Chapter Text
The first thing Tony thinks when he wakes up, is that orange is a really fucking ugly color.
The idea of an afterlife has always been a kind of foreign mystery in his mind. Considered, but never pondered with any real amount of seriousness. It is a nebulous. An unknown. A problem for tomorrow because there really is, and he cannot emphasize this enough in his own mind, so very much to do today.
And maybe, for someone who does come so close to death so often, that may seem a little strange. But then again, the world of today is a strange place. An unrecognizable cycle of wizards and god-like aliens, and of course, the smack-you-in-the-face-reality-checking that comes around just about every other Tuesday.
Tony can't definitively say he's ever had a real firm theory on heaven, or hell, or whether he'll float around as an amorphous consciousness for all of eternity. He's been too busy trying to not let the universe burn down to nothing under his fingertips. Too much to do right in front of him to give some future afterlife much thought.
Sometimes he misses that ignorance of yesterday.
The Tony of this moment can say that he does not enjoy the endless hazy-orange memories he's carrying around from the past however-the-fuck-long. Printed in his mind and creeping in behind his eyelids.
Endless orange nothingness. It feels just a little like a bad cosmic joke.
The first thing he sees is Rhodey.
Hunched over and set against white walls and white bedsheets. He looks tired. Bone deep. His braces are on over an old pair of jeans, the wires and intricate spining tight and well taken care of, but maybe in need of a tune up. The metal ridges of it dig forcefully into his forearms where they're propped up on his knees, leaning his whole body towards Tony like a sunflower seeking the light.
He's holding Tony's battered copy of Alice in Wonderland too. Cradling it delicately in his hands, passed down from Maria and cracking apart at the seems. Tony hasn't seen it since Morgan was a baby. Read softly to her in peaceful tones on her calmest sleepless nights. He'd shoved it in a box somewhere in the cabin years ago. Once they'd made it all the way through and Morgan was closer to one; When the memories of Maria's voice had started feeling claustrophobic instead of gentle.
Rhodey is barely awake. His eyes are struggling through lines like he's wading through molasses, his words stumbling. His breathing is a soft rumble that Tony can only just hear over the beeping of the machines. The familiar cadence of it a comfort amidst a room so bright that he has to squint his eyes against the garishness of it.
A dream is not a reality, Rhodey reads, almost silent, but who’s to say which is which?
His mouth is unbearably dry. The words in his brain leave his mouth in a barely audible groan.
"Hey, Honeybear."
The breathe catches. Rhodes's eyes snap up to meet Tony's, frantic and blown wide in their surprise. The book drops with a thud that makes him wince.
"Oh my God." says Rhodey.
"Oh my God." Says the Doctor he frantically calls with the panic button.
"Oh my God." Says every person he sees for the next two weeks.
They tell him that he's been in a coma for over a year.
Shocking. Almost impossible to believe. And yet, true in a way that Tony can't discount. Written in every moment that he fades in and out of focused consciousness. The worry on Rhodey's face. The shock of the doctors and nurses. But mostly it's-
Pepper. Older and exhausted. She crashes in, rumpled and hurried. The distance from the door is crossed in an instant, and the tears in her eyes leave patches of water on the shoulder of Tony's hospital gown as she desperately clutches the edges. There is a weight to her that he's never seen before. Something in her eyes that reminds him of the fuzziest thing before all that orange.
Smoke and ash in the air. The taste of electricity on his tongue. Something burns up his arm and the side of his face. Limbs too heavy to move, eyes sliding shut between labored breaths.
"It's okay." She says, softly, cool hand on his burning skin. "You can rest now."
And he watches the weight settle.
"Tony. Tony." She breaths. "Oh my god, you're awake. You're here. I- I didn't think you'd ever- but you're here."
He tries to speak then. To say something clever that will make her smile or laugh and leech some of that heaviness from her eyes. His words catch in his throat, clawing and heavy and so he coughs. Week lungs and weak muscles seizing up around it. He coughs until his eyes are watering and his face is red and some doctor has the presence of mind to bring him a water bottle with a straw.
Pepper hovers through it all. Hunched in by his bed and valiantly fighting tears while he drinks. When the coughing finally fades, Tony goes to take her hand. Weakly lifts his arm as the blanket falls away to reveal-
Nothing. There's nothing there.
"Tony," Pepper says, regretfull, gentle. "There's some things you missed."
"Oh." He says, staring down dumbly at his arm. At the stump of it sticking out of the hospital gown. His mind is static sound. Caught on the shape of what isn't there. Caught on the angry red scars that creep up his body. A map of lichenburg figures indented in his skin.
"Pepper."he says, far away from his body. Far away from the white room and the orange memories and everything in between. Distantly, there is beeping getting faster and more frantic as the seconds tick by. At the end of the tunnel there is Pepper, putting her hand on his shoulder and trying to tell him something. Mostly there is static. And a burning in Tony's chest. Like all the air in the world has been sucked out, and none of it is left there to go into his lungs.
All at once there is a thought, clean and clear, that cuts through the noise. And Tony has to ask. He has to.
"Morgan?" He gets out between gasps.
"Morgan is fine." Pepper says softly. "She's at home with Happy right now. Grilling burgers and eating juice pops. She's okay. She's gonna be so excited to see you, Tony.
The relief of it is so palpable that all he can do is nod. Still gasping as he tries desperately to breath. He can see the gray creeping back into his vision. Can feel himself falling down the tunnel away from her. But Morgan is safe. She's fine.
Pepper is fine, and Morgan is fine, and-
"Peter?"
Where is Peter?
The last thing Tony sees is Peppers lovely face, twisted in confusion.
And then it's all black.
When Tony wakes up next, it's to Morgan's wide wide eyes staring right into his soul.
She's sitting there in the edge of his bed. Coloring books layed out on the blanket and ignored for the absolute razor focus she's giving to staring down at his face.
Like Pepper, Morgan is the well seen evidence of the passage of time. She's bigger now, a full two or three inches taller than he remembers, and her face is older. No longer a happy four, but five and edging ever closer to six. She's lost just a little bit of her baby fat and run straight into knobby elbows that stand out from where her arms are wrapped around her knees.
He smiles between one blink and the next, happy to see her, happy to be close.
"Hey Maguna." He says, reaching out his good arm as best as he can.
The expression on her face is… hard to place. Cautious. Wary. Her eyebrows screw in confusion and her lips press together in doubt. The hitch of her shoulders is fragile in a way he's never seen before. It pulls on his heart in an awful tug, sharp and painful as she just stares and stares.
He wants to say something, to fix the horrible well of sadness and distrust in her eyes, but the fog in his brain is persistent, and it's like his body isn't sure what to do. His mind can't connect all the cylinders.
But then suddenly the fear slides off. Replaced with a determination Tony can't help but be immensely proud as Morgan, beautiful, resilient, amazing Morgan, all but throws herself onto his chest. Connecting with a thud that takes the breath out of Tony's lungs even as she latches on like a limpet. Tiny shoulders heaving in great big sobs.
"Y-you were gone for so long, daddy." She hiccups in to his chest, her eyes screwed shut.
All he can do is hold her.
"I missed you." She whispers reverently into his neck. "I missed you. I missed you. I missed you."
He brings his good arm up as much as he can to rub along her back. Trying with everything in him to hide the minute shaking in his hand and to keep the exhaustion out of his voice where Morgan won't hear it.
"I know," he says softly, his own vision blurring at the edges. "I missed you too, sweetheart. So much."
Between Morgans determined presence, Pepper's worry, and the haze that collects and clings stubbornly at the edges of every thought, it takes Tony almost two weeks to wonder why Peter hasn't come to see him.
When he does ask, stumbling and half afraid of the answer, he's met with nothing short of blankness. Incomprehension. Happy, Rhodey, Pepper,none of them have an answer. None of them seem to know who he's even talking about.
"Peter Parker." Tony says, tone slipping into flippancy as he desperatelly tries to hold in the agitation and fear that's crawling up his throat. "Real small fry. Absolute chatterbox. Brown hair, hazel eyes, bit of a smartass. Where is he?"
Nothing. Pepper shakes her head slowly, like Tony's the one being difficult.
"He's my kid." Tony says, and feels the panic of it start to take hold in his chest, tears stinging at the corners of his eyes. "He should be here. Why isn't he here?"
Why don't you know Peter?
"Tony," Rhodey says, cautious and low, like he's scared of setting him over the edge. "We don't know anyone named Peter."
All the air leaves Tony's lungs in one deflated gust. Pepper looks at his pale face and frowns even harder. Puts her hand on his shoulder.
"Is it possible this could be something left over from the stones?" She says, worry evident in her eyes as she looks between them, "Some kind of scramble?"
Is it?
He doesn't think so. But then, he has gaps. That, he knows for sure. Fuzzy thoughts and a mind that's been running itself in circles since he woke up. Is he crazy to think that he remembers Peter being here? Seamlessly slipping himself into every place Tony tried so vemenently to keep him out of since the moment they met. Lab days and stupid arguments over movie marathons. Peter in the penthouse, Peter in the lab, Peter at the old Italian place Tony used to only take Pepper.
A million moments spent with Peter in and out of the suit.
It feels so real.
The memeories in his head, but also the ache in his chest. The sharp tangy pain of it on Titan. The way Peter had looked when he said sorry as he crumbled down to nothing beneath Tonys' shaking fingers.
The long flight home from the edge of the universe, emptiness lapping with all the inevitability of the tide at the edges of his heels. Worse, somehow, than the hunger eating him from the inside out.
Grief. Sharp, all-encompassing, crippling, grief.
Real.
The way it never really faded from his peripheral through the aftermath. An ebbing and flowing phantom present at every milestone in Tony's life in the years that followed. Chasing into every moment of joy with that subtle persistent wondering; waving its arms and demanding to be heard. Unlike anything he'd ever felt before.
And then, five years gone, the hope of it all. Meeting with Steve, and looking at that picture of Peter. Wondering if he was really willing to risk everything he'd built to fix this one thing.
How much it had scared him that the answer was always going to be yes.
The peace he couldn't fight on that battlefield, holding Peter in his arms, rambling and confused and alive. So kind and young. So much like he remembered.
Like everything would be alright. Like the five years without him never even happened.
His kid.
Real.
"No." He says, shaking his head. "Peter is real. I don't know- I don't know why or how you don't remember. But I'm not crazy. I know he's real. A pain in my ass maybe, but real."
More head shakes, side eyes. They don't have to say anything for Tony to know that they're all thinking the same thing. That he's lost it. That he's crazy.
But how could they not know? How could they not remember Peter? Not remember Spider-
"Spider-Man." He says, with all the conviction in his chest. "Peter is Spider-Man. Don't even try and tell me you don't remember Spider-Man."
Rhodey's face twists even more, the confusion a palpable thing running through his frame.
"I thought you never knew who Spider-Man was? Mask stays on, you said."
"No." Tony says, shaking his head. "I knew. I always knew."
He pauses to breathe. Gathers all the horror he can feel in his rib cage to focus on the problem. On the next step.
"And so did you."
The first problem, is that nothing anyone says makes any sense.
He gathers information slowly. It takes time to convince them. Brain scans and interviews with doctors. Everything comes back clean. Everything is normal.
Not crazy.
So with a reluctant stamp of approval, Tony finally starts asking questions.
They know Spider-Man, is the strange thing. They can remember him. They recite highly edited versions of events. Spider-Man in Germany, Spider-Man saving his plane. Never showing his face. Never revealing his identity. It scrambles more and more after the blip, the barebones lost in some mass memory wipe.
But only Peter. Not Spider-Man.
He gets a million different versions of what's happened, contradictory and maddeningly muddled. No one can remember it right, everything's a little bit fuzzy. Video feeds are glitchy. Every news article is vague. No one ever says Peter's name. They talk about each event with a detachment Tony can't understand. The broad strokes of it in an inconvenienced but mild way. Spider-Man did this, Spider-Man did that.
What Tony does know is this:
It starts with Beck. The shitshow in Europe that had been a last fuck you to everything Tony wanted to leave as his legacy. A mix-up of epic enough proportions that Happy went personally to bail Spider-Man out of a tough spot.
The details of it, why Tony would leave the glasses to Spider-Man, how exactly he got ahold of Happy, the importance of the glitched out identity reveal video, remain as ambiguous as each edited moment before. They fade in and out of Happy's recitation in an almost fascinating way.
Some things, May, come out more clearly than others. Happys' choked off voice and red eyes. May Parker, gone again after all these years. For real this time. Never coming back.
It makes Tony's heart squeeze into his throat.
Mostly, he gathers that Spider-Man was in trouble. That Peter needed help. That no one in the wider superhero community has talked with Spider-Man since it all went down.
That he's doing it all alone.
'He's always been reclusive.' They say with a shrug, minds already moving on to the next thing. 'Never one for making friends, Spider-Man.'
It's the same in his own information systems. Friday holds the bare bones of the suits and protocols he wrote for Peter. Scrubbed of personality and investment, but saved in vague brush strokes under his superhero mantle.
As baffling as it is, Peter is gone. Erased from their lives as easily as if he'd never been there in the first place. Spider-Man is, impossibly, filling in all of the gaps.
None of it makes any sense. Why they don't remember, why Tony does.
He needs to find Peter.
And really, it should be as easy as that, finding Peter. Tony has a lot to work with. He has a face, he has a name, he has an alter-ego superhero identity. He's done this before. But then, the problem is, Peter's gotten careful. Crafty and more slippery than an eel.
Somewhere along the way between that second snap and Tony finally managing to claw his way back to the land of the living, Peter has learned how to watch his back. How to cover up his tracks. How to disappear.
It's all very maddening.
He starts with the obvious thing: documentation. Despite his loud and conspicuous absence, Tony knows Peter is out there, he just has to get an address. FRIDAY does what she does best and runs the algorithms. Gathers any data to be found for birth certificates, medical and school records, and more importantly, current residences for anyone named Peter Parker.
His private servers might have been wiped, but Tony figures he can just gather the information again.
No biggie.
It all comes back empty. Files and data that should exist, that hadexisted. All of it is gone. Erased the same way the kid has vanished so completely from everyone's memory. Tony looks and looks, and leaves with nothing to show for it. Turns out there are a lot of Parkers in New York.
None of them are Peter.
There is a moment, there in the middle, two weeks into his search and with absolutely nothing to show for it, that Pepper gently asks if he's really very sure he's remembering everything right. If he's positive Spider-Man really is out there alone. All Tony can do is ask her to trust that his mind isn't betraying him. That he knows what he knows. Even when there is nothing he can find to back him up.
It's possible that this whole affair might be a much bigger problem than he originally thought.
Tony, exhausted and angry and full of so many goddamn questions he might just explode, handles it as best he can. He takes failure in stride, and goes back to the old chopping block. The choice so obvious it was staring him in the face all along.
Peter might be gone, but Spider-Man is very much active. It's all a game of cat and mouse really, and he's done this whole song and dance already.
He moves on to his old methods from all those years ago, hacking cctv cams and traffic lights to track movement through the different burrows. It's just as inelegant and illegal as it always was, but then, Peter of the past had been such a synch it had almost felt like he was trying to be found. Easy to follow routes and a geological profile that was so obvious his address might as well have been written across the city in crayon.
The lack of subtlety had been both alarming and incredibly helpful. FRIDAY had gotten all relevant patterns of data collected in an hour. She'd narrowed it down to an approximate apartment another fifteen minutes later.
Things are not so simple now.
Peter's patrols are sporadic. More so than they've ever been.
One day Spider-man helps a kitten out of a tree in Queens. The next he stops an armed corner store robbery in Manhattan. He's in Harlem. He flirts the edges of Hells Kitchen and then ends up in Brooklyn the same day. He has operations going in every dingy neighborhood and classy apartment complex in New York City. Sometimes he patrols in his more regular nighttime hours, but often, and more and more frequent with every passing week, his appearance is becoming impossible to predict. Showing up in the middle of the morning or afternoon and staying out until the next sunrise is peaking over the edges of the city skyline.
It's all very impressive and concerning. If Tony didn't know better he'd say there's no possible way Peter is getting this kind of reach and variance unless he's spending almost all of his time in the suit.
Even worse, Spider-man is a complete ghost to the cameras. No matter the footage, no matter the location, Tony and FRIDAY are lucky to even catch a glimpse. A red flash here, a web placed there. Never enough to follow his trail. Never enough to establish a pattern or a direction of movement.
It's a showcase of skill on a level Tony has never seen before. Calculated and precise. Peter has always had the potential to be incredible. An impressive collection of abilities accompanied by an irritatingly sharp mind and a giant fucking heart. But he'd been a kid, back in the beginning. Clumsy and awkward and still growing into abilities he couldn't fully control. Adjusting to his reflexes and superior senses, honing his focus and failing miserably to prove he was all grown up.
The Peter tingle was just a barely formed hypothesis then. What Spider-man is showing now registers as nothing short of practiced precognition. He can't fathom this level of skill acquisition in the time he's been gone. It makes no sense.
Tony is so incredible impressed and so completely furious.
It would all be so much easier if he could just go out and find him. But he can't. Pepper may have given her stamp of approval, but Tony is thwarted at every turn by the insufferable limits of mortality. His muscles are weak and useless, atrophied to the point of nonexistence. It's a sad wheelchair bound and exhausted life at the end of the presumed-dead coma tunnel.
He tires easily, barely able to exist in the lab long enough to gather relevant data, or work on any project the way he really wants to.
Hours are spent with a physical therapist every day. Practicing exercises that will hopefully prepare him for exercises that will, allegedly, eventually, help him accomplish normal daily activities. His hands shake in a constant tremor. His arm, once strong and useful, can't even lift Morgan. The road to recovery is a long and arduous slope.
Tony's been here before though, after Titan. Bruised and starved and half crazy with lack of oxygen and the endless expanse of the universe flickering behind his eyelids. He was tired then, too. He was weak then, too.
He counts to ten. He takes it slow.
Inbetween his searches for Spider-Man, life goes on.
The world, as it does with most things, remains ignorant, secure in the well-known tragedy of the Stark family. As far as they know, Tony is still a vegetable, Pepper a widow in all but name. One more family ripped apart by Thanos.
Saving the universe and ending up in a coma is a narrative they're not too eager to replace. Tony wants to question the wisdom of it, but he can't. Not if it gives him time for recovery. Not if it keeps a target off Pepper and Morgan's backs.
Tony's wonderful wife, as she does with most things, continues the philanthropic work she so excels at. Beautiful and competent and as in the spotlight as she ever was. She runs remote meetings and takes overnight flights for all the ones she can't cancel. Tony does his exercises, finally graduates to walking with a cane, and tries to find a way to be okay with staying home.
Fortuitously, they had already off-shored a great deal of the responsibilities of their many projects years ago when Morgan was born. Trading shareholder meetings for naptimes and corporate files for diaper bags.
It feels like more of that. Balancing the search for Peter and spending as much time as he can with Morgan. Laying in bed with his wife. Keeping his mind occupied with projects while he learns to do what he can with a body that has been pushed too far past its limits.
The screwdriver in his hand drops to the table with a dull thud. The muscles in his wrist spasming painfully. Tony leans more weight on the edge of the table and closes his eyes. Breathing through the full body tremors that creep in while he waits out the pain.
The prosthetic design he's working on has been stumping him for weeks. An impossible puzzle of engineering. He looks at the blueprints of it between tea parties with Morgan and imagines it in his minds eye as he does his morning stretches. Mostly he wishes with a longing that surprises him that he could build it with Peter. Cool quips and that occasionally brilliant suggestion that seems like it comes from left field, but has really been rattling around in the kids' head for ages while he reasoned it out.
He thinks it would maybe feel less daunting that way. Easier to face.
When the pain stays for the next ten minutes, Tony throws in the towel for the night. Locks up the lab and heads to bed at the very reasonable hour of sometime after midnight. Pepper is still awake when he comes in. Leaned up against their headboard with her laptop balanced on her legs. She furrows her eyebrows when she sees his shaking hand. Shifting down and moving her computer so that he can settle in next to her, head in her lap.
"You look tired." She says, a gentle hand finding its way to his hair, fingers running through the ends of it. Tony closes his eyes. Let's out the sigh that's building deep inside of him.
"I've hit a wall, is all. This prosthetic has me stumped."
"Hmm," says Pepper knowingly, "is it the prosthetic, or is it Spider-Man?"
Tony laughs, caught.
"Both." He admits quietly, feeling defeated. The hand on his hair tightens momentarily, Pepper takes a breath.
"Maybe- Have you ever considered, Tony, that he doesn't wantto be found?"
"I- it's possible." He admits lowly. "But it doesn't matter. He's- Peter is a social kid. He's been through a lot, and he sometimes doesn't do well with isolation. If I'm right, if no one remembers him, then he's gonna need me.
"And if he doesn't want you there?"
"i don't know. But I- I can't lose the kid, Pep. Not again. I spent five years of my life without him. I invented time travel just to bring him back. I can't stop now. I can't."
"Okay." She says, bending over and pressing a kiss to his hair, "Then don't stop."
Tony loves her for it.
The breakthrough comes six months after Tony wakes up for the first time. Entirely, frustratingly, diabolically, from a tabloid. Some breathtakingly out of touch imbecile with a mustache that's so thick a caterpillar might as well have died on his face. Just the sound of his voice sets Tony's teeth on edge in a way he can't explain.
The most logical reason for it is the way he uses his little rag to drag Spider-man's name through the mud every week. That's neither here nor there.
But still. Tony has FRIDAY bookmark it for a later use and send him little ping notifications when she thinks Jameson has said something that will get his blood boiling.
And really, it isn't the article he pays attention too, when the disastrously ugly logo of the Daily Bugle website crosses his screen, it's the picture. Jameson goes on and on in his little video. Something something property damage, something something Spider-Man is secretly three evil cats in a spandex suit. Whatever. It doesn't matter. It's confetti.
The picture. Small and stuck right there in the left corner until Tony clicks on the credits; The picture is a masterpiece of lighting and position. A perfectly framed shot of Spider-Man from all the right angles. Captured mid-swing, web in one hand and the other curled behind him. Centered and laser focused. Tony can make out the individual fibers of that ridiculous spandex monstrosity Peter wears now and the glint of light reflecting off the goggles of his mask. It's a perfect shot.
For any casual observer, it would seem very possible that the photographer simply managed to capture New York's favorite hero in a good bit of lighting. Maybe a convenient fire escape or rooftop and one hell of a camera lens.
Tony knows better though.
Tony has just spent months tracking Spider-Man. Always illusive, always aware of the camera. Always evading capture both metaphorically and literally. This is no coincidence.
A simple search to backlog the rest of the Daily Bugle photos yeilds astonishingly positive results. Not every photo is a winner, but every photo that catches his eye, crystal clear and perfectly posed, is taken by the same person. Name stamped like a watermark in every article.
Ben Reilly.
At first the name itself seems inconsequential. A dead end with nothing waiting at the finish line. Tony has a few wild guesses. A superpowered individual rushing to the scene. A lucky photographer that managed to make a once in a lifetime photo deal with Spider-Man. A regular Joe off the street with reallygood timing.
But then there's something about that name, Ben Reilly.
On a whim he looks back at the data he has on Peter's aunt, May Parker. Months of old information that still stings like new. Pictures of her and Happy together, going out for ice cream, volunteering for feast, happy and full of life. Preserved in a memory and forever out of reach. He goes further back. Combs through her personal history and hits the jackpot.
Previously married to Ben Parker. And there before that, maiden name Reilly.
And well, Peter always did like photography.