spiderman angst/sickfic oneshots

it takes a little hurt. (irondad, depressed Peter)

(day 5 prompt: that's gonna leave a scar)

TW for self harm and suicidal ideations on this one!

In which tony finds out Peter's been hurting himself as a coping mechanism for just about any bad situation.)

Being a hero was exhausting, but some could argue that being a student with a 4.0 GPA was more exhausting.

Add those two together and you get Peter Parker.

Being spiderman and himself wasn't easy. Not at all. Some days it wasn't even fun, especially when he had heavy work as spiderman and it was finals week. It wasn't easy to cope with.

It wasn't easy to get through nights of patrol and studying all together in one. Peter was constantly overwhelmed.

For months now, he'd picked up cutting himself whenever he was stressed. For whatever reason it grounded him and calmed him. He used it to stop panic attacks, to drag him out of feeling like burnt out shit, and at times when he was just generally upset and felt like he deserved it.

However this tricky habit presented multiple problems as it got worse. He had begun to cut deep enough that whenever he climbed into his suit, Karen was alerted by the injury and it made a very strained conversation with Mr. Stark.

Of course Peter could lie his way out of it. If he could come up with something funny to say while beating up bad guys under the pressure of adrenaline he could lie to Mr. Stark about an unhealthy habit.

His solution to this was, of course, to hack into the programming and change the code for how severe an injury had to be to send an alert. Not ask for help.

Over the next month, Peter's mental health took a pitfall. He was self harming daily, sometimes more than once a day. His thighs and wrists were littered in bloody lines, some so thick they would certainly need stitches on a normal person.

But his enhanced healing took care of most of his problems.

Until it didn't.

Until one day Peter found himself sobbing in the bathroom, sitting on the floor, blood streaming so heavily down his arm he felt dizzy. He could see muscle beneath the blood. He'd gone so deep, but he didn't feel better. He went deep again and again and again.

He felt like screaming when it didn't make him feel better. When it didn't erase the black hole in his gut that felt like it had sucked everything out of him.

He pressed toilet paper to his arms, attempting to clean up a little before getting ready for patrol. It soaked right through.

He groaned and left the blood to drip down his arms and pulled on his suit, neglecting to care about his own well being at all.

He began to wonder why he was still living this miserable life and wiped his puffy red face with one suited hand before crawling out the window and pressing, painfully, his web shooters to swing around the city.

He wasn't even looking for crime.

He just wanted to stop feeling like shit. He wanted these thoughts of dying to get out of his head. He didn't want to want to die. But he did.

And it scared him because all he had to do to face a certain death was not shoot another web. He'd fall into traffic and everything would be over.

It was appealing.
But the dizziness he was experiencing swayed him to perch on top of a building instead.

He continued to watch the traffic below for a while. Everything felt cloudy and grey and sad.

Stressed
Overwhelmed
Sad
Tired.