maybe that’s the reason you’re pitching a fit right now. Surely that’s gotta be why you’re picking such a teeny-weeny, itty-bitty battle, when there’s grand scale war sitting at your feet. Maybe that’s it?”

Tony wasn’t expecting an answer. It was a good thing, seeing as Peter was too stunned to bother with one.

He followed the man’s hand with frantic speed, his breaths coming in tights burst each time he caught sight of his surroundings. Double takes turned into triples, and Peter clenched his eyes shut before looking again.

Tony crossed his arms along his chest, all but pushing the chair out of the way to stand closer to the bed.

“Maybe you’re having trouble understanding just how bad this is because you’re in multi-organ failure, and that big brain of yours isn’t far behind. I’m not sure, but since you clearly have this under control, you tell me.” Tony was close enough that his hip pressed against the metal railing of the bed. It caused the restraints to sound, just briefly. “I’m all ears.”

Despite the scalding hot rage that blossomed at his core, Tony would swear up and down that he hadn’t meant to sound as angry as he did. The anger had become a boiling pot, and he couldn’t control what overflowed. Not anymore, not this far into things.

It wasn’t just Peter he was mad at. It was everything — who and what was behind it, how it happened, how long it went without attention. And the fact that with all this taken into consideration, they were sitting here arguing about pictures taken on a camera.

A damn camera, of all things.

At the very least, Peter seemed to finally catch onto the severity of it all.

It was the last bit of saving grace Tony had.

It certainly didn’t make things any easier though, not as he watched the kids expression transform into something that looked horrified.

Frightened.

“I…” Peter choked, swallowing back a cough before regaining his breath. “What’s...what’s happening to me, Mr. Stark?”

At the sound of Peter’s voice — brittle, vulnerable, afraid— Tony’s own loathing seemed to freeze in his gut.

He felt his chest crack open, felt his lungs vacate themselves of air.

There was more air to breathe when he flew a nuke into space.

Tony forced himself to speak, the words like acid on his tongue.

“You’re infected.”

His voice rang through the room like a church bell within a steeple, quiet when it left his mouth and yet somehow boisterous in its departure.

He wanted Peter to say something, anything — it didn’t even matter how ridiculously argumentative the kid wanted to be. Tony just needed to hear something besides his own words echoing in an already small, cramped space.

They taunted him, like the deaths of many who died at the weapons bearing his name.

Like a country wiped off the map in the haste to stop what he created; a machine built with nothing but good intentions.

All of it — preventable.

Infected. It rung through his ears, played over and over again in his head.

Preventable.

It didn’t take long to realize if Peter had anything to say, he surely wasn’t going to speak it now.

“We don’t know how,” Tony answered the question that was never asked. By the way Peter’s eyes suddenly locked on his, it was safe to assume he was addressing the right things. “All we know is the substance kept in those incubators — the ones you got up close and personal with —”

“I – I didn’t touch —” Peter’s voice cracked painfully as he spoke. No amount of dry swallowing fixed it. “I just took pictures. I mean, it didn’t touch me…I don’t…remember…”

He trailed off, slowly, until his voice disappeared completely.

Tony stared him down — literally, looking down at the bed as he uncrossed his arms, making a feeble attempt to appear less intimidating. He ran his tongue over his lips before speaking again.

“This thing is a parasite.” Tony set his jaw, both hands gripping the bed railing, not knowing what else to do with his hands besides place them somewhere. “It’s eating you alive to stay alive. It’s gnawing away at your brain cells, I wouldn’t expect you to remember basic arithmetic math at this stage in the game.”

Despite falling mute, a sheen of realization glossed over Peter’s eyes, telling Tony that his words were finally settling in. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling, certainly nothing worthy of celebration. But it was a start.

Never in his wildest days did he think it would take this much effort to have the kid be on the same page as him. He knew it wasn’t all Peter’s fault, he knew that this... symbiote was messing with his head. His brain. Everything.

Still. It didn’t ease his frustrations any.

Seeing Peter in front of him, that’s who he expected to be talking with. Not a shell of who he was. Not somebody so far gone, with something else having taken his place. Something possessive, seizing him and his very flesh.

A knot tore into Tony’s stomach. He shook it off, shifting on his feet and hunching forward with a tired and aching back.

“Within an hour of getting you to the compound, your kidneys shut down,” he outlined stonily, only throwing Peter a brief glance before looking far off elsewhere. “Half your liver is gone — literally, gone. Poof, nowhere to be seen on the scans. You have a critically low red blood cell count, enough gastrointestinal bleeding to warrant them pumping your stomach, your muscles have atrophied up to sixty-percent since the last time you were seen here — Cho’s gang says they’ve seen corpses in far better shape than you.”

Tony wondered how long he could stare at the wall before needing to say something else. The room fell quiet, and for once since Peter woke up, he basked in it. Relishing in the bridge that separated ignorance from the cold, harsh truth.

His head moved back as his eyes looked at Peter; involuntary, because every inch of him begged to never have to see what he saw now. And yet Tony stared, eyes deadlocked, his jaw unclenching only to tighten again.

“I haven’t been spying on you, Peter.” The words weren’t hard – not the clipped, strained words that usually coursed openly from Tony’s lips whenever Peter wanted to argue. They were honest, raw. Haunted.

“I’ve been spending the last three days trying to figure out what the hell is killing you.”

Peter’s eyes widened to the point that Tony worried they might fall right out the sockets.

“...killing?”

The restraints clattered as Peter’s elbows buckled, his back slipping deeper and further into the mattress. As if he was unintentionally trying to hide himself, suddenly appearing half his size in a bed that otherwise fit his frame.

Tony could feel his blood rush cold as Peter echoed what he said. He watched, wordlessly, as the kid’s face melted into something different. Something new. The anger and animosity parted way, the front of his facade disintegrating like sand to the waves of the ocean.

It left way for what could only be perceived as brute, earnest fear.

Tony didn’t know what to say.

This wasn’t Rogers laying in the bed, beaten and bruised at the hands of the Winter Soldier. It wasn’t Barton, wounded with flesh sliced open from a laser hot enough to melt the snow of Sokovia. It wasn’t Banner, trembling at the diminishing appearance of the Hulk.

Peter wasn’t any of these men. He wasn’t even an adult. And yet here he was, far worse off than Tony had been himself in the caves of Afghanistan.

The words came, even though he hated saying them.

“You’re dying,” he bluntly stated, his voice feeling twenty years older and five times weaker than before. “And fast.”

The room grew startlingly cold. The shiver that ran down Tony’s spine was the same tremble that rolled through Peter’s muscles, noticeably, as his hands suddenly clung to the railings of the bed. His knuckles grew white — paler than what his skin already had become.

Another hand gripped the railing. This time Tony’s, as he looked down, staring intently at anything that wasn’t Peter. If his eyes focused any harder on the lint covering the bedsheets, he was sure his migraine would turn into a full blown aneurysm.

“It’s some kind of...parasitic, sentient organism.” Tony gritted his teeth out of frustration. “It’s using your body as a host — completely neuro-sensitive, relying on you and only you to activate it. Then keeping you locked out from control. Your memory’s shot because it’s not you behind the wheel. Think of it as some sort of...jekyll and hyde conundrum. Or Banner and Hulk, depending on how you wanna see things.”

Tony didn’t wait for Peter’s response before he plundered on.

“My assumption — which we can assume is correct, as I almost always am,” he started, hands gripping the railing tighter but his eyes staying firm on the bed below. “Every time those oil drenched tentacles come sprouting out of you? It’s using your body as fuel. You’ve become unleaded high octane gas for this sucker, and its got a forty gallon tank that’s guzzling up every last drop you’ve got. It feeds on your insides, all so it has the stamina to come out and play. And there’s no telling —”

Tony looked up.

Without warning, whatever he had been saying — it stopped. All the words that trotted from his lips, the cascade of explanations he knew to be long-winded and rebarbative — his voice cut off as if he had never been speaking to begin with.

The sight of blood was enough to do that to him.

“Hey.”

It was a singular sound, the only one he could produce. The wind was knocked straight out of his chest, now constricted and tight — too tight, far too tight, the room tilting with a sudden onslaught of panic.

He wasn’t alone in his anxiety.

Peter stared; though not at him, his eyes wide and far away, watering with a pool of liquid bound to escape.

There was a harsh tremble in his shoulders — a shiver? Tony couldn’t tell. The kid’s breathing hitched in an unpredictable rhythm, teetering on the verge of hyperventilating.

There had only been one other time Tony had seen him this scared. Completely terrified.

Suddenly, they were both harmonious in thought. The same wavelength seizing them, taking them back to the same place. Captivated by a moment in time that had long since passed.

“Hey, hey, Peter —” Tony paled, his voice holding firm, but there was no denying the hysteria that laid underneath. His gaze softened, though his eyes widened at the blood he didn’t dare look away from. He moved to touch Peter, averting at the last second. “Shit. Pete, look at me.”

Peter’s eyes shot to Tony, nearly as fast as the blood that free-flowed from his nose. Scarlet gushed down his face; a twisted, broken fountain that poured past his lips and splattered down his chin. It doused the already-too-thin material of the scrub top that had been dampened with his sweat.

It smelt of acidic metal.

A muffled sound, followed by a high-pitched cry, tore into Tony’s ears.

“I don’t wanna die.” Peter’s throat tightened, making it nearly impossible to force out the words. His windpipe convulsed under his chin harder than the shudders that rippled his back. 

Tony froze, shock coursing through him like a riptide. One hand hovered in the air, halfway to Peter, as if reaching to help but not having a lick of an idea what to do.

The other gripped the bed railing with alarming force.

The blood kept coming.

“You’re not going to — shit!” Tony threw a frenzied glance to the door, desperation and anger stampeding over the shock and panic like a wild horse. “Hey! HEY! I need some help in here!”

Most of the observation window had been decked out with isolation signs and hazard tape. What little he could see of the outside hallways showed no one nearby.

Go fucking figure.

Almost immediately, he swung his neck up, bouncing to every inch of the room until his eyes found the camera hanging in the corner to his right. It was almost hidden by the monitor that showcased Peter’s vitals, and had Tony not been so preoccupied, he would’ve taken note of just how crazy the lines and numbers had quickly become.

Instead, he all but screamed at the ceiling.

“Pronto, Cho!”

If there was a response, he wasn’t privied to it. Tony could feel his gut clench, tenfold when he looked back at Peter. So fast his neck howled and his eyes blurred with vertigo.

There was no anger left in the kid’s expression. No more resentment, no disdain.

There was just terror. A raw fear that Tony had hoped and prayed he’d never see again. A look that brought with it the smell of rotten seaweed, and sulfuric ocean waters.

“I don’t wanna…” Peter released a guttural sob, his words almost inaudible between each gasp that heaved his chest. “I don’t — I don’t — wanna go —”

And just like that, everything came crashing down at once.

“Please, I d’nt — d’nt wanna die —”

“You’re not going to —” Tony lurched forward to grab Peter. He stopped inches from his collarbones, throwing his head to the doorway with a thundering yell. “For Christ’s sake, any day now!”

“I d’nt wanna go, Mr. ‘ark, I ‘nt wanna die, I don’t —!”

Peter’s breathing quickened, pain etching onto his face, bringing a surge of bile to coat the inside of Tony’s throat. He knew it partially stemmed from the overwhelming stench of blood, dripping onto Peter’s lap like a broken faucet.

It was a damn horror movie, if he’d ever seen one before.

Tony threw a wild glance to the door, before looking back to Peter with fierce determination.

“Oh for the love of — fuck this!”

He was across the room in a single stride.

Drawers flew open hard and fast, contents inside ricocheting out and tumbling onto the floors. Tony rummaged through every accessible cabinet that wasn’t locked shut, tossing items aside in a frenzied fit. Discarding anything and everything that wasn’t to his liking.

He snatched two rolls of gauze and practically twisted his ankle running back to Peter’s side.

Peter, who was gasping at the back of his throat, blood tainting his teeth and spluttering into the air with each panicked, strained cry he let out.

“I cn’t — I d’nt — I d’nt — I’m — I —”

“Peter — Peter!” With a force not intended, Tony pressed a wad of gauze directly under Peter’s nose, covering his face with cotton. The restriction of air did nothing to stop Peter from hyperventilating, making his already raggedy breaths even worse. “Kid, look at me. You gotta calm down, you gotta —”

“I cn’t — I can’t go — I can’t —”

“You’re not. Stop freaking out, you gotta —”

“I can’t die, Mr. Stark, I can’t — I can’t — please, please, please —”

“Look at me, Peter.”

Still, Peter didn’t look at him.

“I can’t — can’t leave May. I can’t, I can’t — not after Ben, not — not after —”

With his other hand, Tony grabbed the back of the kid’s head and squeezed.

“Look at me.”

Peter shook his head manically.

“I don’t wanna die. I don’t want to go, please Mr, Stark, I don’t want to die.” His words were tripping over one another, flooding out like a broken dam. Brutal and unfeigned. An incoherent mess of petrified sobs.

There had never been a time Tony had seen him like this.

Weak, yes. Overwhelmed, sure.

But not like this — dismantled. Ripped apart. Drowning within himself.

He once saw that sort of vulnerability come out with May, in private, never intended for his eyes to witness. He never had doubts it existed.

But it was never something shared with him.

Without hesitation, without so much a second thought, Tony reached for the restraint wrapped snugly around Peter’s wrist and he yanked.

“You’re not going to,” Tony’s throat rumbled like stones to gravel, and he grunted as worked to loosen the velcro. “You hear me? It’s not happening, you’re not going to—”

Panic flared as he tugged and pulled until the velcro came loose, and all while using one hand — the other still pressed firmly with gauze to Pete’s face — he unraveled the damn fabric from its hold. The restraint was still hanging loosely around Peter’s wrist when he went to unbound the other hand.

“I don’t wanna go, Mr. Stark, I —” Peter looked startled as Tony jerked his limbs free, yet compliant all the same. “I don’t wanna die, please, I don’t —”

“You’re alright,” Tony dryly insisted, as if he didn’t believe his own words. “Do you understand that? You get that?”

With his arms free, the first thing Peter did was press the heels of his palms against his eyes. His forearms clashed into Tony’s hand, alongside the wad of gauze that smothered against his nose.

The cotton was now a drenched mess of blood.

Tony quickly discarded it for the second, fresh pack, and this time forced it into Peter’s hand to staunch the bleeding.

“Parker, you hear me, and you hear me good.” With both hands unrestricted — and fingers caked with blood — Tony grabbed each side of Peter’s head and forced him to look his way. He pulled Peter’s hands away from his eyes, making sure one kept the gauze in place while he watched the other listlessly drop to the mattress below.

Blood-shot, yellow tinted, and wet, but his eyes finally found their way to Tony. And they held in place like magnets. 

In a voice stronger than he’d ever thought he could manage, Tony insisted,

“You’re not going to die.”

He looked at Peter; hard, unwavering. His knees nearly buckled as he leaned over the beds railing, but his hands stayed firm on each side of Peter’s head. His fingers slipped through the matte of hair and stayed there.

Peter didn’t blink. His breathing barely hitched, his body frozen as he stared at Tony. His lip quivered but no words came out as he instead swallowed. Again and again, working frantically to smother down the remains of what hysterics threatened to consume him.

Tony grabbed Peter’s shoulder with his other hand and clasped it tight. He didn’t care about the smell or sight of blood, he didn’t care about personal boundaries and the way close contact usually made his skin crawl in a way that screamed ‘this wasn’t how I was built.’

That part of him had been demolished, destroyed and left to die in the icy cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean. He wouldn’t dare let it come back now.

He dipped his head a little lower, forcing his way closer to Peter’s face, his eyes boring in the brown pupils staring back at him.

“You are not going to die.”

The finality in Tony’s tone left no room for argument.

Just like that, Peter forgot about regaining his composure. There was no longer a need to find the pieces to his self-control, and what dignity may have come with it.

It was gone, no sooner than when the words left Tony’s mouth.

Peter flung himself towards Tony, a hoarse cry tearing through his throat along the way.

Tony caught him without hesitation, wrapping his arms so tightly around Peter that it looked as if he were worried the kid might float away. Arms squeezed him in return; Peter gripping his shoulder’s with such strength that Tony was sure it would leave bruises.

The pressure was needed. It kept him together, kept him grounded. Tony held Peter tight, so neither of them would fall apart.

“I’m sorry, I —!” Peter choked, the apology caught in a wet, ugly sob that made his chest hitch and ache. “I — I d’nt mean to hurt anyone — I swear, I didn’t, I —!”

“I know,” Tony murmured, his lips brushing against hair as he rested his chin atop Peter’s head. He moved one hand from the kid’s back and along his neck, squeezing the nape with firm pressure. He could feel Peter’s pulse hammer with each sob that rattled his body. “I know.”

Peter tried to stifle his cries, but each attempt left him shaking and gasping even worse than before. With each sob, Tony held him tighter, all but smothering him against his chest.

“I don’t — I don’t remember it.” Peter’s voice was muffled against the confines of Tony’s shirt. Still, Tony understood. “I don’t – I know I did bad things, I —! I know I hurt — hurt people, I —! I just...I don’t remember it, I swear. Mr. Stark, I swear, I don’t —!”

“I believe you.”

It was the truth. As God honest as Tony could ever be, the words slipping from his mouth without a single beat giving him a second to consider what was said.

It was the truth. And he felt ashamed he couldn’t say it sooner.

Tony pulled Peter away, hands cupping his cheeks and the smear of liquid that stained them. Tears had lightened the blood but also smudged it further along his face. Tony took his thumbs and moved what he could out of the way, his eyes never once straying from Peter.

“I believe you.” Tony eyes locked onto Peter’s so forcefully, that he couldn’t look away even if he had wanted to.

Tony needed that. He needed Peter to see the transparent honesty on his face, to know more than anything that he’d go to hell and back if it meant keeping the kid safe.

His kid.

Nothing would change that. And damn the universe for trying.

“We’re going to fix this, understood?” Tony insisted, intending to sound comforting but missing the mark completely. It had never been his specialty.

Peter stiffened, his whole body growing rigid in Tony’s grasp. The firmness in his voice must’ve been enough to trigger something, as his eyes averted and he moved to get away. Brows creased deeply and his gaze shot down, almost looking shameful.

He wasn’t having it. Tony rounded back on him — refusing to let go of him for even a second.

“Peter,” he started, staunchly. “I’m going to fix this. That’s a promise. One I intend to keep.”

It was a moment that felt like eternity where they both stayed like that.

Tony waited, far too long for his liking, until he saw what he needed. Until he saw trust bloom in Peter’s eyes. Return — back from the painful departure it had taken.

Just slightly, just by a threshold. But he saw it.

The knot in his chest loosened. But only as slightly as the trust in Peter’s eyes.

“You are not going to die.” Tony tried for a weak smile. It twisted his lips in an unpleasant way. “I already bought a casket for you once, Underoo’s. I’m not doing it again.”

Breathing began to mellow out, not just for Peter but for Tony as well. Harsh and sharp breaths slowly but surely reached a calm.

“Capiche?”

Peter barely nodded, more of a twitch to his neck than anything else. But the movement was seen. And it was enough for Tony.

Right about now, he’d take whatever he could get.

Slowly, he released his hold on Peter, his hands moving back to the guard railing with slight hesitation. Peter matched his speed as he dabbed at the blood slowly coming to abate from his nose. Slow and sluggish, smearing the gauze across his face with shaking hands.

With an effort, Peter let the tension erode off his back. His breathing came in more evenly, and the monitors found equilibrium in result.

Still, he stared at the sticky, scarlet mess on his hands. A look burned in his eyes, a look Tony shared as they both watched blood drip between his fingers and along the back of his knuckles.

This was bad.

This was real, real bad.

There was a stretch of silence before slowly, Peter’s eyes slid up to meet his.

“You really bought me a casket?” He swallowed a chuckle, his voice tinged with a weak attempt at humor. Anything to distract from the ominous boding that threatened to swallow them whole.

Tony frowned, hard-pressed to keep his own rising anxiety at bay.

“That’s what brings you back to the land of the living?”

The rebuttal came without his bidding, escaping his mouth before he could even think of how Peter would react. Tony couldn’t have kicked himself harder if he tried.

“Bad phrasing —” He held his hand in the air, hating how there was blood sinking into the lines of his palms. He gave Peter a quick, sweeping look. “Forget I said that.”

For what it was worth, despite the grimness of his comeback, Peter managed a slight laugh. It was forced, the kind that crinkled at mouth but didn’t match his eyes. Tony wasn’t sure how he felt about it.

There wasn’t any time to consider. Horror suddenly washed over Peter's face, his skin somehow growing whiter than the ashen pale it had taken on.

“Did I…” Peter swallowed painfully. His voice, albeit audible, was paper thin. “Did I hurt any of the team?”

Tony’s jaw flexed as he considered his response. His hand moved back down to the guard railing, and he gripped it tight.

“Only their pride,” he settled on.

Peter wasn’t buying it. “Mr. Stark —”

“They’re fine,” Tony cut in, fast. “Really. They’re off licking their wounds. Nothing they won’t shake off.”

It wasn’t all lies. Tony hadn’t spoken a word to the team since leaving the Queens — hell, he barely said five words to anyone on the damn Quinjet as it was. It was a can of worms he was not in a place to open.

Not right now. Not with more pressing matters ahead of them.

They all had a few good punches thrown their way. But it wasn’t anything they hadn’t survived before.

And yet Tony couldn’t shake off the growing worry of what could’ve happened.

What might happen next, if they didn’t get a grip of this thing.

He shook his head — more for himself than anything. It wasn’t happening. It wasn’t going to happen. This would end, here and now. Damn it to all, he wasn’t letting it get any further than what it had.

“Principal Morita?”

Tony shot his head over to where Peter laid. The guilt inscribed on his face was enough to cause Tony’s heart to miss a beat.

Right. The high-school.

Tony gritted his teeth. That was a problem. A mildly disconcerting problem.

But not a problem for right now.

“Alive,” was the most he could manage.

Peter swallowed, his eyes squeezing shut momentarily before he forced them back open. Exhaustion seemed to hit him all at once, and yet he pushed on.

“Is he gunna —?”

The hard look Tony shot him silenced Peter before he could even get the words out.

“Rain-check the conversation,” Tony insisted. There was a knock on the door — he briefly gave it his attention, scowling at the men in hazmat suits who stood behind the cluttered observation glass.

Useless timing as ever.

He turned back to Peter, eyebrow high to his forehead.

“Who, what, when, where, why — doesn’t matter right now.” When Peter failed to look his way, eyes half-lidded and fighting a losing battle to stay open, Tony let go of the guard rail and gripped his bicep firmly. “We worry about you and only you. Got that?”

The squeeze was enough to do something. Peter nodded, this time stronger than before. But seconds were all he could manage to keep his eyes open. His eyelids began to flutter shut, and Tony’s concern briefly soared as he watched the kid sink back into the bed, the mattress all but eating him up.

It was like watching a battery drain completely, all at once. Peter’s head lolled to to the side, his cheek pressed firmly against the pillow behind his head.

“I’m grounded again, aren’t I?” he murmured, so softly that the beeping of machines in the room nearly swallowed up his voice.

Tony heard. Something froze in his gut, his every limb locking in place.

The question seemed to dwell in the air for too long.

“It’s…” Tony paused, choosing his next words carefully. “It’s a little bigger than that, kiddo.”

Something about his answer, indirect and yet straightforward all at the same time, cut right through the fog clouding Peter’s head.

His eyelids fluttered open with a mixture of confusion and concern.

“How big?” Peter asked thinly, his voice smaller than Tony had ever heard it before.

There was a pause of silence. Tony opened his mouth to say something — though what, he wasn’t entirely sure. He hovered where he was, shifting on his feet to buy time, scrummaging through his head in hopes an answer would produce itself without his trying.

Nothing came. Nothing but a sigh, so deep it dropped his shoulders and brought his gaze to the ground.

Just when he went to speak — to say anything — the unspoken words were swept away in a gust of electrifying air.

Tony lifted his head, violently fast, whipping his neck in the direction of the sound.

The walls illuminated with an orange and yellow radiance, only to disappear as quickly as it came. Leaving nothing but sparks to taper off.

A portal appeared, growing larger, just as Tony’s eyes grew wide. Little fireworks lit the room ablaze, with sizzling orange drizzling down onto the white floor. Igniting out of thin air, fizzling away only once touching the ground.

There was a pounding on the door. Tony gave the entrance way a brief glance, the lines around his eyes deepening as he realized the men in hazmat suits were unable to get inside.

Locked out.

“You know, I don’t usually take house calls,” a voice accompanied the opening portal, the figure only visible once the bright flares cleared way. Their words were nearly enveloped in the sound of crisp, crackling magic. “Consider yourself lucky I happened to be in the same dimension this evening.”

Tony’s back grew straighter than a stiff board, and he swallowed thickly as his eyes met with the sudden presence occupying the room. He realized he was grinding his teeth only once an ache began to set in his jaw.

“I’ll go buy a lottery ticket,” Tony wryly said. He nodded in the direction of Peter, who was looking between both men with rapid fire glances and eyes large enough to make a baby deer jealous. “Though from the looks of it, you aren’t going to let us leave this room anytime soon. Straight to the recourse, then?”

Strange adjusted the cloak that hung onto his shoulders, though the rest of him failed to match similar attire. Tony gave him a once over — jeans, a t-shirt, and a thin jacket all clashed horribly with the outrageously extravagant overcoat that swung behind his back.

Had it not been for the red piece fluttering in the air, Tony would have assumed the man walked straight out of a movie theater. As if he had been on a casual nightly stroll.

The informal getup was the least of Strange’s own concern. He turned to Peter, oblivious or ignorant to Tony’s one over, which of the two didn’t seem to matter. Once he caught a good sight of what was ahead of him, he didn’t look away.

Tony noticed it first. There was a look on him, undeniably strong.

He almost looked sorry.

“Hello, Peter.” Stephen gave a small smile, but there was worry evident in his face.

Peter saw it.

He looked to Tony one last time, before his gaze stayed firmly locked on the man wearing the cloak. The paleness in his face grew, heightened by the smear of blood that stained his skin red.

“Hi, Mr – Doctor Strange.” Peter swallowed, his voice croaking against his will. “Sir.”