The cliffside always makes the tide unpredictable,and yet, Tony is never concerned about being caught in the wrong moment. This was his life’s work, wasn’t it? Making the impossible possible. Billionaire, genius, playboy, philanthropist. The maker of dreams, constantly fixing. The tide won’t take him. Stronger things have tried and failed. Of course, the mansion did end up crashing down into the Pacific so perhaps this isn’t the greatest analogy.
Tony walks along the coast, the rocky sand rough against his soles. He looks up. It seems so… small. It doesn’t seem possible that space was choking him just years before. Surrounding him, dark with no respite from the constant blare of the solar system or the pitch black of isolation. It doesn’t seem possible that it almost killed him twice.
For the first time since Morgan was born, Tony thinks about Peter.
Peter hated English class. Tony doesn’t know why this is the first thing he thinks of, but he smiles at the memory. When he was 14, when Tony had first met him, it was only because he was a science nerd with an utter hatred for the non-literal. Tony had tried his hardest not to think of himself and let the kid take a hammer to his facade, but nothing had cracked his heart until his utter hatred of “Dover Beach”.
“What does it mean?” Peter had said. Tony had gotten stuck in a riveting conversation with May over Peter’s workload and grades when he was dropping him off (at the time, he had convinced himself it was courtesy over care) when the conversation had turned to Peter’s hatred of English.
“It’s talking about societal issues in the Industrial Age, Peter.” May rolled her eyes fondly at her nephew’s frustration.
“Ok, but how does Sophocles relate to Queen Victoria?”
“I don’t think Queen Victoria’s mentioned in Dover Beach.”
“It’s probably an analogy, kid.” Tony shrugged, looking amused at the boy.
“No, no, no.” Peter threw his hands down onto the mahogany table, old with the dirt and heat of Queens. “An analogy is supposed to be obvious. It’s supposed to make things clearer. That,” he pointed to his paper. “Is just dumb.”
Tony watched, barely concealing his smirk at Peter.
“Let’s ask the genius in the room. Maybe he can bring that grade up for you.” Tony felt both sets of expectant eyes fall on to him. Oh no.
“Oh,” He said, sweating under May’s gaze. “I mean, I never really went to high school.”
Both of them groaned.
Later, on the car ride home, Tony had texted Peter.
“Trust me, kid. I failed English 101 at MIT. You don’t want me as a tutor.”
Peter had only sent an emoji in response.
Nearly three years later, that poem was all Tony could think of. He couldn’t help but think that the poem echoed so perfectly into the present now.
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Peter had been his first tide of hope. Morgan was his everything, but Peter was his first. The cadence would never stop beating for the rest of his life.
-
Peter was alone. He had thoroughly fucked up everything. He had lost his parents, lost his uncle, lost his Tony, lost his aunt. And then he gave up MJ and Ned and Happy and everyone who had ever loved him.
Not that that was a very long list to begin with.
He looked at the stack of books on his side table. His last possessions, last reminders, of his past love. His first love and likely his only love. He wasn’t stupid enough to let anyone else in. Greek dramas. MJ had always been an English nerd. Reading thick, political treatises filled with “witty repartee” and “irony to the max” that commented on society. Peter hadn’t liked the pure philosophy of Aristotle or the dry writing of Machiavelli, but had quickly fallen in love with the dramas. Bachae, the Oresteia, Elektra, even Narcissus (he had a hard time reading that without imaging Narcissa Malfoy) were all funny and oddly enchanting in their crude writing and odd format.
Out of all of them, however, he preferred Antigone. Maybe it was because his own life was so filled with tragedy. Maybe it was because (when he first read it) his life posed such a contrast to Antigone’s lonely and empty life despite their similar life experiences. It’s only now that Peter realizes it was written by Sophocles.
He picks it up, thumbing through the rough edges of the copy. It’s a Penguin Classic, but the cheap paperback kind that wears with age and dust and is sold at the Subway. The cover is unadorned, simply aerial text placed over black and a white stripe running through the middle with Penguin Classics written on it.
It’s funny how time changes people, Peter muses. He doesn’t think that Mr. Stark would recognize him today. He hated English as a child.
He lets his mind wander back to the lab at the Avengers tower.
Peter had groaned, leaning over his laptop.
“What happened?” Tony asked. He was working on something. Was it a car? No, it was DUM-E. He had made a marvelous motor oil smoothie earlier that day, Peter recalls. Pepper had found it hilarious and then attempted to get Tony to the hospital wing. The only way he had gotten out of that was by promising to fix the robot.
“I got a bad grade on my english test.” Tony looked up from his tinkering.
“Oh, English. Horrible subject.” He leaned back down. “Pepper’s always been trying to get me to read her romance novels.”
“Are they any good?” Peter had asked, curious. Ms. Potts’ hadn’t seemed like the type to read romance.
Tony had snorted, and drawled. “They’re definitely not for you.”
Peter had blushed bright red and went back to analyzing his grade.
“You know, you should get around to reading philosophy sometime.”
“Philosophy?” Peter had wrinkled his nose. “It’s just a bunch of old white men preening.”
“You don’t have to read Greek philosophy. I mean, I would start with Sophocles but that’s only because he did everything I don’t do. Diogenes is a personal favorite of mine. Search him up.”
“I don’t know how to spell that. Besides MJ says I have to start with the Greeks before focusing on the other stuff. Something about them being the dumbest of the lot..” Privately, Peter thought MJ just had a problem with old white men. Not that he would ever tell her that. She was terrifying. Tony gave Peter a knowing look.
“Smart kid.” They then returned to silence, Peter mourning his grade and admiring his code and Tony trying to avoid DUM-E’s passive aggressive swipes.
Peter looks down at the book again. He’s read this three times over already.
He rereads Antigone the day after he has lost everything. The sorrows, the peaks, the lines that he’s read over and over again in the context of time now lost. It’s only after that he reads the preceding quote before the play begins.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
Peter knows more pain than the Northern Sea ever did.
-
Nat and Steve didn’t stay for lunch. He knows they wouldn’t, kind of expected them to walk back in their self-righteous anger, but it still hurts to watch them go. It doesn’t matter anyways. They had always been the first to leave.
As Tony sits on his porch, coca cola in hand, watching the tide stretch upon the lake, he wonders when he lost his faith in them so completely. Obviously, there had been the Accords. Undeniable, unavoidable, perhaps his antithesis is what would’ve always killed him one way or the other. First, the drinking, then the responsibility. Shield plunging straight to the heart. Steve had always known how to push Tony’s buttons. Or maybe Tony had always brought out the worst in Steve.
But even after that, he had harbored some misconceived notion of faith. That maybe, just maybe, Steve would come back. Or rather, his Steve would come back. Time had only proved Tony more foolish. People don’t come back. Few people had even bothered to stick with all his habits and his eccentricities.
Tony mused over a line, a slight paraphrasing of something Pepper had read that morning to him. He had been half-asleep, just comforted to have her words gently brushing over him.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Where was that from?
“Friday?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What’s that poem Pepper was reading earlier?”
“The one in the morning, sir?”
“Yea, that one.”
“It’s called Dover Beach. It’s written by Matthew Arnold.”
Tony crossed his legs, staring out into the distance.
“I didn’t know you liked my poems.” Pepper grinned, leaning against the door frame.
“Yea, well, you took all of my pretentiousness from me so I’m trying to build it back up.”
Pepper laughed, red hair shimmering along her back. God, he was lucky. She walked over to the rocking chair next to him and stared at the lake with him, relishing the silence. They never had moments like this in New York. Then again, New York now was completely different.
“What’s on your mind?” Tony let out a sigh.
“Peter hated Dover Beach.”
“What?”
“The poem. He read it to me once on a school assignment, complaining about the useless analogies.”
Pepper chuckled. “He was definitely your kid.”
“I wish he was.” Tony leaned back in the chair.
“Tell me a story about him.”
“You have your own. Like that board meeting.”
Pepper scrunched her nose. “God, I honestly couldn’t tell if the stocks had gone up or down with the way he had messed with the calculations.”
Tony let out a grunt of laughter.
“Come on.” Pepper nudged him with her knee.
“Ok.”
So he told her how Peter had made his Sea of Faith touch from shore to shore.
It was a year after Germany. Tony kept his distance. Rhodey had yelled at him for bringing a kid into the fight, and honestly, after his manic panic of keeping the team together had ended, Tony had struggled to not leave the kid’s life. He wanted to. He ruined everything he touched and had almost killed Peter. What more could he say? He stayed because if he left, he thought Peter would be even more devastated than if he stayed. As a solution, he simply kept his distance.
Then one day, Peter had shown up outside his workshop.
“Mr. Stark!” Tony looked up from his soldering. Surprised he dropped the soldering iron, barely missing his hand and in a clumsy last-ditch effort managed to get the soldering iron upright.
“Kid! You go to a STEM school! Do not yell in the lab!”
Peter had cocked an eyebrow. “How do you know that?”
“I’m secretly an FBI agent, I coordinate efforts of finding information on random teenagers.” Peter rolled his eyes. Tony distractedly, attempting not to panic, waved the boy in. “Also, you do realize that I track your location?”
“I need your help.”
“Sure. What do you need? Are we taking down a crime syndicate? You need some help with the old mob bosses? You know I’m Italian, right, I’m sure me and them would get along perfectly.”
“Yea, that and the whole bomb thing.” Tony snorted at Peter’s dry delivery.
“So, what is it?”
“I have to interview a male member of my family.” Tony became very very still. Of course, Peter started rambling. “You know, I would’ve asked someone else, it’s just that my uncle died a couple years ago and there’s only me and my aunt and there’s Mr. Delmar, but he just makes my sandwiches, and-”
Tony looked up. He didn’t know whether to be more surprised that he was asked or that someone could talk that fast.
“Kid. Relax. I’ll do your project.” Peter looked up. The kid looked like an over-excited bunny and Tony wasn’t sure whether to be endeared or roll his eyes. “When do you need to do it?”
“Now? Preferably?” Tony looked at him, with raised eyebrows. “It’s due tomorrow.”
“Kid, do not be like me. Remember, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do-”
“Or anything you would do, there’s a tiny grey area.” Tony looked aghast. Peter giggled.
“You little shit,” He said, no bite in his tone. “C’mon, let’s go do this project.”
It was the first time, Tony realizes as he’s telling Pepper, that someone had trusted him so completely before even knowing him. It was the first time in the decade after the Avengers’ had formed that Tony had been something other than a weapon to the people he worked with.
With Peter, he was just Mr. Stark. He was Tony.
-
Peter wasn’t sure what these petty criminals had against being decent people. He shouldn’t call them petty, really. Taking money from innocent people hardly seems petty and he would argue that taxes had essentially become that, but that’s beside the point. It seems cruel to abuse trust in any situation, yet it seems especially cruel in regards to what the Mayor’s doing.
It seems kind of contradictory to Wilson Fisk’s story, honestly. He was a poor man once as well, but now, it seems that he has no time for memories and almost all the time necessary for the excessive gluttony that comes with politics. He’s always cut a kind figure to the common man. Matthew had said that was his one flaw. Always and forever, head over heels for his wife. He’s also far too civil for a man that is so cruel.
Thus, Peter, the street rat (or spider) of Queens found himself crawling on to the windows of Gracie Mansion. He’s tracking down a lead of Fisk’s laundering, enjoying an easy lead after a hard day of studying. Peter didn’t really need to study, it just cut through the loneliness better than silence does.
A knock at the door. Wilson straightens in his chair. Peter creeps closer.
“Yes, let them in, let them in.” Fisk nodded his shiny head, lain thick with a level of sweat. Whether that is guilt or of the blasting heat that is blasting through the mid-winter air, Peter could not tell.
A man walks in. He’s tall and spindly in contrast to Fisk’s imposing and thick figure at the table, dressed in shabby clothes and a noticeable limp. “Mr. Fisk, I’m afraid I have some bad news to tell you.”
The man has a distinct accent. Washington Heights? Queens? Somewhere in the center of the city, maybe.
“Well, get on with it, I don’t have all day.” Fisk attempts too hard appear confident. Peter hears his Brooklyn accent gently leaking through.
“See, sir. It appears that the NYPD is cracking down harder on the elites of the city.” The man has a strange glint in his eyes, like he’s plotting something. Fisk’s hands tighten into soft but noticeable fists.
“Is that so?” Fisk leans back in his chair, projecting an air of just cracking nonchalance.
“Yes. They’re offering a good prize to us too.”
“Really?”
“Of course, sir, we both know that the things you have asked me to do seem like they would be of…” The man shifts his weight, and flutters his hands in an arc. “concern to them, dontcha think?”
“And what do you think they will say? When they find out it is you who did it?”
“Oh, sir.” The man clicks his tongue. “I’ll make a deal. How will you get out of it though?”
Peter watches Fisk slowly open his desk drawer. A sense of dread fills him.
“Come on now, Marks, you know my protection would hold better than the police.” It’s an ask for a treaty but a level of threat sits beneath it.
“Oh, I’m sure sir, but me family could do with the reward money.”
“Alright.” Fisk leans back in his chair, leather plush against his back. The drawer is now fully open. Peter’s trying to figure out how to look into it without being conspicuous. He needs to know if he should intervene. “How much do you want?”
“Well, the NYPD is offering $2500.”
“Why don’t I make it 5,000?” The tall man’s face flickers in surprise, not going unnoticed by Fisk who is gently smirking.
“Why, thank you sir! I- yes- of course-”
“Think of it as a Christmas present.”
Fisk takes a checkbook out of the opened drawer. Peter relaxes, but his muscles remain taut. His sixth sense tells him something’s wrong.
“This will give Maria and Joaquin something to look forward to, no?”
“Yes, sir, Maria’s been asking for a new laptop. She’s on her way to Harvard, that one.” The man boasts. Peter watches. He knows the drill. All men who do bad things cannot always be doing it for bad reasons.
“What does she want to do?”
“English. Her favorite’s that Matthew Arnold, lad. Never saw much value in the word of the man.”
“Here. Treat her to something good. We’re all in Arnold’s ‘darkling plain’, no?”
The man thanks Fisk and turns.
Then.
Split second.
Peter can’t stop it.
He doesn’t move fast enough.
It sounds like a hammer hitting firm metal.
The man falls to the ground. There’s blood around his head, spreading like a wretched crown.
Fisk is sitting at his desk smiling. He walks to the man. He’s choking on his own blood.
“Don’t you see, Marks? I’m the next Ironman. I help people, I save people. I do things for the greater good for everyone. The next time I see your daughter, I’ll tell her: Begin and cease and begin again, the tremulous cadence slows and brings the eternal note of sadness in again. Tell her what her father really cared for.”
Fisk kicks the man and suddenly his breath is gone. Marks is dead.
That night, Peter finds himself on the top of the Queens bridge. He knows the significance this bridge has to his variants. Peter 3 had spent his last night with Gwen here, but honestly, Peter can only think of the last night of that man. The world had become colder, after the blip. The city had turned desperate.
Desperation, of course, came in two ways. The warm desperation that was drowning you, so you were forced to connect. Forced to make a new life, forced to love someone to make up for the world that had let you down. Or the cold desperation. The sort that clawed its nails through your lungs, up to your brains, that had your mind echoing for cold revenge, for agony. The kind that made you wrap around yourself till your breath had mixed with the snow and your eyes had become ice and you could feel nothing. You only had the cold hard facts. You wanted to make someone pay.
New York had been making people pay before it could speak English.
Matthew Arnold. Isn’t that who the girl had liked? The man’s daughter.
“Karen?”
“Yes, Peter.”
“Read me a poem by Matthew Arnold.”
“Of course. I believe you and Mr. Stark read a couple of his poems.”
“Oh.” Peter pauses. Death really did seem to be the theme of the night.
“Would you still like to read it?” He feels his mask push the back of neck gently, almost like a caress.
“Yeah.” He exhales. “Let’s read it.”
The poem is pretty. It’s a bit melancholy, pessimistic for sure, basking in pretentiousness and a pride in the “old ways”. Peter has always thought the old ways had been far too violent. Why was it that people always prided their ways? Why did they refuse to change, and bend, moving for what they only valued? What led people to be so selfish? Were people worth saving if they were going to kill each other over and over again?
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Peter got up. He had a city to save. He had to be true, even if the rest of New York was breaking down. He thinks of Fisk- a man that was desperately trying to be everything Peter had dreamed of since he was a child. Desperately trying to be his father. He had built an empire of blood yet he tries to make himself a king. He thinks of the poem that he so hated but now he cannot escape. He thinks of Antigone, he thinks of MJ, he thinks of Tony. He doesn’t have the answers. He doesn’t think he ever will. But he wants to do better.
So, Peter swings.