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blossom-hwa · 4 years

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Arc [Drifting Apart] - MARK |Swing!|

This part contains a lot of the events of Spiderman: Homecoming, though the timeline has been changed so Civil War happens after Homecoming, not the other way around! There are spoilers for Homecoming! Read at your own risk!

Again, thanks to @deathbykpopboys for inspiring this series :)

Pairing: Mark x fem!reader

Genre: fluff, angst, Spiderman!au

Triggers: a lot of cursing, mild violence, PANIC ATTACKS IN FUTURE CHAPTERS (I in no way meant to romanticize these triggers. If you feel I did, please let me know and I will fix it.)

Word Count: 8.4k

Petty spats and overreactions threaten to tear a decade-old bond apart.

Attach >> Arc { 1 - Drifting Apart | 2 - Coming Home } >> Fall { 1 - Spiral | 2 - Rise }

NCT Masterlist | Swing!

After two months, the small earpiece wedged into your skin still feels weird and hurts if you keep it in for more than a few hours at a time. Pausing on a rooftop, you reach up to adjust it for the fifth time tonight.

“We really need to fix this thing,” you mumble under your breath.

For a few silent minutes, you swing between buildings, keeping a close eye out on the streets below. Your black hood flutters around your head with the soft breeze.

Queens is quiet at night, much quieter than the always-bustling streets of Manhattan. You love patrolling, not just because you can help people, but also because of the peaceful silence that follows you as you swing through the crisp air. It’s a quiet rhythm, one that’s comforting during the dark night.

Crackling sounds in the earpiece just as you land on a rooftop to catch your breath. Seconds later, Mark’s voice fills your ear. “Two streets down from Jaemin’s apartment.”

“Give me four minutes.” Leaping off the building, wind begins whistling again as you swing your way over to Mark.

You notice him before he sees you, the blue of his outfit visible on the roof against the black backdrop of night. His red hood pools around his shoulders, his head covered in a matching mask.

(The first time you watched him put it on, you thought you’d die of laughter. He returned the favor when you tried on yours. Even now, the sight brings a slight smile to your face as you soundlessly jog over the roof to stand by him.)

Behind his mask, you can see a faint smile of greeting as he points down. “Break-in,” he whispers.

Looking closely, you can see the vague outlines of several people, at least two holding guns. Your brain leaps into overdrive, determining the best way to end this as bloodlessly as possible.

“I’ll take out the guns and try to immobilize their hands,” you whisper. “Knock out anyone you can, and we’ll web them up afterward.”

Mark nods. The two of you drop down.

The would-be robbers barely have time to look up before you’ve descended upon them, lashing out with your legs to kick two in the head. “Did you know this neighborhood is haunted?” you taunt as they fall to the ground, groaning. “Seriously, that’s what my friends told me. Maybe you’re ghost hunters? But why would you try to shoot a corporeal being?”

One of them grabs for the gun they’ve dropped, but you quickly kick it out of the way. “I don’t think so!” you sing, flipping him over your shoulder. He lands on his head, then flops over, unconscious. His friend doesn’t get a chance to blink before a punch to the side of his temple knocks him out. “Stupid,” you mutter, webbing them to the wall.

DANGER DANGER DANGER –

You duck. A bullet flies over your head and buries itself into a nearby trash can. There’s a muffled shout at the other end of the alley. A cracking noise sounds, and the final two men drop like stones.

Success.

You pick up the gun you kicked away. You’re about to just crush it under your foot, but something about it makes you look twice. Where a bit of the gun’s paint has been scrubbed off by its encounter with the ground, there’s a subtly glowing piece of metal that doesn’t look like anything you’ve ever seen.

“Mark?” You gesture at the weapon. “What…?”

He frowns in the darkness, raising a tentative hand to touch the glowing patch. “That’s weird.”

“Where are the other guns?” you ask. Mark picks up their crumpled remains. They’re normal – you’ve seen those types before. You look back at the weapon you’re holding.

Besides the glowing metal, you detect other small differences in shape and size. This one is slightly bigger than the other two, with a smaller bullet hole (does it even shoot bullets?) and a larger trigger. The paint obviously isn’t professionally applied – you easily scratch some of it off with a fingernail.

“I think we should take this and look at it further,” you say, turning it over in your hands.

Mark nods. “You think it could be something remaining from the Battle of New York?”

It’s certainly plausible, you think. Metal doesn’t glow on this planet, not even vibranium. Vibranium shines, yeah, but glowing is something completely different. You don’t think it was one of the weapons the Chitauri used, though. Maybe someone took the space material that the aliens brought in and manufactured a weapon with it.

Your stomach sinks. What if there are more?

Your watch beeps in the silence, signaling half an hour before Johnny gets home from his late shift. “Time to go.”

Releasing a string of webbing, you quickly climb up the warehouse wall with Mark following closely behind. In fifteen minutes, you land on your apartment rooftop, where you share your thoughts with Mark.

He doesn’t look very comforted by the idea of more of these things being out there. The two of you don’t even know what it does, and you’re not keen to find out. Once you’ve swung through the window in your room, you stash the gun in an empty corner of your closet and cover it with some old clothes.

Your black and white outfit gets shoved underneath your mattress, while the web shooters go inside your underwear drawer. Despite the fact that there’s a possibly alien weapon inside your room, a wave of exhaustion crashes over you. It’s all you can do to climb into bed before you pass out.

. . . . .

A normal day goes like this. Mark will fall out of bed to his alarm, drag himself past his snoring aunt’s bedroom to the shower, and snatch an apple or some other small breakfast in the kitchen before heading down to meet you for school. The train ride will pass, he’ll greet his friends, and then walk to homeroom, where Mr. Lee takes attendance.

(Thomas isn’t his homeroom teacher this year. Even though Lee is considerably stricter, Mark still thanks his lucky stars for the change.)

After school, he’ll take the train to either Professor Tuan’s lab or home, where he’ll work or do homework for a few hours before it’s time to patrol.

The day starts mostly normally. Mei isn’t snoring when he goes to take a shower, but it’s just one of those rare mornings where she isn’t sleeping on her back. He meets up with you and his friends like usual, and besides the history pop quiz he didn’t study for, the school day passes quickly. You tell him you’ve figured out nothing about the weird glowing gun you found last week, and the two of you resolve to just destroy it.

Everything, by all accounts, should be going fine.

But despite all of this, he feels uneasy. His weird sixth sense-reflex thing keeps randomly sending subtle pulses of danger, danger, and he doesn’t know where the danger fucking is. It pops in at the most inopportune times – on the walk to the train station, during PE, even as he walks past the other offices in the university building to get to Dr. Tuan’s lab.

And yet said danger doesn’t manifest when he goes to the local deli for a sandwich. It doesn’t show itself in front of a chemical engineering lab labelled “Dr. Roberts.” It doesn’t appear when he leaps on to the rooftop to meet you for patrol, either.

He relays his irritation to you as you swing through the darkening streets of Queens. There’s a beat of silence on your end, and then you admit that you’ve felt the same. “I honestly just thought I was going fucking crazy,” you say.

The two of you swing around in silence for a while before Mark’s earpiece crackles loudly (seriously, the crackling is really annoying and he needs to get around to fixing it soon) and your voice floods his ear. “Robbery at the ATMs near Delmar’s deli.”

Mark immediately changes direction, doubling back to meet you outside the bank. Four people are inside, faces covered in Avengers masks (seriously?). Several weapons rest on the ground.

Not just any weapons, Mark realizes as he looks closer. They’re weirdly shaped and they glow.

Much like the one that you hid in your closet.

“Weird, right?” you whisper from your hiding spot.

Mark nods. “Well, let’s see what we can get from this.”

The two of you slip inside the building soundlessly. The room is kind of cramped, which will make it difficult to fight in, but destruction is almost guaranteed in a situation like this.

He looks over at you. You nod.

One man goes down quickly, stuck to the floor with Mark’s webbing. Three other Avengers masks turn around – Mark sees Thor, Iron Man, and the Hulk – and the place descends into chaos.

“Forgot your PIN?” you snark, leaping onto the ceiling. You quickly kick Thor in the face as he lurches forward, leaving Mark to pin him to the ground. A couple of web shots later, and he’s immobilized.

(Mark doesn’t know how you magically come up with comebacks and punchlines for every situation. He’d give up just about anything to be as witty as you are.)

You’ve flipped back onto the ground and are now engaged in a fistfight with Iron Man (“Why the fuck is Iron Man robbing a bank? I thought you were a billionaire?”). Mark turns around to find Hulk and is met face-to-face with the weirdest thing he’s ever seen.

“What the fuck?” is all he gets out before Hulk does something and the weird, metal, three-pronged thing starts glowing. Purple light shoots out of the prongs and engulfs Mark.

It’s the weirdest thing he’s ever felt. He still has control of his limbs – he can wiggle his fingers – it’s just that the light has more control, somehow. Mark tries to lash out and hit something – stick to the wall, grab an ATM machine, anything – but the light keeps him loose-limbed and useless.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees you still fighting Iron Man, who’s now picked up one of the weapons discarded on the floor. You dodge the first blast of purple light, then use webbing to lift yourself up to avoid another.

Webbing.

He’s so stupid.

Mark forces his arm out and shoots a string of web fluid to the far wall, yanking himself out of reach of the three-pronged light thing. His feet lash out, kicking Hulk’s mask. He lands, crouched on the door of the ATM building.

Iron Man somehow breaks out of your fight and races to the door. Mark’s eyes widen and he throws himself out of the way of the glowing thing –

And then the fake Avenger uses the light to literally carve out a section of the wall, including the whole door and the entire corner of the deli across the street.

Mark yells, narrowly avoiding another errant blast of light and kicking the guy to the floor. “Mr. Delmar!” he yells, racing across the street. Behind him, he hears some more scuffling as you keep trying to take down the last two robbers, but he’s only focused on making sure Mr. Delmar and his cat are all right.

“Mr. Delmar!” The corner of the building is burning, and there’s no water to be seen. Mark launches himself into it anyway, thankful for his sweaty mask filtering out some of the smoke. With relief so strong it burns, he spots Mr. Delmar stumbling out of the store’s back exit, his humongous cat in his arms.

“Are you all right, Mr. Delmar?” In the moment, Mark doesn’t care if the deli owner recognizes his voice. He just needs to know if he’s okay. After a few seconds of coughing, Mr. Delmar nods. “I’m all right, Spiderboy. I’m all right.”

Spiderboy? Really?

Well, you and Mark never really came up with names for your alter egos. Maybe you should have.

But not now. Someone’s called 911, and he can hear the fire trucks and police sirens starting to converge on the area. There’s no water in sight. He can’t help out anymore.

Just in time, you burst out of the ATM building carrying something in one hand. “Let’s go!” he yells, webbing himself up a tall building nearby. The thwip of your own webbing follows, and then the two of you are racing across the rooftops back home.

“Holy fuck,” Mark gasps once you’ve reached your apartment building. It’s only midnight. You usually patrol until around one thirty, but Mark feels too shaken to fight at the moment.

You repeat his sentiments, sinking to your knees. One hand burrows into the pocket of your hoodie and pulls out something purple and glowing. “This broke off from that weird glowing thing one of them used to… control you?” You look at him, unsure. He just shrugs, not wanting to remember the experience. “It’s made of the same material as the gun I destroyed earlier.”

“This is definitely not just a one-time thing,” Mark groans. His legs start to wobble and he sits down too as you crush the object in your fist. “How many people do you think are involved with this… alien weapon stuff?”

You shrug helplessly. “At least the four people we fought today, and the robbers we saw last week, maybe?” Your expression turns dark. “I think they escaped. I started fighting Hulk when the Iron Man guy just fucking tore down Delmar’s store, and then the sirens started blaring and I had to get out. When I looked back, they were gone.” An angry sigh bursts from your lips. “Hulk and Iron Man probably cut their two friends away and escaped.”

It’s a blow, but Mark takes comfort in the fact that the two of you and Mr. Delmar are alive. “Well, we’re alive. And now we know what to look out for.”

Humid air blows in the silence.

“I guess we have to figure this out?” you say.

“Wasn’t aware that we were private investigators now,” Mark teases, pulling his mask down slightly for some fresh air.

“Wasn’t aware that people wanted to make weird glow-y weapons out of alien materials either,” you snap back, doing the same.

Mark laughs a little and squeezes your hand. “Let’s just go to sleep,” he says. “I don’t think… neither of us are in a state to do much more patrolling tonight.” His weak knees and stinging throat agree.

You do too, clearly, because you get up without complaint. “See you,” you murmur, ready to climb down to your window.

He waves, wondering what the universe will throw at you both tomorrow.

. . . . .

“Are you going to homecoming?” Jihyo bounces up to you at the end of the day, eyes wide with excitement. “This year’s theme is Harry Potter!”

You blink. “Since when was the homecoming theme announced?”

Jihyo cocks her head in confusion. “Yesterday, in homeroom?”

Your brain holds no recollection of that. Then again, you weren’t paying attention to the announcements. Mark’s new design for the earpieces was taking up most of your focus at the time. They’re pretty good, you think – you can’t wait to try yours on tonight.

“Um, I don’t know.” You shrug. “When is it?”

“In exactly three weeks.” Jihyo grins widely. “I’m going with Daniel! You should come with Mark.”

Something in you curdles as memories of last year crop up, when people thought you and Mark had broken up even though you were never dating in the first place.

Mark is your best friend, nothing more. Why would you go with him?

Plus, last you heard, he had a crush on Lia, one of the girls on the Academic Decathlon team. If anything, you’ll push his cowardly ass to ask her instead.

You feel a twinge of something that doesn’t feel good when that thought runs through your mind. The fact that you can’t put a name to it just makes you feel even more irritated than you already do.

“Maybe,” you reply unconvincingly, closing your locker. “I don’t have a dress.”

If anything, that just makes Jihyo grin wider. “I can go dress shopping with you! Lia and Yeri wanted to get new dresses too, so we can all go together!”

You try to smile. “Thanks. I’ll, um, let you know if I can go sometime soon, all right?” The bell rings, and you turn away right after catching her nod.

Homecoming. As if you didn’t have enough to worry about between Wang’s lab, homework, AcaDec, and patrol, now you have to think about wasting one night to wear a fancy dress and watch the other people around you spike the punch or sneak sips of vodka in the bathroom.

You don’t even know if you have enough money for said fancy dress.

Johnny would probably tell you to go for it anyway. It’s your junior year already, so you be experiencing what Midtown High has to offer. He’d definitely find some way to afford a nice dress and shoes.

But you don’t want him to have to take more extra shifts at the office just for a dress. He’s done enough for you.

You sigh, slipping into a seat in the auditorium for AcaDec practice. Mark’s at the other end of the room, talking to Haechan and Jaemin, so you take the opportunity to put your head down and close your eyes.

It’s practice time. You will the irritation flooding your brain to subside. Even though you’re practically a shoo-in for the team, you still don’t want to run the risk of losing your spot to someone like Flash.

Mr. Harrison, the team sponsor, claps his hands and the talking dies down. You lift your head to see Mark and Lia walking over together, while Haechan and Jaemin take seats next to you.

Since when were Mark and Lia talking?

Actually, since when did Mark have the courage to talk to his crush alone without stuttering up a storm?

A slight smirk crawls onto your lips at the thought, despite the lingering irritation at the back of your mind. Mark looks over and frowns slightly. You good? he mouths.

You nod, smiling, then cock your head slightly in Lia’s direction. She’s at the head of the table now, since it’s her turn this week to read the questions. A small blush blooms on Mark’s cheeks and he starts to look uncomfortable.

Two emotions war inside of you – satisfaction at seeing your best friend flustered, and the other feeling from before that you couldn’t name. Before you can get distracted, though, Lia calls attention.

As she starts reading the first question, you push your feelings away. Emotions mean nothing in the face of AcaDec nationals.

. . . . .

Mark feels like he shouldn’t have come to this party.

It’s not just the fact that he doesn’t really like parties and feels kind of uncomfortable. It’s also that Lia only invited him, not you, and he kind of didn’t tell you the truth when he asked to call off patrolling today to be here.

He told you that he was sick.

He hasn’t been sick since the spider bite (which is a miracle in itself).

He could also hear the skepticism in your silence over the phone after he gave you that excuse.

Mark doesn’t even know why he lied. First, he’s a terrible liar. Second, you’re not stupid. Third, Lia holds really big parties, and you obviously knew that this one was happening.

All he does know is that you and Lia don’t exactly coexist peacefully in his mind. He likes Lia – definitely a bit more than as a friend – but you’re his best friend, his rock, the person who’s been there with him throughout everything.

It kind of feels like he has to choose between you two, and he really doesn’t like that.

So here he is, standing in the corner of the kitchen with a cup of (definitely spiked) punch in his hand that he’s yet to take a sip of. The noise level is a bit lower here, which is nice – he nearly got sensory overload when he walked into the living room. He mindlessly scrolls through his phone with his other hand, its light shining on the web shooters still around his wrists.

Even though he isn’t patrolling tonight, better safe than sorry.

“Mark!” Lia’s voice turns his head. She pops into the kitchen. “You made it!”

“Yeah.” He smiles as best he can, giving her a quick hug. “Thanks again for inviting me.”

Is that a blush on her cheeks? Mark can’t tell if it’s that or just the lighting leaking in from the living room. “Well, you aren’t usually at parties.” She tucks a lock of hair behind her ear. “I wasn’t sure if you’d actually come.”

Mark doesn’t really know how to reply to that. After a short but awkward silence, he just gives a sheepish smile and a “sorry.”

“No, don’t be sorry!” Lia laughs, her infectious cheer returning immediately. “Why are you here, by the way? Let’s go to the living room, that’s where all the fun is!” And before he can stop her or stutter an excuse to stay, she’s taking his wrist and dragging him into the chaos.

Mark’s feet stop at the edge of the crowd, but Lia’s take her to the middle. She’s a really good dancer, he can tell. She actually moves to the beat, while the others mostly just hop around weirdly.

But he doesn’t really like dancing, even though it’s fun to watch. The crowd is also pressing into him, making him feel uncomfortably claustrophobic. Lia’s smiling at him, obviously trying to get him to join in, but the music is too loud and the smell of sweat and alcohol is too heavy and before he knows it, he’s holding up his phone as if that’s an excuse and racing out of the house.

Outside, the air is warm and heavy, but there’s an underlying breeze that cools Mark’s cheeks and soothes his mind. His feet don’t stop once he’s left the house, and he keeps walking until he’s reached the sidewalk just in front of the lawn.

No one’s here. Everyone’s inside, dancing or drinking or wreaking havoc. Mark takes several deep breaths, in through the nose and out through the mouth, before he feels calm enough to think properly.

Looking back at the house, he doesn’t really want to go back. Mei gave him enough money to pay for an Uber back to the apartment, but he doesn’t feel like going home either. Instead, he memorizes where Lia’s house is and starts walking.

The quiet of Lia’s neighborhood is somehow very similar but also very different from his own. There’s the same susurrus of crickets and the wind blowing through trees that makes Mark feels somewhat like he’s at home, but it’s a much more peaceful quiet. Here, it feels like nothing while happen. Meanwhile, on his street, there’s always something ominous about the silence. Like something could very well explode any second.

And then something does explode.

It��s pretty faint. If it weren’t for his enhanced hearing, Mark probably wouldn’t have heard it. He turns around, frowning.

He’s actually walked pretty far from Lia’s house. Here, the houses are a little more run-down, and there’s a broken fence in the direction Mark heard the noise. Upon closer inspection, it doesn’t seem like he’d be trespassing if he jumped over.

Maybe he shouldn’t do it. Mark’s fingers run over his web shooters. He’s pretty sure he could make it out of a fight alive, but he only has his hoodie to cover his face. It might not be enough.

(The fact that he wore a hoodie to a party is a testament to how much he doesn’t know about parties.)

Another small explosion sounds, followed by faint voices. Mark pulls up his hood, tightens the strings so that only his eyes are visible, and leaps over the fence.

To his surprise, he’s actually wandered into the large field just outside Jaemin’s neighborhood, next to an old abandoned building that a lot of kids play in. It’s good. If he needs backup, you’ll know where to go.

Doubt strikes him. He told you he wasn’t patrolling tonight. If he calls on you, you’ll know he lied about being sick.

Well, you already know. This will just confirm it.

Suck down your pride, he thinks. If he finds that he’ll need help, he’ll take yours. Even if it means revealing that he lied to you.

Some would say he’s too worried about all of this, that he’s making a big deal of nothing. But it’s you. He’s never really held any secrets from you, and on your end, you’ve always told him everything as well.

Enough. He shoves his thoughts away and starts crossing the field. Running just makes him realize how convenient swinging is, and by the time he reaches one of the trees surrounding the field, he’s extremely disgruntled.

He leaps into the tree. Just beyond the field, purply-blue light shoots out of something and knocks out part of the abandoned building. One man crosses his arms, displeased, and asks for something more “low-key.”

This is a weapons trade. And the light from said weapons is dangerously familiar.

Fuck.

Mark calls you without really thinking. You pick up on the second ring. “Mark? What’s wrong?”

“Can you get to the field just outside of Jaemin’s neighborhood?” He leaps into another tree, closer to the explosion. “There’s… three men. And a van. And…” He sucks in a breath. “The van is full of those glowing weapons.”

There’s a beat of silence on your end. Then – “I thought you were sick?”

Mark winces. “I’ll explain later. Promise.”

You sigh. “Give me ten minutes.”

. . .

Nine minutes later, you’ve leapt into the same tree Mark’s hiding in. Your face is covered by your mask, but he can already sense the suspicion and disapproval radiating from your hidden expression. He winces again, but it disappears quickly when you see the van.

“Shit,” you mutter.

Mark likes the way you can sum up situations into one loaded word.

“Stay out of sight for a bit,” you say. “You don’t have a mask, so it’ll be easier for them to identify you if they see you.”

He nods.

“I’m going to try to take out the one in the van.” You point to one man, who’s poking around the back of the vehicle. “Wait no, the other guy has a gun. Fuck…”

“I’ll take out the gun,” Mark whispers. “You go with the guy in the van.”

You purse your lips under the mask. “Okay. You said this is a trade, right?” Mark nods. “If you can, follow the guy who’s supposed to be buying. If we don’t get answers tonight, I think we’ll have to ask him some questions later. Meet me back at the apartment roof.”

“Got it.” Mark stretches out his arm. “Ready…”

“Now.”

His aim is perfect. The gun wrenches itself from the man’s holster just as you leap from the tree, entangling your guy’s legs in webbing.

“This was a set-up!” Mark’s guy yells, rounding on the buyer. The buyer quickly raises his hands and begins denying the accusation, but the other man pulls out another gun and whips it between Mark’s tree and the buyer.

You’re still tussling with the guy in the van, who’s picked up one of those three-pronged things Mark had to deal with and is now aiming it at you. There’s no way you can turn around to help.

Mark’s just decided to jump out of his tree too when you’re thrown out of the van with a blast of purple light. You get up quickly, but by that time, his guy has jumped into the van too and is revving the engine.

Then, because you’re fucking nuts, you shoot a web into one of the open back doors. The van starts driving away, dragging you behind.

He almost yells your name before he remembers that’s not a good idea, but a gasping shout still escapes his throat. You turn back just as the van starts speeding up. The message behind your masked face is clear.

GO.

The buyer starts sprinting away. Heart in his throat, Mark follows.

. . . . .

Covered in muck and dirt, you swing onto your apartment rooftop. You must look slightly unhinged, because Mark actually takes a small step back.

“Are you… okay?” he asks tentatively.

“No, I’m not fucking okay,” you snap, ripping off your hoodie. Your shirt is just slightly damp underneath, but it still stinks. “First, my best friend lied to me about being sick for some reason I still don’t understand. Second, I got roped into a mess because said friend found some criminals when he was supposed to be sick and apparently needed my help. Third, I was actually about to beat up said fucking criminals before a flying vulture man just fucking snatched me off the top of the weapons van, tossed me around in empty fucking air, and then dropped me into a goddamn fucking dumpster.”

Silence falls on the rooftop. You’re still seething – mostly because of the stupid vulture dude, what the fuck even was that – but Mark looks so guilty and upset that you start to feel sorry for yelling at him.

“Look, Mark.” You rub a hand over your face before remembering said hand was covered in muck until a few seconds ago. Ugh. “I’m sorry. I’m just really mad about the vulture guy and losing the van, and I’m definitely still upset that you lied to me, but I shouldn’t have yelled at you.”

“No, I’m sorry too.” Mark shuffles his feet a little. “I… Lia invited me to her party at the last AcaDec practice. I didn’t really want to go, but she looked so hopeful that I decided to. She didn’t invite you, and it just felt like it’d be really awkward if I told you about it, so I told you I was sick.” He winces.

Irrational anger boils in your chest but you force yourself to breathe. “You shouldn’t have lied, Mark.” You cross your arms, but your voice remains steady. “You should’ve told me. Why didn’t you think I would understand?”

“I don’t know.” Mark is starting to look frustrated, which makes you even more upset. It’s mostly his fault you’re in this situation now, anyway. “It always seemed like you didn’t like Lia very much.”

Well, that much is true. But how dare he say it out loud?

“Whatever.” You know you’re being slightly (really) petty, but you’re covered in dumpster juice and you think you have the right to be angry. You also really want a shower. “You don’t need to sneak around to be with your crush. It’s fine by me. Just go.”

“Y/N, that’s not fair,” Mark protests. His face twists up in anger.

“Yeah, you know what’s not fair?” you snarl, holding up your ruined hoodie. “I had to go dumpster diving because you decided to lie about going to a party with your crush!”

“I didn’t know this would happen!” Mark snaps back. “And even if I’d told you the truth, we’d still have fought those guys anyway!”

You scoff. “Yeah, but you wouldn’t have lied.” Your lips curl. “Next time, just tell me the fucking truth. You don’t need to hide your crush around me, and you know I hate liars.”

You don’t stick around for his reply.

. . . . .

After last night, Mark doesn’t really feel like talking to you. He realizes he was wrong to lie, but he’s also pretty sure you’re overreacting. And logically, that would be sound because you were spitting mad at the vulture dude (who he kind of wants to see in person. Is he a cross between a vulture and a human? Or does he just have metal wings, like Falcon?) and you were thrown into a dumpster.

From the smell of your clothes, it wasn’t a very clean dumpster either. If such a thing even exists.

But he doesn’t feel like apologizing, not unless you decide to as well. He knows he’s being petty. And he isn’t usually petty.

Then again, he usually doesn’t fight with you either.

He still waits for you in the apartment lobby, anyway. Mark doesn’t feel so pissed at you that he’ll leave all of your traditions behind. You look a little surprised when you come down, but you nod at him in greeting anyway.

The walk to the train station is silent but filled with awkward tension. As the two of you descend belowground, Mark remembers when people asked him if you two broke up last year, when you hadn’t even actually had a fight.

He wonders if people will ask him that same question again today.

Five minutes pass in the train before Mark can’t bear the silence anymore. “I followed the buyer to his house last night,” he says abruptly. “He’s not far from us. I heard someone call him Davis.”

“Oh.” You shift awkwardly in your seat. “That’s… good.” A beat of silence. “When do you want to go and talk to him?”

God, Mark hates this so much. He almost swallows his pride and apologizes right then and there, but self-righteous anger boils in his chest again and he gladly lets it reign. “We can try and tail him Saturday afternoon?” he suggests.

You shrug. “Fine by me.”

The day is awful. The awkward tension between you two is literally palpable, especially since you sit next to each other in every class you share. At lunch, Haechan and Yeri try to keep up some conversation, but it doesn’t last longer than ten minutes before the words dwindle away.

After school, Mark makes up some excuse about wanting to visit Professor Tuan’s lab. It’s not a lie, really – he’s not required to come by today, but Mark has been wanting to pick up some scrap metal for some time. He wants to see if he can upgrade his web shooters and make them a little less bulky.

You nod and let him go without saying much. That would hurt a lot more if he didn’t know just how awkward you have to be feeling as well.

Mark sighs as he walks through the university halls. He aimlessly looks around the doors he pretty much knows by heart now – Dr. Yang’s has a chemical burn on his nameplate, while Dr. Brook’s door is marred by thumbtack scratch marks from his children – but one of them still catches his eye.

Dr. Roberts.

He narrows his eyes. Wasn’t that the same lab that set off his danger sense the day he felt jumpy for no reason?

Mark checks his phone. It’s four, and Dr. Tuan usually leaves at five.

Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to take a look inside Roberts’s lab.

There are security cameras here, he knows. But he won’t be doing anything wrong. And even if he gets caught by someone inside – though he can’t hear any heartbeats or breathing, so he thinks that’s unlikely – he can just pretend he was lost.

His knock on the door remains unanswered. When he turns the doorknob, it’s unlocked. He steps inside.

It’s a normal lab. Beakers of oily stuff and spare pipet tips litter the tables, while expensive-looking machines crowd the floor. It doesn’t look suspicious at all. His sixth sense isn’t going off at all, so he’s not in imminent danger.

It doesn’t make sense. His danger sense has never been wrong before.

Well, maybe it was a fluke. Something could’ve been on the verge of exploding in the lab that day, which his sense registered, but nothing actually happened. Maybe someone contained the explosion.

Something tells him that’s not the case, though.

It doesn’t matter. Mark doesn’t want to be caught snooping, so he quickly heads out, making a silent promise to come back and take a look again soon.

. . . . .

Saturday comes too slowly and too soon. You and Mark have loosened up a little, but there’s still tangible tension in the air when you two come together. So as the two of you walk to the buyer’s house – Davis, you remember Mark saying his name – the silence feels like it’s eating away at your soul.

Add that to the fact that it takes almost eight hours for this Davis guy to exit his house, and you want to die.

Okay, so maybe you did overreact a little that night.

Fine. A lot.

But in your defense, Mark knows how much you detest lying. The justice system did enough of that to your family. He also has to know how much it hurts to think that someone so close to you doesn’t trust you to know something.

Look, you might not like Lia very much. You don’t know why – maybe it’s because she always looks so perfect and poised, and the fact that she’s really smart too. Maybe it’s the fact that she’s rich and you’re still struggling along in life.

It’s probably jealousy. But you don’t have the desire to unpack all that, so you leave that thought alone.

Yet if Mark actually liked her, you wouldn’t actively discourage it. As far as you can see, Lia’s a decent person. She seems to like Mark for who he is, and not just because he can provide answers to the homework.

It hurts that he didn’t trust you enough to tell you he was going somewhere with her. The two of you are in high school, for fuck’s sake. If he wants to date, he can date. Where’s the problem in that?

As the minutes tick by, you consider apologizing to Mark over your earpiece. But that feels too much like apologizing over text, so you resolve to find a better situation at some point.

(Who knows when that point will come.)

Davis finally leaves his house at around three in the afternoon. You tell this to Mark over your earpiece, and he immediately begins following as per the plan. He’s supposed to figure out where Davis is going and clue you in. You’ll handle the questions because most criminals know your voice already (it’s a side effect of yelling awesome witticisms during fights) and because Mark has a tendency to stutter with strangers and not sound commanding.

An hour passes before Mark tells you he’s gone to a grocery store and rattles off the license plate of Davis’s car. You swing into the parking garage just as Davis walks in, and a well-placed glob of webbing sticks his hand to the car trunk.

“The fuck?” is all he gets out before you walk into view, mask on. You don’t know exactly where Mark is hiding, but you trust him to get you out if things don’t go as planned.

“Hi!” You put on an annoyingly cheery voice, flipping up to sit on the roof of the car. “I’ve got questions about your trade deal with the glow-y weapons from the other night.”

The guy pulls at the webbing. A stab of pride shoots through you when it doesn’t let him go. “What the fuck is this?” he complains, pointing at the sticky glob. “Come on, seriously?”

You shrug. “Maybe I’ll tell you how to get it off when you tell me everything you know about that group of people selling highly illegal and dangerous weapons.” You pause. “Oh, and if you know anything about a weird vulture dude working with them, that would be great as well.”

He looks up at you, eyes narrowed slightly. “You’re not very intimidating, you know that, right?”

That… kind of hurts. Underneath your mask, you pout. “If you say so. But I can stay here all day. And from the looks of it, you have ice cream in your bags.”

“How did you know?” Davis looks at you weirdly. “You smell it or something?”

You shrug again. “Don’t worry about it. Are you going to tell me what you know?”

“What’s in it for me if I do?”

A deep sigh passes your lips. Do you have to spell it out for everyone? “Those weapons literally took out the entire corner of Delmar’s deli.” You wave your hands around for emphasis. “The entire fucking corner. If stuff like that gets into more people’s hands, things are going to be a lot more dangerous than they already were.”

“The fuck would you know about dangerous?” Davis scoffs. “Where do you even live?”

“The neighborhood five streets down from you.” Your voice turns flat. “You know, the one where my parents were killed by a rich family’s drunk son, and my best friend’s uncle was shot by a thief no one managed to catch.”

That shuts him up.

“Look.” You rest your cheek on your fist. “I started doing this –” you wave a hand at your mask – “because I didn’t want other people to deal with the same shit that we did. And if you don’t tell me what I need to know, I’ll find out some other way. I don’t want those weapons in the streets. From what you said that day, I don’t think you do either.”

Davis sighs. “No, I don’t. I have a nephew in the area. Want to keep the place safe for him. The vulture guy’s a psychopath.” He looks into the eyes of your mask. “I know one of them. Charles Roberts. He’s not the vulture dude, but he’s pretty high up on the ladder.”

“Charles Roberts.” You repeat the name. Something about it feels familiar, but you’re not completely sure why. “Thanks, dude!” You flip off the car, ready to leave.

“Hey, what’s this?” Davis pulls at the webbing on his car. “You said you were gonna let me go!”

“Oh!” You turn around with your most beatific smile (even though no one can see it). “It’ll come off naturally in two hours.”

“I have ice cream!” he protests.

“I know!” You wave wildly. “Still a criminal!”

You don’t sweat it. Mark will definitely let the guy go, anyway.

. . . . .

Mark’s heart is pounding like nuts when the two of you sneak in Roberts’s lab under the cover of night. Just hours before, he’d almost had an aneurysm upon hearing “Charles Roberts” coming out of the buyer’s mouth. With a quick Internet search, he’d confirmed that Charles was indeed the first name of the professor who ran the lab that had given him the alert before.

Something makes him uneasy as you pick the lock. Sure, you’ve avoided all the security cameras as best as you can, and the lock opens quickly with a quiet snick, but there’s still a bad feeling in his stomach.

It isn’t like his danger sensor. No, there’s no imminent danger at the moment. He just feels… bad.

Thankfully, the enhanced sight that came with the spider bite allows him to see things in the dark much more easily than before. No flashlights means no increased chance of being caught. Aided by the dim glow of the emergency lights, the two of you start looking around.

Just like last time, Mark doesn’t find much at first. The beakers that littered the tables before have been cleaned and are now sitting in neat rows on a different table. Someone’s put the pipet tips into glass cabinets. A few experiments sit half-finished in incubators.

Then you find the trapdoor.

It’s underneath a huge machine that Mark doesn’t know the name for. If it hadn’t been for your increased strength, you probably wouldn’t have found it. Together, the two of you shift the device over and descend through the trapdoor.

Only to be immediately met with a blast of purple light.

Mark’s the second one in, so he doesn’t feel the full brunt of the attack. You drop like a stone, groaning, but Mark just feels slightly dazed. This light isn’t destructive, like the beam that cut through Delmar’s. It’s just… disorienting.

“Oh, it’s the spiderkids again!” someone says cheerfully. Mark rolls aside just in time for another beam of light to cut into the floor right where he was. He looks up.

A grinning man’s face meets his eyes. There are too many teeth in the smile. The eyes are cold and hard.

“You!”

Mark whips around to see you standing up slowly, clutching at your stomach like the light was something solid that actually punched your skin. “Fucking… vulture man!”

“This is the vulture dude?” Mark yelps before he can stop himself.

Mark can now see why Davis labelled this guy a psychopath. There’s no feeling in his eyes at all – just cold anger.

“And I thought I left you in the dumpster.” He lifts the weapon again. “Should I dump you there again?”

With a roar, you launch yourself at him just as two more men materialize out of the shadows. Mark immediately starts attacking, drawing their attention away as your fight begins.

Two flashes of light nearly blind him, while another nearly renders him immobile. He wrenches himself out of his daze, using his webs to pull himself onto the ceiling and drag one of the weapons away. Unsure what to do with it, he hesitates for a split second.

And in that second, the vulture guy decides to spread his wings.

You’ve got enough presence of mind to leap out of his reach, sending out jets of web fluid to trap the huge metal wings extending from a contraption on the man’s back. Mark hurls his weapon at the vulture, but he’s already crashing through the ground floor of the university, laughing loudly. Another crunch sounds faintly above and you swear. “He’s flown out of the fucking building.”

Mark turns around. The other two men have disappeared – where, he doesn’t know, because he can’t see any more openings here other than the trapdoor and the hole in the ceiling.

Something beeps ominously in the corner. Frowning, Mark looks over.

You come to the conclusion at the same time he does. “Bomb!” you yell, leaping for the trapdoor. You disappear from view, then a hand reaches down to help Mark jump out.

The beeping increases in volume and intensity as Mark jumps with all his strength. One hand grabs yours. The other releases a string of fluid, attaching to the wall just across. He scrambles out just as the bomb explodes.

His body hits a wall with a sickening crunch and he blacks out.

. . .

When Mark opens his eyes again, he’s in a darkened area just behind the university. Sirens blare, there’s a fire somewhere, and the sound of the explosion is still echoing in his brain.

“Mark?” Your face, frantic with worry, swims into his vision. He blinks, and your expression turns to one of abject relief. “Thank God!”

Air rushes past the skin of his face. Belatedly, he realizes you’ve removed his mask. “What happened?” he gasps out, trying to sit up.

“There was an explosion, and you got thrown into the wall.” You press your trembling lips together. “I got tossed away too, but I had enough time to react and sort of steady myself. I carried you out, but I couldn’t get us back home unless you woke up.”

The two of you watch in silence for a bit as a fire truck douses the flames. “Well, there goes our only lead,” Mark finally mumbles.

You sigh. “We’ll find another one.”

Doubt pushes through Mark’s muddled brain. “Should we?”

The look you give him is one full of confusion. “What?”

“I don’t know.” Mark finally sits up, resting his back against a wall. The cool night air helps clear his head, but it also makes his back feel more painful. “If we’re going to get into all of this trouble over it, should we really be the ones dealing with it? I mean, we’re only kids.”

“Mark, no one else knows about this,” you say, a note of anger entering your voice. “If we don’t figure it out, who will?” You scoff. “The Avengers? They only deal with world-scale stuff!”

“Well, maybe!” Mark snaps. “If it becomes a big enough threat, they’ll deal with it! We’re literally teenagers, Y/N – what else have we even done with this, besides make things worse?”

“What if we can make it better?” you yell. “You just want to leave it, even if there’s a chance that we could fix things?”

“Do you want to die for this shit?” Mark snarls.

Your eyes narrow to slits. “So you just want to give up.”

He doesn’t reply.

“Fine. Okay, fine.” You stand up and shove your mask back on. “Jesus. I can’t believe you. Fucking… doesn’t matter. I’ll figure this out on my own. Just stay home and do… fucking whatever.” You sigh. “Let’s go.”

Swinging back home is a nightmare. Between his slight headache, aching back, and the chill between you two, Mark thinks this whole experience might be worse than death. On the rooftop, you don’t even wait for him before climbing down the side of the building into your room.

Well, whatever. Mark stands by what he said before. All the two of you have done is fuck up – first the ATM robbers escaped, then everything got botched the night he went to Lia’s party, and now all the evidence of any wrongdoing has been exploded at the university.

Shit. Professor Wang’s and Professor Tuan’s labs are probably fucked up too.

The two of you can’t keep fucking shit up. He doesn’t want either of you to die because of a mistake. And if it takes his silence for you to realize that…

He can handle it.

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swamp-world · 3 years

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anyways. if... (1968). how to talk about it. tired ramblings below the cut. again, big TWs for a lot of stuff.

im slowly in the process of rewatching it because i just havent had the time lately. it just...strikes me as such a strange film for what it is. i dont remember much, frankly. i remember the general idea, the general vibe, i think there was a lot i was too young to understand the first watch.

the first thing that comes to mind in this film is the idea of the school shooting. they didnt call it such, no, but that’s what we would call it today. as a film made in 1968, it’s morbid and horrendous that they created an event in an overdramatized film, clearly meant to be divorced from reality, clearly satirical in every way, and that by the end of the century, Columbine would happen, and within the 21st century, school shootings became a regular event in america. a cursory search shows that there certainly were instances of school violence before this (a man shot a student in a dorm; a principal shot colleagues, etc.) but none so sensationalized or arguably senseless as those in Brenda Spencer, as Columbine.

and that’s where this film walks a tightrope. there are multiple ways to see the film and all of them are true in at least part.

1. many will recognize malcolm mcdowell from his role in A Clockwork Orange. many will recognize that as a film that white american men tend to look to aspirationally instead of with horror, as it was designed. same vein as the matrix, fight club, the joker, etc. this movie is where he got a lot of his character inspiration from. and there’s definitely that same idea of the disillusioned loner who, if given a gun, can make enough of a revolutionary difference in a world that has wronged him

2. is this supposed to be a good thing? the film seems conflicted itself at times. the teachers are in the wrong, certainly. oh, that’s without question. it doens’t paint the violence as aspirational, i dont think. i do think that there’s this idea of a fictionalized, sensationalized and glorified revolution, fighting back against the school system and society

3. this was part of a “series” that was satirizing british school, healthcare, and capiatlism. make of that what you will.

4. it predates monty python as well but absolutely demonstrates much of the same humouor and influence and aims. i can’t explain the surrealness of it.

5. the disillusioned students aren’t disillusioned for no reason. the school system strips them of their character, reduces them to family names and no personality, turns a blind eye to abuse at the level of peers, encourages harmful hierarchies within the student body that involve active abuse and corporal punishment, and aims to produce machines instead of people. this is an understandable reason to be upset. it’s something we still grapple with today.

6. the context of the school shooting in the film absolutely must, for my intentions here, be separated as much as possible from our modern conception of the school shooting. the ones that we encounter in the modern world are certainly a product of the issues that the film brings up, but i want to do my best to look at it in its own time, as much as i am able to with my limited knowledge

7. the modern school shooter tends to be a “lone-wolf” domestic terrorist, and i will not hesitate to call them such. they tend to be incels, white, straight, young men who perceive themselves as being rejected by women, or who are motivated by alt-right and fascistic beliefs and goals. these are acts meant to inspire terror in those populations. i would certainly classify these as hate crimes, since that’s their primary motivation. in If... on the other hand, they are very clearly attacking the system of british education itself and the people who perpetuate it. (in a lot of situations, this isn’t inherently much different from the way that a lot of modern school shooters see themselves: important to consider.) rather than being violence deliberately directed at the students, it’s specifically on Speech Day, where parents, administration, faculty, etc. are all present. These are the people in power; these are the ones who send their children to these schools, who fund them, who run them, who allow, encourage, and enact the violence. it is not an aimless violence, nor is it a hate-motivated violence.

8. the shooting in the film is meant to be farcical and satirical. who would have imagined, in 1968, that this scene, meant to be the pinnacle of overdramatized and hyperviolent revolution in a satirical manner, not meant remotely to approach reality, would become something that people avoid watching because it has in fact happened to them? in 1968, who would have predicted Brenda Spencer, Columbine, Stoneman Douglas, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech? there was one significant school shooting in 1966, in Austin, that killed 28 and was the deadliest mass shooting for 18 years. but, and while this doesn’t diminish the violence, i want to emphasize that that took place at a university in america, not at a boarding school in england. the fundamental difference between the concept of adults, former military, gunning down 28 people; and a set of schoolchildren taking over the boarding school’s armoury and shooting at the headmaster, having been taught how to shoot those very guns on that very schoolground, is an extreme difference.

9. so, the shooting is designed to be an act of violence, targeting a system that the film paints as being actively harmful and deserving of a takedown, using the very weapons that the school taught them to use but never anticipated to have turned on them, and created in a farcical light: the idea that “this won’t happen, it’s too outrageous to be real”.

10. how do we take this these days? it seems, in many ways, like very little has changed. oh, corporal punishment isn’t practiced (or at least, not sanctioned, but certainly practiced). students are still molded to machine standard on the basis of class and aspirations spoon-fed to them by their parents. there’s still a significant divide between the working class and the capitalist class. there’s still rage simmering at the way that students have been abused by their schools. the violence that was seen as being overexaggerated at the time became a reality for a completely different set of revolutionary reasons, and the film balances the same tightrope as the matrix, as fight club, etc., between being commentary and satire that violent men will mark as aspirational and true rather than satirical and a warning

11. (that’s not to touch on the misogyny of the film)

this is apparently voted one of the best british films of all time, but that doesn’t mean much a lot of the time. it being a best voted doesn’t mean it’s popular or common or well known among people outside of britain, or outside of that generation; it doesn’t mean it was understood and received as intended.

the other thing i want to bring up about the film is the question of reality. the whole thing is so surreal and strange that the line between reality and imagination begins to blur regularly, but particularly near the end. there’s the question of whether this shooting actually happened in the film, or whether it was merely a twisted fantasy of mcdowell’s character. frankly, i would say that it doesn’t matter if it’s real, according to the movie or not. it genuinely doesn’t. this is what we as the audience see, and the intent is the same: either the boy is so driven to this violence that he actually does it, or he’s so driven to it that he fantasizes vividly about doing it. the point of it is still the same. it isn’t our job to know reality from fantasy; it’s possible that if it’s made up, the character himself isn’t aware of that. of course the film won’t make sense, it’ll be muddled and confusing and unrealistic, it’s satire and meant to bend the rules of reality to make a point. (those rules of reality included: schoolchildren do not use semiautomatic weaponry on their own schools. except for in texas, it does not happen.)

so what’s this to do with dark academia? let me answer that when it’s not 4am.

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stories-sometimes · 5 years

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I’ve Made A Huge Mistake {1/?}

Peter Parker x Reader, Quentin Beck x Reader

Summary: Peter just wanted to enjoy his trip to Europe, maybe even confess his feelings to his best friend. But along came a mysterious new hero to ruin all of those plans. Peter and his class are aged up and in college.

Warnings: Violence in later chapters, manipulation, age gap

Word Count: 2087

Series Masterlist

Main Masterlist

~~~

The blip had been stressful, college had been stressful, overall it was pretty safe to say Peter’s life was ridiculously stressful at the moment. He was hoping this trip to Europe would help him blow off some steam. And who knows, maybe it will be the perfect time to tell his best friend that he was madly in love with her. So there he was, standing in an airport with Ned, waiting for her to show up. Finally she did, looking effortlessly perfect. She’d always been pretty, and he’d probably always been in love with her, but now she was on a whole other level. And somewhere along the transition between schools she found an affinity for short skirts, which Peter (along with the majority of the male (and some female) population on campus) firmly believed was purely to torture him.

“Hey, you look great,” Peter said, feeling a strong sense of pride as he watched her face turn a couple shades of red darker. “You excited?”

“Yeah, I really need this break.” She responded.

“Same, wanna just be a normal person for once.”

“So no Spiderman?” Peter shook his head. “What are your guy’s plan then?”

“Single bachelors in Europe.” Ned answered, Peter watched her carefully, trying to figure out if her face did drop a little or if it was just his imagination.

“Well that’s his plan.” Peter mumbled.

“What’s your plan then?”

“I don’t know, just gonna see what happens.”

“Alright, I should probably go check in on MJ.” She said as she walked away. Peter watched her, admiring the way her legs looked in that skirt.

“Single bachelors in Europe.” Ned tried to remind him.

“Yeah, that’s your plan.” Peter answered absentmindedly. The plane journey was reasonably uneventful, minus her falling asleep on Peter’s shoulder and him trying to make sure his brain didn’t short circuit. And somehow Ned managed to start dating Betty, neither her nor Peter could figure that one out.

They finally reached Venice, and even though their hotel was a little shoddy, the city itself was more beautiful than any of them could have imagined. The three friends all split up, Ned went off with Betty, she went off with MJ and Peter was walking around the city on his own, aimlessly wandering around the old streets. One small jewellery store ended up catching his eye. It was down a small alley, a good walk away from the Grand Canal. There was a delicate silver necklace with a detailed, glass daisy charm.

It reminded him of when they were kids. How she thought they were the prettiest flowers and how he would search round parks and the occasional crack in a sidewalk for them. He’d bring them to May, who would help him tie a bow around them. Then the next day he’d give them to her at school, feeling the greatest satisfaction a kid could possibly experience when he saw her face light up. It would be the perfect gift to go along a lifelong love confession.

Peter entered the store. Lucky for him the necklace was within his budget. He carefully placed the package in his pocket, planning out how to tell her how he felt in his head. He strolled out of the store, an extra little pep in his step.

“Boh.” Mj said, popping up behind Peter, closely followed by her.

“What?”

“Boh. It’s the perfect word in the world. Italians created it, and I just discovered it.” MJ explained.

“She’s very proud of that.” She said, smiling at MJ’s unusual excitement.

“What does it mean?”

“That’s the thing, it can mean a million things. It can mean ‘I don’t know’, ‘get out of my face’, ‘I don’t know and get out of my face’. It’s the best thing Italy ever created, except for maybe espresso.”

“Oh, so you’ve been drinking espresso.”

“How did you possibly guess that.” She jokes making Peter laugh. MJ sticks her finger up in response to her two friends. A man came up to the three of them before MJ shooed him off with a simple boh.

“Boh is my new superpower. It’s like the anti aloha. I was born to say this word. So, what’s in the bag?”

“Um, boh.” Peter responded.

“Nice.” MJ smiled before walking away after she spotted Brad, leaving Peter and her alone.

“You think they’ll get together?” She asked Peter, watching MJ and Brad interact.

“No!” Peter said surprisingly abruptly, “why, did she say something to you?”

“She likes him, thinks he’s really nice. But she’s not ready for a relationship at the moment, the world’s too messy for that right now.”

“Tell me about it.”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t want them getting together. Don’t think they’re right for each other.” Peter said.

“Oh.” She said, feeling her heart drop a little. Why did he care so much about MJ’s love life?

“So you two have a nice time?” Peter smiled.

“Yeah, the city’s insanely pretty and I also got to find out how much pigeons like MJ.” She replied, trying to lighten the mood and ignore the jealousy bubbling in her chest.

“Wait … what?”

“Yeah, I’ve got pictures.”

“You have got to show me.” There was multiple photos of an awkward-looking MJ covered in a stupid amount of pigeons. In front of them a hoard of crabs scurried out of the water.

“Whoa,” she said, moving her phone away to watch the animals. “What the hell?” All the water around them began to flow towards the middle of the river. Seconds later the water exploded above the river. People quickly began to panic, running away from the water. Ned and Betty slammed into her and Peter, scrabbling out of their gondola. The water soon formed a giant-like monster.

“What is that?” Ned asked, panicked as he scrambled out of the boat.

“I don’t know, I don’t know.” Peter shouted back, “You just need to get them out of here.” He gestured to Betty and MJ. Ned nodded, guiding the two girls far away from Peter.

“Do you have your suit?” She asked him. He shook his head. “Why not?”

“I’m on vacation.” She glared at him. “You need to get out of here, don’t worry about me just get to safety.” He said, holding onto her shoulders protectively. She nodded.

“Take this.” She said, pulling out a masquerade mask from her bag before kissing his cheek and running off. He blushed before regaining his composure and placing the mask on his face. The monster smashed through the surrounding buildings sending rubble raining down on the fleeing civilians. Streets flooded with water as parts of the monster flew out to attack. Peter put on his web shooters and shot out at the monster. The web went straight through it. You fucking idiot, he thought to himself. He spotted a bridge, vaulting over poles sticking up in the river to get to the higher ground. Before he could prepare himself for a fight he was hit by a blast of water. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a masked figure fly down, shooting green beams at the water. The figure was dressed in green and golden armour with a fishbowl-like mask. Peter watched the mysterious guy fight the monster, the water thrashed out, hurling the man into the water. Peter panicked, climbing up the side of a building to get a better view of the situation. The man somehow remained reasonably unharmed and flew back up to carry on the fight.

“Hey!” Peter shouted, getting the attention of the man, “Let me help, I’m really strong and I’m … sticky.”

“I need to draw it away from the canal.” The man shouted, flying towards the city centre, luring the monster away from its source of power. As the man flew away Peter swung up to a bell tower that was about to fall - potentially about to crush a number of civilians, including a cluster of his classmates. He shot his webs to more stable buildings, using all his strength to prevent its collapse, ignoring the pain as the bell slammed into his head. He manages to pull the tower back into place, shooting a series of webs to keep the tower up. He stood up to watch the man formed green mist around the monster, repeatedly hitting the monster with it. The monster weakened, losing water and power. The man flew up to closer to the tower Peter was on. Green triangles sent beams out at the monster until it was about to be defeated. Right before the monster fell Peter spotted her standing on a bridge behind the monster.

“My friend’s on that bridge.” Peter shouted, the man looked from Peter to her, frozen in fear, cemented to her spot on the bridge. The man sent one final blast out at the monster and as it fell towards the bridge, the man flew out towards it. The remaining water crushed the bridge below it, leaving her screaming as she began to fall down into the water. Peter felt the world crumbling down around him, he’d lost too many people, he couldn’t risk adding her to the list. He began to swing out towards her, but before he could reach her he saw the man dive into the water, soon emerging with her in his arms. Peter relaxed instantly, dropping down a safe distance away from his friends. He watched as the man held tightly onto her as he placed her down on the ground. The college students all cheered for the man as he saved their friend.

“You alright?” The man asked her, continuing to hold her as she coughed up the water. He had one hand on her waist and the other placed high up on her leg, dangerously close to the end of her skirt.

“Yeah, I can’t thank you enough. I thought that was going to be the end.” She said, smiling admiringly up at him. Her hands also remained holding onto him as though if she let go she’d be back in the water.

“I couldn’t let you die on my watch.” He said, his hand leaving her waist to push the wet hair out of her face. She blushed, looking down at his other hand. Only then did he seem to realise how high up her leg his hand was. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

“No, it’s fine, I don’t mind.” She replied, the same grateful tone in her voice. She pulled down her skirt slightly as he helped her up.

“Here, take this, it’ll warm you up a little.” He said, removing his cape and wrapping it around her shaking shoulders.

“You sure you don’t need it?”

“I’ve got a spare one, you need it more than I do.” He pulled the cape tighter around her, he placed a hand on her cheek which she instantly leaned into, “stay safe.” He said before finally flying away, waving to the cheering crowds around him. Peter had watched the two’s interaction from afar, a strong feeling of guilt consuming him that he wasn’t there to help him. He had vowed the day she found out he was Spiderman that he would always be there to protect her, save her from any harm that may come her way. And if it wasn’t for this mysterious saviour, she could have easily been dead. Peter tried to push these feelings aside. His classmates now all surrounded her, checking she was alright, asking about the man, failing to hide their envy of the small interaction. Peter walked slowly back to the group, checking that the necklace was still intact. Thank God it was.

“Peter!” She shouted, running over to him and wrapping her arms and the cape around him. “Thank God you’re alright, I was so worried. How are you?” She buried her head in his neck.

“Hey, hey, this isn’t about me. You almost drowned, I should be asking you that. I promised to protect you and I didn’t. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t you dare apologise.” She said, lightly smacking him on the chest. “You had other things to deal with.”

“I just can’t lose you as well.” Peter hung his head.

“You’re not going to, I promise.” She smiled at him, he looked up at her through his lashes. Her heart swelled and she almost hated him for how adorable he looked right now. “Who was that guy?”

“I have no fucking clue.”

#peter parker #peter parker x reader #peter parker imagine #peter parker x you #peter parker x original character #quentin beck #quentin beck x you #quentin beck x reader #quentin beck imagine #marvel #marvel fic #spiderman #mysterio x reader #mysterio imagine #mysterio #spiderman far from home

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whump-town · 4 years

Text

Shattered Hearts, Fractured Lungs

(Warnings for: school shooting, violence, language, and heart failure)

Emily Prentiss just wants to do her job but a messy case sends her sprawling into the arms of a dying man with a toddler and his weird, broken family.

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken pieces.” -Ernest Hemingway

They sit in the back of a cramped van. The heat swelters between them. Thick enough to cut. It makes it pretty damn hard to breathe between how close they all have to sit atop one another and the lack of air conditioning in the back. Still, there’s no time to complain about the heat. They need to get into their head spaces. They need to be prepared.

The van comes to a halt and before the engine is even cut, the side door is thrown open. They dismount fluidly, the product of constant practice. “We know the target. Don’t be stupid. Don’t take any chances. We’re in and out, are we clear?”

She’s not accustomed to working with SWAT but that doesn’t matter. They’ve got an active shooter in an elementary school. Bureaucratic nonsense can be put aside for this. She’s so ready to take the building, she doesn’t so much as blink an eye as SWAT takes the command. Sure, she’s supposed to have it but in the face of getting into this building and saving kids and bossing around a bunch of overgrown toddlers in tactical gear… she’s not butting heads over this.

Rifle cradled into her shoulder, she follows the others in.

It’s a simple protocol.

“3.”

“2.”

“1!”

But things are never that simple.

The first room they enter makes her heart drop.

On the floor, is a single man. A single teacher. He’s sitting upright against a desk. It’s the tiniest little chair she’s ever seen and looks even smaller with his large frame sitting against it. His eyes raise to hers and he smiles. It’s soft and the crimson of his blood has stained his teeth, but she knows it’s taking every bit of strength he doesn’t have to produce it. “They’re in the cabinets,” he tells them.

It takes her a moment to understand him. His voice is raised just above a whisper and strained with his pain but she nods her understanding. He'd moved his students to the cabinets lining the west wall. She moves from the others. There isn't a need for her to be told that she's their best bet in protecting the children saved by their teacher. The children will trust her.

She opens the first door and stifles the soft shocked noise she makes. "Hello," she greets softly. They're fucking pre-schoolers. "Hey, baby." The softly crying boy goes straight into her arms. Behind her, the other's call for medics.

"Prentiss, we're leaving Anderson with you."

She throws a glance over her shoulder and sees Anderson kneeling down beside the teacher. "Okay," she responds, moving to the next cubby.

In total there are six children. Four boys and two girls. She does her best to protect them from seeing their teacher bleeding out on the floor but they're frustrated. Not a single one is happy with her for not letting them go crawl to the man. They cry softly for him and she knows the way that he's writhing away from Anderson's touch that he wants to be with them just as badly.

"Fuck."

Emily whips around. Anderson and the teacher had been pretty loud. Mumbling curses between the two of them as Anderson laid heavy and constant contact on his painful wounds but she hadn't been able to make out much of what they were saying. Not until now. The single syllable word breaks through the tension of the tiny room.

"No!" She moves to her feet but it's too late.

The shooter looms in the doorway. His blood is landing in quick, heavy drops beside him. She knows he's hurt and he's trying to take out as many people as possible. And his current line of sight is the teacher and Anderson.

He unloads as much of his clip as he can before her bullet hits its mark.

Blood sprays, the children sob.

She clears the body, seething with anger as the sounds of ragged breathing and sobbing children are measured out behind her. Scooping the gun up in one hand she shoves it away, watching it clatter across the cheap linoleum tile in the hall. Away from them.

"Suspect is down," she says shakily over the radio piece in her ear. "I need medevac, stat on the west side of the campus! I have an agent and a civilian down and six kids in here like sitting ducks." She turns back into the room and feels her chest sink for the second time today. So much for the protocol. "Anderson?"

She sinks down beside the teacher and Anderson. The children are horrified by the sight of the blood but they've grown steady with the presence of the other man.

His dark hair is plastered to his skin. She can recognize past the cold sweat and the dark bags under his eyes that he's attractive. "I'm Aaron," the man rasps, wincing as his body is consumed in a wave of pain. His face is dangerously pale but he manages to control his face enough to force himself to relax. This is the first time she's really been able to get a good look at him. But, his furrowed brows and light brown eyes aren't what's important.

The children are gathered close to him are who she needs to be watching out for. Each one is gripping his hands or articles of his clothing. Even as he lies dying, they understand the safety he presents. So, she has to trust their judgment.

He had saved them and he wouldn't change a thing about what he'd done.

She's torn between what she's supposed to do. Anderson's unconscious and he won't last five minutes with or without her help. He's quickly bleeding from what she can only assume is an arterial wound. She's kneeling in his blood. Covered in it. While the teacher- Aaron, she's reminded- needs help too.

"I'm Emily," she responds. She moves to shake the hand he's weakly lifted when the hall behind them is flushed in beams of light: help. She moves to them, shouting above the radio noises to draw attention to their situation. Leaving the man on the floor and the children with him.

She's greeted at the door and the feeling of relief is mutual when she steps into the hall and sees Derek.

"Princess," he sighs, pulling her into his arms. The high pressure of the situation they're in is unbelievable but to hear her voice through his radio calling for help in a frantic, shaking voice had made his stomach tie itself in knots. Emily Prentiss is a strong woman, unphasable but this a new extreme. It's past conceivable.

He can breathe. "I thought-" she's his best friend. Hell, most days she's his only friend.

She pushes her body closer to his. Behind her shut eyes all she can see is Anderson. The blood- there was so much blood. It seemed to just keep pouring out of him. Anatomically, she knows the human body holds liters but…

"Shh," Morgan runs a hand over her head. This isn't about images. She's not a female agent who has to micro-manage every expression she has to be taken seriously. They're just two agents who have been through the worst case they've ever worked. They're just hurting.

They're just broken.

He knows something isn't right the moment he looks over to his left and finds David Rossi. The older man is practically all of the family he has, as well as his only friend. But in all the years he's known the other man, he's never once seen his resolve so crumbled. His faith so broken.

Dave's name gets caught in the back of his throat. It comes out a mangled, pained cry grunt as an ache settles across his chest. It feels like there are hands pressing down on his chest, keeping him from breathing.

It had taken a lot of arguing for Dave to get himself access to Aaron's ICU room. No amount of doctor talk could push Dave away and no amount of Dave's in-depth explanation of Aaron's "love language" seemed to be doing the job either. But with time and as the scene calmed, Dave was allowed back. Mostly, so that the doctor's wouldn't have to be the ones to explain that one of the three casualties had been Aaron's ex-wife, Haley.

It seemed an unfair price to pay but Dave didn't care so long as his trouble-finding prodigy didn't wake up alone and in pain. And Dave made sure he was there at Aaron's bedside for as long as he could be.

"Hotch," he grabs the younger's man's hand. Gently calling out for him as Aaron's eyes find Daves. The first thing he notices is the absence of Aaron's laser-like focus. His eyes are on Dave but it's like they can't quite focus on him. "How are you, son?"

Hotch swallows thickly around the sharp pain in his throat, wincing. After a moment, he manages to control his body and force out a weak, " 'm okay."

That's a blatant lie. For more reasons than one.

Dave is sitting on a bomb. A ticking time bomb.

The doctors had found themselves at a dead end with Aaron. They'd fixed the damage done to his chest. He wouldn't be winning any wet t-shirt contests but his stitches wouldn't rip and he'd heal with time. The problem was that his heart had been under too much strain. He'd lost too much blood. He'd pushed himself too far.

He needs a new heart by the end of the year.

"Okay," Dave whispers, his fingertips stroking back Aaron's hair from his face. "I'm right here," he promises as Aaron's eyes start to drop back down. David Rossi is going to have to watch as the boy he'd practically raised dies slowly and painfully. The transplant teams won't care that Aaron's a single father. They won't care if he saved his classroom of kids in a shooting.

They'll just see a man in need of a heart.

And they'll all see a list of people who need it just as much as Aaron Hotchner.

"I'm right here, son."

She's absolutely seething. The world seems to be falling in around her. There is no balance and she's certainly convinced herself there can't be a God. Not a merciful one, anyways.

"It's not that big of a change," Morgan tries and fails to comfort. He knows it's not that simple. He knows it the way everyone knows it. She's too unstable to work. Not that anyone can blame her. She'd seen awful things. Watched a friend bleed to death. Comforted children in a dark room. And all for what?

A reassignment.

He stops at the address she'd given him and when he sees the neighborhood and the house… he understands her frustration even more. They're kind of in the middle of nowhere. It's close enough to the middle of everything that stores aren't a long drive but every house on the block is boring and they didn't pass a single person younger than sixty.

"Look," he points to the beat-up old jeep sitting in her neighbor's drive-way. They watch in silence as an older man gets out of the driver's side and a flutter of hope is shared between them as the passenger's door is opened right after, a man about their age sitting in the seat. That optimism is kicked out of place.

They watch in stunned silence as the younger man crumbles into the other's arms. An oxygen tank pulled behind them.

"We should probably-"

Emily looks away, "no." She looks down at her lap, to the hands she's clenched there in her obvious tension. It's dark and it's twisted but she can't. She can't feel anything past the pain in her own chest. The vulnerability of the scene before her is too much. It's overwhelming.

Morgan can't stand it. He throws his door open and goes to the men, anyways.

She can hear them talking.

"Derek Morgan. I work for the FBI," Morgan informs the pair. He hits it off with the older one. The man's hands had been warm and calloused. He assumes he's the other man's father. "What about you guys?"

Morgan finds himself being bathed in a warm smile. "Teachers," the man says. "I'm Dave and this grumpy son-of-a-bitch is Aaron." Before Aaron can grumble- or gasp- out a retort, Dave amends, "but everyone calls him Hotch."

Morgan nods his understanding, he throws a hooked thumb in the direction of Emily in the car. "I know a thing about brooding co-workers." Sure, Morgan doesn't outright understand what's wrong with Hotch but he knows pissed at the world when he sees it. "That's my partner, Emily Prentiss. She's moving in right over there."

Dave pats Hotch's shoulder, it's nothing more than softly laying his hand on Hotch. He knows his pain bad and Dave isn't aiming to make it worse. "You need any help," he asks, moving in union with Hotch as he eases him onto one of the chairs on his scrappy porch. It's not much but Hotch needs a break before Dave pushes him into bed.

Hotch melts into the old wood of the chair. It's a learning curve but he's a quick study and closes his mouth and tilts his head back, pulling in wheezing inhales as he struggles to breathe. Allowing the oxygen canals to do their job and supply him with a steady stream of cold air. It's not even ten feet from the car to the porch. He'd never expected dying to be this painful.

Or so fucking slow.

"We'd really appreciate that," Morgan says, sincerely.

Dave nods his head, "just give me a minute and I'll meet you over there, okay?" It's just across the yard, no one's going to get lost. He just needs to make sure Hotch is good. Morgan nods his head and ducks out of the yard, heading for his car with a thankful wave and nod.

Attention now turned back to Aaron, Dave can really take into consideration who the younger man's doing. "You cold?" It's hard to tell if his body is trembling with a chill or from the strain of their walk.

Hotch cracks an eye open, chest still painfully heaving as he struggles to breathe. He manages a single look, a glare that says it all. No.

Dave still shrugs out of his light jacket and pulls it up around Hotch's body. "I'll be right back," he promises. "Then to bed with you."

Hotch is almost looking forward to it.

A breeze sweeps through the yard and Hotch turns his face into it. He can feel the sunbathing his skin in warmth, the air blowing past him warmed by the humidity looming in the air. Yet, it's still too cold to go without a coat. That had always been one of Hotch's least favorite parts about Virginia.

He'd hated it even more with a group of preschoolers on the playground. The kids always got too hot and would strip themselves of the thin jackets their parents would send them in. Of course, there is always that one kid who's parents gets them a winter jacket on sale somewhere in the middle of September. When the humidity is still too high to be wearing anything besides a thin layer to protect from the breeze. But children are relentless in their pursuits of what makes them happy. And new winter jackets are a great sense of joy for them.

Hmm, he'd never have to deal with that again. He… He already misses it.

Feeling an eerie chill run down his neck, he cracks an eye open and finds the woman from the car staring back at him. She has a box in her arms while Dave and Morgan move past her with an awkwardly built coffee table. As he lifts an eyebrow in confusion, she blinks and lowers her gaze. Both unable to shake the unmistakable feeling of deja vu.

Dave invites them both over for dinner.

Hotch suffers through angry nausea he's hit with at just the scent of the spaghetti. The worst part is that no one can make spaghetti as well as David Rossi. Besides, he can't shake this weird feeling in his chest. And no, it's not the slowly dying from a failing heart feeling. That's distinct and it's just intense never-ending pain. This is… it's deja vu. He's seen this woman and he knows she recognizes him.

There was a point in time when he'd be pissed that anyone is seeing him so weak. He's leaning his weight into Dave, his body too weak to even carry him. He'd lost substantial weight over the last few weeks since waking up in the hospital. They'd given him a year and now he's looking at a month, maybe.

The damage had been worse than they'd been expecting.

And he's going to leave his son an orphan.

"Daddy!"

Emily watches silently as the brooding man- Hotch, Morgan had informed her- is nearly swept off his feet by an overly excited toddler. He's quickly followed by a brightly dressed blonde woman and a scrawny brunette man. Neither can halt the toddler's progress.

Not that Hotch minds.

"Jack," Hotch manages, his voice a breathless grunt as Jack throws his arms around his legs. It's the first time she's seen anything other than a pained grimace on the man's face. It makes it much easier to see how young the man actually is. The smile takes years off and she's forced to look away as she thinks about just how attractive he is. "Hey, buddy."

The toddler beams up at his father, a toothless mess that just adds onto the adorableness of the scene before her.

"Sorry," the scrawny man grunts out. His face is flushed with his concern and anxiety over not being fast enough to stop Jack's head-on collision. "We tried to subdue him as much as possible-"

Whatever excuse he's putting into place is cut off as the brightly dressed woman steps in front of Emily, her hand outstretched. "Hi-ya!" If it's at all possible, she's smiling harder and brighter than the little boy. "I'm Penelope! That's Spencer."

Emily takes the woman's hand, unable to stop an easy smile from spreading over her own face.

"I take it you've met Hotch and Dave?" she asks, throwing a thumb over her shoulder in their direction. She leans in as if telling a secret, "Hotch isn't always so grumpy, I promise."

Somehow, Emily finds that really hard to believe.

"I teach Kindergarten!" She grins, "we all teach in the same elementary school." The way that she looks at the others garners a strong sting in Emily's chest. They're a little family. A wolf pack all centered around the man who Emily can't quite wrap her head around. They seem to love him… she wonders what that's like.

The sudden sound of Jack crying evokes an instant panic in Emily's chest. It reminds her of the school and the kids and the- and the man. Her eyes find Hotch's over the crowded room. He'd been so much worse then but the dark bags under his eyes and his pale face- it's him. He was the man. He is Aaron. The same Aaron.

"Excuse me-" manners aside, she can't breathe. She tears out of the house, knees giving out beneath her. She can hear someone call out her name- probably Morgan, he's the only one who would care. She just hardly gets to the edge of the porch before losing all three bites of the spaghetti she'd managed to get down. It hurts and it only makes the panic swell in her chest.

She's still heaving over the edge of the porch, the cold metal of the railing biting into her skin, when the front door opens. She doesn't care enough to observe who it is. All she hears is the croaking groan of the wood from the pair of rocking chairs behind her. Someone taking a seat.

"I heard about your partner."

She jerks around, brows furrowed. It's Hotch. He still looks like shit and she's sincerely concerned watching him wheeze and fight for a steady breath. He seems fairly unphased and she wonders how long he's been like this- dying. Not that it's any of her business but he really doesn't seem like he should be chasing her around.

"His name was Anderson," he rasps, "right?"

She nods, lowering her gaze. "Yeah," she manages. She chews on her lip, wincing when her tongue moves over her tattered gums and tastes the copper of her blood. "He didn't make it to the hospital."

Hotch shakes his head, obviously displeased. "You saved the kids," he says after a moment. The sun has mostly gone down, leaving just the meager light filtering through the window for them to see one another. It's probably for the best but that doesn't really matter. They've already seen each other at their lows.

And yet they're still mostly strangers.

"You good," Emily asks, starting to worry a little with the sound of his breathing.

He waves her off, dismissing her with a simple, "this is my new reality until either I die or someone else does."

She grimaces at the plain truth of his statement but he doesn't owe her gentle lies. They're just strangers.

"You said the kids all made it out," she asks.

He nods.

"Good," she whispers.

They can agree there. No matter what that day has taken from them- peace of mind, family, and sleeping at night- at least the kids made it out. No matter what happens to them, at the least the kids are okay.

A huge shout out to @ontheoddoccasioniwritestuff and @clockedstar who both looked over this yesterday and gave me the positive reinforcement needed to actually write this.

#tw school shooting #tw voilence #tw death #criminal minds #criminal minds au #aaron hotchner #tw dying #heart failure #emily prentiss #hotchniss #hotly #david rossi #penelope garcia #spencer reid

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complete-trash-and-despair · 4 years

Text

A small, random observation I've made but honestly, it is just so...weird to see how the usual internet narrative, particularly in SocJus circles are actually moving forward to victim-blaming bullying victims even harder than before. I'm not kidding.

For male victims, we've already seen the various "weird, quiet kid" memes, showing that male introverted loners are really just school shooters in waiting. Aside from that, they have been recently stereotyped as "alt-right incels" (especially if they're white), that the reason why they avoid others is really because they're secretly a racist misogynist.

For female victims, those who are derogatorily referred to as "not like other girls", are similarly stereotyped to be that way because they have internalized misogyny. They hate hanging around more conventional female circles because they hate the very concept of femininity in itself.

Like, all in all this just seems to basically just send out the message towards bullying victims that the persecution they face is really their own fault, that if you acted in the more mainstream, conventionally accepted way then of course people would accept you, if they don't then that must be you're a -ist in some way. For all that this site in particular likes to talk about ~bullying is bad uwu~ they like to turn around and viciously attack victims when they actually speak about their experiences.

#Personal #Ramblings #Discourse #Bullying

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spidercakes · 5 years

Note

ABO prompt if you will - Tony is an alpha but Peter is a beta. They can’t be together as laws prevent alphas from mating with betas so they pine in silence. Peter gets kidnapped by Ross who is trying to figure out how Peter got his Spider-Man powers and one experiment changes Peter into an omega. When he is rescued, he is in heat and throws Tony into rut and the alpha claims his omega.

This prompt: implies smut

Me: ok, angst.

I mean, its still technically what you asked for minus the smut but also there’s like many angst.

Its not, Tony has decided, that they don’t want to. Its more like they can’t, not really, not without a level of backlash at every level that would make a relationship impossible. Its not exactly reasonable to start a relationship with someone full well knowing that everyone, including the damn government, will do their damndest just to tear you apart. Tony has no idea why there are laws preventing alphas and betas from being together, there’s no reasonable explanation for it. Omegas might be more fertile and have an easier time with alphas reproducing but its not like betas are infertile. And also he and Peter wouldn’t be a reproductive couple anyway.

Beyond that the reasons get even more senseless given that betas are just as capable of dealing with heats as alphas, and its not like alphas can’t survive without omegas in heat- they make it through most of their lives without that. That particular set of laws are, Tony has gathered, little more than forcing people to fit into the hegemonic mold of acceptability and he’s never been fond of that, but he’s also not stupid. Generally speaking any alphas and betas who test that shit see betas in jail for an extended period of time, not alphas. And he can’t do that to Peter. If either of them should end up in jail its him- first of all he’s actually broken like a stupid amount of laws in his lifetime and Peter hasn’t, and also he’s the older one. He’d miss out on less in prison, but the laws are designed to punish betas for not falling in line, not alphas or omegas.

So he gets stuck watching Peter from afar, working with him in the lab, and trying his best to avoid him blowing up in the field. “You know we wouldn’t say anything, right?” Bruce asks softly, disrupting his line of thought. Across the lab Peter is trying and failing to teach Dummy to fetch.

“Wouldn’t need you to. Since when have I been known to do anything subtly?”

Bruce sighs because they both know he makes a point. Its not like he hasn’t thought of that either, and Peter absolutely has. Came to him a couple months ago insisting they could manage it and Peter he’s sure could. But Tony has never been known for his ability to keep secrets or keep anything from the public eye. He literally decided to throw out Pepper’s cue cards and proclaim himself Iron Man because that felt less difficult than playing like he wasn’t. There’s no way Peter wouldn’t end up in jail over his stupidity.

When Peter goes missing it takes them a day to notice. Its not entirely unusual for him to disappear from the public eye for a day or two thanks to school and its exam season so Tony hadn’t thought much of it until May showed up at his door. “So you haven’t talked to him either?” she asks, clearly on the edge of panic.

Tony is too but he’s also not totally stupid- Peter isn’t exactly easy to contain with his abilities and hurting someone with super healing permanently is difficult. He once tested out a few theories on Steve and the guy is next to immortal. He can be killed, Tony is sure, but not through any normal means and that includes aging. Peter’s genes share a lot in common with Steve’s now, so he suspects he has a lot of the same resistances not that he’d ever dream of testing that out on him.

“May, I once watched someone drop an entire building on him and he mostly crawled out pissed off. I’m sure he’s fine, we just need to figure out where he is.”

“Is that actually supposed to make me feel better?” she asks and Tony sighs.

“My point is that he’s durable, exceedingly so. Causing genuine, permanent damage is nearly impossible. Its why we tend to send him out with Steve and Bruce- the three of them are stupid strong, hard to kill, and their collective intelligence makes them hard to deal with strategically too. Trust me May, wherever he is it might not be pleasant, but he’ll more than likely be fine when we pick him up.” Psychologically? Probably not, but he doesn’t want to freak her out and they’ve all, in some way or another, been held captive and tortured. At this point its like an Avengers rite of passage. That’s at least half their hero origin stories.

“How are you going to find him?” May asks and Tony sighs.

“His suit has tracking in it partially to keep tabs on him but also to keep tabs on the suit itself- that kind of technology wouldn’t exactly be put to any good use in the wrong hands. If we’re lucky no one has turned the tracking off. If we aren’t we’ll see where it went before he disappeared and go from there.” There’s also the added benefit of seeing where Peter ends up the most, where all of them do. It tracks villain patterns well so Tony will cross reference the rest of their tracking against Peter’s too, see if any data points stick out.

Bruce looks at the screen in front of him while Tony paces. Bruce is more than capable of tracking a wayward spider suit, a literal child could do it if need be, but Tony is stressed. “Ping is coming back,” Bruce tells him. “In uh… Florida? He have anything going on there?” he asks.

Tony walks over to the computer and pulls up where, specifically, he is. “No. We’ve all heard him refer to Florida as the smelly armpit of America so I don’t see why he’d go there on his own either,” he points out.

Bruce sighs, “I maintain that the smelly armpit is Texas, but you make a point. The suit shows a pretty much direct travel path too, which is unusual. How the hell would someone manage to get someone with his abilities that far in a straight path? It doesn’t even look like Peter fought back.”

No, it doesn’t. He went from one spot to the other, no zipping around in between to indicate a sign of struggle. He pulls up Peter’s vitals around the time he went missing and frowns. “What the fuck?”

Bruce leans in and frowns too. “Stasis?” he asks, raising an eyebrow.

“You’re telling me you think he was instantly frozen?” Tony asks, eyebrows drawing together.

“Not instantly, looks like he reacted but not in time. And the information is from his web shooters, not his suit. Don’t think he would have been in it at the time. Isn’t it pretty much frozen proof anyway?”

Not exactly, but for the purposes of this conversation yes so Tony nods. “Okay. Given the time of day he was probably about to patrol but why the fuck would anyone freeze him? Why the hell would that be a solution to how to kidnap Spiderman?” Seems kind of stupid, convoluted too. Yes he would be exceedingly difficult to get a hold of given that he’s flexible, strong, and not exactly lacking in intelligence and fighting ability but freezing him? That could go wrong in so many ways. The fact that it didn’t is probably a weird fluke.

Bruce frowns, looking over the information again before pulling up his location. “Tony. I could be wrong, and I’m probably not, but I’m pretty sure that’s one of Ross’ beach houses.”

Tony squints, “who the hell is stupid enough to take their victim to their house? Can’t be Ross.”

“The freezing would make sense if it was Ross,” Bruce says. Tony raises an eyebrow, unsure how Bruce figures that. “He has most of out data on our genes, he’s already tried to experiment on me like five times, and Steve was at his least dangerous when he was frozen. And he’d have enough information on Peter to know they work in really similar ways. Freezing makes sense if its Ross otherwise what kind of idiot would decide to try and freeze a super person with no guarantee that it would work? If not for the information that being frozen essentially stuck Steve in a suspended state of animation, which would make it a lot easier to run a few tests on him, then that makes no sense.”

He says that like villains make any sense at all. The last couple Tony has personally dealt with rode his ass because his father was a dick and because he was kind of mean and didn’t talk to the guy on a roof. Villains are people too, and people make no god damn sense. But he does make a point about the freezing thing, with knowledge of Steve’s suspended animation it would make sense to try and recreate those conditions and hope for the best. It might be common knowledge that he was found frozen in the ice and lived, but its not common knowledge how that happened. There are whole fan theories about it that proper everything from the correct assumption that the serum made him able to withstand extreme cold with a lowered heart rate and slowed brain activity to conserve energy to aliens. And clearly whoever took Peter wanted him alive otherwise what kind of dipshit tries to freeze their victim to death, then panics and takes them to Florida? Though, Tony supposes, that does seem like a Florida man thing to do.

“Do you really think Ross is that bad at strategy? What if it failed? What if Peter didn’t react to freezing the same way Steve had? What if he chose a different route that day for patrol? Ross might be a dumbass, but is he really that stupid?”

Bruce laughs a little. “Sometimes I forget how often you and Steve run every available option through your heads before you do something. Ross isn’t stupid by any means, but he has Peter’s patrol schedule and around this time of year he doesn’t break pattern, can’t because of exams. Strategically its a good time to move on a plan that requires him to be in a certain spot when you know he’s far less likely to deviate from his normal plans. And Peter might be super, but he’s not going to not have a reaction to being flash frozen. If Ross’ goal is to experiment on him if he managed to escape the freezing he still learned something. Its unethical science, but its not exactly bad science.”

Yeah, he’ll agree to disagree there. Tony knows a thing or two about winging it when it comes to experiments and it never goes well. Okay, it never goes well for him. Everyone else seems to not have problems with it but he’s got bad luck. Still makes him weary of that kind of thing and also Bruce has a vested interest in pointing the finger at Ross. Tony doesn’t think he’d do something like that on purpose on account of unlike Ross he’s not a shitty person but still. its worth it to verify Bruce’s suspicions. He runs the address and turns back to Bruce, “you seriously think Ross would be dumb enough to drag Peter’s ass back to his house? Come on, even Ross can’t be that stupid.”

“Its under his mother’s name, I think. Its still not smart, but its close to a secret army base in the area. Peter might be there, not the house.”

“But they left his suit in the house?”

“Ross might not be dumb enough to do that but a tactical team might be,” Bruce points out.

Yeah, alright. Address results return and sure shit Bruce isn’t wrong, including the bit about the house being under Ross’ mother’s name. Except the woman is dead so it shouldn’t be but that’s a whole other bag of shit Tony doesn’t give a damn about.

“Is he really this stupid?” he asks Bruce.

He shrugs, “he tried to shoot me with a gun he knew wouldn’t work given that I’d survived being bombed at that point so yes, I think he’s that stupid.”

Tony sighs. “I guess I should be grateful for it but something about this feels too easy.” Nothing these days is ever this easy for him, usually its Steve that gets all the luck so something is going to go wrong, he knows it.

Steve lets Bruce take the lead because he knows Ross the best but it doesn’t work well when he keeps deferring to Tony. Probably because he knows Peter’s suit’s information best, and the information they got from the web shooters, but still. That and he probably has the most vested interest in getting Peter back. But Bruce’s suspicions are right in that he’s not in the house- his suit was, and one of his web shooters, but Peter was nowhere to be found.

“Are you sure your scans are accurate?” Steve asks him and he knows he can’t see his face in the suit but he glares at him anyway. Steve’s cheeks turn a little red. “For a mask that thing has a surprising amount of judgement on it,” he mumbles.

“We’ve found him,” Natasha says over the comms. “Bruce was right about that army base- Clint, don’t you dare piss on- oh my god, someone get here and deal with this,” she mumbles.

Steve frowns and Bruce sighs, concentrating for a moment before he turns green and gets considerably larger. Tony’s mostly glad that the pants he made to accommodate worked and no one has to risk being exposed to Hulk dick ever again. And if Natasha isn’t concerned he assumes Peter is okay, if likely shaken. Or still in stasis. That’s probably the most preferable option, all things considered.

“He’s loopy,” Natasha tells him, leaning against the door frame and Tony frowns.

“Can you smell that?” he asks Steve, who looks red enough for Tony to assume that’s a yes.

“Smell what?” Nat asks, looking between the two of them and Steve sighs.

“Shit. Neither her or Clint have a strong sense of smell. Budapest,” he says in way of explanation not that Tony believes it. They say that to everything and fuck sakes he knows, he knows that’s Peter.

He pushes past Nat into the room they’ve found Peter in and his brain is already fuzzy but he forces himself to focus through the smell and attraction. Peter has bigger shit to worry about than Tony’s biology to react to his. Shit. Peter notices him fast too, perking up as he sees him and when Tony gets to him he reaches out, circling his arms around Tony and pressing his face into his neck. Tony swears for a moment he sees white and he doesn’t mean to let out a small, strangled moan in response but its almost impossible not to all things considered.

“Hey, Tony,” Peter murmurs, voice at his ear and Tony counts to ten to try and refocus.

“Hey, baby. Lets get you out of here, hmm?” He pulls away, or tries to, but Peter pulls him back fast.

“No, don’t go. Please,” he asks, voice small and eyes wide.

Jesus Christ.

Bruce looks over at Tony, who looks half lost himself let alone Peter, who is happily curled into his lap, face at his neck smiling away deliriously. Every time he sees some poor omega in heat he’s a little happier he’s a beta because it looks awful. “Do… do you think you can reverse that?” Steve asks.

His self control is remarkable, Bruce will give him that. His senses have to be going haywire at the moment and Tony is having a hell of a time holding back. Granted out of the two of them Bruce supposes he expects Steve to have the better self control anyway. He looks over at Peter though and winces. “I… don’t think I can,” he says not because he can’t, he’s sure he could figure it out eventually. But after so long of watching him and Tony dance around each other it seems cruel to pull them apart when they can actually be together now.

“How the hell does that happen?” Steve murmurs.

Bruce shrugs, “no idea. Presumably some type of gene therapy but it looks like the rest of his biology is the same, including the altered bits. I don’t see why Ross would want to turn a beta into an omega, there’s no real use for that.” And of all the eugenicist ideas that have stuck around the idea that betas are useless and should be either eliminated or turned into omegas or alphas isn’t one of them. Now the assumption is mostly that they should just stick to being with each other because omegas and alphas belong together and betas don’t fit into that binary at all. There’s no real reason Ross would have done this except by accident and that’s one hell of an accident. The Nazis spent years on it and they never figured that out either, and god knows his own experiments went terribly.

“What did he want with him to begin with?” Steve asks.

Good question but they don’t have all the answers at the moment. Right now there’s like five different police agencies crawling all over that army base looking for motive and evidence. “As far as we were able to tell he wanted to know how Peter’s powers worked, and yours. But I suspect he chose to capture Peter because he’s the easier target. You’re well versed in military strategy and Peter is a stressed twenty two year old- he’d be my choice too.”

“And off the record?” Steve asks, correctly assuming that Bruce has his own theories.

He sighs, “off the record I assume he picked up my research where it left off. We found one of those spiders Oscorp had, the one that turned Peter into what he is. It looked different from the one Peter drew out for us.”

Steve snorts, “are you sure that’s not because Peter isn’t exactly a good artist?”

Bruce smiles too, looking over to Peter, who’s still curled up in Tony’s lap looking content. Tony looks like he’s given into his urges to actually react to Peter and he’s got his arms curled tightly around him, face tucked into his hair as he gently runs his fingers up and down one of Peter’s arms. “Could be that, but I doubt he got the colors wrong. They look cute together.”

He looks over at Tony and Peter but something looks off in his expression. “Yeah, I guess they do,” he murmurs.

Tony knows he should leave Peter be, stick him in a warm bath to cool his skin some and leave him alone but he can’t. Peter doesn’t want him to either and its hard to say no to him when he’s wanted him for so long. Peter has had an interest in him for longer, probably since before they met given that he wasn’t exactly unknown to Peter before then. He’d been so gangly and adorable and green, but full of promise and someone had to get the damn kid out of crime fighting pajamas. May might have lost her shit when she found out but Peter was Spiderman before Tony and he’d be Spiderman without him though he suspects Peter would have grown a brain cell or two and made himself a suit.

And then he got better, seemed to learn from everyone else’s mistakes and he grew up too. He stopped being so gangly and filled out, and his voice started to sound more like an actual person’s and not a squeak toy and he’s smart. He’s always had a thing for intelligence but with Peter its different than the way he usually is. Normally he likes the showy types, not unlike himself though usually they don’t present that showiness in the same way. Pepper was brilliant and had no problem showing off, but she never actually stated that’s what she was doing. She’d just do something better than everyone else and give them a look. Rhodey was the same way, except he had no problem rubbing someone’s nose in it if he felt like they didn’t get the point enough. Even Christine Everhart fell into that given that she’s tenacious and kind of an asshole, but genuinely better at reporting than most.

Then there’s Peter, who’s so quiet about his intelligence, who mostly just uses it to help people and make other people’s lives easier. Its a soft show of the way his mind works but its just… hard for him to get out of his head, the way Peter consistently manages to find easier and faster ways to evacuate people out of cities, or respond to whatever calls for their help they get, or new features for his suit that help him do his job better. People like to think of Steve as the golden boy but the truth is that he’s jaded and stubborn and sometimes that makes him mean and hard to work with. Peter is the one everyone should look toward but he’d never say so himself, even if Tony is sure he knows its true.

“Missed you,” Peter murmurs, curled right into his side, one leg thrown over Tony’s hip and his arms curled tightly around him. Every time Tony moves a little Peter clings harder and that’s adorable even if he’s sure that’ll leave bruises in the morning.

“I missed you too,” he says, running his hand up and down Peter’s back. Poor thing starts to get fussy if Tony stops, irritated that he’s no longer being scented. “Are you okay?” he asks. Its the first time he’s gotten the opportunity to ask and he can feel Peter smile.

“I can finally be with you, so yeah.” Fuck, doesn’t that just break his heart. He curls his arms tighter around Peter, earning a soft noise of happiness for it and Tony feels his heart squeeze. He’s wanted this for so long and he can finally have it so he huffs out a laugh and releases Peter from his grip. He gets a dirty look for it but Tony quickly tilts Peter’s head up and kisses him to remove the frown. Peter lets out a surprised noise and presses himself into Tony, shifting fast so he’s straddling him and Tony has no idea how they ever managed to go this long without doing this anyway.

When he wakes up Peter isn’t there and something doesn’t smell right. He frowns, wrinkling his nose and getting up. He feels hungover, which he knows is stupid but taking care of omegas in heat takes a lot out of someone and more out of the omega, so he has no idea where Peter has gotten off to. Can’t be far but he’s not in the bathroom so Tony decides to check the kitchen only to find him absent of that space too. He does find Steve though and he looks weirdly guilty.

“What’s up with you?” Tony asks, somewhat irritable.

Steve looks away for a moment and sighs, “whatever… whatever Ross did didn’t stick,” he murmurs and no. No. This can’t possibly- he just got Peter, he can’t give him up now.

He turns and walks out of the room fast, hoping he’ll manage to find Peter in the lab.

Bruce looks pained and Peter doesn’t have the patience for it because he felt his fucking heart break this morning and he has no time for Bruce’s pain too. “Please, you have to be able to do something,” he says, voice cracking.

He shakes his head though, taking a small step back. “Peter, the last time I did anything like this I turned into, as Tony not so delicately put it, a giant green rage monster. Do you seriously want to take that risk?”

Peter throws his hands up, “well I might as well!” he yells. “Because I’m tired of living like this, always skirting around my feelings because I’m a beta and I can’t date anyone who isn’t! Its bullshit Bruce and you should know that!” He’s the only other beta in the Avengers, he figures if anyone can relate is has to be Bruce. No one else has to deal with all the stupid weird laws that they have to follow to properly fulfill their role in never shaking up the alpha/omega binary that people think makes some type or equilibrium or something- he doesn’t fucking know. But he does know its all a bunch of garbage and all because people don’t like betas dating alphas or omegas, there’s no other reason to act like that.

“Peter,” a soft voice says from behind him and he turns to find Tony there. He turns back around immediately and squeezes his eyes shut because he can’t deal with this right now. “Hey,” Tony murmurs and Peter can feel his arms circle around him. He wants so badly to hug him back but he won’t, not when he knows Tony will just leave him and he can’t do it, he can’t deal with that. “Peter,” Tony says, “baby, I love you.”

He feels his breathing slow a little as he sinks into Tony’s arms but he doesn’t turn, doesn’t respond. He can’t because Tony is telling him that to make him feel better, not because he’s actually going to stick around in their barely even was a relationship. Bruce, on the other hand, looks uncomfortable and Peter wants him to leave as much as he wants him to stay.

��You’re just going to go,” he tells Tony, “so do it.”

Tony’s arms tighten around him some and he hears Tony let out a shaky breath. “I should,” Tony says, voice cracking a little, “because you’ll be the one punished for this if anyone found out but-” his words cut out for a moment and he takes another deep breath. “But I can’t, I can’t leave you.”

#tony stark x peter parker #starker #fanfiction #alternate universe #abo fanfic #omg lmao this is so not what you wanted im so sorry

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yuvon-writes-letters · 3 years

Note

Yu...

Damn Yu, I don't even know how to explain what just happened!!

Okay, so..I went upstairs...But when I got to Hannah the psychopath came upstairs. [The handwriting starts to get shaky] He had his gun. And he was angry. He...he shot. Shot me.

If I had to explain I would say my entity, the..nice (??) entity stopped time. At least it felt like it. The world went blurry and suddenly everything, *we all* crashed to the ground. Then everything went black.

[The writing is more clean again] Okay, I think I got myself together now. I'm back home. On my couch. That's where I woke up. And all the letters we ever sent are clean infront of me. I read everything I missed, also what you wrote Jake.

But on top on all of those letters there was a little note written with golden ink. The same ink 'my' entity used to..write you. Honestly, I don't know why, the way they write their letters seems so familiar. I just can't grab it.

But the most important thing: Time seems to be..turned backwards. I just got the picture of the mask again. You know, this very first picture.

You know what, I'll add the note I talked of to this letter, I think that explains my situation probably a bit better.

Thank you for your whole support, Yuvon. At least in the moment I don't want to think about what might have happened. BUT I want to concentrate and help you while I sort things out here.

A very relieved and maybe traumatised,

Lis🐾🔥

Ps. I just got a message from Jake...

~~~~

[The note is written in a beautiful handwriting and golden ink]

My girl, that's the last thing you'll hear from me for some time.

Keeping much contact with you isn't good and definitely counterproductive.

So listen closely: These events probably won't happen again like this. But I won't always be able to safe you.

Keep your contact with Jake now, *your* Jake and tell him everything. Send him all the letters you got till now.

Your Jake *now* isn't the Jake you almost met. He's the same but with no memories. You just got the picture of the mask. Turn the events.

Lis,

Holy shit what the fuck.

Even for us, this is kind of insane. Time travel is... well, I was always sort of, I had the impression that time as we knew it was a construct of human society to make our lives easier. Looks like I was wrong, which means the universe is probably structured to some extent, which means it was CREATED by someone, which actually sort of

Sorry. This shouldn't be about my existential crisis.

I'm so, so sorry you had to go through that. I once was under lockdown in my school building because the police thought there was an active shooter in the building (there wasn't thank hell) so I have somewhat of an idea what you went through, and yeah, it's fucking terrifying.

Your nicer entity seems to be very much invested in you, for some reason or another. It seems likely you know them somehow. Maybe they've been watching over you for a while, a sort of guardian angel, or maybe a literal one. Or maybe someone you knew somehow ascended. Honestly, your entity seems very reluctant to contact either of us if at all possible, so we may never know.

You're welcome. You're my friend, of course I'd help you.

And, yes, your entity is absolutely right. You should show Jake everything. Let me know if he needs any more proof of my identity, I'll give it gladly. Please let me know what he says in response to all this.

Jake is relieved too. And, while I was telling him you were okay, he managed to apologize to me before I could go back to ignoring him, so we're back to talking. I'm still not exactly happy with him, but I've mostly forgiven him. I can't really keep grudges well after they apologize.

Stay away from the woods, stay in places with lots of people whenever possible, maybe rent a hotel room if you can, and text Jake every day (maybe even multiple times a day) so he'll know quickly if you go missing.

Good luck.

—Yu and Jake

(The letter tucks itself into the paper clip with the others.)

#duskwood letter game #yuvon writes letters #duskwood #duskwood game #duskwood everbyte #duskwood jake #lis

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iron--spider · 5 years

Text

four photographs

In honor of Father’s Day. Tony Stark displaying very Dad-like tendencies when it comes to one Peter Parker. No Endgame spoilers

----

“How many are you gonna eat?” Tony asks, standing in front of Peter. “How many? I’d like to know an exact number. I’d like to know your plans.”

Peter stares at him, and he feels like he’s been caught, despite the fact that Tony’s been across the lab since all of this started. This, being—creating the giant pile of plastic beside him.

He’s in the middle of Number Unknown ice pop, and this one is green. He’s had at least six other green ones. He thinks.

Peter continues staring at Tony. He doesn’t know what to say. His hands are numb and frozen, he’s got a brain freeze. His whole head is an ice pop. He’s still eating an ice pop. Ice pops. Ice pops everywhere.

Tony narrows his eyes. He’s in the patented Dad pose, hands on hips, head cocked, eyes narrowed, brows furrowed. His mouth is slightly agape, because he’s stuck between shock and deciding what he needs to say next. Peter can tell.

“When I bought those I thought you might be having one,” Tony says, eyes darting back and forth between Peter, his ice pop, and the pile of remains beside him. Some of the plastic strips still have juice clinging to them, the juice he couldn’t suck out no matter how hard he tried. A rainbow of juice drops left behind.

“Peter,” Tony says. He steps closer, leans down. “Earth to Peter Parker. Are you in an ice pop coma? Is someone forcing you to consume as many ice pops as possible? Blink twice for yes.”

Peter doesn’t blink. He just takes another, blistery cold bite. Green apple, down to the roots of his teeth.

Tony straightens back up. Shakes his head. “My God,” he says. “He’s not there anymore. He’s gone full ice pop.” He walks over, grabs one of the discarded plastics, twisting it between his fingers. “What the hell do they even call these things, really? They were just in some…red net bag when I bought them. Shit, was that a sign? Were they even supposed to be there? Maybe some villain planted the idea in your head, told you to tell me to get them. Now you’re broken.”

“Ice bag stick,” Peter says, taking another icy bite. “Ice stick bag.”

“No way you call them either of those things,” Tony says, letting the plastic flutter back down to join the rest.

“I used to eat these in elementary school,” Peter says.

“And May realized you ate seventy two of them in one sitting and stopped buying them for you. You had a burst of nostalgia recently and decided to get me in on it?” Tony asks.

“Maybe,” Peter says. “Kinda.”

Tony’s smiling a little bit now. “You asked me to upgrade the web shooters as a distraction. You totally could have done it on your own.”

“Oh, definitely.”

Tony hums to himself.

“How many would have been too many?” Peter asks, pushing the ice up to the top of the plastic. “You know, had I—not gone the distraction route?”

“Four?” Tony asks.

“Oh,” Peter says. “Good thing I went the distraction route.”

Tony stares at him like he’s trying to figure him out. And then he pulls his phone out of his pocket, aims it at Peter, and takes a picture.

“Oh, smile,” Tony says. “I bet your teeth—”

Peter grins.

“—yep, yep, I was right. Mud. Dirt. You look insane, Parker.” He snaps a couple more photos.

“I couldn’t stop,” Peter says, taking his last bite and then tilting the plastic up so he can get the juice out. “I still don’t know if I’m done,” he says, garbled through his current endeavor.

“I hope you left some behind for your ice pop dealer,” Tony says, marching off in the direction of the freezer. “I’m gonna try to count how many you had based on how many are missing.”

“Definitely more than twenty!” Peter calls.

“Yeah,” Tony calls back. “The pile speaks for itself.”

“Just slip and move, kid, c’mon. I know I’ve seen you fight before.”

Peter tries to be light on his feet, but he feels big and weighed down by the padding. The boxing gloves. The stupid red foam helmet they’re both wearing.

“Yeah, random dudes,” Peter says. “Not you. Not a—real person.”

Tony reaches out and pops him one in the shoulder. He’s clearly pulling his punches, but Peter isn’t keyed in, so he’s still not catching them, not blocking. Tony laughs, and they circle around each other. Peter tries to copy him, stay light on his feet.

“Oh, they weren’t real people?” Tony asks. “I’ll tell that to the guy that stayed webbed to a tree on 3rd for six hours.”

“I didn’t box with him.”

Tony reaches out and taps him again, this time in the middle of his forehead. Or, his foam forehead. He feels really dumb.

“Didn’t you tell me you learned to fight from the movies?” Tony asks, hands up by his face but ready to move at any second. “Rocky is a good movie. Rocky is an excellent movie. That’s the kind of film I’d expect to see you referencing—running up sets of stairs, arms in the air, children racing after you in the streets—actually, I think I’ve seen that happen—”

“Maybe I just don’t wanna hit you,” Peter says, fast, without even really thinking about it.

Tony laughs, and keeps moving without missing a beat. “Pete, c’mon. C’mon, I trust you. We’re just sparring, it’s fine.”

Peter sighs. They keep circling around each other, and Peter tries to stay on the balls of his feet. He reaches out and throws a punch, which Tony purposefully doesn’t block.

“There we go,” Tony says. “Okay, c’mon. I know you’re a fighter, Spider-Man. Just gotta style you up a little better. I’m tired of all the broken noses. How many times have you broken your nose? At least a dozen times.”

Peter rolls his eyes.

“Okay, Mr. Sass, okay,” Tony says, and he lands another punch, with a little more force behind it, in the middle of Peter’s chest.

“Okay, okay,” Peter says.

They start sparring more intensely after that. Nothing serious, no hard hits, but Peter matches Tony’s movements, watches his footwork, blocks his hits and throws some of his own. This is the first time someone has genuinely—trained him, in combat. Or made an attempt, anyway.

Maybe he gets a little too into it.

“Perfect, kid,” Tony says, after Peter lands a punch in the middle of his forehead. “Good, good—”

Peter grins, slips away, and then winds up. He’s aiming for Tony’s forehead again. He totally—he totally is. Aiming for his forehead.

Except he hits him square in the nose. Hard.

Peter gasps and Tony staggers back, both gloved hands clutching at his face.

“Oh my God,” Peter breathes, rushing towards him in a panic.

“Maybe that was a little too good,” Tony says, chuckling wetly.

“Oh no, oh no,” Peter says, his heart beating loud in his ears. He rips one of his gloves off with his teeth, quickly ridding himself of the other once he’s got his hand free.

“It’s fine,” Tony says, still covering his face. “Totally fine.”

“Lemme—oh fuck.”

Tony pulls his hands back and glares at him. “Language, spider-baby.”

“I broke your nose. I broke your nose.” Peter reaches up to grip his own hair in an instinctual move, but instead he grips the stupid foam helmet. He rips that off too, tossing it aside.

“Hey,” Tony says, watching its trajectory. “Throwing shit now—who said we were done?”

“I broke your nose.”

“I know you have super strength, I was prepared for this,” Tony says, walking over to the chair where he stowed his phone. He grabs it, holds it up in front of his face, narrowing his eyes at himself and the new wound. “Actually, I just wanted to claim elder abuse.”

“Stop,” Peter says. There’s a crack across the bridge of Tony’s nose, bright red blood streaming from his nostrils. “Oh shit, it looks bad.”

“Only I’m allowed to use the ‘s’ word—”

“I’m a teenager—”

“Precisely.”

Peter sighs.

“Come over here,” Tony says, motioning with his head. “We need a selfie.”

“A self—a selfie?”

“Yeah, put at least one glove on, I wanna send it to May.”

“Oh God. Really?”

“Yeah.”

Peter sighs. He shuffles over to where one of his abandoned gloves is, putting it back on. He goes over to stand beside Tony and pouts.

“Just consider it payback for all the times I’ve annoyed the shit out of you,” Tony says. He throws an arm around Peter’s shoulder, and Peter holds one glove up like a reluctant winner. “Say ‘bloody nose!’”

“You’re the worst,” Peter says, as Tony snaps the photo.

“I’m the best,” Tony says. “Alright, let’s—let’s get to the med bay and bother somebody about this.”

Tony sits at the edge of Peter’s bed, and feels like any minute, the world might explode.

His world, anyway. The tiny portion of the larger world that he’s carved out for himself. To keep himself sane, to keep his family safe, to keep the things he loves intact. Yeah, that world—it’s got cracks in it now, and they’re all surrounding Peter.

The news is on mute, the TV above Peter’s bed blaring in its silence, the kid’s image plastered there alongside the headline BREAKING—SPIDER-MAN REVEALED AS QUEENS RESIDENT PETER PARKER. They have an old school photo, which makes Peter look younger than he is, which in turn makes Tony furious. Not even he can stop the coverage, and he’s sure as hell tried. Peter’s phone keeps buzzing in Tony’s pocket, but he doesn’t look at it. He feels half catatonic, has been stuck in that state since the photo was delivered earlier today. The photo he’s still clutching, face down, in his left hand.

They received it at the first guard gate, in a plain Manila envelope. It made its way to Tony’s office, where May was already with him, because Peter had been gone for more than ten hours without checking in, which is never a good sign. The envelope was addressed plainly, only said TONY STARK on the outside with nothing else, and he wondered how the fuck it got here. In his mind he had planned to order someone to check the cameras, talk to the gate guard, but he kept quiet, trembling hands peeling the thing open.

The photo was black and white. Peter, in his suit, without his mask, chained to a chair. Blood around his mouth. A black eye. A cut along his neck. And a message, in red sharpie, that said WE HAVE YOUR SPIDER-MAN. A note taped on the back demanding six million dollars or they’d release his identity.

Tony had started to get the money ready to go immediately, but then Peter himself showed up. Bloody, one chain still around his wrist. Promptly collapsing at their feet.

His identity went live about an hour later, with all the evidence the public could need, and Tony hasn’t moved from this spot since. He swallows hard, watching the kid sleep, and he tries to kickstart his brain, tries to get into gear, tries to figure this thing out. He considers denying it, but they already have photos of the two of them hanging out in public together, as they tend to do. There’s been speculation about Peter’s identity for months, and this is the final puzzle piece pulling it all together. Of course he’s Spider-Man. Of course.

Tony turns the photo over, and his heart aches at the sight of it. The defiance in Peter’s eyes, among all that pain. All the bruises. Tony feels like Peter had to have known what would happen if he escaped, but he’s stubborn—he wasn’t gonna let Tony give up anything for him.

Tony wishes the kid knew by now that he’d give up anything to keep him safe.

Tony startles a little bit when the door opens, and he turns the photo back over, putting it on top of the small shelf beside him. May walks back in, clicks her tongue when she sees the news is still rattling on about their latest story.

Tony gets up to meet her, taking one of the pillows out of her hands. She’s got a couple, since Peter likes to sleep with about ten of them if he can, and she’s got a bag of his clothes.

She meets Tony’s eyes. “So, uh—any more thoughts on what we should do about this?” she asks.

His mind is a jumbled mess. This is a problem he’d never exactly planned for, because he’d fought so hard to keep it from happening. He clears his throat. “I guess we’ll deal with it,” he says.

She nods at him, and her face changes. She looks resolute. “Yeah,” she says. “We will. He’s got us, right? We’ve got this?”

Tony nods, because that is something he can agree with. “Yeah,” he says. “He’s got us.”

“Alright,” May says, putting her things down. “Uh, help me arrange these without waking him up.”

Both he and May walk over on either side of Peter’s bed, ignoring the news and the horror of their new situation. Tony gently slips one hand around the back of Peter’s head, avoiding the bandage at his temple, and lifts him up a little bit. May helps put the pillow down, and then Tony rests Peter’s head back down on top of it. He swipes a stray hair out of the kid’s eyes, and May leans down, kissing Peter on the forehead.

“We’ll figure it out,” Tony says, his voice rough. “We will. I promise.”

“I know,” May says. “We have to.”

Tony sits in the stands beside May and Happy and sinks a little lower into his seat. Flashes keep going off, but a lot of them are aimed in his direction, and that pisses him off something awful.

“I should have worn a disguise,” Tony says, looking at May. “A fake mustache. Some bad eyebrows. Something.”

“You’re fine,” May says, patting his knee. “They knew you’d be here anyway.”

“If you were wearing a disguise, I would have had to wear one too,” Happy says. “And I feel like it would have made us stick out more.”

Tony sighs. “Probably.” He watches the kids go across the stage in their black graduation robes, meeting their principal, shaking his hand, receiving their diplomas. “How many more?” he asks. “How many more til Pete? I’m suffering. I’m dying.”

“You’re dramatic,” May says, but she’s suppressing a smile.

“Context clues, Tony,” Happy says. “They just announced Amy Ourelis, so it’s gotta be soon.”

It was fine when the kid was down in the chairs on the ground level—the three of them were making faces at him, signing messages back and forth, but he got up to get in line what feels like hours ago. And it’s been torture ever since, save for the brief moment when Ned went across the stage.

“Too many kids go to this school,” Tony says. “Too many kids with last names starting with A-O.”

“Your patience is unparalleled,” May says.

“I know,” Tony says. “I’m very proud.”

“Look look, there he is,” Happy says, leaning over and pointing. Both May and Tony follow his finger and see Peter standing at the side of the stage, at the base of the steps, and he turns, eyes darting around to find them. Both May and Tony’s arms shoot up into the air, waving around kinda manically.

Peter waves back, grinning, and Tony smiles at him.

“He looks so goofy in that cap,” May says.

“We actually had to use your barrette,” Tony says.

“Really?” May asks, raising her eyebrows at him.

“Yeah,” Tony says. “Damn thing kept falling off.”

“I told him.”

“Julian Pao,” the announcer says, into the microphone.

“Oh, I think he’s next,” Happy says, as they watch Julian go across the stage. “Should be—”

“Peter Parker.”

Tony jumps to his feet and May quickly follows, and they clap and hoot and holler like insane people. Like they’re at a concert.

“Way to go, Pete!” Tony yells. “Hell yeah, Peter!”

And then he realizes that everyone—everyone—is on their feet, too. The place has erupted in clapping and cheering, and it includes all the school board members across the stage. Tony hears some exclamations of “YAY SPIDER-MAN” and so, so many people are taking pictures.

Peter gets his diploma, shakes his principal’s hand, and turns to wave in their direction. They wave back, probably too enthusiastically, and Tony’s heart swells with a kind of pride that he’s only ever felt for Peter Parker.

They created a special exit for Peter, considering there’s a shit ton of paparazzi waiting for him out front, and May, Tony and Happy meet him there. It’s a long hallway at the back of the stadium, and even though they’re alone, Tony can still hear the reverberations of all the other students and their proud families passing through.

Peter rushes up to them, beaming, and May catches him in a hug. His cap is crooked on his head now, and Tony straightens it out.

Jesus, he’s so close to crying. He steps back, wiping at his eyes, and tries to cover it with a smile.

“Did you hear that cheering?” Happy asks, smacking Peter on the shoulder once May pulls back. “They know they’ve got a damn hero in their midst.”

“I think all that was for Julian Pao,” Peter says, laughing.

“Honey, can I get a picture of you and Tony?” May asks. “Quick, before he breaks down.”

“Mrs. Parker,” Tony hisses, narrowing his eyes at her. She smiles a little wickedly.

“Yeah, yeah, I wanted one anyway,” Peter says.

Tony clears his throat. “Alright, lemme just make sure the kid’s barrette isn’t visible,” he says, peering around the back of Peter’s head.

“I think it’s buried in my hair pretty good,” Peter says.

Tony nods, and wraps his arm around Peter’s shoulders, looking down at him. He’s hit with that fondness, ever present when he thinks about Peter. But it’s particularly strong and gripping in this moment.

“You know, I’m really proud of you, Pete,” he says. He can hear May clicking away, taking photo after photo. He feels the tears coming on again, and he’s gotta stop ‘em. “I mean, I absolutely expected you to faceplant walking across that stage, but you—you made it. You made it all the way.”

Peter snorts, the tassel on his cap swinging back and forth. “Well, I’ve gotta make my old man proud, right?”

Tony is struck in the face of that statement. Frozen. He doesn’t know what to say, and he hears Happy snickering in the background.

“Right, kid,” Tony croaks. “Right.”

“Alright,” May says. “Look at me. Say ‘MIT!’”

They both face her, and Tony tugs Peter close.

“MIT!”

Tony shreds the ransom photo. The ice pop photo becomes Peter’s contact picture in Tony’s phone. The boxing one becomes something Ned sends to Peter every time he doubts himself, which Tony totally condones. You broke Iron Man’s nose! You’re capable of anything!

And the graduation photo is blown up, framed, and has a spot of honor in the living room.

Peter’s made Tony into a damn sap. But when he looks at that picture, he feels like he’s been one all along. The kid just brought it out in him.

#tony stark #peter parker #iron man #spider-man #father's day #my fics #as i sit here eating an ice pop #here is my father's day contribution

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