Chapter Text
It was bullshit.
Pure bullshit.
It had been a few weeks since Peter had met with the Avengers, and for the first time in a while, life had been looking up. The dingy alleys and empty buildings were a thing of the past, replaced with the luxurious feel of the Avengers tower. If he thought about it too hard, he supposed he might feel guilty for the anger.
The thing was, they took in Peter with the thought of saving the oh so young (oh please) Spiderman of the streets, and giving him the safety he may need to get back on his feet. What they didn’t expect was for said Spiderman to be 15 years old, instead of the collage aged guy they expected.
That had been such a fun conversation to have.
It had started with some street criminal getting in a lucky hit on him with the (admittedly disgusting) knife he somehow got.
Then, the med stash turned out to be low on supplies.
All of this, combined with the persistent hunger that he had had for days, made it a bit hard to focus. But this alone was not all that new to Peter; no, it could always get worse. The problems only really started the moment that he heard an explosion in the distance.
An explosion meant fire and collapsing buildings, and those two meant people getting hurt. So, even though black dots were dancing on the edge of his vision, he had to go there. Even if it was a little outside of his usual territory.
With great power comes great responsibility, after all.
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Before he even arrived, he could hear the panic of the people in the street. It did not take long after that for him to smell the burning, see the buildings, and feel the heat. With everything going on around him, he barely even noticed the Avengers running around, both on the ground and in the air.
It took him mere seconds to single out the building that was in the worst shape, and only a second more to hurl himself straight through the, now broken, windows. One by one, he had lowered people out of the building, not focusing on the blinding pain.
The dots in his vision had definitely grown in number, but damn him if he would let anyone stay behind. Even if the building had started to groan harder and harder, and the fire kept claiming rooms.
It went really quickly after that, though, looking back, he wished it had taken longer. Longer meant getting people further away.
Longer meant getting himself away.
With the increasing creaking and groaning, he almost wasn’t surprised when the building finally collapsed. At this point, he had in fact been out of the building itself. Just not out of the radius of the debris.
And when it all came crashing down, it hurt. He involuntarily let out a scream at the weight of the concrete crushing him, just moments before the black spots finally claimed him whole.
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The good thing is that that same scream alerted the Avengers to the presence of someone being in danger. It only took a flash of blue and red at the edge of their vision to realise who it was, and when they watched the building crash down, it took no time to realise what had happened.
When Peter came by, he was in a hospital wing. A white, bright room with beeping and needles sticking out of his arms and it was so bright and his mouth was so dry and, oh my god, this will be so expensive when he gets out of here.
His first reaction to this panic was to stand up, and everything went blurry the second he moved his head at all. Frantically trying to stabilise himself, he ended up crashing down to the floor, including the needles ripping out of his wrist and elbow, and the monitor beeping loudly.
He barely had any chance to get up before a gaggle of people rushed into the room, and before long he was in the bed again with people explaining exactly what happened back there.
They had heard him scream, and Iron Man had noticed him getting crushed. It was the Avengers who had saved him from dying there. It was the Stark tower he was staying at.
It was the Avengers that had seen his face. It was the same Avengers now questioning what a child was doing on the battlefield, ‘running around in pyjamas’, as they oh so eloquently called it. It took maybe 5 minutes for Peter to realise that he would not be walking out of this building at all for a while after discharge from the hospital wing.
And thus, here he was, without his web slingers, his suit (they were not fucking pyjamas) and without permission to leave. They meant well, probably, but that did not mean Peter was going to be happy about it all the time. They probably expected he was, that they saved him, that spiderway was a way to get around and that they solved that problem for him.
God, he hated the babying they put him through. It annoyed him to no end, and it seemed to annoy people like Cap that he was not the innocent 15 year old they expected him to be.
He had seen people suffering all sorts of things in those streets; he had suffered all sorts of things in those same streets. His parents had died away from those streets, but his aunt and uncle definitely did not. And what they probably didn’t realise that that was the whole reason he did what he did.
He could not let them down again.
And now, he was basically locked up in ‘his’ room like a child on house arrest. He looked out the window, down at the vast expanse of New York stretching out before him, and scoffed. They couldn’t honestly think that he was going to stay here to sit and wait for them to ‘fix’ him?
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He needed a suit. Not specifically his suit, just anything to hide his identity and keep him relatively recognisable to the people in the streets. Good luck struck first, with him finding a bright red hoodie in the pile of clothes Tony had left in his closet.
The bad luck was that the door was seemingly locked, and he needed those webshooters.
“FRIDAY?” he asked, almost tentatively. The AI responded instantly with a chipper “Hello Peter, what can I help you with?” “Can you open this door for me? I really want to take a little walk around the tower, I’m so bored down here.”
FRIDAY response came quickly, and Peter had to remind himself just how high-tech this tower really was. “I’m sorry Peter, but I can’t unlock the door until the morning. Boss made me promise not to let you out for small things.”
He sighed, and thought for a second about a reason for FRIDAY to let him out of the room. Anything bathroom related was off limits, as he had an ensuite (who even has an ensuite for a guest room?), and he was just told that a little walk was not allowed.
“I may have worded this wrongly FRIDAY. I knocked my leg into something and I think it rehashed some old injury from the fight from a little while back, and I really need to go to the medbay to check with doctor Cho! She told me to come back if anything starts hurting again.”
For this response, FRIDAY took a little longer to reply, as if weighing the options. After about a minute, she replied. “Sure Peter, but in the morning miss Cho shall report back on your injuries. If this report does not come I am obliged to tell mister Stark about this.”
That, he could work with. The medbay could always be visited after a little running around the city, and otherwise it was a problem for tomorrow. A second after FRIDAY was done talking he heard a click, and when he tried the door it finally gave way.
He looked around in the hall to see if anyone was around, and he set off to find those damn webshooters.
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It didn’t take him long to find them, lying neatly in some drawer. He had first tried the common areas, but to no surprise, no one had left them lying around in the kitchen or the living rooms. Next up had been Tony’s lab.
Finding it had not been the problem, he had been shown it on the first day when Tony had given him a tour of the relevant parts of the tower. The problem was that Tony was known to work into the early morning hours, and if he saw Peter sneaking around, it would be over in seconds.
For once, though, Parker luck was on his side, and it was blissfully empty around the entire floor of his labs. It was a mess in there, with parts lying around everywhere, and entire workbenches filled with scraps, screws and screwdrivers. It was here that he decided to start on the drawers, hoping for the shooters to still be in one piece somewhere. One problem: there were a lot of drawers around the room.
He went through them methodically, opening them and scanning for the glint of his webshooters. It took until one of the last cabinets for him to strike gold, and he almost yelled out in relief.
In another stroke of luck, he had found a few masks lying around, presumably for working in the lab. Tonight, they would not be used for any science, but it was a perfect solution to hide his face.
With almost uncontrollable giddyness he strode out of the room, back to his sleeping quarters. The lock shut behind him, and he supposed that FRIDAY would definitely make a problem out of this when morning comes.
For now, though, he could go back to his usual routine. With that, he clicked on his webshooters, opened the window, and jumped.