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He doesn’t know what he’s doing until the desk drawer flings open and he’s reaching towards the back for the Exacto knife he bought for last year’s art class.
The noise is drowning. It should be silent this late at night, and it isn’t. Because he hears it all happening around him, the whirr of machinery nine floors down in the intern labs, every heartbeat nearby, the dripping faucet in Sam’s bathroom he keeps complaining about yet never doing anything for.
Sam .
He can hear everyone’s heartbeats, Pepper and Tony both sound asleep a few doors down, Steve and Bucky a floor above, Natasha a floor below, Bruce somewhere in a lab (yet fast asleep, by the steady pulsing of his heartbeat), yet Sam… isn’t.
Peter knows where his floor is, can picture it in his mind, has a mental map of how everything should sound with his near-perfect memory and hearing that may as well be classified as echolocation. But Sam isn’t asleep, isn’t even on his floor. Peter hears his footsteps (steady, heavy, clunky) a floor below his own. He’s in the gym.
He struggles against it all. The knife is still gripped tightly in his right hand while he barely stops to notice the tears streaming down his cheeks.
Later, he’ll realize he’s on the verge of a panic attack, which is why when Peter leaves his room still dressed in sweatpants, he doesn’t realize where he’s going until he’s three floors down and entering the gym. FRIDAY knows well not to stop him.
“Pete?”
Sam glances over his bare chest, and this is the first time the boy realizes he’s not wearing a shirt. And that the scars he gets now may heal, but the scars from before the bite are plenty visible.
“Peter, can you hear me?”
Sam steps closer. Peter flinches, barely, at realizing he’s exposed . Sam can see, sees all of it, the current and the past mistakes. But some still-functioning part of his body nods.
The man realizes quickly what’s gripped in Peter’s hand, and slowly, carefully, catches his eye. At the very least he doesn’t see anything fresh on the boy’s body. “Did you come here to give me that?” Sam points at the blade.
His grip on it loosens slightly as Peter looks at it. His breaths still come in short, and he isn’t sure if the panic attack already happened on his way down and he just dissociated long enough to not remember it, or if he's just getting started. Hopefully the former.
“Peter,” he says again. “Can you give me the knife?” Sam holds out his hand; not demanding, not angry; concerned, maybe, but not angry. It relaxes Peter slightly, and that may be the only reason he hands it over.
Sam lets out a breath he’d been holding in as soon as the blade is in his hand. Peter thinks he says something as he leaves the room for a moment, probably throwing it in the nearest trash can, but he’s focusing on keeping his heart in his chest and his breath steady.
(It doesn’t work, but it gives him something to focus on.)
He doesn’t realize Sam’s back until he’s crouching in front of him and there’s a hand placed gently on his shoulder.
“Sorry,” Peter whispers with every ounce of strength he has to spare.
“Nothing to be sorry for.” A thumb rubs over his shoulder, and it does wonders to keep him grounded, Peter realizes. “Thank you for going to someone.”
Numbly, Peter thinks, he could figure out where Sam’s leading them, but it’s taking up too much energy to keep the tears from turning into sobs as the panic subsides. He’s led into the elevator and is swiftly sat down on a bed. Not his bed. The sheets smell faintly like detergent, as if they’ve been washed, but Peter knows his smell like a storage container since he swapped them out for flannel sheets yesterday. Sam is back at his side with a shirt in his hands.
“You look cold,” he says as he hands it over. The t-shirt is undoubtedly large on him, but the long sleeves don’t hug his arms and instead lay loose around the muscles he tries to hide. The cuff comes down to his fingertips and he relishes in the warmth for a few precious seconds while Sam sits down next to him.
“Feeling better?”
Peter nods. “I think so.” If nothing else, it doesn’t feel like a building crushing him when he tries to do anything more than breathe.
“Anything I can get you?” Peter shakes his head. “In that case, I think we should probably talk.”
His heartbeat picks up again at the sentence he knew, logically, was coming. Yet when it does, it startles him and almost convinces him that the open door is looking pretty good right about now.
“You can talk to someone else if you want, I can get Tony, or I know Nat understands, but I figure-”
“Don’t tell Tony,” he cuts in.
He swiftly nods. “Okay, I won’t.” A beat of silence passes. Peter pretends it’s actually silent. “Does he know?”
Peter swallows, pausing to think about his answer before spitting out the first thing that comes to mind. “He knows I stopped.”
“Have you really?”
He nods without hesitation. “This is the first time it’s gotten… bad, again.” He curls his fists around the fabric, the same detergent wafting from it as the sheets. “I started after my uncle died. I don’t know why-” His breath hitches. He tries his hardest to stop it, knowing it’s no use. “Nothing triggered it.”
Sam seems to contemplate his words. “Sometimes it’s just an overflow. Like everything became too much, even if nothing really bad actually happened.”
Peter wants to think he has control, wants to think he could have put the knife down if he gave it time, but he knows. If he hadn’t acted on auto pilot, the blade would have gone through his arm and he would have been useless to stop it. He silently flicks the hair tie around his wrist, letting it snap against his skin. Sam doesn’t seem to notice, or doesn’t say anything.
“Can you-” his volume lowers, enough that he’s afraid Sam doesn’t hear it. “I haven’t had to think about all this in over a year.” He refuses to make eye contact. “Can you search my room?”
“Bud, I was going to search it whether you asked me to or not,” he says with a smile they both know is made completely out of levity. Neither should be joking, but he knows it’s all that’s keeping himself from breaking down all over again. It’s nice to see the quirk of his lips to remind him that he’s alive, breathing, and not alone.
“I’m no stranger to this kind of stuff,” Sam continues. “I’ve worked with too many people who self-harm to count.”
There’s that word again. The one he promised he’s left behind when May replaced his razor for a hair tie and a tattoo marker.
Peter fights off the nausea.
“It’s been a while, but I know what it feels like.”
Finally, Peter meets his eyes. He sees the pain in his gaze, the expression of someone who understands, and not just from second-hand experience.
“Considering you said you’ve been clean for a while, I can assume you’ve at least heard of some of them, but there are a lot of coping mechanisms people use. I used to use a rubber band, you know, snap it against my wrist. Worked pretty well, at least until I put my sorry butt into therapy again and I didn’t need it anymore.” Peter couldn’t help but let out a breathy laugh. “Have you found any that work for you?”
He continues to play with the band. “Hair tie,” he says as he raises his wrist. “And I draw on myself. Takes the edge off.”
Peter sighs, faintly. “Haven’t had to do either in a while. I started wearing one of May’s hair ties again a couple weeks ago. I think MJ realized, but she hasn’t said anything yet. She likes to draw, though, so I asked her to draw on my arm a while ago when it got really bad at school and it worked wonders .” He doesn’t realize he stopped snapping the band against his wrist until he looks down.
Sam is smiling, and distantly, Peter realizes his chest isn’t constricted anymore. He can breathe .
“She sounds pretty amazing.”
This time, it’s Peter who smiles. “Ya. She is.”
Nobody speaks, and it takes a moment for Peter to realize that Sam’s gotten up. He picks up his phone, presumably to check the time. Peter thinks it’s after two, as he’s pretty sure it was 1:45 when he jolted out of bed from a crash somewhere in the lab.
“Here’s what we’re gonna do.” Sam ushers him up. “I’m going to go rifle through your sock drawer, and you’ll go throw a bag of popcorn in the microwave.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Popcorn?”
“Well I’m not going back to sleep, and I’m assuming you aren’t either, so I guess it’s time you forced me to watch the next Star Wars movie since it’s ‘practically a sin’ that I only ever watched the first one.”
Peter can’t help but smile as he walks towards the kitchen. “Well, it is.”
He hears Sam’s laughter as he enters the kitchen, and the joy of the moment fades the moment he hyper-fixates on the knife he sees on the drying rack.
He can confidently say he doesn’t miss this state of mind.
Peter passes the sink as quickly as he can and crosses the room towards the pantry. Microwave popcorn, as it would seem, is in abundance among the residence of at least two supersoldiers and a mutant spider, all of whom have indulged in too many movie nights to count. He starts thinking about the fact that this will technically be a movie morning , and it amuses him enough to take his mind off the thoughts that threatened to pull him under again as he stared at the knife without actually looking at it.
Sam enters after Peter has poured the popcorn in a bowl, already sitting down on the sofa and quietly asking FRIDAY to queue up The Empire Strikes Back . The theme starts as Sam takes his first fistful of popcorn.
They start the movie on opposite sides of the small sofa, but halfway through the empty bowl is set on the floor, and Peter has slid closer towards the middle. It takes less than ten minutes more for Sam to feel a weight land on his shoulder. He isn’t sure if he’s actually asleep yet, but it makes him smile. Sam runs a hand softly through the boy’s unruly curls, and it brings a warm feeling to his chest when he leans into it.
He can’t bring himself to leave once the movie ends, not even to bring the boy to bed, so it doesn’t take much mental-convincing before they’re both asleep on the couch.
========
Tony finds them first, Sam waking up just before seven to the coffee maker hissing and a mug being set down in front of him. Tony’s smiling softly, as if to say who’s the father now, upon seeing the too-large black shirt hanging off the boy’s frame and the hand still settled in his hair.
“Rough night,” Sam says simply, and Tony nods. Regretfully, he removes himself from the boy to pick up the coffee. His body slumps over into the spot where Sam used to be, and it takes everything in him not to chuckle at how much he just looks like a corpse. He’s clearly not moving for a while. Who knows how long it’s been since he’s slept , he thinks dimly.
“Is he okay?” Tony asks, something akin to a parent’s concern tinting his voice.
Sam nods, numbly. “He will be.”
Nobody comments when Sam moves the kitchen knives into an upper cabinet, out of sight, or when Peter is seen wearing the black long sleeve that clearly isn’t his throughout the rest of the winter. Because they see him smile a little more freely, now, and whatever familial role Sam starts playing in his life is making a difference.
(He acquires an air force hoodie too, and that the team just smiles at.)