TASM Peter Parker Imagines

Two Sides (Part One)

You're in trouble with the Avengers again.

To be honest, it's not even like this is your fault. Technically, you hadn't done anything wrong- not by anyone else's standards, at least. You'd been on a mission, you'd seen a chance to save the day by going in solo and taking down the resident bad guy of the day, and you'd taken it. It worked, and all was good.

Well, not to the Avengers. Admittedly, you had defied orders to stay put and wait for backup, but it's not like this wasn't common among the world's supposedly mightiest heroes. Steve Rogers does it on a regular basis. Thor shows up whenever he wants and leaves whenever he wants. The only difference in this case was that it was you.

The main forerunners of this argument are Steve and Tony, no surprises there. They do their best to get along, but something like this just reignites the frustration from the previous fight and the whole thing just happens all over again. Sometimes, you swear that they use Avenger meetings as an excuse to argue with each other and get their friends to pick sides.

By now, the main focus of the fight has shifted away from you and back to the two of them. They'd been focused at first, telling you with firm voices and pointing fingers that you can't just rush into battle, someone could get hurt. You could get hurt. They hadn't seemed to pay attention when you pointed out that no one had gotten hurt, and you had super-regenerative healing anyway, so it's not like that would matter.

No, what matters is that you didn't follow orders, and had someone gotten hurt, the Avengers would have landed themselves in a ton of bad press because their youngest recruit turned out to be a loose cannon. It's not like they haven't gotten their fair share of angry reports before, but they're already on thin ice when it comes to you.

You, the youngest recruit, who's been here for a few years and still hasn't been allowed to do anything without a monitor or chaperone. You, who's long been desensitized to the Avengers' worst nightmares. You, who made a split second call and saved lives, who is now getting yelled at for the possibility of bloodshed that never existed.

It gets to you towards the end, and once you're sure that Steve and Tony are fully preoccupied with making sure they end up on the winning side of the argument, you slip towards the exit. No one sees you go except Natasha Romanoff, who just winks and opens the door for you. Your footsteps don't echo down the hall as you go. There's no sign that you'd ever been there at all save the fleeting silhouette reflected in the glass windows.

It's night by now, as the Avengers had caught you right after the mission ended to give you the appropriate speech. You haven't even had time to wash the blood off your hands from the fight; it's dried into your skin now, and you're fairly sure that you'd still see it in the back of your mind even if you scrubbed it off. It's not like you enjoy all this, the fighting, the dying. You just don't see any other way to do what you have to. With powers like yours, it's practically a crime to sit back and watch the world fall apart.

You end up taking the stairs to a door leading outside, then use your powers to fly to a nearby roof so you can be alone. You carefully take a seat, doing your best to ignore the complaints of your sore muscles and aching bones. Sure, you may be able to heal almost instantly, but that doesn't mean you don't remember the pain of each and every injury.

You lean your head up against the brick behind you, letting out an almost involuntary sigh. You never really had a choice in joining the team, but you'd had hopes of becoming this great hero, someone people could look up to. What are you now, except a glorified puppet who gets yelled at for saving lives and yelled at when she tries to sit things out?

You're so caught up in feeling sorry for yourself that you almost don't notice that something isn't right until you hear the faint sound of footsteps. You tilt your head slightly to the side, still keeping your eyes trained on the cityscape before you. "Whoever's there, you might as well stop hiding. I know you're there."