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“They’ve partially recovered Grey’s file, here’s what they have,” Yelena tells him in one of their calls one time.
“Thanks,” Peter responds, watching the fresh cascade of data inundating his screen. He fetches the USB drive tucked in a drawer by his side and plugs it in, clicks a few keys to navigate through the files for transferring. Just for safekeeping; you never know, with these things. “Scorpion?” he asks. He could go to Dewolff, but being lied to by a government official once is quite enough for him, thank you.
“Safely transferred to Supermax,” Yelena drawls, her hair falling in wet strands over her face as she leans closer to fill the screen. Peter tries not to stare at her bare shoulders. Every time they meet or are in a call together like this, she seems completely unbothered about her unclothedness. “And before you ask—don’t you worry your little head, Damage Control won’t be able to lay a finger on him after the whole fiasco with the little telepath. They have every pair of eyes trained on them.”
“Yeah,” Peter says, thinking about the look on Scorpion’s face when he pinned him to the side of a car, that time. Well, technically it wasn’t him Peter was speaking to, but still. Gargan may be a petty, vengeful criminal with a penchant for being a pain in the ass—Peter’s ass specifically—but it wasn’t his fault that he was involved in Jean Grey’s pursuit of her sister. “How long do you think it’ll hold him, anyway?”
“Eh, I’ll leave you to do the math on that. They’re your potatoes, not mine. The New Avengers deal with—”
“The bigger potatoes, yeah, I know,” Peter says, not unkindly. “I’ve been keeping tabs on him, I just needed the actual confirmation. He should be fine for a few years, I think? Probably. Just out of curiosity, how exactly do you determine what sizes these potatoes are?”
Yelena tilts her head, considering. “Well, there’s… a scale.”
“Oh, okay. What does that look like?”
“Somewhere between neutralising contained threats to, like, genocidal aliens.”
“What exactly counts as contained threats?”
“Ah, now well that—that has its own little baby scale.”
“Yeah?”
“The scale there would be…” She makes a seesaw motion with a hand. “...armed robberies, drug cartels, general criminal activity to, you know, stopping the next megalomaniac villain of the week with delusions of grandeur from getting their hands on things like alien tech or, I don’t know,” she shrugs, scratches her chin idly, “nuclear codes, and the like. That’s more or less the size of potatoes you deal with, right?”
Peter chuckles. “Well, add the occasional cat stuck in a tree or helping old women cross the road and you’ve got it down pat.” Yelena snorts. “What about, like, stopping a government body from conducting inhumane, exploitative experimentation and general violation of personal autonomy on mutants and enhanced people?” Peter asks. “Where does that fall in the grand potato scale?”
“Well, compared to alien invasions and other world-ending catastrophies, I’d say not too high. Maybe three or four, generously.”
“Alien invasions don’t really happen on a regular basis, though.”
“Big potatoes take time to grow,” she states easily, and Peter just snorts at that. “And they might as well. The alien invasions, I mean,” Yelena leans back against the wall behind her. “Would be less surprising than finding out you actually have friends.”
Peter laughs. “I am beginning to think your potato sizing is a little flawed.”
“Believe me, kid, if it were up to me, I’d say we wouldn’t need to deal with any potatoes at all.”
Peter laughs again at that. He laughs, and laughs, and laughs some more. Laughs for quite a while. Has to close his eyes for a moment and just let it consume him. He holds his head.
“You okay?” Yelena asks once he’s contained his laughter.
“Yeah, just—” He huffs out several more dry chuckles. Tries to breath through the steadily growing contractions of his throat. Fails, and doesn’t trust his voice to speak further without cracking. He works his jaw, draws his hand over his head and stops at the base of his neck, just lets them sit there.
“Long week?”
He snorts. “Year, more like. Several years.”
“Boy, tell me about it.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe you should take some time off. Some recuperation. Getting shot isn’t a fun experience.”
“Ah, well… No, I—I can’t. People need Spider-Man. Who else would deal with all these little potatoes?” he says good-naturedly.
“Of course.” Yelena gives him a half-smile; a wry tilt of her lips. “What we do,” Yelena continues, “It’s a harrowing line of work, you know.”
“It is,” Peter agrees, “It really is.”
“At least you’ve got friends.”
“Ah well,” Peter rubs his nape a little awkwardly. “They’re not, actually, you know, technically.”
“Not what?”
“Not… my friends. Well, technically they are but they don’t—know me. Like, know, know me. You know?”
Yelena hums understandingly at that and, yeah, actually, Peter thinks she does know. He thinks she does understand. Harrowing line of work, she said. Of course she knows.
“It’s hard to do things alone,” she says.
“Yeah. It—yeah.”
“The nature of this job, it really makes having relationships difficult, does it? They kind of have a thing for going after your loved ones.”
Peter thinks about Aunt May. About Mr. Stark. About Yelena’s sister, the Black Widow, the one who came before her.
“That, they do.”
“But we can’t do it alone.”
“No. No, we can’t.”
They stew in silence. Yelena is watching him with something inscrutable on her face. He feels as though he’s the one stripped naked, with just her look, even through the safety of his mask.
“You know, I’m starting to think—I might as well be part of the New Avengers, at this point, you know. With the amount of potatoes I deal with. They might as well accumulate to one or several big potatoes. And I’ve fought against a genocidal alien, anyhow.”
Yelena doesn’t say anything to that for a while. She has a way of making one uncomfortably self-aware by simply… being. “Is that what you want?” she finally asks, with a hint of amusement, eyes disproportionately intent for the casual way she holds herself.
Peter thinks about it for a moment. “No,” he answers, “Not really.” It didn’t go over very well the first time, anyway.
“Alright. Then there you have it. You can just be your average friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man, working on his own terms. Sort of.”
“Haha, yeah.” He thumbs the USB drive, fidgets with it idly.
“My friends don’t really know me, either,” Yelena says. It’s the very first time she’s ever shared anything remotely personal, spoken anything about herself other than her work. It’s not like Peter ever made the effort to ask. But neither does Yelena. They don’t talk about anything other than… potato business, more or less. “But it helps that they are there. That they understand.”
“Understand?”
“The darkness,” Yelena elaborates. “That void inside that keeps eating at you.”
Peter hums, nodding diffidently.
“Do you have people who understand?”
Peter thinks about Frank. “I think so.”
“That’s good,” Yelena says, and just like that, her tone shifts back to business. “Do you need anything else?”
“Uh, no. No, I don’t. Thank you. I’ll handle things from here.”
“Good.” She waves. “Bye.”
And then the line cuts off. Peter stares at the empty screen for a second, then begins to dig through the new files.