The first thing Peter felt when he gained consciousness was the soft linen pressed against his face. His head ached like a troll decided to wham a baseball bat against his head, but thankfully, the dull buzzing in his ears was slowly fading away.
Mentally throwing snowballs at imaginary trolls with baseball bats, he refrained from groaning out loud because his ears were beginning to work again, and he could hear loud whisper-shouts that were going on above his head. Someone was agitatedly pacing back and forth, shoes making a soft pattering sound on the ground.
"What are you, stupid or something? I thought you were smarter than that, Romanov." Peter could nearly hear the snarl in Mr. Stark's whispered voice.
Okay wait, what?
Black Widow was being stupid? What in the world was he talking about?
Coolly, Natasha snapped back, "Watch your words, Stark."
"I don't care if you skewer me. I'm asking you, what were you thinking when you decided to bring a kid into a full on Hydra base?" His voice was quickly rising before he quickly dropped it to a hiss. "He not just a stupid minion you could just order around, he's a kid and he has a life."
Oh.
They were talking about him.
Peter's curiosity peaked, because hell yeah he wanted to listen to what two famous superheroes thought of him. He kept his eyes closed, and ignored the slight uneasy feeling at the back of his head. Because at least, as the expression goes, curiosity might have killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
"You brought him into a full superhero fight," Natasha murmured.
"And that's not the same," Mr. Stark spat back. "I shouldn't have done that, but we were desperate and I calculated the odds. Nothing would have happened."
"Yet Rhodey happened," she said. Surprisingly, she had no bite to her words, just a tiredness that seemed to etch itself into the sentence. "Sit down."
"And?" His responding words were tightly forced out, laced with bitterness, but a small thud indicated that he still sat down in a chair. He took a deep breath, and suddenly said with a deceivingly calm tone, "I don't see your point. Superheroes and Hydra minions are not the same thing. The golden boy of America wouldn't have aimed to kill."
"We… miscalculated," Natasha said quietly. "It was supposed to be filled with grunts, and it was, at first. But there were too much people to be a side mission like it was originally going to be."
""A trap?" Mr. Stark said shortly.
"The other mission, with Steve, Sam, and Wanda? They were supposed to deal with the main group with the spare vibranium from the wreck."
"The shield prototype."
"Yes," Natasha sighed. "Steve called after and said their mission was a distraction," the words were a bit forced, as if she didn't want to admit that there was a mistake. "If Spiderman wasn't there, I would have…" she hesitated, "... been incapacitated. The building would have collapsed."
A shiver trickled down Peter's spine, and he barely restrained himself from shivering.
"You said that Stern was there," Mr. Stark muttered. "He's an idiot, how did he outsmart you?"
"He didn't," Natasha grounded out, teeth gritted.
"Losing your charm?" he said, a bit waspishly.
Something cracked, and Peter flinched. Thankfully, no one seemed to notice. Natasha blew out a frustrated hiss, and threw something down, probably a broken piece of furniture. "I forgot how much of an ass you could be."
"Love you too," Mr. Stark said with fake sincerity. "But seriously, I'm curious. How did the great Black Widow get outsmarted?"
A pause, and she admitted quietly, "We were low on resources. I had to do everything on a library computer in 2 hours. We didn't have time to analyze the information."
"But even so-"
"He must have had help," Natasha agreed, cutting him off. "But this isn't something out of his capabilities. He's just egotistical and vengeful. It's a dangerous combination."
"Don't look at me like that, Romanov," Mr. Stark snapped back. He paused, then let out a breath and suddenly switched the topic. "The kid's stopped snoring, you think he's up?"
The topic change was so abrupt that Peter did a mental double-take, before feeling indignant. He didn't snore. Maybe Ned complained about loud snuffling noises sometimes when he fell asleep, but it wasn't like he actually snored.
Natasha calmly said, "Spiderman's been up for a while now." There was a rustling sound, as if she turned around to face him, before she amusedly said, "It's fine, you can stop eavesdropping now."
Hesitantly, Peter opened his eyes, blinking a couple of times to let his eyes adjust to the sudden brightness. He tried to ignore the sudden flush of embarrassment that was creeping up his cheeks when he met the gaze of the two adults.
"Sorry, I didn't mean to-"
"Aww, he's blushing," Mr. Stark smirked at him. But as quickly as it came, the smirk slid off his face like water off an umbrella. His eyes were unusually blank when he asked, "Why did you go with Birdman?"
Peter blinked at the sudden change in mood, and Natasha quickly intervened, glancing sharply at Mr. Stark, as if warning him not to go further. Then she looked casually back at Peter, as if she didn't realize that he was very very adept at reading facial expressions because of MJ's weird obsession to communicate only with her glares.
Absentmindedly, he wondered what would happen if MJ and Natasha might one day meet up, and he inwardly winced because the apocalypse would be coming a couple centuries earlier than necessary.
"You heal abnormally fast," Natasha said with surprising warmth, bringing him back to the present. "You were supposed to wake up after a couple of more hours, considering how much your brain was overstimulated in such a short amount of time."
A loud screeching noise reverberated throughout the room, and Peter jumped. But it was just Mr. Stark standing up suddenly and pushing back his chair. He strolled towards the huge window on the side of the wall without any comment, arms crossed against his chest.
Peter eyed him nervously, before he shrugged sheepishly at Natasha. "A radioactive spider bit me."
"Not the strangest origin story I've heard of," Natasha mused.
"Sorry kid," Mr. Stark called out from the far side of the room. "That prize would have to go to Vision. You can't beat a purple semi-humanoid robot who had to fight his evil father that tried taking over the world when he was only a couple of days old."
Natasha ignored him, and kept talking to Peter. "You're decent at fighting," She gave him a half-smile. "With a bit more experience, you'll be terrifying to any superhuman, especially with that arsenal you have."
Peter couldn't help the warm glow that spread through his chest at her praise.
She continued, "Would you want to join us some other time? I'll make sure it's safer this-"
"No."
Both Peter and Natasha swung their heads towards Mr. Stark. Peter could only see his back, silent and unmoving, against the sunlight trickling through the window.
Beside him, Natasha opened her mouth, then closed it without saying a word. Her expression almost twisted into something like pity, but quickly shut down before Peter could look at it more closely.
Mr. Stark turned around, and raised an eyebrow coolly at their faces. "What?"
"What do- what do you mean, no?" Peter could feel his heart drop in his stomach. He quickly added a "Mr. Stark." after something in the man's expression darkened, like a stormy cloud ready to unleash a downpour of rain and thunder.
Mr. Stark walked back, and everything about his stride reminded Peter of the day he messed everything up and nearly sank an entire ferry.
"You're talking a break off," Mr. Stark said, eyes strangely dark and without that maniac spark that Peter was so used to seeing. "No patrolling for a week. Do you hear me?"
"What do you mean?" Peter protested, horror flickering in his chest. It was one thing to be restricted from hanging out with awesome superheroes, but a completely different thing to be banned from patrolling. "Why? That's completely unrelated from- I don't understand."
"I'm speaking English, right?" His words were so blocky, short. Peter imagined them floating in the air, framed in bold dark letters that stood out sharply against the dim glow of the setting sun. "Stay home. Literally, you've just got tortured. You need to recover before you decide to swing around in some spandex."
A shard slowly dug its way into Peter's chest, and he resisted the impulse to curl into a little ball and dig out that shard of hurt that was slowly making its way through his heart. Because patrolling was his life, his duty, and he thought that Mr. Stark understood him, unlike May. He owed it to the people to keep the streets safe, and he couldn't, he couldn't just not-
"But I don-," his own voice was soft, softer than he would have liked to admit.
Mr. Stark's face softened for a brief second, but then hardened immediately after his eyes flickered towards Natasha, who was half-hidden in the shadows.
"No. And that's final. It's just a week, for god's sake, and you need to take care of yourself and learn something about responsibility."
The words cut into him deeper, pushing the shard of glass into an area of hurt that he did not want to remember. He tried to say something back, argue, anything, but the words stuck in his throat like glue to paper.
Words floated to the top of his mind, an aphorism that mocked him endlessly and chattered in his ear every moment of his life. With great power comes great responsibility.
Mr. Stark sounded so much like Ben, and it hurt. Unbelievably so. He was trying to be responsible, but he couldn't just, what, stand back and let people suffer when he was fine and dandy? How was that responsibility?
Why was everything so complicated?
Natasha suddenly spoke up, her voice steady, and so unlike Peter's own soft voice. "Stark, you can't possibly-"
He turned on her with a sudden fury, a blast of anger that was so dense that it almost seemed tangible. Peter almost expected to see the fragile glass vase on the far end of the table to get swept off the table, but the vase stood still.
On the other hand, Mr. Stark did not. He stormed up to Natasha with a sudden quickness that she blinked. In a strange, sort of breathy voice, Mr. Stark breathed out, "You do not dictate my life. My home, my words, my law."
"Stark, think about what you're-"
He interrupted her, his voice sharp. "No, don't tell me what to think. You've abandoned ship, and look, there's consequences Ms. I-can't-be-controlled-by-the-government. Maybe you should face reality instead of running around like a biker gang still pretending to protect the world."
Something in Natasha's face grew brutal, edged with a serrated blade that glinted cold in the fading light of the room.
"Choose your next words wisely," she said.
Mr. Stark's laugh was lined with something that seemed close to hysteria, a harsh discordant note that made Peter nearly jump back in surprise. "Haven't I said enough wise words for the century, Romanov? No one listens."
"Because your definition of saving the world also is the very definition of destroying it," Natasha smiled grimly. "Remember Ultron?"
"I'm trying," a frustrated breath out, "to save the world when no one else is seeing the problem. There are- things," Mr. Stark forced out, his hand rubbing against his face tiredly, "above that are coming, and instead we focus on-"
"We focus on the human things that we can actually fight right now," she cut him off.
"No, we don't, and that's the problem," Mr. Stark bit back. "We-"
It was like watching a bunch of toddlers fighting over a piece of cookie, but instead of a cookie, it was the entire world and their ideals. Shoving away the ache he was still feeling, he spoke up hesitantly.
"Uh, Ms. Natasha? Mr. Stark?"
Two heads swiveled to look over to Peter, and he shifted nervously, because god, their expressions were terrifying. But they were bitter, too bitter to get out of no-man's-land without triggering some sort of huge superhero bomb, and he couldn't exactly keep watching the line fracture even further.
It was also way too late, with the sun below the horizon, and May was probably already panicking.
Crap. He completely forgot about May.
"I appreciate it and all Ms. Natasha, but uh," he swallowed inaudibly. "I was wondering when I could get home."
May was going to murder him.
Mr. Stark sighed, before muttering to Natasha, "I'll deal with you later."
"Excu-"
He cut her off, "You're lucky I disabled all the cameras Ross put in this house. As it is, you're pushing my boundaries, and you're still a war criminal."
"I'm leaving," she responded curtly. "Can't stay, still need to clean some things up."
"You do you," he said. Facing Peter, he gave him a faux smile. "Happy's not home right now, so you'll be hitching a ride with me."
"Wait, no- no I don't want to be an inconvenience, Mr. Stark," Peter protested. "I can just walk home or something, don't worry ab-"
"Kid, first, it's dark out," Mr. Stark interrupted. "Superhero or not, you're like, twelve-"
"Sixteen"
"-sixteen, trixteen, whatever same thing." He stopped when he saw the look on Peter's face, probably something akin to embarrassment. There must have been something, because immediately the harsh lines in his face lessened minutely, and much more gently, he said gruffly, "Doesn't matter, it's not an issue."
"But are you su-"
"Yes, Pete." Amused exasperation this time. "In fact, it'll be an insult to my pride if you don't come."
"Oh okay- er I'll just, go?" Peter mumbled awkwardly. "Down the stairs?"
"No, go out the window," Mr. Stark deadpanned. "Yes, of course go down the stairs. I'll be right there."
Right before he disappeared down the stairs, he faintly heard Natasha chuckle. But paradoxically, her next words were void of any humor. "He's something, isn't he?"
Mr. Stark's reply was too low to be heard, even with his super-hearing.
Peter did try to follow Mr. Stark's orders, he really did. He went to school, came home, tried not to spaz out while watching the news and imagining the different sorts of robbers that would roam the streets. It didn't help that the Spiderman suit was in his closet, dangling in full sight from the living room.
(He was too lazy to close the door. Whatever.)
Thankfully, people at school school didn't ask too many questions on why he missed the last couple of days. It helped that the flu was currently going around the district, and a few mentions of "I didn't really feel so good," got teachers off his back.
MJ just gave him a weird look.
"I supposed that phone call was from your doctor that somehow managed to be on a first name basis with you?" she said sarcastically.
Ned gaped at him, wide-eyed. "Phone call?"
"Yeah," Peter mumbled. "Family situation, and then got the flu."
"That sounds fun," Ned said, a bit envious. He quickly backtracked at Peter's incredulous look, "Of course, not the I'm-dying-from-the-flu part, but the awesome I-get-to-miss-school part."
Peter shrugged weakly. The "I-get-to-miss-school, yay!" wasn't so fun when it was replaced with a dark, dripping cell-
Alone, can't do anything- trapped, please oh god someone-
He shook away the lingering emotions of fear, pain stop it and grinned without any real sort of emotion. "It was a interesting trip."
It was all mixing together, the Vulture incident and the stupid Hydra imprisonment, and he wasn't sure if he could handle all the emotions. It was like someone got a fork, and scooped out his mind like a plate of spaghetti one by one to only leave the shattered pieces at the bottom.
Deep breath in.
Out.
This whole scenario was just so stupid. He got out with hardly a scratch, yet the thoughts tumbling in the back of his mind were still dark, dripping, no escape, what is happ-
Ned stared at him for a moment, and Peter braced himself for the onslaught of questions he was not ready to handle. But strangely, after a moment, something in Ned's eyes shifted and he nodded without demanding another explanation.
MJ opened her mouth and closed it. Finally, she sighed, "Is this one of the things that I'm not allowed to listen to that you both talk about? Spiderman business?"
"What?" Peter nearly squeaked, before embarrassedly coughing. In a normal voice, he asked, "What do you mean?"
Did she really find out? Was it really that obvious?
"Well, yeah. It's not like your obsession with Spiderman is a huge secret anyways," MJ frowned, answering his unsaid question, before looking back and forth and Ned and Peter's faces. "Obviously, I still must be missing something, because you both look like you ate a rotten tomato dunked in toilet water."
"No, no, no," Ned's voice was way too high. If Peter decided to plunk him in the soprano section of any chorus section, he would probably fit right it. "It's nothing."
"Uh-huh." MJ responded bitingly. "And I'm the pope of Spain, sue me."
She did leave the topic alone for a bit, for some unknown reason that Peter didn't understand but was infinitesimally grateful for.
When he arrived home, he surprisingly got his homework done early, trying to send the uneasy feeling away. May was still a bit exasperated at him, and it shone through her displeased grimace when she found him and Mr. Stark at the front step together yesterday. It ended up with a couple of thrown spatulas at Mr. Stark and enough apologies to fill up a canister of gasoline to drive all the way to Wyoming.
She wasn't home yet, so he had to deal with his jitters alone, which he was perfectly fine with. May was given the briefest of summaries, enough to sate her curiosity, but definitely not the full picture.
And, if he was really honest with himself, he would rather keep it that way. He didn't want her worrying even more, because she was doing enough of that already with him going on the streets and all, wearing only spandex.
Spandex? You're so easy to crush, little spider. Just a twist of fate's fingers, and-
He found himself gazing at the darkened TV screen blankly, and mentally winced. Even if he wasn't Spiderman for the week, he still needed to get on the streets and do something, or else the empty echoing of his head was going to drive him insane.
Maybe he would do something normal. Like take a walk.
His gaze fell on the Spiderman suit regretfully, before he stuffed a paper bag in his backpack just for emergencies. He wasn't sure if Mr. Stark would be happy if he had to use the suit, even when he wasn't officially patrolling.
His brain helpfully supplied him with facts. Walking is fun! Don't worry, Queens is totally a safe place where no robbers are, and you'll totally not meet any trouble.
He mentally snorted, before quickly writing, Just getting some fresh air :), on a Post-it for May to see. Then he slipped out of his apartment without so much of a sound, trying to ignore the feeling of foreboding he was getting.
I am so so SO sorry for the terrible wait. School happened, tests were evil, SAT was even more evil (thankfully, I did fine), and now with AP's coming up, I'm still looking forward to a horrible week of cram-studying. I can't promise either that my updating is gonna get better, but hopefully I'll try to cram in some more chapters.
Wasn't any science this chapter, since this was actually supposed to be part of another chapter, but because it was getting super long, I decided to split it into two parts. Hopefully I'll get the other part out soon, but can't finalize anything yet.
To all of you who reviewed, faved, and followed, thank you guys so much, I'm really glad for some of the points brought up in the reviews since it'll improve my writing, and even more so, I'm extremely glad for the encouragement. Good luck to all of you on all your tests also, and Endgame is coming so soon woop woop, super hyped for that too!
