Sins of the Father
The air is crisp and cool. Refreshing. Tony takes in a deep breath of it, his shoulders sagging with relaxation.
The smell of salt water is strong, drafts of wind hitting his face with no sign of letting up. It’s his favorite aspect of the Malibu mansion. The evenings provide solitude, moments where only whispering waves of the ocean could be heard, water crashing and beating unforgivably against the mountain rocks.
His home. Looking out from his bedroom windows, he releases a lungful of air, and his eyelids close shut, giving way to a small smile on his face. Nothing could ever take away the tranquility of his home.
“Mr’...Stark...I...I don’t...”
His eyes snap open.
Peter lays heavy in his arms, beaten and broken. Bleeding. The blood is everywhere, coating his hands, staining his skin. He grips Peter’s body tighter, pulling him closer, hugging him with nauseating despair.
Over the sound of ocean waves, he hears the wheezing, the struggle — a crackly, heartbreaking whine.
“I don’t feel so good.” Peter’s voice is barely a whimper, drifting away in the wind. An exhale of air escapes the boy’s chest and Tony waits for a returning breath.
It never comes.
The smell of the open sea no longer brings him peace. The horror swells inside of him, eats away at his bones, the sulfur and ocean-life now nothing but a repulsive taste in his mouth.
CRASH!
Tony shields the motionless body with his own, bracing himself for the impact. Windows break around him, the glass mansion shattering with the intensity of the wind. He waits to be swept away, to feel the never-ending tide hit his body like knives, freezing and paralyzing. He waits for the outpour of the ocean that never comes.
“Tony, Tony, Tony…”
His eyes locked intently on the man kneeling in front of him. He’s no longer kneeling, he’s sitting. He’s paralyzed. He can’t move, crippled to the sofa. His heart withers away with fear, decaying from the ruins of panic that steal his breath.
Obadiah shakes his head, scoffing. “Look at you.”
The man’s voice is gruff, breathy against his skin. Too close, too close for comfort, his nerves screaming danger. The weather from outside the mansion roars, winds howling, lightning blazing and thunder rolling. He’s helpless to its wrath, paralyzed in place.
“It’s a shame, you know.” Obadiah moves closer, leaving little space between the two of them. His hand lays against Tony’s chest. “I spent thirty years of my life holding you up, at your side, guiding you through the tundra of a dog eat dog world that you would never have survived without me.”
The lights from above shine brightly onto his bald head; successions of flashing lightning obscure his face. Tony’s mind hollers to get up, to run, run-danger-run-run—
Obadiah squeezes his face, hard. His other hand claws at Tony’s chest, fingers digging for a hole that no longer exists. Tony shudders at those familiar, sadistic blue eyes staring him down, the need to scream burgeoning.
“Thirty years, Tony. You barely gave that boy one, and look at what it did to him.”
His face is held tightly in Obadiah’s grasp, cheeks aching at the pressure. His eyes wander freely. They lock on the corner of the room, the shadow of a mangled body barely seen. The lightning illuminates red and blue, the suit — his creation, Peter’s livelihood — laying in a crumbled mess.
“You finally outdid yourself,” Obadiah belittles. “Did you really think that you could right your wrongs...just like that? Take a child under your wing and sing the praises of unearned, undeserved redemption? He was better off without you, Tony. Your influence is only poison, you containment and kill everything you touch. That’s why we worked better in weapons manufacturing. That’s why you’re a —”
“You’re a failure.”
His eyes look back.
Stane is gone.
His limbs move freely, no longer held down by his former business partner, someone who he once considered to be a mentor. The storm comes to a sudden stop, leaving only darkness in its wake.
And Howard Stark.
They stare at each other.
Howard stands by himself in the gaping black void. His back is straight, and chin held high, as tense as the last day he had ever seen the man. His father, a man who raised him in anger, in hate. Someone who had abandoned him long before ever leaving the physical world they lived in.
“Please don’t leave me.”
The voice echoes from above. It doesn’t come from his father, it didn’t come from him — he looks around, desperate to find the source. Desperate for reassurance that the voice it belongs to is still alive.
Only darkness surrounds him.
Howard is gone, without a word, without another breath. In his place stands one object, floating in the abyss. Tony eyes it, curiously and cautiously.
A glass case, square with sharp edges and a blue light that shines from inside. He slowly approaches it. The text boldly stands out; it seems he could read it from miles away.
‘Proof that Tony Stark Has A Heart.’
The decade-old arc reactor looks as new as the day he created it. The silver metal is polished and glimmering, the blue glow dazzlingly bright.
He picks it up, holding the square case in both his hands. It feels light, as if it isn’t even real. It feels like a distant memory. The darkness begins to recede away the longer he holds it, bringing sight to the moldy, steel walls enclosing him.
A hand grabs his shoulder.
He gasps.
The glass case drops below and shatters.
Dmitri sneers through bloodstained teeth. “The heart that beats inside of you will be your greatest downfall, Stark.”
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
He looks down, the arc reactor no longer there. In its place is a bomb. The Jericho. The Stark Industries logo taunts him, a weapon with his namesake ready to kill him.
BeepBeepBeepBeepBeep.
He looks up. Dmitri holds an object tightly in his hands.
Beepbeepbeepbeepbeeepbeep –
The glow of a different bomb reflects in his eyes, blinking rapidly, orange and green emitting from the round shaped design.
Dmitri grins, sickeningly, menacingly. “You will fail him, Stark.”
BeepbeepbeepbeepBEEPBEEPBEEP —
Tony jolted awake.
Thunder rolled from outside, a boisterous sound muffled from the insides of the compound. It masked his sluggish, startled gasp, his uncoordinated limbs jerking in place. The pitter-patter of rain began to start up, hitting heavily against the rooftop.
He leaned forward in the recliner, slowly swinging his legs over the footrest. “Damn it...”
Tony sniffed, hard. His hands scrubbed at his face, the pounding of his heart lessening into a more tolerable drum. It took him a moment to blink through the darkness, rubbing away the drowsiness in his eyes to better see his surroundings.
The few lights around him came from the abundance of medical equipment in the hospital room, all emitting a soft glow.
The same equipment that was making unusually loud and alarming sounds.
“May?” Tony croaked, looking to his right where he had last seen the woman.
The love sofa he had insisted she take for resting was unoccupied. The curtains nearby were still closed, lightning flashing through the fabric, and her blankets laid tossed in a bundle. A brief glance to the clock on the wall showed digital numbers that read ‘3:42 am’, telling him it had been hours since he had fallen asleep.
Well damn, that was embarrassing. So much for just resting his eyes.
Tony shuffled out of the recliner, fighting off the pull of sleep. The more awake he became, the louder the machines seemed to get. They were piercingly incessant, no longer the repetitive, steady hum that he had dozed off too. He didn’t need to be fully awake to know something was wrong. Adrenaline kicked in almost immediately.
He almost collapsed the moment his foot hit the ground, his exhausted and overworked muscles failing to take all his body weight. Despite it, he stumbled to the far end of the room. The lights automatically flickered on the closer he got to the hospital bed, and thank god for it because he hadn’t realized how dark the room had actually become.
On the wall was a panic button and Tony hastily smacked his hand on it. His heart was making leaps into his throat, and while he was almost positive a response team was already on their way, he figured there was no harm in being overly cautious.
Looking down onto the hospital bed, he was glad he had been.
“Shit.”
Peter was awake.
Tony felt a tense knot form in his gut, his heart somehow beating faster than the quick pounding of footsteps he heard down the hallway. The machines were blaring with shrill noises, getting worse by the second, all accompanied by the panicking patient they were attached to.
“It’s fine. You’re fine.” Tony’s voice was still groggy with sleep. He laid a firm palm against Peter’s forehead to keep him still, a feeble attempt against the growing thrashing beneath him.
The room lit up with more overhead florescent lights, and he could see clear as day as the kid’s throat convulsed around the endotracheal tube. Peter grunted, gagged and groaned, making sounds that were constricted and muted from within his chest.
It was horrific. Tony stared at him, shock coursing through him like a riptide, and by the time nurses and doctors swarmed into the room, he had already become clammy with sweat.
Bruce pushed through them all, rushing in with a stethoscope bouncing around his neck.
“How long has he been —”
“Just now,” Tony answered, stepping back to give the staff space to work. “The alarms woke me up, I must have fallen asleep. He hasn’t been...”
His voice drifted away in the organized chaos that followed, his words no longer a priority over the overwhelming amount of instructions that were tossed about. It was a stark contrast to the past couple of days, the previous evenings providing a calm that nearly gave them a sense false of confidence.
“Vitals showing tachycardia, push forty mg’s of diltiazem.”
“Hold on, let’s see if we can get him to relax with the enhanced opioid.”
“Pulse OX dipping down to fifty. Kid’s not getting enough oxygen.”
“He’s too anemic for this high of blood pressure, are we administering to treat or observing?”
Tony knew things would eventually take a turn for the worse. It was just a matter of when. This, though — he rubbed at his eyes in hopes that the scene unfolding was just part of his chilling nightmare. They had managed to keep Peter fairly sedated up until now — this was bad.
“Peter? Peter, can you hear me?” Bruce spoke loudly, standing opposite of him where he lowered the plastic guard rail to the hospital bed. “We need you to calm down, Peter — Claire, where are we on the dosage?”
Tony’s eyes darted back and forth, trying to keep up with the conversation between Bruce and the caramel-skinned woman standing at his side. While he couldn’t hear what was said, Bruce’s grimace told him that it wasn’t good.
He ran his hands down the length of his face, forcing himself to wake up. “FRIDAY?”
“Here, boss.”
Tony was impressed that he managed to hear her over the noise filling the room. The machines, the staff, Peter’s increasingly louder struggles — the once quiet space had quickly fallen into pandemonium. He dropped his head to look at the floor, a hand forcefully rubbing away the crick in his neck. He hadn’t remembered falling asleep, and clearly he must have done so in a very uncomfortable position.
“Where’s May Parker at?” he asked the AI.
Thunder rolled violently from outside.
The sound briefly startled Tony.
It was nothing compared to the havoc that came from Peter, who incoherently started to lash out at the nurses trying to help him. His arms swung in every direction and his good leg jerked back repeatedly, as if he was trying to lift himself up from the bed.
Tony inadvertently grimanced. God, the sounds. Frantic, smothered and strangled cries — he felt them cut razor deep.
“Tony,” Bruce’s voice was tense, both his hands struggling to hold down Peter’s one shoulder. “A little help over here?”
There wasn’t any hesitation on Tony’s part. Four large steps and he was already there.
“Hey hey, calm down now, Pete.” Tony rushed to use both his hands to still Peter’s thrashing, who was surprisingly strong in his state of agitation. “It’s me, kid. Still the same side. It’s me.”
Peter’s jaw clenched down persistently with each cry he tried to let out, his teeth practically biting into the tube snaked down his throat.
“Boss, I have located May Parker’s whereabouts,” FRIDAY informed him. “She appears to have taken a walk around the facility. A security officer is with her on the far south wing. Would you like me to —”
Whatever FRIDAY had said next was drowned out by the crashing boom of thunder.
Peter’s uninjured leg kicked against the mattress, his arms twisting against both Bruce and Tony, both of whom fought to hold him still. Tony’s eyes locked on his, now wide open and panic-stricken, darting around wildly. In his stupor, they never landed on anything particular. His dilated pupils rolled around, overwhelmed at the number of people surrounding him.
Tony was painfully familiar with that type of panic.
He leaned forward, hovering himself over the bed and forcing his face into Peter’s line of sight.
“Hey. Hi. Kid, it’s me.” Tony could have sworn he saw a glisten of lucidity from Peter. He went with it. “You gotta calm down, Underroo’s. It’s only thunder, it’s not going to hurt you.”
Tony had a feeling that, if a doctor hadn’t pushed by, he just might have gotten through to the kid. Immediately though, she started pulling away at the thin bed-sheet and loosely fitted gown sitting on top of his body, easily startling him.
Once she began injecting contents of a syringe into the central IV line embedded in Peter’s chest, something the poor sap was just now able to notice, all hell broke loose. Peter looked back over at Tony, terrified, muffled cries louder than ever.
Tony quickly squeezed Peter’s arm, forcibly in a way that drew his attention. “The thunder’s just Thor, okay? He’s saying hi. Right, Bruce? It’s just our buddy Thor, right?”
Bruce didn’t look his way as he tensely answered, “Yeah, yeah, right.”
“You’re okay. Calm down, you’re alright.” The terrified agony stretching along Peter’s face could only be rivaled with the stress coming from Bruce. “What’s that look for, Banner?”
His question fell on deaf ears. Bruce only shook his head in response, something done more for himself than for Tony. The readings and layouts from the equipment kept his attention, his focus never faltering.
It was around that same time Helen had come rushing into the room, and the stress that came with her presence only made Tony’s concern grow.
“What’s going on?” she quickly asked, slapping on a pair of latex gloves.
Bruce kept his eyes fixated on the screens. “He’s fighting intubation, the medicine isn’t calming him down like it should and we’ve exceeded the maximum dosage. We’re going to need to extubate.”
“Without weening him off?” Helen paused, coming to a halt near the bed. “What makes you think that will be safe?”
Bruce pointed towards the monitor. “Look at the flow of his oxygen saturation. Not even five minutes before he fell into distress and his levels were within the acceptable range. He’s having unassisted spontaneous breathing —”
“Have you done an SBT test to confirm —”
“We don’t have a choice, Helen. We can’t risk hypoxia.”
“You’re risking extubation failure.”
Tony had tuned out their fast-paced conversation. It was easy to let their medical jargon and terminology fall into a blanket of white noise. The pained grunts and choked gags coming from Peter, however, were difficult as hell to ignore. He tried not to watch as Peter flimsily wrestled against them, the events from a couple of days ago already playing back in his mind, on repeat — over and over again.
For a brief moment, he zoned out. Fell absent to everything around him. Disassociated. It was easier than handling the situation, the nightmare, occurring in front of him.
This wasn’t fair to the kid.
Jesus Christ, this wasn’t fair. They couldn’t even do their jobs in helping Peter rest, just sleep it all away. The smallest act of kindness and they had managed to screw that up too. What else was he going to miserably fail at next?
“You will fail him, Stark.”
“Boss?”
Tony snapped himself back into the moment.
“What, FRI?”
“You never provided an answer to my question. Did you want me to have security escort Mrs. Parker back to the infirmary?”
The black-haired woman at Bruce’s side — Claire, from what Tony had gathered — passed a syringe his way. Tony watched as Bruce quickly placed it within the much smaller catheter hanging from the tube in Peter’s throat, sucking air out of it to deflate the internal balloon that kept it place.
“No,” Tony bluntly answered. “No, keep her away from here. They...hopefully they’ll be done with this by the time she comes back.”
Tony swallowed dryly, unable to wet his suddenly parched throat at the sight of Bruce messing with the intubation tube. Peter was watching him with a fear that couldn’t be described and Bruce looked at the kid with a sense of pity throughout it all.
May didn’t need to see this, not if it could be avoided.
Honestly, he didn’t need to see it himself. This — bedside comfort — it wasn’t something he was good at. Peter had been kept well out of it up until now, and suddenly the maelstrom of nurses and doctors manhandling him was much too uncomfortable to witness.
It was becoming harder to ignore the voice in the back of his head constantly reminding him of how this was his fault. Maybe, after everything that had happened, he was afraid of being confronted by a conscious and defeated Peter. Maybe he was just a coward who couldn’t handle the sickening seesaw of his own conflicting emotions.
At this point, Tony didn’t care which it was. He just wanted to leave.
“Peter, we’re going to remove the tube from your throat, okay?” Bruce kept his voice calm but loud, ensuring Peter could hear him over the rising commotion. “We know it’s bothering you, buddy, we’re going to take it out. But I need you to do me a big favor. On the count of three, I need you to cough the best that you can. Squeeze Tony’s hand if you understand what I’m saying.”
Tony hadn’t realized he was still holding Peter’s hand, not until he felt the squeeze that came with Bruce’s words. It clenched and unclenched, each move followed by a painful, muted grunt. He looked down, seeing through the mess of wires and IV’s Peter’s much smaller hand clasped within his.
Bruce looked away from the machines and towards him. “Tony?”
Tony hadn’t looked up from below, squeezing Peter’s hand back. It was all he needed to ground himself.
“Y-yeah, he’s…” Tony breathed out, “he gets it.”
They didn’t waste any time after that. The countdown was painfully short.
Bruce steadied his hands around the intubation tube. “One, two — cough, Peter — three!”
Peter’s forehead creased, his face contorted with wide eyes screaming for help. It took one fluid and flawless motion to remove the tube. Once free of it, he was coughing uncontrollably, his wheezes for air dry and restricted.
Claire leaned forward to strap an oxygen mask around Peter’s face. Tony didn’t think twice about it.
Not until the kid went absolutely ballistic.
A hand smacked into her, pushing her back. “Sweet Christmas — whoa!”
“Hey, whoa, steady him!” Helen was quick to take action, half her body weight pinning Peter’s one side to the bed. The instruments Bruce had been holding immediately fell to the ground and he lunged forward to help.
“Kid — Peter — shit!” Tony tightened the grip he had on Peter’s hand, his own shoulder buckling against the frantic jerking. The kid was acting as if someone had forced him to inhale poison, repeatedly swatting the oxygen mask away with delirious fear and an ungraceful hand.
“No! N-no!” Peter’s voice was weak and raspy, spoken between a handful of stifled coughs.
Claire didn’t back down. “Peter, we need you to —”
“No, no, don’t! Plea-please —” He gasped with a series of strangled huffs that bordered on hyperventilating, his body twisting to evade her movements. “Don’t, please — no!”
A nurse huffed. “He’s moving too much, Doctor Cho, he’s going to rip his damn structures.”
That was all Tony needed to take action, his own panic shooting through him at an alarming rate. His free hand started to make grabby motions at the oxygen mask Claire held.
“Give me.”
Claire furrowed her brows. “I’m sorry, what —”
“Now!” Tony all but snatched it out of her hands, gently though forcibly using his open palm to turn Peter’s face towards him.
“Hey, hey, kiddo, it’s okay. See?” Tony shoved the mask against his mouth, exaggerating the breath of air he took in. “It’s just air, it won’t hurt you.”
Peter froze. His eyes glistened brightly from the overhead lights, staring at Tony. A single blink was all it took for the tears to break free, leaking down his still-too-pale face.
Tony quickly placed the device back over his mouth, inhaling again, pointing to the plastic mask.
“See?”
Aside from finally becoming still, Peter didn’t respond.
Tony handed the mask back to Claire. She quickly sterilized it and, very slowly and with great hesitation, placed it over Peter’s face.
This time, he didn’t fight it.
He did, however, break into a series of cries too weak to be heard over the hissing of flowing oxygen. Each sob, quiet as it was, wrecked through him, his upper body heaving at his own emotions.
“Honey, it’s okay, it’s okay,” the nurses repeated.
Peter clenched his eyes tightly, his face contorted into a distressful mess. “Ple-please, please...”
“Shh, sweetie, you’re going to be okay.”
Tony looked up, forcing himself to count ceiling tiles in a desperate attempt to calm himself. He knew he was blatantly ignoring Peter wheezing and crying into the oxygen mask, but fuck he really wasn’t good with crying.
“God, kid...what did they do to you.”
Maybe he should’ve had FRIDAY direct May back to the hospital room after all. Tony was becoming more confident that he wasn’t equipped to handle this problem. He kept a firm hand on Peter’s shoulder, occasionally squeezing his grip. He was positively clueless on what else to do.
“Tony...”
Standing opposite of him, Bruce jerked his head towards the corner of the room, near the recliner where Tony had fallen asleep earlier. With a quick glance spared to Peter, Tony followed Bruce away from the hospital bed.
Thunder rumbled violently from outside, seemingly louder the closer they got to the room’s bay window.
Tony nervously crossed his arms over his chest, stuffing his hands under his armpits with his shoulders hunched upward. Any trademark Stark poise he had was lost.
“What is it?”
Bruce stared over his shoulder for a moment, eyeing the scene behind him. Tony didn’t miss the pause between responses.
“The enhanced analgesic isn’t affecting him anymore,” Bruce ruefully explained. “At least not intravenously, not at the highest dose we can manage before it causes liver andnkidney damage. He’s built up a tolerance way faster than we expected him too.”
Tony frowned. “What are you saying?”
Bruce hesitated. “Helen wants to try giving it to him intrathecally. Inject it directly into the spinal canal. It’ll reach the cerebrospinal fluid and —”
“You want to give the kid an epidural?” Tony arched an eyebrow. That was certainly a new development.
“Not quite. There’s a difference between the two. But they are similar, so...” he paused, nodding his head a little, “yes, if that’s how you chose to view it. It should be more effective. We can provide a much more stronger, concentrated dose that’ll bypass the blood-brain barrier —”
A harsh, high-pitch yelp reached over Bruce’s voice.
“Ahh-aCK!” Peter cried out.
Tony closed his eyes, refusing to let himself turn around and see first hand what had happened. “Spare me the semantics. Do what works at this point.”
Every ounce of patience he had leaked away with each painful cry he heard from Peter. If he ran off a percentage, he’d surely be at negativity right now.
Claire’s tone remained calm. “Shh, shh, honey you’re making it worse —”
“St-stop it, pl-please. Please. It – it...”
“Will one of you get off your damn asses and help me keep him still? The more he moves the worst this is for him.”
Tony hunched his shoulders up tighter, unable to hide his discomfort. Bruce took pity on him. Tony absolutely hated that he took pity on him, but he did, if only in the form of laying a gentle hand on his arm.
“It’s temporary,” Bruce reassured. “We’re making progress with a new formula, I promise.”
Another shout pierced the air, broken and rough as sandpaper. Tony finally turned around, slightly agitated at the persistent cries that quite frankly, in his opinion, shouldn’t be happening at all.
Peter choked on a sob.
“Stopstopstopstopstop —”
“Count of three. One, two —”
Nurses were rolling Peter onto his side, adjusting his limbs when he couldn’t do so himself. Tony’s knees trembled at the sight of the kid stuffing his face into a pillow, muffling each sound that came from his mouth.
He remembered the pain of having an electromagnet placed into his chest, each slight twitch of his muscles causing a fiery agony that couldn’t be tamed. He was sure that wasn’t anything close to what Peter was feeling now.
They had at least thrown him a rag of chloroform. Peter was getting closer to having nothing at all.
Tony’s lips pressed into a thin line. “It’s been days now, Banner.”
“I know,” Bruce somberly answered. “There have been some roadblocks — the first trial dose wasn’t strong enough to inhibit the arachidonic acid pathway in the prostaglandins —”
Tony held his hand up. “Just-just do what you have to do, alright.”
His vision tunneled as he watched staff quickly prepared for the procedure. Claire was already cleansing Peter’s back with a swap of iodine, the russet brown antiseptic standing out among the white sheets and pale complexion of his skin. It was all too clinical for his liking.
“Do I need to...” Tony shifted uncomfortably. “Should I leave?”
Bruce looked between the two of them — Tony and then Peter, as if taking a moment to deliberate on his answer. He ultimately shook his head.
“No, I’d uh, I’d actually advise that you stay,” he warmly suggested. “Or get his aunt here. We need him calm while this is done and...he looks like he could use someone familiar to comfort him. We’d restrain him, but he’s...not reacting well to that.”
Tony scoffed incredulously. “You think? He was bolted to a wall, of course he isn’t reacting well to restraints.”
Bruce decided it was best not to respond to the sarcastic remark.
Tony decided he was smart for doing as much.
He reproached the hospital bed, slowly, one foot at a time. Tony felt incredibly out of place around the scrubs and lab coats. It was an odd feeling for him, almost foreign, to not be in control of the room. It felt unnatural.
He watched intently as nurses handled Peter, Claire specifically. She moved Peter’s arm away from his hip, positioning it towards his chest and letting him rest it near the plastic guard rail they had risen up. The movement sparked obvious pain that he vocalized, half smothered in his pillow, half sharp in the air.
“Gah-ah!”
“Christ, be gentle with the kid, will ya!?” Tony blurted out. “He’s got two holes the size of your damn fist in his stomach, go easy on him.”
It was an overreaction, sure. But it made him feel better. Right now, Tony would take any bit of that he could get.
Bruce stayed neutral, refusing to intervene whereas Claire stepped towards him and met his gaze head-on.
“Mr. Stark, I didn’t come all the way from Harlem just so I could do a shitty job here,” she bluntly stated. “Now I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt being that you’re clearly upset right now, but try to have some faith in us. We know what we’re doing.”
Tony narrowed his eyes, looking the woman up and down. He was positive he’d never seen her before, not a day in his entire life. Light blue scrubs highlighted her caramel toned skin and her slick black hair was pulled back in a low ponytail, emphasizing the hard glare she proceeded to give him.
“Trust me,” Claire softly yet firmly pressed. “I’m in the business for people like Peter.”
For a moment, she almost reminded him of Pepper. Hot-headed, stubborn and strong. He arched an eyebrow — strong women like that were hard to come across.
“Tony, Claire Temple is good at what she does. A lot of enhanced seek her out when they need help.” Helen barely looked his way as she brought over a handful of packaged supplies. “Trust her.”
Bruce pulled up a chair next to Peter’s bed, gesturing for him to sit down. “And if you don’t trust her, trust me. She’s my recruit.”
Tony absentmindedly watched as Claire laid out the supplies she needed on an instrument tray. The tiny glass jars of medication caught his eye, the red stripe wrapping around the vials an indicator of enhanced painkillers.
“Harlem, huh?” Tony muttered, slowly settling down into the hard, plastic chair. “You there when Brucey here managed to break Harlem?”
Claire ripped open the package to a syringe. She managed to screw the barrel to the hypodermic needle without once breaking her stare at him, the corner of her lips pulling up in a small grin.
“You think you can help me?” She avoided his question by leaning over, taking Tony’s hands and laying them down on Peter’s shoulder. “Here — hold him still, just like that. There you go, keep him nice and steady.”
By the time she was finished, Tony had both his palms resting on Peter’s one shoulder. The kid was facing him, though his face was hidden within the depths of the pillow, wet cries leaking onto the cotton fabric. Tony wasn’t even sure if Peter was aware it was him at his side or not.
Claire must have read his thoughts. “Just talk to him.”
Tony bit back a sardonic laugh. And say what? ‘Sorry pip-squeak, this is all my fault, the guy after you only wanted my money and by the way, my ridiculously over-sized staff of scientists can’t figure out how to get morphine to work for you. This one’s on me buddy, my bad.’
He gripped Peter’s shoulder and bunched what part of the hospital gown laid around him. Hesitantly he looked down, deciding it was easy to watch Peter writhe in pain then look at the uncomfortably large needle Claire had just uncapped. Christ, how big was that thing? He didn’t even have a needle phobia, and yet somehow the long, extended size of that one left a twinge his gut.
A sudden adjustment of his body brought Peter’s face directly out from the pillow, his neck craning over with a harsh cry. With it came a sharp voice, cut and cold.
“Careful — careful!” Helen laid a large pillow underneath Peter’s injured leg. “Watch the rod, stabilize it.”
Tony found himself irrationally angry when he looked towards the end of the hospital bed, seeing staff delicately work with Peter’s broken leg and the silver metal embedded to the side of his calf.
“Why are you still using that medieval crap?” he snapped with a little more bite than necessary.
Helen looked up, shooting him a glare of pure exasperation. “I did have a regenerative cradle. It would have done wonders right about now.”
And that was the end of that argument.
Tony eyed the leg with a sense of remorse. The team of orthopedics mentioned that if all went well and his ‘quick healing’ kicked in, they could remove the rod within a couple weeks. Clearly, that was far down on their list of priorities right now, but Tony hated that they practically strapped bracelets onto the kid’s broken wrists and couldn’t do something less invasive for his leg.
It hurt just to look at it.
No, that wouldn’t do. He needed to find a way to fix this.
“Tony,” Bruce firmly spoke up. “Talk to him.”
Tony hadn’t realized Peter was aware of his surroundings, his neck having craned to watch Claire as she began her work. Two loud snaps of his fingers and the kid turned his head back over towards him.
“Hey, look at me — don’t look at them, look at me,” Tony insisted. “Eyes on me, Parker. C’mon now.”
It didn’t take much for Peter’s glassy and puffy eyes to roll back in front of him. The movement was slow and sluggish. Once he let his head fall back onto the pillow, his eyes seemed to settle straight ahead.
“There ya go.” Tony hoped his smile didn’t look as awful as it felt. “I knew you weren’t that rebellious.”
Peter blinked. His eyelids slid down to half-mast, and his head seemed to sink further into the pillow, the echo of a groan escaping his lips.
Tony winced. He looked positively exhausted.
“Hey there, kiddo.”
For once in — how long had it been now? Tony shrugged off the details. For once in what felt like a lifetime Peter looked at him with recognition, letting out a shaky breath as he wearily blinked his eyes.
“...hey...” Peter rasped.
Tony cringed. His voice, barely a whisper above everyone else, sounded like sandpaper in a blender. Days of not talking combined with the rough abuse of intubation were not kind to his throat.
“Eek.” Tony patted his shoulder. “How about we save that voice for right now. You sound like a seventy-year-old chain smoker. No offense.”
He felt a modicum of relief when Peter’s lips tugged upward, a twitch that could almost be considered a smile. It felt oddly comforting to see him awake and mildly lucid, a grounding reminder that despite it all, he was still alive.
Peter inhaled, his body lifting with the action. He released his breath in two words. “...’m sorry.”
Tony frowned and shook his head. “You got nothing to be sorry for, Underoo’s.”
Peter’s face began to scrunch up, and Tony briefly looked up over his shoulder to see that Claire had started inserting that uncomfortably large needle into his back. He was quick to look away. It was yet another thing to add to his ‘things Peter will never go through again under my watch’ list.
“...should’ve...listened to you,” Peter swallowed dryly, struggling to speak. “Not go in...the building. No one...needed saved. I...me’sed up.”
The oxygen mask around his mouth fogged up with every strained breath he released. Tony was happy to provide a distraction, he really was, but Peter’s efforts in talking were too much of a struggle and things were already on level ten-of-ten in rankings of how bad this situation could get.
“Yeah? Well let’s not focus on it right now,” he quickly dismissed. “We need to work on getting you better first, okay?”
Peter didn’t seem to want to listen to him, not that Tony was surprised by this. He licked his chapped lips, persistent on talking.
“...was...” he grimaced in timing with Claire administering a barrel full of medicine. “...was a trick.”
“You can tell me all about that later, Pete.” Tony gave himself credit for keeping his expression and voice neutral as Peter chewed on his bottom lip, his face twisting in pain. “I’ll be here. I’m not leaving.”
His one lid peered open, shortly followed by the other. Peter kept his eyes steady on Tony, throughout the entire procedure, throughout every groan and cringe that came with the pain and aches in his body.
The amount of trust emitting from him, the faith and conviction — it was a knee-jerk reaction for Tony to feel disturbed. He wanted so badly to tell Peter different, tell him ‘don’t trust me, that’s stupid. I’ll get you hurt.’
The words never formed.
In the back of his head, Tony told himself he was a coward. A selfish coward. Because as much as he wanted to leave, he also never wanted to step one foot away from the kid.
And it was conflicting.
It was dangerous.
Tony trying to get what he wanted — that was Stark selfishness, and that always ended poorly for everyone involved.
Peter’s eyes had closed, his breathing having fallen into a more steady, slow rhythm. It was easy to tell when the drugs kicked in. His muscles relaxed so dramatically that both the nurse and Tony holding him in place needed to strengthen their grip.
“...was scary.”
Looking over Peter’s body, Tony could see that Claire was wrapping up the procedure. She dumped used syringes and medicine vials aside on the nearest tray. He kept his one hand holding Peter’s shoulder still while the other moved to his forehead, brushing his hair away away from his eyes.
Tony wasn’t sure if it was the drugs that caused Peter to lean into his touch or something entirely else he wasn’t ready to confront yet. Whatever it was, he didn’t fight it.
“Yeah,” Tony said, tilting his head up to keep his eyes dry. “Yeah, it was.”
The once angry machinery calmed down as Peter fell into a deep sleep. He murmured under his breath, a sound barely heard over the rumble of thunder outside, an achingly sweet portent of rain washing down from the skies.
Tony was sure he had heard him say, “thanks...mr. st’rk.”
He chalked that up to his own sleep deprivation.
Steve had fallen into a routine. Every other hour he was awake, he checked up on Peter. The wrist-watch he wore set off an alarm ten minutes of, allowing him time to make his way over to the medical wing of the compound. FRIDAY had programmed it for him, seeing as the device was a little beyond what he was used to. It was a gift from Tony, of course.
He would have asked the man to help him with it, but Tony was a bit...preoccupied the past couple of days. Steve let him be.
Steve had just woken up and taken his shower when the beeping gained his attention. It didn’t take him long to toss on a pair of khakis and a black t-shirt before he made his way out of his quarters. The hallways to the infirmary led him to pass by large windows that fogged with the condensation of rain, the thunderstorm from outside drearily persistent.
The walk always gave him time to think, though he couldn’t say he appreciated that fact. Once the worst of the situation had dissipated, he found himself doing the best he could to occupy his time. It helped to stay busy.
Most of his efforts went into SHIELD. Scratch that, a lot of his efforts went into SHIELD. There was no denying that their impromptu rebellion stirred a lot of aggression with their superiors, and the aftermath proved to be as difficult as he had expected.
The rest of his time, well...there wasn’t much else he could do but sit with his thoughts.
Steve found himself wishing he could be angry at Tony. He tried, desperately, he really did. But the same anger he felt when this all first started wouldn’t return. It eerily reminded him of decades ago when he lived under the impression that Bucky was gone — killed, an unfortunate victim of war. Even way back then, he couldn’t be angry at Peggy or the commanding officers that sent them on that mission.
If he felt anything for Tony right now, it was sympathy. He could relate to the situation, the pain of witnessing someone he truly cared about dying, only to find out they were suffering from much, much worse. That was common ground for them, something they could cling to together. No, he wasn’t mad at Tony.
Now, the sick men who hurt his team — that was a different story. Steve was furious that they had the nerve, the gall, to hurt Peter. To hurt a kid. That was a seething fury of which he had never felt the likes of before. There was no amount of punching bags for him to break that would release him from that anger.
It mildly surprised him to see that he wasn’t the only one affected. The entire team struggled with this one; even Vision seemed to have an unusual amount of empathy for Peter. Steve had a gut feeling Wanda had a lot to do with that. She always managed to explain things to him in a way that he understood. There was a link between those two that he’d never understand, and since she left to train with Strange, the android hadn’t emerged from his quarters. Most of them assumed he didn’t have a need to.
There was no denying that the kid really pulled on their heartstrings, and it wasn’t uncommon for someone else to be paying a visit to the medical wing themselves. He had encountered Sam, Rhodey, and Clint a handful of times already.
Natasha, however, was someone he hadn’t expected to see.
Not long after they were debriefed on Peter, she retreated, something she did best. No one chased after her because they knew they wouldn’t be able to find her. When Natasha didn’t want to be found, she disappeared. There was never a trace to follow.
And yet here she was.
Steve furrowed his brows. He eyed her, standing by herself in front of the large window exposing the inside of Peter’s hospital room. Her back was straight and tight, her arms crossed over her chest. She didn’t look his way, not once, not even as he casually walked up to her and stood by her side.
Steve stuffed both his hands inside his khaki pockets. “He’s looking better.”
Surveying the insides of the room, Steve was happy to see Peter laying asleep in his bed. Unfortunately, he couldn’t testify if it was a peaceful sleep or not. Still, small blessings and all, the kid was out of it. His aunt sat on the nearby couch, fiddling with a new tablet in her hands.
Things seemed calm, given the circumstances.
It took a double take for him to realize that Tony wasn’t present. He frowned. That was a first.
“Bruce removed the feeding and breathing tubes around three a.m.” Natasha didn’t break her stare, her eyes locked straight ahead. “They say his red blood cell count is increasing.”
Steve noticed. The bulky tubes obstructing his face were gone and his skin had a little more color to it, at least more than when he had arrived. It was slow progress, but at least they were making it.
“That’s good,” he said.
Natasha popped her lips. “They’re having more problems with the painkillers.”
Steve bowed his head. That...wasn’t good. He wondered if that’s why Tony wasn’t around. It was unusual, he had been glued to the kid’s side since they brought him back. If he was off helping Bruce and Cho with the drugs though, all the better.
After all, Peter had a lot of great minds helping him.
“They’ll figure it out."
Standing next to Natasha, Steve could feel the nail-biting tension building. If he had to pin a time he had ever seen her so exposed, it was years ago when Fury had faked his death.
That, and what had now occurred, were the only two times he ever felt such an emotionally driven concern from her.
One way or another, everyone really was affected.
Steve tensed and shifted on his feet. “I know it’s none of my business —”
“Then stay out of it,” Natasha coldly snapped.
Steve pursed his lips and didn’t respond right away. He took in a deep breath, lingering long afterwards.
“Dmitri...he called you Natalia Romanova,” he paused, carefully choosing his next words. “That’s not a name listed in your dossier.”
Natasha remained stoic. “No. It’s not.”
“You told us you knew him back —”
“Why do you need to know, Rogers?” She finally looked his way. “What’s it going to change?”
Steve met her stare.
“Nothing,” he simply replied. “But let’s just say I have a hunch you knew him a lot more then you led us onto.”
Natasha’s expression was indifferent. “Even if I did, what difference will it make now?”
Steve shook his head and lowered his chin to his chest, finding himself huffing at her answer. There was a stab of disappointment in his gut.
“You know, I’m getting used to my teammates not telling me things.”
Natasha scoffed a bitter laugh. “You couldn’t have possibly thought I’d be the exception.”
“I don’t know what I thought you’d be,” Steve admitted. “All I know is that you’re not that person anymore, whoever it was and whatever association they had with Dmitri...that’s not you.”
He braced himself to look back at her, surprised to see she hadn’t turned away. Their eyes locked and she smiled, just slightly, a ghost of a grin that held nothing but sadness.
“That’s cute.” Natasha swallowed hard. “But it’s fairy-tale I don’t think even you believe in.”
Steve shook his head.
“You’re too hard on yourself, Nat,” he insisted.
“Maybe.” Natasha shrugged, turning back to the window. “And maybe Bruce isn’t the only monster on the team.”
After a handful of quiet minutes, Steve concluded that anything else he wanted to say would only add fuel to the fire. There was a time and a place for his leadership, and right now just wasn’t it.
A couple of days didn’t prove to be enough to clear the air between them all, not after everything that had happened.
Maybe if this had occurred before the Accords. Maybe.
Steve broke his gaze from Natasha, settling back to look at Peter. It was strange: he'd seen first-hand the injuries on battlefields that would traumatize the average man. It was the dark side of war that most refused to acknowledge, something he tucked away and never spoke about. It was a part of him he had to live with, a detached coping mechanism that only got stronger with each incident he witnessed.
Peter…
Peter was different.
Peter was a kid.
And Natasha, well she was always a mystery he could never decipher. With every piece of her puzzle that he found, he seemed to lose two more. He didn’t know how he felt getting to know her in ways she never let others see.
He didn’t know how he felt about a lot of things lately.
“We’re being marshaled to SHIELD headquarters,” Steve suddenly spoke up, without preamble.
Natasha arched an eyebrow, hugging herself tighter. “I thought this had become SHIELD headquarters.”
Steve’s lack of response said enough.
Natasha looked his way, gawking. “Really?”
He gave one concise shake of his head. “Not my decision.”
“Unbelievable.” Natasha huffed exasperatedly, her jaw tightening. “The moment they form a new world security council and immediately they’re jumping our asses.”
Steve smirked, devoid of any humor. “Funny. That’s what I said.”
It was a hard-pressed position to be in, now that the Accords had been repealed and Ross wasn’t anywhere close to being their superior. Sure, Director Hill was tough as nails, but even she had bosses that sat above her.
Steve’s hip leaned against the wall, crossing his own arms over his chest with a tired sigh. Politics always made things more difficult.
Both of them were focused straight ahead when Natasha asked, “How long do we have?”
“Ninety-six hours.” Steve let a beat pass. “As of seventy-two hours ago.”
Natasha narrowed her eyes. “So a day, then?”
“Couldn’t find you, Nat,” he casually replied, his tone slightly accusatory. “How was I supposed to tell you?”
She stayed neutral. Both of them silently watched as the automatic doors on the other side of the room slid open, nurses quickly striding in and doing their job. May stayed seated at Peter’s side as they worked diligently around the hospital bed. Some checked vitals, others recorded data from the monitors and the rest prepped to change bandages on their patient.
Soon the high-tech glass windows would dim for privacy. There wasn’t much point in sticking around any longer.
“Tony know?” Natasha asked.
Steve pushed himself away from the wall, sidestepping her. “Tony’s not going.”
Natasha’s eyes fluttered rapidly with confused blinks. She spun on her heels to face him as he walked away.
“I don’t get the story behind that?”
Steve turned around, hands deep in his pockets when he shrugged. “What’s there to say? Only those involved were marshaled. Tony got lucky, he wasn’t there.”
Natasha was torn between grinning and letting her jaw fall unhinged to the floor. She settled for something in-between.
“You sly son of a bitch,” she muttered. “Isn’t lying a constitutional sin for you?”
Steve smirked. This time it held fond empathy, a trademark Rogers smile.
“Pack your bags, Romanoff.” He turned back around, continuing his walk down the corridor.
Natasha rolled her eyes and called out, “Can I not have been there?”
“It’s okay, Pete. You can let go.”
In and out. It was all he knew — the voices would come in and out, his mind would go in and out, and he wasn’t even sure where he would go when it happened. He felt detached, muddled, a wandering soul with no terrain to land on.
“You’re safe now. It’s okay to let go.”
He clung to those words. For the longest time, it was all he had to hold onto. For the longest time, he floated between the then and now, unsure of what was a dream and what was real.
When his mind finally re-connected with his body, it happened all at once. It felt like a crashing meteor plummeting to the earth, hard and fast, and the lack of control smothered him.
Peter felt trapped.
Not under a building, not to a wall, but trapped within a body he couldn’t move or function. Every breath he involuntary breathed sent agony radiating down his core to his every muscle, each inhale causing a scorched inundation of red pain to simmer in his stomach.
Peter moaned. He could feel it taper off in his chest, the keening never forceful enough to part from his lips. One after another they came, a string of groggy sounds loud in his own ears.
Distantly, he remembered when he first got his spider powers. After the mutation took place, after he was violently ill and swore up and down that he would die, he proceeded to spend two very long days locked up in his room. He jammed his earbuds tightly into his ears though no music played; he was just desperate to block out the noise, adding a pillow over his head and wishing — praying — that the world would go quiet.
Before he learned how to control his heightened senses, they controlled him. And it was hell.
This was like that. Only five hundred times worse.
Beeping, whirring, dripping, hissing — the sounds, the smells, the sights — it was all a constant presence. Each beep felt like a screw drilled into his head, the smell of chemicals burned his nose and he couldn’t open his eyes without the lights stabbing into his retinas. He felt as if he could taste the colors in the room, each and every one making him overwhelmingly sick.
He had once told Mr. Stark that his senses were dialed to eleven. This had to be eleven hundred. It wouldn’t stop, it wouldn’t go away.
Peter felt helpless to it all.
“You’re safe now.” The words were his only lifeline. He clung to them, tighter than ever.
Peter jerked awake, or at least jolted in the bed, unsure if he had ever fallen asleep in the first place. His back jostled off the bed and — shit that hurt — the uncomfortable feeling of something up his nose began to bother him. It left a tickle in his nostril that made him want to sneeze.
His hands lazily reached up for it, sloppily attempting to yank on the intrusive tube.
“Don’t touch that, kid.” An exhausted voice slithered into his ears. It was familiar. Safe. “Trust me, you don’t want to pull it out. Been there, done that. It’s not all that fun.”
A painful groan rumbled in his chest, constricted, restricted. His hand reached for his face and callous fingers gripped his, the rough skin coarse against his own. He focused on the feeling. It was better than the persistent fire that lanced up and down his body, shock-waves controlling his every twitch.
The pain came and went in waves, in tides, some moments more pronounced than others. Things were moving. He felt dizzy, like he was floating, spinning around on a fast-moving Tilt-A-Whirl. A sheet of sweat sat on his body, feeling both hot and cold at the same time. The smells were raw, too clean and they set fire into his nostrils, or at least the one open nostril he had. The invading object sliding into his other made him want to throw up every time he dry swallowed.
God, just make it stop.
Memories came back to him in chunks. He was wet at one point. Drowning. Or was that a dream? His dreams blurred together with reality, forming a nightmare he couldn’t escape from. He was never sure if he cried in those dreams or in real life.
"...'m here, sweetie, it’s okay.” He heard May’s reassurance over the piercing machinery around him, soft around his ear. “Cry all you need to, I’m right here.”
Her voice came with a nervous energy, the type of worry that made him anxious. His intuition told him that her being upset was a bad thing, that she shouldn’t be so worried about him. But he wasn’t sure what he could do to fix that.
So he drifted. It was easier that way.
Time passed in scattered moments and Peter wasn’t sure how long each separated from the other. There was a lethargic feeling in his bones, a film behind his eyelids that told him he had been sleeping for a long time, that things weren’t happening all at once. It was the only grounding thing he could feel. Everything else happened in splintered stages.
He went to swallow and the dryness caused him to cough, no saliva resting in his mouth for him to work with. Without warning, the pain he had been feeling flared up to anew. The pounding in his ears went in sync with each beat of his heart, sometimes a steady flutter, other times a frantic throbbing.
“....hh, shh, it’s okay, honey. It’s okay. Here.” Something cold rested on his tongue. At contact he sunk into the mattress of the bed, unaware of how good the wetness felt in his mouth. “There you go, baby. You’re okay.”
His vision came in fragmented pictures, too bright to make out details. The lights burned the shadows out and it felt like his eyes were lagging, like the damaged computer monitor with broken pixels that he once found from the dumpster. He’d make out one thing, one image and it’d freeze on a frame, surrounded by a blistering white light.
It was usually faces.
May. Doctor Banner. Many other people he didn’t know.
Mr. Stark.
“Easy Petey, easy.”
It was always pain that drew him back into awareness. The next time he moved, he let out of a guttural cry. The callous hand found his again, gripping it, tethering him to reality. Though the contact on his skin hurt, causing nerves to scream at the slightest pressure on bruises and broken bones, it also brought comfort.
“You’re safe, Underoo’s. No one’s going to hurt you, not on my watch.”
The voice penetrated any fear he had pullulating inside.
Peter painstakingly opened his eyes. His senses hadn’t let up, everything was still too bright and too harsh. But his eyes locked on the familiar picture, the familiar goatee and brown eyes staring down at him.
“You’re safe,” Tony whispered.
Something restrained him from pushing through the fog in his brain and holding onto consciousness was a feat enough. It was easy to close his eyes, let himself sink to the depths of unawareness. As long as the voice stayed present, it was easy to let go.
As long as he was there to remind him, Peter felt safe.