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BURIED ALIVE flashes in neon letters across the screen, the techno theme music plays, and Peter’s eyes glaze over. He’s officially entered The Zone, and there’s no pulling him out of it until his character dies or he achieves the highest honor, a score enormous enough to knock MQB off the hall of fame.
His hand clutches the joystick, and his fingers glide across the buttons, and he can feel Ned staring at him, but it doesn’t distract him from the current mission.
It doesn’t help him, either.
This game ends exactly the same way every game before it had, on level five, when he’s only points away from taking first place away from MQB.
He sighs, and reaches a hand in his pocket, searching for more tokens but finding it empty.
“Shit,” says Peter. “I’m out of tokens.”
“Again?” asks Ned. “How many times have you played this? Exactly?”
“I dunno, not that much.”
Ned doesn’t look like he believes him. He looks worried, and Peter tries to shove the annoyance he feels deep, deep down.
He wishes people would stop looking at him that way. Like he’s just one fall away from breaking and shattering in a way that’d leave his pieces uneven and unfit to be put back together the correct way, the uniquely Peter-way.
“Maybe we should do something else,” says Ned. “Go to a movie, or pick up that limited edition Star Wars set?”
It’s tempting, and Peter wants to go, wants to be anyplace but this arcade, going to war with himself over a some stupid high score on some arcade machine. An environment without all the flashing lights, screaming children, and annoying game music would be a nice change in pace, but he can’t.
He has to stay. Until he’s won. Until he wipes that name off the charts and replaces it with his own.
“I need more tokens,” says Peter, as a way of answer. He hopes the way his voice sounds like a zombie will go ignored.
He walks past Ned, and heads towards the token machine, dodging running, shouting kids on his way. He fumbles around with his wallet, until he finds the credit card Tony had given him for emergencies. Not for the first time, he swipes it at the token machine and receives a hundred new chances to defeat his enemy.
If that isn’t an emergency, Peter doesn’t know what’s supposed to make that list.
When he turns, he comes face to face with Ned.
“Dude,” he says. “Maybe you should take a break. Have you even eaten dinner yet?”
His stomach growls at the mention of food, and his eyes automatically drift towards the restaurant installed into the arcade. He supposes Ned has a point. He can afford to stop his gaming long enough to scarf down some pizza.
“Yeah, okay, good idea.”
Relief washes through Ned’s features, and Peter’s stabbed with guilt. It attacks him from all angles.
He’s guilty for worrying his friends, and his family, and guilty because he doesn’t know how to stop. He’s guilty of the wave of crime overtaking Queens now that Spider-Man has abandoned it, in favor of standing still at an arcade game.
Guilty for that thing he doesn’t allow himself to think about.
Most of all, he’s guilty, because instead of working towards wiping away the current charts on BURIED ALIVE, he’s sitting at a table eating pizza, wasting time.
*
Drops of sweat trickle down his forehead, and a shiver runs through his body.
And he tries ignoring it, the way his stomach is heavy, and cramping, and the way his body is just begging him to take a seat, close his eyes, or more pressing, run to the bathroom and shove his head in a toilet.
But he doesn’t, because he can’t. Because he’s just so damn close.
When game over flashes across the screen, he slams his fist down. He considers what might happen if he didn’t hold back his strength, if he just destroyed the machine right then and there.
“Peter?”
He stared at the screen., refusing to look away.
“You’re not looking so great, kid.” Tony’s hand comes up from behind him, and presses down on his sweaty forehead. “Yep, that’s a fever.”
“Mr. Stark,” says Peter. “What are you doing here?”
“Ned called me,” he tells him. “He was really worried, and so am I.”
Tony wipes the sweat off his hand and into the insides of his suit jacket.
It’s the first time in awhile Peter takes his eyes away from the screen, and the room blurs. All the flashing, neon lights merge together. All the kids, teens, parents combine into one collective shout that threatens to make his ears bleed. The arcade tilts, and the knot in his stomach is pulled tighter.
“I need to get outta here,” says Peter, a shake in his voice.
“Then come on,” says Tony.
He grabs him by the arm, and leads him through the jungle of prize hungry children, beeping game machines, and parents trying to ignore it all.
Fresh, cold air hits Peter’s face when they step outside the door, and he breaths it in, then he bends over and pukes in the on the sidewalk while strangers watch in disgust, while Tony rubs his back, and while the paparazzi snaps photos of Iron Man comforting some poor, sick kid.
*
“So, while we’re just hanging out in the bathroom,” says Tony. Peter’s head hangs over the toilet, and he shuts his eyes tight, willing Tony to stop talking. “I thought we could chat.”
“Maybe that can wait,” says Peter, dryly, and miserably. “Until, I dunno, I’m done puking my guts out.”
“It’s waited long enough. Besides, you never call me back, and you won’t talk to your aunt.”
It just figures. That there’s so avoiding it now. That there’s not even a proper distraction to keep him from the things he’s not trying to think about.
That day comes back to him and hits him with full force, as if were angry Peter had been suppressing it.
His memories are pulled backwards to Mysterio’s twisted game. That dull, grey day the fishbowl guy taunted him with a devastating choice, save May fall from a skyscraper, or save a stranger from suffocating six feet under the earth.
His failure flashes across his mind.
He’d thought he could save both, but he’d still made the decision to go after May first. Once she was safe on the ground, he had bolted to the burial site, only to dig up a man who was already dead.
He’s selfish, and he’s sad. All this bad will stirs his stomach enough to force his head back in the toilet to throw up some more.
Tony rubs his back until he’s finished with his gagging. He puts the toilet lid down, and flushes, and he leans against the toilet, weak and wanting the pain in his stomach to ease so he can sleep and not exist for awhile.
So he can continue avoiding the conversation Tony keeps trying to force him to have.
“It’s not your fault, you know,” says Tony. “That fucking psychopath created that situation to fuck with your head.”
“But I’m Spider-Man,” says Peter. “I should’ve been able to deal with it, without - someone dying.”
“Can’t save them all, kid. No matter how hard you try.”
It’s as if Tony’s words bounce off him. He hears them, but he doesn’t. They don’t sink in. He won’t allow them to, and it’s as if Tony hadn’t spoken at all.
“Suppose I deserve this,” says Peter. “Feeling this way.”
He isn’t sure if he means the stomach cramps, or the guilt, or both, but the alarm that flashes across Tony’s face only makes the stabbing pains worse.
“You only deserve good things, Pete,” he says. “I don’t know how to convince you to believe it.”
*
When he opens his eyes the next morning, his stomach is peaceful, but his memories are hazy. They exist, just vaguely.
And it’s better that way, really. Puking and crying on the bathroom floor while Tony held him and told him it would be okay weren’t exactly his finest hours. Peak teenage embarrassment that he hopes will go forgotten, or at least unmentioned, in future conversation.
He’s ready to crawl and hide under the covers when the guest room door creaks open, but he stays visible when he sees it’s just his Aunt May walking through the doorway, carrying crackers and a mini bottle of Sprite.
“I hear you had a rough night,” she tells him. She puts the sick people snacks on the nightstand. “How’re you feeling?”
“Better.”
May’s face folds into disbelief, and Peter releases a breath, realizing there’s no avoiding it anymore. Not after last night.
“I’m sorry, May.”
“About what?”
“About Mysterio.”
She sits on his bed, and takes his hand. “From what Tony’s told me, you’re tired of hearing it, but I’m going to stress again that that wasn’t your fault and you will not accept responsibility for what some demented man cooked up in his free time, okay?”
“But May -”
“If someone asked me to choose between my own life and somebody else’s,” she starts. “You know I would choose theirs. We’re Parkers, and that’s what we do, for better or for worse, but if someone forced me to choose between a stranger’s life and yours? Peter, that’s not even a choice, it’s an instinct.”
“But May I should’ve -”
She squeezes his hand, and cuts him off, a second time. “You have to let this go. You weren’t being selfish, and you did everything you could’ve done. It’s not your fault. You didn’t kill anybody.”
Her tone leaves no room for argument, so he doesn’t try. He lets her hug him, and even hugs her back. He even feels a little lighter now that he’s been ordered to move on.
*
Tony’s idea of helping is to throw money at it. He goes to the arcade and pays them a ridiculously large sum of money for the BURIED ALIVE game machine.
It’s sitting in the workshop when Peter arrives for their lab hours, along with giant hammers and other tools of destruction.
“I think they do this in therapy,” says Tony. “Something about getting it all out. Healthy destruction. All that.”
“They let you break things in therapy?” asks Peter, apprehensively taking the hammer from Tony.
He’s gotta admit, he’s warming up to the idea of letting Tony pay for a therapist, even if he knows he only said it for that very reason.
“Sure,” says Tony. “Why not?”
Peter stares at the game. The thing he’d been using to distract himself from his misery. The thing he’d become obsessed with as a way to relive the past, take some control. Of course, getting the highest score would’ve never brought back the man Mysterio killed, but obsessions weren’t exactly rational.
“I have a better idea,” says Peter.
They spent the next few hours taking the game apart, piece by piece, and then, and until late in the night, they use the parts to build a new, better game. Something that Ned has to come over and help them program. Something with a less morbid topic.
And Peter starts to think better, feel better.
There’s something cathartic about taking apart the horrible things and turning them into something new. It’s a breath of fresh air. It’s a sense of hope, for himself, that eventually he’ll be able to take May and Tony’s reassuring words and believe them.