Chapter Text
”Destroy what destroys you, they say, but they get mad when you destroy yourself” - Unknown.
***
Previously on “What if… Natasha recruited Spider-man?”.
Natasha shows up at the Queens apartment that day, not to find the strongest and most experience hero out there, not to find someone who can win a war… but to find someone with their heart in the right place, willing to fight for what is right and protect who needs protecting. No matter who they are, or what they might have done to get where they are now.
And that’s exactly what she get’s in Spider-man, who provided an important perspective to the roughs, to Tony Stark… and maybe even to Natasha herself.
The fight at the airport ends in peace instead of war for the team.
But for Peter the war with balancing Spider-man and his civilian life has only just started. Because Agent Skye from Coulson’s special team, agents of Shield, and Peter falls in love. Fury finally reveals the reality of Peter’s parents’ accident, and his unborn sister Terresa.
And that is only the beginning…
Destroy what destroys you, picks up two months after Peter Parker’s return from Germany.
***
Peter runs.
It’s a new habit he’s picked up after the battle at the airport. Running through the streets of New York City, through Queens in the late afternoon hours. The light from the lampposts illuminating his path over the wet pavement. The water reflecting the soft light in small shivering sparks. The rain hovering over the city with a threat of drowning the world. Drowning Peter.
The constant, rhythmic, thuds of the pavement is the only sounds the reaches Peter’s ears. As the bottom of his shoes meets the rough ground below him, lets it stick, before he propels himself future along. Faster. Picking up speed as he rushes through the busy city. Car honking and breaking at him, as he let’s himself cross the street between cars. The adrenaline pumping through her veins, at each close call. At each time his Spidey sense calls to him from the back of his neck, a reminder that he’s still alive. The only reminder at moments…
“Natasha told me about training. She’s impressed, you know. Taking Black Widow down is no easy feed. You have to tell me your secrets. Teach me Pete”.
He leaves the noise traffic behind as he turns in over a smaller path, into a park area he’s found since he started running. He wonders sometimes if maybe Ned and himself had been playing on the swings as kids, May and Ben watching over them when Ned’s parents couldn’t. At moments, the park feels almost familiar, at other moments it’s a new world to Peter’s eyes as he breaths heavily through his mouths, and slows down out the rocky, muddy park path.
He pushes Natasha against the blue training mat below them. The softness of it wearing out, as it get’s older. Soon Natasha will have to replace it again. Not because Peter win’s all the often, though it becomes more often over the last few weeks. No… Peter has been pushed into the mat more times than he can count. He had counted at first… he stopped when the embarrassment started growing in his stomach as nervous energy. A contact question about weather he was good enough. Weather Natasha would throw him out when he would make a miss step.
It’s taken a long time for the two to training Peter’s strength. Not that Peter had to build up any muscle, the Spider bit had taken care of that for him. But the fear of striking out, seriously injuring someone with his strength had been real for as long as he could remember.
Spider-man doesn’t kill. Spider-man isn’t a killer… Spider-man doesn’t kill.
Yet T’Challe’s broken helmet and still form on the floor of the airport hanger keeps haunting him when he closes his eyes. Flashes before him as his hands meets Natasha jaw. The broken helmet, the graying skin, the smell of blood and the pain down his left arm as it had splintered into a million pieces of bone. The smell of blood in his nose. Spiderman doesn’t kill.
It’s better now, even if he still hesitates sometimes. Even when he pulls back at the last moment, stumbling to the mat all on his own, without Natasha even touching him. On those days he finds himself shaking as he walks home from training, the hood of his black hoodie pull far down into his far, covering over his eyes, casting shadows of pain and hopelessness as his body slumps into a slow walk. On those days Aunt May sits waiting in the kitchen, the food already cold.
“You’re overthinking it” Natasha says from the mat as she pulls Peter down with her, “You have to stop that, it really isn’t healthy to be stuck inside your own head. Trust me, I would know”.
Peter nods and let’s his head sink into the blue leather mat. Breaths quietly as he looks at the blue mark slowly forming over Natasha cheek from one of the hits he’s successfully aim and went through with. Purple and yellow tinting her tender skin. “I know” he replies softly.
“One day hesitating will cost you your life” Natasha reminds she pushes herself up into a sitting position, let’s the elastic band fall from her hair before she throws it over her shoulders. “There won’t always be someone to come save your ass. Or maybe an ally will turn their back to you again. You don’t have time to think it through, you have to act on instinct”.
“What if my instinct tells me to stop fighting?” Peter says raising his head from the blue mat just high enough to meet Natasha’s eyes. Seeing them, all the emotion yet all the emptiness that filled his mentor’s brain, at the same time in those green eyes.
Green like life, and energy and renewal. Like the change of path Natasha had made, and recently told Peter pieces about too. Not enough for him to understand where Natasha might once have come from, but enough to understand that they in some, mixed up, crazy way where fighting for the same cause. To clean their hands of all the pain they had cause to the people they loved and cared about. Their families, waiting for them to return home at night, only they didn’t. Both stuck seeing these crimson red drops of life-giving fluid, of blood, dripping in front of their eyes. An endless flow that Peter wasn’t sure he could ever outrun. His mom and dad, his unborn sister, Ben…
It was nothing compared to what he knew about Natasha, yet… the two heroes where so alike. Fighting to forget about what they regretted doing or note doing.
Green like growth and harmony. Like safety... ambition. Green like fertility… ironic.
“Then” Natasha shakes her head, “You’ll die before you even get a chance out there. Now get up, we’ll do it again. This time… don’t hold back”.
He pulls the hoodie a little future down into his face as he comes to the park exist. Pushing himself to go faster, faster, faster, and faster. He feels the blood rushing through his body, he hears it as it pumps past and through his ears. There, shaking his inner ears. It’s a welcome feeling as he passes the exit and out into the street. The path changing from gravel to concrete where he can pick up even more speed. Where he can let his muscles ache all he wants. No limits.
“… Simmons sounds really impressed by your work in the lab…”.
No limits, other than the growling gap in his stomach growing bigger and bigger. Empty and hollow, getting worse and worse for each day there goes. For each bit he eats he runs, pushes himself hard, hard, harder as he passes his own records. For each bit he skips he feels himself disappear, but he skips it anyways. He feels better running on an empty stomach.
Feels even better running, filled to the brim with water. Loves feeling the ice-cold liquid in his body. He hears is scrupling against his skin, on his insides.
He doesn’t feel hungry anymore.
The lab at Stark industries is bigger than Peter expects it to be. At first, he doesn’t even expect it to be placed in a well-known building. But it shouldn’t surprise him, that Shield will pull some cards and favors with Tony and get a lab with view over the large city.
He’s pretty sure he can see Queens out of the large panorama windows that covers the backwall.
On his internship papers, the place is called ‘Horizon’. A small subdivision to Stark Industries, who’s focus is on medical equipment and new advanced surgeries to treat wounds that would under normal circumstances be fatal. Or at least, would leave permanent impairment.
It’s at Horizon he meets Helen Cho for the first time, in a private room as she helps him get’s stitches up after a rough patrol where he’s stabbed with a knife. His healing slow and unstable. Unpredictable.
It’s Dr. Helen Cho who finds out that his blood is radioactive, it’s her who makes the calculations about how much he really needs to eat in a day to keep up with his enhanced metabolism. A staggering fifteen thousand calories. That’s more than he feels capable of eating in a month, though he knows that’s probably no whole the truth. It’s without looking at his amount of activity as Spider-man and in day to day life. It’s without all the fancy stuff. The number is purely a guide.
A minimum.
It’s at Horizon that Peter meets Dr. Bruce Banner one day when he’s working there after school. Hiding in some darker corner, waiting for his newest version of his web fluid to react. Together they make it stronger, better, more useful. It’s Banner’s idea to use it in the medical field.
As it turns out, Spider web - at least Peter’s kind - is amazing at treating normally fatal wounds.
Mr. Stark invite him up in one of the Stark industries labs. Lets him run around mingling with other interns, meeting college and university students who has somehow impressed their way into SI. Some as nerdy as Peter, some less so, but all with a common passion. Only Peter feels so young next to them, out of place almost, as he hides back on Horizon’s floor. He feels left out on those floors, the same way he felt left out as a kid who couldn’t play football because of his asthma. He can’t drink or go to late night parties, because he has school in the morning. Because he has Aunt May to look out for. Mr. Stark doesn’t push Peter. He wonders if that’s Natasha doing after he reveals to her how he feels, with her weight over his stomach, his body digging into the blue softness below him.
But Midtown high school of science and technology congratulates him when the papers are sent in and he’s registered as an official intern to both Horizon and Stark industries.
Flash doesn’t believe him. Ned is jealous. Peter is still the same loser he’d always been.
He finds himself steering into the edge of Brooklyn that lays right against Queens. He finds himself there more often, though it’s far from a regular thing. At first, he doesn’t even know what pulls him there during his runs. But then he remembers that question… ‘Where you’re from?’.
Queens and Brooklyn.
From there it becomes easy to conclude that a part of him keeps staggering that way, watching over his shoulder like a hawk trying to find them. Talk to them. Because he has a feeling in his gut that this is where they would go as soon as the details about the accords had been fixed, and they once more could live their normal life. Steve, Sam and Bucky alike.
“… So… are you going to the competition?”. Oh yes. And then there’s the soft voice coming from the brunette over the phone, that makes Peter almost lung for something he knows he can’t get, because she’s so far away and busy with her work at Shield. They keep promising each other that soon, really soon they’ll see each other again… but it always falters. Always breaks a few hours before Skye is supposed to jump onto the plane and come Peter’s way. “Pete? Are you still there? You’re so quiet today”. The voice filters through his headphones as he steers out of Brooklyn and starts tracing back towards the Queens apartment.
Skye is right after all; he has been quiet today. He’s been quiet a lot lately. Not that she would know about that. She doesn’t know that he stumbles over his words and more often than not never speaks up, because he’s scared of what to say or what to do.
Scared of who might or might not be watching him, because Wards words still echoes. ‘Hydra has been wanting you for months. Watching your every move. Unable to figure out who was behind the mask. And then Natasha brings you, little Spider, right into my grasp’. So, he says nothing.
“I…” Peter shakes his head, pushes the headphones a little deeper into his ears and slows down. Lets his hands rest on his knees as he leans forward, gasping for air. “I’m sorry. Could you… could you repeat that question?”.
Skye’s chuckles ever so lightly over the phones and repeats, <“Are you going to the competition?”.
Competition? “Eh… what competition are you, eh… talking about exactly?”.
“The decathlon meet in DC?” Skye says, partly as a question, partly as a statement, as fact. “You told me about it just a few days ago, that you weren’t sure if Spider-man had time to leave the city for, you said and I’ll quote, ‘something so childish and useless’”. He had said that hadn’t he? After another fight against Natasha had left him wondering if maybe he wasn’t doing enough for the city. So why would he be allowed to waste valuable time for a competition. When he could be getting better, stronger… when he could prove himself. Show the world he wasn’t a kid.
“Oh” Peter says under his breath, “That competition”.
“So…” Skye repeats, “Are you going?”.<
Peter shrugs, forgetting that Skye can’t actually see him, and starts walking down the dark street. The fall weather catching up with the city, leaving it cold and wet and boring. Empty. “I don’t know. There’s… a lot of things I need to figure out here, in New York first. I have to think about collage and stuff, and… you know…” Peter trails off. Let’s himself grow distant.
“I though you already decide on MIT. With your perfect GPA and the internship there is no way you won’t get in there” Skye points out the same thing Aunt May has pointed out a million times over the last few weeks, a point that Peter needs to change his excuse for why he’s been so busy lately. Ned says the same thing. Natasha says the same thing. Mr. Stark says the same thing. Coulson says the same thing, reminding him that he’d be closer to Skye if he chooses MIT as well.
Peter sighs and rubs his forehead quietly as he turns down the street towards his and May’s apartment complex. “Could we not talk about this right now?” he asks almost inaudibly, and Skye goes so quiet that he wonders for a moment if he even said it out loud. “Tell me about how things are going for you at the moment” Peter asks instead.
Skye hums for a moment before she starts speaking, fast enough that Peter has to focus everything in his brain to understand the words the leaves her mouth. Em>“I told you about that odd drawings Coulson has been carving lately, right? I mean, how couldn’t I have. It’s really freaky you know. Some of the others don’t really trust him because of it”. She has told him. Has show him pictures of the carved strokes over the walls of their current Shield headquarters. The lines and circles all connected and crossing and intertwined into a mess of something nobody can read or understand must less.
“So, it turns out now, that Coulson isn’t the only one who’s drawing these… things” she hesitates at the last words, unsure what to call it. “There are other people as well. We think they might all comes from the Tahiti project. But someone is killing them off, one by one”.
She goes on to explain how she isn’t drawing anything yet, and that Coulson didn’t start until he saw it for the first time. Goes on to tell him about everything they know, which isn’t a lot. And everything they don’t know, which leads to a lot of questions that Skye and Shield doesn’t know that answers to, and Peter can do nothing but guess about it as he pushes the door to the building open and starts moving up the stairs. Counting each step inside his head as he allows Skye’s voice to be drowned out by thoughts as well as the sounds of his own racing heart finally slowing down.
He lets the phone slide out his pocket, and while he waits for the video to connect, waits for Skye’s soft eyes to meet his, he unplugs the headphones and moves towards his apartment door. “It sounds like a tough case” he comments halfheartedly. Lets the door swing up with a soft click the same moment Skye’s face appears on his phone and he moves into the apartment.
“You look like shit” Skye comments “Are you sleeping okay?”.
Peter nods “Oh thanks for the wonderful inside. I hadn’t realized” Peter says staring at the small video of himself. The dark bags stands clear against his pale skin.
“Peter is that you?” Aunt May’s voice rings through the apartment, from the kitchen. So loud that even Skye hears it as she shakes her head with a smile that makes Peter blush. But he moves and finds May over a steaming pot of… something. “Dinner’s ready in just a moment”. Then she looks at the phone and moves to his side “Is that Skye you’re talking with?”.
Skye waves through the camera as Aunt May enters the frame by Peter’s side, waving over his shoulder. “Hi Mrs. Parker!” she says with a high pitches tone.
“May. Just May. Skye how many times do I have to tell you”. His aunt smiles kindly at his girlfriend, “No need to be so formal. You are family, in a way. How’s work going? You need to come by soon, we could get Thai together, the three of us”. May moves back towards the pot, and Peter turns so the camera follows her.
“Sounds good May. And work is going really well, how about you? You’re looking really pretty today” Skye says so brightly that Peter for a moment wonders if it’s an act.
“You’re too kind Skye” May replies with a smile, “I’m doing good”.
Peter shakes his and and let’s himself slide into one of the chairs before waving his goodbye at Skye. “I love you Skye” he says. Lets his eyes shine with all the energy they possibly can and feels his heart flutter as Skye replies the same before the connection turns off and the screen goes black. Leaving Peter to stare at the emptiness while May finishes cooking. “I’m actually not that hungry” Peter says in a whisper “Do you mind if I go to bed a little early?”.
May looks at him with a raised eyebrow and pushes the pot of the stove so it wont burn when she moves towards him once more. Places a hand on his forehead with a thrown. “Are you feeling okay Peter?”. He nods. Swallows the nut in his throat, that has haunted him all day. “I supposed it’s okay” May says, “I’ll check in later, okay?”.
Peter nods and retrieves into the darkness of his bedroom before May can ask anymore questions. Before she can reach out a hand in worry that will leave Peter shaky, because he knows if May asks, he won’t be able to pretend. The smile on his face will falter the same was it does when he is alone. When nobody can send him judging looks or questions that he doesn’t want to answer. The smile is a mask the same way Spider-man is, only one of them is more effective than the other. One is just to hide his identity to people who doesn’t know him, doesn’t care about him. One is to protect the people he cares about, from the dark distant look in his eyes. So filled with pain.
The metal glitters at him from where it’s been discarded under one of his textbooks. Crimson red drops has dried on it.
The sight makes him instantly pull his sleeves a little future down as his hand’s hovers over the slow healing wounds. The cuts, so deep that they’ve bleed. So deep that they won’t heal overnight anymore, so he needs to wrap his arms in white bandage to prevent stains to form on his cloths.
A cut for Mary, a cut for Richard. His parents.
A cut for that little baby girl who should have been his siter.
A cut for Ben… it feels almost ironic as he remembers how Ben had sometimes asked to see Peter’s wrist, so make sure he way okay. That he was doing alright.
A cut for T’challa.
A cut for Natasha, for Mr. Stark, for Bucky, Sam, Steve, Wanda, Clint…
A cut for Ned.
A cut for the decathlon team.
A cut for every meal that he skips without getting worried glances. Because the pain fills him better than the over cooked rice May makes them for dinner…
A cut for each lie he gives his aunt as he swings through the streets at night.
A cut for each person he fails. As Peter, and as Spider-man.
A cut for himself…
Destroy what destroys you they say. But what if Peter Parker destroys himself?