#ghosting you

[doggogills]

gaybos from my book #mybook

[poetryofmuses]

Sorry for ghosting you, I fell asleep

[thestarkerisobvious]

This is the last thing @von--gelmini ( aka @starker-stories ) and I wrote together.  

The setup: All the events of Avengers:Endgame have happened.  As far as the world knows, Tony Stark is dead.  Only one person on the planet knows otherwise (well, two, if you include a certain Ancient resident of  Kamer Taj.)  One person, and one tight-lipped AI.

All the events of Spider-Man:Far From Home have happened, with one exception.  When J. J. Jameson attempted to do his hit piece on civilian (and minor) Peter Parker, he found himself off the air in the middle of his sentence, and out of a job in the middle of the day.  He never knew why.

Now Peter Parker, like the rest of the world, is trying to move on from this devastating loss.  But that’s impossible - because it really feels like the ghost of Tony Stark is haunting him wherever he goes.  (Not that he really believes in ghosts, just that his spider-senses tell him Tony is present and watching him, that’s just a malfunction of his spider-senses.  Unreliable at best, once they deserted him, and now they are trying to inform him that his dead mentor is there when, obviously, his dead mentor is NOT there.)

                                             Ghosting You

Chapter 1:  Peter - Things We Shouldn’t Do

It wasn’t normal.

Texting a dead guy wasn’t normal.  Rereading and rerereading his texts from you and pretending they were recent?  Also not normal.  If anyone had asked, Peter would justify it by pointing out that the ghost of Tony Stark was haunting him everywhere he went, and sending texts out into the ether was just the way he was coping.  Not that anyone ever asked.  Not that anyone ever knew.  Peter Parker still relied on his constant communications with Tony, even if all those communications were strictly one-way.  

Maybe he shouldn’t have been relying on Tony as much as he was. But maybe he shouldn’t have been doing a lot of things. Like spending all his time at this party MJ’s parents were throwing half longing for another party, or dreading another party.

But he was doing both.

But dammit, the kids getting high in MJ’s side yard were looking better and better to him by the second. He was NOT going to do illegal substances – he was an Avenger dang it – but damn if he couldn’t help but go talk to them, twice, and listen to their carefree giggle rambling with deep abiding envy. They didn’t have a care in the world.

Actually they had lots of cares, the exact same number of cares he did. Well almost. Half of them had been displaced by the snap. Everyone there had lost half of everyone they knew. Woken up one day to find that exactly half of their friends were now 5 years older. Different ages, different grades, different social stratus. Alive, but lost. Visible, but erased. The other half, went home one day to find that half of everyone they knew were gone, and spent the next 5 years learning to live with it. Those friends were back now, different ages, different grades, different social stratus. Alive, but lost. Visible, but erased. Everyone there felt their lives toppling as the world tried to figure out what to do with them, or with their friends. Peter, just like half of them, talked the tightrope between being 17 when his birth certificate said he was 21. Parents, politicians, and society all had their own ideas. Peter longed for college the way a baby longed for its blanket, the way a swimming man longed for land. Maybe in college his maybe-minor maybe-major status would at least feel normal.

It wasn’t normal.

Texting a dead guy wasn’t normal.  Rereading and rerereading his texts from you and pretending they were recent?  Also not normal.  If anyone had asked, Peter would justify it by pointing out that the ghost of Tony Stark was haunting him everywhere he went, and sending texts out into the ether was just the way he was coping.  Not that anyone ever asked.  Not that anyone ever knew.  Peter Parker still relied on his constant communications with Tony, even if all those communications were strictly one-way.  

Maybe he shouldn’t have been relying on Tony as much as he was. But maybe he shouldn’t have been doing a lot of things. Like spending all his time at this party MJ’s parents were throwing half longing for another party, or dreading another party.

But he was doing both.

But dammit, the kids getting high in MJ’s side yard were looking better and better to him by the second. He was NOT going to do illegal substances – he was an Avenger dang it – but damn if he couldn’t help but go talk to them, twice, and listen to their carefree giggle rambling with deep abiding envy. They didn’t have a care in the world.

Actually they had lots of cares, the exact same number of cares he did. Well almost. Half of them had been displaced by the snap. Everyone there had lost half of everyone they knew. Woken up one day to find that exactly half of their friends were now 5 years older. Different ages, different grades, different social stratus. Alive, but lost. Visible, but erased. The other half, went home one day to find that half of everyone they knew were gone, and spent the next 5 years learning to live with it. Those friends were back now, different ages, different grades, different social stratus. Alive, but lost. Visible, but erased. Everyone there felt their lives toppling as the world tried to figure out what to do with them, or with their friends. Peter, just like half of them, talked the tightrope between being 17 when his birth certificate said he was 21. Parents, politicians, and society all had their own ideas. Peter longed for college the way a baby longed for its blanket, the way a swimming man longed for land. Maybe in college his maybe-minor maybe-major status would at least feel normal.

Those kids in MJ’s side yard had as many cares as he did, but they had forgotten them for the moment. Substances were beginning to look REALLY nice.

Which is exactly what he texted to Tony.

Substances are beginning to look really nice.

Ned’s graduation party would be different, of course. More formal, more grownup. Whatever that meant. Alcohol would be served, Peter had been informed, but they’d all be regulated to one glass each, according to Ned. That was the only think Peter was looking forward to (at this point he was partied-out. Then again he had been partied-out since party one. He didn’t want to be ungrateful – May had really gone all out on a big graduation blowout – but the only thing he would ever remember from that party was spending the night with MJ. She had been officially invited to stay the night, with May’s permission and blessing. It was the only night they would spend together. When it was over, they both agreed it wouldn’t happen again.

A glass of alcohol at Ned’s family’s formal dinner was honestly the only thing Peter was looking forward to now. Maybe drinking a glass of wine would make him feel like an adult. Graduating from high school certainly wasn’t working. Losing his V-card to MJ made him feel MUCH younger, not more. Drugs were out (besides those carefree, forgetful individuals in MJ’s side yard didn’t strike him as particularly grownup, especially when they bragged they had been using since 13) because he was an Avenger now.

Being an Avenger SHOULD have made him feel grownup.

Hell – being TO OUTER SPACE and fighting in a for-the-safety-of-Earth battle should have made him feel grownup. But all that seemed like a dream to the Peter Parker who was trying to endure Graduation Party Number 2 and dreading Graduation Party Number 3. 

The Peter Parker who was really counting down the minutes to when he could bow out, beg off and go home.

The Peter Parker who really shouldn’t have been thinking about Tony as much as he was.

That didn’t stop him, though.

He took his phone out for the 100th time to go back over his text messages. Grinning at Tony’s quips, his one liners, his smart-alecky remarks. His bordering-on-flirting sentences.

They weren’t really flirting, of course. They couldn’t be. Peter was just a kid.

But it was fun to pretend.

***

“You can’t keep doing this,” a quiet, secret part of his brain whispered to him as he headed home that night.

“You can’t keep pretending forever” that hateful voice murmured in the back of his head.

He hated that voice. Wanted to pull it out and pummel it into the ground until his fists were swollen and bloody.

“You can’t keep texting him. You can’t keep rereading his old texts over and over. It isn’t healthy. It isn’t normal…”

That part, at least, was true, and he knew it. It wasn’t healthy. It was okay, surely, to pretend in his head. Everyone pretended in their head. Aunt May was STILL talking to Uncle Ben, Peter still caught her at it sometimes, and that made it okay for Peter to do it too. Made it okay that he was still texting Tony, still leaving him messages, even though Tony wasn’t really on the other end. That was normal.

But it was interfering with his understanding of reality. THAT’S what made it not normal.

Like on actual graduation day, for instance, when his spidersenses were telling him something he knew couldn’t be true. That Tony was there. That Tony was watching. It was mercifully brief, ended right after he crossed the stage, but while it was happening it was terrifying. Overwhelmingly, unabashedly REAL. But it wasn’t real. Tony wasn’t really there. Despite all of Peter’s texts, emails, and phone messages with all the details of graduation. All those prayers to a dead man. The dead man didn’t come to his graduation. It’s not like Peter was alone, there were many people there missing the living, wishing the living could have been there too. Peter was just one more in a crowd.

Just one more pretending the dead still walked the earth. 

On his way home he pulled out his phone, his thumb flying across the letters in depression. 

//I’m not going to be talking to you much anymore. You understand. College and all. I just won’t have time to text you much. But please don’t think I’m ghosting you because I would never do that to you. You mean too much to me. I’ll always be here when you need me. But I won’t have time much to//

That’s as far as he got. It was as far as he could get. He hit send on the nonsensical words and pocketed his phone. It was time to focus on reality. On the future. On what he had to do next. Like finding out if alcohol had any effect on him, for starters. Because if it did, he might actually have something to look forward to.

He shouldn’t have been relying on Tony as much as he was. But he shouldn’t have been doing a lot of things. 

-------------------------------------------------------

Tomorrow I’ll post @von--gelmini‘s chapter, which will be titled “Tony - Losing Negotiations”

I plan on posting a chapter a day - eventually to all be placed on Ao3.

Please message me if you want to be tagged.

Thank you.

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[thestarkerisobvious]

Ghosting You

by @thestarkerisobvious

and the late @von--gelmini​  aka @starker-stories​

This is the last thing we worked on before his death in October, 2020.​

//I said “please don’t think I’m ghosting you” but I was totally ghosting you because I can’t deal but I won’t be ghosting you any more. I thought ghosting you was the grownup thing to do. Nothing I do feels grown up. You’d think coke would make me feel grown up but no. When a man loses his v-card to a girl, that’s a grownup thing, right? Nope. So I gotta lose this v-card to a guy but there Are. No. Guys. And you aren’t around to help. YOU ghosted ME Tony.//

                                                           * * *

The man Peter Parker fell in love with has died.  The man Peter Parker fell in lust with betrayed him utterly... then promptly died.  

And Peter isn’t coping very well.

Isn’t coping well with Tony leaving him EDITH.  Isn’t coping well with Quentin seducing him to steal EDITH.  Isn’t coping well with the decisions that have to be made in a world he no longer trusts without closing his eyes.

The street drugs aren’t exactly helping, but they’re better than nothing.  Yes, Peter’s taking some risks, but when he was walking the straight-and-narrow he made some terrible decisions, so there’s that.  Other than getting high Peter’s only solace is sending texts out to a dead man.

//It was supposed to be you, Tony. I was saving it for you.  It was yours.  But it wasn’t you.  Why wasn’t it you? Why wasn’t I good enough?  If its not you its not anyone.  Ill just die a virgin//

Dead men don’t read texts, and sending texts into the ether is probably not a healthy habit, but it’s all Peter has anymore.

 Little does he know... someone is reading them...

//I don’t know why Meth has such a bad rep.  You never kissed me, not even once, but you put your arm around me and I can still feel that. I know how strong you are. How strong youd feel. When we’re together again.//

//I think it might be soon.//

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

-------------------------------

THIS IS MY BEST STAB AT A TAGLIST (If I forgot you and I’m sure I did because I suck PLEASE MESSAGE ME or hit up my ask box so I don’t lose you.)

@peterisstarks      @ haylove5               @katzenbaby1​

@callmebill             @serrabloodsong        @go-wonder-boi​

@abbbby333            @tsuyu-sama            @ilikestarker

@sheris532

-------------------------------

excellent art, and constant emotional support,  from @mrstarksbaby​

[thestarkerisobvious]

Ghosting You - Chapter 2

Chapter 1 Is Here

-------------------

                                      Ghosting You

Chapter 2:  Tony - Losing Negotiations 

Tony went and watched. Of course he did. He couldn’t miss the kid’s graduation. Even though stepping back into the time stream meant... 

It meant stepping back for real. 

No more watching.  No more observing through mystic mumbo jumbo.  No more cheating.  No more living like he’d been doing for the past few months.

                                                            ***

Time, enough time, will heal all wounds. He woke up in an odd red place of visions, visions he knew were false. The story that his mind played out of a grown up Morgan was a comforting lie designed to sing him to his rest. It would’ve been nice, too. He'd been ready for it. He’d earned it. To close his eyes and simply... go. How he knew it wasn’t real he couldn’t say. But it wasn’t. The illusion shattered and there was no rest, only pain. The forces of the universe tore through him endlessly, recreating and destroying him over and over. How long that little bit of fun went on, he didn’t know. Didn’t want to know. But a mind can be inured to anything. Eventually he felt individual things within the pain. Maybe it was because of the time travel, Pym particles still in his system, it was the green lines he felt calling out to him first. And he followed where they went.

A scarred man driven mad from pain wound up on a doorstep of a Kamer Taj that was out of the timestream itself. The Ancient One refused to help him. He’d served his purpose within time. Anything else wasn’t her problem. He didn’t get to be who he was by giving up. Or by losing negotiations. 

When he stepped out of the back door of the Inner Sanctum, unseen by Wong or Strange, it was only a little more than a year after he’d been killed. Decades perhaps of him studying under the Ancient One to remove his scars, to dampen down the remnants of the Infinity Stones to where he couldn’t sense them at all, or be tempted to use any residual power. It took her to help give him the kick back into linear time, then, of course, she erased what little knowledge he did have. Standing there in the alley, he tried. Nothing happened when he focused on the green lines of the faint multicolored tattoo he still had on his forearm.

                                                              ***

Tony proudly watched Peter parade across the stage. Watched him take his honors for his extracurricular and his grades. “You did great, Pete,” he mumbled to himself in the upper bleachers. “So proud of you.”

But as he watched him go off with his family and friends, he noticed something else. How much the kid had grown in the last year. He filled out the suit he wore under his cap and gown. He held himself straighter. And there was such a sadness in his eyes. That hurt too much and Tony walked away.

As Peter came back to May’s apartment after his partying was over, there was a man standing in front of a white car. He had a clipboard and appeared to have been waiting there quite a while. He looked down at the board and then up at Peter. 

“Mr. Parker?” he asks, stepping in Peter’s way. “If you could sign for this? I’ve been told to tell you ‘Happy Graduation’. And here are your license and registration.” The man handed over a packet with New York plates in it that read PARKER1. “No, don’t worry, sir, the tip has already been included.”

[thestarkerisobvious]

Ghosting You - Chapter 3

thanks to @mrstarksbaby

who is amazing

--------------------------------

Authors note - I WILL create a tag list, I promise.  Soon.

-------------------------------

Chapter 1 is here

Chapter 2 is here

Ghosting You

Chapter 3:  Peter - I Would Have Ben So Gentl

The thrill should have lasted a lot longer. Peter was pretty sure. After two weeks, MAY was still thrilled. But Peter felt nothing other than confusion. Confusion, and a little numbness. And that wasn’t fair. The thrill should have lasted longer.

May had a million questions, of course. It was two days before she even drove it. They had concluded it was a posthumous gift from Tony Stark, it had to be. That should have been a thrill for Peter, a thrill that didn’t wear off, but it did. 

May taught him how to drive. He picked it up quickly. She said he was a natural. He read the drivers manual in under an hour and studied for two nights online. He wanted to be good. He wanted Tony to be proud of him.

But Tony wasn’t around to be proud of him, and that wasn’t okay. For some reason graduating was okay. Getting ready for Columbia was okay. But driving the new car? Not okay. 

It didn’t make him feel thrilled. 

It made him feel disgusting. Even sitting inside it alone, pretending it was a gift from Tony, pretending he was driving somewhere to pick Tony up and take him out on a thank-you date, even that felt wrong. It felt bad.

Tony trusted him with the car, the same way he trusted Peter with the glasses hidden away in a safe under Peter’s bed. 

And Peter should never have been trusted with either one.

                                              ***

June drug on endlessly and Peter was still texting Tony. Every night he promised himself it was the last night. Every morning he realized it probably WAS the last morning. Then weeks passed and he noticed he still hadn't stopped. Sometimes he would go sit at night at the memorials, the official memorials, the makeshift memorials, just to torture himself. Just to try to convince himself he was living in a fantasy that only existed in his head. Each time it seemed to work. Until the next day.

One thing about the car, though.

He was getting a whole new set of friends. 

And those friends had hobbies that were a lot different than his other friends.

                                                                                                                 ***

I said “please don’t think I’m ghosting you” but I was totally ghosting you because I can’t deal but I won’t be ghosting you any more. I thought ghosting you was the grownup thing to do. Nothing I do feels grown up. You’d think coke would make me feel grown up but no. When a man loses his v-card to a girl, that’s a grownup thing, right? Nope. So I gotta lose this v-card to a guy but there Are. No. Guys. And you aren’t around to help. YOU ghosted ME Tony. 

                                                            * * *

He probably should have felt a *little* guilty about it all. Listening to his friends talk as they got high by day, using that info to bust the dealers by night. But he was still Spider-Man. He still had responsibilities.

                                                                                                                              * * *

It was supposed to be you, Tony. I was saving it for you.  It was yours.  But it wasn’t you.  Why wasn’t it you? Why wasn’t I good enough? 

If its not you its not anyone ill jubst be aseuxual thats a thing callmyself ace no more girls for me thats for sure.  Ill just die a virgin

                                                                   ***

Meth was probably supposed to have a lot more effect on a person than this. But that must have been his spider abilities. Alcohol never had any effect, at least, one back-pack full of alcohol had no effect and he didn’t have the money to try MORE than that. 

There was no one around to see how much meth he had consumed, and, it turned out, it could move the dial, just a little. It was probably supposed to do something else, but what it was doing was fine. Took the edges off the world, made the horrors just a little fuzzier. Peter lay on the rooftops gazing up into the stars and realized that things maybe weren’t quite as bad as he had thought. He took out his phone to tell Tony.

I shouldn’t be telling you these things, but here I am. I don’t know why Meth has such a bad rep. But I guess the toothless thing is a bad thing. Although it’s hard to say. I’d lose teeth for this. It seems like a fair trade just like paying money for groceries or getting banged up to stop a train or getting dead to save the world right?

I miss you so much I can feel it. You never kissed me, not even once, but you put your arm around me and I can still feel that. I know what one is like so I know what two would be like. I know how strong you are. How strong youd feel. When we’re together again. 

I think it might be soon.

                                                        ***

Peter Parker didn’t get high. 

That was strictly a Spider-Man activity. When he “got high” (i.e. lay on top of New York City skyscrapers and watched the jets go by, daydreaming that he and Tony were on those planes together, jetting off to somewhere private and romantic and… personal. That was his ‘getting high.’ Because he was too high up to be seen. He loved the secret joke.) he was hidden from all prying eyes. There was no one to see.

Not that he exactly felt like Spider-Man while he was impaired, he felt… like someone else. The “Night Monkey” possibly. That was okay. The Night Monkey wasn’t an Avenger.

It didn’t matter. It was a time for him, and for him only.  Some private time for Peter Parker and the ghost of Tony Stark.

Sometimes he impaired-texted Tony. Mostly he didn’t. Mostly he impaired-texted Tony in his head.

You never kissed me why didn’t you try to kiss me I would have let you kiss me in the car your face was bashed in your arm I would have ben so gentl

Sometimes the impaired-texting was embarrassing to read. Fortunately he was the only one reading them.