Air Made of Glass
Ground.
Air.
Cool ground, something unfamiliar and softer than concrete.
Warm air, warmer than the usual December chill.
Scents of something unfamiliar, something green and unplaceable.
And stars. So, so many stars, more stars than he has ever seen in his life. These are the sort of stars only seen in museums, in artist’s and dreamer’s illustrations of the world as something beautiful, a sky unclogged with pollution and a sky full of the impossible, the imaginary, an expanse unlike anything that would ever truly be real.
He can remember the distinct feeling of falling in his mind and in his bones, and yet he can not recall ever landing.
Still, he must have landed because here he is, the soft and crumbly ground beneath him balancing out the warmth in the air, his limbs strangely distant from his body and his mind swimming, yet entirely too present in his skull.
Rustling. Some sort of rustling to his left startles Tony, makes him move too quickly, makes his fingers dig into the soft ground beneath him and push himself up, the too-bright sky sliding out of view and his head swirling with an unshakable strangeness that has him positively shaking, his chest heaving as he gasps for breath.
He is not the only one gasping.
“No, no, no, no—” a soft voice, one that fills Tony with a sense of bone aching recognition and familiarity while simultaneously shaking him to the core with the fact that he did not recognize this voice, that the voice was not the voice of Jarvis or his butler’s wife or any one of his hundreds of employees whose voices echoed uniformly against gray walls and solid stone, always the same and always merging together. It was a different voice, a voice so distinctly different that it made Tony’s skin prickle, all of his nerves on end and every single thing— the scent of something fresh, the vibrant colors, the taste of something unrecognizable, the feeling of warmth and coolness, the sound of that voice— so real, so incredibly vibrant and tangible and yet notat all. It is like he is reaching through glass into a pond, clear substance melting and forming and clinging to his hand without hardly any resistance and the water against his hand and yet not, but that is not possible because that was not how the physics of glass or water functioned and yet he cannot describe the sensation against his nerves in any other way, in any way that made sense.
The rustling is still there, and Tony inhales sharply, forcing the oxygen into his lungs even though it feels wrong, felt like swallowing liquid glass or impossibly clear water and yet he is still breathing, breathing breaths that are more clear than anything he can ever remember breathing… he forces himself to inhale and to open eyes that he does not remember closing, the sudden brightness causing him to flinch back, hands fisting into soft material and chest heaving with shock. Perhaps bright is not even the correct word, as the world is streaked in shadow and darkness… vibrant, that is the word he needs, vibrant and pulsing colors surrounding him in the form of leaves, wide green leaves that cast shadows beneath the impossibly starry sky. Their shapes are wild, something that he has never seen before, their color impossibly green and their stems arching up higher than Tony can even comprehend. The air is sharp and warm, yet chills his lungs as he breathes, the grains beneath his fingers shifting and clinging to his skin— sand, he is sitting in the sand of… of a forest? Something wild, something foreign, something so far outside of the realm of his brick-and-mortar existence that Tony nearly screws his eyes shut again, tries to shake himself awake from what must be a dream, must be a nightmare, simply because he could not be awake and present despite the sand gritting against his fingers and beneath his nails, despite the strange air in his lungs and the bite of warm wind against his overstimulated skin. It had to be a dream, a falsehood that his unconscious brain had erected that would be over once he manages to jerk himself back to consciousness…
But his eyes stay open, his breathing hitches, because that voice is still there, that creepingly familiar sound is still present…
And between the too-vibrant leaves, beneath the too-bright stars, crouching there in the too-real sand, is a child.
Tony blinks slowly, his eyelids moving in that same detached yet hyper aware sensation that his entire body seems to be filled with. He blinks and he watches the way that the boy’s shoulders shudder, his body curled in on itself and brown hair cascading across thin arms as he buries his head and rocks slightly in the sand. His clothing is tattered, strange in a way that Tony cannot quite place, red and blue that seems vibrant despite the darkness that surrounds them. The only thing that holds a sense of true, real familiarity is the black shape that is slung over his shaking shoulders.
A familiar jacket.
Tony’s jacket.
The man inhales again, the air just as strange and sharp as before, and he remembers. He remembers turning to his left, walking through the alleyway, stopping at the sight of the child crouched there in the cold and kneeling down, reaching out his hand…
“...What is this?” His voice is rough, the words somehow horridly out of place in the strange, unfamiliar environment. Something about the way he spoke felt… wrong, as if they were unfit for the strange, glassy air that he is breathing. But the words are out and Tony’s chest is heaving and the dissonance that he has been feeling is sharpening into something tinged with confusion, edged with something akin to fear. “What… what—”
The voice— that strange voice, that voice that is so normal and youthful until it is not in that way that creeps up Tony’s skin and prickles his brain— stops suddenly, murmured nonsense cutting off with a sharp breath, an inhale that leaves shaking shoulders still and the child frozen like a deer in headlights. The stillness is sudden, complete, unmoving until there is a quick twitch and suddenly eyes are boring into Tony’s, wide and brown and shot through with nothing short of shock.
They stare at each other, Tony breathing heavily and the boy hardly breathing at all.
“I—” his mouth opens, emotions warring on his too young, too genuine face, his wild curls outlined by the too bright starlight in the unnaturally warm air. His voice is hardly a whisper, his lips hardly parting with the words. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” Tony cannot control his tone, cannot do anything but breath heavily as his fingers clench in the sand beneath his palms, his arms shaking where they hold his weight and his chest heaving with each inhale. “Sorry for what?”
Tony stares, his eyes wide and his nerves on end like they never have been before. The boy stares back, eyes wide and deep… too deep, too deep to be set in such a young face. And he remembers, remembers the feeling of warm skin on his cold, calloused hand for just a moment, a split second in the void of eternity before he was falling…
Tony breathes, his voice hardly more than the whisper of air through teeth, his tone shaking with something that he could not put into words. “What did you… what did you do?”
The boy is no longer still. He is trembling, something fierce and not at all a result of the wind— where did the December chill go?— but something else, something that has him quivering violently as he shakes his head. “No, I didn’t… I didn’t do anything, I didn’t mean to—“
“You did do something,” Tony shoots back because the boy had to have done something, there was no other explanation, no other reason behind this, behind the air and the sky and the ground that is so strange and foreign on his senses in a way that he cannot explain, behind any of this and of course there has to be a reason. He can remember the touch too clearly, can remember the moment that they connected in such a way that his skin prickles and his hand feels hot from just the memory. He can remember the fall, the endless nothingness… he cannot remember landing, this must be a dream…
“I…” the boy hiccups, the sound small and soft in the warm air, and Tony suddenly notices just how wet his eyes look. “I must have... no I couldn’t… but I didn’t even…” he hiccups again, painful and quick as if the sound was strangling him, and his eyes slide back over to Tony with far too much emotion for him to even begin processing. “How are you here?”
“That’s what I’m asking you!” His voice is raising and it sounds so wrong in the air, a sharp streak of metal across glass, something that clearly and painfully does not belong. “What is this place?”
“I…” the boy chokes, his voice cutting off before he lets out a deep, shuddering sigh and inhaling again. “Um… I, I’m not sure you’ll—”
“Not sure I’ll what?” Not sure he’ll like it? Not sure he’ll accept it? Not sure he’ll believe it? Because Tony Stark is sitting in the sand, his chest expanding with each vicious breath, and he is inclined to agree with all of those statements without hesitation.
“Not sure you’ll… believe me?”
The boy’s words are more of a question than an answer. Tony snorts, his nostrils flaring and his knuckles digging deeper into the gritty sand. His mouth opens, throat dry and sarcastic. “Well, we should find out, shouldn’t we?.”
The boy winces again, the expression twisting his smooth, youthful features. He opens his mouth once, closes it with a glance down at the sandy ground, and then opens it again with a cough. “It’s, uh… this is Neverland.”
“Neverland?” Tony repeats, his words flat and utterly disbelieving. His voice seems to splinter the glass in his lungs, to send cracks shooting through the too smooth, strange tasting air. His fists dig into the ground, hard and fierce because no, this could not be Neverland. It could not be Neverland simply because Neverland was not real. The entire concept of Neverland was a thing of bedtime stories and children’s fantasies, the exact sort of nonsense that he learned at an early age to shirk for more productive, worthwhile ponderings.
And yet despite all logic, all science and explanation, here he is in a strange place that feels dangerously foreign and yet achingly familiar, sitting in the sand with his arms aching and a boy staring at him, his black jacket draped over the kid’s shivering form and a warm breeze twisting softly between them.
It must be a dream. There is nothing else that it can be.
“Neverland is not real,” Tony spits.
“Then where do you think you are?” The boy’s voice is wobbly, so soft that Tony seems to be hearing it only on the edges of his mind, though there they strike golden and solid in a way that no voice ever should strike. And yet even as he opens his mouth to speak, to rebuke the child, to force some sort of logic out of this situation, nothing comes out. His mouth is still and dry, and there is no argument that can be articulated on his tongue despite the many that are buzzing beneath his skin. Nothing can deny the fact that he can feel the sand beneath his fingers, that he can taste the strangeness, that he can sense the other-worldliness in the air surrounding him.
Perhaps he is drunk. That is a possibility, a good one in fact. Tony is no stranger to alcohol, after all. Did he drink something today? Could he simply be suffering the consequences?
Perhaps he had made it to the gala after all. Perhaps he was wrong in the head, and the turn down the left of the alleyway had never happened. Perhaps it was all a fabrication of his mind, the result of too much alcohol in his veins. Or maybe it was not alcohol at all. Anyone could have spiked his drink while at the gala. It would not be the first time it was attempted, though perhaps the first time it succeeded.
He could simply not be lucid. Something— alcohol, sleep, anything that can cloud him to what’s real— that has to be behind this fever dream mirror of reality. There is no logical explanation otherwise.
The boy is still staring at him. And the longer he stares, the shallower his breaths seem to come.
“This…” he speaks slowly, the words a whisper that Tony is not sure that he is supposed to hear. “This is not… this should not be possible.”
The snort of laughter that blows from Tony’s nose is nothing humorous. “You’re telling me?”
“No, no you can’t…” the boy looked down, his eyes flickering shut with a sharp, tight squeeze that is coupled by palms pressing against his eyes before he looks up again. “You can’t be here. You shouldn’t be here.”
Tony snorts again, once again completely devoid of humor. “Really.”
“It’s dangerous here.”
“Oh yeah? What’s going to happen?” Tony inclines his head, the bitterness in his chest dredging up what little he remembered of the tales of Neverland, the frivolous fictions that nannies or babysitters would twist before his father waved them off. “Are the fairies vicious? Captain Hook, is that what you’re scared of?”
“Sir, you don’t understand—”
“Oh, I understand plenty. I understand that I am in some twisted sort of hyper realistic hallucination,” Tony snaps. He pushes his hands back, palms sliding roughly across the smooth, gritty sand, grains sliding off of his skin like water as he leans forward, one hand on his knee before he rises to his feet. The child in front of him scrambles, the black jacket still clutched tight in pale-knuckled hands despite the heavy warmth in the air around them as he too rises to his feet.
The realization of how small he is, that he is almost a full head shorter than Tony— a man who relies more heavily on his ego and representation for his presence in a crowd than any sort of natural height— is something dim and distant that scratches across the surface of Tony’s skin as the boy shakes his head, brown curls bouncing just above wide brown eyes.
“Sir, mister uh… I, I didn’t catch your name but—”
“Tony Stark,” Tony snaps on instinct, his feet moving without any direction but forward. The boy skitters at his ankles, his fluffy brown hair bobbing and his expression something deeply distressed. Tony makes a point of not looking at it.
“Mister Stark, uh, sir, I uh… Peter, by the way, my name’s Peter—”
“Peter?” Tony stops in his aimless steps before he has gotten more than three paces, turning to settle an incredulous gaze on the young boy behind him. The fragments of what he has heard, of the chubby drawings that smile at him from the covers of children’s books and coloring pages cause him to draw back his lips in something like a grimace of pure disbelief. “Peter Pan?”
The boy stares up at him, the distress flickering away for a moment to be replaced by something like confusion. “No? Peter Parker.”
Tony blinks, unsure of how to respond. He settles for a snort that could be interpreted as a laugh and a shifting of his posture to angle himself away from this boy, away from Peter Parker and toward something— anything— that could be counted as at all normal.
But of course nothing can. Not here, where everywhere he looks there is a bombardment of too-vibrant plants and too-bright stars. Nothing about this place—whatever it may be— is normal.
He is ready for this fever dream to end.
He turns again, somewhat angled in the same direction he was a moment prior. This time he makes it a full four paces forward before he is stopped again. This time though, it is not him stopping himself, but rather a small hand reaching out and grasping the hem of his white button-up.
“Mister Stark—”
“Don’t touch me,” Tony bites out, far more bitter than he intends. He can see the boy flinch, the flush of hurt that crosses Peter Parker’s open, expressive face, but he can also still remember the burn of the contact between his open hand and the boy’s warm palm. He can remember the prickling sensation and the instantaneous, unstopping sensation of falling, and he cannot help but tug himself sharply from the boy’s grasp. It is not hard; the boy was hardly holding on at all, his hand dropping to his side even as Tony steps back.
“I’m sorry, I— I’m sorry, sir,” Peter’s voice trembles, and he both looks and sounds genuinely sorry. His hands twist into the black fabric of the jacket that is still slung across his shoulders, his knuckles white under the all too bright gleam of the impossibly numbered stars above. “I don’t know… you aren’t supposed to be here—”
“No kidding.”
“—it’s dangerous, it… it can be dangerous if you don’t know your way around and, and you definitely don’t know your way around or, or what to do or anything—”
Tony snorts again, the irony of a child claiming that Tony Stark does not know anything almost enough to pull true humor from him. His voice is flat and edged as he speaks. “Just point me to the exit, kid, and I’ll be gone.”
“No, it’s…” Peter’s eyes slide shut again, a strangled noise escaping his throat as his hands reach up to claw at his wavy brown hair. “It’s not that simple, you can’t—”
The boy cuts off suddenly, sharply, his eyes snapping open and his entire figure going rigid as the words stop in his throat. Tony did not even speak this time. The boy just froze and now stands there, still frozen, his fingers in his hair and his eyes wide, dilated, every inch of his body still.
The change is so sudden that despite everything, despite the strange surroundings and the anger and frustration and confusion that buzzes heavily in Tony’s chest, despite the blame that weighs steadily in his mind and the way that everything around him feels off, something inside Tony clenches at the sight of the boy locking up, and he cannot help but feel something. The anger staves off just enough for him to take a small— very small— step forward, to shift his body weight closer to the strange boy.
“Peter?”
“We have to go.” The boy’s voice is so low, so miniscule, such a soft whisper that Tony does not even see his lips move.
“Go?” He repeats, the edge creeping back into his voice as he does.
“We have to go.” Peter’s voice is stronger this time, much stronger, and it does not leave time for hesitation. The boy unlocks in an instant, the tension that had stilled his limbs and kept him in place gone like the snap of a rubber band. He leaps forward, his movements quick and agile in a way that Tony was not expecting as he begins to run.
Tony takes one step backward, arguments on his tongue and white-hot confusion in his mind, but before he can speak any of it he is interrupted by a laugh that echoes out through the sky. It is a laugh that cannot be human, that cannot be natural, that can hardly be counted as a laugh and yet can hardly be categorized as anything else.
Perhaps the only other word that could come close is a scream.
Tony Stark does not even feel his feet moving before he suddenly is, his polished black shoes kicking up sand and dirt as he scrambles blindly after the boy moving into the tree line, the only thing he can in any way recognize in this strange place. Bright, broad leaves streak past him as he runs, thick fronds catching on his expensive slacks and tearing at his clean white button-up. His lungs heave in his chest, clear air burning his throat as he gulps dryly, the ground shifting beneath his feet as he kicks up more sand. He has no idea where he is headed, no idea where he is to begin with, but something primitive and fundamental in his mind hears that chilling, echoing sound that fills his limbs with unbidden adrenaline and screams at him to run. He can hear the slap of his feet against the ground, can hear the sound of his pulse in his ears and— somewhat less clearly— the rustle of the bushes ahead where Peter darts through the fronds.
Tony has no other sense of direction but to blindly follow that rustling.
Moments later the noise falters and suddenly Peter is there next to him, grabbing at his shirt to direct him toward a sharp turn. There is too much adrenaline in Tony’s veins for him to jerk away, but the moment that Peter motions to the hole in the ground he takes his first pause since they began running.
“What, no you can’t mean—“
“Come on,” Peter says, one hand still tugging at Tony’s sleeve while the other is fisted tightly into the jacket that still hangs across his shoulders. “It’s safer down here!”
“A hole in the ground?” Tony asks incredulously. His feet stay where they are until Peter gives him another tug and he stumbles forward with the realization that the little boy is incredibly strong.
“Yes, come on, we’ve got to go—“
“No—“ Tony jerked his arm away with the sharp riiip of fabric. He cannot even bring himself to care that he just ripped a perfectly nice shirt because Peter is staring at him with those huge brown eyes and the look of pure panic that is visible is almost enough to make Tony falter, and yet… “Why should I follow you anywhere? It’s your fault that I’m—“
“I know!” Peter’s voice is raw, genuine, shot through with a sort of desperate emotion that stops Tony in his tracks. He blinks, and Peter’s left hand rises up to pull at his hair while the right stays firmly clenched in the fabric of Tony’s jacket. “I know, I’m so sorry, but I just— I didn’t mean to, I didn’t— please, please, I don’t want you to get hurt!”
Maybe it is the desperation in the boy’s eyes. Maybe it is the way that his voice cracks, that his sentences tumble out of his mouth and tangle with each other in a knot of pure emotion. Maybe it is the “please”. Maybe it is the echoing laughter from somewhere off in the distance.
Tony’s mouth falls shut with a snap and he moves forward, his palms in the dirt as he ducks and slides into the hole.
It is small, it is cramped, and if there was any slight slimmer of a chance that his clothes would be salvageable it is now gone. But Tony holds his breath, he wriggles through, and a few moments later he is gasping as he rolls across a dusty dirt floor in the darkness. A moment later Peter drops down, his bare feet soft against the dirt, and a low thump echoes through the space as what little light had come through from the sky was cut off. The total darkness engulfs them, harsh and encompassing and so dark that Tony can not see the dirt that was only an inch in front of his face.
It is dark, it is musty, but somehow Tony can feel tension draining from his body as he lies there in the dirt.
“What…” Tony coughs, his throat suddenly raspy and dry in a way it had not been a few minutes prior. He tries to shift himself up, but it is difficult to maneuver in the pitch blackness that envelops them. “What was that…?”
“It’s, uh, a hidey-hole.” There is a noise, something like a low skritch across metal, and light flickers into existence. Tony orients and then presses his palms against the dirt, pushing himself up into a sitting position as he glances across the small room to see Peter hunched over some sort of lantern. The lantern is silver, a shape that seems ancient and strange to Tony, and its soft yellow glow flickers as its light cascades across the worn dirt walls. Peter sits back, his eyes darting up to Tony only briefly before back down to the light source. “There’s a lot of them, all over the island actually. They’re helpful, a lot of the time.”
“Not the hole,” Tony chokes out, the words bitter and harsh in a way that he did not mean. It is a reflexive tone, one he resorts to often, and he cannot work up the energy nor give himself a good reason to try anything else. “The laugh. The noise or, or whatever. What was that?”
The lamplight flickers, warm and bright against the packed-dirt walls. It curls around Peter as he hunches over it, his form suddenly rigid with tension and jaw tight. His fists are still curled in the black fabric of the jacket, pulling it tight around him in the slightly-chilly air of the hole. He does not seem to notice how tightly he is gripping the fabric, his eyes narrowed and his chest moving steadily as he makes eye contact with Tony.
“Danger,” he says, a simple answer that does not satisfy the complicated question. It does not satisfy the terror that Tony felt, the instinctive adrenaline that pumped into his veins as he heard that sound, something chilling and foreign and yet creepingly, horridly familiar. Something that he felt he should know, that he should recognize and fear, despite the fact that he has never heard anything like it in his life.
It is the same way that Peter’s voice makes him feel as it creeps along his skin and burrows into parts of his brain that feel distant and underused. It is the same way that everything here feels just a bit skewed, just a bit too real and a bit too vibrant. It is the way that nothing here is quite remarkable, and yet he knows in his bones that everything he can see is unnatural and not right. It is the way that everything brushes his senses the wrong way and makes his skin prickle as he simply breathes.
Tony is ready to wake up from this nightmare.
“Well that’s helpful,” he snaps instead, his voice sharp and grating against the strangely soft dirt that he sits on, the soft lamplight that flickers across the walls. The bitterness in his tone is forked and sharp, and he can see a small flinch cross the young boy’s features. The tiny twinge of regret that he feels is not enough for him to back off. “I suppose you’re not going to explain what you did to me either, then?”
“I didn’t—!” Peter exclaims quickly, but Tony interrupts before his protest can truly leave.
“No, no, you said it yourself.” Tony’s voice is something of a whisper, harsh and vicious as he flings a hand up to gesture toward the hole they came in from. Peter flinches at his words. “You said you know.”
“No, I-I didn’t, I couldn’t—”
“You did.”
“No, I—”
“You did something, you know what you did—”
“No, I don’t!” Peter shouts, loud and sharp like a thunderclap. His jaw instantly snaps shut, his eyes wide and his entire body freezing. His voice echoes in the enclosed space, a thrumming exclamation that pushes through the glassy air.
There is not much room between them, perhaps two feet of dirt floor space, the packed walls rising up just barely above Tony’s head as he sits and stares at the boy in front of him.
Peter breathes hard, the movements strange and wavering in the lamplight. His shoulders shake, and he shuts his eyes as he presses his forehead roughly against his knees. A groan slips out from between his lips, something guttural and painful.
“I said… I-I know what I…” he stops, and inhales with a shudder, his voice hitching as he continues. “I know what I said. I know… I know I must have… this is my fault a-and I’m…I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Tony opens his mouth halfway through the boy’s words with an instinctive rebuke on his tongue, ready to once again berate him and demand something— anything— solid, sensible, informative. But when the silence opens up for him to speak, nothing comes out. The words dry up before he can attempt to speak them, his lips frozen and his tinge unmoving.
Tony Stark has heard the phrase “I’m sorry” many times in his life. He has heard it from business partners apologizing for delays in plans. He has heard it from Jarvis when there is a bit too much traffic for him to handle and Tony arrives a full minute late for a meeting. He has heard it from skittish interns when they splash their coffee just a bit too much, some of it ending up on the pristine Stark Industries floor. He has heard it from hundreds, thousands of strangers who bump into him on the street without even realizing who he is, or who try to bar him from entering a venue and become very painfully aware of who he is. He has heard the words “I’m sorry” more times than he ever cares to remember.
But he has never heard the words “I’m sorry” whispered more genuinely than in that moment, in a dirt-walled hole in the ground with a small child huddled two feet in front of him, eyes wide and brown and more real than anything Tony has ever seen before in his life.
Never before has he heard the words “I’m sorry” and known, truly known to his very bones, that they are meant.
He inhales slowly, entirely unaware that his lungs had been empty. The air fills his lungs with that same clear, glassy texture, this time with a mingled taste of dirt and earth that he had not noticed when he had been on the verge of shouting. His fingers curl into the dirt beneath him, the soft texture pushing against his senses as he lets the air out in a puff, then exhales again. The dirt between his fingers is warm. Solid.
Real.
And even more real is the boy in front of him, the boy with dirt-streaked limbs and torn clothes, his hands fisted into the jacket that Tony offered— no, gave— him, his head pressed into his knees with a force that looks painful as he breathes heavily, his shoulders shaking and his limbs tight with tension. It is as if he is bracing for something. It is as if he is waiting for Tony to lash out… again.
“Alright.” The word is on his breath before he realizes he is speaking, a soft sound that is more exhale than voice. Tony swallows dry and ragged, then speaks more deliberately. “Alright. You’re sorry that’s… that’s something, at least.”
The boy shudders, but does not speak. He stays curled up, his head buried in his arms, tension in his limbs.
A feeling curls in Tony’s chest, something strange and unfamiliar that he cannot put his finger on. But no matter what he feels, he needs answers, needs clarity, needs something. So he shoves the feeling down deep inside, an action of practiced ease, takes one more breath and presses on.
“You may not have meant to do…” Tony gestures around, exasperation tinging his movements despite the fact that the kid can’t even see them. “This, but you did. You did something.”
There is something of a noise from the boy huddled in front of him, and once again Tony feels that twist in his gut. But he shoves it away, lets his mouth keep moving because the soil beneath his hands is real, the air in his lungs is real, as different and as strange and as wrong as it feels. He needs answers.
“How did you do it?” The words are a breath of air that feels out-of-place, just like everything that Tony has done in this strange, unnatural place. “How do you undo it?”
“I don’t…” the boy exhales, his shoulders shagging with the motion. Slowly, painfully, he lifts his head, wavy brown hair falling across his forehead and his eyes, wide and deep with strangely unfiltered emotion, raise up to meet with Tony’s. It strikes the man to the bone just how young he looks. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know,” Tony repeats, his voice more controlled at this point. “You don’t know what? How you did it, or—“
“How to undo it,” Peter finishes, his voice a whisper. He seems to shrink back, his eyes darting down to the dirt floor as he lets out a small breath. “I… I have no idea how to undo it.”
The words feel like a stone, heavy and cold, settling in Tony’s gut.
“Then how did you do it?” Keeping his voice steady is harder now, but he manages it. Only a tremor remains of the emotions curling and twisting in his gut— anger? Fury? Frustration? Fear? Perhaps something even more primordial, something that he does not understand. “How did you do… whatever this is?”
“I don’t—“ Peter begins, but stops himself with a rub of his hand across his face and another grunt. “Maybe I know? But it’s not… it’s not something I… something I understand, it’s not something that I meant to do, I don’t, I don’t know—“
“But what was it?” Tony presses, voice low but still potent enough to cut through the air.
“I don’t know!” The shout is lower this time, and Peter does not even make it halfway through the statement before his voice breaks. “I don’t know what I did… but it, I understand it must have been something… I understand it’s my fault.”
Something hangs in the air between them. An apology. Another “I’m sorry”, one just as deep and genuine as the first. And there is something else too, something in the way that the boy grips the black fabric of the jacket over his shoulders and the way that his brown eyes drop to the dirt for a moment to avoid Tony’s gaze. Something else that hangs heavy in the air, something that is held back by youthful lips and a white-knuckled grip.
But Tony does not press. Instead he lets out a breath, lets his chest sag, and lifts a hand to wave it through the air tiredly. “Fine. You don’t know what you did. You don’t know how you did it, you don’t know how to undo it.”
The boy nods slowly, a jerky and weak thing.
“Then how do I get back?” That is the only question Tony can think to ask, the question that everything else leads up to anyway. The question that he needs to know the answer to. “How do people leave this place?”
Because Neverland cannot be real, but if it is then there must be a way to leave. There must be a way to travel back despite the fact that Tony cannot remember a boat ride or a walk or anything of the sort before waking up in the sand. But there has to be because it is impossible for there to be no exit.
Peter’s eyes once again drop away, the lamplight flickering warmly across his face. “This is Neverland,” he says, the words soft and small and yet clear, painfully clear in the cramped quarters. “Leaving is… complicated.”
“But it is possible,” Tony insists. “It has to be. You left.”
The boy blinks, his eyes moving back up to meet Tony’s. There is a flash of confusion, a flash of realization on his features, still so open and readable that it takes Tony aback. Then his expression shifts again, something like sadness twisting his features. “Yeah, I guess I did. But… I don’t—“
“You don’t know how you did.” Tony lets out a harsh huff at the boy’s sheepish nod, unsure of why he expected anything else. “Of course you don’t. Why am I not surprised?”
“It’s not an easy thing to do,” Peter says, shaking his head a bit with the words. “Especially if you are trying.”
“Yeah, that’s not cryptic or confusing at all.” Tony clenches more dirt between his fingers, his right hand still moving through the air. “Isn’t there something about fairy dust? Some star to the right?”
“It’s pixie dust, actually. And that’s not how pixie dust works,” Peter says with a frown and a shake of his head. But the moment he stops speaking his eyes widen, his mouth falling open slightly before he looks up sharply, the sudden eye contact nearly startling Tony. “Of course! Pixies!”
“Uh, yeah?” Tony says slowly, a bit whiplashed by Peter’s sudden excitement. He did not know much of the stories of Neverland, but the thought of cartoony drawings of tiny winged people did not fill him with much confidence. “And what exactly could pixies do?”
The simple act of speaking such a ridiculous question aloud made him want to groan. He could practically feel his father rolling in his grave.
“I have a couple of pixie friends!” Peter nods to himself, leaning forward with the motion so that the knees that were pulled protectively up to his chest now hit the dirt ground before him so that he can lean closer to Tony. “Well, sort-of friends. Good acquaintances? It doesn’t matter, they know more than I do, a lot more about this sort of thing.”
The idea of visiting fairies, pixies, whatever they are called, is not something that dregs up Tony’s excitement in quite the same way that it does for Peter. He feels himself frowning, his posture skeptical as he raises an eyebrow. “What sort of thing, exactly?”
Peter waves a hand nonchalantly. “Magic, mostly.”
“Of course,” Tony says, his voice flat and toneless as he tries to gauge if the child is joking in any capacity. From all that he can tell, Peter is dead serious.
More than serious, the kid looks excited. Peter is beaming now, and Tony blinks slowly as he realizes that it is the first time that he had seen the boy truly smile. He had been huddled in a dirty alleyway when Tony first set eyes upon him and while there had been something brief cross his face at one point during their first conversation, it was hard to count it as a true smile. Now, it lingers. The expression looks right on his face, comfortable and cheerful in a way that forms tiny dimples in his cheeks and adds a spark of life to his unnaturally deep, dark eyes. It seems natural on his features, fits him in a way that the worried frowns and gritted teeth do not.
A face made for smiling, Tony thinks wryly, and then has the urge to roll his eyes at himself for the childish description.
“Yeah. Things like… like whatever I must have done…” Just like that, the smile falters, the light dies, and Peter is curling back in on himself. It is not as tight as it has been, but it is still a visible shift in the way his shoulders hunch and his fingers tighten into fists against his knees. “It… it has to be magic. There is no other way.”
“There are plenty of other ways,” Tony says automatically, if only to avoid giving into the desire to scream magic isn’t real! at the top of his lungs. He contains himself, leaning heavily on the fact that logic is discovered over time.
Peter gives him a look, but he does not push. Instead he lets out a slow, bone-deep sigh that stirs the glassy air before him. He straightens up, a determination in his eye as he looks up at Tony.
“Mr. Stark… I messed up. I made a mistake, and I brought you here.” His eyes flutter shut, brief and quick, and when they open again Tony finds himself fixated by a gaze that is deep, dark, eyes so brown they could be black and the depths of that blackness glinting, sparkling, with something more intense than Tony has ever experienced from another person's eye contact.
The boy’s hand extends, and Tony cannot help but think about how earlier that night— if it could still be considered the same night at all— he had reached out in a manner that was not all too different.
“I promise you,” Peter says, his voice low and clear and completely devoid of any earlier stutter or stumbling. His words fall into the air and hang there, waiting. Intense. Powerful. “I will get you home.”
The words linger in mid air. The world seems to hold its breath, anticipation creeping between the two as silence stretches between them.
Tony Stark is a man of the world. He is a man of science, he is a man of logic. He does not believe in magic, in fairytales, in Neverland and Peter Pan.
But as a man of logic, of science, Tony Stark understands that sometimes stepping into the unknown is easier with a guide.
He reaches out, and with the weight of the words in the unnatural air, he takes Peter Parker’s hand.