A/N: Thank you for your kindness and patience while I finagled with this chapter lmao. I got a few questions about the course of the fic, plot-wise, and I wanted to respond and say that I'm going to be going on a bit of an original arc (I guess you can call it that?) and Age of Ultron won't kick in until Part 5 (probably) of the fic. So there's going to be a little bit of action until AoU, but it won't be the focus, more character stuff if you catch my drift.
Anyways, enjoy!
Chapter Thirty-Seven
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English class was thankfully silent. In the second half of the period, Mrs. Evans let us half Reading Time — basically a free forty-five minutes to do whatever we wanted, so long as we were quiet about it. Usually, the class just read the day's assigned reading, so they wouldn't have to take it home. Which is what I did, because suffering at school was better than suffering anywhere else.
I had my focus set on getting ahead on Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. I had started school a week and a half behind, and actually reading this would've put me even further behind schedule — so I listened to it on audiobook. It was an agreement I worked out with Mrs. Jones; she didn't trust that just listening would be enough for me to fully absorb the contents, so while in class I had to actually follow along with a physical copy of the book as well. Completely tedious and not at all pointless? Oh yeah. But as long as I remembered to keep moving my eyes back and forth across the page, I could pretend I was doing my job.
This semester's focus was on Russian literature. Something I had initially been excited about when I first signed up for the class.
Now? Not so much.
Mostly because I had no idea how common the name Dmitri was in Russia, or at least in Russian works chosen by Mrs. Evans.
I realized I'd been drifting, and with a roll of my eyes had to rewind the audiobook. Since I'd thrown away my smartphone, Peter's old iPod had found new use as my personal library.
As the audiobook started again, on a long monologue about eldest son Dmitri Karamazov and his obsession with his family inheritance, I wondered vaguely if maybe this was why I might be having nightmares about my Dmitri. Was that too far a stretch?
But thinking about it only gave me a headache. I dropped my head onto the desk. I hated reading.
When the final bell rang, I was the first out of that classroom. I made a beeline for the AV Club room — more specifically, the storage closet, which MJ had commandeered for Midtown Conspiracies (along with a helpful twenty bucks), and spent the next hour and a half with her setting up the room so it would be, at the very least, mildly presentable as a film backdrop.
After that was a meet-up with Ned and Peter at the Silver Spoon; I'd asked MJ if she wanted to come, and the look I received said she'd rather go swimming with sharks, so I didn't ask again.
From there, it was a walk alone from Midtown. Maybe faster if I took the subway, and less breezy; Spring was in full force now, with heavy rains and warmer sunshine bringing out all the green leaves and flowers. I pulled the red Nationals cap low on my brow to fight against the headwind.
The Silver Spoon wasn't too far away, thankfully, and I enjoyed a nice, windy day. Made me feel all billowy. Maybe that was weird.
About ten minutes into my trek, however, all thoughts of being carried away on a strong breeze like a puffy cloud vanished from my mind. Something felt off.
The back of my neck crawled, a chill dropping down my spine. I passed by a long shop window and turned my head to glance at the reflection. But not at myself.
Behind me were several other pedestrians. Directly behind me, a pair of women in leggings and yoga mats under their arms, sipping Starbucks. Behind them, a businessman in a heated conversation on his cellphone. An elderly woman walking a dog. A behind her, a dark, hooded figure, male physique but nondescript and alone, too far away to make out clearly. Just far enough behind me that I wouldn't suspect I was being followed, but close enough to watch what I was doing.
A tail.
I kept walking, not pausing in my step. Act too soon and it could be a mistake. I had to make sure it wasn't just my paranoia overanalyzing things.
There was a corner up ahead; hanging above the bodega posted there was one of those round mirrors that allowed you to see around corners. I glance up, studying the figures behind me; the man further back, walking a little slower. Maybe he realized I spotted him the first time.
I sped around the corner, deciding to put some more distance between us.
The two yoda ladies and the businessmen stopped at the crosswalk; I could hear their voices receding. A few seconds later, I heard the click-clack of dog nails on the sidewalk. The old woman, walking her pet. A parked car on my left had its side mirror angled perfectly, allowing me to see the man had turned down this street, too.
Swallowing at my dry throat, I continued, spotting an alleyway to my right. It would take longer to get to the Silver Spoon if I took a detour, but right now it seemed I had a bigger problem to deal with.
As soon as the entrance was within my reach, I ducked into it, hoping I hadn't telegraphed my move. The key to losing a tail was persistence, and unpredictability.
For a few blissful seconds, all I heard in that quiet alleyway was the crunch of my boots on gravel, echoing off the narrow brick walls.
Then I heard a second pair of footsteps right under my own.
Heart skipping a beat, I came to an abrupt stop. Spun around. Fists clenched, shoulders stiff, head lowered. Ready for a fight.
My eyes landed on… nothing.
The alleyway was empty. Nothing to hide behind but an empty milk crate.
My breath came out in a sharp burst. Eyes flicked around, scanning every possible crevice and corner. Waiting for a ghost, a monster to jump out at me.
But none did. The only people I saw were the distant pedestrians passing the entrance. I was entirely alone here.
Heart still in my throat, I turned on my heel and ran.
It was not the first strange thing that had happened to me, although maybe it was the first that might have happened due to my overactive imagination. Another thing my paranoia might have been overselling was whenever I spotted an unmarked white van parked on the street, either near school or the apartment. Considering just how many unmarked white vans exist in the tri-state area alone, this was not exactly unusual, but it still made my skin crawl nonetheless. And earlier this week, I answered a phone call from the landline in the kitchen — only to get nothing but dead air on the other end. They hung up quickly after I answered.
It wouldn't be the first time that someone called the wrong number, but it would be the first time since I got home.
"Hey, Mia," Ned said, when I finally showed up to the Silver Spoon fifteen minutes later, red-faced and out of breath. "What took you so long? You look like you just ran a mile."
"Chased by a pack of man-eating wild dogs." I said, flopping in the seat opposite him in the booth, slumping my head back to catch my breath. The Silver Spoon was a warm, narrow little place with worn red leather seating and steamed-up windows. It smelled of milkshakes and french fries and all the good things in life, and was a balm on the panic still skittering in my mind.
Ned just snorted, making a face at my answer but not questioning it. He picked through a small basket of steaming chicken wings before him. "Well, at least you're here before Peter. You know, he's been getting late for things a lot. It's kinda weird how he always disappears right after school."
I stiffened slightly, then made myself relax. "That's because he walks me home, Ned."
It was certainly a better answer than He's Spider-Man. Still, the realization that Ned might be onto something quickly erased the fear I had at being followed (and the embarrassment afterwards), now having a real problem to worry about. I may be an outed dumbass but that didn't mean Peter had to be, too.
"Oh," Ned frowned slightly, tilting his head. He took a sip of his milkshake, then added, "Well, not right now, right?"
Dammit. I shook my head reluctantly. "No."
Ned opened his mouth to continue, but stopped and waited when a waitress came by to get my order. After my hectic race escaping some slippery inner demons, I was famished, and ordered a hamburger and a whole plate of fries. Then soda, as an afterthought.
As soon as she was gone, Ned forged on as if nothing happened: "Peter's gotta be up to something. You don't think he's been acting… different lately?"
"Different how?"
"Well —" Ned paused, appearing to grow anxious, averting his gaze. He tugged at his collar, and when he spoke again he had lowered his register. "I know you weren't here then, but he got really different after… after the Incident," he put a special inflection on this word as if I didn't already know what it meant.
He continued. "Peter was really intense for a while, and I get it, you know, after everything's that happened, who wouldn't be upset but — I don't know. He stopped talking to me for a week or so, not that he was mad at me, he just needed time, and then when he did, it seemed like… it seemed like Peter kind of blamed himself for what happened? For everything, I mean, and not just about your mom, but Uncle Ben, too. Like he had this crazy idea that he could've done something to stop it from happening. "
"O-oh." I just stared at Ned, unblinking for one long minute and found myself bereft of an appropriate response. A part of this, I already knew. Some of it, I knew more than Ned. But it hurt, to realize that Ned had been able to tell that Peter was hurting.
"And I think he still does, you know, blame himself," Ned said, his brow drawn in concern. He held out his hands, prostrating, "But I don't know how to talk to him about it, you know? It's not like he outright told me he feels responsible, it's just a feeling I get. And I just want to let him know it's not his fault. None of it is. It's not his job to save people. He's just a kid. We're all just kids."
Finally, Ned heaved a sigh, falling back in his seat and shaking his head. "Sorry, I didn't mean to unload on you like that, Mia. I guess I've been bottling it up. Not like I can tell Michelle any of this…"
"It's alright," I said with a tiny smile, sliding my hand forward on the tabletop in a gesture of sympathy. "I get the same feelings too, sometimes. But I think Peter's just working through it, slowly. On his own, you know? And he's not up to anything, he just likes doing photography by himself. Maybe he'll talk about all that, when he's ready. And maybe he won't. I don't know, Ned. Just… just let him know you're open to listen when he is. Couldn't hurt."
The words coming out of my mouth were almost verbatim what Aunt May told me, about opening up after the DC stuff. Specifically, about the topic of my father, which I'd been avoiding. We'd talked about it, briefly, in the hospital. Just the basics, the cold facts. Not how I felt about it then. Or how I felt about it now.
At any rate, it felt like the right thing to say now. It was true, for the most part. But Peter still didn't talk about Uncle Ben much and I didn't expect he would for some time. But if he could wait for me, then I could wait for him.
"Yeah, I'll try that," Ned said, a smile growing across his face, "Thanks, Mia."
"No problemo." I just gave a lame thumbs-up, slumping in relief. Aunt May's ineffable wisdom saved the day yet again. Maybe one day I'd try it for myself.
A silence fell between us; the waitress arrived with my food and I dove right into it, eating like a woman who hasn't been fed in a week. I had just cleaned off my hamburger when Ned checked the clock on his phone for the third time. It was starting to become obvious that Peter wasn't going to join us, and I had a suspicion why. It wasn't unusual that being Spider-Man made him forgetful of his other engagements, or he got so caught up in a petty crime that he couldn't afford to just abandon it. His dedication was admirable, but it left a little something to be desired, sometimes. Still, I was the last person who'd ever call him out on it.
"He doesn't talk about it either, by the way," Ned added finally, frowning at his plate. "The Incident, I mean."
"...Why don't you?" I said at length, my words tip-toeing over ice. It was a question that had been nagging at me for a while. MJ and Flash and Betty and all the other kids at Midtown weren't shy about sharing their own Incident experiences — I knew why Peter didn't but I was surprised that Ned never partook, either.
"Oh, yeah, uh —" Ned glanced away, his fingers tapping the tabletop mindlessly. He gave a hefty, hasty shrug. "Yeah, I dunno. Kind of water under the bridge, you know. It was actually kind of fun, to be honest, but I mean, it's not like I lost anyone, not like —"
He stopped himself suddenly, glanced at me, blood rushing to his ears, then remembered he still had an empty plate to finish. His fork scraped uselessly against the empty plate and he cleared his throat. "Sorry, I didn't mean to put it like that. You and Peter, I just don't want to make you guys feel bad, that's all."
"No, it's fine," I murmured, watching as Ned tore apart a breaded chicken wing into smaller and smaller pieces but not eating it.
Now it made sense to me. Rolling over it in my mind, I finally decided to say, "Still, it's okay if you want to mention it, talk about it with me. I wasn't there. I have no idea what it was like for you guys."
"Oh," Ned said, eyebrows shooting up in surprise. He pursed his lips for a second, taking that into consideration. "Well, if you say so… I mean, the day it happened, you know, none of us had any idea what was going down. Mom and I were heading back from a dentist appointment when weird shit started falling out of the sky. I still remember looking out the bus window and seeing that giant black portal over Stark Tower, looking like God's asshole or something. It was really cool! And then stuff started falling out, and I thought it was like, comets? At first? But then it turned out it wasn't, and then shit got weird."
I blinked in surprise. "You weren't scared?"
"Hmm," Ned screwed up his mouth to the side, thinking about it. "I think so, but it didn't really hit me until my mom started screaming. I just, it got me in my bones, dude. I didn't know what to do. The last time my mom screamed like that was when I was five and almost stuck a paperclip into a light socket. Things don't feel scary until the grown-ups are scared, you know? That's when you know things are bad. What are you supposed to do when even the adults can't figure it out?"
"Y-yeah, I know," I stammered, blinking hard. That hit deeper than I expected. Usually I could decide for myself what was scary and what wasn't, but hearing the anguish in Steve's voice during that phone call on the Triskelion — seeing the fright in Aunt May's face when I first woke up in the hospital — was unlike anything I'd ever experienced before. It made everything that happened to me feel far more real than I could ever conceive it on my own.
I was so used to taking my life into my own hands, not waiting for older people to tell me what to do, that I forgot that I wasn't just my own responsibility. I was Aunt May's, too. I was Steve's.
Ned continued, "The aliens, Chitauri, whatever they're called, they shot up the bridge we were on, knocked the whole bus on its side. I guess we were pretty lucky no one died, although Mom ended up breaking her wrist. A little girl dislocated her shoulder. Another guy couldn't walk at all. We were trapped in there for a while, the fighting happening right over us. I didn't end up seeing a lot of it, Mom just hugged me close and covered my eyes. All I could do was listen to all the sounds, the screaming, the explosions..." Ned paused, frowning. "I remember being mad at her at the time, I wanted to see what was going on, but … I guess I get it now, she was trying to protect me. Seeing what the city looked like after we got out was —" He shuddered. "— I think I peed my pants."
"What? Ew."
"Yeah, I said the same thing," Ned snorted, still amused by it. "I was afraid of grossing out Hawkeye when he showed up to pull us out. But he didn't say anything. That was nice of him. After that, it was kind of a blur. Some policemen helped escort us to the subways where we hunkered down until it was over. There was a, uh, a triage center there and Mom got her wrist checked. A guy lent me a pair of shorts, and then after the police said it was clear, it was over, we went home."
"You went home? Just like that?"
"I mean, yeah. What else were we going to do? Mom didn't want to get caught up when the news people came around for interviews and stuff. I think she was just tired. I was, too, actually. We had to walk all of it home, since all the subways were shut down and there were people still trapped in the tunnels. Traffic had stopped practically all the way to Jersey City. Longest walk of my life, Mia. I hit the sack as soon as I got home and slept until noon the next day."
I couldn't help but smile at that. If there was nothing I knew better, it was the sheer exhaustion of just trying to survive, life-threatening situation or not. Sometimes the hardest parts came after the scary stuff was over. Popping a french fry into my mouth, I said, "I probably would've done the same thing."
"Yeah," Ned grinned dreamily. "It was the best sleep of my life. The nights after that kinda sucked, though. Kept getting nightmares. I think my mom did too, but she doesn't like to talk about that stuff with me. You know, it's really weird, it's like, almost exactly a year since it happened, and I can remember it like it was yesterday."
"Does it still scare you, now?" I was curious. How did a normal person cope after a year out from this kind of thing? I had yet to make it a year from escaping the Crucible and that date was still a long way out. It'd be longer still until I'd make it so far after the fall of SHIELD. I knew I wasn't normal by any stretch of the imagination, but I had to believe that it wouldn't feel like this, the way I was, for the rest of time.
Ned hummed as he thought about that question, and it was the longest he took to respond. "Sometimes yeah, sometimes no. Mostly I'm just… I'm just scared it's gonna happen again, you know? Like it's going to come back or something. I mean, sure, the Avengers are going to be there, and everything's going to be fine, but what the hell do I do?"
"Didn't you say earlier that we were just kids?" I pointed out, raising an eyebrow. "We're not supposed to be doing anything?"
"Oh, right," Ned frowned, apparently having forgotten about this. He just shrugged his shoulders, helpless. "Still, I mean, I don't want to be useless, either! I'd want to help. And I just — I just want my family to be okay. I — I don't want to get hurt."
"Yeah," I mumbled, ducking my head. That was a hard point to argue with. "I get that, too."
"At least I feel normal now," Ned said, then reconsidered, scrunching up his face. "Well, almost normal. A little to the right of normal."
That made us laugh a little. Ned, at least, dropped it at that and we went back to eating. Maybe still holding out hope that Peter might show up, but I was pretty sure it was a done deal he wasn't. I made a note to myself to tell Peter to make it up to Ned somehow — this conversation was enough to make me concerned for the both of them.
(And remind Peter that if Ned asks what he's been up to lately, answer with photography).
My eyes skipped to the window on my left. To the street, the sidewalk, the low buildings near and the taller ones further away (a perfect sniping position — no, stop it — he's not there, no one's there), chewing on another french fry for way too long. A white van passed by, and I had to force myself not to flinch in front of Ned, keeping a lid on my paranoia. It wasn't just about getting over what happened. It was worrying about what if something like it happened again.
And if DC was anything to go by, I was shit out of luck. Brandt's voice echoed in my head: No one escapes the Crucible. Was it going to haunt me for the rest of my life? Would I ever feel true peace? Know that I don't have to be afraid ever again?
Oh man, I just made myself sad again.
Maybe it was something I could bring up to Dr. Siwa next I saw him. As a former SHIELD agent, maybe he could give me a realistic view of my chances. If I had any.
"So, uh, why do you keep looking out the window?" Ned asked, his voice breaking me out of my reverie. "I noticed you doing it in class, too. What are you doing, looking for something?"
Someone.
"No." I said with a half smile, not at all honest. "I just get… distracted, that's all."
"Oh, okay," Ned said, blinking. "Well, I know you're still dealing with a lot of stuff, Mia, but if you ever wanna talk about anything, I'm always around to listen."
It took me a hot second to recognize those words. When I did, I lifted my head from my plate, throwing Ned a suspicious look, and he received it with a grin. "Ah. Clever move, Leeds."
He tipped his invisible hat. "At your service, Fletcher."
Although it made us laugh again, I knew I ultimately couldn't tell Ned what I was going through. That I might be seeing things, sensing things that aren't really there. I haven't spotted that ghost again, and if I did I wasn't sure if I'd run away or confront him — but I still couldn't shake the feeling I was being watched, even now. Maybe it was just the long, wide windows of the cafe that had me feeling I was being watched by every satellite on earth.
Maybe one day Ned would know, maybe one day I'd tell him everything, but not yet. Right now, I was okay with just being a little to the right of normal.
