Work Text:
Piper rises from her bed, gasping and clutching at the sheets beneath her, her fingers practically tearing a hole in the fabric—oh wait, she wiggles her fingers and finds that the XL Twin lavender sheets May had gotten her as a college gift are punctured, the knit stuck around her knuckles.
Piper frees her fingers from the sheets and then as gently as possible, she gently lifts the bare arm around her shoulders and peels her sweat covered back from the muscled chest pressed into her. She holds her breath until she manages her escape without waking Harley who is blissfully unaware of her nightmares. He sleeps, smiling, the hint of the cutest little dimple on his cheek. She silently wishes for his dream to be of life saving tech, super hero assisting, and potato guns.
Piper fights the urge to return to Harley’s warm embrace and return to sleep. Instead, she grabs the blanket at the foot of the bed and wraps it around herself, walking to the window. There, in the dim lights of the campus streetlamp, she can see her tear streaked reflection, her eyes full and glassy, ready to flood.
She presses her lips together and holds in the tears. This has become an old practice for her now that she’s in quiet Cambridge, not noisy midtown New York City and she really doesn’t want to explain the quiet induced night terrors to Gwen, her roommate. They had frequented most nights since she got to school.
Piper thought she was over her fear of quiet—she spent an entire summer before senior year in much more silent places than Cambridge, Massachusetts, but she’d had the small comfort of MJ’s snoring and Betty’s sleep talking. Gwen, on the other hand, sleeps silently. Harley does too apparently, though this is their first sleepover after spending the last few weeks of her summer and the first few weeks of his fall semester sneaking into FRIDAY’s blind spots for quick kisses and Piper lying about her whereabouts to hang out in his dorm.
Though the connection between them was immediate, Piper fears her dad won’t take the news of their entanglement so well. She’s desperate to keep it between the two of them for now, and she’s only gotten better at keeping secrets. She hasn’t even told Ned and MJ.
Across the room, Harley’s breath changes. It’s small, but Piper’s enhanced hearing catches it quickly. She watches him carefully to see if he’ll fall back asleep but his hands search the bed for her and when he doesn’t find her, his eyes flutter open.
Piper swipes at her eyes in attempt to cover up the crying. “Go back to sleep.”
Seeing the dismay in her face, he ignores her command and gets up to join her at the window. “You’re crying.” He reaches a hand to touch her face but she flinches away.
“I had a bad dream,” she admits.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No,” she says cooly, even icy, though she doesn’t mean to come off so harsh. She just knows she can’t. Harley, like the rest of the world now, may know that she’s Tony Stark’s daughter, but he still doesn’t know about her powers and her mask. That is a secret she’s sure she won’t share until she’s one hundred percent sure about him.
She presses her fingers to the bridge of her nose with a shake of her head. She can feel a stress vein forming down the center of her forehead. “I’m sorry, Harley, I didn’t mean to snap, it’s just not something that’s easy to talk about.”
He takes her hand away from her face and holds it in his, his fingers threading through hers, their palms touching. It somehow feels more intimate than everything else they’ve done together earlier in the night.
“No need to apologize, I just thought it might help to talk. You know, you can share anything with me.”
She turns away and slides her fingers from him, pulling her arm under the warmth of her blanket. She presses her lips together as they subside to quiet for far too long. “It’s the quiet here,” she admits and she thinks she’s going to burst out with the story, but instead, she tries to find a way to tell him without giving him her secrets.
“When I came back from the blip, I was…” she almost tells him she was with her dad, but she learned soon after her return that the whole world waited with bated breath to see if Tony Stark would return from Titan. Everyone knew where he was when half the population vanished into thin air. “I was with someone who wasn’t snapped. We were…” she thinks of a place that’s as deadly silent as Titan, somewhere that could rival the quiet of a demolished planet. “We were camping in the dessert and when I came back, I was completely alone. No transportation, no one else to help me get home. I thought I was going to die.” Her lungs freeze, remembering the fear, recalling the moment she’s been forced to relive night after night since starting school.
Of course, there are good nights. Sometimes there are parties, or Gwen stays up late studying. Sometimes, she convinces Gwen to leave the TV on while they sleep, though it’s a hard sell because Gwen believes in unplugging everything at the end of every day and that silent sleep helps your brain recall memory.
Maybe that’s the problem. Instead of forming memories around all the new information she learned at school for the day, maybe her brain is just recalling one memory over and over. It makes Piper think about her grades, about how she’s struggling to retain C’s in most of her classes. She assumed it’s because she’s tired and unfocused due to lack of sleep, but maybe, even the sleep she is getting is erasing all the important stuff.
“That sounds really scary,” Harley whispers. “I can’t even imagine…” He can’t. He wasn’t dusted. Piper tries really hard not to resent the part of him that can’t understand her the way May, Ned, and MJ do. It’s the same amount of effort she puts into not holding it against her dad, Pepper, and Morgan for continuing to live their lives after she was gone.
She works really hard to shove irrational feelings into a box.
“Like I said, I don’t really want to talk about it.”
“Right, not with me.” He takes a step closer. She stays absolutely still, eyes watching, waiting to see what he’ll do. “Have you thought about talking to a therapist about this?”
Caught off guard, Piper snorts. “Are you serious? A therapist?”
“Why is that funny?”
She gazes at him, inquisitive, careful. He’s so naive, it makes her heart throb and want to pull him close, wrap her arms around him and build him a protective shield over him. “Harley, my life is comprised of life experiences that are highly classified. Anything I’d want to share with a therapist could get me in trouble with my dad, with the company’s board members, or with the government.”
“A therapist can’t share your personal information,” he argues.
Piper presses her lips together. Nothing she can say could make him understand. Especially when she can’t tell him that she wouldn’t dream of telling a therapist that she was Spider Bite before she tells him.
“Can we go back to sleep, please?” She presses. “You have a long drive in the morning and it’s not safe if you’re both exhausted.”
Harley’s lips curl in. He’s not ready to end the conversation but Piper has made it clear that the talk is over. They retreat to bed and return to their positions, his arms holding her tight against his chest, his legs pressed against hers, his breath hot on her neck.
It’s not long before she can hear his breathing go from short and shallow to long and deep and she knows he’s returned to sleep.
The weeks continue on and there is no reprieve from her restless nights until Gwen invites her out. She must see Piper’s desperate need for a break from studying and late nights awake in bed, so she invites her to a party.
It’s not really Piper’s scene, but she gives her best attempt at fitting in. The problem is, alcohol doesn’t affect Piper like everyone else. She knows this, she’d tried to party a handful of times in high school and even when she kept up with everyone else’s drinking, she never even got a buzz.
Tonight, she actually tries though. When Gwen takes a shot, she takes two. When She joins a group for a game of pong, she makes sure her cups are doubly filled. When no one is looking, she grabs for a bottle and adds extra to her plastic cup. She tells herself that this is normal, that she’s just trying to have a normal college experience.
She gets a slight buzz and she knows she’s doing something right so she keeps going. She drinks so much that even her high rate metabolism cannot stop her from getting drunk. When her and Gwen hobble back to their dorm later in the night, and she lays her head on her pillow, she passes out without a second thought.
She doesn’t wake up until late afternoon.
So she does it again. She asks Gwen if she knows any other parties going on and the blonde looks at her like she has three heads but tells her about one anyway and joins her out. There, Piper starts to make friends, exchange numbers, talk to the right people so she doesn’t have to bother Gwen for plans every single night.
It’s not hard for her to make friends—not like it used to be. Even if she’s awkward, people are eager to be friends with the newly revealed daughter of Tony Stark. The can hide it under the guise of making connections for a future career, but she knows it’s mostly out of intrigue.
It doesn’t bother her, though. It gives her access to parties, to drinking, to making it through the night without nightmares.
But it’s not really sleeping.
It doesn’t matter if she closes her eyes at night and peels herself up when the sun is up. It’s passing out. It’s resting her eyes. It’s bad enough that the rate she needs to drink to get there puts her in bed between four and six hours of when she needs to get up—give or take depending on the day.
To her, it’s better though. She can no longer get a clear picture of it because she’s constantly hungover, she’s behind in her classes, and even Gwen isn’t speaking to her much.
One night, she goes to a floor party in a Harvard dorm and stumbles back, only slightly tipsy. She comes home to find Gwen already asleep and she throws herself down in her bed. A phone notification pops up on her screen.
She groans when she sees a reminder for a biology test in the morning—early. She knows, not having had enough to put her out, she won’t be able to get even a drop of sleep. She feels like she’s failing—failing herself, failing her family, failing school—failing everything. This new pattern is not sustaining her and she can’t imagine one more night of soundless nightmares on a loop.
Her eyes drooping, head lolling towards her pillow, she sends a text that she won’t remember in the morning.
Not even when Gwen shakes her awake.
She sees a flash of blonde and realizes it’s because Gwen is turned away from her, her nose rubbing against her shirt—politely letting Piper knows that she smells.
Piper pushes herself up and rubs the sleep out of her eyes. It’s the worse sleep she’s ever gotten because not only did the nightmares come back, but this time she was unable to get out of them—paralyzed in her own hellscape.
“Um, Piper?” Gwen’s eyes shift back and forth.
“Something wrong,” she asks with a yawn.
“Yeah, kind of.” She glances off to the door. “Pepper Potts and your aunt are here.”
There is a sobering jolt of electricity that runs through Piper’s body. She taps on her phone screen and finds a response to her text along with eight missed calls from both Pepper and May.
Piper looks over herself and sees that she’s still in last night’s jeans and tank top. She reaches up to her hair and finds it stringy and greasy and if she didn’t change out of her clothes, she knows the tiny bits of mascara she’d put on to try and make her eyes look less dull is probably smeared across her face.
There is no hope at attempting to make this look like anything other than it is—a bad morning after a bad night, after a terrible month.
Piper slinks to the door and cautiously pulls it open. The two women on the other side look like royalty compared to Piper’s state. They also look disappointed.
“Oh, Piper,” May frowns at the sight of her.
Meanwhile, Pepper sucks a breath through in her nose and tells her, “Get dressed and clean yourself up, Piper.” She closes the door behind her, sits down at the desk and crosses her legs. May, hovering near the door, lifts a hand to uncomfortably greet Gwen and apologizes under her breath.
Without missing a beat, Piper scrambles for her things and as quickly as she can, escapes to the shower.
Even when she comes back clean and polished, she can’t hide the heavy bags around her eyes, the paleness under her lucid skin, or the red blotches across her face. It’s even more obvious now than it had been when Harley had visited that she is unwell.
Wordlessly, Pepper has her follow her and May out to the road where a car is waiting. Piper finds a small relief that Happy is not there to witness her full on breakdown but she’s also not thrilled that the driver is some stranger in this private moment. It makes the car ride even more uncomfortable because they cannot say a word in front of him.
He drops them off at a diner not even a minute down the road from school. She’s never been to the place, but she’s sure Pepper has done her research—just as she can be sure Pepper spent the three and a half hour car ride up to Massachusetts doing research into Piper’s life—and as a woman who is CEO of a billion dollar tech company, and whose finances are combined with the person funding Piper’s education, that gives her a lot of access.
They sit down and wit for the server to leave.
“Do you want to start, or should one of us start?” Pepper and May are sitting on the same side of a booth to present a united front, but May looks as intimated by Pepper as Piper feels.
Piper swallows a lump in her throat. Her mouth is dry and cottony. She desperately wants the server to return with water, but no amount of hydration will make this conversation any more comfortable. In her shower, she recalled what she had texted Pepper at three in the morning, and now sober, she thinks maybe her intoxicated self had been onto something.
“I should come home,” she tells Pepper. Being home would fix her problems. She’d be able to sleep, she’d have her support system around, she’d be able to consult a number of experts employed by Stark Industries when she didn’t understand her homework. It is an obvious to solution.
“You’re not coming home,” Pepper says, firm, but a little softer in her tone. She tucks her lips together, turns to May and offers her a nod of encouragement.
Piper looks to May for support and instead finds her aunt agreeing with Pepper. “I’m not sure what’s going on Piper, but coming home is not the solution, addressing the drinking is.”
“The drinking?” Piper rests her elbows on the table and buries her face in her hands. The cold of her skin feels so good on her tired eyes, that her muscles ache when she slides her hands down the length of her face and into her lap. “No, the drinking is not a problem—it’s just a—it’s—I,” she stammers, searching for the answer, but what could she say that doesn’t make her sound like a copy of her dad’s old diatribe.
It’s a temporary solution? It’s an answer to the actual problem? It’s not a big deal? All three of them have heard those words slide so easily out of Tony’s mouth. If she doesn’t stop herself, they’ll come out of hers just as easily.
Piper glances around. The diner is pretty empty but she isn’t sure why this conversation has to happen in public. She’s one move from bursting out into tears. She’s already got a thin layer of sweat on her forehead and a headache that rivals her concussion after a bad hit from Thanos.
Her voice is barely more than a whisper when she says, “It’s too quiet here.”
Her eyes meet Pepper’s, searching for some recognition of what she means. Once, she had said a similar sentiment to Pepper, and her step-mother had jumped into action, making amendments to the family’s living situation in order to fix the problem.
This time, Pepper’s lashes flutter shut for a moment, before her head tilts and the corners of her mouth turn downward. “Piper, you cannot sleep in Stark Tower with your window cracked open, for the rest of your life.”
Piper exhales in disbelief. “Why not? I’m going to inherit the company eventually. Plus, even if I move out, I’ll still be living in the city. I’ll just leave school now, and I’ll apply to a school in New York for next fall.”
May looks between Pepper and Piper. Piper has never verbalized what the quiet does to her—not to anyone, but it’s something that Pepper seemed to get instantly. May seems genuinely confused.
“I’m sorry, Piper,” Pepper’s frown deepens, “but that’s not a solution. What about vacations? What about business trips? Do you think your dad spent half your childhood in other countries exclusively for fun? You will have to face the quiet eventually. Now, we will get you help, resources, tutors, therapy, whatever you need, but you are not dropping out a month and a half into school.”
“You sound like you’ve been talking to Harley,” Piper mumbles.
Pepper stares her down, unflinching.
“You have been talking to Harley? How did you even know?”
“Nothing happens in my building that I don’t know about.”
Piper turns to find May in unsurprised either. Of course they’d talked about it. They had a whole car ride—plus, Piper is pretty sure they text each other daily. It’s a friendship that warms her heart yet chills her to the bone.
“Does dad know?”
“About us coming here?” May straightens out in her seat. “Yes.”
“About Harley,” continues Pepper, “absolutely not. I like to keep tabs on you, not give your father ammunition to throw tantrums.”
There’s some relief in that, but not much. She’s surprised there are only missed calls and texts from Pepper and May and that her dad didn’t have FRIDAY call her on rotation all night until she picked up. If there’s one person who can out-insomnia Piper, it’s her dad.
The server comes back with their waters and takes their orders.
May reaches across the table and puts her fingertips against Piper’s arm. “You cannot be drinking anymore,” she says.
“It’s not a problem,” Piper stresses. “Plus, it’s unbelievably hard for me to get a buzz.” Yet she’d been managing much more than that for weeks. Still, she knows if she wants to stop, she can. She feels like crap anyway. Four nights in a row have put her in a place where she never wants to drink again anyway.
“Maybe it’s not a problem yet, but it will be.”
“May—“
“No, do not try and talk yourself out of this. I will not sit by and watch you depend on substances the way your dad did to hide away from what he was really feeling. Even if it takes you drinking ten times as much to feel something, you have to be ten times as careful with everything you take. Do you understand me?”
And she does, because the look across May’s face is truly fearful. She’s terrified that Piper will turn out like her father in the worst ways. It’s a fear she’s had since given the task of raising Piper when Tony wasn’t yet up for the job. She knew how to prepare for the parts of Piper that were Mary, and the pieces of her that Richard had instilled. She’d always feared for the day that Tony Stark’s traits would rear their head and worried how she’d handle them.
That being said, she hoped desperately, she was doing it right.
“I get it,” she concedes.
The food comes and Piper who had been barely awake ordering, is pleased to see she’d ordered right when a sandwich on a waffle appeared before her. Her first bite tells her that it’s perfect hangover food. She can practically feel the remnants of alcohol getting sucked up by all the starch.
Pepper locates the waitress and lets her know they’ll be taking another two sandwiches to go.
Piper with a mouth full, raises her eyebrows at Pepper over the sandwich.
“They’re not both for you,” she explains. “I’m worried about your dad’s blood pressure and if I can convince him that vegan substitutes are just as good, it’ll bring me some peace of mind now that I have to worry a little extra about you.”
With her mouth full Piper looks at the food. “This is all vegan?”
“See, he won’t even know until he’s done eating and then he won’t be able to argue with me.”
Later that night, when Pepper and May have gone, and Piper is waiting for Gwen to get back to apologize for her recent behavior, she gets a call. When she sees her dad’s name light up her phone screen, she’s not sure she wants to answer. With a silent little pep talk, a big breath, and a whole lot of courage, she answers.
She hears his breath on the other end of the phone. It sounds calm and even—not at all what she expected, but she stays wary, stays alert. He can switch at any wrong move.
“Hi,” she speaks tentatively into the phone.
“You good?”
She rubs her hand up and down her wrist, trying to sooth herself. He doesn’t sound angry. Then again, he hasn’t been as quick to anger since she got back—since Morgan probably.
“Not great, actually,” she admits, hoping by showing her weakness, he’ll take some pity on her. “Pepper and May think I can do this, but I’m not so sure.”
“One thing I’ve learned over the years, is that Pepper and May aren’t usually wrong.”
A breathy laugh escapes Piper’s lips and enters the void between phones. Her dad hears how lifeless the laugh sounds, even over the sounds of Morgan playing while watching television.
“I thought you’d come.”
“If you had wanted me to, you’d have reached out to me, instead of Pepper, which is how I know you don’t really want to come home.”
“I do,” Piper insists, close to her breaking point, “and I might not have a choice. The semester just started and my grades are already declining.” Her hand slides the length of her face, her knees pull up into her chest and she wiggles back against her pillow. She stares at the hole she’d left in her sheets. It wasn’t as big as it seemed when she woke up in the night, but it definitely couldn’t be repaired. Tiny little threads hung lose. If a single strand pulled, she’d unravel the entire thing.
“Look, you leave the grades thing to me—“
“Dad, this isn’t patrol gone wrong where you can swoop in and finish off the bad guys for me.”
“No, it’s not. This isn’t a superhero issue. This is a human issue. One I’m going to help you fix, the same way any other parent would. Look, kiddo, I know you want to come home, and if Pepper weren’t my voice of reason, I’d have flown up to you in a suit and helped you move out of the dorm today, but that wouldn’t make any of this go away, and it wouldn’t make it any better.”
She wants to tell him that it would absolutely make everything better, but she knows that it would be short lived. Pepper was right. She can’t avoid leaving home for the rest of her life. She just doesn’t know the next steps forward.
“I’m going to call the school and see what I can do, in the meantime, I’ve got help coming up your way.”
“Dad, I don’t need Rhodey in on this. He’s the last person I can handle letting down after you, May, and Pepper.”
“Did I say it was Rhodey? I—oh shoot. Morgan, wait! Morgan, honey, don't do that." He curses under his breath. "I gotta jet, kiddo. I’ll call you later.”
He hangs up before Piper has a chance to say goodbye.
She sits, staring at her phone for a little, thinking he might call back.
After twenty minutes, she’s sure he won’t.
She considers calling Ned or MJ. They’re usually her sounding board for big issues, but somehow, she’s not sure if it will help. Even if it did, she’d just end up feeling bad for laying all of that on them. They’d sent pictures and texted tons since starting school. With MJ still in New York and Ned in California, Piper still didn’t feel distant, despite them being tagged in pictures with new friends and expressing how great a time they were having. Despite that, she couldn’t bring them down. The worst case scenario she can imagine is them dropping everything to show up and be there for her and derailing their own lives.
Not going to happen.
Instead, she scrolls her phone, waiting for Gwen to come home.
She waits an hour.
Then she waits two.
The sun descends and the room becomes consumed with shadows.
Piper isn’t usually uneasy in the dark, but she’s alone, and when she gets into bed and closes her eyes, the worst images flash before her and she’s up, in a ball again.
She tries sitting up, staring at a wall, running sound apps on her phone. They help her to fall asleep initially, but they aren’t loud enough to keep her asleep. She doesn’t want a noise complaint from her neighbors.
When she snaps awake, set off by another silent dream, she reacts so aggressively, that she finds herself clinging to the wall above her bed, fingers and bare feet stuck against the cold brick, staring down at her bed.
With a frustrated grunt, she drops herself to the floor. “You can do this, Parker,” she tells herself. “It’s just sleep. Babies do it literally every day.”
This time, instead of getting right back into bed, she goes to her dresser drawer and removes her web shooters from underneath her socks. She pulls them over her hands, checks the web fluid in them, and once she’s sure she’s armed, she tucks herself back in.
A little armor should make her feel more protected—even in sleep.
And it does. She sleeps for hours, dreamless, restful, her first in many nights.
Until a sound wakes her from sleep, and before she can process, she’s shooting web fluid at the door before she even opens her eyes. For extra measure, when she does open her eyes, she shoots three more webs, sticking the door shut, making it impossible to enter.
It’s only when she comes to her senses, heart pounding against her chest, sweat burgeoning on her brow, that she remembers where she is. The sun is streaming through the window and she has made it to the morning in one piece.
“Piper, are you in there?” Gwen’s voice calls from the other side of the door. The doorknob wiggles but the door doesn’t move. “Did you blockade the door or something?”
Piper curses to herself. She scrambles up to her desk and rips open the door. “Sorry about that,” she calls back. She begins tearing open the well organized layout of drawers and dividers that Pepper helped her put together, trying to recall where she hid the serum to break down the webs.
When nothing turns up in her desk, she gets on her knees and slides under the bed. She pulls out the storage boxes and begins searching through them.
“I’m going to get the RA,” Gwen says.
“No, it’s okay, I can get it open!”
Finally, after two storage boxes are in disarray on the floor, she finds the serum in a spray bottle in the third. She runs to the door, nearly tripping as her feet stick to the tile, and begins spraying furiously at the webs.
The serum works quickly, and soon enough, Piper throws the door open and leans into the hall. Gwen is three doors down, standing in front of the RA’s room, her fist poised to knock.
Or so Piper thinks until the door swings open and their RA with her died black hair and oversized black hoodie, slinks out into the hallway. “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” Piper calls, “it’s all good, the door got stuck but I fixed it.”
Gwen glances her way and then looks back at the RA. It’s like the didn’t even hear her, joining together and walking towards Piper and Gwen’s room.
“Piper,” Melanie, their RA begins, “I’m going to have to do a room search based on some information I’ve recently heard.” She glimpses at Gwen and Piper is pretty sure Gwen tattled on her.
She really wants to be angry, but she tries to simmer it down. If it were someone else, Piper might even have done the same thing.
Only, Piper isn’t sure what a search entails. What is the RA allowed to look through? Surely not her drawers and wardrobe, right? She has no choice but to step aside, but the sweat lining her pits increases as Melanie enters.
Gwen enters as well and looks around the room. It does look chaotic since Piper whipped through her things like a tornado, but there isn’t anything illegal in the room—just incriminating things that might out her secret identity. She secretly would prefer getting caught with illicit booze.
“Just warning you, any tech you see is considered Stark Industries intellectual property,” she warns, hoping that Pepper can sweep Spidey suits under the Avenger’s copyright license that Stark Industries technically owns.
“I’m not trying to out your daddy’s tech,” Melanie responds, kneeling on top of the pictures on the floor from Piper’s graduation. The first box she’d torn through had been a memory box from MJ and she hopes she can put back together as nicely.
Melanie bends to the side, peering under the bed. Piper holds her breath, watching Melanie look, move things, but not open a single box.
She stands and crosses the room to Piper’s desk, which is also scattered with a series of things, these however, are more work related in nature. She’s still not breathing when Melanie rests her finger on a bottle of black nanites that Piper has been experimenting with to improve her suit. The bottle tips back a hair so Melanie can peak inside, but she ultimately decides it’s nothing to be worried about.
Piper swears she’s in the clear, Melanie headed towards the door, when Melanie stops at the tiny spray bottle sitting on top of the mini-fridge.
“What’s this?” Melanie lifts it, the bottle of blue liquid and holds it up for Piper to see.
“It’s a cleaner,” Piper swallows a lump. “It’s a gentle, acidic compound to breakdown cobwebs,” she lies, then grabs the bottle from Melanie’s hand. She turns to the corner of the room and hopes she’d done as terrible a job at cleaning the room as May told her on move in day.
Sure enough, there are dust bunnies and a big old cob web in the corner. She sprays the fluid and bites her lip, her breath catching yet again, praying that it works. A moment later, the webs dissipate and foam onto the floor.
“See,” Piper stands, truly feeling the sweat pool under her arms now, “nothing illegal, nothing ingestible. Just, a new kind of house cleaner.”
Melanie narrows her gaze just a hair. She doesn’t buy it, but she also can’t press. It turns out she can’t look through Piper’s drawers which is saving both of them from a really awkward interaction with Pepper and a team of lawyers.
“So…are we good?”
“For now,” her brows lift on her head, “but Piper, if I get another complaint, I have to file paperwork with the RD, who will take it to the housing board.”
“I promise, you won’t get another one. I’m turning over a new leaf.”
She just needs to get that message through to her sleeping mind.
Melanie nods and then leaves, closing the door behind her.
“What are you wearing?” Gwen asks her once their RA is gone.
Piper follows her gaze down to her wrists. It’s there that she sees her web shooters are still strapped to her arms. Piper feels heat rise to her face and she begins to take them off of her and stuff them back into her sock drawer.
“They’re an old prototype for a device I designed in high school.” She wracks her brain for a decent explanation as to why she’s wearing them and knows, feeling safe while she sleeps won’t suffice as a stand alone answer without further explanation. “I was tinkering with them,” she lies.
“Weird,” Gwen replies skeptically. “Sorry to…” she scratches behind her ear, “to really have to do that.”
“You didn’t have to though,” Piper points out, feeling a little annoyed, “you could have talked to me first.”
“No offense but I don’t know you all that well, and I didn’t know how you’d react if I outright and said you have a drinking problem and you’re making me feel unsafe.”
Piper jolted backwards. She knew she hadn’t been subtle, but hearing Gwen voice that she’d felt unsafe really hit her like a knife to the gut—and she certainly knew that feeling well enough.
“I’m sorry, I really am. If it makes you feel any better, my step-mom and my aunt really put me in my place this morning.”
She pinches her lips together and considers this admission. “If I didn’t know who your step-mom was, that would mean nothing, but I have seen videos of Pepper Potts putting the president in his place so I really don’t envy you.”
Gwen, whose backpack had been slung over her shoulder, places it on her bed and starts unpacking her overnight stuff. She continues around the room, her back to Piper and Piper takes her hint that the conversation is over. They both have to get to class and Gwen has been bothered enough with Piper’s problems.
A few days later, Piper is in one of the school labs, staring into a microscope looking at a sample she’s collected for her extra credit project in her molecular biology class. It had taken a lot of phone calls, a lot of sweet talking, and a few huge donations for her dad to talk her professors into even allowing her to attempt extra credit.
At least class, homework, and the extra projects have left her exhausted enough to get a few hours of sleep every night.
She’s super focused on the sample, attempting to get a clear view of the cell structure in order to take a photo for her lab sheets, when she hears someone enters the room. Assuming it’s another student doing lab work, Piper continues to access her sample and turn to jot down notes in her notebook about her findings.
“What’s that you’re working on?”
She snapped her head up. She knew her dad was sending someone to help, but she genuinely had been anticipating Rhodey, or even Steve to show up—not The Winter Soldier. Not Bucky Barnes. Out of all of her dad’s plays, this one by far is least expected.
He looks different from the last time she saw him—short hair, civilian clothing, gloves to cover up his vibranium arm. He looks healthy.
“It’s a synthetic organ tissue that I hope to be able to match to skin grafts to make synthetic organs for donor matching,” she responds rote. “I’m sorry,” she snaps out of her sudden daze, “you are not Colonel Rhodes.”
“No, I’m definitely not,” he agrees. He points to the microscope. “I have no clue what you just said but it sounds very cool, and very important.”
“If it works, it would be. It would also keep me from being put on academic probation which would be a plus.”
“Yeah,” Bucky takes a seat on one of the lab stools adjacent to Piper, “your dad mentioned something about that.”
“Yeah, though again, and no offense, you might be the last person I thought he would send to give me inspirational words of wisdom.”
Bucky leans back in his chair and throws his hands down to his knees. “No, that’s definitely more Steve’s agenda. I’m not really into the whole inspiration thing…or wisdom…or words.”
“Then why are you here?” She’s blunt and to the point.
“Can I tell you something that only Steve know about?”
She looks away. She’s waited for this moment for some time but this is not specifically the time to have the conversation—still, she wants to face it head on. “Is it that you killed my mom and my other dad? Because I already knew that and my dad knows it too.”
“Oh, well,” Bucky blinks back shock and turns away, scratching at the back of neck, “no, that’s not what I was going to say…we can,” he gestures a hand between them, “we can talk about that if you want, though.”
She shakes her head. “I know it was Hydra, not you behind it. I don’t blame you.”
There is a flash behind of his eyes of regret, remorse, eagerness to say more, but Bucky knows as well as Piper that it’s not why he’s there. He’ll have time to make amends. Even helping her move on from her trauma will be amends of sort, paying out a debt for the pain he’s caused her.
“Well, what I was going to say, is that I find it hard to sleep in a bed.”
Piper narrows her gaze skeptically. She isn’t sure how this pertains to her and it’s nearing sharing territory. Piper has no hard feelings towards Bucky, but they aren’t exactly at a sharing point in their relationship.
“I lay down in the bed and it’s so soft and comfortable, that my body is on high alert. If I allow myself to be too comfortable, it’s the same as being vulnerable. Even sleeping on the floor, the nightmares still come.”
Her face softens. Her hands slide to her knees and she rubs the denim against her palms, soothing herself at the mention of nightmares. She dares to ask him, “What are your dreams about?”
“Mostly the people I’ve hurt,” he admits. “Every now and then, I’ll be back in the war, or a prisoner, or waking up from a decades long sleep, but mostly it’s the faces of the people whose lives I’ve taken.”
“My parents?”
He won’t lie. “Sometimes.”
“And my grandparents?”
With a nod, he replies as simply, “Them too.”
Piper thinks, just for a second, if she had to be haunted with the faces of all the people she’s failed, she’d never be able to sleep again. Even in the loudest city, in her own bed, surrounded by people who made her feel safe. It would tear her up inside. She cannot imagine Bucky’s pain.
“How do you live with it?”
He shrugs. “I just do.”
Her head drops, her eyebrows lift, her eyes widen. “That’s it? You just do?”
“Yep.”
“You didn’t come all the way here to tell me to just live with it.”
“Nope,” he says, standing from the stool, “I didn’t, but you better go suit up.”
Piper swings to the coordinates Bucky had given her after going back to her dorm and retrieving her suit. She finds him near an old stone wall in the center of a nature reserve in full gear, his open faced button down replaced by a one armed, leather jacket, his silver vibranium arm catching the hints of light through the trees, his other hand gripping onto a black handgun.
“You think we’re going to need that?”
He weighs the gun in his hand and settles to put into the holster on his leg. “No, but I’ll feel better having it, just in case we do.”
“So, what is this place?”
Bucky begins to lead the way, walking along the length of the stone wall, through the overgrown grass. There are remnants of a pathway, but it’s cracked and worn away over time. “Hydra took old US air raid shelters and turned them into bases after the war. Every time I remember one, I go, check it out, take any information that might be relevant to snuffing out the dregs of the organization and report it back to Steve.”
He stops his steps when they approach a gate at a tunnel that looks no more than an average sewage tunnel. There’s a heavy chain with a big lock holding it shut. Bucky’s metal hand clasps around the lock and crushes it until it crumbles to pieces, rust scattering on the ground like orange confetti.
They walk down the tunnel until the outside light has almost vanished. It’s near the end that they come to a stop over a port hole in the ground, Bucky bends down and turns the locking mechanism to unlatch the door and swings it open. They aging metal shrieks and lands onto the concrete with a thud.
Bucky nods his head to the dark tunnel. Piper notices the latter rungs trailing down into the earth.
“You mind going first? Use that extra tingly sense you get to snuff out any traps.”
“I guess so,” Piper sighs, sensing there isn’t much of a choice.
She lowers herself to the ladder and begins descending downward. At least as she starts her descent, lights along the wall turn on, activated by her presence. She can see the bottom and it’s not too far from the top of the ladder.
She’s able to skip the last few rungs and plop down to the ground.
The room below is small. There’s a tube with a gurney inside of it, a lab table, a desk, and not much else besides a few chairs. Nothing indicates to her that there are any kind of traps set, so she returns to the bottom of the ladder and calls up to Bucky.
“All clear down here.”
“Okay, good,” he calls back.
Then, he does the unimaginable. He shuts the port hole and cuts her off from the door.
“What are you doing!”
Skipping the ladder all together, she climbs up the length of the tube, sticking to the walls, getting to the top in half the time it took her to get down. All the while, she can hear the metal grinding as Bucky locks the mechanism back up.
Piper slams her palm against the metal door. “Let me out!” Her voice burns against her throat. “Unlock this right now,” she demands, slamming and slamming her palm and her fist against the door.
Bucky does not respond.
Her breaths start to shorten. Heat spread across her skin, sweat forming under her arms, behind her knees, between her fingers, across her back and her face. Her voice lowers, unable to manage much more volume with her breathing so broken. “Please,” she whimpers. It is more quiet here than she thought humanity possible on Earth.
The quiet is too much.
She drops back to the floor and begins to pace. Her hands shake and her eyes start to deceive her, show her images of things that aren’t really there. When she closes them, the images only get worse.
“Damnit!”
She retracts her suit, having it open up to her in a tank top and leggings. She doesn’t care if Hydra left secret cameras behind, she needs to cool off.
Without thinking, she lowers herself to the ground, the cold concrete chilling across her shoulder blades, her back, her arms, and her palms. She’s more aware, flat on the ground of her heavy breathing.
Thoughts of her missing dad encompass her mind.
“He’s not missing,” she tells herself. “He’s in New York.”
But then she considers that if it were true, why would he have sent Bucky Barnes to lock her up somewhere.
To detox? Is he punishing her for drinking?
She tells herself if that’s the case, then she deserves it, and if it’s not the case, she still deserves it for trusting Bucky, for lowering herself into a trap, and getting stuck, unable to save her dad.
She’s never the one to save him. It’s always the other way around. Not when Obadiah Stane tried to kill him, or Justin Hammer and Ivo, or that weird guy with the man bun. Even after she got powers, she hadn’t made things better when she snuck onto the plane in Germany, and she’d failed so badly with Thanos that half of humanity had been dusted for five years.
Even the one time she did save him, it had been the tech in the suit he’d made to protect her from her allergy that had done the saving.
The quiet serves to remind her of how utterly useless and helpless she really is, even with super powers.
She’s not sure if she’s laying there for seconds or minutes, her breath is still ragged, her pulse still running wild, when Bucky calls from the other side of the door.
“You calm yet?”
She struggles to form the words against her panting, labored breaths. “How,” she exhales, “am I supposed to be calm,” her voice turns to a growl as she snarls out, “when you locked me in here!”
“Piper, you are not afraid of the quiet.”
“Screw you,” she yells back.
“You know how I know that?”
“Let me out.” She grinds her teeth together and pushes herself to a sitting position with a grunt.
“I know, because I’m not afraid of beds. I’m afraid of what happens when I go to sleep—the nightmares, having to decipher if they’re real or not—that’s what the real fear is.”
“If I’m not afraid of the quiet, what is it then?”
“If I had to guess, it’s being alone with your own thoughts.”
She seethed, using her effort to push off the ground. Who was Bucky Barnes to psychoanalyze her? He’s more messed up than every other Avenger, and that was a huge measure. He doesn’t have a right to try and identify what was wrong with her.
She made her way back to the ladder.
“I have a question for you, Piper?”
She grabs onto the first rung and hoists herself up. “Oh yeah? What’s that?”
“Tony said, your thing with quiet started after Titan.” Her knuckles grip tighter around the metal bar. He’d only know that if Pepper and Tony had been talking about her and about her issues. She hates the idea of them gossiping about her.
“What’s your question,” she responds, stepping up to the next rung.
“When you close your eyes at night, where else do you go?”
She pulls herself up again, leveling up. “I go to Titan.”
“I’m not buying it.”
She wants to scream at Bucky. She has half a mind to call him a smug asshole, but she can sense, he’s not getting any enjoyment out of this. He sounds as stressed as she feels.
“You were on Titan for what? An hour? Two tops? Most of that time you were with other people. Where else do you go Piper?” He repeats the question, this time putting more emphasis on the words.
She stops climbing. Her breaths are still heavy, but they’re more even now, allowing her to stay against the wall with ease. Her mind is just a hair clearer. She closes her eyes and lets the quiet seep in. The image that forms behind her closed eyes is Titan, but the Tony in front of her isn’t the one in the suit, telling her that it’s going to be alright. This one is younger, the one that she sees much more often in dreams than the one who is already Iron Man.
With her eyes closed, Piper is balled up behind an end table, hiding because Tony isn’t alone and visitors aren’t allowed to see her—especially the women. Piper holds her breath which isn’t that hard, because this version of her, the small, powerless version of her, has been struggling to breathe for hours—since she woke up in an empty house and tried to go to her dad’s bed to tell him about the monster in her closet.
She opens her eyes. Her words are tense, but come out freely. “I go to the Malibu house.”
“Where else,” Bucky presses.
Piper files through the dreams, so vivid, even waking memory cannot erase them. “I go to May’s couch, in front of the TV where the reporter has just said my dad is dead and the ringing in my ears is so loud, it’s all I hear.”
Without prompting, she searches for another answer. “Sometimes, I'm trapped under a building again, and after the blast, I can’t even hear myself calling for him.”
“And when you’re there, what are you thinking about?”
It comes out without hesitation. It’s the clearest answer in the world. “How much of a failure I am,” she slams back. “How useless I am. How I’ll always be helpless. How my dad doesn’t need me. How he never even wanted me to begin with.” She finds herself bubbling with anger. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“As long as it’s the truth.”
“Of course it’s the truth, it’s what I think about. I know it’s stupid. I know it’s irrational. Now,” she taps her suit back on and it spreads up the length of her skin. Shooting a web to the top, she flings herself back to the hatch and continues, “let me out!”
“What good will that do me? If you’re so helpless, why does anyone want you on their team? If I leave you here, it’ll only make them stronger—that is if you’re really as useless as your worst thoughts say you are.”
“I know,” Piper grunts, hitting her fist against the metal door, “what you’re trying to do.”
“What am I trying to do? I trapped you. Your dad called me to help you and instead I set a trap. That’s what bad guys do.”
She punches the door again, the edges of it creek, tiny flecks of light sprinkle in.
“Is that the best you got? You’re alone with the guy who killed your parents. Hey, I’ll even throw in that I killed your grandparents. If I hadn’t done that, your dad wouldn’t have been distant, right? Then maybe he’d have wanted you. Maybe he’d have taught you how not to be such a failure as a hero.”
With one final blow, the door cracks open and falls back to the ground, crashing into the pavement, the hinges breaking off. Piper shoots a web out and flings herself up. Bucky faces her in a lowered stance, ready to fight.
“I’m not going to fight you,” she spits out in a scowl. “You are not the same man who killed my parents.”
Bucky relaxes and straightens himself up. “And you’re not the same, abandoned kid, unable to help herself when her dad isn’t around.” He points to the broken door of the hatch. “That’s two hundred pounds of the densest metal found on Earth with vibranium hinges and you snapped it like a candy bar. It used to operate on a motor. You, Piper Parker, are not helpless, and you never will be again.”
Piper peers at the circular hatch door, how it’s bent and warped, and considers how she’d broken out in more of a sweat in her panic than in her actual escape. She wants to stop being afraid of her own thoughts, and start living out this new part of her life.
“I don’t know how to make the thoughts go away and if I can’t get rid of them, I’ll never get rid of the nightmares.”
“You have to keep proving yourself wrong,” Bucky tells her. “The more you show up for yourself, prove to yourself, that you aren’t those things, the easier it will be to dismiss those thoughts.”
“So what? Lock myself up whenever I’m having nightmares and force myself to escape scary situations?”
His face furrows. “I was thinking more like, keep doing the whole spider thing and I’m pretty sure you’ll end up with more wins than losses…but if you want me to lock you up again—“
“No, I’m good, thanks.”
She wonders if he’s right. The more time she spends being Spider Bite, the more she’ll be confident that she’s capable of saving herself, of being there for the people she cares about, of not being alone again.
She’d struggled to articulate to anyone else what the quiet really means to her. She’s come so far with her dad that bringing up the past isn’t easy. She has moved on. She isn’t mad anymore. Sometimes, she resents how present he is for big moments in Morgan’s life, but those times he made her scared when he left her alone, or when she’d thought he died, or even when he failed to show up for her when she needed him most? She’s already forgiven him.
That doesn’t mean, those moments don’t still haunt her. Maybe she did need to air it out. For her own sake.
“I want to thank you for your help, but I’m very pissed off right now, so I hope you don’t mind if I swing back to campus, now.”
“I’ll talk to you later, Piper.”
She video chats with her dad later that night.
“Bucky Barnes is psychotic.”
“He was brainwashed by an evil conspiracy group for a couple of decades, so I’m not sure why you sound so surprised.” He’s in the kitchen, standing next to a pile of dishes he should be washing. Piper anticipates Pepper showing her face to chastise him any second for not getting it done. “Did it help?”
“Not sure yet, but I guess we’ll find out.”
Piper crosses her legs underneath herself on her dorm bed. She picks at a piece of lint on her fuzzy sock, aware that anything she says, Gwen will probably hear on the other side of the room. She’s not looking at her, but unlike Piper, she isn’t wear headphones.
“Dad, why did you leave me alone when I was little?”
“What do you mean? Like with May and Ben?”
“No, like when I’d visit you.” If she closes her eyes again, she’s sure she’d be right back to the conglomeration of her childhood memory and Titan again, only this time she isn’t as afraid of it. “Why couldn’t you wait for me to go home to start partying and bringing people back to the house?”
Tony sighs and lowers his glasses, placing them on the counter beside him. “Piper, I’m not proud of who I was back then.”
“I’m not mad, dad, I promise. I just—I used to be so terrified that you’d left me and you were never coming back. Then you went to Afghanistan and you really didn’t come back and I guess I ended up developing this fear of being alone, which Titan kind of triggered in a major way.”
He shakes his head. Pepper must enter the room because he makes a hand gesture that stops her from speaking. His hand moves from the gesture to slide down his face. “I want to have a good reason for you. You deserve a good reason, but the truth is, I was messed up. I’d start drinking, I’d forget you were visiting, and I’d go out. I’d get these moments when I found you in the morning. You’d be curled up inside a cabinet or under a blanket in your closet and the guilt would hit me like a truck, and I’d spend a couple days sober, with you, trying to make up for what I’d done, until I couldn’t handle the guilt anymore and I’d drink and repeat the cycle.”
Hearing the explanation out of his mouth, only caused Piper to see just how alike they really are. She’s been face to face with it her whole life, but she’s never had to confront it—not until it had begun to affect her life. Everyone had always told her how much like her mom she was like, but the truth is, she’s always been a lot like her father. She works to hide those parts away.
“I think I understand,” she tells him. Only, she knows she understands. Given one more week, she’d have been in the exact same spiral as he was. “We’ve both been trying to bury our feelings.”
“It’s not always bad,” he points out. “Sober, I’ve done a lot of good, burying myself in work.”
“Yeah but, you were able to step away after you got back from Titan. You told me yourself that you used that time to reflect. To think about your life. Maybe we need to stop burying our feelings so much.”
“I don’t know, kiddo. That means talking to each other about some big stuff. You up for that?”
“We’re doing it right now, aren't we?”
“I’m in if you’re in…Do you think Dr. Cho would do family therapy?”
Piper snorts, “Dad,” Piper reprimands, “you’re already using the world renowned geneticist as your PCP. Find another doctor!”
“Okay, okay!” He holds up his free hand in defense. “We good?”
“Yes, we’re good.”
“Love you, kiddo.”
“Love you too.”