might not be alone
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 21 — 12:30 PM
It’s Friday. The court day looms over them like a literal storm, dark and cloudy and shrouding any sense of light they had in the days before. Two days, and Peter will have to stand in a courtroom. Two days, and Peter will have to see those bastards again.
But it’s lunch time, so for now—Peter and Cassie are playing in the bed with their Legos, and for a split second Cassie has a can of mandarin oranges awaiting her and she plays with Legos for a second too long—choosing play over food. Peter still eats quickly, though, maniacally, eating so fast he’s practically inhaling it. When they’re done, they return to the toys.
They’ve gotten to this point of partial normalcy now—and Tony really, really doesn’t want to lose it. Peter’s reassured now, that when he returns to his hospital room that Cassie will be there. He’s begun to trust the meals that come—and the toys with it. He even trusts, somewhat, that Tony and the other parents won’t hurt Cassie.
They’ve been working on Peter’s mobility, too; they need him to be able to walk for the hearing, because he refuses to sit in a wheelchair. But the kid still can’t make it more than a hundred feet without collapsing, so they put a brace on his leg, one that allows him some bending but doesn’t put as much pressure on the broken bones there. Getting it on should take a couple minutes, but instead it takes an hour, Peter pulling at it every time, breaking off anything he can and ruining the clasps with his super-strength. “Peter, leave it,” he says gently.
He does at first, taking his hand straight off it; it’s clear that he doesn’t like having it on him, though, and when Tony’s back is turned, he breaks the first one right off.
“He doesn’t like those,” Cassie says quietly, as Tony is talking with Peter—he can hear their voices from somewhere behind him.
“Doesn’t like what, honey?” Maggie Paxton asks.
She takes her stuffed animal then, that stuffed striped zebra, and maneuvers it carefully in her lap; then little Cassies stares down at it for a moment, her face going a little slack and squeezes the zebra’s leg, hard. And she says, in that small voice, “The doctor gave him those, too.”
They know not to ask follow up questions—not now, not when everything’s so fragile, but Tony can’t help it— “And then what happened?” he asks, and Maggie twists her head at him, hissing his name—he ignores her.
Cassie picks at the zebra’s fur with her little fingers. “Charlie broke it.”
And Tony remembers it—a rush of memory hits him like a fucking truck—
On the television, someone’s dragging Peter to the chair, hand wrapped around his upper arm—Peter’s limping fast, trying to keep up, but this time there’s something on his leg: a plaster cast, white and solid, all the way up from his foot to his thigh. Charlie’s dropped the phone by now—he’s snorting up another batch of white dust off his knife, swipes the rest out with his finger and shoves it into his pink-and-bloody gums. When he sees Peter, he stalks to the door. “The fuck is this?” snaps Charlie, heading towards the kid, and Peter jerks backwards, only to be forced forward again by the guard. “Parker! PARKER!”
Charlie grabs the kid by the collar of his shirt and drags him up—Peter pushes at him, Charlie shakes him violently, and the kid stops pushing at all. “THE FUCK IS THIS, HUH? DOC THINKS HE CAN PROTECT YOU? IS THAT IT?”
Peter’s shaking his head—and the kid’s already crying, even as he tries to stay brave—and shaking, and Charlie hits him with his other hand, a slap, hard, a crack! that Tony can hear over the phone. “FUCKING ANSWER ME!”
Once Peter finally gargles out a satisfactory answer from his bleeding mouth, Charlie sniffs loudly—there’s still a smear of white dust under one nostril. “I’ll teach him—doc thinks he can stop me?” He chokes out a vicious laugh. “NO ONE CAN PROTECT YOU, PARKER—I’M IN CHARGE! I AM! WHO’S IN CHARGE, PARKER?”
There it is—a flash of defiance in the kid’s eyes, fury visceral in him. With tears still drying on his bruised face, shining, Peter—stupid, brave, wonderful Peter—just clamps his mouth shut.
Charlie’s eyes go wild, pupils expanding as the drug he took sinks into him, and he cocks his head to the side, grasping harder in Peter’s torn-up jumpsuit—and hits him— “ANSWER ME! FUCKING ANSWER ME!”—and hits him again, even harder, his fist a flash of color—and his ring leaves a streak of red across Peter’s left cheek—and another, and another, until the side of his face is bloody and Peter’s gargling out red, his hands flailing up to protect himself only to be easily pinned above his head with Charlie’s bloody hand, both wrists clamped in Charlie’s meaty fingers. “SAY IT! FUCKING SAY IT!” he snarls, spittle flying onto Peter’s bloody cheek.
With both arms pinned above him, he curls his head to his chest, trying to shy away from another hit. “Y-you—”
Charlie clamps down harder on his wrists. “WHO’S IN CHARGE!”
“You,” Peter chokes out, eyes squeezed shut. Red comes in slow trails from nose right into his mouth and then follows down his chin, down his neck, and disappears under his collar.
Charlie releases him then, and the kid drops like a fucking stone onto the ground, groaning now, shielding the left side of his face with a shaky hand. Charlie’s screaming again, something incoherent, and Peter’s crawling away on his arms—one of them is broken from yesterday, Tony thinks, because Peter keeps faltering beneath it, dragging himself forward on his knees with one hand to prop himself up. The other he now holds crooked to his chest, cradling. He’s gasping, and his face is half-bloody now, ruined by Charlie’s fist, and still he crawls, frantic and broken, away from the crazed man.
(Tony can see it in his face—the sheen in his eyes, the flare of his nose, the cringe in his jaw. Peter knows what’s about to happen. They both know what’s about to happen. At this point, he’s just prolonging the inevitable.)
Charlie stalks to the crawling kid and grabs him then—by the fucking hair, he grabs him—a fistful of tangled brown hair, and he yanks him up with such violence that Peter shrieks, grabbing uselessly up at Charlie’s hands.
It’s not hard to shove him in and strap him down; the kid’s much too weak to fight back, and barely willing to do much more than strain at the cuffs—so they manage to get him locked into the chair with some ease. The kid’s chest heaves—a terrified breath, and then another—and his casted leg sticks out awkwardly from the chair, pointed out straight. “MASON! HAMMER, NOW!”
Peter thrashes suddenly, violently—with a wild scream—so hard that he smacks his head against the chair, so hard that it cracks audibly. “No—NO—NO, PLEASE—”
Mason shuffles up to his boss, handing him the massive thing, and Charlie waves it in the air like a fucking trophy. “Doc’s gotta learn, too!” he says, in a near-cheery voice, waving it back and forth, swinging it around. “Doc’s gotta learn, right, Parker?”
Peter flinches at his own name, and he looks quickly to the camera and back. “Wait—” he tries, and his eyes go impossibly wide, glistening in the light of fluorescent bulbs overhead, as Charlie raises that hammer, “wait, wait, wait —”
Charlie swings it down, and there’s a whiff of sound as it comes, then a crunch of plaster and bone, and Peter howls like something dead—
Tony looks at the kid now. How could he have forgotten that? So many moments, all buried somewhere in his fucked-up mind. Peter cuffed to that chair, Peter curling up on that cement floor, Peter dragged sideways against the wall by his long hair, Peter slumped forward with his head hanging down. “Oh,” he says.
There’s a dark spread of sparse hair over the girl’s head now, although it’s still patchy in places. “Charlie always breaks it,” Cassie says, looking down at the steel-vibranium brace with some twist in her face.
(They dragged Peter everywhere by the end. To the chair and back. He could barely move; by the end, they didn’t even need to strap him down. Sometimes Charlie would drop him on the ground and beat him there, just because he could. They only put him in the chair to scare him.)
And for the next hour, they keep trying, encouraging Peter to move with his new brace, to try to walk around the room, but all that does is make him more guarded, and he’ll curl up on the bed with Cassie, guarding her with his thin, weary arms, and start glancing between Helen and Tony like he doesn’t remember who they are.
After lunch, Matt Murdock and his partner return to the Tower for another meeting.
They’re in his makeshift office—Murdock and his partner Foggy Nelson, as well as Pepper and Tony sitting across from them. Rhodey and Steve Rogers at the door, too. And they’re arguing—as per usual, they’re arguing.
Tony rubs his eyes. “Aren’t there—there are ways around this, right? A determining competence thing?”
Murdock grimaces, his mouth forming a thin line. “A competency evaluation? Those are for defendants, not witnesses.”
“But there’s something like that?” Tony presses on. “Right? We could disqualify him from… from testifying? People do that sometimes, right?”
Murdock takes in a small, grounding breath. “Yes and no. It has happened, yes—but only with witnesses that were so…disoriented or so…delayed that they couldn’t express themselves at all. They call kids to the stand, Tony, as young as four—they call seniors with dementia, drug addicts, mentally ill, anyone …” He shakes his head. “Peter has as much competence as anyone else. They won’t disqualify him.”
He can feel it there in his chest, that want for some peace, the desire for one more day of nothing before Peter’s dragged off to court. But it’s time. It’s time. “But he’s just a witness,” he says helplessly. “He…”
The blind man adjusts his glasses again, and his eyes drift away from Tony’s—like a sadness, a physical one. “An enhanced witness,” says the man. “So thanks to Ross, the law says he’s dangerous. They’re not gonna put him in handcuffs, but—”
“Why the hell would they put him in handcuffs?” Tony asks.
“It’s not uncommon for the enhanced side to want some just some precautionary measures,” Foggy adds, shifting uncomfortably beside his friend. “You understand, to make sure nothing happens—but they will have to give him at least a bodyguard, some security… And they can’t allow you to go without it.”
“Not an option,” Murdock says, bringing forth another sheet of paper. “They gave us a list of options—acceptable bodyguards, and if you don’t pick, they’ll just pick for you.”
Tony’s about to ask What kind of list? but the man in the red glasses just passes it across the table to him. At the top of the list, several superheroes he knows, as well as a list of enhanced soldiers, and the rest are the names he’s never seen before.
“Someone enhanced,” adds Murdock, wincing, “Or an enhanced equivalent, that’s what they require. Pick two, and we’ll get them all worked out for court on Sunday.”
Tony glances up at Rhodey, who’s standing in the corner, and his friend grimaces. “Me?” he says, voice withdrawn.
Murdock nods. “You, him” —the lawyer points a little with a slight motion at Steve Rogers, who’s standing with his arms folded in the doorway— “...and whoever else they pick. A couple soldiers, others—but I’m sure you'd rather have one of you instead of some random enhanced fed.”
Tony is shaking his head. “They should be the ones in cuffs,” he says with this croaky shout, a stab of his hand in the air. “They should be the ones with fucking security measures, they should be the ones in fucking handcuffs.”
“They will be,” says Murdock gently.
They go over more things, too—what they each have to say to the judge, where they’ll stand, what order they’ll go in. Apparently, they’ve gone over some of this before—Tony doesn’t remember it, though.
“So,” Murdock says, once Steve and Rhodey have left the office, “I saw the cast you put on the kid—that’s good.”
“A leg brace,” corrects Pepper.
“Right,” he says. “You’re going to want to keep that up—more casts, braces, medical tape, anything. Leave his hair, show off his scars—you want him to seem as non-threatening as possible.”
Beside Tony, Pepper nods, her hand over her stomach; Tony just gapes. “You want us to—to—to fake it?”
Murdock tilts his head. “A little. The worse he looks, the kinder they’ll be. And we want them to be kind.”
They talk a little more—about actual charges, both federal and state, until tony’s exhausted from the legal jargon and antsy to see Peter, and at last Murdock lets out this strained sigh and adds, “There’s something else we need to talk about.”
Tony knows what it means when Murdock gets that tone is his voice—a heavy, gutted tone, like he’s just been punched in the stomach. He knows what they’re about to talk about, and he can feel it pull painfully at his skull, bury deep in his gut like a knife.
“You remember what we talked about before—dropping most of the charges?”
Tony nods. “Yeah.”
Murdock continues, “Well, for Peter we’re dropping everything—everything except for one charge—
“Everything?” he says. How will they get the Seven in prison if they’re dropping most of the charges?
“Yes” Murdock says. “With Peter’s…condition, I doubt he’ll last very long on the stand. Even if the trial’s a year from now—I’ve seen it happen before—victims kill themselves before this kind of thing, just so they don’t have to testify. I don’t want him up there any longer than he has to be.”
Tony nods.
(Truly, he’s barely listening. He never thought he’d get to this place—where Peter was safe, where Tony was free of the lab, where they were discussing how to prosecute the fuckers who bloodied Peter every day for five months straight.)
“...now, the sex crimes. Sex trafficking, abuse, the works. Those are our most important charges—”
“Trafficking?” he says, fast.
Matt Murdock braces his hand against his face. “Let me finish, Tony. Forensic evidence uncovered one man who probably committed the majority of the sex crimes against Peter. According to the witness—”
“Riri?”
“Yes,” he says. “According to her, there was—at the very least, one man who sexually abused Peter during his captivity.”
Foggy Nelson adds, “His name is Quentin Beck.”
The name sounds vaguely familiar. “Is he.. The name sounds vaguely familiar. “Is he… Did he…” The realization sinks, deep in his belly like a stone. “He worked for me.”
Murdock grimaces, and Foggy Nelson passes him an envelope. “Until a couple years ago, yes. Fired for—”
“He assaulted some kid,” Tony says, and he feels sick just talking about it. “A middle schooler—I remember. Security caught him with the kid in his office.” He swallows. “He was…in there? With Peter?”
Murdock nods. “It’s a bit more complicated than that, though. Apparently, Beck was communicating with someone who alerted him about the whole Keene project. There’s text records, call history… This guy was the one paying for everything, supplying Keene and the rest with drugs, working coverup jobs…”
“Who?”
“We don’t know quite yet.”
Foggy Nelson adds, “Supplier kept a pretty low profile—everything was untraceable.”
Tony knew this, too. He’d mentioned it to the police officers when they’d questioned him— There was someone else running the show, he’d said, again and again and again. And when they’d asked him who, he didn’t have anything to give them. Riri never told him who it was—just implied it: that someone had supplied Charlie Keene with the money, the supplies, the drugs, even the injections of super soldier sedative they’d used on Peter. And most importantly, access to a federally owned former HYDRA building. The bunker.
Someone encouraged Keene to do this—it wasn’t even that crazy man’s idea. Keene was just a guy—this mystery supplier was something else entirely. Someone with access to federal buildings, enough money to drown a couple dozen addicts in PCP, enough to pay Beck and five soldiers to get involved, enough to hack FRIDAY and pay Charlie and his gang to kidnap Peter Parker, Scott Lang, and Cassie, too.
Someone with enough power and enough malice to look the other way when someone raped Peter Parker.
“According to the bank records,” says Murdock quietly, “there was an original payment made to Quentin Beck right before he originally arrived. And then he contacted the supplier, and they had this series of text messages.” Foggy passes Tony a sheet of paper: printed out messages in green bubbles. “They found this on Beck’s phone.”
Text messages. Dozens of them. Tony reads the paper:
BECK: [Hold on how are you gonna keep stark pinned down if potts is still up and moving]
UNKNOWN: [we got his kid]
BECK: [ts has a kid???]
UNKNOWN: [nephew or something. intern. enhanced apparently]
BECK: [of course he does, stark fucked his way through the eighties there’s no way he didn’t have a love kid.]
UNKNOWN: [no like an actual kid. teenager]
BECK: [wow how old?]
UNKNOWN: [idk not my problem] [they knock him around once a day and stark squeals like a kicked puppy] [kinda fun having stark under my boot]
BECK: [i bet] [can i get a pic]
UNKNOWN: [of who] [stark?]
BECK: [the kid]
UNKNOWN: [IMG_1321.HEIC]
BECK: [god he’s young] [how old is he again?]
UNKNOWN: [the fuck does it matter]
BECK: [whatever] [and he’s like under total lock and key?]
UNKNOWN: [not going anywhere, the hackers kid too]
BECK: [there’s two??]
UNKNOWN: [yeah and that one’s all over the goddamn news cuz the parents won’t leave well enough alone]
BECK: [how old]
UNKNOWN: [a girl, q, so keep your dick in ur pants]
BECK: [fuck you]
There’s another series of messages, too, dated weeks later.
BECK: [if you let me do what i want to the kid you can take a million off my pay]
UNKNOWN: [which one]
BECK: [the boy]
UNKNOWN: [yeah sure]
BECK: [perfect]
UNKNOWN: [how far is stark on that weapon]
BECK: [not far enough]
That’s where the printed messages end.
“He paid the supplier,” Tony realizes and he’s feeling sicker by the second, like there’s something broiling in him. “He paid him… to…”
“To have sex with Peter,” Murdock says solemnly. “Yes.”
Tony’s having trouble breathing. “He worked for me,” he echoes. “God, he worked for me.”
He remembers that guy—brown hair with a scruffy brown beard, tall with dark eyes. Beck. A predator. The kid’s family didn’t want him going through the legal process, and the kid refused to say anything after it had happened, so his legal team dropped it, paid the family thousands to try to make up for what had happened. Things like that didn’t usually happen at Stark Industries—Tony knew too many people who had suffered like that, too many to ever look the other way. He met with the kid himself, shook his hand. A sweet kid, interesting in engineering. His name was Miles. Miles Morales.
“...understand now, Tony?” Murdock is saying. “Legally, that’s sex trafficking. Because Beck paid the supplier for Peter, and that payment’s primary purpose was for sexual contact—that makes it commercial. It’s our easiest charge to prove, with the text messages and the bank statements, and if you want Beck to go away for a long time…”
Tony’s hearing is going white, and his vision’s going hazy, and he’s gripping the arms of his chair to steady himself, and Matt Murdock is still talking.
“So yes, I think we should drop the charges—everything except the sex trafficking. For the amount it happened, Beck’ll get at least twenty years for it, and add that to Cassie’s and the racketeering, he’ll go to prison for the rest of his life.” Murdock adjusts his glasses. “Everything else,” he adds, “will just upset Peter and will most likely fall through, with the law of collateral—you’d be essentially dragging him through court for nothing. But with the frequency of the sex crimes and their severity…”
Tony pushes his hand to his arc reactor, the circular spot in his chest glowing blue through his shirt, and he tries to breathe properly as Murdock finishes speaking.
“...they found DNA on him—remnants—so there’s no doubt that Beck had some kind of sexual contact with Peter while he was imprisoned. There’s evidence of intercourse as close as twenty-four hours before he was rescued…”
It’s a physical pain in his stomach then—twenty four hours. Twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours before Tony held Peter in his arms, that fucker was raping him. Twenty-four hours before they saved him, Peter was alone and afraid with Quentin fucking Beck, unaware that they were coming for him. Twenty-four hours before, Peter was doing to Beck what he kept trying to do to the nurses. Thinking he had to. Thinking there was no other option. Believing that he’d never ever see daylight again—
Tony struggles to breathe through the shock of it. “Twenty-four—“ The air physically stops in him, a pressure pulling wide. Riri explained to him once where Peter stayed, in a quiet, resigned voice. That cell the size of a walk-in closet. Those scratched-up walls and grimy floors. Those black jumpsuits that belonged to old HYDRA prisoners. The reeking toilet. The freezing cold sink.
Tony tries to take another breath, and it comes in ragged, horrible, like a broken piece of glass. He gasps it out, pressing his hand to the middle of his chest, and finding the pacemaker there only makes it worse, makes him dizzy with thought—
—and here Tony is, completely unharmed, complaining about his fainting and his heart problems, complaining about the loneliness and the drugs and the lack of sleep, when all this time Peter—he was—Peter, beautiful brave Peter, his wonderful nerdy kid was being—he was being—
“Tony, breathe.” A hand on his back, rubbing gently. “Breathe, honey, just breathe for me, you’re alright.”
—but Peter wasn’t—this whole time, he’d been forced to solicit some asshole engineer, thought that he had to—that he had to—to touch him. For food, for medicine, for bathing, whatever else. He’d been trapped in that fucking hellhole, in that nine-by-six foot space, without a mattress or a pillow or a fucking blanket, awaiting torture, awaiting the creaking door, awaiting a visit for Quentin fucking Beck—
Oh, God, his kid. His precious, beautiful kid. How could someone do this to him? How could someone look at Peter, at his endless joy, at his care, at his smile, at his brave heart, and hurt him still?
And Tony didn’t do a thing to help him. He just sat around and worked on a useless fucking prototype and hallucinated his friends coming to rescue him and watched the television and—and—and all that time . All that time, Peter had been there, in that room, waiting for someone to rescue him.
Waiting for Tony to rescue him.
And Tony didn’t —he never saved him—he never even left the fucking lab—he let it happen—he fucking let it happen—this is all his fault—
“Tony.” A hand on his back, warm pressure. “Tony, breathe—just breathe, come on.”
Tony gathers himself, pushing his knuckles into the blue-glowing reactor in his chest. It gives him some mild comfort, that slowish pulse in his chest, and he gasps in a shaky breath. Pepper keeps pressing slow at his back, helping him.
The lawyers before him look incredibly uncomfortable. “I’m sorry to upset you,” says Murdock. “But we have to discuss this. The court hearing—you have to be prepared.”
“I know,” he manages, “I know.”
“The courtroom will be closed,” says the lawyer. “Due to the nature of the case—with two juvenile victims and a juvenile perpetrator—so you don’t have to worry about that. And besides that, it’s a federal case, so they have to close it to the public. No media, no paparazzi—just family members and anyone approved by the judge.”
Tony hadn’t even thought about that. He just nods, his head in both of his hands.
“Now, you don’t want to explain this to Peter. Younger enhanced victims tend to take court pretty hard, and in Peter’s case… Just tell him they’re going to prison no matter what—which they are. It’s just a matter of how long. Now, in the case of the sex trafficking charge, that’s our most important—”
“The what?”
Matt Murdock looks suddenly sad, and then he removes his red glasses, scrubs a hand down his face, and replaces them. “We just talked about this, Tony—the sex trafficking. To do what Quentin Beck did, in the manner that he did it—technically, it’s not a private crime. It’s human trafficking. He was performing commercial sex acts, Tony—”
“No,” Tony snaps, and he feels the heat of his thoughts rise in him. “He never—”
“The definition of it is loose,” Murdock adds, “but this definitely, definitely applies. To entice someone by any means—including food, pain medication, harm to another, restraint—these are all things Peter was, well…” Beside his partner, Foggy’s not looking at any of them—he’s looking at his shoes, a little pale. “...paid in.”
“You don’t know that,” he says quickly, frustration pulsing through him, and he doesn’t know why this is making him so fucking angry.
Murdock just looks sad, his mouth downturned. “He tries to touch people whenever they give him things, Tony. That’s—I mean, there’s no other word for it. It’s sex trafficking.”
He imagines the kid again, like time skipping forward—
—wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and pink lace-up sneakers, that mischievous brave look on his face, defiance sparkling in his eyes—
—his jeans torn to shorts, hanging looser on his hips, brown hair hanging shaggy around his grimy face, inner elbow littered with needle marks, his bare chest dark with bruises, sneakers spattered with old blood, knee aching with half-healed broken bone—
—in a black jumpsuit, the fabric swallowing his skinny limbs, his thin white wrists circled by dozens of scars, a permanent hunch to his back, the pinkish scars on his face, dull-eyed and exhausted, plastic port taped to his wrist—
—in that same black jumpsuit, cloth stiff with old blood, quiet and jumpy, sleeves torn up and baring bloody wrists, jumpsuit pulled down to his waist, hair dragging low over his collarbone, pink scars layered over old white ones, hollow-eyed and frightened and long given up, forced to his knees—
“Can’t you drop this one, too?” Tony says quietly.
Murdock sighs. “Tony… Quentin Beck has sources. He’s got money, connections—I don’t know how, but he does. In all likelihood, if they get him on racketeering, he’ll be in and out. It’s got a minimum sentence of two years. He could be in and out in no time, you understand? I don’t want that for Peter.”
Tony doesn’t want that either.
“I know it doesn’t sound good to you, but… The rest of them we can get—they’ll probably be in it for life. But Beck?” Murdock shakes his head. “I’m not sure. According to the witness, he showed up late in the process—and he rarely participated in any of the filmed sessions. Nothing public. There weren’t even any drugs in his system when we found him. With his lawyer, it’ll be much easier for Beck to get a lessened sentence. And I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure that doesn’t happen. Which means, yes, we’re keeping the sex trafficking charge. Besides that—the law states that if the offender makes someone available for commercial sex—even knowing or believing it might happen to him—that’s a class A felony. Every single one of them could suffer under that charge.”
Tony’s not listening to Murdock’s incessant rambling; he can barely feel Pepper’s hand on his back. He tries to pay attention, he really does, but the world is tilting again, hazy.
He can’t help it—Tony imagines Peter then, the way he looked a month ago—trapped in that room he’s never seen.
Walls close enough to touch, windowless door locked, hiding far beneath the bed with a little girl. He imagines him there, bleeding and in pain, his stomach cramping with hunger. His face swollen from Charlie’s beatings, back bloody from the wire, breathing in low gasps of pain. Curled up on his side, panicking as the door creaks open.
Waiting for someone to rescue him.
For Tony to rescue him.
Tony leaves the room before the meeting’s even over.
Steve knocks a couple times on Sarah Wilson’s open door. He hears a come in and pushes the door the rest of the way, finding her office just the way it was the last time he was here. “Hey,” Steve says, shuffling in. He’s got on one of Bucky's sweatshirts, some sweatpants, too. Worn socks and some slides. “You busy?”
She shakes her head. “You wanna sit?” she asks.
They sit in silence for a long while; Steve’s still not good at this. Eventually, Sarah asks him if he wants some water, he says yes, and just as she gets up he blurts out, “Court hearing’s tomorrow.”
Sarah pauses where she is, just a step away from her chair, and slowly sits back down. “That’s right,” she says, putting her notebook back into her lap. “Do you wanna talk about it?”
Steve shakes his head. “Not for me—I just mean, it’s gonna be hard, you know, for Peter to see him. Them. All the people who hurt him.”
Sarah nods. She’s wearing a light-colored shirt, and her hair is different, braids pulled half-up half-down. She looks a lot like Sam—that helps, Steve thinks. “Could be hard for you, too.”
Steve shrugs, attempting nonchalance, and it doesn’t work.
“Do you feel like it could be difficult for you? Seeing him?”
“I’m not afraid of him,” he says.
“I didn’t say you were,” she says gently. “Just that it might be hard.”
Steve shifts, uncomfortable, on the couch. On the coffee table in front of him, there’s a spread of magazines and a small basket full of items—fidget toys, a couple stress balls, colored pencils, the works. He picks up the stress ball, squeezes; feeling Sarah’s eyes on him then, he drops it back into the basket. “I’m stronger than him,” he says, “you know?”
Sarah nods.
“I mean—there’s no reason for me to be afraid of him. Not like this.” He gestures then to himself—to Captain America, to his height, his bulk, his muscle: all of it. “Right?”
“You are technically stronger,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t be afraid.”
Steve shakes his head. “I’m stronger than him,” he says. “I… I mean—God, this is so fucking embarrassing. I’m gonna have to say it in front of everyone—that I couldn’t fight off some guy in jeans. A fucking engineer, you know? If it had been, like, a supervillain it would’ve been easier.”
Sarah grasps her notebook in her hand. It’s open. “What I'm hearing,” she says, “is that you think what happened to you was embarrassing because under normal circumstances, you would’ve been able to stop him.”
“Yes,” he says, and his chest clenches.
“Steve,” she says, “those weren’t normal circumstances. You were drugged enough to pass out—and you did, right?
“Yeah,” he says, a choked sound, because he remembers that. The passing out. The gaps in his memory like literal black in his mind, waking up and not remembering where he was, just to be back there again. “Couple times.”
“That alone would make it abnormal circumstances, Steve. He took away your strength in order to give himself an advantage over you. That’s just… the nature of assault, Steve.”
He knows that—he’s not stupid. He knows that.
And he drops his head into his hands like he usually does, looking down at the carpet instead of Sarah. Why the hell did he even walk back in here?
“It might not be good to hash this all out again,” Sarah says, quietly. He can hear her rest her pen against her notebook, hears her shut it around the pen. “Right before the hearing, I mean.”
“I know,” Steve says. Still, he stares down at the carpet. “Just keep thinking about it.”
And somehow, forty-six minutes later, they’re still ‘hashing it out,’ arguing as per usual, going in circles and circles, Sarah giving her shitty therapy takes and Steve saying, for the last fucking time, “Would you stop fucking calling it that?”
“Assault?” she repeats, looking up at him. Her face is open and wide with concern—so much like Sam’s.
“Yes,” he snaps. “I did it—I know exactly what I did. Everybody keeps calling it that—but it’s—they don’t… They don’t get it.”
“What don’t they get?” she asks.
Steve grimaces; at Sarah’s even tone, he sits back. He’s holding that stress ball again, squeezing a couple times. “I… I started it. I was the one, you know. Doing it to him, not the other way around. I basically, I mean. I came on to him. I caused the whole thing.”
Sarah presses her lips together. “It doesn’t matter what you did,” she says, grasping that notebook still, “or didn’t do. He still assaulted you. You didn’t cause it—and it’s not your fault.”
Steve shakes his head. “Forget everything else for a second, okay?” he says, and he can hear his voice crack. “The only reason that…that it happened was because of decisions I made. Me. Not him. The only reason he put his hands on me at all was because I told him to. So how is that not my fault? I fucking caused it.”
“The circumstances matter, Steve,” she says, “he didn’t give you much of a choice.”
“But it was me ,” he says. “I told him yes, and the rest…”
“You didn’t consent to the rest.”
He nods shakily. “I know. Just… Still.”
“It’s hard sometimes for people to accept that something happened that was out of their control,” she says.
Steve shakes his head, dropping the stress ball onto the couch beside him. “But I stopped him the first time,” he says. “I…” And he had. He’d seen what was going to happen to Peter and he’d broken free.
“But he drugged you,” she says again. “You were physically unable to—“
“Don’t say it,” he says.
Sarah stops. “Feeling embarrassed is a perfectly normal response, Steve. Something violating did happen to you.”
Embarrassing is such a simple word for it, but it’s true. He can’t stop that feeling burning in his chest like acid—like he’s a kid again, like he had his pants pulled down at recess. “It’s just so…”
He finds himself scouring the coffee table again for a distraction—ånything, anything not to have to say this out loud. “I just don’t understand,” he says, “how that could’ve happened, you know? I mean, it’s me.” He presses his knuckles into his chest. “I mean, fuck, Sarah, that was me in that room. How the fuck did that happen?”
It just seems wrong. It doesn’t feel real.
“It happened,” Sarah says. “It’s not right, but it happened.”
He finds the stress ball where he dropped it on the couch, and he picks it up again. “It feels like,” he says, “it wasn’t even me, you know? Like I became something else in that room. I couldn’t—I couldn’t fucking move, Sarah. I was just laying there, and I was so fucking nauseous from the drugs, my head was all over the place, kept going out, and I kept forgetting where my shirt was, and that guy—his voice, God, that voice .” He presses a hand into his eyes, one at a time, and blinks as though that’ll clear his mind of whatever shit’s inside. “It’s not even a scary voice, you know? It wasn’t angry—it was just kind of sultry, he was going for a sexy kind of thing, and that would’ve been really fucking annoying if I wasn’t so fucked up. And the whole—God, the whole time, I just. I just wanted to go home.”
Sarah says, “That’s an understandable response.”
“Not like home-home,” he says. “Like not my place with Bucky. My house. Home. Like with my parents. I wanted to go back home. Felt like falling asleep on the couch, waiting for my mom’s hand to shake me awake.” Steve shakes his head. “And, I—I mean, even if my ma was still alive—she. She knew what I was, you know? She knew I wasn’t…right.”
“You mean gay?” she asks.
Steve grimaces. “Yeah.”
“She didn’t approve?”
“I mean—it was the thirties,” he says. “So she knew, and she just kinda looked the other way.”
But after it happened, I just… I still wanted her there. To hold me, you know. To—to just, God, just to tell everything was gonna be okay. I haven’t wanted that in a long time. But I… God, I really, really wanted to tell her.” There it is—sadness, and it presses at his throat, at his face, aching there. “Still do. I feel like—I mean, it’s my mom, you know? She always fixed everything for me. And I—” He can feel the tears growing. “I just want her to fix this, too.”
Sarah nods. “That's completely understandable." He doesn't know how to respond to that, so he just presses at that stress ball, squeezing and squeezing.
“There was a point,” he adds quietly, “when I was on the ground. On my stomach. And I woke up and I could just hear him breathing, and his hand was…on me. And I couldn’t remember, um. What color my underwear was.” He stares down at the ball. “Which is like, a weird thing to think, I guess, but the drugs… He was touching me, and I just kept trying to remember which boxers I’d put on that morning.” His hand is shaking a little. “And I couldn’t. Remember.”
“That sounds hard,” Sarah says gently.
He shrugs. “Not like it matters,” he says. “Doesn’t change anything. But I hate that I can’t remember. After was kind of messy, too. Memory-wise. It’s in the police station now, probably. Evidence. I could go look, I guess, but I feel like if I go… I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”
“It might be difficult,” she says, “knowing that he has all this information about the time you lost, and you don’t.”
“Yeah,” Steve says. “It is.” And then he looks down, and he thinks about what color his underwear are now—blue. They’re blue.
He looks miserably down at himself. Steve imagines himself then through Beck’s brown eyes—lying facedown on concrete, barechested, gone. “Do you know what it’s like?” he says, because it’s all he can think. “‘Cause I didn’t.”
“No,” says Sarah Wilson carefully, and she closes that notebook with her hand. Her eyebrows slant, tilt—concern. “I don’t.”
Steve shakes his head. “Waking up like that? Coming to, expecting to be like at home in bed and instead you’re just… you’re there, in a room, with someone’s hand on you? It’s not fun, It’s… Fuck, it’s just fucking con fu sing. You don’t know what the hell is going on. You don’t know what position your own body’s in. Can barely fucking see. And you didn’t—“ His voice drops. “It feels like a dream. A really fucked up dream. It’s your body and you can’t even feel it properly. You’re too fucked up to even think thoughts like— oh, that’s bad. Instead I was thinking about how much he was sweating and what color my underwear was—like, trying to figure out what was happening twenty seconds before because I kept forgetting.” He chokes out a laugh. “Kept trying to recognize the room, too. There was something familiar about it, but I couldn’t—couldn’t—recognize—” He swallows. “God, the only time I’m not thinking about it is when I’m fucking sleeping, Sarah. It’s stuck in me, it’s, it’s… The color of the walls, and his skin, he. The smell. Like a… a lotion or something. I don’t fucking know.”
“It won’t always be like that,” she says. “You have to give it time.”
“Everyone’s gonna see me,” he says. “Everyone. God, they’re all gonna know.”
“No one blames you for what happened,” Sarah says, and he just shrugs. “He committed a crime against you, Steve.”
Steve doesn’t usually think of it that way—a crime. It doesn’t feel like a crime. It just feels like him and that brown-haired man in a room—him and Steve, the man’s hand on him, and Steve’s heart thumping in his chest.
He has to tune back in to what Sarah’s saying, and he hears her say, “...what do you mean by that? Fun?”
Steve grimaces. He’s not sure he even meant to say that. Fun. “You know, like.” He swallows. ““I see Bucky sleeping. I mean, we live together, so obviously I see him sleeping.” He shoves his hands into his pockets and leans back a little. He’s glad he has this sweatshirt on, that it shields so much of his body. “And I just… I think about what I looked like. In there. Just laying there, you know?” An ache in his throat, a pressure in his chest, and Steve blinks back burning tears at his lap. “I, uh. I just think, like. I’ve never really thought of having sex with someone like that. I know some people are into that kind of thing, right? They think it’d be… I don’t know.” He looks down at his hands. “So I just look at him, sometimes, Buck—when he’s sleeping, and I just… I don’t get it. I just don’t get it. How could he have done that? Looked at me just lying there and decided to touch me? My eyes weren’t even fucking open.” He opens his hands then, and he closes them tight. “And when you’re that…” He swallows, and he feels his face then, all of it, the heat of his skin. “You don’t even feel it, not really. Doesn’t feel good, doesn’t feel bad. Just that you’re there, and something’s happening.” He looks down at his cup. “And you have no…”
“You can say it, Steve,” she says, a gentle prod.
He drags air into him, a shaky breath. “…control…over it.”
Sarah nods. “You had no control over what happened to you, Steve. So it’s never, ever your fault.”
He sighs something ragged, something tired. “But I told him—“
“It doesn’t matter what you told him,” she says, firm. “You understand? It doesn’t matter what you said, or how you acted, or what you did. He violated your boundaries, he made you do things you didn’t want to do, and he assaulted you while you were unconscious, Steve.”
Another horrible ache in his throat—Steve sees it again in moments: Beck’s brown eyes, the hand pressing against him, the entire room swaying wide around him. “It’s just so… so humiliating,” he says, a whisper—he feels the shame pull hard in his chest, a hook. “And you’re telling me that I gotta sit in that room—knowing what happened, him knowing what happened. Knowing I did that, knowing what I look like—how I—how I—and I just gotta what, act normal? Strong? Like I don’t think about this every single day?”
He breathes in a ragged gulp of air. “And my underwear,” he says, and he’s choking out those words again. “I don’t remember—what color—I just…” Steve tries to imagine it again, like he has so many times before, and he can’t draw it to mind. “I just feel…” He stares down at that glass table. “Like I’m twelve years old again. Small, you know? Helpless.”
Sarah looks at him then; her notebook’s closed. “He made you feel that way,” she says gently, and Steve winces when he looks up at her. “That doesn’t mean that’s what you are.”
Steve just shrugs.
Tony returns to Peter’s room—there, the kid. Peter’s on the bed like usual, knees curled up to his chest. He’s got on a couple pairs of socks, long knitted ones, and he’s pulled them up over a pair of black sweatpants as though trying to conserve the heat there. A T-shirt over his hospital gown, one of Tony’s old band ones, and Tony’s hoodie over that.
Peter’s not saying much—just watching Cassie play with her stuffed toys. Tony offers him a couple things then—some books, paper and pencil, and Peter forces his eyes up to Tony’s—that gaze. God, it’s like pain, like something fucking physical, like someone’s taken a hammer right to his knee again.
“Can I…” Peter says quietly, glancing up at Tony, a fleeting moment of eye contact, and then down at Tony’s hands. “...see her?” Before he can even say anything back, Peter’s already stiffening, dipping that left side of his face down away from Tony as though trying to protect it.
“Of course, buddy,” Tony says, soft. And he realizes then that hoodie—the blue one he’s in now—isn’t one of Tony’s. It’s one of Peter’s —one of his old ones from the compound upstate. It was so big on him that he just assumed…. Five months ago, it fit perfectly—and now it’s so baggy on him that it brings a twist of nausea into Tony’s stomach. “You… You don’t have to ask, you know that, right?”
Through the haze of tangled dark hair, Peter’s eyes flick up again—only one’s visible, and a stretch of scarred skin. Across his face, a horrible look—shame.
In the afternoon, Peter spends a blessed hour in May's hospital bed. Tony sits in the corner, trying not to intrude.
Like the previous times, he’s so hesitant— barely moving towards her, curling his arms around himself, hiding his face beneath his tangled mess of dark hair, trembling with unbidden anxiety, hands shaking, chest shuddering, fearful eyes squeezing open and shut in quick succession.
And just like all the other times, May smiles wearily at him, beckons him forward, and assures him that she just wants to see him. Slowly, tiredly, she reaches out to him. “...Peter…” she whispers, “...my Peter…you’re okay…”
It takes him a minute, and then another, but finally the kid shuffles forward until he’s about a foot away from the bed. He’s not wearing a hat today—just his sweatshirt with the soft hood drawn up over his long hair, and he tugs nervously at the strings of his hoodie, pulling hard, the hood tightening over his head.
“May,” he chokes out. “May, they… They…”
“I know,” she says, “I know, baby… I know.” And a second time, she puts her hand out, sticks it over the bed railing, pale and reaching for her nephew’s hand: a silent come here, baby.
Peter’s face twists. Violently, he shakes his head, stepping back with his arms tightening around himself, and his tangled hair shakes, too. “I… I look…”
“You…look…like Peter,” she whispers to him, before the kid can say anything else. “My…sweet Peter, my beautiful boy…”
And she keeps saying it, calling him by his name, and eventually he takes a step forward, and another, until his hand reaches May’s. She grasps it with what little strength he has, and she says to him again, “Oh, baby…”
And that’s it— baby— that cracks Peter’s resolve. He bows his head a little, hair falling forward, and grabs the hospital railing. Then crawls up and into the bed with difficulty, and he lands badly on his broken knee—the kid shudders with it, a sudden shock of pain, falling forward onto the bed onto his hands in his attempt to relieve it. Tony watches as Peter takes the pain, his face twisting into something Tony’s seen dozens of times before—bearing it—and breathes through it, gripping the hospital blanket beside May.
His aunt touches his arm, trying to comfort him, and the kid cringes, sucking in a breath, and May leaves her hand there where it is, gentle on his wrist. “You’re okay, baby…” she says. “You’re right here…with me…”
Such a simple sentence—perfectly plain—and Peter opens those squeezed-shut eyes to find his aunt looking up at him. Then he tips his head down, his limbs crumpling beneath him, and he just lays there beside his aunt, pressing his head then into her neck. Slowly, gradually—either from exhaustion or from care or some tender mixture of both—she draws her arms around him, and he shudders with each further touch, but grabs at her, too, gripping the bedsheet around his aunt. And Peter reaches for her, clawing at her arms with his scarred-pink fingers, pulling at her as a baby does, begging to be held.
And the kid sobs then, muffled, into her neck, sobs leaving him in restrained bursts—choked coughs of wet tears. “I was gone—so long —so long…”
“I know, baby…”
“No one… No one…came…”
May shushes gently into his long hair, stroking it back behind his ears, pushing it away from his face with her weak, trembling fingers.
“We… we tried—so—so hard…”
“I know you did,” she whispers, her voice dry and worn; from across the room, Tony can see her shining-wet face—silently, so Peter doesn’t notice, May’s crying, too. “I know, baby.”
Peter falls asleep like that—in May’s room, curled into his aunt’s side.
Tony has to come in and knock—he doesn’t even wake then, not until Tony is somewhere beside him, saying his name until the kid jerks awake. He flails up and off the bed, panic flooding his pale face, and he practically throws himself into the corner, backing up and gasping hard. “Just me,” Tony says, stepping back as the kid chokes out a sob. “Buddy, hey, it’s just me…”
It takes Peter a couple seconds to figure out where he is, and then he’s just sitting on the hospital tile with his knees curled up, arms wrapped around himself. “Sorry,” he whispers. “S-sorry, sorry…”
May’s asleep again, in the same spot she’s been for the past hour as though she’s holding him still, arms still open like Peter's going to climb back into them. Curled up against the wall, the kid rocks himself into some kind of comfort, mouthing words to himself, cringing as he realizes what he's doing and apologizing again.
But there is no rush—so Tony just sinks to the floor beside him, struggling a little with his old knees.
And when Peter's ready, they get up off the floor together, and Tony leads the kid back to his room, letting him follow him like a duckling does its mother, slow and steady, pausing every time he hears him stop.