Chapter Text
“I bet you’ll wake up soon,” Peter told Tony, tracing the hollows of the man’s cheeks with his thumbs and forefingers. Perhaps if he pressed down with a little more force he could reshape his mentor’s face back to its original healthy-ish roundness.
Casting a cautionary glance to the ajar med bay door, Peter thought about it for a moment longer.
Then, with a pang of urgency, he shook his head to dispel the idea, the last dregs of rationality that lived in his disintegrating mind vetoing the act of violence.
No wonder this was the first time he’d been left alone with Tony, Peter chastised himself.
And then the entire near miss was forgotten as the tell-tale all encompassing pain that had followed him around for the past few weeks like an ugly shadow reared its horrible head.
To distract himself, Peter packed his brain up into a mental backpack and threw it over his shoulder, leaving himself and Tony in the bright white room- just for a little while, just to escape. He hoped the man wouldn’t mind.
Upstairs, Peter could hear Thor sharpening his axe again. Though he had zero clue why, the God had killed Thanos over a week ago now.
“Peter,” Pepper rushed into the room, looking between him and Tony frantically, breathing hard.
“Miss. Potts!” He greeted. “Do you know if Mr. Stark wears scarves? Sure, it’s still May and all but don’t you think he looks cold?”
“Peter,” the CEO repeated, and Peter craned his head at her dark purple under eyes. Maybe he could knit her a scarf too.
“-you hearing me, Peter?”
Peter blinked. “Yes?” He hadn’t, but that was rude, and he didn’t want to upset Miss. Potts more than she already looked.
Pepper’s hand came up to his shoulder, pressing down firmly. “You feel that, sweetie?”
“Uh-huh,” he nodded, liking how solid the hand felt against him. He didn’t feel very solid these days.
“Do you know why you ran away from Bruce?” Pepper questioned after a few minutes, Peter happily basking under her touch.
He mulled over her words for a second, still smiling. And then it all came flooding back.
Blood tests upon blood tests, skin cells under microscopes, pin pricks, and needles, and trying to sythensize pain medications for his newfound condition.
“I forgot again,” he said numbly, all but collapsing into the chair besides him, feeing cynically grateful that his body remained solid enough for him to not pass through it like a pathetic ghost.
Shifting slightly, Pepper kneeled down besides him and grabbed his jaw gently, tilting his face to look at hers. “It’s a learning curve, kiddo, don’t beat yourself up.” At that, she cast a glance to Tony’s prone form, as though looking for reassurance. Receiving none, she continued. “Come on, let’s go back to Bruce. You know what they say about him- you wouldn’t like to see him impatient.”
Peter mustered a small grin and allowed the woman to pull him upwards and through the Avenger’s compound, back to Tony’s labs, briefly appropriated by Bruce, who’d been poking and prodding at him ever since his return to Earth.
Was this really still Earth?
He closed his eyes and pictured May by his side, holding a terrible drawing of a green and blue circular blob high up into the air for examination.
“Can’t find anything amiss,” she nodded her head, “can you draw Queens next?”
Peter shook his head and the agony thrummed alongside the motion. He half reached out to take the drawing back from May before realising that he was day dreaming again.
“When are the funerals taking place, Doctor Banner?” He asked abruptly, catching back up to his body.
“I’m not too sure,” Bruce jumped slightly at receiving his rapt attention, but recovered himself well, Peter thought. Part of the job description. He was dabbing away a bead of blood from Peter’s forearm with a chunk of cotton wool. “Was there anyone you wanted us to look into in particular?”
May, Ned, MJ
“Sidonglobophobia,” Peter sniffed and almost choked on the ash that clouded around him. “Fear of cotton wool,” he added.
“Good to know,” Bruce rolled his swivel chair across the room and deposited a vial of blood into the refrigerator Tony had stuck Peter’s internship photo onto, claiming he’d get round to framing it later.
Slightly confused again, Peter spun around, half expecting to see Tony’s bunny ear fingers looming behind him.
“I’m not usually like this,” Peter felt the need to explain to Bruce, suddenly unreasonably upset that his idol was meeting him in this condition.
The doctor’s tired eyes softened, and his body sagged.
“Neither am I.”
….
Unsurprisingly, Bruce couldn’t find a cure for his half alive, half dead state. And, after a few more nights of working tirelessly, something within the scientist cracked, the weight of his failures sneaking up on him all at once.
He left Peter an apology note, though, which was nice.
“He’s always been a bolter,” Natasha Romanoff told him, swirling an untouched glass of wine between her fingertips.
Tony, once he woke up to find Peter still a few loose screws away from insane and in constant agony, was less forgiving of the whole thing, and had lunged up to track down the wayward neuroscientist himself. They’d had to sedate him again.
“Honestly, I’m feeling better,” Peter tried to reassure Tony, once they’d removed his mentor’s restraints. “Like, last week, I couldn’t even remember that all my friends and family are dead. Now it’s like a constant freaking klaxon in my head!” Then he gave the man a thumbs up and picked a piece of dirt from his sheets. “Does that look like cheese to you?”
Helen Cho was then put on the case.
Peter tried to be nice about the whole thing. It must’ve been hard to see him fall apart like this. But he had to admit that his patience was waning the longer he went without any sort of reprieve.
“I miss eating,” Peter tucked himself under Tony’s arm, interrupting the man as he flipped a burger at the stove of the new lake house. Everything tasted like ash.
His mentor turned the heat to low and brought his other arm up to bring him into a deep hug, only letting go somewhat reluctantly as Peter squirmed, suddenly antsy. Peter found he couldn’t stay still for too long these days, it made it easier for the pain to sneak in.
“What was- is,” Tony corrected, “your favourite food. And you can’t say churros or hotdogs.”
“That’s like asking me to pick a favourite Avenger and excluding S-Spider-Man,” Peter stumbled over his past self. “Cruel and unwarranted.”
“Narcissistic much?” Tony combed a hand through the beard he’d only just started grooming again. “Though that’s a good question too. Come on, it’s like campfire bonding. I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”
“Build a bonfire and maybe I’ll take you up on it,” Peter said cheekily.
And then that’s what they did, him and Tony and Pepper. They hauled wood in from the surrounding forest and failed to spark a flame with flint. In the end, Tony charged up a repulsor and blasted at the wood when Pepper’s back was turned.
“Walnut loaf,” Peter said finally, the sun now behind the trees and the night colouring the starry sky. He’d never seen the stars before Titan, and now he had a whole galaxy before him. “Ben used to make it all the time. May never could recreate it, but I always loved that she tried anyway.”
Knowingly, Tony nodded. “When I got into MIT, Howard threw this huge party, and when I say huge I mean humungous. I think there was even a clown. And I ruined every damn second of it by getting into his whiskey an hour beforehand and showing up annihilated.” Tony whistled lowly. “Let me tell you, the guy reamed into me, called me things my ancestors are probably still rolling over. After it’s all over, I hear the door creak open, and I think oh God, what now? But instead, it’s my Mom, standing there with a cheeseburger the size of my head.” Tony coughed. “So yeah, that.”
Peter smiled at the clumsy ending, and wondered whether Tony would ever find some happier stories to tell. He hoped so.
He never did get to hear Pepper’s favourite food, or either pair’s favourite superhero. He blinked away from himself, he could’ve sworn it was just for a moment, but before he knew it, he had both Pepper and Tony upon him, hauling him away from the bonfire that he gripped with iron clad hands.
“It doesn’t hurt,” he babbled at them. “Nothing can hurt me any more, I promise.”
His suit remained under tight lock and key after that. Peter understood.
Desperately, more so with every day that passed, he wished that he could’ve just left that day with the fifty percent. Broken up like confetti into the atmosphere.
He was alive, he was dead, he was alive, he was dead. He couldn’t bear it a second longer, he missed May so much.
Tony got nightmares, Peter figured out fairly quickly. And, as the lake house’s only nocturnal (and diurnal) creature, Peter took it upon himself to guard him as best he could.
It wasn’t unusual for Tony to not make it to his and Pepper’s bedroom. Typically the man slumped into a heap on the lab’s couch, which Peter supposed can’t have helped his condition, but who was he to judge? Either way, he’d always be there to wake up his mentor when his breaths quickened, remind him where he was, even if Peter wasn’t always so sure himself.
One night, wearing his Hello Kitty pyjama pants and ‘I survived my trip to New York’ t-shirt, Peter sat cross legged on the floor by Tony’s sleeping form. Blue holographic projections of Peter’s anatomy lit up the room, and he held up two hands to the scene, as though taking a picture.
“I love you,” he felt the words trail out of him. He almost broke the invisible barrier between them and stroked Tony’s face, but he couldn’t risk waking the man up.
As though his almost action had been felt, Tony grunted and shifted in his sleep, inching closer to Peter’s outstretched hand. He held his breath and waited for Tony to settle.
“I love you,” Peter said again, before quickly standing onto shaky legs and exiting the lab without another further look.
As though making a pilgrimage, Peter’s feet led him to where Pepper slumbered. Knowing the woman was a heavier sleeper, he chanced tucking the blankets around her a little tighter, clamping down on the sob that rushed to top of his throat.
“I love you,” he whispered for a third and final time, lingering only long enough to reach his hearing out, to make sure he was making the right decision.
Pepper’s strong heartbeat greeted him, a tinier, faster heartbeat fluttering alongside it.
Nodding, Peter crept back out of the room, down the wooden staircase, and out of the lake house, knowing in his heart, as sure as he knew that he was now a ghost, that Tony and Pepper would have a much happier story without him in it.
…..