Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Over here, Eliza! Only the small slide for today. We don’t want you getting hurt.” Peter hisses and blows over his hands, chafing them together to warm them up, but they still refuse to work without shaking when he attempts to button up his denim jacket over his hoodie. He settles for tugging it closer over himself and reaching out for the little girl’s hand again.

Peter doesn’t miss the slice of a heartbeat that passes as Eliza hesitates before taking his larger hand, her face creasing with a smile of trust. He often wonders if he’s pushing her too fast, if the gentle touches he occasionally offers her are triggering. Too much like Harrison’s. Still, she insists each time that he’s different (different how? I dunno, Petey, just different) and she doesn’t mind him holding her hand at all. In fact, she looks forward to it.

The boy struggles to tamp down the skepticism and guilt that spring to his own face with the same habitual speed that made Eliza balk in the first place.

“Make me go fast, Pete!” Eliza implores him.

Peter grins. “Sure, but not too fast, okay? You could trip at the bottom and hurt your knees.” He helps her up the ladder of the smaller apple green slide.

Eliza twists around, brushing impatiently at the chocolate friz from her brow. Peter swallows. Shoves down the notion that it’s just like MJ’s fringe. It’s stupid. Weak. He’s been well aware of their resemblance since two years ago, when he first met Eliza.

“I won’t hurt my knees. I’m wearing my jeans today, see?”

“You could still hurt your hands. Let’s just take it easy today, okay?”

“Okay…” Eliza turns back to clamber onto the top of the slide and holds out her arms, already letting out a tiny squeal as Peter pushes her. She never fails to giggle or scream, even though they’ve done this every single Monday afternoon.

They go through the motions again another three or four times. Peter wonders a little venomously to himself if she’s only affecting her excitement for his sake. She may be barely ten years old and very easily distracted, but she has the emotional intelligence of a near adult, and somewhere along the line must have figured out that Peter derives more joy than she does from park days.

“Now the swings!” she demands, already stumbling over her own boots and racing toward the swingset on the other side of the playground.

Peter allows himself another small semblance of a grin. He glances back over his shoulder at the tower behind them and figures Eliza’s mother won’t be home for another fifteen minutes, at least, since she hasn’t texted yet. The lights are definitely still out from the window of their fifth-floor apartment.

Peter coughs into his fist and feigns rolling his eyes in reluctance when Eliza beckons repeatedly at him from the turquoise swing. She cups her mouth and shouts, “You’re slower than my great-great uncle!”

“Am not,” he grumbles, and slowly draws his hands from his pockets. He crooks them in front of him and advances on her, wiggling his fingers in his classic tickle torture threat.

“No!” Eliza shrieks. She leaps off the swing and dashes to the other side, then catches herself against the support beam and peaks around with her wide black eyes.

Dark, round, quiet eyes, full of perceptiveness and intelligence.

Just like--

“C’mere, or I’m not swinging you anymore!”

Eliza laughs again and joins him back at the turquoise swing. She chatters on as he pulls her back and launches her gently into the air. Something about her classmate Eric who bragged about getting an A on their earth science test when she knows there was only one in the class who got an A, and it was her best friend Kyla--and how Kyla laughed over recess and suggested she and Eliza should kiss just to see if it was really what the boys cracked it up to be…

Eliza interrupts her own meandering narrative to shout, “Higher, Pete! Higher!”

“Okay, but you gotta hold on!”

“I am holding on, see?”

Peter shakes his head fondly and complies with her request. He grabs the chains of the swing and pulls her back about half a foot farther before releasing her. She lets out a wild whoop. “Catch me, Pete!”

“I will!”

“Faster!”

“Make sure you’re holding on!”

“Hey Petey, check this out!” Just as he lets go of her chains, Eliza springs up on her feet to stand with her boots braced against the corners of the swing.

Peter’s eyes widen. Eliza’s curly ponytail bobs in the gust of wind, a stark contrast against the cotton cloud in the sky above them. Her left hand releases its grip on the chain to find a higher purchase. There’s still an uncontrollable laugh bubbling up from her, it’s snatched from her lips by the momentum of the upswing, it’s caught and shuttered in her throat as a gasp. Peter’s heart lurches into his mouth.

“Eliza--!”

Screaming. Screaming. Too high-pitched.

Where is she?

On auto-pilot, detached, as if watching himself from somewhere above, Peter lunges for the tiny body and wraps his arms around her mere fractions of a second before they land on the ground and the breath is knocked clean from his lungs. Wood chips go flying everywhere.

“Are you--are you--”

“I’m so sorry, Pete! I shouldn’t have let go.”

“You’re okay,” Peter chokes out. “You’re okay. You’re breathing. Are you hurt? Did you hit your head?”

Eliza sits up, and ridiculously, the first thing she does is to rearrange her sparkly purple infinity scarf. She reaches forward then to brush away the hair from Peter’s brow and peer up at him. “You saved me. I didn’t hit anything, I think. You look like you hit your head.”

“I’ll be fine,” Peter responds through his teeth. He gives her another doubtful once-over. Sure enough, she seems unharmed. A little shaken and teary-eyed, but alert and far more worried about him, of all people.

Unconsciously, Peter rubs two fingers against his sternum, as if the useless little motion will help the air return faster to his chest. He winces as he sits up beside the girl. It’s amazing, he thinks to himself, it’s amazing, it’s horrifying, how just fifteen seconds ago this same little girl was hurtling through the air with a scream behind her tongue, headed for the ground and certain injury or death.

Fluffy curls. Caramel skin--dark eyes--that small gasp no one else hears before she realized she could die--

No. No no nonono.

Breathe. Forget about MJ. Just breathe. It didn’t happen. Not again. Eliza’s safe.

Breathe.

The shrill vibration of the phone in his jacket pocket makes Peter jump.

Starch Man, the caller ID reads. God, he should have changed it back from that stupid pun eons ago.

His first instinct is to reject the call. His thumb is ready, hovering over the screen to swipe down, but he fights against it.

No more hiding shit from each other, got it, Underoos? That goes for me, too. We made a pact to go into this whole therapy thing together so it’s gotta be a team effort. And I’m not just talking bullets or stab wounds.

“Hey, Mr. Stark,” he mumbles into the receiver. He already knows he sounds wrecked.

The man on the other line seems to give a deliberate pause, as if weighing whether to bombard him with questions right away or let Peter bring it up on his own. Apparently Tony decides on the latter. “Hey, kid. You busy?”

“Uh…” Peter glances over at Eliza, who is still staring up at him wide-eyed as she kneels beside him. He presses his lips into a shaky but reassuring smile and motions for her to go over to the Tic Tac Toe blocks. She nods and plods a few feet away to give him some privacy.

“...Just babysitting,” Peter finally answers. “Mrs. Nieves should be home in ten minutes.”

“Oh, afternoon with Eliza, right? I forgot it was a Monday. Lost track of time.”

“Like you keep track in the first place, caffeine-guzzler.” Peter meant the jest as an invitation to ease back into their characteristic banter, but even he knows the second the words leave his mouth that the joke falls flat.

It’s only been two days since they talked and Peter already feels rusty. Out of practice: as if it’s a metaphor for something bigger.

He supposes suppressing the memories of a funeral just that past Saturday would do that to you.

“No, I...I knew it was Monday. I was just being stupid. I didn’t realize you would--uh, that Mrs. Nieves would still--considering--you know what, forget it.”

“No, no, I know what you mean.” Peter coughs into the crook of his sleeve. “It’s okay. I just--it--” He chokes on his own words. He didn’t realize he still lacked for breath.

“Kid.” Tony’s tone is pressing now, more urgent. “What’s going on?”

“Can’t,” Peter whispers.

He sucks in the air through his nose with all the force he has left in him. It burns, icy, and his eyes almost sting with moisture at the pain of something other than the knife of panic inside him. He can’t find the handle; he doesn’t even know where the blade begins and where the tip ends. They always taught that wounds with exit points were easier--or was that with bullets? He’s survived a bullet before. Stab wounds, too. They say you shouldn’t pull the dagger out without a way to stitch yourself right back up, unless you want to bleed to death.

Because at the end of it all, that’s what everything leads to, isn’t it? Entry points. Exit wounds. If Peter concentrates hard enough (if the drag of the breath that doesn’t exist doesn’t cave in his ribs first) he can taste the blood pooling in his mouth. Maybe he’s bitten down to keep from crying out. Lord knows it tastes exactly the way it did when he first heard the crack of her spine.

“Peter. Peter. Answer me, buddy, please.”

“I’m here.” The two words cost him another half a lifetime of air.

“You’re having a panic attack.” Peter knows this. “I’m gonna need to you focus on my voice so we can talk you down from it, okay?” Peter knows this. He knows this. Rage blooms unwillingly under his fingernails.

“C’mon. In on one, out on five. One...two...three...four...five...hold it. Four...three...two...one...zero. Let’s go again.”

And again, and again, and again, and again…

Peter’s thinking in circles now. This isn’t the first time the knife has bitten into his flesh. It has always manifested in different ways--a shooting pain in his arm, a twinge in the center of his chest that knocks him back. A stab of light and salt behind his eyes. The slow, soft, maddening reflection of those he’s killed staring back at him from the glowing star stickers on his ceiling at night.

“...Three...two...one...zero. There we go. That’s it. Keep breathing. You’ve got those wonderful super-enhanced ears, listen to my breathing and match it. Keep going.”

His lungs expand again, and Peter hates it.

He doesn’t deserve this. He doesn’t deserve to know he’s alive.

Perhaps marginally worse is the knowledge that the borrowed breaths may keep the blade at bay, but the moment he is alone and too weary to keep lying to himself, he will feel it lodging in his throat again.

Peter rasps out, “Thank you.”

“You don’t have to. That’s what I’m here for.” Tony sounds sad. So sad. Peter’s head is beginning to cloud with a fuzziness too thick for him to fathom why.

“I didn’t panic like this when I got shot.”

“You didn’t panic at all. And not when you got hit with a sledgehammer, either,” Tony agrees. “But this is different.”

“It wasn’t even me. I don’t know why I keep acting like this.”

A sharp intake of breath through the nose, as if Tony has to physically asphyxiate his snarky reply. “It’s because it wasn’t you that got hurt that you’re reacting like this. Reacting, Peter. Not acting. Remember what Dr. Nayan told us.”

“Okay. Okay.” Peter can hardly hear his own whisper. He digs the heel of his palm into his eye. “Sorry.”

“Ah-ah.”

“Sor--uh, yeah.”

“Better.”

Peter shifts abruptly so he can watch Eliza’s movements from across the playground. How could he have forgotten even for a second that she’s still there? Her brow is drawn, but she plasters on a toothy smile and waves. He reciprocates the gesture.

“Is this the first time this has happened since…?”

“...The funeral?”

“Well, I was gonna say ‘since it happened,’ but yeah. The funeral. Let’s go with that.” Tony knows Peter understands the switch of timeline. He was there to hold Peter in his own trembling arms the week before, when the boy stumbled out the front door of the apartment before the man could even raise a hand to knock. They don’t speak of that night. Peter didn’t seem capable of speaking even then, though the windows of his eyes were unlocked completely for the first time and Tony looked into them. He stared at them and he wished with the horror of a visceral desperation that he could unsee the abyss staring right back at him.

Peter didn’t need to describe the body bag or the broken beams. Nor did Tony need to imagine them. The news was enough. More than enough.

“Yeah, it’s been the first time,” Peter says truthfully. “We went to mass yesterday and...well. That was pretty cool. Kept my mind off things for a bit.”

Tony’s silence on the other end is inquisitive. They both know Peter senses it and simply chooses not to answer.

“Went to school today, which was manageable,” Peter continues conversationally. His throat still feels raspy. He presses the pads of his thumb and pointer finger against the inner corners of his eyes.

“People left stuff taped to her locker. The teachers--they--had a little talk. I guess you could call it. I didn’t think they would, since they waited so long after the news came out anyway. Maybe…” Peter forces a sigh through his nose. It burns. “It seems like...I don’t know how to explain it. How I felt when I was listening to them. Like it actually only hit them now that she’s...gone, and--and they’re human too, and they couldn’t process it, just like the rest of this bunch of seventeen-year-olds that they’re in charge of and...I guess. I guess. I don’t know. I can’t explain myself right now.”

Tony assures him softly, “I understand you just fine.”

“...Sort of like a tribute? No. No. Not that. I can’t…”

“Peter? Are you having another--”

“No,” the boy says quickly. “No, I’m not. It’s just wrong. I can’t say that word. It’s not--”

The kid doesn’t even choke on his words. It sounds more as though his vocabulary has simply failed him. His brain has short-circuited. It’s a funny thing to Tony how grief does that to people. Everyone thinks it’s a passive thing, a pain that just sits there, just exists in your chest and forces moisture into your lungs and eyes until time’s up and the grief has to go. They don’t realize how autonomous, how animated of a monster this grief can be. How it can shut down eloquence, paint the sun inside a boy’s soul a permanent black, how it can tame the warrior and activate the rage inside the dumb.

You can’t say the word because it will make it real, Tony responds in his head. It will only give a name and a timestamp to the distance between you and the girl you all lost.

Tony could say it. He probably should. After all, what he has is only secondhand grief. Not the kind that robs you directly of words and dreams.

Instead, what comes out of his mouth is: “It’s okay. You don’t have to say it. You probably shouldn’t.”

“I didn’t know they cared.”

“Yeah, well, sometimes they show it in different ways.”

“Sometimes it’s too late,” says Peter.

“I think you showed her well enough.”

Peter laughs. It’s jarring and bitter, sounding like he knows something Tony doesn’t. In a way, that’s very true. Tony never felt the things Peter had to feel when he was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.

The kid’s chuckle dies abruptly. A small silence. “Mrs. Nieves is here,” he says with a wooden tongue.

Tony wonders if he’s lying.

“Okay, bud. Okay. Go take care of Eliza first. Call me right back, though? I want to make sure you’re okay.”

“Better now. Talk to you soon, thanks--” The call drops, or ends, before Peter himself can finish his own sentence.

Tony knows he won’t be getting that return call.

--

When May opens the door and the amber light from the hallway strikes half of her face, Tony can see her hair pooling around her collarbones with that characteristic one-directional S-wave that says she just pulled it out of her workday bun. He still can’t get used to the sight of the long bob, to be honest. Not because it doesn’t suit her--Pepper has mentioned once or twice something about the new length doing “wonders for her bone structure”--but because it serves as an inconvenient time marker for when everything changed. Years from now, when the names of years blur together into decades, he won’t have to dig around in his memory to recall just when Michelle Jones died. The image of May Parker on a Friday night in March 2018, auburn hair freshly chopped and colored, standing in the middle of an unlit kitchen in front of the glow of an open refrigerator as she ran her hands through her sobbing nephew’s curls, is enough of a timestamp for Tony.

May draws a deep breath. “He’s sleeping.”

Tony’s mouth twists. He rubs at his goatee with his free hand, the one that isn’t holding a ridiculous papaya-colored platter of mint brownies. “Yeah? That what he told you to tell me?”

May’s only answer is a sigh and a step back to hold the door open wider for him to come in. Tony looks at her again as he passes over the threshold, truly looks at her this time, and he almost flinches to see the same kind of aimless sadness in her eyes as the one that is welling up in his stomach. It’s directionless and without genesis, as if they’ve just stumbled on the realization that this is the true normal and the happiness has just been an odd interruption in their lives.

“Yeah, well, he might as well be unconscious to the world.” Under ordinary circumstances, May’s tone would be clipped. Now she just sounds slow and bone-tired. Her hands move on autopilot to take the platter from Tony and set it on the counter. She lets out a strange hum as she undoes the saran wrap and reaches into a cabinet above her for the Tupperware. “Tell Pepper I said thanks for the brownies.”

“How’d you know it’s from her?”

May spares him a raised brow over the gold wire rim of her glasses. “Baked goods and ceramic? I might have believed that you took a random stab at making food, but cutting it up and putting it in any presentable way is where you draw the line.”

That draws a genuine laugh of surprise from the man. He remembers the last humongous batch of Hershey’s Kiss cookies that he and Peter made at the tower last summer. He hadn’t even bothered taking them off the baking sheet before handing them over to May.

May piles six pieces of the brownies onto a dinner plate before moving to seal up the Tupperware. Before he can think, Tony shoots out a hand to swap out two of the pieces on the plate for some from the plastic container.

“Corners,” he says with an apologetic shrug. “Pete likes them.”

Something in the tension around May’s shoulders melts. She leans forward again to seal the container, with slower and more deliberate movements, as if the little comment has made her come back to herself. She slides the Tupperware on top of the toaster oven and steals a piece from the plate. Tony’s already turned with his back to the counter, elbows against the tiles, munching.

“He won’t talk to me,” May says, after a little while.

“One of his best friends just passed away and he’s feeling survivor’s guilt because he was there at the scene,” says Tony. “I may only have known the kid for three years and change, but I’m guessing this is classic Peter. I mean, after all it’s just like…”

“...Just like Ben,” May finishes for him. She holds the brownie between her teeth for a second so she can hoist herself up on the counter and rest her back against the cabinet.

“D’you think going back to school right away was such a good idea?”

“Well, I knew a lot of things there would remind him of what happened, but...he insisted it was good to keep himself busy. I couldn’t really argue with that logic. One of the only things that kept him afloat after Ben died was his robot building. He could stay up for hours at night tinkering with the stuff he got from the dumpster. It was more like a mania, actually.”

Tony conceals an internal wince. So much for hoping the kid would be better than him.

“Besides, he said seeing Ned would help him a lot.”

Tony doesn’t doubt it. The two boys have been dating steadily since that weird alien reprisal last year, and if you were to ask him on a day when he’s feeling charitable, Tony might even admit the two nerds have a bond twice as strong as the one he’s got with Rhodey.

“Poor kid.” Tony wipes his hands on his jeans. At May’s confused look--likely triggered by Tony’s offhand tone--Tony clarifies: “I mean Ned. It can’t be easy, dealing with one death and then a grieving boyfriend.”

“Well, I don’t mean to--y’know...invade his privacy or anything but I thought I heard raised voices from his bedroom last night. They were supposed to be on a phone call. Peter hasn’t mentioned anything at all to you?”

“About his romantic affairs? Quite the contrary, Ms. Parker. Got the mouth of a venus flytrap when he thinks he’ll get teased for it.”

May rolls her eyes at him. Pushing her glasses to the top of her head, she says primly, “Well, aren’t you the expert at teenage wrangling.”

“I’ve dated two people, May. Two. Nothing else in my widely publicized history could count as a real relationship. As it is, we should be thanking the powers that be that your kid isn’t actually asking me for dating advice.”

To her credit, May doesn’t even bat an eye at the careless mention of two. As far as she knows, he’s only ever really ‘dated’ Pepper, and he’s fairly certain Peter would never mention Jesús to her. Not after they made a tacit pact up there on the roof of the cathedral, watching the sunset burn away the rain together.

Tony sighs and crams the rest of his brownie in his mouth. He feels like he’s been doing that a lot lately--giving fatherly sighs of worry here and there. “In all seriousness, though, I want to make sure we’re giving him what he needs to get better. There’s always this guidance counselor talk that going to school, keeping busy, seeing your friends, yada yada yada, it’s all going to kickstart the ‘healing’ process.” He ignores the look that May rolls at him at his use of air quotes. “I dunno about that. I dunno. I guess it works for some people. Rhodey, that dear War Machine prancing around on bionic legs? You ever met him? The guy lives for routine. He’d fall apart if anyone so much as suggested spontaneity while he was grieving.”

“But you’re the total opposite, and Peter is just like you, is what you’re trying to tell me,” May finishes for him.

Tony crosses his arms and tucks his hands under his armpits. Bounces on the balls of his feet a few times. “Don’t say it like you believe I’m a self-absorbed asshat.”

“What if I actually believe you’re a self-absorbed asshat?” May shoves the plate with the remaining two brownies at him.

“God, May, no.” When May withdraws the plate, he snatches it back. “Ah-ah-ah. No to the asshat, yes to the brownies. The last thing I need is a self-destructive, guilt-ridden, robot-building, sleep-deprived mini-me wandering around Queens fighting off crime with his Iron Man backpack.”

Something in May’s expression softens. She cocks her head, as if to get Tony to make eye contact with her, but he’s a master at avoidance. The sniff and scrunch of his nose that follows is confirmation enough of his allergy to emotional conversations, still intact.

“You just don’t want your mini-me wandering around like that because you’re afraid he’ll end up the same way you did. I’m sorry nobody was there for you when you needed them most--”

“Rhodey was there.”

May bites her lip. “Right. Rhodey was there.”

Tony, ever the genius despite his pretense of ineptitude at sentimentality, picks up on the unfinished tone at the end of her sentence. “He was there when I let him be there for me.”

May nods. “But things are different now, Tony. They can be different for Peter. There’s an adult in his life. Two adults. Even three.”

Tony grins humorlessly. “I highly doubt Happy would take well to being called ‘uncle’.”

“Uh-huh. The same way you take remarkably well to your mini-me looking up to you like a father figure.”

Tony mimes gagging. “You want a father figure? Call Pepper for the job.”

“I always did think Ms. Potts looked way taller than you in the rescue armor.”

Both adults jerk their heads up at the gravelly drag of the teenage voice from the doorway. It’s comical, really, how Tony and May mirror each other’s cartoonishly guilty expressions, as if they’ve been caught stealing from the brownie bin instead of discussing Peter’s grief behind his back.

Tony licks the chocolate off his finger before pointing it in Peter’s direction. “You know I’m sensitive about that.”

Peter arches a brow. “You’re Italian. It’s in your genes.” He squeezes past them into the tiny kitchen, batting away Tony’s finger from his face.

“She wears heels inside the suit. Heels.”

“Yeah, you keep telling yourself that.”

“The rest of the brownies are still out here, hon,” May says, reaching out a foot to toe the back of Peter’s knee when he hasn’t turned around from the open freezer.

“I know, I’m just looking for the rest of the rocky road.”

“Behind the Freezer Mate with the mixed vegetables, kid.”

That actually gets Peter to lean back from the freezer with a squint. “How do you know what’s in our fridge, Mr. Stark?”

“How do you not know what’s in your own fridge, Mr. Spidey Sense?”

“It doesn’t work that way!”

Tony has the decency to keep the volume of his snicker to a minimum, and even makes up for the jab by handing Peter a spoon from the drawer. Peter takes it with a pout of suspicion.

“She probably has Scandinavian warrior blood,” the kid mutters over a mouthful of ice cream and crumbled brownie.

“Thin ice, Parker. Real thin.”

“Come to think of it, Rhodey was mentioning something over Thanksgiving about your phase in the ’80s,” May muses. “Something about...I quote… ‘platform shoes’?”

“Betrayal sure is second nature to you Parkers, isn’t it?”

“I taught her everything she knows,” Peter deadpans, just as May hops off the counter and mouths over his head, “Let him live with his delusions.” Peter is too busy to even notice the two adults having a full conversation over the top of his hair, now that he’s scrolling through his phone for what can only be a screenshot of aforementioned blackmail photo from Rhodey.

Suddenly the kid’s thumb stills over the screen. Tony glances back at his face in time to see his visage darken.

“Hey. Gimme the phone,” he says with a gruffness that’s not unkind.

“Just a second, I know it’s here.”

“I don’t give a crap about the picture, kid. Give me the--”

“Yeah, you do, you just wanna--”

“Peter. Look at me.”

A tremor that resembles a spasm courses through Pete’s shoulders. He slides the phone across the counter without a word, refusing to meet Tony’s eyes.

Behind the kid, May runs her hands over face. She is the picture of regret, of useless sympathy, like an echo of the woman lost in her own trembling bones as she let her seventeen-year-old nephew cling to her flannel shirt that still smelled like Ben after all these years.

“Pete, please.”

May’s hand comes up to cover her mouth, perhaps to hide the wobble of her lip at the foreign softness in Tony’s voice.

“Sorry,” the kid chokes out. “Sorry--I--went on the app and I didn’t realize--they were...she was...it’s still there.”

The bob of Tony’s Adam’s apple as he swallows is palpable in the curtain of tension between them all. He doesn’t realize until now just how close he’s been leaning in the boy’s direction; with a wave of uncertainty, he takes a step to the side. Clears his throat and shoves one hand into the pocket of his jeans. The other, deceivingly steady in the air, hovers over Peter’s shoulder for a sliver of hesitation before it comes down with the heaviness of his clumsy comfort.

When May realizes that Tony won’t speak--can’t speak: his throat is stopped up with sandpaper, it seems--she reaches out to squeeze the kid’s other shoulder. “No need to apologize, Peter. It’s nobody’s fault.”

“I--”

“Listen to your aunt, Peter. There’s nothing to be sorry for.”

“I just…” Peter’s voice trails off. He sniffs, almost as if he’s crying, but the sound is dry and there is no moisture leaking from his eyes or nose. Both adults raise their eyebrows almost in tandem when he doesn’t continue for a long while.

“What is it, baby?”

“Just. The, uh.” Peter coughs into his balled up fist behind the sleeve of his oversized hoodie. He lifts the almost-empty carton of rocky road ice cream in a gesture of vagueness. “I was just gonna say, the brownies. Are really good. Yeah. Please tell Ms. Potts I said thank you.”

May’s elbow finds the side of Tony’s arm. Whether by accident or design, it hardly matters at this point. She pockets the phone from the counter, at the same time trying a comforting smile that comes out like a crease across her face. “Tony will definitely tell her you loved it. Just…” A sigh. “Why don’t you take a break from social media for a tiny bit, hon? Maybe sign off for a few days?”

Peter neither argues nor nods in agreement. The only sign of acknowledgment is the infinitesimal lift of his head in his aunt’s direction.

In all this time, Tony hasn’t moved his hand from Peter’s shoulder. The man clears his throat again, and this time, Peter graces him with a wide-eyed stare. Just as his mentor suspected, his eyes are dry. “I’ll tell her, Pete, I promise. I won’t forget.”

The kid’s jaw rolls. He knows there’s a hidden meaning there to be found; he simply has not stumbled upon the energy to decipher Tony’s words.

Tony chuckles humorlessly. “Funny how the women in our lives are always taller than us, huh?”

That draws out a surprised bark of a laugh from the kid. He glances up at May, who at that precise moment shoots Tony a look with a tiny spark in her eye. Maybe he isn’t that bad at this, this whole teenage wrangling thing.

“That’s why she was me and Ned’s bouncer,” Peter remarks, almost as if Tony and May themselves are in on his boyfriend’s inside joke.

“I mean, from what Rhodey honeybunches tells me, your boyfriend isn’t that bad himself at packing a--” Tony’s jest is interrupted by the shrill ringtone that can only mean one person is calling. He can’t help scowling at the ceiling before holding up a finger to the Parkers--more out of habit, really--and answering his phone.

“I thought our rousing little PTA meeting wasn’t scheduled until tomorrow, Spangles,” Tony grumbles into the receiver. “What’s going on?”

Steve, true to his no-nonsense military commander persona, doesn’t even miss a beat on the other end of the line or rise to Tony’s bait. “Nat’s alarm system just went off forty seconds ago.”

Tony swears. “Already? They weren’t supposed to--”

“--Make a move for another three days, yes, I know. Clint’s already heading down there, since he was closest. Nat and I are taking our bikes there right now.”

“If you’re taking a covert route, lemme come in through Broadway. I’ll bring the party. Big and bold, as always.” Tony pinches the phone between his ear and shoulder and taps his wristwatch twice, activating FRIDAY to summon his suit.

A smile seems to lift the edge of Steve’s voice. “Big and bold, as always. We’ll be waiting, Stark.”

“Hey, is Banner--?” But the line is already dead.

Peter is still rooted to the same spot in the kitchen, staring at Tony with an unreadable shadow over his face. “Aliens?”

“Nope,” says Tony, popping the p. “Worse. AMMO.”

“Peter,” May warns him, with steel in her voice this time.

“I’m not going.”

“You listen to your aunt, Underoos. Every time I say--hold on, what?”

“I’m not going,” Peter repeats, with a calm that should be reassuring to both adults but which only strikes Tony as eerie. For the briefest second, he stumbles internally, unable to read the boy who has been as open as a book with him for almost three years.

May obviously doesn’t buy it. “I know where you hide your suit. I’m going there right now, young man, so if you’re planning anything…”

“I’m serious!” Peter’s voice pitches up half an octave. “May, Mr. Stark, you guys have enough to worry about. Actually, Mr. Stark, would it be all right if we both went to the Tower while you and Mr. Rogers and the rest hash it out?”

Tony opens the apartment door and throws up his left hand just in time for his compressed nanosuit to come flying in and attach itself to his forearm, closing over the rest of his body with the metallic clink of a thousand scales. “Kid, I can’t believe I’m saying this to the resident teenage daredevil, but that’s the smartest thing you’ve said in your entire super-pajama career. FRIDAY, would you be a dear and call Happy and Rhodey to come escort my precious cargo back to the Tower?”

“Boss, Colonel Rhodes has told me to tell you, and I quote, ‘the precious cargo better not be a bundle of red spandex and puppy dog eyes’,” says FRIDAY.

“It’s not spandex!” Tony and Peter protest in unison. May reappears from one of the bedrooms with a duffel bag miraculously packed and zipped, and throws a hand in the air at the two of them.

“Tell Rhodey the precious cargo is free of all spandex and teenage angst, and to track me to Broadway as soon as he’s done, please and thank you.”

“Already sent, sir.”

“Perfect.” Tony manually snaps his faceplate closed and flashes a peace sign at the Parkers. “Don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone.”

“Like you?”

“Thin ice, Parker.”

“Love you, too!” Peter hollers down at Tony’s Iron Man-clad figure speeding toward the lobby and out the main entrance of the complex.

Chapter Text

Tony doesn’t know what he expected when he returned to the Tower with the rest of the Avengers, but it certainly was not to Peter and May both huddled on a couch in his lab in the dark. Much to his confusion, FRIDAY runs a few extra scans of his face, prints and body before finally letting the door slide open.

Peter jerks awake and stumbles to his feet at the first scuff of Tony’s shoe on the concrete. “Mr. Stark! You’re back! We were just, uh, we were just, well, I thought we could watch the action from here, and…”

“What did you do to FRIDAY?”

“Nice to see you, too, Mr. Stark.”

Tony rolls his eyes. “I thought your boyfriend was the hacker and you were the chemist. Explanations, now. Go.”

“I am the chemist in the relationship,” Peter quibbles, daring to sound almost offended.

Tony curves a brow at him.

“Okay, so maybe I tweaked her a little bit and added just a couple more lines of security code.”

There’s a rustle as May rouses from her light doze on the couch. An olive fleece blanket is thrown haphazardly over her, enmeshed with Peter’s distinctive dark red one. In her stupor she pulls both closer around her body and shuffles to her feet. “Peter wanted to make sure that there was a last line of defense against anyone entering the Tower who might not be you,” she says, voice scratchy.

Tony glances at his watch. Half past one in the morning. The team must have been out for a total of four hours or so, and in that span of time, the kid has rewritten his AI’s security code, compulsively neatened up the lab tables and set up camp with a nest of blankets and goddamn candles between the couch and the shelves.

“Candles,” Tony repeats aloud, as if physically incapable of saying or processing anything else.

“In his defense, those were my idea,” says May.

“Ms. Potts is probably gonna love it.”

Tony just stares at Peter, slack-jawed. His mind is cycling rapidly between this kid rewrote my AI’s code and holy shit, this kid REWROTE my AI’s code. Peter fidgets visibly before his gaze.

“I’ll change it right back,” the kid blurts out.

May is suddenly very much awake as she moves toward Tony’s side. “Tony, can I have a word with you outside?”

“I’d just be able to hear you guys, you know,” Peter grouches.

“FRIDAY, soundproof the lab, please.” A blink of the lights confirms Tony’s command. At that, the man jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “Alternatively, you can go down to the kitchen, Spiderling. Pizzas abound. Oh, and your favorite green rage monster might be down there as well.”

“Tony,” May sighs, the instant the kid has slipped into the elevator at the end of the hall.

“He rewrote my code.”

“I did warn him you’d react this way.”

“I specifically said don’t do anything stupid. That’s a very distinct and very recent memory in my mind.”

“Tony,” May says again. This time, it’s sharp. “He didn’t do anything stupid. I’ve got his suit here in the duffel bag with me and he knows it, and not once has he tried to put it on and give us the slip. He did exactly as you asked and as he promised.”

“A real anomaly I’ve gotta look into, if we’re being honest.”

“He’s scared.”

“I was scared. He could’ve--he could’ve gotten tripped up by the failsafes in the code and initiated lockdown by accident! Nobody would’ve been able to get in, then, because he was freaking programming the thing to keep anyone out! That would have been a whole ’nother glorious pickle in itself.”

“Tony. Are you even listening? Peter is terrified.”

Then, and only then, does Tony’s mouth snap shut with a click.

May drops her forehead into her hand with a sigh. A chunk of hair slips from her messy bun and onto her cheek, which is now finely dusted with age lines. Her tone when she speaks again is barely audible. “He just lost a friend, Tony. A best friend. Someone he loved. He’s lost his parents, his uncle Ben...now MJ...he may not talk about his fears much, or at all, but he doesn’t need to say anything for me to be able to tell that he’s petrified of the idea of losing you. He was glued to the live feed of the battle tonight until he fell asleep. Which was just a few minutes before you came back, I might add.”

Tony swallows. “You’re right,” he replies after a while. “He didn’t do anything stupid. That was--that was incredibly reckless, yeah, but also genius, to add the layers of security. Even I might not have thought of that under the same circumstances.”

The corner of May’s mouth quirks upward in a soft hint of wistfulness. “I know you’re scared of losing him too.”

“Scared shitless,” Tony agrees without missing a beat. “Those AMMO fuckers--” He stops. May pushes the glasses up higher on her nose as a way to prompt him, but he shakes his head and folds his arms instead. “It’s not that he was scared of losing me, May. He’s scared of losing you. Holing you up here and getting FRIDAY to block everybody else out? He was protecting you.”

“He was awfully accommodating of my whim for candles,” May chuckles.

“I’m not cleaning up any of the spilled wax.” Tony sniffs. “That’s not to say you can’t keep them here as long as you want. If, uh, if you want. Listen, next time the kid stays up watching the news, just tell him the war stories sound better when I come back and tell them myself, okay?”

May is rubbing a suspicious hand over her eye and the side of her face. “Yeah,” she whispers, voice cracking a little bit on the single syllable. “Yeah. Or you could tell him yourself.”

“I’m telling you, betrayal runs in the Parkers’ blood.”

--

The pizza tastes like wood on Peter’s tongue. He doesn’t even remember or care if he picked up the pepperoni or sausage one.

“Save some for the guy in raggedy pants, will you?”

Peter turns with a smile pasted on his face. Dr. Bruce Banner is limping toward the breakfast bar with a new lavender t-shirt that contrasts comically with the loose, ripped corduroys hanging low on his hips.

“Dr. Banner! You should come sit. Don’t you, uh, shouldn’t you be getting checked out at medical?”

Bruce reaches over Peter’s arm with a muttered sorry to grab two cold veggie slices. “Just a twisted ankle. Miscalculated a jump from a thirty-story building and landed a little funny. Don’t worry, it was mostly the other guy that took the brunt of it.”

Peter rewards him with one of his characteristic wide-eyed looks. He may not stutter around Tony Stark anymore, but Bruce Banner is and forever will be an exception to Peter’s fading hero worship.

“So,” he whispers reverently, almost conspiratorially. “How’d it go? Did you take them down? Beat ’em back like dogs with their tails between their legs?”

A smile tugs at Bruce’s lips. He takes great care to rearrange a spinach leaf and chunk of feta cheese on one of his slices. “You could say that, but you can never be so sure. From what I gathered from Steve, though, sounds like we rounded up all the serums that AMMO was planning to release.”

“Release?” Peter frowns.

“Into the city’s water supply,” Nat’s cool voice answers from the living room. She strides by the pizza boxes and plucks out a sausage slice for herself.

“Hi, Ms. Romanoff.”

“Nat.”

“Ms. Nat.” Peter’s frown deepens. “I thought Mr. Rogers said they were using syringes. Like, injecting actual people.”

Bruce barely suppresses a shudder. Nat, for her part, lets the muscle around her eyes tighten as the only sign of her unease. “To be clear, they’re using both.”

“Clint and Rhodey carried back crates of the stuff,” Bruce volunteers. “Syringes, vials, bottles…”

“Giving away prized spy secrets, are we?”

Bruce, who is polishing one of the lenses of his spectacles on his shirt, points the ear piece in Nat’s direction. “Syringes, vials, bottles, to an undisclosed location.”

Peter pretends to tap his chin in thought. “Hm, either Basement 2-C or 2-D, then.”

Nat pauses mid-chew to roll the boy a dry look. “Remind me again what Tony sees in you, munchkin.”

“It’s like they’re polar opposites,” Bruce deadpans without missing a beat.

“Very funny.”

Nat wipes her fingers efficiently on a spare napkin. “No poking around the basement, Spiderling. That shit is dangerous.”

“I know.”

“Tony would freak out if you touched any of that stuff,” Bruce adds.

“I know.”

“I know it’s tempting. For science and all that. You may be Spider-Man, but you’re not immune to the chemicals. Most especially not you. That stuff hasn’t been tested properly yet and I’d prefer that I go over its exact side effects before we let any other people with non-human DNA go near it.”

Peter swallows the last of his crust with a bob of his head. “Yeah, Dr. Banner. I know.”

That finally gets the scientist to stop with a blink. His gaze flits to Nat’s and then back to the kid’s bowed head. Peter appears to be examining a fascinating pattern of threads on the leg of his jeans.

“Well, you’re easily mollified today.”

“Don’t question it,” Nat rejoins, as she takes a swig from a Poland Spring bottle of a clear liquid that is most definitely not water. “You scientists always look a gift horse in the mouth.”

Bruce ignores her in favor of observing Peter’s visage more closely. Unsurprisingly, the kid refuses to look at either of them. He’s rubbing the pad of his middle finger over the palm of his left hand in an absent-minded sort of way.

“I was surprised we didn’t see a rebellious Spider-Kid swinging into the battle at the last minute,” Bruce says softly. “You mad at Tony for keeping you on lockdown here?”

Peter’s stomach twists against his will. His throat is dry and a dull pounding has taken up residence at the back of his skull. He almost wishes the moisture would spring to his eyes right now--anything to relieve the pressure that’s been building and building behind his ribcage--but when he blinks, all he feels is the sting of every silent gasp for breath inside him that refuses to fall asleep.

“He didn’t keep me on lockdown,” he rasps out, finally. Shrugs. “I thought Mr. Stark has enough to worry about when I don’t listen to him.”

Slowly, Nat lowers her plastic bottle to the counter. Her eyes are icy with that glint that says she’s about to call bullshit. But at the last moment, Bruce catches her gaze and gives an infinitesimal shake of his head.

“I’m sorry you missed out on the action, but I’m not sorry at all you came to that decision. You know how Tony’s been on edge about this...AMMO thing.” Another gesture from Bruce with his glasses. “We all are. We just want to make sure young mutants like you, and especially you, are safe.” Bruce’s voice is still soft, so, so soft that something wrenches even deeper in Peter’s stomach. Suddenly his mind begins to scream at him that he needs to flee. Just escape. His hearing has whited out around him, as if he’s trapped on a different frequency wave from the others altogether.

Not a panic attack. Not again, after he told himself over and over today that it’s okay. He’s okay. Everyone’s okay.

Okay. Okay.

His hand starts to tremble violently. He shoves it under his armpit. Counts to five in sync with his breaths--he’s hardly gotten past three when he has the distinct urge to vomit.

“Sorry, bathroom--”

He doesn’t even make it to the first restroom. He grabs the nearest crystal vase off a decorative table with hardly enough time to send a mental apology to Pepper, and he hurls into it.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Peter’s throat burns with the acid from his stomach. Tears almost prick at the back of his eyes, but traitors that they are, they never come. He’s on fire everywhere, from the tips of his veins to the knot of monstrous anxiety inside him.

Wild eyes. Dark curls whipped forward by the wind, the wind that does nothing to slow her trajectory. The blood-curdling scream ripped from her lips as she crashes into another pair of broken beams in a tangle of limbs.

More of Peter’s dinner comes up. He gasps and breathes sharply through his nose, grateful for the sliver of pain in his sinuses that keeps him grounded in the present. He closes his eyes and leans his forehead against the wall. He doesn’t recall when he slid to his knees in a clumsy crouch in the middle of the hallway.

Another scream in his mind. Peter’s voice, wrenched from his gut.

MJ--

“Pete?”

Stupid, stupid--

You killed--

“Peter!”

Peter comes back to himself at the snap of the voice that reaches him as if through a curtain of water. He lets out another miserable dribble of bile and coughs raggedly.

A heavy, calloused hand comes into contact with the space between his shoulder blades and rubs soothing circles there. Peter almost dares to close his eyes again and lean into the touch.

“Okay. Okay. Just let it out, buddy.”

Peter gulps in a few more breaths before he settles back on his haunches. He blinks up at Tony, whose dark hair is framed in a blur against FRIDAY’s artificial blue lights. “I think I’m done.” His voice is wrecked.

Tony reaches forward to gently take the vase from him. “Your Spider-aunt didn’t ply you with vodka, did she?”

The kid shakes his head.

Tony’s mouth twists. “Something you ate?”

Peter hesitates. The easy excuse is right there in front of him, and Tony seems to be offering it to him, a rare free pass on the truth when they both know the man is dying to know what’s going on in Peter’s head.

He almost takes it. But then he remembers Dr. Nayan’s words from before, and he decides that therapy is useless if he’s going to fall back into the same old habits. Tony is trying, after all. He really is.

Peter shakes his head again and settles for a half-truth. “Guess I didn’t realize how stressed out I was.”

Tony’s gaze softens. His hand moves from the boy’s shoulder to the top of his head. “I know you hate not being able to do anything when we’ve got missions, but you should know I’m proud of you, buddy. I--I really couldn’t be prouder of what you did tonight.”

The kid makes a low noise of assent. He doesn’t feel the weight of Tony’s words right now, not when his mind is drifting between the past and the present, barely tethered to the man’s touch. But later he will remember this moment and maybe, just maybe, he may decide to cry a little over it.

“That guy in the jeep with the weird shearling jacket,” Peter starts. “He almost got you. They caught it on TV.”

Tony chuckles. “Almost. But I’m faster.”

“Was that the last of it? The warehouse?”

Tony doesn’t answer for a few seconds. Instead, he taps the side of Peter’s cheek and beckons with his other hand for the kid to get up. “C’mon, you should be lying down. FRIDAY’s got you and May’s suite all prepped.”

They trudge down the hall in silence. Once in the elevator, Peter plays with the hems of his sleeves. “Mr. Stark?”

Tony rubs his chin. “We don’t know if that’s all of the serum, but they better be on their goddamn knees praying that it is, because if not, we’re ready to unleash hell on them for it.”

Peter swallows. He’s overly aware of the rustle of Tony’s denim jacket as the man turns to him with the smallest of conspiratorial smiles. “Playing Black Sabbath as our soundtrack, of course.”

The kid finds himself chuckling. “Y-yeah.”

The elevator dings, a jarringly cheery sound in the stiffness of the atmosphere between them. Peter already knows the way to room, and yet he clings to the distinct comfort of Tony falling into step beside him the entire way there. Tony thrusts his hands in his pockets and watches the unmade laces of Peter’s left shoe slap against the tile floor; Peter worries at the edge of the sleeve of his hoodie in the same spot he’s almost rubbed through.

Tony’s hand comes up in the air to stop the kid when they reach the door to the suite. A lock of grayed hair falls over his brow as he leans down to catch Peter’s eye. “Hey,” he murmurs. “You good?”

The boy swallows again. It’s become difficult to discern between the lump in his throat and the monster of guilt that rules beneath his skin.

“Yeah, I’m good.”

An echo of their words the night Peter crawled in through the glass door to the living room almost two years ago, the night he’d almost killed Harrison. The night he’d finally told Tony about Skip. They were words that held both a lie and a promise in them at once: I’m okay and Maybe I will be okay.

Tony looks like he wants to say something. It could be one of a million things, really. Don’t bullshit me, Parker. Or What you did tonight was incredibly stupid but I’m not going to call you out on it because what matters is you’re safe. Or I’m just a couple doors down in case you change your mind.

But he doesn’t say any of those things. He gives Peter’s shoulder another parting squeeze, and then he’s making his way slowly down the hall again, leaving the kid to bite back the urge to call out to him with all the unsaid words that still escape him even now.

--

She’s not supposed to look like this. She’s not supposed to be crying.

Michelle Jones never cries.

“Ned’s gonna be elated, Peter. You should tell him.” The same words are coming out of her mouth, it’s all playing over the way it took place that night, but there are tracks of moisture glistening on her cheeks under the streetlamp.

Even Peter’s voice, high-pitched in nervousness, utters the same things that he said in reply. “He’s gonna--he’s gonna freak when he finds out, MJ. Like, major Death-Star-breaking-all-over-the-floor level freak out. And what if, what if we don’t both get in? What if--”

“I can’t believe you’re the star of the decathlon team.” MJ’s tone is flat and dry, just a hint of humor behind it.

But she’s still crying. The tears won’t stop. The glow of the lamp above them throbs and flares into a blinding brilliance, and the tracks of salt cutting across Michelle’s cheeks become palpable like the edge of diamonds.

“We should, uh. We should get back.” Peter presses his lips together and shoots a thumb over his shoulder. Makes a twiddling gesture with his pointer fingers. “Y’know, before Ned starts suspecting we’re actually proposing to each other or some shit like that instead of grabbing snacks and talking about college.”

MJ opens her mouth to deliver her snarkiest comment to date, but it is at this point that it all shifts. It’s always like this, never letting her speak again, skipping past the drug dealer and the dumpster chase and the confrontation on the roof. Peter searches for it, he reaches out and tries to grasp at the invisible strands of a storyline so elusive that it begins to feel more like a trick of his brain than an actual memory. All that’s left burned into his brain is the fall.

Neither of them see the push.

He’s blind: he hears only the groan and rumble of the beams of the scaffold below. The aborted cry from Michelle’s lips as her fingers latch onto the wood one second and slip away the next.

He’s mute.

MJ. MJ! He wants to scream.

MJ! No!

He’s paralyzed.

And then Michelle’s voice comes back for the briefest of moments, and Peter almost wishes it didn’t, because then his last memory of her voice wouldn’t have to be how she screams out his name. How her voice is raw. Terrified. Bleeding.

Her eyes were dry when she cried out for him. Here, they’re always clouded with tears.

It’s wrong. All wrong.

Michelle Jones does not cry.

Wrong.

Another beam breaks. She hurtles toward the splintered fragments at full velocity. Suddenly Peter’s airborne too, his maskless face stung by the rain he doesn’t remember here either, and his voice is battering against the prison doors of his throat. Somehow he’s tumbling after her with his webshooters extended, but it’s not enough. It never is.

A bend, a snap. He knows it’s not another beam this time.

Her eyes roll back in her head till he sees white, and then, only then, does the scream cut off from her lungs and he--

Peter comes to with an invisible weight on his chest and the taste of ash in my his mouth, as if he’s been hurled into a grave and buried alive. His entire body is on fire. He struggles to kick off the blankets and only succeeds in entangling himself further. With a dry, ragged sob, his limbs shaking so hard they threaten to collapse under his weight, he drags himself into a sitting position on his bed. The sheets beneath him are damp with his sweat.

One, two, three, four, five. Peter hauls in the breath that refuses to come to him. Four, three, two, one, zero.

One, two, three, four, five. He brings up a hand to claw at his chest.

Maybe if he tears open his ribcage hard enough, cracks the sternum with his brute strength, he can breathe again.

Four, three, two, one, zero.

It’s not working.

She’s not supposed to cry. She never died crying.

One, two, three, four, five. Peter feels like the pressure has bloomed anew inside his head. If he doesn’t manage to breathe now, the darkness and the fire will overcome him.

It’s not working. The only other time it didn’t work, Peter had run all the way from school to the Tower just to be near where Tony lived. He hadn’t expected the man to actually be there waiting for him.

“May,” is what stumbles from his lips instead, a moment later.

But no one comes. Not that Peter wants anyone to--there has been far too much pain and death already on his account.

“Breathe,” he whispers. “You can do it. I’m okay. I’m okay. Breathe. You’re okay. Just breathe…”

A part of him knows what this is. So why does it feel like he’s dying?

And the other part of him whispers back: Because you don’t deserve to be living.

--

“Should I alert Boss that you are awake, Mr. Parker?”

Peter jolts a little on his feet at FRIDAY’s soft inquiry upon his entry into the kitchen. The bar lights immediately come on at his movement, though the dim glow--adjusted specifically for his sensitive eyes--does nothing to mitigate the excruciating realization of emptiness as he stands there alone. The quiet hum of the heater, too low to be detected by the human ear, kicks in at that moment, sending Peter into a bone-deep shiver. The ghosts of the Avengers’ voices are simultaneously too clear and too silent tonight.

The boy pads over to the fridge and pauses there, staring at the door without opening it, before he answers the AI. “No, it’s okay, FRIDAY. I’m just getting a drink.”

Still, Peter does not move an inch to actually get water from the refrigerator. After about another minute of inactivity, he pivots on his heel and his gaze lands on the empty Poland Spring bottle in the recycling bin behind him.

How many dead bodies has Natasha seen?

It’s not a thought that’s completely foreign to him, but this is perhaps the first time the silent question is not an idle one.

He wonders, in some part of him that still dares--and fears--to believe in a higher being, if this is karma for what he did to Harrison: or rather, what he almost did. Would the guilt have been so stifling if he had not released his strangling hold on the guy?

Would any part of him have felt a grim rejoicing at watching the body slide down the brick wall?

Maybe. It is a possibility that is higher than fifty percent, a possibility that strikes a coldness in Peter’s veins as he comes face to face with the epiphany that he never was as good as he made himself out to be. And the universe knew it, and imparted on him the judgment of guilt.

Because only a death like MJ’s could make him wake up to the reality of what he is truly capable of.

The world suddenly seems to snap back into clarity at that single thought.

When you can do the things that I can, but you don’t--and then the bad things happen...they happen because of you.

The answer is right there in front of him. It has been, this whole time. There can be no coincidence about it.

Peter’s lungs stutter once as he turns and exits the kitchen.

With great power comes great responsibility.

And with the relinquishing of great power, comes an atonement.

Chapter Text

Peter floats up toward wakefulness more slowly than he usually does, and the first thing he registers is dull pain.

It isn't often that he gets injuries severe enough as Spider-Man to wake up the day after still sore in places. Still, he knows the drill and forces himself to lie there a moment more with his eyes closed, cataloging the discomfort and rating it. The worst of the pain is running up and down his spine, he decides, though it's difficult to ignore the fire at his fingertips that seems to originate somewhere beneath his skin.

Peter makes the mistake then of attempting to sit up. He barely bites back a cry as his shoulders spasm and the world spins around him.

“FRIDAY,” he gasps out. “Lights at ten percent. Please.”

Several minutes drag by as he waits with eyes closed, both hands clutching his skull, just for good measure. When he finally blinks his eyes open again, he struggles to focus on the pattern of stitching on the quilt tangled around his legs in front of him.

And then it hits him. The nightmare, the realization, the syringe. The injection.

Then losing consciousness.

Peter rubs his eyes viciously--not to take any of it back, but perhaps to test the limits of his decision. Decide what's real. Blurry vision, it turns out, is real. He'd forgotten about this part.

His gaze falls on the fuzzy mass of red and blue by his desk that he knows is his backpack. If his calculations are correct, then his glasses should still be in there, in the pouch together with the small gold hoop earring that Ned used to wear. They've been planning to make a time capsule for some time, but with MJ's funeral…

Peter hisses through his teeth at the thought. He scrambles out of bed at a pace that he immediately regrets, and he barely catches himself by the palms of his hands as he tumbles to the carpet. After digging around in the pockets of the bag for a bit, he finally feels the felt material of the pouch.

The sharpness of his vision when he slips on the glasses is nearly as disorienting as the near-blindness that greeted him upon waking. Unlike when he was fourteen, he finds himself hyper-aware of the edge of the lens where the sharpness gives way to blurriness at the corners.

A sharp rap on the door makes him jolt backward. “Peter? You up yet?”

“Uh--uh--” Peter flails around for purchase on the carpet and finally manages to leverage himself to his feet. His knees are shaking. A strange flavor of illness is creeping up his throat, and he doesn’t know why, and the uncertainty of it all is sending him into another spiral of panic. “Yeah!” he hollers.

May’s tone through the door seems colored by both amusement and slight concern. “Can I come in?”

“N-no!” Peter curses himself for the stutter. “I mean, nope, not yet. Getting dressed. In a minute--”

“That’s fine, just don’t break a bone while you’re at it,” May says warmly. “Pepper said she’s got breakfast going for everybody and it should be ready any minute now.”

“Wait--Ms. P-Potts is here?”

“--Are you dressed now? Can I come in--”

“No,” Peter says again, almost frantically. He doesn’t know what it is, precisely, that prevents him from opening that door. All he knows is that he doesn’t want May to see him like this--whatever this is.

Shaky, breathing unevenly and jumping out of his skin, the ever-analytical part of his brain supplies helpfully.

Peter is getting sick of these tidal waves of panic. He thought the worst of it was behind him after he and Tony finally hashed out their conflict over the Bully Incident last year and Tony recommended Dr. Nayan to him. He’s been able to manage the bouts of anxiety through breathing techniques and a buddy system with Ned, mostly; he only ever needed to go steady on medication for about a month when the attacks were at their worst.

“Okay, I’ll be downstairs with the others, then. Don’t take too long.”

“I won’t,” Peter breathes out through his teeth. It’s barely above a mutter, certainly not discernable to May’s ears. He leans forward against his desk chair, gripping the top until his knuckles turn a mottled pink and white, and closes his eyes and listens to his aunt’s retreating footsteps.

Several things register with him then. His death grip on the chair is doing nothing to dent the cushion, much less mangle it. His heart is jackhammering behind his ribs at an almost fatal velocity--like the first time he had to run five laps around the track in ninth grade because Flash told the coach Peter had been the one to trip him and Ned hadn’t been there to defend him. And his hearing, though not quite muffled, keeps cutting in and out like a terrible radio frequency. One moment he can hear the faint laughter of what seems to be Rhodey’s voice three floors down, and the next he is overwhelmed with a low, persistent buzzing that drives him up the wall.

Peter lets go of the chair to pace the length of his room. He shakes his hands, blinking back the hot moisture that suddenly fills the corners of his eyes, and he curses himself again when his naturally uncoordinated limbs make him stumble on a simple walk across the carpet.

“Breathe, Peter. Breathe. Stop panicking. Everything’s fine. Okay? Okay. You’re okay. I’m okay. Just breathe--”

“Good morning, Mr. Parker. Are you in distress?”

If Peter could have jumped five feet in the air, he would. He trips to a halt. “Fuck,” he whispers. Presses the heels of his hands to his eyes. “No, FRIDAY, I’m fine. Just--just gimme a minute.”

“As you wish,” the AI returns pleasantly. “As per my programming, I must alert you and the nearest adult when your heart rate exceeds 120 beats per minute. You are currently reading at 97.”

“Thanks, FRI,” Peter mutters back. Then he stops. Ninety-seven? His heart normally goes at 105--oh. That was when he was--

Spider-Man.

No. No. No, no, no. He needs to stop thinking about this. He needs to talk about it, and then stop thinking about it, but first he needs someone to listen.

“FRIDAY,” Peter chokes out. “Call Ned Leeds, please.”

“Dialing ‘Leeds Feeds’ now.”

Peter collapses back onto the foot of his bed and drops his head into his hands, counting the rings.

“Pete?”

Peter opens his mouth to answer Ned’s voice the moment it sounds over the room’s speakers. He tries to bring the words to the forefront of his tongue, but nothing comes out. He struggles, drags the breaths into him by their claws.

“Peter, are you there? What’s going on?”

There it is, the hot track of moisture racing down the side of his face. Peter shakes his head, though he knows no one can see him do it.

“Babe, I’m switching to video call, okay?”

A hologram projection of Ned’s face appears before Peter a few seconds later. He’s about half-dressed, hair still parted in wet strands and his favorite copper tie undone around his neck. Dimly, Peter remembers that Ned likes to leave combing his hair till last, especially on Sunday morning before church when he uses a hair dryer and hairspray.

The wideness of Ned’s eyes shifts to something soft and indiscernible. “Babe,” he says again, and this time there’s a crack in his voice, a glint of understanding. “What’s going on? Talk to me, dude.”

“I don’t know,” Peter manages to say at last. His throat is thick and stopped up with mucus. He curls up in his spot on the edge of the bed, arms wrapping tightly around his knees. The movement sends waves of memories through him again of the day in sixth grade when the asthma hit him out of nowhere and he could do nothing but curl up in the same way on the curb in front of the gym while Ned sat beside him and awkwardly patted his back. It was one of the most miserable of his more mundane memories--at least, those not related to his parents or Uncle Ben--but in this moment, in the present, Peter would give anything to be that twelve-year-old again who had a proper excuse to curl up on the sidewalk and put his head between his knees.

So much has happened between then and now. He’s become Spider-Man. He’s been Spider-Man.

“Are you at the Tower?”

Peter offers a mute nod in response.

“Panic attack?”

Peter vehemently shakes his head, but the choked sob that escapes him at the same moment belies his denial.

“I can be there in twenty minutes if I catch a cab. I just need to go tell Ma--”

“No,” Peter protests. “Go to church. I know you gotta leave in like ten.”

“Peter,” Ned says. It’s soft. Everyone has taken that tone with him, that same softness. Peter at once resents it and craves its presence.

“Don’t blow off church,” Pete mutters. “I just--I just needed to hear your voice, okay?”

Ned scrunches his brow in concern. “Well, I don’t want to spend the time babbling if you gotta unload something. Was there a trigger? Are you--you okay with talking about it?”

Peter’s heart stutters. And then he finds the words pouring out of him, and he can’t find the brake, even though his breath hitches and Ned leans forward to hear him better because his words are barely discernible through his broken sobs.

“I--I did something really--I don’t know why I did it, but I don’t regret it, but I forgot about how fucking hard it would be once I went back, and...and...I know I deserve this. This is who I really am. I never was a hero. I didn’t deserve to have it, all that--that power--responsibility, y’know? Bad things. They happened.” A hiccup. “Because of me.”

“Babe. Babe. I’m sorry, but you gotta slow down. You’re not making any sense.”

“Bad things happen,” Peter says again, “because of me.”

Ned inhales sharply. His eyes dart toward something offscreen, perhaps at the beckoning of one of his parents, but Peter can’t hear the person’s voice over the line. Ned returns his attention to Peter. “Peter Parker, listen to me.”

Peter drags the sleeve of his hoodie across his nose and fixes his bleary eyes on his boyfriend’s face, waiting.

“Bad things do not happen because of you. Bad things happen to you. There’s a difference, man. And you know what that difference is? You turn the bad things into good. You’re a good person, babe. I don’t--I dunno how else to say it. Or, I, I don’t know how else to make you understand.”

“But I’m not. You don’t know half of what I’ve done.”

“Well, the half of what I know you’ve done is nothing but good,” Ned rejoins with conviction. “I know you, Pete.”

The words should be potent. They should be piercing his soul. But instead, they fall flat against Peter’s lungs.

“Sorry, Ned, May’s calling me,” he says suddenly. The lie rolls off his tongue too easily.

“That’s okay. My mom’s calling me, too. I’m gonna try and see if I can swing by the Tower this afternoon, though, okay? We gotta talk.”

“Y-yeah--yeah. Thanks.” Peter blinks. His next words feel paltry and wrong, but he says them anyway. “I love you.”

“I know,” says Ned. Not a jest, but a reassurance. “Love you too.”

--

Over the course of twenty minutes, most of the Avengers have trickled out of the kitchen and the dining room, leaving Tony, Rhodey and May in the vicinity when the kid finally shows up. Pepper has just excused herself with a sigh to answer a call after trying in vain to ignore the ringing for four times now.

Tony may not be enhanced or have anything akin to Peter’s spidey sense, but a wave of simultaneous relief and alert filters through him the moment he senses the boy coming down the hall toward the breakfast bar. He deliberately continues to chew his bagel with his gaze drifting unfocused from one of the windows to the next, the picture of affected nonchalance, despite ever fiber in him urging him to rush over to the kid and check on him. He even tucks his left hand under his right armpit for good measure as he pretends to study his bagel.

Peter shuffles into the kitchen clad in the same hoodie and jeans from last night. He’s rubbing his hands together in the slow, rhythmic way that tells Tony it’s a bad day. If Pete were excited or nervous about something--such as breaking exciting news--his hand-rubbing would be twice as fast.

“Mooorning,” says Tony. His eyes flit over the boy, giving him a swift and critical once-over. Something is off. Very off.

And then he sees it. The glasses.

Tony squints. He’s seen photos of a pre-pubescent Peter Parker in tortoise shell frames (though May has sworn him to secrecy on this point, lest they become subject to her nephew’s “absolutely terrifying puppy-like rage”), but he’s never once seen the kid in glasses in person. They seem to be the same pair, too, with the cellophane tape wrapped neatly around the bridge.

“Hey, Parker,” Rhodey greets the kid warmly.

“Morning, Mr. Rhodey.”

“Slept okay?”

“Mm,” the kid hums noncommittally. “You?”

Rhodey smirks. “Oh, yeah. You know this one?” He jerks a thumb over his shoulder at Tony, who’s already rolling his eyes at his best friend in preparation for whatever nonsense is about to come out of his mouth. “Worrying about this guy’s complete and utter lack of a sense of self-preservation can be extremely fatiguing. Conked me out instantly after four hours of chasing his daredevil, show-offy ass around Manhattan.”

“Oh, excuse me, Mr. Jump Out of My Suit Every Ten Seconds to Ambush the Enemy,” Tony scoffs.

“Twice. I did that twice. Because nobody’s expecting it from the paralyzed guy. Besides, I got that move from you. Remember the thing with the Mandarin? Hypocrite, much?”

May comes up between the two bickering men to smirk at Peter as she slides him a plate loaded with toast and waffles. “Boys,” she mouths, shaking her head.

Peter rolls his eyes at her, despite himself. “I’m a boy too,” he mouths back.

“Exactly.” May blows him a flying kiss.

“You’re literally three feet in front of me,” Peter complains aloud. “Mom.”

“He’s definitely a mom,” Rhodey readily agrees, with complete disregard for context.

May gathers up her hair in a ponytail, shaking her head yet again at Tony and Rhodey. “I just remembered, I need to call Ruth about Thursday night. Will you be okay with these losers for a few minutes, hon?” She steps around the counter to cup Peter’s chin, searching him behind the glasses. If she sees the redness and puffiness in his eyes, she doesn’t mention it. Not yet.

Peter takes a large bite of his toast in answer. “Seeing as I’m a loser myself, I think I’ll survive.”

May flicks a finger at his forehead. “None of that. I’ll be back.”

Inexplicably, Rhodey follows her out almost immediately after, mentioning something about needing to find Nat.

In the cloak of silence that settles then, Tony clears his throat.

Peter raises a brow at him over his lenses. “Mooorning,” he says, imitating Tony’s drawl from earlier.

“Stop that,” Tony says fondly. “There are already enough jokes at my expense about my ‘mini-me’.”

“Should’ve thought about that before buying me that I Heart Iron Man sweatshirt.”

“Yeah, well--” Tony pauses, coffee cup poised at his lips, his mind racing before he visibly switches tacks. He goes on in a lower tone, “Just don’t want you emulating the whole...y’know...not sleeping, not talking thing.”

Peter draws a shuddering sigh from somewhere deep within him. “We’re talking.”

Tony sniffs and sets the mug down. Peter crunches down on a waffle, waiting. Shifts on his barstool.

“Look,” Tony says at last. He refuses to meet the boy’s gaze--not that Peter even wants him to. “You don’t have to--just, all I’m trying to say is, you don’t need to hide it when you’ve had a rough night.” He glances up pointedly at Peter’s glasses then. “Capisce?”

In a split second, Peter’s confusion turns to understanding. His mentor thinks he’s using the glasses as a cover for the teary eyes. The coward in him decides to shy away from the truth, just this once, just one more time. “Yeah,” he whispers, settling the waffle back down on his plate. He bobs his head once. “Capisce.”

Tony taps the counter twice with his palm and returns the single nod. “Good. Okay. Yeah. So, what’re we thinking today? Labs? Lunch out? Training? Or something more lowkey?”

Peter shrugs. It’s as if the one declaration from Tony--the admonition to talk about things--has completely drained his defenses, his pretense.

Tony draws a sharp breath. After a split second of hesitation, he decides, “Labs it is, then.”

--

“You guys are losers.”

“Yeah, so you’ve said for, like, ninety thousand and one times,” Ned said with a squint up at MJ’s upside-down face. She was sprawled halfway over the edge of the lower bunk bed, stealing handfuls from Ned’s quickly decreasing supply of garlic popcorn.

Peter certainly wasn’t setting a much better example as far as comfortable snacking positions were concerned. He hung completely upside down by a web from the ceiling in a classic Spidey pose, likewise pilfering from Ned’s bag.

“Yeah, MJ,” Peter snarked through a full mouth. “Branding is one thing, but that line is just seriously getting old.”

“I’ll stop saying it the day you two stop being losers,” MJ quipped lightly. “I mean, a time capsule? Really? What are we, Girl Meets World?”

“Aesthetically speaking, I prefer to think of us as Boy Meets World, actually--”

“Babe,” Ned interrupted him. “Not. Helping.”

MJ flipped over onto her stomach, apparently tiring of the blood rush to her brain. She cupped her chin in one hand. “Seriously, what’s with the pushiness behind this time capsule? It’s not like Peter doesn’t already post enough about us on social media for us to forget what we were like when we were in high school.”

Peter squawked in protest at the social media jab, then thought better of it when MJ wordlessly held up her phone with the screen open to his personal Instagram page. Which was, objectively, flooded with photos of her and Ned in various aesthetic and candid poses.

“Yeah, well…” Ned slapped his hands against his crossed legs. “You’re always the one going on about how print and physical media are different from digital archives. It’s gonna feel different ten years from now when we go back and open up the box and actually touch the things that, I don’t know, kind of represented us from this era.”

MJ pressed her lips together and seemed to actually consider his words for a minute. She gestured at the empty Danish butter cookie tin in front of them--the time capsule box of choice. “Don’t you--” She paused. “Don’t you find it weird to put a part of yourself in there?”

Peter cocked his head at her. “Isn’t that kind of the point? You put it there to be re-discovered by you and your friends when you open it up again.”

“Babe, please come down from there. It’s hard to take you seriously when you’re upside-down,” Ned interjected.

With a long-suffering sigh, Peter planted a kiss on Ned’s forehead and dropped down into a crouch on the carpet. He soon mirrored Ned’s cross-legged position and turned back to Michelle.

“I guess it feels a little wrong,” she admitted. “What if one of us isn’t there anymore when we open the capsule?”

“I think it’s safe to say our friendship has lasted the test of time,” Peter pointed out.

MJ exhaled heavily through her nose. “What if...one of us has changed.”

A lump rose suddenly and unbidden to Peter’s throat. He chanced a glance at Ned to find his boyfriend was staring back at him with that open and trusting expression that always came over him at the threshold of uncomfortably vulnerable moments.

“That has to be a risk we’re all willing to take,” Peter said softly into his knees.

“I don’t think I could--” MJ cut herself off and tried again. “I don’t think it would be fair to any of us if one of us was gone and the others had to open up the box and get reminded of what happened, what exactly went wrong in the ten years between then and now.”

Peter said nothing. Suddenly, abruptly, like a glass of cold water to the face, he was beginning to understand what she was trying to articulate.

“We always have the option of...you know…not opening the box, in case that ever happened and it was really bad,” said Ned.

MJ huffed out a heavy breath, somewhere between a scoff and a shaky sniff. Peter shoved away the absolutely frightening thought that he could picture her maybe trying not to cry right now. “Then what would be the whole point of making a time capsule, idiot?” she said.

“Look,” Peter said quickly. “I’m not saying that what you’re saying isn’t valid. It’s--it’s still possible, right? But also...we’re the best of friends, aren’t we? I mean, c’mon, MJ. I’m Spider-Man, he’s the Guy in the Chair, and you’re the Badass Deadpan Lesbian who always ends up saving our asses. You don’t get more tight-knit than that.”

MJ pointed at Pete with a hint of a smirk and a squint. “Don’t forget, I’m also the Badass Deadpan Lesbian who inherits the Spidey suit when you inevitably have a crisis of identity and decide to go on a year-long furlough in Costa Rica to find yourself.”

“Cuba,” Peter corrected her pettishly, earning a light swat on the arm from Ned. “But, yeah. Point still stands. We’re meant to be.”

“Please don’t say it’s fated,” Ned pleaded. “You always jinx shit like this.”

“It’s fated.”

“I hate you.”

“I object,” MJ said in a bored tone. “You’re probably about to make out in like thirty seconds.”

“Negative,” Ned said quickly. Peter shot him an amused look. “So have you decided what you’re gonna put in the capsule? Or, y’know, would put in it?”

MJ hesitated. “I’ll let you know.” She jerked her chin at the items scattered on the floor. “What about you?”

Ned immediately went to pick up a small gold hoop earring from the carpet. “This one. This will always remind me of the time I thought I looked cool with an earring on until Peter said the ear infection wasn’t worth it.”

“Dude,” said Peter. “I basically saved your life.”

Ned rolled his eyes. “You’re missing the point. You probably don’t remember, but you gave me a little speech about how you liked me just as I was with the dorky fedora and I didn’t have to try so hard to look like Quinn Fleming from eighth grade just because you thought his earring looked cool. When you said that, I realized that my crush on you was, like, way bigger than the Empire State Building.”

Peter flushed. He did, in fact, remember that speech very clearly.

“I was going to call you an idiot, but you already called yourself a dork, so thanks,” said MJ. She raised her eyebrows at Peter. “What about you?”

Peter cleared his throat self-consciously before picking up the tortoise shell glasses from the floor. He ran a finger over the tape on the bridge of the frame, his visage pensive. “This isn’t to say that glasses aren’t an awesome fashion statement, but for me, like, not having to wear these was one of the best things about the spider bite.”

Ned hummed in understanding. “I told Ms. Pérez that it was Flash who sat on your glasses, but she never fucking listens, I swear.”

MJ sighs. “Once we’re out of this high school hell hole and in college with actual people--”

“--You mean zombies,” said Ned.

“--Then you could totally Clark Kent it up and wear them again just for looks. I’m just saying.”

Peter grimaced a little. “Does nerd even suit me?”

Ned gaped at him. “You are a nerd, Pete. You know the Merriam-Webster dictionary? Where it says ‘nerd’? They’ve got your selfie right there.”

“Okay, first of all, that is the lamest fucking insult you’ve ever pulled from your book, Leeds--”

“--There may also be a 580% increase in chance of impromptu makeout sessions if you wear the glasses.”

MJ groaned and slapped the roof of the bunk with a hand. “Incoming makeout session. Called it.”

--

“Parker. Parker.”

Peter jolts on his stool. “Sorry.”

“I don't need you to be sorry. I need you to be with me.” Tony consciously unfolds his arms and picks up the nearest wrench to twirl in his hand so he can avoid eye contact while letting the kid know he meant no sharpness by his tone. “How many hours of sleep did you get last night?”

Peter smears the exhaustion from his eyes with the pads of his fingers. “I dunno. Some.” His fatigue has taken on a taste now, the flavor of stale air against lonely cricket chirps and impending rain.

“Hilarious. At this rate, you could do stand-up down at the middle school. Seriously, though.” Tony jerks his chin in Peter's direction. “What's going on in that big brain of yours? And don't tell me 'nothing.’ Me and May know we raised too much of a genius for your head to be empty.”

Something like the lesser, more lethargic cousin of spite uncoiled in Peter's stomach. Yes, as a matter of fact, his mind is empty. Blank. A void of too many memories that mean too little and voices that lack distinction, faces whose identities blur together into a smudge somewhere between the white and the gray of his confusion. Something inside him is floating. Coming untethered.

Not good, a tiny part of his brain supplies. Stay. Don't go. Stay.

But he wants to go. It's easier. Easier than standing here trying to figure out why the silhouette of MJ's bony fingers should feel like something, why the way her curls fell into her eyes and her right eyebrow crinkled when Ned laughed should stir an emotion in him.

“Stay with me, buddy.”

Peter swallows. “Sorry,” he says again.

Tony sighs. It's soft, low, too subtle even for Peter to catch with the last fading of his superhearing, but from the corner of his eye he catches sight of the man's chest rise and fall and that is enough to let the boy know.

“I'm here, Pete. You're here. We're in the lab. Have been for a couple hours now, actually. Which, whoopsies, your truckload metabolism must be crying now. Anyway. Not the point. Not yet. You with me?”

No. No. Peter doesn't want to be.

“I know Pep is the expert at this, but she's not here right now. It's just you and me, bud. Here at the Tower. You don't need to talk if you don't want to. Uh, not yet.” If Peter were to pay closer attention, he would just be able to discern the edge of fear in Tony's voice. He wonders idly if fear tastes like that concrete dust.

“I'm here,” he mutters at the strange formation of his fingers twisted in his lap.

“Yeah. Yeah, Pete. I know. I know.” Tony reaches forward to tap the kid's bicep. He leans down a bit, studying the sheen behind Peter's eyes. “Hey, kid,” he whispers.

“I don't know what she would have put.”

Tony's brow furrows. “Huh?”

“The capsule. I have--I have no idea what she would've put inside.”

“You're not making any sense, bud.”

Something's flickering to life inside the boy, vague and nameless but urgent. “No. No. Mr. Stark. You don't get it. I don't, I don't--oh, God. I don't know. Ned said it would be the earring and I said the glasses but--but--I don't know.”

“Okay. Okay. Okay, buddy. It's all right. I believe you. Don't get yourself too worked up. We'll figure this out after--after some sugar, okay? That sound good? You gotta eat but maybe it's best to get a drink inside you first. What're you feeling? Water? Coke?”

He's already striding toward the mini-fridge in the nearest corner of the lab. Tony scrounges around for a second and returns with two Dr. Peppers. He doesn't stop to consider the painful parallelism to his choice of drinks that night the kid opened up about Skip.

Peter barely moves at the thunk of the can on the table. Obeying his impulse this time, Tony sets his own drink down and gently pries the tortoise shell frames from Peter's face by the side pieces. “Give your eyes a break,” he mutters. “Can't imagine how uncomfortable those are for those super-spider retinas of yours.”

The kid mumbles something unintelligible. He goes to grab the can and open it, but the next instant his finger slips against the ring on top and there's a knee-jerking tumble before the low buzz of the workshop is shattered by the impact of the Dr. Pepper on the concrete floor. Maybe time splices itself; all Peter knows is his pant legs are suddenly drenched.

“Sorry,” he gasps out for the third time now. “I can't--hold things--sometimes. When this happens.”

Quietly, cruelly, the impact of that single word--this--delivers more of a punch to Tony's chest than the clatter of the soda can on the floor did.

“That's okay. I was the stupid one, I forgot. Let's go sit you somewhere else comfortable.”

With one hand guiding Peter forward by the small of his back, Tony gets the kid situated on the couch. He tries to ignore the tremor flooding underneath Peter's skin.

“I can't see.”

Tony halts his movements with a few mental expletives of confusion. Deciding not to question it just yet, he obliges by handing the glasses back to Peter. The kid takes them, but instead of slipping them on immediately, he starts tossing them from one hand to another. It's certainly more movement from the boy than anything else Tony has seen all afternoon.

“Talk to me, kid. I'm here.”

“It's hard.”

“I know. No one's rushing you. I mean, I know I'm generally referred to as a VIP round these parts, but my schedule's cleared for you. You know.”

“Mm.” Peter lets the frames dangle from one hand and folds in on himself, hiding his face behind his bangs. “I'm tired, Mr. Stark. Just...tired.”

Tony returns the hum. With a crick in his joints, he settles in a wide-legged position between the couch and the table, his own knees wedged between Peter's and knocking rhythmically against them.

“Can't see.”

Tony's heartbeat trips a little faster. “Losing your eyesight?”

In answer, Peter pops the glasses back on. He shifts a little and reaches out an arm as if to summon another drink with his webshooters, before remembering that his wrists are bare. Tony cannot fathom the devastation that flickers across his face then.

“D-depression does that sometimes.” Tony hates himself for the stutter. Hates himself even more for the way his left knee jerks a little more violently against the inside of Peter's leg dangling from the couch: an unconscious viciousness at himself for not remaining steady.

Peter starts playing along, knocking his knee back against his mentor's.

“I'm tired.”

“I get it.”

“Tired of being tired.”

Oh, kid. “I know.” Tony pops open his own can of Dr. Pepper before handing it up to Peter. “Just don't make it into a decade of tiredness, bud. Then you end up doing shit you regret.”

Peter takes a long draught before answering. “What if it never goes away?”

“It will.”

They lock eyes. Immediately Tony flinches. He never expected to see such intensity there, such rawness of doubt and betrayal. Peter Parker never looked at him like that.

He swallows. “It will, Pete. I promise.”

“Did it go away for you?”

Tony takes the half-empty can suspended between the kid's fingers and shares a sip, then hands it back. Peter sets it down and steadies it between his thighs, trapping one of Tony's bent knees between his calves in the process.

“Pepper helps.”

The man covers his eyes with a palm.

“Rhodey, too. And you.”

Small comforts in even smaller words, but neither of them is fooled. It never was an answer to Peter's question in the first place.

--

“Good evening, Peter.”

“Hey, Karen,” Peter chokes out.

“Are you planning to head out on patrol tonight?”

The boy lets out a sound like a chuckle. He splashes the water around him with a hand and tucks it between his knees. “I'm naked in the middle of a bath, Karen. I don't think so. I just--I, I just need to talk.”

“Would you like me to contact anyone in particular?”

“No, no, no...I can't...it's hard to express shit to somebody. I don't know. Can I just talk to you?”

“I cannot replicate the same emotional experience as a conversation with a human being, but I most certainly can oblige.” Karen's voice through the mask feels muffled. Warm. “Go on, Peter.”

And so he does.

“I don't know where it all came from. Spider-Man. The idea of responsibility because of power. Ben just d-died and I, I, I felt like shit about it and just like that, I was a superhero. There was nothing to, I don't know, nothing to really sustain it. No truth behind it, you know? I guess. I don't know. I was never good with words at stuff like this. But guilt can't be the reason to do good. It doesn't stop. It doesn't stop feeling like this, Karen. It just keeps going and going and...going…”

“Your uncle's death was tragic, Peter, but even statistics could tell you that you have saved far more lives than risked them.”

“I--I--”

He forces out a breath in a rip of hot air through his nose. The water around him has turned tepid.

“I killed someone, Karen.”

His voice sounds guttural and broken, even to his own ears.

“I'm not that much of a liar that I can fool myself into thinking that that doesn't cancel everything out.”

The AI seems to pause. “Are you sure you wouldn't prefer that I contact somebody who can help you?”

“No. No--I mean, yes.”

“All right, Peter. What can I do to help you feel better? I want to make sure I am doing all that I can for you.”

Behind the mask, Peter shuts his eyes and leans his head back against the tile. The white lenses narrow over his face. How easy it is, he thinks, how mindless, how effortless it would be to slip further and further down below the surface of the water. It wouldn't even be death that awaited him--death is far too harsh a word, rough and jagged around the edges--but the comforting pillow of the void, of the thing between warmth and cold. The end of colors. Sensation. The end to the tiredness and the guilt and the being.

“Saving people was the only thing I had left to keep me pretending I was good,” he whispers into the dark behind his lids. “Now saving people has turned into hurting them. Pretty soon just breathing the air around me will kill them.”

A dim light bulb comes on somewhere in his mind. It's an epiphany that brings no relief. Only clarity.

“And being human again isn't even near enough to make me suffer for what I did.”

Under the lazy swirl of soap, his nails find the familiar crook in his elbow and latch on, digging deeper and deeper, till the dull throb of pain registers somewhere in him. A drop of pink floats away and dissolves at the surface.

Maybe Karen says something. Maybe she doesn't. More than likely she does, but Peter has already lapsed into that guise of sleep that strips him of the need to listen or care. He drifts for minutes, seconds, hours--he has no way of telling--

Until he's jolted awake like a bolt of electricity to the blaring overhead of the Avengers’ alarm.

Chapter Text

The water slides off Peter’s arms in waves of alarm as he jolts back up to the surface. The smell of citrus punches his lungs with a grounding force that almost rocks him back on his heels. He’d forgotten, he’d forgotten how the bathrooms here in the Tower smelled. He’d forgotten.

FRIDAY’s security system is still wailing overhead. Peter scrambles over the side of the tub in a flurry of reflexes he hasn’t realized he still had. His grip on the edge of the sink slips and he plummets toward the tiles--gasps for breath--then catches himself on the doorway in the nick of time.

His tongue feels heavy, unable to keep up with the racing of his brain. “FRI--FRIDAY,” he stammers out. Flings himself into his bedroom and rattles open his wardrobe. “FRIDAY! W-what’s going on? Where’s the--where’s the breach?”

FRIDAY’s answering voice is considerably muted, indicating to him that she has disabled her building-wide speakers to limit her interaction to only those heat signatures she recognizes in individual rooms throughout the facility.

“The west side entrance, Mr. Parker. My camera systems in Basement 2-A have been disabled. There appears to be a virus attempting to shut down all surveillance on the first three floors as well. However, my systems everywhere except for Basement 2-A are still up and running.”

“Shit,” Peter mutters to himself. The suit. The suit. Where the hell did he put it? He flies to the other side of the room for his backpack and spills its contents onto the bed. Sure enough, the wad of red and navy spandex is crumpled at the bottom. His hands won’t stop shaking, God, why can’t he stop shaking? It takes him a full ten seconds before he’s able to step into the boots and arms of the Spider-Man outfit and find the steadiness to hit the emblem on the chest to conform the suit to his body.

Thank God Karen has already got the heater up and running. Peter hadn’t even bothered to towel himself off from his bath and stepped into the suit dripping and shivering.

“Basement 2-A. Basement 2-A,” Peter mutters to himself. Karen’s screen of alerts comes online at that instant, making him flinch at the sudden burst of blue schematics and letters across his vision. Hypersensitivity to light--another characteristic of his pre-spider-bite body that’s slipped his mind. “Hey, Karen, uh--could you, could you sharpen my lenses, please? And maybe--I dunno, dim the display a bit?”

“No problem, Peter.”

“Hey, FRIDAY?”

“Yes, Mr. Parker?”

“You still got Grandpa Monitor Protocol installed?”

“Yes, I do. It has not yet been disabled since it was installed less than forty-eight hours ago.”

Peter knows, because he’s the one who coded in the protocol that evening that Tony flew off with the Avengers to smash things up against AMMO down in Manhattan.

“Cool, cool, cool. Just checking. Uh, enable Gramps Protocol then, could you? And connect your security feed to Karen’s screen number three in my suit.”

“Right away, Mr. Parker.”

Two seconds later, a view of May’s room two doors down fizzes to life on his display. His aunt is hammering her fists against the door, silently screaming at somebody, anybody, to unlock the room. Peter winces. But before he can react, the feed switches rapidly through the other rooms.

“Only the rooms with heat signatures, please, FRIDAY.”

“Already entered that filter to limit my feed.”

Bruce is racing around one of the smaller labs, slamming glass cases shut and sweeping chemicals into cabinets and locking them. On another open floor that looks like the gym, Natasha is swinging a roundhouse kick at the nearest vent, no doubt to enter the ceiling ducts: a trick she must have learned after decades of working with Clint. Then FRIDAY switches to Tony’s private quarters at the precise moment that the camera catches the tail end of Tony pressing his palm to a security checkpoint and herding Rhodey and Pepper through the door of the secret elevator.

“FRIDAY, where’s Mr. Stark and Mr. Rhodey and Ms. Potts headed to?”

“It appears that Elevator 4-B is headed toward the basements.”

“Fuck,” Peter says suddenly, loudly, with far more lucidity than he’s had the past two days put together. “The serums. Fuck. AMMO’s here.”

He shouldn’t be surprised, really. With heroes as flashy as the Avengers hot on their trail, it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist for AMMO to figure out that the confiscated serums would be secured in the nearest Avengers facility. How could they have been so careless?

But there’s no time for musings and regrets. Peter leaps toward the door and jiggles the knob. As he expected, it’s bolted.

“FRIDAY, let me out.”

“I apologize, Mr. Parker, but my lockdown protocol forbids me from opening any doors except for Tony’s handprint alone.”

“Hey, FRI?”

“Yes?”

“You still got Mini-Me Protocol installed and ready to go?”

“Yes, Mr. Parker.”

“Activate it. Now. Go.”

“Mini-Me Protocol activated.”

Peter’s breath leaves him in a whoosh of relief. He spring forward again and slams his palm against the security checkpoint beside his doorway. The panel pulses blue for a few seconds, then lights up green and there’s the telltale click of the multiple bolts on his bedroom door unlocking.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he mutters under his breath. He’s already racing down the hallway. He almost forgets to gulp in air as his legs pound up and down on the tiles--was running always this hellish when he was in middle school?--but he pushes past the burn in his lungs, the sting of sudden moisture in his eyes, and he activates the double rope web combination on his webshooters at the same instant that he takes a running leap over the railing of the penthouse floor. He goes soaring into open air--nothing latching him to the ground except the delayed reaction of gravity--and for an instant, a brief and glorious flicker of time, his heart thumps in the middle of his throat with the familiar adrenaline rush of Spider-Man swinging from skyscraper to skyscraper hundreds of thousands of feet from the earth.

It’s almost right. It’s almost home.

Peter aims for the farthest pillar, chanting meaningless prayers under his breath all the while that Karen’s sharpened vision makes up enough for his faulty depth perception, and he feels his stomach lurch within him when he doesn’t instantly feel the tug of the web rope against his shoulder. And then it all falls on him in a rush--the tension of the web, the fatal velocity at which he’s hurtling toward a wall--and he bends and twists himself just in time to clear the corner and skid down the hallway several floors down.

His head jerks up and down as he assesses his surroundings. He can’t be more than a few hundred feet from Elevator 4-B now, if his architectural calculations are correct. He takes off at a jog around another corner and suppresses an exclamation of victory when he comes face to face with the sleek, subtle titanium doors of the elevator shaft.

Peter presses his ear to the wall. His superhearing may have been cutting in and out for several hours now, but for whatever reason it appears to be the last of his powers to go, and he can just make out the whine of the elevator grinding to a halt several dozen more floors below. With the knowledge now the the shaft is clear, Peter casts about for the nearest potted plant. With Pepper Potts living in the Tower, there’s bound to be at least ten on each floor.

He’s out of breath again as he lugs the gigantic fern and its stone pot back to the elevator doors. He knows there’s no use trying to bash in the impervious doors; nor can he use the same Mini-Me Protocol and his palmprint to open it up, since there is no checkpoint panel on this floor. He knocks quickly on various points along the wall around the elevator door. As soon as he finds a spot that echoes the slightest bit--an indication that it’s not reinforced--he sucks in a deep breath, grabs the stone pot with a stumble, and flings it with every ounce of strength in his tiny body at the sheetrock. It crumbles on impact.

Peter only needs to aim a few well-placed kicks at the hole to expand it, and then he’s sticking his head through into utter darkness.

“Karen, night vision, please.”

On his screen, FRI’s security feed is still cycling through the rooms with heat signatures. Steve has just rolled out of the garage--what the heck was Captain America doing down there? Ogling Tony’s vintage cars, probably, Peter’s ADHD brain supplies unhelpfully--and the other Avengers are nowhere to be found. They must already be either outside, in the vents or in the basements where FRIDAY’s security access is rapidly shutting down.

Back in her room, May is still slamming at the door and screaming herself hoarse. The playback is silent, but it doesn’t matter: Peter can read his name easily enough on her lips. He swallows.

“FRIDAY,” he whispers. “Karen? Anyone who’s online. Please let May know I’m okay. Everyone’s okay. She needs to save her energy and just hide. I’ll--I’ll be back b-before she knows it.”

“I will try to transmit your message right away, Mr. Parker.”

Fear of heights is another of those pesky pre-bite characteristics of his that has picked the most inconvenient time to plague him now. Peter blinks once, twice, several times, then steels himself and shoots two flexible webs at opposite walls of the elevator shaft to lower himself swiftly but safely several floors down. He repeats the process until he comes upon a sturdy-looking pulley. He pushes himself off it, eyes clenched shut, and swings his arm around for the thick pipe he knows he saw nearby. He lets out a hiss at the heat radiating off the metal pipe, but doesn’t relinquish his grip. Swearing to waste no more time, Peter shimmies down the pipe system and stops just where he can hear and feel the heating system blowing through a vent. He slides closer to the wall and feels around. At last, his fingers touch something like metal shingles, and he’s wrenching open the duct and tumbling through.

Peter never realized before how much he took his sticking abilities for granted. Sure, the suit gloves may have some traction on the palms, but it hardly compares to his supernatural stickiness. Not when he’s scuttling blindly through a vent system and sliding at an almost breakneck speed down the sleek metal surface.

FRIDAY’s alarm has gone eerily quiet. It takes Peter a few seconds to realize he’s slid to a halt above one of the basement levels, where FRI’s systems are shot and her sirens are silent. In their stead, a concatenation of gruff-sounding voices wafts up to the vents.

“There must be another floor, I’m telling ya. This place is labeled 2-A. There’s gotta be a 1-A.”

“We’ve already seen Basement 1, Einstein. Just a bunch of car parts and crap.”

Peter almost snorts to himself. Uneducated fools.

“You, Hidley. Head out that way and check for other rooms. Take Quincy with you. Rico, Mark, keep guard in the direction we came from. We gotta be quick. Someone’s bound to be coming any minute now what with those fucking alarms going off everywhere. C’mon, move it! Now!”

Including the leader’s voice, that leaves at least five invaders to deal with. Peter freezes just above the vent cover, waiting for the guys named Rico and Mark to come into view. To his relief, it’s just the two of them--though if the size of their weapons is anything to go by, their illegal arms are a force to be reckoned with.

Peter chews his lip and listens for the other footsteps. Two sets, fading rapidly in the direction of the other rooms, and one, belonging to the leader, he presumes, circling around Room 2-A below him. He leans back on his haunches and thinks. If he waits long enough for Rico and Mark to be out of earshot, and then drops down on the leader and takes him by surprise--but then the other two will have found 2-B by then--no, he reminds himself, it doesn’t matter. They can’t harm him with another serum: he’s already stabbed himself with it voluntarily. There are no more powers left to suck out of his fragile body.

He taps a finger against his knee and waits three, four more seconds. It’s now or never.

He hears a rustle of leather and a squeak of rubber on cement. It’s close enough for him. With another rattle of his heart in his ribcage, Peter lifts the vent cover, attaches a web rope to the ceiling of the vent, and swiftly lowers himself through.

Well, shit. The leader is facing him eye to eye. Just his Parker luck.

“Web grenade!” Peter shouts. The web ricochets half a second later against the guy’s face with a satisfying crack.

The man (who, as Peter’s hyperactive brain helpfully notes, is wearing that hideous shearling jacket from the live news footage), roars and charges him.

Peter swings out of the way half a beat too late. Shearling Guy’s fist connects with the side of his ribs, knocking the wind from him. Peter shuts his eyes and lets instinct take over, all the months of weekend training from Nat and Tony. He seizes the momentum of the impact by releasing his hold on the web rope and rolling to the side, tucking his knees in. He lands in his classic Spidey crouch a few dozen feet away, webshooters at the ready.

“So they sent you down to stop us, huh? What is this, a diversion?”

Shearling Guy and Peter circle each other around a bunch of crates, each one tense and with right fist raised.

“Gotta give it to you,” Peter quips. “You’re not the dumbest criminal I’ve met. But nah, nobody sent me. I was enjoying a really nice bath when you guys came, by the way. You’re kinda destroying the whole night routine vibe I’ve got going on.”

“Mutant scum,” Shearling Guy spits at him. And then wastes no time in drawing and cocking a pistol in Peter’s direction.

“Oh, shit,” Peter hisses to himself. Guns. Guns are bad. Spidey powers or not, he’s never been immune to them.

The shot comes before he has time to web up the gun. The bullet narrowly misses his cheek and shreds through the corner of the crate instead. Peter springs to the side and collides with another stack of boxes with all the spectacular coordination of his former prepubescent self.

Shearling Guy shoots again, and again, and then a fourth time, before Peter risks a peek over his barricade of boxes and finally has a clear chance to web the gun toward him. The villain swears and charges at him again.

“Really?” Peter shrieks. “Not the bull run again--oof--”

He leaps for the pipes running across the ceiling and latches onto one, barely, just as his enemy bowls into his lower half. Peter tightens his grip on the pipe and swings a kick squarely at the guy’s chest. He goes down on a knee with a winded bellow. Peter seizes the opportunity then to drop down on him with the guy’s head between his calves, and he bodily flips them both over backward. The back of the man’s skull connects with the cement floor with a crack, and then he goes deathly still.

Peter groans and struggles into an upright position, but the sheer effort of that single disabling move on his opponent has left him seeing stars. He drops his head into his hands and allows himself the space of three breaths, then five, then six, before pushing himself up to his feet and staggering in the direction of the nearest doorway.

Everything around him is swaying. The lights overhead are shimmering. Are Karen’s blue screens flickering in front of him, or is it his vision? Peter shakes his head from side to side to clear it. His breath, he realizes belatedly, is coming in curtailed gasps.

A figure in black materialized in front of him, blurry, a mass of red curls. He puts up his arms instinctively, but the newcomer is already speaking to him in a low, soothing voice.

“It’s just me, Spidey. It’s Nat. Hey. You good?” She presses a feather-light touch to his shoulder.

Peter uncurls from his defensive stance and returns a jerky nod. “Did you, did you come from 2-B?”

“2-B and 2-C,” the assassin confirms with a grim smile. “The two in there are dead. No need to worry about them.”

“And the serums?”

“Tony’s heading over there now to initiate lockdown on those storage rooms again. At least for now, until we get them transported elsewhere.”

“There’s--there’s--” Peter’s voice is struggling to bubble up to the surface. Why is his tongue so heavy against the roof of his mouth?

“Nat,” Tony’s voice crackles over the comm in her ear. She stiffens into high alert.

“Yeah? Hit me.”

“FRIDAY’s systems are going back up again and she’s detecting a bunch of foreign heat signatures in the garage.”

“On it.”

“W-west entrance!” Peter finally gets out. “There’s more there. At least two. I, I heard them head over there there, they’re expecting you guys to come at them there and they’re ready for the attack.”

Nat tosses him the tiniest of smirks. “They may think they’re ready, but never as ready as me.” She’s about to turn and jog down the hallway, when she notices that the boy has moved barely an inch. “Spiderling? Where are you hurt?”

“Not--hurt--” Peter wheezes out. “Just winded. And a little dizzy. Taking down the Shearling Coat Guy took a bit more energy than I expected.”

He now has Black Widow’s full attention. Her ponytail swishes as she cocks her head to give him a closer once-over, one brow arched and the other scrunched up in clear disbelief. “Hey,” she says in a lower voice, evenly. Peter doesn’t like it very much at the moment how her tone lacks its usual sardonic edge. It feels foreign, wrong, soft. He’s tired of it.

Peter bends over, leaning a hand on one knee, and waves her off with the his other hand. “I’m good,” he pants. “Actually, let’s get going. The adrenaline’ll do me good.”

Nat decides not to question him anymore and throws him a tiny nod before setting off.

When they finally arrive at the west entrance, it’s worse than Peter initially imagined. When he’d said “at least two” waiting for the Avengers, he hadn’t expected the “at least two” to mean “about twenty.” Cap is hard at work swinging his shield and kicking at a circle of opponents, while Tony and Rhodey tag-team from the sky and the ground to blast the weapons from the intruders’ hands. Pepper zooms by decked out in metallic purple--Peter muffles a fanboy-brand holy mcfreaking shit, it’s the rescue armor--and appears to be headed toward the east side entrance, blasters at the ready. Nat wastes no time in running into a practiced leap at the head of the nearest villain, wrapping her hands around his skull and using it as leverage to swing a roundhouse kick at another AMMO minion.

Somebody springs on Peter from behind. He drops to his knees with a yelp and almost succumbs under the weight of his attacker--yup, he’ll dub this one Onion Breath--until his training instincts kick in again and he rolls forward to heave the guy off him. He doesn’t pause anymore to consider the pain crying out in his lungs or the way his reality quivers around him. He thrusts back his elbow on the man’s nose with a brutal force, knowing he’ll have to overcompensate for his now human strength, and is rewarded with a shout and a satisfying crack.

But Onion Breath is a tough cookie to break. The next thing Peter knows, there are two sets of meaty fingers wrapped around his throat and then he’s being vaulted up into the air. He kicks out futilely, only landing an ineffectual hit on the guy’s shin.

“Guys--” Peter chokes out. He scrabbles at the hands around his neck. “Guys! A little--a little help over here! Hey!”

Oh, God, Peter thinks, this is it. This is how it’s gonna end. He’s survived a bullet to the leg and a sledgehammer to the shoulder, on top of multiple concussions and even being tied up in his own web, and now some common muscly goon is going to choke the life out of him just because he doesn’t have the extra ounce of strength it takes to fling him off his back.

“Kid! I’m coming! Hang tight!”

Tony spins in midair and performs a practical figure eight to head back in Peter’s direction. Still flying in at full speed, he opens one of his shoulder missiles and shoots at Onion Breath’s chest. The guy gurgles and wavers on his feet, then releases Peter like a rag doll and collapses backward on the concrete.

“That’s what happens to motherfuckers who touch the Spider-Ward,” Tony quips. His barely contained rage seethes just below the surface of his characteristic sarcasm.

“Th-thanks,” Peter rasps. He rolls over onto his side and lets out a hacking coughing fit.

“Underoos! You good?” Tony lands in a kneeling position with a clang beside the kid.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, Onion Guy just caught me by surprise back there, I could’ve--fuck! Look out!” Just as Peter yells out the hoarse warning, his hands work on autopilot and he shoots a web at the butt of the weapon about to come crashing down on Tony’s head. He yanks with all his might, and the alien-like contraption skitters to the side of the garage.

Tony swivels and blasts the now unarmed attacker in the opposite direction. He bounces off the hood of one of the BMW’s and crumples to the ground, out cold.

“You know I had that, right? Titanium alloy armor and all that. Wouldn’t’ve made a dent in the helmet. This shit is worth billions.”

Peter can’t help it. He rolls his eyes up at the Iron Man faceplate and gives another weak cough before retorting, “Yeah, sure, but at least I saved you your totally extra post-battle freakout over the new scratches. Mark 72’s maiden voyage, I know.”

Tony points a metallic finger in his face. “Stop that. I am not extra.” He retracts the nanonites from his hand for a moment to check around Peter’s head and chest. “Seriously, though, thanks, kid. Looks like your reflexes are still intact. How’s the neck?”

“I’ll live.” Peter hauls himself upright and ignores the way the lights around him have been swimming. Even Karen’s vision-sharpening feature does little now to mitigate the effects of the knocks to his head and the pre-bite eyesight.

“Stay down, Spidey. There’s only a few more to take down. I need you to go back in and make sure FRIDAY’s back up at a hundred percent. No need for you to be in extra danger out here in the garage.”

For once, Peter’s argument dies on his tongue the moment it’s born, and he simply nods. He staggers to his feet and ducks back through the west entrance with a thumbs-up over his shoulder at Tony.

“FRIDAY?” Peter asks, once he’s through the doorway. “How’s the security system doing?”

“Ninety-eight percent and rapidly recovering. However, I detect a moving--”

A low, sonic boom cuts off the rest of FRIDAY’s report. A tremor runs through the floor beneath Peter’s feet, and then a beat and a half of frightening silence, and then--

Peter’s heart lurches to his mouth as the ground rumbles.

It’s not him anymore. His vision’s fine.

It’s not him.

The leader he left unconscious in the basement. Oh, God. The building groans.

A bomb.

The guttural scream rips from Peter’s throat before he can stop it. “MAY!”

And then he’s racing down the corridor, tearing around the corner, shooting web after web and swinging from one floor to the next. He’s slamming into walls and then he’s shimmying up the elevator shaft through the hall he broke with the potted plant. It’s too far, too high up, he can’t even hear anything anymore because the booming is getting louder and louder and more frequent and--God--his superhearing’s gone--what if he can’t get to May in time?

He has at least ten more floors to go. He slips down the pipe he’s clinging to, and his stomach somersaults inside him. He can’t breathe. He can’t breathe.

“Peter? Peter. Peter!”

The kid barely registers Tony’s voice over the comms. Karen. Mask. Right.

“I gotta, I gotta get to May, Mr. Stark! She’s up there in the penthouse! Get everybody else out of the garage, now!”

Finally the ceiling of the shaft comes into view. Peter hauls himself onto the ledge where the elevator doors are gleaming. He shoves his fingers into the crevice and pries with all his might. A bellow of frustration erupts from him when it barely gives. He lets out a puff of breath, eyes stinging under the mask from the sudden salt of the sweat pouring down his brow, and pries again. The doors creak and groan, and after three more seconds--three tortuous, interminable seconds--they spring back.

Peter collapses in a heap on the tiled hallway of the penthouse. “May!” he screams again. “May? May! Can you hear me?!”

He half-scrambles, half-trips his way to the Parkers’ guest suite. The muffled agony of May’s hoarse cries are now discernible through the door. The knob is still rattling.

“Hold on, hold on, May, stop stop stop! I got you!” Peter rips off his glove and slams his palm down against the control panel. With an anticlimactic click, the bolt unlocks, and FRIDAY’s muted speaker announces, “Access granted, Mr. Parker.”

Peter yanks open the door without wasting another breath and braces himself for his aunt to come tumbling through. She falls into his arms with something between a gasp and a dry sob of relief, and Peter almost bows backward from the weight of her collapsing against him, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. She’s alive. She’ll be safe. He strokes her hair in frantic movements and shushes her almost as a mother would.

“I’m sorry, May, I’m sorry,” he chants over and over in her ear. “The AMMO guys--they were attacking--I had to help everybody disable them first--listen. Aunt May. We gotta get out of here, now.”

“Are you hurt?” May’s eyes are still shining with more unshed tears, and yet with the steel characteristic of Linetti women, she has already cast aside her panic and directed her attention to him.

Peter blinks behind the mask. “Not badly. Mr. Stark said--”

He’s cut off by another boom. It’s louder now, deafening, and this time it brings with it a crumble of sheetrock from the ceiling above.

Peter inhales sharply. “May, get on my back.”

May has never once heard her nephew speak in this tone of voice, one that brooks no argument, and she does not question it. She snaps back into action and climbs on his back as directed, wrapping her arms and legs around his torso.

Peter suppresses a huff. His lungs are dying and his muscles are on fire. The adrenaline has left him, and the weight of May’s body pressing against him feels like it is draining the very last of his life force. Still, he shakes off the dizziness and races for the elevator shaft.

There’s an ominous groan right before a massive chunk of the penthouse ceiling slams down in front of their path. May coughs up a hacking fit at the cloud of dust.

“Fuck!” Peter yells. Think, Peter, think. The shaft is blocked. You can’t climb out the window--you don’t have sticky fingers and the building structure is compromised--

--And then he looks up in time to catch sight of a blur of purple whizzing by the window.

“Ms. Potts!” he yells into the comm. “Ms. Potts, is that you?”

“Peter!” Pepper hollers back at nearly the same volume. “Where are you?”

“Penthouse. East corner. I’m waving. Ms. Potts, turn around and come in through the living room window!”

He’s barely finished his sentence before Pepper bursts into the living room in a spray of glass and whirring metal. She lands with a clang a few feet from Peter and May, one that rocks the entire floor.

“Take May!” Peter orders her.

May’s eyes go wide. “Peter--”

“I’ll be fine. I’ll be right behind you guys.” Peter tacks on a shaky smile, one that neither woman can see underneath his spandex mask. “I’m Spidey, remember?”

Pepper simply nods, grabs May under the armpits and blasts off through the opening in the shattered window.

“--Kid! KID! Can you hear me?!”

Peter winces at the crackle and whine over the comms. “Yeah, Mr. Stark, I can now!”

Tony swears. “FRIDAY’s going down and our connection went shot. Where the hell are you? Don’t say you’re still--”

“Ms. Potts got May. I’m getting out,” Peter cuts him off. Another blast rocks the entire penthouse, sending massive ripples of destruction through the tiles underneath him. He flails for one heart-stopping second before he finds himself airborne, shooting through the open window and facing the sky in the wrong direction.

Well, they always say there’s many ways to skin a cat.

Peter’s heart lurches to his mouth. He’s hurtling, freefalling, wind slicing at him at a deadly velocity. The clouds are spinning above him. There’s ash--ash and concrete--dust--it’s all crumbling behind him, and for a minute of eternity he’s trapped again underneath the rubble of the warehouse, paralyzed and floating as the ceiling of cement comes caving in on him.

Parachute. Parachute.

“K-Karen,” he sobs out in a garbled mess. “Parachute! Please!”

The clouds are fading. It’s all a haze and he’s being sucked into a vacuum with no control over his limbs. The only part of his body that is racing is his brain. They say your memories flash before your eyes like a videotape right before your mind knows you’re about to die. Peter knows now that is a lie: because he knows, with unshakable and stunning certainty, that he is going to die, and yet all he can think is a desperate cycle of May-Ned-Tony. He knows there is no way he can survive this. Parker luck gave him thousands of chances, but this is it. His time is up.

It’s an unsettling irony, really, how the panic clogs up his throat and his heart refuses to cease its jackhammering. It’s so alive, so frantic, beating rapidly enough to leap right out of his chest, and yet a shroud of darkened calm has fallen over his mind. Another instant of clarity.

Saving people wasn’t enough. Ben’s still dead, because of him.

Being human wasn’t enough. MJ’s still dead, because of Spider-Man.

May is safe now and she has the protection of a dozen armies behind the Avengers. Peter has done his part. It’s the least he can do.

Karma was only ever the answer.

Was this how it felt in the last few thousands of split seconds as MJ plummeted to her death? Did she zip through the same stages--shock, rage, panic, grief--acceptance--as she closed her eyes and felt the pavement rush up to meet her?

There’s a sharp tug suddenly at his shoulder blades. Peter’s eyes snap open. The parachute?

But it’s too late. Too late.

Always too late.

He doesn’t register the pain at first. He anticipates it would hurt all over. But when his body comes back online, every nerve ending that is shrieking at him is centered in his chest.

He’s on his back, eyes up to the sky. This must be the part now where he floats away.

Distantly, he hears the scream from Tony even over the roar of the thrusters.

Tony crash lands in a tumble on the pavement and stumbles over to the kid. He wants to close his eyes and look away, but he can’t: he’s transfixed in the unmoving mass of crimson and navy on the ground. There’s something sticking out, straight up in the air, that doesn’t make sense. It’s too close to the kid and jutting out at the wrong angle.

It can’t be. It doesn’t make sense.

He’s fallen onto his knees beside Peter with short gasps bursting out of him without realizing it. He rips off the mask. “Pete! Pete!”

He almost wishes the kid’s eyes were closed. They’re wide open and glazed over, unseeing, an eerie lightened tone of his normal chocolate brown. He looks more dead than alive this way.

Something dark and viscous trickles down from the corner of Peter’s mouth. Tony doesn’t want to think about what it is.

Despite everything in him screaming at him not to, Tony’s gaze snaps to the pole slicing through Peter’s chest.

He doesn’t know if he should laugh or curse that he designed the suit to be red. It doesn’t matter. He can see it, he can feel it, the wetness sliding sickeningly between his fingers as he touches the kid. Peter is barely breathing.

Tony’s lungs constrict.

In and out. In and out.

“FRIDAY, vitals.”

“Peter’s right lung is punctured and he is rapidly losing blood. At this rate, if he does not get medical attention immediately, he will die of blood loss in the next half hour.”

“Fuck.” Tony struggles to breathe. “Pepper! Rhodes! Anyone who can hear me, get medical now! The kid is down!”

Peter’s lips are swiftly turning chalky. Why isn’t he blinking?

“S-superhealing,” Tony stutters. “FRIDAY! Where’s his superhealing at?”

A gut-wrenching pause. “Boss, according to my scans, Peter no longer has superhealing because his DNA registers--ully human--” Her voices fuzzes in and out and then cuts out for good.

“Somebody!” Tony screams. There’s clanging in the background. He doesn’t know, doesn’t turn around to see who it is who landed behind him.

Breathe. In and out. In and out.

It's no trick of the light: it never was. Not the red-rimmed eyes behind broken glasses, not the tremors under Peter's skin that he chose to ignore. Not the crimson painting his kid's chest in muddy rivers now, seeping out and pooling underneath him.

His fingers are soaking. There's a goddamn metal pole impaling his kid's shoulder and all Tony can think of is how his fingers are wet.

No. No. This was not supposed to happen to a human. Peter's not supposed to be human.

Chapter Text

Peter thinks he’s falling upward when he opens his eyes. No, that’s wrong: he doesn’t actually open his eyes, so much as he drifts to the side from a blur of murky gray shades into another side of his world that’s decidedly lighter and a little more defined. A world that has a little bit more noise, more moving shapes, an uncomfortable low buzz of something flowing into his veins and the overwhelming sense of eyes on him even when he can’t make out any faces or bodies around him.

He closes his eyes again. Or rather, he bumps up against the wall of white and pushes off against it to start drifting left toward the darkness again. The comfort. It may not be devoid of all feeling, but it’s far less frightening, the uncertainty of floating in diluted ink compared to the sharp vertigo of being sucked upward into the blurry halogen lights. Everything was spinning there. Here, he can continue turning in lazy circles. Pretend the sky was always this lackluster, this unsaturated. Pretend he can forget the image of the last sunset burned into his memory--that pungent fragrance of rain from the slate storm clouds rolling over a burning pastel mess of peach sorbet and lemon yellow and intense, indescribable strawberry fire.

Sunsets don’t exist in his comforting gray world anymore. They don’t. Not here, not where he’s safe from the burn of feeling alive while others aren’t.

The sky has no dimension. He could be falling still, maybe, in this gray world he’s chosen, but at least he can fool himself into thinking there’s no gravity.

He wonders if Michelle Jones fell through somewhere into a pocket dimension where she, too, floats in a sky that has no up or down, no sunrise, no sunset, no color, no confusion and no distinction between life and death. Maybe she did. Maybe she found the invisible door just fractions of a second before her body collided with the concrete.

Maybe her soul detached in time and she didn’t feel anything at all.

He still manages to wonder if he’s dead, even when he knows he isn’t. He wishes he was.

“--You waking up for us, buddy? You finally with us? C’mon. C’mon. Blink. We gotta know you’re--”

“--Not too forceful, Tony, you’ll overwhelm him--”

“I don’t give a--”

“Honey. It’s okay. We’re here. We’re all here. You feel that?” There should be a squeeze, somehow he recognizes that abstractly. There should be nerves in his fingers, there should be pressure and warmth. “That’s me. It’s me. I’m right here. Nobody’s leaving.”

And that’s all the unintended permission he needs to push off the white shore for good again and curl back in on himself in the shadows waiting to embrace him.

--

May reads him a poem, once. He knows this one. Something about woods on a snowy evening or thereabouts, by this guy named Frost.

Peter hadn’t read it for English class the day it was assigned. Getting caught up in Spider-Man duties and other requirements for his science classes and all that. That’s how he remembers it, because it was the sole required reading for English that he hadn’t managed to at least skim before class, and MJ had teased him relentlessly in her droll, fond way about it. She and Ned had wrestled with each other over the reader at lunch that day, fighting for the rights to read aloud the poem in as loud and obnoxious a voice as possible in Peter’s ear.

He still doesn’t remember what it’s about. Not quite. Because that day, even as Ned cleared his throat and pronounced the first three verses with a bombastic roll of his r’s, Peter had been more caught up in the bottomless sparkle of mirth in his boyfriend’s eyes and the rare flush blooming across MJ’s cheeks as she leaned forward over the table with her face in her palm and rolled her eyes at the two boys in front of her. Peter had been arrested with the way her lips moved as she mouthed the lines along with Ned’s terrible stumbling reading. Because of course she knew Robert Frost word for word.

Peter wishes he opened his eyes and looked up at May when she finished reading the poem at his bedside. He really does. But Peter Parker is not brave--he never has been--that’s where everybody is wrong about him. The coward in him wins, and he shuts his ears and tunes everything out and pretends. Pretends MJ’s smile and MJ’s curls and MJ’s rolling eyes weren’t there when Ned dramatically read the part about the farm pony wondering what they’re doing at the edge of the woods in the whispering dead of night.

--

Tony never talks when he’s sitting at Peter’s bedside. The rest of them do--May, of course; Pepper, Rhodey, Cap sometimes, even Natasha. All of them. But not Tony.

Tony’s exactly like him. They both know that. And so Peter has no doubt that Tony can see right through him, the pretense at a comatose-like sleep, the avoidance, the subtle shifts to roll over to the other side of the bed when he thinks nobody’s in his room and watching him.

And Tony’s older, perhaps not that much wiser, but definitely older and so much more experienced at this game than Peter. In the end, it’s the kid who raises his white flag.

It’s not that he ever really falls into a deep sleep again. He’s always there, just barely conscious beneath the surface, hyper-aware of everything and only half-choosing to tune it all out. He simply tires of the comfort of the gray--rip off the band-aid in one go and all that bullshit they used to say--and he slowly, gently, but resolutely opens his eyes.

To be honest, he’s surprised to find he’s in his own bed in the guest room of the Compound and not the med bay.

Peter takes his time lazily tracing the faint stain of web dissolver fluid on the ceiling that he knows is there from the first time he and Ned tried the upside-down kiss thing. He can’t see it--his retinas are as human and unfocused as ever--but he knows it’s there. He knows, with the same level of conviction that he also knows Tony is to his left in the ridiculous metallic rocking chair, watching him.

Tony’s rumpled MIT hoodie rustles as he leans forward by an infinitesimal degree. “I’ve got your glasses right here, kid.”

Peter’s mouth moves in the formation of the word thanks. He doesn’t roll his head to the side to look at his mentor. Doesn’t have the strength or the will to, not yet. He blinks and holds the darkness behind his lids for one more second and holds out his left hand, barely flinching at the coldness of the plastic frames when they’re pressed into his palm, and then he opens his eyes again to stare right back at the ceiling. He doesn’t put on the glasses for a long, long while.

And then that hideous, pathetic, hated track of moisture begins to cut its familiar path down the side of his face.

He’s alive.

Tony blows out a breath beside him. “Take all the time you need, Underoos.”

And then he gets up, a jumble of creaking bones and popping joints, and walks slowly and deliberately out of the room.

If Peter had his superhearing right now, he’d be able to tell right off the bat if the man is standing outside the door. But he doesn’t need to listen for Tony’s heartbeat to know he’s pressed up against the wall, hands in his pockets, waiting for the kid to open up the bedroom again.

“FRIDAY?” is the first thing Peter chokes out. “Time and day, please.”

“Good evening, Mr. Parker. It is currently Thursday, April 5, 2018, 7:36 p.m. It is 43 degrees Fahrenheit outside.”

He’s been sleeping--floating--for almost a week.

“P-please--please tell me where all the others are.”

FRIDAY obliges without a moment’s hesitation. May is in the kitchen with Pepper and Natasha; Rhodey is on the outskirts of the gym close by Steve’s heat signature; Bruce is having a brisk walk around the perimeter; and Tony, just as Peter suspected, is down the hallway a few feet away.

“FRIDAY?”

“Yes, Peter?”

“Why am I alive?”

“Peter, I believe that is a question for--”

“I mean, I mean--what happened? How am I alive? I--I--fell like at least a thousand feet…”

The AI pauses. “You have sustained grave injuries, Peter. Karen’s reports tell me that your parachute deployed about two seconds before you would have hit the ground at full impact. However, your descent was not slowed enough to prevent you falling on top of a metal rod that was one of the residual support structures still standing after the Tower was bombed. According to the extensive medical reports filed in my system by Dr. Cho and her surgical team, your right lung was punctured and several ribs were either fractured or shattered. You are also healing from a concussion and various abrasions and contusions.”

“Oh.”

Yeah, Parker, oh.

“But...why.”

Peter doesn’t realize he breathed aloud the next question until FRIDAY replies: “I believe only a human companion can answer those kinds of questions, Peter.”

“Could you...could you please let Mr. Stark know he can come back in, please?” Peter says in a small voice.

“Certainly.”

Tony peeks in with hesitation and raised brows, an almost comical contrast to his characteristic confidence, and something about that fact almost makes Peter’s eyes sting again. The man has the sleeves of his hoodie rolled up now. Peeking over the waistline of his lab jeans is the telltale patch of plaid of his favorite faded flannel shirt that Peter’s seen him wear underneath other layers quite a few times. Peter’s gaze dips down and he almost makes a noise of inquisitive surprise upon finding that Tony’s feet are bereft of shoes. Only his socks remain.

“Hey,” Peter whispers, at the same time that Tony also murmurs, “Hey.”

“I got, uh--got pretty banged up, huh, Mr. Stark?” Peter tries a shaky lopsided smile that he already knows is going to fail before he even attempts it.

Tony moves closer to him and settles on the edge of the mechanical rocking chair with his hands tense against his knees and elbows up in the air. There’s something shimmering in Tony’s eyes, a bit of disbelief, a bit of pain and softness, just an edge of anger: an all too familiar emotional cocktail that Peter is well-versed in living with May. But the one that seems to overpower the rest is a raw and unadulterated relief, too sharp in the heat of its own intensity.

Tony looks at him. God, he tries. And so does Peter. They don’t know how to look at each other anymore.

Too many seconds have passed. Finally, Tony blurts out: “They almost gave you your own blood.”

Peter furrows his brow, not understanding.

“They. They almost--” Tony chokes. “They almost gave you your own blood. The blood we drew from you and stored back in 2017.”

Spider-Man’s blood. Mutated, enhanced, two percent non-human.

“You could have died. Right there on the surgical table, not because of the lung or the blood loss or the--but because of the wrong blood.”

Peter loathes how low and tortured Tony’s voice sounds. This was never meant to be the case. The parachute was not supposed to deploy--he was supposed to accept the descent into nothingness halfway to the pavement--there was not supposed to be any second chances. No more suffering, not for any of them involved.

He’s rendered mute.

Tony’s still not looking at him. “I almost didn’t believe FRIDAY,” he goes on, “not when she scanned you and you were--lying there on the ground in your own...with the pole...she said you were 100% human. I couldn’t believe it. I thought it was--I don’t know, the chemicals in the brain. The depression suppressing all your enhanced abilities. It couldn’t have gone DNA-deep. It’s scientifically impossible.”

Tony sucks in a breath that shudders from his very core. “But here we are.”

“I’m sorry,” Peter says at last.

Tony gives him a strange look then. Contemplative, almost. “Why are you sorry?”

“Because I--” He almost can’t say it. “Because I...I took the serum.”

Tony blinks. And then the muscle in his jaw jumps. He pinches the bridge of his nose and drops his other hand into his lap.

“I’m sorry,” Peter says again. It’s all he can say. Weak. Pathetic. Hardly making a dent in all the lifetimes of things he can never make up for.

Tony’s voice is gravelly. “That was your decision to make, Peter. It was--fucking stupid and reckless and--God, Parker, did you never once even stop to think that you should tell one of us? I don’t know, if not your aunt or me--maybe your boyfriend? Or even Bruce, for God’s sake?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize, Peter. Just don’t. Just--” Tony inhales sharply and gets up in a jumble of limbs to begin pacing. After two aborted trips across the room, he returns to the rocker. He leans forward to lay rest a hand on Peter’s shoulder. The kid almost flinches at the distant pressure.

“Peter. Look at me, please.”

He does.

“I’m not angry about you taking the serum,” Tony says, slowly and clearly. “Though it was stupid to not at least test it before sticking a goddamn shot of blue shit into your--well. Point is, that’s your choice. But what you did that was stupider was not telling anyone. I--I knew something was going on, Peter, and honestly I should’ve seen the signs better--those glasses--but--”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” Peter amends. His voice is barely above a thin whisper. “I dunno if I could have. It felt like...like...you would’ve stopped me. Told me it wasn’t worth it.”

Tony gazes into his eyes, long and searching. Something clicks on his face, as if he’s found the answer he’s been looking for, and yet he draws a breath to ask the question anyway. “Why did you do it?”

There. It’s out in the open now. It’s ugly and unfathomable and--it’s out there now.

The tremor starts up again from the depths of Peter’s chest to the ends of his hands. Human, human, human--never enough to atone--

“Hey. Hey hey hey. It’s okay. You’re all right. I’m sorry, bud. We can talk about this another time.”

Peter nods so rapidly and vehemently he almost gives himself a migraine. He’s so sick and tired of these salty tears blinding him and rolling down his face.

“Can I touch you?”

“N-no,” Peter hiccups. He gasps a little. “Please. I’m sorry. Can we--can we just--”

“Yeah. Yeah, bud. Anything you want. Get some rest. Are you thirsty? Hungry? Want me to bring up May?”

Peter starts to shake his head, then pauses. “May, please. And some water, I guess. Thanks.”

Tony’s already at the door with his hand on the knob when he looks back. “You good?”

The boy almost doesn’t answer. Either that, or he almost goes to answer with the usual “I’m good.” The man can see it in his eyes. But something inexplicable stops Peter, and after the space of three or four breaths, Peter simply says, “I don’t know.”

Tony wants to say You will be. Instead, what comes out is: “That’s okay.”

--

He asks May obsessively if she was hurt anywhere during the bombing. She assures him over and over that she was only slightly winded from the impact of Pepper’s rescue armor, nothing more.

She combs through his curls with that quiet sort of frantic energy that last came out when he broke down in her arms the night MJ fell. She scolds him for throwing himself into the suit and joining the battle when he knew he was human. She lectures him and praises him all in one breath. At some point she’s up on her feet gesticulating and on the verge of screaming.

He asks her to please just let it out. Lay it on him. It’s the least he deserves after what he put her through.

That gets her to stop and pivot on her heel to face him with a recondite expression. And then she says, in no uncertain terms, that she will not do that. Because she did enough screaming when she was locked in the penthouse and didn’t know where he was, and now at least she knows he’s all right.

“And I know why you did it,” May finishes softly, rejoining him on the edge of the bed. This time she tips to the side and shuffles closer until she’s pressed against him through the layers of blankets and sheets. The weight of her arm across his hips is careful, warm. Familiar enough to trigger an ache.

“I know, deep down inside of you, no matter what your DNA says, you’re Spider-Man. You’ve always been Spider-Man. You put others’ safety first. I know you were trying to save us...to save me. And you did.”

Peter fights the lump that chokes him at that moment.

He dares not think what might have happened if he had been the one to swing out of the penthouse with May on his back, instead of handing her off to Pepper.

Dead.

Falling.

Dead dead dead. Just like everybody else he should and tries to save.

Peter shifts his hand to brush against his aunt’s. She locks onto it, traps it by rubbing a thumb across the back of his hand in that insistent maternal rhythm.

“I love you,” he gasps out in a ragged breath. Because that’s all he can say to disguise the horror of the what-could-have-been and the what-should-have-been and the impossibility of I’m sorry. For being your son. For everything.

--

He learns to walk again, first with heavy supervision, then eventually without needing much support anymore. He could scream at the gentleness with which they treat him and tread around him. It tears him up inside, like he’s cheated death and his conscience can never escape the foul taste of his accidental victory.

Three weeks later finds him in the lab, spinning in lazy circles on his stool as he stares into nothing. It’s perhaps the only place he can stand, where he can be some semblance of Peter Parker and not hate himself.

Tony breezes in with two hot chocolates. No Dr. Pepper this time.

“You with me, bud?” he mutters cautiously, as he sets the mugs down one at a time.

“Yeah,” Peter whispers. “I’m here. With you, in the Compound. We’re in the lab. It’s…” He glances out the floor-to-ceiling glass window. “It’s late afternoon.”

Tony’s mouth twitches. “That’s right. You’re right here.”

“I’m not going back to school for the rest of the semester.”

If Tony’s gotten whiplash from the change in subject, he shows little sign of it. He takes a sip. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I--May and I talked about it a little over the phone this morning and...if you don’t mind, that is. I just needed to clear it with her first, you know? Not that I mean to be overstepping or--”

Tony waves a hand. “Not at all. You wanted to ask if you could stay here for a bit until you’re ready to go back home to Queens?”

Peter’s answering nod is shaky. “If that’s--if that’s all right with you.”

“Kid.” Tony sets down the mug with a thunk. “I’d rather not have May worrying about you being alone in the apartment all day long, not when--well. You get what I mean. She’s gotta work, bring home the bacon and all that jazz, and you gotta have someone around you. It’s cool. At least you don’t need to make your bed again for tonight.”

The boy almost smiles at that. “Thank you s-so much.” He hesitates, and Tony picks up on the flavor of awkwardness in the air that same instant. Normally Peter would tack on Mr. Stark at this point in his sentence; for some reason, he has refrained from doing so now.

“So.”

Whatever brief eye contact Peter’s managed to hold with Tony suddenly snaps away. He plays with his mug. “So.”

“We gotta talk.”

“Y-yeah.”

Tony leans back with his fingers steepled in front of him, drinking in deep, even breaths. His tie is loosened around his neck for the day. He stares at Peter over the edge of his fingertips, debating whether to prompt Peter or not. In the end, he does. “Peter. Why?”

A violent shudder jolts through Peter’s body. It looks frail, so tiny, even though nothing about his actual physique has changed. He scoops up his mug and takes a compulsive gulp. “Mr. Stark, I…”

“Take your time, kid.”

“I’m not gonna ask you to promise not to look at me any differently,” says Peter. “You’re--you’re not supposed to. It would be wrong. Because I--I gotta tell you everything from the beginning. I haven’t--haven’t told you everything, or anything, and it…”

“I know, bud. I know. I’m here. I’m listening.” Tony refrains from adding, No matter what, kid, I would never look at you differently.

Peter’s answering breath is so shaky that Tony nearly thinks it will knock the whole place down.

“Back in March--two days before spring break ended--me and MJ were walking together from the bodega. Ned was waiting up for us. We were supposed to continue our movie marathon, we just ran out of snacks and...I volunteered to run over to the store because obviously I was the fastest and...it doesn’t matter anymore. MJ made up an excuse to come with, ’cause she knew I needed to talk to her about something and we could never really get a moment alone all day hanging out with Ned.”

Tony nods at him to continue when there’s a lull in the narrative.

“I wanted to ask her opinion about telling Ned that I was applying to Columbia. ’Cause, like, we were both applying to MIT, obviously, but then Ned was also really into this program at--” Peter risks a glance up at Tony to find that the man is staring straight back at him with a softened gaze.

“It’s okay,” says Tony. “I get it. You wanted to go to college together. Go on, bud.”

“So, like, I wanted to know if it was better to tell Ned right away that I planned to apply, since I’m shit at keeping secrets, or if I should try to keep a lid on it because there was a huge chance I wouldn’t get in anyway and I didn’t want to get his hopes up and--yeah. Then I suddenly I picked up on some bits of conversation from a bunch of criminals in a nearby building. It was obvious they were in the middle of a drug dealing and…” Peter’s grip on the mug is so tight his knuckles whiten. His breath has begun to come short and heavy. “I should’ve walked away. I shouldn’t have even mentioned it to MJ. It was--it was petty and stupid and--I only had my mask and webshooters with me, I was wearing civilian clothes mostly--and MJ was with me--”

“Take a second, Peter. Breathe.”

But Peter barrels on. “She was with me. I wasn’t Spider-Man. I shouldn’t have gone up there. I told her to go back to Ned, but I guess--I think she was worried. I told her to at least stay downstairs by the streetlamp and...yeah. I went in with my mask and broke up the deal. I was doing okay, but then one of the guys I thought I’d knocked out jumped on me from the side and--and if it weren’t for MJ…”

Peter gurgled and choked as the pressure on his neck was ripped away from him. In the midst of it all, he dimly registered the clang of metal against bone. MJ stood over him where the goon had been a second ago, strangling him to death. In her hand was a broken pipe.

“You’re supposed to be downstairs.”

“You’re welcome.” MJ held out a hand to help him scramble to his feet. “And I knew I was going to need to save your scrawny ass. Badass Deadpan Lesbian, remember? I’m stocking up on superhero points so I can earn the suit when you lose it.”

Peter talks through it. He keeps on talking, slowly beginning to detach from himself, finding that his death grip on the mug loosens and becomes more tolerable the farther away he drifts. But then the brush of Tony’s hand on his arm tethers him back to earth.

He goes on. It’s like the words are vomiting out of him now without control. He describes the leader cutting his way out of Spidey’s webbing, racing up to the roof of the building. The final confrontation in the chill of the open March air. MJ following close behind; the rapid Spidey-and-perp banter; the sudden suspension of breath between the moment Peter closed in on the drug dealer and the split second the guy grabbed MJ by the arm and pushed her over the edge.

Peter doesn’t remember when he screamed first, if it was when he saw MJ’s combat boot catch on the ledge or after the top of her curls disappeared over the brick wall. He doesn’t mention it to Tony now. He doesn’t need that graphic detail.

“I was moving too slow, but then--didn’t even think--couldn’t care about the drug dealer anymore. I--I--it was like one minute she was there and the next minute she wasn’t. It was like a vacuum, it was like--it was like she was meant to fall.” He doesn’t know why he does it, why he says it this way. Why it’s so urgent and painfully important to convey this part of the narrative to Tony that doesn’t even make any sense at all.

Tony’s quiet.

And then--

“You don’t need to keep going, Peter. May told me what the police saw. You can stop.”

Peter’s breath is like fire. His chest heaves and burns; he can almost feel where the metal pole entered him and pierced his right lung just like the doctors said it did. He shakes his head.

“No. No. You need to know.”

A great and indescribable pain has filled Tony’s eyes. There’s fear now, too, residing in his throat. “No, Pete. I don’t.”

Pete’s voice is wrecked with anger. “I need to. I need to. You’re always--going on about how I don’t talk about shit and it’s true, it’s like this--huge poison inside of me and it won’t stop. It won’t go away. I need to tell you.”

The kid looks up at long last, and Tony locks eyes with him, and they stare at one another for an interminable fraction of time.

“Okay,” Tony whispers. “Okay.”

“I killed her.” It’s blunt. The shaking gone for now. “I shot a web at her to catch her and I--wasn’t thinking. Could’ve--made a web or--tried to flip and get under her to catch her--I’m faster--or, or, used the extendable web combination, it’s stretchy, it wouldn’t have…”

The stuttering’s back.

“Wouldn’t have--wouldn’t’ve--I was so fucking stupid. I killed her.”

Tony flinches.

“Her back.”

Tony wants to look away. He really does. Whatever it is Peter’s going to say now, in that incredibly distant and old voice, with his chocolate brown eyes fixed too firmly on his mentor, there’s no going back once it’s said.

“When I shot the web at her stomach. It broke.”

He doesn’t need to ask anymore to clarify what broke. Peter has said it in no graphic terms, but Tony can picture it all the same, the vivid and sickening crack of MJ’s spine as the fatal velocity of her descent and the unyielding rope of web around her middle snapped her in half.

It never was the concrete that knocked the life from her.

And then a sickness roils in Tony’s stomach, because Peter’s right: there was no way he could ever look at the kid the same way again. But not in the way that Peter ever thought.

Why did Peter have to be the one to kill someone he tried to save?

Why him?

Why now, why a seventeen-year-old kid?

Why somebody who’d never done anything except gladly accept the ‘responsibility’ hurled at him by the universe, without once buckling under the weight of an impossible world on his shoulders?

And in that moment Tony more than understands the abstract disbelief, the quiet detachment of Peter Parker from God. Maybe he almost joins the kid there, too. But this isn’t about Tony. It never was.

Tony can barely speak for the roughness of the moisture stopping up his throat. “So you took the serum.”

Peter doesn’t say anything. Maybe he nods. The kid himself is at a loss for words, pale now and unnaturally still, as if the act of saying the words aloud--it broke--was the final dam breaking loose for him. The two syllables to seal the reality of MJ’s fate in his mind.

“Kid,” Tony breathes out, battered. “Come here.”

The words are contradictory, because it’s Tony himself who stands and crosses the few feet between them to crush Peter in a desperate embrace while the boy is still half-seated on the edge of his stool.

“I’m not Spider-Man,” Peter mumbles into the now-drenched front of Tony’s button-down. “I thought I could be. I thought I could--”

“Shh, shh.” Tony silences him with a hand carding through his curls.

Peter starts up again. “Uncle Ben died because I didn’t do anything. Sh-she--MJ died because I tried to do something.”

And the worst part of it is, Tony can’t tell him that last statement is a lie.

But he can at least try.

“She was falling too fast. You were enhanced, Pete, but it was you against gravity. You did the only thing you could do to try to save her.”

“But I didn’t.”

“No, but you did everything,” Tony says again with force. “Everything, Pete. At the very least, you saved her from a more painful end.”

Peter says nothing in reply to that. It isn’t lost on them, the irony of how in their superheroing world, words of comfort have been reduced to this.

“It hurts,” he gurgles out after a while. “Tony. Tony. It hurts.”

Tony’s heart cracks just a little more at that and he tightens his already firm grip around the kid. “I got you, Pete. I got you.”

The boy is full-on sobbing now. He screams: a weak, half-choked and animalistic sound that drives a spike through the man’s chest like nothing else ever has.

“Please. It hurts, Tony. Let me go.”

“Never,” Tony says in a fierce whisper. He doesn’t care what the fuck Peter is talking about, if it’s the dissociation or cutting off ties or letting him die. “This is the promise I’m making you, here and now. I will never. Never let you go.”

--

After that evening in the lab, Peter doesn’t talk again. Not for a long, long time.

--

Tony doesn’t know what to say to May. Eye contact over the top of the kid’s head is hardly enough communication for them these days.

The man gives Peter a look at dinner the first time May comes up to the Compound for the weekend and the kid merely greets her with a silent, breathless hug. It’s not a look of reproach--rather, it’s a look seeking permission.

Peter pulls out his phone and fires off a text. A second later, Tony’s screen lights up.

Please tell her for me. I can’t do it.

--

It turns out Tony can’t do it either. In the end, he leads May to the security control room on the second floor and wordlessly has her sit in front of FRIDAY’s screens, his own knees knocking so hard he feels like he may never walk properly again.

May watches the footage of the conversation in the lab with an almost contorted stoniness to her face. She is a force to be reckoned with--a lioness--but never has she been more powerless before the pain of her son.

When Peter starts screaming on the screen, Tony jumps up and starts pacing compulsively. He never watched the playback before now, and he never realized just how long Peter’s guttural cries lasted in his arms that night. Now they never seem to end.

--

Peter doesn’t scream in his nightmares. He never really did.

Still, May knows with the gut feeling that only a parent can possess when the terror has invaded his mind. On the nights she’s staying over at the Compound, he will always wake up in the wee hours of the morning, drenched in sweat and silent trembles, to the immediate pressure on his hand from a wide-eyed May lying beside him. The auburn dye in her hair will catch the bluish moonlight from the window in an unearthly glow, one that inexplicably calms him.

One morning, he wakes up flanked on both sides by both May and Ned. He flounders in his own head, not knowing for a full minute where he is and who they are. And then the soft squeeze of Ned’s arm around his middle and the tickle of his boyfriend’s hair against his face opens the floodgates of remembrance, and Peter could almost cry at the mere realization that Happy must have driven Ned up here late last night to surprise him.

He fancies he can hear their heartbeats, the two of them. They’re almost in sync. Thump, thump. Thump, thump. Thump, thump.

Slowly, gently, the shortness of his breath evens out to match the rhythm of the two north stars beside him.

--

He’s hung up his suit. Spider-Man’s gone on furlough and hung up his goddamn suit, and all he can think of is how MJ the Badass Deadpan Lesbian never got to wear it even once.

He writes down the thought, because something tells him he needs to.

--

“Nicest thing about the quiet is probably how I don’t need to put up with you being a sass peasant. Third wrench from the left, kid. Thanks.”

Peter plants a socked foot on the concrete and pushes off the floor to roll himself back and forth on his creeper. He watches with half-lidded eyes as Tony disappears underneath May’s car on his own creeper and tinkers some more.

Tony resumes talking once he’s fully concealed by the mass of metal. It’s easier this way, when they’re not looking at each other. “Y’know, I talked nonstop when my--my parents died. Guess it was a coping mechanism. Rhodey literally could not get me to shut up. I talked about everything, the grass, the buildings, the smelly gym he dragged me to, the--the way the waitress was stealing her co-worker’s tips. You get the picture. Anyway.” Peter can’t see it, but he knows Tony’s waving a hand somewhere underneath the car. “That just occurred to me now. I’d almost forgotten about that. Go figure, since I promptly drowned the rest of that decade in pills and vodka.”

--

Tony finds Peter’s shame stack of sticky notes and intrusive thoughts completely by accident. It’s one of the better days--Ned and May are over again and Peter is actually making snacks in the kitchen for movie night--and Tony just wanted to pop into the kid’s room to gather up his favorite blankets and pillows.

He halts mid-step when he sees the half-open drawer in the desk with the rainbow of neon sticky notes peeking out. He really shouldn’t, but he looks anyway.

MJ only started going by MJ that day she was elected captain. She said that was what her friends called her. I wonder how long it took her to work up the courage to say that and then look at me and Ned right after she said it.

She’s literally never played Mario Kart with us but I already know she would obliterate us on her first try. There are just people who are awesome that way.

The next one’s on a lime green sticky.

Ned and I agreed he would put his hoop earring in the time capsule. I said I would put the glasses in. MJ never wanted to put anything in because she was afraid of what life would have done to us by the time we had to go dig up the capsule again.

And on an electric blue one:

If you’re nothing without the suit, you shouldn’t have it. I understand it now.

Jesus Christ. Tony stops flipping through the stickies to shut his eyes and blow out a breath for a second.

I don’t deserve Tony. I wouldn’t even know him if not for Spider-Man. He’s the real hero and he always has been.

I wonder if MJ would have wanted to put that sketch she did of us three into the time capsule, if she knew now how much it meant to us. I mean me.

Tony doesn’t hesitate anymore. He picks up a pen from Peter’s desk and scribbles an answer on the bottom of the last two sticky notes.

I think you should definitely put the sketch in there for her. She would be honored.

And, in a slightly trembling hand:

How do the kids say it these days? Came for the Spider-Man, stayed for the Peter Parker.

--

Peter comes awake with a shudder at two in the morning. The TV screen is paused in the middle of Eponine dying in Marius’s arms, rain streaming in tendrils through her hair.

May and Ned are lightly snoring on the couch to his right; his left cheek is pressed up against Tony’s shoulder. There’s a slow, steady rub of a thumb against Peter’s upper arm, and he knows without a second thought that it belongs to his mentor.

“You’re okay, bud,” Tony whispers. “You’re okay.”

“I’m here,” Peter responds automatically. His voice barely makes it past the barriers in his vocal chords. But somehow, Tony still hears it.

The lopsided smile is audible in Tony’s reply. “Of course you are. You were never gone. Just...left for a little while. We’ve been right here.”

Peter nods. Something about his emotions feels messy and incongruent and wet. Two words is enough for one night, and he’s exhausted.

“I meant it when I said it. I’m never letting go. And you? You’ve--you’ve always been him. Do you--d’you understand?”

Peter blinks. He does. They’re still whispering, trapped in the honesty of two a.m. darkness.

“You haven’t been Spider-Man this whole time. Spider-Man has been you: he’s been Peter Parker. What you did with FRIDAY? Those safety protocols that saved us? That wasn't Spider-Man, that was Peter Parker. And that’s something that never goes away, no matter what. You’ll always be Peter, always my hero.”

--

He and Ned make the trip to the cemetery after school. Happy makes no comment when Peter requests that he drive them there; he simply bobs his head and flicks on his signal to take a different turn from the school parking lot.

It’s a little ridiculous, in hindsight, how they manage to make do with the tiny emergency snow shovel in the trunk. Peter has no idea what they were intending to do if Happy didn’t just so happen to come prepared with tools like this in the car.

The Danish cookie tin still shimmers through the layers of dirt that spray in a rhythm over the lid. Peter and Ned take turns tossing the upturned soil back over the shallow hole next to Michelle Jones’ gravestone.

“Is this illegal?” Ned wonders aloud. “It feels illegal.”

“Vigilantism is illegal,” Peter points out.

“True. That means I’ve been dating a criminal. Ohh!” Ned sucks in a dramatic gasp, a bit quieter than normal in respect for where they are. “A bad boy. I’ve always wanted to kiss bad boys.”

Peter pauses to lean on the shovel. There’s almost a sparkle in his eye. “Should I open up the capsule again and put on the earring?”

“Okay, you’re a bad boy, but you’re not that bad. Your face wouldn’t suit it.”

Peter rolls his eyes and goes back to shoving dirt over the time capsule. After a sequence of a few heaving breaths, he asks softly: “Do you think she would have approved?”

Ned matches his tone. “Yeah. Definitely. I don’t think there’s anything else we could have put in that didn’t describe her more.”

It is kind of perfect, now that Peter thinks about it. Michelle Jones: artist, friend, observer, storyteller. Nothing bound the three of them more closely together than that messy sketch of them laughing around May’s table.

Peter pushes his glasses up his nose unconsciously. He has new frames now, courtesy of Tony Stark. The old taped-up ones are safely in the time capsule underground.

“Ten years?” he asks.

Ned shakes his head. “Let’s make it five. We never know what’ll happen in ten.”

Peter nods.

Several minutes later, Peter sends Ned off to the car. Happy steps out from the driver’s side and leans against the side of the vehicle with his arms crossed, no doubt silently worried in that Happy Hogan way, but Peter just gives him a little wave before turning back to the headstone.

Michelle “MJ” Jones. 2001-2018. Loving daughter, loyal friend, passionate learner. Forever in our hearts.

“I’m sorry,” Peter says. “I don’t have much to say now, but...I’m going to keep trying, every week. I’m going to keep coming back and trying until I finally get the words right. You--you deserve so much more than an apology. I just...you gotta know how much me and Ned love you. How your dad loves you. We all love you and miss you and I--” Peter’s shaky breath stops him. “Look, just...come haunt us sometime when you feel up to it, okay? Maybe even follow us to MIT or something. I don’t know. I don’t think either of us could go on much longer without being called ‘loser’.”

He touches three fingers to his lips and then rests them gently against the gravestone.

“Fuck shit up in the afterworld for me, MJ. Who knows...maybe next time I visit I’ll be swinging in with the old Spidey onesie.”

Peter almost allows himself a smile.

“See you soon, MJ.”