Chapter Text
On July 11th, 2003, exactly thirty days from Peter Parker’s second birthday, Mary Parker wakes up in the passenger seat of a jet and tells her husband she’ll join him soon.
She knows she’ll join him soon, because his corpse is strapped in right next to her, a neat bullet hole between his eyes and a soft smile on his face, because they’ve done what they could. Mary Parker does not cry, nor does she worry. Her expression is clear and calm, as if this is a normal day, like any other day. She tells her husband she loves him for what she knows will be the last time, bringing his limp, cold knuckles to her lips and pressing a gentle kiss into them.
She knows that, if he could open his eyes, he would be in a panic, and the only thing that could calm Richard Parker in moments of panic was her own calmness, so for him, she stays calm.
She holds his hand and she lets her shoulder relax as she watches him one last time. She is aware he will not move. She is aware he will not open those deep, chocolatey brown eyes of his and give her that twinkling sense of spirit and humor she adores so deeply, that he passed down into their beautiful gift of a son. She is aware that it is probably not sane of her to hold onto the hand of a dead man and offer him comfort when his last moments have already passed.
But sanity is for those with lives to live, and she knows this is the end of hers, so she lets herself be a little less than sane now.
She is a woman who is controlled. A woman who is calm. She can be this way because it brings stability to Richard, who is excitable, sensitive, a chronic worrier, and a man who loves so intensely, with everything he carries in his body. She picked him because she needed that in her life, that excitability, that hopefulness, and she’s glad that, however short their story turned out to be, at least it was a good one.
“I can’t wait to see you,” she tells him, “I can’t wait to tell you about my day. You won’t believe what happened today.”
She imagines his laugh, and, in this moment, it’s enough.
Mary cannot undo the straps holding her to the seat, and she can see plainly out the window that the plane will not be in the air for much longer, the ground ever approaching at a speed it shouldn’t. Ultimately, she knows she will not live to know the destination, but she pictures it as Venice, because that was where they wanted to take Peter for his first overseas vacation. She’s been many times, and she wanted to bring her boys there to see the beauty of it all.
“I can’t wait to watch what Peter becomes with you,” she says, giving his hand a squeeze before she is no more.
The funeral is completely paid for, anonymously, by the Stark Foundation.
His Aunt May thinks it’s from Uncle Ben’s estranged family as a sort of way to buy themselves out of attending, and Peter will never tell her the truth.
Everyone and no one is there. Every kid at Peter’s school is there, whether they know him or not, and he somehow manages to thank every single one without having to look at any of them. Coworkers of Uncle Ben’s come, and they hug Aunt May and offer her their distant condolences as she cries in their arms.
Ned, for some reason, finds it a good idea to stick by his side, as if stuck there by glue. He mutters to Peter about drama at school, about Star Wars, about random manga he’s read. Anything and everything other than the lights of the funeral home, the smell of the funeral home, the funeral home, the funeral home. The place everything that goes to end, even the things that can never be. Peter’s never been to one before and he hates the finality of it all.
Peter listens to Ned. He truly does, hanging onto every word, and wonders to himself why he’d never let himself be a friend to Ned before. Ned has done nothing but stay by his side, showing him unconditional support. Even now, he’s working to be a good friend to Peter, and he’s just never let him.
“I think you should hate me,” he tells Ned, and he’s just confused.
“Nah,” he says, a short sentence for Ned, but it’s unnecessary to say more, not with the way he lets Peter hold his hand.
The news says it was a mugging gone wrong, and that’s the story he told Aunt May when she finally made it to the hospital to find Peter, knees of his jeans steeped in blood not his own. His parents had arrived at the hospital the same time he had, and had already locked down the hospital and flooded it with Stark Industries security details before Dad and Pops pulled him into their arms, tuxes pristine when they pull him in and rumpled when they finally let him go only to hide at Peter’s request—so that Aunt May will not see them.
He told them the same thing he told Aunt May. A mugging. A mugging gone wrong.
It’s technically the truth—it was a mugging, was supposed to be a mugging—but it’s also not, not for Peter. It’s the story that murmurs through the funeral, and Peter hangs his head as the words echo through him. He knows it was a mugging. Logically. But he knows he should’ve done more. It was his responsibility to do more, and he failed to do it.
Dad and Pops are somewhere in the mass of the funeral. Their presence, hidden and obscured, is exactly enough, and he sits in the front, Ned on his right and Aunt May on his left.
Uncle Clint had hugged him tight when he’d arrived, and introduced him to his kids, to Laura. They’d started telling him about the things Uncle Clint had told them about him, but he whispered to them that there’d be time later. Peter wants that.
Viz is disguised and visibly uncomfortable, eyes darting around at the sheer mass of people, and Wanda looks at him with far too much understanding, but both maintain their distance.
Tetya Natta sits right behind him, closer than anyone else dares to. The rest of the Avengers keep distance, and even his own parents do. It was his own request, as to not compromise the secrecy of his parentage even in this moment. His parents certainly hadn’t been happy about it, but they had agreed to sit at least two pews back. Not Natta. No, Natta refuses to be anywhere else but near him. A decided show of I’m here. And he knows. He knows it when she brushes a hand across his shoulders in a ploy of needing the support of the pew in front of her, and he knows it by the way her foot taps the underside of his seat.
It’s exactly enough. He thought he could get away with them being here but not being close, but he’s wrong. After all, there’s no other Parkers besides himself and Aunt May. They’re either dead or have no desire to be around. He squeezes Aunt May’s hand, and she squeezes right back. They don’t need other Parkers. They’re enough. And his family is here for her, just like they’re here for him. Aunt May’s not alone, not like Peter has been. She’ll never be alone, even if she doesn’t know it.
“It’s not your fault,” Natta whispers from behind him when Aunt May steps away, as if knowing he needs to hear it.
She’s right, but she’s not. Peter doesn’t think the truth will be fair for either of them, so he keeps it to himself and looks straight forward as military buddies speak to Uncle Ben one last time.
There’s a part of Peter who believes in the idea of parallel realities; multiple universes. One day, he’d be proven right, of course, but right now, fourteen-year-old Peter Parker believes in this idea. There’s universes where it was as simple as mugging gone wrong, he believes. There’s universes where Oscorp isn’t a problem, he hopes. There’s universes where he caught up to Uncle Ben’s killer, he imagines.
He wonders what kind of choice leads him to Uncle Ben’s killer. If, in some universes, what happens to him isn’t a nightmare as so much as a matter of circumstance—the bite, the enhancements, the changes. He wonders if it’s all some freak accident, and he’d like to imagine how much easier things could be if it could be a matter of circumstance.
But it isn’t. It isn’t a matter of circumstance, and worse yet, it all had been dictated by his choice, his one, dumb decision to go to Oscorp on a field trip and have his normalcy ripped from him. Have everything taken and ripped up and destroyed.
Uncle Ben has said he’d done the right thing, not going after the mugger. The right good thing. Apparently, that meant this outcome. Staying with Uncle Ben. Watching him die.
In the days that followed, Peter only became more and more aware that staying with Uncle Ben had done nothing to stop him from dying. He’d been but an innocent in this fight that had very little to do with Peter himself, and yet, Peter finds himself in the dead center of. He wants not to be angry. He wants to not be furious. He wants to move on. Uncle Ben is dead, Aunt May is widowed, and it’s his fault, and he needs to move on.
Except he can’t. Because he could’ve caught him. He could’ve let Uncle Ben’s killer find the justice the Parkers deserved, because what’s to stop them from doing this to someone else? Taking someone else’s life and ripping it to shreds? Steal from them, take from them, entrap them, ensnare them, ruin them? Take whatever remains of the life they’d been chasing and just… just stomp it out?
Dad and Pops don’t fight him to get out of bed after the funeral.
None of the family does.
Uncle Clint stays the remainder of the week on his old floor, his kids drifting by Peter’s cracked door in an attempt to see him, to try and talk to him. He makes his baked ziti and climbs into the bed with him to check on him, to let him cry into his lap. Natta joins them for a few of these sessions, a hand carding through Peter’s curls as she whispers in Russian that Peter can’t understand. Wanda and Viz wander in sometimes, Wanda just sitting with him and telling him about Pietro, and bonding over the morbidity of having lost someone; while Viz merely sits with him, knowing there isn’t much for him to say to help Peter, being so new to the world, and has asked Peter what he needed him to do.
Doing their best to be there, Peter figures. He doesn’t know what else Vision could do. He can’t revive the dead. No one can do that.
Dad and Pops are there for him. They are. Every night, they come in and check on Peter, and tell him that what he’s feeling is okay to feel. That what happened was a travesty. Something they never wanted him to go through, and will stay with him as he works his way out of it.
None of them completely get it. They try to, but they can’t. This was something that goes beyond a travesty into a cosmic joke. Of course the moment Peter’s ready to hold tight is the moment he loses his grip. Of course the moment he thinks it’s okay to grab hold is the moment the chance of the connection is ripped from his grasp, just like every other time he’s tried to hold tightly onto something. He would’ve been content in the ignorance, but knowing now that he’d missed out on over a decade only to have all the possibility ripped from him before he could bring himself to admit the potentiality? Peter doesn’t know how to describe that to them. To any of them.
It’s only further proof that he’s no hero, not the way Uncle Ben saw him to be. He can’t be a hero, if this is the best he can do; let a man die in the street, in his own capable arms, while his murderer escaped. Here he is, with all this power he never asked for, all this capability, and yet, he was just as weak as he’s ever been. Still pushing the same boulder up the same hill, and struggling with it.
The mask taunts him. He can’t see it, not tucked away in the depths of the closet, but it taunts him all day long, no matter how much he tries to turn his back to it, no matter how much he tries to drown it out. He really thought he could be a hero. He hadn’t wanted these powers, and he thought he could use them to be a hero for his family. Shoulder the burden for them so they could take a breath. And yet, they’re catering to him, not the other way around.
He curls in on himself, and cries softly as the mask shouts at him. He’s somehow able to catch a car traveling at high speed to stop it from hitting a bus. He’s capable of sensing danger. He’s capable of all these great things. So why isn’t he, why can’t he be, good enough to keep the people in his life around?
Why couldn’t he save one man?
The eighth day straight Peter spends in his room, Pops comes to him.
Usually, Dad and Pops are a duo, coming to talk to Peter together, attempt to soothe him together; a united front that Peter’s been wanting, but Pops comes alone. He sits on the edge of the bed without saying a word, blue eyes looking at the wall as if he this is just another place to rest for a bit. It’s a new tactic, the silence. Mostly, people try to talk to him. Tell him how this couldn’t possibly be his fault. But Pops says nothing, does nothing, merely sits there in silence with Peter.
It leads Peter, who does truly hate silence when he’s left in a room with any other person to occupy it with him, to say—or, more accurately, rasp out—the first word:
“Hi.”
Pops doesn’t respond. Not right away.
Peter is almost scared he didn’t hear him, but then he leans back against Peter’s curled legs just enough for Peter to be able to feel the security of his pulse through the blankets and layers of clothing, and then he says, voice soft but firm, “It’s about time to start getting back up, Pete.”
Peter can’t help but burrow in a little further, his eyes going to close. The idea of going anywhere fills him with trepidation. What, get out of bed so he can further prove how ineffective he is? How truly pathetic he is as a protector, a defender? The son of Avengers, and he can’t save one man.
“I’m not ready,” he manages to say.
He doesn’t say anything about knowing he never will be.
Pops’ hand goes to Peter’s arm.
“It’s not about being ready, son. No one’s ever ready.”
The hand is gentler than the words.
“You’re ready,” Peter finds himself mumbling out, “You’re always ready. Y-You’re the Star Spangled Man with a Plan.”
Pops hums out something that sounds like it could’ve been a laugh, in some plane of existence, if it weren’t so mirthful.
“No one is ever really ready, Pete,” he tells him with a sigh before he nods, as if confirming his own words, “But it’s part of the job.”
And at this, Peter’s confused, and he can’t help but turn to look at Pops. His blue eyes are clear and free of any malice, kind and open and honest, and his hand tightens just so on Peter.
“I lied to you, back when I first found out about the bodega thing,” Pops says, soft and gentle still despite what he’s saying, “I would’ve kicked the gun away, too, if I were in your shoes. Actually, in fact, I would’ve jumped on it myself. I’m glad you didn’t, don’t get me wrong, but you…” His lips tilt into a smile now, soft and sad all the same, meanwhile Peter’s insides are a mixture of horror at the realization at what he’s saying, and fear that he couldn’t even manage to protect him enough to hide this at all, “It’s a tragedy that you’re so much like me, Pete, I’ve gotta admit that. I kinda get why Bucky was stressed about me all the time—watching the things you’re doing, it’s… it’s nothing short of amazing, and it scares every single part of me.”
Peter’s breath is caught in his throat. He’s frozen. Stock still. Pops knows. He knows. He put two and two together and he knows. He’s been hiding this all, and he’s known about it.
“I—I don’t know—”
“Pete, I love you, but you’re not a very good liar,” Pops interrupts with a soft laugh without a trace of malcontent, “I know my kid when I see him, and all you did at that bodega was cover up your face. I’d recognize you, and that ugly hoodie, anywhere.”
He didn’t want them to know. He didn’t want them to know that he wasn’t Peter anymore. That he wasn’t the same. That he was irrevocably different, altered, changed. He didn’t want them to think that he was some sort of monster. That was part of saving them, after all—letting them think that he was safe.
“I’m—I’m sorry that I—”
Pops’ brow furrows, and he frowns before he interrupts, “Peter, don’t apologize for doing the best you can. I may not like that you lied, but I know what it’s like to be doing the right thing. And you are—or, you were, except now you won’t get out of bed.”
Tears sting at Peter’s eyes, and, hurt, the words escape him before he realizes it.
“What’s the point if I couldn’t even save one man?”
Pops is still for a moment, and Peter, for a moment, is terrified by the idea that Pops will confirm is inability to do right.
“Peter,” he says after a moment of silence that is so heart-wrenchingly long, “Peter, you can’t save everyone. No one is that strong. You can do your best, and try your hardest, and it won’t be enough. But you can’t measure yourself off of the one you lost, not with everything else you’ve managed to do. And you’ve saved a lot of people, Peter.”
Peter swallows. “But… Uncle Ben.”
Pops nods, and the grip goes tighter still. It’s as if he knows Peter needs the tightness of the grip to keep him from spiraling, to keep him here.
“Peter, I know this is hard to hear,” he says, slowly, carefully, as if painfully aware that Peter is in a place to break, “But no person on this earth is impervious, not even the people we want to protect the most. But it’s our responsibility to do what we can in the moments we can, and do what we can to save everyone we’re able, no matter who they are, or aren’t, to us. And you may not have been able to stop him from dying—and I’m so, so sorry that you’ve experienced that—but you did what you could, and you ensured that he didn’t die alone. That’s worth more than you think. That is saving him, in a way—you held his hand, in his last moments, and showed him that he didn’t have to move on alone. That's a hero, Peter. Not some thug who can fight everyone. A man who won't leave someone alone to be scared.”
They’re words he thinks on for a while, after their talk, after Pops cradles him to sleep through his tears, through his sorrows. He stares up at the ceiling, covered with stick-on stars that Dad had looked at him weird for bringing with him when he moved in, but helped him tack to the ceiling nonetheless. He’d never had a bedroom all of his own before this one, and he’d always wanted the stick-on stars he’d see at the dollar store. Dad may have looked at him weird, but he’d known that Peter wanted it, and decided to do it with him. He could’ve told him no. He could’ve called it silly. But instead, he participated in it with him. Created the memory with him. He’d needed it, just like Ben had needed Peter to be with him.
It was the right good thing.
He doesn’t feel like enough. He doesn’t feel strong.
He feels weak in all senses of the word, because instead of bringing the mugger to justice like he could’ve, he sat with a dying man and cried for him instead. Just a scared little Spider, a boy, trapped in a Tupperware begging to be free.
There’s universes where that thought—the thought of bringing about his own brand of justice—would lead to him making an unspeakable choice.
But Peter is here, in this universe.
And, as with many of the other universes, across what he wouldn’t know is technically called the Arachno-Humanoid Poly-Multiverse by a man who, due to actions Peter takes in the years to come, would deem him unworthy of joining the ranks of a multi-dimensional Spider Society, he decides to make a decision. It is the same decision all of those in the Arachno-Humanoid Poly-Multiverse would make, a choice that would continue to seal all of their fates and tragedies alike, a choice that would continue their web of interconnection and central canon across dimensions and variants and realities.
He decides that no one around him is impervious and impenetrable, not even himself.
He is a little guy, in a sea of little guys, and he simply has a choice: revenge, or avenge. The former sounds nice, but it’s not the right good thing, so he picks the latter. It could’ve meant fighting. It could’ve meant bloodshed. But, for Peter, it doesn’t. Peter decides on a different way to be an Avenger. He decides to make it so no one else feels the way he does. Make it so no one else experiences the loss he does.
He wants to make sure no one else feels this fear. Make sure to bring hope, and live up to Uncle Ben’s idea of the right good thing. There's no room for him to be a boy anymore. He has to be grown. He has to grow.
The right good thing was to stay by his side. To stay and let him know, in the broken way he did, that he wanted him there. To not leave him alone as he lost his breath.
Peter did that for him, and let him know one last time that the nephew he’d searched for years had managed to find him, and had dared to love him as deeply as he could. The right good thing was to take these abilities he’d never wanted and not to reciprocate the same violence back. The right good thing was to honor Ben’s memory, his love and respect of him, and find that lost little kid he’d gone looking for that night.
The right good thing was to move on from the things that had hurt him, and make himself something to protect the lost little kid from their own boogeymen. To use his powers for the good of everyone, not just the people he loves.
The right good thing was to be Spider-Man, not just for his family, not just for Ben Parker, but for himself.
And for James Buchanan Barnes, a man who’d saved him, who breathed for him when he couldn’t.
Pops eventually leaves. He has to. He ignores the missions for as long as he can, but he can’t do it forever, and Peter doesn’t want that for him. He sees the sense of duty and the guilt of even wanting to leave eating him up, and Peter decides he needs to do the right good thing here, too. So he pauses the Empire Strikes Back, pulls himself off of the couch, and walks over to his father, who stares at him in confusion.
This is not much different than any time Pops has had to leave, Peter can admit that. However, to Peter, this just is the time he’s decided he will show his father who he is, and what he’s learned. That he needs to show him that even if he’s not ready, that he will be strong, and he will stand up the way he needs to.
So he cups his cheeks between both hands, close to squishing his face, and kisses his forehead. When he pulls back, he finds Pops staring up at Peter, shocked and confused and struck dumb.
“Go do the right thing,” Peter tells him, voice cracking as he dares to allow himself to show the sadness of letting him go, “We’ll be here.”
He stares up at Peter before he cracks into a sob that takes him so suddenly that even Peter is surprised, but not more than Steve himself, and he finds his own cheeks cupped.
“You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” Pops promises Peter, pushing his forehead against Peter’s, “I will come home. I’ll always come home to you.”
Peter somehow manages not to cry.
Dad finds them cuddled together, and takes too many pictures of the sight of them.
Peter sets one has his lock screen on his phone, a sucker for his family, his favorite people, as he tugs down the mask to cover his face. He pushes the phone into his pocket, zipping it shut and then, for extra security, webbing the zipper into place. He stands at the edge of the tower, the wind buffeting him, threatening to toss him over, and he remains firm. Resolute. Planted.
Made of iron and more; the sum of parts that created the person he’s shaping to be.
Just shy of a decade since Mary and Richard Parker’s deaths, the former Asset tucks a cybernetic hand into the pocket of a jacket he’d lifted from the Salvation Army in D.C. before hopping on a bus to New York City.
He’s only a few weeks out from his escape from HYDRA, and he has very little idea as to why he needs to do this, but he remembers a dossier shown to him with a toddler’s face. He knows he’s watched the face grow up; he remembers the fog of it through the drugged, tortured, brainwashed haze, so he knows what the toddler now looks like, and he knows their name still, as if it’s the first time he’s heard it.
Almost ten years and a life time later, Bucky Barnes is heading to New York City to fulfill a mission he hardly remembers to protect a boy named Peter Parker.