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(Sometimes, it begins like this.)
Peter wakes up, and he can feel the bad day prying at his chest.
He can barely breathe through it. There is too much emotion to feel anything at all. He is a kaleidoscope. So many colors that color ceases to exist altogether. Color upon color upon color upon color upon-
He pushes the spiral until it wavers and cracks. Watches the fragments of the spin tangle up and crumble in the lines of his hand.
Peter hasn’t hit the numbness yet. This is the rising action. If he’s careful, if he snags Anxiety before Anxiety can snag him, then there will never be a falling.
So he gets out of bed, even though his bones and joints ache and clatter like they’re splitting apart. He stands there, swaying beside his twin mattress, for longer than he’d like to admit. There is heaviness inside him. A heaviness so immense that anyone else might fold and give in to the trajectorial decay.
But Peter Parker is determined. He doesn’t really know why. Maybe it’s some type of twisted curiosity. So far, he’s survived every bad day of his life. Maybe he’s just searching for the one that he doesn’t.
He takes a step: tests the ground, tests his feet, tests his lungs. None of them are working like they should. He walks anyway.
He puts on clothes. He takes those clothes off and puts on others. He takes off that shirt and replaces it with a sweater. He takes off the sweater and puts the original t-shirt back on.
Sometime in the distant past, a comet called Shoemaker-Levy 9 flew too close to Jupiter during its orbit around the sun. For years, the gravitational pull of the planet forced the comet into a drawn-out game of cat and mouse. Orbit after orbit brought Shoemaker-Levy 9 tumbling ever closer to its fate. An inescapable spiral with an inevitable ending.
In 1994, Shoemaker-Levy 9 slammed into Jupiter with a series of explosions that lit up telescopes across the globe.
Peter Parker was a comet, and his orbit was failing. He was in a corkscrew. He’d dance away from destruction just long enough to fear it, and then he’d collapse right back in.
His Jupiter had always been waiting.
He shook his head at the thoughts. He wasn’t stupid. He knew what Depression sounded like. He knew how it twisted his brain into some kind of sick labyrinth, a maze full of shadows even more terrifying than a Minotaur. He forced himself back onto a straight path. He put on some socks and tied his shoelaces too tight and said goodbye to May and started to walk.
The pavement scratches under his sneakers’ rubber soles. Friction. A stopping force.
(But he knew it couldn’t stop him. Gravitational fields could be troublesome things.)
His phone rings. It’s too large in his hand, but he stares at the screen and it feels foreign, small.
He answers, brings the phone up to his face. He misjudges the distance and the impact makes him bite his cheek. Blood fans through his mouth, a bitter-sweet reminder that he’s alive. Born of skin and flesh and organs and bone. An organic creature with fucked up brain chemistry.
“Why have you been walking aimlessly around the city for three hours?”
Peter pauses. “I didn’t realize it was that long.”
“Are you alright?”
Is he alright? No. No, he’s not alright. Very not alright. He’s flying too close to Jupiter. “No.”
“Okay. Okay. I’m coming. I’ll be there in 10.”
The line dies. There is a flicker of Peter that wants to die with it.
Fuck. No. He wants to snarl at Depression, wants to murder it with his bare hands. But then he looks into its eyes and all he sees is something pitiful, something so deeply afraid that its forgotten what fear actually tastes like.
And all he feels is a sick twist of pity. Pity for Depression. Pity for himself. Pity for anyone else who’s ever been caught in the gravitational pull.
After a while, Tony’s Audi pulls up to the curb. He gets in quietly. He waits.
“We’re going away.” Tony says suddenly.
Peter blinks. He presses his fingertips into the seam of the glovebox until they thrum his pulse back down his arm. “Away?”
“Yeah.” His mentor’s eyes dance up and down his body. “Good. You’re wearing sweatpants and sneakers.”
“Why is that good?”
“We’re going hiking.”
“Hiking?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so. And because people who’ve been dissociating all morning don’t get a say in the daily activities. New rule. Just made it up.”
Oh. Right. He’s dissociating. Of course he is. That… that makes sense, actually.
“Oh.”
“You didn’t know?”
“No.”
“Bad day, huh?”
“It’s in my chest. I’m too close to Jupiter.”
Tony’s hands tighten on the wheel until his knuckles go white. Peter wonders if it stings his hands. He makes two fists, tries to remember the sensation of sting.
“You’re talking in abstracts. That means it’s a really bad day.”
He blurts before he thinks. “Have you heard of Shoemaker-Levy 9?”
Tony is patient. He is an open sky of stars. There is chaos in the specifics but consistency in the whole. “It was a comet. Abbreviated as SL9.”
“Yeah.” He opens his fists, holds his hands up to the windscreen and watches sunlight dance through his fingers. He thinks of the plumes of fire curling up from Jupiter. He thinks of SL9 and a literal blaze of glory. “It fell into Jupiter.”
Understanding, light and tentative, spreads through Tony’s shoulders. “It did.”
“I’m too close to Jupiter. I can’t clear it from my orbit. I don’t have the force.”
He’s asking for something, he thinks. He isn’t sure what.
“You’re not going to crash into Jupiter, kid. I won’t let you.”
He drops his hands into his lap. That’s what he wanted, he realizes. He wanted a tether. To be bound to something.
“Okay.”
The city melts into countryside. Peter puts his palm to the glass. Everything blurs but he is still.
--
The trail snakes up and up and up. Tony says there’s a waterfall at the end. Rising action, falling action. Peter sees the pattern.
“It would take you 7 hours to get to Pluto if you could travel at the speed of light.”
Tony sighs. Leaves crunch under his feet. “It’s space metaphors today, huh?”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s okay. Keep telling me about this Pluto point.”
“People think that the asteroid belt is crowded. It isn’t. They’re all alone.” He shivers. When his hands clench, he thinks he can feel his own skin. Walking is easier. Breathing is not. “Space is lonely.”
“They’re asteroids, Peter. They can’t get lonely.”
“Do you get lonely?”
Tony twitches on a step. “No. I have you.”
They walk.
--
They get to the waterfall, and Peter sits on the edge of a rock. His feet dangle under him. He kicks them. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and back and back and-
Tony sits next to him. “Let’s talk.”
Peter breaths through lungs that beg to do anything but. For a minute, he wonders if he’ll cry. He feels like he could. Maybe he should.
He stares at his hands. He thinks. Words are stars and he has to design constellations.
He’s always been shit at art.
“You get used to being afraid.” He is surprised by his own clarity. “It’s all you know.”
Tony seems surprised by it, too. “I know.”
“For some people, bravery is a choice. It isn’t for me. I’m brave or I’m not anything at all.”
“It’s tiring.”
“It’s exhausting.” He wishes he’d just cry, already. It’s like someone hit pause on his breakdown. He’s suspended in it. “Somedays, I don’t have any brave left.”
“Is today one of those days?”
“Yeah.” He picks up a pebble and throws it into the water. He feels an instant pang of regret. “I can’t face it. It’ll hurt too much.”
I’ll hurdle into Jupiter. A stormy splash of vapor and viper and fire.
“So you just don’t.”
“So I just… don’t.”
They sit.
“Everyone will leave me.”
If the sudden topic switch startles Tony, he doesn’t show it. “No, they won’t.”
“Maybe not,” the words feel hollow, full of logic but nothing else, “but I still think it.”
“I won’t leave you.”
It feels like he is shattering. Like he’s been on the edge of this all day and now his lungs are giving out. Throwing in the towel. Raising a white flag.
Jupiter has finally pulled him in.
He wants to scream. Instead, his voice is barely a whisper. “Everyone will leave me. And I don’t… I don’t mind. Nobody owes me anything. It’s just that… I don’t stop wanting people after they’re gone. I don’t stop caring.” He pinches his wrist. He wants to feel. Anything to stop tasting the backwash of agony in his chest. “All the stars are dead. We’re looking at their light from millions of years in the past. I don’t want to chase after dying stars.”
“We all chase after a few dying stars.”
He closes his eyes. “I’m tired, Mister Stark.”
“Yeah, buddy. I know you are.”
He pushes his eyelids up and watches the water tumble. It arcs over rocks, fallen branches and trees. And then it settles into the pond underneath, and it is still. A falling action, a conclusion.
The supernova of change. The quiet of after.
We all chase after a few dying stars.
He understands something, then. Something important.
He is going to chase after things that are already dead. He is going to love people who leave. He is going to live a life handicapped, stumbling along with a backpack of fear and only a thimble of bravery.
But at least he has a thimble, right?
And if he loves people who leave, at least he was a stepping-stone. At least he got a chance to try, even if the try was always doomed.
“Hey, kid?” There’s a duality to Tony’s voice, like he’s saying something significant in its triviality. “I know the world’s knocked you down right now, and you might need a second to catch your breath. But when you get up? Get up snarling.”
Snarling. As in, actively aggressive.
As in, you are not a comet. As in, you can pull yourself out of Jupiter’s orbit.
He takes a deep breath. The air smells like damp moss and turbulent water and the crackle of sticks beneath shoes. It washes through his veins, diffuses through his fingertips.
He feels clean.
Tony is watching him with deep eyes. “Better?”
The water falls. Tony’s arm wraps around his shoulder, and Peter Parker feels his feet on a ground that he made up in his head.
It’s still solid, though. It’s as real as he lets it be, and he’s letting it be the realest thing in the world.
“Better.”
(And sometimes, this is how it ends.
Endings aren’t always sad. Sometimes, they’re hard won. Sometimes, the road to them is a symphony of blood and loss and grief-laden ribs. Sometimes, endings are gentle.
We all chase after a few dying stars. But even if the light dies, at least we got to see it.)