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Peter’s no interior or exterior designer, but as far as kidnapping locations go, this one isn’t the worst.
It’s not an abandoned warehouse, it’s not a lab, it’s not even in the middle of nowhere.
It’s a house— a normal run-of-the-mill house in the rural suburbs; it may be small and deteriorating on the outside, but it’s nondescript enough that it doesn’t stand out. A beige, off-white of flaking lead paint that comes with age and terrible weather, basic plumbing and running water and everything.
The place has even got flowerbeds with actual— albeit dying— flowers and a shitty stone pathway and a half-demolished fence and a red fucking door.
How they intend to keep an entire teenager— a superhero, nevertheless— abducted and presumably tortured for any length of time is beyond him. Not with this many people around. Not with this many potential witnesses, this much traffic and friendly neighbors and life.
It’s the last place anyone would look for him, and Peter doesn’t know whether to give them kudos for their ingenuity or scoff at the absurdity of it all.
It’s the middle of the day when he’s forced to use his own legs to walk up the driveway and through the front door, which doesn’t feel right. This sort of thing is defined by a set of principles: i.e. hidden under the cover of night, undisclosed isolated location. Out in broad daylight in the middle of this neighborhood… it seems like it isn’t a secret, like it’s not wrong.
The one man that knocked him out originally is too touchy and close, finds every excuse to keep his hands on the kid. When they drag Peter out of the car, he wraps an arm around his waist tight enough to bruise and hisses a threat that makes him shut down and trip over his own feet in a rush to get inside and away.
It shouldn’t be, but the first thing he notices is the color scheme. The walls are an unattractive shade of green, hastily slathered on by the last owners to hide any imperfections from the realtor. He can see little pockmarks, divots where screws used to be imbedded, not even plastered over before a shoddy coating of paint.
A bathroom off the dining room, presumably another bedroom or two down a short hallway. The living room and kitchen are connected, some weird open floor plan that feels unnecessary. Another door leads to what Peter later finds out is the basement.
Subtract a point for the temperature— it’s freezing in here. -13/10.
There’s furniture; a furnished kitchenette with a fridge and small stove, a warped table and four three-legged stools, a worn-out couch tucked by a cheap television, and in the corner—
They throw him on a bare mattress, and he goes down like a sack of bricks. Or maybe just like a super-powered teenager with a tranquilizer high enough to fell two large elephants in his system.
But the mattress might actually be a step up from where he’d be sleeping tonight anyway: a tent on a bed of dirt and rocks and sticks. Small mercies.
In actuality it’s a funny story, if by ‘funny’ one means ‘ironic’ and ‘super inconvenient’.
Because technically he’s supposed to be on a long weekend trip to Pennsylvania, home of a remote wilderness retreat, with the Academic Decathlon team; a trip, he realizes too late, had no access to the internet and no way of contacting anyone outside of the camp.
Mr. Harrington had claimed it would be “a good team bonding exercise without the technological constraints of the twenty-first century”.
The gen-z in him had revolted at the very concept.
Too bad that Peter hadn’t even made it onboard the bus there, ambushed on his walk towards Midtown after the subway. Was walking his familiar route towards the high school and bam— he’s in an alley with a chloroform rag smothering his face like he’s some sort of teenager in a cliche movie. They got him in a white, nondescript van— even more cliché— and drugged him up to his eyeballs.
He’d kill to be in the middle of the woods with Ned right now, exploring the hell that is camping for the first time. To be watching MJ sketch her two best friends as they try to assemble a tent, both grumbling about building suits and robots and still not being able to put together what is essentially a glorified, flimsy pyramid. With poles. And flimsy tent fabric that’s just thick enough to keep out the rain, but too thin to ward off the biting cold of early morning.
Peter almost has to wonder if this was planned— airtight alibi and no suspicion if he doesn’t answer, he’d even shot Mr. Stark a quick “goodbye, see you Monday :)” text on the subway over.
He contemplates whether or not these kidnappers had access to his schedule, had tracked him for however long before to be that familiar with his routine, and decides on willful ignorance. He doesn’t want to know, because it’s just gonna freak him out and he doesn’t need that right now.
Panic is designated for the period after all hope is lost, and Peter still has hope.
They never do tell him the reason that they took him— which is rude, because usually the hostage has some semblance of idea why in these situations.
His arms are wrenched up to a metal headboard, thick handcuffs clamped onto his wrists uncomfortably tight.
The vibranium cuffs are a first for him.
Remind him that they know of his enhancements, or at least of the super strength. And had adequate time to prepare for it.
Who the hell are these guys?
A hand trails up his back, and he shudders. The more tactile of the two men moves from his side and over to deadbolt the door, the other heads over to the fridge.
When the man turns around, there’s a syringe tucked between his palm and thumb.
Peter shifts, twists his wrists in their confines. “What are— you guys know that drugging people without their consent is frowned upon in this day and age?”
The shorter man huffs out a breath, amused. “Kid’s got a sense of humor, Richardson.”
Peter watches as Touchy’s— Richardson’s— lips stretch wide, like parallel jagged edges to the sharp wound of his mouth. His eyes are dark, hungry for something that isn’t food. “‘s alright, I like the sarcastic ones.”
The back of his neck prickles dull warning bells into his skin. Thrum of anxiety, of anticipated danger.
Peter is intimately familiar with predators like this.
Richardson makes his way back over and wraps an arm around the teen’s head, tilts his head back to expose the pale column of his throat. “Come get him, Semlow.”
Peter shrinks back, struggles to escape, but the grip holds firm.
The needle sinks in, then—
Lights out.
This is the only sleep he gets for the first thirty-six hours.
If he’d known, he would’ve tried to appreciate it a hell of a lot more.
As the sun sets on that first evening, they leave him alone for eight whole minutes without the cuffs on, convinced he’s still asleep because they still fuck up the dosage sometimes and he’s gotten good at keeping his breathing deep and even.
A mistake, really.
The kidnappers retreat down a set of creaky steps, off to do something or other that Peter can’t be bothered to keep up with.
It’s a battle, to drag himself up and off the mattress with little noise. Peter’s not sure how successful he is through the blackout vision and head rush, but neither of his kidnappers come running.
He knows they stashed his stuff somewhere in the kitchen, so he stumbles his way over in that direction with legs like a newborn fawn’s. He wastes four minutes opening cabinets and drawers before he finds what he’s looking for.
Under the sink, amidst cleaning supplies and old chemicals, is his jacket. His backpack and camping supplies had been left in an unassuming alley a block over from his school, but tugging the zipper open on the left-inside pocket, nestled between broken remnants of his phone, is his watch.
It had been a gift from Tony for his birthday a few months ago; a way to keep the man close in case anything happened. Engraved with a spider on the underside, plated with gold and blue to represent a coagulation of their respective superhero accent colors. At the time, Peter had had less appreciation for the practical implications of such an object, choosing to focus more on the sentimental aspect considering that it was a birthday gift.
But this small, ordinary looking watch is fitted with a panic button. Hold for five consecutive seconds to send an emergency alert to FRIDAY and subsequently Tony, hold for eight to send a location and geographical coordinates.
His trembling fingers take a moment to wrap around the small device, take another to even wrangle a thumb onto the small button.
One.
A crash from the basement, indistinguishable mumbling.
With each second that passes, the watch face flashes red. It pulses in time with the footsteps heavy on the stairs as one of the men climb back up to the main floor of the house.
Three. Four.
Doorknob, aborted shout.
Five—
The seventh beat is interrupted by a fist to his temple, the automatic slack in his grip as his hair is fisted and yanked backwards.
A steel-toed boot to the side, accompanied by the snap of his ribs breaking under the onslaught. Another, and another, the grind of his kneecap against the floor and a sharp pain down his calf.
The assault lasts for an indeterminable length of time, and the pain drags on longer than that.
Somewhere in the middle of it all, he watches with dawning horror disguised as thinly-veiled apathy as the watch shatters under a stray heel. The metal cuts into his fingers as he grapples for the residue.
After the cuffs are put back on, there’s a new burning across his shoulders, a word carved into his back again and again and again.
The skin isn’t so much split as it is torn; jagged and uneven against the jut of his bones. One is substantially easier to stitch shut, and two guesses as to which one Peter’s got hacked into him like a fucked momento.
Hasty preparation of a syringe, and Peter shies away from the needle even though it doesn’t do him much good.
The drug settles in the muscle, smears numb and cold across his skin like a toddler messing with acrylic paint.
Emergency alert is enough, right? Surely there has to be a failsafe.
This will be worth it.
It has to be.
Two days later, he’s not so sure.
The hope is trickling down into the sand of discarded faith, and the doubt is snaking its way back into the corners of his peripherals.
Peter knows he did the best he could, and yet— nothing.
Not a blip.
No extravagant rescue, no confirmation that help is on the way.
No Tony.
Sure, he supposes the famous superhero has more important matters to attend to than rescuing his protégée from a couple of kidnappers. But still… rude. Peter kind of thought he’d be a higher priority.
And yeah, he’s almost an adult— he shouldn’t need rescuing, and he is definitely more than capable of taking a few (dozen) punches and some mediocre torture.
Peter’s just getting a bit tired, is all.
He can’t really tell if he’s awake anymore.
If anything, he blames the lack of windows in the basement.
No windows, which seems like a fire hazard and against regulations, not to mention not really conducive to his half-baked escape plan. It gets so dark at night.
They took him down here sometime after the watch incident and hadn’t bothered to bring him back upstairs, choosing to drag the mattress and frame down to him instead. Which seems like a lot more work, but whatever, it’s a small mercy to forgo the hurt that would inevitably come from forcing himself up the stairs.
Disorientation only aides his confusion, whatever they’re giving him has Peter out of it most of the time anyways. His stupid healing power prioritizes getting the drugs out of his system as fast as possible, leaving him with all the other injuries in addition to an absolutely delightful nausea that is almost constant from the withdrawal.
Regardless, Peter’s not really sure it counts as waking up if the lapse in consciousness was a brief dark interlude between fists to the temple. Not too sure if that constitutes falling asleep either.
He hisses as the punch rolls off his already-swollen cheekbone, blinks away the subsequent blackout vision and burst of hurt that only joins the rest into a haze of universal throbbing.
Shift in movement, dance of dark shadow and darker intent.
Oh— there’s the light, framing the silhouette of his attacker as he winds up for another hit.
Glimpse of a sneer, someone else pressed up against his back— too close— with a concrete grasp around his wrists. Waits for the blow to land, stomach this time, and lets the rust-tinged saliva fall past his lips with a groan.
Richardson’s back down here, finds a twisted appreciation for being the restraint to his partner’s violent impulses. A lewd whisper into his neck, “Shhh, pretty boy, quiet now— I’m starting to think you want this.”
Mocking rock of hips and hissed threat of alone time that Peter wishes he could feel more than mild panic about. It’s hard to feel anything around the buzzing in his skull, the needling itch in his veins. The nausea never quite dull enough to make a definite decision for or against expelling the nonexistent contents of his stomach.
Besides, it’s not like it’s anything particularly new; and it’s definitely nothing he can’t handle.
This is negligible compared to the deep bruising and bone fractures and burns and the drugs.
Fuck, the drugs.
Speaking of which—
The man in front of him— Semlow, he thinks— takes a couple steps back and starts grabbing shit out of the mini fridge. Starts the assembly process with his broad shoulders intentionally blocking the young hero’s view, like it matters when he already knows what’s happening.
And he— he needs it. God, he wants the relief, doesn’t care that it’s a goddamn needle that delivers it. Would even let them feed him the strawberries again— mushy and pungent with thick fingers in his mouth— if it meant the universe would let him slip away for the foreseeable future.
Unbidden, a whine slips past his teeth the minute the syringe is in his line of sight— a mistake. He tries to bite it back, but the damage is already dealt.
He flinches at the sloppy press of lips to the junction between his throat and shoulder, shudders at the rough scrape of teeth against sensitive skin. “Mmm, listen to that. So pretty, baby.”
Peter wants to crawl out of his skin. He’s already most of the way there— the world narrows down until it’s just him, eyes clenched and trembling, the palm that settles low on his abdomen, syringe prepped with liquid bliss, and the hot moisture on the nape of his neck.
When he jerks his head away, the hand abandons his waistband to settle on his windpipe, fingers hooked on his jaw until it’s back in place. “None of that, sweetheart,” he chides. “Come’on, beg me for it.”
There’s wetness, on his cheeks, on his neck. The tears sting as they flush out the little wounds on his face, but not as bad as the humiliation.“No— no, I—“
The grip on his forearms slackens, arms wrenched back up until the familiar metal rests back around his wrists like jewelry. A possessive press of fingertips back on his stomach, the unyielding splayed palm over his throat— here, Peter feels so small, useless. A mouse in the claws of a hawk. “Alright, go ahead and put it back. Pretty boy here clearly doesn’t need any.”
And then the syringe is leaving and he can’t see it anymore and—
No. No, no, no no no no no… they can’t, they can’t, please, “—please?,” he sobs, wrists scrabbling at their restraints. “Ple’se sir, i need it, ‘need it please—“
Semlow turns back, revulsion twisting his top lip into a grimace, but the other man practically moans into Peter’s skin, grinds his hips up into the boy’s thigh. “Unggh, good, such a good boy.” The stench of his arousal is suffocating, so is the hand that tightens on his neck until he sees spots. “‘Course you can, beggin’— mhm— so pretty for me.”
And then finally—
Peter does little other than twitch as the needle settles into the tendon in his neck among other, similar, injection sites.
Hand on his hip, his thigh. “So greedy— what do we say when we get what we want, baby?”
A haunting, familiar chill precedes the slow numbing of the sedative— first his jaw, down his collarbone, then his lips, cheek, and temple.
Peter sighs, finally starts to slip away. “Th’nk you,” he slurs against the oncoming fog. “Thank you.”
The world splinters into fractals of light, a kaleidoscope of color across his retinas.
And that— that definitely counts as falling asleep.
One day, Peter’s going to eat his own words.
‘Nothing he can’t handle’, his ass.
He’s seventeen years old and also ten, eighteen and nine— feels his mind oscillate between the past and present in a haze of familiar pain. Pretty boy pretty pretty— gag reflex. Rough denim. Brown and blond, red red lips, hungry blue eyes. Einstein— Predator and predator and prey too fucked out to struggle. Harsh breathing; too little air in too little time.
When it’s over, Semlow tugs Peter’s shirt back over his head too rough, tells Richardson he’s kinda fucked up, ya know? with little more than a wince at the state the kid is left in.
The man leaves, and the other flops on the couch, watches his hostage with half-lidded irises; Peter is a rodent in a trap, an insect pinned under a microscope, a slab of meat under the heavy gaze of a wild dog.
Richardson looks like he’s contemplating a second round.
Like he thinks Peter can take anything else.
Like he thinks he can take anything else, like Peter has much more to give other than saltwater and mottled skin.
Like he hasn’t taken everything, left him a collapsing star in an empty galaxy.
Almost like some fucked up math problem: if Peter has three days spent camping in the woods, and Richardson steals four of them, a nice chunk of real estate in his hippocampus for the foreseeable future, and an agonizing seven minutes fucking his throat, what is Peter left with?
Negative, a debt to go stagnant and nullify, an overflow of nothing and nothing and more nothing.
He’s still going to try. Glint of serrated knife, glint of hungry hungry hungry—
Peter’s shivering.
He doesn’t know how to stop.
When help does finally come, the only thing Peter can think is— too late.
There’s no such thing as on time for situations like this, he has learned. Trial and error and error and error.
The worst happens, and then the rescue attempt and the saving and the fixing things. Not before. Never before.
Trauma is not prevented, only endured. And then that trauma lingers, metastasizes into his brain tissue like cancer, like malignancy, like death in slow motion.
After Skip, he was still left with hands and left to panic over every shock of bleached hair and every reminder, even after the medical examination and court case and jail cell and sealed record. The man might’ve been gone, but the image of his fingers, of his sharp teeth, his glassy eyes, still loiter in his head like a parasite.
After Ben, the blood and the flashing lights and the last words. Gunshot, ringing ears, newsprint headline: victim of circumstance. A grieving wife, and a child seeking familiar comfort in sacrifice.
Titan, dissolving fingers and red dust and cells trying to multiply at a rate that isn’t fast enough to keep him from falling apart. So many stars, but none of them close enough to make him feel warm.
And now—
Repulser blast, dull impact of flesh meeting hardwood floor. Too muffled, recent dose of drugs; must be a hallucination. Not the first time, in here.
Too late.
Iron Man rips through the basement door like it’s aluminum foil, and the wheezing gives way to panic before—
“Kid?” Hands, rough on his neck, tilt his face up towards the light. “Shit— kid! Peter!”
Not a hallucination, unless hallucinations had the power to become corporeal. Maybe they do, but this is the best delusion his brain could have ever come up with.
Peter groans, presses his chin into the newfound warmth. He’s so cold. “W-wh’s goin ‘n?” The syllables feel funny in his mouth, smashed together like overripe fruit. He chokes out a chuckle at the thought, which serves as a reminder of all the aches in his midsection. Tries to curl an arm into his stomach, remembers the handcuffs.
When he pries open his eyes, there’s flashes of a dark goatee, wide eyes, red.
Red, red, red— all over, everywhere. Ben’s blood, thick and vicious over his hands, a curved needle’s methodical in-and-out contributing to a long row of sutures. His soiled bedsheets, a fake Iron Man mask and the real one, a foreign planet, dust settling into evaporating lungs.
A snap near his face. Another, middle finger hitting a calloused palm. “—arker? Peter! You alive?”
Cold metal over wrists, sharp and biting over open wounds. He can’t feel his hands. Or his arms, or his face, or his tongue.
He can feel the pulsing ache in his ribs, torn tissue in his upper back a dull protest. Burning throat as he tries to swallow goddamn nothing because his mouth is too dry for anything else. A stab of pain pain pain when he forces his eyes back open. “-‘ny? Wh—?”
A huff of relief, slump of shoulders in the dim light that he senses more than sees. “Yeah— yeah, kid. It’s Tony.”
Door off its hinges, practically spilt down the middle and half-in half-out of the door frame. The ugly walls— the bile green ones— have new marks on them, crumbling plaster and several large holes that are gonna be a bitch to patch up. He hopes Richardson and Semlow know they aren’t getting their down payment back.
The warm palms shake Peter’s head a couple times until the boy meets his gaze with lazy irises. A deep baritone rooted in urgency snaps, “I need you to think. Was there anyone else with that guy?”
The teen’s eyelids flutter as he hums, peel back open as his head is jostled once more. “Hey—! You gotta work with me here, bud. Where’s the other guy?”
He tries to think, he really does. Nods his head in what he hopes to mean ‘yes’. Thinks of the bruises and burns on his ribs, his swollen cheekbone. Peter shivers, a full body tremor that sets off more injuries than one. “Mm-hmm. N’t here now tho’h. He l’ft.”
“Good,” the billionaire praises, runs a thumb over the smattering of bruises on his cheeks. “Good, okay.”
Good, good—
The cold rushes back in as the hands release his jaw, and Peter whimpers at the loss. His head falls forward without the support.
“We gotta get you out of here. You know where the keys are?”
The keys? His mind is stilted, cloudy. Car keys? House keys? What good are those right now?
“K’ys?” He tries to ask, but it must be incomprehensible jargon because Tony dismisses it with eyes that flicker over the other parts of the room.
There’s a body, a large mass keeled over by the stained couch. Faint heartbeat, shallow breathing: he’ll be okay.
Peter doesn’t want him to be okay.
Even through a muddled fog, he recalls the pair of steel-toed boots, pitch ink and sprawling tattoos, hissed warnings and rough teeth— gasping and frantic pleading, please, please I need—, a different set of hands. He jerks his head away, back into the headboard, the corner of the wall.
Away from Tony.
The man doesn’t seem to notice, moves away from the teen in search of a solution. Something he can fix with his hands.
That’s okay, he thinks. He doesn’t feel tangible, doesn’t mind his— what? mentor? father?— abandoning him to find something better. Someone cleaner. Less damaged.
Dark, as his eyes slip shut again.
He drifts in the void for a while, then. Goes somewhere far enough from here, to gentle fingers scratching his scalp, to legos scattered over a thin carpet.
Tony must find the keys, because he blinks into awareness as his arms jostle, small click of mechanics releasing his torn wrists. They flop down in his lap with little grace, and his upper body tries to follow.
Handcuffs. Right. Can’t forget those.
Wonders why Tony couldn’t just laser them or something, remembers that he is, in fact, a mutant with super strength and he’d been trying to get them off for a while. Which means vibranium or some other high-impact metal, ergo— keys.
The warmth is back, catches his sternum to prop him back into an upright position. “Woah, can’t sleep yet buddy, gotta get you out first remember?”
“‘M t’red. Can’t.” Funny, how he can’t seem to stay awake now, after the hell of earlier.
Funny, how he’s never gonna sleep again once he gets out of here.
“No can do, kid. I don’t know the extent of your injuries, but everything FRI is picking up doesn’t look great. Got at least a pretty severe concussion by the looks of it. You gotta stay awake.”
“D’nt wan’a,” he whines— don’t whine, don’t—, “’s not.. n’t real.”
The world spins as the other’s grip settles, tugs Peter until he’s a boneless sack of organs but now also vertical. He stumbles, trying to get his legs to cooperate with the new position.
The two heroes take a few stumbling steps forward, Peter’s arm slung around Tony’s shoulder because if anything knocks him off balance right now, he’s not getting back up. He’s gonna topple like a house of cards; disappointing, but not surprising.
Goddamn Parker Luck.
Muffled impact of steel and flesh, and then he’s tumbling; falling and falling until he hits threadbare carpet. His head smacks the ground hard enough that his vision whites out, ears start to ring.
Similar thud, somewhere to the left. He’s not sure who, wants to force his brain into some working order to figure it out, but…
Then the pain hits, hot and real and excruciating.
After that, it’s hard to comprehend much of anything else.
Peter dreams.
Peter dreams of abstract forms; people that aren’t people, clouds of black smoke writhing and hissing under distorted human skin.
Others that just drift along the dark landscape, listless and apathetic and restless, searching for a feeling they cannot name, something they don’t even know is missing.
No matter how much he tries— scrubs his eyes with a barely-there fist, stumbles towards the light— there’s only static and blurred distortion where their faces should be.
There are no legos here, no childlike comfort or sci-fi films. Just hallways with no end set perpendicular to others, slightly altered walls and tile floors that switch from black and white to black faster than he can keep up with. A way-station, an amalgamation of frigid terror and colder fury and compliant indifference.
A sort of purgatory, in-between of the in-between, the epitome of middle ground. No shadows, because it is shadow. No light, because it is light.
A labyrinth of turpentine and bleach and no footsteps, just echoes of echoes of unintelligible whispering. Peter catches his reflection in the shine of a wall panel, and there is only muddled absence where his own face is supposed to be.
Maybe, he contemplates sluggishly, torn between raw panic and cold cold indifference and what is but shouldn’t be relief, maybe this is what he’s destined to become.
A numbness settles over him like a wet blanket. He can barely tear his eyes away.
Watches the void like a television screen, and in some surrealistic nightmare sequence, the whole world splits down the seams like torn stitches, like deep, weeping scars on the earth, like gates into hell. Swallowing all the good and all the bad, hollowed out and bleeding with the excess, slipping down the moist expanse of tongue and all the way down into the belly of the beast.
Through it all, Peter can both see and feel the forced breathing, waterlogged lungs and suffocation and pressure dragging him down and down and—
Damn, if that isn’t some foreshadowing for what comes next.
When Peter comes back to himself this time, he’s slung over someone’s shoulder in a fireman’s carry.
Several slow blinks, the back-and-forth motion of clunky footsteps is almost nausea-inducing. Reminds him of the withdrawal, that void inside him that begs to be filled with something other than ache.
Each step ignites the flare in his ribs and condemns him to an eternity of sharp-dull-sharp throbbing in his skull.
It takes longer than it should have to realize that it’s not Tony.
Sue him, he’s not thinking straight.
In between flashes of light, in the times where he doesn’t just see but can actually look, there’s no red-gold suit, no whir of nanotechnology. No off-kilter heartbeat, no expensive aftershave and motor grease. No attempt at comfort. Just too-wide shoulders, threadbare shirt and cheap pair of jeans that his mentor wouldn’t be caught dead in. Steady heart, strong pair of lungs.
But it’s the hands, that does it. Tony, at the heart of it, is an engineer— and his hands reflect that. He’s got rough calluses on his fingertips from wires and screwdrivers and mechanics, palms rugged but not hard, still soft where it matters.
The hand that comes to rest on the back of his neck has thick calloused palms, leather-tough fingers. The kind of skin forged from abrasive, repetitive labor, with sturdy bones to match.
Not to say the billionaire hasn’t had his own share of physical exertion, but— he’s rich. Never had to suffer through manual labor like construction work just to barely scrape by on rent and groceries.
So decidedly not Tony.
And he’d spent enough time with Richardson to know his hands intimately, their lithe, boney silhouette branded on his skin in mottled purples and yellows and reds. Entered like corrupted data into his memory along with a similar pair from what feels like lifetimes ago.
Which really only leaves—
Semlow.
Peter wants to struggle, but the bone-deep exhaustion carved in ruins on the core of his being, leaves him drowning in molasses and red clay and viscous mud.
They walk for a lifetime, it seems. At least an hour and a half, maybe more. Probably more, depending on how they even got here.
Tony can do a lot, but even he won’t be able to find Peter wherever they’re headed.
On and on, step after step after step punctuated with the crunch of stray leaves, boot tread heavy against the weeds and underbrush. It’s eerie, the lack of birds or other signs of life besides the hum of crickets, dozens of feet away.
A silver wire fence at the edge of the property reflects the white moonlight and orange-hued street lights, damp with leftover rain.
It seems to be some sort of junkyard, by the glimpses he catches. Hollowed out car frames, rusted tire rims, scrap metal, discarded engines. There’s a large pile of half-demolished vehicles, charcoal coated as if some teens decided to come through and set the whole thing on fire with gasoline.
This is the final destination, he figures, when the older man tosses him to the ground like spoiled fruit, peaches rotten right down to the pit. Face blank but eyes alight with twisted malice, he just stands there and watches as the superhero crumples, wheezing when his ribs hit a broken headlight.
Somewhere, he had forgotten just how dangerous Semlow was in the face of too-touchy, too-everything Richardson.
His stomach gives, swears his intestines are actually writhing in his abdomen like eels, foreign and panicked and trying to claw their way out of his body. He coughs up stomach acid and bile, retches half-formed prayers like the only recipients aren’t stray weeds and disfigured iron and passive ideation for something better.
The teen stays on the ground for a while, rolled away from the sick into a recovery position. There are rocks gouging out craters in his knees and biceps, focuses on that instead of the other parts of him howling for attention. Watches ants scurry away, lazily tracks a stag beetle as it meanders through the dirt. Maybe it has a family, a father and a sister an an aunt; maybe it’s just trying to go home. Maybe he’s reading too much into it, and it’s just as trapped out here as he is.
As it goes, this peace doesn’t last.
Peter has very little strength left in him, but damn if he doesn’t fight like hell when Semlow stoops down and grabs him by the throat against the cold metal.
“Knocked out Iron-Man pretty good,” He boasts, examines the position that he’s placed the teen in as though appraising an animal for slaughter. “Put ‘im in yer old cuffs. ‘M gonna leave you strung up here like a gift for him. Bastard ruined my life.”
Underfoot, the terrain leaves mud and grass residue on his sneakers as he scrabbles for purchase, which is a shame because Peter really liked these shoes.
He squirms at the scrutiny, hates that he can pinpoint the moment Semlow finds what he must be searching for.
The kidnapper reaches for his knee and grabs his thigh, yanks up to fuck with his balance, and attempts to knock him back to the ground. Peter flinches, hard, and falls on his ass anyway. Tries to scramble away, doesn’t get too far with the fence against his back.
Semlow huffs out a laugh, the only part of him that seems amused. “Don’t worry kid, I ain’t gonna do nothing like that. I got a kid ‘a my own— not sure why people are attracted to ’em.”
Peter’s mouth tastes like copper. He swallows, hard. It takes a second for his vocal chords to work, and when they do his voice is wrecked. “Then wh- why’d you… let him?”
The other man’s jaw clenches. Not quite apologetic, but not really apathetic either. “You rather ‘im to do it to someone else?”
Yes. God, yes.
Imagines some other kid, maybe even younger than him, younger than younger him, Richardson’s sloppy mouth on their neck, hands on—
”No,” Peter spits out, “‘course not.“
The older man searches the ground around them, spots something out of Peter’s line of vision. When his hands are back in sight, the teen watches with detached horror as he begins crafting a noose from a discarded seatbelt.
“Thought so. ‘Sides, you can take it.“ Thick fingers start forming the knot, more deft than one would expect. “You crack easy, but you ain’t broke. Not like some’a the others.”
He keeps talking— about some other child caught in the jaws of a ravenous beast, about his own daughter that Tony presumably “killed”— but Peter stops listening, lets it all filter to white noise and deafening wind like blood rush, like the reverberate hum of a black hole.
He can take it?
He can take it!?
And yeah, Peter’s used that justification one too many times; he has super-strength, better him under the collapsing building than an innocent civilian. He’s got super-healing, better him take the knife to the gut rather than the man trying to get home to his family.
He’d starved himself when the money got low, made sure May always had something on her plate at the end of the day even if he didn’t.
It’s so easy to forget, but he died— he died, and the terror that comes with that has been simmering under his skin since he had taken that first breath again on a foreign planet.
The world has deemed him strong, which must be synonymous with martyrdom, with the theft of everything he is able to survive out of his bones. He’s never quite met anyone just as greedy to get its hands around his throat, except maybe god and his hollow expanse of palms and desire for overexertion.
And even in this case— it’s fucking true.
Not his first time, not even his tenth or twentieth— unwilling participant yet wrung out for all he’s worth regardless; left to slough off skin in the shower in an attempt to feel clean that never really works, monotonous routine of hydrogen peroxide to get the blood out before another load of laundry. Sleeping at the scene of the crime and faking surprise at the implications of that.
He’s used to it, so why not him? When he can lay down and take it and break later, always later? Doesn’t even need anyone else under the scythe— just get him in the perfect position, breathe the right words, and he won’t even try to fight back.
Peter can fucking take it.
But the thought’s never curdled in his gut this way before, not like it does now. In this moment, it’s a gaping, festering wound of indignation and writhing self-hate.
Because, because… he shouldn’t have to.
It’s not fair; he hates it and he doesn’t want to, wants to let someone else take the weight off. Wants to tell, and he’s never wanted to do that before. Never wanted to confess to any of it before those words, before this graveyard of dust and cast away parts, and god, if that isn’t some kind of miracle.
Why does it always have to be him?
For the first time ever, he feels no guilt at the thought.
Some irony, that the realization comes now, when he’s going to suffocate in the middle of nowhere and he’ll have saved no one. Who is there to protect out here?
Is it martyrdom if there is no cause, no one to save?
A crucifixion for an audience of rusted objects cast aside the moment they no longer fulfill their purpose, a graveyard of absence so thick and stifling that he can taste it.
What’s the goddamn point? He went through all that pain for what, exactly?
He’s so fucking tired.
”—ou ain’t gonna be ‘ere much longer anyways.”
Fair.
Grip back around his neck, rough hands tugging the loop over his head and down his cheekbones and past his jawline.
Rough polyester and nylon meet the raw, tender flesh of his throat. Scrape against his windpipe as the knot tightens and tightens like a collar, like condemnation and public execution but all the spectators are ghosts with no faces.
Could even be classified as something akin to rug burn, if this were an everyday occurrence, if it didn’t feel like barbed wire gouging layers of his skin off.
The adrenaline rush hits, then. Adrenaline can make ordinary people lift cars off of their loved ones, run on broken bones, and swim through miles of briny water. For Peter, it can do more than that.
Except—
Flailing limbs and struggling mass is hardly a deterrent when aforementioned struggling mass has been running on no sustenance and too little sleep and thirty five milligrams of midazolam and another four of ketamine every couple hours.
And then: taught seatbelt dragging him off the damp soil, pulling him up and up and—
Empty is an paradox, MJ told him once; the absence of something implies the presence of nothing. Nothing is ever truly empty.
She’d talked about the Mayan zero— the first civilization to put a meaning to deficiency, to recognition of what is now gone.
Lack of food, documented against grain and rations of flesh of the past. Lack of life, haunted by old friends, leaders, and enemies alike. Lack of shelter, of safe land to settle on. All of it carved into the stone face of mountains, captured with sweat and blood for the next thousands of years.
How we can still see it, now, after all this time.
How we experience desire enough to make it known, how we love enough to gouge it into the earth. A call into the void, an exhibition for every:
hey, i’m still stuck here without you and i can feel your hurt in my own ribcage;
to know you is to love you and grape soda reminds me of your favorite pair of sandals;
you are haunting me and i still see you in my peripherals and it doesn’t scare me anymore;
i could not forget you if i tried and you are everything, everything;
i miss you and i miss you and i miss you and i hope that wherever you are, i get to see you again someday.
Physical and metaphorical manifestation of loss, of care enough to grieve.
And it’s fitting, that we can mourn what is lost because we remember what it once was to have it, how that ghost of memory can fill moments in time and colosseums alike.
Nothing is truly empty, because all that nothing still exists to take up that vacant space.
Zero: the first loss. The presence of absence.
All of this to say— Peter enjoys breathing. Nothing better than a twin pair of healthy lungs, completing their primary function without fault.
But god, there sure seems to be an infinite amount of nothing in them right now.
Heaving breaths, only to exhale gravity, dribbling more absence into the cavern. A whole expanding universe, condensed into 3.6 liters of shuddering organs locked behind a cage of bone and sinew.
One. Bu-dum. Two. Ba-dum. Three. Bu-dum.
Black spots in his vision, dripping dark wax drop by drop until it’s ink, thick red blood on parchment. Like flies and insects crawling around on his corneas, infected and teeming with the rot devouring him from the inside out.
The seatbelt is just loose enough to keep him teetering on the precipice of consciousness, enough give to seize a mouthful of air if he digs his heels into the fence, to haul himself up a precious few inches.
The thought proceeds an intense longing— unbidden and smothering, Peter wants Tony.
It’s more of a slow climax rather than a floodgate, but just as desperate, just as helpless. But for a moment, more than the pain, more than the ache of collapse and intolerable need to escape:
He just wants his dad.
Bu-dum. Three.
It’s pathetic, he knows, but— this is when he’s supposed to show up.
Too late but still here, still here, still here.
But he won’t. Not this time.
Peter’s going to fucking die out here and no one will ever find his body.
Bu-dum. Two. Bu-dum.
Distantly, his cheeks and chin sting, knows like seismic waves that there are angry red scratches where he stried to claw off first the noose, and then his own face. Knows he can already feel it disappearing, fading into radio static and dark shadow and damning him to drift listlessly down endless corridors.
No identity, his entire life whittled down and confined to an unidentified form decomposing in the weeds, buried in an unmarked grave.
Ba-
Peter Parker, the latest cold case printed across the morning newspaper. A file left to sit in a police precinct, shelved and gathering dust. A photo album in Tony’s lake house, pulled down less and less frequently until that too gathers dust on a shelf, face lost between laminate pouches and thick paper.
—dum. One.
Spider-Man, the hero that abandoned his people when they needed him most, trying to rebuild after the latest tragedy. Headlines about him, too; calling him a coward and a vigilante and a menace, claiming he killed others just because he stopped showing up, just because of his absence.
Absence, absence, not enough and never ever enough. Can’t save himself, or anyone else, so he’s saving everyone else from himself. Or saving himself from everyone else. His turn to take it because he can, it’s his fucking turn. Too late.
Zero.
All of it just boils down to zero. The Mayans had it right; all that nothing has to go someplace.
He’s fading too, and there’s not going to be anything left for them to find.
A lungful of human ash on a foreign planet, deterioration, death in slow motion. They almost feel the same— suffocating and falling apart.
Just an overabundance of nothing.
How fitting for a fallen hero.
If there’s one thing Peter Parker knows for certain, it’s casualty and calamity.
He knows it like he knows roadkill and internal bleeding and wreckage— how intimate he has become with collateral damage.
When the snap comes, Peter thinks that it’s his neck at first.
Say what you will, but the universe has impeccable timing.
The seatbelt tears off the fence, wrapped around an iron gauntlet, and Peter collapses down with it.
Hesitantly, the ghost of calluses over the forming bruises littering his throat— a macabre set of parallel lines.
“ Oh god —“
Tony.
Too late, but here. Always here.
“No, no— come on kid, you gotta wake up.” Index and middle fingers against his pulse point, the light brush of a thumb over his eyelids. Drops of water spill on to his chin and right cheek, warm against the cold atmosphere, and trail down into his hair. “Please—“
And what is Peter if not obedient to a fault?
He blinks into the waking world, and his lungs finally remember how to be lungs. He chokes on the first breath he takes, and it feels like absolution: holy, so holy.
And now— now, that he’s pulling air into battered lungs faster than they can take it; now that he’s been rescued and there are sirens coming towards him like a song of the damned— it’s fine.
He’s alive— and that (should be) is a good thing— and relatively unscathed. Give it a couple weeks, and everything will be gone.
Everything, everything.
It’s fine, so he’s fine, will probably barely remember any of this anyways.
He’s fine.
He can take it.