st_arkintern | Tony Stark Voice Test

Peter's mouth drops just in time for Tony to make that quip about flies --

-- only to clamp shut the second his face surfaces in front of him.

By reflex, Peter takes a step back, but stops. It's not until Tony issues his orders that Peter's mind snaps back into action, and his body with it.

"Y-yeah!"

Peter opens the window as high as he can, then scrambles backwards, leaving Tony with more than enough room to maneuver in.

It's only once Tony is safely situated inside that Peter opens his mouth again.

"You really didn't have to rush here," he insists. Still, there's no denying how moved he feels by Tony's urgency; he knows that he's very busy, and still he dropped everything immediately to be here.

It's hard for Peter not to feel touched right now.

The armor's form became visible as its chrome plating darkened and distinguished itself from its surroundings, not unlike a chameleon. Tony emerged from the armor, dusting his matching (and rather humble) black shirt and jeans combo off.

"I'm retired, kid. Also, when I make bets, I don't make it a point to lose." The man eyed Peter as he said that, mouth drawn tightly with visible reluctance. "Speaking of. ... ...I think it's up for debate who won."

"I think you were a little late, Mr. Stark," Peter says. "You were already past six minutes when you arrived, and it was probably over seven by the time you came inside."

Peter really wants that lab tour. And besides that, he knows he's right.

Even if Mr. Stark doesn't think so.

"It's called staging." Tony claimed the sole spinny chair in the room, rotating in a slow, defeated circle with the force of his rear end flopping down into it.

"I could have made a beeline for your room, if you weren't too attached to your noggin." He pushed off his foot onto the floor, making the chair jolt into another few rotations.

"Alright. Fine. Hit me with your best shot."

"That doesn't matter because you were still late when you arrived here," Peter argues.

Peter dampens his lips, reluctant to ask Tony for something that seems so simple and nerdy. If the roles were reversed, he knows that Tony would come up with something good, something fun. Asking to see his lab somehow feels seems uncool somehow.

"I want to see your lab," he says, finally. "Just... not while I'm grounded."

"My lab." Tony repeated, fixing Peter with a look as the chair slows to a stop. He opened his arms in silent inquiry, as if expecting Peter to continue.

"Just my lab? Or did you want fries with that?" He paused and backpedaled, truly registering the look that was already plaguing the boy's face before he started talking. "I'm just saying. You could have a tour and some nice gelato. A bubbly or two. Some high class--oh, right, fifteen. Scratch that."

Peter shoots Tony a disturbed look -- the same sort of disturbed look he gave him when he called May hot.

"Just the lab is fine," he tells him, though the gelato is tempting. "There's actually a lot of people online who speculate what you have in there."

Peter may or may not be a regular visitor of the superhero subreddit.

"And you have the new suit," he says, gesturing to arc reactor on his chest. "I'd really, really like to see how it was made."

It was really, really cool.

"You get one selfie." Tony held up a finger. "One."

The implications of Peter's words weren't at all lost on him.

"And not while you're in the lab. If I see any hint of snapchat or instagram while you're on my turf, I'll have Aunt May ground you for the rest of your life. Then I'll summon your spirit with voodoo and have you grounded for the rest of your death."

He gets a selfie, too?

Peter couldn't show the Berlin video trip video to anyone (Happy's orders), but he could probably get away with showing a selfie to Flash. That at least, might stop him from giving him a hard time over the Stark Internship thing.

At least Peter hoped so.

"Promise," Peter says solemnly. "Just one selfie."

Peter takes a breath and sits down on the edge of his bottom bunk. There's so many emotions muddled up inside of him right now. Worry at how they're going to handle May, warmth at his mentor's willingness to drop everything to help him, excitement at being able to see Mr. Stark's lab -- and it's overwhelming.

He looks over at Tony.

"What are we gonna tell May?" he asks, finally.

"What indeed." Tony dug around to work a bulge from his pocket, producing a Stark Industries branded stress ball. 'Who even approved these?'

"If there's one thing I learned from...recent events, we'll call it, is that compromise is essential." He tossed the ball Peter's way. "When someone has power, it's bound to frighten others. In all sorts of ways."

Peter catches the ball easily; superheightened reflexes are just one of the advantages of being bitten by a radioactive spider during a school field trip.

Peter looks down at it, then gives it a squeeze. He looks up at Tony just as he finishes his last sentence.

"What do you mean?"

Peter is oblivious.

Tony suppressed a grimace. While it was true he enlisted Peter for work on behalf of the Sokovia Accords, it wasn't a topic he was eager to discuss explicitly. Swallowing his emotion, he opened his hand to prompt Peter to pass him back the ball.

"Checks and balances. You have the power to fight crime and quite literally combat evil. It's dangerous work. Messy. Unfortunately, you don't stop being the teenage nephew to one very alarmed Aunt May. Of course she's going to use her power as your guardian to put you in check. Or, as you see it, an over correction."

Tony quirked a knowing eyebrow at Peter. He had done the exact same thing to his protege when he had gotten too big for his britches, after all.

Peter looks at Tony's hand and for a second it doesn't immediately occur to him that Tony wants the ball and not a low-five. Thankfully, it registers quickly enough that this doesn't become another hug-in-the-car incident.

Peter passes Tony the ball, then nods at what he's saying.

"Yeah, that makes sense," he says. It does. "So how do we get May to correct her over-correction?"

He didn't exactly go into the whole "stopping Vulture" thing with the hope of correcting Tony's over-correction, either. And something like that might have convinced Tony Stark of his readiness, but he's pretty sure it'd have the opposite effect on May.

"Diplomacy, kid. Diplomacy." Tony gives the muddled red ball a few good squeezes. "What approach do you use when asking permission to have your friends over? Or a puppy? Or to borrow the car on your sixteenth? Hopefully what you don't do is whine, first off."

Tony passed the ball back and forth between his hands, idly rotating a few degrees back and forth in the dark chair. He felt hilariously out of his element, but he wasn't about to admit it.

"You swear you'll be responsible. You promise to stay out of the liquor cabinet and that you'll house train Fido." Tony tossed the ball Peter's way in a high arc. "No one's gonna hand you the keys to the car if they can't trust you with it, kid."

"I don't whine," Peter protests in a tone of voice that comes across as whining.

Peter presses his lips together. He's not sure he wants to know the answer to this question.

"Do you trust me?"

He thinks that Tony does; he wouldn't give him the suit back if he didn't. But there's still that lingering doubt that if he did trust him, it was tentative -- that as soon as he screwed up, he'd take the suit away again.

"Enough to make you an Avenger." 'If that didn't say enough.' Tony thought and resisted saying.

He was at a point in his life where he knew that actions weren't always enough. When he was developing the Binarily Augmented Retro-Framing, he had to dig deep to acknowledge all the things he wished he had said to his father upon hindsight. No less than that, all the things he wished his father had said.

"I trust you to do the greenhorn thing and make mistakes. God knows the Avengers do. You'd think literal gods would know better than us mere mortals, right?" Tony's mind went back to the Asgardian he hadn't seen in years. "Thing is, I trust you to work hard to fix them."

Edited 2018-07-22 15:54 (UTC)

A warm feeling permeates Peter's body from the inside out. He tries to remember the last time he felt like this, and when sifts through his memories, he realizes that it was when Tony returned the suit to him.

He should have believed that Tony trusted him then.

Peter tries to open his mouth to say something, but the first attempt gets stuck somewhere in his throat. He tries again, and this time the words come out easily.

"I won't let you down, Mr. Stark," Peter says solemnly.

Peter briefly presses his lips together, trying to reign in the excitement and pride welling inside of him; he's sure that his enthusiasm irritated Happy sometimes, and he doesn't want it to irritate Tony.

"You really think I can be an Avenger someday?"

"First things first," Tony scooted towards Peter, clapping him on the shoulder. "We get you back your goods. I could build you a new one, but you don't walk away from your first love so easily."

He checked his watch. It was only 5, so they had a good hour to solidify the game plan.

"If I pretended I was a responsible parent, I'm guessing some things I'd want include making sure you didn't fall behind on your homework. Fair place to start?"

Peter nods.

"Yeah, and... probably answering my phone." Peter pauses there, but only for a moment. "It's not always something I can do, though."

He'd been really distracted when people were trying to call him when he was on the ferry. But he couldn't just ignore people, either. Not without making May or anyone else panicked or worried.

"Don't sweat the small stuff." Tony replied, scooting back a few feet. "We're discussing a model of applicability here."

While Tony was on track to graduate summa cum laude from MIT and inherit a Fortune 500 company by the time he was Peter's age, he at least had an appreciation for the idea of living a normal life in the boy's case. And more than that, it was more than true he had violently enabled Peter's descent into chronic heroism. To be the one mentoring him to get halfway "on track" was ironic at best.

"Live the "best years of your life" and all that. Has anyone actually told you that, kid? Never listen to someone who peaked in high school. Anyway, you know what I mean."

Peter does not know what he means, but he still nods anyway.

"Yeah, yeah... of course."

Tony sighed at the faux-knowing look in the boy's eyes. Peter always managed to look lost, some times more than others.

"Okay. Different approach. I'm Aunt May. Persuade me."

"Persuade you?" Peter repeats, taken aback. He's not entirely sure how he could.

And perhaps worse, looking at Tony and trying to imagine May was almost impossible. They didn't look or act anything like one another.

"Okay," Peter says, taking a breath. He looks down at his hands, tries to put himself in the I'm really talking to May and not Tony mindset, then turns to look at Tony.

"May, I wanted to talk to you about the whole Spider-Man thing."

That seems like a good place to start.

"I know that you're worried about me. I know I'd be worried about me, too." It's true. "Especially because of everything that happened with Ben."

That had been a big part of why he'd kept it secret from her in the first place.

"But I really thought about it for a long time. Even before I decided to be Spider-Man," he says, "and I think if I can help other people, I need to."

This is somewhat embarrassing to admit to Tony, but he really is trying.

"So... I really just want to talk about the things you're worried about and figure out if there's some way we can meet halfway."

Cold silence filled the room for a long moment after Peter had finished talking. His expression was hard, frozen in a mask of barely-there composure.

"This," He gestured all around Peter, "Is not up for discussion." His words were quiet, but they struck like knives.

Tony's silence sends a chill up Peter's spine. Did he say something wrong? He really hopes that --

And then Tony opens his mouth.

And then Peter wishes he hadn't.

Immediately, his mind is scrambling for the perfect words. He's sifting through his mental filing cabinets of May knowledge, frantically trying to figure out what she'd want to hear.

But he knows that the only thing she'd really want was for him to just agree with her.

But he can't.

"I know you don't want to discuss it," Peter begins, "but I want to because I think that it --"

Peter swallows. He hates the idea of clashing with May.

"I think that it's important for you to know why I was doing all this, and why I was doing it behind your back."

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