Work Text:
mark rothko painted in colour.
blocky, and abstract; everything about his paintings were simple and straightforward. whatever escaped the clutches of his mind and spilled onto canvas was clean. dark, and sharp, but clean. straightforward.
peter doesn’t think he could be anymore different. he’d tried, previously, to sketch and to paint, but everything he had tried had ended up a masterpiece of tears and blood. a messy masquerade of something close to poetic, he’d filled his room with canvas upon canvas until there was no air for him to breathe anymore.
it wasn’t abnormal for him to paint with his own bodily fluids; a canvas of the splattered blood he’d pulled from his wrists on tuesday, a masterpiece of watery vomit on friday. he can paint, but he’s too complicated to class himself as anything near an artist.
he tries to tell people. tries to enter classes, and to buy real supplies, but he’s not sure whether it’s in his blown lungs or swollen throat that the words become lost in. he settles for tears, and blood, and vomit. it’s the only thing he has.
if peter’s lungs could work, he’d force the words out through his lips, breaking the choke they hold in the back of his throat. often times, he finds himself unable to decipher whether the lump in the back of his throat is a cluster of jumbled, strewn together words, or a tight ball of unshed tears.
his eyes have long since run dry, but he doesn’t forget the nights he’d spent hunched in the shower, naked and trembling and alone. he could have cried for days on end, sobbing into the shower that he was alone, so, so alone, but he chooses instead to dissociate under a blanket of smoke and steam.
he doesn’t think a lot when he dissociates, if at all. it’s uncomfortable, and he’d woken up in water up to his knees more than once, but it helps him forget, and that’s more than enough at this point.
when he comes to, it’s in a sticky ball of drool of sweat. no matter how warm it is, or where he is, he comes out of episodes sweating and shaking, chanting the same mantra he’d adopted since he’d fallen into such a god forsaken lifestyle.
i exist. i exist. i exist.
he doesn’t think he could say it anymore if he tried. he refuses to say anything more, and nothing less. it’s the same two words, on a constant loop, and he’s not sure he even stops when he sleeps.
if peter had a normal sleeping pattern, he’s sure so many of his problems would be solved, but he nurses his insomnia over cup after cup of coffee and energy drinks. he’s skin and bones, but the caffeine provides him with one less essential that reminds him he’s still human.
he stops drinking coffee for days at a time, running solely on his free will to torture his mind awake. he consumes nothing for two days, and wakes up on the balcony, staring through swollen eyes up into the burning sun. he decides then and there that he’ll kill himself when it’s raining. no thoughts about it.
just to his benefit, it doesn’t rain again. he trudges around the broken apartment, looking for something, anything, to help him through the endless days and nights he spends alone, but he comes back empty handed and he stops speaking altogether.
if he speaks maybe he’ll break the hold these paintings have on him, but he can’t, so instead he sits and cries and remembers a time when life couldn’t have been easier.
he remembers swinging through new york. whether it was spider-man or peter parker at that point, he’s not sure. god knows the two were entirely separate, and he’d kept that lifestyle till the day he broke. he’d ruined spider-man that day, tarnishing his image and painting over it with a canvas of salty tears and pure red blood.
most of all, he remembers mr. stark. what the man was up to, peter didn’t know. he had no phone, no television, and the watch his ex-mentor had made him had long since been destroyed in one of the thousands of domestics the four walls of peter’s apartment had seen.
he remembers germany with a faint smile. perhaps he’s delirious, and he can’t see through the blurriness of the insides of his mind, but he remembers germany as clear as he possibly can. he holds onto the feeling of wielding the shield, savours the compliment mr. stark had given him. it seems so long ago, but he clasps onto what little remaining happy memories he has, and he fills the box in his mind to the brim with people he loves.
then it rains, and peter shatters.
the trauma hits him as soon as the first raindrop trickles down the window. he remembers how much of his hair he’d pulled out, watches his eyes gravitate to the corner of the kitchen table where he’d almost lost his vision. the apartment holds so many bad memories that he finds it difficult to look past them and see the good he’d had here.
he barely remembers it. ned, mj, even flash had seen the inside of this apartment. he wonders with an agonising stab in the heart where they had been since he’d been forced to cut contact with them. as peter looks outside, watching the rain stream down the window, he hopes they’re as far away from him as possible. they’d already been through so much - peter couldn’t do that to them again.
if peter could speak, he’d remind himself that he really did exist. but, when he steps outside into the pouring rain and feels nothing but emptiness, he sinks to the ground in a painstakingly terrible flurry of silent sobs, screaming out into the busy street.
he sits there, crying while no tears fall, and waves a giant red flag, screaming at the citizens down below to save him. they don’t take notice. why would they? peter’s been crying for help whilst simultaneously covering their ears with his hands - he couldn’t think people would help him now.
as the rain becomes heavier, so do peter’s lungs. the unspoken words he’d never said come spewing through his mouth in the form of a scream, so loud yet stuttered that he scares even himself. his throat had been chewed raw on the inside by the mantra he’d forgotten about, and the pain relieves itself in the form of tears when he doubles over.
“i don’t exist!” he screams, clutching at his stomach with his hands like he’s trying to keep everything inside of his body whilst it spills onto the pavement below. he’s not sure if he’s screaming, or silently crying, but it matters nonetheless. nobody notices, and nobody cares.
there’s so many different canvases on his balcony, ranging from splatters of yellow and blue paint to furious dribbles of red seeping through black wounds. the canvas to the side of him, peter’s favourite, holds only the colour black. it’s beautiful.
there’s a small canvas to his left, completely empty, that peter takes with shaking hands. it’s wet, and unusable, but he watches it with a newfound fondness in his eyes. the dehydration and starvation is finally catching up with his body, and his limbs collapse to the floor in a heap while he cries. he pokes his nail through the centre of the canvas and feels the agony rip through his heart.
he’s dying, and he knows it.
it’s completely void of colour, almost like when peter had first started in this world. pure, and innocent, and completely devoid of trauma and empty words and broken eye sockets that he can only reach in his darkest dreams. peter hates the way it teases him with the promise of something he never got to have, so he attacks it in the only way he knows possible.
colour after colour, he paints whilst sobbing, letting the paint run past his fingers, down his wrists. he enjoys dripping the red on his skin, smearing it into the pale bones underneath his fingertips like it’s warm blood. it stops the itch, if only for a second.
when the painting is finished, he collapses to the side and lets his lungs rest. they’ve been trying so hard for him his whole life; he owes it to them to let them rest.
peter paints one last canvas and calls it sleep and realises that he’s been trying to wake up this whole time.