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~~~THWIP~~~Parker looked far too pleased with the situation, Tony couldn’t help but mutinously think as he watched the kid trying to smother giggles behind shaking fingers. It was a nightmare seeing his own body laughing at him, Peter’s obvious mirth behind Tony’s eyes. Tony’s grip tightened on the strap of the backpack hanging off his shoulder.
“Laugh it up, Parker, you’ve got a board meeting later today,” he pointed out with a light sneer, causing the spider menace to make an honest to god eep! noise, turning pale at the thought. Tony snorted, but it lacked the presence it normally had coming from a voice that still had the tendency to squeak at times. It was galling and Tony was ready to punch the lights out of the next person who dared laugh at him for it.
“Boys, behave,” Rogers said in a light tease, though his expression still displayed a sense of befuddlement at their situation. A situation they wouldn’t even be in if the kid deigned to listen to orders for once.
Tony’s glare, as ineffectual in his new face as his sneer had been, only caused Rogers to have to swallow his own laugh and turn away. Tony rolled his eyes, annoyed at everyone, but especially Spider-Boy whose wickedly gleeful look still looked far too childlike on Tony’s face. The poor kid. The vultures were going to eat him alive at the meeting today. At least Pepper would be there to handle most of it. Tony’s presence was only needed because his name was still on the damn tower. They’d tried to get “Tony” out of it after this whole mess went down, but it was one of those few meetings where Tony was absolutely necessary. Which meant Peter was absolutely necessary.
Horror of horrors.
The kid better not embarrass him, or else he was going to be grounded until he graduated .
Just as soon as they had their bodies back.
“Tell me again why I have to do this?” he grumbled in his new annoyingly childish voice which made it sound more like a whine than his righteous adult annoyance.“Because Mr. Stark, we have an important meet coming up and if I’m not there then I might lose my seat!” Peter reminded him, his look of anxiousness foreign on Tony’s face, as well as his voice. It was disconcerting to say the least. “Everyone’s counting on me!”“You care far too much what other people think about you, kid,” Tony muttered. “Your life is far too cozy if you’re worried about high school extracurriculars.”Peter shuffled a little, a brief flash of his annoyance covering his borrowed face for a moment before he obviously swallowed back what he wanted to say to that, though he looked away from Tony. They’d had that conversation before really, after they first switched bodies in the accident and Tony almost destroyed the medical bay when he woke up in a body that had the proportional strength of a spider and the hormones of a teenager. He grimaced at the memory, more at the embarrassment he felt and the horror of seeing his own equally horrified face staring back at him from the other bed, than from any feelings of acceptance at Peter trying to tell him that his life was more stressful and complicated than Tony gave him credit for.
The kid protected a few blocks of neighborhood and occasionally helped with alien invasions and other Avenger level threats; it hardly made his life as complicated as the adults he knew. Sure, he was a valuable asset and Tony almost made him a full-fledged Avenger before, but the kid turned it down. Which was the responsible thing to do, sure, and Tony might grudgingly admit he was proud of the kid for it if said kid wasn’t around, but that still meant Peter’s life was far less complicated than it could have been. So he could quit complaining.
“Appearances have to be kept up, Tony, you know that,” Rogers chided in his best Captain AmericaTM tones. The star-spangled jerk. “Peter’s missed enough classes as it is, and anything more might seriously compromise his situation and identity.”Tony rolled his eyes again, though he knew that Rogers was correct, deep down. After the incident , obviously neither of them could have gone to Peter’s classes, since Peter was in a grown (famous)
man’s body and Tony, even if his current body was the correct one for the occasion, couldn’t control his new strength or abilities.
Even now the whole tingle thing the kid had was going haywire making him uncomfortable and vaguely nauseous, though at least he wasn’t jumping away on spider instinct alone and sticking to the walls or ceiling. Again. That had been an experience he wasn’t eager to replicate any time soon. The vertigo he’d felt had not been kind.
“Yeah, yeah,” he mumbled, annoyed but knowing by the square set of Rogers’s shoulders and the apologetic face of Bruce behind him that he really had no choice. So here he was, Peter’s school backpack on his back, Happy downstairs waiting to drive him to Peter’s school, having to pretend to be a goddamn teenager again so as not to alert anyone who wasn’t already in the know. Besides the Avengers, only Pepper, Happy, and Dr. Cho (brought back from the Avengers compound due to the medical emergency of two body-swapped superheroes) were aware of the swap, everyone deciding that the less people who knew the better. Even Happy had barely been allowed to be told, and only after Peter had insisted he be made aware of the changes due to how often he and Peter interacted nowadays.
After the whole Vulture deal, Peter had been allowed to help rework his suit a bit in Tony’s own lab, under strict observation, though it slowly led to Peter helping Tony out with a few other things, and somehow without either of them realizing it at first, Peter’s fake internship had developed into a very real one, with Pepper even coding Peter into the tower’s employee list with the rest of the interns, granting him clearance as Tony’s personal intern in Stark Industries. This of course meant that Peter was around a lot more often nowadays, not that Tony really complained about it too much (and when he did it was obvious his heart wasn’t really in it), which did lead to Spider-Man helping the Avengers far more frequently than he used to, though he never let it affect his original Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man role, which he still practiced with every free chance he got.
Except lately. After this whole ordeal. Despite Tony’s gruff exterior, he could tell that that fact was starting to stress the kid out some.
It still couldn’t compare to Tony’s stress being in this situation now. He was an adult man in a teenage boy’s body. It had been an awkward experience the first time he had to go to the bathroom (hell, it still was), and he still made certain to keep his eyes squeezed shut tight whenever he had to change.
“Have fun at school,” Natasha smirked from where she was lounging against the wall, looking for all the world like the cat who got the canary. Or the assassin-spy-traitor who got to pull the trigger on the killing shot. Clint snorted loudly beside her before grunting when Natasha elbowed him in the stomach with a now serene smile on her face.
Tony tossed one more glare at them both before turning and all but stomping into the elevator to take him to the ground floor. Yippee. School time.
Tony was going to murder someone.
~~~THWIP~~~Tony was going to murder someone. And it might be the kid who kept taunting him and throwing spit wads at him during the cursed assembly. He might also kill the Spider Brat for not telling him that there was going to be an assembly in the first place.
Tony’s fingers dug hard into the bleachers until he heard them creak and groan, ready to snap, Peter’s tingling whatever spiking before every hit. Taking a deep breath, he tried to release his annoyance so as not to reveal the super strength this current body of his held. It had been hard earlier, when he first entered the school’s halls and was tripped by the boy now currently shooting spit soaked projectiles at the back of his head, slamming into the lockers and leaving a noticeable dent in one of them with his flailing fist.
He’s been about to make a different dent with his fist regarding the smarmy look the boy sent him until one of Peter’s friends had grabbed him out of nowhere and pulled him away. Which was…fine. After all, Tony did not condone child abuse, no matter if he was currently in the body of a child himself. Peter’s friend (Ned), who Peter chattered about incessantly in the labs when they worked together, babbled about the teen jerk Tony had encountered and tried to convince “Peter” to brush it off. That it wasn’t worth spilling his secrets about, that the boy (Flash) was just jealous, etc etc.
Tony rolled his eyes for the hundredth time that morning, stalking down the halls without even bothering to grab any books from Peter’s locker. He might be stuck in high school again, but that didn’t mean he had to do homework. Which was just as well, as they were soon shuffled to the gym to discuss “exciting news” according to the man standing before them.
“Dude,” Ned whispered next to him. “Are you okay? You seem…different.”
“I’m fine,” Tony snapped, wiping at the drying bits of paper peppering the back of his head.“Leeds got a point,” a girl said, leaning down between them from her place above them, a sketchbook on her knees. “You’ve been spending too much time around that boss of yours. I swear I’ve seen him make that same face. Though, it looked more impressive on him,” she smirked, reminding Tony suddenly of Natasha, though it lacked the same quality of bite.
Ned squinted his eyes at Tony. “Yeah…yeah, now that you mention it…you have been acting a lot more like Tony Stark today, Peter.”Tony felt himself flush, inwardly cursing adolescent hormones for being so telling. How the hell were these two children able to see through Tony so easily? “I don’t know what you mean,” he said haughtily.
“That, right there,” the girl pointed out. “You sauntered into the hallways, have a supreme look of disdain on your face like you’re better than this place, and hold yourself far too stiffly. I saw Stark do the same exact thing on the news a month ago.”Ned frowned for a moment, turning to look at the girl. “What were you doing watching Tony Stark on the news, MJ?”She shrugged, going back to her sketching. “It pays to know your enemy.”Tony’s eyebrows shot up. While he was aware of the relationship between Peter and the Vulture’s daughter, he hadn’t expected the kid to be friends with yet another villain.
Ned, however, scoffed and rolled his eyes. “Tony Stark is Iron Man ,” he pointed out as if the girl hadn’t known that. “And Peter’s boss,” he tacked on, shooting a nervous look at Tony. “You know. For his internship. At Stark Industries. Nothing else.” Smooth, Leeds, real smooth.
MJ’s eyebrow ticked up as she looked between them, a calculating look on her face, though when she opened her mouth to say something, a different voice cut in.
“Oh my god, don’t tell me you’re still trying to panhandle that lie,” Flash groaned in a mocking tone as he too now leaned forward with his cronies. “You’re so pathetic, Penis Parker.”Tony’s eyebrows shot up higher than ever. What the hell did he just call the kid??“ Psst ! Peter !” Ned hissed, drawing his attention away from the idiot two rows behind and to the side of them and, with a pointed look, to Tony’s hands. Which had turned the bleachers beneath them into pulp. Whoops.
“You know, Flash,” MJ began, turning to him with an obviously fake smile on her face. “I’m really proud of you for being so honest about being obsessed with Peter and his penis so much. It’s so nice to meet someone so secure in their sexuality and interests.”“ WHAT !” Flash squawked while Tony inhaled so deeply at the girl’s brazenness that he accidentally almost swallowed his tongue, which several people in the surrounding area who overheard seemed to have had the misfortune of doing, if they weren’t covering their outright laughter behind their hands. Flash, meanwhile, was deep red and looked like he’d eaten a particularly sour lemon.
“Truly,” MJ continued, before he could say anything else. “And knowing you don’t want to be a bigot and say anything about that which might be seen as negative or distasteful, I’ll just let you keep thinking about Parker’s penis in your own head and you don’t have to say anything else.” She smiled sickly sweet, and suddenly Tony realized that she could smile just like Natasha, and that thought was terrifying.
“Children!” the teacher at the bottom of the bleachers yelled to regain their attention. “If that is all…we are getting to the point of this assembly now.”
Expectant if bored faces returned to the man below, though Tony was considering simply just buying the school so he could walk out and never have to return with the knowledge that Peter wouldn’t have to worry about losing his Decathlon seat or anything else for that matter ever again.
“Now I think this will be a surprise for everyone,” the teacher grinned. “We have finally worked out all the kinks and we’ve finally got permission for our field trip’s destination!” A sudden inhale of excited breath. “As you all know, things have been a little dicey lately regarding off-campus activities after that little incident in DC, but this plan has been months in the making.” The teacher grinned, enjoying the palpable energy coming off the students.
“Where are we going!” an impatient kid yelled when the teacher took too long to answer.
“Hold on to your seats…we’re going to…Stark Industries!”Oh. Oh no. Oh fu— ~~~THWIP~~~
to possibly be continued...maybe one day lmao