Chapter Text
The subway car was quiet.
Almost too quiet.
Peter’s senses buzzed in the silence. A familiar shiver ran down his spine, and his muscles clenched reflexively. There was danger, his spidey-sense told him that much.
But where?
Someone sneezed into a tissue before clearing their throat gruffly, and the noise grated in Peter’s over-sensitive ears.
A woman in a business suit chattered away on her phone, her voice brusque and commanding. She reminded him of Pepper when she was in a meeting - poised, well-aware of the power she held.
Somebody was tapping their nails against the hard plastic of the empty seat beside them in a steady rhythm, almost like a countdown.
Tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap .
A pair of white Converse swung their way into Peter’s peripheral vision, and he whipped around, earning himself a few odd looks, but he didn’t care. His senses had him on edge, and the fabric of the shoes seemed to reflect the harsh lighting in the carriage.
Tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap .
The owner of the shoes kicked her feet again, and the sound of them hitting the linoleum floor made Peter’s hair stand on end. She was a small child, maybe seven or eight, and her blonde hair was combed into two neat, little pigtails. Her eyes, shockingly blue, darted up to meet his own for just a second, and he offered her a smile, just a twitch of his lips, really. He was too focused on the spark at the nape of his neck, telling him that something was wrong. Danger was near.
Tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap .
She glanced away, and continued kicking her feet. The Converse were glowing under the light of the cabin, and they made Peter’s eyes water just looking at them. They must be new - he knew his own tattered pair sitting in his closet at the apartment were not nearly as clean.
Tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap .
The kicking stopped, and for just a moment it seemed like the entire world had frozen in time, like a candid snapshot of a routine day in the life of the people who called New York City home. For just a moment, everything was still.
But then there was a shockingly loud boom, echoing through the tunnel, and the train rocked to a halt. The passengers looked around the carriage in confusion, as if one of their fellow travellers would hold the reason behind their sudden stop, and the boom that had accompanied it. The few who had fallen out of their seats at the jerking motion of the train clambered to their feet grumpily.
Peter focused his hearing, and it may have been his overly paranoid brain, but he could have sworn he heard faint screaming, terrified and desperate.
He didn’t have time to question the noise further though, because the muffled confusion in the train car was replaced by a second boom, several yards away from him, accompanied by a bright flash of light that encompassed Peter’s vision as he was launched into the air by the force of the explosion.
There was a brief moment of silence - the kind of torn, broken quiet that followed an event so terrible that no one had the words to describe it - before he smashed into the wall of the train car. The metal dented and warped around his body, and the pain was instantaneous as he slid down to the floor, boneless. It bloomed through him, like a plant curling up to meet the sun.
He ached .
Screams filled the air, not faint like the ones after the first boom, but loud and pervasive in his ears. The last thought that his throbbing brain brought to his attention was that the tap-tap-tapping had stopped.
~~~
Peter was running late. Again.
He’d stayed out a little too late as Spider-Man last night, but he’d had a good reason. Once the clock struck midnight, patrol had really heated up. Literally. There’d been a fire in an old apartment building, and after rescuing three people and a very distraught cat, he’d resolved to have a talk with the city council about their fire safety regulations. That was the second one in a month that he’d had to deal with.
He’d made it home eventually though, smelling of sweat and smoke, but buzzing with the victory of the night. It wasn’t often that he made it through patrol without a hitch. May and Mr Stark would be proud of him for making it a full day without running into trouble. They often joked that he was a trouble magnet, and after looking back at some of the events in his life, Peter couldn’t help but agree with them.
After a cool shower to soothe his overheated skin, he was about ready to collapse onto his bed and never wake up again. Naturally, just as he was about to fall asleep, he remembered the history homework that was due tomorrow. The history homework that they’d had a week to do. The history homework that he hadn’t even started.
By some miracle, he’d managed to pump out a satisfactory essay on how technology had evolved from World War I to World War II, despite the way sleep tugged desperately at his eyelids throughout the process. He was sure that it was interlaced with an absurd number of typos and grammar missteps, but he could edit it tomorrow morning. Sleep was a bigger priority right now.
Finally, he’d let himself drift off. It felt like only moments later when he woke up to May hammering on his door, telling him to get his ass out of bed before he was late. Peter glanced at the alarm clock sitting placidly on his bedside table, looking way too innocent for something that had forgotten to do its job and wake him up. He also did some very quick maths, and figured out that he’d gotten four whole hours of sleep. That was fine. He’d functioned on less, and he didn’t have anything important going on that day.
Peter actually managed to get out of the door on time, though he’d had to forego a proper breakfast and settle instead for a cold Pop-Tart out of the box. Everything was going well. He should have known it wouldn’t last
Halfway to the subway station, he realised that he’d forgotten his history homework on his desk. Shit , he could not afford to miss yet another assignment. If his GPA dropped any more he’d risk being kicked off Decathlon, and Peter would rather die than let Flash take his spot on the team.
Sighing, he started on the route back to the apartment, and that was the beginning of a very unfortunate series of events.
If he ran, he’d still miss his usual train, but he’d be able to catch the one after it, which would get him into school a few minutes shy of the first bell that signaled the beginning of first period. Normally, he wouldn’t chance getting the second train, because the New York subway system was about as reliable as the Nigerian Prince scam emails that popped up in his inbox every now and again. To make matters worse, the likelihood of there being a delay rose exponentially as the city edged into rush hour, but he was running perilously low on options.
In a brilliant stroke of luck, he managed to grab his history homework and make it back to the subway platform just seconds before the train pulled in, though he had gotten several dirty looks from irritated New Yorkers as he pushed through the crowd in his desperation to make it to the platform on time.
As he filed onto the subway and took a seat, he slipped his phone out of his pocket. There was a message from Mr Stark on the lockscreen, and a smile tugged at his lips as he read it.
Mr Stark: Hey, kid. Happy’s gonna pick you up from school today and drive you up to the compound. I’ve got a couple of ideas for your suit that I wanna test out. Don’t worry, I checked with Aunt Hottie, and she has given her blessing.
Peter: Sounds awesome! Thanks, Mr Stark.
Peter: You gotta stop calling my Aunt that though. It makes me uncomfortable.
The ellipses popped up on Tony’s side of the screen, indicating the man was typing, and Peter waited patiently for the no doubt snarky response from his mentor… father figure… whatever Mr Stark was to him. Their relationship was one of constant stumbles and awkwardly sappy moments, but Peter still had no clue what he was to the genius, and he had no idea how the man felt about him in return.
Ever since the disastrous Homecoming night, the billionaire had transformed from a distant benefactor, to a mentor, and then to an almost-father. It had been a slow shift, one that Peter himself hadn’t noticed until recently. Mr Stark started inviting him over to the compound on the odd occasion, and then those visits had increased in both frequency and length.
Now, Peter couldn’t count the number of times he’d slept over at the compound, but it was often enough that the thought of staying overnight at the Avengers-fucking-Compound didn’t send him into a mess of excited fanboying.
Eventually, their activities had moved from superhero stuff in the labs to strangely domestic things, like curling up on the couch with a carton of ice cream and a movie. Somehow, Mr Stark had dug his way into Peter’s life, occupying, but not replacing, the place that Ben had left when he died, and Peter was pretty sure that he held his own spot in Mr Stark’s supposedly iron heart.
They continued their playful banter until the older man had to go, claiming that Pepper was dragging him along to a board meeting.
Mr Stark: Now is a fantastic time to have an emergency, kid. I think this meeting is going to be the end of me.
Peter had chuckled and left the dramatic genius on read. It was only when he slipped his phone into his backpack that he became aware of the dreadfully familiar tingling sensation at the back of his neck.
~~~
Peter’s eyes fluttered open, and the first thing he noticed was the throbbing pain shooting through his entire body. It was no longer a plant curling up to meet the sun, but a tiger, vicious and insatiable in its hunger. He groaned, and then cried out when the action shifted something in his torso. His ribs, maybe?
He tried to move, but his limbs felt swollen and useless. The air was ashy, and he choked as he sucked in a tortured breath. That brought a round of coughing, and his ribs screamed , and then Peter screamed, the delirium in his mind rendering him incapable of suppressing anything.
No one came to his aid, and he flopped his head to the side. There was something dripping into his left eye, red and warm. He realised with a sort of detached alarm that it was blood. His blood.
The one eye that wasn’t obscured by blood was blurry, like his eyesight used to be before he became Spider-Man. He didn't feel like Spider-Man now. He felt like Peter Parker, weak and helpless as he squirmed on the ground, unable to move, unable to breathe around the pain zinging through his very bones.
He blinked a couple of times, and his right eye cleared, though he immediately wished it hadn’t. Lying not two feet away from his face were a pair of bloodied Converse, attached to pale, limp legs.
The urge to scramble away from the corpse of the little girl (too little, so much life left to live) was enough to jolt him into a sitting position. He ignored the scrape of his ribs and the throb of his skull at the movement, eyes fixed on the face of the girl.
Her blonde pigtails were stained with red, and her eyes had dulled until they were morose, lifeless. Peter’s mouth opened in a silent sob, and he felt his heart cave in as he looked around the smoking ruins of the train car.
There was death and pain painted on every face he could see amongst the twisted metal and shattered glass. They needed someone to help them, they needed Spider-Man, someone strong and unaffected by the horrors strewn across the tunnel, ready to lead their quivering, terrified bodies into the arms of safety.
But they didn’t have Spider-Man. There was only Peter Parker, and Peter Parker wanted to get far, far away from the wreckage of the train car.
He scrambled backwards like a crab, only making it a few paces before his trembling arms gave out underneath his weight and he fell onto his back with a barely-repressed groan of pain. His left arm had felt numb from the elbow down before now, but when he’d put pressure on it a sharp jolt of pain had shot through his nerves. When he brought it to his face, he had no trouble seeing why.
Peter’s elbow was broken, or maybe snapped in two was a better description. His forearm was at an odd angle to his upper arm, and it would have been nauseating if he didn’t feel like he was watching it all happen to someone else. It was like Peter himself was a character in a movie that he was only partially invested in. The whole area was turning an alarming shade of purple, and he wondered if it was just bruised, or something more serious.
After that, Peter decided it was probably a good idea to take stock of his injuries, before he accidentally hurt himself even more.
His right side was littered with burns, though from what he could tell, none were above second degree. He figured that the heat of the explosion had been the cause, and congratulated himself on his excellent deductive reasoning. Normally, it would have been a simple conclusion to draw, but his brain felt like a half-melted slushie, and he figured he had a concussion of some sort.
His left side seemed to have gotten the worst of it, though. There was a cut on his forehead, if the blood dripping into his eye was anything to go by. Obviously, his arm was fucked beyond belief, and at least six of the ribs on his left side were fractured, if not broken. He’d also discovered a sizable piece of metal sticking out of his calf, and Peter wondered if something was wrong with him when he stared at it with abstract detachment. He distantly attributed all of the injuries on his left side to the fact that it was the side that had made contact with the wall when the bomb went off.
And, shit, it was only just hitting him. Someone had set a bomb off on the train.
Two bombs , he corrected, thinking of the boom he’d heard right before his world was shattered into fragments of pain by the force of the explosion.
Someone had willingly blown up a train filled with innocent civilians. Children , he thought, and a pair of white Converse flashed before his eyes. Why would someone do that? Peter looked around him, at the desolation and reeling panic on people’s faces. Who in their right mind would do something as utterly evil as this?
A face swam in front of him, a woman with kind eyes and dried blood caking the bridge of her nose. “Hello? Hon, can you hear me?” she asked gently, and Peter flinched at the endearment. They reminded him of May, God, how he wanted his Aunt.
He wanted to relax into her strong embrace, knowing that she’d protect him from anything, even though he was the one with the superpowers. He wanted to feel her acrylic nails scratching gently at his skin as she rubbed her hand up and down his back, the comforting gesture a habit from his childhood. Peter used to get vicious asthma attacks before the spider bite, and it was the only thing that would help while they waited for his inhaler to kick in.
He wanted Mr Stark too. The man who had somehow moved from distant mentor to father figure in the short span of a few months. He wanted his quick, one-armed hugs and gruff compliments disguised as lighthearted barbs.
He wanted May, and he wanted Mr Stark.
Briefly, his mind flicked to the watch that the man had given him a couple of weeks ago as a means to contact him in case of emergency, but as he looked down at the device, he could see that the screen was shattered beyond repair, and that the delicate wiring inside had been partially melted by the heat of the blast. Not even Stark tech was strong enough to withstand the unspeakable consequences of the bomb.
His backpack, which held his phone, was also nowhere to be seen. It was probably buried under a pile of twisted metal somewhere. May would kill him for losing yet another backpack, and Mr Dell would kill him for not handing in yet another round of history homework.
He was letting so many people down.
A hand touched his arm, and Peter jumped at the sudden sensation. “Hon, I’m really gonna need you to answer me, alright? Can you stand?”
Peter blinked owlishly at her, and his brain churned its way through her question a few times before he finally understood them. Fuck, it felt like he was supended in jelly. “I-I don’t know,” he whispered, coughing a few times as he let the words hang in the air. There was something warm and metallic at the back of his throat.
“That’s okay, hon, but we’ve gotta start moving. The tunnel might collapse and we don’t want to be here when it does.”
Peter’s mind flashed to homecoming night, when the building fell down on top of him and ironed the breath out of his lungs. He agreed with the nice lady - he didn’t want to be here if the tunnel collapsed. It was almost a miracle that it hadn’t done so already. The explosion was sure to have affected the stability of the structure in some way.
“Y-yeah. Okay,” he wheezed, struggling to his feet, careful not to put pressure on his left leg. The area around the metal pulsed with pain, and the sheer wrongness of having something forcing his skin and his muscle apart made his insides squirm uncomfortably.
The nice lady looked at his leg with a sympathetic wince, but ultimately decided there was nothing she could do about it here. She took his good arm and slung it around her shoulders, wrapping her other arm around his waist. Peter ignored the way her grip shifted his ribs uncomfortably, and instead focused on breathing through the wave of pain that had come with standing up.
They started hobbling towards the light at the end of the tunnel. It wasn’t too far away, but Peter was already wheezing from the effort of staying upright, and the nice lady was limping slightly. He felt bad for making her support most of his weight, when she was so clearly injured herself. He was Spider-Man, Goddamnit, he should be able to get himself out of this fucking tunnel without burdening a poor civilian.
The remaining passengers of the train were slowly shuffling towards the light of the tunnel opening as well. All around Peter, strangers were helping each other and able-bodied people assisted the injured. The display would have been heartwarming, if one ignored the tears tracking down grimy faces and blood mixing with dust on the ground.
A pair of hauntingly familiar shoes caught his attention, and he froze in his tracks, bringing the nice woman to a shaky halt as well. The little girl was still there, and he was aware enough this time to notice her mother was lying alongside her, eyes similarly dull and lifeless.
His breath caught in the back of his throat, and a sob bubbled out of his mouth at the sight of it. Two whole lives, wiped out of existence like they hadn’t mattered at all. Like they didn’t have people waiting for them to come home.
There was a tug on his arm, and he turned to see the nice lady looking at him with pitiful eyes. Peter hated pity. In the months after Ben’s death, he’d become all too familiar with it, and it had almost been enough to drive him insane. He couldn’t stand the sad looks that everyone gave him, when they themselves had no clue what the grief of losing a loved one felt like, the way it weighed heavy in his chest like a boulder pinning him down and trapping the breath in his lungs.
“There’s nothing we can do for them anymore, hon. They’d want you to make it out of here, c’mon.”
He realised with a start that she thought he was related to them. He shook his head frantically. This wasn’t his tragedy. “I’m not - they aren’t… I don’t know them,” he finally stuttered out with a sigh. “They just… shouldn’t have died.” He should have been able to save them. What was the point of him making it out of this alive when an innocent child hadn’t? Surely, the little girl had deserved to survive more than he did.
“I know, hon, I know,” the nice lady murmured as she pulled him forward, and Peter thought he saw the shine of tears in her eyes as well.
They turned away from the bodies of the mother and daughter, and followed the other passengers out of the tunnel. Other people in cars that hadn’t been blown to pieces by the explosions pried their doors open and rushed to help those struggling to make it out.
Hundreds of feet crunched against the gravel covering the ground and Peter slipped in and out of awareness as they made the trek to the light. The nice lady kept muttering encouragement, but her soft words were drowned out by the screams of pain, the sobs of distress, and the cloying air of loss that seemed to press against his body, ever-expanding.
Distantly, Peter thought he could hear sirens, but he wasn’t sure. The explosion had left a shrill ringing in his ears that wasn’t going away, no matter how hard he shook his head to try and dislodge it. He prayed that it hadn’t permanently damaged his hearing, because he relied on that sense so much when he was Spider-Man.
But did he even deserve to go out as the vigilante after this? He had known something was wrong. His spider sense had told him as much, but he had done nothing to stop it. Spider-Man was supposed to save people, and he had failed miserably.
Weak sunlight hit Peter’s face and pulled him out of his spiralling thoughts. He quickly shut his eyes against the rays - they felt like needles piercing his skull and served only to exacerbate his already throbbing headache.
Red and blue lights flashed against the windows of nearby buildings, and he glanced up to take in the emergency vehicles parked messily around the exit of the subway. Curious onlookers were held back by police tape and a few officers, their faces pale and horrified as they stared at the seemingly never-ending stream of people emerging from the subway, coated in dust and blood.
The air in the subway tunnel had been ashy, marred with the scent of blood and burning flesh, and Peter choked down a sob as he struggled to get a proper lungful of blessedly ash-free air around his throbbing ribs. Why was he crying? He shouldn’t be crying. People had died , and he had the gall to cry about the way his limbs hadn’t stopped shaking since he woke up on the floor of that subway tunnel, about the pain in his body that only intensified the longer he stayed balanced on a singular, weak leg. Because everything hurt, it really did, but he had no right to complain when people had lost their lives and he escaped with just a few broken bones and the image of bloodied, white Converse imprinted behind his eyelids for all of eternity.
“It’s alright, hon. One of the ambulances will take you to the hospital and we’ll get you all fixed up. It’ll all be over soon,” the nice lady assured, and she ran a hand through his dirty, tangled hair.
But that only made Peter cry harder, because that was Mr Stark’s thing. The billionaire wasn’t a very touchy-feely guy, and he didn’t give out very much physical affection, but when he did it was usually in the form of a gentle hand through Peter’s hair.
Maybe it was the concussion, but the nice lady’s words took a while to sink into his brain. When they did though, he could not stop the tide of panic that rose within him. The hospital? He couldn’t go to the hospital! Mr Stark had made that very clear when he explained that Peter’s very DNA was different to a normal human’s, and that meant he required a different level of care. He needed super drugs that were capable of knocking out a grown elephant, and the doctors had to factor in his enhanced healing when planning out his treatment.
The staff at the hospital weren’t stupid. They were healthcare professionals, and they would surely figure out that something was odd about the teenager who could heal at an alarming rate, so long as he got the right amount of nutrients to keep his metabolism satisfied. It wouldn’t be hard to connect him to the spider-themed vigilante that swung around Queens.
Peter wasn’t sure of very much at the moment, but he knew he couldn’t get in that ambulance. “No!” he cried desperately, pulling away from the nice lady as she guided him towards the vehicle. He wobbled on his only usable leg for a moment, before toppling to the ground.
There were several cries of alarm, and he found himself surrounded by a team of EMT’s, their hands reaching out to touch him.
“Stop! Stop it, I don’t want to go!” he sobbed, watching helplessly as the nice lady pushed through the crowd of medics.
“Hey, back off. He’s traumatised enough, let me talk to him,” she snarled at the nearest EMT, who was reaching for a terrifyingly long needle, presumably full of sedatives. She crouched down in front of him, blocking his view of the crowd, and he took a shuddering breath. “Hey, hey, hon, you need to let them take you, okay? What’s your name?”
“Peter,” he gasped out in between rapidly quickening inhales. “I can’t - I can’t go with them.”
“Alright, hi, Peter. My name’s Tia. Can you explain to me why you can’t go with them?”
“I-I have special medical needs,” Peter said, coughing pathetically as he did. The warm liquid that had been resting at the back of his throat until now splattered onto his lips. Tia’s eyes widened, and he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth in response, doing his best not to panic at the sight of the bright red smears left on his skin.
“Okay,” Tia said, sounding worried. “Well, where do you need to go to get properly taken care of. You’re not looking too good, hon.”
“I have someone I can call, I just… can I borrow a phone?” Peter said, a little calmer now that someone was finally listening to him. His adrenaline was ebbing away, and as it left, a deep exhaustion took its place.
A phone was shoved into his line of sight, and he muttered a thank you as he took it. His fingers dialed the number on muscle memory alone, and he brought the device up to his ear with a trembling hand as it rang.
Please pick up, please pick up , he thought. I know you’re busy, but please pick up .
The dial tone clicked, and then a familiar, voice answered. “Who is this?”
Peter let out a hysterical breath of relief that turned into a sob by the time it left his mouth.
“Hello? Peter? Is that you?” Mr Stark said, his tone switching from lightly suspicious to terrifyingly urgent. “Kid? Answer me, bud, what’s going on?”
“Mr Stark,” Peter whispered, and he heard Tony’s breath stutter on the other side of the call.
“Yeah, kid, it’s me. What’s wrong?”
“Please, Mr Stark. I need help.”