Chapter Text
“I’m sorry, I know this is going to be a lot, but…did you…do you know Skip Westcott?”
The sudden sound of glass breaking startled all three of them. Shards from the pint glass Peter-Three had been holding now lay scattered in a puddle of water. Standing there with the mess he’d made lying at his feet, he ground out a short, pained sentence that matched his furious expression: “Don’t say his name.”
That was enough of an answer for Peter-Two to eye him with pity. “So he…wasn’t good with you either,” Peter-Two understood, nodding slowly.
“That is the understatement of the fucking century. Congratulations. Do you want an award or something?” Peter-Three replied sarcastically. Peter-Two didn’t bother to entertain Peter-Three’s response, instead looking to Peter-One in the hopes that he would say something.
“Yeah, we were friends when I was younger. Why’d you ask?” Peter-One’s nonchalant answer was met with exclamations of surprise from Peter-Two and anger from Peter-Three. He sounded almost entirely innocent, his tone of voice a sharp contrast to Peter-Three’s shock and anger. Still, Peter-Two noticed a little more nervousness from Peter-One than his casual acknowledgment should have warranted.
“We’re not talking about him,” Peter-Three insisted.
“But now I want to know why he asked,” Peter-One persisted, curious. It was more than mere curiosity, though. He usually tried to avoid even just thinking about Skip, but he felt a strange need to find out more about his counterparts’ experiences with their shared… friend? Peter-One’s gaze flickered back and forth uncertainly between the other two’s respectively concerned and enraged expressions.
“No, you really don’t.” Peter-Three still hadn’t moved since dropping the glass, standing amidst the broken glass and spilled water on the floor.
“Why are you so freaked out?” Peter-One questioned.
“I don’t want to think about him ever again, much less talk about him,” Peter-Three snapped. He reacted with anger, clearly, but the sheer intensity of it was not lost on the other two. A little bit of fear, maybe, and definitely an unhealthy amount of pain. Peter-One was completely lost as to why, but Peter-Two knew that feeling all too well. “Shut up, both of you. Talk about literally anything else, please,” Peter-Three told them unhappily.
“Then you don’t have to talk about it,” Peter-Two said to Peter-Three, then turned to Peter-One. “But I, I just…if both of us had a really bad experience with him, there’s got to be more to it with you. Did he…I don’t really know how to ask this. But did…did something happen, with him?”
“Uh…” Peter-One’s tone suddenly became defensive, infused with nervous energy, as he realized he might have something to hide after all.
“That’s not an answer,” Peter-Two pointed out, starting to worry about his younger counterpart.
“What’s the big deal? Did he do something?” Peter-One’s voice was higher now, sounding more frantic as his attempt at feigning cluelessness began to fall apart under Peter-Two’s scrutiny. “He was my friend, he went off to college and we don’t talk much anymore, but it’s not like something happened with him.”
Peter-Two raised an eyebrow, entirely unconvinced. It was clear to him that there was more to it that belied the younger one’s dismissive attitude. “Well, uh, I mean, we did some stuff…I know we’re all the same person, but it’s still kind of awkward to talk about, y’know, that kind of thing…” Peter-One’s sentence trailed off into nothing. “I’m sorry,” he said hastily to Peter-Three. “I know you don’t want to hear about it. I’ll stop talking now.” But his avoidance of the subject was less of a kindness and more of a cop-out, and all three of them knew that.
Peter-Two glanced at Peter-Three, whose grim expression mirrored his as he came over to sit next to him on the couch and discreetly reached out to take his hand. “Don’t worry about me, keep him talking,” Peter-Three whispered, not caring whether Peter-One’s enhanced hearing could pick up on his words. “He needs to get it more than I want to avoid it.”
Peter-Two squeezed his hand briefly and let go, appreciative of his concession. “Thanks, man. I’m sorry this sucks so much,” he whispered back.
“Did he ever make you do anything you didn’t want to do?” Peter-Two asked.
“That is one hell of a loaded question,” Peter-One retorted.
“Answer it. Please,” Peter-Two added as an afterthought. “If you can. Please just try to talk about it. I want…I need to know, because for me he was…he was not good.”
“I mean, we’re still kinda friends, we just haven’t talked or—or anything in a while,” Peter-One admitted, much to his older counterparts’ chagrin. Their reactions were the same as before, concern from Peter-Two and upset disapproval from Peter-Three. “I guess there were some things that—that weren’t great, but I just went along with it, so those, uh, those bad experiences, that’s on me—”
“Okay, stop with that shit, you are not going to blame yourself,” Peter-Three shouted. “Skip Westcott emotionally, verbally, and sexually abused me, and clearly he did something to you too, or you wouldn’t be dodging the question so much.”
Peter-One stared, wide-eyed, at his counterpart. “I… I’m sorry that happened to you. That’s awful.” The statement had evoked a multitude of distressing emotions in him. Horror, because he hated that Peter-Three had been through so much brutality. Shame, because what he said was starting to make him rethink some things, now that he knew the other two had been through much worse.
"He did the same thing to me," Peter-Two said simply. "Did yours?"
Peter-One shook his head vigorously. Too vigorously, really. "Don't you think that maybe between all the multiverses, there might be one where he wasn't so bad?" he asked, though the question only made him sound even more in denial. The other two kept looking at him without a word, Peter-Three shaking his head in disagreement and Peter-Two clearly waiting for him to say more. He didn’t really know what to say, or even what to think. He didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to remember, ashamed of everything he’d done back then. Reluctantly, he continued to talk.
“I, uh, I used to experiment with him." But that wasn't quite the full truth, either. If Skip had been so terrible in his counterparts’ universes…then maybe his own bad experience wasn’t just something to regret. He kept talking, surprising even himself with his explanation. "Well, I mean..."
"Um, I mean, I didn’t really, like, want to, but he really wanted to do it, and I wanted him to keep being my friend, so I—I let him,” he choked out, sounding like he was about to cry towards the end as he came to the crushing realization of what had really happened between them. He felt no relief to understand that it had been wrong, validating that strange feeling that something had been…not quite right…about that whole thing. Instead, all his new perspective brought was shame. How could I have been so stupid? I let myself be taken advantage of…I let him do whatever he wanted to me…
“I was nine, he was eighteen, so twice my age,” Peter-Three said as calmly as he could manage. “It was never okay. He made it very clear that he knew what he was doing was wrong, he knew I didn’t want to, and he did it anyway. I tried to fight back, but I was just a kid, so there was only so much I could do. Sometimes I thought I could’ve stopped him if I’d tried a little harder, but what he did to me is his fault, not mine. And the same goes for you.”
“I was nine too. How old were you?” Peter-Two asked Peter-One.
“I mean, it went on for way longer than just one year.”
Peter-One’s statement was immediately met once again by concern and anger respectively from the other two. Peter-Three in particular had to stop himself from punching a hole in the wall out of rage. “I’m going to kill that motherfucker,” he seethed to himself. “I mean, I’m not going to, but god I want to,” he quickly added for his counterparts to hear, this time in a more normal voice. “What a piece of shit!"
“It started when I was nine, or sometime around that? I think he was fourteen at the time." Peter-One had to think about it. The years blended together in his mind to the point that he wasn't quite sure of the details. "He went off to college when I was in middle school, so then I only saw him when he came home for breaks and stuff, but we didn’t...do anything then, we just hung out sometimes. So, four years?”
“You were nine and he was several years older. That’s really fucked up,” Peter-Two pointed out. “When teenagers experiment, they’re supposed to do it with people their own age who want to do it with them, not a child. He would have known that.” Peter-One nodded. He was around the same age now as Skip had been when the abuse stopped, and he could never imagine treating someone that much younger the way Skip had. But understanding that Skip was no exception to that behavior being wrong, and therefore knowing it had been, well, a type of harm he didn't want to think of as having been done to him, that was much harder.
“Is it still not-okay if I let him?” Peter-One asked quietly. “If I—it’s not like I just lay there and let him touch me, I did a lot more than that. I can see how he thought it was okay, because I thought it was okay until, like, five minutes ago, and I kept telling him it was fine because I didn’t want him to be mad at me for not wanting to…to do it. I don't think he even knew I didn't actually want to."
“You were a child,” Peter-Two repeated. “He should never have touched you. Legally and developmentally speaking, a nine-year-old is not capable of giving consent. He would have known that. But even without your age, the definition of sexual assault specifically includes situations where you were pressured into it or manipulated into thinking it was okay. It’s called coercion. Doesn’t matter what you did if he made you do it. It’s still nonconsensual.”
“Even if—” Peter-One started to say, but quickly stopped himself. “Never mind.”
“It’s going to be okay. We’re here for you,” Peter-Two reassured him. "I promise you can tell us, 'cause we know what it's like."
“I…okay. I’ll try.” Peter-One closed his eyes. They sat in silence for a little while. Eventually, he began to speak again, so quietly the other two had to strain to hear it. “I wish I’d listened to that bad feeling I got when he started. I knew something wasn’t right, but he said it was weird that I didn’t like it, so I believed him when he said that, and I did whatever he told me to do…I thought there was something wrong with me.”
“He manipulated you,” Peter-Two said gently. “That’s not your fault.”
“Does it matter if…if I thought I wanted it when I really didn’t? It was really confusing because sometimes…it didn’t always feel bad, if you know what I mean by that?” Peter-One kept his question carefully vague, too ashamed to describe the specifics out loud. "He...he always liked to...to make me...I can't even say it," he whispered, the depth of anguish in his voice twisting Peter-Two's heart in his chest.
Peter-Two knew exactly what he meant. He took a deep breath, remembering what he’d never even said out loud before, not even to Ben and May or the therapist they’d had him see, because he’d always thought that if they found out, they would know it was really my fault. So he’d struggled for a long time, all on his own, to weather the crushing guilt of that unwelcome feeling Skip had forced on him. It had taken him decades to understand that no matter how ashamed he was of it, it still wasn’t his fault. He still hated even just thinking about it, but he also knew that Peter-One needed to hear it from him so that he wouldn’t take as long as he had to reach that conclusion.
“I never talk about this, but I think it’ll help you to know you’re not alone.” The older Spider-Man leaned in and whispered something in his younger counterpart’s ear. He mostly managed to keep the pain out of his voice as he spoke, but his hands took it out on the couch, clutching the cushion so tightly that the fabric began to tear.
Peter-Three wordlessly placed his hand over Peter-Two’s, interrupting his unconscious destruction of the couch cushion. Out of respect for his counterparts’ privacy, and his own hatred of the subject, he blocked out the whispered conversation happening next to him, distracting himself by picking out each distinct noise he could hear from outside the window. That’s a 747 taking off from LaGuardia. That’s an ambulance siren three-and-a-half miles to the east, heading south. That’s a truck horn half a mile west of here. That’s a bus announcement at the intersection right down the street. That’s music coming from a speaker outside the bodega two streets over. That’s someone walking up the creaky stairs out in the hallway. That’s a mother arguing with her teenage son in the apartment two floors above us, because she found the vodka bottle filled with water and realized he was sneaking into her liquor cabinet. That’s the next-door neighbor’s phone ringing. That’s a cooing pigeon perched on the fire escape right outside the window. That’s the steady hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen. That’s Peter-Two trying not to cry…and that’s Peter-One actually crying.
“So please believe me when I say that still doesn’t make it your fault,” Peter-Two finished quietly as he pulled back. “I know that because he did the same exact thing to me.”
Peter-One swallowed hard and reached for Peter-Two’s other hand, both offering comfort and seeking it in the gesture. “Not your fault,” he murmured, his voice shaky.
“Not yours either,” Peter-Two repeated. “When you’re being manipulated, it’s really hard to distinguish between the thoughts and feelings that are your own, and what’s only there because of the abuse. That just means he was a very powerful abuser. That’s on him, not you.” Peter-One nodded, trying to believe Peter-Two’s reassurances. It made sense to him, but he still felt guilty anyway.
“So you know your shit, huh?” Peter-Three said to Peter-Two.
“Well, you know, things happen around the city,” Peter-Two answered. “People going home with someone they met at the bar or the club even though they’re so drunk they can’t walk on their own. The freshman who everyone says got lucky because he has a thing with a senior. The wife whose husband thinks that marriage means they’re entitled to sex whenever they want. The executive assistant to the CEO at the big corporation with an office in a skyscraper downtown. College girls going to frat parties where they serve jungle juice. The little kid who dreads seeing her creepy uncle at the family reunion. The student whose teacher demands favors in exchange for a better grade in her class. The grad student who has to work with the tenured department chair for their PhD. The teenage lesbian running away from home after her father tried to turn her straight. The kid who grew up going to Sunday School and studying the Bible with the church pastor. The kid on the youth sports team traveling to a tournament supervised by his coach. The neighbor’s kid who has a babysitter because his parents are at a party across town. I remember every single one of them, even when the details of so many other patrols have blurred together in my mind. Every time it’s one of those—when they’re like I was back then—I have to help. Some of them didn’t even realize it’s wrong until I said something. A lot of them think it’s their fault, but it never is,” he finished, throwing a pointed look at Peter-One with his last sentence.
“But that’s different,” Peter-One began to protest. "Those are way more obviously wrong. I—I let him do whatever he wanted with me."
“No the fuck it is not,” Peter-Three insisted. "You didn't let him, he manipulated you."
"Do you ever think about why you didn’t feel comfortable telling him you didn’t want to?” Peter-Two prompted.
“I—I thought he’d be mad at me, and I didn’t want to disappoint him…so I went along with it. I went along with it. I let him. That means I was okay with it.” Peter would never, never in a million years, say those things to Peter-Three or Peter-Two, or to anyone else in the same situation, even if their experience was the exact same as his. But somehow, he felt like he had to be an exception, like only he could be blamed for what had happened to him.
“He made you afraid to say no,” was all his older counterpart said.
Peter-One simply sat there without responding, overwhelmed by the deluge of emotion and memory washing over him.
“Helping them means knowing these things. I have the rape crisis center hotline on speed dial at this point,” Peter-Two continued, resuming his earlier conversation with Peter-Three.
“For you, or for them?” Peter-Three asked.
“...Yes," Peter-Two admitted.
“Okay, well, it was worse for both of you, but it really wasn’t that big of a deal for me, like, yeah, I regret it, it shouldn’t have happened, and I wouldn’t have done any of it if he’d given me a real choice, but it wasn’t like that—it wasn’t as bad as what he did to you two, it’s nothing in comparison.” It came as a surprise even to Peter-One that he just could not stop talking, all his uncertainty tumbling out uncontrollably to his older counterparts. “Sometimes he’d ask, but it wasn’t like, ‘do you want to,’ it was always him convincing me to experiment with him, or I’d say I didn’t want to but he’d keep asking and eventually I’d give in—and he said we were just messing around so I thought it was normal—and I hate myself for not realizing it was wrong—”
Peter-Two regarded Peter-One gravely, shaking his head at the younger one’s denial. “It is not ‘nothing.’ You regret all of it, you know it shouldn't have happened, and you wouldn’t have done any of it if he’d given you a real choice. He manipulated you. He made you think it was okay when it wasn’t. ‘I don’t want to’ doesn’t mean ‘keep asking' or 'convince me.’ It means no. Skip knew that and didn’t care.” Peter-Three drew a sharp breath at the use of their abuser’s name, but said nothing. “That’s not ‘experimenting’ or ‘messing around,’ it’s rape. You were nine. He was several years older. And doing that for years is sexual abuse.”
“Okay, well when you put it like that it sounds way worse than it was—” Peter-One started to say.
Peter-Three cut him off. “He literally just repeated what you said back to you, word for word,” he told him.
Peter-One’s confusion slowly turned into a terrible understanding. He slumped forward, his head in his hands, his elbows braced on his knees, and his gaze fixated on the floor under his feet. “I know this is a lot to wrap your head around. It’s going to take a long time before it gets better. But you will eventually realize that it was never your fault,” Peter-Two said gently to Peter-One, who mumbled a thank-you even though he didn’t believe it quite yet.
“Did either of you tell Ben and May?” Peter-Three asked.
“This is the first time I’ve talked to anyone about it,” Peter-One admitted.
“Yeah, they called the cops immediately,” Peter-Two explained. “He went to prison, and I went to therapy.”
“Ben fucking beat him to death with a tire iron,” Peter-Three said, cracking a smile for the first time since they’d started talking about Skip. “I just wish I could’ve been the one to do it.”
“Hey, can you do something for me?” Peter-Two asked Peter-One.
“Yeah, sure,” Peter-One agreed. “What is it?”
“Block his number,” Peter-Two suggested. “And all of his social media accounts.”
“I mean…I feel like it wouldn’t be fair to him,” Peter-One hesitated, drawing disapproving glares and shaking heads from the other two, leading him to hastily follow up with more nonsense: "If I just cut ties out of nowhere, it’s not gonna make sense.”
“For fuck’s sake, block him, or I will take your phone and do it for you,” Peter-Three insisted.
“Yeah, what he said,” Peter-Two agreed. “If you don’t talk much anyway, he probably won’t even notice.”
“Okay, okay, fine, I’ll block him.” Peter-One took out his phone and started going through several different social media platforms, pulling up Skip’s profile on each and hitting the block button. Once he was done, he sank back into the couch cushions with a sigh of relief.
“Any idea what he’s up to nowadays?” Peter-Three asked, trying to make the question sound casual.
“He went away to college, then he moved out of state after that. He survived the Snap, I think. He’s working for some defense contractor company in DC now.” Peter-One wasn’t sure. He hadn’t kept an eye on Skip all that closely, just saw the occasional Facebook post from him or his mother.
“Did he call all of us Einstein?” Peter-Two asked, his question met by frowning nods from the other two.
“And a lot of other things I can’t say in front of the kid,” Peter-Three grumbled with a pointed look at Peter-One.
“Don’t call me kid,” Peter-One protested. “I’m not nine.” It was a loaded number, the age all three of them had been when Skip abused them. “He called me that. A lot. Especially when we—when he—well, you know.” He was trying to remind himself that he really hadn’t been a consenting participant in Skip’s experimentation, he’d been a victim of his abuse, even if he was less than happy about calling it or himself that. Reframing it as something Skip did to him, rather than something they’d done together, was a step in the right direction. ”I don’t know how I didn’t realize how fucked up it was that he called me ‘kid’ when we were—no, when he was—” Receiving displeased looks from his counterparts again, he ended his sentence there and stopped blaming himself, at least out loud in front of his counterparts. “Besides, it’s not like he didn’t also say all sorts of awful shit to me.”
“Oh, right.” Peter-Three’s expression soured at that, still upset by the thought of this younger version of himself being subject to such extensive abuse. “Still don’t want to get into it.”
“You don’t have to,” Peter-Two told Peter-Three.
“He said it was normal, and I should’ve known better—” Seeing more unhappy reactions from the other two, Peter-One corrected himself. “—I mean, he convinced me it was okay. I thought there was something wrong with me for not wanting to do it.”
“It’s not,” Peter-Two replied immediately, in such a rush to reassure the teenager that their sentences overlapped. “There wasn’t.”
“No, that’s not the problem,” Peter-One insisted. “He said he did it with his other friends, and that if I didn’t then we wouldn’t be friends anymore. And I didn’t have any other friends, so I wanted him to keep being my friend, so I—I went along with it.”
“Alright, that’s it, I am getting on the next train to DC and hunting this motherfucker down,” Peter-Three practically snarled, jumping to his feet as rage enveloped him once more. “Where can I get a gun around here?”
“You are not going to kill him!” Peter-One shouted. “I know we’re all really angry at him for abusing us.” Peter-Two nodded gravely, noting Peter-One’s first use of the term that placed blame on Skip rather than himself. “But the one that hurt you is dead, and yours is in prison, and I get to decide what happens to mine, and I say we’re not killing him. Besides, you know you won't be able to get a gun here in New York.”
“Do you know any of the other survivors?” Peter-Two asked Peter-One. “Do they know it was wrong, or do they blame themselves like you did?”
“I don’t actually know who they are, I never met them, but if I saw them I would recognize them. He made me look at pictures of him doing it with them, that was how he convinced me it was normal. There were—” Peter-One closed his eyes for a moment, counting the memories seared into his mind. “—Seven others that he showed me. Looked like they were all around my age, too. I'm sure there were others after me, too. Is that my fault because I didn’t tell anyone? When I could’ve stopped him?”
“No, you wouldn’t blame any of the ones before you for what he did to you, so you can’t blame yourself for any that happened after. It’s his fault for hurting them,” Peter-Two answered. “I know it’ll take you a while to actually believe that, but it’s true.”
“Are you okay?” Peter-One asked Peter-Two, sounding genuinely concerned. “You were the one who brought it up in the first place, but you’ve barely talked about what it was like for you.”
“I mean, I’m fine now. Ben and May took me to therapy, I eventually learned that it wasn’t my fault, and I think I’m doing about as okay as I can,” Peter-Two explained, brushing off Peter-One’s question. “Besides, now I help people when they’re in a similar situation, and I can handle it better than the police.”
“I hope I can do that too,” Peter-One said quietly.
“Just…take your time, please,” Peter-Two told Peter-One. “Take all the time you need to process all this shit, work through all the emotions it brings up, go to therapy if you can afford it. Take care of yourself. Talk to your friends if you can’t handle it alone, they’re there to support you. Don’t run yourself into the ground thinking you have to stop every single rapist in New York ‘cause you think it’s the only way you can bear to live with the memory of what he did to you.”
“That was oddly specific,” Peter-Three muttered.
“So what if it is?” Peter-Two fired back.
Their mocking exchange broke up the heavy feeling in the air and ended their chat. Satisfied with the progress Peter-One had made over the course of their conversation, Peter-Three picked up a broom and started sweeping up the broken glass, then mopped up the spilled water with a towel.
Peter-Two laid back on the couch cushions, staring vacantly up at the ceiling. His dissociative state was soon interrupted by Peter-One scooting closer to him and quietly asking, “You doing alright?”
The older one shrugged. “Okay enough to worry about you and not me,” he replied, redirecting the conversation back towards his younger counterpart’s emotional state. “For what it’s worth, having to reckon with it is really hard, but it’s better than never realizing it was wrong.”
Peter-One just nodded, feeling wildly disoriented. He had a lot to process. The remembrance of what Skip had done to him—now mixed with his counterparts’ insistence that it had in fact been wrong—suddenly overwhelmed him, and he curled in on himself, drawing shaky breaths amidst quiet sobs.
“Hey,” Peter-Three asked softly. Emotional support was clearly not so much his strong suit as it was Peter-Two’s, but he was determined to at least try. “Do you want a hug?” Peter-One raised his head long enough to nod in response, and felt his older counterparts embrace him. Their gentle touch grounded him, helping him to stay in the present rather than free-falling into traumatic memories.
Peter-One knew he had a long and hard road to recovery ahead of him. But for a brief moment, as his older counterparts held him, he allowed himself to believe their reassurance that he would be okay again someday.