Chapter Text
So now you're chasin' the American dream
Just like the dollar is gonna make everybody scream
But I can tell you for the money
The simple life sure looks good
– ‘All the Money or the Simple Life Honey’ by The Dandy Warhols
The chairs in this room spin, which means Tony has been swinging his chair back and forth, back and forth, for the past thirty minutes. It could be taken as nervous fidgeting, except that aside from his foot pushing off the floor his body is perfectly still and his attention is on his phone, ignoring everyone else in this meeting.
His chair squeaks every time it turns to the left. That was why he’d originally started swinging, and he can practically see the vein about to burst in Secretary Ross’ forehead.
“And you, Stark?” one of Ross’ lackey’s prompts – he’s been speaking for a while but Tony honestly hasn’t heard a word. “You think we should just ignore these vigilantes the same way you want us to ignore your fugitive buddies?”
Tony leans back. The chair squeaks. “No one’s ignoring them,” he says. “They caused an earthquake or whatever that was in New York a couple months ago. They’re definitely on the radar.”
“But you’re not willing to help track them down,” Ross says.
Tony raises an eyebrow at him. “Is the UN ordering me to help? This is a little below my paygrade.”
“As if you couldn’t track them down with all of that,” Ross says, gesturing sharply at the phone Tony’s still holding aloft.
Tony shrugs. “Adherence to the Accords is voluntary,” he reminds them. “No one is being forced to sign.”
“For now.”
“You’ve had a few inhumans come to you already,” Tony continues, ignoring Ross’ comment – for now. “If these guys want to sign up then I’m sure they’ll get in touch.”
Ross is glaring at him. Tony smiles, showing his teeth.
“Are we done, then?” he asks. “Because I don’t know about all of you, but I’ve got a multi-billion dollar green energy slash tech corporation to run.” He thinks, suddenly, of how Pepper would react if she heard him say that. “Well, not run, per se. I oversee things. I’m involved. I’ve got R&D… stuff. To do. Very important. So.”
Ross drags the meeting out for another ten minutes, probably just out of spite.
Tony leaves without saying goodbye to anyone and finds Happy waiting out front with a car. “That took awhile,” he comments, opening the door of the backseat for Tony.
“Politicians,” Tony grouses. “Never know when to shut up.”
Happy’s sliding into the driver’s seat before he replies. “You say that like you know when to shut up.” Belatedly, he tacks on: “Boss.”
Tony narrows his eyes at the back of Happy’s head. It has the same effect on Happy’s attitude as usual, which is none. “Drive, Hogan. I need to get out of DC as fast as possible.”
- - -
Back home in New York, however, the penthouse at the Tower isn’t really much more welcoming than the anonymous hotel suite in DC had been. Tony can’t help but notice the things that are missing from around the living areas. Things Pepper took with her when she moved out. Things that were destroyed when Ultron trashed the place. It’s just stuff, which he doesn’t care for that much because it’s all replaceable, but the missing candles on the coffee table seem to stand out.
Well, the bar is fully stocked. Nothing missing there. He takes the time to mix up a gimlet and takes it downstairs to the workshop with him.
For the rest of the night, he doesn’t bother with mixing up any drinks that take work, just splashes tonic on top of a generous pour of gin.
There’s something wrong with the internal layout of the new StarkPad and he can probably fix that tonight, only a week after he promised Pepper he’d have it done. She can stop having her assistant nag him about it then. Except the parts are so damn tiny, and the more he drinks the more fiddly they get.
- - -
Tony’s awoken by a buzzing noise the next morning, and after a minute realizes he fell asleep on the couch in the lab. His neck and back are not thanking him for that now. And his head is throbbing, protesting the amount he drank last night. He rolls over, looking out at the workshop blearily. “Ugh.”
“Good morning, Boss,” FRIDAY says, loudly. The buzzing continues.
“Wha’s that?” Tony mumbles.
“Someone is requesting access to the penthouse level,” FRIDAY says. “Security has detained them in the lobby for now.”
Tony frowns, levering himself up onto his elbows. “Who?” The penthouse can only be accessed via a private elevator, and it’s hidden behind a door with a biometric scan.
“Not sure, Boss.”
“Call security.”
“Security is already on it, but they’re quite insistent that you deal with this personally.”
Tony gets himself off the couch and walking in the general direction of the stairs to the living room. “The fuck am I paying them for?”
“Is that rhetorical?”
“Yes,” Tony mutters. He tries to smooth out the wrinkles in his clothes, but it’s a lost cause. “Tell them I’ll be down in five.”
Five minutes was optimistic, it’s closer to ten. He washes his face, digs out some eye drops from under the sink, changes into clean clothes, and feels slightly more human. Enough to down a shot of espresso and go kick out whoever is downstairs, anyway.
When he exits the private elevator tucked into the back corner of the lobby, he’s expecting the security guard to be detaining whoever it is nearby. Instead, the man is sitting at his desk, talking to a kid who’s gesturing animatedly.
“What’s going on?” Tony asks, walking over. “Where’s this situation you can’t handle without me? Y’know, I don’t skimp out on paying security. You guys should be able to handle anything thrown at you.”
“Um,” the guard says. “Normally, yeah.” He gestures at the kid.
“Is it bring your kid to work day or something?”
“Hi!” the kid says, smiling brightly and waving at Tony. He’s missing one of his front teeth. “I’m Peter.”
“Hi.” Tony gives him a vague smile back, not one for being rude to random children. The kid is probably a fan or something.
“He says he’s, uh...” The guard seems to be at a loss.
“You’re my dad!” the kid says, still smiling brightly.
Tony’s whole body flinches.
- - -
Tony takes the kid and his luggage – the kid has luggage! – and puts him on the couch in the living room before sinking into one of the chairs by the coffee table, staring at him.
The kid stares right back.
“This is impossible,” Tony tells him.
Peter sighs, like Tony is being difficult. “You met my mom, Mary Fitzpatrick, at a conference. Then she had me.”
“Mary Fitzpatrick? I don’t know anyone named Mary Fitzpatrick.” He frowns, then: “FRIDAY?”
“You met Mary Fitzpatrick at the Toronto Tech Innovation Conference in November 2006.”
Peter tilts his head, as if to say told you so .
“Okay,” Tony says, holding up a finger and waving it for emphasis, “just because I met her doesn’t mean I’m your father.”
Peter pulls his backpack closer and opens it. “She wrote you a note.” He stands up and walks over to hand the paper to Tony.
“I don’t like being handed things.”
Peter rolls his eyes and sets the envelope on Tony’s knee.
Dear Tony,
I know this is a big surprise, but Peter is your son and I need you to watch him for a month. It’s an emergency. I’ll explain everything when I get back.
- Mary
The note is typed, aside from the signature. Tony reads it over twice before he realizes Peter has wandered away, staring out the windows. “This is really high up,” the kid says.
“You expect me to believe you're my kid based on this?” Tony waves the letter at him. “Anyone could have written this.”
“Oh, yeah.” Peter goes back over to his backpack – it’s Avengers themed, Tony notices, with colorful, stylized cartoons of the whole team on the front – and pulls a large manila envelope out. “I’ve also got this,” he says, trying to hand it to Tony again and finally just dropping it onto his lap. “It’s my birth certificate.”
“Birth certificate. Right,” Tony says, opening the envelope.
“Your name is on it,” Peter says, wandering back over to the window and pressing his hands against the glass.
“My name is not–”
Tony stares at the paper in his hand. The only part registering is: Father’s Name: Anthony E. Stark.
“This– She just put it there, it doesn’t mean anything.” He doesn’t have a kid. He would have known if he had a kid.
Peter turns back to look at him, fixing him with big brown eyes that do not look anything like Tony’s. Absolutely not.
“Okay,” Tony says. “We can figure this out. Come on.” He drops the papers on the coffee table and heads for the elevator, waving at the kid to follow him. There’s a lab on the floor that Bruce used to occupy that’s better suited for medical stuff than his own workshop. “Time for a paternity test.”
- - -
The paternity test is a match. Tony runs it two more times, then makes Peter give him another DNA sample and runs it another three times. The same results stare at him every time: Probability of paternity: 99.98%.
For a lack of other ideas, and because he absolutely cannot tell Pepper about this, he calls Rhodey.
It’s a video call, so he’s treated to the disbelieving expression on Rhodey’s face, tinted only slightly blue by the holoscreen, as he says, “You have a kid?”
“Apparently. DNA test was a match, so.”
“A real life kid?”
“Pretty sure he’s real. I don’t know, maybe I’m hallucinating this whole thing. Is this a lucid dream?” Tony pinches himself. “Nope, kid is still here.”
Said kid crowds close to him, pushing his way up and under Tony’s arm to peer up at the screen. Tony lifts his arm clear, taking a step back. “Oh my god. Are you War Machine?” Peter asks, voice filled with awe.
Rhodey’s eyes are wide. “That is a real kid,” he says, sounding stunned.
“I’m Peter! This is so cool! It’s really nice to meet you, Mr. War Machine. Are you on a mission or something? Is it really secret? Are there any aliens?”
“Uh, nice to meet you,” Rhodey says, with a tight smile.
Peter beams back at him.
Rhodey locks eyes with Tony.
“Help,” Tony says.
“What am I gonna do?!” Rhodey demands.
Tony flounders for a moment, before inspiration strikes. “You have nieces and nephews. You know what to do with kids.”
Rhodey’s already shaking his head. “Uh, no. I know nothing about children other than how to wind them up with sugar and send them back to their parents. Besides, I can’t just go AWOL for no reason.”
“This is a reason! This is a crisis.”
“For you.”
“Rhodes.”
“Some of us have jobs, Tony.”
“I have a job,” Tony grouses. Sort of, he thinks. He certainly winds up working a lot, anyway, for someone who is currently only chairman and no longer CEO of a company. He sits back, trying not to sigh too deeply. Peter has wandered off, opening drawers in the lab to poke at their contents. “Well, what am I supposed to do with him?”
“Give him back to his mom?” Rhodey suggests. “Or at least talk to the woman. She can’t just leave him on your doorstep without saying anything. That’s insane.”
- - -
Tony takes the kid back up to the living room and orders him to sit in front of the television so he can spend time tracking down Mary Fitzpatrick. Peter changes the channel every few minutes. Tony retreats to the kitchen, trying to ignore how annoying the TV is, and makes more coffee. He can keep an eye on the kid from here.
He sets up shop at the counter and looks up the Doctors Without Borders nursing assignment that Peter’s mother is supposedly on in Sudan. According to the kid, she was asked to fill in at the last minute and is probably still on the flight, en route. She won’t be back for a month.
When did she become a nurse? he wonders vaguely. Career change, maybe?
Despite what he told the kid, he does actually remember Mary Fitzpatrick. Aside from a few blackouts, he remembers pretty much every woman he’s slept with. She’d been a biochemist at OsCorp when he’d met her on the show floor, gotten rather drunk with her at the conference after party, and then spent the night with her. Petite, brunette, curly hair. He remembers her hair; it’d been distinctive. She’d mostly talked shop, when she wasn’t flirting, but also complained about the higher ups at OsCorp being sexist and a coworker who kept asking her out.
The results he’s getting for her online are… odd. She’d published some research in early 2006, the same thing she’d been presenting at the conference. But then she seems to have disappeared. He finds the record for Peter’s birth, matching the physical certificate the kid had given him. An address for an apartment in Queens around the same time pops up too, registered for Mary’s name. Scrubbed Facebook and LinkedIn accounts that he only gets by hacking into their servers, but maybe she got sick of social media. There’s no mention of the career change there.
And then the trail just goes cold. There’s nothing else on Mary or Peter.
“Where’s everything else, Fri?”
“There’s no public record of either Mary Fitzpatrick or Peter Fitzpatrick past December 2007, Boss. But there was a reference to Mary Fitzpatrick in records held by the Directorate of Operations.”
Tony sits up straight at that, staring straight ahead past the holoscreen in front of him. “The CIA? ”
“I was able to find her name in an unclassified email from November 2007 about lunch plans. The metadata is hidden so I can’t identify the sender or recipient.”
“That’s Clandestine Service,” Tony says, ignoring that it’s just an email. “She’s a spy? ”
“According to public records prior to 2007, she’s a biochemist.”
Tony waves a hand in the air, dismissing that. None of this is making a single ounce of sense. “Anything else on the CIA servers?”
“Nothing else that’s unclassified. But it’s possible there’s something there if her name’s being mentioned casually in an outgoing email.”
He taps his fingers on the countertop as he considers that. He doesn’t have any favors he can call in to get access to classified CIA records right now, especially not ones held by Clandestine Service. Not with how things are going with Ross and the Accords.
The story Peter told him about Mary going to Africa for Doctors Without Borders is looking less and less likely by the minute. The lack of any public records, the ping on the CIA servers, dropping Peter off without a word while she goes on a last minute trip abroad…
“Call Rhodey,” Tony says.
Rhodey answers by asking, “Find your baby mama yet?” He’s smirking, clearly amused by the entire situation.
“About that,” Tony says. “I need a favor.”
Rhodey’s eyes narrow. “What kind of favor?”
“The kind that involves searching through some classified CIA records.”
Rhodey’s silent, waiting for him to continue.
“There’s no public record of Mary past 2007, not long after the kid was born. But I found a hit on an email on the CIA’s server. So I need to know if there’s more there. This whole jetting off to Africa at the last minute and leaving the kid behind isn’t adding up.”
“CIA,” Rhodey says, tone and expression perfectly flat.
“The email was on the Clandestine Service server.”
Rhodey’s eyes widen. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
Rhodey runs a hand over his jaw. “I don’t know if I’ve got that many favors right now,” he says. “The business with the Accords is making people…” His lips twist. He shakes his head. “Clandestine Service never gives anything up.”
“You don’t know anyone over there?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“So you’ll check on it?” Tony asks.
Rhodey sighs. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“You’re the best, honeybear.”
Rhodey rolls his eyes. “Go take your kid to Disneyland, or whatever it is that deadbeat dads do to make up for not being around.”
Tony rests a hand over his heart. “Okay, that hurt. I didn’t know he existed. I’d totally have paid someone to take him to Disneyland years ago if I’d have known.”
Rhodey snorts.
After ending the call, Tony heads back into the living room. “Off,” he says, exhaling at the blessed silence that descends as FRIDAY turns the TV off.
“Hey,” Peter protests immediately, turning towards him. “That was in the middle of an episode.”
“You’ll live,” Tony tells him. He sits down on the edge of the coffee table so that he’s directly in front of the kid, and Peter sits up a bit straighter. Tony takes a moment to just look at him. Peter doesn’t look like him, not really. Not beyond a similar hair and eye color. Mary is a brunette too, and the curly hair has to come from her. Tony can’t remember what color eyes she has.
There might be something of Tony’s mother, actually, in Peter’s jaw and nose, the shape of his eyes. Tony shies away from that thought, because his mom probably would have loved having a grandchild, no matter what the circumstances were. And she’s never going to meet him.
“We’ve got to talk about why you’re here,” Tony says. He doesn’t want to grill the kid, exactly, because that would be… well, mean. And Peter is just a kid. But he also wants to know what’s going on.
“Because you’re my dad,” Peter says.
There’s that D word again. “Yeah,” Tony says. Admits. “We figured that part out already. That doesn’t actually explain why you’re here, now, without your mom.”
“She’s in Africa.”
“Uh huh.” Tony nods. “You mentioned. That still does not explain why you are here.”
Peter’s face is pinched in confusion. “Because… you’re my dad.”
“And your mom thought it was okay to just drop you off at the door? Without even coming inside to talk to me? After not telling me that you exist for eight years?”
Peter hesitates, but says, “Yes.”
Tony cannot keep the disbelief off his face. “Right,” he says. “Well, that is certainly a, uh, interesting choice on her part.”
“She got the assignment really last minute and needed someone for me to stay with,” Peter explains. “So I said ‘Well why don’t I stay with my dad?’ and she said ‘Oh honey he doesn’t know about you yet’ and I said ‘That’s okay, I’ll surprise him.’” Peter gives him a big smile. The missing tooth is very prominent.
“Congrats,” Tony says. “I’m surprised.” Then: “The assignment?” Now he’s getting somewhere.
Peter nods. “In Africa.”
“Does she get assignments a lot?”
Peter frowns, confused again. “Like… from Doctors Without Borders?”
“Sure,” Tony says. “Let’s call it that.”
Peter’s still frowning. “Um, sometimes,” he says.
“Where does she usually go on assignment?”
Peter’s looking down at his knees, kicking his legs against the base of the couch nervously. “She, um… She went to Canada, once.”
“Who do you usually stay with?” Tony asks.
“I go with her,” Peter says.
Tony blinks. Okay, he wasn’t expecting that. He’s assuming, now, that Mary’s some kind of spy and is lying to the kid and telling him she’s a nurse who travels abroad. But… taking him along doesn’t track. “You do?”
Peter nods.
Tony debates asking what happens when Peter goes with her. But maybe she’s convinced the kid it’s all nurse stuff. “So why didn’t you go this time?” he asks instead.
“Well, it was really last minute,” Peter says.
“And there wasn’t anyone else for you to stay with?”
Peter shakes his head.
Tony sighs. “Look, I have to talk to your mom. She can’t just leave you here without saying anything. That’s not… She can’t do that, okay? Now FRIDAY can’t find a number for her. I’m assuming you know her phone number?”
“Yeah. But, uh…” Peter bites his lip. “She doesn’t have cell service. In Kassala.”
“I’m sure I can push it through with my satellites.” Tony highly doubts she’s in Kassala at this point. Some other international hotspot, maybe.
“She didn’t even take a phone,” Peter says. “Because, uh, she knew it wouldn’t work.”
Right, Tony thinks sarcastically. She didn’t take a phone because she wouldn’t have service. Not because she’s a fucking spy who is on a covert mission and dumped her kid off with him without a word while she’s gone. “Email?” he asks.
Peter frowns at him, like Tony is asking a stupid question. “They don’t have internet.”
Tony stands up and stalks across the room, resting his fists against the top of the bar and taking a deep breath. He is very aware, at the moment, of Peter’s eyes on his back. He wants nothing more than to leave, hole up in his workshop and ignore the rest of the world and focus on something slightly more manageable than the child that he is suddenly responsible for and the increasing mystery of the woman who left him here.
Of all the stupid, irresponsible, fucking bullshit things for a person to do. Who in their right mind just up and leaves their kid with a stranger while they jet off to another continent? Even if that stranger is the kid’s father? What, was Mary just hanging onto the kid while it was convenient for her and now it’s not anymore, so she’s dumped him on Tony? Who does shit like this? How is this happening right now?
How does he have a kid and he didn’t know about it?
When Tony turns back, Peter is still watching him, kneeling on the couch and leaning over the back of it, chin in his hands. Tony just looks at him, not sure what to say.
“I’m hungry,” Peter says. “Can we eat lunch?”
Tony takes a deep breath, lets it out through his nose. He can handle lunch. Probably.