Chapter Text
Benjiman Parker dies mid-flight, wings extended, a stern smile stiffening his lips. He’s gunned down and Peter can do nothing but stumble gracelessly, hands outstretched and reaching for something he cannot properly name or grasp.
His uncle collapses onto his knees and Peter follows suit, not knowing what (if anything) he is supposed to do in this situation.
“Shit – fuck! Fuck, fuck—”
“What did you do?!”
“I didn’t mean to do jack shit is what!”
The sound of his heartbeat beats like the errant drums in the shells of his ears, drowning out almost everything else. He can hear Ben’s slowing heart, that steady pulse stuttering into something frail and meager. He doesn’t need to press his fingers to the soft flesh of his uncle’s inner wrist to know he’s dying (that his heart is stilling) but he does so anyway, stupidly thinking that just once, just this once, that his enhanced senses are wrong, because—
“—rid of any witnesses.”
“You don’t mean…”
Peter feels the cool contour of a muzzle pressing against the side of his head and before he can react, there’s a pop and a twinge of heat before his vision fades to black.
When he comes to, his tongue is glued to the roof of his mouth and there’s something sticky plastered to the side of his face. He blinks roughly, clamping his eyes shut tightly before squinting suspiciously at his surroundings. There’s pavement below his fingertips, coarse and grainy. He groans before climbing to his knees and weakly maneuvering onto his elbows, saliva like dried cement tainted with the slightest hints of copper.
He huffs.
It’s early morning, he drily notes. The alley he is in is horribly narrow and tall, dyed in various depictions of crude gestures and bulbous names. There are several cans of unkempt trash piled high as though they have been ignored for the better part of a month (a feat that is unsurprising considering just where he thinks he is) and the stone walkway is riddled with potholes and—
Abruptly, his train of thought derails.
He collapses to his knees and scampers forwards on his hands and knees, uncaring of how they scrape across the pavement or dampen with that same viscous liquid he now knows is blood. His hands hover uncertainly over the still chest of his uncle, afraid (terrified in all honesty) that he might only inflict more harm than good – that he will only make matters infinitely worse.
In the backmost corners of his brain (the cynical parts that he keeps carefully locked away), he knows he is already too late. He cannot hear nor feel a pulse and he tries desperately to narrow his focus, to just see this one man. The results leave him numb to the touch. Benjiman Parker has long since gone cold, eyes narrowed on a distant cloud, unseeing. His skin has gone pale, not unlike that of a mime caught in the midst of an act.
He’d failed, again.
Failure, Peter thinks a touch hysterically, tastes a bit like sour apple.
He clambers to his feet and tries to breathe.
Watching his uncle die once was enough to break him. Watching it a second time?
Peter faintly realizes that he is clenching his fists hard enough for his own bones to groan in protest. He unflexes his fingers, clinically retracting each finger from his palm with a dazed sort of focus. The wounds from his nails are already healing. He wonders, idly, if a bullet to the head would invoke the same reaction.
He touches his face, noting how his naked palm comes away red.
That is his uncle’s blood. Or his own. Or whoever had mugged them. Peter doesn’t know, nor does he particularly care.
Right.
He should probably contact May, get in touch with her, tell her the news.
(That Benjiman Parker, her husband, is dead and her ditz of a nephew somehow survived.)
Except he has no phone or wallet. He needs—
One of his shoes scuffs the concrete and he pauses, freezes for a second of a second. It’s like he’s playing tug of war with himself – pulled in two opposing directions by twin forces, both equally as vicious and frightfully insatiable. He needs to find someone, anyone, and call May, or the authorities. But he can’t just leave Ben there, splayed like some bug on display, in some backwater alley in the depths of one of the most dangerous cities known to man.
But he can’t just disturb a crime scene, not because he can’t bear to leave his (dead) loved one in a place so dank and dark it would give the deepest depths of hell a run for its money.
Swallowing hard, Peter bends down and picks Ben up. The deadweight of his virtual father nearly brings him to his knees. He’s careful not to disturb the shell casings pockmarking the narrow alley and huffs at himself, ignoring how the breath stutters in his lungs. He can deal with the consequences later, he decides.
There are only a few onlookers going about their business this early in the morning and they gawk at him as he exits the decrepit alleyway. Some raise their phones, as if he were performing an act.
(He wants to cry and scream.)
Those few onlookers avoid him like the plague, parting like the Red Sea. They quicken their steps and hasten on by, looking partly curious and worse of all, pitying. (If there is one emotion Peter hates the most, it is pity.) He’s careful to shield the majority of Ben’s face but he can do nothing about the blood painting his face nor the stains debossing his chest and slacks. He can do nothing but glare and glower like a dog without its maw.
He enters the first store he finds. Ironically, it is a Bodega, though not one he recognizes.
“Oh, my god,” says a young woman when she looks up from the counter. She’d been counting pennies. She rushes around the corner of the counter, coming to Peter’s side and she’s oddly tall considering how rail-thin she turns out to be. “Is he—”
The cynical quarter of his brain knows he is dissociating; has been ever since he’d first laid eyes on the cooling corpse of his father figure.
“Um,” he says.
“MANNY!”
An overweight man hurtles through the back doors, looking thoroughly hunted. “Yeah, yeah, what is it Tulip?” The man is panting and then he looks at Peter, who’s just staring numbly back and what happens to be wrapped in his arms. “¡Por Dios!”
Immediately he’s sprinting at them.
They can’t manage to pry Peter’s fingers from Ben’s still body. Eventually, the girl is pacing somewhere to his right, talking to someone (the police, his mind supplies) in rapid fire Spanish. Manny, or so he’s been called, has taken to merely scooting near Peter (when did he sit?) and resting two fingers against Ben’s jugular, likely searching for a pulse.
“He’s dead,” Peter says when Manny presses his fingers against Ben’s throat harder, as if he has somehow missed the telltale thrum of life in his deceased uncle. He has not. “He was shot,” he continues when Manny only shoots him a glance. The man reluctantly draws his fingers away, looking miserable.
Peter wants to reassure the man that, really, he did the best he could given the circumstances.
(Then Peter wants to devolve into peals of laughter, because his uncle is dead again and it’s all his fault.)
(When will Peter Parker learn? When will he learn that the very thing he preaches, applies just the same to him?)
Soon, the medics arrive and the EMTS have to work around Peter because nothing short of The Jaw of Life will separate Peter from his uncle. They call in his aunt and there are police surrounding him and speaking to him but he hears none of it. All he can hear the dull roar of his own pulsing heart and the distinct lack of one other.
Then the perfume hits him like a vibranium fist to the gut and his head whips to the left, where one police officer is speaking lowly to him (perhaps in effort to calm his blissfully empty mind. Do they think him mad with grief? Should he be? Do they think him a suspect? He would, if he were in their shoes, which he is not), and directly over his shoulder is the entrance to the Bodega. An unfamiliar face greets him but he knows that scent anywhere. Ben had gifted it to her on their third wedding anniversary as a sort of gag gift. It’d backfired completely because not a day later May had been sporting a stylish new necklace and a brand-new perfume, fresh off the shelves of some teenage grunge hideout.
“Aunt May?”
Her face is splotchy and pinched in ways that clearly depict her grief.
“Peter, baby,” is all she says before she’s sliding to the floor beside the officer. Her voice is wet and choked. It’s obvious she’d been in a rush to get here, judging from the jacket she’d thrown on and the hastily knotted sweatpants she’s wearing. She nudges the officer out the way and wraps her arms around him, vice-like and tight. She runs her hands through both his hair and Uncle Ben’s.
For a single moment in time, Peter doesn’t know what to do.
“Aunt May,” he repeats, monotonous. “He’s dead.” He looks her in the eye, withdrawing enough to accomplish his goal without disturbing Ben. “I killed him. It’s my fault.”
Those in hearing range freeze but Aunt May just gives him a watery smile and pulls him in for a desperate hug. Her fingers dig into the fabric of his coat, almost punishing with how hard her nails press into his back but he knows (in that cynical, clinical manner) that she is only grounding him – that she is tethering him back into this plane of existence before he leaves it entirely (would he leave? Could he? Perhaps if Mary were not around or May, he might).
She draws back, hands gently caressing his own where they are pressed against Ben’s forearm and knee. Her eyes do not waver from his own, and perhaps she cannot bear to see her husband dead and lifeless clutched in the hands of her one nephew, but Peter likes to think that for one dizzying moment, nothing truly exists (not the EMTs or the police or Ben, dead in his arms) and that it’s just them.
“You know that’s not true, Pete, you know it isn’t.”
“C’mon son, lets go,” says an officer, gesturing to his unrelenting grasp on his uncle.
The numbing poison of dissociation begins to bleed from him in a slow trickle. He blinks and registers May’s hands cradling his own. They’re smooth, uncalloused, thin and fragile in comparison to the rebar he has twisted like putty in his hands before as a gift for Fisk’s henchmen upon their arrival to another eviscerated warehouse and ruined shipment. They twine in between his own and the rumpled fabric of Ben’s overcoat, kindly peeling away his fingers until they are cocooned between her own.
“C’mere,” is all she has to say before he’s lunging into her arms, sobbing hysterically.
“Ben’s dead, Ben’s dead, Uncle Ben is dead—”
“Yes,” May says after a long second, clutching him close to her breast as if in promise. “And it wasn’t your fault, Peter.”
The EMTs are fitting a c-collar around his uncle’s neck and hollering his given name, and the sight is almost humorous enough to dredge up a plastic smile as the backmost parts of his crumbling psyche bellow incoherently, something about knowing when to quit. Peter can’t summon the will or stomach to even listen as they bark orders at one another, exchanging equipment with nary a comment or whispered instruction.
Aunt May pushes to her feet, dragging him with her. Her hug tightens. Absently, he wonders if the act could inflict actual damage if he weren’t a… mutant (that is what they call his kind, yes?), but just the notion of her unwittingly harming him causes him to almost physically recoil.
He dismisses the outlandish concept without hesitation, instead wrapping his arms around her in return.
He was thinking about something else beforehand, wasn’t he? Something important.
Ben.
He was thinking about his Uncle Ben, hadn’t he been?
Guilt is a familiar commodity to him. He’s never been without his patented martyr complex – never without the ugly shame that seethes below his skin much like a topical balm he’s grown allergic to. This crushing culpability is the very staple of his character, a constant that does not change in the face of Spider-Man or Peter Parker. It stalked his very existence, hovering like a scorned lover across his slumped shoulders, always reminding him of the fact that Peter Parker is nothing more than a killer, a murderer, a blatant sycophant—
May inhales deeply through her nose and says: “Don’t you think for one second that you’re the cause of this, Pete.”
He wants to argue, to disagree, but they are standing less than a meter from her dead husband and he realizes suddenly that this woman (his aunt and mother in all but blood) is grieving too. And up until now, he has been making this solely about him, about his guilt and not the agony that is surely surging like bile in the bowels of her heart.
Her husband is dead and here he is, sniffling into her shoulder as if he’s just lost his parents again, a frantic toddler with no family to speak of.
“Aunt May,” he says, gripping her tight. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so, so—”
Her voice cracks down the middle when she says: “There’s nothing to be sorry for, baby.”