Happy Hogan sees the parallels between Tony and the kid in almost everything. Every moment he spends with Peter feels like he is spending time with a ghost of his best friend. It makes him feel like he is drowning at first, but slowly he learns to love watching and waiting and cherishing the parallels.
At first, he only sees it in the little things. The way Peter scrunches his nose up when he’s frustrated or confused. Peter drinks coffee straight from the pot and buys t-shirts that go down to his thighs even though he can afford a smaller shirt. And god- the teenager sticks his tongue out when he laughs exactly like Tony use to. Peter reminds him so much of his deceased best friend, that Happy ruffles his hair when he’s proud- just like he used to ruffle Tony’s identical dark brown curls. He also finds himself slipping into the same easy, yet protective mannerisms he used to have with Tony.
As time passes, he starts to spend more time with Peter in the lab Tony had left the boy. He finds it simultaneously comforting and unbearable to see Peter’s curls bouncing up and down as he listens to Led Zeppelin and AC/DC alarmingly loud as he tinkers away on some new suit or technology that only Tony himself would ever be able to understand.
He still sees it in the little things, but his heart aches when he starts to see it in the big things. He wants to scream and cry and punch a wall the first time he picks Peter up from a party drunk. He didn’t get mad at the boy, that’s May’s job (it once was Tony’s job too), but he can’t help the tears that pour out of his eyes when the kid rambles on and on about how much he misses Tony, before he throws up all over the floor of the car.
And the heart ache turns to nerves when he looks at the boy’s red rimmed eyes as he cries and cries and cries over everything in his life. His face looks like a waterfall as he confides in Happy that every male figure in his life either hurts him or dies; and Happy wants to wrap him up in a giant hug and promise that he’s here now and he won’t hurt him or leave. He knows that others have promised this in the past, he even heard Tony utter the same words, but he can’t help but hoping that this is the last time a male figure has to promise this to Peter. He doesn’t want to replace the kids father or uncle or fuck- he can’t replace Tony ever, but he want’s to try to be there for the kid no matter what.
The boy seems so broken all the time and it makes Happy want to cry. It makes him feel even more when he realizes the appearance of the broken boy makes him think about Tony. But maybe it’s a good thing, because Tony was strong and never as broken as he appeared to be. And when Happy looks at Peter, it seems like Tony passed it on to the kid- to his kid.
It’s weird thinking about Peter in that way, but as far as Tony was concerned, Peter was as much his kid as Morgan was. Tony loved Peter and protected the kid and Happy hates that Tony isn’t still alive to help Peter out in his later teenage years.
They even look the same, which Happy finds unbearable at first. He knows it is impossible, but Peter seems to be the perfect biological son of Tony Stark and it sucks that the boy doesn’t even realize it. But Happy realizes it. And sometimes it makes him sad to see a mini Tony floating around, seemingly alive and well, but always crying and nervous.
But he slowly moves away from the overwhelming feelings of pain. He starts measuring his days in the intoxicating feeling of watching the similarities between Peter and Tony like he is watching a movie of Tony’s past; and for a fleeting second he wonders if and hopes that Peter is some sort of holographic reflection of Tony’s past. The more moral part of him, hopes it is of the future and Tony’s legacy in this world.
The part of his mind that he sometimes wants to expel from his thoughts for being too despicable, tries to convince him that Peter has it harder than Morgan does. They were both Tony’s children, blood be damned Peter is Tony Stark’s fucking child, but Morgan has age on her side. She has the luxury of being able to forget the lines of Tony’s face which haunt Peter’s nightmares- Happy’s nightmares as well.
Sometimes the kids are in the nightmares. Screaming and begging for Happy to save their dad and Happy never can save him. He always wakes up in a cold sweat, shaking and tears rolling down his face. Those are the moments where the parallels feel like a lifeline.
The children are like ghosts and he watches over them like a guardian angel. He feels like a bad one, laughing and crying and yelling at the universe when Morgan gets cheeseburger all over a dress Tony gave her one the last birthday she had before he passed. The feelings come back when Peter fails a physics test and swears if Tony was alive that he would hate the boy and the two spend an entire hour crying and holding each other.
Some of the parallels make him sad and he prays to a God he doesn’t believe in, asking for strength and maybe for Tony to appear out of nowhere and help him. He wishes Tony would come back, laughing at all of them for believing that he could actually be gone from this world and leave him and Morgan and Pepper and Rhodey and Peter all alone.
Like Tony, Peter is a trauma survivor. He didn’t realize it at first, finding out in bursts of anxious moments and panic attacks and flashbacks from the boy. Peter hasn’t been diagnosed, but he is sure the boy has PTSD- yet another parallel between him and Tony.
He learns the boy’s triggers like the back of his hand, while fleeting wondering if this is what Tony felt like with the boy. Did he feel like he was walking on a minefield, terrified of hurting the boy even further.
Some of the triggers make sense in the life and experiences he knew the boy had. He knows that tall buildings and space and school dances all cause him anxiety. But he didn’t know, yet learned with time, that bullying and violence and non friendly teasing make him want to cry. And the worst is when he learns that the nickname ‘Einstein’ and adult magazines and babysitters make the kid’s entire body feel like it is on fire.
Hearing stories about Skip Westcott, being whispered to him on a cold December night as they drink hot chocolate and sit on a bench in an empty park, reminds him of stories of Howard Stark that Tony had once, so long ago, confined in him in whispers on similarly cold nights.
It takes less for Peter to confide in him, the boy is more trusting than Tony ever was. but it still reminds him overwhelmingly of the man. And though the exact abuse is different, Howard hurt with words and fists, abuse is abuse and Happy wants to murder both Howard and Skip for what they did to both his best friend and his son.
He offers to help Peter in the same ways he helped Tony and he smiles at the parallels of their slow battle towards recovery. Every time the boy identifies a trigger or takes care of himself, he sees a little bit of Tony in the kid’s smile. It’s like a puzzle piece shining through the boy’s lopsided grin and it makes Happy feel like he is living in another time.
Falling into love with May makes him feel like he is betraying Peter- betraying Tony. He knows that both of them want only happiness for him, but he fears Peter’s reaction will parallel Tony’s mannerisms and that scares him.
But he recognizes that fear should not control his life, so he takes a deep breath and lets it happen in ebbs and flows of sharing lunch and daffodils and whispered secrets.
One of those secrets is the fact that Morgan has started calling Peter her big brother and May cries for what seems like forever when she hears him say that. Happy cries too and when he finally stops crying, his joke that Peter should call him ‘Uncle Happy’ makes them cry even more because he wasn’t thinking about the connotation of that comment and it is equally heartwarming and traumatic.
Peter is so much Happy’s mini Tony, that sometimes it is hard for him to force himself to remind the kid that he doesn’t have to be a mini Iron Man for the world. But he gets over it with time and he promises the kid over and over again that he gets to come into his own and doesn’t have to be someone he is not.
Peter feels relieved when Happy starts saying these sentiments. But one night he curls into a ball in the corner of the lab and his so catontic that Happy has to go find him. He finds the teenager crying and later Peter claims that he finally realized that he is not Tony Stark and that the man, his mentor and his father, is never ever coming back to him.
That night, Peter relates living without Tony to living without water and that hits Happy harder than he thought something ever would. Peter is like the glass and Morgan is the ice, but without Tony, who is very much their water, the two of them are left feeling helpless and lost.
The two start spending time together and Happy sees even more parallels in Morgan. He likes to see them, but combining them with Peter’s parallels makes him feel helpless. But he ignores it and focuses on buying the two of them all the cheeseburgers in the world and smiling instead of crying when Peter laughs at one of Morgan’s doodles and his tongue flops out of the side of his mouth.
When Happy stays the night with May for the first time, he thinks it is only a chance to get closer to the woman that he thinks he may love. But he hears Peter crying at 2 in the morning and he takes the kid out for cheeseburgers at the 24 hour diner down the block.
It reminds him of Tony’s nightmares and Happy wants nothing more than to curl into a ball and stop functioning. He doesn't want to deal with the mopey kid and his feelings of loss all at once. But he has to and he shoves his own sadness away and only focuses on the kid- Tony’s kid.
Peter physically leans on Happy and every heartbeat and shaky breath the kid takes feels like a sort of broken parallel. Tony’s kid is so much like him. He is a mini Tony Stark in terms of appearance, intelligence and heart. He is everything Tony was and more and Happy feels like he has his best friend back with him. But at the end of the day, Peter is here and Tony is gone and Happy needs to stop living his life through parallels and pretending like Tony and Peter are the same person.
He misses Tony and he mourns his best friend daily, but he does it differently now. He remembers Tony in his children’s heartbeats and their shared mannerisms and the legacy he left behind with Morgan and Peter. He tries his absolute hardest to make those kid’s lives as perfect as possible.
Peter Parker is not Tony Stark, and Happy Hogan is finally ok with the fact. But Peter is Tony’s legacy and more importantly, Tony’s child. And Happy refuses to let the childhood livelihood and spirit die with his father.