Chapter Text
"What the f - "
"Don't freak out! I'm not like, an evil clone or anything, I swear."
Peter doesn't relax in the least. The guy standing in front of him is wearing his face. This is not the kind of situation where relaxing seems like an appropriate response.
"That's definitely something an evil clone would say, just so you know," Peter says.
"But I'm not! I swear I'm not."
The guy’s suit looks a lot like Peter’s, except it’s yellow and black instead of red and blue. Peter’s seen him around - never in person, since they generally stuck to different parts of the city, but on the news and stuff.
And never without the mask before, obviously.
But today Peter had chased a purse-snatching drone over the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan. At present, said drone was scattered in pieces across the rooftop, after a messy near-threeway collision between it, Peter, and possibly-a-clone yellow-suit guy.
"Okay... so is this another time travel travel thing?” Peter asks. “Did Mr. Stark send you back in time to fix something bad that’s gonna happen?"
Dammit, he hadn't meant that to come out sounding excited.
Then again, if Mr. Stark sent him back from the future, it couldn't be that far in the future, Peter thinks. The version of Peter standing in front of him looks pretty much exactly the same as Peter does now. His hair is a little shorter, and the suit is different, but otherwise it's like looking in a mirror.
A really creepy, weird mirror.
"It's not a time travel thing. Sorry. That would be awesome though. It's not a multiverse thing either, if that's the next thing you were gonna ask." (It was.) "I'm, um. It's kinda hard to explain, actually?"
Peter is about two seconds away from calling Mr. Stark - he’ll definitely be able to figure out what's going on here. But some part of Peter is incredibly curious to hear what the guy has to say. Because if it's not time travel thing, and not a multiverse or a clone thing, Peter is kind of out of ideas.
Unless this new guy is lying, that is.
"Try harder.”
Other-Peter takes a deep breath, blowing it out through his mouth. "Okay. Okay, so - remember how you were kind of dead for two years?"
"I don't actually remember it, but yeah. It's kinda hard to miss."
"Tony didn't really... cope well with that."
Peter frowns. That seems kind of obvious. Half of all life in the universe had been snapped out of existence. Peter's seen the tributes, the books, the memorials. Hell, the cascading sociopolitical and environmental impacts of the Snap were covered in his social studies and life sciences classes these days.
In any case, Peter kind of doubts anyone who'd been left behind during that time had been able to deal with it particularly well; Mr. Stark probably least of all, since he'd been right there, so close to stopping it.
Peter could remember all too well the look on Mr. Stark's face when the reality of their failure had set in. Mr. Stark had been on the ground, bleeding, half his suit destroyed by going head to head with Thanos while the rest of them scrambled just to survive.
Thanos had already vanished from the planet, but the prickle of fear Peter could feel racing across his skin had only intensified, second by second. Peter shivers, remembering.
"But he fixed it," Peter says, forcing himself back to the present.
"Well yeah, eventually. But for a long time fixing it didn't even seem possible. Thanos was dead, and the stones were destroyed. There were two whole years where nobody thought it could be undone."
"I get that, but none of this is explaining who you are or why you're here."
"It is actually, you're just being kind of slow on the uptake - no offense. Tony had all this stuff on you - biometric scans, DNA samples, a ton of video and audio recordings from all the time you spent in the suit." Other-Peter pauses, swallowing. "He was a mess, when he first came back. Like, really a mess. And he really, really missed you."
"Oh my god, you're a robot. Mr. Stark made a robot-me?"
Other-Peter grimaces. "No! No, I'm not that either. I'm - I mean, my thought processes are based on some pretty advanced AI stuff that Tony developed, like, specifically for me. But I'm all biological," he says, gesturing vaguely to a small cut on his forehead. It was already healing, but a pinkie-sized smear of blood was clearly visible.
Other-Peter had mentioned something about DNA samples. It would explain the wall-crawling and the super-strength - not that Peter doubted Mr. Stark could design a robot with those same abilities, if he really wanted.
"So you sort of are a clone then."
Other-Peter shakes his head. "If he'd just made a clone, then I'd still be a baby, right? He printed me, using a prototype of the regeneration cradle Dr. Cho designed and built a few years ago."
"No way."
Peter reaches out, fingertips brushing against the shoulder of Other-Peter's suit before he realizes what he's doing and yanks his hand back.
"Sorry. That's just, that's really cool."
Other-Peter grins. "I know, right?"
But doubt starts to creep in once again. "How - how many other people did he bring back like that? During those two years?"
"Just you. I mean me, I guess."
Peter probably shouldn't let himself be convinced this easily. It could still all be a big lie. It does sound just a little bit too good to be true - why would Mr. Stark go through all that trouble just to recreate Peter, of all the people they'd lost?
Sure, he knew Mr. Stark cared about him, but he had plenty of other people he cared about too. Plenty of other people were way more important to bring back, like King T'Challa, for one. Or any number of the other world leaders who'd vanished, really.
But maybe Peter's not taking the practicalities of doing that into account.
Sure, there was plenty of footage of King T'Challa in the news, especially after his coronation and the subsequent opening of Wakanda up to the outside world - the media had gone (understandably) nuts covering that story. But even so, it's not like Mr. Stark would have access to the sheer volume of footage for King T’Challa that he must've had of Peter. Peter does a quick estimate on the number of hours he's spent in the suit since Mr. Stark first gave it to him, plus all the hours he spent just talking to Karen or doing... other things.
Oh god.
Mr. Stark probably didn't look at that footage, right?
No, of course not. He had way more important things to do than comb through all that video. He probably just created a base AI structure and then pre-loaded all the video and audio files on there. Peter shutters the thought, but can't quite help the blush he can feel heating up his cheeks.
Which of course, Other-Peter seems to notice, if the brief flicker of a grin on his face is anything to go by.
He seems to take pity on Peter though, because he doesn’t actually bring it up out loud.
"Yeah, I mean maybe it would've made sense to bring back other people like that - but he didn't have the raw material he would've needed to do it. Not for anyone other than you, really."
It's a little bit creepy how easily Other-Peter seems to read his thoughts. Or maybe it's not even about that. Maybe all he has to do is put himself in Peter's place and try to figure out how he would react, if he were Peter. Which he is.
Kind of.
Yeah, this is definitely going to give Peter a headache.
"If I asked Karen to call Mr. Stark right now, would he tell me all the same stuff you just said?" Peter asks.
"He would. But uhh, please don't do that? I'm not technically supposed to be telling you any of this. Or interacting with you at all, actually. He was kind of trying to prevent you having to deal with any of this stuff. He didn’t want to freak you out."
Peter's heart sinks, and he can't immediately put a finger on why.
Sure, he and Mr. Stark had gotten pretty close in the couple years after the whole Vulture thing. They'd spent a lot of time together in the lab, turning Peter's "internship" into an actual internship, at May's insistence.
Mr. Stark let Peter work on his suit, and mess around with tech that Midtown's science department would never be able to afford, and in return Mr. Stark occasionally asked him to make a fresh pot of coffee or hold something in place if it was too delicate for DUM-E to handle.
It'd been pretty great.
But then that crazy spaceship had appeared over Manhattan, and they'd ended up on Titan, ...and they’d lost.
And Peter had clung to Mr. Stark in those last moments, begging and crying like a little kid to make it stop as he'd felt himself fading away, piece by piece.
The next time he'd opened his eyes, Mr. Stark was gone and Doctor Strange had been in his place, pulling Peter upright and telling him they needed to move, now.
The battle that followed had been chaotic, and terrifying, and Peter had spent most of it wondering in a vaguely panicked way if he should even really be there at all. He wasn't some supersoldier, or magician, or Norse god; he was just a kid.
Mr. Stark must’ve had the same thought, at some point, because he stopped spending as much time with Peter, afterward.
At first he'd thought the man was just busy. Mr. Stark had all that rebuilding to do, after all, and a ton of other problems to deal with - half the world's population had vanished for two years and then reappeared just as suddenly; power grids and water supply systems were overloaded.
A lot of people came back to find they didn't even have a place to live anymore, Peter and May among them. Mr. Stark had made sure they got a new place, but he’d done it from a distance; through employees and short, almost business-like emails to Aunt May.
It had felt good, to know that Mr. Stark was still watching out for him, even as busy as he was.
But it was hard not to think of it in another light too - that even after everything they’d been through together, Mr. Stark still thought of him as just a kid. Just one more of those problems he had to tick off a list - not a fellow Avenger, regardless of what he’d said to Peter on the ship.
If Mr. Stark thought of him as - well, maybe not as an equal, but at least as a sort of lesser partner - then he wouldn’t have felt like he needed to hide this Other-Peter from him, right?
“I’m not freaking out,” Peter says, even though he is. Other-Peter raises an eyebrow at him. It’s a familiar enough expression; he definitely picked that up from Mr. Stark. “Okay, maybe I am. I think it’s a little justified though. This is really weird, dude.”
“Oh it’s definitely weird,” Other-Peter agrees.
And suddenly Peter can see it in his expression - this other version of Peter may know more about what’s going on than Peter does, but he’s just as freaked out as Peter is, coming face to face with his doppelganger. Freaked out and more than just a little bit fascinated.
Peter grins. “Super weird.”
It’s not like Other-Peter is a completely unknown quantity, he figures. Peter’s seen the guy in the black and yellow suit in plenty of news reports over the past few months - he does the same kind of stuff that Peter does on patrol, helping people out. Friendly neighborhood stuff.
Peter just hadn’t realized they had a whole lot more than that in common until today.
“So wait, if you’re me - I mean, did Mr. Stark set you up with an apartment somewhere or something? And a fake name too?”
“That’s a yes on the fake name, no on the apartment though. Legally speaking, my name is Pete Reilly, although I’m still not really used to using it, to be honest. But I live in the tower with Tony.”
Peter gapes. “You live with Mr. Stark?”
“Yeah?”
Peter takes a deep breath, tries to remind himself that the wave of jealousy that overcomes him in that moment probably isn’t super great. Besides, it’s not like he wants to live anywhere that isn’t with May anyway, and he’s pretty sure she would hate living at the tower - she’d been iffy enough about accepting the apartment Mr. Stark had set up for them.
But still, he couldn’t deny that he was achingly curious about what it must be like. Sure, he’s been to Mr. Stark’s private lab a bunch of times, but he’s never actually been up to the penthouse.
The penthouse. Where Other-Peter, or Pete, lives. With Mr. Stark.
“You have to show me. That’s my deal - I won’t say anything to Mr. Stark about knowing you exist, but you have to show what living in the penthouse is like.”
“Okay,” Pete agrees readily, which, when Peter stops to think about it for a second makes perfect sense. If Peter lived in Mr. Stark’s private penthouse suite, he would definitely want to share that with someone.
“Tony's down in DC today anyway. We can’t both swing up there though, it’d be too obvious,” Pete says. “How about this - change into your street clothes and go up to the lab. I’ll meet you there and take you up.”
That suggestion more than anything else convinces Peter that Pete must be telling the truth - because when Peter gets to the lab fifteen minutes later, FRIDAY grants Pete access upstairs with a warm welcome, even shuts off the interior surveillance systems at his request before he gestures Peter inside.
If FRIDAY allows Pete that kind of access, then that means Mr. Stark must trust him pretty implicitly.
Peter does his best to pretend that it doesn’t sting; knowing that Mr. Stark trusts Pete that much when he clearly doesn’t think of Peter the same way, even if they are supposed to be the same person.
After all, Peter wasn’t around during those two years, and maybe that’s all it is - Peter hadn’t been there, and Mr. Stark had grown close to someone else.
That the someone else just so happened to look like Peter was sort of weirdly irrelevant, somehow.
*
Mr. Stark’s penthouse is - there’s no other way to describe it, it’s insane.
Sure, Peter’s seen parts of the place in pictures in magazines and articles online (he’s not a stalker or anything, he was just curious, really), but none of those really capture the experience of actually being there. The panoramic view out the floor to ceiling windows is breathtaking; even to Peter, who’s spent time perched on practically every skyscraper in the city.
There’s a pretty big difference between crouching on a precarious rooftop ledge and lounging on a plush designer couch that Peter can only assume costs more than a year of tuition at NYU, after all.
It even smells expensive.
“Woah.”
“Right? I mean, it looks loads better now than it did the first time I was up here. The place was all empty and like, kinda creepy almost? They’d been in the process of moving everything out, so we barely had any furniture, just a couple beds and a couch.”
Someone had clearly fixed that at some point, though.
Peter wanders over to the immaculate-looking kitchen first, tracing his fingertips over the marble countertop of the island. He opens the fridge to peer inside, then closes it, blushing. “Sorry,” he says.
Pete shrugs. “I’d probably do the same thing, if I were you.”
Oh. Right. Peter’s not sure how he keeps forgetting that of course Pete, of all people, is going to understand his burning curiosity.
Pete turns out to be a pretty great tour guide, showing Peter around the living area, then down the hall to a small but very comfortable looking media room, which they both spend some time geeking out over together.
One level down there’s a lap pool and a separate gym, with a boxing ring and free weights, complete with a sauna and showers tucked off to one side.
“Does Mr. Stark spend a lot of time in here?” Peter asks, trailing one hand through the water of a jacuzzi, idly picturing him leaning back in the water, with his eyes closed.
“Not really. He spends a lot of time working. I usually only see him at night, or sometimes first thing in the morning if I’m up early enough.”
“Oh.”
“Wanna go in?”
Peter shakes his head. He shouldn’t; May will be expecting him home soon anyway.
“Hey, what about your room?” he asks instead.
“Uh, yeah. It’s just a bedroom though, nothing special.”
“A bedroom in Stark tower, dude. C’mon, don’t pretend you don’t know how cool that is. Besides, you have to show me, a deal is a deal.”
But Pete turns out to be right - mostly. The room has incredible views of the city, to be sure, but just stepping inside makes Peter feel hollowed out and disappointed in a way he can’t explain.
There’s nothing in the room that’s really personal. No posters on the walls or photos tucked into the frame of the mirror, no dirty clothes on the floor. Peter guesses maybe Mr. Stark just prefers Pete to keep things neat. He probably has like, housekeepers or staff to keep everything clean and tidy. Although maybe not - Mr. Stark is pretty strict about security, after all.
As cool as the penthouse is, Peter would hate to live here, like he was a guest in someone else’s home.
Peter turns away, not wanting what he’s thinking to show on his face, since Pete seems to be pretty good at picking up on that stuff. He fiddles with the handle of the dresser, pulling it open just for something to do.
“Don’t - !” Pete starts, but it’s too late.
Peter is already staring down into the drawer. The empty drawer. He closes it and opens the next one down, which is equally empty.
“This isn’t your room, is it?” he says, shifting so he can see Pete in the mirror’s reflection.
“Oh I’m so dead,” Pete mutters, eyes wide.
“Why did you lie?”
Peter’s thoughts are racing. FRIDAY allowed him access, sure, but FRIDAY wasn’t infallible. Maybe she'd been hacked. Or this really was some kind of time travel multiverse thing. If Pete didn’t actually live here -
“I didn’t lie!” Pete insists. “I just - maybe didn’t tell you the entire truth? I do live here, but I uh, I can’t show you my room.”
Peter turns around to face him.
“Why not?”
Pete winces. “It’s… personal?”
“If what you said about Mr. Stark creating you is really true, then you have a ton of my life downloaded in your head, including some pretty private stuff I may or may not have done while wearing my mask - ” Peter clocks the flicker of an expression across Pete’s face that basically confirms yeah, at least a few of his mask-assisted masturbatory sessions must have been included in there, “so I don’t think you’re the one who gets to decide what’s too personal to share, here.”
Pete purses his lips, then gives Peter a short nod.
He looks conflicted about it, but at least he hasn’t started villain-monologuing yet, which Peter takes as a good sign. Peter holds out hope that maybe there really is a perfectly good explanation for the subterfuge.
Pete leads him down the hall, back through the living area and over to a separate wing of the penthouse. Up a half-flight of stairs, Pete pushes open a door and gestures Peter inside without a word.
This room is bigger. A lot bigger. It also has plenty of personal touches - no posters on the walls, but plenty of knick knacks scattered around on the dresser. The sheets are rumpled, and there’s a pair of jeans on the floor next to the bed. There’s a couple of books and a tablet on the nightstand.
There are tablets on both nightstands, actually. Peter stands in the doorway, blinking dumbly at the room in front of him, trying to make sense of it.
The bed is really big.
There are indents on two of the pillows.
Peter takes a step further into the room without meaning to, drawn forwards by the sight.
The room is nice; really, really nice. It’s the sort of room he’d always pictured, whenever he’d thought about Mr. Stark in bed.
“I - I don’t,” he says.
Peter looks back over his shoulder to see Pete behind him, slouched against the doorframe with an almost apologetic look on his face, chewing on his bottom lip.
“This is Mr. Stark’s room,” Peter says. It’s not really a question.
It even smells like Mr. Stark in here.
“Yeah.”
“And it’s your room,” he adds, feeling numb.
“...Yeah.”
“You sleep in Mr. Stark’s bed.” Still not a question. Peter has no idea why he has to keep verbalizing the same thing over and over again. Maybe until it actually sinks in.
“Technically it’s our bed, but, yes.”
“Oh my god.”
“See, I knew this was gonna freak you out. For the record, I was trying to avoid throwing all of this at you all at once like this. But then you were all, you have to show me the penthouse and a deal is a deal. I should’ve just let you call Tony in the first place,” Pete pauses to swear under his breath. “He’s gonna kill me if he finds out about this. I’m so dead.”
Peter tries not to picture it - not Mr. Stark finding out, but Mr. Stark and Pete stretched out in bed together. In this bed. The one he’s looking at right now.
Now that he’s focusing on it, he can actually smell Pete on the sheets too; both of them mixed together.
He tries not to imagine what that must feel like, waking up to Mr. Stark’s hands in his hair, or rubbing his back.
He doesn’t succeed.
He does, technically, know what that feels like - to have Mr. Stark holding him like that. Sort of. He’s felt it twice now - once on Titan, crying and begging for his life, and the second time mid-battle, both of them bloodied and jittery with adrenaline, the fate of the entire universe hanging in the balance.
Moments later, the entire battlefield around him had erupted in fire and explosions.
Peter sits down abruptly, his breath going rapid and shallow and out of his control.
He digs his fingers into the carpet, trying to let the sensation of it overwhelm the panic. Pete is there a split-second later, his hands on Peter’s shoulders, his forehead pressed against Peter’s own.
Peter looks up only to find his own panic perfectly mirrored in Pete’s face. He clenches his eyes shut, and goes with it when Pete pulls him forward into a crushing hug.
“It’s okay, it’s okay. Shit. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to freak you out with all this stuff, I swear. It’s okay,” Pete is muttering to him over and over, stroking his hair.
The panic starts to recede, just like it always does. Quicker than he expects when it first starts - when it feels like it might go on forever, but still fading far too slow.
It’s been a while since he’s had one that bad.
Pete being there helps a lot, actually.
“Sorry,” he mumbles into Pete’s shoulder.
“Don’t be sorry,” Pete says. “You’ve got nothing to be sorry for. I get them too, sometimes.”
It doesn’t make Peter feel better, exactly, but it does make him feel like less of an idiot.
“Were you there that day? When Nebula - ”
“Yeah. Tony wanted me to stay out of it, but when Wong sent out the call for help it’s not like I was gonna say no.”
Peter doesn’t remember seeing him there, but he’s not entirely surprised. It really had been chaos.
“Have you - you know, talked to anyone about this stuff?” Pete asks.
Peter shakes his head. “It’d just freak May out, and she’s already scared enough about the Spider-Man stuff. I told Ned a little bit, but he’d freak too if he knew about all of it. How close it really was.”
“You can talk to me, if you want.”
Peter shifts back, looking up. It should be weird. It is weird.
But it’s also kind of nice, knowing that he's not alone. There's someone else out there who gets it, understands what it's like. The way he used to think he and Mr. Stark might understand each other.
“Thanks, man.” He means it.
“Don’t mention it. I figure we’re kind of like a team, right? Or we could be.”
“Uh huh, yeah,” Peter says, distracted.
Now that he’s a little steadier, he can’t stop staring at the pair of jeans on the floor just a few feet away. He can’t tell what size they are, but it doesn’t really matter who they belong to, does it? One or the other of the two had kicked them off yesterday, or maybe the day before, and crawled into bed.
Peter swallows. He’s not going to think about what they might have done next.
It’s insane, possibly more so than anything else he’s heard or seen today. And worse, it stung. Mr. Stark barely even looks at him these days, even on the rare occasions they’re both in the lab at the same time. He thinks about Mr. Stark ducking out of the lab early or brushing him off entirely so he can go upstairs to spend time with this other version of Peter. The one he must like better.
“I should probably be getting home,” Peter says. “May’s gonna start wondering where I am.”
Pete hums in agreement, standing up and offering Peter a hand. They head back down to the lab in silence.
Peter grabs his backpack, slinging it over his shoulder and shoving his hands in his pockets.
“I guess I’ll see you around?” he says.
“Not if I see you first,” Pete answers with a grin, waving as the elevator doors slide closed.