Chapter Text
In spite of his attitude, Tony Stark is well aware of his shortcomings to a painful extent. This awareness was founded primarily when around alcohol, after a long week that lacked any sort of technological breakthrough, when confronted with board meetings, when he looked down at his prosthetic left hand, and of course mainly, around Peter Parker and Steve Rogers.
These were both for very separate reasons, of course. Tony had long since understood with a sort of grating annoyance that Steve was better than him in every possible way, which was particularly hard to reconcile with when greeted with visions of his father enunciating the fact over and over again. While Tony had long since stopped outright despising the captain, even becoming easy friends with the man, his bitterness was still well kept to his heart.
Peter was also better than Tony, but this betterment didn’t hold the same sour irritation that came with Steve. Peter was so good that Tony didn’t want to be better than him, but be better for him. His… intern, mentee, protagee- whatever you’d like to call him in relation to Stark- was a bright, snarky, wonderful child (“I’m a teenager, Mr. Stark, seriously!”) that Tony would do his absolute best to help prosper in any way possible, which made the wave of self-hatred come upon all the more heavy when he dragged Peter into this mess.
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It was a Wednesday afternoon, and Tony had been long-since tinkering with some alien-tech from the last invasion when Peter- accompanied by Steve, who must’ve intercepted the kid in the elevator after a mission and led him here, the avengers always doted on his poor kid and took any excuse to talk to him, even Sam and Bucky- walked in, the younger gesticulating wildly as he explained something that happened in his fifth period with excitement.
“Pete! Over here, I’ve got something cool to show you.” Tony said, waving him over with one hand as the other fiddled with the hologram FRIDAY brought up which was doing analysis on the extraterrestrial technology. Peter bounded over happily, Steve wandering alongside him at a more measurable pace as they both leaned over the table to see what he was working on.
“Alien tech from last week's invasion?” Peter guessed easily, humming and hawing over it as he leaned closer to the hunk of metal, eyes squinting- a bad habit from before the bite when he needed glasses, subconsciously- whenever he thought something was worth inspecting- he always squinted. Steve averted his eyes from the technology to the hologram, which was the only way he was going to discern what the thing was, seeing as he wasn’t particularly endowed in the whole tech aspect of life- the misfortune of his age, Tony mused, with the same bemusement making dinosaur jokes to the supersoldiers gave him.
“Bingo- take a look, FRI says the main function is teleportation, but it doesn’t have any discernable location input site so we’re taking apart the core,” Tony said, jerking his head towards the hologram, which was running through the purposes of certain sections of the tech and how it interacted with the energy source.
Peter pulled up his sanctioned spinning-chair and pulled the hunk of metal closer to himself without complaint from Tony, who was watching him with a small smile. He squinted further, leaning closer as he took a panel off a subsection to the core to isolate the power source from anything else- even though Tony had enough foresight to completely drain any remaining energy from it before he’d started messing with it in the first place.
“Well there has to be some kind of reader somewhere if there’s no place to input a location, that- or it’s connected to another matching tech piece somewhere else that acts as a hearth for all the teleporters,” he murmured, frowning, “Like, maybe it teleports everyone back to some kind of alien-home-base, or a prison if it was used as a weapon to capture people.”
“Smart thinking, but I already checked and the weapon is completely isolated from other sources as far as I can tell.”
“So it’s reader-based then?”
“Sorry-” Steve interjected from where he was going through FRIDAY’s findings, “-What do you mean by reader-based?”
Peter perked up- just like he always did when he got to go on nerdy tangents. “According to our knowledge so far, there are three types of teleporting technology: one with a connected hearth or checkpoint, where every teleporter teleports the person to the hearth, next there’s location-input teleporters where you input a location and then get teleported to that location- obviously, it’s in the name- then there’s the third type which is reader-based teleportation where the teleporting mechanics are connected to you- so it can read your thoughts and send you where you wanna go or it can read your DNA and send you back to your home planet. There’s one other unofficial type where the teleporter just teleports you places randomly, but that’s more-so the trial and error step of making one of the three teleporters,” Peter shrugged, still poking around the machinery carefully,
“Seeing as there’s no place to input a location and Mr. Stark said it’s isolated from a hearth then it’s either a really rudimentary teleporter that just teleports you anywhere or it’s a reader-based teleporter, which, if it is, that means it’s the safest one for us to deal with, so it’s a win-win,” Peter shrugged,
“I wouldn’t call getting teleported places accidentally a win-win, but alright,” Steve stated with bemusement, humming a little war-tune under his breath as he went through the list of past alien-technology to see if he could match up designs and find the location of these aliens based on the location of the former ones. Only in New York, Tony reflected as he saw what Steve was doing.
“Yep, it’s a reader,” Peter said, scooching closer to Tony to show him the component on the underside of the core, which had a built-in vial system that read through DNA and incinerated it after teleporting the person in question to their original planet. “Look- I figure if you press the button here that triggers the power this plate gets lifted and- yeah, ok, a needle comes out on spring-release and pricks your hand which then puts your blood through the system and dissects it against a list of all living beings that these guys were aware of and their planets, which would be stored here on this chip,” Peter pieced together, putting the plating back on after setting the spring back.
Tony blinked, “We’ve never seen a reader without telepathic technology though,” he murmured, leaning closer to Peter to get his hands on the hunk of tech, “Do you think we’re even on this list of known organisms and their planetary systems? They’ve only just met us presumably. What happens if we aren’t? Would the teleportation not work or would it transport us to the closest extraterrestrial organisms planet?” Tony mused, inspecting the mechanisms trigger, “FRI- be a dear and analyze this for me,”
A second hologram popped up next to the first, with Steve quickly abandoning what he was doing to inspect the other, leaning in close with Peter and Tony, who were squished together trying to get close to the hologram like a pair of curious children.
Unfortunately, when doing so, Steve’s hand shook the table, and in an attempt to steady it, the teleporter made a small click sound, and there was the feeling of a pierce to the side of his hand.
By the time Steve looked down, he already knew what he was going to see- a small speck of blood welling up by needle-prick. It took a moment, two of silence, before Tony, tense with worry, one hand on Steve and the other arm ensconcing Peter, his prosthetic hand already armed with the metal glove of his suit, spoke:
“Guess it didn’t work,” he murmured, the sound of his painful, unsteady heartbeat slowly curbing to a semi-regular rate. The shrapnel might’ve been taken out years ago, and the arc reactor might’ve been helping it beat from where it shone under his t-shirt, but it still wasn’t perfect.
Steve slowly let his hand drop from where it went to grab his shield- still strapped to his back from his most recent mission, when Peter hummed, “Well, you did drain the core of energy, plus it was a 50-50 if it was going to work anyways, seeing as we’re already on our home planet and we might not even be in the readers system.” Tony sighed, letting his shoulders relax as he moved a hand cautiously to touch the teleporter.
There was a crackle and Tony convulsed like he was shocked, the light of the arc reactor going dark for a moment before flickering back to life. He shook as he fell to the floor, and Tony would later yell at them for being so concerned about him that they missed the sound of the teleporter whirring to life with the stolen energy from Tony’s chest. They only noticed what had happened when white ensconced their vision, a loud ringing sounding out, drowning the whirring noise from the world, before the feeling of cold hard pavement hit them all as they passed out.