Chapter Text
Peter woke up slowly, with the sense that his body had come back online in the wrong order. The room arrived before he did: a low, steady beeping beside him, filtered air that smelled like antiseptic and expensive silence, sheets too soft to belong in any hospital he had ever visited, a ceiling without stained tiles or flickering lights. For a few confused seconds, he stared upward and thought, with the distant clarity of someone whose brain was still mostly submerged, that this was definitely a rich person hospital.
Then the rest of him woke up, and the observation stopped mattering.
Everything hurt.
Not in one clean, useful way, either. His body had organized the pain into layers. His side burned under tight bandages. His shoulder throbbed when he breathed. His jaw ached all the way into his ear. His ribs objected to the concept of lungs. There were bruises in places he did not remember getting hit, which seemed unfair, because if his body was going to keep receipts, Peter felt he should at least be allowed to review the transactions. He made a small sound before he could stop himself, more breath than voice, and something moved beside the bed immediately.
“Peter?”
May’s voice changed the room.
He turned his head toward her too fast and regretted it instantly. Pain flashed white along the back of his skull and down his neck, and his eyes watered hard enough to blur her for a second. When she came into focus again, she was sitting in a chair pulled close to the bed, one hand already halfway toward him. Her hair was tied back badly, strands escaping around her face, and her eyes were red in a way that made his chest hurt worse than his ribs. She looked like she had been crying, then angry, then crying again, and had finally settled on staying upright through pure stubbornness.
“Hey,” Peter tried.
It came out shredded.
May’s face crumpled for one second before she got control of it. Not all the way. Just enough. She leaned forward and took his hand with such care that it made him want to apologize before he remembered he had not done anything in the last thirty seconds except wake up.
“Hi, baby,” she said, and her voice was gentle enough that it scared him.
Peter blinked at her, then at the machines, then at the very expensive-looking wall behind her. “Hospital?”
“Yeah,” May said. Her thumb moved once over the back of his hand. “Hospital.”
“It’s fancy.”
“Tony,” she said, which explained the entire room more efficiently than any doctor could have.
Peter would have smiled if his face had allowed it. Instead he managed something that probably looked like pain with ambition. “Billionaire hospital?”
“Private medical suite,” May corrected, in a tone that suggested she had already had this phrase explained to her by someone and had decided to hate it. “Apparently when Tony Stark calls ahead, people start saying things like suite instead of room.”
Peter let his eyes drift half-closed. The relief of May’s hand around his was enormous, but it did not soften the rest enough. His body felt too heavy for the bed. He tried to remember how he had gotten here and found fragments instead: police lights, the street outside the Italian place, Flash’s white face, repulsors in the air, Tony’s armor closing around him with impossible care.
“The team?” he asked.
May’s expression tightened. “They’re okay.”
He opened his eyes again. “Everyone?”
“Everyone,” May said, and this time there was something fierce in the word. “Ned is okay. MJ is okay. Your teacher is very upset and probably going to need a week away from all school-sponsored restaurants, but he’s okay. The other kids are okay.”
Peter’s breath came out too quickly. His ribs punished him for it, but he did not care. “Marcus? Elena?”
“Alive,” May said. “Injured. Angry. Which seems to be the default setting for people assigned to keep you safe.”
Peter stared at the ceiling for a moment, letting that settle. Alive. Everyone alive. He had gotten them away. Or Marcus had. Or Elena had. Or Tony. Or the police. It did not matter exactly how, not yet. The important thing was that the Decathlon team had walked out of the restaurant and not been dragged into the thing that had come for Peter.
His eyes burned, and he was too tired to hide it well.
May noticed, because May noticed everything when it mattered. She pressed his hand between both of hers and lowered her head for a moment, not quite kissing his knuckles, just holding him there as if she needed to feel the proof of him warm under her fingers. When she looked up again, her face had changed. The relief was still there, huge and raw, but something steadier sat beneath it now.
Peter felt the shift before he understood it.
“Peter,” May said.
His stomach dropped.
It was amazing, really, how a person could be stabbed, tasered, beaten across rooftops, and still have enough survival instinct left to fear that tone.
“I’m not going to yell right now,” she said.
He swallowed. His throat felt scraped open. “Right now?”
May’s eyebrows lifted, and for one second she looked so much like herself that he almost relaxed. “Do not negotiate timing with me from a hospital bed.”
Peter shut his mouth.
May took a breath, and then another, like she was measuring out the anger so it would not spill too far while he was still lying there half-broken. “I know,” she said.
Peter stared at her.
The words did not land at first. They hovered in the clean hospital air, too small for what they meant. “Know what?”
May’s mouth trembled once, and she pressed it into a line. “I know you’re Spider-Man.”
The monitor betrayed him immediately.
Peter’s heart jumped hard enough that the steady beeping beside him changed, and May looked at the machine with the exhausted fury of someone who had already spent too many hours listening to it decide how scared she was allowed to be. Then she looked back at him.
“Breathe,” she said.
Peter tried. It hurt, but he did it.
He could not find words. Not even bad ones. Panic moved through him slowly, thickened by pain medication and exhaustion, but it was still panic. May knew. May knew, and he was in a bed and could not sit up, could not move away, could not fix his face into something convincing. He had imagined this conversation so many times and always stopped before the middle. Sometimes May yelled. Sometimes she cried. Sometimes she grounded him forever. Sometimes she looked at him like she did not know him.
She was looking at him now like she knew him too well.
“How?” he whispered.
May looked away for the first time. Her gaze went toward the window, though the blinds were mostly closed and there was nothing outside to see but a wash of gray city light. “Tony called me from the street. He said you were alive. He said you were hurt. He said they were bringing you here. I don’t remember everything after that in the right order.” She gave a small, humorless laugh. “I remember yelling at a cab driver who did not deserve it. I remember Pepper calling me. I remember Tony saying you needed clothes.”
Peter closed his eyes.
The suit.
He knew before she said it.
“I went to the apartment,” May said. “I thought I was getting sweatpants, socks, a hoodie. Normal things. Hospital things. I was angry because even then I was trying to do something practical with my hands so I wouldn’t think too hard about what you looked like when Tony carried you in.” Her voice thinned there, but she forced it steady again. “And then I found it.”
Peter kept his eyes closed.
“Peter.”
He opened them.
May’s anger was quiet, and that was worse than if she had shouted. It was not clean anger. It was tangled up with fear and relief and a kind of grief he did not know what to do with. “I found the suit,” she said. “Hidden badly, by the way, which is not the main issue, but I want you to know I noticed.”
His mouth twitched before he could stop it. It hurt. Everything hurt.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
May nodded once, sharply. “You should be.”
Peter flinched despite himself.
Her face softened immediately, but she did not take it back. That was very May, somehow. Kind and furious and unwilling to lie just because the truth hurt. “You should be sorry,” she said, quieter. “I have spent weeks trying to understand the danger around you. Tony. Stane. Barnes. Security outside your school. Strange apartments and guards and phone calls I wasn’t supposed to overhear. I thought I knew the shape of it, at least. I thought I knew what people were keeping from me.”
Peter’s fingers curled weakly around hers.
“I thought,” May continued, and this time her voice broke, “that when you came home exhausted, it was because your life had been turned upside down. I thought when you had bruises, maybe it was stress, or school, or some horrible thing connected to Tony that nobody had fully explained yet. I thought you were letting me be your aunt in the middle of all this.”
“I was,” Peter said, too fast, too desperate. “May, I was.”
“You were letting me be part of it,” she said. “Not all of it.”
Peter looked away as far as the pillow allowed. “I didn’t know how to tell you.”
“I know.” May’s thumb brushed over his knuckles again, even though she was still angry. Especially because she was still angry. “That is one of the reasons I am not yelling right now.”
“There are more reasons?”
“You are very injured, and the nurses already look afraid of Tony. I don’t want to add to the workplace environment.”
Peter made a sound that was almost a laugh. It turned into a wince. May’s expression tightened, and she leaned forward like she could take the pain back by proximity alone.
For a minute, neither of them said anything. The machines kept up their quiet rhythm. Somewhere beyond the door, voices moved past and faded again. Peter stared at May’s hand around his and tried to imagine what she must have felt, standing in their apartment with his suit in her hands while he was in a hospital, and the thought was so unbearable he had to stop.
“I’m mad,” May said at last.
Peter nodded.
“I am so mad that I don’t think I know how mad yet. I’m going to find out in stages, probably at very inconvenient times. There will be yelling later. There will be questions. There will be rules, and then arguments about the rules, and then revised rules because apparently this family is now negotiating with superheroes.”
Peter’s throat tightened. “Okay.”
“No, not okay like I’m being reasonable.” May gave him a look. “I reserve the right to be unreasonable.”
“Okay,” Peter whispered again, and this time it came out a little more like himself.
May looked down at their joined hands. Her anger stayed, but her face crumpled around it. “And I’m glad,” she said.
Peter blinked. “What?”
“I hate that I’m glad.” She said it almost angrily, as if the feeling had betrayed her. “I hate it, Peter. I hate that there is any part of me that can look at what happened today and think thank God he can climb walls, thank God he can take a hit like that, thank God something in him let him get away long enough to come back.” Her eyes filled, but she did not look away this time. “Those men came for Peter Parker at a school lunch. Not Spider-Man in a mask on a roof. You. My kid. Sitting with his team, probably about to eat too much pizza because you always think I don’t notice when you skip breakfast.”
Peter could not answer. His chest hurt too much.
“If you had been just Peter,” May said, then stopped. Her mouth twisted, and she shook her head once. “No. I’m not finishing that sentence. I refuse to give it room. But I thought it. I thought it the whole way here.”
Peter looked at her through blurred eyes. “I didn’t want you to have to think that.”
May leaned closer, and this time there was steel under the tears. “You don’t get to protect me by leaving me in the dark.”
The words settled heavily between them.
Peter thought of Tony in the penthouse, angry and scared, telling him almost the same thing in a different shape. You have to give me the chance to choose better. He wondered, distantly, if all adults eventually arrived at the same terrifying sentence from different directions.
“I know,” he whispered.
May’s expression shifted. She had been ready for an apology, maybe. Or a defense. Peter did not have either cleanly enough.
“At first,” he said, and the words came slowly because his throat hurt and because the truth was bigger than the air he had available, “I didn’t tell you because of Ben.”
May went very still.
Peter stared at their hands because looking at her face would make him stop. “It had just happened. He had just—” His voice failed for a second, and he swallowed against the pain in his throat. “You were already hurting so much. We both were, but you were trying to keep everything together, and I had this thing happen to me that I didn’t understand, and then I was going out at night and putting myself in danger, and I couldn’t tell you that. I couldn’t come home and say, hey, May, I know Ben just died and everything is awful, but also I got bitten by a spider and now I’m doing dangerous stuff in a mask.”
May’s eyes filled again, but she did not interrupt him.
Peter breathed carefully. It still hurt. “I thought it would make it worse. I thought I would be making you carry one more thing when you were already carrying too much. And then later, when Ben’s death wasn’t so fresh every single second, it was already this huge secret. Too huge. Every day I didn’t tell you made it harder to tell you the next day.”
May closed her eyes.
Peter’s fingers tightened weakly around hers. “And then it became normal. Not normal-normal, but mine. Something I did and came home from. And you were still you, and I was still your kid, and I didn’t want to break that open. I didn’t want you to look at me and see all the ways I could die.”
May made a small, wounded sound.
“I’m sorry,” Peter said. “I know that’s not fair. I know I was still making choices for you. I know that now. I think I knew it then too, but I didn’t want to know it.”
For a long moment, May did not speak.
When she opened her eyes, the anger was still there, but it had changed shape. It was not smaller. Maybe it was bigger, because now it had Ben inside it too. But it was less sharp at the edges, softened by grief Peter had never stopped sharing with her, even when he had hidden everything else.
“Oh, Peter,” she said.
His eyes burned.
May leaned closer, careful of the wires and bandages, and brushed his hair away from his forehead with shaking fingers. “I understand why you thought that.”
Peter’s breath caught.
“I do,” she said. “I understand why a scared kid who had just lost his uncle and thought he had to be strong for me would make that choice.”
Peter shut his eyes.
May’s voice trembled, but it did not break. “But you were wrong.”
He nodded, because there was nothing else to do.
“You were wrong,” she repeated, not cruelly. “Ben dying did not mean you had to become something alone. My grief was not something you had to protect by hiding yours inside a suit.”
Peter cried then, quietly and helplessly, because he was too hurt and too tired to keep it anywhere neat.
May held his hand harder. “I’m mad,” she said again. “I am going to be mad for a long time. But I am not mad because you were scared. I am mad because you were scared alone.”
Peter opened his eyes.
May’s face was wet now, and she looked furious about that too.
“I wanted to tell you,” Peter whispered. “I wanted you to know. That’s not the same thing.”
May nodded, brushing her thumb carefully along the side of his hand. “No. It’s not.”
“I wanted you to know and I wanted you never to know.”
“I know,” she said softly.
“I thought if you knew, you’d stop me.”
“I might have tried.”
His heartbeat jumped again.
May watched the monitor, then him, and took a slow breath. “I still might try, Peter. I am not promising I’m going to become the cool aunt of vigilantism because I found out you have a suit. I am not cool with this. I am barely vertical with this.”
Despite everything, Peter almost laughed.
“But,” May said, and the word came with effort, “I also know you. And I know enough to understand that if I make this into me versus Spider-Man, I will lose parts of you I cannot afford to lose. So we are going to figure out what happens next like people who love each other and are furious, not like people keeping secrets on opposite sides of a locked door.”
Peter stared at her.
That was almost worse than yelling.
It was kinder, and it was worse.
He nodded once, barely, because moving too much still felt like a bad idea. “Okay.”
May gave him a tired look. “You say okay very easily for someone who is about to experience consequences.”
“I’m injured.”
“Yes,” May said. “That is why the consequences are waiting in the hallway with everyone else.”
Peter looked toward the door instinctively.
May followed his gaze. “Tony is here.”
Peter’s stomach twisted.
“He’s been here the whole time,” she said. “He is currently talking to doctors, Pepper, Rhodey, and possibly a hospital administrator who made the mistake of saying visiting policy in his direction.”
Peter closed his eyes briefly. “Is he mad?”
“Yes,” May said, without hesitation.
Peter opened his eyes again.
May’s expression gentled, but not enough to lie. “He’s mad. He’s scared. He looks like he’s trying to keep himself from becoming a weather event. But he is here, and he is not mad at you in the way you’re afraid of.”
Peter nodded, though he was not sure he believed that yet.
The door opened softly before May could say more.
Tony stood in the doorway.
He had changed out of the armor, but not out of the feeling of it. Everything about him looked held together too tightly: dark shirt, disastrous hair, eyes fixed on Peter like the rest of the room had gone out of focus. Pepper was visible behind him for a second, pale and composed in the frightening way she got when composure was the only thing between her and breaking. Rhodey stood farther down the hall, speaking quietly to someone Peter could not see.
Tony did not come in right away.
His gaze moved from Peter to May, then back again. He understood something from the way May held Peter’s hand, from the shape of the silence in the room. Peter watched guilt cross his face before he could hide it.
May did not let go of Peter. “He knows I know.”
Tony closed his eyes for a second.
When he opened them, he looked at May first. “Okay.”
“It is not okay,” May said.
Tony nodded. “No.”
“I am mad at him,” she said, “and I am going to be mad at you.”
“Also fair.”
“Do not agree with me too quickly. It makes me want to escalate.”
Tony’s mouth moved like he almost smiled and did not dare. “Understood.”
Peter would have laughed if his ribs were less committed to ruining his life.
May looked at Tony for a long moment, then said, “You can come here.”
The permission did something to him. Peter saw it in the way Tony’s shoulders dropped a fraction before he came to the other side of the bed. He stopped close enough to touch but did not reach immediately, not until his eyes asked May and then Peter. May’s expression did not soften, exactly, but she did not stop him.
Tony set two fingers lightly against Peter’s wrist, above the hospital bracelet, in the narrow stretch of skin that was not bruised.
“Hey,” he said.
Peter tried to answer and had to swallow first. “Hi.”
Tony looked him over with the same awful precision he used on damaged machines, except his face made it clear this was not a machine and that was the problem. “You scared the hell out of me.”
“Sorry.”
“Yeah, we’re retiring that word for the next hour. You’ve overused it.”
May made a small sound that might have been agreement.
Peter’s eyes started to drift shut, exhaustion pulling hard now that the worst of the conversation had moved into something he could survive. He forced them open again because there was something he needed to say. There had been something. Roof. Steve. Barnes. Tony. Kill him. Tell him I had to.
His pulse ticked upward.
Tony noticed immediately. “What?”
Peter’s mouth felt too dry. “Steve.”
Tony went completely still.
May’s hand tightened around his.
Peter tried to focus. “Later,” he whispered, because he could not do it now. He could not carry Tony’s face when he said it. Not yet. “Need to tell you. Later.”
Tony’s expression changed, fear and fury rising so fast it almost became a physical thing, but he swallowed it down with visible effort. His fingers stayed careful on Peter’s wrist.
“Later,” Tony said, though the word sounded like it cost him. “You sleep first.”
Peter nodded. His eyes closed despite him.
May’s hand was still in his. Tony’s fingers were warm against his wrist. They were both mad. They were both scared. Everyone was going to yell later. There would be questions and rules and probably Tony saying something inflammatory to a doctor. There would be Steve and Barnes and the message Peter did not want to deliver.
But May knew. May knew, and she was still there.
That was the last thought Peter managed to hold before sleep pulled him under again.