Disclaimer: Spidey belongs to someone else.
A/N: After thinking I wasn't going to have time to write at all this week, I stay up all night writing on two stories. Go figure. This takes place after the first movie.
Fear of Heights
Peter Parker sat with his legs crossed, looking out over his world. The harsh air burned into his lungs, pooled around him. The city waited tensely under a sky hung with black, every building bracing itself against the snow that refused to fall. Cold slid over walls and pavement like a living thing, whispering maliciously around the corners, sliding intimate icy fingers over the skin of strangers.
Breathing deeply, Peter closed his eyes and let the possessiveness he felt wash through him, as cold and certain as the weather. This city was his place, and he had come to love it with a strange, bright fierceness; its muggers and tourists, its hard streets and sudden joys, its busy secret life that beat underneath reality like the heart under the skin of a lover. Here, in the high lonely seat where he came to think, he sensed its rhythm. In the clarity of this dark winter day, it belonged to him and he belonged to it.
Often, he heard strangers or friends discuss his life and his mission, not knowing that the man they spoke of was standing with them, wearing an ordinary face and drab clothes. He smiled when people speculated on the source of his gifts. No one ever came close. They expressed malice and fear, sometimes, and he heard them laugh, questioning his sanity or his taste in clothes. And he heard himself called hero, heard the awe and adulation. Now and then, when cheers filled the air or he received the tearful thanks and blessings of a grateful populace, he was able to admit very quietly in a far corner of his mind that he lived for it.
A gust of wind whipped across the narrow post where he sat, and he shivered. Jameson, the editor of the local tabloid, waged an unending campaign of distrust against him. The bombastic newsman might think it was intimidating, but in a way, Peter was glad for the constant abuse from the press. If he ever started to think he was above the common world or found the word hero sweet, all he had to do was pick up a paper to bring him sharply down to earth. The suspicion and hostility kept his feet on the ground, at least metaphorically.
Today he had no illusions. Winter held the city with a power that dwarfed his own, each frozen moment tightening its grip. Peter wished it would snow. The expectation that filled the air made him restless and lazy at the same time, his blood light and racing but his mind drifting.
Beyond the news stories and sound bites there were real people, people whose lives he had touched one way or another. Lives he had rescued from oncoming death, saved from indignity or harm. Gradually, he had noticed another, subtle, effect of his actions that had surprised him. His existence, the fact that he made the effort to help people, had motivated others. Some people found a sense of community, of hope. Some people found the strength to be more than they were, just from knowing that there were heroes in the world. Some people were inspired to make a stranger's problem their own.
He had witnessed it several times, through his mask and through his uncovered eyes. Each time, something hard and painful inside his chest knotted into a complicated mixture of joy and grief. It sent him into the clouds, and brought him back to a silent graveside. Peter preferred the grave to the sky. There was no glory in seeing someone else willingly take up the responsibility he had failed to accept. It was better to remember that, better to keep in mind that the mask he wore came from that grave. What happiness he experienced by helping others, no matter how high it took him, led back to the same place. In every triumph he learned only the same sad lesson: he could not change the past.
Peter stood up and dived in a single liquid movement, the chill wind slapping his face and sliding around his shoulders. Aimless, he moved through the city, trying to work off some of his nervous energy. The threatening gloom overhead trapped pedestrians and cars darting below him under the inverted pressure of the impending storm. Heads down and scarves up, diving for shelter, no one noticed him gliding silently above. Then, he saw her. With her shining hair covered and the brown coat wrapped tightly around her, she was hardly noticeable against the grey sidewalks. Nothing distinguished her from hundreds of others passing by, but he landed and clung to a wall and caught his breath, his eyes following her with all the certainty of his heart. Maybe it was chance that he crossed her path, or maybe it was the pull of the bond between them, bringing him back again and again to watch her.
Following her without a sound, Peter laughed wryly at himself. She had called him a stalker, once, and here he was doing exactly that, drinking her in the only way he could allow. The sight of her warmed him, excited and saddened him at once. He wanted to turn somersaults in the air and he wanted to creep away and die, so he did neither and trailed behind her as she walked home.
Mary Jane. Long ago, a six year old had looked at her and found heaven in her blue eyes. He had given her his heart before he had known what the gift meant. Over the last painful year, his love for her had changed—or maybe only grown—from puppy adoration to something deeper and richer. He had seen her leave insecurity and fear behind, taking confident flight. Her gentle compassion, always so much a part of her, was stronger now, more mature and wiser. Peter had discovered, bitterly, that few people met change and fear with grace. Mary Jane had faced both and walked away with her soul intact.
It amazed him that she loved him but at the same time it was right, the way things had to be. Crouched with the cold cement ledge rough under gloved hands, Peter watched with burning eyes as she turned the last corner and opened the door to her apartment building. His mask was between her and him, but he didn't make the mistake of thinking the problem was that simple.
He had read comic books, watched melodramatic movies where the hero despaired because the woman he loved scorned his true self, too dazzled by a heroic alter ego to appreciate the ordinary human he really was. Peter certainly had a new perspective on that old story. Mask or not, he was no ordinary human living an ordinary life; that choice had been taken from him. He could deny the responsibilities he had accepted, but he would always be a spider-man. Putting on his mask, he didn't feel like he left his true self behind. It was more like setting his true self free—or part of his true self, that couldn't exist any other way. He was who he had chosen to be. No woman who didn't love the hero could love him.
On the other hand, he was also Peter Parker, and he needed that as desperately as he needed the freedom of the rooftops. To have an ordinary conversation, to leave his room messy, to walk unnoticed down the street. He had been a geek in high school and he was still a geek—scholarly, socially awkward, unexciting. When he stood on the ground with the rest of humanity, all he wanted was peace, to watch TV and eat pizza, to pass his classes, to spend time with his aunt. It was incredible that anyone could love the whole of him. But Mary Jane had brushed aside the walls separating his life with ease, miraculously shared his feelings, loved both the hero and the man. Peter rarely took that thought out for examination, afraid to dull the wonder of it: the woman he loved had fallen in love with him twice.
At last, the cold began to break through his thoughts, and he began to make his way home slowly, hardly noticing where he went. A new thought was working its way through his mind. Beside Ben Parker's grave, Peter had told Mary Jane he could not love her. In his mind, it was the only way to keep her safe from the dangers surrounding him. Deep down, a small voice had always questioned acidly if he didn't think she deserved to make her own choices, but he refused to hear it over the panic that filled him when he thought of how close she had come to dying. Better to have nothing except stolen glimpses of her than to lose her forever. But now, doubt was creeping into his determination.
If he let Mary Jane into his life, what could he offer her? He was always gone, always at risk. There was the constant pressure of keeping secrets, the loneliness that came from guarding every word. Experience had taught him that the weight of it was unbearable at times. Still, wasn't that her choice to make? She was strong, in many ways stronger than he was. She knew how to live without a mask. He shut his eyes as his head swam with desire, but it did not banish the fear. Maybe, just maybe, the fear was wider and deeper than he realized. Was it the fear of losing her, or the fear of having her?
Dropping lightly to his balcony, Peter laid his hand on the door, his head spinning. The temperature was still falling, the sky was growing darker as the invisible sun abandoned the attempt to break through the clouds and sank sullenly below the horizon. It seemed as if the high walls surrounding him were covered with a tight, crinkly skin, pulling away from the icy air. The world held its breath in anticipation, waiting for the storm to break. Opening the door, Peter stepped inside, pulled his mask free and picked up the phone.
All he had to do was dial seven numbers. If he let the connection between them flare to life over a telephone wire he could see her tonight, face to face, hold her, bury himself in her warmth and let go of the pain. The dizzying height of heaven was waiting in her eyes, as it always had been. As his heart thudded in his chest, his life was up in the air, waiting for her voice to decide his future. But still his fingers hovered, unmoving.
Although Mary Jane owned his heart, he had given his soul to a city. Two loves, each deserving his dedication, his undivided devotion. Was he afraid that loving Mary Jane would distract him from his life as a hero, lessen him? And if he gave up that life for her, would there be anything left of him to offer her? Was that what he really feared, that he would have to make a choice between loving her and being who he was? He had buried his feelings underneath dutiful responsibility and self-sacrificing concern for the woman he loved, but the fear was there. His love was greater. His fingers moved closer to the phone, and then he dropped his hand to his side.
Deliberately, he set the receiver back in its cradle. The questions he struggled with might be unanswerable, but one thing was clear. Whatever his needs or fears, his responsibility was as great as his power, and it pointed one way. If he could not trust his heart or his courage, he could trust the path he had chosen back when his only concern was to do what was right.
Firmly, Peter covered his face with the symbol of his guilt and obligations, and left the frigid, empty room behind as he soared back out into the city.
Outside in the night, it finally began to snow.
A/N: I just wanted to thank everyone who sent me such wonderful reviews for 'Fear of Falling', and especially to DuoShinagami, who suggested this story. I hope it isn't a disappointment!