Made some artwork for the lovely @polaroid15 ’s Febuwhump fic: After the Storm: Chapter 19—thank you so much for allowing me to be a little part of the story, it was such a delight creating this! I love you!!!❤️❤️
I highly recommend this entire fic—it has a beautiful mix of whump, angst, fluff, comfort, and plenty of Irondad😊, please go read!!
Usually, the kid is bouncing off the walls in the final minutes before a fight. Usually, Tony has to remind him that their enemies won’t be very intimidated by his endearing puppy dog energy. Most of the time, Peter ignores him and goes into battle with a cartwheel and a shout.
Today, it’s different.
Peter is leaning against the back of the quinjet, his mask clenched tightly in one fist and his arms circling around his stomach. His gaze has a distant, faraway quality to it that unnerves Tony, especially because Sam is sitting just two seats over. In no universe would Peter spare an opportunity to talk anyone’s ear off, let alone Sam Wilson’s.
Tony takes the vacant seat beside Peter, but Peter doesn’t even look at him. He stares unblinkingly at the opposite wall until Tony nudges his shoulder. “Hey, you alright kiddo?”
Peter jumps a little. Then, when his eyes register Tony, he relaxes again, his posture dull. “Oh, hey. Yeah.”
“Yeah, no. Asking was just a formality. What’s up?”
Peter smirks a little. “Did you just say ‘what’s up?’”
“Gotta problem with that?”
Peter pinches the bridge of his nose and shakes his head, his small smile growing. “No.”
“Good,” Tony says, then nudges him again. “So? Spill the beans, Spider-kid.”
“It’s nothing,” Peter says. “I just have a bad feeling, I guess.”
An ember of concern flickers to life in Tony’s gut. “A bad feeling?”
“Mhm. But it’s probably nothing.”
Tony looks more intently at his kid. Physically, he looks fine, albeit a little pale. His knee is jumping rapidly, his knuckles bone white from where they clutch his mask. Not for the first time, Tony feels a deep, stabbing guilt for involving Peter in this whole mess in the first place. “You can sit this one out, you know.”
“No-” Peter objects, straightening in his seat. “No, it’s fine. I want to help.”
“I need your head clear.”
“It’s clear,” Peter promises. “I’m sorry.”
He’s torn. “Pete…”
“I’m fine,” Peter says. This time, he’s firm. “Just forget I said anything.”
After a long pause, Tony folds. “Okay. But we’ll stick close together. How’s that sound?”
To his surprise, Peter relaxes a little. “That sounds great, Mr. Stark.”
“Okay, then.”
The quinjet lands and Peter pulls on his mask. The city outside is overrun with aliens. Again. As soon as the back doors open, the safety of the quinjet dissipates. Chaos leaks in. There’s no time for further debate.
Tony lowers his faceplate and follows his kid out into a warzone.
------
Two, grueling hours pass.
Tony’s taken more hits than he’d like to admit and has been saved by Peter by twice that. Despite his uncertainty on the quinjet, the kid is more than holding his own.
Peter webs up one of the bigger aliens to the side of a department store and Tony shouts him praise. The kid spins, and even through his mask Tony can tell he’s smiling.
And for a moment, Tony thinks the trouble has passed.
Then an alien rips between them, throwing them both to the ground. By the time Tony stands, Peter’s already gone. He follows the trail up and finds the alien on a direct route to the rooftop where a camera crew is poised over the lip of the building. They must’ve been filming their fight, Tony realizes. Idiots.
Peter shoots a web at the alien, catching it on its scaly back. He digs his heels into the brick of the building as the camera crew above scatters, loose brick raining down to the street below. The alien screeches as Peter shoots more webs, securing it to the building. It twitches feebly as Peter twists his neck to look down at Tony, his shoulders dipping when he sees that Tony is standing.
It’s a moment of distraction for both of them. Neither of them see the second alien come. It flies in fast, colliding with Peter head on. The impact must knock him out because as the alien barrels further down the street, Peter drops from the side of the building like a stone.
“Peter!” Tony yells, his repulsors engaging long before his brain processes the hit. But even with his suit’s intuition, there’s no way he’ll make it in time.
Peter hits the pavement. Hard. He lays crumbled on his side on the sidewalk, everything about him eerily still. It reminds Tony of the time he’d approached Peter on the airstrip in Germany, and his stomach does several Olympic-level backflips.
Get him out of the street. Get him out of the street. “Any spinal injuries?” Tony asks FRIDAY through his mask.
“None detected.”
Without wasting any more time, Tony grabs Peter around the shoulders and drags him into the cover of the department store. The lights are dim and flickering, the front window shattered. He pulls Peter away from the debris and drops to his knees, his hand immediately reaching to peel the mask off the kid’s face.
When it comes free, Tony falls back into a shelf, his vision whiting out and his chest constricting down to an impossible size. On a secondary level, he recognizes he’s having a panic attack. But he doesn’t truly comprehend it.
Because Peter… Peter…
“Kid,” Tony wheezes, curling his fingers around Peter’s shoulders. “W-w-wake up.”
The entire right side of Peter’s face is stained with blood, gorey and dark. He doesn’t respond to Tony’s movements. He doesn’t even look like he’s breathing.
He looks dead.
Tony hyperventilates, clutching Peter’s still form like a lifeline. He knows he should check his pulse, but he can’t bring himself to do it. He doesn’t want to find nothing.
“FRI- oh god. F-FRI? Is he… Is he?”
It’s the most agonizing three seconds of his life. “He’s alive, sir.”
“Jesus Christ,” Tony gasps, bringing his cheek down into Peter’s chest. Sure enough, he can hear his kid’s heart. It’s the most beautiful sound he’s ever heard, and he remains that way until the static in his body eases and his breathing returns.
“Boss,” FRIDAY says. “Peter has suffered a severe head injury. Now that your panic attack has passed, it is imminent that Peter receives immediate medical attention.”
Tony lifts his head back up. His cheeks are stiff with salt, which is strange, because he doesn’t remember crying. He nods feverishly. “Right. Right.”
Biting back a sob, Tony picks up Peter and cradles him to his chest. The kid is absolutely pilant in his hold, his blood-soaked head tipping back against Tony’s elbow. The sight burns Tony’s throat with bile. He raises his head and steps back into the street.
Peter had a bad feeling about the fight, and I did nothing.
“FRI,” he says, his voice hoarse. “Take us home.”
------
Everything is a blur when they land at the compound. FRIDAY must have called ahead, because there’s a team of medical professionals waiting for them on the landing pad. They take Peter out of Tony’s arms and he stands there, numb, and watches unblinkingly as they wheel him away.
He doesn’t know how long he stands there. Shock, his mind supplies. You’re in shock.
All he can see is Peter’s still, lifeless face.
The sun is close to the horizon by the time Tony comes back to himself. He takes a quick step forward and nearly falls, his legs aching from standing too long. But they carry him anyway, his newly found determination outweighing his fatigue.
When he steps inside the compound, his suit falls away. He catches himself on the wall, exhales deeply, and pushes himself toward the medical wing. Cho is waiting for him at the threshold, as if she’d been waiting for him.
“Tony,” she greets. “It’s about time you came along.”
“I’m sorry…”
“Sit down.”
Tony does, worry building up within him like a dam threatening to break. “How is he?”
Cho’s expression falls, and Tony nearly slips into his second panic attack of the day. “He sustained a lot of damage to his brain. He’s in a coma.”
“What?” Tony asks. His voice is distant to his own ears. “A coma?”
“It’s important that he sleeps while his brain heals. There’s no telling how long it will last, or if…”
“If he wakes up at all,” Tony finishes, choked.
Cho doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t need to.
“Can I see him?”
“Of course.”
Tony follows Cho to Peter’s room as if in a dream. When they enter, the air shifts, becoming heavier. “Oh,” he says, sagging against the doorframe. The entire right side of Peter’s face is covered in thick bandages already dotted with blood. He’s hooked up to about every machine imaginable. There’s a tube down his throat.
“It looks scary,” Cho says, “but it’s to help him.”
Tony can’t look away. “He told me he had a bad feeling,” he whispers. “Before the fight. I should’ve never let him off the quinjet.”
“There’s no point in blaming yourself,” Cho says, laying a hand on his arm. “That’s not going to help Peter now.”
With a final squeeze to his arm, Cho turns and leaves. Tony stands in the threshold of Peter’s room for a long time, his heart sinking in quicksand. Then he moves. He sits by Peter’s bed. Slowly, carefully, he grabs the kid’s hand and hangs on tight. “I’m right here kiddo,” he says. “I’m so sorry.”
And after that, he can’t quite find the words to say.
-----
Over the next two and a half months, Peter has a visitor everyday. Most of the time, multiple.
Tony spends all of his free time in Peter’s room. May, too, when she isn’t working. Ned and MJ swing by after school most days and play cards over his lap. The rest of the team, to Tony’s surprise, also spend a good deal of time sitting with Peter. They sit and tell him stories about missions gone wrong and sometimes, Tony catches them saying how proud they are of him.
The city mourns the loss of Spider-Man, and everytime Tony sees a news article talking about it, it breaks his heart.
Ever since Peter had gone down, life had stopped for Tony.
But now, today, two and a half months later, Peter’s finger twitches.
It’s such a small motion, but it takes Tony’s breath away. He leans forward and stares intently. “Peter?”
Nothing happens for a moment, but then he moves again. This time, his whole hand.
“Pete? Buddy, can you hear me?”
And then the most wonderful thing happens. Peter groans, shifts his head, and opens his eyes.
Immediately, it brings Tony to tears. He collapses against Peter’s side, clutching the blankets tucked over the kid’s chest and holding him close. There’s a light pressure on his back. Peter’s hand, he realizes.
“Oh kiddo,” Tony says, tilting his face up. “I sure missed you.”
Peter’s still half asleep, his eyelids drooping and unclear. “Where’d I go?”
“It doesn’t matter right now. You’re back.”
Hit by his own words, Tony reaches for the nurse’s call button and presses it. Peter may be awake and relatively lucid, but that doesn’t mean there aren't any other complications to check out.
“I really love you kiddo. You know that, right?” God, he’s been waiting months to tell him that.
Peter blinks at him. Then, he smiles. It restores every aching inch of Tony’s heart. “I know. I love you too.”
Though Peter is largely uncoordinated, Tony guides him into an embrace. He holds him tight with the intent of never letting go. My kid, he thinks. My stupid, brave, wonderful kid.
They’ve been through a lot of storms together, some more scary than others.
Summary: Post Homecoming fight, except Tony shows up and helps Peter patch himself up.
------
Peter doesn’t like this part of the job.
The stumbling back home in the middle of the night, half-dead and thanking the heavens above that May is working a graveyard shift part of the job. He’s been hurt as Spider-Man before. Lots of times, in fact. But never like this. Never this badly.
It’s a lonely feeling.
He barely makes it to the bathroom, half aware that he’s stained the doorknob with blood. He catches himself against the bathroom counter with the little strength he has left in his arms and just stands there panting, not yet able to look at his reflection.
In and out. In and out.
As he collects his breath, he sees Toomes. He feels the heat of the fire on the beach. The impact of hitting the sand after crashing Mr. Stark’s plane. The suffocating pressure of being crushed under thousands of pounds of concrete…
Overwhelmed, he snaps his head up to look in the mirror, though his features become blurred as his eyes fill with tears. The suit he had made is torn. His body is torn. There’s not an inch of himself that’s not covered in sand, blood, or ash.
Shower, the last calm, rational part of his mind supplies. Listening, he forces his body to the edge of the tub and with a shaking hand, twists on the water. It takes three separate tries to pull the ruined remains of his suit over his head. His ribs are definitely broken. In the time it takes him to get undressed, the whole bathroom is filled with thick steam and he can hardly breathe.
He knows it’s going to hurt. A lot. He sets his jaw, curls his hands into fists, and steps under the hot water. Immediately, every cut on his body lights up with a sharp, burning pain. He cries out, his fingers scrambling to find purchase on the wet tile as his knees go weak. The entire bottom of the tub is swirling with red as new and old blood mixes with the water.
It’s too much.
Peter loses his battle to stay standing and bangs his knees against the bottom of the tub. A sob rips out of his chest before he can contain it, and after it, he can’t stop the breakdown. Here, there’s no one to be strong for anymore. Here, he’s alone.
So he cries, letting the water erase the pain and fear of the night. He lets it wash away his insecurity, his regret. Everything.
He doesn’t know how long he stays curled up on the floor of the tub, only that eventually- the water gets cold. It brings him back to being pinned under the warehouse and suddenly he can feel its crushing weight again. His tears stop as he chokes on his next breath. He reaches out blindly until he shuts off the water. Immediately, his chest loosens.
“Oh god,” he whispers, gripping the edge of the tub. He needs to get out, like, yesterday. He wraps a towel around his waist and stands in front of the mirror, shocked by the damage displayed on his arms and chest. The worst of it is the six angry puncture wounds where Toomes had dug in his metal talons. Even after the shower, some of them are leaking blood. There’s dark bruising, too, around his ribs and shoulders. So dark, they're nearly black.
With his lip wobbling, Peter makes his escape. He steps out of the bathroom and relishes in the unfogged air.
“Rough night?”
Peter nearly topples over for the second time that night, his heart stuttering as he turns toward the voice. He finds Mr. Stark sitting casually on the couch, his legs kicked up and his arm draped over the couch’s back. He’s wearing dark glasses, but he takes them off and puts them in the front pocket of his suit as Peter gapes at him. “What… How?”
Mr. Stark straightens, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. “I’m just saying, it looks like you’ve had a rough night, kid.”
For the first time that night, Peter is angry. He squares his shoulders, hoping it’ll oppose the overwhelming urge to shrink in on himself. “Yeah. Thanks for that, by the way.”
Tony looks almost impressed. He sits back again, nodding. “Yeah, okay. I deserve that.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I saw what you did at Coney Island. Impressive stuff, kid. Though I would’ve preferred if my plane stayed in just a couple more pieces…”
“I don’t care about your plane,” Peter says boldly, then, “and besides, I cleaned everything up.”
“I know you did,” Tony says, his voice softer. “C’mere.”
Peter hesitates. “I think you should leave.”
“And you’re actively bleeding,” Tony says. He holds up a small first-aid kit. “I’ll patch you up, okay? Just get over here.”
Peter caves. He walks unsteadily over to wear the billionaire sits and perches awkwardly on the next cushion over. “I’ll heal, you know.”
“Everyone does.”
“Well, yeah. But faster, I mean.”
“Not when you’re still bleeding you won’t.”
Peter bites back his next objection as Tony pops open the little first-aid kit. He digs his fingers through it and pulls out a roll of gauze and tape. “Why’d you bring that?” Peter asks.
Tony shrugs. “I had an inkling.”
Within fifteen minutes, the worst of his wounds are covered and cleaned. Tony tucks everything they didn’t use, which isn’t much, back into the first-aid kit and sets it on the coffee table in front of them. “You should keep this. Something tells me you’ll need it.”
“Why are you here?” Peter asks him again.
For the first time since meeting him, Peter sees Tony uncomfortable. He tugs at his collar and touches his fingertips to the rims of the glasses in his pockets. “If you die, it’s on me, remember?”
“It’s not on you. You made that clear when you took the suit, Mr. Stark. No offense.”
“It’s gonna take a lot more than that to offend me, kid. But I get it. And it was a mistake to take the suit. I’m sorry.”
Peter frowns. “What?”
“You’re something without the suit, Pete. Stupid as it was, you proved that tonight. I just- I didn’t want you to make the same mistakes I have.”
“I don’t want the suit back, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
Tony smirks and looks down at the ground. “Sure, kid.”
“Did they arrest Toomes?”
“They did.”
“No one else was hurt?”
“Just you,” Tony says quietly. “And speaking of, what happened? You know,” he trails off, gesturing widely to the massacre that is Peter’s body.
Peter sighs, exhaustion lowering his defenses. Toomes is in prison. No one was hurt. He points to the puncture wounds. “This was from Toomes’ suit.”
“And the bruises?”
Peter closes his eyes when he feels the oncoming signs of tears, because he is not crying in front of his childhood hero. “Nothing,” he whispers.
“That sure isn’t nothing, kid. In fact, we should probably get that checked out by a professional.”
“I don’t want to talk about it, okay? I just want to go to bed.”
Tony looks as if there’s more he wants to say, but he represses it. His eyebrows draw together. He taps his foot against the ground. “Fine,” he says, “I don’t think you’re in any mortal danger tonight. But, Happy’s bringing you to the Tower tomorrow to get checked out.”
“The Tower?” Peter asks. “I thought…”
Tony cuts him off with a flick of his hand. “I changed my mind. We’re moving back in.”
Excitement falls through him. “Why?”
“I’m Tony Stark. I don’t need a reason, do I?”
“No, sir, but…”
“Don’t question it. Just be ready when Happy comes to pick you up, alright?”
“Alright.”
Tony stands, and Peter stands too. He feels a lot better, he realizes. Not physically, but in other ways. “Thanks for breaking into my house,” he says with a smile that splits a cut on his lip.
“Thanks for not calling the cops,” Tony says, straightening his suit coat. “And, you know… for saving the day. I’m proud of you, kiddo.”
Peter doesn’t know what compels him to do it, but in the next second he has his arms wrapped around Tony’s torso. At first, Tony siezes up. Then, gradually, he relaxes, his arms coming to circle around Peter’s shoulders.
“This is a hug, by the way,” Peter says.
Tony’s chest vibrates when he laughs. “Yeah, kid,” he says fondly. “I know.”
