Chapter Text
“I have a problem,” Peter says. “You have to swear you won’t make fun of me. I mean it, Nat.”
The kitchen is dark and cool. The sun won’t rise for a couple of hours, so the room is filled with a florescent light that does nothing to dull the headache thrumming against Peter’s temples. It’s somewhere between the middle of the night and early morning. Ben used to call this time No Man’s Land. The red clock above the stove reads 3:52 AM. Any reasonable person should’ve fallen asleep hours ago.
Natasha sits across the table from him. She’s reading The Widow by Fiona Barton. Clint gave it to her as a joke, but Peter thinks she’s actually enjoying it. She hasn’t glanced at the clock in twenty minutes, and her hot cocoa is growing cold in front of her. Besides, Nat doesn’t do anything she doesn’t want to do.
For a second, Peter thinks she’s going to ignore him. Then she dog-ears the page like the heathen she is and sets the book on the counter. She folds her arms across her chest and surveys him with grim, vibrant eyes.
“Whatever you’ve done, it can’t be worse than this hot cocoa,” she says.
Peter stirs his hot chocolate, which is formulated with his newest special recipe. One cup of water, two packets of Swiss Mix powder, and three pumps of Nat’s weird vanilla latte creamer. It’s topped off with a mixture of skittles and gummy bears that float in the brown liquid like pool toys. Nat rolled her eyes when he made the brew, but she didn’t comment, and she let him make her a mug. Tonight, he had a nightmare about being crushed under a parking garage, and he woke up suffocating himself in his pillow. He needs his sugary goodness.
“You don’t like candy?” he asks.
“Not particularly,” she says, and then pauses. “When I was a child, there were these Russian taffies that tasted like passionfruit. They were okay.”
Peter, who was looking forward to cutting her off so they can talk about his issue, hesitates. Nat never talks about her childhood. She’s such a freaking enigma, and the details she shares about her life are wildly conflicting. Once, she told him about the time she didn’t sleep for forty hours straight, because she was undercover in a Hydra cell and she was afraid someone would slit her throat if she drifted off. The next day, she told him she was raised in a traveling circus as a contortionist and lion tamer (although, to be fair, he’s pretty sure she was joking). Then she told him Red Room survivors handcuff themselves to their beds every night, because that’s how the little girls are put to sleep in the Soviet brainwashing program. And now she’s talking about passionfruit candy.
Nat always looks faintly surprised when she opens up. Her red eyebrows draw together and her nose wrinkles, a small flaw in an indifferent mask.
“What were they called?” Peter asks, deciding to push a little. Why not? Shit gets real in No Man’s Land.
“I don’t remember.”
“We should find them,” Peter says. “We can visit every candy store in America, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll go abroad. We’ll test every candy that looks remotely Russian and passionfruity. It will give us something to do.”
“Not to mention diabetes.”
“That’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”
“How noble of you.”
Of all the Avengers Peter daydreamed about befriending back when he was a dumb kid, back when he’d never fought a criminal or turned to dust on an alien planet, Nat wasn’t high on the list. When he was younger, staring up at his Avengers poster and messing around with his action figures, she seemed so cold and—to be perfectly honest—scary as hell. The first time he fought her in a training stimulation, she got him with a widow bite, and he couldn’t move for an hour. And now, at eighteen years old, she’s one of his closest friends. How the hell did that happen?
Tony is busy with Morgan and hasn’t called Peter in a long time. Too long. He’s a fantastic father, and Peter doesn’t reproach him for getting his life together while Peter’s dust particles floated around Titan. Wanda’s off in some foreign country, living it up with Vision. Thor’s abroad, trying to track down his brother. And then there’s Peter, halfway through his senior year of high school five years after he was supposed to graduate. It’s like he got stuck in a subway door and is being dragged through the tunnels by the hood of his jacket.
But Nat? She’s here in the kitchen with him. If Peter’s being excruciatingly honest, she always reminded him of Ben. There’s this steady caution in her eyes that never goes away. She’s always poised, always elegant, always refined. Every word that falls from her lips is spoken with the most careful precision. Peter sometimes wonders if she only asks questions when she already knows the answer.
“How do you do it?” Peter asks, trying to figure out a non-psycho way of phrasing all this.
“How do I do what?” Nat asks.
She scoops a grubby, half-melted gummy bear out of her hot chocolate and frowns at it like its mortally offended her.
“Talk,” Peter says.
Nat raises her eyebrows at him. Her red hair falls in gentle curls around her face. She looks so alert. Peter wonders how she can function on so little sleep. He certainly can’t. His mind feels like the inside of washing machine, chugging around damp clothes and nonsensical thoughts. Chug. Chug. Chug.
“I mean, how do you talk the way that you do?” Peter says. “Does that make more sense?”
Nat doesn’t look offended. If anything, the question seems to amuse her. Peter sometimes wonders if he’s incapable of saying something that will rub her the wrong way. He’s seen the tension in her shoulders when she talks to others, the wariness in her eyes when there’s someone in between her and the door. Peter’s more observant than he lets on. But these nights they share in No Man’s Land, Nat is as close as she ever gets to openness. They’ve shared these moments since he was fifteen years old—three years ago for him, and eight for her. Sometimes it feels like a lifetime ago. Other times, it feels like less than five minutes since the first time they did this, when he snuck up on her, she almost shot him, and then they drank cocoa together and waited for the sun to come up.
Peter sometimes wonders if the hot chocolate is magical.
“How do I talk?” Nat asks with a slight smile. “Good question. I’m glad to see that school for mini geniuses is teaching you critical thinking skills.”
There’s a glimmer in her eyes, but he’s pretty sure she’s not laughing at him. Well, maybe a little, but not in an unkind way.
“Every word you say is important,” Peter says. “There’s no bullshit with you. Me, I’m always babbling about something or another. You know what they say. Peter Parker just can’t shut up. My facehole is awash with the English language. My mouth spews diction like—,”
“Peter.”
“You see what I mean?” he asks, smiling even though nothing about his insecurity is amusing. “I just . . . I feel like nothing I say matters. Especially since the blip.”
Nat tilts her head and surveys him like she’s dissecting him under a microscope.
“Words have power,” she says finally. “You’re the future of the Avengers, Peter. You always have been. But that doesn’t mean you have to be perfect.”
It’s not a pointed comment. Her tone is light, and her gentle eyes are comforting. A small tremor runs through Peter. He’s too exhausted to respond.
“Rest, little spider,” Nat tells him.
She pulls out a gun and begins to polish it with one of Tony’s dishcloths. The noise is familiar and soothing. Peter rests his head against the kitchen table, using his chem textbook as a pillow, and allows the scent of hot chocolate to bridge the gap between reality and dream.
---
The next night, Peter’s sitting at his desk doing chem homework. It’s easy and boring, and his eyes keep drifting to the paper bag in his closet, the one that he uses to hide the Spiderman suit. It’s Monday, and Peter can’t wait for Friday—he loves spending weekends at Avengers Tower, almost as much as he loves watching cartoons with May in the morning before school. It’s a steady, good life he’s built for himself. He rarely dreams about Thanos, or turning to dust on Triton. He’s taken the SAT and is actively working on his college apps to Harvard and MIT. Tony’s writing him a letter of rec that’s basically going to guarantee he gets admitted anywhere he wants to go. And yet…
Everything is loud. Peter can hear Mr. Lincoln arguing with his boss on the phone two apartments over. He can hear the lady in the apartment beneath them whistling under her breath as she makes a midnight snack. He can hear May turning the pages in her book as she gets ready to go to sleep.
He hears all of it. Every word, every beat, every breath. His head is pounding and his eyes hurt. All he wants to do is put on the suit and tell Karen to initiate Naptime Protocol so the sounds and lights go away. But he can’t, because it’s almost midnight and he has a test tomorrow.
He’s not a kid anymore, and he hasn’t been for a while.
“This is not ideal,” Peter says to himself. God, he wishes he were an irresponsible fifteen-year-old again. Growing up and having to make good choices is the absolute worst. He should change his Facebook status to ‘wish I were still a little dust cloud,’ but Mr. Stark—Tony—goes nuts when he makes jokes like that. Peter doesn’t understand why. It’s not like he died or anything.
Oh, well. Tomorrows a new day. He’ll be a little crabby in the morning, but he’ll be fine by the time he starts patrol.
He writes A Suit of Dust and Ash on the corner of his paper, trying to be clever and get the words out of his spinning mind. Then he realizes it sounds less like a profound thought, and more like the newest Sarah J. Maas book. His handwriting looks cramped and untidy underneath row upon row of balanced equations. He erases it the next morning, before he turns it in.
That’s how it starts.
---
Patrol the next day is about as fun as a trip to space, if said trip to space involved getting the shit beat out of him by stray animals and ended with people threatening to sue him for breaking and entering. In short, it’s almost as bad as the Another One Bites the Dust fiasco.
Peter gets beaten up by a cat that obviously doesn’t want to go to the shelter. Probably a wise choice, Peter thinks as he nurses his scratches, because there’s a good chance it would just get put down anyway. He busts into an apartment when he hears people yelling, but it turns out they were just running lines for some play. They threaten to sue.
“Bold of you to assume I have any money,” he says. “Ma’am, I’m broke. Like, ‘digging for change in the couch’ broke. ‘How the hell am I going to afford college’ broke. ‘To poor to get some much-needed therapy’ broke, although Tony did offer to foot the bill for those last two things…”
She stares at him, shaking with rage.
“Maybe try to practice your play a little quieter?” Peter suggests. “Like, don’t yell ‘he’s killing me’ over and over again? Just a thought.”
When Peter gets home, he’s so frustrated that he can’t see straight. May is in the kitchen, humming while she cooks, but Peter doesn’t want to tell her he’s home. There’s a good chance he’ll snap and lash out, and May doesn’t deserve that.
He writes Like Screaming in Space on his hand with a Sharpie. He has to scrub his wrist really hard with soap before the words come off. The reddened, raw skin has healed by the time May asks him to set for dinner.
Maybe he should take Tony up on that therapy offer after all. Oh, well. At least he’s not a little black dustcloud anymore.
---
Peter and Ned are in lit class, brainstorming ideas for the end-of-semester project. Ned cracks a joke, and it’s not even that funny, but Peter starts laughing and can’t stop. And then they’re both cackling, trying to smother their jubilation in their fists while the rest of the class patiently ignores them. It’s only been seven months since The Blip. Tensions are still high. Every once in a while, like today, everyone seems like they’ve lost a couple marbles.
“What’s so funny?” MJ asks from the next desk over, where she’s working with Abraham.
“Nothing,” Peter and Ned say in unison.
MJ peers over Peter’s shoulder at their list. It’s short, and all of the ideas are crossed out except for two.
“Don’t do a poster,” she says. “Posters are stupid.”
Peter frowns. “You’re always working on those activism posters.”
“Posters about the symbolism in Lord of the Flies are stupid,” MJ amends. “You should kill a pig, put its head on a stake, and use that as your presentation. Bonus points if you eat the rotting flesh. That would be raw.”
“Raw, meaning cool?” Peter asks. “Or raw as in, Ned and I get salmonella and have to go to the hospital?”
“Raw as in cool,” MJ says. “And…sure, you might get salmonella. But you’d be legends.”
“Oh, well, in that case…”
“What are you doing for your project?” Ned asks, folding his arms over his chest. “If you guys aren’t planning on bringing a swine carcass into the classroom, you best stop judging us.”
“We’re doing something even more badass than that,” MJ says coolly, and Abraham nods authoritatively beside her.
Peter can’t stop himself from smiling at her.
MJ takes one last look at his list.
“You have pretty handwriting,” she says nonchalantly, and then she’s turning away like she didn’t just rock the fundamentals of his world. Peter sits there, blinking stupidly. Apparently, all a girl has to do is complement his handwriting and suddenly he’s in love with her.
Once again, not ideal, but…not not ideal, either.
At the end of the period, when Ned asks him to read the list back, Peter realizes with horror he’s just written MJ over and over again instead of taking notes.
“Dude,” Ned says, peering over his shoulder. “I’m embarrassed for you. You’re so screwed.”
“Oh, for sure,” Peter says, but he can’t stop smiling.
---
“Do I even want to know what you’re writing in that notebook?” Nat asks.
It’s late. They’ve past No Man’s Land and are firmly in the territory of early morning. In just a few hours, Happy will be here to drive Peter to school. He feels pretty good considering it’s 4:30 on a Monday morning. May’s going to take the afternoon off work, and they’re going to see a movie in Manhattan like they used to do when he was younger. Peter invited Nat to join. She said no, and he didn’t expect anything else. He knows how much she hates the crowds in the city.
Ever since the ‘Infinity War,’ as the Thanos-snap escapade has been dubbed by the media, people have been treating her like a hero. Everyone knows exactly how many times she sacrificed herself for the world. One-million-and-seven, to be precise—it took that many time-stone messarounds before they successfully accomplished the scenario with the fewest possible casualties, and Natasha died in all but the last one. Peter knows Natasha hated people thinking she was a villain, but he thinks she might hate them loving her even more. These days, she rarely leaves the tower.
Peter drains the dregs of his hot chocolate, and a shudder runs through his body at the warmth. Nat gives him an amused smile and gets up to make more.
Peter glances down at the open notebook in front of him. He’s supposed to be outlining an essay for psych about Stockholm syndrome. Instead, he’s written the word Sleep. Sleep. Sleep. Sleep. about a hundred times.
Huh. That’s new. At least he can see the connection this time.
“I’m not writing anything important,” says Peter, and he slams the notebook shut.
He is. He just doesn’t know it yet.
---
Later that day, Peter has a mild, totally inconsequential panic attack in Spanish class.
It doesn’t happen often. Really. This is his first breakdown in a couple of months, which was his best record yet. And it’s not like there’s anything that triggers him—God, Peter loathes that word with every fiber of his being, just like he hates all words with that double-g sound. One second he’s studying casual conjugation— escribo, escribes, escribimos —and the next second…
Peter tries to focus on whatever Profe is saying, but his head is splitting open. He thinks he might be about to throw up his breakfast burrito of gummy bears and skittles wrapped in a fruit roll-up. He tries to ground himself, tries to concentrate on the little things, like the crunch of Ned’s potato chips and the birds chirping outside. But his entire body feels like it’s about to disappear into dust again, and he really, really can’t handle it.
His ballpoint pen is moving on the lined paper in front of him. He’s not making words this time, he’s just scribbling. He pushes down harder and the lines go deeper and suddenly the pen snaps and black ink is all over his hands.
Profe doesn’t notice. Neither does Ned, who’s gaze is unfocused as he stares out the window.
MJ notices.
She slides into the empty seat next to him and silently hands him a paper napkin. He quirks his lips in a rueful smile and wipes the ink off of his hands. He tries to steady his breathing. It’s not a bad panic attack—God knows he’s had worse—but his heart is hammering in his chest, and he think he might be a little bit dead inside. You know, normal teenage things.
“You look like shit,” she mutters in his ear. Her rosemary shampoo smells nice, and it clears some of the noise in his head.
“Thanks,” he whispers back, trying to sound calm—real calm, not oh-my-God-I’m-about-to-fucking-lose-it calm. “I took a shower this morning. Gelled my hair back and everything. Super sexy, right? Like…like the count from the Muppets.”
“Count von Count?”
“Is that his name?”
“Yup.”
“I should’ve figured. Sexy name for a sexy guy.”
MJ hands him a pen. It’s thin and black, with elegant writing down the side. Peter can’t read what it says. His vision is blurry, and it’s probably just a brand name or something. He looks at the pen, then back at her. The pen isn’t nearly as beautiful as she is, but he manages to stop himself from telling her that. Barely. You’re more beautiful than a writing utensil, isn’t the best pick up line, especially since he’s half a second away from bursting into literal tears.
“It’s a push-pen,” she explains. “Calligraphy,” she clarifies when he continues to look confused. “I’m going to teach you.”
“You know calligraphy?”
“I know how to do calligraphy with a push-pen,” she says. She hands him a sheet of paper, and he takes it with shaking hands.
His brain autofocuses on her voice, completely tuning Profe out. It should be a problem, but it’s not. Ned is taking notes for him, because Ned is perfect and somehow gets how much he needs this. And MJ is talking to him in a low voice about the principals of calligraphy.
His hand stops shaking as soon as he starts trying to form letters. You can’t form letters with a wobbly hand, after all. Kind of like how kids stop crying when you give them water to drink, because you can’t drink and cry at the same time. It figures that MJ would know this. Word on the street is she wants to be a therapist.
---
“Thick coming down, thin going up,” Peter tells Nat.
“Am I a bad role model if I make a ‘that’s what she said’ joke?” Nat asks, silently handing him a mug of hot chocolate. This is the third time this month that Peter’s slept less than her. Peter can see the worry in her eyes as she surveys him over the lip of her ceramic mug.
Peter grins at her.
It was three AM when Nat found Peter in the kitchen, spine curled over his purple notebook, hands working obsessively to form the letters. He’s pretty good; his slant is a little off, but that’s okay. MJ has given him a cheat sheet so he can learn letters on his own. And he’s getting better—he can even do a lowercase F. So far, it’s been the hardest letter to learn, which is a pity; he enjoys writing fuck my life like he’s Amy Shark.
“Thin on the upstroke, thick on the down stroke,” Peter repeats. “It’s the core principle of calligraphy. On the upstroke, you want the line to be as thin as possible, so you take pressure off of the pen. But on the downstroke, you want the line to be thick. So you push the pen down and the line gets fatter.”
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. The . . .
“Impressive,” Nat says, looking at the words over his shoulder. “But you know what else is impressive? When itsy bitsy spiders get the beauty sleep they need, instead of staying up half the night to practice cursive to impress their girlfriends.”
It’s the wrong thing to say.
“Ouch,” Peter says. “Thanks, Nat.”
Anger pulses through him, hot and sharp, and Nat seems to realize she’s crossed the line. That’s the thing about Nat; she’s never judgmental, and she certainly never offers unsolicited advice.
“I’ve overstepped, haven’t I?” she says mildly. “Oops.”
From anyone else, the words would repel him, send him spiraling down the rabbit hole of insecurity and instability. Ever since the blip, his anger issues could give Bruce Banner a run for Professor Hulk’s money. But this is Nat. He can tell Nat anything, if he could just figure out how to give the words meaning.
“I’m not doing this to impress MJ,” Peter says, his voice hard. “I mean…okay, I am, but it’s not like that. I’m doing this for me.”
Nat’s face is expressionless. She doesn’t apologize. Peter doesn’t expect her to.
Peter can’t bring himself to look at her, but he knows that there’s concern on Nat’s face. He knows that he shouldn’t have snapped, shouldn’t have lost his cool, but he’s so damn sick of people not understanding.
So explain it to her, says the little voice in his head that sounds an awful lot like MJ. If only he could’ve been born without a conscience, like Thanos or maybe Flash. Wouldn’t it be nice to be a supervillain. Alas.
Peter wants to tell Nat about all the words floating around his head. He wants to tell Nat about all the things he didn’t have time to say the first time around, when Thanos snapped and the world turned to dust. He wants to tell Nat about how he never got to tell May he loved her. How, when it came down to it, his last words were a string of incoherent apologies that will guest star in Mr. Stark’s nightmares for the rest of their lives. And now everyone is back, and somehow nobody died, and there are all these words spinning around his head.
The words he writes will still be etched on the paper, even if Peter disappears into nothingness.
Instead, he says, “I’m sorry.”
And suddenly Peter’s back with Tony on that damned planet, and Peter’s body is disintegrating around him, and—
—And Tony is asleep upstairs with Pepper, and Titan is millions of miles away. And Peter is here with Nat, who’s looking at him with concern and sadness and another emotion that Peter has never seen her wear before.
Nat picks up the pen.
“Alright,” she says. There’s an unusual warmth to her voice, and Peter exhales. Every word she speaks is careful and precise, because this is Nat, and Nat knows how to make words meaningful. “Will you teach me, Peter?”
---
Nat picks calligraphy up quickly, which is really unfair if you ask Peter. It took him five days to memorize the stroke order of his lowercase letters, and she had it down in under an hour. Her slant is always consistent, even from the very start. Her letters are evenly spaced, and it only takes her four minutes to master the ‘o’ swish that’s present in every letter with a curve.
“Your hand is so steady,” he says.
“Once you’ve dismembered a HYDRA agent with a ballpoint pen, everything else is easy,” she says.
“What?”
“Kidding.” She pauses. “Mostly.”
By the time that Happy arrives to take Peter to school, she’s even mastered ‘d’ and ‘f,’ and her penmanship is neater than his. He pouts, but only a little. As he shoves his textbooks into his backpack, she hands him a travel mug of hot chocolate.
“How come your hands never shake?” he asks. “Is it really because you killed someone with a pen? I want to be impressed by that, but…yikes.”
Two identical dimples appear on either side of her smile, and she smooths her red hair back into a ponytail.
“I once used a plastic spork to reinflate Barton’s collapsed lung,” she says. “If my hands wavered, he’d be dead, and we’d be free of him.”
“Isn’t that a pretty thought,” Peter says, grinning. Happy coughs from the doorway. Nat shoots him a slight smirk, and his ruddy face grows red.
“We should get going, Pete,” he mutters.
“Yeah, yeah.” Peter keeps his tone playfully feisty—he’s not exactly thrilled that Happy is screwing his aunt. It’s a pity he’s not a grudge holder; he’d love to give Happy a hard time, maybe call him ‘Mr. Stepdad’ once or twice to really twist the knife in.
“Bye, Nat,” he says.
“Goodbye, Peter,” Natasha says. She leans down close to him, lowering her voice to a murmur so Happy can’t hear. “Thank you.”
“For what?” he whispers back.
She pauses. Deliberates. Weighs what to say.
“For teaching me calligraphy,” she says. “And for choosing to share your words with me. Sometimes it feels like…”
“Like what?”
She stares at him, her expression distant. “The Avengers aren’t needed anymore,” she says after a pause. “Which is good. But I miss my team.”
Peter grins and pulls her into a hug. He’s grown; he’s tall enough that his chin can rest on her shoulder. She lets him touch her for three seconds—just three—and she even ruffles his hair with affection that borders on maternal.
“So get the band back together,” he says. “The team can still exist when the world doesn’t need saving.”
She offers him a thin smile but doesn’t respond.
“I’m serious,” he says. “You’re Nat. You can fix anything.”
Peter shoves a crumpled-up piece of paper into her hand. Then he pulls away, grabbing his backpack from the counter and steering Happy toward the door. He feels his mouth open and starts to pound Happy with questions about May and how the relationship is going. It’s awkward, but in a normal sort of way.
He turns back just before they reach the door to watch Nat read the paper he shoved into her hand. He watches her eyes scan the words. In shaky but firm calligraphy, Peter’s written: Daily reminder that *you* can lift Thor’s hammer 😊 but only if you have the right attitude.
“Christ,” she mutters, before she has a chance to filter the affection out of her tone, before she can compartmentalize her feelings. Peter pumps his fist, grinning.
For the first time since The Blip, things feel almost normal.