Spider-Son & Iron Dad two shots

Everywhere, Everything

Spooktober 25: Insults

He was everywhere.

Every quote on the wall. Every lesson in class that Peter could have sworn felt more like an obituary. Every tearful pep assembly. Every morning news announcement with memorial music. Every poster in the halls reminding students to go to the grief counselor they hired after the events of... everything.

Peter couldn't escape it.

The worst part wasn't the memorial, although that was unbearable to its own extent too. Tony Stark deserved to be remembered. He deserved his achievements recognized, the superheroic kind especially. He worked hard to scrub his name clean, Peter knew and had seen it firsthand. He was a lot of people's hero, he—He was Peter's hero.

But, simple and clean, like the sharp sting of papercut ran under a faucet, Peter didn't want to remember him. He didn't want Tony Stark to be someone he had to remember at all, actually, because he wanted Tony to be there to do the remembering for him.

Peter didn't want, 'Remember when we burst the water pipes in the lab, and water was flying all over the place and it was ruining the suit we were working on but we were laughing too hard to care, and Mrs. Potts had to leave her meeting to yell at us? I miss that so much. I miss you.' He wanted, 'Hey kid, we haven't hung out in a while, I want to know how school is going for you. How'd that trigonometry test go? Come by the lab next Friday. Let's talk.'

He can walk down every corridor, every street, every room, every alley, every hallway, and all anybody can talk about is Tony Tony Tony Tony—

Peter's always been his biggest fan, but he's starting to get sick of hearing the way people say the man's name. The adoration, the awe, the sympathy, the pity, the falsity because they just don't get it and they never will.

Sometimes he just wants to whip his head around at them and say, 'It's really cool that when you think of Iron Man, you think of when he saved a family in Sokovia by sticking them in a bathtub. When I think of Iron Man, I feel my throat start to close up and all I can see is his dead eyes, and all I can hear is Mrs. Potts sobbing, and—'

He couldn't take much more of whatever this was. It would kill him, he know it would. With Ben, it was awful, and everyone knew and treated him delicately and stepped around it, they made sure not to bring it up unless they were apologizing. That was bad. But this? This was torture. This was hellscape.

This was him blinking in class the first week back to see a photo of Tony Stark projected on the white board and him only seeing how the cheap projection makes him look as pale as a ghost, and suddenly Tony is dying in front of him again, and this was him running out of the classroom to throw up in the middle of the hallway, not even making it to a trashbin before his stomach clenches and his lunch spills out.

This was him poking into the office of the grief counselor the school hired and him sitting down with sweaty palms, and when the man asks him if he's alright, all he can hear is Tony's voice asking him and him stumbling forward with uneasy limbs because they were becoming dust one painful atom at a time. This was him staring down at his hands with wide eyes until he suddenly stands up and leaves the office, and the man's distant calls of concern don't register until he's walked himself out of the building.

This was him, now, sitting in a Decathlon meeting and wishing he had quit back in sophomore year because today Mr. Harrington had decided it would be a good way of remembering the lost heroes by doing an Avengers-styled trivia meeting.

Ned was skipping today, and this entire week, because he has family visiting New York that had travelled to reunite after the global catastrophe. He had told Peter to text him, if anything was wrong or if he needed someone to talk to, but Peter doesn't want to bother Ned when he was reuniting with his family.