#it's been such a pleasure to see so many iterations and interpretations of the character by so many POWERHOUSE actresses over the years

[esmes]

try as i might, i simply CANNOT stop thinking about annaleigh's mrs lovett so i need to just get this out of my system!!!

nellie lovett is a patient woman, in an overarching sense. there's ample evidence for this. in spite of hard times, she holds onto sweeney/benjamin's razors for 15 (!!!) years, all on the off chance he may someday return and have need of them again. she could've used the money, but she waited and waited. then, one day, she is rewarded for her patience. the man she held a torch for returns to her.

nellie lovett remains patient, chiding and reassuring sweeney when he is in the grips of a maddening impatience to get at the judge. she is patient with the way he is sometimes so far away, thinking of another woman even when his hands are on nellie's own form. she is patient with the way he brushes her off. she is patient with the way he sometimes looks at her like he wishes she was someone else - not always, though, because when they are plotting together she can tell it's really her he's seeing. she is patient, because there is good mixed in with the bad, and her patience has been rewarded. surely it will be again, right?

one of my favorite acting moments for annaleigh comes after the end of 'by the sea', when nellie and sweeney are ensconced on the couch and she has gotten him to concede that he loves her ("just a little bit?" uttered so quietly, so heartbreakingly unsure.) when his answer comes - "of course" - she is monstrously relieved.

sweeney is present with her just for a moment before slipping away again into his fantasy of revenge. so nellie takes his face - forcing him to look at her, hoping he will also SEE her, and finally, we see some impatience from her. after decades of not knowing, and now with her dream of a cobbled-together little family within reach, we see her beseeching him to be here, now, with her. your nellie, she says. for a moment, it seems as though he is finally ready to surrender, to commit to this life with her. they nuzzle noses and lean into the softest expression of affection we've seen from them yet. and then the moment is ripped away from them.

nellie lovett is a patient woman, and her dreams are just out of reach when she dies. even as she dances closer to her end, certain of what's to come, she desperately tries to recall her dream of the sea, to beseech him to come back to that moment on the couch with her. back to the moment when he almost surrendered.

so much of annaleigh's performance hinges on her portrayal of nellie lovett as this "bubbling bubbling pot of magic" (her own words). nellie is unflappable, optimistic, determined. she doggedly sees opportunity (and humor!) in everything. she is undeterred by sweeney's moments of indifference and callousness. there are MANY moments in which annaleigh's lovett shines, but never more so, imo, than in that moment on the couch. it makes me ACHE just to think of it. it's one of the only times we get a glimpse behind the curtain, a peek into the heart of a woman who simply cannot let go and who is going to her grave for it.

#sweeney todd #sweeney todd 2023 #2023 revival #mrs lovett #honestly... one of THEE characters of my heart #it's been such a pleasure to see so many iterations and interpretations of the character by so many POWERHOUSE actresses over the years #annaleigh's has cemented itself as one of my favorites tho #she's just.. :c #im lov her ur honor #anyway thought vomit complete! #mt

[kitcat992]

│Identity Saga │Narrative Discourse (The Breakthrough to “Dad”)

Identity Saga

It's no hidden secret that the underlying themes of the Identity Saga have been found family focused, with the heart and core revolving around the developing relationship between Tony Stark and Peter Parker.

Throughout the multitude of narrative threads woven into each installment, those two characters have always been the soul of the series; each chapter igniting the flame of their slow burn father&son relationship a little brighter than before. Though some will find it strange to call a platonic relationship 'slow burn', I find that as a society, we talk about romantic love far more than we do family love. And that's always been a damn shame, in my opinion. The love we can find in one another outside of romance is highly neglected, and my love for found family will never cease, especially in my written works.

As recapped in the "Steps to Son" Narrative Discourse for Tony, it took an abundance of time, patience, and many accumulating events for him to realize what Peter meant in his life, and further accepting that role Peter played. No different, Peter went through the same journey in Identity Crisis — resisting the idea of Tony taking on the role Ben once played in his life, but slowly coming to terms with it, and eventually finding peace and content in the path they both found themselves on.

The MCU had a chance at giving us a new interpretation, and a new iteration of Peter Parker. If you're a comic book reader, you'll know that there's no one Peter Parker that exists. There's many versions; some better than others, some more remembered than most. Some old, some young, some even set in space. But fanboys complained, whined, and screamed that he was "Iron Man Jr", and instead of taking that by the reins and steering into the skid, the MCU backtracked so quickly and so hastily that they literally erased every bit of existence Tony Stark had in Peter's life (I know, it's painful to talk about No Way Home. So let's not. Let's not talk about it at all.)

It's been a goal of mine to do what the MCU should've done — steer into the skid. There's always going to be iterations where Ben Parker is Peter's one and only father figure, long gone and deceased, but his memory living on forever. I think that's unfair to Peter. I've always felt he deserves a support system — it doesn't erase the support system he had with Ben, it just pushes him forward in life to be a better person, grow into the man he's supposed to become, and be the hero he's always been destined to be.

Getting Peter to this moment with Tony has been a pleasure to write. The only thing I look forward to writing more than the last two stories is now reaching the final installment, where we'll get to see Peter truly grow into his own shoes, led by the heroes who supported him along the way. The MCU didn't want to steer into the skid, afraid of the title "Iron Man Jr", and even mocking it in No Way Home (okay done talking about it, really, I promise.) My pleasure will be taking that joke and turning it into something truly memorable. You can have a hero born under the shadows of another, but that doesn't make them lesser in any way.

And thanks to the journey Peter's taken in Identity Crisis — seeing Tony as a father figure and not someone to "be better than", that narrative will be all the more satisfying to unfold.

Until then, here's the journey that got us there.

Identity Theft│ Chapter 6: Breakfast at Tony’s

The heat in his bite was enough to silence the room. Slowly, Sam sat back down in his seat; though the way he crossed his arms over his chest showed signs he wasn't ready to just forgive and forget yet.

“My intent was never malicious with Peter." Tony sighed, rubbing harshly at the nape of his neck. "He’s just a boy trying to keep his family and friends safe and honestly, can you be angry with that? None of you can look me in the eye and say you wouldn’t want the same thing." Tony noticeably turned to Clint. "Hell, Barton, your entire family is a secret from the world.”

Clint shrugged, not making an attempt to dispute the fact.

Tony continued on, “I respected his request and followed through with it. So if you have anyone to be mad at, it’s me — but it’d be pretty damn stupid to stay mad over something like this. We have bigger fish to fry.”

Rhodey looked between him and Peter, raising an eyebrow with curiosity.

“You trust him then?” he asked.

It was easy for Rhodey to tell when Tony was bullshitting. They had been friends for a long time, way before Iron Man, long before Afghanistan — there was a foundation between them that couldn’t be rattled. His entire life changed along with Tony’s, somehow joining him in the crazy ride of War Machine, the brief blip of Iron Patriot, and ultimately landing with the Avengers.

So when Tony nodded, he wholeheartedly believed him.

“I do,” Tony said, flapping a hand in Peter's general vicinity. “He’s good. He’s better than good, he’s great.”

Nobody missed how Peter looked up at hearing those words, his eyes sparkling with a sense of pride that made him grin ear-to-ear. For a moment, Tony looked nowhere else but at that. A shadow of a grin washed across his own face, something that not one person in the room didn’t notice.

The exchange was brief, but unique, giving Tony a different light to him; a humility that bounced off him no different than the skylights from above.

Identity Theft│ Chapter 7: New Kid on the Block

Tony pounded on the kid's back as he coughed dirty river water onto the ground with each action, his inhales wet and rickety.

“Breathe, kid, breathe…” he calmly instructed him, obviously not wavered by the thumbs up that Peter insisted on giving, not until his coughs dissipate and his breaths were less shaky.

Peter took a deep inhale, this time clean and dry. He watched in front of him as Sam contained the much smaller rock creature, and he laughed with amazement.

“Holy crap, he’s so small now! That’s just…” Peter grinned ear-to-ear. “That was so awesome! Way more awesome than the Android, which is still so awesome. Holy crap, that was —”

Peter stopped mid-sentence as Tony removed his Iron Man mask, exposing much less happy features than what he was experiencing.

Oh crap. He was in trouble — he had to be in trouble - he must have screwed up and now they were angry with him, again — angry again. Heart plummeting to the sopping wet soles of his feet, Peter gulped hard enough to shake his throat.

“Mr. Stark, I —”

His apology was cut short when Tony laid a hand on his shoulder, sighing with relief.

“You did good, kid,” he said. “You scared the devil out of me, but you did real good.”

Peter grinned, possibly wider than before. Mr. Stark wasn’t angry — no, he seemed almost…proud. And though it wasn’t much, barely a twitch of his lips, he could tell Tony was also smiling.

He did good.

Peter nodded in thanks, wiping away the dirty water from his mouth. He did good.

Those few words were the best he had heard in a long time, feeling a sense of pride in himself that he hadn’t felt in months. Suddenly, all the overlapping failures washed away — the Daily Bugle's headlines didn't mean squat to him. Not with the approval he'd just received.

Tony must have noticed his happiness, because he went from having his hand on him to wrapping his entire arm around his shoulder with a tight squeeze.

Peter relished in it.

Identity Theft│ Chapter 8: Afterparty

While everyone chatted about, Tony had locked eyes on Peter, all the way from across the couches — and even as Peter struggled to speak, he could see that. Orange-tinted sunglasses slipped down his nose and he met Peter's gaze head-on. Latching onto his eyes like a moth to the flame.

It was weird. In that moment, Peter swore Mr. Stark could hear his thoughts. He swore his own voice echoed between them — “I’d rather just stay on the ground…for a little while.”

Whether that same thought bounced back to Tony, Peter would never know. But the look in his eyes didn't go unnoticed — and neither did the sound of him clearing his throat, so loud the others stopped talking.

“I think we can arrange a PRN agreement," he settled on saying, offering Peter a tight lipped smile. "Called in when necessary or needed. Sound good?”

So good. Peter could feel his shoulders slump with relief.

“Yeah. I like the sound of that. Just…" Peter nodded, his grin pulling at his lips. "Just when needed.”

Tony's grin matched his.

It was a weird feeling — a unique feeling. Peter loved May, loved home and Queens and his friends and school. He loved it so much he wanted to keep going back to it, to have a life as both Peter Parker and Spider-Man. But to have a chance at fighting side-by-side with the Avengers again? That was a feeling he couldn't put to words.

It felt right, sitting with everyone — his people, his kind. Peter felt the most at ease he'd ever felt before.

“I keep the new suit until you're full time though," Tony stated, taking a seat next to Bruce and crossing a leg over the other.

Peter rolled his eyes. “You can keep it if it still has the Baby Monitor Protocol.”

Tony smirked. “Kid, when I’m dead and in my grave, you’ll still have that protocol.”

“That’s not fair!” Peter threw his head back onto the sofa's headrest, leaving a wet stain where his damp hair plastered against the cushion. "C'mon, Mr. Stark!"

“Wha—what’s that?” Bruce asked, his confusion evident. "Baby...baby —?"

“Baby monitor?” Clint finished for him, wagging his beer bottle in Tony's direction. “Tell me that’s quirky name and not what I think it is.”

Tony grabbed a cracker off the tray next to Clint's feet, purposefully shoving the archer's boot aside when he did.

“A program designed as a safety, security feature that’s embedded in his suit, recording everything he does, monitors his vitals, reports any abnormalities, and god forbid he screws the pooch, gets in touch directly with moi?” Tony paused for dramatic effect. “Yeah, no, that’s exactly what it is.”

“Unnecessary is what it is,” Peter mumbled under his breath.

Tony’s whipped his head towards him. “Want to say that again?”

A beat of silence passed.

Peter shook his head with a smirk. “No.”

Tony let out a mix of a huff and chuckle, picking up a toothpick covered with cheese squares and tossing it his way. “You’re such a little shit, Parker."

Peter didn’t have to look up to catch the finger food — his hand raised with quick and accurate speed.

Once in his palms, he took a bite and smiled.

Identity Theft│ Chapter 12: The Doctor Is In

“What do you need me for then?” Peter sneered right back at him. “You told everyone I’m dead, but why? What’s your endgame here, Mysterio?”

The man was a leaking pool of knowledge, already having told him so much. And probably not even realizing it. Had it not been for the other occupant interrupting their conservation, Peter was sure he would have gotten more information from the moron.

And yet,

“Klum," the voice was deep and snarly, and so, so thick in its Russian accent. "Use your stuff to quiet him. Now.”

Mysterio smiled, so wide that his yellow-tinged teeth could be seen. Peter’s stoicism rapidly degenerated, watching as the magician crossed the room; gathering in his arms an oxygen tank and mask attached to it.

Peter tried to keep the determination on his face. He wouldn't deny that this time, it faltered.

“You won’t get away with this,” Peter insisted, fighting against his restraints one pull at a time. “They’ll find out.”

Mysterio squatted down in one fell swoop, his cape tangling in his legs as he lowered himself to the ground. One hand grabbed at the back of Peter's head, clutching a handful of his hair tightly along the way.

“Don’t touch me — get off!” Peter fought against him, his hips buckling as his arms stayed firmly restrained against the wall.

The oxygen mask was strapped around his face quickly and swiftly, elastic straps the only thing holding it in place. But with his arms trapped beneath the metal forcing him to the wall, and his hands locked down at his sides, he had no way of ridding the offending device — no matter how hard he swung his neck back and forth.

Peter heard the hissing before he felt the gas. It poured out from the tank sitting next to him, sizzling like a balloon losing its air. He shot his head over to his side, his eyes growing wide with panic. The tank was big. Because — just his luck — of course it would be

He wished he hadn’t looked back up. Mysterio grinned — large and wide, with a low chuckle that sent goosebumps across his skin. Still not brought on by the chill of the cold room.

When the cold air hit his face, Peter began to feel sick almost immediately. The gas was sweet — nauseating, pouring through the mask, flowing against his mouth and nose. By instinct he held his breath, refusing to breathe until his face went red. He only managed to spare a few minutes, at most, before his body betrayed him. The inhale rattled his whole body. 

Almost instantly his head floated away from him, with his stomach rolling in waves.

“Mr. Stark will…find…me.”

Peter lost the fight in keeping his eyes open, his head slowly tilting forward until his chin met with his chest. His body slumped forward, held only by the strong metal that wrapped around his biceps. And the world around him dissolved into wisps of fog.

Identity Theft│ Chapter 17: Grace Under Pressure

That’s when Peter leaned into his touch. His eyes fluttered open at a pace that didn’t seem right, the lids barely lifting past half-mast, sluggish and slow.

“...mr’...’ark…?” he slurred.

Tony swallowed hard, the lump in his throat increasing in size. He thought he’d never hear that voice again. He was so damn grateful to hear that voice again.

“In the flesh, kiddo.” With his other hand, Tony laid a gentle palm across the back of his neck, practically holding the kid’s head upright.

“...you...‘ou came?” Peter’s lids opened a little wider, the whites of his eyes bloodshot red and glistening with tears.

“You bet your ass I came.” Tony gave him a forced smile. “As soon as I could, buddy.”

Identity Theft│ Chapter 18: Homecoming

“Somebody take this!” he finally shouted, storming forward and shoving the helmet to the nearest tech. The bottles shook inside, a few almost falling to the floor had it not been for the woman’s quick reflexes.

Tony didn’t care. Everything else ceased to matter, his only focus, his only concern — he had to get to Peter. He couldn’t reach the kid fast enough, his heart racing, pounding.

“Pl-ea-ea-se, pl-ease, g-get away! S-stop!” Peter sobbed, his cries wet, hoarse, exhausted and yet purely agonized.

“Hey, hey, Peter — it’s okay.” Tony reached the gurney, standing at the top near Peter’s head, hands firm on his shoulders to lessen his thrashing movements. “Hey, Underoo’s. Same side, okay? Same side.”

Glassy, blood-shot eyes looked all around the room, frantically darting at the mayhem that surrounded him. They locked in place the moment he saw Tony.

“M-make ‘e-em stop. P-please,” Peter begged, hyperventilating and grunting with ragged breath. “Ma-ake them sto — gah-agh!”

Tony pressed a firm palm against his forehead. “They’re here to help you, kid. I promise. We’re only trying to help.”

“Administering first dose. Fifty milligrams.”

A doctor injected the contents of a full syringe directly into the IV settled in the crook of Peter’s arm. Tony watched from the corner of his eyes as colorless liquid traveled up the clear tubing. Almost immediately the kid was jerking away, three other nurses plus himself struggling to hold him down.

“Ah-ah-gah!” Peter howled, his back arching from the gurney. “It burns! I-it — it burns, pl-please stop!”

His cries were so loud that his voice began to break, weak and wrecked from screaming, the strain tearing his throat raw. Standing at the top of the gurney, Tony cupped his palms around Peter’s cheeks. His fingers gripped his chin, hands closing in around his ears in hopes that it would dim the sound of hell that encircled them.

“You’re alright.” Tony held his face tighter, repeating the words like a mantra. “You’re alright.”

Nurses pulled away at his spider-suit, his body jostling and buckling with every movement they made, yanking it down and leaving it to grip at his hips. Peter tried to look below. He lifted his head the best he could, wide eyes terrified, his forehead creased with what Tony was sure could only be unbearable agony.

Looking down with him, Tony proved himself to be right. His stomach lurched and he quickly swallowed a mouthful of vomit. It was like watching a goddamn horror movie, blood mixing together with dark scarlet and vivid red, old and fresh and too much of it.

He eyed one doctor in particular, watching as the man shoved the tip of an irrigating syringe inside the gaping wound on Peter’s side. With each push he flushed out dirt, clumps of seaweed and blood that poured onto the floor below them, repeating the process over and over. The saline never came out clear, always a twisted mixture of light pink. It spilled onto the white linoleum floors and around Tony’s shoes.

Peter convulsed with sobs, his clenched eyes dripping tears down Tony’s knuckles. The wet warmth on his hands caught his attention. Tony tried to wipe the tears away, his thumbs cupped around Peter’s cheekbones but they came too fast, too quickly.

“Pl-please, plea-se.” Peter choked on a gasp. “Pl-please —”

“Administering second dose. Another fifty milligrams.”

“Mr. Stark, you need to leave —”

“D-don’t go,” Peter begged, the back of his head hitting the bed. “Pl-please. D-don’t lea-leave me.”

“I’m here, Peter. I’m not leaving.” Tony kept his voice steady, squeezing his grip. “I’m not leaving.”

Tony kept his eyes locked on Peter, refusing to look as doctors manhandled him, shoving in tubes and creating more holes, treating broken bones, injecting medicine — he kept his eyes focused on Peter’s face and only that, saving the kid what dignity he had left.

His erratic struggles were slowing, just slightly, just enough that Tony noticed. Thrashing turned more into weak buckling, and his screams died off into pained, nasally grunts.

Peter’s eyes flickered back up to him. “Mr-Mr. St’k, help. It-it hurts. It hurts.”

“Creatinine levels rising, he’s on the verge of nephrotoxicity.”

“Give it one last chance. Push one hundred.” Helen’s voice cut through. “OR is prepped, Doctor Wu is waiting. We can’t keep stalling.”

The room tilted briefly and Tony dropped one hand from Peter’s cheek, clinging onto the mattress of the gurney to steady himself. He could hear as a doctor stated, “Administering last dose. One hundred milligrams.”

‘Jesus Christ.’ Tony closed his eyes, tendrils of panic choking him. It took one of these things to knock Cap flat on his ass. Peter was up to four. If this didn’t work...God, if this didn’t work…

“Let go, kid,” Tony begged. “You gotta let go.”

He was desperate to end this god-awful nightmare. He wasn’t even sure if he was still talking to Peter. He wasn’t sure if Peter could even hear him, not over the sound of doctors, beeping and screeching machines, not over the sound of his own cries.

Tony smoothed back his wet hair, pushing the curls away, carding his fingers through the tangled mess.

“It’s okay, Pete. You can let go,” he whispered, his voice soft under his breath. “You’re safe now. It’s okay to let go.”

Frantic jerking morphed into mild spasms. They were still strong underneath his grasp, shoulders harshly lifting off the padded gurney, but Tony noticed the difference.

Peter seemed to swallow his next groan, the sound smothered in his throat. The one after that came out as a whine, dying off before it even escaped his lips.

It was both the most beautiful and horrific thing he had ever seen when Peter’s eyes rolled back, half-lidded, whites staring back up at him. He let out one final moan, a soft whimper, and his body fell slack.

Identity Theft│ Chapter 19: When the Bad Things Happen

Tony shifted weight on his feet and grimaced. Tubes, catheters, wires — Peter was surrounded by a warehouse of medical supplies. A very baggy gown barely covered him, hanging loosely from his shoulders, more like a blanket than an act of modesty. A thin sheet covered his waist but left his one leg exposed, something Tony adamantly refused to look at because he simply did not have that kind of strength right now. The glimmer of a metal rod was enough to make his stomach churn. His face wasn’t faring much better, a tube snaking down his throat and up his nose, IV’s in his arms and even his chest.

Yet nothing bothered him nearly as much as the stillness.

Peter was always moving, always hyperactive and bouncing with an energy he couldn’t contain. Once Tony had watched the kid doze off in his workshop, and even then he was twitching restlessly. He was never sure if it was his age, the spider-bite or both combined. Whatever it was, it was Peter. Bouncing, jumping, jittery and twitching — he never sat still.

Seeing him so still, so motionless — Tony hated it. Peter looked as if he were only a shell of himself, no color to his face and no warmth to his body. Tony swallowed convulsively against the rising bile in his throat. This was too much.

He had thought that his panic developed more into a slow burn, a languid torture that he could handle. He was wrong.

Tony’s hand dropped from the bed’s plastic railing, resting uneasily on the firm mattress beneath him. He hadn’t meant for his hand to fall on Peter’s, his fingers brushing up against the IVs and wires that protruded from underneath the sheets. He also didn’t move it away.

“You’re good, kid,” Tony muttered quietly.

It wasn’t naive to say as much. Healing factor or not, the kid had the strength of a thousand warriors, strong-willed beyond his expectations. If Peter could have that kind of resolve, so could he. If that meant doing everything in his power to get him better, that was what Tony would do.

“You’re stronger than all of us put together.”

The beeping of machines filled the air, some constant and some further apart. It practically drowned out his voice, already a whisper under his breath. Protectiveness rumbled in his chest and his sight locked onto Peter, unable to look away, unable to want to look away.

His shoulders were stiff and his neck tense, and he never paid mind to his fingers slipping underneath Peter’s palm, lightly gripping his hand in a loose hold. He never paid attention as his thumb grazed back and forth over Peter’s knuckles, distantly remembering the comfort it would bring him when his mother did the same thing.

“You’re good.”

Tony didn’t notice that Helen let him stay an extra eight minutes.

He did notice that Peter’s fingers twitched under his touch.

Identity Theft│Chapter 21: Sins of the Father

Memories came back to him in chunks. He was wet at one point. Drowning. Or was that a dream? His dreams blurred together with reality, forming a nightmare he couldn’t escape from. He was never sure if he cried in those dreams or in real life.

"...'m here, sweetie, it’s okay.” He heard May’s reassurance over the piercing machinery around him, soft around his ear. “Cry all you need to, I’m right here.”

Her voice came with a nervous energy, the type of worry that made him anxious. His intuition told him that her being upset was a bad thing, that she shouldn’t be so worried about him. But he wasn’t sure what he could do to fix that.

So he drifted. It was easier that way.

Time passed in scattered moments and Peter wasn’t sure how long each separated from the other. There was a lethargic feeling in his bones, a film behind his eyelids that told him he had been sleeping for a long time, that things weren’t happening all at once. It was the only grounding thing he could feel. Everything else happened in splintered stages.

He went to swallow and the dryness caused him to cough, no saliva resting in his mouth for him to work with. Without warning, the pain he had been feeling flared up to anew. The pounding in his ears went in sync with each beat of his heart, sometimes a steady flutter, other times a frantic throbbing.

“....hh, shh, it’s okay, honey. It’s okay. Here.” Something cold rested on his tongue. At contact he sunk into the mattress of the bed, unaware of how good the wetness felt in his mouth. “There you go, baby. You’re okay.”

His vision came in fragmented pictures, too bright to make out details. The lights burned the shadows out and it felt like his eyes were lagging, like the damaged computer monitor with broken pixels that he once found from the dumpster. He’d make out one thing, one image and it’d freeze on a frame, surrounded by a blistering white light.

It was usually faces.

May. Doctor Banner. Many other people he didn’t know.

Mr. Stark.

“Easy Petey, easy.”

It was always pain that drew him back into awareness. The next time he moved, he let out of a guttural cry. The callous hand found his again, gripping it, tethering him to reality. Though the contact on his skin hurt, causing nerves to scream at the slightest pressure on bruises and broken bones, it also brought forth comfort.

“You’re safe, Underoo’s. No one’s going to hurt you, not on my watch.”

The voice penetrated any fear he had pullulating inside.

Peter painstakingly opened his eyes. His senses hadn’t let up, everything was still too bright and too harsh. But his eyes locked on the familiar picture, the familiar goatee and brown eyes staring down at him.

“You’re safe,” Tony whispered.

Something restrained him from pushing through the fog in his brain and holding onto consciousness was a feat enough. It was easy to close his eyes, let himself sink to the depths of unawareness. As long as the voice stayed present, it was easy to let go.

As long as he was there to remind him, Peter felt safe.

Identity Theft│Chapter 23: Bridge Over Troubled Water

Tony gave Peter a once over before snatching a pillow from behind his head, slipping it behind his back with an over-exaggerated grunt.

“I’m getting old, kid, and if I’m stuck here I might as well be comf—whoa!” Tony nearly jumped out of his skin when Peter tipped sideways, his body weight all but slamming into his shoulder. “Oh, jeeze, kiddo.”

He froze, mouth gaped open, his mind reeling to a halt.

Did that just…?

Tony’s eyes glanced from the nondetachable clasp he had on Peter’s hand, back up to where the kid slept against him, his head nestling into the crook of Tony’s neck, mouth slightly ajar and snoring lightly.

The brown curls tickled the bottom of his chin and Tony lifted his hand to adjust the nasal cannula around Peter’s face, the plastic having gone slightly askew against his nose.

Peter’s only response was a light sigh combined with a smack of his lips.

“Well.” Tony cleared his throat. “This is new.”

And boy was it ever.

Tony frowned, gazing at Peter for a moment, his heart soaring somewhere between his head-space and the ceiling. He had never been one for close contact like this, often not even with Pepper. Yet he didn’t dare move the kid — not for fear of waking him up, no, that was a concern long since gone. The steady drip drop from the IV bag across his way told him Peter would be out for a while, and after everything that had gone down the past couple days, he couldn’t be more thankful for it.

Tony's free hand went to brush away the soft, brown locks from his forehead, pushing it back with his open palm. Peter seemed so relaxed, so comfortable leaning against him that he wanted nothing more than to relish in the peace that this brought them.

The cold chill to the room began to drift away, a foreign warmth taking its place, settling deep in Tony’s chest. It wasn’t from Peter — a brief glance to the monitors showed the kid had a normal temperature, no higher than ninety-seven degrees. Tony decided not to dwell it. He crossed his legs and positioned his hands — and the one attached to him — in his lap.

“Sweet dreams, Underroo’s,” he muttered, patting the hand that he held.

As if on cue, FRIDAY turned off the remaining few lights in the room. Tony hadhad his eyes closed before she had even bothered, the overwhelming, leaden fatigue finally taking over. Only the glow from the monitors and the moonlight shining through the curtains highlighted the shadows of their environment.

The calm and mellow breathing from Peter was enough to relax him, each inhale and exhale bringing forth a catharsis he so desperately needed. Soon he found his own breathing evening out, slowly but surely syncing to the rhythm of Peter’s.

Calm. Gentle. Steady.

The machinery’s beeps, buzzing and chirping faded away into white noise, nothing more than a story that no longer needed to be told.

Identity Theft│Chapter 26: Building Blocks

Tony nodded, as if to say ‘suit yourself’ before they both departed in opposite directions, Sam disappearing somewhere down the hall.

He made a mental note to follow up about the situation at another time — for now, he focused on approaching the departing gurney with as much composure as he could manage. With luck, he caught sight of a familiar head of hair peeking through the crowd of medical staff.

“Ms. Parker,” Tony called out.

May shot her head up at the sound, removing one of the two hands she had gripping the gurney’s railings to wave him over.

At first unsure about getting any closer to the scene, Tony managed to wiggle his way through the crowd and stand at the top of the bed where Peter laid. He watched the kid’s hazy brown eyes drift back and forth like a loose ping-pong ball, eyeing the busy activity around with him both wonderment and confusion.

“...wha’s goin’ on?” Peter asked, his voice thick and mildly incoherent.

Tony smirked, following the moving gurney down the hall while May patted her nephew’s arm.

“They already gave him something to help relax him. He’s just a bit confused,” May whispered his way before she turned back to Peter. “You’re fine honey, we’re getting that super uncomfortable metal out of your leg, remember?”

Peter sluggishly blinked. “...’s my leg better?”

“Not quite, tough guy,” May chuckled, rubbing his arm with reassurance. “But Tony has something that’s way more comfortable for you, remember?”

Peter eyed May curiously. “He does?”

She nodded, giving him an encouraging thumbs up.

Peter lazily smiled, the grin all teeth. “...mr. ‘tark ‘s the best.”

May failed at suppressing her laugh, one that Tony hadn’t realized was because of him. It wasn’t until he noticed that his jaw was hanging loose and his openly exposed eyes had widened comically that he moved quickly to recover, looking away to where she couldn’t see him.

Still, May smiled in his direction.

“Yeah,” she softly agreed, walking along the gurney with her eyes set on Tony. “Yeah, he is.”

Tony ducked his head low, realizing that Peter was so out of it he didn’t even know who was standing near the top his head. He stayed quiet as they wheeled the gurney down the halls, only stopping as they came to the double doors that led down into the operating rooms.

May gave his arm one more supportive squeeze before calling out, “I’ll be there when you wake up sweetie, okay?”

Both were almost positive Peter didn’t hear her as they wheeled him away, the gurney eventually disappearing behind automatic doors that slid shut with an air hum.

Identity Theft│Chapter 27: Growing Pains

Despite his encouragement, Peter remained dejected. “You were right, though. The moment I mess up and it’s ‘ Spider-Man: Thwarted by local street magician.’ So stupid.”

“Yeah, well...” Tony popped his lips, shrugging. “What do they know?”

Peter scoffed, rolling his eyes.

“No, seriously, what do they know?” Tony asked again, piquing Peter’s interest. He finally looked up from his hands, frowning, completely puzzled. Tony met his gaze head-on. “Tomorrow’s issue isn’t going to be about Spider-Man taking down a psychopathic Russian spy in an underwater facility, all with two broken wrists, hypothermia, a concussion—”

Peter blushed with embarrassment. “Okay, I—I get it—”

“A shattered leg, a gaping hole in his stomach and back,” Tony went on, ignoring his protest. “And you still managed to knock that Bond wannabe flat on his ass. Don’t let some outdated, old fart of a journalist who’s a couple years away from retiring and starting a podcast get under your skin.”

Peter gave a soft, wobbly laugh that brought on the inkling of a smile. With it, the tension seemed to thin just enough that Tony felt comfortable leaning forward, resting a firm open palm on Peter’s shoulder.

“For every ten good things Iron Man does, there has to be fifty that the press doesn’t talk about. They will always pick and chose what the public wants to hear. That doesn’t discredit your doing, kiddo. You know in your heart what you’re doing is right.” Tony’s voice dropped a little, quieter but no less sincere. “And if I’ve been hard on you lately about that, well...I really have no excuse. I just want you to be safe.”

Peter nodded, letting his smile widen a tad bit more. The feel of Tony’s thumb stroking over the curve of his shoulder was grounding, comfortable. It reminded him a lot of the same feeling he’d get when he wore his suit — protection, safety.

“Thanks, Mr. Stark.”

Tony patted his shoulder before leaning to the side in his chair, grabbing his coffee cup from next to him.

“Always thanking me, and I never know what for.”

Peter gave an easy smile and shrugged, a swell of warmth and gratitude replacing the butterflies of anxiety in his chest.

“For being here.”

Tony looked up from his coffee cup and gave him a wink, all charm, no bite. Any worry he had about his off-handed comment from before faded away with it, and Peter grinned as he picked his phone back up, though he was too distracted to really use it.

He stared down at the device, flipping it around, caught up in his own thoughts. He almost felt silly for having panicked earlier over what he’d say. It was just that he and Mr. Stark always had an odd relationship, never really defined, always bouncing between ‘he helps me do my superhero-ing and keeps me in line’ to ‘he’s like my mentor and teaches me all these cool things’.

But that had changed lately, since Homecoming, since he broke-in-but-not-really-broke-in to the Avengers facility. He wasn’t exactly sure what this was now, what they had become. He didn’t care either way. He liked it.

Uncle Ben would always tell him to try and find the positives out of any situation he was faced with.

Peter smiled — he was pretty sure he just found one.

Identity Theft│Chapter 29: Breaking the Cycle of Shame

“Hold up.” Tony stopped him, his hand outstretched before he could go any further. “You might want to look a little further in that box first.”

Bent over with the box between both hands, Peter craned his head up at Tony, his brows furrowed. Tony had gone back to staring at the stairway banister, the attempt at managing his discomfort more than obvious.

Slowly and cautiously, Peter sat up straight, letting the box rest against his thighs. The two lapsed into silence as he rummaged around the bundles of red and blue tissue paper, his fingers scraping the bottom of the cardboard. He froze when he finally gripped onto the additional item inside, carefully and slowly bringing it out to see.

It was a sleek, thin black watch — or at least, it looked that way. But there was no case to the band, no circular or even square window where a clock could be displayed and time could be shown.

Peter tilted his head to the side, turning the bracelet over in his hands. “What is this?”

Tony cleared his throat, sniffed his nose in a way that sounded painful, drummed his fingers against the armrest of the sofa — all the things he normally did when vastly uncomfortable. He even went to push up the sunglasses he hadn’t been wearing, his hand smoothing back his hair to cover for the mistake.

“I was inspired by that little Starkbits illusion you had going on,” he explained.

Peter frowned, glancing up at Tony before looking back down at the thin, metal bracelet. He vaguely recalled the memory, most of the details having come second-hand from sources like Mr. Stark and Bruce, the two sharing the story with a hearty chuckle.

Still, those had been high-tech casts for his broken wrists. Bone stabilizing devices, Tony had called them. What could this possibly be —?

“It’s a panic watch, directly connected to me,” Tony answered, as if reading his thoughts. He lifted his arm, showing off the same sleek, black bracelet strapped around his wrist. “So if anything happens to you — earth, wind, rain or shine, you can reach out to me.”

The information floored Peter, his throat tightening in a way that made it hard to speak.

“Wow, this is...I-I don’t know what to say...” his voice cracked, forcing him to swallow hard before looking up at Tony. “Why?”

“Why?” Tony echoed.

Peter quickly shook his head.

“Not that I’m not flattered! Or-or appreciative, ‘cause I am. Like, this is awesome, really. I’m just...confused,” his tone swirled in the same pattern that his head spun. “You can monitor the suit, right? Or is this about that nanite mist in the base? Would this even work with that nanite mist? Or is this —”

Tony held a hand in the air, desperate to stop the rapid-fire onslaught of words.

“I’m going to give this to you straight, Pete. No chaser. You good, you able to handle that?” Tony didn’t even let the kid respond before jumping right back in. “Good, that’s what I thought.”

With one fluid motion, he lifted his arm in the air again, his other hand tapping on his own wrist bracelet.

“This works both ways,” he diligently explained. “It’s not just about me keeping tabs on you — you hit a dead ringer, we got the suit for that. This is for non-Spider-Man business. If you’re in trouble, it reaches out to me. And if I’m in trouble, it’ll reach out to you. I want you to feel a part of the team, to feel safe. And I don’t mean that solely to the physical concern.”

The recognition seemed to hit Peter long before Tony had finished, his eyes clouding over in a way Tony could really only describe as shame. He almost wanted to hit the metaphorical back button, undo what he had said and go back to laughing at stupid bunny ear photos.

And yet Wilson, the naggy little shit he was, pestered relentlessness in his ear that this needed to be done, these things needed to be said.

Peter seemed to take it a like a champ, and exactly how Tony expected him to — by deflecting.

“Oh! That’s — I’m-I’m good, Mr. Stark,” he insisted, still twirling the bracelet in his hands. “I’m fine, really. Everyone’s been, ya know...checkin’ up on me. I’m fine, really.”

Tony nodded firmly. He pretended not to notice the bob in Peter’s throat, or the way he fidgeted with the bracelet as he fidgeted with anything else he could get his hands on during times of high anxiety. There was no point in calling him out on it right now — it was his birthday, or so they celebrated the day as such.

Wilson was right, the kid needed to go at this on his own pace. He searched Peter’s eyes, those wide, absurdly trusting eyes that stared back at him as if he could solve all the problems in the world.

“That’s okay, that’s great. If you’re fine today, that’s great. But on the days you’re not, I’m here to help. We all are.” Tony dipped his chin low, hand braced against Peter’s arm to gain his attention. “And I’m not the best listener, Peter. But I’m here. I understand.”

The words came out with more ease than Tony ever could have anticipated, much smoother than the numerous practice talks he had with FRIDAY in his lab. He distantly wondered if it was premature to declare how natural this felt for him now, this whole mentor nonsense he took on finally gaining the right trajectory it had needed.

For the sake of not jinxing things, he decided to push the thought away. He was just happy the bout of nerves he had initially felt when beginning the conversation seemed to vanish, or at the very most transfer over to Peter. The kid nodded with a sense of insecurity pouring through every fiber of his begin.

“Thanks. Really, thanks, that...it means a lot.” Peter’s mouth upturned slightly, his gaze fixed on Tony.

Identity Crisis│Chapter 1: Prologue

“Tonight, Peter!” May hollered from outside his bedroom.

“I will!” Peter shouted back, belly-flopping onto the bottom bunk of his bed with his phone so close to his face, he could see his breath marks on the screen. It was an easy way to ignore the open handy-me-down suitcase from Uncle Ben that laid on his floor — t-shirts, pants, and boxers spilling out that still needed put away.

He knew full well what May was asking from him because it was the same thing she’d been asking for three days now, ever since he returned home.

Without even thinking about it, Peter scrolled through his phone and opened his text messages. He’d get around to unpacking at some point. It’d probably be around the time he didn’t have any clean clothes left but hey, it’d get done.

A part of him realized that unpacking made him a little sad; it would officially put an end to what was an amazing summer. Even without getting a real chance at driving, Peter had the absolute time of his life. Never in his wildest dreams did he think he’d get the chance to spend an entire month traveling the country, and with Iron Man nonetheless.

He had to admit that while he never, ever wanted to experience almost dying again — not even if you paid him a billion dollars — it certainly came with its perks. And despite really not needing the road trip as some sort of extra apology from Mr. Stark, Peter also didn’t have the heart to turn it down. If he didn’t know better, he’d say Mr. Stark seemed just as excited. In his own weird way.

Still, by the time the month-long trip came to an end, he admittedly missed the city life enough to say goodbye to the beaches of the West Coast, the deserts of Arizona and the odd alien-abduction culture in Missouri.

Both him and Mr. Stark were surprised to see the quaint little state had New Mexico beat in the ‘obsessed with aliens’ department. Something about a boy going missing in 1988 and the entire town of St. Charles being under this absurd impression that a UFO took him and — well, Mr. Stark had high tailed it out of there before Peter could learn any more.

The stories he came back with seemed endless and if he needed to keep his suitcase full a little while longer before saying goodbye to summer, than so be it.

Identity Crisis│Chapter 2: Smells like Teen Spirit

Only a few moments later did he turn back around, finger lazily wagging in Peter’s general direction.

“You brought your bags, right?” Tony asked.

The implication was there before he had even finished the sentence. Peter gaped, arms falling to his side as his back went ramrod straight on the couch.

“You’re sending me home?” Peter’s breath hitched for a moment. He could feel same type of panicked boil in his gut that he’d get when May would take away his computer or phone. “That’s not fair, it’s my weekend here! I’m supposed to train with the team, you can’t—”

“Oh no, you’re not going home,” Tony halted Peter’s relief with, “And you’re also not training.”

A beat.

“What?”

“You’re grounded,” Tony responded flatly.

Peter’s jaw practically fell to the floor. “I’m what?”

“You heard me. You’re grounded,” he said matter-of-factly, this time with more kick to his tongue — as if every time he repeated the words it rejuvenated his soul.

Peter shot forward on the couch, eyes darting hopelessly between Tony and Steve.

“What? How? You can’t!—!” He groaned, so loud it could have broken his vocal cords. “That’s not fair, I’m supposed to start training!”

“And now you’re grounded. Consider yourself lucky that you’re grounded here with a hundred acres and a movie theater, and not Queens with a lumpy twin bed and poorly received cable.” Tony wagged his finger in Peter’s general direction. “I want your suit in the next hour. You’re not training, you’re not going into the city — you are grounded.”

Peter huffed. "Okay, now I think you just like saying that word."

Tony could have laughed. In fact, he chuckled. “Oh, you bet your ass I do. Grounded, grounded, grounded. Has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

“Mr. Stark, this is —”

“You too, Wanda,” Steve said, more solemnly than the vigor excitement Tony had.

Wanda’s eyes went wide. “How? I am at Clint’s farm this weekend.”

The way Steve shook his head looked as if his skull weighed a thousand pounds, such dismay in his body movements that truly brought to life the saying ‘this hurts you way more than it hurts me.’

“Not anymore,” Steve calmly explained, no heat to his tone, only disappointment. “I already called him, and we both agreed that you need to stay here after all that’s happened.”

“You brought Clint into this? And he agrees with you?” Wanda stared at him, flabbergasted. “We’re being punished for savings lives?”

Tony rolled his eyes. “You’re being punished because — can we really call it that? Seriously, this place has a lap pool —”

“You’re being punished because you need to understand the situations you put yourself in represent us all,” Steve diligently answered. “You shouldn’t have been at that party, Wanda. It wasn’t age appropriate, and you didn’t think of the consequences that would occur if something like this had happened. You have to make better decisions with your spare time.”

Wanda was staring at them both in disbelief, a handful of seconds passing by as she struggled to formulate a response. Her mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water. Finally, she resorted to rising from the couch in a huff of anger.

“The one and only time I go to party and this happens, and I get punished for it!” She pushed through both Steve and Tony to storm away, hand rising in the air and bracelets jingling with erratic movement. “Unbelievable!”

They turned to watch her leave.

“TMZ isn’t talking about me,” Peter immediately spoke up, still on the sofa. “Not even the Bugle is talking about me. Why am I being grounded?”

Tony spun around, eyes practically bugling out of his head.

“You were at a party with booze!” He shouted. “And no adult supervision! And three kids got hurt from it!”

Peter’s glare deepened, reddening with heat. “Wanda’s right. This is unbelievable. It would have been so much worse if we hadn’t been there! Kyle and Zach? Wanda saved them, and Flash would have been a pancake had it not been for me! We saved lives!”

Tony could feel his blood pressure rising, his throat constricting with irrational anger in the moment. He shook his head tensely.

“Yeah? And you’re finding out the hard way that saving lives doesn’t always make things okay.”

Peter scoffed, loudly, and he shook his head right along with it. His hands pressed against the cushions of the sofa as he practically bounced himself up, keeping his eyes dead locked on Tony as he stormed away.

“You’re being a hypocrite, Mr. Stark.”

The words echoed in the common room, or so it seemed for Tony. Normally composed despite anything thrown his way, Tony was surprised to feel his jaw slack to the floor, spinning on his heels to follow Peter wherever the hell the kid was running off to.

Identity Crisis│Chapter 4: Honey Bunches of Insomnia

“Mhm,” Bucky acknowledged distantly. “Got it.”

He left the room without another word, a second glance, or even an acknowledgment of Peter on his way out. Bucky left like he had never even been there to begin with.

Long after he was gone, Peter couldn’t help but continue to stare at the empty doorway. For someone that made Tony so angry, Bucky hadn’t made much of a remarkable impression on Peter. He was quiet, kept to himself, and aside from the weird clothes that made him look like a middle eastern farmer, there wasn’t anything particular about him that stood out.

Peter knew, though, that there was more to his story than that. Tony had told him...things. Things they never talked about again, things that clearly still affected him to this day. Tony had once said that he was learning to move on past the whole incident, for the team’s sake, for his own sake.

Looking at him now, Peter wasn’t too sure how true that remained.

“What’s up, Mr. Stark?” he asked, the stretch of quiescence making his voice sound foreign to his own ears.

Tony sniffed, hard, and folded his arms across his chest. “You need to stay away from that guy.”

“Who?” Peter did a double take at the doorway. “Mr. Bucky?”

“Mr. Bucky?” Tony repeated back incredulously, the thunderous look on his face nearly as hot as his words. “Is that what Rogers told you to call him?”

Peter had a bad feeling that all of Tony’s buttons had been pushed by now. He knew that not all had been pressed by him; he was just very unlucky in being the one to deal with the aftermath.

“No! I mean, maybe, I mean no but he could've —” Peter shook his head free of his stutter. “What’s the big deal?”

Tony’s mouth stayed set in a thin line as he slipped his glasses back onto his face, purple-tinted lenses reflecting brightly from the skylight ceiling above him.

Peter had caught on a while ago that it was a defense mechanism, a way to hide the emotion that reflected in Tony's eyes. Most people were aware the habit. Some challenged it, like Ms. Potts. Peter let it be, though sometimes he wondered what would happen if he ever did the same.

“He’s trouble,” Tony flatly explained. “He’s here so SHIELD can keep an eye on him, nothing more, nothing less. I don’t want you associating with him.”

“Mr. Stark, come on!” Peter tossed a hand in the air, full of exasperation. “You can’t tell me —”

“Kid,” Tony warned, his voice firmer now, with an underlying note of rigor authority. “Stay away from him.”

The warning came with narrow eyes and a twisted face; an expression Peter couldn’t read past the purple-tinted lenses, frames acting as a veil to his reality. His voice, meek whines in protest, was lost amid a whirlwind of emotions. Ninety percent of which he was sure could be categorized as pure aggravation and annoyance.

He settled on a scoff of disbelief, one he failed to keep tightly in his chest, and he didn’t bother to hide it either. Tony’s eyes shot towards him at a record-breaking speed, a way of saying ‘I heard that!’

Peter shook his head, looking away and back towards the empty doorway. There was a part of him deep down inside that coiled resentment, frustration snowballing into something bigger despite his efforts to ignore it all weekend.

First, Tony grounded him — which, what was with that? He knew the man kinda-sorta saw him like, well, ‘like a son’ as he once said a few months back. But grounding? It just seemed very...un-Mr.Stark-like. And now this? Telling him who he could and couldn’t hang around?

If he didn’t know better, Tony was acting like his da—

“Peter!”

Tony’s voice pierced through his thoughts for what felt like the fifth time that day.

“Yeah! I heard you, okay?” Peter shifted uncomfortably on his feet, quick to cover up his outburst with, “Don’t worry. It’s a big place, right? What are the chances of me even seeing him again?”

Peter hid his frustration behind a look of false reassurance, the type he had mastered as of late. It was typically a look he’d find himself giving May before leaving for patrol on the weekend nights, where his curfew was later, and her panic strung higher.

She never did look convinced. And right now, neither did Tony.

Identity Crisis│Chapter 4: Honey Bunches of Insomnia

Peter rummaged around for a bowl, craning his head behind him as he asked, “Lucky Charms?”

With his back facing him, Bucky didn’t answer. Instead, he lifted his beer bottle to his mouth, took a chug, and set it back down on the island. The glass made a clang as it touched the granite counter.

Peter waited an extra second for an answer. When he didn’t get one, he brought out a second bowl and dug around for a second spoon. “They’re good. Magically delicious.”

Peter could see Bucky’s head twitch just a smidgen as he poured an obscene amount of cereal into one bowl, a small amount into the next. A few marshmallows fell to the floor, and he swept them aside with his foot, making note to clean up his mess after he ate.

It was on his way to the fridge that he finally heard a voice break through the stale air.

“Shouldn’t be hanging around me, small fry. You know your pops really snapped his cap about that today.”

Peter froze mid-grab to the milk jug in the fridge. He looked behind him, eyebrows furrowed with confusion so intense he wasn’t sure if he could still feel his fingers — now blindly reaching around in the fridge while he stared at Bucky’s backside.

“I have no idea what you just said,” Peter pulled out the jug of milk and walking back to the counter where two bowls of cereal awaited him. “Anyway, Mr. Stark isn’t my pops — or my dad, or whatever. He’s just...Mr. Stark.”

With a steady hand, Peter poured the two-percent milk into each bowl — over flooding his bowl while dishing out a reasonable amount in the other. The few pieces that floated to the top fell over the rim, and he collected them in his hands before tossing the handful straight to his mouth.

Behind him, Bucky scoffed. “Wouldn’t be so sure about that.”

Peter rolled his eyes, setting both bowls down on the kitchen island, deliberately pushing the one that wasn’t his in front of Bucky.

“Seriously. Mr. Stark is cool, but he’s more like...” He dragged a barstool across the floor, moving to sit directly across from the older man. “I dunno, he’s like my mentor or something. It’s just that he’s been sorta...protective lately.” Peter dug his spoon into his Lucky Charms, shoveling marshmallows and oat pieces into his mouth.

Bucky looked down at the bowl in front of him, eyebrow quirked high as he opted instead to grab the base of his beer bottle and swig a gulp.

“Why’s that?” he asked, practically grumbled under his breath.

Peter shrugged, taking in another spoonful. “I think he feels responsible for me. He’s been helping me with this...” Peter swallowed hard and gestured vaguely, “... super-hero stuff for a while now.”

Bucky hummed, the sound hoarse, rumbling like grinding stone. It almost seemed darker in contrast to Peter’s voice, even the sound of his chewing somehow lighthearted.

“And also,” Peter swallowed before speaking again, “these crazy bad guys kidnapped me after they stole his tech and held me hostage under the sea in the Bermuda Triangle and I almost died. So there’s that.”

Bucky paused mid-swig of his beer, eyes wide enough to see through the bangs of his hair. He didn’t take a drink this time, rather he set the bottle back down on the counter and stared hard at Peter.

Identity Crisis│Chapter 8: Infected

“Mr. Stark, this is ridiculous!” Peter was shouting again, raising his voice when Tony hadn't raised his. “C’mon, Harry is a good guy, it’s not like he’s his dad!”

Tony dropped his head, rubbing at his forehead with enough pressure to dent the skin. Even out of view, Peter could see his frown deepening, the tension in his neck making his veins stick out more prominently.

“You’re right,” Tony started, clenching his jaw tightly. “But he’s an extension of him, and that’s just as dangerous.”

Peter let out a huff through his nose, unable to look Mr. Stark in the eye anymore. It was a good thing too; his gaze could probably melt a glacier.

“I thought you of all people wouldn’t judge someone by their dad.”

Tony’s eyes grew big, his lips parting with disbelief.

If it meant anything — anything at all — Peter did regret the words the moment he said them.

But he was also mad.

And that seemed to be winning over anything else right now.

So he didn’t apologize, he didn’t take them back. Not even when neither of them spoke for what felt like a lifetime.

Peter chewed his lip fiercely, his face practically glowing red. The hum of A.C had grown so loud, he wanted to crawl into a vent and turn it off himself.

There was a lot of silence.

The crushing weight of unguarded anger had finally overtook the room, inundated frustration drowning out any chance of getting their heads above water again.

“Do as you’re told, Peter,” Tony finally spoke up, his voice taking on an uncharacteristically sharp edge.

Months of agitation, of secrets and more secrets, of being kept in the dark like a child who couldn’t be trusted —

“Will you stop treating me like a kid!”

“You are one!” Tony’s voice thundered right over his. “And you’re going to be in for a rough time when you finally get yours hands on that birth certificate of yours — although I’m growing more tempted by the minute to hack into every damn hospital database in Queen’s and have it on display in this facility to remind you that you are a kid! Like it or not, you need to do what you’re told! And I’m telling you now — stay away from him.”

Peter shook his head, aggressively, angrily. This was the same argument they had just a week ago, when he was told he couldn’t be around Bucky — and now Harry? Not even May would dictate who he could and couldn’t see.

What happened to trusting him, to treating him like an equal?

He gritted his teeth with frustration — what happened to being one of them?

“No,” Peter fired back, hands clenched into fists so tight that he could feel his nails digging into the soft skin of his palm. “You can’t tell me who I’m allowed to be friends with.”

“Goddamn it, Peter!” Tony smacked his hand against the workbench, random mechanical parts tumbling to the ground in a fit of temper. “This isn’t like being grounded, this isn’t causing trouble at some party — it’s much bigger than that and it almost got you killed!”

“Will you stop bringing that up!” Peter spun on his heels, snatching his backpack off the ground with wordless sounds of anger. “I am so sick of you treating me like glass! That wasn’t my fault and you know —!”

Everything came to a stop.

Peter froze.

Identity Crisis│Chapter 9: Gray Area

“I know,” Peter nodded, moving the granola bar to his lips but unable to take a bite. It smelt as disgusting as it looked. “I’m-I’m sorry, Doctor B.”

“Like hell you’re sorry,” Tony’s voice tore into his ears like Iron Man repulsors that would blast a door straight off its hinges. Peter nearly jumped in bed. “You know better than that, kid! You have a metabolism on crack, you miss one meal and you’re as good as —”

“Tony,” Bruce’s warning was stronger than time around, his voice holding a tension that made them all nervous.

“Don’t get me started,” Tony threw back.

Clint scoffed from the back of the room, muttering, “You sound pretty started to me.”

Peter had hoped Clint’s remark would have turned the attention away from him, especially as he forced down a bite of the dirt-chalk food that immediately regurgitated up into his throat.

Oh god, it was worse the second time down.

Tony didn’t appear to be finished. He continued on, even as Peter swallowed down a mouthful of his own sickness.

“You seem to have developed short term memory, which I must say is a damn impressive considering your IQ,” Tony ranted, his hand waving in the air to nothing in particular. “Have you already forgotten just how mangled up your leg was? Or how about the bear trap it was in for weeks before yours truly managed to invent a device that looked a lot less medieval times?”

Bruce rolled his eyes. “That wasn’t just you, you know.”

Peter nodded, his head bowed down to his lap. “Yes, Mr. Stark.”

“How about both those wrists of yours — you still use those to websling around the city like a monkey who escaped from the zoo with no self-preservation, right?” Tony rambled on, loud and indignant, upset beyond stopping. He was on a roll, and they all knew it. “Remember how easy it was for someone to shatter those bones after just two days of not eating? You want a repeat of that? You want to test the limits of your body, because —”

“That’s enough, Stark,” Steve’s voice rumbled over Tony’s, a steely sense of authority finally bringing control back into the med bay.

Tony jerked his head towards him, eyeing him, practically glaring at him. If they stood any closer, Peter would have been worried Doctor Banner might have to step outside to avoid the two of them breaking out into a fight.

The energy flowing between them was hot, creating a sense of hostility and tension.

Ultimately, after a few beats and what they were all sure was much contemplation, Tony backed down.

“I’m just saying,” he turned back to Peter, his shoulders dropping as his posture softened. “You don’t eat, and it becomes a problem. You can’t do that.”

The room fell quiet, the kind where a pin could drop and Peter wouldn’t have been the only one to hear it. In fact, he might have been the only one not to hear it, the pounding in his head reaching an apex that made the muscles behind his eyes ache with pressure.

“I know. I’m...I’m really sorry,” Peter apologized for what felt like the hundredth time, his fingers pulling at the plastic wrapper to the calorie bar. It made his fingers slimy and sticky at the same time. “Really, Mr. Stark. I’m sorry. I just...I must have forgot.”

Tony didn’t respond, not immediately, though the look on his face told Peter there were many things he wanted to say but was holding back on. He instead sighed, his body lifting with the heaviness of his exhale.

Yeah, Peter decided, he was definitely the cause for those gray hairs.

Identity Crisis│Chapter 11: Screwed the Pooch

“Alright, bring it back in.” Steve waved his hand at Peter, motioning inwards. “You have a lot of untapped potential, son. I have a good feeling that once we —”

“Underoo’s!”

The shout burst through the gym, almost as loudly as the doors that flew right open.

Peter whizzed his head around, catching an object mid-air and inches before it could smack him in the face.

What the —?

He looked down at his hand, confused even as he opened his clenched fist to examine the object squeezed between his palm.

It was a calorie bar.

The nasty kind, wrapped in nothing but plain silver packaging. The one difference that stood out were the words ‘Spider-boy’ written in Sharpie across it.

Peter looked back up, his face immediately dropping.

“What are you doing here?” he practically hissed, voice so high pitched it gave cartoon characters a run for their money.

He didn’t care. It was hard to be bothered, what with his stomach doing that flip-flop thing that made him incredibly sticky with sweat, the back of his shirt already dampening in wetness. A sudden bout of rough seesawing to his head nearly stole his balance, his knees buckling and wobbling briefly.

“And good morning to you, too, sunshine.” Tony stopped a few feet short of closing the distance between them, the double-doors far behind still swinging back and forth from his grand and unexpected entrance.

Bruce was on his tail, walking a lot slower while juggling a laptop in his hands. He barely gave a wave to the others; his reluctant presence clearer than the squeaky clean windows lining the gym walls.

Peter fought to find his voice again. “Mr. Stark —”

“You look tired.” Tony cocked his head to the side, giving Peter a long once-over. “You sleep at all last night?”

Peter knew his eyes were as wide as saucers — but he couldn’t shake the shock long enough to fix them.

“I slept – I slept fine, I —” he stammered, unable to pull the words from his brain long enough to string together something that sounded remotely coherent.

Mr. Stark was here. In front of him. When he absolutely wasn’t supposed to be. They had agreed training sessions were Steve’s thing. Lab nights were Tony’s.

Was this because they didn’t even see each other last night? It had been lab night — their night — and Peter was clearly avoiding him, and they both knew it, and he really didn’t want to deal with this right now but he was here.

And there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

“I was up for a while, had homework. I’m fine,” Peter rushed out, so fast he could barely even understand himself.

Tony met his eyes. Peter forced himself to look away.

It wasn’t a lie. He was up for a while, and he did have homework. It just so happened that Peter chose to hang out with Bucky instead, at least until he felt good enough to sleep. Which wasn’t until close to four in the morning.

But none of what he said was a lie.

“Up late, then?” Tony raised his eyebrows, high enough that they peaked over his fancy sunglasses. “I don’t believe I caught the aftermath of your usual ravaging in the kitchen. You eat at all?”

From across the way, Natasha coughed — loudly. “Mother-hen!”

Everyone but Peter looked towards her; Peter was sure Tony gave himself whiplash from how quickly his head spun around, faster than a rocket.

He barely paid attention, definitely didn’t care. His grip on the calorie bar tightened, clamping down on it hard enough for the nasty granola pieces to crumble and break. Opening it now would only be a mess.

“Mr. Stark...” Peter bit his tongue — literally, the force of his teeth puncturing the soft tissue inside his mouth. His voice was low, irritated, and under his breath. “I’m good. I ate.”

“Yeah?” Tony gestured an open palm his way. “What’d you have?”

Steve took a few steps to the side, closer to where Tony stood, making a noise that sounded oddly close to clearing his throat.

Tony noticed.

He glanced at Steve. Glanced at Peter. Gave Natasha a look that appeared to be more of a heated glare.

Finally, he turned back to Peter with a snap of his fingers.

“No need to answer. That’s only something I would ask if I didn’t have complete, absolute, endless faith in your capabilities to take care of yourself like the responsible, young adult you are.” Tony walked ahead, giving a firm pat on Peter’s shoulder. “My favorite young adult, at that. One of the best.”

Peter looked down at his shoulder, staring at where Tony’s hand rested.

“Uh...that’s...thank you?” He shook his head and the daze that clouded it. “Why exactly are you and Doctor B here?”

The question came so suddenly that there was no hiding his objection at Tony’s presence. Even Bruce gave him an odd look, mostly hidden by his laptop, but still there to be seen.

“This is my building, in case you’ve forgotten.” Tony pointed his thumb towards Bruce, already across the gym and sitting on the bleachers. “And Bruce lives here, so I can’t help where he goes. It’s open terrain.”

For possibly the first time since entering the gym, Bruce looked up from his laptop with a look so aggravated the others worried it might turn green.

“Yeah, but like...” Peter kept his voice hushed, moving closer to Tony to keep the others from hearing. “Do you have to be here...now?”

Tony took off his sunglasses with one hand, pocketing them into his blazer with ease.

“I like to check in on my investments from time to time. See what progress is being made, how the horizon is looking, all that good stuff. Besides, don’t forget who’s suggestion it was to arrange these little kumbaya’s. You wouldn’t have a Captain America’s Training Tips notebook if it weren’t for moi.”

The self-pointed gesture Tony gave was enough to make the paparazzi jealous they weren’t there to capture it.

Peter made a face. “You said this was my aunt’s idea.”

“I freed up some time this afternoon,” Tony continued on without missing a beat, “decided to see what the hoopla is about with this...what are you calling it, Cap? Spider Boot Camp? Tactical Webinars?”

“Training, Tony.” Steve sighed, shaking his head. “No clever names. We’re just training.”

Tony looked at them with a studious glare, lips pursed tightly, head to the side in a way showed he had five million different thoughts running through his mind.

Peter rolled his eyes, staring up at the gym ceiling for what felt like an eternity. This was exactly why he’d been avoiding Mr. Stark for nearly two weeks now. One moment everything was cool, everything was alright, he was having fun. Now it was tense and weird and —

“Well!” Tony clapped his hands together, the sound ripping Peter straight out of his thoughts. “Training, then. Right. I thought it was about time I checked out this little training rendezvous. And, preventive measures after last week’s ruckus, I came by to provide a healthy snack for the growing spiderling. You’re welcome.”

Peter’s eyebrows knitted tightly. A snack?

He looked down at his hand, suddenly remembering the calorie bar he’d been holding.

A snack.

A snack.

Even after all he said, after everything they fought about, even as he trained with the-freaking-Avengers — Mr. Stark was still treating him like a kid.

Peter handed it over to him, jaw set. “I said I already ate. I’m good.”

The granola bar split the distance between them, hanging in the air where Peter refused to take it back, no matter how long he had to wait. He’d throw it across the gym before eating it. Hell, even if he was hungry, the things tasted like both dirt and chalk gave birth to a baby covered in mud.

It’d be just his luck to throw up all over Captain America’s shoes. He wasn’t taking the chance.

For the longest time, Tony stared at it. Not Peter, not Steve or Natasha or even Bruce clicking away at his laptop. He stared directly at the calorie bar, Peter’s hand covering up the Spider in Spider-boy.

“Then I will just...keep this for after the show.” Tony snatched it from his hand, tapping it against Peter’s shoulder with a forced grin. “That’s what they say, right? Protein after a hard work-out?”

“Tony,” Steve firmly said, his eyes directing Tony over to the bleachers. “We were about to start.”

Identity Crisis│Chapter 11: Screwed the Pooch

Peter flickered his eyes open, blinking rapidly. Tony’s glare was as hot as the tears that began to burn in his eyes.

“I didn’t...” his words were stolen by the swell in his chest, growing so painful he couldn’t swallow it away. With desperation, he pushed past Tony, brushing against his shoulder in a frenzied need to get away. “Mr. Stark, I swear—”

Tony spun around before Peter take even a step.

“Park your ass on that bench!”

Peter didn’t chance doing anything but.

“Yes, sir,” he forced out, sitting down so fast it made him lightheaded.

The simple act of getting off his feet had the room spinning in places that it surely wasn’t supposed to, lockers titling at the edges and the tiles on the wall blurred where he had lost focus in his eyes. The inertia was enough to boil nausea in his stomach.

The one thing that stood against everything was Mr. Stark, looming over him with an expression Peter was sure he had never seen in his entire life. Anger? Disappointment? Outrage? Horror?

Whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

Peter bowed his head, averting his eyes to the floor instead.

“You’ve had a stick up your ass for weeks now, kid,” Tony waved his hand angrily. “Your attitude has been shit. Here I was passing it off as whatever flood of hormones you teenagers deal with, turning you into little brat-monsters that scream about acne and curfews and whatever other goddamn nonsense that you feel is apocalyptic to your social life. But then you go and punch someone’s lights out — a classmate, of all goddamn people! One I continued to ask you about —!”

“Who told you about that?” Peter shot his head up so fast, the water that pooled in his eyes nearly evaporated.

Tony looked at him, eyes ablaze but mouth shut.

The realization of what Peter heard felt like a scolding knife sliced through his windpipe, driving a sound from his throat that not even he recognized.

May had promised that she wasn’t going to tell him.

May had broken her promise.

Peter’s forehead creased as he felt his jaw lock tensely, teeth grinding in ways that hurt his head.

She had promised.

“It doesn’t matter who told me,” Tony argued, defended — deflected. Peter’s hands clenched tightly into fists the longer he looked at him, practically lying straight to his face. “What matters is I know. And that’s just another important piece to this puzzle I like to call Peter Parker’s Pissy —”

“Why do you know?” Peter interrupted, a bite in his tone that sounded foreign to them both.

Tony gaped, his eyes narrowing until they were mere slits. “Because!"

“No,” Peter was quick to throw back. “No! That’s not fair!”

“Life isn’t fair, Peter!” Tony matched his volume and then-some.

“But you don’t have to know that! You didn’t have to know about that fight — it was nothing, it didn’t mean anything and you didn’t have to know about it!” Peter raised his voice, feeling his throat dry up as he heard his words fracture at the sheer stress of it all.

“Tough shit!” Tony snapped. “I know all about it! I get to know all about it!”

“Why!?” Peter shot up from the bench, his arms gesturing wildly. “Why do you get to know, why do you have to know everything!?”

“Watch yourself, Parker,” Tony quietly warned, more intimidating than menacing and yet somehow still both to Peter.

Peter shook his head, disbelief blooming over him and swinging his world sickeningly sideways. Tony’s voice was the loudest between the two of them, always had been, a lion’s roar screeching over a mouse. Peter hated it. He hated how he couldn’t be heard, how he wouldn’t be heard, how no matter how many times he spoke nobody ever listened.

“I don’t need you knowing every single thing about my life! I don’t need you hovering behind me and constantly checking in, or spying on me, or whatever it is that you do!”

“I beg to differ,” Tony scoffed. “And I believe the last few weeks are on my side with that. If you really think —”

“You’re not my dad!” Peter blurted out. “You’re not! So will you stop acting like it!”

The finality of his words didn’t escape his head like they did his mouth. They stayed there, a thought he didn’t feel was his, a feeling he didn’t own. He had no concept of even speaking, not until the words echoed in the room and bounced off lockers like thunder.

Only then did Peter realize what he had said.

And that there was no immediate come back to it.

For once, he kinda wished there was.

Instead of yelling, shouting or giving some smart-ass response, Tony stayed quiet. He stood tall, straightening his back as his lips pursed tightly.

Peter wanted desperately to take it back – ‘I didn’t mean it’ somehow refusing to leave his lips. It didn’t matter. It had already latched onto Tony, holding him in place.

Peter could tell.

Tony nodded, and did nothing else but that.

Identity Crisis│Chapter 13: Into the Abyss

“You’re okay?” Tony asked again, a bit of relief easing the tense pressure that had been building between them.

Peter nodded a little too hard, faintness making his eyes dance and wander.

“I’m fine.”

There was a pause. The brief silence that fell between them was harsh enough to send goosebumps up the course of Peter’s arm. Or maybe that was from the look Tony was giving him, cold-stoned and harden like a rock.

“Try that again.” Tony shifted from one foot to the other, his lips pressed back and his eyes hard. “This time with a little more feeling.”

“Mr. Stark —”

“You look like shit.”

Peter gaped, his own breath coming out in large puffs, making him realize he absolutely needed to brush his teeth. “I just woke up!”

Tony let out a snort, folding both his bare arms over his chest. “Yeah, and I’ve seen your morning hair before. Cow-tails and all.”

The sarcasm died off the tip of his tongue, and Tony’s demeanor suddenly changed with a slight tilt of his head. He looked at Peter — really looked at him, so intently that Peter wanted to hide under the covers of his bed and never come out.

“You sick?”

Peter wanted to balk at the question. It was kind of hard to, all things considered. He had slept the entire day away, and blew dinner money on every bottle of nausea medication he could find at the store.

Still. The idea of opening up to Mr. Stark didn’t feel right. He flat out didn’t want to.

And Peter didn’t like how that made him feel.

“I had an off weekend,” he said instead, the sheer amount of bitterness coating his words impossible to ignore. “Lost my spot on this team I’d been looking forward to joining one day.”

“Answer the question, Pete.” Tony didn’t miss a beat. “You sick?”

Like a broken record, Peter shook his head. He tried to tell himself it was okay, that everything was alright — even as Tony stared him down like he was some sort of project to be examined and figured out.

It wasn’t lying if you didn’t say anything, right?

That sounded right.

So he kept shaking his head.

“Talk to me, kid,” Tony’s tone faltered into something close to unrecognizable. If Peter didn’t know better, he’d say it sounded freakishly close to begging. And Tony never, ever begged. “I can’t do the equation unless I have all the variables.”

Peter fiddled with the material of his bedsheets, pulling and tugging to keep pressure on his fingertips where it could distract his mind from anything but the current situation.

There was a lot he could tell Mr. Stark right now. More than what Peter realized he’d been hiding. Nose-bleeds that hadn’t let up, odd bouts of sickness that kept him in bed all day.

Nightmares.

More nightmares.

“Really, Mr. Stark. I’m fine.” It didn’t feel like the right thing to say. But Peter didn’t stop himself from saying it.

The lie of omission started to taste like acid in his mouth. Or maybe that was the bile creeping up through his throat.

Tony clucked his tongue and swiveled his jaw, working on releasing the stress built up in his muscles. With one fluid motion, he uncrossed his arms from his chest and pointed almost casually to the trash bin next to Peter’s bed.

“You doing pharmaceuticals for fun now, then?”

Peter shot his head to the floor with lightning speed. Shit. Boxes upon boxes littered his waste bin and — okay, fair enough, he couldn’t fight that one. It didn’t look good at all.

“I ate something bad,” Peter fumbled for an excuse. “Made me sick to my stomach. Went to the store to see if anything could help.”

Tony narrowed his eyes, his mouth twisting into sharp confusion.

“Interesting choice in purchase to spend your allowance on,” he dryly stated. “Those drugs don’t touch you with a ten foot-pole.”

A heat of shame began to redden on Peter’s cheeks, and he turned away in hopes that it couldn’t be seen in the dimly lit bedroom. The last thing he wanted was to be reminded of was the struggle that Tony, Doctor Banner, and a massive amount of scientists went through trying to create drugs that effected his metabolism.

It was borderline ridiculous how he thought a few bottles of anti-nausea medication sold at a convenience store would do anything for him. As if the chalky, pink liquid that worked on normal humans would even touch his mutated DNA.

“I know,” Peter mumbled, running his hand through greasy hair that desperately needed a wash. “I just...made due with what I had.”

The persistent sound of tapping overtook the room. Peter barely lifted his head to notice Tony gripping his computer desk, his nails taptaptapping on the metal frame.

His eyes were still staring at the waste bin on the floor, even as he spoke.

“Could have called me.” The tapping got louder, faster. “Could have returned one of my calls.”

Peter swallowed thickly. “I was gunna. Tomorrow.”

Just like that, it went quiet again — minus the racket of miscellaneous street sounds from outside, Queens New York failing to sleep even in the wee early hours of the morning. The noise seemed to attract Tony’s attention, where he looked out the bedroom window with a low hum sounding deep from his throat.

“That’s fair,” he mentioned, so quietly Peter almost didn’t catch it. “I didn’t exactly give you any reasons to keep me on speed dial.”

The words struck a cord. Peter had a lot of things he could say about that. A whole lot. The seams of his bedsheets got tangled up in his fingers, his nerves working overtime in fidgets and twitches. Perhaps if muck wasn’t coursing through his brain, he could have managed a response. Like, any response at all.

From the way Mr. Stark looked though, it was probably best he didn’t say anything. A stab of guilt hit him, fast and hard, the lack of any talking suffocating and stifling.

As mad as he was with the man, Peter didn’t mean to stress him out.

Identity Crisis│Chapter 16: Web of Lies and Deceit

She was rambling; Peter could tell. He turned on his heels to face her.

“I didn’t know what had happened!” he tried to calm her down to no avail. “I didn’t...charge my phone, it died, and-and I —”

“Here he is asking me about you, and — and this assault that had happened, and why you’re not home yet and —” May wrapped her arms tightly around herself, yanking the cardigan until it stretched thin. “I thought he had discovered...you know…god! I thought he’d be taking you away from me!”

Peter frantically shook his head. “May, he doesn’t know anything about Spi—”

“And then he tells me that your principal is in the hospital, and then I couldn’t get a hold of you, and Ned hasn’t heard from you and Michelle wasn’t answering and —” May forced herself to take a deep breath, her shoulders shuddering the entire time she heaved in, practically gulping for air. “I thought — I thought you were hurt, or in danger, or —"

“I’m fine!” Peter took two large steps into the living room, only coming to a halt when his aunt turned to face him, so suddenly it took him off guard. Her cheeks blistered hot with streaks of red, her eyes matching alongside them. He tried again, “May, I’m fine.”

The silence that followed was hollow.

“Peter, you do not look fine.” May’s arms tightened around her chest — so tight now that there had to be a serious risk to her need to keep breathing. She stood still, rooted in place, the quivering on her shoulders making it appear as if she were splitting apart.

There had only been one other time Peter could remember seeing her this freaked. This unnerved. It went all the way back to a night that a robber needed a getaway car, when Peter had left home with his uncle and instead returned to their Queen’s apartment accompanied by the police.

Vomit began to surge into his throat, coating his esophagus with caustic bile. He couldn’t tell why — if it was from the sheer stress of everything, or something more. But he felt like he was somehow about to throw up, every part of him fighting the urge with weak restraint.

“Talk to me. Please.” May begged, her voice cracking at the edges. “It’s just you and me here, no one else. It stays between us, it...it…”

The words froze Peter for a moment — brain, mouth, all the way down to his fidgeting fingers that locked up, bent at crude angles. His eyes crept over to May, lips still moving, still speaking.

“I need to know, Peter,” she finished with a shaking breath. “I mean it. Just you and me.”

Peter blinked. He stared at May, straight on, his gaze turning cold and steely. A razor-deep spike tore straight into him, without warning, with no caution.

If it was anger he felt, it was incapacitating; crushing any deliberate and clear thought he once had. All consuming, beyond the control of his unsteady, decrepit attempts at suppression.

“If I tell you anything, you’re just going to tell Mr. Stark.” His words sounded painful, and jarring – as he if were forcing them out of a throat that just refused to corporate.

May seemed taken aback. “Peter, I’m not —”

“You’ve been doing it all year!”

The shout tumbled out of his mouth, hitting the walls at full force — and May, who’s eyes had grown wider than the glasses on her face.

“Every time — every time we talk, you go and tell Mr. Stark. Every time!” Peter’s tongue dripped with disdain, his spine taunt with indignance. “I can’t tell him anything myself because you’ve already told him! I get bad grades, he knows. I get in a fight, he knows! I swear if I stay up too late he knows that too! Ever since that stuff happened months ago, it’s like you two don’t trust me to do anything anymore! You two are constantly looking over my shoulder like at any moment I’ll be snatched up, like — like I won’t be able to do anything about it and I can — I can protect myself, I can!”

Peter swallowed thickly, his throat raw, chafed. Feeling as if he had ripped apart his vocal cords with a yell that was foreign to his own ears. The outburst hit like an erupting volcano, destructive, devastating everything in its path.

His heart hammered against his ribs, his chest heaving desperately. Urgently sucking in a breath he’d wasted in a moment that made him dizzy, abruptly too light on his feet.

May stared at him, stunned and stuttering.

“I — I know that sweetie…” she tried, suddenly quiet, timid. “I — we never meant to make you feel like you were —”

“See? It’s we, ” Peter croaked, stomping forward, barely noticing May instinctively take a few steps back. “You have to include him in everything, even when he’s not here!”

She shook her head, the crease between her forehead deepening. “Peter, what is your problem with Tony all of a sudden?”

“Nothing!” The crack in his voice did little to help his case. “My problem is you constantly involving him with everything in my life! I don’t need him to know everything, I don’t need him for everything — I did just fine before him!”

May opened her mouth to respond, but faltered. Her lips clamped shut a moment later, her eyes wildly looking Peter up and down, the grip on her cardigan growing so tight that her knuckles were turning pale.

“I thought...we thought you wanted that. I thought —”

“Not like this!” Peter’s shout thundered across the living room, and this time, he did notice May backing away from him. Somehow, it only added to his outrage, fuel to the firing pit of anger that simmered hot in his veins.

May shook her head, viciously, her expression growing stern.

“You can’t just pick the good things for people to hear, Peter,” she insisted. “If you want Tony in your life, he has to hear about the bad stuff too. That’s just how it works.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Peter firmly, coldly, insisted. “Not if you don’t tell him! Not if —”

“That’s not how it works —”

“Will you just let me talk!?”

A breath of air stuttered in Peter’s chest, oxygen suddenly too hard to come by. The feeling seemed to be reciprocal; May stilled, frozen in the wake of his outburst.

Peter swore, just for a moment — a fleeting second that passed by too quickly — that his vision went dark and his ears grew deaf. The brutal rage seeping through his very being coursed on like a rampage, dismantling him in ways that should have otherwise frightened him no different than before.

But the anger felt good. It felt better than the fear, better than the panic. He held onto it, unknowingly, clinging to the renewed energy it provided.

The breath caught in his chest escaped through gritted teeth. Peter set his jaw tight.

“It doesn’t matter.” His voice began to sound rough, abused. It almost didn’t sound like him, laced with so much untapped emotion that he was losing track of what there was to be angry about. “If I tell you, you’ll go running back to tell him. And then he’ll be on my case, and so will you, and no one will actually listen to what I have to say so what’s the point!?”

The only response to his yell was the dog barking across the hall.

Weeks of resentment had snowballed too big, built up a boil that had split over the pot and drenched the floor. Peter couldn’t help raising his voice, he didn’t care that his shouting had disturbed the neighbors and their pet.

It felt good to let it out. Like scratching an itch, like water that was too hot against sore skin.

It felt wrongfully good.

“Peter…” May slowly started, cautious to keep distance between them. “If I tell Tony anything, trust me — it’s for your own good. I swear, sweetie, I…” her voice grew quiet, close to impossible to hear. “I swear on...on Ben’s life. It’s only to help you.”

If the sound of his uncle’s name didn’t break him, the look on May’s face did.

Peter flinched, though he failed to realize it in the moment. He blinked, once and then again, realizing his eyes were suddenly burning with the fire he’d felt surging through his veins.

A chill swept over him. Suddenly, he was tired.

Really, really tired.

“Yeah, sure, whatever,” Peter found himself muttering, unable to look anywhere but the top corner of the apartment, far away from his aunt and the tears that glossed over her eyes. Right alongside his own.

Identity Crisis│Chapter 17: Along Came a Spider

“I’m busy, okay?” A wetness coated his voice, and he cleared his throat to work past it. “I’m sorry, Mr. Stark. I have other plans.”

Tony couldn’t put a finger on it, but he could have sworn something was distracting Peter — to the point that he looked around at the surrounding buildings, double checking to ensure every shadow of his team, on a rooftop or the streets below, had remained incognito to an innocent bystander eyes.

They couldn’t be seen, not even with Tony knowing the precise location of each individual.

So why did the kid look like five million voices were running through his head, leading him astray?

If he really wanted to leave, what was keeping him here?

Whatever it was, Tony hoped he could use it to his advantage.

“You’re gunna have to cancel them, Pete.” He walked after Peter, each step cautious. “If you just listen to me —”

“Why?” Peter asked, dragging the word out. “Because you say so?”

Tony furrowed his brows, a growing sense of confusion turning into something closer to apprehension. Concern. He almost felt unsettled, though it took everything to actively avoid that thought. The temper in Peter’s outburst was nothing close to normal. This wasn’t agitation, it wasn’t teenage grief or angst.

He stepped forward, necessarily reluctant. Peter didn’t get angry like this. Not without something else taking the turns at the steering wheel.

“Buddy...listen to yourself,” he tried, reaching out to Peter only for the him to step further away. “This isn’t like you.”

Peter shook his head vehemently. The further he moved back, the more his face became clouded in the shadows of darkness, hidden from the streetlights nearby.

“You don’t get to tell me what I’m like.”

Tony paused. He didn’t care for the tightness that grabbed hold of his chest.

“Peter —”

“You don’t get to tell me what to do!”

“Locked and loaded over here,” Clint prompted through the comms, calm with firm urgency. “Give me the signal and it’ll be a go.”

Tony grimaced. It was like having a ticking time bomb in his ear — one he wanted to fly into space where it couldn’t be bothersome to him anymore.

“Yeah, okay, you’re right. You’re absolutely right. Not questioning you or that smart brain I know you got up there.” He jokingly pointed a finger to his forehead, a half-lipped smirk barely masking the rising panic and frustration that his team was starting to induce. “But hey, I think it’s best that you come with me. Not saying you have to. You’re a free Spider-kid, after all. No webs tying you down.”

His overly faux chuckle dissipated into something more serious. Tony lowered his head, sincerity highlighting his every feature.

“You aren’t looking so hot, Pete.” His attempt at casualness failed remarkably. “Let’s get you to a doctor. Remember Cho? The nice lady who literally saved your life this year? Why don’t you two catch up over a cocktail of antibiotics. Sounds a great time to me. What do you say?”

Tony forced himself to take a few steps closer to Peter, the silence that fell between them making each movement of his legs within the armor no different than atomic bombs exploding in the sky. He pushed through, the arc reactor on his chest shining light where there was otherwise shadows.

The blue light of the circular device highlighted the paleness of Peter’s face. A vacant stare tore into him, his brown eyes appearing frighteningly void of life.

“I’m fine, Mr. Stark,” Peter murmured, his voice as derelict as he looked.

Tony arched an eyebrow, clearly not convinced. “She’ll give you a lollipop if you’re a good patient.”

Peter swallowed hard, shaking his head even harder.

“I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“Not even if I say pretty please?”

Static fizzled before Sam’s voice crackled to life. “Put a lid on it, Stark.”

Tony bit the inside of his cheek. For once, he had to agree with the damn annoyance in his ear. This was taking way longer than he planned — than what they had time for. Desperately, he cut through the space between the two of them, now merely an arm’s length apart.

“Peter, you can deny this tooth and nail, but something is wrong.” Tony wanted nothing more than to spit a million swear words when Peter continued to back away from him. Any further and he was going to tumble right off the rooftop. “We know what’s going on, we’re going to —”

“I’m fine, Mr. Stark!” Peter shouted, his words ragged, as if he’d been gurgling shards of glass that sliced through the muscles of his vocal cords.

Tony looked at him, his expression grave.

“No. You’re not.” It wasn’t an argument anymore. It was facts. “The security footage I pulled from your school —”

“So you are spying on me!” Peter’s yell was shrill and sharp, unlike anything Tony had heard before. He tossed both hands up before throwing one in Tony’s direction. “I knew it! You don’t trust me, you’re still treating me like a kid! You act like I can’t take care of myself when I can, I can do just fine without —!”

The little air that was left in Tony’s lungs fled, right along with his patience.

“You are a kid!” He was matching Peter’s volume now, his shout echoing along the rooftop. “You’re unequivocally, without any question, by all legal terms a child!”

“I’m sixteen now,” Peter smugly bit back, gripping his mask tight. “Sixteen and a half, actually.”

Tony scoffed and rolled his eyes. “Equally adorable how you think stating your age in fractions helps your case.”

“Tony,” Natasha was an odd combination of calm and annoyed. “If you have any chance of taking Peter in without restraint, both of you need to calm down.”

Tony’s fingers curled and uncurled convulsively. Easier said miles away than done face-to-face with a kid who, in no terms possibly stated, would listen to reason.

A shallow breath lifted the chest-plate of his armor.

“We have a lot to talk about, Peter,” he tried — damn it, he was trying. “You have a lot you need to hear. But let’s not do it now, let’s take you somewhere —”

“You’re not taking me anywhere!” Tony didn’t think it was possible for Peter’s face to grow any paler than the sheer whiteness that practically made his skin translucent. As his arc reactor shined directly on the kid, he was proven wrong. “You don’t control me!”

Tony’s mouth went dry. Reason was going out the window, and fast. He could practically hear the tautness to the string of Clint’s bow.

“You don’t have a horse in this race, kiddo.” Tony reached forward, his arm gestured out with an open palm that he desperately wanted Peter to grab onto. “I came here to ask you to come back with me. For the love of God, please, just...for once, do what I say.”

Peter inhaled sharply, looking unsteady on his own two feet, even as he unraveled his mask and lifted it towards his head.

“No. I’m not going anywhere with you.” The mask slid over his head, smothering down his greasy brown locks and covering his face entirely. Even the mechanical spider-eyes seemed to move sluggish once adjusted to his facial features. “Goodnight, Mr. Stark.”

Identity Crisis│Chapter 20: Parasite

“I don’t wanna die.” Peter’s throat tightened, making it nearly impossible to force out the words. His windpipe convulsed under his chin harder than the shudders that rippled his back. 

Tony froze, shock coursing through him like a riptide. One hand hovered in the air, halfway to Peter, as if reaching to help but not having a lick of an idea what to do.

The other gripped the bed railing with alarming force.

The blood kept coming.

“You’re not going to — shit!” Tony threw a frenzied glance to the door, desperation and anger stampeding over the shock and panic like a wild horse. “Hey! HEY! I need some help in here!”

Most of the observation window had been decked out with isolation signs and hazard tape. What little he could see of the outside hallways showed no one nearby.

Go fucking figure.

Almost immediately, he swung his neck up, bouncing to every inch of the room until his eyes found the camera hanging in the corner to his right. It was almost hidden by the monitor that showcased Peter’s vitals, and had Tony not been so preoccupied, he would’ve taken note of just how crazy the lines and numbers had quickly become.

Instead, he all but screamed at the ceiling.

“Pronto, Cho!”

If there was a response, he wasn’t privied to it. Tony could feel his gut clench, tenfold when he looked back at Peter. So fast his neck howled and his eyes blurred with vertigo.

There was no anger left in the kid’s expression. No more resentment, no disdain.

There was just terror. A raw fear that Tony had hoped and prayed he’d never see again. A look that brought with it the smell of rotten seaweed, and sulfuric ocean waters.

“I don’t wanna…” Peter released a guttural sob, his words almost inaudible between each gasp that heaved his chest. “I don’t — I don’t — wanna go —”

And just like that, everything came crashing down at once.

“Please, I d’nt — d’nt wanna die —”

“You’re not going to —” Tony lurched forward to grab Peter. He stopped inches from his collarbones, throwing his head to the doorway with a thundering yell. “For Christ’s sake, any day now!”

“I d’nt wanna go, Mr. ‘ark, I ‘nt wanna die, I don’t —!”

Peter’s breathing quickened, pain etching onto his face, bringing a surge of bile to coat the inside of Tony’s throat. He knew it partially stemmed from the overwhelming stench of blood, dripping onto Peter’s lap like a broken faucet.

It was a damn horror movie, if he’d ever seen one before.

Tony threw a wild glance to the door, before looking back to Peter with fierce determination.

“Oh for the love of — fuck this!”

He was across the room in a single stride.

Drawers flew open hard and fast, contents inside ricocheting out and tumbling onto the floors. Tony rummaged through every accessible cabinet that wasn’t locked shut, tossing items aside in a frenzied fit. Discarding anything and everything that wasn’t to his liking.

He snatched two rolls of gauze and practically twisted his ankle running back to Peter’s side.

Peter, who was gasping at the back of his throat, blood tainting his teeth and spluttering into the air with each panicked, strained cry he let out.

“I cn’t — I d’nt — I d’nt — I’m — I —”

“Peter — Peter!” With a force not intended, Tony pressed a wad of gauze directly under Peter’s nose, covering his face with cotton. The restriction of air did nothing to stop Peter from hyperventilating, making his already raggedy breaths even worse. “Kid, look at me. You gotta calm down, you gotta —”

“I cn’t — I can’t go — I can’t —”

“You’re not. Stop freaking out, you gotta —”

“I can’t die, Mr. Stark, I can’t — I can’t — please, please, please —”

“Look at me, Peter.”

Still, Peter didn’t look at him.

“I can’t — can’t leave May. I can’t, I can’t — not after Ben, not — not after —”

With his other hand, Tony grabbed the back of the kid’s head and squeezed.

“Look at me.”

Peter shook his head manically.

“I don’t wanna die. I don’t want to go, please Mr, Stark, I don’t want to die.” His words were tripping over one another, flooding out like a broken dam. Brutal and unfeigned. An incoherent mess of petrified sobs.

There had never been a time Tony had seen him like this.

Weak, yes. Overwhelmed, sure.

But not like this — dismantled. Ripped apart. Drowning within himself. He once saw that sort of vulnerability come out with May, in private, never intended for his eyes to witness. He never had doubts it existed.

But it was never something shared with him.

Without hesitation, without so much a second thought, Tony reached for the restraint wrapped snugly around Peter’s wrist and he yanked.

“You’re not going to,” Tony’s throat rumbled like stones to gravel, and he grunted as worked to loosen the velcro. “You hear me? It’s not happening, you’re not going to—”

Panic flared as he tugged and pulled until the velcro came loose, and all while using one hand — the other still pressed firmly with gauze to Pete’s face — he unraveled the damn fabric from its hold. The restraint was still hanging loosely around Peter’s wrist when he went to unbound the other hand.

“I don’t wanna go, Mr. Stark, I —” Peter looked startled as Tony jerked his limbs free, yet compliant all the same. “I don’t wanna die, please, I don’t —”

“You’re alright,” Tony dryly insisted, as if he didn’t believe his own words. “Do you understand that? You get that?”

With his arms free, the first thing Peter did was press the heels of his palms against his eyes. His forearms clashed into Tony’s hand, alongside the wad of gauze that smothered against his nose.

The cotton was now a drenched mess of blood.

Tony quickly discarded it for the second, fresh pack, and this time forced it into Peter’s hand to staunch the bleeding.

“Parker, you hear me, and you hear me good.” With both hands unrestricted — and fingers caked with blood — Tony grabbed each side of Peter’s head and forced him to look his way. He pulled Peter’s hands away from his eyes, making sure one kept the gauze in place while he watched the other listlessly drop to the mattress below.

Blood-shot, yellow tinted, and wet, but his eyes finally found their way to Tony. And they held in place like magnets. Locked hard with a desperation of a child begging for things to be made better. To be made okay.

In a voice stronger than he’d ever thought he could manage, Tony insisted,

“You’re not going to die.”

He looked at Peter; hard, unwavering. His knees nearly buckled as he leaned over the beds railing, but his hands stayed firm on each side of Peter’s head. His fingers slipped through the matte of hair and stayed there.

Peter didn’t blink. His breathing barely hitched, his body frozen as he stared at Tony. His lip quivered but no words came out as he instead swallowed. Again and again, working frantically to smother down the remains of what hysterics threatened to consume him.

Tony grabbed Peter’s shoulder with his other hand and clasped it tight. He didn’t care about the smell or sight of blood, he didn’t care about personal boundaries and the way close contact usually made his skin crawl in a way that screamed ‘this wasn’t how I was built.’

That part of him had been demolished, destroyed and left to die in the icy cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean. He wouldn’t dare let it come back now.

He dipped his head a little lower, forcing his way closer to Peter’s face, his eyes boring in the brown pupils staring back at him.

“You are not going to die.”

The finality in Tony’s tone left no room for argument.

Just like that, Peter forgot about regaining his composure. There was no longer a need to find the pieces to his self-control, and what dignity may have come with it.

It was gone, no sooner than when the words left Tony’s mouth.

Peter flung himself towards Tony, a hoarse cry tearing through his throat along the way.

Tony caught him without hesitation, wrapping his arms so tightly around Peter that it looked as if he were worried the kid might float away. Arms squeezed him in return, Peter gripping his shoulder’s with such strength that Tony was sure it would leave bruises.

The pressure was needed. It kept him together, kept him grounded. Tony held Peter tight, so neither of them would fall apart.

“I’m sorry, I —!” Peter choked, the apology caught in a wet, ugly sob that made his chest hitch and ache. “I — I d’nt mean to hurt anyone — I swear, I didn’t, I —!”

“I know,” Tony murmured, his lips brushing against hair as he rested his chin atop Peter’s head. He moved one hand from the kid’s back and along his neck, squeezing the nape with firm pressure. He could feel Peter’s pulse hammer with each sob that rattled his body. “I know.”

Peter tried to stifle his cries, but each attempt left him shaking and gasping even worse than before. With each sob, Tony held him tighter, all but smothering him against his chest.

“I don’t — I don’t remember it.” Peter’s voice was muffled against the confines of Tony’s shirt. Still, Tony understood. “I don’t – I know I did bad things, I —! I know I hurt — hurt people, I —! I just...I don’t remember it, I swear. Mr. Stark, I swear, I don’t —!”

“I believe you.”

It was the truth. As God honest as Tony could ever be, the words slipping from his mouth without a single beat giving him a second to consider what was said.

It was the truth. And he felt ashamed he couldn’t say it sooner.

Tony pulled Peter away, hands cupping his cheeks and the smear of liquid that stained them. Tears had lightened the blood but also smudged it further along his face. Tony took his thumbs and moved what he could out of the way, his eyes never once straying from Peter.

“I believe you.” Tony eyes locked onto Peter’s so forcefully, that he couldn’t look away even if he had wanted to.

Tony needed that. He needed Peter to see the transparent honesty on his face, to know more than anything that he’d go to hell and back if it meant keeping the kid safe.

His kid.

Nothing would change that. And damn the universe for trying.

“We’re going to fix this, understood?” Tony insisted, intending to sound comforting but missing the mark completely. It had never been his specialty.

Peter stiffened, his whole body growing rigid in Tony’s grasp. The firmness in his voice must’ve been enough to trigger something, as his eyes averted and he moved to get away. Brows creased deeply and his gaze shot down, almost looking shameful.

He wasn’t having it. Tony rounded back on him — refusing to let go of for even a second.

“Peter,” he started, staunchly. “I’m going to fix this. That’s a promise. One I intend to keep.”

It was a moment that felt like eternity where they both stayed like that.

He waited, far too long for his liking, until he saw what he needed. Until he saw trust bloom in Peter’s eyes. Return — back from the painful departure it had taken.

Just slightly, just by a threshold. But he saw it.

The knot in his chest loosened. But only as slightly as the trust in Peter’s eyes.

“You are not going to die.” Tony tried for a weak smile. It twisted his lips in an unpleasant way. “I already bought a casket for you once, Underoo’s. I’m not doing it again.”

Breathing began to mellow out, not just for Peter but for Tony as well. Harsh and sharp breaths slowly but surely reached a calm.

“Capisce?”

Peter barely nodded, more of a twitch to his neck than anything else. But the movement was seen. And it was enough for Tony.

Right about now, he’d take whatever he could get.

Slowly, he released his hold on Peter, his hands moving back to the guard railing with slight hesitation. Peter matched his speed as he dabbed at the blood slowly coming to abate from his nose. Slow and sluggish, smearing the gauze across his face with shaking hands.

With an effort, Peter let the tension erode off his back. His breathing came in more evenly, and the monitors found equilibrium in result.

Still, he stared at the sticky, scarlet mess on his hands. A look burned in his eyes, a look Tony shared as they both watched blood drip between his fingers and along the back of his knuckles.

Identity Crisis│Chapter 21: The Eleventh Hour

“Huh — wha —?” He sat up a bit higher, the tug of the seat-belt pulling on his neck. “Oh. I…” For good measure, Peter looked around the car seat, even reaching into his backpack, albeit his search was unmotivated. “I think I ate ‘em all...it's all gone.”

The look Tony proceeded to give him — which wasn’t really a look at all, more a side-glare hidden beneath high tech frames — was enough to speak volumes.

The sound he made said the rest.

“Let aunt hottie know that if you’re returned to her custody with rotting teeth and a mouth full of cavities, you can take on a paper route to pay off your dentist bills.”

Peter rolled his eyes, though a humorous grin curled at his mouth, stealing any chance of looking even the least bit miffed.

“Pft, this is nothing.” Peter gave a one-shouldered shrug, using the seat-belt to further pull himself upright. He stretched his legs the furthest they could go out, which wasn’t all that far, what with his backpack cramped between his knees. “You should see me and Ned on ‘May the fourth’ Star Wars weekend. One year we filled up a shoe-box with gummy worms and ate them all before we even finished the prequels. Aside from the green ones — neither of us like the green ones. So, like...a third of the shoe box was still full. We melted them down for our science fair project. It...didn’t work.”

As if suddenly having a memory re-surface that he’d forgotten long ago, Peter made a face, something that was caught between a grimace and a wince.

“We ruined May’s casserole dish. And the kitchen smelt like burnt lime for weeks.” A beat. “The stove’s never not been sticky since...”

Tony spared the road his attention as he craned his neck over to Peter, his eyebrows so high up his forehead that it kept his sunglasses in place.

“I have no words,” was all he said, before turning back to driving.

Silence fell, although it was a comfortable one. There was enough noise from the car to fill the moment, what with a slight hum from the engine combined with the softly played rock music from the stereo. Peter shifted in his seat — his butt was definitely growing numb — and he turned to look at the road from the backseat mirror.

It was growing darker, and the headlights of the cars that followed behind them were giving off more light than anything else. What little cars there were, anyhow. He could count on one hand how many he saw both in front and behind them.

“Where are we going to next, anyway?”

As if also noticing the setting sun, Tony carefully removed his sunglasses, placing them in a compartment above the rear-view mirror.

“Malibu,” Tony answered, shutting the compartment closed. He let his hand fall to the stick-shift, keeping one hand casually on the wheel. “Was thinking about swinging up that way and paying my old stomping grounds a visit. You ever been up to Point Dume?”

Before Peter could shake his head with an ever-so-obvious ‘no’, Tony plowed right through.

“We’re going, you’ll love it.” Tony adjusted himself in his seat, pulling his eyes away from the road ahead of them to steal a glance at Peter. “It’s a beaut, hell of a view. When you’re not free-falling hundreds of feet into the Pacific Ocean, that is.”

Peter arched an eyebrow, not completely sure if what he heard was actually what he heard, and if he should laugh or pretend he didn’t hear anything at all.

Judging by the smirk on Tony’s face, he decided to follow suit.

Sometimes he forgot just how many crazy things had happened in Tony’s life, long before they had ever met. It was coming close to a year now since Mr. Stark had taken him under his wing — truly, not just giving him the suit in Germany. Things changed after Coney Island, and Peter would be the first to admit that it had been a strange journey.

A really, really strange journey.

It was hard to forget that at first, it was all by force of May’s hand. She insisted Tony have responsibility in Peter’s ‘extracurricular activities’, as she’d call it. And to Tony’s credit, he did just that. In beginning he wasn’t always present, just allowing Peter the use of his lab to tinker on Spider-Man related stuff. ‘Do it right, not in pajamas’, as he’d say. But slowly, he was around more. And more.

And more.

And then one day, Peter got a phone call from him. From Tony. Personally. Inviting him to the compound. It was just earlier this year when out of nowhere, it became a thing. Happy would drive him there, they’d spend the day working on things that weren’t even Spider-Man related, and a time or two Tony even took him out to eat. Usually food cart hot dogs or tacos, whatever gained the least attention from the public.

There was only one rule — don’t go to the east wing of the compound. None of the Avengers could know Peter was that guy from Germany. No matter how badly Peter wanted to meet them, Tony wasn’t ready. It wasn’t allowed.

Until the day that it happened.

Peter felt a laugh somewhere deep in his chest, a bubble of joy he had to suppress. Was all that really just a few months ago? He scratched at his head, pushing his hair back with his hand. Everything after that...jeeze. It was only more that could be added to Tony’s crazy life.

And here he was. A part of it. On their way to visit Tony’s old home — or, well, where it used to be, anyway.

“How far away is it?” Peter stretched his legs out even more, pushing his backpack into the depths of the passenger seat floor. It wasn’t like there was anything important in it. His cell phone was in his back pocket and his new camera, gifted by Tony himself, sat somewhere in the backseat between both their dufflebags.

Tony eyed the dashboard mounted GPS before turning back to the windscreen. “Seven hours, give or take.”

Peter nodded, stretching his arms out in front of him, aching to crack his back in a way the car wouldn’t allow him.

Halfway into stretching and he threw Tony a wild look.

“Can I drive?”

Tony laughed, curtly, before, “No.”

Peter’s hands fell dramatically to his thighs, slapping onto his jeans with a resonance of rockets.

“Just for like, an hour!” he begged.

Tony shook his head. “Still no.”

“You told me —!”

“I said we’d see—”

“Thirty minutes!”

“Answer hasn’t changed.”

“Twenty,” Peter compromised, having lifted from his seat and reaching halfway to Tony’s. “Twenty minutes, and I promise —”

Tony lifted his hand off the stick shift, placing an open palm in the air as if he was keeping Peter from climbing into the drivers seat and taking over.

“Bargaining is beneath you, kid.”

With a wine so dramatic that it reached a new octave, Peter threw his head back against the headrest.

“C’mon!” his voice squeaked in pitch. “I can drive!”

Tony snorted, and made sure it was heard.

“And I can design pre-programmed micro-manipulators to function within a napalm gel fragmentation grenade all while using electrosthetic conductors,” he argued. “Doesn’t mean I should.”

A flash of annoyance crossed Peter’s face, but left no sooner than it came. He plopped back down into the passengers seat with a huff far more exaggerated than it was genuine.

“Oh, whatever,” he drawled out, rolling his eyes. “You’re so extra, Mr. Stark.”

Identity Crisis│Chapter 22: Welcome to Wakanda

Peter didn’t want to ask.

He really, really didn’t want to ask.

“Why?” he asked.

Tony looked as reluctant to answer as Peter did to asking.

His foot began tapping on the floor, the metal of his boot making a song against the metal of the Quinjet. Still, it was muted underneath the sound of his grinding teeth.

“That spider you were bit with...low and behold, it was bred with the intent to fuel the symbiote project. Its venom would have been used to generate the bonding power that it currently lacks.” A sour expression crossed over Tony’s face. Remorse immediately washed it away, like soil in the rain. “It bonded to you because it recognized the DNA of the radioactive spider. And it fused with that DNA. Just like OsCorp intended.” 

The words rang in Peter’s brain.   Shrill, and loud...

And for all the reasons that Tony wasn’t aware of.

“Mr. Osborn said that.”

Until he was.

Tony looked at Peter, now his turn to both raise his eyebrows and scrunch his face. The confusion was just that powerful.

That’s when Peter realized he’d spoken aloud, saying the thing in his head when he hadn’t meant to. He turned to Tony, his eyes wide with a realization he didn’t like having. It felt nearly as bad as the poison coursing through his veins — or, in terms he’d just been educated on, the feeling of his new DNA mutilating his very being.

“It was what he told me. That he had this, like...genetic bodysuit to cure cancer.” Peter’s voice was tremulous. The fortitude to look brave was quickly crumbling. “But he needed the spider. And he kept asking me if I knew where the spider went.”

Tony stared at Peter. It was all he could do, a loss of words making his voice obsolete.

“The spider died, Mr. Stark…” Peter trailed off, his eyes drifting over to Tony — unaware that he had ever looked away. “Am I going to die, too?”

An armor clad hand gripped Peter’s knee and squeezed. Hard. 

“Not if I have a say in it.” 

Tony sounded every bit as heroic as Peter imagined him to be, years ago growing up as a powerless kid in New York city. His words were strong, stubborn, and most of all determined. It managed to filter through the panic that was quickly settling over. 

Still, the knot in his chest tightened. 

They fell into a silence, one of many. It stretched on until Peter couldn’t take it anymore.

“Mr. Stark, I’m…” he lost his voice for a moment. When it returned, it didn’t sound the same. “I’m really scared.”

Peter was surprised at what he heard next.

“I know,” Tony quietly acknowledged, with the smallest nod of his head. “I am too.”

A bout of nausea came pulling at his stomach and Peter swallowed, forcibly. The battered and abused tissue of his throat screamed in protest but he did it again, forcing down a wave of sickness that didn’t stem from the illness in his body. Rather the fear in his mind.

The admission was crippling. He looked away from Tony, back to the dreary black and gray roof of the Quinjet. A part of him wondered how much of that fear was shared. 

A part of him wondered if he’d ever heard Mr. Stark admit to such a thing.

Identity Crisis│Chapter 29: Rebirth

“Well, yeah, but…” Peter shook his head to clear away the shock. “I mean...you didn’t have to...you could have —”

“Eliminate the threat?” Tony shook his head right back at him. “Not in a million years.”

Peter made a face — if he came off as insulted, it was beyond his control. The confusion had him by the reins and held him tighter than the grip he had on the blanket beneath him. If his hand squeezed any harder, the wool would combust into a million little fibers.

“Venom killed people,” Peter’s voice grew dark, rueful. “I killed —”

“You didn’t touch a soul.”

The moment Peter heard Tony speak, all of the air swept from his lungs. There was a firmness in his voice, so hard and powerful that Peter was sure he never never, ever heard the man speak in such a way.

“That wasn’t you,” Tony insisted, not sounding like he was trying to convince Peter — not even sounding like he was trying to convince himself.

Rather, he spoke the facts. Talking as if the sky were blue and the grass was green.

There was a lot about Mr. Stark that Peter had yet to learn, but there was one thing he always knew — long before he ever met the man. If Tony Stark said something was true...it was true. The sky was blue and the grass was green.

Still.

“You didn’t have to…” Peter’s eyes flittered away. “You could’ve let SHIELD take me. Or the government. You could’ve...done it yourself.” Peter decided eliminate the threat didn’t need to be said twice. But it still rung in his head, even as his eyes drifted up to meet Tony’s. “Why?”

Peter found himself looking at Tony’s injured arm, where his hand was gloved and a sleeve made of technology covered the limb from fingers to shoulder. The lights dancing up the length of the limb had slowed down, immensely, making Peter wonder if it really matched the pulse beneath it or if it was just some kind of effect for show.

When he returned his gaze to Tony, he found himself doubting that theory. The calm in Tony’s face, the restful stance as he stared at Peter and no where else but Peter — there wasn’t any panic to be seen, no stress or trouble that could be discerned.

His heartbeat was calm, his pulse peaceful. It was only when silence briefly took their conversation that Peter realized that same calm had radiated towards him, soothing each beat of his own heart.

“Because…” Tony smiled, slowly, until the grin cracked the lines around his weary eyes. “You’re my kid.”

A breeze blew the curtains back, and the sun swelled through the window — just for a moment, just long enough for Tony to speak.

Peter went to say something, but only took in a breath instead, the fresh air crisp as it hit his lungs.

He heard the words. But he heard what was behind them as well.

Three words spoken, three words not.

‘You’re my kid.’

Tony smiled at him.

‘I love you.’

Peter smiled back.

There was distant chatter that grew from outside the room, the door shut but the cracks leaking in sounds. Hospital personnel passed by the hallway, and some equipment was rolled by after. Filling the silence between them with the ordinary; standard, every day life that continued on around them.

Peter felt a blush start on his neck, and he quickly moved a hand to rub it away. All while nodding in the direction of Tony’s arm.

“Is your arm…” he started to say. “Is it gunna be…?”

Tony looked down at the limb before shrugging it off.

“Wakanda’s kinetic skeleton? Far superior to my new skin.” Tony turned the arm around, almost as if he was giving Peter a good look at the technology. “Give us a couple weeks and we’ll be as brand new as you are.”

Peter chuckled, savoring how light it felt — how right it felt. How everything, for once in...an amount of time he lost track of, everything felt okay.

Everything felt right.

Identity Crisis│Chapter 31: In a Quiet Lagoon, Devils Dwell

“Peter,” Tony addressed him head-on, tilting his chin low until he caught Peter’s gaze. “It wasn’t you.” Even when Peter fought to look away, Tony found a way to grab his attention again. He didn’t speak unless their eyes were locked. “You were, by all accounts, legally dead.”

Neither of them were surprised when Peter shook his head. “Yeah, but —”

“Kid,” Tony stressed. It was his turn for his voice to waver, just enough for Peter to smother down any rising argument. “I want you to listen to me, and listen to me good — okay?”

Peter didn’t nod. But his eyes spoke the ‘yes’ that stayed in his throat.

Tony briefly looked away — at nothing in particular, his eyes finding the same hole in the chained fence that Peter had noticed before. But Peter could tell it wasn’t the hole left behind from a rabid raccoon that distracted him. His lips moved soundlessly, as if he were talking to himself.

And then he turned back around, the streetlamps from far away not dim enough to highlight the sincerity in his eyes.

“You were...you were under the influence of something, Peter. Something much more powerful than any of us could handle.” Tony squeezed on his arm, this time harder than the last. “Bigger than anything you could control.”

The frustration spread across Peter’s face began to ebb away, just a bit. The crease between his brows softened enough to bring back his young features, washing away the stress that tried relentlessly to weigh him down in all the wrong ways.

With the hand not clasped on Peter’s forearm, Tony reached out for the gravestone, gripping the top and holding it tight.

“And if your uncle was half the man you’re growing up to be, then he was a smart man. And he’d say the same thing.” Tony lowered his chin along with his voice. “He’d tell you that life is all about lessons. We all make mistakes — we learn from them. The lessons we learn aren’t always easy ones, either. But if you keep harping on it, you won’t be able to see the next lesson that’s waiting for you.”

Peter almost wanted to mention that what Tony said was exactly what Ben would’ve said.

Instead, he gave a small smile.

“I might need you to tell me that. Every now and again,” Peter said, quietly. At first, unsure if he was heard at all, even with the close proximity to the man.

Tony moved his grip off Peter’s forearm and settled it on his shoulder, latching firmly and squeezing hard enough to rock Peter against the wet soil of the ground.

“Take the world off your shoulders, Underoo’s. Nobody can handle that weight.” Tony met his meek, small smile with his own. “Share the burden, we’re here for you.”

Peter was as bad at hiding his emotions as he was at lying. When the slightest look of shame crossed his face, Tony squeezed his grip on his shoulder. Using a strength too weak to top Peter’s, but still holding firm in a way that was always grounding. Keeping Peter anchored before those thoughts could take him away.

“Hey,” Tony started, his face unequivocally honest. “I’m here for you.”

Peter blinked, and then blinked again, staring Tony down for a time that felt far longer than it could’ve been.

That didn’t sound like Mr. Stark.

Not the Mr. Stark he’d had come to know; changing through the months no different than the seasons that changed while they were in Wakanda. It reminded Peter an awful lot of his conversation with Steve, right before they left the country. How he saw a difference in the great Captain America— altering him, changing him. Just like time had changed Mr. Stark.

Peter saw different in the beginning. Time slowly, but surely, brought that on. The Mr. Stark, the one and only Tony Stark. The Iron Man.

Turned mentor. Turned friend.

And now, listening to him speak, using a gentleness Peter had never heard before...time had changed the seasons again. Turning him into something else.

Only once Tony finished speaking did Peter look back to the headstone in front of them. The sight never changed; not as time separated his visits, not with the leaves brushed away, and not even with Tony’s hand covering half of the R that ended Parker.

Peter’s eyes scanned the length of the gravestone, from left to right — making out the name of Benjamin Parker with crystal clear clarity, even in the late of night. And from there, his eyes drifted over Tony’s hand, covering half of the Parker surname before Peter turned his head to face the man directly.

When he realized it, Peter smiled.

Identity Crisis│Chapter 33: Comes Great Responsibility

Peter let his eyes travel to the bathroom door, lingering there for a second that felt too long. The noise — or rather, the lack of noise — hadn’t been there since he returned earlier in the week. He vaguely remembered May saying she’d gotten the landlord to fix the pipes. But with everything that happened recently, he’d honestly forgotten all about it.

Until now.

May came walking back to the living room with a different rag thrown over her shoulder — the residual sauce on her forearms indicating a mess that soiled the other dishtowel — and Peter watched her as she returned to the couch. Though he wasn’t really paying attention the whole time.

His thoughts were caught up in the memory of what happened after ‘that bunker nonsense’, as May dubbed it. How — like she said — he almost never woke up without Mr. Stark at his side.

How Mr. Stark was always present in his recovery, and tenfold after the fact.

The road trip, the training, the ever-persistent need to be involved — even if Peter absolutely didn’t want him to be.

The symbiote. The efforts put into helping him, even when he pushed help away. And — Peter blinked too many times to count, still unable to fully wrap his head around the whole resurrection ordeal — it all traced back to ‘that bunker nonsense.’

It was the second realization Peter came to, silently — with no audible statement to follow. It was information he stored away, hoping it would help him figure out — or finally accept — what he’d gotten so hung up on.

“I think a part of me…” Peter’s thoughts leaked out before his mouth even knew it was speaking. He quickly shook his head. “Never mind. It’s stupid.”

May plopped onto the sofa and flapped the dishtowel at Peter.

“Try me.”

Peter cursed his inability to keep his mouth shut. Mr. Stark had once joked that he wanted to add a mute feature inside his mask — some days, Peter couldn’t deny supporting the add-on of that function.

“I think...I may have. I dunno.” Peter blew a hard breath through his cheeks, puffing them out until they were five times their normal size. He didn’t resume speaking until all the air had vacated his lungs. “I think I felt like I was...replacing Ben with Mr. Stark.”

A clap of hands was absolutely not what Peter was expecting.

“That’s good!” May cheered.

The look he threw May nearly had her doubled over. She held back her laugh with a visible bite of her tongue, and reached for Peter’s bicep, gripping it with colored nails that pressed into his skin.

“Sweetie,” May drawled out, the lines on her face pulling with a flood of sympathy that warmed the room. “Ben’s not here anymore. He’s here —” May moved her hand to his chest, her index finger tapping firmly in the middle. “But he’s not here.” She let her hand drop no sooner after, with a frown that followed suit.

Peter brought his own hand to his chest, laying a fist there as if he could feel the presence of his uncle beneath his flesh and bone.

And yet the ache still lingered, not much different than the night the man passed away.

And Peter blinked frantically, fighting to ease the burn that began to swell in his eyes.

“And trust me when I say he would not want you living in the past.” May forced her lips upward as she saw the sheen pool around his eyes. “Ben wanted nothing but the best for you. It wouldn’t matter who played that role in your life, so long as someone was there to do it. Someone good.” May’s smile became more genuine as the seconds passed. “Someone like Tony.”

Peter looked away, unable to keep the smile off his face even as he diverted his attention from May. He flicked his thumb across his nose, sniffling a few times to free the building emotion from his chest.

“Ben hated billionaires,” Peter returned his gaze to her with a joke.

May leveled him a look.

“And millionaires,” she dryly stated. “He was a blue collar guy, Peter, what do you expect?”

Peter laughed, flicking at his nose one more time as the sound of his own chuckles was too wet for his liking. He couldn’t help it; Ben was always a hard subject to bring up, even around people like May.

Time may have separated him from that night, but talking about things made it feel like it happened yesterday. And just when Peter thought it was getting easier, suddenly, he felt right back at square one. Like all the thoughts he struggled with regarding Mr. Stark re-opened a wound he hadn’t realized was slowly healing on its own.

He knew May was right. Deep down, logically, Peter knew he wasn’t replacing Ben. The shoes were being filled, but it wasn’t replacing his uncle.

His uncle had to leave those shoes behind. At fault of no one but the shooters, out of anyone’s control.

Peter would grapple with that reality for the rest of his life, but he’d come to accept it.

And with that acceptance, maybe he could let someone else in.

“Do you think he would’ve liked Mr. Stark?” Peter turned to ask May, a quirk of his lips telling her he already knew the answer.

May’s snort proved as much to be true. “At first? Hell no.”

Peter let himself laugh — loudly, at that.

“Yeah,” Peter’s laughs turned into chuckles, and he shook his head for good measure. “You kinda didn’t like him, either.”

Nothing, not even sentient parasites, could make him forget how May reacted when she first found out about things — specifically Tony’s involvement in his ‘extracurricular activities.’ Peter wasn’t too sure which topped the embarrassment chart — when the Avenger’s made him de-mask and discovered his identity, and his age in the process —

Or May screaming at Tony Stark while he was locked away in his bedroom, grounded for an infinite amount of time that ended up being six weeks, turned to three, turned to two with good behavior.

May’s smile softened, no different than Peter’s laughs died down. She slapped the back of her hand against his shoulder, jokingly and lovingly all at the same time.

“You always see the potential in people, you know,” she began to say. “You always see the good in them, even when others can’t. And I think we can both say that Tony isn’t the same person he was at the beginning of this year.”

Peter didn’t think there was any words in the English dictionary that described just how much of an understatement that was.

“Yeah…” he just narrowly held back a huff — one that easily would’ve overtaken the shrill BEEP sounding from the stove. “That’s for sure.”

Identity Crisis│Chapter 34: Break of Dawn

“You want a new arm...right?” Peter asked, only to suddenly feel incredibly intrusive once speaking the question out loud. He adjusted himself on the stool, so quick he nearly fell over. “Like, obviously you want a new arm. Who wouldn’t? You can’t juggle. Could you juggle before? You could learn to juggle. I mean, I wouldn’t wanna be armless. Or legless. Or —”

“You now have a words-per-minute allowance,” Bucky firmly stated, lifting the spoon from the bowl so he could point it at Peter. “Let’s start with thirty and see if you can stick with that.”

Peter paused, his lips growing tightly together as he considered Bucky’s words.

“I’d just talk slower,” he concluded — and in all fairness, he didn’t start smiling until long after Bucky’s expression of exasperation became permanently fixed on his face.

“Do you find loopholes for everything?” Bucky asked, dryly, making it very clear he didn’t need an answer.

“Depends on who you ask,” Peter answered regardless.

Bucky was mid-chomp on his oatmeal when he pointed the dirty spoon at Peter again.

“Your pops,” he stressed, taking in as much pleasure from Peter’s expression of exasperation as Peter had towards him. “How ‘bout him?”

Peter rolled his eyes and snatched up his pencil, the little-bit-of-eraser on the top beating relentlessly against the pages of his textbook.

“Mr. Stark wanted to add a mute function to the inside of my mask,” Peter murmured, purposefully ignoring the look of satisfaction that crossed Bucky’s face — his eyes dropped down to the island and landed somewhere on paragraph seven.

“It’d be a good start.” Bucky scraped the spoon around the bowl as he dug for the last remains of his oatmeal.

Peter shook his head with another eye-roll, not that either could be seen as Bucky stood from his stool; the legs screeching against the floor as he made his way to the kitchen sink.

The faucet had turned on by the time Peter broke away from his history books, looking up at Bucky even though the mans back was facing him.

“You do want a new arm…” he asked, his one eyebrow slowly reaching up to his hairline. “Right?”

The sound of running water occupied the space where neither of them spoke. The sound of glass clinked and clanked as Bucky washed his bowl in the sink, only answering when the faucet eventually shut off.

“It’s complicated,” he answered, reaching for the roll of paper towels and pulling a few down, his hand dripping soapy water along the counter as he did. “Old one had a lot of memories attached to it.”

Peter watched, silently, as Bucky single-handedly dried himself off; using the counter as a base for the paper towels that soaked up the water from his hand, before he tossed the wad into the nearest trash can.

He didn’t re-approach the kitchen island, choosing instead to plop his back against the kitchen sink, and stuff that same hand deep into the pocket of his sweats.

It was honestly the first time Peter ever saw Bucky look anything remotely close to tired. Though exhaustion was far too a strong a word to use, there was a hunch to his posture that indicated more of an urge to sleep than what Peter felt. If any of them were leaving the kitchen first, Peter had a feeling it’d be him.

“Yeah, but…” Peter wasn’t sure why he trailed off. “New things give new memories, so...”

Peter’s attempt at words of encouragement was as remarkable as his attempt at his history essay. He shook his head, this time at himself, as he returned to the notebook on the counter.

He was surprised to hear Bucky respond.

“Just don’t want that happening again.” He was quiet, especially from across the kitchen.

Peter wondered if Bucky knew he could hear at that distance, or if he was just speaking to himself in the middle of the night; looking off in the distance with a stare, just like he always did.

There was a slight drip to the faucet in the silence that followed; leaking the residual water from the pipes after its brief use. Peter looked past Bucky and at the sink, listening as each droplet ‘plopped’ down, almost in a way that matched the beat to his pulse.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

“Memories?” Peter asked, almost matching the same volume, though not necessarily on purpose. It was hard to even broach the subject of memories, what with his dream leading him to this very kitchen at — Peter looked back to the stove — two thirty-six in the morning.

“Bad ones.” Bucky dropped his head when he answered. “Easier to avoid the problem if I don’t got an arm. That’s all.”

The dripping continued, though it noticeably lost its rhythm. Spanning out gaps between each plop of water in the sink.

Peter heard it, but this time, he didn’t try to shake the thoughts away.

Avoiding the bad memories was just problematic, after all. He never allowed himself to dwell on those moments before, and they leaked into his dreams — turning into nightmares that stole away his sleep. And his peace of mind.

The sound from the sink hit his hears no different than the noise of Bucky grounding his jaw, or the crickets chirping outside — all piercingly sharp with his enhanced hearing, but some hitting harder than others.

Months had gone by and the seasons had changed, and Peter was starting to give up hope that he’d ever remember his kidnapped-bunker-under-the-sea ordeal in full clarity. The moments after his encounter with Dmitri — after being shish-kebabed — it was mostly a blur. Everything he’d been told by others helped put together the pieces, but there were still things he couldn’t quite make out.

“I’m here, kid.”

He remembered his dreams — his nightmares — of drowning. He remembered moments where he swore he’d taken his last breath, where his lungs failed to take in anymore air, and the fear seized his last heartbeat.

He remembered being scared.

“I gotcha.”

And slowly, he was finally starting to remember more.

Eventually, when enough time passed, the pipes cleared themselves of any residual water. And the last drip brought with it complete silence.

Identity Crisis│Chapter 35: Like Father, Like Son

“Besides,” Tony went on to say, unfolding one of his arms to gesture at nothing in particular. “While I know you don’t like me harping on your age—”

Peter quickly looked up. “As long as you stop threatening to put my birth certificate in every hallway of the compound.”

“Whoops.” Tony winked and grinned. “Too late.”

DUM-E passed by them both, his whirring and whining drowned out by Peter’s soft laughter. He tried to roll his eyes with indignance, but even if he had, it wouldn’t be anything remotely close to believable. 

Tony leaned forward a bit with his grin softening at the edges. 

“You’re young, Parker,” he said shrewdly — and quick to beat Peter to the punch before he could make any comebacks. “That’s a good thing. That means you got plenty of time to learn, far more than us headstrong geriatrics got going for us.”

Tony reached for the holographic screen near Peter, a drag his hand bringing the lines of coding closer to him. He scrolled his finger through it while he talked.

“And while the last few weeks have put a recess on things, Cap’s gunna get you where you need to be with training. Remember, it’s not just your abilities that make you strong.” Moving his index finger away from the hologram, Tony tapped at his temple while simultaneously looking over at Peter. “It’s what’s up here. Rogers will fill up that noggin of yours will all the tricks and trades your Captain America Training Tips notebook can handle. Just you wait.”

Peter’s chuckle quickly fell into a tightly contained grimace as the words dug deep through his head. A sour taste on his tongue suddenly returned, and he shut his jaw fast to swallow it away.

The last few weeks were still vividly fresh in his memory, sans the gallant battle he never got to witness. And though a lot of moments were murky and clouded by the symbiote’s leech-sucking-feeding that ultimately took his life, there were still parts he could remember. All of which stirred guilt that he tried, patiently, to shed himself from.

That day in the gym was one of them.

Tony continued to work with the holographic screens, and Peter briefly chewed on his bottom lip — hesitant to bring up the incident, and almost afraid to mention it. 

“You...you really want me back to training again?” Peter asked, timidly, unable to stop his hand from rubbing at the back of his head. His hair ruffled in six different directions that no product or hairspray could replicate. “After...you know. What happened?”

Tony briefly looked away from the screens, the forced smile that followed only looking twice as forced against the harsh blue lights of the holograms.

“Look at it as nothing more than a bump in the road,” he airily said, before gesturing Peter’s way. “Now wrap up that circuity, FRIDAY’s gotta run a full analysis on the suit integrity before you can take it on any test runs.”

Clicks and beeps followed Tony’s words, along with the haptic feedback from each touch his fingers made to the holograms.

Peter watched, silently, as Tony worked through the lines of code to his suit. The slight crease to his brow spoke of his concentration, and for a second, Peter debated on dropping the subject entirely. It would’ve been easier, there was no doubt about that. Hide and tuck it away where it could never be dealt with; forgotten by choice, swept under the rug by the them.

In many ways, he was sure he would’ve — another time, another place, perhaps another universe. 

It was Mr. Stark’s words, the ones said back in Wakanda, that stirred what Peter had to say next. 

“I didn’t mean it,” he blurted out, almost too quickly. Peter took in an extra breath before resuming. “What I said. In the locker room.”

Tony’s movements slowed down before coming to a stop entirely; his hands dropping with gradual ease, and his hips twisting to turn his stool towards Peter.

With a shake of his head, Peter re-affirmed, “I didn’t mean it.”

A brief silence fell, and Peter couldn’t tell if Tony had something he wanted to say and wasn’t saying it, or if he was leaving the floor open for Peter. 

Either way, just a few seconds of dead air was more than enough to get Peter’s nerves in a bunch.

“I mean, obviously you’re – you’re not my...you’re not my dad. I mean...I know that, but…” Peter stammered off, desperate to fill the awkward silence with anything that wasn’t — well, silence. His head dropped low and he grabbed the wires, clenching them into a fist. “When I said that, I was just...I mean, I meant it, but I didn’t mean it, and it was more like...I didn’t want...I felt like...after everything — I thought May told you about the fight with Flash, and she didn’t but you knew and it just felt like you guys were hovering over me and I didn’t want to seem helpless but I guess I sorta was, in... that moment and then, you know, with the symbiote and all, and I —”

“Kid,” Tony’s loud, albeit it goodhearted chuckle, tore right through his rambling. “You’re awful at this.”

Peter sighed, dropping the hold on the wires once more. 

“I know.”

With the same hand that held the wires, Peter reached for the crown of his head, ruffling at his hair with an anxious and obnoxious bout of nerves. It was a good second before he eventually looked back up at Tony. 

He wasn’t sure what his expression said exactly, but Peter figured it was something close to ‘take pity on me.’

“No, please,” Tony gestured ahead, doing nothing of the like. “Continue.”

Peter expected nothing else but as much. Especially not when seeing the smile Tony gave, so wide it nearly met each corner of the workshop. 

It reminded Peter, again, of what he’d said back in Wakanda. Though it was only those three simple words, Peter swore — and he’d swear until the day he actually died for good — that there was so much more to them.

“You really did go way out of your way for me, Mr. Stark,” Peter repeated himself from that moment in time; suddenly fresh in his memory, as if it occurred just yesterday. He looked down to his hands for a moment, nervously tapping his fingers to the inside of his palm. “The only other people in my life who have...you know, cared about me like that…”

Peter swallowed, hard, forcing his hands to be still. Only to end up tapping his foot in turn.

“I mean, there was my dad. And Ben, he was like….he was my dad.” Peter felt the tug on his lips long before the smile actually took place. He lifted his head, the slight shrug bringing his shoulders back up to his earlobes. “You’re like that. To me.”

Tony arched an eyebrow, and Peter smiled a little wider than before.

“You’re like my dad.”

They stayed like that for a moment; not long enough to be substantial, just long enough that Peter would remember the look that fell over Tony’s face. 

A ‘blink and you miss it’ moment later and he turned away, one hand sweeping the holograms to the side as the other waved in a gimme motion to Peter.

“Lemme see that circuitry,” Tony told him, going so far as to snap his fingers when he didn’t get an immediate result.

“I’m finishing it!” Peter’s voice squeaked towards the end, which only made Tony snap his fingers louder. The few chuckles Peter managed were accompanied with an incredibly dramatic eye-roll. “Jeeze, impatient, much?”

Peter unhooked each wire from the computers mainframe, one at a time, until the tightrope line that separated the two of them was loosened and lax. 

#irondad #spiderson #iron dad #irondad & spiderson #marvel fanfic #mcu fanfic #fanfic #writing #writing discourse #fanfic discourse #tony stark #peter parker #tony stark & peter parker #iron man #spider-man #don't mind me just rambling on about the fanfic that has taken up 99% of my free time for the last 4 years #found family for life #found family #give me found family or give me death

[blk-chauvinist]

At HoochieCon, Black women’s sexual power and agency take center stage

(I did not make this up. This is an article taken from the LA Times 

Event creater and curator Zorine Truly dances at the HoochieCon party on Saturday in Glendale. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

BY MARTINE THOMPSONJUNE 23, 2023 9:53 AM PT

When taking in the images of Black women that adorn the gallery space at HoochieCon, it’s clear the creator and curator, Zorine Truly, 37, has a major soft spot for hoochie mamas — fly Black women who harness the power of their sexuality and creative expression as they see fit. Photos on the walls of the Glendale event space Junior High depict women with artful multilayered updos reaching for the heavens, big smiles sparkling with gold embellishments, vibrant acrylic nails as imaginative as they are long. Nostalgic portraits of friends turning up before the social media boom are spotlighted along with cherished TV and movie characters.

These women may not have an abundance of money, but they draw on their unique flair, swagger and innovation as a tool to show up authentically and claim space in a society that tells them they should shrink. Truly knows these women — often classified as hoochies — have always been more than a punchline in a movie or a mood-board fixture divorced from their humanity. Hoochies flip narrow, misogynoir-fueled ideas of what a good or respectable or fashionable woman can look like and look damn good while doing it. And as Truly explains to The Times, hoochies — in their many iterations over the decades — have long set the blueprint for popular trends and it’s high time they received their flowers.

“Simply put, hoochies are pioneers — for so many different genres of things,” says Truly, a North Memphis, Tenn., native and self-anointed Hoochie Historian who translates her research on hoochie culture into bite-sized videos. Interspersed with glimpses into her personal life and adventures around Los Angeles (like casually cutting up with Janelle Monaé at their Age of Pleasure party), Truly’s posts range from celebrations of prominent women and rituals in hoochie culture and their undeniable impact on fashion, beauty, art and pop culture to thoughtful deep dives that contextualize significant cultural moments, like Brandy and Monica’s ’90s smash hit “The Boy Is Mine.”

Graphic art on display Saturday at HoochieCon, a gathering celebrating Black style, culture, femme artistry and sexual freedom. (Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

The pull to honor this rich legacy in a major way compelled Truly to launch HoochieCon, a group exhibit featuring mixed-media art and music honoring Black women pioneers at the center of hoochie culture. The exhibit, which was co-organized and hosted by the popular queer community space Junior High last weekend, kicked off with three days of activations. The exhibit’s opening day featured the type of moody bisexual lighting that promises a good time. Attendees from near and far came decked with joyful energy and their interpretation of comfortable hoochie attire, and a stripper pole that was added to the gallery for the special day was put to good use thanks to the trio of dancers (Phoenix, Ziyah, Brooklyn) who blessed the space with their skills.

The intention at the heart of HoochieCon resonated with a range of Angelenos on their own journey of discovering and embracing their authentic self and sexual agency, including Earyn McGee, 28. “I am the oldest daughter in a Black family and definitely felt like I had to perform a certain way of being and show up physically a certain way,” she says, noting the baby steps she’s been taking toward less filtered self-expression now that she’s grown. “Even with my outfit for today, I was a little bit nervous but I was just like, ‘I’m trying to be in theme. This was an idea that I had and I’m just gonna go with it.’ I’m trying to do all the things that would’ve made kid-me happy.”

The next two days had a little something for everyone: a panel discussion moderated by Truly, a dance party (more on that shortly) and an outdoor market featuring Black vendors. Chef Rochelle Tyler of Selah Bakery served up vegan cookies with flavors like Hollaback Girl (banana pudding) and Babycakes (strawberry shortcake), while Cake Chemistry offered its boozy miniature red velvet cakes with Hennessy-infused caramel sauce and cream cheese buttercream. There were beanie purses and clothing designs by Beautiful Soul Childz for the avant-garde fashionista who’s gonna serve a look if nothing else, handcrafted jewelry by Skiin & Tones and Studio Ebunoluwa, Hooch Juice travel tumblers by High Standards Cosmetics to help the hoochies hydrate in style, and more.

With music being so deeply intertwined with hoochie culture, Truly knew she had to have space devoted to everybody coming together, dressing up and having fun on the dance floor. The experience of dancing and moving her body to good music in the company of new and old friends makes her feel tapped into a particular feeling of power. “There’s something powerful about dancing despite everything that’s going on outside and despite what���s in the news or maybe what’s happening when you go back to your house,” Truly says. “There’s freedom in getting together in community and seeing Black faces celebrate, regardless of what circumstance they face every day. There’s power, there’s freedom and there’s happiness in it for me.”

DJ Space Age was on music duty for HoochieCon’s dance-floor celebration and did not disappoint. Bangers from the ’90s and early 2000s that stand the test of time boomed through the speakers, eventually teasing out the most committed of wall huggers to let loose and shake a little something.

Dani Daniels poses for a portrait at Hoochie Con.(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

For Danielle Daniels, 29, the visual nods to the ’90s throughout HoochieCon resonated instantly. “My style of dressing is ’90s style so I love the environment of HoochieCon. The bamboo earrings, the jackets, the clothes and the nails — it’s nice to come out and see a lot of girls with the same culture and idea of things and to be able to express ourselves together as Black women,” says Daniels, who considers Halle Berry and Natalie Desselle’s iconic BAPS characters major hoochie inspo for herself and her best friend. “I wanted to come and celebrate ourselves and the beauty that we bring to beauty culture and everything.”

Art on display at HoochieCon.(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

As Truly takes in the fruits of her labor, and the community that has formed around her first HoochieCon, she’s mindful to acknowledge the importance of giving respect and reverence to women who have pioneered and “touched popular culture for so long” without reaping the benefits or even receiving credit. “Not only did they pioneer it, they also had to suffer for it,” Truly says. “They had to suffer to wear their hair the way they wanted to. They had to suffer to wear their nails the way they wanted to, and gold teeth, and to be sexually liberated. They had to suffer to shine.”

One day, years later, people will look at images of Truly’s HoochieCon celebration. “What do you hope they take away?” I ask the Hoochie Historian.

“I hope they take away from HoochieCon the importance of being yourself, no matter what people might judge you by,” says Truly, releasing a deep exhale, eyes watering as she processes the idea of HoochieCon reaching people generations into the future. “It’s important to be happy with how you look, how you feel, how you dress, and the choices that you make, and that is the most important thing. I want people, especially Black women, to take away that they can be fully themselves no matter what that looks like and still be worthy of all the good things.”

#Racial Stereotypes #Self-Sexual Exploitation #Negative Imagery #Self-Degradation #Feminist Lies #Women Objectifying Themselves #Women As Sex Objects #Double-Standards #Gender Double-Standards #Dumb Bitch Logic

[shealwaysreads]

Just dropping in to say I hope you realise how fucking talented you are. Your writing is just beautiful and I am envious and bitter and completely addicted. It should be illegal for you to be such a wonderful person and that fantastic an author ♥️

Hey anon!

First off, I want to thank you for your beautiful compliments on my writing—I put a lot of love into it so it always means the world when someone lets me know they enjoyed it. I pour a lot of precious time and energy into my writing, and everything I’ve created and shared has come from the heart—I write it from myself and for myself primarily, but I share it purposefully and the joy I get from hearing that other people have connected with it really is immense ❤️

But I also want to talk a little bit about the idea that my writing makes you feel envious/bitter—which might have been a completely off-hand comment without any deep intention, but it really caught my attention and gutted me a little bit, because I can empathise with that. I go through phases of feeling like I’ll never be skilled or talented enough to write the way I want to, and it’s become part of my creative process to encounter and then deal with that feeling when I’m in the midst of a project. There was also this post  (particularly @pineau-noir’s brilliant addition) circulating on my dash which has provoked a lot of discussion amongst me and my friends, and I wanted to bring a little of that out here, so forgive me for highjacking your ask.

Envy/jealousy is something that all of us feel, at one point or another. Whether it's looking at how many followers/subscribers/kudos a creator has, or the perfect turn of phrase or clever plot device that just makes you wish you’d thought of it! And jealousy is uncomfortable, we all know it’s not a nice emotion, and I think part of what makes it difficult to process is that it can feel like something that we need to keep secret. It isn’t a pretty emotion to feel, even less to admit to publicly, so it’s an emotion that can fester if left unchecked. It’s when this happens that resentment/bitterness can set in, and once those feelings get their feet under the table it’s hard to get rid of them and find your equilibrium again.

But if we accept that we probably all feel envy at some stage, then perhaps we can be a little kinder to ourselves and each other about it instead of letting it become something that settles into a stone around our feet that stops us from taking joy in our own work and in the work that other people share with us. We can accept that an emotional response (feeling like we’re not as good, or as experienced, or just plain less-than) is a natural thing, but we can also acknowledge that our first initial emotional response isn’t the be-all and end-all—we can choose how we express and respond to that instinctual kick of emotion.

We’re in the position to cultivate a sense of self-awareness and catch ourselves when we feel that envy creeping in, and we can challenge it, and manage it. Sometimes that’s going to mean taking a break, sometimes it’s venting to a friend, sometimes it’s actually facing ourselves down and recognising that the negative self-talk is coming from inside and we need to rewrite that narrative for ourselves.

For me it’s about looking at what I love about someone else’s creativity and appreciating it—it’s a gift they’ve given, and focusing on the pleasure I can take in their talent and skills, and remembering that they probably feel like I do when they see their own favourite creator means that I can tune in and remember that we’re all in the same boat, and there’s a lot of comfort in that.

Making fandom friends is something that makes a huge difference—when you can look at someone you love, creating work that you love, it becomes easy and habitual to take joy in their victories, and then you can look at every other fandom creator in that way. Because fandom is a community; to survive it needs all of us to participate. It needs every writer, and every artist. It needs every podficcer, every reccer and beta-reader, every gif-maker, every graphic maker, and every editor. It needs every fanvid creator, and every reader, commenter, and enthusiastic tumblr-tagger. It’s a community that lives and breathes on creation, interpretation, re-interpretation, celebration, sharing, the interlinked inspiration of headcanons and tropes and subversion and elevation of every iteration on character and plot.

Fandom exists because we’re all here. Including you.

I’ve got some links here, of posts that helped me and inspired me, including the tag I use on my blog to collect all the quotes and advice that keep me on track with remembering that my writing is mine, and it’s okay, and it’s worth creating.

Writing advice

@ruinsplume’s beautiful advice here

This art

Advice on competition

#bella talks #the writing life #writing advice #the fandom life

[tigerdrop]

hey i just wanna say the long posts genuinely make my day. also can you talk more about gordon freeman character because the way you write him makes me quake in my gay little boots

i would love to talk about gordon freeman. thank u for the opportunity

the first thing i need to communicate about gordon is that this dude sucks. and i say this in the fondest way possible. he is a bitch from the moment he drops into the world until the moment he goes out. if you dont believe me, give it another watch! gordons mouthy and rude for no real reason, at least so far as “being a regular dude on his way into work” goes, and this dude goes around calling his coworkers names with zero provocation. (of course, we all know that the reason is because its a funny guy improv stream that borrows a bit from freemans mind, but im talkin from a character sense.)

but my argument isnt just that gordon freeman sucks. its that he sucks in a very specific way that i find insanely endearing. i love this dude. i love to hate him. hes awful in a very mundane sense - weve all known a guy like this, at least if youve spent too much time online - and its cathartic to watch him suffer because of it.

gordons a smart guy. as written, hes gotta be - hes a recent MIT grad, on his way to work at a top-secret research facility to do weird shit with crystals and theoretical physics. but the thing about smart guys is that theyre often......selectively intelligent. we can see this in the way that he has a hard time navigating his surroundings, and needs the science crew to guide him through it and keep him alive.

this is one of those things that is a natural consequence of somebody going through the game for the first time, but that i am interpreting as “gordon is kind of stupid sometimes”. its uncharitable but its not like he doesnt deserve it. he likes to boss around the crew as if he knows what hes doing, when he often very much does not, and is fond of demeaning their intelligence. hes real bad about this with tommy in particular, treating him like hes a kid whos playing at being a scientist when tommy is actually a decade older than him. all i am saying is that gordon ought to stay humble. hes awful cocky when he perceives himself as better than others.

which, i think, tracks with how cocky he gets when he gives up on the whole “well-meaning citizen” thing and just unloads bullets into people. he puts up a front of being a Nice Guy, you know, just some dude caught in a bad situation who doesnt like seeing his companions obliterate every NPC they come across, but that doesnt stop him from cackling like a fucking madman and mowing down aliens (and soldiers) every once in awhile. when he stops seeing himself as helpless and starts seeing himself as the one in control, the gloves come off. he gets mean. and i think thats very sexy of him

this, among other things, is why i am insistent that gordon freeman is a control freak. he desperately wants to be in control of the situation at all times, shepherding around the science crew primarily by bitching at them, but its of limited success. its futile. sisyphean. tommy, coomer, bubby, and benrey exist almost to torment him with exactly the thing that would make him suffer the most: a gaggle of people running around causing problems for him, but he cant go anywhere without them b/c hes reliant on them to make it out alive.

its perpetual suffering, and its cathartic to watch. and funny, too. and if youre a little weirdo like me, its very, very enjoyable. how twisted up he gets when nobodys listening to him! how sweaty and frazzled he must look. its cute, and it also makes me want to reach through the screen and shake him and tell him to just be a little nicer. he wants control but he doesnt know how to attain it, he doesnt know how to play nice like a real leader. i think its a neat contrast to gordon freeman as we know him in HL2, where he literally is the leader of the resistance and has to live up to it. this is gordon freeman but if he was moe through helplessness.

“helpless” is, i think, a great way to describe him. a core bit of imagery in half life is this sense of railroadedness and helplessness, with gordon freeman being put into play like a chess piece and having no choice but to move forward. and this iteration of gordon leans into that by being totally dependent on the science crew in order to make progress and Not Die. and hes also subject to the whims of benrey, local eldritch weirdo who has basically made it his life mission to fuck with gordon.

gordons anxieties dont help with that. if he wasnt so fun to stress out and fuck with, the science crew probably wouldnt do it so much! too bad for him that they like fucking with him so much that he was driven into a panic attack (multiple times, even, depending on your interpretation). hes got that real neurotic mindset. always worrying about shit that could go wrong, and attempting to exert control over his surroundings in an effort to control the anxiety.

IMO the real way to nail the Neurotic Gordon Freeman Experience is to combine the ever-present anxiety with his pervasive sense of self-loathing. he openly states that he has no friends and nobody seems to like him, and to that, i really gotta say, i wonder why. he doesnt really seem to factor in that hes kind of a bitch, and has way too high an estimation of his own intelligence relative to everybody elses. its really one of the worst ways to be: aware that people dont like you, but unaware of exactly why. if he was like, 10% nicer, he probably wouldnt have had half as many issues getting through black mesa, but also, its funny to see him squawking his way through the game. so, you know.

its stuff like that that makes me headcanon him as a dude with low self-esteem in general. convinced that hes not likable, not attractive, out of his element......impostor syndrome, except that theres some truth to it. this is a guy who truly does not realize how good he has it: he really is just an average shitty dude, and yet, somehow, benrey took a shine to him. some poor motherfucker out there actually likes him and wants to suck his dick. thats dedication

also, i keep bringing up “repression” when i talk about gordon. and hopefully, what ive been talking about helps explain why. he has a strong desire to be a regular dude, not just murdering his way through black mesa, but if hes pushed hard enough he leans into it. gets bossy. picks up a cigar off a dead soldier and takes a long drag, before smacking forzen around with a pistol and ordering him around. gordon freeman is a regular, kind of anxious guy who likes competitive swimming and streaming on justin.tv and making anime references, and he is also a guy who takes a filthy pleasure in making a trained soldier his bitch. and i didnt make up any of this shit - this is purestrain canon, baby. this is a guy with problems

to me, this screams the kind of guy who represses a lot of shit b/c he doesnt feel like its morally decent. you run into this guy a lot online: the wokeboy, the online leftist, the guy who spends too much time on social media websites. (like reddit. i think he would actively use reddit and he would never get any appreciable amount of karma but he never stops posting. its sisyphean! cathartic.) from the way he talks about “bootboys”, i think it tracks. he knows about imperialism, he knows about feminism, but at the end of the day hes your average american white dude who struggles with internalizing it.

a lot of those dudes struggle with sex and gender issues. (dont we all.) when youre trying to be a Good Person(tm), you spend a lot of time thinking about your own relationship to sex and kink and all that shit. and i maintain that a too-online dude who buries a lot of his control freak tendencies would also try to bury a lot of weird sexual shit in an attempt to seem Normal and Well-Adjusted and not like a little freak. i justify this by the sheer number of times gordon blurts out weird sex shit as a joke. there are only two outcomes to making that many piss jokes: either youre secretly a piss guy, or you lathe-of-heaven yourself into becoming one. i will stand by this

ive talked a lot about why this dude sucks. now, let me talk to you about what makes gordon so much fun to write. first things first: hes funny! a subjective evaluation, yeah, but both in- and out-of-character, hes aiming to be funny. and being the straight man to everybody else plays into that whole “helplessness” thing.

secondly: underneath it all, there is a good dude under there. gordon worries when his companions get hurt, he tries to clean them off and patch them up, and hes got his lil leftist heart in the right place. you could even read a lot of his bossy, bitchy demeanor as him wanting to make sure everyone gets out okay and doesnt hurt themselves. when it comes to animals and anti-imperialist sentiment, gordons a pretty good guy.

hes the kind of guy who would probably see a dog on the street and get excited and play with it, but would get really prickly about the correct way to put dishes in the dishwasher. control freak tendencies.

finally, subjecting such a miserable, tormented guy to even more psychological anguish is really, really fun. you feel a little bad for him, but he kind of deserves it. so many problems he goes through are purely of his own making, and if gordon would just relax and quit trying to hard to maintain control - of himself, of the people around him - and own up to having Problems and Issues, he would be a happier guy. but thats why its fun to bend him until he breaks. being a little control freak myself, putting gordon freeman thru psychosexual torment is cathartic.

when it comes to writing his thought processes, the fact that he is canonically some kind of psychotic (yes, i am boldly claiming this. suck me) and i am also canonically some kind of psychotic makes it easier to write what i think his thought processes are. i just give him my brain issues of “getting lost in thought” and “overthinking fucking everything”. a touch of paranoia helps. even if i dont explicitly label him as schizophrenic please know that i am writing him as a paranoid little nutcase at all times because, uh, you write what you know.

paranoid. anxious. of the mindset that everyones out to get him (which isnt helpful when everyone is out to get him). repressed and deeply Not Normal but trying so very fucking hard to be normal and well-adjusted. a control freak with sadistic tendencies who also really, really likes getting bullied by his best frenemy. a hapless little nerd who sounds really cute when his voice starts to break from nerves. and, most importantly, a dumb jock. do not ever forget this.

thats gordon freeman, babey. hope that helps

#asky #careposting

[miss-bennie]

hey can you please advise me, i'm majoring in english and recently i've realised that i'm inclined heavily towards reading for pleasure than analysing text. whatever i write in my papers/exams doesn't feel original and i feel as if i'm just iterating ideas from dozens of different sources. this sem we've got to analyze lots of poetry and i'm stressed cause i don't get it at all. i used to love lit and i had to REALLY convince my parents for allowing me to take it. can you suggest anything?thanks

hey it's the lit anon (hipe you haven't forgotten about me!) i just want to add to the list of the questions that is it okay if i find analysing poetry much, much harder than prose/ plays.

Oh my goodness, first of all, it is legitimately CRIMINAL how long it took for me to answer this; it honestly was just because I don’t have the time at work I used to in order to answer things properly, which leads to a lot of disappointment.  However!  I really hope that anything I say now, far too long later, will be helpful or comforting to you.  I’m going to put the rest of this under a read more to save people’s dashes (and before I do, please please feel free to hit me up on Tumblr messenger about this, because it is way easier for me to keep up with people on there since it’s basically like texting via tumblr on my phone, lol):

This really is a normal way to feel, for a start - it’s difficult to make a switch from reading entirely for pleasure into critical analysis.  I know I struggled with it a lot - I had to strike a balance between fun/analysis.  It was a help to sort of realize that even when you’re reading for pleasure/fun, you are still analyzing the text in a way, just not within the same framework as an English major, you know?  So like, say you’re reading a novel and telling a friend about it, to recommend it to them - what are the sort of things you say?  That’s still analysis.  So you can kind of turn that eye “hey, I loved this book, the character/plot/etc was great” into a deeper look into WHY you liked it.  And even if it’s something you’re reading for school and you’re not enjoying it, think about WHY you don’t, or try to think of things you do like.  Another thing that helped me out with that is reading other critical theory or analyses of what we were reading and trying to reframe how I thought about it?  I feel like this seems overly simplistic, but I know it can be very, very hard.

As for feeling like you’re just regurgitating other people’s interpretations, that is the most frustrating thing, I know.  Especially when it’s a text that’s been analyzed a million times.  What I can say here is to take advantage of office hours and talk to your professors!  Bouncing your ideas off of them and getting guidance can really be helpful in pointing you in the right direction.  Even if you bring one of your papers in to them and say, “hey, I feel like I’m not saying something original here, can you help?”  Because sometimes you might be onto a new thread of thought without realizing!  When you’re taking a ton of lit classes, it’s so easy to burn out and feel like you’re just repeating yourself over and over when in reality you might have a real gem as a throwaway thought in there that can turn into something great!  

For the difference between prose and poem/plays, that is because you approach each of those mediums differently!  I always struggled when I took a survey course that covered more than one of those things at the same time, because it’s difficult to switch between, in my opinion.  There are different nuances in each one.  And prose always was infinitely easier for me, but the longer I spent immersing myself in the other two, the more I at the very least came to appreciate what was there (plays, lol) versus fully enjoying what I didn’t see before (poetry).  And even within those genres some are WAY harder.  You’re not going to approach an Arthur Miller play the same way you’d approach Euripedes, and you wouldn’t approach either of those the same way you’d approach Shakespeare.  The thing about being an English major that people don’t realize is that there are SO many layers to it, one could say that it contains multitudes.  (I’m sorry, I can’t help myself.)  Is there a particular kind of poetry or play that you are having issues with?  

As someone whose parents were also.....skeptical when I was like I’M GONNA BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR!!!! I really get you on this, and it actually got easier for me after the first tough year because the more I got into it, the more I could choose a track that was more tailored to what I really liked and was most interested in!  Is there anything you’ve studied this year that you truly enjoyed?  Sometimes it’s a matter of finding that one big THING that just grabs you and flips the script.  Like, you’ll think, “man, poetry is the worrrrrst” and then you’ll pick something up and it’ll hit you.  Or maybe it won’t!  It could be a slow burn of realizing you actually enjoyed something and then you seek out similar things.  I remember the summer after my first year, I was rereading a book I’d loved before, and without realizing I discovered new things about it that gave me a deeper understanding, just from spending all that time in a different mode while I was in school.  

All of this being said, if at the end of the day you decide that you’d rather simply enjoy what you read instead of studying it, that’s okay too.  There is no one perfect way to do something, you know?  Fill up your extra classes with things that seem interesting to you just in case.  (I ended up double majoring in Art History simply because I loved it and took so many classes it made sense, hahaha, another one my parents were thrilled about.)  I hope this was even a tiny bit helpful to you, and please feel free to come to me ANYTIME, I promise promise promise it won’t always be a month before I’m able to answer.

#answered #and trust me #every single english major #will have one or two things #they absolutely HATED #we're all in this together #<3 #Anonymous

[recentanimenews]

Staff Picks: Our Favorite Manga of 2019

Welcome to the first post in our annual “Staff Picks” series, in which the Ani-Gamers team selects some of our favorite anime, manga, and video games of the past year. As is the custom, we begin with manga.

2019 was a year of transition for the manga industry. The breadth of manga available in North America is larger than ever thanks to an array of seemingly thriving publishers. Japan-backed veterans Viz Media and Kodansha Comics continue to pump out great books, Seven Seas is more active than ever, and Square Enix has now thrown their hat into the ring with a new US-based subsidiary. But the biggest news of the year is the rise of digital manga services. In late 2018 Viz launched their revamped digital Shonen Jump experience (simulpubs and the full back catalog for some of the most popular manga in the world for the absurdly low price of $1.99 a month), followed shortly thereafter by Shueisha’s Manga Plus, a competing free manga service offering major titles from Viz’s Japanese parent company (go figure). Meanwhile, third-party services like MangaMo are starting to explore the digital subscription space. 2020 may just be the year that manga has its Crunchyroll moment.

That’s all the business side, though! Now it’s time to talk about the comics themselves. This year we’ve got three staff members participating, showcasing stellar manga stories across the genre spectrum, from whimsical fantasy to gothic horror to understated romance. Enjoy, and feel free to chime in with your own 2019 picks in the comments.

David Estrella

#3: At the Mountains of Madness

Quick disclaimer: H.P. Lovecraft was a big-time racist and I’m very aware of the contemporary re-evaluation of his works in the context of the man’s politics. That said, Gou Tanabe’s adaptation of Lovecraft’s novella is still an incredible work that should be taken with the illustrator’s own merits in mind. It’s Tanabe’s own talents that really elevate an old story that has been mined for parts and made relatively obsolete by other creators. As an artist, Tanabe’s visuals paint a perfect picture of alien desolation and dread, and his approach to pacing has few parallels among his peers. It’s a manga that doesn’t read like a typical manga and as far as graphic novels go, Tanabe is comfortable pulling from as many Western influences as needed without losing sight of his own identity and ideas. It’s simply a good comic from an artist that’s probably better than Lovecraft deserves.

#2: Bakemonogatari

Having rewatched the TV series innumerable times before reading the novel, I was convinced there wasn’t much new ground to break with Bakemonogatari. Oh!Great proved me wrong. The manga artist’s career-defining works had their moment before I was aware of them so I came into this unprepared for what I would find. Not content to simply rely on Nisioisin’s prose to carry the familiar story of a boy, a girl, and the crab spirit that stole her physical weight, Oh!Great pushes the imagery to extremes that not many artists would dare attempt. It’s almost overwhelming to see the ambition in every page that features some wild shifts in angles and perspective and yet remains totally comprehensible. The kinetic energy of the manga does override some of the finer, subtler points of the source but I can respect it as its own creation separate from the original.

#1: Nicola Traveling Around the Demon’s World

Nicola Traveling Around The Demon’s World is the best manga that I’ve read in 2019, rising above even my Monogatari bias on the virtue of being a completely new and fresh title, drawn with an infectious sense of joy and wonder that you can’t find in much of anything these days. I tend to fly through manga as quickly as I can read it, to the dismay of any hard-working comic artists reading this, but Nicola is worth the time to slow down and properly take in all the details inked onto the pages. It’s not Asaya Miyanaga’s desire to show off their skills when the panels are brimming with character, but instead it’s their love for their creation. Nicola might have run in a magazine explicitly marketed at adult readers but it would be unfair to place it in a box that would discourage young manga fans from reading this.

Ink

#3: Kino’s Journey – The Beautiful World

As someone who remains 100% in love with the 2003 anime adaptation of some of Keiichi Sigsawa’s Kino’s Journey novels and someone who found the 2017 anime adaption reboot largely soulless and hugely disappointing, I am fully prepared to defend my claim that this manga not only carries the very essence of the 2003 adaption but successfully builds on it in a few ways. First off, the stories, which include new and established chapters, are by Keiichi Sigsawa, so everything’s right from the source (via translator) there. Secondly, illustration by way of Iruka Shiomiya offers everything one could ask for in a title with such disparate situations as Kino’s Journey. Gone is the bishi Kino of 2017, and the more androgynous design returns. Heavy detail is placed into Kino’s motorad, Hermes, as well as weaponry and other machinery, but more detail is also placed on gore … which is a lot more prevalent and, as one might expect, not illustrated in detail to evoke a feeling of pleasure. Each volume also begins with a lovingly drawn, two-page spread overlain with a translation from Sigsawa’s original novels. This manga is only #3 on my list, because it’s another, albeit fantastic, iteration of something I already love, and that puts it at an unfair advantage over the other two in my list.

#2: Girls’ Last Tour

When the anime adaptation of Tsukumizu’s Girls’ Last Tour manga aired, the series of successive vignettes seemed the spiritual successor to the 2003 adaptation of Kino’s Journey. The episodes, like the source material, focus on moe blobs Chito and Yuuri exploring a stratified, post apocalyptic landscape via kettenkrad in search of, well, anything. While the episodes sometimes feel like a platformer video game with regard to how characters get from point A to point B, the human elements of observation and imagination are ultimately what make the series so enthralling in portraying the means necessary for maintaining sanity in the face of desolation. The anime, however, does not adapt all of the manga; the last two volumes are (as of yet) not adapted, and they are worth reading to the very end. The manga sports a style that melds the industrial with the abstract/absurd to simultaneously isolate humanity and show the ways in which it thrives. The chapters are often pensive think pieces which exploit innocence as a lens to both denounce the destruction of an inherited world and praise that which is found therein. The art, despite being hyper-mechanically and -pasturally focused, is admirably minimalist; a few lines often define landscapes, and the resulting emptiness is of the utmost importance for atmosphere and tone. Panel progression and related mastery of visual metaphor are so very important to the interpretation that I question whether dialog is necessary at all. That said, the charming, often (but not constantly) comical relationship between the odd couple MCs does help move moments along in the more stagnant bits while providing enough chuckles to press on.

#1: Happiness

Despite being a huge fan of Shuzo “Your Mental Discomfort is My Middle Name” Oshimi, this manga is about vampires, and I am very much burnt out on vampires and werewolves and zombies and the like. To be fair, however, Happiness is just as much about vampires as most vampire movies are about vampires. That is to say they are about (a) hunger. More to the point, and more to Oshimi’s forte, this 10-volume deep-dive into a youth mentally dealing with his newly awakened, biological need to feed is a visual feast from which Oshimi wants readers to catch the warm coppery waft of life. I fell in love with this title with Volume 2. The initial concept in the visual depiction of hunger - a swirling and distortion of character POV that increases in magnitude with the length of abstinence - feeds right into Oshimi’s Francophilia; post-impressionist landscapes and portraits are definite influences, and other European styles are invoked as well for jaw-dropping art used mainly in chapter breaks. Oshimi’s visual style has improved by leaps and bounds since Flowers of Evil, and that’s saying something given how much I love the visuals in the latter volumes of that title.

Evan Minto

#3: Bloom Into You

It’s been a pretty quiet year for Bloom Into You, with only a single book (volume 6) released in the US. However, 2019 was the year I discovered this wonderful manga, so here it is on my list. Bloom Into You is a yuri manga with an unlikely premise: its main character, Yuu, has never had feelings for anyone, boy or girl. Even when Touko, the seemingly perfect student council president, confesses to her, Yuu feels nothing, but as she spends more time with her she finds a hint of something growing in her heart. Bloom Into You is all about the slow burn, the uncertainty and furtive glances of young love. But what especially sticks out to me is the way it captures — intentionally or not — the experience of asexuality. Where most manga romances follow characters seeking love from others or obliviously stumbling into it while the audience cheers them on, Bloom Into You is about the process of introspection and overthinking, as Yuu tries to figure out if she is even capable of love. Nio Nakatani’s character designs and realistically stylish costumes are a delight, and come to life beautifully in her flowing, evocative art style. I can’t wait to see how this series wraps up next year.

#2: Witch Hat Atelier

It’s rare that I find a manga that I want to read for the artwork alone. Kamome Shirahama’s Witch Hat Atelier is exactly that, and as if the stunning art weren’t enough, the story is also fascinating in its own right. Coco is a village girl who dreams of magic, but rarely gets the chance to interact with the mysterious witches of her country. When a grave mistake causes Coco to unleash a dangerous spell on her village, she gets taken in as a witch’s apprentice and discovers her country’s long-held secret: magical power isn’t innate, but is called forth by drawing magical signs with special ink. Anyone can draw, and thus, anyone can make magic. That direct metaphor for art would be pretty inspiring if Shirahama’s illustration style weren’t so intimidatingly beautiful. Everything from characters to backgrounds is painstakingly rendered in a style that’s halfway between a woodblock print and the textured drawings of Kaoru Mori (A Bride’s Story). The world of Witch Hat Atelier feels tangible, weighty, lived-in, yet simultaneously light and whimsical. I’ve only just started on Coco’s journey, but with art like this I will read just about anything Shirahama puts out.

#1: Chainsaw Man

Viz launched their Shonen Jump app in late 2018, offering easy access to dozens of currently running and retro manga series from Shueisha’s flagship boys magazine. As for me, I jumped into the app and skipped right past One Piece and its ilk to find the most dangerous Shonen Jump manga of all: Chainsaw Man. Denji is a horny 16-year-old boy who makes money by selling off his organs and hunting monsters called “devils.” When he dies (spoilers), his pet chainsaw-dog devil merges with his body, turning him into “Chainsaw Man,” which is basically just “Denji but with chainsaws growing out of his arms and head.” Tatsuki Fujimoto’s manga is an unhinged, action-packed spectacle of blood, guts, and bone-headed idiocy, fueled by the antics of Denji (number one goal: “touch some boobs”) and his unstable devil-hunting partner Power (a devil possessing the body of a dead girl). The series is heavy on the comedy, bouncing a cast of morons and psychopaths off of each other in increasingly destructive ways, but it also takes turns into heavy drama and even romance, all of which Fujimoto handles with a surprising amount of sensitivity. The art is scratchy and high-contrast, but full of unforgettable action set pieces including a giant fox demon taking a bite out of a building and a high-speed car chase with a devil who can turn anything she touches into a bomb. Chainsaw Man is the closest thing we’ve got to reading a Hiroyuki Imaishi (Promare) doujin manga in English, so naturally it’s my manga of the year.

Staff Picks: Our Favorite Manga of 2019 originally appeared on Ani-Gamers on January 6, 2020 at 6:53 PM.

By: David Estrella

#Anime #News #Ani-Gamers

[c-ornflowertea]

BTS WORLD: A Game Built on a Community

I had been listening to a lot of stories from my brother about the different game communities he has had the pleasure (?) of joining around the time I was researching for this blog. For example, a few years ago, he had played Pokémon competitively both online and offline. His days back then were spent on grinding for good Pokémon stats and natures (did anyone actually understand that back when they played Pokémon as a kid? Like that is seriously a thing?), craftily building mono-type parties to become a community’s Gym Leader, and he even opened a quite reputable Pokémon trade shop to support his eagerness to play in the competitive scene. Compared to the times when he played Pokémon for fun or modded the MissingNo.’s out of the Pokémon Emerald ROM, he had a completely different experience playing the very same game.

At some point, he went on a tangent about another Nintendo franchise, the Super Smash Bros. series. He noted that the game was never really intended to be a part of any competitive scene; the idea was to make a party game, “that was more party than Mario Party.” However, when Super Smash Bros. Melee came out, players saw the opportunity to take the game to another level and created the esports scene around it today. The developers seemed to still be keen on their original direction with their release of Super Smash Bros. Brawl. The game stripped away the more competitive mechanics such as the Wave Dash, guiding players to experience the game within simpler mechanics. The reception around the third installment became mixed; at this point, the competitive scene brewed a specialized community who were primarily invested in fast-paced competitive play. The new game suited players who were more casual and the fact that it was released along with the Wii made it a potential entry point for players new to gaming as well. Super Smash Bros. Brawl simply did not fulfill existing fans’ expectations. Still, the game brought in new fans and expanded the fanbase, albeit having segregation between those who liked Melee (a.k.a. competitive players) and those who liked Brawl (a.k.a. casual players) (Scott The Woz 2018). Future iterations of the game try to strike a balance between these two scenes in the community but still tries to stay true to the developers’ initial vision of an accessible party game.

Through both Pokémon and the Super Smash Bros. series, we can see how a game community influences gameplay experience. Pokémon’s simple premise attracts many children who have just started playing games, but its depth in mechanics allows for more complex gameplay. Depending on who players interact with and how they interact, the community can gear a player towards one playstyle or another, shaping their experience into many forms. On the other hand, the community Super Smash Bros. built up in one installment sets up players’ expectations of their experience. As a result, instead of putting forward initial intentions, developers must also be aware of what fans are attracted to—why do they play the game in the first place—in order to tap into an existing fanbase. It shifts the perspective of why developers make games from creating a game of their dreams into constructing a game that people will play.

This leads to the question of whether or not a developer should stay true to their intentions. Developers want their games to be played a specific way because they want their players to experience specific things, so wouldn’t community input ruin the game itself? Depending on what the game is and what are the intentions of those behind the game, it can make or break a player’s experience. So, following that train of thought, what if, instead of developing a game based on a developer’s personal vision, a game is developed based around a community that isn’t necessarily related to games? What would it be like, what would it take, and why would it be a good idea?

The most obvious reason to create such a game would, of course, be money. There is a community that is already invested in something, and to incorporate that something into other mediums is more or less the 101 of selling more using fewer resources. In a reversed setting, it would be akin to games selling merchandise of their franchise in order to gain more income. The game’s story, characters, and its impression is already deep-rooted in players’ minds. Selling merchandise evokes these impressions without actually having to deliver the actual experience. Utilizing existing properties as a base for a game is, essentially, the same thing.

Another probable reason to develop a community-based game would be to expand a brand. As many have argued, the value of games lies in their ability to create an experience. Having players connect with a brand through a unique experience further develops the brand identity and potentially, a player’s loyalty towards the brand. The brand can introduce new ideas they would like to associate themselves with, but these ideas are also developed through player interaction and interpretation of their experience.

I believe that BTS WORLD is a product of the culmination of these reasons.

The game was released on June 26, 2019, and have since tapped into many channels of BTS fans. As a group that has been operating for more than six years, their fans vary in age, race, gender, interests, and most of all, opinions regarding the band themselves. To be able to cater to a majority of the fanbase requires a product that not only showcases the group’s familiar branding but also integrates a unified idea that represents the group as a whole. The group does not originally represent a body of experienced players so mechanics needed to be relatively simple, but it has to have enough challenge, variety, and depth in order to sell itself as a justified part of the brand rather than merely a shameless cash-grab. Fans’ behaviors would also need to be thoroughly investigated in order to deliver a compelling experience. Any one-note gone wrong and the whole game would be under fire—just like with Super Smash Bros., the community has expectations and they expect developers to deliver (because, y’know, they kinda have the money). The game did actually receive strong criticism for their lack of gender-neutral pronouns, although it was more of a fault on the localization team’s side than the original writers, and was later fixed in an update patch. Being able to monitor community response and adapt accordingly is perhaps one of the reasons that the game launched so successfully as well.

So with that said, how did the developers manifest the community’s investment towards BTS into the game? First of all, they incorporated many of the concepts fans associate with BTS. In the game’s narrative, the player becomes BTS’s manager before their debut, progressing through the chapters with hopes of bringing the group together and helping them to perform under a spotlight for the first time. The experience is very reminiscent of the relationship between BTS and their fans: in many ways, their following had presented them with the many opportunities they have today. The narrative may seem like a superficial, fantastical romance delusional fans would eat up, but the game’s narrative goal keeps the player’s motivation in focus. Instead of pursuing a character in a game, the player is pushed to help BTS to achieve their dreams and become who they are today. Progressing through obstacles, both through narrative and gameplay mechanics becomes an expression of experiencing moments together, which is another concept BTS emphasizes to their fans.

BTS also invested a lot of their primary source of income—as in music and performance—into the game, tying it back to their prevalent branding. OSTs, cut scenes, and even the promotional MV was created with a polish no half-hearted work could have. They brought in collaborators for some of the songs and added references to theories about their MVs’ lore, showing that the game is an extension of their craft, which fans already adore. Seeing the developers put so much effort into the game motivates fans to appreciate the hard work and explore the content, trusting that they will be served with a familiar enjoyment they experience through BTS’s pre-existing works.

And then there is the “Another Story” section to the game; a side-story collection featuring individual members of the group. It can be said that the whole section is a quality recreation of fan fiction (which is probably where most of its appeal comes from), but developers also made sure to include themes of personal growth that BTS is known for in each storyline. In that sense, even though players are given the opportunity to experience a closer relationship with each member, they are also reminded that the player’s support through the narrative is pretty much what they have been doing as fans: giving support and helping the group’s members progress through their lives. Being able to relive the same experiences through the side-story helps to tie the game’s different narratives together.

In terms of gameplay, their solution to the whole ordeal was to use trading card gacha mechanics. Simple, keep people invested even through loses because it’s a game of chance, and could easily be assimilated with BTS’s visual identity. Player progression is not necessarily locked to these mechanics, but securing better gacha items helps players progress quickly and obtain lucrative bonuses. I personally think that this system is very familiar to BTS fans who play a violent game of chance to get tickets, buy multiple different versions of their albums to complete their photocard collection, and spend a hefty amount to obtain an object representing the member they connect the most to. The developers basically migrated that system into a virtual game space to structure their potential cash flow.

True to their visual novel style, there are also affinity meters players can fill by interacting with the characters through texts and social media, as well as choosing dialogue that would appeal to each individual member. Although in all honesty, I have not found a single reason that makes the affinity meter have as much of a significance towards the narrative as they stereotypically would (more cut scenes, story progression, etc.) aside from unlocking side-story chapters. I suppose that can be attributed to the fact that it gives a reason for the fans to focus on the main narrative, arguably the experiences that are most relevant to them.

Classic energy-based mechanics are also implemented to encourage (or maybe even force) short bursts of play over a long period of time over hours and hours of short-term play. I personally swore off this type of mechanics for a long time, but I found myself working around it because of one, I am interested in the content, and two, limited energy (or wings, as they are called in-game) isn’t the only resource preventing player progression. After I’ve spent all my wings in one sitting, I could level up cards, increase stat bonuses, or gacha my in-game money away to ensure my progress the next time I can play wings-restricted content. Instead of feeling like I had to wait hours to do barely anything, waiting resembles the feeling of discerning the perfect timing to seize the day. It took me some time to realize this but the gameplay structure fits the narrative of waiting for the perfect chance to debut: working, progressing, and having off-times to rest and recover, patiently anticipating the arrival of the day. Perhaps because of its simpler mechanics, some fans even choose to lay out a spreadsheet and calculate the most optimal way to play the game, further enhancing the game of chance into a more elaborate strategic play.

What is interesting about the game is that it gives players enough wings to progress through the first chapter seamlessly. This gives players the starting satisfaction of the narrative and BTS-related content the game boasts of while providing enough motivation for the players to strive for the end goal. In the middle of a torturous grind to complete their launch event, I found myself repeatedly thinking that I’ve come so far and there is no way that I could (read: would) stop now, finally realizing that they’ve got me hook, line and sinker. Using BTS as the bait as well as the end goal, somehow everything in-between can be tied to a journey necessary to develop one’s soul.

Lastly, and by far an observation I am most keen on seeing through, is how the game’s narrative, design, and mechanics can appeal to the many types of BTS fans. Those who casually enjoy BTS’s music might be attracted to the OSTs and sound design, and those attracted to their visual branding will find exclusive new content by progressing through the game. I have seen a fair share of players who claim that they play the game so they can draw visually stunning four-star cards instead of actually progressing through the game, which funnily enough, looked like they were faring better than players who were more invested in the gameplay. There are also fans who could relate to the more personal side-stories, earning an emotional investment separate from the group’s debut story. The side-stories developed on the idea of who they were and who they could be, but essentially adding another layer of depth to the fans’ understanding of the members’ characters and personalities. As I’ve said above, it wouldn’t be strange to see players who go above and beyond to play the game as efficiently as possible either, calculating all their moves to not let one resource go to waste. And, even to those who doubt the narrative of the game and worry that it is a way for fans to step outside of their boundaries and affirm delusional fantasies that should not be encouraged, can see that those ideas are not at the core of the game. Despite the title of “Manager” and chances to interact more with the members’ virtual persona, the game is, as a whole, created for their fans, and arguably, because of their fans. Each fan’s way of interpreting the narrative and progressing through the game is as valid of an experience as any other. In a way, even though the game was created through the representation of a brand and the community surrounding it, the experience of playing through the game is personal to each player. And that, I believe, is why and how a game developed based on an existing community can work to a developer’s interests.

In conclusion, there are countless ways in which a game community can influence a developer’s vision of a game. Players invested in a specific style of game and play may contribute to the developers’ and other players’ decisions and alter a game’s experience. Sometimes, this may be detrimental as the development of the game becomes a fight of balance between intentions and what will essentially sell. However, if taken advantage of, such in the case of BTS WORLD, the game opens up to the possibilities of an alternate stream of income and development of brand identity in exchange for the community’s investment. Even though the community is not primarily based around gaming, the narrative, design, and mechanics all contribute to unique yet familiar experience fans would not be able to obtain otherwise—the perfect merchandise for their ever-growing brand and fans.

References RandomTens 2014, Is Melee Better Than Brawl? - A Super Smash Bros. Love Story, Youtube, 6 February, viewed 13 July 2019, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhHTF3_pON8>. Scott The Woz 2018, Super Smash Bros. Brawl | The Worst One, Apparently - Scott The Woz, Youtube, 29 July, viewed 13 July 2019, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhRx-FHiIvc>.

[koragame]

The Best New Games Right Now (September 2018 Update) The Cutting EdgeThere's always an abundance of new games that come out every month. Some are incredibly big-budget releases that we've been eagerly waiting years for while others are smaller, more surprising independent titles that no one sees coming. In addition, there's plenty of other games found near and around those releases. You get games from mid-sized publishers and even the occasional remaster or re-release of gaming's most definitive adventures.There's a lot of exciting games coming out in the future. We recently got to see debut gameplay of Cyberpunk 2077, and we already can't wait for it. In addition, Nintendo did a Direct presentation and announced 22 upcoming Switch games. With so many games coming out year-round, it can be difficult keeping track of what's worth playing. To help keep you in the know, we've compiled all the best new games you absolutely need to play right now. The point of this feature is to focus on the latest and greatest games, so the choices you'll find here have been limited to the past couple months.What you'll find in the slides ahead are games rated 7 or higher by GameSpot. However, you'll occasionally find some lower-rated ones that have been chosen to be included by an incredibly passionate member of our team. We won't hesitate to highlight experiences some members of our staff absolutely love--even if there are others who may not agree. The games included in this feature are ones we personally believe you should check out in some capacity. Here's a brief taste of what you'll see.Best Games To Play Right NowMarvel's Spider-Man -- 9/10Yakuza Kiwami 2 -- 8/10Guacamelee 2 -- 9/10The Walking Dead: The Telltale Series - The Final Season Episode 1 -- 8/10Madden 19 -- 8/10Unavowed -- 9/10Divinity: Original Sin II Definitive Edition -- 10/10Phantom Doctrine -- 9/10Dead Cells -- 9/10Overcooked 2 -- 8/10Valkyria Chronicles 4 -- 8/10No Man's Sky Next -- 8/10Dragon Quest XI: Echoes Of An Elusive Age -- 9/10Warioware Gold -- 8/10Monster Hunter World (PC) -- 8/10Check out the slides ahead for all the games we've highlighted as the best out right now. And as the months go by, we'll be continually cycling out the older games with the most cutting-edge experiences out now, so be sure to keep checking back as often as you can. Which new games have you been playing recently? Let us know in the comments below. Undertale (Switch) -- 9/10"Three years after its initial release on PC, Undertale has found its way to the Nintendo Switch--and of course, the game is every bit as charming, challenging, and harrowing as it was the first time around. Undertale may seem like a straightforward retro-style RPG, but it subverts player expectations every chance it gets, which never gets stale because of clever writing and an evocative chiptune soundtrack. Thankfully, it plays just as well as it does on other platforms without any performance hitches or bugs after putting about four hours into this version. Like its console counterparts, you can fill the screen with an adaptive border that thematically fits with the location you're in (Undertale plays in a 4:3 aspect ratio). Dodging enemy attacks in the bullet hell-style defensive phase in combat works just as well with the Joy-Con analog sticks. Undertale isn't afraid to break convention, and because it does so in a way that's thoughtful and humorous throughout, the result is an emotional rollercoaster that fills us with determination." [Read the review] -- Michael Higham Valkyria Chronicles 4 -- 8/10"Ultimately, this is a return to form for the Valkyria Chronicles series as a whole. It stays so true to the franchise's first iteration that it'll feel as if almost no time has passed in the decade or so since the original game first came out. In revisiting the concerns and the environments of the first, it makes the most of those parallels and invites comparison in a way that highlights its strengths. Valkyria Chronicles 4 doesn't necessarily tell a new tale, but it doesn't have to; for all of its clichés and expected twists, there's a charm to the game's unwillingness to let up as it drives you and your friends forward at a rapid clip towards its bittersweet end." [Read the review] -- Edmond Tran Marvel's Spider-Man -- 9/10"Minor shortcomings don't detract from Insomniac's achievement in creating a game that feels like an authentic interpretation of a beloved creation. The feeling of embodying Spidey and using his abilities is astonishing, and the time spent on exploring its major characters help make its story feel heartfelt, despite superhero bombast. There have been open-world Spider-Man games before, but none so riveting and full of personality, none that explore and do justice to this many facets of the universe. Insomniac has created a superior Spider-Man experience that leaves a lasting impression, one that has you longing for just one more swing around New York City, even after the credits roll." [Read the review]-- Edmond Tran, Senior Editor and Producer NBA live 19 -- 7/10"NBA Live 19 is a capable and competent basketball game that offers a multitude of different ways to play and numerous reasons to keep coming back. Its impressive attention to detail complements the strong foundation set by its presentation and gameplay. However, the AI logic and animation problems are impossible to ignore given they're at the heart of the experience the entire game is based on. These issues, combined with a lackluster franchise mode and a push towards microtransactions, detract from what is an otherwise solid basketball game." [Read the review] -- Eddie Makuch Divinity: Original Sin II Definitive Edition -- 10/10"From lonely farmhouses through pitched battles with gods in far-flung dimensions, Divinity: Original Sin II is one of the most captivating role-playing games ever made in both its original and Definitive incarnations, with the latter proving that even the most complicated role-players can be ported successfully to gamepad-limited consoles. This immaculately conceived and emotion-wrought fantasy world, topped by brilliant tactical combat, make it one of the finest games of recent years, and it remains an instant classic in the pantheon of RPG greats." [Read the review]-- Brett Todd Planet Alpha -- 7/10"While there are moments of frustration in its platforming, and the puzzles are relatively unsophisticated, the locations of Planet Alpha will most certainly stick with you. It doesn't matter why you're there, or what it is you're looking for. There's great pleasure in just existing on this planet, in navigating its harsh terrain and admiring its vistas, and the sheer beauty of it all makes the game's shortcomings easy to bear." [Read the review] -- James O'Connor Strange Brigade -- 7/10"The grand result is an amusing adventure that makes a powerful case for more creativity with level design, setting, and pacing in co-op shooters, without thoroughly capitalizing on all of its own best ideas. Traps and their extensive use within many of the levels are a joy, and the underpinning gunplay is strong enough to warrant a sturdy recommendation, but it all comes to a head well before it should." [Read the review] -- Daniel Starkey Two Point Hospital -- 8/10"It’s remarkable that it’s taken so long for a spiritual successor to Theme Hospital to show up, but now that it’s here, it feels like it’s been well worth the wait. The exaggerated, cartoon look and relaxed approach to management make it inviting enough for most players, while the deeper aspects of its economy are enough to keep seasoned players engaged. Two Point Hospital not only re-works an old formula into something modern and enjoyable, it also iterates on the classic brand of irresistible charm and wit, making something that’s truly wonderful." [Read the review] -- James Swinbanks PES 2019 -- 9/10"For as long as EA continues to develop FIFA and hold a monopoly over official licences, PES will be the scrappy underdog just hoping for a surprise upset, even when it's fielding the likes of London Blue and PV White Red. The lack of licences for top-tier leagues remains a disheartening sticking point, but PES continues to make brilliant strides on the pitch, building on what was already an incredibly satisfying game of football to produce one of the greatest playing football games of all time. It might be lacking off the pitch, but put it on the field against the competition and a famous giant killing wouldn't be all that surprising." [Read the review] -- Richard Wakeling F1 2018 -- 9/10"F1 2018 is brilliant, and the most complete Formula One game to date. The changes to career mode make it the strongest and most appealing it’s ever been thanks to the revamped upgrade system, while the simulation-like additions to the driving model bring you closer than ever to the feeling of sitting on the grid with 1000+ horsepower at your feet, without overwhelming those who just want to jump in and drive." [Read the review] -- James Swinbanks Dragon Quest XI: Echoes Of An Elusive Age -- 9/10"Innovation in games is talked about a lot, but it's also great to see traditional gameplay formulas that have been around for decades presented exceptionally well. Dragon Quest XI is one of the best modern examples of this; its beautiful presentation, both visual- and story-wise, combines with a tried-and-true gameplay formula for a journey that’s full of heart and soul. Once you find yourself sucked into the world of Dragon Quest XI, it's going to be hard to put down until you reach the grand finale." [Read the full review] -- Heidi Kemps The Messenger -- 8/10"The Messenger takes the best parts of the action-platformers it takes influence from and reinterprets them well. With clever writing, well-designed levels, and balanced difficulty curve, the game continuously hooks you with enticing skill-based challenges and satisfying payoffs. Your character might have an immediate imperative to delivering a world-saving scroll, but the journey there is definitely one to savor." [Read the full review] -- Alexander Pan Into the Breach -- 9/10"There is so much strategic joy in seeing the potential destruction a swarm of giant monsters is about to unleash on a city, then quickly staging and executing elaborate counter maneuvers to ruin the party. Into The Breach's focus on foresight makes its turn-based encounters an action-packed, risk-free puzzle, and the remarkable diversity of playstyles afforded by unique units keeps each new run interesting. It's a pleasure to see what kind of life-threatening predicaments await for you to creatively resolve in every new turn, every new battle, and every new campaign. Into The Breach is a pristine and pragmatic tactical gem with dynamic conflicts that will inspire you to jump back in again, and again, and again." [Read the full review] -- Edmond Tran Yakuza Kiwami 2 -- 8/10"The tale of Tokyo and Osaka, Kiryu and Sayama's partnership, and Kiryu and Goda's rivalry remains one of the Yakuza's best stories, and Kiwami 2's minor missteps don't affect the heart of that experience. The modernization of its presentation and its mechanics elevate it, making it absolutely worth revisiting or experiencing for the first time. Yakuza is an exemplary, if flawed series that does an incredible job of steeping you in contemporary Japanese-style crime drama, and establishing an evocative sense of place. Yakuza Kiwami 2 is an excellent example of the series at its best, coupling its most memorable stories and characters with its most sophisticated mechanics yet." [Read the review] -- Edmond Tran, Editor and Senior Video Producer Guacamelee 2 -- 9/10"Everything about Guacamelee 2 comes off as smarter and more thoughtful than the first game, even while indulging in its self-aware shenanigans and Rick & Morty-esque dimensional hijinks. The game never stops finding new ways to hook you in, to the point that even the most painstaking and intensive playthroughs feel like they just fly by. Saving the numerous timelines in Guacamelee 2 is just as much about partaking in a marvel of devious, meticulous game design as it is about saving Juan and his family from peril." [Read the review] -- Justin Clark The Walking Dead: The Telltale Series - The Final Season Episode 1 -- 8/10"The full scope and breadth of The Walking Dead: The Final Season has yet to be laid out, though perhaps the best hint can be found in the game's fancy, HBO-esque title sequence, showing Clementine and A.J. walking into Ericson, but also showing a silhouetted dead walker rotting away in the front yard, being overtaken by ivy, and, eventually, sprouting a yellow flower. Beautiful things are possible in the new world and the new ways to play that Telltale has laid out in Done Running. But something ugly and horrifying is likely to happen first, and it is going to be captivating to watch." [Read the review] -- Justin Clark Phantom Doctrine -- 9/10"In spite of the lackluster visuals, Phantom Doctrine succeeds in making an incredible impression with its intricate and engaging mechanics. There is a lot to admire, with a single-player campaign taking about 40 hours to complete, full of varied and interesting mainline missions and procedurally-generated side content. The ability to play as either a CIA, KGB, or Mossad agent (the latter unlocked after one complete playthrough) also offers the tantalizing prospect of different narrative perspectives. Phantom Doctrine takes the familiar framework of isometric turn-based strategy and confidently repurposes it into a unique and satisfying experience. It wholly embodies the paranoia and tension of the 1980's Cold War setting in every aspect of its numerous gameplay systems, and completely immerses you in that all-encompassing state of mind." [Read the review] -- Alexander Pan Flipping Death -- 7/10"Flipping Death's logic is sometimes too ridiculous for its own good, and frustrating platforming sections add some tarnish. But the game’s silly puzzles, self-aware humor, and crazy characters still make a wonderful experience filled with plenty of chuckles, which help to leave you satisfied as the credits roll." [Read the review] -- Seamus Mullins Madden 19 -- 8/10"Madden 19 is an excellent football game that improves on last year's entry in almost every way. There are problems, but there has never been a football game that more authentically represents the NFL than this in terms of presentation, controls, and depth." [Read the review] -- Eddie Makuch Unavowed -- 9/10"But Unavowed's greatest strength is that it maintains an admirable focus on incredible characterization that feeds into every quest and conversation. Every question you ask, every decision you make, and every sacrifice you make carries you and your team members on an impassioned journey that epitomizes the best qualities of an adventure game. It never rests on tropes, a strong sense of empathy is present through its entirety, and not only do you come to wholly understand character motivations, the way these people deal with supernatural situations helps to build a bond between them and you as a player. From its wonderfully realized locations and its inviting, three-dimensional characters, Unavowed will have you eager to discover the captivating stories lurking in the demonic underworld of New York City." [Read the review]-- David Rayfield Monster Hunter World (PC) -- 8/10"Ever since the title was first announced, it was clear that Capcom was gunning for something grander than Monster Hunter Generations. It has succeeded, and this is likely the biggest and best that the franchise has ever been. It's not just the comparative depth of the narrative; it also boasts almost seamless integration between combat systems that were previously incomprehensible for amateurs. The Monster Hunter formula has definitely honed its claws, and all the above factors play their part in making Monster Hunter World a meaningful evolution for the series at large." [Read the review]-- Ginny Woo Overcooked 2 -- 8/10"Overcooked 2 undoubtedly shines in local co-op and the versus arcade modes. New recipes and obstacles provide a fresh challenge for veterans, but it remains approachable for new players with simple controls and short playtimes. The new throwing mechanic, too, adds a new dimension to both strategy and the inevitable chaos without overcomplicating things. It's a strong foundation, and with the right friends, Overcooked 2 is one of the best couch co-op games around." [Read the review]-- Kallie Plagge, Associate Editor Dead Cells -- 9/10"Dead Cells is a phenomenal effort to blend together some very disparate genres into a tight, cohesive whole. It's one of the better examples of how to remix ideas without losing their individual strengths." [Read the review]-- Daniel Starkey No Man's Sky Next -- 8/10"At its absolute best, No Man's Sky is a measured, gentle experience where you are rarely the agent of change, but a perpetual visitor who's constantly dwarfed by the magnitude of a universe neutral to your presence. It is not your job in these stories to colonize the universe. Your job is to comprehend it. Your job is to recognize the spirituality in it. The primary gimmick of No Man's Sky, since day one, has been awe. The best things about the Next update feed that gimmick. While features like multiplayer and base-building certainly put more proverbial asses in seats, they're also the least memorable additions to an otherwise thoughtful experience." [Read the review]-- Justin Clark Warioware Gold -- 8/10"WarioWare Gold might not be entirely new, but it's the best representation available of what makes this series special. It's a true greatest hits package that showcases Wario's unique weirdo vibe, and this style of play remains inventive and thrilling 15 years after the original Game Boy Advance game. We're still hoping for an entirely new title on Switch in the future, but for now Gold is a compelling, generous victory lap." [Read the review]-- James O'Connor Chasm -- 8/10"Even when its flaws are obvious, Chasm is a well-crafted adventure, and during the more than 12 hours I spent playing through my first time, I got lost only once. That's a huge bonus in a genre where getting lost is often the most frustrating aspect. Even after I finished, I was eager to venture forth on a new adventure, to test my combat mettle against harder foes and find the one secret that eluded me the first time through. It's a shame the randomization of the world isn't that big of a deal and the challenge could be better balanced, but the superb combat and visual design ensure your time with Chasm will be well spent." [Read the review]-- Tom McShea The Banner Saga 3 -- 8/10"As things come down to the wire the two separate groups become more and more interconnected, the consequences of one group's choices directly affecting the potential of the other. This exemplifies the best part about The Banner Saga 3: the feeling that every action you've made in regards to your clan for three games--the friends you've kept and lost, the decisions you've made, and the battles you've picked--will likely influence how well this finale is going to fare. The Banner Saga 3 won't have the same kind of meaningful impact if you haven't experienced the rest of the series. But if you've taken the time to journey with these characters from the very beginning, this finale is a worthwhile and cathartic end to your long journey." [Read the review]-- Edmond Tran, Senior Editor Semblance -- 7/10"Because it's so short, and the puzzles never get particularly fiendish, Semblance is an enjoyable but light experience. This isn't necessarily a bad thing--it's a relaxed game, a good one to clear over a few sessions in bed or on the train if you're playing on Switch--but it also means that it doesn't feel like the game realizes its full conceptual potential. But the fact that I desperately wanted more, and that I was disappointed when Semblance abruptly ended, says more about the game's strengths than its weaknesses. This is a good idea realized and executed well, even though you're likely to come away from it wishing for just a bit more." [Read the review]-- James O'Connor Mother Gunship -- 8/10"With the game's clever gun crafting system added into the mix, familiar tropes and techniques from classic shooting galleries feel super-charged in the game's randomized bullet-hell dungeons. When Mothergunship is firing on all cylinders, it's a satisfying and thrilling shooter where it really counts. With an incredibly fun and never uninteresting gun-crafting mechanic, it certainly goes a long way with its clever hook and an endless flow of enemies to gun down." [Read the review]-- Alessandro Fillari, Editor Source by [author_name] #games #gamer #gaming #game #play #koragame #freegames #onlinegames

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Miley Cyrus and Her Minstrel Show

Miley Cyrus on stage during her “Bangerz” tour (photograph by Karina3094 via Flickr)

Why bother being disgusted by Miley Cyrus? I ask because there has been a deluge of recrimination hurled at her for the Billboard magazine interview in which she is said to have thrown hip-hop under the bus by remaking herself as a homespun country girl reaching out across the partisan divide to speak to supporters of the current president. Her transformation has even been called creepy. Reading through all the revulsion, what emerges for me is an uncomfortable, but relatively obvious truth that has both little and everything to do with Cyrus: that hip-hop culture is — in its mainstream, highly commercialized versions — precisely constructed to be a kind of costume one can put on and take off. That young white pop stars take on persona associated with people of color and shed them at will should not surprise us.

Sherronda Brown describes what Cyrus had done as a kind of minstrel show, concluding that “The ease with which she is able to achieve this almost seamless transformation is evidence for why cultural appropriation is a form of violence.” This seems more heat than light. But given this allegation, I have to remind myself what precisely a “minstrel show” is. There isn’t clear consensus on how it was structured, but there is broad agreement that it was a national art form that existed in the early years of the twentieth century and consisted of white people in makeup, or blackface, performing the role of blacks. There was often dancing, an exchange of jokes, singing, speeches and slapstick musical skits or satiric interpretations of popular plays. It was a kind of entertainment that was rooted in white supremacy and schadenfreude — demeaning others to secure and confirm one’s place in the social hierarchy while finding pleasure in all that. However, looking at what Miley Cyrus has done, I don’t see that kind of willful humiliation, but rather a kind of mercenary American calculus for achieving success: to pick up the traits, styles, and dress of a group with which to identify to profit from that identification — emotionally, socially, financially, or in terms of cultural capital. Cyrus took one of her star turns via hip-hop because mainstream, commercial, hip-hop dangled from populist, overly-produced videos is a culture that is the coin of the realm. There is at least $10 billion to be had.

MIley Cyrus in an earlier, more PG phase (photo by Mike Schmid via Flickr)

As pointed out by Chelsea Stone at Teen Vogue, Cyrus sliced into this pie, collaborating with hip-hop producer Mike Will Made-It on her 2013 album Bangerz, and has previously working with Snoop Dogg and Timbaland. More than her working relationships with hip-hop producers and rappers to identify with hip-hop, there was the costuming and performance: the bandana ties around her head, the twerking, the wearing of gold fronts, the sneering and throwing up gang signs, and the crotch grabbing. This playing dress-up has (rightly) earned resentment. As Dodai Stewart writes about Cyrus, “She can play at blackness without being burdened by the reality of it.” So Dodai makes it seem that Cyrus is slumming: hanging out for the weekend, getting her crunk on, only to get sober later and show up respectable to wherever she is expected.

But while her behavior is racialized, and exists within a long history of whites taking advantage of black culture, borrowing and stealing it for profit (I often think of that record producer who once said that the success of the Doobie Brothers was based on them being white men who sang like they were black), this is also an American issue: we reinvent ourselves all the time. Think of Don Draper, the main character in the TV series Mad Men — a man who reinvent himself with the theft of someone else’s name. Perhaps because the origins of our reinvention are so ugly and the theft so blatant, in the new iteration of ourselves we often express disgust and horror about who we were.

How Cyrus’s influences have been interpreted (image by Mariah McKenzie via Flickr)

But that appropriation is carried out by an entire culture, so when a white woman apes the hard-won inventiveness and discoveries of black people, many of us are livid. Some are made even angrier when she disavows the connection. In the infamous interview Cyrus says, “I can’t listen to that anymore. That’s what pushed me out of the hip-hop scene a little. It was too much ‘Lamborghini, got my Rolex, got a girl on my cock’ — I am so not that.”

Still, I don’t see how is this violence — that is in the typical usage of the term to refer to the use of force to hurt, harm or kill, to use something with destructive intent? That accusation assigns to Cyrus much more malevolence than she has shown. She’s a 24-year-old pop singer who was a child television star and grew up in a family headed by a celebrity musician. That may sound like a delicious cocktail to drink, but I know it’s poison, and she drank it for a long time.

Now she insists, “The fact that ­country music fans are scared of me, that hurts me. All the ­nipple pastie shit, that’s what I did because I felt it was part of my political movement, and that got me to where I am now. I’m evolving, and I surround myself with smart people that are evolved.”

Of course, she’s said that hip-hop pushed her away, though she willfully associated with the Dirty South/crunk sort of hip-hop, the kind that is associated in the popular imagination with drug dealers and pimps and strip clubs. There are many kinds of hip-hop that are much more politically active and aware, such as “Alternative” and “Conscious” rap. She chose something else because it was profitable and maybe even fun to play in the dark.

Miley Cyrus performing in Vancouver in 2014 (image by Rob Sinclair via Flickr)

I think we waste time and energy denouncing Miley Cyrus. I don’t think it’s worth writers, fans, and cultural critics being angry now, when she was doing this several years ago, as if hip-hop — and by extension black people — have been demeaned and worse still, abandoned because Cyrus has moved on. Black culture is much wider and deeper than commercial hip-hop; they are not synonymous. It’s a mistake to buy what it’s selling: that it is representative of some deep black authenticity that gets eroded every time a white person adopts its language and tropes. Long ago it became a commodity in a culture that thrives on commodity consumption and presumes we are smarter because we are nimble, eclectic, and constantly in motion flitting from taste to taste.

The hip-hop of Snoop, Ludacris, Timbaland and others who are similar has long showed us that its culture is structured to allow a few people to profit extravagantly from it, precisely by copying the tropes and styles of the genre. Even Snoop complains that most rappers these days sound the same to him. However, he’s only apparently referring to the top of the food chain — the commercial acts — and isn’t cognizant of hip-hop’s underground, or its international following.

Miley Cyrus during the “Bangerz” tour (photo by Karina 3094 via Flickr)

Cyrus does not lend credibility to hip-hop, nor can she take it away. When she says, “I like to surround myself with people that make me want to get better, more evolved, open. I want to be super clear and sharp, because I know exactly where I want to be,” that is not a betrayal as much as a change of lanes for a millenial who understands lane changes to be necessary to get where you want to be.

Why should we care what she does? She is both warm and indifferent simultaneously, the definition of millennial coquettishness: “This record is a reflection of the fact that yes, I don’t give a fuck, but right now is not a time to not give a fuck about people,” she says. “I’m ­giving the world a hug and saying, ‘Hey, look. We’re good — I love you.’ And I hope you can say you love me back.”

Yes, this is ridiculous, but no less ridiculous than the brand of hip-hop that said we could pretend our way to stardom — fake it till we make it. And now we can’t help but fake it.

The post Miley Cyrus and Her Minstrel Show appeared first on Hyperallergic.

from Hyperallergic http://ift.tt/2qZpaQR via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Hyperallergic

[koragame]

The Best New Games Right Now (September 2018 Update) The Cutting EdgeThere's always an abundance of new games that come out every month. Some are incredibly big-budget releases that we've been eagerly waiting years for while others are smaller, more surprising independent titles that no one sees coming. In addition, there's plenty of other games found near and around those releases. You get games from mid-sized publishers and even the occasional remaster or re-release of gaming's most definitive adventures.There's a lot of exciting games coming out in the future. We recently got to see debut gameplay of Cyberpunk 2077, and we already can't wait for it. In addition, Nintendo did a Direct presentation and announced 22 upcoming Switch games. With so many games coming out year-round, it can be difficult keeping track of what's worth playing. To help keep you in the know, we've compiled all the best new games you absolutely need to play right now. The point of this feature is to focus on the latest and greatest games, so the choices you'll find here have been limited to the past couple months.What you'll find in the slides ahead are games rated 7 or higher by GameSpot. However, you'll occasionally find some lower-rated ones that have been chosen to be included by an incredibly passionate member of our team. We won't hesitate to highlight experiences some members of our staff absolutely love--even if there are others who may not agree. The games included in this feature are ones we personally believe you should check out in some capacity. Here's a brief taste of what you'll see.Best Games To Play Right NowMarvel's Spider-Man -- 9/10Yakuza Kiwami 2 -- 8/10Guacamelee 2 -- 9/10The Walking Dead: The Telltale Series - The Final Season Episode 1 -- 8/10Madden 19 -- 8/10Unavowed -- 9/10Divinity: Original Sin II Definitive Edition -- 10/10Phantom Doctrine -- 9/10Dead Cells -- 9/10Overcooked 2 -- 8/10Valkyria Chronicles 4 -- 8/10No Man's Sky Next -- 8/10Dragon Quest XI: Echoes Of An Elusive Age -- 9/10Warioware Gold -- 8/10Monster Hunter World (PC) -- 8/10Check out the slides ahead for all the games we've highlighted as the best out right now. And as the months go by, we'll be continually cycling out the older games with the most cutting-edge experiences out now, so be sure to keep checking back as often as you can. Which new games have you been playing recently? Let us know in the comments below. Undertale (Switch) -- 9/10"Three years after its initial release on PC, Undertale has found its way to the Nintendo Switch--and of course, the game is every bit as charming, challenging, and harrowing as it was the first time around. Undertale may seem like a straightforward retro-style RPG, but it subverts player expectations every chance it gets, which never gets stale because of clever writing and an evocative chiptune soundtrack. Thankfully, it plays just as well as it does on other platforms without any performance hitches or bugs after putting about four hours into this version. Like its console counterparts, you can fill the screen with an adaptive border that thematically fits with the location you're in (Undertale plays in a 4:3 aspect ratio). Dodging enemy attacks in the bullet hell-style defensive phase in combat works just as well with the Joy-Con analog sticks. Undertale isn't afraid to break convention, and because it does so in a way that's thoughtful and humorous throughout, the result is an emotional rollercoaster that fills us with determination." [Read the review] -- Michael Higham Valkyria Chronicles 4 -- 8/10"Ultimately, this is a return to form for the Valkyria Chronicles series as a whole. It stays so true to the franchise's first iteration that it'll feel as if almost no time has passed in the decade or so since the original game first came out. In revisiting the concerns and the environments of the first, it makes the most of those parallels and invites comparison in a way that highlights its strengths. Valkyria Chronicles 4 doesn't necessarily tell a new tale, but it doesn't have to; for all of its clichés and expected twists, there's a charm to the game's unwillingness to let up as it drives you and your friends forward at a rapid clip towards its bittersweet end." [Read the review] -- Edmond Tran Marvel's Spider-Man -- 9/10"Minor shortcomings don't detract from Insomniac's achievement in creating a game that feels like an authentic interpretation of a beloved creation. The feeling of embodying Spidey and using his abilities is astonishing, and the time spent on exploring its major characters help make its story feel heartfelt, despite superhero bombast. There have been open-world Spider-Man games before, but none so riveting and full of personality, none that explore and do justice to this many facets of the universe. Insomniac has created a superior Spider-Man experience that leaves a lasting impression, one that has you longing for just one more swing around New York City, even after the credits roll." [Read the review]-- Edmond Tran, Senior Editor and Producer NBA live 19 -- 7/10"NBA Live 19 is a capable and competent basketball game that offers a multitude of different ways to play and numerous reasons to keep coming back. Its impressive attention to detail complements the strong foundation set by its presentation and gameplay. However, the AI logic and animation problems are impossible to ignore given they're at the heart of the experience the entire game is based on. These issues, combined with a lackluster franchise mode and a push towards microtransactions, detract from what is an otherwise solid basketball game." [Read the review] -- Eddie Makuch Divinity: Original Sin II Definitive Edition -- 10/10"From lonely farmhouses through pitched battles with gods in far-flung dimensions, Divinity: Original Sin II is one of the most captivating role-playing games ever made in both its original and Definitive incarnations, with the latter proving that even the most complicated role-players can be ported successfully to gamepad-limited consoles. This immaculately conceived and emotion-wrought fantasy world, topped by brilliant tactical combat, make it one of the finest games of recent years, and it remains an instant classic in the pantheon of RPG greats." [Read the review]-- Brett Todd Planet Alpha -- 7/10"While there are moments of frustration in its platforming, and the puzzles are relatively unsophisticated, the locations of Planet Alpha will most certainly stick with you. It doesn't matter why you're there, or what it is you're looking for. There's great pleasure in just existing on this planet, in navigating its harsh terrain and admiring its vistas, and the sheer beauty of it all makes the game's shortcomings easy to bear." [Read the review] -- James O'Connor Strange Brigade -- 7/10"The grand result is an amusing adventure that makes a powerful case for more creativity with level design, setting, and pacing in co-op shooters, without thoroughly capitalizing on all of its own best ideas. Traps and their extensive use within many of the levels are a joy, and the underpinning gunplay is strong enough to warrant a sturdy recommendation, but it all comes to a head well before it should." [Read the review] -- Daniel Starkey Two Point Hospital -- 8/10"It’s remarkable that it’s taken so long for a spiritual successor to Theme Hospital to show up, but now that it’s here, it feels like it’s been well worth the wait. The exaggerated, cartoon look and relaxed approach to management make it inviting enough for most players, while the deeper aspects of its economy are enough to keep seasoned players engaged. Two Point Hospital not only re-works an old formula into something modern and enjoyable, it also iterates on the classic brand of irresistible charm and wit, making something that’s truly wonderful." [Read the review] -- James Swinbanks PES 2019 -- 9/10"For as long as EA continues to develop FIFA and hold a monopoly over official licences, PES will be the scrappy underdog just hoping for a surprise upset, even when it's fielding the likes of London Blue and PV White Red. The lack of licences for top-tier leagues remains a disheartening sticking point, but PES continues to make brilliant strides on the pitch, building on what was already an incredibly satisfying game of football to produce one of the greatest playing football games of all time. It might be lacking off the pitch, but put it on the field against the competition and a famous giant killing wouldn't be all that surprising." [Read the review] -- Richard Wakeling F1 2018 -- 9/10"F1 2018 is brilliant, and the most complete Formula One game to date. The changes to career mode make it the strongest and most appealing it’s ever been thanks to the revamped upgrade system, while the simulation-like additions to the driving model bring you closer than ever to the feeling of sitting on the grid with 1000+ horsepower at your feet, without overwhelming those who just want to jump in and drive." [Read the review] -- James Swinbanks Dragon Quest XI: Echoes Of An Elusive Age -- 9/10"Innovation in games is talked about a lot, but it's also great to see traditional gameplay formulas that have been around for decades presented exceptionally well. Dragon Quest XI is one of the best modern examples of this; its beautiful presentation, both visual- and story-wise, combines with a tried-and-true gameplay formula for a journey that’s full of heart and soul. Once you find yourself sucked into the world of Dragon Quest XI, it's going to be hard to put down until you reach the grand finale." [Read the full review] -- Heidi Kemps The Messenger -- 8/10"The Messenger takes the best parts of the action-platformers it takes influence from and reinterprets them well. With clever writing, well-designed levels, and balanced difficulty curve, the game continuously hooks you with enticing skill-based challenges and satisfying payoffs. Your character might have an immediate imperative to delivering a world-saving scroll, but the journey there is definitely one to savor." [Read the full review] -- Alexander Pan Into the Breach -- 9/10"There is so much strategic joy in seeing the potential destruction a swarm of giant monsters is about to unleash on a city, then quickly staging and executing elaborate counter maneuvers to ruin the party. Into The Breach's focus on foresight makes its turn-based encounters an action-packed, risk-free puzzle, and the remarkable diversity of playstyles afforded by unique units keeps each new run interesting. It's a pleasure to see what kind of life-threatening predicaments await for you to creatively resolve in every new turn, every new battle, and every new campaign. Into The Breach is a pristine and pragmatic tactical gem with dynamic conflicts that will inspire you to jump back in again, and again, and again." [Read the full review] -- Edmond Tran Yakuza Kiwami 2 -- 8/10"The tale of Tokyo and Osaka, Kiryu and Sayama's partnership, and Kiryu and Goda's rivalry remains one of the Yakuza's best stories, and Kiwami 2's minor missteps don't affect the heart of that experience. The modernization of its presentation and its mechanics elevate it, making it absolutely worth revisiting or experiencing for the first time. Yakuza is an exemplary, if flawed series that does an incredible job of steeping you in contemporary Japanese-style crime drama, and establishing an evocative sense of place. Yakuza Kiwami 2 is an excellent example of the series at its best, coupling its most memorable stories and characters with its most sophisticated mechanics yet." [Read the review] -- Edmond Tran, Editor and Senior Video Producer Guacamelee 2 -- 9/10"Everything about Guacamelee 2 comes off as smarter and more thoughtful than the first game, even while indulging in its self-aware shenanigans and Rick & Morty-esque dimensional hijinks. The game never stops finding new ways to hook you in, to the point that even the most painstaking and intensive playthroughs feel like they just fly by. Saving the numerous timelines in Guacamelee 2 is just as much about partaking in a marvel of devious, meticulous game design as it is about saving Juan and his family from peril." [Read the review] -- Justin Clark The Walking Dead: The Telltale Series - The Final Season Episode 1 -- 8/10"The full scope and breadth of The Walking Dead: The Final Season has yet to be laid out, though perhaps the best hint can be found in the game's fancy, HBO-esque title sequence, showing Clementine and A.J. walking into Ericson, but also showing a silhouetted dead walker rotting away in the front yard, being overtaken by ivy, and, eventually, sprouting a yellow flower. Beautiful things are possible in the new world and the new ways to play that Telltale has laid out in Done Running. But something ugly and horrifying is likely to happen first, and it is going to be captivating to watch." [Read the review] -- Justin Clark Phantom Doctrine -- 9/10"In spite of the lackluster visuals, Phantom Doctrine succeeds in making an incredible impression with its intricate and engaging mechanics. There is a lot to admire, with a single-player campaign taking about 40 hours to complete, full of varied and interesting mainline missions and procedurally-generated side content. The ability to play as either a CIA, KGB, or Mossad agent (the latter unlocked after one complete playthrough) also offers the tantalizing prospect of different narrative perspectives. Phantom Doctrine takes the familiar framework of isometric turn-based strategy and confidently repurposes it into a unique and satisfying experience. It wholly embodies the paranoia and tension of the 1980's Cold War setting in every aspect of its numerous gameplay systems, and completely immerses you in that all-encompassing state of mind." [Read the review] -- Alexander Pan Flipping Death -- 7/10"Flipping Death's logic is sometimes too ridiculous for its own good, and frustrating platforming sections add some tarnish. But the game’s silly puzzles, self-aware humor, and crazy characters still make a wonderful experience filled with plenty of chuckles, which help to leave you satisfied as the credits roll." [Read the review] -- Seamus Mullins Madden 19 -- 8/10"Madden 19 is an excellent football game that improves on last year's entry in almost every way. There are problems, but there has never been a football game that more authentically represents the NFL than this in terms of presentation, controls, and depth." [Read the review] -- Eddie Makuch Unavowed -- 9/10"But Unavowed's greatest strength is that it maintains an admirable focus on incredible characterization that feeds into every quest and conversation. Every question you ask, every decision you make, and every sacrifice you make carries you and your team members on an impassioned journey that epitomizes the best qualities of an adventure game. It never rests on tropes, a strong sense of empathy is present through its entirety, and not only do you come to wholly understand character motivations, the way these people deal with supernatural situations helps to build a bond between them and you as a player. From its wonderfully realized locations and its inviting, three-dimensional characters, Unavowed will have you eager to discover the captivating stories lurking in the demonic underworld of New York City." [Read the review]-- David Rayfield Monster Hunter World (PC) -- 8/10"Ever since the title was first announced, it was clear that Capcom was gunning for something grander than Monster Hunter Generations. It has succeeded, and this is likely the biggest and best that the franchise has ever been. It's not just the comparative depth of the narrative; it also boasts almost seamless integration between combat systems that were previously incomprehensible for amateurs. The Monster Hunter formula has definitely honed its claws, and all the above factors play their part in making Monster Hunter World a meaningful evolution for the series at large." [Read the review]-- Ginny Woo Overcooked 2 -- 8/10"Overcooked 2 undoubtedly shines in local co-op and the versus arcade modes. New recipes and obstacles provide a fresh challenge for veterans, but it remains approachable for new players with simple controls and short playtimes. The new throwing mechanic, too, adds a new dimension to both strategy and the inevitable chaos without overcomplicating things. It's a strong foundation, and with the right friends, Overcooked 2 is one of the best couch co-op games around." [Read the review]-- Kallie Plagge, Associate Editor Dead Cells -- 9/10"Dead Cells is a phenomenal effort to blend together some very disparate genres into a tight, cohesive whole. It's one of the better examples of how to remix ideas without losing their individual strengths." [Read the review]-- Daniel Starkey No Man's Sky Next -- 8/10"At its absolute best, No Man's Sky is a measured, gentle experience where you are rarely the agent of change, but a perpetual visitor who's constantly dwarfed by the magnitude of a universe neutral to your presence. It is not your job in these stories to colonize the universe. Your job is to comprehend it. Your job is to recognize the spirituality in it. The primary gimmick of No Man's Sky, since day one, has been awe. The best things about the Next update feed that gimmick. While features like multiplayer and base-building certainly put more proverbial asses in seats, they're also the least memorable additions to an otherwise thoughtful experience." [Read the review]-- Justin Clark Warioware Gold -- 8/10"WarioWare Gold might not be entirely new, but it's the best representation available of what makes this series special. It's a true greatest hits package that showcases Wario's unique weirdo vibe, and this style of play remains inventive and thrilling 15 years after the original Game Boy Advance game. We're still hoping for an entirely new title on Switch in the future, but for now Gold is a compelling, generous victory lap." [Read the review]-- James O'Connor Chasm -- 8/10"Even when its flaws are obvious, Chasm is a well-crafted adventure, and during the more than 12 hours I spent playing through my first time, I got lost only once. That's a huge bonus in a genre where getting lost is often the most frustrating aspect. Even after I finished, I was eager to venture forth on a new adventure, to test my combat mettle against harder foes and find the one secret that eluded me the first time through. It's a shame the randomization of the world isn't that big of a deal and the challenge could be better balanced, but the superb combat and visual design ensure your time with Chasm will be well spent." [Read the review]-- Tom McShea The Banner Saga 3 -- 8/10"As things come down to the wire the two separate groups become more and more interconnected, the consequences of one group's choices directly affecting the potential of the other. This exemplifies the best part about The Banner Saga 3: the feeling that every action you've made in regards to your clan for three games--the friends you've kept and lost, the decisions you've made, and the battles you've picked--will likely influence how well this finale is going to fare. The Banner Saga 3 won't have the same kind of meaningful impact if you haven't experienced the rest of the series. But if you've taken the time to journey with these characters from the very beginning, this finale is a worthwhile and cathartic end to your long journey." [Read the review]-- Edmond Tran, Senior Editor Semblance -- 7/10"Because it's so short, and the puzzles never get particularly fiendish, Semblance is an enjoyable but light experience. This isn't necessarily a bad thing--it's a relaxed game, a good one to clear over a few sessions in bed or on the train if you're playing on Switch--but it also means that it doesn't feel like the game realizes its full conceptual potential. But the fact that I desperately wanted more, and that I was disappointed when Semblance abruptly ended, says more about the game's strengths than its weaknesses. This is a good idea realized and executed well, even though you're likely to come away from it wishing for just a bit more." [Read the review]-- James O'Connor Mother Gunship -- 8/10"With the game's clever gun crafting system added into the mix, familiar tropes and techniques from classic shooting galleries feel super-charged in the game's randomized bullet-hell dungeons. When Mothergunship is firing on all cylinders, it's a satisfying and thrilling shooter where it really counts. With an incredibly fun and never uninteresting gun-crafting mechanic, it certainly goes a long way with its clever hook and an endless flow of enemies to gun down." [Read the review]-- Alessandro Fillari, Editor Source by [author_name] #games #gamer #gaming #game #play #koragame #freegames #onlinegames