“Why is the bed dusty?”
Pepper raised an eyebrow, a pillow in her hands. As Tony watched, she squeezed it, and a small cloud of dust puffed up and quickly vanished into the air.
Pepper sneezed and tossed the pillow back onto the bed, where it landed with a sad thump. Tony had to resist the urge to grab the tissue box and hand her one.
“‘Cause I don’t sleep in it?”
At this, Pepper all but rolled her eyes.
“I can tell, Captain Obvious. But you don’t seriously expect me to believe you’ve been awake for at least a month without sleep.”
Tony opened his mouth, then thought better of it and closed it. Pepper just watched him squirm as she crossed her arms over her chest, a smile already creeping across her face.
“If you’ve come up with some sort of sleep-avoiding invention, I think I deserve to know, don’t I?”
“You do, hon, you do,” Tony sighed. “Not that I recommend that you start keeping to my sleep schedule.”
“Not planning to,” Pepper replied. “So, where are you sleeping? If it’s the lab bench again I’m going to start coming by at midnight and locking you up in here.”
There wasn’t a bone in Tony’s body that wasn’t certain that Pepper would follow through on her threat, even if she was halfway around the world on her many business trips.
Tony sighed for the second time in a minute.
“I’ve been…sleeping in the kid’s bed,” Tony finally admitted.
“With Peter?”
“Look, you try taking him to bed and not staying there until morning. He’s like a walking sleeping pill. He wakes up on the couch in the lab at three, so I take him to bed, tuck him in, and then he asks me to stay for a little longer. So I stay a little longer. Next thing I know, it’s seven in the morning and he’s getting up for school.”
Tony shook his head.
“I don’t know how he does it.”
When he finally looked up again, Pepper had a look of amusement and relief in her eyes. Any hardness to her features, any sign that she’d been worried about Tony’s sleeping habits had simply slipped away. It was a strange thing to witness after so many years of seeing her worried.
“Good. I’m glad.”
Pepper planted a soft kiss against Tony’s cheek and walked away, leaving him alone and bemused in the middle of his bedroom.
…
“Peter? Could I talk to you about something?”
Peter glanced up from his textbook and visibly jolted a little in his seat.
“O…Oh! Miss Potts! What can I help you with?”
Normally, Peter didn’t interact much with Pepper. She was either off running Stark Industries or dropping by Tony’s room for a few minutes before duty called and she was off on yet another plane. Today’s visit was out of the ordinary, to say the least.
“It’s just Pepper,” she replied casually, and without her makeup and a comfortable sweater on, she really did look like a Pepper. Not a Virginia Potts, CEO of Stark Industries.
“I’m sorry we haven’t really had the chance to talk yet. I hate to use work as an excuse, but we both know I haven’t really been around lately.”
Pepper sat herself down on the couch next to Peter, and though he was already up against the other armrest, Peter felt compelled to make room for her. She wasn’t a large person, but she had an aura about her – one that made Peter think of the first time he’d met Tony, back before he’d seen him fall asleep and drool on his desk, burn macaroni and cheese, or clumsily try to get Peter’s things ready in the morning after oversleeping for the fifteenth time in a row.
Pepper definitely wasn’t unapproachable, though. The warm smile on her face, as though this wasn’t only the third time they’d spoken to each other, gave off the impression that she’d been looking forward to talking with him.
“Ah, right! Sorry. Pepper.”
“So, about you and Tony’s sleeping habits,” Pepper began, forgoing any sort of lead-up into what she wanted to talk about. “I want you to keep it up.”
“Huh?”
“You know, the whole thing where he takes you to bed and you ask him to stay and he actually gets a semblance of a good night’s sleep?”
Peter could feel his cheeks go a visible shade of pink. Of course, he’d only known it was visible because MJ and Tony had told him such.
“You…You know about that?”
“He told me,” Pepper replied, her smile growing wider. “In a way, I owe you a thank you. I’ve been worried about Tony’s sleeping schedule for years, but you’ve somehow managed to fix it better than I ever have. Nice work.”
“Thanks,” Peter replied, all too aware that his cheeks were still a few shades darker than they needed to be. “But to tell you the truth, I really didn’t do that much.”
Pepper raised an eyebrow.
“Oh? Do tell.”
“I only really asked him to stay the first time,” Peter continued. “After that, he kinda, well, started staying without me saying anything. It was…it was nice.”
“He loves you like a son, Peter. But you know that already, don’t you?”
“I…I had some idea,” Peter replied awkwardly. “Did he really say that to you?”
“You know, if you do anything - get a good grade on a test, figure out something new in the lab, I never hear the end of it. He just goes on and on with no sign of stopping, and it’s amazing to see.”
Pepper was smiling so widely that Peter was worried that her face might split in two. It was the happiest he’d ever seen her.
“Last night, he called me at four in the morning to brag about the hundred that you got on your chemistry exam. Almost slept through my meeting because he kept me up until six,” she chuckled.
Peter thought he might die in a fiery explosion that involved his heart swelling to unnatural sizes, but at the same time he couldn’t help but feel he was somewhat responsible for Pepper being woken up at a terrible hour and having to attend a meeting after the fact.
“I…I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? What do you have to be sorry about? If anything, it’s my fault for picking up the phone.”
Pepper put a hand on Peter’s shoulder.
“The point of me being here right now is just to let you know that you mean a lot to Tony. And that means you mean a lot to me, too. If you ever need anything or if Tony’s not picking up his phone, you can always give me a call.”
Right. Peter had Pepper’s phone number, even though he’d never had cause to actually call it.
“I…I will. Thanks, again.”
“Oh! I almost forgot. Tony and I are going out for lunch tomorrow. Would you like to come?”
“Uh, it’s alright if you just want to go with Tony,” Peter replied, casting a downward glance at the book in his lap. “You don’t need to invite me.”
Pepper looked at him like he’d grown a third head.
“Nonsense,” she insisted. “We’re going to start doing things in threes from now on. It’s long overdue.”
Peter wasn’t convinced he would fit in at one of the high end restaurants that she would no doubt have booked, but Pepper seemed to have anticipated his concerns.
“Besides, with the way things have gone in the past, Tony’s probably going to change his mind, want a cheeseburger, and we won’t actually end up going to the restaurant anyway. We’ll find something you like, wherever we end up going.”
At this, Peter snorted, unable to help himself. The thought of Tony turning down lunch at a five star restaurant and opting for a drive-through burger wasn’t one that had occurred to him, but one he could definitely see happening.
“You’re coming with us tomorrow, Peter,” Pepper said, a note of finality in her voice. She wasn’t taking no as an answer.
“Oh, okay,” Peter stuttered, painfully aware that he’d barely been able to utter a full sentence throughout their entire conversation.
Pepper didn’t seem to care, though.
Much to Peter’s surprise, Pepper leaned over and wrapped her arms around him.
“I don’t want you to feel like Tony’s the only one who cares for you,” she whispered. “If you’re his kid, you’re my kid, too.”
Peter couldn’t help the the stinging wetness that welled up in the corners of his eyes.
…
That night, Peter woke up with warm, strong arms wrapped around him. He blinked a few times in the dark as he blearily tried to figure out where he was.
“Tony?”
“Yeah, kiddo?”
Tony shifted Peter in his arms as he shuffled down the dark hallway.
“Time is it?” Peter slurred.
“Believe it or not, it’s only– ” Tony paused, probably to look at the lit-up face of his watch. “– one thirty. Full hour and a half earlier than usual.”
“Oh,” Peter replied sleepily as Tony rounded a corner.
“Yeah. Pep mentioned something about us going out for lunch tomorrow, and I figured it’d be best if your first lunch with the Starks doesn’t go like it usually does.”
Memories of Peter’s conversation with Pepper that afternoon came drifting back in bits and pieces.
“Did you really leave a dinner reservation for a cheeseburger?”
“Not now, Pete,” Tony chuckled. “Okay, maybe I did, but that’s a story for another time.”
Tony set Peter down on his bed and Peter rolled over to face him. Not that he could make out Tony’s face in the darkness.
“‘S okay if you wanna sleep with Pepper tonight.”
Tony sighed.
“I was hoping you wouldn’t say anything about that.”
In the darkness, Peter raised his eyebrows.
“Pep…pretty much ordered me to sleep in here with you after you talked to her earlier,” Tony confessed. “We’ve had our issues with sleeping in the same bed in the past, so I can’t really blame her after the incident with the suit.”
Peter just grinned.
“What, did you kick her out of the bed or something?”
“Believe me, I wish that were the case,” Tony muttered darkly. “It was worse. Way worse.”
Immediately, guilt bubbled up in Peter’s stomach like he’d eaten something rotten. Here he was, ruining a moment by dredging up old memories.
“Ah. I’ll uh, just go to sleep then,” Peter stuttered.
“Not so fast, kiddo. You haven’t brushed your teeth yet.”
And just like that, Tony was back to his overly father-like self.
Peter groaned.
“It’s just one night, do I really need to – Okay! I’m going!” Peter yelped, nearly falling off the bed in his hurry to get to the bathroom as Tony headed for the door. He wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice; the last time he’d avoided brushing his teeth he’d woken up with a mouthful of toothpaste suds and more on the pillow beside him.
A wolfish grin on his face, Tony simply followed him like Michael Myers, leisurely making his way to the bathroom while Peter scrambled for the door like a would-be murder victim.
Unbeknownst to either of the two, Pepper watched from further down the hall as the father-son duo comically went to brush their teeth, her heart close to bursting in her chest.
Tony had his kid already. He’d had him all along.