You know that feeling when everything goes according to plan?
Exactly the way you intended?
Peter did not.
And apparently, he never would.
The basic problem was this: Peter really, really wanted perfect grades because he planned to attend a good university.
MIT, for example.
The complication was that, to achieve those wonderful grades, he had to turn everything in on time, avoid missing classes, and stop being late.
And that could be so damn hard.
Especially when you were a superhero.
He managed deadlines more or less successfully.
The last two requirements of the ‘perfect student,’ however, refused to cooperate.
Punctuality simply did not like him.
What was he supposed to do about that?
Which led to another consequence: to make up for all his absences and late arrivals, Peter had to do an absurd amount of extra work.
He could no longer remember the last time he had gone home with the same amount of homework as Ned.
He had nearly accepted it by now.
He had adapted and learned to organize his insane life so that everything still got done.
And it worked.
He even had time left over to live a little for himself.
Peter considered that ability another reason to be proud.
Then everything went wrong.
It was not entirely his fault, you know.
So, what happened?
It began on Sunday.
They returned safely from Wakanda, MJ went home, and Peter and Tony planned to crawl into the laboratory and examine some schematics Shuri had shared.
Everything was perfectly scheduled: they would spend a couple of hours there, eat, Peter would have four more hours for homework, then a two-hour patrol, and bed at eleven.
An ideal timetable.
It fit beautifully into his life.
They never even reached the lab.
They were standing in the lobby talking to Anna when F.R.I.D.A.Y.
announced that she had detected an Avengers-level threat on the other side of the city.
Everything had to be dropped.
Peter, Tony, and Rhodey—the only heroes currently in the Tower—flew out to deal with it.
As it turned out, the threat had not been designed for three people.
It was more of a twenty-person problem.
Peter never fully understood what was happening.
There were explosions, murderous dolls, and the person behind the entire disaster was almost impossible to locate because he used some strange sound waves to block most of F.R.I.D.A.Y.’s capabilities.
None of that mattered.
What mattered was that Peter did not return home until around eight in the evening.
He might still have completed something if not for one slight complication: he was unconscious.
He woke close to midnight.
His injuries had already healed, but his head hurt so badly that he simply went to bed.
As a result, Monday’s overdue work rolled over into Tuesday and joined everything already due then.
Which was fine.
Peter sadly accepted that there would be no laboratory time that day, but at least he would catch up on everything.
That did not work out either.
Tony was at some meeting with Rhodey, and the Avengers still had not returned to the Tower.
So when terrorists took hostages in a bank just as Peter was writing his biology report, homework had to be suspended.
Seriously, people?
Could you not have scheduled the hostage situation for around nine?
He handled it in only an hour and was ready to return to biology, but then discovered that he had been shot during the crossfire.
To be honest, he had not noticed at first.
So there was a bullet in his leg.
These things happened.
By the time he was approaching the Tower, however, it became clear that the bullet had apparently hit an artery and that he was now quite literally dying from blood loss.
Oh, come on.
Helen patched him up, injected painkillers, and—much to Peter’s annoyance—he blacked out.
For three hours.
By the time he got up, it was already nine, and Tony saw a child with a bullet wound in his leg and massive blood loss, whose world was spinning only slightly at a terrifying speed, attempting to reach his homework.
Tony ordered him to lie down and not move.
Then he gave him another dose of painkillers that knocked Peter out completely.
Not that Peter was particularly opposed.
So when he arrived at school on Tuesday with only half of Monday’s overdue assignments and none of Tuesday’s, his teachers had questions.
As a bonus, they gave him another assignment.
Now he had to finish the rest of Monday’s work, all of Tuesday’s, the additional punishment assignment ‘for being slow,’ and everything due Wednesday.
Peter was willing to admit the situation had escaped his control a little.
He nearly screamed when they got caught in traffic on the way to the Tower and remained there for two hours.
It was already three.
He had only eight hours to finish everything if he wanted any sleep, and the entire universe seemed to be conspiring against him.
Actually, not eight.
First, he had to eat.
Second, the final two hours had to be spent on patrol.
He had promised the police he would provide backup in case a criminal escaped.
In six hours Peter finished Monday’s assignments and half of Tuesday’s.
And it was only the beginning of the week.
God.
*** By Friday, Peter had fallen into complete despair.
When he returned from school, he went straight to his room and laid out everything he still had to do.
From that moment on, the only way to move around was across the ceiling.
Five extra assignments, half of Tuesday’s work, all of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, plus the following Monday—and according to his calculations, completing all of it would take fifty-two hours.
A day had only twenty-four.
Technically, if he started immediately, he might even manage to sleep.
On Sunday night.
Where had he hidden his supply of energy drinks?
By Friday evening, Peter’s eye was twitching.
Normally he had far greater endurance when it came to studying, but honestly, if he saw one more system of equations involving those foul-word logarithms, he was going to hang himself.
F.R.I.D.A.Y., sounding almost sympathetic, asked whether he wanted to go downstairs and join the Avengers, who had finally returned.
Peter did want to.
But no.
Damn it, he was not interacting with a single human being until he finished those three blank maps.
He finally came downstairs three hours later.
Instead of greeting anyone with hugs, he merely gave a weak nod and walked into the kitchen while ignoring everyone and everything.
Where had he hidden the coffee?
Tony—and probably everyone else in the room—watched with mounting concern as Peter calmly made himself a gigantic cup using six spoonfuls of coffee.
Tony’s record was four.
Whatever was happening to Peter was definitely not normal.
“Kid, are you all right?” Peter did not answer.
He only exhaled wearily, reached into a cabinet, took out an energy drink, and poured it into the coffee with complete composure.
Tony recoiled slightly.
He was not certain, but he was fairly sure that mixture was at least mildly fatal.
Peter swept his dead-eyed gaze over their faces, took a pointed sip, and started back toward his room.
He stopped only beside Steve.
“Why are you always so lucky?” “What are you talking about?” Steve asked, genuinely confused.
“I want to sleep in ice for seventy years too.” Peter left the room, leaving behind approximately a million questions.
Tony was genuinely frightened.
He needed F.R.I.D.A.Y.
to alert him if the child became ill from the explosive mixture he had just consumed.
*** The next morning, Tony sincerely hoped Peter was all right.
Those hopes died when he found the child sitting on the ceiling in the middle of his room, textbook in hand and enormous dark circles beneath his eyes.
“Did you sleep?” “Sleep is like a tiny coma,” Peter muttered with a half-crazed expression, never looking away from the textbook.
“I refuse to let some ball of fire control my life.” Tony opened his mouth to ask another question, but Peter dropped from the ceiling, still reading, stole another can of energy drink and a box of cereal from the kitchen, and left.
Tony prayed he would not mix them.
At this point, nothing could be assumed.
Tony’s second encounter with Peter was even more frightening, though he understood he had brought it upon himself.
The child had not left his room for eight hours, and somebody had to confirm he was still alive.
Tony had once believed his laboratory was messy.
After seeing Peter’s room, he was no longer certain.
The floor had disappeared entirely.
Peter paced in circles across the walls and ceiling, writing with one hand while turning textbook pages with the other.
“What is happening?” “I’m studying,” Peter muttered quietly, not dignifying Tony with his attention as he continued writing.
“Twenty-three hours so far.
Only twenty-nine left.” Tony hurried out because this version of Peter terrified him.
The five empty energy-drink cans, the dent in the wall, and the fact that his child was running across the walls with a deranged expression did not help.
He should ask Pepper to talk to him.
Pepper suffered a devastating defeat.
She returned from Peter’s room shocked and horrified.
“He asked whether he was dead.
And when I asked why he thought that, Peter said only the seventh circle of Hell could involve solving logarithms.” Honestly, neither of them knew what to do.
Their only remaining hope was that, as Peter had said, it would all end in twenty-nine hours.
Peter frightened more than Tony and Pepper.
He frightened the entire Avengers team.
Natasha and Wanda approached Tony cautiously to ask whether it was normal for Peter to crawl past them along the wall while muttering about theorems and how he had never been closer to death than he was now.
Under ordinary circumstances, Stark would have agreed.
At the moment, he was no longer sure.
Sam and Bruce joined the list of people terrified by Peter after cautiously trying to determine what he meant when he dropped onto them from the ceiling and asked about ‘real plastic dinosaurs.’ He did not wait for an answer and simply crawled away again.
Tony could have sworn all of this would have been hilarious if Peter’s condition were not so alarming.
God, please let him come out of this with his sanity intact.
The next day, Tony made another cautious attempt to pull Peter out of the abyss.
The room looked better.
Much of what had covered the floor the day before had been arranged into a large stack in the center, though Peter was still on the ceiling.
“Hey, kiddo.
Are you ready to interact with society?” An indistinct grumble came from above.
Then Peter lowered himself on a web, hanging upside down, and looked thoughtfully into Tony’s eyes.
“Tony, this is important.” Peter bit his lip slightly, as though working up the courage to ask.
“If I jump on the ceiling, which way will gravity pull me?” “Right.
I’ll come back later.” Tony tried not to run for the exit.
Even if he had, Peter probably would not have noticed.
He simply returned to the ceiling and continued writing in his notebook.
Peter appeared two hours before his predicted deadline, finally walking on the floor.
He looked exhausted despite the several cans of energy drink he had consumed over the last two days.
The child collapsed onto the couch, pulled Charlie close, and gave a weary sigh.
Pepper and Tony exchanged anxious looks, hoping this was truly the end.
“How are you?” “Like I haven’t slept in two days,” Peter muttered painfully, though he smiled.
“I’m waiting for the random urge to run across the ceiling to pass, and then I’m going to sleep.
At least I learned that energy drinks make me a little insane.
My brain has too much energy and tries to use it all by generating horrifyingly strange questions.
But I finished everything.
I had to run across the walls to calm myself down, though.” Pepper smiled and offered to escort Peter to bed.
Little spiders had been awake far too long.
*** The next morning, Tony met Peter in the kitchen and was delighted to see that the child looked considerably more alive.
Good.
Peter smiled and waved with one hand.
With the other, he was mixing cereal with—thank God—milk.
“Tony, why do they sterilize the needles used for lethal injections?” “Pepper, he’s doing it again!” Tony flinched away from the question.
Had it started all over?
“Oh, relax.
I was joking.” Peter smirked as he watched Tony’s reaction.
The little menace.