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Peter cries the entire ride upstate.
It’s awkward, for all that Peter isn’t the type of crier you can usually ignore – blotchy all the way down his chest, too much mucus and snot to reach the Ned-level of endearing where people smile and write it off as cute – but Happy hasn’t spoken since they got in the car. He’d called Peter after the news broke, said, “Come back to the apartment. Don’t let anyone see your face,” and then corralled Peter into the passenger seat, slid a piece of paper into May’s hands with a quick and messy murmured few sentences, and drove off.
Peter is pretty sure he’s dead and no one has told him yet. He’s got the penance and the broken, desperate wrath of a drowning man to prove it. But for once in his life, he can't find anything to say, and when he finally does, it's a useless and unhelpful, “What am I supposed to do?”
Happy just glances sidelong at him, reaches past to fish around in the glove compartment for a package of tissues he drops in Peter’s lap. He says, “We’re almost there. Clean up your face.”
“Happy,” Peter tries again, a little more desperate, because now would be the time for Happy to actually say something comforting and he’s just – not. “What am I supposed to do? The whole world knows who I am. I’m done. I’m done, Happy. It’s over. They think I’m a murderer.”
Somehow it’s worse, hearing it out loud, knowing this is what it’s come to. The terrible reality of it all has always been on a backburner in Peter’s mind – that someday his identity might get out, that someday he might lose everything he’s worked so hard for. It’s been a fear as long as he’s been Spider-Man, but he’s always viewed it with the same indestructible stubbornness he had as a kid when his parents told him not to climb trees because he could get hurt – impossible, unlikely. Not him.
“Listen,” Happy says, with the kind of sigh that loosens something raw in Peter’s chest. “This isn’t the first time we’ve dealt with something like this, okay? Just relax. Pepper is coming up with a plan.”
He's got his hands wrapped too tight around the steering wheel, knuckles bone-white, so Peter tears open the pack of tissues and mops under his eyes to have something to do other than cause him more physical stress.
Happy lets the silence settle for a moment, and says, softer this time, “It’s gonna be fine, Peter.” And it must be that Peter’s misery is projecting itself outside of his body in waves so palpable they’re driving Happy insane too.
Peter works his jaw a few times. “What if it isn’t?” he whispers, and swallows down another set of tears, pressing the tissues hard into his cheeks.
“Then we’ll deal with that too,” Happy says, diplomatic. “But we’re probably gonna have to stick you in front of a bunch of cameras, and if people see you’re upset they’re gonna think we’re lying to them. You gotta calm down.”
“Being accused of sending a fleet of drones to kill people isn’t a good reason to be upset?” Peter asks, only a little serious. He’s not good for much, but he’s nothing if not for his quips.
“Not if you’re innocent,” Happy retorts.
Peter rolls his eyes. “Right. Sorry. Forgot you had all this experience with killing people.”
“Yeah, you’d be surprised,” Happy mutters, promptly ignoring Peter’s exasperated, "What?" to park them in front of the compound, to straighten out his shoulders and flex his fingers until they look more like living flesh again. Peter thinks of him in a jet above a tulip field in the Netherlands, how he’d calmly and precisely stitched Peter back together when Peter had been so sure his entire world had broken apart and could never be mended again.
He looks stressed now, but he turns to Peter all the same, cautious, serious if the lines on his forehead mean anything, and says, “I know this is a lot, but Tony had backup plans in place if this ever happened. You just need to keep it together for a little bit, okay? You’re a Stark Industries intern and that’s all. Don’t let them see anything else.”
What he means is stop crying, but somewhere between a few months ago and a couple years ago he decided to be nice to Peter and there are rules about that kind of thing. Telling someone to stop being upset, however well-intended it might be, is probably right at the top of what not to do.
Still, Peter agrees with a mostly solid and only mildly shaky, “Okay.” Considering how often Happy has come to his rescue lately, he thinks it’s only fair to listen to him.
“All right,” Happy says, and pushes open his door. “Then let’s go save your identity.”
- - -
BREAKING NEWS – Spider-Man is a sixteen-year-old from QUEENS?! You won’t believe our insider scoop!
- - -
Live now: CEO of Oscorp, Norman Osborn, weighs in on the possibility of future superpowered humans and what it will mean for the world.
- - -
@TheDailyBugel
Spider-Man is a criminal and we should be holding him accountable!! Look at the damage he’s caused our city! Look how dangerous he is! #cancelspiderman #butbringmepicturesfirst
- - -
When Rodney Ballinger steps into his classroom on that miserable, humid day, it’s to a frantic murmur of voices, each one of his thirty students crowded around two tables pushed together, wide-eyed and glued to their phones. Rodney has been a teacher for six years, reaching on seven, and he has a three-year-old daughter at home and no guarantee of tenure in the future, so nothing really scares him anymore.
But when his top student, Bethany Summers, stalks her way to the podium to meet him and demands, “Well, what are we gonna do about this, professor?” he can’t help the shiver of fear that rolls down his spine.
“Do about what?” he asks, patiently, because Bethany is a force to be reckoned with even on her good days. A third year at Empire State University, majoring in business with a dash of psychology on the side. She’s got the kind of eyes that can scold you without her ever saying a word, and when Bethany is disappointed in you, you better believe you’re disappointed in yourself too.
“Spider-Man,” says Ellie Johnson. Second year, shy. She’s taken four of Rodney’s classes since her first year. He can count on one hand how many times he’s heard her speak. Two, now.
“I’m sorry, what?” he asks, and it’s like he’s just personally offended each and every one of his students by the way they all turn toward him, yelling over each other and the sound of the videos they’ve pulled up on their phones via explanation.
“One at a time, one at a time,” he pleads, turning to Bethany, who – bless her wonderful, if not scary, people skills – gauges his mounting lassitude and explains the situation the way Rodney imagines bullet points would look if you could use them out loud. A kid in Queens has been outed as Spider-Man by a guy named Quentin Beck. The news is saying Spider-Man might be a killer and they’re blaming him for the recent attacks in Europe. Rodney's entire class has spent the better part of an hour researching articles and have found evidence that Beck used to work for Tony Stark. The kid in Queens is a Stark intern. And –
“We think Beck is framing him,” Bethany says.
No amount of union meetings have ever prepared Rodney for this. “Okay,” he says, still confused. “Why?”
Bethany crosses her arms over her chest. “Quentin Beck was fired for being unstable. Then he just shows up out of nowhere pretending to be a superhero?”
“The guy’s crazy,” says Taylor Wilson. Third year, business major. The most energetic member of Rodney’s class. He waves his phone high in the air like a torch. “There are all these videos from the London attack and you can see the monsters were made of drones and shit. Spidey was trying to save people. He’d never hurt anyone.”
“Exactly,” Bethany chimes in. “Spider-Man protects our city. Even if he really is that kid from Queens, we can’t let some psychopath destroy his whole life by accusing him of a terrorist attack. Spider-Man isn’t a bad guy. And after all he’s done for us –”
“We can’t let him go down without a fight!” Taylor finishes. “We’re New Yorkers. We don’t quit.”
Rodney is as much a fan of Spider-Man as the next guy – that is to say, for an old man like him, appreciative but not that involved. He’s maybe twice the age of his oldest students, and he doesn’t always get their slang or memes, but he knows passion when it’s in front of him, and here, his entire class all staring his way, a fire burning in their eyes, he knows which fight is his to choose.
“Very well,” he says, and, favoring them all with a swell of pride no one in his eight years of schooling ever warned him about, declares, “We are in the business course after all, aren’t we? So what do you say we head to the computer lab and do what business majors do best?”
“Hell yeah!” says Taylor, jumping up with enough excitement that even Ellie Johnson smiles and whispers, just loud enough Rodney can hear, “Hell yeah.”
- - -
If anyone asks – and no one will, because he is an excellent secret keeper and MJ can shut her mouth – the whole thing is Ned’s idea.
Sure, the video of Peter is up for an hour before he thinks of it, and it’s already trending and dominating every local news feed he can find. People are even editing their faces over Peter’s and reuploading the clip, stacking onto a new hashtag someone has created in the midst of the Twitter speculation, one in support of Spider-Man.
And Ned knows exactly what he has to do.
He calls Betty, he calls Josh and Zach and everyone he can think of, everyone he knows will help with his plan.
MJ says, “You know this could still end bad, right?” and, “Obviously I’m in. It’s uploading.”
He records his own video, short and succinct, and posts it on all his social media accounts, hijacking the growing hashtag and watching as each one of his friends follows suit.
Yes, the whole thing is Ned’s idea, and he’ll defend that to the end, but even as the tides start to change in their favor, there are a dozen unread messages in his outbox, and Peter is still gone, disappeared off somewhere with Happy, and all Ned can think is, “I hope you’re okay.”
It hasn’t even been a week since Europe. Ned will be the first to admit he doesn’t know all the finer details of what goes on behind the scenes after the day is saved, but he knows it’s too soon, too much, too – not fair for this to be happening to Peter again when he’s still probably cleaning up after the last world-ending event.
All Peter has ever wanted to do is help people. Since he was a kid, moving snails off the sidewalk, walking with Ned to the nurse’s office on their first day of school when neither of them knew each other and Ned was just that kid who fell off the slide and Peter was just that kid who rushed over to make sure he was okay.
They’ve come too far for this to be the end. Ned can see the world shifting, can see New York stepping up for every stolen bike Spider-Man returned, for every lost tourist he gave directions to, for every drunk person he helped home in the middle of the night and every mugging and robbery he stopped before anyone could get hurt. Peter is always there for them. Peter is always fighting and watching and sacrificing himself, and Ned can see it all, can feel it rolling through the city, and it's like a dam has been released. Mess with one of them, mess with all of them.
Ned can see it all, and he hopes Peter can too.
“We’re gonna make this right,” Ned says to himself, to Peter, wherever he is. “Don’t worry about a thing.”
He'll make this right.
- - -
@JohnnyStormOfficial
okay, not to be thirsty on main, but omg
- - -
@SueStorm
@JohnnyStormOfficial Can you PLEASE not? I think more important things are happening here.
- - -
@SpideyWatch
RT in support of our favorite hero! We don't care who is under the mask. Spider-Man is innocent and we all know it. Don't let the media fool you.
- - -
For a few hours after the initial reveal, the city goes weird, unsettled. People on the street watch footage of Spider-Man displayed on billboards in Times Square. Stations from states on the other side of the country pick up coverage. News 4 New York receives an influx of angry tweets and a random surge of activity that crashes their website servers until they agree to stop playing the clip of Spider-Man getting his identity revealed and remove the photos from their articles with his face.
Betty’s mom, Linda, receives no fewer than twenty calls from the station asking her to get out in the field and report on the breaking news. “Get us interviews,” her boss says. “Quotes. Anything you can get from the citizens of this city. We need leverage and we need it now.”
Linda and her cameraman Jacob stakeout in front of high population areas – restaurants, stores, bars. They try for the older crowd first, because Linda’s boss says that’s where they’ll get the most variety – and this, she knows and hates the most, means scandalizing comments, rude things they can use to ride the trail of degrading stories every one of their powerful competing stations are using to their advantage right now – but the first older man Linda gets to agree to an interview looks at her microphone and her wrinkled skirt and says, “Spider-Man is a good kid. I hope he’s safe, wherever he is.”
It’s more of the same after that. The younger kids are eager to show off in front of the camera, and then solemn and intense when Linda asks them to give their thoughts on the Spider-Man situation.
A college boy in a bright red hat says, “I don’t believe for one second that Spidey would ever hurt anything. He’s being set up.”
A teenage girl and her friend say, “I support Spider-Man one hundred percent. He’s innocent,” and, “I don’t understand why anyone would believe that footage is real. You know how easy it is to do deepfakes these days?”
A little boy with a gap between his teeth dressed in a cheap Spider-Man costume stands proud and says, “Spider-Man, we believe in you,” and when the small crowd gathered around to watch murmurs in agreement, Linda has to take a moment to regroup, to remember that her daughter probably wouldn’t be alive right now if not for Spider-Man showing up in DC, and to wonder – is this really the best she can do? Looking for someone to say something mean so her boss won’t be mad? So they can run a story for a day that no one will really care about in the end when they’re all so swallowed up in the constant headlines on social media?
No. Linda is better than that. New York deserves better than that.
“Jacob, let’s start rolling,” she says, bringing the microphone to her mouth, situating herself to show the bustling and beautiful people of her city holding Spider-Man themed signs behind her in the street and dressed up in the iconic red and blue colors. “I’d like to interview myself about the time Spider-Man saved the Midtown Decathlon team from falling to their deaths.”
Jacob smiles and hoists his camera up onto his shoulder. “Ready?” he asks. “In three, two, one.”
- - -
It’s Pepper who greets them first, stood inside a conference room on the second floor with a phone pinched between her shoulder and ear and a tablet balanced in her hands.
“Ah,” she says when she spots them, and ends her phone call without even a goodbye, just hangs up, so brutal, and heads their way. Peter’s never had a reason to be intimidated by her, not really, but he’s starting to consider his options.
“How are things going?” Happy asks, while Peter scrubs as non-discretely at his cheeks as he can.
Pepper glances at him, her expression softening. She says, “I think you need to see this.”
She has a look on her face that means something’s happened. It’s one Peter remembers vividly, painfully, and so he takes the tablet from where she’s extending it out and he swallows, suddenly nervous.
“Um, what am I –?” he starts, but doesn’t need to go on, because it’s clear now what he’s meant to be looking at. There’s a live feed of Twitter posts already pulled up, videos and pictures and text flashing by, each one with the hashtag “WeAreSpiderMan” and moving too quick for Peter to process.
He blinks, confused. “What – what is this?”
Beside him, Happy breathes out a laugh. “That?” he says, and there’s an amused undercurrent in his voice, knowing and fond, “That’s New York.”
“It’s been happening since right after Beck’s video came out,” Pepper says, swiping at the screen to bring up more videos from Tiktok and Youtube. “Look.” She presses play on one. It’s the clip from the bridge in London, the same clip Beck used to expose him, but instead of it being Peter, there’s an entirely new face edited over his and a caption reading, “See how easy it is to manipulate videos? No one believes you, Beck.”
“And this,” Pepper says, playing another where a girl is sat on her bed in her room, holding a costume Spider-Man mask and telling the camera, “The truth is, I’m Spider-Man.”
Peter grips the tablet tighter, his hands shaking. “I – I don’t –”
“They’re everywhere,” Pepper explains, and opens more to punctuate her point, like somehow Peter hasn’t gotten it yet – and maybe she’s right, because Peter certainly has no idea what the hell is going on and he kind of feels like he might be in some weird dream. “People started making videos claiming they were Spider-Man. That one with the face edited over yours? There are hundreds more like it.” She tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear and smiles. “One of the business classes at ESU even made a very detailed video about why they believe Beck is framing you and why you’re just an innocent Stark intern. Kind of stepping on my tail here, but it will work in our favor for the press meeting.”
Peter is still struggling to catch up, and by the time he manages to finally comprehend some resemblance of clarity in all this – the people of New York are supporting him? The people of New York are stepping up to keep his identity a secret? But why? – he’s being shuffled into the hallway and past employees who spare quick looks at him, over him, sizing him up.
“I – I don’t understand,” he says. “Why are they doing this?”
“To protect you,” Pepper says, swiftly, as if that’s any reason at all. She’s a step in front of him now but manages to twist around and pull up another browser on the tablet. This one nearly brings Peter to a stop, but Happy is behind him, a hand on his shoulder, guiding him along.
It’s Ned. It’s Ned and MJ and Betty. Videos of them in their homes, videos of them saying, “I’m Spider-Man” with such sincerity that if Peter didn’t know better, he might believe them. His classmates, his friends, the city. Everyone protecting him, supporting him.
“Looks like it’s not over for you after all,” Happy says softly, with a squeeze to his shoulder, and Peter does everything in his power not to start bawling again.
For a moment it doesn’t matter that Pepper has come up with a plan. That in a few minutes she’ll stand Peter in front of a room of cameras and reporters and tell them Peter is their youngest intern and Beck picked the easiest person he could frame to get back at Tony. She’ll tell the world of Beck’s past while a gymnast she’s hired dons the Spider-Man suit in a fight downtown with a fake criminal and fake bystanders, the footage from their phones going out live over the internet. The perfect alibi, made more perfect by an unsteady accuser. Happy was right. They had backup plans. They knew how to deal with this.
But for a moment, it doesn't matter, because for the first time since he put on his suit, for the first time since he came back, alone and different in a world that kept moving without him, Peter feels like he’s doing something right, something that makes sense, something that makes a difference. Impossible, unlikely. Him.
It’s not over. This city, in all its messy and amazing and painful moments, is, and always will be, his to protect.
That’s one thing no one can ever change about New Yorkers: they never give up.
He won’t give up either.
- - -
Peter: thank you, ned
Ned: guy in the chair always has your back :) :)
- - -
And so Ned will scream to the heavens until his dying day the idea to have everyone out themselves as Spider-Man was his own creation, but if you want the truth of the matter, it wasn’t actually Ned who started the whole thing. It was Flash. Flash Thompson, who saw the video of Peter go live and thought, so vehemently and annoyed, “As if.” Then sat on his floor for a solid four minutes, wondering, “Okay, but actually, what if?”
There wasn’t much else to it. Either Parker was Spider-Man – and that was very, very doubtful – or he wasn’t and things were going to go to hell for the real person behind the mask, for the hero Flash had grown to respect and trust and admire.
It was easy after that. Easy for Flash, who had spent years editing videos for his Spider-Man fan pages, to superimpose his face over the clip of Peter. To send out the hashtag “WeAreSpiderMan” to his followers and get the ball rolling. God, he’d even given out instructions to people on how to photoshop themselves into the video too, because he wanted to prove how easy it was, wanted to show them there was no way Parker was anything but the nerdy kid in his class who watched too many old movies and couldn’t throw a football if his life depended on it and disappeared all the time right before Spider-Man showed up and –
And that was all it was. Really. Flash isn’t going to stop to think about it too long, because there are some things he just doesn’t need to know.
Spider-Man’s identity can stay a secret. That is absolutely, completely, totally fine with him.