Archive of Our Own

Peter doesn’t fully understand it, at first. His first thought isn’t Aunt May or the world knows or even shit shit shit . It’s: what and god, not that picture; I look like such a dork . 

That’s what he thinks: what . He knows what’s happening, his brain is following the sequence of events--there’s a special message, he was framed for the drones, Mysterio is a dick, his identity is being revealed, wow this is not good. The logical part of his brain understands the sequence of events perfectly. It’s the rest of him that’s the issue--the part that, even after everything he did, even after the gunshot blew Peter’s ear out, its first thought is still what . That, there--that’s Mr. Beck ( Mysterio , he had said, naming himself after the babble of teenagers) up there on that screen, the same Mr. Beck who had bought him seven lemonades and trusted his call and told him it was okay to want a normal life. There he is, spilling Peter's most important secret to the whole world. 

His first thought is what . His second is god, not that picture; I look like such a dork . His third is I’m sitting on a pole in the middle of New York and I need to move now . 

The crowd underneath him is restless, turning to stare and point and gawk. He can count at least a dozen people who already have their phones out, and the sirens in the distance are growing louder. This is bad. This is so bad. 

Still. Despite all that, he sits there like an idiot, frozen to the spot while his whole brain tries to reboot to accommodate everything that’s just happened. 

“Go, Peter!” MJ screams from below, and he startles into action. He isn’t even thinking about it, he just reacts: go, Peter and he takes off, just like he has since he was a kid, five-nine-twelve and running when someone screamed that, when those guys cornered Uncle Ben and he ran without even thinking, without remembering he could have helped--

MJ yells go, Peter and he swings away on muscle memory, going and going and going until he’s out of web fluid and the sirens have faded away behind him. 

*

He takes off the suit--

(The second one he ever built himself, and he can’t quite forget the way Happy had looked when he saw him, something misty in his eyes while Peter twisted the holographic light between his fingers--)

--and steps into pedestrian traffic. He makes it four blocks before he realizes it’s not just his imagination; everyone really is staring at him. The woman across the street drops her bags on the bodega steps when she sees him and he hurries along. 

It takes another block before the sirens start up, close enough to make him jump. There’s some guy standing nearby, and his super hearing gives him just enough to make out the 911 dispatcher on the other end. 

Oh, right , he thinks, feeling somewhere between lost and dumb in a way he hasn’t since the first day of freshman year. 

He’s not used to being recognized as Peter Parker. He’s never been recognized as Peter Parker. For as long as he can remember, anytime he wanted to disappear, he could just step outside--boom. Invisible. Even MJ, the girl he really likes/who really likes him, said no one paid attention to him. The world watches Spiderman; it doesn’t even know that Peter Parker exists. 

Right now, the whole world is watching him. Peter Parker is being seen and this is even stranger than being bitten by a radioactive spider. 

He’s standing in the middle of an intersection. He’s not quite sure how he got here, or why he stopped, by he’s here now. Bystanders are gawking in the way usually only tourists do. The sirens are closer than ever. 

He doesn’t know what to do. The police are coming for him, Peter Parker, and he doesn’t know what to do. 

He runs. 

*

It’s hard to be homeless. He knows this; for a week or so in eighth grade he and May and Ben were between apartments and couldn’t scrape together enough for a hotel, so they slept on benches and couch surfed. 

It’s a whole new beast to be homeless and a fugitive. 

Everywhere he goes--the streets, the metro, the rooftops--someone is watching. Someone is looking for him, because as far as the world is concerned, he just killed a hero and tried to wipe London off the map.

(He did kill a man. Maybe he didn’t pull the trigger, but he killed Beck when he got in close and fought and the blasts when off and even before that, on Titan, when he pulled and pulled and almost had it and then, just as suddenly, he didn’t, and he’s never really forgiven himself for that has he--)

(He hasn’t had time. He died on Titan, then woke and battled and five years had passed and everything happened so fast, and then Mr. Stark was dying in front of him, and he was standing in black clothes at a lake house and crying when he found that picture of himself by the dishes when he was helping clean up and then and then--)

(They all know Peter Parker got blipped. No one--or at least no one on Earth and alive--knows quite what happened that day on Titan.)

(The point is this: he didn’t fire a gun at Beck, and he saved millions of lives, but a man still died because of his actions. His choices. With great power comes great responsibility and he has never felt heavier with the weight of it all; his hands have never felt so coated in blood.)

*

It’s midway through the third night (he’s hiding on the underside of a dock, this time--theoretically sleeping, but every time someone walks past the wood creaks and he snaps straight into fight or flight) when the homesickness crashes down on him. He wants his ratty twin bed. He wants his Frankenstein computer and he wants his old couch and he wants his Aunt May to wrap her arms around him, to tell him it’s all going to be okay. 

And just like that: Aunt May . 

He is beyond panicked. He is spiraling, he is reeling, he is somewhere past feeling emotions and chock full of them at the same time--

He has his phone out, thumb hovering over the power button, before he even realizes what he’s doing. He’s been trying not to use his phone, in case they’re tracking any activity and also because he isn’t sure when he’ll be able to charge it again, but he’s been too afraid to really get rid of it, in case that somehow solidifies his new status as homeless- and- on-the-run . 

But Aunt May. He doesn’t know where she is, or if she’s okay, or anything, really. He thinks Happy must be protecting her--they were together, last he saw--but he doesn’t know if the cops tried to get her or if some disgruntled criminals did or if she’s already dead in a gutter somewhere or if she’s hurt and needs him. 

His thumb is still hovering over the button. Turning it on might let them track him.

He doesn’t know if she needs him, if she’s safer if he doesn’t call. Maybe she can disown him, go on TV and say Peter Parker’s no nephew of mine, we haven’t spoken in months, crazy child --maybe she can avoid the backlash. He doesn’t know what the best course of action is, and he can’t ask Aunt May because that’s sort of the whole problem. 

He just… doesn’t know.

*

At night, his dreams are vivid and leave him shaking and sweating awake. He dreams of the press of crushing concrete, of the way it felt to come undone, shaking apart until he was so much like those endless rusted sands. He dreams of Mysterio most of all: in those dreams, the dark is long and endless, sharp bursts of pain coming as trains and drones and slabs of concrete and rebar burst out of nowhere. He stands at their graves--Mr. Stark, Mr. Beck, Uncle Ben, all the people he’s let die--and hears you don’t deserve it and you’re an avenger and c’mon kid, I’ll buy you a drink and watches as rotting corpses and crumbling costumes claw their way out the dirt and he just. Doesn’t. Move. 

After he wakes, he still sees the gravestones behind his eyelids. He thinks about that a lot, in those long, cold, days--Mr. Stark, who believed in him, who wanted him to be better, is dead. Mysterio, who tried to kill him and MJ and Ned and half of Europe, is dead. Mr. Beck, who told him to go after MJ and came back to check on him after Nick Fury yelled and who told him the glasses looked ridiculous, is also dead. 

He thinks about the long line of buried mentors stretching out behind him and something hollow in his gut twists. 

*

It’s six days before MJ tracks him down. When she does, he’s perched in the rafters of a crumbling warehouse on the wharf. She walks right up underneath him while he’s half-asleep and shouts, “Hey!”, and he tumbles straight out of the rafters with all the grace of a limp noodle. 

He lays there on the ground, groaning, and MJ leans over him and says, “‘Sup, Parker,” like she has every day for the last year and a half. If his eyes weren’t open, he’d think he was back at school, walking into the chem lab late for the fifth day in a row--but his eyes are open, so he can see the bags under her eyes and her pale complexion. He can see the way her lips don’t crinkle into that uniquely MJ smile. He sees how tired she is. 

“MJ,” he gasps. It’s about all he can manage. 

“Why were you hiding?” she asks. There’s about a million ways he could answer that-- because the police are looking for me, because I’m being blamed for things I didn’t do, because two days ago someone shot at me and pedestrians cheered him on --but what he goes with is: “You told me to go.”

MJ rolls her eyes and he wishes he was kissing her. That’s not the point, it’s not important at all right now, but it’s true. All he’s had is those kisses on the bridge, everything burning and crashing around him and he’d really only tasted his own blood, and suddenly he feels robbed. He and MJ should be on a date right now, at some restaurant he can barely afford and is about to get kicked out of, or wandering Coney Island, or attending a protest to raise awareness about illiteracy rates in inner-city middle schools. Instead, he’s out of breath, lying on cracking concrete, while MJ rolls her eyes about him. He wants to kiss her, because he always does, but also because the world owes him that much by now. 

“I told you to run, Peter, not to hide from your Aunt May and me for a week.”

“I wasn’t sure if it was safe,” he manages, sitting up and then stumbling into something close to standing. He has an arm wrapped around his ribs--the guy with the gun had missed him, but he’d hit himself pretty badly on a car trying to get away. 

“Did you seriously think any of us would turn you in.” It’s a question, but she doesn’t say it like one. She says it like depending on his answer he might have a whole lot worse than a city-wide manhunt to worry about. 

“What? No,” he says, baffled. “I wasn’t sure if it was safe for me to be near you guys. In case the cops get trigger happy, or some of my old busts come looking, or… I don’t know. Anything could happen. I didn’t want you guys getting hurt.”

MJ’s face screws up really hard, and he blinks and leans in a little closer, trying to figure out what she’s thinking. It’s not until he’s shuffled closer that he sees the wet gleam on her cheeks and realizes she’s crying. Her fists are balled, her shoulders clenched, and she’s not making a sound. She’s just standing while the tears dry on her face. 

“MJ?” he asks, hesitant.

“You’re an idiot,” she announces very suddenly, “and even worse, a cliche. You’re going to come with me and listen to me and we are going to work this whole thing out.”

She turns on her heel and marches out. There’s nothing here but the sagging remnants of a shipping business, a few disgruntled pigeons, and him. 

He does the sensible thing: he follows. 

*

At MJ’s apartment, after she’s finished chewing him out and he’s sure the cops didn’t catch him hiding in the trunk of her car on the way here, the two of them sit on her bed in silence.

“And you swear my Aunt May is fine?” he asks for the millionth time.

“No, Peter,” MJ says, “her nephew was finally back, safe at home, and now the whole world is gunning for him and he vanished and the police keep showing up at her place to question her about you. I don’t think she’s fine. But she’s alive, and no one’s tried to hurt her or anything.”

He buries his head in his hands and tries to remember how to breathe. He did it before. He was doing it when his picture was splashed across the massive screen. He can remember how to breathe, of course he can. 

“What’s the plan?” he asks. His voice comes out muffled by his hands, and he isn’t really sure who he’s asking--MJ or himself or the universe in general--but it’s MJ that answers. 

“Your aunt is talking to the media, trying to get the real story out there. Happy is trying to get in contact with some of the Avengers. Ned told me to tell you some guy name Fury is working on it. They’re going to take care of this, Parker. And in the meantime you’re going to hole up with me and let the protests die down a little.”

“I should be helping,” he mumbles, but it’s half-hearted. He’s exhausted, smelly, and starving; and even beyond that, there’s nothing he could really do anyways. 

“You should be resting,” MJ says flatly, “or are you going to keep pretending that you aren’t hurt?”

“I’m not,” he says, staring blankly at the wall. There’s a poster of Eleanor Roosevelt on the wall, right next to a bunch of comic strips that have been printed out and taped up. It's very MJ.

“Yes, you are. You broke, like, every single rib during the fight with Beck, and you’ve been up and moving ever since. There’s no way you’ve healed.”

“I have super healing. It’s part of the whole Spider-Man thing. I’m not hurt,” he mumbles. It’s true. His ribs had finished healing the night before that stupid video got released, and the random nicks and bruises he’s accumulated over the last week  are mostly gone. 

Physically, he’s not hurt. 

(That doesn’t mean he’s not hurting.)

MJ doesn’t listen to him, just demands that he shower with soap so nothing gets infected. He stands in lukewarm water for entirely too long, staring vacantly at the grime gathering between tiles on the shower wall. He uses MJ’s body wash--something faint, generic, and lavender-y; he’s not quite sure what--and when he steps out, in one of her oversized hoodies and sweatpants, she forces a peanut butter sandwich and several rolls of gauze into his lap. 

“Thank you,” he says. He doesn’t know what else to say. How do you thank someone for something like this? In the last seven days, MJ has saved his life repeatedly, tracked him down in New York City, given him a safe place to stay, and made him a sandwich. They don’t sell greeting cards for that level of dedication to dorky (boy?)friends.

He quietly mulls that over for the next few hours, wondering about the timing of it all. He doesn’t figure out a better way to show her how much he appreciates her, but he does come to a conclusion: he has the best (girl?)friend ever. 

*

It takes four days for the knock to come at her door. They're sitting on her bed, debating the realism of “science” in Star Wars vs. Star Trek, and then suddenly there’s a knock on her door and he’s hiding under the bed when the men in big black tactical gear come in. He can hear them questioning her, asking if she’s had any contact with Peter Parker, if she knows anything about the vigilante’s whereabouts. Anything about his whereabouts. 

Yeah, he imagines her saying, looking as bored as she always does to the outside world, he’s hiding under my bed. What about it?

She doesn’t say that. She starts going off about the flaws in the system and warrant reforms and the twelve ways they’re violating what this country was supposed to be; by the time the SWAT agents have made it through the door, they’re shifting uneasily on their  feet, shuffling through the house and checking things with a frankly ridiculous level of care, as though disturbing one too many vases might set her off again. The agent assigned to sweep her room gets as far as checking her closet and one drawer before the force of MJ’s stare is too much for him and he scurries away. 

He waits until he hears their car doors shutting and driving away before he comes out from under the bed. MJ is sitting very still, looking perfectly calm except for the lingering fear in her eyes, and his gut twists uncomfortably. 

“Look, I’ll head out. I can get spotted over Brooklyn or something--” he begins, but MJ’s already standing and moving around, throwing clothes and toiletries in a bag.

“Come on, Parker. We’ve got to get you out of here. We’re going to Flash’s.”

“I… what?”

“Get up. We’re leaving.”

“What are you talking about? Why would I ever go to Flash’s house?”

“Because they’ll be surveilling Ned’s apartment, and Flash is the only one who’s ready for you. Betty and the others need a few more days to convince their families.”

His brain kind of short circuits. This is… a lot to take in. 

“What is happening right now?”

MJ doesn’t stop moving for a second, just zips the bag closed and tosses it toward his chest before starting for the front door.

“We’re moving you to the next safe house. Get up, Peter, we’ve got to time this right.”

He’s listened to her so far, he figures, so why stop now?

*

Flash’s home is unsurprisingly massive. There’s a coded gate in front of his driveway that Peter and MJ neatly hop, winding stairs just to get to the front door, and an honest to God chandelier in the foyer. None of this is really much of a shock. 

What is astonishing, though, is that the first words out of Flash’s mouth are an actual apology . Peter stands there with his mouth gaping open, in Flash’s bedroom (which is about the size of his whole apartment) as Eugene Thompson tells him that he’s really sorry about the way he acted, that Peter didn’t deserve it, that he knows Peter is innocent because Spider-Man is someone he really respects and he’d never do something like that. 

And then MJ just leaves him there with a quick bye , as though his entire fucking world hasn’t just been flipped on its axis for the seventh time in the last two weeks. 

He kind of feels like screaming. There’s a pressure that’s been building in his throat for days, itching at the inside of his skull. He still isn’t quite sure whether it’ll burst in the form of tears or laughter, but right now, he just wants to scream. He wants to throw himself on the ground and demand the world revert to what he once knew. He wants, in what he’ll admit is probably the juiciest bit of irony in this whole situation, for Flash to sneer as soon as the door is closed and call him Penis, because at least that is familiar. 

Instead, as he hears the distant sound of the front door closing, Flash turns to him and smiles. “You okay, Peter?”

He opens his mouth to let that scream out but instead what comes out is, “Yeah, I’m good.”

*

Flash asks him a few times, in the five-and-a-half days they’re together. You okay, Peter ? He asks other things, too, of course--more obnoxious things and more wow-you're-spiderman-how-does-that-even-work things--but those don’t trip him up the same way. Peter can carry on a perfectly fine conversation with him for a little less than three hours about the web fluid and which species of arachnid his abilities most closely resemble, but when Flash comes back from the bathroom and finds him staring blankly at the ceiling, he asks you okay, Peter? , and his throat closes up a little and he says “yeah” without even thinking about it. Even when he opens his mouth fully intending to come clean, to vent and possibly cry to fucking Flash (what even is his life), that’s all that comes out: “yeah, I’m good.”

He doesn’t know how to stop. He thinks if this were any other situation, he’d be neck-deep in a Wikipedia wormhole by now, following links for pathological lying and repression and compartmentalization and all the other things he hasn’t gotten far enough into A.P. Psych to know about.

(Is he going to get any further? Is he ever even going back to school? It’s been three weeks; he’s missed at least two unit tests and half a dozen quizzes. The make-up work alone would be hell, but then he doesn’t need to worry about that if this is his life now, if it’s just running and hiding and borrowing Flash’s extra socks and what if this is all that’s left --)

He takes a shaky breath and looks over. The retro alarm clock (“Collectible,” Flash had said, still a smug little bastard even when he’s more or less good) reads 3:02. It’s dark, but light plays across the wall as a car rushes by.

He’s going to be fine. MJ and Ned and Aunt May have a plan; Happy and Director Fury are pulling strings; he hasn’t heard from Pepper but somehow he doubts that she’d let Morgan’s favorite babysitter be a ghost for very long. He’s going to get out of this. He’s going to be fine.

Maybe if he says it enough, it’ll even be true. 

*

He tries to put the suit back on just once. It’s one in the morning and he can’t sleep and he’s craving the feeling of swinging-- rush wind freefall up up up rush wind --so bad he can feel it in his bones. He slides the mask on, one foot already out the window, and hears Karen say: are you sure it’s safe, Peter?

And he just. He just stops, for a minute. 

Because for a moment, he forgot that it’s not safe to be Spider-Man. Not because of the bad guys who shoot at him, not because of the ridiculous heights he drops from regularly, but because the cops are after him. Because everyone is after him. Because Quentin Beck died on a bridge in London and it still wasn’t enough to stop him. 

He’s terrified for the people of New York--it was one thing when he was just another superhero in a sea of them, but all the Avengers are dead off-world and who’s left to protect the little guy? It’s just him, only he can’t. Not even in a stupid, self-sacrificing way, with the generic it-doesn't-matter-what-happens-to-me-as-long-as-everyone-else-is-safe speech, because there are literal mobs looking for him and bullets fired at him are bullets that could ricochet into the crowd and there’s nothing he can do. Even the “night monkey” angle is way past blown.

He sheds the suit and crawls back into bed, but he doesn’t get any sleep that night. 

*

He’s standing back on Titan, hands wrapped loosely around the big metal glove. All around him, superheroes are working, trying to keep Thanos down long enough to pull it off. Mr. Stark is standing beside him, frantically moving, trying to finish before Mantis loses her hold on his mind. 

“We’ve almost got this thing off,” he says, desperate. Peter’s next to him, his hands on the glove, but he’s not moving. He isn’t helping, he’s just standing there. 

Thanos turns towards him, smiles. No one else seems to notice that he’s awake. “Are you going to stop me?”

Peter doesn’t say anything. He feels numb, like when his fingers go cold after ice skating too long, only it’s all of him at once. 

“I didn’t think so,” Thanos says. He pulls the glove back on and Peter can finally move, only he isn’t controlling it; he’s backing away from the monster before him, terror rising in his gut and his throat and his Peter-Tingle is making the whole world scream and--

He hears the sound of a train, barreling towards him, and jolts awake with a gasp. 

*

There’s no polite knocking when they come to Flash’s house. Maybe they learned a lesson from trying that at MJ’s or maybe people are just running out of patience, getting less and less willing to wait for a nice, clean investigation.

It doesn’t matter. He hears the cars pulling up before he’s even fully awake, and he’s out the fourth story window and into the surrounding pine trees before they’ve even finished breaking down the door. 

* 

Betty Brant lives in the suburbs just outside the city, a twenty-minute car ride away. He knows exactly where it is, because Flash made him memorize the route right away on the first morning he woke up there. It takes him an hour of wandering the woods to find the road he’s supposed to follow, and another two to get into the neighborhood. Peter thanks whatever deity is out there that it’s drizzling, enough to justify the deep hood he has on but not enough to soak you to the bone.

When he knocks on the door, he hears the sound of dogs barking. It takes one minute, twenty-eight seconds (enough time that he’s trying to brainstorm where to go, where to escape if this is the wrong house, c’mon Peter what’s the backup to the backup--) for her to get the door. She stares him down, utterly unimpressed with the slightly-soggy vigilante/fugitive slouching on the porch. Behind her, he sees the beginnings of a long hallway with peeling yellow paint, and he can hear her sisters giggling upstairs as they destroy what sounds like some kind of block tower.

“Flash said you’d probably be headed my way. I thought you’d move faster.”

He doesn’t quite know how to respond to that, but after a second she moves aside and Peter follows her in. 

*

He doesn’t know why he never saw it before, but Betty is kind of brutally honest. He guesses that he probably never bothered to look before. He’d feel worse about that, except it’s not exactly like she was looking at him, either. 

“I can leave,” he offers, halfway through the first night. He’s felt her staring at him for the past two hours, and there’s something uneasy in her posture. 

“And go where? You’re here, Parker. Don’t be an idiot.”

“You don’t like me, do you?”

She’s quiet for a minute. The bedsprings creak as she rolls onto her back. The silence drags on, and he’s just starting to let his eyes drift shut when she finally speaks. 

“You used to be this scrawny kid, and then something happened and suddenly you were--different. Acting weird all the time. You ditched my best friend at her senior year Homecoming Dance and acted even weirder than everyone else when the shit with her dad went down. You kept disappearing during the trip, and worse, dragging Ned into whatever you were doing to cover for you. Then we get back and suddenly there’s this footage of you killing Mysterio. The Spiderman angle answers a lot, and everyone else seems to think that you could never have done anything like that.”

She falters, goes quiet. There’s a strange stinging in his throat and eyes and he doesn’t know if this is hurt or anger. 

“If you think I’m a murderer, why would you let me stay here? Are you gonna turn me in?” he asks, something vicious and pent up in his words. 

“I never said I thought you did it,” she says, apparently not even phased by pissing off the potential murderer who’s going to sleep next to her. “I don’t know if you did it. I don’t know you, to be honest. But I think everyone is capable of darkness.”

Peter scoffs, a bitter, angry thing. 

“Look,” she says, leaning over the edge of the bed, “I don’t have any proof one way or the other, and I’d be a pretty crappy reporter if I just went along with whatever everyone else assumes is true. I’m not going to turn you in. But I’m also not going to go along with everyone who thinks we should pat you on the head and tell you you haven’t done anything wrong. You chose to be a hero. One way or another, that footage was of you standing on that bridge, and you put yourself there. Maybe it’s not fair, but there are consequences. It’s time to face them, Peter.”

And then she just rolls over like she didn’t just lay him out in a way he hasn’t been since Tony, since the spaceship and shouting about sneaking on board and getting knighted Aunt May, before the Blip.

She’s asleep in the next fifteen minutes.

*

In his dreams, he cries out for help while a building rests across his shoulders and Liz runs to hug her dad, beaming while he swings her around. Peter calls for help and they turn toward him, smiles fading. Why’d you do that to me she asks, hurt splashed across her face. Please he tries to say, but the dust keeps getting in his throat (his throat is turning to dust?) and choking him, please I was just trying to do the right thing I was just trying to help it wasn’t safe, Liz, people were getting hurt because of him . She looks at him so sad and says but what about how you hurt me and he wakes to blood in his mouth where he’s apparently bitten his tongue to stop himself from screaming. 

*

The morning is an awkward affair, a thick silence hovering over everything as he stumbles around the unfamiliar space, trying to find some peanut butter to smear on bread. Then Betty’s sisters come down and she just… melts. She’s all smiles and hugs and nicknames, reaching up and around to get the twins everything they need and laughing as they very seriously tell her all about their plans for a jellybean-and-marshmallow store.

Oh , he thinks, this makes sense . He thinks of the frigid, sharp-edged girl who was honest with him last night when nobody else would be and of the bubbly romance that sprouted between her and Ned on the trip. 

Betty Brant, he theorizes, is the kind of person who holds nothing sacred but the people she cares about. 

It’s the kind of sentiment Peter can get behind. He’s known some pretty good heroes people who were the same way. 

*

Things don’t stop being surreal, in the three days he spends there. He wakes up and wanders around the house in a daze, then comes downstairs for family dinner, where her parents smile benignly at him and ask him where he wants to go to college while they pass the potato salad. At first he thinks they don’t know about Spiderman, about who he is, but then they’re cracking jokes about swinging from webs between classes and everyone’s laughing along. Halfway through the second night, he hears a helicopter and they all jump into action. When he comes out of hiding an hour later, Mrs. Brant just smiles at him and ruffles his hair, then tells him to go help with the dishes. 

He still doesn’t really know what’s happening or what to think of Betty’s family, but two weeks ago he was hiding in an alley and shaking with some combination of fear and shock and cold. Right now he’s standing in the warm kitchen light with soap suds on his hands and a pair of too-large socks on his feet. If nothing else, this is decidedly an improvement. 

*

He keeps moving, and moving, and moving. His list of personal items has been cut down to one backpack of essentials and the clothes he’s wearing. He’s out of people he knows now, for the most part--he isn’t sure who’s running things, if this is Aunt May or MJ or someone else, but they have it down to a rhythm. When he arrives anywhere new, the first thing they do is drill the next address into his head and exactly how to get there by foot or bus or subway, whatever’s around. Most of the time when he shows up the person who opens the door isn’t even someone he knows by name--it’s that cheerleader who walked past him every day on her way to Calculus, the kid who sat behind him for half a week before switching English classes; it’s people in grades above him and below him and teenagers he’s never once seen in his life but who are wearing Midtown Tech t-shirts. 

He’s still up late every night, still sleeps uneasily and wakes from nightmares. The difference is that these days, part of what keeps him up is the sheer awe at what’s happening, at what all these people are willing to do to keep him safe. 

*

When he winds up at Brad’s house, the conversation is awkward and stilted. Mid-afternoon sunlight is streaming through the kitchen windows, and he’s sitting quietly not saying anything while he sips on Brad’s mom’s homemade fruit punch. It’s somehow too tart and too sweet all at once and it makes his throat burn while it goes down, but it’s fruit punch and he’s been missing sugary drinks like crazy. 

“I’m sorry I tried to out you,” Brad finally says. He’s fidgeting in his chair, not making eye contact. Peter doesn’t blame him; he’s doing the same thing. “I mean. I’m not sorry that I tried, because I was trying to do the right thing and I was right, anyways, but--I’m sorry. That I tried to get MJ away from you, and that I almost blew your whole Spiderman thing.”

“It’s fine,” Peter says, swallowing the last of his drink. “I mean, I, uh, almost blew you up, so I probably had it coming.”

“You did what ?”

“It was an accident!”

“When was this?!?”

“On the bus. I was trying to find a way to delete that picture of me that you were gonna show MJ, but then my AI thought I was ordering a drone strike on you, so--”

“Ohmygod I almost died.”

“Only almost! I saved your life!”

“You also tried to kill me !”

Peter shrinks back in his chair. “I’m sorry. I promise I didn’t mean to.”

“I… I need to go.” That’s all the warning he gets before Brad’s suddenly vanishing, rushing upstairs. He hears a door slam shut and he would just sit at the table sinking into the ocean of guilt that’s currently swallowing him whole, except that he can hear Brad’s heart going way too fast and the shallow little gasps he’s taking and wow okay he’s having a panic attack . 

Peter sits still for a minute, paralyzed by indecision. He’s coached himself (and Ned) through enough panic attacks to know what to do, but he also caused this one, and he doesn’t know if him being there will make things better or worse, and he just--he doesn’t know what to do. 

Instinct makes the choice for him. The attack is getting worse, and if Peter was the kind of person who could stand by while something was wrong--well, then he probably wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. This whole shit storm is actually probably a sign that he needs to stop meddling and trying to help, actually, now that he thinks about it, but he’s already up the stairs and opening the door. 

“Hey, Brad,” he says, trying for a smile while he does his best to keep his voice calm and level. “I need you to take a deep breath, okay? I know it’s hard and I know it feels like you can’t breathe, but I need you to try.”

Peter sits by him for a while, doing his best to help. When he hears his heartbeat calm down from dangerous levels and he’s breathing steadily, he offers to leave, but Brad just shakes his head. Peter stays, but he has to count backward from a hundred with Brad twice before his hands stop shaking. 

“Listen, I’m really sorry. I can go ahead to the next place. I know I can’t fix this, but--let me know if there’s anything at all I can do to start making it up to you,” Peter says. He feels like shit. Scratch that, he is shit. He is an asshole who tries to kill his peers and then gives them panic attacks. 

“Stay,” Brad says instead. “You tried to kill me, but you also saved my life and helped me with… that, and you’ve probably saved everyone a bunch of times over doing the superhero thing. I’m not saying all’s fine and dandy, but… stay.”

Peter wants to ask are you sure , but he can hear Brad’s tone and heartbeat. He’s sure. The last thing Peter wants to do is ask pointless questions and make him angry. 

Instead, he takes a deep breath and swallows his shame. “Thank you.”

*

He still dreams of trains, of sand, of a bar with lemonade and bendy straws. Gravestones burst from the ground and everything collapses into dust; a building falls around him and he cannot breathe because the ground is slipping away into water and he’s tangled in the parachute; his Uncle Ben frowns and tuts while he screams and pleads for Aunt May to come back, to wake up, to stop being cold and covered in blood. He dreams that he is being knighted, that he is dying, that he is late for a Spanish quiz and Toomes is his teacher. He dreams that he walks into the lakehouse and Pepper and Morgan hide from him, that he looks in the mirror and sees himself covered in Beck’s blood. He dreams that he is with Beck. 

Tony dies. And dies. And dies. 

He wakes gasping, his jaw weeping with tension and his teeth sore from grinding in the night. He’s sweaty and shaken, but he doesn’t scream. 

(He dreams of Aunt May. It’s not a nightmare, it’s just Aunt May, dancing around the kitchen, smoke billowing out of the oven where she’s forgotten something’s cooking. She’s telling him all about the fish named Oreo (made of Oreos??) she’s adopted, and nothing is wrong.)

(He wakes with a hollow, soul-deep ache in his chest and misses the nightmares.)

*

Mr. Harrington has a cat! Named Aloe! And a full living room wall devoted to Dune memorabilia!

Ned needs to know these things!

He hasn’t missed his phone this much since the first week. 

*

He’s at a little apartment in Brooklyn when the call finally comes in. It’s somebody’s girlfriend’s cousin’s place, and he doesn’t recognize the single dad or his daughter Daphne even a little bit, but apparently they were on the bus he stopped a car from smashing into all those years ago. They were grateful enough to join in with the ever-growing number of accomplices in hiding a fugitive. 

Still, it’s a bit of a shock when Mr. Jackson walks in with his phone and hands it to Peter. “It’s for you,” he says, gruff but not unkind, and leaves. 

Peter sits there for a minute, frozen with fear. What if this is the police? What if he’s been turned in and they’re calling to negotiate terms of surrender? What if this is something else, something worse than anything you can imagine, and he just picks up the phone like an idiot?

“Peter?” he hears, tiny from the phone’s speakers. All of the tension melts out of his body and he can breathe again. 

“Pepper!!”

“Oh, good, I got the right number! Listen, Peter, your aunt and Happy and I have been doing a lot of work, and we’ve gotten things mostly sorted out. There’s still going to be a shitstorm, don’t get me wrong, but we’ve got you pardoned and the government agreed to settle your case as self defense, once we managed to get our hands on the unedited footage. It’s time, Peter. You can come home.”

He lets out a shaky breath, somewhere between a laugh and a sigh of relief. “Oh my god, thank you. Thank you so much, Pepper, you have no idea--”

His throat is closing up. The world is fuzzy and his eyes are stinging. He’s crying. He doesn’t know why he’s crying; this is a good thing, an amazing thing. All he knows is that something loosened in his chest for the first time in the last two months and suddenly there were tears in his eyes. 

“I know, kiddo,” Pepper says quietly. He can’t see her, but he recognizes that voice. He knows she’s sitting in her chair, staring out the window with unfocused eyes. Peter spent enough time babysitting Morgan in the aftermath to know what Pepper Potts looks like when she’s tired and finally done with whatever was taking up her time. “I know.”

*

He feels like he should’ve known just how many people would be here, given how often he rewatched Tony’s old press conferences,  but he’s still shocked when he steps on stage. He’s blinded by camera flashes all at once and he flinches away from the attention, each snap of a camera as loud as a gunshot to his still-frayed super senses. 

The whole thing moves by in a blur. He’s vaguely aware of the fact that he’s standing at the front, stumbling through the notes on the flashcards Pepper had pressed into his hands; in the background, cameras snap and flash from every direction. 

He knows not all those people behind the cameras believe him, but he stands up there and he gives a stuttering speech and he hopes they don’t catch the bags under his eyes (or maybe they should? Maybe that would make him more empathetic? PR’s never really been his thing) but even if they do it doesn’t matter. He’s seventeen and shaking and standing there doing this anyway. He’s going to get to go home after this. 

He’s going to get to go home . 

When he steps outside the building the sunlight blinds him for a moment, reflecting off all the metal and steel, so he’s not quite prepared when sudden weight catapults into him. He staggers back a few steps, muscles tense and ready to throw his attacker to the side--

And then the smell of her hair filters in past his fight-or-flight reflexes and his whole body just… melts. He slumps against her and they pull each other tight and all he can think is Aunt May Aunt May Aunt May , like a chant in his head.

“I’ve missed you so much,” she tries to say, but it’s kind of muffled because of the way her face is squished against his hair. 

“I missed you too,” he tries to say, and holds her just as tight as she’s holding him. He focuses on not breaking her bones with superhero strength, because if he lets himself think about anything else he’ll burst into tears right now. 

She pulls away after a minute and something in him cries out in protest; he never wants to leave her arms ever again. But when Peter looks at her he sees the scowl on her face as she watches something behind him, and he realizes with a sudden dread that the clicking of the cameras hasn’t stopped; the press that was there for the conference is standing a few feet away and documenting all the tears hovering in his eyes. 

“Come on, Peter, let’s get out of here,” May says. She ushers him into the car waiting nearby, and just like that, he’s gone. After all these months, he’s finally going home. 

*

When he walks into the apartment--not his apartment, he had realized halfway through the drive; May had had to go into a homemade version of witness protection the instant his identity went viral, so she’s been living in this tiny apartment under a fake name for months. There’s cat hair everywhere--he’s not sure why, they don’t even have a cat--and the whole place reeks of hair dye and cigarettes.

But Peter’s favorite blanket is on the couch, and May’s usual coffee is fragrant enough to almost drown out the other stuff, and he feels better than he has since he was sitting on a pole in the middle of New York and watching his life crash down around him. It might not be his apartment but it’s where May lives and that means it’s home--or at least close enough to it that he can finally relax. 

He tenses for a second, hearing the squeak of tennis shoes against the floor as someone races around the corner, but just as he gets ready to fight? run? what is his instinct, now? do something, Ned rounds the corner at a sprint. The two of them race towards each other, and Peter breathes a little easier having solid proof that Ned’s okay.

“Dude, I missed you!”

“I missed you too, Ned,” he manages. “Remind me to tell you about Mr. Harrington’s living room.”

The two of them spread just far enough apart to do their handshake, and he’s about to launch into demanding an explanation of the latest Star Wars movie--he missed the release date somewhere between Jamie’s two-story just outside the city and Rick’s little half-basement sublet--but then more people are rounding the corner and Peter looks up and something in him just

stops. 

Standing here with him in this unfamiliar apartment is his aunt and his best friend and his girlfriend and Happy and Pepper and Morgan. Everyone he loves is here. They’re all safe. They’re all okay. They’re smiling and talking and laughing, shouting over each other to ask about him, about where he stayed, about what he’s missed in their lives. Morgan is babbling excitedly about her new robotics kit and how she’s been waiting for him to finish it and Happy is visibly stopping himself from cursing every other word, trying to give both the “I’m so glad you’re okay” and the “what the hell was that, kid” speeches at the same time (Peter can only tell because he’s heard them both so much). MJ and Pepper are both standing there with disturbingly similar expressions, like relief that’s carefully packed away behind a wall of analysis and logic. For a second, he wonders just how close they’ve gotten, if he should be worried about world domination in the near future, but he puts that out of his head pretty quickly. If they’ve decided to go down that route he knows better than to think he could do anything to stop them. 

“Hey, loser. It’s about time you stopped lounging around on vacation,” MJ says. He beams at her, resisting the urge to run over and kiss her, and instead says, “I missed you too.”

“Oh my gosh Peter, you will not believe how much the group chat exploded when the news broke, you should totally scroll up and see Flash’s messages, he was freaking out and it was hilarious--” Ned is saying as he presses a little black piece of metal and glass into Peter’s hands. He curls his fingers around the edges and smothers a laugh when his old lock screen--a picture of him and Aunt May at Coney Island, looking windswept and ridiculously happy--pops up. Aunt May has just rushed off, cursing under her breath, to turn on the fan before the smoke coming from the oven hits the fire detectors. 

Yeah. It’s a different apartment, and a lot has changed. He has changed. But here, with the chaos and the teasing and these beautiful, wonderful people by his side, he knows he can face whatever comes next. 

He’s home. For now, that’s all that matters.  

*

Living as a superhero without a secret identity is a whole new ball game, he comes to discover.

It's got its perks: free sandwiches from just about every corner stand, the school excusing his absences, the first time Flash demands to know why he's late and he can honestly say "sorry, I got caught up catching a bus in that traffic accident on Fourth" and enjoy the other boy's sputtering. When the mean lady in the attendance office gives him shit about unnecessarily missing schooling, he can pull up YouTube videos of the bridge collapse on his phone and shut her up. His backpacks still get stolen if he leaves them lying around, but he doesn't have to do that anymore, because Principal Morita lets him build in a few free blocks into his day and pick up more online college classes in order to leave time for Spider-Man. Now, when he has to go take care of something, he has time to drop off his stuff at his locker and grab an apple to eat while he swings over, because he doesn't have to sneak out of class.

Once, halfway through BC Calc, EDITH chimes a notification on his smartwatch of a robbery-turned-car-chase with potential for civilian casualties. Instead of awkwardly announcing that he has to pee and running out of the room, he quietly stands up, leaving all his stuff where it is, and exchanges a nod with Mr. Westfoal before walking out of the classroom. He slides back into class just before the bell rings, smelling a little like gas and a lot like sweat. Every so often he still gets a whiff of burning hair. All of his classmates as whispering gossip furiously, but Mr. Westfoal doesn't make a big deal out of it, just grabs him after class to hand him the homework packet he missed being handed out.

School is more fun in general, really. In physics, Mrs. Warren asks him if he'd be willing to do a demonstration of projectile angles for the club, and he spends all afternoon playing around with his web-shooters and showing some kids from his class how the way that he curls himself affects the speed of his turns. When they're talking about prison reform in his government class, he can raise his hand and offer up examples from his time as Spider-Man and just say "I know this one guy who..." instead of coming up with an elaborate cover story to explain his extensive experience with criminals. Plus, now that everyone knows, he has a great topic to write his college application essays on.

But it's not all good, either. Whenever someone he's chasing gets away, it's a nerve-wracking few days of waiting-waiting-waiting for Aunt May or MJ or Ned to wind up in the hospital or worse. He feels more like an exposed target than ever before, and there are days when it's hard to convince himself to put on the mask, days when he wants to gather everyone he loves close to himself and take off running, to leave and never look back.

On those days, he makes sure to swing over parks as much as possible--to listen to kids' laughter bubbling on the wind, to watch all the tired parents and quiet elderly couples and scowling teenage babysitters. He has Karen pull up a picture of him and Ned and MJ at comic con a few weeks ago, all dressed as Spider-Man and grinning broadly, and keeps it in the corner of his display. He reminds himself exactly what he's fighting for.

(Aunt May decided not to move back to the old apartment, since it was such a compromised location. The landlord in their new one is starting making everyone in the building do "supervillain attack drills" and Peter hasn't felt this miserable and guilty in years.)

There are days when he can't convince himself to go out on patrol, when his mind turns into an endless spiral of guilt and fear, when he feels paralyzed, unable to go out and unwilling to live with whatever happens because he doesn't. ( When you have the kind of powers I do, and you don't stop the bad things, they happen because of you. But what about what happens when bad things happen because you keep screwing up?)

He has those days, of course he does. But most of the time, those thoughts are just little moments of hesitation before he's out and swinging across the city, the adrenaline high in his veins and drowning out any doubts. Most days, he loves being Spider-Man--it gives him the same freedom it always has, just with stranger Twitter commentary afterward.

Peter goes to school and ducks out when something big is happening. He's really the only superhero left in New York, aside from some vigilantes in Hell's Kitchen that he's met in passing, and as far as he knows he's the closest thing to an active Avenger that Earth has at the moment, so sometimes when he's dealing with the supervillain of the week there's a minute where he panics, terrified that there is no one who knows what they're doing that he can call. He feels like a kid that's been left home alone for the first time and doesn't quite know what to do with all the empty space.

But EDITH and Karen remind him when he needs it: he's Peter. He looks out for the little guy. He likes Star Wars lego sets and Delmar's sandwiches with the bread squished down flat.

Peter helps old ladies cross the street and battles Doc Ock; he meets with Nick Fury to discuss how to divert the interests of a potential alien invasion and gets scratched up by Mr. Tickles, a 9-year-old Siamese cat that a little girl keeps putting in a tree just so she can get his autograph over and over. He gives a grandmother directions to the nearest subway station and eats his free churro while he swings home.

*

The nightmares never stop, even when he comes home. He doesn't mention them to anyone, because every time he opens his mouth to tell them he has trouble sleeping, he thinks about how to explain the nightmares he'd have to explain Toomes and Titan and Beck and so many failures, so many things he's never said out loud coming out all at once, and he freezes.

He spends his allowance on melatonin and natural lavender oil extract, trying anything and everything to get some sleep. He finds ways to fall asleep, but he still wakes from nightmares most nights after only a few hours and can't fall back asleep, nausea and fear and guilt gnawing at him. In the morning, on the way to school, he drinks sugary caffeine, frappuccinos and lattes and anything with enough flavor to mask the bitterness. He carefully blocks out the part of his mind that sounds like Tony, teasing him for not being able to drink coffee black like most STEM students.

It can only last so long, though. Everything comes to a head during a movie-marathon-turned-sleepover, he and Ned and MJ sprawled across the couch and the floor, the air smelling faintly of burnt popcorn. Peter was halfway through setting up a blanket fort when he dozed off, so when he jerks awake he hits his head hard enough to startle the other two. He gets himself under control pretty quickly, but his mouth still tastes like the phantom of sour-sweet lemonade, and he can't shake the image of himself sitting at a bar, smiling benignly with polite disinterest as Beck kills passers-by one by one.

"Alright, out with it Parker. What's going on with you?" MJ says, squinting at him.

He can still feel his heartbeat in his throat, his fingertips, but he does his best to smile. "Nothing, I'm fine."

"Bullshit."

Peter stills. Ned doesn't swear unless it's serious--last week someone had dropped an entire computer on him while he was helping IT under a desk, and all he had said was "oh, ouch!".

"You're not okay. You know you can talk to us, right Peter?" Ned says, watching him rub at the bump on his head. 

"Yeah, I know. I really am okay, I just--I haven't been sleeping the best."

"You're having nightmares, right?" MJ says, her voice uncharacteristically soft. Peter can't bring himself to look up at her, so he shrugs, picking at bits of kernel wedged between fibers in the carpet. They must have landed there when he spilled the bowl earlier, he thinks distractedly.

"Talk to us. We can help, I promise," she says, leaning forward from where she's perched on the couch. Their hands brush together and he reflexively weaves their fingers together before he even thinks about it.

"I will," Peter swallows, "but, uh, can we--just not tonight? Please?"

"Sure, whatever you need, man," Ned says. Peter's pulse lowers a little, but the thought of telling them about his dreams is still making him anxious. He knows he could not bring it up, could keep pushing it off or tell them a watered-down version, but he also knows it's the truth. Something in his gut is saying that they deserve to know about all of it, the good and the bad and the incredibly messy.

For tonight, though, he leans back against the couch and watches the flickers of orange light reflect across the room in time with explosions on-screen. MJ's fingers are moving absent-mindedly through his hair and the Indiana Jones theme is playing in the background; with his super-hearing, he can hear further out, to the slam of car doors and distant conversation and the creak of the dishwashing unit three floors up.

He'll have to tell them what he's been dreaming about, but for now, he takes slow, steady breaths, and lets the moment flow by.

*

He spends most Friday afternoons babysitting Morgan, these days. Pepper has to go into Stark Industries for board meetings once a week, dealing with the massive fluctuations in value--even now, after all these months, the population is swinging wildly between buying everything labeled Stark in honor of the hero who gave his life for them and disbelief that the company will continue to be worth anything without him there to lead it, never mind the fact that he stepped down as CEO more than a decade ago. 

So Peter goes and spends time with Morgan. They play together, mostly--build Lego sets and robotics kits sometimes, but other times they play superhero or just wander around the house, Morgan picking different random objects and asking him to explain how they work. It's amazing how much a light bulb can entertain a five-year-old. But then, she's not just any five-year-old--she's Tony Stark's daughter. Peter should've known Tony's kid would be just as smart and inquisitive as her father. 

Late at night, after she's been put to bed, Peter sits on the couch and waits for Pepper to get home. He plays on his phone to avoid going to look for that picture of him and Mr. Stark, because at least for now, that brings nothing but pain. He focuses on beating this level of Candy Crush, on outlining his college application essays, on figuring out where to take MJ on their next date--anything but what Tony would think of all this. What he'd say if he could see it all. 

*

Therapy is rough. There's no way around it.

Most days when he leaves he somehow feels small and brittle and hollowed out all at once, like someone has carved him open and ripped out his guts. He hates every minute of it, but he pictures the tears in May's eyes when she caught him having his third panic attack that month and he holds up his chin and walks into the office. The receptionist's eyes always bug out a little when she types in his name, like she can't believe the Peter Parker is here, and it always catches him off guard. (He still can't get over the fact that everyone knows he's Spider-Man, that the secret is out. Even after all these months, he has moments when he forgets and someone calls him Spider-Man on the street and the whole world spins, for a minute.) Still. When he goes in for his first session, he babbles through introductions and when she asks him why he's coming he says "well, you know, I'm Spider-Man and I just see a lot of weird things--" and she doesn't even raise an eyebrow, just sits there calm and unaffected. 

Peter hates therapy, but he can at least appreciate Dr. Gordon. 

The comforting thing is that nothing seems to fluster her, not his stammered explanations that usually end in space, man , not the way he'll start a story about the OsCorp field trip and look up fifteen minutes later, his hands waving wildly as he goes off on a tangent about particle physics, not when he just sits there and cries. Peter tiptoes around his own mind most days, but Dr. Gordon is a rock, solid and unmovable. She always has a counter-point or question for clarification, something to say when the silence gets to be too much and it feels like the solid nothingness is crawling its way down his throat.

Even when he hates her, hates the world, hates himself--walking out of that little brick office, there's still something else in him, gut-deep and solid. Maybe he feels empty and broken and miserable, but somewhere deep inside, there's a part of him that lifts its chin and plants its feet; something in him says look at me, doing this despite everything; look at how the universe can't hold me back . 

*

The story comes out in crumbles, for everyone else. For Ned and MJ and Aunt May. He can't bring himself to sit down and let the whole thing unravel, so it falls away from him in fragments as the months roll by. It's three in the morning and he and Ned are playing Mario Kart for the tenth hour straight, and he just opens his mouth and says it out loud, like it's nothing, like it's casual: "Toomes dropped a building on me." Once, when Aunt May surprises him with homemade lemonade, something in his eyes must give him away because she asks what's wrong and the next thing he knows he's talking, telling her how Mr. Beck had taken him to a bar and ordered lemonades, made him feel better. How it was all one big lie to steal EDITH away. 

May throws out the lemonade and starts buying apple juice instead. 

Another time, he and MJ are in her apartment, unsuccessfully trying to learn how to make cookies. Of course, they'd probably have more success if they would stop throwing ingredients across the room at each other--the dark kitchen backsplash is half-covered by flour, making the whole thing look like a messy attempt at a night sky. While their creations of dubious quality are in the oven, he sits on the floor while MJ plays with his hair, and he doesn't know why but he opens his mouth and suddenly he's talking about Titan, about the battle and the way he'd almost had the glove off and how bone-deeply terrifying it was when he had started to dissolve, how he had felt shaky and desperate and how he didn't want to die without having said goodbye to everyone. He hadn't wanted the last thing he saw to be the rusted-orange of an unfamiliar landscape. 

Saying it all out loud feels like pulling off the bandaid over a cut that's already healed--a sting that you know will fade, the strange tingle of skin exposed to light and air for the first time in a while. 

It feels like healing. 

*

In his dreams, he and Tony are at a workbench, heads bent over the latest project with tools strewn about the area, a kind of controlled chaos that they'd always worked best with. 

Tony looks over at him, face crinkling with that half-smile that he always made when Peter cracked a particularly hard problem. It makes his eyes light up. Like the arc reactor makes more than just his chest glow. "You did good, kid," he says, and leaves. 

Peter just smiles and keeps working. 

*

(He convinces Mr. Harrington to host the Decathlon victory party at his house. Ned's face is totally worth it.)