Chapter Text
One thing Peter knows for sure is that smart kids always know they’re smart. It’s not the kind of thing that’s easy to hide as a child, and once you’re branded with the gifted tag, you can’t really make people forget that you were leafing through Macbeth in second grade while everyone else was struggling through Read With Me! (Grade 2).
Another thing he knows is that it fucking sucks to be a smart kid. It’s exhausting, for one thing. More gray matter apparently means more work. Skipping grades means bullies, at least in Peter’s experience. There are tests and talks and discussions (which are somehow different than talks), and parent-teacher conferences (though in Peter’s case it’s aunt-and-uncle-and-teacher conferences) (someone really needs to come up with a single word for aunt-and-uncle and it won’t be Peter because he’s more interested in the STEM side of things, thanks very much).
But most of all, he knows that when there are smart kids around, there are also adults. Everywhere, adults watch him. It reminds him a bit of when his parents died (don’t think about it), the feeling of eyes on the back of his neck, the constant chill working its way down his spine, turning to find eyes flicking away, heads tilted in concern, soft chuckles about nothing (don’t think about it). But it’s different, because this time (don’t fucking think about it, Peter, don't) no one’s hiding it. No one’s turning away. No one’s pretending they weren’t watching him, waiting for him to cry and --
Nope. Not thinking about it.
For years he looks up to smiles, to expectations. He looks up to mounds of homework, and it’s not that hard but it’s kind of the principle of the thing, right? Shouldn’t being smart make things easier? Shouldn’t breezing through homework be one of many gifts that come with brains? Shouldn’t invitations to the principal’s office be reserved for troublemakers? Doodling in class quietly and disturbing no one should not be cause for alarm or detention or more homework. If Peter is ever president (why does everyone want him to be president, all of a sudden?) he will sign doodling into law immediately.
He tells Ben and May how annoying it is, all of it, because they were there for him when his parents (don’t think about it) died, and they were pretty chill with the whole grade skipping thing and they always hug and kiss him goodnight, both of them, even though his parents (don’t think about them) were never really the kind of people who kissed goodnight, they were more the kind of (don’t-) people who went on long research trips and proofread each other’s articles for fun. Some days it makes him love Ben and May more, but mostly it makes him hate them for giving him so much of their love, a pressure near bursting in his chest that can’t be contained, like the alien in Alien.
Another thing about smart kids is that they know it’s really not that hard to sneak into a movie theater. Not that hard to sneak anywhere, actually, especially in a city as big and bustling as New York. Peter had a soft spot for the Angelica, but Metrograph is easier to maneuver around, so that was where he watched Alien, and Aliens, and half of the third one, at some week-long marathon they were running years ago.
And yeah, one older lady gives him a funny look and asks if he's in the wrong theater (the other one is showing Saw, so Peter almost agrees just to see the look on her face), but he smiles, points past her, waves at the back of some scruffy hipster man’s head, and says, “my dad’s right there, ma’am,” in as cheery a voice as he can. Peter can put lots of cheer into his voice when necessary.
Ma’am is Peter’s secret weapon. It melts old ladies into puddles. Mister is a pretty solid second, he thinks, but men are in general easier to fool than women, less concerned with a child or a stranger or anyone but themselves, really, so he doesn’t rate it quite as highly. When he eventually meets Iron Man, Mister helps more than it ever has before, and Peter ups it in his lexical esteem.
Ben and May tell him what a privilege it is to gifted, what a treasure his brain is, what wonderful luck to be given a full ride to Midtown. Luck is a word Peter would love to strike from the dictionary. His own is abysmal, and he’s not stupid enough (he’s not stupid at all, which is its own kind of shitty luck. Ignorance really is bliss, he thinks all the fucking time) to believe it’s about to change. He wonders if luck, like magic (like science), can be manipulated. He wonders if he's smart enough to manage it. He wonders if he's dumb enough to try.
But, it turns out, smart kids can be wrong, actually. Which lesson Peter learns when he’s blindsided by Ned. Peter already skipped a grade at PS69Q, which puts him a full class above Ned Leeds, which means he’s maybe noticed the kid in the cafeteria, or milling around on the subway platform with all the other kids heading home after school, but he doesn’t come face to face with Ned and his disarming friendship until the Friday of his first week of high school.
Peter is, in a word, overwhelmed. He’s starting over, and even though it's high school and everyone is starting over, a lot of the kids at Midtown have been there since sixth grade. And this is a school where he has to actually try, and pay attention, after years of paying literally no attention in class and completing his homework (100% perfectly) in thirty-seven minutes flat (is record is fourteen, but that was a day with no English or History because of a mono outbreak amongst certain teachers (his English and History teachers) so he thinks it doesn’t count). He’s a year younger than everyone else in his classes, some closer to two years, and in middle school a body can change so much in a year that Peter, who has always thought himself average looking, feels ten years younger than every single one of his classmates.
He doesn’t hate his teachers, the work is interesting (but challenging), and the cafeteria food is way better than his old school. They also don’t make everyone wear a clear backpack, or go through metal detectors in the morning. They have a fully stocked lab that high school kids can do independent research in (Peter’s checked out a few of the projects, and he kind of can’t wait for high school, now). They don’t have “Student Resource Officers” (cops) hanging around to discipline (handcuff) any student who laughs too loudly in class or jokes around too forcefully.
But it’s still a big adjustment, as May tells him the night before his first day, hugging him while they watch Aliens together (Peter still loves Alien the most, but May gets scared of it so they settled on Aliens, which is also, Peter assured May, a masterpiece).
So when Ned walks into Peter’s Computer Lab, plops himself directly next to Peter, and starts talking excitedly about his independent hacking project, which he’s here to work on because Mr. Computer Lab Teacher (Peter hasn’t learned his teachers’ names yet, sorry) said he could only do it with supervision because last time he let Ned hack on his own Ned started fixing bugs in the coding to the upcoming (at the time) Mass Effect game, Peter is caught completely and utterly and undeniably off guard, suddenly open to friendship and dweeby intimacy.
“So, anyway, you weren’t here last week and I was wondering, who are you?” Ned finishes rambling, already logging into his computer and not paying any attention to Peter’s stunned face.
“I’m new?” Peter chokes out.
“Oh. Oh. Cool. You’re the genius new kid from that underfunded charter. Everyone was all aflutter about you last week.”
Aflutter? Peter would raise one eyebrow if he could, but he can't. He's never been able to. Ned sounds like an old, southern lady. He sounds like a kid who gets beaten up after school. He sounds genuinely interested in Peter.
Peter laughs without humor. “No one cares about me. I don’t know anyone in this room’s name, even.” (That’s true; not an exaggeration. Peter and the rest of the 9th grade have come to some sort of peaceful symbiosis wherein no one bothers him (talks to him (acknowledges him)) and he doesn’t make eye contact with, nor noise around, any of them.)
“What?” Ned says, distracted. He's still typing away. “Oh, yeah. No. Not the students. The teachers.”
“The teachers talked to you about me?”
Ned’s fingers don’t stop moving, but he leans towards Peter and whispers gently, much as a parent might speak about an unruly, but much-loved child, “I read their emails, obviously.” He glances at Peter for the first time since logging in, and smiles at Peter’s own, incredulous grin. “They all have school-assigned emails, you know. And we’re on the school’s server right now, so. It’d be irresponsible not to.”
“Yeah,” says Peter, dumbly. “Irresponsible.”
Ned grins, wide open, easy, self-assured. “I’m Ned. Want to be friends?”
Peter offers a fist bump and a quick, “hell yeah,” and fights the urge to say best friends forever and ever and ever and ever. But he thinks it to himself anyway.
Ned's friendship transforms high school from scary experiment to kind of fun, actually. The work is whatever, but lunches and assemblies and robotics club are fun. Computer Lab is the best because he gets to sit next to Ned, and gets help from Ned, who is so good at computers it scares Peter a little. He wonders if this is how his aunt and uncle feel about his engineering projects, the little creatures he manufactures in his room out of used electronics parts and the conductive glue he formulated after getting caught stealing duct tape from the hardware store.
Ned lives with his grandmother, who says aflutter, knows nothing about computers, and loves Ned with a force stronger and more constant than gravity. Ned doesn't ask weird questions about why Peter lives with his aunt and uncle. When he tells Ned about his parents' deaths, Ned gives him a hug, checkmates him in twelve moves (Peter sucks at chess), and then makes him stay for dinner.
Here’s another thing Peter knows: nothing good lasts. He sometimes feels his whole life is a series of ifs gone wrong. If his mom and dad hadn’t gotten on that plane. If he hadn’t aced that math quiz in first grade. If he’d never met Ned. If he hadn’t gone to OsCorp on that field trip. If he hadn’t noticed that strange beeping that sounded suspiciously like morse code. If he hadn’t been bitten by a radioactive spider (this if, Peter concludes, is unique to him, amongst every living human in the world). If he hadn’t taken the plastic cup full of shitty four loco dregs at that party for Academic Decathlon finalists. If Ben hadn’t noticed he was drunk. If he hadn’t gone out in a huff to clear his head. If he had done something, anything about that guy with the obvious fucking gun before Ben –-
Peter wrenches himself out of the Ben Spiral™ and gets back to his regularly scheduled programming. If Ned hadn’t noticed him sticking to pencils and missing school and eating so much more food than usual. If Ned hadn’t asked him about Spider-Man. If Peter had lied. If Ned hadn’t shown Peter the flyer from health class where it said people who were high generally looked euphoric. If Peter hadn’t known the word euphoric and its enticing definition. If May hadn’t been so goddamn good and taken him in as a child, and kept him, and loved him, and comforted him after Peter had killed her husband (don’t think about it). If she hadn’t been the kindest aunt, the worst baker, the best hugger. If she hadn’t followed him. If she hadn’t tried to fucking help, what help would she have been anyway, he was Spider-Man for fucks sake and he could take care of himself and she didn’t have to –-
Peter has a harder time wrenching himself out of the May Spiral™. For one thing, he knows the following spirals intimately and they're all absolutely awful, and, for another, he notices he’s out of weed. He realizes that actually explains the spiraling, and finds just knowing why helps calm him down. Of course he’s spiraling. He’s sober. He always thinks about the past when he's sober. That's why he does his level best never to be sober, not if he can help it.
And, okay, there’s a lot more to spiral about, what with The Snap and Tony’s funeral and Tony’s Miraculous Resurrection™, which, if Peter is being honest with himself (though he rarely is these days), is actually something he basically expected, since he’s known Tony years, now, and he was an avid filmgoer prior to meeting his idol in person and becoming his intern and fighting crime (and sometimes their friends, but who’s counting) with him, and if he were writing a film, Tony would absolutely still be alive, just think of the cashflow when that little spoiler leaks, the studio would never allow a permanent death.
And beyond his mentor-slash-friend-slash-father-figure-slash-hero died and then returned there was the Ferry and there was Coney Island, and there was Beck, and Peter thinks it’s completely unfair, on the level of homework or getting in trouble for doodling, that he of all people, who has lost so much and continues to realize anew the depths to which the universe will plunge him, was tortured. Even worse, it turns out, is the aftermath of torture, which feels not unlike the aftermath of being dusted, the resurrection or reformation or whatever you want to call it, the painful reknitting of every atom in his body from nowhere to here.
Still, Peter would rather spiral about any and all of those delicious traumas than think for another second about Dr. Strange’s Fucked Up, Unthought, Evil, Arrogant, Asshole Spell (Peter would trademark that, too, but he knows that he’s the only person in this or any universe to know about it, so really, why bother wasting the day traipsing down to the patent office).
One thing Peter knows about smart kids? They grow up to be the stupidest adults.
He’s out of weed, as mentioned, which means focusing on finding more. Legalization isn’t Peter’s favorite political agenda these days. Yeah, he’s in favor, of course, but it used to be much easier to get free drugs on patrol. He’s been Spider-Manning long enough that a little smoke won’t bring down his stats, and he likes swinging when he’s stoned. He used to get by with alcohol, which was the drug of choice for most of his high school years, but now it just feels sad.
He sometimes imagines, in his weaker moments, what Tony would say about all of it. What Peter would say back. One thing he has in spades is evidence of Tony’s debauchery, well publicized, and at such a formative age, so formulating a counter argument to any kind of “you shouldn’t be doing this to yourself” or “I’m disappointed in you” speech is pretty easy.
Tony used to do that to Peter, sighing and running his hands through his hair and saying, “kid, you know I’m only disappointed because I care about you,” or “c'mon, Pete, you know better than to follow in my footsteps.” This, Peter hates to admit, worked extraordinarily well on him. He did try to stop the substance abuse use, several times, and only for Tony's sake. It worked until May’s death (his (don't think about it) fault). The thing about getting your aunt killed, after getting your uncle killed, after both your parents died, and your childhood heroes have become your disillusioned parental substitutes, is that it’s hard to believe anyone is more disappointed in Peter than he is in himself.
So even as a figment of his subconscious, Tony's whole, “I'm the most disappointed in you and you'll have to face me and my vast swaths of disappointment eventually” speech doesn't quite pass the sniff test. Anyway, Peter's adept at brushing off his subconscious.
“That’s a competition you won’t be able to win,” he tells Tony, in his mind. The man’s competitive enough that it probably does bug him a bit. Peter smiles.
In reality, when faced with the real Tony, Peter usually didn't bother saying anything at all. He'd stand in Tony's lab, or in his bedroom in the Tower, or in the kitchen that always smelled like Pepper, always, and sway listlessly. He'd watch Tony fiddle with the bracelets that deployed his suit, he'd think about goading Tony into blasting him through the wall. He'd fantasize about it, about how good it would feel to finally take some portion of the punishment due to him, after all the death he'd caused.
The first time Tony catches him is awful, but also it's so calming, so easy.
Peter lets his hand drop to his desk, just his fingertips, but that's enough. He sticks and he's steady, now. It stops the swaying, keeps his room from spinning quite so much. Keeps Tony's face in his periphery -- he can't exactly look at him, not right now, not drunk, not like this.
Tony pinches the bridge of his nose. His eyebrows form a mangled line across his not-quite-controlled face. His expression is dark, so dark and upset and even as Peter's stomach is dropping and spinning and whipping around like the Cyclone, he's also a little proud, a little relived, anticipating the consequences of his actions, the punishment he might have to put up with, the attention his teenaged rebellion will require.
"Look, Peter," Tony sighs. "You're a smart kid. You know you're just killing brain cells and inviting misery with this stuff."
And Peter does know that, it just happens to be a feature rather than a bug. "Maybe I'd be happier with fewer brain cells, Tony."
Tony's eyes narrow in a way that would probably send Peter's Spidey sense haywire if it were functioning properly at the moment. He takes a long moment before he responds. He speaks as if he's not sure he wants to hear the answer to his own question. "How long have you been so unhappy?"
"It's not like that," Peter backtracks immediately.
"Like what?"
"I'm fine."
Tony raises an eyebrow. Just one. Peter is irrationally furious that his mentor has this ability and he still doesn't. He practices in the mirror all the time, or at least more than he'd like anyone to know. "Don't do that," he spits, and Tony's eyebrow flies even higher.
"Do what, kid?" He waits for a response, but Peter isn't sure how to say what he means, not right now, not like this, so he just looks at Tony's wrists and does his best not to puke. Tony sighs again. He takes a step towards Peter, raises his arms as if to embrace his wayward ward, but Peter jumps -- drunk and high and so out of it he's using his stickiness to hold himself upright -- and the entire desk comes with him.
Tony stops, his arms half-raised. He flinches when the desk falls to the floor with a thump, then again when Peter lets his body slam into the wall. He watches Peter slide down the wall, curl himself into a tiny ball. Peter can feel Tony's eyes on him, can feel judgement rolling off him. Peter hates him.
"You're not fine, Peter. But that doesn't mean you won't be. It just means you need a bit of help on your way. This," Peter doesn't look at him, but he can feel Tony's eyes on his body, his hand waving in Peter's general direction. "is a cry for help. Trust me, I know. I've been there." Peter resists the urge to say something snarky about following in Tony's footsteps. About what fathers want from their adoptive sons. He wonders if he'll have to endure a hug. But Tony surprises him when he says, "I'm going to talk to Pepper about this whole situation, but you're definitely grounded. Drink some water and sleep it off."
Peter hates how much he loves being told what to do. How easy he finds following instructions. Maybe years of gifted and talented programming has made him into little more than a second DUM-E, constantly fucking up, constantly asking for praise.
He finds ignoring a directive almost as satisfying as following one. He starts disobeying instead of sneaking. He practically lives in his room, FRIDAY watches his every move, he hasn't seen Ned in months (Ned doesn't drink, doesn't approve, and has stronger morals than Peter). He writes joke answers on his homework and his grades slip into the high 80s. He realizes he doesn't need a scholarship anymore, not now that he lives with Tony fucking Stark, so waits to see who will care first. He thinks about the Tony that Beck created, the Tony who lives in Peter's mind, who more often than not drowns out the real Tony, the Tony-who-came-back. He thinks maybe he'll never be able to trust anyone ever again. He thinks maybe there's no good in the world, no one worth saving, no one worth even caring about.
He has no phone, no computer, no internet in his bedroom. He does his homework at the kitchen counter as fast as he can, ignoring Morgan's critical gaze, Pepper's constant sighs, Tony's pointed absence. He is still allowed to patrol, but he has to check his suit in and out with FRIDAY, like his own depraved, AI-powered library. He doesn't chafe at the boundaries so much as he can't find it in himself to care. If he wanted to be better he would do it. If he wanted to steal his suit and carve Tony's tech out of his life he would. If he wanted to hang out with Ned and build legos and watch Star Wars and drink tea with Ned's grandma he would be doing that, rather than staring at his ceiling thinking about how best to write a humorous-but-B-worthy essay on Twelfth Night, which he has to turn in this week or else.
The first person to notice his grades is Pepper, followed immediately by Tony and Morgan, who eavesdrops almost as well as Peter (and he has enhanced hearing). He lies on his bed, staring at the ceiling, and doesn't move when Tony enters his room. He rolls his eyes at Pepper's concern. He distracts Morgan with bad jokes when she asks him why he isn't smart anymore. He wonders how much she knows about being a Smart Kid, how much she's absorbed from him and Tony and Pepper and all the other Avengers. He wonders if she has a Ned. He looks up at his mentor, his father figure, his idol, at one point, and wonders how he can get the man to stop caring.
And now, years after getting what he wanted (Tony can’t care about someone he doesn’t remember, someone who doesn’t even exist), he knows exactly how much he gave up. And yeah, it saved the world, maybe many worlds, maybe even all the worlds, but it certainly didn’t save Peter. And now there's no one who knows Peter needs to be saved.
He perches himself above the M in Ridgewood, feeling calmer and a little floaty, when he sees it for the first time. His tongue is prickly, almost numb, which always happens when he smokes, he’s not sure why. There was a time, years ago, when he would have theorized and experimented and maybe even figured out which particular spidery glands in his mouth/throat/brain made it happen (probably Ned would have helped), but now that kind of work gets pushed to the end of a long to do list with a why bother post-it note above it (probably it would have been fun, if Ned was there to help).
His tongue is prickly and then the stench of death fills his senses and numb is no longer paramount. His Spidey sense is quiet (but it’s always pretty quiet when he’s high) (that or it’s SCREAMINGLOUD and quiet is better, definitely better), so whatever’s going on is probably better left alone.
But when has Peter ever left anything alone?
He giggles as he webs himself down to street level. The DeathStench is stronger, but also, weirdly, weaker. Closer but lesser. He cocks his head this way and that, trying to figure it out. No can-do, buckaroo. He walks at a normal, human pace towards death, thinking about how much he’ll have to drink later to get the taste of it out of his mouth, and kind of looking forward to his upcoming personal pity party. At this point in his life, Peter is about as adept as he thinks he’ll be able to get at forgetting death.
He rounds the corner, takes a whiff of laundromat, then it’s laundromat plus death, then it’s death and sweat and – huh.
Peter crouches down next to a pile of guts spread over a pile of trash bags. He peers in between the bags and spots a few loose limbs, a foot, a hand, all of them shielded by red and black tactical fabric. The guts, loose and bloody, are an outlier. He giggles again, then laughs – he can’t help himself – there’s something funny about a whole person in pieces. How many times has he wished he were in pieces? Way to be jealous of a corpse, Parker.
He makes his brain shut up by threatening it with abstinence (as if you could follow through on that threat, idiot. Don’t you know how much worse it’ll be?), and then forces himself to focus on the body. He lets his senses take over, sniffing through the residue of whatever happened, trying to piece together a story that doesn’t want to be told.
His eyes confirm what his nose already realized. There was a fight, not far from here, probably indoors. Some unlucky survivor – bleeding and sweating, Peter can smell both, and the fear – carried the lucky victim to this pile of trash, and dumped him or her or them here, probably hoping that no friendly neighborhood Spider-Man would stumble upon it.
Peter pokes the guts, just as an experiment. They’re squishy. They’re also, undoubtedly, alive. Which… is weird. The death smell is all around him, blanketing him, trying to choke him (he won’t let it), but it’s also receding; the pile of body is not as dead as it was.
Peter sighs so heavily. He doesn’t have time for this shit. He just wants to relax and forget and enjoy his buzz, and now here he is, about to get revenge for some dead idiot, just because he can hear the gloating a few blocks over, in the same cadence as the sweat and survivor-blood, and it really annoys him (it really annoys him) when bad guys gloat in his ear shot. Like, have a little respect, for fucks sake. This is Queens, he’s been caring for the stupid best borough for how long now? (Don’t answer that!) (Eleven years. Get yourself a cake, Parker.) And still, still!
He’s swinging and flying and crashing through the street-side, third-floor window of a railroad style apartment before he’s gotten over the disrespect angle. He has to focus for a few hot seconds as he takes down the first unsuspecting goon with his feet and the glass from the window and webs up the second. Goon Number One is unconscious and bleeding (different guy than the survivor-from-before, Peter can smell it), but Goon Number Two is trying to scream through the webbing, which is annoying. Peter wants to interrogate him.
He turns to the Goon, going for an annoyed-teacher look before he remembers he’s wearing his mask. Oh well. “Listen, I know it’s not every day you get a visit from the coolest hero out there,” he starts. The Goon does not stop his muffled screaming. “But you need to calm the fuck down right about now, okay?”
If possible, the guy screams even harder. Peter sighs heavily, again. He’s beginning to feel put-upon. It's hard to demand respect from someone so pitiful. “That’s like, the opposite of calming down, buddy. I’m just gonna take my time here, see what you murderers are up to, and we’ll come back to you later, okay? Try again when you've gotten this out of your system. Blink once for yes, twice for yes, thrice for yes, four times for no thanks, I’d prefer to be tortured! Yeah?”
Peter doesn’t wait to see how many blinks the annoying Goon goes for, it’s all the same to him. He webs up Goon Number One for good measure, then takes in the room. It’s musty in a stale, unused kind of way, and filled with weapons. Not just guns (lots of guns, though), but knives, throwing stars, nunchakus, is that a fucking Morningstar what the hell, and all sorts of random, bloody objects.
“Every day I regret my no-kill policy more,” he tells Goon Two over his shoulder. Goon Two is predictably silent. “You’re terrible entertainment, man. I usually like a little banter. But this room is nasty,” Peter draws out the last word, making sure the Goon is clear on his feelings. “I’m not sure I want to talk to anyone who keeps this much fetish equipment around. I mean, I’m not trying to kink shame, here, but it’s verging on overkill. A few more swords and you could run a Ren Faire. I mean, seriously. Why swords?”
Peter glances over to see if Goon Two is listening. His wide, frightened eyes say he is. At least he’s stopped trying to scream. Peter rubs his temples, like the overworked, underpaid social worker he’s becoming. “This sucks,” he says. Goon Two doesn’t respond, but Peter knows he agrees.
Beyond the weapons there’s nothing of interest in the room. Peter catalogues everything quickly, scanning the room one last time, but nope, just boxes of weapons, loose weapons, boxed up weapons.
“Well, the whole thing is pretty obvious, I guess,” he says, more to himself than his prisoner. “I’m gonna go check out the rest of the action, and then you and me will have our little chat.” Goon Two blinks. “Jesus, I really do sound exactly like my high school principal. What a fucking blow. Hold tight, kay?”
He doesn’t wait for a response before he kicks his way through the door that separates this weapons-packaging-room from whatever lies beyond.
What lies beyond turns out to be an empty closet, which leads to another bedroom, much the same layout as the first, but without windows, and way creepier. Even before entering the bedroom Peter’s spider sense is screaming at him, ice down his spine, needles at his neck. It smells worse than blood (blood is fine, blood is fine), it smells like –
“You ever notice that hospitals and barber shops and labs all kinda smell the same?” Peter is just making small talk, he’s mixing chemicals and writing down results and it’s not boring, not exactly, but it’s repetitive.
The music is loud – not as loud as Tony likes it, but at Peter’s absolute edge of discomfort – but still he can hear Iron Man mutter over the thumping bass, “it’s the hypochlorous acid.”
“Yeah, like, I know that?” as soon as Tony says it Peter realizes it’s obvious. “But also I meant like, metaphorically.”
Tony grins at him, a look so easy and mindless and full of genuine recognition, a look that Peter takes completely for granted. “Metaphorically they smell the same? Explain that one to me, kid.”
Peter keeps mixing chemicals and writing down results, but he can feel Tony stop working behind him. He can hear Tony cross his arms and lean his hip against the work bench and wait patiently for Peter to come up with some inane explanation, which Tony will inevitably tease him about over dinner, which he’ll hold onto forever and bring up again and again, Tony loves to tease Peter, something about keeping your head the right size, kid, trust me on this one, smart kids are all on ego trips, and suddenly Peter’s hand is covered in broken glass and cadmium-experiment-7.38.
He looks at his hand for way too long. It’s been a while since he lost control of his strength like that, since he squeezed without realizing what he was doing, but it’s happened before, and the best thing to do is play it off like nothing happened, like he’s completely chill and calm and meant to spill dangerous chemicals all over himself.
“Uh, kid?” Tony’s music is gone, now, and alarms are blaring, and FRIDAY is saying something.
Peter waves them all off, with his good hand. His bloody hand is rapidly becoming a flesh-laden skeleton, and he thinks it’s probably a bad idea to give Tony too good a look at it. “It’s – sorry, I’m sorry, but you should probably leave, Tony, cause uh – yeah. You don’t have a healing factor, so. It's cadmium. Yeah. Sorry.”
Tony presses his lips together in a hard, thin line, but does as Peter says and leaves him alone to clean up his mess. “Sorry!” Peter calls after him, knowing it doesn’t matter at all.
The bedroom-turned-laboratory-slash-torture-chamber (it’s clear to Peter’s nose even if his eyes can’t find much trace of violence, yet) is empty, so Peter flees. He crashes through the last door, into the poorly furnished kitchen-slash-living room, where three more goons hang out and drink coffee like they haven’t just murdered someone and dumped their limbs and guts in a pleasant, residential area.
“Wow,” Peter drawls, leaning against the door frame and crossing his legs idly. The goons startle. “Yeah, nothing makes me lust after a good cup o’ joe more than torturing a random guy. Let’s do it together, next time, yeah?”
Goon Number Three (or is it One, again? New room new count?) is quickest on the trigger. Peter flips away from his bullets and towards Four and Five before they can get their asses up enough to draw. A foot in each face – he loves it when they stand close together – and they’re both out cold. Number Three is smarter than he looks (he looks like a medium-sized boulder, which is to say, brainless), because he stops shooting at Peter when Spider-Man gets close to the other goons.
“Hey, you’ve got brains under that stone face,” Peter cheers for him.
“Fuck off,” says the Goon, which isn’t quite up to Peter’s level of banter.
“God, you’re all so boring.” He jumps up to the ceiling, crawls across it faster than Three can follow with his eyes, and lands behind Three. Peter taps him on the shoulder, just for fun. “Boo.”
Three doesn’t scream, exactly, but he definitely eeks, which is still pretty great. Peter laughs, webs the gun out of his hands, and sticks it to the ceiling. He claps his hands, delighted. “That was so cute!”
“I’m not cute,” says Three, who has no idea what to do with his hands now that there’s no gun in them. He starts to throw a punch, but Peter’s already out of the way. He grabs Three’s extended forearm, twists and throws, and smiles wanly at the crack of bone and the scream that follows the break.
“You’re right. That wasn’t cute,” Peter agrees. He’s trying to be amicable. He’s still a little high, and it’s fun to have a case to solve. Fun to work with proper criminals. He’s glad he’s not in that bedroom-slash-laboratory anymore. That wasn’t cute either.
He uses his webs to tie the guy’s good arm to his bad one, then webs him to the wall near his gun, “so the feds know it’s yours. Don’t want them mixing it up with all those other guns I saw lying around.”
Goon Three’s eyes widen in horror, but Peter throws a web at his mouth before he can say anything else inane. He finishes cleaning up after himself, and braves the awful bedroom-lab (bedlab? labroom? bedritory?) once more. It smells like all labs, like chemicals and cleaning agents, like Tony's lab, like Peter's past. He hates himself for feeling so much. (But the suffering might be good for you, Parker. Can't feel the pain you deserve if you can't feel at all!)
Peter tries to ignore his subconscious by searching for clues. Unfortunately, these guys have cleaned up after themselves pretty well. He finds a wrinkled, gross-smelling notebook in a drawer, which he takes, but nothing else seems even close to resembling evidence, so he gets the fuck out.
Once he can breathe easier, he focuses on Goon Number One. Or was it Two?
“It’s so hard to remember when you all dress the same,” he tells the guy. “Maybe I’ll just call you Albert instead.”
Albert blinks a lot.
“Wasn’t blinking a lot asking for torture? I’m gonna be honest, I’m a little out of it right now. That lab thing fucked me up good, I have a whole past trauma thing with labs, not that it's my worst trauma, but yanno, it's the one I'm faced with right now, and I also saw some guy’s guts on the street earlier. I’ve been doing this a while, now, but still, not exactly fairy tale material, if you know what I mean.”
Albert stops blinking. He stares at Peter, his eyes wide and shining and scared.
There was a time Peter hated seeing the fear in his enemies’ eyes. Hated smelling it on them, hearing their racing heartbeats, knowing they were easy prey. That time is long gone. It barely phases him, now.
(Oh yeah? That’s why you’re focusing on getting your breathing under control, big dog? Because you’re all good with inspiring fear in others, now?) (Shut up) (SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP)
Peter rips the web off Albert’s mouth. The skin underneath is red raw. Peter hopes it hurts, and he’s not at all jealous of Albert’s pain, no siree. (Not at all.)
He runs a finger under Albert’s jaw. Albert swallows hard. He places his finger under Albert’s chin and pulls, ever so slightly, so that Albert’s face is tilted up, so that he has to roll his eyes to look at Peter, who is a few inches shorter.
“I don’t want to torture you,” Peter admits. It feels like a confession. It feels wrong.
“Please,” Albert rasps. Peter moves his finger to Albert’s lips.
“Shh. Now’s Spider-Man talking time. Albert talking time is in a little bit, okay?” Peter boops Albert’s nose to confirm. “Now, I don’t want to, like I said, not really a torture kind of guy, but I will if I have to. Crazy the things you find yourself capable of once you’ve lost everyone and everything.”
Peter grabs a chair and sits in it creakily. He leans back on two legs and watches Albert struggle to make sense of his predicament, of Spider-Man, of everything. He sighs heavily, again.
“I can see we’re working with the dregs, here. You ever get the sense you didn’t live up to your potential? No? Oh well.”
“Please,” Albert tries again, and Peter is back up close with his hand over Albert’s mouth before his heart has had a chance to beat again. The chair falls to all fours a second later.
“I already told you,” Peter’s voice is a growl. “This is Spider-Man talking time. Say nothing if you understand.”
Albert pisses himself, which Peter takes as confirmation. He retreats back to his chair, but the piss-stench is already way too strong to avoid. “And maybe drink some water every now and then. Hydrate or dydrate, as they say.”
Peter gives himself one long, silent moment to compose a question. He's still thinking about Tony, about what Iron Man would do in his situation, about how Iron Man would never be in his situation because Iron Man, the hypocritical bitch, doesn't do drugs anymore. Albert whimpers, but doesn’t say anything, so Peter allows it.
When he’s ready, he looks Albert directly in the eye, and asks, “who were you experimenting on?”
Not the most clever opening, but Peter’s way past ready to leave this creepy apartment.
Albert says nothing. Peter rolls his eyes, under the mask. “Albert. Now is your time. Your time to shine! Albert talking time! Go!”
He waits. Albert swallows. “I don’t –”
“Yeah, I’m sure you’re not supposed to tell,” Peter waves this off with a flick of his wrist. “But if you don’t you’re gonna end up next to him, guts and limbs and all, so maybe start telling.”
“He agreed,” says Albert, quickly and too loudly. And very, very desperately.
“Oh?”
“He agreed, he was paid.” Peter is tuned into Albert's heartbeat, his pulse, his hormonal stink, so he knows Albert is not lying. But something is off, here. Something is very wrong.
“Seems like he’ll have a hard time using that money now, Albie.”
“I don’t know the details. I just–” he cuts himself off, but his gaze – flitting around the room full of weapons to sell – gives him away.
“Right, right. You package the goods or some shit. Fine. Name?”
Albert's eyes go wide. Panicked. “I – uh. Albert?”
Peter fights the urge to facepalm. He loses the fight. His voice comes out muffled. “Ughhh. No, you fucking idiot. The dead guy’s name. The willing test subject. Come on, use a few more brain cells. It won’t kill you, I swear.”
“I don’t know.” Albert’s heartbeat is faster than a hummingbird’s. It’s about to canter all the way out of his chest, just from fear and adrenaline. Albert is lying.
Peter lets the front legs of his chair hit the ground and leans forward. “You’re lying, Albert.”
“I don’t know!”
Peter lets himself fall to all fours, which feels super natural to him since the spider bite, but which he knows freaks people out, and crawls slowly towards Albert.
“I can’t say, I can’t, they’ll kill me–”
Peter crawls up the wall and sits, cross legged, body parallel to the floor, right next to Albert’s head. He pulls Albert's head onto his knee and strokes Albert’s gross, sweaty hair.
“Oh, sweetheart,” he says, in his best impression of Aunt May. She used to stroke Peter’s hair. May didn’t sit on the wall, though. “If you don’t, I’m going to kill you.”
“You don’t – you’re Spider-Man. You’re – you’re…”
Sadly, Peter never gets to learn what he is. Albert starts crying. Big, wet sobs. Peter uses his thumbs to wipe the guy’s tears away. His dirty gloves leave dark, bloody streaks on Albert’s face. Ben used to wipe Peter’s tears, for years after his parents died, he would wake up crying, just like this, sobbing, choking –-
Peter leans over and kisses Albert on his disgusting forehead. “It’s okay, sweetheart. You’re here, you’re alive. Let’s name five things we can see. Guns, that’s one. The broken window. The splintered door. Gosh, I did a lot of damage, didn’t I? I used to really avoid that kind of thing. Oh well. Two more. We can do it. The wall, that's four. And my hand! Panic attack averted, right?”
Albert’s breathing has actually quieted a bit. Peter congratulates himself silently. He keeps wiping away the spilling tears. He feels, and he’s not sure when this came on, oddly protective of Albert, a feeling he does not like at all. Albert, a low-level thug, who probably got into the thugging business for much the same reasons as Peter got into the Spidey business, is not someone he wants to feel sorry for. He is not someone he wants to empathize with, because fuck that.
Back when he was little, after his parents died, but before he became friends with Ned, Peter was forced to see a series of child psychologists. Unlike in the movies, he had actually liked most of them, well-meaning, kind women who truly wanted to help him through a massive, unexpected, unthinkable loss.
One of those women, Dr. Susan (if Peter remembered her last name he would write her a nice card), told his aunt and uncle that he was an unusually empathetic child. This stuck in Peter’s mind for several reasons, but mainly because, in all his living memory, no one had ever said anything nice about him that wasn’t related to his brain. He was a Smart Kid, after all, not a girl. Boys weren’t supposed to develop empathy until fifth grade, or so said the child psychology book he’d taken out of the New York Public Library when he learned he would be seeing a shrink.
Now, Peter curses his unnatural empathy. “I’m not gonna kill you, Albert,” he sighs, leaning back on his elbows. “But living and living well are two very different things, sweetie, and I’m stronger than I know.”
Albert’s breathing is ratcheting up again. Peter sits up and starts petting his head. “Tell me what I want to know and I’ll get you out of here in one piece. I’ll even give you a big head start on the others, my little way of saying thank you. How’s that sound?”
Albert’s hair is bloody. Peter wipes his hands on his thighs and waits. He can feel Albert close to his breaking point. He doesn’t feel bad anymore, nor happy, nor anything, really. He feels suddenly numb, now that the fighting and interrogating are over. He fishes for a joint, he knows he has one hidden in his suit, but he can't find it quickly.
“He’s not dead,” Albert manages to choke out, distracting Peter.
Peter lets himself fall to the floor. He lands directly in front of Albert. “Um, I saw his guts. Like, literally, his stomach, big intestine. Small intestine. Colon. All that shit. Ha! Get it?”
“He’ll come back. He always does.”
Time stops for Peter. He stills, stops breathing, stops thinking. “His name,” he hisses, barely aware of the words escaping his lips. He knows, of course he knows, if he were honest with himself (maybe you should be more honest with yourself, Petey) he knew from the moment he smelled the dead-but-healing-body.
“It’s – he agreed. Deadpool, he needed the money, he said. He–”
Peter webs Albert’s lips shut and jumps out the window. He is done listening to Albert. He is done caring about Albert. He is not (repeat: not!) going to think about that awful apartment or the lab or anything even remotely relating to what just happened.
He swings himself through one of his nearby hideouts and grabs a mostly-empty handle of vodka, then he’s back on the streets and his webs are taking him to the same pile of trash he inspected earlier.
It still smells like death, but less. It also smells like work, like a body trying to knit itself back together from nothing. It’s fascinating, at least as a sensory experiment. He can literally hear Deadpool’s cells growing, or mutating, or reforming, or whatever it is they do. Peter thinks for a while about how fun it would have been to pursue that biochemical engineering PhD Tony was always teasing him about, but the vodka helps shove that particular thought back where it belongs. He thinks about how it felt to reform from nothing into himself, blinking back orange mist, Titan forever in his periphery. He wonders if Deadpool can feel each death, if it still sits in his body somewhere, his mind, his soul.
Peter sits his blue and red ass on a stoop overlooking the black bags and bloody body parts, sips his vodka, and waits.