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He has a... thing.
He doesn’t like to name it. Naming it, well, it’s not that it makes the thing real. He knows that it’s real, he’s all too familiar with the migraines, the dizziness, the worry that the others look at him with, and the panic that sets into his bones at the feeling of food on his tongue.
Naming it means he has to deal with it. And he doesn’t quite want to.
He has a thing about how he eats. And he’s fine with calling it that.
He can’t remember having it in most of elementary school. He recalls the cafeteria, not so much a place of discomfort then. He’d sit in the corner of a long table, happily sipping a carton of chocolate milk. He contents himself with blowing bubbles into the container, watching orbs covered in filmy brown expand, flowing over the top of the opening as he blows into the straw.
Peter doesn’t really mind that he sits alone every day, not when he has his books, not when he has his chocolate milk. He doesn’t ever bring it up to his dad, because what was that he’d said?
“Real men in our family deal with things on our own. We don’t need help, right, buddy?”
So he sits, and munches on chicken nuggets, and he pretends to miss the way every kid who surrounds him has friends and circles and conversations. He pretends to miss the sound of his name, the one he hates, whispered in those conversations. Pretends to not hate every inch of the skin he was once so comfortable in.
And he’s fine with it.
If he stops having actual food on his paper lunch trays, well. No one seems to notice. He still sips on the chocolate milk, and he always eats enough food at dinner time, where his parents actually call him Peter. He’s always been skinny, but never enough to be worried about. Never enough for someone to say something.
Middle school is different for Peter. The summer before fifth grade starts, Peter’s parents and him have a very long talk with their family pediatrician, and a week later, Peter’s dad comes home from the pharmacy with a bottle of something called ‘puberty blockers’. Pete knows only vaguely how they work, but what he does know is that one day, they could help him look and feel just how he wants.
Three months later, he moves in with Aunt May and Uncle Ben. He doesn’t think anything of it until he asks Aunt May when his mom and dad are coming back, and she breaks down crying in the middle of a Twilight Zone rerun. He feels raw, and the threads on the couch are suddenly too rough, grating against his palms like rusted razor blades. He doesn’t know what to do when they explain that his parents aren’t ever coming back.
But he’s a real man. A real man, and he doesn’t need any help. So he picks himself up, dusts himself off, and handles it.
(His version of handling it involves throwing his chocolate milk out the next day when he tries to drink it. He does try, really, but suddenly the feeling of it in his mouth is too heavy and too unavoidably real. He runs into the girl's bathroom and retches in the sink, and spends the next half hour rocking back and forth in a bathroom stall, pressed up against the door in fear of being discovered.)
He claims a stomach bug, and pins the loss of energy and weight on that for May and Ben. He doesn’t want to worry them, because he’s fine. Really. They still worry, fussing over him and tucking him into bed so tenderly, and forgetting just how thin the apartment walls were--
(“--he was such a skinny kid to begin with, Ben, I’m worried about him--”)
But they believe the lie, because they don’t want to believe it could be anything else.
In the sixth grade, Edward Leeds moves from Indiana. He moves from Indiana and sits down right next to Peter in the lunchroom. Edward Leeds gives him a conspiratorial grin, sliding half of his tater tots onto Peter’s tray (empty, save for an apple juice) and asks Peter to call him Ned. Peter asks Ned to call him Peter.
They get on well.
Ned finds out that Peter has never seen Star Wars (“A crime, Parker!”), so they huddle in his basement, covered in blankets, and Peter pushes in a DVD called Star Wars: A New Hope.
He jumps as loud music rings from the speakers, but is soon entranced by the yellow text scrolling across the screen. Something about Luke Skywalker’s character tugs at his heart. When Leia says, “Aren’t you a little short to be a stormtrooper?”, maybe Peter finds himself just a little less self-conscious about some of the things that he thinks makes him...less of a man. Maybe.
After that, eighth grade is an alright year for him, and he’s thankful for that. He and Ned save up to buy the Lego Batcave. Building it in Ned’s room is pretty much the coolest thing ever, and Ned’s dad brings them a plate of fried banana slices called maruya, and Peter nearly cries at the soft crunch and the sweetness on his tongue. He eats two of them, and he’s okay with it.
That year, he gains some weight that, medically speaking, he really should have had in the first place. He’s alright with it at first, he actually is. But then it starts to fall in all the wrong spots. He’s never had much of a feminine figure, because he didn’t have enough flesh on him for a figure at all. But now there’s some padding on his hips, and his chest is accentuated by flesh. Not breasts, really, the hormone blockers don’t allow that to happen. But when he’s changing into pajamas one night and sees himself, standing in his mirror, he freezes. Thank god he’s alone in his room, because explaining away his panic attacks is too hard and far too stressful.
He can barely hear anything that’s going on around him as his heartbeat and labored breaths fill his ears, rushing like an ocean. He clenches his eyes shut in an attempt to shut everything out, but the darkness just serves to isolate him further.
And then he’s lost, shipwrecked in his own mind.
After that night, Peter doesn’t eat for weeks. It’s easy, especially since it’s late April, and school is so busy, as it is towards the end every year. In the morning, he grabs something from the kitchen for breakfast, kisses May and Ben on the cheek, and leaves it for strays on his way out of the building. His ‘lunch’ period is just a study hall, which is filled with mostly seniors. Both Aunt May and Uncle Ben have precious little time with their deadlines coming up, that they only ate a handful of meals together over those weeks. There’s no one around to notice that he hasn’t eaten. Not even meaning to, Peter keeps stock of everything he’s eaten since the Bad Night.
-A carrot, thinly sliced
-A few bites of chicken, each on a separate day. the rest of each had ended up rotting under his bed for a few days until he can safely dispose of it
-Half of an energy bar
-A piece of celery
-One spoonful of rice
And nothing else. He can’t bring himself to do it. He’s tried, tried very hard. He sits on the edge of his bed, lamp on, fork in hand. Tries to bring a tiny mouthful of something, anything to his mouth. It doesn’t matter what it is, vegetable, meat, pasta. When he’s not being watched, food is like poison to him. He spews it across the room as it passes his lips. It just feels like pouring cement into his mouth, weighing him down to the ties of a physical form he hates. He’d much rather float weightlessly at the top of the river, thanks.
High school starts the next year in a blur of activity, with new teachers, new people, and new stresses. New kinds of mean kids--he gets locked in the janitor's closet a few times, and certainly roughed up. But it’s nothing he can’t handle.
Freshman year goes by quickly enough, he supposes. These types of years usually do. Each day is more of the same, wake up with a headache, grab some toast on his way out the door, kiss May and Ben on the cheeks, toss the toast out in the lobby’s trash can. Struggle to stay awake in his classes. Answer questions when necessary. Yes I’m feeling alright, no there’s no trouble at home, yes Ned, I can come over tonight, yes I have the homework done.
Come home. Do homework, fake down as much of a meal as he can manage. Help with cleanup. Go up to his room, dispose of the food he’d tucked into his sleeves, folded into napkins in his pockets, use listerine to get rid of the greasy feeling in his mouth. Occupy himself for the next four or five hours, building things, taking them apart, running his hands up and down over the push of his stomach that he hates, until he can fall asleep for an hour or so.
He’s always cold. It doesn’t matter how many blankets he piles on top of himself.
Freshman year is also when Peter and Ned meet Michelle, which is certainly a noteworthy event. They’ve seen her around school, of course. Michelle is Cool. Michelle is Cool Enough to hang out at tables where people have conversations with each other and not with them.
She walks from her table, abruptly, almost angrily turning her back on a group of kids who are laughing about something Peter wishes he hadn’t heard. They call after her, but she doesn’t seem to care. The way she walks strikes Peter--slouching, but with a certain tilt to her chin, daring the world to come after her. She sits down at the end of Peter and Ned’s table, staring at them coolly and offering them a nod before spearing a mac-n-cheese noodle with her plastic fork.
Peter decides that he likes Michelle very much.
Sophomore year, things start to change for Peter, for better and for worse. He starts taking testosterone, and the physical changes come slowly. But the psychological ones are so fast. He feels more like who he is than he’s let himself feel in years.
And when he wakes up one morning after a certain spider bites him to find that, well, sticking to ceilings and walls isn’t exactly normal, but it’s something he can do now, he remembers what his dad told him. Real men… real men deal with things on their own. So he doesn’t tell May, or Ben. Doesn’t tell anyone.
If he deals with it all by getting his ass handed to him in a makeshift costume, then that’s fine. It’s a learning curve, after all.
Then Uncle Ben is shot in an alleyway. Three times, point blank, to the chest. And Peter watches him die. He watches his blood spill over the bumps in the pavement, listens to the sirens that are too far away, and when the time comes, when Uncle Ben squeezes his hand so tight that it hurts and asks Peter to look into his eyes--
He can’t. He clenches his teeth and breathes in hard, shuts down. Uncle Ben says something, and then he’s not saying anything at all. His hand is slack in Peters. He looks up, quickly, hoping that anything is still there. A spark, an ounce of the warmth that always had lit up Uncle Ben’s body like a hearth. But there’s nothing in his eyes.
Peter screams and screams until his throat is raw and numb, and the screams fill his ears like blood, pouring, rushing. The EMT’s have to drag him off of Uncle Ben’s body just to pronounce him. But he can’t be dead, he can’t, because Peter didn’t watch that spark flicker out of his eyes. He never saw it, so it wasn’t real. It wasn’t real. He can’t be dead. What doesn’t May get about it? He’s not dead.
He’s not dead.
He’s not.
It isn’t until Peter is in the stifling silence of his room, lying on the hardwood floor, that he acknowledges it. That he’d been sitting, useless, only a few feet from Uncle Ben. His costume was in his backpack, and he’d still been unable to do anything to stop the man who’d killed Ben, but he could have.
He prefers the loud screams of the alleyway to this quiet.
Apparently, the learning curve that comes with being Spider-Man doesn’t just affect him in the mask. He seems to have a brand new metabolism. He’s never had much of a problem hiding the whole….eating thing at school.
But after the bite, his body seemed to burn through energy faster than ever before.
For the first time since, like, sixth grade, Peter passes out in school. He wakes to a massive migraine and Ned hovering anxiously, worry written across his face.
“He’s awake! He’s--Peter, what happened? Geez, you scared me half to death! How do you feel?”
He tries to talk, but his throat feels like it’s filled with honey, thick and viscous. He coughs a few times, though it makes his head pound, and says, “m’fine”, and gets up from the nurse’s couch.
Ned pushes his shoulders back.
“Uh, no way! You’re not fine, Peter, look at you! Jesus, you’re--”
Ugly. Worthless. Not a real man. Fat. Disgusting. He knows he knows he knows
“--falling apart. Are you taking care of yourself?”
So that’s when he learns how to fake it even with his magical new metabolism. Fighting bad guys, patching up knife scrapes, passing out on fire escapes, drinking a few sips of protein shakes as he perches on rooftop ledges. That’s how he spends his evenings now. And it kills him, lying to May when she’s already hurting, lying to Ned when he’s always so worried about him.
But finding out just how much of a failure he is would hurt them both so much more, and that just isn’t an option. He deals with it on his own.
And in some ways, becoming Spider-Man is the best thing that’s ever happened to him. Everything he does changes his body is a very new way. He wakes up to find his stomach is more concave than he’s ever been able to make it. He stands in the mirror, for hours, counting ribs, counting bruises.
This soon turns into counting scars, counting bones he knows should be broken, probably were broken. He wonders, numbly, if that's why it hurt so much to walk on his leg, but can’t find it in him to care.
The next morning, he wakes to blood soaked through to his mattress and the ghost of an ache in his knee. It’s gone by noon.
He pushes past it, and works as hard as he can and then harder, to keep up pretenses and maintain some sense of stability in his life. If he can just push, push, push until he’s nothing, then maybe he won’t lose control of everything he’s worked for in his life. Love. Friendship. Grades. His future. Spider-Man. weight weight weight weight, oh god, the hollow pit in his stomach, the translucent quality his skin has taken, on the skeleton he sees when he dares to look in the mirror, the terrifying smallness of his wrists--his waist--his legs--
And maybe one night he doesn’t make it home.
Maybe one night, he doesn’t want to make it home at all.
He wakes up, the pale sky staring back at him from the roof of some nondescript building. He checks his phone and almost cries with relief when he discovers that it’s only 4 AM, no missed calls from May. He treads home, slowly, narrowly avoiding face-planting into a building twice, and changes into his civvies outside his window.
Sliding into his room as quietly as possibly is difficult, these days, and his hands shake as he balances himself on the windowsill and pushes himself over the desk, and finds May sitting in the bottom bunk of his bed. Her eyes are rimmed with red and her hair mussed, like she’s been pulling at it and rubbing her skull like she does when she’s stressed.
Peter aches, aches knowing that he’s the cause of that stress.
She looks up at him, shaking. Or maybe that's just his vision. He can’t tell at this point.
It’s probably her intention for them to have a long, serious talk, but Peter can barely get his mouth to work right now. So she says words at him, and he stares at the ground, breathing hard. His ears are roaring but he nods along to her talking, and he doesn’t go to school the next day. Aunt May sits with him in bed, hands him a gatorade and a sandwich. Peter smiles at her and takes a hearty bite of the sandwich.
She grins, rubbing his back. Gets up from the bed. He closes his eyes, for just a moment. He doesn’t know if it’s relief or disappointment that he feels, but she doesn’t know.
The sandwich doesn’t get a chance to rot. The rats behind the building get to eat this one.
In the end, it’s Ned who says something.
The two of them are tucked away in Peter’s room, working on their trig homework together. Despite Aunt May making sure the apartment was always warm enough, Peter had been shivering in the pervading winter chill. It seemed that with the onset of October, a new kind of coldness had settled into his bones, his blood. His thoughts are frozen in his head, words in his throat. It doesn’t help that he hasn’t eaten much of substance for--for--
He can’t remember when the last time he’d eaten was, and that terrifies him. It’s a new kind of rush, this loss of control, and he’s busy deciding whether or not he likes it when he feels two hands on his shoulder, and a warmth.
Ned’s sweater.
“Put it on, dude. You need it more than I do right now, you're practically shivering out of your skin.”
Ned says it in a lighthearted manner, joking around, but Peter can see the fear in his eyes.
“Ned, I can’t just--” Peter starts, taking the sweater off his shoulders, but Ned gives him a Look, and his hands still. It is a really warm sweater. Maybe he’ll wear it for a little bit.
He’s sure he looks completely ridiculous, his tiny frame (too tiny, too tiny) drowning in the sleeves and the neckline. He rolls the sleeves up a few times and just lets the neck hang, and somehow, this is the warmest he’s felt in months.
“It’s okay to ask for help, you know? It’s okay.” Ned says, rather suddenly. Peter’s breath catches in his throat, and he looks up at Ned.
Something in his heart flutters. What he says next is hard for him. Really hard. It takes more effort than stopping a moving car, stopping a train, digging out a bullet from his calf. But at the same time, it’s the most natural thing in the world. And he knows that he can do it, because he does have people who can help him make it through. He just has to ask for it.
“Yeah. Yeah, it is.” He says, taking a deep breath. Ned’s smile turns into a natural one.
“Fuck trig.” Peter says, grinning for the first time in what feels like forever. And he knows that there will be bumps, there’ll be times darker than he’s known before. But he doesn’t care, in this one shining moment, because he has people who care about him. And he’s going to let them.
“You wanna order Thai?”