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still standing

for webshootrs

by @iron--spider

a follow-up to more peril in thine eye

~

Peter wakes up somewhere dark.

Halfway in halfway out of wherever deep place he was inside his mind—still sludgy—

And he thinks he hears laughter—

He feels his synthetic eye trying to adjust to the darkness, and he blinks and he blinks and there’s something swirling in his head, something something, not just the normal Peter something, and it reminds him—it reminds him of—

And the way it reminds him simmers in his head and he’s somewhere dark and he was not somewhere dark before at least not as dark as this, he was fighting in an alleyway who was he fighting where he was he fighting—

And he isn’t moving, even though his panic is getting bigger, because whatever is swirling in his head is making him swirl too, down down down into more dark deeper dark—

And before it’s just dark just quiet he thinks banned name that’s a banned name don’t even let his name into your head not at all—

And he wakes up again, and he feels even worse, a dizziness that’s big in a bubble all around him, and it’s like he’s moving slow but he’s probably not moving slow, and when he presses his hands to the ground he feels the cold brick against the palm of his hand and he feels that texture all over his body pressing and he hears dripping somewhere, dripping in one spot from a pipe and he tries to—no reminders—he tries to—he squeezes both eyes shut and the synthetic eye is still having a hard time adjusting to the pure darkness of wherever the hell this is, and—

Dripping, dripping, dripping—

He feels hands cupping his face, and his first instinct is to flinch away, because he doesn’t know where the hell he is what the hell is going on but he knows it’s bad—but he knows it’s Tony with him because he can feel the iron hand and he knows it’s real he knows it is he—

“Hey, hey—”

And he holds onto him a certain way, always has since everything happened, since he realized Peter would always be wary, even with all of it in his rearview mirror—

But this feels like a car crash now—

“Kid,” Tony says, and he’s holding his face gently.

Peter can’t find words. He feels like there’s cotton in his mouth, like he’s floating, like—

“You’re drugged,” Tony’s voice says, and the words are floating in the air, and Peter feels like he’s sagging into Tony’s hands.

He feels his own heart speeding up, the panic roaring again—

“I’ve got you, okay?” Tony says, and he sounds farther away, because Peter is spiraling again, he’s drowning again, he’s drowning and falling away and he needs to get up he needs to get out he needs to get them out he needs to—

Can’t be happening again can’t be can’t be—

And he floats for what feels like a long time. Deep inside his own head, and he knows what’s happening and he doesn’t, and every time he remembers he knows it’s like he’s been struck by lightning, and he hears the laughter again—

And his is a banned name, and Peter’s recovery has been a squiggly line a line with starts and stops and up’s and sharp downs but his is a banned name, and he’s been out of Peter’s head for a while now for a good long peaceful while, there was that bump in the road with the dreams that didn’t feel like dreams that he worried were more, but that’s been a while ago now, a while, no more dreams like that no more moments like that, but Peter hears rumbles of laughter now—

And he’s in and out, and every time he’s in he knows, he knows, he hears the dripping and feels the smallness and feels Tony holding him close, and as he spirals to out again he hears the panicked horror of Tony’s heart—

And he’s out again and swirling in deep darkness and he knows they’ve been taken—

Taken taken taken and he’s still fucking here they’re still fucking here because they drugged him with something that knocked him on his ass—

And he rises out of it a little clearer than he’s been—

“Don’t sit up too fast,” Tony says, and he’s holding him by the shoulders.

Peter’s synthetic eye adjusts quicker this time.

The place they’re in is small—wet looking brick all the way up, walls short enough that he thinks they wouldn’t be able to stand up straight if they tried. Tony has him smushed up in the corner and there’s only about two feet before the door, which looks like reinforced steel.

Not a big warehouse. Not big and loud and billowy, full of knives and cages and things to hurt—

But this probably isn’t the whole thing. There’s probably more.

Peter closes his eyes, swallowing hard, and his mind starts making mazes.

He hasn’t had to deal with this since everything happened. He hasn’t been taken again, they’ve avoided it, somehow, with extra paranoia and caution, but here he is, here they both are, and Peter doesn’t even know how the hell this happened. He was—he doesn’t even remember, the drugs are still laying into him like a thousand cuts, over and over, and he’s trying—he’s trying—he’s trying to keep his head on straight—

Tony can tell he’s starting to separate, starting to—think too much, and his whole body tenses up when he thinks too much—and they’ve been over that, how to conquer it, how to stay on top of it. Focus, focus—

“Focus,” Tony says. “I’ve got you, I’m here with you—”

“That’s bad,” Peter breathes, thinking of him in danger, too. Tony isn’t enhanced, he’s easily breakable, he already lost a goddamn arm—

“It’s good, we can work together,” Tony says. He’s holding Peter’s elbow and his far shoulder, and he tugs him against him. “Take a breath. Just take a breath.”

Peter’s head is spinning, he feels like he’s—spiraling down too far too fast—no no, he can’t—

He focuses on the dripping, even though it’s the closest thing to the warehouse, the biggest reminder, the closest similarity. But he focuses on the sound, and closes his eyes, focusing, focusing. Matt’s voice and Tony’s voice, mixing together.

Focus. Listen. Breathe.

He hears heartbeats, a couple rooms over. Hears the movement of something heavy, being pushed. He hears the air curving into the corners of the room they’re in—the cell they’re in—can hear fans vibrating somewhere. Muffled voices, but he can’t make out the words—

Tony’s hand is on his chest, and Peter focuses on that too.

Wasn’t he—wasn’t he just chasing those guys who were trying to break into that lab in Hell’s Kitchen? Wasn’t that all he was doing? And now he’s—now he’s here, and Tony’s here too, they got Tony too, which makes it a two-pronged attack, in different locations—

Why the fuck, what the fuck—

“Your hands are free,” Tony says. “Okay? Your hands and feet are free. There’s nothing on you.”

Peter nods, swallowing hard. “You?”

“Nothing on me either,” Tony says.

Peter nods again. He can feel himself teetering on the edge of the cliff in his head, and he thinks about just letting himself fall. The panic has him in its teeth, and there’s still that rumble of laughter in his head, deep underneath everything else, the way it sounded when he was approaching Peter slowly, with that look in his eye—

Focus. Focus. He’s gotta focus.

He reaches up, gripping his forehead, because his head is still pounding. “God, whatever it is they got me with it’s—it’s really—doing a number on me—”

“Just try to breathe,” Tony says, squeezing Peter’s shoulder. “I was at the Harlem campus getting supplies for the re-up tomorrow. The one time I wanna go pick out my own shopping—”

Peter laughs a little bit, surprised at himself, and the movement makes his head throb.

It’s better, because Tony’s here. It’s worse, because Tony’s here. It’s worse because Peter doesn’t know what the hell is going on, doesn’t know why they’re here, doesn’t know what these people want, doesn’t know who these people are—and does it ever matter who they are, what they want? Some people try to grab Spider-Man just to say that they did—

Can you get yourself out of this? Can you? Is this a step back or a step forward? You can never tell, can you?

Peter is always testing himself. Testing his limits, testing how far he’s come. What still affects him, what doesn’t, what he considers a good day, what he considers bad—and today was good. No bad dreams, his head wasn’t foggy, things at school were good, he’s actually getting used to college, he feels prepared to transfer to MIT next year with Tony’s help, and things were—things were—

Peter cracks his jaw, and in his rundown of everything that’s happening, it hits him—he doesn’t have his mask.

“Shit,” he breathes, touching his own nose. “No mask, they—they know my face.” He hardly recognizes his own voice.

“But that doesn’t mean they know who you are,” Tony says, fast. “They aren’t necessarily tech whizzes, kid, we don’t know what they’ve got, we can’t jump to worst case scenario yet. And I’m not using your name.”

Peter nods, trying to regulate his breathing. He needs to stop equating this in his head with that—with his experience, his month-long living hell that felt like years and left too many marks on him. Too many he’s had to acknowledge, had to handle, had to live with. He used to get snatched over and over before that, before Beck—

And banned name, banned, but he’s thought it, it’s out, and there’s B-E-C-K in his head in red fireworks—

He squeezes his eyes shut, tries to get rid of it. It’s just a name, a name of a dead guy, and even though that carries its own shit since Peter is the one that made him dead, he hears over and over again in his head he’s gone and he deserves to be gone. He has no power over you anymore. He’s gone. He’s gone.

And Peter doesn’t want to compare this to what pre-Beck Peter would have done in the same situation, but he’s already making the comparisons, the pro and con lists, and all of his thinking is wobbly and uneven and he still feels inches from throwing up.

“Okay,” he breathes, and he pushes himself to his feet, rocking the earth to its core when he moves too fast. He braces his hand on the wall, and tries to start looking around. There’s not much to look at, it’s so damn small—brick on brick, no windows, one dingy light bulb, a grate in the ceiling too small for either one of them to get through—

“Okay,” Peter says again, and he turns and sees Tony standing up behind him, and Peter grabs onto his arm and helps him up without even thinking about it. Then he focuses, watches him wince. “Are you hurt?”

“No,” Tony says. “Yes—I don’t goddamn know, something’s always hurting somewhere—kid, okay, when you and I go missing, people are looking, we have eighty-seven protocols in place for the second we go off the grid whether it’s legit or not, we just have to hold tight here—”

Peter knows that. He knows about all the protocols, and they’ll be on the SPIDEY app too as missing founders, and he feels dizzy, thinking about being ‘missing’ again, thinking about Tony being ‘missing’, that not knowing, their families not knowing—

He knows MJ and May panic every time he’s even seconds late in getting home, in answering a text, in picking up a call, and when they can’t track him—

“Pe—hey. Hey.” Tony is gripping the back of Peter’s neck with his good hand, and—

And Peter realizes he was starting to spiral, starting to—fall into it—and he can’t do that, he can’t. He has to stay focused. He tries to remember his mantras, his dailies, how far he’s come, he tries to hone in on all of that and not think about anything that came before it—

But he just hears the dripping, he just hears—

And then there’s a hissing.

They both look up at the grate at the same time, and they see the gas coming in.

“Goddamnit,” Tony says, and he’s already crowding up against Peter, like he can protect him from it, and Peter can hear his heart like it’s on a loudspeaker, and his own, too, booming in his ears—

And he’s breathing fast, and he shouldn’t be breathing at all—

Dead, dead—

And his panic is too big to be something real, this unwieldy force all around them, like a vacuum into a dimension where he can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t move—

You’re Spider-Man, you’re Spider-Man—and he thought that so many times when he was in the warehouse, too, when Beck had beaten him down into something unrecognizable—and in his most heightened moments, when he’s most affected by his time there, he can’t believe it was only a month, just a month to change his life in thick strips—

And now he’s here facing whatever this is and Tony is trying to cover Peter’s face even though it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter it won’t matter, and Peter tries to count tries to focus tries to surface, tries to remember he’s come so far and he can do this he can be quippy slippery Spider-Man—he can get out of anything, he can, and why does his own inner voice sound so doubtful—

It’s already hitting them both, darkness pinpricks and acid bites drawing him back—

“Tony—”

~

And Peter wakes up somewhere different.

“—where’d you hear that?”

“It’s the word on the street. And I paid good money so it better be true. We don’t need this guy bouncing off the walls like a trapped squirrel.”

“I don’t know. Might be fun. Keep your mask on, dipshit.”

They stop talking, and he hears shuffling, walking, and he realizes he can’t move.

That sends a shock through him, and he tries to wade through the fog, come up to the surface, blink back the memories trying to superimpose themselves on top of whatever the fuck this is—and he opens his eyes—

Tony is across from him, still knocked out, tied to a chair, his head hanging down awkwardly. Peter starts to breathe harder, because he’s up against a pole, and definitely wearing vibranium cuffs. There’s some sort of steel band around his middle, holding him flush against the pole, but that feels like it’s got some more give. This is a bigger room than the cell from before, but still small, all brick.

And someone with a green mask walks around and stands in front of him.

“Sleeping Beauty’s finally awake.”

Beck said things like that. He might have said that exact thing, and it makes Peter’s head spin to hear it.

This guy is using a voice changer, and he wasn’t before, when he and the other dickheads didn’t know Peter was listening. Peter tries to wrack his brain, tries to remember that voice, think if he’s heard it before. But his brain is a wildfire of too much and not enough, and he can’t nail anything down. Not right now.

He’s panicking. It’s big again, the shadow of it trying to fill up all the empty space in the room. He tries to look over his shoulder, tries to see if any of the other guys are still in here, but as soon as he moves the guy in front of him launches at him, holding him by the throat.

“You think you can just do anything, don’t you?” the guy says, squeezing, and Peter struggles to breathe. “You think you’ll always come out on top—you think that Spider-Man will never meet his goddamn match—”

Peter falls into one of the little caves he’s carved out for himself. And for a second, he doesn’t know which one—

He hears himself talking. “Listen—buddy, I did not—consent to your—little kinky games—”

The guy lets go before Peter can finish his sentence, and gasping for breath takes precedent. But then he’s taking a blow to the face that’s complete with brass knuckles, and he’s a piece of throbbing pulp for a second there, stars dancing in his eyes.

“You don’t know who you’re playing with,” the guy says. “You two, you took down the wrong operation last month. Flying around just the two of you, not a care in the goddamn world—it was too easy, wasn’t it? Well now look at you. Not so easy anymore. Wish that goddamn asshole could have killed you when he had you, but we’ve got you now. Both of you and your special little relationship.”

Peter retreats into another cave. Camouflage. He coughs a little bit, everything still stinging, still hard to breathe. “If you’re talking about that hot dog stand, there was salmonella—”

He gets hit again, the opposite cheek this time, and he can feel his tooth knocked out of its socket. He spits it out, along with a line of blood, and he just sort of sags there against his bonds. The cuffs are vibranium. He can tell, because they’re not breaking. They’re not breaking.

Not since—not since then—didn’t want to ever, ever, but now, and when he moves and he can’t move and—

Calm, calm—

“You fucked with the wrong operation,” the guy says again, as Peter squeezes his eyes shut, “and you two will know from now on just who the Kingpin—”

“Hey, dickhead!” Tony’s voice yells, and Peter’s heart plummets. “Yeah, uh, what’s the problem? You put me in a chair because I’m an older guy, huh? Because that’s—that’s ageist, boys, you guys should be above all that—”

Peter’s panic reaches a new height now that Tony is awake, now that he’s talking and trying to get the bad guy away from Peter, and Peter is panicking so much that he devolves—

—he can only hear a high pitched ringing in his ears—not Tony’s voice, not whatever the dickhead says when he leans in close to Peter again, and he still can’t hear anything but that high pitched squeal when he takes two gut punches in quick succession—they’re enough to bend him over but he can’t bend, because of the band around him and the goddamn handcuffs, cutting into his skin now in red-ringed slices—and he tries to breathe and—he tries to breathe and blink and he glances up and his panic is so fucking big that he feels like he’s gonna pass out—

And he means to say don’t hurt him and he feels himself form the words but he can’t hear them, can only hear this ringing this loud shrill ringing—and he looks up enough to see the guy wailing away on Tony, and Peter feels himself screaming, feels himself yelling blood-curdling renditions of the word no over and over, can feel it ripped from his throat between gasping and gasping for air—

And then another guy rounds the corner, shoves a cloth in his mouth, and starts tasing him—

And the electricity surges, and he can’t even scream right, and he still can’t hear, just the ringing, but that, it’s getting louder and louder, and his vision cuts, in the moments he’s got his eyes open—and the left eye goes dark. Stops working.

Stops working. Dark. Not working.

Reminds reminds reminds him—

And Tony—he’s still—and another—and they’re hitting and hitting and—

The guy in front of Peter repositions the taser, gets Peter in his neck, and then there’s only darkness.

And his darkness is high pitched. Darkness, black, and that ringing. That ringing.

He wakes up again, still blind in his left eye, and that gives the memories life. They swoop with dark wings. He can see Beck approaching him. He can see the city the way it was, when he was escaping, half and half.

Tony gave him the choice, with the new eye, but now it’s not working, now it’s—now—

He can hear again.

“Hey. Hey. Kid, listen to my voice. Listen to me. Wake up, buddy. Wake up, show me you’re okay, please. I need you to be—hey hey hey, there you are. Can you hear me? Pe—kid, focus. Focus on my voice, come back, come back to me now, hey? Okay?”

Peter coughs, and he can hear that too, and he’s still got the goddamn cloth in his mouth. He tries to shake it loose, and he has to nearly hack it up to be able to spit it out. It falls, unceremoniously, at his feet, bloody and wet. He realizes he’s still leaning forward, pulling against the cuffs.

His whole body hurts. He’s aching, he’s pulp, he can feel himself bleeding, still twitching, and Tony—

He blinks up. Tries to get his feet under him better, and he nearly slips, but the band keeps him upright and held against the pole. His hands feel slippery in the cuffs when he’s not pulling against them, and it’s almost like—it’s almost like—

“Talk to me,” Tony says. “Hey, hey—”

Peter looks up at him. He’s bloody too, and his right eye is swollen shut from taking too many hard blows. There’s blood dripping from his nose and staining his shirt.

He’s hurt, he’s hurt—it’s bad—

Peter’s panic tries to roar up again. Tries to make itself big, tries to drown him out, and he’s gotta focus, he can—

“I’m okay,” Tony says, before Peter can even ask. “I’m okay, this isn’t even as bad as my worst day in the ring with Happy. Promise, promise I’m fine. Don’t think about me, are you—Jesus Christ, I’m gonna fucking kill them—”

Peter rattles his hands a little bit, and the cuffs slip back and forth. It feels too good to be true, it feels like something he might be imagining, but they feel like, they might be—

“Tony,” he breathes. “I think I can…I think…”

He’s afraid to say it out loud, because they’re probably listening. They could be anywhere, they could be right outside the door—

And he can hear laughing. That laughing.

It’s not real. It’s not.

“You can—”

“Eye’s not working,” Peter whispers, cutting him off. He closes both of his eyes to try and reboot it, but it’s still all dark.

“Shit,” Tony breathes. “Might have been the electricity, I’m not sure, goddamnit—just don’t—it’s okay, just breathe, just stay—just try and breathe—”

Peter feels like he’s shaking too much. He thinks about all the times he was snatched before Beck. He shouldn’t be thinking about it but he is anyway. Most of them were in and out, like a video game mission, and half the time he knocked everybody out as a goodbye present—

But he feels like he can’t move—even though the cuffs are loose.

And they are loose.

He rattles a little bit more, feeling it out, and Tony watches him. “I feel like I can maybe…”

And he thinks about when he escaped the warehouse. Thinks about how much it took to get out, and how Beck dragged him right back, and how it felt like he was gonna get away until the door locked behind him again, until there was a noose—

And his panic—what if, what if now—

This just started, it just started—

And what if—

What if they got out—but then they took Tony back and—

What if Peter couldn’t find him again—

Nothing can happen to Tony. It can’t. Peter can’t let it. He has to be strong enough not to let it. But he doesn’t know what move to make which way to go if he’s capable of going any which way and can he breathe, can he breathe—

“Look at me,” Tony says, gently.

And Peter does, trying to keep breathing. Trying to swallow his panic, trying to tamp it down, trying to make it small. Blink away the shadows.

“You can do anything,” Tony says, nodding at him. “You can. You’re capable of anything, and everything, and I know what you’re trying to tell me. I know what you’re saying. If you think you can, you can. And I’ll back you.”

Does he really know? Does he know Peter thinks he can get free? The memories of the escape keep playing on a reel, over and over, and he’s panicking again. He pulls a little bit on the cuffs and he knows they’re slipping, he can feel that they’re slipping, because he’s bloody, because they’re too big, and he pulls and it’s tight but he’s not gonna fucking deglove his hands like that Stephen King story, he feels like he’d know by now if that was gonna be the case—and he nearly pukes just thinking about it but he keeps pulling—

And they’re tight over his thumbs, and he tries to make his hands smaller, and Jesus, everything hurts, and he grits his teeth—

“You’re okay,” Tony breathes, and he coughs a little bit. “You are, you are. You’ve got this. You’re so goddamn strong, kid, you’ve got this.”

And the escape makes clouds behind his eyes again, and he thinks about stopping. Thinks about just wilting here, and not trying, and waiting to be rescued.

He’s afraid. He’s so afraid. He doesn’t wanna be and that makes it fucking worse. He thinks of that mask the guys were wearing, thinks of running and that guy and his dickhead friends running him down. Stringing him up, getting cuffs that fit better, cuffs he can’t get out of. Thinks of them hurting Tony in front of him to teach him a lesson.

But they have them now. They’re hurting them anyway.

Peter isn’t resigned, isn’t having that hero moment, but he blinks away Beck’s face and the noose and the memories and worst case scenarios and pulls anyway, and he cries out and grits his teeth—

“It hurts,” he groans, before he even means to, and he should feel lucky that the cuffs are loose enough to do this but he knows luck isn’t always luck and it doesn’t always end up in luck either, but he keeps gritting his teeth and pulling and—

One cuff slips off before the other, and both he and Tony gasp in surprise—Peter quickly pulls his hand around and works the other cuff off, dragging the harsh metal along his fingers—

“Jesus—you got it you got it—”

And it comes off a second later, and he’s in fucking disbelief—

And he doesn’t have time to be in disbelief, because they’re probably watching, and he needs to get Tony free, and he tries to—he falls into another one of the caves he’s carved out, and his vision narrows down—

He reaches up and breaks the band around his middle, and he nearly collapses down without it holding him up—and he feels every blow, every jolt of electricity they sent through him, and he staggers over to Tony without thinking of what might happen what could happen what is actually happening—

“Okay, okay,” Tony says, as Peter rushes around behind him and starts undoing the ropes, and the few cuffs they chained around the iron arm to reinforce it. These aren’t vibranium—they didn’t think they needed to use it with Tony.

Peter has tunnel vision, but his focus almost seems fake, manufactured, and before he knows it he’s gotten Tony free and Tony is hauling him up to his feet—he braces his arm around Peter’s middle, gently, and he ushers them over to the far wall, closer to the door.

Tony turns towards him, touching Peter’s cheek with his free hand. “Are you okay?” he whispers. He tugs him into a gentle hug before he gets an answer, a hug that shows he’s hurting and that he’s worried about how hurt Peter is.

Tony pulls back again, looking at him intently. He props him up, trying to hold his gaze. Words pile on top of each other in Peter’s head. Different caves blink their lights on and off like they’re waiting for him to come home, and every day since he got out of that warehouse is highlighted and scrutinized in his head.

“Not really,” he says, before he decides on it.

Tony nods at him, and his swollen eye looks so bad. “But can you—”

“I can keep going,” Peter breathes. “I can—break the door, but do we know if—I mean, they’re not in here yet—do we know what they’re even trying to do—”

“Haven’t seen hide nor hair of ‘em for the last hour so, nothing in here that shows they’re watching but we know that doesn’t mean they aren’t—from what I gather they’re connected to that arms warehouse we busted last month, I guess it was bigger than we guessed—”

Peter can’t even process that right now. He leans on Tony a little bit, but tries not to, because he knows they were beating the shit out of him, too. “This is the only way out,” he whispers.

“Yeah,” Tony says, nodding. “No windows, no vents.”

“And that’s the door they’ve been using,” Peter says, his panic simmering.

Tony nods again. “They clearly don’t know we’re out,” he says. “Or they would have busted back in here—or sent more gas in—”

“You think they just want to torture us?” Peter asks, swaying a little bit. “Probably they—if they know that we’re in their way, and they’re trying to be some sort of—new criminal network, they—I doubt they’d—let us back out, if they have us. Let us live.”

Tony blows out a frustrated breath, like he doesn’t want to acknowledge any of that, or the position they’re in. And Peter knows he’s stubborn and never likes to look at the odds, but this is different, things have been—different, since everything happened. And this is as close to a worst case scenario as they can get, and Tony knows it, and he also knows what goes on in Peter’s head from day to day, and he knows what’s going on in it now. It’s a trainwreck, a kaleidoscope hellscape of chutes and ladders and panic monsters and starts and stops with no map and no arrows and no help along the way—but Tony still knows what’s going on. He always does.

And he’s the outstanding factor, here. Peter can’t square with the fact that Tony is here too, Tony is in danger too, and that makes all of it that much worse. He doesn’t know what he would have done on his own. Might have given it up, taken it all, might have turned into a Spider hulk and smashed the building and everything in it into smithereens.

But Tony is here. Tony keeps bringing him back to earth. He’s panicking and he’s on the edge but he has to get Tony out of here.

“I’ll break the door,” Peter breathes, staring at the handle. “And then we’ll just—face whatever it is—out there, we’ll just—blow through it—”

“Can you fight?” Tony asks him, holding him a little tighter. “You took a lot of hits there, and the taser—”

“Yeah,” Peter says, even though he still feels the tremors, and his face is pulsing, and he knows he’s got broken ribs. It doesn’t matter, he has to fight, he just knows he has to—

And is that the difference between now and a month after escaping? Knowing that he can face whatever it is, because he has to?

“Eye still out?” Tony asks, and Peter nods. “Well, we’re both down one. It’s fine, we’re—we’re in sync. We’re a team, we’re a good team. Two eyes for two people. It’s fine.”

“Yeah,” Peter says, trying not to sound too—how he probably sounds.

He swallows hard, and they nod at each other, an unspoken sort of moment. And they move over there slowly, and Peter takes a hold of the door handle, trying his best to focus, to listen. His senses are going haywire, probably worse because he still can’t see through the synthetic eye, and his hearing is almost crystal clear. He doesn’t hear anything coming. Nothing close by.

He feels like he’s about to fucking vomit, but he breaks the door handle.

Tony braces his hand on the door as they open it, so it doesn’t make any noise as they slip out into the hallway.

There’s nobody there, nobody anywhere Peter can see, and he still can’t hear anybody either. He feels exposed, in a situation like this without the synthetic eye, and he tries to remember everything they all told him, before, when he was still recovering. He tries to remember things Matt said, when it was all new.

His panic blooms, anyway. Slowly, that same shadow, growing longer and longer behind him.

They press themselves against the wall, like that does anything, and Tony stays in front of Peter, with his arm thrown out across him, like he’s fully suited up and not in jeans and a Snoopy t-shirt. It’s all brick out here too, and Peter can’t even imagine where the hell they are. He vaguely hears car horns, somewhere. There’s shelving up ahead of them, and what looks like a chainsaw and some lawn tools laid out on it.

They approach it slowly, and Peter can hear their heartbeats, loud and off kilter, and he can hear the beginnings of the high pitched noise somewhere in the back of his head.

His whole left side is dark.

And he tries to listen, tries to listen for air changes, for more outside noises, and Tony turns and moves around the wall and into the room—

“No one,” Tony says, as Peter follows behind him. He feels like a moron for standing behind him, and he moves up alongside him, glancing behind them to make sure he didn’t miss a door. There’s a desk, an old looking computer, a few chairs like the one Tony was tied to—

“We need to go,” Peter breathes, because he’s starting to panic again, it’s starting to get the best of him again, and he tries to focus, tries to carve out a spot to focus.

There are two doors, one straight ahead and one to their left, and they have to pick one, and there’s no fucking way these guys cleared out and they’ll have an easy escape, no way—

They’re gonna swarm soon, they’re gonna swarm—

Worst case upon worst case sprout up like weeds in Peter’s head—

“Let’s go left,” Tony says, still with one arm outstretched in front of Peter, like they’re in an eternal car accident and he’s shielding him from more damage. “More likely to be another hallway—”

And Peter doesn’t know why he thinks that, but he follows him, anyway—

And that door is unlocked—

And it is a hallway, and there are a ton of fucking doors in here. It feels like a horror movie scene, that stillness before everything happens, and he and Tony don’t slip all the way out just yet, they’re just—peeking out, and Peter thinks he thinks the room at the end of the hall might be a way out, but he can’t see all the way out there to know, not yet. He can hear voices now—they sound like they’re on the right side of the hallway—maybe, maybe—

And he listens and tries to clock how many people are in the building and he tries to hear breathing and heartbeats and voice patterns but his head his head—

“Okay,” Tony says, and they start moving out into the hall, and Peter knows there’s no way they’re making it out of here just by tip-toeing out, there’s no way, it’s not that easy, it’s never that easy, it was never even that easy in the before times—and he hates that his life is divided like that, the before and after—

And they get past one set of doors before they hear one of them opening behind them—

“Run,” Tony says, and he grabs Peter’s arm.

“Hey they’re out here! They’re out here!”

And it feels like the place explodes—

—they start running and they get past another set of doors before all of them are opening, and then there are at least six guys on them, and one of them knocks Peter in the head from his left side, where he can’t goddamn see—

He crashes into the wall, and he throws an elbow back, colliding with someone’s throat, and he knows it’s not Tony because he sees him throwing someone to the ground and slipping away from another one’s right hook, and seeing that lights a little fire in Peter’s heart—

He can hear an open window somewhere, to his right, somewhere in the bigger room—

Car horns and a light breeze and freedom—

And Peter dodges a punch too, grabbing the two that are attacking him and slamming their heads together—and he reaches and grabs Tony’s arm and tries to tug him closer, because they can make a run for it, they can—

“Release the goddamn gas, Jason, we can breathe through it, they can’t—”

Panic in a shadow so big that Peter nearly buckles under the weight of it—

And he doesn’t know who says it, and the attacks start again in earnest, and his hand slips from Tony’s wrist—

And he gets hit in the face and he staggers backwards, further down the hall, away from where they came—

“Shit, shit—”

“God fucking dammit—”

“Hold still, asshole—”

“Here, here—”

“Fucker—”

Words and curses and a flurry of punches and blood, a tangle of limbs—

And Peter sweeps the legs out from the one in front of him and he’s about to charge at the one attacking Tony, when a chain is looped around his neck—

And Peter reaches up to grip it, immediately, to keep space between it and his skin so he can breathe—

“There we go there we go,” a voice says, directly behind him, hauling him into the bigger room in the front—

And the gas is coming out and Peter scrambles, and he knows they’re gonna get them again, they’re gonna get them again, they already have, and the guy tries to loop the chain again and choke him, and Peter throws an elbow and hits him in the gut—they both double over and Peter holds his breath—he reaches back and grabs the dickhead and throws him over his shoulder, and the chain yanks Peter along with him—

And the floors are wooden in this room and his feet nearly punch through—

wooden…wooden…

“Peter!” Tony yells, and he’s finally used his name, and Peter can’t tell if that’s concern for him or him needing help and he can only hold his breath for so long, and the gas is already here and filling up the room and trying to drag him under again—

He has to think he has to think he has to save Tony—

Tony, who always protects him, always, always—he’s here too and that’s why this is different, that’s why—Peter has to keep pushing, has to keep trying—

He grabs the mask off the guy lying beside him, wrenching it off his face, and he lets out the breath he was holding—

“Tony!” he yells, looking down the hallway, trying to see around the dark patches on his left—

He throws the mask, hoping, praying—

And he sees Tony catch it, he catches it, and he’s still fighting with two—two guys—

The gas, it’s—

Peter tries to push away from the guy on the ground, who’s gasping now too, trying to hold on to him, still trying to get the chain around his neck—

Peter pushes at him, throws a wayward punch, but it’s—he’s—

It’s dark—

He wakes up and he’s being dragged—there’s yelling—

He blinks, sluggish, slow-motion—

Someone drops his arms—

He crumbles—

He tries to sit up, throw a punch—tries to hit—tries to hit something—

People are falling, the guys in masks—

Looks like a black and white movie—

“Tony?”

Was that him who said that—

Warbling, darkness on—going in and out—he’s still here kidnapped taken but there’s—there’s more there—who else there’s—

Someone else grabs him, yanks him to his feet, and they’re trying to put handcuffs on him again—

“No, no,” Peter says, and he does get a punch off, a good one, and he feels the jaw crunch under his knuckles, and he punches again and again until he slams this guy’s head against the wall, and he crumbles, and they’re back in the back hallway he thinks and—is there yelling it all sounds—underwater—

His neck hurts, he’s—he tries to walk but his vision is—

Dark on the left dark on the left—

Stumbling over—bodies and debris and masks and guns and—

More people and they’re like ghosts and—

Gotta get to—the front, gotta—

Yelling, there’s yelling—

He trips, and falls again, crumples in a big heap—

He’s in that first room they found, and he starts crawling towards the hallway, and the place is rumbling with footsteps and people and big weapons he hears bigger weapons, and he tries to blink to focus but he feels drunk and—close to vomiting and is that just the panic is it—

Doesn’t matter have to get out have to get out none of it matters where’s Tony where’s Tony where’s—

Someone tries to grab his feet, pull him back, but they drop him just as quickly—

And then new darkness is coming just as swiftly—and does he hear gas coming—more—

Holds his breath again—

“There he is—Peter!”

Darkness, before he can—

He is laying. Moving but not moving. Jumbling.

“—okay, boot again. No, don’t force—you can do it while he’s using it. We’ve discussed this. Update number five, stay on top—you are usually on top—okay. Okay—that’s fine. Good, okay, that’s fine—no, he’s not sleeping, I want him to wake up. Friday, please relax, are you trying to give me—I know. I know that—have you been talking to Rhodey lately? Jesus Christ—”

Peter opens his eyes. He can see out of both of them.

Tony is hovering over him, and he smiles broadly. “There you are,” he says, cupping Peter’s cheek. “Is it working again? Can you see? How are you feeling?”

Tony’s eye is still swollen shut and he’s got cuts all over his face. It makes Peter dizzy.

“Are we safe?” Peter asks, and he feels like he’s slurring. “Are we—feels like we’re moving—”

“We are in a SPIDEY van—we’re safe, we’re out, we’re—heading back to the tower—let me know how you are, Pete—”

“Eye is working,” Peter says, but the movement of the van is uh…uh…He reaches up and covers his eyes. He feels like he’s on a rollercoaster. “These vans need to be upgraded. This is not a smooth ride.”

“I know, bud, it’s in the works across the board,” Tony says. He pushes his hand through Peter’s hair gently. “Just relax for a second here. We’re almost back. How are you feeling other than the bumpy ride?”

Peter is a swirl of something, rummaging in his head and his gut, careening back and forth like an out of control ping pong ball. “Feels like they might have—injected me with something else—more than the gas—”

“They did,” Tony says, “but we ran scans and it was just a stronger knock-out agent, but shit’s always weird with you—I didn’t see anything life threatening—”

“Not life threatening,” Peter says, swallowing hard. “Just a—day in the life—”

Tony scoffs, and he ruffles Peter’s hair again. “Okay, just—we’re almost back, do you think you need oxygen? Your levels are a little low—”

“It’s okay,” Peter says, slinging his forearm over his eyes. “Are you okay? Are you okay?”

“I’m okay,” Tony says, holding onto Peter’s arm. “I’m okay. As long as you’re okay.”

“Okay,” Peter breathes. “Don’t lie.”

“I’m not,” Tony says. “Promise you.”

Peter groans. He can feel the tires and the rough road, can hear the driver’s breathing, can hear radio communication somewhere up there too. He can hear Friday talking in Tony’s ear. Peter wants to know more—he lost sense of what the hell was going on when the assholes swarmed them in the hallway, but he doesn’t have it in him to ask yet.

“No med bay,” he finds himself saying, even though he doesn’t really know why. Sometimes he’s okay with being in there, but right now the memories are…pressing.

“That’s fine, easy,” Tony says, and he’s talking in that way where he’s trying to keep his voice steady. Peter feels like he can hear everything Tony isn’t saying. Everything he wants to say.

He’s never been in the back of one of these SPIDEY vans. He knows this is what rolls up when they find someone—nobody wants to pay ambulance bills, and SPIDEY vans are free. But it feels weird, in too many different ways. It’s not warm and comforting. It’s a little too close to a “kidnapper van”. He’s not uncomfortable, but it does sort of feel like he’s laying on a slab.

Tony sits back in one of the chairs that’s stuck onto the wall, but he leans forward and keeps holding onto Peter’s arm. “It’s okay,” he breathes. “Almost there. We’re okay.”

Peter doesn’t realize that he drifts. Sleep darkness is different than knocked-out darkness, or drugged darkness, and he’s been working on his dreams lately. They don’t try to eat him anymore, like they used to, but he wants them to be good. So he tries to imagine something before he goes to bed, some kind of scenario that can imprint itself into his mind and carry on when he drifts off. He didn’t do that here, in the back of this van, and he gets a garbled, short version of what they just went through. Chained to that pole. Them beating Tony up. The gas, the masks, the half-blind fight. And one of them steps up close to Peter while he can’t move, while he’s pulling against cuffs he thinks he might be able to slip off—

“You’re always gonna be here. You’re never gonna get out.”

And it’s not Beck, but it’s his voice. His voice, through new roots and disturbed earth. Through a distended, broken jaw. Through days of death and moldering—

“Hey. Hey, Pete, wake up.”

He sits up too fast, neatly bonks heads with Tony, but Tony gets out of the way quick enough and latches onto his shoulder.

“Hey, hey,” Tony says, and he tries to stay in Peter’s line of sight, and Peter focuses on him. The dream and everything clinging onto it dissolves.

“Hey,” Peter says, trying not to collapse back down again. “Are we—”

“We’re back—how you doing? You all in there?”

That’s always a loaded question, and it especially is right now, and he doesn’t know how to answer it. He’s in here, obviously, but so is…a lot of other stuff.

Or is it? Does he just expect to be going insane after what they just went through, so he’s leaning into it and going insane? Or is he actually going insane because of what they just went through? Is ‘going insane’ the right term for what’s going on in his head right now? Is anything going on? Is what’s going on what he expected to be going on in a situation like this? Did he ‘expect’ anything? He anticipates things, problems, Spider-Man missions gone wrong, and sometimes he thinks about the Beck situation being duplicated precisely, or half, or even just down to a few terrible details, and he thinks about it for hours on end sometimes and then not for a couple weeks and then two days in a row and—

“Hey,” Tony says, to get Peter’s attention again because yes, okay, he’s—there’s definitely something going on in his head.

“Yeah,” Peter says, and he braces his hand on Tony’s iron arm and starts to turn around. “Let’s, uh, let’s get inside—”

“Good idea, just what I was thinking—”

And Tony helps him get out of the van.

And it’s tunnel vision again, on their way in, not something Peter chooses but almost a mode he shifts into automatically. Like he’s in a bubble, like his hearing is muted—Tony brings him around to the back entrance, Happy is there to meet them. He’s saying something, he tugs Peter into a hug and he’s saying something about the dispatched teams and Tony says something back, and they’re both holding onto Peter for a second there in the elevator, and then they get out and Sam is there, and Pepper and Helen, and Peter feels like he’s dipping further into his own head, into one of those caves. Because they’re all talking to him and he can see their mouths moving and he can feel them hugging him and can see Helen asking him things and running scans but he can’t—he just can’t—

And does he actually feel this way or does he feel like he should feel this way, is it worse or better than he was expecting—

“Gimme a second,” he says, or he thinks he says—

“Here, here,” Tony says, and he’s guiding him down the hallway to his room, the room he stays in when he comes here, which is really more often than not—

And the three of them appear with a sort of light attached to them, an aura that doesn’t hurt, and his hearing keys in a little bit—

And then he’s in a bouquet of May and MJ and Ned, Tony’s hand still on his back—

“Hey baby, hey baby—”

“Peter when you think about it that was actually so badass like we saw the footage—”

“Lemme see you, lemme—”

And he pulls back so he can look at them, and MJ is cupping his face in her hands, and her eyes are searching, tracing over his face. “You’re good,” she says, not like a question, an entire reassurance. “You are.”

“Uh huh,” he says, trying to stay where he is now, because he can hear straight, and maybe it doesn’t all hurt so much.

“We’re good,” May says, rubbing Peter’s arm, and Peter sees her make a very obvious face at Tony, and Tony nods at her, and Ned is nodding at them both.

“Your eye,” Ned says, and Peter snaps over to look at him, but Ned isn’t talking to him, or even looking at him.

He’s looking at Tony.

—and it’s sort of bad because Peter realizes he’s gotten used to Tony’s eye being swollen shut, because it’s been like that for hours now. And Peter swallows hard, and shakes his head, and looks at Tony again now that other people are looking at him and seeing him and seeing them both, and he reaches up and covers his eyes again. His head starts spinning, spinning, and he can’t hold onto any of it except a strain of guilt, some strange relief, a streak of panic, and he can feel them all latching onto him again.

“Okay, let’s head into his room for a second here,” Tony says, and he’s squeezing Peter’s shoulder and getting him to walk. “C’mon, it’s alright—let’s get out of the hallway—”

“I’m sorry,” Peter says, before he means to say it, before he even knows what he’s apologizing for. Crying. Not being fast enough.

“Nothing to be sorry for—we’re gonna talk here,” Tony says.

And Peter feels MJ reach down and thread their fingers together, and he clings to her hand, and Jesus Christ he doesn’t know what the hell is going on in his head, and for a moment it feels like it did in the beginning, right after all the banned name bullshit, and he knows recovery is not a straight line but he shouldn’t be back at the beginning after a situation that they escaped from, that lasted a matter of hours, and it was like Ned noticing Tony’s swollen eye made everything bigger again—

And Peter wants a reset button. He’s always wanted one, when he feels things slipping into somewhere else, somewhere he might not be able to rescue them from, and he doesn’t want to need one and he doesn’t want to not need one—

He’s Spider-Man. He wants to be perfect.

But was he ever that? Even before?

They sweep into the room and start arranging things.

“Soft mulberry,” Tony says to Friday, turning on the TV.

They knocked out the far wall this past summer so Peter’s room could be bigger, and Tony keeps talking about doing even more renovations to make it even bigger so it’s got a kitchen and two bathrooms and it would essentially be an apartment inside the tower, but they haven’t done that yet. But MJ and Ned push the big loungers over, and Peter sits on the edge of the bed. May and Tony immediately sit on either side of him. Like sentinels.

“I’m fine,” Peter says, rubbing at his eyes. “I’m fine.” Synthetic eye is still working well. He can see. He can. Both eyes.

Better than Tony. Swollen eye. Swollen shut. Peter couldn’t stop that from happening. He just had to watch.

Everyone kind of sighs, and then Peter hears Leia trilling, her feet hitting the ground as she rushes him. She leaps up into his lap, and bumps her head into his chin, and he starts petting her, glancing up at Tony.

“Are you okay?” Peter asks, and he’s already tearing up again, just looking at him. “This happened to you too, you need to, you need—Helen needs to look at—”

“I’m fine,” Tony says, scoffing at him. “I’m fine, I told you that. You don’t need to worry about me, how are you doing, huh?”

May ruffles his hair, and MJ rubs his knee, briefly petting Leia, her hand on top of Peter’s. Ned clears his throat, and they just kind of sit there for a couple long moments, while Peter tries to…settle.

They all know that it’s significant, that this happened. That’s why they’re gathered around him right now, staying close, trying to act normal even though they aren’t acting normal.

Normal. No such thing as normal. Only moments of quiet, moments of stillness. Not pursuing anybody, not running from anything. Maybe homework. Maybe laughing. Maybe Ned dropping a LEGO T-Rex that took them three weeks to build. Maybe that.

“You guys, uh,” Peter croaks. “You guys already saw—you saw footage—”

“Happy picked the three of us up when the alerts went out on you guys,” MJ says, still rubbing Peter’s knee. “SPIDEY is incredible, Peter, it’s—I know we’ve seen what it can do for these kids but seeing it work for the two of you—I know we’re always worried but—”

“You guys never felt lost,” May says, fast. She knows what that word means to him. She knows that’s something he never wants to be.

“Happy and Rhodey were saying this was like…some new syndicate or something,” Ned says. “I was looking over their shoulders, I was getting all the guy in the chair info—they were letting me, I wasn’t—I wasn’t spying, I was concerned, a concerned party, obviously, but it’s like—they’re some new underground thing and you guys didn’t even know it when you first encountered them before—but that made them mad or something—really mad—they have some powerful like leader or benefactor or something—someone that gives them money—”

“Some rich guy,” MJ says.

“A guy that’s rich that’s in charge,” Ned says.

And Peter snorts before he means to, and he doesn’t even know if he means to, and then he’s laughing again and sort of tearing up and he shakes his head and covers his face. He feels Leia turning over in his lap, rolling a little bit, and he can feel Tony and May getting more nervous on either side of him.

“Okay, baby—”

“Peter, let’s just—”

And Peter finds a middle ground, somewhere in his head, like he’s swinging down Flushing Ave and he hits a branch or something and he rolls along the sidewalk but he finds his feet under him again, even though his head hurts and his legs are wobbly and he isn’t seeing straight—

“Lemme just—lemme just wash off real quick, and change, and Helen should—look at both of us—and then we can just—”

He’s getting up, holding Leia and putting her on the bed behind him, and all four of the rest of them are getting up too, and looking at him like they think he’s about to dissolve into about a million pieces—

“It’s okay,” he says, without thinking about it, and he keeps saying things without thinking, and does that mean he means them more or means them less, he doesn’t fucking know—

And he can hear them gearing up to ask him if he needs help, as if he’s two years old and doesn’t know how to shower on his own, and he remembers the stained glass pain of Tony and May being as gentle as they could that first night, washing his hair and making sure the water didn’t get in his eye socket—

And his head is swimming right now, but he’s not there, it’s not—it’s not like that—

He sees Ned hit Tony in the shoulder, and May and MJ share a loaded look, like they’re all reining each other in.

“I’ll get Helen to head this way,” Tony says, “I’ll have her check me out, and we’ll—”

“—we’ll find out what’s going on with the teams,” MJ says, and she holds her head high. “I’ll just—I’ll—I mean we’ll, we’ll reach out, and contact the strike team—we’ll see if they’ve—we’ll see if—”

“We’ll see if they’ve struck,” Ned says, nodding at him.

“They were the ones that were there, Ned,” May says, giving him a kind but pointed look. “That helped get them out.”

“I know but like—a restrike—another strike, a stroke on like—a double strike somewhere else—”

“Right, right—”

And Peter nods, and nods, and feels like he’s being pulled in about seven different directions, but he half-stumbles over to his bathroom—

“Okay, you—you do that, keep an eye on all—potential strikes, I’ll be alright, I’ll be—just give me—”

And before he knows it he’s standing under the water.

And he doesn’t usually worry about the synthetic eye with water anymore, and he still doesn’t now, even though it just went through a trauma. Along with him. His trauma.

And he stands there under the warm spray and wonders when that trauma is going to explode in his chest. He feels like this should have set him off, maybe for good, a cascading burning fireball consuming everything around it, but it hasn’t. It hasn’t. Nothing has yet, none of the triggers, none of the memories, none of the close calls, and not this, an actual kidnapping, and a bad one, at that—

And he opens his eyes, leans back against the wall, the steam rising up all around him.

He rubs his neck, feels the pain in his side, and knows now his aches and pains are new ones. There aren’t any more scars left over from what Beck did to him. Not any he can see, anyway. Not any he can feel all the time.

And even with new aches, new pains, new worries, a new aftermath, he’s still—he’s still standing here.

“I’m still standing here,” he whispers, and hearing it out loud makes it feel more real, almost. The tile underneath his feet. The wall behind his back, his own breathing. Heartbeats in the surrounding rooms waiting for him.

“I’m still standing here,” he whispers again, and he feels like some part of himself, in his worst moments, locked away in that warehouse, can hear that phrase. He can hear himself saying it.

And it’s real. Both times. He’s on the other side of it.

He dries off and gets dressed, and Tony is waiting on the other side of the door with Leia draped across his shoulder. He’s just standing there, holding his tablet, and MJ and Ned are setting up trays with food by the lounge chairs and trying to act like they’re not jumping at the fact that Peter is back in the room. He can hear May and Helen talking in the hallway.

“Hey,” Tony says, in that fake nonchalant voice that he still tries to put on even though Peter can always clock it. “I’m uh, I’m good, Helen said it, she said it, my eye’s just—superficial, Rocky shit, it’s actually very masculine, and I only have a slight concussion, which is also very manly—she’s, uh, anxious to get at you—”

Peter really looks at him, trying not to agonize over it and nearly failing. “But how do you—how do you feel, really—”

“Pete, I swear to you, I’m not lying when I say I’m alright. I can take a couple hits, you know? Always have been able to. And I know you don’t want me to,” he finishes, before Peter can say anything. “Same to you, huh? But we got through that together. If you hadn’t thrown me that mask—”

“You protected me the whole time—”

“Not enough—”

“Yes you did,” Peter says, fast. “Just by being there. Even if I didn’t…want you there. Bad and good at the same time.”

Tony nods at him, and Peter nods back, and all of that is just something—that’s always gonna be what it is. They’re always gonna be racing to try and keep each other safe.

“You,” Tony says. “Tell me about you. How are you feeling now? Do you feel steady?”

Leia trills at him, waving her head around from her perch on Tony’s shoulder. Peter sees MJ and Ned trying to carry on a conversation, but they keep stealing looks at him, and he feels his chest go warm.

“I’m still standing,” Peter says again, because he likes the way it sounds and the way it feels to say it. “Physically, and, uh—mentally.”

Tony stares at him for a second. “Uh—yeah—yeah, yeah, you are. You are, absolutely, you are.” He nods at him again, enough that he shakes Leia, like he sees this as a moment to jump on. To underline.

Peter feels himself smiling. “I was just—I was just—I don’t know, yeah, it was hard, it sucked, and my head is—foggy and messy, but I’m not—I’m not—crumbling, I guess. I thought I might be, when something like this happened—”

“—and it’s not gonna happen again,” Tony says, turning and facing him. “The team that found us, that extracted us, they’re already starting the search for more of these guys, and Rhodey and Nat are doing the questioning and you know how good they are at the questioning, and whatever dickhead is at the top of this, we’re gonna find him, and we’re gonna take him down—”

“I know,” Peter says, swallowing hard. “And I’m quaking a little bit at—the thought of getting taken again but I—I’m not—it won’t stop me. I know you said it’s not gonna happen again and I believe you and I always believe you even if you’re wrong—”

“Hey, I’m never wrong—”

Peter snorts, looking down. “I know. I know. But it doesn’t—I don’t know, I’m—” He clears his throat. His mind is still a beehive of contradictions and machinations and his own voice and the ghost of other voices, bad and good, but his own voice saying about a billion different things that don’t make any sense. But he just keeps hearing still standing still standing still standing. “I just thought maybe after all of that happened I would fall apart completely and I kept expecting to fall apart and I—didn’t. I haven't yet.”

Tony smiles at him, gently. “And it doesn’t look like you're going to.”

Peter blows out a breath. “It doesn’t feel like I’m going to either.”

Leia takes a step forward onto Peter’s shoulder, so her front feet are braced on him and her back feet still perched on Tony.

And Peter wonders if he still might fall apart, one day, if something worse happens. But the wondering won’t stop him from pursuing this, or anything else, or upgrading SPIDEY’s vans. Or anything else. Anything else.

He feels like he knows that now, for real. Solidly. And he doesn’t know why.

“This girl is using us as a bridge right now,” Tony says. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed. But we are nothing but her stepping stones—”

And Leia meows, scurrying across Peter’s shoulders and leaping up onto the shelf. She glances back at him, as if to make sure he doesn’t need her, and she seems to decide that he doesn’t. Not right now.

Peter snorts, watching her find her favorite place in the corner. She blinks at him, her eyes shining.

“We okay?” May’s voice asks, and Peter turns again and sees her and Helen walking into the room.

“We’re okay,” Peter says, without going around and around about it in his head. He wants to know all the details about what happened and who they’re dealing with, all the questions Rhodey and Nat are asking, he wants Helen to look at Tony again while he’s in the room so he can know the actual situation, and he wants to make sure there’s not another shoe that’s gonna drop when he least expects it.

But it doesn't feel like it. It really doesn’t feel like it.

“Well, I’ll make sure of that,” Helen says, sweeping into the room. “Butch and Sundance over here.”

“Listen, we’re Spider-Man and Iron Man, we don’t need any more monikers, Redford and Newman have nothing on us—”

“Now you listen, Pepper is coming in here and I know you can’t keep up your tough man exterior around her—”

“Hey he’s tough he’s Iron Man I grew up with Iron Man I should know I’ve seen it from a special perspective—”

“Ned you always know exactly what to say—”

And Peter smiles, at the way all of their voices mix together, and MJ gets up and takes his hand and tugs him closer, right into a kiss she presses to his cheekbone. And he smiles into it, full of warmth and delicate certainty and a new upswing. Maybe a new swing out and away from downswings.

MJ squeezes Peter’s hand, and Tony reaches back and grips his shoulder. It feels soft and bright in here.

“Okay,” Peter says, facing the group of them. “I’m ready.”

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