Chapter Text
Subject: Fwd: Attachment missing
Yes, thank you for the heads up, Rogers. Now with the correct attachment, a series of incident reports drafted up by Agent Wilmot. Please read thoroughly and attentively. That means you, Stark. We’ve seen an increase in incidents from this so-called Spider-Man over the last months. I’m gonna go ahead and label him a kleptomaniac, because I have no idea what other reason he’d have to make off with nine g*ddamn pairs of sneakers on his latest heist. Either way, it’s a nuisance, like a damn mosquito in my bedroom. Worse, because at least I can kill a mosquito.
We have a meeting scheduled in a few weeks. Whoever comes up with the best plan to capture this MF gets a cupcake.
-Fury
Peter’s favorite spot in the world is the roof of the parking garage. There are sturdy weeds growing through the layer of gravel, knee-high, that make him feel like he’s in his own little private garden, and he has a great, expansive view of East River with Queens on the other bank. He comes here as Spider-Man and sometimes just as himself, he doesn’t care. He’ll drink in the sun, his legs dangling down over the side, heels scuffing the wall below, his elbows draped over the lowest bar of the metal railing.
Whenever he spots an expensive car down below, he tries to hit it with handfuls of gravel. He rarely misses. Sometimes the owner will pull over, tires shrieking, get out, wildly look around. None of them have ever spotted him yet. It’s a great hobby.
-
Things are fine, anyways. His boss might fire him soon, the Avengers might arrest him soon, the principal might expel him soon, but none of it has happened yet. And his dad—
“You didn’t get my coffee,” his dad says, halfway through his burrito. He has been in a state of low, simmering irritation all evening, and apparently this is how long it took for him to find a reason to blame Peter for it.
“You didn’t tell me to get coffee.”
“Do you have eyes?”
“Yes,” Peter says. “I have eyes.”
“So you could have checked if we needed coffee without me telling you every little thing, Jesus Christ.”
Peter liberally pours more sweet-and-sour sauce into his burrito. Fusion cuisine. “I’ll get it tomorrow, calm your ass down.”
He goes to the corner store the next day. Coffee, tomato sauce, soba noodles, a banana, he chucks in a packet of chewing gum at the register. He pays with his dad’s credit card. “I’ll need the receipt.” The cashier tears it off and sets it on top of the paper bag. Dad says he keeps an eye on the finances and Peter has decided to take his word for it.
He shoulders his way outside, gives the banana to the homeless man sitting next to the mailbox. “God bless ya,” the man says.
“That would be a first.”
He gets a lot of god-bless-ya’s from homeless people. Last weekend he went around the neighborhood handing out nine pairs of sneakers and he was blessed nine times. And then he got home and straight away got into a big ugly fight with dad about the latch on the balcony door. So he didn’t feel particularly like God was firmly in his corner or anything.
His corner, in fact, has felt pretty damn empty for a really long time.
At home he packs the groceries away. He crosses the threshold into the living room. Dad is snoring on the couch in partial sunlight, one hand grazing their lime-green carpet. Peter tiptoes around him and looks at the still-not-fixed latch on the balcony doors. Sighs.
Their apartment isn’t huge, but even when there were three of them it was just right. Peter’s game console. Dad’s record player. Mom’s white piano that has been gathering dust for years.
Mom used to play really well. Peter just dabbled a little, knew a few songs by ear, Für Elise, Flea Waltz, little shanties. It was never really his thing. But now he misses it. Dad always gets pissed off when he tries to play, says the noise bothers him.
“Do that when I’m not around,” he’ll say.
Which is just a barrel of laughs because dad hasn’t left the house in almost a year by now. Doesn’t even go down to the laundry room. He says it’s just because he doesn’t want to. Peter thinks it’s some kind of psycho issue, actually. He never prods, though. He’s got enough to worry about in his own life, he can’t have his dad’s anxieties piled on top.
He just has to stick with his plan.
He opens his bedroom door, tugs at the straps of his backpack extra tight, then starts hopping across the room; his floor is permanently littered with discarded parts of old appliances he took apart. It’s not messy, thankyouverymuch, he has a system. And he has a plan. He is eight months away from his sixteenth birthday and well on schedule.
Plan to file for emancipation at sixteen, January draft:
Focus Area 1: Dad. Tell dad I’m moving out, get him to sign paperwork. Ensure dad doesn’t die of starvation within a month of me moving out. Delicate approach required. Choose moments wisely, prepare dad for the idea that I won’t be here forever. Get him to try ordering his own groceries online.
Focus Area 2: Money. Get patents on my bots, license to the highest bidder, royalty payments. Need at least three solid ideas to work with to hedge my bets. Three horses to bet on. Have two that I’m happy with, and a third currently perfecting.
He crouches and pulls a plastic crate out from underneath his bed. Project Horizon. After his previous robots ‘Ray’ and ‘Hope’, this one should complete the set. Three bots to put on the market, three horses to bet on.
He opens the crate and lifts the robot out with both hands. Horizon looks a bit like a large snow globe: A square base and a 2V geodesic dome on top, made of a translucent sheer-white plastic. It houses a noiseless air filtration system so advanced that asthma and allergies will become a very dim memory.
And of course, Peter stuck some googly eyes on it.
“Are you gonna get me the hell out of this place?” he asks, and then makes Horizon nod enthusiastically by bobbing it up and down, its plastic eyes dancing around.
He plugs it up to his laptop and climbs on the bed, tucks his stuffed elephant Nonnie under one arm. He spends an hour-ish troubleshooting, and tears his way through the entire packet of chewing gum.
His dad appears in the doorway. “What do you want for dinner?” he asks. “Sushi?”
Peter doesn’t look up from his screen. “You need to eat more vegetables.”
“We’ll get the… Madamada beans.”
Peter snorts. “Edamame.”
“Is that to your approval, boss?”
“Yes. Approved. And you need to shave.”
His dad rubs a hand across his chin. “Perks of working from home.” He does… IT stuff, something vague. “What are you doing?” He takes a few steps inside.
“Watch where you step,” Peter says.
“Yeah,” his dad says, but then doesn’t. He stops when he’s standing right over Peter’s bed.
Peter feels his shoulders tighten even though dad seems to be in a good mood. “Do you want my last piece of gum?” he offers.
His dad holds out a hand for the almost-empty packet. “Another robot?”
“Yeah.”
It was his dad who taught him to code, ages ago. Peter has good memories of that, but he hopes dad isn’t about to offer help or anything. He doesn’t want help. He gave up on wanting help months ago, when he made his plan.
His dad stands there a moment longer, a bit awkwardly, swinging his arms. “Okay. Sushi,” he then says, nodding a bit, and shuffles back out of the room, displacing more of Peter’s carefully arranged parts.
Peter closes his laptop and stares up at the ceiling for a while, thoughtlessly twirling Nonnie’s ear around his fingers. He really prefers fights with his dad over these awkward attempts to bond, there’s just always something really sad about it.
-
“See all these people chopping vegetables?” His boss says. “You know where they were at seven AM? Right here doing their damn job, because they were all on time.”
“Ha. That’s funny. You’re funny, Trish.”
“Don’t attempt to get me with flattery. If you arrive late one more time, you are fired.”
Peter ties his green apron in the front. “Can I work the registry today?” He never gets to work the registry, but it’s always worth asking.
“No. You can scrape the grease off our bacon-pans, then the sheet pans, get to work.”
Peter opens his mouth to argue, then decides not to.
In many ways, this job is his fourth horse. It doesn’t exactly bring in the big bucks, certainly not enough to get emancipated. But it helps, he has read, if you have actual pay stubs to show the court, or something called employment verification letters. Just in case the judge is one of those unimaginative boomers who doesn’t understand that freelance entrepreneurship is where it’s at.
Who is he kidding, the judge will definitely be an unimaginative boomer. It’s basically a prereq for the job.
“Get outta here Jo, I’m on grease duty,” he says, entering the dish pit.
“Ain’t you lucky.”
He rolls up his sleeves, hums under his breath: Cinderelly, Cinderelly, night and day it’s Cinderelly. He slaps on the gloves that don’t ever do jack shit because his fingers still end up wrinkly after dish washing duty. He hates the feeling of wrinkly fingers. He wrote a biology essay about that once. Why your fingers wrinkle in water and nothing else does. He got a C+ because the teacher said it was “fascinating stuff but not exactly the assignment, Peter”. That’s where he always goes wrong. He gets intrigued by something and forgets what he was supposed to do in the first place.
“I don’t hear any work being done!” Trish yells from somewhere in the other kitchen. So he bangs a few sheet pans together for good measure.
Just eight more months.
-
A quiet afternoon of doing parkour across the Manhattan skyscrapers is interrupted by that stupid ass Iron Man. Peter swings up to a rooftop, flips and lands in a crouch, and the guy is just hovering there next to a chimney. “Look at you go,” Iron Man says.
Peter huffs and rolls onto his back, flopping his arms out wide. A show of ‘I’m not intimidated by you’. “What do you want?” He catches his breath. The rooftop is cool below him, the sky clear.
Iron Man hovers closer and casts a shadow over him. “Just a little tête-a-tête.”
“Your tête is blocking my sun.”
Iron Man shifts to the left and then lands. “You got a name, kid?”
Peter folds his hands on top of his stomach and says nothing. Honestly, the Avengers have been bugging him for a while now, but in a way that’s like… it reminds Peter of substitute teachers who have no idea how to handle a rowdy classroom. The awkward balance between trying to be your buddy and trying to assert authority, but failing at both.
“Just—Look,” Iron Man says, and then the helmet folds away and Tony Stark’s tiny head is looking at him.
Peter pushes himself up on his elbows. “What’s that supposed to do?” He asks. “That supposed to make me feel safe or something? Like I’m supposed to think you keep all your guns in your helmet and the rest of the suit is just for show?”
“I thought maybe you’d want to reciprocate.” Stark gestures at the mask.
Peter just laughs and lies back down, looks at the clear blue.
“You recently stole nine pairs of sneakers from Doug Rice,” Stark says.
“Doug Rice is an asshole.”
“And Mera Levine’s wallet and sunglasses, in broad daylight, right as she was coming out of a restaurant.”
“Also an asshole.”
“And a car from a Eugene Thompson.”
“That’s—I commandeered that. I gave it back.”
“Yeah, scrunched up like an old sweater in the dryer. Kid, I don’t know what’s going on in your life, but using your enhancements to pull these kinds of stunts, it’s raising all kinds of red flags with people you don’t want to cross.”
“I forgot to mention Eugene Thompson is also an asshole.”
“Kid—"
“You know, Rice promotes wearing mink on his social medias. And Levine should have been convicted of labor law violations, she got off on a technicality. And I used Thompson’s car to catch up with some asshole who was stealing your Chitauri technology. You seem to be forgetting about that.”
“No kid, I’m not forgetting about that.” Tony Stark sounds tired. “But why’d you have to take those shoes?”
“Because.” Because they were just sitting there, mint condition, in their own special room with tiny shelves, because that’s what mad people do with money, because those shoes would have kept sitting on those little shelves until Doug Rice had died of old age, even though there’s hundreds, thousands of people in this city alone who can barely afford shoes.
“Well. Just to warn you,” Stark says. “I’ve been promised a cupcake if I bring you in.”
“You get paid in snacks? That’s cool.”
“I’ll give you half if you come willingly.”
“You know,” Peter says, holding up a hand to shade his eyes as he looks up at him again. “You know, you look really stupid like that, with that tiny head poking out of that giant suit.”
There’s a clicky-clunky noise and the suit folds away entirely. Tony Stark steps out. Puts on sunglasses. And sits next to him on the flat rooftop, cross-legged.
All right, props to him, Peter didn’t think he’d actually do it. He sits up too, crosses his legs, mirroring Stark’s pose.
“You’re in dire need of a mentor,” Stark says, and doesn’t even bat an eye. Or at least Peter assumes he doesn’t; his sunglasses are dark.
“That’s cute,” Peter says. “Aren’t you in some top hundred list of the worst role models imaginable?”
“Doesn’t have to be me.”
“Who’d you have in mind?”
“I had me in mind. I’m just saying, it doesn’t have to be.”
“I don’t need a mentor. I’m just out here doing some zoomies, a little rooftop parkour.”
“And breaking and entering.”
“So what you’re actually saying is, I need someone to keep me in check.”
“What you need,” Stark says, “is to not actually end up on SHIELD’s most wanted list. Trust me, kid.”
“For stealing sneakers?”
“You’re enhanced. Unfortunately that means a certain amount of extra scrutiny.” Stark lays his hands on his knees and leans in. “Take me up on the offer.”
Peter lays his hands on his knees and leans in. “I’d rather drink bleach.”
And in a single fluid motion, he spins towards the edge of the rooftop, to his feet, pushes off and jumps.
-
Peter watches a small, striped fish sail back and forth through the plants in the aquarium.
“Three counts of the f-word in one class, Peter?” Mr. Morita waves the note Ms. Khorsandi wrote, drawing Peter’s attention back to him.
“It wasn’t, like, at her. My water bottle was leaking into my bag.”
“And what is a different way you could have handled that situation?”
Peter sighs and sinks lower in his chair. “Ms. Khorsandi, may I please use the bathroom, if you be so kind, thank you ever so much, so I can get some paper towels and soak up all this fucking water? Oh no, just water.” He starts kicking the leg of Mr. Morita’s desk.
“Are you aware that with your track record — the counts of absence, the mouthing off — any other student would have been expelled a while ago?”
Peter grins. “You must like me, then.”
“Is there any reason why you feel a need to act this way?”
Peter stops kicking. “Like what do you mean?”
“Getting enough sleep?”
Peter stares at him until Mr. Morita sighs and says what he clearly actually means:
“Your father didn’t attend our latest PTA meetings, despite my specific request.”
Peter looks back at the fishies floating around in their tank. “Must have slipped his mind.”
“In that case, I think I’ll give him a call this week.”
“Sure.” His dad can handle a phone call.
“I’d hate to see you overplay your hand and get kicked out. You’re extraordinarily talented. Mr. Harrington sings your praises every chance he gets. These robots you’ve made, uh—” Morita leafs through his papers. “‘Ray’ and ‘Hope’.”
“I’m making a third one.”
“That’s good, Peter. That’s great. That’s what I want to hear.”
“School is just so boring, sir. It’s so boring it makes me want to cry.” He does feel a bit like crying, suddenly. He wishes he could like school. By all accounts, he should. He likes learning new things. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with him.
“We’ll get you to the finish line. Just try to focus on the things you like. The robots.”
“Okay,” Peter whispers.
“This school is the right place for you. Stick with it.” Mr. Morita signs a permission slip and slides it back across the table. “And talk to me if there is anything you need. Because I wasn’t making things up, Peter. Midtown Tech has a five-strikes-and-you’re-out policy when it comes to persistent defiance or repeated disregard for authority. You are well beyond five strikes. I can’t keep making exceptions.”
Peter leaves. Sticks his head back inside. “I do appreciate what you do for me,” he says. “Really, I do.” Maybe this is how it feels to have someone in your corner.
-
He goes with MJ to a meeting of the after-school robotics club, where a girl with long braids tells them repeatedly, and weirdly aggressively, that the robotics club is not something to take lightly. “Do not take it lightly,” she keeps saying with a glare. Peter and MJ exchange glances.
“That’s still a hard no,” Peter says later, on their way to the bus stop.
“Yeah, I’ve changed my mind, too.” MJ had been badgering him to join the robotics club together. She seems like she’s never intimidated by anything but then she’s actually always scared to do new shit alone. “We’ll start our own club.”
“Losers’ club. Only losers can join. And girls.”
“Losers and girls.”
At the bus stop there’s a guy on his phone, he took one plastic seat and put his backpack on the other like an asshole, so Peter and MJ lean up against the advertisement for Jimmy Kimmel Live.
He often takes the same bus as MJ, to the west of Queens, and then walks the final miles to Manhattan. He says it’s because he likes to keep her company. Which isn’t untrue. The fact that it takes him longer to get home this way, is just a bonus.
A woman with a walker pauses next to them, eyes the backpack on the plastic seat with hesitation.
“Hey, jackass,” Peter says. “Let the lady sit down, fuck’s sake.”
The man jolts, almost dropping his phone, and then removes his backpack with a mumbled apology, cheeks red.
“Fuck’s sake,” Peter mutters again while MJ covers her smile with one hand.
“Watch your mouth boy,” the woman says as she sags down.
“Oh— screw you, lady, you’re fucking welcome.”
-
He tries getting to work the cash register a few more times over the next weeks, tries it once with the other shift lead when Trish isn’t there, but other-guy shakes his head. “Nah, I was warned about you.”
“Are you for real?”
“The problem is you’re too rude. Trish thinks you might yell at a customer if they take too long to order or something.”
“Well, screw you,” Peter says.
Trish is probably right.
At least he gets to chop vegetables instead of wash dishes that morning, and other-guy lets them play the radio louder than usual, lets them sing along to the final countdown, ta da daa daaa, at the top of their lungs.
The week after, he heads to work, through the rain, with a plan. To be allowed to work the register, all he has to do is make it through an entire shift without swearing. Or, let’s start with an entire hour. Baby steps.
He folds his jean jacket more tightly around himself. It’s his dad’s jacket. Peter likes wearing it, at least it still gets some exercise this way. The rain swells, blowing against his face. He throws a look over his shoulder, darts between two parked cars, jumps over a puddle, his spider-sense SPIKES—
and in the next moment he is flat on his back on the road, looking up at grey clouds.
I guess there is no one to blame, We're leaving grou-hound (Leaving grou-hound), Will things ever be the same again? It’s the final countdown ta da da daa, ta da—
“Hey kid, HEY!” someone yells in his face, taps him roughly on the cheek.
Peter blinks. “Go away, I’m singing.”
“Jesus,” a voice mutters.
“Well done, Hogan, you hit an unaccompanied minor,” says another.
“Get back in the car,” the first hisses. “People are gonna take pictures. No—kid, stay down, you hit your head.”
“I’m gonna be late for work,” Peter says, pushing at the hands that keep patting his face.
“I think your boss will understand.”
“Yeah, I don’t think so.”
“I’m calling 911.”
“Are you kidding me?” Peter doubles his efforts to push the hands away. He sits up, looks. It’s a broad-shouldered dude in a suit and tie who was trying to hold him down, and standing behind him, hands in his pockets—
“Hogan, he seems fine.”
“I had a security guard who hit his head once, thought he was fine, went home, had dinner went to sleep and never woke up. We’re getting him checked out, Tony.”
Tony Stark slides off his sunglasses and sticks them in his breast pocket. He tugs at his pants and crouches at Peter’s side, smiles. “All right, kid, you heard the boss. Stay down.”
“I’m gonna get fired.”
“Surely not.”
-
“I’m fired,” Peter says crossly, showing Tony Stark the message that just came in on his phone.
“Huh,” Stark says.
“There goes step 3d, e and f of my plan, dumbass,” Peter snaps. He sags back against the pillows, arms flopping down. They’re in some large hospital room—not a room, barely a hallway. With lots of plastic curtains all around. The doctor declared him thoroughly healthy after he had to follow a finger with his eyes, squeeze her hands evenly, and name the president. And now he’s waiting here for, he doesn’t even know what. Just a gigantic waste of time, and a gigantic monkey wrench in his emancipation plan. Getting fired from jobs is not what boring boomer-judges are going to be impressed with. “Can I sue you? I feel like I probably can.”
The blue plasticky curtain moves and a nurse sticks his head in. “We’re contacting someone to come pick you up.”
“What? Can’t I just leave?”
“No. A parent or legal guardian has to sign you out.”
“Well, he isn’t coming. He has a thing. He can’t leave the house.”
The nurse taps his pen against his clipboard. “But you… A parent or legal guardian has to sign you out.” Fucking broken record, this guy.
“Then I’m going to be here for the rest of eternity, man, so figure something out!”
The nurse frowns but disappears.
“I can get you a job at my tower,” Stark says.
His… probably bodyguard, standing at the foot of the bed, shifts on his feet and scowls.
“Your tower,” Peter mocks. “Who are you, the Wizard of Oz?”
“I’m Tony Stark.”
Peter makes a show of giving him another skeptical once-over. “Oh, yeah. You look taller on TV. Even with those weird shoes on, you still look taller on TV.”
“Excuse me, I’m trying to throw you a bone over here.”
“I don’t want your bone. I don’t want anything from you,” Peter says, and then, after actually giving it a moment’s thought: “What kind of job?”
“I don’t know. What do you do now?”
“Burger joint. I work the registry.”
“I can work with that. We got no one to man our pretzel stand on Saturdays.”
The security guard frowns some more, though maybe his face is just like that, and says: “Most of our concessions stands are closed on Saturdays, there’s barely any employees in the building. Who’s he gonna sell pretzels to, the Roombas?”
“Shush,” Tony Stark says. “You like pretzels, kid?”
“Fine,” Peter says. “We can negotiate.”
-
Dad sends Mr. Samuels, an elderly neighbor, down to pick him up. Which is apparently fine. Apparently, this seventy-something year old man who drives with his nose practically pressed against the steering wheel counts as a responsible adult. It takes the man damn near half an hour to parallel park in front of their building.
“And a quick recovery for your pop,” Mr. Samuels says, because dad obviously made up some shit about—whatever, having broken his leg or something.
“Yeah, thanks,” Peter says. “He’s mostly faking it for the meds, anyways.” He grins and waves goodbye.
-
The contract drops into his inbox when he’s in his history class, which is good, because at least he’ll have something more interesting to read than the Gettysburg Address. The pay is a little better than in his old job and the hours are more or less the same. Saturdays, early shift.
It’s funny. When he first made a rough draft of what is now his 12-step-plan-with-two-focus-areas to get emancipated, he was thirteen and stupid. Sending his project to Stark Industries was one of the options he listed. He later scratched that off the list for being a dumb, childish fantasy.
Maybe he should have included ‘step 8b, get run over by Tony Stark’s security guard’ to that plan, because it doesn’t seem so far-fetched anymore. Even if he is just the pretzel guy, he has a foot in the door.
He shows the contract to Ned who gets so excited about it he just about wets himself. “You’re gonna make pretzels for Tony Stark!”
He shows it to MJ, who is less impressed. “You are never gonna see that dude again in your life,” she predicts.
He gets home and his dad is in a piss-awful mood, clearly, because he’s sitting in the armchair not even doing anything, and doesn’t greet back when Peter says hi. Peter sorts through the mail, throws out a real estate ad and some retail flyers.
“Don’t touch my mail,” dad says suddenly.
“I’m just throwing out the advertising.”
“You know I like the advertising.”
Peter gives him a look. “Do I?” He walks closer and puts the rest of the mail on the table in front of him.
“Yes you do,” dad says, and uses his foot to swipe the stack of envelopes to the carpet. “Because there’s coupons. Bring it over here.”
“Get it out of the trash,” Peter says rebelliously, and sits on the far end of the couch.
“You threw it away. Get it out and bring it over here.”
“What crawled up your ass today?”
“You’re fucking unbearable, that’s what,” dad says, and goes and gets the advertisements out of the trash. Peter watches him flip through them, sigh and drop them back in the trashcan.
“Told you so,” he says.
“Shut up.”
Peter shuts up and gets out his history book. He knows he has an assignment, but he forgot what about; he was too busy reading his contract while Ms. Khorsandi was explaining. So he finds his phone and drops Ned a message about it.
His dad returns to the armchair and leans back, closing his eyes.
Peter lays on the couch on his side and starts morosely flipping through the book as he waits for Ned’s response. Words, words, words. Whatever the assignment is, it’s just gonna be about taking those words and putting them in a different order. It’s never gonna be something like ‘make an interactive map of the Civil War’ or ‘encrypt these messages using 19th century techniques’.
He clicks his pen, clicks it again. He sighs noisily. He wonders what techniques they did use in the 19th century to encrypt messages, so he starts looking up information about that.
His phone buzzes with Ned’s response—
“Oh my GOD SHUT UP!” his dad roars so suddenly that Peter’s whole body jerks with surprise. His phone drops to the floor. Dad dives out of the armchair and hauls him up, pushing him back against the wall with such force that Peter’s head rocks back and hits the wall with a crack. A salt taste immediately fills his mouth — blood. Something slams squarely right into the middle of his chest and he loses all his air.
It’s always over before he has fully caught up to it even beginning. Like a lightning strike. When the ringing clears, he is a puddle in the corner and his dad is back across the room, chest heaving.
Peter wipes his mouth. His tongue is bleeding. “Fucking asshole,” he says, voice wavering. He sucks in a sharp breath and it cracks on a sob.
Dad stomps into the kitchen, rummages around in there a while. Peter sits up, carefully rubs his chest; it hurts to breathe.
Dad comes back out, opens a can of 7up. “You know, my old man gave me a black eye once,” he says, voice rusty. “Once. And you know what I did? I broke his nose and told him to never touch me again. Whereas you just lie there and sniffle like a pathetic little girl.”
“That’s sexist, you know,” Peter tells him. He swipes the back of his hand over his mouth again. He drags himself to his feet and walks into his bedroom, closing the door behind him.
He rolls his shoulders a few times. Lifts his shirt to wipe the tears away. Stares at the wall and concentrates on slowing his breathing.
Just eight more months.
He opens his wardrobe, grabs his spider-suit from the back of a shelf and stuffs it into his backpack, goes back to the living room. “I’m going out. Why don’t you finally fix the latch on the balcony door? And do a few sit-ups or something, blow off some steam.”
“Why don’t you sleep in the park tonight,” his dad snarls back.
Peter flips him the middle finger and walks out, slamming the door.
He spits out some blood on the sidewalk. A passerby notices and looks at him, concerned. “Fuck off,” Peter tells her.
He jogs a few blocks until he reaches Tubman park where he can change behind the bushes. He leaves his backpack wedged between the branches.
He climbs, jumps, swings, flips, the wind roaring past him. He has his usual parkour route: the archway fountain, across an avenue, up a fire escape, a bunch of connected rooftops and then the dizzying height of the skyscrapers. News outlets call it ‘patrolling', what he’s doing. Ha. Just because he sometimes webs down a bike thief while he’s out here. Or, you know, steals some fashion hot-shot’s shoes.
He isn’t doing this for anyone.
He stops by the loading docks, helps the guys move crates around in exchange for a sandwich and a cup of coffee. He thought that stuff was gross the first few times, he remembers the forklift operator snorting her own coffee out her nose when Peter took his first ever sip and gagged theatrically. But nowadays, he gets cranky when he goes a whole parkour without getting any.
“How’s the new shoes?” he asks Oleg, who looks down and wiggles his toes. Blue-green shoes. There are little specks of mud on them. Doug Rice would have a coronary.
“Good,” Oleg says, sticks up two thumbs and beams.
Peter finishes his sandwich and continues his route, deviating to go past a construction site where he practices triple backflips until his chest burns. He climbs to the top of a pile of sand, pushes a hand against his side and winces. His ribs are probably looking fairly bruised right now. He sits and leans his chin on one knee. He draws a grid in the sand and plays tic-tac-toe against himself, wishes he could stay right here forever.
But he can’t, not in the last place because the longer he sits here, the colder he gets. The sun has long disappeared.
He stands and mentally calculates the most roundabout way home. He fires a web and launches himself upwards.
The most roundabout way home leads him across a few wide boulevards, lined with shops, that are still bustling with activity. And then a quiet sea of low-rise apartment buildings — and then he pauses. There’s a tingle at the back of his neck and all his attention is drawn to the darkness of the alleyway below. Okay. Creepy, shadow-y alley. That’s how this shit usually starts.
He can hear a muttering, spots a skinny man with a beany sitting on the lowest step of a fire escape. The muttering seems to be to himself, which is also how this shit usually starts. And the guy is playing with a knife, twirling it around in his hand, opening it and closing it.
Here’s the thing. He knows from experience, if he webs him down now, and the guy is clever and acts all innocent and victimized, the police aren’t going to do shit. You can’t arrest someone until they’ve actually done a crime. Peter argued with a cop about that before (“So next time I’m supposed to wait until after he’s stabbed a kid before I do anything, right?”) and it didn’t do much good.
Peter breathes out through his nose. He crawls along the edge of the roof until he’s right above the guy. Looks down at him down there, fidgeting, framed by metal railings and brick walls.
The trick is, obviously, to get the man worked up enough that he’ll start yelling, tries to stab him, and — jackpot of all jackpots — trash-talks the cops once they get here.
Peter leans forward until gravity grabs him and he drops down to the ground, landing on his feet right in front of the man—who just absolutely SCREAMS, flounders, his knife almost dropping to the floor before he snatches it back up and holds it out.
“Whatcha doooing?” Peter asks.
“Fuck off!”
“That’s not very nice.”
The guy lurches forward, thrusts the knife out, but Peter deftly evades and in the same fluid motion shoots his webs, plastering the guy’s knife-wielding arm against the brick wall. “That didn’t take much,” he says. “You were stab-happy, huh?”
“Fuck off!” the guy yells again and yanks at the spider-webs. There is absolutely zero give. He still holds on to the knife, though.
“Hey. Should I call the police?” someone calls down from a window.
“Fuck off!” the guy belts for the third time.
“Yeah, I’m calling the police.” The window slams shut.
“Your vocabulary is pretty limited, huh?” Peter says. He takes a step back and sits on the ground. He just has to make sure the guy stays this keyed up until the cops arrive…
But someone else arrives first. Something splutters overhead and Iron Man floats down from the skies like the big, inelegant iron brick he is.
Knife-guy curses and starts twisting in the webbing so hard that he about pulls his own arm from his socket.
“Stop that,” Peter says, “you’ll hurt yourself.” He stands and pushes one hand firmly against the man’s shoulder to prevent that from happening. And then scowls up at Iron Man. “Give us some space, you’re freaking him out.”
“Obvs,” Iron Man says, and he doesn’t move away or anything, just floats further down until he hits the ground.
“I’m not some fucking alien or some shit!” the man bellows, eyes bulging a bit as he stares wildly at Iron Man, all color drained from his face.
“He’s not gonna hurt you,” Peter says, still pushing against his shoulder.
“Says who,” Iron Man says, all amused, the fucking bully.
“Because I’ll leave your plastered to that dumpster over there for the next three hours if you even try, you fucker,” Peter snarls. “Now take three steps back. Nice, big steps. …That’s more like it.”
Iron Man says, from slightly further away: “I’m not here for him, I’m here for you.”
“Yeah, I figured, I’m not a fucking dumbass. What’s your plan?”
“Uh. No plan.”
The Avengers really aren’t cut out for this, it’s funny. They can shoot something down or blow something up, boy, can they. If these guys wanted him dead, he’d be dead. But they just want to ‘bring him in’ and they clearly have no idea how to go about it.
A blue light flickers at the mouth of the alley. A cop steps out of her car and approaches with some—no, a lot of hesitation. “How’s everybody doing this fine evening?” she asks, tipping her hat back a bit.
“I didn’t do jack shit!” knife-guy says loudly.
The cop looks at him. At the knife still in his hand. The guy only now seems to realize it’s still there and abruptly drops it.
“He tried to stab me,” Peter says.
She nods, points at the webs. “Dissolves in three hours, right?” she says dryly.
“Have we met?”
“Your reputation precedes you.”
“You can cut through them, FYI.”
“Most cops don’t carry nail clippers around.”
Peter puts his foot down on the knife. “Well, look how convenient.” He kicks it her way. “Does this mean you’re gonna actually take him in?”
She does, gets the handcuffs out and everything. The guy yells and curses about it the entire time which unsurprisingly, doesn’t seem to help his case.
Iron Man remains uncharacteristically quiet through all of it, just says a polite “ma’am” to the cop and does some sort of salute as she passes them. He starts staring at Peter again and asks, only when the cop car’s doors have slammed shut: “busy day?”
“What do you want?”
“I’m gonna need you to come back to—”
“Yeah, bye,” Peter says. And shoots off down the alleyway.
Iron Man is immediately in hot pursuit, of course. As Peter zigzags through the alleyways, he can hear the suit clanging against corners with all the grace of an obese rhino, further and further behind, and then nothing at all.
It’s pretty late by now, but he nevertheless throws in a few more evasive movements before he finally reaches Tubman park again, finds his backpack still wedged between the branches of a tall bush.
-
When he gets home, his dad is on the balcony, the closest he ever gets to going outside these days. He’s sitting on the edge, legs dangling down, throw-blanket wrapped around his shoulders, smoking a cigarette.
Today’s mail is still sprawled across the lime-green carpet. Peter sorts it into a neat pile and puts it on the table. Picks up his phone and checks for cracks, slides it back into his pocket.
He steps onto the balcony. Dad glances up at him, cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth. His eyes are dull. Peter sits next to him. His dad passes over the cigarette, wordlessly. Peter sighs and closes his eyes when he takes the first drag. The adrenaline hangover is kicking in.
“Your uncle Ben died this morning,” dad says.
Peter inhales too much smoke and breaks into coughs. Dad thumps him roughly on the back and that fucking hurts.
“What?” Peter rasps, his eyes burning, his throat burning.
“Caught a stray bullet during some grocery store robbery.”
“What the fuck,” Peter says. “What the fuck?”
“Yeah.”
Peter can only stare at him. Uncle Ben, bright and breezy, wisecracking, occasional harmless bouts of cursing, just a bottle of sunlight in a turtleneck. Benjamin. The little brother.
He throws the cigarette away, leans in so he can wrap both arms around his dad. “I’m sorry.” It’s not fair, he thinks, it’s not fair. They already lost mom. There should be a limit to how many of your loved ones die much too young, and that limit should be zero, and if it can’t be zero, it should be one.
“He had a good life, you know. He went kayaking, stuff like that.” Dad wraps an arm around him, squeezes tight. Peter’s ribs protest but he ignores it.
Uncle Ben, who took him to the science museum and the zoo.
“The funeral is on Friday,” dad says. “You should go. On behalf of us.”