marvel one-shots

trapped // peter parker

takes place post-endgame
⚠️ tw: thoughts of suicide and other self-destructive habits ⚠️

     There are two kinds of people: the ones that are aware of the five stages of grief and those who are aware of the five stages of grief, but only feel numb.

     Peter was aware of the five stages of grief. Every Avenger was, every Avenger had lost someone at one point or another. Every Avenger had regrets about doing something. Every Avenger felt a little numb sometimes. But Peter was a brand of numb that none of the remaining heroes had ever experienced before.

     People always long for simpler times. They always think back to sometime else when things were easy. By no means was what Peter felt easy, but to him, these were very simple times.

Every day was a carbon copy of the last, as though someone had copied the long, miserable hours of one day and had pasted them to the corresponding hours of the next.

     To say that Peter was stuck in a loop would be an understatement.

     Peter was trapped. He was a prisoner to his thoughts, locked in, spending his most of his moments banging and screaming on the inside of his skull like it was a prison fence, keeping him locked in.

// s s stage  o o one / d d denial //

     Peter never knew what convinced Tony to join up with the Avengers five years after the snap. He understood that Tony had figured out the secret of time travel, but he didn't understand why he went to the Avengers.

     Pepper had told him what Tony had said when he had figured it out. Pepper had told him that Tony thought about keeping the time travel thing in a locked box and tossing it to the bottom of the lake and just going to bed. Peter just didn't understand why he hadn't.

     Peter would never know that Tony had looked at the framed photo of him and Peter with Peter's Stark Internship certificate. He would never know how the gauges in Tony's head had never turned faster than in that moment. Peter wouldn't know that, overall, he was reason that Tony was dead and he was alive.

     Peter didn't want to believe it, that Tony was gone. Peter didn't want to think about it, but it was all that was on his mind.

     "Everywhere I look, I see him, so it's almost like he isn't actually gone," Peter had said. His way of thinking was purely desperation to hold onto his childhood hero.

// s t t a stag e  t t two / a anger //

     It was frustrating. To everyone. To Carol and Stephen and Thor, who genuinely cared for the kid. To Ned and MJ, who wanted their friend back. To Clint, who had also been trapped in the loop and wanted to help. To Morgan, because she wanted to get to know the Spider-boy from her dad's numerous stories. To May, who wanted her nephew back. But most of all, to Peter, because he desperately wanted not to be alone.

Sometimes Peter would lose himself and go crazy. The numbness would become so overwhelming that his vision would fade to black and his ears would ring and he would scream at the top of his lungs and kick around and yank at his hair until he ran out of breath to scream. He would let the claw-like pain of possible suffocation creep into his lungs so that he would finally feel something, even if it hurt.

     Peter could never hear the racing steps up the stairs and the pounding fists on his locked door. He couldn't hear the heartbroken cries of the people that would do anything to make him feel anything other than whatever it was he was feeling at that moment.

// s s stage t t three / b b bar bargaining //

     Peter would have done anything to trade places with Tony. He would've done anything to at least be able to change the last thing he had ever said to Tony.

     "Mr. Stark. Hey, Mr. Stark, can you hear me? It's Peter. We won, Mr. Stark! You did it, sir. I'm sorry," he had said to Tony.

     Peter was sure that Tony knew that he had won it for them, he knew what the consequences of taking the stones would be, yet he did it because he knew y was the only way they could win.

     Peter resented the fact that the last words Tony had heard him say were, "I'm sorry." He hated that he had said it on Titan as he had turned to dust. He would give anything to be able to go back in time and change it. He had thought about what he would've said in place if he ever did get the chance.

     Peter decided that if he had ever gotten the chance to go back he would tell Tony that it was ok and that even though Peter had vanished on Titan, he was never really gone. Peter wished to tell Tony that every end was in fact a new beginning and that the world would go on, keeping him in its mind. He would've given anything, even his life, if it meant Tony was alive.

// s s s s stag e f f four / de de depression //

Eventually, Peter stopped trying. He stopped trying to escape his mind prison. He stopped thinking about what to say to Tony in the case that he is offered a do-over. He just stopped.

Peter traded thinking logically for crying regularly. He swapped his Spider-suit for sweatpants and hoodies.

He gave up caring and let his hair get greasy and he let the bags under his eyes grow darker from his lack of sleep. He let himself fall backwards onto Tony's bad habits and he just didn't care.

He avoided all contact with people and made excuses not to do things. He skipped school and missed missions. Most of the time he didn't want to get out of bed in the morning.

He thought about how easy it would be to jump from atop a building and end the numbing pain. He thought about crimson lines against his creamy, pale skin and the dripping of blood as he progressively grew paler and paler until he was as white as copy paper and his warm, chocolate eyes transformed into dark, empty voids.

// s s s stage f five / accept ac acceptance //

Peter was a train wreck for sure, but eventually he started unlocking his door.  He let select people back in and washed his hair.

     He was nowhere near ready to put the Spider-suit on again, but he was slowly finding his way to that path.

     He was able to confide in Clint about everything going on in his head and Clint offered his best advice.

     He finally agreed to see Ned and MJ again and every other week he would go to visit Morgan and Pepper.

He started going to school regularly again, and instead of attending missions, he would do research that benefitted the others.

He did everything in his power to make up for the months that he wasn't really him, and it worked well.

     He knew that after losing his childhood hero that a part of him would never truly be fixed, but he finally untrapped himself and got help.