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If I Couldn’t Find You (Prompt Fill)

Good morning! @theoceanismyinkwell This is to fulfill the prompt you gave me a couple months ago from the whump prompts list: "“I’m not hurt.” “You are actively bleeding.” “Oh, so I am.”

I was so happy to get a prompt; and I'm sorry it took so long to write. But! I had so much fun writing this story. It was longer than I first planned it, but I'm kind of a more is more type of person when it comes to fic. 😅

Anyway, thanks for the prompt, and I hope you enjoy! To read on AO3, click this link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24898108

Or, click to read more...

If I Couldn’t Find You

Tony was in a great mood. He’d spent the previous evening with Pepper, and his morning with Rhodey over brunch. The two friends were just stepping out of Rhodey’s favorite cafe in Manhattan when Tony got a call. He frowned when he saw the picture that flashed on his phone, swiping his screen immediately and putting it to his ear.

Rhodey raised an eyebrow, “Who’s that?”

Tony glanced at Rhodey, “It’s Peter’s friend... Leeds, you and Pete are supposed to be at a museum; please tell me you haven’t gotten yourselves in trouble.”

“Oh. Uh. Sorry, Mr. Stark, sir, but I think Peter might be… We were outside waiting to be let into the museum this morning, and he heard something bad going down a couple blocks away. Said it sounded like a robbery? He hated just standing there listening, so he snuck off to check it out, but he’s still not back, and that was two hours ago, sir, and I’m really worried. I’ve got a bad feeling; he’s got his phone turned off. I don’t know what to do, I’m so sorry, sir...”

Tony felt like he’d been doused with ice water. Rhodey edged closer to him, eyes narrowing in concern. Tony’s mind was racing with possibilities, but he had a procedure for situations like this.

First, track the kid.

“Friday, track Peter’s suit and phone. Pull up the location when you have it.” Tony said without preamble, praying that the phone and suit and his kid were all in the same actual location. “Leeds, you did the right thing by calling me.”

“Can you… tell him to call me when you find him? Please.” Ned sounded distressed.

“Yep, that’ll be on my list of things to tell him. Catch you later, kid.” Tony hung up as Friday pinged the locations for the suit and phone.

Locations, plural. The suit being in an alley a couple blocks from the museum where Peter’s class was meant to be that day, and the phone being forty miles north of that, in some abandoned packing-house, and Tony felt like he might vomit. Instead, he tapped his chest.

“Honey Bear, I need your help,” Tony’s pleading eyes turned to Rhodey’s, just before his suit formed around him, closing him off.

**********************************************************************************************

Tony was preparing his descent on the packing house when Rhodey called him.

“I’ve got his backpack, and his suit’s here, Tones,” Rhodey reported. “But, it sounds like Pete got himself in trouble. I spoke to a couple shop owners, they said the cops were here earlier responding to an anonymous call.”

“That was Peter,” Tony informed him, “Friday told me he’d made a call, before his phone was turned off.”

“Well, the shop owner said he was being held at gunpoint - and a teenager came in to say the cops were on their way; tried to talk the gunmen into leaving. They did, but they made the kid go with them.”

“Why the hell wasn’t he in his suit?” Tony would be pulling his hair out if he could. Why did his kid insist on doing stupid shit like this? Tony was going to ground him until he was forty. Fifty. He was going to implant a tracker in his -

“The suit notifies you when he wears it. Maybe he didn’t want you to know he’d ditched his class field trip,” Rhodey suggested.

“Well, surprise. I now know. Million dollar suit and he leaves it in his backpack. I swear to God, Rhodes, I’m gonna...” Tony took a deep breath, “Can you just… I’m gonna have Happy pick you up, and meet me at this location? What else did you find out?”

“No problem; I got your back on this,” Rhodey told him. “All I know is the cops are on the lookout for an unmarked white sedan. Surveillance cameras were unable to make out the license plate, and as you can imagine thousands of cars match that description…”

“I think I found it,” Tony told him as he approached a building. A dirty white car was sloppily parked near the side entrance.

“Don’t kill anyone,” Rhodey ordered.

“No promises.”

Tony eschewed all subtlety in favor of blasting his way inside. Friday’s sensors indicated four adult males, and zero teenage idiots, inside. But the kid’s phone was there, and those men were his only lead. They started shooting first, but of course the bullets ricocheted off his suit. He registered a lot of yelling, but that didn’t matter. He blasted two of them before grabbing the nearest asshole by the collar.

“Listen, Dipshit, you have ten seconds to tell me what you did with the kid you kidnapped this morning.”

“Whoa - what kid? - Shit! Hey!” Tony lifted the man up so his feet could barely tap the floor.

“Wanna try that again, Jackass? Because if he’s disappeared, then so do you -”

“No, wait, we didn’t do anything, that kid was crazy!” The man tried fruitlessly to loosen Tony’s grip.

“The hell are you talking about? Where is he?” Tony demanded. He didn’t appreciate man’s use of the word was. “Two seconds, and I’m gonna rip off an arm.”

“You’re insane! Put me down!”

“One,” Tony snarled.

“He jumped out of the car!” The man was practically crying at that point; probably recognizing how close Tony actually was to making very good on his threats. “We were going over a bridge and he- he just jumped out! We- we- you gotta believe me, we didn’t even touch him!”

Tony took a second to breathe. Peter was Spiderman. Peter could feasibly jump out of a moving vehicle and onto a bridge and still be ok. His kid could do that. In fact, maybe it was his best option to escape these assholes. Peter would be fine. Except, if he was fine, then where was he? Why hadn’t he called anyone? He had to know by now that at least Ned would be freaking out. Peter wasn’t the kind of kid to just make his loved ones worry like that. Uncertainty was gripping Tony’s lungs like a vice.

One thing Tony did know for sure was he didn’t feel any sympathy for the man crying in his vice grip. Peter wouldn’t have been jumping out of cars at all if he hadn’t been forced into one at gunpoint.

He pulled the man’s face close to his mask. “Where?”

“Wh-where?”

“Where were you. When the kid. Jumped out. Of the goddamn car?!”

Sobbing, the man finally gave Tony an actual location, and he wasted no time incapacitating the crook, asking Friday to contact local law enforcement as he grabbed Peter’s phone from one of their pockets. Then, he was shooting like a rocket towards the kid’s last known location.

********************************************************************************************

Tony called Rhodey in-flight.

“I’m sure he’s fine, Tones, the kid’s strong.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know he is. Just, get here soon as you can. Please.”

Tony slowed down when he approached the offending bridge. It was short, spanning over a lazy, shallow portion of a river. There was a decent amount of traffic, but it wasn’t too bad. He had Friday scanning the area as he dipped under the bridge.

Nothing. There was nothing.

Considering it had been probably approaching two hours since Peter had escaped the moving car, Tony shouldn’t have expected the kid to still be there. But, then where the hell was he? Tony flew along the bank. There was a golf course on one side and a strip mall on the other. Had Peter fallen in the river? Hit his head and drowned?

No, no, no, no. Come on Parker, I need a clue, here.

He had another minute of freaking-out searching, before a new call was being pushed through. Given Tony’s calls were all filtered by Friday, he accepted it with a guarded hopefulness.

“This is Stark.”

“H-hey, Mr. Stark! Uh, so a crazy thing happened, today. Um, please don’t freak out - ”

Tony sucked in a breath that he hadn’t realized he was holding. He’d been sick over the possibility of never hearing that voice again.

Thank God. Thank God.

“Pete?! Where the hell are you? Are you hurt? Friday, track this call - take me there now. And, please get Rhodes and Happy the new coordinates... Kid? Hey, I need you to answer me, Pete. Are you hurt?”

“Oh. Ok, this is not, uh, not freaking out.”

“Parker, are you hurt?”

“NO! I’m fine, Mr. Stark, I swear, it’s - OH, God, did Ned already tell you what happened?” Peter groaned miserably. “He did, didn't he?”

Tony loved this kid so much, and he was going to kill him.

“Tell me what? That you ditched school to interrupt a robbery, without the suit that I so lovingly crafted for you - to keep you safe - and that you were abducted at gunpoint and taken out of the damn city?”

“Oh, yeah, well that’s a lot more detail than I expected Ned to know about…”

“Rhodey, Happy and I have been searching for you since Ned called me an hour ago, which was apparently two hours after he’d last seen you. I just threatened to rip the arms off of someone, because I couldn’t find you, Peter! What the hell would I do if I couldn’t find you?”

“God, Mr. Stark, I’m so sorry…” Peter sounded like he might be very close to tears, and Tony shut his mouth, clenched his fists, counted to ten… He saw Friday guiding his suit to the call’s location. It looked like some old payphone at a service station on the other side of the golf course.

“I really would’ve called sooner, Mr. Stark,” Peter was saying, “but they had my phone, and everyone I approached acted like I was gonna attack them or something, they yelled at me and some of them threatened to call the police, and I didn’t know if they’d believe me if I told them I’d just been abducted, so I hid and looked for some spare change in the golf course, and then I found this really old fashioned pay phone...”

“Ok, listen Pete, it’s ok, just breathe.” Tony was going to wrap this kid in bubble wrap. He was going to put a tracker in his watch, and in his shoes, and...

“So, can you please maybe send Happy to come get me, sir, because I don’t even have my wallet so I can’t get on the bus, and May will actually murder me if she finds out that I ditched my field trip…”

“I’m gonna get you, kid. Come on, you know I’m gonna help you. I thought we were past this… I’m almost there. So, just stay where you are…”

He heard Peter sniff on the other end. “Wait, are you in the suit?”

“Am I in the suit?” Tony rolled his eyes. “Are you serious, right now, Parker? You were kidnapped. You better damn well believe I’m in the suit.”

******************************************************************************************

Tony descended on the service station, to see his kid - finally, thank God - in the flesh, and felt his throat tighten. He was dismayed, but not particularly surprised, to see just how much Peter had undersold his injuries. He was soaking wet, missing a shoe, and he had a bruise on his chin and across the bridge of his nose. Dried blood crusted under his nose, and a trail of blood still dripped from a cut on his forearm.

But, he was there. He was alive.

Thank God.

Tony disengaged the suit as Peter ran into him. The kid wrapped his arms around him, and Tony just stood there senseless for a few breaths before he returned the embrace.

This kid was gonna be the death of him.

“Pete, what the hell?” He reproached softly. “You look like a damned drowned puppy.”

Peter started to pull back, but Tony held him by the shoulders at arms’ length.

“Mr. Stark, I really am sorry - “

“Hey, no - we can talk about that bit later, Pete, but you said you weren’t hurt…”

“I’m not,” he said, “I’m not hurt, I’m fine…”

“You are actively bleeding right now,” Tony remarked dryly, touching Peter’s sleeve right above the injury.

Peter looked down as if seeing the wound for the first time.

“Oh, so I am,” Peter said quietly. He looked back at Tony. “I must’ve scratched it when I jumped out of the car. I don’t even really feel it.”

Tony gently touched Peter’s nose, the bridge of which was a hazy blue, and swollen. “Do you feel that?”

Peter frowned. “It does not feel great.”

“May be broken... we’ll get it checked,” Tony said. “Did those assholes hit you, or did this happen when you leapt to freedom?”

“No, they didn’t hit me, they just tied my hands when I was in the car, and then… I didn’t know what to do, because I couldn’t break the rope while they were watching, right? Or they’d know I was too strong to be a normal... guy. So, I pulled the car door open and jumped out, but it was kinda hard to land with my hands still tied…”

“That was really dangerous, Pete, even for Spiderman…”

“They would’ve killed me, I think,” Peter looked at him, eyes haunted, and Tony felt a chill run down his spine. “I was really scared; I didn’t know what they wanted with me - to be a hostage or what - but they took their masks off in the car, so I didn’t think they were gonna let me go…”

Tony sometimes hated his mind, and the thousand possibilities that he could see all at once - the ways in which this whole scenario could’ve gone so wrong. The ways he could’ve lost this kid...

But, right then, Tony’s hands were still holding onto Peter. He was safe, and Tony promised himself he would do whatever he needed to do to make sure this scenario never happened again.

Tony cleared his throat. “You’re shivering. Come on, there’s a diner across the road. We can wait for Hap & Rhodey there.”

********************************************************************************************

Tony gave a huge tip to the wide-eyed waitress who greeted them at the diner.

“He’s had a rough day,” Tony whispered to her after he’d sent Peter into the bathroom to at least wash his hands before eating. “We’re just gonna wait here until his dads come pick him up. You don’t happen to have any towels, do you? I’ll pay for them.”

The waitress, bless her, nodded and disappeared into the back. She returned with three fluffy hand towels and a stack of dish towels, just as Peter was exiting the men’s room. She then led them to a booth towards the back; a seat which afforded a good view out the window, so Tony would be able to see his friends when they arrived.

Thankfully, the place was nearly empty, and the patrons that were there didn’t seem to be paying them any attention. Tony ordered four large meals; not knowing when Peter’s last meal was, or if Rhodey or Happy would want anything when they arrived.

As soon as the waitress was gone, Tony picked up the fluffiest towel in the pile and tossed it to Peter.

“Dry your hair, Parker, you’re gonna catch cold.”

Peter caught the towel and eyed Tony warily before obediently rubbing his hair with it.

“Listen, Mr. Stark, I really am sorry…”

“Kid,” Tony sighed, feeling extremely tired, “every time you apologize, a fairy loses its wings.”

“I - I know, I get it, I keep apologizing,” Peter peeked at him from under the towel, and Tony’s heart clenched again with the thought of what could have happened. “But, I want you to know, I wasn’t just… trying to be reckless, or - or trying to ignore your rules. I just… Can’t let bad things happen to people if I’m there to stop it.”

“And what about you?” Tony raised an eyebrow, folding his arms across his chest. “Who stops the bad things from happening to Peter?”

Peter frowned, “I was fine.”

“Yeah, we’re gonna work on your definition of ‘fine.’”

“The man was begging for his life.” Peter whispered harshly, flinging the towel down against the seat, not wanting anyone nearby to hear, but clearly needing Tony to understand. Clearly thinking Tony didn’t understand. “I couldn’t just stand there with my class and go on into the museum and listen to him getting murdered. I couldn’t… I - I had to do something!”

“Then wear the suit, Pete,” Tony ground out slowly through clenched teeth, pitching his voice to match the kid’s, even quieter, knowing Peter could hear, leaning forward to add emphasis. “The suit I made for you, so you could go save people when bad things happen to them, and so I would know to go save you when bad things happen to you!”

“I couldn’t wear the suit when I was supposed to be in class!”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because then you’d know I was… out.”

“Yes. Yes! Then I would know! Yes, that’s the whole entire goddamn point!” Tony hit the table - not loud enough to get them kicked out of the diner, but loud enough to drive home the point.

Peter stared at Tony like he’d just grown two heads. He blinked several times, took a deep breath, and exhaled.

“Peter?” Tony reached over and poked at the kid’s arm. “Did I break you?”

“Ok, wait, so would you have been ok with all this if I’d just worn the suit this morning?”

Would he have been ok with all this?

Something Rhodey had said before they’d left on this whole wild goose chase came back to him…

”Maybe he didn’t want you to know he’d ditched his field trip.”

Tony leaned back in his seat; trying to put himself into the mind of a 16-year-old. When Tony was 16, he was a little shit. He was already enrolled at MIT, going to parties and getting into trouble he had no business being part of, and the whole time… He had wondered if his Dad was ever going to give a damn what his son was up to.

He’d wondered if he’d ever get into enough trouble for his father to finally notice him. He’d wondered if he’d ever get into so much trouble that his dad just disowned him.

But, Peter wasn’t getting into trouble to get attention. Peter was cursed with the ability to know when something terrible was about to happen, and unlike most grown-ass adults, the kid actually gave a damn about someone other than himself. So, this morning, he’d been stuck in a catch-22.

Option One: Ignore the genuine terror of a man a block away, when he could’ve potentially helped.

Option Two: Go help the man, but get in trouble for ditching school.

“God, Pete, I’m sorry,” Tony sighed. He grabbed one of the clean towels and dipped it in his glass of water, sliding out of his booth and crossing the table.

“Scootch over, Web-head,” he said softly.

Peter obliged, and Tony sat next to him. He examined the cut that was still sluggishly bleeding, and carefully dabbed at the blood.

“I don’t want you patrolling when you should be at school,” Tony said, finally.

Peter opened his mouth, but Tony held up a hand before the kid could start to argue.

“This wasn’t patrolling, though, Pete. This was… you over-hearing an emergency situation.” Tony applied pressure to the cleansed wound. Happy had a first aid kit in the car, so they could bandage it up once he arrived. “In the event of an emergency like the one that happened today, I’d much prefer you to wear the suit. I can’t promise you won’t ever get detention if you ditch school, although the fact that they didn’t notice you were missing makes me doubt their abilities to keep you safe… I’m just thankful you have a friend like Ned.”

“Oh, shit, Ned!” Peter looked up at Tony, then clapped his hand over his mouth. “Sorry.”

“Another fairy, kid,” Tony laughed. “You can call Ned in a minute. Let me finish my heartfelt speech, please.”

Peter nodded, lips turning up in a slight smile. Tony ruffled Peter’s hair before continuing.

“I can’t honestly promise that I won’t ever get mad, or not lecture you… But, I promise to listen to your side of the story, and no matter what, I’m not gonna ditch you. Even if you have a month of detention. You’ll just have to visit me after you’ve served your time. And, I’m not gonna take the suit. I’m gonna help you. I think we’ve established today that I physically cannot handle losing you. Similar to how you cannot seem to physically handle not helping people out.”

Peter was quiet for a moment, seeming to process what Tony had just said. Then, his eyes grew misty, and he lunged at Tony, wrapping his arms clear around his mentor, so the man couldn’t move. The kid rested the side of his face against Tony’s chest.

“I really love you, Mr. Stark,” the kid whispered, and Tony’s brain short-circuited - fireworks exploding in his mind. He opened and closed his mouth like a fish, just looking down at the kid’s head, before Peter sat up again, blushing.

The waitress came with their food, and Peter stabbed his stack of pancakes with a fork, shoveling them in his mouth with an appetite that only teenagers seem to have. In the meantime, Tony texted the kid’s aunt to tell her Peter was with him, and Ned to tell him Peter was ok. By the time Rhodey and Happy pulled into the parking lot, the kid had eaten all of his meal, and half of Tony’s.

“Look, who’s here,” Tony said quietly, as Rhodey and Happy entered the diner.

Peter put his fork down, frowning at Happy’s scowl. “Am I gonna get another lecture, now?”

“Probably,” Tony said lightly, “But that just means they love you.”

#irondad #whump prompt #fanfic #kidnapping #peter parker #tony stark

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