Chapter Four: The Guy in the Chair
It had taken Peter a long time to get over Liz.
Even then, he still wasn't entirely convinced that he was. Because before her father, before he discovered who he was and what he was doing, she was just Liz. Student Council President. Decathlon team member. That girl everyone associated with her kind personality and go-getter spirit. That was the person Peter missed the most. And what frustrated him the most was that, despite the fiasco that was the night of homecoming, no amount of replaying resulted in him doing anything differently. He didn't regret ditching. But his actions had sacrificed the one friendship he'd wanted to make sophomore year.
"Cute girl at ten-o-clock. I repeat, cute girl at ten-o-clock," Peter muttered to no one in particular, maybe Karen, if she was still listening to him. He was currently on stakeout in front of a jewelry store on Tenth Avenue, but had been pacing the adjacent fire escape for twelve minutes, occasionally catching his reflection in the store windows from a certain angle. The girl with a headful of curls and pink headphones was the only noticeable person on the block.
"Would you like me to amplify her a greeting from across the street?" Karen asked. Peter balked as he swung up on the railing and did a few pull-ups.
"What would you say?" he asked her incredulously. "'Hi! I think you're really pretty!'"
"Greeting accepted."
"No no no!" Peter corrected himself, his grip slipping as he fumbled for words. "I take it back! Don't say anything!"
There was a brief respite from the program built into his suit. Sometimes, he thought that Mr. Stark had designed her to keep him company more than provide him with assistance in times of need.
"Why?"
"Because she might hear me!" he hissed under his breath, as if that weren't already obvious. Sitting back down, he stuck his legs through the bars, and mumbled to himself, "I really need Ned to go back in there and remove the speaker system. Who thought that speaker system was a good idea?"
"Mr. Stark installed it upon noticing that you failed your most recent hearing screening at school."
"I failed because I fell into the Hudson River!" he defended, a shiver working its way up his spine at the memory. "And that ear infection really hurt."
Mr. Stark had been giving him more assignments throughout the city this past week under the assumption that he had nothing better to do. He even had Peter's phone hooked up to receive any alerts of nearby distress signals so he wouldn't have to relay them (out of convenience on the billionaire's part, though Peter swore it was because he was proving himself more responsible). Today was the jewelry store on Tenth, where the most exciting cause of commotion was Peter's growling stomach. He'd missed lunch period for this.
"Do you think we could rig this thing to carry snacks?"
"It's a skin-tight suit, Peter."
"Yeah, I figured," he said disdainfully, the hairs on the back of his neck perking up when a man and a woman approached the window of the store with dark sunglasses and large handbags. Ducking behind the stairs of the fire escape (the bright suit probably wasn't his best choice when going on stakeout), Peter watched as they silently observed oncoming traffic before entering the store in broad daylight.
"It's go-time," he murmured to himself, readjusting his web-shooters before taking the leap.
When he got back to school, he crawled through the ventilator shaft directly above his locker, his chest still heaving with jagged breaths from the commotion he'd stirred just moments before. He'd managed to remain relatively unscathed, though he couldn't say the same for his adversaries. He was just glad the police had arrived when they did—he didn't know how much longer he could've gone bashing that poor guy's head into the marble tile.
Still attached to the ceiling, Peter aimed his web-shooter at his locker door and fired, the synthetic webbing hitting the aluminum door with a splat. A strangely hollow sound emerged from within. Furrowing his brow, he tugged on the webbing. The door swung open. His locker was empty.
"What—?!"
He fell out of sheer surprise, his body hitting the floor in a tangle of his own limbs. He didn't think bullies were still on-hours during summer vacation, but apparently anyone was still fair game. Scrambling back to his feet, he grasped at the dark shadows within his locker, as if doing so would somehow conjure his belongings from wherever they'd disappeared to. His backpack, phone, and clothes. All gone.
Groaning, Peter allowed his forehead to bang against the bottom of his locker. The sound traveled down the hallway in waves.
"Would you like me to screen you for potential head trauma?" Karen offered.
"Not now, thank you."
"Where were you?" Michelle asked him when he returned to class, his defeated expression enough to have piqued her interest. She lowered the journal she was writing in to stare at him. There were nothing but large, inked scribbles on the page.
"Restroom," he replied, averting her slightly disgusted expression and trying to focus on the assignment Mrs. Higginbotham had chalked out for them on the board. He found his vision to be blurring in and out from fatigue.
"And the clothes?"
Peter looked down at himself. After minutes of scrounging through the school's lost-and-found, the only decently smelling articles of clothing were an XS Midtown gym tee and a pair of baggy jeans with a horrendous series of holes. Patches of bare leg poked out from all angles.
"Peter," Mrs. Higginbotham started, blinking at him as she set the day's poem and a pink highlighter on his desk. "If I were a stricter teacher, I'd dress code you for those pants."
He tried pulling them back up, but without a belt, they were a futile cause. He swore he heard Michelle chortle from behind her journal.
"I swear, I have no idea where it went!" Peter groaned, bouncing on the mattress of his best friend's bed and trying not to bash his head on the ceiling. The birthday party cone was really making it difficult.
"Are you sure it was the right locker?" Ned asked from his desk. His back was turned to him, the bright light of his computer screen bending around his shoulders as he scrolled through the Wiki-How article he had just pulled up. 'Three Ways to Find Lost Objects.' "Things look a lot differently when you're hanging upside down."
"No, I promise, it was my locker," he replied, plopping back down on the bed. "I had my phone in there and everything! Mr. Stark's probably messaging me, and I can't even get to him."
He usually hadn't a problem with losing a backpack, as Aunt May had already grown accustomed to purchasing another, though her warnings were now starting to creep up on him. ("Next time you ask me, I'm buying you one from Target. With your face on it." The fact that Target now carried Spider-Man backpacks was beyond cool to him.) But things he considered valuable were in that backpack. His card for Mr. Stark was in there. And now it was missing.
"It says here you have to give yourself positive messages," Ned informed him from the article. "In the moment of panic, it is easy to slip into self-loathing, blaming, or other self-defeating thought patterns…"
"My sweater was in there," Peter murmured, twiddling his thumbs as he tried to keep his negative thoughts at bay. "The blue one? The one I wear with the collared shirts? I loved that sweater."
"Why were you wearing a sweater? It's like, ninety degrees outside."
"That's beside the point."
"Ned! Peter!" a female voice came from outside, following by a series of knocking. "Halika dito! Come out here! Your Lola wants to sing with you two!"
"In a sec, mom!" Ned hollered back.
His grandma was currently celebrating her ninetieth birthday (how she still had the strength and fervor to navigate Queens was beyond Peter), and his entire family had flown in to squeeze into the Leeds' tiny two-bedroom apartment. Badly arranged karaoke backtracks reverberated off of the walls.
"I'm surprised we haven't received a noise complaint yet," Peter admitted, reaching down to nab a lumpia spring roll from the Styrofoam bowl sitting on the carpet. Ned merely shrugged.
"We invited the neighbors, too. They're probably out there somewhere," he said, taking a sip from his red solo cup. "Can't issue a complaint when you're given free food."
That he couldn't argue with. Ned's mom was an excellent cook. Most of the times, Peter dropped by just to eat, and she was always nice enough to send him home with a Tupperware dinner for Aunt May.
"Why don't you just search for your phone's location on your computer? I taught you how to do that already."
"I can't—May took away my laptop for a week because I skipped school."
"Right. How was that by the way?"
"So scary dude," Peter said from behind his hands. "It's like—how do you convince someone to keep living? It's like you're doing a sales pitch, with your product being life. Or you're a travel agent, destination tomorrow." He let out a shaky breath and rubbed his eyes. "I'm just glad she's okay."
"I'm glad you're okay, too," his best friend replied. "Everyone thinks superheroes are like invincible or something, but I guess it's different when you know them. You don't even like the kiddie coasters at Coney Island."
"They have those…sharp turns," Peter protested.
Another point of contention regarding his duties as Spider-Man was his inherent fear of heights. Sometimes, he still dreamt of that Washington D.C. trip, fragments of his labored breathing and lightheadedness returning to him throughout the night. Upon later research, he found out that the Washington Monument was five-hundred and fifty-five feet tall. Why on earth would anyone willingly climb that—on a roller-coaster or otherwise?
It was something he was trying to wrangle down, either by taking to the rooftops more often or convincing himself that amusement park rides weren't designed to kill people. Whenever he was far from the ground, he was also directly far from comfort, and he appreciated Aunt May and Ned's concern for him whenever they heard of his most recent lofty escapade.
"I wish you were at summer school with me, Ned."
"I...don't."
"You know what I mean."
"There's only a few more weeks left. And besides, Mr. Stark gets you out of class half the time anyways. Can he just sign you out of class like that—is he like one of your emergency contacts?"
"No." Though it wasn't a bad idea. He could just add him in for next semester's registration. "I don't actually think he knows I'm in summer school right now."
"Seriously?" Ned asked in surprise, swiveling around in his desk chair.
"Well, if Mr. Stark finds out, there's no way he's gonna let me do all this superhero business!"
"I'm surprised he lets you do it in the first place." His best friend shook his head in incredulity, turning back towards his computer. "Just make sure you get your English credit, because I don't think there's a summer school for the people that flunk out of summer school."
"I think it's called repeating the tenth grade."
"Exactly. And I like you and everything, but I don't want to sit with an underclassmen during lunch."
They'd discussed using Peter's Spider-Man abilities as a sort of call-to-fame on multiple occasions. It was undeniable that people would pay attention to the duo knowing that one of them was a nationally recognized superhero. But Peter had promised himself since the beginning not to use the suit for his own benefit. And they had gotten so used to Michelle reading at the end of the table that they couldn't just have her seat taken by some random kid. An overly crowded lunch table was overrated, anyways.
"Okay, what if I try and find your phone for you?" Ned offered, looking at him through the reflection in his screen. "I'll find you a location, and with your luck, the rest of your stuff will be there, too."
"Really?" Peter jumped up from the bed, accidentally kicking over the bowl of spring rolls. He cursed under his breath and tried to gather them off the floor in under five seconds or less. Ned's expression contained only the slightest distaste.
"Yeah, man. I'm the guy in the chair, remember? The Dennis Nedry? The Felicity Smoak?"
"Smoak's a bit of a reach, but yes, that would be great," Peter said behind a mouthful of vegetable and pork. "Thanks, Ned."
"You're welcome," he replied, lowering the screen of his laptop before standing up. "But not now. My mom wants us out there for karaoke. You know how my family is about this kind of stuff."
"Right," Peter nodded, brushing the crumbs from his fingertips before following Ned out the door and into the party. While he was never one to sing eighties ballads in front of an audience, his voice wasn't bad, which was really the only qualification for the Leeds' family karaoke. And if he were being honest, he'd do anything for Ned. Because he knew he'd do anything for him in return.
Ned was his best friend. And that was more than enough for Peter.
A/N: I really appreciate everyone who has taken the time to read, follow, favorite, and review this so far! I truly take all of your words into consideration and am so grateful to have you along the ride for this fic. There are a lot of aspects I find interesting with the MCU's version of Peter, such as his quirky interactions with the other characters and his fear of heights, and it's been entertaining to explore those dynamics here! Next chapter is in the works.