Chapter Text
It’s a full week after the events of Homecoming night before Peter has his first nightmare.
He has no idea what hit him, but suddenly he’s stumbling out of his bedroom window, crashing on the fire escape, gasping for breath. His eyes are open wide, his chest heaving, and he rolls onto his back, inhaling desperate gulps of air, eyes fixed on the wide-open sky above him. He’s loudly sucking in air for a few long minutes before he’s able to focus his eyes on the stars, and his heart rate finally starts to decrease, the sweat on his face quickly drying in the cool night air. The panic is still there, barely held at bay by the knowledge that he is currently safe, outside, not under the rubble in that warehouse.
He can’t stand the thought of being indoors, and the late spring night is not that cold, so he stays where he is, shivering lightly, until he falls into a restless sleep. The sunrise wakes him up, and he wearily makes his way inside. It takes twenty minutes under the hot spray of the shower before he stops feeling cold.
School and patrol effectively distract him for the rest of the day, and by the time he goes to bed that night, he’s only vaguely apprehensive.
By the end of the week, he’s almost forgotten he ever had a nightmare, and the all-consuming panic of feeling like he’s about to die hits him like a freight train when the nightmare repeats itself the following Friday.
He wakes up tangled in his sheets, wheezing, convinced there’s not enough space to breathe, fighting to getout - getout-getout.
By the time his brain realizes he’s not in the warehouse, his sheets are torn and he’s back on the fire escape, still breathing too hard and too fast.
He can’t take a full breath and the panic climbs, clawing at his heart, until in desperation he reaches blindly inside his backpack below his window and yanks his suit’s mask on.
“Hi Peter,” Karen greets him. “You appear to be experiencing a panic attack. Would you like me to walk you through how to make it stop?”
“Yes!” he gasps, “yes!”
“First, try and locate a paper bag.”
The instruction makes no sense, but he trusts his AI and crawls back inside, fishing out a take-out bag he forgot to throw out.
“Now, place the bag over your mouth and try to breathe as normally as you can.”
A small part of Peter wonders idly if his AI is capable of playing pranks, while the rest of him focuses on keeping the bag still and on his mouth, mask hastily pushed halfway up his face.
After an eternity, his breathing slows down and he can finally take a full breath. Exhaustion hits him hard and he sags against the wall.
“Thanks, Karen.”
“No problem Peter. Would you like me to call someone?”
“No, no, I’m fine. It’s over now, right?”
“Yes Peter, your panic attack has ended.”
He wordlessly takes the mask off all the way and rests his head back. It was worse this time, somehow, and he doesn’t think he can go back to sleep.
No, he corrects himself wryly, he’s afraid to go back to sleep. He stays on the floor indecisively for a few minutes, but eventually decides he may as well patrol instead.
That night, he discovers that the criminals of Queens are much more violent, abundant, and have even less of a sense of humor in the middle of the night than during his usual patrol times.
He stumbles home at dawn with a rapidly mending broken rib, and a crowbar-shaped bruise across his back.
After that, the nightmares come more frequently. It doesn’t help that he’s expecting them, which makes him anxious, which he privately admits likely triggers them more often than if he wasn’t so afraid to go to sleep every night.
He spends most of his early mornings, in the aftermaths, patrolling. It’s not every night, but by the time April turns to May, he’s outside by three in the morning more often than not. He’s bone-weary in a deep, raw way he never thought possible. Most of the time, he can’t remember what he was doing five minutes ago, unless he’s in the suit.
Everything is clearer in the suit, and he can focus on what’s important – helping people. School just doesn’t quite compare, and he’s starting to not be able to fool his teachers anymore. He sometimes zones out so completely that he thinks he might be asleep with his eyes open. Then a loud noise (or worse, an ominously sudden silence) makes his eyes snap back into focus.
One of the upsides is that he gets to spend a lot of time with Karen, and he tinkers with the suit’s capabilities until he feels like he’s finally earned the congratulations she offered a few months ago when he had “completed” the Training Wheels Protocol.
He never does find out what Instant Kill mode does. He just doesn’t have it in him to even turn it on, and knows he’ll never use it anyways. Instead, he has Karen disable it entirely. He also blocks out the Baby Monitor Protocol from sending feed back to Mister Stark. That Protocol was, frankly, embarrassing for one, and unnecessary for the other. He finds the override that will allow Karen to transmit data in case of emergency (and the sub-protocols for what constitutes an emergency take him two hours to read through, Mister Stark has been so thorough), and, in the wisdom of learned experiences, leaves that one alone.
Happy texts him once to check he’s still alive and saving kittens, and Peter cheerfully texts back that all kittens in Queens are happily purring at home. Neither texts the other again. Peter has learned a few things about how to attract Mister Stark’s attention, and Happy is definitely not the way to go. He’s not sure what is the way to go exactly, but he also isn’t as desperate to prove himself as he was. Mister Stark acknowledged him, offered him a position as an Avenger (a sneaky test!), and Peter has made the conscious decision to stick to what he’s doing now.
There’s still a large part of him that mourns the lost opportunity to spend so much more time with his hero if he’d accepted his offer, and that really wishes Mister Stark would text, or call, or drop by or something. But he knows better than to reach out himself now – not that he could if he wanted to. Though he supposed he could rig something through Karen since the data must transmit to somewhere that gets to Mister Stark.
But there’s plenty to keep him busy in Queens, especially now that he patrols so much at night, so he manages not to think about Mister Stark too much. His healing ability has been taking a serious beatdown (forgive the pun) with the lack of sleep, but he finds out that if he can nap for an hour or two during the day to make up for some of the sleep debt, it helps a lot, though by now he’s almost always nursing a healing injury in school. They just don’t heal fast enough anymore.
His fifteenth birthday rolls around, and his expectations are low. He isn’t too concerned about it, or disappointed. He’s hardly seen May in weeks as she has had to take as many shifts as she can, and the money is, as always, tight. What he is really hoping for is to be able to spend a few hours with her, if she can get off work, but mostly he just wishes she could get some rest.
It worries him to see how tired she is. When Ben passed, May had decided to cut down on her hours a lot to help Peter grieve and transition to life with just the two of them. A part of him feels immeasurably guilty that she was taking time off work to help with his grief, yet it was her husband who had died. Her husband whose death Peter had been unable to prevent.
And since those few weeks after Ben’s death, May has been trying to play catch up to bring her income back up. Peter has seen the overdue bills, and the fridge is always bare, and the guilt gnaws at him when he thinks how much he must cost her. He knows he has needed to eat so much more since the spider bite, and he is painfully aware they simply can’t afford it anymore, not without Ben. So Peter pretends he’s still the scrawny teenager he was a year and a half ago, and pushes his food around his plate at night so she doesn’t feel bad about the empty pantry.
What he unfortunately realizes as his patrol time increases threefold, is that the longer he spends webbing around Queens stopping petty theft and muggings, the more food he needs to sustain his energy. He can’t get enough food, so he rations himself, and stops saving kittens from trees. He tries to be strategic about which crimes he’s going to stop, who is actually at risk of getting hurt if he doesn’t step in, and ignores the way his vision sometimes goes black around the edges when he stands up too fast.
The day of his birthday, he decides to treat himself with a lazy morning spent playing video games, then tries to take a nap for a bit to recover from another early morning patrolling. He wakes up gasping just before the nightmare truly takes hold, and takes it as his cue to become Spider-Man. He knows he only has a couple of hours as May told him she was planning on being home tonight so they could celebrate together.
She doesn’t get him a gift, but he wasn’t expecting one. She does get him take-out from his favorite Thai place, and he spends the evening grateful, once again, for his aunt who understands him so well.
When he gets back to his bedroom after they’ve exchanged their goodnight, a sleek package is awaiting him on his bed. He approaches it cautiously, and starts grinning when he recognizes the handwriting on the card that’s stuck on the top.
Every almost-adult should have one of these. T.S.
He opens the small box and retrieves what has to be the coolest looking smart watch he has ever seen in his life. It’s sleek, black, obviously a touch screen, though it does have a couple of buttons. It does not come with an instruction manual, which makes Peter wonder if it’s even on the market yet. He giddily spends an hour playing with it and fiddling with its features before going to bed, a small smile on his face.
Peter is under the rubble. It’s too heavy, it’s crushing his lungs, his back, his legs, and he knows he’s going to die. There is no one around, not even Karen, and he knows he’s going to die alone, slowly suffocating.
He jerks awake abruptly, sitting bolt upright and his hands go to his chest, eyes wild as he tries to control the panic attack he can feel coming on.
His phone buzzes on his nightstand but he doesn’t notice, too busy freaking out that he needs to calm down right now , which is a particularly effective way to panic more.
Suddenly, the phone’s screen lights up with code, and the call impossibly goes through. A voice coming through speaker phone startles him badly.
“Hey, kid.”
“Mister... Mister Stark?” he asks incredulously, panting.
“Yeah, it’s me. What’s up?”
“...What?” Still feeling badly disoriented and terrified, Peter’s unable to piece enough context together to focus completely on the voice and follow the conversation. He knows his reaction isn’t right, that Mister Stark calling in the middle of the night normally means something, but he just can’t pull himself together enough right now.
“How are you? What’s up? What’s going on?” Mister Stark shoots rapid fire questions at him.
“Are you... Why are you calling?” Finally, he asks the question a distant part of his brain knows he should know the answer to.
“Just checking up on you, kid.“
Speaking to Mister Stark is grounding him a bit, enough that he is starting to put together enough pieces to know that this is not normal.
“At... 2:13 in the morning?” He prods, his breathing almost back to normal.
Silence. A suspicion starts forming in his mind. If there’s no emergency, no mission, then...
“Mister Stark. Why are you calling now?”
A heavy pause. Then, “Your watch.”
“My watch?” He repeats stupidly.
“Your watch. It tracks your vitals. When they go past certain ranges, I get a notification. Since you’re not in the suit, and the GPS is placing you at home, there’s no reason your heartbeat should be off the charts right now. So, again, what’s going on kid?”
The revelation that the watch was not just a gift, but also a GPS and some sort of health tracker leaves him feeling confused and... maybe hurt? He’s not sure, he’s scrambling to sort through his emotions. He had been longing to hear from Mister Stark for weeks now, but this is not what he had in mind. Or what he expected.
“Mister Stark... That’s a little creepy. Why are you tracking me?”
“Well, last time I left you to your own devices, it didn’t end that well.” And that stings, because it’s true, but he made it in the end, didn’t he?
But did he really? Some part of him is still stuck in that warehouse. If he’d had the suit, Mister Stark would have known and come for him. But Mister Stark is the one who took it away in the first place. But that was because Peter screwed up, and wasn't worthy of the suit, so maybe he deserved to be left alone, buried alive.
The whole situation is confusing, and upsetting, and he just can’t sort through all his feelings right then.
“It worked out fine in the end,” he settles on.
“Yeah, but I never make the same mistakes twice. So I’m keeping an eye on you both in and out of the suit now. It’s a loose eye. Super loose. Reserved for emergencies.”
He’s not sure how to respond to that. Mister Stark takes advantage of the silence to speak again.
“So what’s going on? Why does your watch think you were racing Captain America just now?”
His gut churns at the reminder of his nightmare. The feeling of helplessness, of being completely on his own with no one to turn to, the knowledge that if he couldn’t get himself out, no one would help, the sensation of the building slowly crushing his back, compressing his lungs, the oxygen rarefying, all come rushing back and he finds his breath coming out in short pants again.
“I.. I don’t want to- to talk about it,” he stutters.
“Come on kid, give me something.” And if he wasn’t so focused on breathe-breathe-breathe, he may have noticed that Mister Stark’s voice has lost some of its usual edge.
“Mis- Mister Stark. I.. Please. I can’t.” And he really can’t. He can hardly breathe right now, and he’s trying so hard to hide the desperate gasps so Mister Stark doesn’t hear them.
The phone stays silent for a moment.
“Hm. There’s a project I’m working on I want your help with.”
It takes him a second to switch gears and follow the abrupt change in topic. Mister Stark doesn’t give him a chance to do more than register the words before he continues.
“You’re coming to the compound for the weekend. I’ll clear it with Aunt Hottie in the morning. Happy will pick you up at school at 3.”
“But... But I have decathlon practice after school!” is, absurdly enough, the first thing that comes to his mind.
“He’ll pick you up after nerd club then,” Mister Stark ruthlessly carries on.
Peter vainly exclaims “Hang on a minute!” not noticing his chest isn’t heaving anymore, and he hears the call hanging up. He incredulously looks at his phone.
“What the heck just happened?”
A closer look at his phone reveals that the call came from an encrypted number, which he can’t save in his contacts. He isn’t quite sure why he would want to save it, still feeling unsettled by the whole conversation on the heels of his nightmare – to be able to contact Mister Stark himself? Or to be able to ignore a call in the future? Not that not picking up seems to be effective in stopping Mister Stark from pushing the call through regardless.
Sighing, he sets his phone back down and wearily puts his head in his hands. He knows he won’t be able to go back to sleep without slipping into another nightmare, but he is relieved that he somehow avoided a full-blown panic attack.
He tiredly gets up and puts on his suit, jumping out the window a few minutes later, not making it back to his room before the sun rises a few hours later.