Chapter Text
“Take to the skies, Spidey, I want you to look out for newcomers on the perimeter, keep civilians out of the area.”
“Got it, Cap.”
“Tony, we need the walls up sooner rather than later. Get those frequency disks up and running, then join whoever needs help most.”
“Roger that, Rogers.”
“Uh-huh. Nat, Clint, stick to the roof tops. These guys are a fan of the mid-size buildings, not too tall but more than one story.
“On it.”
“Gotcha.”
“Sam, you’ll be tying up loose ends with me. Between all of us, the aliens shouldn’t be able to get outside of the four blocks they’ve taken up. We good, team?”
“We got it.”
“We’re great!”
“Ready to kick some ass.”
“Great. We touch down in thirty seconds. Get geared up, everyone.” Steve turns his star spangled ass to the cockpit where Friday is driving, and the rest of the team turns to getting suited up or checking that all their stuff is in order. Peter parks himself on the seat next to Tony, energy radiating off him like… radiation. Or something.
“Ready to punch some aliens in the face?” Tony teases, bumping their shoulders together.
“Always,” Peter smiles, fidgeting with his web shooters. “Hey, if any of them- I dunno- happen to drop an arm or a fingernail or something-”
“Any testing on foreign biological matter must be done with Brucie’s supervision.”
“Yes! Thank you, Mr. Stark!”
“Twenty seconds,” Friday reminds from the speakers above. Tony gives Peter an encouraging nod.
“Anything happens- anything, for any reason, you tell me, okay?”
Peter scoffs, but smiles anyways. “Duh.”
“You say ‘duh’ now, but must I remind you last week-”
“Uh, no, no need to remind me-”
“When you called me, clearly having abused some kind of substance-”
“Uhh, no- ”
“Way after you left the party, almost getting hit by a car-”
“Mr. Stark, do you have a point?”
“My point is,” Tony turns to the kid, dropping a hand on his shoulder to really get his attention, because sometimes he doesn’t listen, “My point is, we have each other’s backs. Okay?”
“Ten seconds out,” Friday says.
“Okay,” Peter agrees, eyes and smile equally wide.
“Good. Great, even. Glad we’re on the same page. See you out there, kiddo.”
“See you out there, sir!” Peter pulls on his mask as the jet starts to lower, and man, Tony is already regretting letting Peter come along.
They lose each other in the fight, which only adds to Tony’s regret. Any point where he can’t see the kid is a point in which the kid could be in some kind of trouble. He’s like Schrodinger's cat. Schrodinger's spider. Something like that.
Either way, everyone gets caught up in their own things and the comms are relatively silent, and even though he has Friday programmed to let him know if Peter so much as breaks a nail, Tony is, for lack of a better term, extremely worried. But the aliens are gross, and weird, and Tony’s busy setting up the corner disc beacons that will emit a frequency they can’t pass through, hopefully containing the fight to the commercial area they started in. Based on Fury’s info, they react strongly to really high or really low decibels outside of the realm of human hearing, so the hope is that the frequency disks do most of the work to keep the creatures semi-pacified. God, they’re ugly things. Tony catches glimpses as he flies around calibrating disks - they’re vaguely humanoid, but they’ve got broad gorilla shoulders and tiny Barbie ankles and huge yellow eyes that take up half their face and think black fur covering every inch of them. Tony’s not one to judge a book by its cover, but yeesh.
“How’s the perimeter coming along?” Steve asks over the comms.
“Got two more discs to place down- once the last one’s in place, the frequency wall should- Jesus-”
“Tony?” Sam says, “You good?”
“Yeah,” he grits his teeth, “They throw their hairs like javelins. Almost got impaled.”
“Gross,” Clint comments, “As if I don’t have enough hair in my shower drain.”
“Chatter!” Cap reprimands, and everyone shuts up. Well, almost everyone.
“Oh, shit , they do throw their hairs- like tarantulas!” Peter chimes in, “Don’t come up behind them- they have incredible aim, woah-”
“Spidey, how’s the air looking?” Nat asks.
“Only a few of their drones left, we should be clear any second now-” And while Tony’s dropping the last disk into place, Peter’s sentence cuts off with a yelp. “Woah Woah Woah, what is that?!”
“Peter?” Steve’s concerned voice comes through.
“It’s just- that- it’s like the air is vibrating-”
“Kid, are you hurt?” Tony asks, knowing a yes or no question is the only way to get a direct answer out of the kid.
“No, no, not hurt, still good! Promise!”
“Great. Keep the chit chat to a minimum.”
“Got it! Sorry!”
And with that, Tony flies in between buildings, joining Nat and Clint on their run of catching the creatures on the mid sized buildings. It’s weird- like they have an aversion to going above a certain threshold, but they hate being on the ground. Maybe he’ll join Pete and Bruce on that alien study sesh.
The battle carries on, and it becomes increasingly clear that these things are not all that bright.
“Tony, use your repulsor again- the big deep one.”
“On it, Nat,” he replies, bringing up his hand as a deep whirr emits from his wrist. All the creatures in the area turn toward him, staring as if he’s an oasis in a desert, fascinated by the shiny thing on his wrist- which is the perfect opportunity for Natasha and Clint to strike from behind.
It’s not until Sam mentions an hour later that he’s low on fuel that Tony realizes the comms have maybe been too silent. “Status check, everyone?”
“Cleaning up down here. No injuries, same for Sam.”
“We’re good, Stark,” Clint laughs a bit, because they’re standing right in front of each other, Natasha finishing up the murder of an alien in the corner. Tony nods, waiting for one more.
“Pete? You good?”
No response. Perfect. This is exactly the scenario he was hoping to avoid.
“Peter?”
Nothing.
“Anyone have eyes on the kid?” Sam asks, and Tony can see him in the distance flying around, looking for a certain slippery spider.
“I’ve got a tracker- One second-” Tony joins Sam in the air, following the blip on his HUD to a bank not too far from where one of Tony’s wavelength disks are situated. What he finds in the bank is a bit… unnerving.
“Kid, there you are,” Tony lands in the threshold, suit melting away into the housing unit, “You can’t ignore roll call, ‘kay?” He crosses the floor to where Peter is standing, but Peter makes no reaction to Tony’s presence at all. “Peter?” Tony shakes his shoulder- nothing. “Peter, what’s going on?” He takes off the kid’s mask, startling at the expression on the kid’s face. Blank eyes, unblinking and dazed. His hair is standing on end like he’s been electrocuted, and they buzz with the force of the disk right outside. “Kid, c’mon, we gotta high-tail it outta here. Aliens are gone, let’s go,” Tony says, dragging Peter by the wrist before scooping him up into his arms entirely. Peter stays limp the whole time, a puppet cut from its strings.
“Spidey’s out,” Tony sighs to the team. “I’m taking him to the tower. Meet all of you there.” And then he takes off, not waiting for a response from the group.
“What’s wrong with him?” Bruce asks as Tony drops Peter in a med-bay bed for the millionth time this week.
“No clue. Scans came back clean- no concussion, no sensory overload, no injury he was hiding. Not even bleeding anywhere, which is a first.”
Bruce gives a dry laugh. “Anything from the aliens that I missed from the debrief?” he asks, taking Peter’s blood pressure, checking his reflexes.
“Nothing super bonkers- except, we figured out pretty quickly they can throw their hairs like darts. Pete mentioned tarantulas do the same thing,” Tony supplies, before remembering, “Oh, and they were averse to super low frequencies. Acted like moths towards a lamp when I turned on my repulsors.”
“Interesting,” Bruce mutters. “Give me an hour or so- you’ve given me a lot to think about with the tarantula comparison.”
“You don’t think it’s a spider DNA thing, do you?”
“Tony,” Bruce meets his eyes, tucking a clipboard under his arm, “Every weird thing that comes from this kid is a spider DNA thing.”
“Touche,” Tony huffed.
“The team’s debriefing downstairs. Go chat with them, tell them Peter’s okay, and I’ll work with him until I have some answers, alright?”
“…I’m not sure if I should leave-“
“I got him. It’s okay.”
“… Okay. Sure.”
The debrief goes without a hitch. Clint is also in the medbay, getting stitches after getting hit by one of the hairs on his forearm, which means there are way fewer distractions as Cap leads the meeting. Tony leaves afterwards, pouring a cup of coffee and snacking on a cold piece of pizza before coming back to the medbay to see Peter.
Who isn’t there?
“Where’s the kid?!” Tony exclaims, gesturing to Peter’s empty bed. Bruce looks up from his lab bench, a small playful smile on his lips.
“He’s fine. You were right.”
“Not that I don’t like that phrase- what was I right about?”
“Spider DNA. When he woke up, he told me about the disks? With the frequencies? Tarantulas- and most spiders, actually, use their body hair to feel out soundwaves. It’s how they hear. I bet somewhere, his spider side probably confused his human head with the sounds from those discs,” Bruce explains patiently, showing Tony his notes and diagrams he’d drawn on his clipboard. “Plus, I used some remnants from the hair Clint got pierced with - the aliens you fought? They’re not dissimilar to Avicularia avicularia, a common pink-toe tarantula.”
Tony stared. “The kid’s related to aliens.”
“More or less,” Bruce shrugged. “He was stoked.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet,” Tony scoffed. “Where’s he now? He okay?”
“Oh, yeah, just sleeping off the work from the day,” Bruce said with a smile, gathering some of his things into a duffle bag. “No need to worry, promise. Although, I would love to take a look at a bit more of his physiology, if he’s okay with it. Maybe synthesize some solutions for any traits that might be a hindrance when he’s trying to pass as a human.”
“I’ll talk to him about it,” Tony says, “But nothing he’s not comfortable with, okay?”
“Of course.”
Peter is, indeed, sleeping when Tony goes to see him. He’s curled up under a huge yellow gingham comforter, snoring softly and drooling all over his pillow. Somewhere along the line, Sam or Bucky gave him a stuffed spider as a joke, and it’s trapped between Peter’s arms right now.
“Oh, kid,” Tony sighs, sitting on the edge of his mattress, “You’re gonna be the death of me.” Peter just smacks his lips in his sleep, and Tony smiles, running his hand through the kid’s hair. “You’ll be the best of all of us. Don’t forget it, ‘kay, bud?”
Peter snores in response.