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“Peter.”
“I’m not even doing anything,” he groaned automatically. Then wiped his mouth and went back to the mini-drone.
Mr. Stark didn’t say anything. Peter glanced up and over to see if the old man had abandoned him to his devices. He had not. He’d pulled up the welding mask and an eyebrow—only one eyebrow, the skeptical one—as far as it would go.
Peter fought the urge to hiss and duck under the table. It was a mighty battle and it must have shown on his face because Mr. Stark’s eyebrow twitched as it could not go any higher.
“Peter,” he said simply again, as if Peter was supposed to be a mindreader now. God.
“What?” he asked, more moodily than intended.
“You tired, kid?”
“No.”
“Peter.”
“What?”
The very corner of Mr. Stark’s lip did something weird, like it couldn’t decide if it wanted to smile or frown. Peter thought he could fuck off.
“What did you just say to me?” Mr. Stark asked.
“Fucking nothing, God. What do you want?”
His lip was twitching again. Even harder than before Like, why? Was this a stroke? Was Mr. Stark having a stroke? Was he even old enough to have a stroke? More importantly, should Peter, like, call someone?
“Pete, you need to sleep.”
Go to hell, old man. You don’t know me.
Mr. Stark was laughing at him, full on laughing now, trying to hide it by rubbing his face, but Peter knew. He was smug, the bastard.
“Peter, you’re talking out loud.”
Oh shit.
“Yeah, oh shit. Go home. You’re useless to me. Plus, you got shit on your face.”
Oil. He’d smeared engine oil all over his mouth. Perfect. You know what? Fine. He would go home, but not because Mr. Stark was telling him to. He was just tired. It had been a long, long, long, frustrating day.
“I bet it has, champ.”
Peter was not taking a nap. He did not take naps. He was sixteen years old. He was young, vibrant, and free. He did not need naps.
Old people like Mr. Stark and Cap needed naps. He’d seen Cap conked out on more common room couches than he’d seen him awake. And for all that picturesque poise in front of the cameras, Cap was a messy sleeper. He drooled. Always and only on Sergeant Barnes, to his credit. And Barnes didn’t seem like he cared anymore, had apparently accepted this as his lot in life in the thirties or something, when Cap had always been one good nap away from death.
But now that he thought about it, Peter realized that he’d never seen Sergeant Barnes nap and he was, and it was hard to believe this was possible, a whole year older than Cap.
Why didn’t they old man nap together? Or maybe they did. Maybe Cap had public sleeping-on rights and Sergeant Barnes had private sleeping-on rights and they both drooled on each other round the clock like nasty people in their spare time.
“Honey, are you okay?” May asked through the door. “Who are you talking to?”
Fuck.
“Peter!”
Double fuck.
This was getting out of hand.
He needed advice and he knew exactly who to get advice from for this.
Peter had never in his life seen Wade sleep. He’d seen him recently woken up; he’d seen him disgustingly hung over. Once, which Wade told him he wasn’t to tell anyone about until he was forty, he’d seen him so high he’d barely been conscious. But he’d never seen him like, hunker down to sleep.
Ergo, he would know how to fix this.
Wade was useless. Just like Mr. Stark was useless, except taller.
“Oh my god, you’re a talker.”
Horrendously useless.
Wade snickered and dropped tools to come over and sit down with Peter in his corner of the roof. It was not a tantrum corner. It just felt like one.
“Someone needs a nap.”
“Why does everyone keep saying that?” Peter said with flailing arms to shove Wade’s teasing finger away from his shoulder. “I don’t need a nap, what I need is for someone to tell me how to cope with this.”
Wade cocked an eyebrow.
“Alright, I’m someone,” he said.
“No, you’re not,” Peter snipped. “You’re just gonna tell me to take a nap, again. And we’ve already established that that is not helpful.”
Wade’s hands did some waving as he tried to figure out what the hell it was that Peter wanted him to say.
“I want you to help me fix it,” Peter told him after a long moment of waffling. “I want it to stop.”
“Kid, this is not rocket science,” Wade said with twist of irritation in his voice. “You’re fucking tired. The solution is to go the fuck to sleep. Here, my place is downstairs; go crash on the couch for an hour or so, you’ll feel better.”
“You don’t sleep when you’re tired,” Peter pointed out.
Wade scoffed and shook his head, then picked himself up off the poor excuse for a concrete balcony. He stretched and his back popped loud enough for Peter to hear it.
“Lack of sleep ain’t enough to end all this.” He gestured to his whole body salaciously. “But then again, neither’s a bullet. Don’t mean I don’t get mega crabby, though.”
Why did they say people were crabby when they were grumpy? Crabs are not inherently grumpy. Crabs don’t have human emotions, you can’t just project your shitty feelings onto animals and then blame them for all your problems.
Wade paused in collecting his half-finished device and toolbox from beside the roof access structure behind them and turned back to give Peter a flat expression.
“Sure I can. Crabs are the bastards of the sea. Don’t fight me on this.”
“How would you know?”
Wade sighed.
“Peter, you need a nap.”
“I don’t.”
“You actually, literally do. When was the last time you slept?”
Didn’t matter. He couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter.
“Pal, we can do this the easy way or the hard way, and you’re not gonna like the hard way.”
Peter had witnessed the hard way many a time. Wade made Double D take enforced naps sometimes when he got a little too murder-y on the job. Usually, these naps started out vertically and involved a whole lot of gasping until they didn’t. Peter was honestly surprised that Double D didn’t have more brain damage given the number of times he gotten whacked in the head and choked out by his own teammates.
Peter did not currently have any brain damage, nor was he in the business of finding any at the present time. But still.
“I don’t want a nap,” he told Wade.
“Okay, so don’t take one. Just go lay down for twenty minutes with your eyes closed. You don’t have to sleep,” Wade countered far too reasonably from half inside the roof access stairs. “And come like, soon-ish. People are gonna see me up here with you and call the fuckin’ cops again.”
Again?
“Boy, you have no idea. Ms. Jenkins over there—purple drapes— old coot is a spy. Got her scope on me like I can’t fuckin’ see it in her goddamn window. Calls the cops any time you pop up in my kitchen, you know how many times those fuckers have searched my house? Thinkin’ I’m some kinda pedophile, dungeon-master fuckhead?”
Peter hadn’t realized that someone was looking out for him like that. It was kind of sweet in a deranged kind of way. It was like he’d had a paranoid, geriatric angel watching over him this whole time.
It was less sweet the more he thought about it.
“I don’t wanna nap,” he maintained.
“Oh, for the love of—okay whatever. Come watch the damn cat for half an hour then. Then go home. I got shit to do tonight.”
Bella needed love. Wade didn’t ever love her enough, so okay, fine. Peter would allow some time for cat-petting, but only for Bella. Not for him. Or for any napping business.
He woke up with one of Wade’s huge fleece blankets thrown over him on the couch. He groggily blinked at it until the grainy image printed on it morphed into the shape of a Korn album cover. Wade had left a single lamp on in the living room when he’d left for his job and it lit up the room just enough for Peter to see that it was dark outside between the blinds. He felt overheated, and this was not helped by the extra warm weight rumbling happily against his side.
He petted Bella in the knowledge that she wouldn’t be offended by his squinting.
He wasn’t sure if he felt better.
He mostly felt pissed off. Disoriented. Like there was the distinct possibility that he could open the door and be faced with the Upper West Side of the year 3057.
It sucked, yo. That’s what it did.
With his head stuffed full of cotton, he forced himself to get up and set the cat on the floor. He folded the blanket but couldn’t remember which basket it had come from, so left it on the couch.
Bella followed him to the door, and he told her to be good right before he closed it behind him.
He didn’t go out that night because his whole mood had been ruined by his impromptu nap. The one that he intended to never speak of again in Wade’s or anyone else’s presence.
Instead, he went over to Double D’s place because it was a Tuesday, which was, more often than not, Double D’s R&R day. If he’d done anything big over the weekend, he usually stayed in either Monday or Tuesday night to heal from the damage. Given the electrical fire which had gotten started in one of the new Amazon warehouses up that way, Peter was going to go ahead and say he’d had a busy weekend.
Double D was predictably a little toasty when he answered the door. Both his arms were wrapped in clingfilm and he was walking with a limp.
“I am dying,” he said in anticipation of Peter’s request.
“I am tired,” Peter grumbled back at him. “Can I come in?”
Double D shrugged, then winced, and moved out of the way. He kind of jerked his shoulder in lieu of herding Peter in with his arm.
Double D actually listened to people when they talked, unlike some other jerkfaces in Peter’s life. He nodded solemnly when Peter described his woes and his uncalled-for nap at Wade’s place.
“No, I feel you. When I first started with the all-nighters, it was awful,” he said, “And of course Wade wants you to take a nap, he’s got all the time in the world to take naps.”
Peter nodded and tried not to droop on the floor across from Matt. Matt cocked his head at him and then squirmed until he could stand up without jarring his arms.
“Stay there,” he ordered.
Peter wasn’t going anywhere. He still felt like ass. Double D cursed as he bumped his arms against stuff in the kitchen behind him.
“Here.”
He looked up to see Double D holding out a green and black can.
It was a Monster. The kids at school drank them all the time; Abe from AcaDec drank them on the study days before competitions so he could cram for longer.
“May says those’re poison,” he noted.
“No, poison is poison,” Matt said simply, “These are friends. Everyone drinks caffeine, anyways, it’s no big deal. You might not even feel it with your metabolism.”
Peter took the can. It was cold and sweaty with condensation.
“I heard they taste bad,” he said.
Matt scoffed.
“They all taste like ass,” he said dismissively, “You don’t drink this kind of thing because it tastes nice, though. If you want something that tastes nice, drink coffee or something.” He paused and took in Peter rolling the can in his hands. “Well, go on. I’ll be supervision.”
Peter gracefully refrained from saying how much coffee tasted like ass and from pointing out that Matt was the literal opposite of supervision. He cracked open the can and sniffed its contents. It was, well. It smelled like cough syrup. Looked like some kind of tea.
It tasted like ass.
He just about gagged.
“That’s the spirit,” Matt told him fondly.
Maybe Double D was actually the wrong person to ask about this whole thing. Maybe he just should have gone home and taken a nap.
“No, no. You gotta try everything three times before you say you hate it, Pete. It’s the rule.”
Sounded suspiciously like something a nun would say to get her charges to eat vegetables, but okay. He took another sip and hated it slightly less than the first one.
“How often do you drink these things?” he asked Matt. He crossed his burnt arms gingerly and shrugged.
“Depends on the day. The case. How tired I am. Used to chug ‘em before finals in undergrad. Five hour energy saved my ass when I was studying for the bar.”
Wow. Okay, so maybe there was something to Abe’s whole pre-competition ritual.
He took another tentative sip from the can. God, it was still horrible. Sticky sweet with a tang in his nose.
“Take the whole thing,” Matt told him. “Should kick in in twenty minutes or so. If it works, you’ll probably be pretty jittery the first couple times you drink it, at least ‘til you get used to having that much caffeine in your body on the regular. You going out tonight?”
He wasn’t 100% sure yet. He still felt pretty tired.
“Alright, well. We’re still on for next weekend, yeah?”
Yeah, they were.
Peter had fucked up.
He had fucked up so bad.
Words would not make themselves into sentences. Thoughts could not fully form.
His hands were shaking and his heart pounded, throbbing in his jugular vein.
He thought maybe he could hear color.
The only thing that kept him from throwing himself out his window into the trash below was the knowledge that if May found out, she’d go and strangle Matt with her bare hands. He didn’t deserve that. He was just trying to be helpful.
On the upside, Peter was very awake and he had the feeling that maybe, if he could get ahold of himself and control this whole shaking, jittery mess, he could channel it towards something productive. He just had to learn how to focus.
Focus, Parker, come on.
Haha. Not tonight, apparently.
He crawled under the comforter and laid his head on the pillow and tried not to freak out. It would go away soon. And if it didn’t, it was fine. He hadn’t had enough caffeine to overdose, right?
Right??
“Peter, what is that?” Mr. Stark asked with his arm trapped in the guts of a new, unpainted gauntlet.
Peter had to roll himself out from under the old quinjet engine that had come in for upgrades to hear him properly. Even after he got his head back out, it took him a moment to realize that Mr. Stark was pointing at the can tucked in the side of his bag.
“A friend,” he said, then rolled back under. He bumped a pipe with his elbow on the way down and got a chest full of coolant for his trouble.
Mr. Stark didn’t go back to work or acknowledge his sputtering.
“A friend,” he repeated flatly.
Peter didn’t see the big deal. Double D called them friends, and honestly? He totally got it now. A can or so of the stuff kept him on his toes when the adrenaline started to wear off around 2. After the first couple times, the jitters went away, as promised, and he thought his body had learned how to metabolize the stuff. Matt told him, no matter what, not to drink more than 3 or 4 cans in one day. He said he’d downed a couple once in desperation at the very end of his bar-studying days and had lost an entire night to being horrified, thinking he could see again.
Foggy had apparently left him to suffer alone in these troubled times, with the occasional callus, yet no less incredulous, reminder that he’d really fucking done that to himself.
“You looked in a mirror lately, Pete? The last thing you need is more energy.”
“No,” Peter told the fan shield which thought it was going to win this battle, “The last thing I need is to get sloppy. You said it yourself, sir. Get sloppy, get shot. Colonel Rhodes said it too.”
There was once again silence as Mr. Stark chewed on his own words.
“Well, alright. Just be careful, okay? We don’t know how you metabolize caffeine.”
He didn’t know. Peter was learning just fine, and the answer was exactly that: just fine.
“What the fuck is this?” Wade barked, wrenching the can out of Peter’s hands. He was so quick, Peter didn’t even feel it disappear until it was gone.
“Hey, give it back,” he yelped, trying to reach it without slipping off the perch and plummeting twelve stories to street level. He’d found lately that he could stick on stuff in almost any position, but that didn’t make standing horizontally high enough that the streets were the breadth of a thumb any less terrifying.
“What is this??” Wade continued, dancing out of reach and waving at the can as though it was a bag of pot. “You bring this?? Into this house? Under this roof?”
“Wade,” Peter griped, “Chill. It’s just a Monster.”
“Just?”
“Dude.”
“Peter. Pete. Darlin’. Honey. This is not just anything. This is the start of an addiction. A gateway drug of the most insidious and deceitful type.”
Sometimes Wade was a lot. And then some. He was a lot and then some.
“Are you watching 90s movies with D.A.R.E. shirts in them again?” he asked. Wade owned a D.A.R.E. t-shirt. Three, actually. He collected them for the irony.
“That is none of your goddamned business,” Wade said.
“Fine. Then that isn’t any of yours,” Peter countered.
Dead silence.
Oh, whatcha gonna do now, old man? Got played at your own game.
Wade stared him right in the face and dropped the drink off the roof. Peter almost choked as it fell, like a sack of lead, swiftly and gracefully down between the buildings. They were too high up for Peter to hear the noise it made upon contact with the ground.
“Wade, that’s dangerous,” he shouted, “You could have hit someone.”
“Bah.”
“Dude.”
“That shit’s no good,” Wade huffed, “Where did you even—” his head jerked up and his brow furrowed. “Red.”
He gave Peter A Look.
“It was Red, wasn’t it?”
“No,” Peter lied.
“That motherfucker.”
“He didn’t give me anything, I bought it on my own.”
Wade’s suit eyes squinted at him, but not in the usual mirthful way.
“You bought it,” he repeated. Was that sweat, Peter felt at his neck? Had he started sweating?
“No,” he backtracked.
“So now you didn’t buy it. Did Red buy it for you?”
“No.”
“So neither you or Red bought it, it just turned up in your hands. Like magic.”
God, Wade was worse than a mom sometimes. Peter wondered if pointing out the intensity of his paternal vibes would distract him for long enough for him to escape.
Wade took his lack of answer as guilt and growled a little before doing an abrupt about-face and stomping away to climb off the roof. Peter’s body chose that moment to remember how to move.
“Wait, wait! Wade, I bought it, it was me. Leave Double D alone.”
“I think not,” Wade called over his shoulder.
Wade stormed into Double D’s gym and picked him up around the waist and carried him right out the door in full view of all the other boxers. Matt went frozen with shock and hung like a ragdoll in Wade’s grip for a second, until he snapped back to awareness halfway across the gym and started to fight like the Devil. The other boxers in the place, including the guy who’d been holding Matt’s punching bag, adopted various styles of gaping as Matt’s shouting grew softer and further away.
Peter couldn’t decide whether it was second-hand embarrassment driving him to apologize profusely to all of them while chasing after Wade or if it was the fact that they both definitely now looked like they were kidnapping a local blind man in public that did it. Either way, he swore that Matt was fine and they’d be back in just a second.
Wade dropped Matt’s wriggling body down in an alley with zero regard for his thin-soled shoes.
Matt threw him away as far as he could in disgust. It wasn’t very far, but it got the point across.
“What’s your fuckin’ problem, man?” he spat in the strongest New York accent Peter had ever heard emit from his body.
Matt was New Yawk-y in like, general attitude and being, for sure, but that didn’t always come out in his voice. Mostly he walked around clipping his vowels like the prim, proper altar-boy/lawyer people thought him to be. That is, until you got him good and pissed—both kinds of pissed. Apparently his dad had had one of those thick, movie-type accents, which Matt himself, delightfully, tended to dip into about two drinks in and generally when his heart hit more than 100-odd beats per minute.
Wade did something similar, although no one dared to point out his occasional drawls or ‘Sohrry’s to him upon fear of death.
“My problem is you,” Wade spat right back over Peter’s admiration, “My problem is your flagrant disregard for law, order, and society, dipshit.”
Matt didn’t get it. Had no reason to, hyperbole aside. It had been weeks since he’d given Peter that Monster. Peter opened his mouth to explain, but Wade shoved him behind his back and continued.
“You’re over here, exposing the youth to illicit, reckless behavior. Condoning it, even! What would your mother say, huh, Red?”
Matt stared up at Wade like he couldn’t decide whether to slap him or admit him to a hospital.
“Are you drunk?” he decided on.
“No,” Wade snapped, “But you’re about to be.”
“Drunk?”
Wade faltered upon realizing his misstep.
“Sorry,” he corrected.
“For what?”
Oh, god. These two. Peter had to physically swallow to tamp down the urge to go find the nearest dumpster and jump in it. Possibly close the lid.
“No, you’re going to be sorry.”
“For what?”
“For being a dealer, Redthew. For exposing the youth to your wily ways.”
Where was that dumpster, now?
Matt caught on faster than Peter expected him to, and Peter was straight-up impressed. Matt chuffed out a derisive laugh and cocked out a hip, stylish and suave in his boxing shoes, even in a shitty alley in Hell’s Kitchen in 30 degree weather.
“Wade,” he said evenly, “It’s an energy drink. Kids drink them all the time.”
Wade was scandalized. He cocked out a hip to match Matt’s.
“They don’t.”
“They really do. Hell, Foggy’s niece drinks them and she’s what, thirteen? Fourteen?”
Wade was only further scandalized.
“This is a symptom,” he said, “There is no fuckin’ need to—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Natural energy, whatever,” Matt interrupted. “That’s all horseshit, and you know it. Caffeine is natural. Comes in coke, anyways--what’s the difference? Pete burns through all that shit faster than your average Joe, too, so he’s fine, Wade. Christ, I can’t believe I’m saying this to you, but fuck, let the kid live a little.”
It was the same conversation, said in the exact same tone, that May and Ben had had when Peter had brought up learning how to solder. He felt the exact same, head bouncing between Matt and Wade, as he had then too.
Wade mugged hard, but Matt mugged just as hard right back. He added a good squint in at Wade’s ear for good measure.
“Shit’s toxic waste,” Wade finally growled. Matt tossed his head and laughed. Apparently, that was a sign of victory. Peter’s whole spine relaxed.
“All fast food’s toxic waste,” Matt pointed out, “And you eat it anyways. You wanna teach the kid healthy habits? Fuckin’ send him to live on a farm in Canada or something, he’s not finding any here, between you and me.”
Wade dropped his arms and groaned. Matt laughed at him again and flicked him in the shoulder.
“Kay, well, if you’re done, I need you to carry me back in. I’ll scream, and then you drop me and thank me for the info,” he said. Man was perpetually building his cover story. Peter loved it.
Wade groaned louder and then stooped to wrap his arms around Matt’s waist again. Matt cleared his throat and gave Peter a little wink and thumbs up after hopping back into Wade’s grip. He started to shriek and kick all over again as Wade made the defeated journey back into the gym.
Peter decided that he’d omit that part when he told Ned about this later, though. Ned never appreciated Matt’s normal-people act as thoroughly as he did.
Wade didn’t stop stealing his cans, but Peter did come to find that if he did it in Matt’s presence, Matt would steal the can back and chug half of it so that Wade had a whole new target to lavish his despair on.
Half a can was better than none. And it really did keep him from getting shot in the ass most days.