Peter finds a seat in the back of the bus, by the window. Headphones plugged in; hood pulled forward to hide his eyes. He is not part of anyone’s world, he is invisible, doesn’t exist, nobody better fucking bother him.

He has attempted to run away from home six times before. So far, Tony and Pepper have managed to drag him back each time. But it’s different this time, he can feel it. He isn’t going back. He isn’t going back.

This bus should carry him all the way to Philadelphia and he doesn’t know what he’ll do once he gets there, but he doesn’t care. They won’t expect this move from him. They won’t expect him to actually leave the city he was born in. The city he has been protecting. And yeah, that bit does hurt, somewhere deep inside his chest. But at this point, he’ll do anything to escape his captors.

-

Tony and Pepper snatched him up only a few weeks after the first Spider-Man video went viral. Real fucking coincidence, right? Suddenly, Tony Stark rocked right up at his group home, strewing business cards around like he was Oprah. If Oprah were an ugly white dude with a goatee.

“Big fan,” he told Peter, fasting forward through a video of Spider-Man catching a bus before it crashed through a road block. “In and out of foster care your whole life, am I right? I believe my wife and I could provide a very fitting home for you.”

“Pass,” Peter said.

But, like most things in life, he never got a choice in anything. So merely a week later, he was dropped off on the doorstep of the Stark residence, a humble abode also known as the freaking Avengers Compound, with his meager belongings crammed into his father’s old suitcase. He hadn’t unpacked that suitcase in almost three years.

He made his displeasure known by slamming every door and yelling at every person he saw. With the exception, perhaps, of Tony and Pepper’s six-year-old daughter Morgan. It wasn’t her fault her parents were a pair of dicks.

“Dicks?” Morgan repeated in a dubious voice.

“Peter, watch your language,” Pepper warned.

“You’re all dicks,” Peter said. “And child labor is illegal, and child soldiers are especially illegal, so whatever you think you’re getting out of this deal, it’s not happening. I’m not an Avenger.”

“You’re not here because we want anything from you. Or from Spider-Man,” Tony said. “You’re just here because you fit in.”

Tony kept saying stuff like that, and it was high-key preposterous that he expected Peter to believe it. He had never been anywhere where he ‘fit in’ less than he did here. In this nice little rich family that had fresh fruit smoothies for breakfast; where everyone played the freaking piano; that had a fridge calendar where they wrote down every time Peter had an important test which they somehow knew about because school had already given them access to their online parent portal those traitors.

“I’m not studying for my test tomorrow!” he loudly announced while jabbing aggressively at the fridge calendar. “I’m building a Lego tower with Morgan.”

“Okay,” Tony said with a shrug.

To Peter, running away was… he generally referred to it as a hobby. It was always highly entertaining to see how far he could push people before they snapped and finally showed their true, ugly selves. The more friendly a family pretended to be, the more he felt the itch to wipe those stupid fake smiles off their faces.

“Work with us, buddy,” foster parents would tell him. “You know you can’t stay here if you keep running away.” Which — yeah, duh, that was the whole point.

Tony and Pepper didn’t do the smiley thing as much. They didn’t sit him down for a ‘heart to heart’ every time he used the f-word. They didn’t tell him to finish his vegetables or do his homework. They sort of acted like they didn’t care how Peter behaved.

“And I’m going to bed whenever I want!” he warned.

“Okay,” Pepper said.

“And I’m having chocolate cookies for breakfast tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Tony said.

They weren’t even pretending to parent him. They probably considered him some sort of SHIELD investment. It really wouldn’t take much to dissuade them. Just the tiniest push to send them over the edge.

So Peter barely put any thought into his first escape attempt. He simply didn’t return home from school the next Monday. Why go home when you can spend the day at the mall? He bought a churro, sat on the edge of the fountain and fed a few pieces to a stray cat while googling random facts about Kansas.

His phone started buzzing after about two hours. Peter stuffed it into his backpack and steadily ignored it. He had mastered the art of just sitting in one spot, staring at people and keeping himself entertained by imagining where they were all coming from, where they were going.

Tony showed up about an hour later, pausing next to the fountain with his jacket slung over one shoulder. “Hey. What are you doing?”

“What are you doing?”

No foster parent had ever found him after he ran away. He usually just got picked up by the cops when he tried to sleep on a bench somewhere. They would put him in the back of their car and drive him back to his current captors. And all the neighbors would peek through the curtains to see why a police car was pulling up in their street while his flustered foster parents stood in the doorway.

Or, if the cops never spotted him, he’d go back to school the next day and his foster parents would be waiting there and wail about having been worried, and Peter would make a big fat scene right in the school’s entrance hall. Bonus points if he made them cry.

Far more dramatic that way, and Peter felt decidedly disappointed by this turn of events.

“I’m getting you back home,” Tony said.

“Why?”

“Because,” Tony said, “it’s time for dinner. I’m making pizza.”

It was time for dinner. And Peter liked pizza. So he surrendered, just this once, and followed Tony back to his car.

“You’re a runner, huh?” Tony said as they drove back. “I saw it in your file.”

Peter said nothing.

“I’m a good finder,” Tony said. It sounded very much like a threat.

-

The second time was only a few days later, after he got an A-plus back on that biology test. He hadn’t told Pepper and Tony, but they still knew about it because they were checking the ‘parent portal’ like a pair of damn cyberstalkers.

“Well done, honey,” Pepper said.

Peter hated when foster parents got all proud about his good grades as if they were their achievements. For ‘providing a stable home’, or whatever they thought they were doing. It almost made him want to flunk every single one of his subjects to prove a point. Almost. Except he needed a good GPA to get a scholarship for college. To finally get his fucking freedom. Life really had him over a barrel.

Which meant it was not his fault at all that his only option was to run away again. He shoved all his books into his locker after his last class, and left with nothing but his Spider-Man suit and a half-eaten mars bar in his back pack. He once again chose the mall as his spot for the day, but snuck into the cinema this time. Perfect excuse to put his phone on silent and ignore the inevitable messages and calls from Tony and Pepper.

He watched a gory zombie movie first, and then a comedy about a woman and her dog, and then sat down for an Argentinian coming-of-age movie, because MJ had told him it was good. She had horrible taste in movies but Peter still wanted to impress her.

He was about halfway through when he spotted Pepper shuffling towards him with a lot of “excuse me, thank you, could I…?”

Peter sunk lower in his seat and stubbornly kept staring at the screen as she took the empty chair next to him. She laid something on his knee. A movie ticket, stamped and everything. “It’s fair to pay for these things,” Pepper said, because she apparently thought that pointing out Peter’s moral shortcomings was a great way to break the ice.

“Did something happen at school today?” she then asked, as if Peter needed a fucking reason to run away other than just to get away from her. He didn’t respond.

“Do you want to come back home now, or finish the movie first?”

“Movie.”

“All right,” she said, and watched the rest of the movie with him.

“I didn’t get it,” she said later as she drove him home.

“No duh, you missed the first half,” said Peter, who honestly didn’t get it either.

“Do you like movies?” she asked. “We can all go together this weekend. But we’ll have to pick something Morgan can watch, too.”

“Pass,” Peter said.

-

The third time was the very next day. Because Peter was low-key annoyed at himself for running away and hiding at the mall twice. That was the same general level of stupidity of a three-year-old child who hides by sticking her head behind a pillow. He wasn’t sure how Tony found him the first time, but of course they would find him there the second time.

He left school and turned right, and right again, and walked down unfamiliar streets until he reached a small park where kids were playing basketball. He didn’t know this part of the neighborhood. And if he didn’t know where he was, Pepper and Tony wouldn’t either.

He sat on a bench, grabbed his books and started cramming for tomorrow’s test on plate tectonics. He ignored his phone when it started buzzing. They could call him all they wanted. He was going to win this round, he was sure of it.

Until a sleek black car pulled up right next to him and Tony rolled the window down. “Mr. Parker, your Uber driver is here!”

Peter growled and jumped to his feet, stomping away. He heard a car door slam behind him and footsteps following. His skin started itching.

“Pete. Hold up.”

Peter turned and hurled his book at Tony. “How did you find me? Where did you put the microchip, you fucking stalker? In my backpack, in my shoe?”

Tony picked the book up from the sidewalk and wiped off some dirt. “Let’s talk about it at home.”

“I’m not coming back with you.” Peter turned and clenched both arms around the nearest lamp post in case Tony was planning to drag him back. Oh, he was going to make one hell of a scene. If he couldn’t do it in the school’s entrance hall, he’d just do it right here on a random street corner.

“You’re putting a serious dent in my plans for the day, kiddo. I was going to make you a new Spider-Man suit.”

Peter glared at him from behind the lamp post. “I don’t want anything from you.”

“You can help me develop it.”

It was very clearly an attempt at bribery, and one Peter would not fall for, even if Tony’s workshop was like a little corner of heaven, and building a more high-tech suit had been pretty much at the top of Peter’s bucket list for ages, and…

“Okay,” he said, and stopped hugging the lamp post. “I’ll help.”

-

Pepper and Tony didn’t do any of the things a normal foster family did. They didn’t sit him down to talk about boundaries and unacceptable behavior. They didn’t pull the ‘we just want to help you’-card, they didn’t tell him he was ‘probably dealing with some tough emotions, aren’t you honeybun?’.

In fact, each time after they found him and drove him home, they generally acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened at all. Which left it up to Peter to bring it up. “How did you find me?” he asked as he poked Tony with the handle of a screwdriver.

“For your own safety,” Tony said, “I don’t think I should tell you.”

He held up on his escape attempts until after the suit was finished, which took almost a week. Which was fine. It was fine. He was simply lulling them into a false sense of security. Spending time in the workshop and building Lego towers with Morgan; it was all part of his very elaborate escape plan.

“You can make me all the expensive tech you want, I’m still not gonna be your Avenger-soldier,” he warned.

“That’s not even on the table, kid,” Tony said. “It’s nowhere near the table.”

But it had to be on the table. Why else hadn’t Tony and Pepper just tapped out already? Everyone gives up eventually.

-

The first thing Peter did when the suit was done, was take it into his bathroom and poke at it with a pair of tweezers until he had extracted the tracker. He also searched his own backpack, shoes and coat. Turned them inside out, but didn’t find any sign of a hidden microchip. Which meant the most likely scenario was that Tony and Pepper had simply found him each time by using their fancy technology to track him through his phone.

Therefore, escape attempt number four started with him turning off his phone and leaving it in his school locker. And then he went home with MJ so they could work on their project about tornadoes. Because sometimes ‘escape attempt’ simply meant ‘staying with your friends the whole day without telling anyone’.

They sat on the floor of her bedroom, surrounded by a jagged landscape of books, pencils, crumpled up papers and empty wrappers from candy bars. MJ drew all the graphs. Peter collected all the data. “There’s a lot of tornadoes in Kansas.”

She huffed. A strand of hair danced away from her face. “You need to forget about fucking Kansas. Did you meet any Avengers yet?”

“Only from a distance. They usually stick to their own area of the compound. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that I told Captain America to shove his dick up his own ass on my first day.”

Rogers had looked delightfully bewildered at that.

“You’re such a skinny nerd,” she informed him. “You want to act like a big shot, but you’re too skinny and nerdy to really pull it off.”

“Am too a big shot,” Peter said. “Biggest, shottest. Canon fire.”

They spent unnecessarily long debating whether Peter was a big shot, and then spent unnecessarily long debating the best transitions to use on their PowerPoint slides. They worked until dinnertime. Still no sign of Tony and Pepper. Peter felt incredibly vindicated. Oh, how the mighty had fallen. Even the great Tony Stark couldn’t do anything without a phone signal. “Can I sleep here tonight?”

“What?” MJ said. “Oh, crap. Are you back to doing that running away thing? What’s the point of this again?”

“It’s mainly a hobby.”

“You need therapy.”

“I came out of the womb needing therapy.”

“Let me go ask my parents.”

She left for a while, and then returned and asked “do you eat mushrooms?”, so Peter assumed he got the green light.

They were in the middle of a very tasty mushroom risotto when the doorbell rang.

“That was fast,” MJ said, dropping her fork onto her plate. She left the room, and returned with Pepper in her wake.

“Smells nice,” Pepper commented. “Are those chestnuts?”

“It’s my grandpa’s recipe. Do you want a copy?”

“That would be lovely! Thank you for your help today, honey.”

“I hate you,” Peter told MJ. “Like, not in a sarcastic fun way. I actually hate you.”

“That’s hurtful,” she said. “You can apologize to me in the morning.”

-

The fifth time, it was just one of those days. Peter had woken up feeling anxious and restless. In his dream, he’d arrived home to find the compound deserted. Tony and Pepper had decided to move away, but he got home too late and they’d left without him, and the compound was just a big, empty, concrete maze.

He was almost nervous to go downstairs, and embarrassingly relieved to find Pepper right there, standing in a corner of the kitchen, steeping a large pot of tea.

“Bad dream?” she asked as soon as she laid eyes on him.

The simple question made his skin itch. He slumped down in a chair and crossed his arms so tightly across his chest that it hurt to breathe. “Is that what it says in my files? That I get bad dreams?”

“Yes.”

The unfairness of it all made Peter want to cry. “Why do you get a whole file on me and I don’t get anything on you? What else does it say in there?”

“Do you want to read it?”

Peter deflated a little. “Uh. I don’t think that’s allowed.”

She left the room, returned, and placed a faded green file on the table in front of him. Peter waited until she had turned back to her tea before opening it.

It was… boring and dry and disturbingly detailed. From how much he weighed at birth to a copy of his latest report card. It’s a pleasure to have Peter as a student, was Mr. Harrisson’s cheerful comment.

His social workers were not as unanimously positive in their comments, though they were careful to describe any problems not as ‘flaws’ but as ‘potential for growth’. They probably learned that in social worker school, right along with that perfunctory smiley voice they all had.

Abandonment issues was scribbled somewhere, and Peter felt his mouth drop open in outrage. If anything, he felt he had made it pretty clear by now that he had no problem abandoning people, thankyouverymuch.

There was a picture of his parents together. A really random picture of the two of them standing under a tree. They were both smiling. Peter wondered where the social workers got it. And where he was when it was taken.

He was first placed in foster care when he was four. Just temporarily while his mother went to rehab and his father got another bout of therapy to get over his obsessive hoarding problem. It didn’t work much. Peter vaguely remembered coming back home a few months later, and finding his own bedroom crammed with all the victims from his father’s latest shopping spree. He hadn’t particularly minded, especially since his father assured him that these were all gifts for him. Why his gifts included an adult-size indoor bike and a wide selection of ash trays — well, he didn’t worry about that too much.

He loved his parents. He just didn’t always want to be in the same house as them, especially when they were screaming at each other. He’d leave the house and wander around the city until a concerned passerby asked him if he was lost, where his parents were. Someone would usually call the cops, who always drove him back home. And mom and dad would stand in the doorway, flustered, while neighbors peered at the police car from behind their curtains. They would promise Peter that they would never ever fight again.

They promised him that every single time.

He was placed in foster care again when he was five, and again when he was seven, and basically, on and off until he was twelve and it happened. He was living in a group home when he got the news that his mother had OD’ed. After the funeral his father grabbed all his hoarded junk and moved to Kansas — which he didn’t even tell social services about until they called him a few months later to ask whether he felt ready to take care of Peter again. Which, suffice it to say, he didn’t. And Peter never saw him again.

His dad was probably sick of all the running away, too.

He suddenly realized that he didn’t even have a picture of his parents. He had some on his phone, but not one you could hold in your hands or hang above your bed.

“Can I keep this?”

Pepper glanced at the photo. “I think we need to keep the file intact. But I’ll make a copy for you later, all right?”

“Okay,” Peter said, and scuffed his feet against the ground. “Uh. Thanks.”

-

The urge to run away was always particularly strong after mornings like these. It was just a thing where he could tell his foster parents were happy in that really smug way, about ‘getting through to him’. And now he had a point to prove.

He also got another A-plus on a test, and just the thought of going home and facing Pepper and Tony’s happy compliments made his chest feel irritatingly tight.

He patrolled the streets for a while after school, thinking that it might clear his mind. It didn’t. He changed back into his regular clothes after an hour or two, turned his phone off, and wandered into the city. He sat on some random stone steps for a while, watching people, wondering where they came from and where they were going.

When it started raining, he ducked into a nearby pet store to look at the rabbits and the birdies. He spent at least half an hour gazing at the little fish floating around in their aquarium. What a life these animals had. You share your cage, your tank, your aviary with other animals, and every now and then a customer comes in and grabs one of your buddies. And you never see them again. You don’t even know where they are going.

It made him want to go home and ask Tony and Pepper to buy out the whole shop. Just so the animals could stay together forever.

The employee behind the register shot him increasingly frowny looks and eventually sidled up to him. “Hey, you gonna buy something, kid?”

“Yeah, maybe,” Peter said, because what was this dude gonna do, throw him out?

“Can I help you, then?”

“No,” Peter said, and kept staring at the fish. “Just browsing.”

The guy gave up and walked away.

Everyone gives up eventually.

The store closed at 6 PM and it was still drizzling rain. He didn’t want to call MJ because she might stab him in the back again and rat him out to Pepper or Tony. But he also wasn’t particularly looking forward to sleeping outside in this weather.

He walked around some more, his mood plummeting further which each step. He found a bus stop where he could hide out for a bit. He was hungry as hell, and cold, and wet, and it was only seven PM. He suddenly remembered that he had promised Morgan to watch E.T. with her after dinner.

Damn. He should have run away tomorrow.

Then again, who said he couldn’t? If he went home now, he still might be in time to catch the end of the movie. And he’d proven his point for today. That he could run away, that he had the upper hand, that they wouldn’t find him unless Peter allowed them to.

So he dug out his phone and turned it back on. To allow them to find him.

He slouched down on the plastic seat and waited. He waited for over an hour, but no sleek black car pulled up next to him. Tony and Pepper weren’t even calling or texting him. What the hell was going on; why weren’t they here yet?

He fiddled with his phone for a while, and then finally dialed Tony’s number.

“Hello?” came Tony’s voice, against the background noise of metal slamming together.

“Hey. It’s Peter.”

“Oh, hi, Peter,” Tony said. “What can I do for you?” And he sounded all casual about it, the bastard.

Peter swallowed around a big fat lump of pride. “Can you come pick me up?”

“Sure thing, bud. Where are you?”

“Track my phone.” Peter snapped and hung up.

He waited another hour, and it was just getting colder and darker, and no one was showing up.

He called Tony back. “Where are you?”

“Who is this?”

“It’s Peter!”

“Oh, hi, Peter. You still want me to come pick you up? I didn’t receive an address yet.”

“You can track my phone!”

“That’s such a hassle. Just tell me where you are and I’ll be there in a jiffy.”

Peter knew what Tony was doing, he knew exactly what Tony was doing. But fuck, it was working. He gritted his teeth as he got to his feet and lumbered to the nearest intersection. “I’m at…” he squinted. “I’m at 68^th and 172^nd.”

“Okay, kiddo. Hang tight, I’ll be there in about twenty minutes.”

Sure enough, Tony arrived twenty minutes later. He brought a dry sweater, and some leftover burritos in a Tupperware box, and didn’t ask any questions about Peter’s whereabouts that day. “I made a toaster in the shape of a human brain. It’s wildly off-putting. Can’t wait to show you.”

Peter nibbled on a burrito. “Did Morgan watch E.T.?”

“No. She didn’t want to see it without you.”

“Okay.”

-

And then there was the sixth time. The sixth time should have been the one. He had hardly any homework. The weather was pleasant. Morgan was having a sleepover with a friend. Perfectly timed, perfect conditions.

By 9 PM Peter was sure he had everything under control. He had already spotted a nice bench on a street corner where he could sleep and wait for the police to come poke at him. But he felt too wide awake to tap out now. So instead, he hid behind some bushes and changed into his suit to make one final round.

It bummed him out, sometimes, that his dad didn’t even know he was now Spider-Man. He would be so psyched about it. Super-hero merch was only one of the many things he hoarded, but he still treasured every single item; from the Black Widow egg timer to the War Machine bed sheets.

Although, Peter figured, people in Kansas probably didn’t even know about Spider-Man. He wasn’t exactly a nationwide phenomenon like… like Iron Man. Woah, his actual dad probably knew all about his current foster dad without realizing it, that thought was even weirder.

At least it’d give them something to talk about, next time.

He swung around the area for a while. Helped a drunk guy cross the street safely. Chased away a few graffiti-kids. He was in the middle of bending a crooked lamp post back into shape when he heard sirens approaching. Moments later, an ambulance tore through the street below.

He swiftly followed until he reached a junction with, right in the centre, the crumpled up remains of a car. Small pieces of debris littered the whole intersection. Next to the wreck, a civilian woman was trying to calm an elderly man who had a dazed look on his face. She moved out of the way when the paramedics approached.

Peter intercepted her as she moved back to the sidewalk. “What happened?”

“Red van. Hit and run,” she said, and Peter immediately felt his blood boil.

“Which way did he go?”

The woman pointed and Peter swiftly fired off a web and launched himself into the air. If there was anything he hated, it was a hit-and-run. You don’t cause a mess and then make like a tree, that’s just basic human decency. You stick around, you take responsibility for your actions.

The red van was moving fast, but Spider-Man was faster. Peter caught up as it blew through another red light near Queens Museum. There were long scratches down the side of the van. The wing mirror was dangling by a few wires.

Peter shot his webbing at a tree branch and swung right past the van, only inches above the tarmac. “Hey! Stop the car!” he yelled.

The guy behind the wheel made a very obscene gesture in response.

Peter swung ahead, flipped through the air and landed right in the middle of the road. He turned, straightened and faced the approaching van head-on.

And yeah, in hindsight, maybe he should have thought about that better. This guy did just do a hit-and-run. But he had really expected the driver to stop or… at least slow down.

Instead, it seemed like the van sped up right before crashing straight into him and sending him flying through the air. Before he could even process what just happened, his back slammed into the stone façade of a building. A scream escaped him when he felt his arm snap painfully.

He crashed down to the pavement. His eyes watered with pain as he carefully rolled over and pushed himself up with one hand. It felt like his head had been cleaved in two. He blinked down at himself. Something sharp had torn right through the fabric of his suit and cut into his side. He couldn’t see well, but the cut felt deep. His right arm was flopping around in a way he recognized all too well, and he gritted his teeth before forcing the shoulder back into its socket with a sickening pop.

“Holy shit!” someone called out from a window above him.

Peter ignored it. He staggered to his feet and blinked in an attempt to clear his vision. The red van hadn’t gotten away unscathed. It stood on the other side of the road; smoke billowing out from under the hood, a Spider-Man sized dent in the bumper.

The driver rolled out of his seat, cursing, blood dripping from a cut above his nose. He clearly hadn’t anticipated that crashing into Spider-Man would be about as disastrous as crashing straight into a bollard.

Peter wanted to web him down, but he was woozy and shaking on his legs, like he might pass out-- and he didn’t want to tie this guy to a car that would potentially catch fire in the next ten seconds. He lifted his good arm. “Step— Step away from the vehicle.”

“Fuck you!” the guy barked, and broke into a sprint.

“Yeah, just like that,” Peter said, and shot his webbing in the same moment that his legs gave way and he keeled backwards. His side was throbbing, everything was throbbing, and weird blobs of color overtook his vision.

Footsteps approached, whispers, shapes of people moving around him.

“Dude. It’s actually him.”

“Dude. Take off his mask!” another one hissed excitably.

“Dude. Don’t be an asshole!”

“C’mon dude, I’ve been instagramming live the whole thing, we’ll go so viral. Lemme just— Hooooly shit.”

Something heavy smashed down against the road right next to Peter, making the ground tremble and sending fresh spikes of pain through his head.

“Turn it off and step back,” Iron Man said, “you post-aholic attention-tweeter.”

“Holy shit,” the voice said again, followed by the sound of scrambling footsteps as the bystanders hauled ass.

And then, steady hands, on his shoulders, pressing against his side, cupping his cheek.

“How did you— How did you—"

“The power of social media. I got you, kid. I got you.”

“Doesn’t hurt,” Peter grunted.

“I bet it doesn’t,” Tony said. “My stubborn boy. ‘Tis but a scratch, right?”

“Per-fect-ly fine,” Peter managed. And then everything went black.

-

Peter had lived in several foster families where he had to share a bedroom with other kids. The parents always apologized for it and, like, they really didn’t need to. They didn’t have the money for a big-ass house, but they still took other people’s kids in. Peter could appreciate that. But more importantly, it gave him a strange, sheltered feeling. There was nothing he hated more than waking up to a quiet, empty room. In those few seconds when his brain hadn’t fully woken up yet, he would sometimes panic that maybe during the night, all people had disappeared from the world and he was the only one left.

So when he blinked back into existence and saw Tony’s face hovering right over him, he felt relieved, and then immediately annoyed about being relieved. “Get outta my face, stalker!”

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Three, I’m fine!”

He was fine. No throbbing pain anywhere. He pressed one hand against his side to find the wound fully healed. His shoulder felt fine, too. “How long was I out?”

“Only an hour or so. It’s around midnight.”

“Did the cops take the guy?”

“Yup. All cocooned up in webs like a little Spider-burrito.”

Peter relaxed his head back against the pillow and let his gaze wander around the room. He spotted his Spider-Man suit carefully draped over a chair nearby. Tony hummed softly under his breath as he checked Peter’s vitals.

He felt… he could only describe it as ‘weird’. All of this was something he’d never had before. A home where he didn’t need to hide Spider-Man, didn’t need to lock himself in the bathroom to try and stop the bleeding before anyone noticed. It was such a relief to know that Tony was right there, that everything was going to be okay, that he didn’t need to worry, and it was horrible and Peter hated it and he just wanted Tony to leave.

Pepper came in, too, and squeezed his shoulder. “We made you something today,” she said, and showed him a blue folder with an elastic band. “That’s the file on me and Tony. Our whole story, since childhood. We even put some embarrassing details in there. You can read everything about us.”

“I don’t care,” Peter said, turning his head away. “I hate all of you and I hate living here and I don’t care.”

“I’ll leave it here on your nightstand anyway,” she said.

-

His seventh escape attempt was perfect because it wasn’t even planned. Which meant Tony and Pepper had no way to predict where he was going.

They had driven down to Manhattan; all four of them out and about like a nice, fake little family. Pepper had just bought them all ice cream at a fancy parlor and they sat down at the back of the terrace. Morgan was playing with another girl by the ice-cream-cone-shaped slide, leaving Peter behind to deal with the small talk from Pepper and Tony.

And then, across a crowded room, he saw his way out. A bus, parked right by the entrance of the ice cream parlor, destination ‘Philadelphia’ displayed on the sign. The bus driver was outside, grunting as she tried to help a tourist lift an overly large suitcase into the luggage compartment.

“Going to the bathroom,” Peter announced, keeping his voice as casual as possible, and he left the table. He wasted no time; walked past the bathrooms straight out the front door, swiftly dumped his ice cream cone and his phone into the nearest trash can and snuck on board.

-

And now here he is. In the back, by the window. Headphones plugged in; hood pulled forward to hide his eyes. He is not part of anyone’s world, he is invisible, doesn’t exist, nobody better fucking bother him.

But, because the universe loves to spite him, someone chooses this moment to tug at his sweater, and tug again, so Peter turns. He turns, and his stomach does a somersault. Because it’s Morgan sitting next to him, her legs dangling as she beams a wide smile.

“Are we there yet?” she asks brightly.

Peter shoots up in his chair and yanks his headphones off. “Jesus – Fuck!”

A middle-aged man across the aisle shoots him a scandalized look. Peter doesn’t even have the presence of mind to respond with a withering glare. “Morgan, you— How did you even—”

“Why did you throw away your ice cream?” she asks with a frown. “Did you not like it? You should have given it to me.”

“You weren’t supposed to follow me!”

“Where are we going?”

Heart skipping into overdrive, Peter clasps one hand around Morgan’s wrist and presses his other hand against the window, frantically looking for a landmark, a street name, a building he knows. He has no idea in what part of New York they are, and he has no idea what time it is, and this is so, so bad.

“C’mon,” he climbs past Morgan into the aisle and then tugs her along to reach the front of the bus. “Excuse me? Ma’am?”

“Huh?” The driver says without taking her eyes off the road.

“We. We got on the wrong bus. Could you pull over?”

She spares a cursory glance in his direction, eyebrows dipped into a frown. But then she spots Morgan and her forehead smoothens out. “Sure thing, honey,” she says. “You two all alone? Will you find your way back?”

“Yes. No. We’re fine. I’ll call my… my parents.”

But he has no phone, he realizes moments later as he stands on the sidewalk with Morgan’s hand still firmly tucked in his. She doesn’t have a phone either.

Okay. Okay.

They just need to get on the next bus in the opposite direction and get off at the same stop and dig through that damn trashcan until he finds his phone except — Shit, fuck, he doesn’t even know what bus stop that was, doesn’t remember the name of that park or that ice cream place they went to. No phone, no keys, no wallet, no Spider-Man suit.

He could ask someone to borrow their phone, but he wouldn’t know what number to dial. “Morgan. Shit. Do you know your mom or dad’s phone number?”

“No,” she says, and her bottom lip instantly starts quivering. “Are we lost?”

“No, Mo-Mo, we’re fine,” he quickly assures her, despite his own heart beating out of his chest. No – no, no, no. Pepper and Tony must be out of their mind with worry. They are going to be furious. Oh god, they might actually kick him out of the house.

Wait.

Where did that thought come from?

“Okay. We’re gonna cross the street, Mo-Mo. Keep holding my hand.” He’ll just take this clusterfuck one small step at a time. Do: focus on getting back to downtown New York. Don’t: go into a full-blown panic attack.

“Sir?” he asks a passerby. “Can you, could you help me? What’s the quickest way from here to Manhattan?”

The guy takes out his phone and swipes and pokes and then shows Peter a few options, but Peter is too panicked to really take them in. “Okay. Okay. The bus. Thank you, thank you sir. Come on, Mo-Mo.”

“Where are we goooing?”

“Home,” he snaps.

They wait by the bus stop. Morgan yammers on about nonsensical stuff until Peter’s nerves are about fried. So when the bus finally pulls up, Peter has zero patience left to deal with the goddamn fuckity fucking rules of this shit fuck asshole bus.

“C’mon, man, we just wanna get home!”

“Sorry, kid,” the driver says. “Can’t let you on without a ticket. Rules is rules.”

Peter clamps his hands over Morgan’s ears. “You’re a fucking dick, you know that?”

He storms off, tugging Morgan along. Panic and dread pool in the pit of his stomach, as he frantically tries to go over his options only to realize he has zero. What’s he gonna do, walk? It must be at least twenty miles to Manhattan, and even further to get to the Avengers compound.

“I’m tired!” Morgan complains, dragging her feet.

Yeah, walking is definitely off the table.

…and then he spots a police car parked nearby. The cop has her window rolled down and is writing something down in her notebook.

Peter rushes closer. “Ma’am,” he says. “Please, can you help us?”

-

Tony and Pepper are in the doorway of the compound when the police car pulls up. Even from a distance, Tony looks white as a sheet and Pepper’s unblinking gaze is frankly terrifying. At least three different Avengers are peeking through the curtains from different windows.

Peter finally got his dramatic moment.

“There’s mommy and daddy!” Morgan calls out, waving enthusiastically. She throws the car door open as soon as the car stops. The police woman gets out too and briskly steps up to them, shaking hands.

Peter pushes the door open on his side and approaches as slowly as possible, lead in his shoes and even more lead in his stomach.

“Thank you so much,” he hears Pepper tell the cop, who then promptly marches back to her car. She gives Peter a single tap on the shoulder as she passes him.

Peter stops in front of his foster parents and ventures a glance up. Tony is staring down at him, his mouth a thin angry line, every inch of him trembling. “Go. to. your. room,” he manages. “Wait for us there.”

Peter wants to draw himself up and sneer but instead, to his horror, his face crumples. “She f-followed me. I’m so sorry, Tony, I’m so sorry,” he manages. “I didn’t see-- I swear, I didn’t notice her until--“

Tony’s face relaxes marginally. “Go to your room,” he repeats. “Wait for us there.”

-

Minutes feel like hours as he curls up on his bed and hugs his pillow, trying to will away the feelings that are brewing dangerously close to the surface. A cocktail of frustration, panic and a strange sense of loss, sloshing through his belly.

He has been through a dozen foster homes. His previous record for running away was four times. Four times before even the most patient of foster parents filed for ‘relocation’.

Tony and Pepper made it to seven.

Tony and Pepper made it to seven, and his dad doesn’t even send him birthday cards. There’s something not quite right about that.

His mattress dips and a hand finds its way to his back. “All right, kiddo,” comes Tony’s voice. “Take a breath. We’re going to talk it out, yeah? But take a breath first.”

Peter wants to yell at him that he’s breathing absolutely perfectly fine, but he just starts crying instead. Really ugly cries, with stuttering breaths. It’s incredibly humiliating and he doesn’t care. He must have run away a hundred times by now. He suddenly isn’t so sure anymore what point he was even trying to prove. He doesn’t want to do this anymore. He feels scrubbed raw inside, and Tony’s steady hand on his back is like a soothing balm.

“You’re okay, kiddo,” Tony repeats over and over. He doesn’t say anything else, he doesn’t ask questions. He keeps rubbing slow circles on Peter’s back, until Peter can breathe without feeling that stabbing pain in his chest.

He turns his head to take a quick peek at Tony’s face. The man still looks pale, but not so angry anymore. And he gives a smile when he catches Peter’s eye.

“You’re okay, Pete. We’re happy to have you home again. Come here.” He tugs Peter closer, against his chest. And his arms settle around Peter just right; everything fits. He slowly rocks Peter back and forth. “Morgan really scared the crap out of you, didn’t she?”

“Yea-a-ah,” Peter blubbers.

“It’s one of her many talents. Sorry kid, we should have watched her better. She doesn’t usually run off like that. I guess she just really likes hanging out with you. She already gave her version of the story. Can you tell me what happened?”

Peter tries, stumbling and stuttering, and he doesn’t even understand why he cares so much which makes everything worse. Don’t leave me, he thinks, which is a really stupid and childish and embarrassing thought, but it makes him cling to Tony’s sweater even tighter.

“I’m proud of you buddy,” Tony says. “It sounds like you dealt with the situation as well as you could.”

Which just makes Peter cry all over again. Because everything is unfair and he’s furious and miserable and relieved and he doesn’t understand why they haven’t given up yet.

A hand settles on the nape of his neck and squeezes reassuringly. “And the worst part is your devilish little sister is already happily chomping on her lasagna without a care in the world. No inkling of guilt in that one. She gets it from her mother.”

“From- from you,” Peter hiccups. “You didn’t even c-care when you b-broke your neighbor’s mountain bike.”

“Ah,” Tony says. “Sounds like you’ve read my file.”

Peter wipes his face with his sleeve and heaves in a deep breath. “What are you gon-gonna do now?”

“Hmm,” Tony taps his fingers against Peter’s shoulder as he ponders the question. “I think I’m going to heat up some lasagna for you as well, and then maybe finally put on E.T. How does that sound?”

They aren’t kicking him out, then. Or maybe they’re planning to do it after the movie, but that seems like a level of cruelty Peter wouldn’t expect from Pepper and Tony, not anymore. “Are you ever going to give up?”

“Never,” Tony says. “You can run away a thousand times, we will come find you a thousand times.”

“You won’t really. You’re just saying that.”

“Try us.”

“You chose me because I’m Spider-Man. Don’t pretend that isn’t true.”

“That’s true,” Tony says. “Pepper and I wanted to foster. We looked for a kid who would fit. Yes, we chose you because you’re Spider-Man. Not because we wanted Spider-Man in our family, but because we thought our family would be the best possible home for a kid with enhanced powers. Much like a— a foster parent who knows sign language might offer to foster a child who is deaf. Because they have something to offer that most other families probably don’t.”

That does make sense, but Peter doesn’t want it to make sense. “That’s stupid,” he says. “And I’m still gonna run away.”

“Seems we have an interesting few years ahead, then. Do you think we’ll actually make it to a thousand?”

Peter sniffs stubbornly. “Probably.”

“Okay,” Tony says. “E.T.?”

“Yeah. E.T.”

-

He has a restless night. Tony had hugged him and then Pepper had hugged him and they had let him eat his lasagna on the couch while watching E.T., even though they were usually really particular about eating at the table.

So it seems like everything is all right. But there is still a little spot right in the middle of his stomach that feels off. A tiny black hole of guilt.

He slips out of bed around 6 AM and makes his way down to the kitchen. He has a plan. It’s really stupid and he’s already embarrassed about it. He doesn’t even really know his way around this kitchen. But it’s the only idea he has.

He makes tea and coffee and fresh fruit smoothies. He boils eggs, and sets out plates, and cuts cucumbers into thin slices like Pepper always does.

He puts the final touches to his apology-breakfast by clumsily writing SORRY on a post-it note and leaving it right in the centre.

Of course he timed it all horribly. It will be at least another fifteen minutes before anyone else comes down. So he faceplants on the couch and sends MJ about fifty messages before she returns with a cranky I was asleep how do I press snooze on you.

Footsteps approach the kitchen. Peter doesn’t really register them, but he tucks his phone away behind a pillow when he hears Pepper’s voice.

“Oh,” Pepper says. “Oh. Already, so soon? All right. All right, FRIDAY, wake Tony up.”

Something about her tone is off, and Peter pushes himself info a seated position. “Pep?”

She whirls around, the post-it note clenched in her hand. It seems like she needs a few seconds to understand what she’s seeing. Then, her shoulders slump. She glances down at the word SORRY on the note, then back up at him. “I thought you had run away again.”

“Oh.” Peter says, ducking his head. “No. I’m not running away. I’m not ever leaving here unless you kick me out or move away and leave me behind. So.”

She takes a seat right next to him and pulls him into a soft hug, the note crumpled up in her hand. “Welcome home, sweetheart,” she says. “Welcome home.”

The coffee is lukewarm and the slices of cucumber have dried out by the time everyone gets downstairs for breakfast. But Tony hugs him too, and says it’s the most amazing thing he has ever seen. It’s clear from the look in his eyes that he actually means it.

Tony and Pepper are such dorks, it’s kinda adorable.

They make plans for the day. Popsicles and Lego towers and swimming after lunch. “Do you have swimming trunks?” Pepper asks him.

“Yeah, I think so.”

He makes his way upstairs, still nibbling on an orange slice. He lingers in the doorway for a while, glancing around his bedroom. He should hang a poster next to that window. And put his books over there by his desk. And if he’s moving his books and grabbing his swimming trunks he might as well, he might as well, yeah…

Yeah.

For the first time in almost three years, he is going to unpack his suitcase.