Chapter Text
Peter Parker had mixed feelings about his calculus teacher, Mr Harrington. Peter liked him, and his subject, because he was competent at teaching it. He let Peter doodle all of the advanced equations on the back of his exams when he was done with them (because, let’s be real, high school grade science wasn’t going to challenge the guy who spent his free time working on Iron Man suits — not that Mr Harrington knew that). He was an okay teacher, in that respect.
But Peter had two main problems with Mr Harrington. The first was that the content he was teaching was so easy. They’d been doing derivatives for at least two months, for Christ’s sake. Surely even Flash had understood them by now. And worse — they weren’t even difficult derivatives. That was just a Peter problem, though, because everyone else in the class was apparently “struggling” with the content they were doing.
The one thing that everyone in the class, and possibly everybody in the whole school hated him for was his policy regarding phones. Mr Harrington was anti-technology in most senses, and therefore whenever someone’s phone went off in class, he had a specific policy that all of his students had to follow. They would have to stand up and answer the phone in class, on speaker. If they didn’t, they’d get detention and also a call home to parents complaining about it. Most students quickly took this as a sign not to even bring their phone into the lesson, deciding it wasn’t worth the risk.
Peter, however, couldn’t really abide by that rule. He was the heir to Stark Industries, and played a pretty key role in running the company. Of course, he wasn’t expected to do work during his school hours, but there were several people whose calls were forced through, people he kind of had to answer. It was a limited (but impressive) collection of people. It was genuinely a possibility that something really important could come up and he would have to drop everything to go to the Tower and get on it. There was, of course, the YoungBoss protocol, which would be activated by FRIDAY sending him a text, which would mean that he would be in charge of the company if Tony or Pepper were indisposed.
So he needed his phone on him, which caused just a slight problem when it actually went off in one calculus lesson. Peter glanced up at Mr Harrington, hoping he hadn’t heard anything and that he would get away with it.
No such luck. Mr Harrington’s eyebrow raised, in the sadistic way he always did whenever someone left their phone on and the policy came into action. “Answer it, Parker.”
“But, sir,” Peter shook his head defiantly. Whoever was calling him, it was definitely someone who he shouldn’t be speaking to in front of the whole class. The people who were authorised to call him during school were…well, it wasn’t like it was his aunt calling him to ask about his day, to put it that way. It would be business talk, probably, company secrets.
“You know the rules, Peter,” Mr Harrington nodded at the noise, so, with deep regret and embarrassment, Peter pulled out his phone. It was Tony. Peter winced, looked up at Mr Harrington with another pleading glance. Mr Harrington just made a gesture towards the phone and raised his eyebrow further, somehow.
Peter winced and said, “Karen, can you answer it and put it on speaker, please?”
He decided not to think about the fact that he was asking his phone’s AI to answer the phone, and that, to most people, that would be considered weird.
“Hey, kid,” came the voice of everyone’s favourite billionaire.
“No way,” one student whispered. Yes, way.
There was a collective gasp around the class as people recognised the voice, because everyone knew who Tony Stark was and how he sounded. They’d all seen the press conferences. Tony continued. “I was wondering whether you remembered the specs—”
Peter tried to interrupt Tony before he started giving out company secrets that definitely didn’t need to be heard by his calculus class. “Hi, Mr Stark! You’re, um—”
But Tony didn’t let him finish. He’d never liked to be interrupted in the middle of a sentence, even if it was pretty crucial that Peter shut him up before he started saying stuff about the company.
“As I was saying, I was wondering if you still had the specs to the energy deal with Pym Tech?” Peter closed his eyes in horror. This was his worst nightmare. “I know it’s not really your focus right now because of the whole thing with Colonel Williamson and the military being complete assholes but—”
“Mr Stark!” Peter interrupted quickly, covering his face with one hand in frustration, and the whole class stared at him like he was completely mental. Mr Harrington was flabbergasted that Peter was addressing an authority figure like that, and especially that it was literally Tony Stark, billionaire, genius, superhero, saviour of the world. Peter was pretty sure Flash was passed out, if not dead. His face was completely blank, slack jawed. Someone should have probably checked for his pulse.
"You’re on speaker,” he finished, and Tony went silent, processing. Great, his whole class had heard all of that about his role with controlling contracts with the US military. Hopefully they’d all been so surprised to hear Tony’s voice and hadn’t focused on the content of what he was saying. (Peter wasn’t hopeful, though. Cindy Moon and Betty were particularly good at picking out things they weren’t supposed to hear about).
“Shit,” Tony said finally, with a tone of concern. “And who, may I ask, just heard all of that?”
“The whole of my calculus class,” Peter grimaced, “And my teacher.”
“Oh?” Tony abandoned the worry, instead sounding genuinely intrigued. His voice had an upward lilt to it, which set off alarm bells in Peter’s mind. That was the voice Tony used when he was about to cause trouble. “Would that be the calculus teacher who teaches the easiest derivatives to date?”
Peter’s mouth dropped open in surprise. He’d been complaining about the lack of difficulty in Mr Harrington’s work for months to Tony during their lab time, and every time he’d done so, Tony had asked whether he could speak to the teacher and get him to ‘teach better’.
This was, of course, despite the fact that what they were being taught was technically the correct syllabus, and that it wasn’t normal for someone to be getting 100% on all of the tests they did. Unfortunately for Mr Harrington, Peter did get 100% on all of his tests, and he was bored 90% of the time in the class. Tony had decided that he needed harder work during calculus (which was why Peter was now in contact with one MIT professor once a week for extra tutoring), but Peter had declined the offer of his mentor talking to his calc teacher, mostly for the personal safety and security of Mr Harrington, really. Tony was very protective.
“Um,” Mr Harrington said, stunned that he was being referred to, and probably slightly insulted. Peter’s face flushed, trying not to make eye contact. He didn’t say anything to Tony.
“Peter, do me a favour and pass me over to Mr Harrington, please,” Tony requested.
The knowledge that Tony Stark seemed to know the name of Peter’s calculus teacher without Peter having said it seemed to set off some kind of chain reaction with the members of his class, because whispers swept around the room within seconds and there was a rustling of people being more and more shocked as the call went on. Peter presumed they were wondering just how closely he knew Tony, because Tony knowing the name of his teachers was suspicious as hell.
Peter grabbed onto the phone tightly as though Tony was actually in the room with him. It seemed like a bad idea to pass the phone over to Mr Harrington. More for Mr Harrington’s sake than anything else. Tony really cared about his education, something about his own childhood neglect and ensuring he didn’t feel the need to ‘take off to MIT as a fifteen year old’ like he’d done as a teenager.
But Tony just coughed a little in encouragement, and so Peter passed over the phone with his heart pounding in its chest. He tried not to think about what people were whispering behind him. Even MJ had taken a noted interest, although she was sketching, and Peter had a sneaky suspicion it might be a picture of him. He was definitely in crisis, after all, and those were her favourite people to sketch.
Oh god.
“Hello, Roger.” Tony emphasised, and Peter wanted nothing more than to melt into a pile of goo on the floor and never retain human shape. It was so embarrassing. Tony had clearly stalked Mr Harrington online to be able to find out his first name, which made it, somehow, 1000% times worse. That didn’t seem possible, but hey. It was. Tony was probably hacking into the man’s home computer as they spoke. Peter prayed that Mr Harrington didn’t have an extensive internet footprint, because Tony would find it in a second.
Mr Harrington’s face had flushed red, especially when Tony name-dropped his first name in front of the whole class.
“Do me a favour, and take me off speaker,” Tony instructed, and Peter watched as Mr Harrington tried to figure out how to do that on Peter’s Starkphone, the newest generation (which hadn’t even been released to the public yet. Peter had gotten one because he was one of the leading engineers on it, and because Tony loved him).
“Karen, turn it off speaker please,” Peter called for his AI, remembering just how weird it was that his phone had its own artificial intelligence and promptly deciding he just didn’t care at this point. He then nodded for Mr Harrington’s benefit. “It’s off now.”
He slumped in his seat with embarrassment and watched as the rest unfolded before his eyes.
They couldn’t, of course, hear what Tony was saying, but Peter could guess. Mr Harrington’s head was nodding so fast Peter thought it might fall off, and the colour was draining out of his face as Tony continued to speak. Peter had never seen his teacher look so scared, so clearly Tony was saying some extremely terrible things and making threats to his wellbeing.
“Okay, sir,” Mr Harrington said meekly, and Jesus, Peter was going to be having a conversation about not threatening his teachers with Tony, because the man looked like he was about to have a genuine heart attack.
Tony then asked the man to put him back on speaker, because Mr Harrington fiddled with some of the buttons and looked confused. Maybe he didn’t have a hatred of modern technology, but actually didn’t understand it.
“Karen, speaker,” Peter called out again, saving him the trouble.
“Pete, we’ll catch up later. It’s lab day, yeah?”
“Yeah. See ya,” Peter says, too genuinely exhausted to say anything else. Tony hung up the phone, and the class collectively seem to sit back in shock, confusion, every kind of emotion. Flash seemed to be going through the five stages of grief, but Peter couldn’t tell what stage he was going through.
“Did that just…happen?” One of his classmates asked, clearly representing the whole class.
“Well, he did say he had an internship,” another of his classmates, someone he didn’t even know well, replied, and Peter just crumpled even further into his chair, keeping his eyes firmly closed. He could feel his face redden.
Mr Harrington seemed to have shut down on all levels, similar to Flash, as though he couldn’t quite believe what had happened. He passed the phone back to Peter, somehow remembering how to move, and then stood at the front of the class.
“Well, class,” Mr Harrington said after a good several minutes of blankly staring at the back of the room. He kept glancing between the class and the board, then skated his eyes past Peter, trying his best to avoid eye contact with him, because whenever he did end up making direct eye contact, his face went white as a sheet and his hand started to shake. What the hell Tony said to him?! “Let’s get back to talking about derivatives.”