Chapter Text
The day Peter got shot started off well, and that should have been his first clue, really. Peter Parker just didn’t have good days. Not anymore.
That morning he woke up to his alarm. Not to Mr. Stark or Pepper dragging him out from under his covers. His favorite songs played while he showered, and then once he was dressed for the day, he jetted off downstairs to the kitchen. He had been determined to return to normalcy, to reclaim as much of his old life as could, and that meant making himself breakfast.
His eyes trailed over the large kitchen once he reached the bottom of the stairs. His hand gripped the steel railing to his side. It was intimidating. Practically a stranger’s kitchen, and Peter didn’t know where to begin. Up until then, he’d been perfectly content eating pop-tarts and cereal, or even whatever food Mr. Stark attempted to make for him.
He took a breath, then got to work.
It was a series of stumbling around at first, a series of opening and shutting drawers and cabinets until he found his ingredients. And then, once everything was aligned on the counter top, the rest easy. He made his famous omelets. He made them for himself, and for Mr. Stark and Pepper, too. He needed them to be famous again. The only other person he cooked them for, the one who dubbed them famous, wasn’t around to appreciate them anymore.
Mr. Stark made his entrance by hurrying down the stairs, pausing at the same place Peter had, looking confused and worried. His eyes flickered back and forth from Peter to the plate piled with omelets, before he marched slow and steady into the kitchen and put the back of his hand against Peter’s forehead.
“Are you sick?” he asked. His hand moved to clamp down on top of Peter’s damp hair. “And you already showered? I’m calling the doctor.”
Peter ducked down and out from under his hand. “I made breakfast.”
“I see that,” said Mr. Stark. There was still suspicion in his eyes, but also, there was something else. Something that completely overpowered the suspiciousness when the two of them sat across from each other at the dining room table with their breakfast and Mr. Stark took his first bite. “Pete… this is the omelet I’ve ever tasted.”
He couldn’t help his grin. It was true Mr. Stark’s compliment had less to do with the actual omelet and more to do with Peter making it out of bed. That was fine. Peter’s grin had less to do with the compliment and more to do with being able to give Mr. Stark a reason to quit worrying about him so much.
As it turned out, this was a bit premature. Mr. Stark had every reason to keep on worrying about him.
They both should have known it was too good to be true. All the signs were there. There weren’t any disagreements at the breakfast table, even with Pepper sleeping in, and even with Peter asking if he could hang out with Ned after school in Queens. Mr. Stark agreed. Peter didn’t fight it when he was slipped some spending money. Just a couple of twenties. A noticeable improvement from the multiple hundreds he would try to gift him with in the beginning.
“Got your watch?” Mr. Stark called after him, as he swung his book bag over his shoulders and headed towards the elevator.
Peter turned, raised his right hand pushed down his sleeve, revealing the shiny and sleek black watch Mr. Stark built for him. He nodded his approval, and Peter went on his way, waiting for the elevator to take him down to the front entrance where Happy waited to take him to school.
The drive there, just like the rest of the day, went by like a breeze.
There was just a slight bump in the day, in gym, while they were supposed to be doing sit-ups.
“I guess Penis really was Tony Stark’s intern,” said Flash. He was talking to his friends, but his volume implied he wanted everyone, including Peter and Ned, to overhear him. “Guess now he gets to be his charity case scheme for improving his PR.”
“Forget him,” said Ned, and Peter did.
The comment didn’t bother him as much as he thought it should, and by the time him and Ned were out of school and standing in line at Delmar’s, he’d forgotten.
“Are you coming over after this?” asked Ned.
“I can’t,” said Peter. “Mr. Stark wants me home by seven.”
This was something that couldn’t be connected with his life from before. May was never one to be a curfew setter, especially towards the end of their life together, and also, it was a reminder of his missing powers. Spider-Man was allowed out at all hours, but regular, normal teenage boys had early, unfair curfews. At least they did if it was Mr. Stark making the curfews for them.
“You still call him Mr. Stark? Even now that you’re living with him?”
Peter adjusted the strap of his book bag and stood on his tippy toes in attempt to see what was taking so long up front. Mr. Delmar and another man, a customer, were arguing. He fell back on his feet with a mental sigh. All he wanted was a sandwich. One that would taste like home.
“He doesn’t care what I call him,” said Peter. That was a lie. Back when he first came to live with him, Mr. Stark tried to get him to call him Tony. He has since given up. “Just… calling him Tony would make everything… real.”
“It’s real enough already, dude,” said Ned. He lifted Peter’s hand by the watch.
“That’s… not what it looks like,” said Peter. “It’s, uh, a safety precaution. In case I accidentally eat something I’m allergic too. It injects epinephrine.”
“Really?” asked Ned. He examined the watch more closely, before Peter gently jerked his hand away. “That’s so awesome. It’s a tracker, too, right? What else does it do?”
Peter opened his mouth to reply, but his voice couldn’t be heard over the sound of a single gunshot.
The sound was deafening, and it sent everyone in the shop to the ground on their bellies. Except Peter.
He stayed standing upright as time seemed to slow down. He needed to make sure Mr. Delmar was okay, and he was okay. Alive, at least, even if he was staring down the barrel of a gun with a bullet hole in the wall behind him.
“I’m not gonna fucking tell you again,” said the man. He was red in the face, either from anger or from all the arguing with Mr. Delmar. His voice shook, but his arm didn’t. It stayed steady with the gun pointed at Ben’s forehead.
Mr. Delmar. The gun was pointed at Mr. Delmar’s forehead, but not even self-correction could stop the fracturing of Peter’s brain waves. Or maybe it was the opposite. Maybe that’s what it felt like when things got put back, got rewired the correct way. The image of Mr. Delmar being held at gunpoint, and in consequence, Ben in the same position, was a painful reminder why the world needed him to be Spider-Man.
The gunman took his finger off the trigger, just slightly. Peter took the opportunity.
He charged at him, collided with him, and they both went tumbling to the floor. It was no good, though. The force of Peter’s tackle hadn’t been strong enough to part the man with his gun, and he hit him with it, across the back of the head. He pushed Peter aside and stood.
“Dumb ass kid,” he said. He kicked him in the stomach. “Stay down.”
He lifted his eyes despite the pain in his head and in his stomach and made eye-contact with Ned. He was mouthing something to him, but Peter couldn’t make it out. Ned repeated it over and over again. No luck. The pounding in his head made it hard to concentrate on lip reading. There was one word that was unmistakable, though.
Spider-Man.
Peter figured Ned was confused. He hadn’t bothered telling him that his powers left him the same way Aunt May did. Peter was confused, too. He thought they would come back if he were in danger, like the time he crushed his phone as he fell from the roof, but if they had, he would have easily taken the man down.
“You hear me?” shouted the gunman. He was still standing there. Right above him. “Fucking stay down.”
Peter couldn’t do that anymore.
Once Mr. Stark told him he wasn’t going to let him sleep his life away, and it wasn’t until then that Peter knew he meant it in more than one way. He was tired of sleeping. He was tired of staying down. With or without his powers, with or without May, life marched on. So would he.
He waited until the gunman turned his back, then sprung to his feet, ignoring the dizziness, and bringing them both back down to the floor. It didn’t go much better than last time. Peter’s powers don’t make entrance. Peter was pinned quickly, hit across the front of his face with gun, and screamed at.
“You think this is a game?” His words were unnerved and angry. It was a combination Peter knew spelled trouble for him, knew it even before the gun blasted off once, twice, then three times. “There. Maybe that’ll teach you to listen to the man with the gun."
The pain wasn’t immediate. There was a brief pause in the universe, or at least, in his universe, as his brain tried to process what had happened. Then he looked down. He saw the three holes in his leg, and then it was on fire. He bit his tongue to keep from screaming out loud, bit it so hard he tasted his own blood, but he didn’t care.
He wouldn’t give that asshole the satisfaction of hearing him scream.
Ned screamed though, and Mr. Delmar shouted.
“What’s the matter with you, huh? You just shot a kid!”
Someone else piped in, “Dude. That’s Tony Stark’s kid.”
There was a rebuttal on Peter’s lips. Not biologically. He wanted to add that in somewhere, but he didn’t trust himself to open his mouth with cursing or screaming. The guy who shot him didn’t look much better off. His eyes were wide with realization and fear.
“Shit.”
“Better get out of here, man. Tony Stark has, like, cameras everywhere. Probably on his way already.”
Footsteps hurried out of the grocery store, and Peter let out a pained gasp as he threw his head against the floor. All he wanted was a sandwich, one that tasted like home, but all he could taste was metal as he bled out on Mr. Delmar’s floor.
Mr. Stark showed up before any of the ambulances.
Peter heard him, heard the sound of clanking walk into the store, and knew immediately, without looking, he came dressed in his armor. A fury entered the room with him. It was something Peter felt in the air as Mr. Delmar secured a torn piece of his shirt around the wound on his leg. He gasped with pain as the final knot was tied tight, and Ned pushed down harder on his shoulder to keep him on the floor.
“Where is he?” asked Mr. Stark.
That felt like a dumb question, and it took Peter a couple of seconds to figure out Mr. Stark hadn’t been talking about him, to catch onto his tone and the dangerous undercurrent that carried it across the room. That wasn’t a tone that he would ever use to talk about Peter. Mr. Stark was looking for someone else. He was looking for blood.
“He ran,” said Mr. Delmar.
“Which way?”
Peter heard the clanking again, but this time, it was getting further away.
“No! Wait,” said Peter. He tried to sit up but cringed with pain. Instead he turned his head right there on the floor and saw Mr. Stark standing in the doorway. “S-stay, please?”
The fury vanished from the atmosphere Mr. Stark locked eyes with him. He walked away from the door, kneeled down next to him, placed a hand on his other shoulder and removed his face plate. That was better. Iron Man was comforting, but Peter needed to look at real eyes.
It was starting to get cold, and he was starting to get scared.
“It h-hurts.”
“I know,” said Mr. Stark. “But you’re gonna be fine, Pete.”
His eyes didn’t match his words. They stared at his leg wound, and Peter barely resisted the urge to look at it again. He imagined it was a lot worse than before. Both his slowed breathing and the chill under his skin were important clues that his blood was probably soaking through his jeans and Mr. Delmar’s shirt.
“I’m just gonna give you a lift, so we can get you to the hospital faster, alright?”
Peter’s nod was sluggish and slow, but Mr. Stark was quick. He had one arm locked under his shoulders and his other pulled up on the back side of Peter’s knees. He picked him up easily. Peter felt like he was weightless. Like a ragdoll, he went limp in Mr. Stark’s arms. He tucked his head into his chest and shut his eyes tight.
“FRIDAY, make sure Bellevue is ready for us,” said Mr. Stark. A light breeze blew through Peter’s hair, and it was his only indication that they’d left the grocery store. “You’re gonna have to hold on Pete, can you do that?”
He wrapped his arms around Mr. Stark, and his grip was questionable. Not only was he weak by Spider-Man standards, but also, he was weak by Peter Parker standards. Mr. Stark must not have thought it was strong enough, either. The arm supporting his shoulders disappeared. The one supporting his legs stayed.
Peter expected the flight to be bumpy since Mr. Stark only had one hand to steer, but he barely noticed they were in the air at all. He didn’t realize when they hit the ground, or even when they hospital. At least not until Mr. Stark was putting him down on something soft and he heard the scrambling of doctors and nurses and their urgent, fast talking.
A panic caught him, his head swam, and he held onto to Mr. Stark tighter. He knew, from the movies, that this was the part where Mr. Stark would leave him and let the medical staff wheel him away to surgery.
“Pete you have to let go of me now.”
“No.”
Mr. Stark easily removed himself from Peter’s grip, and gently pushed him so he was lying down on the stretcher. Peter opened his eyes. He intended to convey every ounce of the betrayal he felt with that one look, but his eyes ended up teary instead.
“I want you to come with me,” said Peter. He didn’t care that doctors and nurses were waiting and watching. They might as well not have been there at all.
“You know I can’t do that,” said Mr. Stark. “But I will be here when you wake up.”
“N-no. Just don’t go. Not you too.”
Mr. Stark looked conflicted, almost pained, as he ran an iron-covered hand through his hair. Peter tried to hold onto it, to make his hand and the rest of him stay, but his arms didn’t seem to want to obey him anymore and they stayed limply by his sides. Mr. Stark stepped away from the stretched and gave a nod to one of the doctors.
He wasn’t ready to be wheeled off to surgery, but they wheeled him down the hall towards the swinging, double doors, anyway. Someone put a mask over his nose and mouth. Someone else ordered him to start counting backwards. He didn’t. He just laid there until there was nothing.
Peter was drifting at sea, and he wanted to stay there, rocking around on that boat, forever. There wasn’t anything troubling about the waves, or anything frightening about the nothingness in front of him. Behind him was different. There was a shore he wanted to stay away from, an island he didn’t want to be trapped on, but there was also a slow, steady persistent beep. It drug him backwards, closer to shore, until he was forced into awareness.
He wasn’t staring out at the sea. He was staring straight up at a white ceiling in a hospital room.
The last place anyone wanted to be.
So much for reclaiming normalcy. Every time he took a couple of steps forward, life tossed him twelve steps backwards.
He shifted his head to the side and searched the room for Mr. Stark. The last thing he remembered was his promise to be there when he woke up, and Peter desperately needed that to be true.
His eyes found Iron Man. Literally Iron Man, in plush form, sitting on a small wooden table next to his bed. The stuffed toy held a sign that said get well soon, and was surrounded by boxes of candy, flowers and other knickknacks commonly found in hospital giftshops. Then Peter saw the real Tony Stark. He sat on a couch behind the table filled with gifts. He used one of his hands to support his head as he scrolled with his thumb on his cellphone.
“Mr. Stark?” tried Peter. His voice was groggy, but it worked.
His head popped up. His attention diverted away from the phone immediately.
“Where did all this stuff come from?” he asked, looking at the stack of presents again. By the quantity of the presents, he feared he’d been asleep for days.
Mr. Stark abandoned the couch and walked over to stand by his bedside. “I don’t really do waiting rooms, kid. I just couldn’t… sit there… doing nothing, so I found the gift shop while I was pacing around and well, I guess it made me feel like I was doing something.”
Peter imagined Mr. Stark frantically buying everything in the giftshop, forcing himself to stay at the hospital so he would be there when he woke up, even though Peter knew what he really wanted to do to feel useful was hunt down the man who shot him. He reached over to the table and grabbed the Iron Man plush.
“Thanks,” said Peter. He allowed a small smile as he held the plush his lap. “I love this, Mr. Stark.”
He ran a tentative hand through Peter’s hair again. This time it was his real hand, and he let it rest between his ear and eyes for a few seconds before withdrawing and taking a few steps backwards. “So, you’re really awake now? Last time you woke up you were rambling about being on a boat.”
Peter frowned. He didn’t remember that, but before he could stress about any other embarrassing things he might’ve said, Mr. Stark moved on.
“What were you thinking, Pete? Never charge a man with a gun.”
“I just couldn’t… couldn’t stay down anymore,” said Peter. He looked at his leg covered up with a hospital blanket. It was probably good he couldn’t see it. He didn’t think his stomach could handle the gore. “Is it… am I okay?”
“You did well in surgery. The doc said he’s optimistic for a full recovery, no lasting damages.”
“So we can go home.”
A solemn pause was enough to make Peter’s stomach drop, and the answer that followed it didn’t do anything to improve the silence. It was Mr. Stark’s round way of saying no, one that made Peter wish he was just direct.
“You were shot three times and it’s clear your healing isn’t working like it. You’ll make a full recovery. That just takes time for us normal people.”
“How long do I have to stay here?”
“I don’t know,” said Mr. Stark. “Three or four days, maybe.”
Peter looked back at the plush in his hands and unraveled the string holding the get well sign in place. He discarded it in the mess of gifts on the table. He didn’t want it mocking him anymore. There wasn’t any soon without his powers, and it was hard to believe that just that morning he sat at the kitchen table eating omelets with Mr. Stark, smiling and determined. That earlier he longed to be back in Queens eating sandwiches from Delmar’s and now he just wanted to be in his bedroom at the penthouse. It felt like the universe was trying to take all his homes away, to erase all his progress before he even made any.
“It’s gonna fly by. I’m going to make sure they put you in a good room once you’re out of recovery, and I’m gonna call Pepper and have her bring the blanket from your bed and your real clothes. Just think of it as an extension of your spring break, like staying at a hotel, okay?”
“Okay,” said Peter, resigned to his fate.
“And I’m going to stay with you,” he said. “The whole time.”
Peter felt like Mr. Stark should’ve led with that. The thought of spending any amount of time in that hospital alone filled him with so much he even say the polite thing and tell Mr. Stark he didn’t have to. He was afraid the man might change his mind. Instead he nodded, and looked back down at his leg covered in hospital blanket and wondered how long a wound like that would take to heal.