Chapter 20
Peter is woken by the alarm, rather than his sense, which makes the alarm more startling. It probably has nothing to do with him, given that his sense didn’t go off. He’s still tense, wondering what it means. Guards start to run past his cell, each group of them setting his spine prickling. Maybe that monster I fought is on a rampage, Peter thinks, sitting up. The alarm changes and he’s pulled to the wall, both arms fastened to the strip that runs along beside his bed. He gives an experimental tug and sighs. The pull is at full strength, keeping him from moving.
Breakfast doesn’t come, although the alarm shuts off. Peter’s sense is oddly calm, but his stomach is less and less so as the day wears on. He wishes for some of the slop and a muffin, and it doesn’t occur to him to crave anything else. Just as his stomach stops cramping from hunger, the cuffs fall open with a crackle of electricity. Peter doesn’t move his hands, not believing what he’s seeing. Hallucination from low blood sugar, he decides, but he still finally lifts his arms, marveling in their lightness, even if it is a hallucination, his mind reminds him. Good hallucination, he shoots back, standing and pacing around his cell. He uses the full surface area, pacing up the walls and across the ceiling. Then he comes to the door. It’s metal, and Peter’s guessing he could pry it open, if it weren’t electrified. He reaches out a hand, and feels the warning zap in his skull, along with the hum of electricity from the door.
Backing away from it, Peter goes back to his bed and wraps his blanket around himself, putting his pillow in front of him with his three prized possessions on it. His socks, which he’s never managed to convince himself to put on. They’re perfectly pressed, fuzzy socks with grips on the bottom. To defile them by wearing them is unthinkable. His pillow is another prized possession, along with the blanket. A cheap plastic comb sits on the pillow as well as a handful of plastic vines and leaves. Peter arranges these just so and settles back, watching them. He could sit like this forever, with a blanket and everything he loves right in sight. He lets his focus zero completely in on the little treasures, lets his world narrow down to the things he has. He lets the scope narrow past what he did to get them, and he waits for the next horror to start.
The peace is broken when the door begins the slow process of opening, but the lack of a warning lets a piece of him relax. Another part wonders if his sense is broken. He looks at the opened cuffs, still sticking to the strip of metal beside the bed, and then down at his own hands. They’ve never opened the door without putting at least one of his hands on the wall first. Maybe I’m dead, his brain helpfully suggests. I would be able to see my body, wouldn’t I? Peter reminds himself. It’s probably low blood sugar. The door is fully open and people he knows rush in. He stares. Strike one for being dead, he admits.
“Peter, thank God,” Clint says, stepping forward. “C’mon, we’re getting you out, let’s go.” Peter sees Nat, Bucky, and a man he doesn’t know. They’re dressed familiarly, in cream colored scrubs that are grimy in only the way that garments washed far too many times can be. In an instant, there’s a juxtaposition of memories. He remembers Aunt Nat, stern and honest, always meeting his eyes, always willing to help him get away with something. But, alongside those memories comes–
“His powers are arachnid based. He should be able to regrow it."
Peter’s siding with the woman, his handler, on this one, something that he’s reluctant to do, but he agrees as she says, deadly calm, “Should isn’t enough.”
Quickly, the man replies, “He can regrow teeth, ma’am. The precedent is there, and besides, he would be fine without–”
The woman had moved like a snake, and the man collapsed, clutching his throat and making an awful sound. A sound that was familiar to Peter, and he hated that he knew exactly what that man’s last moments looked like. “It,” the woman clarifies forcefully, “is only worth the victories it can achieve. I would jeopardize it, but I would not jeopardize the victories.”
Peter is practiced at pulling himself out of the memories. Certain ones surface more frequently, and he has moments where he can shake himself free. Icy terror clenches around his heart, reaching to tie his stomach in knots as his would-be rescuers approach. Their faces are falling. Peter can’t see his body, either on the cot below him or on the floor somewhere, but it’s terrible, watching them realize that he’s dead.
“Peter,” Nat says hoarsely, “come here, c’mon.” She holds up a hand. She’s looking right at him, which is uncanny because there’s no way Peter is visible to her. Finally, he reaches out, expecting his hand to pass through hers. It doesn’t, and she pulls him off the bed into a solid hug. “Good to see you, kid,” she says into his neck. “When did you get so tall?”
Peter lets her hug him. The sensation is foreign, but not something he hates. He just isn’t sure how to act, so he lifts one hand, patting his aunt on the back. She releases him and smiles. Bucky steps forward, and Peter sees his lack of an arm. “I’ll get a new one,” Bucky assures him.
“You’re Stark’s kid?” The man he doesn’t know holds out a hand. “Sam. It’s a pleasure.”
Peter looks at the hand, and then at the man, and then manages a rough approximation of shaking hands, made worse by the fact that he doesn’t know where to look or when to let go, let alone how tightly to hold on.
Clint drapes a crinkly tinfoil blanket over his shoulders, and Peter pulls it around himself, glad of something to do. With a light hand at Peter’s back, Clint guides him from the room and into the corridor. Peter is led, familiarly, through the halls, flanked by people, but this time they start to climb stairs. Peter’s nerves build, but the situation is familiar. All he has to do is stay in step with these people, follow their lead. Sam, Nat, and Bucky are talking the entire time, prattling in a way that suggests they’re afraid to stop. Clint stays by his side, holding doors for him.
It happens abruptly. One moment they’re in the concrete hallway, the next, they’re stepping outside into a wintry sunset. It’s freezing, and Peter’s blanket is suddenly doing very little, but Clint guides him to a massive black ship, onto which people are trickling. There are a lot of stations set up with curtains and doctors. Clint leads Peter to one of them and looks to Nat, Sam, and Bucky. “Wait in this line. I’ll take Peter to the mutant doc.” Mouths are opened to protest, but quickly closed. It’s evident that Clint is on his last nerve and it is incredibly frayed. He guides Peter through the crowd, situating the two of them in a short line. It moves moderately quickly, and they make it to the front after what could be a long time or a short time. The doctor is someone Peter recognizes, Bruce Banner. The man smiles at Peter and pulls the curtain between the two of them and Clint.
“I’ve got some regular clothes for you,” Banner says, pulling a long sleeved shirt and a pair of sweatpants from two boxes. “I’m going to do a quick exam. Take your shirt off please.” Peter looks down at the bodysuit he’s wearing. He doesn’t know how it comes off, so he reaches up to the neck and tears the fabric until he can pull his shoulders and arms out of it. Bruce’s only reaction is an intake of breath that’s barely noticeable. “Let me see,” he says, reaching for Peter’s bad arm. He glances at Peter, who wordlessly holds out his arm. Banner has already been infinitely more gentle than any of the doctors he’s encountered lately, and there’s a piece in the back of his mind that is worried about the consequences of not complying. Banner makes a few notes, watches Peter’s hand shake. “How long as it been doing that?” He asks.
Peter can’t come up with a number. He has no idea how long he was there. “It happened in the beginning,” he says, holding up his other arm. The long scar from near elbow to near wrist is hard to see on the other arm, lost in the scar tissue from the crocodile fight that Peter can almost think about without recoiling.
“Did you…” Banner catches Peter’s eyes and holds the eye contact. “Did you do it to yourself?”
Kind of, Peter thinks. He shakes his head. “I moved. With this one.” He glances toward the shaky hand. “Not with this one.” His eyes dart to the other hand. “So, yeah, I guess,” he finally answers.
“I see,” Banner says, making a note as the corner of his mouth is dragged down. “Do you mind if I feel your ribs?”
“They aren’t broken,” Peter tells him. He’s very acquainted with the feeling. “Nothing is,” he adds.
Banner makes another note. “That’s great. Do you have any injuries?” Peter opens his mouth, showing his most recently knocked out tooth. Banner pulls off his glasses. “Is that… are your teeth growing back?” Peter nods, closing his mouth. Banner mutters something that Peter doesn’t bother to catch and makes another note. Then he hands Peter the shirt. Peter pulls it on and pulls the rest of the suit off. He’s in underwear and an oversized shirt, but disobedience isn’t something that occurs much to him anymore. Banner hands him the sweats and stands up. “I’ll go ahead and open this curtain.” Peter nods and he does, where Clint is crouched, the picture of exhaustion. He stands quickly when the curtain is opened, smiling at Peter. Peter goes and stands next to Clint, staring around. There are queues of people to see the doctor in every direction, and Clint is saying something to Banner in an undertone. Peter only catches what his enhanced hearing explicitly picks up, not trying to overhear the rest. “Note… at capacity… going home… unprepared.”
Banner nods and pulls out another sheet of paper, jotting out a note, and then folds it, placing it in an envelope. Clint takes the envelope and pockets it, then leads Peter away, letting the next mutant accompanied by a shield agent through. “You’ll go home with your parents tonight,” Clint tells him, checking his watch. He continues, but Peter doesn’t hear it. His ears are ringing, and he’s thinking of his nightmares. Very few of them featured his reality in that cell, the torture and experiments. As hellish as it was, he developed worse fears. Almost all of the dreams featured his parents, figuring out that something was wrong. His inability to do things the way he used to or was supposed to. Taunting reminders of the fact that he can’t recall his favorite kind of cereal or the names of the restaurants he’d frequented.
Peter grabs Clint’s arm desperately, and the agent abruptly stops talking, giving Peter a bewildered look. Peter empathizes with a fish for a long moment, gasping at something he isn’t able to breathe. Finally he chokes out, “I’m not.”
“What?” Clint asks. “You’re not what?”
“Who they think I am,” Peter finished with difficulty. “I’m not.”
Clint’s expression softens. “They don’t think you’re anyone, Peter. They’re your parents. They love you no matter what.”
Peter nods along with the words. Clint gets busy and has to leave, but he tells Peter to stay with two nearby SHIELD agents. This is familiar. Peter and two guards. He can do this part. They lead him off the ship and stand with him. It’s familiar, something he can engage with. It makes his world a little smaller, a little more constricted. A little more manageable. And then his Dad’s arms are around him and his world shatters into something too massive to comprehend.
The agents leave and he’s being hugged from every angle. Babbo asks him if he’s okay, and he thinks of Banner’s assessment. A clean bill of health, he thinks, and replies, “yeah.”
Tony suggests that he drives, and all Peter can think of is his dreams where the cars have too many buttons and pedals, and he remembers when Steve had gently told him, “when you drive, you’ve got every passenger’s life in your hands.” Peter knows what his hands have done. He’s felt bones break and last breaths, heard the silence after a final heartbeat. He shouldn’t be trusted with lives.
It’s only when Steve suggests they get some food that he remembers how hungry he is. There had been crackers on the helicarrier, but it’s all he’s eaten all day. Steve’s putting in the order— Peter tries not to think about the last time he ate burgers and fries— and Peter has no idea what soda he used to get. He can’t think of any of the options besides coke, which he doesn’t think he likes. Then again, it could be his favorite, but he can’t bring himself to say it. Steve puts something in, but he’s falling apart in the backseat. There was a moment, a groove, and he shattered it. He’d ruined a good thing, and both of his parents are exchanging looks in the front seat. They’re going to realize he doesn’t know how to be who he’s supposed to be, and he doesn’t know what they’re going to do. Things will never be normal again, he can’t help but think.
“We’ll all be together for Christmas,” Tony says, and Peter can tell he’s filling the silence. “It’s going to be a massive party, Pepper’s been planning it. She’s going to be so excited to see you. So is Rhodey. Pepper’s in town, so she might stop by tomorrow, and I’ll be hard pressed to keep Rhodey from flying out to spend time with you. Of course, May and Ben are in the loop, they’ll want to stop by as well. And your friends.” Tony’s hand leaves the wheel to snap, trying to conjure up their names.
As much as his parents know him, Peter’s friends knew him best. They’ll notice everything, and it’s an unbearable possibility to consider. Before he knows what he’s doing, Peter blurts, “no.”
Tony meets his eyes in the rear view mirror. “No to which one?”
“I’ll see Pepper and Rhodey,” Peter says, only managing not to hold his breath because he has to speak. “Not—“ he gulps— “Ned and MJ. Not them.”
There’s a split second that lasts an eternity before Tony nods. “Of course. Pep’ll be thrilled.”
“Looks like our food was delivered,” Steve announces just as they enter the garage.
“Perfect,” Tony says. All of them unload and pick up the bag of fast food and cup holder full of drinks on their way to the living room. Peter notices a smell as soon as he walks in, not unpleasant, but unfamiliar. He realizes with a jolt that it must have always smelled like this, he simply didn’t realize it. Tony’s arm makes its way around his shoulders. “We- uh- didn’t touch anything of yours.”
Peter nods, and the three of them sit down to eat. Steve and Tony take their time unwrapping their burgers, each taking a cursory bite and chewing for much longer than they might need to. Peter begins to inhale his burger, and starts in on the fries. By the time he’s finished, his stomach is comfortably full, but he’s still feeling lightheaded and tired, like his blood sugar is still low.
“Do you want mine?” Steve says, pushing it toward Peter. “I’m feeling too tired to eat.”
Peter shakes his head. “I’m… full,” he says slowly. He takes a sip of his drink, remembering the woman’s words to him during his captivity. She’d said he wouldn’t be able to eat enough to keep him alive. This could be part of that, but there isn’t any of the thick goop to supplement his diet. He can’t fathom bringing it up, so he doesn’t say anything. It was a scare tactic, he convinces himself. It was a long day and I didn’t eat anything. What would the manager know?
That night, Peter can’t sleep. His bed, a California king, is drowning him, and his fathers can’t stop walking to his door to check on him. His sense pings him– less of a warning and more of an informative jolt–and moments later a figure is at the door. It happens multiple times throughout the night, and he doesn’t sleep a wink. He’s starving by the time some lights turn on in the house and he decides it can be acceptable to leave his bed. The sun still isn’t up, but it is winter after all. The nights are long.