Anyone who knew Tony Stark knew not to disturb him on nights like these.
Anyone who knew Tony Stark knew that if you walked in and saw him sitting in the dark with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a picture frame in the other, tears running down his face, it was best to leave as silently as possible.
Those were nights that even his wife Pepper wouldn’t attempt to talk to him, though on occasion he would go to bed and just cry as she held him tightly, trying to take his pain as her own.
Tony Stark’s loved ones all had a silent agreement that his grief wasn’t to be disturbed or discussed. Though they had all experienced loss, none had lost like this. None of them knew the pain of losing a child.
Not many of the Avengers had met Tony Stark’s son, but there were whispered rumors of a boy named Peter, who was kind and smart and so, so brave. The boy who was the center of Tony Stark’s world, who went up to space on the ship with Tony and never came back down.
Even if they never met Peter, they could all tell how much Tony loved his kid. Before his death, it was by the framed picture on his desk, the homescreen of his phone a picture of a teenage boy with brown hair and eyes and an excited smile, the smile Tony would get when talking about how proud he was of Peter because of the A he got on a test or how the promise of spending time with his kid would make him light up on a rough day. After his death, it was by the grief etched deep into his features, the pure pain in his voice as he said ‘I lost the kid’, the way that he would look like he had been slapped if anyone so much as mentioned Peter. But above all, it was nights like these.
Tony sits with a half-drunk bottle of cheap whiskey that smells and tastes like battery acid, gently tracing a smiling face with his fingertips and smearing the glass of the picture frames with both fingerprints and tears. It’s Peter’s birthday today. He would have been 18 if Tony had just fought harder.
As he looks into doe eyes that he’s never going to get to see the sparkle in again when Tony promises a rewatch of Brooklyn Nine Nine, he wonders what would be happening if Peter was alive. Tony would have thrown an elaborate party that he knows would make the kid turn red with embarrassment and mutter ‘Mr. Stark, you didn’t have to do this, I would have been happy with just pizza and Netflix-’, to which Tony would reply ‘Come on, Underoos! That’s what we do every other night! It’s your 18th, buddy, we gotta celebrate.’ He’d get Peter a giant chocolate cake from the best baker in New York. Hell, the best baker in the world. He’d get Peter any gift that he wanted and beam with pride.
Would he be taking Peter on college tours that weren’t really necessary because Tony would just use his connections to get him into MIT? Would he be teasing Peter as he got ready for prom? Would he be hanging out with Aunt May to plot the kid’s embarrassment as he got a girlfriend or boyfriend and started going on dates? Would Peter still be leaving voicemails about his Spider-activities that Tony would be smiling as he listened to before saving it to a folder that he still opens?
Would Peter have said yes to the partial custody agreement that he worked out with May and the court, so Tony would be Peter’s father and co-guardian? Would he have signed the adoption papers that Tony still has in his desk, unable to bring himself to get rid of what could have been?
He stares at the picture, trying to burn the kid’s features into his memory. He’s afraid that if he doesn’t do this too often, if he doesn’t listen to the voicemails and look at the pictures and dwell on the memories, his mental image of Peter might start to fade. It may be painful to remember, but it would be even worse to forget.
Tony has so many regrets. That he wasn’t able to keep Star-Lord in check and keep Thanos asleep long enough to steal the gauntlet, saving the kid. That he hadn’t stopped Peter from coming with him to space in the first place. That he hadn’t met him sooner and gotten more time than the two years that weren’t enough - he just wishes he had gotten more time with Peter, but then again, no amount of time would ever be enough. He wishes he had told Peter how much he really cared, just said ‘I love you, kid’, even just once. He wishes he had hugged his kid more. He wishes he had apologized for when he took away Peter’s suit, and told him how he was only angry because he was afraid and about how his heart broke when he heard Peter say ‘I’m nothing without the suit’. He would give anything to fix even one regret.
‘Mr. Stark, I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go. I… I’m sorry.’ comes up in his memories, and Tony crumbles just like his bambino did in his arms. He sobs loudly, setting down the picture and putting his face in his hands. Why Peter? Why couldn’t it have been someone - anyone - else? Hell, why couldn’t it have been him? Why couldn’t Tony have died instead of Peter?
After a few minutes, Tony removes his hands from his tear-streaked face and takes one, two, three swigs of battery acid. He grimaces as it goes down. If it didn’t have such a high alcohol content, he wouldn’t be drinking it. It tastes like crap. But the burn numbs the weight in his chest that comes from the knowledge that he’s never going to see his kid again.
Sometimes, Tony forgets, just for a moment. He goes about his day and thinks that Peter’s just at school and will be back at 3:30 unless it’s decathlon that day, thinks about how maybe he and Pep and Peter can have spaghetti for dinner before binge-watching Star Wars because it’s the kid’s favorite despite the scientific inaccuracy before it hits him like a truck. It’s like that weight in his chest from his kid being gone is lifted for a moment when he thinks Pete might just walk through the door before the grief is just dropped right back on him. When he’s around the Avengers, business partners, whoever, it’s hard to hide the tears welling in his eyes when he realizes that Midtown High School is never going to have Peter Parker walk down its steps again, that the tower is never going to have the chatty spiderling filling the once-empty space with laughter and happiness again. The penthouse feels so much emptier than it did before Pete, because back then it didn’t know what it felt like to have so much happiness in it. But now that it knows what could have been, the silence and emptiness feels so much worse.
He chugs some more of the substance. He knows Peter wouldn’t want Tony to drown himself in liquor, but he just can’t cope with the pain without alcohol to take the edge off.
Tony goes back to the pictures. He grabs his phone from next to him and opens up a folder in his Gallery that's marked 'private'. Tony starts looking through, clicking each one and zooming in on Pete's face, carefully memorizing each freckle on the kid’s face, the excitement in his smiles, the beaming look that he would get around Tony.
Tony thinks to himself how maybe Peter would still be alive if they had never met. Tony may not have been the one that snapped, but Peter's blood is on his hands. That look in his eye would still exist if it weren’t for Tony.
He hurls the whiskey bottle at the balcony’s exterior wall as hard as he can, listening to the crash as the bottle shatters and swill drips down the wall. His shoulders shake with sobs again.
The first time he threw a bottle at the wall, Pep came out, worried about him. He was crying too hard to communicate that he had realized that Peter was in pain when he died.
That night, it had hit him like a truck. Peter took longer to turn to dust than the others and was more afraid, and it was because he was Spider-Man.
His Peter Tingle would have told him about his death before it happened, meaning he had the terrifying experience that Tony'd had with the Arc Reactor years earlier. Knowing you're dying with nothing you can do. And he took longer to die than the others because his enhanced healing was trying to heal him, hold him together as he disintegrated, but it wasn't enough. It just wasn't enough to save his kid.
Previously, he had taken solace in the thought that it wasn't painful, but knowing that it was, that he was terrified and in pain and turned to Tony for help nobody could provide, took away the only bit of comfort that Tony had left. He would give anything for it to have been different. For him to be able to save the kid. But he couldn’t.
He goes to drink again to drown his misery, but remembers that he threw the bottle. With a groan, he gets up out of the rocking chair and wipes his eyes and nose with the back of his hand, wobbling as he goes inside and gets vodka from the cabinet in the kitchen. He shouldn’t be drinking, but he’s too hurt and tired to stay sober.
Once outside and on his chair, Tony grabs his phone again and resumes going through the pictures. There are too few. He wishes he had thousands and thousands of photos of his son, but he only has about a hundred. As he goes through the camera roll, he clicks on a video that he hasn’t watched in a while: the home movie Pete made on the trip to Germany that Happy sent over a few weeks after Tony got home and Peter didn’t.
As Tony watches Peter be excited by the size of his hotel room, messing with Happy, and the fact that he’s fighting Captain America, he gives a watery smile. He misses that exuberant puppy-dog energy. He misses his kid.
Tony puts down the phone and goes back inside, grabbing a silver picture frame with an image of Peter and Tony on a ‘retreat’ as cover for their superhero-ing. They’re both doing bunny ears, and while Tony’s doing his ‘too cool for school’ look with sunglasses and a suave expression, Peter looks happy, goofing off and making a funny face.
And in that moment, looking at that picture of his son, Tony makes a pact with himself that he might forget when he’s not drunk off his ass (but doesn’t): he’ll do whatever it takes to get Peter back. Even if it takes twenty years, even if it takes Tony sacrificing everything, he’s going to get his son back.
'I promise,' he thinks, looking at the picture in his hands and feeling the determination rest in his chest along with the Arc Reactor and grief. 'I promise, Underoos, I'm gonna get to see you again. One way or another.'