Chapter 9
Peter got his first very real surprise in this universe the next morning when, after a fitful night of glitching and interrupted sleep, a stylish young woman in white sneakers strode into Stark and Banner’s lab, greeted him cheerily and said her name was Shuri.
“My brother is the Black Panther, King T’Challa,” she said. “Is he a blockhead in your universe too?”
“If he is, you’re the only one who says it to his face,” he told her, and she giggled in delight.
Stark, Banner and Parker watched from the side of the lab. Parker was hoodless and appeared to have given up the charade in front of Banner with good grace. Both Stark and Banner had seemed a little anxious for the Wakandan princess to tour their lab, which they showed off with great flourish and she responded with the particular brand of politeness that denoted she had good manners but was at best only moderately impressed.
Parker was bashful around her and spoke only when she spoke to him. Upon realizing this, Tony’s expression was now one of suppressed mirth and he constantly prompted the kid to try speaking to her.
Peter had to resist the strong impulse to ask Parker whether he knew a cute girl named Mary Jane. Better to let him make his life choices organically. (Right?)
They’d brought her in to get as many minds as possible on the problem. Peter appreciated the effort.
Before long she was all business, gliding her wrist slowly over his face. Drawing it back, she tapped one of the large beads encircling her wrist and it projected a video close-up of his cells. As they watched two of the cells deteriorated. Did they evaporate, Peter wondered, or had they simply found another universe to hang their hat in?
As she worked Shuri clucked her tongue disapprovingly. “Reckless, very reckless,” she tutted. “From her research notes I gather she rushed the science at the end.”
Though he wasn’t compelled to defend Ock given that he’d twice been her unwilling guinea pig, Peter responded, trying to keep as still as possible as she swept the beads over him again: “Fisk did kind of rush things along, both times. The glitching happened even faster in the last dimension.”
“What pulled you into that universe to begin with?” Shuri asked clinically, her eyes on the neon schematics scrolling across the air. “Not random chance, surely?”
Random chance hadn’t been a factor in Peter’s life since that spider picked him, of all snot-nosed teenagers, to bite on the hand.
“Not exactly. Another Peter Parker was the, ah, launch code, so to speak.”
Stark looked sharply at him. This was the first time Peter had mentioned a third Spider-Man. Banner paused in the act of typing sums into a holographic computer and watched, while Parker frowned. Shuri’s eyebrows raised in curiosity but her eyes stayed on the rolling figures. “You were pulled into his universe, but he wasn’t taken to this one?”
“No.” Peter hesitated. “He died. I never met him.”
It was a weird thing to say about himself. No, he’d never had the occasion to shake Blond Peter’s hand, but who would have known him better? He’d simply been Peter B. Parker at a different point in his life.
“Did the collider kill him?” asked Banner. It was a reasonable question, searching out the technical hurdles to avoid when it came time to fixing Peter’s jumping cells. It didn’t require the empathy he heard in the scientist’s voice. Parker seemed uncomfortable while Stark brought a hand to his chin and looked away.
“Wilson Fisk killed him,” said Peter. “Peter Parker only got caught in the collider long enough to scramble the signal. Hence, me,” he gestured to himself. Shuri clucked at him to stay still but her face was troubled.
“The problem is easy enough to diagnose,” she announced a little while later.
She stepped back and began tapping her beads in a sort of Morse code. They projected a shimmering image she enlarged for the benefit of the room at large. “Human bodies are comprised of ten trillion cells, all of which the collider must analyze and process.”
She gestured to the rather beautiful rotating holographic display showing just a small sample of the extraordinary data making up a human being. All present knew this already but the image never ceased to inspire a kind of wonder. For some reason Peter was put in mind of Rabbi Abraham, who loved to talk of the intricate systems that operated life and pointed to them always as a divine work of art.
“There’s no .zip file for that kind of thing,” Parker said from the side, earning a smile from Shuri that made him blush.
Peter rarely got to dust off his graduate degrees around scientists who weren’t actively trying to kill him. Nice change of pace. Scratching his jaw, which was already stubbly again, he said: “String theory solves the problem of how electrons can jump around without actually traveling, but that’s just what it is: a theory. Ock didn’t make the jump from theory to theorem. All she could do in either universe was mimic the result.”
“Doctor Strange can open portals to other universes,” Parker pointed out. “Doesn’t that prove the theory is possible?”
“That’s magic, not science,” grumbled Stark. “Magic cheats.”
“If anything’s possible, it has to be scientifically possible.”
Secretly, Peter was delighted to hear his younger self talk this way. A proper mind.
Shuri nodded in agreement, similarly pleased to be among intellectuals. “From what her research notes indicate, in order to process that amount of information in a short amount of time the particle accelerator acted as a kind of scrambler and descrambler. It took the atoms apart at one end of the rift and rearranged them in order to pass through in a way that,” she said, gliding her hand in the motion of a beach wave, “can be more easily put together on the other side. It simply did not do a good job. Your cells are convinced they still must reconstruct and are constantly attempting to do so, but they are not on the same wavelength, so to speak.”
Peter nodded, following along. “Intermodulation. Like when you hear two radio signals at the same time. Ock was trying to impersonate string theory and ended up with a crackerjack set of rabbit ears instead.”
Shuri clapped her hands together, delighted to find she did not have to softball the explanation to him. Stark, Banner and Peter were all nodding in understanding as well.
“So we gotta finishing descrambling his atoms,” said Stark, crossing his arms and staring beyond the lab walls. “If he’d gone through the rift again as intended, his cells would have ended up in their normal pattern again—like a reversal—but since he got snatched in midair, they never had a chance to reconcile.”
It wasn’t as often anymore that Stark was truly tested by a scientific challenge and Peter saw the old light he got when he really got to sink his teeth in one.
Too bad it was Peter they were all gonna sink their teeth into. “What are you gonna do, stick me in a rock tumbler?” he asked nervously.
“In a manner of speaking,” Banner said, starting forward. He looked at Stark, Shuri and Parker in turn. “We could attempt to recreate Octavius’s process from scratch, and just get it right this time, but we’d need to modify a lot of machinery for the purpose and that takes time. Time Peter might not have.”
He had Shuri’s attention. “What are you suggesting?” she asked.
“We start from the middle. Skip the scrambling process and go straight to descrambling.”
Parker wondered aloud, “Like a stolen cable channel?”
“Yes, like my cable channels,” Peter muttered under his breath.
Stark raised an eyebrow at him and Peter shrugged. “Not all of them.” He’d pay for them if he were any more liquid than a gaseous state.
“Well, I happen to have another particle accelerator in the cabinet,” said Stark, rubbing his hands together. “Shall we?”
.
.
“What is this?” Peter asked, tilting his head. It looked like a tank.
“A tank,” said Banner.
“Ah.”
Stark, Shuri and Banner had drawn enough air during their conversations to consider another possibility for the time being. “More specifically, it’s a ‘quantum chamber.’ A Bill Foster specialty,” Banner added with a small smile. “Of course, we’ve made some modifications since then.”
Did Hank Pym know? Peter didn’t know the man but had heard he was territorial over that field of research. It probably didn’t matter. “Of course. What does it do?”
“You get in and sit,” Banner pointed at the spartan bench inside the tank, “and the chamber uses, um, quantum energy to stabilize your molecules for the time being. It’s just a temporary measure, sort of like an oxygen boost for your atoms, but it might give you more time.”
Time would be good. Peter felt as though he were glitching constantly, making every movement uncertain lest it be undermined by a seizure that threw him off balance. Much of his enhanced physiology did the work subconsciously but more and more he found he was having to put up a determined effort to keep the spasming at bay. It was like having a chronic condition; you learned to ignore it.
“I never thought I’d hear you say ‘quantum energy’ with a straight face,” said Peter slyly.
Banner rolled his eyes, though not unkindly. “Blame Hank Pym. He thought it sounded catchy.”
Quantum had achieved ‘parsec’ status in terms of its scientific misrepresentation. It was such a conveniently science-y word.
Peter walked into the clear-walled chamber, feeling like a lizard stepping into its aquarium. “How long do I sit here?” he asked, his voice muffled by the panes.
Banner set his watch. “We’ll try an hour first. See what that does.”
The scientist moved to the controls and adjusted the settings, then turned a dial that set the machine built into the chamber’s side to humming. Peter didn’t actually know if he was supposed to be feeling anything. This wasn’t going to hurt, was it?
He rapped his knuckles on the panes. From the sound and feel he guessed the material was Stark’s patented take on palladium microalloy glass, one of the strongest materials in existence after adamantium and vibranium. Graphene scaled the joints and ceiling of the chamber. It was a cautionary measure for the kind of energy it was supposed to channel and he felt a little jittery about being on the inside.
“I’ll be back in an hour,” Banner told him.
“Thank you,” said Peter, looking at him through the glass. “For all your help.”
Banner smiled and tapped his clipboard. Turning, he paused and almost seemed on the verge of saying something else, then gave an awkward little wave and walked from the room to rejoin the scientists in the lab, leaving Peter to his thoughts and the small hum of the chamber’s ventilation.
He sat down on the cot. It wouldn’t hurt to try and sleep.
What would Miles and Gwen and Noir and all the Spider-People and May Parker say, knowing he was sitting in a fishbowl instead of his home? He felt weirdly like he’d let Miles down. Peter’s job should have been the easy one but he couldn’t even fall into a rift right when he was literally dropped into it.
If he hadn’t held on so long to his—what, his nobility, his denial, his reluctance?—if he’d let go of his fears just a few seconds sooner, would he have sailed right past the window of time where this universe’s Ock had activated her own collider and gone home?
Peter sighed. He’d had an epiphany, damn it, hadn’t the cosmos gotten the memo?
Stretching, Peter closed his eyes against the chamber’s soft light and mused: what exactly was his epiphany? That it wasn’t too late? He felt like he’d arrived at the answer to a mathematical equation without showing his process on the homework.
Dutifully, he ticked off the stages. First step when he got back: clean his apartment and throw away what were certainly piles of decaying pizza slices. Second step: find his suit—a regular suit, not a crime-fighting suit—clean it, and hope it fit. Third step: show up on MJ’s doorstep with flowers in his hands.
Those were a good start, but there were going to have to be a lot more steps that followed. It wasn’t a process with any definite end—it was a progress. That’s what steps were for.
Seeing Tony Stark again; being here, in this compound where the Avengers lived and trained, opened an old and grody can of worms he’d managed to squirrel away in a forgotten corner of the cabinet nearly ten years ago. He’d have to clear all those cans out. No more cans of worms.
Peter couldn’t go back to MJ dragging along all his old baggage. Baggage had sabotaged them the last time. He’d get strong again, really mentally strong.
She’d never blamed him, either. If anything she worried about all the strain he put on himself, intensified for the conviction he’d have to do it alone.
The day before he’d been pulled into Miles’s universe, she’d called him. He’d let it go to voicemail and hadn’t listened to the message she left. He was scared to listen to it. How could he be so dumb? If he’d died he would have blown his chance to listen to her voice one last time. He could have picked up so she could hear him a last time.
It was all kind of muddled together in his head. Each problem seemed to be a knot tied into the same long string. Sleepily, he resolved to untangle the entire thing.
Peter drifted to sleep. It was hard to tell whether the chamber was doing anything but he did seem to glitch a little less and it allowed him to get an uninterrupted nap.
.
.
In his drowsy state, his spider sense alerted him to Parker coming. He turned his head from the bench to yawn at the kid coming up to examine the controls.
“How are you feeling?” Parker asked.
“Better, I think.” Still lying on his back Peter held his hands up against the industrial light. The atoms didn’t do much more than shiver. “If a little like I’m a specimen in the reptile house. How long does the effect last once I’m outside of the tank?”
Parker drew up a stool and took a seat. He wore a hoodie over his suit and was sipping a Coke. “Probably not long,” he admitted. “At least, Mr. Banner doesn’t think so. You could leave if you want, to test it. Or you could hang a while longer.”
Peter was inclined to stay lazy for as long as possible. “Have you heard from Strange?”
“Mr. Stark talked to Wong. I think Doctor Strange ran out for a sandwich a while ago. Wong says a ham on rye helps him think. He said they’ve about got it sorted out.”
“Cool.” Peter paused. “Thanks.”
“Sure,” said Parker. “Anything for me.”
Knowing it was a lame joke, he grinned at Peter’s unwilling snort. Then his fingers drummed a little on the Coke can and he shifted on the stool. “So this, ah…this other Peter Parker…”
Peter closed his eyes. “Yeah?”
“I mean, you said you didn’t meet him, but—I mean, do you know what he was like? Was he like us?”
“I’d say he was squarely between you and me.” Peter thought. “Also blond. And blue-eyed.” And perfect.
“Really? Weird,” said Parker in amazement. “Did he look at all like us?”
Eyes opening, Peter motioned down the length of his torso like Vanna White showing off a car on Wheel of Fortune. “Think a carbon copy of me, only someone messed with the saturation in Photoshop.” And removed the crow lines.
Parker played with his Coke. “Why didn’t you tell me about him?”
“Honestly, I thought maybe it’d freak you out.”
The kid thought on that for a moment. “Did it freak you out?”
Not unduly. Weirdly, the living Aunt May had unnerved him more than the deceased Peter Parker. “I guess it should have, shouldn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” said Parker honestly. “I mean, you’ve probably kind of seen it all by now.”
Peter sighed. “Oh, I still manage to get the rug pulled out from under me once in a while.”
A smile tugged at the corner of Parker’s mouth. Then it faded as he plucked at the can’s snap lid. “Did he leave a lot of people behind?”
Most of New York, judging by the outpouring of grief. Peter suddenly wondered what that Spider-Man had thought about having kids someday. Maybe he’d planned on it. He’d had his act together completely and it hadn’t done him a damn bit of good at the end. “Most of us do, kid.”
“Yeah. I just feel sorry for them.” Parker stared at his Coke, lost in thought. “I mean, I worry about what would happen to Aunt May if something—you know. Happened to me. She already lost a husband, and his family too…I just don’t want to leave her alone again.”
Peter remembered that the kid had died in the Snap and guessed that May Parker hadn’t. Was her memory of the incident wiped along with most of the world’s? That would be kinder. In a way, Parker had already been through this and might understand why Peter so badly feared leaving a kid fatherless.
Parker’s phone buzzed and he pulled it out of the hoodie’s pocket to check. “Ned says you have to say goodbye before you go portal-hopping.”
Yawning away a smile, Peter sat up and stretched. Just the hour he’d spent in the tank had done wonders for his energy. It really was like an oxygen boost.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” said Parker, putting his phone away. “I think they’d have liked to do an MRI, but you’re too unstable. The magnets might screw stuff up.”
“Where are the other Avengers, anyway?” asked Peter.
“Mr. Stark says he found stuff for them to do. I think he’s trying to keep them of our hair,” the kid confided. “‘Cause, you know, if they see you and then me…”
That was encouraging, at least. In Peter’s universe, Stark had come very, very close to convincing Peter he should unmask to give a degree of legitimacy to the pro-Accords faction. At one point Peter had even intended to do it. It was the only time in his life he could remember cold feet being a saving grace.
It also added a wrinkle to this dimension: though Tony Stark had left some doors worryingly open, others seemed shut, if not locked. If he could be convinced to shut all of them for good and throw the key away…
Parker hopped off his stool and stowed it to the side. “Well—I’m gonna have to run out for a while,” he said. “I spent last night here and I should probably do some patrolling. And get a change of clothes,” he added with a grin.
“You didn’t have to stay,” Peter told him, feeling weirdly like some jailbird, staring out at him from the tank.
Parker smiled and shrugged, pulling on his backpack. Though he didn’t say it, Peter rather thought the kid had been fretting over the increased rate of glitching. Now that the quantum chamber was helping, he felt okay to leave for a while and do his normal rounds around Queens.
His phone buzzed again. “Hap’s here,” he announced. “I’ll come see you again before you go.”
With a little wave, Parker walked out the door.
It was tempting to linger in the chamber but eventually Peter began to feel increasingly nauseous from the atom therapy and let himself out. Dizzy, he rubbed his temples and squeezed his eyes shut until everything seemed to settle again.
He wandered back to the lab, feeling like an interloper walking the Avengers’ stomping grounds alone. When he got there he found only Tony Stark, eyes on some readouts scrolling across the air. He glanced up as Peter came in.
Banner and Shuri were not in sight and Peter was debating whether to return to the chamber room (chamber chamber?) and park his kiester there when he paused at the sight of the Iron Spider suit standing attendant in a unit behind Stark’s table.
When he’d looked around Blond Peter’s trying-too-hard secret lab, he’d seen the Iron Spider numbering among the many other suits (geez, was it a lab or a walk-in closet?) So far as he knew, that Peter had not been an Avenger either, though he hadn’t yet reached the point of division after which Peter B. Parker had actively avoided Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.
Peter would have bet money he didn't have that Blondie had probably been a lot warier than anyone had credited him for; though his ties to the Avengers were certainly cordial, he’d stayed at arm’s length too.
Stark’s eyes followed his gaze. Peter shook his head as if to dislodge a fly. “Dr. Banner and Shuri?” he asked.
“Working on the accelerator,” said Stark tersely, picking up a tool. “I suppose the chamber helped?”
“Yeah.” Peter didn’t mention it made him sick after a while. “Thanks.”
Stark inspected the superconductor he’d been comparing against the data readouts.
Peter’s natural curiosity perked up at all the gadgets around but he started to take a step back to the door when Stark, still looking at the superconductor in his hand, asked in a clipped tone: “Mind explaining why Parker was in here a little while ago, asking me about overrides?”
“What?” Peter was surprised. The kid hadn’t mentioned it during their chat, and hadn’t seemed duly bothered by the information anyway. Peter had just figured that Parker had let it go.
“What have you been putting in his head?” Stark said sharply, putting the superconductor down.
Maybe Peter’s zen time in the quantum chamber had subconsciously relaxed him, allowing him real rest from the constant cell firing, because he didn’t immediately rise to meet Stark’s brittle tone. “What did you tell him?” he asked, as curious as he was wary.
“What I’m telling you now: I gave a multi-million dollar technological marvel to a teenager I didn’t know at the time. Would you let someone drive a Ferrari off the lot without a GPS? Yes, I put in an override. It’d be asinine not to.”
“You know him now. Have you taken it out?” Peter asked, with a critical look at the suit behind Stark. “Like you did Instant Kill? Or did you just…hide it better?”
“Listen, Quantum Leap,” Stark snapped, pushing back in his chair, “I get that you crash landed in this universe but I’m busting my ass here trying to help, practically defying established laws of physics with barely a thank you by the way, which you didn’t seem to have a problem saying to Banner—”
“I am grateful. I really don’t want to turn into Sam Beckett.”
“No, Beckett tried to fix things that went wrong, not screw up what isn’t broke.”
Peter tilted his head. Already he could feel the glitching trying to start up again. “Out of curiosity, does 'Omega Omega Epsilon Nine' mean anything to you?”
Some passwords, chosen at random, were totally different in this universe. And some of them, chosen by intent, evidently remained the same. Stark said nothing at first, which said everything.
Unsurprised, Peter went on, leaning against the doorway with arms folded across his chest: “Is that the override for the Iron Spider, or for the suit the kid’s wearing now?”
“Did I have to use it?” Stark said acidly. “In your universe?”
“I didn’t give you the chance. Like I said then: what kind of protege would I have been if I didn’t anticipate you?”
At the word ‘protege,’ a line formed between Stark’s brows. Peter sighed. “The Accords are over with in this universe, so why the paranoia? You’ve all patched things up, but it’s like you’re planning for the chance it could happen again.”
It was easy to forget they were practically strangers; this argument felt like an old one between them.
Stark left his seat, rubbing at his chin and stepping away like an agitated cat. “The override protects him, too, did you think of that? What if that suit went haywire? What if it did something he couldn’t control? I’m not having another Ultron.”
Peter rolled his eyes and said, “That's the only reason, huh? Does your suit come with an override?”
Stark swiveled to face him. “You’re a hypocrite, you know that? You say you and our Spider-Man aren’t the same person, yet ever since you got here you've resented me for what a different Iron Man did in your universe. What’s next; do I hold Parker accountable for the screwup you became?”
Peter’s zen evaporated. “A screwup?” he snapped.
“You think I can’t tell? You don’t exactly project the aura of a guy who’s got his act together. Somehow I don’t think that’s your Stark’s fault. So he put in an override too, boo hoo. It’s not like he billed you for the suit.”
Stung, Peter shot back: “It’s not just about the override, jackass! It’s about trust!”
“Parker trusts me!”
“Yeah, he does! So how do you think it makes him feel that you don’t trust him?”
Their voices reverberated around the lab and down the empty hallway.
“He’s a kid! It’s for his own good!”
“That kid’s an Avenger! You can’t make his choices for him! A Kill Mode? A tracker? Really? What else is there?” Peter waved animatedly at the Iron Spider and leaned forward. “If he’s going to use your tech, fine! But he should know it inside and out! Hasn’t he earned that?
Admit it, Stark," he added, pointing at him, "you're a doomsday prepper. Ever since the first split mended you've been preparing for the next."
Why else had Peter fought so hard to learn so much? Maybe his own gear wasn’t as sophisticated, maybe his attempted buttwarmer had nearly set his ass on fire, but he still felt pride in his work—maybe more now than he had in years. And yeah, he’d recently learned that independence only got you so far, but Peter had seen what Miles could do when he’d been able to build upon the guidance he’d gotten from others. Miles was Spider-Man, uniquely Spider-Man, and so was Parker.
Tony shook his head. “You seem to have a hard time believing this, but I do actually try to look out for him.”
Was Peter jealous? He stopped, taken aback by the thought. No—Tony had loved him too, taken him under his wing no less than this Stark was doing for Parker.
Peter was jealous all the same: of this universe, and the circumstances that had inspired different choices.
He started talking before he realized it, before he could stop. “Tony Stark made choices for me too—without asking, without even telling me. I was loyal. I didn’t hack that suit until I realized just how militant the Accords were getting, what the powers behind them were willing to do to get control over as many ‘enhanced individuals’ as possible. Tony couldn’t see it; he was so paranoid and guilty over Sokovia but I thought he loved me better.”
Peter had never said this to anyone except MJ. Was he shaking, or were his atoms glitching? Stark stared at him with an unreadable expression, hands at his sides.
“He put a spy on my spider sense,” Peter said in quiet disbelief, renewed after nearly a decade. “He threw it red herrings to confuse me in a fight. He got so suspicious. He didn’t just make sure the suit couldn’t be used against him; he used me. To build his own sixth sense and sabotage mine. How could he do that?”
He looked to Stark as if the man could tell him the answer. “Say you're totally honest with him," Peter rasped.
Stark hesitated.
Peter suddenly cried out and doubled over, his loss of control seized on as a moment of weakness by atoms that suddenly went haywire. He dropped to his knees and clutched his head, feeling himself pull apart at the seams. Peter wrenched his eyes open and saw his hand spasm between dimensions, tugging his atoms across an abyss they couldn’t cross.
Stark moved forward instinctively to help, but Peter stopped him in his tracks with a raised hand that even then was splitting between universes.
Tony drew back as if scalded.
Eventually the glitching subsided.
For a full minute neither of them spoke and Peter just tried to regulate his breathing. The electronic noises of the lab sounded unusually loud in the midst of the silence between them.
His ears burned as they always did when he was ashamed. He stared at a stain on his Converses.
The truth was…one of the missed calls in his phone’s history was not from MJ.
One had been from Tony Stark, his universe’s Tony, made in the last month after years of silence between them. Peter hadn’t missed it deliberately, he’d just been taking delivery of a pizza and and absently pressed play on the short voicemail left on his phone.
In the message Tony had simply said that he and Captain America both were trying to get hold of him; they wanted to talk.
He didn’t know what they wanted to say to him. It hadn’t seemed fair for them to reach out, after all this time. Isolation had gotten comfortable to Peter, like a well-worn butt groove in his La-Z-Boy, and he wasn’t sure what he’d do without it.
All he had to do was change his cell number again. He’d changed it once in the last ten years, on the first day following back surgery that he’d felt well enough to march into an AT&T in Queens and demand a new number from the bewildered shop assistant.
True, it’d take the retired Iron Man a literal heartbeat to suss out the new one, but Peter knew he wouldn’t. He’d accept the message Peter was sending and leave him alone.
One day they’d stop trying. For the first time Peter suddenly dreaded that.
What if MJ gave him the cold shoulder? It wasn’t the same, he’d never divorced the Avengers because he’d never been one, but the thought of turning up on her doorstep and seeing her look away was unbearable, a thought that wrapped cold fingers around his heart.
But of course she’d never do that, she was too kind, she—she was better than that, better than him. She’d always kept the faith.
Standing against the table counter, Tony folded one arm but held the other hand in the air as if it could speak for him. “I don’t know what I’ll do if he dies again,” Tony said unexpectedly.
Peter looked at him from where he still knelt on the floor.
“He died, right here.” Stark held his arms out, loosely. “There was nothing I could do to stop it. No override. No special mode. That suit is the best thing I ever made and it did nothing to save him.”
Peter believed the grief he saw. He struggled to his feet, feeling really drained.
Chewing the inside of his cheek, Stark hesitated, then motioned between them. “Tell me what to do to avoid this.”
Slowly, Peter said, “Parker’s a good kid. If you want him to trust you, you have to do the same. If he says he doesn’t agree with you, listen.”
Stark nodded and looked away to his counter, tapping on it with one hand. Knowing him, he was embarrassed by the uncharacteristic display of deeper emotion. So was Peter. Catharsis acted as a muscle that went sore with every use.
“And the next suit you make?” Peter called to Stark’s profile.
Tony turned, waiting.
“Make it together.”
Stark’s phone rang.
Both of them jumped at the sound, made shriekingly loud for the silence it had interrupted, and Peter had to fight a nervous grin. The billionaire glanced at the caller ID on its screen and frowned at an unfamiliar number. The ring had the effect of cutting the tension and Peter detected some relief in the eye roll Tony directed at the phone. “I know the spam callers can’t find this number. If I have to hear about chronic back pain solutions one more time…”
He hesitated, then tapped the speakerphone and answered the call while picking up the superconductor again. “This is Stark.”
“Well hiya, Tony Stark,” came a raspy New York accent.
Peter froze.
Not as familiar with the voice, Stark caught Peter’s reaction and responded warily. “Who’s this?”
“We’ve met, actually, Tony. Can I call you Tony? I’m gonna call you Tony. We met at one of your Expos. Alchemax is nowhere near your equal, but I haven’t done too bad for myself. You can call me Wilson, but Kingpin works too.”