Chapter Text
Peter never thought that his dad could actually hurt anyone.
And maybe that made him naive. Their family legacy was built on weapons just as much as other tech, but— his dad had inherited that legacy, and so would Peter someday, and Peter wouldn't ever hurt anyone. It didn't say anything about his dad that Stark Industries sold weapons, and Tony had done away with that branch of the business when he'd come back from Afghanistan, warm and mostly whole but with something haunted behind the eyes.
And— his dad had changed a little bit after that. After Afghanistan, after the arc reactor, after that treatment he'd invented that he told Peter not to worry about but that had given his eyes that weird blue light. He was a little faster to anger, going flat and cold with his men when they made mistakes in a way that Peter didn't remember from before, but— that was normal after something traumatic, Peter knew. And he was more protective of Peter, more controlling in a way he hadn't been before, but that made sense too, and he was never mean. That didn't mean he was a bad person. It just meant he was stressed, and of course he was.
That was part of why Peter didn't tell him once he got bit by that spider. He wanted to be Spider-man, he wanted to do good in the world, but he knew his dad would never let him if he knew, and Peter didn't want to give him anything else to worry about. Peter could handle it on his own, anyway, and maybe if he kept it up for a few years, Tony would be okay with giving him the go-ahead by the time he was seventeen or so.
And maybe he should've known that even that was a pipe-dream, with the way his dad had been beefing up the security around their house recently— more guards, more tech, more safety features— but Peter just thought, his dad was starting to get really involved in politics, and making all kinds of deals over new pushes towards ways to help with public services and infrastructure, non-violent security drones and free water initiatives and— they'd always been such public figures, such big targets, of course he needed more security.
And then—
It had been a punch to the gut when Peter figured it out. Months into investigating this new ring of arms dealers, with all their ties to weird, dangerous experimental drugs, when he'd finally broken into enough storehouses and secret labs and eavesdropped on enough conversations— when he'd finally figured out where the funding was coming from, where the tech was coming from—
But even then, after he'd had to accept that the ring was integrated into Stark Industries and not just being spearheaded by a few unscrupulous employees, Peter had still thought— his dad couldn't know about it. Not all of the details, at least. Maybe, maybe in his bids to do good for the city, he'd turn a blind eye to some shady things going on in the lower levels of the company, some kind of for-the-greater-good trade-off, but— he couldn't know about all the people that were getting hurt. That were getting killed. He couldn't know.
(Even though— his dad ran SI with an iron fist, now. After Afghanistan. After Uncle Obie. He'd even promised Peter that he would never let something like that slip by him again; he would never let something hurt their family where he could stop it.)
Peter's body accepted that he was lying to himself before his mind did. Even without consciously making the choice, he started sitting at the opposite side of the couch when they watched movies, instead of close enough for his dad to throw an arm over his shoulders. He started eating dinner as quickly as possible so he wouldn't find himself scrutinizing his dad's shirtsleeves while he ate, looking for pinprick dark spots and then trying to convince himself they were specks of lint or grease once he found them.
He started tensing every time his dad reached to ruffle his hair or clap his shoulder.
("Oh, what, are you getting to that age where you're too cool for your old man?" Tony teased him once with a genuinely puzzled smile when Peter cringed away from his arm around his shoulders, and Peter mumbled a lie about being sore from a workout, stomach twisting with guilt.)
But Peter tried not to let anything change between them at home. He didn't have any actual evidence against his dad, and how hurtful would it be for Peter to put distance between them if— when— it turned out that his dad hadn't actually done anything wrong? Especially when his dad was so protective of him, and already so tense over all the time Peter was spending outside the house when he was on patrol.
So he kept groaning at his dad's corny jokes and telling him about school and spending time with him in the family workshop, and he tried not to notice that his dad was always more stressed in the days after Spider-man had busted up another supply chain or storehouse.
(He almost— almost— asked about it, one night. He'd taken down a sizeable cache, and it was almost like clockwork, the way his dad had called to tell him he was going to be working late the second Peter was through the front door after patrol.
He couldn't sleep, after that. So when his dad came home at nearly 4am—
"What are you doing still up, kid?" his dad asked, surprised, when Peter stepped out of his room.
"I heard you come in," Peter lied. He hesitated, and asked, "...Everything okay at SI?"
"Yeah, yeah," Tony answered, waving off his concern and continuing down the hallway to his own room with a jaw-cracking yawn. He left the door wide open behind him, so Peter followed, sitting on the edge of the bed while his dad stripped out of his jacket. His tie had already been stuffed away in his pocket, Peter noticed. "Nothing to worry about, kid."
"I kind of do worry about it," Peter blurted, and Tony looked at him, surprised.
"SI's just fine, Peter," he said, soothing. "Your future is totally secure. I've made sure of it. Trust me, huh?"
Peter wanted to. He wanted to.
"I just..." He bit his lip. "What's it supposed to... look like? When I take over for you."
Tony grinned, puzzled and amused in equal measure, and said, "Wow, already planning for when I'm in the ground, huh? Are you plotting your coup? My own kid!"
"Dad," Peter complained, and Tony must have seen the real distress of his guilt.
His face softened, and he crossed to the bed from where he'd been tidying away his belt and cufflinks, sitting by Peter's side and putting a hand on his shoulder. Peter leaned into it this time, not able to resist the comfort of it.
"That's a long ways down the road, Pete," Tony said, squeezing his shoulder. "And if all of our infrastructure deals shake out how I want them to, SI's going to look very different by the time you're at the helm, okay? And I'm going to make sure that you're ready for it."
He smiled, oblivious to the cold sneaking its way into Peter's veins.
"You're going to do great once we get there, kid."
Peter shook his head. He couldn't ask what he actually wanted to ask, but—
"I don't think I can," he said, unsteady. "I don't think I can— do what you do."
Surely his dad would hear it, right? If SI really was some kind of— criminal empire— surely he'd realize that he couldn't expect Peter to take over; that Peter would never accept something like that. It was ridiculous, so— the whole thing was ridiculous, and it was fine, and he should just finally have Spider-man send his dad the evidence that SI was embroiled in stuff he wouldn't approve of—
Tony hummed a disagreement, hugging Peter to his side.
"You could do anything I can and better, Pete, I don't know where this is coming from," Tony said, and Peter let himself relax a little, because that was just a normal dad response, there was nothing to read into there—
"And if this is about the late nights, you don't have to worry about that either," Tony said. "There's been some bugs popping up with my projects lately, but I'm taking care of it. These problems will be out of our hair long before you take over, okay? You're never going to have to lift a finger about it."
Peter couldn't find anything to say about that.)
He held out hope, though. Just a glimmer of hope, even as he gathered evidence that the corruption spread higher and higher in SI, even as he grappled with the guilt of only disrupting the ring at its lower ranks instead of turning in what he'd found to the police, even as he watched his dad disappear into his study more and more frequently for tense, low-volume conversations the more trouble Spider-man caused—
And then he got someone killed.
He had infiltrated one of the storehouses by the skin of his teeth and was tucked away to eavesdrop and pointedly ignore just how much disabling the security system had felt like hacking JARVIS when the conversation between the crooks turned heated. One of the lower-level guys had overheard— something he wasn't supposed to? Wanted reassurance that his family wouldn't be affected? Something about the drugs—?
Peter frowned as he listened, trying to make as much sense of it as he could. But even with his senses on alert, he didn't have time to react when the angry mook insisted, "I want to talk to the b—" and dropped immediately to the floor with a bullet in his gut.
"No one talks to the boss," the head of tonight's operation said dispassionately, but his eyes went wide when Peter sent out a web to yank the gun out of his hand.
It was too late for the man who had been shot by the time Peter had the rest of them webbed. Peter still packed medi-web over his wound with shaking hands and asked for an ambulance when he alerted the authorities, but the man was quiet even to Peter's enhanced senses.
All because Peter was a coward.
He should've waited for the police. He should've told them everything and let the chips fall where they would.
But he had to know for himself, and if his dad was hiding anything somewhere that Peter could actually find it, without breaking into Stark Tower itself—
Peter swung home and went directly to his dad's room. Tony would be away for at least another hour, maybe more now, and JARVIS wouldn't rat Peter out— Peter was an old hand at slipping small things past JARVIS, but he'd had to actually code in some overrides to prioritize his privacy over the default security coding to keep Spider-man under wraps.
It wasn't a struggle to remember the code to the hidden panic room embedded in his dad's wall. Peter had one just like it in his room, his dad's paranoia at work, and it had never occurred to Peter before to wonder why exactly his dad was so sure their family would be targeted again. It had never occurred to him to think about what else a hidden room could be used for.
The door opened, and Peter stepped in, hoping against hope that he would find nothing but the usual array of bed rolls, blankets, rations, wireless radio, and gun safe.
That's not what he found.
Peter had never actually been in his dad's panic room. He knew the code, but his dad had been uncharacteristically utterly serious when he'd explained that Peter was only to use the rooms in the event of a genuine emergency, and he shouldn't talk about them with his friends or even with the security team. The more people that knew about the rooms outside the two of them and the contractors that had built them, the less effective they were, Tony had explained, and Peter didn't have any reason to disobey. He was allowed to rotate the supplies in his own room on a scheduled basis now that he was older, and he'd always assumed that his dad's room would be a mirror of his own.
It was a second lab space. Not quite as big as the family workshop where they spent so much time together downstairs, not quite with all the same bells and whistles, but it was a near thing. And Peter should've known that; the dimensions of his dad's room weren't quite right from the outside, but why would he have overthought it? How could he have expected—?
But no, he was just making excuses for himself again. Peter shook his head, and got to investigating.
Other than the large cabinet by the door labeled "SUPPLIES," the main difference from the downstairs lab was the nature of the projects lining the walls. There wasn't any tech, but there were dozens of vials on the shelves, each neatly labeled with a string of letters and numbers that Peter couldn't decipher. About a fourth of the vials were filled with a strange silvery substance almost like mercury, the majority were filled with something colorless, and the rest—
The rest were glowing a gentle shade of blue, just like his dad's eyes.
Peter couldn't get into the files on the colorless substance. The silvery stuff was... some kind of psionic armor? Looking at the data, it was chilling to think of what might happen if it fell into the wrong hands, but it didn't look like anything he had seen at the ring's storehouses.
He moved onto the files about the blue stuff, and that was when his stomach dropped.
It was obviously the treatment his dad had given himself after everything with his arc reactor making him sick, and it was doing a lot more than keeping his heart healthy. The files reported increased strength, accelerated healing, improved sensory perception and reaction times— it almost sounded like Peter's own powers, except...
One early file from before his dad had actually injected himself had a brief, passing mention of the potential for neurocognitive effects. He predicted that these would be positive— greater psychological resiliency, increased mental flexibility, reduced risk of neuro disease or mental illness— but he did make a note that there was a very slight potential that the outcomes could be… different.
But Happy, Rhodey and Pepper aren't afraid to call me out if I'm a crazy manic asshole, so there's that, the notes said. Plus, Peter's a smart kid, he'll be able to tell someone if something seems wrong.
It had been shortly after his treatment that Tony had promoted Happy and Pepper to new positions in different departments, Peter remembered. It had been after his treatment that Uncle Rhodey stopped visiting as much. And when Peter had asked about it, what was keeping Uncle Rhodey so busy and why a new department meant that Happy and Pepper couldn't still come over for dinner now and again instead of only catching up at the occasional SI event, his dad had brushed him off.
"Things change," he'd said, sympathetic, a comforting arm around Peter's shoulders. "And sometimes when they change, people drift apart."
It hurt to realize Peter had failed where his dad was counting on him.
Peter didn't spend too long on his dad's experimental notes from after the injection. It was terrifying to think of his dad all alone in that room, using himself as a human experiment for something that easily could've killed him, just one more thing that Peter could hardly believe, but— the more important thing was figuring out how this 'Extremis' stuff worked.
He scrolled quickly through the formula notes on the finalized version that his dad had used, pausing just long enough on each page that he knew he could play back the video from his mask to revisit the data when he had time, and then moved on to the versions of Extremis that his dad had developed later. Which— weirdly seemed purposely designed to be much less effective, with only temporary effects that included a fraction of the accelerated healing and almost negligible boosts to anything else. Some kind of… medicine…?
Peter frowned at his findings, baffled and shaken but still more certain than ever that something was wrong. Nothing added up— the ways his dad had changed after Extremis, the weird armor that could definitely be bad news but didn't match the weapons SI was secretly manufacturing and dealing, this weaker version of Extremis that seemed specifically designed not to be used to build some kind of secret superhuman army—
And then a door somewhere else in the house slammed open, and Peter's senses went haywire.
"JARVIS," he gasped. "Did you tell him I'm here?"
"I informed your father that the panic room had been accessed, as per his security protocol," JARVIS responded, "but I did not inform him that you were the intruder, as per your privacy protocol."
Fuck, fuck, Peter didn't know that even authorized individuals accessing the room would trigger a security alert, his room didn't, but his room also wasn't a secret lab and he should've thought about that before breaking in and now his senses were screaming to run—
Peter had made it out of the panic room and halfway to a window by the time his dad's door flew open, but it was already too late. Too late to escape, too late to reveal himself and confront his dad instead, too late not to be a coward and too late to save anyone again, because—
Tony was wrapped in a suit of armor, silver and blue and alive with tendrils that shot out to grasp at Peter from every direction, and Peter didn't even have time to gasp at the image of his dad as this horrifying weapon before he was overtaken. A wide ribbon of silver covered Peter's mouth, cutting off his chance to speak, and impossible ropes of liquid metal encircled his limbs and wrestled him down to the carpet.
"Gotta say, Spidey," Tony said as he advanced, the casual tone at odds with the terrifying coldness of his expression. "I didn't think you had the balls."
And that was it, then. His utter lack of surprise to find Spider-man in his home. The way he showed zero hesitation to attack.
This wasn't Peter's father defending their home. This was a crime lord— a villain— defending his organization.
Tony knelt by Peter's side, and Peter forced himself to pause in his instinctive struggling, praying for the first time that his dad would try to remove his mask. That he'd want to know who had been ruining his plans, that he'd see that it was his son who had been betraying him, that they would have to argue and say things they couldn't come back from but that it would stop his dad from— from—
"Getting my guys arrested is one thing. Destroying my things is one thing," Tony said, and he didn't reach out for Peter's mask. He just watched, almost bored, as his tendrils wrapped themselves even tighter around Peter's limbs and Peter whimpered with the agonizing pressure. "But breaking into my home? My family home, that I share with my son?"
Peter's heart felt like it stopped as his dad's expression twisted into a snarl, and he yelped with panic and pain alike as the tendrils roughly dragged him around on the carpet until he was splayed at his dad's knees.
"That, I'm going to have to hurt you for."
'No—'
Peter's gag muffled his cry of panic, and his mind was so soaked with adrenaline as he struggled and squirmed that he didn't even recognize the actual threat in it when tendrils started tearing away the fabric of his spider-suit. He was frantic, discarding ideas as quickly as they came to him— his hands were contained by the tendrils and he couldn't shape his fingers into the ASL alphabet he'd learned long ago, he was pinned too tightly to stomp his feet or thud his head against the carpet in Morse, there was no dislodging the gag but maybe he could hum through his nose if only he could stop panicking enough to control his breathing— and he was still stuck, uncomprehending, on the thought of 'no no no this isn't happening this isn't my dad he wouldn't do this no—'
And then the tendrils tore through his boxers, exposing him to the air through the rips in his suit, and only then did his image of his dad finally, finally, shatter.
Tony snorted at the sight of him, mean.
"Wow," he said, reaching out and fondling Peter's soft cock, more cursory than salacious. "I knew you were young, but you really are a kid, huh? That's too bad, Underoos; you should've left well enough alone."
Peter jolted in his bindings at the touch of his dad's hand, his horrified pleas muffled into nothing more than a wordless wail. Tony knew— his dad knew, knew it was a teenager he had pinned to his floor and he was still doing this and it was wrong because his dad wasn't a monster he wasn't he wasn't but he was still—
"Are you still at that age where you get hard over nothing?" Tony took Peter's cock in hand more firmly, stroking it experimentally, and he huffed a laugh when Peter yelped and squirmed ineffectively against his silvery bindings. "Cute. Lucky you; maybe the next part will still feel good."
'The next part—'
Peter's fresh dread wasn't enough to drown out the feeling of a hand on him, hot and rough with calluses. His body didn't care that it was fear that had his heart racing and his breath coming in gasps— touch was touch, and the humiliation of feeling himself start to harden was the final drop that made the waves of uncomprehending horror spill over. Tears soaked into his mask as he tried to twist his hips away from his dad's hand, but he was held fast by his bonds, and knowing exactly how powerful those tendrils had to be to hold him down at all did nothing to make him feel less helpless.
His groan hitched in his chest with a sob, and Tony scoffed again, thumbing his slit while Peter's hips jerked.
"Crying already? I thought you were tough, kid," he said, and Peter's voice went high and breathless with panic as he felt something cool and firm nudge its way between his splayed legs. "I can give you something to cry about."
There wasn't any other preamble for it. A narrow tendril pushed into him, barely wide enough to burn, but the intrusion sank into Peter's soul as cruelly as a knife. A cold, nightmarish haze settled over his mind, narrowing his world to the facts of his muscles tensing to try and fight the bonds holding him in place, fight the tendril slowly thickening as it worked its way inside him, fight the seal over his mouth so he could scream 'Dad, Dad, it's me,' but all of it was useless.
"They did tell me that you never shut up," Tony said with distaste over Peter's frantic moans, and why wouldn't he stop talking so Peter could squeeze his eyes shut and pretend he wasn't there, pretend he wasn't hard and spreadeagle and being touched and stretched open at the mercy of his dad—
But when Tony did pull his hand away, any relief Peter may have felt was washed away by the sensation of the tendril inside him starting to thrust in place, still growing in size.
The silvery not-metal, not-fluid of the tendril was slick enough not to chafe with friction, but the stretch was too foreign and too fast to be comfortable, and Peter couldn't keep himself from bearing down in panic with bruising intensity to try and force the thing out of him even when it hurt. He was too full and it was too much and it was wrong and not supposed to be happening and this wasn't his dad, couldn't be his dad making this happen, drug or no drug his dad was the person who supported him and teased him and comforted him and loved him and his dad would never, never—
"There, that should be enough, huh?" Tony's voice broke through the haze of Peter's struggle to block out the overwhelming sensation of the tendril pumping inside him, and Peter's eyes snapped back open.
His blood ran cold even as his horror-torn mind struggled to process what he was seeing. The tendrils were still holding Peter tight, but the rest of the suit had phased underneath his dad's clothes, somehow— was he wearing it under there all the time?— leaving the tendrils protruding bizarrely from the heartbreaking familiarity of his dad's everyday work clothes.
He'd given his dad that tie for Christmas, Peter noticed unwillingly, his mind catching on the vanishingly few certainties it had left. It was dark blue and expensive and looked classy from a distance, but the weave was actually in a subtle pattern of gears. His dad loved it and wore it all the time, and now—
Tony reached to unzip his fly, and a tendril snaked its way over his shoulder, wrapped around a bottle of something clear and gel-like from the bedside dresser.
Peter didn't even try to make words. He just wailed against his gag, managing only the most miniscule shake of his head against the hold of that silvery ribbon around his jaw, and Tony shrugged.
"Yeah, I'm not trying to get friction burn, here," he explained casually while he drew himself out of his pants, idly stroking himself with one hand while he held out the other for the lube, and that was— that was his cock, hard and flushed from this, from what he was doing to Peter— "I figure you're going to be plenty tight even with a little bit of prep."
The tendrils pinning Peter in place shifted then, flipping him over unceremoniously onto his knees with his arms bound behind his back, his mask pressed roughly to the carpet. He groaned with wordless terror, waiting, waiting, waiting for the moment where this would all turn out to be a nightmare, where a call would come to drag his dad away to something more pressing, where JARVIS would find some kind of loophole in Peter's privacy protocols to tell his dad who he was hurting, where his dad would recognize the tenor of his muffled cries or the pattern of the freckles on his hip or something, something to make it stop.
But nothing came. Just his dad's hand, grabbing roughly at one globe of his ass and squeezing, the hot blunt head of his cock teasing at Peter's entrance.
"I'm not going to go out of my way to make this good for you," Tony warned, and the pressure grew more insistent. "But you might as well try to enjoy it anyway, sweetheart."
Head spinning with the dissonance of that familiar pet name against everything else, Peter didn't even recognize the sound that punched its way out of him as his dad's hips urged forward to thrust his cock past Peter's rim.
It hurt. Peter's body fought against this intrusion just like it had fought the last, and he was still sore from that round of too-much-too-fast. And his dad was rough, not working his way inside slowly and carefully, slamming into Peter with his hands bruisingly tight on Peter's hips and chasing his orgasm without any regard for Peter's pleasure, just like he had promised.
"God, it's too fucking bad about this, kid," his dad groaned, voice all gone to gravel. "You would've made some other lucky man's cock very happy someday."
But the thing was—
"Or maybe several lucky men's cocks, huh?" Tony asked, a grin in his voice as Peter's moan caught with something other than pain and fear. "If you can get off on this, who knows what kind of slut you would've been."
It also felt horrifyingly good.
Peter didn't want to like it. He didn't like it, his mind recoiled from the very thought, but— once the ache had smoothed out into something bearable, once his body had surrendered to the predictability of in-and-out, again and again, he couldn't help it. Everything else hurt, heart and mind and soul, and this was something that could feel good, so it did.
It didn't help to try and tune it out, no matter how much he focused on the rough scrape of carpet fibers through his mask or the burn of how he was stretched open or the sting of his dad's hips slapping against his ass. No matter how much he tried to focus on the wetness of his mask, of how it was hard to breathe through the messiness of his tears when his mouth was so tightly bound, the discomfort of how his arms were twisted behind him or how his back was bowed. The shame and humiliation of it, the betrayal, the horror and heartbreak of knowing that his dad could possibly do this to someone—
With his body desperately craving any kind of comfort at all, none of that could help him ignore the raw, animal appeal of a warm body pressing over him, a cock stretching him wide open, driving into him and rubbing against that one spot that made him whine every time his dad brushed against it, and his own cock was hard and heavy between his thighs regardless of how hard he was crying.
"Maybe this was too good for you, Spidey," Tony growled as he slammed into Peter, relentless. "But how was I supposed to know you'd turn out to be such a whore?"
He shifted his weight, bearing down over Peter's body with his hands sliding up to grip higher on Peter's waist, and Peter keened as his cock plunged against that sensitive spot, his toes curling helplessly. He could barely even squirm, the tendrils around him holding him down so that the only control he had was over the rocking of his own hips against his dad's, and he didn't— he didn't want that—
"Just like that," his dad cooed, and his hands were almost gentle in how they caressed Peter's waist now, a dizzying contrast from the snap of his hips. "Tighten up just like that for me, kid, it's like you wanna feel me come in you, want me to fill you up—"
Barely hanging on by a thread, even the false, sinister tip towards kindness was all it took. Peter sobbed as starbursts exploded behind his eyes, his hips jerking erratically to meet his dad's thrusts as he came, shuddering all over.
"Fuck, kid," Tony moaned, and Peter could barely even process it as he was flipped again, his dad's hands pushing back his thighs towards his chest as he slid back inside in one smooth motion. "Coming on my cock like that, it's too bad I can't keep you—"
Peter whined, too overcome to try and keep his sounds to himself anymore and too overstimulated not make any as his dad fucked him hard, oversensitive and grappling with the idea of that— it was a horrifying thing to suggest, but if his dad did want to keep him, if he would just give Peter a chance for his mask to come off, then maybe he wouldn't— he wouldn't—
His dad grunted as he tipped closer to the edge, and Peter was too dazed not to watch. He didn't want to know what his dad looked like during this, but he knew, now— the sweat beading at his hairline, the crease between his eyebrows, the dark heat of his eyes as he stared down at Peter's body, at where he was stretching Peter open. Peter jolted with another aftershock, a cry punching out of him, and his dad slammed into him twice more before he groaned, wet unfamiliar heat spilling inside Peter's body.
Peter sagged against the floor, all the fight long gone out of him, and he shivered even at the gentle shift of his dad's cock inside him as Tony caught his breath.
Even now, hushed and still and face-to-face, Peter could barely wrap his mind around it. Those were his dad's hands hooked under his knees; the same hands that ruffled his hair and clapped his shoulder. Those were his dad's eyes, tracing Peter's body with utter disregard for the shuddering of his quiet sobs. It was his dad's cock inside him, it was his dad's come—
Tony sighed, ragged, and said, "Thanks for that, kid, that was unexpectedly lovely."
He didn't pull out, still— he ground his hips gently against Peter's ass so that Peter choked out another helpless groan, and he said, "I'll do you the kindness of letting you share some last words, how about that, huh?"
It was awful the way that Peter's heart jolted with hope at those words, as horrible as they were. This was it— this was it, his only chance, so he had to fight down the instinctive urge to babble out a useless string of 'stop' and 'please' and 'no,' he had to get this right—
Peter drew in a huge gasp as the gag finally loosened around his jaw to wrap around his throat with menacing promise instead, and he forced out the only word he knew might be able to save him through his sobs:
"Dad."