Let Them Come, Just Let Them Try (I’m Not About to Say Goodbye)
Peter stirred awake. The first thing he noticed was the pain in his back against the hard floor. The rest of the pain came later, all at once.
He groaned and opened his eyes, blinking against the gentle gray light bathing over him. He didn’t move yet. He wasn’t sure if he could.
His whole body was encased in different kinds of pain. Stabbing in the back of his head, aching on his ribs, sharp snapping in his wrists, burning in his nose. There was no where in his body that felt neutral, untouched by agony. He could even feel a thin crust of old blood over his face and back. He began to feel a tickle of anxiety in his stomach; shouldn’t his powers have healed him by now? This time last month his injuries would have all but disappeared within a few hours of their infliction, and yet he felt them as acutely as if he was still getting beaten by—
May.
Peter shivered. Where had the warmth from her name gone? Why did he no longer feel a softness when he thought of her face like he had so often before? Now his mind showed him not flashes of her smiling face and loose auburn hair, but of her deep scowl and gripped fists.
He pushed her away. As far as he could tell, she wasn’t even home. She worked on Saturdays, anyways.
Saturday. He was supposed to go back to Mr. Stark’s house to finish suit repairs and upgrades. And now he would have to flake out without so much as a warning. Tony would think he abandoned him. He might even sit around all day waiting for him to show up. He might never want to mentor him again after this.
Oh, but who was Peter kidding? Tony didn’t care about him. Not as much as he thought, anyways. Peter was just some kid that did the dirty work for him and showed up whenever he ripped a stitch in his suit. Maybe he wasn’t an inconvenience to Tony, but he was certainly no one important. He was nowhere near the ranks of Pepper, Happy, and Rhodey, all of whom Tony talked to outside of business. Peter was just another colleague. Just Spider-Man.
Spider-Man. He was done with that for sure, now, huh? He hadn’t seen his suit in days. When he asked May about it she had insisted he had surely misplaced it. And he had, right? He wasn’t so sure.
But even if he had the suit his healing was all but gone without the necessary food. He wasn’t sure he could even stand up, much less swing around New York City fetching kittens from trees.
But as he laid in silence the Sun was rising ever higher and now it shined straight into his eyes, flaring even beneath the red tint of his closed eyelids. And one arm was dead beneath him, numb and bent awkwardly. And the hardwood beneath him wasn’t doing his back any favors.
Slowly, gingerly, Peter sat up. He propped his back against the wall and used his nearly uninjured legs to push him into a seated position. He cradled his numb arm in his lap, though his stomach twisted when he saw the odd angle of his wrist. He was almost disappointed when feeling returned to the limb, sharp and stabbing.
He stretched out his neck, trying to coax the sore muscles into relaxation. He leaned his head back to let it rest on the wall and cried out. Something in the back of his head hit the wall and scraped his skull so roughly the room spun around him. He felt sick with pain and heaved, his stomach trying to contract around nothing, and releasing when the fierce cramping jostled his broken ribs. He stayed hunched over for a few long minutes, breathing through his nose and trying to quell the dominoes of pain toppling through him.
Finally, he straightened his back, careful to keep his head from touching the wall behind him. He slowly raised a trembling hand to the back of his head. His middle finger bumped a shard of glass and he hissed in pain as it moved in his skin.
He let his hand drop as tears started to gather in his eyes. He felt his face grow hot and tried to lean his head back to face the air vent but no, he reminded himself, he couldn’t even do that. He had to keep his fucking head suspended in the air until he worked up the nerve to pull out the gigantic shard of glass stuck in his skull.
And that was it. The tears in his eyes finally spilled over. He drew his knees up to his chest and let his forehead drop onto them, not caring about the way the collision shot agony through his nerves because every movement did that now. His body shook and heaved with sobs so loud he had to bite his kneecap to muffle them for fear that somehow May was home, he just hadn’t noticed her, and if she heard him breaking down she would come back in and really finish him off.
He wanted to scream. He wanted to stand up and open the window and scream out into the city until his voice gave out and the tears spilling constantly from his eyes dried into invisible tracks. But he couldn’t, because that was impolite, the neighbors would be angry with him, and he knew that he would never be able to stand long enough to open the window, let alone lean out of it and shout his frustrations to the world.
But...but he could scream if he was in pain, right? People usually didn’t like it when someone screamed for no reason, but if there was a reason then they would be fine. And he wanted to scream.
He shot his hand up to the piece of glass sticking out from his hair. He hissed as his fingers grabbed the smooth shard, slick with still-wet blood. And before he could let himself think about whether or not this was the best idea, he yanked the piece of glass out of his head and let out a blood-cuddling scream. And it felt good.
Panting, he dropped his hand and let the glass fall to the floor. He finally was able to see what was stuck in his head; coated with blood both fresh and dried, it was nearly four inches long. He could see which end had been stuck in his skull, saw tiny flecks of white on it from where it had scraped over the bone.
He felt the blood from the new wound streaming through his hair and down his back, hot and thick. He groaned when he remembered that these were his only clothes until...well, for the foreseeable future. And now they were bloody and wrinkled and probably smelled terrible because the only shower he could use was the one at school after gym class.
Peter blinked lazily at the floor. His tears were still wet on his cheeks, but beside from the occasional sniffle he was still. There was more glass stuck in his head, but he was too tired to care. He would get it out when he could walk to a mirror.
Time passed. He spent the hours thinking of decathalon questions from so long ago and trying to remember the answers. At one point he dragged his old decathalon binder from beneath his bed and reviewed the crumpled study guides and yellowed flash cards. In the late afternoon he finally stumbled into the bathroom and managed to keep himself standing long enough to relieve himself. He worried briefly about May noticing an extra gallon of water on her monthly bill, but he could hardly survive a trip down the hallway and back. He would never make it to the bathroom at the gas station across the street.
Periodically throughout the day he shoveled room-temperature spaghetti in his mouth. The cold noodles made him shiver as they slid down his throat. He told himself to take it slow, ration the food to last the rest of the week. But God, it felt so nice to be full that Peter couldn’t resist eating the slimy sauce that was once the perfect consistency. By the time night fell more than half of the spaghetti was gone.
And as disgusting as it was, he needed water. And, well, the sauce settled over time.
He was exhausted. His slowly healing limbs hung heavy and his eyelids dropped, but his body wouldn’t let him sleep. He tossed and turned as best as he could on the hard floor, but there was no position comfortable enough to invite sleep into his brain.
He turned onto his side, sighing. He just wanted to sleep. But he wasn’t desperate enough to repeat last night’s measures. Just as he was considering breaking a rule and dragging a blanket from his bed, something beneath the bed frame caught his eye.
He reached in and pulled out Ben’s shirt. With a shaking hand he took it out of the bag he had hastily shoved it in weeks ago. He had almost forgotten that he had kept it. He drew it up to his face. It still smelled like him, just a little.
Only minutes later, he fell asleep, the shirt clutched tightly to his face, the only life left around him. He dreamt of nothing but static.
When he woke, he squeezed the shirt to his chest for just a second before sliding it back beneath the bed. Hardly ten seconds, he heard the front door open and shut and hurried footsteps approach his room. He lifted his head, blinking blearily, his muscles stiff. May threw his bedroom door open and he flinched back, hissing when his bad wrist hit the ground.
She threw a black sweatshirt onto his face. He yelped and lifted a hand to his face, tearing off the fabric and tossing it to the side. He looked up at May, who was hurriedly tying her hair into a neat knot. “Put that on,” she said, and so he did.
“May? What’s going on?”
She ignored him. “Make sure you cover all the bruises and shit. Weren’t you supposed to be healed by now?”
”Sorry,” he mumbled, fidgeting with the strings of the hoodie. He was quite glad for it, really; as his body grew thinner, he found that he nearly always felt freezing.
She sighed, smoothing her bun with her hands. “Well, I’ll just have to deal with it. Come on.”
She quickly left the room. Peter stood shakily and limped after her, stepping over the trail of dried blood leading from her bedroom to his.
She motioned for him to sit at the kitchen table, so he did. It felt nice to sit on something other than a floor, he thought. She tossed him a wet towel which landed on his shoulder with a splat. “Here,” she said, “clean your face. Get the blood off.”
Peter nodded and dragged the cloth over his face, wincing when it nudged his cracked nose or dark bruises. As he cleaned his face, she bustled around the kitchen and listed information she wanted him to remember. “This weekend I was home the whole time, got it? We ate that spaghetti together and you didn’t tell me you got hurt last night until this morning. This is gonna hurt”
“What—ow!” May grabbed a small piece of glass from the back of his head with tweezers and pulled it out in one sharp move. She immediately pressed a rag to the wound, staunching the blood. She dropped the glass onto the table. She repeated the action on the next shard, then the next. Peter winced each time. She was none too careful, ripping his flesh more than it was already.
She grabbed another piece just as a knock sounded on the door. Peter felt the blood drain out of his face. Who was here? What if they saw him with a broken nose and glass sticking out of his head?
“May?” he whispered, staring up at her with wide, frightened eyes. She hushed him.
”Come in!” May called.
The door opened, and Tony Stark sauntered into the apartment.
——
Tony had been seeing less and less of Peter in the past months. Karen showed fewer hours logged in the suit every week, texts became slowly less frequent until they just plain stopped, and he’d been showing up later to check-in every week. Happy had stopped forwarding messages from Peter to the point that Tony had started to ask for them, and every dissapointed shake of his head hurt a little more.
But worse than the physical vacancy was the mental. The few times he actually did show up to check-ins he was barely there. He hardly said two words outside of “Yes,” “no,” and “I’m sorry” anymore. His eyes were always deep sunken and glazed, trained down as if looking someone in the eye would get him killed. And whenever Tony touched him, he flinched like he’d been burned.
Tony was scared for the kid. Reviewing Karen’s footage made him feel dirty, like he was spying on someone’s privacy, but he couldn’t stand the nail-biting between meetings. What he saw made him feel hollow. Or better yet, what he didn’t see. There were no more funny quips Spider-Man was known for, no flips for tourists or waves to grumpy old women. Peter worked in silence, webbing up criminals without even a joke to leave them on. Even Karen has been trying to get him to talk, asking questions about his day and prodding at him for conversation. He just waved her off with single-word answers, and at the end of the day he would remove the mask without saying goodbye to his previously beloved AI.
And Tony wasn’t an idiot. He knew what starvation looked like.
He’d tried to give Peter his space; if he didn’t want to talk to him, Tony wouldn’t make him. He knew better than anyone that he was an easy person to get tired of. He had thought Peter was going down the same route as everyone in his life but Pepper.
But when he eyed the pasta he was given like a forbidden fruit and ate like a madman only once he was told to, Tony knew it was up. Something was way, way too wrong, and he should at least call for an extra meeting to try and pry something out of him.
And then Peter didn’t show up. Or answer his phone. And when Tony called Happy, he confirmed total radio silence.
So, he called May. He still had her number from Germany.
”Peter’s just been going through a tough time with his uncle,” she said only an hour before. “You know, they say grief for adolescents peaks a year after the actual death.”
Tony asked if he could come check on him. After a good amount of convincing and an offer to pay the Peter’s college tuition, May begrudgingly said yes.
When he walked through the door of the apartment, he was hit with the sense of home. He’d always lived in a glorified museum, so burlap pillows and inspirational quotes were something new for him. It took a good amount of his focus to tear his eyes away from a picture of Peter smiling between his aunt and uncle.
His gaze landed on the scene in the kitchen. May stood behind Peter, holding tweezers to his scalp. She jerked her hand back and Peter winced. Tony’s stomach flipped when she dropped a piece of glass onto the table, beside three shards that were considerably larger.
Tony fought to keep his voice casual as he said, “What’s going on here, kiddo?”
Peter looked up. Tony paled at a bruised face and crooked nose.
May answered for him, her eyes still trained on his head. “Just Spider-Man antics,” she said, then laughed airily. Peter dropped his eyes back down, swallowing around nothing. May removed another piece of glass. Peter barely flinched.
”Really?” he asked. “Karen didn’t say anything about an injury. Or you even being in the suit.”
May stiffened for just a second, so quickly Tony hardly noticed. Then she replied, “Well, you know, he wasn’t actually going to go on patrol. He meant to stay in with me last night, but he heard someone scream outside and just couldn’t help himself. You know how he is.”
Tony nodded. That was something Peter would do, and had probably done before. Something in the back of his head asked why he would risk his identity, the one thing he fought to protect over almost everything else, but he pushed it away. Peter was too selfless for his own good. Right?
”So, uh Peter. What have you been up to?”
Peter’s eyes flitted up to him, then immediately back to his lap. He shrugged and shrunk further into himself. His face screwed up in pain as May took another bit of glass from him, barely the size of a pebble.
Tony looked to May. He liked to think he knew Peter, and if he did, he knew he’d never express any discomfort in front of May. He already felt bad enough for existing around her.
So, he cleared his throat and said to May, “Hey, Uh, I think you had a package down at the lobby. They said you had to claim it in the next hour. Maybe you ought to go get that.”
”Oh, I’m sure Peter can get it when you leave.” She smiled at him, her warm eyes trained on him. She was so much kinder than Tony’s own mother. Despite everything, he thought Peter was lucky to have someone like her.
”They actually said they need an adult to sign for it. Now. It seemed important.”
May stood up straight, placing the tweezers on the table. She looked between Peter and the door nervously. “Are you sure?”
Tony pressed his lips into a thin line. “Yup. Better go.”
She sighed. “Alright,” she relented, and Tony let out a breath. She looked to Peter. Tony saw his eyes widen as her hands rested lovingly on his shoulders. “Don’t dissapoint me while I’m gone, honey.” Peter nodded hurriedly.
They watched silently as she left. Tony saw her reach out a hand and close the door to the hallway as she passed it.
Probably just messy, he thought. Not everyone has personal maids.
The front door shut behind her. Tony took a breath. He put his hands in his pockets. He let his eyes drift around the room as he sat on the sagging couch. He felt his body sink a solid six inches into the cushions. Peter watched him out of the corner of his eyes.
Tony clicked his tongue. He patted the cushion next to him, staring at Peter. Slowly, Peter stood. He shuffled to the couch and perched on it, as if he were on someone else’s home.
”What’s up?”
Peter shrugged.
”Are you okay?”
Peter nodded hesitantly, but his Adam’s apple bobbed And Tony knew that wasn’t quite true.
”...May said you’ve been having a hard time. Wanna talk about it?”
Peter paused, then shook his head.
Tony sighed. “Look, kid, you’ve got to give me something to work with.” Peter looked up from his hands. “I know something’s off with you.”
Peter said nothing. Tony continued, “Is it school?”
Peter sniffed and shook his head.
”Friends? Girls?”
He shook his head again.
Tony dropped his voice to just above a whisper. “Your uncle?”
Peter didn’t move. He didn’t nod or shake his head. He didn’t burst into tears or collapse to the floor. No, he didn’t do anything Tony thought he might. Instead, he took a shaking breath, his eyes red, and asked in a voice far too hoarse and exhausted for a teenager, “What do you want me to say?”
Tony stared at him for a long moment, his brow furrowed. He stared at the bruises, the new gashes and old scars. He stared at Peter’s clenched jaw and dipped head.
Then, he said, “What’s real.”
“I...it’s not like you can change anything.”
”No,” said Tony, and Peter blinked. “But maybe I can help.”
Peter stared at him, his head cocked as if trying to see Tony’s angle. Tony fought to keep his face neutral.
Slowly, Peter opened his mouth to speak, but no words came. After a moment, he closed it again. Tony watched as he looked up at the ceiling and bit his lip, letting out a long, shaky breath through his teeth. The tears pooling in his sunken eyes struck Tony like a knife, but he kept his expression steady. This wasn’t about him.
Finally, Peter started, “It’s just—“
The door handle turned. Peter’s eyes widened and he sharply closed his mouth. Tony turned over his shoulder to see May walking through the door. She kicked off her shoes and shook out her hair. “Well, there’s no package, but I guess the walk did me good...What’s going on?”
She stopped in her tracks and looked between Tony and Peter. Her smile faded. “Peter?”
Tony looked back at Peter. He stared at May with frightened eyes like a lamb before slaughter. His face had somehow paled further, and Tony saw his chest rise and fall with rapid, shallow breath. He recognized the look. It was the same one he gave his father so long ago.
”Um...just talking about some suit upgrades,” he lied, though he wasn’t entirely sure why.
He could tell May didn’t quite believe him. “Right,” she said, sucking her teeth. “Well, Mr. Stark, I’ve still got to clean Peter up. But I’m sure we’ll see you soon.”
Tony stood. He straightened his jacket. “Yup. Yeah, okay. Uh, I’ll see you on Friday, right Peter?”
Peter nodded, but his eyes were still trained on May as if she had a gun pointed at his head.
Tony started slowly towards the door. May put her smile back on. With her hands on his back she lead swiftly him out of the apartment. “Okay, well, it was great seeing you, it’s nice to know there’s someone who cares about Peter just as much as I do. But you know, you’re not his dad, and he’s definitely not your son, so maybe stop acting like it—“
”Wait, What?”
”Oh, nothing,” she said, and Tony realized he was outside of the apartment. She stood in the doorway, her body blocking the space. Tony tried to lean over her shoulder to see Peter. She shifted to that side. “See you soon, bye!”
And before Tony could even start his goodbye, the door was shut in his face.
He blinked at the empty air that had held a woman only second ago. “Okay,” he muttered to himself. “Weird.”
But it wasn’t his business. He wasn’t Peter’s dad. It wasn’t his place to step in.
As he turned on his heel and started to leave, he could have sworn he heard May hiss, “You fucking idiot,” followed by the muffled sound of flesh hitting flesh. The cry of pain that followed sent a spike of ice through his stomach.
He hurried back to the door and his hand was on the doorknob before he decided he was acting stupid. What was going to happen if he walked in there? He would see...what? May, pulling glass out of her nephew’s head to help him heal, swearing in frustration whenever she pricked her own finger? The two of them, watching some violent movie on the couch together just like families should?
Obviously. He was just projecting. He’d never had a healthy relationship with his parents, and his mind jumped to the worst case scenario. There was no way Peter was being abused. May loved him, and he loved May. They were happy together.
As Tony hesitantly walked back towards the staircase, something in him didn’t quite believe it.
But always true to himself, he pushed that part deep, deep down. Down to where he’d never see it again.
(Hopefully.)