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Peter Parker knows, logically, that not everyone in the world hates him.
He does. He does. He does. Sure, there are days and nights when that concept dances precariously just inches from his fingertips, in sight but out of reach, days and nights when the numbness of the empty threatens to unhinge him from himself, but those moment are getting less and less frequent as the months wear on. He knows how to redirect now, how to snatch the certainty in his fist and refuse to let it go.
See, Reasonless Anxiety is easy to reason with. He has steps.
What am I afraid of? People. Why am I afraid of people? They hate you. What evidence do I have for that? None, I just feel it. Do we trust everything we feel? No, sometimes our feelings get confused, lost in the ether. So, do we need to be afraid? No, we don’t. We don’t. We don’t have to be afraid.
The cataclysm comes when the evidence falls into his lap.
It’s ridiculous, really. He’s seventeen years old and choking back sobs over a handful of his classmates hating him. He knows they don’t have a reason, knows all those screenshots Ned showed him were substanceless, just the product of forces outside his control. He knows that their opinions cannot touch him, that who they think he is does not have to be congruent with who he actually is.
But he’s lived long enough to know that what he knows is not always congruent with what Anxiety knows.
Anxiety knows very little, but what it does know it knows very well. It knows about his adrenal glands and how to fire off the synapses in his amygdala. It knows about racing hearts, sweating palms, muffled screams. It knows how to drag the universe from the sky, ball it up like Play-Doh, and press it lovingly into the center of his chest, a gift, a precious gift of everything all at once. It knows that Peter does not often appreciate its gifts, but it does not know how to stop creating them. It knows about fingernails in skin, skin between teeth, teeth against wood, wood against wrist.
And it knows, without even a flicker of doubt, that everyone in the world will grow to despise him. That everyone is waiting, breathless with ecstatic expectation, to watch him fail.
He does not know how to barter his way out of Concrete Anxiety. His entire system banks on the idea that Anxiety will be irrational, that it will reach for purpose and come up short.
What am I afraid of? People. Why am I afraid of people? They hate you. What evidence do I have for that? The screenshots. The messages. The laughter in the halls. You know they hate you, they’ve said it to your face. Even worse, they’ve said it behind your back. The ball rolls and rolls. Truth burns like wildfire. If a handful of people hate you now, how will the others feel tomorrow? You’re unlovable. Unworthy. They’ve seen. They’ve seen, and they know.
There is no escaping Concrete Anxiety’s wrath, because Concrete Anxiety doesn't scatter, doesn't rely on the head-rush of adrenaline to get the job done. It has logic, numbers, graphs and figures.
He has built his foundations on the concept that Anxiety is always wrong, but what happens when Anxiety is right?
He doesn’t know how this new dance ends, but he knows that it starts with him breaking.
There is a comforting mundaneness to the whole thing. The tendrils sprout from his solar plexus, wind their ways up, braid through his ribs, get caught in his throat. He shakes. Shakes and shakes and shakes. Tears drip over his chapped lips, make the places where he’s bitten through the skin sing with pain. He runs his tongue over the spot to keep it there, grounding himself in the sting.
He is used to this. Used to the way his entire being screams out for something, anything, other than the all-consuming everything. Used to the feral urge to hurt. This is natural selection going wrong. It is generations-old instincts telling him that danger means threat and that threat means danger and the only way to fix danger is to kill threat.
He is danger, he is threat. How do you kill something that’s inside of you?
His fingers crawl up his side, across his collarbone, down his bicep. He drags his fingernails across the soft skin on his forearm. One, twice, three times. Harder and harder and harder.
Maybe this hurt will smother that hurt.
Physical pain is isolated. Peter can pinpoint where it is, can point to it on a picture. But the hurt inside him is so much more than the ache of red-raw skin. It is pervasive, it is perpetual, it fills him and empties him in one long brushstroke of totality.
He would do anything to bleed this darkness out of himself. Drain it all into the mattress, drip it down into the floorboards. It could soak into the wood, make blood-blot art. What would he see in the picture? Would it be Anxiety or Depression or Peter?
He wonders if time would wash the painting away, or if memoires to shadows are permanent installations. Is time enough to wipe him clean? He doesn’t think so, but Peter is still aware enough to acknowledge that he’s an unreliable narrator on nights like these. He’s a plot hole, a construction of missing details.
The skin on his arm throbs. He realizes exactly what he’s done too late, tears his hand away when the shame snarls around his throat.
He can feel his heartbeat in his stomach.
It’s too fast, scrambling and shuddering like a frightened deer. Like it wants to escape him.
Peter doesn’t blame it. Isn’t that what everyone wants? To free themselves of burden? Hell, he wants to escape him sometimes, too.
The door to his room opens.
“Peter?” Anxiety lets out a high hiss at the familiar voice. Peter almost laughs in relief. “F.R.I.D.A.Y. says your heart rate is elevated. Did you have a nightmare?”
“No.”
Peter doesn’t look at the figure who sits on the edge of his bed. He knows who he is, knows what he looks like, knows the crease on his forehead and the worry in his eyes. He could drown in it, he thinks. And right now, he’s too busy drowning in himself.
“Alright. Panic attack?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” He flips his arm over. “I hurt myself.”
Tony’s fingers brush over the scratches, breath hitching. “Oh, buddy. You should’ve called me.”
Peter’s stomach whirlpools. Violence and froth and the never-ending abyss of the expectations he will never fulfil. “Mister Stark?”
“Yes, Peter?”
“Can I ask you something?”
Tony’s hand brushes across his bangs, sweeps them aside. Peter wishes that Anxiety was that easy to tame, that a touch from the man’s fingertips could reorder his DNA, lift the burden of inheritance.
“Anything, kid. You can ask me anything.”
“You always say that people don’t hate me.”
“Because they don’t.”
“But they do.” Anxiety snaps, recoils. Fast and hot and angry. “Some people hate me. Some people will always hate me. What do I do with that? How…” He trips over his words, sprawls out on metaphorical concrete. He doesn’t have the vocabulary for this. He’s memorized dictionaries, bent verse and prose and meters just trying to find it. “How do I hold it?”
Tony does him the mercy of contemplating his question. His hand has moved to his chest, now, tracing his collarbone where it juts out against his skin. Familiar touch, familiar rhythm.
“It seems like you have a pretty complicated situation on your hands,” he finally says.
“Yeah.” He swallows. I am greater than my fear. The things I think are not who I am. But are the things they think who I am? How do I know? “Yeah. It’s… it’s pretty complicated.”
“Well, how about we start by uncomplicating it a little, yeah?” He sometimes wonders how Tony can dig his hands right into the red-on-blue-on-green wire mess of his thoughts. He never flinches, never worries about the walk-the-wire nature of the burden. He just does it, calm and smooth. “Alright. So, let me see if I’ve got this straight. You’ve found out that somebody, obviously somebody blind and stupid, dislikes you, and now you’re not entirely sure how that reflects on you. Is that right?”
“Exactly.” Yes, yes. That was it. If you fill a room with mirrors, what do you see? If you fill a world with people, how can Peter ever breathe? “I just… I feel really guilty. But I can’t tell if it’s real guilt or ghost guilt.”
Tony is patient. He is an open sky of stars. Chaos underneath but consistency above. “Ghost guilt?”
“I’m guilty about everything.” Peter’s throat closes. Is this what it will feel like, to inevitably die? The end of it all, and it’ll taste like panic. “I-I feel like everything is my fault all the time. And I know that’s not true, and it’s wrong, and so I try to remind myself that things aren’t my fault. But then you get to a gray area, and area where it could be your fault but you just don’t know, and you’ve got nowhere for the guilt to go. Do you manifest it, or push it away?” He feels near tears. Breaking. Burdened and undone. “I don’t know how to feel, and that’s the very worst thing to feel.”
“Do you know why this person doesn’t like you, Peter?”
“No. Well, I don’t know. Maybe.”
Tony hums, drags his fingertips down the inside of Peter’s forearms, over his palm. He takes each one of Peter’s fingers and closes them into a loose fist. “Did you hurt them?”
“Maybe. I mean, I must’ve, right? People don’t just hate other people for no reason. I must’ve hurt them, so now they hate me.”
“Sometimes people get hurt, Pete.” Tony takes his chin between his thumb and forefinger, realigns their eyes until they lock. “A lot of times, that’s not your responsibility. And, buddy,” there is pain on Tony’s face. A deep, throbbing pain, “you’re a good person. Even after everything, you look at the world so innocently. Sometimes, people are just cruel. They may have their reasons for not liking you, but I highly doubt that they’re good ones.”
“But they have reasons. And if they have reasons, then I must be wrong somehow.”
They are playing a game of tag. Dance around the issue, try to catch the solution. Solving equations with no variables and a waterlogged formula sheet.
Tony’s mouth quirks up. He smooths the pad of his thumb across Peter’s jaw. “Can you change it?”
He blinks. “What?”
“The thing that they don’t like. The thing you did, or the thing that you are. Can you change it?”
“I… yeah, probably.” He could. He could change. He could break his bones and build something new. He was used to breaking, used to building monuments in the wreckage. “Maybe.”
“Hm.” Tony tilts his head, holds Peter’s gaze within his own like he’s cradling something precious. “Would you be happy if you did?”
Peter pauses. Realigns. Chart the stars and map a path. “No.”
“There you go, then.” Tony says it like it’s easy, like the world is made of straight roads and signposts. “I’m going to give you a big truth about the world now, so bear with me. Not everyone’s gonna like you, and you’re not gonna like everyone back. That’s okay. Doesn’t mean that you’re not worthy of being liked, just means that some people aren’t your style.” There’s a pause. Tony knows that his mind can only handle so much input like this, that everything he says must be translated into the meandering language of Anxiety before it can even hope to be processed. “You just keep living the way you want to live, and the people that matter will like you. That’s the end goal. That’s what you’re living for.”
Unexpected. For a moment, his mind is still. Then it whirs and clicks and ebbs back into overdrive. Norestnorestnorest. “Do you like me?”
“Oh, Peter.” Tony cups both sides of his face, eyes glittering with emotion. “I love you.”
Love. Love. Peter knows love. He knows that he loves Tony. He wishes he could feel it, wishes Anxiety knew that filling him with everything was the same thing as filling him with nothing.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
“Don’t be sorry, Peter. Never be sorry.” He lets himself melt into Tony’s eyes, lets himself believe that this is all he needs, all he could ever need. If he finds acceptance here, acceptance from the person who matters, why would he need it from anyone else? “Do you feel better?”
“Yeah.” Anxiety slinks back, and Peter feels the sweet loneliness of being left behind. “I have you.”
Tony smiles, touch soft and firm, the physical manifestation of a promise. “Of course, buddy. You’ll always have me.”