Chapter Text
Peter has a pounding headache from what has to be a concussion, there’s a bag over his head, his hands are chained tightly behind him, and a gun presses on the back of his skull, herding him along.
This was not what he was expecting when he took the long route to the library. Something was seriously wrong with his luck if he’d been randomly taken from the streets and been beaten half to death.
He’d once heard that if a kidnapper moves you to a secondary location, your chances of surviving decreases by 70%. He doesn’t want to know the chances for a tertiary location is, especially if the kidnapper is the fucking Joker who won’t just tell him what he wants.
He stumbles blind, almost tripping over himself a few times.
“You know,” he mouths, and the gun presses more firmly into his head. “I really don’t see how we’re going to get out of this stalemate. Ha, I don’t see. Get it?”
There’s no response, but they do stop moving. Maybe they’d arrived.
“I already told you, I can’t help you. I can’t do anything. So you might as well let me go.” Peter struggles a bit, testing out the chains again. He won’t use his strength in front of the Joker—he has the feeling that it wouldn’t be too hard to connect the dots to Spider-Man, and that’s not a target he wants on him. “Pretty please?”
Peter can hear someone come closer to him, with Joker’s strangely steady but still erratic heartbeat. He tenses in anticipation as the sack is pulled off his head.
He blinks a few times, cringing from the light. He doesn’t know how long that’s been on him. When his eyes adjust, he sees Joker leaning down over him, face twisted in a terrifying smile, and—they’re in a lab. A large one. An expensive one.
And there are two dozen people shoved in a corner, all forced to kneel with rifles pointed at them.
“I heard you put up a fight, Petey,” Joker sings, taking one finger and tapping the belled bruise on his cheek. “That’s not very grateful of you.”
“What is this?” He spits out, glancing from the hostages to the clowns with guns and to all of the tech supply in front of him—it’s everything he’s dreamed of having access to for months. “Why am I here?”
Joker giggles maniacally. “This is all for you,” he croons, gesturing to the lab. “And the people, too. You said you didn’t have the materials.”
The blood drains out of Peter’s face. “I also said what you’re asking for is impossible. It’s all theoretical, the science just doesn’t exist.”
The chains binding his wrists are yanked off, and he immediately brings his hands out in front of him, noting that they’ve been rubbed red and raw.
The Joker brings out a familiar red plastic notebook, the cheap two-dollar kind, that started all of this. “The science doesn’t exist, yet you wrote it all down,” he drawls. “And isn’t half the fun of science the experimentation? I’m giving you a gift, Petey.”
“You still haven’t told me where you found that,” he scowls in response.
The clown pays him no mind. “You know what I want. Just play by all my rules and I’ll let everyone go! And if not—well, I’m sure that’s rather obvious, don’t you think?”
“You want me to make a bomb that doesn’t exist,” Peter protests. “You’ve got the wrong guy. I’m just a high school student—a street rat. I can’t help you.”
Joker shrugs good-naturedly, seeming none too off put by that. “Oh, well. Can’t say I didn’t warn you.”
There’s a yelp from the group of kneeling people, as a woman is grabbed by her hair and forced down. “Hey, wait,” Peter yells, panicked. “Don’t touch her!”
The woman is sobbing, and then—she’s not. The gunshot rings in his ears.
“No!” Peter rushes towards her but is held back from the clown that brought him here. He knows it’s useless, he knows the woman was shot point-blank in the head, all because of him. There’s another cry from the group. “No, please, stop.”
“Reconsidered?” Joker laughs, and Peter feels an intense hatred for him—something he’s only ever felt for two people in his life. “There are still more people for your… incentive.”
Peter tears his eyes away from the brain matter decorating the cold tile, from the group of people all suppressing horrified sobs—all except for two. Peter chokes on a gasp when his eyes briefly meet Tim’s.
Tim’s here. And, from the looks of it, so’s his dad.
They’re at Wayne Enterprises, because of fucking course they are.
He tries to steady his voice, but it’s hitched and shaky. “You don’t know what you’re asking for,” Peter tries to reason. “It’s not a bomb. It’s not meant to be a bomb.”
The Joker flips through the pages, and Peter flinches. He knows what’s in that notebook. Mostly just him thinking on paper, but there are notes on various superhero suits—he thanks whatever God there is that all of it is generic enough not to be traced back to Spider-Man—as well as weapons, inter-universal travel, time travel…
And the arc reactor.
“When has Joker ever needed someone to make his bombs for him?” A voice murmurs incredibly softly from the crowd of people. It sounds much calmer than the situation warrants, sharp with clear focus and attention, and Peter spares a glance to see Bruce Wayne staring intently at the two.
The notebook is handed to him, open to the page of countless notes of the arc reactor. Calculations of its energy, its potential. “This is an energy source,” Joker states. “The most powerful in the world by far. And don’t tell me you did the calculations wrong—I checked them myself!”
Peter’s heart thuds. So he knows his stuff, in both making bombs and mechanical engineering as a whole. “It’s clean energy,” he still resists. “Renewable. Not a bomb.”
“But it could be!” The Joker laughs, eyes alight. “It could be a bomb!”
“If you know your stuff, why didn’t you just make it yourself?” Peter snaps, closing his notebook and hugging it tight to his body. “Why do you need me?”
Joker leans closer over him. “That little gem fell into other hands at first,” he sighs regretfully. “It didn’t work out too well for them. You hear about the explosion way out?”
Peter pales. A fifty-mile radius crevice formed, killing everything in its path. It was in the middle of nowhere, at least—nothing but miles and miles of abandoned highways. That was his fault.
The woman’s death was his fault.
“You’re a very valuable man right now,” the Joker delightedly exclaims. “Everyone wants a piece of your mind. But I got to you first—had to see what all the fuss was about. Ha ha ha!”
“Please,” he begs Joker, even as he knows it’s hopeless. “Just please let everyone go. The reactor, it’s not meant to be used like this. It’s supposed to be good. Just stop.”
There’s a twinge of annoyance in Joker’s smile now, and his voice drops very low. “If you don’t agree to this right now, I am going to personally shoot every last one of those people. And then I’m going out to find more. It’s your choice, really.” He breaks into peals of laughter, and pulls out a gun.
“Don’t,” Peter whispers. “I… I need sketch paper. And—and palladium. I need palladium.”
The Joker laughs.
-
Peter’s hopes of Batman coming to save them are dismissed when he hears that the bats have been sent on a chase around the city to find and deactivate smaller bombs that could still kill dozens of people.
He tells the Joker the bomb will take time, and he gets three days in return. Every day after that, they start eliminating hostages.
Three days.
It’ll have to work.
He spends a few hours sketching over the design and changing parts of the original. He knows that the arc reactor could be used as a bomb—had helped Tony design it with failsafes so that it wouldn’t.
Which really sucks for him, because he knows how to take all of them off. Well, most of them. A few, he’s guessing here.
The most dangerous part is that Joker is knowledgeable in bomb making, engineering, and chemistry. The trick is to make sure that Peter is just better.
Which he is. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have needed to kidnap him. But he has to be better enough, because the moment he finds something off, twenty people are dead.
He gets to work.
The worst part is that once he’s started, it’s so easy. It feels like stepping into a sigh, how simple it is for him to work in the lab. He’s unconsciously aware of everything around him, hands flying as he gets the material he needs.
He works through the night, and by the end of it, he’s got the beginning of a reactor.
On the second day, he steels himself and speaks out.
“I need help.”
Joker stops what he’s doing and faces him. “You don’t expect me to fall for that,” he sneers.
Peter keeps his face forcefully neutral as he talks. “A bomb like this has multiple different mechanisms that all have to work. You know that, you saw the design. If you want me to meet the deadline, I need another set of hands.”
“Work faster, then. Or let a few people die. Whatever.” Joker couldn’t look less bothered about it all.
Peter takes a breath. “In case you haven’t noticed, I haven’t slept in two days. And you guys could’ve been nicer transporting me—a concussion is not the best for thinking. My hands are shaky, and one wrong move, and all of us vaporize. I need help.”
Joker sighs, notes of anger letting through. “Fine. Take your pick,” he says, gesturing to the clump of hostages. “They’re all smart enough to work with WayneTech.”
Peter walks to the side where everyone’s cowering under the guns. He makes a show of looking over the people, his face softening in guilt and sorrow. His eyes meet Tim, who looks straight back at him.
“Him,” Peter says, pointing at his friend. “I want him to help.”
The Joker condemns him. “Wayne’s brat? Why would you choose him over the engineers?”
Peter keeps his voice carefully monotone. “Look at everyone else—they’re all about pissing their pants right now. I need someone with calm, steady hands and slender fingers. I choose him.”
Joker peers at the hostages, slow delight blooming on his face. “Yes, they rather are scared, aren’t they? Alright then, let him up.”
Peter walks to Tim, ignoring the sharp gaze of Bruce Wayne from next to him, and helps him up, tugs him over to the table he’s been using as a workbench.
“Peter, you can’t do this,” Tim hisses. “He won’t let us live no matter what.”
“I have to,” he whispers back.
“No secret talks!” Joker sings, something deadly in his eyes. “Speak loud and clear for all of our friends to hear.”
Peter snaps, “I was just introducing myself.” He pulls out his sketches and the latest drafts, and shows it to Tim. “This is an arc reactor, miniaturized and compressed. It’s a Multi-Isotope Radio-Decay Cell with a toroidal plasma containment system. The Pd-107 beta decays, and the particle is the source for the electron capture by Pd-103, producing gamma rays. The electromagnetic coils around it capture that energy and redirect it. Get it?”
“Peter…”
“The bomb itself is simple. It’s just a controlled overload of energy—with the materials I have, it’s going to be about 5 GigaJoules per second,” he continues. “Do you understand that?”
Tim blinks. “That’s insane,” he breathes. “That’s more than an entire generating complex.”
Peter jerks a nod. “It can level all of New Jersey,” he says ruefully. He shakes himself, turns back to his sketches. “The energy has to be focused and controlled. It can’t hit any part of the reactor before it needs to. These,” he points at a different sketch, “will protect it from exploding prematurely.”
Peter widens his eyes meaningfully at Tim and hands him the sketch. It’s similar to the antigrav puck, only on a smaller scale, larger power, and very difficult to make.
“I can help you build the first few, and then I need you to make them yourself while I work on the bomb. Then we put them together, and I’ll connect them to the switch. I think I’ll need—at least twenty, or so.”
Tim hesitates, eyes furiously scanning through the blueprint. “Twenty,” he repeats, tapping the paper with a finger. “I can do twenty.”
“Do as many as you can,” Peter warns. “Something like this can easily turn into a catastrophe, and the range of protection isn’t very big. The wires will have to be coiled up tight to fit. We can never be too safe.”
Tim nods forcefully in return, and Peter relaxes. He understands—at least a part of it. Protect, one per person, curl up into a ball. And did he have any doubt? Tim’s every bit as smart as he is—a few minutes speaking physics to each other more or less proves that. It’s how he’d known he could trust him with this. And it’s only that Tim hasn’t had the workings of Tony Stark to build off of, that’s the difference.
Now it’s just up to Peter to pull off what Tony Stark pulled off in a cave ten years ago.
-
He makes an arc reactor, but it’s more than that.
He makes an Iron Man gauntlet, too.
It’s not shaped like one, only has the repulsor. In the design he showed the Joker, the repulsor is supposed to be set into the reactor to continuously fuel the reaction. In theory, that’s true, but he has a different purpose in mind.
They have twelve hours left on the clock when Peter breaks down.
“It’s not enough time,” he cries. “I need another day. And some sleep. Please.”
He puts his head in his hands, body hyperventilating. It’s not all fake, it’s just extremely controlled. And he’s definitely gone longer without sleeping before—he and Tony had some famous “all weekers” when working on something especially interesting—but that didn’t mean exhaustion was pulling at him with a vengeance.
“You have twenty more days,” Joker reasons delightedly. “Your friend, however, has until tonight. If you want him alive, you should get to work, Petey.”
Peter chokes back a sob, paling as he turns to Tim. He wills tears to his eyes, calling up every terrified emotion he’s felt in the past almost-week. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I got you into this, and now you’re going to die. I’m sorry.”
He collapses onto Tim with a wail, and shakes in his arms. He pushes his face into him, pressing his mouth against his shoulder as he speaks incredibly softly.
“Make sure everyone has one,” he murmurs and hopes Tim can catch it. He’s still snivelling pathetically. “When I say, get down and curl up.”
Tim grabs him by the shoulders and shakes him. “Get it together,” he snaps at Peter, and looks at him emphatically. “I’m not dying today.”
Peter whimpers. “Let’s… let’s finish up your part of the bomb,” he stammers. “You should at least have time with your—with your dad.”
With careful hands, he guides Tim to the reactor. It’s not his greatest work, but it’ll do, as long as he times everything right.
He narrates to Tim where he should put all of the little bugs he’s made, his hands holding aside unnecessary wires in the big metal containment in which the reactor resides, watching as Tim’s hands disappear into the machine and then slip out—another bug hidden under his sleeve each time.
They space the time out, so that all together it takes two hours before bugs are hidden in pretty much every crevice of Tim’s clothes.
“He’s done,” Peter miserably declares. “He can’t help anymore. Let him be with his dad.”
Joker eyes them both up and down suspiciously. “Are you giving up on the deadline, Petey?” He coos, but his eyes flash. “You don’t want your friend to help you? You want him to die?”
“I chose him because he had good nerves, not because he was a fucking genius,” Peter seethes. “You’re about to kill a teenager in less than nine hours. The least you could do is let him be with his family.”
Tim starts trembling. “So I’m really going to die?”
Peter tries to look like he’s one step away from another breakdown. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “There’s just too much to do.”
If they get out of this alive, maybe there’s a career for them in acting, because the Joker flicks his hand. “Go,” he orders, bored.
Tim scurries back to where the hostages have laid, almost unmoving except for the odd bathroom breaks or meals they’d irregularly gotten. “Bruce,” Tim’s voice breaks down, and then he collapses into his arms.
Peter starts sobbing again, little hiccups of “I’m sorry,” drawing the attention back to him. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I don’t want to do this,” he bawls.
Tim discreetly passes a handful of the bugs to Bruce.
Peter can’t afford to pay attention to them. He has to keep the attention on himself, which he’s been doing for the most part anyway—none of the clowns obviously think any of the hostages are much danger, because they don’t really watch them all that closely.
He makes a show of trying to calm himself, biting into the soft flesh of his palm to stop his hiccups. He has to trust that Tim knows what he’s doing, that he’ll figure out his side of the plan and Peter will do his own.
“Tick, tock, Pete,” Joker sings maniacally. “Six hours.”
He bites his palm hard enough to draw blood and gets back to work.
-
“Time’s up.”
Peter’s hands stall from under him. The bomb is still wide open, with wires sticking out. It’s clearly unfinished.
“No,” Peter breathes. “No, no, no, please. I’m going as fast as I can.”
“And maybe this will be a motivation for you.” A clown tears Tim from his dad, whose eyes look incredibly pained. Tim just lets out a sob.
The clown forces Tim onto his knees in front of Peter, and Peter chokes on a cry. He looks at Tim through the tears in his eyes, and they’re not fake, because Jesus, that’s his friend in front of a gun.
He prays to whatever God there is in this world that this will work.
“Please don’t,” Peter whispers. He grabs the bomb violently into his arms. “It’s almost finished, look! I just need more time. See?” Tim’s shaking too hard to speak.
The Joker takes out his gun and points it at Tim’s head. “Sorry, Petey! Better luck tomorrow.”
Peter meets Tim in the eyes. Tim gives him a slight nod.
“Now!” Peter yells, plunging his hand deep inside the bomb and activating the bugs with a switch hidden inside. Tim hits the ground hard, curling into a ball with everyone else as force fields flicker to life around them.
Peter doesn’t have one, he has something else.
Bullets crack off against the energy of the force fields as Peter rips the arc reactor and the repulsor out from the bomb, dropping the shell. He quickly fastens the repulsor around his right hand, holds the reactor with his left—it’s done in less than a second.
And then he fires.
He takes the Joker down first, the familiar sound of repulsor blasts whirring as it emits a beam of light and pure energy, sending him sprawling across the lab, knocked unconscious with a mix of third degree burns, a heavy concussion and severe bruises, probably. Not enough to kill. So familiar he might cry.
He dodges the bullets as best as he can as he shoots again and again, taking each individual clown down one by one. The repulsor’s not great—hastily done, scrap work, not fit to be in a suit—but it’s good enough, if somewhat out of control. With the civilians out of the way, they don’t stand a chance against an Iron Man gauntlet.
More clowns file in through the door—the ones that were keeping watch in other parts of the building, keeping it all secure. Peter takes them down with ease, one after another.
Now that the shooting’s started in the lab, Peter can hear fire down below the building, too. The police—they must’ve been here all along, trying to find a way in without getting anyone killed. But now that everything’s gone to mayhem inside, anyway, they must be brute forcing their way in.
Eventually, there are no more clowns. Peter falls to his knees just as the first cops arrive.
“Shit!” He hisses, cradling his right arm. It’s already swollen with bruises—the jerk of the repulsor injuring his hand where there was no gauntlet to protect it. He’s lucky the bones aren’t completely shattered. “Fuck.”
He drops the reactor and stumbles for the husk of the bomb, blindly reaching in and switching off the force fields now that the cops have arrived. They work on securing the Joker first, who’s still unconscious.
Tim arrives in front of his vision first. “Peter, you’re shot,” he hisses, propping him up against the wall.
“Huh?” He glances down, sees some red blooming through his shirt. “Oh, yeah. That’s just a graze.” He hadn’t even felt it in the fight, and it really only nicked his side.
Another figure joins Tim in kneeling down in front of Peter, and he starts as unfamiliar hands press firmly against his wound, hissing as sharp pain starts to course through his body.
“Oh, hey, Mr. Bruce,” Peter mutters, breathing through the pain. “Good to see you again, except not really. Sorry about all this.”
“It’s not your fault,” he immediately responds, frowning. “This needs stitches.”
Peter flashes a weak grin. “Nah, it’s fine. Just needs a bandage, and… some sleep. A few good meals.”
All of the hostages save the three of them have eagerly left the lab, met by more policemen outside. The Joker is secured surprisingly quickly and efficiently, carted off to Arkham, assumably. He doesn’t know where the other clowns will go.
A familiar man in blue uniform joins where the three are. “Hey, I know you,” Peter says. “Commissioner Gordon. You helped me get to school, before.”
Gordon looks over Peter, taking in Bruce’s bloodied hands at his stomach, the repulsor in his hand connected to the arc reactor abandoned a foot away, and the bruises all over Peter’s body. He swiftly calls in his radio for a medic.
“Wayne, I need to know what happened,” Gordon addresses Bruce, whose face looks horribly tense. “We’re taking the other hostages in, but with your case…”
“He can’t go in,” Bruce replies, voice strained but firm. “Peter Parker, he was the target, and if Joker wasn’t lying, there are others after him. Gordon, we should talk alone.”
Gordon pauses for a second and then nods, radioing in that all units should leave the building, watching as the cops file out the door, leaving only the three of them.
“The kid?” Gordon asks incredulously, as soon as he gets confirmation that the building is secure and completely deserted. A paramedic arrives, and Bruce backs off a bit, although Tim stays silent at Peter’s side. “What did they want from him?”
The woman has a first-aid case, and opens up a suturing kit, starting by cleaning the wound. Peter decides to let it happen—with how stunted his healing is right now, it might even be for the best.
Peter grimaces as he pushes himself slightly more upright, cringing at the death-glare he gets from the woman. “I can tell you that,” he still pipes into the conversation. “They wanted me to make a bomb.”
Gordon furrows his brows. “Joker is notoriously good at explosives. Why did he go through all this trouble for you?”
“Because I was stupid.” Peter bites his lip, all of the anger and guilt he’d suppressed the past few days bubbling up. “I lost my notebook about a month ago. I didn’t really think anything of it—I just used it for brainstorming, you know? Thinking on paper. I don’t know how, but someone bad must’ve found it, and then word got around that I know how to make a bomb that could wipe a small country.”
Gordon narrows his eyes at him. “Why were you designing a bomb? And how do you even know how to do that?”
Peter lets out a forceful exhale as the stitches start. “It’s not a bomb,” he swallows hard. Tony would hate his tech being used like this. “It’s a reactor. Clean energy—it could be a renewable source to fuel a city. But… but any energy source can be a bomb, and this is an especially powerful one.”
He continues on. “Last Friday, I was walking to the library after school, when they kidnapped me off the streets. Hit me pretty hard in the head, too. They took me to some kind of abandoned building—I don’t know where. Told me they wanted me to make them a bomb. I said no.
“They tried beating me into doing it, but I can take a hit. And then I said I couldn’t make one there anyway because they didn’t have the materials I needed to make one.”
“Could you have made one there?” Tim asks, voice reproachful.
Peter blows out a breath. “Probably,” he shrugs. So could Tim have, or anyone with a good enough brain and a few closely kept Stark-secrets. “But I wouldn’t have. It seemed smarter at the time to just keep denying. The technology isn’t supposed to exist, the science is all theoretical. But they wouldn’t let it go.
“Next thing I know, I’m getting a sack shoved on my head and I’m brought here. They told me if I didn’t build it, they’d shoot everyone here. They… they killed a woman, because of me,” Peter says softly, voice breaking. “So I tricked them. I made this reactor instead,” he half-heartedly lifts his right hand, “and I got Tim to get force field shields over everyone during the shootout.”
The paramedic is finishing up her stitches—he only needed four or five. He lets her clean it one last time, and then dress it with a bandage.
Gordon turns to Bruce. “Did he say who was after him?” He sounds urgent.
Bruce shakes his head. “Joker mentioned that somebody else got a hold of the notebook first. He brought up the explosion far out east.”
The blood drains out of Gordon’s face. “Everything was vaporized in a fifty-mile radius,” he mutters, pacing. “The government tried to cover it up as much as they can—they blocked it off, let as few details about it out as possible. I only know that whatever it was, it scared the shit out of them.” He turns to Peter, who’s finished being treated and is now pulling himself up against the wall, waving away the paramedic’s concern. The paramedic gets dismissed by Gordon. “That was you?”
Peter staggers over to his work bench, where his notebook and various looseleafs lie, almost unruffled by the fight. He gathers them all up in his arms and then drops them on the floor, slumping down next to him.
He waits for the others to sit down around the pile with him before he speaks.
“This is the notebook,” he says bitterly, handing it over to Gordon. “It’s mostly a mess. Half-baked concepts I never really cared enough to fully realize them. And I didn’t have the resources or the need, anyway.” Mainly so he wouldn’t forget—Tony’s work, the science he learned from his world—sometimes somewhat contradicting that of this one.
Gordon flips through the pages, eyes scanning through, not understanding the content. “You’re going to have to explain this to me, son.”
Peter sighs, leaning forward. He takes the book and puts it on the ground. “Superhero suits,” he says, pointing at the sketches with his left hand. “Wings, repulsor-based flights, shields, force fields.” He turns a few pages. “Weapons—the nerdy kind, like what comic book heroes would use. AI huds, tech bow and arrows, an android. Multiverse and time travel—I haven’t cracked those yet,” he smiles ruefully. The ones he needs most.
He taps at some calculations that stretch twenty pages long. “Nanotech,” he murmurs, fingers tracing the page, underlining some key equations that even Tony needed to filch off the princess of Wakanda to figure out. “You could make pretty much—anything.”
“Peter, this is insane,” Tim says. He looks at the work with some understanding in his eyes—enough to at least get an idea of what caliber of tech they’re talking about. Honestly, probably more. Man, they should let loose in a lab together some time, when a crazy crown isn’t holding a gun to their heads. That’d be fun. “How did you even design all of this?”
Peter shrugs. He didn’t actually design most of it—although there are plenty of his own notes, additions, and improvements on each. He’s not that smart—at least, not Tony-Stark, Hank-Pym, Shuri smart. But he can’t exactly say that.
“I’m a nerd,” he says sheepishly. “And I like building stuff. Most of this is incomplete—someone really smart would have to work really hard to finish the designs and make it work. But—”
“It’s all feasible,” Bruce finishes. “All of this tech—you could make it. Or someone else can. Lex Luthor, maybe—There’s nothing stopping this from existing in our world.”
Peter hesitantly nods. He flips the page again, showing the arc reactor. “This is the energy source,” he explains, pointing to the first draft. He finally slips the repulsor from his bruised hand, tosses both the repulsor and the reactor on the ground in front of him. “And this is what I made it into. The repulsor is a beam of a high-density form of muon particles. You can set it to different powers—see?”
Tim frowns at his notes. “You said the maximum energy on this is 5 GigaJoules a second,” he says, tone slightly accusing. Peter nods. “It says here that the estimated energy is more like 70. That’s—that’s basically unlimited.”
Peter turns the page. “To get more energy, you need a particle accelerator,” he reveals. “The palladium core I used is a temporary fix. Eventually, it gets neutron damage. To overcome that, you need a new element, made in a very specific accelerator. After that, it’s just a matter of efficiency—how good you make it.”
Peter picks up a loose piece of paper from the ground. “This is the one thing that doesn’t leave this room,” he vows. “There are fail safes in the design of the arc reactor to keep it from being weaponized as a bomb. I put them there. You mess with them, and they become unstable. My guess with the highway is that they just made it wrong. This,” he shakes the paper, “is how to get past them—I had to make it to throw the Joker off my case. And there can be no copies, no trace, no nothing. I’m going to burn it to ashes.”
“Jesus, kid.” Gordon takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. “No wonder they went through this trouble. I’d be surprised if every gang and supervillain weren’t foaming at the mouth for this.”
Peter flinches inwards. “I can disappear,” he blurts out. “I—I have a friend, she’s good at this stuff. I’ll leave Gotham. I can run so they won’t find me.”
“No.” Bruce forbids resolutely. “We can’t risk that. If you get caught again—”
“I won’t,” Peter promises. “I’m good at disappearing.”
Gordon lets out a sigh. “Wayne’s right. We can’t risk you getting into the wrong hands. Frankly, I’m worried about the government, too. They might already know, even. What they could do with this stuff…”
Peter rakes his good hand through his hair in pent-up nervous frustration. “That’s literally all I can give you,” he says. “I don’t know what else to do.”
Bruce hesitates, shares a look with Gordon. “We could do a cover-up,” he suggests. “The media already believes that I was the target of this attack, doesn’t it?” Gordon confirms with a nod. “We keep with that story. Throw out all witness testimonies. Give Peter Parker an alibi for the past week, and then bury him so deep no one can ever find the name.”
“But that doesn’t change the main problem,” Tim argues. “That gets the government and police off our trails, maybe. What about the bad guys who already know about him? Joker implied that Peter’s currently valuable, that important people are still looking for him. They won’t be fooled—and even if they are, it won’t matter, because they’ll still be looking.”
“Maybe we should bring the League in,” Gordon mutters. “Peter could be a—a consultant, of some kind. Build them some tech. And they could keep him safe.”
Bruce immediately shakes his head. “With Wonder Woman and Superman missing? The League’s a mess right now, they can’t handle this too. 70 GigaJoules, that’s enough to blow what?”
“The entire Fukushima generating complex was less than five,” Tim pipes in. “You put it in the right place, on top of the bomb itself, you could cause earthquakes, tsunamis—massive, possibly global-scale destruction.”
“So it’s an extremely high profile case,” Bruce concludes. “Whatever we do, we need to pick a route, and fast.”
Peter frowns in weary thought. “Can’t we just, like, fake my death or something?” He asks, jerking his head to the side for good measure. “Really publicly, super visually. Let everyone know I’m dead, and then I can actually run away and live the rest of my life in peace?” Hopefully, find a way home, too.
“Sorry to break it to you, kid, but we can’t get you a new identity without witness protection,” Gordon says. “And we can’t get witness protection without ringing some very high bells.”
“Oh, I can do that,” he waves away.
Bruce pauses. “You can make a new identity?” He doesn’t look—well, he doesn’t look put off by it. If anything, he looks—slightly suspicious, definitely curious, but mostly like he’s just figured something out.
Peter blinks at him in response. “I can hack into the government, get some new papers. It’s no big deal. So is it settled?”
Gordon makes a noise in the back of his throat. “Just keeps getting better and better,” he mutters lowly, and then states louder. “You’re not running. On top of how dangerous it is, you’re safest where we can keep an eye on you, especially so that if anything happens, we know what to prepare for. Also, you’re sixteen.”
“What if we don’t hide him?” Tim offers. “We could establish him. It doesn’t need to be real, but if we just get word out that he’s working for the League, or Batman now or something, maybe it’ll be enough to get them to back off?”
“That still invites attacks,” Bruce counters. “Maybe even more. The contents of the notebook could be just rumour now. Publishing Peter like that would be a confirmation.”
Peter groans. The migraine that hasn’t gone away for the past week is killing him, and everyone just going around in circles is not helping. “Isn’t there just some super secure place you can lock me up in or something?” He complains. “And then you can argue this out. But also, I feel the need to remind you I haven’t slept in three days straight, or eaten much of anything, and also my brain feels like it’s melted from all of that math.”
Everyone pauses to consider him.
“You’re right,” Bruce says finally. “We can argue the details out later. We need a plan for right now.”
“We’re not going to lock you up,” Gordon vows. “You’re a kid, and the only thing you did was be too smart for your own good.”
“I got a woman killed,” Peter grieves.
“No,” Bruce clips. “You didn’t. You did save twenty people. For now, our priorities are buying some time, and keeping Peter safe until then. We can hash out the rest later.”
Tim starts gathering up all of the papers and the notebook, pointedly leaving behind the most dangerous one. “We start by locking this up,” he says. “Get it secure in a place no one can find.”
Peter hesitates. “I have more notebooks at home,” he admits. “There’s… a lot more where this came from.”
“How many?” Bruce asks, wearing a tense expression.
Peter tries to think back. “Maybe a dozen or so? I’m not entirely sure. Mostly they just go further in depth with some of these, a few more concepts.”
Gordon shakes his head. “Kid, you’re giving me an aneurysm,” he grumbles. “Give me an address. I’ll get them to you discreetly.”
Peter winces. He thanks God that he left his spider suit with Felicia for repairs before she left, and he hadn’t had time to pick it up before getting nabbed. “Uh, okay. You know that really old abandoned firehouse in the deserted part of Crime Alley?”
Tim stares at him. “Are you living in a Fire Station?”
“Hey, I was literally orphaned again like, six months ago,” he protests. “Give a guy some time to get back on his feet.”
“We’ve been trying to get you home with us for months now,” Tim almost yells. “Why didn’t you come?”
Peter chews on his lip. “I like living alone,” he defends. “And I like Crime Alley. I didn’t exactly plan to end up in Gotham—I had to make do with what I had. You’ll find all my stuff on the second floor. My notebooks should be around there, too.”
Tim obviously looks like he wants to argue more, but Bruce lays a hand on his shoulder, cutting him off. “We cover this up,” he warns Gordon. “As far as everyone knows, this was a targeted attack on Wayne Enterprises. Open and shut the case, and I’ll get NDAs out to all my employees.”
“The Easter Egg hunt for the bombs is still going,” Gordon informs with a grimace. “I heard they only have two left, but the bats and cops are stretched thin, they won’t get a chance to take accounts from the hostages until then. Will Peter be going with you?” Gordon asks, and Bruce nods.
“What?” Peter cries. “I didn’t agree to this.”
Tim gives him a withering look. “Too bad,” he clips. “I know you have an allergic reaction to getting help or something, but you’re not doing this alone. It’s too dangerous.”
“Tim—” Peter begins, but a glance at Tim’s face stops him in his tracks. He’s never seen him so worked up before—not even when there was a gun to his head. He slumps forward, crossing his arms, feeling like a small child.
Bruce settles a weighty gaze on him.”My manor is heavily protected,” he explains gently. “It’s secure to a paranoid degree, and as a benefactor, I have contact with both Batman and the League. It’s the safest place for you, right now.”
Like Tony Stark minus the Iron Man. Peter chews on his lip. “Fine—but only until you come up with a plan. I was planning on going home soon,” he says mournfully.
Bruce nods at him, unhappy but obliging. He stands, helping Tim up, offering Peter a hand which he declines. Tim has all of his notes but one, and the repulsor is still lying on the floor.
Peter reaches for the repulsor with his left hand. He sets it on the absolute lowest setting so that it just begins to emit light. He casually aims it at the piece of paper lying by his feet and fires. The tiles on the floor around it are shattered and blackened.
Gordon stares at the crevice it left behind.
“I can safely take it apart,” Peter reassures. “Once my hand gets better. Honestly, this is not my best work, I kind of want it gone. I’ll pull it to pieces so that it doesn’t exist anymore.”
Gordon nods slowly. “That might be best. Get some rest, kid.”
-
After the most awkward car ride in history, they finally arrive at the manor.
“Shit,” Peter murmurs. “Big place for a street rat.”
At least in Stark Tower, everything was futuristic. Peter felt somewhat like he belonged—between the nerding out and all. And Johnny had always made Baxter Building seem impossibly welcoming. This mansion stinks of Old Money, and everything Peter is not.
Walking through the doors is like signing his fate to the guillotine. It’s silent, and empty, and more than a little gloomy. The exact opposite of home with May.
The butler sees them and immediately fusses over Tim and Bruce before noticing Peter’s presence. He introduces himself extremely formally, and Peter feels awkward standing there.
“Alfred, can you take him to one of the guest rooms?” Bruce asks. “He can borrow some of Tim’s clothes for now.”
“Of course,” he assents, and leads Peter through countless halls that all look the same. “I’m afraid we don’t have a room prepared at the moment, but you may stay here while that’s sorted.”
Peter rubs the back of his neck. “Oh, it’s, um, fine. Anything’s fine, really.”
The room is probably as big as Peter’s old apartment—maybe more. The bed is way too big, and the room itself has a distinct feeling of unused. Tim stops by with a pair of soft sleep clothes in his arms.
“Hey, can I take a shower?” He asks him, shuffling his feet. “They didn’t exactly give me much while I was with the Joker.”
Tim stares at him for a bit before gesturing to a closed door inside his room. “Go ahead. Everything’s probably in there.”
It’s the first time he’s showered in hot water in so long Peter almost cries. He has to be careful not to get the bandage wet, and contorts his body to manage it. The steam pulls at him, exhaustion taking him, until he almost wants to fall asleep in the shower.
He’d forgotten how his hair curls, soft and mute, when washed with real product and not a generic cheap soap bar. He shampoos thrice, and washes his entire body twice, just to get the feeling of dirt off of him. He brushes his teeth for five minutes.
Tim’s clothes swallow him, looking ridiculously loose on his skinny frame. He’s just skin and bones and vague hints of unusually corded muscles.
“Eat before you sleep,” Tim says, perched on Peter’s bed. He has six pieces of plain toast on a platter, with three bottles of water. “You didn’t eat much in the lab.”
Peter grimaces, and takes the toast from him. He manages down four before his stomach churns too much.
“Hey,” Peter says softly. “I’m glad you’re okay. And I’m really sorry I got you into this.”
Tim’s expression is pinched. “Don’t be sorry,” he says, narrowing his eyes at him. “Damn it, Peter, I just wish you’d let us help you before. You saved my life.”
Peter just winces. “I’m the one who got you there in the first place,” he argues, and Tim shakes his head.
“No,” he states firmly. “You didn’t.” He hands Peter a water bottle to drink from and puts the remaining two on his nightstand. He stands with the platter. “Sleep for as long as you can—we won’t bother you. Come find someone when you wake up. Everyone else should be home by then.”
Peter tilts his head. “Where are they? Where’s Duke?”
Tim briefly hesitates. “They’re dealing with the fallout for WE,” he explains. “Making sure everything’s right.” Peter gets the sense that that’s not quite true, but he doesn’t push. “Don’t worry about it. Get some rest.”
He leaves him alone in the room. Peter’s asleep before his head hits the pillow.
Notes:
guys i finished my first year of university yayayay wow woooo wow yay. after a few weeks straight of covid scares, isolation, studying, not sleeping, procrastinating studying, still not sleeping, alcoholism, and exams—I'm fucking finished! just got my grades back today and y'all. y'all not to be an annoying bitch but. y'all I got a 91 average. thank fucking god. maybe it was all fucking worth it all those mental breakdowns and alcoholism. maybe placing my entire validity and self worth on a transcript was ok. I can count on two hands the number of classes I've actually been to this semester but still—
also I've been so antisocial except for me tripping absolute balls last night and high-calling my besties (mistake and thanos!) incoherently babbling about string theory (or so I've been told. I don't actually remember all that much of last night so)
anyway i'm a slut for kudos and comments and that sweet sweet validation so thank you to anyone who kudos and comments <3<3, and once again, if you've stuck with my trashcan on fire writing, i just want you to know i appreciate you so, so much. you guys are amazing.
Chapter 2
Notes:
surprise.
this takes you all the way up to the missing from the photographs chapter, but I might post that unaltered in here too just to make it a cohesive read, so don't get too excited or too disappointed if the next update isn't any new content sorry :)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
He stays knocked out for a good 30 hours or so, waking up to a bright day and feeling like the rising dead. He has a feeling he’ll be having some long nights still—sleep debt isn’t gotten rid of that quickly, but at the moment, he can’t sleep another wink.
He downs a bottle of water and goes to brush his teeth again before hesitantly stepping out of the room. The halls feel so empty, and without a guide there to lead him in any particular direction, he’s lost.
But, because he’s a genetically enhanced freak, Peter has a very simple solution for this: he goes quiet and listens for sounds in the house. There are less heartbeats than before. A slightly irregular one, a strong, unusually steady one. Alfred and Bruce, he’d guess. They’re in the same direction.
He heads towards the sounds before he can think too much about it.
Distantly, he’s taking details about the manor in. There are many bedrooms, although he doesn’t know which are the ones being used. Eventually, the corridor turns to large rooms, and he finds Bruce sitting in the dining room with a mug of coffee and Alfred wiping down the table. He shyly pokes his head in.
“Peter,” Bruce greets, setting down whatever he was working on. “Come eat.”
He uncertainly steps into the room as Alfred briefly gives him a warm look, leaving to the kitchen. He returns with a bowl of lukewarm soup, some plain crackers, and a whole host of vitamins, sets them down on the table.
“Thanks,” Peter mumbles, hesitantly sliding into his seat.
Bruce nods at his food. “We’re putting you on a meal plan,” he explains. “Get you used to eating. We’ll start with supplements and lighter meals every two or three hours and slowly reintroduce you back to food over the next two weeks.”
Peter dips his head. “Are they at school?” He asks, taking the vitamins first. He recognizes a few of them—Thiamine, B-12, multivitamins. Supplements might not work with his metabolism, but it’s worth a shot. He guesses the soup wasn’t fully heated on purpose, to help it go down more easily.
“Tim and Duke wanted to stay, but we figured that while you’re placed on a temporary leave from school, their absences shouldn’t coincide with yours,” he tells him. “My youngest, Damian, is at school, too. Dick is at work, Jason doesn’t really come by very often, and Cassandra is off in Hong Kong for a while—although she might want to come back for this.”
Peter feels troubled at the thought of someone coming back for him, but he pushes it aside. “That’s a lot of kids,” he comments casually. “You might have a hoarding problem.”
Bruce’s lips quirk slightly up. “Maybe,” he agrees. He taps the book in front of him, and Peter belatedly realizes it’s his own—one of the notebooks from the firehouse, with his own paper, a pencil, and a tablet, trying to work them out. “I’ve been trying to go through these, get some sense of what we’re working with. I can make heads or tails of them, but some of the pieces…”
Peter notices the box full of books in the chair next to Bruce. He pushes his soup slightly to the side and leans over the table, taking the notebook and rotating it so both of them can read.
“This is how to design an AI,” Peter says. “The entire book, I think. It’s a very complicated process.”
“Artificial Intelligence?” Bruce frowns at some of the equations. “Are we talking self-driving cars or disease mapping or smart assistants?”
“It’s meant to be an assistant, but anything, really.” Peter picks at his thumb with his teeth while his eyes roam his notes. “It’s an AI capable of individual thought. Almost like a person, just without the free will and what not. With this programming, it can hack into the webs and teach itself anything. So basically it’s a genius robot.”
Bruce pauses, staring at the paper with wariness. “That could be a very dangerous weapon.”
Peter just wrinkles his nose. “It’s also a very useful tool. That one,” he points to a blue notebook in the box, “is about how to make the AI specifically help in designing and engineering. It can calculate formulas for you, solve its own problems, you could do all the work from a little hologram. Like a lab assistant, just a really good one.”
Bruce closes the notebook and sets it and the blue one aside, gets another from the stack and opens it up to a drawing of Chitauri tech. Peter nibbles on a cracker. “How about this one?”
“That’s a hypothetical ideal energy source. I was just playing around with it, seeing if I could learn anything to apply to the real world.”
It takes them an hour for Peter to give a brief summary of all his crazed notes. It’s clear that Bruce is smart, has a lot of understanding of tech and engineering—not surprising, considering WE being a lead tech corp. But this is science from another world—one that plays by different rules, rules that people like Tony Stark and Princess Shuri have spent years pushing to the limits.
They land on one of the last three books.
“Oh my God,” Peter says. “It’s so lucky that this wasn’t the missing notebook.”
“What is it?” Bruce squints at his messy writing. “Equations after equations.”
Peter pales. “Um, this is one I haven’t cracked yet,” he admits. “The other two are also just me trying to figure it out. I’m so close but there’s a piece missing.”
He takes the pencil and paper from Bruce, flipping to a blank page and drawing a set of squiggly lines on top of each other in a square, 3-dimensionally drawn vector plane, a few peaks within it. “This is a visual representation of the Pym field. It's quantum field theory—every particle comes from their respective field encompassing all matter and energy, and disturbances within those fields are what we view as particles. Capiche?”
“Somewhat.”
“Cool. Can you pull up the Standard Model?” Peter points to his tablet and watches as he types it into Google. He taps the far right of the screen with the eraser end of his pencil. “That’s where the Pym particle should be. It’s a force carrier—a scalar boson, no spin, not gauge, like the Higgs Boson in the Higgs field. Higgs gives things mass, and it interacts with every particle to break the electroweak symmetry and give it its correct mass. If you find a way to isolate it, you could manipulate the mass of anything. Take it a step further, you could make a black hole.
“But the Pym particle is different. It gives things space . It allows matter to stably exist in the universe without collapsing into some kind of pre-universal soup—the singularity that existed before the Big Bang, or in black holes.” Peter blows a breath, contemplating the theory. “Isolate it, and you can manipulate matter. You can shrink or grow anything.”
Bruce knits his brows. “Like a shrink ray?”
Peter huffs a short laugh. “Kind of, but way more powerful. Cooler, too. The small of it is that if you shrink enough, you enter the Pym field yourself. You keep shrinking forever, infinitely small, basically a one-dimensional point. And then you’re trapped in the Quantum Realm, where time and space doesn’t exist.” He sighs. “Play it wrong and you’re confined into an infinite, meaningless, unending and exhaustive existence beyond all dimensions—that passes by in the blink of an eye. Play it right?”
Peter flips back to the notebook, goes towards a middling section. “Time travel. The multiverse. Ending life as we know it. Everything’s possible, and all doors to quantum physics are unlocked.”
“This is theoretical,” Bruce says, and Peter shakes his head.
“No.” He sets down his pencil, leans back into his chair. “It’s real. Only parts of it are undiscovered. Pym particles were successfully isolated, and people have gone into the Quantum Realm—only two have ever come back.”
Bruce’s eyes are wide, his posture rigid. “Someone made it?” He demands, words stilted. “Who? How come nobody has ever heard of it before?”
Peter can’t exactly say because it happened in another universe, but then again, people back home didn’t exactly know about the Pym particle either. He goes with the same explanation. “Pym discovered it, obviously. It’s named after him, and he’s one of only two people who’s ever been able to isolate it. Don’t worry,” Peter says bitterly. “They’re both dead. They can’t make more. And he didn’t tell anybody because it was dangerous. Can you imagine what someone could do with this?”
Bruce’s mouth is set firm. “How did you learn about it then?”
“I met him,” Peter truthfully says. “Back home, I used to be interned by some big minds. It’s how I learned to make stuff. Dr. Pym visited sometimes, and I got to sit in. Coolest thing in my life,” he sighs dreamily.
Bruce pauses for a moment, and then takes care packing all of the notebooks back into the box. “These are going into a very secure location,” he says seriously. “Potentially passed onto the League. I can’t tell you these will get back to you but… I’ll inform you of everything that happens.”
Peter nods. “I don’t mind. All the information’s here, anyway.” He taps his temple with his forefinger. “If I really needed to, it wouldn’t take me long to start from scratch.”
Bruce hesitates. “That’s our problem,” he mumbles under his breath. To Peter, he says, “Gordon also got you your clothes from the firehouse, if you haven’t noticed. They’re by your room.”
Peter brightens. “Be right back,” he rushes out, and gets up from his chair and darts in the direction he came from, longing for the familiar comforting feeling of his threadbare clothes. True to his word, there’s another box by his door, with his clothes and school supplies stuffed in his backpack and even the Stark Radio—he doesn’t know how he didn’t notice it coming out.
He emerges from his bedroom again wearing an old, soft tee of a band he doesn’t recognize, thrifted for a dollar, loose-fitting jeans, and a large, soft hoodie. When he makes his way back to the kitchen again, Bruce is standing up, and the notebooks are nowhere to be seen.
“Come,” he says, leading Peter through another hallway. “I’ll show you our security.”
When Bruce had said the manor was secure to paranoia, he really wasn’t kidding. He walks Peter through each of the gates, the alarms, and the protocols they have installed, as well as all of the security cameras, safety rooms, and lockdown protocols.
“Do you have a meth lab in here or something?” Peter asks, squinting at a panic button with a tracker that Bruce passes to Peter, telling him to keep it on his person at all times. “Why so much security?”
Bruce quirks a small smile. “No drugs,” he promises. “I like to be prepared, is all.”
“For what, a zombie apocalypse?” He mutters in response.
His comment is ignored—instead, he gets a lecture on safety. “Don’t leave the manor,” Bruce orders him. “Don’t go out where others can see you, or where you can be captured by satellites. If anything seems wrong, come tell me right away. No doing anything on electronics that can be traced back to you, either. And for the time being, we have to take you out of school.”
Peter already knows this, but he can’t help but sag. “Can I see a friend, at least?” He asks, hopefully. “Felicia Hardy—you’ve met her. She already knows about my work. She’s been out of town for a while, but she should be coming back any day now.”
Bruce hesitates, and then shakes his head apologetically. “It’s best not to,” he gently justifies. “Tim and Duke can tell her you’re safe, but until things calm down at least a little, it’s best to keep this as under wraps as possible.”
Peter sulks. “She’ll probably find a way in anyway,” he broods—half a warning. “Just be prepared for her to knock on some doors.”
To his credit, Bruce does seem genuinely sorry for the situation Peter’s got himself into. “My sons will be happy to meet you,” he offers. “You missed them yesterday, but they were very excited. Tim and Duke talked about you a lot.”
Peter’s not so sure. He nods and chews on his thumb anxiously. “Is there anything I can do?” He blurts out. “It’s just, school’s pretty much the only thing I did.” That and Spider-Man, but he can’t say that. “I don’t know what else to do.”
Bruce exhales slowly. “We… have a lab.”
Peter smiles.
-
“It’s technically open for anyone in our family, but Tim’s mostly the only one to use it,” Bruce explains. “He won’t mind.”
The lab isn’t anything near Tony Stark’s or Reed Richards’, but barring the past week, it’s better than anything he’s had in months. Peter’s fingers itch to get his hands moving, even the swollen one. “Do you have some more workbooks?”
Bruce opens a drawer to reveal books and loose leaf paper, translucent sketch and blueprint design. “I might need to lock those up too,” he warns, and Peter shrugs. Still gives him something to do. “Don’t… don’t do anything that could be qualified as a national security threat.”
Peter looks thoughtfully around the lab, not bothering to hide his sheer glee. There’s a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. “Am I allowed to make a particle accelerator?”
-
He doesn’t, because he’d have to destroy a fair bit of the lab to do that and he’s not actually good enough to do that particular feat of engineering yet, but he does make an AI.
Well, he starts one. It would take him longer than a day to complete one—if he works nonstop, then maybe he could get a passable one in a week, just for some company and very basic mechanical help. But among his stuff that Commissioner Gordon brought was a small USB stick—an abandoned project from a month ago that had the workings of an AI in it. With an actual lab at his disposal, it shouldn’t take much more to activate it.
He makes a tablet pretty easily, where he downloads what he has of the AI and does the rest of the programming, and where the AI will reside until he can make a better host.
He works for hours, coding and scrapping and writing and rewriting, occasionally interrupted by either Bruce, who’s making sure he’s not breaking into some kind of government system, or Alfred, who consistently brings him various light foods, like crackers, pretzels, apple sauce, bananas, the works.
At five, Duke shows up out of nowhere and claps him in the back.
“We were so worried,” he says, with genuine happiness in his eyes.
Peter feels guilty that he worried him and guilty that he showed up. He offers him a tentative smile. “Sorry,” he keeps his voice casual. “But it’s good to see you, too.”
He meets everyone else at dinner, where everyone has some big spread of salad, some kind of chicken, a bunch of things Peter couldn’t name if he tried. Peter gets a dinner of plain chicken and rice with a few boiled vegetables. He can barely keep that down as it is.
An eleven year old boy glares at him from across the table. Peter feels discomfited.
“Aw, don’t be like that, Dami,” the guy who introduced himself as Dick says, ruffling his hair and ignoring the scowl. Peter’s noticed that Dick is the only one that Damian softens up enough to only scowl at him instead of yowling like a cat. “He’s fine, it’ll just take him some time to get used to you.”
“I don’t mind,” Peter says mildly. “He, uh, reminds me of a kid I knew.”
“Oh yeah?” Dick grins. “I dunno, Dami’s one of a kind. In what way?”
Peter has a soft smile on him as he thinks about Valeria, who was only a baby when the snap happened. “My best friend’s niece,” he reveals. “The cutest thing you’ve ever seen but man does she scare me. I think she could kill all of us in our sleep and take over the world if she wasn’t so sweet. Her eyes… She looks like she understands everything anyone says. I’m pretty sure she solved a chemistry problem that was stumping me. She’s one.”
Dick blinks, then laughs, ruffling Damian’s hair again. “That… sounds pretty on point, actually. Hear that?” He talks to Damian. “You’re like a psycho genius baby murderer.”
The kid scowls more, but he’s not screaming, so Peter takes it as a win.
After Peter’s stomach starts churning in protest at the thought of another bite, he sets back his food and waits. The family sends each other uneasy looks, which Peter pretends he doesn’t notice—and honestly, doesn’t really care enough to think about.
“Can I go back to the lab?” He asks, taking small sips of water for the remainder of the meal.
Bruce pauses. “You can go anywhere in the manor anytime, Peter.”
“Cool,” he says, hastily excusing himself, eagerly returning to his element, where everything feels comfortable, familiar, and it all makes sense.
Tim stops by and Peter gives him an easy grin.
“Do you need anything?” He asks. “We’re all about to go to bed now.”
Peter stares curiously at Tim’s dark circles. He would’ve guessed Tim went days without sleeping and only on coffee—like Tony did, or Peter, too, except he hates coffee and prefers the highly radioactive energy drinks. “I’m good,” he replies. “I just have a lot to think about. I’m in a tinkering mood.”
Tim nods, and then wavers for a moment. “I’m glad you’re here,” he settles on. “Even if you don’t want to be. I’m glad you’re with us.”
Peter stops from his work. “It’s not that I don’t want to be here,” he tries to excuse. “I’m just used to doing things on my own, and I don’t like to bring people into my problems,” he adds bitterly. “A lot of them tend to get hurt.”
“We won’t,” Tim states, more confident than an eighteen year old guy who had a gun to his head a couple of days ago should be. “We’re smart. We’re good at this kind of stuff.”
“Mob wars?” Peter raises an eyebrow.
“Taking care of each other,” Tim corrects. “Keeping each other safe. You’ll see.”
Peter isn’t so convinced, but he leans over to friendly nudge him with his shoulder. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad that if I have someone at my side, it’s you. We made a pretty good team back there.”
Tim grins. “We did, didn’t we?”
“Professional actors,” Peter nods solemnly.
Tim leaves Peter tapping happily at his tablet, and Peter distantly hears doors opening and closing, some strange sounds—but he doesn’t pay them any attention. He’s too absorbed in his task.
Eventually, he realizes the entire manor is silent and he can hear no heartbeats.
Peter halts in his thoughts. “Okay,” he mutters. “Everyone says they’re going to bed, except they all secretly leave the manor entirely. Cool. That’s not weird at all.”
He doesn’t think too much about this, either—just tucks the piece of information into himself.
He doesn’t stay in the lab for too long. All he needs is the tablet, really, so he takes it back to his room and finishes up there, lying on the bed. Eventually, he falls asleep.
He misses everyone returning back to the manor, and a small creak in the door of someone checking in on him late at night.
Notes:
yoo guys I got fucking hatecrimed on the Toronto subway by a dude who had to have been like mentally fucked up or on so many drugs. (uh, disclaimer, homeless/mentally ill/addicts need help, not stigmatization and criminalization, but also, this guy was just straight up fucked up.) but Toronto's been so crime-strife lately some people are literally calling it Gotham city now. when DC said NYC is metropolis by day and Gotham by night, we weren't supposed to take it as a fucking challenge lmao.
it used to be peepeepoopoo man. it used to just be peepee attacks. now it's like, stabby-stabby-hatecrime-murder man. peepeepoopoo man was Toronto's joker. now all we have are common criminals who have no artistic vision with their assaults and batteries and manslaughter charges.
considering this new link between Toronto and Gotham, I have a proposition. batman comics, write peepeepoopoo man in as a Gotham villain. I want to see batman freak the fuck out over having to defeat this guy who is clearly more insane than joker himself. I want to see his trial, when every single person in the city goes to see him acquitted. I want a cinematic reveal of his chilling smile as he stares at the security camera after his latest peepeepoopoo attacks. who stands with me?
peepeepoopoo for those who don't know
Chapter 3
Notes:
the first part most people would've already read before in missing from the photographs, but i put it in for the people who haven't and also the continuity. the second part of the chapter is new, though, so skip to that if you don't want to reread the rooftop scene.
guys i'm dying. i'm like, miserable. i can't breathe and i keep coughing. this is the end.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The next day passes by in much the same way. Peter wakes up and goes down for breakfast, where he has his supplements, dry, bland cereal and some fruit. Then he hides out in the lab for the rest of the day, keeping to himself, only emerging when he’s dragged out by Bruce for lunch and then Tim for dinner.
“Are you always like this?” Duke grumbles. “I should’ve guessed you were another little lab gremlin.”
Peter grins at him. “Worse,” he says. “Back home, the guy I interned for had the coolest lab in the world. We wouldn’t leave for days.”
It’s Duke that checks on him tonight, saying they're all going to bed. Peter plays along, but he keeps an ear out afterwards in the lab, straining to hear the strange noises. Doors open and close. A strange chittering noise. Maybe a car? But it sounds far away.
He pushes it from mind again. Honestly, these are rich people, and those are a whole different breed. It's not like Tony didn't have weird habits. Harry mostly just got high. And Johnny used to take his cars for a joyride late at night, waking up pretty much everyone in the city.
Sometimes, if Spider-Man was still out, Johnny would call him to stick onto his car, laughing as they screeched everywhere and he held on with just the tips of his fingers, or a strand of webbing, or planted his feet onto the hood and held his arms out like Jesus or the Titanic or something.
He misses his weird billionaire friends.
This time, he falls asleep while working, head lowered onto the table and drooling slightly on his sketch papers with his newest designs—all a bit scratchy, with his hand still not fully healed.
He’s woken up with a small shake to his shoulders, deep into the night. “Let’s get you to bed,” Bruce murmurs as Peter slowly rises. He’s wet, like he just had a shower.
His feet drag on the way back to his room.
“‘Night,” he mutters, and he misses the way Bruce’s face softens just a touch.
The third night, as soon as he hears them leave, he counts down half an hour and then leaves the lab. His room doesn’t have a window—a safety thing, but there’s a hallway that does.
He could just use his spider powers, but considering how jacked the security system here is, he doesn’t doubt there are cameras that could pick up on him, if anyone was looking. Instead, he spent an hour of his time earlier in the lab whipping up four little discs, with a band around each.
He straps his latest invention onto each of his palms and shoes and climbs out the window.
They work like a charm—they stick onto the walls easily, letting Peter get a grip and make his way up the wall, up onto the roof of Wayne Manor. The manor is admittedly not particularly tall—only four or five stories, maybe. Peter hasn’t actually explored all corners of it yet—he hasn’t needed to.
But it’s tall enough to be freezing, even with his hoodie, and for the wind to be brisk enough it batters the thoughts out of him.
He sits down on the edge of the roof, unstrapping the tech from his hands and feet, and shrugging off his backpack. He takes Stark Radio out, fiddles with the channels until it lands on older songs that reminds him of the ones May used to awfully belt in the kitchen on lazy Sundays.
Peter closes his eyes, lying down on the roof with his legs still sticking off, face turned up at the sky. His breathing evens out, and he blinks slowly. There are no stars.
He zones out, letting the thoughts leech off him, listening to song after ad after song for he doesn’t know how long.
“You shouldn’t be up here,” a voice startles him, and Peter jumps.
He pushes himself to sit up abruptly, whipping around to find Batman standing on the roof with him.
“Oh,” Peter slumps. “It’s you.”
Batman lurks over, carefully edging closer to him. “You shouldn’t be here,” he repeats. “How did you get up?”
“You first,” Peter quirks a smile.
“I’m Batman,” he replies rather redundantly. “I have a grappling hook. And you?”
Peter grabs one of the tech discs from beside him and tosses it over. Batman catches it out of the air. “Modelled after Spider-Man’s powers,” Peter says. “It sticks to things. I climbed.”
Batman turns the device over in his hands, looking unimpressed. “What are you doing up?” He asks unhappily. “Wayne won’t like this.”
“What’s he going to do, find out?” Peter grins mischievously, shifting his legs to sit criss-crossed on the ledge. “And I like high places. Good to think. Helps to get away from it all.”
Batman walks to his side, setting down the climbing device with the others before hesitantly sitting down next to him. “Is it really so bad?” He asks, and Peter blinks at his gloomy voice. “Living with them, I mean?”
“It’s been three days,” Peter replies. “It hasn’t been much of anything. But… no, it’s not bad. They’re—they’re good people. And Tim and Duke are my friends.”
“Then why come up here?”
Peter’s silent for a moment. “It’s easier to live alone than with a family you don’t know,” he confesses quietly. “I miss my aunt. After my uncle died, everyone thought she was going to give me away—I’m not even related to her, and all of her ties to me died with him, you know? But it was never even a question for her. I don’t know how to live with someone that isn’t her.”
“She wouldn’t want you to be alone,” he murmurs in response.
“She wouldn’t want me to be here at all,” he replies bitterly. “She wouldn’t want to be dead. She’d want me home with her.”
The stiffness of Batman’s face where the cowl doesn’t mask it shows all of the tension that belies him. “But right now, she’d want you safe.” His voice doesn’t have its signature growl—it’s just rough, deep and low. “You’re not safe alone, and you’re not safe up here.”
Peter waves his hand, unbothered. “I’m fine here for a while,” he says. “I, uh, actually used to climb up buildings a lot. Especially when I first came to Gotham. It helped with the loneliness. Now I just like the view. If you unfocus your eyes enough, it almost looks like New York.”
“Why did you leave?” Batman asks. “You talk about Queens as your home. Why come to Gotham?”
“It wasn’t my choice,” Peter mumbles. “Would you believe me if I said I was caught in another war?”
Batman halts. “Another one?”
“It wasn’t my fault,” Peter defends. “My mentor was one of the key people in the center of it, and I got pulled along. So did Spidey.” He swallows hard. “That’s why—that’s why both of our families are dead. And all of our friends. Why we ended up in Gotham.”
“Will you tell me what happened?” Batman rumbles, a hint of pain in his voice.
Peter shakes his head resolutely. “It doesn’t matter,” he expresses firmly. “You know enough to know why we like to be alone. That life is dead, and I’m just trying to make it until my next one. No one’s searching for me from home.”
They lapse into a terse silence, only the radio’s bright advertisements cutting through the thick air between them. Batman breaks it first.
“Go inside, Peter,” he says softly. “It’s cold out, and Wayne won’t like that you’re alone outside.”
Peter snorts. “Bruce told me I couldn’t leave the manor. I’m still in the manor—well, on,” he points out. “Besides, it’s an empty house anyway. But sure. It’s freezing up here—next time I’m bringing a blanket.”
Batman freezes. “What do you mean, it’s an empty house?”
Peter half-heartedly shrugs. “Nobody’s home. It’s why I knew I could climb up. They all leave every night and are back by morning.”
“And do you… do you know where they are?” Batman asks, a note of panic in his voice.
Peter looks at him curiously. “No. And I don’t really care enough to find out—it’s their business. Maybe they’re in a fight club or something. I don’t know, I just heard them leave.”
“Alright…” Batman’s voice is oddly strained. “If you say so.”
“Do you know what’s going to happen?” Peter snoops. “Like, what’s going to happen to me? What’s going on right now?”
Batman shifts. “I’ve been debriefed on the situation,” he slowly says. “My team’s keeping an ear out for any talk, trying to figure out who knows about you and how much. Red Hood is sending feelers out through his associates. Gordon has kept it from most of the police force. But this is a high-priority case—chances are that it will take a long time to settle.”
Peter sighs, slightly disappointed with the information. “I don’t plan to stick around long after things clear up,” he says, tone sober. “Felicia and I are gonna try to go home. And you should know—Spider-Man’s already left. He didn’t plan on it, but something came up. So, sorry about that.”
“I figured,” Batman exhales. “He hasn’t shown up in a week.”
“Really took the most inconvenient time to leave,” Peter agrees. “I don’t think he’ll come back unless something really big happens.” He turns off the radio and shoves it into his backpack, straps the climbing tech onto his shoes first, and then hands. “He’s fine, though. The reason I was going to the library when I got nabbed was actually to send him a message. Make sure he got there okay. He’s alright.”
It was actually just for Felicia, considering Peter’s still in Gotham and all. But he can twist a few details of the story to fit the narrative.
“Don’t make this a habit,” Batman warns, rising with Peter. “No more roof escapades. No ‘next times.’”
“I’m pretty sure that you’re not allowed to give me orders,” Peter casually slides, slinging his backpack onto his shoulders. He pinches his face like he ate a lemon. “Don’t snitch to Bruce. And don’t think that confiscating these will stop me.” He waves his hands and feet like a puppet. “I could make them again in, like, thirty minutes.”
The edges of Batman’s mouth quirks up slightly, but he sounds tired. “You get into an unusual amount of trouble,” he comments, resignedd. “Get some sleep tonight.”
Peter stops in his tracks. “You know when I said I could be a super-villain if I wanted,” he starts, “I didn’t mean it. I don’t want to hurt people, ever. All I want is to help. I didn’t mean for all of this to happen. You know that, right?” He can’t meet his eyes, and he tries to keep his voice steady, but inside he’s practically begging to be believed.
“I know.” Batman’s voice is unusually quiet, without the growl or the gravitas he pulls for show. “Do me a favour. You said—you said you wanted to try to find another family. One that lasts. Maybe… maybe give the Waynes a go?”
Peter brings his thumb to his mouth and nibbles on the soft, tender skin. “Maybe,” he allows. “Don’t get your hopes up. Bye, B-Man.”
He crawls down the wall until he reaches the window, all too aware of the eyes that follow him, a small hitch in Batman’s breathing as he cautiously watches Peter find his steps.
He falls asleep on his bed, exhausted and tired out from his trip up. He always sleeps best on the nights he gets some air, and it’s been a while.
The next day, he wakes up to a thick, warm blanket, folded on a chair in the corner of his room. On it lies a note.
Take the stairs.
Peter scowls at it and flicks it off. He digs his hand into the blanket, feels the soft fabric, grumbling all the while.
“Snitch.”
-
“Friday is family dinner night,” Dick explains to him as he gets ready to leave the manor. “Our brother Jason doesn’t really stay in the manor very often and he always throws such a tantrum, but I like to drive over and wheedle him into coming.”
“As family does,” Peter remarks sarcastically, and Dick beams at him in total agreement.
He shrugs his jacket on, heads for the door. “Jason can be a bit of a grump, but don’t let him get to you. I know he’s curious about you, at least.”
Peter nods absent-mindedly. At any rate, he can’t be worse than Damian, who’s been slowly warming up to him. Well, not so much as warming up but more of vaguely acknowledging his presence. But at least he doesn’t terrorize him like he does Tim—or, they do each other. Peter doesn’t touch that with a ten foot pole.
He fiddles with the new watch on his wrist. Just about five days of almost non-stop tinkering, only taking breaks for meals or for a few hours of sleep a night, has led to this—a semi-finished project.
Duke drags him into a game of Go Fish on the living room floor while Tim finishes up his homework. Peter keeps losing—he doesn’t know why he’s so bad at the easiest card game, but he’s on his fourth loss in a row when they’re called for dinner.
An unfamiliar man is sitting next to Dick—maybe twenty, or twenty-one. Jason Todd, Bruce’s second adopted son, whom Peter really hasn’t heard all that much about. He tentatively follows Tim into the dining room.
Alfred’s gone all out for the spread, as far as Peter can see. He recognizes it as a full roast dinner, only it seems much fancier. Peter gets to have a cold sandwich, some apple slices, and carrot sticks. He feels like a child with a packed lunch, but he has to say he appreciates it—his stomach was already shriveled up to the size of a grape from starvation before the Joker. And then spend a week straight with virtually no food, and now he can barely keep his frequent but childlike portions down.
Peter takes his seat, trying not to shrink in on himself. He and his friends are the last ones there, and he feels out of place. Family dinner night . He’s not family.
“So you’re the kid all this fuss is about,” Jason remarks. “I’m not exactly sure what I was expecting.”
Peter bites his nails. “I’m, uh, Peter Parker,” he introduces lamely. “It’s nice to meet you.” He says it genuinely—even if he’s a little bit anxious at the most estranged Wayne member.
Jason acknowledges him with a nod. “Jason,” he says, and then drops the conversation from there.
Dinner is a fairly silent affair for the Waynes, with Dick the most talkative, goading them all into conversations. Duke gives in, keeping the friendly chat up.
Peter picks at his sandwich, and when he can’t anymore, gnaws on an apple slice, taking ridiculously small bites. His stomach turns queasy in protest, and he bites down on his lip.
“Peter, stop,” Bruce gently says. “We can try again in an hour.”
He gratefully pushes the plate to the side, choosing instead to sip at his room temperature water. He ignores the scrutinizing looks he receives from almost everyone around the table.
Jason leans over the table towards him. “So, you gonna show me how you made so much trouble? I heard some chatter in the Alley.”
Peter perks up. “You’re from the Alley?” He asks, peering at him. “I don’t recognize you.”
“It’s a big place,” Jason justifies.
“Not if you’re a street rat,” he points out. “Spend enough time out there and you start to recognize pretty much everyone, even if they don’t notice you.”
Jason tilts his head in admission to that. “I mostly keep to myself,” he explains. “Keep an ear out for trouble. But recently, things have been stirring up. So, what’s so special about you, kid?”
Peter hesitates, glances down at his hands. “Nothing, really. I’m just a nerd who made a stupid mistake and I got a lucky shot on the Joker. That’s about it.”
“There are no lucky shots on Joker,” Jason disagrees. “Come on, I’ve heard you’ve been falling asleep in the labs. What have you been working on?”
He wavers for a moment. “It’s not done,” he says, holding up his left hand. “I still have a lot to do, and this is just a prototype.”
Tim leans over. “Your watch? What does it do?”
Peter taps it twice. “Twopio, wake up.”
The watch comes to life, a soft blue light emitting from the watch’s face, where the clock should be. “Hello, Peter,” a distinctly robotic, female voice says from the watch. “Hello, Peter’s friends. It’s very nice to meet you.”
“You made an AI?” Bruce asks, clearly unsettled. “Peter, that technically counts as a national security threat.”
“I am not cleared to hack in governmental security systems unless explicitly ordered by Peter,” Twopio says very helpfully. That evidently does not help Bruce feel better.
Peter raises his palms innocently. “I wanted help in the lab,” he claims innocuously. “I literally yoinked all of her designs from this other AI, Friday, but like... less cool. Um, speaking of which, can I borrow someone’s phone? I can show you what she does.”
Nobody seems terribly eager to volunteer their own, but Duke eventually just humours him. “Go nuts,” he says, shoving it down the table.
Peter catches it, and points his fist at the phone. “Toopy, give me a scan.”
“Yep!” A blue, sparkling plane of light emerges from the sensor that scans from above, hitting the phone. Once it reaches the table, Toopy calls out, “pulling up a blueprint,” and a hologram flickers to life above the face of the watch.
Peter pinches with his fingers and then flicks them, enlarging the hologram so it’s true to life. “Split the layers,” he says, and watches as the individual layers separate and space apart. He squints at one of them. “You guys should really get better batteries,” he critiques, using his fingers to pinch the layer and toss it out. “Swap in a standard Chitauri-based one.”
A new light flickers on the hologram, and Peter fiddles around with a few of the wires before closing the layers of the phone back up. “Compress the print to 2D,” he says, flattening the palm of his hand against the light, and he watches as everything smushes together. He points his left index finger to Duke’s phone, and uses all five fingers of his right hand to swipe the print from the watch.
Duke gets a notification that something has been downloaded into his phone.
“I still want to add a lot more features onto her, and she has a lot of bugs to work out. This is about all she's programmed to do so far, and I'm pretty sure that file she sent you is just full of gibberish,” Peter continues. “But I’m hoping she can help me out in the lab. I have some ideas.”
Jason sets down his fork. “Well,” he blows a breath out. “That explains why people were talking.”
Now that the demonstration is done, Peter feels uncomfortable being under their gaze again. Tim reaches over and takes his wrist, pulling it in front of him to look over the watch.
“How’d you hack into Duke’s phone?” He demands, turning Peter’s hand over. “We’re supposed to be protected.”
Peter rubs the back of his neck with his other hand. “Well, we’re on the same server. Toops can’t hack anywhere else yet—I still have to program that part, and I’m thinking I might include backdoors to any major telecommunication networks.”
“Maybe put a pin on that,” Dick says mildly. “You know, if we’re trying to keep you under the radar and all.”
Bruce just sighs like he’s exhausted. “I need all of the notes you made making this,” he pinches the bridge of his nose—an unusually expressive motion for him, from what Peter’s gathered so far. “They have to be locked up too. And we’re having a discussion about what you’re allowed to make in the labs.”
Peter smiles sheepishly. What he’s hearing is they won’t take her away. At least, not yet.
“Twopio?” Duke asks. “What kind of name is that?”
Peter blushes red. “Uh, well, you know how in Star Wars—”
-
Peter’s resumed his game of Go Fish with Duke when he overhears a conversation in the kitchen.
“A lot of people are looking for him,” Jason tips off. “As far as I know, they don’t know his name or what exactly was in that book, but they heard word of a street kid who could blow up a city and they all want in.”
Peter sets down a pair of cards and frowns, straining to hear Bruce’s reply. “We’re working on it. Once he recovers, we’ll discuss our next steps.”
“I don’t know if there is a next step, Bruce,” Jason cautions. “Best case scenario? Their knowledge is limited and Peter lives a somewhat normal life, just one where he always has to check behind his shoulder. Worst case is that he’s constantly in the state of running and hiding forever.”
“He’s just a kid,” Buce murmurs. “He shouldn’t be caught up in all of this.”
Jason replies dryly, “it’s too late for that.”
There’s a small hesitation from Bruce’s end. “I’m worried for him,” Bruce finally admits. “You saw what he’s been up to. And he’s having trouble adjusting.”
“He’ll be fine,” Jason assures, a note rueful. “Figure this out without locking him up in the manor lab for the rest of his life. I’ll keep an eye out on the alley, see if anyone’s poking their nose in.”
“ Peter.” Duke snaps Peter out of his trance. “Where’d you go?”
Peter refocuses his eyes on where Duke wears a concerned expression. “Nowhere,” he answers. “Just thinking. Go Fish.”
He manages down a pack of saltines in small bites without feeling like he’ll throw up, so that’s a win. Sooner or later, Dick is calling for bedtime, and Peter goes without complaint. He hears them leave, and he doesn’t care.
Saturday, Peter notices his stitches are starting to be repelled from his body, so he gets an X-acto knife from the lab and cuts them off himself.
On Sunday, Steph comes over, and Peter takes a break from the lab to hang out with his friends for most of the day. They can’t leave the manor, but they do watch some detective movie and order a cheap, greasy pizza. Peter chews on the crust.
Tuesday, Felicia comes back into town.
Notes:
1. a quick poll: so say i wrote a limerick to someone about wanting to eat their ass like a steak. also say that, on a different occasion, they texted me that we could call in a moment and i got so excited i forgot what i was doing and i wrapped my entire hand around a 400 degree pan. which would you say is more romantic? i'm trying to prove a point.
2. anyone who knows duke thomas comics and is willing to help me out with a fic 👉👈🥺 pwease weach ouwt.
3. anyone know of any cool writing challenges or events or collabs or shit? i'm bored.
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