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“Hey, Tony, look what I can do!”
Of all the things he expected in the grand adventure that is babysitting Peter’s daughter, Tony did not expect to turn his head to find the kid stuck to the ceiling.
The wrench in his mechanical arm slackens in his grip before it falls completely, almost matching the speed at which his jaw unhinges in surprise. “AJ,” Tony says in the calmest voice possible. He leans down slowly to pick up the wrench, eyes never leaving the world’s stickiest six year old crawling about above him. “How’d you get up there?”
The sad this is he knows exactly how she got up there.
Stupid spider DNA.
She gives a sickeningly sweet grin before she lets her hands unstick and she drops, the soles of her feet catching her and leaving her hanging like a bat.
Tony’s seen Peter do shit like that millions of times, but it’s a whole new terror to see the girl he thought was genetically not spider-like to do...spidery. Things.
So yeah, he kinda yelps.
“April Jones Parker -!”
She laughs. In his face. The little devil.
He sighs, breathing deeply out of his nose. “AJ,” he tries again, “Do your parents know about this fun new skill you’ve acquired?”
April shakes her head, still grinning like a madman.
Great. Now Tony has to be the one to break the news. Six years of convincing Peter that his daughter would be a perfectly healthy, normal, non-spider human is now completely down the drain.
“Okaaaaay,” he drawls, eyes on her like a hawk. He’s not as sprightly as he used to be, so he doesn’t know if he’ll be that great at catching her in the event that she falls, but he’ll give it his all. Morgan can wheel him around when he inevitably breaks every bone in his body. “Could you maybe tell me when you acquired the ability to walk on the ceiling?”
“Just now,” she says, with all the simplicity of someone giving a pleasant weather forecast. She swings her body weight up so her hands are back to sticking on the ceiling. She begins to crawl. Tony can’t help but try to follow, attempting to always stand right underneath her in the event she decides to fall. “But I started sticking to stuff last night.”
Last night. Dear God. “...What stuff?”
April’s eyes widen with glee. “My door knob! I had to pull real hard and the whole door ended up falling off the hinges.”
Tony blinks, taking that information in. So it’s not just the stickiness and acrobatics she’s inherited. It seems she’s annoyingly strong as well. “...and your parents didn’t think it was weird that the door just fell off?”
She shrugs. “Mommy didn’t seem surprised. She said the apartment is a shithole?” her voice pitches in hesitation on the last word. “Daddy wasn’t home. He’s been in Europe doing spider shit all week.”
“Sweetie,” Tony sighs as he rubs the bridge of his nose. “You gotta stop saying the word shit.”
“But Mommy says it’s fine,” she shrugs from the ceiling. Tony really, really wishes she’d come down. He gets 50% of what he wants when she ends up crawling to settle sideways on the wall. “As long as I don’t say it in front of the other kids at school.”
That’s not...the worst compromise he’s heard. Honestly, it’s pretty much what Pepper and Tony did with Morgan. “Fine,” he caves. “You can say shit all you want around me. Just...come down from there?”
She cocks her head to the side. Blinks twice. “Why?”
“You’re creeping me out.”
April rolls her eyes. “I’m not gonna fall. I’m sticky. Just like Daddy! I didn’t know if I could do it, and I was a little scared to try it but - ”
Yeah, he doesn’t care. This is beyond his babysitting duties. Tony pulls out his phone and declares, “I’m calling Pete.”
He’s not entirely sure what he expects from that statement, but he was hoping it would be more along the lines of getting her back on the ground. Instead, she lights up and goes back to the ceiling, doing some sort of Olympian flip to do it. It makes him queasy just watching it.
“Yes! Can we do Face time!? I want him to see!”
Honestly, that’s all Tony wants as well. He wants to push this problem on to someone else.
Since April didn’t specify where in Europe Peter was doing his Avenger spider shit business, he isn’t sure what time it is over there, but after five rings or so, Peter picks up. He’s not in his suit, nor is his sporting any injuries that he can see, which is good. The bright smile is the cherry on top. “Hey, Tony!”
“Hey, buddy.” Tony tries to match the smile, but he’s pretty sure it looks forced.
“You’ve got April right? Everything okay?” He doesn’t sound worried, per say, but he’s rightfully curious. Tony and Pepper watch April every Thursday afternoon while Michelle works on her PhD, which also gives Peter an opportunity to do Spider-Man...things. It’s always been a smooth affair, and Tony can’t recall ever calling Peter or MJ while their daughter was under their care.
Until now.
“Yes,” Tony sighs. “Your daughter is just fine. Better than fine. I’d even go as far as to say she’s super.”
Peter blinks, clearly not following. “Uh... okay? I mean, I hear that’s ideal for raising happy healthy children, but I could be wrong,” he smarts.
“Daddy!” April squeals from the ceiling. She waves both hands in the air, her feet still stuck to his very high ceiling. “Can you see me!?”
“Hi, baby!” Peter shouts, the bright smile back. “No, but I can hear you! Where are you, kiddo?”
“Grandpaaaaaa,” April sing-songs. Tony frowns. He hates the G word. “Turn the camera around!”
Tony’s about to giving a very sympathetic speech to prep Peter for his worst fears coming true but then the kid hits him with a cheery, “Yeah, Grandpa, turn the camera around!” and then Tony doesn’t really care anymore about Peter’s well-being. At least not for the next five minutes or so.
He taps the button on the phone, flips the camera, and watches as all hell breaks loose.
“....ohmygod.”
April just giggles at Peter’s gasp before she starts crawling on the wall again. Tony tracks her movements. “See, now I’m just like you, Daddy! I can be your sidekick! You know, until I’m big and I’m my own superhero. With my own sidekick.”
Peter is still in shock. “.....oh my god.”
“I want a dog sidekick. Do you think I can have a dog sidekick? Or should it be a spider?”
“ Oh my god .”
“Does this make me Spidergirl?”
“Oh my god!” If there was a Peter Parker Stress O Meter, it would be in the red. Critical. Danger Zone. “My daughter is on the ceiling !”
All Tony can manage is a sympathetic nod. “Your daughter is on the ceiling.”
“She’s sticky!”
“I’m sticky!” she agrees, not at all properly responding to her poor father’s mental spiral.
“Why is this happening!? I thought - we checked -” He struggles for words, settling on the face that, “she’s very much never been on the ceiling before !”
Tony lifts a hand in surrender. “I don’t know. We barely know how your own spider shit works. I can consult Shuri but I’m sure it’s just some…” he struggles. Biology isn’t his forte. “...dormant DNA thing - that or she was bitten by a spider. Hey, honey?” He shouts a little louder to make sure he has her attention. “Were you bitten by a freaky spider and didn’t mention it?”
“Nope!” she answers.
“Okay, so yeah, just a freaky hereditary thing that - ” He stops short when Peter looks like he’s about to pass out. “Point is, we’ll figure out what she can or can’t do.”
Finally, finally, April drops from the ceiling, landing like a cat on all fours. “Do you think I can pick up a car, too?”
“No!” Peter yells just as Tony lets out a resigned, “Yeah, probably.”
“Tony,” April says his name in a pleading whine as she skips over to him, rubbing her head against his arm in that cute little way she always does. It’s a manipulation tactic her Aunt Morgan taught her, no doubt. “Can I have a cool suit like Daddy?”
“No!” Peter yells just as Tony lets out a resigned, “Yeah, probably.”
Yeah, he should probably not be teasing the kid. But what’s the fun of being Grandpa if he doesn’t get to spoil the grandchildren with multi-million dollar spider suits?
“Just a suit,” Tony promises Peter as he taps the camera to be front-facing again. “No webs, no fancy AI’s -”
“-if I had an AI, I’d name it Pickles -”
Pickles. Peter’s daughter is amazing. “- just the best Spider-Man cosplay New York has ever seen.”
April tugs on Tony’s sleeve and whispers not-so-quietly, “Can you put a drone in mine too?”
Something in Peter snaps. Eerily. His expression sobers, rivaling a look that Rhodey or Happy used to shoot him when they were 1000% done with his shit. “I’m coming home.”
Tony feels a little guilty. This is quite a lot for him to handle so far away. “...AJ said you were doing important spider shit? Avenger spider shit?”
“Buck and Sam can handle it without me.”
“....Can they?”
“They’ll have to. My daughter is - she’s -”
“Spidergirl!” she declares, throwing her arms up in the air. She looks directly at the camera and gives her dad two thumbs up before Peter lets out a defeated whine, burying his face in his hands. “I want pink webs. Can I have pink webs? Ooh!” she tugs on Tony’s sleeve once more, desperately this time. “Can we make them glow in the dark?”
It’s not exactly practical, but it would be cool. “Sure.”
“Tony!” Peter hisses out.
Oh, right. Responsibility and all that. “Fine, fine,” he concedes. “Just the suit. Sans anything fun.” He playfully tugs on April’s braid. “Sorry, no drone or webs or any kind of superheroing until Dad gets back.”
“Or like, ever -”
“Ever?” Tony scoffs. “That hardly seems fair. I let you prance around the city in my high tech jammies when you were fifteen -”
"So I can be Spidergirl when I'm fifteen?"
“Oh my god. We’re not having this discussion until I get home. Just ...” Peter fails for the right words. “Keep AJ off the ceiling until I get back.”
“Sure,” Tony says, just as April leaps away, sticks to the wall, and climbs to hang from the ceiling. As nauseating as it was to see the first time, he’s...strangely warming up to the sight. It reminds him of the good old days when his hair wasn’t grey and his bones didn’t squeak and Peter was just a baby without a baby of his own. “No problem.”
“And Tony?”
“Yeah.”
“No suit.”
“Are you sure, because I really think if we’re proactive we can help her -”
“Tony, I swear to god -”
He doesn’t give Peter a chance to finish. “Nice talking to you, have fun telling MJ, see you soon, bye!” and he hangs up. When he stuffs his phone back in his pocket and dares a glance at the ceiling, April is pouting.
“We really can’t make a suit?”
Tony shrugs. “Well, we can start designing. If we do something real cool, we might be able to convince your dad to let us make it,” he compromises, and April lights up at the suggestion. “What colors do you think would look good with pink, glow in the dark webs?”
She squints, mouth quirking to the side. Peter has the same tick when he's thinking. “...Purple?”
“Purple sounds good to me. Let’s test it out. You gonna come down and help me?”
“Yeah!” She drops like a sack of potatoes, but still lands in a tumble, unharmed. Tony tries not to scream. Someone so little should not possess such strength. “Oh, this is gonna be so cool! I have so many ideas.”
He snorts, holding out his hand so he can walk her down to the lab. Tony’s been afraid she’s starting to get a little too old for it, but she still grabs it happily, swinging their hands back and forth. “Yeah? Like what?”
She pauses, almost stopping dead in her tracks before she looks up at him. “Spiders have venom.”
“Some do, yes.” He reaches down and playfully pokes at her cheeks . “That’s...not an idea though. Are you telling me you can spit venom?” When she laughs, he tries to look into her mouth. “Please tell me you can’t spit venom.”
“No. I can’t spit venom." A thoughtful pause. "Can we make poisonous glow-in-the-dark webs?”
God, this kid is something else. “...I can’t tell if you want to be a superhero or a super villain.”
“A superhero! I swear!” April pouts. “I’m just curious if you can.”
“I invented time travel, little lady. I can do anything.”
The exuberance is back. “So we’ll make them?”
“Oh. Absolutely not.” Aaaaaaand the exuberance is gone. She sags with disappointment. “Can and should are two very different things. That's superhero lesson number one."
"I'm getting superhero lessons!?"
Peter's going to kill him. "Um. Let’s just start with the purple suit, yeah?”
She takes his hand again, this time without being prompted. “...Purple and red.”
Tony smile. “Purple and red. You got it, Spidergirl.”