#pottery shards

The scene came from a fic I have planned and partially written but no idea if I’ll ever publish. The idea was that Bucky, post Winter Soldier, ends up recovering with the vigilante community of New York, which results in Peter Parker becoming ferally protective of him. This Peter is extremely productive, mildly insane, terrible at communication, and a total ride or die. Every adult in his life is terrified as to what he is doing at any given moment, because it could be anything, and Peter will not tell them until it has already happened. he just keeps doing things and he will not fucking tell them what those things are. 

as a side note, bucky in this AU adores peter to his dying breath, and he has never been more stressed out in his life. it’s like a tiny steve who has the power to fling himself off buildings and is even worse about sharing relevant information in a timely fashion--and steve let the army fucking experiment on him without letting his good ol’ pal bucky know that his last enlistment attempt worked. bucky has aged a thousand years since meeting peter. he would be stressed all day, every day, seven days a week, but he gets to time share his stress with frank castle, which alleviates some pressure. 

Bucky hadn’t reached out to Steve at this point—who was tearing apart the world looking for him—and Peter was a very firm believer in bucky’s right to heal on his own timeline. So, when Steve spots Bucky near one of their old haunts in Brooklyn, he’s elated, and Bucky is less than elated.

Peter, who was coming to meet bucky, takes exception to this fact.

He just sort of gets in Steve’s way in the street, acting like a random passer-by, and Steve, in his rush to get to bucky, grabs him by his bare forearms to move him out of the way when Peter keeps getting in his path. This is, of course, exactly what Peter wants, because he immediately activates his stickiness and Steve now physically cannot let go of this obvious child.

Peter immediately proceeds to give an Oscar winning performance of “terrified child in the process of being kidnapped, please, please, this isn’t my dad, someone save me.” He tries to fuck off immediately after, but he gets snagged by Sam and dragged into Avengers tower for questioning as to what the hell he just did, how the hell he just did it, and how is he involved with bucky.

Peter decides the only way out is through and that he just has to lean into the kidnapped child thing. He just. Immediately starts gaslighting the fuck out of everyone. He didn’t do anything, that’s insane, their theory is that he can, what—become sticky at will and somehow force captain America to drag him around by the arms? he’s fourteen and an honor student and he wants his aunt, oh god is he actually kidnapped by the avengers. He cries. It’s mildly humiliating.

It’s also extremely convincing, because like. He’s fourteen and an honor student. he’s crying. Why would this random child have any affiliation with the winter soldier? And what could he have done to make Steve grab him by the arms and drag him around—become sticky at will? That’s insane.

So he convinces everyone that Steve saw someone who was just a bucky lookalike on the street, snapped, had a nervous breakdown, lost control of his own strength, and almost kidnapped a fucking child. Including Steve. Steve also thinks he had a breakdown and almost accidentally kidnapped a child. But, good news, Peter really really doesn’t want to be on Ellen as the kid who almost got Datelined by Captain America, so he’d love to just go home and never talk about this ever, please and thank you. they really lucked out of a lawsuit, if you think about it. So he manages to gaslight them into letting peter go with their profuse apologies, and they’re actively making plans to ship Steve off to a wellness retreat on one of Tony’s tropical estates, because obviously the stress of hydra and looking for bucky has just been too much for him. He snapped and almost caused the most difficult to explain PR scandal ever. 

This, of course, all fails, because Peter accidentally unlocks his phone with Face ID while they’re giving him back his stuff, and a photo of him with Bucky is his home screen. He is very high intelligence, very low wisdom.

“Huh,” says Peter, into the damning silence. “I almost gaslit my way out of that like a girlboss.”

And then he immediately shoved his phone down his pants and announced that he would personally make sure that anyone who went after it would never be allowed in a school zone again. It devolves from there.

I loved it. It was so funny. It was peak chaos. Peter will never apologize for his actions. Foggy tries to get him to, and Peter says “I’m not sorry and I would do it again” and Foggy has to be like “HAHAH kids say the darnedest things please don’t press charges.” Matt keeps having to leave the room to laugh. Karen gets all teary-eyed with pride whenever Peter does does anything illegal, so she’s useless at scolding him. I had to scrap it in the end because it was a very big narrative point—Steve finding bucky again—that could be used in much more effective ways. It was devastating but made for a stronger plot.

I fully agree—a lot of fandom makes peter like, pretty spineless and helpless. I think there’s a big difference between making him young and making him a damsel which a lot of fanfiction misses. I, personally, like him insane. Ironically, pottery shards peter is probably the tamest peter i have in my drafts. 

Jack murdock was this lasting point of interest for me where I desperately wanted a fanfiction where he lived and there just really wasn’t a lot of options. Lying by Omission by deniigiq was really the only thing that had fun with an alive Jack murdock, but I really, really wanted a Jack who just managed to survive canon. Roscoe Sweeney taking Matt instead was the obvious choice, which—it has such fascinating implications for guilt that I was obsessed. I’m glad you also like it.

As a like, disclaimer, I’m soooo aware that being a dad is more of a meme in fandom than genuine attempts to say someone is the functional father of someone, but also it does crop up in genuine contexts too, and I don’t know if you mean in more of the general like, vibes sense or in a more literal “Frank is becoming his father as an actual relationship development” kind of way. I built my brand on taking things way too seriously however, so I’m gonna like, delve into this as if it were.

Frank is the most stable adult influence in Peter’s life right now, and I’m going to somewhat include May in that. That’s not because May is somehow failing to be a stable adult for Peter, but more because Peter has purposefully cut her out from access to parts of his life in a misguided attempt to protect the last family he has left to him. And that’s a decision that has pretty severe consequences for Peter’s mental health.

The decision to sort of phase May out of full involvement in Peter’s life predated Spider-Man; however, Spider-Man turned this from a sort of gradual decrease of information he shared to an extremely abrupt stop. We know that, for whatever reason, Peter did not tell May or Ben when he first got his powers. If it was physically painful or even just noticeable, he did not tell them about the probable medical emergency, but even if we just assume he went to bed normal and woke up with abs, he did not walk into the kitchen the next morning and announce he could stick to walls now. Ideally speaking, kids should be going to their parents about that kind of shit. Peter didn’t. So we know something’s just not exactly right with Peter’s relationship with May and Ben.

Usually, that’d be a bit of a red flag with abuse. Frank actually had a moment where he suspected as much, and Peter flipped his shit on him, so he knows it's not that. But whatever the cause, Peter's been without an adult influence to rely on for a while.

And, psychologically speaking, that's fucked him up pretty thoroughly. Peter's been taking on stresses that are way worse than most adults ever face, and he's been doing it without having the support that kids really need. That's compounded by the fact that he's still reeling from one of the biggest pillars of support in his life, Ben, just got ripped out entirely.

Frank's relationship with peter has developed on an incredibly quick timeline because he's been able to occupy that empty space that parents usually are meant to be in. In that respect, he's acting in a lot of the ways a dad is supposed to, by being that sort of adult figure Peter can go to as a reliable source of support. Peters finally buckling under the pressure now that he finally has someone who can help take some of it off of him, which quickens the development of their relationship.

But at the end of the day, that does not change the fact that it’s only been two weeks. Peter hated him for the first week of it. They’re very much in the infancy of their relationship, so like, genuine fatherhood is a good long way off.

I’m a big believer in the fact that there’s no substitute for time in relationship develop. That’s not to say that relationships can’t develop on different timelines, but there’s a very practical reality that figuring out the boundaries and dynamic of a relationship is something that develops over multiple interactions and needs time to do. Peter and Frank are still at the stage where Peter’s struggling to figure out if he can ethically have Frank in his life and Frank is struggling to figure out how to be in Peter’s life when his objective goal is still to get peter to stop being spider-man. They need a lot of time still to figure out who they are to each other.

The other thing about time in a relationship is that it’s really going to be the thing to build trust. Trust isn’t exclusively built by time, but it’s still important. Frank and Peter have started to build some trust between them, but it’s still young. Frank, specifically, only got peter to start to trust him when he helped out with the Calloways. Peter only started building trust that same night when Frank started to understand why Peter did what he did.

When you’re in someone’s life, especially to the degree that a father and son would be, then you’re going to get into conflict with them. You’re going to disagree, fight, cross boundaries. Or you’re going to need to be vulnerable to someone, and you have to decide if they’re a safe person to do so with.

Time where you can build up a consistent basis of trust and understanding is what helps you weather that. There’s going to be fuck ups. That’s part of being human. If you have spent a long time developing a relationship, people are going to have a better time grappling with those fuck ups, figuring out how to navigate it, and then moving towards forgiveness. If you really trust someone, then there’s more stability and reliability to fall back on when they do something that hurts you. If you haven’t had that time? Then it risks destroying the relationship entirely.

We’re still seeing that develop with Frank and Peter. We have yet to see if they can even last, let alone make it to father/son.

I don't want to say that I have compunctions with how fandom treats relationships, because that is suggestive of like, a higher degree of dislike than I actually have. It's just not my style. A lot of fanfiction or fanon has people going from 0 to 100 really really fast. You go from just having met to being the most important and trusted people in each other's lives in a few days. You're madly in love in the span of a few interactions. Characters hand out trust that isn't really earned yet and act more comfortably with people than they objectively should. With Peter especially, you have him like, calling people 'Dad' or being like, really comfortable accepting physical affection from them almost immediately or he's like, really quick to seek comfort and support from whatever adult is around. It just all happens on a weirdly fast timeline.

And I want to be clear--there's nothing wrong with liking to write that or read that. It's fanfiction. We're all doing this shit for free, and sometimes you want to get to the found family part everyone's showed up for without trudging through 100k words of boundary negotiations and relationship development.

It's just not how i like to write? I'm a slow burn person. I need a bunch of build up or i'm not satisfied in the pay off. toy rosaries is 45k words and counting because i wanted to write one fucking scene. i'm holding myself hostage. I could not bring myself to write frank and peter as father/son on this timeline even if i wanted to.

They also have the added hurdle of their own trauma around parents and children.

With Frank, it's pretty obvious--he loves kids, it's undeniable. He was great with Zach and Leo, would die for Amy, and even had a cute moment with Rex in the diner. He gets attached to his kids, acts parental with them, and would straight up die for them. Peter's well in that same territory now.

I think we still have to ask if he would be able to be an explicit father/son relationship given his lasting trauma around his own kids.

It could go either way, honestly--it would depend on how someone wanted to take their relationship development. The thing is, Frank wants to be a dad--but he wants to be his kids' dad. The debilitating loss he feels from his children's death is absolutely central to his character--and it's pretty clear he's not even close to getting over it. First off, he's living like a fucking goblin in the seedy underbelly of new york. that's not an emotionally healthy decision. But secondly, he's established time and time again that he's not ready to really heal from his family's death. He picked the Punisher over going with his family when he went up against Agent Orange. Season 2 opens with Frank's revenge complete, experiencing that great, peaceful family dynamic with Beth and Rex--and then he's killing a room full of people by the end of the episode. Undeniably, he loved Amy--but he still sends her off to live in Florida with someone else. He could have gone with her. He had finished his newest war entirely. There wasn't any immediate danger of staying with her. He could have asked her if she'd like to set up shop somewhere new, with him, new names, new pasts, new lives, as father/daughter. Instead, he ships her off and fully becomes the Punisher.

The Punisher is a part of Frank, and it's not exclusively a product of what happened to his family. But it's impossible to remove his grief from who the Punisher is. Being a dad means putting the kid first, picking the kid first, and it's not really clear what would win if it really came down to being a stable influence for Peter and giving up his war or staying with his mantle.

It's particularly difficult when you consider the parallels between Peter and his son. Frank didn't really have regrets around Lisa, save that she died and that he did not read the book to her the night before. He didn't visibly regret the state of his relationship with her when she passed--in fact, most of how he talks about her suggests their bond was incredibly close.

His son, though, is almost exclusively shown in canon to be in conflict with Frank, and it's something that Frank displays visible regret over. He seems to constantly wish he could have been a better father to Frank Jr.

Peter, like Frank Jr, spends a lot of time in conflict with Frank. They don't see eye to eye. They bump heads. Peter disobeys him every chance he gets. And Frank's really, really trying not to repeat old mistakes, but it still begs the question whether he could bring himself to be the kind of father to Peter that he never could be to Frank Jr. How would that feel? Would it feel like a betrayal of Frankie? Would he be haunted by the fact that he couldn't be like this with his own son? It'd be a long, painful road to figure that out.

Is it possible that Frank could be someone's father again? I think so. But he needs to do a lot of healing that he's just not done yet.

Peter, likewise, is in a state where he'd need an enormous amount of healing to have another father.

I think with Ben particularly we need to distinguish from Dad as a title and Dad as a role. Peter Parker, whatever universe he's in, does not call Ben "Dad." He calls him uncle--but calling someone "uncle" does not dispositively indicate that that's the role they fill for you.

And there's no real definitive right answer as to what Peter considered Ben to be. Life is messy. Peter's relationship with Ben and his father is honestly fascinating. Peter went to live with Ben at a young age--but not so young that he didn't have defined roles of "Mom" and "Dad" already filled. He never tried to call Ben and May mom and dad. But it's indisputable that the larger influences on his life were May and Ben. He's spent more time with may and ben than he ever did his parents. It's their moral code that defines his character. By every functional sense of the word, Ben and May Parker are his acting parents, but they never cross into parenthood by title.

If you lean into the comic book death of the Parkers, it's especially interesting when you take in Ben's likely confused feelings on this. His brother died in the most obvious cover-up known to man. They were murdered, their plane was sabotaged, and Ben can't do anything about that except raise his brother's son. His brother won't get the chance to be Peter's father throughout his life. He won't get to be there for Peter's graduation, birthdays, wedding--all those things Ben thought he'd live to see. Richard's death is this horrible source of constant, aching injustice, and instead of getting that justice for him, Ben gets what Richard should have gotten to experience--would he have felt guilty taking the title of Dad too? At the end of his life, did he regret never telling Peter that he was his son?

Does Peter regret never telling Ben that he was his father?

Ben is meant to be this horrible, aching space in the narrative. The death was recent and the pain is fresh. Peter lost someone who was one of the biggest if not the biggest influences in his life. Could he want another father figure one day? Honestly, I have no idea. He's already lost two. But he definitely would not be ready right now. If you offered him a new father figure right now, he'd say he doesn't want them--he wants his uncle, and that's the person he simply cannot have.