Outnumbered

Tony’s hands shake as he attempts to unbuckle a sleeping Morgan from her booster seat. It’s nearly two in the morning and they’re finally back at the Tower after a two-hour car ride home from the wedding. Peter watches as Tony’s right hand gives out, bites his lip when Tony backs out of the Suburban, closes his eyes, and sighs in frustration on the sidewalk.

“Honey?” Pepper calls out as she exits from the other side of the vehicle. Peter can hear her heels clacking on the pavement, watches her wobble, one hand keeping her steady on the SUV, as she joins them. Tony lets her clutch onto his left arm as she pulls her heels off. “I’m still a little tipsy.”

“It’s okay, I’ve got her,” Peter offers despite his own fatigue, leaning into the SUV and unclipping the harness with one click. He pulls Morgan into his arms, her legs immediately wrapping around his waist. She whines, Peter adjusting his grip when they’re both upright again.

“Thanks, kid,” Tony says, ruffling his hair as they enter the lobby. “Appreciate it.”

All Peter can think about is getting to bed when the mission alarm blares throughout the Tower.

“I’m getting way too old for this crap,” Tony mumbles, holding the elevator door for Peter and Morgan before helping Pepper stay upright. “Iron Man’s sitting this one out. And I suggest Spiderman does, too.”

“Tony, come on!” Peter argues in response, shifting Morgan so that she’s settled on his left hip.

“You’ve been up for almost a full twenty-four hours. You’re exhausted even if you think you’re not, even if you lie and say you’re not. I’m watching your eyelids droop before my very eyes. It’s a level one,” he explains, checking his watch. “They only need one or two of us. Looks like Cap and Natasha already checked in.”

Peter scoffs. At least he didn’t bring up my blood sugar, he thinks.

“Can’t fool me, kid. I know you too well. And,” he adds, tapping at his watch, “you’re only 96. No suiting up unless you’re–”

“160, I know. Stupid rule, by the way.” Peter does a shitty job of hiding his irritation, and his fatigue, is having trouble keeping Morgan, who won’t stop squirming despite being so sleepy, in his arms.

“Stupid rules keep you safe,” Tony posits as they reach the residence. “Do you need me to read you the riot act again? I’m kind of ready to pass out right here in this elevator, but I think I can muster up the energy–“

Peter shakes his head, exists first and heads toward Morgan’s room to put her down. “I got it!” he whines. “No mission tonight! Loud and clear!”

“I’ll check on her once I get this one to bed. Night, Spider Brat!” Tony teases as he offers his arm to Pepper again.

Peter knows that Tony’s one of his guardians and all, but sometimes, he gets thrown off by having someone other than May tell him what he can and can’t do. He generally avoids conflict with his stellar grades and penchant for good deeds, but Spiderman, and now Spidermanning with his diabetes, always seems to bring out the more authoritative side of Tony and Peter despises it. He understands, he does, but it doesn’t mean he has to like it.

In the last few months, he’s been resigned to light patrols and, at max, level three missions. And then his blood sugar is usually either too high or too low, or Tony’s not in any shape to go, and so he has to stay behind, too. At first, when this was all brand new and he didn’t have his pump yet, he was glad for the excuse to not go, scared of what could happen because he was still trying to wrap his head around the fact that this was his life now and there were so many unknowns, but lately, he’s been itching to get back out as much as possible, just wants carefree nights of swinging until he’s nearly out of web fluid, his legs dangling from a rooftop while he polishes off a cheeseburger or churro and details the patrol on his StarkWatch.

He wants Before back.

Because now?

Now it’s Tony checking in every hour on the hour through his AI Karen, Dexcom and pump alerts because he’s always dropping when he swings and, most recently, a shattered insulin pump screen after pulling it a bit too eagerly from his suit. Maybe he’d used a little too much Spidey force, or it was already loose enough in the pocket Tony had added beneath his chest plate, but it had come flying out with surprising speed, painfully taking his pump site on his abdomen with it. He watched in horror as it left his hands, fell two stories, and smashed against the pavement.

Not one of his finer moments, but it had solidified his frustration at the fact that even his gig as Spiderman, as a superhero, wasn’t sacred and spared from the monster now invading every nook and cranny of his life.

The incident had earned him a scalding speech about responsibility from May, who had promptly ordered him a new one with a sleek black case and handed it to him with a copy of the $7,000 bill.

It’s the only time since this whole diabetes thing started that she’d raised her voice at him. Peter could feel the panic of their past money insecurities in the way her voice wavered, her hands animated as he listened and hung his head in shame.

Of course, the bill was all for show. Tony had already covered it, winking as he cited his made-up “Stark Industries Health Insurance” that “all of the Avengers are automatically enrolled in,” blah blah blah, but it hadn’t made Peter feel any better about the situation.

He hates that it costs so much to keep him alive from a disease he never asked nor wished for. Between the pump, pump site infusion sets, Dexcom sensors and transmitters, test strips, and myriad of insulin in the fridge, he knows he’s costing Tony and May at least $10,000 a year extra, if not more, that it doesn’t count his stint in MedBay for the days post-diagnosis, nor those for his severe lows that have caused him to pass out.

He looks down at Morgan, who he’s tucked in beneath her pink unicorn comforter, party dress and all, and wishes he was little again. There’s a spattering of dim, slowly moving star projections painting her walls and ceiling in the darkness that remind him of the glow in the dark plastic galaxy his parents had decorated his childhood bedroom with.

He still has a few memories of them, of their yellow house in Oceanside with the red door.

He was only four when they died, a year younger than Morgan is now.

He wishes he could have done a better job shielding her from everything with Tony’s recovery from the infinity stones, knows that it’s affected her in more ways than one.

The nightmares that have plagued her the last year are a bit too nostalgic, give him a sense of what May and Ben went through after he came to live with them in Forest Hills.

Maybe that’s why he’s so gentle with her, so eager to drop what he’s doing to play Monopoly Junior or read her a book, distract her with the promise of pink cupcakes with sprinkles when her face flashes with fear.

May and Ben did those things with Peter to bring him back to normalcy, to the family he had left.

Morgan waking Peter up in the middle of the night has been going on for almost a year now, since Thanos was defeated at the price of Tony’s health. After the stones had done their damage, it had been months of surgeries, skin and muscle grafts, mostly, and rehabilitation. At first, they’d expected Tony to lose his right arm completely, but Shuri had offered her Wakandan knowledge and technology, which far surpassed that of SHIELD. Though on the outside it seems that Tony has made a miraculous recovery, he’s only regained some movement and dexterity back. Peter knows that Tony is often up late and working in his lab due to painsomnia from the nerve damage suffered, that he has a hard time with jars, doorknobs, buttons, and zippers on his right side, that he plays it off by claiming to be ambidextrous (he’s not). The Iron Man suit compensates for some of his resulting muscle weakness, which is why he keeps his situation quiet. Peter remembers Tony mumbling, “Not their business,” when Pepper made the suggestion that he talk publicly about his experience while in the kitchen a few weeks ago. “And I’m not about to be some kind of inspiration porn. That shit is toxic.”

He’d never heard the phrase before, so he’d looked it up, stumbled across a YouTube video of a woman named Stella Young saying, “Inspiration porn is an image of a person with a disability, often a kid, doing something completely ordinary—like playing, or talking, or running—carrying a caption like ‘your excuse is invalid’… It’s there so that non-disabled people can put their worries into perspective… It’s there so that non-disabled people can look at us and think ‘Well, it could be worse… I could be that person.’”

“Sometimes,” Tony had said with a dejected sigh in the lab a few weeks later, “I think that typing code will be easier than speaking it, so I sit down and start to type, but then that becomes laborious and my hand gives out, so I do this hybrid talking/typing with my left hand, but then it sucks up my brain power, so I’m back at square one with the talking and having to type anyway to fix or update FRIDAY’s damn coding.”

“Isn’t FRIDAY supposed to make things easier?” Peter had asked. “Like, shouldn’t she and the robot arm make everything more…”

“Accessible. Yes. But it’s still arduous and frustrating at times. They don’t actually make it easier, not all of the time, just makes things doable-ish. It’s like your pump. The site and cartridge changes, the Dexcom insertions and warm-ups, calculating a bolus? It all takes time and energy. In some respects, it makes it easier, but in others, it’s extra work and emotional energy. I have to remind my brain, my muscle memory, that my arm doesn’t work like it used to. Sometimes I just miss tinkering, you know? I miss coming to my lab and just fiddling with my own two hands.”

Like I miss being able to just eat without thinking about it, Peter had thought.

“Me trying to find ways to live around this doesn’t make me inspirational,” Tony had tried to explain. Peter had tried to hide his knowledge of the kitchen conversation, but his quick look away from Tony at the word ‘inspiration’ had tipped him off. “I know you heard me talking to Pepper the other day. This is just me living. I wish people could see that. Pepper’s been trying. I know this is hard for her, too. She means well, but she doesn’t always get it.”

“May keeps trying to tell me this doesn’t define me,” Peter had added.

“And what do you think about that statement?”

Peter had shrugged. “It seems too simple to be true? I don’t know. May’s really into platitudes, but I don’t think she actually truly believes them. They’re just sayings to fill space, almost. Things haven’t been easy for her either and I think she says them to make herself feel better. It’s like your thing with Pepper: She means well, but she doesn’t always get it. Not with diabetes, at least. Like she gets the medical part because she’s a nurse, but the emotional stuff, not so much.”

“You can feel however you want to feel about it,” Tony assured him.

“But I’m not supposed to be so okay by being defined by this, right? It’s…a disease. And it’s not that I like it, I absolutely hate it, but it’s always on my mind, always screaming for my attention. It’s not something I can just take off when I don’t want to deal with it. How could I not feel like it’s a part of me when it’s changed everything?”

“That’s the million-dollar question right there,” Tony had said with a small chuckle, but it hadn’t been in jest, sounded more knowing than anything. “I’ve been asking myself that exact question for years now.”

“Hey, how is she?” Tony asks from the doorway, pulling Peter from his memory. In the hallway light seeping into the bedroom, Peter can see that he’s rubbing his right forearm, the way he does sometimes when he’s in pain but trying to hide it.

“Out cold,” Peter answers quietly, rising from where he’s kneeling on the floor.

“She’ll be up at five asking for cereal and cartoons,” he jokes. “Thanks for tucking her in. Get some sleep, kiddo. You look like you need it.”

“Love you too,” Peter whispers with a laugh, shaking his head as he heads toward his room.

x

“No! Stop!” Peter shouts.

He’s on his bed with his shirt raised just enough to see the new Dexcom sensor Tony’s stuck against his abdomen, Tony’s index finger paused on the orange button that inserts the sensor wire via a small needle.

Tony sighs, because this has happened during every sensor change in the last month. “Pete, the longer we put it off, the more anxious you’re going to get.”

“It’s the sound more than anything!”

“Bruce said it’s supposed to be nearly painless! Would you rather prick your fingers?”

“No, I just…ugh, I hate this! I hate all of this!”

“Let’s just get this done so we can do your pump site change. Ready?” Peter closes his eyes and nods. “One, two, three,” Tony announces before pressing down.

“Ow!” Peter cries out, wincing in pain. He looks down at it, watches as Tony works unsuccessfully at pulling the applicator away. “It’s stuck! Fuck! The needle…I can feel it! It’s stuck! It’s stuck!”

“Shit,” Tony spits. “I’ve gotta rip it off. Bear with me, kiddo.”

“Argh!” Peter pants as Tony slowly rips the white adhesive around the sensor from his sensitive skin. Finally, it’s off, a bloody, irritated mess left in the failed sensor application’s wake.

“There’s the needle,” Tony says, whistling as he examines the device up close. “You’d think that at more than $100 a pop, these babies wouldn’t jam.”

Peter grabs a tissue and wipes away at the blood pooling on his abdomen, tries not to let the tears brimming in his eyes fall.

Tony gets up, grabs a band-aid out of the plastic drawers with Peter’s medical supplies, and hands it over to Peter. “A Spiderman band-aid? Is this supposed to be some kind of cruel joke?!” Peter croaks out as he unwraps it, unsure if he’s on the verge of tears or laughter. He takes a gulp of air, and then another one, before the tears fall.

“Hey, kid, you okay?” Tony asks gently. He’s been asking that a lot lately.

Peter wipes his tears away and sniffles. “It’s just hard, is all. I’m tired. It’s after ten and I want to go to bed.”

“I know you are. I would be, too. It’s just sucky right now because both changes lined up around the same time.”

“Just want a break.”

“Amen to that,” Tony says, ripping open a second Dexcom sensor.

“No! I am not putting another one on!”

“Kid, you’ve gotta. Don’t make me chase you around the house like I have to do with Morgan and antibiotics. I’m tired, too.”

“Can’t I just go one night without it?”

“We can’t run Basal-IQ without Dex.”

“Just one night? Please?”

“Pete, I want to say yes, I do, but you’re not doing these changes yourself yet and I have an early work meeting tomorrow. You’d have to go the whole school day without a Dexcom. May would have my ass if we didn’t have these around-the-clock readings while her and Happy are on their honeymoon. Not with your lows like they’ve been.”

Peter rubs his face, wills the tears to stop because he still has to get the Dexcom insertion over with, and then his pump site, which hurts even more. He’s running out of space on his abdomen, hasn’t rotated sites in a while, which has left him with some bruising and irritated skin. He looks up at Tony, who seems to be reading his mind, and offers up the back of his arm.

“You sure?” Tony asks him; it’s no secret that Peter hates arm sites. He has a tendency to rip them off by accident when changing a shirt or walking into door jambs.

“Just get it over with.” He knows there are little kids with diabetes that do this all of the time without complaining, has a sharps container full of used Dexcom sensors and applicators to prove he’s got months of these down in the books, but knowing these things doesn’t help. Sometimes, when Tony’s pulling out alcohol swabs and going through the plastic drawers in the corner of his room with his diabetes supplies, Peter feels sheer panic run through his body at the thought that he has to do this again when he could swear they just did an insertion yesterday.

It’s the pump sites that are making him crazy. Dexcom gets changed every ten days, but every three days, they load up a new insulin cartridge and insert a new infusion site.

It’s supposed to be getting easier but it’s just not. If anything, they’re making him more anxious, more emotional, and he doesn’t understand how or why.

He doesn’t realize that Tony’s swabbed his arm and secured the sensor until after it’s been released from the applicator, a slight sting in his arm from the insertion of the wire.

“Didn’t even jump this time,” Tony comments, Peter taking a deep breath in relief. Tony unboxes a new transmitter, the gray piece that clicks into his sensor and sends his blood sugar readings to his phone, and points to a pile of the decals May purchased for him. “Let’s see, we’ve got a Pokémon ball–“

“It’s a Poké ball, Tony.”

“Right. Pac-man, LEGOs. What’s this one? Looks like–“

“Warp speed.” It’s black with streaks of white that make it look like it’s traveling faster than the speed of light. It’s quiet, discreet, unlike some of the other, brighter designs May’s picked out. “I want that one.”

“Aw, the Pokémon one would’ve been funny. What’s it called, a Poké Dex? Would that make this a…PokéDexcom?” He raises his eyebrows for effect.

Peter can’t help but throw his head back and laugh despite his frustration. “Ugh, Tony, that was the worst dad joke ever. I’m serious!”

“Got you to laugh, didn’t I?” he adds. “Anyway, warp speed is actually called warp drive,” Tony explains as he attaches the new decal to the transmitter. He hands it to Peter, who clicks it into the sensor. “It’s a spacecraft propulsion system that uses…”

Peter’s too focused on pairing his new transmitter and starting his new sensor on his phone to hear most of what Tony’s saying. It takes a moment for the Bluetooth to recognize his transmitter, and then for him to go through the prompts on the screen and insert the sensor code.

“Einstein's theory of special relativity states that energy and mass are interchangeable…” Tony drones, wiping Peter’s abdomen with an alcohol swab. By the time Peter’s sensor is warming up, Tony’s already got a new pump cartridge filled with insulin, primed and ready to go. “And then you have to bring in Newton, because that explains low velocities…” Tony prepares the pump site inserter, a gray, round disc of plastic, with a click, before he removes needle guard and presses the inserter against Peter’s skin. “Relativistic velocities, however, are the answer to the issue of…” Tony’s continuing, but Peter’s looking up, closing his eyes, trying not to have a panic attack because there’s no going back now, he needs this site change if he wants to avoid shots for the next three days and–

Click.

A sharp pain.

The site is in. A moment later, after Tony fiddles with the settings on the pump, Peter can feel the insulin being delivered.

But he can’t breathe. His lungs are getting air, but it doesn’t feel like they are.

“Pete?” Tony’s asking, but his voice sounds distant. “Hey, look at me, kiddo.” It’s not until he puts a hand on Peter’s shoulder that the kid breaks down, fully and completely, into a mess of tears and sobs.

“Hey, shh, shh,” Tony whispers, pulling him against his chest. “Underoos. It’s okay. You’re okay.”

“S’not okay! None of this is okay!”

“I meant the crying, kiddo. You’re allowed to be upset.” He rocks him back and forth, rubs his back just like he does when Morgan’s fallen and scraped her knee.

There’s a point where he can’t even get a breath in, is crying so hard that there’s only silence before he gasps for air, and Tony doesn’t know what to do. This is the second time in three days that Peter has broken down like this, has turned to Tony and just completely crumbled.

Tony can count on one hand all of the times this has happened, so two in such quick succession is concerning.

“I-I’m okay,” Peter finally sobs out against Tony’s t-shirt, but it’s painfully obvious that he’s not.

“It’s okay not to be okay,” Tony whispers, but the words feel hollow, like a cop-out, because he can’t make this better no matter how much he wants to, no matter how much Peter wants him to, and that’s a hard truth to stomach.

“I don’t want to do this anymore!” Peter cries out, face twisting in anguish. “It’s only been three months and I’m exhausted!”

“Why don’t you take tomorrow as a mental health day?” Tony offers. “You can sleep in and I’ll get my afternoon meetings rescheduled so that we can see a movie or something.”

“Sleep in?!” Peter asks, incredulous as he lifts his head from Tony’s shirt. “I don’t get to sleep in anymore, Tony! Everything is about diabetes now! Every little thing!”

“We can have FRIDAY can take over for a few hours,” Tony says, remembering a second too late how that played out the last time they tried it.

“Yeah, remember how well that worked?” Peter throws back.

Tony doesn’t call Peter out for his attitude, because he deserves it.

Tony had spent countless hours coding an algorithm for FRIDAY to loop Dexcom and the pump more seamlessly with the hope that it would give Peter a break and Peter, worn out from a week of rollercoaster blood sugars, had happily taken the offer. At the time, Peter’s pump was programmed to pause his insulin if he fell under 80. Dexcom had said he was in the 70s, but they’d made the rookie mistake of blindly trusting a brand new sensor without seeing if it needed calibration. Peter had taken a nap and woken up with a headache from Hell.

Dexcom said 78, but a fingerstick showed he was 450.

The sensor had been way off. Technology had failed them.

Garbage in, garbage out.

Tony feels the guilt from that day fill his chest.“You’re right,” he says, nodding. “That didn’t exactly work out, which was my fault. I’m really sorry about that, Underoos. We know better than we did, though, and I think it could work this time if we make sure Dex is calibrated.”

“I appreciate it Tony, but I’m not exactly…comfortable.” He wipes his eyes with his t-shirt, sniffles as he tries not to break into sobs again. “I don’t like being out of control, you know? This just feels really complicated and confusing and scary and I’m…I’m so tired of always having to be ‘on.’”

Peter’s words are a reminder to Tony that all of the technology and brainpower in the world can’t always outsmart diabetes. That little mistakes, little breaks, can sometimes cost the most.

Tony knows parents say this all of the time, but even with his own health stuff, he wishes he could take this from Peter and go through it himself so that the kid didn’t have to. There will be no “growing out of it” as Thor had suggested one night at dinner or “a cure” like Clint had mentioned reading about while Tony was fixing his comm unit. There are so many facets to chronic illness, Tony knows, and he doesn’t have the sense or the words he knows he needs to help Peter through this.

The teen grabs for a tissue from the box on his nightstand, takes a slow, deep breath, and breaks down again on the exhale.

Instead of responding with empty words, Tony wraps his arms around Peter and lets him cry and mumble out all of his frustrations until his breathing is slow and even, his eyes too tired to stay open.