To All Those Brave and Lovely

Kids

He's got a kid.

Two, if you count Peter, and somehow Tony can't stop himself from counting Peter, considering that he is sort of repsonsible for making him an official crime fighter rather than just a "saving a cute teenager from some muggers" kind of hero.  Originally the plan was to just have the suit in case an emergency rose up, and then Cap went all crazy and it sort of was an emergency, so he showed up at the kids house and told him to mostly just stay out the way and planned on giving him a hefty scholarship to MIT when it came time for Peter to worry about college.

Except the stupid kid had way too much fun fighting and was acting like fighting half the avengers team was a dream come true, and then he went back and basically single handedly saved the world even if no one knows it, despite that whole fiasco with the boat that Tony had to admit might have been avoided if he had actually talked to Peter more than once a month.  It had been a reasonable request, then, for Cap to ask Tony to bring Peter into the fight against the killer robots, even though actually seeing Peter flying around through the fight made Tony's stomach twist and his teeth ache.  

Tony had intended to stay away from him, because depsite how responsible he might feel and how many hours he spent working on his suit, Peter was not his to care about.  He had his Aunt May and his small handful of friends and his bright future, and Tony didn't want to get in the way of that, even if he couldn't stop himself from lurking in the back of the auditoriums during his decathlon matches and took him out to dinner once a month.  But then the city seemed to go quiet for just a moment, long enough for Tony to watch Peter fall to the ground with a robot on top of him and then fling it up, up and away and straight into a building full of civillians, and the two of them watched the whole thing start to collapse.  And then Peter was up, flinging himself into the air just in time to snatch those two girls away from the ground seconds before it got too late, and Tony didn't seem him again until the battle was over.

"It's okay,"  He told him, when he finds him down an empty alley with his mask off, bent over and dry heaving.  Tony puts his hand on Peter's shoulder, thankful that he had taken off the suit before he went to find him.  "It's over. We won."

"It's not okay."  The kids crying now, and he looks over at Tony with red eyes.  Tony had seen him cry before, right when the boat thing just happened and Tony had thought that taking the suit away was the right solution.  (Which, it was, he still stands by that, but it would have helped Peter with his task of not dying if he hadn't.)  Back then, he ignored it because he didn't want to make his fatherly feelings for the kid even more complicated than they already were, but for now he has no choice but to deal with it.  "It's my fault they're dead."

"No."  Tony pulls Peter to him, holds him in the way that he imagines a father should hold his son when he gets upset.  And it must be right, becuase Peter's sort of clinging to him in a way that he's pretty sure neither of them are going to mention again.  "You didn't."  He keeps him there until he's calm, until the dust settles and the first repsonders have turned into the clean up crew, until Peter takes a shuddering breath and takes a step back and scrubs bthe tears off his face.  "I promise you it's not."

He had taken him back to the avengers complex that night, because there was no way that Peter was going to be able to go home, and Tony wasn't sure that being around Aunt May would improve how he was feeling.  He does let Peter call her, a long conversation that included a lot of very teenager like sighs and eye rolls, and maybe a bit more of crying, and then yes, Aunt May, I just need to sleep.  And then Peter was sitting down at Tony's kitchen counter with Wanda, and Tony was cooking them pancakes of all things, becuase that was what Wanda had asked for.