Chapter Summary: There are some memories that swirl through time as if it wasn't a line, but a circle. They call this trauma. Peter calls it an inconvenience.
The sky is a heavy thing
Filled with starlight and kerosene moon beams
Don't let its empty depths fool your earthly eyes
The vastness of space is just a disguise
His week went like this: a cyclical pattern of pain and terror, leaving him on edge for all the horrible things that were and had been and would be.
(Death, death, death. Fear, fear, fear.
Hands, hands, hands.)
There were lots of things stuck in Peter's head. Peter had a thousand memories to his name and a thousand more than that as well. He had his high school chemistry textbook wedged alongside his uncle's deathly pale face and wondered why the sentences on page 47 were just as easily remembered as Ben's dying moments.
Though, that wasn't the point. The point was that Peter remembered. Peter was a flytrap for information with too much stuffing his brain and too little flowing out.
It didn't mean those more terrible moments weren't scarring or more vividly felt. It just meant that he was built by that which he had experienced (as we all are) and he had never lost much of any knowledge he obtained.
His brain was bursting with nebulas and his starlight innocence was stripped bare. He was a black hole of trauma.
If all of his hateful experiences were to be shed, would he still be Peter Parker at all?
How does one measure a man when he is still but a boy? What is the difference in age but experience?
(Peter Parker had too much experience for any age.)
He was changed, scarred and twisted and some things were just ingrained in him now – some tics just never left. Would he have been anywhere close to the person he was today without Skip? Would his trauma be a light dusting on his skin, unlike this deep and all-penetrating suffering?
Peter didn't know but he didn't want to either.
(If you take away the pain from him, would he really be the same? Would he want to know what he could have been? What he could have had?
Could he deal with that, that unscarred being?)
There was no spectacular story to him, no single defining event, but if you looked at his life as a whole he knew any average person would wince. Whether in sympathy or astonishment, he didn't know but he knew it wasn't the happiest resume.
Being Spider-Man meant he was changing that to some degree. He was participating in a good-willed, fulfilling activity and, although he was adding trauma upon trauma every time he got hurt or saw others get hurt, he couldn't find it to be negative for his health. Somehow, it made him feel… cleaner as a person.
He knew he was a little broken, a little shattered in the head, but Spider-Man made him feel whole again. Made him feel wholesome and good and worth something.
But, Peter was trapped. His suit was on lockdown in his room –
(so close yet so very far away – )
and his world seemed confined to his crime scene of a bedroom and his lonely, hollow home (that doesn't feel like home, might never feel like home, isn't home anymore).
Without Spider-Man he was spiraling in the restraints of his own emotional turmoil. He was restricted by his racing heart and creaking, cracking soul. There was no freedom to find, no reprieve from the nightmare of his sleeping mind and waking world.
His life was a surround sound view of scraping skin and scratching fingernails scrabbling for a way out.
But there wasn't an escape from this, there wasn't somewhere he could run.
And it was both all his fault and not his at all.
(The suit is locked up and his Aunt has a shift until 6 every day but on Sunday but she gets home at 7 because this is New York and he has 4 hours alone with a monster and he is alone -
And he's locked up in a pretty box filled with cushions and false comfort and why does that make it so much worse? Why are the softest touches the most painful?
Why does he prefer the uncomfortable shift of a blade over the softer caress of skin?
You might say this is easy, you might scream and say, 'just tell her' but do you know the ache and strain of a carefully balanced soul trying its hardest to stay upright? Do you know the abject terror that comes from the discomfort of lingering eyes?
Do you know what it's like to be a boy of paper-thin excuses and yet not be caught in your lies, having to watch as you wear down slowly and no one sees? Do you know what it's like to wish to scream but not be able to because of the hand plunged down your throat blocking your confessions of slimy sin and morbid screams?
Do you know what it's like to be trapped in a gilded cage?
Do you know what it's like?
And if you do but do not sympathize than there is nothing here for me to say for you are made of false empathy and cold-hearted apathy. If you have made it this far and do not care, then why are you here at all?)
Peter was trapped in his routine as well, but he liked to think there was some reprieve. After all, he still had lab days on Wednesday and Friday where he spent his evenings in the calm monotony of chaos that Mr. Stark had carefully constructed for himself. And, if nothing else, at least it was September and he had school each day for the whole extent of Skip's stay. He didn't know what he'd have done if he had to stay at home with Skip's wandering fingers instead of attending classes.
There were hundreds of thousands of paths he could have chosen his entire life and a hundred thousand more he could still choose. There were millions of realities at his fingertips, swirling out of his every breath and slightest shift of movement. There were a thousand ways he could be and a thousand more he was.
And, when thinking that, Peter liked to believe he wasn't trapped. He liked to think that he was just one of the many Peter's that could have been and could be and that he was just the one with the bad habit of trapping his own damn self.
He pretended it had something to do with fate. He pretended that all of the little strings of time he resided in meant that this was just his path.
He liked to believe he wasn't in control of the situation because the knowledge that he might be – the knowledge that he could change what was happening to him – was too much to bear when he lay cold and hollow like a stone drum under Skip's panting breaths. He liked to believe everything was out of his control at the same time that he wished he held the reigns of his life clutched in a white-knuckled fist.
He wanted to grasp desperately to his control, but it was failing him. He had no grip on the steering wheel of his life.
He had no control – never had any.
But that was fine, he was fine…
It was a lab day today as it had been the past Wednesday and the Wednesday before that. It was a lab day just like any other (the same way it always was) and yet it felt so very different. It was a lab day and yet it wasn't really, because lab days were supposed to be looked forward to, not dreaded.
And, although there was some part of Peter that felt excited to be out of the house and with someone he trusted, there was a lot to be wary about when it came to spending time with Tony Stark whilst hiding something.
Sometimes he thought his vision got too dark to see clearly but mostly he knew that his perception of the world around him was skewed by his mind and not his eyes. Everything seemed so much bigger down where he stood. People always said that abuse or trauma or mental illnesses made everyday things seem less important but, for him, each and every task seemed like a mountain he had to climb or else be crushed by an avalanche after its weight tumbled down from incompletion.
Each breath felt like a great wheezing choke of air as he struggled to filter the oxygen rushing to his lungs.
But tinkering in a lab next to a man who could cut through bullshit with a knife was one of his more daunting feats and he felt perfectly entitled to his discomfort.
So if Happy would please stop looking at him all concerned that would be highly appreciated.
(And the man said he didn't like him.)
"Hey, kid," Happy grunted as his eyes flicked up to meet Peter's through the rear-view mirror, "you doing alright?"
"Y-yeah, yeah. I'm alright."
Peter smiled wanly at him before looking away awkwardly when Happy gave him a disbelieving stare. He supposed it wasn't Happy's fault that he was concerned. Peter was acting suspiciously. He was quiet where he was normally loud and sullen where he was normally bright-eyed and eager.
It didn't help that Peter had behaved strangely the week before as well. Though, he had been much less timid and skittish as he had yet to deal with what the reality of Skip's return meant for him.
"Alright, kid, but if Tony asks me how you're doing don't think I'll sugarcoat it for him. You're acting like a nervous zombie."
Peter sighed as they pulled into the Tower's private parking lot, his body sagging as he nodded to Happy's statement.
Mr. Stark had eventually decided to keep the tower after the debacle with the Vulture just so he could have a way to monitor New York, but Peter suspected that Tony wanted a way to maintain contact with him as well. Though Mr. Stark spent most of his time upstate, he came down for lab days and company business. He had made a clear distinction between the compound and the tower – the main one being that all Stark industries business was conducted in the city while Avengers business happened upstate.
The elevator ride to Mr. Stark's private floor felt stifled with awkward anticipation as Peter fidgeted agitatedly. Happy's scrutinizing glances didn't help and when the elevator doors finally slid open, Peter, for all his nervousness, couldn't help but feel relieved to be out of the tight space.
Making a beeline to the lab, Peter almost smiled at what his super-hearing picked up as he departed from the elevator.
"Boss, some teenage angst is heading your way," Happy mumbled into his earpiece and Peter was too amused at Happy's forgetfulness of his abilities to have the energy to scowl petulantly as he might have before.
The sound of a welding iron grating on metal and ACDC filled his ears the closer he got and, as if through some sort of muscle memory, Peter somehow felt much calmer than before. Greeting Mr. Stark with a smile, he set his backpack down in the corner of the lab and grinned to himself at the sudden freedom of his chest.
Where before he had gotten to the lab he had felt weighed down with a cloud of smoke that had clogged his lungs and impeded his breath, just being in the pandemonium of metal and advanced technology alongside his mentor felt like a breath of fresh air.
"Hey, Mr. Stark!" he chirped, relishing in the brief lapse in the depression he had been experiencing.
Tony's eyebrows raised at the happy tone and he gave Peter a considering look.
"Here I was expecting some sort of gloomy teenager and I get a puppy. How come Happy made it sound as though it was the end of the world?"
Peter plopped down and spun on an empty rolling chair towards the desk Mr. Stark was working at as he thought of an appropriate answer. He rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly and gave Mr. Stark a small smile.
"Well, I guess I was a liiiittle quiet," he joked, lighting up when Tony laughed.
"See, that's scary kid. You probably gave him a heart attack from that alone, the big worrywart."
"Probably," Peter agreed, letting out a little laugh, "what are we working on today?"
"Just the mechanical properties of your bio-chemical fluid over there," Mr. Stark said pointing his left hand to the shelf that held Peter's web fluid as he continued to fiddle with an Iron Man gauntlet in his opposite hand.
Peter furrowed his brows in confusion.
"But it doesn't have any mechanical properties," he started, trying to understand what Tony meant, "unless you mean the function of its movements in which its structure affects the – "
"Ah, ah, I'm gonna stop you right there before you go on some rant that will just disappoint me in the end – you being a biophysics prodigy over mechanical engineering and all. For shame," Tony snarked affectionately and Peter laughed at the teasing that once might have made him curl inwards in shame, "I only mean that we're going to try to apply the same idea of your web fluid into a mechanical model."
"Ohhh," Peter nodded his head in understanding, "makes sense. You want to make a flexible metal-based polymer-like substance with a configuration that would allow for high tensile strength for every direction it may be stretched. It's like taking the saying 'a spider's web is as strong as a metal pole' and making it a reality."
Ignoring Mr. Stark's fond look at his rambling even though it filled him with pride, Peter's eyes widened as he came to a realization.
"But wouldn't doing all that require nanotechnology?"
Tony swiveled his chair until he faced Peter head-on as he swung his wrench to point it mock sternly at Peter's nose.
"That's correct, Underoos," Tony confirmed as Peter's eyes crossed to focus on the tool in front of him.
Slipping out of his chair and wiping his grease-stained hands on his jeans, Mr. Stark sauntered over to the large containers of web fluid and plucked one off the shelf.
"And if you don't think I can make nanites then you haven't met me yet," he smirked, "I'm Tony fucking Stark, I can do anything."
Peter raised his eyebrows at his mentor and gave him a humoring smile.
"Don't quote Sam Winchester. That's plagiarism."
"Kid, I don't even know who Sam Winchester is."
Peter gasped dramatically, placing a hand over his chest, "how can you not know who Sam Winchester is, you uncultured swine?"
"Yeah, yeah, get over here Mr. 'I love 80's music but don't know a single song'."
"Hey! I resent that," Peter complained as he shuffled over to his 'boss'.
"Oh, yeah? Name one song."
"…Iron Man?" Peter asked unsurely.
Tony sighed, "I wanna say that doesn't count, but I can't."
Peter whooped and slammed a fist in the air triumphantly and Tony rolled his eyes at his antics.
"Okay, so, let's get started," Mr. Stark said as he clapped his hands in a decisive smack to get them back on track, "firstly, what would the difference in function be if it is no longer an organic compound and is, instead, an inorganic product made of reusable but tougher material."
"It's only tougher on a cellular level, though," Peter noted, perhaps a tad bit defensive of his creation, "also, wouldn't it be difficult to mimic the stickiness?"
"Not if the texture the nanites create on the exterior is fashioned after the way your own skin grips materials."
"Okay, but what are the benefits?" Peter questioned, a little wary of changing his web fluid to something as clunky as metal.
"Well, nanites can reform so you'd only need one canister that can return its contents to you consistently," Tony pointed out, "and its inorganic nature implies that it can be controlled easier."
"But one major benefit of my webs is the fact that they're organic because of its high concentration of Vitamin K which I can utilize to speed up the healing of wounds and stop blood flow. It was based on the ancient medicinal practice of putting spider-webs in wounds to clot the blood."
"Ignoring the fact that that's absolutely disgusting, we aren't doing this to replace your web fluid. We're doing this to figure something out. It's mainly just for science, kid."
"Oh, okay. Good," Peter breathed out, relieved.
For some reason, his web fluid felt like a part of him and he didn't want to give that up to some strange metal contraption.
"So, where would you start?" Tony asked, an amused glint in his eyes at Peter's behavior as he gave Peter the chance to direct the flow of the experiment.
Peter blushed but turned thoughtful for a moment before his eyes lit up.
"Well, you'd need to take the structure of both my web fluid – to make the interior of the nanites similar to that of a tunnel made of angular support beams – and the structure of a bridge's foundation as well as utilize the surface of the nanite piping in a way that doesn't interfere with the interior's structural integrity but can also hold firm to different materials. We'd need to take a look at angles that can fold and still hold weight as well as…"
"Boss, dinner has arrived."
They were still only on the theoretical levels of research by 7 p.m. when F.R.I.D.A.Y. notified them of their meal and subsequently ended lab time. Peter and Tony had spent too many nights getting caught up in work and having Peter come home late before May made sure that Tony had some sort of permanent protocol in place that would remind him of his duties as an adult watching over a teenager on a school night (though even Friday nights had the protocol, only it was implemented an hour later).
Embarrassingly for Peter, this protocol was called the 'Night-Night protocol'.
Peter had had a fun night and, barring the few flinches at Mr. Stark's sometimes sudden touches, there were no real issues they had to confront in dealing with his emotional state.
But, staring at the large meal in front of him, he couldn't help but cringe at the thought of eating. The noodles in the takeout dish looked slimy and he gagged when he imagined them sliding down his throat. His stomach felt as if it was heavy with curdled milk. It churned nauseously and threatened to rebel.
Peter didn't want to eat in front of his mentor – lips wrapped around –
Peter didn't want to eat but he wanted to throw up. Were those two things related?
Perhaps, perhaps not.
It could have all related to that sick feeling of unreality he had as he stared down at the meal wobbling in his watery view. It could have been the images flowing through time and overlaying themselves in a cruel parody of real-life video editing.
Skip's leering face mixed with his bloodstained hands on top of the stir-fried noodles and it took all of Peter's control not to scream out for his Uncle and beg him to just 'Stay alive! Please! I'm sorry!'
Peter swallowed. Peter swallowed and then he blinked, long and hard. Peter swallowed and blinked and choked on a sob that he refused to let out.
And then he sighed, wet and tearful and broken as he cracked open a pair of cheap wooden chopsticks. The wood splintered at the top and a thin filament pierced into his skin.
Peter didn't care nor did he want to remove it.
Tony sat down beside him with a loaded plate and Peter swallowed again and forced a smile as he tried to stop his brain from imagining his mentor's eyes cold and glassy with death.
"Are you too rich to eat out of the takeout box?" he asked, going for a cheeky grin as he continued their age-old jabs at each other's eating habits.
"Are you too boorish too put your Pad Thai on a plate?" Tony scoffed, feigning snobbishness as he looked at Peter's box of noodles
"Excuse you, this is Pad See Ew I am eating," Peter joked, "Thai noodles don't just consist of the ever-popular Pad Thai, you uncultured swine."
"Is that another one of your memes?" Tony asked around a mouthful of what was actually Pad Thai.
"Somewhat," Peter conceded before looking back to his noodles.
They were flat and long and made him question why he had gotten something so slippery and thick to eat. He still felt nauseous but, for some reason, Tony's presence had calmed him again.
'2 in one', he thought sardonically. It was as if being around his mentor made everything better.
He imagined it might have felt the same way with Aunt May if every time they interacted Skip wasn't in the room next door. He hoped that that was the reason he couldn't get this kind of emotional reprieve with her.
(He tried not to think about what that meant about the nature of his and Tony's relationship.)
Sighing once again but with less horror and more despondency, he brought the noodles to his mouth, chewing slowly and relishing in the taste that wasn't quite as horrible as he'd expected with his angry stomach.
And then, Peter swallowed.
(There was something rather morbid about it all: the degradation of rudimentary acts of survival and the impossibility of these tasks because of visceral fear. What kind of thing could be so terrible to make the most basic human instincts seem like great hurdles of principle?
Had something so awful happened to him to make him this way? Was this all so horrifying?
Sometimes, it felt so.)
"So, it's been, what? A week and a half since you were grounded?" Mr. Stark asked, "When do you think your outrageously hot Aunt will let you go out again, spiderling?"
"Hmm," he hummed, shaking his head clear of thoughts to focus on what Tony had said.
"Oh, well, I'm pretty sure she said this weekend. Why? – and stop calling my aunt hot," he whined
"Just wanted to know when to look forward to monitoring your curly topped little head again."
"Mr. Staaark," Peter groaned, putting his face in his hands, "you don't have to monitor me."
Tony gave him a deadpan stare.
"Uh-huh," he droned, disbelieving, "and who else is gonna lift buildings off of you when you're too stubborn to call for help."
Hey!" Peter whined, "that is not how that went and you know it!"
"Yeah, but it would probably be how it went if you had the suit – still hacked so it couldn't even send me an alert. At least then you'd have had an option to call me, but I doubt you would have taken it," Mr. Stark said, piercing Peter with a knowing stare – the one that said, 'you can't lie to me'.
"Fine, fine," Peter grumbled, "helicopter all you want, it's your time you're wasting, not mine."
"It's not wasting time if it saves your life," Tony pointed out.
And Peter thought, so loudly and so clearly, 'It is if I don't even want to be saved. What's the point of living then?'
And that thought scared him because another voice echoed in his head that haunted him like a noose tugging at his neck – always there and making its presence known by teasing softly at his jugular:
'With great power comes great responsibility.'
How could he want to die with those words ringing in his ears?
(When Peter was 16-years-old he looked to his hands and saw blood that wasn't there.)