Cold Water Takes Out Blood

Karen waited until Peter had put the second quarter in the dryer before she said, very politely, "Peter, I've initiated the Baby Monitor Protocol." He froze with his hand on the dial. The laundromat on Thirty-First Avenue was empty except for him and a TV bolted to the ceiling, showing a soccer match nobody was watching. It was 2:47 in the morning. His hoodie was going around in machine number six, slowly turning the water pink. "You did what?" "Your heart rate exceeded 160 beats per minute for eleven minutes, you lost an estimated four hundred milliliters of blood, and you declined medical attention three times," Karen said. "Under the terms of the protocol, Mr. Stark has been notified." "Karen. Karen, you have to un-notify him." "I'm sorry, Peter. That isn't a feature." He sat down hard on the orange plastic chair. His side throbbed under the gauze he'd taped on in the alley behind the bodega, a lumpy rectangle cut from a first-aid kit that had been rattling around in his backpack since the decathlon trip. The guy with the box cutter had been fast but not that fast. Peter had been distracted. The guy's friend had been holding a little girl's scooter and laughing about it, and something about the scooter, pink with streamers on the handles, had made Peter forget for one second that people could also come at him from the left. It was already closing. He could feel it, the hot itch of skin knitting itself back together. By the time May got up for her shift, there'd be a pink line and nothing else. That was the whole plan: wash the hoodie, dry the hoodie, sneak back in through the window, act normal at breakfast. It had been a good plan, right up until his suit decided to snitch. "How long do I have?" "Mr. Stark's estimated time of arrival is four minutes." "Four minutes from where?" "He didn't say. He did use several words I'm not permitted to repeat to you." Peter put his head in his hands. It was more like six minutes. He heard it before he saw it: the dull roar of repulsors overhead, a car alarm going off two blocks down, then a clank on the sidewalk that rattled the big front window. The laundromat door banged open, and Tony Stark walked in wearing the Iron Man suit from the neck down and nothing from the neck up but a very bad mood. The faceplate had already retracted. His hair was flat on one side. Peter had a sudden, deeply unwanted thought that Tony had been asleep. "Hi, Mr. Stark," Peter said. Tony looked at him. He looked at the dryer, at machine number six, at the pink water sloshing in the little round window. He looked at the gauze peeking out under the hem of Peter's T-shirt. Then he looked back at Peter's face, and whatever he saw there made his jaw do something tight and complicated. "Shirt," he said. "It's fine, it's basically—" "Kid. Shirt." Peter lifted it. Tony crouched in front of the plastic chair, the suit whirring softly, and peeled back the tape with gauntlet fingers that were a lot gentler than they looked. The cut ran four inches along his ribs. It had stopped bleeding twenty minutes ago and was already pinking over at the edges. Tony didn't say anything for a long moment. The soccer crowd on TV roared at something. "FRIDAY," he said finally. "Scan." "Laceration, approximately ten centimeters, superficial to the intercostal muscles," FRIDAY said from somewhere in the suit. "No organ involvement. Accelerated healing in progress. He'll be fine, boss." "He'll be fine," Tony repeated. He stood up. "Great. Fantastic. He'll be fine. Do you want to tell me why I found out about this from a suit at three in the morning instead of from you?" "It's not three. It's like 2:55." "Peter." Peter dropped the shirt. "I didn't want to bother you." "That's not an answer, that's a greeting card." "I handled it! It was two guys, they were mugging a dad and his kid outside the bodega on Steinway, and I webbed them both to the awning, and the cops came, and I left before anybody saw. And one of them got me a little bit, which, okay, wasn't great, but it's healing. I'm handling it." "You're doing laundry." "Because there's blood on my hoodie and May's gonna see it!" That came out louder than he meant it to. The words bounced off the row of washing machines and sat there. Tony's face went careful, the way a man walks once he realizes he's out on ice. "Okay," Tony said slowly. "So May doesn't get to know. Fine. That's your call, we've talked about that. But me? I built the suit. I'm the guy with the satellite. What's the logic here, Underoos? Walk me through it." Peter looked at the floor. There was a dropped sock under the folding table, gray with a hole in the heel. He stared at it with tremendous focus. "Last time I messed up," he said, "you took the suit." The dryer ticked. Machine six shifted into its rinse cycle with a long sigh. "After the ferry," Peter went on, because now he'd started and he couldn't seem to stop. "You said if I died, you'd feel like that was on you. And then you took it. And I get why, I do, I'm not mad about it. But if you think I can't handle this—if you see I got hurt and decide I'm not ready, that I'm just some kid in pajamas—then I don't get to do it anymore. And I need to do it. I need to. So I figured if it was healed by the time anybody checked, then technically there was nothing to tell." He waited for the lecture. He knew it by heart: responsibility, the suit was a privilege, he was fifteen, this wasn't a game. He'd heard all of it from Tony in a dozen different flavors. Tony sat down in the orange plastic chair next to him. The suit made it creak alarmingly. He rubbed a hand over his face, and for a second he just looked tired, older than he looked on TV, with gray coming in at his temples that nobody ever seemed to photograph. "Did I ever tell you about my birthday party?" he said. "The one where I was dying?" Peter blinked. "What?" "Palladium poisoning. The thing in my chest that kept me alive was also, very slowly, killing me. My blood was turning into something you'd find at the bottom of a car battery." Tony said it lightly, the way he said most things that weren't light. "And I didn't tell anybody. Not Pepper, not Rhodey, not my security guy, who was also, at the time, my driver and my boxing coach, it's a long story. Instead I got blind drunk in the suit at my own party and blew holes in my living room. Rhodey had to put on one of my armors and fight me to stop it." "Like, actually fight you?" "We broke a lot of furniture. There's a DJ out there who still won't take my calls." Tony looked down at the gauntlets resting on his knees. "You know why I didn't tell anybody?" Peter shook his head. "Because I figured if they knew, they'd look at me differently. Like I wasn't the guy who could handle it anymore. Like the suit had to go to somebody else." He snorted. "Sound familiar?" Peter didn't answer. His throat had gone tight and hot, and he didn't trust it. "Here's the part I didn't learn till later," Tony said. "The people who'd have looked at me differently? They were already looking. They just didn't have the information. So they spent months watching me fall apart and thinking it was something they did." He turned his head. "I took the suit after the ferry because you were in over your head and you didn't tell me. Not because you got hurt. Getting hurt comes with the job. Hiding it is the part that makes me crazy." "So you're not gonna take it?" "I'm not gonna take it." Tony held up a finger. "I am going to have Karen send me a ping any time your blood pressure does something interesting, and you are going to answer my calls. Even the boring ones. Especially the boring ones." "You don't make boring calls." "I'll start. I'll call you about my taxes." Peter laughed, and it hurt a little in his side, and he didn't care. The dryer buzzed. Machine six clunked to a stop. Tony got up before he could, opened the washer, and pulled out the hoodie, wet and heavy and only faintly pink now around the hem. He held it up to the fluorescent light and squinted at it with the expression of a man evaluating a prototype. "This is a disaster. What did you use?" "Detergent?" "Cold water. Blood comes out with cold water. Hot sets the protein. This is basic chemistry, Parker, I thought you were a genius." He shook it out, wrinkled his nose, and dumped it into the dryer. "Who taught you laundry?" "May. Mostly. Also YouTube." "YouTube," Tony muttered, feeding quarters into the slot from a little pile Peter didn't remember giving him. "Unbelievable. I fund three universities." They sat back down. The dryer started its slow tumble, the hoodie flopping around inside like something sleepy, and the soccer match ended in a tie that nobody on TV seemed happy about. Tony stood, and the suit split open down the front with a soft series of clicks. He stepped out of it and left it standing by the detergent machine like a very expensive coat rack. Underneath he was wearing a faded MIT T-shirt and flannel pajama pants with tiny cartoon donuts on them. Peter stared at the donuts. "Not a word," Tony said. "I didn't say anything." "Your face said something. Your face is very loud." It was warm in the laundromat. The dryer hummed. Peter's side had stopped hurting, mostly, and somewhere in the last ten minutes the adrenaline that had been holding him up since the bodega had quietly packed its bags and left. He meant to sit up straight. He meant to say something about getting home before May woke up. Instead his head tipped sideways and landed against Tony's shoulder, and it was too much effort to move it. He felt Tony, back in the plastic chair, go still. Then, after a second, a hand settled on the back of his head, awkward, like Tony wasn't entirely sure where hands were supposed to go in situations like this. "Karen," Tony said quietly, "change the protocol's primary contact." "From Happy Hogan to?" Karen asked. "To me." "Mr. Stark, you're already listed as—" "Make it more." Peter was asleep before the dryer finished. He didn't know until much later, until Karen told him on a rooftop in Astoria with a little too much satisfaction, that when the cycle ended Tony had reached over without moving his shoulder, fed in four more quarters, and started it again.