Dead-eyed, dead weight
One night after patrol, he flopped on the couch, face-first, contemplating whether he should try to expel his frustrations through an old fashioned pillow scream. He wasn’t sure what specifically was making his skin crawl, but something had been burning in the pit of his stomach ever since the funeral, and it hadn’t gone away. He had a clue as to what exactly had caused it, but as per his usual fashion, he was trying not to address it. He just counted to ten, then back up from one, and breathed harshly into the couch’s pillows.
May interrupted, poking the back of his head and forcing him to peer up at her. “Scootch,” She commanded, pointing to the cushion. “You need wallowing company.”
She looked like she was about to sit down and read, her glasses balanced on her head and her computer tucked under her arm. Peter begrudgingly moved down, pulling his knees under him and taking up only half of the space, now. His face was still down, though, which he would not compromise.
“I’m not wallowing,” He argued, though he wasn’t sure if she could hear him, muffled. “I’m self-combusting. I’m coming to terms with my impending doom. I’m struggling with my poor futile mortality.”
“Yikes,” May said, cheerfully. He rolled to his back, giving her a look, and she just moved her laptop to the coffee table, lifting her arm to expose her side. “C’mere, my self-combusting nephew, I have a solution that doesn’t involve suffocation.”
He pushed himself over, leaning on his elbows and laying his head in her lap. She lowered her arm around his shoulders, and he settled into an awkward but comfortable embrace.
“I wish I could read people’s minds,” He told her, shifting a little as she began to run her fingers along his scalp. “Maybe then I could know how people felt about me. What they want from me. What they expect.”
May hummed, smoothing down the hair that curled at the back of his neck. “Do you worry about expectations?” He didn’t say anything, but he thought she probably knew the answer. “Do you have any expectations?” She asked, after a moment.
Did he? Peter mulled it over, pushing the idea around the rough edges of his brain. He wanted to use his powers to help people. He wanted to finish the year with decent grades. He wanted Harley to like him, for him to be his favorite, too. He wanted a lot of things, but what did he expect? It was tricky, balancing a personal bias that became inherently singular the more he focused on avoiding it. To expect, to hope, to anticipate. Everything seemed easier, manageable from the perspective of someone else.
What would May want for him, or Pepper, or Happy, or Ned and MJ, or Harley? What expectations would they hold that he could force himself to fit into? How many different ways could he count up and down from ten before it became increasingly clear that he was insurmountably and blatantly abnormal. He wasn’t at all like he used to be, and everyone noticed, and no one talked about it, and he gnawed and scratched at any semblance of recognition between himself and who he used to be. What did they expect from him? What did they want?
Why couldn’t he just be made up of scraps and slivers of how everyone else wanted him to be? Why did he have to choose, to think about it, to agonize over it? Why did he have to be a person all on his own?
“I expect to be confused,” Peter muttered, and May laughed, even though he wasn’t really joking.
“Well, I expect to…order out tonight,” She returned, and then moved her leg up to jostle him a little. “You go. What else?”
He stared at the carpet, at the corner that always seemed to curl a little, prepped for tripping him at inopportune moments. “I expect to worry about what everyone else is thinking.”
“I expect that you’ll have no fun with that,” His aunt commented, and he felt her gaze on the tips of his ears.
“I expect you’re probably right,” He wet his lips. “I think we should stop saying ‘expect’, it sounds weird now,” She made a noise of acknowledgement, agreement, and he rolled back, sitting up. He wished he was a mind reader. He wished he didn’t worry so much. He wished his scale wasn’t broken. “May?” He asked, tentative, even when she was right beside him, still pressing a hand to his head.
She smiled at him, and the lines around her mouth were soft, stretched just a little too tight at the edges of her nose. “Yes, sweetheart?”
He looked at the rug, then at his hands, and then he exhaled. “I feel…wrong. I think I’m different than I used to be, and I know that’s the thing about growth, but it doesn’t feel like I’m going anywhere. It doesn’t feel like I’m growing, just that I’m different. I feel bad about it. I feel like…like I should miss it? That I should try to fit back to how I was, but I don’t know how,” He blinked a few times, and he realized his vision was blurry and his cheeks were wet. “Mr. Stark missed the old me for five years, and I don’t even have the decency to stay the same. Isn’t that wrong? Isn’t that bad?”
There was barely a second between the end of his sentence—where he looked towards his aunt, and he tried not to let a sob escape his throat—and getting scooped up into her arms again. He let himself melt into the hug, his shoulders shaking and his nose running. May squeezed him tight, pressing his face to her collar with a gentle hand to the back of his head. It made him feel like a little kid again. It made him bawl.
“I’m going to tell you something,” She said, her voice brushing the top of his head. “And I know you might not believe me, or want to hear it, but I think you need to hear it.”
“Tell me,” He breathed, rasped along the frayed edges of his vocal chords, stretched and twisted from the grief he’d pulled through them.
May traced little figure eights along his spine, and she inhaled deep. “I don’t think you’re bad,” A simple sentence. Short, concise; spoken with an air of confidence that came with the mundane, like stating a fact or describing the weather. He felt himself tense, almost involuntarily, hesitating on even taking a breath so he would hear everything she had to say. She was still tracing her fingers on his back, methodical, familiar. “I…I don’t think you’re a bad person. I don’t think what you’re feeling is bad. I don’t think there are many things that can be associated with you and with badness. I think that sometimes, when you feel awful, everything seems a little awful, too. Doesn’t it?”
He hiccuped a little, struggling to manage it in himself to find his composure. “I don’t think everything is awful. There are a lot of things that I like…” Building legos with Ned. Finding new ways to make Michelle do that half-smile she does when she pretends he didn’t impress her. May drawing little figure eights on his shoulders. Making Harley laugh when he doesn’t mean to. Debating bad movies with Harley. Speaking with Harley. Being around Harley.
“Sweetheart, you were just laying face down because you’ve been thinking about your ‘impending doom’,” She used air quotes; he could tell when her hands left his back. He felt himself smiling at the motion. “I hope you don’t think everything is awful, I really do. But I think that…a lot of things have been happening. There are also a lot of things that have changed,” She explained, gently. “That doesn’t make you bad, or wrong, or anything. It makes you a human person who’s experienced a lot of grief and a lot of impossible situations one after the other.”
“How come everyone else is better at this?” He couldn’t help but mutter, his throat clogged with tears and the strain of honesty. “Everyone acts like they’re fine, like losing five years and…and losing Mr. Stark isn’t that big of a deal. And I’m—am I just a bad actor? Am I crazy?”
May tightened her grip, and then pulled back, just enough so he could see her face. She looked him in the eyes, and she blinked furiously as they lost the battle with the wetness. “You’re not crazy. You’re not…” She let out a shaky breath. “I don’t think you’re crazy, I just think that you’re not very good at pretending, and that’s something I love a lot about you. Because you can’t lie to yourself. I think that everyone else is…trying really hard to protect you from seeing that they’re bad at acting, too.”
He sniffled, then peered up at her through his blurry vision. “Speaking from experience?”
“I’m sorry for making you feel like you were alone in all of this,” She said, quietly, and brought him back into a hug. “I’m sorry for making you feel like I wasn’t worried, and I wasn’t grieving. That I’m not different, because I am. And it’s scary, and sometimes it’s growth, but it's also because we’ve all had to adjust a lot to fit back into things.”
“You didn’t make me feel awful,” Peter reassured her, and she just shook her head. “I’m still just really…sad. And I’m angry that so much has changed and I can’t do anything about it.”
“You can,” May said, and he made a noise, questioning. “You change with it. You already have, haven’t you?”
He was different. He had changed. But so had everything else. He hugged her back, and he thought that maybe his scale wasn’t broken, maybe it had just changed.