Chapter Text
All at once Peter’s no longer on the asphalt in the open. The hair beneath his fingers was no longer blonde but brown. Blood on his knuckles, blood between his fingers and blood in his nose. So much blood that wasn't his. He couldn’t hear. He couldn't see. All he could do was plead.
He thought he was done mourning. That his tears for loss had dried. He had lost all the people he ever knew and all the people who knew him. He had lost the only world he ever knew. He had lost things he didn't even know he could lose. Hope was thin. Weathered by the tears he shed. And, he thought he was done. That he had nothing more to give with his fragile heart. The heart that, unbeknownst to him, had tied up that thin hope to new names of people who know him and a new world that he's only beginning to know. Tying him up with new things to lose.
Loss pierced him hard and true with a familiar blade. A pain that he knew well yet could never expect flooded him. It burdened him with a weight he could only break under. Broken, bleeding and drowned, he couldn't help it.
It tore a scream from within his chest.
For a moment, there was nothing. Only pain.
When he came back, his ears were ringing. There's an arm around him, a weight on his back, squeezing him in an embrace that could make him crumble.
Nightwing.
His gloved fingers, rough but warm, ran comforting grooves through his hair. Peter’s senses honed in on him. His touch, his warmth, his weight, his scent, his sounds.
This is Dick Grayson. His father.
Peter's breath hitched and the first sob ripped violently out of him.
He had never cried like this. Tears were shed. Nightmares were had. Regrets abound. Peter had mourned everything he lost.
But, he never mourned the boy who was Peter.
Self-pity never got you anywhere, was what he kept telling himself. It's true too, it was how he managed to get as far as he had. If he ever stopped to look at himself, he would hate himself too much to move on.
He wanted to be proud of where he was in this new world. He had people. People he cared about, people who cared about him. He's in a slightly better place in a less than ideal situation. He was getting ready to move on. After thinking that maybe Aunt May, Ned and MJ would be okay with him moving on from them, he was feeling a little less pessimistic about the possible future.
So, he felt more than a little justified for losing the careful grip he had on his fragile state of mind that he'd been performing the most precarious balancing act with since his time on Titan.
The dams broke. All the pain he knew was buried deep inside, webbed up in a package of self-deceit, poured out of him.
He cried not for all the things he did wrong but all the things that went wrong simply because. He cried for all the things he was forced to lose, all the choices he never had. He cried for the peace that escaped him ever since he was bitten by that spider.
Without the mask, without Spider-man… Peter just breaks.