Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Alright, so.

In the situation of getting caught by your teammates, sort of, kind of making out with your best friend in the middle of something that, in his defense, he hadn’t known was a city-wide emergency: what is the correct course of action?

Because Peter would place every cent of his student debt on throwing said friend to the other side of the couch being the wrong one.

Ned was displeased.

Ned had a right to be displeased because Peter was the one who initiated this bad fucking idea after they’d both very clearly admitted that it was a bad fucking idea because Peter was a goddamn moron who’d said, “Okay, but like, maybe let’s just see. No one else has to know, right?”

Ahahahahaha.

Ahahaha.

Ah, he wanted to die.

And he couldn’t even ask Wade to end him because he was standing there, doorknob in hand, standing in dead silence. And stillness.

“I can explain?” Peter’s mouth tried.

Little Spidey had both hands slapped over her face and Louis, like Wade had frozen in terror. Wade, ever the most mature of their team, woke up out of his daze first and his reaction was to close the door.

Peter and Ned sat in resulting privacy and silence for a minute, before Peter’s brain reminded him that he had two degrees and that maybe, if he started apologizing now and never stopped for the rest of his short, miserable existence, Ned would forgive him.

“I’m so fu—”

“Literally shut up,” Ned countered.

“Okay, let me just get one in because—”

“Peter.”

“I’m—”

“Ah.”

“Sor—”

“AH. Nope. People are dying. Go do the thing.”

All hope was lost. Fuck it, go big or go home.

“I’ve repressed all my feelings for you since we were eighteen and I cry for hours sometimes because you always love me even when I can’t and I’ve never gotten over the time we messed around when we were sixteen it’s one of my top ten sex fantasies and sometimes I THINK OF BOTH YOU AND MJ WHEN I’M DOING IT OKAY BYE.”

Because the correct course of action was always jumping out the window in a red spandex suit.

It worked every time.

“Dude,” Little Spidey whispered in awe when he caught up with them.

He could not look at her. He could look at no human ever again. He was gonna to have to go north and become a hermit in Vermont. Karen still had friends in Vermont, right? She could hook him up.

“I mean, that was classic—”

“Angel, if you don’t shut your fucking face, I will throw myself off the goddamned Empire State. Wade, what’s happening?”

Wade said nothing, watching him with huge white eyes.

“Wade,” Peter shouted.

“Y’all are children,” he finally said, “Like. I’ve known y’all since you were babies. You cannot be doing the do, Petey-Pete. You can’t. You’re not old enough to. I don’t make the rules.”

God, just fucking—he crammed a hand up to his face and pinched as hard as he could at the bridge of his nose without breaking it.

“Okay, one? We are adults and have been for eight years, Wade. And two? I’ve ruined everything, so y’all can rest easy knowing that nothing will come of it. Now what’s happening?”

“It’s like someone’s tried to bomb Penn Station,” Miles, bless his fucking heart, chipped in. He was out of breath, must have hurtled this way from Brooklyn. “Everything is crazy, there’s something in the tunnels.”

Yeah, Parker. Focus on the tunnels.

He breathed in and breathed out.

Be Spiderman, Parker.

“Alright. These things, are they big?” he asked.

“Huge,” Miles threw back.

“Perfect, let’s go say hi,” Peter decided.

Huge was an understatement. Huge was a gross miscalculation. What Miles meant by ‘huge’ was ‘about the size of a subway car.’

They.

Were.

Spiders.

This was not a drill. Huge, many-eyed, many-legged spiders and Peter had always thought that that one scene in Harry Potter was fucking nightmare fuel, but that was nothing compared to the purgatory he was currently trapped in, wherein he was using every ounce of his super strength to wrangle a single hairy leg out of one of the North River tunnels while just barely containing his urge to wail like a child.

Penn Station cheered at his and his team’s arrival. Cheered. Because they made the obvious logic leap that Spiderman was the perfect man for this horrible job.

The spiders, the gargantuan tarantulas dead set on burrowing into the commuter rails, were less cheery. The one Peter was working on dragging out as the copycats tried to get as many people out of the station in as orderly a fashion as possible, made the Spidey Sense go absolutely apeshit. The hairs on the thing’s legs were like, feeling him up.

He looked behind him for a second to make sure that the deafening creaking he’d just heard wasn’t an oncoming train and looked back to find that a second leg was headed right his way.

Alright, listen. If he was going to die today, it was going to be on his motherfucking terms.

The Spidey Sense told him to strike, so he did. Dropped the leg, threw an elbow back and twisted his wrist into the motion.

His fist collided hard with the incoming leg and for a second, he thought that nothing had happened. Then the giant hairy leg spasmed and shook and the tunnel itself reverberated with a roar.

Where the fuck was Wade?

Fuck this, where the fuck were the Avengers?

“Karen, get me online,” he shouted over the noise. The noise was only getting louder. The tunnel got blacker and blacker as what little light inside was drowned out by the tarantula moving forward. More enormous, pillar-sized brown legs emerged out of the blackness.

Karen put him online.

Sorry, kids. Shit was about to get even louder.

“AVENGERS ASSEMBLE” he screamed into the comms at full volume, “ASSEMBLE AT NYC PENN STATION. THREAT LEVEL SEVEN GOING ON EIGHT. AIR SUPPORT VITAL, GROUND SUPPORT VITAL, CROWD CONTROL VITAL. BIO THREAT. ARACHNID. BLOCKING RAIL TRAFFIC.”

The blackness of the tunnel gave way to brown and orange and blindingly reflective eyes.

“Copy that, Spiderman,” Sam Wilson’s voice said in his ear. “We’re on our way. ETA 15.”

“Holy shit,” Peter heard Louis say over the comms. “This is Avengers level?”

“Y’all get everyone away from tunnels, subways, everything. Keep ‘em surface level for now. Get the cops to help you,” Peter ordered.

“UNDER,” Wade’s voice suddenly shouted in his ear.

“Under?” Peter snapped back immediately.

“THIS AIN’T TELEPHONE PRINCESS, UNDER AND THROUGH,” Wade’s command tone informed him. It was followed by a noise of disgust and cursing.  

Under and through. Get under, strike through. Wade must have already taken one of the other ones out. Peter turned back to the beast. The hairs on its legs moved with it, like gargantuan hairs planted in human goose bumps.

Under and through. He needed it to move. He needed it to get out of the tunnel and over him.

Think, Spiderman. Think.

How do you scare a spider? How do you scare a spider? How do you scare a spider?

Glass jar. Human foot. Harsh wind. Loud noise.

Make it bigger. Spider was bigger.

An earthquake? A huge motherfucking shoe—

Oh, now there’s a thought.

He was so sorry Amtrak.

“MILES, HERE. NOW.” He shouted over the comms.

He just barely heard Miles’s cry of confusion and then affirmative as he bounced his shoulders and breathed in and out.

You got this, Parker. It’s just a spider. You’re a spider. It’s fine. This is nothing like space. Remember space? Yeah, that was horrible.

He threw himself up onto the platform and started running.

“Spidey, what the fuck are you doing?” Wade’s voice snapped in his ear. “I said—”

“I’m fucking trying here, Wade,” Peter snapped back, in full sprint.

The spider was a hell of a lot bigger the closer he got to it. The more it unfurled, the bigger it got. The Spidey Sense practically whited out his vision, he’d never felt it so strong before. He flung an arm back and prayed that May wasn’t watching tv and punched the wall underneath the legs on the right hand side.

C’mon. C’mon. C’mon.

He thought he heard something in all that cracking.

He started sprinting back from where he came. Further back. He heard the squeak of shoes skidding onto the platform. He didn’t need to look to the side to know it was Miles, he grabbed him as he passed and threw him into a sprint alongside him.

“Miles, we gotta put our backs into this one,” he puffed out as they ran back as far as they could before hitting the other tunnel.

“What?”

“We gotta break that wall.”

“WHAT?”

“Put all your strength behind it, kid, we only got one more shot.”

Miles’s shoes shrieked with his as they hit the end of the platform and pivoted back towards the spider.

“We gotta break the tunnel in,” Peter shouted, “It’ll scare it out and then up and then we can get under.”

Miles, thank God for this kid, managed to match Peter’s pace, despite being a whole head shorter.

“What happens then?” he asked.

5 seconds to impact.

“We fucking pray. On my mark, baby boy.”

He took back his arm and saw Miles do the same.

3.

2.

“NOW.”

The impact took Peter’s wrist with it.

The wall cracked.

The tunnel seemed to shudder.

The concrete screamed as it slid against itself.

Peter ripped the broken hand back and, snapped his head up at the spider. Something was wrong.

Very wrong.

He reached out with his other hand and grabbed a handful of Miles’s suit. They didn’t have time. That thing wasn’t moving fast enough. It hadn’t moved fast enough. It was still half in the tunnel like an idiot. It wasn’t as fast as a normal tarantula. Couldn’t pull its abdomen out.

They needed to scram or they were going to get crushed. Miles’s wrist must have broken too, he was shocked into silence. Peter couldn’t give him time to feel the full extent of the pain. He threw the kid forward again with him into a run and then threw out a line of webbing with his non-fucked up hand.

The noise of the spider falling was tremendous. Perhaps even greater than when it had screamed at him from the tunnel.

They needed to get up and fucking out. He snagged the broken hand’s elbow around Miles’s waist and pulled hard with the other arm, put a fuckload of bicep into it and thank, Jesus, they had lift off.

He bypassed the stairs, didn’t stick the landing at the top. Both he and Miles went rolling. He recovered first and grabbed the kid again. More web.

Rinse, wash, repeat, until you see daylight.

The building was going to collapse when the tunnel did.

The copycats had gotten everyone out.

Wherever Wade was, he’d have the sense to move. He’d be alright.

They cleared the entrance onto 8^th Avenue.

Miles stumbled hard but got caught by the arms of the hundreds of strangers waiting outside. But Peter couldn’t fucking deal with that because there was suddenly a woman screaming somewhere in front of him. Screaming full volume over all the noise and he knew without thinking what that scream meant.

He pushed himself up and then shoved through the crowd to meet her halfway, his broken hand screeching in pain. The women crashed into his chest, breathless.

“WHAT DO THEY LOOK LIKE?” he shouted. He didn’t have time for politeness.

13 years old. Brown hair, pink hat.

He sprinted back to the entrance and nearly ate shit because the whole building was shaking with the tunnel’s demise and the shrieking of the dying tarantula.

“Karen, give me heat signatures,” he ordered as he ran.

Where are you where are you where are you gotcha.

Smart girl, find a doorway. Maybe in any other situation, honey. He grabbed the girl before she could make so much as a shriek and started gunning it back towards the entrance again. He got halfway across the room before the walls started cracking.

Shit.

Shit.

He only had one arm left. The girl was sobbing into his neck, terrified. She was making it out of there. Come hell or high water.

“Hold on,” he told her. Tucked her in. Threw the web.

And put his fucking back into it.

The phantom ring of vibranium echoed in his ear as he hit the asphalt. It was quickly replaced by honking and the distant screech of tires.

But he didn’t hit any cars. His shoulder was hot. A mess. Some serious road rash. He knew without looking that it would be as red as his suit.

His head felt like shit. His hand felt like shit.

The girl was. She was breathing. Crying. But breathing. Maybe a little banged up. She’d make it.

Where was mama? There was mama. Yeah, she’s good, mama. Breathing at least, no, take her.

He realized that he was surrounded by parked cars and legs and gasping. Shuddering. The ground shuddered. He shivered.

Then there were hands on him, big ones. Oh, he knew these. From work. Ha.

Mr. Stark was pissed. He was saying something, but Peter’s ears were ringing and his head was ringing and he knew he was exactly fifteen seconds from unconsciousness, so Mr. Stark could say all that he wanted.

He woke up at home on his couch to a four pairs of eyes over him.

He screamed.

They screamed.

Not even a little ice cream in the whole fucking house.

Everyone collected themselves and sat back on their heels to clutch at their respective hearts and Wade at his nipples.

“Y’all trying to kill me?” Peter barked, slinging an arm—fuck that hurt like a motherfucker—over his eyes.

When no one answered him, he peeked out. When no one responded to that, he and his broken-ass hand sat up. Wade gave him a filthy look, then stood up and stalked out of the whole room. He left the apartment. He closed the door behind him.

That wasn’t good.

“Hey,” he said softly in Wade’s direction. He turned to the kids. “What’s happened? Is everyone okay? Where are the spiders?”

None of the copycats were wearing their masks. Miles had a few bandages on his face. His lip was trembling.

Oh shit.

“No, no, no,” he pleaded, “Tell me someone got the—”

“Spidey, just shut up,” Little Spidey snapped.

He couldn’t. Not with Penn Station collapsing. The casualties alone. He thought everyone had gotten out. The building had been empty when he last remembered it. No heat signatures. Just the one girl. He’d gotten the girl. Had she been hurt? Had her head cracked on the way out ? Had—

Miles couldn’t take it anymore and threw himself on top of Peter’s chest and started full-body sobbing. He was just a little bigger than that girl. Fuck, Peter had put him in danger, he’d—

“Spidey, just stop thinking, okay?” Angel snarled at him. “You’re a fucking maniac, do you know that? A fucking maniac. You could have died going back like that. You and your goddamn martyr complex—YOU COULD HAVE DIED.”

“Angel, settle down,” Louis ordered. She snapped her lips closed. Her eyes were shining.

Oh, no. Oh, god.

Louis didn’t say anything. He reached over to pry Miles off Peter, but Peter caught his hand with the unbroken one. He could see now that Miles had a matching cast. He wrapped his arms around the kid and gave him a tug until he allowed himself to be pulled up onto the couch with Peter. Peter hugged him close and let him tuck his head into his collarbone, let him curl up next to him to cry. He rubbed a hand in circles on the part of the kid’s back he could reach.

Angel sniffed.

Peter closed his eyes, then held out an open, but limp palm to her.

She came, too. Reluctantly, then all at once. He pressed his jaw against the top of her head and looked straight at Louis.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

He was always saying it. They were always hearing it. But he really, truly meant it this time. And there was nothing more to say.

“I’m sorry.”

Louis nodded and sucked in a breath, then let it out slowly. It made his back and shoulders rise.

“Louis, I’m sorry.”

“I know, man. You’re also crazy.”

Peter huffed. It was hard with all the combined weight on him. All the stress. All the tears, the relief.

He dropped his head back and stared up at the ceiling. He swallowed.

“I’ll be more careful,” he promised them all. Miles rubbed at his eyes and unintentionally at Peter’s ribs. Peter dropped the broken hand onto his head and pressed in a little bit.

“I promise.”

“Wade’s mad at you,” Little Spidey told him as Louis convinced Miles to go wash his face in the bathroom.

Peter sighed and, inch by inch, forced himself up. He wasn’t wearing shoes, or the suit for that matter. Someone must have changed him out of it, paramedics maybe. Either that, or Mr. Stark had taken it away for repairs. It was going to need them.

“Where are you going?” Little Spidey asked him. She stood and helped him to his feet, though. She brought him his shoes when he asked for them.

“Gonna go find Wade.”

“But he’s mad.”

“Yeah, and he’ll only get madder. Hey Miles, there’s a pack of peas in the freezer, put that on your face for a minute, bud. It’ll help with the swelling. Call your dad and tell him you’re safe and with friends for the minute, alright? Don’t know if you’re getting back to Brooklyn tonight, but you can stay here if you need to.”

He got an affirmative as he staggered out the door.

Passing out in the middle of the day was always a trip because it meant waking up when it was dark.

He found Wade at the meeting roof, the old one. The perch. It took him a long time because everything hurt.

Wade didn’t acknowledge him. He sat as close to the edge of the roof as possible. Peter didn’t have the balance to do that right now. He sat down on the opposite side of the crumbling concrete divider on the safe side of the ledge and leaned the top of his back against Wade’s.

It was familiar.

Comforting.

He’d done that a lot when he was upset as a kid, except he’d been the one sitting on the ledge and Wade had been the one sitting against the concrete.

“Wade, I’m sorry I’m stupid,” he said.

Wade’s back expanded and deflated evenly.

“I’d say I won’t do it again, but we both know I’d be lying.”

Inhale. Expand. Exhale. Deflate.

He remembered being Miles. Throwing himself on Matt’s bloody, broken chest and sobbing for everything he was worth. Begging Matt to stay home, not to die. Please don’t die, Double D. We thought you weren’t coming back. We thought you weren’t coming home.

“Peter, you become more like him every day,” Wade said to the city.

Inhale. Expand. Exhale. Deflate.

“I’m sorry, Wade.”

“One of these days, you ain’t coming back, baby boy. Just like he ain’t.”

Peter had called Miles ‘baby boy’ back there. It had been reflexive.

He forced himself to push off of Wade’s back and climbed over the divider on his knees. He pressed himself up against Wade’s side and dislodged his arm to wrap it around himself.

He pressed his face against Wade’s chest. Wade didn’t look at him. But he did pull the arm closer.

“I’ll do better.”

“Only got one life to live, Peter.”

“I’ll do better.”

“Hey, why do you hate yourself so much, l’il one?”

He swallowed hard and pressed in closer. Remembered feeling like Miles.

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t cry, Pete. C’mere.”

Even after all these years, Wade could pull Peter into his lap, into his arms. Ten years and nothing mattered. Peter was still that kid crying because he thought he and May were going to have to leave Uncle Ben’s ghost. An apartment which no longer even smelled like him.

Wade rubbed wide circles in his back, like he had back then.

“You gotta love yourself, Peter. No one’s gonna do it for you. Well, at least not the way you need it most.”

He nodded.

“You can’t go throwing your life away like that, pal.”

He sniffed.

“There was a girl,” he managed to croak.

“I would have got her,” Wade said evenly. “I was right behind you. I saw her.”

There was no point in trying to justify it further. No point in saying ‘but the walls were crumbling,’ ‘but you didn’t know what her mom looked like,’ ‘but she was so scared.’

Wade would have got it. That was kind of his thing. Weighing the impossible and saying ‘nah, not today, I think.’

Wade sighed. Peter sighed with him.

“Promise me you’re not gonna do nothing stupid for at least a whole week?”

Peter laughed. Wiped his face. Nodded.

“You gotta set a better example for them kids, Pete, seriously. Between you, me, and Red, they can’t afford anything less.”

Nah, that was true.

“I really am sorry, Wade,” Peter sniffed. Wade sighed again and wrapped his arms around him tighter. He started swaying.

“I know, you fuckin’ brat. Just stop givin’ me fuckin’ heartburn.”

Peter laughed.

Chapter Text

Shelley and Peter had long, arduous relationship which was called by medical professionals and probably most members of the community, ‘therapy.’

Peter called it torture and Shelley asked him why he felt that way.

Peter called it ‘analyzing all his flaws’ and Shelley asked him why he used the word ‘flaw’ there.

Peter decided that okay, maybe they weren’t all flaws; some of them were just human reactions and then he had to stuff his fist into his mouth because damnit, she’d got him again.

Shelley was a specialist who worked specifically with enhanced, mutated, and seriously traumatized people. Peter had never outright told her he was Spiderman. Not once in the nine years they’d been working together. On paper, all she knew was that he had expressed that he thought he had a mutation of sorts which interfered with his daily life and resulted in high levels of anxiety and occasional bouts of depression and hey, maybe some PTSD, too? Just a smidge.

When the doctors took his vitals to confirm that he could start to meet with Shelley at the tail end of 17, May had had to step in so that they didn’t like, cage him. Or hospitalize him. Or whatever it was that they’d wanted to do with all their machines and biopsies and shit.

May had firmly stated that her nephew was not a medical experiment, and Peter had heard her and he’d been so proud to be her kid. He’d spent every year since conveniently ignoring all the polite requests from the hospital’s research team to come in for like, the teeniest of all tiny tests. A single drop of blood. That was all.

Haha.

No.

Shelley acted as though none of this had ever happened. Peter, she’d told him, was one of her favorite clients. He thought she probably told that to everyone, but also said “great. When I inevitably die young, you can go ahead and publish all our session notes for research.” And she’d said, with dead seriousness, “duly noted.”

So both Peter and Shelley understood exactly where they stood with each other and they both chose to overlook the scientific value of their meetings and the fact that Shelley and Peter’s psychiatrist worked together to prescribe him frankly upsetting dosages of anti-anxiety meds.

This was because, as Shelley frequently told him, he was more than his mental illness.

She surveyed the broken hand this time with pursed lips before lifting her eyes to his face.

“It took me ages to get in this morning,” she observed.

“Yeah, I heard Penn Station’s fucked,” Peter observed alongside her.

“Hm.”

Silence.

“So I made out with my best friend the other day and ruined every meaningful anything we’ve ever had.”

“Oh? Do go on.”

And he did.

Shelley told him that besides talking to his friend about the experience they’d had with each other and how that changed or didn’t change their relationship, and besides taking his goddamn meds on the proper schedule, what Peter really needed to try to do was to exercise some positive self-care practices. She told him that he ought to try to find something that was soothing to him, which allowed him time and space to reflect on the state of his mind and the state of his body.

She said that these self-care things didn’t need to be big ones.

Self-care practices could be things like eating when he was hungry, not doing two all-nighters in a row, and putting new sheets on the bed.

Self-care, she said, was about teaching himself and his body that he didn’t need to earn the right to be happy and to feel nice.

Self-care, she warned him, having gone with him through the Harry situation, and the Lizzy one before that, was not about finding validation in other people.

It was about learning to love himself.

“Don’t make out with Ned again until you’re sure you’re doing it for the right reasons.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Don’t make out with MJ again either.”

You know what? Self-care was a bitch.

“Yes, ma’am.”

SM: guys my therapist has prescribed me self-care

SM: she gave me a pamphlet

SM: It is all bullshit. I need real-life suggestions. Ready go

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): k what you need is to start a ranch

SM: she said no hermit or Lotr fantasies

SM: next

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): well fuck man

S2: maybe u should start with the bullshit in the pamphlet

SM: impossible

SM: next

S3: angel’s right spidey

SM: NEXT

S4: isn’t self care a meme?

SM: a boy after my own heart, thank u miles a very good point

D2: work out

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): a strong contender has approached, tell us more David. Work out what exactly

D2: your? Body?

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): the answer was ‘problems’ youre dismissed David

DD: self-care?

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): REDTHEW HOW IS CALIFORNIA AT THIS TIME OF YEAR?

DD: I paid three fucking dollars for the privilege of riding the bus this morning and some guy puked in the back

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): god, makes you just wanna get up and move doesn’t it?

DD: I mean it isn’t that different from riding the subway

DD: anyways. Self-care. You should fight.

S2: strike 1. Try again old man

DD: I get three? Cool. My new thing is triathlon.

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): ajdaskjfhlsdfkasdjfasdfkj

SM: DD, no.

SM: DD, there’s water.

DD: yes it’s horrible I hate every second of it and I’m not amazing at the biking part either.

DD: fogs thinks I should stick with rock climbing

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): akdhaadlajfs red you are so fucking precious COME HOME

DD: [voice message] can’t. Kirsten wants me to roller skate with her at some old church. She says she got us matching helmets. Pete, you should try every sport imaginable and then watch true crime. That’s self-care. My therapist says so.

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): what else does she say boo?

DD: [voice message] that I have clinical depression and she’s frankly amazed that I’m functional 9 months of the year

S2: how is watching true crime self-care?

DD: [voice message] because nothing brings me greater joy than listening to my husband freak out every time they reveal the murderer even though this is literally our day job.

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): nelson is so cute

S4: okay, so I’m under the impression that we aren’t talking about the meme

S4: don’t you have friends spidey? Why not talk to them? You guy can hang out

DD: [voice message] getting wasted is not self-care, my therapist tells me. If you hang with friends you’re supposed to do an activity or eat food.

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): coming in strong out of right field, red. Good for you. Go lay all over MJ pete.

[Read 4:53]

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): peter

S2: dude did you

SM: I have to go back to work

DD: what have I told you about fucking your best friends?

SM: you married your best friend

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): and fucked your best friend

S4: Sorry what

S4: is that a thing that happens? Asking for a friend

SM: MILES NO SAVE YOURSELF CHILD

DD: agreed. The suffering is only worth it if they propose.

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): y’all are A LOT

DD: you wanna go there wade?

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): no I’m good

DD: because if we want to talk about fucking best friends

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): we don’t

DD: we should also talk about fucking teammates

SM: I am stopping this conversation now. You’re both filthy and there are children present. I’m going to google self-care. K ily bye

DD: Dom told me some shit, Wade Wilson

DD: and I am going to get to the bottom of it.

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): never talk to her again

DD: make me

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): I fucking will after I strangle her and hide the body

DD: oh NATHAN

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): remember the time we fucked and you cried

DD: wow look at the time. Bye Pete best of luck

Chapter Text

Okay, he could do this. He could do this self-care thing.

He totally could, he was a superhero, duh.

He laid out the pamphlet on the table and got a pen. It was basically like a to-do list. He loved to-do lists. He made them all the time at work. At home. Sometimes in the middle of the night during hell-weeks.

Okay, so maybe making lists was part of his anxiety and maybe it fed into his anxiety, but what the fuck ever. Someone else had made this list. He was allowed to follow it to the letter.

1. Take a walk.

What.

Just, like, a walk? Like, that was it? Going outside and walking? That was it?

He put down the pen.

This list was bullshit.

No, no. Nope. You, sir, he reminded himself as he picked the pen back up, know fuck all about what is good for you. And so you, sir, are going to do what’s on the damn list. To the goddamn letter. Sir. Spiderman, sir.

Okay, but did he have to walk or could he web? He could web right? The paragraph at the top of the first page of the brochure said he could personalize his list. He was pretty sure that meant that he could web.

He assessed his still broken hand. His knuckles were nasty—swollen and purple despite all the anti-inflammatory meds. It didn’t hurt, per se. He could probably get away with getting one of the webslingers over it, he just couldn’t make his fingers bend far enough to hit the buttons.

Damnit.

Foiled again.

Ugh, fine, walking then.

He grabbed his coat.

Ugh. Walking. The slowest means of bipedal transportation. It was cold. There were no dogs. The roads were a nightmare because of a severe lack of train transport. He nearly got hit by no less than two cars and he’d only gotten twenty minutes away from his apartment.

Fuck.

He did not feel cared for.

In fact, he was starting to feel pissed off.

He nearly flung the next guy who shoulder checked him on the crowded sidewalk into the street.

Fuck walking. Next item.

2. Think Positive Thoughts.

How positive were they talking here? And towards who? Himself? No, not happening. How about towards someone else? He could think positive thoughts towards other people.

Like Angel, who had forgiven him faster than the other two copycats. She was good. She was great actually. She’d passed both her night classes that semester and had executed the most ridiculous victory dance Peter had ever seen upon checking her final exam results on her phone while they were out on patrol. Miles was endlessly embarrassed by her.

Okay, yeah, see? That wasn’t so bad. He could think positive thoughts. How many did he have to do? Probably like, five. Five was a good number to do things by. Five positive things to think. Only four more left.

Matt was getting married soon, that was a positive thought. Matt was going to get drunk as fuck and sit in Foggy’s lap and cry all over him at his wedding reception. Foggy was going to have to teach Matt how to dance for their reception, or maybe Matt already knew how to dance. He probably knew how to pole dance, that was the kind of guy Matt was.

Alright, good. Two down, three to go. Who next?

Mr. Stark was finally getting his damn bifocals. The ones he swore he didn’t need. The ones which would mean that he’d finally stop thrusting paperwork into Peter’s hands and telling him to read it out loud. The day could not come soon enough.

And Dr. Banner was coming home for a while, too. That meant that Thor would be coming home for a little while. And that meant that Mr. Stark was going to be good and distracted and out of Peter’s hair for two whole weeks.

Those last two didn’t feel as positive as before. Why didn’t they feel as positive as before? Maybe it was because he was allowing too much room for complaining. Alright, no more complaining.

It would be March soon and May wanted him to come and make a balcony garden with her. They had to go buy pots and soil and bulbs. May’s favorite flowers were daffodils. They’d plant daffodils then.

That was better.

Maybe they could take some of their flowers to Matt and Foggy’s wedding.

Maybe Wade would want to grow flowers. He’d probably grumble about it, like he grumbled about the rocks Peter gave him or the crafts he made him do. But Wade was really good at those kinds of things. He’d probably like a balcony garden.

MJ was going to be honored at a charity thing in a few weeks here; she’d look good with flowers in her hair. No, she’d look beautiful with flowers in her hair. Peter wasn’t supposed to make overt romantic gestures towards her, but Shelley hadn’t said anything about flowers. He was allowed to send flowers.

Those were good thoughts. More than five even.

It kind of made him feel better.

Better is relative. And better is fleeting.

Better went to shit two hours later when he got the call that two of his researchers for Lab 37 had gone missing.

Not just any researchers. Not just any researchers in the entire SI basement. A basement literally crammed full of overly-qualified, intelligent, professional scientists who, for better or worse, made Peter’s life a living hell.

No. His researchers.

Fuck self-care, Peter had to go maim someone.

He threw on his SI labcoat before leaving the house so that when people saw him sprinting down the sidewalk, they’d have a little goddamn respect and get the fuck out of the way.

He’d lived in the city long enough to understand the mystical ways of pedestrian traffic. If a man in a suit shoves past you, he’s an asshole. If a man in a white coat does it, he’s a doctor.

The labcoat was a good call because he’d forgotten about the fucking trains again.

Well, ain’t that a kick in the head?

The sidewalk was crowded and even the white coat didn’t give him permission to stand in the middle of it and not get jostled.

He had to get to SI. He could not take a cab. That wouldn’t be any faster than fucking walking at this point and walking was still the slowest type of bipedal transportation—fuck it.

His hand was already broken. He’d sleep a few nights following this. It would heal.

He shoved through the crowd until he found an alley to tumble into. He jogged to the back of it and ducked behind a tower of cardboard produce boxes outside of the doors. He peeked out around them, then dug the webslingers out of his bag. He checked the street traffic again. People were in too much of a hurry trying to plough through the stream of humanity to be paying much attention to little old him, lurking around like a suspicious piece of shit in an alleyway.

He broke the plaster holding his smashed hand in place and dug through his bag again for the ace bandage he always kept in there for minor sprains. It was hiding at the bottom with the gauze and the sewing kit. He wrapped it as tightly as he could around the broken hand and forced his fingers down until they met the inside of his palm.

Good enough.

On go the webslingers.

Off goes the labcoat.

Spiderman, you are cleared for air travel.

“Peter, no.”

“Peter, yes,” Peter snapped back, “Alverez and Lovett.”

Mr. Stark held the space between his eyes as though he was in physical pain.

“I’ve got half of SI security on the issue, Pete. Not to mention the NYPD. They’re adults. There’s nothing we can do—”

“Bullshit. Who saw them last? Where were they? Were they here?”

Tony dropped his hand and then crossed his arms over his chest. He gave Peter a long once over, then froze.

“Pete, what the fuck did you do to your—”

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

“Fine, I’ll do it myself.”

He didn’t have time to deal with security. He vaulted over the gate and burst into the stairwell leading down to the labs.

The officers were in his lab. That told him everything he needed to know.

Alverez and Lovett had last been seen at SI.

If this was some Doctor Oct shit again, Peter was going to rip out all his fucking tentacles and feed them to him individually. He “bumped” into one of the officers and fell over himself in distress, pleading to know what happened.

“My name is Peter Parker, I’m the Lab Manager for this room,” he explained to the guy’s creased brow, “Alverez and Lovett are under my supervision. I was injured in the Penn Station disaster the other day and couldn’t get in to work. What happened? Do you know if they’re okay?” He held up his fucked up hand as proof of his story and the guy’s eyes widened. He started nodding.

“Sir, I understand your concern; I can’t give you any information right now, but let me—let me just ask my senior officer one thing and maybe you can help us. Just stay right there.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever. Go.

The senior officer wanted to talk to Peter.

The senior officer took Peter aside, or rather, had Peter take them aside into his office. By then, Peter’s hand had started throbbing again. He told it to shut the fuck up.

“Mr. Parker, I’m sorry to say that—”

No.

“They’re not dead,” he said involuntarily. “They can’t be. They—”

The officer sighed.

“Well, we don’t know for sure, Mr. Parker, but it doesn’t look good for them. We found evidence of a struggle in Ms. Lovett’s apartment and it is our understanding that Ms. Alverez was there with her after they left work together.”

Peter went cold. Numb. Ice spread from the nape of his neck, down through his spine and into his ribs. His collarbones tinged with it.

Not on his watch.

“So they weren’t last seen here?” he said.

“No, but we suspect that—”

Peter was already ahead of him. Someone at SI might have done it. Who? Didn’t matter, they were about to experience their worst fucking nightmare.

He pretended to sag in shock against the edge of his desk. He put his hands over his face and made himself breathe in gasps.

“No, I can’t—no one at SI would do that. We’ve—we’ve got security and—and—”

The officer’s forehead furrowed and his eyes curled downward in sympathy.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Parker, I know this might come as a shock to you. I’m sure it’s even more difficult following your accident.”

Fuck you, sir. Peter had caused that accident.

“I’m sorry to ask, sir,” the officer continued, “But do you have any idea if there was someone in this lab or here at the company who didn’t like these ladies? Maybe had a grudge or talked poorly of them? Rumors?”

No, but these shitheads were going to get in Peter’s fucking way.

“No, but I heard a couple of staff talking about Lovett’s brother once?” he offered, “In the breakroom, there were a couple folks from a different lab--I don’t know who they are, I only know my staff—they were saying that he might get hired here and they were pissed because of the whole nepotism thing.”

The officer cocked his head and dug out a pen and piece of paper.

“What do you mean, nepotism?” he asked.

“Ah. Well, lotta of the older folks don’t like me or my team ‘cause we’re all kind of, uh, young and sprightly. They think I got my job because Mr. Stark uh, favors me. Some of that kind of bleeds into ideas about my team.”

“I see.” The officer wrote this down.

Come on, man, can you write any fucking slower? Daylight’s a-burning.

“And do you remember what these persons looked like, by chance? Were they all men or women or--?”

“No, I didn’t pay too much attention. It gives me anxiety and I kind of get it, like, if some kid fresh out of school got the same job as me when I’ve been doing it for like ten years, I’d be pissed too.”

“So it was some older people? Older than you?”

“Well, if I had to say, then yeah.”

The officer nodded. He thanked Peter for helping out and took his contact information before politely asking him to leave the lab so that they could keep on investigating. Peter gave them Alverez’s and Lovett’s locker numbers so that they could poke around in there, and then he let the officer guide him to the elevator.

When the doors closed, he asked FRIDAY to take him to Ground Lab 14.

Lab 14 was Mr. Stark’s lab. Not his workshop. The workshop had since been relegated to Lab 13 because Miss Potts (technically, Mrs. Stark, but Miss Potts ignored this and so did everyone else out of fear for their lives and their jobs) said so.

You do not question the boss as to her reasoning.

That was treason-talk.

The remnants of the suit were stretched out over one of the three empty stainless steel tables in the room. It was trashed. Peter swore. The shoulder was ground out and one of the gloves had been cut off and there was a long gash from neck to crotch and then from ankle to hip in each leg.

The EMTs had really gone for it, hadn’t they?

Christ, it wasn’t like he’d been dying. They could have just waited for him to wake up or smashed the disengage button.

But more importantly: fuck.

“Peter.”

Double fuck.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

Peter jerked around to face Mr. Stark and his crossed arms once more. He knew exactly what Peter was doing.

“I need the suit,” he said. Mr. Stark stayed dead even.

“No, you don’t.”

He’d just web it together, it didn’t matter. He didn’t have time for this.

“Tony, I need the suit.”

“No. We’re letting the cops take this one.”

“Fuck you.”

Mr. Stark dropped his head and sighed.

“Pete, you’re hurt. You can’t do this. I know you want to do this. I want to do it, too. And I know they’re your friends, but—”

“Fuck. You.”

“Don’t make me do this, Pete. I don’t want to sideline you. You know I don’t want to.”

Yeah, but he fucking would.

“I can find them,” Peter said, “Before they get hurt—before they die, Tony. I can find them.”

Mr. Stark just looked sad. It pissed Peter off.

“Fine,” Peter snapped, “Fine. I’ll go home. I’ll go to bed. I’ll just let the people who you put under my supervision die. Probably because of me. I’ll just do that, Mr. Stark. And it won’t haunt me until the day they burn my fucking body.”

Fuck all of this.

He stalked back over to the elevator. Mr. Stark rubbed a hand against his forehand and let him go.

Peter pounded on Wade’s door and, when he didn’t answer, jumped onto the building and climbed in through the kitchen window. He threw open the bedroom door and flopped down, hard and heavy, on top of Wade’s body in bed.

The resulting grunt was gratifying.

Wade was painfully hungover. He batted weakly at Peter and let spew a string of insults before rolling his old self onto his belly. Peter fell over when he did, then gathered himself back up to drop his weight flat on Wade’s back.

Wade dry-sobbed a little into the pillow.

“I need a suit,” Peter told him. Wade made a muffled quizzical sound into the pillow.

“I need a suit,” Peter repeated. “Can I borrow a suit?”

Wade shoved himself out of the pillow so that he could throw Peter off of him, then drag him back up into his face by the front of his shirt.

“We just fucking talked about this, Peter,” he said, blocks and perhaps even cities away from a good mood. “We literally had this conversation two fucking days ago.”

“Someone’s kidnapped two of my coworkers, you met them. Alverez and Lovett—Julie and Mo. You met them. They found blood in Julie’s apartment.”

Wade groaned. Dropped Peter and fell back face-first into his mattress. A string of vowels emanated up from his misery, punctuated occasionally with a ‘fuck.’

“My suits are all fucked,” he finally said once he’d gotten the irritation out, “Fucking arson last night, Pete. That one’s burned right through and the two back-ups are no longer back-ups. More like front-ups. Onesies? I don’t fuckin’ know, doesn’t matter, they’re fucked. Sorry, bud, if I had a spare I’d give it to you.”

Goddamnit.

Well. Desperate times.

“I’ll figure it out,” he told Wade’s frown.

“Are you serious?”

“No, I’m—”

“Shut the fuck up, I don’t even care anymore. Here, take this.”

Wade really, really needed to stop sleeping with his rifles. Where the fuck had it even come from? Behind the mattress head? Did he just stuff ‘em under the pillows or some shit?

“Wade, I can’t take Bertha. I can’t run with her and I’m not gonna—”

“You will take Bertha or you will take Gertrude and you will stop fucking complaining. Get out of my house.”

Peter left the guns by the door.

Angel was at work. Louis was at work. Dave was close by.

“Dave.”

Dave tried to punch Peter in the head.

He was good, he almost got him too.

Peter watched impatiently as the man planted his hands on his knees to recover from his mini heart attack.

“Dave, can I borrow your suit?”

Dave blinked at the padded floor in front of him for a second, frowned, and then stood up. His hands were wrapped in black kickboxing gloves. He was slightly more stubbly than usual.

“My suit? It’s at the cleaners, man. Not sure it’ll fit you, you’re kind of a stick.”

“The Double D suit,” Peter clarified.

Dave made a little ‘oh’ noise and looked around himself quickly.

“I mean. If you really want it? What do you—good god what the fuck did you do to your hand?”

Peter looked down to see. It was even more purple than before. That was encouraging. He looked back up at Dave.

“Punched a wall,” he said. It wasn’t technically a lie. “Suit?”

Dave thought he was crazy, but then Dave thought they were all crazy. He was just on that other side of the normal-idiot divide.

“Let me get my keys?”

The Daredevil suit was stiffer than any of the Spidey suits and Peter hated it immediately. But that didn’t matter because he could re-wire the computer into the helmet in fifteen minutes and then fuck off, on the hunt for his gals.

Dave had never named his computer and so Peter had to for him. Sorry Dave, you’ve got Janice in your ear now.

Computer. Suit. Spiderman’s ready to go.

Over the years, Peter had developed a network of contacts through the city, some legit, some less so. He stopped by to talk to Randy first thing and the guy nearly pissed himself when he saw the mask. He screamed and Peter had to wrestle him against the wall to keep him from throwing himself down the stairwell.

It took him a little while before he believed that Peter was not, in fact, Daredevil. Once he’d gotten over that hump, he was a little looser in the tongue area.

He told Peter he hadn’t heard of any kidnappings, but he had heard through the grapevine to stay away from the piers up in the north for a minute. There were rumors of arsonists up that way.

Those must have been the guys Wade had been playing with.

He left Randy to hunt down Trenton.

Trenton swore up and down that he didn’t know shit about any arsonists or any kidnappers, but he had heard that some guys in Damage Control were advertising for underground scientists.

He then asked Peter if he could give him a blowjob because he’d always wanted to fuck around with Daredevil.

Peter was profoundly upset and disturbed by this information. He did not need to know how the general public felt about Matt’s or Dave’s dick or their pecks or any other part of their bodies. He certainly did not need this information communicated to him in hand gestures.

He refused the blowjob and went to track down Will and Perry and Mel to confirm this information—the relevant, less-nightmare inducing information.

His hand was edging into blue territory when he found his gals.

Alverez and Lovett had tucked into each other in the very corner of the warehouse and sobbed softly in each other’s arms.

He rolled back the door slowly and the two in the back started sobbing and clutching at each other harder. Peter could hear sirens, but they weren’t headed their way.

He surveyed the empty space in front of him. The light from the floodlight behind him painted a huge trapezoid into the room around his shadow. Everything else was darkness.

It was a trap.

He closed the door. He heard one of the ladies scream in anguish. It died out as quickly as it started, and it twisted his gut, but he couldn’t take any chances here. He only had one arm and he had to be able to get all three of them back in case the police didn’t get there fast enough.

The Spidey Sense shivered. He looked around slowly. There was only the noise of water. It was a good cover up for footsteps. These guys knew what they were doing, picking this place. He pulled out his phone and dialed the cops. He put it on speaker and let it ring.

Then he slammed a fist into someone’s face.

That person fell and was replaced with a second, and then a third joined the mix. Peter dropped the phone. He heard the operator trying to get his attention on the other side, but he was a little busy forgetting that his fucking hand was broken.

Note: do not use this one.

He decided leg-work was going to be the main vehicle of offense here. That sucked because there were like, ten guys now, and kicking required a whole lot more space and time than punching.

He took a few blows to the side and the stomach and then kicked the side of the warehouse hard enough that it shuddered and showered him and his assaulters in ages-old bird shit and rocks and rotten wood.

A+ distraction.

He laid half the remaining guys out in the mess, stunned some of the of last few, and then decided to cut his losses. He held himself steady while the last two came to rush him and sprayed web in their faces. Then he threw open the warehouse door and screamed at the gals to get up and follow him.

They hesitated.

“NOW,” he commanded. Whether they recognized his voice or just snapped out of their daze, Peter didn’t know, but they were up on their feet and springing his way in less than a second. He snagged the phone off the ground and redialed the police as he slammed the door to the warehouse closed behind the ladies with his shoulder. He shouted at Alverez and Lovett to run down the length of the pier, into the city. He took up the rear and panted into his phone.

“This is 911, what’s your emergency?”

“Heya, is this Val? Hey Val, this is Daredevil,” he puffed into the receiver, “I’d like to report an attempted kidnapping and arson off Pier 99. Victims are safe. They’ll be at the Movement and Arts Center in oh, say, three to five minutes here. There’s about ten guys still hanging around, though. They’re all wearing black windbreakers. Couple are unconscious.”

There was a pause on the other side of the line.

“Heya Spidey,” the dispatcher said, “Didn’t realize you’d transitioned to a new role. I’ve got people on the way, stay on the line?”

“No can do.”

“Yeah, I figured. Got some cars on the way now.”

“Thanks Val.”

He hung up. Ran fast enough to overtake Alverez and Lovett. He grabbed Lovett’s arm and she was with it enough to grab Alverez’s and he dragged both of them with him across the street and then up the stairs to one of the art center’s back offices. Someone had left the door unlocked like an idiot.

Peter fucking loved idiots sometimes.

The ladies followed him in and they all stumbled into a cramped back office. He jumped back over one of the desks and slammed the door shit. He locked it and dropped the back of his head against it.

Thank fuck.

Thank Jesus.

He heard shots outside followed by sirens. Well, that was his cue.

“Peter?” Alverez asked hesitantly, her voice shaking.

THAT WAS HIS CUE.

window window window window window

“Peter, is that you?”

Where’s a damn window to jump out of? Fuck it, he’d go have to go through the lobby. Welp. The night crew could probably use a little excitement.

“Peter, you’re—you’re Dare--?”

He felt bad, really he did, leaving the two of them alone like that after the shit they’d just been through. But he didn’t have a choice, and they would be fine. He shoulder-checked a police officer as he screeched through the center’s lobby. The girls were calling after him. At least the police wouldn’t have to search for them in the building.

His feet left linoleum and hit concrete and then he was off. Webbing with one hand; the other one was on fucking fire.

Chapter Text

When he got home, he taped the bag of frozen peas to his hand and crashed into bed. He woke up nine hours later to a slew of increasingly furious messages piling up on his phone screen.

He didn’t want to look at them because he could only imagine what the fucking news was saying and he could only imagine the fucking shit show he was going to walk into work to deal with.

Oh. And if any of those messages were from Matt, he was going to die.

That night.

Possibly in mere hours, actually. Matt still had enough city contacts to end his ass from across the entire continental U.S.

It was fine. Everything was fine.

Actually, no, this was anxiety attack territory. This was the kind of stupid shit that, time after time, landed him in anxiety attack territory. It was exactly what Wade was talking about. The blatant disregard for his body. The fact that, in that moment, he literally did not give a shit about his own life or the fact that he might not see the next day.

His hand hurt like a motherfucker. The very bones throbbed. He might have to go back to the hospital for it because as much as he trusted his healing factor, there were a lot of little bones in hands and sometimes the healing factor wasn’t as accurate as it was effective.

If he had just left it alone, left the damn cast on it, it would probably be healed by now.

He rolled over in bed and grabbed the phone.

Fuck it, may as well take the full force of everyone’s scolding while he was already feeling like shit. He’d climb his way up from rock bottom like he did every time. It would be fine.

May told him he was coming home.

Wade wanted to know why the fuck he’d left the guns by the door.

MJ and Ned sent him approximately two thousand messages each calling him an idiot and swearing that if he ever did that shit ever again, they wouldn’t speak to him for the same period of time.

Dave told him that he was putting limits on suit borrowing in the future.

Angel and Louis sent the same nervous Kermit meme within seconds of each other.

Miles sent a simple ‘are you okay?’

And Matt. Well.

DD: call me

He did not want to call Matt. He could not call Matt. He could not not call Matt either, though, because that was Matt’s face he’d worn back there and while Matt was happy for people to take up his banner where it mattered, he’d never have had Peter do that shit in his name.

Peter wasn’t allowed to be Matt.

Spiderman wasn’t allowed to be Daredevil.

There had to be limits. Had to be boundaries.

His phone started ringing.

He couldn’t not answer it.

Matt didn’t say anything right away and that made Peter want to cry. It was 4 am in California, which meant that Matt had gotten up early or not slept at all in order to place this call.

It would be disrespectful to leave him hanging.

“I’m sorry,” Peter managed to squeak out into the tense silence. It felt like it spanned the space between their shores, but also like there was no space between them at all.

Matt said nothing for a long time. Long enough that Peter felt the tears leaking out onto his pillow.

“No, you’re not.”

Matt had two degrees and he’d been practicing law for nearly twelve years. He’d been to prison and he’d been to court and he’d walked every street in Hell’s Kitchen. He could hear lies in hearts and lungs, but he didn’t need superpowers to hear the lie in Peter’s tone over the phone. Peter had nothing to say to him.

“I heard you hurt your hand,” Matt said at length.

“Yeah,” Peter managed to creak.

A pause.

“You were on the news with those spiders the other day. Sounded pretty bad.”

It was.

Nothing.

“I don’t know why I’m not sorry,” Peter admitted.

“Don’t fucking lie to me. Wade told me about your talk.”

Thanks for nothing, Wade.

“You keep on like this, Peter, and you’re gonna end up like me.”

He’d always wanted to be, though.

“You know what I was like before Fogs got sick? You know what kind of crazy shit I was doing? Because I didn’t. Seemed fine to me. Seemed normal.”

But it was.

“And that was exactly the problem.”

Peter sniffed into the pillow. Didn’t put down the phone.

“Kid, that feeling that’s pushing you on, that’s not what you think it is. It’s not anxiety or self-hatred or anything like that. It’s pride. And it’s addictive, and we’re addicts. There is nothing in the world that makes us feel like we mean something to someone—anyone, ourselves even--like doing shit that makes us feel strong, right, powerful. But you know what that means, kid? That means that we are always using other people for our own gain. And that, Peter? That’s just selfish.”

Peter wiped his face on the back of his hand and nodded even though Matt couldn’t see or hear him through the phone. He couldn’t talk.

“Now, I ain’t ever claimed to be a good influence on you,” Matt continued. There was the soft sound of a car going by. He must have gone outside to have this conversation. Must not have wanted to wake Fogs. “But the last thing I want you to have to do is to go through what I had to, to humble my dumb ass. So all I’m gonna say is this: humble yourself. Before something or someone does it for you. It’ll make you happier. It’ll make you value things differently. You think you can do that, Pete?”

Peter took in a shaky breath.

“Yeah.”

“Good. Hey, kid?”

“Yeah?”

“I miss your dumb ass.”

Peter laughed a little hysterically through the mess of his face.

“I miss you too,” he said.

“Come see me.”

“What, like now?”

“Yeah. Take some time off, you’ve probably got more than enough vacation time, you workaholic. Come stay with me and Fogs.”

He rubbed at his face with the back of his good hand and thought about it.

“Okay?” he croaked.

“Atta boy.”

He could hear Matt’s smile and it made him smile.

He went to the hospital before he went to see May and he went to see May before he went to work. May held his newly bandaged hand and his non-fucked up one and told him that she loved him and that he needed to be more careful.

He told her he would. He asked her if she still wanted to make her balcony garden. She smiled at him and said she did.

“I think I’m going to go to San Francisco,” he told her. “Maybe we can do it when I get back? Or will that be too late?”

“I’m okay with some late bloomers,” May told him.

Mr. Stark couldn’t technically be mad at him because neither he, nor Pepper had two newly vacant research positions. Nor did they have a scandal. Nor did they have a fuckload of police invading their building.

Also, Thor was there. No one was allowed to be mad with Thor around.

Thor launched himself forward upon noticing Mr. Stark’s beeline towards Peter after the security threshold. He was tactful like that.

He hauled Peter up into his arms like he’d never had that growth spurt in college and swung him back and forth in delight.

Peter couldn’t really help but laugh because he was but a blip of cheap humanity compared to Thor’s fucking insane existence, and so of course Thor was going to treat him like a kid for the whole of their acquaintance. It was charming. A little freeing. He threw his arms around the guy’s neck and got a killer hug in return before finally being set back down.

Mr. Stark was hard pressed to disturb such a happy reunion. He squinted at Peter out of the corner of his eye and gave him a threatening finger, promising pain and retribution later. Thor beamed at him until he grumbled off back to Pepper’s side.

“I heard you fought giant Spiders,” Thor whispered to Peter. Peter held up his hand as proof. Thor was very impressed. He gave Peter a huge grin. “They’re horrible, those things. Show up on most planets every couple hundred years or so to try to dig or find holes to live in. They want to lay their eggs.”

Peter was mesmerized by this new nightmare fodder. Mr. Stark cleared his throat unnecessarily loudly in his and Thor’s direction.

“Spaceman, we have Avengers business to discuss. Leave my employee alone,” he said.

Thor gave him a sassy eyebrow wriggle, then returned to Peter.

“You must meet Brunnhilde,” he said. “She can teach you how to kill these spiders.”

“For sure,” Peter promised him. “But not now. I’m going to San Francisco.”

Amazing how the Avengers operated as a hive mind sometimes. Every head over there had snapped his way immediately, then they all coughed or shuffled their feet and tried not to look suspicious in the SI lobby.

“What’s in San Francisco?” Thor asked.

“My friend. And the Golden Gate Bridge.”

Thor was stoked.

“A bridge? Where does it lead to?”

“I…have no idea. But it’s orange.”

“No.”

“For real.”

“Nooooo. It’s golden, you just said this.”

“Yeah, but it’s orange.”

“How?”

“I dunno.”

“Peter,” Mr. Stark interrupted, “Stop confusing the alien. Go do work.”

Peter gave him a sloppy salute that made Sam Wilson start laughing and slap Sergeant Barnes’s shoulder. He did an amazing impression of the very same salute, which made Barnes start snickering in turn.

On that note, Peter took his ass over to the elevator and told FRIDAY to take him to his labs.

The day went by as normally as it could for the first couple hours, with Peter meandering mournfully into Saanvi’s office and giving her big puppy eyes and asking her if she could help him type out the supply orders.

She remained as unimpressed as ever and told him to dictate his orders like everyone else, you luddite.

Ugh.

He’d managed to put out one fire and save half a table before he made the mistake of going into the communal kitchen and trying to open a granola bar one-handedly. Alverez and Lovett found him with half the wrapper in his teeth.

Really doing the most, he was.

They all stared at each other in concerned silence for a second. Then Peter realized that this was more suspicious, not less. He yanked the wrapper out of his mouth and held it towards the gals.

“Can one of y’all open this?”

Those looks could take popcorn off a ceiling.

“Who even are you?” Lovett snapped, snatching the granola bar and opening it from the side which wasn’t covered in spit. She shoved it back at him with two fingers.

“Parker,” Peter told her smoothly, “They call me—”

“I can’t fucking believe this.”

Wow, harsh much?

“How did you—does anyone know?”

He took a huge bite of granola.

“Know what?” he asked with his mouth full.

The ladies stared at him in silence again.

“We’ve made a mistake,” Alverez decided.

“You’re,” Lovett looked around and whispered, “Daredevil.”

Peter stared at her long and hard. Then took another enormous bite of granola.

“I’m not,” he said simply. Then he headed out of the kitchen.

“Saaaaaanvi,” he whined. She turned around and leaned heavily on his shoulder.

“Peeeeeeeter.”

“Can you do me a favor?”

“I’m not a secretary.”

“Can you pay me back for that time I watched your team for like, two million years?”

Saanvi righted herself and watched him curiously.

“I mean, of course. When?”

Peter looked at the shit on his computer screen.

“Uh, starting either the 21^st or the 23^rd.”

“What, like, next week?”

“Yeah.”

He re-attempted the puppy eyes. Saanvi remained perplexed.

“I mean, I guess. For how long?”

Good question.

“Probably a week or two?” he tried.

Saanvi’s jaw dropped. She pointed a quivering finger at him.

“Don’t you fucking move,” she ordered. Wow. So many threatening fingers today. He crossed his heart. She scurried out through the door. He returned to staring at the flights on the screen. Glanced after his coworker and sneakily dug out his phone.

It was really hard to text with one hand, wow.

He asked Foggy if he’d spoken to Matt.

Saanvi skidded back into the doorway with half the other Lab coordinators on their set of floors. Peter had not expected that. They all looked like cops ready to put an end to a bunch of teenagers’ ritual sacrifice of a chicken.

“He’s taking a vacation,” Saanvi accused him in what he now realized was a speedy trial by his peers.

Concerned murmuring filled the hallway and caught the attention of his researchers. They started to put down tools.

“So what?” Peter snapped defensively.

The murmuring intensified. The crowd grew with the interest and attention of the research assistants and a couple of the daytime interns.

Jesus Christ. Did it always have to be a thing like this?

“I am allowed to take a vacation,” he justified.

There was a thoughtful pause followed by a breakout of whispering.

“I am not a workaholic,” he barked at them all to set the record straight.

Dead silence.

“I’m telling Mr. Stark,” Betty in the back announced.

What the fuck, girl? What had he done to earn such betrayal?

“I already told him,” he said haughtily.

More silence.

“I’m still telling!” Betty decided. Popular opinion was in her favor.

“Fine,” Peter snipped.

“Fine,” Betty snipped back.

Mr. Stark only came to Peter’s office when Peter was in trouble or he had more work he needed Peter to do. Peter had developed a Pavlovian reaction to his presence in the shitty office chair and that was to start sweating.

“A vacation,” Mr. Stark said slowly.

“I’m allowed,” Peter reminded him. “Look, I’ve got like, a month’s worth of time.” He turned his monitor so that Mr. Stark might grace his eyes with Peter’s absurd working hours.

Mr. Stark did not look. He remained in his seat with a single judgmental eyebrow.

“Am I right in assuming you’re going out to see Murdock?”

Peter pouted at him.

“You don’t know me.”

“Right, and we’re just not going to talk about the fact that you nearly got yourself killed for the second time in a week?”

“Well, that was the hope?”

Mr. Stark held his breath and counted to three before letting it out.

“Pete, whatever it is you’re going through right now, I’m not sure spending time with your blind sociopath is going to make it any easier.”

He’s only a sociopath to you, Mr. Stark.

“Also, Daredevil, Pete? Where did you even get that suit? I thought that guy was out of the city.”

“He came with Little and S3. We call him ‘Dave.’”

Mr. Stark sighed and held his face in his hands. Peter wondered if maybe he could just weird the guy into clearing his vacation time and then out of his office. It had worked before. He’ lined up all his Monster cans on one of the lab tables until a group of the assistants had called for an intervention, citing clause 8 in the health and safety handbook which detailed reporting unsafe work practices. Miss Potts had come down for that one and graced the entire lab with the image of her slapping Tony and fussing over Peter.

“Soooo, about my—”

“Just fucking take it.”

Yes.

Foggy was beside himself in his enthusiasm for Peter’s visit. Peter knew this because Matt was miserable and evidently being made to clean things he didn’t even know they owned. He was extremely vocal about this on the chat.

DD: do you know how many lights there are in this house???? Because I don’t????

S2: you can’t sense them with your dolphin brain?

DD: Did you know we have a fruit bowl???? I have never touched this thing in my life.

DD: Did you know we have guest bedding—a whole fucking set? When the hell did we buy bedding? I don’t remember buying bedding.

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): red do you just kind of passively wander through life or?

DD: I don’t fucking know, Fogs puts shit in the house. it’s not my problem until it is. Apparently Kirsten bought this bedding, is that a thing that people do?

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): dude where did you get your shit from before? Just picked it out of the trash or something?

DD: I guess I went shopping? Or maybe I ordered it. These things don’t matter. Anyways, we apparently need to put the books in a semblance of order or else the world will implode, apologies I must go.

The peace couldn’t last. An hour later compelled Matt back to his phone.

DD: DID YOU KNOW WE’VE HAD THE FUCKING HOBBIT IN BRAILLE THE WHOLE TIME WE’VE LIVED HERE?

DD: DO YOU KNOW WHO I’M DIVORCING AS WE SPEAK?

S2: dude you need to chill out it’s elves

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): ELVES

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): DID YOU

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): DID SHE

DD: nevermind apparently this is next year’s birthday present and there are reasons I’m not allowed to touch things in my own house. Anyways, Pete, make a list of things that you want to do.

DD: fogs says no cliff jumping or swimming the bay because he’s no fun. It’s fine, we can go without him.

Peter couldn’t help but grin at his phone as he waited for his coffee.

This was self-care, wasn’t it? Running away to San Francisco? That sounded like a very self-care-y thing to him.

Chapter Text

He had his flights booked. He had his bags—okay well a bag. Half of a bag, what the fuck ever—packed. He had made his lab team swear on the graves of their mothers and brothers and beloved pets that they would not make Saanvi’s life a living hell.

There was only one thing left to do.

“C’mon. That’s not fair.”

Peter sighed. Miles pouted. Peter resisted the urge to sigh again.

“Miles,” he said, “You’re the one who suggested ‘Nose Goes.’”

Miles evidently hadn’t counted on the shit fucking luck that came with his mutation.

Oh, sweet child, he would learn. Hard and fast. Probably from 300 feet up.

“But I’ve got school,” Miles whined.

“And I’ve got school plus two jobs,” Little Spidey shot back, “You wanna play this game, little man?”

“It’s just for two weeks, Miles,” Peter interrupted before the back and forth between those two could get started. “And you can call me if there is anything you don’t know how to do, and I’ll hook you up with Karen so you’ve got all my contacts.”

“I don’t want Karen, though.”

Peter raised an eyebrow.

Miles backtracked.

“It’s not that I don’t want Karen,” he babbled, “It’s just that I don’t wanna be team lead. I’m already farther away from everyone else and I’ve got school for like, most of the day. And I’m like ten years younger than every…” he trailed off in the face of everyone else’s indifference.

“Anyways,” Peter said, “First point of contact is Miles. You two, listen to him. You may give him no more than 20% more shit than normal.”

“40%” Little Spidey negotiated.

Peter made the eyes on the suit glare at her.

“20 or go home.”

She pouted. Louis did not laugh at her. Miles still looked like the whole world was crashing down around his shoulders. Peter heaved one last big sigh and took a step forward to wrap a firm hand around his knobbly shoulder.

“You’re gonna be great, kid,” he promised.

“I’m gonna fucking die.”

Now, that’s the spirit.

Peter headed back towards Queens after he was done being Miles’s worst nightmare. Well, second worst nightmare, really. Little Spidey was his first worst nightmare and she wore that title like a banner.

He opened his window and hopped off the sill. Took off the mask and valiantly did not shit himself upon realizing that there were two people sitting in the dark on his sofa. MJ and Ned didn’t laugh at his despair which meant they really were there for business, i.e. conversations Peter wanted to avoid until he was worm food.

“Peter,” Michelle started patiently, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and her hands clasped in front of her chin. “Fleeing the state will not help you.”

Ned leaned back with crossed arms and an expectant eyebrow.

Ugh. Fuck.

“Okay, but maybe we can talk with the lights on?” he tried.

Neither moved.

Or maybe not. That was fine, too.

He had a six am flight and his anxiety decided that he needed to be at the airport exactly two hours before then, so he got almost an entire hour to ruminate on the last four hours like a middle school kid with their first crush before he allowed himself to evacuate the bed to go wash his face.

MJ was displeased. Ned was displeased.

It had taken some explaining for them to understand that he wasn’t avoiding them, he’d just been avoiding them. It wasn’t a big thing.

The onslaught of pillows had finally ended when he’d admitted that his therapist was the one who had put him up to this.

“She says that until I get my shit in order, I am not fully emotionally available to other people, so it wouldn’t be fair to my partner—uh, partners—if I kept doing the uh, wooing thing,” he explained, arms up against the pillow Ned had hiked over his shoulder.

This had given the other two pause.

“Did you just fucking say ‘wooing?’” Michelle asked.

“Shelley said that?” Ned clarified at the same time.

Peter nodded until his neck popped. Ned and Michelle exchanged a long, slow look.

“I’m not being wooed,” Michelle said firmly. Ned flattened his eyebrows at her. She raised her chin back.

“Sure, whatever helps you sleep at night, girl, but I am being wooed and I am experiencing a profound lack of wooing, and I don’t like it,” Ned snipped at her.

Peter put all his weight behind stomping down the impulse to clutch at his heart. His teeth ached a little bit with the emotion.

The other two noticed him standing there caught in-between grinning and lip-wobbling.

“Shut the fuck up, you,” Ned amended, “This is your fault to begin with.”

Aw, buddy.

“Agreed, you’re a fuckhead, Parker.”

Aw, girl.

Peter thought that he should maybe talk to Shelley next about how being called a ‘fuckhead’ and blamed for all major and minor inconveniences made him feel all warm and gooey inside. But that seemed like it was going to lead to a lot of follow-up sessions, so Peter decided that that friendly little thought was staying an internal one for a hot second or six.

“Guys,” he’d managed to creak out.

“Ugh, you’re gross,” Michelle groaned.

“Guys,” he repeated over her. “You’re—”

“Ah,” Ned interrupted with a finger. That made Peter’s chest squirm with delight, too.

God. He had a problem.

Was he a masochist?

Fuck. Was he a masochist, though?

“Peter, why don’t we do this?” Ned continued, eying Peter’s now-unrestrained heart clutching with well-worn suspicion, “You will go to SF. You will do responsible things in SF. You will find yourself in a cave or whatever and when you come home and take a break from being an idiot for like twenty seconds, we can all sit down and figure this—whatever this is—out. Is that fair?”

“Absolutely,” Peter gushed. Michelle’s sneer was an affirmative one, they just had to wait.

They waited.

“Ugh,” she finally groaned.

“Alright, good. Intervention adjourned.”

“I love you both,” Peter blurted out.

The other two winced, then shared another look. Michelle dropped her head forward and groaned like the thought pained her.

“Fuck,” she said.

“We know, Pete,” Ned huffed.

The flight to SF was nearly seven hours and Peter was trying hard to be a good sport about it, but there was a baby who was up-fucking-set and he was about to get up and go back there to take the child himself.

Mama 100% would not be happy with that, but Peter was just about willing to do anything at that point to stop the goddamn crying. It had been hours.

He lasted all of twenty more minutes before he cracked and surreptitiously stood up to ‘go to the bathroom.’

The baby, as many seemed to these days, shut up immediately upon noticing him.

He didn’t know what it was, but after the bite, it was like he’d tapped into the wild and fantastical sixth sense of small children and animals. It wasn’t something he often abused and it didn’t work all the time, but with the especially young and the especially fluffy, his presence seemed to be intriguing if nothing else. He may or may not have been followed by a family of raccoons to work once.

Maybe twice.

Mr. Stark had called animal control and made him sit out on the curb with them. There was not a more surreal experience in the world than trying to explain to passersby and animal control why three baby raccoons had nested in his labcoat as Mama raccoon rustled through the nearby dumpster.

He waited for the person in the miniature bathroom on the plane to finish up while maintaining eye contact with the monster child. The tension in the baby’s mama’s back eased a little bit at the lack of wailing child in her lap and she tried to follow the munchkin’s line of sight.

The bathroom’s occupant left. Peter entered and closed the folding door.

The child began shrieking again within ten seconds.

Decision made.

He did some squats in the tiny room and yanked each leg up over his head to press lightly against the closet in there to get the blood flowing in them again before he stepped back out and pretended to notice the baby on the way back to his seat. He saw the little thing’s mom staring at him at full attention now and cranked up the charm preemptively.

He sauntered her way and leaned out of the aisle just over her, so another person could pass him. The baby, seizing their opportunity, reached for the hand he’d laid on the top of the seat. Peter strategically bumped them together and then jerked in surprise when they made contact.

“Well, hello there you,” he said. The child’s wails started settling to the visible relief of literally every single human body around them.

It cooed.

Peter smiled at mama.

“Having a hard morning, huh?”

“You have no idea,” she sighed.

“Maybe I can hold him? Her? For a minute for you?” he said, gesturing to the empty seat next to her.

“I couldn’t—”

“No, no, I insist.”

The hard part was getting Baby back into mama’s arms without waking him before landing. The hard part was sitting in his assigned seat while Baby shrieked his little head off for the last thirty minutes to landing.

Foggy met him at the airport in casual clothes and bestowed upon him a huge, tight hug. He was wearing a beanie and boots. He looked like a fucking hipster. Peter didn’t know how to tell him, but someone fucking needed to ASAP.

“How was your flight?” Fogs asked as he attempted to take Peter’s bag, despite being well aware that Peter could carry an entire bus to the city if he wanted to. It was sweet. Tt was polite. Peter would be damned before he handed it over.

“It was an experience,” he said.

They had to take one train and then another into the city and then they were supposed to take a bus which Foggy told Peter would take them straight to his and Matt’s apartment.

“Matt and Kirsten are holding the fort at the practice,” he explained, watching Peter’s surprise at the mist settled over the city. It was mid-day. Fog had no place existing anywhere during mid-day. And in the summer no less.

All the houses out the window of the train were tucked together like pastel Legos.

Why the fuck was everything pastel?

Who looked at their perfectly good house and said ‘nah, this shit needs to be fucking seafoam?”

“They’re both pretty excited to see you. Matty couldn’t remember what you like to eat, though, so uh. Yeah, you don’t have to eat what he got.”

Wait, no. This needed his full attention. Matt had a history of trying to feed Peter the weirdest fucking homemade granola he could concoct. Neither Peter or Wade had ever had the heart to explain to him that his favorite mix of tea leaves, basil, and white chocolate did not constitute any type of trail mix known to man and was possibly an insult to the trail mix deities.

What had he gotten?

“Oh, you know. Buddha’s hands. Mangosteen. He found some feijoas the other day which he decided you needed.”

Buddha’s hand?

“Yeah, it’s like yellow and looks like a squid.”

What.

“Smells really good. Tastes like all the worst parts of a lemon. He eats it like a carrot because he’s a maniac. If you rub some of it on your hands he won’t know the difference. He’s too excited to notice anything right now.”

What the fuck was happening?

“We’re getting off at Castro.”

You know what? Yes, sir. Whatever you want, sir. Peter was just going to let this happen.

Matt and Fogs lived in the top half of an old Victorian which Fogs declared tolerable only because the temperature never got below thirty degrees. It was dark green on the outside with fancy gingerbread trim all around the fake balconies and banisters up the stairs. Foggy took them through a side door and stopped halfway through putting in a code on the door.

“Okay, so,” he said carefully.

‘Okay, so’ was a harbinger of doom in Peter’s field. He braced for impact.

“I know nothing,” he swore, crossing his heart.

Fogs chuckled at him.

“It’s not that, it’s—” he put in the last digit for the lock and opened the door with his shoulder.

The rattle of claws and rustling of fur exploded in front of them. Fogs started scolding immediately, like he was made for it.

Peter was gobsmacked once the realization set in. He turned slowly to Fogs and did not burst into fucking tears.

“You guys took Tuesday?” he creaked.

Tuesday was Matt’s guide dog. Well, guide dog-cum-emotional support dog. She was retired now, having been dumped into Matt’s life when Peter was still in highschool. She arrived after Matt, despite having earned two entire degrees, decided that climbing a roof in plain sight of his church was a good fucking way to deal with his stress. A local church lady had reasonably thought that her local blind man was trying to catapult himself off the roof to commit suicide and had called the cops on his dumb ass.

Tuesday was the result of the battle between Matt and his state-appointed therapist over Matt’s complete inability to talk about his problems without using the words ‘fine,’ ‘that’s normal,’ ‘everyone’s like that,’ and ‘fuck off.’ Tues was a good girl, the best girl with her blessed white muzzle now. No one had mentioned Tuesday to Peter over the last year or so, so Peter had decided that she had lived out the entirety of her precious doggy lifespan and Matt had dealt with her death the way he dealt with all deaths: stomping it into a Repression Box and throwing away the key.

And yet?

Tuesday wagged her plume tail slowly and nudged her nose into his palm. Peter had only just begun to process the urge to cry for two million years when a new, more vigorous wet nose shoved Tues’s out of the way. Peter blinked at this interloper.

The interloper, also a golden retriever but with more red in her fur than white, nibbled at his hand before losing interest and abandoning him to rattle her claws in Foggy’s direction. Foggy was not impressed at this spry spring retriever. The dog, oblivious, danced all around him with singular focus and whipped its less bleached version of Tuesday’s tail back and forth.

“We were going to leave Tues with Frank because we didn’t know how well she would travel,” Foggy explained, squinting at the interloper with skepticism, “But Matty decided that he needed to have a breakdown over that halfway to JFK, so she ended up coming out a few months in. Now, this fresh hell is Hazel. And she is a bad girl.”

Such a thing could not exist. The dog pressed up against Foggy’s side and lolled her tongue out of her mouth happily. Fogs ignored her in favor of abandoning them all to fix Peter a drink he did not want or need. Hazel bustled after him. Tues, ever the gentlewoman, waited until those two had crossed the threshold into the kitchen before nudging her nose back into the hollow of Peter’s hand.

He petted her and bit his cheek.

“Is Hazel taking a day off?” he asked.

“Two clients today are deathly allergic,” Foggy said from the kitchen. “So Hazel gets to have a whole day off-duty, don’t you, you menace?”

Foggy and Matt’s apartment brought together Matt’s disdain for material possessions with Foggy’s usually acute taste in color. They had a well-worn brown couch with a huge cream knit blanket thrown over it, accompanied on the other side by a couple orange pillows. This was set atop a dark rug which must have recently been relieved of its dog hair.

The place was bright with soft light from the huge windows set in the Victorian’s face and the glass door leading out onto the deck.

Foggy, naturally, had filled every window with plant life where Matt had evidently claimed for his use most of the bookshelf space, as these were crammed full of books with huge spines, some with words on them, some without. They had several neatly stacked bankers boxes on the table taking up space in the narrow kitchen area, which Peter knew immediately were cases which came home with the guys.

Two dog beds, one surrounded by toys, were placed next to each other by the glass door.

Peter turned around to compliment that place and got a drink shoved into his hand. It was very…purple?

“I do not know, I do not ask, it is my understanding it is either acai or dragonfruit,” Fogs answered before he even opened his mouth.

What the fuck, Matt?

This was like, May-levels of health-nut-ism.

“Matty and Kirsten will be back in about an hour.” Peter watched as the crowd went wild at the mention of Matt’s name. Fogs eyed the crowd until it settled down and stopped riling up her sister. “Go ahead and make yourself at home, Pete, here, let me show you your room.”

Hazel decided that she needed to help Foggy find Peter’s room even though he was very much not blind. Tuesday wagged her old plume slowly and then left them to go rest her old bones in her bed.

The second Matt opened the door, Peter could have sworn an earthquake hit. The Spidey Sense twitched as both dogs went into uproar. Matt came in, still in his work suit with his cane, with Kirsten behind. The first thing he did was crouch down to lavish attention on Tuesday, while her sister alerted the entire universe of her owner’s return from war.

“Haze, down,” he ordered.

Hazel misinterpreted the command and laid down on her belly to keep barking. Tuesday, because she was the best girl, took the command too and laid down. Kirsten beamed at Peter and climbed over this demonstration of fealty unceremoniously to attempt to strangle him in a hug.

“We missed you,” she said, rocking Peter back and forth with her so she could more effectively crush all his ribs.

“I missed you, too?” he gasped.

“You’re so tall.”

“Uh?”

“Are you eating enough?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re not eating enough—Matthew, Franklin, we must feed this child.”

Ah, yes. He remembered this now. He was officially, once again among old people.

Fogs stayed well away from this display with a hip pressed against the doorframe. He was pretending to be grumpy, probably so that Matt would be on his best behavior.

Matt stood up, stepped through the sea of fur, and carefully pried Kirsten off Peter so he could finish the job on Peter’s ribs. He at least smelled nice. It would be the last Peter breathed, so he appreciated that.

Matt pulled back and crinkled his eyes at him before giving him a once over with the tilt and tip of his head.

“Agreed, counselor. He is obviously starving, we—can I help you?” Hazel did not like all this hugging going on around her partner without her and so had squeezed herself into the space between Matt and Peter’s legs.

“You’re a bad dog,” Matt told her. She wriggled in delight. He readdressed Peter and gave him a firm pat on the shoulder. “Welcome to home number two, Pete. We’re thrilled to have you. Also, I might have told Kate Bishop you were coming and she might have planned a road trip with her girlfriend, and now we might have dinner plans, so go put on your shoes.”

And so the whirlwind began.

Chapter Text

Spidey was gone.

Spidey was gone and everything was under control.

Spidey was gone and everything was under control and nothing bad was going to happen. For two whole weeks.

Miles could cope with that.

“This is coping? That’s what this is?”

Miles could also murder and hide the bodies of certain best friends who didn’t know how to shut the fuck up. He was more than capable of doing that in the two weeks where nothing was going to happen.

“What happens if your dad does the dad-thing? Like, in the middle of a natural disaster or something?” Ganke agitated.

“Okay, first off,” Miles snapped, “There is not going to be any natural disasters or anything like that because nothing bad is going to happen for two whole weeks here, Ganke. Listen when people are talking to you. And secondly, Spidey swears that the solution to escaping any uncomfortable situation is to find a window.”

Ganke stared at him for way too long in judgmental silence.

Miles was offended. He had personally found this technique to be like, the second most useful thing Spidey had ever taught him. Right after how to tie knots. Spidey was freakishly good at knots.

Ganke did not relinquish his disbelief.

“I give it 72 hours before the world caves in,” he said.

Miles threw a pillow at him from his desk chair and followed it up with a practice book and then a highlighter when Ganke successfully fended the first two off.

He was tapping his pen against his notebook in English when he looked up and saw that his phone was blinking. He strategically moved his stack of books in front of him to the other side and tapped on the message while Ganke gave him interested eyebrows from the seat adjacent.

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): hi kids

Oh no. He could feel himself starting to sweat already.

It hadn’t even been 12 hours. It hadn’t even been 12, come on.

S2: Bitsy is lead talk at him not me

No no no no no. Please don’t.

Angel, girl. Why you gotta be like that?

“Miles,” Ganke hissed at him. Oh, right. He put a book over the phone and tried not to panic. Waited until Ms. Taylor finished her rounds of the classroom before returning to it.

S3: ^ same. What’s up tho?

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): Bitsy you know where Pete is? He ain’t answering his damn phone

Had Spidey not told him?

Miles checked for Ms. Taylor before sneaking the phone over the end of the desk and into his lap.

S4: he’s in sf, what’s up?

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): oh fuck that’s right that’s this week

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): Any of you know his itinerary? I got a problem that cannot wait.

S4: with Spidey?

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): depends on his fuckin answer. He say if he was turning off his phone?

S4: no. No as in, he is not turning off his phone.

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): perf

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): PETER

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): PETER BENJAMIN

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): ANSWER YOUR PHONE SMALL ONE

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): IT IS A MATTER OF NATIONAL SECURITY

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): I LIED, IT INVOLVES ME

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): INTERNATIONAL SECURITY

SM: do y’all wanna get fucked right now? I am trying to be cool in front of America fucking Chavez and y’all are NOT gonna blow this for me.

S2:  holy fucking

S2: everyone shut up. wade what is it? I’ll do it for you. Spidey, seduce her and bring her here so I can.

SM: she’s already got a NYC gf, babes, sry

SM: but you know what she doesn’t have?

SM: an NYC bf, so y’all fucking take care of it whatever the fuck it is. SM out.

S2: ur dead to me

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): woooooooow

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): p sure you’re not supposed to be seducing anyone, hot shot

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): but whatevs, that’s your bad decision. Bitsy, I’m passing your info off onto my international problem. You kids take care of it, pls. papa deadpool’s got three jobs tonight and only so many caffeine pills. Imma take a nap

Ganke went home with Miles after school so that he could get in on the superhero gossip. Miles had nothing of import for him. He never did, given that he was generally left out of most of the especially juicy stuff—according to Angel anyways. She said that there was a Team Red NC-17 chat which he had not been added to.

Louis said there wasn’t. But all that meant was that Louis hadn’t been added to it either.

“Spidey can’t get with America Chavez,” Ganke ruminated, “That’s so much red and blue. That’s too much red and blue. They’ll turn into a flag or something after like, a week and a half.”

Oh, buddy.

Miles was 100% sure that Spidey did not want to date America Chavez. Spidey wanted to fuck America Chavez. Or be fucked by America Chavez. Who knew? Spidey was an equal opportunist kind of guy.

“Alright, fine,” Ganke pouted upon being gently regaled with Miles’s slightly more informed knowledge, “It’s always sex with you, you know that Miles?”

That wasn’t his prerogative, friend. As the esteemed goddess Janelle Monae once told them, everything in the world is about sex, except sex.

“You realize that she’s not the first one who said—”

“Don’t you dare finish that sentence,” Miles warned. Ganke rolled his eyes.

Miles’s phone chirped and Ganke lit up.

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): Hi hello 911? I’d still like to have the fucking demigod removed from my residence please. ASAP as in now as in yesterday as in I have a job in an hour

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): this is some edgar allen poe shit

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): someone make this beautiful man stop knocking he’s been here for hours

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): imma have a fucking breakdown PETER CALL YOUR LOCAL ALIEN PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD I HAVE WORK

Ganke and Miles ruminated on this new information for a long moment in the middle of the sidewalk. Several cars passed and a wave of fourth graders parted to move around the two of them.

“Man, I think you might have to go move Thor,” Ganke said.

America Chavez was absolutely charmed by Peter and he was making damn sure that Kate was an active witness to it. He bought them both drinks and put on his brightest smile to chat with them about his recent work on polymers. It was entirely different from the baby-charming smile and it made Kate purse her lips and tap a nail against the side of her glass.

Matt was dying of secondhand embarrassment. He’d smashed his forehead against the sticky table and was apparently regretting ever having put any of them in the same goddamn room together.

This naturally brought Foggy no end of pleasure. He ordered his beloved another three fingers of whiskey that his poor Irish heart could not bear to leave unfinished and leaned his chin on his palm in rapt attention for the entire time they were at the bar. He didn’t look at Matt once.

“You’re not what I expected from Spiderman,” America Chavez finally admitted as they all collected their bags as slowly and discretely as possible, so as to fully appreciate their resident red-headed elder knocking his forehead against the wood of the table in an attempt to make the suffering wrap up faster.

Peter cocked his head.

“Expecting a jock or something?” he asked. Kate snorted. He gave her a judgmental once-over.

Jock. He said with his eyebrows. Kate produced two middle fingers and gasped when they hit eyelevel. America watched with the corners of her lips twitching.

“Kate told me you were, and I quote, ‘a fat-headed jerk,’” she said, complete with air quotes.

“She projects onto me a lot,” Peter offered with a light shrug.

“She,” Kate interjected, “Worked hard for her reputation and didn’t need no dumbass kid bouncing around making a bad name for the rest of us.”

“One time, when we were like sixteen and seventeen, she fractured a hip running into a parked car in Midtown.”

Matt choked on a laugh under the table, remembering. He and Hawkeye the elder had lost their collective shit once they’d all regrouped at Claire Temple’s place after that exciting episode. In apology for laughing at Kate’s pain, they’d proceeded to recall all the times they’d both gotten grievously injured from doing monumentally stupid shit and the list, imparted to all of them between gasps and tears, had been both shocking and impressive.

America beamed at Kate like a woman uncovering a crate of untouched ammunition.

Kate scowled.

“You’re done, Parker,” she announced.

“Hey, come with us to the Mission tomorrow,” America said over her. “We’re going mural hunting. Fogs said you do some photography, I think you’ll love it.”

Kate gave Peter a look that said she would find the nearest raccoon and stuff it in his bag if he agreed.

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he promised. “What time?”

Thor was a billion feet tall and not one of his hairs like anything Miles had expected. He had a zig-zag pattern shaved into the side of his head and was pounding, well, more like thundering, on the door to the address Wade had sent to the chat.

“I have heard you are a great mercenary,” Thor was crooning at the doorknob when Miles rolled up. This was an issue for Spiderman, yes, but it was also the middle of the day on a Friday, so it wasn’t like he could just show up in the red and black. They were gonna have to do things in street-style.

I.e. in a school uniform.

It was fine, he was doing his best here. That’s all that mattered.

“She is a great mercenary herself,” Thor continued, buttering up the door which remained cold and uninterested. He’d braced his shoulder against it with his hand on the knob. “And I am sure that your hearts call to each other.”

Miles heard Wade swearing through the door. Something about already being in a committed relationship with the voices in his head and threatening to call the Avengers out to come pick him up. It was then that Miles realized that he was leaning hard on the other side of the wood.

“It is of our mutual interest to find her,” Thor carried on, putting a little more shoulder into his leaning. “There isn’t much time before the eggs start to hatch.”

Oh hell no. Miles did not like the sound of that.

That sounded like Giant Spiders Round Two. He’d already broken a hand during Giant Spiders Round One.

“Excuse me?” he piped up. Thor’s giant shoulders went rigid and he jerked his head Miles’s way.

Oh shit.

He hadn’t planned this far ahead.

“Uh,” he stammered, “My name is Miles and I’m—I’m Spiderman and uh, can you leave my friend alone? He doesn’t want to find your friend. He’s got work and he already said no, so I—I think you’ll have to ask someone else.”

Thor blinked at him and then went white as a sheet. He abandoned the door and Miles heard it slam closed from Wade throwing his weight at it from the other side.

Thor started advancing on him. He was enormous. There was not a single action figure or life-size cut out which could have appropriately conveyed this.

“You’re Spiderman?” he repeated staring straight into Miles’s eyes.

No, sir. I am a child. Please don’t eat me.

“Y-yes,” he whimpered.

Thor’s blanched face started to crumple in the middle. The wrinkles around his forehead and under his eyes were especially deep.

“You’re Spiderman,” he said a third time, much more softly. He dropped his eyes and carefully tucked a hand over his heart. Or where his heart would be if he was a human. Miles wasn’t an expert in alien anatomy. Maybe the guy was holding his liver or something.

Either way, he sighed and then nodded.

“I knew this day would come,” he said, “But I did not know it would come so soon. Please, tell me: was it peaceful?”

Miles found himself snapping his jaw back into place before he could answer.

“I mean, probably not?” he said, “But I’m pretty sure he got there safe in the end, if that’s what you mean.”

Thor closed his eyes and nodded his head a few times in silence. He took a big breath and then stood up straight and rubbed at his face. He murmured to himself for a few moments and then another few to the sky and then he let out a sigh and readdressed Wade’s door.

“I am sorry to have upset you during this time, Wade Wilson,” he boomed. Miles imagined Wade hissing on the other side for him to shut the fuck up so his neighbors wouldn’t hear. “I did not realize you were in mourning.”

He rounded on Miles and his eyes looked a little shiny.

Weird.

Maybe a god thing?

“I don’t mean to burden you, small one, in such a time either. But do you think you could help me find a friend of mine? One of the spiders which landed on this planet a week ago has managed to burrow in, and I am concerned that it is a female who has come here to nest.”

He had Miles’s full attention. He was absolutely not fighting any more giant spiders.

“Your friend can help find it?” he asked.

Thor nodded solemnly.

“She is an excellent tracker and a skilled warrior,” he explained. “But she’s also an.” He paused and floundered a bit with his hands. “She’s got a bit of a problem—okay, maybe not a bit of a problem, maybe a—actually nevermind that. The issue is that I appear to have lost her a while after we entered the city and I am not overly familiar with the intricacies of it, not nearly as familiar as the local mercenaries are at any rate, and so re-locating her is proving to be difficult. Peter is—apologies, was—an excellent tracker, however, so given that you are his student, I am sure that you will be able to help me find her.”

Miles needed to process.

“Your warrior lady friend can find and kill the spider before it makes eggs?” he said.

Thor tipped his head and his hands back and forth.

“More or less,” he said, “I’d serve as back-up if she needed it, but first we must find her.”

That was doable. Find the lady, the lady finds the spider, the lady kills the spider, Miles retains two in-tact hands.

Miles was great at finding things. He could do that.

“Okay, I’ll help,” he said, “Where do we start?”

Thor was delighted with Miles’s agreement and rapidly abandoned Wade’s door to herd him, like a giant sheep dog, in the direction of Midtown.

“We will stay undercover,” Thor said as he ushered Miles down the apartment stairs and then down the block. “We will not be able to enter the spaces Bruunhilde likes to occupy in armor.”

And where exactly was that?

He received no answers, only Thor’s hand at his shoulder blade nudging him over a curb and past a Starbucks. Miles could already see hands going for phones in the street. He tried to turn his head in, away from the sidewalk, but then remembered three very important facts.

Firstly, he was wearing a highly specific uniform. Secondly, he was one of like, twenty black kids at his school. And lastly, he had very distinctive hair.

His dad would murder him if he found out he’d gone to Midtown instead of straight home.

“Wait, wait, wait.” He took a sharp right into an alley. Thor didn’t follow quite as fast. It took him a bit of looking to figure out where Miles had gone.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, joining Miles in the alley.

“I can’t just like, wander around with you,” Miles explained. “People are taking pictures and stuff. I’ve gotta suit up or people are gonna notice me and I can’t afford that.”

Thor stared at him like he was an idiot. And maybe he was, who knew what kind of education or whatever Thor had.

“My dad--” he started to say.

“Alright, fine. You stay here, I will find disguises,” Thor declared over him.

What?

That was not what he meant. That was not even close to what he’d meant.

“No, listen. We can just go up high and then—”

“Stay.”

“No, man. Really, we can just get a couple stories up.”

He was already gone.

There was no book or formula for how to work with a demigod. And even if there was one, Miles was pretty sure that it would not cover the kind of weird demigod Thor was.

He just shows up, out of the blue, tries to hire a mercenary to find his own mercenary. Gets all teary and emotional over nothing, and then fucks off for a ‘disguise,’ whatever that was.

Miles was not an expert here, but he had read a couple books on ancient mythologies and he was pretty sure that that kind of nonsense was typical Greek-god behavior. Norse folks were supposed to be a little more human-sacrifice-y. Have more giant animals and sleighs and shit.

Thor was failing on all counts.

Not to mention he’d been gone for like, half an hour. What kind of disguise took half an hour to find?

Maybe he was shaving the other side of his head to match the first.

“Jesus Christ, can you not?” someone passing the mouth of the alley blustered. Someone else started cackling nearby.

Miles wondered if Thor had ever heard of Jesus or if he knew Neptune or Saturn or something.

“Hey, hey. Sorry, are you alright?” a voice suddenly asked his direction.

Miles looked up to see a guy with salt and pepper hair and concerned eyebrows staring at him. He scrambled up from his crouch against the wall.

The man had a squarish jaw and looked very tired. He didn’t wait for Miles to respond.

“Sorry, this is a crazy question. Please know that I know it is a crazy question, but you wouldn’t happened to have seen Thor around here, would you?” the man asked. “Blond hair, blue eyes—"

“’Bout yay big and fuckin’ dumb?” the person who was clinging to the man’s arm asked, with a highly inebriated hand wavering around carelessly over her head.

She had a weird accent, Miles couldn’t place it. But he could damn well place that salt and pepper hair.

“Oh my god, you’re Dr. Banner,” he gasped.

Dr. Banner went rigid under his friend’s lazy arm. She just about oozed off to the ground before he snapped back and caught her.

“I—uh—yes. Hi. Sorry, we’re a little busy,” he stammered.

“You’re amazing,” Miles said before he could stop himself, “We read part of one of your papers last week for physics and it was like—I want to be like you when I’m old—wait, I mean. Not old. You’re not old, just—”

Dr. Banner’s eyes were all over the place, bouncing from Miles to the lady rapidly melting off his shoulder, to the mouth of the alley.

“That’s real kind of you to say,” he said without feeling, “And I’m sure you’re a smart kid, but we really gotta find our friend. He’s lost and very foreign. The most foreign. Intergalactically foreign, if you catch my drift, so have you seen him?”

Seen him? Seen Thor. Right, yes. He’d seen Thor.

Dr. Banner stared heavenward in relief.

“Thank god. Which way did he go?” he asked.

Oh.

This was not good.

He couldn’t lie to Dr. Banner, but he couldn’t very well just be like, oh hey, I’m Spiderman. Just hanging around with my buddy Thor. Taking walks. Wearing disguises. You know, friend stuff.

Right?

He couldn’t do that, right?

“That way?” his mouth said for him as his arm pointed at the mouth of the alley on its own volition.

It was possibly the most unhelpful suggestion he’d ever made.

Dr. Banner hated him, he knew it.

“That way?” Banner repeated, gesturing with his own arm.

“Yeah?” Miles creaked like a fucking moron.

“Lies,” slurred the lady hanging off Dr. Banner’s bicep. She had little lines of white paint on her face, Miles now realized. They looked like some kind of tattoo. Dr. Banner cocked a skeptical eyebrow at her.

“She speaks,” he said sarcastically. “Well, if you’re finally back with us, dear heart, bravest warrior, it would be supremely helpful if you’d—”

She puked all over his shoes.

Things Spidey had neglected to tell anyone:

1. Thor’s besties were Dr. Bruce Banner and an intergalactic alcoholic who declared herself a ‘Valkyrie’ and who had an addiction to getting turned down by women in gay bars in Chelsea.

In hindsight, there was literally no reason why Spidey should have told anyone on Team Red any of that, but Miles decided that he needed someone to be mad at for this predicament and Spidey wasn’t there to defend himself.

Dr. Banner and the Valkyrie had lost Thor.

Thor had lost Dr. Banner and the Valkyrie.

And now Thor had probably lost himself like the moron the Valkyrie and Dr. Banner promised he was.

Miles could not with these old people.

“Bruun, if you could, for like two seconds, not get wasted,” Dr. Banner swore, pacing the alley as Valkyrie wretched against the side of one of the many dumpsters chilling with them back there. “We could cut hours of out of this never-ending shitshow.”

The Valkryie retched again in response.

Dr. Banner threw up his hands. Then remembered Miles was there.

“Okay,” he said, pinching the space between his eyes, “Okay, okay, okay. Thor was with you—why was Thor with you? Actually, no. I don’t care. Thor was with you. Thor went from the Upper West Side to Midtown. If I was an idiot, looking for a secondary idiot, where would I go next?”

Miles understood that this was a somewhat dire situation, given the apparent oncoming hoard of car-sized spiders somewhere in the city, but he decided that Dr. Banner was his new favorite Avenger.

“He said he went to go get disguises,” he offered.

Dr. Banner froze. The Valkyrie lifted her head. They made eye contact.

“Scarf?” she offered.

“No,” Dr. Banner groaned, “He spends time with Steve and JB, it’s gonna be sunglasses and a hat.”

“Sun…?”

“Just. For my sanity, just leave it.”

The Valkyrie righted herself and wiped her mouth. She seemed to be doing alright now, with the lack of liquor sloshing around her belly. She had on an enormous knit sweater which barely concealed the scabbard she’d wrapped around her waist.

Miles could only think of conceal and carry laws.

He looked up and found her staring right at him. Her eyes were piercing. Probably like that blade dangling from her hip.

“He’s probably trying to nick some glasses or something from a tourist stall. He was making friends with a hot dog vendor a ways from here a few days ago, he’ll probably be somewhere around there,” Banner continued, ignoring the fact that the Valkyrie was trying to see into Miles’s soul behind him.

Miles wondered when the appropriate moment to scream for help was.

Dr. Banner fell silent and Miles knew he was watching this exchange.

“Bruun, be nice,” he warned.

“What are you?” she asked over him.

That was the best question ever, in Miles’s opinion. Spidey had been trying to decide for ages. He said he couldn’t decide if they were technically mutants or just enhanced folks. Mostly, he walked around calling them cursed, but that wasn’t very scientific by any stretch of the imagination.

“I’m Spiderman?” he offered before he could stop himself.

There was a long pause.

“Oh, god, no,” Dr. Banner gasped.

Chapter Text

Peter was shooing Kate out of his shot for the sixth time when his phone had a small meltdown in his pocket.

He stood back up and whined to America that her girlfriend was impeding his artistic vision and was subsequently blessed with a series of photos depicting America manhandling said girlfriend out of the frame.

It was a beautiful thing. He was getting that sequence framed and mounted on his wall. He smirked as he switched his camera out for his phone.

S3: hey miles are you alive? Wanna give us an update on how yesterday went?

S4: hi yeah I’m alive, sorry im in class

S4: wade I’m pretty sure thor’s still gone from your house but I definitely lost him somewhere around midtown and dr. banner showed up right after that and started freaking out, but he left a while later saying that the avengers were gonna handle the thing Thor was trying to get your help with

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): [heart emoji]

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): thnk u

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): only gt 1 hand

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): txtng hard

 DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): but THANK U

S4: oh, and Spidey, they all think you’re dead

S4: I told them I was spiderman (is that okay?) and when dr. banner left with his friend and he was ugly crying even tho I tried to clarify and stuff afterwards. What should I do?

For the love of Christ.

A man can’t take a vacation without being presumed KIA these days.

“Hey, are you coming?” America asked his way. She and Kate were standing at the mouth of the alley, next to a neon pink thrift store.

“Yeah, I just gotta make a call,” he sighed. Kate jutted out a hip.

“You’re on vacation, Pete. Let them handle it.”

Not an option, if he left it for too long, Mr. Stark was going to catch wind of it and send out a search and rescue team and that would ruin everything for everyone.

He found Thor’s number in his phone. Rather, he found the last number he had associated with Thor in his phone. For someone who came from eons of technological advancement, Thor struggled with electronics and was partial to breaking and/or losing every device handed to him. Peter had asked Dr. Banner if it was because his society was so far advanced, Thor using a smartphone was the equivalent of Peter trying to use a fax machine, but Dr. Banner told him that the answer to that was a ‘yes and no’ type of thing and if Thor really needed to find someone, he literally tried on his buddy’s eyes.

It had been a lot.

More than Peter could feasibly conceptualize in his present state.

Sam Wilson, however, had found a workaround in this whole mess, and, bless his fucking heart, had removed all the apps from an iphone except three. He’d then gone and renamed everyone in the contacts app ‘RAVEN’ so that Thor had no fucking reason not to answer folks when they called. This phone lived in a pocket in the leather jacket Mr. Stark kept for Thor when he visited. Sam and the Widow were really good about charging the phone and slipping it into the pocket upon being notified of Thor’s imminent arrival.

Mr. Stark just wanted to chip him.

It was a point of contention.

Peter dialed. Then dialed again because Thor was half-blind and probably increasingly deaf in his old age.

“Hello?”

Thank Jesus.

“Heya, big guy,” he said, “Heard that I died.”

“PETER,” Thor gasped like it had been three thousand years since they’d last seen each other as opposed to less than seven days, which was about what he’d expected.

“I mourned for you, little one. I have been collecting combustibles for your funeral.”

Okay, going a little far there, friend.

“I met your replacement and he is very, very small.”

“Yeah, he’s not my replacement. He’s one of my team,” Peter explained. “There’s three of them, I just made the kid point person for a couple weeks. Hey, what’re you hunting down Wade for, anyways?”

“I lost Bruunhilde.”

Which naturally meant that she’d lost him back, gotten bored, and probably wandered off to go flirt with earth girls in the Village.

“Okay, did you find her?”

“No.”

Oh, good.

“Alright, that’s fine, the kid did. Go to Stark Industries and I’ll have her and Dr. Banner meet you there.”

“Peter, Earth will be a lesser place without you in it.”

Aw.

“Thanks Thor, it’d be darker without you, too. I’ll send you pictures of the orange bridge.”

Thor was pleased. Thor promised to head back towards SI. Peter hung up and dialed Dr. Banner. He picked up on the first ring.

“PETER.”

He knew that that was relief talking, but the enthusiasm was still super endearing.

“Heya, Doc. Not dead. Thor’s fine, I just talked to him. He’s got a phone, you know that right?”

Silence.

Uh-huh. That’s what he thought.

Fucking old people, man.

“He’s headed to SI. You can meet him there, sorry about that. Should have checked in with my team last night.”

“Team?”

“Yeah, I kept the copycats from a while back. We got a whole Spidey Team and everything now. The youngest is in charge this week, it’s his first time and normally Wade would be better about helping, but he’s busy doing the thing where he works six jobs a night and calls the Avengers a bunch of neoliberals again; that’s probably why things got a little more complicated than they needed to be. Sorry about that. Is Bruunhilde with you?”

There was a tinny commotion in the background.

“Unfortunately.”

He laughed.

“Cool. I’m on vacation for a bit across country, if you need anything Spidey-related again, you can talk to the kid.”

“Oh. Right. Yes, I remember now. Sorry about that Pete, you didn’t have to call. Thanks for helping out, though. Have fun in SF.”

He said bye.

The world was once again in alignment.

SM: hi

SM: still on vacation. America Chavez thinks I’m charming and Matt’s house is full of secret dogs. More importantly, talked to Thor and Banner. They should be sorted out. Thanks for taking care of that, Miles. From now on, let’s have a nightly report okay? And if you don’t know what to do, go ahead and talk to Angel or Louis, they’re there to help you, yeah?

He thought that that was a reasonable start.

“Ganke, I’m the worst Spiderman,” Miles said miserably, trying to suffocate himself in Ganke’s pillows.

He could feel Ganke watching him from behind. The Spidey Sense didn’t pick him up as fast as it used to these days.

He wondered if he could engage camouflage and go off upstate and reinvent himself as a lumberjack before Spidey came back.

“Can I see your evidence?” Ganke asked over his fantasies.

Miles threw the phone weakly in his direction. There was a pause while Ganke read through the messages.

“Dude, he literally says ‘thanks’ here. What are you even talking about?”

Miles groaned.

“That’s just a polite thanks. Louis says that’s how adults say ‘nice try asshole’ in the workplace. I should have asked him what to do to begin with. Why didn’t I do that? That’s like, step one.”

Ganke took a moment to process this.

“Okay, maybe you should have, but he still said thanks. And Deadpool did too, see? You’re not the worst Spiderman, dude. You’re just learning, that’s all. Everyone else is hella old, they already know these things.”

“He wants me to report in so he can fix all my screw-ups,” Miles lamented over this good reason. “I don’t know why he left me in charge to begin with, we all know I suck at this.”

Ganke sighed.

“I’m not gonna feed into the self-hatred, Miles. If you’re that upset about it, just like, I dunno, write down all the stuff that went wrong and all the stuff that went right and make a big effort to work on the bad stuff.”

Miles hated this idea.

“Here, I’ll help,” Ganke said, uncaring of his misery.

Miles heard him rustling around to drag out his whiteboard and then the squeak of a marker being uncapped.

“Let’s start with the bad stuff,” Ganke said, “Ready, go.”

The chaos trigger in the Nelson-Murdock household was the word ‘walk.’

Matt and Fogs spelled it out loud over the dogs’ heads so as to place limits on the imminent destruction which followed. Peter thought they had underestimated the dogs’ mental capacity. Tues, at least, could spell, which meant that the second the letter ‘W’ was mentioned, her plume got to wagging and she raised her bones to go dance on Matt’s feet.

Peter was the youngest and was thus relegated to walking Hazel when he got back from mural hunting and taco-eating with Hawkeye the second and Miss America. Haze, who was absolutely fine, despite Matt and Foggy’s insistence that she was a bad dog.

The dog family lived a few blocks away from the edge of Golden Gate Park and Matt introduced Peter to a device which threw tennis balls farther than most normal folks could when they arrived at said edge.

Peter had no use for this device. He took Hazel off lead and showed her the tennis ball. She dropped into a crouch immediately.

He shook the ball and Haze shook her head with it and then he pitched the damn thing as hard as he could into the green. And subsequently into the surrounding trees. He thought maybe he’d overdone it for a second, but Haze was off like a shot, stretching those doggy legs like her life depended on it.

In the exact wrong direction.

She went crashing through the trees and, after a beat, Matt went crashing after her, swearing at her to leave the ducks alone. Tues could not let Matt go alone, not after years of keeping him away from the exact type of brush he’d just dived into. She leapt into action to go save him.

That left Peter and Fogs standing like chumps on the edge of a path at the entrance they’d come in by.

Fogs sighed.

“Every time,” he grumbled, then started walking down the path. “They’ll come back eventually. Got three tracking noses between them. Walk with me.”

It wasn’t like there was too much choice, so he went.

Golden Gate Park was full of rolling hills and huge pine trees and the slight medicinal aroma of eucalyptus. There was a gravelly little trail that wandered through the trees and Fogs opted for this over the asphalt one which lead down towards a huge concrete museum.

“How’re things back home?” he asked. He was still wearing his knit beanie. He still looked like a hipster. Peter decided that Matt didn’t know what hipsters looked like and Kirsten probably thought that this was the best joke ever.

He resolved to bring it up casually later that evening so as to save Fogs from himself.

“They’re fine,” he said.

“Giant spiders,” Fogs countered.

“They’re as fine as they usually are,” Peter amended.

“And you? How are you?”

“I’m fine.”

“Not according to Matt.”

Ouch.

“Might be struggling with this whole self-care thing. Matt says I’ve got problems with pride.”

Fogs hummed.

“Seems like a common illness among your people.”

They walked in the quiet for a little while longer.

Foggy was Matt’s reason for humbling himself. Maybe he knew something about what exactly that meant.

“Fogs, what was it like to have cancer?” he asked.

Foggy sighed.

“Fucking horrible,” he decided after a while. “Everything hurts, like, to the bone. Head hurt, as if someone was trying to blow air into it. Over and over. Like a migraine, but worse. One second, you’re convinced it’s never going to end, then the next you feel fine. Maybe dizzy, maybe a little achey, but fine. That’s the drugs. Radiation therapy is the actual worst. Your fuckin’ teeth hurt, Pete. All the way in the back, the insides of them. You don’t wanna eat, and there’s nothing left to puke up. You just smell like rot after a while.”

He itched at his scalp under the beanie, then paused without looking back at Peter.

“Kirsten made it for me,” he said, pointing at the beanie. “She can’t knit for shit, but she learned just to make me this thing ‘cause she knew I was cold. Then Matt shaved his head for me.”

He still didn’t look at Peter, but Peter could hear the little twist of a smile in his voice.

“Buzzed it right down in the middle of winter. It grew back in red, I mean, flaming red, and he was all upset, but he shaved it down a second time so that our hair could grow back in together, you know that?”

He took a painful breath. Then shook his head and kept on walking, waving at Peter to catch up with him.

“He gave up Daredevil for me, Pete. That day,” he explained as they came to a stop at the curb adjacent a flat space where a load of kids were kicking around a soccer ball in the remnants of sunlight, “Threw away the helmet and came to get his head shaved. Lost 20 pounds when I was in the hospital. I thought it was worry, but it turned out he couldn’t keep anything down because of the smell. He’d tell me he was going to grab a coffee and then went to puke his guts out. Never came back with a coffee. I was too fucked up to notice at the time. Karen told me when we were getting ready to move out here.”

The thought of Matt running around a hospital, lying to Fogs to go vomit his guts out, then turning around to lie with Fogs to ease the pain made Peter’s own stomach ache. He tried to imagine what he would do if May or Ned or MJ got sick like that.

His diaphragm squeezed.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” he said. Foggy hummed.

“It’s alright. There came a point where I didn’t even want my family there, if I’m honest. People were so upset, and there was nothing I could do. Maybe it was selfish, but I didn’t feel like having them there was helping any of us.”

There wasn’t much to say again, so they walked into the next little grove of trees.

“Matt told me to humble myself,” Peter said as they moved off the trail so two big dogs fighting over a twisted piece of rope could trot past them. He looked at Fogs carefully. “But I don’t know how to do that. I just work and work until I can’t. And nothing ever feels enough. Almost died the other day—the day with the spider. Broke my fucking hand, then went back to grab a kid like an idiot and the building nearly took both of us out.” He sighed. “I don’t know how not to do that shit, Fogs. It just happens. I don’t think, I never think. And even when I do, it just—”

“You’re spiraling, Pete.”

Oh.

Yeah, he was.

“Sorry.”

“S’alright. Hey, if you don’t mind me inserting my nose where it doesn’t belong, do you feel good when you do the work?”

Rude.

He was on vacation. Hard questions weren’t allowed.

“I wouldn’t say good,” he drawled.

“Bad?”

“No, not bad. I just don’t know if it feels good. Feels more like a second of satisfaction. Kind of like when you’ve got a thousand papers to file and you get to the halfway point. Kind of like that.”

Fogs hummed.

“Ah, I see. Yeah, okay. I get where Matty was coming from now. Peter, you are aware that you’re the one who decides how much responsibility you take on, right?”

What.

False, sir.

“I don’t follow,” he said instead, so as not to start a fight in the middle of the woods.

Fogs shrugged and his sweater moved up on his hips.

“I mean when Matt realized that he was the one who had decided Hell’s Kitchen needed saving 24/7, he was finally able to step back and see that he’d always needed Hell’s Kitchen more than it needed him. Places are stable like that, for the most part. They keep on keeping on, even when the rest of us are long gone. I get the feeling that he wants you to figure out where that line is in your case. Is it the city that needs you, Pete? Or is it you who needs the needs the city?”

It was.

Well, it was both, honestly.

Peter was self-deprecating, not fucking stupid.

Matt had always drawn clear limits for himself. He was a street-level vigilante. He didn’t fuck with the big league, wasn’t interested in playing their games or climbing any ladder for power.

When he’d started out, Peter had thought that he’d be the same. Then came one team and then the next and then the next and before he knew it, he was fighting aliens and wrangling robots and whaling on terrorists.

Spiderman had saved New York City. That’s what he did. That’s what he’d do. Hundreds and thousands of lives depended on him to be able to do that, to be able to fight a giant fucking spider and save a little girl with a broken hand.

But what did New York City do for him? How did the city save him these days?

He hadn’t thought about it. It provided comfort, he guessed. Home. His family and friends. His uncle’s grave, his heroes, his job. A fuckload of anxiety. A metric shitton of petty crime.

A broken fucking hand.

A dead uncle to begin with.

Now that he thought about it, it didn’t seem like such an equivalent exchange.

“You think I’m trying too hard?” he asked Fogs. “Like this is some kind of abusive relationship thing where all they do is take and all I do is give and we last like, six months after an obvious breaking point before I cut off all my hair and move to Alaska to find myself or something?”

Fogs laughed.

“Yeah, buddy. This is definitely a romantic comedy scenario. 100%.” He crinkled his eyes at Peter. “Maybe you need to regroup a little, Pete. Redraw your boundaries and let folks take care of you for once. Although first, we need to find that damn ball or Haze will sulk for days.”

They found Matt before they found the ball. He was half up a tree at the end of the trail, to both dogs’ vocal concern, telling them both to shut up for one goddamn minute already.  

He found the ball in the crook of the branches.

The crowd went wild.

The locals were extremely amused.

“Matt?” Peter asked, watching him meticulously run his fingers over file heads in one of the banker’s boxes in the kitchen.

“Hmm?”

“Do you think I’m working too hard?”

“Do bears shit in the woods?”

Right. Okay then. If Mr. I am the Day, the Night, the Mid-afternoon, and occasionally the Dawn says you’re working too hard, you’re fucking working too hard.

“Should I get a hobby?”

“Sure. Why not? Just don’t start knitting. Kirsten started knitting and now she keeps giving us shit and we’re running out of places to hide it.”

“You think I’d be good at snowboarding?”

Matt took a moment to think about this.

“I dunno. Let’s go snowboarding,” he decided.

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): where the fuck is everyone y’all are boring I got 1.5 hands and a whole lot of fucking time on them

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): here let’s liven this place up a bit

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): [image]

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): [image]

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): [image]

S3: dude is that your cat?

S3: what the hell happened to it? Is it sick?

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): you will NOT fatshame my fucking cat, you hear me, Louis?

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): that’s just how she fucking is

S2: OH MY GOD WADE YOU HAVE A CAT???

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): yes. She is a princess and she deserves ALL her treats, Louis.

S3: dude she’s the size of a child. Kitty needs to go on a diet

S2: I LOVE HER

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): me too

SM: [video]

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): oh my god Pete welcome back and thank you for your contribution

S2: jesus

SM: so Matt and I wanted to go snowboarding but Fogs said it was too short notice to get up to anywhere with snow, but the ice rink was open late so we went ice skating

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): red are you okay buddy?

SM: it’s not broken just dislocated

SM: he was only in the ER for like, an hour.

SM: he says to tell y’all that it doesn’t even hurt. He’s definitely trying to open a beer bottle with his teeth atm so I think he’s fine

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): send us video of that

SM: [video]

S3: OH MY GOD HOW DID HE DO THAT

S2: akdhfaksdfhasdlkf respect

DD: fuck with me

SM: says the man hiding in his own garage. The dogs found you. Fogs is still mad.

DD: teeth are replaceable.

SM: elbows are not. Fogs put your pain pills in your weird smoothie thing by the way I watched him do it. he says you can’t tell the difference between them and kale if he puts enough in

DD: That motherfucker I knew it

SM: Miles? Evening report?

“Someone’s popular.”

Turns out sheer force of will was not sufficient to make a phone shut up, even with Spider enhancements.

Miles edged the phone off the table to look at its screen before tucking it into his pocket. He’d text back after dinner. His mom was pleased with his restraint.

“Making new friends at school, mijo?” she asked.

Not school exactly. Thor had found him earlier that day on his way home and enthusiastically had him add his number into his contacts book as ‘Spiderman the Small One.’

His contacts book was fucking insane. Everyone in there was named Raven, like. Literally everyone.

Miles now understood that Thor wandered through the world giving exactly four fucks and one shit, but that was no reason to do that to the guy.

Thor didn’t seem too bothered, however. He patted Miles’s shoulder and then asked him if he’d seen an unusually large fish-egg-looking object lately.

No. Obviously the answer was no.

And then obviously the next question was “wait, have you?”

Indeed Thor had, and he was trying to figure out a way to kill all the eggs inside of it without half the people in the northern half of Brooklyn noticing. He’d recruited Cap and invited Miles to stand between their stupidly handsome shoulders so that they could, all three of them, scrub at their hair ponderously while trying to decide what to do with the enormous translucent buoy-like object chillin’ on the edge of one of the docks. It rose and fell peacefully with the waves. It looked like a huge plastic bag full of gigantic salmon roe.

Cap was absolutely fascinated by it. Neither he or Thor appeared to think it was a threat to humanity so much as a cool new puzzle to be solved.

Standing between them and feeling every millimeter in their height differences, Miles decided he liked Captain America a lot. He was at least twice as dumb as he was in all the books and tv shows Miles had consumed about him.

His first solution to the egg sack was, “Well, maybe we can poke a hole in it and drown them?”

To which Thor responded, “Pretty sure they’re all still in the eggs. They can’t drown if they can’t breathe yet, right?”

Cap chewed on that for a second than dug out his phone and googled ‘how to kill spider nest’ like a true strategist.

“People online say use a broom or a vacuum,” he announced. He was so fucking stupid. Miles loved him so much. Neither of those options was even close to a viable solution. Thor, however, lit up like this information was in any way useful to them.

“Excellent, do we have either of those things?”

He could not be serious.

Cap addressed the egg sack with firm seriousness.

“Not yet,” he told Thor.

They were totally serious.

Miles could not believe his fucking luck. If for nothing besides the entertainment value of what was about to happen alone, he decided he’d stick this one out.

Cap told them to wait fifteen minutes but they ended up having to wait thirty. Thor’s idea of small talk involved asking Miles if he could commune with the spider hatchlings.

No, he could not. They tried anyways.

“What in God’s name are you fuckheads doing now?” said the strongest Brooklyn accent Miles had ever heard. He and Thor turned around to see Bucky Barnes with his metal arm clenched around the back of Cap’s neck. Evidently, he’d dragged him all the way back to the dock that way. Bucky Barnes noticed Miles, cocked his head, then dismissed him with an eye roll.

Thor thought that his presence was wonderful, however. He explained the situation while gesticulating enthusiastically.

Bucky Barnes had a face like a mad raccoon. His eyebrows flattened like none Miles had ever seen and when they did that, his face became visibly darker. Miles suddenly understood all those references to ‘stormy expressions’ he’d read in English class over the last few years.

“Why the fuck do I leave you two alone together?” Barnes demanded once Cap had helpfully jumped in to explain that, according to the internet, they needed a broom, a vacuum, or some tea tree oil.

“The spider child cannot speak with them,” Thor said. “But he tried.”

Bucky Barnes turned and stared dead-eyed at Miles.

“So you’re one of the new ones,” he said flatly.

Miles gave a little nod.

“Jesus fuck. Listen, kid, I’m sorry you got involved, you can go home, I’ll take care of these guys.” He shook Cap for emphasis. It was unnecessary. There was literally no one else besides the four of them on the dock.

“It’s okay,” Miles said, because now he needed to see how this panned out, “If there’s anything I can do to help, I’m down.”

Bucky Barnes considered him, then addressed the buoy-egg sack. He scowled at it so hard his whole face wrinkled. He turned back to Miles.

“You ever shot a gun?” he asked.

Uh, no?

“Well, today’s your lucky day, pal.”

Miles could not look either of his parents in the eye across the table because he couldn’t trust himself not to say that Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes had taught him how to shoot a .22 not even two hours previous. Especially not when his dad had been operating under the impression that that would be a bonding experience for the two of them for the last five years.

He stuffed several forkfuls of salad into his face to distract himself.

S4: minor situation at the docks

S4: mostly resolved. Met Cap and Sergeant Barnes. They helped a lot

SM: perfect. Hopefully things’ll even out for you guys over there. Ttyl

Chapter Text

TS: pete I need spiderman

PP: spiderman is on vacation you literally approved his time off. Hey do we compost? We should compost. I just saw a whole street of compost bins out here. Like a green army of future mulch. I think I’m in love. I’m getting one for the labs

TS: there are two perfectly functional compost bins in the lobby do not buy more trash

PP: sir

PP: you are mistaken. you see, It’s not trash.

PP: its compost

TS: don’t call me sir over text, its weird. put in a request for your green trash like everyone else.

TS: Anyways, remember the Local Heroes project we talked about like a decade ago?

PP: oh fuck that’s this week? Fuck I’m so sorry I totally forgot

TS: its fine I forgot too. Anyways, obvs this is my bad, I should have remembered before approving your time, but do you think we could borrow a spiderman for the afternoon? Doesn’t have to be you, we just need someone for the kids to meet and greet etc. I’d get some rando in a mask, but considering our target population here, that seems kind of not great

PP: not 100% sure and I’m actually 2 seconds away from getting on a ferry rn. You’re gonna have to ask them. I’ll give you temp. access to the TR chat

TS: I will use this temp power for good.

PP: lies but whatev

TS: btw despite whatever your sociopath friend tells you, you cannot and should not attempt to swim the bay back from Alcatraz.

PP: you know what that sounds like mr. stark?

PP: quitter talk.

TS: hi hello I have been temporarily added to this chat

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): get fucked ya libertine

TS: the Avengers are hosting an event for kids in need and we are suddenly lacking the second most popular of our red and blue menaces. Are any or all of you free to come take pictures, sign posters, etc. for a bunch of kids this sat?

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): I am

TS: is literally anyone else?

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): see this is exactly what im talking about

S2: hi, I work until 11 this sat, but I can try to get it off. We don’t look much like spidey tho, how is that supposed to play out

S4: ^

TS: it’ll be fine, your troop has kind of made a name for itself as of late. It is my understanding that a lot of people are really into picking a favorite copycat too

S2: that’s actually kind of cool

S3: hi yeah I can make it, saturday at what time?

S4: if louis does it, does that mean the rest of us don’t have to?

SM: miles you’re doing it. nice try.

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): AHAHAHAHAHAHA

S2: damn boy he used data for you. Spidey is this kosher?

SM: kosher

TS: thanks pete, do not swim the bay. I don’t know if reckless-moron syndrome is covered in our health insurance plans. The rest of you, send me your email privately and I’ll send you an invite with all the info. You can either come in the suit or come to SI first then change, I’ll send you a security code if you want to do that

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): gotcha motherfucker, im saving your number

TS: im switching phones immediately

S2: wait Spidey you’re gonna swim the bay?

S2: Spidey?

“I don’t know about this.”

That water looked pretty nasty. There were a lot of birds around.

And fences.

Matt gave him a dark look as the park ranger ahead of them directed people off towards the white concrete building or underground to watch a film about the prison first.

“Suck it up, we said we’d do it, so we’re doing it. But first we need a distraction.”

Miles did not want to go be Spiderman. He’d already been Spiderman four times that week, two times with Thor and the spiders, and another two with Angel and Louis to do the evening patrols.

That was plenty of Spiderman-ing. He deserved his weekend.

“Dude, we’re going to visit the cancer ward after, you really want to be a whiny bitch about it?” Angel scolded.

Ugh.

Like, she wasn’t wrong, per se. But still. They weren’t therapy dogs. They didn’t do what they did to be paraded around like some kind of neighborhood watch mascots.

“Miles.”

UGH.

Louis, too now. Tag-teaming was unfair.

“Fine.”

Miles told his parents he was going to spend the day in the city with his cool new school friends (this was a joke. He had two new friends total, and neither he would call ‘cool’ even if pressed.) and stuffed his suit in his bag. Mr. Stark sent them a passcode and directions to the back of the big SI tower in Midtown.

It was surreal stepping through the huge white and yellow striped security gates to meet Angel, standing right inside wearing a coat made of what appeared to be the top half of a pink fluffy teddy bear mascot.

“It’s fashion, Bitsy, and it’s not pink, it’s ‘blush,’” she informed him. “You wouldn’t know because you’ve got no style.”

False.

His style was called ‘cooler than hers.’

“It is so early for you to be begging for death like this,” she said.

Louis turned up a few minutes later wearing a leather jacket and a green t-shirt, somehow looking unfairly cool. He informed them, regretfully, that Wade was not coming. And then he looked back at the automatic doors ahead of them and then back to Miles.

“Alright, fearless leader, we’re following you,” he said.

Peter was fucking freezing and Matt’s lips were purple and his fingers shaky but admitting out loud that that shit had been a horrible fucking idea felt like betrayal.

That water was so much colder and nastier than it looked. The piece of kelp Peter had been positive was a tentacle of the fucking kraken was still wrapped stubbornly around his ankle. If either of them had had any sense whatsoever, common or otherwise, they would have turned back after the first half-mile, when the current started to feel weird and Matt had started to have orientation problems.

But alas. He and Matt were kind of nonsense royalty.

“P-p-play it c-cool,” Matt stammered, as though neither of them had nearly drowned three times on the way over.

So the man said it, so it shall be.

It took Fogs and Kirsten another half hour to find them. Naturally, Foggy was blazing with fury by the time he got over to their little beach. He didn’t even say anything, just got a handful of the back of Matt’s suit and started dragging him, with zero regard for his stability, further inland. Kirsten gave Peter disappointed eyes then shook her head. He took that as his cue to follow.

He was a little scared to request a stop for a warm drink.

He did, however, stop to lean against a lamp post to extricate the wannabe kraken from his foot and to chuck it back off the pier.

PP: for the record

PP: it was a bad idea

TS: you’re a fucking idiot sometimes pete

PP: yes thank you I’ll take this

PP: how are the kids?

TS: uh. so

TS: thor and cap have adopted the little one. are you aware they’ve been hanging out?

PP: what the fuck? no. what do you mean ‘adopted’?

TS: they are herding him

TS: I don’t know if he knows hes being herded

PP: oh jesus he doesn’t even know what he doesn’t know

TS: you want me to do something about it? you know, before they start in with the mentoring bullshit?

PP: Gimme ten. I’ll let you know if that’s necessary.

SM: Cap leave him alone.

CA: why

CA: we are friends. Fellow brooklynites. Friends.

SM: he is mine to mentor, he came to me first, you already have a replacement.

CA: yes but do I have a replacement for my replacement? No. Also he’s an artist! We have much in common.

SM: sorry what?

CA: for shame peter

CA: what kind of mentor doesn’t know of his mentee’s talents???

SM: this one. What’s he do?

CA: murals. Stickers. Kid’s got an amazing sense of line and color.

SM: steve, I love you, please don’t encourage defacement of public property. Leave him alone, I’ll talk to him about it

CA: its not defacement its improvement and expression. It should be fostered.

SM: fine I’ll foster him about it. lay off.

CA: ehn I’ll think about it.

Well, if that’s how he wanted to play it.

SM: your life partner is corrupting my mentee. Make him stop.

JB: he likes him. Shit’s novel

SM: mine first, already overwhelmed. Make him stop.

JB: gonna need a better reason than that

SM: you remember that time y’all tried to mentor me all at once when I was like 17?  And that time I got a cap in my ass because I didn’t know who to listen to first?

JB: …

JB: noted, will conduct interference should the opportunity arise

CA: pete

SM: yes?

CA: this is war

Fuck.

Wearing the black suit in the middle of the day, in the middle of a huge crowd of not-imminently dying folks felt a little like sacrilege. Miles tried to pretend he was okay with it, because the only way out of the whole thing now was to declare solidarity with Wade and that had far-reaching consequences he wasn’t prepared to deal with.

On the upside, he had the second longest line at their table, right behind Angel’s.

On the downside, he had the second longest line at their table.  

Louis was hella smug about it. He got to sit down, the asshole, while Miles and Angel took picture after picture with what felt like baby after baby and toddler after toddler.

Most of them were dressed in some variant of Spidey’s obnoxious red and blue suit, but Miles found his heart doing a little squeezy thing when a little kid with a hearing aid in his line scrambled out of his dad’s grip in a black and red suit.

The kid shook a poster of Spidey at Miles, which he had evidently colored over in black sharpie and red paint to match Miles’s suit, and asked him if he could have Spiderman’s autograph, please, please, please, please.

Yes.

Yes, he could.

Just as soon as Miles figured out what Spiderman’s autograph looked like.

Angel’s Spiderman autograph was a quick little spiderweb with eyes drawn on it. Louis’s was ‘S.M.’ with a line under it and a little spider crawling down from its tail.

Miles took a breath and reminded himself that this was his hobby, goddamnit.

He did a quick little stylized piece in the corner of the poster and handed it back to the kid who stared at it with huge eyes for what felt like forever, but was probably a second at most. It made Miles nervous regardless. He tried to avoid the dad’s eye contact just in case he was one of those kind of people, the kind not unlike his own dad, who had ideas about the intersection, or lack thereof, between legality and spray paint.

“This is awesome!” the kid shrieked, waving the paper around while also demanding that his dad behold its glory. The dad, apparently used to such demands, nodded sagely without even bothering to look and thanked Miles for taking the time to do it.

Cool. Crisis averted. Alright, great. Next.

At about hour four, Miles found himself dying of irony and oddly, second-hand embarrassment, wedged in between a group of nine people wearing his own school’s sweatshirts. He knew four of them from math and physics.

They were the kind of folks who had keychain figures of all the Avengers on their bags. Miles, having sat through lab with two of them, also happened to know that Rachel, the one with the cat-eye glasses, had a thermos of Cap that when heated, revealed his bare chest.

There was a whole line of those things. And they were…a lot. For class, anyways. Rachel had gotten in trouble for hers and had been specifically asked to leave it at home.

Miles, with his new-found understanding of Cap’s situational intelligence and lack thereof, found the idea of this mug only more entertaining now. He could totally imagine Cap and Thor buying each others’ and seductively drinking from them in top-secret Avengers meetings.

He reveled in this image to carry him through the tooth-souring awkwardness that was the pictures.

After the shutters stopped clacking, the group turned to him to say thanks and Emmanuel Rodriguez, the fucking dick who took gleeful pride ruining all the curves in Miles’s math class, stuck out his hand for a handshake.

“It’s an honor,” he said in a pompous tone, with his chin up high.

Miles felt his eye twitch. He, Angel, and Louis had made the decision to talk as little as possible, just in case the kids had heard Spidey on Youtube or something. They didn’t want to break the illusion too bad, and anyways, it was kind of fun, playing charades with the kids. They seemed to love it and giggled all over the place when Angel did her overblown bows at their thanks.

He executed his best impression of Spidey’s wink and finger-guns to this end.

Emmanuel laughed.

“For sure, keep up the good work. .”

Emmanuel moved to leave the line with the others in his group but paused at the last second.

“Hey, do you know, by chance, when the real Spiderman will be back in town?”

Wait.

“Excuse me?” Miles said before his brain could stop him. Angel a couple feet over slowly rotated her head their direction with her suit eyes as wide as a pissed off owl.

Emmanuel and his buddies all blinked a little in surprise at their break in character. The guy shrugged, trying to play it off like it was no big deal.

“I mean, like, it’s cool that you guys came out and all, but we all came here to see the real Spidey. And no offense, you guys for sure do great work, but none of y’all are genuine article.”

Miles actually felt a muscle in his jaw bounce.

Only he was allowed to wallow in his imposter syndrome, and only he was allowed to talk shit about his teammates, not some rando who didn’t know him from Adam.

Miles had a quick fantasy of pointing out that Spidey’s constant existential crisis meant that even he didn’t believe that he was the genuine article but bit the words at the tip of his tongue.

Angel had no such qualms.

“What the fuck did you just say?” Angel spat, low and dangerous. Louis tipped his head their way with a little girl in his arms. The crowd of folks around their tables went wide-eyed and whispery upon realizing that, yes indeed, that Spiderman could talk, too.

Emmanuel started to get flushed at the sudden attention on him and started babbling to cover up his discomfort.

“I—I said--I just wanted to know if the real Spidey was coming down to this event, that’s all.”

“What, we ain’t real enough for you?” Angel snapped. Miles felt his blood pressure jump a little at the reminder.

Emmanuel flinched, but decided that his masculinity was strong enough to endure the oncoming storm.

“No, it’s not that. It’s more like, well. The whole thing is Spidey’s job; you guys are just like assistants or whatever.”

The crowd around the table had become a mixed bag of reactions in light of this information. Some offended on Team Spidey’s behalf, some embarrassed, and a couple, just a couple, guilty.

Angel, however, was hot. Hot, hot, hot. And getting hotter. Probably stoking the fire in her head with nerd masculinity and Spidey’s latest near-death experience. Louis reached over and touched her elbow to rein her in a little. He cleared his throat and Miles remembered that he was supposed to be in charge here.

“We are, every one of us, Spiderman,” he announced firmly in his most authoritative voice, both to Emmanuel and to the crowd around them. “It’s not about who’s in the mask, it’s about what you do with it.”

“You’re not Spiderman,” some middle-aged asshole in a Captain America t-shirt in Angel’s line declared suddenly from behind his toddler daughter. “You can’t do what he does, don’t even play. Just get back over and take the damn pictures.”

Angel’s suit eyes went huge as she rounded slowly onto this new target for her rage. Her fingers twitched, curling into half-moons before splaying wide at her sides.

“Actually, we can,” Miles argued. “And more.”

“Prove it,” the guy goaded.

Miles blinked. He consulted Louis because Angel was preoccupied with thoughts of murder.

Louis shrugged with the hand not newly buried in the back of her suit’s neck.  

‘Why not?’ the gesture said.

That was basically permission. And technically, this was a team decision, so if Spidey asked, Miles could say it was in defense of the whole concept or something.

He stared at the guy for a moment, then thought about the fact that this man was in line so that his daughter, who wore a mini-version of Angel’s new pinker suit with black elbow and knee pads, could meet her while he threw everything she did and stood for into the gutter. Just because Angel didn’t have some mutation or special super power.

No respect.

Angel would give her life for that baby girl in a heartbeat if she needed to. Powers or no powers. She’d break her hands, her arms, her legs, however many times it took if someone or something threatened that little girl, and she didn’t have any special healing factor to mop up the aftermath.

No respect.

She’d do it right there, right then. All three of them would.

This guy didn’t even know how safe his daughter was right now.

No respect.

His heart pounded in his neck.

He closed his eyes, focused in on the throbbing, and heard the gasp in the crowd.

Spidey had developed a theory that Miles’s camouflage function was somehow linked to his cortisol levels.

If this was the case, he’s argued, then the function could be induced by any stressful reaction, not just fear.

And because Spidey was who he was, he wasn’t happy enough with this theory, no. He was the kind of nutjob who had to test it. He’d produced a cup of highly corrosive acid, dumped it in a pan, and had held a bare toe just above it, inching closer and closer, while Miles pleaded with him not to fucking do that.

He was insane, but he wasn’t wrong. Miles’s heart attack and fury at this stupidity had indeed activated camo-mode.

Spidey thought this was a brilliant result. He’d freaked out and vanished in what Miles, Angel, and Louis were coming to understand was his normal manic, slightly depressive scientist way, and returned with a horrible device which shocked dogs when they barked too much or too loudly.

He made Miles hold it and had then produced a list of facts about American presidents in one hand and a remote control in the other.

It was a bad time for everyone. But it did mean that Miles had much more control over camo-mode now.

With great power comes great responsibility.

He reached over and picked up one of paperweights keeping the stack of extra posters on the middle table from getting knocked over. People in the crowd gasped again as it appeared to levitate on its own. He tossed it over to Angel and she caught it, saw his game, and turned around in a pitcher’s crouch. She hurled it up at the glass in the roof of the atrium.

Miles shot out a line of web just before it connected and pulled, sending the weight rocketing back towards them. The crowd flinched hard and some folks screamed as the now-abused bauble made its rapid descent. Louis sent out a line that intercepted it mid-air, but it missed Miles’s waiting hands and went hurtling right at Cap at his table on the other side of the room.

Miles felt his stomach drop.

A metallic ring sounded through the whole room, silencing and freezing everyone in its wake.

It was followed by the rough noise of the weight skidding to a halt a couple feet away from the table.

Cap lowered the shield.

Barnes and Hawkeye, stationed on each side of Cap, cheered like the proud dads of a kid who’d caught a foul ball at a stadium. Hawkeye leapt up and had scampered across the room with his bow in one hand and a rattling quiver of arrows in the other before Miles had fully processed the reaction they had just set off. Barnes yanked Cap off the top of his table by the back of his belt and snatched the shield from him. He hopped up on the table in Steve’s placed and assumed an umpire’s position.

“Hit me,” he barked.

An arrow cracked against the middle of the star and shattered into pieces.

“Weak, Barton,” Barnes called.

The next arrow clipped his ear.

“I’m literally holding a target, you moron.”

A kid dressed all in purple scrambled out of the crowd behind Hawkeye and took his shot with a shitty, dollar-store bow. He let loose an arrow that didn’t even make it halfway to the shield.

Thor cheered at this momentous display of courage, which set all the children around him to cheering with him.

Soon the whole place was in uproar, with other Avengers organizing teams of their fans to launch attacks on Barnes and Cap and Sam Wilson, who had somehow pulled a plain metal shield and the Falcon wings out from nowhere to defend their self-proclaimed turf on the north half of the atrium. A line of munchkin Captain Americas lined up to form a barricade in front of these. A short bulwark against the oncoming dollar-store Hulk fists and Hawkeye arrows and plastic arc-reactor bursts.

It was a whole deal.

But technically, at the end of it (Tony Stark, of all people, announced over the din that this game was now being relocated to outside ASAP and, surprisingly, everyone listened to him and chased Team Cap as they gunned it for the courtyard) no one had died or gotten hurt and if anything, most of the kids were happier than ever to be allowed to partake in some low-budget civil war.  

Miles was going to go ahead and call this one a win.

Angel and Louis decided that for the report that night, they were all going to thank Spidey for letting them go in his place and tell him that they’d introduced an ‘essential interactive element’ into the event which their audience immensely appreciated.

This, Louis explained, was adult-speak for ‘things got a little out of hand, but they worked out alright in the end, so we’re still good.’

“Hey, Fogs?” The house was so much warmer than the bay. It was a miracle.

“Yes, Peter?”

“Sorry me and Matt swam the bay.”

“Are you, though?”

Was he, though? Matt, having nearly drowned at the hands of Wilson Fisk nearly a year earlier, seemed determined to overcome his weakness with water through an endless cycle of repetition and terror. That morning had definitely been a part of that process. And that was fine because Matt knew very few ways to overcome a weakness besides throwing himself at it until one of them submitted.

Matt would submit to the Lord and on his deathbed only. Hence why that whole process worked out so well for him.

But that was Matt. Himself? He wasn’t so sure, it had been pretty scary, if he was honest with himself. He was scared that Matt would go down or lose his grip on Peter, and then he’d nearly fucking pissed himself at the kraken.

Just the reminder made phantom tentacles scrape against his ankle. He rubbed at that ankle with his other foot, then realized Foggy was watching him judgmentally. He stuffed both ankles under the blanket on the couch.

“Yes?” he tried.

“Peter,” Foggy sighed, “Do you think swimming the bay is self-care?”

Oho.

An easy question for once.

“Abso-fucking-lutely not.”

This was evidently not the answer Fogs was looking for. He crushed his fingers into the bridge of his nose. Hazel lifted her head in concern at his knee.

“Then why the hell did you do it?”

Well, because he told Matt that he’d do it and he wasn’t gonna leave the guy hanging. Matt couldn’t swim without a buddy. He’d for sure drown that way.

“Peter, Matt operates at a .2 on the impulse control scale on a good day. You are a 3. He needs to learn how to accept his limits. You need to learn not lower your standards out of comradery. It’s not your job to make everyone happy.”

Uhhhhhhh.

So.

Right, right, almost right, except the last part. It was totally his job to make everyone happy. He was a people pleaser, the biggest, fattest people pleaser on the Eastern Seaboard, if he did say so himself. If he wasn’t pleasing people, then what was he even doing with his life?

Spiderman helps people, Foggy. That’s his job.

“We’ve been through this, Pete. Life isn’t only about other people. You work too much. Spiderman works too much. Thankfully, you are still young and impressionable, so here’s what we’re gonna do. We are going to punish Matt by making him eat a spoonful of shrimp paste, and then you are going to pick an activity for tomorrow which does not involve work or a high probability of death, alright?”

Hm.

Like what?

Fogs shoved a huge pile of brochures in his hands.

“Pick something. Anything. No death. Repeat after me, ‘no death.’”

“No death.”

“Thank you. Consider yourself dealt with. MATTHEW.”

He stomped off the couch to go exact Matt’s punishment upon him in the kitchen. Peter went to his room with the brochures to think.

No death.

No work.

Self-care.

There was a fuckload of hiking in the bay area. There were more trails than he could count; it seemed like there was no end of National Parks to go to, either. There were elephant seals at Pier 39 and some secret slides in the Castro. He could ride a trolley or go see a show at the Orpheum.

He kind of wanted to do something he’d never done before. Swimming the bay, he saw now, was part of that urge. He didn’t do much swimming. He didn’t do much hiking. He was a city-slicker, through and through.

He heard Matt’s baritone buzzing through the wall, pleading with Foggy not to do this to him. Foggy said something that Matt whined at for exactly two seconds before begging even louder for Fogs to reseal the jar he’d apparently opened.

Peter had done a lot of shit in his life. He was a bit of a thrill junkie like Matt. Sky-diving, pub-crawling, spider-fighting, acid-neutralizing. He had loads of excitement in his life. Maybe what he needed was something a little more low-key.

He flipped through a few of the brochures again, then got up and peeked his head out of the door so that he could see into the kitchen.

Matt was wrapped around Fogs, pressed all up into his neck from behind, murmuring sweet nothings and apologies. Fogs held both a closed jar of reddish mash and a pinched expression. He looked Peter’s way at the sound of the door opening. Matt buried himself deeper into the newly available skin.

“’Sup, Pete?” Foggy asked, ignoring his barnacle.

“I wanna go see the elk,” Peter declared. He waved the elk reserve brochure for emphasis.

Foggy’s eyebrows bounced up a little, surprised that someone in this household had taken on his advice for once with only minor coercion.

Matt lit up.

“We can go see the elk,” he said. Fogs turned towards him suspiciously.

“Stop. Whatever you are thinking, it is a no,” he ordered. Matt hunkered down back into his neck in glee at getting caught. Peter could never tell if Matt was a masochist and Foggy his enabler, or if Matt just loved that Fogs could predict all his bad ideas before they were fully formed.

Foggy turned back to Peter.

“We can see the elk,” he said. “But we’ll need to get up pretty early to get out there in time. Is that okay?”

Yeah, duh. There were elk.

“Alright, but I’m just gonna put it out there, so that we’re all on the same page: if we go out to the coast tomorrow, no one in this household will fight or attempt to fight any elk or any other hoofed creature.”

Matt squirmed in delight, having been caught red-handed in his plans. He left them to go explain this to the dogs in baby talk. Tues wagged her plume at him.

“I wonder if any of the girls would want to go,” Foggy hummed.

Elk-hiking with Miss America. Kate would hate it. Sign Peter the fuck up.

“I’ll text them.”

PP: hey bitch we’re gonna go see elk. you in?

KB: we’re in the east bay

PP: that a yes or a no

PP: ask America

KB: she says she hates wildlife

PP: cool what time are we picking y’all up?

KB: and we’ve got another friend with us

PP: they like elk?

KB: they hate everything we all hate everything stop trying to steal my girlfriend you are not fucking subtle you’ve got one back home

PP: therapist says no relationships. Not trying to steal your girl, damn were you always this jealous?

KB: yeah bitch

KB: UGH

KB: America says she’s never seen elk

PP: WHOOP WHOOP k matt’s driving

KB: ur not funny. Ugh. Our other friend wants to see elk now too, why did you do this to me. We’re supposed to go back to LA this weekend

PP: you’ll be fine. Nature is self care. Says so online. What is friend’s name? Matt says depending on the number of folks we have, we might need to rent a car. Can you drive? ‘cause my ass can’t

KB: can I drive? Yes I can drive, I live in LA dumbass, there are no other options. Alright, there’s three of us. Friend’s name is Gwen.

PP: …stacy?

KB: no, not stacy. Poole. Who’s Stacy?

PP: no one. Alright, three of y’all, four of us. Sounds like we need a bigger car. I’ll let Matt know. He says everyone needs to be up at 4am.

KB: tell him to get fucked. We get there when we get there

PP: fogs says it’s a long drive, need to leave around nine. Compromise. Meet up here at 8:30?

KB: alright yeah we can do that. See you tomorrow. I won’t forgive you

PP: <3 <3 <3

Chapter Text

California had changed Matt. Changed him into a disgusting hippie morning person who made overnight oats and shit. Peter woke up to him opening the bedroom door and letting the dogs in. He then left and left Peter to Hazel’s mercy.

It was so fucking early.

“Pete, you’re the one who wanted to see elk.”

Silence, mortal.

So fucking early.

He needed an energy drink.

“This isn’t even that early,” Matt said with his hands full of newly filled dog bowls. Both dogs danced around him in anticipation.

Peter dug out his phone to text Wade because he could not be alone in these hard times. Wade wasn’t awake but texting him made Peter feel better anyways.

“Coffee?” Foggy offered.

Fuck your coffee. He needed an IV of straight caffeine. Stat. Foggy didn’t take offense. He returned to scrolling through his phone.

“No dogs,” he told Matt who was trying to get Tuesday to eat by tapping on the edge of her metal bowl. She wagged her tail at him and dipped her head towards the food and his hand but didn’t start eating it. Matt tapped the bowl again and she got excited that he was kneeling and got to work smelling the inside of his ear. She did that a lot now, not eating. Foggy said she just didn’t have the same appetite as she used to. Matt was convinced she was dying. He didn’t say it out loud but Peter had walked in on him scolding her in the kitchen late at night, telling her that he understood where she was coming from, but really, she could at least make an effort.

“No dogs,” Matt relayed to his children.

“Kirsten says she’s on her way.”

Matt went to wash his hands and vanished into the fridge again. Peter laid his head on the table.

A familiar clank sounded by his ear a few seconds later.

He knew it in his soul.

“You,” he told Matt, collecting and then cradling the already sweating can to his chest, “Are my favorite person.”

Matt snorted.

“Don’t tell Wade I gave you one. Go get dressed.”

“My favorite person,” Peter emphasized as he hopped back into the hall.

The Redbull helped. He even managed to do something with his hair before going out to pick up the rental car with Fogs. They bumped into Kirsten on the way out the door and Peter immediately felt unprepared.

Kirsten had donned waterproofed hiking pants and some serious footwear. She had a backpack and one of them puffy, lightweight mountaineering jackets on. She even had a hat and a smidge of missed sunblock at the corner of her eye.

“We ready?” she asked.

“Gonna get the car,” Foggy told her. “Make Matt take a cane.”

“On it.”

“I don’t need no cane,” Matt called from inside.

Peter wanted to ride shotgun. He was not allowed to sit shotgun, however, because Fogs was driving and Foggy was a control freak who didn’t like people touching the buttons on the console. Not to mention the fact that someone had to sit in the back and keep Matt from opening doors and leaping out onto the highway at any interesting smell.

Kirsten consoled Peter by offering him shotgun at the next rest stop.

He thought that was fair until they got there. Then he swallowed all his complaints.

Kate and America met them in San Rafael with a tiny crazy person.

She was the size of a mouse. Pink and blond on top and pink, blue and white on bottom and she had a fat crush on Matt. Like, a fat. Fucking. Crush. It was borderline painful. She had zero qualms with using any excuse whatsoever to get in his personal space bubble and, even though he’d only just met her, Peter could tell that she wanted to tap that. Bad.

The second-hand embarrassment for all parties except Matt was so strong that none of them could make eye-contact for more than a second after she spoke. Matt, for his part, pretended that none of this was happening, although it was hard to tell if he was doing that, or if he was just distracted by the sheer amount of cows in the yard adjacent to the gas station.

He had a hand buried in Foggy’s jacket sleeve which he kept clenching and un-clenching while staring in that direction, though, so Peter was gonna go with the latter.

Ah, Double D. Only blissfully ignorant when it mattered.

Kirsten offered Peter the front seat and Kate wondered very loudly if maybe Peter wanted to ride with her and America. He did not. L’il Pink was their friend and therefore their bad decision. They’d known Matt was coming on this trip, Peter had made that very clear.

“Me and Matt are having quality time,” he said, “You know. Doing mentor-y things.”

“I’m what?” Matt asked.

Silence, you.

Matt grimaced at him and dragged Foggy with him away from the conversation.

“I need mentoring,” L’il Pink remembered.

Peter thought that maybe cracking his jaw in half would get the point across to Kate. She gave him wide eyes back at his threatening look and splayed her hands open in front of her.

Ugh.

He was just gonna have to eat this one, wasn’t he?

It turned out he didn’t have to because Foggy yelped a few seconds later and they then had to deal with the exciting task of getting Matt away from his new bovine compadre. He’d decided they were friends. The cow had decided she was down with this. She made a very scary noise and tried to headbutt anyone who go too close to her new precious child. Peter was thereafter put in charge of keeping Matt away from all fences.

Foggy threatened his husband with a finger in his face.

“We are staying on the trail,” he said. Matt hummed agreeably, 100% having already forgotten his earlier remonstration. “What are we staying on?”

“The trail.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

Foggy didn’t trust that for a second. He grabbed Peter’s shoulder and stared into his eyes with gravitas.

“I’m trusting you, Peter,” he said.

Foggy released Matt from the car like Matt released his dogs at the park and left Peter to go join up with his fellow Gen Z folks as they put on the jackets and hats they’d stuffed in the trunk of their rental. It was drizzling slightly, not really the best weather for hiking, but whatever. It was what it was.

The air smelled like wild sage. He could hear little drops of water hitting old trees. Tapping away lightly at the old wood of the huge empty old barn on the side of the parking lot. Foggy had explained that the space was part of a historic landmark, but it seemed more abandoned than historic to Peter.

“Lotta cypress trees around here,” America said pleasantly. He hadn’t noticed her walk up beside him.

“Which ones are cypress?” he asked.

“They look like flat pines. They remind me of hands.”

They sounded nice.

L’il Pink’s name was Gwen, and Gwen was about as chaotic as Matt in her own way, (i.e. running ahead of the group, then circling back like some kind of herding creature) and having the two of them in their posse was just asking for trouble, especially since Matt was a really bad hiker.

It wasn’t his fault. It was just that the footpaths along the cliffs were more like the bottoms of streams than any kind of paved trail. Little gopher holes and gullies made bumps and steps in the dirt and Matt had a hard time navigating them, even with the cane for help. Peter felt kind of bad for asking to come out this way. If he’d known it would be so difficult, he would have chosen somewhere a little more accessible.

He offered his arm in place of Foggy’s, but Matt said it was fine. Foggy waved him off too and told him to go ahead with the others, they’d catch up where the trail cut off.

Like hell Peter was doing that.

America snuck up on him again and made him jump when she tugged lightly on his jacket.

“C’mon,” she said, “Come with us for a while.”

“Nah, I’m good,” he said.

She said nothing but pulled a little more meaningfully and bounced her irises between his and Matt.

Ah. Okay.

“I’ll be right back,” he told Foggy and Kirsten, well. Foggy. Kirsten had fucked off to go climb a rock off trail and take a photo.

America led the way back to the other two.

“I think this is interesting for him,” she told him quietly once she was satisfied they were out of earshot. It took a while to get there, given Matt’s hearing. “So let’s let him go as far as he wants. He knows his limits better than we do.”

That was true, Peter guessed.

“I feel kinda bad,” he admitted, “It totally slipped my mind. I usually try to be more, uh, aware I guess, of this kind of thing.”

America smiled at him. The skin around her eyes made crow’s feet when she did.

“You’re very considerate, Spiderman,” she said. “Is it true you’ve got a heart of gold?”

Hold up.

Was this flirting?

This was flirting.

But was this flirting?

KATE. HELP.

“So you are Spiderman,” the pink demon asked out of nowhere. Girl damn near gave him a heart attack. She must have finally caught back up with them after going to check on the lawyers for the third time. “And here I thought you’d be taller.”

Why the hell would he be taller?

“We don’t ask Gwen questions like that,” America murmured.  

What? Why not?

Kate threw herself bodily over both his and America’s shoulders before America could answer. She jabbed a finger frantically over to the right side of the trail and whispered “Elk.”

And so there was. A whole family of them. Or herd, maybe? Whatever, a lot. They moved gracefully, like a lope in slow motion. Three with antlers walked together a ways ahead of the others. They held their heads high as though they were seeking something.

Peter crouched low and took a few pictures while Kate dragged America over to the other side of the trail so they could take selfies. After the first couple of shots, he put down his camera to check the screen, then popped it back up to take a few more. America and Kate had finished up by then and stood, chatting, waiting for him. He dropped the camera again and cupped a hand around the screen to see it better.

“Oh, okay,” Gwen said somewhere in front of him. “Hi, friend.”

There was something blurry in the corner of one of the photos. He zoomed in. didn’t look like a thumb. Too dark. Must have been a bird or something. He could shop it out later, he figured.

“Nice, friend,” Gwen crooned. “Big friend.”

Big?

“Peter, don’t move,” America said.

Oh. Okay.

“How the fuck do you scare an elk?” Kate hissed.

“You don’t unless you wanna die,” Gwen noted amiably.

“Girl, you wanna be helpful for two seconds?”

“What, you want me to stab it or something? You’re nuts. They got antlers. Piss ‘em off and they’ll gore ya.”

“America.”

“I’m trying, babe. Hi, friend. Let’s leave the nice Spiderman alone, huh? Let’s go ahead and do that, huh?”

He could feel it now, breathing in his hair, on his neck. The Spidey Sense woke up from its fucking nap and remembered that it was still on the clock. It sent a shock ripping down his spine each time the elk breathed out.

Was this how he died? Not giant spiders. Not caffeine overdose. Elk. Maimed by elk. May was going to be so disappointed. Ben, too, once he finally caught up to him.

“Holy shit.”

Oh, hey Fogs. Don’t mind me, just over here making friends. Making plans. The funeral kind.

“Holy shit. What is that?”

Matt sounded stoked. Peter hoped someone would grab him before he died the same horrible death he was about to.

“Elk,” Foggy said.

“It’s huge.”

“Matty, we don’t need to touch it.”

“We absolutely need to touch it. Pete, why’re you panicking? Don’t panic, he’s just sayin’ hey. Hi, buddy, you are big.”

It would never cease to amaze Peter how much Matt adored things which could kill him. Booze, ice, running through traffic. Apparently motherfucking elk. He heard the hollow, metallic sound of Matt’s cane tapping around a little bit and the swish of Foggy trying to get ahold of his jacket.

The elk snorted.

“Are you the friendly kind of elk or do you got rage issues like me?” Matt asked the thing.

It stopped breathing in Peter’s ear. He presumed that meant that it was no longer looming over his crouched form. The Spidey Sense agreed, it let up the tiniest bit.

“Ah, we don’t have much in common then,” Matt continued. “Bummer. Well, we’ll be on our way, don’t mind us. Come along, children.”

Peter finally looked up to see him return to tapping his way through the dirt, pulling at Foggy’s arm to bring him back up next to him. Kirsten very calmly followed them, one gravely step at a time. After a few beats, Peter stood up and turned slowly to the side, he lifted his eyes to see the elk still standing there.

Looming.

Uh-uh. Fuck this. Majestic? More like murderous.

The elk watched them go. It was still watching once they’d gotten a couple hundred yards down the trail.

As a small comfort for his new trauma, at the end of the hike, Foggy made them all pile back into the cars and drive a few miles to the coast to see a lighthouse. This, Matt seemed to know and was equally excited about. He kept demanding to know if the whale bones were still there.

 The main path to the place was paved, but Foggy stopped at the beginning of it and held out his hand to Peter.

Peter looked at the hand, uncomprehending. Gwen fell out of one of the cypress trees on the other side of the road.

“Bag,” Foggy explained.

“Why?” Peter asked.

“You’ll see.”

He doubted it. But he handed over his backpack, which Foggy then made Matt carry. He whistled for America and Kate and Gwen’s attention too, then pointed at a small dirt path which broke away from the road before the asphalt even properly started.

“Y’all go that way,” he instructed. “Don’t die. We’ll meet you at the lighthouse.”

Oho.

An interesting proposal.

Peter was great at not dying.

Gwen fucking wasn’t. America had a white-knuckled fist buried in the back of her pink and white hoodie as the four of them picked their way along a six-inch-wide path covered in red and teal ice plant. It was pretty misty and they were 110% walking a deer path, not a human one, but Peter could now totally understand why Fogs had told them to take it.

The reds and teals of the ice plant at their feet melded into a plain of magenta settled over green, blanketing the side of the cliff. Little clusters of magenta and yellow flowers sparked up in small bursts and then in patches like snow, hovering just over the surface of the green.

The ocean heaved and crashed down below, off the side of the cliff, bluer than Peter had ever seen it in real life, heaving in great pulls and cracking into white foam around a few rock formations that rose, ever-patient and long-suffering out of the little bay. He looked up at one point to pick his next foothold and met the eyes of a small troop of deer staring back, wondering what these humans were doing following the little roads their feet had carved out of the dirt over years.

“This is incredible,” Kate breathed behind him.

For real. He wondered how far they could go. The path was narrowing already and he wasn’t sure how well the web would stick to ice-plant.

“Hey, take a picture.”

Yeah, alright.

One of the ocean. One of the cliffs. A pano. And then one of all four of them trying for the life of them to be at peace.

Matt was petting a huge, weathered whale skull when the deer-path group caught up with the others. He wasn’t so much petting it as hugging it, actually, while Foggy watched on in a mixture of fondness and disgust.

Fogs wasn’t into the whole stroking bones thing, it turned out. Not did he think Matt’s boner jokes were funny. He told Matt to go throw himself into the sea.

Kirsten was perched on top of yet another rock and she called for Peter and Co. to join her. It was a huge piece of limestone, littered with holes and bubbles. Peter hopped right up without thinking and Gwen shrieked in delight, then said something about literal sticky hands.

The other side of the cliff, the one not facing the lighthouse had been more awe-inspiring, but the view from the big rock wasn’t so bad. The view from the allotted deck wasn’t bad either when they got there and found Matt trying, as usual, to woo Foggy by reciting the words of old, dead judges and poets at him.

Foggy was definitely well-wooed and charmed, but it had nothing to do with whatever the hell it was that Matt was spewing.

Huh.

Maybe this was what peace felt like.

They all climbed back into cars and went to grab dinner and to recount over bread bowls and hot soup Peter’s near-death experience with the elk and Gwen’s near-death experience with literally everything else. Then they all said good bye and Kate crushed Peter in a hug and made him swear on the grave of his mother that he’d come to Los Angeles sometime to visit her.

Not that she’d missed him or anything.

“I’ve been trying to get Clint to come out this way, but the old man is dragging his heels,” she explained.

“I mean, what’s in LA?” Peter asked.

Kate threw her hand over her heart in offense.

“What’s in LA?” she repeated, “Only the worst smog in the state, baby cakes. We got smog, we got traffic, we got botox, and kickass dim sum. Come visit.”

He laughed.

“Sounds like home.”

“Yeah, but less humid. Come visit.”

“Alright, alright. I’ll come visit.”

“Bring Clint.”

“I mean, you can lead a horse to water, girl.”

Kate sighed in understanding and then punched him in the shoulder so no one got the wrong idea about their whole relationship.

America said goodbye like a normal person and Gwen latched onto him and promised him that it was okay, he was taller in other editions, and for the record, his was now one of her favorites.

America told him with her eyes not to ask.

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): ah sorry pete, just got your message. Agreed, life is a cruel and hateful mistress

SM: dude life is amazing

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): a fast and unexpected turnaround, but okay. this is new. I can deal. What makes it amazing?

SM: [image]

SM: [image] [image] [image]

S2: dude is that a reindeer?

S3: everyone shut up right now

S3: angel where do you think reindeer live?

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): oh my god

S3: I said shut up. Don’t google it. where do you think they live?

S2: the north pole?

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): oh my god

S3: and where is California? Don’t google it, just like. The first thought in your head

S2: i don’t like this

S3: tough. Where is it?

S2: I dunno like, the top of its all pressed up against like Canada or smth. Where its all flat on top, you know?

S3: yes okay thank you I love you

S2: are you making fun of me?

SM: not reindeer. Elk. Here, Kirsten took a picture of Matt saving us all from it

SM: [image]

S2: OH MY GOD ITS HUGE. DD weren’t you scared??

DD: hi hello. Man without fear.

SM: water

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): commitment

SM: therapy

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): self reflection, emotional vulnerability, lobsters

DD: THEY ARE IMMORTAL WADE. LOBSTERS ARE IMMORTAL.

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): so am I?

DD: you’re terrifying

SM: we’ve discussed this. They aren’t

DD: they have so many legs. And whiskers. And feelers. Fucking ugh I can’t. I’m creeping myself out.

S4: wait lobsters are immortal?

SM: they aren’t

DD: they are

SM: Matt I am staring at both the degrees on your wall and they are astoundingly unscientific. A minor in philosophy, man? Really?

DD: you know what

DD: im telling fogs you said that. And I want you to tell him to his face what you think of his theatre minor.

SM: im sorry I take it back.

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): philosophy, Red? Any recommendations or were you drunk off your tits in those classes?

DD: Plato. And only like, half of the time

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): awwwwww so responsible. Make Nelson send us baby pictures.

DD: no

SM: no worries I found some in the office. [image] [image]

DD: [voice message] Peter, if you think that I will not wake up all of these dogs to put an end to this, you have another thing coming.

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): OH MY GOD REDTHEW LOOK AT YOU AND YOUR STUPID HAT

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): ALL YOUNG AND FRESH AND DON’T KNOW NOTHING

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): for real though, how many fucking nuns is that? Did you get the whole convent to come to your graduation?

DD: [voice message] I know this may come as a shock to you all, but I do have people in the world who actually care about me.

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): nuns

DD: and a priest

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): but mostly nuns.

S2: dude why so many nuns tho? Is this Sister Act?

S3: oh no, now we gotta watch it.

S4: what’s sister act?

SM: ^

DD: what

DP (´｡✪ω✪｡´): what

S2: what

SM: just ‘cause y’all need full perspective, matt just woke up all the dogs and fogs because apparently they own this movie

DD: everyone stop texting the lord’s work is afoot.

Chapter Text

The lawyers had to work the next day, all day. They were apologetic about it, even after Peter told them not to be.

On the way out the door in the morning with the happiest, calmest Haze ever to be seen, Matt shoved his blue train card into Peter’s hands.

“Go downtown,” he instructed, “And have a good look around.”

Cryptic.

Suspicious.

But okay, sure. Why not?

Downtown San Francisco was a tourist trap, as was the downtown of any major city. Being from NYC meant that Peter was mostly immune to having shit waved at him in the street by hawkers. He tried to find the districts he’d always heard of back home. Little Italy. Chinatown. Fisherman’s Wharf. But the street names didn’t give him any hints as to where those places might be and so he found himself standing next to a giant stone heart statue in Union Square, trying to maximize the map on his phone screen.

Even all blown up, it wasn’t illuminating and so he decided, fuck it.

He was in San Francisco. He had the whole day to himself. He was just going to pick a direction and go.

He headed north first, because that seemed like the most obvious first direction, and entirely by accident found himself in Chinatown. People played piercing instruments on the street corners. A lady gave him a handful of advertisements for a spa. The same lucky cats and jade sculptures he saw back home graceful the windows and archways of storefronts.

He bought a sticky piece of fried, twisted phyllo dough from a place which set all their baked goods on red gingham tea towels covered with lacy paper doilies. The gal at the register told him to buy one of the buns in the display box beside her and took his brief waffling for confirmation.

The bun was delightful. Warm and filled with a pale yellow bean paste.

He called that a success for Chinatown and kept going north until he hit a grungy-looking bookstore. He took a left and followed the road through increasingly empty space and increasingly posh buildings with plants hanging down from iron baskets suspended from streetlights. Festive lights, turned off in the daytime, draped themselves across what seemed like half of block of outdoor seating. He followed the lights until they turned into cheaper versions of themselves, wrapped around the insides of dry cleaning  and liquor shop doors, and when he ran out of lights, he followed road for a while. He came out, to his surprise, right next to the Ghirardelli Chocolate Factory and at the mouth of a huge expanse of greenery and ocean.

There was a building not far from there, next to a collection of massive, slowly bobbing old ships which called itself the National Maritime Museum.

Inside was a collection of brass and ship nets and sails and tools and rope dyed brown and red with age. He stood in front of a rippled glass lantern—enormous, the size of a small room itself—and found himself, just for a second in awe of all those folks who had sailed into the port by the light of that thing.

He went out to touch the bay water again and laughed at how stupid he and Matt had been for jumping into it like morons. It was much warmer on the shore. And there were far fewer kraken pretenders.

He followed the water for a while, dodged the hoards of new moms with running strollers until he ran into another huge blanket of green. He wasn’t sure he needed any more green after the whole elk incident, so he hung a left and then found himself, in time, at an intersection surrounded on all sides by hospitals. People in wheelchairs and elderly folks tottering their ways in and out huge automatic glass doors joined him on the street. Eventually he decided that this was probably not the best way to see the city and decided to take a bus.

An old man at the bus stop saw him trying to decipher the map on his phone by using the one trapped between the panes of glass on the side of the bus shelter and asked him where he wanted to go. If there was one thing Peter had learned from home it was that the old folks of a city knew it better than anyone else.

“I’m not really sure,” he admitted to the man, who gave him a curious look from under the wrinkles on his dark forehead.

“You from New York?” he asked.

It stopped Peter short for a second.

“Well, yeah. How did you know?”

The man waved at him to explain.

“My daddy’s people came here from New York in the 40s; they talk a little like you,” he said. “Listen, you wanna go south, that’s the where kids like you like to go. Take this bus here to Divis and McAllister, and then walk up to Castro.”

The bus wasn’t crowded, but it was pretty well-worn and it squeaked, jerked, and bounced as it ground its way down the street and across intersections.

A red electronic sign over the driver’s seat told Peter the names of the streets they were passing, but he didn’t end up having to pull the string running down the center of the bus’s windows to make a stop request; a little girl in her mama’s lap cheered at having had the opportunity to do it before he could. She yanked on the string a few more times for good measure and Peter looked away before she or her mama noticed his dumb smile.

Divisadero was full of more fairy lights and trendy little restaurants and less trendy hole-in-the-wall places. He recognized the name of one of the markets and went in to have a look around. It was horrendously expensive, even by his big city standards. There was not a single reason on planet earth for pesto of any type to be sold for ten bucks.

For ten bucks, Peter would grind the pine nuts and basil himself. With his blood.

Ridiculous.

He did get some ice cream though, because the line was out the door and if he couldn’t have pesto, he would damn well have basil ice cream. And mango sorbet, too, because why not?

He felt burned.

Insulted.

Offended.

But mostly devastated that he had experienced that shit now, because nothing, nowhere could ever compare to basil and mango sorbet from Divisadero.

Fuck.

He took a few pictures of the cone to send to Ned and MJ to document his upset.

It was a long day. A satisfying one, but long, and he had to do some backtracking to get back to Matt and Foggy’s place. He didn’t go straight there, he stopped by their office first.

It was adorable.

Compared to their old firm in Hell’s Kitchen? Fucking precious.

Nelson & Murdock in NYC had been a no nonsense office. They’d done their best to make it cozy, despite having only room for six people to wait in any sort of comfort, but it had still been kind of a lost cause. They’d tried, though, that was what had always been important. Matt had recruited Peter once or twice when he was still a kid to help him in going around to used bookstores and buying kids books in every language under the sun. Foggy had bi-annually thrown everyone and everything out of the building to re-varnish the hardwood floors. They’d kept a pretty active bulletin board, the two of them, as well, and by the last few years of that firm, Peter remembered it having nearly an inch thick layer of notices and brochures pinned to it.

But no matter how much love or thought went into the beast, at the end of the day, it was a cheap, shitty office in Hell’s Kitchen, and it had looked it.

McDuffie, Murdock & Nelson was much, much lighter. The tell-tale signs of Foggy’s opinions on hardwood were still evident, but the waiting room had a comfortable assembly of chairs and a bench seat lined with cushions and stuffed toys. Matt appeared to have amassed yet another collection of kids’ books, and these, along with novels for their readers’ older counterparts, filled out a wooden bookcase.

They’d even gotten rugs, tasteful ones, these guys. Look at them. High rollers.

As it was the end of the day, Haze had been allowed a little leeway and was busy being loved on by Kirsten’s last client’s two kids. Matt tsked at her as she acted as though she had never been loved, not once in her life.

Foggy wasn’t in the office. He’d been at court all day.

Peter was reading Matt the entire ingredient list of a package of cured olives in the grocery store when his phone started buzzing and didn’t stop. People didn’t usually call him; they knew better than that. If anyone needed his attention, they knew that a text would get them much farther.

Only businesses or scammers actually called him these days, so he almost ignored it, but the area code was a Manhattan one, so he thought it was probably someone from work. He handed the olives off to Matt who shooed him into a quiet corner while he and Haze collected the rest of the ingredients for that night’s dinner.

“Hello, Mr. Parker?”

“Yeah, that’s me.” He touched the leaves of one of the plants stacked up on that side of the store.

“Mr. Parker—Peter—it’s Mona from Metro Gen. Honey, your aunt’s been admitted for emergency surgery. They found a mass in her breast.”

Peter tended to think of himself and Spiderman as two different people.

Spiderman, he’d decided, was the guy who put out the fires at Stark Industries, while Peter was the one who did all the paperwork.

Spiderman was the guy who told Lowell and Munez to get their shit together or else they were going to put this whole project in jeopardy, while Peter was the one who dumped all the now-toxic jars and beakers in the lab and methodically replaced them with versions containing uncontaminated chemicals.

Spidey was the go getter, the daredevil and party guy, while Peter was the anxious, compulsive clean-up crew. They lived in the same house, but served different purposes and Peter found, that as he got older, he was more and more able to imagine them as the same person.

That said, he sure felt a whole lot more like Spiderman when shit like this happened.

When he’d been a kid, the first reaction had been panic. Panic, every time. Wade had trained that out of him.

Wade had grabbed his shoulders one time, when the world was crumbling in on itself and shouted “Look at me, Peter.”

It had seemed so hard until it wasn’t. Until he’d just listened.

“These people don’t need some fucking scaredy-cat, shithead running in there to protect them right now,” Wade had said, dead serious. “They need someone who can think. They can’t think and you can’t help them if you’re dead. You’ve got to think for them. Think, Peter. What needs to happen? What needs to happen first?”

What needs to happen first?

First, he needed to get to the hospital. Then he needed to talk to the doctors. Then he needed to be patient, to let those guys do everything they had to. And then he needed to be there when May woke up.

That was the end goal here.

Be there when May woke up. So she wouldn’t be alone. She’d never be alone for something like this, not on his watch.

He caught the next flight to New York, didn’t look back. Didn’t think until he got off the plane in the city. Didn’t call anyone. Didn’t text anyone.

Went straight to the hospital.

It was May’s hospital, the one she’d worked at since he was six. Most of the nurses on staff there knew him or knew of him, so when he hit the front desk, with his bag still thrown over his shoulder, they didn’t even hesitate before saying, “She’s in recovery. Let me take you back.”

May was tired. Raspy, groggy. Peter only set down his bag after the other nurse had left him alone with her. He touched her hand, the one with the IV stuck in its elbow.

Her eyelids fluttered and she held his hand back.

“Hey, baby,” she said.

“You gave me a heart attack,” he said softly.

“C’mere.”

She wanted him to climb into bed with her, like he always used to when she was sick and feeling bad. He was too big now to be doing that, but this was May. He carefully, carefully moved her a little to the side and then carefully, carefully, laid down on the sliver of space that made on the bed. She rolled over the best she could to face him.

She cupped his face with a cold, dry hand and smoothed her thumb across his cheekbone.

“I’m sorry I ruined your vacation,” she said, “Didn’t even notice it until I noticed it, I guess.”

Peter leaned forward to press his forehead against hers.

“It’s not ruined,” he said. She huffed a little and then shifted their heads so that she could tuck her cheek against the crown of his head. “Is it cancer?” he asked.

May shook her head groggily.

“Don’t know. Won’t know until they test it.”

“Can I stay with you?”

“You never have to ask, you know that.”

Not like that. Not to live for a minute, or sleep, or anything like that. To watch. To guard. He wanted to stand vigil.  

“I brought you something,” he said. She smoothed a hand through his hair and his heart ached. A wave of ache pumped out of it when he sat up a little to dig into his bag onehandedly.

She knew what they were from the smell alone and a smile stretched into her cheeks as she stroked the very edges of the leaves.

“Eucalyptus,” she said.

“They got a little bruised on the plane,” he explained.

“You found some in SF?”

“Grows all over the place. Lots in the park by Matt and Foggy’s place. I had a few hours before my flight.”

May set the pale leaves between them on the bed and smoothed her thumb over Peter’s eye this time as well as his cheek.

“I’ll heal, Peter,” she promised.

“It’ll help,” he choked out.

“I know, baby. I’m sorry I scared you. Scared me, too. Went in for an exam and the next thing I knew, they were scheduling a surgery. Must have looked real bad on the screen.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I know.”

There wasn’t much else to say. He curled in closer around the eucalyptus and wrapped an arm around May’s side, over the blankets.

PP: hey Mr. Stark. I need another week off. My aunt’s just got out of the hospital.

TS: Done.

TS: you two need anything else?

PP:  no we’re okay

He tucked the phone in his pocket so that he could show the guy behind the counter how wide he needed his wood cut.

Peter was a scientist, but before he was a scientist, he was an engineer. Always had been. Always would be. Sitting in a hospital room, rolling a piece of eucalyptus bark between his fingers while May slept reminded him of that.

Reminded him of daffodils. Sun-yellow with firm stalks.

Happiness is yellow.

Maybe self-care could be yellow, too. Maybe self-care could be the finding of yellow. The making of yellow. The cultivating of yellow in someone else’s heart, eyes, fingers.

May came home to sleep and Peter went with her to make sure she did. To get ice packs and pain killers when she needed them. And to buy wood.

He drew out designs on the old scraps of vellum he had stuffed in his boxes from high school. He sat at the table with a ruler and a calculator and drew between offers of meds and food. When May was good and asleep, he went into the hall closet and dug out Ben’s old tool boxes. He needed a saw. Some nails. Sandpaper. Most of it was in there, but not everything.

So he called Wade.

While Wade kept an eye on May, Peter went out and bought more sandpaper and some extra dowls and metal he could twist into a frame with his hands when no one was looking.

He went home and asked Wade if he could spare another day, by chance?

Wade decided he could.

PP: Mr. Stark, can I use one of the workshops?

TS: ? Shop 28 is open today if you want it

PP: thank you!

It didn’t take long to pound everything together and sand it all down. Mr. Stark came in to check on him while he was waterproofing the wood and hummed thoughtfully at the piece as a whole.

“What’re you planting, Pete?”

Yellow.

“It’s for May, so whatever she wants.”

But for this first run, yellow.

Mr. Stark smiled a little in his left cheek.

“You know if you needed planters, we’ve got some on the roof,” he said, knowing full well what Peter would say to that. Peter indulged him anyways.

“Needed to make it myself.”

“I get that.” Yeah, because he did it too. All the time.

There were two packs of daffodil bulbs remaining in his local hardware store and he bought them in addition to as much potting soil as he could carry in public. Two bags on the train. That wasn’t so suspicious. But the bulbs weren’t all that needed to go in the planters. It wasn’t a planter if there were only daffodils.

So he bought some hyacinths at the next store and then he got a little sage bush, some rosemary. The guy at the register talked him into a few sprigs of chamomile and when he got home to hide all these under the balcony window, he remembered bluebells and mint and jasmine and had to go back and then walk all over the whole nursery for ten minutes, trying desperately to avoid running back into the cashier from thirty minutes ago.

It took longer to buy everything than it took to plant it all, and even if it didn’t look like much, what with none of the bulbs blooming, he knew May would love it. He’d take her with him to pick out some taller plants to sit in the corners of their tiny balcony when she was feeling better.

He swept up the extra potting soil and dumped it into the bottom of the bright orange pot which would become the garden’s compost bin.

Then he went inside to make tea and remind May that she had a doctor’s appointment in the morning.

Chapter Text

“On a scale of one to unbearable, how’s the anxiety?” Shelley asked, a few weeks later, checking her notes for their agenda.

“Fair,” Peter said, after a moment of reflection upon the water main that had burst at work the other day.

Shelley paused and then looked up with an expression Peter didn’t often see on her face.

“That’s…tame,” she pointed out suspiciously. “Have you been doing anything differently?”

Not differently per se, more like the same things with a different mindset, he thought.

The tears that had rolled down May’s cheeks when she was well enough to look out her window at her new planters had brought him back to base. Really, in a meaningful way.

Because to May, he had never been Spiderman. To May, he had only ever been Peter and the fact that it was Peter, not Spiderman, who could make her so profoundly happy, not by being a hero, just by being thoughtful, made his heart rush in his ears.

It brought home the fact that he’d been slowly killing Peter, day in and day out, over the last year now.

For sure, other people had been killing Peter too. Osborn, for example. The guys from the warehouse. Fisk—always Fisk.

But the crushed hand? The risk-taking? The endless days of overwork and sleep deprivation?

Well, fuck. That was all him.  

He was fucking miserable.

He was, he could now admit to himself, honest to god, fucking miserable.

And he’d thought that the end of grad school would be the end of that. Then he’d thought that a relationship would be the end of it. Then he’d thought that stomping down the anxiety would be the end of it. But no, no, and no again. He was still stuck in a vicious cycle of working towards a giant, nebulous ‘greater good’ in the city which, now that he saw it, was consuming him in its own way. And he was letting it; hell, he was stoking the fire, pumping the bellows, putting his goddamn neck on the chopping block.

And asking for nothing in return.

It was noble, sure. But smart or fair? No.

Who was Spiderman if he couldn’t save Peter Parker?

Something had to give.

“I went to San Francisco,” he told Shelley, “To see some friends, and it was amazing. An elk tried to gore me. I got lost in downtown. I met up with a friend I haven’t seen in forever and met one of my heroes.”

He hesitated.

“I think I got comfortable in the way that I’ve been doing things,” he explained, “In being sad and miserable and a mess. And I think I forgot why I even started doing what I do to begin with.”

He watched Shelley write a little bit on her munchkin-sized notepad and waited until she looked up and met his eyes to encourage him to go on.

“We both know who I am,” he said with his eyes locked on hers. She didn’t look away, and he felt himself cross that threshold. He stepped into Spiderman, the voice and the pride. The fearlessness, god, he missed it so much sometimes during the day. “But only I know why I started, and I can say now, with hindsight, that it used to be so much fun. I think,” he paused and chewed his lip, “It used to be my self-care. So when you gave me that pamphlet, everything seemed like horseshit. ‘Cause, you know. I’ve always had an outlet. This is my self-care. It makes me feel good, it helps me de-stress. But lately it’s been nonstop and high-stakes, like, all the time. And I guess when your self-care becomes your other job, you’re in the shitty position of having to find a whole new self-care thing to do.”

Shelley lifted her chin up to him.

“Either that,” she said, “Or you find a way to make it self-care again.”

Yeah, as if.

“I can’t. I’m too far in. Everything’s too complicated, there’s too much responsibility. I’ve committed and I can’t pull out of some of this stuff now.”

“Things like the Avengers?”

Fuck you, girl. They weren’t naming names. He’d already given more than he should have.

“Agreements,” he said firmly, “Which I have worked very hard to earn my place in.”

“Do these agreements benefit you?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“How?”

Well for one, they…

No, okay but they…

Fuck.

“Okay, well, maybe they don’t like, outwardly benefit me, but they benefit other people, important people like—”

“Listen, Peter,” Shelley interrupted with just a hint of irritation in her tone, “Do you want your friend to be your self-care or not? Because if you want to reclaim him as self-care, that’s one thing, but it you want him to stay as a job and to find something else which grounds you between work, then that’s another. You said it yourself, the important thing here is movement. You’ve become too comfortable with being uncomfortable, so what can you do to change that?”

Lady, if he knew, he wouldn’t be sitting here.

He couldn’t just drop everything and go back to being your friendly neighborhood Spiderman. He had alliances. He had allegiances. He was on the goddamned go-list in the case of an alien invasion or nuclear disaster. People, hundreds and thousands of people, relied on him to be able to get his shit together to do what needed to be done. Stepping away from something like the Avengers would be stepping away from them. Those people. But Shelley didn’t know that, and she couldn’t know that. She was, at the end of the day, a civilian, super-people specialist or not.

She’d never had to shoulder that responsibility.

And he’d never—

Holy fuck, wait.

Holy fuck, holy god.

“Peter?”

Dear Jesus, no. No. He hadn’t even realized—

“Peter, listen to my voice. You’re starting to breathe very rapidly. Can you tell me what’s upsetting you? Or do you want to sit with me on the floor?”

Miles. He’d left Miles in charge.

Miles who was the only real choice to succeed him, and everyone knew it. Angel and Louis and Dave, all of them.

Miles was fourteen years old. And Peter had almost died five weeks ago. If he had, if he hadn’t made it out in time, then all of those people, the hundreds and thousands, they’d be sitting on Miles’s shoulders.

At fourteen years old.

Like the weight of a skyscraper. Huh, funny, that analogy. It was almost as though he’d fucking been under one.

“Peter—”

“This stops now,” he gasped. Shelley blinked at him in shock. “This needs to stop now.”

“What?”

“Fuck it. How do I make it self-care? I gotta make it self-care again.”

“Peter, you’re not making sense—”

“THERE IS A FOURTEEN YEAR OLD BOY COUNTING ON ME TO GET MY SHIT LIFE TOGETHER,” Peter roared, standing before he even knew what was happening. “And I will be damned if what happened to me, happens to him. I will be damned if his life is as fucking miserable as mine because of some freak fucking accident neither of us even asked for. And I am so fucking sick and tired of being so fucking sick and tired and I just WANT TO MOVE ON.”

The silence in the office was palpable.

The back palate of his mouth ached suddenly and painfully.

He hadn’t meant to yell. He never meant to yell.

“Oh, god, I’m so sorry,” he choked out. “I’m so fucking sorry, Shelley, I’m so sorry.”

Shelley threw herself up with her arms in the air like a new wrestling champion.

“Progess!” she shrieked, practically dancing in place, “Progress, at last!”

Sorry, what?

“What are you going to do to move on?” she bubbled in excitement, “Like tangibly, what you gonna do?”

Well.

“I’m done not picking my battles,” he realized.

“And? And?”

“I’m done going out every night.”

“Good, good, and?”

“I don’t want to work sixteen hour shifts anymore. I want to spend time with my friends. I want to see my aunt at least once a week. And I want to build things again, instead of just putting out fires.”

Peter couldn’t tell if Shelley was seconds away from unconsciousness or orgasm, either way it was freaking him out.

“Let’s make a plan,” she sang, scrambling over to her desk and digging out paper and pens.

A plan? Like, a real plan?

“You write out one thing that you want to do this week or month and then you do the best you can to do it. And then once you’ve done it, we can try another. And then another and another, until we’ve built a whole new foundation for you!”

“A foundation of what?” Peter asked, trying not to seem butthurt. It wasn’t rational, but he felt, once again, like he’d been tricked into something. Shelley was always tricking him into things. Positive thinking. Self-reflection.

“Your boundaries, Peter,” Shelley said. “What we are talking about is setting boundaries.”

Boundaries?

Oh, no.

Oh, god.

This—this was what Matt and Wade and Mr. Stark had been trying to get him to understand for the last ten goddamn years. He’d had a ‘boundaries’ talk at least once a month, every month from the moment he first cropped up on their radars to the moment he left his teens behind. Only then, safe on a college campus, had the boundaries talks faded away from his waking hours, moving instead, of course, to haunt him in his sleep. Wade’s voice saying ‘nope, this is none of our business, we are actively ignoring that’ and Matt’s chiding ‘hell, no, this is not our fuckin’ problem,’ were the ones he, to this day, still heard in his head while staring at stakeholders spewing shit from their lips and upper managers and editors laying out year-long expectations and new demands in staff meetings.

This whole time, his self-care had been boundaries. And he was the one in charge of setting them.

Fuck.

Fuck.

He could tell no one that they had been right all along. Not Mr. Stark, not Wade, but most importantly not Matt. Never Matt. Matt would never let it go.

“Do we have to do this?” he pleaded with Shelley.

She gave him a fierce look up from her desk. She stabbed a pen in his direction and slowly slid the paper his way.

“You are going to write one thing, right now, that you will not allow yourself to do this week,” she instructed in a tone that left no room for alternatives. “And you are going to like it.”

He swallowed.

Fuck, she was scary.

Alright, fine. It didn’t mean anything anyways. He could always come back next time and say it hadn’t worked. He was the one in charge of his therapy, right?

Right?

Okay. Alright. One thing. One thing.

He picked up the pen.