friendlyneighborhoodspidernerd:
It was Peter’s turn to blink right back (like a mirror image of Mr. Stark, really – how much time was he spending in this lab anyway?). It somehow always surprised him how far Mr. Stark was willing to go for him, the lengths he’d go to make sure Peter was happy. Not just safe, not just ‘not-screwing-the-pooch,’ but happy. “That’s okay,” he said quietly, a small smile on his face. “It’s kinda nice, ya know? To have something normal. Well, as normal as anything ever gets around here.” Which… wasn’t saying much, especially when it came to Peter. (How many kids got superpowers from their school field trip?)
“What were you thinking about?” Peter asked instantly, because his curiosity about Mr. Stark’s thought process and the arc reactor in particular never waned. The reactor was, in his opinion, the single biggest breakthrough in modern technology, it would revolutionize the world – already had. And if Mr. Stark had come up with that idea because of a random tangent… Well, who could blame him for wanting to know what it was?
Peter whistled lowly. “Okay, so this is definitely an issue. Raise the terror alert to Carrie Underwood levels, plus two, gotcha,” he said, biting his lip. He raised a brow at that, but then Mr. Stark clarified and Peter felt himself flushing all over again. “I – uh, wouldn’t really know about that, Mr. Stark,” he said quietly. The thing that had been in the back of his mind for so long now, that little niggling thought, it was getting closer. Peter tried to answer, but he wasn’t sure. “Both?” he suggested softly. His mind was racing in a million directions right now, reeling from Mr. Stark’s confession, trying to find the words for his own – and wondering why it felt like it had to be a confession in the first place. “I mean – it’s about people, I guess. But not emotions, emotions I get, I feel those, but –” He bit his lip again, harder. This was the point of no return, and once he crossed this line, everything could change. “It’s about the world, too,” he blurted out. “Like, every magazine ad. And in movies and TV and books – it’s like, everyone’s obsessed with this – this thing that I just…” He stopped, inhaling deeply and holding the breath for a long moment. “Sex,” he said finally, wanting to melt a little on the spot. But now that he started, the dam was broken. The words came rushing out in a torrent. “I don’t get it. Like, Johnny always seems like he’s gonna die if he can’t – ya know. But I never – I mean, I haven’t, and I don’t even really want to, and that feels weird. Like I’m just missing this whole part of the world and people, and if everyone is telling you that you should feel a certain way and you don’t, aren’t you kind of – I don’t know, messed up?”
No one was near S.I. level, because no one was near Mr. Stark’s level. (Of course, Miss Potts had a lot to do with it, too.) But there was a reason Peter was saying this to Mr. Stark before he said it to anyone else, even Aunt May or MJ or Johnny. There was a reason he was adamant about stopping this crazy ex-boyfriend before he did any serious damage to his mentor. Because Mr. Stark had completely changed his life, trusted him when no one else did, and kept supporting him through every mistake, every mess up, every collapsed building and cruise ship. Peter knew he would always be able to rely on Mr. Stark. It was time to return the favor. “I’m okay with sounding like a bonafide genius,” he said, smiling softly. “You’ve got a lot of people in your corner, you know? We’re in this together, as a team.”
Sometimes Tony looked at Peter and wondered whether he better kick the kid out of the car before he influenced him anymore. Then he realised, either because someone else said it or that little part of his brain that wasn’t always on the edge of a mental breakdown pointed it out, that the point to do that had long since passed. Any damage that he was going to do to Peter had been done already. Any good that he could do - well, maybe he could still do some more good, could still teach him, guide him, support him in any way that he could. If that involved threatening professors and getting his homework cut way down, then he would do that, and he would do it without hesitation.
“Going to school is pretty normal, all things considered.” Most kids weren’t child geniuses like Peter, but Tony wasn’t particularly good at knowing what was the average anyway. “Pepper,” he admitted, “and staying alive. First time I tried miniaturising the arc reactor was when I was piss drunk, and I blew up the entirety of my workshop for the first time. Dum-E was covered in dust for weeks. Second time, I was in Afghanistan. Ideas come to you when you least expect them, or when you’re trying not to die. I would recommend going for something a lot simpler than terrorist abduction, though.”
Tony blinked a few times, and then grinned despite himself. He wasn’t entirely sure whether this was a meme or just a country music reference - he made a point to avoid both as much as humanly possible - but either way, Peter needed the reassurance. He had to boost the kid’s confidence somehow! “Right. Right, yeah, of course.” Tony was definitely not helping in this situation. Truthfully, he had never been very good at talking about anything even roughly in this area. The reason that he slept with anything that moved had been a relatively simple one - it got him out of his head, it let him pretend for a second that there was someone that could get as close to his heart as they were to his body, and because it felt really good. “We can work with both,” Tony said with a hum, nodding as if he had just decided to slot the answer into place. When the word finally came out, Tony looked at Peter for a moment. “Sex,” he repeated.
“Hey,” Tony said, watching as Peter continued to talk himself into a spiral. He set the robot down on the workbench and went towards Peter, putting a hand on his shoulder, looking at him as he did so. “I get it, kid. You look around at the world and there’s a part of it that you can’t understand. If everyone else wasn’t banging on about it so much - that wasn’t an intentional pun, swear - then you wouldn’t even want to understand it, yeah? That doesn’t make you messed up. That makes you unique, and unique is what saves the world. You know what is messed up? Fucking a super villain. That’s messed up. What you’re telling me - that’s normal, or at least, it’s your normal.”
Tony didn’t have much of a measure for what constituted a good talk, but he knew that every single thing that he had said was pretty much the exact opposite of what Howard would have said - what Howard did say when Tony brought Tiberius around and it was evident that there was something else to it. That seemed to be pretty close to success, or at least far from failure. “Teamwork makes the dream work, and all that tooth-rotting sweetness,” Tony said with a smile. “All I want to do is get in one solid punch on that guy, and we can throw him in jail for the rest of his life.” He paused for only a moment. “I appreciate you, you know that? Coming to me. Talking. Being with me. It means a lot, and my dad never really said that to me, and it sucked, so I just. Wanted to say it to you.”












