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The bomb looks like it’s been built by a 14-year old as part of their science project, and Tony is halfway through a joke about it when the thing goes off, hitting his shoulder in a series of explosions and knocking him dead out of the air.
While falling, he hopes against all odds that the web Peter had been dangling from is still intact. But of course he’s wrong, and the first thing he feels after hitting the ground is the boy’s hard impact next to him. The second thing is a raging fire in his shoulder that makes his vision go black.
He can’t have been out for too long, though, because pebbles and dust - it’s dust, only dust - are still falling from the sky when he forces his eyes to open and his arms to push him upright, because the kid got injured.
Tony makes it to his knees and bends over Peter, feeling his heart thud against his ribcage at an ever-rising speed. There’s blood flowing from a gash on the kid’s temple, and he looks still, awfully still.
“Hey, buddy.” He touches the boy’s arm carefully, knowing better than to shake someone with a probable head injury. Nothing.
“Pete, if you’re trying to pull a show, that’s not the moment,” Tony half-jokes, but he can clearly hear the panic in his own voice.
The boy finally stirs, and the relief flooding through Tony makes him momentarily dizzy. Or maybe it’s just the injuries catching up with him.
“Ow,” Peter moans, blinking hard against the streetlights brightening the early New York winter evening. He shifts as if to make to sit, but Tony pushes him back down. He uses the kid’s mask to temporarily stall the blood flow on the side of his head.
“Your name, kid. And tell me where we are,” he demands.
“P-Peter Parker?” It sounds a little like a question, but Tony decides to let it pass.
“On a – a mission…I guess,” Peter adds, then swallows, his face now turning ashen below the crimson lines.
“Okay. Tell me what’s hurting.” Tony is sure that there was more to the concussion protocol, but confirming that the boy is not dying from any internal injuries seems more important at the moment.
“My - my head. And I feel –” the rest of the sentence ends in a wet gurgle. Tony turns Peter to the side when a gush of vomit pours out of his mouth, spilling over his suit and onto the pavement. The kid’s shoulders hitch and he brings up another wave, screwing his eyes shut against the pain in his head.
“Easy, kid, easy,” Tony soothes, now using the blood-stained mask to wipe the boy’s mouth. He absent-mindedly makes a mental note to ensure that the next version will be liquid-repellent.
“I..don’t feel well,” Peter states hoarsely when he is done retching and lets himself slump against the Iron Man armour.
“Yeah, I got that much. You’re pretty concussed.” Tony replies.
“Oh. Ok,” Peter mumbles, already shutting his eyes again.
“Hey, no sleeping yet,” Tony orders.
He’s had enough concussions in his life to know that this one is not life-threatening, but it’s far from benign, either. A quick glance around the bus-station-turned-battlefield confirms his suspicion - there’s no way an ambulance will get through to them any time soon, and even a helicopter landing would be difficult at this point.
Flying it is, then. Tony gets up with a groan, pulling Peter with him into a sitting position. But as soon as he locks both of his arms under the boy’s shoulders, the agony ripping through his own momentarily takes his breath away. The joint is out for sure, and the skin above it probably burnt if the stinging pain is anything to go by. There is no way he’ll be able to manage Peter’s weight dangling from his arms like this.
“Kid, I need your help,” he says, making a split-second decision to bend down and scoop Peter up in some sort of a one-armed embrace. “You gotta work with me here.”
“Hmm,” Peter mumbles, opening his eyes slowly, apparently having difficulties in focusing on the older man’s face. But he locks his legs around Tony’s middle obediently, then wraps his arms around his neck, his head coming to rest on Tony’s good shoulder.
Taking off while minimizing his movement is a challenge if Tony’s ever faced one, but Peter is light like a feather, and they make it into the air without any further problems. The boy lets out a noise suspiciously close to a whimper when they shift from the vertical to the horizontal, and Tony curses himself, not for the first time this night, for ever calling him to the mission in the first place.
“Straight to the tower, Fri,” he murmurs into the helmet once they have reached skyscraper-level. “And give Pepper a heads-up that we’re about to barge in.”
“Kid, you still with me?” he asks aloud, to keep Peter engaged, and maybe a little bit to keep the darkness inside his head and the other, more menacing darkness above them out of his thoughts. Flying at night has become quite of a challenge recently.
“‘s stars are beautiful,” Peter slurs in reply, clearly not sharing Tony’s aversion.
“Yeah, everyone says that.”
He forces himself to look at the ground, where New York is rushing by at breath-taking speed. It’s filled with lights, with lives, with loud and annoying people. Not with blackness and desperation and the futile longing for rescue.
“But once you’re out there,” he adds, because talking helps, talking means that he’s still here, and it’s not like Peter’s going to remember any of this anyways, “It’s not beautiful at all. It’s fucking empty and it scares the hell out of you.”
He holds Peter a little closer, a little tighter, so that he can nearly deceive himself into feeling his warmth through the armour. Alive.
“Misser Stark, you okay?” Peter asks, sounding a little more lucid now. “Cause your heart beat’s through the roof, and I can sorta hear you hyperventilating.”
“My shoulder’s out. I’m in a little bit of pain here, buddy.” It’s a half-truth, at least.
“‘s it bad?”
Peter tenses in his grip, trying to sit up and get a good look at his mentor, and jostles Tony’s arm in the process. He hisses in pain and drops a few feet before he can catch himself.
“Don’t worry, boy, I’ll be fine. Not gonna let you fall.”
“Hmm.” Peter nods and then gags in response. A slim stream of vomit splatters onto Tony’s armour.
“Ugh. Sorry,” he says weakly. “Just…so nauseous.”
“It’s okay, kid. I’ll send you the dry-cleaning bill.”
But the joke is lost, since Peter has buried his face in Tony’s neck again at the sight of the approaching tower, shielding his eyes from the growing shape as if he was a child on a rollercoaster ride. Or maybe he’s just passed out again.
Tony makes a tumbling and embarrassingly unsteady landing on the terrace, hoping in vain that no one is there to witness it. But at least it’s only Pepper and not any of the Avengers that’s waiting for him.
“God, Tony, this looks terrible!” she fusses as soon as she’s at his side.
“It’s a pretty nasty flesh wound, but he’s lost less blood than it looks like, the concussion’s what we gotta worry about…”
He trails off when he realizes that she isn’t looking at Peter but at his own shoulder, where the melted metal is burying itself into his skin.
“Oh, that. Yeah.”
The smell of burned flesh is suddenly filling his nostrils, eliciting a queasy feeling in his guts. He’s lightheaded all at once, as if someone had flipped a switch and cut off his adrenaline supply. Tony had fully intended to carry Peter down till medical, but when he takes a step towards the balcony door, the head-rush hits him full force, and it’s all he can do to grab the wall for support as not to lose footing.
“Woah.” He sets Peter down as gentle as possible, blinking through the greyness clouding his vision.
“Can you just get Bruce,” he addresses Pepper. “Or Sam? Whoever’s on medical?”
As soon as she’s gone, he gives up any pretence of being able to stay upright, letting himself slide down next to the boy. Stars are dancing in front of his eyes. Stars. Hollow, all-consuming, nothing - stop. Don’t think about it.
“What?” Peter slurs.
Was he talking out loud?
“Nothing. It’s okay, buddy, just stay awake. Help is coming.”
“…hurts.”
“Yeah, I know. It’ll be better soon, trust me.”
“My hands…” Peter stares at his fingers as if it was the first time he’s seen them, and unfortunately Tony has a pretty good idea of what the kid is hallucinating there, “Something’s wrong with my hands…”
“Your hands are alright. A-Okay. Here, see.”
Tony takes the kid’s fingers into his own, squeezes them tightly, to convince the kid that he’s intact, that they are flesh and blood and not dust and no, not going there now.
Then, suddenly, Bruce is standing over him, pulling molten pieces of metal from his arm.
“Whatcha doin’?” Tony glares, because Peter is the injured one, the one that needs to be taken care of, “Look at the boy first, he’s hit his head.”
“Already done,” Bruce reassures.
And it’s true, Tony must have lost time again, because when he shifts to glance at Peter, the kid's head is covered in white bandages. He smiles at Tony hazily, his pupils wide and unequal, the kind of smile that comes after a dose of painkillers on the heavier side. Tony is a bit jealous, because fuck, his shoulder is more than just stinging now.
“What happened here?” Bruce asks in a calm voice, examining Tony with admiringly steady fingers.
He rides out a wave of nausea when the doctor prods at the injured joint and he can feel something shift below the skin.
“It’s…” He searches for an expression that adequately describes the sensation of fire and pain raging in there, “…wrong.”
“That’s the most creative euphemism for broken that I’ve heard in a while now,” Bruce replies drily. “Keep still for now, Pepper’s coming with the medics, they are getting a gurney.”
“I can walk,” Tony says for the sake of it, but he doesn’t even attempt to move.
His gaze returns to Peter, and yes, the boy is staring upwards again, eyes fixed somewhere on a star Tony can’t see, doesn’t want to see, and for a moment he’s irrationally afraid that someone’s just going to reach down and pull the kid up and away. He resists the urge to rub his hands clean on his armour, because they are not coated in dust, no, they just aren’t.
“Hey kid,” he says, and there must have been something in his voice, because Peter turns towards him instantly, and even through the drug-concussion-haze in his eyes Tony can see Titan clearly written all over his thoughts.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Stark,” he whispers, and Tony’s throat goes so tight that he can’t even tell him to shut up. Instead he just sits there, silently, thinking about all the cracked and damaged people on this planet, wondering how they are ever going to be strong enough to piece each other back together.
When the tranquillizers kick in and Peter starts listing to the side, Tony puts his good arm around him and pulls him close, just to keep the boy upright, to make him feel safe, not at all because the touch helps to ground his fragile senses in reality. He can hear the kid’s breathing, loud and clear and alive, and he focuses on that, because it is all that counts now.