something that remembers
outtake from my MCU bio-dad Peter Parker series, What Didn't Go Out.
this one is set during the Tower period, before things were better. Peter can't sleep. He finds the workshop. DUM-E remembers him.
it's called something that remembers and it's quieter than the main fic. you don't need to have read ITAOA to follow it, but if you want to cry about a robot standing guard over a kid who hasn't decided to stay yet, this is for you.
something that remembers
(an outtake from In the Absence of Air – the Tower period, before things were better)
The loading dock hadn't worked. The forty-seventh floor window hadn't worked. The kitchen service entrance definitely hadn't worked – FRIDAY had flagged him before he'd even gotten the door open a full inch, and Tony had appeared in sweatpants looking like a man who was very tired of being reasonable, which Peter found he didn't care about at all.
He knew the building now. Two weeks inside it had done that – the Tower resolved itself into a map whether you wanted it to or not, elevator banks and stairwells and the rhythm of which floors had foot traffic at which hours. Peter had catalogued it the way he catalogued everything: methodically, without deciding to. He knew which corridors the overnight security team covered and when. He knew the three-minute window between camera cycles on sublevel two. He knew that FRIDAY's coverage had a soft spot on the thirty-first floor that Tony had apparently not gotten around to fixing.
He knew all of it and none of it had gotten him out.
It was past one in the morning. The room – Tony's room that was temporarily his room, the room with the good mattress and the view he hadn't asked for – was doing the thing it did at night where it felt less like a room and more like the outline of one. Too quiet. Too prepared. Peter had unpacked three things: his textbooks, his web-shooters (carefully hidden), and the picture of him and May at Coney Island. Everything else was still in the duffel.
He wasn't staying.
He got up. Put on the sweatshirt May had sent because May always sent practical things without being asked. Opened his door.
The hallway was empty. He walked toward the elevator, past it, to the stairwell at the end of the corridor. He didn't have a plan. He had tried plans. Tonight he was just – walking. Not toward an exit, not toward anything in particular. Just not lying in that room anymore, staring at a ceiling that belonged to someone else.
He went down.
He didn't count floors. He stopped when he saw the light.
It was coming through a glass panel set into a door – low, ambient, the kind that meant a room waiting rather than a room in use. Peter stood in the corridor and looked at it. He hadn't mapped this floor yet. The door had no keypad, which meant it wasn't restricted, which meant Tony had left it open.
He pushed the door.
The workshop was large. Larger than the Malibu garage had been, which had itself been larger than anything reasonable – but the ceiling was high and the benches ran along three walls and there were things on every surface, half-built things, annotated things, components Peter's eyes moved across before his brain finished processing them. Holographic displays dark. The smell of solder and metal and something underneath that he didn't have a word for, only a feeling of recognition he wasn't ready to examine.
He was three steps in when something moved.
Peter went still.
It was a robot. Arm-mounted, claw-tipped, rolling on a wheeled base – it had come from the far corner and stopped about six feet away, camera fixture angled toward him. Yellow paint, worn in places. A dent along the base that looked old, long since absorbed into the general character of the thing.
Peter's first thought was a stupid one: intruder alert. His second was: no, that's not right.
The robot's camera rotated. Made a small sound. Rotated again, adjusting, like it was running something.
Peter looked at the yellow paint. At the way the arm hung – not raised, not a threat, just present. At the camera making its slow, deliberate pass across him.
He knew this robot.
He knew it the way he knew certain things about Malibu – not as a clear image but as something with weight to it, something that had been filed somewhere below where language operated. He'd been in a lab with this robot. He'd watched it knock things over and make sounds and respond to Tony's voice in ways that were not quite intelligent and not quite not. He'd been small enough that the arm had seemed enormous. He'd laughed at him. He was almost certain he'd laughed at him.
He'd drawn it on the back of a paper in kindergarten because the front wasn't big enough.
He'd told Mary Parker, his first week in San Luis Obispo, that he missed him. He remembered that with more clarity than he wanted to – sitting at the kitchen table in the apartment, eating cereal, missing Malibu in the generalized way of a six-year-old who had lost several things at once and couldn't always sort out which thing he was missing at any given moment. Missing the workshop. Missing the smell of it. Missing the robot that knocked things over and made sounds and didn't require anything from him.
Mary had listened. Had asked questions. Had probably known more about DUM-E than was strictly necessary, by the end of it.
That had been nine years ago.
Peter looked at the robot now, which had stopped its camera rotation and was holding position, waiting.
"Hey," he said. The hour made it easier to say things out loud. "I don't know if you – I mean, you probably don't –"
DUM-E's arm extended slightly. Not toward him, just up, the claw opening and closing once.
"Yeah," Peter said. "Okay. I'm Peter." He paused. "I used to – I was here when I was little. Before Queens." He felt the slight absurdity of explaining himself to a robot and kept going anyway, because there was no one else in the room. "I don't know if you remember that. I don't know how your memory works."
DUM-E's camera rotated again. The arm adjusted. The robot rolled forward two feet and stopped.
Closer, now. Camera at roughly Peter's eye level, running what was clearly some kind of assessment.
Peter held still and let it.
He wasn't sure what he expected. The camera adjusted once more, a small precise movement, and then DUM-E made a sound – a low whir, rising slightly at the end, that didn't mean anything Peter could translate and meant something anyway. The claw extended toward him, careful, slow. The way you moved something fragile.
Peter held out his hand.
DUM-E touched the back of it. Gently. Held the contact for a moment, camera still, and then withdrew. The sound came again, lower this time, settling.
Peter let out a breath he hadn't known he was holding.
"Okay," he said. "Yeah."
DUM-E's motor idled. The robot stayed where it was, close, not retreating to the corner. Peter looked around the workshop – the benches, the displays, the half-finished things – and felt the shape of it press against him in a way the room upstairs never did. This was recognizable. Not his, not in any way he could claim, but recognizable in the way that certain things were just true regardless of what you'd decided about them.
"I tried to get out again tonight," he told DUM-E. "Didn't work." He looked at the robot. "She tell you that?"
DUM-E's arm moved in a way that might have been a shrug.
"FRIDAY," Peter clarified. "Do you two talk?"
The camera rotated.
"Right," Peter said. "Probably not."
He looked at the workbench nearest him. At the components laid out in a grid that had an internal logic Peter could read even without knowing the project. His hands stayed at his sides. He wasn't here to touch things. He wasn't here for any reason; he'd just ended up here, which was different.
DUM-E rolled to the left. Stopped. Rolled back. The motion had no apparent purpose.
"You're just doing that," Peter said.
The claw opened and closed.
"Okay," Peter said.
They stayed like that for a while – Peter standing in the middle of the workshop, DUM-E nearby, both of them not doing much of anything. It was easier than Peter had expected. The workshop had a quality he'd forgotten, or maybe not forgotten exactly, just stopped letting himself think about: it asked nothing. The room upstairs asked things just by existing, by being prepared for him, by having the right kind of mattress and the right view and all the implicit weight of someone's effort. This room just – was.
Peter's eyes were getting heavy.
He noticed it the way he noticed things he didn't want to be true: from a distance, clinically, too late. He'd been awake since six in the morning. He'd spent two hours mapping exits he couldn't use. He was standing in a workshop at one in the morning having a one-sided conversation with a robot, and his body had apparently decided that this constituted a safe enough situation to start shutting down.
DUM-E noticed before he finished noticing it himself.
The robot's camera fixed on him. The motor sound changed – a slight shift, something Peter didn't have the vocabulary to name but registered anyway. DUM-E rolled purposefully toward the far end of the workshop, stopped next to a chair Peter hadn't clocked before – not a good chair, one with a torn armrest, the kind of chair that had been kept because it was useful rather than replaced – and then looked at Peter.
Or did the thing that passed for looking.
"I'm not tired," Peter said.
DUM-E's arm came up.
"I'm not," Peter said.
The claw gestured, brief and unmistakable, toward the chair.
Peter looked at the chair. Looked at DUM-E. Looked at the chair again.
"You're a robot," he said. "You don't get to tell me what to do."
DUM-E made the sound. The low one, rising.
Peter crossed the workshop and sat down in the chair.
He put his feet up on the armrest and his head back against the torn vinyl and looked at the ceiling, which was high and industrial and caught the ambient glow of the city at its far edges. DUM-E repositioned a few feet away, between the chair and the door, motor dropping to a low idle. The sound of the building settled around them – climate systems, servers, the Tower doing whatever the Tower did at this hour.
He was not going to fall asleep.
He was absolutely not going to fall asleep in Tony Stark's workshop with a robot standing watch like he was something worth watching over.
He closed his eyes for a minute.
***
The room was empty.
Tony stood in the doorway long enough to confirm it and then pulled the door shut quietly, which was a reflex, and then registered the absurdity of being quiet about it. There was no one to wake up.
"FRIDAY," he said.
"Workshop, boss," FRIDAY said. "He's been there for about forty minutes."
Tony stopped. "The workshop."
"Yes."
"He's not trying to get out."
"He is not," FRIDAY said, with the particular evenness she used when she was declining to editorialize.
Tony stood in the hallway for a moment. He had been braced for the kitchen service entrance again, or some new variation he hadn't anticipated – Peter was nothing if not iterative. The workshop had not been on his list.
He took the elevator down.
***
The lights were low. Workshop-at-rest low, the setting Tony used when he wasn't actively working but wasn't ready to leave either – FRIDAY had learned the distinction years ago and stopped asking. Through the glass panel in the door Tony could see the benches, the suspended holographic displays gone dark, the familiar silhouette of shelving and half-finished things.
And DUM-E.
DUM-E was in the center of the room, which was not where DUM-E usually was. DUM-E was usually in the corner near the charging station or underfoot near bench three, depending on whether Tony had recently said anything that could be interpreted as praise. DUM-E in the center of the room meant something had happened.
Tony looked for Peter.
Peter was in the chair. The one Tony kept near bench two – not the good chair, the one with the torn armrest that he'd been meaning to replace for two years. Peter was sideways in it, legs over one arm, head tipped against the back, fully asleep. He was wearing the sweatshirt May had sent over and socks that didn't match and he had clearly not intended to fall asleep, because his arms were crossed in the way that was a posture before it became a position.
DUM-E was stationed between the chair and the door.
Tony looked at this arrangement.
He put his hand on the door panel.
DUM-E's arm swiveled toward the glass.
Tony opened the door anyway, slowly, and DUM-E rolled two feet to the left and stopped directly in his path. The arm extended – not toward Tony, just up, the particular angle that meant I have assessed this situation and rendered a verdict.
"Move," Tony said, quietly.
DUM-E did not move.
Tony looked at the robot. The robot's camera fixture rotated toward him, adjusted, rotated back. Holding position.
"I'm not going to wake him up," Tony said.
DUM-E's arm stayed exactly where it was.
Tony exhaled. He looked at Peter, who had not moved, whose breathing was slow and even and whose face had the specific quality of someone actually, genuinely asleep rather than performing it – and Peter was good at performing things, Tony had learned this, but he was not performing this. His cheek was pressed against the torn vinyl of the headrest. One sock had a small hole in the toe.
"He's fine," Tony told DUM-E. "I'm not going to do anything. I just want to –"
DUM-E moved another inch to the left.
Tony stopped.
He stood there for a moment, and then because there was nothing else to do he said, very quietly: "You know I could donate you to a community college. They'd love you there. Very forgiving grading standards."
DUM-E made a sound. A low, uncertain whir that Tony had always privately categorized as skeptical.
"Okay," Tony said. "Fine."
He went back to the hall.
He stood there for a moment, thinking about nothing useful, and then he went to the linen closet two floors up and took a blanket from the second shelf – the good one, the one Pepper had bought and that Tony used when he slept on the workshop couch, which he was not supposed to do but did approximately twice a week. He brought it back down.
He opened the door again. DUM-E's arm came up immediately.
"Blanket," Tony said. He held it up. "That's all."
DUM-E's camera fixture rotated. Considered. Then the arm lowered, slowly, to approximately forty-five degrees – not standing down, but accepting the terms.
Tony held the blanket out.
DUM-E took it. Gripped the edge with the claw, careful, and rolled toward the chair. Tony watched the robot settle the blanket over Peter with the focused, effortful delicacy of someone performing a task they understood mattered and did not want to get wrong. It was not graceful. DUM-E nudged the corner twice before it lay flat. Peter shifted, exhaled, and didn't wake.
DUM-E rolled back to its position between the chair and the door.
Tony stood in the doorway.
He thought about Peter putting DUM-E on the back of the family drawing because there wasn't enough room in the front. He thought about Miss you. And DUM-E, said on a patio in San Luis Obispo while the fire crackled, with the ease of a child who did not yet understand what it cost to say things like that.
He thought about a fifteen-year-old who had spent two weeks trying every door in this building and had ended up here. Not through any exit. Just – here.
He pulled the workshop door closed.
He went up to his own floor. He didn't go to bed. He sat at the kitchen table with the lights off and the city outside the window doing what the city did at two in the morning, which was not sleep but something adjacent to it, and he stayed there until FRIDAY told him, just after five, that Peter was awake and had taken the elevator to the residential floor.
Tony didn't say anything.
"Thanks," he said, eventually, to no one in particular.
FRIDAY, to her credit, did not ask him to clarify.