1 If you're nothing without him, you shouldn't have him.
Tony thought he'd successfully kept everyone in his life at a safe distance. He and Pepper were 'taking a break', a break that wasn't likely to ever end. Rhodey had been given his leg braces, seen through physical therapy, and then left pretty much alone. The team had broken up; Tony hadn't seen any of them in weeks. And Peter… well, he'd given Peter the suit, given him Happy's phone number, and sent him on his way.
Then the fiasco with the vulture happened, and Tony nearly had a heart attack. He'd thought the kid had been hurt, he'd almost been killed. Tony had realized he'd needed mentoring, help, so he'd told Peter he was taking the suit until Peter was trained enough to hold his own in bad situations. Since then, Peter had been coming to the tower at least three times a week, training, building things, adding upgrades to his suit. Eventually, he was there any night his aunt was at work, staying for dinner, until May got home and Tony drove Peter back to his apartment. Then, his aunt had to go a few cities over for a business meeting, and Tony found himself offering to take Peter to the compound for the entire weekend. It had been awkward at first, but soon, the tension broke, and they were watching movies, eating junk food, and making an overall mess together.
Peter was good for Tony. His sleeping schedule was normalizing; it wasn't what anyone would call normal yet, but it was getting better. He only had five cups of coffee a day, which was a vast improvement from before, when he couldn't keep count. He hadn't touched alcohol since the first time Peter came over. Overall, Peter had turned Tony's whole life around, in a very good way, and Tony knew he could never repay Peter for the service he didn't know he had done, so Tony stuck with just secretly feeding money into the Parker's bank account, as Peter's internship salary, giving the kid anything he needed for Spider-Man, and spending as much time with him as possible.
They'd known each other for nearly two years. Peter was 17 now; he wasn't a reckless teenager who'd just gotten his powers, he was nearly an adult, who'd had his powers for quite a while, had seen the danger there was in the world, and finally allowed Tony, May, and Happy to help him. Tony was the happiest he had ever been in his entire life, and in his eyes, nothing could change that.
And then Peter went missing.
It happened so suddenly. Peter had been dropped off at school, responded to Tony's text confirming that he was going to the compound after school for the weekend, and then, suddenly, stopped responding to anyone. Tony received a call from Peter's phone, that turned out to be from his friend, Ned, asking if Tony knew where Peter was and why he'd left his phone in the boys bathroom. Tony had been at the school immediately, had shut it down, and searched through it from top to bottom, and found no sign of Peter other than his spare suit under the lockers, and his backpack, jacket, and watch thrown haphazardly into the locker room.
Peter's watch monitored his vitals, and had a tracking system in it. His suit was in his backpack. With neither of those on Peter, Tony had no way of tracking him, no way of knowing if he was okay, if he was even alive. Tony was terrified.
And Tony fell apart.
For nearly the first time in his life, Tony had no idea what to do. He assumed Peter had somehow been abducted, but nobody had contacted him, for ransom, to make demands, or anything. In his panic and confusion, his helplessness, Tony did the only thing he could think of to do.
He called him the team.
Steve answered the burner phone almost immediately. He listened carefully to Tony's panicked explanation, then agreed to bring the team and be there before the day was done. Tony returned to the compound, and started doing everything he could to find Peter. He contacted the police, he sent Peter's photo out all over the city, he searched through the security cam footage from every camera in the city. He had Peter's classmates and teachers come to the compound to be questioned, if they saw anything, heard anything, at all. May showed up, and then Pepper did, and even though Tony hadn't spoken to her in months, he found himself crying into her shoulder.
True to their word, the team arrived before Peter's school day would have even ended. Natasha immediately began working whatever magic she had on the computers, before she stopped abruptly and called them all in. There was a video feed on the screen; Peter, tied up on a bed, his masked captors standing beside him, facing the camera. They made no demands, simply said that this was their revenge for everything Tony had done to them and their families, and then climbed into the bed with Peter.
Tony couldn't watch. He turned around and started punching the wall repeatedly as the sounds of Peter being assaulted filled the room. It wouldn't turn off, no matter what any of them did. When they finished assaulting Peter, they beat him to a pulp, then turned off the camera.
Tony kept beating the wall. He didn't care that his hands were bleeding, probably broken. He didn't feel any pain at all. And when Steve tried to stop him, Tony turned around and started beating him, too. Finally, they'd knocked him out with a sedative, and the last thing Tony remembered was swearing at Steve as he punched him weakly.
When Tony woke up the first time, he tried to leave, tried to fight off Steve and the doctors keeping him in the bed, until they had to sedate him again. He was told he was no use to them in the state he was in, that he was hindering their search, so he stayed in the hospital bed for nearly a week, obsessively searching through security footage, rewatching the interviews with anyone Peter knew. When he woke up on the seventh day, it was to Natasha bursting into the medbay room to tell Pepper and Steve, who were sitting by his bed, that they'd found where Peter was being kept. Tony had ripped through tubes and wires, demanding that he go and not taking no for an answer. The team had suited up, got on a quinjet, and off they went.
When they arrived at the abandoned warehouse Natasha had somehow tracked down, Tony stormed in there, blasting anyone and everyone he saw, showing no mercy and leaving nobody alive. There were no heat signatures left on his reading of the building, but Tony refused to believe that Peter wasn't there, because that would mean his captors either escaped with him, or… or Peter was dead. Tony came across an empty hallway and blasted his way into every room down it. There was the room with the bed, a room covered in blood and chains, a room full of crude medical equipment, a room with some sort of torture device in the center. It was in the last room he broke into that he saw, in the corner, the small, hunched figure, with a mop of brown curls, currently matted with blood.
In a sort of daze, Tony exited his suit, stumbling towards Peter, calling his name, falling to his knees beside him. In some place in his mind, Tony knew the truth before he touched Peter, because the whole time Tony was there, Peter never even twitched. Still, he refused to believe it until he touched Peter's cheek and found it cold. He held his fingers to his throat, his wrist, his chest, and found no pulse. He had Friday scan the body repeatedly, only to be told the same thing, over and over and over: There is no sign of life.
The team found him in the room, cradling Peter's bloodied, broken body, sobbing into his curls and crying his name, over and over again. Steve had to drag him, kicking and screaming, from the room, as the rest of them recovered the body.
They had a funeral, which Tony almost couldn't bring himself to attend. May spoke, and Peter's friend, Ted, or whatever. A girl named Michelle, who Tony remembered Peter talking about, saying he had a crush on. Tony did not; he couldn't, not when blamed himself for Peter's death. If he'd done more, if he hadn't stayed in the MedBay all that time, if he'd kept Peter home that day. After the funeral, Tony locked himself in his lab for three days, refusing to eat or sleep as he trashed the whole thing. In a corner of the lab he rarely entered, Tony found books, notebooks, textbooks, action figures, blueprints, and plans, all with Peter's name neatly written in the upper right hand corner, as all high school students are taught to.
A high school student. A seventeen-year-old boy; that's all Peter was, and he'd had his life ripped from him. New York City mourned the loss of Spider-Man, their friendly neighborhood hero. Midtown Tech mourned a classmate, someone who won their Academic Decathlon nearly ever competition, the smart, nerdy boy that girls had secret crushes on. The Avengers mourned a hero who could have been a teammate, who threw quips at them when they were fighting each other. Ned Leeds and Michelle Jones mourned a best friend. May Parker and Tony Stark mourned a child; a child that was theirs in everything but blood, that they loved with everything they had.
Two months after Peter's funeral, Steve came down to Tony's lab. Tony received the news that May Parker had been found in her apartment, dead, from alcohol poisoning, as he nursed his own glass of scotch.
"Tony, you've got to pull yourself together," Steve said. "Peter wouldn't want to see you this way."
Tony glared at Steve, a glare full of grief, guilt, and hate. "You don't understand," he snapped back. "I am nothing without that kid."
I'm nothing without him .
The words rang through Tony's mind, as he remembered Peter saying something similar, and his own response.
If you're nothing without that suit, then you shouldn't have it.
Tony supposed this was the universe throwing his own angered words back in his face. If you're nothing without that kid, then you shouldn't have him.
Tony refused to leave his lab. He sat in the corner, Peter's corner, going through his notebooks, finding his collection of notes scrawled back and forth between him and Ned. He found his plans to ask Michelle to prom.
The worst was when he found the camera. It was filled with pictures and videos of Peter with his friends, Peter with May, Peter with Tony. Tony watched the videos on repeat as he clicked through the photos, for hours on end. He watched Peter, his face full of happiness, of light, of life , starting from when he was recruited by Tony to fight in Germany, and ending with the day before he went missing, when he, Ned, and Michelle had gone out to lunch, and then to a farmer's market. He watched them laugh together, banter. He watched Ned and Peter flick pieces of their sandwiches at each other as Michelle rolled her eyes behind her book. And Tony cried, for the dozenth time that day, the hundredth time that week, probably the millionth time since Peter had disappeared.
When he watched the video of Germany, Tony reached his conclusion. It was his fault Peter was dead. Not because he had sent him to school, hadn't pulled him out early, hadn't worked harder. It was his fault because he'd shown up in Peter's apartment that day, had taken him to Germany, given him a suit, and then taken him back to his lab that day with the ferry. If he had stayed out of Peter's life, Peter would still have his life.
Tony reached another conclusion that day. There were no more Parkers. And if there were no more Parkers, there should be no more Starks.
Pepper found him in his lab the next morning, Peter's camera in one hand, an empty pill bottle in the other, finally at peace.
