Chapter Text
“Does it get better?” Peter-One asked.
“Sort of. It isn’t going to go away completely, but as long as you keep trying, healing will come to you in time. When I was younger, I had nightmares about him almost every night,” Peter-Two admitted, “but now it’s only every once in a while. Sometimes I need MJ to hold me and tell me everything’s going to be okay, and sometimes I just lose it if she touches me at all, even if it’s totally harmless. Sometimes I wake up screaming for help, or crying that I don’t want to be touched, or I just need to be out of bed and fully dressed as quickly as possible. Sometimes it feels like I’m still that scared little nine-year-old boy back at square one. That was a near-constant feeling when I was younger, but I’ve been working on that for decades now, so it’s gotten easier to overcome.”
“You told her about him? How’d that come up?”
Peter-Two nodded. “I had to. Our first time together…I ran away and locked myself in the bathroom for a whole hour because it felt like him all over again. I felt so guilty about associating her love with his abuse, even though it was just a trauma response. So I told her what happened, and I said I wanted to overcome it so I could be with her in that way. She was worried I might have been pressuring myself into it before I was actually ready, but I didn’t feel like I had to or anything, we both just wanted to. She’s really careful about asking for consent, and that helps me remember that I’m safe with her.” Peter-Two thought he should probably go back to therapy and finally talk to a professional about this problem he’d avoided intentionally thinking about for so long. Maybe now that he’d talked about it for the first time, he could do it in ways that would help him, rather than only being able to unlock it when it was needed to help someone else. “Are you thinking about telling yours?”
“I don’t know. I think I need more time to process it. And we’ve never…done anything…anything like that. I think if it seems like we’re going to, then I’d tell her. But I don’t know if I ever will.” Peter-One wavered reluctantly.
“You know, it’s not just relevant in the bedroom. She’s your girlfriend, and that’s a commitment to caring about you. She might not be an expert or a professional, but I’m sure she’ll want to help,” Peter-Two encouraged him gently.
“I don’t know. I don’t want her to think less of me. She’ll think I’m weak or broken, and she’d be right,” Peter-One admitted, hopelessness dimming his tone.
“I felt that way for decades,” Peter-Two admitted. “But really, you’re stronger for having survived it.” He reached out to him, but paused first to ask, “This okay?” Upon seeing him nod, he gently put an arm across his younger counterpart’s shoulders.
Peter-One leaned into the comfort of their contact. With his head tucked against Peter-Two’s chest, he couldn’t see it, but his older counterpart was smiling down at him almost hopefully.
Late that night, when none of them could quite manage to fall asleep, Peter-One sought out Peter-Two once more in the hopes of working through more of his feelings. “I…I can’t believe I thought it was normal. I always left feeling so shitty about myself, about whatever it was we’d done that time. I thought I was supposed to like it, so of course I didn’t argue with him about it. But not disagreeing with him was more than just a defense mechanism. I believed everything he said about me because I just didn’t want to fight or get hurt over it. It was easier that way.”
“It was what you had to do to make it through something so horrible,” Peter-Two told him. “It’s not fair to judge yourself for that. I promise it’s still not your fault.”
Peter-One threw his arms around Peter-Two in a desperate bid for comfort, his tears seeping into his shirt. “I just stayed friends with him no matter how much he hurt me, because I thought I was supposed to let him do whatever he wanted, and I thought I was wrong to feel bad about it. For four whole years! Why didn’t I realize that it was hurting me more to keep going along with it? I should have known. I should have known! I feel so stupid. How is that not my fault?” Peter-One cried.
“It’s not my fault, right? What he did to me, all of it, no matter what it was or how it felt. It was wrong. He was wrong to rape me.” Peter-Two was a little surprised that his last sentence came out as steady as it did, given his stark characterization of the act. “It’s not my fault.”
“Of course it’s not your fault,” Peter-One agreed. It had been a rhetorical question, but hearing him say it made Peter-Two feel a little better. “It could never be. He’s the one to blame.”
“And he did the same exact thing to you, which makes it all his fault and not yours.” The logic made sense to Peter-One, but it would take longer for him to really internalize it. “It’s not your fault because he was manipulating you to prevent you from realizing just how bad it was. You didn’t think it was okay of your own free will, you only thought that because he manipulated you. It’s his fault, not yours.” He was starting to get repetitive, but he knew both of them needed him to keep saying it.
“Even though I kept going back? Even though I let him do it for all that time? And I thought I wanted it?” That—and what neither of them could bear to say out loud—gave Peter-One significant hesitation to believe Peter-Two’s reassurances. Even though he knew they’d both experienced it and he’d never apply to his counterpart the things he thought and felt about his own version of the abuse, he still doubted himself. “You didn’t do any of that, did you? So I don’t know…”
“You didn’t ‘let him,’ he manipulated you. Still not your fault,” Peter-Two continued. “And just because we don’t have every single detail in common doesn’t change that.”
“Sure, I guess.” Peter-One didn’t sound like he believed it quite yet.
“I’ve found it helpful to reframe everything as ‘he made me do this’ rather than saying ‘I did this,’ because that’s the real truth. Does that sound like it would help you?” Peter-Two suggested.
“Right, because even when I thought it was okay, that’s only because he made me think that,” Peter-One agreed, earning an approving nod from Peter-Two at the progress he’d made over the course of their conversation. “I’ll give it a try.”
It took a while, but Peter-One eventually managed to fall asleep. Although it hurt Peter-Two to hear the teenager’s soft cries of distress from behind the bedroom door, presumably brought on by their shared trauma, he was at least glad that the kid was actually sleeping.
No longer needing to be there for his younger counterpart, Peter-Two went looking for Peter-Three. He found him behind the apartment building in the back alley, throwing punches at a wooden fence that splintered further with every blow. Thanks to his healing factor, the scrapes on his knuckles were already healed, but they were still somewhat bloodied. “You good?”
“No, but this is better than the alternative,” Peter-Three replied, his voice strained.
“The alternative? Wanna talk about it?” Peter-Two offered.
“I’d rather keep punching this fucking fence, actually,” Peter-Three laughed bitterly as he did exactly that.
“Sure.” Peter-Two still didn’t leave, but Peter-Three didn’t send him away, either.
Eventually satisfied, Peter-Three ceased his assault on the remains of the fence and examined the splintered bits of wood embedded in his hands. “Can I help?” Peter-Two asked. Peter-Three nodded, holding his hands out to his counterpart, who carefully picked the splinters out.
“Thanks, man. I know that was hard, and I’m sorry.” Peter-Two told him.
“Yeah,” Peter-Three agreed. “I mean, he needed to talk about it or nothing was gonna change for him. But it’s over for me. I don’t need to talk about it.”
“Even if you don’t need to…” Peter-Two began.
“No,” Peter-Three insisted firmly. He knew exactly what he was doing, setting a firm boundary of nonconsent, because he knew that Peter-Two could never cross that line.
“Okay,” was all Peter-Two said. He had known he was pushing it a little after asking about Skip and getting such an aggressively avoidant response. But Peter-One had been in desperate need of their intervention, and Peter-Three had been fine with it despite his distaste for the subject. It had worked out in the end, perhaps about as much as it possibly could have. With no pressing need to have the conversation again, he let it go, leaving it up to his counterpart to bring it up again if he so chose.
Peter-Three nodded. “Thanks,” he said quietly. There was another period of silence between them, but neither made any move to leave.
“Getting pissed off about it is better than feeling like I’m just that scared little kid all over again,” Peter-Three explained after a while.
“The thing he asked me about…did you…?” Peter-Two had been able to talk about it in a roundabout way earlier, but he still couldn’t bring himself to name the act out loud.
Peter-Three shook his head. “I know what you’re talking about, but no, he didn’t do that to me. But he did pretty much everything else that a predator can do to a little boy.” Peter-Two noticed how Peter-Three pulled away from him, pressed his lips together in what seemed more like pain than anger, folded his hands over his body, and turned his back to the wall as if to protect himself, seemingly without even realizing he was doing it. Even though he knew exactly what his counterpart had meant by everything else that a predator can do, it still saddened him greatly to see his traumagenic defensive stance in the flesh. As far as his spidey-sense went, he didn’t pick up on any threats, so it had to be a result of their conversation reminding him of the trauma they shared, rather than a real and present danger.
“There’s nothing that bastard didn’t do to me,” Peter-Two admitted. “I didn’t want to say this in front of him, but I don’t think I’ll ever be completely over it. I really fucking hate that he went through it too. Especially that part. I wish I was the only person in the world, or the multiverse I guess, who ever had to.”
“If we’re talking hypotheticals, I wish that fucker never laid a hand on any of us,” Peter-Three countered. “And I wish he was a little less opposed to murder,” he added.
“Yeah, fair enough.” Peter-Two knew that feeling of vengeful rage, but it didn’t dominate his mind anymore like it did his counterpart’s. “I know he understood that what he was doing was wrong, and I’m glad he isn’t allowed to be around kids anymore, but prison and murder aren’t going to rehabilitate him.”
“No, but prison and murder sure would keep him from doing it again,” Peter-Three replied. “He’s a fucking serial predator, and I hope someone brings that bastard down.”
“You and me both,” Peter-Two agreed. “Even if he isn’t up for it himself, I bet one of those other kids will. How’d you find out that yours died?”
“Oh, Ben took that secret to his grave, but I saw him come home really late at night smelling like blood, and then there was an obituary in the paper later that week. Wasn’t too hard to connect the dots,” Peter-Three explained. “It wasn’t until after I lost Gwen that I started wishing I’d been the one to kill him. If everything had to go so wrong for me…I needed to be the one bringing the consequences of people’s actions, you know?”
“Right, yeah.” Peter-Two sympathized even though he didn’t feel the same way anymore. “Anger is a pretty normal thing to experience when you’ve had so much shit go so wrong, but especially for survivors. There’s no timeline for how you should be feeling. I will say I was pretty pissed about it for like a decade, and I still am, it’s just not overwhelming like it used to be. I take my mind off it by going out on patrol and helping people in the same situation. God, I hate how there’s always some rapist to stop and some victim to help, but it’s a more productive use of my mental state, I guess.”
“Yeah, give me several more years and I’m sure I’ll be more like you,” Peter-Three laughed, but there was still some seriousness behind it. The dominance of anger in his mind felt comfortable and right to him, but he knew he couldn’t run on it forever. He really did hope that someday he’d be able to be the helper more often than the vigilante.
Peter-Two understood that it wasn’t just a joke. He nodded, giving Peter-Three a small smile. “You can and you will, someday.”
Peter-Three had meant to go to bed upon returning to the apartment, but his plans were immediately derailed when he heard Peter-One talking in his sleep. He stopped beside the bedroom door, listening in on the teenager’s distressed cries. Once he could make out the words, he froze, finding them all too familiar.
”Let me go!”
”I don’t want to do that!”
”No, please don’t, I don’t want to…”
”Stop it, Skip, you’re hurting me!”
Peter-Three remembered the same exact words falling from his lips in between despairing sobs and agonized screams all those years ago. As he listened to his younger counterpart’s cries, he was enveloped once again by that awful feeling of helplessness. He tried his hardest to hold back tears, internally scolding himself for what he believed to be his weakness. No time for my own shit. He needs help, and Two's not here, so it's gotta be me.
Trying his best to compose himself, Peter-Three knocked on the door. When that didn’t wake his counterpart, he opened the door and came to sit next to the bed.
“Hey, Peter? Hey, it’s me, it’s Three. You okay?” he asked, his voice increasing in volume with every word in the hopes of being able to rouse him without touching him. Less than thrilled to find his younger counterpart nonresponsive to verbal stimuli, he tentatively reached out and gently tapped his shoulder. That did it, but he’d been right to want to avoid touching him at all.
Immediately upon waking, Peter-One leapt out of bed and clung fearfully to the ceiling, crying out in panic, “No, don’t—!” It wasn’t until Peter-Three joined him on the ceiling, definitively proving that he wasn't the monster Peter-One thought he was still facing, that he realized he wasn’t in danger. “Oh, it’s you! Sorry about that.”
“Bad dream?” Peter-Three asked knowingly.
“Yeah,” Peter-One admitted, letting go of the ceiling and landing back on the floor in a sitting position. “It was him all over again.”
“I know,” Peter-Three nodded, joining him on the floor. “You were saying the exact same things I’d said to him back then, word-for-word.”
“All the things I feel so stupid for not telling him back then,” Peter-One groaned. “Maybe I could’ve stopped it if I’d just told him no. If I’d known it was wrong. Maybe he would’ve listened.”
“I hate to break it to you, but it wouldn’t have helped. I know because I tried, and it made everything worse.” Peter-Three wasn’t going to get into all the horrible details, especially when both of them were in such a vulnerable state, but he remembered how the initial moments of the abuse had felt almost painless in comparison to what came after he’d tried and failed to stop Skip from molesting him. Sometimes, he thought he could’ve stopped it if he’d just fought back a little harder so he wouldn’t have been so easily overpowered. Other times, when he relived the sheer amount of pain caused by the violation of his body, he almost wished he hadn’t tried to fight. But now, having heard of his counterparts’ versions of the abuse, he understood that it still would’ve been just as awful had he been less resistant. He tried his hardest to wrangle himself out of the intrusive memory, but it just wasn't working; he felt helpless in its iron grip. At least it wasn't a full-scale flashback, he thought; it helped that he was still in touch with reality. Still, reliving it in any capacity was such an awful experience.
“I’m sorry. That must have been really hard to overhear.”
“Yeah, but it must have been worse to relive,” Peter-Three replied, pretending as though he wasn’t also currently experiencing that himself, even though his body language clearly gave it away. He hugged his knees to his chest, arms wrapped tightly around himself. It’s not real. He’s gone. He can’t hurt me anymore. It’s okay. I’ll be fine, he thought to himself over and over again, trying to interrupt his involuntary trainwreck of thought. “I don’t regret trying to fight him. The only thing I regret is that I failed.”
“No. Stop that. You didn’t fail. You did everything you could,” Peter-One insisted. “He was a terrible person for what he did. That’s not on you, no matter what.”
“Thanks. I think I really needed to hear that.” Peter-Three still didn’t budge from his defensive position, but the reassurance helped him break free of the awful memories assailing his mind.
“…How do you feel about hugs? Or would you rather not?” Peter-One was so goddamn perceptive, but to be fair, Peter-Three’s distress was probably pretty obvious anyway.
“Yeah, sure. C’mere. It’s gonna be alright.” Sitting on the floor and leaning back against the side of the bed, the two Spider-Men embraced one another. In such close proximity, they both knew the other could easily pick up on their erratic breathing and elevated heartbeats, and so they both tried to calm themselves in the hopes that they could offer comfort to one another.
Having checked in on both of his counterparts, Peter-Two finally let himself turn off the big-brother mode he’d been operating in ever since he’d first asked them about Skip. One had it so much worse. So much worse. I can’t even imagine how fucked up I would’ve been if it‘d happened more than once, let alone for four years. Why did I even say anything when I knew talking about it would hurt both of them? I shouldn’t have told him it could get better for him, because how on earth do you come back from something so awful?
He knew what the answer always was: time and hard work, for however long it takes. But that wasn’t going to make him feel better right now. So he went swinging through the city, checking on the usual bars and nightclubs and paying special attention to any places he’d heard about having drink-spiking incidents. He wondered for a moment if the locations he usually kept an eye on in his universe were the same, or if his efforts were wasted. But he reassured himself that he was doing something helpful, because where there’s alcohol, there’s usually trouble of the exact kind he felt he needed to put a stop to.
None of the usual bars or clubs seemed to have any suspicious activity going on. But around one in the morning, when he was about to give up and call it a night, Peter-Two realized there was one more place he could check out. He took a very roundabout route, going through Staten Island to get to New Jersey, because he needed bridges to swing across and he wasn't going to bother with the tunnels. He ended up on some college campus, where he soon overheard something that caught his attention. “I gotta go home, I’m soooooo drunk,” he heard a guy's voice slur. Peter-Two jumped to attention, scampering from roof to roof until he found the guy. He was stumbling down the street, with the girl walking with him almost fully supporting his weight so he wouldn’t fall flat on his face.
The girl just laughed as if he’d told the funniest joke in the world. “Oh, you’re so silly, you’re coming home with me!”
“I dunno,” the guy replied, his words barely intelligible. If it weren’t for Peter-Two’s enhanced hearing, he wouldn’t have been able to understand what he was saying. “I shoulda stopped drinking, like, four beers ago."
The girl’s face formed into an exaggerated pout. “Are you really saying you don’t want me? We were making out at the party!” she whined as she ushered him around the street corner, leaving behind the road with all the fraternity and sorority houses and turning onto a road with normal apartment buildings.
“Nooo, my house is the other way,” he protested. “I’m soooo drunk.” He probably didn’t even realize he was repeating himself, not that it was helping his side of the argument. Peter-Two squinted at the pair through the flickering glow of the streetlights, watching the guy try to twist away as the girl tried to grope him. Yeah, this was bad.
Peter-Two had seen and heard more than enough. He jumped down from a fire escape and landed in front of them, blocking their path. “Holy shit, is that Spider-Man?!” the guy exclaimed, astonished. “That’s so cool!”
“Hey lady, he said he wanted to go home, not hook up with you,” Peter-Two said sternly to the girl.
“Oh come on, don’t ruin my fun!” she complained. “You know how it is, guys always want it!”
Peter-Two turned to face her, unable to show the depth of his anger through his mask, but conveying enough of it in his tone of voice. “That’s bullshit. You are going to go home right now, and not with him,” he insisted, putting his hands on their shoulders and pushing the two of them apart.
Looking stunned but also pissed, she let go of her victim. “I can’t believe fucking Spider-Man cockblocked me,” she grumbled.
“I didn’t 'cockblock' you, I stopped you from committing sexual assault,” Peter-Two corrected her, his tone incredibly sharp to the point that he wondered if he sounded a little too invested in this intervention. Hopefully nobody was watching or recording, because he didn’t want his little escapade to cause any backlash or rumors for Peter-One. He’d caused the kid more than enough stress today. “Now go home.” He’d spoken with enough authority, even though he didn’t feel like it on the inside, that he scared her into speed-walking away from them without any further complaints.
“Dude, I can’t believe I met fucking Spider-Man! It’s Peter, right?” the guy slurred loudly almost to the point of shouting. He looked like he was about to fall over, so Peter-Two put his arm around him and steadied him.
“Yeah, that’s me. Nice to meet you. What’s your name?” Peter-Two asked him.
“I’m Tony. Tony Lewis.” Tony shook Peter-Two’s hand vigorously with alcohol-fueled enthusiasm. “This is the best day of my life!”
Peter-Two shrugged. “I’m just here to stop it from being the worst.”
“Thanks, man,” Tony replied. “Uh, my house is back that way.” He pointed in the opposite direction from where the girl had been steering him, and Peter-Two guided him up the street. “So, like, you never come out here, you always stick to NYC. What’s up with that?” He was slurring his words less now, so Peter-Two didn’t have to concentrate so hard on understanding his speech.
“I see a problem, I stop it,” Peter-Two said simply. New Jersey had never been his or his counterparts’ turf, but he knew that college campuses always had trouble of the exact kind that he felt like he needed to do something about tonight. “She was being a problem.”
“Yeah, she was,” Tony agreed.
“How much did you drink?” Peter-Two asked him.
“A lot, dude,” Tony told him. “Like, eleven beers or somethin’. I dunno. You shoulda seen the keg stands, it was the coolest thing everrrr. I blacked the fuck out after that, and then Judy was trying to take me home with her. She said we made out at Theta, but I don’t even remember that. Like, did I do something to make her think I wanted to hook up with her?”
“No, of course not!" Peter-Two reassured him. "You're clearly nowhere near sober enough for what she was trying to do. She would've known that, so she was wrong to...to try to take you home with her.” The euphemism felt awkward as he said it, but he wasn't going to use serious words like attempted rape with someone who wasn't using it to describe his experience.
“Yeah, I dunno, she thought guys always want it or something?” Tony’s face scrunched up in confusion, his expression exaggerated by the copious amounts of alcohol in his system. “That’s some fuckin’ bullshit. I mean, guys are pretty horny most of the time, I would know,” Tony laughed, despite the seriousness of the situation. “But I swear I still didn’t wanna hook up with her.”
“Yeah, no, of course I believe you, dude. She was full of shit, but like, dangerous shit,” Peter-Two agreed. What he didn't say was, I've been there. I don't want anyone else to ever go through what I did, not when I can stop it this time. “That’s why I made her leave.”
“Yeah, and like, if you didn’t show up, I think she woulda…uh…yeah.” Tony’s sentence trailed off into nothingness as he stopped and pointed to the apartment building they were outside of. “Uh, this is me.”
“Great. You need any help getting up the stairs or anything?”
“Nah, I’m on the first floor,” Tony answered, drunkenly fumbling with his keys to the point of dropping them on the sidewalk. Peter-Two picked them back up and unlocked the front door for him. “You wanna come in? Grab a beer or anything?” Did Tony even realize he was supposed to be talking to a teenager? He was probably way too wasted to remember that Peter-One wasn’t even eighteen yet, let alone twenty-one.
“No thanks, I gotta swing back home after this,” Peter-Two laughed. He didn’t think he could even get drunk with his enhanced metabolism, anyway. “Have a good night, Tony.”
“You too, Spidey!” Tony replied cheerily. “Wait, come back, can you sign my shirt or something?” he shouted after Peter-Two. By the time Peter-Two stopped laughing about the bizarre autograph request and regained his composure, Tony had already disappeared into his apartment.
As Peter-Two swung back home, the adrenaline from the confrontation starting to wear off, he was relieved to realize that his intervention had had the intended effect: it had completely wiped out his despairing mood from earlier. Tired from his extensive trip around the greater New York area, he quickly changed into normal clothes upon his return and fell asleep on the floor.
That night, Peter-Two dreamed that he was once again his nine-year-old self. He was far too familiar with this kind of nightmare, but it was a relief to find that this one diverged from its typical path, starting after the assault rather than before or during it. In this dream, he was stumbling back into the Parkers’ apartment after the unimaginable. This time, he found his multiversal counterparts waiting for him in his childhood bedroom. Peter-One offered him a clean change of clothes, Peter-Three treated the scratches and bruises that littered his small body, and together they held him as he cried from the pain and fear. They reassured him that it was over, he was safe with them now, and that everything would be okay.
When Peter-Two awoke the next morning, he was surprised to find that he didn’t feel the urge to scream for help, cry that he didn’t want to be touched, or run away in fear. Instead, he felt the tiniest bit stronger, ready to face his villains, whether they were superpowered or simply interpersonal, with his counterparts beside him.