Spider-Son & Iron Dad two shots

midnight feasts and phonecalls

Spooktober 29: Tip-Toe

"It's exhausting. I don't know how you do it. I raise my voice one time because he's driving me nuts for doing something dangerous, and all the sudden I'm taking several steps back thinking, who am I to scold him? But if I don't, he's gonna do something stupid!"

May plucked out a tangled lump of laundry and shook out one of her dresses. Smoothing the dress out on her lap, she sighed into the phone. "And I totally see where you're coming from, I do, but Tony, I think you just have some new-teen-parent jitters."

Now, she had always known since Tony had arrived in their apartment so many years before that Peter looked up to him in an inspiring admiration. He was a role model to her kid, whether she liked it or not, and at the time she vehemently did not.

But, before the 'Stark Internship' Peter had been in a rough place— both of them had been, with the disruption of grief and the stress May had of seeing her nephew lose such an important figure in his life— and it was clear to her that Tony had unknowingly picked up this role.

She begrudgingly learned to live with it, and only hoped that Tony wouldn't break her kid's heart when he decided to find a new intern, or move out of New York, or whatever billionaires did while running companies.

May didn't know when exactly she had befriended Tony Stark. Somewhere along the chaos of her finding out Peter was Spider-Man, at some point in between the lab nights and training missions, a friendship formed just out of the need to mutually support the unhinged teenager both of them shared responsibility for.

It started when out of the blue, Tony had just called her. Peter was at school, so when his number had shown up on her phone, there was a great deal of confusion and understandable stress as she picked up. She was thinking, maybe Peter snuck out of school, maybe something happened, maybe he was hurt, maybe Tony found something on his patrol logs that was worrying.

What she hadn't thought of was that Tony had called her that evening for what was, in the simplest and most baffling of terms, parenting advice. She couldn't even remember what it was now, something about how to properly speak to Peter when he was being stubborn about something rather than arguing back and forth, and she had dutifully supplied an answer, accepted his thanks, and to her own surprise, told him to call again anytime.

He had done just that, and before May knew it, the two of them had unknowingly developed some kind of a routine.

Tony called again tonight, just as May was pulling her clothes out of the dryer. He sounded tired, stressed, as if he had been ruminating on his conundrum for a while now and finally caved in to asking advice on it.

"New-teen-parent jitters?" Tony's voice strewn through a forced laugh. "Okay, very funny. I'm not trying to get him to clean his room, or do his homework— which by the way, I had him do the overdue chemistry assignment while he was over here the other night— I'm just trying to get him to not do stupid shit while he's fighting real, actual criminals."

Ah, right.

She supposed that was the main reason they became friends, truly— the slow realization that while Peter looked up to Tony Stark, Tony Stark himself had meaningfully taken on the mantle of what exactly that meant. There had never been any risk at all of Tony not caring enough, not being responsible enough, to take care of her kid where she couldn't.

She smiled with amusement. Pausing to take a sip of red wine from one of the fancy glasses she usually kept in the cabinet above the fridge, she let Tony relish in the damning sentence he just said.

"...Okay," Tony said slowly. He sighed with another wave of tiredness and defeat. "Yeah. I heard it. Whatever. You win. Just tell me what to do, May, you've got me on the edge of my seat here."