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Spider-Man Fails to Stop Speeding Car, Resulting in Injury of Mother and Two Children
Spider-Man: Hero or Menace to New York?
Crash Caused by Car Chase Involving Local Superhero Spider-Man
A Six-Year-Old and a Nine-Year-Old in Critical Condition Due to Negligence from Queens Hero Spider-Man.
May keeps telling him not to read the news articles, but he can’t help himself. It’s been three days since the car chase, and all he’s managed to do is eat, sleep, and refresh the Spider-Man news feed on his phone.
He fucked up. He fucked up so badly. He let two little kids get hurt because he was stupid, and irresponsible, and useless and -
No. Not going down that road again. He’s been down that road more times in the past three days than he has in the past year, and he’s spent a lot of time on that road this year.
Peter curls up tighter, legs pulled up to his chest and one hand twisted into his comforter. His chest hurts so much right now. He tries to focus on that instead of...everything else, letting the pain wash over him and drown out the rest of the noise.
When he closes his eyes, he sees smashed metal and blood splatters.
Red paints the backs of his eyelids and spills into his dreams.
“Peter, sweetheart,” May says quietly. She’s standing in the doorway with a plate in her hands, and a soft smile on her face. “You need to eat something, baby.”
He’s sitting up in bed, staring at his blank phone screen on his lap. Every bone is his body is numb, and his voice is hollow when he says, “M’not hungry, May.”
She sighs, walks over to the side of his bed, sits down on the edge. She brushes a hand through Peter’s hair, eyes sad, and places the plate on Peter’s nightstand. “You know it wasn’t your fault, right? You did the best you could, honey.”
Peter leans into May, resting his forehead on her shoulder. He hates this.
This. This right here, this pain? This is the worst thing he’s felt since becoming a superhero. He’s known guilt before, way more than most people have, but this is different.
There’s two children in the hospital because he wasn’t good enough. Because he wasn’t fast enough. Because he couldn’t be as good of a superhero as those kids needed him to be.
“I didn’t save them,” Peter murmurs into May’s sleeve. “May, I didn’t - I couldn’t -”
May wraps an arm around him, lips pressing gently against the top of his head. “It’s not on you, Petey. It’s on the criminal you were chasing, okay? You didn’t hurt those kids. You tried your damndest to ensure that no one got hurt, but these things happen.”
These things aren’t supposed to happen. Not when there’s a superhero involved.
Peter has always done everything he could to avoid collateral damage, and now two kids might die because he messed up.
Peter cries into May’s shoulder until all the tears run dry.
He goes to the hospital on the fifth day.
It takes a lot out of him to even drag himself out of bed, but he gets up eventually. He puts the suit in his backpack and walks out of the apartment while May’s not home. Takes a bus to the hospital, changes in the hospital bathroom, and spends about fifteen minutes psyching himself up to ask the woman at the front desk what room Mia and Jude Alvarez are in.
She barely even does a double take before giving him the room number (perhaps hospitals get a lot of visitations from superheroes). He spends another five minutes dawdling outside the door to room 136 before finally knocking.
A small, disheveled woman with one arm in a cast opens the door and immediately lets out a sob when she sees him.
Tears prickle in the corners of Peter’s eyes, too, but he holds them back, stepping into the room when the Ms. Alvarez moves to let him in. Hoarsely, he says, “Hi, Ms. Alvarez. I, uh - I wanted to see how - how your kids are doing. If that’s okay.”
“Of course it’s okay.” Her voice is wobbly, but she’s smiling at him. Why is she smiling at him after what he did?
Mia and Jude are both asleep (unconscious?) in their hospital beds, hooked up to more machines than Peter would’ve thought possible. There’s an oxygen mask over Jude’s mouth and a horrifying tube stuck down Mia’s throat, and Peter thinks he might throw up.
He knew the kids were in bad shape, but…seeing it is a whole other story.
Peter looks away. Turns to Ms. Alvarez and doesn’t know what the hell he’s supposed to say.
After a moment, he just says, “I’m so sorry, ma’am. I - you -”
It feels disingenuous. With the mask on, under the guise of a strange sort of anonymity, the whole apology feels fake.
He’s definitely not supposed to take his mask off, but he does. Gets the feeling that this poor woman isn’t all that concerned with his civilian identity anyway.
Ms. Alvarez actually gasps when she sees his face, and it takes Peter a long minute to remember why. He’s just a teenager. And he looks it - there’s no way she doesn’t know, now, that her kids were hurt because a high school student thought he could do what real superheroes do.
Peter doesn’t know what he’s expecting, but a hug isn’t it.
And yet, he’s pulled into the arms of the woman whose children are in the hospital because of him, indirectly or not. His hands dangle at his sides until he finds the sense to at least hug Ms. Alvarez back, even if he knows he doesn’t deserve this.
“How old are you, sweetheart?”
“Sixteen.”
The hug tightens. The tears Peter’s been holding back threaten once more to fall.
He doesn’t deserve this.
“Thank you,” Ms. Alvarez says. It doesn’t process for a second, and even when it does, Peter still doesn’t understand.
“Why are you thanking me? I didn’t - I couldn’t save your kids.”
She gives something between a laugh and a scoff. Peter can feel tears soaking through the fabric of his suit. “But you tried. You, a - a sixteen-year-old boy, did everything you could to try to save my babies. So thank you, so much, for trying.”
You tried. Thank you for trying.
Peter comes back to the hospital at the same time almost every day for the next two months.
Jude wakes up on day sixteen. Mia follows on day twenty-one.
They both hug him, carefully but enthusiastically, and tell him that he’s their hero.
On day sixty, he goes home with a drawing of Spider-Man standing in between two kids, signed
Mia and Jude Alvarez.
It stays pinned on his bulletin board for years.