Tumgik
#platonic! peter parker x reader
Text
Y/N: *on the phone* Tony? I need your help! I-
Tony: Is the compound on fire?
Y/N: ...no?
Tony: Then, it’s not an emergency *hangs up*
Peter: Well? What did he say? What do we do about the portal to hell in the living room?
Y/N: *shrugs* Apparently it’s not an emergency
Kate: *being strangled by a demon* HOW THE FUCK IS THIS NOT AN EMERGENCY??
4K notes · View notes
literaryavenger · 18 days
Text
Can I be him?
Summary: When Bucky finds something of yours, he hopes against hope that you feel the same way about him.
Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Enhanced!Fem!Reader
Warnings: Language cause it's me. Fluff. A lot of angst. Idiots in love. Self-deprecating thoughts, both reader and Bucky. No use of Y/N.
Word Count: 4.8K
A/N: It’s 3am where I live, so… Happy 107th Birthday to my favorite Supersoldier! Today I’m posting 2 Bucky fics because my baby deserves it, this one and another one sometime around the afternoon. Hope someone likes it! Thank you to my angels @ordelixx and @mrsbuckybarnes1917 that gave me so many ideas that helped me finish this. I love you🖤
Masterlist
Tumblr media
Being an Avenger is not easy. The long missions, the intense training, the weight of the world on your shoulders…
Everybody on the team has a different way to unwind after a mission. Steve draws, Clint and Natasha compete doing target practice, Thor sleeps, Sam plays video games, Bucky takes motorcycle rides, Tony and Bruce work on side projects in their lab, Loki reads, Peter does his homework and Wanda cooks with Vision.
For you, it’s going to the rose garden behind the Compound. It’s a bit of a sanctuary for you, Tony allowed you to put tall hedges of roses with a gazebo-like structure in the middle of them facing the lake, only it’s entirely made of vines. You made it yourself, that’s your power: you can manipulate anything plant-related. 
Everytime you finish a mission the team splits up as soon as the debriefing is over and you walk straight here. You sit on the bench, also made of vines, take out your diary and start writing.
You write about everything, from details of missions to your feelings about the team, from things you did that you don’t want to forget to things that you want to do after you’re not so tired anymore.
The hedges hide you from view and the only thing you can see when you’re there is the lake. Sometimes, after a particular difficult mission, you don’t even write. You just sit there and look out into the water, the sunshine or moonlight shining down on you, and you feel at peace.
It helps that nobody else ever comes here. The team understands it’s your safe space, and the agents are mostly scared of your powers ever since you grew a giant carnivorous plant and it bit an agent that squeezed your ass during training. 
The agent got both taken to the medbay and suspended on the same day, and you got the thanks of about a dozen girls that had the same problem with the same asshole.
You walk out of the conference room, the debriefing of the team’s latest mission just wrapped up, and like usual everyone scatters to their own after-mission ritual.
Today, though, you can’t concentrate on anything. Your feet take you to the rose garden by reflex, but your brain doesn’t even register you’re there until you sit on the bench.
Today’s mission took a lot out of you, not just because of the amount of magic you had to use to get everyone out safely, but also because it was your fault the team was in so much danger in the first place.
You fucked up your task, Natasha had to step in and save your ass, moving away from her post and making her late for her own task and that derailed the entire mission. At the end, you had to use your powers to take out the hundreds of Hydra agents at the same time, which is no small feat and made you almost pass out.
Everybody told you on the way home not to worry, the mission was successfully accomplished and everyone made it out safely, but you know that if it wasn’t for your screw up the team would’ve gotten in and out of base without so much as a scratch. 
Nobody had fatal injuries, thank God, but Sam got shot in the leg, Clint got stabbed and everyone else had various degrees of injuries because Hydra got the jump on the team.
Because of me. That was all you kept thinking about. Your brain had a field day making up all kinds of scenarios where your mistake cost someone’s life, a few of them even had the entire team dying because of your stupidity. 
You were so caught up in your head that you didn’t even notice someone following you to the rose garden.
Not that you ever do. 
If there’s one thing Bucky Barnes knows how to do, is to move around undetected. He’s a master assassin, he was trained for this for over 50 years, he knows how to be a shadow. Except now he uses his skills for good during missions and, occasionally, to follow you.
Not in a creepy way, of course, just to check on you. At least that’s the excuse he always uses so he won’t have to admit to himself that what he does is, indeed, a little creepy.
But he can’t help himself, Bucky knew from the moment he saw you that he was fucked. 
The moment you walked into the room to meet the team his heart was yours. You stole it with one simple smile, with one look of your beautiful eyes.
You introduced yourself and shook hands with everyone, but when you looked at Bucky he felt like a light came on and it was just you two. You shook his hand and he felt like he had to take it off and give it to you, it was yours now. His hand, his arm, his leg, his head, his heart, his soul. Everything he is was now yours, he just knew it.
Then you said his name and he could’ve died right there and then. It was the sweetest sound he’d ever heard, and it was barely two syllables. Every word you said, every laugh and sound that came out of your pretty mouth, Bucky felt like it was all for him. Nobody else mattered.
Bucky knew then he was in love.
But he didn’t know how to approach you. You were like a fairy, like a princess. Growing flowers, always smiling, baking, growing everyone’s favorite flowers and always willing to help, like growing Aloe when Wanda burned herself cooking, or Chamomile to help with Tony’s anxiety, or Valerian roots whenever someone was feeling down. 
You were like sunshine and he was terrified he’d kill your light. But he’d be damned if he’d let the world kill your light either, he’d protect you with his life.
So he took to following you, making sure you were safe from a distance. But it’s not like he never talked to you, the more time you spent with the team the more comfortable Bucky got around you and eventually you became friends.
Bucky knew you could take care of yourself, you were one of the strongest members of the team, but he didn’t like it when you were in your rose garden by yourself. The tall hedges made it impossible to see incoming danger, so he kept an eye on you just to be sure. For his own piece of mind.
And you never saw him.
That was Bucky’s actual way to unwind after a mission. He’d tell everybody he was going for a ride on his bike, but he’d drive it through the woods around the compound and to the other side of the lake where he’d have a perfect view of you without you knowing. 
Deep down he knew it was a little creepy, he could just ask you if he could join you, but he felt like you needed your time alone without anyone else around, and he knew if he asked you, you’d say yes no matter what you were feeling, because that’s just the kind of person you are.
So Bucky watched you from afar, always careful not to be seen. He watched you write for hours, it relaxed him to see your beautiful face so concentrated. Sometimes you’d laugh quietly at what you’re writing and those were the only times Bucky was grateful for the supersoldier serum that allowed him to hear such a beautiful sound even with so much distance between you.
But it was torture for him when he knew you had a bad day. Sometimes you’d hug your knees and cry, Bucky could tell how much you’d need a hug, and it killed him that he couldn’t just walk up to you and hug you.
Everytime he sees you cry his heart breaks a little and he always tries to make you feel better when you walk back inside. He doesn’t ask you what’s wrong, he just tried to make you laugh. But all he wanted to do was dry your tears.
You did notice Bucky always seemed to act a little goofy when you were feeling down, like he somehow knew, but you never thought much of it. You knew he was a very observant person, so you assumed he just saw your mood through your behavior better than most.
Bucky loves hanging out with you, even if it’s just as friends. You make fun of him like with everyone else, you don’t treat him like could explode at any moment, never walking on eggshells around him like most people do.
You’ve never been afraid of him, and he’s glad that you don’t treat him like glass. You treat him like everyone else, and it makes him feel normal. Everytime time he hangs out with you, you take him back to a time where he was unbroken. You make him feel alive again.
And he falls more in love with you by the second because of it. You’re all he wants, he wants to have you and kiss your lips and never let anyone hurt you. That’s all he can think about, but he knows that’s not gonna happen.
He heard you talk to Natasha and Wanda, heard that there’s someone you’d gone on a few dates with. But Bucky knows that guy doesn’t deserve you, nobody does. Even Bucky himself doesn’t deserve you, you’re too pure for anyone in this world, but if there’s someone that has any chance of making you happy, Bucky prays to God that someone is him.
Bucky knows today’s mission shook you deeply. He knows you blame yourself, and no amount of reassurance will make you believe that everything is okay. So today, for the first time, Bucky actually follows you. He can see your unfocused eyes even as you walk and he wants to be near you, just in case.
He almost walks to you when you curl up on the bench and start sobbing quietly, but he holds back not wanting to startle or upset you further. He just listens to your soft cries until you stop and compose yourself. You sigh and get up, walking back to the Compound to take a much needed relaxing shower.
But you’re still so much in your own head that you don’t even notice you left your diary on the bench in the gazebo. 
Bucky did notice, though.
He’s tempted to call after you and tell you, but something deep down tells him not to. He waits until you’re gone and then walks to the bench, picking up your diary and opening it. He doesn’t know why, he knows it’s wrong, these are your private thoughts, but he’s just drawn to it for some reason.
When he starts reading he notices you don’t mention any specific names, which makes sense because only you read it, you know who you’re writing about. He reads a page here and there, reading about your missions or lazy days. 
He reads about some memories with the team you wrote about, some he remembers and others he probably wasn’t there for, but seeing all these memories from your point of view does something to him.
It makes him feel connected to you, makes him feel like he’s reading your heart and soul, because he kind of is. Then he reads something that captures his attention completely. 
You write about eyes blue like the ocean and just as troubled, about a smile that could light up the world. You write about someone with a complicated past that never lost his spark, never lost his love for life. 
A man that went through hell, and never once took it out on the world. A man that didn’t ever blame the world, even when he had every right to, choosing instead to protect it. 
You filled pages and pages with everything you admire about this man, everything you love about him that you know he hates. 
And Bucky feels like every word you wrote, you wrote for him. But could this be him? Could he be the one you talk about in all your stories?
He wants to. He wants this to be him. He prays you’re talking about him. He wishes this could be him… Who is he kidding?
Of course it’s not me. 
It’s probably the guy you’ve been dating. Yeah, that’s it. You’re in love with that guy, that much is clear. 
Bucky gets to the page where you write about your dates with the guy, but he can’t read them. He closes the diary, not knowing that you compared your date to Bucky every step of the way. Not knowing that you granted the guy a second date just to be sure he couldn’t compare to Bucky, and went on a third date at a coffee shop just to let him down gently.
Bucky didn’t read how you know he’s the one for you, he didn’t read his own name written in your handwriting, the only name in your whole diary because he’s the only person you never want to forget, even though you know you never will.
But Bucky didn’t read that.
He puts your diary back where it was on the bench and, with his heart broken and his hope that one day you could be his lost, he goes back inside and to his room.
It’s only when you go back to the rose garden after your shower that you notice you left your diary there, but don’t think much of it. Nobody ever comes here anyway, as far as you know.
After finding out you’re in love with someone else, Bucky can’t stop himself from acting differently towards you, which you don’t fail to notice.
It’s not like he’s mean, but your conversations get shorter, like he tries his best to end the conversations quickly. He no longer sits close to you, no longer tries to make you laugh when you’re feeling down, doesn’t hang out with you as much during your down time and if he does, it’s never just the two of you anymore. It’s silly to say, but you miss him.
Bucky knows he’s been distancing himself, he knows you’ve noticed and he can see it’s affecting you, but he’s doing this to protect himself. He knows it’s only a matter of time before you present your boyfriend to the team, the man you’re in love with and he doesn’t want it to hurt more than necessary.
You decide not to push Bucky, knowing he has his reasons to pull away from you. Maybe he’s just trying to deal with all the stress the team’s been under and you don’t want to add any more to that, so you let him be.
A few weeks later the team’s on their sixth mission in just as many days and everyone is exhausted. You’ve been taking down Hydra base after Hydra base, because waiting too long meant losing your chance to shut down their operations for good before they got the opportunity to leave.
You’ve been dividing in smaller teams to take down the bases while still giving the team a chance to recuperate, but this last one was the biggest and required the whole team together, which sucked for you because you were in the last team with Steve and Bucky that took down a base just yesterday, so the three of you got barely a few hours of sleep while you flew to the last base.
You’ve cleared the base, all that’s left is the agents in the courtyard who are really going down fighting. The whole team is outside now, the Hydra agents giving you a hell of a fight. You’re using your magic against your better judgment, giant vines coming out of your arms like whips, covered in poisonous thorns. One touch of that and anyone would go down immediately, everyone except you.
Or at least that’s what you think.
As you’re fighting you can see an agent trying to sneak up on Bucky who’s fighting near you, so  you quickly take care of it for him. Bucky turns around and sees the agent down and then looks at you with that charming smile you fell in love with and winks at you. “Thank you, doll.”
That’s the friendliest Bucky’s been towards you in weeks and you can’t help but smile back with a small blush. You can see the last agent standing coming at you from your peripheral vision and you quickly whip him with a vine, taking him down as soon as you can so you can turn back to look at Bucky, still smiling at you.
Bucky’s smile drops quickly, though, as he sees your face draining of any color. You barely have the time to register the sting of your own thorn on your arm that you’re already falling to the ground.
Bucky tries to catch you, but he gets thrown back by your magic that goes into defense mode, creating a wall of thorns to protect your now unconscious body.
The team doesn't know what to do, none of them know enough about plants to be sure that these thorns wouldn’t just kill them all. The only one that would know that is you, the person that’s passed out, or worse, trapped in the midst of a cocoon of thorns.
“Okay, we need to find a safe way to-” Steve starts but cuts himself off almost immediately. “What are you doing?!”
Bucky doesn’t even turn around to answer, too intent on breaking the thorns around you with his metal arm, not caring that the thorns are ripping his clothes and scratching his face, all he can think about is getting to you.
He finally manages to get through to you, but nobody can follow because your magic regrows the thorns Bucky broke, trapping him with you inside the cocoon. But Bucky doesn’t care, his eyes never leaving his face as he kneels behind you, running a finger softly along your cheek and shivering when he feels it’s cold like ice.
His mind goes to the worst possibility, that there’s nothing he can do, but his brain gives him some hope seeing as your magic wouldn’t be working if you were dead. Right?
He snaps out of his thoughts when he feels the thorns around you vibrate, he takes you in his arms and shields you with his body from whatever is about to happen. But the only thing that happens is the shade cast by the thorns gets replaced by sunlight. Bucky looks up and realizes Wanda used her magic to lift the thorn cocoon.
“You couldn’t have done that before?!” Bucky barks at Wanda with a glare while carefully picking you up to take you to the Quinjet.
“She’s not the dumbass that threw himself headfirst in a mess of thorns without even considering another course of action!” Natasha came in Wanda’s defense, though she seemed more amused at Bucky’s antics than annoyed.
As the team heads back home in the jet, Bruce examines you and lets the team know you’re still alive but in a coma. Their relief is cut short when Bruce makes it known that he has no idea when, or if, you’ll wake up.
As soon as the Quinjet lands you’re taken to the medbay and hooked up to machines, an IV in your arm to keep you hydrated. Bucky holds your hand through it all, staying all night next to you just in case you wake up. He didn’t want you to be freaked out and alone, he wanted to be the first person to see your beautiful eyes open.
When morning comes, though, you’re still unconscious, but Bucky doesn’t lose hope. You probably need a good sleep. That’s what he tells himself for two, three, four days. That’s what he keeps telling himself for a week, two weeks. Never once leaving your side, not eating unless Steve brings him food and makes sure he eats before leaving, and using the bathroom of your room in the medbay.
He barely sleeps and when he does he dreams of you.
Everyone was getting worried about him, he refused to leave your side until one day Steve came into your room to tell Bucky there was something wrong with your rose garden. Bucky was torn between staying with you and seeing what Steve was talking about, but decided that it would kill you if something happened to your roses so he had to make sure everything was okay when you woke up. Because you’re going to wake up.
Bucky follows Steve to your rose garden, and his eyes widen in horror as soon as he sees it. The roses, the hedges, the vines. Everything is dying.
Bucky’s heart breaks, only one thought in his mind. If your plants are dying, does that mean you’re slowly dying too?
No. That’s unacceptable. You’re not gonna die, not if Bucky has anything to do with it. He takes it upon himself to take care of your garden, watering it and doing everything he can to keep the roses and vines alive, fooling himself into thinking that this will keep you alive.
He stays on the gazebo day and night, sleeping on the bench, spending every waking moment trying to keep a hold of even the smallest part of you. But it’s not enough. Nothing is enough.
Bucky loses track of how many days he’s been in your garden, sleeping maybe an hour at a time here and there, watering the roses every few hours and crying the rest of the time.
After all it’s his fault, if he hadn’t distracted you none of this would’ve happened. You’d be in your beautiful garden, probably with your boyfriend, and the only broken thing would be Bucky’s heart. That he could’ve lived with. 
But how can he live with the knowledge that he caused your end? That he killed your light? That he killed his sunshine, his hope, the love of his life? He can’t live with that.
Not that he has to.
While Bucky’s spiraling while surrounded by dying roses, inside your room in the medbay you’re finally waking up after almost a month.
You open your eyes slowly, looking around you at the hospital-like room. There’s nobody around and, as you look at the window, you can see it’s really late at night. You sit up and try to make sense of what happened while rubbing your eyes. The last thing you remember is Bucky’s bright smile, and then nothing.
You look down at your arm and see an IV, which you take out while frowning. How long have you been sleeping?
You carefully get off the bed and make your way outside to your rose garden, just to be sure everything’s okay. It’s not like anyone’s gonna stop you anyway.
When you get close, the moonlight shines on the hedges and you gasp at what you see. Your beautiful roses withering away, the gazebo made of vines dying too. But the most confusing thing is the sobs coming from the bench, although no one’s sitting on it.
You get closer and see Bucky sitting in front of the bench while hugging his knees and crying softly. You frown and get a little closer before stopping, not wanting to startle him.
“Bucky…” You say quietly and his head snaps, his eyes instantly meeting yours. For a moment it feels like he’s trying to decide if you’re real, he reaches out and you extend your hand to take his. That seems to convince him and he gasps.
“Doll…” His voice is barely above a whisper, almost as if he thinks if he makes too much noise you’ll disappear.
“What’s wrong?” You ask him while getting a little closer to him, concern clear in your every feature. It’s only when you get closer that you see his face full of cuts and you frown. Those are not just any scratches, it’s clear to you that they were made by thorns. “D-did… Did I do this to you?” 
You’re kneeling in front of him now, one hand still in his one the other comes up to trace the cuts in his face softly, but he takes your hand in his and kisses your palm.
“I’m okay…” He reassures you. Just then he realizes, you’re fussing over him when you’re the one that’s been in a coma for a month. “Are you okay? How long have you been awake?” 
“I… I just woke up.” You tell him honestly, then look around at the dying roses and vines before looking back at him. “What happened to me?”
“You got stung by one of your poisonous thorns.” He says quietly, his thumbs rubbing circles on your skin while he refuses to let go of you. “You’ve been unconscious for almost a month.”
“A month?!” You’re shocked at the news, not knowing what to say or do, so you just stay there while letting the information sink in. The silence is broken by Bucky after a minute.
“I’m sorry about your roses… I tried to keep them alive, but…” He looks around with a hopeless expression. “I failed you.”
Your heart breaks a little. Does he really think he failed you?
You take a deep breath, then close your eyes and when you open them again everything’s back to normal. The roses are as beautiful as ever, the gazebo just as majestic. It’s like nothing ever happened. Bucky looks around in awe when he feels you take his chin and make him look at you.
“You could never fail me.” You say firmly, wanting him to understand you mean it. You look at the cuts around his face and you can’t help the guilt and pain that you feel deep within you. “I’m sorry…”
“It wasn’t your fault.” It’s like Bucky can read your thoughts, he knows all you can see are your faults, and he wants you to know he doesn’t blame you for anything. “You weren’t even conscious. You have nothing to be sorry for.”
“I never wanted to be one of the people that hurt you…” Your voice is a whisper as a tear escapes you. “The world hurt you so much already… I never wanted to be part of that. You don’t deserve it.”
Bucky frowns. He feels like he’s heard those words, but where? No, he didn’t hear them. He read them. He read them in your diary, where you wrote about the man you’re in love with. Could it be possible?
Could I be him?
“It’s me…” He says lower than a whisper, his eyes locked on yours, and it’s your time to be confused now.
“What are you talking about?” You ask him with a frown while wiping your cheeks.
“It’s me you’re in love with.” His voice is a little louder, but firm. He’s not asking you, he’s making a statement. Your eyes widen in surprise, you almost take your hands away from his but his hold prevents you from doing that.
“I-I… What?” Is all you can bring yourself to saying, confused as to why he’s so sure of it. Are you really that transparent?
“I read your diary…” Bucky says, guilt written all over his face, but at least he’s owning up to it. “You wrote about the man you love… and you wrote the same thing you just told me. It’s me, isn’t it? You love me back?” His voice is more hopeful now, his confident demeanor weavering.
“You… You read my diary?” You say, your mind still playing catch up. It’s only a moment later that you register the ‘love me back’ and you don’t give him a chance to apologize or justify himself before you’re speaking again. “You love me?!” 
Bucky hesitates a moment but nods firmly. “I love you, doll. I’ve loved you since the moment I met you.” 
You feel like someone punched you and all the air has left your body. You have no idea what to say, so you don’t say anything. Instead you lean in and kiss him.
Bucky wastes no time kissing you back, but a thought pops into his mind and he reluctantly pulls back. “What about your boyfriend?”
“Boyfriend?” You frown again, having no idea what he’s talking about. “I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“You don’t?” Bucky feels like a weight has been lifted off his shoulders and he pulls you to straddle him. “What about the guy you went on a few dates with?”
You narrow your eyes at him but decide to table the conversation about how he knows that for another time, so you smile at him and decide to just be honest with him. “Do you honestly think that anyone could ever measure up to you? Because if you do, you’re an idiot.” Bucky grins and kisses you again. 
Maybe he is an idiot. But when he’s the idiot you’re in love with, how much of an idiot can he really be?
It looks like he can be him after all.
837 notes · View notes
heartpascal · 10 months
Text
is it freedom?
Tumblr media
▹— spiderverse (future) found family x platonic!reader
▹— summary: after losing everything, you struggle to accept the one thing you needed all along.
▹— a/n: ok i have been enabled by exactly two (2!) people. (thank you both) SO dare i start a spiderverse series??? IF YALL WANT MORE OF THIS… I WILL DO IT. this is really just a set up thing idk but i feel like arachnid has potential for further parts and ACTUAL found family!! also haven’t tagged people on my general taglist bc idk if you guys want to be tagged in ALL works or just all pedro works :(
▹— warnings: slight across the spiderverse spoilers, not really found family yet, injuries, blood, treating own injuries, stitches, fighting (canon-typical violence yall), dead parents (mentioned a LOT), a whole lot of angst (it’s a spider-person so what do we expect), reader has a whole lot of bad thoughts, loneliness, isolation
masterlist PART TWO
∘₊✧───── ───── ───── ─────✧₊∘
Had you known what this, this thing, would lead to, you would have never started it. Not that you had done so purposely, at least to begin with, more so happening as an event of pure chance. You were in the right place at the right time, and since then, you had been addicted.
But if you could go back, look at yourself just a year younger than you are now, tell that kid what would come if you went through with saving a life for the first time, you wondered. It was a question that scratched deep in your brain, sending you off balance the more you thought about it; would you have still done it? Would you have saved that person’s life, knowing it would lead to your own falling apart?
You would like to think yes. In fact, you know that back then, when your eyes were bright at the prospect of helping people, when you still marvelled at the world like it was good, you would have been certain that it would be worth it. Why should that person die, just to save you? It’s a harrowing realisation. A conclusion that makes your fingers tremble, your voice shake. Now, you’re not sure you would do it. You don’t think you could bear to face that decision knowing what you know of the world around you now.
It’s something cruel, really, that the spider that bit you gave you these powers, and nothing to go back and fix your mistakes. Your perceived victories. Your losses.
But the worst has already happened, and the only one left to die is you, so you carry on. You don the suit every day, you sew up your own injuries on the top floor of the abandoned offices that you’ve claimed as your own. Each day, you wake when you choose, you sleep when you want to, and you work yourself down to your very bones with nobody to object.
The hollow feeling in your gut is a pain you have no choice to ignore, to smother with assurances that this is freedom. What else could it be? You do whatever you so please, you spend your time swinging through the streets of New York rather than doing schoolwork at home, you eat all the junk you could ever have wanted.
It’s freedom. It has to be.
You tell yourself that you don’t miss the home part of having to do schoolwork, promise your heart that you don’t miss home-cooked meals as opposed to greasy food that leaves you unsatisfied. You swear that you like having nobody to tell you what to do. There’s no other choice, after all.
And each day, when you spend a little bit longer out on the streets, getting yourself into needless fights that the police could certainly handle, you tell yourself it’s because you’re protecting the city. You convince yourself that it’s not because of having an unending rage to satiate, or a permanent feeling of breathlessness when you leave police to handle anything, as if you could relive the moment your father, the captain, was left to handle something he couldn’t.
So, you’re almost relieved by the appearance of something… strange. Something dangerous. This is what you live for — this is your job.
You crouch against the wall, fingers splayed and suit itching where you had crudely sewn it back together across your ribs at an almost too-close call. You hold your breath, you watch. The lenses over your eyes shield your sensitive sight from the harshest colours of this new opponent, who looks almost… unreal. Too different to be a part of reality. He yells out, seemingly glitching? A distorted scream of what is apparently pain, accompanied by flashes of colour that are unfamiliar to you.
“Well, that doesn’t look good.” You comment, eyebrows raised beneath your mask, and the strange looking guy snaps his head towards you, long hair slapping across the goggles over his eyes. He bares his teeth at you, something almost resembling a grin marring his face.
“Spider-man!” He yells triumphantly, cackling as he wipes the hair away from his face, tendrils unfurling from behind his back and lifting him into the air.
“Not quite!” You call back, dodging below the metallic arm that shoots towards where your head was, crumbling through the wall. You try to think back to the jokes you used to tell to rile up whoever you were facing, but find your mind is blank. Instead, all you can think of is questions. “Where the hell did you come from, anyway?”
The man follows you as you spring from wall to wall, heading towards the center of the building where it tunnels up for about forty floors, balconies overlooking the fountain below. “A new spider, eh? Well I’ll take you down just as easily as I have the other!” He tells you, though you’re immediately suspicious of his statement. You’re the only Spider-related hero around, and even if you weren’t, you doubt this guy could squash a worm, let alone you.
“Sure thing, man.” You say, sighing, already exhausted by the repetitiveness that comes with every fight. Your opponents always say they’ll beat you, kill you, squish you, take you down, and yet you always get back up at the end of the fight, and they always remain defeated. When you started doing this, you never would have thought you’d get so tired from winning all the time.
And yet here you are, slipping further and further up the building with the octopus-looking guy chasing after you, metal arms crumbling walls and bannisters on his way up. He falters once more, another one of those glitch-like movements sending him down a few floors, but he’s quick to recover. Of course, it wouldn’t be that easy.
You crouch down on one balcony, somewhere around the thirty mark floor-wise, peering down at the guy as he shakes lingering pain from his body. He charges upwards, aiming to reach you quickly with an almost predatory smirk on his face. Before he can even get close to you, however, you’re back on the move, setting a trap for him that he doesn’t even seem to notice.
It’s only when a group of late workers emerge on what you’re pretty sure is the twenty-first floor that you become more anxious about this fight. You don’t like when civilians are involved.
There’s about a dozen of them crowding the balcony, looking up to where you’re facing off with octopus-man above, some having begun to descend the stairs to the next floor before catching on to your presence. You try not to draw attention to them, but their pointing and whispering sets the Spidey-sense off, ringing loudly between your ears, almost deafening in its intensity. Maybe you underestimated this guy. The flash of a camera sends the last hope of him not noticing down the drain, and he grins at you as he switches targets, climbing down towards them with some semblance of caution.
You’re much faster than he is, dropping down and using a web to catch yourself rather than having to climb. It’s hard to stop yourself from yelling at them, cursing them out for being so damn foolish — who in their right mind would stick around a very dangerous fight to take pictures?
Instead, you choose to yell, “Get out! Go, go, go.” And usher them down the stairs, but it’s not difficult to realise that this guy is going to get to them before they manage to descend to the bottom. You shouldn’t be surprised, really. Nothing is ever as simple as it could be, not for you.
The split second decision to drop down and form a net-like web low enough to catch the workers worked out for you in the end, as you swung back up and pushed the workers off of the balcony and stairway just as the octopus man was reaching them. He cursed at you, refocusing his efforts on you as you vaguely noted the workers clambering down after their screaming had stopped. Honestly — did people really have so little faith in you? Had you ever sent anybody to their death before?
“You are just as pesky of an insect as Spider-man!” He growled out, teeth gritted, and came after you with renewed force. He kind of reminded you of that doctor you faced not long after getting your powers, but this guy looked completely different. The doctor you faced — aptly named Doc Ock — had turned himself into some form of a mutant, he had reinforced tentacles which sprouted from his back. Was this guy some kind of copy cat? Maybe he was just delusional.
“I don’t know who Spider-man is, man!” You shout to him as you ascend the building again, trying to figure out the best way to take this guy down. His tentacles seem electronic, so surely you could disable whatever machinery resides on his back?
“That’d be me.” A voice came from above you, two floors ahead of your position. Your head snapped towards it, seeing a man in a blue and red suit, framed by a burst of orange behind him. He didn’t linger up there long, instead moving to leap down to the guy who had turned his attention to the new guy. The closer you looked at this new guy, the more similarities you saw to yourself — his webs looked remarkably similar to your own, the pattern that went across his suit matched your own, even the wide white lenses that shielded your eyes on your mask. Who the hell was this guy?
The octopus man grinned widely, shaking greasy hair from his face. “Ah, finally! The real Spider-man. Got yourself a new protégé, I see.” He drawled, dodging this new guy’s hit straight off of the bat. You tried not to get annoyed at being referred to as a protégé, considering as far as you were aware, you were the only Spider-person around. Where was this guy when you were holding a bridge full of civilians together? Where was he when you took down villain after villain, never once failing to get the guy? No — you were the real Spider-man, if anyone.
“I don’t know who you are, man, but I’m handling this just fine.” You call to the guy, swinging down to rejoin the fight, webbing the villain’s metal tentacles to the wall behind him, before dropping down to kick him towards the wall.
“Oh, so you know how to send this guy back to his own dimension?” Spider-man asks you, eyebrows raised beneath his mask, and as if on cue, the guy glitches once more, ripping his arms away from the wall and just about catching himself on a balcony below before he could fall into your net.
You gape at the new guy, glancing back up to where the burst of orange remains opened, and is that a portal? Is this Spider-man from another dimension? Is that why you’ve never heard of him before? God, if your mother was alive, she’d kill to find out about this. Inter-dimensional travel was something she had spent her life researching. If you didn’t remain so bitter toward her even after her death, you might’ve been sad she wasn’t alive to see this.
But you were bitter, and it made the experience all the worse.
Because you’re pretty sure that that bitterness takes the place of grief within you. It’s hard to understand why you crave to feel that pain, that grief, as opposed to the aching resentment that floods you with the thought of her. It’s such a sharp contrast to thinking of your father, your kind father, the man who threw himself into a battle he couldn’t have hoped to survive, just on the off chance he could save somebody. You hope you take after him.
“Wait— you’re from another dimension?” You question anyway, eyes flickering between the battle and the looming portal above. In fact, you’re so distracted by finding out about that tidbit of information that you miss octopus man aim a tentacle for you, and it snatches you around the ankle. “Oh, you gotta be kidding me—!”
The man waves you around like some kind of rag doll, and you try not to be too bitter about being caught off guard. You should probably learn that getting caught up in your little pity party always ends up badly, always distracts you from that renowned Spidey-sense. You formulate a plan in your mind when the drip of blood around your ankle draws your attention back to the battle at hand.
You web the wall opposite and hold on tight, pausing the movements and letting the dizziness that had come over you fade away. The man growls out in annoyance, and gets closer to cut the webs with another tentacle, which is exactly what you planned for. The tension from the webs launches you towards him when you let go, and in his surprise, the metal tentacle releases you. You wrap around him, and start webbing up the machinery embedded in his back as Spider-man distracts most of the tentacles, keeping them from pulling you off.
His tentacles start faltering, clearly not obeying his movements, and you wrap them up where they emerge from his back, continuing along until the movement is so limited that he has to use them all to clutch onto the nearest balcony.
You crawl up the tentacles in the very same spidery manner that you’re known for, and crouch, watching the octopus man struggle as Spider-man observes from the balcony opposite. “You wanna finish this one off, Spider-man?” You ask, unable to hide any bitterness from your tone at his mostly unhelpful actions throughout the battle.
“Hey, not bad!” He praises, and it annoys you. You’re good at what you do — for the most part. You manage without help constantly, and that’s the way you prefer it. “You’d make a good addition to the Spider Society!”
Now, you don’t know what the Spider Society is. But honestly? You don’t care. You don’t need help, and you prefer working alone, and you certainly don’t like feeling patronised.
“Whatever, man. Just send him back to whatever dimension he came from.” You tell the guy, and drop down as you hear sirens outside, landing on your injured ankle and just about stopping yourself from cursing. Through all the adrenaline and fighting, you’d forgotten about the way the metal had ripped into your skin, drawn blood. It’s just be another place you’d have to sew up your suit with itchy, uneven stitching. “Officers,” You greet as they open the doors, guns drawn, radios murmuring. “All taken care of. Civilians okay?”
“Shaken up, but fine.” The leading police officer says, immediately relaxing and holstering his weapon. You wish it reassured you that the police trusted you now, but it didn’t. Nonetheless, the other officers follow suit. “Thank you, Arachnid.”
The name your world has bestowed upon you has yet to grow on you, but you nod your head regardless, and salute them as you make your way out, swinging across the city, trying to put the existence of the multiverse and inter-dimensional travel out of your mind. Surprisingly, it’s pretty easy when you have a busted ankle to fix up.
∘₊✧───── ───── ───── ─────✧₊∘
You’re halfway through stitching up your suit, having already sewn your skin back together with as much skill as you possessed in the matter — which was, not much. But the bleeding has stopped, and your stupidly slow healing will take care of it within a few days. You know that the itchy stitches on your suit will just irritate the injury, and though you wouldn’t lose anything if your identity was revealed, it doesn’t feel right to go out into the city with any part of you on show.
No, you wear the suit for a reason. You keep every part of yourself covered because nobody can know it’s you underneath the suit. Not because you had anything to lose, no, you had already lost everything. It was because then you could never make a mistake, you would have to be absolutely perfect, flawless, to make up for the fact that it was you underneath the layer.
So, you settle with a sewn suit that will itch and make the stitches on your ankle sting.
However, when there’s a burst of orange across the room, you have no choice but to forgo the suit, to simply drop the needle and thread and hover your fingers over your web shooters. You wait, nervously, for some other villain to appear. You’re not sure if Spider-man appearing would be better or worse.
But when a foot steps through the portal, it’s nobody familiar. In fact, it’s a suit you have never seen before, made up of dark blues and bright reds, sharp edges and long claws. It’s… unnerving, and considering the silence coming from the person wearing it, you’re not entirely certain of what they’re here for.
A moment later and another person steps through, a woman, with bright yellow lenses across her eyes that filter her irises into an amber. She steps forward, standing beside the person who had stepped through first, and if she hadn’t showed up, you would’ve been tempted to attack. With that being said, you remain on edge, but there’s something… comforting about her presence. Like her presence softens the man’s jagged edges.
She says your name, and then adds, “Arachnid.”
You furrow your brows and curse as you glance back at the suit so crudely laid out on the floor. Still, it doesn’t explain how she knows your name. Was it an inter-dimensional thing?
“Spider-man told us about your work in capturing Doc Ock earlier.” She tells you, as if that explains their presence. You did what you were supposed to do, which was take out the bad guys. “We’re here to offer you a place in the Spider Society.”
You can’t help but wonder if this is some kind of good cop, bad cop thing. She presents an offer which doesn’t sound too bad, and then her sharp-edged companion presents all the drawbacks and the catches. They don’t seem like the type to take no for an answer, either way. You still don’t even know what this Spider Society was! Was it some kind of multi-dimensional cult?
“I already told Spider-man that I wasn’t interested in joining whatever cult you’ve got going on.” You practically hiss, though you didn’t exactly tell him in such blatant words. You were more dismissive earlier, so you’d have to be clear now.
“It’s not a cult,” The man speaks, voice harsh and sharp much like the blades that branch from his forearms. “We work to protect the multiverse from anomalies that threaten to destroy it.”
The woman glances at him in a way that you translate as being vaguely annoyed, like he wasn’t approaching you in the way she had wanted him to. “He means to say that it’s a big job, and we need all the help we can get.” She says, softer, but only in comparison to the man’s harshness. “Listen, kid, you’re good at what you do. We need that kind of talent.”
“You’ll have to find it somewhere else.” You say firmly, because why would you want to leave your universe? This was a lot to think about when you had only learned of the multiverse existing mere hours ago. Regardless, you weren’t about to abandon your city just to go across the multiverse to help other heroes who couldn’t keep a leash on their own villains.
The two of them shared a look, a mere glance, before the woman heaved a sigh. “Look,” She sighed, heavily, like whatever she was about to say was something she didn’t want to be voicing. “Before you make your choice, you should know, your Green Goblin is currently terrorising another universe.”
You couldn’t work out if this was some kind of recruitment tactic, or something. That just wasn’t possible. You had put Gwen Stacy in the highest security prison after all antidotes to her goblin-tech failed. She was stuck in there — permanently. There was no way she had gotten out, let alone gotten out to another universe.
…Right?
It’s hard not to think of the memories at the mention of her—Green Goblin, not Gwen Stacy. Never Gwen Stacy. You wonder if this is where your fear comes from, the terrifying fact that you are remembered only for your mistakes. Because before she was the Green Goblin, she was Gwen. She was everything to you. She was the sun you orbited, the stars that charted your path. And it hurts, it hurts that you can only remember the blood and the dust and the destruction when you think of her.
People aren’t born as monsters, are they?
Like the spider that bit you, that invertebrate that so many fear, it was born the way it was. It was born with those fang-lined maws, with those eight legs and dozens of eyes. It was made into the monster it became, artificially crafted to deliver a venom that changed you forever. But it wasn’t born that way.
Surely, Gwen wasn’t either. She was kind. You remember that about her. You can remember her soft hands that used to hold your own, the loud laughter that always ended in a snort when she laughed at her own jokes, the gentle eyes that stared into your very soul. But those eyes are the very same ones that let her see through your mask, let her see exactly where to hit you to make it hurt. Was that what she was born as? Or is that what she was made into? A killer. A monster.
“Show me.” You say, because what else could you possibly respond? If what they’re saying is true, if the Green Goblin is loose once more, then people will die.
You can’t let her get fresh blood on her hands. Not when somewhere, deep inside your chest, so far down it’s almost unreachable, you have hope for her. You have an innate desire to look for the best in her, even when the Gwen you knew was the first life that the Green Goblin took.
∘₊✧───── ───── ───── ─────✧₊∘
If there’s one thing you’ve taken from being Arachnid, it’s to expect the unexpected. And you go through the orange portal after Jessica Drew and Miguel O’Hara with that exact mindset about you, staring at where an orange watch-like device is wrapped around your wrist.
It’s in your nature to be suspicious, and these people weren’t an exception to that.
In fact, their presence only heightened that behaviour. After all, what were you to expect from two Spider people, who supposedly came to you for your help?
You weren’t blind, you saw the aged lines of their faces the moment you got close enough to see them clearly, away from the dim lighting of the building. They were adults, adults who had clearly been doing this type of thing a lot longer than you had. You, who was barely bordering on adult, who had fought enough battles already to last a lifetime — so why would they need you?
It didn’t feel right.
And when this Miguel person summoned Lyla the moment you walked through the portal, it felt all the more wrong. She was a hologram of some kind, much higher tech than the kind of thing you saw on your earth. But then again, you had never really been in high tech labs back in your earth. Still, it unsettled you. “Lyla, get me the location of Green Goblin, Earth 5011.” He commanded, and they argued in hushed voices for a moment, before a wider hologram appeared, stamped at Earth 3899.
“How did she get to another universe?” You ask, then, because it doesn’t make sense, and you’re shaking underneath the thin material of your suit. You’re hyper aware of each drag of stitching against the wound on your leg, each patch of fabric you had sewn on in hopes of the suit lasting you just a little longer, because you didn’t have the resource to produce a new one.
“It’s an anomaly.” Jessica Drew tells you, her tone softer than you’d heard it, as if she was attempting to reassure you in some way.
It didn’t help. But how could it? The last time you had faced Gwen Stacy—Green Goblin— you had lost so much. It had been the beginning of the end of everything good in your life. The explosion she had caused at your mother’s laboratory was the very same one that killed her, the very same explosion that sent you and your dad miles apart all while living in the same home. And still, you found a way to hope that there was something to salvage within Gwen.
But not only had you lost your mother, and not long after — your father, you had also lost your closest friend. The one person you had confided in, who knew you from your surface to the deepest level, and she had used that against you the moment the Goblin had taken over.
It had taken everything in you to beat her, back then.
And that was on home turf! How did these people expect you to do that a second time, in a completely unfamiliar place?
“Specifics aren’t important right now. Jessica, you take Arachnid. Lyla, send another one of the teams.” Miguel instructed, dismissing your questions right off the bat. It was frustrating. They were leaving you completely in the dark, and sending you to fight the worst enemy you had ever faced, and they were sending you alongside others like you from different universes. It was like asking you to bare your soul in front of them, to reveal your secrets, your deepest regrets, everything that you wanted to stay buried.
You knew Green Goblin. You knew that’s exactly what she would do. She would undermine you, she would lay your life out in front of you like tiles on a scrabble board. In the end, none of it amounted to much.
Jessica Drew made her way out, glancing at you and nodding for you to follow along. Your moment of hesitation had drawn Miguel’s attention, and he called out to you after a moment of hesitation. “We’ve all faced one like it, kid. It’s easier with others.” He told you, though he held a pained expression on his face all the while. Instead of admitting to the way he had hit the nail right on the head, you simply nodded and followed after Spider-woman.
It was a whirlwind from there.
Meeting up with others. Travelling the length of the so-called Lobby to wherever it was that Jessica was taking you. When you finally arrived, she offered an empty glass box with a mannequin inside, bare. She gestured towards it like it should’ve been self explanatory, but soon realised she’d have to spell it out for you.
You shouldn’t have been so upset by the offer of a new suit.
But you were.
This suit was your life. You had nothing outside of it, not anymore. You couldn’t just throw it away, as if it meant nothing, as if every rip and patch and wonky stitch didn’t mean anything. These were proof that what you were doing was real, that it was worth something. Each stitch proved you had value. You weren’t about to throw all of that away, especially for whatever overly technical suit these people would provide.
You had everything you needed.
And so Jessica led you to the next destination: Earth 3899.
The moment you stepped through the portal, it was like you were hit with a wave of familiarity. And not in a positive, slightly nostalgic way, no— this was chaos. This was the state your world had been in when Green Goblin ran riot, unchecked. She had torn apart buildings, blown up parks, she had set New York City aflame. And she was doing exactly the same here.
It was more contained here than it had been on your earth, and you had to assume that was thanks to the Spider-man already on site, coordinating police, ambulance and fire responses to douse the fires as quickly as she set them. If only the police in your city had trusted you so much, back then.
“Where is she?” You ask, the moment you get close enough to speak to the resident Spider-man of the universe. He looks at you as if you’re familiar, but doesn’t comment, instead just pointing a finger toward a skyscraper just a short way ahead. You’re gone the moment he tells you where to go.
She had the uncanny ability to stay quiet. It had freaked you own back on your own earth, but it was even more terrifying here, where things were ever so slightly different.
“Arachnid.” Gwen’s voice called, and for a moment, you could forget. You could forget every horrible thing the Goblin had done, and you could remember your friend, your Gwen, who had called out to Arachnid more than once without knowing it was you behind the mask. Whether it was for a story or to provide information on your most recent opponent, the voice calling your alias was familiar. But then there was that crackle of laughter, an unnatural gurgle in the way it left her throat, and you turned to see the green-tinged pallor of her skin. “I was so hoping you’d show up.”
You didn’t know how much her appearance would effect you, until you were stuck to the side of the building, staring at what had once been your best friend. You’re so choked up that you can’t even formulate a response, because you want that to be Gwen so badly, but you know it isn’t. The more you look at her, the more Goblin you see, the more you know that the Gwen you love is never coming back.
“Nothing to say?” She asks, and then says your real name, the name she used to say down the crackle of a phone line, or across the school hallway, and she smiles. “I thought you’d be happy to see me.”
“You should’ve stayed in prison, Gwen.” You say, your voice unsteady as you say her name aloud for the first time in what must be forever. She seems to relish in the tremble of your voice, and you have to curse yourself for being so stupid, for already showing the vulnerability she was so easily able to pick out.
The Green Goblin tutted at you, stood atop her glider, but the smile you saw didn’t belong to Gwen. “You’re pathetically predictable, you know. You’re like a moth to the flame.” She tells you, and you fear that she’s right, that you’re the same person you were back when you fought her, back when she almost won. She sighs, like something heavy is weighing upon her, but it turns wistful in the blink of an eye. “I’m just glad your dad isn’t here to see this. He’d be so disappointed.”
“Arachnid, focus.” Jessica’s voice interrupts, before you can spiral down that rabbit hole. How did Gwen even know about your father? She was in prison long before he died. It didn’t make sense.
“Maybe,” You say, that familiar tremble around your words. “He did always hope for the best for you.”
She bares her teeth at your words, the only visible reaction before her mask is slipping over the bottom of her face, stretching out up to pointed ears, all metallic and tinted a murky green. Then, she’s attacking.
It’s muscle memory, mostly, you think.
If you don’t think too hard about it, it could be like playing a game with a longtime friend from your childhood. You know the moves to make, you know how she’ll respond. It’s a constant push and pull, a balance which leaves only destruction behind, the path of the Green Goblin’s wrath tangible in each battle scene the two of you leave behind. You can’t beat her like this.
It’s her glitching that gives you a slight upper hand — and you send her careening off of her glider to the ground below.
Your heart squeezes suddenly in your chest as you watch her fall, her eyes wide in what could almost be perceived as fear. If you didn’t intervene, would she die? Would you have put an end to her story, once and for all, when you secretly hope there’s a cure out there for her? You can’t bear the thought of finding out, of watching her die, and so you foolishly dive after her.
A web to her midsection allows you to grip her before she hits the ground, and you set her down with a far more gentle hand than you would ever admit.
She says your name, then, a whispered version of it that sounds like Gwen. You think you can see her in those wide blue eyes, in that stare, and you approach with some caution. “Gwen,” You say, more of a question, “You with me?”
“I’m with you,” She answers, as you reach her side, as you resist the urge to pull off your mask. You’re so preoccupied staring at her expression that you don’t see the blade until it’s too late, your Spidey-sense failing you as you wallowed in your search for someone who was gone. “You sweet, predictable bug.” She spits then, twisting the blade she had sunk deep into your side, and you writhe, trying to move away from her.
“Arachnid!” Jessica Drew calls out, drawing the Green Goblin’s attention, allowing you to pull away from her slackened grasp. You leave the blade where it is, knowing your only slightly enhanced healing wouldn’t make up for the onslaught of blood that would pour from the wound. “I think that’s enough, Green Goblin.” Jessica says, riding a motorbike that you swore she didn’t have earlier. Nonetheless, she uses it to put even more space between you and your villain.
“You need a hand, kid?” A new voice asks, and a gloved hand reaches out for you where you had knelt against the tarmac. You look up, seeing a new Spider-man, but this one has his mask up, showing off his aged face and the bags underneath his eyes. You wave him off, staggering up to your feet, and clench your jaw as you stare at Green Goblin, watch as she pulls bombs from her waistband, barely the size of a chocolate bar, but capable of causing irreparable damage. “Get back to HQ, Arachnid, we can handle this.” Spider-man tells you, in what you suspect to be a fatherly voice, but you ignore him.
Time flies, slips out of your grasp, and you don’t know how long you and the others spend fighting Green Goblin, but she proves to be just as difficult of a foe for them to face as she was for you. Each time the three of you manage to get the drop on her, she slips away before she could be caught. It’s frustrating, and you can even see the way irritation thickens in the air, tangible.
Spider-man, or Peter, as Jessica had called him, is with you, focusing on trying to take Green Goblin down, whilst Jessica Drew is focused on damage control, blowing up Gwen’s bombs before they could hit their intended targets. You’re pretty sure the resident Spider-man is around here, too, pulling any lingering citizens out of harms way before Green Goblin could end them. You’d admit, it works better than you had done alone back on your own earth.
But it doesn’t work well enough, and more than one building is damaged almost beyond repair, and in the dust and rubble, Peter was distracted by the few citizens poking their heads out of the gaping hole in the side of their apartments. He didn’t see Green Goblin coming until it was too late, until she had thrown two of her bombs, one towards him, and one towards the already wrecked building.
Your throat dries up as you try to figure out what to do, who to go for, but in the end, you don’t have to choose.
Beams of glowing orange webs shoot into the bombs where they arc towards their victims, blowing them up and leaving both Peter and the civilians in the apartments without a scratch on any of them. Well, nothing that wasn’t already there before. You see him then, running alongside Jessica Drew, none other than Miguel O’Hara — who clearly didn’t think that the three of you were capable of handling Green Goblin.
“We’ve gotta end this.” Peter tells the three of you, glaring over at Green Goblin after coming so close to one of her bombs.
“You distract, I’ll go in.” You say, the only plan that makes sense. The only plan that’ll work. You wouldn’t be much use as a distraction, not with the blood still pooling around the blade hanging from your side, but you could beat her. You knew you could.
Peter nodded, and he, Jessica and Miguel went in one after another, landing hits on Green Goblin before she could even think to withdraw another bomb, or land a hit of her own, whilst you made your way behind her, swinging as high as you dared to go in your state. She was getting angry, you could tell, a distinct flush rushing up the back of her neck, a tell that Green Goblin shared with Gwen.
It was only when she was starting to turn the tide that you jumped down from your spot against the side of a building, looking for your opening.
She sent Jessica Drew tumbling off of her motorbike, which was your chance.
Green Goblin heard you only a moment before you were on her, not giving her a chance to make a countermove. Instead, you were curling your arms around her, as tight as you could, holding her hands away from her waistband. You gripped the blade in your side and yanked it out, holding it to her chest, breathing heavily through the pain as you bared your teeth at her, her face beside your own.
“Don’t make me kill you.” You say, and try not to hear the pleading in your own voice, the distinctive tone of a beg. You may have the upper hand on her, but as always, she had the power. “Don’t.” You repeat, because you can feel it in your bones that you would do it. If it was the choice between her or the hundreds that she would kill on this world, it would be those hundreds. There was no doubt about it, no questions to be asked.
You may have resented your mother, but she wasn’t the only one who died because of the Green Goblin. You wouldn’t let that happen again.
Perhaps she heard the plea in your voice, the giveaway that you weren’t bluffing, because she went still in your arms, still enough for the other Spiders to approach with some caution, eyes on her hands where you held them away from any weapons, using your forearm connected to the hand holding the blade to her chest to keep her left hand from grasping anything.
“I won’t be asking again.” You tell her, which is as much of a threat as you can muster. Or, more so, a promise.
As Miguel pushed you back with a firm hand, throwing a machine at Gwen’s feet, you think she understands. If the two of you are ever in that position again, there will be no hesitation about it. You will kill her.
“Good work, kid.” Peter says as Miguel and Jessica get to work with getting your Green Goblin through a portal to the HQ. He glanced down at where your hand is now pressing into your side, blood pouring steadily. In your other hand, you still hold the blade that had pierced your own skin, that would have killed Gwen Stacy had she not surrendered. He winces as if it’s him who got hurt, and guides you through the portal after the others. “C’mon, we’ll get you checked out. You not got enhanced healing?” He asks, though you suspect he doesn’t expect you to answer, and you’re glad.
∘₊✧───── ───── ───── ─────✧₊∘
“I can do this myself, you know.” You sigh, wincing as a Spider-man — who apparently is also a doctor and works in the Spider Society’s infirmary — stitches up the wound on your midsection. It’s uncomfortable, though less painful that when you do it yourself. Still, it’s uncomfortable to accept help from these strangers.
“Ooh, shouldn’t say that to him.” Peter B. Parker laughs, one of the many Peter Parkers of the Society, but the same one who had fought Green Goblin with you. “He’ll lecture you on proper healthcare for days if you give him the opportunity!”
The Spider-doctor glares at Peter, or you assume he does, from the slight squint of the lenses of his mask. He kisses his teeth under the mask, tutting, muttering about “Spiders and their complete disregard for their health. Lucky you haven’t died ten times over from infections.” But he doesn’t say anything that requires a response from you, and he soon finished up the stitches. He goes to offer to fix up the injury on your ankle, but you’re up on your feet before he can even get the words out.
“Now, I gotta get back home to the wife, but Miguel wants to see you. He’ll take you home,” Peter tells you as he walks out of the infirmary by your side, but he stops you in the hallway with a hand on your shoulder, surprisingly gentle. “If that’s what you want.”
Your eyebrows furrowed before you could stop them, and the confusion over his words must’ve been written all over your face.
“Why wouldn’t I want that?” You ask, defensively.
Peter opens his mouth, but nothing escapes. Instead, it’s his expression that tells you everything he’s thinking. The crease between his brows screams pitying, or sympathetic. He’s talking about the way you live back on your earth, about the life you lead, Arachnid by day, and by night. With no room for you, no room for your secret identity. He’s thinking of the way you’ll be returning to a world with nobody awaiting you, with not a soul to look out for you, to stitch you up after a battle. Nobody but yourself, anyway.
You pull away from him, brows furrowing further, into an almost angered expression, and you don’t watch the way his hand falls away from your shoulder back to his side. He sighs when you turn away, scoffing as you make your way through the hallways of the Lobby towards where you think Miguel will be.
It’s overwhelming, all of these people. They all believe that they know you, that they know your circumstances, your story, but the truth is that they don’t. Nobody does, and that’s the way you prefer it. You don’t need a Society of Spiders surrounding you, breathing down your neck, telling you they’re sorry, or not trusting you to handle yourself in your own fights, because you can handle yourself. You’ve spent the last year of your life trying to prove that, trying to prove that you can do good things, that you’re worthy of the title Arachnid. You certainly shouldn’t need to prove that to a whole Society of people like you, most of which had been doing the job a lot longer.
You’re capable and you’re content.
You don’t need a life as your secret identity to be content, in fact, it’s better without one. You don’t have to tell so many lies, don’t have to worry about hurting the people you love, because there are none of them left. There’s nobody to hurt, and there’s nobody to lie to. Why would you want to change that?
The hallway ahead looks familiar, and you follow it until you enter a room where Miguel stands, looking at orange tinted screens on a platform halfway up the room. You enter with the absolute certainty that you want to return to your own earth, and you’re not going to let anybody stop you.
“I’m ready.” You tell him, expectantly.
He scoffs, saying nothing, still staring at the screens in front of him. For whatever reason, the reaction makes you angry — inexplicably so. You’re slinging up to the platform before you can have a second thought about it, and you’re pushing his shoulder so he’ll face you, so he’ll acknowledge you.
He stares at you, unimpressed.
“Send me back to my earth.” You press, brows furrowed beneath your mask, but you’re sure he can see the anger in the way your shoulders tense up.
“Sure,” Miguel said blankly, staring at you as if you’d suddenly change your mind or something. “But you know, there’s a lot more like her.” He added on when you said nothing, waiting for him to send you back to your world so you could give him back the stupid watch still wrapped around your wrist.
You stared at him like he was speaking a foreign language. “There are no more like her.” You respond, feeling that hot press on your chest. You don’t want to talk about Gwen Stacy anymore than you’re sure he’d like to talk about whatever he had gone through in his life. Hell, you don’t even want to think about her, but you know that nobody else you would ever have to face would hurt you in the way that she did. In the way that having to see her as an enemy, rather than your friend, had hurt. So, yeah, there was nobody like her, not for you.
Miguel seems ready to let you go for a moment, but then he’s shaking his head at you. “You have a place here. You can be with people like you. You don’t have to do this alone, anymore.” He says, and you think that is ironic, because you don’t see anybody else in here. To you, it seems like he is doing exactly that; doing the job alone. You can practically see the weight of the world on his shoulders.
“I prefer being alone.” You tell him, and it has to be true. It has to be.
His jaw sets, acceptance, you think, and he nods. He glances past you, to where a portal was open on the floor below. Considering that you hadn’t seen him set up the portal, you’d wager that his AI Lyla must’ve listened in and done it for him. You pull the watch off of your wrist, relishing in the way your very atoms seem to sag with the weight of being in another dimension.
“Thanks.” You say, and drop down, landing on your sore ankle but not murmuring a word about the pain. You walk back to your world with your head held high, despite your tattered suit and multitude of wounds that would take days to stop hurting.
Miguel stares after you as the portal closes, eyebrows furrowed. He barely acknowledges Jessica Drew’s arrival in the room, already having known she had been lingering in the hallway, listening in. “Well, that went well.” She comments, glancing between where the portal had been and where Miguel stands, brooding. She knows how much pressure he puts on himself, and she knows that he cares about each and every Spider-person in the multiverse. It doesn’t take a Spider-sense to see the way in which you struggle. It’s a familiar struggle, sure, but there were so many Spiders across the multiverse who had a shoulder to lean on in their hardest times. Who did you have? There was no Aunt May for Arachnid, or Gwen Stacy, or Harry Osborne, or, well, anybody.
Jessica thinks that if anybody were to know exactly how that felt, it would be Miguel.
3K notes · View notes
floatyflowers · 2 months
Text
Dark Platonic Father! Spiderman x reader
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Peter Parker never imagined ending up as a single young father.
But it happened, and he doesn't regret it at all, even though it is hard to take care of a child while being a superhero.
Adding to that, he is keeping his identity a secret from you.
Why? because you have phobias from spiders
He always makes sure you get to school on time and helps you with your homework.
Spiderman is incredibly protective of you, always making sure you're safe and sound, even if it means breaking a few bones while saving the world.
Peter is your biggest fan, cheering you on from the sidelines at every performance you do.
And if a parent or a student makes fun of you, he doesn't mind paying them a visit and 'putting them in their places'
And by that, I mean he scares the living hell out of them.
Even if he is always busy, but all his free time is spent with you, because he believes his life should revolve around him.
So imagine his shock when he discovered that you have friends.
He felt betrayed
Yes, he flew to their houses dressed as Spiderman and made them swear to stay away from you or he will eat them alive.
Maybe it's Venom who is starting to effect his behaviour.
618 notes · View notes
cxlamarisalxmi · 10 months
Text
Being Miguel’s daughter and hosting Venom
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
[Platonic One-Shot]
c/w: major spoilers, angst, gender neutral terms and pronouns (they/them), suicidal thoughts, attempted suicide, no gendered terms used to describe reader, canon ignorance and inaccuracies, if you read the drabble you’ll know you originally just hosted Venom but this time I’m writing you as Spider-Venom
[Unedited]
The sun kissed the Western horizon as it slowly sunk beneath the surface. The gorgeous colors of the settling dusk bathing your New York in the luminous sheen of the golden glow that settles upon the city like a blanket.
You were just finishing up for the day, swinging from a tall skyscraper to tether a web to the very top of a clock tower. Pulling yourself up all the way to the top to perch on one of the very many gargoyle statues jutting out of the tower’s roof lip.
“Hungry.”
“That’s what the sandwiches are for bud.”
Venom settled inside when you tore the wrapping off the sandwich and took a big bite out of the end. Plenty of meat packed into the sandwich but also enough vegetables to sustain you too. Nutrients were vital in your symbiotic relationship with the alien and regardless of where they came from you both needed hundreds of them to keep yourselves alive and healthy.
“I hate the vegetables.”
“Well I like them. They taste better than people do.”
“You’ve never had another person before! You don’t let me eat people!”
“I’m not a cannibal.”
“Hmph.”
You rolled your eyes at the symbiote’s childish behavior, you’ve grown used to it but that didn’t mean you’d grown to like their attitude.
But you had grown to like them, ever since they had attached themself to you on your fourteenth birthday. The same day you very nearly took your own life.
Your life was far from perfect, as a matter of fact you can’t remember a time in your twenty long years of being alive that you’d actually been happy. Really, well and truly happy.
Your mother died when you were five and your father had abandoned you not too long after. About a year and half to be precise, and in his care and his care alone you’d learned that he was the furthest thing from what a proper father should be.
The first five years in which he parented you alongside your beloved mother he seemed guarded. Closed off, angry at the world and everyone surrounding him. And his own personal turmoil seemed to transcend into raising you— as he didn’t put an ounce of love or affection into bringing you up.
At the time, you hadn’t understood. What did you do wrong? Did you make him angry? Why wouldn’t he love you unconditionally? Your mother did.. was it so hard for him to treat you as his own? As if he loved you?
Apparently it was too hard for him, because he didn’t want to do it alone. And when your mother had died of cancer he had attempted to raise you in her honor but failed miserably and gave up within two years.
You were seven when you experienced your first heartbreak, in the years prior under his ‘care’ you had plenty share of devastation and let-downs from him. But none compared to this, no other feeling you had ever experienced before compared to this.
A searing ache in your chest born of self doubt, lack of self worth and value. Because you had believed it was entirely your fault that he was incapable of loving you fully and to the extent of his heart. And it festered in your years spent under different families, the issues regarding how you viewed yourself only darkening as you were let down over and over again.
Given up on— over and over again. And the ache continued to linger, growing in secret places— dark and hateful in your tired heart.
And slowly but surely it had given up on you too, shatter to pieces and cast to the wind to leave you broken and hurt. Vulnerable and fragile to the cold and bitter winds of this cruel and brutal life.
Eventually your mind followed suit, wishing for anything to escape this pain. Anything to leave it behind.
Your luck had a turn for the worst when you were bitten by a spider at twelve and gifted cursed with abilities and skills inhuman and otherworldly.
Enhanced senses, heightened sensitivities and awareness and phenomenal intelligence and strength.
Superhuman.
And for two years you lived with it, not utilizing the powers for any kind of purpose. The heightened healing property of your curse made it hard to give up on this life as you had so desperately wished to.
You tried and tried again— and each time you failed.
When you were fourteen is when you met Venom, you had tested buildings before but never the Golden Gate Brigde. And as you clambered over the rail to stand at the very edge of the bridge’s structure— it happened.
You remember the feel of their texture sliding across your skin, then the pressure you felt as they sunk beneath your skin to meld with your body—
“It wasn’t that bad. You’re overexaggerating.”
“I thought we agreed you’d stay out of my head.”
“I never agreed to that.”
“Venom,” you scolded lightly. Not reprimanding in a way that spat disappointment over ownership. But in a way that spoke volumes of the relationship you shared with the alien. Equals.
“I hate it when you think about that bastard.”
“I know, I’m sorry.. my thoughts get away from me.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for. He made his choice, you are what he made you. And you’re more than worth it. You deserve love just as everybody else.”
They went silent after that and you didn’t bother trying to get them to keep up the conversation. Just smiled softly at their nature— overprotective and fond.
Venom had saved your life when you were at your lowest, the abilities you gained from your spider bite coupled well with their own. And upon latching themself to you they had promised they would make you see the value in life. And you had.. in them.
They were what kept you alive, and you couldn’t be more grateful for them coming to your aid when you needed it the most.
“You’re sweet, you like to act like you’re big and bad but on the inside you’re just a big softie.”
“I regret everything I said.”
“Oh come on, I was thanking you for what you said.”
“Funny how you didn’t actually say the words ‘thank you’ at all.”
You just laughed as they grumbled in your head, but you were swift to straighten and turn serious when your senses tingled. Like a cold rippled shucking down your back to warn you of incoming danger or threats.
Venom growled lowly alongside the tingle and you jumped up, spinning around to face the danger that caused your senses to ripple. And a glowing orange portal suddenly erupted to life just a few feet in front of you. Sliding your mask back on you separated your feet and steadied yourself, prepared and strong in stance.
Your senses tingled again— sharper this time and you stood there on tense silence and a brief moment of absolute stillness. A moment later something was shooting from the portal, something turned out to be someone and you recognized the green suit and grinning goblin mask as Green Goblin tackled you off the building.
You freed yourself from his grasp and shot a web to the corner of the building to your left before pulling yourself free from his grip and onto the side of the skyscraper.
Your jaw ticked as a flicker of annoyance sparked to life in your chest. The very last thing you wanted to deal with after a long day was an anomaly. You were honestly tempted to just call up Peter B. Parker and have him come here and take care of this himself.
Or maybe he could convince the leader he follows to come do it, not that you know his name or anything f about him but from what Peter says apparently he’s pretty damn good at his job.
“Seriously another one? Our dimension can’t be that exciting can it?”
“Right there with ya buddy, why did he have to come here after we already finished up our day too?”
“Honestly, like— a little fucking class wouldn’t hurt.”
You chuckled at their remark before your senses tingling had you swinging away from the spot you occupied previously just as a gas bomb erupted against the brick.
An irritated sigh left your lips behind the fabric of your mask as you perched yourself on a lamp post, the Goblin’s eerie hysterical laughter echoing loud and prominent in the desolate streets surrounding you. Everyone having long since turned in for the night leaving the area free of any civilians which made your job —and in turn Venom’s— easier at least.
The fight that had begun two minutes after Goblin had tried to surprise you with his fucking chemical bombs wasn’t all you had thought it would be. This Goblin was a whole lot weaker than your Goblin, not only that but the guy kept glitching every few minutes.
And you and Venom capitalized on the very golden opportunities that event opened up to you every time it occurred.
And finally taking him down without any damage to the buildings or street was just the icing on the cake, the fact that the whole fight didn’t endanger any innocent people was a plus too.
Things only went to shit when you went back to that portal with Goblin slung over your shoulder and found two different spider variants walking out of it.
“Well what the fuck took them so damn long? Sure, sure no worries we’ll protect our own universe and keep others out too. No fucking problem on our end.”
Again, you found yourself chuckling humorously at Venom’s attitude. Their clear lack of patience and respect for those in charge of keeping the multiverse under control amusing you. Sure, you both liked Peter enough to admire what it was he and the guy he followed did.. along with the other spider variants he works with. But still.. if you’re going to make this your entire career and you’re going to dedicate yourself to the security of the multiverse— at least be good at it.
“Think this asshole got lost, poor wee lamb.” You quipped as you landed on the rooftop the other were standing on. You carelessly threw Goblin off your shoulder and he grunted as he hit the concrete on his back. The sound of pain coming from him almost humanizing him a bit, and you curled your lip derisively as he broke out into a mad grin seconds later.
Whilst you were distracted staring at Norman, Miguel withheld his sudden and intense urge to upheave all the contents in his stomach. His heard felt like lead as it plummeted to his toes, knots in his stomach winding themselves up tightly at the sound of your voice.
“[Y/Name]?”
You looked up when the man of the two variants spoke, and there was a flicker of recognition in your stomach at the voice. Recognition that swiftly turned to course and fiery hot rage that flowed through your blood like magma.
“How dare he?!”
The man pulled his mask off his face and there he was, your father, Miguel O’hara.
“How dare he return here?!”
You took an instinctive step back from him when he revealed his face. And you flinched internally when you saw it, he looked miserable.. eyes bloodshot and brows downturned to put a deep and painful scowl on his face.
He looked broken.. hurt.
And the twisted and vengeful feelings inside you felt good at the prospect of him hurting. You liked that look on his face.. because he more than deserved whatever put it there.
Miguel watched as you stepped back, you didn’t remove your mask as he did. Just stood there frozen as you stared at him. Then the eyes of your mask narrowed and he could abruptly feel the heat of your glare searing into his skin. Angry and painful.
“Parker— that fucking bastard, we’ll kill him.”
“We?” The woman spoke and you looked from your father to her. She had darker skin and a styled afro, her mask was more or less goggles on her face and Venom snickered inside your head at the mental insult you made.
You decided to ignore her question, the passive aggressive tone she took not inclining you to be cooperative with her at all.
“As far as we know Osborne was the only one who got into this universe,” you informed choosing to look back to Miguel to address him instead of the woman. “So gather him and go home.”
“[Y/Name] wait!—”
“Don’t. You’re just here for him right?” You queried gesturing to Norman when you referred to him. Then you were facing Miguel again. “Take him and get out. We’re finished here.” You weren’t granted the chance to see his reaction— immediately doing what you thought was best for you and getting out of the uncomfortable spot his return had put you in.
And you swung away as you ignored the calls of your name he roared into the night. You didn’t want anything to do with him, and there was nothing you owed to that bastard. Not a damn thing.
And as you swung away from that rooftop you felt angry at the fact that you could feel your guarded heart hurt in deep and stinging agony once again— because of him.
And you felt a twitch of disgust in yourself twist itself into a knot within your chest, born at the expense you felt you were dishonoring Venom by being hurt you saw your father again.
After all, it was them that had healed you six years ago when they had first bonded with you. And it was them and them alone that had healed that ache in your heart.
“Kid.”
“Please Venom, not now.”
They went silent after that, and you stayed quiet too as you swung through the city. You just wanted to be at home, safe and comfortable in the warmth of your own space. Just so you could calm the roaring of your blood and thunderous heart in the security and peace that your home brought you.
You knew that now that he knows you’re still alive he’ll come back, and you’re not sure how the next time will go.. this time you just wanted out. The way your heart had picked up and the way your blood quickened had made you just want to be isolated and safe.
You’re not so sure which feeling will take more presence next time— but you could promise this; the rage you had briefly felt, that died behind the feeling of ache and hurt but still lingered, was strong. If it took province over every other feeling next time you could promise it wouldn’t end well.
Not for Miguel.
Not for you.
And not for the multiverse.. the same multiverse he had been so keen on protecting—
The multiverse he had chosen over you.
a/n: I did this during a tattoo on my ribs— and the wipe down continues to be my least favorite part of adding tattoos to my body, cause how can I sit through a tattoo just fine then get weak on the wipe down? 🥲🤌🏽
3K notes · View notes
pixiexdusts-world · 11 months
Text
Incorrect quote
Bucky: Dumbest scar stories, go!
Y/n: I burned my tongue once drinking tea.
Natasha: I dropped a hair dryer on my leg once and burned it.
Steve: I have a piece of graphite in my leg for accidentally stabbing myself with a pencil in the first grade.
Tony: I was taking a cup of noodles out of the microwave and spilled it on my hand and got a really bad burn.
Peter: …
Peter: I have emotional scars.
2K notes · View notes
i-cant-sing · 9 months
Note
do you think yandere platonic miguel prefers to sedate his kid with his venom when attempting to cuddle/bond with them or is manhandling them into submission his preferred method?
I just- I just can't stop imagining Peter B stumbling upon you guys and going "😳😳😳Miguel??? My man??? Why is your child lying paralysed in your lap????🥺🥺🥺 What do you mean its because you want to bond with her??? As what- her paralysis demon?😭 Miguel, stop this is not parenting, this is traumatising your child 101- LOOK AT HER, SHES CRYING!😭😭😭😭😭"
Tumblr media
811 notes · View notes
oopwoop · 8 months
Text
Their Reaction To You Getting/Saying You Want A Piercing
pairings: e!42! & e!1610 Miles Morales, Hobie Brown, Pavitr Prabhakar, Gwen Stacy, Peter B. Parker (platonic)
warning(s): swearing, unedited!
im back on my grind 💪 (sorry for not posting recently, had no motivation)
Tumblr media
e!1610! Miles Morales
stared in surprise for a bit until he heard you call out his name. He didn’t mean to zone out and stare, or make you insecure, he was just surprised when he saw you got a piercing. you didn’t say anything about getting one or anything. he thinks you look amazing though! (he always will no matter what)
asks if he can touch it unless it’s a tongue piercing, if it’s too sensitive or sore. he understands. shouldn’t mess with it too much otherwise it won’t heal as well.
reminds you everyday to clean it with saline water. twice a day! or however much/long the piercer said.
tells you that you should get a black and red one depending on the type it is.
“woahhh..” Miles gasped quietly as he stared in awe for the next few moments, snapping it out of it when he heard his name. he felt bad when he noticed the nervous look on your face.
“is it bad? do you you not like it?” you asked sadly, upset that he may not like it. sure, you got the piercing because you wanted it but it’d still be nice to know that Miles thought it looked well.
he gave you a shocked look, shaking his head. he grabbed your hand comfortingly and kissing your cheek, careful not to touch your piercing depending on where it is.
“no, no! it looks wonderful. you look wonderful! suits you very well.” he whispered lovingly and kissing your cheek again. it’s good to know he liked it. he really does think you look amazing.
e!42! Miles Morales
did a double take. not out of disgust but more so out of surprise. usually when you get something done or are going out he gives you money, even though he knows you are fully capable he enjoys spoiling you. so it was a surprise when you came over with a brand new piercing that he didn’t know about or pay for.
tells you look good and just goes about what he was doing. doesn’t make a huge deal of it. though, a few minutes later he does ask why you didn’t say anything about it.
also reminds you to clean it, or at least s asks if you did everyday until it’s healed.
will buy you all the jewelry you want for it. will even buy a few he thinks matches his vibe, hoping you wear them. if not he’s not butt hurt or anything, though.
“looks good.” he hums out nonchalantly before returning to what he was doing beforehand. you respond with your thanks. the next few minutes are spent in a comfortable silence, the two of you enjoying each others company until Miles breaks it.
“so, why didn’ you say anythin’? i’d give you the money for it.” he questions, raising a brow as he turns to you. usually you tell him about stuff like this and he gives you money for it.
“mmm, just felt like it, y’know? wanted to treat myself for once. not that i don’t love you spoiling me but it feels nice once and a while to gift myself something.” you explain to him as he nods in understanding.
“yeah i get it.. next time ‘m payin’ though, got it?” he states firmly. you know he’s gonna find a way to pay for your next one for sure.
Pavitr Prabhakar
beyond excited when he noticed it. gasped super loudly when he saw it and rushed over to you. just like the other two, he had no idea of this happening. he also asks you a thousand questions about it.
showered you in compliments on how good you look, how it fits you perfectly, all of it. also showers you in soft kiss around your face, being really careful not to mess with the piercing as he’s worried to hurt you on accident.
he also reminds you to wash it everyday. setting reminders on his phone to text or call you. or if y’all are together he’ll help wash it if he can, being as gentle as possible. he has a bottle of saline spray at his house for whenever you’re over and need to clean it.
sends you pictures of jewelry he sees when he’s out and about, asking if you’d like it. if so he will definitely buy it for you. does not care about the price. if he doesn’t have enough now he’ll save up for it. (jewelry is expensive 😃)
“woah! you look so good! when did you get it? did it hurt?” Pavitr said happily and he rushed over to you, grabbing your cheeks softly to examine the piercing closer.
you chuckle at his antics, grabbing his wrists so you could pull his hands away to be able to speak properly. “slow your roll, Pav. i got it today and it hurt as much as i thought it would.”
“absolutely gorgeous. i knew you’d rock it, even though you never told me. why didn’t you tell me?” he continues to chatter fast, it was hard to keep up with him. he was just excited for you though. he knew you’d only get a piercing if you really wanted it.
“wanted to surprise you.” you smiled at him as he started to peck your face with a bunch of soft kisses. you didn’t think he’d be this excited over a piercing.
Gwen Stacy
was surprised when you said you wanted a piercing but was excited for you. she helps set up the appointment and everything, goes with you for comfort if needed, let’s you squeeze her hand as well.
if you let her, she’d pick out the one you get. she wouldn’t suggest one that hurts really bad though, depending on your pain tolerance.
definitely picks out the jewelry for it if you let her. it’d be a soft pink or blue fs.
so, she has her brow pierced so i feel like maybe she might get more piercings. maybe like her septum or a normal nose piercing, yeah? if it’s around the same time you got your piercing she’d set an alarm for the both of you and if you’re together at the time you’d clean it together or she’d ft you and y’all would do it on call
Incoming FaceTime Call From
gwendy ❤️
Answer Ignore
you decided to answer the call and when you did all you saw was her eyes and up until a few moments later. Her face popped into the screen, a huge smile as she noticed you answered.
“i’m assuming you already know what time it is, yeah?” she shook the can of saline in a jazz-hands gesture, chuckling as you rolled your eyes playfully.
“yeah, yeah.. just let me get to my bathroom.. you always call me when i’m in bed and comfy” you sigh, your tone whiney and exaggerated.
“oh boo-hoo.. you’ll be okay. now get your butt up and go clean your piercing. don’t want an infection, do you?” gwen raised a brow at you. her expression felt similar to a judge-y mothers.
Hobie Brown
when you said you wanted a piercing he was more than willing to do it himself, free of charge. all of his have either been done my someone he’s friends with (for free) or himself. he’s got all the supplies needed and knows how to do most piercings. you wouldn’t be the first person he’s given them to.
if you do let him do it, it’ll be the same as if you were to have gone to a trained professional. just more.. homey? sure it’s a little more risky, but think about it, it’s free of charge (it’s expensive, my septum was $100), plus it’s with someone you know and should by now trust
if you go to a professional he doesn’t really care. it’s your money you’re spending.
totally steals jewelry for you if you wanna change it out once it’s healed. helps you clean it, as well. he knows the perfect way to clean it well so it doesn’t get infected.
“d’ya want me t’ do it? cuz i can, free of charge too, luv.” hobie suggested when you said you wanted a piercing. you weren’t sure if you should take up his offer. he could tell you were hesitant about it so he continued on.
“i’ve done a good few piercings b’fore. some of my own, actually. y’ can trus’ me, promise.” that helped you feel a little better. his looked so good so that must mean he’d be able to do yours even better. especially because doing a piercing on another seems easier than doing one on yourself.
“yeah.. okay sure, i’ll let you do it. but if you fuck it up I won’t be happy..” you glared at him, letting him lead you to the living room of your place to sit and get ready.
“y’won’ hafta worry ‘bout bein’ angry, luv cuz i won’ fuck it up.” he chuckled deeply as he got the needed supplies ready and kissed your forehead.
Peter B. Parker (my first time writing him so sorry if it sucks 🫢)
was probably the most surprised of all. he doesn’t care that you got one, not at all, he’s just surprised you didn’t say anything. your like a kid to him, you tell each other almost everything.
definitely pats you on the shoulder or back and tells you that it looks good and suits you well.
randomly gifts you new jewelry for it. it’s usually stuff he thinks fits you well or one he knows you’ve been looking at. how does he get the money for it? begs MJ until she says yes. though she says yes really quickly because she loves you like a kid as well.
i feel like he can be really forgetful with some things so he’s not as consistent as the others to remind you to clean it. it’ll be more here and there that he reminds you
“when did that happen..?” he says slowly, mouth agape in surprise. “you never told me about that. we tell each every.” peter mutters with a pout, sad you didn’t tell him about this.
“oh this?” you say, pointing to the piercing, “just got it a bit ago. wanted it to be a surprise. does it look good..?”
he just chuckled and walked up to you, patting you on the back firmly. what is with dads and their firm pats? “looks great, kid. suits you very well. you think i’d rock one? i should totally get one, yeah?”
“uhm, yeah, if you want mj to leave you then you should, old man..” you joke with him and return you get a gasp from him.
“i’m not old! and she wouldn’t leave me. i’d look amazing, even better than you!”
500 notes · View notes
i-am-true-believer · 9 months
Text
To the fanfiction readers, the late night scrollers, the ones who are trying to escape, to find a moment of peace, to find comfort or a safe place to land.
You're safe here. You are safe, you are loved and you are important. The world needs you and my dear sweet one, I promise you it will get better. Maybe not today or tomorrow but it will get better. People love you and are here for you.
You are valid, you are enough. I promise you that you are enough.
So take a deep breath and relax a little for me. I hope you find the fan art or the fanfiction you need. I hope you find comfort and safety here. I hope you know you're favorite character is waiting for you, they adore you and are so excited to see you.
You can do this sweet one. Life is tough but so are you. Your comfort character believes in you and so do I, the random girl on Tumblr who knows it gets better, because it did for her.
❤️💛True Believer 💛❤️
1K notes · View notes
firegal19 · 1 year
Text
Kidnapper on the phone: We have your child
Natasha: No, Peter is next to me doing his homework and Y/n is listening to music on the couch
Kidnapper: Then who just asked for me to put hot sauce on her Mac and cheese?
Natasha: OMG, you have my sister Yelena
2K notes · View notes
galacticspaceguy · 9 months
Note
May I ask for Peter B Parker and Miguel O'Hara with a platonic, teen, gender neutral or male reader who's wary of adults because their parents and most other adults in their life were horrible to them? It's okay if not <3
You were constantly on edge with these two.
One man grieving his recently lost child, and the other obsessed with his recently gained child.
Jess had a child on the way, but she got the memo that you wanted to be left alone.
You were not comfortable with the idea of parents, at least not at the moment.
It was an understatement to say your parents were the worst. They constantly fought. With you, themselves, the neighbors.
Being around them was like walking on eggshells, which made being Spider-Man half of a blessing. It gave you a reason to leave, to get away.
It didn’t help the fact that your parents hated Spider-Man, bashing the hero whenever they were being talked about on tv.
They either ignored you, or belittled you. Bad grades, not doing the dishes, being in peace? No, no, that wasn’t allowed.
You tried your hardest not to blame it on them. They were stressed with bills and work, leaving them agitated all day, everyday.
But they didn’t get that you have bad days to. School was a living hell, even if it was keeping you out of the house. The teachers were no help, labeling you as lazy, troubled, rude, etc etc. The other kids at school watched this happen, and believed it.
Parents of kids at school, neighbors and people you knew from taking your route to school and back, seemed wary or uninterested in you, given your parents were always causing other people problems.
But, there WAS this one guy.
His name was Ben.
Ben was old man who lived across from you in your apartment complex. You sat for his three pet cats once, and your friendship bloomed from there.
He was widowed and alone, so having you around brightened his day. You helped water his flowers, make tea, clean his apartment, all for the exchange for his company.
You had actually gotten bit by the radioactive spider while water some plants of his.
He helped you with homework, but mostly your mental health. He was a 100x better than both your parents combined.
But you couldn’t save him.
Green Goblin had destroyed your apartment complex, killing Ben.
Your home was destroyed.
-and your parents home was also destroyed.
You had been living within a program for recently homeless families that suffer from the villain attacks. Your parents were now miserable to live with.
Sometimes you would just run away for hours, not that they cared much, sometimes they didn’t even know or care that you were gone. They only seemed to care when a police officer had escorted you back.
But this time, you actually ran away.
You spent most of your days in the spider society, practically living there. Yeah, you kept tabs on your universe, but you really only spent around a few hours there.
You’re pretty sure Miguel was ‘almost’ getting concerned with how often you’re here. One time he found you sleeping on a cough way after your schedule. You were supposed to be in your own universe, but instead you made yourself at home.
You watched as Peter B. Parker and Miguel O’Hara talked. Peter was trying to get him to hold Mayday, and Miguel, like always, was refusing.
You observed from a distance. Peter was a good dad. The concept was just very strange to you.
Miguel noticed you, and used you as an opportunity to distract himself from Peter.
“Y/N, you’re off your schedule, you’re supposed to be in world-###, your world.” He said, turning to you. Great, another scolding. “I don’t know how many times I gotta tell you this. Go home.”
He turned back to the dozens of screens.
“I would if I could.” You mumbled under your breath.
“What was that?” He called out, but you had already walked away. When you were out of the room, Miguel turned to Peter.
“If you are gonna be so enthusiastic about kids, go take care of that.” He pointed in your direction. “Go make sure Y/N is actually going to the going back to their universe.”
“Oh, I’m sure the kids fine-“
“Go.”
Peter threw his hands up. “Alright, alright, geese man, you need to lighten up, no wonder the kid doesn’t talk to you.”
Miguel rolled his eyes and sighed.
-
You had in fact, no gone home. You were sitting on the edge of the giant skyscraper in world 2099. You sighed, leaning back and breathing in the fresh air.
This was so much better then your life back home.
But suddenly your thoughts were interrupted by the sounds of a baby’s laughter.
“Hey, kid.” Peter strolled in. How did he find you secret hiding place? He looked around. “So this is where you do to get way from Miguel, nice.”
“How did you find me?” You said, a bit distraught.
“Oh, I just followed the scent of angsty, rebellious teenager.” He took a seat next to you. Mayday giggled as she looked over at you, holding her arms out.
Peter hands her to you, and you hesitantly take her.
“So, why don’t you wanna go home, kid?” He asked, leaned back. “Don’t get me wrong, Miguel’s place is alright, but being at homes a lot for comfortable.” He laid down, arms folding behind his head. “Been here for an hour and I already miss my bed and fridge.”
You tried coming up with some excuse, but every time you try to speak, nothing comes out. You just wanted to be left alone.
“Don’t you got, like, a bedtime, or something? Your parents are probably worried out of their minds about you.”
You let out a empty laugh. “Yeah, right.” Your grip tightened around Mayday’s little body as you held her close. Your cheeks burned. You didn’t mean t let that slip, but you can’t go back now. “They probably don’t even care I’m gone.”
Peter’s usual smug smile fell, and he sat back up. “What do you mean?”
You looked away.
“They don’t… like me… that much.”
-
“Lyla, did Y/N return home?”
“Nope.”
Miguel sighed, and mumbled a few words of frustration under his breath.
“They did leave their phone here though, so you should probably return that.” Lyla pointed out. She was correct, your phone was laying backside up on a nearby table.
Your phone was going off the hook, beeping with messages and missed calls.
Miguel groaned and picked your phone up.
A bunch of messages, calls and voicemails from your mother, with a few from your father.
Miguel’s brow furrowed as he saw he quickly the messages were coming in.
“Lyla, open this.” He held the phone out in her direction, and she did her work. Your phone unlocked.
Miguel was expecting messages from a pair of concerned parents, but no. He read through the most recent messages.
“Lyla, find Y/N. Now.”
-
“They don’t… like me… that much…”
The words were a pain to get out. You grimaced, refusing to look his way. Mayday, in all her baby wisdom, somehow knew something was wrong. Peter took her back into his arms.
“It’s better if I stay away. They tolerate me more when I’m not in their way…” You said, almost in a whisper.
He looked at you for a long moment.
“Kid…”
Suddenly, realization hit you.
“Where’s my phone!?” You looked around, hoping it was laying around.
“This phone?”
You turned around and Miguel was leaning against the wall, holding your phone up in one hand.
You webbed your phone out of his hand.
It was open, and on messages.
You throat suddenly hurt, and your eyes began to water.
“I need to get back.” You hurriedly got up, and were about to make your way back inside.
“You don’t have any place to stay.” Miguel said. Oh, great, so he read all of the messages, wonderful.
“I’ve got money.” You brushed him off.
“The money your parents claimed you stole to try and get you arrested?” Miguel countered, crossing his arms, silently daring you to walk away.
Peter looked at you with the concerned, pitiful expression you hate.
“Why do you care so much?” You choked out. “You want me out so badly, so I’m going.” You were on the verge of tears and it was so… embarrassing. “I’m not your problem anymore.” You breath hitched, tears beginning to stream down your cheeks.
Miguel placed two hands on your shoulders, holding you in place.
“You’re not a problem, kid.”
You couldn’t stop yourself. You let out a sob, wrapping your arms around yourself.
“Just let me go home.”
“You are home, kid.” Peter placed a hand on your back. “And it’s gonna be ok”
You close you eyes as Peter pulled you into a side hug. You could feel Miguel staring down at you. Through teary eyes, you watched as Miguel knelt down, taking your hand in his.
“You’re gonna be ok.”
745 notes · View notes
Text
Peter: *Hanging from a chandelier, screeching*
Bucky: *yelling and jumping while trying to get him down*
Tony: *walks into the room* What the hell is going on in here?
Y/N: *calmly eating popcorn and recording* I dared Pete to wake Bucky up from his nap. Popcorn?
Tony: … yeah sure
3K notes · View notes
literaryavenger · 3 months
Text
New Year's Eve
Summary: A game of two truths and a lie reveals to the team a fact about the you that Bucky can’t seem to stop thinking about.
Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Avenger!Female Reader
Warnings: Minimal use of Y/N. Language 'cause why not. A lot of fluff. My poor attempts at being funny. Mutual pining, idiots in love.
Word Count: 3.2K
A/N: Happy New Year's Eve! Thanks for all the messages when I was sick, I'm finally feeling better and I'm negative for Covid! I really wanted to post something for New Year's Eve and this came from a fever dream I had when I was sick, lol. I hope it's any good and someone enjoys it! A particular thank you to @ordelixx for helping me with this story!💘I've only started posting here about a month and a half but I'm really enjoying it and feeling more and more comfortable in my writing. I hope I'm also getting better at it. Anyway, I have big plans for the New Year that I hope you'll enjoy! This year hasn't been great for me, but I'm planning on working harder than ever to make sure the next one is a year I can be proud of. I hope you guys have a nice last day of 2023 and an amazing start of 2024! Love you all.💘
Masterlist
Tumblr media
“Ok, your turn, Kill Bill. Two truths and a lie, go.”- Tony says, referring to the fact that you fight with swords, making you roll your eyes before you join the laughter.
“Ok, uhm,”- you try not to look at anyone so you don’t give away the answer- “I have a teddy bear that I sleep with, I have bungee jumped from the top of the tower and I’ve never had a New Year’s kiss.”
You look back up to the room and wait for their guesses.
It’s a Friday night and the people that remained in the Tower for the holidays decided to have a little game night. Every year the same people stay around, having nowhere in particular to go, and spend Christmas together. 
Clint and Scott usually spend this time with their families, this year Thor decided to go to New Asgard with Bruce and Loki to visit Val and Korg and Peter spent it with aunt May and Happy.
You usually alternate between going to visit your family and staying in the tower each year, and this one was your turn to go to your first home. You came back the day after Christmas, never being one to miss Tony’s New Year’s Eve party that’s gonna happen in two days now.
“Well, we know she has a teddy bear.”- Wanda said.
“Do we know that?”- Tony turned to you, narrowing his eyes -“Do you have one?”
“Yes, she does, we’ve seen it”- Natasha answers for you while you glance at Bucky, praying he doesn’t put together that they’re talking about the teddy bear he gifted you for Valentine’s Day this year along with flowers. 
Natasha and Wanda were more happy than you when you told them, sustaining that he did it because he liked you until you pointed out that he gave flowers to them too, because he’s sweet and a gentleman and that’s just who he is.
They wouldn’t let up on the fact that neither of them got a teddy bear though, and you would have agreed with them but Bucky never really did anything else about it so you decided to let it go and not read too much into it. You were brought back to the present by Tony.
“Ok, so she has one. Then it’s gotta be the New Year’s kiss, everyone has had one at least once in their life,”- he was looking at your reaction very closely while talking, but you did your best to keep an easy smile and not give anything away -“even Captain Virgin over there had one last year.”- he said vaguely waving towards Steve’s general direction. 
You cracked at the nickname and at the undignified sound Steve made while blushing and glancing at Nat that shared that kiss with him.
“Tony, there’s no way that she’s bungee jumped from the roof without us knowing, that’s gotta be the lie”- Sam interjected, also watching you closely for any signs of a reaction that you managed not to give.
“Alright, just take your guesses, people.”- You said to the group.
“New Year’s Kiss”- Tony all but yelled, Natasha and Wanda agreeing with him.
“Bungee jump”- Sam said and Steve and Bucky agreed, then they all seemed to hold their breath as they waited for your answer. It’s not a surprise that even these stupid little games cause a lot of competition among the team.
“Neither”- you finally said and let out a laugh when they all groaned in annoyance while taking their shots for guessing wrong.
“WAIT- you bungee jumped off the ROOF? When?!”- Steve seemed more concerned than anything.
“Well, you know a few months ago when we happened to all be on different missions at the same time?”- They nodded, not knowing where you were going with this -“Clint and I came back first from ours, we were bored and there was no one around to stop us from doing anything stupid so…”- you trailed off, shrugging while laughing. 
Steve looked shocked while Sam laughed his ass off, Tony immediately going to look for the security footage. They all cheered while watching you throw yourself off the roof, Clint's yells and laughter could be heard, and then Steve shook his head while joining you in the laughter when you see Clint take his turn and scream like a little girl while you fall to the ground laughing in the video. 
Once you all composed yourselves, Tony pocked Wanda’s arm -“I thought you said she had a teddy bear”- he looked at her like she brought him on a treasure hunt and then betrayed him and left him for dead on a deserted island.
“She does! She got it from-”- you interrupted her before she could finish the sentence, blushing a little and avoiding Bucky’s eyes.
“I do have a teddy bear, I just don’t sleep with it”- you said, shrugging.
“Oh, come on, that’s cheating!”- Natasha whined.
“It’s really not, just because I do have one it doesn’t mean I didn’t tell a lie about it”- you laughed at her pout.
“Wait a minute, so you’ve never had a New Year’s kiss?”- Tony looked at you like you suddenly grew two heads.
“It’s not a big deal. Funny thing is, I have had boyfriends during New Year’s Eve, I just never happen to spend the day with them”- you say absentmindedly while thinking back at all the parties you’ve been to over the years to celebrate the new year.
“Really?”- it was so quiet you almost missed it, your eyes snapping up to meet Bucky’s that were already looking at you.
“Is it so hard to believe?”- The room seemed to go quiet as everybody looked at you two, but you were too focused on each other to notice.
“I didn’t- I mean…”- his cheeks started to turn a little pink as he seemed to have trouble finishing his sentence -“It’s just you’re very pretty, who wouldn’t want to kiss you?”
You didn’t know what to say to that, you start blushing too while opening and closing your mouth a couple of times, looking like a damn fish. You settle for a soft ‘thank you’ with a smile that he shyly returns, neither of you noticing the glances passed by everyone else.
The whole team is convinced that there’s something between you and Bucky, but both of you always deny it and don’t seem to read too much into each other’s actions, always dismissing the glances and lingering touches as friendly affection even though you’re not really that close. But what else could it be, right? 
The team lets the moment end and the game goes on, everyone keeps drinking and having fun until it gets really late and you all decide to call it a night.
Bucky goes to his bedroom and gets ready for sleep but he can’t seem to focus on anything else but you. He really doesn’t understand how can anybody see your pretty self when you’ve just woken up, no makeup and your eyes full of sleep and not want to kiss you, let alone when you are all dolled up in a pretty golden dresses like you do every New Year’s. 
Every year it gets harder for him not to just grab you and kiss you, hell every day is pretty much torture to see you around and not get to be with you the way he wants to. But he has to keep his hands to himself because there’s no way you could actually like him like that. 
He’s even tried to drop hints here and there like giving you the teddy bear for Valentine’s Day but, except for the cute shade of pink that your face turned, you still didn’t seem all that interested. Still, that didn’t stop him from thinking what it would be like if you did like him and fantasize about being your first New Year’s kiss and maybe even your last first kiss.
At the same time you were in your own room getting ready for bed while your own thoughts kept going back to the moment you shared with Bucky in the living room. 
You didn’t know if you were more embarrassed because you actually told the team you’ve never had a kiss on New Year’s Eve or happy because Bucky called you pretty. If it was anyone else you wouldn’t even think twice about it, but coming from him it just felt like you were being complimented for the first time ever. 
Everytime you thought about it you felt all warm and fuzzy inside, and at this point the moment was pretty much in a loop in your mind. The more you think about it the more you feel yourself heat up, sleep not coming easily as you slip into Bucky filled dreams.
The next day everybody’s hanging out in the living room, most of them nursing a hangover from last night. You get ready for a last minute shopping trip to try and find a new dress for New Year’s Eve and when you get to the living room you see Steve grinning at a disgruntled Tony, Wanda, Sam and Natasha who were obviously very hangover and nowhere as amused as the blonde supersoldier. 
Bucky’s attention was on you as soon as you were in his field of vision and no one failed to notice it, except you of course, your own attention being on Wanda and Natasha sprawled on the couch.
“Well, I was gonna ask you if you wanted to come shopping with me”- you start watching from one to the other, as amused as Steve at everyone’s inability to contain themselves when drinking. -“But I don’t think that’s happening.” 
“Bite me, YLN”- is all Nat says.
Wanda, on the other hand, is a little gentler -“I can come with you, if you want.”- she said sweetly.
“That’s okay, Wands”- you smiled at her -“just rest and drink lots of water”
You turn around, saying bye to everyone and making your way out. As soon as the doors of the elevator close, everyone turns to Bucky, not even pretending not to be staring anymore. Not that anyone could ignore the longing look on Bucky’s face as he watched you walk away.
“Buck”- Steve starts talking, glancing at everyone before setting his gaze on his best friend. -“We need to talk.”
“Okay…”- he slowly drags out, unsure if he even wants Steve to keep going.
“Well, we’ve been noticing some things lately…”- He’s unsure of how to say this. -“Between you and Y/N.”
Bucky’s cheeks start to turn a slight shade of pink, but he’s still not sure where Steve’s going with this so he says nothing.
“So we thought”- he gestured around at everybody -“that maybe we should-”
“We know you like her, and we want to help you get with her”- Tony interrupts Steve, quickly getting to the point. At Steve’s glare, Tony merely raises his hands in surrender saying, -“Listen, Capsicle, I’m way too hungover to take the panoramic route. Let’s just get this over with.”
“Yeah, Stark’s right.”- Sam says, turning Bucky whose face is fully red now. -“You have a weak ass game, man. Let us help you.”
They all looked at the brunette supersoldier while waiting for his answer. He chewed his lip while looking at the expectant faces of his friends, before letting out a deep sigh.
“How would you even help me?”- He said quietly, neither accepting nor denying their help just yet.
“Well, we know Y/N,”- Wanda said.
“Yeah, we can tell you what turns her on”- Natasha smirked, before Wanda flicked her ear making her let out an ‘ow’ with a slight pout.
“What she means is,”- she glares at Natasha -“we can tell you what she likes, you know. Maybe help you get closer to her.”
Bucky shakes his head lightly -“This is not a good idea. And it doesn’t even matter if she doesn’t like me.”
Wanda and Natasha seemed to have a silent conversation, ending with Natasha raising her eyebrow at Wanda and Wanda just sighing with a soft ‘fine’.
“She does like you”- Wanda turns back to Bucky.
“She’s just convinced that you don’t like her like that.”- Natasha says with a roll of her eyes.
Bucky still wasn’t completely convinced, but he agreed nonetheless. Maybe it was the glimmer of hope the girls gave him, but if there was even the slightest chance you could actually like him, he owed it to himself to try. 
So he let the team make a plan to get you guys together, hoping to god he wouldn’t come to regret it.
You come home a few hours later, super excited to have found the perfect dress for the party the next night, and Bucky thought you were just so cute, all smiles and giggles. Wanda and Nat talked you into having the last girls night of the year, although it didn’t really take much convincing.
And so the plan begins.
You’re relaxing on your bed, Wanda lying next to you, your head on her lap, and Nat sprawled on the love seat near the window close to your bed. You’re wearing bathrobes, sheet masks on your faces as you watch a cheesy romcom that you’re so embarrassingly into you don’t even notice the girls exchange a look and nod at each other.
Wanda clears her throat and then begins talking, as casually as she can. -“So, how come you never told us you never had a New Year’s kiss?”
They had to approach the subject somehow, right?
“I don’t know,”- you say absentmindedly and then shrug, your attention still on the Tv. -“didn’t think it was important.” 
“Sure it isn’t”- Nat said, and her tone took your attention away from the movie for the first time since it started.
“What’s that supposed to mean, Tasha?”- she simply shrugs, an innocent look in the face.
“It doesn’t mean anything”- she says, her attention seemingly on the movie -“I mean, if it doesn’t bother you, it doesn’t bother me.”
“Why would it bother me?”- you frown, you didn’t understand what was so weird about this.
“Well, some people might find it a little…”- Wanda trailed off.
“Sad?”- Natasha ended for her.
“It’s not like I’ve NEVER kissed anyone”- you were starting to get a little defensive.
“We know that, sweetie.”- Wanda cooed, stroking your hair while you looked up at her.
“We really didn’t mean anything by it”- Natasha ends, giving you an apologetic look.
“Yeah, whatever”- it’s all you say, and you turn your eyes back to the tv, your attention nowhere near it. Natasha and Wanda could basically hear the gears turn in your head and gave each other one last glance. 
Part one of the plan is complete.
The next day goes through like usual, the team spending basically the whole morning together. It’s a tradition, having the last breakfast of the year together, watching the last movie, having the last lunch and so on. Doing all the lasts together, it’s silly, but it’s a tradition you've all came to be fond of. 
The afternoon comes and you and the girls spend it getting ready for the party, last night’s conversation almost forgotten.
Almost.
As you got to the party the music was deafening before you even stepped out of the elevator and, once you did, you were immediately immersed in a sea of perfume and cologne and, like every other Stark party extravaganza, you didn’t know about 98% of the people there. 
You quickly found the team, as outgoing as most of them were, you usually spent most of the night together because it’s the last night of the year, last party and, again, tradition.
You talked, you joked, you laughed but the more you drank the more you kept thinking about your conversation with the girls last night. Was it really that sad that you’ve never started a new year with a kiss?
Midnight came sooner than you would’ve liked and your teammates decided to ask you a sobering question.
“So, who are you kissing?”- Tony asked very casually.
You turned around confused, the team’s eyes all on you. -“What do you mean?”
“Oh, nobody told you?”- Sam said, looking around him -“We’re all kissing someone tonight.”
“I- You- What?”- you glanced towards Bucky so quickly he almost thought he imagined it.
“Well, Romanoff is kissing Rogers, I’m obviously kissing Pepper and Wanda is kissing Wilson.”- Tony said, before specifying while pointing at the last two -“As friends, obviously”
“So, you’re all kissing someone?”- You look at everyone except the one person you actually wanted to look at. Something inside of you just believed that he would nod too and a beautiful woman that you could never compare to would appear at his side.
“Well”- Steve started -“not all of us…”
He trailed off and, following his gaze, you landed on the very pair of blue eyes you were trying to avoid.
Suddenly everyone else scatters and it was just you and Bucky. You didn’t know what to say, but felt like you couldn’t look away from him now.
What the hell is happening to you?
You’re talking before you can even stop yourself -“You know, we could also kiss. As friends.”- you add, realizing what you just said, your eyes wide with your own surprise.
He’s about to say something, but don’t give him a chance to get a sound out before you’re backtracking so fast you might actually fall off the window. -“You don’t have to. Obviously. It’s not like I’d make you.”- you chuckled awkwardly, but you can’t stop yourself from rambling -“Unless you wanted to. But why would you want to? It’s not like you’re missing anything. I’m not anything special.”
You can hear the countdown starting, but it sounds distant to your ears as your heart pounds faster. -“I mean, I’m sure you’re a good kisser. Why wouldn’t you be? Not that you’re like a lady’s man.”- Bucky glanced around him, the team giving him encouraging looks as they near zero and you just kept going -“But like you were, you know. Not that it’s a bad thi-”
You were thankfully interrupted abruptly by Bucky’s lips on yours just as everyone yelled ‘Happy New Year’ and gold and black confetti started falling down.
You couldn’t even begin to comprehend what was happening but your body did, kissing him back almost immediately. It felt like forever and also too soon when he pulled away, you couldn't even hearing the chaos around you anymore. All that existed was you and Bucky and his eyes and his arms around your waist and yours around his neck and his lips that you wanted to kiss again and kiss forever and never stop.
“You have no idea how long I’ve been wanting to do that”- he says after a few seconds. Or maybe days. Weeks? Hours? It doesn’t matter, all that matters is the bright smile he gives you when you say -“Me too.”
He kisses you again, but this time the spell is broken by the team’s whistles and cheers. 
When you pull away you’re both blushing a little, you glance around you and see all the smug faces of the idiots you love to death, Bucky’s attention never leaving you.
“And by the way,”- he said, gaining your attention once more -“you have more qualities than you think,”- Bucky said, then pointed at your chest -“You have this.”
You looked down to where he was pointing before saying -“I do have great tits, yes.”
When you looked back at him he was blushing even harder and looked like he was having a hard time maintaining eye contact, while you were more relaxed now that the kiss took away all the awkwardness, but trying hard not to laugh. 
“... I meant heart”- he said after a few moments of silence.
“Either or”- you answered, shrugging and when you heard the snickers of the team around you, you couldn’t help but join them, followed by a still blushing Bucky.
Yep, this year is definitely gonna be an interesting one.
607 notes · View notes
heartpascal · 9 months
Text
or is it loneliness?
Tumblr media
▹— (eventual) spiderverse found family x platonic!reader
▹— summary: you need closure, and information. two visits kind of give you that.
▹— a/n: guys idk what im DOING. i have things planned for atsv but not how we’re gonna get there … rn im just yolo-ing. im not a big fan of this one but im gonna start writing the next one asap, which will hide fully be more found family-ish lmao arachnid is gonna start warming up to them all some day i swear
▹— warnings: angst, injuries, not good thoughts, dead parents, sensory issues, explosions, violence, fighting, blood?, damaged hearing for a good minute, peter b parker eating burgers deserves its own warning, food, mention of throwing up / nausea, insecurities about being good enough, refusing help, idk what else, if ive missed anything let me know!!!
▹— taglist: @rhymingtree (everything taglist) @justmare @uniquemonstrosity @lacunaanonymoused @erensbbg @dulceteris @noxxing @escherichiacolli @ray-rook @i-3at-kidz @miwagila @stoneforests (is it freedom’verse) — also i only tagged those who explicitly asked to be tagged!
MASTERLIST , part one
∘₊✧───── ───── ───── ─────✧₊∘
You spend a long time sat on the edge of the open window, staring out at the traffic below after getting back from Spider Society HQ. There’s a tangible relief that comes with returning to your dimension, like a weight being removed, a tension that is finally released from where it had been pulled taut. Your shoulders feel just as heavy as they did when you left, but you try not to think about it. You try to be happy that you’re back.
While you wouldn’t say it aloud, and you hate to even have the thought, you don’t think anybody had noticed you were gone. But then again, who would? You have no reason to be so upset about such a thing.
Time slips by as you diligently sew up the tears in your suit, frowning as you hold it up once you’re finished. It looks nothing like it used to, but then again, neither do you. Things have changed, it only makes sense that your suit would, too. You wonder if travelling through alternate dimensions can alter your perception of things. You’d swear that your suit had been a different shade before you left, lighter, maybe, but you have nothing to compare it to.
At least now, this time, when you put on your suit there is evidence of damage that Gwen Stacy had caused. The stitching along your the material where she had tore into you is a tangible thing, physical, and you run your fingers across it as if it might disappear. It’s almost a relief, to be able to feel where she had caused you pain, as opposed to the invisible ache she had left within you after fighting her the first time around.
Alongside the scar raised on your body, the fight with Gwen had left you with a sort of paranoia. An uncertainty in the back of your mind that has you glancing over your shoulder, has you messing up simple manoeuvres as you panic, thinking you hear her voice.
It must have been your third day back from the HQ that you come to the conclusion that you have to visit Gwen Stacy in her prison.
The decision doesn’t come easily. It comes slowly, torturously so, a realisation that deafens you as you glare through squinted lenses at the city around you. You won’t be able to go on like this, getting yourself hurt in stupid ways all because you’re not certain that she’s back in her prison. You’re meant to be a hero, which means that messing up, despite whatever paranoia that lingers in the back of your head, is unacceptable. It has consequences.
Seeing her in the flesh will likely be the hardest thing you’ll ever do. Except, maybe, not killing her when you caught her in that other dimension. You keep your mind on the fact that she won’t be able to touch you, that she’ll be walled away, to reassure yourself that there is no risk of either of you hurting the other — at least, physically.
But seeing her isn’t the only difficult part.
No, the hardest part is stepping back into an identity that you had lost your grasp on, long ago. You wear your old clothes, clothes that you hadn’t put on in months, and try to remember how it felt to be you, rather than Arachnid.
“Hi, Mrs. Stacy.” You say, when the door to an all too familiar apartment opens just a slither, and you catch sight of her wrinkled eyes. There’s a noticeable change to them when she realises who you are, and she’s slamming the door shut, undoing the chain, and reopening it before you can say another word.
She whispers your name like she can’t believe it’s you — and you can’t blame her.
You had disappeared, months ago, after the death of your father. Going missing was far easier than being placed in a foster system that would only hold you back. It had been so much easier, not having to face anyone, not having to speak at his funeral.
“Hi.” You repeat, when her stare lingers in the silence for far too long. The sound of your voice once again breaks her out of her trance, and she’s rushing forward to pull you into her arms as if you were her child. You suppose, in some ways, it was quite a lot like that. At the very least, your presence will remind her of the daughter she had lost.
“Where have you been? Oh, honey, I was so worried.” Mrs. Stacy says, her voice trembling by your ear as she squeezes you tight, unfazed by your lack of reciprocation. “Come inside, please.”
You follow her through the doorway, closing the door behind you as you had done so many times before. Not looking around at the apartment is near impossible, but you’re not sure how much familiarity you can take. Even just seeing Mrs. Stacey’s aged face makes your chest ache, your legs feeling shaky.
“Sit down, honey, let me get you a warm drink.” She says, a tremor to her voice as she bustles towards the kitchen which is adjoined to the living room. The news plays on the television, and you’re glad to hear a weather report, rather than some city-wide attack. Mrs. Stacy is quiet as she goes through the process of making your favourite drink, but with your enhanced hearing you listen to the telltale clink of a spoon against ceramic. You listen closely to her hitched breathing as her footsteps pad back into the room. “Here.” She hands you the warm mug, and you don’t comment on the way her hand shakes.
“Thank you.” You say, though it feels stilted, wrong, too formal. It’s hard to be normal in this setting, to be whoever you used to be, especially as she stares at you like she’s seen a ghost.
Mrs. Stacy stares at you for a long while before she speaks again, as if she’s still not sure that you’re real. “Where have you been? After—After your dad… we didn’t know what happened to you. Are you safe? Do you need help?” She asks, frantic once she’s gotten started on her questions.
“Mrs. Stacy, I’m fine, really.” You lie, smiling tightly over the rim of the mug as you hold it towards your face. Before, you would’ve burnt your tongue drinking it too fast, but you’re hesitant to drink it at all. The last thing you want is to become too familiar to your old life. “I’ve been staying with some friends, downtown. It’s been good.”
She raises a brow at you, and stares for a moment longer. “Honey… you don’t look well.” She tells you, and raises the back of her hand to press it against your forehead. Her frown only deepens when you flinch away from the touch. You try not to curse yourself too much, but can’t help reprimanding the way you hadn’t anticipated such an action.
The skin on your forehead is clammy, but that’s just the anxiety, the nerves at being back here. Arachnid can’t get sick.
“Listen, I… I was hoping I could ask a favour from you.” You say, hesitantly, gripping the warm mug tight between your hands, but loosen your fingertips against the ceramic when you hear a minute crack.
Mrs. Stacy furrows her brows, looking more concerned by the second, but nods. “Of course, anything.” She tells you, and places one of her hands against yours on the mug.
“I was hoping I could visit Gwen.” You voice, after one last moment of hesitation. The way her face immediately crumples at the request doesn’t give you much hope, especially as her hand withdraws from your own. “I—I know you don’t get to see her very often, and maybe it’s selfish, but… I don’t know. I wanted some kind of closure, I guess.” You ramble on in response to her silence, glaring down at the liquid still swirling in your mug.
“Honey,” Mrs. Stacy interrupts, her voice soft in contrast to the way yours was growing in volume. You quiet immediately, your gaze drawn up to where her tearful eyes stare at you, her expression almost mourning. “I would never deny you that, but you should know… I haven’t visited Gwenny since she was put in there.” She admits, her stare dropping to her lap, almost ashamed.
“Oh,” You voice, softly, in response. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have assumed— I—I mean, I can’t even imagine—”
“No, don’t be silly, how would you have known?” She replies, raising her eyebrows at you strictly. “Now, I can get you that visit. I’ll call my attorney first thing tomorrow, but… really, honey, do you need me to call someone for you? Who are these friends?”
Her voice is familiar, and it’s kind, which makes it all the more painful. It’s strange, seeing the resemblance between her and the Green Goblin, and it makes a part of you ache. Your life wasn’t the only one torn apart by Gwen. In fact, her mother probably faced the worst of it. With her husband being long gone, her oldest son away at college, youngest withdrawn after her daughter became a homicidal maniac, who did she really have left? Who was looking after Helen Stacy?
You smile at her, as best as you can without tearing up, and reach out to grasp her hand, which she readily accepts. “I’m okay, Mrs. Stacy, I… It’s just a few friends of my dad, from his home town. Their kids, too. It’s better than being put in the system.” You tell her, and can only hope that she believes you. You have no way to back up these lies, knowing those friends of your father don’t exist.
“You could’ve stayed here, you know?” She says, teary and squeezing your hand so tightly you can hear your bones creaking. You smile sadly at her.
“You’re a much stronger person than me, Mrs. Stacy. I couldn’t even face my dad’s funeral, let alone be around the memories of somebody I lost. This place, it—it reminds me of her.” You explain, voice shaking as you hold back your own tears, swallowing them down and trying to breathe through the ache in your throat.
The way her heart breaks is almost loud enough for you to hear it, but she nods her head understandingly, regardless. “Of course,” She says, nodding still, “But know you always have a place here, okay?”
“Okay.” You respond, heart clenching so tightly you’re not sure it can pump your blood any longer.
“Now, what’s your number? Your old phone was disconnected.” She says, shaking her tears away to pull out a pad and pen from the coffee table. She sets the notepad against her knee, looking expectantly toward you.
“Oh, right,” You stutter, teeth chattering as you comb your mind for the number of your burner phone. “There was a mixup, because it was in my dad’s name.” You explain needlessly, still searching your mind for the answer. Finally, you remember it. You listen to her ballpoint pen scrape along the paper as she writes the numbers as you say them, and then she clicks the pen off after writing your name beside it, underlining it twice.
“How about I give you a call with the details of your visit, okay, honey?” She asks, nodding with a pleased hum at your affirmative. “Good. Stay for dinner, okay? I’ve missed you.”
Who are you to deny her that?
Though, even as you try to pretend that you help to set up the table for her benefit, and as you hug Gwen’s little brother tightly when he comes home for his, you know, deep down, that it’s for you. That this is a moment of selfishness that you’ll let yourself have, because god, you deserve it, don’t you?
∘₊✧───── ───── ───── ─────✧₊∘
It’s thirteen days post Spider Society discovery, and you’re starting to regret the way you discarded that watch so carelessly. Not because you want to be a part of some cult of superheroes, but because you wish you had asked some more questions.
Surely Miguel O’Hara must’ve known a way to stop these villains from appearing in other universes? And if he did, had he already implemented whatever it was to stop Gwen escaping again? How exactly did she escape the first time? Was it a coincidence? Is there somebody out there, working behind the scenes, helping her get out?
You, unfortunately, have no way to answer any of the burning questions nagging at the back of your head. While a part of you hopes that you never see any of the Spider Society weirdos again, you also desperately want answers. Especially if it meant you could call off your visit to Gwen Stacy.
But the day arrives as any other does, and you spend every moment before the drive over to the prison desperately hoping that one of the Spider-people will show their face. None of them do, and you’re left to get into Mrs. Stacy’s car and simply brace for the journey ahead.
You’re pretty sure that swinging would be quicker, or easier, but you had no way to explain that way of transport to an interrogating Mrs. Stacy, and so you had to relent to her insistence on driving you. Now, you sit here, shifting in the seat of the car, uncomfortable without your suit underneath the clothes you used to wear on a daily basis. Even the knowledge that it’s stuffed into the bottom of your tattered backpack in the boot of Mrs. Stacy’s car doesn’t bring you any comfort.
Instead, the rough material of an old jacket has your skin crawling like you were being bitten by a thousand mosquitos, and the trousers on your legs itch like you’re allergic to them.
You suppose, really, that the spider bite that gave you so many powers had to have more drawbacks than just destroying your life. It only makes sense that your heightened senses would extend to the receptors on your skin. It makes every movement in these clothes torturous, and you wonder if it had always been this way, or if you were just so unused to wearing your old style of clothes. Either way, you hope that you won’t have to wear them for much longer.
If it all goes to plan, you should be in and out of the prison, just ensuring that Gwen Stacy is actually in the cell as she’s supposed to be. Then you just have to endure the fifty minute drive back to the city with Mrs. Stacy, and you’re free. You won’t have to wear these clothes again, won’t have to use your name, no — you can just sink back into the half life that is being Arachnid. It’s better that way.
“Okay, honey, here we are.” Mrs. Stacy says at last, having shifted her car into park. She pointedly avoids looking at the looming high-security prison ahead, instead focusing on you as you wipe your sweaty palms against your trousers. “Now you take as much time as you need in there, alright? I’ll be just out here, if you need me.”
You smile tightly at her, nodding with what you hope is more of a grateful expression rather than a grimace. “Thank you, Mrs. Stacy, really. I appreciate it, more than you know.”
That much was true — after all, it wasn’t like you could tell her that she was allowing the vivid paranoia you had been experiencing to be put to rest after her daughter escaped to another universe. Mrs. Stacy, from what you could gather, didn’t even know that Gwen had been missing for any amount of time. She had no idea what Gwen had done, how many more people she had hurt, but you assured yourself that it was better that way. Mrs. Stacy already had to deal with plenty, and that knowledge surely wouldn’t help.
She was already dealing with her own grief and feelings on the situation, as well as trying to support her two sons in the matter. Given what Gwen’s little brother had asked of you when he found out about you visiting her, you knew that he hadn’t been to visit Gwen, either. It seemed that he wasn’t coping with it all very well.
“Of course, you’re family. You should know that by now.” She says, smiling with teary eyes, reaching across the console to grasp your hand tightly in her own.
Her words take a stab at your chest, especially considering what had happened to everybody else who had seen you as family. Dead parents, villainous best friend — it really didn’t bode well for your loved ones. You just reassured yourself with the fact that you’d be able to disappear as soon as the two of you returned to the city. You couldn’t put her in any danger, that way, or her remaining kids.
“I’ll—I’ll see you after, okay?” You respond, squeezing her hand in return before quickly letting go and throwing open the car door, getting out and catching a slither of Mrs. Stacy’s surprised reply before you shut the car door.
There are guards waiting for you at the gates, checking you are who you say you are, scanning you for weapons before you even get in the building. They’re satisfied after their searches, content that you weren’t stupid enough to bring a weapon into a highly secure prison. You keep your focus on your breathing as they walk you in, handing you clothes to change into as well as a box to put all of your belongings in.
The scrub-like clothes they give you are even worse than your own, sending shivers up and down your spine at the feeling of each fibre scraping against your skin. You just try to breathe through it. Luckily, the rest of the security checks blur by, which means less time spent on agonising over this visit. You barely hear a word of the statement they read to you before you go in, and your hand cramps as you write your signature against a dotted line of a waiver. All of the other legal things were sorted out by Mrs. Stacy’s lawyer, which you are more than thankful for.
Instead of having to deal with that, you just have to wait.
You think that the waiting might be the worst part of it all. With the scrubs making your hairs raise and promoting uncomfortable shivers up and down your body, as well as the cold metal seat that they sat you on, you’re far too aware of everything around you. You can hear the hundreds of heartbeats in the buildings, the beeping of security doors, the footsteps heading your way. You can smell the coffee that the head guard in the adjoining room to the one you’re in is drinking, as well as the day-old sandwich in his desk. Worst of all is the way your own heartbeat is thrumming in your throat, padding harshly against your chest, so loud in your own ears that it slowly starts to drown out everything around you.
Gwen’s footsteps are heavy, accompanied by the clinking of the chains she’s shackled in. You can practically hear the maniacal laughter that had come from her whilst in that alternate dimension, even though she’s completely silent as she enters the room.
She smiles at you when you look up, and for a moment you’re fooled — it’s soft, gentle, kind. But then you see the glimmer in her eyes that was distinctly not Gwen, and you feel the scar along your side throbbing with phantom pain.
You smile tensely at the guards, who regard you with looks of gentle concern and caution, before they attach her chains to a link on the floor beside a chair three metres away from where you sit. They nod at you, which you return, and you watch as they go and take their positions beside the door before you move your eyes back to the elephant in the room — which is Gwen Stacy.
“So, you missed me?” She asks, baring her teeth in a grin that has too much teeth to be anything friendly. Gwen regards you closely as you stare at her, watch for any signs of flickering, any signs that this isn’t real. Her brows raise slowly, the longer you’re silent, but you’re in no hurry to talk. “No? Is that not it?”
“Sure, I miss you.” You respond after another stretch of silence, tilting your head to study her more closely. You don’t acknowledge the way that your voice shakes as you speak, the way it comes out in something closer to a croak before you swallow harshly against your dry throat. “Thought I’d come to check in.” You add, brows furrowing to make sure she gets your true meaning.
“Ah,” She voices, then laughs, shoulders shaking, chains clanking loudly against her metal chair. “I get it, now.”
Gwen doesn’t add anything else after that, even though you suspected that she may take this opportunity to loudly claim that you were Arachnid, outing your identity once and for all. Apparently, if she does want to out your identity, she doesn’t want to do it like this, as she stays silent until you speak.
You sit forward on your chair, ignoring the way the guards at the edges of the room shift uneasily at your movement. “Your mom arranged this for me, you know?” You say, eyebrow raised. She probably knows what you’re doing, or what you’re trying to do, but she doesn’t voice it. Instead, she just shifts to lean backwards in her own chair, sighing as if relaxing.
“Hmm, so she can visit.” Gwen says, nodding her head as if it’s all making sense now.
“She can, she just doesn’t want to. Neither does Georgie.” You respond, and find satisfaction in the way her eyes flash at the mention of her little brother, the nickname that the two of you both used to call him. She recovers quickly, but you can tell that she knows it wasn’t quick enough. The Green Goblin cracked, right in front of your very eyes. It’s proof that, if anything, her little brother has some meaning. “He wanted me to tell you something.”
Her head tilts across from you, though she doesn’t move from her laid back position.
You clear your throat, and look at the words you’d written on your skin. She tilts her head forwards the slightest amount, and you shift uncomfortably in your seat, glancing at the guards who look just as uncomfortable as you feel. “He said that he misses his Gwenny, but he doesn’t want you coming home.” You stare at her as you repeat his message, the one he had told you nervously, as if he was truly afraid that Gwen would escape and come back. Her eyes twitch as she focuses on keeping her expression cool, but you know that the words have hit something in her, even if it’s part of the Green Goblin. “Looks like you even ruined your own family.”
You’re up on your feet as she lurches forwards, flung backward from where she tried to go against her chains to rush toward you. The guards are in front of you in mere moments, but you weren’t in any danger. Not as long as she stayed in here.
It’s almost satisfying, to see her chained up. It’s so different to seeing the Green Goblin on the outside, where she could be your Gwen Stacy. Whereas in here, bound by chains of heavy metal, clothed in uncomfortable looking prisoner scrubs, she was nothing but the Green Goblin. It was reassuring, almost, to be able to pick apart something physical between the two.
She bares her teeth at you, animalistic in a way that Gwen never was, and glares at you as you follow one of the guards out of the room, the others closing in on her, ready to take her back to whatever cell she came from.
The clothes you wear become less overbearing as you keep your focus on the guards taking Gwen away the whole way back through security, only switching back to your surroundings when they hand you the tray of your own belongings to change back into. You’re relieved for many reasons, and you try to focus on that feeling as you approach Mrs. Stacy’s car rather than the way your jacket itches.
Mrs. Stacy looks as if she wants to speak as you get in the car, as if she wants to ask about your visit, but she seemingly can’t bring herself to do it. You keep your mouth shut.
∘₊✧───── ───── ───── ─────✧₊∘
Not a month later, your daily activities are back to normal, uninhibited by the daunting idea of Gwen being free. Still, though, you think about her more often, as much as you did in the time after she was put away the first time.
Mrs. Stacy had tried to call you more than once since, and at the two week mark you’d had to invest in a new burner phone. You just couldn’t risk anybody getting a hold of it and seeing her contact, or the ringer going off and exposing your position in a fight. No, it was better for her not to have your number. Besides, you had hers memorised if you needed to call her.
It was better if you tried to reduce any connections to Gwen Stacy. You’d be much better off, the less you thought about her.
Despite knowing that, you couldn’t help it. And despite seeing that crack in the Green Goblin exterior at her little brother’s words, you didn’t have much hope for her. You don’t think they’d let her out of prison even if you could find a cure, somehow. The fact of it was that Gwen Stacy’s life was over. She had no hope of a future in this world, the Goblin had destroyed that. All you could do was remember her and hope beyond anything that in one of those alternate dimensions, you and Gwen were happy together.
The thought of it played on your mind every day, a lingering pain that stung at your eyes. You thought about it so much that you had even imagined the world where Gwen had never become the Goblin, where you and your Gwen were happy. It was a suffocating image, one without any hope of being true, but you couldn’t help thinking about it.
Even as you fought villain after villain, petty criminal after petty criminal, you thought about it. Even now, as you were swinging around a bridge, dodging all the debris this villain was throwing your way, it played on your mind.
It was a distraction, and it was one you needed to get rid of.
That much became certain as the villain you were facing, Tombstone, managed to get a hit on you, sending you flying across the bridge. You landed on a car with a groan, the windshield cracking below you, and you rolled your eyes as the person in the car held a hand on their horn until you managed to climb off, a distinct Arachnid-shaped dent left in the bonnet.
Well, that would be aching tomorrow, that much was for sure.
He grinned where he was stood across the bridge from you, showing off his filed teeth, as if trying to intimidate you with the pointy edges of them.
“You’ve been a formidable foe, Arachnid,” Tombstone says, his voice barely a whisper above the wind, but you can hear him perfectly. You suspect he knows as much, and that only makes you nervous. “But I think it’s time for our battle to come to an end.”
“I actually agree.” You respond, stretching your aching back and feeling a bone shift when it definitely shouldn’t. You can’t help but wince, gritting your teeth and glaring over at Tombstone across the bridge.
You’re getting tired of these villains, of their constant spiel about how the world should be, about how everything should be how they wanted it to be. What was so wrong with the human population that everybody couldn’t just get along? Surely, if everybody got along, listened to each other, the world’s problems would be solved. But then again, this is New York, and it’s a city in which greed is bred.
A light press against your webshooter has you slinging high up on the bridge, staring down at Tombstone as he watches you intently. You’re planning your next move, considering all the variables, when a burst of orange manifests into the air behind him. He looks confused as you falter in your web slinging, dropping slightly before you catch yourself, and he turns around just in time to receive a curled fist to the face, courtesy of a familiar man in a red and blue suit.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me.” You murmur, lowering yourself to the bridge to approach this Spiderman, glaring at where Tombstone stands, straining against a red barrier that had materialised from the device Spiderman had placed at his feet.
“I hate that guy!” The familiar voice of Peter B. Parker says, shaking his fist as he hops slightly from one foot to the other, his lenses squinted before he finally turns to acknowledge you. “That guy sucks.”
Your brows are furrowed, eyes squinted behind your lenses as you stare at Peter, confused. This Tombstone guy isn’t an anomaly, is he? While you hadn’t faced him before, you knew that there had been a battle between him and another vigilante down in Hell’s Kitchen. And he knew your name, hadn’t been calling you Spiderman like the last anomaly. So why was he here?
Peter sighed, as if he was disappointed to be met with your confusion. “You got a place, kid? Or a burger joint, maybe?”
With that same amount of confusion, you nodded, brows furrowed as cops came to collect Tombstone, who was still in a fit of rage. You can just barely hear him swearing to get you back, both of you, through the barrier. Peter gestured a hand forwards for you to lead the way, and with slight hesitation, you swung off with him following.
Now, the two of you are sat in a Shake Shack, despite you wanting to head back to the offices you were set up in. Peter had ordered two burgers, one for you and one for him, though you had decidedly rejected the one he pushed towards you. He had only shrugged, and accepted it onto his own plate.
“My wife’s pregnant, can’t even stand the smell of these.” Peter groans, stuffing what must’ve been at least a quarter of the burger in his mouth. You just nod at his statement, though you had to admit you were slightly surprised that this guy was going to be a dad. But then again, you’re pretty sure you can remember your dad scoffing down his favourite food in a similar way. “Now listen,” He continues, speaking with his mouthful and paying you no mind as you cringe at the sound. “Miguel wants to strike a sort of… deal with you.”
“Okay?” You respond, brows furrowed. You look around the place, uncomfortable with all the people staring at Arachnid in a booth beside an old man stuffing his face. The lenses of your mask squint with you as you look at Peter, waiting for him to add anything on to explain his statement. “Then why’d he send you?” You ask, at last, when Peter makes no move to speak of his own free will, too engrossed in his second burger.
Peter held up a finger, gulping down a sip of his strawberry milkshake. “Said something about this being good practice for me,” Peter eventually answers, flashing you a smile. “You know, being a new dad and all.”
He seems to realise quickly that that was the wrong thing to say as your eyes narrow further, visible only through the shift of your lenses. The last thing you need is some random guy trying to father you. Even just the idea of it irritates you, makes the very blood rushing in your veins feel hot with anger. You had a dad, and look what good that did you. He’s gone.
Not to mention the implication of you being a child! You’re far from being a kid. You’ve been looking after yourself for some time now just fine. Whatever deal Miguel wants to strike with you is because they need you. Not the other way around. You knew that you shouldn’t have let that Spider-doctor fix you up.
“I’m not some kid. I don’t need you lot, you need me. Don’t get it all twisted, Peter.” You respond as he continues to look like a deer in headlights, clearly kicking himself for revealing what Miguel had said. You keep your voice low, fighting to stay unheard with the quietened air in the diner. “Now hurry up and tell me about whatever bullshit deal you want to strike with me, so I can say no and we can go our separate ways.”
“Kid,” Peter sighs, before immediately wincing as he realised he just directly disregarded your statement about not being a kid. “Sorry, Arachnid,” He corrects, settling his hands on the table in front of him, finally taking a break from his almost-finished food. “Nobody’s saying you can’t do this.”
“Sounds like that’s exactly what you’re saying.” You mutter, averting your eyes from Peter and instead narrowing your lenses at the people still staring in your direction.
“All we’re saying is that you shouldn’t have to do this alone,” He continues, ignoring your interruption with nothing but a quirked brow. “It’s a tough job. Everybody needs someone to look out for them, you know? It’s in our nature to feel responsible for everything around us, as Spider-people. But you can’t carry the whole weight of the world on your shoulders, it’s too much!”
You stare blankly at him, remaining unimpressed with his whole speech.
Peter sighs once more, looking at you with hesitant hope that you’ll come around. Unfortunately, you’re not about to let these people think that you’re incapable. If anything, Peter’s little speech was just adding fuel to your fire. You liked proving people wrong — it’s what you thrived on. You needed to prove them wrong. Because if you didn’t, what did that make you? You couldn’t let people be right about their assumptions of you. If you couldn’t prove everybody wrong, then that meant some of the things people said about you were right. And with the amount of people who accused you of being responsible for more deaths than you saved, who portrayed you as a menace rather than a vigilante, who said you weren’t worthy of your powers, who said whatever divine intervention had given them to you was wrong, you couldn’t let them be right. You wouldn’t.
“I already told you people. I’m not interested.” You spit out at him, feeling your frustration brimming over the edge. Why would nobody just trust you? Was that so much to ask? You understand that you had made mistakes, that you had cost people their lives, but you were trying. Why couldn’t that just be enough?
Peter says nothing as you slide out of the booth, stomping your way out of the Shake Shack as if you were some kind of grumpy teenager. He could only hope that his unborn child was a less grumpy teen, but then again, he was pretty sure you had every right to be miserable. Correcting himself, he could only hope that his unborn child never experienced your reasons for being so miserable.
You make your way towards your office building, swinging through the streets whilst doing your best to keep your heightened hearing down. You really didn’t want to have to deal with anything else, tonight. All you wanted was to get back, to put on the only clothes other than your suit that didn’t make you want to crawl out of your skin. Even if it was just for an hour, you’d take it.
While you had gotten used to how quiet it was in the building a long time ago, you couldn’t help but think that tonight, it felt almost… eerie. There was something tingling, buzzing at the very base of your skull, but even as you strained your hearing, your sight, everything, you couldn’t detect anything out of place. Everything seemed normal, so you couldn’t understand why you were so on edge! It couldn’t just be Peter’s presence, surely, because he posed no threat to you. So what was going on?
Picking up your backpack filled with belongings, you stared around at the empty office, the breeze that flowed through the open window sending a shiver down your spine, even though you weren’t feeling cold. Something wasn’t right. You just couldn’t figure out what it was.
“Hello? Anybody there?” You call out, straining your hearing once more, trying to listen out for even the slightest sound. A movement, a breath, anything, even as you couldn’t help but think that this was the most cliché horror movie like moment that you had experienced to date. Still, you heard nothing, but that nagging feeling didn’t dissipate, and you quickly lost all desire to change out of your suit.
The unease you felt only grew stronger as you stood there, unsure what to make of the feeling. It was quickly growing towards being overwhelming, but you didn’t know what to do.
Luckily for you, you didn’t have to make a decision.
Unfortunately, the decision was made by one of the very people you were trying to prove yourself to.
Peter B. Parker — or at least, you were pretty sure it was him — swung through the very same window you had, only to grasp a hold on your arm and pull you out of the window as he jumped straight back out of it.
Now, you had been Arachnid for a long time now. You had gotten used to the swinging, to the way your stomach dipped and your throat tightened, but you had never experienced it where you weren’t the one in control. Finally, you understand why people you brought to safety had, on occasion, thrown up immediately after you set them down on their feet again. The feeling of falling, of having no choice but to trust somebody else to catch you, it was terrifying.
But what was infinitely more terrifying was the way that the very floor of the building you had just been stood on exploded.
The blaze was blinding, even with your lenses protecting your eyes, but the noise that came moments later was much, much worse. And sure, you had been around explosions before, but never one that big, never so close. And never so unprepared for one.
Your ears were ringing, and you vaguely realised that you had become dead weight in your shock, with Peter struggling to keep his grasp on your arm firm. After a moment, you had the sense to grab his forearm in return, trying to assist him in holding you up. He didn’t seem as effected by the explosion in comparison to you, and you wondered if he’d had the time to put earbuds in his ears as you had sometimes done before a fight. Either way, you were insanely envious as the pain in your ears increased, leaving you struggling to focus on holding on to Peter.
When he set you down, which couldn’t have been more than a minute after he had grabbed you, considering you could still see the office building smouldering, you had to hold a hand over your mouth even over your mask, trying to rid yourself of nausea. Smoke was leaking into the darkening sky, and you saw the flash of sirens below, but heard nothing other than the distinctive ringing that felt like it was melting your brain.
Peter’s hand was squeezing your shoulder, and after a moment in which you didn’t acknowledge him, he was gripping your other shoulder with his spare hand, shaking you the slightest bit. You looked up at him with a groan, squinting past the floating lights in your vision to see that his mouth was moving, no sound coming out. You shook your head, trying to get rid of that incessant ringing, but it didn’t work. You dropped your chin to your chest again, hands bracing against your ears as if they could ease your pain, and you didn’t make a move as Peter removed one hand from your shoulder.
Mere moments later, the same tingling you had felt before the building you were in exploded returned, stronger, more intensely. Your head snapped up, frantically looking around, paying Peter no mind as he spoke into the orange-glowing watch on his wrist. You breathed through your nose, trying not to cough at the smoke permeating the air, and you just managed to push Peter over the edge of the roof of the building, with you diving after him, as another explosive went off.
That explosion was smaller than the last one, and the only reason you had managed to avoid it was because you knew it was coming. You knew what the alarm bells in your head were trying to tell you now, and you spotted the projectile just seconds before it reached your feet.
Part of you was glad that your senses were dulled from the first explosion — your hearing, especially, as it meant you were less effected by the close-range on this one. You saw Peter’s eyes widen as he looked up above you at where the explosion had just occurred. You just about managed to web him before shooting a web towards the next building, feeling something in your shoulder pull sharply with his extra weight and the suddenness of the move.
You squinted down at him as he gripped the web attached to his chest with one hand, his lips moving more frantically as he spoke to a hologram projected by the watch on his other hand.
“Shit, what is going on?” You asked, though mostly to yourself, but the only way you could tell you had even voiced the words was by the way they rumbled out of your throat. That explosion had messed up your hearing, for the moment, anyway, and you quickly realised that with your slow healing and the ringing in your ears, this fight was going to be majorly difficult.
You only had a moment to think that, before something snapped the web that was holding you to the building, sending both you and Peter falling through the air. Embarrassingly, you’re pretty sure that you let out a yell of some sort.
All the air was knocked out of you the next second as something hurtled into you, sending you careening towards the windows of the closest building. Peter, for a moment, had a shocked expression on his face, before he seemingly realised what was going on, smiling and letting out a string of words that you didn’t hear. You groaned as your sore back collided with the window, smashing upon your impact, and you were sent sprawling over a desk, a monitor breaking underneath your sudden weight.
Yet again, there was a hand against your shoulder, and you paid it no mind as your head dropped back, thudding against the desk. You couldn’t help but groan, the duress that your back had been under today was certainly taking its toll, leaving your whole spine throbbing with pain. On top of that, you were struggling to catch your breath, and with the sudden adrenaline provided by the spider-sense fading, the intensity of the pain in your ears was increasing.
Finally, you managed to peel your eyes open to see a concerned Peter B. Parker looking at you, with Miguel O’Hara stood beside the shattered window, staring out menacingly, as if daring whoever it was to attack again. Peter said something else, squeezing your shoulder, and all you could do in response was hold up one thumb.
Miguel seemingly barked out an order over his shoulder, and a moment later, you were squinting against the bright orange light of a portal.
Peter was hauling you to your feet, leaning to hold one of your arms over his shoulder, practically carrying your weight towards the portal looming ahead. “No, no, wait,” You said, and you felt the way your words slurred as you became slightly delirious with a mixture of pain, adrenaline, and desperation. “Stop, I gotta—”
He only shook his head, before tipping the two of you forward until you both fell into the portal.
The dizzying feeling of inter-dimensional travel definitely didn’t help the pounding in your temples, nor the nausea you had previously been feeling, and you had no choice but to try and focus on Peter’s grip on you as you squeezed your eyes shut. When the world finally stopped spinning, or feeling like it was falling away around you, you opened your eyes just enough to take note of where you were — which was back in the Infirmary of the Spider Society HQ.
You shook Peter off, standing on your own weight and waving him away when he tried to assist you as you swayed once more. You glared, eyes narrowed, and turned to head straight back through the portal you had come from, only to see it close before your very eyes.
The same Spider-Doctor from the last time you were here snapped a band around your wrist, and you squinted down at the red and blue band. It made you feel lighter, even slightly, which felt good on your aching bones and muscles. You opened your mouth to speak as the Spider-Doctor led you to sit down on an empty bed with white sheets, but you vaguely saw the way his mask shifted as he presumably spoke. You couldn’t tell what he was saying with his mask on, but a minute later, you felt a sharp prick against the inside of your elbow.
You just about had the lucidity to murmur “You fucker—” before you succumbed to the weight of your eyelids.
∘₊✧───── ───── ───── ─────✧₊∘
When you woke up, it was to a throbbing pain in your forehead, that only got worse when you tried to open your eyes. At the very least, you were glad to have your hearing returned to you, albeit slightly muffled, which you were only aware of because the sound of voices across the room was the reason for you waking.
“I’m just saying, maybe knocking the kid out wasn’t the greatest idea!” Peter B. Parker’s annoyingly loud voice says, slightly high pitched in the end. Who he was saying it to, however, you couldn’t say, not without opening your eyes. And that didn’t feel like a good idea, the lights even with your eyes closed feeling like too much.
Instead, you just groan, bringing your hand up to rest over both of your eyes. “It wasn’t a great idea.” You say through gritted teeth, more than annoyed over the situation you found yourself in. Honestly, what did these people have against leaving you be? Why did they think they had any right to tell you what to do, or how to handle things, or to overrule you when it came to your own treatment?
“Hey, kid!” Peter responds, drawing the letters out in that typical oh shit voice. From the snippet of the conversation you had caught, at least he was seemingly trying to advocate for your consciousness. However, that didn’t change the fact that he was there when that Spider-Doctor knocked you out. No, you were still pissed. And when you got your hands on that doctor? He was in for it.
Any other thoughts or feelings on the matter were overturned when you realised that your hand was resting over your eyes, not the lenses of your mask.
Who do these people think they are?
You open your mouth to jump into a rant on that exact subject, on the audacity that they all have, but find yourself silenced by somebody grabbing onto your free wrist, and seemingly dropping your mask into your hand. You feel it until you’ve got it the right way around, and then pull it over your face.
The lights are much more bearable with your lenses back over your eyes, but it’s still painful, and still worsens that pounding in your head. But it does mean that you can see who’s around you; Peter, Miguel and the Spider-Doctor. You have half the mind to leap at that doctor, but Miguel is raising placating hands in your direction before you can make the move to do so.
“Let’s all calm down.” Miguel says, placing his hands on his hips when your eyes only narrow at him.
“What is wrong with you? Who gave you people the right to—to take off my mask? To knock me out? Hell, to come to my universe and get in my business!” You practically yell out, swinging your legs over the side of the bed, ignoring the way your back hurts with the movement and glaring when the three of them step forward to help you.
“If Peter hadn’t gotten there when he did, you would’ve died.” Miguel responds plainly, seemingly aggravated by your irritation. One of his arms is raised in a gesture towards the man, who smiles almost guiltily, as if helping you was a crime. Which, in your mindset, it might as well have been. “There was an anomaly, a villain from another dimension targeting you.”
“I can handle myself.” You spit out, though the way the room spins when you stand is almost a direct contrast to your words. Your blood is rushing through your veins, and you realise that there’s a machine beeping next to you, increasing in frequency. As you look, you realise it’s measuring your heart rate, and you yank wires off of you that you hadn’t even noticed before, as if they were exposing you somehow. “And that doesn’t give you the right to take off my mask. Who does that?”
Spider-Doctor raises his hands, as if surrendering, though seems unintimidated by the way your glare switches to him. “It was necessary. Your hearing was severely damaged by the explosion, you needed treatment. You have dampening-buds in your ears now, while your healing catches up.” While that sounds reasonable, it only makes you angrier. Why did these people even care if some anomaly killed you? If your hearing was damaged? Why did they insist on bothering you?
Miguel sighs, pinching his nose, before he lifts his head up to speak to you again. You just about stop yourself from making a snotty comment about his attitude. You didn't even want to be here, and here he was, acting like dealing with you was such an inconvenience to him. It was frustrating. “Your universe seems to be at some sort of epicentre of anomalies, and we don’t know why. Yet.”
“We’re just trying to keep you safe. You can’t deal with all of those anomalies alone, nobody can. Sometimes, you need a team.” Peter says softly, like he could convince you of the matter. “Believe me, you don’t want to learn that the hard way.” He adds on, smiling almost hesitantly, as if there’s a memory he’s thinking of connected to his own words.
You’re sighing through your nose, your teeth gritting together as you regard them. “Okay, fine, you want to come take out your anomalies, or whatever? You do that. But anything more than that isn’t welcome.” You say, at last, your eyes narrowed towards them as you wait for their responses.
You still don’t really understand it, any of it, but it’s becoming clear that you have no choice but to deal with these people. Apparently, they were not budging on all of this stuff, which — fine, so long as they stay out of your way. The last thing you need is a bunch of Spider-people stepping on your toes, or making you seem incapable in front of the citizens of your own dimension when in the end, they’ll all up and leave.
After all, you can remember your mother telling you how important it is to do things yourself. The moment you start accepting help, you relax, and when they decide they don’t want to help you anymore? You’re screwed, your sense of independence reduced to ashes. And as Arachnid, there’s far too much at stake to risk that happening.
“Here,” Miguel says, only nodding his agreement — or at least, that’s what you assume the nod was for. He throws a watch towards you, and you catch it with some confusion. “In case you see any anomalies before we do.” He explains as he watches you fiddle witht he watch in both hands, glaring down at it as if it was offensive. He’s relatively satisfied when you relax at that explanation. While Miguel doesn’t voice what else it’s for, knowing you’d only get irritated and refuse the watch, he’s silently hoping that you’ll understand. It’s so you can come to them, if you need them. They can only hope that they’ll be able to tell you that, one day, before it’s too late, without the offer scaring you off.
“So, I’m good to go?” You ask, looking between the three Spider-Men still staring at you and the watch you hesitantly clasp around your wrist. They nod, or, Peter and Miguel do, while the Spider-Doctor throws his hands in the air, exasperated.
“That dimension is yours,” Peter says, leaning over to see the screen of your watch. “The button at the bottom will input this dimension as the destination. Just press that,” He points to another button, “To open the portal to whichever dimension has been typed in.”
You nod, still pissed that he’d let the Spider-Doctor knock you out, but at least you didn’t give him a snarky comment. Instead, you just pressed the button to go back to your own dimension, and stepped through the portal the moment it was big enough for you to go through.
You didn’t expect for him to follow you through.
“Hey, listen,” Peter says, almost reluctantly, as if he doesn’t want to upset you. When you turn to him, he raises his hands, as if to further prove that sentiment. “I am sorry that he knocked you out, I didn’t know he was going to do that.”
“Okay, fine, apology accepted.” You say, flatly, turning to survey where exactly you are. It doesn’t take you long to notice the remains of the building you had been camping out in, the building charred and the air still thick with all the smoke that had been produced.
“I wasn’t done,” Peter sighs, pinching at the bridge of his nose momentarily. “I also wanted to say that I’m sorry about your building. And I wanted to ask, well, mention about how when Doctor-Peter took off your mask, he noticed you don’t have anything protecting your ears, like other Spiders with your level of enhanced hearing do.”
You turn to stare blankly at him, while mulling through where exactly you’re going to stay in your head. If you’re being honest, you’re not paying his words much mind. So what, you don’t have anything protecting your hearing? Sure, sometimes you had stuffed earbuds into your ears when you knew you were going into a rough fight, but you didn’t know when some psycho exploded your building right in front of you. Plus, it’s not like you have unlimited resources to figure out some way of protected your ears under your mask while also letting you effectively use your hearing.
“Okay? And?” You ask, voice edging on the side of boredom. In all honesty, you just want to be left alone. You want to put on your comfy clothes, curl up into a ball and go to sleep so you can dream of a world where everything is okay. The likelihood of that happening is small, but not impossible, right?
“Well,” Peter hesitates then, which piques your interest the slightest bit. “Here, I had these made back when my hearing was crazy sensitive, but it’s not anymore, so I got no use for them!” He says, holding out two blue and red earbuds in a clear case. “You gotta wait until your ears are healed up to use ‘em, but I figured they’d do you more good than me.”
For a moment, you’re ready to deny him. To glare and insist that you don’t need his help. But then, he had said that they were originally for him, and he didn’t need them any longer, so really, would it be so bad to take them? To accept this one thing? To allow yourself to be saved of this tiniest bit of pain?
“You’re sure?” You ask, likely the least aggressive you’d spoken to him, though that’s not to say that it was asked softly. You were still firm on not accepting their help, on doing your own thing, but you could accept this much, surely? It couldn’t hurt.
Peter smiles, a short laugh leaving him, and he waves the box towards you. “I’m sure!”
“…Thanks.” You say, shortly, as you accept the earbuds offered to you. He also hands you the backpack that you had lost track of after the attack, and you accept that far more quickly. You’re glad that it feels the exact same weight as it did the last time you held it, before you shove the earbuds into the opening and zip it back up.
There’s a portal still open on the rooftop the two of you stand on, and Peter backs up to go towards it almost reluctantly. “Also, if you need somewhere to stay—”
“Don’t push it,” You respond, quickly, cutting him off before he could finish what he was saying. He doesn’t take offence to your abruptness, and smiles with a nod, before he disappears into the portal. You stare out at the city around you, looking in the direction of another building you had been very reluctant to return to. “What is my life?” You ask yourself, rhetorically, because you don’t know how you’d even answer that.
You glance behind you to ensure the portal is closed, before jumping off the rooftop, freefalling, relishing in the way the cold wind soothes the pain in your back. Before long, though, you have to shoot a web to catch yourself. You head towards the only place you know will be suitable for you, but can’t shake the way the thought of it chills you.
All you can do is hope that this multiverse stuff will be over with, and soon.
1K notes · View notes
realtalkswithfinn · 3 months
Text
Christmas at the Compound
Avengers x reader
Tumblr media
Summary: Avengers x reader Christmas head cannons because I am a sucker for the found family trope.
a/n: I tried to get this up before christmas but totally spaced it, so… tale it as a christmas morning gift! I tried to make it as age neutral as possible, so it could totally be teen!reader or not.
The holidays are a tough time for the Avengers.
Most of them have lost family members or friends, and the idea of celebrating anything is extremely difficult.
Tony especially - he always gets gloomy around the Holidays.
He always says something along the lines of, "I don't actually care about this, but its social convention."
But secretly he cares a lot.
He overcompensates for his lack of affection throughout the year by buying everyone the expensive gifts he knows they want but could never justify spending on themselves.
At surface level, it just seems like “oh rich guy is spending rich guy money”
But they’re actually really thoughtful gifts
Like last year, he got Peter a new laptop for school.
He bought Bucky new and thick clothes since all of his were old and worn.
He upgraded Clints cellular data so he could talk to his family anywhere.
Things like that.
Sam and Rhodey take one for the team and string the christmas lights on the tower
“It’s too cold for this.” Sam would complain, the sharp wind nipping at his cheeks as he flew from one end of the building to the other, lights in tow.
“Come one man, where’s your christmas spirit?” Rhodey would laugh
“I’m just doing this so stark’s power bill goes up.”
it really was worth it seeing the tower lit up top to bottom though
Wanda LIVES for commercialized American Christmas
"We have to make gingerbread houses and go to Rockefeller to see the Christmas tree and we have to go out to the snow and go sledding-"
She demands family Christmas photos be taken, even though you don't really have anyone to send them to.
This years theme was christmas pjs
Which lead to a few very interesting viral videos of the avengers in an Old Navy
“Tony come on the reindeer ones are cute!”
“Bruce. A man can not hold onto his masculinity while wearing pjs with dancing reindeer.”
Natasha gets tired of the bellyaching and bickering and makes the final decision
She grabs everyone’s size in the Reindeer pjs and marches to the front of the store
After snagging Tony’s credit card, of course.
Actually taking the picture is a whole other ball game, but that’s a story for another day
Thor has a hard time with the idea of Santa
You try to explain it to him, but it doesn’t seem to help
“So a fat man breaks into the safety of your home late into the night… and you let it happen because he comes baring gifts?”
“Well… yeah.”
“But only to nice children. That he stalks throughout the year.”
“He doesn’t stalk the children he just…”
“Hm.” He squints. “what about the naughty children?”
“They don’t get any presents.”
“OR,” Wanda interjects, “Krampus comes to get them.”
“Is that another fat man in a red disguise?”
“No. He’s a demon sent from hell to eat them.”
Thor nods in approval. “Ah. That’s much more asgardian. A fair reward system for the youth!”
You stare at him. “So… you’re okay with Krampus but not Santa?”
“Well I think they work together well, like a team. Like us!”
“I… I guess…”
Decorating the tree was an all night event
You would help happy bring up what felt like hundreds of boxes of christmas decorations
The tree itself was about 15 feet tall, because it wouldn’t be a holiday at the compound if you guys weren’t extra
It was placed in the living space, right next to a huge wall of windows so all of New York could see your festivity
it had to be decorated to the nines to pass Wanda’s inspection
Not a bare branch
Theres tinsel, ribbons, colorful lights, and hundreds of ornaments
But of course, ladders were a no go
You guys liked a challenge
To reach the higher branches, you and Natasha would stand on Steve and Buckys shoulders
And I mean stand
Not sit
It was a thrilling balancing game
You trusted them to catch you if you fell, but you still had to try to avoid it at all costs to save the tree from certain destruction
Peter would dangle from the ceiling, crawling around to hang ornaments toward the very top
Both of these acts nearly gave Bruce and Vision a heart attack
“CAP, you’re moving to fast shes gunna lose balance-“
“Bruce, please take a breath.”
Meanwhile Thor is getting distracted by all the ornaments and forgetting to actually hang them up
“This one’s a little man of snow! How silly!”
Speaking of ornaments
You all have an ornament of yourself on the tree
Or, your super hero alias at least
There’s a tiny black widow, a little iron man, a bity baby hulk, so on and so forth
Tony always demands his be the highest up on the tree to fuel his god complex
Drawing names out of a hat to see who got to put the star on top of the tree
(except you guys would always rig it behind Wanda’s back, only putting her name in the hat)
She would always protest, insisting to let someone else do it this year, but you guys never relented
So with a big cheesy grin on her face, she would use her magic to delicately place the star on the tippy top
You would think Natasha wouldn’t want to see the Nutcracker Ballet after her time in the red room
But it makes her so happy to see dancing as an art form instead of a way to brainwash young girls
She drags you, Clint, Wanda, and whoever else wants to tag along every year
She even splurges on front row seats
You look over and see her eyes glittering while she watches every turn, leap, and stunt intently
Leaving the theater, she’ll walk on her toes and do a few turns, encouraging you to try as well.
She ends up cackling watching you trip and stumble
“We’ll work on it.”
Can you IMAGINE the ginger bread making contest???
You’re all huddled around the long dining room table with christmas music playing
Theres Clint and Natasha, who just make the classic gingerbread house, no fancy bells or whistles.
Then there’s Bruce,Tony, and Peter who are going absolutely wild building gingerbread sky scrapers and gingerbread hotels.
“Mr. Stark look, I made a working elevator!”
Bruce puts an electric system (fairy lights) through his
Steve and Bucky rebuild their childhood homes
Wanda is going all out, delicately hand placing every candy and covering the whole thing in edible glitter
Visions is pretty similar, but more sleek and modern than Wanda’s
And then there’s Thor, who’s totally missing the point and just DUMPING everything on top
“Hey Peter, I think yours is missing something.”
You string a long thread of white rope candy from his structure to yours.
“Webs!”
“You know… we can probably make a web-like consistency with some starch and frosting…”
That becomes a whole sticky project, but you eventually get it to work, connecting everyone’s gingerbread houses with icing webs
Steve and Bucky are TOTALLY participating in the classic christmas traditions they grew up on.
They sit quietly together in the living room, making paper chains and stringing popcorn
“Do you mind if I join you guys?”
they smile gently. “Of course not.”
You sit crisscross in front of the couch while they teach you
They tell you stories of christmases long, long ago, which feels kinda silly considering they’re talking like grandpas while not appearing much older than you
On Christmas eve, you’re all there except for Clint, who went home to his family
Youre all dressed in your pajamas from the christmas card
You make hot coco and cider
Wanda pops in some old vhs tapes and you watch the classics late into the night
“Alright you nutcrackers,” tony would say around midnight. “I know you want to stay up and catch Santa, but he’s not coming if you all stay awake.”
he really just wanted to go to bed
He sauntered off, calling for lights out.
Most of the boys wandered away to their rooms, leaving you, Wanda, Nat and Thor not quite ready for sleep.
“So,” you ask, taking a sip of coco, “Do you guys think we’re on the naughty list?”
Natasha Chuckled. “I’m not sure. Does beating people up count as naughty if you’re taking down the bad guys?”
Thor set his mug down on the coffee table, the bells on his sweater jingling. “Do not fear ladies, I will catch that nasty Krampus if he comes in to devour your soul. I believe you were doing the right thing.”
You all laughed, thinking he was joking. But he just stared at you.
“Thor… you realize Krampus and Santa aren’t… real?” Wanda asked.
He had a hard time swallowing that.
He ended up sleeping on the couch “just in case”
you woke up at 3 am to a loud clattering coming from the living room
You decided to check it out against your better judgement
There was Thor. Hammer in one hand, cookie in another.
Down the hall toward the elevator was a completely destroyed life-size nutcracker.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“I thought I heard something by the elevator.”
“Congratulations. You murdered the Nutcracker.”
“I feared he was an accomplice of the holiday demon.”
“He’s been there for weeks!”
“He could have been a spy. Or possessed.”
“Goodnight Thor.”
Christmas Morning finally arrived
Everyone was sleeping soundly in their beds
Until Sam decided to be a little shit and wake everyone up at 7 am
He pounded on every. single. bedroom door.
“Y/NNNN. SANTA CAME TO TOWNNNNN.” he sing-songed
“No he didn’t.” You grumbled. “Thor killed him.”
“… I don’t know what that means.”
You all stumble out into the living room
Natasha took the time to actually run a brush through her hair and do her morning skincare
You and wanda were far too excited and skipped over that completely, barely remembering to brush your teeth
Tony looked the roughest - he had a silk robe draped over his pjs and looked like he was just awakened from a coma
Essentially, everyone was a little disheveled
Vision made everyone coffee before you started the gift exchange
You all sat around the coffee table in a circle so everyone could see each other
Bruce and Steve passed out the gifts from under the tree
it took a solid few minutes, there was a MOUNTAIN of presents
You went one at a time opening gifts
Some people think this is awkward, but you felt it was more genuine
this way, everyone can see the gift and the joy on the receivers face
as well as a million “thank you”s
It also gave time for the giver to explain why they chose the gift they did, whether it be something they remembered you said you wanted, something they knew you needed, or even just a simple “this made me think of you”
In the end, you loved all your gifts
And everyone loved what you got for them
But mostly, you were just happy to spend the holiday with your family
321 notes · View notes
brnesblogposts · 23 days
Text
movie night with the avengers
Tumblr media
pairing avengers x reader
warnings: none!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
" UH.. THE MICROWAVE IS ON FIRE"
I turn around and to my surprise Peter has set the microwave on fire. Steve quickly grabs the extinguisher and puts it out.
"Peter, you know you're not supposed to use kitchen appliances unsupervised" I say jokingly and he gives me the finger in response.
"STEVE DID YOU SEE THAT?! SPIDERBOY JUST SWORE AT ME." Steve just gives me a stern look that screams annoyance and walks out with his salad
"how are you an avenger, you can't even make popcorn without burning the compound down" O I tease peter.
"July 27th last sum-"
"LA LA LA LA LA" I cover my ears with my hands. a horrible day that was. the guys haven't stopped talking about it since. "truce?" I say to Peter with pleading eyes and he nods
"truce, if you agree to tell Mr. Stark that this was pietro's fault.." I put my hand out and we shook on it.
As Peter and I go into the movie room with a fresh bowl of unburnt popcorn that we made using an old popcorn maker I found, everyone looks up
"What took you guys so long?!" Clint snickers as he takes a handful of popcorn
"Oh you know us, always losing track of time by talking, Y/n is such a blabber mouth" I hold my hand over my heart as if deeply hurt.
"Totally off topic but we need a new microwave." I say to tony
"What did you guys do." He spat out, rolling his eyes
"WE.." I say using my hands to gesture between Peter and I "..didn't do anything!" and Peter adds on, "Pietro set the microwave on fire, he sped away before I could confront him."
Peter is a horrible liar.
"I know you're lying parker, your voice goes all high and squeaky when you lie. luckily for you i'm a billionaire, I can buy a new microwave. it's coming out of your allowance though."
"Mr Stark I don't have an allowance-" Peter looks perplexed
"Exactly." Tony says back.
We both placed the popcorn bowls on the table and took our places in our seats, "what're we watching tonight?" Kate asks with a mouthful of popcorn
"13 going on 30!" Bucky says and everyone looks at him with a raised eyebrow
"REALLY?!" Sam says, "Buck if I have to watch one more romcom with you.." Bucky just shrugs.
"I like that movie, Matt is kinda cute" Natasha says
"..He looks so much like Bruce it's uncanny" I say while raising an eyebrow at her.
"He’s a handsome fella" Bruce shrugs and everyone laughs at his quip
"I think we should watch The Truman Show" Loki voices and everyone comes to an agreement.
“I've always felt like him you know, like i'm in some sort of movie" I didn't mean to say that out loud but I did and everyone looked at me all weird..
"You're funny" Scott laughed a little. I brushed it off and settled into my seat as the movie started
"If I ever had a movie made after me i'd want that RDJ guy to play me" Tony said as everyone was looking at the movie, we all burst out laughing, "you're all so mean to me." Tony said with a frown.
we all watched the movie and had a good time.
94 notes · View notes