5
“Come again?”
The thin sheet of exhaustion previously laying atop Tony was quickly tugged away, leaving unease and maybe even a bit of fear in its wake. Peter sounded scarily sure of himself. He spoke without hesitation or unease, which is what frightened Tony most; despite being one of the smartest people Tony knew, Peter was always a little insecure. Never wanting to step too far out of bounds. None of that uncertainty was showing itself at the moment.
Peter ducked under the arm Tony had on the doorframe and came into the bedroom. He walked toward the bed and paused, scanning the area for somewhere to sit. He ignored the chair and the bed, apparently deeming any sort of interaction with those objects unacceptable, and plopped straight onto the floor. The way he had his legs crossed gave him an appearance painfully close to that of a toddler during storytime. It was startling, really, how easy it was to imagine Peter Parker as nothing but a child.
Despite the fact that he’d just admitted to killing a man.
“I think I killed that cashier, Mr. Stark., Oh my god.”
Tony could see Peter’s oncoming hysterical episode in the taut lines of his mouth and tightly closed eyes.
“Hey, okay, hey. Just pause for a second. Breathe.” Tony watched as Peter took a deep breath and released it through his nose. “Yea, okay. That’s good.”
Tony kneeled to be level with him, but didn’t come any closer. If Peter was fighting off a panic attack, he needed some space. “Now, take a second to really think about what you’re saying. You didn’t kill anyone, kiddo. You handed the man some money and he collapsed. That’s all. Right? Not your fault.”
Peter’s head was turned. Tony followed his eyes to the New York skyline outside the window. Nighttime was still in full swing, no traces of daylight visible through or behind the trillions of stars above the skyscrapers.
“All I did was pull. It was just a pull.”
“You said you just barely touched his hand.”
“Yea.”
“Then what do you mean by ‘ All I did was pull?’”
Peter pulled his eyes away from the window. He wasn’t looking at Tony’s face, exactly, more like a spot next to his head and just over his shoulder.
“There was this… this feeling.” He stopped there, taking a moment to compose himself. “When I touched the cashier. I felt something in my stomach. Not nausea. More like, I don’t know, a tugging feeling? The tugging started when our hands touched and all I could think about was getting away from him, because there was something black and slimy and awful around him. Like a shadow, but instead of being outside him, I could feel it floating around inside.”
That was a lot to unpack.
Peter had been through a traumatic event. everal, if you counted the death of his parents and uncle. but Tony was more focused upon the things that had happened within the last day or two). Hell, he’d woken up in the Hudson two days ago with his feet encased in cement. That was enough to throw anyone a little off-balance. But he’d seemed...He’d seemed relatively stable up until this point. Tony hadn’t seen any warning signs of psychosis, at least.
But Tony didn’t know what he’d gone through in the last year. Not really. He may have shown up about a day ago, but he’d been missing for almost a year. What happened between then and now? He hadn’t been underwater that long. There was no way.
The dark purple bruises circling Peter’s neck were visible despite the darkness of the bedroom. He had a feeling, no matter when Parker had actually gotten them, that they’d never fade.
Tony needed to find out what happened to Peter. Where he’d been for all of those months, what had been done to him. He had to know. He deserved to know. So did May.
But would May want to know? Tony could only imagine how she felt during Peter’s absence, could only imagine the sense of loss. She’d had no idea where her child was, if he was hurt or worse. Would she really want to know if he was being tortured? Experimented on?
A small, quiet part of Tony added, If he’d died ?
But Peter wasn’t dead. He was sitting on the penthouse floor, his left shoulder pressed to Tony’s right. If Tony really focused and activated his imagination, he could hear Peter’s heartbeats, his even breaths as he sucked air in through his parted lips.
But he couldn’t hear the heartbeat, the breaths. Bruce Banner had pointed out during Peter’s exam that he was barely pumping enough blood to be considered alive. He shouldn’t be alive with a bpm of, like, 5, but here Peter was, having a breakdown that made him seem very much not like a corpse.
“I know you think I’m crazy,” Peter whispered.
“I don’t think you’re crazy.”
Peter finally made eye contact. He blinked a few times.
“I think you sound crazy, but I don’t think you yourself are crazy.”
“I knew you wouldn’t believe me.” Peter threw his hands in the air and hopped off the floor. He took to pacing in a straight line toward the window, past the bed, almost to Tony, then back to the window. “I’m telling you, Mr. Stark, I did something. When I felt it, that inky darkness, it was like an internal tug-of-war. The cashier had one end of the rope and I had the other. Once I felt it, I just - I couldn’t - I had to win. So I pulled. I tugged just enough, and the darkness left.”
Tony’s brow furrowed. He was much too old to sit on the ground for this long, so he pushed off the floor with a grunt and sat on the edge of his bed. The fitted sheet was cold and unwrinkled from lack of use. Tony guessed he wouldn’t be getting much sleep tonight, either. “It left? Where did it go?”
Peter stopped pacing mid-stride. “Into me, I think.”
“ Pardon?”
"I know it sounds weird. But I think I took it? I’m not sure.”
“Well does everyone have the...Whatever you called it. Blackness.”
Peter had stopped pacing. He was focused on Tony, now, with an almost uncomfortable intensity. His eyes seemed to trace the outline of Tony’s face, his arms, as he sat on the bed.
Peter shook his head, his hair moving with him. It had really grown out in the year he’d been gone. It was fluffy and fell over his forehead, the ends curling around the edges near his ears. “No. You don’t have it.”
Tony, despite the intensity of the conversation, was losing his resolve. Exhaustion was kicking in, and the temptation of tucking into the bed beneath him and not leaving it for the foreseeable future was quickly becoming too strong to resist.
“Maybe it was a one-time thing. A fluke. A hallucination.”
Peter huffed. He’d wrapped his arms around his front and grabbed his elbows like he was trying to keep his heart from falling out of his chest. “Yea. I guess a hallucination could be possible. I did die, after all.” The casual way in which he said it, said something so outrageous but possibly true, was extremely unsettling.
Peter looked up when Tony accidentally let a particularly wide yawn escape. “I’m sorry, I’m keeping you awake.”
“Life keeps me awake, Kid. Don’t sweat it.”
“No, I’m gonna go. Goodnight, Mr. Stark, sorry to bother you.”
“No Peter it’s fine, really, wait-“
The bedroom door shut quickly. Tony, in his exhausted state, could do nothing but look at it. He lay back on the bed, not caring that his comforter was still on the floor. He was still trying to process the last twenty minutes. “You gotta open up, kid.”
If Tony knew Peter was on the roof, he’d freak out.
Peter didn’t really know where else to go. He didn’t feel tired in the slightest and knew laying in his overly-soft bed downstairs wasn’t going to change that. He couldn’t stand sitting in his room and listening to the hum of the air conditioner any more. He had to get some real air before he plugged the vent with old socks and silly putty.
It wasn’t like Peter hadn’t been on the roof of the Avengers tower before. Of course he had. It was one of his favorite places in the entire city, aside from his and May’s apartment and Ned’s room (he had the coolest vintage Star Wars posters that Peter had always wanted. He’d found them at a pawnshop for ridiculously cheap, and Peter took every chance he could get to stare at them).
The top of the tower was always so quiet. High above the glowing, busy streets of New York, the sounds of pedestrian and vehicle traffic alike were almost nonexistent. Peter vaguely remembered MJ telling him about her vacation to Florida and the parasailing trip she went on while she was there. She said despite being in a parachute about fifty feet above the ocean, it was almost dead silent. The sound of the boat engine faded away, and you couldn’t hear anything but the howling wind and your own breathing.
Sometimes Peter called upon that memory, that description, and pretended the top of the tower was his own little getaway. An exotic parasailing trip without the boat, or ropes, or ocean. But he had the sky, and his lungs, and that was enough.
Thinking about MJ made Peter miss his friends. In the least cocky way possible, Peter had been a sort of linchpin between the three of them. MJ and Ned likely wouldn’t even be friends if it wasn’t for Peter introducing them. He hoped the two of them had found comfort in one another in his absence. That they still hung out on Fridays, still dumped bags of M&Ms in bowls of popcorn and made a mess on the living room couch of whoever was hosting that weekend’s get-together. There were enough butter and chocolate stains on Peter’s living room sofa to prove that he’d offered his place as the hangout spot on multiple occasions.
His friends missed him too, right? Surely they were grieving. After all, they likely thought he’d died.
I did die, Peter reminded himself.
Because it was death, wasn’t it? Whatever was constantly sending chills down his spine. Whatever killed all of those fish in the Hudson when he woke up. Whatever kept him alive after inhaling lungfuls of water.
Whatever was responsible for that horrible, black, oily darkness he’d felt when he touched that cashier’s hand at the convenience store. Because whatever it was, it wasn’t anything close to life. He’d hated every second of it, but not because it felt wrong. He’d been unsettled when he saw it around the cashier at first, wondering if the light within the store was casting odd shadows. Or maybe he was seeing things, the effect of a water-addled brain that was only receiving blood about ten times a minute. But then he saw them when their hands touched; images. Of what, he couldn’t quite discern just yet, but they were images nonetheless, and they weren’t his own. All he’d known was that the cashier was holding onto those images with a sort of sick fascination. With pride. It had filled Peter’s own chest like a deadly gas.
He knew the second he felt it that he had to take it. Whatever it was didn’t belong to that man. Didn’t belong in his head or heart or wherever he was keeping the images that Peter couldn’t yet see, but knew he’d pay for possessing. Above all else, Peter felt atonement as he watched the blackness slither from the cashier into himself. Like he’d done something right. A universal scale had been balanced.
But then there was a dead cashier on the dirty bodega floor and Peter couldn’t figure out why. His lethargic heart was beating way faster than it had been all day, and he had lost his train of thought as he called for Tony to come fix whatever horrible thing he’d managed to do.
The wind picked up on top of the tower and Peter’s hair shifted across his forehead. The edges tickled his eyelids, but he didn’t care. His eyes were closed. He was trying to recall those images he’d gotten from the cashier. They were just a blur of faces and movement at the moment, tornadoes of sound and color. It was like having a broken TV, one of the ones that kept switching channels on its own, and you just got flashes of faces and voices as the numbers in the corner of the screen climbed.
The channel froze. One of the faces focused, and then the next. Peter was quickly slipping into the image. He could still feel the roof of Avengers tower, the ledge he was sitting on, the wind making his eyes water. But all he could see was a woman lying on a hardwood floor. Her hands were thrown up over her face. Peter thought she might have been crying.
"Please, Mark, Stop! Why are you doing this?”
A hand appeared in the corner of Peter’s vision. There was something cold and heavy pressed into his palm.
“ He was here! That motherfucker was here!”
"There was no one here! I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
The voice seemed to be coming from Peter, but he’d never seen this woman before, had no recollection of ever speaking to her, especially not like this. He sincerely hoped he’d never spoken to someone like that. Ben and May had taught him better.
“You cheating bitch! Just admit it! Don’t fucking lie!”
“Mark, please, no one-“
Peter positioned the object in his hand, slid his finger over the trigger.
No. Not Peter. Mark. The cashier. Peter was seeing this from his point of view.
The tip of the pistol pressed into the woman’s forehead. Her crying escalated quickly, evolving into something close to a pained howl. “This isn’t you! You don’t have to do this!”
Mark’s change in demeanor was abrupt but sure. He straightened his legs quickly and stood from the floor, his back facing the crying woman. He eyed the framed photos lining the dark hallway. They looked cheerful, like a couple’s photos should look. The proof of his admiration for her was everywhere; in the way his eyes never left her, the way his hand wrapped around her waist. He loved her more than life itself. Even the photographs proved that.
And she’d thrown it all away to fuck some bastard that didn’t even care about her.
Without a word, without a second thought, Mark spun on his heel, aimed the gun, and fired.
The shot seemed to ring out in real time. Peter was so startled he almost fell off the roof ledge, catching himself at the last second with one hand attached to the side of the building. He climbed back over the edge and threw himself down on his back, not minding how the impact knocked the air out of his chest. He didn’t need it, anyways.
That vision. No, not a vision. It was a memory. Mark’s memory. It had that thick darkness surrounding it, clouding Peter’s vision whenever he tried to recall any piece of it.
Mark has killed someone. A woman. He obviously wasn’t in jail, hadn’t been caught.
Peter didn’t know how he could tell. Maybe it was the intensity of the shadow that he pulled from Mark, the depth of its origin. But there was no mistaking the void for what it was. Or wasn’t, for that matter. Mark killed that woman and didn’t regret it one bit . His satisfaction, his sick pride, it was all twisted up in the darkness. And now Peter had it bouncing around inside his skull.
Peter closed his eyes, threw an arm over his face, and cried. He cried and cried until he was heaving like he still needed air. He cried until his heart was pounding so hard that he went dizzy from the sheer amount of blood flowing through him that, for the last day or two, had been moving at a snail’s pace. He could barely discern which emotions were his and which were Mark’s. There was a definite sense of fear; Mark’s. It was more fear of being caught than anything else. Unease; Peter had a feeling that was a little bit of both of them. The grief, though, the underlying blue and purple haze within the black. That was all Peter.
Despite telling Peter to go to bed and heading that way herself, May hadn’t expected to get much sleep. Her day-long nap on the couch would surely keep her awake. Her child being basically back from the dead may have also had something to do with it.
The second she saw him, she didn’t want to let him out of her sight. His shaggy hair, big smile, slightly crooked nose, it was all painfully familiar. She’d missed it. She’d missed him.
May knew being Spider-Man was risky. Every gig had its pros and cons, superhero gigs included. It took her a long time to come around to the idea of Peter being a super-powered vigilante, but May had seen him do some pretty incredible things over the years. Physical and emotional strength were sewn into Peter’s very genes. He was more than capable of taking care of himself. He’d come to her or Tony if he knew he was in too deep.
At least, she’d thought he would. He must have really been in over his head if he’d managed to get himself kidnapped.
The alarm clock on May’s bedside table switched silently from 3:23am to 3:24am, looking almost exactly as it had when it switched from 3:22 to 3:23. The glow of the numbers was almost the same shade of blue as Iron Man’s gauntlets. May had only ever seen them on TV, but it was enough to know that the color match was probably intentional.
May was...Okay with Tony Stark. She didn’t particularly love him or what he stood for. His rocky past. His early 2000s sexcapades and very, very public intoxication incidents. But he took care of Peter. In May’s book, anyone earned points for doing that.
It didn’t make her feel any less guilty for staying in his tower. It wasn’t like he was short on living space, really, but she still felt like she was hogging the penthouse when she sat on his fancy couches or drank the milk in his fridge. Her and Tony had been spending rather significant amounts of time together while searching for Peter. She’d been around the tower enough in recent months that it wouldn’t have been wrong for her to feel at home among the marble countertops and jacuzzi bathtubs. But in recent years, nowhere felt like home when Peter wasn’t nearby. It had been May and Peter against the world since Ben died. With Peter’s bed going cold for almost a year, she felt stuck. Alone. Carrying the Parker name when it was never hers in the first place. Peter’s parents, Ben; they deserved to be alive and kicking, spreading all kinds of Parker knowledge and love and success across the city. But they weren’t, and the apartment seemed too big with just her and Peter, and the hallway that lead to Peter’s bedroom seemed like an endless abyss without him there.
He’s here , she reminded herself in the dark of her borrowed bedroom in Stark Tower, he’s alive. He’s okay. Peter’s home.
Peter.
“FRI, how’s Peter? Asleep?” She wouldn’t have been surprised if he crashed early. He looked like death incarnate when him and Tony got back from dinner.
“Mister Parker is on the roof, ma’am. Would you like me to let you know you’re looking for him?”
May scrunched her nose. “The roof? Why?”
“I don’t know, ma’am. Would you like me to ask?”
“Lord, no. That’s creepy. I’ll go check on him.”
“Please be careful. The wind is strong tonight, and you’ll be 93 stories above the ground.”
“Thanks, FRIDAY. Really makes me feel safe.”
Even Stark Tower’s private elevator didn’t go to the roof, so May had to ride it to the 90th floor and hike up three flights of stairs. The treck wouldn’t have been terrible if the stairwell wasn’t ridiculously cold, and if she’d remembered to bring her slippers. She broke out in goosebumps every time the soles of her feet touched the concrete stairs. She hadn’t thought to bring socks or shoes. She didn’t know why. Just hopped out of bed, grabbed the old sweater of Ben’s she’d brought to the tower this morning, and walked right out of her room.
May threw the rooftop access door open and the wind blew it closed again. She jumped when it slammed in her face. A more carefully calculated push yielded the results she wanted, and she stepped through the doorway into the night air. FRIDAY had been right; the breeze on the roof was abnormally strong, and not to mention frigid, for June . Ben’s sweater did almost nothing to eliminate the chill.
“Peter? Honey, are you up here?”
Someone cleared their throat. “Yea, here,” they called back. May moved in the direction of the voice. She noticed Peter lying flat on the roof. He was breathing heavy.
“Peter! Are you alright?”
He propped himself up on one elbow. His breaths were evening out, albeit slowly. He only glanced at May before turning away and aiming his gaze over the side of the roof. “Yea, yea. I’m okay. Just couldn’t sleep.”
May hooked her hand under Peter’s shoulder and pulled him up. She was able to support enough of him to get him off the ground despite his wobbling knees, but he seemed heavier than she remembered. Not like he’d gained weight, but like he’d bulked up. Gained some muscle mass. Had he always been so muscular? Surely not. May had always had trouble finding clothes for him. He was the definition of Tall and Lanky; he either wore long pants that sagged at the waist, or highwaters that fit around the hips. The sleeves of his shirts were never long enough, but the torsos always hung too wide and low. She didn’t know when he’d suddenly began filling out his clothes. Looking like a man. It definitely wasn’t puberty. He’d been just as noodle-like after that as he had been before the fact. The new muscle must have come from the spider bite. From the villain-fighting. May wondered how it had never caught her attention.
“Why are you up here?” Peter asked, eyeing the way the ends of Ben’s sweater were bunched up in May’s fists. The wind blew her hair into her face and she tucked it behind her ear.
“I couldn’t sleep, either. Thought I’d see how you’re holding up.” She and Peter stood arm-in-arm, a few feet from the building ledge. It was only about two feet tall, not near high enough to keep her from tumbling to her death. She knew Peter could stick to walls and stuff, swing on those webs, but she had no such ability. She wasn’t taking any chances. She nudged Peter with her elbow. “So how are you?” she asked sincerely. “Holding up, I mean.”
Peter visibly swallowed. “Okay.”
“Peter.”
“May.”
“ Peter.” He was hiding something. She could tell.
“Alright, so maybe a little less than okay.” Peter’s lips were chapped. He licked them before he spoke, which May had told him repeatedly over the years would only make them worse. “I’m just confused.” He rubbed at the horrific looking bruises around his neck, as if he could still feel the pressure of whatever had put them there.
“Confused about what?”
“Where I’ve been. Where I went. Why I didn’t come back sooner.” He paused for a moment, licked his lips again. May refrained from saying anything. “How are they?”
“How are who?”
“My friends. Ned. MJ.”
May had kept in contact with the kids in the wake of Peter’s disappearance. She’d always liked the two of them, Ned and MJ. Ned’s goofy humor and MJ’s surprisingly prim manners were pleasant to have around and reminded May that Peter was an excellent judge of character. A good boy who made good choices. May invited the two of them over for dinner every once in awhile. Just to catch up. To vent. To cry over Peter. To not be alone in the apartment for five seconds. To feel like she was taking care of someone, providing for someone, even if it wasn’t Peter.
“They’ve probably been better. They did lose their best friend, after all.”
Peter’s lip wobbed, and May knew she’d said the wrong thing. She seemed to do it a lot. She was a parent. It came with the territory. “I didn’t want to go,” he said quietly, just before the tears began falling.
“Oh, I know you didn’t, Peter. I know that. I know that.”
He returned her hug with an intensity she wasn’t expecting. “But they don’t. They probably think I did something stupid and got myself killed. MJ always warned me Spider-Man’s life would catch up with Peter Parker’s. That I needed to-“ His words got stuck behind a hiccup, “to be more c-careful. I just- I didn’t- I thought I’d have more time before I royally screwed up.”
May kissed the top of his head. Peter’s hair had gotten longer. He needed a trim.
There were so many things she wanted to ask him, questions she needed answered. But Peter didn’t seem like he was in the shape for an interrogation. He was certainly fragile at the moment. May didn’t want to force him to talk about anything that would set him off.
So she tried choosing her words carefully, balancing the tone and intensity behind each one to the best of her abilities. “If it’s alright, Peter, I’d sort of like to know what happened. If you’re okay with telling me, of course.”
Peter went totally still in May’s arms. She thought he may have stopped breathing. From her position wrapped around him, she could see the New York skyline glittering over his shoulder. Being this high up in the air was frightening, but she had to admit, the view was killer.
“I don’t remember much,” he said quietly. “Just some voices. A face or two, but I have no idea who they belong to. I don’t even remember what I was doing before I-”
Before you were taken, May thought to herself. “Did it have to do with Spider-Man? Something he was involved with?”
Peter wiped his nose on the sleeve of his sweatshirt. She’d been telling him not to do that or ages, that it was gross and unsanitary and ruined his shirt sleeves. He never listened. She didn’t mind it this time, though. The action was so undeniably Peter that it made May’s heart ache. She’d take snotty Peter over absent Peter any day.
Peter nodded. “It had to do with Spider-Man. I woke up in the suit.”
Peter startled a little when May pulled him out of her arms and held him by his shoulders.
“You woke up in the suit?”
“Yea. Did Tony not tell you about it this morning?”
“He didn’t even tell me you ‘ woke up ’. It was more of a ‘Peter’s just decided to show up, come to the tower’. I didn't really ask any questions.”
Peter wasn’t going to tell May he woke up in the Hudson. That would only scare her.Or that he was sort of dead.
That might scare her too.
Or that he was 99% sure he had killed a man and absorbed memories of the man’s previously committed murder.
That would undoubtedly scare her. Hell, it scared him.
“Let’s head inside, Peter. I can’t see the ground from up here and it’s making me woozy.”
Peter chuckled. “Yea, alright.”
“Maybe we can both try and get some sleep.”
Peter wasn’t tired. He didn’t know why, but he had a feeling he wouldn’t fall asleep tonight.