“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Peter didn’t even look up from where he was staring at nothing. He didn’t flinch at Tony speaking, almost like he knew he was there already. “Whiskey,” he said, casually.
Tony felt his blood begin to boil. “Yeah kid, I’m not blind. Do you mind telling me why the hell you’ve decided to steal from me and then get shitfaced on my balcony at 4am? Especially when the last time you got shitfaced you promised to never do it again?”
Tony didn’t even want to think about that party last week, lest he get himself even more worked up. 27 missed calls only to get a text back from someone else using Peter’s phone saying he was going to stay the night. May was beside herself, and though Tony played it cool, he’s not too proud to admit he was freaking out too.
“I wasn’t shitfaced,” came the lame reply. Peter was looking at Tony now, defiance alight in his eyes as if he was ready for a fight. Tony could think of a million things he’d rather do than fight with his kid, but seeing Peter casually lift the bottle of whiskey to his lips and take another sip really had him seething.
“What, so you just ignored all of our calls and texts because you were perfectly sober?” He bit through his teeth. Peter met his eyes.
Tony pinched at the top of his nose, scrunching his eyes shut. “Peter, tipsy people don’t-“
“I was tipsy,” Peter continued like nothing had been said, “and then I just wasn’t anymore.”
Tony rolled his eyes. “Yeah that’s how getting shitfaced works,” he sighed.
“No. I was tipsy,” and the eye contact was suddenly desperate. Tony allowed himself to fall into a crouch beside Peter if only to prevent the inevitable rise in volume that he could sense from a mile away. “I was barely tipsy and then I just, I couldn’t see, or hear and I was moving but I didn’t know where.”
Tony searched between the desperation in Peter’s eyes for something. He didn’t know what, but whatever it was, he didn’t find it. “Peter, give me the whiskey.”
“You know it’s all lies?” Came the fast response.
Tony sighed and collapsed into a sitting position, resigned. “What is?”
“All that bullshit in books and tv shows and stupid fucking movie scenes where they wake up and- and it’s always ‘it hit them like a ton of shit’ or whatever the fuck it says.” Tony couldn’t suppress the raise of his eyebrows at the language change. Peter sounded angry.
“It’s always that it comes back to them ‘all at once’ but it doesn’t come back. It doesn’t fucking come back no matter how hard I try.”
And he suddenly sounded desperate. Hysterical.
“It’s just gone. I didn’t- I didn’t wake up and not remember and then it ‘all came flooding back’,” he spat the words with disgust. “Nothing flooded back; it’s dryer than the fucking desert in there. It’s- it’s like there’s a crack in a house, right?”
Peter turned his body to face Tony, as if he was explaining something terribly simple and Tony just wasn’t listening.
“One of those really bad ones where you have to take out the whole wall just to fix it, except I don’t know where it is so I’m just hammering the wall mindlessly except what if there wasn’t even a crack in the first place? What if the wall was fine and everything was fine and now my house has a fucking hole in it all because I was worried there might be a crack?”
Tony tried to ignore the tears sliding down Peter’s face and as he violently scrubbed them away with the back of his wrist.
“Even though I don’t even remember there being a crack! It’s like- like I left the house for the day, came back and- and I just thought that someone had like, thrown a stone or something at my wall except now there’s a big, fuck-off hole in my house and-“ he paused, taking a shaking breath before continuing much softer than before. “And I don’t even know where this metaphor is going but I think I broke my house, you know?”
“Pete-“ and Tony didn’t know what he was going to say because he didn’t know. He honestly had no idea what it was that Peter was trying to say, but it was eating him alive and Tony was watching him fall apart.
“I didn’t even know I could get drunk, you know? I thought- thought I was like Steve.” He huffs out a wet laugh as if he’d just said a joke. “Turns out it just takes bit more than normal but I- I’m definitely drunk right now so- so maybe I was drunk then, too.”
And the way he said it, as if being drunk was the worst thing ever, made Tony’s heart drop to the floor.
Something happened, and Tony was going to find out what.
“I think I’m about to throw up.”
Right after he gets Peter a bucket.
This is now an AO3 one shot called “Break Down the Wall” by El1zabethJ