Spidey Oneshots

The One With The Speech.

"Spider-Man was the best of all of us." Tony begins.

He's on a stage, in time square, talking to the hundreds of people who came here, for this, and the thousands more watching from home.

It's sunny, which doesn't seem fair. Not in the slightest.

A day like this shouldn't be sunny.

It should be raining and thundering but then again Thor's sat in the audience in front of him, so maybe, he stopped the rain for the people here.

To allow them this without having to worry about getting wet. To allow Tony this.

"He was..." He pauses and scans the audience. He sees May sat in the front row, Ned and Mj next to her.

She smiles at him.

He looks away.

"He was kind, and funny, and selfless, and caring, and so brilliant that sometimes I had trouble keeping up with him." Tony smiles, like he's somewhere else, somewhere better. The audience chuckles.

They don't notice the nostalgic look on his face, Tony's glad.

It's gives him a moment to be back in his lab, with Peter, laughing at one of his dumb jokes that weren't actually dumb.

The silence brings him back.

"He was also the bravest person I have ever met." Tony looks down at the blank index cards that he was shuffling on the podium in front of him.

The cards were just for show.

Like this was some PR stunt. Like he's just here because he has to be. Like Peter didn't matter to him at all.

He puts the cards down.

"I once asked him why he did all this." Tony gestured to the people in the audience and to New York in general. "He told me 'when you can do the things I can, but don't, and then the bad things happen, they happen because of you.'"

Tony glances at May again.

Shes smiling again. It not a real smile though. More of a grimace.

She had heard those exact words before, probably a hundred times.

Whenever her and Peter would argue about him being Spider-Man, he would say that, and she would give in.

How could she argue with that?

"He was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, and it wasn't for recognition or for thanks." He looks down again briefly before looking back up. "It was because he thought he had to and that no one else would do it if he didn't."

"God, he was just a teenager and he thought that it was up to him to save everyone." Tony wipes his eyes to stop the tears threatening to fall.

He doesn't miss the reactions though.

The reactions of people finding out that Spider-Man was a teenager.

That he had his whole life ahead of him yet he gave it all up to save them.

To save the people who called him a menace and villain and a murder and hundred other things that he's not.

"And I guess he did." Tony look down at his hands, that rested carefully on the podium, as he wrung them nervously. "He did save everyone, in the end, and as selfish as this is to say, especially today, I wish that he didn't."