Holding To The Ground

A good thing:

Peter was alone.

Tony had stopped his visits days ago—it must have been a week now, maybe two. He sent a note down with the nurse once or twice, updating Peter on things he never much cared about. Nobody bothered him except to exercise or eat, now that they’d taken the feeding tube out. He mostly just sat in bed and stared out the window with his one good eye, watching threes move in the wind. He felt a bit like that, like something shaking apart but still rooted desperately to the ground. 

Which leads him to a bad thing: he was alone.

Because alone meant thinking. Alone meant remembering, looking back on everything he had scene. Alone meant burning shame in his gut when he thought about the day in the hospital, when he’d yelled at Flash for just trying to help.

(But it wasn’t help, he was trying to take you away from her, he was trying to hurt you—shut up shut up shut up)

Alone meant wondering why no one was coming to visit him. 

He knew why. He had pushed them all away. They didn’t want to see him, and he knew that. He knew that it was his fault.

But it kind of hurt that they didn’t try anymore.

Alone meant a splitting headache because he kept trying to separate versions of May, the before and the after, and maybe the inbetween, but he found all of his memories of her melted together into one strange blur. The woman who bought him ice cream when he was six was the same woman who made him pick up glass with his bare hands. The woman who drove him three hours to the state science fair in eighth grade was the same one who stared at him with so much disgust that he felt less than human. The woman who held him, cared for him, loved him, was the same one who beat him near death. 

Where did kindness end and cruelty begin? Where did May Parker morph into a monster?

Peter’s heart dropped at that word. Monster. How long had it been since he’d assigned that label to anyone but himself? Why was he placing it on May now, after all these months of loving her, protecting her, not deserving her?

Was he wrong to doubt her? Or was he a fool for never trying to.

It hurt to think of. Everything hurt—his hand his eye his ribs his head his heart. 

He’d ask for some pain meds, he had a call button. But the nurse from down the hall wasn’t a companion, wasn’t someone to talk through this with.

Peter was beautifully, terribly, unshakably, alone.

——

“Hey, Flash, you coming?”

Flash turned in the hall and saw a small group of his friends starting towards the lunch room. Cindy, who had asked, was watching his expectantly.

Flash shot her a weak smile. “Nah, I’m alright. I think I’m gonna catch up on O’Dell’s work.”

Something lingered in her eyes, something Flash couldn’t quite read, but she shrugged and left, too. Flash watched his friends turn the corner, their lighthearted banter and simple lives, and something in him ached.

He shook it away. He didn’t get to have a normal teenage experience. He’d accepted it. Time to move on.

He started towards the library. MJ had spent almost every lunch period there for years, and had all but holed up permanently in the historical fiction section when everything happened. Somehow, Flash found himself ducking out of conversations and plans to join her.

He found her sitting on the dusty carpet between two disorganized bookshelves, ham sandwich in one and (“You’re all activist and stuff, shouldn’t you be vegan?” “It’s not the responsibility of the consumer to keep the corporations ethical.” “...Right.”) and a copy of Pride and Prejudice in the other.

”Hey.”

She didn’t look up. “Hey.”

Slowly, Flash sat down next to her, placing his bag in front of him. He’d packed lunch, but he wasn’t hungry anymore.

They sat in silence for a long few moments. MJ’s eyes scanned the pages like she was looking for something beyond the ink. Flash just tried to find words.

Finally, not daring to look at her, he asked, “You seen him?”

MJ’s eyes paused in the middle of a sentence. “No.”

”Me neither.”

A long silence.

Flash turned his head to look at MJ, and found that her calculating eyes were already on him, studying his face like a puzzle. “What are we supposed to do?” He asked.

She sighed and set down Jane Austen without even marking her page. She touched two fingertips to her lips, as if she could draw out the words. “I don’t know,” she answered finally.

Flash sat back with a huff. “I mean, I feel like we should visit him, but he kicked me out last time I tried. Like, isn’t it best to do what people ask when they’re freaking out, and deal with the fallout later?”

”But is it later yet?” MJ asked, more to herself than Flash.

”Exactly! I mean when...when everything happened with you, what did you do?”

MJ blinked. “I, uh...I didn’t really have anyone looking for me, so there was no one to push away, so...I don’t know. I don’t know.”

MJ looked as close to heartbroken as she could get. Her features barely changed, but her brown eyes looked almost lost. He figured maybe she was lost. Not knowing was probably the worst thing that could happen to someone like MJ.

”Do you think he wants to see us?” Flash whispered. “That maybe he’s lonely, and he needs someone to talk to, but he doesn’t know how?”

”He would have called us if he wanted us there.” Even as she said it, he could tell MJ didn’t believe herself.

”But he doesn’t have a phone.”

”Yeah, but Tony Stark does.”

”Well...Well maybe he just needs us to reach out first.”

”Reach out how, Flash?” MJ snapped. She threw her sandwich to the ground, and Flash didn’t know the sound of stale bread on carpet could be so chilling. “He’s clearly fucking pissed at us, if him ghosting us for almost a month means anything. I mean, shit, he hasn’t talked to me since the second time he woke up, even though I spent two goddamn weeks in the hospital with him. What if—what if he never snaps out of it, and he never wants to see us again? What then? What if we messed everything up by freaking him out too fast, and now he hates us, and he’s gonna have to do this all alone?”

Flash blinked as something like guilt filled his veins with ice. MJ wasn’t the one who had snapped and forced Peter over the brink with accusations. That was Flash. MJ had visited Peter for days straight, while Flash ran away after a few harsh words. Here she was, on the verge of tears on the floor of a neglected library, when Flash was the one who had messed everything up. It had always been him.

But as she settled and muttered an apology, Flash realized, no. It hadn’t always been him.

He’d reacted poorly. He’d been dumb. But he hadn’t beaten Peter within an inch of his life. He hadn’t broken his mind or body. That was May Parker alone.

MJ took a shuddering breath and composed herself. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just been a lot.”

Flash nodded. “Yeah,” he agreed. “It has.”

MJ picked up her sandwich and wrapped it in a paper towel, slipped it in her bag. “So, now what?”

Flash blinked. It wasn’t often that his opinions were asked after by MJ. He wasn’t sure how to respond. “I’m not really sure. I still don’t exactly know what I need to do. Like, should we call him? I think—I think we should, like, check up on him at least, make sure he’s alright, he can always send us away. But what if he’s doing better without us and doesn’t want us there?

“And, I mean, yeah, okay, we should call him, but he doesn’t have his phone or anything, so we can’t keep contact, and it’s not like I have Tony Stark’s personal phone number, so what am I supposed to do about it?”

MJ straightened. For the first time in a while, some kind of spark came back to her eyes. An idea, a hint of her sharp wit.

”Actually,” she said, digging through her bag, “I might have a way around that.”

She pulled out her old, beat-up phone in its sticker-covered case and tapped on a contact. She brought her phone up to her ear.

”Hey, Ned? I need a favor.”