Chapter Text
On a Friday afternoon in the middle of summer, Peter Parker wakes up with a snort.
He knows that it’s the afternoon before he even moves because the sun is streaming through a nearby window and tinting the inside of his eyelids an unpleasant orangey-red, but he buries his face further into the cushion underneath him anyway.
The idea of getting up from the couch is going to take him a minute to accept with the headache pounding behind his still-closed eyes and the cotton mouth making his teeth taste like actual, literal garbage and he wonders for a moment how he had once gotten up with any consistency for classes back when he was still the studious kind of young adult with a degree on the way and prospects for the future.
He supposes that doesn’t matter at the moment, because as he finally cracks open his eyes to May’s old, forest green couch underneath him and his wallet and shoes on the floor beside the coffee table, the only thing that does matter is the potential for coffee.
Coffee will make this morning better. (His nearly dead phone tells him it’s one o’clock in the afternoon. Still feels like morning, though, after the like-the-dead sleep on the couch of the night before.)
As Peter finally manages to heave himself first to sit, and then after a beat and a breath to get his bearings, to stand, he glances down the hall towards the cracked door to his bedroom. He leaves that door closed when he isn’t home, leaves it closed a lot of the time when he is home too, which is how he knows that May must have peeked in looking for him when she got up this morning before finding him on the couch.
He takes off the belt that he fell asleep wearing on his way to the kitchen, tossing it back towards the couch with semi-accurate aim before unplugging the toaster and plugging in the coffee maker in its stead.
With one hand rubbing the sleep out of his tired eyes and one on the handle to the freezer door, Peter sees the bright orange post-it note that has become one of May’s primary ways of communicating with him.
“I’ll stop,” she had told him a month prior. “When you start charging your phone on a daily basis like a regular person.”
Peter sighs, and he unsticks the post-it from the door and feels his body sink somehow even deeper into the trench he drags his feet through on the daily as he reads it.
Off to work. Please take the recycling on your way out.
Love you
She’s drawn a little heart next to that last bit, but it doesn’t make up for the fact that when Peter turns to look at the recycling bin he realizes she hadn’t just peeked into his room this morning but had, in fact, cleaned up a little bit for him as well.
It wasn’t a particularly fast accumulation, but looking at it all gathered up in one spot like this gives Peter a heightened awareness of why he’s been putting off cleaning up. It’s the sound the glass makes all clinking together as he carries it down to the dumpster out back that pierces him with fresh guilt, so he ignores it for the moment and grabs the coffee grounds out of the freezer like had been his original intent.
It’s one of the more entirely unsubtle ways that May has been trying to have this conversation with him in recent months. It’s passive aggressive at worst, but only because the last handful of times she’s tried to have a forthright conversation about it, Peter has spent five to seven days sleeping on Ned’s couch and ignoring her calls.
So she leaves notes, and she kisses him on the forehead when he comes home before midnight, and Peter makes her dinner whenever he can find the energy because the guilt is corrosive and the weight of it is too familiar sometimes, like a mountain of concrete on his back.
Peter changes while his coffee brews and puts on extra deodorant in lieu of a shower and closes the door to his room behind him as he slings his backpack over one shoulder. He burns his mouth drinking one cup too fast and then pours the rest of the pot into one of May’s travel mugs.
A fresh battery slots into the bottom of his camera with ease and exactly forty-seven minutes after first waking up, Peter Parker is out the door.
He forgets to take out the recycling.
***
Peter technically got his job at the Bugle before he dropped out of school.
Back then though it had been a side gig, and he was mostly just a freelancer that Jameson used to get high quality Spider-Man pictures. Back then it had been ironic and a little bit funny and an easy way to make some extra cash.
Now though, it’s his only non-vigilante job and it’s an unironic livelihood and he’s not just taking his camera out on web shooter joy-rides for fun and getting to profit off of them. Now, he has to go on actual assignments and today that means attending Brooklyn School of Science and Technology’s career fair.
It’s part of the reason he had had such a rough night, and why he now has a low-level hangover on the subway at two o’clock in the afternoon. Because he’s twenty-one years old but he had once been sixteen and attending a similar job fair at a similar school with similar kids who he may not have seen in years but knows from social media are graduating and going off to grad school or jobs at the places at which they had once dreamt of taking unpaid internships.
The fair is already in full-swing by the time he steps inside and slides his lens cap into the back pocket of his jeans.
He starts with some wide shots, some establishing views of the school gym and its lines and lines of booths. And maybe he takes more of those than he could ever possibly need because his pity party is still raging on and he is dreading stepping into the crowd of eager high schoolers with their stacks of pamphlets and youthful optimism.
Eventually he has to dive in though, keeping out of the way as much as he can in the given circumstances and only talking to people when he needs to get names for captions. He’s keeping his head down, and so it’s entirely his own fault that he doesn’t notice the OsCorp booth until he’s right up on top of it.
“Parker?”
Peter’s head swings up from looking at the LCD screen on the back of his camera and he starts about three different sentences with incomprehensible almost-words before he manages to blurt out--
“Harry? What are you-- I mean....?”
“How’d I get stuck doing community outreach?” Harry Osborn snorts, leaning back in a folding chair with his feet propped up precariously on the table at his booth. He doesn’t seem to be doing all that much outreach to the community from that position, but he’s there which is something in and of itself.
“Well… Yeah,” Peter chuckles awkwardly under his breath, stepping out of the foot traffic so he’s right beside the OsCorp booth now.
“Pissed off dear old Dad,” Harry shrugs.
“So same old hat then,” Peter deadpans with a wry grin. It’s easy to put on a show for Harry, always has been because of the way Harry puts on a show for everyone.
They don’t talk as frequently as they did when they were both at ESU, but once you know how to speak Harry’s language, it’s kind of a hard skill to shake.
“Hey, I’m not the only one who got the shit sandwich,” Harry motions to Peter’s press pass. “How’d you piss off the boss man this time to get stuck with this gig?”
“Who knows,” Peter shrugs. “I think just looking at my face puts Jameson in a bad mood at this point. It’s fucking pavlovian.”
“Well,” Harry cocks his head to the side, studying Peter as though through a magnifying glass in such a way that makes Peter push away the urge to squirm. “Can’t blame him, really. I mean look at you.”
Peter knows he looks like shit, and on top of that he knows this is Harry’s way of asking whether or not he’s doing okay, but still he puts on his best expression of mock-affrontedness and says, “You wound me, Osborn,” as flatly as he can manage.
Harry smirks at him, and Peter can almost watch as he visibly decides not to press the issue because that’s not who they are to each other. It may have been at one point, there had been the potential for their easy banter at the back of a freshman biology lecture to turn into real and long-lasting friendship, but by the time Peter was ending semesters with more withdrawals and fails than actual usable credits he was also not exactly in the headspace to be maintaining friendships let alone making new ones.
“Well, are you gonna get a glamor shot while you’re here or not?” Harry puts his hands behind his head in a pose that would have looked goofy on anyone lacking his confidence.
Peter lifts his camera and clicks it twice in quick succession.
“Front page,” he says as he steps back out into the sea of people. “Enjoy your community service,” he adds over his shoulder as he steps away.
He can feel Harry’s eyes on him until he turns the corner and starts down the adjacent aisle of booths, at which point the exhaustion of basic social interaction begins to mingle with the exhaustion of whatever it was that made him decide to sleep on the couch last night instead of in his bed a few feet down the hall.
But nothing is simple and nothing is without emotionally wrought reminders of where his life is at these days anymore so he is almost immediately confronted by a booth far more crowded than Harry’s.
Stark Industries-- the dream of every nerdy engineering student-to-be.
Peter half expects to see Pepper Potts standing there, either because that’s just how his day is going or because he knows her modus operandi pretty well these days.
It’s not often that she makes public appearances anymore, mostly showing up for major company announcements and not much else. But she’s still Pepper, and in the years since Peter’s return to life he’s noticed that she likes this sort of thing.
She likes low-key environments and meeting enthusiastic young people and he’s sure it has to do with the whole transition to motherhood as much as it does the loss of her husband and what it means to carry a legacy like that.
The legacy of the man who saved the universe-- the man who saved Peter and then died right in front of his eyes.
Peter knows that Pepper cares a great deal about young people, the way they are the future, and he knows this from experience. Because directly following Tony’s death she had put a lot of emotional work into getting to know Peter better, bonding with him over things other than their shared grief (although that too, always that too), and making sure he knew that he was always welcome in her home, with her daughter, in the space that she and Tony had built for themselves during his absence.
The relationship had been good for both of them, but in the past year or so Peter has been pretty well fucking up every relationship in his life, including this one. He looks at the SI booth in this moment where a teenage boy with a yellow backpack is gazing longingly at a pamphlet for an internship program that hadn’t existed back when Peter was using it as an excuse for Spider-Man related absences. He looks over his shoulder to where Harry is still slumped in his chair but at least talking to a kid this time.
He looks down at the press pass hanging from a lanyard around his neck, feels the weight of his suit at the bottom of his backpack, finally remembers that he was supposed to have taken out the recycling this morning--
And suddenly he has to leave.
He has to leave, has to leave, has to leave so he turns around before this whole event can bring forward any more of his copious amounts of failures and pushes his way back towards the exit, hoping all the while that he has enough on his memory card to avoid a lecture from Jameson.
***
“Hey man, what’s up?”
“Nothing just-- I’m on my way to Pour Over now,” Peter says into his earbuds, camera now safely inside his book bag as he tries to ignore the weight of it and his failure to finish even the one task that was assigned to him today. He dipped out of the fair before he was supposed to, not like anything he did felt like it was supposed to nowadays.
“Oh cool man, yeah. I’m uh-- I’m gonna be a few minutes late but you should head right over there,” Ned says through the phone, Peter squinting as he walks forward.
It wasn’t like Ned to be late to anything -- so firm was Mrs. Leeds’ insistence on punctuality that Peter was effectively-- but lovingly-- banned from having any kind of responsibility for a Leeds family function.
Not that Peter has been to any Leeds family functions in some time, much less anything that he wasn’t absolutely required to be at because of his job.
Or, in this instance, because it would lead to him having to face the flood of guilt he feels from being a terrible friend.
For as much as he avoided May when she started to poke him towards being something more than the human equivalent of a trash can, Ned wasn’t really any better-- not missing the way he’d look at him when Peter would scare the shit out of him, tapping on his living room window and slipping in with a backpack to stay with him for a few days.
These weekly lunches with Ned, at a coffee shop that was about as expensive as Peter could manage without feeling like a total piece of shit, was far below the metric of what Ned deserved.
But like everything in Peter’s life lately, it was the best he could do.
“You okay man?” Peter asks, Ned uncharacteristacally quiet on the other end as Peter walks down the sidewalk, seeing Pour Over in the distance.
“Yeah! Yeah totally, totally fine. I’m just swamped at work, lots of stuff I’m working on but--”
“If you can’t meet up--” Peter starts to say, slowing his pace the closer he gets to Pour Over and already hating himself that he was thinking of how he’d be able to save a few bucks this week if Ned actually cancelled only for Ned to cut him off with a fervency that surprises him.
“No, no, I’m uh-- I’m good. You just-- get to Pour Over and I’ll be there like very, very soon.”
“Okay,” Peter says with a snort, taking the last few steps necessary before he’s at the front door of Pour Over, “you’re being weird, man.”
Whatever Ned says, Peter doesn’t hear it as he steps into the coffee shop-- his eyes scanning the place and landing on the one person he hadn’t expected to see glancing up to him with a surprised look on her face-- Ned’s caginess making entirely too much sense now as he sighs and walks up to her.
“Did Ned put you up to this?” He asks, hearing Ned stammer on the other end and seeing Michelle frown as she grips her mug tighter.
It looked like green tea, Peter’s gut twisting at how much he had missed her, missed being in her presence and missed knowing how she took her tea as she stares up at him with a frown.
“I’m gonna kill him,” she mutters, Peter realizing belatedly that both of them had been put up to this as Ned’s voice continues to echo over the phone.
“I’m not sorry. You two are being stupid and I’m tired of playing middle man. Figure it out.” A beat. “And call me later. Love you man.”
Ned hangs up without another word, Peter sighing again before taking an earbud out of his ear as Michelle goes to stand.
“You’re leaving?” Peter asks, Michelle just staring at him for a beat.
“You don’t want to be here, you don’t want me to be here,” she says, barely concealed hurt flashing across her face as she stands, “I’m gonna go before I say something that I regret.”
“Wait,” Peter says, surprising himself and seemingly surprising Michelle as he puts a hand out, “You’re here and Ned’s-- Ned’s too nosy for his own good but I um, it’s good to see you.”
Michelle studies him for a beat, her face impassive even if Peter knows her too well to know that it’s just a front. Michelle Jones was many things but cold-hearted was not among them.
It’d been six months since they’d broken up-- since she had broken up with him-- but he could tell now just as he could then that it wasn’t a decision she particularly enjoyed making.
Especially when in Peter’s eyes, it had been completely justified.
“If you have a few minutes…” Peter says, motioning towards the table.
He half-expects Michelle to sit back down, to have a conversation like they’d had so many times before. He’s not sure if he’s surprised or just sad when Michelle doesn’t make a move, staring at him with a look with entirely too much forced apathy to be genuine as she says, “I have a deadline. Ned said it was an emergency but if he’s not coming then…”
“Oh,” Peter says, clearing his throat as Michelle grabs the remainder of her mug of tea, downing it so that she can drop it off in the bin Pour Over usually kept to the side, “Okay, that-- yeah I--”
“Aren’t you supposed to be working the Brooklyn Science fair?” She asks, Peter blinking back up at her in surprise.
“How did-- you knew about that?”
Michelle shrugs, avoiding his gaze as she glances at her watch. “Harry texted me.”
Peter presses his lips together, wondering not for the first time just how much his friends talked about him behind his back. He was aware that there was a “Friends of Spider-Man” group text, though if Harry was officially part of it now it probably wasn’t called that.
He and Harry hadn’t been close enough friends for him to learn his secret, though it’s clear from the residual friendliness that him and Michelle kept in touch.
It bothers him more than it should.
“Oh,” Peter says as carefully as he can manage, only for it to be clearly not careful enough for the way Michelle’s eyes narrow.
“He’s just worried about you,” she says with a sigh, Peter shifting his weight back and forth before blurting out words he should know better than to say.
“Are you?”
It’s an instant regret, especially for the way the hurt travels across her face before it turns to anger.
“How do you— no,” she shakes her head, “I’m not doing this. I have a gallery to get ready for and I’m not doing this with you right now.”
She moves to walk past him only for Peter to block her path, Michelle glaring at him as he says, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.”
“How did you mean it then?” She asks point blank, like she always does— cutting straight to the point and clearing away the bullshit that Peter’s gotten entirely too good at throwing people.
He should’ve known better than to think that Michelle Jones, even broken up, would accept his pitiful excuses.
“I didn’t— I just meant—”
“Of course I care about you,” Michelle says softly, thinly veiled hurt in her tone as Peter grinds his teeth.
“MJ--”
“No,” she says, her voice thick until she clears it, gripping the mug in her hand tighter, straightening herself up as she stares into his eyes, “Of course I care about you, Peter. But I can’t keep watching you do this to yourself. You’re ducking out of science fairs now? Seriously?”
She shakes her head, Peter not really having a suitable enough answer for himself much less than for her as she says, “I have to go.”
“MJ, wait—”
He gently raises a hand to rest on her arm, hearing her heart skip a beat despite how busy the coffee shop is from his touch in a way that still thrills him.
Only for it all to come to a screeching halt when his phone buzzes in the same familiar pattern it always does when it’s Spider-Man related, loud enough that even Michelle can hear it as he brings his hand down and reaches into his pocket.
“You should go,” she says, her voice even and expression blank— Peter hating himself for looking at the alert but knowing he’d hate himself more if he didn’t check.
“Can we—”
“Tell Ned he owes me lunch,” she says, moving to walk away from him as Peter sighs.
She pauses, turning back to look at him before saying, “Be careful.”
I love you too, Peter thinks but doesn’t say, knowing Michelle well enough to decipher the meaning of her words when she turns to deposit her mug and walks out of Pour Over with purpose.
Peter’s left staring at her, much longer than he should as his phone buzzes— wondering where it all went wrong between them.
They’d survived being dusted for five years, survived a European trip from hell and a supposed identity reveal, survived the fall out and the questions and the eventual dismissal, survived the jump to college— give or take— only to now be almost five years since he first noticed, really noticed Michelle Jones as she walked into home room after the Blip and to now be transfixed at watching her leave.
Only to sigh as he slips his phone back in his pocket and moves towards the door to go change.
Peter knows exactly what went wrong between the two of them— nothing to do with MJ.
And everything to do with him.
***
“Spider-Man, are you okay?”
“Never better kid,” Peter says, as he throws up finger-guns, swaying slightly as he tries to stay still for the picture.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” a voice says next to him, Peter glancing up and seeing what he can only assume is the kid’s mom frowning at him. She grabs at her child who is whining that they didn’t get a good enough picture, only to walk towards another woman with another equally disappointed frown who takes the other hand of the kid.
“Definitely am, ma’am,” Peter calls out, groaning as he hoists himself up from his squat. Only to move too fast, letting out a short oof as he falls flat on his face.
It’s a credit to New Yorkers that they ignore the sprawled out Spider-Man on his face, drunk out of his mind and wearing a suit that was several stages past worn . Maybe they thought he was just a drunk imposter, something that would work out in his favor since Pepper already had enough on her plate than having to retroactively run PR for a washed-up superhero college drop out.
Not that anyone else knew that Peter was such a failure in his personal life. He groans again, moving to shift up into a seated position as people continue to walk past him, wondering for a beat if he’s truly reached rock bottom or if there were still some feet left to fall.
He doesn’t really get a chance to dwell more on it when he hears the screams of someone in the distance, manicacal laughter that sounds way too fucking cheery for how exhausted, drunk and yet somehow already hungover Peter’s feeling.
“Great. Just great, can’t even fucking wallow in peace for five damn minutes,” Peter says, mostly to himself as he hoists himself up off the dirty sidewalk, sending a hand out and swinging himself into the air.
The change in direction is quick and a little too fast, feeling as if he’s gonna hurl for three seconds before it passes as he swings towards where the sound is.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Peter mutters when he sees the source of the sound, an honest to God wizard flying around in a purple haze.
Or at least it looks like a wizard, decked out in a robe that looks like it came from Party City and enough black eyeliner to look like a raccoon as they levitated themselves up in the air-- laughing in glee as they yelled out, “Spider-Man!”
“The one and only,” Peter mutters to himself, avoiding a shot of whatever purple shit that’s coming out of the guy’s hands, “If you wanted to meet up, I got an open calendar. Free and clear, Houdini.”
“ Who?” The man asks, Peter scoffing before just barely missing yet another shot of purple laser looking shit that Peter can’t tell if it’s real or he’s just too drunk to really understand what the hell he’s seeing.
“Dude, come on,” Peter says, shooting a web out to swing in the opposite direction before sending a few taser webs towards the guy-- the man deflecting one before getting hit with another. He spasms a few times before starting to fall down to the ground, hearing the sharp inhale of the crowd that had gathered before Peter moves into action-- switching the webs to the regular version and creating a bit of a cushion before the guy fell.
“Maybe some time with a real wizard will give you a better perspective on things,” Peter says to the man who looks a little dazed, only to glare back at Peter when he lands next to him.
“You’ll see Spider-Man! You’ll see if--” The man is immediately muffled as Peter sends a web over his mouth, the man’s hands still wiggling only for something just as purple and terribly gaudy to fall out of the guy’s pocket.
“Ooh what’s this? Another Party City souvenir?” Peter jokes, the man’s eyebrows furrowing as he yells something at him-- muffled from the web as Peter looks at it.
It kind of reminds him of what the glowy thingy had looked like when he was back in high school, his spider senses just barely itching in the back of his neck. It’s instincts he tacitly ignores, shoving the little rock in his pocket before directing Karen to call for Strange for clean up.
“Are you sure you don’t wish to stay, Peter?” Karen’s voice chimes in, Peter shaking his head in response only to take a beat too long to remember that Karen was in fact an AI and could not read his facial cues.
“Nah,” Peter says, blinking a few times and hoping the quick swing will sober him up, “Gotta get to May’s before five. Cooking dinner for her and it would probably suck if my apology dinner didn’t happen because I was playing phone tag with a dude who can’t be bothered to show up half the time.”
He swings away from the purple wizard guy, asking Karen to touch base with Wong for good measure before he changes his trajectory back to May’s apartment.
***
Dinner turns out slightly better than Peter hoped, something he’d feel a lot more proud of had it not been for the reason.
Peter—historically— was a shitty cook. Ned had a knack for it and Michelle had a solid five meals she could whip out in rotation but Peter was abysmal at best.
It’d been a joke, before Peter had run his life into the ground, before Michelle had broken up with him and they still joked about these things, that he made up for his shitty cooking in other ways.
Six months of being broken up and even longer of living as a step above a mooch in May’s apartment, Peter had decidedly gotten better at the whole cooking thing.
The pasta was still a little gummy and the salad was a step beyond tossed than it should be but it tasted good and May didn’t seem to have any complaints, dutifully eating the portions Peter had given her as he chattered on aimlessly.
Peter didn’t have anything remotely interesting to talk about but it was better than the silence that would fall between them anytime he let them sit quietly for two long. Silence felt like a gap, silence allowed for an opportunity for questions.
Silence reminded him that for as much as May loved him, that the fact that they had so little new things to talk about, made him feel even more like a failure.
Peter is actively working to combat said silence as they do the dishes, yammering on about some story he saw about a gang of green pigeons that had been spotted across the city when May cuts in— catching him off guard as she asks, “Peter, are you happy?”
“I’m— uh, am I what?” He asks, looking over to her as she dries the plate she ate from, focused on it as she repeats the question.
“Are you happy?”
“Well,” Peter says with a snort, the prickly feeling of unease in the back of his throat having less to do with danger and more at the bluntness of a woman who knows him better than he probably knows himself, “I mean sure, yeah. I’m happy. I got a job and a place to live and—”
“You should know by now that things don’t make you happy,” May says, Peter feeling his stomach churn as she looks at him over her glasses.
“You’re not happy,” she says definitively, not as a question but more of a statement as she continues, “And I’m not sure what else I can do to help you.”
“Are you kicking me out?” Peter asks, his voice a lot softer and tinged with a lot more hurt he intended as May frowns, putting the dried plate down and turning to him.
“Why would you ever think that? Peter—”
“It’s okay,” Peter cuts in, focusing on the faucet as he scrubs his plate harder— remembering to control his absurd physical strength, “if you want to, I mean. I know I deserve it and you’ve— you’ve let me stay here a lot longer than I probably should have but—“
May puts a hand to his shoulder, Peter blinking back tears as he looks back at her— only to feel worse when he sees the hurt expression on her face.
“Peter, why would you ever think that I’d kick you out? I love you, kiddo. We’re a team. Always,” she says, Peter feeling a prickle of hot shame rolling around his spine— remembering the first time May had said those words, shivering and wrapped in a shock blanket after he watched the only man he’s known as a father die right in front of him.
She must remember it too, upturning the corner of her mouth before bringing a hand to his face as she says, “You’re going through a rough patch, but that’s just it. You’re going.”
“I’ve fucked up, May,” Peter says with a huff, water still going on in the background, “I can’t— even Spider-Man is a total fuck up these days.”
May frowns, bringing her hand down to turn the water off at the sink before looking at Peter— leveling her gaze in a way that makes him feel like he’s in high school all over again.
“That, right there, is your biggest problem.”
“Wait what?” Peter asks, May sighing as she shakes her head.
“You are not just Spider-Man. You base your whole life on how that’s going—”
“May—”
“And you can’t, you can’t keep doing that, Peter,” she says definitively, firmly, making Peter feel a lot younger than he is.
“You were Peter Parker long before Spider-Man ever came along and you’ll be Peter Parker long after Spider-Man is gone,” she says, Peter ignoring the itch in the back of his throat as he holds her gaze— a quiet whisper in the back of his mind that it was an all too real possibility that the end of Spider-Man would be the end of Peter Parker.
Peter says instead, “I don’t even know who I am without it. I can’t— I can’t give it up, May.”
“I’m not saying you have to,” she says, exhaustion emanating from her and a recognition in her eyes that Peter feels deep in his bones— that she too feared what his end would be.
“But you need to figure out how you’re going to continue to do this. Figure out what kind of person you want to be.”
Happy, Peter thinks but doesn’t say, only for May to confirm his own fears as she says, “Because I don’t think you’re him right now.”
***
Logically, Peter knows he should be doing some soul searching— perched on the roof of his apartment, suit in hand and barely a hint of restraint at the chance that someone could see him.
Emotionally, Peter doesn’t give a fuck— five steps past tipsy and straight into full out drunk as he blearily stares at the suit, running over it with his fingers.
If Peter was sober, he’d recognize he was being stupid— being drunk on the rooftop, being drunk on the rooftop with his suit in hand, being drunk on the rooftop with his suit in hand and half a mind to go out on patrol.
If Peter was sober, he’d recognize that he’s been doing the superhero thing for almost a decade and yet it feels much, much longer than that— that it was okay to feel a little overwhelmed and that he should, as literally anyone in his life told him to, take some breaks.
If Peter was sober, he’d know he’s been hard on himself— that he’s fucked up but isn’t a fuck up.
Peter, however, is not sober.
“You’re my fucking problem. Always— always been a pr’blem,” he slurs, only to frown as he comes across something in the pocket.
He reaches for it, frown deepening as he pulls out some glowy purple thing, his alcohol ridden brain failing to remember where it came from as he drops the suit.
“What the hell…” Peter says, looking at it over in his hand.
If Peter was sober, he’d remember he should contact Strange or Wong or literally anyone else about this.
If Peter was sober, he’d probably think better of shaking the glowy looking rock or pinching at its sides.
Peter, however, is not sober.
He does just that, spider sense tingling in the background when the glowy thing turns bright— white hot light out of nowhere.
“Oh shit,” Peter mutters, going to drop it only to feel an immediate pulling sensation in his gut— not even sure if it’s fallen from his hand.
Peter feels a blinding pain, like he’s being pulled apart into a thousand pieces.
And then nothing at all.
***
On a probably Saturday, probably afternoon in what feels like it’s probably Summer, Peter Parker wakes up with a snort.
He’s laying down but he’s definitely not in bed, which wouldn’t be all that abnormal these days except he’s definitely not on a couch either from the way he can feel wood grain digging into his cheek and threatening to give him a splinter or seven.
The sun is beating down on him and Peter can feel the beginnings of a sunburn on the back of his neck, which means he’s been here for at least long enough for that to happen. His stomach is roiling and his teeth taste like actual, literal garbage and as he cracks open an eye and pushes himself up with the palms of his hands his head spins.
Something’s not right inside his body, but quite frankly he’s had worse hangovers so his main focus for the moment has got to be figuring out why the hell he’s outside and…
Beside a lake?
Peter runs a hand over his face, digs two fingers into his eye sockets, and when he opens them again, blinks away the spots in his vision to confirm that, yes, he is on a bench between the treeline of a forest and a large, still lake.
It’s quite frankly a new level of fucked up, a new step towards rock bottom, if he’s waking up in places he doesn’t recognize with no memory of how he got there in the first place, and he just slumps back in the bench for a moment to let that sink in before he even considers trying to problem solve.
He doesn’t have any of his Spider-Man gear, but he also isn’t currently locked up, so this is probably an issue of his first truly embarrassing blackout and not of, say, kidnapping, but a pat to his pockets reveals he is also without a phone or wallet.
So not a much better situation to be in, as far as Peter’s concerned.
He takes a deep breath, as much to settle his nausea as to get his bearings. The sun glints off the water and full, green leaves rustle softly in a faint breeze and it’s… actually not entirely unfamiliar.
Why, exactly, is it not entirely unfamiliar?
His balance is off as he tries to stand, like when you step in a puddle that’s deeper than expected, except he’s on solid ground, even looks down and stomps his foot a couple of times to double check.
The treeline behind him continues in both directions, but as Peter turns around, he notices a dirt trail cutting through the forest and it’s so not entirely unfamiliar but he can’t place why. Why can’t he place why?
With few options and a restless need to figure out what the fuck he’s gotten himself into, Peter starts down the path at a careful, methodical pace. He can’t hear anything that would be out of the ordinary for a forest by the lake, and he can’t see or smell anything of that sort either, even when he tunes in to his super senses and really makes a go at it.
He feels like he’s wandering as he arbitrarily chooses a path winding through the trees and picking forks in the road based on an instinct he only trusts about half the time these days until he sees a break in the forestry up ahead of him and slows down.
Peter worries for a moment that he’s going to have to fight his way out of something, that this has all been a fun game for some supervillain with a vendetta, but as he approaches the edge of the forest and peeks out around the trees, all of his wild (if not entirely unlikely with the nature of his life) theories go flying out the window.
The lakehouse.
Of course the fucking lakehouse, Parker, you woke up beside a lake.
Peter lets out a breath of tension, because although he still has no idea how he got here or why he came, he at the very least knows where he is. It’s still humiliating and he still kind of wants to puke but even if it’s been a while since he last visited, Peter knows he’s welcome here, no matter how much he feels like he probably shouldn’t be.
Mostly, he pauses there at the edge of the treeline because he needs to have a plan before he knocks on the door and scares the living daylights out of Pepper with what he’s sure is a pretty disastrous appearance and no viable excuse for showing up.
He considers his excuses, levels his shoulders so as to seem reasonably put together, and is about to step out onto the lawn when a twig behind him snaps.
“Stop right there. Put your hands up and turn around slowly. You know exactly who I am and exactly what I can do to you.”
Peter freezes, because the fact of the matter is he doesn’t know who this man is, despite the way his brain is screaming at him that he does. Years of only hearing that voice on recordings and he still hasn’t forgotten what it sounds like, but it’s not possible.
It’s simply not possible and Peter is already disoriented beyond belief and he doesn’t know how he got here and who is behind him and how are they replicating that voice--
“I said hands up!”
Peter, stuck somewhere between shock and terror for the way he thought he had a grasp of the situation but now realizes he very much does not, keeps his hands at his sides and whips his head around in direct opposition to what he’s been ordered to do.
It’s not possible, not possible, not possible.
Dark hair, greying at the sides; beard, neatly trimmed; blue glow, filtered through the fabric of a t-shirt; gauntlet, charged and pointing directly at Peter’s head.
Peter watches his face fall, watches the armored hand falter, watches his breath hitch and still in his chest, and Peter’s going to puke. He’s definitely going to puke this time, there’s no question of it in his mind-- not possible not possible not possible.
“Pete?”
It’s a breath of a thing, hopeful and scared and loud in Peter’s ringing ears. Because put all together, the location and the voice and the face, it feels like his feet have been sucked in by the earth and his lungs have been entirely removed from his body.
He’s looking at a dead man.
“Might be time to stop drinking, Parker,” he mutters to himself.
He’s looking at Tony Stark.