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.

"You heard him, surely? No touching. Of any kind. Or else there'll be no breathing for either of you." The man moves away after shooting Tony a glare that chills him to the bone and beyond.

If he could, he'd punch something. Maybe a wall. But he can't, because he can barely stand up and his mind is on high alert, waiting for the electricity to come back. He does, however, manage to pull himself up and try to smile as he stares at Peter, taking in the fact that he's alive, his son is alive.

"Why?" Tony croaks, not sure exactly what he's asking or, ironically, why.

Peter shrugs, grabbing at his left elbow with his right hand and shifting between balancing on his heels and his toes. "Compromise."

There's a moment where Tony genuinely wonders what he's done in life to deserve the tragic sight of Peter trying his best to explain a horrible situation without starting to cry. And then the moment passes and it occurs to him that Peter must have been awake when he'd passed out from the pain of becoming a temporary lightning rod and so he will have had time to make negotiations he should never have had to make with the people he shouldn't even know exist.

"I'm sorry, kid," Tony whispers, "I'm so, so sorry."

"Yeah..." Peter sighs, stilling and finally looking at Tony, his eyes watery.

If Tony could sacrifice anything, anything at all, to see Peter excitedly beam at him again, he would do it in half a heartbeat. His hands itch to wrap his son in an embrace and shield him, if only for a moment, from the rest of the world and its vendetta against his innocence. For now, all he can do is say, "I promise you that we'll get out of here. Just hang on, alright, kid? We're going to be alright..."

Peter simply nods a little. "That's what you say every time. And then I tell you that it's nothing you should worry about and you ask me what I mean by that, and then I explain and it's all for nothing because it just keeps happening. Every single time..."

He doesn't wait for Tony to say anything before turning, lifting his hands to run them through his dripping-wet hair and rolling his shoulders as if- well, as if this is a routine he's familiar with, as if, once again, Tony is missing something. With the way things are going lately, he probably is.

The only thing he can do is hope he's not missed something that could have helped them escape. He'd been counting on someone having tracked him or FRIDAY having alerted the team that his signal had blinked out but with every second that passes with Peter in pain and literally just out of arm's reach, he can't stop his hope from shrinking.

"Pete?" Tony asks as kindly as he can, frowning, barely even thinking about the water starting to coax the blood away from his arm.

Peter's shoulders slump but he doesn't turn around and Tony can almost sense that his eyes are closed to stop himself from crying. After an extended pause, he shakes his head. "Mister Stark, just enjoy the shower, please? We both know you need it, right? And I'll explain everything later just like you usually explain stuff to me, I promise, but... please."

Funnily enough, Tony almost falls for it.

Figuring that he's better off keeping his clothes on instead of attempting to find privacy when he's being watched by three men who look like the incarnation of expert poker faces, he washes the sweat from his forehead and gently rubs any stubborn blood crusts off his skin. His hair is sopping wet by now so he gently rakes a hand through it, wincing when he pulls on the wound in his arm that doesn't look like it wants to heal any time soon. It's only when he almost slips again that he realises what Peter had said and joins some of the dots together.

"Pete? Am I going to forget this whole shower experience? Like I've done before"

Bingo.

Peter nods slowly, then turns around with the most melancholy look in his eyes. His chin is shaking but he licks his lips and says, "Yeah. There's um, there's something in the water. It makes you forget and uh-" he gasps, blinking rapidly- "and then we go back and it's-"

"It's like nothing ever happened?" Tony finishes for him and, if the water rolling down his face isn't only from the showers, nobody can prove it.

The scientific, curious side of him wonders what it is in the water that means only he forgets what happens but he doesn't listen to that part of himself, knowing he doesn't have time to waste on theorising instead of trying to distract Peter from their nightmarish situation.

"How many times has this already happened?" He asks, stretching out his legs as he does because, regardless of the reasons why, if he can prevent cramps, you bet he's going to.

"Every day," Peter replies, then pauses. "Well, we've only been here once before so, uhm, this is the second shower? But like, the basic, you know, stuff happens every day. I mean, it's probably every day but, like, I can't be sure because there's no- uh, no clocks in here..."

It's a good thing Peter then walks away, going into another en-suite-style room which Tony assumes is the bathroom, because, there and then, another part of his heart instantly folds into itself and dies with a scream. It hurts, it hurts so much to know that they're hurting Peter even more than he knows and it physically pains him to know there are gaps in his memory, gaps that make Peter cry and gaps that he can never fill in no matter how hard he tries.

It kills him to know that Peter is right there, close enough to wrap his arms around and hug until they forget about the rest of the world, but, at the same time, he's far too far away to protect.

"Why are you doing this?" he demands weakly, opening his eyes to glare at the man stood in front of the door, the man watching him as if he's capable of anything more than a bitter, useless hatred.

The man just smirks a little. "Like the brat said, no point in telling you. Now go, it's your turn for the toilet."

He must have been here with them all the other times too, as if bathroom duty is his job, because there's no other way he could have known Peter would come out that very second. It pains him to think someone else can know Peter's habits so well – that's his thing – but that's not even nearly as painful as seeing Peter keep his head ducked down as the two walk past each other, this time separated by only Peter's determination to keep the distance between them. It makes Tony wonder if they'd touched before and something had happened because of that.

He hears a muffled conversation from outside the door; it doesn't take a genius to figure out it must have been one of the men saying something hurtful to Peter.

His head is spinning even as he comes out of the bathroom, his feet echoing strangely as he walks back to the showers, propping himself up on the wall. He's dimly aware of Peter lightly crying – oh, how he hates the sound of that – as something, possibly a soapy solution, is poured over his head and he has to throw his arms out to steady himself from the force of it. By the time his vision is primarily white, he can feel his limbs weakening and the last thing he recognises is a cold smirk before his eyes shut on their own accord.

He yells at himself to remember just before everything fades entirely.

"No!"

Tony jerks awake, Peter's cry having destroyed his restless slumber.

"Pete? You okay?"

The silence that follows his question is full of a tension so thick, you could almost poke it. He pulls his eyes open in time to see Peter school his features into a messy smile.

"Just peachy, Mister Stark."

Tony coughs, shaking his head when he feels the weight of wet hair pulling him down. Without missing another beat, his whole body tenses up, not wanting to be caught off guard if they decide to use him as a pointless electric conductor again.

"It's okay, Mister Stark, they won't do it again, you got too close to uh, dying."

There's something in Peter's voice that doesn't make sense but he lets it slide, purely because Peter's eyes are full of hope, full of a hope that's quickly fading away, fading away because of something that Tony has clearly missed.

"Have they hurt you?" Tony asks instead, trying to scan Peter's skin but his eyes refusing to work, stinging as if someone had washed them out with soap.

Peter sighs and shakes his head, biting his lower lip as he leans back and stares at the light bulb hanging from the ceiling. At least, that's what Tony assumes he's staring at because he can't see anything else up there but, then again, Peter's eyesight if different and it's possible there's something he can't see.

Tony just wishes he knew what to do.

Just a reminder that one of my friends is in a really REALLY difficult and painful situation so I've opened fanfic commissions! (detailed post on my tumblr) If you guys want me to write anything you want to read, feel free to help out and ask me!

Happy pride month, I hope y'all are having a good time!

Thanks for reading! Love ya :)