Could I Have Pulled The Trigger If I’d Been Told?
To be honest, Peter couldn’t name any of the emotions running through his brain if he tried. There was something cold running through his veins, something electric zapping at his skin, something heavy sitting on his chest. He ran without really seeing, following his mental map of the city he knew so well. Was he running faster than a normal human should? He didn’t know. He didn’t care.
Because now they knew. Flash and Michelle knew that he was weak, and they would take him away and May would be all alone. They knew he couldn’t even defend himself against a middle aged woman, but why should he defend himself if she loved him, but if she really loved him would she starve him? He didn’t know. His thoughts felt like tangled yarn, running round in circles, dipping in and out of darkness and light with no end in sight. So he didn’t think. He ran.
As he burst through his apartment door, he realized that he hadn’t taken a breath since he turned onto 45th street. He gulped in a monumental lungful of air and almost tripped as the blackness he hadn’t even realized was filling the edges of his vision began to recede. He dimly heard the door shut behind him as he rushed to his bedroom. His foot slipped on a discarded test paper and he crashed onto the floor, all of the air knocked out of him on impact. He sprawled on his back, trying to pull in a single breath to no avail. He needed—he needed—
He didn’t know what he needed. He needed someone to hold him, form a protective wall around him and let him curl up and sleep for a million years. He—he needed Ben.
Without any signal from his brain, Peter’s hand shot out beneath his bed and pulled out Ben’s old shirt, still wrapped in plastic. His trembling fingers, unable to grasp the plastic zipper, ripped the bag open and drew the shirt first up to his face, then cradled it against his chest. God, why did it have to be Ben? He hated himself for thinking it, but why couldn’t it have been a dirtbag, a drunkard who abused his wife? What cruel God decided to kill the only person who made Peter feel safe, who was able to calm May’s emotional outbursts, who was good?
Now what was Peter supposed to do? Face Flash and MJ In first period after running out like a fucking idiot? Avoid everyone he’d ever known? Run? He didn’t know. He couldn’t know. All he knew was the burning in his chest, cooled only where Ben’s shirt touched his skin. He had nothing left. Not food, not friends, not school. All he hasn’t left was this old shirt from a shitty department store.
Peter was so caught up in his confusing world of swirling darkness, he didn’t hear a key turn in the apartment’s lock.
He didn’t hear a purse being thrown down on a table.
He didn’t hear the footsteps stomping towards his room.
But he did hear May slam his door open and yell, “Why the fuck did your school just call me and—“
He shot his head up and saw May just as she cut herself off. He followed her gaze to Ben’s shirt still clutched against his chest, and felt his entire body turned to lead. He wasn’t supposed to have it, and he knew it. He threw it to the other side of the road room, but it was too late. He watched as her face turned from white to red, her chest beginning to heave. Her hand balled into fists and he instinctively flinched away.
”May, please, I can explain—“
Halfway through his sentence, May turned on her heel and stomped out. Peter stared at the empty doorway with wide eyes, hardly breathing, listening to her footsteps fade to the other side of the house. She stopped, didn’t move for a long while. Was that it, then? Did she understand that he missed Ben, too, and wanted a piece of him?
The thought disappeared when her footsteps started rushing back to his room. He knew before she was even visible to bag them the answer was no. Peter jumped to his feet, nearly blind with fear, and climbed on top of his bed to open the window and run. With a hand on the latch, Peter felt May grab his shirt and yank him back. He yelped as his frail body slammed into the floor. May raised a hand far above Peter’s head, and he gasped when he saw it gripping an iron fire poker, and holy shit the only person he had left was wielding an actual makeshift weapon. He raised an arm to protect his face and felt the rod hit him once, pain exploding up past his shoulder, twice, the pointed end sticking in his arm and ripping out a chunk of flesh upon removal, three times, and the bone broke in two with a resounding crack. He shouted and dropped his arm, his face now fully exposed.
He saw a glimpse of May’s face, and strangely realized he saw no humanity in her face scrunched up in anger and her mouth contorted into a grimace. He scrunched his eyes shut, and just in time. The fire poker came down again, cracking something next to his left eye. Pain, a type of searing, biting pain he’d never experienced before, radiated through his entire face, and he screamed outright. He tried to cry, but the effort of moving his face just about sent him into darkness, but Hell, he would have welcomed it.
She slammed the rod into his ribs, his chest, agony resonating across his too-visible ribcage. Something cracked, something bruised, something broke. She must have decided that a weapon wasn’t hands-on enough, because suddenly the fire poker fell next to his face with a clatter (he would grab it if he could move his arms, his head, anything at all) and began kicking him, punching him, alternating between the two like she couldn’t decide which one would hurt him better. Her feet had more power, he thought, but her hands were more precise. Feet, fists, feet, fists, feet, fists, forever swinging down onto his brittle body.
Finally, she leaned down and whispered into his ringing ears, “You’re not taking Ben from me ever again.” To punctuate her sentence, she picked up the fire poker once more and stuck it into the wood. Unfortunately, his palm was in the way, so the metal had to go straight through. Peter finally screamed, the last of his energy escaping from his throat in a blood curdling shriek as hot blood began to flow from the wound and join the pool already forming around him.
He felt May every breath hurt wrestle fabric over his face and behind the bones in his skull crunched and slid against each other and he could hear it his head. Something blurry the light hurt so much appeared in front of his face why could he only see half of it? Another voice, more mechanical spoke in his ears who was Karen?
He heard a rustle of fabric god no it was all he had left being picked up from the floor, feet fade away one final time, a door slam and a car start and pull away.
“Peter, you are fatally injured,” who was speaking? Why was someone speaking? “Should I call Mr. Stark?” The voice in his ear was so loud but he could do nothing but let the tears slip from his eyes and gather in his ears.
“Peter?”
Oh the Darkness, how I’ve missed you.
”Peter, I’m calling Mr. Stark. Don’t fall asleep.”
He could see nothing now, he could feel his body sinking through the floor and spiraling into the void.
”Peter?”
How could a robot sound so panicked?
How could...
How...
“Peter!”
Enter darkness.
——
"Boss, you have approximately seventeen minutes and nine seconds until Peter dies from wounds inflicted by May Parker.”
”What?”
——
MJ had no idea how she found herself in the passenger seat of Flash’s car that was worth more than her house, speeding through New York City, directing Flash around traffic jams and car crashes to find the fastest way to Queens.
She cursed the school for making her wait for an hour for her foster mom to check her out of class. “Left!” She yelled, and Flash barely missed a car turning into the same lane. They sped away from the following honk, and MJ almost flew out of the car, but she didn’t care. May could be home by now, a gun to Peter’s head or a rope around his neck. She felt sick at just the thought, and could feel the knife that had been held to her throat only two years ago.
Another left, a merge, and a fallen mailbox later, Flash screeched to a stop outside of Peter’s apartment building. He didn’t even turn off the car, just threw a hundred dollar bill in the general direction of the parking meter and sprinted through the doors. Her eyes landed on the stairwell and threw open the door, taking the stairs two at a time, almost soaring. She burst into the fourth floor lobby, and the elevator dinged next to her, and who would be there but Tony fucking Stark?
She met his eyes. “Peter?” She asked.
”Peter,” he nodded.
Together, they ran, Flash following once he recovered from being star struck. Tony moved to open the door, but it was locked. “Fuck!” He exclaimed, but she just pushed him out of the way, pulling a pin from her ponytail. She shoved it into the lock and pulled, jiggled, and shifted the metal until she heard a quiet click. She shoved the door open, and she would have preferred screaming over the eerie silence that greeted her. Slowly, she creptinto the messy apartment, stepping over bottles and candy wrappers and old receipts. “Peter?” She called, her voice barely above a whisper. No response.
As she slowly moved through the wreckage, her foot slipped. She lifted her shoe and saw a puddle of something red beneath it. She told herself it was fruit punch so she wouldn’t be sick. She heard Tony gasp when he found it, and Flash’s quiet “Holy shit,” was hard to miss.
”Peter?”
She held back her own memories, chains and liquor and blades, reminded herself that this wasn’t her fight. This was Peter’s. Forcing away the stench of her father’s breath, she opened the hallway door with a creak. A quiet groan caught her attention. Suddenly breaking out of her reverie, she hurried to the door with “Peter” written on it in peeling blue stickers. She burst into the room, and when questioned later, all she could say she found was blood.
But it was so much more than just blood. It was a metal rod sticking out of a hand. It was a skull dented in. It was a fucking Spider-Man mask with flecks of bone on it. She heard Flash’s sharp intake of breath, felt Tony shoving her out of the way as if she was watching in on a television screen. No, she thought to herself. She didn’t get to check out now. Snapping out of her reverie, she skidded to her knees beside Peter, shivering at the hot wetness soaking through her jeans.
“We, uh...” she trailed off, closing her eyes and swallowing. She breathed hard through her mouth. It’s not your brother, she told herself. It’s not Beaux. But they looked so alike, and the blood was the same color...
She shook her head, opened her eyes. Forcing her emotions away, she said simply, “We need to get the poker out of his hand. Flash, get me some sanitizer tissue, or gauze, if you can find it.” But Flash was huddled in a corner, staring at Peter like he was someone else, and Michelle could tell he wasn’t really there. But she didn’t have time to bring him back from whichever nightmare he was stuck in, so she let him shiver against the wall and ran quickly to the bathroom, grabbed a roll of toilet paper and ran back.
”Okay,” she whispered to herself. Then, to Tony, “You need to pull out the fire poker as quickly as you can. When you do, I’ll be there to stuff the wound. He’ll scream, mine did, but ignore it.”
Tony blinked, shook himself out of some oblivion, and nodded. “Alright. Yeah.” He gripped the metal with bold hands, and Michelle told herself she would be cool, calm, be there to do what she said she would. But when the poker came out and Peter screamed even though he was asleep, Michelle wilted against the wall, the tissue forgotten, because all she could see was the blood streaming out of brother’s body, so much, too much, all that it could hold. Was she alive? Was she dead? Did it matter?
And then police were there, someone must have called them, bursting through the door and bringing in a stretcher and training their guns on Tony.
Wait, Tony?
But then she saw the fire poker in his hand, the broken boy beneath him, and the two kids huddled in a corner as far from him as they could get, and realized that the police had connected all the wrong dots.
”Oh, fuck.”