st_arkintern | Tony Stark Voice Test

"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."

"Oh, Peter, please!" Tony threw up his hands, the mask of control quickly slipping.

"Is there a good reason why the Avengers needed a high-schooler to do their dirty work for them?! All this--this sneaking around, lying to my face, I expected some of that as you got older but THIS? It's like you'd gone off and joined a cult!"

Peter tenses. What is he supposed to say to that?

"I," he starts, and he can't seem to figure out what word he should use after that. "It's not like that."

Gone is the deliberate composure of a few minutes ago.

"I knew you were going to be afraid for me if you knew what I was doing," he argues. "I didn't want you to be afraid, but I still wanted to help people."

He swallows.

"No one made me do this," he says. "I chose to do it."

"You are fifteen years old." Each word was pointed, as harsh as the look Tony was casting on Peter.

"You could be the most noble person in existence, but it won't change the fact you're still young! And that's what scares me. Not just the thought of you tossing yourself into danger, but the thought of someone taking advantage of that good will." Tony was closed off, arms folded across his stomach.

"The suit? Stays locked up. Anyone saying it's a good idea to wear it? Staying away. I don't care how good a grant they're paying out."

Peter bristles with irritation.

"Didn't you tell me that age was just a number?" he asks. "What does it matter that I'm young?"

Peter doesn't think it matters, even if other people think it does.

"Someone's going to take advantage of me eventually," he says. "Even if you take away the suit, nothing's going to change that. It's still going to happen."

This much is true. Peter can't believe he'll go through the rest of his life without having someone take advantage of him.

"And I can't let that stop me from being able to help people. I can't. And even if you take the suit away..."

Peter stops there.

"Listen," Tony slowly rises from his seat. "You're fashioning yourself the guardian of Queens. Fine. I am the guardian of you. Do you know what that means?"

Tony let the question hang in the air, locking Peter into a glare that challenged his will and dared him to say another word.

"It means that no matter how strong you are, no matter how many bad guys you take on, no matter how many superheroes you rub elbows with, I am responsible for you. This is not punishment for lying to me. This is me doing whatever I can to prevent you running off and getting yourself killed."

Tony chewed the insides of his lip. His own adrenaline was pumping.

"I know why you lied, I know why you're doing what you're doing. At the end of the day, maybe I can't stop you. But if something happened to you?" Tony threw up his hands before letting them fall back down. "...I couldn't go on, Peter."

Logically, Peter knows this is practice.

Emotionally, it doesn't feel like it is.

He knows, even as he fights against it, that this should be the one time where he should be calm and cool and practiced because those are all the things he's going to need to be when May comes through the doors and finds him and Tony waiting for her.

But he's not calm, because when he hears Tony say these things, it's like he's not just May saying them, it's like Tony's saying them too.

"Why couldn't you just support me instead?" he asks. "Why not instead of stopping me, you help me? I know I'm going to do this and you even say you can't stop me, so what good is telling me no going to do for either of us?"

Another silence. It's wasn't cold like before, but it was heavy.

Tony broke the stillness, approaching Peter slowly, and lowering himself into the space beside the boy on the bottom bunk.

"Why this?" He asked, watching the side of Peter's face. "Why not something else? There are so many other ways out there to help others aside from being a superhero. With your smarts...you could be any of them."

"There's a lot of people out there who are smart," Peter says. "A lot of them are way smarter than me."

People like Tony.

"But there's only one person that can do what I can do."

Yet another pause, yet Tony was nodding slightly as Peter finished speaking.

"...Alright." He was the first to break, turning his eyes towards his knees.

"Alright, kid." Tony enunciated his words with a sort of finality that was concretely him. "That was...I think you've got the basics down. Maybe a little less combatting but I think we've got something workable."

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