Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Tony has seen enough of the world to know what to expect when they find Peter, four days and a dozen injuries late. He expects to see him bloody and starved, expects the way he’s strapped down on a metal slab like a cadaver being dissected. He expects the way the sight makes bile fill his mouth and the way his lungs don’t seem to be working. The strength-leaching fear is stronger than he thought it would be, and he’s never been quite so desperate to feel the vital warmth of someone’s pulse before, but even those reactions were somewhat anticipated.

He doesn’t expect Peter to stand up from said table and walk out of the room. And, perhaps naively, he expects Peter’s cold, silent regard of him even less.

When the Avengers, re-assembled for this one mission at Tony’s pleading, bust down the reinforced steel door of the room Hydra’s holding Peter in, Tony’s the first through it. And he’d planned on being suave and collected and strong for Peter, but he sees him and freezes.

Others rush past him, Rhodey undoing Peter’s bonds and the others clearing the room and salvaging information and Tony just stands there.

“Peter,” he whispers, feeling like he might collapse at any second. Peter looks at him and raises his chin.

“Tony,” he says, projecting all of the calm that Tony can’t muster. And then he stands up, like his knee isn’t three shades of purple and his stomach isn’t still bleeding sluggishly and his pupils aren’t blown wide from a concussion.

“Whoa!” half the room shouts, diving toward him.

“Don’t move, Peter,” Rhodes chastises, pressing on his shoulders. Peter looks at him blankly, than moves his gaze back to Tony, who’s hand is on his arm. The kid shrugs away from both of them.

“We can go now, right?” He asks. Tony nods woodenly.

“Kid, you should wait for the medics to check you over,” he manages to say, reaching for Peter’s arm again. Peter bats his hand away and starts forward. Tony is stunned for a second, meeting Rhodey’s wide eyes. Rhodey is the only one who’s met Peter before, so he’s the only one who understands how wrong the kid is acting.

Tony spins and catches up with Peter, which isn’t hard considering he’s walking like a puppet, with only a few strings holding him up.

“Is it this way?” Peter’s words are coming out like his mouth is full of cotton.

“Yes,” Tony says, reeling. “Peter!” He reaches for Peter’s arm again when the boy lifts his foot like he’s just going to climb the stairs. He barely has a grip on Peter’s elbow before the kid spins around, shoving Tony’s hand away.

“Stop it, Tony,” Peter hisses, eyes unfocused and blurry, but with it enough to be alight with anger.

Tony’s breath catches, and he watches, uncomprehending, as Peter turns and climbs the stairs. He can feel Rhodey and Steve looking at him with concern. Feeling like he was the one with the head injury, Tony follows after Peter, determined to be there for him, whether Peter wants him or not.

As long as Peter is alive, it doesn’t matter if he hates me. How many times had he said that to Pepper and Rhodey when they questioned his invasive and drastic safety measures? But Peter’s alive and he hates Tony and it must matter because it feels like palladium poisoning in his chest, creeping, burning cold, through his veins until it freezes his heart.

He can’t even blame Peter for hating him. He’d been in Hydra’s hands for four days. Peter had certainly been waiting for him, expecting him to come blasting in at any moment. And before he’d been taken, it had been Tony’s job to protect him, he’d sworn to protect him, and he failed. It was only a matter of time, really. He feels dizzy.

Peter’s marching forward, ignoring his injuries through pure stubbornness and about ten levels of shock. His face is set in a detached scowl, but there’s a childish sort of confusion in his eyes, as if he isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do next. Tony wants to reach out to him again, but doesn’t.

The daylight makes Peter’s eyes water when they finally reach the doors. It’s another hundred feet to the jet and Peter almost falters before plowing determinedly onward.

He’s nearly there when his strength gives out, and he crumples mid-stride. Tony, half a step behind and expecting it, catches the unconscious boy easily and scoops him up, carrying him the rest of the way.

For the next two days, people bustle in and out of the medbay, and Tony stands down the hall and watches. He’d almost gone in once: when Bruce had come out and told him Peter was awake, he’d lurched toward the door and then frozen in place as Peter made eye contact, and then, very deliberately, turned away. Tony, sick to his stomach and barely breathing, had left and not returned.

The problem is, the sick feeling only gets worse as guilt eats him alive. And finally, he can’t take it anymore. He goes to see Peter and apologize for not getting there sooner, for not protecting him in the first place, for being so utterly rubbish at looking out for the people he cares about. And if the kid tells him to keep the heck away from him… he’ll deal with that later.

Only, Peter’s missing from the medbay when he gets there. May is at work for the first time in a week and Bruce is sleeping, and Peter is just gone.

“FRIDAY, Peter—” Tony starts, entire body shaking.

“Peter is in the garage,” FRIDAY tells him quickly. “He is unharmed.”

Tony bends double, bracing his hands on his knees while he tries to breathe. “What’s he—" he starts, then shakes his head and decides to check himself.

The garage is huge and airy, divided into two sections; one half housing Tony’s car collection and the other holding all of the Avengers’ vehicles, including their quinjet. Tony finds Peter on that side of the space, sitting on the wing of the quinjet, a hundred feet above the ground.

The combination of worry and frustration and relief is so dizzying, Tony doesn’t stop to think about the repercussions of surprising someone recovering from kidnapping and torture before snapping, “Peter!”

Peter’s gives a full-body flinch, loses his balance and, with Tony watching, horrified, slips off his precarious perch.

But he’s still Spider-Man, injured or no. His hand sticks to the wing of the plane just long enough for him to shoot a web (and Tony is simultaneously relieved and horrified that Peter is paranoid enough to be wearing his webshooters) and lower himself down at a less terminal velocity. He still collapses to his knees the second he’s on the ground, gasping.

Tony swears, sprinting toward Peter, but skidding to a halt a few feet from him. He isn’t sure Peter wants Tony to touch him.

“Peter, I’m sorry, I didn’t think,” Tony spits out, hand hovering impotently above Peter’s bent back. Peter shakes his head, eyes squeezed closed.

“It’s fine,” he pants. “I’m fine.”

Except he isn’t fine and his breathing isn’t slowing down. Peter’s every exhale is an almost inaudible whine of pain as he curls protectively around his injuries. Tony swears again and frantically drops down behind him and pulls Peter back against his chest, leaning the boy’s weight against him to relieve pressure on his ribs. He traces shaking fingers up Peter’s ribcage, counting until he finds the ones that are broken and wraps a bracing arm around his waist, trying to hold the bones in place as Peter gasps.

“You need to take deep breaths, Peter,” Tony instructs, all previous apprehension gone as he splays his palm over Peter’s sternum, holding him in place. “FRIDAY, get Bruce-“

“No,” Peter whimpers. “No, just let me—please, I can’t—”

Tony hesitates, but he doesn’t hear any wheezing as Peter inhales, and the bones under his hands aren’t shifting, so he can convince himself that Peter hasn’t aggravated his injuries too much, and they can stay here for a moment, at least until Peter catches his breath.

Tony presses Peter’s back a little more firmly against his chest, and Peter must take it as confirmation, because he relaxes, dropping his chin to his chest. His breathing is still ragged, verging on panicked. He’s starting to tremble, an after-effect of the pain.

“I’m sorry,” Tony says again. “I’m sorry,” without knowing which misdeed he’s apologizing for.

“I dreamed about how you would come rescue me,” Peter confesses, voice hoarse. Tony freezes, fingers unconsciously clenching around Peter’s t-shirt.

“Sometimes it was just you. Mostly it was all of you, the Avengers, all my heroes coming together to find me.” Tony swallows, seeing it in his head as Peter speaks: The entire disbanded team, putting aside their differences to save this kid because Tony had cast down every tattered scrap of pride he still had and all but begged Steve to come; Tony blasting down door after door, his head spinning more and more with each empty room.

“And it all happened, just like I’d imagined—” Peter’s ribs grind as his breath stutters. “All of it except you.”

Tony doesn’t want to hear this. He doesn’t want to know how he’d failed this kid even worse than he thought. Peter’s voice breaks when he speaks again.

“You were supposed to come in and say some stupid line, and… and—you were supposed to tell a joke and call me kid and I was-I was supposed to be ok.”

A drop of water splashes onto Tony’s forearm as he lowers his head until his forehead is pressed against Peter’s shoulder, until he can feel each erratic breath reverberate through his entire frame.

“I kept thinking up things you would say when you came, I had like a dozen,” Peter hiccups, “and then you just… you didn’t.” 

He hadn’t. He had gone into more battles than he could count, and he’d looked every enemy in the face and spat out some brash, foolhardy quip, knowing that all they could do was kill him: it was nothing to be afraid of. But he had seen Peter bloodied and starved and so idealistically brave, and he hadn’t. Because he just couldn’t.

“And I just keep thinking… It’s so stupid, but I keep thinking—"

“It’s not. It’s not stupid,” Tony says, because he knows what it’s like to grasp at straws and realize that’s all you have for armor. And he knows that the lowest you’ll ever be is knowing that you’ve never been weaker, and having someone look at you and treat you like it. Nothing destroys a man quite like pity.

“I should have known,” Tony whispers into the too-bony jut of Peter’s shoulder. How many times has a joke from Rhodey or Steve saved him from himself? He’d been too furious and desperate to think Peter might be seeking that same boon from him. “You’re so much like me, I should have known. Peter. I’m sorry.”

Peter stifles a sob. He tilts his head back and drops it onto Tony’s shoulder. Tony lifts his eyes and watches him as he stares at the ceiling, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows, his brow furrowed in grief. 

“I wanted to walk out. Like you,” Peter croaks. “I wanted to walk out by myself like you did and show them I hadn’t lost.”

It takes Tony a moment to catch up before he remembers blinking in the California sun as it reflected blindingly off the tarmac, Rhodey clutching at his un-injured hand and helping him walk off the plane. He’d refused the medics, refused the wheelchair, and even pushed away Rhodey’s supporting hand at the last minute because he didn’t want to take his first step on American soil as an ex-captive. And maybe he hadn’t thought it through quite like Peter had, but he’d known the press would be there, he’d known, somehow, that his captors, the ones who survived, would see him walk off that plane by himself. They would know they hadn’t beaten him.

“You haven’t lost,” Tony tells Peter, as firmly as his shaking voice will allow.

“Well, I haven’t won,” Peter says. It would have been incredulous if it didn’t sound so exhausted.

“You’re not winning at the moment,” Tony corrects, “but you haven’t lost.”

Peter seems to think about that for a moment. And then his chin starts trembling and his chest spasms under Tony’s hold as the boy tries not to cry. 

“Peter,” Tony murmurs, resting his forehead against Peter’s cheek. Peter clenches his eyes shut, his jaw clamped tight. “You did walk out, all by yourself. You did.”

Peter cries, then; tears sliding down his temples and into his hair as he weeps. Tony keeps his arms carefully bracketing Peter’s abused ribs while he sobs. He holds him close, closer than he probably needs to, and counts the heartbeats under his palm.

As Peter tires out, his tears slowing down, he turns his face into Tony’s neck in a heartbreakingly childish gesture. Tony raises a hand and buries his fingers in Peter’s hair, holding him in place while Peter’s shuddering breaths slowly even out.

Eventually, after a length of time Tony doesn’t measure even in thought, Peter speaks, his voice gravelly and wavering. “I should probably go back to the medbay now, huh?”

He must be in a lot of pain, Tony thinks, to voluntarily go back. Peter’s usually an even worse patient than Tony, and that’s saying something. “Yeah. Your ribs hurting?”

Peter hums noncommittedly, which means yes. “Anything else?” Tony asks. He’s stupidly unwilling to move, and judging by the fact that Peter hasn’t dislodged Tony’s quasi-embrace, he’s equally reluctant.

“My head,” Peter admits. “And my knee.”

“Ok, we’ll go slow, alright?” Tony says, finally shifting from their position. He stands, stiff and trying not to let it show, and then carefully grips Peter’s elbows and slowly helps him stand as well. They shuffle to the medbay together, with Tony holding onto Peter’s hand to support him as he limps along on his battered knee.

Bruce is furious when they arrive, but he takes one look at Peter’s face and swallows his lecture. Peter sits dutifully on his bed and lets himself be fussed over. When Bruce injects a painkiller into Peter’s arm, he starts falling asleep before he even lays down. Tony cradles his head in his palm and guides him toward the pillow while Bruce helps him swing his feet onto the bed.

“Wait, Tony,” Peter slurs as Tony’s fingers brush his cheek. His eyes are practically closed as he grasps limply at Tony’s wrist. “It wasn’t really you I was mad at.” The words are nearly incomprehensible, Peter’s so far gone.

“I know,” Tony assures him. He’d been mad at the situation, his own perceived weakness, Tony can see that now. He’s done the exact same thing a hundred times over.

Tony has his own apologies to give and explanations to make, but not now. Peter’s hand slips from Tony’s wrist and his eyes close fully.

When Peter sees Tony hovering at his doorway later that evening, he smiles.