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Ghost in the Workshop

The workshop was never quiet, not really. Even after everything—after the dust had settled and the world had decided to keep spinning—Tony could still swear he heard Peter’s voice in the static hum of the machinery.

It wasn’t rational, of course. Nothing about grief ever was.

Tony would stand at his workbench, hands trembling above half-finished gauntlets and arc reactor schematics, and swear he could hear the soft rush of footsteps behind him. “Mr. Stark?” Peter’s voice would echo, half-hopeful, half-anxious, the way it always had when he was about to ask for something impossible.

But there was nothing there. Just shadows and empty air.

Sometimes, he’d find himself speaking back—catching himself only when the words were already in the air. “Not now, kid. Later.” Later never came.

It was the could-have-beens that haunted him most. The suit he’d never finished upgrading for Peter. The trip they were supposed to take to Berlin—just the two of them, no aliens, no world-ending stakes, just coffee and bad jokes. The apology Tony had practiced a hundred times in the mirror but had never managed to say.

“I shouldn’t have let you come,” Tony would whisper into the empty room at night, when the ghosts pressed the hardest. “You were just a kid.”

And in the silence that answered him, the truth weighed heavier than the armor ever had:

Peter had trusted him. And Tony had failed him.

No matter how many suits he built, how many new heroes he trained, there was no fixing this. Some mistakes didn’t get a second chance.