Frozen Heart (Peter Parker x Male!Stark!Reader)

Prologue

Your childhood had been a strange one.

For you and everyone else, it was shrouded in a large sense of mystery. No matter how many sleepless nights you spent dreaming of it, trying to reach it, to make some sense of it... You just couldn't remember. 

Sure, you remembered some things, like bits of your mother. You had spent every moment with her as a child - It was just you and her against the world, or at least, you were pretty sure. You had vague memories of other people passing through, but none had been so prominent as mom. She was soft, kind, fair. She told had told you stories and played games with you. She was the only person you could remember loving you.

Unfortunately, what you seemed to remember most, above all the things you would much rather know, was the way your mother spoke about your father.

She never kept it a secret that her son was a Stark - not from you or the strangers she met - but it had never quite clicked in your child mind that the same 'Stark' your mother had referred to had been the same one whose name you heard passively on the news and in magazines you never quite understood. The shared identities of Iron Man and Tony Stark had never clicked in your mind as a child, so how were you supposed to shove "father" in there alongside them?

Your mother had always spoken so highly of Tony, despite all he'd left her with. A single mother maintaining the house all by herself, no other family, no other friends (as far as you could remember). Tony had left her utterly alone, yet you still remembered the way she spoke of him, how excited she got when she lightheartedly rambled about the man who swept her off her feet. Sometimes, fleetingly, you would almost find himself falling for the idea of Tony, too; If your mother loved someone so much, then surely, he should have made a good father.

She had always sounded so absolutely head over heels for your father, and it had often made you wonder why he wasn't here with her. Your mother was great, she was kind and creative and understanding, so why would anyone leave her all alone?

You'd grown a strong resentment over the years for the father you'd never met, for the father who'd left you and your mother alone in this big, scary world.

If you had been older, if you had understood better the circumstances of your own existence, maybe you wouldn't have been so upset. But you didn't. And even as you got to the age where you could have understood, your mentality was too beyond reparation. Years and years of resentment built up, and that was something that wasn't so easily washed away. Not through the meeting with your father, not through any amount of conversation or attempted trauma processing. Y/N hated Tony Stark. It was an objective fact, and undeniable truth.

You remembered the house they had lived in, too. It had been a studio apartment, a rather nice one at that, and you and your mother had put a lot of work into customizing it. The walls were cluttered with art and posters and whatever they pleased, the room would get repainted at least once a month, and the furniture was rarely in the same place for very long.

You remembered it felt like home, more so than anything else ever would. And, just maybe, you were okay with that. Even in your hazy mind, you could remember the place through the fog, accompanied by a sense of nostalgia and melancholy. It was all you had, and you were willing to let it remain as such.

You had gone to live with Tony when you were twelve. You didn't remember anything that had caused his living situation to change, but you were certain that twelve should be old enough to remember something. Anything. Whenever you attempted to ask, to search for answers, everyone got silent. Everyone began to pivot, to scramble, to leave. They were all hiding, all coddling - Trying to protect you.

You resented every moment of it.

No one ever cared to talk about your mother. When you'd first arrived, you'd pestered Tony about her relentlessly, hoping he could give something new, some insight into why he was never there for her.

But Tony never gave anything up, and neither did any other adult. You wondered if they thought it would be too hard for you to talk about her, or if they simply didn't want to know anything more than what interested them. You'd picked up on it early, exactly the things they wanted to know.

Another memory, embedded in your mind, sticking out among the fog. Ever since you were younger, you had been cold; Cold enough to touch a glass of water and have it begin to freeze under your touch. Cold enough to constantly breathe out white puffs of cold air. Cold enough to make the moisture in the air around you grow thick.

That was what Tony and his associates were interested in hearing about and, for once in your life, you were glad you knew nothing. It made you feel proud to return the favor to Tony. To give the man nothing, just like Tony had given to you. Call you petty, sure, but that didn't stop the feeling.

Your powers had been there as long as you remembered, and you didn't think you had ever worried about it. You weren't sure how your mother had reacted it, nor if you'd ever be able to learn to control it or... Anything. 

Y/N just wanted his life back. He wanted to be back with his mother, he wanted to be a normal teen. God forbid.

Tony forbid, really.