Chapter Text
You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
0 years, 0 months, 0 weeks, 0 days, 5 hours, 6 minutes
Grief is a dark room with the shades drawn.
It’s a box that no one can look into except the resident who calls it home. It’s like Schrodinger's model: that cat isn’t dead until someone observes that it is (despite the fact that it’s been 81 years so of course the cat is dead, of course it is, how can it not be.) Instead grief is a casual state of being neither alive nor dead. Unknown.
This isn’t happening, right? Not until someone else observes it. Right now Peter is stuck in his own dark room with the shades drawn, reality separated from him. He’s far enough away from it that nothing seems real.
How did he get here? He doesn’t remember. He remembers tugging off the mask and holding her, begging, begging, (the cat is dead you saw it die) wishing with everything he’d had to go back four years, undo it all, every moment, every night on the streets, every wound, everything.
He'd give up everything he was for her. He should have. He promised, once, that he would.
Spider-Man finds himself standing in his empty apartment, lungs stuttering inside his chest. He takes his gloves off, holds them in one hand. Drops them to the floor like they’ve burned him.
He hooks a bare, trembling finger in his left webshooter. It’s about half full from the looks of it. (He could have done more. He could have--)
Deft fingers unhook it from his wrist. He holds the shooter between his thumb and forefinger for a while, and doesn’t realize he’s clutching too tightly until the cartridge cracks and the pressure shifts, ruining the whole mechanism for good.
He drops that, too, left hand dripping in web fluid. He clenches a fist around it and that’s when he sees them, the splotches of purple on his still-suited arm. He wipes the web fluid from the back of his left hand on his chest and skims his index finger down his right arm.
The pad of his finger comes away red.
Grief is a room with the shades drawn. When Peter pulls back the curtains, right now, he sees Spider-Man fumbling to rid himself of the suit, ignoring the pain as he twinges new injuries. The whole situation carries a stench that only he can smell, and it’s...it’s too real, too encompassing, and he can’t. He can’t believe it.
He’s numb for a moment, shock dulling the heat of a detonation only five hours old.
He’s tripping from his boots. His arms are speckled from blood that had soaked through the fabric. He feels the pressure of her head in the crook of his arm, the warm wetness as-- “No," Spider-Man says, out loud, as if the physicality of the words will stop the tide. It won't. He'll drown beneath it anyway.
In the bathroom, he turns the water on cold, heavy, and throws himself underneath the spray until he prunes, until he cannot breathe, until there is ice in his throat, until he is clean. (But he’s not clean; the blood is still there, beneath the surface, on his suit, in his mind, everywhere. The blood that beats through his own veins doesn’t even feel natural.)
He’d always wanted to live inside her mind but not like this, not this literally.
Grief is a room with the shades drawn, and in the overwhelming waterfall of cold, Peter closes his eyes and sees nothing but darkness.
0 years, 0 months, 0 weeks, 0 days, 23 hours, 18 minutes
When Peter Parker finds out that Gwen Stacy is dead he does not believe it.
(Oh he knows, of course he does. He knew it before she’d even hit the ground, knew it in the way she reached for him, the slow-motion of his limbs and the calming of his heart.)
“I just…” He stutters, grasping for something that has always been there, always, but isn’t anymore. “I just talked to her yesterday...she can’t…”
Call him an actor, a fake. Accuse of him of lying to everyone he knows and sabotaging the things he loves, but this, right here, this surge of confusion, the bad taste of horror in his mouth; this he cannot fake.
It's like he's been ripped from his own limbs, they were so intimately familiar to him that the ghost of them sends pain through him. He can feel it as if his amputated parts are still there, as if he hasn't yet lost them. Lost her. He used to be whole and now he's finding out he never will be again. Large hunks of liver, shavings of his aorta, the tendons behind his kneecaps that used to hold him steady on his own feet--parts of him that Peter used to think were vital to survival--are just gone.
“Oh, sweetheart,” Aunt May says, lips twisting like they’re fighting a battle, eyes welling, welling, and this is Peter’s fault. He caused this.
It can’t be...It can’t be true. Can it? He’s fast, he’s strong, he’s mutated, for God’s sake, and yet he still could not save the one thing that mattered to him above everything else. There's a way these things work, a science to it. This is unprecedented, it's unfounded, it's not real. Peter has holes in his body large enough that someone could stick their whole fist through, so how is he still breathing? How is Gwen not breathing?
“Aunt May?” Peter asks, desperate. His voice has gone high. His world is spinning panic, crashing disbelief. It wells up, desperate. His world is white noise and lungs that do not work, it's trembling hands in an oppressive quiet. It's a room, closed, sealed, filling up with water, draining of air. “Aunt May, please, I--” He can't force the words out.
He's wheezing.
“Peter,” She says, and this is Ben, this is Ben all over again. Peter weighed down by the burden of his own failure, Aunt May blind to everything but the simplicity of loss. “Peter, sweetheart, I’m so sorry.”
She hugs him.
He’s crying, he realizes from somewhere distant, cavernous. He’s crying but the act is nothing more than small droplets of water down his face. His chest is so tight he cannot possibly be feeling anything, anything at all.
0 years, 0 months, 0 weeks, 3 days, 6 hours, 55 minutes
He’s a scientist, or hopes to be. He goes about it procedurally.
(Define. What is the problem? What assumptions are you making? What are the constraints?)
The problem is Spider-Man, lying boneless and in pieces all over his room.
He places his suit jacket on the hanger and glances at himself briefly in the mirror. His eyes are drawn inward. He’s wearing emotion like exhaustion.
Next comes his shirt, starch pressed and buttoned to the throat. He slides it off, straightens the sleeves, the collar, and hangs it off another hanger. In the dark of his room, his uncovered forearms look strange and alien.
(Plan. State any developed assumptions. Write equations. Develop procedure.)
A bird’s-eye view shows him his own weakness, spread in scarlet pieces over the thready carpeting of his shitty apartment. He realizes with some sort of distant disappointment Spider-Man is little more than a man, not something powerful or meaningful or promising, or anything that he’d intended the mask to become.
Spider-Man is just spandex and guilt, that’s it, nothing more.
Peter Parker as a man is a writhing mess of organs and yet still gutless. He was never really sure of himself before, always tentative without the suit, clumsy without something to hide behind, and now the very fact that he hid behind the mask feels like a cop-out, and a shitty one at that.
Oh, the world can blame Spider-Man and not Peter, but Peter doesn’t have the luxury of separating the two. He thought he could; his sole goal in the mask was keeping his lives separate but they both feel pretty meaningless right now. What's the point of an identity if this is the outcome? Why bother with Spider-Man at all?
Anyway.
(Gather materials. What do you need? How will you get there?)
He picks up two gloves and places them in a bagless metal trashcan he usually keeps below the sink. Moving across the room, he scoops the body of the suit, browned and crusted with blood and sweat, and tosses it on top. Boots follow.
He sticks his hand inside the mask and lets it fan out across his palm. He looks down at himself.
(Evaluate. Do your units make sense? Does this answer the question?)
Mirrored eyepieces and webbed detail stare back at him. Everything fluid, tight, and designed in red and blue and how fucking stupid is that? To put on a suit and pretend to be serving a cause bigger than himself. To feel power from a personality that did not belong to him. What was he thinking? Who did he want to be?
Gwen is dead because of this.
Peter looks at the mask and sees her closed casket and public funeral, sees Calvary Cemetery underneath a gray afternoon of clouds. Most of all he sees her. Her outstretched hand. The sound her body made in the cradle of his webs. That’s all she is. A split second of motion.
He drops the mask in with the rest of the suit.
He sets the can on the kitchen counter and pauses a moment.
Peter looks out the window. It’s not raining but the night is murky with clouds. It’s close to midnight. The funeral had run long; lunch afterward had turned into socializing and Aunt May doesn't want him to be alone for the foreseeable future. For tonight, though, he managed to avoid her, begging off with a claim of packing up his things and getting some time to think.
In the bathroom, he uncaps a full bottle of rubbing alcohol and carries it back to the kitchen. He’s not going to stand on ceremony; this doesn’t deserve that. At Gwen’s funeral there’d been people, dozens of them. One of her fellow interns at OsCorp, a student from her high school, aunts, uncles. Her mother, whip-cut and unafraid to show it, pushed to the point where the devastation made her hollow. They all told stories about how smart she was, how talented. She’d been so beautiful, inside and out.
It was all true, of course it was. Peter had seen firsthand her beauty, her intelligence. He remembers walking through the streets of Williamsburg with her, snapping pictures when she wasn’t looking. Over coffee he’d let her see them and she’d blushed and deflected, saying he was a stereotypical hipster and she wouldn’t stand for it anymore.
Peter thinks, idly, that he still has those pictures, action shots, landscapes, somewhere on his external hard drive. Her hair in falling waves, blonde and unkempt from the city humidity, bangs ratty and in her eyes. Her head tilted back in a laugh, teeth exposed, eyes crinkling.
He would probably still think the shots were beautiful, but he wouldn’t be able to stand the sight of them anymore. Even thinking about them makes something nasty curl through his stomach. He won’t delete them but he won’t look at them again.
(Implement. Perform the experiment)
Instead he turns the bottle over and drenches the spandex, lets the whole damn room smell like isopropyl alcohol. He’s not pretending to bleach himself clean, because that’s melodramatic and ridiculous.
Instead he strikes a match and lets Spider-Man burn, lets the end come in an inferno. For a moment, before they crumble, the dark corners of his life light up in perfect orange. This ending is imperfect, but then he wasn't expecting an end at all. But that's how it works, really. That's how all of this works.
0 years, 0 months, 0 weeks, 3 days, 7 hours, 4 minutes
Alcohol, fire, and smoke clog his nose, mix together in a way that churns his stomach, and as soon as the flames are out his lunch is climbing its way out of his stomach. He barely makes it into the bathroom in time to rid himself of it.
His mind is a mantra of Gwen, the way she smelled, the way she tasted. The way she could never correct Peter’s homework mistakes without being condescending. Her tentative hands on his bare chest, the hunch-set of her shoulders standing in front of Flash, her voice, trembling, when she lifted up the mask and saw who was underneath.
The quiet resonance of the place where she rests now, the last person standing ceremony over her dropping his head and burning his life.
Peter tucks himself in the shallow corner between the toilet and the tub and wraps his arms around his legs, tips his head back, lets go.
She’s dead and he killed her.
She had a simple faith in him, built by study sessions, in whispered distractions late in the library, forged through the anxiety of schoolwork, the quiet dinners on the couch (she’d steal is edamame and he’d eat her water chestnuts. He liked baby corn and she liked the long carrot strips. They were Chinese food compliments, their only corner of perfection together).
She wanted to go to Europe, he knows. And she’d wanted him to go with her. He could’ve proposed at the top of the Eiffel Tower, on a gondola under the Italian stars, as the clock struck midnight in the busy wake of Big Ben.
He choking on salt water, now, but he can’t sit here and deny the truth any longer. Spider-Man is in ashes in the next room and Gwen is in the ground.
It’s an end to something, he knows, but not much of a beginning.
Peter doesn’t move for hours, just tries to breath through it, doesn’t try to convince himself it’ll be okay. It won’t. A half-dozen mourners couldn't convince him of that, sympathetic pats and all, and his own mind knows those placations are meaningless when compared to what he knows about Gwen's death.
He did this. He did this. He did this he did this he did this.
If there are claws in his chest then he put them there; this is no one’s fault but his own.
0 years, 0 months, 1 week, 0 days, 15 hours
“Do you want any more, Peter?” Aunt May asks him. He glances down at his half full plate, watches his fork comb through what’s left of his serving of her casserole.
“No, thank you.” He replies.
“Okay.” She tells him, and something deep inside is screaming at himself, how could he do this, how could he let this happen, he has one thing left now and he’s pushing her away. “What are your plans for this evening?”
“I have a Bio midterm I need to study for.” He replies blankly. His fork is separating the ingredients of his casserole. A pile of rice, a separate stack of chicken, broccoli. His plate is streaked with cheese and breadcrumbs.
“Peter, do you really think that’s such a good idea?” Aunt May has never dimmed her concern for him. She has always loved him plainly, as if he was her own. “I’m sure your professor will understand.”
He shakes his head. “I have to take this test.” He tells her.
There’s a beat of silence. He scrapes metal against porcelaine.
“Peter,” She says, softer now, even more concerned. She approaches him like he’s an injured bird in need of help, and it’s nothing he deserves. “It’s hardly been a week since--”
He cuts her off (screaming, screaming inside because he’s so fucking mad, so fucking mad, and this is all he knows now, this is all he can do) “She’s dead, Aunt May.” He snaps. “She’s dead and she’s not coming back and I have a Bio test tomorrow.”
Aunt May flinches back, startled. Peter isn’t going to presume to know what Gwen would have wanted for Peter to do, because Gwen wants nothing, now. Gwen is dead and ambition doesn't last without breath. But he has nothing to do other than continue to forge through his life; he has nothing left.
Peter doesn’t notice his world blurring at the edges until Aunt May gets up from the table and places a firm hand on his shoulder.
He drops his head into his hand, cupping fingers over the bridge of his nose and his eyes, elbow gouged painfully into the table. The fork drops with a clatter.
“I’m sorry.” Peter says, bubbling with it. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m
0 years, 0 months, 2 weeks, 4 days, 8 hours
“Shit.” Jameson says, thumbing through his newest (and most likely last) stack of Spidey pictures. “Shit. Shit. Okay. Shit.” He abruptly glances up, “Kid, even you look like shit, what the hell is going on? Actually, scratch that, I don’t care. Don’t you have anything that says ‘I’m a Masked Drug Runner’? Or gang member? Crooked politician?”
“No.”
“Then what the hell am I paying you for?” Jameson asks and hits a button on his desk, “Betty! Come in here and fire this kid, I don’t want to look at him anymore.”
Peter doesn’t even react.
“What, you just gonna stand there gaping at me? You’re done! Out of here! Don’t come back until you have a picture of this menace doing something I can actually print.” He hits the button again. “Betty, now! ”
“Mr. Jameson?” Peter finally manages, unable to hide the slow burn of heat beneath his words. He feels it distantly. A fire in a trashcan. The sun in a graveyard. “You’re the biggest douchebag I’ve ever met, and the single reason I await the death of print media.” He says. Jameson tries to interrupt, gaping like a suffocating fish, face draining and turning purple. Peter continues on. “But for the record, you were right about Spider-Man.”
Peter turns, hands forming fists beside him.
“What the--kid, you’ve got a lot of nerve telling me that, I swear to God.” Jameson says to his back, “Scratch what I said earlier. Don’t come back at all. I’ll find someone else to get my Spider-Man pictures.”
Peter watched Spider-Man die two weeks ago and does not mourn his loss. It aches, of course it does, but that's it. It's over. "Good luck.” He replies.
“Yeah, you’re done here.” Jameson spits, and that’s that.
0 years, 0 months. 3 weeks, 0 days, 0 hours, 0 seconds
Loss is red.
Loss is a cherry cough syrup popsicle that tastes like sickness, the heat death of a star. Loss is what Peter watches at night when he lies in his childhood bed and watches the ceiling shift in shadows, in memory.
When he was younger, he used to read novels that characterized anger as the color: red fire, heat, blood. But loss is red. It's the darkest color of under-oxygenated blood from the deepest recesses of the human body. He feels her loss so intimately it can’t be anything else but something that comes from within himself. This right here is lifeblood that he tastes.
Instead anger is a transparent intensity.
He watches memories on the silk screen of his ceiling at midnight.
Captain Stacy bleeds a promise that Spider-Man never intended to keep. He paraded, egotistical, bragging, saying he wanted to keep his city safe, to keep himself and his family and his loved ones safe, but it meant jack shit, right? He’d promised never to drag anyone else into his secondary life, but as soon as Gwen saw underneath the mask, that was it.
And what the hell kind of hubris did he have, thinking that she would be invinceable, too? He thought that for once having something warm to come home to, having someone to help shoulder his troubles, meant that something in the universe was looking out for him. But the universe is a vacuum and doesn’t owe anyone any favors.
He’s so so angry.
Anger is feeling her everywhere, a rock darkness in his chest, blood fingers in the cavern of his lungs, around the corner on the quad, behind the door as he unlocks it. This morning he'd lifted his phone to text her and had the message written before he'd remembered that Mrs. Stacy had closed her contract at Verizon. Anger is turning on the lights and finding out she’s his ghost, nothing more. Anger is looking at himself in the mirror and wanting to crack the glass, splinter his haggard reflection in a thousand pieces, spitting what are you doing and who the hell did you think you were.
He imagines himself standing at the top of a sheer face of a cliff in Death Valley, maybe, where the granite rises thousands of feet into the flat sky, and the sun beats down heavily. Uncle Ben is dangling by his fingertips, dehydrated and sunken, four years dead.
“Pete.” Ben pleads, “Pete, please.”
Peter crouches and leans over him, glancing once downward to the sharp outcropping of rock below, and then glances back at Ben’s face, weathered and desperate.
“Pete.” Ben says again, and Peter spits in his face.
(He’s not sure when he fell asleep, but he know’s it’s a dream because he wakes up gaping into the wet cotton of his pillow, plunging his nails into his thighs just to ground himself on what’s real. It stings his flesh, breaks it, and he gets a hold of himself, panting, digging in harder just to remind himself that pain can be felt somewhere other than between his ears and inside his organs.)
0 years, 1 month, 1 week, 1 day, 1 hour, 1 second
When Peter was younger he used to imagine his parents as lost at sea; as if they went out one day and never found their way back. It was easier for Peter to rationalize it that way, as if they were desperate to return to their son, as if instead the universe and circumstance buried any chance they might have had. Peter had thought that being buried was better than being dead. He’d thought nothing of life past a process of oxygen, blood.
The fear, confusion, was, at times, all he felt like he had in common with the people that brought him into being. In middle school he’d thought he’d understood the gravity of the situation, thought that being marooned on his own island of isolation was exactly the way it felt. In high school, bruised and unpopular, his definition shifted but still remained largely the same. He thought he knew the taste of desperation, the way anxiety curled in the pit of his stomach, but he didn’t, he really didn’t.
He feels it now, a desperation so thick in his marrow he cannot swallow around it. He thinks it was cruel in his middle school years to imagine his parents as lost, because if they were, why didn’t anyone find them? Why didn’t anyone help? They were ocean travelers scrambling on splintered wet boards, the water a looming giant all around. Infinity is not just a constant, like that. Instead it’s something that shifts and reforms, a terrifying, hopeless void.
He knows now that his parents are never coming back, and if they are lost he has no way of finding them.
His own path is in smoke around him, watering though his eyes and choking his throat. Or maybe he, too, is drowning in the cold, salty sea and he can no longer remember the way up, the way to oxygen, freedom, life.
Aunt May finds him curled in the bathroom between the toilet and the shower, the latter spewing water onto the porcelain, making a sound to cover the wheeze in his breath.
She steps into the room in just her nightgown and threadbare robe, and as her eyes adjust to the dark, she sees the streaks on Peter’s cheeks, the nail marks in his bare skin, sees how frail and small he is. For a moment, they are both phantasms of who they were in those desperate few months after they all realized Richard and Mary weren’t coming back.
Aunt May’s hands fly to her face and she lets out a gasp, eyes already welling. If grief is a room with the shades drawn, then she keeps trying to pull Peter’s back only to find deeper darknesses.
Peter is six again with nothing to cling to, no bottom to the murky depths.
“Please,” he whimpers, something fundamentally broken in his voice. “Aunt May, please.” He hears Gwen's voice sometimes, but never enough to guide him, only enough to jerk him back under.
He does not know what he’s begging for, maybe relief from the cold, maybe oxygen. Something. A hard end to the emptiness, something to scramble on top of that feels more solid, a drag friction to slow his free fall.
May doesn’t turn on the lights. “Peter, I don’t know what to do.” May says, and he realizes that her own shades are drawn tight so Peter won’t see them, and it breaks his heart again and again and again, like the tide, relentless on the shore
0 years, 1 month, 2 weeks, 6 days, 4 hours
The wind is so cold it hurts, throwing color into his cheeks. He feels bruised by it and tries to make himself smaller inside his coat. He’d forgotten gloves this morning when he left Aunt May’s house for class.
He’d spent hours in the library, and now it’s late and he has a long walk home. Lately school is the only corner in Peter’s nothingness. At least school is something to do, somewhere to focus his attention that isn’t all Gwen.
Across the street, the empty wind blows harshly into the side of an old metallic trashcan, which hits cracked concrete with a hollow crash.
(Gwen, tossing her Introduction to Psychology book at his head freshman year, Peter catching it out of thin air, Gwen sending him a confused look and making grabby hands for it. I have homework, Pete. Peter, tossing it behind him, grinning. Not now you don’t.)
Peter is stressed, he has a big lab write-up due in a few days, and for once this is the kind of weary exhaustion he can deal with. It has a clear end. Friday in Biology at 2PM.
Night in the winter city has fallen like a hush; fat snowflakes are falling around him, turned orange in the streetlights. Cabs sludge through the slush.
He could take the subway back, but there’s something about the whirl of the track that makes him feel sick recently.
(Gwen, clinging to his hand on a crowded Sunday morning as they headed out of the city, stumbling against him as the train lurched from the station, her body a warm line against his own. You’re like one of those subway creeps, huh. He’d scoffed at her. In response, she had elbowed him in his lower ribs and snaked a hand into his jacket pocket)
The streets are quiet and Peter's head is too loud. He burrows his fingers into the satin lining of his jacket and tips his head down, watching the patter of his feet across salted concrete, feeling the sting of cold to his reddening ears.
“Hey!” he hears, suddenly, and comes up short. The back of his neck is tingling, a sensation that kills him a little every time he ignores it.
He slows his walking anyway, tries to listen.
“Gimme your purse and your jacket and nobody gets hurt.” A slurred voice, gruff, weathered.
“Okay, okay, please,” A second voice, younger. Female.
Peter takes an involuntary step.
“Faster!” A clipped warning, a shout, and then the female’s voice gasping with pain.
Suddenly, from around the corner, a tall, thin man comes thundering, purse clutched in his hand. The man comes up short when he sees Peter, and then obviously decides he’s no threat, because he resumes his sprinting, colliding heavy with Peter and sending him off balance before disappearing down the block.
Peter stumbles backward a moment before righting himself and peering around the corner, only to find the woman bent solidly over, clutching her face, sobbing and alone.
Peter is not Spider-Man.
Peter is Peter Parker, twenty years old, a struggling biomolecular engineering major, a man so deep in mourning he’s not sure who really got buried so many weeks ago.
He reels backward as if he’d been hit, listens to the woman cry and cry and cry, and has to dig his canines into the skin of his wrist to keep himself from doing something that might bring back the bile of his old life.
(Gwen, clinging to the ribbed spandex covering his shoulders, breathing heavily I trust you I love you I know you’ll keep me safe)
0 years, 1 month, 3 weeks, 3 days, 12 hours
Peter doesn’t go to class today. Instead he lies in bed with the door locked, eyes glazed. Aunt May knocks and he doesn’t answer.
His sheets and mattress swallow around him.
He watches the sun bleed over a ground covered in snow.
0 years, 1 month, 3 weeks, 4 days, 12 hours
“Pete. Hey,” A voice of a classmate.
Dr. Armandi had just finished lecturing, and students were beginning to file out into the snow. Armandi teaches a hard and fast Linear Algebra series; this is a class that Gwen took last semester when Peter was taking Differential Equations. She’d be in Differential Equations now, if she was still--
“Peter!”
Peter turns and sees the round face of a classmate he can’t quite place.
“Hey, how’d you do on that last midterm?” Nate, maybe?, asks, a friendly grin playing on his face.
Nate, Tate, whatever, didn’t know Gwen.
“Did Armandi post the grades?” Peter asks. He doesn’t know how he did. He hardly remembers taking the test.
“Yeah, man, this morning.” Tate grimaces. “At least the curve in this class is going to be wicked. Like Everest tall.”
Peter scrolls absently through his phone, plugs in his password, clicks on the class page. “What did you get?” He asks idly as his grade loads.
“Sixty-five.” Nate replies, proudly.
Peter stares at the black 58 printed neatly in Courier New next to his name. He feels a spark of irritation.
“Not too bad.” Tate is peering over his shoulder to look, invading Peter’s personal bubble. He poses no threat, but Peter can feel his hackles raise, his breath coming shallower, a tingle through the top of his spine. “Don’t worry, man. I heard the average was like a 60. You’ll catch the curve.”
“Don’t worry?” Peter asks, heat seeping into his voice. He doesn’t even remember taking the test. He doesn’t remember studying for it. It’s too irrelevant to worry about. Jesus. Who the hell even cares.
Tate backs up a step. His coloring, all pale skin and fine white blond hair, is turning ruddy with the cold. “Yeah,” He says, beginning to frown. “Hey, weren’t you the guy that got, like, a ninety on that first test? The one that murdered the rest of us?”
He was.
And Gwen had whooped when he found out, laughed with him, because that was higher than any midterm grade she’d ever gotten in that class. The test doesn’t matter now. Drinking stale root beer in the January fuzz of evening with her, celebrating, is the part he cares for, holds on to.
When Peter doesn’t respond, Nate slaps him on the back, casually friendly. “Dude,” He asks, “What happened?”
Something tense tugs tighter inside him, like a rope holding a pulling weight. It frays, pulling tighter still, until he feels the thrum of his own heartbeat in his palms. He grits his teeth against it and tries to ignore the part of him screaming.
Tate is apparently still looking for an answer.
Peter doesn’t have one. “Fuck off.” he says instead, his voice grinding stones into gravel.
“Woah, Peter, I--”
“Seriously.” Peter cuts him off, tasting copper in his mouth and not knowing when he bit his tongue. He wants to punch this kid. He wants to punch him until he is nothing more than some sort of abstract example of human interaction, blood red and unreal.
Peter clicks his lock screen and turns on his heel. He makes it a block before he has to stop, sit down, tug hands through his hair and breathe, inhale, exhale. Repeat.
0 years, 2 months, 0 weeks, 4 days, 3 hours
He comes to sobbing into Aunt May’s shoulder, unsure of where he is or what happened, but the nightmares sweep his mind with a vengeance that she tries to hold him through.
“Peter, talk to me.” She begs him when he calms enough to stutter around his oxygen deprived lungs.
He closes hot, wet eyes and manages, “This is my fault.” and “I’m sorry.”
She regards him silently, like she doesn’t know what to say. Grief is a room with the shades drawn and every time Peter emerges he looks different. New bruises beneath his eyes, broken bones moving beneath his skin. Weight loss, hair flat, skin yellowing and frail. He's a diluted version of who he was two months ago, like he's been replaced with something subhuman.
Beneath he’s different in ways that don’t have names. He knows, objectively, that his organs haven’t shifted and his DNA hasn’t been rewired, but he feels as if he’s going through some sort of machine, or perhaps he’s been turned inside out. He wonders if eyes follow him as he walks down the steet, look at this oddity, they all think, look at how broken.
“It’s not.” Aunt May says, “Peter, it’s not.”
He leans away from her and refuses to look at her. Ignores her until she gives up, gets up. He listens to her cry in the kitchen all alone.
0 years, 2 months, 2 weeks, 5 days, 0 hours
The Times had reported just this morning that crime this quarter was at an all-time high, violent crimes spiking by two percent from the end of last year. Petty crime, the type that Spider-Man more often than not dealt with, was a stat that remained largely unchanged. His AP Statistics teacher from senior year of high school would call the tiny bump statistically insignificant.
Peter is thinking about this with a gun pointed at his head.
“Nice and slow, please.” The man behind him says, edging Peter toward the wall. Peter Parker himself has never been mugged, and despite having stopped dozens of them, he thinks that this man is probably the nicest criminal he’s come into contact with in a long time.
Of course, this does not stop the bone crushing fear that’s seeping, hot and acidic, into the tissue of his stomach, around the muscles in his upper shoulders. As Spider-Man he would have been suave, cracked a joke, taken the thief down with a zinger and a laugh, but he doesn’t have Spider-Man .
Peter’s hands, up in surrender, hit the brick of the wall. An obtrusive hand breaches his jacket pocket, and Peter swallows around the feeling of being touched, albeit clinically, by a stranger. He feels lost. He feels weak.
He thinks of Gwen.
The robber withdraws the left of his favorite pair of gloves; Uncle Ben’s sheepskin, thick and soft and worn by callouses that weren’t Peter’s own. It ends up on the ground. Then comes a few gum wrappers, a receipt from lunch (a large cup of coffee and nothing else). Then the pocket is empty.
There’s a creak, maybe the wind, on the fire escape from the building across the street. It sends something frying into the back of Peter’s brain, and then, finally, finally instinct is taking over.
He turns as the robber is shifting his gun to his other hand in order to search Peter’s other pocket. Pete is quicker, sends an elbow to the other’s forearm, grasps the gun in one of his bare hands, and cracks the butt of it into the thief's skull.
He stands heaving, and his mugger goes down.
He drops the gun immediately, watches in sickness as blood drips steady from his mugger’s nose.
“Oh my God,” Peter finds himself saying, his hand coming to cup his mouth. He feels bile in his esophagus, burning, burning. “Oh my God.”
His senses are still screaming at him, residual or otherwise, and his heart is a kick drum, speeding up the rhythm in a song he can’t hear.
Something else creaks above him; twice in one night is too much to be a coincidence, but Peter cannot even comprehend that crises over his internal one.
Instead of craning his neck to look at the looming threat above him, he drops to his knees. “Oh my God.” His ice cube fingers find the man’s neck. He scrambles for a pulse, and though he can clearly hear the wheeze of his lungs and see his chest expand (deflate, expand, deflate, expand), he still feels lead in his stomach. “Oh my God.”
“He’s not dead.” Echoes from the fire escape above him, mirthful, lonely. Peter starts so hard he starts backward and barely gets a hand underneath him to keep his balance. He lands too hard, though, and instantly feels pain shoot up his wrist. “You didn’t hit him that hard.”
The figure watching him swings down from his perch; orange light slides over the red in his suit. Peter can’t move.
“Hafta say, kid,” Deadpool says, casual, “You pack one hell of a punch. Surprising.” he adds, an afterthought. “I would say sexy, but, uh, you like like you’re about to puke.”
“Observant.” Peter manages, feeling like he’s on the edge of an out-of-body experience.
But then, his sarcasm startles a laugh out of Deadpool, tentative, unexpected, and Peter is slamming back to Earth.
He’s Spider-Man, and Deadpool is shoving an autograph book in his face, spouting something about being a geek, obsessed, and then blowing Spider-Man up.
He’s Spider-Man, slumped and overtired, eating a taco slumped against the apex of the Chrysler building, sharing company with Deadpool.
He’s Spider-Man and playing up the role of fondly annoyed, going after a monkey hitman, thinking that his life belongs in a heartfelt sitcom and for once not finding any fault with it.
He chokes around it, having forgotten in two and a half months, about the strings that came with the job, how they’d catch up to him, fray him even more.
He realizes he’s panicking, and Deadpool is still talking. “...look, kid, you don’t have to be worried. I mean the fucker on the ground was a bad dude, and you, damn, you just took him down. Ever since you-know-who retired I’ve been trolling around the west side, but fuckers like you make me feel useless, y’know. May as well go right back to contracts, no fun in helpin’ people with, like, six black belts in karate, dunno how he did it all the time--”
Get it together, Peter.
He knows he needs to say something. Anything. “Who--”
“Am I?”
“--Are you talking about?” Peter finishes, and then winces. Of course asking about the identity of the masked freak who descended from the fire escape would be the normal thing to do. Peter already knows who Deadpool is, sure, but Deadpool doesn't know who Peter is.
Deadpool sends him a weird look. “Spider-Man.” He drawls, slow, and Peter tastes the bile finally hit the back of his throat.
Peter sees his chance. His brain is clicking back on, his heart still racing. It helps that his senses have chilled now that he’s realized it was just Deadpool. “You’re Spider-Man?” He manages, still sounding shakey.
On the inside, he gives himself a high-five. Smooth, Parker.
“No?” Deadpool says. “It’s not just me that’s confused, right?” He pauses, as if waiting for an answer and then shakes his head. “Starting over.” He holds a hand out. Peter remembers a second before taking it that Spider-Man was the one who trusted Deadpool, not Peter. “I’m Deadpool, no, not a Spidey knock-off, yes, he copied the suit from me. But that’s all irrelevant anyway because Spidey hung up the cape a little while ago.” Peter must have something on his face, because Deadpool withdraws his hand and heaves a put-upon sigh. “Don’t you read the papers? You millenials, I swear. He’s been AWOL since that nasty, uh, thing with Greeny.”
Peter’s eyes drop back to his mugger.
His heart, calming now, gives way to memory, and he sinks back to the cold ground. He takes a controlled, trembling breath through his nose and feels like nothing, like a coffee ring in an unwashed mug.
Deadpool is still talking.
“Listen, get up, brush that dirt off ya shoulders, and move on. Cool? You’re cool. You’re good.” Deadpool says, a pitiful attempt at comfort. He holds his hand out again, and this time Peter takes it. He’s not sure he could get up if he tried on his own.
Wrist gripped under Deadpool’s big hand, Peter lets himself be hauled to standing. His glove is thick and tough on Peter’s bare skin, the first foreign contact that Peter has felt in days. “Hey, you really don’t know who I am?”
Peter looks at the hand, steadying him as he relearns how to stand on his two feet. Red wrist, red fingers, eyes behind a red and black mask. “No.” Peter lies. “No, I don’t know who you are.” He says, and it feels like a sickness, feels like some kind of permanent end, and for some reason it doesn’t make him feel any better.
He’s Spider-Man, quips a cut off joke that makes Wade laugh and then give him the finger, and for a moment swinging through the city is the most beautiful, most freeing thing he’s ever done.
“Well,” Deadpool says, flippant, a slow grin burning beneath his mask. “Nice to meet ya.” He says, and Peter doesn't have air for a response.