Having Peter in the compound was great, no matter what Happy thought about it.

Tony had him for the fortnight, mostly to get him out of May's hair while school was out. That, and to prove himself capable of keeping the kid in one piece. Trust was important, and if that meant paying Happy time and a half to keep the kid from sticking his hands in heavy machinery, that was worth it.

They'd spent most of the afternoon tinkering in the workshop, in something like parallel play- the importance being in presence, rather than interaction. It counted, just having Peter around, elbows-deep and hyperfocused on his own work. Actual access to the resources he needed stirred him into a laser-like sort of concentration, and Tony loved to watch that happen.

But six o'clock had come and gone, and Peter'd been dragged back upstairs for food and exposure to sunlight.

Tony was flicking idly through the latest set of data on him. Someone had finally managed to bribe the kid into sitting through a medical assessment, and gotten much more in-depth than the standard temperature/heart rate/bpm readings he got from the suit. Surprisingly, some of the readings were skimming a little bit low. Tony wasn't sure how someone could eat an entire thing of oreos and skirt hypoglycemia within the hour, but apparently Peter had managed it.

" Bruce." Tony kicked off the wall, propelling his desk chair towards his colleague. "What do teenagers need?"

" What, like, psychologically?" Bruce had been working on a write-up of something related to his own wacky biology, and most of the surface area of his desk was lost beneath a forest of coffee mugs.

" Nutrition," Tony clarified. "I'm making Spider-Man a meal plan."

It turned out the answer was protein, and lots of it. Smoked salmon, steak, and prosciutto featured heavily in every conceivable combination. Tony recruited Jarvis to cross-reference the family library of cookbooks and Peter's calculated caloric and nutritional needs, and he was basically going to have to buy out a charcutier's. Steve's nutso enhanced body did something similar- healing and super-strength sank nutrients like nothing on earth.

After a few hours, spent in a haze of pinterest boards and recipe blogs, he was ready for the next step of his hastily-assembled plan- putting it into action.

He jogged down to the staffed kitchen, just in time to catch his head chef. He'd found Giulia in a hole-in-the-wall place in Modena and snapped her up before anyone else got the chance.

" Hey!" he said, leaning against the doorframe. "Do you do lunchboxes?"

" Does he think I don't feed you?"

May turned the red and gold box over in her hands, frowning at the little note-card on the back. The fancy type was bragging about all of the overspecialized features it had. There were many, far better uses of the technology that went into self-cooling meal storage than sending unnecessary lunch boxes to her kid.

Peter shrugged.

" He probably just thinks you're not feeding me-" he picked up another one of the boxes, turning it over to read the back. "Uh, pastrami of Hudson Valley duck foi gras, with salanova lettuces, and young almonds, and pickled green strawberries. You can pickle strawberries?"

" You can pickle anything if you put your mind to it," May said, distracted. In the big, brown cardboard box- stamped with the Stark Industries logo- which the meals had arrived in, there were two envelopes. One addressed to each of them.

The letter made it a lot worse.

Suddenly deciding to feed someone's kid was weird , but May could justify it as one of Stark's bizarre fits of charity. There was a clear cycle of guilt and giving. But the letter. Dear lord, the letter. The cheery condescension of it would have been bad enough, even if it hadn't focused entirely on her apparent failure to care for her kid. Colourful info-graphics detailed the acceptable ranges of a cherry-picked selection of vitamin values, and a red rectangle described, in monosyllables, the definition of anemia. There was nothing to even correct yet- all the numbers still looked fine, but apparently truffle oil and Piedmont hazelnuts were part of a "medically ideal" diet.

" I'm going to call him," she decided. Peter dropped the box he was trying to claw his way into.

" Don't!" he begged. "I think. Right, we should totally try this. I mean, I should try this. I might like it! And also it's free."

" I can afford food , Peter," May protested, although 'free' was always a good point.

" Well yeah, but not for free," Peter said, turning over another box. "And not. Like. Squid ink spaccatelli." He squinted at the box for a moment. "What's spaccatelli?"

" It's a pasta," May said. She fidgeted with the leather strap of her watch, twisting it around her wrist.

She didn't hate Tony Stark. Not entirely. But the trust between them was- understandably, in her opinion- incredibly delicate, and the utter disregard for boundaries didn't exactly help reinforce it. She was perpetually two steps from a restraining order.

" May?" Peter momentarily deserted the shiny lunchboxes. "He did tell you about this, right?"

May shook her head.

" This is just as much of a surprise to me as it is to you."

" Oh." Peter wrinkled his nose, digging through the cardboard box. At least he was picking up on the weirdness of it. "Sorry."

Peter was not having a great day.

He'd missed the bus that morning, and been late to first period. In chemistry, he'd managed to get crystal violet on both his sleeves and his hands, and May was probably going to kill him for destroying another shirt, even though it hadn't been for spider-man reasons that time.

He was also coveting Ned's pizza.

Peter tried not to be distracted by the mouth-watering familiarity of school-cafeteria pepperoni. His own lunch was one of the simpler things Tony had inflicted on him recently- recognizably some kind of fish, and spinach, and some weird gooey sauce stuff, and shredded, multi-green mystery vegetable salad, all plopped down on top of quinoa. He sort of liked spinach, but he was very dubious on the rest.

The sauce- which was a gluey yellow, with suspicious flecks of green- turned out to be gross. It was like a cross-bred abomination somewhere between mayo, ranch, and a herb garden. Quinoa was already markedly disgusting; Peter had tried after one of May's monthly pilgrimages to Whole Foods, and the fact that it was stupidly expensive didn't counteract the fact that it literally made him want to throw up. He'd been excited about the weird rich people food at first, but now, he was seriously wishing he'd let May make that phone call. It didn't even seem to be helping - he didn't feel any less tired or annoyed at everything.

That might have been because he wasn't actually eating most of it.

He could handle things tasting bad- he'd eat just about anything, based on that metric- but it was the texture that got to him. The mushy-flaky mouthfeel of meat cooked weirdly, the salty squish-pop of roe. Whoever was cooking for him could do some seriously troubling things with avocado.

But food was food. And breakfast had been supposed to be some weird array of bread and ham, and very quickly turned out to be just milk and a handful of lucky charms, grabbed on his way out the door. So really, he should have been eating it, and not just stabbing it into ever more uniform mush with his provided plastic fork.

" Dude," Ned said, breaking Peter from his wallowing. "You look like, really depressed."

" I haven't had a potato chip in three weeks ," Peter answered. "Yesterday, I had a carrot and kiwi and kale smoothie. It had an egg in it. Just, like, a totally raw egg. I can't trust anything not to be gross."

Ned considered that for a moment.

" I have an Uncrustable-" he began.

Peter reached across the table, grabbed Ned's hands. It wasn't lunch , but it was better than nothing.

"Ned," he said. "If you give me that Uncrustable, I will love you for the rest of my life."