Chapter 13
Intellectually, Tony is aware that he should tell the team about this. The Captain, unbearably abiding to protocol as he is, has made numerous good points about telling the team of any new, important developments such as this -- insisting that it results in less conflict and better overall integrity and more trust in each other both as friends and as coworkers, whatever that’s supposed to mean. He’s never really listened to Steve’s ‘do good, be good’ speeches.
But there’s some distant part of him who looks at the kid and can only think that there is no way that he -- twiggy little Peter Parker, who eats his popcorn one at a time and still gets excited when he has the chance to hang out with Bruce (which he is not jealous of, at all) -- is Spiderman. And he thinks that, if he wants the team to properly believe what he saw, he needs to do so himself.
So, over the next week, he tries to convince himself.
It isn’t hard to keep an eye on Peter. With JARVIS on his side, he can monitor every room in the tower aside from the team’s personal floors (which he reluctantly implemented out of pure respect for their privacy, because he’s nice like that) -- and with Peter still stubbornly residing in the sixteenth floor infirmary, he has full clearance to monitor that room however he likes. Of course he doesn’t watch it himself, because that’s incredibly disturbing and likely illegal; he simply gives JARVIS instructions to alert him of any odd, spider-like behaviour and leaves it to settle.
The first alert is given to him via his smartwatch while he’s hanging in the communal living room with Clint, Sam and Bruce and JARVIS quietly shows him footage of Peter placing some odd pieces of technology behind a box of bandages under the bed. When Thor takes the kid to the park later that day, he takes it upon himself to investigate, only to find a pair of what he can only identify as Spiderman’s webshooters. The spinneret nozzles, empty canisters and spring steels are dead giveaways.
He’d placed it back afterwards. He didn’t want to spook the kid away if he picked up on Tony’s discovery.
It’s as if discovering one spidery train enlightened him to a dozen more he’d been brushing off as nothing but odd quirks. For instance, he immediately picks up on the fact that his reflexes seem honed to the max when he throws the kid a spoon and he catches it without so much as glancing away from his book. And he noticed a little while later, Peter was absently turning the pages by simply pressing a finger against the paper. Part of Tony wonders whether it’s a force of habit or something he does purposefully.
A day after that, he’d gone about researching Spiderman’s known mutant abilities. Sticking to surfaces, superstrength, superhealing, enhanced senses of a sort and perhaps some kind of early warning system. Of course, most of these things are only rumours conjured by curious citizens while watching his behaviour in action, but Tony has no reason to think that they’re unrealistic; he lives in the same house as a God, for fuck’s sake.
And so he decides to dig into the specifics of the operation and decides that nothing could be more telling than a DNA sample. He’s never gotten anything from Spiderman but he can only assume that there’s something abnormal there, what with the weird spider superpowers and all. It’s hard to believe that none of that is biological in some way or another.
He manages to swipe the kid’s fork while volunteering to wash the dishes after a sleepy Wednesday dinner. It doesn’t take a genius to spot the irregularities in his DNA structure; a structure he can recognise from some sort of spider -- that part is obvious -- but not any breed he’s seen before. He labels the sample as ‘jacked up spider’ and then tells JARVIS to remind him to look into that more some other time.
By Friday, he comes to the conclusion that Peter has to be Spiderman. The DNA, the reflexes, the hand thing all adds up eventually.
The reality that Spiderman is a kid -- a fifteen year old, who they found homeless and beat up -- leaves his whole body feeling hollow. Spiderman has been hit with cars and shot and stabbed and beaten up and-- and he’s just a kid—
—a kid who can stop a bus with his bare hands—
—but he’s fifteen—
—no. No. Tony cannot comprehend how on earth Peter got these spider powers and why he decided the best thing to do with them was to fight crime in New York alleyways, but he isn’t incapable or stupid. Peter -- Spiderman -- may be young, but he can clearly take care of himself, and who is Tony to suddenly come and start mothering him over it? Peter is his own person who can make his own decisions. Tony is not his parent or guardian; he is simply just offering him a place to live until Peter can decide where he wants to go and what he wants to do.
So how did he end up homeless?
What happened to Spiderman?
… has he hung up the suit for good?
It’s a comfort to know that Peter is happy in his home. He just wonders about the future of it all.
“J, what should I do?”
His voice echoes in the expanse of his personal floor, with no one but JARVIS to keep him company.
“I suggest telling Mr. Barton and Mr. Wilson first, sir.”
It makes sense. Sam and Clint were the two who saved Peter from those assholes in the street and brought him back to the Tower. They’re the closest to the kid out of them all. He notices that they gravitate the closest to him when they’re all doing something together, like a couple of moons on their orbit. Like two annoying older brothers who secretly care about their younger sibling more than they care about anything in the world.
He decides it’s best to add Natasha in too. Her and Clint have been searching for Spiderman even without the support of SHIELD (they think he doesn’t know that they leave the Tower late at night but JARVIS tells him every time) for God knows how long and Tony finally found him right under their noses this whole time. Besides, he thinks it won’t be long before she finds out herself if she hasn’t already.
Tony works the crink out of his back as he stands up from his couch. “Good idea, J.”
.
Sam wakes up to catch the pillow before it hits his face and he throws it at whatever presence is trapping his legs against the bed. “Piss off, ghost.”
“Tony ordered waffles for breakfast,” the ghost tells him, and another pillow thumps the side of his head before he can detect it’s swing.
“What time is it?”
“Seven.”
“Fuck off, Barton.”
The sharpshooter cackles like a witch high on laughing gas. “I love you too, man. Let’s go eat our body weight in waffles before Steve beats us to it.”
“I’m sure Tony can afford to order more,” Sam says, and Clint rolls off his legs to let him get up.
The distinctive scent of sweet waffles and warm syrup hits Sam like a freight train the moment he steps into the communal kitchen and he is pleasantly surprised to see everybody eating their breakfast somewhat normally for once. Even Tony joins them this morning -- he’s sitting on the countertop instead of at the table, but he’s here nonetheless, and Sam admires his effort to actually get out of his workshop once in a while. The man really does hole himself up to the extreme sometimes.
Steve pats the empty seat between him and Peter, who has positively drowned his share of two large waffles in an unholy amount of syrup. “Come sit here, Sam. Is two waffles okay? And do you want the syrup? We had to open a new bottle after Thor drained the last of the other one.”
“It does taste delicious,” Thor reasons with a shrug. His hammer is sat just beside his plate, the harsh, white light of the ceiling lamp hitting the flatter edges of the corners and reflecting dull lines onto the surface top.
“Sounds perfect, Steve” Sams says as he sits down. “Good morning, Pete.”
Around a mouthful of waffle, Peter says passively, “morning.”
Bucky passes him his breakfast, the fork stabbed upright in the middle of the stack and the syrup bottle sat on the side of the plate. He doesn’t get to use it before Clint, though, who is quick to snatch it and follow Peter’s example of smothering his share of three large waffles in the stuff. “Thank you, Buck.”
“So polite,” Bucky murmurs and crams a forkful of waffle into his mouth.
It’s unusual to have a quiet breakfast time, but Sam cannot say he doesn’t enjoy it. With a team as upbeat and as energetic as this, it’s not often he sees them as tranquil as they are right now, and the calm of it all is appreciated in the tired grey of the early morning. He can still feel the throb from where Clint hit him with a pillow behind the weight of sleep lingering under his skin.
Soon enough, Thor is dropping his fork into the space where a stack of five waffles had been sitting. The noise is enough to jar everybody out of their state of peace. “I have finished!” he declares helpfully.
“Leave your plate there,” Tony tells him, still tucking into his first waffle. “U will take it later. Right, bud?”
The friendly AI, who has been quietly picking up the empty delivery bags and putting them in the bin ever since they started to eat breakfast, spins his arm in the affirmative. “That isn’t DUM-E?” Clint says, pointing his syrup-stained fork in the bot’s direction.
“Obviously not,” Tony snaps.
“They look the same.”
“But they act differently. They have their own personalities.”
Steve makes a tired face into his waffle.
.
It’s two hours after breakfast and Sam is locked in a trance as he watches the plot of Dunkirk unfold slowly on his television screen, the sheer impact of the silence and the raw beauty of each and every shot leaving even his packet of hot Cheetos tasting somewhat dull the more he eats. Even the reddish-orange dust on his fingers -- that is usually considered the best part of the whole bag -- doesn’t compare to whatever he feels over this movie.
He’s watching Tom Hardy fly his plane when the movie suddenly pauses and the familiar British intone of JARVIS talks through the quiet in the room, voice a knife through warm butter. “I am sorry to interrupt, but I must tell you that Sir requires your presence in the open laboratory, Mr. Wilson. He asks me to tell you that Mr. Barton and Miss. Romanov are also there, so you can not worry about, and I quote, ‘being eaten alive by my sheer presence’.”
His stomach flips. He says, “I’m guessing you can’t tell me why he wants me.”
“That is correct, Mr. Wilson.”
“Call me Sam,” he murmurs absently, advancing for the elevator with too much energy in his step. There isn’t much to justify the sudden bout of nerves -- he supposes that there’s just something intimidating about his presence being required, especially by Tony Stark. Half of him is afraid he’s going to be turned into a science experiment, or an AI, or something.
(“It’s unlikely, but not impossible,” Bruce had pondered thoughtfully, when Sam asked him whether he’d ever be turned into a robot by Tony not too long ago.)
“Take me to--”
“You do not need to ask, Sam.” JARVIS sounds as formal and as polite as ever and yet Sam can detect the tiniest fraction of frustration in his tone.
The elevator jerks into its descent down a couple floors and the few minutes of complete silence gives him time to worry about what is to come. Anxiously, his leg bounces, a subconscious habit born out of nothing he can remember. Tony has never done anything to him; nor have the two resident superspies, save for perhaps Clint, who has a habit of attacking him with pillows or water pistols when he’s just minding his own damn business.
So why am I so worried about it? he asks himself, and cannot think of a reasonable answer.
The elevator stops with jarring movement and the doors take what feels like a decade to open, to expose the sleek grey design of Tony Stark’s favourite open laboratory. As expected, the man himself is sitting on a countertop, scraps of metal and a beaker full to the brink of a strange, steaming blue liquid pushed away to make room for him and his accompanying coffee cup. There’s a fading oil stain on his right cheek, a feature that seems to be on the permanent side nowadays. The arc reactor’s blue disk of light barely shows through the thick, reddish material of his AC/DC hoodie.
Clint, meanwhile, is slouching on the couch in the corner, decked out in his Hawkeye gear with his bow lying on the floor beside his feet. The sharpshooter must’ve been training. He gives Sam a quick once over as he steps out of the elevator. “You’re nervous,” he concludes a moment later.
“I see it too,” Natasha adds. She’s sitting on one of the stools wearing leggings and a sweater, hands hidden under it’s sleeves. The fact that she looks relaxed makes Sam feel that little bit more comforted.
“Do you know how chilling it is to be ‘required’ by Stark?” Sam says, and flops onto the sofa beside Clint like a tired cat.
“I won’t bite,” Tony defends uselessly.
Clearly uninvested with the conversation at hand, Clint carefully tries, “so what’s this about, then?”
Tony’s hands are kneading together in his lap.
“I found Spiderman.”
Both Clint and Natasha are out of their seats in a moment. The sudden loss of weight on one side of the couch startles Sam more than their movement does. “What?” Natasha demands. “Are you sure?”
“After all that time we spent searching for that little cunt -- all the sleep I sacrificed -- and you found him?” Clint snaps, and falls back into his seat. “You found him! You!”
Tony simply says, “sit down, Nat.”
Sam isn’t sure why he’s been called to attend this meeting, too, but he plays along nonetheless. He hasn’t been searching for Spiderman as much as Clint and Natasha have -- hell, he can’t remember a time he tried at all. How little he contributed to their tireless searching almost makes him feel guilty -- and he wasn’t even part of the set mission in the first place.
“I can’t believe you found Spiderman,” Clint says again, as if trying to convince himself. “I can finally sleep a full night. I can finally stop prowling around New York like some kind of child abductor.”
“I need an explanation, Stark,” Natasha is demanding again. There’s surefire venom practically dripping off her words and yet Tony remains cooly impassive, his eyebrows not so much as twitching.
“Why am I here again?” Sam tries, but one seems to be listening to him.
Tony fingers drum against his knee. “J, play the video,” he says, and a video feed comes to life projected on a holographic screen in the middle of the room. Sam has to crane his neck to look at it properly.
It starts off with a cinematic shot of New York. Sam almost admires the beauty of the image, observing how beautiful his city can be from a birds-eye view such as this, but the footage then suddenly dives down and he realises as he notices himself in the shot that this is the viewpoint of one of the Doombots.
He watches it dodge Tony’s repulsor blast. “Did we do bad in that battle?” he asks.
Tony gives him a look akin to as if he were eating a lemon. Behind his shoulder, the video continues to show the Doombot pounce at a pre-occupied Nat and escape before she can land a hit. “You did fine. Why’re you asking?”
“Why else would you be showing us this?”
“I’m a little confused too,” Clint says uneasily.
(He wonders whether Natasha already knows his intentions. That woman knows everything.)
“JARVIS, skip ahead fifteen minutes and… thirty seconds,” Tony says, and the AI obliges.
The video jumps to a shot of the Tower getting gradually closer and closer, a small swarm of perhaps six or seven Doombots flying ahead of the one they’re watching the view of. They don’t stop as they reach the glass of the window, just crash right in through it and send shards of glass flying in every thinkable direction. Sam’s heart skips a beat when he sees Peter throw his bag of Cheetos across the room and vault like a gymnast over the couch the moment they break in.
God -- this must have been terrifying for him. Sam can only remember the bone-quaking fear and nothing else before he’d gotten used to this kind of thing. Maybe the point Tony is trying to make is that Peter needs better protection if he’s going to be staying in the Tower for a while. Maybe he just needs to work harder to keep the kid safe.
This, like white noise, is the only thing on Sam’s mind as the Doombot advances towards the couch.
“Oh my god,” Clint murmurs right next to his ear.
“Why are you showing us this, Tony?” Natasha says.
The billionaire doesn’t reply, just motions to the video. The Doombot is leaning over the couch now. The distinctive sound of a whining repulsor blast -- much like the one that the Iron Man suit makes and yet so much more sinister -- is muted to the sound of his own blood running in his ears. Peter’s eyes are glossy with mounting terror as he looks up into the Doombots face and-- and--
Climbs up the wall?
“Stop it, J,” Tony says quickly, and the sudden loss of the video feed’s humming background noise leaves the room washed over in an overwhelming tidal wave of tense silence.
It’s Sam who speaks first. “What the fuck?”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Clint says.
“What the fuck?” Sam reiterates, because what the fuck?
He’s seen that kind of wall-crawling before. He’s seen it on the news; flashes of it in the streets; on YouTube videos he occasionally finds himself watching. There’s not many people who have that kind of crawling. In fact, that kind of crawling is special to only one person in this whole damn city.
Spiderman.
And-- and--
What the fuck?
“What are we going to do?” Natasha asks, strangely calm.
“What the fuck,” Clint says.
“Peter is Spiderman?” Sam says, hoping to God himself that Tony is going to say no, that the walls just happen to be crawlable, that Peter fucking Parker is not the missing vigilante that they’ve all been looking for.
But it all adds up. From what they derived from the school report, Peter could have been homeless and kicking for over a year -- which is round about the same length of time that Spiderman has been missing. Peter can catch things without looking up. Peter’s hand once got stuck to his jacket and it isn’t like he had glue on his hands. It all adds up and he’s fucking kicking himself for it.
“Peter is Spiderman.” Tony repeats. “I have a DNA sample. J?”
The AI projects an image of DNA through a basic microscope. Sam isn’t a genius nor does he know anything about DNA, but even he can spot the odd irregularities in the sample. It makes him feel like he’s looking at a peeled lime, or someone in the bath; like he’s looking at something he shouldn’t see.
“So that’s what you were doing with his fork,” Natasha says, and Tony shoots her a somewhat unnerved eye.
“What the fuck,” Clint says again.
.
“Peter is Spiderman?”
It’s like someone took a knife and twisted it into his gut. He regrets snooping. Oh, God, he regrets snooping. They know. They know. Tony knows. They knowtheyknowtheyknowtheykn--
“W-window, J.”
“I am not sure that letting you out is a good idea, P--”
“I swear to God-- open t-the window!”
The window opens and Peter is gone.