Chapter Text
When Peter was younger, he used to go out into the fields of his grandparents’ farm and try to make friends with their ponies.
They owned them; they had bought them as pasture pets. It was sort of odd to have a stable with not a single horse in it. His grandparents preferred donkeys; they mostly kept donkeys because donkeys were helpful in work. That didn’t stop them from getting a couple of ponies to have in the field. Peter loved them.
At the height of summer, when the grass was tall because it hadn’t been cut to make hay yet, he’d wander out into the field barefoot, in just his shorts and a t-shirt with a carrot to bribe Truffles, his favourite pony. He’d close his eyes and let Truffles come to him, feed him the carrot, and, when he was ready, he’d grab a handful of his mane and swing a leg over the pony’s back. They’d gallop around the field together, as one unit, enjoying the warm summer breeze and the rays of sunlight as they shone on their backs.
Aunt May had always hated it when he did that.
She told him it scared her to see him going so fast with nothing to hold on to. He told her that that was the best part of it all, that he just had to trust the horse not to throw him. She never understood.
That didn’t stop her and Ben from putting him into a riding school when he asked, though. He spent countless hours braiding ribbons into tails and trotting around the arena in circles with other kids his age. Most of them didn’t stay after their first fall. He did. He always got back on.
He remembered his first fall.
He was seven, and his pony — Radmiral — had gotten shoved by another rider who had no control of their pony. Radmiral lost his balance and tripped, which resulted in a wholly unprepared Peter sliding over his head and landing flat on his back. Aunt May had shrieked, already beginning to panic, but Peter just laughed, stood up, brushed himself off and got right back on. Later, when he complained to May about her screaming, she had told him she yelled because she was worried.
May had never stopped worrying.
Not when he graduated from the school ponies to a lease horse. Not when he started jumping higher. Not when he became the youngest winner of the State Cup. Not even when she and Ben had surprised him with his own horse for his twelfth birthday, he remembered that he cried when Ben had led him to a stable with his hands over his eyes, presenting him with a gorgeous eight-year-old bay Dutch Warmblood.
Titanium Dynamite. That was his name.
Peter loved him to bits. Dino — that was his stable name — took him to his first one-meter-thirty-five class, his first one, and they had won first place. He kept the two of them at the top, consistently. That’s how Peter became the youngest winner of the State Cup; he still remembers it like it was yesterday, even though it’s been years. Looking back, though, Peter now thought May had been right to worry. Because, while Dino had been incredible, his trainers were not.
They were pushy, to say the least. They strived for excellence and instant results. None of them had the patience to put in the work that the horses and riders needed. They pushed and pushed until their athletes had nothing left to give. Until their horses had nothing left to give. Peter was, unfortunately, one of those athletes who had fallen victim to his trainers.
May had been right never to stop worrying.
Two years after he’d been gifted Titanium Dynamite, when Peter was fourteen, his trainers had taken him to the Nationals. He remembered being so excited to go; he and Dino had given everything the last two years to get to the Nationals. To him, he’d finally made it. Their round had gone incredibly well; they finished at just over a minute and a half — ninety-two seconds and 3 milliseconds to be exact — but so had someone else.
The jump off was where it all went wrong.
Peter didn’t remember much of it; his brain mainly had shut it out, locking the memory away in a drawer that gathered dust and was never to be opened again. But from what little he did remember, he knew it was bad. In his nightmares, he still heard his trainers yelling at him to push harder, push faster, to beat the clock. He had listened because he trusted them at the time. That was a mistake. He pushed too hard, they were going too fast, Dino’s strides were too long, their distance was all wrong, and they took off too far from the oxer. It was too wide. From the moment they went up, Peter knew they weren’t going to make it.
Dino came down hard. The back pole of the oxer was caught between his legs, and Peter had never felt fear so raw before, but he only had about a split-second to think about that because Dino was flipping. The last thing he remembered was the odd shrieking sound that he now knew had come from his horse before it all faded to black.
The next thing he knew, he was waking up in a hospital room. He had assumed that he was going to be in one, there were moments where he could hear the people — doctors — around him talking, and he wanted nothing more to tell them that he was there, that he could hear them; but he couldn’t speak. He didn’t know how long it had been since the accident; he’d lost all sense of time, and he had been too busy freaking out because he was in so much pain; his left leg felt like a hydraulic press was crushing it.
Then a man Peter vaguely recognised had walked into the room. He was tall with kind eyes, and Peter knew he had seen him at shows; he just couldn’t pinpoint where exactly. The man had introduced himself as James Rhodes — it clicked in Peter’s head; he was one of the judges, that’s why Peter knew his face. His trainers were nowhere to be found. Mr Rhodes had told him about the accident, said to him that he’d broken his collar bone, his scapula, his wrist and, worst of all, his femur in three places. He’d also said Peter had been in a coma for six months. That had explained the pain and confusion, but it hadn’t explained the sad look in the man’s eyes.
Mr Rhodes told him that Dino had broken his leg when they flipped; that was the terrifying shriek that Peter had heard before his head hit the ground. He knew, as soon as Mr Rhodes told him his horse had broken his leg, he knew that Dino had been put down. He’d asked Mr Rhodes if anyone was with him, and he told Peter that he was. That the paramedics had cut off Peter’s show-jacket when they got there and he’d taken it to Dino, held him and let him smell the jacket, to smell Peter, as his breathing slowed and his heart rate stopped.
The universe was out to get Peter, it seemed, because it didn’t end there. Peter remembered the debilitating feeling of loneliness as Mr Rhodes took his hand and told him gently that May and Ben had been in a wreck on their way to the hospital the day of his accident. They had been told which hospital he was being taken to by the paramedics, and they were on a two-lane road when a semi-truck travelling in the opposite direction lost control and swerved into their lane. They were hit head-on and died on impact.
Peter had felt so cold in that moment, he was glad Mr Rhodes had asked if he could hug him. He still didn’t know how long he’d sat there and cried in the man’s arms; everything he’d ever known had been ripped away from him so quickly. Mr Rhodes had relayed to him that the doctors had ordered another month of bed rest in the hospital to recover physically, followed by another six months of physiotherapy to heal his leg fully.
He’d worried about the hospital and vet bills at the time. Mr Rhodes had been kind enough to pay for them all. Peter still didn’t know why.
The man had also been kind enough to tell Peter that he would place all of Peter’s trophies and rosettes into his storage room for safekeeping until Peter was old enough to receive May and Ben’s inheritance and get a place of his own, because now Peter belonged to the state: no parents, no grandparents, no other relatives to take him.
The months in physiotherapy were the most painful months of his life. Peter would cry during sessions, and he would cry in his hospital bed, because no pain he’d ever experienced was quite as bad as healing a broken femur. He cried because all he wanted was for Ben to tell him he was doing a good job, for May to hold him and assure him that it would be alright, for them both to say to him that they were proud of him.
Six excruciating months later, Peter was placed in foster care.
Mr Rhodes had come with him and his social worker to May and Ben’s apartment to pick up his things. The items that he could take were packed into bags to bring to the foster home, and the things that he couldn’t bring with him that were valuable were handed to Mr Rhodes. The man had kept his promise to keep Peter’s beloved items in his storage room. May and Ben had appointed their neighbour, Mr Delmar, as custodian of the apartment until Peter was old enough to take it over in the event that something were to happen to them.
Mr Delmar was nice. He promised Peter that he would take care of the place. Peter told him that as long as it was there for him to have when he turned eighteen, he didn’t care what Mr Delmar did with it. So the man cleared the place of May and Ben’s belongings, placed them into storage, and rented out the apartment. He sent half of what the rent was to Peter, so that he would have money to spend while in foster care. Mr Delmar kept a quarter of it for himself and used the other quarter to pay for the storage room.
Peter really appreciated it.
He appreciated having money to spend on himself because foster care sucked. Their care home hadn’t had a proper inspection from the state for years, the woman who ran it, Mrs Higgins, and her husband couldn’t have cared less about the kids. There was no such thing as privacy in the home. Peter shared a room with three other boys, all of whom were younger than him. Peter didn’t hate them, far from it, but he missed socialising with people his age.
That didn’t happen at school either. He’d been pulled out of the school he was going to before and was now attending a state-sponsored one instead. It was shit, to say the least. It didn’t help that there was an asshole kid named Flash — well, Eugene Thompson actually — who consistently picked on him for being an orphan, for having a little limp. He hid it well, but there were days when he had flare-ups and his leg hurt; he limped on those days.
The money Mr Delmar sent helped him refill his prescriptions for pain medication and make his doctor’s appointments, because those still hadn’t ended.
Peter had long ago accepted that he was on his own now. Nobody adopted the older kids; he’d watched plenty of the younger ones get adopted by loving families, and he was okay with that. Mr Delmar had enough to tide him over until he turned eighteen, and once he inherited what May and Ben had left for him, he would be able to apply to university and be out of there. It was only two more years, and he was fine, really.
Which is why he was so surprised when Mrs Higgins came upstairs and told him to pack his bags, as there was a couple who wanted to foster him. Him.
Peter Parker had spent so long feeling hopeless that he had forgotten what hope felt like, but he definitely remembered when he tossed his bag into the boot of his social worker’s car before getting in beside her.
He was going to be fostered.