Chapter Text
“—and we could all see the bubbles starting to build up in Flash’s beaker, but nobody really realized it was bad until Mr. Grace turned around and shoved him out of the way, and then, like ten seconds later, it exploded! I mean, it wasn’t, like, a big explosion, and the beaker didn’t even break or anything, but it got so hot you could feel it all the way across the classroom, and if Flash had still been bent over it like he was before, his eyebrows totally would’ve been burnt off!”
Peter was practically bouncing on his heels as he talked, and even though the up-and-down motion was making the solvent in his hand slosh precariously within its container, Tony didn’t have the heart to warn the kid about it. It was a nice change of pace to hear a good story from his school day anyway, considering he was usually complaining about tests or unfortunate group projects—and actually, now that he thought about it, that was definitely where Tony recognized that obnoxious kid’s name from.
“It sounds to me like your teacher should’ve just let him suffer the consequences of his actions,” he offered, mostly just to watch the way Peter’s expression twisted with offense at the words. “Fuc— uh— fudge around and find out is the first rule of science for a reason.”
Peter sighed. “Come on Mr. Stark, you can’t censor yourself like I’m a five-year-old while advocating for my teacher to let my classmate set himself on fire because he can handle the consequences.”
Tony smothered the smile threatening to grow at his mentee’s ire. “That’s where you’re wrong, Spiderling. Watching your creations blow up in your face is a pivotal moment for any young scientist, as I’m sure you of all people know very well. I seem to remember a particular accident with one of my brand-new lab tables and a metric ton of that experimental web-fluid recipe—”
“I said I was sorry about that!” Peter whined. “Besides, it’s not like you actually cared about that table. You said that if it couldn’t even handle the chemicals it took to dissolve the web fluid after it dried, then it would’ve been useless anyway.”
Tony scoffed. “I stand by that assessment. We use stronger acids than that as cleaning solutions, Pete, it would’ve been full of holes within weeks, but it’s the concept of the thing.”
Peter rolled his eyes at Tony like the petulant teenager he was, and then pointedly slid a pair of extra-strength noise-cancelling headphones over his ears just to drive the knife in even deeper. Kids. This was why Tony didn’t have any. All they did was make a mess of your lab, eat you out of house and home, and disrespect you to your face. It wasn’t like Tony had had any grand plans brewing for a new model of the Iron Spider suit, which was meant to be more of a collaborative project to teach Peter the ropes of nanotechnology, and would have undoubtedly sent Peter back into that wide-eyed, starstruck fervor that had become rarer and rarer as he’d become more comfortable in the tower’s labs.
It wasn’t like Tony missed the way Peter had looked at him then, hanging off his every word with a kind of earnest, genuine interest that was impossibly rare despite the entire world’s infatuation with Tony Stark. And these feelings certainly wasn’t being exacerbated by his mentee’s excited recaps of how incredible this Mr. Grace guy’s classes were, which had to be a damn high bar for a high school teacher dealing with a teenage genius. No, jealousy was not a word that appeared in Tony Stark’s vocabulary, despite how the situation might have looked. This was merely professional concern for the level of intellectual stimulation his student may or may not have been receiving, along with a hint of personal curiosity, because for some reason, the last name Grace had an edge of familiarity to it. That was all.
The moment Peter disappeared for the night through the lab’s rigorously soundproofed doors, FRIDAY’s voice rang out around him.
“I’ve already pulled files from Midtown School of Science and Technology’s employee database on one Ryland Grace for you, Boss.”
Tony laughed. Leave it to FRI to know what he wanted before he even asked. “Thanks, babygirl,” he murmured, knowing she’d hear it, as he pulled up the first file—and froze, as the name finally registered.
Grace. Ryland Grace. The same Ryland Grace whose brazen disrespect in the field of academia was second only to Tony himself, and whose papers were still talked about in hushed whispers far from the ears of anyone named in them, because the wording may have been crude but the science was solid in a way no one could truly disprove. The same Ryland Grace who had once been a young, headstrong prodigy, brave enough to look Tony fucking Stark in the eyes and call him wrong with no fear of the consequences. The same Ryland Grace who had been so uncomfortably, intimately familiar that he’d taught Tony simultaneously how it felt to be pulled into his own inescapable orbit, and how it could destroy someone to be expelled from it.
Tony hadn’t thought of Ryland Grace in years. Not by name, at the very least. Every time he found himself slipping out of a hotel room in the odd hours of the morning, or watched someone he loved, who loved him back, step away and give up? He couldn’t help but feel that soft blond hair brushing against the nape of his neck and remember those bright eyes staring past him like he was a stranger. Every time he and Pepper had argued, and she’d stormed out fuming over some stupid comment that had escaped him before he could think, because it was so much easier to figure out exactly how to hurt someone than to stop the words from slipping out, he’d regretted how their last night together had ended. How he’d let Ryland go with the egotistical assumption that he’d always come back, and hadn’t realized he was wrong until he heard whispers on campus that he was gone, transferred to UC Berkeley an entire country away.
To this day, he would never admit that the Malibu house had been a decision made in a drunken haze, one where he’d forgotten just how big California was and couldn’t help imagining a coincidental meeting at one conference or another. Then, of course, Ryland had gotten himself excommunicated from the entire academic world, and Tony had gotten himself involved in far too many world-ending crises to think about trivial things like college flings gone wrong, and he’d found some kind of uneasy peace disturbed only by a half-remembered face in an occasional, embarrassing dream.
And then, of course, Peter Parker sent Tony spiraling into yet another crisis. Seriously, were he not a billionaire, he’d be making the kid pay for the medical expenses this kind of constant stress would undoubtedly bring him. First there was the absolute insanity of Spider-Man being a kid, then there was the utter mess that was the Vulture incident, then Peter wormed his way into a legitimate internship and forced Tony to be a responsible adult, and now this? It had to be yet another power of his.
At least this wasn’t as bad as the aftermath of the Vulture incident. It was, after all, just an unfortunate coincidence. It didn’t mean anything, it didn’t matter, and within a few weeks, Tony would probably have forgotten all about Ryland Grace for the second time. Nothing would come of this.
—
“FRIDAY, do you think unironic enjoyment of science puns is infectious?”
Tony could practically hear the sigh—actually, wait, he could, even though FRIDAY shouldn’t have been physically capable of making that noise. Whether she’d found a video online to steal or somehow forced it through her servers, it was entirely too much effort put into deriding his legitimate concern.
“I’m serious, FRI! Ryland would never have worn this stuff in college, but now that he and Peter are in close proximity for hours a day, he’s willing to post something like this with no shame?”
This was a post on Ryland’s (technically private, but when had that ever stopped Tony?) Instagram, one of the few actual selfies on the account, though it was just as terrible as the others. Captioned ‘One of the few downsides of biking to work,’ all it managed to capture, thanks to the horrendous angle, was a sliver of dark clouds, Ryland’s dripping hair plastered to the sides of his head, and a t-shirt, preserved by the bright yellow rain jacket thrown over it, which read AH! The Element of Surprise. It was ridiculous, and gaudy, and Tony was embarrassed on Ryland’s behalf, since clearly his own sense of shame had been brutally murdered sometime between calling out the world’s premier minds and deciding to teach snot-nosed brats in accordance with the AP curriculum.
He flicked mindlessly to the next photo, which was of a pile of beanbags of all things, just as FRIDAY spoke up again.
“Boss, Happy just texted you that he’s come down with something and can’t pick Peter up after school. Would you like me to send one of our self-driving cars out instead?”
Before he could think better of it, Tony dismissed her suggestion with a wave of the hand.
“No, I’ll get the kid myself. Saves us all some trouble.”
He and FRI both knew this was actually far less efficient than just letting her do her thing, but she kindly didn’t comment on it. Tony didn’t even know why he’d told her not to bother, not when there was no reason for him to fight through New York traffic all the way to Peter’s school—and there wasn’t. Really. The kid got out late on tower days because of his club, so the only teacher that’d still be there was the one supervising it, which was convenient because Tony wanted as few eyes on him as possible and not disappointing in the slightest.
Whatever reason he’d had for committing, he had, in fact, committed, and before he was forced to examine what could have possibly possessed him with the urge to get within a hundred feet of a school, Tony slipped into the driver’s seat of the closest car to the parking garage elevator and floored the gas. It was exhilarating for all of the ten seconds it took to reach the ramp, and once he was stuck in the thrum of traffic, he busied himself planning out yet more modifications he could make to the engine. By the time Midtown was visible in the distance, he’d decided to gut the chassis and start from scratch again, and his fingers were tapping against the wheel in a rhythm that someone else might have called frantic.
Tony glanced out the window, tinted so that it could be seen out of but not into, and caught sight of Peter waiting on the curb, fidgeting slightly. The person beside him, who must have been a teacher, was frowning worriedly in his direction, though he turned toward Tony’s car as it approached, giving Tony a glimpse of his face. A painfully familiar face, though changed since he had seen it last, lined and aged in a way Tony somehow hadn’t expected despite having watched the same phenomenon in the mirror. As Ryland Grace stared toward the window, already looking faintly annoyed at the mere sight of the car, Tony could only muster up a single coherent thought.
Damn, those Instagram pictures really hadn’t done him justice.