Spider-Son & Iron Dad two shots

Last Second Chance

Spooktober 05: Isolation

⚠️ tw: death, no way home⚠️

a/n: I am so sorry peter I am not making this month easy for you. alexa play nobody by mitski 

Peter Parker can't ask his parents what his first words were.

He thought meaningfully his life must have really started when he was a kid, standing in the hallway of May and Ben's apartment and dripping rain onto the carpet, his mom and dad beside him with a suitcase in hand.

Everything before that was merely a collection of moments, a blurred series of photographs in family albums and the logical conclusion that the events in each one must have happened.

That seemed to be a pattern in his life.

The blurring, he meant. The... forgetting.

Here was the thing—

It wasn't easy being a big-time hero and trying to juggle three part time jobs, and then on top of that he was staying up every night studying for his GED.

He was tired that cut down deep to the bones these days, the kind of exhaustion that a two-hour crashing on his raggedy mold-smelling couch couldn't fix. An emptiness filled his lungs and his heart, a solid weight of nothing constantly choking his every breath.

He found often that if he stared into one place a second too long, or stopped his everflowing adrenaline-fueled movement, a horrible lump would form in his throat and his eyes would begin to burn. The past few months he was living in a hell of his own making. A purgatory of his own design.

("Are you okay?" Peter asked softly, gesturing to his own temple.

"Oh," Michelle smiled awkwardly and shook her head, looking down at the register. "Um, yeah. It doesn't really hurt anymore."

Peter felt his heart stop. He took the smallest of steps backwards from her.

"Anything else?"

Peter took a few moments to look her face over. To memorize every detail he could, like it was the first and last time he would be seeing it— and it would be. Because he won't ever let Michelle get hurt again.

Slowly, he shook his head, his own smile crossing his face. He felt his breath wither away as an influx of tears welled in his eyes.

"No," he whispered.

He left.)

That's all to say, it was his own fault he ended up here tonight— isolated on a rooftop somewhere in the Financial District, surrounded nauseatingly in his own sticky blood. He can't tell if the whistling he's hearing is coming from his lungs or the wind.

His head leant back and looked up at the stars, and he thought for maybe the first time in his life that he wished he was back in space. Misery loves company, after all, and even in the most traumatic part of his life he hadn't been alone.

'Alone' was a word he thought about a lot, now. Nobody knew where he was. Nobody would care, because he had nobody.

He should be trying to get up now. Peter knew that. It wasn't like he didn't want to, it was just that, as well as the knife currently sticking out of his side and causing him severe bloodloss, the newest bad guy left him with several broken bones.

He got away just barely, catapulting himself up with webs and swinging far enough away in the dark that they couldn't track him. He remembered in some hazy blur of pain that he stuck to the side of a building and crawled up, and that's how he ended up here.

Either way, with his injuries, he couldn't get up if he wanted to. Everything seemed mortally lose-lose.

He didn't make so many hard choices for it to end like this. He didn't go through so much for him to die alone on a rooftop, doing nothing about it. May wouldn't have wanted that for him.

("Oh," she said fiercely. "What Norman said? My moral mission? No. Peter, you listen to me. You have a gift. You have power. And with great power, there must also come great responsibility."

And Peter realized that while he cradled the whole city in his arms, the crushing weight of responsibility ate him alive; it tore him apart crime by crime, it will be his undoing.

And here he had been in May's arms, and he had been her responsibility, as he had been her undoing.)

"I want my second chance," Peter mumbled as an afterthought. He swallowed thickly the blood that was fighting to gurgle from his lips.

He screamed as he pushed himself up from the gravel-topped roof, and slumped onto the fire escape beside it. Every movement hurt like hell, every bone and muscle screaming in protest. His stomach turned, his head felt light.

He heaved himself to the nearest apartment window, and brought his fist up and banged on the glass. His vision was spiraling in a flash of coloured dots and a black crosshatch pattern that definitely wasn't normal.

And just as his body finally gave up, the whole muscled mass of him thudding loudly on the metal grate of the fire escape, he thought distantly that he heard the window creak open.

"Thank you, May," he stuttered through the blood.

His eyes closed.