eunoia || Peter Parker (Spider-Man: Homecoming)

13

The sewers really stank. They stank like a week-old rotten fish carcass dipped in truffle soup. Really bad.

He's been hanging from the ceiling (too scared to touch the water) for nearly an hour now. His brain was in overdrive. He would've done anything to make it slow down. Every thought he had contradicted itself with another. He was being brainwashed, but he wasn't brainwashed just then. He feels terrible about what he did, but it felt so good in the moment. Being Weapon X, being HYDRA, everything seemed simple. Being the Terrorist was easy for him; a constant, a drug, but now he was relapsing to his strange addiction. When he wasn't in control of his own mind, he didn't have to deal with every unfinished pattern in his brain because another one came before he could finish the first one. It had simply been black or white. Kill or die.

Now? It was live or survive, and it was so much harder.

He didn't wanna go back. Flashes of Katie's terror kept working its way to the forefront of his mind every time he considered it. And he knew May's apartment would be the first place Tony would go looking. The sewers, though? The place where most drug deals and Pennywise's occur was not the normal habitat for Peter Parker, which was exactly why he went there. He didn't wanna be able to breathe in fresh air on the top of a building, or a bridge, because he didn't know what he would do being so high off the ground.

God, he wondered what his biggest problems were before Ben died. Oh no, an A-minus in the Science Validation that was only worth seven percent of the semester's grade? A travesty. What would Happy Peter think if Now Peter told him that he would becoming a spider-human mutant, his uncle would die, he'd crash a plane and get tortured by his crush's dad, then come back to life and die again and come back to life and get brainwashed and kill a tonne of people including his other crush's mom and then try and kill the only father figure in his life and then find out his Aunt's dead and Tony Stark nearly was too then crashing another plane and drowning in the middle of the ocean and going through a secret portal to an invisible city worth billions, even trillions, in Central Africa and realising your Aunt's actually alive then going back home and not going to school and being on the run from the FBI for the rest of his life and punching out someone's dad, then hanging from the ceiling of a underground sewerage tunnel? And he lost his churro. Churro, churro, wherefore art thou churro? The blood was rushing to his head.

With a groan of reluctance, Peter retracted his web from the roof and flopped into the muddy pool of water (and whatever else he cared to think not of) below him. It was only then, with his vision darkening for a moment at the sudden change of orientation, that his brain paused.

There was a dripping, cold and hollow, plink, plink, plink coming from somewhere down the tunnel. There were faint sounds of engines and tyres from the road above. A low whistle of crisp wind whizzing through the system. The frigidity of the water was seeping through his suit, relieving the ache in his bones and dousing him like an ice bucket to the face after spending a night out partying.

But there was something else, too.

It was slow; metal against metal, starting at a distance and clang-clanging its way through the tunnels. One, a ten second wait, two. And again. It could've been a door opening and closing. But it gave Peter a weird feeling, and the hairs on his neck didn't like it either.

There was something in there with him.

As quietly as he could, he pushed himself to his feet, silently thanking the gods for being smart enough to put his suit on before he ran away. It was his old one, the first one Tony had ever made him. All the others had too many memories attached, and barely one of them good. He'd shut down Karen, knowing Mister Stark would try and contact him through her. He missed not having her talk into his ear, but he knew he couldn't risk it.