Helpless

5: Ignorance Is Tantalising Bliss

A/N: 700 reads? 75 votes? so much support? thank you <3

Tony coughs as he regains consciousness, his throat rough and dry.

"-ake! You can stop that now! We can both go! Please, he's awake, look!"

He blinks, wondering who Peter's talking to, then gasps when someone harshly yanks him to his feet. Wait, to his feet? Tony groans as the world spins and his limbs start to tingle. He doesn't have much time to wonder why he's able to stand up or where the metal restraints have gone before he's walking – more or less being dragged – and walking and walking until he's shoved into a swimming pool.

No, not a swimming pool, he realises after finding out that he can still breathe and he isn't sinking. He's in some sort of a shower but the shower is the whole room so either someone had specifically designed a tiny shower room for them or he's going mad.

"Mister Stark?" Peter asks softly and heaven help him if that's not the most beautiful thing he's ever heard.

"Pete?" Tony asks, blinking, lifting his right arm to rub his eyes because he can't really feel his left one. He winces anyway because the fourteen cuts on his right arm haven't yet healed and, if anything, they've just been provoked by the water falling from the showerheads near the ceiling that he doesn't have the energy to take a second look at because his neck is too stiff.

He can't peel his eyelids apart at first, part of his brain wanting to curl up and wait for the storm of reality to pass, and he has to pinch the skin under his eyes in order to make his eyes water and tell himself that he needs to move, he needs to see Peter, he needs to stop trying to hide from this pain because he can't risk what might happen to his son if he does.

When he does finally open his eyes, he sees an exhausted Peter smiling at him, standing a good metre or so away for some reason. Tony takes a moment to gather his bearings before looking Peter up and down, making a note of the healed cut on his collarbone and the scars all the way up his right arm, matching his. It's something that, had it happened accidentally on a mission, Peter would have high-fived him for but, now, it's an awful similarity Tony wishes he could erase.

Satisfied when he doesn't see any major injuries on his son, who he's not even fooling himself to think of as just an intern anymore, he puts his pain aside, lunges forwards faster he's ever done so before, and pulls Peter close.

Or rather, he tries to.

Before he can actually touch Peter, his fingertips just about having brushed those cute but worse for wear brown locks, a human wall appears in front of him and he smacks into it before being all but thrown backwards, landing heavily on his left side and sliding along the wet floor until he hits the wall with a groan.

His first instinct is to curse and he mentally strings together all the profanity he knows into grammatically-flawed sentences before he can even breathe again. Then comes the anger, the frustration at being so close to what he yearns for but stopped by someone they could easily have defeated had they not been so weak, so hurt.

"Oh, what the actual-" Tony mutters before he's forced to groan again as his arm shrieks in pain, then looks up to see a man he's never seen before standing with his arms folded, a cold smirk on his face as he towers over him.

"Uh, Mister Stark? We, um, we're not allowed to touch," Peter says quietly from behind the human wall, his small voice wavering.

"What?" Tony splutters, partly due to his absolute rage and partly due to the mouthful of water he'd collected as his jaw had dropped in shock at the absurdity of it all.