#spider webs on spider webs with a huge dead spider in the middle

[lilgynt]

super cleaned my bathroom and looks like a human space. god bless.

[yuriskies]

A fun element to Otherside Picnic vol 8 (spoilers ahead after the break, if you're still planning to read it) is an easter egg about the location of Toriko's apartment. Actually, "easter egg" might be underselling it a bit; it has a huge amount of thematic relevance to Toriko's character. So here's the easter egg: if you follow Sorawo's description of her path to Toriko's apartment, you can actually find the building on Google Maps.

The train arrived in Nippori. Pushed by the rush of people, I got off, went down the stairs, and out the gate. I climbed the hill, out of breath, in the unrelenting rain. The wall of a graveyard continued along the left-hand side. Turning onto a side street at the top of the hill, I could see Toriko’s apartment in the middle of a residential area ...the building uses an autolock system... Getting off on the fourth floor, I headed into the hallway. The town I could see over the chest-high wall was misty in the rain.

The fun thing about this is that Sorawo's narration is just specific enough to follow along. In a way, it's an invitation to the reader to imitate Sorawo. Prior to the events of the series, she spent time tracking down the sites of ghost stories from the minor details that leaked into their narration. Tracking down where the weirdness happened placed it in context; stories from the edge of reality seem more reliable when the reality can be charted.

So, let's do it. Sorawo mentions a graveyard wall - this can only be Yanaka Graveyard, located on the west side of Nippori Station. Yanaka is located on the former grounds of the Tenno-ji Buddhist temple, and is one of Tokyo's largest cemetaries by area. It is the resting site of the final Tokugawa Shogun, as well as a who's who of Meiji-era academics, literati, and government officials.

The road along the north edge of Yanaka Graveyard goes up a steep hill, and where it reaches the top, a side road splits off on the left to go into a residential area. Going into street view shows that all of the buildings along this road are only two or three stories tall, except for a building at the very back. It's four stories tall. The building has an auto lock system at the front door, and chest high walls along the hallways to the apartments. Bingo.

The fun part of this is the name of the apartment complex: 山口マンション (Yamaguchi [Mountain Gate] Mansion).

The first part of the thematic relevance here is its relationship to Satsuki's monologue about being brought into the Otherside.

"What happens to the people who don't return?" "Who knows? They probably die, right?" "Life and death aren't the issue. Once you get to that point, that is." My brow furrowed. "What do you think mountains are made of?" Satsuki asked, smiling. "Trees and stuff?" I said without putting much thought into it. When I thought of mountains, the image that came to mind for me was the mountains of my home prefecture, Akita, covered in green. "If trees were sapient, they wouldn't think of themselves as a mountain. Only as a single tree. It's the same concept. People who go into the mountains, regardless of their mental state, are still people. But the wind that blows through the trees. The rocks. The birds. Every speck of rock covering the bedrock. The beasts, hiding in their dens. The ancient mollusks, sleeping in a geologic fold. The morning dew in a spider's web. The bacteria and microorganisms in the soil, breaking down the body. None of these individual constituting elements is the mountain on its own, yet the mountain is made up of them. So it is for those called by the mountain. Living or dead." She raised her hand, pointing all five fingers at herself. "That is how it is for me." Uncurling her fingers, she pointed at me. "That is how it is for you."

This "mountain gate" connection also ties back to Sorawo's previous visit to Toriko's apartment in File 4, where she opened the door to the apartment and encountered the ultrablue void of the Otherside. Thematically, this places Toriko's apartment at the interface between the surface world and the Otherside. The back of the building also abuts Yanaka Graveyard, and so thematically, also forms an interface between life and death.

Sorawo touches on this latter theme in the back half of File 26, when Toriko forces herself on Sorawo in her parents' bedroom. Sorawo becomes profoundly uncomfortable - equally, if not more disturbed by her surroundings than Toriko's behavior. After relocating to Toriko's bedroom, Sorawo realizes the following:

This home was a grave, and Toriko the crypt keeper—that's the image that I was getting. The sudden feeling of resistance I'd felt when we were in the bedroom might have come from that mental association. Even if it weren't the place where her parents had once slept, it was almost like flirting in front of a Buddhist altar. After entering Toriko's room, I finally got it. This room has color. It's the room of a living person.

Toriko's bedroom forms a small bubble of life in an otherwise dead house. The interface between life and death isn't simply close to Toriko's living space, it is actively defined by it. This ties in closely to Toriko's character, given that she's admitted her pushiness to do relationship things in the Otherside is driven by a fear of loss. Her mothers suddenly died, and Satsuki suddenly vanished. All she has left of them is her cherished memories, and she wants to form those memories with Sorawo, just in case.

Another element in play here is Sorawo's relationship to the Otherside. At multiple points in the series, the Otherside seems to suddenly draw closer when Sorawo gets stressed out with her thoughts about her relationship with Toriko. The most obvious example is in the hot springs when the mannequins appear immediately after Sorawo feels backed into a corner with Toriko's "cute boobs" comment, but those fears are also linked to Hasshaku-sama (both times the entity appears as Sorawo contemplates jealousy and the possibility that Toriko will be taken from her), Satsuki's surface world appearance (Kozakura implying Sorawo is manifesting Satsuki through her jealous fixation), the the love hotel girls' party (the lion dancers appear as Sorawo is trying to avoid a romantic bath with Toriko), and Satsuki's appearance in vol 7 (when Sorawo is considering where she would be without Toriko). In a sense, the terrifying aspects of the Otherside to Sorawo are closely related to the terrifying aspects of a defined relationship with Toriko.

One puzzle piece in play is a conversation from vol 7, as Sorawo, Kozakura, and Toriko are figuring out their approach to exorcize Satsuki. They discuss the concept of "atmosphere" and its ability to transmit emotions, particularly fear, and explore ways to change that atmosphere. Toriko mentions that she's mostly heard ghost stories where sex changes the atmosphere. Sorawo then elaborates to a doubtful Kozakura with the following:

No, it's true. There's stories where they were in a real bad situation, but then they started saying all sorts of lewd things and they survived. I don't tend to say that ghosts are this way or that, but sex is the source of life, so that makes it the polar opposite of ghosts, which belong to the world of the dead... At least, there's that sort of reasoning. It's an idea that's been around since ancient times.

Sorawo also goes on to mention that in some situations, the atmosphere can be overwritten, but in others, these attempts only reinforce it more strongly.

The thing about ghost stories is that for all its other indiscretions, it's an elegant genre in strange ways. There's not a lot of bawdy stories in it. Maybe that's because if you're trying to scare someone, and then sexual elements get involved, it hurts the atmosphere. Anyway, I only brought up the sex stuff as an example of how the atmosphere can get changed. It's too weak to be her weakness. There's some real nasty ghost stories with sexual elements, and there are people who've had scary experiences at love hotels.

All of these concepts start to interweave with one another when the two relocate to Toriko's bedroom. Sorawo immediately notices a change in Toriko's demeanor.

Her expression looked uneasy, without composure. She wanted me, but also feared rejection. Despite the way she'd been breathing heavily through her nose as she led me here by the hand, now Toriko was just standing there awkwardly. As if once she'd dragged me into her room she didn't know what to do anymore. Maybe as we entered what remained of the domain of the living inside this house of the dead, Toriko had come back to life.

This scene firmly links Toriko's fear of the Otherside (death) to Sorawo's fear of the Otherside (relationships). In her moms' bedroom, Toriko had been demanding, frustrated, and angry - the malicious emotional states traditionally occupied by spirits in ghost stories! However, she settles down when she enters her own bedroom. For Sorawo, passing through this interface changes Toriko from an unknowable force who inspires fear into a very human entity with whom she can sit down and discuss the uncomfortable topic of sex. In turn, this allows Toriko to an explore an aspect of their relationship that she views as fundamentally life-affirming. After this scene their Othersides are no longer totally different, or inspire mind-numbing terror, but are now operating on a common logic.

The concept of an atmosphere comes up again just after their first try at sex. Toriko has finally found a turn-on for Sorawo, and Sorawo describes the feeling in the same analytical voice she uses for ghost stories.

Until mere moments ago, our nakedness had been no more than that. Just another awkward state of undress, like when we got in the bath. Not anymore. My nudity, and Toriko's, took on entirely new meaning. One little switch inside of me got flipped, and it caused a startlingly dramatic change in my perception. It was mystifying how, as that change occurred, it swallowed up the entire atmosphere of the scene, including Toriko. Stuff like this can happen... I thought in a daze. The room was dominated by my lust which had suddenly materialized. As it overlapped with Toriko's desire, the atmosphere inside the room became something kind of extraordinary.

Prior to their second go at sex, Sorawo and Toriko take a moment to talk over their last remaining fears about sex - using their Otherside-altered body parts on one another. They come to the mutual realization that they have both been afraid of harming one another, but not of being harmed by the other. This last discussion is important, because it totally diffuses their fears around sexuality prior to indulging it. So as they travel into the deepest reaches of the Otherside, they have total trust and intimacy with one another - and an absolute lack of fear relating to what the Otherside represents to them.

The color of the calm world was blue. As we whorled together, intertwining, the ultrablue abyss spread out endlessly beneath us. We didn't fear it. Because this was our place. No one was watching us. No one knew we were here. We were the only ones watching, and the only ones who knew. So the only things Toriko and I have to fear are each other.

"Was it just me who wasn't that scared?" "Nah, it was the same for me. Everything around us was blue, but it wasn't scary." "I wonder why?" "I dunno, maybe because we were on the side that scared people?" Toriko got a mystified look on her face when I said that. "The side that scared people? You mean the Otherside's side?" "We weren't human anymore, were we, Toriko? When we were there." "...Yeah." Toriko suddenly moved closer to me and chomped down on my ear.

So to bring this full circle, this is why I love this particular easter egg, and Otherside Picnic in general. The setting is treated as an important aspect of the story, and it is carefully chosen for its emotional content and thematic relevance. Toriko's apartment isn't just some random place in an upscale neighborhood of Tokyo. It's a fundamental part of who Toriko is as a person. It's a location that lends a huge amount of thematic subtext to Otherside Picnic as a relationship story, and to the reader's interpretation of the Otherside.

Is it a metaphor for death? For queerness? For our ability to truly bridge the gap in understanding between self and non-self? The reader is invited to imitate Sorawo, and in doing so, finds a treasure trove of understanding. The little rush of discovery shows us what keeps Sorawo interested in exploring a totally alien world and trying to understand its workings.

Miyazawa's writing actively rewards readers for engaging with every little bit of the story, and it really tickles the analytical part of my brain.

[mimilind]

Sent to Middle-earth - Part 1

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Pairing: Legolas x Reader

Rating: T

Chapter Word Count: 2700

Parts: [ Next Part > ] [ Masterlist ]

Full story: [ AO3 ]

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1. Spider’s Web

The huge spider took another step towards you. You tried to back away, but there was a tree behind you, and you could get no further. Trapped.

A hairy foot crushed the basket of bilberries you had worked so hard to gather. As you stared into the monster’s multiple eyes, helplessly awaiting your death, you cursed the magician for sending you here – and not for the first time. Middle-earth was not a cozy, romantic world with exciting adventures around each corner, and where everyone was a badass fighter. It was dark and dangerous, you were still your normal, non-warrior self, and you hated being here.

“Go away,” you told the spider in your broken Sindarin, the language your new family had taught you. 

It did not reply, and instead came closer. Its stench filled your nostrils, making you dizzy, and you could not look away from its black, dead eyes. In a last effort to protect yourself, you covered your face with your cloak.

It did not help. You felt a sharp sting through the stout wool and straight into your belly. As the poison spread through your veins, your body went limp. 

Still awake, but unable to move or even speak, you were dragged up on the spider’s web. It swiftly spun you around, covering you head to toe in sticky silk. Instead of devouring you directly, it left you hanging there like a big burrito, perhaps wanting to wait until you were dead. 

When you were alone, you felt utterly miserable. Your stay in Middle-earth had been no picnic so far, but this topped the list as your worst experience. And likely your last one, too.

Why had you ever gone into that stupid box? 

But it had been a funfair, and he was not a real magician – or so you had thought – and you had played along. After entering his vanishing box, you had said where you wanted to be sent (Middle-earth, of course!), and the next thing you knew, you stood in a dark forest outside a cabin, with an elf family staring at you like you had popped into existence right before their eyes. This, you later learned, was exactly what had happened.

That was over a year ago now, and still you had no idea how it had been possible, or if you could ever return home. If you became spider-food now, would you wake up in your own world again?

There was a rustle above you. The spider returning? You tried to see, but your eyes were partly covered, and you could only perceive vague shapes.

You heard a twang, a shrill screech, and then something big and dark fell past you, hitting the ground with a soft squelch.

“Got it.” The voice was strong and melodious; an elf voice, but none you recognized.

“Well done,” said another. “Now let us destroy these eggs.”

“We continue tracking its partner, and you catch up with us when you are finished.” The third voice sounded further away.

Whoever the elves were, they had not seen you. You tried to call out, but your mouth was full of sticky web.

“Mpff! Mph!”

“Did you hear something?”

“Up there. It has caught someone.”

You felt the web tremble and heard the voices mutter and grumble as they tried to avoid getting caught in it while cutting you loose. And then you fell, crashing down, hip first. The impact would probably have been painful, but the spider poison had made you numb, and you felt nothing.

“Sorry about that. It was the only way to get you down,” said the first voice kindly, as its owner began to peel away the cocoon from around you. When your face was freed, you could see him clearly. It was a male elf – an ellon, as they were called – with an unusual golden blonde hair color. He wore a hunter’s green tunic, and a quiver of arrows strapped across his chest. Could it be…?

“I am Legolas of the woodland guard. Who are you, and why does a human walk alone in these woods?” 

Legolas. The elf you had loved since the first time you saw him on screen, in the first Lord of the Rings movie, when he walked into Rivendell and curiously looked around. The movies had got his appearance slightly right, but even in his youth, Orlando Bloom had never been as handsome as this elf. You felt your heart beat faster.

The poison made you unable to move your lips and tongue, and your speech came out unintelligible. “I ah ooh…”

“Did the spider sting you?” Another elf came into view; this one had dark hair. 

“How unfortunate,” said Legolas. “And your hip is swelling up. I hope the fall has not broken it.”

“So, what do we do? The rest of the company is already far ahead.”

“We have to go to the camp.” He turned back to you. “Don’t worry. We are going to treat the sting wound and clean out any remaining poison. When your speech returns, you can tell us where you live, and we will help you return there.”

You blinked your eyes and made another noise, hoping it sounded grateful. These elves had saved your life.

Legolas picked you up as if you weighed nothing, and carried you in his arms along a nearly invisible path, closely followed by his friend. You felt your face heat up, starstruck to be this close to your idol, and you were almost grateful the poison made you unable to speak – for you suspected whatever you said right now, would be incredibly stupid. 

After a long walk, you came to a glade with a fireplace in its center, surrounded by a couple of tents in the same green color as the elves' clothes. Legolas carried you into one, and placed you on a blanket. He took off your cloak and folded it into a thick roll, placing it under your head as a pillow.

Then he called to his friend outside: “Can you go after the others, explaining my absence, and ask Niphredil to come back here? Meanwhile, I will do what I can, but I am no healer.”

The elf agreed, and was gone. 

“I have to cut this off, to find where you were stung. The sooner I can wash off the poison, the sooner you will get your mobility back.” Legolas looked apologetic as he ruined your outer garment, but you did not mind. The elvish family who found you all those months ago had given you clothes more suitable for this world, and you were sure they would understand. They were kind people, and you hoped they were not too worried that you had not returned home yet.

In only your undershirt you felt a bit embarrassed, and it seemed Legolas was not entirely comfortable either when he found where the wound was. He folded the hem up and exposed your stomach. Looking down, you saw the ugly mark from the spider’s stinger and felt nauseous; it was round and even, and as large as a coin. A black, oily mess covered the area, mingling with your blood, which seeped out in a sluggish trickle.

“The poison holds the bleeding back, but if I leave it there it will keep leaking into you and prolong your immobility, and possibly do some lasting damage to your nerves as well. I have to get it off, and then quickly bandage the wound. It should be painless, but with the poison gone, your sensations will slowly return. I hope the healer will have come by then; she knows better what to do about the pain.”

He soaked a cloth in something herbal-smelling, and washed the area carefully. As soon as the black filth was gone, fresh, crimson blood welled out of the hole. Legolas was ready with a wad of linen and pressed it firmly against the stinger mark, winding a long bandage around your waist to keep it in place.

Next, he checked on your hip. As he gently prodded the swelling, you felt a numb ache. 

“Ahh…”

“Does it hurt?” he looked worriedly at you.

“Little,” you managed to get out.

“I’m glad your speech is returning. I had better check this before your senses return entirely; it will probably be less painful if I do it now. May I?”

“Yeshh,” you slurred.

“I, uh, have to roll down your hose a bit.” He blushed.

“Yeshh,” you assured him. Of course he could not know you were from a world where showing one’s leg was not a big deal, especially not for medical reasons. 

Legolas fumbled a while with your hose strings; apparently he was not used to the kind of knot you had tied them with. 

Hose were interesting garments, worn by both men and women around here. They resembled a pair of very long socks, though not as elastic; reaching from the toe all the way to the crotch. Unlike pants, they were not sewn together, and tied to an underbelt to stop them from sliding down. Underneath the hose, you wore linen underwear, looking a bit like large, baggy boxer shorts – these too unisex.

Legolas had finally loosened your hose, and uncovered the leg which had hit the ground first. Your hip and upper part of the thigh had gone dark and looked twice as thick as normal. He felt along the bone, and the ache returned, a bit stronger now. You grunted.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. 

“‘S alright.”

“It could be broken, but it’s not easy to feel.” He sighed.

As he started to roll the hose back up, you stopped him. “No. Leave… Swell. Hurt.” The pain was steadily growing worse now, a sharp throbbing with each heartbeat.

“Of course.” He covered you with a blanket instead. “How are you feeling?”

“It hurts,” you said. 

“Niphredil should be back soon. She can give you something to drink. It tastes horrible, but it will take away some of the pain.”

You nodded. Your sensations had returned to your arms and hands now, and you experimentally wiggled your fingers.

“What were you doing alone in the forest?” He took on a somewhat stern tone, and you remembered the Elvenking did not take lightly to strangers roaming Mirkwood. Legolas probably helped his father guard the borders.

“I was gathering berries, but strayed too far from the others, and lost my way… I called back to them, but then the spider came.” You looked at him apologetically.

“Humans are not allowed in this land.” He frowned.

“I know, but… They took me in. A family of elves.” You described how you had been sent here by magic, but on purpose kept most of the details out. It was too hard to explain how different your world was; it was easier to make it sound like you were from another part of this world.

Legolas looked a bit skeptical, but to your relief he did not question you further.

Not long afterwards the rest of the elf company returned, and their healer took over your care. Like Legolas had predicted, she gave you a bitter draught for the pain, but it actually did help a little and also made you drowsy. Soon you were fast asleep.

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In the morning, the healer returned to check on you. When she removed the bandage from your stomach, she drew in a sharp, surprised breath. “It’s almost healed!” 

You looked down, and your eyes popped open. She was right. The hole was nearly gone, and had scabbed nicely. It still hurt, but much less. Uncovering your thigh, you saw that the swelling was down, and it was less dark in color, but when you tried to move your leg a searing pain shot up.

“Keep it still. The hip bone is broken,” said Niphredil. “But it still surprises me how much better it looks. If you were an elf, it would have been expected, but for a human to heal this fast… I have never seen that before.” 

Legolas came inside the tent, and heard the last part. He too examined your wounds, looking very puzzled. “Are you an elf?” he asked. “You don’t entirely look like one, but with a stamina like this, you must be.”

“Maybe the magical box did it?” you pondered. You actually had noticed some differences in yourself the past year. You were physically stronger and had more energy than before, and slept a lot less – you had accounted it to your wholesome lifestyle with lots of fresh air, healthy food and exercise – but what if your transport here had changed your body somehow? It was no less strange than you coming here in the first place.

Legolas seemed intrigued that someone could change from a human into an apparently immortal person, and resumed his questioning about your arrival here. This time, you told him more than before – the truth about where you came from. 

“So this is why you speak with an accent. If you had been from Gondor like you said at first, you would have learned Sindarin at an early age.” 

“Sorry.” The accent embarrassed you, and there were still many Sindarin words you did not know.

“Don’t be. I like your accent.” He smiled, and you felt your cheeks heat pleasantly.

Strangely, your being sent through time and space did not surprise Legolas as much as you had thought, and instead he seemed mostly curious about you and your world. But then, this was Middle-earth. Here were fire-breathing dragons and rings of power, giants who turned into stone in sunshine, talking spiders and cursed swords; here they used to have trees and lamps instead of a sun and moon, and one of the stars was a guy in a boat sailing across the sky. Magic was normal here. 

All through the day and well into the night you talked, telling Legolas all he wanted to know about the future. You only hid one thing from him: that Middle-earth and all its characters were fictive – including him. That was just too weird. I mean, how do you tell someone they are the figment of a 20th century author’s imagination?

Besides, you were beginning to suspect this was not made up. Everything felt real, and looked real. What if Tolkien too had been transported to Middle-earth, and only wrote what he had seen? It was a curious thought, and you wanted to ponder over it more before you said or did anything stupid.

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The following day, the elves had planned to return to the palace, and to your delight Legolas asked if you wanted to come; both because he wished to question you more, and so the healer could make sure your leg healed properly. If you agreed, he would send a messenger to the elf family where you lived and explain the situation.

“I would love to see the palace,” you said.

“Good, that’s settled then. I should make it up to you for breaking your hip.”

“Don’t say that!” you objected. “You saved my life. Had you not come, I would have become spider food.” The thought made you shudder.

“I should have cut you down more carefully. One of us ought to have stood below, catching you.”

“I’m just grateful to be alive. Think no more of it,” you assured him.

Legolas lent you one of his tunics instead of the garment he had been obliged to cut when examining you, and when you had put it on, your nostrils filled with his pleasant smell. 

The elves had made a pair of crutches for you, and though your hip still hurt, you found it worked fairly well to limp along with them. Legolas adjusted his pace and walked slowly beside you, telling you about the places you went past. Despite the increasing darkness, there was some beauty left in Mirkwood.

You listened, and tried not to gaze at his attractive face too much. Before, you had loved your imagined version of him from the movies and books, but here he was real – and greatly surpassing your imagination! His kindness towards you had only made you like him more.

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Parts: [ Next Part > ] [ Masterlist ]

Full story: [ AO3 ]

[lady-of-imladris]

CHAPTER 8 - I VOWED NOT TO FIGHT ANYMORE

Synopsis: Thranduil and his wife do not like sharing their forest. But when they investigate, their findings are much worse than what they could ever have imagined. The King and Queen prepare for war.

Word count: 4k

Pairings: Thranduil/OC

Warnings: violence, murder

Additional tags: SMUT

Link to the chapter overview

Always remember Uh-huh, the burning embers I vowed not to fight anymore If we survived the Great War - The Great War (Taylor Swift)

Their measures to keep the forest free from spiders seemed to be working. No one had seen a spider in many months. The forest itself, however, was still decaying, leaves blackening, creating an everlasting darkness and a foul stench throughout most of the forest. The light of the elves seemed to be enough to keep the area around their halls clear of the spreading corruption. Thranduil had learned to control his anger. True to his word, he never threatened his wife again, but he could feel it. He could feel the forest slowly darkening, trying to touch his heart and turn him into something twisted and evil.

While the King and Queen had once taken long walks in the forest regularly and Legolas had been climbing trees before he had learned how to walk, Thranduil now avoided the forest. He rarely left his halls, and when he did, he made sure to be wary of any negative feelings he experienced afterwards. Queen Anarríma took a more scientific approach, her view of their situation was that if she understood it better, she might be able to fix it, or at least slow it. One of the first things she discovered was that Thranduil’s mood seemed to be better if he bathed immediately after coming back from the forest.

Her experiments led her into the darkest corners of the forest, venturing further south. It was there, that she discovered them, huge webs, woven by spiders of unprecedented size. Anarríma kept to the trees on her expeditions, so when she heard the stomping footsteps of several individuals, she quickly crawled up as high as she could while still being able to see the ground clearly. But what she saw made all colour drain from her face. Orcs. A scouting party. She had assumed that all orcs were dead, killed by the armies of the last alliance. Anarríma almost screamed out loud when a huge black mass suddenly descended on the group of five.

The spider was bigger than Thranduil’s elk, with massive fangs and more eyes than any creature should reasonably possess. Could it be that it was Ungoliant herself? It killed the orcs quickly, quietly and efficiently. More spiders appeared, gorging themselves on the flesh of the dead orcs. Anarríma pondered where they might be coming from. What wretched place in the south of their forest could be their home? Dol Guldur. Amon Lanc. The mountain had been abandoned by Oropher, Thranduil’s father. What if the orcs, the spiders, or maybe even worse lived there now?

Thranduil was relieved when his wife came home, but when she immediately ordered a war council, before even taking her armour off, he was worried beyond reason. Their small circle of advisors arrived quickly, and the Queen told them of what she had seen in the forest. Scouting parties were chosen, favouring stealth over numbers, letters were written to Imladris and Lothlorien and Gondor, informing them of the situation and asking if orcs had shown themselves in Celeborn and Galadriel’s realm, or the ruins of Mordor. Queen Anarríma desired to join the scouting party herself, but Thranduil protested vehemently. This time, she saw reason. She had been in the forest for too long and she could feel it affecting her mood already. Countermeasures were in order.

The advisors and soldiers departed in the middle of the night, having received their orders to keep this development a secret. Thranduil reached for his wife’s hand, leading her to the bathroom. One by one, he stripped her of her weapons. He lovingly removed every piece of armour, then her boots, her jacket, her shirt, her pants, her underwear, until she was completely bare. One thing Anarríma loved about her husband was that no matter how often he had seen her naked, he always looked at her as if he saw her for the first time. She lowered herself into the water, fully submerging herself for several minutes. The relief was immediate.

She felt at peace when she finally rose to the surface again, a deep, content sigh leaving her as she looked over at Thranduil, who was sitting at the edge of the pool, already undressed, bottles of shampoo and soaps and a washcloth next to him. She approached him slowly and he lowered himself into the water. “Are you alright?” he asked, wrapping his arms around her shoulders. Ana nodded. She felt so much better already. She straddled his lap as he washed her hair, paying attention to every single strand. The Queen got drowsy as his skilled hands massaged her scalp and slowly lathered up her entire body. Thranduil rinsed her hair thoroughly, letting go of her only to wash himself.

Anarríma smiled contently, lost deeply in her thoughts. “What is it, meleth nin?” Thranduil asked. “When we bathe together, I am always reminded of the first night we spent together, how much simpler things were back then.” Thranduil chuckled as she reminded him of that night. “If you wish, we can re-enact it,” he suggested smugly. The Queen splashed his face with water. “You’re incorrigible.” “That was not a no.” Anarríma giggled and jumped into his arms, wrapping her legs around his waist. “I believe, my king,” she remarked, “that you carried me to bed that night.” Thranduil leaned in close, making her feel his hot breath on her neck. “I don’t think I have the patience for that tonight.”

Unceremoniously, he set her down on the edge of the pool, draping her long legs over his shoulders as he kissed his way up her thighs. Anarríma exclaimed his name in shock, threading her fingers into his hair, grabbing onto him for support. She could feel him moan against her, reacting to the way she pulled his hair. The torturous pleasure he was subjecting her to seemed different that day, somehow more urgent, more desperate. “I need you,” the King groaned, his head emerging from between her legs to take a quick breath, immediately returning his attention to pleasuring his Queen. “You have me,” she gasped, digging her heels into his back.

“More,” he grunted amidst his ministrations, digging his nails into her hip, holding her in place, easing in two of his long fingers, making the Queen cry out in pleasure. He could tell she was close by the way her thighs were shaking and her back was arching backwards. He ought to leave her like this, he thought, but quickly tossed the thought aside at the feeling of her hands tugging so firmly on his wet hair. “My King,” she moaned, “I am so close, my King.” A final swipe of his tongue against her sensitive clit sent her over the edge, panting and moaning as she let herself fall back onto the floor, overcome with pleasure.

Thranduil emerged from the water, sitting down next to her, his back against the wall. He dragged her onto his lap, lovingly caressing her face, kissing her cheek, murmuring words of praise in her ear as she sank down on his hard cock. She still felt so raw from her first orgasm that it made her whimper. “That’s it, you’re doing so good for me, my darling,” he whispered, the roughness of his hands on her hips a stark contrast to the softness of his voice. The Queen buried her head in the crook of his neck, placing soft kisses all over. Thranduil took control, as always, even when he was not on top, using his strong grip on Anarríma to move her up and down slowly.

They spent what felt like hours, and yet, too short, wrapped in each other’s arms, their joined movements so deliberately slow and so desperate to be close to each other. Their moans grew louder and the King let one of his hands wander between their bodies to increase his wife’s pleasure. He could feel how close she was, how close he was. Thranduil knew that he couldn’t hold back any longer. He began thrusting harder, more quickly, grunting more loudly and when his wife screamed out in ecstasy, he came with a loud moan, pushing her down firmly on his cock, holding her still as he spilled his seed inside her.

Anarríma laid her head on Thranduil’s chest, completely and utterly exhausted from their hours of lovemaking. He had ended up carrying her to bed after all. The sun was already rising, returning them to the reality of their lives and the inevitable threat that lingered outside. “Thranduil?” she whispered. “Hmmm?” came the half-asleep king’s response. “Legolas needs to learn how to fight. To defend himself. It may be necessary before long.” Thranduil sat up with a groan, leaning against the headboard, Ana’s head resting on his thigh. “Ana, I don’t want this,” the King admitted after a pause, his voice quivering just slightly, almost unnoticeable, but she knew him. The Queen sat up slowly, leaning in even closer to her husband, her fingers ghosting over the left side of his face.

“I know.” She sighed deeply “But I’m afraid we don’t have another choice.” Thranduil let his head fall back in despair, knowing that their situation was getting dire. “We will kill them all. I will destroy every single orc there is left and every spider that crosses my path. Our son will never need to fight a day in his life.” He really meant those words, Ana knew it. But could they manage it? She had been thorough in her attempt to destroy the spiders, and all she had done was make it worse. “And if we can’t?” Her voice was unsteady, shaking with a fear instilled into her by centuries of war. Gondolin. Her earliest childhood memories. She did not want Legolas’ life to be so dark. Thranduil sighed deeply. “If we fail, I will train him myself. He will become the best warrior this kingdom has ever seen.”

Reluctantly, the King and Queen rose to face the day. Thranduil went to the throne room, he was holding audiences today. Anarríma went to Legolas, attempting to wake him up. “Nana I don’t wanna be awake!” he protested. The Queen smirked mischievously and let herself fall into her son’s bed dramatically, wrapping her arms around him. “You’re right,” she yawned. Just as she was about to drift off, a knock on the door jerked her awake. “What is it?” she groaned. The door opened, revealing Galion, Thranduil’s butler. “Pardon the intrusion, my Queen. Your Highness. His majesty requested I tell you that it is unfair that you should get to sleep when he has to sit on his uncomfortable throne all day, without even having eaten breakfast.”

Ana sat up. “Thranduil sent you here to wake me up?” “Yes, my Queen.” She grimaced. “Little Leaf,” she addressed her son, “I think Galion would like to have a pillow fight.” Legolas was wide awake all of a sudden, grabbing pillows twice his size and throwing them in the butler’s general direction. The Queen herself also grabbed a pillow, threatening Galion playfully. “Please don’t kill the messenger, my Queen, I beg mercy!” he exclaimed, dramatically sinking to his knees. Anarríma grabbed Legolas and lifted him onto her shoulders. “Let’s go find Ada and bring the poor starving king some breakfast.”

The Queen sneaking into the kitchen in her nightgown to make some breakfast used to be a frequent occasion in the first years she spent in Lasgalen. These days, she rarely did. She and Legolas had a quick breakfast before grabbing the tray set aside for the king and making their way towards the throne room. The guards did a double take when they saw their Queen, dressed in her nightgown, Prince Legolas on her shoulders, the King’s breakfast in her hands. One glance from her and they quickly remembered themselves, opening the doors. “Her Majesty, Queen Anarríma of Lasgalen, Lady of the Woodland Realm and His Highness Crown Prince Legolas.” Ana watched Thranduil’s eyes shoot open when he saw her.

Legolas ran towards his father, climbing his throne at remarkable speed and throwing his arms around Thranduil’s neck. “Ada!” he shouted excitedly. “We brought you breakfast.” “Yes, I can see that, Little Leaf,” Thranduil chuckled, gently ruffling his son’s hair. He took mostly after him with his bright blond hair, it was just a hint darker, shining golden in the sunlight. He got that from Ana. His Queen approached the throne, setting down the tray on a small table to the side before kissing Thranduil on the cheek. It seemed like a sweet gesture, but Thranduil clearly felt that it was meant to say ‘You bastard had Galion wake me up.’

Audiences appeared to go less smoothly that day, many people said. The King seemed somehow distracted and the Queen must have been feeling under the weather, as she was wrapped firmly in King Thranduil’s robes and she was clinging to her husband all morning, as if she would freeze to death if she moved only an inch away from him. The truth was she needed him. Few others knew that she had encountered a band of orcs, and even fewer knew how much it had upset her. Thranduil could feel it. He didn’t say anything but he could tell by the way she was trembling ever so slightly, barely even noticeable if she hadn’t been so close to him. It was at that moment that he decided his Queen should never have to face an orc again for the rest of all eternity.

The scouting party returned late. Ana had been anxious all day. While she had gotten dressed sometime in the morning, she was still wearing one of Thranduil’s robes on top, the hem trailing after her as she was pacing restlessly. They held a council in Thranduil’s study and the King and Queen’s worst fears were confirmed. Dol Guldur, the abandoned remains of Amon Lanc, former home of the Sindarin and Silvan elves, was swarming with orcs. But that wasn’t all. They had brought a prisoner, except it was not an orc, but an elf. “Why is he in chains?” The King demanded to know immediately and the other soldiers reluctantly followed his order. He had been wounded by a being of darkness. A shadow in the shape of a man, they described it.

The Queen approached the restrained soldier cautiously while the others relayed their tale to the king. His skin was grey, she realized horrified. The soldier’s blood had turned from red to black. “I cannot feel his fëa anymore,” she murmured. The elven soldier had turned into something straight out of a nightmare. The soldier who was speaking turned to her instead. “Hiril nin,” he addressed her, fear and despair apparent in his voice, “when the blade struck him, it was only a matter of minutes. We cleaned the wound and bandaged it to the best of our abilities while we made our retreat, but even after the bleeding stopped, we could feel him slip away.”

“Can he understand us?” the Queen wondered out loud, trying to get the soldier to look up at her. When he finally did, she stumbled backwards. Thranduil caught her, steadying her with an arm around the waist. “After his fëa was separated from his body, he transformed,” the soldier continued, “we saw his blood change from red to black, his eyes changed. If I didn’t know who he was, I would not be able to tell anymore.” Orc. That’s what he was now. Not elven. Not anymore. Maybe even dead. Was he in the Halls of Mandos now? Was he still in there somewhere? Was he still immortal? Would he go to the Halls of Mandos if he died? Anarríma’s thoughts were racing. Thranduil did not appear to be in a better condition.

“Bring him to a cell,” Thranduil ordered quietly. “Speak of this to no one. Rest now, all of you. We will reconvene tomorrow.” Ana felt his hand grip her arm hard. Not an act of violence, but one of fear. The King was about to lose his calm demeanor and he was trying to somehow keep it together until the soldiers were gone. The door closed. “How is this possible,” Thranduil whispered. “The shadow, what is it? What does it want from us?” Ana wrestled herself out of Thranduil’s firm grasp, hastening over to his desk. The ink dripped onto the page as she struggled to find the right words. When they came to her, she wrote at lightning speed, her usually elegant handwriting now only legible to people who knew it well enough. She copied the letter, sealing both copies with wax and handing them off to a servant she stopped in the hall.

When she was finished, Thranduil was still standing in the middle of the room, staring blankly at the wall, his eyes darting from side to side, muttering words under his breath. Anarríma walked towards him slowly, approaching him like a startled animal. “Thranduil?” She reached for his arm, gently taking it into her hands and leading him over to the desk, pushing him down into his chair, letting him pull her down with him, landing on his lap. “What did you do?” He motioned towards the remaining evidence of her letter-writing. “I sent a letter to Ada. And to Elrond. They need to know. Maybe they can help.” Thranduil merely nodded before burying his head against Ana’s chest.

“How did this happen, Ana?” he whispered shakily, “did we not do everything we could?” The Queen was stroking his soft hair gently, taken aback by Thranduil’s rare display of sadness over rage. She had expected him to throw glasses against walls, letting them shatter into thousands of pieces, to leave the palace immediately and return hours later, covered in dirt and sweat and blood. This was somehow worse. She felt somehow even more powerless as she felt his tears soak her dress, muffled sobs making their way to her ears. “We have to kill him,” she suddenly found herself saying out loud.

“I know,” came the whispered response. Their situation was hopeless. “It would be cruel to make his family see him like this,” the Queen continued. “He was killed by a spider, somewhere out in the woods. The others never found his body.” Thranduil looked up at her. Rarely had he ever seen his wife look so cold. So determined. “He was killed by a spider. They never found his body,” he agreed. “We can’t wait for Elrond to come and take a look at him. A fëa can’t be brought back. It would be cruel-,” she hesitated. Thranduil nodded thoughtfully. “It would be cruel to prolong his suffering,” he agreed. The King watched in horror as his wife pushed him away and stood up, straightening the long white skirts of her dress.

“Ana you don’t have to-” “Yes, I do.” He stood up, racing after her, but she shut the door in his face, turning the key once, twice, three times. “Ana, open the door,” she winced as his fist connected with the wood, pounding relentlessly. It would not stop him for long. “Please Thranduil,” she pleaded with him. “Please don’t do this to yourself. Stay here, I will come back right after.” She heard him calling after her as she slowly walked down the corridor. The King could scream as loudly as he wanted to, their chambers were soundproof. No one would hear him. He sank to the floor in misery, letting the tears fall freely down his cheeks.

Anarríma was shaking, her heartbeat too fast, her breathing too unnatural. She steadied herself as she made her way into the dungeon, clutching the small bow she had picked up on her way down more tightly. “Dismissed.” The dungeon guards only gave her a nod and left. They knew what she had come to do. They knew that not a word of this could ever leave their mouths. Her eyes adjusted quickly to the darkness as she made her way towards one of the only occupied cells. There were not many prisoners in Lasgalen. Mostly Noldorin elves imprisoned by Thranduil’s father for kinslaying. Those who had fought in the Dagor Dagorlad had been pardoned. The others would face a long eternity behind bars.

The light of a torch illuminated the former elf’s twisted face. Anarríma searched desperately for something familiar, something that would tell her that she was wrong about this. But she found nothing but contempt for her. “I’m sorry I failed you,” she whispered to the prisoner. “You know what I must do. You know there is no other way. I am so sorry.” Ana had hoped to at least see some form of recognition in his eyes. But he didn’t even look scared as she aimed an arrow at his throat. She felt tears sting her eyes as she released the bowstring. He dropped to the floor with a loud thud, dead before he even hit the ground. “Hiro hon hîdh ab 'wanath [may he find peace after death],” she whispered, turning around to return to their quarters.

As she passed Legolas’ chambers she heard muffled sobs. Immediately, she opened the door and found her son in the far corner of his room, wrapped up in a blanket, crying softly. “Little Leaf? What happened?” She approached him slowly, sitting down on the floor next to him. “Nana, you got hurt!” He must have had a nightmare. “I am alright, Little Leaf, it was just a bad dream.” She picked him up gently, carrying him back to his bed. “But I saw it, Nana,” Legolas insisted weakly. “Ada hurt you.” What on Arda had he seen? “Ada did not hurt me, Little Leaf,” she reassured him. ‘But he will if I don’t let him out soon,’ she added silently. “Ada would never hurt me.”

A lie. But a necessary one. She kissed his cheek softly. “Sleep, ion-nin. I love you.” Legolas drifted off slowly. Ana waited until she was certain he would not wake up again and returned to her and Thranduil’s chambers. Thranduil was not banging on the door anymore. He had forced the door open. She peaked inside his study carefully. He was sitting at his desk, writing something down. “Is it done?” He did not look at her. She was glad. “Yes.” Thranduil put down the quill and looked up at her. “I am giving a speech tomorrow. The army needs to be ready. We strike immediately if reinforcement from Imladris and Lothlorien comes. If not, we must do it anyway.”

Anarríma nodded. “I will think up some different strategies, think over some numbers, prepare my armour and weapons.” Thranduil stared her down. “You will not fight. I do not allow it. You must remain here. With our son.” She raised her eyebrows at him. “I assume you will be leading the attack?” He affirmed. “Thranduil, do you not remember the last time you told me to stay-” “Says the person who just locked me in!” He shouted angrily. She stumbled backwards. Thranduil’s outburst had only been a matter of time, but she was still caught off guard. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. He huffed a laugh. “Me too.” “I will fight beside you,” she stated plainly, approaching her husband, carefully wiping away the tears on his cheeks. Thranduil leaned into her touch, wrapping his arm around her waist, pulling her in for a long kiss. “You will fight beside me,” he agreed, “and we will kill them all.”

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[scatteredthoughts2]

SAMPSON AND THE STORMY NIGHT.

I came upon the house

In the middle of a storm,

And I wanted shelter from the night;

In someplace dry and warm.

I entered through a creaking door,

To a hall that once was grand,

But at first I didn't notice this;

There was more pressing things to hand.

I was wet and cold and shivering,

And what hope I had was dwindling,

When I went into this drawing room,

And the grate was set with kindling.

I put a match to crinkling paper,

And soon the flames were burning high,

I took off my wet clothing,

And I hung it up to dry.

The wind was howling through the house,

The groaning shutters hung askew,

When I thought I heard the long dead voice,

Of someone I once knew.

But t'was surely my head playing tricks;

My imagination running wild,

And my heart was thumping in my chest,

And I was cringing like a child.

Then suddenly the wind stood still,

And the night was hushed and dead,

The silence was so profound and deep,

I heard the spiders spinning webs.

Then came a crashing from above,

And I cowered in despair,

As footsteps came a pounding,

Racing down the stairs.

I wanted to get up and flee,

But my clothes were on the floor,

So I tried to save my dignity,

And I hid behind the door.

I was filled with fear and horror,

When what burst into the room,

But the biggest Irish wolfhound,

And I was sure I'd met my doom.

He had paws the size of saucepans,

Drooling fangs in his huge mouth,

And a head so vile and fearsome,

And a snotty, dripping snout.

He stood there looking round him,

I was sure that this was it,

He would eat me without relish,

And not leave a little bit.

Then he saw me hiding behind the door,

I was weak as weak could be,

And I fell down upon the floor,

Then he started licking me.

I struggled to my feet,

And he put his paws up on my shoulders,

He was towering over me,

And his paws felt like two boulders.

His tail was wagging fiercely,

And his eyes were warm and bright,

And his barking truly pierced me,

But t'was barks of pure delight.

We sat down beside the fire,

In the warm glow of the flames,

And I tried to find out who he was,

By trying different names.

And when I called him Sampson,

His ears pricked upon his head,

And then we both fell fast asleep,

And we slept just like the dead.

When we woke the storm was over,

And my clothes were aired and dried,

And I went happily along my way,

With Sampson by my side.

@Ambrose Harte

@Scattered Thoughts

[a-mag-a-day]

MAG 56 - back to apple cutting!

"Perhaps I just got the smell of them." - Already super Hunt-y.

"There’s a sharpness to them. They’re hunters. But over the years I’ve become a hunter as well and maybe predators recognize each other." - I'm actually pretty sure they do. Just because an animal is a predator doesn't mean the are on top of the food chain. Cats for example are predators but stand in the middle of the food chain. They have to be wary of other bigger predators in order to not to become prey themselves.

"The hunt is a purpose. It’s not just a way to get through the day, it’s a reason for there to be a day at all." - Already foreshadowing that fledgling Avatars have to feed their "god" or it will feed on them.

"I couldn’t focus, couldn’t do anything, so I hit him again. Hard. In the head. And then he was quiet" - Thank you, Jonny, for not taking head injuries lightly! I hate that in movies. People hitting others on the head, sometimes even more than once and the victim seems fine except for a concussion. You are very likely dead after those hits I've seen in movies. And then you get people doing this in real life and go surprised Pikachu face when they find out, that they actually killed them.

11:37 "Because that’s what I thought it was, you know.", right after "you know" strange whistling sound in the background.

"Vampires were what lurked in the dark. The only thing that lurked in the dark." - I did very much appreciate this in Dog Soldiers. Oftentimes in monster movies there's only this one type of monster and everything else is still fiction. In Dog Soldiers there's actually the question raised, if werewolves exist what else is out there. On the opposite it reminds me a bit of Special Unit 2, a TV series. The boss of SU2 explains to the newbie "Everything's real! Dragons, gnomes, spider people… Except for vampires. They are pure fiction. Don't know what idiot came up with that idea!" XD Laughed so hard.

"when she locked eyes with me, and the weirdest sensation began to flow through me. I wanted to leave." / "I’ve been sober for three years at that point but I felt like I desperately wanted to get high, and I knew that the best place to get some was out in the night." - Web/addiction connection!

"Looking back I think it might have been my own mind rationalizing the way I felt my will being tugged out of the room, but it was still very powerful. If I hadn’t had a lifetime’s experience identifying and fighting off the effect of the vampire’s gaze I probably would have done it too. But I did, so I stood my ground." - Ok this is remarkable, being able to withstand the control of the Web. I was already announcing in my ask to MAG 10, that I have a theory there and that I would lay it out in MAG 56. This came to me after a friend of mine with a Husky told me, that her dog had slurped up a huge spider directly off the wall just when she was casually walking by. I thought "Ha, Hunt beating the Web" for funsies, but it made me think. Shortly after this I coincidentally listen to MAG 56 while in the car (it was my husband's relisten) and this came up. And it made me think… I think the Desolation is not the only Entity opposing to the Web. The Hunt is also capable of this! (Pokemon type chart Hunt super effective!)

Aaand we get to the JonMartin part. After MAG 22 Jon really got better, he only mentioned Martin in an a bit exasperated tone in MAG 26 ("It always happens to him") and then there's a bit of stressed out conversation in MAG 39 which was widely very open though (and being stressed in a situation of being trapped by the Flesh Hive is understandable). I think this is actually the first time since MAG 22 that Jon was an arse to Martin.

MARTIN "Sorry, who’s… who’s Trev–" JON "Trevor Herbert. The tramp? The vampire hunter." - Lol, that could be a conversation between me and my spouse. They often forget what I told them and I will have to elaborate in great detail what I was talking about.

JON "I can’t forget it. Everyone in this place has so many goddamn secrets and I can’t trust a word you say. Not about this and not about Trevor –" MARTIN "Jon, just–" JON "[shouting] Martin!" - Ok, let's take a look at this. Jon is reaaaally spiraling into his fear there. He's building up his paranoia in those last few sentences with this line being the culmination and only the tiniest stimulus could be the last straw. And it was. Martin again trying to deflect broke the camel's back and Jon snaps. I don't know if I should be angry at him in this specific scene, or sad. Because this is such a low, even for Jon. He completely lost it there.

JON "…what." - He's immediately deflating.

MARTIN "But most of my employment details are made up. I’m only 29." - Since the previous statement was live (3rd November 2016) we have a pretty good idea were in the timeline we are right now. We know that Martin's birthday is in summer since they went for ice cream, so we can tell exactly when Martin was born - 1987.

JON "Yes, um, I jus… I won’t mention it to Elias. Just between us." - He sound so, sooo relieved indeed. I'm also totally on board with the headcanon that Jon WANTS Martin to be innocent. Jon doesn't admit it at this point but he likes Martin, he trusts Martin. And that shows by believing him.

This is an uncomfortable scene but I think it's different than Jon's pre-MAG 22 hostility to Martin. He's not an arse because he doesn't care about Martin. It's because he actually does care about Martin and is genuinely scared to lose him.

It is amazing just how much foreshadowing there is to the Entities in seasons one and two.

[indig0trolls]

Muiren bravery also,

[ ] Spend the night in a haunted building [X] Go into a burning/collapsing building to save someone [X] Take a shortcut through a dark alleyway [X] Stay calm with a weapon pointed at them [X] Be confident defending themselves from an attack [ ] Touch a dangerous exotic animal (Not afraid, just doesn't like interfering with wildlife. [X] Take someone else’s punishment to protect them [X] Travel to an unknown place by themselves [X] Spend a night in the woods alone [ ] Witness (or join) a seance [ ] Play a scary video game in the dark alone (he's like a billion years old he doesn't play video games) [X] Explore a pitch black catacomb with only one light [ ] Contact the spirit of someone they once knew [X] Spend the night in a cemetery [X] Sit in a room with one hundred creepy dolls [X] Hang their feet over the edge of a tall building [ ] Swim in dark, murky waters without being able to touch the bottom (he cant swim actually) [X] Use or accept a powerful magic spell [X] Be covered in spiders, snakes, or other insects [X] Go looking for the source of a mysterious sound late at night [X] Spend an hour sealed up in a coffin [ ] Go sailing miles from shore without any communication [ ] Use a Ouija board [ ] Go diving in a dark, underwater cave [X] Climb through a long tunnel just big enough to fit through [X] Explore a spot where cult rituals were performed [X] Go walking late at night, alone [X] Spend the night in a home where someone was murdered [ ] Go surfing on the Dark Web [ ] Play an urban legend game (bloody mary, the midnight man, etc…) [X] Stay home alone with a suspected killer on the loose [X] Climb a dangerous mountain where many others have died on their way to the top [X] Explore ancient ruins where strange things have happened [X] Touch a supposedly cursed object [X] Check out a creepy cellar or attic [X] Cross an unstable bridge over a huge drop [X] Pick up a hitchhiker in the middle of the night

Muiren is many things.... but he doesn't like to mess with the dead yknow? Or. Deep water.

[bristolianbackpacker]

Day 23 - The Peruvian Amazon

We are being picked up at 9:00am for our tour. Breakfast is complementary at the hotel but I just need some oats. 

Our cold symptoms have pretty much cleared up but now I have a cough developing. Marco our guide for the next 5 days picks us up and we go via a pharmacy to get some cough syrup and lozenges. 

We head to the HQ to drop some of our stuff off and we start the 90min drive to the lodge. It’s fairly unusual that we can access our lodge by road as most lodges are accessible by boat only. Our lodge would take 5 hours to reach if we were travelling by boat. Once we arrive we just need to take a short boat ride to the other side of the river and we get an intro from Marco, meet the other guests properly - there are two couples from UK and one from US/Canada.  We then get shown to our rooms where we have a little downtime. The room is a bit basic but it’s exactly what I was expecting. 

The site is big and they are building more lodges, the gardens are so well maintained with flowers and fruits growing - plenty of bananas on the trees. 

It takes us quite a while to walk from our lodge back to the lunchroom as there is so much wildlife to see - butterflies, two types of monkeys.

Lunch is served at 1:00pm and it’s really good considering we are in the middle of nowhere. Beetroot, potatoes and carrot salad as entree and vegetable curry for main followed by some watermelon. 

Eating together in the group at set meal times makes it feel a little like boarding school but the group are really nice and we are getting on well so it’s nice to sit together. 

More downtime before we go on a walk later. We need to get adjusted to island time - especially given the limited internet access!

We meet back up at 4:00pm to go on a short 10min walk to a lookout tower. 

The lookout tower is 38m high and is a little scary for me as it gets quite wobbly at the top but it’s easy to get distracted with wildlife spotting. Marco brings his huge telescope so we can zoom in on things - it really puts out Temu binoculars to shame. We see lots of birds - a few types of vultures (3 king vultures were perched in the top of a nearby tree which Marco said was very rare - they were absolutely massive!), a few types of toucans and the olive crested oropendola.

After spotting for a while, it starts getting dark but we stay at the top whilst Marco gives us some information about the area. The lodge is situated on 30 square hectares of private land and it borders Tambopata National Reserve which is 205,000 square hectares. The national reserve is protected land but there is plenty of other land in the Peruvian Amazon that isn’t protected where mining is allowed. He also says that during COVID gold miners started illegally mining in the park because it wasn’t able to be monitored effecting by rangers but this has since been cracked down on. We also find out a bit about native tribes that do not have contact with other humans (plus some that do). 

By the time we get to the bottom it’s really dark and we need our phone torches to get home. 

On the way back to the lodge we see spiders (incl. a deadly spider - I think it was the wandering spider but can’t remember 100% plus a tiny little spider that uses other dead insects to form a big fake spider in its web), a lizard, leaf cutter ants (so cool) and army ants (bad), some frogs plus a cane toad (we know all about this one!)

After the trek we get stuck into dinner - chicken with a creamy mushroom sauce, roasted potatoes and veg. So yummy! Also another older American couple have joined us. 

It’s an early night for us, we have to be ready for our excursion tomorrow at 4:45am! Also the electricity goes off at 10pm and I don’t fancy our chances walking along the uneven/non-handrailed boardwalk in the dark.

[sacredsorceress]

You and Me || Peter Parker

pairing: peter parker x avenger!reader

summary: your best friend, peter parker, disappeared with the snap of thanos’ fingers five years ago. when he comes back after five long years things may have changed, but you’ll always be his

a/n: okay so here let’s pretend that even if you were snapped you still aged; reblogs and replies are super appreciated!

word count: 3.3k

warnings: angst w/ happy ending, a lot of this involved the battle scene from endgame so fighting, getting crushed and tony’s death

masterlist || request || taglist

"Y/n? Oh my God, Y/n! Are you seeing this on the news? It’s crazy! I- I don’t even know what that is! M- maybe it’s aliens! That would mean-”

“Woah! Peter slow down!” You whispered to your best friend on the phone, sneaking into the bathroom to take the call in the middle of class. “What’s going on?”

You could hear shuffling and heavy breathing on his end, no doubt swinging across the city while holding the phone to his ear. “So I was on the bus and then I saw this big round spaceship thing so I was like ‘Oh shoot! Mr. Stark might need me!’ so I had Ned distract the bus-”

“Wait. You’re following a spaceship?” You asked, watching as the only other person who had been in the bathroom finally left. “Peter that sounds really dangerous. Maybe... maybe you should let the big guys handle it.”

Despite your best efforts to conceal it, Peter could hear the anxiety laced in your voice even over the phone.

“Y/n, I- I have to.” He told you, and you could hear him stop swinging on the other side. “If you were nearby, you would do the same thing. I know you would.”

“Yeah, and if you were in my position, you would tell me not to too.” You chuckled, leaning against the bathroom wall.

“”Yeah, because you need me there to make sure you don’t get yourself killed.” He teased.

You rolled your eyes at what your best friend had just said. Despite him not being able to see you, you knew he knew you well enough to take the hint. “Shut up!” You gasped. “At least my powers are cool! I can do magic, spider boy.”

Before he could even argue with your nickname for him, reminding you that he was “Spider-Man” and not “Spider-Boy”, he cursed on the other line.

“Shit! This guy’s huge!” He exclaimed. “I have to go, Y/n.”

“Wait!” You shouted into the phone. “Be safe!”

“You got it, Y/n!”

Holding the phone tighter to your ear, you found the courage to finally say it.

“I- I love you.”

But before you could get a reply, the line went dead.

“Y/n!” You heard a voice shout, but you weren’t able to tell from where.

You opened your eyes only to be met with darkness and a heavy weight crushing your chest and covering every part of your body. Huffing you attempted to wiggle your fingers, seeing if there was any part of you not crushed by the absolute weight of concrete on top of you. When you felt a few of your fingers able to move freely, you stretched them out, allowing the golden glow of your magic to flow from your hand.

“Y/n?” You heard again, this time recognizing the voice as Cap’s.

“Hey, Y/n’s over here!” You heard Tony shout from above, closer than Steve.

Without another word, you felt the weight thrown off of you as Steve picked up the slab that had crushed you. You looked up only to be met with the somber faces of both Tony Stark and Steve Rogers, the wires sparking and dust rising around them. Steve kneeled above you, reaching out his hand to pull you up and still coughing you accepted it.

“You okay, kid?” He asked.

Standing up and stretching out your arms, making sure you could move everything, you nodded. “Yeah,” You replied, suddenly taking in the scene around you. What felt like seconds before you had been standing in the Compound, but now you were surrounded by ash, dust and destruction. “What happened?”

You followed them as they made their way over to Thor who was standing feet away, observing the field ahead of him. You watched as Cap shrugged.

“I think we’re about to find out.”

Minutes later when you were besides Steve, picking yourself up and off of the ground, you almost wished you hadn't asked. You watched as alien ships and Thano’s army flew overhead and marched into your line of sight. You grew hopeless. Although you and the other Avengers who were at the Compound were undeniably powerful, you knew that even Steve who stood at your side, strapping his shield tighter around his injured arm was aware of the likelihood of you all making it out not only alive, but on top.

Just then, however, you heard the voice speak through Cap’s earpiece.

Turning around you watched as a singular portal opened behind him and began to feel tears prickling in your eyes- as much as you would deny crying once the battle was over. As more portals continued to open up, you couldn’t help the smile that stretched across your face, seeing everyone who had disappeared five years ago beside you again. However, there was one face you couldn’t help but search for.

You finally laid eyes on him as a portal opened up from a remote planet you didn’t recognize. At first you only saw unfamiliar faces and nearly grew discouraged until you saw your favorite spider boy swing through the portal.

Before you could see him without his mask, you spun around as you heard Cap’s orders.

“Avengers... assemble.”

With that, everything happened so fast. You were floating across the field in seconds, shooting bursts of magic out of your hands at each warrior that came your way. Knocking each of the alien warriors to the ground, you couldn’t help but check around you, watching to see if you would be lucky enough to have him fighting beside you once again.

Before the blip you and Peter had always fought beside each other. The two of you were essentially inseparable and the whole team who knew the two of you knew it. You told yourselves that it was just because you were younger and less experienced- that a buddy system was beneficial to the both of you. You knew better though.

By the time that Peter had been snapped to dust by Thanos’ fingers, you had fully accepted the feelings that you had for your best friend. You were so adamant about being beside him on the battlefield because you had to make sure he was okay- to make sure he was safe. You knew how easily distracted he could get, caught up in the moment of being a superhero, so you were always sure to look out for him and cover his back, not just for him but for yourself as well. You never told him your feelings though in fear that it would ruin the relationship you had built.

It was your biggest regret for the past five years of your life.

Knowing he was back, you needed to find him.

It was as though God had heard you and answered your prayers when once you looked up from killing another one of Thanos’ warriors, your eyes met across the field.

As soon as you saw him, you watched as he tapped the side of his neck, the mask that had been covering his face, retracting.

He looked older- five years older to be exact. The baby face you had grown to love had matured into one that was recognizable, but undeniably new. His hair was a bit longer, his shoulders looked broader and you were sure he had grown taller. All the changes didn’t matter an ounce to you though- all that mattered was that he was your Peter and that he was finally standing right in front of you.

Your hands trembling at your sides, you looked at him and dared yourself to smile.

“Peter?”

He smiled right back and in that moment you were sure that your feelings hadn’t changed a bit from five years ago. God, you missed him.

“Y/n?” He asked.

You couldn’t help but laugh, overjoyed to hear your name slipping out of his mouth again. No longer being able to hold yourself back, you ran across the space to him and he did the same. Meeting in the middle, he immediately slipped his arms under your arms and around your waist, picking you up and off the ground in a tight embrace. You were so afraid of him slipping away through your fingers- you grasped him so tightly you were sure that if his suit wasn’t made of metal, you would have left a mark on his back.

You sobbed into his neck while laughing, telling him that you missed him and that you couldn't believe he was really there.

When you finally let go, you pulled away, both of you still holding each other at arm’s length.

“You-”

“I-” Peter began.

You laughed, shaking your head. “Sorry- you go first!”

Peter laughed, shaking you while he spoke. “Has it really been five years? Dr. Strange- do you know Dr. Strange? Anyway- not important- Dr. Strange said that it’s been five years and then he did the swirly thing and now we’re here and-”

You smiled as you listened to his speech, Peter talking about what had happened when he came back after five years away, sprinkled with questions like “Was the last Star Wars movie good? I can't believe I missed the last Star Wars movie!” and “Are there flying cars now? Sorry, that’s dumb. Who needs flying cars?”. When he finally took a breath, you cut into the conversation.

“Yeah, it’s really been five years, Pete.” You laughed. “You look... older.”

“Do I really?” He asked excitedly. “How much older?”

You quirked your eyebrows at him. This was Peter alright.

“Five years older, bud.”

“Oh... yeah.” He chuckled scratching the back of his neck. “Y- you look older too... in a good way! You also have um dirt all over your face, but uh... you always... look good.”

You smiled and even after all this time you could feel yourself become flustered by his compliment. You really were his.

“Thanks.” You said. “The uh... the Compound kind of fell on me so...”

“Wait what-”

Before Peter could ask you more about you surviving a building collapsing on you, the two of you watched as T’Challa ran through the battlefield, the gauntlet in his grasp. Snapping back into the moment, you let go of Peter. As he tapped the side of his neck, the mask covering his face again, you knew what he was about to do.

“Be safe!” You shouted.

Without a word you watched as Peter shot a web that flew right by you. When you spun around you watched as one of the warriors fell to the ground, held down by the web- a blade still in his hand.

“You first!” He called before swinging away.

The moment he left, you snapped back into action, taking out warriors left and right, moving on to help others when you cleared your area.

Your bones were beginning to ache, feeling the weight of not only the building that had fallen on top of you earlier, but also your relentless swinging and fighting to not only protect yourself, but humanity. The weight of the world felt as if it was on your shoulders and no matter how sore you were- you wouldn’t stop until it was over- for better or worse.

When the beams started raining down from the large ship overhead, you fell to the ground, concealing yourself within a forcefield in just enough time to protect yourself before one rained down right above you. The impact of it hitting the ground shook the earth beneath you and you could see nothing but the golden glow of the forcefield surrounding you and dirt exploding from the ground around you.

You pulled your knees into your chest and wrapped your arms around your head to shield yourself despite the forcefield surrounding you.

“See you in a minute?” You asked.

“See you in a minute.” She smiled.

For the first time since you woke up under the pile of concrete, you could feel your chest tightening and a ball form in your throat as tears were threatening to spill over.

You thought of Natasha, the woman who mentored you for the past five years, and how she sacrificed herself for all of these people to have their lives back. She died for the cause and as you sat there with beams exploding around you, you prayed that it wasn’t all for nothing- that you would all win, that people would get to hug their family members again and that you might even get to tell Peter about how you felt.

Peter. Realizing now that you would have died if not for your powers, you wished that Peter was safe carrying the gauntlet across the field. You couldn’t bare to lose him twice just when you had been given your second chance.

When you felt the ground stop shaking under you, you unraveled yourself, looking up to see that the raining beams had stopped. Removing your forcefield, you watched as the spaceship fell out of the sky.

Being given your second chance, you used your powers, picking up large pieces of the former Avenger’s Compound building, hurling them at large groups of Thanos’ warriors, crushing them instantly. In the distance you could see Thanos, Steve, Tony and Carol Danvers scrambling for the gauntlet.

As you went to make your way towards them, however, you felt a hand wrap around your neck and pull you back. Being thrown to the ground, the warrior fell on top of you, his knife attempting to make its way into your chest. You kicked your legs towards his torso, grunting as you grabbed his wrist, using all of your strength to keep the blade centimeters away from piercing itself into your skin.

Right when you were accepting your fate, growing exhausted from not just today’s, but years worth of fighting, you watched as a look of horror flashed across the warrior’s face and in a second he turned to dust in your grasp.

Pushing yourself up and off the ground, wiping the remnants of ash off of you, you spun around and watched as Thano’s army faded away to dust, facing the same horror that billions did on that one day five years ago. You could finally allow yourself to breathe a sigh of relief as they disappeared across the battlefield, slowly turning to ash.

When you looked back towards where Thanos stood seconds before, you ran over, nearly tripping over all of the objects in your path.

When you finally made your way over, recognizing Peter immediately from behind, you followed his line of sight to Tony who was sitting up almost motionless on the ground. 

You observed the way his arm was mangled up to the side of his face, similar to Banner’s earlier when he snapped half of humanity back into existence. You knew, however, that Tony wouldn’t be able to survive the same fate.

As Pepper placed her hands on Peter’s shoulders moving him to the side, you rushed to him, wrapping Peter in your arms as you held his head against your chest. As soon as he made contact with you, you could feel him tightly squeezing around your torso, crying into the fabric of your suit.

You hushed him, watching as Tony’s hand fell from Pepper’s one last time. You could feel your heart breaking in your chest over all that you had lost, but knowing in the end that you had won. 

The proof of victory, although costly, was evident to you by the crying man in your arms.

A week later when the memorial was held at Tony’s house, you saw Peter again for the first time since the day he had come back. You gave him space, understanding that coming back after disappearing for five years and losing your mentor was difficult to cope with.

After watching the last remanent of Tony Stark float across the lake, Peter found you standing to the side. When you heard a branch snap from a few feet behind you, you jumped, turning around only to be met with Peter’s face.

“Hey.” You smiled.

“H-hey, Y/n.”

“How are you feeling?” You asked him, leaning against the nearby tree.

He shrugged, scratching the back of his neck. “Well... May and I found someplace to stay and all of our stuff so... that’s good.”

You smiled. “That’s-”

“I heard about Black Widow.” He cut you off, fiddling with the cufflinks on the sleeve of his jacket. “About... about how she trained you all this time and stuff.” He finally looked up at you and met your eyes. “I’m so sorry, Y/n.”

You shrugged, wiping your eyes and taking a deep breath, willing yourself not to cry in front of him. You knew that to him five years ago felt like yesterday- that he couldn’t understand how your life changed in the past five years. Regardless, it meant a lot that he cared enough to check on you when there was so much else for him to worry about.

“It’s okay, Pete.” You sighed. “She... and Tony... they did everything it took to bring you guys back. That’s what mattered, you know? Whatever it took. Any of us would have done the same. It’s just... it’s just too bad that there wasn’t another way. I just wish that I could tell her that we won- that her sacrifice was worth it- that she saved the world.”

Peter nodded, taking a step closer to you, still fiddling with his sleeve.

“So you uh.. you think it was worth it then?” He asked.

You smiled, grabbing Peter’s hands to stop them from trembling and pulled him closer to you. “Of course it was worth it, Pete.” You said. “You’re standing right here in front of me again- of course it was worth it.”

Peter didn’t say anything back at first. Instead the two of you just gazed at each other, now leaning against the tree.

When he finally broke from your gaze, he shifted his eyes to stare at your hands in his.

“Do you still mean what you said?” He asked suddenly.

You know for him it had been a week, but for you it had been five years. What you had said could be any number of things, but you knew deep down what he was referring to.

When you didn’t answer, he answered your question for you. 

“That- that you loved me?”

You looked up when he spoke. Pulling your hands out of his, you placed your hand against his face, nudging his chin up to look at you. You could see his eyes still bloodshot and the bags under his eyes puffy, no doubt from crying over the past week. Even when he looked like this, you couldn’t deny that he was the most the most beautiful thing you had ever had the honor of laying your eyes on.

“Yes.”

“As- as more than-” He began stumbling over his words before you cut him off.

“Yes, Peter.” You chuckled. “As more than friends.”

You could see a smile beginning to play on his lips as he searched your eyes for any hint of doubt.

“There wasn’t, uh, anybody else?” He asked. “Even after all this time?”

You shook your head, running your thumb along his cheek.

“Nope.” You smiled. “It’s always been you, spider boy.”

Despite the fact that he always used to argue when you called him “spider boy”, assuring you that he was a man and not a boy, he always loved the nickname you held for him, reminding him that he was more than just some superhero- that he was yours.

As soon as the words slipped out of your mouth he smiled and cupped your face in his hands, pulling you in for a kiss.

It was soft and gentle, just as you had always imagined it. 

For the first time in a week, you smiled into the kiss, wrapping your arms around his neck. Despite everything that happened to you two that had worked to pull you apart you found each other again every time. No matter what happened, at the end of the day it was you and him and that’s all that mattered.

[darkeninganon]

Ha ha! More Hummingbird!Dream! Why? I like tormenting him. It’s how I show my love. XD

Trigger Warning for: Mentions of Vore, talk of eating a person, mentions of fatal vore, implied death, abuse, implied torture. Y’all have been warned~!

Sam walked through the casino, glancing around at the various crowds and patrons. He was supposed to keep people in line, but most people shied away or ran when they saw him. He paused though, catching a glimpse of a huge terrarium surrounded by kids. Something was hanging in the middle, and the kids seemed sad. Sam approached, eyes going wide as he realized who was hanging from a spider web in the center of the terrarium. Sam ran over, pulling open the one human-sized door and running to the dangling prisoner.

Sam pulled Dream from the tangled web, looking at the children before dashing out, landing harshly as he slammed the door shut. “Dream? You good?” The tiny hybrid wasn’t moving, and felt weirdly cold. Sam was never able to feel the hummingbird’s heartbeat. “Dream?” Sam carefully removed the webbing, praying the tiny hybrid was just unconscious and not… dead.

“Sam! What are you doing?”

“Quackity!” Sam ran over to the Casino owner, being mindful of the tiny hybrid he held. “A spider got into the terrarium! It… Dream got caught in its web. Do you think he’s okay?” Sam held up the tiny creature, close to Quackity so the other hybrid could see.

Dream gasped to life, sitting bolt upright. He gasped, clutching his chest as he tried to calm down. By Prime Techno’s venom sucked. The ground was… warm? And he didn’t feel any remaining webbing clinging to him. Did Punz pull him down?

A cacophony of cooing and giggling filled his ears. His eyes finally caught up to the reality, and he saw a bunch of children staring down at him, eyes shining and smiles bright. But… Quackity and Sam’s faces lingered beyond the children, one looking relieved, and the other looking confused as hell.

Dream… Wasn’t inside the terrarium. Dream was free.

Dream bolted, wings humming to life as he flew up, far out of the reach of the children and Sam and Quackity and- Wait… where was Karl?

A rainbow blur slammed into Dream, earning a yelp from the tiny hybrid before he was suddenly grabbed out of the air.

“Punz! Let me go!”

The snake hybrid ignored him, looking to Sam and Quackity, a bored expression on their face. “Lose something you two?” Punz dangled Dream by his wings over the group, glaring at the hybrid as he struggled. Wilbur flew over, landing safely next to Punz before being joined by Technoblade, then Karl, and finally Sapnap.

“Wait, what are you all doing here?”

“Punz, give him here. Let’s all go to my office to talk, okay?” Quackity hissed, doing his best to be pleasant in front of the guests. Punz listened, tossing Dream unceremoniously into the larger hybrid’s hands, which tightened around the tiny hybrid in a vice-like death grip. “Let’s go~.”

Punz crawled over to Sam, Techno and Wilbur doing the same while Sapnap and Karl clung to Quackity as the group walked to Quackity’s office. Once there, Quackity shut the door, locking it behind him before running to his desk and throwing the tiny hybrid into his cage with as much force as possible. “How the fuck are you alive you little shit?!”

Dream cowered away from Quackity, glancing at Sam as the bigger hybrids surrounded him. The bigger predators.

“I… I got cursed?” Dream whimpered, pressing himself into the bars and floor of the cage. He hated this, it always made him feel so stupidly small. Quackity grabbed the cage, lifting it off the desk, a look of pure fury in his eyes. “I’m serious! I was cursed! I went to visit Sam and came across some other hybrids! One of them could use magic and cursed me! Please!”

Quackity was silent as he slammed the cage back down, Dream flying into the air before crashing down again, a chirp escaping his pained body. Quackity turned from the cage, pacing around while pinching the bridge of his nose, face contorted in furious thought; “Great, just fucking great. We’ve got a fucking immortal annoying-ass hummingbird hybrid and we can’t even do anything about it!”

Sam was staring at Dream intently, head tilting as Quackity ranted to himself. “What if… We experimented?”

Quackity spun back around, startling Karl and Sapnap from where they clung to him. “What?”

“Well, he’s immortal, right? I think we should see how it actually works.” The Warden spoke, locking eyes with Quackity. Sam paced around the desk, looking back to Dream, hands folded behind his back as he contemplated how it would work. “I think… I can find a way to make a set of chains small enough for his wrists and neck, plus a length of chain to pull him from whoever’s stomach he’s in.”

“What?!”

“Can it!” Quackity smacked the cage, silencing the hybrid inside. He turned back to Sam, the two staring at each other. “I’m fine with that, so long as everyone else here is as well.”

“Me and Techno are too close to his size to be any part of this.” Wilbur stated, casting a glance to the drider before looking at his own blood-stained clothes. “So, we can’t be part of this.” Everyone nodded in agreement.

“I mean, I’m not going to like having a chain in my mouth and throat, but it seems like something to do.”

“Punz you traitor!”

Quackity grabbed the cage, slamming it down on the desk several times; “I said CAN IT!” He stopped when he was sure Dream finally got the message, the smallest hybrid curled up on the floor of the cage, now littered with feathers. “Anyways. Back to the discussion at hand.”

“I literally cannot eat meat, so I’m also out.”

“Yeah, I’m going to have to dip on this one too. Last time I ate Dream, he nearly choked me and probably nearly caused some internal bleeding. Not a fun time.”

Quackity looked to Sam, who tiled his head in confusion. “Well?”

Sam looked around before pointing to himself; “Me?!”

“Yes you. I’m fine with being part of this experiment as well. The little shit has to contribute somehow and I’d rather not face this alone.”

Sam glanced back at Dream, who looked up to him pathetically. “I… Oh, this is awkward. Uh, Quackity, I don’t eat.”

“You what now?”

“Um, Creepers are… kind of machine, kind of moss? So… I don’t need normal food.” Sam winced. He’d never really spoken about this before, but it was part of the reason he was so into redstone contraptions and lights. “I mean, I’m sure I can find some people, but I can’t do it myself. I literally don’t have the organs for it… I think. It’s not something I want to test.”

Quackity sighed, waving his hand dismissively. “Fine. Go find at least three other people.” Quackity plopped down in his chair, sighing heavily as he rubbed his temple, Karl and Sapnap perching on either shoulder. “Go and make the chains. And take Wilbur and Techno with you. They’re usually good with people. At least Wilbur is.”

Sam nodded, letting Punz slither down his arm to the desk and around the cage that held Dream. Quackity waited until the trio left before leaning forward, staring intently at Dream. “I told you I’d make every day hell.”

Dream could only pray Sam didn’t run into two people.

[ask-spider-man-61610]

The Infiltration: Part Two of Three

In the ten years he had been a vigilante, Peter Parker had become very good at sneaking into places he shouldn't have been.

Air vents were useless. The vast majority of them were far too narrow for anybody to slip through without becoming amorphous, and even when the ducts were large enough it was impossible to move inside one without making enough noise to alert the entire block. The subceiling--the space above the ceiling tiles, but below the actual architectural structure--was a far better bet, but that was similarly cramped--and besides, only some buildings had gaps in the walls to allow for movement like that.

Using a disguise to sneak in was better all around, but it required a lot of skill and care. You couldn't disguise yourself as a scientist unless you were genuinely an expert in the field you were pretending to study. Nor, in this particular case, could you just dress up as any old agent--they had security levels. Executives were out, reporters were only viable if the people you were trying to fool had reason to believe a reporter was going to be there, and the less said about solicitors the better. The key was to attract as little scrutiny as possible, to not raise any questions you'd have trouble answering; because the second someone grew suspicious of you, your cover was all but blown.

Janitors, then, were perfect.

Nobody pays attention to a janitor. It's practically one of the perks of the job. Beneath notice means beneath scrutiny, and people only give custodians the slightest thought when a place needs cleaned. Even then it's just an assertion that a custodian needs to be there. Nobody questions what a janitor is doing in a room, even in the dead of night. Nobody questions why a janitor is wearing gloves, or where they got their ring of keys. There's no better disguise for going somewhere that people generally can't go.

Peter had been pretending to be a janitor in the main headquarters of the Cape Code Authority for several days now. He had listened intently as he'd mopped the floors, mapped out the layout in his head, figured out where the labs were and who had access to what while keeping his head down. He'd owned this coverall for years now, for infiltrations exactly like this, and now with the security cameras disabled he hooked his cart on the handle of his mop and dragged it towards the door the three agents had just left.

The door had locked automatically. Of course it had, all laboratory doors locked automatically around here, and even the custodians needed special permissions to get them unlocked. But as the door had swung closed, Peter had pressed the trigger in his palm under the guise of adjusting his grip on his mop, and now the door's latch was glued down beneath a small splatter of webbing. Pulling on a latex glove, Peter tugged the door open a crack and slipped into the lab.

He adjusted his hat as he glanced around the lab, the hat that had blond curls sewn to the inside to disguise his brown hair, and scratched at his false nose. The hologram table sat in the center of the room, still softly glowing even after its deactivation--an enormous waste of energy, but apparently nobody cared. Ignoring it entirely, Peter headed straight for the computer monitors against the far wall, grabbing a chair without breaking stride and only stopping to climb on top of it and crouch on the seat like a gargoyle on a rooftop.

Like everything Reed Richards ever touched, the computers were encrypted. But Peter had dated Johnny Storm for five months once, and he didn't spend so much time nearby his fellow supergenius without taking some time to figure out how to bypass their usual security. It took him just over five minutes to get through the firewalls, and then he stuck a translucent plastic sticky note to the screen and began to browse.

The sticky note was, of course, a data drive. Peter had learned about these only recently, but he was fast growing to like them; they were easy to conceal on his person and, unlike a USB stick, didn't require a specific size of port. As he opened up the computer's files, the drive pinged off of the computer's software and integrated itself into the system without leaving a trace. Cracking his knuckles, Peter typed a few cursory searches into the file browser and tapped Enter.

Perpetual Holographic Avatar/Nano-Tech Offensive Monsters had been a thorn in his side for over two years now. They didn't move like humans; their range of motion didn't have the limits that their skeletal shape implied; their systems adapted and learned and coordinated in ways that he'd never seen before in artificial intelligence. Even Octavius, permanently on the cutting edge of AI and biorobotics development, wasn't sure what the hell was going on with them. Last year, in the middle of beating the multi-armed megalomaniac's face in, Spider-Man had asked for Otto's thoughts on the Phantoms; the technology, both of them suspected, wasn't exactly beyond Otto's work so much as to the side of it. The systems were hyperspecialized: they had no connection to neural networks of old, and were practically useless for advancing them in the future. They were, in a word, alien.

Peter suspected Chitauri tech. The War of the Worlds had left countless remnants of the Chitauri on Earth; some of them still remained, like the Leviathan rotting in Maine, but far too many of them had seemed to simply vanish. Anyone who gave it more than ten seconds of thought could realize that governments of the world had squirreled the stuff away to study and reverse-engineer. Now, as Peter's eyes darted back and forth across the screen, he skimmed through the blueprints and models that he found in the folder and tried to see if any of it matched the distinctive look of the Chitauri.

Some of it did, he found as he kept searching, but not a huge amount. Reed had done some work with Chitauri tech in the past; traces of its influence were obvious in the composition of the Phantoms' gun barrels, and in the way their hard-light armor projected itself over the skeleton. Kid stuff, nothing that explained the problems he'd had with them. Peter's brow furrowed as he copied the files he found to his data drive and peered over his shoulder at the hologram table behind him.

What had Reed been saying to Flint in here only a few minutes ago? Peter had a spiderlike hypersensitivity to vibration; he could feel footsteps on the other side of the building rumbling through the floor, and the variations in air pressure caused by the fly drifting around the ceiling. But it didn't work like hearing did, nor was it interpreted by the same part of the brain. Though he had felt Reed talking in here, it just felt like a continuous drone of vibration against his skin--he hadn't heard him, and so couldn't interpret the words. And, like an idiot, he hadn't thought to bug the room beforehand.

He pushed his tongue against his upper lip in thought. Had it had something to do with why Flint had registered with the CCA in the first place?

Kicking a foot against the bottom of the desk, Peter rolled his chair over to the hologram table and set to work getting past the security there too. This took even less time than it had with the computer, now that Peter knew how Reed had updated his security measures over the last few years. Within three minutes of typing so fast an observer would have seen his fingers as blurs he was browsing through the most recently accessed files.

The image lifted out of the table and filled the room with its soft light, and Peter frowned at the image of the Phantom he saw. How on earth was this related to Flint's desire to Be A Real Boy? He typed a few commands into the table and watched the Phantom's white shell disappear to reveal the mechanical skeleton beneath. A few notes by Reed appeared to highlight key points, and Peter read through each with steadily rising concern.

Very little of the Sandman's mass was actually Flint Marko. When he had been disintegrated all those years ago, most of his body had become just plain old sand--only his nervous system had become anything different. Over the years, he had gained entire truckloads worth of sand and lost enough to fill beaches, but the gallon or so of milky white silica that had once been his brain and nerve cells had remained, scattered evenly through every shape and sculpture he made himself into. They assimilated granules of a similar composition through static cling, arranging them with an intricate electric charge that neither Flint nor Peter had ever fully understood, and now it looked like Reed wanted to apply that same static charge to the Phantom project.

Looking through the notes, Peter could already see that Reed wasn't putting much effort into following through on his promise. The conjectures and theories put forth in them were ludicrous--ideas that Peter had discarded years ago in his various scrambles to stop one of Marko's rampages. But he read between the lines, read ideas that Reed had intended for his own eyes only, and his blood grew steadily colder in his veins.

It wouldn't take much modification to turn a Phantom into a suitable chassis for Flint's nerve granules, so went Reed's idea. The skeleton already contained organic elements, and they already received commands from a biological source rather than a computer. This flew in the face of Peter's assumptions about the Phantoms.

They were only partially robots. They were like Octobots; their processing units were very much alive.

Peter waved a shaky hand over the table. The hologram deactivated, which wasn't his intent at all, but he was too taken aback to care.

Deep in the bowels of the building, ignored by Peter until now but always scratching at the back of his mind, the vibrations of mechanical footsteps rumbled through the walls and floor. The central hub of manufacturing and deploying Phantoms was located fifty feet under the foundation--a fact he'd known all along, but which he had to investigate now. Now, when he knew that within those robotic skeletons were living and thinking beings. Now, when he knew that the drills whirring and 3D printing that he felt even from here were working tirelessly to imprison and enslave something. Jumping off the chair, he retrieved his data drive from the computer and took barely a minute to wipe all evidence of his presence from the room. Then, readjusting his disguise and checking for the presence of witnesses, he slipped out of the room and finally allowed the door to lock.

The route to the underground hub was a circuitous one. As the operations were almost entirely automated, not even the janitors were given clearance to enter that level; maybe four people had access, and Peter wasn't one of them. No matter. There were more ways to sneak around than just throwing on a coverall and mopping a floor. If Peter's disguise only took him this far and no farther, it was time to drop it. Some places you could only reach as the wall-crawler.

Had the security cameras not mysteriously lost power earlier that afternoon, they would've seen a janitor shedding his hat, kicking off his shoes, and beginning to unbutton his coverall. Without breaking stride, he snatched a small bag from where he'd hidden it in his cart before and pulled on a mask; whatever features, real or fake, a witness might have noticed, they were now hidden by dark red fabric and two gleaming grey bug eyes. In short order the coverall and hat were gone--wrapped up into a web-knapsack that he slung onto his back even as he swapped his shoes out for red spandex boots. Pulling on his gloves right as he reached the elevator, Spider-Man stopped to politely tap the call button beside the sliding metal doors.

With a ding, the elevator doors slid open, and Spider-Man immediately smashed straight through the emergency hatch at the top of the lift.

Elevator shafts were always a bit more complicated than one expected. Even Peter, who could feel the constant motion of the metal boxes through the building and their cables sliding against pullies, always needed a moment to figure out how to squeeze through the systems that controlled its rise and fall. He paused as he examined the mechanism of this particular elevator before he sucked in his stomach and crawled around the box with a few inches to spare. Then, once he was beneath it, he released his grip on the elevator shaft and let himself fall.

He caught himself fifty feet later, his fingertips sticking instantly to the concrete as he touched it. Just across the shaft from him was a set of elevator doors, which he hopped onto and began to pry apart. It was slow going. Like everything in the CCA headquarters, these doors were made with superhumans in mind, and they had a magnetic lock that Spider-Man found himself straining to overpower. He pulled on them for a few seconds, changed his mind, and crawled two feet to the left to begin messing with the wiring that controlled the lock. There was a moment of silence, a low, hollow ding, and the doors slid open.

With one hand still stuck to the wall Spider-Man lowered himself into the unlit chamber, dropping to the floor and landing there in a crouch. What little light had made it down with him reflected off his mask's glaring eyes. For a moment he was still, one hand pressed to the metal beneath him and his attention fully on the vibrations of the environment. Then, mentally sorting through the sea of threats that his spider-sense whispered and squirmed at, he rose to his feet and nonchalantly slapped the lightswitch on the wall behind him. Sparse florescent lights flickered on above him, and he blinked and furrowed his brow as he adjusted.

Now that he was down here the vibrations were sharper, like a the world coming into focus as you come up from underwater. They travelled through the air, through the concrete, and through a metal catwalk that served as a floor, branching into pathways and situated above buzzing, whirring machinery. No wonder it had been so difficult to discern what was going on up above, Spider-Man reflected as he glanced over the guardrail and watched robotic limbs carry a Phantom chassis through a gap in the wall and to another room. He turned his attention ahead of him, where similar chasses were held in racks upon racks that spanned nearly wall to wall across the room, black robotic skeletons awaiting deployment.

But there was a difference between these Phantoms and the ones he so often encountered on the battlefield. Frowning under the mask, Spider-Man stepped forward, leaned over the catwalk's railing, and set a finger against the nearest collection of servos and solid-light projectors. Yes. There it was, the constant, ambient tremor of air in motion; the chasses were hollow like the frame of a bicycle. Whenever he'd fought them, they hadn't displayed any such emptiness.

Right. Mechanical systems supported by biological processing. He took his attention away from the chasses, looking instead at that hole in the wall that one of them had vanished into as he'd come in here. He could feel the Phantom in the next room over being hooked up to--to something, metal vibrating on contact with metal and stabilizing with a little pop. His eyes narrowed. His fingers twitching nervously, his breath held, he began to pace down the catwalk towards the door to that room.

A window on one side greeted him as he stepped through, displaying the Phantom under maintenance. Screens embedded into the window offered diagnostics and schematics, all of which Spider-Man ignored. He turned instead to the far wall, where what looked like a large cabinet was anchored in place and had a hundred or so pipes no wider than test tubes leading into and out of it. A quick ripping of metal, and he tossed a mangled padlock over his shoulder as he threw the cabinet doors open. The interior was poorly organized, and called to mind a prototype rather than anything intended for widespread implementation: a screen with a series of codes flashing across it, a mess of piping and tubing, and in carefully arranged racks hundreds upon hundreds of test tubes, most full of some amorphous fluid.

Spider-Man's brow furrowed as he selected a vial at random. Working carefully, he unscrewed the valve that connected it to the mess of piping and slid it out of the vial's stopper--without it, the test tube's lid sealed airtight again. He held it above eye level and turned to see the light filter through from overhead. The fluid inside surrounded what looked almost like a pipe cleaner, thousands of copper wires branching out from a central silicon rod. As he tilted it one way, an air bubble slid up the glass wall, and out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw--

--a tendril, as black as the rest of the liquid, squirming in that air pocket in a bid for freedom.

Spider-Man's eyes widened behind the mask. Oh my god.

Dead Leviathans and alien technology hadn't been the only things the Chitauri had brought to Earth. It had taken the terrestrial armies, and the remnants of SHIELD that Spider-Man had fought alongside, far too long to realize that the shape-shifting battlesuits that their enemies had used were themselves a separate species. Earth hadn't been the only planet to face invasion under the Chitauri; centuries ago, those invaders had conquered and enslaved a species called Klyntar. Amorphous, shapeshifting, symbiotic creatures, the Klyntar had the distinction of being able to use every single cell as musculature, digestive system, armoring, and neurons. Nobody was sure how long the Chitauri had been selectively breeding and brainwashing their symbiote slaves into battle armor, and until now Spider-Man had assumed that practice had stopped with the aliens' defeat.

The little vial of Klyntar sample in his hand was far from his first experience with the species. He had, for six months during and after the war, worn a stolen symbiote as a battlesuit of his own, and even after he and Vee had separated he'd been up close and personal with the species many, many times. But he had believed that Vee's defection from the Chitauri had been a fluke; that they had been the only Klyntar to be recovered from the Chitarui alive.

But now Spider-Man stood in the basement of the Cape Code Authority, holding a vial that contained another member of that species, and right next to him were over a hundred identical vials. All at once, the control systems of the Phantoms became obvious to him.

Without hesitation he turned back to the cabinet and began yanking the tubes out of their holders. The brush-like machinery in each vial, he figured as he worked, must have been some kind of brainwashing system; the copper wires made contact with as many of the Klyntar's neurons as possible, with controlled electric shocks frying out whatever thoughts the aliens tried to form and replacing them with--with whatever programming was necessary to get the Phantoms working. As he pulled each tube out, he killed the electrical charge, but for now he didn't release the Klyntar within from their cells. Where would they go down here? Did they even remember what they were? At best they'd die, at worst the CCA would collect them again and make it even harder to get to them again. No, for now he stuck the vials together with webbing, bundling them together in a padded sack of sorts--he could keep them safe until he knew what else to do, but for now--

--for now, he could feel footsteps vibrating through the concrete fifty feet above. Could feel the elevator starting to move, and the frantic tingling in his head suddenly concentrated all its alarm on the man upstairs. He paused, but only for the smallest fraction of a second; then he worked even faster, his hands becoming blurs again. Grab, break, thwip, grab, break, thwip. The bundle of vials and webbing in his arms was becoming untenably large. He kept at it anyway, always careful not to smash the vials, always careful to separate them from their neighbors with a carefully padded layer of webbing. Even as he webbed up the last one, he wove backpack straps onto the sack and pulled them onto his shoulders. Then he turned on his heel and darted out the door, ready to make an escape.

But as the elevator began its slow descent towards him, he paced around the room and realized that there was no escape to be found. No windows or doors, because he was in a basement, and the air ducts were of course far too small to crawl through. If he didn't have the Klyntar vials, he would've been able to crawl past the elevator, but with that bundle on his back there was no room. If he wanted to save these Klyntar, he was trapped down here with them.

Well, decided Spider-Man as his pacing came to a stop directly in front of the elevator. If he was about to be discovered down here, he certainly wasn't going to let whoever was about to discover him get a dramatic moment about it. There would be no voice booming out from behind him as he frantically looked for a hiding place, there would be no cat and mouse as the person looked for him in this increasingly exposed room. He folded his arms and leaned against the guardrail right in front of the elevator, glaring at the doors. Waiting.

When the doors dinged open, Scrier momentarily hesitated, not having expected to see Spider-Man so out in the open. He blinked behind those blank white eyes, far more awkward than a supervillain wanted to be, before he lamely managed, "I thought that was you, Spider-Man."

[romeoandjulietyouwish]

everything I have found dear (I've not found by myself)

For @lolotin (@friendly-neighborhood-exchange)

Rating: T

Characters: Peter Parker, Tony Stark

Summary: After a fight with Tony, Peter sneaks out of the tower and ends up getting into far more than he anticipated.

Prompt: Peter gets himself into a huge danger and Tony is so scared when he rescues Peter he’s angry with him so Peter tries to run away and then Tony finds out and apologizes.

Tag List: @justrepostandlove @gasplaughgasp @canonismybitch @shadedrose01 @baloobird @whatisawilltolive @a-liddell-alice @you-know-i-larb-you-3000 @hold-our-destiny @lyssismagical @spideygirl2003 @make-the-stars-stay @pj-hermes-tonystark-obsessed @iron-loyalty Read on ao3

Peter sits down on the couch and wraps his arms around himself. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“I want an explanation,” Tony says not unkindly. He follows Peter into the living room with his arms crossed. “You’re failing more than half of your classes. I can’t just ignore that.”

“Why not?” Peter challenges, crossing his arms. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not fucking fine, Peter!” Tony snaps. Tony looks harried, more than Peter’s ever seen him. Tony’s not one to get angry, especially at Peter, but these circumstances are different. “You’re a year away from graduating. Failing all your classes could me being turned away from any college-”

“Why do you care?” Peter exclaims. “You’re not my dad!” Peter ignores the visible hurt on Tony’s face at that.

“I know that, kid,” Tony says painfully. “But I am your guardian and that means I am responsible for you.” Tony sighs and sits on the coffee table, leaning towards Peter. “I know you’re having a hard time, kid. But it’s my job to take care of you and that includes making sure you’re doing okay in school.”

“My last living relative died four months ago. I’m sorry my grades are slipping,” Peter says sarcastically.

“What can I do to help you?” Tony asks. Peter rolls his eyes and says nothing. “Do you need me to find you a tutor?”

“No.” Peter says immediately, looking up to meet Tony’s eyes.

Tony softens a little, “It’s okay if you need help, kid.”

“I don’t need help.”

“Then what do you need?” Tony asks. Peter shrugs. Tony sighs in exasperation and runs a hand through his hair, “Okay, I really don’t want to do this, Peter, but until you get your grades up, you can’t go on patrol.”

Peter’s eyes widen. “That’s not fair-”

“You’re not giving me any other options, kiddo.” Tony tells him. “FRIDAY, don’t let Peter out through the windows. Let me know if he puts on his suit.”

“Affirmative, boss,” FRIDAY responds.

Tony looks back at Peter whose jaw is set in anger. “Kid-”

“Leave me alone.” Peter stands and briskly walks out of the room. Tony can hear Peter’s bedroom door slam. Tony shoots a glance at the alcohol cabinet. But he turns away and walks down to the workshop.

...

It’s so easy to hack into FRIDAY. It’s even easier to override Tony’s commands, don the spider-suit, and crawl out the window.

At first Peter just wants to blow off some steam, fight a few run of the mill bad guys until his anger at Tony feels dissipated. Then he would climb back through his window, change the code back and Tony would be none the wiser.

He’s been on patrol for about twenty minutes when three glowing alien ships descend from the sky, hulking metal robots leaping off the sides and into the streets. With a soft curse under his breath, Peter swings towards them. He manages to take down one of the robots, but as he is about to start on the next one, it’s long metal claws rake across Peter’s chest. He screams out in pain, blood weeping from the wounds.

Peter desperately shoots a web in some random direction and starts swinging. He can’t see where he’s going, all he feels is the pain tearing through him with every strained movement. Peter doesn’t know how long he swings like that, but suddenly his web snaps.

Peter cries out as he falls quickly to the ground, hitting the side of at least two buildings as he does.

His back slams into the ground hard. All of the air escapes his lungs, leaving him gasping for breath as he tries to sit up. He’s in bad shape. Peter’s whole body feels like one big bruise and he can already see that his suit is torn almost to shreds. Blood stains what remains of his suit.

“Shit,” Peter says weakly. He lets his head fall back against the cold concrete. Tony’s going to be pissed. He destroyed the suit. “Karen?” Peter asks. There’s no response. Peter swears again, the damage to the suit must have broken his AI. In the distance he can hear the metal clanking of his assailant moving towards him.

He has to move.

Peter squeezes his eyes shut in preparation for the pain. With a groan, he lifts himself up onto his elbows and slowly manages to push his way to the feet, leaning heavily on the building beside him. Peter presses his lips together to avoid crying out as he stumbles down the alley and to the street. As expected with some sort of metal monster roaming the city, the streets are empty and very few lights are on in the buildings surrounding him. In the distance he can hear sirens and clanking metal footsteps.

Peter casts a glance up and down the street and feels a sinking sense of dread when he realizes he doesn’t have any clue where he is. He must have gone farther than he thought in his desperation to get away from the robots. He can’t even see Stark Tower from this vantage point. Though, Peter realizes with a grimace, he probably could from the top of one of these buildings.

Grunting in pain, Peter sticks his hands and feet onto the brick building to his left and slowly begins to climb.

Tony’s going to kill him, he thinks. Tony doesn’t even know he’s left the tower. And now he broke his AI, turned the suit practically to shreds, and is lost in the middle of the city. Peter feels tears begin to well in his eyes, not only from pain but from shame and the inevitable disappointment from Tony. Maybe it’ll be enough for Tony to send Peter away. That thought alone makes him start to cry, hot tears soaking into his mask.

The past four months have been difficult to say the least. After moving in with Tony, Peter has been trying to figure out his new place in the world and in his mentor’s life. Peter can’t help but feel that his place with Tony is temporary. May was his last living relative, Tony has no obligation to keep him, especially after how much of a brat he was.

Peter thinks of his first week living with Tony.

Peter awoke in the middle of the night and started sobbing, wanting more than anything for May to come into his bedroom and scoop him into a hug, pressing her face to his hair and holding him tight.

When Peter’s door did open, for a moment he thought it was his Uncle Ben standing on the other side. But when the light clicked on he saw Tony. “I’m sorry,” Peter said immediately, wiping his cheeks with his sleeves. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

“It’s okay, kid. Can I come in?” Peter nodded and Tony crossed the room quickly to sit on the side of his bed. It took no effort for Peter to lean forward against Tony’s chest and the older man immediately pulled him into a tight embrace. “I’ve got you, piccolo.”

Peter sobbed against Tony’s shoulder while Tony gently rocked him side to side.

It takes Peter a painful five minutes to scale the building. By the time he reaches the top of it, he’s incredibly light headed and his breathing is far shallower than it should be and his mask is nearly soaked through with tears. He lays flat on his back for a few moments, struggling to stay awake with all of the bloodloss.

“Karen?” He tries again, tears forming in his eyes. Again, there’s no response.

And then Peter starts to cry in earnest. He cries because he’s scared and he’s alone and he wants someone to find him. Even if Tony is mad at him or kicks him out of the tower, he just wants someone to find him. He wants to not be alone anymore.

Then a bright white light hits him. At first Peter thinks he’s dead, that this light is the gates of heaven opening up to him. But then he blinks and there’s something back lit by the light, a very familiar shape.

“Tony…” He breathes softly, so quiet he almost can’t hear it.

He hears muffled shouting, people calling his name, the whir of an engine, but Peter’s eyes remain on the silhouette of Iron Man. Until his breathing slows and his eyes close of their own accord just as the masked form only feet from him.

...

Peter wakes up slowly. He feels floaty and soft in a way that makes him think that he’s asleep. But he knows he’s not because he’s far too aware of his surroundings to be soundly asleep. There’s something in his hand and Peter immediately squeezes it to try to figure out what it is. It’s warm and kind of soft, but Peter can’t quite place it. Then he hears a voice. The voice is so muffled that he can’t make out what is being said, but the sound alone makes Peter relax even further. That voice means he’s safe.

He doesn’t know how long it takes him to open his eyes, they’re just suddenly open without him having made the choice. The light Peter wakes up to isn’t what he was expecting, it’s not the harsh, white light of a hospital, it’s soft light. It’s dark, just how he likes it. And there’s someone sitting next to him.

Peter tips his head to the side to see Tony sitting in a chair next to his bed. Tony looks like hell, his face is unshaven and his hair is an unkempt mess. On the table beside him, Peter can see a plethora of coffee cups and granola bar wrappers.

When Peter looks at Tony, the man’s face softens and Tony squeezes Peter’s hand. “Hey, kiddo.”

“Tony…” Peter breathes. “Where am I?”

“You’re in the medbay,” Tony tells him. Peter tries to sit up, but winces in pain as the movement disturbs the hefty amount of bandages that cover his torso.

“Hold on, Pete.” Tony stands up and very carefully helps Peter sit up, fluffing the pillow behind him as he does. “How do you feel?”

Peter means to answer the question, to tell Tony he’s fine, but what comes out is a teary, “I’m sorry.” He can’t meet Tony’s eyes as he continues. “I-I went on patrol when you said I shouldn’t and I got hurt and I-I destroyed the suit you made me and I yelled at you-”

Before Peter can continue, Tony puts a hand on Peter’s leg, “Breathe, kid.”

“Please don’t make me leave,” Peter asks with tears building in his eyes. “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“Why would I make you leave?” Tony asks. Peter shrugs, unable to say anything. “Look at me, Peter.” Peter slowly lifts his eyes to meet his mentor. What he sees on his mentor’s face isn’t disappointment or annoyance like Peter feared. It’s just love and deep, deep worry. “Kid, you’re the most important person in the word to me.”

“But I-I hacked into FRIDAY and I left without telling you.”

“And we’ll talk about that later,” Tony squeezes his forearm. “But right now all you need to think about is getting better. You made a lot of mistakes, Peter, but no matter how many times you fuck you you won’t stop being my kid. My love for you is unconditional, okay?”

Peter gulps and lifts a hand to wipe his eyes. “Come here.” Tony gingerly sits on the edge of the bed and pulls the teenager into a hug, mindful of his many wounds. “It’s going to be okay, kid.”

“You promise?” Peter asks, his voice small as he’s pressed against Tony’s shoulder.

Tony pulls back a little bit and holds out his pinky to Peter. Peter laughs wetly, but wraps his pinky around Tony’s and shakes it up and down. Tony then tugs him back into the hug, pressing a kiss to the side of his head.

[holylulusworld]

Fic where Sam and Y/n decorate the bunker for Halloween and when Sam says that he doesn't like Halloween, Y/n shows him her costume (wink wink).

Sam Winchester × reader, implied smut

Sam vs Halloween

11,000 Followers Fall & Halloween drabbles  

Summary: Sam hates Halloween...

Warnings: angst, language, naughty costumes, implied smut, ogling, teasing

Pairing: Sam Winchester x Reader

Characters: Dean Winchester

A/N2: Okay, that one got away from me and it’s longer than 500 words.

Divider by @firefly-graphics 

“Sam, I need another pumpkin and more sweets. Your brother is a goddamn sweets thief,” you groan, glaring at Dean who is about to steal your candies for Halloween. “Dean Winchesters, hands of my sweets!” You slap Dean’s hand away, poking your phone into his chest. “If you do not stop to sneak around my sweets, I’ll tell Sam to get me handcuffs and duct tape too.”

“Sammy, get me some sweets,” Dean yells at the phone, hoping his brother got the message. “Your girlfriend is a bad friend. She won’t share.”

“The sweets are for the kids in town,” stepping in front of the sweets you purse your lips. ”I dare you to steal more.”

“No kid will knock at the door of the bunker, sweetheart,” Dean grins, outrunning you to steal a bucketful of sweets. “Got one.” The hunter runs off, snickering when you throw an apple at him. “You should learn to aim better.”

“You’re lucky I love your brother, or you would be dead, Winchester,” Dean laughs, greedily ogling his prey. “Dean, you can’t eat all the sweets.”

“I can and I will, Y/N. It’s Halloween,” you nod, watching Dean smile like a kid when he looks at all the different sweet sins you bought. He doesn’t know you filled one bucket for your friend, knowing he’s a sweet tooth. “Nougat, sour drops, jaw breaker…all the good stuff.”

“Enjoy, Dean,” you smile, giving your friend a wink. “If you promise to help me carve the pumpkins you can have more later.”

“I think I’ll take your offer.” Dean turns to carry the bucket toward his room. “Thank you, sweetheart.”

“You’re welcome, Dean…”

“Come on, help me, Sam,” you try to reach the top of one of the shelves at the library to place the fake spider webs on the books. “I’m too small. Give me a hand here.”

“Fine,” Sam is in a sour mood since you insisted you need to decorate the bunker for Halloween. While Dean is busy carving his second pumpkin, humming silently, his brother doesn’t seem to be interested in anything involving pumpkins or sweets.

“Why can’t you just help me decorate? I want the bunker to be a spooky and scary place on Halloween,” you grin, pointing toward Dean who carved a witch into the pumpkin. “Even Dean helps.”

“Dean likes Halloween, I don’t” you gasp at Sam’s confession. You never talked much about holidays. Most of the time you are on a hunt during holidays but this year you’ve got a break and want to celebrate Halloween.

“How can you hate Halloween?” You look up at Sam, disappointment clearly written all over your face. “I love Halloween.”

“Well, I hate it,” Sam grumbles walking out of the library, leaving you alone with your decoration.

“Why does he hate Halloween, Dean?” Dean stuffs another candy into his mouth shrugging at your question. “Dean, do you know why?”

“I got no clue,” you run toward your room to get the costume you bought for Halloween.

Sam will love Halloween after tonight. Whether he wants it or not.

“Sam,” you purr when you step into your shared bedroom. “Why don’t you like Halloween?” You smirk when Sam looks up at you from the bed. He swallows thickly, Adam’s apple bobbing when you close the door.

“Y/N,” a low growl leaves Sam’s lips watching you slide his flannel down your shoulders to reveal your costume.

You’re wearing a miss prep school costume. The tie front crop top with plaid trim covers your chest poorly. The plaid skirt barely covers your ass and the stockings matching the pattern of Sam’s plaid let your boyfriends, cock twitch in interest.

“You know,” you sigh, stepping closer to place your hands onto Sam’s shoulders. “Maybe I can help you. Just tell me why you hate Halloween. Is it the sweets? The costumes?”

“No,” Sam’s eyes roam your body, drink your sexy outfit in. He’s running one hand over his clothed erection, poorly hiding his arousal. “It’s… there was that girl I liked,” you hum, now straddling Sam’s lap. You hum when he grips your ass. “I was in sixth grade, she invited me to her Halloween party.”

“Cool,” you smirk when Sam’s eyes drop to your cleavage. Usually, Sam is more subtle, steals glances now and then but not today. Today his eyes are glued to your body. “Tell me more,” you grind against his erection, teasingly rolling your hips. “Baby?”

“We played the game spin the bottle,” you snicker as Sam’s cheeks turn pink. “I had a huge crush on her and when I bent down as it was my turn, well I…”

“You can tell me, Sam,” running your fingers through his hair, tugging lightly you lean closer to peck his lips.

“I kinda…hurled, everywhere. Lunch, dinner it all came up, on the poor girl mostly. Kids ran and screamed and it was so embarrassing. I hid in the woods and waited for Dean to pick me up,” you nod, pecking Sam’s forehead.

“In other words, you didn’t get the girl and that’s the reason you hate Halloween,” you hum, hands cupping Sam’s face. “I’m sorry this happened to you but,” grinning you rock your hips. “You can have the girl, baby. Anytime, anywhere and in any position.”

“Any position,” you picked Sam’s interest. His eyes darken and you've got the feeling he suddenly likes Halloween or at least the costume you chose. “If you want me to enjoy Halloween, I want you in that costume. I’m going to be a bad teacher and give you an A+ if you are a good girl for me,” Sam whispers in your ear.

“I’ll be so good, Sir…”

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-------------------------------------- 

Sam/Jared Forever Tags

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[yellowocaballero]

He’s Just Not That Into You: Web!Jon and Martin ficlet

Another ficlet written in the same universe as The Convention on Chronographer Lane/The Monster at the End of This Book. As before, you don’t need to have read that to read this. These ficlets are being written as character studies so I get a good handle on the uniqueness of the characters in this AU before I actually write something longer. Which is why they’re...like this. 

Very slight content warning for internalized fatphobia and Jon being interpreted as being a creep again. Reverse content warning for Martin’s tasty pasta. 

EDIT 2/4/2021: With the release of Sucker’s Bet, which this story was a kind of pilot study for, this story is no longer canon. However, you can still consider it a 15 page summary of that entire story. I’m sad I couldn’t keep the ‘join my spider cult’ thing but we all make sacrifices. 

Martin was in the middle of making a delicious pot of pasta when Jonathan Sims crawled in through his kitchen window.

Martin stared at Jonathan Sims, too out of it to even be surprised. Jon halted halfway through his entrance, sitting on the windowsill with one leg swung over it to rest on his floor, one leg on the fire escape above. Martin was on the sixth floor of his flat complex.

“Hullo,” Jon said, as if he was not in his window, “have you reconsidered my offer of -”

Martin threw his spoon at Jon, hitting him squarely on the forehead. Jon cursed, shocked into leaning backwards, and he accidentally topped off the window and onto the fire escape. He landed on the metal grid with a loud crash and a rattle, and the muffled sounds of his cursing echoed through the flat.

After a second to grab a new spoon and turn down the heat on the pot, Martin walked over to the window and wiggled it down again. He looked Jon dead in the eyes as he locked it, before going back to his pasta.

It was good. He should add some pesto and herbs next time.

Martin was in the middle of making a delicious pot of pasta when Jonathan Sims crawled in through his kitchen window. 

Martin stared at Jonathan Sims, too out of it to even be surprised. Jon halted halfway through his entrance, sitting on the windowsill with one leg swung over it to rest on his floor, one leg on the fire escape above. Martin was on the sixth floor of his flat complex. 

“Hullo,” Jon said, as if he was not in his window, “have you reconsidered my offer of -”

Martin threw his spoon at Jon, hitting him squarely on the forehead. Jon cursed, shocked into leaning backwards, and he accidentally topped off the window and onto the fire escape. He landed on the metal grid with a loud crash and a rattle, and the muffled sounds of his cursing echoed through the flat. 

After a second to grab a new spoon and turn down the heat on the pot, Martin walked over to the window and wiggled it down again. He looked Jon dead in the eyes as he locked it, before going back to his pasta. 

It was good. He should add some pesto and herbs next time. 

***

Martin had never really bothered to learn how to cook, but now that he was unemployed he had plenty of time. 

Now that he was unemployed, he had plenty of time for lots of things. He was finally taking up knitting again. Lots of seasons of Jane the Virgin to catch up on. His severance package from the Institute had been pretty good, not to mention the check Rosie had slipped him with a wink that she had worryingly called ‘Hazard Pay’, but this was London and even Martin could only make the money stretch so far. He spent eight hours of his day looking for jobs, touting his five year experience as a librarian and six month experience as an Archival assistant. But there was only so far you could go without a degree, and the market was shit, and really wouldn’t it just be so much easier to list a master’s in library science from some huge, anonymous university…

But Martin had the feeling that line of thought was what had put him on Jon’s radar in the first place. 

***

A week later Martin was halfway through a comforting Gilmore Girls rewatch when he heard a knock on his door. He had been fastidiously avoiding answering knocks on the door ever since Jon had pulled his first Jehovah’s Witness impression, but he had ordered a replacement washing machine part and it was arriving that day. He put his knitting down and got up, peering through the eyehole - hair not nearly long enough to be Jon, great - and opened the door. 

“Hullo,” the man said in a thick Cockney accent, not looking up from his clipboard, “I got a package here for Mr. Blackwood?”

“Yes, that’s me.” Martin held out his hands to take the little screen and sign for the package. After a second of clumsy fumbling, the man passed the package and the screen over, and Martin boredly scribbled his name. “Thanks, mate -”

But the man was gone, and Martin had realized belatedly that the man had slipped past Martin to enter his flat. He easily slid the cap off, letting his tightly curled hair cascade down to his shoulders, and propped his hands on his hips as he spun in a circle, admiring Martin’s extraordinarily boring and cramped flat. 

“Really love what you’ve done with the place!” Jonathan Sims said loudly. “Your sense of interior design is really impeccable, Martin, truly. A man’s home is his castle! Oh, is that vintage chintz? So cute.”

“Get out of my house.”

“Look at this ceramic kitten!” Jon was already in front of his mantle, carefully scrutinizing his little row of ceramic figures. They were fifty pence at the charity shops and Martin found them precious and charming, okay? “Your place has so much personality. My flat has personality too, but I’m afraid that personality just screams a propensity towards arson, so it’s much less impressive. How old is that couch, from the 70s? Very grandmother. Is it inherited?”

Yes. “No,” Martin said, resisting the urge to throttle the man as he dumped his washing machine part on the end table, “and please get out of my flat. I’ve said explicitly I don’t want you where I live -”

“Really, Martin, I’m hardly a vampire,” Jon said, having the gall to look offended as he cradled a little meowing ceramic kitten in his hand. “If I needed permission to enter dwellings I’d never go anywhere.” He paused a beat, something seeming to occur to him. “But I get a lot of permission from many different people of a variety of genders to enter their homes for sex, which I am very good at.” He paused again. “I really am very thirsty. I don’t suppose I could trouble you for a spot of tea…?”

Because Martin was British, he made the tea. But he resented every second of it. 

Jon hadn’t started stalking him immediately after he and his weirdo friends had murdered Martin’s boss, but it was pretty close. He had probably thought a week was enough time to emotionally recover from the ordeal of finding out that your boss’ boss was an immortal apocalypse cultist or whatever and that your boss was actually just a plant from a different and somehow creepier apocalypse cult inserted into your workplace to assassinate his boss. He had probably thought that a week was enough time to emotionally recover from the fact that Jonathan Sims - prickly, rude, pretentious Head Archivist with a heart of gold - was an elaborate fabrication, and that the man whom Martin had been falling for had never truly existed at all. 

A week had not been enough time. 

He didn’t even know Jon’s real name. 

“So what is your real name, anyway?” They were, unfortunately, sitting at Martin’s rinky-dink kitchen table, complete with little pock-marked burn scars in the wood and a wobbly leg. Martin had a magazine rolled up and jammed under the leg, which he was uncomfortably aware of as Jon lounged in his hard little wooden chair as if it was a thousand dollar gaming chair. The fake UPS uniform helped make him look like something other than a movie star, but it was hard to disguise the sharp and haughty features and the cold grey eyes. He had kept the ceramic cat, placing it in front of him with its little plainative face turned towards Martin. 

“What makes you think it’s not Jonathan Sims?” Jon asked archly, sipping at his PG Tips out of a chipped black mug. He made a faint face. “Sorry, is there cream for this? I hate black tea.”

“You always take your tea black,” Martin said automatically. Jon stared at him until he got it. “Of course. Right.” 

By the time he got back to the table with the sugar and cream Jon was going through his mail, with absolutely no shame whatsoever. “Bill, bill, overdue bill. You’re hurting for money, aren’t you? You know, I might know someone who’s hiring -”

“If you’re about to say a giant spider that’s going to lay eggs in my stomach and then burst out of my skin and transform me into a spider person, I have to pass.”

“I wasn’t going to say that,” Jon blatantly lied. “I just don’t think you’re hearing me out. Has anybody ever told you that you’re very unwilling to listen to new ideas?”

“When the new idea is joining a spider cult, then yes. Actually, no, because nobody’s ever asked me that before I met you.”

Jon didn’t seem to pick up on Martin’s extraordinarily pained expression, or maybe he just didn’t care. He leaned in instead, easily dropping a grotesque amount of sugar cubes into his tea. “Just consider it. Let the idea percolate in your mind. There’s a lot of benefits. No more worrying about money. No more putting in all that work to manipulate people. It’d be as easy as breathing for you. Anybody you want to like you likes you, and anybody you hate has their life ruined in days.” Something glinted with light in Jon’s grey eyes, like a spotlight shining off a raincloud. “Anybody you want to fall in love with you does so instantly. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

“All for the low, low price of selling my soul to a giant spider god,” Martin said sarcastically. Jon nodded fastidiously, as if it really was a low price. “Seriously, Jon? I have no interest in any of this. I don’t even know why you’ve singled me out to stalk. I don’t - I don’t like manipulating people, it’s not some kind of hobby -”

“Liar. You love manipulating people.” Jon sipped his tea, as if bored. “Honestly, Martin, we’re all friends here. I won’t judge. You don’t need to virtue signal. We both love manipulating people, getting what we want, putting on personas. We like to control how people see us, no matter what that perception is. You believe that ends justify the means, I believe that good means result in good ends. We’ve very similar.” Something strange entered Jon’s expression, almost entirely hidden by the tea, and for the first time Martin wondered if this was an expression Jon hadn’t meant for him to see. “You’re the only person I’ve ever met who is exactly like me. We should work together. You’re so well suited for the Mother. You’d be a treasured son. Valued, celebrated, loved. Everything you always wanted, you can have.”

Silence stretched between them. Martin let Jon think that he was thinking it over, staring into his own cup of Earl Grey and letting the slowly wafting steam fog up his glasses. Jon sipped his tea again, still posed casually yet attractively. In a brief yet stupid spurt of nostalgia Martin found himself missing the man he thought Jonathan Sims had been. 

Stupid. Loving Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist, had been as real as crushing on a love interest in a dating sim. Instead, Martin leaned in, and Jon leaned in to match him. Martin locked eyes with him, as sincerely as he possibly could. No lies, no artifice. “Stop projecting your insecurity about your own bad decisions on me,” Martin enunciated clearly, and Jon’s eyes widened in shock. “and get out of my house.”

He did, eventually. Maybe that was one of a million surprising things about Jonathan Sims, or whatever his real name was: Martin could always get him to do what he wanted eventually. 

***

Martin did not spend time thinking about Jonathan Sims, mostly because he had the feeling that this was what Jonathan Sims wanted. 

Instead, he frantically piled more and more projects and work into his free time. Ever since he was seventeen, Martin had always held down at least three jobs. His life was a never-ending rotation of a six am to three pm shift at Papa John’s, then a three pm to ten pm shift at Panera, and then stumbling home to stuff a ready meal in the microwave before doing it all over again only to work his third weekend job on the weekends. It had gotten to the point where he had paid the unemployed downstairs neighbor living on disability cheques to feed and occasionally take care of Mum because he hadn’t had time to do it himself. Martin could have have just dropped a job and scraped by on two so he could take care of Mum himself, but - well, it wasn’t hurting anybody. His neighbor had needed the cheques, right?

In comparison, the Institute had been an absolute dream. Work from nine to five, every day, then come home and crash. There had been benefits, insurance. It probably said something that even after discovering that both of his bosses had been cultists to Lovecraftian horrors who wanted to end the world or whatever, it was still the best job he ever had. He even missed it, sometimes - missed listening to Sasha and Tim joke around, missed the repetitive work, missed harmlessly and shallowly crushing on his persnickety boss who sometimes flashed a smile at him that made his heart melt. 

Fucker had known exactly what he was doing. 

That was what got Martin, even now. What had been the point? Jon had been there to infiltrate Elias’ plans for a Head Archivist, or so Sasha had confusingly explained after the fact. The skeptic, pissy act was to show himself off as an ideal candidate: willfully ignorant, psychologically vulnerable, and utterly isolated from everyone. What was the point of...of...seducing Martin?

The thought made Martin want to die. Imagine living a life where you woke up in the morning and thought to yourself, ‘Today I’m going to seduce the ugly, fat, high school dropout in my extensive long con to save/destroy the world’. It was like he was a movie star in a heist film or something, only cruel and pointless. 

Was it just to make fun of him? Martin had thought it was. But as he...interacted with Jon more and more, he got the sense that his fascination with Martin was genuine. He genuinely saw something of himself in Martin. 

Unless that was a lie too, and he just needed something from Martin. Unless Jon knew that Martin knew that he was conning him, and that there was another reason -

Martin had the terrible sense that Jon lived his life like this, always guessing and second guessing and triple guessing. It sounded...very tiring. 

He didn’t know how to explain any of this to Tim. They got together every so often for drinks - actually, Tim texted him asking to hang out, playing it all cool as if he went out and got drinks with tons of buddies all the time but was doing Martin a favor. Martin had the sense that he was hiding a deep and pervasive loneliness, but these days whenever Martin went down too deep a spiral of teasing out motivations he felt like Jon, so he quickly cut it out. 

“What’s there to get?” Tim said, throwing back his pint. “He’s an asshole who pretended to be our friend for months, and he turned out to be a total creep who leads a spider cult. You know, as happens sometimes!”

Sometimes Martin got the sense that Tim was a little bitter about what happened at the Archives. He didn’t really have a good thread on why yet, but he had the sense it was because Tim had ‘adopted’ Jon as his friend very intensely and that made him react badly to the perceived betrayal - no! No psychoanalyzing! Not today! 

“It do be like that sometimes,” Martin said wisely, peeling away the label at his shitty beer. The bar was crowded, noisy, and dim, and it was hard to hear Tim over the noise. “I don’t know, though. If that was all there was to it, he wouldn’t be showing up at my house all the time…”

“Wait, what?”

Martin explained in short order, trying not to feel embarrassed about it. Tim seemed to grow increasingly furious, and Martin found himself trailing off uncertainly near the end. 

“He’s doing the same thing to Sasha,” Tim said lowly. “Fucking freak.”

“Wait, what? He’s been bothering Sasha?” Jesus, that really was creepy. Come to think of it, Martin hadn’t seen Sasha around lately - she used to come get drinks with them right after they all got fired, but the last three invites she had begged off and said that she was ‘dealing with a lot right now’ and that she was ‘really swamped’. Martin was pretty sure that she was also unemployed, so he didn’t really know what she was swamped with, but it wasn’t any of his business. Maybe she was depressed. “Like, is he also trying to recruit her into the spider cult, or…?”

Weirdly, Martin felt a weird pang of disappointment at that. He had thought that what he and Jon had was special. 

Ha ha. As if. 

“I don’t know!” Tim cried, frustrated. He was gripping his pint glass tightly, as if he wished he was wrapping his fingers around Jon’s very slim and attractive neck instead. “First he keeps bothering Sasha, and now he keeps breaking into your house and flirting with you -”

“What!” Martin squeaked. “He’s not -”

“He’s a predator,” Tim said finally, as if he was a judge delivering a verdict. “Fucking freak. Martin, next time he drops by, I want you to call me immediately. I’ll kick his ass for you.”

“I’m a grown man, I can kick his ass by myself,” Martin said lamely, fully aware that he had never kicked an ass in his life and never would. 

“Don’t let that bully intimidate you,” Tim lectured, like the overbearing big brother Martin had always kind of secretly wanted. “He’s just a grifter, spider cult or not. Seriously, Martin, next time he bothers you call me. I have more than a few things I want to say to the bastard.”

It was heartwarming, almost. “You haven’t seen him since he killed Elias, right?”

Tim looked away, scowling. “Nope. Dunno why, if he’s hassling you two. I’m the only one with some serious questions I need to ask him, and he hasn’t even - whatever.” He looked back at Martin, forcing a great big smile. “Really, if he wants a hottie, why isn’t he knocking on my door, right? Like, come on, I’m single and ready to -”

“How’s the job hunt going, Tim!”

“I’m trying to get back into publishing, what do you think! Kill me!”

Martin liked Tim. If you had asked him four months ago if they were really friends, he would have smiled and deflected, because he was pretty sure that Tim was just that friendly to everybody. Martin always felt insecure with friendly and nice people, because he never knew if they were being friendly to him because they liked him and considered him a friend, or if they were just like that with everyone. 

But they still got drinks when they didn’t have to, and the expression of tight and barely controlled rage that flashed through his face when he thought that Sasha and Martin were in danger from Jon was real. Maybe they really were friends. 

Maybe there was something deeply buried and long since repressed in Tim that was destroying him slowly from the inside. Maybe Martin and Sasha had that too, that rot: the way Sasha would carelessly invade privacy to hack inside people’s private files without even thinking about it, the way that Martin would almost instinctively balance impression management with playing down to expectations with always dissecting people in a ruthless search for a weak point without even thinking about it. 

Maybe they were all bad people, every one of them. It felt sometimes as if Martin had a corrupt and diseased heart, that infected parts of his body with a sick necrosis. He hurt people when he didn’t want to; he said things he didn’t mean. There was something rotten and evil in Martin, and sometimes it felt as if he couldn’t help but pass it along from person to person.

Man hands on misery to man, Phillip Larkin said, it deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don’t have any kids yourself. 

Well, Martin had the second part down. He was still working on the first. 

***

But Martin was right to worry, because when he woke up at seven the next morning to shamble into his living room, he flipped the light switch to see Jonathan Sims sitting on his grandma couch flipping through his meager collection of books. 

“You don’t read very much, do you?” Jon said.

“How did you get into my house.”

“Told the landlord I was the exterminator and needed to get in to spray for bugs.” Jon tossed the book on the battered coffee table - 1984 - and reclined on the sofa. “You really do have quite a bit of spiders, though. Want me to take care of that? Do you want more spiders? I can get you as many spiders as you like.”

The way he sat was purposeful, the way one of his black boots with a low heel was propped on the coffee table, the way his dark and closely cut trousers were slightly splayed, his tight black turtleneck highlighting his figure was slightly hidden by a fine white silk jacket. The small part of Martin’s mind that used to work at a dry-cleaners inanely wondered how difficult that jacket was to keep clean. Most of Martin’s mind was occupied realizing that Tim was right, and that Jon was flirting with him. 

“What do I have to say to get you to leave my house,” Martin said, instead of asking why, why, why, why. He knew why - spider cult purposes - but why -

“Lots of poetry collections, though,” Jon said, and Martin knew that he had caught him looking. He had a little half-smile: half encouraging, half shy. “You have great taste. I’m a Yeats fan too.”

Sure. “Name one Yeats poem.”

“The Stolen Child,” Jon said instantly.

Martin narrowed his eyes. “What do you like about it?”

Jon was silent. 

“Thought so.” Martin pointed at his door. “Out.”

There it was, a brief explosion, so quick that Martin might have thought he imagined it: grinding teeth, sloping eyebrows, a scowl. A flash of irritation: here one second, gone the next. “I like your poetry, though,” Jon attacked, a different angle. “Your imagery is very vivid.”

What the fuck. “You went through my diary?” Martin screeched. 

“Yes?” Jon looked slightly flummoxed. “I was doing research. People like it when you display interest in their hobbies.”

“I am making coffee,” Martin said, voice strangled, “and I am making breakfast. And if you refuse to leave, you are not saying a single word until I’ve had caffeine.”

And then Martin refused to acknowledge Jon any more. Martin quickly realized that Jon hated this very much, used to being the center of attention wherever he was, and it was an extremely effective method of making him throw himself into a kitchen chair and sulk as the coffee pot sputtered out a cup. Martin focused himself on heating up the pan and cracking a few eggs into a bowl, whisking it absentmindedly as he clenched his mobile. 

He should call Tim. He had never known Jon to get violent, but that didn’t mean anything. The guy was...he was…

He glanced back at Jon, who had his arms crossed and was frowning down at the stained wood of the kitchen table. He didn’t seem to know Martin was looking, and it occurred to Martin for the first time that this might be the authentic Jon: tired and frustrated and uncertain what he was doing wrong. 

The eggs sizzled on the frying pan, and Martin pushed them around with a spatula. “What do you like on your eggs?”

Jon looked up, surprised, before rearranging his expression into something cool and distant. “Surprise me.”

Martin served them cheesy with herbs, just for that. When Jon took a bite he looked surprised, as if he had been expecting something spiteful and received only something good in exchange. 

When he put a cup of Early Grey in front of him, with sugar congealing on the bottom and rosy brown from the cream, he looked surprised again too.

“You’re excellent at reading people,” Jon said, carefully directly after Martin had a sip of his coffee. “Mother would -”

“Do you want to make a bargain?” Martin asked. 

That caught Jon’s attention. He smiled winningly, leaning in, hair carefully arranged to fall over one shoulder in a painfully attractive way. “I could be convinced.”

“If you knock on my door at a reasonable hour, then I will let you in and we can talk or whatever. I’ll make us tea. I don’t care.”

Jon’s grin only widened, and when Martin felt a foot brush his leg he had to fight the urge to jump a foot in the air. “What’ll I do in exchange?”

“You let up on the sales pitch,” Martin said severely, and physically moved his chair further away from Jon. “And you stop lying to me. And for christ’s sake, stop pretending you’re into me.”

 Jon blinked, expression falling in shock. 

He scrambled to paste something back on, but it was as if he couldn’t decide. Martin saw him half-cycle through different expressions, different appearances: abashed, eager, flirtatious. It was as if he was frantically guessing which Jon would work best to convince Martin to do what he wanted, but he just couldn’t decide. 

Finally, he weakly asked, “What makes you think I’m not into you?”

Martin couldn’t help it: he scoffed bitterly. “Guess someone like you was never asked out as a joke in secondary. Nobody would honestly find me attractive. Everything you do is calculated, Jon, and I’m not vain enough to think the flirting is an exception. It’s obvious.”

“I’m not obvious,” Jon said, physically fighting to keep his expression from twisting into anger. It was...obvious. He eventually forced his expression into something wide-eyed and sincere, reaching out a hand to place on Martin’s arm. It was warm, but it settled oddly on Martin’s skin. Something about it didn’t feel like a human arm. “That’s just your low-self esteem talking, love. When I look at you, I see -”

“A sucker?”

Jon opened his mouth, then closed his. His hand was still on Martin’s arm. Martin didn’t know why he hadn’t shaken it off. “I see someone very kind,” Jon said, almost lamely. “I like that in a man.”

“Yeah, sure.” Martin shook his hand off - disgusted with Jon, disgusted with himself. Someone like Jon - attractive, confident, smooth - could never understand how it felt. He didn’t know why he expected him to. “I don’t know why you aren’t leaving me or Sasha alone, or why you’re trying to recruit us both into your spider cult -”

“I’m trying to recruit Sasha into my vigilante superhero team, actually.”

“Whatever. Point is, if I can’t get rid of you, I don’t want our conversations to be exhausting. These...games you’re always playing,” Martin waved his hand demonstratively as he chugged coffee with the other, “are tiring. Maybe - maybe you and I are similar, Jon. But the difference between us is that I find these games tiring. I don’t like doing it. I - what I want is a relationship where there’s no games. Where I can just be me and the other person can just be them. Don’t you want that too?”

Jon stared at him, eyes wide, almost shocked, almost hesitant, almost hopeful. 

Finally, he said, “I only trust three people.”

“I’m not asking you to trust me,” Martin, who trusted nobody, said exasperatedly. What did it say, that the leader of the spider cult trusted more people than Martin did? “I’m just asking you not to lie to me.”

“I don’t know how to do that,” Jon said, before pausing a beat. “I’d trust you if you joined my spider cult.”

“You’re shit out of luck, then. And you’re not going to convince me.” Martin took another sip of his coffee, hiding his trembling hands. “Because you can’t lie to me, Jon. Face it: I’m almost as good as you are.” He smiled wryly. “As good as someone can get without supernatural powers, anyway.”

Jon stared at him, just stared, and Martin let the moment linger in silence as he cut into his eggs. Finally, he said, “You’ll tolerate my presence if I agree to drop the act.”

“Yep.”

“I’m not sure how to drop the act,” Jon admitted, somewhat embarrassed, as if he was admitting to not knowing how to tie his shoes.

Martin rolled his eyes. “Do your best. You must have been normal at one point.”

“When I was normal,” Jon said, “nobody tolerated me at all.”

The shocking honesty made Martin almost gag on his coffee. Jon’s eyes widened again, as if he couldn’t believe what he had just said, as if he had never meant to say it. As if nobody had ever heard it at all. 

“Now that we’re actually getting somewhere,” Martin said, tactfully not touching that barrel of worms - er, spiders - with a two meter pole. “Can you please tell me your real name? Unless it was, like, wiped from your mind by your spider mom? Is this like one of those cult things were they rename you for indoctrination purposes?” Something terrible occurred to him. “Is every guy in your cult named John and every woman named Annabelle? It was just a fake name you gave to Elias, right? Right?”

Jon - whoever he was - stared at Martin, completely and utterly dumbfounded. 

Then he laughed, long and hard, hoarse and wheezing and breathy, and Martin knew that this, at least, was real. 

***

Martin: I think I’ve taken care of the Jon thing

Martin: Probably

Martin: The guy’s kinda hopeless

Tim: ya sash said that hes cool

Tim: apparently shes a vigilante now? or smth? Idk

Martin: Yeah that seems about right

Martin: At least she’s living her best life?

Tim: ya good for her honestly

Tim: ….so does Spider-Man KNOW how to use all eight of those arms ifyaknowwhatimean

Martin: WE! ARE! JUST! FRIENDS!

***

“ - so then after my father passed tragically of brain cancer, I was raised by my emotionally distant and disaffected Gran. I think she’s the one who taught me that if I ever want anything in life, I have to secure it for myself. I’ve been very independent ever since I was a child, and although my social skills have always been naturally lacking I’ve worked to compensate for that by studying the art of social interaction. I guess you could call it somewhat of a special interest of mine, I like to sit in coffeeshops with my sister Annabelle and study passerby -”

“Uh huh.”

“Did you know forty percent of Britons own pets? I think it reveals interesting things about the human psychology. The domestication of dogs has always been fascinating, of course. Did you know that all dogs are descended directly from the grey wolf? There were other wolf species at the time, but they’ve long since gone extinct.”

“Wow.”

“I know! The evolution of what we today determine as dog breeds were only created in the Victorian era. I’m sure Jonah would have had some thoughts on that, if I hadn’t fed him to my mother. Actually, few people know this, but our modern conceptualization of the wolf pack hierarchy has been thoroughly debunked. Alphas and omegas only exist in captive populations. Tell that to the werewolves, huh! Actually, I organize the weekly Avatar poker games - you can come if you’re interested, great way to make some money - and I actually did tell that to the werewolves, and they were not very happy with me -”

“Jon? I can’t hear the movie.”

“Right, right.” Jon passed Martin the popcorn. “So what’s this one about?”

Martin scooped up a handful of the popcorn without shame, feeding it in a steady stream into his mouth. “About a guy who gets turned into a fly.”

“That’s fun,” Jon said warmly. “I turned a guy into a fly once. He got stuck in a spider-web immediately and everything, it was quite entertaining.” At Martin’s horrified look, he quickly followed it up with, “Gerry had found out that he was illegally evicting tenants who were undergoing cancer treatment, asking for rent before it was due and physically intimidating the tenants and everything. He also stole one thousand dollars worth of goods from Whole Foods and everything, which is quite funny if you think about it -”

“How does someone steal a thousand dollars with of stuff from Whole Foods? It’s a grocery store.”

“I know, right!” Jon threw up his hands, accidentally sending some pieces of popcorn flying. “The rich are the true parasites, Martin! I’m speaking as an insect person!”

“Word.” 

Martin ate more popcorn, and noticed Jon carefully brush his crossed legs against Martin’s knee. 

Well, he was trying. He’d stop pretending to like Martin eventually. 

They’d get there. ;

[css1992]

I absolutely love all of your stories and was hoping to give you a prompt! I haven’t seen you write Tony or Peter as superheroes, but I would love a story where the team goes on a mission that goes wrong and they think Peter is dead. A few months pass, and Spider-Man pops up in a different color costume next to a big baddie (Quentin? Rumlow? Whoever it is def has a crush or Peter lmao). If you can’t write the prompt, no worries.❤️

(...)

“Thank you so much for taking my prompt omgggg! To answer your question, Spider-Man pops up as a baddie, and he works with/for another baddie”

You’re too sweet and kind, my dear, thank you so much! I’m so sorry this took so long, something happened in my personal life and I was too heartbroken for love stories for a while there hahaha Everything’s fine now. I hope you’re still out there to read this and I really hope you enjoy it! <3

[*]

This takes place a few years after Civil War.  A few details were changed – Peter was recruited at 18, while attending MIT; Endgame never happened, they defeated Thanos in Titan; Tony and Pepper never got back together after their break-up somewhere between IM3 and CACW.

TW: Mentions of blood, alcoholism, grief and death. I guess that’s it, let me know if you find anything else triggering!

[*]

“It’s him.” Tony stood there paralyzed, staring at the hologram projected from Nat’s phone, heart pounding, ears ringing. “It’s him,” he repeated, running his hands through his hair, trying to get a hold of himself, trying to make sense of what was happening, of what he was seeing. It was too surreal – impossible! – he had to be hallucinating. Right? Maybe dreaming? Had he drunk himself into a stupor again? Had he finally gone mad?

It was a regular day, Tony had been down in the lab for an unknown number of hours when Friday announced Steve, Nat and Bruce were at the door, which was unusual. Usually, they’d visit one at a time, an unspoken agreement not to overwhelm the engineer, but that particular day they all marched into his house saying that he needed to see something. He was too exhausted to tell them to fuck off, so he just poured himself a drink and shrugged, gesturing towards the living room.

Nat proceeded to project a video from her StarkPhone and what he saw took away the ground from beneath his feet. He tried to sit down, but he didn’t make it to the couch, his legs were not responding, he fell on his butt in the middle of the living room. The blood felt like ice in his veins, his throat was closing up, his eyes were burning and his hands were shaking so fucking badly. He was boneless and petrified all of a sudden, as he watched him swing from building to building on his webs, a black and white blur.

Peter.

He felt Steve and Bruce on either side of him, trying to help him up, but he didn’t take his eyes off of the projection. It was him. My Peter, you’re back, you came back to me, you’re okay, you’re alive–

“Tony, it’s not him.” Steve’s voice brought him back to the real world, and he looked around. Natasha and Bruce both stared at him with worry in their eyes, like they agreed with Steve.

“What, are you fucking insane? Of course it’s him!” His voice was firm, angry, even though his hand was shaking when he pointed at the hologram, to the short video that kept replaying on a loop.

“Tony, he robbed a bank. He put civilians at risk. How could you think this is Peter? Are you insane? Don’t you know him? Look, we had to show you this because it’s going to be all over the news soon and whoever this is, they’re trying to tarnish Peter’s memory and we can’t allow it, but this – this isn’t him, Tony. I’m sorry.”

The older man stopped for a second, taking a deep breath. Was he going insane? Was he seeing things, was his mind playing tricks on him again? It wouldn’t be the first time in the last few months. He focused on the images. The bank’s alarm was sounding loudly, as people started running wildly out the front door. Seconds later, someone wearing a cape and a – helmet? Fish bowl? – on their head walked out, then finally him.

Not him, Steve said, but how could it be anyone else, when Tony could clearly see it was Peter gracefully swinging around on the webs. Not him, Steve said, but how could it not be him when Tony recognized every inch of his body? The long neck, the narrow, yet strong shoulders, thin waist, round ass, strong thighs, small feet, long hands and thin, wiry arms. How could it not be him when Tony could recognize the way he moved, the way he leaped and landed effortlessly, the grace with which he swung back and forth?

“It’s him, Steve.” Even as the words left his mouth, his eyes were fixed on the boy in the video. The suit looked a lot like the one Tony made for him, but it was slightly different. Black, instead of blue. White, instead of red. But it was him. Alive and breathing. “It’s Peter, I know it is.”

***

It was supposed to be an easy mission. Even though it called for every Avenger in town, it was just a security measure, Steve told them. They intercepted a terrorist group communicating online, planning a coordinated attack on Stark Tower, the Avengers Compound and Times Square. They were professionals, but only human. They thought they’d be enough: Captain America, Black Widow, Iron Man, Spiderman, Winter Soldier and even the Hulk as a safety net.

In a way, they were sufficient. They were able to avoid the attack and arrest almost every single one of the terrorists that weren’t killed during the mission. But the cost was high – way too fucking high.

Peter.

Tony knew what happened the exact moment when it did. He knew there was no saving him when he opened his lips and tried to call out his name and instead of words, blood came out. Thick, dark blood. He saw the life leaving his eyes when he looked at him one last time, eyelids drooping and then closing. There was no saving him, Tony knew that, and yet he tried. He flew as fast as the suit would allow him, even though he had no idea what he would have done if he had reached him in time. Which he didn’t.

Peter disappeared before his eyes, along with the man who had put a knife through his heart. And not just any knife, not any metal would have been able to pierce the suit. It had to be vibranium. Whoever that man was, he knew that, maybe he had Peter in mind all along. The only thing Tony remembered about him were his wide, blue eyes. Cold and wild. The sadistic smile when he heard Tony’s wail of despair. Tony thought he knew him somehow, but couldn’t be sure.

They just disappeared. One second, they were there, right within his reach, the next, they were gone. He’d lost him. The person he’d sworn to protect at all costs, at the cost of his own damned life, but he was useless the moment Peter needed him the most. Gone. Disappeared before his eyes, Tony couldn’t even bring his body home.

He remembered crumbling to the ground, broken and unbelieving, staring at the empty space where Peter once stood.

“Tony...” Steve crouched down next to him, looking pained and devastated, and the older man broke down.

“I lost the kid, Steve. I lost him.”

He didn’t remember a lot of that day, he’d passed out drunk in his room for the first time in ten years, woke up hours later in the med bay with Steve, Rhodey and Pepper speaking in hushed voices. He didn’t care what they were saying, because the first thought he had when he opened his eyes was that he’d lost the love of his life. His Peter.

***

“Boss, I was able to acquire the footage from the bank’s security cameras.” Friday’s voice brought him back to the present and they all jumped up, all eyes turning to the huge screen facing the couch.

“Good girl, play it,” he answered quickly, taking a seat because he knew he would need it.

It started with a normal day in a bank, people walking around, standing in line, talking to each other, nothing out of the ordinary. Then the guy they’d seen leaving the bank in the other video – Fish-bowl-guy – appeared out of nowhere, levitating above the patrons, slowly floating down.

“My fellow citizens, do not fret, I mean you no harm.” Of course, New Yorkers wouldn’t take his word for it, not after everything they had gone through over the course of the last decade. People started screaming and running, trying to get to the exit, but Peter stood there by the door. When they tried to push through him, he webbed some of them to the walls and the others froze, slowly stepping away from him. “This will all be over soon, I promise.”

Fish-bowl-guy demanded the tellers filled bags with money from their drawers as Peter guarded the exit. He didn’t say anything and it was driving Tony crazy, because he was dying to hear him. Both because he wanted Friday to run the audio through a voice recognition software to prove once and for all that it was him, but also because for six months he hadn’t been able to even look at pictures of Peter, let alone hear his voicemails or watch his silly videos. And he had several of them, the younger man sent him at least a video a day – his daily vlogs, he called them – even if they were just in different rooms.

But Peter didn’t say anything, he just stood by the door as Fish-bowl-guy talked to the patrons.

“I know we seem like the bad guys right now, but I promise you, we’re not. We’re the heroes here, really,” He started, overlooking the tellers as they filled the bags with cash. “We’re here to take the city back from those who took it from us. You know what I’m talking about, right?” The man looked at the patrons as if he was expecting an answer, but no one said a word. “Tony Stark and his little army. He took over his daddy’s empire, now he thinks he can just take anything and claim as his own. He’s done it to this city, even if some people haven’t realized it yet. We’re his hostages. He built himself an army and they control this city, the country, even! They fake threats and then come to ‘save us’, they destroy our homes, they kill our loved ones, they don’t care about collateral damage! Some of us have lost everything, because of Tony fucking Stark and his minions. But it will all be over soon, I promise you. I will set you free.”

He took the twelve bags full of money that the tellers placed on the counter and gestured for Peter to come closer and the young man webbed his way to him, until he was standing by his side. That was the moment people started running out of the bank, the moment they saw from another point of view in the other video. As they watched people leaving, Fish-bowl-guy placed an arm around Peter’s shoulders, pulling him close in a very friendly way, it made Tony’s blood boil and his heart sink.

“You’re doing great, honey. You’re doing the right thing. Come on, now.” He stroked his shoulder softly then walked outside, followed closely by Peter and then the video was over.

The room was silent for a few seconds after that as they tried to understand what they’d just seen. Tony didn’t want to read too much into it, Peter was clearly not in his right mind if he was robbing a bank, but still – the guy called him honey. He was… comforting him. And Peter let him.

“We have to find him.” Tony quickly ordered Friday to do a thorough search on the web, check surveillance cameras all over New York, police database, anything that could give them a clue on  where they might have escaped to – or where they had come from. The news said they were followed by the police for a few blocks, then they simply disappeared before their eyes. It brought back terrible memories.

“Yes, we do, but not for the reasons you want, Tony.” Bruce frowned, coming to stand next to his friend. “You have to agree this – it’s just not possible. Peter is dead, he would never –“

“Then where’s his body, Bruce? Huh? Can any of you answer me that?” He looked around the room and they all avoided his gaze, as if worried they’d break him if they dared to say what they thought. “He disappeared. Right before my eyes, Bruce. Friday couldn’t connect to Karen, we have no idea what could have happened after that.”

“Tony, his heart was pierced.” It was Natasha’s turn to try. Tony could see it was hard for her too, she had a soft spot for Peter, from the very first time Tony recruited him, when he was still an eighteen year-old kid. “He couldn’t possibly –“

“He was enhanced!” He yelled, annoyed they were all so ready to discard the possibility that the person in the video could be Peter when it very clearly was. “Is! He is enhanced! I was never able to measure just how far his healing factor went, Friday could only estimate with the amount of information we had at the time, but clearly–“

“Tony, listen–“

“No, you listen! You listen to me, okay? That’s my fiance! I’m telling you this, that is the man I love, the man I sworn to protect and then abandoned for six fucking months assuming he was dead, when I didn’t even try to look for him! I just fucking drank my days away when I could be looking for him and now he needs my fucking help! So you can either help me find him, or you can fuck the fuck off, ok?” He was breathless by the time he was done, and they all looked at him like he’d gone insane for good.

“What do you suppose happened?” Steve asked quietly, and Tony frowned. “What do you think could have happened in these past few months that would turn Peter into that?” He pointed at the screen. “If he was alive this whole time, why not look for you?”

“I don’t know, Steve, we’ll have to ask him.” Truth was, Tony was terrified of the answers to those questions. He couldn’t think about it at that moment, he had to find him first. “What happened to Barnes? You of all people –“ He didn’t need to finish the sentence, couldn’t. He sighed and Steve flinched, eyes growing wide as the familiarity of the situation seemed to dawn on him. “Do you think you could’ve mistaken him for someone else? Ever?” Tony’s eyes were burning, but he didn’t shed a tear, he didn’t have time for tears. He needed to find him.

Steve was stunned silent after that, watching Tony with huge, watery eyes.

“Tony, we just don’t want you to get hurt,” Bruce intervened again, approaching him carefully. “We don’t want you to go through the pain of losing him again in case...”

“It’s doesn’t get any worse than this, Bruce,” Tony sighed, because he knew that nothing could hurt more than the thought that he’d failed Peter. That he didn’t try to look for him. That Peter had been held captive by a fucking terrorist organization for six months because he was too drunk to get out of bed and fucking try to look for him. Because he just lost hope and never thought Peter might be out there, waiting for him to come, to save him. “There’s nowhere else to go but up, from where I’m standing.”

Nobody said anything else after that, but later that day he got a message from Steve saying they would find Peter.

***

He was in the hospital for three days after Peter’s death. He was a fifty-year-old man with a shitty heart, after all. He was sedated for most of it, whenever he woke up he was so out of his mind with grief that they put him right back to sleep. When he was finally able to go home, he insisted he was left alone, but to calm Pepper and Rhodey down, he activated Friday’s babysitter protocol. It was Peter’s creation. It would let them know if Tony wasn’t eating well, or if he harmed himself in any way. If he tried to deactivate it, it would notify them immediately.

So he was left alone, at least most of the time. He spent his days in the lab, drinking, working, crying, thinking. The memories came and went unsolicited, specially when Tony was too out of it to control them. Suddenly, he’d be back in the boy’s dorm room in Boston, looking at that ridiculous onesie that he hid in a box of books under his bed, watching him stutter as he tried to explain it was just a cosplay.

“A cosplay of some dude who does stunts on Youtube?” Tony raised a brow, amused, and Peter’s face grew red as he scrunched up his nose and frowned in annoyance.

“He’s not some dude doing stunts, he – he’s helping people!” He argued, taking the “suit” back from Tony’s hands and stuffing it under his tiny bed, before sitting on top of it.

“Sure, if you consider doing back flips for the camera helping people, then Spider-boy is doing great,” Tony shrugged, sticking his hands in his pockets nonchalantly, only to watch him grow even more irritated.

“Man! Spider-man! And I don’t just do back flips, I– He...” He stuttered and Tony took pity on him. His expression softened and he sat next to him on the bed, feeling the tension coming in waves from him as he muttered a quiet “fuck” under his breath.

“Peter, I know. I know. Okay?” He clasped a hand on his shoulder and the young man looked at him with huge, round eyes. Scared. Unsure. “I’ve been watching you for years. Your secret is safe with me. I’m not here to expose you.”

“Then why are you here?” He raised a brow and Tony took a deep breath, trying to organize his thoughts.

“I kinda picked up a fight with Captain America about signing some papers and then he met this friend who was supposed to be dead, like, eighty years ago, but is somehow alive and possibly a mass murderer? Now I need all the help I can get to fix it.” He winced and watched the boy’s face for his reaction, but he just raised his eyebrows in surprise.

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

There was silence for a few seconds as Peter looked around the room, then back at Tony.

“So when do we leave?”

That was the thing about Peter. He trusted Tony blindingly, he never asked too many questions before jumping headfirst into whatever the older man proposed him. No matter how crazy, how inconsequential, how inappropriate. So he wasn’t too surprised when the boy said yes when he asked him out.

They had just arrived at the compound after Strange teleported them back from Titan, they hadn’t even showered yet, they were both covered in bruises and blood, but he looked at Peter and couldn’t help but think he could have lost him. They could have died, and he would have died without knowing the answer to the question that had been sitting at the back of his throat for months by then, which was–

“Yes,” Peter nodded, a faint blush taking over his dirty and bruised cheeks, and Tony blinked a few times.

“Don’t you want to think about that for a minute?” He asked, tilting his head to the side, and Peter frowned.

“Um, no? Why?”

“Because you’re twenty and I’m twenty-seven years your senior, kid.” It was terrifying to say that out loud. Peter was twenty. Tony was forty-seven. Twenty-seven years separated them. Tony was full grown man when Peter was swimming around in his father’s testicles.  

“You just asked me out, you can’t call me kid anymore, I’m sure that’s written in some rulebook somewhere.” Even though he was still blushing, he found it in himself to be sassy and annoying. Tony rolled his eyes playfully.

“Fair enough. So, should I call you later?” He pointed over his shoulder, signaling that he was going to his quarters to shower and rest for a few hours. Peter frowned.

“For what?”

“For your answer? About that date?” Peter just looked at him like he’d asked the most stupid question ever.

“I just said yes.” He said, raising an eyebrow, and Tony sighed.

“I thought we agreed you’d think harder about it.”

“Uh, no, you just chickened out for a second there, but my answer is still yes.” He shrugged with a playful smile on his lips and Tony gawked at him.

“I didn’t chic – ugh, you’re such a brat.”

“I’m sure brat is off-limits, too.” He winked, walking away towards his quarters.

Tony worried about their relationship – as did everyone else, specially their close friends and May. Peter was so young and, to make matters worse, he sort of worked for Tony. Ever since Germany, the older man paid him a hefty salary for being a part of the team – he was always on call, after all, and always trained at the compound whenever he was in New York.

But as it turned out, his worry was unnecessary. Although young, Peter was mature beyond his years and acted more like an adult than Tony did most of the time – they sort of met in the middle. As for the power imbalance, it actually felt like Peter was in control more often than not. It was subtle, though, Tony only noticed because Rhodey pointed it out once.

“That kid’s got you wrapped around his little finger.” He laughed into his beer bottle as he watched Peter walking away. Tony blinked, having a sip of the tea the younger man had just brought him. Peter was dead set on getting him on a healthier diet and tea was somehow involved. The young man insisted it would help with his sleeping schedule, so Tony just agreed, even though he thought most teas tasted like dirty water. “If he says jump, you ask how high.” Tony was going to argue, but then stopped himself. He tried to think of the last time he’d said no to Peter, the last time he’d denied him anything, but not a single memory came to mind. “I’m not judging, it’s a good look on you. Whipped boyfriend.”

Tony noticed, then, that he was. Whipped, that is. Peter was always telling him what to do – gently, of course, and always with his best interests at heart. And he listened, because, as it soon became apparent, Peter was usually right about most things. Tony was more practical, he was in charge in the lab, what with decades of experience over him, as well as in the battlefield, for the same reason. But when it came to their personal lives, Peter called the shots. And it was fine. It was good.  He felt loved and cared for like never before and he loved it. He loved Peter.

But he’d lost him.

And he couldn’t help but feeling guilty. It was his fault, had to be. He was in charge out there. He was supposed to look out for him in the field, he was supposed to keep him safe, bring him home alive and well, but he couldn’t even bring his fucking body back. He had nothing left of him but terrifying memories of cold, dead eyes and bloody lips trying to call out his name.

Days and weeks and months went by, but he barely noticed, barely left the tower anymore. He was vaguely aware of people coming and going – Pepper, to check on him from time to time; Rhodey, trying to get him out of the lab; Steve, with constant reports on what the Avengers were doing, as if he cared; Bruce, with excuses about projects he was working on; and Nat, for unclear reasons. They never asked him to suit up, though, not for anything. Not in a Tom Ford three-piece, not in Mark L. They just let him be. Which was good, it felt good to be forgotten up there in the workshop, which used to be their favorite place in the world.

Over those three years they’d been together, Tony had taken Peter everywhere – and he meant everywhere. A boy who had barely left Queens before he met Tony got to see so may different cities, so many different countries, even if just for one night sometimes, just for dinner, before they had to get back to their hectic lives.

But they always went back to their favorite place, Tony’s workshop, filled with so many memories it sometimes felt like it was haunted by their ghosts. Both of them. Because some part of Tony must have died with him and sometimes, when he got distracted, he saw them. Specially on the floor by the couch, that was too tiny for the two of them and Tony kept saying he was going to buy a bigger one, but for some reason he never did and they always ended up on the fluffy rug on the floor.

“You feel amazing,” Tony whispered as his fingers enveloped Peter’s hips, pulling him down lower, and the younger man moaned quietly and smiled as the words left Tony’s lips. He leaned forwards to kiss him as rocked his hips in a slow, lazy pace. “You are perfect, my love.”

“If you keep feeding my praise kink like that, I’m not gonna last two minutes here.” He laughed quietly against the older man’s lips, who sighed when he felt the boy’s muscles tightening around him.

“I won’t complain too much about it.” He tightened his grip on Peter’s hips when he sat back up and started moving up and down in a way he knew would drive the engineer insane. “You’re gonna kill this old man someday, I swear.”

“I really hope not, I kinda like him a little.”

And their ghosts giggled together and disappeared into thin air, like dust in the wind, and only a half-dead Tony remained with a glass of whiskey in hand, staring at the rug on the floor.

***

Friday was monitoring the press and the internet for any sign of Peter, but there was none to be found. For the first couple of days, Tony was restless, but hopeful. Peter had been missing for six months, there hadn’t been any sign of him for all of that time, so the fact that he appeared out of the blue that day meant that something had changed. He was sure he would show up again at any second.

As days went by, though, his hope started to dwindle. He grew desperate by the hour thinking that he would have to go another six months without seeing Peter, perhaps even longer – perhaps he’d never see him again. Sometimes he wondered if he was wrong, if that wasn’t even Peter in the video, if maybe he was really dead after all, but whenever he watched the video again he was sure of it. It was him.

So he couldn’t help but think that he had to be locked up somewhere. It brought back terrifying memories of those three months he spent in that cave in Afghanistan and how he never really recovered from that – he still had nightmares about it, twelve years later. Peter had been gone for six months, seventeen days, four hours and thirty-three minutes. And counting.

He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, the only thing he could think about was Peter, and the cave, and Barnes’s sessions with BARF, and Hydra’s brainwashing methods. He drove himself mad with all the possibilities of what could have happened to Peter – what might be happening right at that second as he waited for answers.

He’d been awake for almost sixty-two hours straight when it happened.

“I think you should see this, boss.” Friday’s voice interrupted the loud music and Tony frowned as he raised his eyes from his latest project – a new suit for Peter, one so sophisticated and impenetrable, not even vibranium could pierce through it. Friday wasn’t supposed to interrupt him unless the world was ending or she had news about Peter, Tony was very specific about that, so, yeah, he was a little freaked out when he heard her voice.

She showed him footage of Stark Tower’s security cameras, Tony’s heart almost stopped when he saw the boy sneaking in through a window, along with Fish-bowl-guy.

“He’s here.” He whispered to himself, unable to move for a second. His first instinct was to run to him, but he couldn’t be irresponsible, there were lots of people in the building, he couldn’t predict what could happen, so he had to take a few precautions. “Friday, where’s Pepper?”

“Miss Potts is not in the building, she’s caught in traffic a few miles away, boss.” Tony nodded to himself, taking a deep breath, then he started moving.

“Evacuate the building immediately, but don’t cause a panic, I don’t want them to know I know they’re here. Call Pepper, tell her to stay away. Where are they headed?” As he barked out orders, he watched Peter climb into the vents.

“They seem to be heading to the mainframe, boss.”

“Revoke Peter’s access to the systems,” Tony rushed to the elevator, the mainframe was situated right below his penthouse, it took up the whole floor and there was no way in or out other than the elevators and the air vents.

“Done, boss.”

Tony’s heart was beating wildly in his chest, filled with mixed feelings. He was going to see Peter for the first time in six months, after he literally rose from the dead – he’d gone to his funeral, for Christ’s sake – but it wouldn’t be a heartwarming reunion. He knew Peter wasn’t himself. Something had happened to him and he wasn’t okay, he was worried about what might happen, but the anxiety to see him again in person after so long was stronger than anything else.

He activated Mark L and when the door to the elevator opened, the room was quiet. It was huge, the light was low and blueish, there were at list seventeen rows of processors from one end of the room to the other, and Tony knew that at the very back, in a corner, there was a computer. He walked down the aisles quietly until he saw them. Peter had his back to him, but there was no mistaking the line of his shoulders, his neck, the way he stood, his quick fingers flying over the keyboard.

“Peter...” It came out as a sigh, but it was loud enough for both of them to hear and turn to him. For the first time, Fish-bowl-guy had his helmet off and Tony could see his face – the same face that took Peter away from him months earlier. “You!” He stalked towards them, but Peter webbed his feet together. Tony could easily break it, but stopped in his tracks, he didn’t want it to escalate to a fight. “What are you doing, Pete?”

“How dare you talk to him, Stark! After everything you’ve done?” Those eyes were so familiar, but he couldn’t place them. Tony frowned, taking a step closer, breaking the webs around his ankles.  

“What– Pete –”

“You revoked my access?” Peter asked, exasperated and nervous when the computer announced his access was denied. That voice. That sweet, honey-like voice...

“So it is you.” Tony took yet another step closer, reaching out to him, but Peter got into a fighting stance.

“Why did you have to do that?” To Tony’s surprise, his voice trembled, like he was actually hurt by that. His heart broke in a million pieces. “You used to love me, you said–“ He shook his head, taking a deep breath. “You leave me no choice.”

“Peter, please–“ Before he could say anything else, the younger man leaped at him and almost managed to rip the faceplate off his face as he sat on his shoulders and started pulling it, but Tony was able to grab him and throw him away, but not far enough to hurt him. He stumbled a few feet and got right back up. “Pete, what are you doing, just stop!”

“No! You stop, Tony, please! How could you–“ He came at him again, and Tony flew out of the his way, but was caught by his web around his ankle. Peter swung him and threw him to the floor, but Tony quickly got up. “Please, Tony, you –“

“Don’t talk to him, Pete, he’s gonna try to manipulate you! We have to kill him, there’s no other choice!” Fish-bowl-guy was typing furiously at the keyboard, but Friday was keeping Tony updated. He was good, definitely above average, but he probably wouldn’t be able to hack into his systems. “Once we’re done, we can’t let him live, Peter.”

“What the fuck is he talking about! Kid, it’s me, it’s me, what are you doing?” Tony tried to reach Peter again, but he shot webs at him, trying to tie his arms to his torso, which was useless. The engineer knew Peter was going easy on him, he was almost as strong as Mark L and if the suit he was wearing was anything like the one Tony made for him, it had an instant kill mode. Still, he kept trying to bind him, not hurt him.

“I can’t let you release Extremis to the public! Please, I’m begging you, let me help you, we can–“ Fish-bowl-guy grabbed Peter’s arm, pulling him away and shaking him.

“Peter, stop fucking around! He’s dangerous!”

“Don’t fucking touch him!“ Tony had had it with him, he charged his repulsors and was going to aim right at his head, but for a short while, the room went dark, then when the lights came back up, only Peter was there. He had his mask off and, for a moment, Tony was free to breath. For the first time in months, he could fill his lungs up with air because his beautiful face was right there in front of him, within reach. Alive, healthy.

And staring at him with hatred.

“You’re disgusting, Tony. How could you do that to me? You groomed me, you sick fuck, I was just a boy, you molested me!” He started walking towards him and Tony blinked in shock.

“What?”

“You’re a good for nothing piece of shit, you left me for dead months ago, didn’t even come looking for me, I bet you found some younger ass to fuck, didn’t you? You old perv.” Tony took a few steps back, heart beating loudly in his ears. He’d never seen such hate in his eyes in all those years they were together.

“Pete...”

“You came after me because you couldn’t find someone your own age who would put up with your crap, right? The drinking, the nightmares, the fucking panic attacks, I was so fucking done with it! All of it!” He couldn’t believe his ears, Peter – he would never talk to him like that. Right? Or was that how he felt the whole time? “Give me access to EDITH, Tony.” He demanded and Tony frowned. EDITH was an AI that gave its users access to Stark Industries's global satellite network along with an arsenal of missiles and drones. It was only supposed to be used in case of Tony’s death, Peter knew that. “If you want to redeem yourself, you’ll do it, and I might forgive you.”

“Boss, I think you should see something,” Before Tony could answer, Friday activated the suit’s thermal imaging and Tony frowned. Peter was not standing in front of him. In fact, he was nowhere to be found and there was nobody where he stood just seconds ago. First, he panicked, thinking he had disappeared again, but it just took him five seconds to realize what was going on.

“Where is this hologram coming from, Fri?” Friday deactivated the thermal imaging and Tony was shocked by how realistic the Peter staring back at him was. So realistic that only one person in the whole world could have made it: himself.

“There are five drones projecting images in the room, sir.”

“Take them out.”

In seconds, five tiny missiles were launched from his suit and the drones fell to the floor, lifeless, and suddenly the whole room changed. It was still the same setting, but it somehow looked more real then, and of course, Peter had disappeared.

“Tony? Tony, where did you go?! What – what happened?” He heard Peter’s voice on the other end of the room and he rushed to get there.

Peter was curled up in a corner, looking scared and desperate as he looked around him in confusion. The other guy was kneeling next to him, trying to comfort him again.

“Pete, whatever he showed you, whatever you saw, it wasn’t real. He’s using BARF!” He tried to approach the young man, but his eyes were wild as he shook his head. He pushed the other guy away but kept crawling backwards, away from Tony as well.

“Stay away from me, please, don’t come any closer. I-I don’t wanna hurt you, please, Tony, please...” He was still looking around like he didn’t expect to still be there.

“Why do you always have to ruin every-fucking-thing, Stark? Why do you have to stand in the fucking way of every single thing that I do?” Fish-bowl-guy got up and started marching towards him, furious.

“I have no fucking idea who you are, you fucking weirdo.” Tony aimed his repulsors at him and the guy stopped, laughing incredulously.

“You hav – you motherfucker! You think you’re a God, don’t you? Above everything and everyone, literally wrapped in wealth and technology you’re unfit to wield. Like the holographic system I designed. A revolutionary breakthrough with limitless applications, that you turned into a self therapy machine and renamed it BARF! My life’s work, Stark, and you renamed it BARF! I told you it was a mistake, that my technology could change the world and then you fired me. You said I was… unstable. Ring any bells?”

It clicked, then. The crazy, wild eyes, the hand gestures, the insane world domination plans.

“Beck.” No wonder Tony had forgot about him, the guy was brilliant, but completely insane. He helped develop the technology behind BARF, but once he started talking about weaponizing it, Tony decided to let him go. “I didn’t steal it, it belonged to me, it was my idea, I made you head of the project because I thought you could see it through, but your ideas for what it could be used for were clearly unhealthy and a fucking threat to the world. So, yeah, not sorry for firing your ass, I was clearly right. What even is your endgame here, Beck? What do you want?”

“These days, you can be the smartest guy in the room, the most qualified, and no one cares. Unless you’re flying around with a cape or shooting lasers from your hands, no one will even listen. Well, now I’ve got a cape. And lasers. With my technology and with EDITH, I will be the greatest hero on Earth!” He spread his arms and laughed like the madman he was, and Tony frowned.

“Yeah? Where are your lasers now?” The guy looked at him like he had just realized he had nothing. Peter was curled in a corner, too confused to act, his drones lay limp on the floor, and he had no way out of the room. “Better luck next time, asshole.” Tony wanted to kill him, he did, but he controlled himself and just knocked him over the head. He fell heavily to the floor and Tony turned to Peter, who was still looking at him like the whole world had been turned upside down.  “Peter, baby, c’mon, it’s me, it’s Tony,” He tried to approach him, but he shook his head violently.

“S-stand back!” He panted, eyes flicking between Tony and the guy on the floor. “What’s happening, I don’t understand, I don’t… We were… Outside and you…You killed people, how…”

“It’s fine, it’s gonna be fine, I promise, just trust me, I will take care of you, I’ll take care of everything, I –“

“Stay away from me!” Peter got up and run towards the elevator, Tony had no choice other than shoot him with the tranquilizer he used on Bruce when he hulked out at the wrong time. He rushed to catch him before he hit the ground and carefully cradled him in his arms.

Finally, in his arms. Warm and alive, solid and breathing.

“I’m so sorry,  Peter. For everything. I’ll make it up to you.”

***

Tony startled awake when he heard screaming. His heart almost jumped out of his chest and he was on his feet in a matter of seconds the minute he registered it was Peter’s voice. He was distressed, possibly hurt, so he flew to his side, but was quickly pushed away by nurses and doctors that rushed into the room and Tony remembered the last 24 hours, where they were and why.  

“Tony! Tony!” Peter called as he gasped for air, and that was more than enough for the older man to force his away back to him, grabbing his shaking hand.

“I’m here, baby, I’m here, are you okay?” He asked in a rush looking into his wild, scared eyes, and the kid just looked back at him for a few minutes, blinking several times, before he nodded slowly.

“Are you – are you real?” He rubbed his forehead, panting, and Dr. Cho approached him to run a few tests. Peter had been out for a whole day after the Hulk-sized dose of tranquilizer Tony shot him with, even with his fast metabolism.

“I am. Do you feel that?” He brushed his thumbs across his cheeks and Peter closed his eyes, sighing and nodding slowly. Tony took his hands and pressed them to his own face, down his scratchy cheeks that hadn’t seen a razor in weeks, and Peter smiled. “It’s me, I’m here now, it’s over.” Tony explained to him as doctor Cho checked his blood pressure and his pulse, asked him a few questions, then once she was satisfied, she nodded.

“You’re okay, Peter. You just need a lot of rest, ok? Most of your wounds from the fight have already healed, but I’m going to keep you here overnight just to be sure, then you can go right home, ok?” He nodded and she smiled. “Welcome back.”

She left the room and silence took over for a second, but they still looked at each other, as if afraid that if the looked away the other would disappear. Nat had interrogated Beck and figured out his plan. The terrorist attack was an ambush, it was his goal to kidnap Peter all along, he knew he was the only person, besides Tony, who had access to EDITH.

He made them see Peter’s death as he kidnapped him with an illusion of Tony. He was holding Peter in a warehouse in Queens and the sad thing was, he didn’t even need anything to contain him. He kept him there with illusions. Peter thought he was at Stark Tower the whole tome, living with Tony as if nothing had changed.

Well, with a few changes. Beck’s Tony was slowly going mad, called himself Superior Iron man and planned to take over humanity by spreading a virus called Extremis 3.0. When Peter refused to help him, he was turned into a hostage. Peter was “Tony’s hostage” for months before Beck “rescued him” – by keeping him in the same warehouse, with different illusions. He managed to make him believe the Avengers were in on Tony’s plan and they had to stop them. The bank robbery was necessary to weaponize the few drones he was able to build after he left Stark Industries.

“How… How are you feeling, Pete?” He braced himself for the answer, because he knew it would be nothing short of horrible and he knew that whatever happened to him was his fault. The younger man bit his lower lip, frowned, and shook his head slightly.

“Confused. Scared.” He confessed, tearing up, but he kept holding Tony’s hand tightly. “Not sure if any of this is even real. If you are real.”

Tony could see that he meant it when he looked into his eyes. He was terrified. The older man took a deep breath and sat beside him on the bed.

“Do you remember our trip to Brazil?” He placed Peter’s hand on his own face again, kissing its palm. Peter nodded with a small smile. “Remember our last night there, on the hotel suite’s balcony? We had been together for, what, two, three months at the time? Remember what I said to you?” A tear ran down his cheek when he whispered yes. “I’m gonna marry you someday, kid.” Tony whispered back, joining their foreheads.

“And I said you couldn’t call me kid when you were making marriage plans.” Peter laughed wetly between tears, leaning up to place a gentle kiss on Tony’s lips, sighing in relief. “I should have known that could have never been you…” Peter’s hand slid from Tony’s cheek, to his shoulder, down his arm, until it reached the little cuts on his hands, the rough pads of his fingers. Peter took a deep breath, closing his eyes. “How long?”

Peter didn’t have to ask the whole question, Tony heard it, and he squeezed his hand.

“Six months.” He winced when Peter’s eyes grew large as saucers.

“Fuck... Fuck! Tony – I feel so stupid… I should have known, I should have fucking –“

“Hey, hey, don’t, don’t you dare blame yourself, you hear me? He fooled us all, Pete. The reason why I didn’t come looking for you before was because... For six months, I thought you dead.” He cradled his face in his hands and Peter gasped.

“Oh, God, Tony.”

“I saw you die, Pete,” He whispered, lowering his head so Peter didn’t have to see his tears. “I saw you die before my eyes. And I – I believed it, too. I never went after you, kid. I’m so sorry, I could have saved you, but I–“ before he could finish, he felt the boy’s fingers under his chin, lifting his head, and he was met with an equally wet face staring back at him.

“I’m here, now. And so are you. We’ll get through this together, okay?”

“Pete...”

There were no more comforting words to say other than his name. The name he hadn’t dared to say for so many months. He knew they had a long way to go, he could predict the sleepless nights, the nightmares, the anxiety attacks, the absolute terror of thinking of ever losing him again. He knew it wasn’t going to be easy, but they were going to do it together, they would heal together and relearn how to recognize each other blindly once again. One step at a time.