Peter wakes up feeling a bad day sitting on his stomach. It happens, sometimes, this way. The universe says you smile too wide, you love with too much of your heart, you are too bold and brash and dedicated soulfully to others, and decides to knock him down a few pegs.
Rain patters onto Midtown in a great sloshing tattoo, striking the glass of windows and the metal that bands the buildings in silvery stripes. The clouds glow with a harsh, ugly light, as if the sun is crying out I am still here, I am, I am, but the mass of greyness says I know better. Every head is hooded or umbrella-hidden, like bouncing paint splatters winding through the streets. Peter doesn’t envy them. He can only imagine the prodding of umbrella spokes into eyes, elbows into ribs, murky puddle water kicked up by rushed steps and soaking brownish into socks. The natural city breeze sends the rain sideways, shrapnel-sharp and biting through mid-August types of layers. Businessmen grumble in damp button-ups with swamps in their stiff loafers, stilettos sink into the edges of small flower beds, the world is impatient, the seasons are getting ready to turn over.
The bedroom is empty, though a quick glance at his phone says it isn’t yet past seven in the morning. Harley is gone, wandering somewhere. Didn’t wake him up.
Must have been a bad one, then.
The abandoned half of the bed is cold when Peter stretches a hand out to brush over it. He traces his numb fingers over the wrinkles and folds of the cotton and wonders where everything is. He can’t- feel it. It’s very nothing. Very empty.
These are the worst kind of bad days. Worse than the ones where his chest and the pit of his stomach ache and swirl with a tempest of dread, of preemptive fear, of flapping, fluttering nerves. Worse than days where everything is loud, loud, loud and sounds echo between his ears and his eyes water with the sheer volume of it all. Worse than ones where he’s certain beyond reason that everyone is angry with him, that, somehow, he’s managed to turn every soul against him just by having the audacity to be.
His bones feel melted into his muscles, which feel melted onto the mattress, which feels melted onto the floor. Like everything is metals, precious metals, and the earth’s core is calling them home.
He gets up anyway, slowly, because if Harley is gone, then Harley needs him. And Harley comes first.
He yanks a sweatshirt over his head, hoping it will chase away the chill. (It doesn’t. It takes him four tries to get it over his ears. He can’t even bring himself to feel frustrated.)
No socks, wanting to feel the chill of the tile under his feet, he winds his way out of the bedroom and towards the common living room.
It is not empty. Bucky sits on the couch, a novel in his hands, but he does not look at it. His glare is glazed over, pointed at the blank television screen, and his jaw is taught. Strands of wavy hair fall loose in his eyes.
He stirs at the sound of the soles of Peter’s feet sticking to the hardwood.
They share a look. They see each other. (They see themselves.)
The shortest of nods. Peter goes to look for Harley in some other place.
He’s not in the lab. He’s not in the laundry room. He’s not on the balcony.
Peter finds himself sitting cross-legged on the floor against a wall in a hallway he doesn’t recognize. He’s blank.
“Mister Parker, if I may,” comes FRIDAY’s voice.
He doesn’t have the coherence to startle. “Yeah, FRI,” he says, somehow, through clumsy lips.
“Mister Keener is in conference room number twelve-oh-eight. I assume that is who you’ve been looking for.”
“Yes,” he says. “Yes. Thank you.”
“Peter,” says FRIDAY, and she is so gentle. “You have been sitting here for nearly forty-five minutes. Should I summon the boss?”
Tony. Peter rolls the name on his tongue for a moment. It feels strange. “No,” he decides. “I’m okay.” He stops talking. He blinks out. “Thank you,” he says. This is not an excuse not to be polite.
“If this episode continues, I will have no option but to alert Mister Stark,” FRIDAY says. “It is in my programming to protect you.”
“I’ll go to Harley,” Peter says, because this feels like a very valid response to the concern.
FRIDAY doesn’t answer, so he assumes she agrees.
He takes the elevator to the twelfth floor. He would normally walk, but. Well. He doesn’t know if his legs will make it or if they’ll leave his top half behind. He thinks the walk goes quickly, but he can’t quite remember it by the time he gets there.
He finds the door and peeks through the glass walls of the conference room.
Sure enough, Harley is in there. He sits on top of the wooden table, cross-legged, leaned completely forward, scribbling into his journal, nose practically brushing to the paper, glasses hanging precariously. Peter can hear him mumbling under his breath as he writes, but it’s too low to riddle it out.
Peter is pressed to the glass. Quite unsure of how it happened.
He taps a finger on the pane, then frowns. It feels almost as if rubber bands are flinging from the spot. Funny-bone hits. But in his fingertip. Curious.
Harley doesn’t look up from the book, but he waves a hand over his head. As if summoning Peter.
He goes. The doorknob is unwieldy in his palm.
The room is decidedly colder than the hallway is. Peter thinks this is going to be good for him. Maybe it will wake him up, Jesus, wake up, wake up.
Harley continues to scrawl. The room smells of ink. He holds up a finger, wait, one moment, and Peter thinks I couldn’t go anywhere if I tried and he feels galaxies and centimeters and old-Greek-epics away from the boy who both sits five feet in front of him and runs through his veins.
Harley drops the pen. The plastic clicks against the hardwood of the table. He looks up at Peter, knee bouncing, eyes crazed. Manic energy seeps from his skin like sweat and it makes the air thick.
“You okay?” Peter says. “Weren’t in bed. Figured…”
Harley frowns. He slides towards the edge of the table. “Are you on pain medication?” he asks. “Did you get hurt on patrol and take something without telling anyone?” Peter shakes his head, he thinks. “Are you sick?” Harley says. He hops down, still frowning, and presses a palm against Peter’s forehead.
Peter struggles to unscramble words from the alphabet soup puddle between his ears.
“Ah,” Harley says, and moves his hand from Peter’s forehead to ruffle his hair. His next words are gentle. “Where are you, huh?”
Peter’s eyebrows beetle. “Dunno.”
“Come back, wouldja?”
Peter’s expression doesn’t change, but an unintentional keening noise comes from the very bottom of his chest, like he’s stuck there and he’s crying out and he’s desperate, wake up.
“Oh, buddy,” Harley says. “Come here. Maybe if I spit philosophical jargon at you for a while, your subconscious will get so bored by it that it’ll be able to break loose from your mind-swamp to tell me to shut up.”
He lets Harley tug him by the hand to the table. Harley climbs up and Peter follows, but it doesn’t feel like he does. Like his every intention has been wrought with fiberfill instead of steel.
The side of Harley’s hand is smudged with a bruise of ink, and it lightly shakes. His breath smells of coffee.
“You had caffeine,” Peter says.
Harley adjusts his position on the table. “I sure did, Pete. I had lots of it. Too much of it. Enough to give a heart attack to a water buffalo, probably. It’s great. I can hear colors.”
The corner of Peter’s lips flicks up. Then sags back down.
Harley frowns. “What can I do,” he says quietly. “What do you need?”
Peter shrugs.
“Okay,” Harley whispers, and picks up his journal. He scoots even closer to Peter, their kneecaps smushed face-to-face. “I woke up at, like, three last night and couldn’t get back to sleep because I had ideas-” he wiggles his fingers- “bouncing around in my head. So I snuck outta the room, grabbed this old thing and a pot of coffee, and got to scribbling.” Peter spots the empty coffee pot now, strewn on the floor in the corner as if Harley had tossed it in a fit of genius. “I won’t read it word for word or anything, but here’s the general idea. Have you ever heard of the saying cogito ergo sum? It’s Latin, and a pretty famous thing.”
“I think, therefore I am,” Peter says. “Descartes. Michelle hates that guy.”
“Yeah, me too— he’s a stupid, narrow-minded white dude with mostly antiquated ideals. But… some of what he says is fascinating. So, like. D’you know about radical doubt and shit? I’ll tell you anyway because my blood is literally screaming Bohemian Rhapsody right now. Okay. Radical doubt is basically taking everything you’ve ever believed and putting it on a sliding scale between complete truth and complete bullshit. Like, if it can be undoubtedly defined, it’s on the end labeled truth. And if it isn’t definable, it’s labeled false. Now, I kinda believe that’s hooey because nothing is actually real, is it? Because real depends on the reality of the person in question. My reality is different from yours, Pete, because we had different experiences that brought us here, and reality is built upon the life of the experiencer. There’s no one reality so there’s no one truth, basically. But, anyway.
“Descartes is an ugly fuckin’ prick asshole, but he says this: the one thing we can be sure of is that, as long as we think, we exist, and as soon as we aren’t thinking, we fail the radical doubt test re: being real. And- it’s crazy, Peter, it is, because basically what he’s saying is that people only know they’re alive because they think it, and that we can’t live if we can’t think, and dream, and reason. Cognitive activity isn’t just life, it’s power, it means we’re worth something because we’re smart. Because we have big thoughts. That’s. Hooo. It’s something. It’s something, alright.”
Harley rakes his hands through his hair. He looks strung up, a silhouette bathed in strange, crooked light. “Peter, this means absolutely nothing is real other than the human mind. Does he mean that once we think of something, it’s real? When we stop thinking about it, it’s gone? It never existed? It’s- one with the void, lost to the gaping maw of space? Spinning at the bottom of the sea? I don’t know!” he bursts, jumping up to his feet on the table. He starts to pace, and all Peter can do is watch. “I don’t know, Pete, and it’s crazy. It’s the origin of all types of fucking racist, supremacist thought and I hate it, but. What if the bare bones are kinda right. What if thought is what makes us real, and everything else is the fuckin’ matrix? How can I know a dog is real if it’s something outside of me? How can I know that- Brooklyn is real, or a cardigan is real, if it’s outside my head? The only real things are the things I think, because I willed them into being. My ability to think gives me power.” He stops dead in the center of the table, staring blankly at the wall before him. “And, thus, man becomes God,” he says, and sinks back down, knees bent before him.
A word bank. Peter’s mind is a word bank. He reaches a hand into it and yanks out terms with reckless abandon, smacking them into space. “That’s a load of baloney.”
Something glimmers in Harley’s eyes as he whips around to meet Peter’s gaze. He pulls himself along the table until they’re face to face again. “Why? Why do you think it’s baloney?” He looks thrilled. Like Peter disagreeing with him is the best thing that could ever happen to him.
“Because everything is real,” Peter says. “How can knowledge only come from the mind? I know you drank coffee cuz your breath. I know you’re real because-” he presses a hand clumsily to Harley’s face, covering the whole front of it and squishing Harley’s nose- “I can touch you and you’re here.”
“Right,” says Harley quickly. “Sure. But how do you know it’s real? You could be imagining it.”
“If my brain thinks it, based on your argument, wouldn’t that make it real, too?”
“No,” Harley says, and bounces. “Good thought, but no, because I think it’s only real if it’s in your head entirely. Only thoughts are real.”
“No,” says Peter. “No, no. There are things… intangible things, too, they’re real. They’re. They’re real,” he feels breathless, sucker-punched.
“How can you be sure?”
“I am.”
“But how?”
“I just am, Harley!” Peter snaps. He doesn’t know if he’s pissed. He just knows the nothingness is condensing into something in his lungs and it’s brackish, bitter, and spiced. Oh. Why, why is he spitting mad. Where did this come from.
“What do you possibly know that would matter that much?” Harley says, and his voice is gentler.
“I never knew my parents, Harley,” Peter says. And- no, it isn’t anger. It’s fierce, sharp grief. “I can’t see them. I can’t hear them speak. I haven’t in a long time. Does that mean they don’t love me? Because I can’t imagine them? Or because they’re dead, they can’t think, so they don’t love me? They never did? It doesn’t matter either way because they’re gone now, so the past doesn’t matter? Is that what you’re saying? Harley?”
Harley opens his mouth and then closes it to think about his response.
That’s answer enough for Peter.
Propelled by something he doesn’t know- he knows nothing, he knows nothing, he is nothing, says Harley- he slides off the table and staggers to the door. He fumbles with the doorknob, trying to catch a grip on it trapped trapped need to get out now and can’t.
One of Harley’s socks hits him on the shoulder. “Pete, stop. Come back, let me answer.”
He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t come back. He fucking runs.
He goes down hallways and turns corners he’ll never remember until he finds himself in a dark room full of copy machines and printers. The room is all beeping and the sleek sound of papers being ironed through the mouths and cavities of the rumbling white boxes. Little lights blink red. There are no windows. It smells like sour ink. Warmth seeps off the machines.
He crawls to a desk and sits under it. He lets his weight fall slack to the ground, sideways, head cushioned on one bent arm, and tries to let the sound of the printers lull him towards sleep.
Harley, on the other hand, is coffee-drunk and wild.
He is pacing. There is nothing else to do.
He cannot keep track of every step. They lilt. He nearly tumbles more times than he can count.
For every step, he questions. He nearly doesn’t land. He’s never landed. He has been imaginary for as long as he can remember. Descartes says so.
His bad day is different. They aren’t always, but. This one. Where Peter had the life sucked clean out of him by some voracious cavernous thing, Harley hums. He is high-saturation sunrise, movie-theater screams and popcorn kernels flying into the air, big band swing with a slammin’ beat speeding up speeding up screaming trumpeters thrashing drummers and he, wailing into the mic.
He tries to funnel it out. He tried. He wrote. And he wrote, and wrote, until his arm ached and his muscles twitched with it and he still didn’t stop then. He tried to riddle it all out. Tried to untangle the thin copper wires that had somehow come knotted like the costume necklaces Poppy used to toss in her vanity and please, Harley, fix them?
He turns to logic. Tell it to Peter. Tell it to Peter, God, is he a fucking moron? Tell Peter- the kid so lost in the labyrinth of his mind that Ariadne and her red damn spool wouldn’t do him a whit of good- that everything around him is fake? When he’s probably already feeling something along the same lines. Jesus.
He is exhausted. He is haywire. He cannot remember the last time he felt like a being, like his atoms were thrumming subconsciously where they made his skin and his bones and his blood. He is empty. He is roaring. From head to toe. Static. Nothing. Symphonies. No one. Empty. Raging, whirlwind, hailstorm. Boring and blase and broken.
Dichotomy. He is so nothing. He is so nothing. And yet. He is shattered. For though he can’t feel it, he knows, somehow, in the depths of his mind and the marrow of his bones that he is splintered. He is unfixable. Disconnected and wavering and wild. Inhuman.
He vomits into a trash can.
He finds their bedroom, buries himself under his sheets, and wonders how long it will take to suffocate.
Everything spins, but only slightly. Not enough to cause concern. Just enough for the nails on his fingers to feel as if they are peeling off; just enough for his soul to thrum to a beat so unsynchronized with that of the universe that he is sure he will die on the spot. His consciousness will implode. With nothing to latch onto, how could it go on?
How could he go on?
He is always floating. For a moment, he doesn’t think. He immediately starts again in earnest, for how could he have a reason to live when he isn’t thinking— when he is nothing?
He can’t touch. He can’t feel. Why should he stay?
No impact. No purpose. Why should he stay?
He thinks of Peter.
A reason. Potent enough to be the only one. To overpower any other feeling he might have had. God, Peter. He loves him.
Tony, May, Poppy, Pepper, Rhodey, Happy.
Reasons.
His reasons, his every reason.
His eyeballs hurt. Like he’s been suckerpunched in the nose and both eyes are blackened in the moment after.
He is the postscript of a fight. He is the pain, the confusion. The turmoil. Harley has been turmoil from the moment he was born.
Harley has done goddamn enough. He buries his head under the pillow and tries to shove himself into sleep.
When Peter wakes, late in the afternoon, he goes on patrol. It’s the only thing he’s sure he can do no matter what he feels like. His muscles could do this for him if he were asleep. He knows this. He is this.
This is running start, free-fall, air whistling around him, eyes locked, arm out, web shot, preparation, and the jarring suddenness of suspension. It’s a few safety seconds because of the rain slicking the building faces, to make sure the web holds, make sure his fingers stick against the great grey edifice.
It’s knowing water is falling quick and fast enough to drown him eight times over but not feeling a drop through his suit. It’s muted Karen, blocked Harley, not telling anyone he left the tower. It’s alone, and it should be bliss, but it’s woeful in the way that solitude is sometimes. It is strange to have absolutely no one with him. No voice in his ear when there’s usually two. No one watching him swing through the tower windows.
Even the streets are relatively bare due to the hour and the weather. No one wants to take a skip through a tropical storm at seven in the evening.
Peter watches for crime instead of hacking into police comms or unmuting Karen to ask. He can do this himself. He can.
He drops closer to the ground. There is a frightening moment, just a brief flash of one, where he is sure his web won’t catch and he thinks meh.
That is freefall, true freefall, with no way out, just one way down.
The web sticks. (Not where he meant for it to.) It slaps against a glass window halfway down a condo building and the strand itself is so long that he needs to curl his knees to his chest to keep from kicking a Volkswagen halfway down 31st Avenue and into the heart of Astoria. He lands funny and pain shoots up his ankles, so he rolls out of his squat, splashing through the dirty street water. Rivers flood every road. He has a strange urge to run through them, kicking and yelling. This feels like cleansing, standing in the eye of a storm. It feels like he is supposed to pray. To go to his knees, clasp his palms, spit out mouthfuls of sour bile and call them sin, and then drink straight from the sky, thick cotton grey clouds in his lungs and that is pure and peace and-
He hears a scream.
It makes his teeth clench.
He almost- almost- turns Karen on. Almost opens his comm connection to Harley, or to Tony, or Nat.
Fake, his mind reminds him. Stop. Stupid idea, because they aren’t real.
He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath that smells like the lycra knitted into his suit, and follows the remnants of the echo in his ears.
It is difficult, at first, to remember it among the thunderous pounding of rain and howling of the wind, but he tries to trust himself. Tries. Tries. (How can he truly trust if he is fake? Has he ever done anything at all?)
The sound had come from an alleyway beside a high school, all chipped brick and rusted bike racks. The pavement in the alley is entirely flooded, enough to cover Peter to the ankles.
The man with a knife held to a teenage girl’s throat and his hand down the front her pants does not turn at the sound of Peter’s sloshing footsteps. He most likely cannot hear Peter over the sound of his own muttering into the girl’s ear, above her whimpers, and, God, Peter is swallowing bile and all he can think of is Harley as a child, undesirous like that, stiff and terrified, eyes scrunched shut.
Harley, who is at home thinking everything Peter knows and feels is fake.
Peter bites his tongue.
God. The rain, the night, the alleyway. He can almost see the blood. Queens. Queens, that raised him, and beat him down. Queens, where he had a family, then watched his uncle bleed out onto the pavement. It’s like a memory. It’s like a dream. It’s like a fucking nightmarescape except Peter can’t break out of it.
The moment Harley fell from grace- childhood robbed by the hands of his father- and the moment he did- Ben’s wet gasp in his ears as he fell stiffly to his knees in the alley, a last I love you that Peter still feels, Harley, it’s real- all rolled into one. It’s fucking poetic.
Peter plans.
If he yells, he scares the man, and the girl gets hurt. If he goes up and grabs the guy, the knife could still cut the girl and there’s the risk of injuring her otherwise where they’re… attached. If he signals for her to make a break for it and webs the guy as she goes, she’ll still most likely get the blade.
Speed and caution. They don’t go together easily, but Peter needs them both.
He holds a finger to his lips and makes eye contact with the girl, who is either so proficient at acting or so dissociated that her expression doesn’t change a bit.
He sneaks right behind the man. Poises one hand to grab the knife arm and one to wrap around his chest and wrench him out of the way. With the left hand, he counts down so the girl can see. Three. Two.
He grabs the man’s knife arm at the elbow, presses. Snakes his other arm around the man’s chest, pulls. Shouts, “go!” with all the gusto he can manage.
The man throws his head back and it smashes flat against Peter’s nose. The sound of shattering cartilage and cracking bone is like nails in a blender and Peter’s mouth fills with blood, sweet and heady and he wants to spit but he can’t and his mask is filling with the sticky stuff and he’s going to drown in it if he doesn’t finish this fast and get his mask off.
The man drops the knife as his elbow cracks, letting loose a guttural yell. (Are they real if they’re both broken? That cracking noise, did it come from Peter’s mind? Does a bone make a sound if there’s no one there to hear it?)
Peter wants this to end. His lungs want this to end so he can fucking breathe. He wraps an arm around the man’s throat and squeezes until he’s bearing the full limp weight of him.
He lets the man fall to the ground, splashing up grimy water, disgusted. He alerts the police through his suit.
He lifts the mask up over his nose. Spits a mouthful of nasty sweet stuff and rinses his mouth out. Lets the rain fall on his face. Washes off the blood. It pounds onto his aching nose and he has to bite back a groan. It fucking hurts.
He rolls his mask back down carefully. He finds the girl, who had stopped running once she rounded the corner. Her hair is sheared short, choppy, in blondish waves, plastered wet to her forehead and her neck. Her jaw hangs loose, shocked, her round cheeks splotchy, and Peter doesn’t know if he wants to hug her or hide her.
“I’m sorry,” he says. The words come out thick and nasal.
“I know,” is her answer.
“Let me walk you to the hospital,” he says.
“I don’t want to be around a man right now,” she says, eyeing him.
“I understand.” A beat. “I don’t want you to be alone right now. Is there someone else I can contact to help you?”
“Are you a kid?” she says, and sounds weakly incredulous.
“I’m seventeen,” Peter says.
She stares at him with red-rimmed eyes, heavily-lidded, and Peter feels like he’s an amoeba under a microscope.
“Fine,” she says thinly. “Walk me. Only because you sound like a nerd and probably need to be protected by me more than I need to be protected by you.”
Peter smiles under the mask, and likes to think she can tell.
They walk with almost two feet of space between them, staying beneath canopies and awnings and balconies to shield themselves from the rain, and reach Mount Sinai soon enough.
Peter knows the place well. May worked there, before. They would have brought Ben there, if.
He doesn’t leave her side until her paperwork is filled out and she’s about to be brought to a room. Andie, her name is. He wants to remember it. To check on her, eventually, maybe.
She waves goodbye to him. He gives her a salute. She rolls her eyes.
Peter goes home, then.
He swings to the tower with ringing ears and aching muscles, so deeply exhausted that he forgets the state he had left in, and doubly forgets the state he is in now.
It feels his feet haven’t even hit the wrought iron of the balcony when Harley comes barreling around a corner and into the living room, heart audibly pounding through the bulletproof glass of the french doors.
The doors slide open for him and Peter steps inside, waiting on the large doormat.
He stands, looking at Harley through the mask.
Harley says, weakly, “holy shit, Pete,” and Peter marches right past him, giving a wide berth, and into the bathroom.
Only once the door is shut and locked does he pull his mask off gingerly, squirming the sides up and holding it far away from his nose as he inches out of it. Even after rinsing in the rain, the inside is grimy and sticks to his face.
It’s a sight to behold, really, his nose all swollen and the bridge bearing a new bump. The skin around his eyes is painted sapphire blue and a single smear of blood remains under his nostrils. Around the bruising, he’s pale. Clammy. Like a painting half-finished, one that the painter smudged when a clumsy elbow upended his dirty paint-water onto it. (Fake. Art is an imitation, everything is an imitation, and the only things that are real are in Peter’s head.)
His knees and forearms, too, sport a mottling of bruises, though they are far lighter and far sparser than the ones on his face. His joints feel sore, as if the rain seeped right into his bones and now they are swollen, unwieldy.
The shower he takes is hot and long. Steam fills the bathroom and blurs the mirrors. He is a ghost in them. (He is an imitation. The only things that are real are in Peter’s head.)
The problem is: the things in Peter’s head. They are big. They are hungry. They are strange. They are space and yet they take up space. They feel like nothing and yet they are obvious and enormous. They hurt him. (They are real?) They hiss at him. (They are real.)
Peter does not go sit in a conference room. (That is where Harley tends to hide when he is “being alone” but really wants Peter to find him. Peter knows this. He does not want Harley to find him, to tell him again Ben’s love was never real.) He goes, instead, somewhere he doesn’t know.
He finds Pepper.
She is ferocious, and brash, and yet devilishly kind. She is dichotomy incarnate. She would gut Peter and then doodle hearts and kittens across the roof with his intestines. She can fix him, he is sure of it.
She is not in a meeting, which is a relief. She sits at her desk, listening to FRIDAY read some sort of paper aloud to her, holding a nectarine between her teeth and fixing a chip in her nail polish at the same time. Her knees are crossed, the stiletto of the upper foot hanging loosely off the edge of her toes.
She looks up when Peter knocks gently on the door.
“O’mm Go’,” she says around the fruit, and that is the moment when Peter remembers his nose is very much broken.
She waves an arm, mutes FRIDAY. The doors swing open as she closes the bottle of nail polish. She removes the fruit from her mouth and drops it onto the table as she rises sharply to her feet.
Peter is sorta standing in the doorway. He didn’t mean for it to go like this.
Pepper takes him by the shoulders and brings him into the room, her lips pressed into a harsh white line. “Honey, you should have gone right to Medical, you know that. Come on. Let me see.”
She gently presses on his shoulders until he perches on the edge of her desk between stacks and stacks of paperwork. She stands before him, leaning towards him, and takes his chin between her thumbs and forefingers, tilting his head delicately side to side. She clicks her tongue and sighs, keeping a hand in place even once her brief examination is completed.
“What’s the verdict, Doctor Potts?” he says, and is almost surprised he can speak.
“Hmm,” she says. “It looks like a broken nose, Patient Zero, but it’s hard to tell around all of the layers of bruising and bad decisions here.”
He tries to send her a smile. He can feel in his face that he lands far from it.
“Oh, Peter,” she says softly. “What are we gonna do with you, hmm? Didn’t Tony say no patrolling when you’re not feeling right?”
Peter shrugs one shoulder. “Had to.”
Pepper taps a hand on the outside of his hip to urge him to scoot over. He does, and she sits beside him. She smells like lemons, so different from May, but her presence is— well, not the same, but similar. An air of confidence but with a caveat: a willingness to drop it all in the face of violently loving.
“Why did you have to?” she asks him. She doesn’t look at him, and he doesn’t look at her, but it feels like she’s probing at his soul with a scalpel and a tiny mirror, taking notes of all she finds.
“Just had to.”
“Peter,” she says.
He shifts uncomfortably. “I think Harley is mad at me,” he admits. “I needed to distract myself.”
Pepper cocks her head thoughtfully. “Why would he be mad at you?”
“We had a disagreement this morning and he seemed angry, I dunno,” Peter says, shrugging helplessly.
“Was it a big disagreement?”
Peter says, “it wasn’t supposed to be.”
“Are you mad at him?”
“No.” Peter pauses. “Just. Just confused, and maybe hurt.”
“Then it can be fixed, when you’re ready for it to be. When you’re ready to hear an apology,” Pepper says. “I watched him march around the living room a good seven times just while I had my breakfast. I didn’t understand it then- I didn’t ask him what was wrong- but he’s pretty obviously losing his mind with worry out there. Won’t talk to anyone, didn’t flirt with Bucky or Natasha when they walked by. And- you know how much coffee he drank this morning. He’s been shaking like a goddamn leaf. I’m surprised we haven’t found him slumped unconscious in a pile on the floor from heart failure yet.” Pepper wraps a gentle arm around Peter, pulling him into her. He rests his chin in the space between her collarbone and shoulder and sighs. “What are you afraid of?” she asks.
“I’m not afraid,” he says automatically. But. That isn’t the truth. That isn’t the truth at all, no, because isn’t the entire problem the fact that he is blood-boilingly terrified of meaning nothing? Of being nothing? Of having done his best, tried his hardest, strived to do good in every way he could and still leaving no speck of dust unbothered before he dies? Useless. Ineffective. Defective. He can try to make things better, but what does his effort matter if he doesn’t succeed? If he doesn’t turn out like Ben: someone whose memory people cling to because of how good, how kind and brave and hardworking he was? And- God- this means Harley thinks not even Ben left an impact, right? And Peter surely can’t if Ben didn’t. Ben was damn close to perfect. It opens a rift like a sinkhole in the pit of his stomach.
And this is the person he trusts most, the person who has read him cover to cover and then picked the book back up and read him again, telling him this might be true. Saying, your life is only real to you. Saying, you’re trapped in your head, your skull is a cage, and still you don’t have the key. Saying, there is no key.
Saying, since everyone who loved you is dead, no one loves you.
“Stop that,” Pepper says sharply. Like an arrow through a sheet. “I can see you thinking and I know it’s wrong, whatever it is. You’re always convincing yourself of these horrible, horrible things, Peter, and none of them are ever true.”
“What if Harley thinks they’re true?”
“He doesn’t,” she says, and she is so sure that Peter wants to believe her. “But, if he does, he’s wrong. He does have the physical ability to be wrong, you know, even if he sometimes pretends he doesn’t.”
Peter frowns. “Does it matter whether or not he’s- he’s actually right? If he thinks he’s right, isn’t that bad enough?”
“No,” says Pepper. “Because Harley will listen to you more than anyone else. If you tell him he’s wrong and explain why, he’ll do his best to understand. He wants to learn. He wants to do better all the time. And, more than anything, he wants to do right by you.”
Peter chews his lip. He doesn’t like fighting, and he especially hates the after part, where the two of them need to make nice and apologize. He never knows what to say. The dull pain radiating from his nose is making his eyes water, he thinks, and he doesn’t want to talk anymore.
Pepper seems to sense this, and softens. She rubs his shoulder and holds him tighter against her side. “Come on, kiddo. I’ll walk you down to Medical so you can get that nose checked, okay?”
He grabs her hand and squeezes it tight. “Thank you, Pepper,” he says.
She gives him a gentle smile, just a quirk of her lips. “Of course, sweetheart.” Her eyebrows arch. “But if you just smudged my wet nail polish, I’ll evict you.”
A laugh startles right from the pit of Peter’s chest, short and loud like a shout. “Okay, Pep,” he says. “I guess I’d deserve that.”
She stays with him as a doctor checks his nose, shining lights and prodding the bridge and generally causing Peter discomfort.
“Good news,” the doctor says, rolling his sleeves up. “The deviation in your septum is so mild that we can get away without fixing it surgically. Especially with your enhanced rate of healing, as long as it doesn’t get pushed out of place, you should be completely symptom-free in a few days.”
“Wait,” says Pepper, waving a hand. “What the hell do you mean the deviation is mild? Is it deviated or not? If it’s deviated, fix it. Don’t leave it, he’ll- he’ll get headaches, or have a bump on his nose or something.”
“Miss Potts,” the doctor says in a soothing tone as Peter mumbles “Pepper,” under his breath and raises his shoulders to his ears.
“If the deviation would pose any sort of issue at all in the future, I would fix it right now,” the doctor says. “It will not have side effects. I am positive of this.”
Pepper scowls and crosses her arms. “I don’t like it.”
“Pep,” Peter says. “It’s my face.”
“And I’m playing guardian right now!” Pepper says, a little manically.
As if cued, a thundering echoes down the hall, coming quickly nearer.
Tony and Harley push through the doors to the medbay in tandem, eyes wide, chests heaving from the strain of running.
“What,” says Tony, jogging to the exam table Peter is perched upon. “What. What.” He takes Peter’s chin the same way Pepper had, tilting it this way and that.
“This is why we didn’t tell them,” Pepper says to the doctor.
Harley follows silently, pale, swallowing compulsively, squeezing his hands into fists and then releasing them.
Something sour simmers in Peter’s stomach. It’s fake, isn’t it? Isn’t it? Harley being here, Harley caring? It isn’t in Peter’s head, Peter didn’t see it coming, so it’s fake. Harley doesn’t give a rat’s ass about him and he knows it because it’s in his head so it’s real.
Why is he here?
Peter pushes himself off the exam table and strides out of the room.
“Oh, no,” Pepper whispers, watching him go.
“What happened?” Tony asks, gripping his left arm. “I can’t walk into things like this without knowing what’s going on, I can’t see a bruised child on a lab table and be expected to not have immediate cardiac dysrhythmia, I can’t deal with the crazy, I’m an old man, I should be retired, I. No. No,” Tony says, waving an arm. “No,” he repeats, then turns to Pepper. “What? Honey. Light of my life. What?”
She sighs, and runs a hand through her hair. “He went on patrol upset and got hurt, as he tends to do.”
“He went on patrol,” repeats Tony. His full body twitches. “He must have blocked me from the suit again, that little shit. Wait, why didn’t you tell anyone?” Tony asks, rounding on Harley.
“I didn’t know he went either. Must’ve blocked me, too,” Harley says weakly, still staring at the door from which Peter had left. “He’s upset?” he repeats. “He’s. Did he say why?”
Pepper eyes him. “Go after him,” she says.
“Yeah,” Harley says, but he doesn’t move.
Pepper taps him between the shoulders, and it’s like a spur.
He marches through the hallways, feeling something like ants crawling under his skin. “FRI, where?” he says, and this is enough for her to respond, somehow.
“Peter is headed towards your bedroom. His heart rate is highly elevated and he seems to be in distress.”
Harley walks faster.
“Did he lock the door?” Harley asks, nearly running. He comes to a sharp stop in the kitchen and grabs an ice pack from the freezer.
“No, not yet, Mister Keener. Should I let him know you’re coming?”
“Probably not,” says Harley, chewing his lip. “Definitely not.”
“Sure thing, young boss.”
It isn’t much longer until Harley is there, staring at the closed door, chest tight and heart whaling against his ribs. He doesn’t know what the hell is going on. He doesn’t. Peter was struggling this morning, yes, he knows that. They talked, and that turned into a debate, and Peter didn’t like it. Peter left. Peter slept, he knows this, because he had started losing his goddamn marbles wondering about him and resorted to asking FRIDAY. He figured Peter had continued to sleep, or maybe went back to Forest Hills to grab some summer work or something. He didn’t think for a second that Peter had gone on patrol. Peter doesn’t block him. Peter blocks Tony, and that’s all well and good and a bag of chips, but for Peter to block Harley from his comms? High treason. And probably not by Peter.
So it’s his own fault. Good, great. Fucking excellent. As if Harley isn’t already bad enough at being self-aware. Everything is his fault, says his brain. His brain is an asshole and also rude. For all he knows, Peter is mad at him for finishing the Cheerios without asking if he wanted any first.
There is no way in sweet heaven and hell he’ll be able to logically figure out what he did before going into that room.
So he’s going in blind. That’s super funky fresh, he is so excited, this is great. Never better.
Harley is on the precipice of panic.
Every time Peter and him fight, it’s because Harley pushes him. Every single time. Harley wants to know what makes people tick. He wants to know what makes his people tick.
Not everyone wants him to know what makes them tick.
Harley takes everything too far. He’s trying not to, but it’s hard. He’s trying to learn. And, sometimes, he forgets that people don’t take as well to deep shit as he does.
Now he has to fix it. He wishes there could be a toolbelt for this, fully stocked, that he could hang low on his hips and pull appliances out of when he needs them. That would make everything a helluva lot easier. Hammer for nailing his apology. Screwdriver for hanging up the new rules like a tapestry in charcoal and magenta.
But if Harley is anything, he’s a goddamn mechanic in training, ain’t he? So he’s gonna go and do it, hands on, figure it out by sticking his arms in up to the elbows and getting machine grease all over his face like war paint. He’ll learn by doing, and he’ll be better after. They will be better after, the two of them, together.
“Jesus, Harley,” comes a muffled voice through the door. “How long’re you just gonna stand out there hyperventilating.”
“Uh,” says Harley and he opens the door a little.
Peter is laying on top of the bed, face down, his chin propped on his folded hands to keep his busted nose from pressing into the sheets. There’s a pillow shoved under his stomach. The room is lit only by a bedside lamp, and it turns Peter’s curls reddish at the tips. He waves a hand noncommittally, as if telling Harley he can sit.
“Thanks,” Harley says, though he isn’t quite sure why, since the room is technically his. Just feels right to say it.
Peter looks at him scrutinizingly and shrugs a shoulder.
Harley holds out the ice pack.
Peter’s gaze softens and he takes it with a little nod, holding it against the bridge of his swollen nose. The bruising is darker, now, and more spread. The edges near his eyes are yellowing, and Harley has to bite his tongue to keep from making a jaundice joke.
“Is your nose okay?” Harley asks as he lowers himself onto the far end of the bed. He crosses his legs and holds his feet in his hands.
“It’s fine,” Peter says.
“Does it hurt?” Harley amends.
“It’s fine.”
Harley raises his eyebrows.
Peter scowls as well as he can. “Hurts. I’ve had worse.”
“That doesn’t make this hurt less,” he says, and he knows they’re not talking about Peter’s nose anymore. Peter doesn’t respond, and Harley finds himself breathing out a thin little, “Peter,” before he can stop himself. “I want to apologize about this morning. Can you tell me what I did wrong so I can fix it?”
Peter looks at him. “Not mad at you. You don’t need to apologize.”
“Yes, I do,” says Harley. Something is very cold in his stomach. “Even if you’re not mad. Did I hurt your feelings?”
Peter frowns.
“Did something I said hurt you?” Harley repeats earnestly. “Because, if it did, then I have that to apologize for. I never meant to hurt you, Pete, I would- I would never do that on purpose.”
“You mean you’re not mad at me?”
Harley’s stomach clenches. “What? What. Pete. Why would I be mad at you? I’m the one that fucked up.”
Peter was frowning, his eyebrows beetled. “But… you said. Aren’t you, didn’t I? Do something that made you say that?”
“Say what, Pete? You have to help me here so I can explain to you what I meant. Please,” Harley says, leaning forward.
“You were saying all that stuff about how nothing is real. Like, I’m not. Real.” Peter takes a deep breath and tries to shoulder on. “Whatever my parents felt about me isn’t real because they’re dead now. And Ben, Harley. I love Ben, even though he’s dead. I know I do. And you were saying that I can’t? That my love for Ben isn’t real? Or that Ben and my parents can’t love me now? Harley, I know I didn’t know my parents that well, but. I can’t handle the thought of them not loving me. I can’t. And Ben? God. Harley,” Peter says, wrenching his hands through his hair sharply. “It would kill me. It would kill me, thinking that.”
Harley thinks he’s going to puke again. “Peter,” he says weakly. “I didn’t think. I didn’t think at all. I’m an idiot. I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize that it would sound like that. I was just. Thinking a lot last night. But I didn’t think about the important parts, obviously- the, uh, the parts that would suck to hear, especially for you. It was, like, the poorest of poor tastes for me to say that.”
Peter is looking at Harley with wide eyes. “So— wait.” He scratches the side of his face. “So do you believe the stuff you said or not?”
This is the crux, is it not?
“I don’t know what I believe, Pete,” Harley says frankly. He throws his arms out. “I don’t know anything. I don’t know jack shit. I think any part of anything can be true. I don’t know.”
“Okay,” Peter says. “I can live with that.”
“I’m really, really sorry, Pete. I hope you know I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
“I know now,” Peter says.
They sit in silence for a moment.
“I think you’re real,” Harley says. Peter turns to look at him. “I know you’re real. You’re the realest goddamn thing in the world.”
Peter flips onto his back and stares up at the ceiling. He says, “we’ve never been… like this. We disagree, but never like this.”
“Never like this,” Harley echoes. He lays himself down next to Peter, slowly, giving him the opportunity to tell Harley no. When Peter doesn’t react, he presses closer, until they’re lined up shoulder to shoulder. “So, while we’re airing out the closet, want to talk about what was bothering you this morning?”
Peter groans.
Harley snorts a half-hearted laugh, then hums. “Yeah. That’s okay, buddy. Sometimes it just happens.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m here for you, y’know,” Harley says, and prods Peter in the ribs with his elbow.
Peter turns his face on the blankets, his hair scruffing and his ear folding under his cheek. “I know,” he tells Harley, and it’s matter-of-fact. “That, I know.”
“Even when I’m being a big turd?”
Peter’s expression softens. “Especially when you’re being a big turd. You’ve got good intentions, you’re just misguided sometimes.”
“Like Patrick Star,” Harley says sagely.
Peter pushes him off the bed.
“I might have deserved that,” Harley says from the ground.
Peter peers over the edge of the mattress at him and summons a grin from within himself.
“Yeah,” he says, meaning absolutely the opposite. “Yeah, I think you did.”