Author's Note: Sorry. Thank you for your patience.
Disclaimer: No.
Warnings: Blood, anxiety attack, some violence.
"There was something terrible in me.
Sometimes at night, I could see it grinning at me."
-William Faulkner, The Sound and The Fury.
Chapter Four:
"I killed her." Peter whispers, biting on another sob. The putrid smell of vomit makes his nose feel hot. With a clumsy, sweaty hand, Peter reaches over and flushes the toilet, clinging to the rim of the seat as his stomach threatens to give out again. "I killed her."
"You didn't kill her," Tony protests, squatting down beside him again. He brushes hair back from Peter's forehead. It's sticking together. It must be disgusting to touch, but Tony doesn't seem to care. Faint humiliation whispers through him, but the heavy weight of exhaustion makes it impossible to milk.
Didn't kill her.
Peter could laugh.
There was blood.
Not his.
Not his.
Not his.
"You don't know that!" Peter shouts. Don't yell at him, he's only trying to help He squeezes his eyes shut, turning his head away with regret. "Sorry. I just. I don't know."
"It's okay." Tony's voice is calm. How is he so calm? It almost feels inhuman. Peter killed somebody, and all Tony did was help him to the bathroom when Peter started dry heaving. He should call the cops. Get him arrested. For murder.
There was blood on his hands. There was so much blood. He doesn't have any memory of where it came from.
"Try to relax," Tony encourages. Peter wants to scoff. "You're doing great, bud—"
"I'm throwing up!"
"Hey," Tony's voice has gained an edge, and Peter flinches back from him. He shouldn't have shouted. Why can't he do anything right today? Not just today. Period. Why can't he do anything right period? Tony's hands settle on his shoulders, and Peter tenses, a throb of pain whispering through his lower back. "You need to calm down or you're going to pass out, okay?"
A thrum of anxiety whispers through him. Logically, he knows that passing out might actually help right now, but the loss of control, simple as it is, makes him want to throw up again. He swallows thickly. His throat is dry and hot. He wants to brush his teeth. He's annoying Tony. He's supposed to have calmed down by now. There's always a time limit on these things, isn't there? People don't want to deal with you forever. He has to calm down.
"Sorry." Peter whispers. He leans back from the toilet to bury his head into his hands, pushing his palms inside of his eye sockets. It throbs dully, the way that a days-old bruise does. "Sorry." He inhales deeply, trying to force his scampering brain to settle. Relaxing is out of the question.
"Don't apologize, okay? You don't have anything to apologize for."
Except the murder.
Peter refuses to look at Tony's face, but he's pretty sure that the multi-billionare's biting at his lower lip. He does that when he's nervous. Which makes sense. Biting at lips is a classic self-comforting gesture. How does he know that? He's not that observant. He must have read it somewhere, right? He doesn't know. Does it matter?
"I'm just," Peter inhales raggedly, pushing harder against his eyes. "I'm okay, I promise. I'll...I'll deal w-with this. I promise. You can go."
This is hardly the first panic attack he's dealt with by himself. He's used to it.
Tony is quiet for a moment. His hand settles on Peter's knee after a moment. Warm and inviting. "I'm not going anywhere. Okay?"
Liar, that treacherous part of Peter's brain protests. Everyone leaves eventually. The end of tears is the end of troubles, isn't it? Peter nods, because that's what Tony wants, and grips at the edges of his hair, digging fingers inside of the scalp.
"Hey, let's just," Tony's hands wrap around his wrists, pulling them back from his hair. His fingers are tight to the point of uncomfortable, but Tony lets him go after a second. "Look at me, Peter."
Peter forces his eyes up. Tony's face is shadowed in the overhead bathroom lighting. His expression is slightly pinched, bottom lip caught between his teeth. His eyes are concerned, if frustrated. Peter can't tell if it's at him or the situation. Probably him.
The last thing that Tony wanted to be dealing with in the midst of a murder investigation is Peter having a panic attack and throwing up. It's not fair. Peter should have just...kept this to himself, then dealt with it at home.
Scheduled, convenient panic attacks are really the only ones people want to deal with.
Why can't he do that?
Tony catches his eyes before saying carefully: "You're okay. I promise. You did not kill that woman."
Peter's eyes skirt. They don't know that. Morgan was screaming. She was screaming at the realization of who he was. Morgan's never been afraid of him. The first thing she did when they met was hug him. And to see her that terrified...
He made the bad thing come to kill her.
"I'm sorry." Peter mumbles, again. It seems to be the only thing he can say.
Tony sighs softly, "It's okay. I'm not mad at you, kid." He shifts his position a little, socked feet sliding across the bathroom tile with ease. This entire room alone probably cost more to build than his and May's entire apartment building. Peter feels severely out of place here.
Tony stares at him a little longer, then shakes his head. "You need to go home. You being here is making this—" he gestures vaguely toward Peter "—worse."
Being at home will make it worse. Guaranteed.
He's terrible. He shouldn't be thinking like this.
But Tony needs him out of the way, and Peter can respect that. It's...it's his own fault anyway. If he had just kept it together—how much blood was on his hands that it got stuck under and around his nails?—then Tony wouldn't be sitting in this bathroom trying to keep a stupid kid from passing out on his expensive tiles.
"Okay." Peter can't get his voice to level. "May, um, May wanted me to come home. That's why I was...that's why I…came upstairs." He explains. He forces out a level breath, relieved that it comes out level.
Tony nods, making an ah sound between his teeth. There's a slight breath before he leans back, starting to get to his feet, then offers a hand out to Peter. After a moment, Peter takes it, trying not to visibly sway once on his feet. His back locks up, and Peter's breathless for a moment as it feels like his hips are sliding out of alignment.
The sensation, as it always does, passes.
Tony keeps gripping his hand, and Peter looks up at him. "I…" he swallows down whatever he was going to say. "Call me when you get home, okay? We still don't know half of what's going on here, and I...I need you to be safe."
Tony squeezes his wrist.
The words are warming. Somewhere. On the surface, Peter only feels empty.
"I'll call you." Peter promises.
Tony smiles, but it's grim, and exhausted. Peter's is an exact replica.
His vision blurs, gray and black at the edges.
000o000
It's hours more before the police finally clear out with strict instructions to leave their crime scene alone. Tony's not sure that any of them have any plans to follow the instructions to the level the NYPD are hoping for, but he nods all the same with false words of assurance, plastered smile in place.
Sure enough, as he'd been expecting, when Tony steps into his apartment, the five—there's more than five again now, but he keeps forgetting that—Avengers are there, gathered around the kitchen table, quietly talking. Tony skirts around the blood trail with ease, making sure not to make any obvious disturbances to the scene.
As he steps up toward the front, he raises an eyebrow. "I see the rest of you are just as good at following instructions as I am."
Natasha smiles wanly, thin and brittle. "If our collective rap sheets haven't given you that information already, I'm disappointed."
It's funny, in the self-sabotaging way that all of their humor has been since the lawsuit. Tony doesn't laugh. Neither does anyone else. Looking at them all, Tony just sees the traces of lingering exhaustion and wariness. They need to sleep.
Tony's eyes slide toward the bloodstain where Zhao's head was resting this morning, and he exhales slowly as the haunting image of her corpse splayed across the table flickers in his vision. Her limbs hanging over the edges, legs bent wrong, head turned to the side. She was on her back, hair loose. The black strands were matted with blood, making them clump together. Eyes open, staring at nothing, Morgan screeching…
"Tony?"
Tony snaps back to the present, lifting his eyes to Clint. The archer's head is tipped forward a fraction, dark eyes squinted. The concern is there, hidden beneath the exhaustion. All of them are staring at him. Tony bites on his bottom lip, rubbing it between his teeth for several moments before he sighs heavily.
"Sorry. It's just…" he gestures toward the table.
"Yeah." Steve intones softly. He tips his head back, tightening his arms across his chest. Strangely, Tony almost feels like laughing. They've seen worse. They've done worse. And here they all are, gathered around this table with a ghost laying across it, and they're rattled. Violence has always come home with them. This shouldn't linger with them; at least, not in the way that it does.
Tony slides his eyes away from the super soldier. It lands on the table again. The dried blood has turned the mahogany wood deep red.
There was blood on my hands, Peter's voice echoes in his ears, the quiet horror obvious. He really thinks he killed this woman, and Tony can't, for the life of him, figure out why. Peter wasn't in the Tower last night. There is no physical way that he could have done this unless he was in two places at once.
He made the bad thing come to kill her.
Morgan's just confused.
And Peter bleeds more often than Tony's comfortable with. Having blood on your hands isn't that uncommon. Peter didn't kill her. He didn't.
"Have you had any luck with FRIDAY?" Steve asks.
Tony's shoulders drop. He sighs through his teeth and feels familiar frustration whisper through him. Tech is what he's good at. That's his job. But Tony can't even figure out where several hours of video feed went. Something like this should be easy; a capability he could do asleep.
"There's...something," Tony doesn't even know how to explain this in a way they'll understand. The giant mess that he's been untangling for hours is that: a mess. "I keep trying to follow where the feed went, but it's...complicated. There's not even an echo of it. Deleted rarely means deleted. I don't even know where the video could have gone unless someone physically took i...t."
Tony stops, swearing under his breath heavily. He's an idiot. Why on earth did this not occur to him sooner? It's been a long day, he tries to reassure himself, there's been a lot more things to focus on beyond where the video went.
"I know that face." Thor says, sounding somewhat relieved. "What is it?"
Tony ignores him, looking around the room for a moment before he spots the camera. It's hidden subtly, as it's supposed to be, but Tony knows where all of them are in the rooms he uses frequently. Biting at his tongue, Tony scours the room for something to stand on for a second before he grabs the back of a chair and starts to drag it toward the corner.
All of his teammates lurch after him.
"Tony!" Bruce hisses. "The police told us not to touch anything!"
"If the movement of a chair across the room is going to throw off their whole case, I think they need to get better detectives." Tony says dryly, continuing to move forward. The chair screeches across the tiled floor before Tony pulls it to a stop. Clambering on top of it, he reaches for the camera.
"Do you want to explain what you're doing?" Clint asks, sounding irritated.
Tony gets that. It's not undeserved. He yanks on the camera for a second, trying to turn it up so he can see the base. With that achieved, he starts to dig his nail into the protective covering to pry it loose.
"Are you actually taking that apart?" Bruce says, and Tony practically see him burying his face into his hands. "As if they didn't have enough evidence stacked against us."
Just a little more…
"Interfering with a crime scene isn't going to give us a death sentence." Natasha says, and her trust in him is a welcomed support. Tony's not even sure what he's doing. The cover pops off, and Tony holds it in one hand, working the SD card free.
"Oh," Bruce intones, sounding slightly more positive about this decision. "Do you really think that that's going to show anything different?"
"Nope." Tony steps off the chair, turning around to face his teammates. He skirts around their gazes, pulling his phone from his pocket. A computer would be ideal, but that would take more time than he's willing to give. He starts to work off the back of his phone, thumbnail separating the two pieces with ease.
"I don't understand." Steve admits, "You said that the video feed was gone. How is this any different?"
"Because, Cap," Tony slides the card into place. "FRIDAY automatically uploads everything into the internet. That's how she can keep long-term storage data. It's why we still have JARVIS's feed. I think whoever wiped the cameras did so from the internet."
"How?" Natasha asks, doubtful, "Nothing ever really gets deleted."
"Yeah," Tony agrees, powering on the phone again, "so whatever they did, it was probably more like they...moved it or something. I'm not sure, and that bothers me. This, however," Tony taps his phone, "is the raw data of the last week. FRIDAYs severs already have it listed as uploaded, so they didn't see a point in doing so twice. An oversight on my part that I'll fix later. If we're lucky, the feed is still on this, even if it isn't in on the internet."
Five equally hopeful faces stare back at him.
God, Tony prays silently, please don't let me be wrong.
"FRI, if you would," Tony requests. His teammates gather around his device, and Tony lifts up the camera to project the video. FRIDAY jumps to the time they're looking for without a word, and Tony spots the time in the corner reading five twenty-two AM. He releases the breath he didn't realize he was holding. It's here. It's actually here.
"Slava Bogu." Natasha whispers. Tony nods once in stiff agreement.
Tony watches as two figures enter the kitchen. The first one is upright, dragging the second, presumably Zhao, by her left foot. The blood trail forms, fresh and wet, and disgusting. Without seeming to care that the figure they're messing with is—was—an actual human being, the murderer heaves her onto the table with little care.
Her limbs flop uselessly against the tabletop, distorted and bent awkwardly. Her head rolls toward the camera, eyes open, but glassy and gray.
There isn't any sound, but Tony's gut tightens as he sees Zhao's lips part to release some sort of shallow. moan. She's still alive. Oh man, she was still alive.
Her murderer stops, and all of Tony's quiet wishing that he'd stop hiding in the shadows and reveal himself is halted when he does.
There's a pregnant pause. Tony's breath catches in his chest, something tight and awful coiling in his stomach, spreading out toward his limbs and making his fingers numb.
"That's—" Steve starts.
"Shut up." Tony snaps before he can finish.
There has to be some sort of explanation. There—there was blood on my hands—this is...this isn't real. There's no way that this could have actually happened, because Peter would never murder someone in cold blood like this. He couldn't.
But there his kid's face gleams in the meager light, his eyes dead, looking somewhat dazed. He looks at Zhao as if he's never seen her before, head tipping to the side in a way that's so severe he's almost leaning over. His posture is off, Tony thinks wildly, Peter doesn't hold himself like that. He never has, not with that...rigidity. Peter holds himself like he wants to make himself as small as possible.
This...isn't familiar.
Tony watches with dread as Morgan steps into view in the kitchen doorway. She must have been woken up by something Peter—not Peter—did in the hall. Peter doesn't notice her, and instead looks over Zhao, not feeling for a pulse, but seeming to know, and he slams his fist into her head. It rolls back, and she slumps, obviously dead.
Blunt force trauma.
They were looking for some sort of hard object. Like a bat or a crowbar or even a screwdriver.
Beating someone to death is a lot harder than propaganda would have everyone believe. Tony didn't consider the possibility that an enhanced being fractured her skull with a single blow to the head. He can't believe that Peter…
What on earth is going on?
This can't be happening. This isn't happening. Peter did not just drag a body into his apartment and then kill her.
Peter confessed to him.
(I killed her.)
"Tony?" Clint says, sounding just as confused and lost as he feels. "What…?"
Breathlessly, he admits, "I don't know."
"He…?" Bruce starts.
"I don't know!" Tony snaps, resisting the urge to throw the phone. He watches, transfixed, as Morgan tries to say something to Peter, who just stares dully forward for long seconds, as if he can't remember how to move. Is he stoned? He looks like he's on drugs. Maybe he's on drugs. Could drugs explain this?
Morgan begins to cry, and starts to move toward him, and Tony feels his entire body freeze with an awful dread screeching no! at his daughter. But this was hours ago, and she's safe. She's alive. Whatever possessed Peter, it didn't kill his child. Oh, man, is he actually considering the fact that Peter would hurt her?
This isn't Peter.
It's not.
It's not.
Peter's head slowly moves toward Morgan, and the edge of his face catches the camera, bloody. Tony realizes for the first time that Peter is dressed in what is pretty obviously pajamas. A loose Star Wars branded T-shirt and sweatpants. Tony recognizes them. The kid's not even wearing shoes. His hands are soaked with blood, up his forearms.
He beat Zhao to death.
There was blood on my hands.
I killed her.
Tony thinks he might be sick.
Peter stares at Morgan for long seconds, then she starts to advance on him. Tony doesn't know what her intention was, but Peter hisses at her, his body...shifting, the silhouette distorting as something black and oily swirls across him, but it's gone so quickly that Tony almost thinks he imagined it.
Almost. If he was alone, he might have. But he's not. Natasha, Clint and Bruce stiffen, Steve swears under his breath, and Thor inhales sharply. Tony, for his part, feels completely numb.
Morgan opens her mouth in a screech, and Peter turns away from her, moving rapidly now, racing toward the windows. He exits the frame, but Tony doesn't have a hard time guessing that he jumped. How he managed to survive is beyond Tony, but Peter was alive and well when he saw him a few hours ago.
FRIDAY pauses the feed, saying nothing, and they all sit there in silence for long seconds.
Tony swears under his breath, laughing shakily, running a hand through his hair. "What just happened?" he demands rhetorically. "What just happened? Someone tell me that Peter did not just murder my wife's assistant."
No one does.
Peter murdered Pepper's PA?!
"That wasn't Peter," Tony tries desperately, even though dread is beginning to sink into his stomach and a small voice in the back of his head whispers you know. "My kid isn't...what…?"
(I killed her.)
Natasha grips his upper arm and squeezes. The pressure is tight, and Tony focuses on it instead of his building anxiety attack. "We don't know what happened." She says, calmly. A voice of reason, and Tony isn't sure if he wants to thank her or shake her.
He laughs, snapping a hand out, "It's fairly obvious!"
"No, it's not," Clint argues, as if he can simply will this away by putting enough force into his words, and holds out a hand, "give me the phone."
Tony drops it into his palm. Not because he believes the archer, but because it's not like Clint can show him something worse. Curses. Showing people things. The police are going to want this feed. And what is Tony supposed to tell them? They'll arrest Peter. They won't care if there's some sort of explanation for this—because there has to be—Peter will end up in prison, and that would be Tony's fault.
He can't give this to the cops. He can't let anyone know about this. He doesn't understand what's happening but (I killed her) Tony knows that he'll take the blame himself before seeing Peter to prison.
Clint rewinds the feed and pauses it at the weird silhouette when Peter hisses at Morgan. He points toward it. "What is that?" he says, "It looks like...like it's on him."
"I'm not sure." Natasha admits.
Steve squints, "Play that part again," he commands, and Clint does so. Tony buries his face into his hands, wanting to throw up. They're all thinking clearly, thinking about this like some sort of mission, and it's not. It's not because this is Tony's kid, and Peter freakin' killed someone.
Tony feels hysterical.
"That's...it's moving outside of his body," Steve says, and Tony looks up at that, watching the clip play again, and sees what Steve does. The...shape sort of reaches out on it's own toward Morgan, and Peter's figure remains still. When the substance drops back, it seems to infuse itself into Peter's skin, like it's sinking in through the pours. Oh, man, that's disgusting.
Natasha presses her lips together, thinking, before she suggests, "Possession of some kind?"
This does get a sharp laugh out of him, "By what?"
Tony thinks about Bruce's comment earlier that Peter picked up something from Titan, and feels sick. What if something had attached itself to Peter, and Tony hadn't noticed, and Peter freaking killed someone because Tony wasn't paying enough attention.
Tony stares at Natasha. Is she—she's serious. He forgets sometimes that she used to work for S.H.I.E.L.D. and came across weird crap like this all the time. They're so detached from this. Tony's body is thrumming. Peter killed someone. Peter killed someone. Peter— He grits his teeth, folding his arms across his chest and watches as Steve, and the two assassins lean forward to get a better look at the shape.
It's wrapped mostly around Peter's upper body from what Tony can see, bulking his shoulders, and also sharpening him. It looks like it's...like it's in his skin.
"He wasn't acting differently earlier," Steve says, then cants his head in concession, "I mean, he was a little anxious, but he wasn't...killing people. He seemed like himself."
He wasn't.
Peter was...possessed or whatever by some sort of slimy thing, and Tony didn't notice. He told Peter to go home. How could he not notice something this huge? Peter tried to tell him. He was convinced that he'd murdered Zhao. (I killed her. There was blood on my hands. He made the bad thing come to kill her.)
But he doesn't remember doing so. That's…Tony doesn't know if that's a good or bad thing.
Bruce chews on his thumbnail, looking agitated. He points toward Peter's left shoulder, "See this? It's reflecting light, not absorbing it, which…physics wise, means we're dealing with something made out of visible matter. And it's probably in or on his skin. Maybe like a chemical?"
Tony catches up with him, but his mouth moves faster, "Your first instinct is to immediately leap to spooky physics?"
"I'm thinking out loud," Bruce says, unperturbed, still squinting at the shape. "It could be alive if it's moving outside of his body."
He had to suggest that? That's...disgusting. And horrifying. What if Peter's playing host?
Is that really worse than him killing of his own violation? Or drugs?
Thor steps forward and lifts up his phone, taking a picture of the image. Inwardly, Tony flails. If Thor has a copy of that, then it means that there is more than one place that this evidence is, and if Thor shares that with someone then Peter might get arrested, and—
Peter killed someone.
Peter killed someone
Peter—
It wasn't him. It wasn't.
They don't know that.
(There's blood on my hands.)
Tony thinks of the seizures. They didn't have a cause, but Peter said that they had been happening more frequently. What...what if this...was that? What if...what if that was a symptom of whatever this is, and Tony completely ignored it?
"What are you doing!?" Tony barely keeps himself from shouting. He leans toward Thor to try and grab the device from him, but Thor evades him with frustrating ease. "Thor, don't!"
Thor ignores him, typing rapidly. But attention has been drawn to him now, and Steve grabs Tony's wrist to stop him from advancing on the Asgardian. Tony flinches beneath the unexpected contact. He's not letting Peter go through this hell, the court cases and arrests, and all the other fun side effects that have come with OsCorp.
Thor keeps typing, picking up the pace.
"Who are you texting?" Tony asks with dread, shoulders slumped.
If this in any way comes back negatively on his kid, Tony thinks he might stab Thor through his remaining eye with a fork.
"Thor," Natasha starts, calmer than him, but Thor takes a step back and there's a shimmering green-ish blue light before Loki appears. Dressed in loose clothing and a black hoodie, he looks like he just crawled out of a grave. He staggers a step forward, phone in hand, like he's about to fall over before Thor grabs him, keeping him upright. Loki, breathless, still gripping at Thor's arms, says, "Show me."
Reindeer Games? Is Thor serious?
"Oh, you've got to be kidding me," Tony whispers, throwing up his hand, "sure. That makes sense. Let's get more people involved in this. What, we're going to ask his advice on how to cover up a murder?"
Peter killed someone.
It's nasty, and Tony knows that it is. Loki doesn't even spare him a glance, walking up beside Clint. The archer eyes him with some apprehension, but lifts the phone up and rewinds the video feed.
"Loki is a master of the magic arts," Thor says stiffly, as if that explains anything.
It doesn't.
Loki watches the video with narrowed eyes once, then tells Clint to rewind it, stopping at a point when Peter's face is profiled to the camera. Loki frowns, lips pursing. He leans forward, then looks at the phone, then the projection, and repeats this several times.
"What is it?" Steve asks, sounding tired.
"This," Loki points at the phone screen with one pale finger, then gestures toward the image, "his eyes."
Tony doesn't see anything, but Thor is nodding in his peripheral vision. "What about them?"
"There's nothing there. There's not enough light, genius," Clint argues. Loki reaches out, grabbing Clint's face and Tony tenses, but if the last few months they've been stuck in house arrest has taught him anything, it's that Loki uses true violence rarely. For all his words flaunt otherwise, he doesn't seem to like it that much.
"Stop looking at him." Loki demands, and lifts Clint's face up, releasing him. "Look in the middle distance."
Tony follows the instruction, pinning his gaze on the table rather than Peter's face. It's not something that would have occurred to him to do, but it makes sense. Sometimes, if you stop looking at things, your eyes are more likely to pick out anomalies in your periphery.
And then Tony sees it.
There's no reflection in the pupils, because Peter's entire eye is glossy. Some sort of black liquid bleeding from Peter's eyes down his face, blending in well enough with skin that Tony didn't notice it before.
Natasha swears under her breath.
"What the heck is that?" Tony demands, disgusted. He lets his eyes focus, and turns his gaze back to Loki. But the sorcerer isn't looking at him, instead winding the video forward to stare at the silhouette again.
"I don't know," Loki admits, "I have a few ideas, but nothing that I can confirm without talking to the boy. Whatever this thing is, I guarantee to you that it's dangerous. Where is he?" The raven-haired man looks up at him sharply, "If this parasite has progressed to the point that it's capable of controlling his body…" Loki chews on his lip.
Parasite.
Tony's stomach sinks. "Then what?" Loki doesn't answer, so Tony repeats, "then what?"
"Usually this means that the host is close to death," Thor explains, subdued.
He—
It—
They—
Curses.
Tony moves forward, snatching the phone from Clint's grip, feeling a desperate, gaping panic wash through him. I don't want to go, Mr. Stark. Peter fading to nothingness in his arms, Peter gone, Peter dead. He can't do this again. He can't. He won't. He can't. His hands are shaking. "I'll call him. We'll get this fixed." He dials Peter's number, praying that the kid will pick up. He knows that he just got home a few hours ago, but he doesn't care. He'd go drag his sorry butt back to the Tower himself if he could. Freakin' lawsuit.
Peter was killing people.
Peter. Parasite. Oh, man.
"Stark, this may not be as simple as you're thinking," Loki warns, "even if we manage to figure out what has taken hold of your ward, the removal process is likely to be extensive and complicated. It may kill him."
"We'll cross that road when we get to it." Tony snaps.
The dial tone of Peter's messages sounds, and Tony hangs up, panic growing in his stomach, reaching outward to consume him. Tony calls him again, and waits, fingers drumming against this leg, "C'mon Parker," he pleads, "pick up, pick up, pick up…"
But Peter doesn't answer that night. Or the next day, or the one after that, and Tony can't find him with any means he can conjure. It's like he left the Tower and accidently stepped of the edge of the earth, consumed by the void.
Peter Parker is gone.
Author's Note:
Next chapter: ? July? Hopefully?
