Work Text:
The workshop is filled with humming machinery— quiet, but constant, as servers run and disks spin and air moves through vents. It’s masked under Tony’s usual playlist. The one Peter has slowly been infiltrating, though he’s stolen a few songs from it as well.
Peter’s sitting in his chair in the way that Tony makes fun of him for, with both legs folded up near his chest, arms reaching around them to fiddle with a hologram, which is still as cool as the first time he did it.
He had to find a new project to work on after, two lab nights ago, he had tiredly confused the gas and air valves on the soldering torch and set a flame over two feet high, setting off the alarm and singeing an inch off his hair. He was not so tired after that, but Tony had steered him from the lab and condemned that project for the time being, so now Peter was stuck with less hands-on tasks unless under strict supervision.
Lab nights had become more common over time— it was rare that a week went by that they didn't have some tinker time, and Peter had gone from awkwardly shooting off at the mouth with questions and barely withholding from touching everything in sight to making a space for himself at a desk right next to Tony’s. The visits ranged from impromptu movie nights to trips to the R&D labs. Sometimes Tony would abuse his power and make Peter go on a coffee run (says it’s good for keeping up the internship front, as if being one of the only people allowed in his personal labs wasn’t enough).
Peter flicks through the various menus on the interface in front of him, searching for the right kind of propulsion mechanism for a new web shooter he wants to prototype. Tony’s doing something similar to his left, absorbed in his work and on what is probably his third coffee of the night.
Finally, Peter finds what he’s looking for: a miniature turbine pump that should compress the webfluid enough to strengthen it before it exits the nozzle. He’s slotting the holographic model into the perfect place on his schematic when Tony breaks the silence that’s fallen over them.
“Hey, look. One of your friends.”
He isn’t sure what he’s expecting when he looks up, but it’s not Tony hunched over the desk, hands cupped delicately in front of something Peter can’t see. Tony turns in his chair, then opens his palm and holds it out to Peter, who instinctively stiffens.
In Tony’s grasp is a spider. Small, dark, and subtly fuzzy, with eight beady, unblinking eyes. It moves unhurriedly and spins itself in a circle, studying its new surroundings with curious steps.
Peter’s laugh comes out thin, more a puff of air than anything else.
“Ha, yeah. Right.” His voice wavers at the edges, and immediately his ears burn with embarrassment. He straightens his spine impossibly more, shoulders squared higher than they should be, and hopes that Tony just thinks it was a voice crack. The man already sees him as young, anyway.
He tries to force himself to relax, to look casual, before Tony inevitably sniffs him out— he has a habit of finding out things you don’t want him to know. It’s one of his expertise— but every muscle is thrumming with tension it doesn’t know what to do with.
There’s nausea slowly building, mingling unpleasantly with his Spider-Sense that tingles up his back. His hair, where it’s grown a little too long, brushes against the nape of his neck, and Peter’s mind helpfully supplies him with an image of a dozen spindly legs crawling their way up his person, like when the babies scatter from their mothers back in hordes.
He’s not sure what to do; his body is stuck between freeze and flight. His sense is buzzing, sure, but that’s never a guarantee. Sometimes it’s razor sharp. Other times, it’s duller— a heads up instead of a move now, but not specific enough about what to look out for. It’s gone off around MJ when he had finally talked himself into maybe asking her to hang out. When he met her at her locker, it had grown stronger, and he’d stood there, white knuckling the straps of his backpack and looking out for possible danger, fumbling his way through a greeting as MJ watched him with a raised brow. Before he could get the words out, the warning bell rang, and she dismissed herself rather nicely, meaning he had made enough of a fool of himself that she felt bad about it, and left. The feeling disappeared with her, and when he saw her again, he’d chickened out of asking.
So there’s no way to know if there’s a real danger. If the spider is about to bite Tony and turn him into Iron-Spider-Man (Just Iron-Spider? No hyphen?) or just straight up envenom him, or if Peter’s brain is being objectively stupid about something harmless.
He lowers his shoulders and wills his heart to stop beating so loud before Tony somehow hears it.
But Tony is already looking at the spider in his hand, studying it, spinning his wrist as it crawls from calloused palm to the smoother back of it, passing over a well-faded scar.
“Kind of cute, isn’t he?” he says, squinting because he had, once again, neglected to wear his glasses. Correction, refused.
The spider climbs up Tony’s middle finger, limbs just long enough to wrap around the sides. It looks like it’s about to leap right at Peter, who swallows a little too loudly and pushes his chair further back.
Tony then turns his attention to the rest of the lab: at the floor-to-ceiling windows, the steel covers of the ventilation systems, the reflective doors of the private elevator. He muses, “Wonder how it got in. Can’t remember the last time I saw one here.”
As he’s preoccupied, the arachnid slips further to the tip of his finger, its myriad of legs moving in slow, stalking movements. Peter forces his sweating hands from the arms of the chair to his thighs before he turns Mr. Stark's furniture to dust.
He wonders if the spider knows he’s, well… Spider-Man. Maybe his sense is going off cause it’s trying to communicate with him, which, god, is somehow worse than Tony getting bitten. Not that he’d voice that out loud, but he’d rather not be able to hear hundreds of tiny voices everywhere he goes, probably claiming him as some kind of leader. He’d prefer to be blissfully unaware of the hidden arachnid community in New York, thank you.
Tony must have had his fill of observing the thing, because he looks up at Peter. He squints, then, in a more scrutinizing way than he did with the spider. Peter bites the inside of his cheek and turns to his hologram, keeping his eyes from flickering back to the creature in his mentor's hand to make sure it hadn’t moved.
“You okay?” Tony asks skeptically, brows already raised in doubt. Peter can feel his stare on him, and wishes he would look back at the spider, if only to keep the thing from weeping angel-ing closer.
“Yeah!” He tries, but it’s so high-pitched it sounds like the tap on the bathroom sink at home. He clears his throat and tries again. “Yeah, yeah— no, I’m good. Just, you know,” he motions lamely at the model he hadn’t touched. “Working.”
Tony looks down at the spider, then back at Peter, whose attempt at not fidgeting is failing miserably. Peter would have to be stupid to believe that Tony won’t figure it out, so he just clings to the tiniest shred of hope that Mr. Stark either drops it (unlikely) or thinks Peter’s being weird about something else (also unlikely).
Tony bites his lip in the way he does when he’s thinking about doing something he knows he shouldn’t— like when Pepper forbids him from something and they both know immediately that he’s going to do it anyway. He’s thinking over the consequences of whatever he’s about to do, which doesn’t mean much. Nothing short of world-ending would sway him from something he wants to do or, in this case, something he wants to know.
It must not be world-ending because Tony leans forward and extends the spider again.
Peter’s lungs stutter, and his breath catches pathetically in his throat. Every hair stands on end as he pushes himself further against he back of his chair, muscles ready to take off at a moment's notice because there is no way he’s letting Tony put that thing on him. His sense is going off like crazy, telling him so many things at once and yet absolutely nothing at the same time.
Tony, to his credit, stops and draws his hand back a bit, though the thing is still at the tip of his finger and looking, for all intents and purposes, like it's getting ready to bridge the gap between itself and Peter.
The corners of Tony’s mouth twitch into a barely withheld smile. “Spider-Man’s scared of spiders?”
Peter doesn’t dignify that with a response. It’s rhetorical, and kinda mocking, and he’s too busy trying to breathe and forcibly not think about a spider crawling in his nose. Besides, he’s sure that if he gave him an answer, it wouldn’t be a very kind one.
“Thought you’d like ‘em. That’s kinda your whole brand,” Tony continues anyway, because a tough crowd never stopped him before. He’s loving the irony of all this.
That’s stupid, Peter thinks, for anyone to be expected to like spiders. It’s not like that’s one of the biggest fears in the world or anything. He sets his feet firmly on the ground and wheels his chair back— Tony knows now, so there’s nothing except shrieking like a little girl or launching himself onto the ceiling that can bring him further shame.
“Has it always been like that?” Tony asks, apparently finding this topic enthralling and not invasive at all. Like they're talking about the weather and not Peter being unable to handle the eight-legged creatures from which he gets his name when he can handle being shot at multiple times a week.
“Not really,” Peter grumbles, trying to make it clear this isn’t a conversation he wants to be having, if the red blossoming on his face wasn’t enough.
Reading the room is unfortunately not one of Tony’s strong suits. He scrunches his nose. “Becoming Spider-Man made you scared of spiders?”
“Yeah, well, becoming Spider-Man almost killed me, so…”
His mentor's lips tip down into a frown. “You never said anything about that.”
“You never asked,” he argues. If he were less flustered, he would be able to see Tony’s worry more clearly from under the curiosity. He shrugs as Tony brings the spider completely back to himself, all attention on him. “You asked how I became Spider-Man, and I told you I got bitten.”
A tilt of his head tells Peter he wants him to keep going. He does this, sometimes, when Peter tries to recount his day at school while simultaneously working on a project, skipping points in his timeline and jumping back to them later as an afterthought before trailing off when he loses focus. It’s a silent encouragement.
“I got really sick,” He admits, twisting a loose thread around his finger while he watches the spider Tony seems to have forgotten about. “Like really sick. I kinda tried hiding it at first, cause I didn’t want May to worry, but it got bad fast. I couldn’t stand on my own. I had a fever and a crazy headache, and sometimes it felt like all my blood turned to acid.”
He tries to laugh to lighten the mood, but it's weak, and Tony’s face stays carefully neutral outside the slight pinch of his brow, which means he doesn’t find it funny.
“It was only a few days,” Peter’s quick to amend. The spider looks like it’s about to crawl up Tony’s shirt now, and the man still hasn’t noticed. He’s getting anxious just watching it. “And I was, like, barely conscious for most of it. Kinda hazy, you know? Besides, it was forever ago.”
Silence. He hates when Tony looks at him like this, poorly hidden worry— pity, as if he can’t handle himself. As if he’s not almost seventeen and more capable than even most of his peers. He avoids the gaze by watching the spider extend its front legs and hook them onto the knit of Tony’s faded tee, hoisting itself up easily. Tony traces Peter’s gaze and gathers the arachnid back in his hand, then stands.
“I got him.”
“Don’t kill him,” Peter calls hurriedly, shifting to the edge of his seat. “He’s probably just here cause it’s cold out.”
“I’m not gonna kill him,” Tony assures with a fond smile and a small shake of his head. “I’m going to take an unnecessarily long walk to an openable window and let him out. I’d invite you if I didn’t think you would faint.”
The grin on Peter’s face isn’t all embarrassment.
Tony leaves the lab, spider in hand, and returns a few minutes later.
“The danger has been relocated,” He announces as he sits back in his chair. “Only spiders allowed in this lab are ones that recklessly throw themselves in front of bullets. F.R.I.D.A.Y, make a note.”
“Note created.”
“Thank you, sweetheart. Now,” Tony pushes Peter and his chair to the other side of the desk to make room for himself. “How’s your prototype?”