Step into a tanning booth and fry yourself for two or three days. After your skin bubbles and peels off, roll in coarse salt, then pull on long underwear woven from spun glass and razor wire. Over that goes your regular clothes, as long as they are tight.
Smoke gunpowder and go to school to jump through hoops, sit up and beg, and roll over on command. Listen to the whispers that curl into your head at night, calling you ugly and fat and stupid and bitch and whore and worst of all, "a disappointment." Puke and starve and cut and drink because you don't want to feel any of this. Puke and starve and drink and cut because you need the anesthetic and it works. For a while. But then the anesthetic turns into poison and by then it's too late because you are mainlining it now, straight into your soul. It is rotting you and you can't stop.
Look in a mirror and find a ghost. Hear every heartbeat scream that everysinglething is wrong with you.
"Why?" is the wrong question.
Ask "Why not?"
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls
-
"It's late, Peter."
Tony had been so silent beside Peter that he had thought he had fallen asleep.
Tony refused to leave him alone.
Even after the huge tantrum he had thrown.
It was ugly, because of course it was.
It was never a pretty thing to be caught doing something you weren't supposed to.
A thing that made it so hard to regain someone's trust.
A thing that made it hard for them to leave you alone, because they weren't sure if they were ever going to see you again.
Peter knew Tony would figure it out eventually with obvious signs.
Long sleeves.
Not sleeping.
Not eating.
Outbursts.
Obviously something was wrong and for so long, Aunt May had acted like it was just teenage rebellion.
When really it was Peter trying to get help.
He had explained it in tears to Tony as he held him on the bathroom floor, begging him not to call Bruce.
It's so hard to be seen by someone who doesn't want to see you.
Who only wanted to see the stuffed shell version of you that they had created...
Even when you're stomping your feet as hard as you can in front of them.
But everything comes to a head eventually.
And in that end there is guilt.
(((I don't want to feel like I can't trust you, Peter.)))
And Peter knows what is next.
(((It won't come to that.)))
The talk of therapy.
(((I feel like it already has.)))
The sharps disappearing.
Antidepressants.
Maybe inpatient.
So much was going to happen and he knew it.
It scared him.
But he was going to be okay, even if that fucked up voice in his head told him otherwise.
Just for tonight, he was letting himself believe it.
"Yeah... It is..." He replied, rubbing his face.
Tony nodded, he saw Peter, he saw him for the moment not the superhero.
He was a kid that was hurting.
A kid that didn't understand.
And somehow, that made things just a little bit better.