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notaparty-trick · 4 years

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All Those Senseless Scars - Chapter 2

By @notaparty-trick for @asyouleft

@friendly-neighborhood-exchange

Rating: T

Relationships: Tony Stark & Peter Parker, May Parker & Peter Parker, Michelle Jones & Ned Leeds & Peter Parker

Characters: Peter Parker, Tony Stark, May Parker, Pepper Potts, Michelle Jones, Ned Leeds

Summary: There is a rule to the way Peter lives now. He didn’t know it at first, but he learnt it.

It’s simple.

To earn what he needs to survive, he has to make sacrifices.

---

Peter Parker's life is derailed when he's kidnapped and kept in a white-tiled room with nothing: no windows, no cameras, no food, no water, no phone, nobody else. Only his own thoughts keep him from losing his mind. If he asks for anything, he must take punishment. Tony Stark will stop at nothing to bring him home.

Archive Of Our Own link here

The second Tony hits the floor, he wakes up.

Before even the throbbing of the back of his head, he notices the kid’s arms around him and recalls the last few minutes of his consciousness, the images of a blowtorch burning blue and of waxy crimson burns spidering across Peter’s face still horrifyingly fresh in his memory.

“Get a medical team to the front door right away,” he hears Pepper saying. Pushing himself hurriedly into a sitting position, Tony sees her crouched in front of them both, her widened eyes fixed on the kid.

The kid, whose every inch of skin is littered with bruises, lacerations, swelling, raised lines that look like whip marks. Who is gaunt and frail and half-naked and blue from cold.

“What should you expect, you asked? Cho, I don’t know what to say. He’s… everything. Just, every kind of injury you could think of.”

Tony has spent twenty sleepless nights looking for Peter Parker.

He’d first begun to suspect that something was amiss when he shut up his workshop for the night and realised he’d never received the quiet ping he’d programmed Karen to send which indicated that the kid had returned safely home from patrol. The protocol had been designed so Tony would get a ping from the Spider-Man suit the moment it entered the Parker abode, and, on the flip side, would send through an alert if he stayed out past his curfew, so the radio silence was what began to raise red flags.

Tony had shoved his paranoia aside for the moment and simply called the kid.

Nothing.

After three missed calls, he patched it straight through, the guilt of prying fading in comparison to a need to assure the kid’s safety, but FRIDAY had pulled him up short. “Boss, it is impossible for me to trace his phone or suit. They do not exist.”

“Sure, they exist. Be realistic, FRI. What do you mean?”

“The most likely explanation for this is that they have both been destroyed to the point where they no longer emit a tracking signal.”

Pushing out a deliberately measured breath, Tony ran his hands down his face in a habitual movement. “What are the chances he’s... destroyed all his tech and run off to join the Amish?”

“That is highly unlikely, Boss. Mister Parker spends an average of three hours on his phone every day.”

“Well - yeah. Shit.” Fighting back a growing wave of unease, Tony tried and failed to pull together some sort of plan of action which culminated in a tentative phone call to May Parker.

“If Peter’s with you right now and he hasn’t answered my texts,” she began without preamble, “You’re both in big trouble.”

Tony’s moment of silence drove her to an instant and terrifying conclusion.

“Tony, tell me he’s with you.”

“He’s off the grid. FRIDAY’s saying his suit and phone have been destroyed.”

“And what does that mean?”

“It means… I suppose we’re - we’re looking at a missing kid now.”

Tony remembers with harsh clarity the way May’s breath had caught.

“Fuck, Tony. He’s - that’s my baby.”

“I know, May, I know. Best not to get - we don’t know anything for sure. There’s a best-case scenario here.” Neither of them are convinced. They’re both catastrophizers when it comes to Peter, and for good reason: the kid gets whammied by the ugliest parts of life on the daily.

“And the worst case?” May ventured.

Words fled Tony’s mouth.

“There’s a place at the facility upstate if that’s where you wanna be. I’ll kickstart a search there.”

The plastered-on bravery in May’s tone fractured a little as she affirmed, “I’ll be right there.”

Tony called the NYPD. He gathered Rhodey and Happy and Pepper and a team of specialist SI security employees. He scoured footage and followed leads himself, gave every piece of information he had to the cops, sent out teams of drones to survey as much of New York as he could until, five days later, Pepper laid her hands on his shoulders and told him, “If you don’t rest now you’re going to be useless.”

“He’s still out there, Pep.”

She simply smiled sadly at him and repeated, “If you don’t rest now you’re going to be useless.”

“I can’t just rest.”

“Yes, you can. Come on.” She let him take her arm and guided him out of his chair as if he were fragile, ancient. “You’re going to take a hot bath. I’m going to warm up your favourite pyjamas. You’re going to take some sleeping pills, and I’ll be with you all night.”

“The kid needs me--”

“He does. He needs you to be strong, and to do that you have to sleep.”

“Make sure I’m up at five.”

“Six.”

“Five-thirty.”

As awful as it felt harbouring a head full of horrific images of what could be happening to the kid while he let his muscles unknot themselves in a tub of hot water, he awoke the next morning with renewed determination for his task.

Losing Peter was simply not an option.

“Whoever’s got him, they must know a lot,” May remarked over coffee as she watched Tony at work that morning. “To disconnect his suit, too.”

She left for a shift at the hospital a few hours later - as much as she wanted to be around during the search for Peter, her job didn’t allow her to take leave for her missing nephew, and she was determined to remain self-sufficient - but her statement stayed with Tony.

They must know a lot.

When Tony stopped searching for a lone villain and started picturing a group - an organisation of some sort - the pieces began to fit.

“Show me feed 4, the 2nd of February, at... 2 pm. One of the first drone searches I sent out, right?”

“That is correct,” FRIDAY chimed. “The feed begins just over a mile from this facility.”

And there it is. The small, ramshackle building by the freeway. He’d dismissed it at first as a broken-down shelter, but it’s too incongruous not to take a closer look now.

“Send in a scout. I want to see inside.”

Not a minute later, the miniature drone whirred through a chink in its wall and revealed a room that appeared completely unremarkable but for the circular trapdoor set into the centre of the floor.

After ten minutes of studying that trapdoor, realisation - a thunderbolt from heaven, the eureka moment inventors like him grasp at all their lives - strikes him. He notices the design: a circle broken by a diagonal hinge on the bottom right.

“Bring up the Oscorp logo,” he demanded urgently.

An image flew to join the paused feed of the trapdoor. A circle broken at the bottom right.

Oscorp.

Lunging for his phone, he patched a call through to Norman Osborn - how he came to store the fucker’s number, God only knows, but he was thankful for it then - and hoped his hunch was correct.

“You took the kid.”

“It took you long enough to figure it out,” Osborn had returned with a short bark of laughter.

As he takes in the state of Peter all over again in the doorway of the Compound, he wishes he’d killed Osborn personally. Painfully. Made him feel every inch of pain the kid must have gone through.

The kid. The kid he’d taken out for ice cream on his sixteenth birthday last summer. The kid whose screams are still freshly ringing through Tony’s mind.

He hovers his hands over the motionless body beside him, searching for somewhere to make contact with that won’t hurt the kid.

“Fucking hell, he just - we’re - he walked all the way back.”

Pepper ends her call and immediately looks to him, gaping, her composure discarded. “What the hell happened?”

“I found the place,” he blurts. “Tried to get him out, but I must’ve knocked my head. He… took us back.”

There’s a moment of stunned silence.

“You should get May on the line,” Tony says, trying to clear a path through his jostled brain. It throbs, but his heart aches more acutely.

Pepper just nods, rushing to find the number.

Swallowing away the breaks in his voice, he tugs off his jacket, shakes away the coating of dust from the explosion, and lays it across the kid’s back. He seems even smaller under it, like he’s shrinking by the minute to a shell of what Tony remembers him to be. Unwilling to gather him up and risk aggravating any of his injuries, Tony takes hold of one of his hands: there’s a litany of half-healed scrapes marring the knuckles, but all the fingers look to be in their proper place, which he can’t say the same of about the other. God. “Kiddo, are you awake? Can you try and open your eyes? I just - we’ve just gotta know you’re all good.”

“May, he’s here,” Pepper says. “We have - no, I’m sorry. He’s not awake. Just - come.”

Tony brings the limp knuckles to his cheek, then his chest. “Look, it’s okay to wake up now. Here’s my janky heartbeat. You always recognize it, remember?” He laughs hysterically, tearfully. Tony Stark is on the verge of tears. “We’ve got a team coming - they’re gonna get you on the good stuff, yeah? Stuff kids your age pay hundreds for. Lucky punk.”

Inexplicably, the kid’s eyelids choose that moment to begin dragging themselves open.

“Oh. Kid? Pete?”

Peter’s face screws up the moment he wakes; he groans, a dreadfully tormented noise.

In his peripheral vision, Tony spots the elevator doors opening to allow out an assemblage of medics.

“You’re okay, kid - it’s me, it’s your Mister Stark, yeah? We’re gonna get you all fixed up.”

“M’s… s’k,” Peter garbles.

“Uh-huh,” Tony assents, although he hasn’t a clue what the kid is trying to tell him.

His gaze is brimming with exhaustion, anguish, pain, a host of harrowing emotions that Tony doesn’t ever want to see there again, but through it all shines trust.

As the medics set down their equipment, he squeezes Peter’s hand and receives a slight twitching of the kid's fingers in response. Encouraged, he prepares to make full use of his skills in comforting monologues. “You’re gonna get lifted onto a gurney in just a second so we can get you tucked up in a bed and fixed up. Sounds good, doesn’t it?”

Peter whines, long and low and broken. After Tony had watched him rein in his response to pain in the white tiled corridor - the fierce, guarded demeanour he’d taken upon him - he reckons the kid deserves to cry out as much as he wants. He must hurt like hell.

Tony can feel it.

He keeps his hand locked around Peter’s as the medical team lifts him onto the gurney on his stomach, the kid locking his gaze on him as if his life depends on it. As he’s carried back towards the elevator, Tony jogs beside him. “And we’re off on a magical adventure to the MedBay,” he jests feebly. One side of Peter’s mouth actually lifts a little. “Get ready to sleep for a decade. I know you’ll love that. No more getting up at the crack of dawn to take the subway, doctor’s orders.”

The elevator takes them briskly upwards, but to Tony it still isn’t fast enough. Through his tirade of falsely-chipper reassurance, the medical team makes a cursory assessment of his injuries and responsivity.

“Your aunt is on her way. She’ll be here real soon, so expect a lot of kisses. From me, too. If that’s alright.”

“Sir, we need you to clear the room while we prep for surgery.”

“Oh.” They’re in an operating room, he realises dimly. “Yes.”

Although it tears at his primal protective instincts, Tony knows he has to step away for the kid’s ultimate wellbeing. Hysterics in the OR will do nothing to ease the process along.

Laying a hand over the crown of Peter’s matted hair, he tries to imbue his own strength into the kid through his touch, though all he’s got at the moment seems to be an overload of frenzied determination.

“Be brave for me, Pete,” he whispers.

There’s an affirmation of his request in Peter’s eyes, he thinks.

He steps away; the doors glide shut before him.

“Well, fucking hell,” he remarks to Pepper who he hears approaching behind him.

“Yes, fucking hell. Do you want to explain why you were passed out and slung over the kid’s shoulder?”

“I found where they’d kept him. Well, I didn’t know for sure, I just… I’m sorry. It was a gut instinct. Couldn’t slow down if there was a chance it was the right lead.”

“Who was it?”

“Oscorp. They brought him to me, and - God - they, he was…” his headache arrives in full force, half-knocking him off his feet with the sudden dizziness that accompanies it. “Maybe we can talk about this after I’ve got some Tylenol in me. Pretty sure I’ve got a concussion.”

“Okay.” Caring Pepper returns. “Let’s get you checked out, too.”

---

Peter opens his eyes to white tiles.

The pain he’d felt so potently the last time he’d been awake has dimmed significantly, leaving him with dull aches; a mattress cushions his smarting back. It’s heavenly, almost unreal.

“They said he’d only be out for an hour or two, right?”

“It doesn’t mean anything’s wrong, May. He’s just exhausted.”

It’s the familiar voices that bring him back to reality, that cement sweet relief in his heart.

Rolling his head to one side, he finds May attached to his hand.

May. May. May who smells of freshly-washed scrubs and orchids and home.

He flexes his fingers in hers and she startles, pressing her lips together in a trembling smile. “Peter, baby. Peter.”

At the affection in her words, a bright golden thing deep in his chest that has been left neglected in a white tiled corner for twenty-one days flares to life, thawing, easing him.

He attempts to turn his head the other way but finds a wad of gauze across the side of his head that prevents him from seeing all of Tony. He spots the elbows resting on his mattress, the downturned countenance harbouring something deep and raw.

Grief settles heavily in the room. Peter’s had enough of grief.

“Tha’ was,” he tries through his numb mouth, “Tha’ w’s a trip. An’ all I got w’s… was this…” He attempts to indicate himself with a hand but finds the arm that isn’t enclosed in May’s hand trapped by a sling and a number of casts.

Like the force of gravity has suddenly been applied to him and he’s hit the ground with a thud, Peter remembers the snap of those bones breaking, the wordless screams nobody had heeded, the bloodstains that had tarnished undulating white tiling, and feels a painful lump well up in his throat.

“I d’n’t even ge’ an’thing.”

A tear races unbidden down his cheek.

“That w’s a lousy joke. ’m sorry.”

The lamentation trapped within him has been caught behind his sternum for twenty-one days; now that it’s beginning to escape, it’s impossible to stop.

Peter swallows. Another tear falls, sinking into the gauze across his face.

“Hey,” May murmurs soothingly to him, “What’s up, sweetheart?”

Everything.

“Forgot how nice y’ were, May,” he tells her, trying to distract from his crying, trying to smile. The gauze and the numbness of the side of his face gets in the way. “Ev’ryone’s real nice ou’ here. Y’ were - m'ster St’rk, y’ came?”

“I did,” he receives in reply. He’s never seen his mentor look so wrecked.

It’s not every day he returns from a kidnapping, he supposes.

“‘M - ‘m back.” He feels as if he needs to say it aloud to solidify it.

“Yes, you are.” May brushes a fond hand across his hair, tucking away his still-dirty bangs. The touch is more tentative than her usual calming gestures, but she offers him a smile that, although plastered on, holds at least a fragment of genuine positivity. “Everyone’s very happy about that, you know.”

His mind turning to the days at school he never attended, the unanswered texts in his phone, the life he’d left behind, Peter tips his head back restlessly. “Di’ Ned… we were g’na…”

“He handled your World History presentation,” May says with a huff of laughter that is mirrored by Mister Stark. “Don’t you worry about it.”

“Goo’. Prou’ of him.” He is. He misses him and MJ like hell.

May’s countenance affects stern incredulity, although she can never muster up any real discipline while he’s bedbound. Peter has learnt this through a long period of trial and error where, after engaging in some form of stupid behaviour, she’d always wait until he was back on his feet to grill him out. With the state he’s in now, he guesses it will take a while this time. She chuckles wetly at him. “You walked yourself all the way back here, you crazy boy.”

Peter takes another hazy stab at lifting the mood: “Crazy, ‘s m’ - uh, my…”

“Middle name?” supplies Mister Stark, subdued.

“Mm. M’ middle name.”

The crease in his mentor’s brow sets off a warning pang in his chest.

“M’ster St’rk?”

“Yeah, kid?”

“Is ev’rythin’ all, uh…” his brain and mouth won’t work together to produce the words he wants. “All, all, um.”

Tony seems to sense the root of his concern. “You’re safe. I made sure of it myself. Multiple times. We have those guys handled, I promise.” He rests a hand on Peter’s knee, pats it a few times, but he gets the feeling that he’s holding back from doing something as intimate as wiping tears from where they’ve halted, quivering, in the hollows of his eye sockets. In a quiet corner of his mind, Peter wishes he would.

“Oh. ‘kay.”

He can’t quite bring himself to believe it.

---

The next time he wakes up, he’s gained a new level of coherence that leads him to take stock of the state he’s in. The dressing on his face feels damp but cool with whatever they’ve used to treat the burns. The burns he doesn’t want to think about.

There’s a splint and a layer of gauze across his nose to reset it; a cast on his hand, one on his forearm, and a sling holding the whole arm at a 90-degree angle. It alleviates the burning pain he’d barely even processed in his collarbone. He can feel a dressing across the lashes on his back, too, and an ice pack laid across his swollen ribs over the hospital gown he’s now dressed in. He’s free from a cannula, thankfully; there are just two IV lines trailing from the crook of his arm and the back of his hand respectively.

God, I’m a mess.

It’s certainly the most wiped-out he’s ever felt. His eyelids are ten-tonne weights.

The trouble comes when May offers him a plastic cup upon noticing his return to consciousness. “Do you want a couple of ice chips, honey?”

“Would you like some clothes?”

Peter’s heart picks up the pace.

“Uh, I - I don’ know.”

“You don’t know?” May presses, brows knitting, and he’s letting her down. She wants an answer.

“Wha’s, wha’s gonna happ’n?” he asks tremulously, recalling the thump of a whip descending on his back, the echoes of his own screams accompanied by the sickening cracking of bones, a million hands pressing him to the ground, and simply needing to know that he’s safe from it.

He is safe. He knows that. But a more primal part of him is terrified.

“What do you mean, baby? Are you feeling okay?”

From his accustomed place at Peter’s right side, Tony leans forward in his seat and interjects. “Hey, is this something to do with…?”

Peter isn’t sure why he says it. It just comes out. “T’ earn wha’ I need, I gotta take punishmen’.”

There’s an ugly silence. Tony sets a hand over Peter’s ankle; Peter can pick up the tremors in his grip. May chews on her lower lip.

“Kid,” Tony says quietly.

“‘M sorry, it just… that’s wha’ they said. I know ‘s not… bu’, uh, yeah. Sorry.”

“Hey, it’s fine.” Tony frowns good-naturedly, signalling a Mister Stark-patented statement on the way, and sure enough: “I don’t want to hear the word sorry out of your mouth for at least a month.”

It’s familiar, comforting, and helps Peter ground himself in the room, the hospital bed, the safe place.

He smiles wonkily at Mister Stark. “Y’know tha’s unrealistic.”

“Seriously, kid, are you gonna take the ice chips?” is the amusement-tinged response. Tony nods towards the cup now set down on the overbed table, his countenance radiating a schooled softness. “No strings attached, that’s a guarantee.”

“Sure,” Peter blusters, shrugging then regretting it as his collarbone is struck with a stabbing pain. “‘kay.”

May pushes a few chips into his mouth, softly pushing away his good hand, which he notices is weighed down by fatigue and more spindly than the last time he’d been in the MedBay. Almost a month of starvation does that to you, he guesses. The ice chips are heavenly against his arid throat.

“Is that how you got all banged up?” Tony inquires softly, re-igniting the previous thread of conversation, and although it unearths the reel of harrowing memories that blemish his recent past, something in Peter yearns to tell Mister Stark, to show him that he’d tried his best, even if it doesn’t appear that way.

He’d gotten captured, kidnapped, and absolutely wrecked, and he’d just waited around until Mister Stark had come to save him. Whether Oscorp was involved or not, it fosters a rankling sense of shame in his gut.

If you’re nothing without the suit, then you shouldn’t have it.

“Tony,” May hisses.

Peter nods anyway, the rustling dressing over his face irritating him. “Yeah.” He searches for Tony’s gaze, injects sincerity into his garbled speech. “I didn’ wanna ask f’r anything an’ I made it five days wi’out water. Bu’... I had to.”

“Course you did,” Mister Stark tells him with a startling level of empathy.

“I tried t’ be smart,” Peter continues, “S’ they wouldn’ hurt me t’ much.”

“Pete, I’m not grading you on how well you handled yourself in there. Relax. You got out, that’s all that matters.”

“You go’ me out,” mutters Peter.

The crow’s feet lining Mister Stark’s eyes deepen. “Same difference,” he affirms.

But it isn’t.

“Di’ you hear me, May?” he finds himself saying, blinking away a haze of rumination from his vision.

“What?”

“I called you in there, y’ know.”

The feel of the vintage telephone he’d wished into being is somehow more concrete than the real memories of pacing the floor and sleeping on the ceiling and not-crying and crawling when he became too weak to stand and screaming to a helpless Mister Stark as fire licked the side of his face.

“You - there was a phone?” May asks quizzically. She’s trying her very best to understand him, Peter knows, to listen to him and fix any problem he voices, to make it all better. It’s him who’s all over the place.

“No. There wasn’ anything. Just tiles. Bu’ I pretended. Thought y’ might hear anyway.”

His remark breaks something in May. With a sharp inhale, she pushes back her chair and stands, looking anywhere but at Peter, at the casts and dressings and stitches that hold him together. “You know what?” she says loudly, “I’m gonna - do you want a milkshake, Peter? I’m getting you a milkshake. Something nice to get you back to solid foods.”

She rakes a hand through her unwashed hair and leaves.

The mattress feels too soft for Peter now, dipping under his weight. He wallows in his own stupidity.

His memories are now too dark to share with May: she isn’t a superhero, just a woman who has lost her husband and who didn’t ask to be pulled into a world where she risks losing her nephew too. She didn’t ask to have another person to worry about, but here Peter is, breaking her heart. He almost wishes she didn’t care so ardently as she does, didn’t long so fruitlessly to protect him from the wear and tear of the superhuman world.

The silence between him and Mister Stark hangs heavily, riddled with tension and the shared recollection of Peter’s screams.

Only when Tony clears his throat and says, “I set you up a new phone,” is he pulled away from his thoughts.

“You di’?”

It’s tossed into his lap. “Go ahead and text your little Gen Z heart away.”

As hard as Peter tries to turn the device on and swipe over to his apps with his one uninjured hand, it just slips from his grip. His face reddens.

“M’ster S’rk?”

“Yuh-huh?” Mister Stark hasn’t yet noticed, having angled himself away from Peter a little and placed his head in his hands. At Peter’s sheepish call, he twists to face him again in a series of jerks. “Oh.” He lunges for the phone, newly sober. “Oh, yeah. How about I read everything out for you?”

In an instant, the notion of Mister Stark seeing all his texts manifests in all its horrifying glory, and Peter finds himself fearing something as trivial as the discovery of his awkward message history with MJ and nerdy conversations with Ned. It’s oddly relieving.

“Don’ spy on my texts,” he protests weakly. The blue light reflecting on Mister Stark’s face serves as a blatant reminder that his mentor might just be betraying him already.

Tony smirks. “I can’t not spy on them if they’re right there.”

Peter lets out a huff that he hopes conveys the entirety of his indignance, although he’s aware the side of his face that’s free of dressings probably doesn’t create a very threatening image.

“There you are,” Tony chuckles in the face of his display, “I was waiting for that little frown.”

“‘M not little.”

“If you say so, pipsqueak.”

Peter rolls his eyes as dramatically as he can. “Jus’ let me talk t’ Ned ‘nd MJ.”

“Video call?” Mister Stark suggests as if he hasn’t yet noticed the way Peter’s face must look.

The thought of his friends seeing the human punching bag he’s become cuts a sense of horror in him too deep for the lightness of the interaction he’s engaged in.

“No, no, no,” he rushes to say before hurriedly covering his panic with a languid shake of his head. “No calls. Text.”

“And you’re gonna dictate them to me like I’m a medieval scribe?”

“I dig tha’.” Peter finds himself letting out a short bark of laughter despite himself. He’s a melting pot of emotion, experiencing everything at once.

“I resent that,” retorts his mentor lightly.

“Suck i’ up, M’ster S’rk. ‘m an invalid, y’ gotta do what I say.”

Tony just swallows. Peter hopes he didn’t say the wrong thing again.

“Di’ Ned say anything?” he prompts eventually.

“A great many things. Forty-two, in fact.”

“Oh, man.” Just the thought of forty-two things makes his head spin. Ned probably went out of his mind. “Don’ think I c’d process tha’ right now. Jus’... tell him I’m alrigh’. ‘M alive an’ he can finish the Imperial S’r Destroyer wi’out me.”

“The Imperial Star Destroyer?” echoes Mister Stark, a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth.

Peter remembers the enthusiasm he used to hold for things like this. He tries hollowly but valiantly to recreate that excitement as he replies: “‘S got four thousan’, seven h’ndred an’ eighty four pieces, M’ster St’rk. Isn't tha’ crazy?”

His mentor’s eyes crinkle amiably as he regards Peter, shifting back a little in his seat as if the levity has physically purged some of his stress. “You built all of that?”

“We w’re gonna,” shrugs Peter.

“He’s typing already. It’s… I have to break it to you, Pete, but his fine motor skills seem to have declined significantly in the time you were gone.”

“Wha’ do y’ mean?”

“It’s just a string of random letters.”

“He’s keyb’rd smashin’, M’ster St’rk,” Peter giggles, ignoring the rasp of his throat.

Tony clicks his tongue. “I won’t even ask.”

Making an attempt to lean upwards in his bed and towards the glow of the screen in Mister Stark’s hands which is quickly aborted by the ache of his ribs and back, Peter urges, “Wha’s he sayin’ now?”

“I think I made out a holy shit somewhere in there… I’m gonna kill you, I thought you were dead… No, I am not finishing the Destroyer without you…”

Peter smiles.

“What happened? With an abundance of question marks.” Raising his eyeline with a dip of his brows, Tony studies him for a moment.

“Tell him i’ was S’ider-Man stuff an’ I got in trouble but ‘m alrigh’,” Peter tells him as firmly as he can.

“You’re not gonna tell him?”

“He’ll stress ou’.”

Setting aside the phone in favour of lacing his fingers together atop his lap, Tony sighs, heralding a lecture to come. “Kid, I won’t lie to you,” he says with surprising softness, “Not everything just goes away once you’re back in the world. Some things never do. You - you know that, right? You’re prepared for that?”

At that very moment, Peter is saved by the bustling entrance of May, who sets a creamy drink before him and smiles hopefully. “I got you salted caramel.”

“Th’nk you so much, May.” Inexplicably, it’s the drink, the way his enhanced senses pick up the rich, sugary smell and the slow bleeding of caramel syrup into the milky base, which rekindles passion in Peter, infuses a little color into his world. He lifts his hand until it rests on her arm, too weak to raise it further, and she sets her hand a little awkwardly but with sincerity over his.

“S’lted caramel’s the bes’.”

“I know, honey.” Returning his smile shakily, she squeezes his hand and tells him, “Now, I want you to enjoy it, okay? It’s - it’s your first...”

Where she trails off, he picks up. “My firs’ drink back in the real w’rld.”

May nods, blinking fiercely. Everything Peter does seems to upset her. So he shuts up and latches on to the straw of the drink.

It’s mind-blowingly good. It’s cool and thick and delicious and makes him feel a whole lot better.

“Can I swear?” he pipes up out of the blue. “Jus’ once?”

Mister Stark indulges him. “Go on.”

“H’ly fuck , I’ve missed s’lted caramel.”

---

Peter tried to escape. He did.

The second time he heard the rhythmic beat of boots nearing his cell, he leapt up onto the wall right beside the door, flattening himself against the tile in the hope that the masked group would be taken by surprise by his sudden attack. With nothing but unbridled terror on his side, he prepared to take out four armed guards who had wrestled him easily to the floor the day before.

The force of the group was unneeded, it transpired. As soon as Peter threw his first weakened punch, the room filled with the torturous whistle, making him drop to the floor in shock.

“Would you like anything?” he was asked mildly after the noise had ceased at last.

From his sprawled position on the floor, hands still covering his ringing ears, Peter shook his head vehemently. “No. Please, go away.”

White tiles spun with the dizzying motion of a carousel before his vision, the cacophony of retreating boots at odds with the thousands of dismembered feet he sees tramping across the unidentifiable orb of the cell. Peter bit back a cry of pain as the slam of the door assaulted his ears, rocking his head back and forth, back and forth, losing himself in the distracting motion.

His swallows became avalanches, blinking like the shutter of a camera pressed against his eyes.

“Oh, man,” he mumbled unevenly, nausea creeping up his throat. “Pull yourself together, Peter. Come on. Just - chill.”

It wasn’t the first time his senses had overloaded. The bout of sickness after the spider bite; his first overwhelming patrol; a school day he’d attended on a single hour of sleep; all had brought about these almost familiar symptoms. But before, he could crawl between his sheets, relaxing in the familiar scent of his room, and call it a day. He could stumble through his day in sunglasses and headphones, knowing it would pass. He could even lock himself in the dark, soundproofed room in the Compound - the isolation room - and shut out every sensation but his own breath and heartbeat. In his box, there was nothing to distract him from the frightening lack of control that came with the sensory overload but his own sheer willpower.

So he continued to rock back and forth for what could have been hours, simply waiting for the storm to pass by.

---

Peter wakes to a sweat-soaked hospital gown and a lump in his throat.

Sucking in a raw breath, he takes in the room: Tony stirring at his side and May passed out at his other. Nothing out of the ordinary. He burns all over, however, damp and shaky and aching.

“Kid?” Tony mutters, righting himself and rubbing at his eyes.

“Mister St’rk, I gotta go t’ the isolation room,” he blurts.

That gets Mister Stark up quickly. He takes in Peter’s taut face, his good hand clenched in the sheets, the beads of moisture at his hairline, and nods.

The transferral from his bed to a wheelchair is awkward and excruciating, with Tony struggling to bundle his fragile limbs and IV lines safely into the seat while Peter shuts his eyes against the red-hot pokers of Tony’s hands on him and the shifting of the synthetic overhead lights against his skull and the jostling of his arm and back and ribs and face. It’s worth it , he tells himself. Just a few minutes and there will be blissful silence.

“Nightmare?” Tony asks him in a hushed tone as he wheels him down corridors and into the lift.

“Flashback, I th’nk.”

Tony’s hand settles in his slick curls; he wordlessly combs them out, his touch feather-light, and it’s a welcome distraction from the deafening creaking of the cables around them.

Guiding him and his IV stand into the darkened room, he half-shuts the door and breathes, “Anything you need, give FRIDAY a command, remember? She won’t make any noise. I’ll come and get you out when you’re ready.”

“Thank you,” he whispers, his brain rattling with the volume.

The door is eased shut, leaving only blissful quiet.

Blissful for a short while, anyway.

Peter has never loved the isolation room. As helpful as it is to rebalance his senses, the very name reminds him of why it scares him - isolation. Now, bound to his wheelchair, hearing only his own heartbeat, all he can think of are the days in his cell wracked with pain too great to allow him to move but also gripped by terrible loneliness.

The fear of being alone has dogged him all his life. Re-starting his life without his parents. Watching Ben bleed out on the ground before him. Floundering under the weight of the collapsed warehouse. Never was it more starkly exposed, however, than the twenty-one days he’d spent in his box.

He’d been scared. He could have rotted there forever, his last breath plagued by the loneliness he’d fought so hard to run from.

“FRIDAY,” he gasps, “Get me ou’ of here.”

Tony comes rushing through, concern clear on his face, but Peter wants nothing more than to cling to him and never let go, so he does just that, clutching him until he grunts at the pain radiating from his ribs.

“Kid, I’m here. You’re fine.”

“Didn’ work,” he says into Tony’s shoulder.

“I know.” Mister Stark’s voice brims with sadness. “It’s okay, let’s just - take a breather for a minute. Sit here.”

“Can’ do much else,” huffs Peter.

They rest, Mister Stark breathing into Peter’s hair while he keeps his hand stuck stubbornly to his mentor’s back.

#fanfic #fanfiction #irondad #spiderson #tony stark #peter parker #whump #angst #hurt and comfort #notaparty-trick

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