Well, that was flattering. Tony didn't know how much he agreed, not really, but maybe she had a point at least when it came to Peter. He had been looking for guidance, when Tony'd first shown up. The kid had been wearing a dumb looking hoodie and filming himself to upload to youtube. It'd been absolute amateur hour, even if it had been sort of cute.
"You'd just have as likely stabbed me," Tony pointed out wryly. It was hard to imagine a teenaged Natasha but that didn't mean that Tony wasn't going to try. Still, he sobered up from that thought soon enough. "He was ready for more, maybe. He had a keen eye on knowing where real trouble was at, and had the luck of the rest of us for getting into it without trying. He stopped my tower from being robbed." And okay, that was a simplistic way of putting it, but it didn't really matter. The point was that Pete had tried, failed, tried again and succeeded.
"He wouldn't have ended up dying on some planet away from home if he wasn't trying so hard to impress me," Tony said after a beat.