Peter & Bucky Are Pals

Chapter 1

Peter’s life started going downhill when he turned 13. That’s when the incident happened. On a school trip he was bitten by a radioactive spider.

At first it seemed really cool, a novelty of sorts. He was suddenly stronger and able to climb up walls with his bare hands.Less than a month later, Uncle Ben was murdered. And it was all Peter’s fault. People started treating him like glass. Even Flash said he was sorry. Everyone was sorry, even though Ben wasn’t dead because of them.Ben was dead because of him. And so, Peter threw himself into protecting civilians. He made himself a suit and a web formula to emulate the spider that had bitten him. He saved as many lives as he could. He didn’t save enough.

Peter was 14 when he lost May. It was stupid, he thought to himself after the fact, that everyone used the word “lost.” “Oh, I’m so sorry for your loss.” Or, when finding out that she was dead, “When did you lose her?” She wasn’t really lost, Peter wanted to tell them.
She’d been taken. Literally, she’d been kidnapped and then never came back. Again, it was Peter’s fault. It really was. If he’d just saved that one life, then the man wouldn’t have gone after Aunt May, seeking revenge against Peter for not saving his brother. A life for a life, he’d said. To Peter, the logic was infallible. Peter started to hate Spider-man. His life had been great before it happened.
Peter was sure that his powers must be the reason for everyone he loved dying. It was some kind of karma. It had to be. He gave up on being Spider-man for a while. He was destroying more lives than he was saving, or so he had convinced himself.

Peter was thrust into the foster care system. Sure, he was a well-behaved polite young man who didn’t take up much space, but almost no one wanted to adopt such an old kid. Especially not one who kept disappearing at night and having panic attacks.

His good nature wasn’t worth the baggage. School continued on as normal, not that normal was good. Peter had no friends, so there was no one to tell about Aunt May’s passing. The faculty had been informed, of course, and put in contact with his case manager, as well as whichever adult he was staying with as he was hopped around from home to home. Some of his teachers tried.

They really did, but Peter didn’t want their help. He didn’t deserve it. Not after inadvertently killing everyone everyone close to him. Flash continued being an ass to him, once the novelty of having a dead family member wore off. It was worse after May died because Flash didn’t even slow down in his abuse when it happened, courtesy of him not knowing. Flash made fun of his clothes, his grades, his inability to get a girl. Peter stopped going to school and his grades dropped. He started caring less and feeling numb more.

The foster family he was staying with was just two adults who were never home, and him. They made sure he was fed and clothed, and that was about it. Peter was just glad he was out of the first place, where there had been so many people stuffed into one house that he’d constantly felt on the edge of freaking out. And the second place where the man of the house had hit him.
Either way, they weren’t present enough to care about Peter’s personal well-being, and they definitely weren’t making him go to school.

Eventually, Peter hit rock bottom. After a particularly bad day (he’d actually gone to school. Flash had said some particularly unkind things about his lack of friends and he was feeling the loneliness rather acutely.) he went to go visit May in the cemetery. Peter sat down in front of her headstone and cried. “I-I never told you this before.” he said shakily. “But I’m spider-man.”
He waited for something to happen. Nothing did. The world kept turning; nobody cared. Peter started crying even harder.