If They Knew All About You

Letting Things Go

"Tony, who the hell is Peter Parker?"

His hand shot up and roughly rubbed across his temple. "Potts, I heard you the first time you asked."

"Then answer me. I've seen the hours, Tony. What is going on?"

His eyes went up to the ceiling, narrowing on one of the cameras up there. FRIDAY had better not screwed him over on this. He swiped his arm in the familiar pattern and started up the projection of his server's filesystem.

"Potts, you're the one who told me the foundation would need my personal involvement to be meaningful and I agreed, so what exactly is the issue here?"

Tony pulled up the Tower's file system, went to human resources and scrolled through the names. Peter Parker, right where he had put it.

"You have an intern in your lab two days a week who spends all his hours either in your lab and in the cafeteria!"

He skimmed Peter's logged hours for the last weeks. No stays in the lab that exceeded three hours. No logs of the trips to his private floor. No school day that had Peter stay later than 7 pm. Good, so at least FRIDAY hadn't openly defied his order and kept Peter's extra hours off the books.

"So? What is your issue here, Potts? You don't want the kid to go to the cafeteria? I know you've always been pushy with me but usually, it was to get me to take a break not—"

"Why do you have a 14-year-old kid in your lab, Tony?"

He had to tread carefully here. One wrong step and she'd latch onto it. "Because he's an intern?"

"You don't like interns."

"Are you trying to tell me that you don't want me to work with the interns?"

"Have you worked with any other interns?"

He rolled his eyes. "No."

"What are you doing with this one then?"

"I like this one, okay?"

"Tony..." She sighed and he could picture her as if she was right in front of him, head braced in one of her hands, her thumb rubbing across the skin between her eyebrows trying to flatten out the wrinkles he was giving her.

"Are you complaining about my numbers? About my productivity?"

"No, I—"

"Then I'm not sure why you called me to yell at me about this! You think there's someone else in the Tower who could teach him more than I could, huh? You wanna call Peter and ask him if he'd rather spend some of his hours being mentored by someone else?"

"Being mentored?"

Urgh. There it was. He had better not let her sink her teeth into that one. "You know what I mean."

"I'm sure the kid is thrilled to hang out in Iron Man's workshop."

"Why do you say that like it's a bad thing, Potts? "

"The kids are there to learn, not to entertain you in the lab."

"Thanks, dear, your faith in me as a professional engineer is humbling."

"Tony—"

"I'm not up to anything other than getting my stuff done and putting my weight behind the September foundation. Like we discussed."

He was going to go to hell for this but they probably had a spot on hold for him anyway. He couldn't tell her. Pepper would freak and he couldn't give the kid away. Not now. At least she'd have a legit reason to be pissed at him concerning the Spider-Kid if she ever found out.