He felt the boundless chasm of death beneath his feet; like an open trapdoor, like a sudden hole popped up in the ground. He struggled to avoid being swallowed, while other people around him shattered into small pieces, too small to be reassembled.

The feeling of dying, he had imagined different. Above all, he would never have believed that he would perceive it minutes before.

He only looked up, having long looked at his trembling hands, and then turned to Tony.

Tony, damn it , turned away to see Strange disappears and then he turned to him.

"I don't feel so good".

His wide open eyes pierced him worse than a blade stuck in the flesh and the fear of dying became the fear to leaving him alone, that strong but fragile man.

"Peter ..." Tony called him, and it was just another reason to unbalance awkwardly towards him, because peter's legs were trembling too much to do so in a stable, straight way.

He let himself fall into his arms, crying all the possible tears, perhaps the only ones left in that weak body.

"I don't want to go, I don't want to go, I don't want to go ... please!" He begged him, and Tony only managed to raise his hands to take his head and caress hir, convinced that this gesture might be able to avoid that inexorable separation , also with him. Trembling like a leaf, finished like a dead man.

"You'll be fine, don't ... you'll be fine," the man replied, and Peter didn't believe it, but it was almost reassuring, somehow, though he had told him in a voice that was trembling with a supplication stronger than his own. .

He felt the body lose consistency; he felt fragmented into many, small pieces of flesh and soul, then dragged a few words from his mouth, managing to say only one thing that really mattered, at that moment as in no other.

"I'm sorry" to leave you alone.

...

It is the garden of S.H.I.E.L.D. to make you a cradle; a boundless container of brown and yellow leaves and almost bare trees, but it also contains you.

His scent envelops you with every hug, and Tony has gone beyond all limits of affection, in that orange afternoon of that day at the end of autumn. His feeling for you has grown even more in those past two weeks - after having made love for the first time, for you the umpteenth time, with a different him but still the same - and it is more and more like what puts the Tony of your present in your heart every time the sky wants you together.

There is a light and reassuring warm breeze, to cradle you. Something that is too reminiscent of the day you arrive, and perhaps it is not even a coincidence that there is this similarity today.

Melancholy, sadness and a sense of emptiness almost unbridgeable, in the heart, but you don't want it to know. You've thought about it so much, and as it should be aware of it, of your black evil, you've finally decided to pretend it's just a day like any other.

«What do you want me not to do in your present, not to hurt you?», He asked you yesterday, before you making love once again; after having loosened the knots between your eyes and having them tied between your fingers, unable to divide even when you are far away.

You requested more lips, before answering. You took time, you tried to think, without giving to see that you were doing it, that you needed it, then you curled the lower lip, you bit it and you said that phrase taken for granted.

"I want you to be yourself. I would not change anything that happened between us ... "but it is not true; there are so many things you would not have heard from that sometimes venomous mouth of him, sometimes unable to understand you. You would like to tell him not to treat you like a kid, when he should do it. You would like to tell him that you don't like to see him slip out of your hands, when there are other people and he must pretend that you are nobody. He succeeds too well, so good that it hurts too much.

"I'm sure it's not like that," he told you. He knows. He knows exactly what mistakes he will make, and in his ingenuity he doesn't yet know them all. It doesn't have to, it's not right.

"It doesn't matter, for me ... and making mistakes is part of the game," and you were also talking about yourself. Above all of you, especially now that you have made the most unjust decision of your whole existence, though against your will.

"Why do you start to think about things and ignoring me?", he asks you and you are back to reality, in the garden of SHIELD; with him sitting with his back against a tree and you in front of him, your shoulder blades against his chest, cradled by a hug that surrounds your shoulders.

"Because they are foolish things," you tell him, and smile slightly, because you know he doesn't believe you, because he knows you enough now ... so much that he lets it run, and pretends not to have understood anything.

"Are you afraid of my judgment?" He asks, and you know he has raised his usual, predictable disenchanted eyebrow.

You puff amused: «I'm afraid of mine».

"Today you're strange. More than usual, I mean, "he points out, unable to speak seriously, when it means to expose himself and he never likes, that he should do it. Imagine yourself.

"It's autumn's fault ... it blows me with all the energy, sometimes. I feel weak, maybe I have a fever, "minds.

Tony raises a hand to gently place it on your forehead; a thoughtful and almost mechanical gesture, which you would have done even if the roles had been reversed.

"Nah, you're just weird. You don't have a fever. Did I say something that hurt you, Peter? "He asks and leaves you a light kiss in his hair; maybe two, maybe three, maybe fifty. You are too focused not to lose yourself, to pay attention, even if that care means the world for you.

"No, no. Seriously ... you didn't say anything! "

"Look, I don't like to insist but ... with me you can talk, you know! I will not have the sweetest and most sympathetic character of the earth, but with you ... damn it, how difficult it is , "he snorts, and he feels him recline his head against the trunk of the tree and fall silent.

You know. You know it's difficult for him to bring down that wall built by a false indifference and detachment from everything that allows you to pass as if you were a ghost.

Only you, you can. Always and only you.

You turn around and face him. You Cross your legs on the ground, stretch the sleeves of the red sweatshirt, his, to hide the trembling hands. Smile, to conceal a secret and then approach the face to his to kiss his lips, with a fleeting and painful touch.

"No need, I'm fine. You didn't do anything, it's just me that sometimes I remember not belonging to this time and ... I feel divided in half ».

"Where I am, you're never out of place, Peter," he tries to reassure you, frowning, as if your confidence, true in part, is ridiculous in his ears.

You melancholy giggling, then lower your head: "It's easy to say, even to believe but it's not always like that ... sometimes you don't have the strength to really believe it."

Tony is silent for seconds, maybe whole minutes. His gaze on yours, to pierce the flesh, kills you. He doesn't know what to say, and you know it. He doesn't have one of his phrases to blurt out as if, after all, nothing had as much importance as you think.

"I understand ... sorry if I insisted," he tells you, and the times when you heard that word are so rare - sorry, you come back to look at him; smile, tenderly, and shake your head.

"don't apologize, but ...", you begin, and you bite a lip, and it hurts your chest and head and hands and fingers, especially it hurts your heart. Beats loud, very strong, and it's not love this time, not even happiness ... it's fear, it's awareness and the inability to change things, of which you're plunged in the most horrid part of your soul. "Tony, I don't feel so good"

It's a choked, broken tone, the one you used. A different tone, an exposed tone that lets your attempt to pretend that there is really nothing to worry about.

I don't want to go, I don't want to go, I don't want to go! , you bounce in your head and would like to cover your ears with your hands, if only you know how it is useless to stop a flow of thoughts only with a stupid gesture like that .

He doesn't seem to understand, but maybe he understood. He swallows; his Adam's apple moves slowly, with the sole intent of not letting you know that he just wants it not to be what he thinks.

"Do you want to rest? Let's go to rest! You could have said that, I certainly would not have said no! "

«No, Tony ... I know, but ...», you start and stand up. With a dry gesture of the hands you remove the fragments of earth and dry leaves attached to the knees, in the pure and useless attempt to take time. "don't get angry but ... I'd like to sleep a little, and I'd like to do it by myself, alone."

Tony stands up, then. He faces you, he takes you by the shoulders. The hardened jaw that blocks so many, too many questions. Uncomfortable questions for both; questions that would leave too much impact on the reality of the facts.

"It's ... it's happening now, is not it? You're too weird, "he tells you, and the question failed to keep him between his teeth.

"No. No, no, no! ». you exclaim, and try to reassure him, to convince him to believe the umpteenth lie. "I just want to rest."

He nods; hesitates, he takes your cheeks with your hands, then hesitates again and finally kisses you.

An immense passion, enclosed in a bubble of terror ready to dissipate in the wind, and in your mouth, which says too much but too little. That tells you, in a devastating cry, I'm not ready for all this.

You're not either, you've never been and you've never pretended to be.

You cling to his back, fingers closing in the thick fabric of his blue striped white bomber jacket. Let slip saliva and lips between his, in a desperate attempt to tell him that you are about to leave him alone once again.

"See you later," you say, when you break away; after he having spent countless minutes studying your soul from your eyes, lost in a time that is neither part of the present nor of the past. It is static, and you would like it to be infinite, but infinite is not.

«Yes», ​​he simply tells you, and you overtake him, go over him and go away. His eyes on his back and don't just look at you because you'd like another kiss, maybe another hundred, but it's too late. You would never do it in time.

Time , let it be cursed.

Run to your room; open the door with a difficulty that never belonged to you, just because your eyes are too blurry with panic to see what you're doing.

You close the door behind you and lean your back. The breath is cut off, between the palate and the teeth.

You look at your hands and small pieces of you are lost in the air, in the silence of your room, with a warmth in your heart that has nothing beautiful but not even so terrible.

You're fading, again. Your senses have predicted it once again, and you can not do a damn thing. You hate them, you hate them with all of yourself and it makes you angry, too much. And, although your desire to come home is finally coming true, you're less enthusiastic than you should and are not ready.

You've never been ready.

You don't want to die again.


...



There is total darkness, behind your closed eyes, and yet it doesn't stop you from feeling around your hand, other fingers that hold it gently but tremble.

Clear your eyelids, trying to overcome that immense sleep in which you are barricaded, because if you have disappeared on one side, it is not said that you have returned exactly where you want.

"Peter?".

That call is like a bomb, a gun that suddenly fires two centimeters from your ear and instinctively open your eyes and you sniff the air. The lungs are filled again, but remain in apnea for a few seconds, before realizing and bursting into tears, for so many reasons that now escape you.

All legitimate, all painful.

Tony is there; still, motionless, sitting on the mattress next to you, and no longer holds your hand, suddenly.

Graying hair is pulled up with jelly, but doesn't seem to be cured in its usual way. It must be late, very late, because his tired face tells you this, because behind his eyeglasses his need for rest is palpable, but not necessary. Not now.

The face marked by time confirms your return, but you're still staring at him while he does the same. Not the same way, not with the same intention.

Behind that look, there is nothing. Nothing at all.

Neither love, nor sadness, nor anger, nor happiness. Anything.

A wall two meters high, which divides you as if you, after all, were no one.

Suddenly, perhaps, you're not anymore. You were, of course. You've been important, maybe he missed you just two seconds ago, but now? What is different in his eyes, which has now moved to another place, with the sole intention of not meeting yours? As if it pretended not to have you in front of you, but you know that unfortunately it is so.

It hurts so much. It hurts as if dying twice was not even enough. It hurts to such an extent that you begin to tremble, and the only desire, as stupid as you are, is to go back again and put things back in their place.

Now in vain.

You have the same person in front of you, thirty years older, who escapes in the childish way he would have done with him when he was eighteen. A mixture of personalities, kept glued together by your fucking indifference to the rules.

Hard rules, that if you break them you put yourself against the whole world and you, now, you have it in front of you, your world. Turned the other side, which finds much more interesting to look at the clock hanging on the wall that punctuates its time, rather than your face corroded and broken by feelings of guilt and pain.

Open your mouth, because you want to say something. You want to do it, you have to do it or you will lose it under every front and you don't want to go back to being anybody for him. don't accept it, it goes with what is for you the concept of living life.

What to say, after all? Anything is just the flame that ignites a fuse ready to explode and see its profile, hardened by the tight jaw, forces you to do the same with yours.

You fall down, lower your eyes. Meet the white light blue color of the sheets that cover only the legs. You don't even know how you got there, there. Did he bring you? What questions ... it is obvious that this is so.

He did this before realizing that you are just the umpteenth person who disappointed him. You, Peter ...

"Maybe it would have been better if I had stayed there ... I just messed up and maybe you needed me at the time," you say and you feel damn stupid; it seems like a sentence so prone to victimization, but it is not. It's just a mere awareness, of which you're not even so sure.

Tony sighs. don't look at you but look down on their moccasins. He raises a hand and passes it through his hair, then he is silent and nothing returns to fill the air.

"I always need you, Peter. At all times ", he says, after having been silent for too long.

"Then why don't you look at me?" You ask. Frowning eyebrows, the desire to tighten and apologize for the mistakes you've made, even if you know you've only created a split between you. A gap destined to grow, at every jolt.

Tony sighs again; place his elbows on your knees and cross hishands together. He curls his lips, tightens his eyes.

He lacks courage when he does that. He misses the balls to say that thirty years have dampened everything, slowly, because waiting so much means losing the desire to do so and love vanishes, inexorably.

"Because that day in the past I understood, and I didn't do anything to change things," he tells you. "Because when you disappeared, then in the future, I knew it would happen, and I could not avoid it anyway."

No.

You did everything wrong. You were wrong to interpret why you did it with the arrogance of believing that you were wrong; to have ruined something because you had decided not to give yourself a brake.

No.

You were wrong in two, as always, as you do in love. You are never wrong alone. Never.

"In that past I didn't tell you that I was disappearing ... because I would not have known what to tell you, because I didn't have the courage. How could I have told you that we would meet again after thirty years ... » You get up on your knees on the mattress and bend over it. You hug his back, your arms tight around his neck, your chin resting on his head. The scent of his jelly inebriates you for a few seconds, "In our present ... only the senses have anticipated me a few minutes what was happening but ... how could you have avoided it, even if I couldn't do it?".

"I couldn't, I know. I knew it for thirty years, even though I was not aware of how and when it would happen. I had promised myself that I would simply let time take its course, because I already knew too much, but I thought I was ready. I was not. I was not at all, Peter, and if it were to happen again, I would not be even now. I would never be. "

He sighs. Raise his arms and takes your hands. He holds them in his and they tremble too much.

"I am here with you. You waited for me, didn't you? "You say to him, with a smile that widens against his hair, that cancels the tears, finally, and also that sense of abandonment that for a moment almost tore you apart. Divided into two. Broken.

"I brought you back," he corrects you, and the awareness of that love floods you. He didn't just wait, he also acted. Waiting was you alone; that man, instead, to get back with you did everything possible, so much that you're not sure you could have done the same, in the same case.

Rotate your torso towards you, and you take off from that embrace to receive a total from him, which engulfs you, touches your soul, tightens your heart and heals it. Put his on yours, and beat together again. They become one.

"My red sweatshirt," he murmurs, as he grazes your neck slowly, before putting his hand under the hole in the shirt to caress your shoulder. A gesture that makes you shiver to the tip of your hair.

Close your eyes and bow your back a little, inebriated by that touch, especially when his lips are resting on your cheekbone and trace its hardness with some weak kiss.

"I wear it more than I should have," you reply, her mouth crossed by an amused twist.

Tony moves his face in front of yours. Your eyes finally meet, and you lose yourself with a simplicity that disarms.

"I always thought it was better on you than on me, Spider-Man ."

He takes your chin between thumb and forefinger, lifts it up to him, and waits no more time.

He kisses you. He kisses you with concern. No impulse given by the passion or the enthusiasm of having you there, only a quiet demonstration that time has challenged you, but you have won and the calm that you are granting is your reward.

Caress a cheek, meeting the rough surface of the beard always well-groomed under the fingertips; the holes of some scar caused by the razor, on those mornings when he was less attentive than usual.

You allow yourself to be completely wrapped up in that love that you soon hoped to feel like a reassuring blanket on a cold autumn day.

"Was it so painful to wait for so long?"

«An agony», he replies, lapidary. It leaves you a kiss under your chin. You swallow, and sigh between your teeth, after a shiver. "As much as waiting for you after your disappearance, knowing that you were with another me ... of which I am stupidly jealous rotten."

You puffs amused, while he continues to study your skin with his lips: "Jealous of you?".

"Damn jealous," he murmurs softly, in a whisper that flaps like the wings of a butterfly in your ear.

"I will not let you wait any longer, Tony. I promise, with all of myself, I will not do it again. I will not allow it, "you say, and for a moment you're Spider-Man again. Resolute, sure of you, even convinced that you will have the necessary strength to not allow that separation to repeat itself.

Tony laughs slightly, at your almost authoritative tone but is not making fun of you. It looks more like a challenge, and when you throw weight on the mattress above you and holding you wrists so you can't run away - in a deja-vu already seen with his younger - you have confirmation that the intention is precisely that .

"It doesn't matter, Peter. You can disappear as long as you want, I will always bring you back, "he says, with that arrogant tone you missed a little before kissing and letting all the rest slip away in a corner. Just for a while. You know that calm will not last forever.

But you're at home, for now this counts. You're with him, and it's like you never left.

You have a wounded heart, waiting to let the time - still him - slowly take care of everything that burns, until it is totally healed.

You like to think it's like that, even if it hurts.

No.

It doesn't matter, you're with him, only this counts and you're his.

You were born to be his.


...


In a different time, punctuated by other hands, Tony Stark had stopped in the middle of a colorful park in autumn, while the glass door closed after letting Peter Parker run away, who had been drowned him with lies.

He felt like a fool because he understood it, what was happening, but he had been too cowardly to admit it, because perhaps in his heart he would rather not know.

He bit his lip, letting a frustrated, weary sound of himself and of his arrogant, even delicate moments, appear in his teeth, whose final decision weighs too heavily on the heart.

He took a deep breath, shrugging as if in an infinite slow motion, then he moved. He strode up to the glass door and flung it open, without any care in closing it behind him.

Run, run, run, more than he could. Maybe it was still in time, maybe he could still tell him all the things he wanted in those days he had hoped could become infinite. More than once, selfishly, he had even hoped that Peter could stay there forever with him.

He faced the door of Peter's room, hesitating a moment before starting to knock as if, behind it, there was the only thing that was worth more than anything else; and maybe it was like that.

He knocked for a while, maybe too much. Red knuckles, hot hands. Then he opened the door wide and found the emptiness there.

He knew. He knew it and hoped it was not like that. He knew it and had done nothing, nor said anything about it.

He closed the door behind him when he finally entered and slumped to the ground, instinctively punching the ground and didn't give a damn about the pain. It didn't matter. That would have passed.

He sighed and leaned his forehead against the frozen floor, his fists clenched around nothingness.

The clock that gave birth to its infinite expectation that would have united them again, shot its first second; the first of many, many others.

He would have waited, yes. He would do it.

It was almost a lifetime, but it would be worth it.

For Peter it was always worth it.


THE END