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Everyone else celebrates.
Peter escapes.
He quietly slips back into the building, asking Friday to take him to the roof. From the top, he can watch people mill about on the neatly trimmed lawn, sipping champagne and enjoying the thrum of music in the air. Pepper managed to talk Tony into making the New Year’s Eve party a more tame affair this year, and for the most part, she succeeded.
It’s not quiet. (It never is.) But it’s quieter. And that’s something.
Peter hates the New Year celebrations. He has for a long time, actually.
For everyone else, it seems like January 1st acts as some sort of factory reset. A new beginning. But for him? It’s only ever been a prolonging. A continuation.
He wishes he could be like everyone else. Wishes he could leave the snap in this year and just move on to the next. But everything that’s happened rests inside of him. His inability to eat much. His lack of sleep. His thoughts. They can’t be left behind with the rising of the sun.
They’re continuous.
He’s perched on the edge of the building, but he knows no one can see him. Not from this standpoint. So it’s fine. It’s all fine.
(It’s not fine. He’s never fine.)
The energy in the air is more high-strung tonight than any other New Year’s Peter has ever experienced before. Part of it, of course, is just Tony’s flair for a dramatic party. But there’s this underlying tension in the air, and Peter knows that everyone is anxious to leave this all - the year, the snap, the loss - behind.
Peter hates them.
Well, he’s more resentful than anything else. Which, he thinks, is completely fair. They didn’t feel every cell in their body be ripped apart slowly and yet all at once.
The crowd below roars as the countdown begins. They’re yelling, joyful and laughing, and when the count gets to one, fireworks shoot high into the sky. Once upon a time, the sound would have been too much for Peter’s oversensitive ears, but now? It’s a small pain compared to everything else he’s been through.
The atmosphere screams of a relinquishing, but for Peter, the weight inside him settles even deeper. It will not leave.
This is a hard fact. It’s sure. (He hates it.)
He’s not sure how long he sits there, the wind gently whipping at his face, but it’s long enough for most of the people to have cleared out, with a few groups of people still standing around and chatting with each other.
And long enough for Tony to worry, apparently.
“Why’s it always gotta be the roof?” Tony asks from behind him, and Peter jerks a little in surprise.
Tony frowns at that. The kid must be really in his head if he didn’t hear Tony’s approach. Peter recovers quickly though, straightening his posture and letting his face slide into a mask of nonchalance.
“I like being up high,” Peter protests half-heartedly, and Tony gives him a fond look.
“I know,” he says, carefully lowering himself to sit next to the kid.
He thinks about the last times he’s found the kid perched on a roof. It was never good. Peter has always loved heights, but even more so, the adrenaline of falling. The infatuation with hitting the ground.
Tony casually slings an arm over the kid’s shoulder slowly, letting out a small breath of relief when Peter doesn’t shrug away the touch.
For awhile, they’re content to just sit there, listening to the echoing silence left behind from all the fireworks.
Peter feels himself begin to slip back inside his head, but today is not an absent day. Present. He needs to stay present. They’ve been working on this.
He darts out a hand and tightly grasps the sleeve of Tony’s shirt and tugs until the man looks at him. Tony turns his head, brows furrowed with worry as he meets the kid’s eyes. His gut churns at the all-too-familiar expression.
Help me! it screams.
(Peter is always screaming. He doesn’t think he’s stopped screaming since Titan.)
Tony always hears it. It’s as though he’s tuned in to just the right frequency to hear Peter’s inward cries, and Peter used to be embarrassed, but now he’s just thankful, because otherwise, he would fall.
“What’s going on in that head of yours?” Tony asks quietly. His words are a rope. A lifeline. Peter hangs on, tethers himself to this moment.
“It’s not fair,” is the first thing that comes out of his mouth, before he shuts it, not knowing where to go from there. Tony just cocks his head and waits patiently for Peter to gather the rest of his thoughts.
Peter swallows and tries again. “It’s not - it’s not that I wish other people had to feel what I felt then,” he says, and Tony doesn’t have to ask what he’s talking about. “But, all of them - “ Peter gestures vaguely to the people below. “They can leave it in the year behind them.”
Tony’s eyes soften with understanding.
Peter swings his feet over the edge of the building, kicking his legs out restlessly. “It’s not that they haven’t been through something traumatic. But - they didn’t - they don’t get it. It’s not - I can’t - “ he cuts off with a sharp breath.
“I know,” Tony says soothingly. “Just breathe. It’s okay.”
He waits until the kid’s heaving chest settles a little bit, taking the time to be thankful he’s still got his arm wrapped around the boy. Seeing Peter sitting on the edge of a roof while in a bad mental state always leaves Tony with a sense of gripping panic.
Peter’s grip tightens on his sleeve, and Tony watches as the kid prepares to speak again, looking out at the horizon. The words rattle on their way out.
“No one’s ever gonna get it, Mr. Stark,” Peter whispers quietly into the air. The words freeze in midair, then drop to the ground and shatter. “Not you. Not May. Not even anyone who was dusted. They’ll never know what it felt like. I can’t leave it behind me. It’ll go with me into next year and the year after that. And I don’t want this. I don’t want another year.”
He stares at the ground now, at imaginary pieces of words he can never take back.
(The truth, he thinks, is like that. Getting help is a trust fall. Sometimes you break on the way down.)
Tony is looking at him now, face tight with pain. He’s always been able to understand so much of what Peter goes through. But this? This is more than a superhero thing.
There are a million words on the tip of Tony’s tongue.
You don’t have to be alone in this.
It’s going to be okay.
I’m sorry.
But none of those are sufficient, so instead, Tony looks Peter straight in the eye and says, “What can I do?”
For a moment, Tony thinks Peter’s just going to shrug off the question. But he sees an internal battle taking place within Peter, so he just sits and waits patiently, neither pushing nor pulling.
Peter thinks. Thinks about falling and breaking and rising. Thinks about all the times he’s come apart and been put back together. About how he’s always falling but he’s nothing without the rise.
He needs help. He has help. He just doesn’t like accepting it.
Peter looks up at Tony with unsure eyes.
“Hold me?” he whispers, eyes watering with a mixture of shame and embarrassment and desperation.
Tony’s hand is impossibly gentle as he tilts Peter’s chin to look at him, eyes so soft with compassion and love.
“Always,” Tony promises, placing a hand on the back of Peter’s curls and pushing his head into his chest as they shift away from the edge of the roof. Tony’s arms wrap around the kid more securely, rocking them ever so slightly, and something inside of Peter eases. He closes his eyes, holds onto this moment.
This, he thinks, is what home feels like.
(Getting help is a trust fall. Sometimes you break on the way down. But sometimes, you get a Tony. You get someone who knows how to help you put yourself back together. It’s not easy, and sometimes wires get crossed and bolts knocked out of place. But one day, you’ll be whole again.
And if you’re lucky, you’ll be even better than who you were before. Stronger. Braver. Happier.
In the end, the fall is worth the rise.)