Archive of Our Own

“It wasn’t my fault,” Peter says.

The look Rhodey gives him is somewhere between amused and withering. He’s wearing loose sweatpants and an MIT sweatshirt that Peter is pretty sure belongs to Tony, and Peter already regrets calling him and interrupting the very little time the Colonel actually has to relax.

The police station is quiet - surprisingly enough, Peter’s the only person in the holding cell tonight and the officer behind the desk stopped talking to him as soon as he told her that someone was coming to pick him up. It’s late and exhaustion hangs in the air, tugs on Peter’s eyelids, makes his limbs heavy. The adrenaline wore off a while back, and now he’s just…tired.

Rhodey doesn’t respond, just walks over to the desk and starts talking in hushed tones to the officer - Captain Milburn, if Peter’s not mistaken. He tunes out the conversation as best he can, head too fuzzy to focus on whatever’s being said, and leans forward on the bench he’s been sitting on for the past hour. Folds his arms on his knees, careful of his bruised knuckles, and rests his forehead against them, more than ready to just go to sleep right then and there.

He closes his eyes and waits.

He thinks maybe he should feel stupid. Or at least guilty. But he is Spider-Man - protector of the little guy and all that.

He’s also stuck in a holding cell, but, well. Collateral.

Peter doesn’t tune back into reality until the door to his cell has been unlocked and Rhodey is kneeling in front of him, saying, “Kid, come on. Let’s get you to an actual bed, yeah?”

“Mhm,” Peter hums softly, letting Rhodey tug him up by his uninjured hand. As he follows Rhodey out of the holding cell and through the police station, he says, “Mr. Rhodes?”

Rhodey stops, abruptly, in the middle of the station, Peter just barely avoiding walking into him. “Are we back to that now?”

“What?”

“The whole ‘Mr. Rhodes’ thing. You don’t have to go back to being all formal just because I’m picking you up from jail, Pete.”

Peter frowns, shifts his weight back and forth as Rhodey stares at him over his shoulder, gaze scrutinizing. It’s not the point, he knows, but Peter still finds himself saying, “It’s not technically jail. Just a police station.”

Rhodey snorts, waving to Captain Milburn as he starts toward the door again, pulling Peter along with him. “Because that totally makes it better. Damn, you sound like Tony.”

Tony’s words from the car ride after Germany ring in Peter’s head.

Don’t do anything I would do. And don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.

Would Tony have done this? Peter likes to think he would have.

It really wasn’t even his fault. The guy had it coming.

Peter voices this to Rhodey when the Colonel slides into the driver’s side of his car after opening the door for Peter, as if he couldn’t have done it himself (which, granted, is not that wild of an assumption to make after he nearly passed out in a holding cell a mere two minutes ago). Rhodey twists the key in the ignition, but doesn’t make any move to actually drive.

Fuck’s sake. This is what he’d been trying to avoid when he called Rhodey instead of Tony or May. The lecture about being careful, about not picking unnecessary fights in his civilian clothes, about not using his powers as Peter Parker unless he’s attacked.

Which he didn’t do, but will surely hear about anyway.

Rhodey is silent for a long moment. Peter taps his foot against the car floor and feels like his mental state is on a pendulum, springing back and forth from one end of the spectrum to the other. Agitated to drowsy and back around to anxious.

“So let me get this straight,” Rhodey finally says, and Peter has to bite back the urge to joke about his wording. “You punched a man on the street, got arrested for assault, and then called me , of all people, to come pick you up from a holding cell when, lucky for you, the guy decided not to press charges.”

It’s spot-on. Blunt, maybe, but spot-on.

Peter sighs, leans his head against the passenger-side window. “Yeah, pretty much.”

“But it wasn’t your fault.”

Remnants of the anger that had panged through him just an hour and a half ago thrum in his bloodstream. “ No. It - it wasn’t.”

Rhodey grips the steering wheel in front of him, tilts his head back, and takes a deep breath. “Okay. Okay, Peter. Tell me what I’m missing here, then.”

Peter presses his fingertips into his thigh and closes his eyes.

A shout. The crack of bone against his knuckles.

“He, uh - there was this boy walking down the street, he was probably sixteen or seventeen, and he had on nail polish and makeup and stuff. The man - the one I punched, I mean - he called the boy the F-word.”

He doesn’t want to say it.

“The F-word?” Rhodey prompts.

Peter casts his eyes over to him, quirks an eyebrow at the Colonel. Understanding dawns on his face and his jaw goes tight, fingers tightening around the steering wheel until his knuckles go white. Peter’s right hand throbs, scrapes and bruises that will heal within twenty-four hours wanting to ache as much as they can for as long as they’re allowed. Rhodey shakes his head minutely, and his eyes are sad.

Not angry. Just sad.

“I’m really sorry you had to hear that, Peter,” is all he says. Peter looks away.

“I - I know I shouldn’t have punched him. Especially when I have super strength and could probably capsize an airplane with one punch. I just…I saw the boy’s face and he was - he was so scared , Rhodey.”

And it hurt.

“And my whole thing is about protecting the little guy -”

And it hurt.

“I couldn’t - I couldn’t just -”

Fuck, he didn’t want to cry. He told himself he wasn’t going to cry over this, over some asshole on the street who thought it was okay to throw slurs around like it was the 1940s.

The man hadn’t even said it to Peter, but it’d felt like a punch in the gut anyway.

“I once knee’d a guy in the balls for calling a friend of mine the N-word,” Rhodey says. His tone makes it sound like it’s just any old story, but the words hold so much weight. “All three of us worked together and we were out at a bar for some - some bonding shit our supervisor suggested. I already didn’t like him, and then he and my friend got into an argument over something or other and he - he decided it was alright to call her the N-word because he disagreed with her, so I knee’d him in the balls.”

Peter snorts - it’s gross and snotty, and if this were most anyone else, he’d be embarrassed for weeks. Rhodey just leans over to open the passenger-side glove compartment and dig out a pack of tissues, which he wordlessly hands to Peter.

Wiping at his nose, Peter breathes in, holds for six seconds, and then releases.

It’s not the same thing, of course. No two slurs are exactly alike, no two forms of intolerance cut the exact same way. But there’s still something to be said for shared trauma.

Slowly, quietly, Peter says, “It took me a really long time to figure things out. To - to understand what I was feeling and be… comfortable in it. I couldn’t say the word bisexual in reference to myself for ages. And it’s just - even if the guy wasn’t talking to me -”

“It still hurts you,” Rhodey finishes.

Peter nods, eyes fixed on the AC vent on the right side of the dashboard. “Yeah.”

Rhodey hums. “Yeah, I get that. It was the same for me. Is the same for me.”

His hand still hurts and his chest is still tight with pain and fear and anxiety, but the air in the car feels...cleaner.

Rhodey lays a gentle hand on Peter’s shoulder. “I know you were expecting a lecture about your powers and how it’s dangerous to use them outside of the suit and all that, Pete - and to be honest, you might still get one from Tony - but I’m proud of you, kid. You stood up for that boy and for yourself, and I’m proud of you for it. And Tones will be, too, once he gets past the bit about the holding cell.”

Peter’s laugh is short and watery, but it’s still an improvement over the tears.

“Alright, Peter.” Rhodey pats his shoulder once, then removes his hand to put the car in drive. “Let’s go home.”

Peter leaves the police station parking lot feeling lighter than he has in months.