operation spider-man
TUESDAY, MAY 8 — 5:03 AM
(THIRTY-TWO DAYS INTO PETER’S CAPTIVITY)
(ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT DAYS BEFORE HE IS RESCUED)
(THEIR FINAL ESCAPE ATTEMPT)
Peter Parker has been very quickly losing track of time since their last escape attempt.
After that last beating, Peter couldn’t even move; he spent all of his time delirious with pain, laying flat on the floor and trying to breathe through it. It was so bad that he couldn’t stitch them up himself, and Cassie had to do it for him.
That’s kind of horrible, isn’t it? That he made a seven-year-old suture up his wounds, ones he got from some kind of fucked-up wire? She did the best she could, and he used his sticky-hand power to seal off most of it, but he was so fucking tired… He’d wake up passed out on the floor, his body reeking of sweat and blood, and Cassie would be sitting there beside him as though standing vigil over his corpse.
Since then, recuperation has been tough. Slowly, slowly—the wire-wounds on his legs have healed, and although he’s still going daily to the Chair, at least he can stand and sort of walk.
It’s been…maybe two weeks since the last try? Something like that? Way too long. Peter has to come up with another plan. It’s hard—they’ve lost a good half of their medical supplies, any toy that could be used as a weapon, their mattress, too. All that’s left on their bed is their pillow and their tarp-like blanket. At night, they huddle together for warmth beneath the tarp as they sleep, Cassie by the wall, Peter by the door.
Their new plan is simple. Operation Spider-man. Cassie insists on the name. “‘Cause this is the last one,” she whispers, “right?”
“Yeah,” he says. Peter has a feeling that whether or not they make it out of the bunker—that this is gonna be their last try. If the upcoming punishment is anything like what happened last time, he’s not sure it’s even worth it. Cassie’s still having nightmares about seeing Charlie beat him—she wakes up screaming so loud that Peter has to clap his hand over her mouth until she stops.
Cassie’s getting used to this, too. She’s learning, strangely. It’s almost disturbing the way she’s getting used to this place. There’s no clock in the room, but their internal clocks have simplified; their days depend now on the schedule of the twenty-ish addicts running the place—and addicts have no schedule. Their clocks depend now not on time but on other things. Sounds and smells. Words. Voices. The different shuffling someone will make down a hallway. Charlie’s lurid laughter. The crinkling of a McDonald’s bag. The beeping of the keypad on the door. Even the food comes in at a different time each day—and sometimes they forget, giving them two or five meals instead of the regular three. Those days are good days; on those days, Cassie gets to eat a whole burger by herself—she doesn’t mind the mustard anymore.
The only thing that remains the same is their seven o’clock deadline; that is the only thing that has never changed.
Watching her learn these things—it hurts a little. Her life isn’t supposed to be like this. Peter, he… He signed up for this. The day he put on that Spider-man suit, the day he said yes to Tony in Germany—that was the day he signed up for this. He has to live with the fact that his captivity is a consequence of his way of life. It is what it is.
But Cassie… She’s too young. She’s way, way too young to know how to suture a cut or how fast to eat so that her belly feels fuller. She’s changing, adjusting herself to fit this new space—she’s quieter, tamer, duller, like someone’s sanded her down. Peter even has to prompt her now to tell stories about her family. It’s like she’s already forgotten them. She never signed up for this—yet here she is, leaning on this life as though it’ll be like this until the end of time.
After last time, Cassie’s resorted to pressing her hand against her side—the cigarette-burned one—whenever she gets frightened, like she’s protecting it from more harm. He’s seen the scarring. It was bad. Really bad. He’s not sure she can survive another one—it might break her. So this has to be it—this has to be the last try, the good try. It has to work, otherwise…
Here’s the plan; every morning now, Haroun and Mateo come in and feed him supersoldier sedatives through an IV port. That’s when he’s at his strongest—right before he’s injected with more sedatives. The IV bag doesn’t have any needles involved—but when his IV port gets infected, then they have to switch it to a different port and use a needle to set up the new IV.
It’s the closest he’ll get to a sharp object—a weapon.
It’s their only shot.
So he’ll pretend to be asleep—and then wham! snatch the syringe right from them and hold it to someone’s neck—and finally, finally, get the code to the door.
Operation Spider-man. It has to work.
They give every one of their ‘operations’ names. Their first three escape attempts: Operation Falcon, Operation Black Widow, and Operation Captain America. Then there’s the hiding messages in the garbage alongside DNA samples—Operation Ant-Man. And sometimes in his head, Peter conducts some operations of his own. There’s one he calls it Operation Winter Soldier, and its objective is simple: don’t help Charlie's goons when they die.
Enough of Charlie’s crew have died now that when it happens now, Peter’s barely fazed by it.
The first one was a guy named RJ. Young, maybe a couple years older than Peter himself.
He’d heard the guy go quiet, mumbling and everything, and heard him dazedly ask for help, slurring that something wasn’t right—and then… he went unconscious. Peter could hear his breathing slow and slow and slow until he took his last. An overdose, Peter knew, but he didn’t know what.
Peter remembers thinking so clearly: Please die, please die, please die. Because another one of Charlie’s guys dead meant one step closer to freedom.
The next death was a girl. She wasn’t even part of the group, but Peter didn’t know that until later. She was just someone Mason brought in, a friend of his, and Charlie had gotten so outright furious that Mason had spoiled their secret that the next time Mason left the bunker, Charlie found the girl and beat her so badly she never got up again.
Peter heard her gargling for help through a mouthful of blood. She died like that, choking on it.
The third was another overdose, a woman. Her death was so quiet that Peter didn’t even know it was happening until it was nearly over—her heartbeat pulsing slow, and slower, and then nothing.
Peter hates himself for this—wishing people dead. He could have said something, could’ve yelled for Ava or Riri to come help the guy, but… He knew, in the long run, that letting people die was his and Cassie’s best chance at getting out.
He’s not the same person he once was.
Before the bunker, Peter would’ve saved anyone outright, no matter whose side they were on—but now… He’s just trying to survive.
And surviving means letting people die.
As the morning nears, and Operation Spider-Man grows closer, Cassie grows more and more nervous by the second. She’s wringing her little hands now, grinding her teeth, holding a stuffed McDonald’s toy close to her face, taking strange breaths in a failed attempt to calm herself.
“Hey, Stinger,” Peter says, and his kid says nothing in response. He’s got an idea to cheer her up, though; usually, they comb each other’s hair with their fingers, but recently with their injuries, they’ve given up a bit. But today… Today they’re gonna break out. So he’s gotta make the day good for her. He’s gotta make it special, just in case it doesn’t go the way they plan. “How about we do your hair today?”
She looks up at him, her freckled face paled with worry, and still she doesn’t answer.
“How does that sound?” he asks quietly.
She nods slowly. “Pigtails,” she whispers.
“Hm,” he says, tapping his chin, and the little girl watches him. “You know what, I think we did pigtails last time. How about something new?”
She always likes this game—when he argues with her a little bit. “Pigtails,” she says again, and a smile’s creeping onto her face.
“Not gonna challenge me? Come on, Cass, I’m bored—gimme a challenge.”
“Braids!”
“Alrighty then, if you insist,” he says, and he stands onto his aching legs, limping over to the sink. “Come on then, your Highness, up you go.”
They usually do each other’s hair, at least a couple times a week—it’s one way to keep busy. Although they can’t wash or condition their hair, they’ll take turns washing their hair in the rusty sink. Cassie’s not nearly tall enough to stick her head in, so she has to stand on her tiptoes, straining to stick her head under, and Peter will run the water over it, dragging his hand through her oily strands of hair to try to clean it—grime and blood like to cling to the scalp.
His braiding skills aren’t perfect, but they’re functional, and he gets the girl’s hair in two braids on either side of her head, mostly finger-combed through. Some of her hair is falling out, strands thinned by malnutrition, but Peter pretends he doesn’t see it. Cassie doesn’t know it’s a problem—and Peter’s not about to tell her.
They don’t have hair ties, so they use strips of their old clothes to tie at the end of the braid instead. The cloth is so worn that Peter can’t tell if it once belonged to Cassie or to him, although he supposes it doesn’t really matter.
When Cassie’s hair is done, they play a little game called ‘Mirror, Mirror’ where Cassie stands in front of Peter and asks what she looks like and he tells her how pretty she looks. They don’t have a mirror—or any other reflective surface, for that matter. The only person who can tell what they look like is each other.
(There’s no mirror at the bathroom sink. Peter doesn’t know why. They used to pretend there was one there. When Peter was stronger, he’d hoist her up a bit so she could ‘see’ herself in it, but he can’t anymore, not with how weak he is now.)
Truly, Peter’s hair has ever been this long before. May always used to cut it herself, and now he’s got bristly bangs, a mullet-like cut, his hair all scraggly and wild, barely combed. It’s a lot longer than it was before. May used to say it was a spider-power—because it only ever grew this fast once he was bitten. Growing hair isn’t a power, he said to her, annoyed, and his aunt had flicked his ear in response.
Cassie watches him mess with his hair now, tugging at it, yanking at its oily ends. She’s just a kid, but she’s very, very perceptive. “You don’t like it,” she says, “right? Your hair?”
“Yeah,” he answers simply. The length of it makes him feel ugly for some reason—like he’s a wild animal with an overgrown coat.
Cassie watches him for a second, shuffling closer to him. “I like it,” she says, and she touches the ends of it with her good hand.
“You do?”
“Yeah,” she says gently. “You’re like Oni Wan.”
“Obi Wan,” he corrects gently. “Obi Wan Kenobi.”
His little girl echoes him, and then she beams when Peter says she got it right.
“Which movie?” he asks. “He’s got some weird haircuts—you mean when he’s old?”
Peter does the motion of a long beard, drawing his hand down from his chin, and little Cassie laughs a little bit, still focused on the stringy, tangled parts of his hair, picking through it with her fingers. “No,” she says with a giggle, “when he’s cool. ”
“Old people can be cool,” he protests.
She’s coming back to herself now, making a face at him, sticking her tongue out a little. “ Oldie Wan,” she says, sing-songy, with that mischievous smile, “you’re old, Peter … You’re Oldie… Oldie Wan…”
He pokes gently at her good arm and she laughs. Good. Laughing.
“Come on, Padawan,” he says, “which movie? I know you’ve seen them…”
“The old one!”
“So specific,” he jokes. “Do you remember what happened?”
Sometimes he tells her the plots of movies instead of bedtime stories— A New Hope is one of her favorites. She's seen them all already; she just likes hearing about them again.
She squints her eyes, and her face falls a little. “I don’t remember,” Cassie whispers, and she looks worriedly to him. “I don’t… I don’t remember…”
“Hey,” he says softly, touching her arm. “That’s okay, Cass—you’re okay, sometimes we forget things…”
She nods tearily, pressing her face into his shoulder, hiding from the conversation, crying softly into his sleeve. It takes a bit to coax her out of her upset, and Peter only manages to calm her by offering his hair for her to do. “Really?” she asks, wiping at her eyes.
“Yeah,” he says, “it’s long enough, right?” He pulls at it with his fingers.
“Yes!” she says, her voice still croaky from her crying. She walks over to the treasure chest, that stupid dented bucket bolted to the floor; Cassie’s talking to herself in the way that kids do, narrating every move, and she digs through the bucket. (There’s not much in there. Most of it was raided last time they tried to escape.) “You’re gonna look so pretty!”
She tells him how they’re going to play, pointing for him to sit on the floor as she walks around him. “I’ll be the princess and you be my brother,” she says. It’s painful for him to sit in this position for too long, but he does it for Cassie, folding one leg and leaving his broken one stretched out.
He hums the tune to some Beatles song as she does, talking to herself about castles and royal tea. “Ah,” he says, “so I’m a prince?”
She ponders it for a second. “Yes,” she assures him. “Prince Peter.”
“Princess Cassie,” he says, and he waves his hand in lieu of a bow.
She offers to cut his hair, to which Peter of course agrees, and then she makes some scissors with her little fingers, saying, “Snip, snip, snip,” as she walks around him, going all the way around his head with her fingers.
“Your highness, how short are we going?”
“Bald!” she says in a hushed giggle.
Peter smiles at her. “Well, I’ve always wanted to try it, I guess today’s the day…”
So she ‘cuts his hair bald’ and then gives him a ‘hair-growy potion’ and then starts to braid. It’s a difficult process—Cassie’s only got one hand, so Peter helps her through it, bringing his hands back behind his head so that she can finish the braid properly—and then, of course, she wants to do another one. They do three or four like this until Cassie’s wrist hurts too much to continue and then she flops happily on the ground beside him, and they both lay there, staring up at the ceiling. “You look pretty,” she says, laying on the dirty floor beside him. “I like your hair like this.”
Peter smiles tiredly. “Thanks, Stinger.”
“When we go home,” she says, starting up that little game again, “I think you should keep your hair long.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah,” she says. “You’re like a prince. Like Luke Skywalker.”
“Luke Skywalker isn’t a prince,” he says.
“Yeah, he is,” she counters. “Princess Leia is a princess and Luke is her brother so he’s a prince.”
Well. That’s certainly the first time he’s been corrected on Star Wars trivia, but he guesses there’s a first for everything. “I guess he is, then.”
Where she is, Cassie coughs a little, turning over onto her side, coughing and coughing until her breaths go all ragged and Peter says, “I’ve got you, I’ve got you,” and rubs her back until the coughing subsides.
“When I get home,” he says, once Cassie’s drank some water and returned to the floor to lay beside him, “we’re gonna have a movie marathon at my house.” He’ll invite Ned and MJ and Tony and Pepper, too, if they’ll come. Flash, even. God, what he wouldn’t do to see Flash’s stupid face. Happy, too. Brad. Anyone at all.
“What’s that?” she asks.
“A movie marathon? It’s, uh…” He waves his hand at the wall as though there’s a projector there. “...when you wanna watch a bunch of movies with people.”
“Like Harry Potter?”
“Yeah, like Harry Potter. But we,” he says, with another pained hand wave, “we’re gonna watch Star Wars.”
“Which ones?”
“See,” he says, “that’s the thing about movie marathons. You watch them all in one day. ”
Her brown eyes fill with awe. “All of them?”
“Yep, all of them. You stay on the couch all day, eat snacks, have lightsaber fights…”
Cassie mimes the lightsaber sound, waving her hand around, and then winces as she pulls too hard at her bad arm. “I wanna come,” she whispers, “can I? Please?”
He smiles at her, and he feels this sad twist in his chest. “‘Course you can, Stinger. Wouldn’t be a party without you.”
She smiles back at him, and then she hugs his arm a little. “Good.” And after a while she adds, “When I get home, I want you to be my brother. Permanent sleepover.”
“Permanent sleepover,” Peter echoes, smiling a little at the ceiling. “Sounds good to me.”
TUESDAY, MAY 8 — 9:35 AM
It’s time.
The next time Mateo and Haroun come in to feed him through the IV, Peter pretends to be asleep. Cassie hides under the bed beneath him—she knows the plan. “Alright, Parker,” says Mateo, “up and at ‘em.”
He can hear them already—the snap of rubber gloves over Mateo’s fingers, the shuffle of Haroun’s shoes. “Wakey, wakey,” says the smaller one, Haroun. “Parker. Hey.”
“Careful,” says Mateo. “You know how they can be.”
Haroun huffs out a laugh. “Whatever. Like he’s gonna do anything like this—you were there last time.” He’s talking about their last escape attempt—Operation Captain America. “Charlie beat him so bad I nearly pissed myself.”
Peter doesn’t like thinking about that day—so he shoves it to the back of his head and focuses hard on his spidey-sense. His mind trembles in anticipation, his face hot with it. Come on, he thinks, closer, man, closer, almost there…
Haroun’s close enough to touch now, and Peter can sense the guard at his right side, prodding at the IV port that’s already there at his forearm.
Mateo hmphs and Peter hears that gun’s safety click on.
Bingo.
Peter moves fast, wrenching the IV’s needle from its spot and twisting around to get at the guy—Haroun, the smaller one. pricking the needle against his jugular, and he can feel the artery pulse beneath his skin.
He doesn’t know if the needle could actually kill the guy.
But maybe they don’t know that, either.
“One word,” he hisses at them both, Mateo who’s standing there dumbfounded, and Haroun who’s locked tight in Peter’s grip, “and I’ll kill you—like the other guy, I’ll kill you, stab you right through the fucking neck.”
“His name was Frank—” says Haroun, trying to pull away, and Peter presses hard enough with the needle that he whimpers and goes quiet.
On the other side of the room, Mateo’s still wearing his rubber gloves, and he’s raising both hands in the air, staring wide-eyed at them both. Haroun and Mateo are friends—that’s why they’re better targets than the last guy. They’re friends, so they won’t risk each other’s safety.
“Now,” says Peter, and he feels dangerous—violent—like he’s bubbling up with that shit Charlie takes, and he can feel it in his eyes, “do you know the code?”
Haroun’s making strange sounds, his arms taut at his sides.
“Answer me,” he hisses. “Nod or shake your fucking head, man—”
He nods, trying not to press his throat further into the needle’s sharp point.
Haroun seems to have more self-preservation than that last guy because he’s still keeping quiet. Quiet is better. Quiet is good.
“Tell it to me,” he says, and Haroun just looks blankly at him, “I said tell it—”
Mateo’s still standing by the wall with his hands up, and hie’s looking at Peter like he’s a feral creature, standing still. “Parker,” he says, and he hates that he trembles now whenever he hears his own last name, “listen to me. Whatever your plan is, it’s not going to work.”
“I didn’t ask you,” he growls, and when he presses the needle in deeper, Haroun lets out this small gasp. “The code , man, the fucking code, I’ll drag you out there myself—”
“No, you won’t,” says Mateo calmly from the other side, his eyes unblinking as he watches Peter. “You know what happens when you go into that hallway. The second you step out there—”
“Shut up,” he says, his voice high, but he’s already remembering the last time, and now he’s struggling to not think about it, to not remember the way his skin tore with the impact of that fucking wire.
“They’re gonna catch you, Parker,” says the guy, moving slightly, his hair hanging long from his head. “They always catch you—”
“ Shut up!” he cries, and his voice is this insane, weird shriek, and he’s way too loud and he’s already forgetting parts of the plan, “shut up! Shut up!”
And this time the needle pricks blood, and Haroun makes another sound, and Peter hisses, “The code! Give me the code!”
Again, Mateo and Haroun just look at each other, but Haroun’s still on the bad side of Peter’s makeshift weapon, so he says, “One, two, oh—”
“Shut up, Haroun,” says Mateo harshly, his eyes darting to the cell door.
One, two, zero. That’s three out of eight numbers for the code. Just five more to go. “The rest,” he says tightly, “what’s the rest—”
“Parker,” says Mateo, his hands still raised. "You gotta put it down." He's holding his brown hand out to Peter, and he flinches. “I won’t hold it against you—we can just forget about it, get your IV in, get you some extra painkillers, right, Haroun?”
“Right,” gargles Haroun, his voice small.
"That's what you want, right? We'll make it good, okay? You won't feel a thing—"
He wishes it were Mateo’s neck he were sinking a needle into. “Cassie,” he says then, and the girl climbs out from under the bed, her prisoner’s jumpsuit buttoned all the way up, standing at three-ish feet tall with as much threat as she can muster.
She’s brave. God, she’s so brave.
“Get his gun, Stinger,” he says. “Just like we practiced. Go get his gun”
She’s a bit more hesitant than she was last time, but he just nods at her and she creeps towards the guy, breathing a little too fast, and snatches up the gun from Mateo’s waistband before running away. She holds it like a toy—and the man says, “Fuck, Parker, this is not gonna end well for you—”
And he hisses, “Shut up! Shut up!” and he doesn’t realize he moved his hand but all of a sudden Haroun’s neck is bleeding and he’s making weird sounds. Peter says to Cassie without looking, “You see that little thing on the back? The little safety lever?” The needle wiggles against Haroun’s skin, slipping over a smear of blood.
By the door, Mateo’s going, “Parker—Parker, let’s think about this—”
Peter ignores him. “Click it, Cass, just like we practiced, and point it at him.”
She does as she’s told, and the safety clicks off. Her hands are shaking. “Good,” he says, “that’s so good, Cass—now you’re gonna give it to me…”
And they go fast, because they’re moving just like they’ve practiced, and Cassie tosses it—Haroun tries for the gun but Peter’s got sticky hands and he and Cassie have practiced, like, a thousand times, and Peter snatches it right out of the air and presses the barrel to Haroun’s throat.
“Parker,” he’s saying, talking faster, stumbling over his words, “when this goes south, and it’s gonna go south —”
“It’s not gonna," he snaps, " it’s not gonna— ”
“—then he’s gonna put you in the chair, you know he will—”
“I’m not going back in the chair!” he snarls. “I’m not—I’m not—I can’t—” And then he’s thinking about it, he's thinking about it, what’ll happen if this goes bad, and his hands shake against the trigger. “Oh, God—” Was he too loud? Did someone hear? Is someone coming? “Oh, God—I can’t—I can’t…” The thought alone is enough to force the tears to the surface of his face, and he can still feel the healing scars on the backs of his legs, and for some stupid reason he's crying now. "I don't want to—"
“I know,” says Mateo, his voice getting a little softer.
“I won’t,” he chokes out, and they’re all just standing around watching him cry like a fucking baby, sobbing into empty space, both his hands on the gun, “I can’t—not again—”
“Then put it down, kid. We can—we can forget this ever happened—Charlie doesn’t have to know. I promise.”
“No,” he chokes out, “the code now, or I’ll kill you both. I’ll—I’ll kill you both—”
“Let’s say you get to the hallway,” says Mateo, like Peter didn’t just threaten his life, like Peter doesn’t currently have a gun to his friend’s head. “Right? We give you the code, let’s say you get all the way up to the second door, you make it out into the forest—”
Forest, Peter thinks very clearly. They’re in a forest.
He didn’t know where they were before.
Mateo’s still talking, continuing, “You make it out there, and then what? With that leg of yours, you’ll be lucky to make it ten feet before you’re on the ground—and the girl’s not carrying you, so what’s the plan?”
“You’ll take us,” says Peter, grasping at straws, “you’ll help me, you’ll lead me out—”
“Only two of us have cars, Parker,” he says, and he shudders at the sound of his own name, “and that’s the only way you get off this mountain.”
“Who?” he says, and he’s imagining it now—they’re gonna get in a car and drive away, far away from here. “Tell me who—”
“Nick,” says the guy, “but—but he’s gone, he’s out with Riri—he’s—he’s picking out supplies for Stark—”
“ Who else?”
“Charlie,” says Haroun from beside Peter, the barrel still pressed to his sweaty neck. “Charlie has the other—ah—”
The guy whimpers as Peter presses the barrel in deeper, his finger tensing over the trigger. “Get his keys,” he says, and he feels hysterical.
“I’m not gonna do that, says Mateo, and Peter wants to shoot him in the head. “Charlie keeps track of them—we never, ever leave without permission, Parker—”
“Shut up!” he shouts, and he’s too loud, and there’s tears coming down his face, “you’re gonna do it! You’re gonna give me the fucking code, or I’ll shoot him! I’ll do it!”
“You won’t,” he says.
“SHUT UP! SHUT UP!”
“This only ends one way, Parker—with your ass in the chair—so give me the gun, kid, just give me the gun and we can forget about it.”
“Yeah,” says Haroun, and Peter crying and he can’t help it, he’s crying and he can’t stop, and his whole body is quivering because he knows what’s gonna happen— “ Give him the—”
Peter lets out this small, guttural scream, shoving the barrel into Haroun’s chin, and the guy flails. "Shut up! SHUT UP! EVERYONE SHUT UP!"
And they do.
He's a stupid fucking freak, so of course he's crying, crying so hard it's becoming difficult to breathe, difficult to hold the gun still against the guard's neck. He's stupid—he's so stupid—he's so fucking stupid, how could he think this plan would work—
This only ends one way. This only ends one way.
“I won’t tell anybody,” he begs, trying anything, anything, and he feels hysterical, like he's banging at a television screen, like he's rattling chains, “please, I’ll—I'll—I'll tell them whatever you want, I just wanna go home, I, I—I just…” He shakes his head again, his eyes so full of tears that he’s having a hard time finding his targets. “I’m in high school, man. I—I wanna take the SATs, I wanna—I wanna go to class, I wanna apply for college, I—I—I—” He sobs again, and his whole face is hot, vibrating with something fucking insane— “I’m gonna be a senior,” he chokes out. “I’m—I’m—I’m gonna be a senior.”
"Parker," one says softly, and he bangs the side of the gun against his head a couple times, pain rearing ugly in his skull, and re-points it back at the two guards. "Parker."
He’s crying again, breath hitching in his lungs, and his whole chest aches with each sob. “Let me—let me—let me call the cops, or—or—anything, anything, and I’ll say whatever you want—whatever—I’ll tell them he made you do it—”
“Kid, think about it,” says Mate, pushing forward, “if the police show up, Charlie’s not gonna wanna go down for this. You know what’s gonna happen?”
Yeah, he thinks, and he can see it in his mind, playing out like a fucking horror film, but he just cries instead, the tears coming down his neck now, going cold down his chest.
“He’s gonna come in here with a gun,” says Mateo, “just like that one, and he’ll shoot you both in the head.” The guy mimes it, too, all slow, pulling a finger trigger at his head. “Hide your bodies somewhere, dig a hole out in the forest and throw you in. And that’ll be it.”
Forest.
For some stupid reason, Peter thought until this moment that they were in some actual civilization. He though that once he made it outside the bunker, he’d step onto the streets of some city. That as soo nas he amde it through those doors, he’d be free—he’d run screaming into the street with Cassie in his arms, and some nice lady would pick them up in her car and ask them if they were okay. An old lady. A hippie, like May. And she’d look at them and ask if they needed a hospital—but neither Peter nor Cassie liked being poked and prodded, so they’d say no, and Cassie would ask in her sweet quiet voice, Can we have something to eat?
And the lady would drive them to her house and let them use her phone to call their families—she’d be a nurse, too, just like May, and she’d fix them up as best she could and give them enough pain medication that they could walk more than a few feet without buckling under their own weight.
They’d sit at her kitchen table and eat whatever the hell they wanted—a bowl of beef stew and a row of butter-soaked bread, a potful of parmesan-crusted mac and cheese… And every time they asked for more, she’d smile and give it to them.
And just when Peter and Cassie’s bellies were full, and their injuries had been tended to, they’d heara whirring outside the house: the Quinjet. And out they would pour—May and Tony and Pepper, Happy Hogan, and his friends, too.
He thinks about this a lot. He knows it’s a fantasy—a stupid fucking fantasy—but right now, it’s the only thing that keeps him going.
“Parker,” Mateo says quietly, and Peter jerks his head to look at the guy. His hands tremble on the gun, tremble on the trigger. His face is wet, and he grips the gun harder. “Come on, kid. You gotta put it down—you know you gotta put it down.”
He takes a strange, shuddery breath. “What happens when it’s over?” he whispers, and both men look pained. “What happens… When Mr. Stark… When he…. When he's done?”
“You know what happens,” says Mateo quietly.
He sobs, his vision blurry and wet, and then he blurts, “And what if… What if I die?”
Haroun’s looking at him strangely.
“If…” he chokes out, and he waves the gun a little for emphasis, and he thinks about it—he thinks about it—and for a second it feels like a solution. “If… If I died… Would you let her go?”
Haroun’s face goes a little slack. “Parker,” he says, his neck still bleeding, “whatever you’re thinking, it’s not worth it—”
“ Would you?”
“No,” says Mateo coolly. “We were gonna take Pepper Potts before we found out about you, you know. So we’d probably just do that—start over. And if we ran out of people to take, we’d… We’d scrap it. Kill Tony Stark, Lang, and the girl, take our share of what’s left, and fuck off somewhere across the border.”
So that means… That means Peter has to stay alive. He has to stay alive or—or everyone he loves will suffer.
“Oh, God,” he whispers, and his mouth is run with teary mucus. “Oh, God, oh, God.” He’s doomed to a lifetime of this—a lifetime— “I can’t—I can’t—I—I—”
And Haroun moves, and he screams at the sudden motion, training his gun on the guy, his arm trembling badly with the weight—he can’t even carry a fucking a gun. He’s useless, he’s so fucking useless. “Parker—”
He’s sobbing but with one hand on the guy and one hand on the gun, he doesn’t have an arm to wipe his face, so he’s just sobbing into nothing, crying like a baby into empty space, liquid coming down his face like blood. “Help me,” he begs, because he feels like he’s in the Chair already, “help me, god, please just help me—” And they’re looking at him—maybe because that’s not what they expected Peter to say, but it’s all he can say because they won’t give him the fucking code— “ What do you want?” he chokes out. “I’ll—I’ll give you anything, I’ll—I’ll do anything, please—god—”
Both men wince. “I’m sorry,” says Haroun, and it sounds genuine.
“What do you want?” he chokes out through his tears, and mucus bubbles up from his nostrils, and he sniffs loudly. “They’re—drugs? Right? They’re—they’re paying you?”
The two exchange looks; both men are backed up against the wall now, as far from Peter’s gun as possible, and he takes a step closer to make up for it. “I can get you drugs,” he blubbers, “I—Mr. Stark—he has connections, he—he has money, whatever you want, just please, please— ” He sobs into the gun, and his tears are falling onto the concrete floor, dripping down, concrete darkening in splashes. “ Please… I—I—I can’t—”
When he looks up, Mateo’s watching him again. “The gun,” he says quietly, still, unmoving. “Put down the gun, kid.”
He’s never putting this gun down—as long as he has it they can’t hurt him—he’s safe, no chair—HE’S SAFE, THEY CAN’T TAKE HIM—
“Let us go,” he sobs, “just—just let us—god, please— I just wanna go home—”
He just wants to see May again. Ned. Tony. MJ. Anyone, anyone at all.
He doesn't want to do this anymore.
Mateo’s gaze flicks to Haroun and back to Peter. “The gun,” he says again, and Peter shakes his head, wild.
“Please…” He’s still fucking crying; he’s still fucking crying. “I can’t—I can’t do this anymore, I—I’m not—I—I can't do this anymore!” And that time he pulls the trigger, and it recoils hard, knocking him in the face—the bullet hits somewhere on the far wall, both guys ducking to avoid the shot.
“Parker, whoa! Hey, just calm down, we can talk about this—”
“I don’t want to talk about it!” he screams, tears streaming down his face, and he can hear people down the hallway, footsteps, drawn by the noise. “I wanna go home!”
He fires at the door then, but he can’t see through his tears, and the gun kicks back in his grip, and that time the mere force of it knocks him backwards and the hard fall is enough to take him out—he flails for the gun, trying to find it, but by the time he looks up Mateo’s got it in his hands and is looking at him, strangely, with pity.
“Cassie,” he chokes out, struggling to his feet, “Ant-Man—Ant-Man—” A code word: run.
And he doesn’t even know why he’s deciding to go now—he just doesn’t want to go to the Chair again—HE CAN’T GO BACK THERE—and pulls Cassie along, and then she’s faster than him and lugging him down the hallway, and someone’s shouting, “Goddamn it—someone grab them!”
And he’s going for the door—they’re going for the door—he’s got three out of eight numbers, he could—he could do it—maybe—THEY’RE GONNA MAKE IT—THEY’RE GONNA—
And Cassie’s running the opposite way, going after her dad’s voice, and Peter screams, “Cassie, no!” and when he turns back to that locked door at the end of the hallway it looks beautiful, like the fucking gates of heaven, and he thinks— I could go, I could go without her, I could leave— but he doesn’t have the numbers, only three out of eight—but what if it works—
TUESDAY, MAY 8 — 8:01 AM
Tony’s working so hard that he doesn’t even realize Peter’s on the television screen. He’s scribbling out chemistry equations on the floor with permanent marker, filling his mind with numbers and elements, running through chemical compounds—he doesn’t have room for anything else in his mind. Dum-E starts making squealing noises—whirring and beeping and pulling at his arm.
“What?” he snaps. smacking the robot backwards.
Dum-D whirs again, beeping in rapid speed, pulling and pulling at his arm. He gets up, and his knees pop, and he collapses back onto the ground. That’s why he was on the ground in the first place—he’s so dizzy without sleep that he can barely stand. On his other side, U snaps his robotic clamp around his other arm and helps him up; both robots drag him forward, all the way to the television, and his brain swims, still full of numbers and chemicals.
And there on the television screen, Peter is dragged to the chair.
“It’s not seven yet,” Tony whispers to himself, “it’s not…”
His robot U whirs beside him, a beep of agreement. And he beeps back with the time—around eight AM.
What happened?
What did Peter do?
It’s usually something small—trying to escape, disobeying, even something as simple as talking back—that makes Charlie beat Peter when it’s not seven o’clock. So what happened?
Peter’s trembling. It looks like he’s been crying for a while, his face pink, his eyes swollen and half-closed.
Peter’s crying still—he’s crying, his kid’s crying so hard that he’s not even speaking, sobbing relentlessly, and he’s grabbing at the arms of the people dragging him—a short dark-haired man and a brown-skinned guy. When they push him into the chair, he grabs hard onto the brown-skinned guy’s wrist with both his hands, pulling him towards him, still crying, clinging hard like a kid who doesn’t want to go to bed, choking out, “Mateo, please, please… Please don’t let him… Please—help me, I didn’t—I don’t wanna—”
He knows them by name. He’s begging them for mercy…by name.
But then they get the first cuff, and the rest come easy because Peter stops fighting them. He stops fighting. He just sits there and lets them do it, all the while hitting his head—hard—against the back of the chair.
And Charlie hasn’t even shown up yet.
Someone else has called now, the blond one, and he’s muttering something drug-addled into the phone, and now Tony can hear everything, all the voices distorted over the phone like they’re coming through a tin can.
Charlie approaches like a man possessed and grabs Peter firmly by the hair, grasping hard—it’s mullet-like now, dark and frazzled and short in places where someone has pulled it out. Longer than Tony’s ever seen it. Long enough to drag bangs across his forehead. and the back of it is in small ratty braids—did he do that himself?—and Charlie snarls, “STOP THAT! IT’S NO FUCKING FUN WHEN YOU DO THAT!”
Tony’s seen the kid do it before—try to hit his head on the chair, try to knock himself unconscious before the torture starts. Charlie hates it so much that he’ll boost the kid full of adrenaline just to wake him up again.
But this time, Peter’s head-slamming just gets more frantic, harder and harder, fighting against Charlie’s grip, so at last Charlie rips up the couple cuffs they’ve managed to snap around his limbs and shove him to the floor. “KNEEL, PARKER!” he shouts, and the man licks his lips, lifting his shirt to remove something from his belt.
A gun.
A fucking gun.
“NO!” Tony screams, and he slams his hand against the television His legs tremble, and he falls to one knee, and then the other. “Please, please—not him, not him, please—“
Peter’s on the floor, curled up, arms wrapped around his head, and Charlie kicks him hard in the back— “I SAID KNEEL—UP, PARKER, GET THE FUCK UP!”
And he’s forcing himself up to some kind of kneeled position, his hands curled around his stomach now, trying in vain to protect himself, and Charlie kicks him again, directly in the mouth, this time hard enough to knock him backwards with a pained moan, flat onto his back. “YOU TRIED TO RUN? YOU TRIED TO RUN AGAIN?”
Oh, thinks Tony very clearly. Oh, no.
Peter tried to escape again. God, this is the fourth time—and each time the punishment gets worse. More violent. More fucked up. The last time, Tony remembers, there was someone in the corner—someone small. A kid, maybe. They forced the kid to watch.
“YOU NEVER—EVER RUN FROM ME, YOU LITTLE BITCH!”
“I’m sorry,” Peter sobs, trying to get back up again, and there’s blood filling his mouth now where Charlie kicked him, his lip swelling, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry—please, Charlie, I won’t…”
“EVERY FUCKING TIME!”
And now Charlie’s kneeled on the ground beside him, pinning him down by the throat with one arm, and Peter’s not fighting him—he’s grabbing him, holding onto his arms like he did that first guard, like he’s trying to beg for mercy again. And he’s pressing the gun to Peter’s forehead, and he clicks the safety off—
—and now Peter’s really crying, gasping and hiccuping in sheer terror, holding onto Charlie’s sleeve, mumbling out half-sobbed pleas as Charlie screams spittle-soaked words into his face. “WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU RUN, PARKER? WHAT HAPPENS! WHAT HAPPENS!” And with that Charlie shifts the gun two inches to the right, just beside Peter’s sweaty forehead and fires it—bang!
Peter shrieks like an animal, crying harder and harder and harder, his eyes squeezed shut, tears still flooding forth. That bullet is now buried in the floor beside him. “SAY IT PARKER! SAY IT! WHAT DID I FUCKING TELL YOU!”
“When—when you—”
“WHAT DID I SAY!”
And then Charlie takes that gun and presses the tip of it hard into Peter’s forehead, right where it was before, and the kid lets out this gargled frantic scream.
“SAY IT! FUCKING SAY IT!”
He chokes it out then, every word: “When you—you run—you get—get punished.”
Charlie releases his neck then, forcing himself to his feet, and glares down at the sobbing boy, waving at him with the gun, his finger still on the trigger. “ALL I GIVE YOU AND YOU RUN FROM ME? FROM ME?”
“Please, I’m s-sorry, so—I’m so sorry…”
And then Charlie’s rambling loudly about empires and the world and peace again, about doing things for the greater good. He’s monologuing, and Tony knows that’s never good. When Charlie monologues it means he has some kind of sick plan for Peter—this isn’t good. And Peter’s crawling backwards with as much effort as he can muster, dragging himself to try to put some distance between him and the man, chest heaving as he goes. Behind Charlie, red-haired Renee has returned with something—a long coiled wire.
Not the wire.
God, not the wire again.
Tony trembles, pressing his palm against the glass screen. He remembers the last time they whipped Peter with that wire, the screaming, the begging, the bloody slashes… Tony still sees those horrible images every time he closes his eyes. The sound of wire against Peter’s skinny back—the slap, the tear, the bright blood trickling down.
Not again. He can’t watch that again.
But he has to.
“Take that jumpsuit off him,” Charlie says at last, viciously, tucking his gun back in his belt, ignoring Peter’s choked apologies. “It’ll get in my way.”
Without hesitation, the other guards pull the jumpsuit off of him, ripping Peter’s only protection off of him as the kid panics, thrashing, trying to keep the sleeves on his arms, but he’s not strong enough to stop them. And he’s not even calling for Tony anymore—he’s calling out for his captors, calling them about by name again: “HAROUN! HELP ME! PLEASE! YOU SAID—YOU SAID—” And the rest of them just stand there, avoiding Peter’s calls, and he just moves onto the next one— “AVA, Ava, please, please, I’ll never run again—I promise, I won’t, I won’t—NO! NO! WAIT!”
Once they’ve taken the suit all the way off, leaving the kid just in his briefs, all his scars bared for the room to see, they drag him to the chair; Charlie and the rest of them force him forward as Renee draws that coil over the cement floor, and Peter hears the sound of that wire scraping against the ground and he starts thrashing against their grip and howling, “WAIT! WAIT! Please! Ple—please, please, please, not again, no, I can’t—I CAN’T—”
“SHUT UP!” snarls Charlie, forcing the kid down to his knees. They’re putting him on his knees on the ground, buckling his wrists into it the opposite way so that he’s kneeling in front of the chair instead of sitting in it, cuffed to it like he’s at a whipping post. “SHUT THE FUCK UP! YOU DID THIS! THIS IS WHAT YOU GET! THIS IS WHAT YOU FUCKING DESERVE!”
All Tony can see now is the kid’s back and his hanging head as he kneels in front of the chair, pulling hard at his cuffed wrists, and he’s crying, “I know, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—please—”
“ARE YOU SORRY? ARE YOU?”
But it doesn’t take much to pin Peter down now—he’s so weak from the starvings, and the beatings, and everything else. They’re buckling him in, and there, threading down his legs, are the remnants of beatings before—the most recent, long pink scars from the beating he endured the last time he tried to escape. Some thick like claws, some skinny like thread, most of the wounds still open. Scabbed over. Some trail all the way down to his ankles, some tickling up by his ribs. But they haven’t healed. They haven’t healed. They’re not even scars, really, but long brown-red scabs.
The deepest ones are lined in messy stitching.
Tony has seen stitches like this—he wonders who does it. One of the captors, maybe. The nice ones. Ava or Riri, maybe.
Peter’s not healing like he used to.
And Charlie’s about to rip them open again. They haven’t had enough time to heal. They’ll probably tear back open as soon as Charlie takes the wire to his back.
Behind him, Peter is sobbing into the chair, twisting and twisting his arms against the restraints, blood coming down from his cuffs. The scars on his legs—and the ones on his lower back, too—stiffen and pull wrinkled at his skin: long curved lines. A little trickle of urine comes down his leg as he cries, pressing his forehead into the seat of the chair, his shoulders bowing.
“Damn!” Charlie says, with this horrible cackle, “I really broke your little Spider-baby, didn’t I? IS THIS WHAT YOU WANTED, PARKER? HUH? ANSWER ME!”
“N-no, n-no, I—I—”
“THEN WHY DID YOU RUN? WHY THE HELL DID YOU RUN FROM ME?”
“I shouldn’t—I shouldn’t—” His face is tipped into the chair—he keeps crying, crying, the tears infinite, just unhinged wailing into the chair in front of him. “Oh, god—please, please don’t—”
Tony doesn’t say anything; he knows he’s not allowed to talk back. If he does, Charlie might do even worse to his kid.
“…but I warned you!” Charlie’s saying, near gleeful with anticipation. “I WARNED YOU, DIDN’T I, PARKER?”
Ragged sobs.
“I TOLD YOU! WHEN YOU RUN YOU GET PUNISHED! ISN’T THAT RIGHT?” He laughs again, and he has the wire now, coiling and uncoiling it in his hands.
No one’s washed the wire from last time; blackened flakes of dried blood fall away as Charlie twists it. And Peter just keeps tensing and tensing—his whole body, trying to brace for a blow that he doesn’t know when it’s coming, each breath coming in fast and shallow—terror.
Sometimes Charlie will hurt Peter while he’s talking. Sometimes he’ll hurt him in utter silence. They never know which. And now he’s talking again, and he slaps the coil against the floor—Peter screams and then delves into another round of crying, gasping out something like relief. “…but,” Charlie’s saying, “I wanna have a little fun first, how’s that sound?”
Peter's crying too hard to respond.
“My old man, he used to” —Charlie drags the wire across the ground, metal against concrete, and Peter presses his whole body as far from Charlie as possible, as far as the cuffs will let him— “make me pick the belt. I think it helps the message really sink in, right, Parker? Picking your poison.” He’s squatting beside him, tripping slightly off-balance before he kneels beside him, unlocking one cuff so that he can drag Peter towards him by the neck, forcing his face close to Peter’s. “So I’m gonna be nice this time, Spider-baby. You wanna pick?”
It seems like Peter’s struggling to stay in his head, stay present, because he goes hollow-eyed for a moment, still, barely breathing, and Charlie slaps him to get his attention. “Look at me when I’m talking to you,” he says, his voice dark.
Peter’s head’s hanging low from the slap; he then lifts it back up, turning to look at Charlie. “Sorry,” he says, his voice eerily quiet.
“Better,” says Charlie, and he’s unstrapping Peter’s last limb from the chair, letting the kid fall to the ground with a horrible smack. “I don’t make the rules, I just follow ‘em. You gotta bleed every day, isn't that right?”
The kid stays there on the ground, just lying there—exhausted, maybe, from the anticipation alone. “Yes,” Peter burbles through a mouth swollen with blood.
“Say it.”
“I have to…bleed…every day…”
Charlie says, shrugging, “That’s right. So you can take your pick, Parker, how about that? Either you do it or I’ll do it for you.” He bares his teeth, a wicked smile. “And you won’t like what I do.”
Tony’s not following.
“...so what will it be, Parker? Door number one or door number two?” He’s crouching by Peter's sprawled out form, and when he doesn’t respond, slaps him hard again—the kid lets out a small whimper.!“The wire or something else, Parker—THE WIRE OR SOMETHING ELSE—ANSWER ME!”
Another smack—Charlie’s hand meeting Peter's bruised face. “Som—something else,” the kid chokes out.
Charlie grins. “Excellent pick,” he says, and Peter's still just laying on the ground. “You’re gonna make me get creative! THIS IS GONNA BE FUN!”
Peter’s eyes aren’t even going to the camera anymore—he’s not seeking solace in Tony being there; instead, he’s staring up at Charlie, who’s fiddling through the tools on the tray—cattle prods with metal stakes, screws and spiked straps, the man holds his fate so firmly in his hands, and Peter’s holding his breath.
Peter’s staring up at him like he’s God—like he’s an almighty being walking the mortal earth. A malicious immortal creature that holds his life in his hands.
To Peter, he supposes, Charlie is as close to a god as it gets—in complete control at all times.
Charlie’s rambling now, picking up different items and examining them with his wild eyes. He motions at one of the others to bring him something, who returns quickly with a white baggie of powder. He opens it up, lays out the white stuff on the edge of a knife, snorts it up, and sticks the remains with his fingers into his mouth, sticking it between his lips and gums.
And his eyes get redder, and his words get faster, and his smile gets wider.
And Charlie keeps talking. Talking and talking, smiling and rambling, talking and talking and smiling more. “...and you know,” Charlie’s saying, sniffling again, his nose red from irritation, “there was this old thing Japanese soldiers used to do—if they betrayed their country, their masters, their empires—they’d cut themselves open, stem to stern. Bleed out on the ground and die.” He motions with the blade then, the one he wiped clean of his drugs. “How cool is that, huh? CAN YOU IMAGINE? WOULDN’T THAT BE FUN, PARKER?”
And then he holds out the knife by the blade, out to Peter, who’s half-lying half-sitting on the cement floor, looking up at him. “Go on then, Parker, give it a go.”
“What?” whispers Peter, shaking like a leaf.
“You heard me,” he says. “Take it.”
Peter just stares at the knife—understand clicks in his battered mind, and then his mouth opens slightly, and then closes. His lip’s split there where Charlie hit him a couple days ago, torn bloody and scabbed over like a lip ring gone wrong. “Charlie,” he tries, his voice a whisper, “please…”
“You wanna prove it to me? Prove to me you’re not gonna run again. Do it yourself.”
Peter stares up, that horrible empty stare, at the knife Charlie’s holding.
“HEY!” he snaps, when Peter doesn’t lift a finger, and the kid flinches back, raising up his arms to protect himself, and the man grabs him by the arm and yanking it out, pressing the knife into Peter’s weak hand. “TAKE IT! TAKE THE FUCKING KNIFE!”
But Peter won’t curl his hand around it, instead trying to pull his arm back, trying to yank it towards himself. “I don’t—I don’t—”
Charlie clamps his hand down hard enough that Peter cries out—that’s gonna bruise. “THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS—WHEN YOU RUN!” he shouts, even as Peter scrabbles at him, trying to escape his bruising grip. “THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS! SAY IT! WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU RUN!”
“You get—you get punished,” the kid chokes out.
“AND WHAT DID YOU DO—WHAT DID YOU DO—”
“I-I-I ran,” he sobs, the knife still pressed into his palm.
“YOU RAN! YOU FUCKING RAN! YOU’RE NEVER GETTING OUT OF HERE, PARKER, HOW MANY TIMES I GOTTA TELL YOU—SAY IT—”
“—never, never—n-never getting—”
“ARE YOU ASHAMED, PARKER? ARE YOU?”
“Yes—”
“YOU SHOULD BE! YOU FUCKING BETRAYED ME—BE FUCKING GRATEFUL!”
“I—I’m—I am—I am—”
“GOOD! THEN FUCKING PROVE IT!”
And he forces Peter’s hand closed around the blade, and the kid takes it this time, hugging the knife to his chest. “How—” His voice is a whimper of sound. “How deep.”
“All the way,” he says.
Peter just looks up at him, and in that moment he looks like a little kid looking up at his father, and he says, face upturned, kneeling awkwardly on his bad leg, a whisper: “But—”
“All the way,” Charlie repeats. “Or I’ll make you do it again.”
The kid stares down at the knife; he doesn’t say anything else. He’s way, way too quiet.
“Remember where your organs are, bitch,” Charlie cackles. “Don’t hit anything good.”
Peter’s been stabbed before. Tony's brought him into the Medbay for stab wounds more times than he likes to admit. Had Cho or Banner stitch up the gaping wounds in neat lines. But he’s never…
“Five,” Charlie says. “Four.”
Peter looks straight into the camera then, as though Tony can see him there. It’s a small knife; it shouldn’t be too bad, but the kid has so little fat to cushion the blow…
“Three.”
Charlie’s got the wire again, and he’s flicking his wrist and letting the wire trail audibly across the floor in slow curls, chuckling as Peter flinches, and then the kid moves in a panic, picking up the knife, and pressing it to his belly. “Okay, okay,” he says breathlessly, terrified. He's moving it around to different points on his abdomen, trying to find the best spot and he picks a scar that’s already there.
Smart. What a smart kid. It's a spot he got at a mugging a few months back. A scar where Tony said, You’re so damn lucky, Pete. You missed every major organ.
Smart. He remembers.
“Two.”
Peter jerks his arms once, stops, with the point of the knife pressed hard onto his skin, barely bleeding, and with trembling fingers, shoves it in all the way—Charlie doesn’t get a chance to say that last number.
Peter just stares down at it then, hand on the hilt, blood coming around the blade, and he lets go immediately, panicking, drawing in breath fast. “Oh,” the kid says, like he doesn’t understand. “I—I didn’t—” He sucks in a breath. “Oh, god. Oh, god—I—I—”
“Great,” says Renee, dryly. “You freaked out the kid—”
“My—my—my—” And he’s gasping in air, nearly choking on it. “MY—it’s in me—IT’S—”
And one of the crew—a young woman—approaches as the kid starts to move, grabbing at the handle, trying to pull at it. “Don’t take it out, kid, you’re gonna blee—”
But Peter’s scared, and he screams as she gets close, flailing his arm out to shove her away. He goes for the knife again, yanks it out in one pull, and then the woman curses as blood spreads fast over the kid’s front. She lunges at him, and he smacks her in the head with her arm—the woman yelps, backing up.
“HEY!” snarls Charlie, eyes trained on the kid, having heard the hit. The other woman has backed away, a hand to her cheek. “YOU DON’T—TOUCH—HER!”
In one staggered move, Charlie, picks up that hammer from the ground—
“NO!” shrieks Tony at the television. “NO! He didn’t mean to—”
—and swings it in one massive swoop—crack!—as it hits the back of Peter’s head. He sprawls out on the ground as Charlie screams at his unconscious body: “YOU’RE NOTHING! YOU’RE NOTHING! YOU NEVER TOUCH US! EVER!”
Until at last Peter starts to stir, and one guard slaps a length of medical tape over his bleeding stomach, although they leave his head alone. Peter pushes away from the contact, cowering, and then groans, tries to pick his head up, before sinking back to the floor. He’s saying something, teary, slurred, and blood from his head wound is now trailing down the back of his neck.
Tony thinks it’s “sorry.” He thinks Peter’s saying “sorry.”
There’s some talking then, some mild fighting between the captors, and then the rest break away so that Charlie can hover over the kid.
And Charlie hauls him up, and he talks to him quietly—gentle, almost. With the hit to his head, the kid’s swaying, delirious, his eyes dragging over Charlie, his fear coming a little too late. Charlie shakes him by the hair, the kid’s eyes rolling around in his concussed skull, and he growls, “Now thank me. Thank me for not beating you bloody.”
“Thank you,” Peter whispers, the words a little slurred.
Charlie grabs him by the hair and yanks his head violently to one side—Peter gasps at the movement, his hands moving to try to dislodge him—and the man peers at the wound.
He’s checking the wound. The wound that he made.
Something curdles in Tony’s stomach, spoiled. Is he checking to see if he can do more before Peter gives out? Is he going to help him? Is he finally, finally, having some empathy for the kid?
Charlie pats the kid’s head, stroking his hair back, and Peter tilts forward, body taut with pain, his arms around himself and lets him, crying into the man.
Tony hates when Charlie does this. Hates it. How he’ll comfort Peter sometimes, rub his shoulder or pat his head or speak to him slowly. He doesn’t know why he does it, either. Maybe to alleviate his own weighed conscience. Maybe because he sees a bit of himself in Peter. Maybe just to screw with the kid’s head some more.
But it’s hard, watching Peter grab onto Charlie like he’s hugging him, choking out genuine apologies as Charlie looks at him like he’s a piece of meat. And the man says quietly, his eyes wide with a crazed shine, “So you know what happens when you run, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he manages, “yes, yes—”
“Say it, Parker. I need to hear you say it.”
And Peter inhales his next sob. “When you—when you run… you get—you get punished,” he says, hiccuping through it.
“Again.”
And he looks up at Charlie with this horrifically childish look, like he’s waiting for his approval. Like Charlie’s his teacher or coach or counselor, his eyes big and glittering with hope. And he says it again—and Charlie tells him to say it again—and he says it again, each time the sentence coming a little easier, his hands grasping onto Charlie’s arms like the tighter he holds, the less likely he is to be hurt again. When you run, you get punished. When you run, you get punished. When you run, you get punished. Over and over and over again.
“Again,” says Charlie.
“When you run,” he manages, his voice hollow like a shell, “you get punished.”
“Good,” he says, and Peter sobs in relief. “And what do you say to me?”
“Thank you,” he whimpers. “Thank you, thank you, thank you…” The kid’s slurring his words again, his head tilting to one side. God, that girl must’ve gotten his head pretty bad; and all Tony can do is watch.
“Good,” Charlie says, and he backs up. “Haroun, Daria—strap him in. Arms only. Put him on his knees.”
Then Peter moves, confused, his head still bleeding, and his face going pale with horrified shock. “What?”
Charlie just smiles.
Peter backs away from the people, scrambling back, painful groaning as he jostles the new wound in his stomach. He’s still wounded from the day before, too, bruises at his knees, wounds letting out small trickles of blood. “But you said—you said—” His voice goes high and frightened. “But you said—”
“I only said I wouldn't,” he says, grinning a little, as his cronies grab Peter and drag him forcefully towards the chair, “but I never said anything about her.”
Charlie hands over the wire to his red-haired wife, who smacks it on the ground hard enough that Peter jumps.
“Charlie,” he moans, “Charlie, Charlie, please—please—don’t let her—PLEASE, PLEASE, NO—NO—I’M SORRY—I SAID I WAS SORRY—PLEASE—”
And then they force his arms into those cuffs, and Peter just sobs into the chair, letting out this animalistic whine into the vibranium seat. “No, no, no, no…”
“Say it again,” says Charlie, his voice loud, his mouth wide with a smile, “say it again, Parker! What did I tell you?”
“When you—you—you—”
Peter just keeps going, slurring that horrible sentence, over and over again without prompt with the naive hope that they’ll leave him alone.
Peter passes out before the wire even touches him. Maybe it’s the pain, or the concussion, or the anticipation alone, but soon he’s sprawled limply over the front of the chair, head slack to one side, unmoving. Renee gives him a couple hits for good measure, but apparently bloodying an unconscious kid is a bit too much for Charlie’s group, because soon they’re just dragging him away like that, carrying the kid between them.
But right before he does, as that red-haired woman recoils that wire in her hands, as Peter’s gasping in a breath and trying to tense up before the coming blow, he’s saying something. Sobbing something.
Sometimes, he cries to Charlie. Sometimes, he cries to Tony.
But the person he’s crying for this time—is May.
He’s crying for May.
TUESDAY, MAY 8 — 8:32 AM
The punishment is bad.
He doesn’t remember it.
They don’t hurt Cassie—but they hurt Peter, and when he comes back he’s bleeding so profusely that when he wakes his whole jumpsuit’s stiff with it. Cassie helps him patch up—but Charlie got his head with the hammer so hard that he can’t remember the past few days. More, maybe. It’s all fuzzy now, bloody, his memories mushed together.
He remembers one thing, one thought, though, from the escape.
It’s one that he keeps thinking and thinking, repeating in his mind like a mantra, folding it over and over like a piece of paper: I’m gonna die here.
So Peter gets it now. He really, really gets it.
If Tony finishes the weapon—Peter dies.
If Tony fails to make the weapon—then eventually, Peter will succumb to his injuries—and die.
If Tony dies for whatever reason, then it’s over—and Peter dies.
And if someone sends for help—Peter dies, too, because Charlie doesn’t want to get caught.
The only way that Peter's getting out of here is in a body bag. He's never gonna see home again, see Tony again…
And if Peter finally cracks and does it himself, they’ll take it out on everyone else—Cassie, Tony, Scott Lang, even Pepper…
He’s trapped.
The lights in the bunker room can be confusing. They flicker and flicker above them, locked in a cage, and they rarely turn off. Peter and Cassie had to get used to sleeping in light—and they never know what time of day it is without any windows or clocks, so they rely on Peter’s hearing, usually. Sometimes one of the guards will mention the time. The only way Peter knows the general time is if they’re all sleeping. Sometimes the lights will go out during the day for a couple hours—sometimes they won’t go off at night.
And when the stars align and the lights flick off in the nighttime, they’ll hide in the dark like it’ll shield them from the coming day, hiding under their tarp-like blanket, whispering to each other and telling each other secrets. Cassie calls them dark nights.
So on one of these dark nights, Cassie pokes at his side, drawing his attention. "Peter," she whispers, and both of them are in enough pain that it keeps them awake. "Peter."
"Yeah? "
"Can I ask you something?"
"‘Course," he answers tiredly, without opening his eyes.
"Something weird?"
That catches his attention. He opens his eyes then, squinting into the dark and trying to find the girl’s face. She’s only inches from him, but the darkness is shrouding her from him. "Yeah," he says gingerly. "Always, Stinger."
Some quiet then as Cassie thinks. "When you were little," she says then, very quietly, "how long were you gone?"
He peers at her then. "What?"
"How long was it? "she repeats. "When you were gone. When you were…here."
Cassie always asks him strange questions—but this one takes the cake. "Cass," he says, "what are you talking about?"
Now the girl’s getting frustrated. "When you were gone," she demands, in that way only little kids can, insisting upon the answers to impossible questions, "how long was it? Did you… Did you get to see your mommy and daddy again?"
It takes a moment for her words to take root, for the understanding to click in his weary mind, and then Peter forces himself into a half-sitting position so that he can look her right in the eyes. "Cassie," he says, and the girl’s staring oddly at the ceiling. "Cass. Cassie, look at me."
Her eyes flick to his—her brow is all scrunched up, her face worried. Her bad hand’s tucked close to her chest, as broken as ever, and her good hand is curled up right next to it. There’s a bruise at the edge of her hairline, mottled yellow and brown.
"Do you think this happens to every kid?" he asks carefully.
And slowly, assuredly, the little girl nods.
Oh. Oh, God. "No," he says, "no, Cass, this isn’t… This isn’t normal, you hear me? This doesn’t usually happen to people."
She’s quiet for a moment, musing over what he’s said, and then she does this minute squint with her eyes: a tiny, tiny wince. "I don’t get it," she replies, dejected.
He forgot that this was something kids did—taking something that happened to them and assuming it also happened to everyone else. "This isn’t…" He did it when he was little, too; after his parents died, he thought it happened to everybody—having their lives flipped upside down like that. "Nobody took me when I was a kid. When I was little, I… I just lived with my family, in my house. I… I went to the zoo, I went to school, I played with my friends… And I went home every day, went to sleep in my bed. Just like you did, Stinger."
"Even when you were seven?" she whispers back. "Like me?"
"Even when I was seven," he assures her, fast. "And when I was eight and nine and ten, all the way to now. No one ever took me. This… It shouldn’t happen to kids. Or to anyone. It’s… It’s not normal, Stinger. Kids are supposed to be kids—to play, go to school, eat dinner…" He looks impossibly to the ceiling, like there’s some fucked up god up there he can plead to for help. "It’s supposed to be… Like it was before. Before you were here. You’re supposed to be… You’re not supposed to get hurt."
"But the grown-ups…" she tries, and then she shakes her head, and they fall into another lapse of silence. In the quiet, Peter’s eyes adjust to the dark, the lines of the room coming to him in blues and grays. Cassie’s face, too, comes to her like a warped, rippled reflection in a pool. Her expression wavers—or maybe it’s just the dark. "They don’t," she tries, in that ashamed whisper of a voice, "get punished?"
" No," he whispers, quick, as though the faster he says it the easier she’ll believe it. The way she’s asking this question is making something twist hard into him, corkscrewing into the tender meat of his stomach. "God, no, Cass, kids aren’t supposed to get hurt for things."
She’s looking at him, staring, scanning his face as though searching for the lie, searching for the catch. "Even if they’re bad?"
Peter swallows. God, this kid. In her words, that unspoken question: even if I’m bad? "Even if they’re bad," he says, because he doesn’t know if he can explain the concept of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ right now. "It’s never, ever supposed to happen."
She’s breathing funny now, taking breaths between her words. "Even if they’re really, really bad?"
"Even then."
The dark is like a fog between them, spreading thick between their faces. "I did bad things," she whispers to him, like they’re in a confession booth with a latticed wall between them. "When I was littler, I… I did some bad things. Is that why…"
Cassie, he whispers, because he needs her to understand, " Cassie, listen to me. There is nothing—nothing, nothing ever—that could make you deserve being hurt. Nothing. It’s not okay, no matter what you’ve done. Even if you were the worst kid in the entire world—you still wouldn’t deserve someone hurting you. It’s never okay. Never."
She pauses, and Peter hates that she doesn’t know this, hates that someone has ingrained this in her, hates that people made her think she deserved this. "Never?" she whispers, her eyebrows sloping, and in her voice is this shameful grief.
"Never ever," he promises.
They’re both breathing in the silence then, breathing in the nighttime, and he can hear her little breaths get slow and slower as sleep threatens to take them. And just as exhaustion has begun to pull at his eyes, just as he’s starting to give in, he hears his little girl shift.
She takes a very small breath, tight in her chest, and then she whispers to him, whispers into the dark, whispers up to the far-off ceiling, "Then why did it happen to me?"