don't you know you're out of time?
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 22 — 7:30 AM
Tony gets up before Peter in the morning.
He rehearses how he’s gonna tell the kid—again and again, he goes over it. You will have to leave your room. You will have to leave the Tower. You will have to see Charlie and every other guy who hurt you. By the time they’re supposed to wake him, Sarah’s already by the door, writing in her notebook. She’s wearing a dress today, a nice purple one with a matching belt. She looks tired; although, Tony supposes, they all look tired now. She looks up as he enters, gives him a nod, and says, “How’d you sleep?”
Tony shrugs.
Sarah stares at him a little too long; he forgets sometimes that she’s a psychiatrist, that she can read people as easily as she reads Peter. “Bad dreams?” she asks.
He shrugs again. “C’est la vie,” Tony says, taking another step towards Peter’s door. “You?”
Sarah smiles; by her eyes, small crinkles like her brother’s. “Same as usual,” she says, and then she shuts her notebook, tucking the pen into it. “So—you told him last night?”
She’s talking about Peter. And, no. He hadn’t. He’d paced outside the kids’ door for nearly half an hour thinking about how to break the news, but by the time he’d come in Peter was so freaked by all the pacing that Tony couldn’t bear to tell him. How could he? How could he puncture this perfect bubble of safety he’d created for Peter? Less than three weeks ago, Peter had been near-catatonic, barely speaking, cuffed to the bed and muttering to a teddy bear. He’s barely spent two weeks with Cassie, and he only just reunited with May a couple days ago.
They’ve made so much progress. And Tony knows that as soon as he tells the kid about the hearing, it’ll all come crashing down.
Tony nods to the woman, shuffling his feet. “Yeah,” he lies.
“How’d he take it?” Sarah asks, cracking open her notebook again, clicking the pen open.
He shrugs, fiddling with something in his pocket. “You know how he is.” Sarah nods, tipping her head to the side, so Tony adds a couple other things, more lies, specific enough that eventually Sarah nods and turns back to her notebook.
The hearing is at two o’clock tomorrow—around thirty hours.
And still, Tony finds himself hesitating.
He and Sarah walk the hallway a little more, talking about Peter, about the upcoming hearing, too. When they return to Peter’s door, there’s some noise—commotion, like a couple people talking. Sarah and him glance at each other and quickly knock and move into the room.
The kids are on the bed; Cassie’s mother is standing close by.
Everyone is awake, it seems; behind Peter, the little dark-haired girl is moving, coughing muffled into her hand, making small pained noises, and the girl’s mother is standing up, reaching out for her—but half-sitting between them is Peter, moving bodily between them, guarding the little girl with his body, moving every time the mother moves, keeping her back. “Peter,” says Maggie Paxton, the woman’s clothes still wrinkled from sleep, “just let me—I just want to help her.”
Cassie keeps coughing, gasping in raspy breaths, and she grabs onto Peter with one hand. Asthma, right? Maggie had mentioned it a couple times; Tony’s seen the little girl’s pink inhaler float from parent to parent.
Tony realizes quickly that Peter is not awake at all. He’s moving a little too slow, and he isn’t saying anything at all—blinking the exhaustion from his eyes, looking dull-eyed and empty, like a hollowed-out tree or like his insides have been scraped out with a spoon. Not even talking, just standing in front of Cassie with this fucking empty look on his face, entire face slack.
“Peter,” says Tony, and the kid twitches a little bit but doesn’t move, eyes trained on Cassie’s mother. “Peter, Pete—wake up. Wake up, buddy.”
The kid does this sometimes—just when he wakes up, the throes of sleep still clinging to him, too tired to remember where he is.
“Cassie, come here, baby…” says the mother, panicked, as Cassie keeps coughing and coughing and clinging to Peter. She tries to lunge for her daughter again, and Peter shoves Cassie further backwards, that dull-eyed glare trained on Maggie.
Sarah, too, has realized what is happening.
“FRIDAY,” Tony announces to his AI, frozen where he is, trying not to startle the kid, “get Helen in here, please.”
“Yes, boss.”
It’s still strange to see her do this—choose Peter over her own mother. A child, Tony knows, so frightened that she turned to a stranger for solace; she’s lucky, thinks Tony suddenly, that it was Peter.
“Pete,” says Tony, turning to the kid, who’s still guarding Cassie like a damn robot, “you gotta wake up, buddy—we’re just trying to help her.”
The boy murmurs something incoherent, his eyes still on Maggie.
“I just moved towards her,” says the girl’s mother, looking close to tears. “She—she was coughing, and he woke up…”
That moment, Dr.Cho comes running in. She assesses the situation quickly, a nurse at her heels, and starts talking fast with the mom, trying to figure out what’s happening.
The kid doesn’t even look at her.
“Peter,” says Tony again, sharper, and the kid blinks. “Come on, buddy, let her help…"
He blinks a couple times, and his eyes graze over Tony, over Sarah, too. After a beat, he sits back a little—a spark of recognition in his brown eyes, and then Peter scans the room from where he’s still squatted on the bed. Cassie coughs again, a ragged sound, each breath loud with effort.
“Pete,” Tony says again. “You with me?”
A long pause, and then a slow nod. “Tony?” the kid croaks.
“Yeah, bud,” he says, taking a step closer to the kid. Peter’s still shaky and a little bleary, looking around the room at all the people. “Can you let us help her?” He points to Cassie, whose wild coughing Peter only now registers; the girl’s still breathing funny, drawing in raspy whines of air.
Even when she can scarcely breathe, Cassie still clings to Peter, hiding behind him as Dr. Cho approaches.
It takes some coaxing—but the kid eventually sits back on the bed and lets Cassie forward. The girl takes a few puffs from her inhaler, a check-in with Cho, and then they’re mostly back to normal.
This is just how it is. Mornings are always hard. One bad dream or wrong noise, and just like that—Peter slips back to where he was a couple weeks ago: completely lost.
Breakfast comes on a tray: a carton of milk, scrambled eggs, a medium-toasted piece of bread, and a cup of mangos. Sarah’s been trying to get them on a less bunker-related food regimen as of late, one that hasn’t worked yet. The nurse sets one tray down at the end of Peter’s bed, passes the other one to Maggie Paxton, and then briskly leaves. Once the door shuts behind her, Peter makes a small sound in Cassie’s direction: a half-whisper too quiet for Tony to hear. Without hearing it, though, Tony still knows the verdict: don’t.
“We’re just trying without the boxes today, buddy,” he says, offering the tray again. Peter’s wearing the same clothes he was yesterday, a hoodie and sweatpants over his medical gown, and he’s drawn the hood up over his tangled hair. “There’s nothing bad about it.”
Peter swallows.
“I promise, buddy, I would never do anything to it.” Tony takes a fork, stabs at it. “Just some eggs, some toast, some mangos…”
Yet still Peter refuses to eat. When Cassie whispers to him, too, the kid clicks his tongue—that sound he makes when he’s telling the little girl ‘no.’
“Peter,” Tony says, and the exasperation in his tone makes Peter look up sharply. “Buddy, there’s nothing wrong with the food… Why…” He’s not supposed to ask why, but he can’t help it. Did Charlie do something to their food? He knows they starved in there—so why would Peter refuse it? What’s wrong with it?
Peter’s dark eyes watch him, still on him—Tony feels uncomfortable for a moment as the kid tries to read him.
“It’s just breakfast,” he says, like that changes anything. “Peter…”
But Peter just drops his eyes to the food, stares at it, and winces before glancing away.
Peter’s reactions are always so strange—this self-awareness that he’s not acting normal anymore, combined with the stress of whatever he’s thinking—leaves him much too quiet. Makes him refuse to eat or eat much too fast; makes him sob or have no reaction whatsoever. Makes him slap people’s hands away from him; makes him stroke at their legs.
“You don’t have to,” Tony says quickly— “We can bring it back in—in the box, or in the cans, if you want, just… I don’t want you to associate here with” —he can’t say the bunker, he can’t say the cell, what should he say?— “that place, Peter, I just want you to feel safe here.”
Peter doesn’t say anything for a while; Tony watches as the boy tugs that knitted bat further and further over his head, covering his tangled hair. “Sorry,” he whispers, in that same timid tone, like he’s trying to placate Tony.
“It’s okay,” he responds, watching as the kid continues to adjust his hat over his hair. “That’s okay—there’s nothing… Nothing to be sorry for. We’ll fix it up for you, that’s okay.”
After a beat, the kid nods, his fist gripping the soft edge of the blanket like someone’s about to tear it from him.
In a few minutes, a nurse brings back their breakfast in McDonald’s boxes, and Peter makes this small sigh of relief before snatching it from the bed, and both children eat quickly.
Alexis, the little girl’s therapist, brings in some paper and colored pencils. Jim brings a few books, too, kids’ ones for Cassie.
Cassie stares at the books for a long time and hides behind Peter when offered them. “It’s alright,” says the girl’s mother, with a quick glance to Peter. “These are from home, baby, remember?”
The woman puts some of the books on the bed: Matilda and Charlotte’s Web, Encyclopedia Brown and Magic Tree House and Where the Sidewalk Ends. A whole spill of books, all of which Tony recognizes. They're worn, too—the little girl must've read them before. Still, Cassie stares down at one without touching it: a bright green book with a tipping apple tree on the cover and a little boy in a red jumper, a book Tony hasn’t seen in an extraordinarily long time. “You remember this?”
The Giving Tree. Tony remembers his mother reading him that book when he was young. Maggie cracks the book open and Tony can see the page—a lanky tree reaching its branches over a boy in a leafed crown.
"Sweetheart? You remember this one?"
Cassie glances up at Peter; the boy gives a quick shake of his head, eyes on the book. She gnaws at her thumb with her teeth, nervous, and backs away from it, looping her arm around Peter’s and hiding behind the teenager.
Another harmless gift—rejected.
God, these kids. They won’t watch television, they won’t listen to music, won’t play video games, won’t read books. won’t even have their friends to visit. They’ll barely hold a conversation for longer than a minute, and even when he does Peter rarely says more than a couple words. Cassie will play with her toys sometimes, but rarely Peter; the kid’s always so hesitant to join in—all he wants to do is watch the damn door.
“Hypervigilance,” Sarah called it. “Normal, for someone in their situation.” They keep trying to pull the kids away from it—the hypervigilance—but here they are again.
“I got you a new phone,” tries Tony, pulling a new StarkPhone out of his pocket, and he holds it out to the kid. It’s still got the plastic cover, and it doesn’t even have a case. Red, like Peter likes. “It’s pretty blank, though. We could load your friends’ numbers onto it, or May’s, or mine… Whatever you want. Games, too, uh, music…” He adds, a pointless joke, “Snapbook or Snapface or whatever you call it…”
Peter must not hear the joke—or maybe he just doesn’t find it funny, because he doesn’t acknowledge one word that Tony’s said, staring hollowly at the shiny red phone. His brown eyes linger on it—and then he gazes up at Tony without saying a word. The kid’s mouth downturns, his mouth pressing in—the stress is obvious. Tony watches as his hands clench on the bed railing, as his eyes dart to the phone and back.
“It’s not a gift,” Tony says; the kid’s neck bobs with a pained swallow. “Just…insurance, right? You lost your old one, so…” He’ll, Peter didn’t lose it—it was taken from him, but Tony doesn’t want to say that aloud. “Uh, here.” He waves it again, a gentle movement, handing it off—but the kid inhales quick, a flinch, curling his arms around his knees. “Sorry. Just, uh, all yours, if you want it.”
Peter’s eyes lock down to it, and then he seems to go away for a moment, looking off at Cassie, past her somewhere, lost. His arms tighten around his knees—hands gripping each opposite wrist tight. He ducks his head sideways, pressing his cheek into his knee. And Peter shrugs, just barely, and his eyes drift past Tony to the door.
The kid’s eyes—they used to light up in the lab, glint at a terrible joke, alight at the sight of a new Spiderman suit. Now, Peter’s eyes are dark—the pupils murky, brow taut with stress, his grim mouth in a slumped line. That look. Glaring up through his brow at the door across the room, just watching it. Watching it and watching it and watching it. Like a dog who knows it’s about to be shot. Like a lamb peering up at the axe. Like a bloodied deer baring its neck for the knife—the final blow.
Like he knows exactly what’s going to happen.
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 22 — 11:49 AM
Just before lunch, Pepper comes to him with her tablet propped up against her hip. She’s moving slower now, and it takes some extra effort for her to sit—she’s dressed in light jeans, a maternity shirt and loose purple blazer; her hair is tied messily up.
Tony’s in one of the medical exam rooms; a nurse is checking up on his pacemaker, and Pepper waves him away as soon as she enters. The young nurse snaps off his gloves, tosses them into the trashcan, and exits past her.
“Sarah came by my office,” Pepper says, hand braced against her pregnant belly. She moves towards him, and she sits in the waiting room chair as Tony attempts the buttons of his shirt; he still struggles with the twitching in his hands. “Said we have to encourage him to go outside.”
“He doesn’t want to,” Tony tells her, tired, moving from the lowest button to the next one. “You think I haven’t asked?”
He has asked him. Tony’s practically begged the kid to leave the hospital room . But every trip outside the hospital room was like a trip to space for Peter.
Tony struggles with another button, and Pepper lets out a soft sigh. She stands up, closes the few feet between them, and grabs the edges of his shirt, finding the buttons with her hands. Getting the second button and then the third, she says, “Tony…”
They used to do this in the morning: Pepper buttoning his shirt, Tony zipping up her skirt, Pepper adjusting his tie, Tony shifting the clasp in her hair until it stood perfectly straight. “Pep,” he says, gentle, not wanting her to go anywhere.
“Honey,” says Pepper, and his heart aches when she calls him that, and she’s frowning, her strawberry-blonde hair shining in the fluorescent light, “you don’t want the first time he walks outside—for him to see them there. He’ll never wanna go outside again.”
Tony thinks, then, of his first glimpse of the outside—how warm the sun felt on his face, how every step felt strange, like staggering on land after getting off a trampoline. “He won’t go,” he says.
“Not outside outside,” she says. “I just thought… Maybe the roof.” She taps open the tablet: a video clip of the roof. He hasn’t been up to the Tower roof in ages: not since they moved upstate, maybe. The clip shows a garden atop the Tower roof: complete with flowers, young trees, and grassy sod. “Thought it might be nice,” she adds. “Something nice, you know? Something harmless. Safe. He’s been up there before.”
“Yeah, he has,” Tony says, surprised. They used to test some of their lab work up there; Peter always wanted to swing him from the top, and Tony never let him. “You did this for him?”
God, he wants to touch her hand.
Pepper shrugs, a small movement, one-shouldered. Her hair shifts over her back. “I’m no Sarah,” she says, “but I do what I can. Baby steps, right?”
Tony’s been outside a couple times since they broke him out. To Pepper’s doctor’s appointments. A couple Avengers meetings. Some legal shit that Tony barely remembers. “Baby steps,” he echoes.
After that, it is not long before they convince Cassie’s parents and the kids’ therapists of the idea; even Dr. Cho agrees to it.
So here they are, standing in the hallway, and Peter’s standing there clutching that wheeled metal pole in one hand, the other casted from the time he broke it, and he’s trembling something awful. Beside him, Cassie glances terrified from one adult to the other, gripping Peter’s hand tightly.
“There’s nothing out there,” Tony says, trying to help the kid understand. “I promise, buddy, there’s nothing out there.”
Cassie’s in her pajamas—some Jim Paxton brought from their house. They’re kid pajamas, warm and blue and spotted in cartoon belugas, and with her other hand she’s holding that stuffed zebra by the hoof. Peter’s a little more ragged, his soft red sweatshirt hanging open to bare his white medical gown, black flannel pants beneath it. Black socks, too. His hood has fallen back, leaving his long hair open to the air.
Peter looks different with the long hair; it makes him look more grown up. The kid used to fix his hair all the time—try to pin it down with gel, brush it back, tug on it awkwardly when Tony made a comment about his curls. It’s long enough now that the curls are gone; enough weight to each strand that it dragged out long, snaking over his shoulders, dark oily tendrils of her. He’s enhanced, so Tony knows his hair grows faster than others, but it makes it seem like… God, he looks different. Like he was gone for five years instead of five months.
Sometimes, Tony feels like that, too.
It takes an hour for them to get the kids to the elevator; another half hour to convince the kids to get inside.
When the doors closed, Peter starts to glance like something’s there, like there are creatures crawling out of the walls, so Tony has to say, “ It’s just the elevator, Pete, you remember the elevator, right?”
And the kid’s breathing hard through his nose, in and out, sliding down to the floor—which is freaking Cassie out, too, so he grabs her and holds her to his chest like a baby; she puts her arms around his neck—surprisingly gentle—hides her face in his neck, all the while Peter glances around the room, clutching her back, his skinny arms looped around her back, holding her impossibly close.
The elevator doors open, sliding open with a ping and FRIDAY announces, “ Tower Roof.”
FRIDAY’s voice alone seems to wake the kid out of his stupor, and the parents watch as Peter struggles to his feet and shuffles out of the elevator.
Peter in his flannel pants, tentatively stepping forward, holding Cassie like a little kid, the girl still hiding her head in his neck like she doesn’t want to look. Jim Paxton looks pissed, but his wife presses her hand to his arm, and that seems to calm him a little bit.
“It’s safe?” asks Peter, very quietly.
He’s looking at Tony—only at Tony. “Yeah, bud,” he says. “It’s safe.”
The kid squints at the sky—something in his brow relaxes, and he limps forward a little more.
Pepper has set the roof up nicely: flowers and plants and rows of green-sprouted sod. Little trees, too, only half-planted, ribbed black tubing propping them up straight. There’s a bench at the very end, one of those painted wooden swings like on a front porch.
A garden.
Pepper put a garden up here for them.
He’d expect little Cassie to scream and run to it, like kids usually do. But that little girl just stays by Peter's side, her hair a dark fuzz over her head, gripping his hand, and looks up at him like he’s her parent, like he’s the only one in the world who can tell her if it’s safe or not.
And he doesn’t tell her it’s safe.
(Because that little girl must know—if Peter Parker is frightened, he has good reason to be.)
Instead, Peter just grips the girl's hand and they move slowly through the roof, Peter limping and Cassie keeping pace with him, the kid glancing back every few seconds at the people behind him.
Tony hates that they had to do that
He forgets sometimes how protective Peter is of Cassie—his body, Cassie’s shield. His body, the only thing between Cassie and those thugs. Which only serves to remind Tony how he had to be protective of her. Who knows what Charlie would have done to Cassie without Peter’s intervention? Cassie might’ve looked just like him: covered in scars, limping everywhere, frail from malnutrition, traumatized beyond belief.
But eventually Peter walks her through, taking slow movements, making sure they can see the other people on the roof at all times. There’s only a couple of them up here—Tony and Pepper, Cassie's parents, the psychiatrists, too: Sarah Wilson with her notebook and the pink-scrubbed one with her satchel. The edge of the roof is a little low, about chest height; for a second Tony has this horrible feeling the kid’s gonna jump, the way he just limps to the edge and grabs the railing, but he only glances over the wall for a moment before turning around. There's a bench at the very end, one of those painted wooden swings like on a front porch.
The kids keep walking around, remarkably quiet. Beneath the leafy archway, Peter lets Cassie lean down and smell the flowers—Tony can see Peter’s nose twitch, just a little. He’s smelling.
He’s blinking back tears.
“Forgot,” the kid says very quietly.
“Forgot what, Pete?”
He blinks again; another twitch of his nose. “The smell,” the kid whispers. “It’s nice.”
Because in five months, Peter Parker had only been outside twice—once during that first escape, when the doctor was murdered in front of him, and once during the final escape, when he was fully unconscious. So truly, Peter hadn’t sensed the outdoors, lucid and outside, since April sixth. Almost six months.
In the corner of the roof, a small row of apple trees, small, barely bigger than Peter himself, sparse and hanging with the weight of the apples they bore—two red ones, a couple yellows, and a green one at the end.
And Peter just stops and stares at it.
God, why hadn’t they thought of this before? Handing Peter ready-made food like those people had, not letting him see where the food comes from. Peter sees the apples on that tree, and it’s like muscle memory takes ahold of him. He touches one, and then the next, and then grasps it with one hand and pulls; the branch strains and snaps, and he hands it to Cassie. Then he plucks another one, taking it for himself.
Pepper grabs Dr. Cho’s arm. “Is this…”
“He’s fine,” she says. “He’s due for a snack anyway.”
The kids sit down on the grass together, eating quickly, and ragged greedy bites; they eat the apples whole, seeds and stems and all.
Tony forgot it was even apple-picking season.
He’d spent so much time in there… God, he hasn't had a fresh bite of fruit since April. Not since Peter. Tony blinks at the tree. When’s the last time he…
A nudge on his arm. “It’s your roof, too,” Pepper says gently. “I know you like the yellow ones.”
Cassie and the kid are muttering together to each other now. Tony steps forward and grabs a yellow one.
They sit on the ground a little —Peter keeps glancing at them, and slowly the people whittle down to just Tony and Maggie Paxton, which puts the kids more at ease. They play quietly in the garden, Cassie plucking the flowers out of their freshly-planted dirt and handing them to Peter. As Tony gets closer, he can hear what they’re saying . “…cornbread,” Peter says.
“Pancakes,” says Cassie.
Peter makes a small humming noise, and his hair shifts over his sweatshirt. It’s so long—his dark hair trailing past his shoulders, moving as he moves, staring miserably down at his lap.
The little girl pokes him. “Your turn, Peter,” she whispers. “Your turn.”
The kid barely moves; the shoulders of his red hoodie hang low on him. “French toast,” he says dully, still looking at his lap..
“French toast!” says Cassie with an excited sigh. “With powdered sugar.” She looks expectantly at Peter, and when he doesn’t answer, she hugs his arm from the side and presses her face into it. “Powdered sugar and…”
“Syrup,” the teen mutters, with a small squint at the dark-haired girl.
The little girl smiles into his arm, enamored by his response. “I wanna drink it,” she says, and she does the motion with her good hand. “The whole bottle!”
It’s almost imperceptible, but there it is: a change in Peter’s expression, a minute flash of amusement: the edges of his mouth peaking, lip pressing down. “Bad for your teeth,” the kid says, and Cassie bares hers at him: her little-kid mouth filled with gaps.
Not a smile, Tony thinks, but it’s something.
They spend nearly an hour on this roof, letting the kids sit in tentative peace.
Near the end, Tony’s sitting on that porch swing alone, watching Peter watch Cassie. By the roof entrance, Pepper is on the phone, one hand clasped over her opposite ear, talking urgently. Maggie Paxton stands nearby, leaned against the wall.
The kid spies Tony from the corner and shuffles over to him slow, limping heavily on his left leg. That nasogastric tube cuts across his face, tugs a little, and he sniffs. He still looks remarkably thin, albeit a little better, his face no longer that sallow yellowish color, yet still bony like the fat had been sucked from his cheeks. The kid sits down beside him, and with this very Peter-like sigh, tips his head into Tony’s shoulder; Tony doesn’t dare move.
And for a while, neither of them say anything at all.
They sit here, the air misty with New York air, the sky peeking blue between the clouds, and Peter doesn’t look up—just breathes softly into Tony’s sleeve, a breath. It shakes Tony sometimes, this realization: that Peter is here with him. Breathing. Alive. Warm. What a remarkable thing.
A few minutes pass, and out of the corner of Tony’s eye he seems something dark move over the painted bench; he turns a little and sees it.
A spider.
It crawls up the leg of the bench and up towards Peter, so Tony says, soft, “Careful.”
The kid watches it crawl up and up, across the arm towards Peter, and he raises one hand; Peter presses his finger to the wooden arm. The spider pauses, shifts, and then walks across the wood, up Peter’s fingernail, and crawls up the back of his hand. Peter turns his wrist as the spider moves, letting it crawl and crawl and crawl.
The kid can’t take his eyes off it.
It’s a small spider, with skinny brown legs and a tiny body with dark markings. Delicate as it moves—and easily squashed, but Peter doesn’t make a move to harm it. He just keeps watching it go. Ever so often the spider will pause, confused, and turn back the way it came.
“She doesn’t know,” the kid says after a while, letting the spider crawl up towards his elbow before leading it to his other hand.
Assuming by she he means the spider, Tony asks, “Doesn't know what?”
Peter turns his hand over slowly, spreading his pale fingers, letting the spider cross over old white scars and newish pink ones. “That she’s in danger,” he mumbles, mesmerized, watching the creature settle on his finger, turn around, and head back up his pale knuckle.
Eventually, Peter lets the spider go: he tips his hand to the bench, and the spider crawls across the painted wood, crawls down the side, and disappears somewhere into the grass. Tony tries not to think about what the kid just said, so he tries to make conversation, but mostly the kid just stays quiet, staring at the ground where the spider once was.
And eventually, when it’s quiet, Peter tilts his head slightly towards Tony and asks, “Did you know where they took me?”
Charlie never told him where. He hinted at it—something about forest and mountains, which could’ve meant anywhere on the planet. “YOU’LL NEVER FIND HIM, STARK!” he’d scream. “YOU’LL NEVER SEE YOUR FUCKING SPIDER-BITCH AGAIN!”
“No,” Tony says, swallowing hard at the memory. “Sorry, Pete.”
“It was the forest,” he said. “I was in a… A forest.”
“Yeah,” says Tony. “New Hampshire. Mountains. Middle of nowhere.”
Peter mumbles the words back at him, a half-echo. Middle of nowhere. “He said…” Peter swallows, like the words themselves hurt. His neck bows a bit, and he fiddles with his hands in his lap. “He said I'd never—that it was too far. From anything. Said… Said…” His brow draws tight, like a visceral pain. “Said I’d never get out.” He squints up at Tony. “Is it… Was it…”
This is the longest Tony thinks he’s heard the kid speak since he got here.
“Yeah,” he says, feeling the weight of his answer heavy on them both. “Middle of nowhere, buddy.” It’s almost good he didn’t make it out, Tony thinks. Peter might’ve died out in that wilderness if he had.
Peter makes a small noise in response, like a hum, a tired sound he’s made to Cassie, but Tony knows how it translates: oh.
Tony thinks of what he’d nearly screamed before when he’d mentioned May— Charlie doesn’t lie, Charlie doesn’t lie.
Well, the kid was right. Charlie hadn’t lied about this, either.
And eventually Peter says, “Think I’m still there,” he says, quiet, staring down at his hands. “Middle of nowhere.”
Tony doesn’t know what to say to that, and he thinks anything he comes up with might just make it worse, so instead he grasps the chain of the porch swing, pushes at the ground a little with his heels, and moves the swing beneath them both, letting it rock.
Peter squints at him again, and then stares down at the grass.
Tony keeps rocking it—a slight movement, shifting his feet in the fresh sod, a familiar squeak, back and forth.
Peter’s shoulders slump a little further, and then he tips his head into Tony’s shoulder. God, Tony never wants to tell him—he wants to stay here now, with the kid’s warm head resting on Tony’s shoulder, pressing in, those strained exhales escaping him—a little more relaxed each time, a little longer, a little gentler until Peter’s closing his eyes a little like he’s falling asleep.
Even with his eyes closed, Peter Parker looks tired.
He looks so, so tired.
It’s not long before something scares the kid—a noise, maybe just a thought, and the kid jerks away, pulling his arms around himself. It’s clear then that this whole ordeal is becoming increasingly overwhelming for Peter—his hands squeezing into fists in his lap, eyes darting around.
“You want to go back inside?” Tony asks.
Peter nods.
Both of them stand up from the swinging bench. He calls for Cassie then, who immediately hops away from her mother and hurries to him. Peter grabs the little girl’s hand, and they follow Maggie Paxton the rooftop door.
But for a second, Tony glances back at the rooftop garden, at the spread of flowers and trees, at the clouding sky.
The bench is still swaying.
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 22 — 1:01 PM
Both kids are a little agitated after the rooftop—but something in Peter seems a little calmer. Grounded. A nurse brings them both lunch in metal cans, and the kids eat together on the bed. Peter falls asleep sometime after that, curled up on his side beneath the covers.
But the universe can’t seem to cut Peter Parker a break, because as soon as Tony gets back Sarah Wilson is standing in front of his doorway with her arms folded. “Conference room,” she says, “now.”
Of course.
He follows her into the conference room at the end of the hall, and Sarah shuts the door behind them, turning around to face him. “Damn it, Tony,” she says, “you didn’t tell him.”
“I did,” he tries, a pointless lie.
Sarah shakes her head. “It was too perfect—minimal emotional outbursts, no breakdowns, no regression… I thought maybe he’d compartmentalized it, that maybe he knew it was going to happen, but it wasn’t minimal, was it?”
Shit.
“It wasn’t a response at all. Because you didn’t tell him. ”
Tony swallows.
“The hearing’s tomorrow ,” Sarah says. “I thought you said you’d told him yesterday—”
“I was going to,” Tony insists, “but he got upset—he was crying , Sarah, he was with May and he was, I mean, he was talking a little…”
“But at night, Tony, you could’ve told him last night!”
“He panicked, Sarah, he was freaking out about the door—and outside, and he’s always worse at night, you know that—come on, how was I supposed to—”
“ Tony ,” she says, exasperated. “This hearing—he needs time to process, to understand that he’s about to see them. We can’t just throw these things at him—he’s too fragile right now. And Tony, I told you days ago we had waited too long. And you said you’d tell him!”
“I won’t do it!” Tony snaps. “I won’t! I’m not gonna—gonna tear down everything we’ve built for some fucking court case! Look at him!” He points an angry finger in the vague direction of Peter’s hospital room. “It’ll destroy him! He’ll go back to—to whatever the hell was happening before—with the teddy bear, and the—the cuffs—”
“Do you think I want to do this?” says Sarah, taking a couple steps toward him. “I know how much this will set us back. I know how badly he’ll react. But we don’t have a choice. And waiting is only going to make it worse.” She paces past the conference table, rubbing an exasperated hand down her face. “God, Tony, now he’s got less than twenty-four hours before he’ll be standing at that podium, and he doesn’t even know he has to speak, let alone face his kidnappers in court.”
Tony swallows, unbearably quiet.
Sarah snaps, “He could’ve had four days to get used to this. He could’ve had three. He could’ve had two. You took that away from him. You’ve—I mean, you’ve essentially—you’ve crippled him, Tony! You have to tell him. Now.”
“But he—he’s doing so well, Sarah. He even spoke to me today, like really spoke. And I know once I tell him, he’ll...” Tony shoves his head in his hands. “You know what’ll happen. All the progress we made…”
“Tony,” she says, “whether you like it or not, Peter will have to leave here tomorrow.”
“I know,” he croaks out.
“You have to tell him.”
“I can’t ,” he says, and he feels a bit like he’s in that lab again. Trapped. His arm twitches then, and he has to grasp it with his other hand to make it stop shaking. “Sarah, I—I tried, I just—God, I haven’t heard him talk like that in months, Sarah. Months. I only ever saw him…” Tony trails off, and he tries again not to think about it. “He’s doing so good, Sarah, he’s—he’s coming back, you know? He’s… He’s becoming himself again. How am I supposed to… To just…”
Sarah is closer now, and she puts her hand on his shoulder. Her hand is warm. “Murdock can help you with the wording, if you need,” she says. “And I can be there, too, but you have to tell him as soon as possible, Tony. He needs to know what’s going to happen tomorrow.”
Tony knows that. He does.
But how is he supposed to say that out loud?