Chapter 14
It is a bleak Friday evening when she finds out.
A normal day to start. Peter wakes up in a brilliant mood, aces his surprise chemistry test and even manages to get out of doing homework simply because of his good attitude in his lessons. Even the rain hasn’t been enough to dampen his high spirits, especially when he gets to witness Flash slip on a puddle on his way out of the front gate. It's things like this that keep him coming to school every day.
In spite of the harrowing weather, he goes out on patrol after school. He figures that, even though he finds it impossibly difficult to thermo-regulate (which he assumes is a trait he’d developed from the spider bite), the safety of the New York population is a matter he regards as much more important than his own health.
But crime apparently has much more sense than him and decides to stay inside this damp evening, for there was little more to deal with than an old man exhausted by the mere thought of carrying his groceries into his apartment five floors up and a young woman whose wife was puking her stomach into a trash can outside of a bar.
And so with that sorted he goes home, somewhat glad that he doesn’t have to stay in the cold rain for too long. Though the suit has built-in heaters, it doesn't do much in the name of keeping the water from getting in — he hasn’t exactly nailed that part, yet. It's a long process of research he really doesn't want to do at the moment.
An average day, so far.
Only, when he gets to his bedroom window, he tries to pull it open and discovers with a twisting stomach that it refuses to budge. He peers through the glass to see that someone has flipped the catch closed. The reason he’s always kept it open is so that he has easy access after patrols, but May must’ve finally noticed it. She's always fretted about people breaking in via the windows.
He can’t fault her for that, really. Anyone who cares about their home would do the same, including himself it he didn't need it open. She doesn't know the real reason as to why Peter keeps the catch flipped but he's frustrated over it nonetheless; getting out of the suit is always a struggle what with the tight fit and the awkward contours of his body, but it'll be even harder with the weather and there's nowhere nearby to change save for a damp alleyway full of dripping drains.
That's just... great. Just perfect.
But then he recalls what May had told him that morning — “I’m going to be at work until tomorrow, so you’ll have to feed yourself tonight, Peter. Is that okay? Will you be okay with that?” — and whips out his door key from his backpack, taking advantage of the late night and quiet apartment building to get through in the Spiderman suit without being noticed.
His mission is successful. He checks the corridor before he rips off his mask, the air becoming considerably fresher as the material is removed off his face. A deep breath ripples through his lungs. “I’m so ready to take a nap,” he murmurs, and lets himself into the apartment.
Only, there’s a voice responding to him as soon as the door opens, one he certainly didn’t expect to be home until tomorrow.
“Oh, me too, Peter. I’m home ear-“
He doesn’t hear anything else. He steps backwards out of the apartment and slams the door behind him before she can finish.
Oh God. Oh God, Oh God, Oh God. He should have gotten changed in the soggy back alley. Oh God.
Is it normal for a human heart to be beating so fast that it’s thumping against one’s skin?
Oh God. Oh God.
Why isn’t she at work?
“What’s the racket? I’m trying to feed my birds,” the croak of an elderly voice says from the door to the left, and Peter is so, so glad that the only neighbour who’s curious about the noise is blind.
“Nothing, Mr. Nelson. Sorry for bothering you,” he says. The shake isn’t easy to keep out of his voice but he manages well enough to satisfy Mr. Nelson, who just hums thoughtfully and goes back into his apartment once more.
He tries his only other way out — getting to the alleyway and taking off the suit again, so as to make sure May doesn’t see again what he’d actually been wearing — but he’s hardly a step down the corridor before his apartment door is opening again, and May is peering out at him through her wire-rimmed reading glasses. “Pete?” she says, faintly. “What are you wearing?”
It’s like there’s a knife in his stomach, twisting and stabbing and making him bleed the liquid of guilt and that indescribable this is it. This is where it ends emotion that no one can even fucking understand--
And then he’s back in the rain.
There’s drops of it running down his skin, down his arms, down the thinner material of the new hoodie Thor kindly brought him just a week beforehand. It’s drenched, now, probably ruined, and he wonders through the onset of panic if he can call it a metaphor of his mood.
They know , his mind reminds him. They know. They’re going to be mad at you for not saying anything. They know.
He knows, intellectually, that they will not have a problem with the whole superhero-slash-viglinate thing he used to have going on. They’re superheroes themselves — and though they never kept a secret identity themselves, so to say, they should have some form of understanding regarding his situation. He knows that.
But there’s May’s voice in his head, controlling his fear, yelling into his ears you should have told me! And I thought you trusted me! And how could you do this to our family, Peter? and even you could have stopped him from dying and-- and--
And he just--
There’s no air. No air. No air.
May is there, next to him. How could you, Peter, she’s whispering. How could you do this to us? To me?
I was trying to protect you!
He can’t breathe.
There’s someone crouching in front of him, a warm, unfamiliar hand on his shoulder, but he doesn’t try to see who it is. He doesn’t want to see who it is. He-- he just needs to-- he just needs to--
He doesn’t know.
His feet are moving before he can register it. Why he’s running, he isn’t sure. Where he’s running… he isn’t sure of that, either. He just needs to escape. Needs to-- needs to do something. Needs to get out before they can kick him out themselves.
He isn’t sure if he can take that again.
.
“Sir.”
Tony’s head jerks up from where he’s resting it against the table. Around him, Clint, Natasha and Sam are still shouting at each other. JARVIS is barely audible over their incredible racket. “What is it now, J?
“Peter has left the building.”
“What?”
“Peter has--”
“I heard you!”
He’s loud enough to be heard this time. The shouting dies down all at once, like a switch has been flipped. Clint says, his eyes watching the billionaire with superspy scrutiny, “what is it, Tony?”
The onset of anxiety is like water through his brain and he kneads his hands together before they can start to visibly shake. “J? Care to-- to explain?”
“Peter was eavesdropping. He then demanded I open the window, and he promptly left.”
It’s quiet for all of five seconds but Tony feels a decade older when Sam finally decides to speak, his voice a razor in the silence. “Wh-- What? Why did you open it?! You shouldn’t have let him-- you shouldn’t of let him go!”
“Sir had given me specific instructions to let Peter leave whenever he wishes, so as to make it clear he is not trapped here. I tried to object, Mr. Wilson, but I had clear orders. I apologise for this, Mr. Wilson. If it helps, I can tell you which direction he went in up until he was out of sight of my outdoor security cameras.”
The AI sounds so sincere that even Clint is casting half-dirty looks towards Sam, who is still huffing despite being considerably subdued. “Why didn’t you tell us he was listening to us?” he says.
It’s Tony who answers, though. “We never asked.”
“But-- but shouldn’t J--”
“Let’s not worry about this now,” Natasha says, forever the voice of reason, “we have a loose Peter, remember?”
Sam coughs. “Right, right. Let’s summon the team, then.”
Anyone could have thought that utilising the whole of the Avengers team to find one kid is the easy way to do it, but Natasha clearly disagrees; her brows furrow and she takes a single, half-subconscious step towards the elevator. “No. We can’t tell the team.”
“Why?” Tony asks.
“It’s too much at once. What are you gonna say, ‘oh hey, by the way, Peter is Spiderman and now he’s missing so we’re all going to go out in the rain and find him’? They’d ask too many questions and it just adds on time we don’t have.”
“Speaking of time we don’t have...” Sam mumbles.
Tony opens his mouth, but it’s that Clint steps in this time. “She has a point. It’s just easier if we get him back and then explain everything, right?” he offers mildly.
It’s a good idea. Find Peter and then explain everything afterwards. The organisation, though little thought has gone into it, at least gives him a peace of mind.
“Right, right. Let’s go. Tell them we’ll be out for a bit, J. I’ll need those video camera clips, too. And-- and find me that suit!”
“Certainly, Sir.”
As he’s stepping towards the elevator, Clint ponders, “no one says ‘Avengers assemble’ anymore, do they?
.
It’s an incredibly miserable day, but the weather is the last thing on Clint’s mind. All he can think is where’s Peter, where’s Peter, where’s Peter, like a mantra in his head, or a hammer hitting his skull over and over and over and over--
And he takes a deep breath. Clears his head. Registers the cold fingers of the rain sliding across his skin.
“Where do we start?” he says into his commlink.
Across the street, Sam is checking every alleyway he passes. There’s a sense of panic to the way his breath shakes over the commlink as he walks but he is entirely calm to the naked eye, if not a little disturbing if the way he pauses at every alley is to be judged. He, like everybody else embarking on this mission, is dressed in everyday clothes so as to not draw attention to himself and therefore stir any kind of panic.
Clint himself takes to the rooftops. His scrappy, Hawkeye-themed hoodie (buying merchandise of yourself is funny) do nothing against the rain, but with the new possibilities opened up by his newfound knowledge regarding his alias, he thinks battling out the awful weather to search in the high-up nooks where only spider-enhanced teenagers could hide is worth it if it helps him to find the kid. God, he just wants to know if he’s okay .
Meanwhile, Tony and Natasha have taken to searching nearer to Midtown High after having figured that he could have gone to somewhere he’s familiar with. They, too, do not wear their suits -- not even Tony, who sticks to his strange, technologically-advanced not-glasses instead of wearing his Iron Man armour for once.
“Just alleyways. Places to hide,” Sam suggests moments later. “He’s probably a bit scared. I think I would be, too.”
“I just don’t get it,” Clint says around a grunt, as he climbs atop an old skip to get a good look at the alleyway behind it. There are people looking at him as if he were a crazy person -- he is, really -- but they’re not on his mind. “Why would he not trust us with it? We’re superheroes. We’re the Avengers. What would we do with that information? Why would we leak it?”
There’s a static pause. Sam’s voice is somewhat strained when it comes back to him. “You have to think about it in his perspective, though. We don’t know why he’s running, but he wouldn’t be running for no reason, would he? There might have been an issue regarding his identity -- maybe someone found out about it and it didn’t end well, and he doesn’t want to go through that again. We can’t know for sure.”
Some indescribable sense of pity seizes Clint’s heart, the weight of his teammate’s words heavy in the forefront of his thoughts. Even just the concept of Peter being so jarred -- so scared, so upset -- by an experience regarding his secret identity makes him want to wrap the poor kid up in blankets and protect him from the flaws of this population.
He knows better than that, though. Living with a human disaster such as Tony Stark has taught him as much. People like Peter -- people so brave, so fucking strong-willed when life hits them with the worst -- do not want to be shielded from everything. People like Peter resent to being mothered, to being treated as if he were made of glass. People like Peter are determined to take care of themselves; to take the brunt of everyone else’s hurt, just so he doesn’t have to watch them fall and burn.
Part of him admires that in Peter, but the other part of him just frets.
“Clint?”
“Mmm?” He stoops and peers into an alleyway from the rooftop above.
“You never answered me.”
Oh. “Sorry. What did you say?”
He can see Sam stopping at the corner of the opposite street to speak into him commlink. It’s hard to see his face from a distance, but Clint’s eyesight is good enough to see how set his shoulders are. “Do you remember that wall that Peter liked so much?”
“Wall?”
“You know what wall I mean. We ate McDonalds with him on top of it too many times for you to forget it.”
Wall?
Oh!
Realization hits him like a freight train. Of course Clint remembers the wall. How could he forget it? It was the closest thing he’d had to a home in the homeless period of his life, Peter had mentioned to him over a Netflix binge session one sleepy Sunday evening. Nearly everytime they went out to buy food for the team, him and Sam would always subconsciously head for the wall to give Peter his share, too, and he’d be there nearly every time.
He jumps onto the lid of a bin from the roof and then to the ground, feet silent like a cat’s. “I remember where it is. Come on,” he mumbles into the commlink.
“Lead the way.”
As he waits for Sam to cross the street, he switches the commlink into their second channel, in which all four of them are tuned into. “Hey Nat, Tony. Any luck on finding him yet?” he asks.
It’s Tony who answers him. “Not yet. Although I did encounter an unpleasant child who tried to convince me to hire him or whatever. Says he’s called Flash. How much did his parents hate him to give him a name like Flash, huh?”
“And then he called me sexy,” Natasha says next. She doesn’t sound too impressed.
Clint snickers. "Bet you loved that."
"Mmm. No."
Tony asks, “any luck on your end?”
“Not yet, but we have a lead. I’m just waiting for Sam to cross the damn street. I’ll report any findings, yeah?”
“Sounds great. Good luck.”
“You too.”
It’s then that Sam finally manages to reach him, the knees of his sweatpants covered in a layer of grit and old, grimy dirt from car wheels. Upon seeing Clint’s questioning look, he just wheezes and says, “I fell over in the road.”
“You’re as clumsy as a drunk on roller skates,” Clint observes, and they both laugh despite the weight of their mission.
.
He’s there. At the wall.
Sam’s breath hitches when he sees the shivering figure curled up at the base of the wall, knees to his chest and hiding his face. It’s clear even from a distance that he hasn’t been under the cover of the buildings around the deserted backstreet for long, the rain soaking his hoodie and jeans to a state akin to ruin a giveaway in itself.
He can feel Clint stagger to move beside him and he grabs the sharpshooter by the bicep before he can take a step. “Tell Tony and Nat that we found him. And get Tony to buy some hot chocolate for all of us,” he whispers, and then, calling out to Peter’s quivering form this time, “Pete? It’s Sam and Clint.”
The kid must hear him because he visibly flinches, looking up for hardly a second as if to confirm it before burying into himself again. Concern swells in the very forefront of his heart. For some reason, the anxiety practically radiating off Peter strikes a chord in Sam's brain. What happened previously that made Peter this scared?
This isn’t a reaction he can say he understands very well -- he may be an ex-military counsellor, but he doesn’t have experience regarding secret identity exposures that are severe to this extent. It’s almost alien, to be completely clueless as to what someone is feeling, to not have an idea of the general structure of their thoughts.
Clint is muttering into his commlink and Sam takes to moving closer, keeping his footsteps heavy so Peter can tell that he’s approaching. He takes a seat in the puddle beside the kid, ignoring the water soaking through his tattered sweatpants in favour of the situation at hand. “Hey, Pete.”
Peter doesn’t move.
Sam takes it in his stride. “It’s really wet, here. Did you know you’re sitting in the middle of a puddle?”
Nothing.
“Tony and Nat are coming, too. They have your coat and a hot chocolate.” He grins at his shoes, and then adds, “for all of us.”
“Do you want cream and marshmallows, Pete?” Clint calls, wisely having not come closer yet.
He doesn’t look up, but Peter tentatively raises a thumb in Clint’s direction, and the response alone is enough to comfort Sam’s therapist brain. His behaviour itself is a worry overall, but the fact that he's at least trying to communicate — even if it is non-verbally — is a good sign.
He has a lot to work through, but he’ll be okay eventually.
"Okay. They're five minutes out." It’s now that Clint comes over, sitting in the puddle to Peter’s other side. Neither of them try to touch him, nor do they directly encourage him to say anything — just let the warmth of their presence alone comfort Peter. It’s important to not overwhelm him too fast, Sam thinks, because the last thing they want is to push him further into himself.
“I think we need to have a Just Dance session tonight,” Clint comments, seemingly unphased by the water seeping through his jeans and probably ruining them for good, “haven’t had a good one in a while. Not since you moved in, I think, Pete.”
“The only person I can beat is Bruce when he sits on the couch and waves the remote around,” Sam giggles, recalling. Their Just Dance sessions may always result with him at the bottom of the scoreboard thanks to his two left feet, but they are a precious memory he holds close to his heart nonetheless.
“I bet you could beat Steve,” Clint says, more to Peter now. “He’s the reigning Just Dance champion. Weird to think someone who’s like, three thousand years old can beat us young’uns.”
Sam’s grin grows. “Sorry, but a 47 year old can not call himself a ‘young’un’ anymore.”
“You’re 47?”
The kid’s voice is quiet, but it always has been, hasn't it? Sam would be lying if he were to say it didn’t bring joy to his heart. Talking without being directly provoked to is a good fucking sign.
“Yeah. We call him grandad now.”
“Since the fuck when?” Clint objects, and even Peter breathes out a laugh under his breath.
Ten minutes of this later and Tony and Natasha show up, brandishing Peter’s favourite black coat and five cups of steaming hot chocolate. Neither of them wonder aloud as to why they’re all sitting on the floor; just join them in the giant puddle, pass around the hot chocolates and conversate as if they aren’t sitting in a dirty backstreet somewhere in New York, pelted by the wind.
This, Sam thinks, as he watches Peter and Tony laugh and sputter hot chocolate down their chins, is what okay looks like.