Chapter Text
The boats are out before the sun. They’re specks on the lake, white sails blue in the weak light of the early morning.
If Flash thinks hard enough, back to before his fingers had turned to dust and the name on his birth certificate had matched the one at the top of his school papers, he can remember his dad explaining the reason.
Something about early mornings bringing higher tides.
The wind whips against his face. His old MIT hoodie isn’t heavy enough for the early-March air, especially not in Saranac. The fingers clutching the pamphlet in his hands are frozen stiff.
Flash doesn’t feel any of it. He’s tracking the wake of one particular boat—no sails, gas powered— with his eyes, and trying to remember if lakes even have tides. A part of him thinks that’s just an ocean thing.
He’s been standing there for hours, he thinks, or maybe just a few minutes, when the shuffling starts.
It’s crunchy. Footsteps on gravel.
A normal person would be breathing heavily after a quarter-mile hike straight up from the parking lot, but whoever Flash’s guest is, they’re light on their feet. Practically silent, save the crunch of the shuffling rocks.
He clenches his jaw.
The owner of the footsteps approaches slowly. Leans forward over the rusty, freezing railing of the pier so that their forearms are parallel to his.
For a moment, the two of them just stand there.
Watching the boats.
Peter speaks first.
Shocking.
“You freaked MJ out.”
His voice is flat.
To Flash’s credit, his chest aches with guilt. Not hard enough for everything MJ’s done for him and everything he owes her, but it’s there.
It does ache.
When he speaks, it’s hoarse and sharp. Makes his throat hurt.
“Tell her I’m sorry.”
“Tell her yourself.”
If this were the beginning, Flash wouldn’t know this voice well enough to pick out the individual threads of emotion between the biting words. He wouldn’t register the thinly-veiled relief, wouldn’t notice Peter’s fists clenching and unclenching where they hang in the air over the water, supported by his forearms on the railing.
“Where’d I mess up?” Flash asks, after a long moment, because this isn’t the beginning, and he should’ve known better than to underestimate Ned Leeds. “I didn’t even use my card for gas.”
“Caught your license plate on I-95,” Peter says. They’re still not looking at each other. “Wasn’t hard to put the pieces together from there.”
Flash almost laughs. The way Peter says it, you’d think that anyone could’ve seen his car heading north and immediately pieced together his final location. Like Peter isn’t the only one Flash has trusted with this part of himself and the ghosts that follow him here.
They wouldn’t have found him, if this were the beginning. Peter Parker wouldn’t have known this place—at least, wouldn’t have known it in relation to Flash. He sure as hell wouldn’t be here, wind whipping his curls out of his eyes and then right back into them, five hours and change from Queens on a random Tuesday morning, if this were the beginning.
It’s not.
But maybe that’s a better place to start.
“Eugene.”
He turns, biting down an impatient retort to meet his dad’s eyes. “Yeah?”
Harrison’s eyes scan over him from the driver’s seat of the convertible. What he’s looking for, Flash has never quite been smart enough to figure out. Sometimes, after the inspection, his dad will smile. Lean back, pleased.
Today’s a pursed-lips kind of day. Flash’s stomach sinks.
Fourteen years, and he’s yet to crack the code.
“Gerald will pick you up this afternoon.”
Flash frowns. “I thought our neighborhood had a bus. Liz said—”
“I’ve spoken with your principal,” Harrison cuts him off. “We’ve come to an agreement.”
“But you said—”
“Eugene.”
Flash swallows the rest of the sentence down. The words land in his stomach, where they’ll smolder until they burn out. “Got it,” he mutters, instead.
He does get it. He’s a Thompson. Thompsons don’t ride in big, yellow, public-looking school buses.
He turns, once the convertible has left the drop-off lane, to face Midtown School of Science and Technology. The weather is atypical for the first day of school, with large, angry clouds casting shadows across the “Freshman Orientation” banners scattered throughout the quad.
Flash takes a deep, steadying breath. When he opens his eyes, there’s another kid staring straight at him.
The boy is skinny. His glasses are too wide for his face, his haircut so uneven that Flash thinks he should probably ask his barber for his money back.
“What are you looking at?” Flash demands.
The kid raises his eyebrows, then lifts his arm to wave at someone Flash can’t see. Another boy, this one with a round, kind-looking face, passes by Flash’s left side to join him.
“Jerk,” he hears the kid—who, apparently, had not been looking at Flash at all—whisper to his friend. The friend glances back at Flash, furtively.
Before Flash can think of a retort, the first bell rings. He trails behind the two boys as they join the throng of overly-excited freshmen, eyes narrowed on the backpack of a boy with the worst first day of school haircut he’s ever seen, and this?
This is the beginning.
When Flash Thompson is little, his name isn’t Flash.
It’s Eugene.
Eugene Thompson, named for no one in particular, because as much as Harrison liked to pretend the Thompson family wealth was the type that had been rolled down through the generations, the truth was that Harrison’s father had been a nobody, and no son of Harrison Thompson would be named for a nobody.
So, instead, his child is called Eugene. A strong name, in Harrison’s eyes, for a son who will need to be strong.
A name worthy of the legacy he’ll one day inherit.
Flash Thompson hates the sound of his first name. He isn’t sure why—not yet, at least, not at fourteen, sitting in Mrs. Delancy’s homeroom at seven-thirty a.m., waiting for his classmates to share their name, favorite candy, and a memory from the summer. There’s just something about the shape of it, the way it sits in the back of the throat before it’s forced to the tip of the tongue, like something spit.
The kids at his old school called him Eugene.
Midtown won’t be like his old school.
When it’s his turn, he does his best to project a bored tone. The secret to a confident sell, his dad always says, is to never seem too invested.
“I’m Eugene,” he says, “But I go by Flash.”
The name Flash isn’t an afterthought. To say it requires lips and teeth. Intention.
Mrs. Delancy makes a note on her attendance sheet. If she finds the nickname strange, it doesn’t show on her face. Something in Flash’s stomach loosens.
“Welcome to Midtown, Flash,” she says. “Do you have a summer memory you’d like to share?”
When Flash Thompson is eleven years old, back when his name is Eugene, he has his first real crush. There've been other boys before, but Andrew is the first one he actually talks to—the first one who doesn’t give Flash shit for the shoulder-length hair his dad refuses to let him cut.
Andrew is blond, his favorite color is red, and he never stops talking. By the end of the school day he’s almost always on his yellow card—red, if Mr. Broadhead’s patience has been worn especially thin.
Flash sometimes gets the feeling that Andrew doesn’t actually like him all that much, but just like Andrew doesn’t care about Flash’s hair, Flash seems to be the only one who doesn’t mind the fact that Andrew walks kind of strange— uneven, like maybe one of his legs is longer than the other.
Fifth grade is a hellscape. They’re each other’s only option.
“How come you don’t talk?” Andrew asks him, once, as the two of them sit on the ground at Elizabeth Academy, picking at the tar that fills the cracks in the blacktop.
“I talk,” Flash scoffs. “We’re talking right now.”
“You only talk if I talk first.”
“Maybe you just talk a lot.”
Andrew rolls his eyes. They’re gray. Flash thinks they look kind of like rain clouds.
“It’s better to talk first,” Andrew says, after a long moment. “Then people look at your mouth, you know?”
Flash doesn’t know, not yet, sitting there on the blacktop during fifth-grade recess. Not until Andrew moves to North Carolina and Flash is halfway through middle school and he learns that you don’t necessarily have to be the biggest or tallest to be the one on the offensive.
(They won’t notice you walk a little crooked if they’re focused on your mouth.)
Megan Zhang asks him why his mom doesn’t come to the science fair. Flash tells her she’s got food in her braces. She never talks to him again.
He’s good at it, is the thing.
Flash knows the words that hurt; is incredibly proficient in picking out specific insecurities in order to maximize the impact of a particular insult. He doesn’t know where he learned this unique skill—not yet, at least, not at age twelve, but for the first time, he’s not the one getting called names.
For the first time, school is kind of fun.
Sometimes, if he’s honest, he prefers it to home.
There is a boy named Peter Parker, and he is a thorn in Flash Thompson’s side.
Flash joins Academic Decathlon because his dad tells him he should. He has a C on his first quarter transcript from AP Lit, and it’s almost enough to keep him from getting a seat on the team.
He suspects that Liz might have pulled a few strings.
Peter Parker is extended a personal invitation to join AcaDec by Mr. Harrington. He brings his friend Ned along.
Flash tries to shoot lasers through Peter’s glasses with his eyes.
Flash is nine, his name is Eugene, and his mom forgets his birthday.
It’s incredibly cliché.
It’s also not the last time.
There is a boy named Peter Parker, and he gets the worst haircuts. Flash can always tell when the day is near, because Peter’s curls will start to get too long to be contained by his cheap hair gel, and he’ll brush them back impatiently with his left hand, and by the following Monday the curls will be gone.
It’s annoying, is what it is. Distracting. Flash thinks about reporting the issue to Mr. Harrington before deciding the complaint might be bordering on the side of too petty to be taken seriously.
Instead, he asks Peter if he gets his hair cut at DollarClips.
Peter gives him an unimpressed look. His eyes are brown.
Flash is annoyed at himself for noticing.
Flash is four, his name’s Eugene, and his uncle just died of lung cancer.
He accidentally leaves the television on during one of Harrison’s work calls, and for the first time, he learns just how loud his father can be.
(Later, his dad holds Flash to his chest as broken-hearted sobs wrack his entire body.)
There is a boy named Peter Parker, and he’s really fucking smart.
He barely even has to try, not at Decathlon, not in calculus, not even in physics.
Flash is failing physics.
Harrison is upset about the fact that Flash is failing physics, despite the As he’s pulling in every other class—even AP Lit. His mom couldn’t care less either way.
Flash calls Peter “Puny Parker,” and the annoyed look and jab he gets in return distracts him from the fact that he hasn’t understood a word of the lecture on buoyancy.
“Hey Parker, what happened to your glasses? Couldn’t afford the monthly payments?”
“Ignore him,” Flash hears Ned whisper, and he bites back a grin.
They both know that Peter won’t.
That he can’t.
Everyone else is good at the whole “ignoring Flash” thing. Liz has been doing it since they were eight and nine years old. Flash suspects it would be easier to lift Thor’s hammer than it is to get a real rise out of Ned Leeds. The seniors—Gabe and Elise— don’t really talk to the rest of them, anyway.
Abe and Cindy just roll their eyes.
Not Parker, though. Flash doesn’t even have to needle him that hard.
“I was worried they’d break if I looked at your face again,” Peter says, flatly.
There’s a chorus of snickering and “oohs” from around the table. Liz calls them to order. Despite only being the deputy captain, she’s already perfected her evil eye.
“Greco-Roman literature,” she says, dryly, tapping the stack of flashcards against the table. “If we’re done acting like second graders.”
Peter turns pink.
“Sorry,” he mutters.
Flash says nothing.
He’s not sorry.
Flash Thompson is ten years old, and his name is still Eugene.
He’s looking at his parents' wedding pictures on the mantelpiece, and he thinks that in the twinkle of his mom’s eye and the softness of his dad’s reluctant smile, he can see the love.
He knows it’s there, because it comes back for a few months the year he turns eight. His dad is softer. His mom is home in the evenings. There are family dinners around the kitchen table and they take a trip to Florida just because, and when they get back Rose pulls Flash into a big hug and tells him that she’s pregnant.
“You’ll have a little sister,” she says, eyes brimming with tears. “Isn’t that exciting?”
And Flash nods, because it is, and his dad gives his shoulder a squeeze—the “right answer” squeeze—but his stomach sinks a little, too, upon realization that the love didn’t come back for him.
It’s for the baby.
The baby’s name is Jessie. Flash holds her in his eight-year-old arms and finds himself unable to look away, fascinated by her tiny fingers and tufts of dark hair.
He’s eight, and he hopes that the love will stick around. Even if it’s just for her.
He’s ten, and he’s searching for it again in the curve of his dad’s smile in the picture on the mantelpiece.
They’re partners in crime, Flash and Jessie.
She’s the highlight of his day all through elementary and middle school, back when he doesn’t talk all that much and his dad still won’t let him cut his hair shorter than his shoulders.
When she’s old enough to start babbling, Jessie learns his name first.
“Gene,” she calls him, and Flash doesn’t mind the sound of it so much when it’s spilling from behind her pearly baby teeth.
There is a boy.
His name is Peter Parker.
One night, his uncle is murdered.
Mr. Harrington gets up in front of the class, removes his glasses, and informs the twenty-three freshmen in front of him that Ben Parker’s funeral will be in two days.
There is an empty desk in the third row, right next to Ned Leeds.
Ned Leeds, who is staring at the floor. Ned Leeds, who hadn’t been in class yesterday.
Flash feels sick. He ditches Gerald and takes the bus home, craving, for some reason, a few extra minutes surrounded by his not-really-friends.
It ends up being a mistake. Liz is the only one willing to sit within ten feet of him. His dad gets pissed.
(When is he not?)
In an uncharacteristic moment of something that isn’t really bravery, Flash tells Harrison that without Gerald’s text, he wouldn’t have noticed if Flash was gone for a week.
His dad calls him an “ungrateful fucker.”
(Maybe he is.)
Banished to his room, Flash stares at the ceiling and thinks about the fact that Peter Parker would probably give anything for the chance to fight with his own dad, again.
Around midnight, he sneaks across the hall to Jessie’s, and the two of them tiptoe downstairs, where they watch Disney Channel reruns until she falls asleep in Flash’s lap.
Peter is back at school two weeks later.
The entire Academic Decathlon team treats him like glass.
Flash sucks at this shit, but he can’t help but notice that Ned Leeds—the only one of them with a real finger on Peter’s pulse— is trying to keep things light. He keeps tipping his phone toward Peter to show him memes, Star Wars threads on Twitter, any form of distraction, really.
Flash decides to take a gamble, because it wasn’t like Peter was ever a fan of his anyway, right?
“You get that shirt out of the garbage, Parker?”
It’s not his best work. The entire team holds their breath.
“I think it was your mom’s closet, actually,” Peter says, after a moment. His voice is scratchy.
It’s not his best work, either, but Flash decides to cut him some slack. Gives a half-hearted retort.
The back and forth puts a little color back in Peter’s ridiculously pale cheeks.
Flash is fifteen. His dad’s company is getting sued.
He doesn’t know the details, but he does know that it’s not looking good. Something about copyright infringement—the serious kind.
Harrison is a bottle of stress, fermenting into a bottle of anger most nights. Flash is good at keeping an eye on the pressure valve by the time he’s fifteen.
Rose calls from Paris to wish them a happy first day of school one week after the school year has already started, and Flash takes Jessie to the library just to get her a change of scenery for a few hours, because something about the thought (or is it a memory?) of a seven year old alone in that big, empty house from the end of school until dinner every day makes his mouth feel sour.
“What are you coloring?” he asks, leaning forward over his AP Gov reading.
“You,” Jessie says, hand hovering over the box of colored pencils. She pauses. “Are your eyes brown?”
“Yes,” Flash confirms. He glances at the misshapen circle on the paper in front of her. “You forgot my mustache.”
“You don’t have a mustache.”
He glares at her. She grins innocently back.
Flash Thompson doesn’t have any friends. He’s a dick and he knows he’s a dick, and that makes his dickish-ness a super power. When you’re just a dick, you don’t know what people are saying about you behind your back. When you’re a dick who knows you’re a dick, you choose the words in their mouths.
He’s a dick with no friends, is the point, but he does have a little sister with a smart mouth and it doesn’t matter that Flash has to get between her and his dad on more than one occasion, because when it’s her, he’s braver.
(Harrison never hits them. Either of them. Not once. It’s an important distinction, in Flash’s mind.)
He’s not a good role model, and that’s fine. He doesn’t take care of her or take her to school—that’s Gerald’s job.
But the lawsuit keeps heating up, and Harrison’s temper rides right along with it, and it doesn’t matter, because Jessie has Flash.
And Flash?
Flash has Spider-Man.
He can’t remember the first video he sees. He thinks it’s the one with the falling traffic light, but it could be the one with the two guys and the stolen electric scooter.
It doesn’t really matter. Flash has seen them all so many times that he’s committed them to memory.
It’s cheesy as hell, but Spider-Man inspires him. Spider-Man’s wins feel like personal wins, like if Spider-Man can stop a three-way car collision, Flash can get through his linear algebra test.
When Spider-Man accidentally blows up Mr. Delmar’s store, Flash is his loudest defender.
A boy named Peter Parker gives him an incredulous look, and it might be there that it—or, at least, the beginning of it—starts to fizzle out.
Flash Thompson could never make goo-goo eyes, even secret goo-goo eyes, at someone who doesn't respect Spider-Man.
“This is Michelle,” Liz says, smile bright. The new girl—Flash is fairly certain she’s in his gov class— gives them all a small, sarcastic wave.
They said they were looking for an alternate.
(Michelle is much, much too good to be an alternate.)
“I’m sorry, Flash,” Liz says, and she really does sound it.
Never mind the fact that Peter Parker skips practice twice a week for his “Stark Internship” and is failing Comparative Language, it’s Flash who gets bumped down.
He doesn’t care.
His dad will.
(Flash didn’t even want to join the stupid Academic Decathlon team.)
Flash is fourteen, his name is technically still Eugene—though, not for much longer—and he just got accepted into Midtown School of Science and Technology.
Harrison is proud. So proud that he takes a few days off, claiming that it’s “been a while since we took the boat out.”
They drive over five hours to Saranac, not because the lake has any particular advantages over those closer to home, but because it’s where Harrison had gone with his brother—the second half of “Thompson and Thompson”—back in the day, before he’d been diagnosed.
It’s a special place to Harrison, and Flash feels the weight of what it means to have it shared with him and cups that weight in his hands, trying desperately to keep it from spilling out from between the cracks in his fingers.
The sun is warm and it’s just the two of them, a father-son weekend, and Harrison laughs as Flash tries to get a too-small life jacket secured around his chest.
Flash learns how to drive the boat on that trip.
He chases the high of his dad’s hand settled reassuringly on his elbow— helping him steer— for years.
Peter Parker claims he knows Spider-Man.
Thompson and Thompson lose the lawsuit.
Flash gets drunk at Liz Toomes’s house party.
He feels good, better, at least, than he had at home, and he’s just getting the crowd warmed up when all of the sudden his music is cut and a moment later, someone is wrestling the microphone from his hands.
“Hey,” he tries, but it’s hard to keep his grip tight with the alcohol pulsing through his system.
“You’re done, Flash,” a voice says.
It’s Liz. She sounds annoyed. More annoyed than she normally does when it comes to him.
“I was just—”
“Leading a chant comparing one of our teammates to a dick?” Liz snaps. “You were just done, actually.”
“You can’t seriously think he’s actually bringing Spider-Man—”
“No,” Liz agrees, grabbing him by the arm to steer him away from the music controls. “I don’t think he is.”
They stop in the entryway of the living room, and Flash shrugs his arm out of her grip. His breath feels uneven and he spends a moment forcing the oxygen in and out of his lungs, not looking at her.
“Flash,” she says, quietly, “Is everything okay?”
He shuts his eyes. Breathes in.
(Harrison Thompson built so much from nothing, and Flash can’t even keep his spot on the Academic Decathlon team.)
“Everything’s fine.”
“Are you—”
“I said everything’s fine, Liz. Shouldn’t you be with your girlfriend? I think I saw her come in.”
Liz blanches, then narrows her eyes. Her voice is frosty. “You’re out of line, Thompson.”
Before Flash can respond, a crash sounds from the living room.
“Fuck,” Liz mutters. She looks back at him. “Don’t go anywhere. I’m cutting you off. And possibly kicking you out.”
Flash doesn’t want to go home. Not yet.
He slips into the hallway as soon as her back is turned, only to find someone already there.
Flash Thompson’s first real friend—not including Liz, who’s only his friend because their dads are friends—is a boy named Andrew.
His second is a girl named Michelle.
Michelle—MJ, she tells him to call her, is fascinating.
She’s a bit scary, too, in the sense that she can see right through him. There’s no use pretending around MJ Watson— she’s got a bullshit detector built into her nose and gives absolutely no fucks about calling it out when she smells it.
She smells it on Flash all the damn time.
“So what’s the deal?” she asks one day, over their chemistry assignments. “This thing with Parker? Is it like, a homoerotic, co-dependent friendship gone wrong? Used and abused feelings, and now you hate each other’s guts?”
Flash snorts. “There’s only one person in this world who gets to claim a co-dependent, bordering on homoerotic friendship with Peter Parker.”
MJ grins, no doubt also remembering the fucking fantastic fedora adorning one Ned Leeds’s head at Liz’s party a few nights ago.
“Alright,” she says, “What is it, then?”
Flash shrugs. “No fucking clue.”
“To be fair,” she says, selecting a new fine-tip marker from her bag, “His bod’s rockin’. I get it.”
“His bod’s not rocking.”
MJ squints at him. “You’re a confusing guy, Flash Thompson.”
Spider-Man saves him in Washington D.C.
It fucking rocks.
Rose doesn’t answer the phone. Neither does Harrison. He calls Gerald, instead, and gets to talk to Jessie for a few minutes before she has to go to bed.
Jessie loves Spider-Man. She probably loves Spider-Man because Flash loves Spider-Man, but that doesn’t really matter. She “oohs” and “ahhs” at the appropriate places in the story, and the day is pretty much perfect.
Until he remembers that Peter Parker had skipped out on the competition to go sight-seeing.
Back in the hotel room he’s sharing with Abe, Flash thinks about his dad’s hand on his elbow, about how Peter clearly doesn’t even want his Academic Decathlon spot.
He falls asleep seething.
Harrison makes Flash get a job to help pay for the car that Spider-Man wrecks at homecoming, appearances be dammed. Flash doesn’t know how to explain that it was literally Spider-Man, dad. What was I supposed to do?
Apparently, he was supposed to stay in the car and call the cops, not get out of the car and immediately post on his story that holy shit, spider-man just commandeered my audi.
“That’s what you get for trying to cosplay as a straight guy,” MJ teases. "Now you get to cosplay as a poor guy." Flash flips her off.
The place he works is called “Crazy Cones,” and they make them wear stupid visors and say “Welcome to Crazy Cones, can I whip up something wacky for you today?” to every customer that walks through the door.
“You got any plans tonight?” his co-worker, Josh asks, one Friday.
Flash shrugs. Jessie wants to see the new Disney movie. He’s not going to tell Josh that his plans involve hanging out with his eight-year-old sister. “Not sure yet,” he says, instead.
“Well,” Josh says, with a shrug that looks a little too forced to be casual, “me and some buddies were planning on going to the Oasis, if you’re interested.”
His dad’s rule is that he’s supposed to be home by ten.
Flash is kissing a boy in a car outside of Oasis Arcade and Bowling at one thirty-five.
“I’m sorry for getting some while you’re sad.”
MJ throws a pencil at him. “I’m not sad.”
“Your girlfriend’s dad turned out to be a giant robot bird, and then she split town. You’re not sad?”
“Not my girlfriend.”
Flash shrugs. “Fine.”
“How pissed was your dad?”
“He didn’t even notice I was gone,” Flash lies. MJ narrows her eyes.
“How was lunch with your mom?” he volleys back. Two can play this game.
She purses her lips, stands up, and leaves the library.
There is a boy named Peter Parker. He’s annoying and a flake, and Flash doesn’t think about him all that much anymore.
Betty Brant invites Flash to her end-of-year pool party. He’s pretty sure the invite only is extended courtesy of Betty’s friendship with MJ, and he debates whether or not he should skip out of spite.
He spends almost an hour getting ready.
“It’s just going to get wet,” Jessie informs him, amused by the amount of effort he’s putting into his hair.
“You don’t actually swim at a pool party,” Flash tells her, tone condescending.
“How would you know?” she shoots back.
He wouldn’t. And he’s wrong, anyway— the only one who doesn’t get in the water at some point is MJ.
It’s a good time. Peter Parker leaves halfway through, some “Stark internship emergency,” and Flash just flips him off as he goes.
“Good show of restraint there,” MJ says, dryly.
She’s not as good of an actor as she thinks she is, not to Flash, anyway, and it’s been seven months since Liz Toomes got on a plane to Oregon.
Her eyes track Peter as he towels off and gets his shirt back on, and there’s no spike of jealousy or flare of envy in Flash’s chest.
He gets it, though.
Peter Parker’s got a rockin’ bod.
There is still a bottle of anger prowling the hallway outside Flash’s room, some nights. He still has to swallow his words and sit with the familiar burn of them in his stomach. At school, he still talks first, still does his best to keep everyone’s eyes on his mouth.
But now, sometimes, when the night is especially bad, he calls MJ and they discuss whatever underground band she’s currently fixated on until he’s tired enough to fall asleep.
Sometimes, he kisses Josh in the back room of Crazy Cones, and his stomach burns in a different way.
His little sister is old enough, now, to hold her own—at least partially— during those weeks when Harrison randomly pivots from unaware the two of them exist to intensely invested in every intricacy of their lives. She’s all skin and teeth, and sometimes, Flash doesn’t feel as guilty about leaving her home alone on the rare occasions that someone from AcaDec other than MJ invites him to hang out with the group.
He’s still a dick who knows he’s a dick.
But sometimes it’s by accident, now, rather than on purpose.
Flash is seventeen, his name is completely, one hundred percent Flash, and he’s holding his little sister’s hand.
Something’s going on downtown, but this is New York City in the age of the Avengers. There’s always some shit going on downtown.
A couple of aliens aren’t even enough for Harrison to leave work, but they are enough for Flash’s field trip to the MoMa to get rescheduled and for Jessie’s school to cancel class.
He’s seventeen. He’s holding Jessie’s hand. He’s explaining to her in excruciatingly specific detail how, exactly, Spider-Man had webbed right by their bus as he drags her up the too-long driveway of their too-big house.
And then the hand in his is turning to dust.
Somehow, beneath Flash’s abject terror and violent need to throw up, his last thought is the memory of Saranac Lake and Harrison’s hand, steady on his elbow.