Chapter Text
Peter built his first computer using parts he’d found in the dumpster, haggling with the pawn shop and tearing apart old toys or electronics he found tucked away at the back of Ben and May's closet. He started it when he was ten. He was thirteen when he finally sourced all the parts and had managed to build it up entirely from scratch.
The first report he wrote on it got a D. It was deserved. He hadn’t read the book, instead having spent the entire weekend tweaking and adjusting everything until the system was perfect – double checking the fans if they started whirring too loudly, distracting himself with Ned’s help as they tested out the limits of his graphics card.
Yet, it’s still to this day one of the grades he’s most proud of. His High School diploma managing to pale in comparison because he could not argue for a second that he’d obtained that all by himself. That piece of paper belonged as much to Ned Leeds, MJ Watson and May Parker for dragging him to the finish line as it did to him for actually making it there.
That report on The Great Gatsby typed up on a computer made entirely from scrap? That was all him.
It’s no suit of armour in a cave, but it’s something. The situation not so dire if they have a genius, an alien who owns the ship and a college student who’s spent his life making the most out of very little.
(Everything is still awful and Peter is having to try very hard to avoid thinking about how the gravel beneath their feet has mixed with the ashes of their friends.)
He tells this story to Tony the first time they step on to Nebula’s ship and start to assess the damage. It breaks through the man’s morbid determination for just a second, sparks something dangerous – hope – and pulls a tight lipped smile from him before he clamps his hand down on Peter’s shoulder. His grip so tight that Peter thinks he can feel the nanites in his suit giving way to the pressure, clinging on to something he hasn’t lost, making sure that Peter doesn’t slip away in the still air of the ship.
“A D isn’t a passing grade.” Tony points out. He doesn’t let go. “Not quite the inspirational story you were going for.”
Peter forces out a laugh, trying to cling on to that as long as he can, pretend he’s still got a right to some version of his own innocence and naivety so that he can keep on pushing, remembering that there’s people waiting for him.
There has to be.
“I got the paper written, didn’t I?” He counters because that was the important part. He’d got his computer built and he got it running enough that he could write a dumb paper for his English class on it.
It wasn’t written on the laptop that he shared with May. It was written on a computer that was designed to run every game and every system that he and Ned had always dreamed of, one he’d built from scratch because anything else would be too much for him to ask of his aunt and uncle considering all they’d done.
He doesn't mention that he built his first webshooters with the same kind of scrap. He doesn't mention that the junk that he wore when he was jumping off buildings, swinging over bridges and catching buses long before Tony stepped into his life was pulled from dumpsters and stray parts in the school's computer lab. He doesn't mention that because everything that suit had stood for had failed them today.
He needed something to believe in that wasn't so clouded in doubt.
Peter could do a lot with a few pieces of junk, saw potential where there might not actually be any simply because there was no other choice for him. That felt like the important part now that he stands on an alien ship, stranded on a foreign planet with a woman he doesn’t know but has accompanied to the end of everything and a man he once thought of as his mentor.
He’d built a computer from parts he’d found in a dumpster because he had a report to write and plans to fulfil.
He’s going to fix this ship because he has a home he has to get back to and a family he has to believe is okay.
“We’ll workshop it.” Tony tells him, finally letting Peter go and shoving him off. “Go find us some tools.”
“Kid, come lift this panel.”
“Not a kid.”
They get the ship off the ground a few days later.
“It is not suitable for extensive flying.” Nebula comments dryly. Peter has only known her for a few days, but he thinks he’s starting to pick up some of the subtle intonations beneath her level tone.
We might not make it.
“I managed to use that same computer to write my report on Of Mice and Men. Got me extra credit.” Peter replies casually.
Tony’s lips quirk up but he doesn’t speak. His eyes catching Nebula’s in an exchange they think Peter is too naive to understand. Like they think Peter is too oblivious to what has happened and want to keep him that way. Like he hasn’t seen strangers turned allies fade to dust before him, like he isn’t running the numbers in his head trying to work out the probability that everyone he loves is waiting for him too. Like Peter doesn’t know the harsh reality of grief and giving up.
Peter’s teeth grind against each other and he pushes himself upright. Right now his hope is the only thing that he knows for certain he has of his family on Earth. It wasn’t the youthful ignorance Tony refuses to believe he’s outgrown. It was a choice.
“I’m gonna go check the rig is still holding in the engine room.” He says to remove himself from the situation.
His first computer had ran on old parts. It needed constant repairs.
They run out of fuel.
Nebula tells him that there are planets full of dumpsters and pawn shops across the galaxy.
None of them are nearby.
Peter tells the story of his first computer for a third time, secluding himself away in the engine room, trying to do more impossible equations to see if there was any hope of getting them moving again rather than drifting aimlessly.
He inspects every panel he finds, disconnects wires and chews on his fingernails as he watches the diagnostics change with every single minor tweak.
He thinks that maybe this isn’t working because Tony is brilliant and smart and trying to keep himself going for Peter’s sake, but that this might be easier if Ned were here. He might be able to find the fun in it again if they were solving it like it was some sort of impossible challenge their curious minds couldn’t dare walk away from.
He really hopes he can tell Ned that he's upgraded from computers to super suits to spaceships.
“So... either of you wanna arm wrestle?”
“With or without the suit?”
“Oh now we can risk using the suit?”
Peter Parker first met MJ Watson the first day of High School. She sat next to him in homeroom. They didn’t talk – Peter too nervous and, in his eyes, MJ too cool.
By the end of the first week, everyone knew her name. Everyone. Sophmores and Seniors smiled at her. Her name was on the sign-up sheet for Academic Decathlon and Drama Club. She walked the halls with a confidence that was different from Peter’s – who knew he was smart enough to be in the school and had only studied as hard as he did for the entrance exam to ease May and Ben’s worries, different from Flash’s – who was far more vocal about his arrival at the school. She knew where she was going and she went. Even in classes when she raised her hand, her voice clear and unwavering as she spoke and even if the answer was wrong – Peter watched as her head tilted a fraction, digesting it and then making a note, unperturbed.
He felt right in his assumption that she was too cool for him to approach and figured that the seat next to him in homeroom would be empty come Monday.
It wasn’t.
The next week, she was back in her seat, doodling as she smirked at the performance Flash was conducting across the room.
He faltered as he walked to his chair, curiosity getting the better of him and peering over at what she was drawing.
Flash surrounded by stars – a joke he didn’t understand – unintentional constellations decorating the page and inaccuracies that Peter found himself biting his lip at until he couldn’t ignore them any longer.
“Jupiter would actually be there.” He had murmured, nodding to her page. “It’s closer than Saturn.”
He had stilled as MJ had looked up from her notebook and stared at him silently for the first time.
“I didn’t want to draw Jupiter though. I wanted to draw Saturn.”
“It’s wrong though.”
“Is it?” She’d asked with a tilt of her head that had put him on the back foot and an argument about the absurdity of her remark on the tip of his tongue. She turned away from him and flipped her book over to a new page before he could voice it.
By the end of the day, a paper slipped out of his locker – a cartoonish drawing of him sat on Jupiter, arms crossed and pouting. It had made him laugh.
The next day in homeroom, she didn’t say a word, but he caught her smiling down at her book when he walked in.
She made it a habit of surprising him throughout high school after that.
He hadn't spoken to MJ in a few months. Their break-up requiring more space than either of them had first realised. They’d tricked themselves into thinking they could fall back into being friends so easily, but instead had found themselves just falling into bed. There were gaps in their friendship that they found were easier to fill when his mouth was on hers and the silence was broken by the breathy sighs of his name.
They were always better at that part though. It was always easier to press his body against hers and show her how he felt, give her something real, something true, rather than whisper promises he’d end up breaking to her. It was easier for her to kiss the scars that she’d sown closed for him rather than give a voice to the fears they both knew haunted her and the pressures that weighed on her.
He’d missed talking to her before they went to space. Even before they’d dated, even before she’d known about his identity, MJ had always had a way of grounding the absurdity of his life – going from reminding him about AcaDec to reminding him about deadlines to reminding him about dates.
She dragged him from the suit because while he kept himself close to the ground, people only had his word that he was ‘just like them’, the evidence they saw of him catching buses and dodging bullets proved to them otherwise and sometimes the city didn’t need heroes in suits. It just needed people. MJ did a good job of reminding him that he was one of them.
He missed her then, and he misses her now as he stares out the front window of the ship, taking in the stars and the cosmos. Thinking that right now he has so many things he could say to her. A lot of the things on that list were apologies.
One thing he’d tell her in particular was that she was right to tease him back then, because he had no fucking clue what space really looked like, understanding a little more now that it was all about perspective.
Their lack of fuel is the least of their problems now that they have a definitive number of days attached to their remaining food and their oxygen. The vast emptiness of the galaxy before him should scare him a little more.
Instead, Peter has his suit form, his mask crawling into place. The HUD worthless and no voices in his ear so far from any kind of signal. For all the money that it’s worth and Tony’s expertise, the Iron Spider has practically been reduced to solely a cosmetic upgrade on his old pyjamas.
There is some irony there. There is something funny there.
Peter doesn’t laugh, instead stares out at the abyss as he navigates through the menu until there is a soft click. A photo captured.
He hasn’t spoken to MJ in months, but he wants to show her this. It’s scary and terrifying, but it’s beautiful and if he captures it now then he believes they’ll get home.
He believes she’s down there to see it.
Right?
“You are going to starve.” Nebula tells him, blunt and direct once Tony has drifted off into some version of sleep.
She slides some of her own rations that he has watched her carefully portioning out throughout the day to fend off her own hunger towards him. Peter shakes his head.
He can’t accept them.
“Keeping him alive will only matter if you make it back to Earth as well.” She points out, holding out the food again to him.
Nebula isn’t the most talkative. She keeps to herself and helps where she can. She watches them a lot. Peter has felt her eyes on him as he works with Tony. He has noticed that she still doesn’t talk much but is lingering more in the cockpit with them. She is creeping closer to their conversations.
Tony and Peter have done their best to draw her out further. He thinks it must be working if she’s noticed these little things, if she’s trying to mediate the ongoing push and pull between her shipmates.
Tony trying to remain the mentor, keep spirits high and keep Peter safe, always sacrificing his blanket or his portion of water – guilt probably driving him that Peter probably wouldn’t have gone up to space if Tony had made a different call or done something more to get him home sooner, continually disregarding how much of this had been Peter’s choice to begin with.
Peter trying to do exactly the same because he can do a lot with junk. He is smart and he knows it. He is smart enough to know that despite what his younger self might have thought, Spider-Man worked best when he was saving his city. The world? And the universe? They needed Tony Stark.
They don’t talk about the anger that blooms in Peter’s blood when he sees Tony give in a little more and slide another bottle of water to him. They don’t talk about the frustration that Peter feels when Tony talks about getting home and that being the end.
Peter has lived with a lot of anger his entire life. He knows that hope can sit neatly beside it, can encompass it, can be born from it. He can be angry and let his defiant determination to keep Tony going by slipping him parts of Peter’s rations be a way to shape that anger into hope. It would be a reminder to him to keep going even after they got back.
They had to.
They haven’t talked about how he’d felt it coming. His senses screaming put to him, begging and pleading him to confront the danger that was coming, the ringing in his ears so sharp and deafening, disorientating him so much that he thought for a moment that he too was coming undone and falling away into dust.
They haven’t talked about the fact that Peter felt this coming from the moment he stepped on to Titan and still hadn’t been able to stop it from happening.
He hopes they never do.
That probably wasn’t healthy.
Peter looks down to the bar of... He still wasn’t certain what it was.
Nebula doesn’t retract it.
It is her way of reaching out.
Three people trapped on a ship doing their best to prop each other up. That means something to him.
Peter takes the bar.
“I think this might be the most believable excuse for not handing in assignment I'll ever give.”
“What?”
“Still sucks I’ll be capped though. Or do you think the whole extenuating circumstances thing will revoke that.”
“Kid... Your professor would have to be an ass not to.”
“Some of them are. Or did you forget the whole turning New York into Lizards thing?”
“Wouldn’t have happened if you went MIT.”
May Parker.
Ned Leeds.
MJ Watson.
Flash Thompson.
Sebastian Delmar.
Tristan Richards.
Sally Avril.
Cindy Moon.
Liz Allan.
The man in Times Square who bailed on a trick so hard that the overpriced strawberry milkshake he’d bought her snorted out MJ’s nose.
The woman who always waves out her window and asks if Spider-Man needs a glass of water.
The guy who uses his podcast to remind New York all the times Spider-Man wasn’t good enough.
Peter is lost in space. When he closes his eyes, he tricks himself into thinking that he's just floating, caught in the moment mid-swing.
He keeps a list of names. Every night a new name appears on it. Some of them are people that are practically pillars of his very being. Some of them just people he thinks of in passing.
All of them people he hopes are still down there.
He misses home so much.
“The suit is running low on juice.” Tony tells him. The days they’ve got left with oxygen is in it’s single digits. “But it’d take more than a dead battery and space garbage to wipe anything I didn’t want it to.” He says, aiming for the same smug and haughty tone he usually has but missing it by just an inch. Most of his energy had probably been spent pretending things were normal during his last round of paper football with an alien – he’d lost. Again. Not that Peter was keeping score.
Peter pulls his eyes away from the tracer he’s pointlessly tinkering with. Years ago Toomes had used alien tech to build weapons. Today Peter’s using it to build something that even the cosmos couldn’t block.
May Parker had been more understanding of Peter’s choices than maybe she should have been. He loved her for that and hated himself for ever putting her in a position where she had to be.
They’d shouted and they’d fought when she found out. At first, May only seeing the danger that Peter was throwing himself into. Not caring about whatever power or responsibility he held himself against because the world wasn’t always kind to heroes.
Ben had died two years prior to May finding out about Peter. Somehow, in the weeks that had followed her revelation, in between the shouting and the warnings, the apartment was more quiet then than it had been after his uncle’s funeral.
They weren’t a quiet family, and they managed to find a way to turn those shouts into softer spoken words when the dam finally broke. Reasons and fears coming out logically rather than emotionally. Compromises being made. May, once again, having to figure out how to parent him because he’d changed things around.
Peter still thinks she’d done a fantastic job even though he’d made her worry countless times. Even though he knows she used to wait up until he got home. Even though he made things hard.
He might not see her again. He knows this though he doesn’t like to think of it, but if by some miracle his Parker Luck actually swings in his favour and he gets home then he never wants to make her worry like this again.
A tracer. Something even the stars couldn’t stop. Something so that he knew she was okay and she could tell the same. Something she might not ever receive.
“Could I borrow it please?” Peter asks. Tony’s reply comes in a hand clamped to his shoulder. His grip is weaker this time. He’s tired.
That scares him.
Peter wants to go home.
He misses his aunt.
Peter apologises to May. If they were talking in person, if she could reply, she’d quieten him quickly, tell him it wasn’t necessary.
They are not together, she cannot reply so Peter apologises. He spends more time thanking her because she has always been on his side. Always. Back when it was sneaking him candy under the amused eyes of his parents, cleaning his smudged glasses with the hems of her cardigans or chasing away the monsters that only lived under the spare bed at May and Ben’s house, then all the way through to posters at her work and anonymous replies in the paper that all sounded too much like the things he’d grown up hearing when they read ‘Spider-Man has a good heart. He’s trying his best’.
She’s always made him think he could do anything.
He hopes he’s made her proud.
He really did try.
May Parker.
Ned Leeds.
MJ Watson.
Flash Thompson.
Sebastian Delmar.
Tristan Richards.
Sally Avril.
Cindy Moon.
Liz Allan.
The man in Times Square who bailed on a trick so hard that the overpriced strawberry milkshake he’d bought her snorted out MJ’s nose.
The woman who always waves out her window and asks if Spider-Man needs a glass of water.
The guy who uses his podcast to remind New York all the times Spider-Man wasn’t good enough.
His fourth grade teacher who told him that he should speak up in class more.
The cashier from his favourite bakery who always gives him a free coffee with his bagel despite Peter never calling him back.
Mr. Harrington.
His Freshman RA.
The list grows longer.
Peter remembers a time when all he wanted to do was impress Tony Stark. It wasn’t that long ago really, just a few years ago, back when he was younger and a little more lost in High School.
Even after he’d walked away from Tony’s offer to join the Avengers, it was hard not to preen when a mod he made to the suit got noticed or when praise for how he handled the giant lizard (who also happened to be his professor his Freshman year of college) got sent his way.
He had grown up on stories of Captain America, the very first superhero, but Iron Man was the one he got to see become a hero on his very own TV screen. He showed a young pre-bitten Peter that brains were just as powerful as brawn - Ben liked to remind him that the money was a superpower unto itself and to be wary of placing people on pedestals (later Peter would wish he’d remembered that). The Iron Man suit made him feel vindicated in his excitement of Robotics that had been teased in the past.
Of course he was still a little in awe when the man beneath the mask saw potential in him even after they’d realised there might just be a few differences in their approach to this life once Peter had realised what part he wanted to play in his city and how the shadow he was trying to fill looked a little more like Ben’s than anyone else’s.
Sometimes that meant Tony underestimated him, and sometimes Peter wasn’t looking to impress Tony but to prove him wrong, show him another way – Sometimes he listened.
Listening into Tony say his goodbyes to Pepper, a conversation that he shouldn’t be overhearing but can’t seem to tune out, he wishes he could do that one last time.
May Parker.
Ned Leeds.
MJ Watson.
Flash Thompson.
Sebastian Delmar.
Tristan Richards.
Sally Avril.
Cindy Moon.
Liz Allan.
The man in Times Square who bailed on a trick so hard that the overpriced strawberry milkshake he’d bought her snorted out MJ’s nose.
The woman who always waves out her window and asks if Spider-Man needs a glass of water.
The guy who uses his podcast to remind New York all the times Spider-Man wasn’t good enough.
His fourth grade teacher who told him that he should speak up in class more.
The cashier from his favourite bakery who always gives him a free coffee with his bagel despite Peter never calling him back.
Mr. Harrington.
His Freshman RA.
Tony Stark.
Nebula.
Peter Parker.
“Pete.” Tony croaks. “Pete.” He tries again, a lazy hand slapping the side of Peter’s face where he’s propped up against the pilot’s chair.
Peter forces his eyes open. He hasn’t really been sleeping, more just clenching his eyes shut and willing to keep them closed because if he keeps waking up then he’ll be confronted by their ticking clock and how few ideas he has left to try.
For the first time in a while he has to squint when he does crack his eyes open. The cockpit alit with a golden glow – a trick of their depleting oxygen surely because he thinks it’s daylight.
“What happened to that old computer of yours again?”
“Overheated.” Peter replies, staring out at the sun rising before them, confuses how it was so close but wasn’t burning. “Needed better cooling system.” He adds on uselessly.
The sun approaches.
They still aren’t burning up.
“Huh.” Tony wheezes. “Would you look at that.”
The sun isn’t a sun at all, and yet a new day begins.