Archive of Our Own ^beta

“So, essentially, to summarise, you’re both now subject to the dormiens cruciatu curse, in which if one of you falls unconscious at any point, the other will suffer from incredible pain for the duration of time the other person sleeps. It is unavoidable and we are currently working on the way to cure you both of it, with the help of the other sorcerers,” Dr Strange informed them both with a grave face, and yeah, in that moment, Tony really understood how he’d been a doctor prior to becoming a magician—sorry, sorcerer. He had the 'bedside manner’ face down perfectly. 

“And there’s nothing you can do,” Tony repeated, the same question he’d been asking ever since the pair of them had been debriefed after the mission. It had been stupid, really. They hadn’t been supposed to take on the villain by themselves, but she’d been causing destruction to New York with her spells and both Peter and Tony couldn’t stand waiting on the sidelines for the others to respond to the call. So they'd launched into the fight ahead of time, and had managed to almost subdue the evil sorcerer…until she’d thrust a spell in their faces and had caught them off guard. 

Steve had arrived just in time to see it happen, and had benched them instantly, a frown on his face. He sent them to get checked by Strange immediately—who was apparently their resident magic doctor, now. He didn't seem too pleased about it, but, hey, he was the Sorcerer Supreme for a reason, right? 

Tony crossed his arms and looked at Peter, who was sat staring at Doctor Strange with a numb expression on his face. It was difficult to tell what he was thinking. Tony hated that he’d roped him into this, trapped him to some kind of fucking torture curse. He had one suggestion. 

Tony nodded his head in Peter’s direction. “What if you take him off the curse? Make me endure the pain constantly?” 

At that comment, Peter’s head snapped to look at him, shaking his head slowly as though he thought that was a terrible idea. Tony could see it from his peripheral vision, because he wasn’t looking at him properly. He was focused solely on Strange, assessing his response to the suggestion. 

Stephen didn’t have to think about it for a very long time.

“Can’t be done.” Stephen shook his head. “You’re both tied to it.” 

Well that fucking sucks, Tony thought. Guess it’s back to the lab binging days, not sleeping and constantly working to keep myself awake. Because there was no way in hell he was sleeping, not if it was going to cause Peter immense pain like Strange had said it wound. Neither of them had experienced it yet because they hadn’t gone unconscious, but Tony didn’t want to risk it and take the chance. No way in hell. 

“I strongly suggest when you sleep, you do it in short bursts to avoid exposing the other to extreme pain for an excessive amount of time,” Stephen told them. “It would not be best to endure more than several hours, from the research we’ve done on dormiens cruciatu.” 

“I’m not sleeping,” Tony replied immediately. Best to make his intentions clear from the start, that way it might make them speed the fuck up with finding the cure. Give them some more incentive to fix it as soon as possible. Hell, if the sorcerers had done copious amounts of research on this fucking curse, or whatever, then surely they’d made at least some headway with finding a cure? Surely?  

“Right,” Peter chimed in, nodding and swallowing harshly. “Well. Neither.” 

Oh, hell no.

“What?” Tony glanced at him. 

“If you’re not sleeping, neither am I,” Peter said stubbornly, staring at him directly. 

Tony’s mouth fell open and he started shaking his head. “Kid. This might take—”

Because they didn’t know when they were going to find a cure. Because it could be hours, but it could be days, it could be longer than that. It could be—it could be weeks. And Tony could probably withstand a long period of staying awake, but it sure as hell wasn’t healthy for Peter to do the same. He was just a kid, and it would probably cause him severe issues if he stayed up for such an excessive amount of time. Tony had had practise. He’d had many years in his early twenties where he slept maybe twice in a week. He knew how to stay awake. Tried and tested methods. 

“I don’t care,” Peter interjected, his expression set, as though he’d decided and no-one was going to be able to convince him. Tony had seriously considered doing a paternity test as a result of that stubbornness the kid sometimes exuded, but then he’d figured it was probably a trait that came alongside being a superhero, not Stark genetics. 

His face was firm, Tony realised as he watched him for a second. Serious, prepared. Ready to stay awake. 

Tony swallowed and turned to look at Strange instead. “Well, you heard us, Doc, we’re going to be awake for the foreseeable future. Might want to hop back to your precious Sanctum and do some magicking or whatever it is you do in that place.”

Stephen simply rolled his eyes and conjured himself a portal. So dramatic. A portal—177A Bleeker Street was literally a two minute walk away from the Tower, god. Tony turned to Peter after he left. They stared at each other for a moment—both at an impasse, unsure of what to do or say. It was beyond words. A torture curse. 

Tony was the one to break the silence. “Want to go and mess about in the lab for a couple of hours?” 

“Yeah,” Peter said quietly, not breaking his gaze, his voice quieter and less animated than it would normally be. Tony didn’t even want to imagine the expression on his face. 

It took five minutes into doing lab work for Peter to yawn first.

Tony watched as he did it, the yawn morphing into Peter rubbing his eyes and then shaking his head. Tony put down the gauntlet he was working on. It didn’t surprise him that Peter was tired—he’d come straight from a full day at high school straight to going on a mission that had been fairly hard work and had ended up with a curse being placed on him. Of course Peter was exhausted and couldn’t keep focused on lab work. 

“I’m good,” Peter said as he saw Tony looking. His expression switched to one of guilt, and he ducked his head to focus on his work. “I’m good, promise.” 

Tony knew protesting that statement with the kid was only going to end up causing both of them pain, so he changed tact and went back to work, against every instinct. Over the next couple of hours, his eyes kept sliding back to Peter’s face whenever he yawned. It increased in frequency as time went on. He was getting more and more tired.

Eventually it came to a point where Peter yawned and then ten seconds later did it again. Tony was having to clamp his own jaw shut not to yawn himself and set off a chain reaction. He wasn’t even tired yet, it was just watching Peter so tired that made him want to yawn as well. 

Tony snapped, pleading as he begged, “Kid, please just go to sleep.” 

It was physically painful watching him try to stay awake. Honestly Tony thought the action of watching him try to stay awake would be more painful than whatever kind of torture the curse was going to inflict on him when Peter fell asleep. 

Because Peter was going to fall asleep in the next couple of hours, no matter how much he was protesting it. It was simply bound to happen. Tony would bet money on it being within the hour. 

Five hours later, Peter was pretty much having to hold his eyes open to stay awake. They’d moved from the lab to the kitchen of the penthouse, watching TV with the lights still on to help them not fall asleep. He was deliberately sat straight upright, his eyes wide as he focused on staring at the screen. Any amount of telling Peter to just listen to his body and crash out had failed, so Tony had resorted to playing the long game. TV on the couch was always an effective strategy of making someone go to sleep. 

Sure enough, another half an hour of some boring documentary and Peter’s eyes had started to flutter shut. He’d relaxed from his fixed position and his head was drifting as though it wanted to land on the arm of the couch. Tony would prefer if he slept in a bed, but the couch would do. 

“Jarvis,” Tony muttered quietly, under his breath, keeping it low so Peter wouldn’t hear. “Can you play that one scene from Tangled now?” 

If there was one thing that could get Peter to sleep, it was the scene from Tangled where Rapunzel and Eugene were in the boat. Tony practically knew the song that played in the background—I See the Light—off by heart. Peter liked to play the music from the movie in the lab. 

Peter’s head fell slowly toward the arm of the couch, inch by inch as the song kept playing and Tony watched it. He breathed carefully, making sure he didn’t disturb the kid, and watched as he fell asleep. 

There was a split second of momentary relief that Peter had finally succumbed to sleep—and then agony swept through him instantly, a wave of it so strong that Tony had to put his whole fist in his mouth to stop himself from crying out and waking the kid up seconds after he’d fallen asleep. Tony bit so hard his teeth drew blood, circular indentations in his hand as he writhed in pain. 

It was beyond anything he’d ever experienced before—agony all over, pure blistering, blinding pain that incapacitated him. He’d wanted to pick Peter up from his position on the couch to make sure he slept in a bed and didn’t strain his neck, but Tony wasn’t going to be able to move at all at this rate, yet alone lift Peter all the way to his room. 

Tony Stark sat on the couch and suffered—silently. 

—

The longest time a human had ever stayed awake before was eleven straight days—264 hours in a controlled experiment by a high school student. Except that high school student hadn’t been tortured with extreme bursts of pain for six to eight hours every night when his mentoree needed sleep.

It had been seven days—over 172 hours, to be specific—since the curse had been placed on them, and true to his word, Tony hadn't slept, or fallen unconscious once. It had also been the longest week of Tony’s life, because it felt like he’d been kidnapped but also he was still in the comforts of his own home. Just occasionally got bursts of pain. Peter had been mortified that he’d fallen asleep, and stayed awake for the next thirty two hours to make up for it before he crashed again. They hadn’t pulled Peter out of school, as much as he clamoured for it. Tony had argued that he needed education, and May had agreed. As a result of that requirement, Peter had to sleep often. High school was exhausting for everyone, and Peter had to crash out as much as he didn’t want to. 

Tony, on the other hand, was an adult with freedom of movement and the ability to do whatever he wanted all the time. He cancelled any meetings he had and set himself up in the lab. It had done wonders for his productivity in fairness. 

Everyone had gotten seriously worried about Tony by the end of the week. He had people coming up to him every couple of hours and pleading with him to just rest his head for a bit. It had been Peter, at first, only him for the first couple of days. Begging him to just get a little bit of rest when the first hint of tiredness had appeared on Tony’s expression. He’d scoffed and had shaken him off. 

“This was like a normal week for me in college, Pete,” Tony told him.“Not even close to needing sleep yet.”

That was, of course, a lie. He was no longer a college student, and he was bordering on the urge to sleep during the first couple of days. But not enough for him to really need it, just a vague itch in the back of his mind. 

No-one else other than Peter had reached out to him to tell him to sleep, because they knew what Tony’s reaction would have been. He’d have shot them a scathing comment with a glare—“Would you take a taser and force it to Peter’s body for hours on end if it meant you could have a few hours of rest? No. Exactly. Zip it, it’s not happening. I’m fine.”  

He didn’t feel the need to mention that the pain he was forced to endure was significantly worse than a standard taser. And he would know. He’d been tasered a lot. 

Day three was when everything had changed. When the exhaustion had actively started presenting itself on his face, something he couldn’t wipe away with a smile, no matter how hard he tried. He was sluggish when he moved, and he couldn’t think about lying down or he’d probably succumb to the temptation instantly, and then Peter would get a serious surprise in Calculus class. It wasn’t worth it, so he stood up a lot, and then sat down when he got tired. Skating away from couches and beds. He hadn’t been into his bedroom since day two, to raid his wardrobe and bring all of his clean clothes down to the workshop for the foreseeable future. 

But after the three-day mark, people started approaching him. They’d lost their moral highground that they’d seemingly been riding on—or possibly, more likely, Peter had asked them all to try to ‘talk some sense into Tony’. That was bullshit—Tony was making calculated movements. He knew what he was doing. It was better that way. 

They all tried—after Peter asked them to, told them he could handle at least a couple hours of pain—like the floodgates had opened. Pepper, Rhodey, Happy. Steve, Clint, Nat. All of the Avengers, even the ones he wasn’t close with. Bruce gave him a series of experiments showing him they could try and make Peter unconscious at the same time, negating the pain for both of them, but Tony hadn’t wanted to risk it. On the off chance it caused Peter to suffer what he’d felt. No—it wasn’t happening. Absolutely not. 

He was even more adamant about it than he had been at the start. There was no way in hell Peter was going to experience pain like that if he had anything to say about it. Fuck no. 

With every day that went past after day three, Tony had held out hope that Stephen would slide into the room through a portal—he even wanted to catch a glimpse of the stupid cape he wore all the time, too—with some kind of cure to the curse in his hand. He craved it more than he'd craved alcohol in his binge-drinking era, in his college days.

So when Stephen had slid in on day five, the portal lighting up the room, Tony had spun around instantly and had ignored the dizziness that shot through him as he did so. 

“Did you find anything?” Tony asked, almost breathless at the idea of it.

Stephen shook his head, and all of Tony’s hopes fell immediately. “Not yet, that’s not what I’m here for. I’m here to tell you to sleep.”

Tony rolled his eyes and turned away from Strange. “Oh god, not you too—”

Strange started talking, unphased. “Medically speaking, five days—”

“I’ve had this chat with everyone else—” Tony shook his head. 

“—without sleep is really bad and in my professional opinion—”

“Don’t start pretending you care about me now just because of this curse.” Tony instructed, cutting Stephen and his medical jargon off before he could hear it all again. He’d gotten the memo from Bruce. Sleep good, staying awake bad. He didn’t care. “Besides, you’re not a practising doctor right now.” 

Stephen shot him a despairing look. “Please god just sleep.” 

Tony crossed his arms. “I can endure it.” 

“You can’t keep this up for much longer without it deeply affecting your body.” Stephen stared. 

“Well then you better hurry up and find a way to end it.”

There was a pause, and then Strange sighed. “Have you considered giving in to Peter’s suggestion? It’d only have to be a couple hours of pain for him—” 

“Not a chance in hell,” Tony growled.

Stephen gritted his teeth. “I would strongly recommend—”

Their conversation wasn’t working out very well for either of them, so Tony decided to shut it down. “It’s not happening, Doc.” 

“Alright.” Strange held up his hands, sensing his failure. “Alright.” 

“Find. A. Cure.” Tony emphasised, “Until then, see you around. I’ll be here.”

Stephen walked out without another word, and Tony could just feel the aura of disappointment he was sending. Tony ignored it and focused back on his work, working on the fifth Iron Man suit that week. 

In the end, it was nine days in total before Strange strolled in with a cure in hand. Tony would have had some thoughts about that, except his brain had sort of fallen into mush over the course of the week and a half, and most coherent thoughts failed to form properly. He simply reached for the cure with grabby hands, drunk it down as fast as he could and ensured that Peter did the same. 

“Thanks Strange,” Tony garbled, his words coming out 3000x faster than normal. “I’m going to go and sleep now. Sorry for being a dick this week. And all of weeks. But specifically this one. This beautiful beautiful flask of goodness has restored your favour in my eyes.” 

“Always a pleasure, Stark,” Strange replied, seeming amused. There was a twinkle in his eyes. Tony was definitely going to have to thank him properly—possibly with a nice gift—when he was more coherent. 

“We can use first names now, right, Stephen?” Tony grinned back at him. “Although if you tell me you go by Steve I might have to mentally reassess my perception of you.” 

Strange shook his head and raised an eyebrow. “How on earth are you still standing? It’s been over 200 hours since you’ve had any sleep?”

“I’m not, I’m sitting,” Tony gestured to the chair he was perched in, and then stood up to test it. Science. Hypotheses. Experimentation. He wobbled as he got up. “Let’s see if I can—”

Tony passed out as soon he put his weight on his feet, collapsing to the floor instantly. He wasn’t conscious to remember it, but apparently Peter caught him and put him to sleep before he could give himself a head injury. 

And that sleep was the best damn sleep Tony Stark had ever had in his entire life.