bargaining/depression
"Do you use drugs?" Rhodey finally asks one day on one of his numerous visits. Peter has a feeling he's been meaning to ask for a while.
Peter looks up slowly. "Yeah," he answers, like he's dumb. Why does he even have to ask?
Rhodey swallows, like it surprises him. . “What do you use?”
He shrugs. “Anything. I do anything.” It's honest. He hasn't been honest in a while.
He started small, a few puffs of weed to see if it worked with his enhanced body. Well, that's what he told himself. It doesn't quite work how he imagines it happen for others, strange and distorted; like he is viewing the world through water, like he is lying at the bottom of a swimming pool and looking up towards the dappled light. From there, it was easy. Snowball.
“Why?”
He takes a while to answer, this time. Well, to answer honestly. At the time, he brushes it off with some comments like, “why does anyone?” and keeps it up until Rhodey leaves again.
But really, he thinks about it.
He wishes he had done all the things he was scared of. Like hug him, or say what he really meant, or spend more time actually interning, not just as Spider-Man.
Maybe then he would still be here. Maybe it would change just the slightest thing, and then he would still be here. The butterfly effect.
Maybe it’s his fault he’s dead.
—
He’s in class when it happens, the professor — some young dude who honestly doesn't give a fuck — makes a joke, about Tony Stark and, y’know, him being dead.
Everyone laughs, but Peter just sucks in a breath. That’s it. It’s sunk right in now, into his bones. His DNA. It’s there forever now, and maybe in a thousand years whatever survives the earth will dig up his corpse and see it there.
TONY STARK IS DEAD.
Along a femur, or the ribs carrying a word each, or his skull, right across the temple, like a brand.
—
And then there's the darkness, the one that lives in the night, in the shadow. It snarls in the corner of rooms and curls down from the blackness between the stars. It reaches out and tries to take him. To a place he might not come back from.
He lies in bed and stares at the walls, at his phone, anything but the creeping blackness around the corner of a room.
At parties, the darkness is pushed away by the lights and music and people filling every space, until the lights stutter with the beat and for one second, two, the lights go out and the darkness leaps out at him. It's gone by the time the lights go back on, but Peter remembers.
—
He goes home, and fills the bathtub scalding-hot, strips, and eased himself into it. There's a moment, in the clear, where he doesn't feel anything at all. But then he does. He bends over, draws his knees to his chest, and sobs.
Sobs, and sobs, and sobs. Shaking, heaving breaths. Hot, hot tears and snot and his hands shaking hands shaking where they grip his skin.
He’s not really sure why. Tony Stark has been dead for awhile now. He’s so much more privileged than anyone else he’s grown up with, his poor neighbourhood in Queens. He’s got a full ride to a top university, opportunity once he gets out. Everything has been handed to him, and here he is, crying in the bathroom because someone died.
When he gets out of the tub, the water is cold and the condensation has dribbled down the mirror.
He stares at himself for a long time in that mirror, then takes one hand and smears it across himself. There’s not much condensation left, but he is still distorted for a moment. Eventually the image of himself clears.