Chapter Summary: A breakdown can be loud - magnificent and garish. A breakdown can be soft - subtle like the scent of flowers on a spring breeze. A breakdown can be immeasurable. A breakdown can be silent. And Peter has broken down in every single way - what more is there for him to experience? What horrors has he yet to know?
(A breakdown can build up.)
It is the same – this light, this heat
It beats sharp upon sand-scarred and unblemished backs across the globe
It is indiscriminant – this light, this heat
It burns without a woe
"I'm fine," he would say to Aunt May and Mr. Stark and Ned and they would look away like he wasn't lying.
Like he wasn't dying inside from the weight of this all.
"I'm fine!" he would scream like it meant something.
Like it somehow changed the fact that he very clearly wasn't
It astonished Peter how well he could lie when it came to the topic of Skip. Last month, if he were to lie to Tony or May's face he would've only received a raised eyebrow in response. Now, no one even batted an eye.
It unsettled him.
It made something in his chest wither. Did they know? Did they not care?
(Oh, please, please please just notice. Don't you see? Please just see. Please, please, please – )
It broke his heart a little every time they listened to his words and turned away like everything was fine.
(Please, don't believe me. Nothing is fine. Please, please, please – )
The lies felt like glass cutting his tongue and they curled in his belly, heavy and cold.
(He thinks this was what shame felt like.
He thinks he rather hates it.)
Peter supposed it was going to happen eventually – that someone would see it in his eyes or catch on to his slow and steady deterioration.
He just never expected it to be a stranger. He just never expected it to happen this way.
There was blood on his hands, they were dripping with it. There was so much blood staining the world, splattering on his face like teardrops and seeping into the ground like that was where it sprung from in the first place.
(There's so much blood, his lies are soaked with it – marinated in the water of mortality.)
There was so much blood and it shouldn't be outside of him. It's Uncle Ben's blood and it's red, so crimson and coppery like the metal of a fire hydrant – steel and unbending. It was slick and it dripped out of Ben like a faucet, flowing out of his flesh with the soft gurgle of a stream rushing over bedrock.
It was Peter's fault. It was Peter's fault and he had to finish this. To stop the man who did this because Ben was dead and there was blood on his hands and he couldn't do this anymore.
(He thinks he can taste it, like fake sugar leaving a bad aftertaste on one's tongue. Sitting heavy and stewing in his mouth until it had permeated his gums and saturated his soul with the noxious blatancy of his failures.)
He was coiled muscle wrapped in tenuously structured skin, flayed at the edges of his very existence. His consciousness was absent, floating through the plasma of infinity and nothingness – the being of the universe itself.
Peter was drowning in the liquid of his Uncle's veins. Choking on vermillion and metal tang as his breath was forced from his lungs with a staccato awkwardness – like the failing limbs of a newborn foal as it clambered to its' mother.
The sky was mauve – blue staining purple from the red drenching the atmosphere. Starlight peeked out behind wispy clouds in pinpricks of bright white, cutting through the city's pollution just to remind him how alone he was. How very insignificant he was in this world.
His hands, sticky and wet, clung tightly to his knees as he rocked to the beat of his racing heart. It thumped in his chest like a drum and echoed harshly in his temples. Pulsing and pounding, it resonated loudly in his ears and he clutched them in his oversensitivity.
So loud was his heart screaming his fear that he thought he might go deaf from it. Curled into a ball, he whimpered into his thighs from pain and panic. Tears carved great rivers down his cheeks and cooled the hot surface of his skin like ash laid over a dying ember.
Peter's eyes, clenched shut in the face of this resurfaced trauma, opened to gaze at the obnoxiously colored hands of his suit.
(He couldn't tell if they were the shade of dark cherry lifeblood or the bright red of a firetruck.)
Sitting there, on a rooftop looking over the cold and impersonal skyline of the city, he broke down loudly. Like a glass crashing and shattering on the floor, it was the beautiful magnificence of disaster.
(It was the terrifying shriek of a child who has seen unspeakable horrors. It was the plea of a boy stuck in the honeyed flytrap of Hell.)
There was no ceremony to catastrophes – no need for class or propriety when it came to misfortune of any kind. It was just the primal ache of a damaged soul wrenched confusedly from normality and left without a guide back.
(Nor with a guide for how to navigate the damage itself.)
Peter startled from his memories, jumping lightly and tensing as a hand settled carefully on his back. His face, still covered by his mask, looked back to see red, red, red –
(The blood of the man shot in the alley that night was dark and glossy as it stained the concrete. It looked like the skin of a black cherry and rippled as Peter knelt in it – so much blood.
Peter had pressed shaking hands to the man's gruesome wounds as he quailed, quivering against the cold of blood loss on the dirty ground.)
The blob of red shook him and he wailed louder, curling away from the offensive color. He looked to his legs and marveled the damage with blurred vision, a frightful numbness leaking through his taut muscles and aching head. Streetlights shone brightly alongside the office lights of the still occupied windows of skyscrapers and they cast a yellow glow upon his bared skin and spandex suit.
(The long gashes on his shin are stained with golden ichor, contrasted brilliantly against the scarlet fluid of his memories. They pervade his every thought and translate over to his present fingers like a stain that won't scrub out.
Peter is in the present and 2 years in the past all at once. He is also stuck in the gluey seconds of fifteen minutes ago leaving gore to transpose itself vividly against his shivering limbs.)
Peter thought he heard something – a deep rumble vibrating through the focal point on his back. It buzzed in his ears until it was mumbled syllables. And then, garbled words seeped through as though a voice was speaking through a faulty radio set that hadn't quite balanced its' channel.
"Come on, kid. Breathe. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 – in," here, the male speaker breathed in an exaggerated breath, "5, 4, 3, 2, 1 out."
He pushed air out heavily and Peter tuned into the words as the hand moved with the man's breath.
Wheezing and seizing up as if his throat was sealed by the terror of his unspoken admissions, Peter followed the man's commands. He was coiled tight in a spasm of limbs reaching inwards and motionless in postmortem like the corpses of dead spiders curled in dusty corners. He peeled his body from his locked position to gasp at the sky and stretch out like a bird readying its' wings for flight.
Peter was weighed down by his inaction, his inability to rise above his terror, his cyclical and constant fear. He was trapped, and he could hardly breathe through the large pants he took with his covered mouth. Itching to remove his suffocating mask, he clawed at his neck as if it was trapped by a metal collar restricting the expansion of his throat as he breathed in oxygen but did not process it.
He was a lump of coal sputtered by flames, a single ember sparking without air to fuel its fire. His lungs shuttered between breaths and he clawed at the arm on his back, pulling himself to face that red, red, red, blob and squeeze it close through his distress.
"In…Out…," the voice continued and some distant part of him homed in on that – said man, hands, death, fear – tensed tighter as he spoke with honeyed words and false diatribes.
(Shame is all he feels as Skip softens him with sweet lies and make-believe friendships lined with cruelty.)
"In…Out…," the voice mocked and he screamed silently from his broken heart as if an open mouth and unhinged jaw meant the words would suddenly flow forward unimpeded from his chest.
(Skip is a flower crown of deception, made of jagged thorns thrusting sharply in Peter's tender skin as roses decorate its perimeter with pretty petals of dishonesty.)
There was a hole in his sternum, a fist with icy cold fingers reaching for his lungs. His ribcage splayed around the intrusion, poking and prodding at it with each sharp inhale of breath.
How could he breathe for this stranger, this man with sweetened breath and sickly, soothing words that didn't mean what they were supposed to? How could he breathe around the ice in his soul?
"In…," the man started, and then silence, sweet and blessed as the city honked like angry geese in that strangely pleasant cacophony of noise it always produced.
Peter waited for the man to keep going (to keep lying through his teeth rotted black by dishonesty) but, besides the physical proof of him underneath Peter's hands, all evidence of the man was otherwise absent. There was no breath to follow and no words to listen to and Peter slowly unclenched his grip on the man's forearms.
His own sniffles marred the air beside the noise pollution as his clarity returned slowly, his chest still struggling to expand with every inhalation of the dirty city's fumes. Blinking against the flickering images in his view, he turned his eyes upward as his heartbeat slowed its' thump in his chest.
And there, sitting in red, red, red – Uncle Ben's blood was so red, red, red like a ruby glistening and sleek with polish – was Daredevil.
(Everything is red, red, red, and he can't breathe it's in his throat and mouth and it's filling up his nostrils. He can taste it on his tongue as he drowns in it and even his tears are red, red, red.
Everything is red, red, red, and he's choking on it all.)
Hitching his breath in a slight panic, he exhaled slowly to calm himself against the outfit's dark and gruesome coloring. After a few seconds of silent rest, he went slack and let himself fall back onto the building's roof.
"You doing better, kid?" Daredevil asked in a low growl, and Peter tensed once more under his hand.
"I'm not a kid," he mumbled to avoid the question (his mind resounding 'I'll never be better'), "I'm Spider-Man."
"Spider-Man?" the man asked, and Peter bristled.
Just because he had a panic attack didn't mean he was some kind of cosplayer hanging out on top of buildings to be edgy.
"Yeah," he bit back, "Spider-Man."
"Hmm, alright. So, what got you so worked up, Spider-Man?" he asked casually.
(But it's never casual. No, it is always leaking with sinister intent and is as slick as an oil spill on top of the bitter water of the sea.)
"Just a bad night," he gritted out.
"Seemed pretty bad for just that," Daredevil remarked, still blithe and carefree.
"Look, thanks for the help, but I should be leaving now," Peter stumbled to his feet, "stranger danger and all that."
"Stark led a kid into battle?" he asked suddenly.
Peter paused at the change, barely remembering to object with a weak, "I'm not a kid."
Looking back to Daredevil showed that the man was not convinced.
"Did you even know what you were fighting for?" he questioned softly.
"You know, right now I don't really care," he responded, words short and clipped as he stood straighter and prepared to leave.
"There's something wrong with you," Daredevil grumbled (and all Matt could smell beyond the blood was stress and fear and pain and sex.)
"Nothing's wrong with me," Peter responded tersely, his voice as biting as the cool wind of winter spreading frostbite to the core.
('The man is just trying things to get you to stay,' his mind whispers darkly, 'he's using you, trying to see what will poke your buttons before he'll pounce and suckle on your flesh like it is fine wine under his fangs.')
"It doesn't take a genius to spot that you're lying," he said.
"Yeah, so? What's it to you?" Peter barked back, "you can't just come up here and pretend to care just because you think you're some sort of hero. I don't know you, you don't know me, why should you care?"
Daredevil paused, tilting his head like a dog as he thought.
"Because, even if you weren't Spider-Man, even if I had no idea who you were, you still matter. Your life and well-being would matter just as much as mine no matter who you were."
Peter faltered a little, turning away from the edge of the rooftop to stare at the man.
"You don't really mean that. People don't value everyone indiscriminately," Peter said, a questioning tone to his words.
"No, they don't," Daredevil allowed, "but people can recognize that someone's life is just as important as the next no matter how much they value one above the other."
"And what about murderers," Peter asked, not willing to touch on who he really meant yet.
(And what about rapists? And what about child molesters? And what about…?
Where is the line between humanity and monstrosity? What would you allow and what wouldn't you? What treatment is deserved by the worst of the worst?)
"Well, I beat them up, don't I?" Daredevil quirked a small smile.
"But then their well-being doesn't matter to you as much as mine, does it? How do you know I'm not a murderer?"
(There's red, red, red on his hands and the dull thud of his Uncle's body falling to the ground resonates in his ears. He is screaming and all there is is death and fear and hands.
How does Peter know that he, himself, isn't a murderer? How does Peter know?)
"Are you?" Daredevil asked amiably.
(His uncle rasps last words that cling to his subconscious like smoke, cloying and heavy, cohering to one's hair.)
"No, I don't think so."
"Then I don't think I need to – what do some people call it? – 'put the fear of hell in you'," Daredevil paused, taking a deep breath as if to gather his thoughts, "listen, kid. What I do isn't perfect, it might not even be right, but one thing I know is that some people deserve to be punished. Sometimes, our system fails us and that's when I take it into my own hands.
"Now, does that mean that I have the authority to say that the lives of those I beat up at night are worth less than the lives I care about or try to protect? No, I don't think so. I don't think anyone has that authority. But that doesn't mean I don't judge or think worse of others for their actions. I'm still human and we all have some sort of prejudice within us."
"So, you're saying that, on the basis of life or death, you would save everyone you could?" Peter asked.
"I'd try."
"What if it was someone else here tonight – someone you knew was bad was panicking and crying – what would you do?"
Daredevil hesitated, "I'm not sure. I think it would depend on the situation."
Peter nodded, leaning back on his haunches and gazing at Daredevil with a cocked head. Daredevil's suit let off a gossamer-like sheen under the city lights and his horns sparkled menacingly atop his forehead. Peter thought it looked more like a supervillain's suit than a hero's.
He angled his head back to look at the stars, grimacing at the dark and unblinking expanse of the sky.
"Do you ever –" Peter faltered a little, his eyes glistening with unshed tears, "do you ever feel alone in the world? Like nothing you do really matters?"
('Like you don't matter' hung unspoken in the air between them.)
"Sometimes," Daredevil acquiesced, "but then I remember everyone who cares about me, everyone who keeps coming back no matter how much I push them away and I know that I won't ever be alone no matter how much I feel that I am."
"And what if they don't come back?"
(What if they leave? What if they don't care enough about Peter to want to deal with this broken and empty shell of himself?
What if they couldn't care less about what he was going through? What if they didn't want him anymore?
What if their bodies thumped cold and heavy on the concrete as Peter watched on and scrabbled helplessly towards their broken bodies too late – too late, too late, too late – too late to save them?)
"Then they never cared in the first place, but that doesn't mean that nobody will care. Somebody out there will always care about you, Spider-Man."
Peter jolted at his moniker, a little startled that he forgot his identity was anonymous to this man sitting beside him. Not that he would trust him with his name.
(Skip was trusted for his candied words and sweetened speech, and that trust was as easily shattered as butterscotch underneath a wooden spoon.)
"How do you know?" he asked.
"Because you wouldn't be here if you were all alone. You wouldn't have put on that suit or tried to help if you had never had anyone to care for you," Daredevil said, shrugging a little as he put his weight on his hands and leaned into them.
"That seems awfully cynical," Peter remarked.
"Maybe," Daredevil allowed, "but, without at least one person to care about you, no matter how small, no one would ever learn humanity."
"I – I guess that makes sense," Peter mumbled.
They fell into a silence, and Peter gazed at Queens, noticing his proximity to the river between Hell's Kitchen and Queens.
"What made you come all the way to Astoria?" Peter asked, "crossing the river seems awfully extravagant for a guy who makes it his goal to help out solely Hell's Kitchen."
Daredevil hummed, "I heard some things that made me think I should come over here tonight. Seems like it wasn't such a bad idea after all."
Peter nodded in acquiescence and they fell into a comfortable hush once more. He laid forward onto his stomach on the concrete of the roof before flipping onto his back to gaze at the waxing moon glowing like a beacon in the sky.
"Do you consider yourself safe at home?" Daredevil asked suddenly and Peter jolted from his relaxed position into a tightly coiled spring readying itself to launch.
"What makes you say that?" he spat out his words defensively.
Daredevil looked at him and, even through his mask, Peter could tell he was raising an eyebrow. Cursing himself for behaving suspiciously, he swung his head away to scowl at the distant skyline.
"Well, a lot of things," he remarked with something of a deadpan droll to his voice.
"Well, you can shove your – " Peter fumbled, his brain blanking out, "you know, I'm usually a lot better at comebacks."
"I've heard," Daredevil joked.
"Have you?" Peter asked, "because I don't remember ever seeing you when I'm out there making quips and fighting crime. Or are you just a really good stalker?"
"You're avoiding the question, but you don't have to answer if you don't want to. I think that might be redundant at this point."
"Yeah," Peter sighed, his arms flopping as he hung his head dejectedly in the night breeze, "I think it might."
Standing and reaching his limbs to the sky in a fluid stretch, Peter turned once more to Daredevil.
"You know, if you ever need any help, I'm here for you. Have you ever gotten any training?" Daredevil asked.
"Do YouTube videos count?" Peter inquired, quirking a smile underneath his mask.
"No, they don't," Daredevil said before mumbling, "damn, Stark. Who does he think he is?"
Peter frowned at the man, looking down at his suit before glaring at Daredevil.
"He's my mentor," he replied tersely.
"Pretty damn bad one if he doesn't teach you how to fight," Daredevil commented.
"And what, you'd be better?" Peter responded hotly.
"I'd like to think so. But look, kid, that's not the point. Just, I'm here for you, alright? And you don't need to hide from me or anyone else."
Peter eyed the man before agreeing reluctantly.
"Fine, but no bad-mouthing Mr. Stark."
"Now that I can't promise," he said with a smirk.
And Peter did not laugh as he swung away.
(He didn't. That was his mentor Daredevil was insulting, of course he didn't.)
Peter stayed out as long as possible.
(To avoid the death and fear and hands that would greet him back at his apartment.)
But, his panic attack and subsequent talk with Daredevil took a lot of time out of his patrol.
(And he can't believe he didn't fanboy over Daredevil. It was Daredevil for god's sake and he didn't even freak out!
He is so proud of himself.)
Peter crawled into his window holding his breath. Scanning the room, he sighed out in relief and closed the window gently behind him. Drawing the blinds shut, he peeled off his sweaty suit. After grabbing a pair of pajamas from his dresser, he snuck quickly and quietly into the bathroom and knelt next to the tub. Cold water sprung swiftly from the tap as he twisted the knob slightly to the left.
Plunging the suit under the stream he swallowed around his fear at the pink liquid staining the porcelain beneath it and scrubbed harshly against the fabric. After a few minutes of rinsing, the water ran clear and he filled the tub up with cold water and soap for it to soak overnight.
(He's not happy that he can keep it in the bath without worrying about Skip finding it, he's not.
He's bitter. He is bitter and angry and scared and that's it.
He's not happy.)
Changing into his pajamas, he padded softly to his room and closed the door behind him.
(He's not allowed to lock it anymore. There are rules, now, rules beyond 'don't tell'.)
Climbing into his bed he curled into his blanket and bit harshly at the fabric.
(There is a constant anxiety rushing through his veins and he just wants to squeeze something until it breaks.)
Rolling onto his back he stared with blind eyes at the textured ceiling above his bed. City lights peeked into his room even through his blinds and he pretended they were starlight come from millions of light-years away just to reach him, just to caress him with their immensity.
The door clicked open, ringing out into the night. Footsteps and blue eyes like glaciers in a stormy sea. Death and fear and hands as he drowned in minutes and hours all at once.
(He is in the past and the present, he is in-between it all – floating through time like stardust in the endless atmosphere of the universe. He is traveling the expanse of time an unwilling passenger to its woes – a slave to its whim.)
He was felled by the sharp claws of the monster under his bed. He was just a little boy and all he saw was white and red – white hair glinting in the moonlight, the city lights.
Red blood shining under police lights, the streetlights.
Red and white all stained and bright against his eyes like a grisly photo film overlaid on the world.
There were sounds, grunts and whispers and words like cherry wine – bitter at the back of his throat as he choked on tongue and salt and blood and fear.
There were so many things as he traveled through time – a reluctant participant to humanity and all its horrors.
There were so many things as he laid on his bed, trying – always trying – to fall asleep.
(Not every breakdown is loud, like chaos brought to life. Some suffering is still and silent; lost minutes of sorrow without tell. There isn't always screaming or the hot rush of blood in one's ears.
Tears can form as sluggishly as crystals, daring to spill over but often drying before their time.
Not every break down is loud.)
Peter broke down to the silence. Peter broke down to the nothingness.
(At 16, Peter broke down into the soil, into the roots of the Earth – a seedling swallowed by dirt before he had the chance to grow, to reach his limbs outwards to the stars.)