Blood Is Rare and Sweet As Cherry Wine
“He won’t listen to me!”
Tony was pacing around his lab, ranting to Rhodey, who had finally fucking shown up what seemed like days after Tony had called him. Well, no, he had only called him last night, but Tony felt he was entitled to any anger he could get his hands on right now.
“He’s a sixteen-year-old,” Rhodey said from where he was propped against the wall. “They don’t listen to anybody.”
”Okay, but still, they usually have some sense of—of self preservation. Why doesn’t he?”
”You ever met a teenager, man?”
“Don’t act stupid,” Tony shot back. “Peter’s not a normal teenager in any sense of the word and you know it.”
”Tony—“
”It’s like he wants to be in pain. I don’t get it!”
”You don’t need to get it. You need to accommodate it.” Rhodey’s voice was calm and even and level. Tony hated it.
”How does that make any sense? How am I supposed to accommodate what I don’t understand?”
Rhodey looked him in the eye, his gaze stern. “The kid isn’t a machine,” he said. “You can’t just understand him if you take him apart enough. You gotta do this the other way around—take care of him first, understand the problem later.”
Tony sat down hard in a desk chair. “Alright, yeah,” he relented. “But I can’t help him if he doesn’t want to be helped. I mean, how do you fix someone who doesn’t know they have a problem?”
Rhodey raised an eyebrow at him.
”Oh, shut up.”
”Didn't say anything.”
“You were thinking it.”
Tony huffed the ghost of a laugh. He rubbed a heavy hand down his face. “How did you do it?” He asked quietly. “You and Pep and Happy? When—when I was a dumbass, when I was blind, how did you keep me alive?”
Rhodey took a breath. He walked over to where Tony sat and leaned with one hand against the desk. “I guess...” he started. “I guess we made keeping you alive the priority. You didn’t have to be happy, you just needed to be alive. If that meant holding you down kicking and screaming until you drank some water and ate a meal, then that’s what it meant. You gotta do the same—keep Peter’s body alive until he can do it for himself, then worry about his mind. Sometimes, they heal hand in hand.”
Tony never thought he would agree with such sound advice. But somehow, against everything he knew, he nodded.
He would stop pushing for evidence—May Parker wasn’t going to get to Peter again, not in the tower. She could roam the streets for a while longer. He would stop forcing in investigators and psychiatrists. He would just let the kid be, until he could do more. Then, he’d go from there.
”Okay.”
——
As it turned out, Peter should have read the papers Tony left on his bed.
He was woken up the next morning by a woman with a pitying smile on her face. She didn’t ask why he was on the floor, but from the sad look in her eyes, Peter was sure she knew. With a great effort, she helped him climb into a wheelchair. The feeding tube followed behind him, rattling its wheels on the white tile floor.
He stared at the pristine walls with glassy eyes, looking through them as they passed. He could have asked where they were going. He probably should have. It was hard to think of anything at all, though, through the fog in his mind. Hell, it was as all he could do to stay awake.
Soon, he was wheeled into a mirrored room larger than his apartment, full of treadmills, yoga balls, and a bunch of other gym toys he couldn’t recognize. The nurse moved so that she was in front of him. She smiled and said, “Alright, today is day one of physical therapy. You read over the guidelines in the pamphlet, right?”
He hadn’t, but he really didn’t feel like listening to this woman’s explanation, so he nodded.
”Great!” She enthused too brightly. “Then let’s get started!”
Four hours passed as Peter was tortured with rubber bands around his fingers, five pound weights, and various other workout devices he used to understand. It seemed like the nurse was focusing on healing the nerves in his damaged hand, and he was almost glad there was so much damage, because surely with all of his nerves in tact, this would hurt a million times worse. Of course, it still hurt beyond belief, but still.
Days passed. Tony didn’t come to check on him. The police stopped coming by, psychiatrists were turned away at the door. Most of the time, when that same nurse wasn’t there, Peter was alone.
There was something dangerous in that. Something dangerous about the doubt that crept into his mind when he had too much time to think. Something dangerous about did she ever love me? About what if she never did and how could she ever want to take me back after this and do I want to go back at all?
It hurt to think about these things. They felt like string in his mind, bundled up and tangled and confusing. As soon as he got far enough on one train of thought to understand it, it would disappear into the right ball of knots, and he would be lost once more.
Only his daily torture session—did he say that? Sorry, physical therapy—distracted him from his thoughts. Today, for example, he had spent two hours on a table while a woman on his blind side poked and prodded at his eye, asking him to open, close, now open again.
Eventually, before he could find a way to jump out of a window, he was taken back to his room. There was a blue plastic tray waiting next to his bed, holding a ham sandwich, an apple, and a carton of milk. It reminded him of the school lunches.
He crawled back into bed and waited for the nurse to leave so he could dutifully ignore the food, but she dragged a chair over to his bedside and smiled at him again.
”What?” He asked.
She gestured towards the food.
”Yeah, it’s a sandwich. What does it matter?”
She met his eyes and said, “I’m staying until you’ve eaten at least one thing.”
Peter blinked. “What?”
The nurse shrugged. “That’s my task. My whole day is cleared, so I’ve got hours to wait.”
”That’s ridiculous,” he said.
”Well, it’s what’s happening.” And she promptly picked up a novel from a bedside drawer and began to read in a chair across from him.
Peter stared at the plate in front of him. God, he was hungry. He wanted to eat everything in sight, more than he’d ever wanted anything. But as he started to reach for the sandwich, such intense fear hit him that he snatched his hand back, cradling it against his chest. The nurse shot him a smile and turned her page.
“Do I really have to do this?” He asked.
In a gentle tone, the nurse said, “Well, it’s either that or we have to change your feeding tube today. But, if you finish something, we can take it out for now.”
”For now?”
”Well, you never know how this sort of thing will go. It could be put back in a month or so.”
”Wait, a month?” He asked, his eyes going wide.
”Yes. Or you could leave here in a week. For now, let’s just focus on the sandwich. Alright?”
Peter gulped, then nodded.
He didn’t know how it happened. Somehow, as if detached from his own body, he forced down the sandwich and a few sips of milk. His stomach turned, and he waited for something to happen, someone to come into the room and make him pay.
But nothing happened.
The nurse smiled and took away the tray.
Nothing happened.
A team of bleached-white doctors came into the room, removed his feeding tube. It burned, but Peter barely felt the pain.
Nothing happened.
Dusk fell. The lights went out, and he fell into bed. It was odd and unusual, hard to fall asleep on, but he didn’t have the strength to move to the floor. Cold fear squeezed his stomach as he started to drift into sleep, because this was wrong, he was wrong, and everybody on the planet knew it.
Without even meaning to, he fell asleep in a bed, covered in a real blanket. He woke up braced for a punch or some other form of punishment.
Nothing, gloriously, happened.