› CHAPTER FOURTEEN ‹
Peter Parker, covered in soot and blood, snored quietly, the pinched nerves in his side's causing a tiny but continuous twitch to occur through his body. His head lobbed to the side, resting on the shoulder of a man with the Netherlands flag painted on his cheeks and a long orange wig under an orange hat. Uncomfortably, Peter's head lolled forward, and with a sudden jolt, he woke up. The unexpected movement roused his body up, and for a few seconds, he blinked, completely unaware of his new surroundings. That is until his brain caught up and alerted him of everything that happened with Mysterio and that he was currently staring at a set of painted penitentiary bars.
A shift of movement to his left caused a snap of his neck as he turned to it. His eyebrows pinched together as he stared at a couple dressed in bright orange t-shirts and covered in face paint. The man sitting nearest to Peter, a man with blond hair and wearing a floral hat, grinned at him.
"Hi."
Peter cringed slightly. His voice was small and rough as he questioned the two overly happy men. "Where am I?"
The man on the other side of the blond man grinned at Peter. An act that didn't seem to fit the answer. "Municipal holding facility."
The blond hat guy nodded and returned to Peter. "They said they found you and your buddy unconscious at the train yard. Very dangerous."
Your buddy. Peter's eyes widened, and he sat up abruptly. His spine popped, and pins and needles shot up his back. He hissed through his teeth as his attempt to move more than a few inches failed, and his back collided back against the wall. One hand clutched onto an orange shirt draped over his body, and the other pressed into the wooden bench. He looked at the blond guy, who appeared to recognize the immediate panic in Peter.
"It's not to worry. He's doing alright." He pointed to the other side of Peter and his direction and recoiled when he realized another strange man was sitting right beside him, not realizing that he had been sleeping on his shoulders moments earlier.
After recovering from the momentary shock, Peter noticed the head of black hair on the other side. His cheek was pushed into the fake orange-haired man's shoulder, and even from how he was laying, Peter could clearly see the blood and bruises coating his features. It brought a twisting feeling to surge in his stomach. The wrist bands that Tony had gifted him were still securely wrung around his wrists, which were popping out from behind an orange sport shirt draped over his upper body.
"He woke up a couple of times already, but he wasn't ever up for long."
"We gave you two shirts because you both seemed a bit cold." The man the two teens have been sleeping against explained with a small smile.
Peter nodded, his heart hammering against his chest as he glanced from Raleigh and to the other men. Something told him this all was real and wasn't apart of any illusion. "Thanks. You guys are nice. You speak really good English."
"Welcome to the Netherlands." The three men spoke in unison and what little smile Peter had formed on his face slipped off as he tensed.
"I'm in the Netherlands right now?"
The farthest man from Peter answered with a simple. "Yeah."
Peter looked at the three men and the passed out man on the ground before turning back at Raleigh. Without another thing said, Peter bolted to his feet. He groaned and seethed as the pain all throughout his body seared, thanks to the new and abrupt action. Doing his best to ignore it, Peter slid in front of Raleigh. And in an attempt to be careful, he gripped onto his shoulder and lightly shook it until Raleigh's eyes flickered open.
His light blue eyes landed on Peter first before sliding them onto the person his head had been resting on. The two made eye contact, and despite the friendly expression on the stranger, Raleigh reacted in a way that was expected after being terrorized by Mysterio. In the anxiety induced panic, Raleigh knocked aside Peter's hand and pushed his body away from the stranger and more so into the wall behind him. A nerve in both his hip and shoulder pinched at the movement, but he hardly noticed them over the pain racing within his heart.
"Hey, hey, it's okay. It's me." Peter told him, holding up his hands. "It's me, I promise."
Raleigh stared at Peter's open palms that faced him, before gliding his eyes over to the hazel-eyed boy. Something screamed safe to him as he studied Peter Parker, and that something told him this was real... this absolutely was his best friend. He nodded, and Peter's shoulders eased. Almost as if forcing himself, Raleigh turned away from Peter and examined his surroundings. He tried to process how they ended up in a small jail cell with four other men.
"Where are we?" Raleigh asked, his voice weak. A dry cough shook his body, and he covered his mouth with his beaten hand, causing the orange shirt to slid onto his lap.
"Netherlands," Peter explained. He lowered his hands, giving Raleigh the choice of whether he accepted them or not. "We need to go."
Once the realization that he and Peter were roughly three-hundred miles from where they were before the battle with Mysterio's illusions, he didn't even consider hesitating when taking Peter's hands. Once they were both firmly on their feet, they hobbled over to the cell door. Raleigh grabbed onto the bars while Peter tripped into them. Raleigh awkwardly slipped on the orange sport shirt, and Peter pushed his face into the bars to call out for security.
"Guard!"
"The guard is on a break." The blond man in the floral hat explained. "Probably talking to his wife."
The man to the blond's left nodded. "Yeah, she's pregnant."
"Oh," the one Peter and Raleigh had been sleeping against grinned, "yeah?"
They continued their conversation in Dutch and Raleigh did his best to block out the noise while he focused on what Peter was doing. The other boy reached through the bars and grasped the thick padlock, and snapped the shackle. Dropping it aside, Peter unbarred and pushed open the cell door.
Raleigh followed close behind him as they staggered towards the front door of the building. However, Peter suddenly stopped, and Raleigh followed his baffled-gaze into the room to their left. The room, an office, was cluttered with personal belongings, and behind the main desk, the guardsman of the holding cell talked on a landline. That wasn't what caught Peter's attention, though. It was the fact that the man was currently wearing Peter's stealth mask. Raleigh's stealth mask was crumbled on the desk.
"Night Monkey and Lucent Shade. Yeah." Raleigh heard the man say into the phone as he and Peter exited the small building.
Stepping out of there, Raleigh was met with the sun blaring down on him, momentarily blinding him, and a pungent odor he somewhat recognized from a time as a young boy at a petting zoo. And as his eyes adjusted to the new lighting, he understood why, as he noticed two goats just to his left and a baby sheep to his left grazing on hay. Perplexed about this and wondering if he had walked through a portal and teleported somewhere else, he looked around at his surroundings.
They appeared to be standing within a small community center market, filled with ordinary people standing behind their stands and selling their organic products to their neighbors. Raleigh glanced behind him to see the doors to the holding security facility close shut and back to the market.
Peter pulled on his own soccer shirt and started walking towards the nearest open-running booth. Raleigh followed him, stepping around a pile of manure, and nearly tripping over a small dog that ran past him.
"Um, excuse me, sir?" Peter reached the booth first and addressed the white-haired man behind it. His attention was on the phone in his hand, but he gave a short look at the two teenagers at Peter's approach.
"Yeah?"
Peter leaned on hand on the empty booth and shifted his weight onto his other leg. "Can we borrow your phone?"
"Yeah." The man's mustache wiggled as he answered them. Without any questions, he handed over his phone and smiled at them. He continued to say something in Dutch, but neither Raleigh nor Peter knew what he was saying. Raleigh wrapped his good arm around his abdomen and raised his brows at the kindness of the stranger. It was hard to believe anyone was this friendly, but the men in the jail cell seemed kind, as well.
Peter thought the same thing as he took the phone gingerly from the man's hand. "Everyone is so nice here."
Peter goes quiet as he stares down at the phone, thinking of who they could safely call and ask for help. More than anything, at that moment, Raleigh wanted to take the phone himself and call Trystan. He wanted to hear his voice; he needed to hear Trystan tell him he was okay, just like all the other times he felt anxiety crawling on his neck as he cried in a bundle of blankets. He wanted Trystan to comfort him by telling him that everything and everyone was going to be fine. But it wasn't safe to call Trystan or May because there wasn't a doubt in his mind that Quentin Beck hadn't already tapped into their families and friends' phones.
And as they stood there, Raleigh suddenly realized who would have passed under Quentin's radar. Someone Quentin wouldn't think to be on two teenagers' side.
"Happy," Raleigh said, bringing Peter's attention to him, "call Happy."
Peter stared through him for a moment before nodding in agreement.
"Okay." He tapped urgently at the numbers and pulled the phone up to his ear. His toes tapped onto the cobblestone and dirt-covered path as he waited for Happy's welcoming voice.
"Pick up, pick up, pick up. Hey, hey, uh..." Peter ran his other hand over his scruffy head, leveling out his frizzy hair. "I, uh... we messed up. We need a—We need a ride." He paused while Happy spoke. "Yeah, me and Raleigh." Another pause. "Where are we?" He turned to the white-haired stranger. "Where are we, sir?"
"It's Broek op Langedijk."
A momentary silence followed as the man smiled at the two teenagers. Raleigh glanced at Peter with his mouth slightly ajar, unsure what the man said, or if he even answered Peter's question. He shrugged and shook his head in Peter's direction when Peter looked hopefully towards him. Even if Raleigh understood what the man said, he doubted he could repeat it.
"Hang on." Peter holds out the phone towards the man. "Could you say that into there?"
"Oh, uh, hi." The man leaned towards Peter's hand. "It's Broek op Langedijk here. Yeah, no problem. Heh, heh."
Peter smiled weakly at the stranger and returned the phone to his ear. "Did you get that?" He hummed short responses as Happy chatted with him, and a frown covered his face when Happy said something further, ending the conversation. "Um, okay? Bye."
Hanging up the phone, he handed the phone back to the stranger. "Can you point us in the direction of the nearest tulip field?"
› › › ›
After the stranger pointed them in the direction they needed to go, Raleigh and Peter thanked him before stumbling through the rest of the individual's shopping in the area. It didn't take them long to desert people, as this village appeared to be small in population and land coverage. And for almost an hour, Peter and Raleigh walked in agonizing silence, surrounded by green and occasional stone fences, before they finally spotted the bright colors of tulips in the distance.
His muscles and, specifically, the area around his left shoulder stung the longer he walked. Everything in him wanted to stop, to just lay down in the field of tulips and accept that he was a failure. Yet, every time he peered at Peter or the bracelets around his wrists, he remembered how others were counting on him. And if he gave up now... if he stopped trying, then Quentin Beck wins. All the people like him win. And everyone he cares about and loves will be in danger of being killed. That was something he couldn't afford, not again.
A soft humming brought Raleigh's head up from the tulips. His hands formed fists, thinking for a moment that it was Quentin's drones again, but he dropped them when he noticed the private Stark Industries jet Tony had left in Happy's name.
The stark white carrier flew over his and Peter's heads, smacking petals from the tulip buds around them, before landing on top of the tulip field a few feet ahead of them. Almost as soon as it landed o the soil, the door folded out from the plane, and Happy, slightly disheveled, walked down it. He squinted at the two roughed up teenagers.
"Peter? Raleigh? Are you okay?"
"Happy, is that you?" Peter asked, his hand finding Raleigh's forearm. He anxiously gripped it.
Happy, rightfully confused, furrowed his brows and frowned. "Is it?—Yeah, of course, it's me."
"Stop!" Peter held out his other hand as he shouted at their friend. "Tell me something only you would know."
"Only I would know? Uh..." Happy stopped and looked around before, smacking his hands together. "R-Remember we went to Germany? You pay-per viewed a video in your room? They didn't list the titles, but I could tell by the price that it was an adult film at the front desk. And you didn't know how I knew—"
"Okay, okay, fine! It's you. It's you. Stop."
Peter's hand slipped from Raleigh's arm as he quickly limped towards Happy. He still didn't have his question answered, and now more questions were racing through his mind as he stared at the two teenagers. However, at the moment, he was more so concerned about them, so he met Peter halfway.
Peter flung his arms over Happy and rested his chin against his shoulder. "It's so good to see you."
Raleigh breathed heavily, both his arms wrapping around his abdomen as a shock traveled into his chest, and a nauseating sensation gurgled throughout his stomach. Blood still dribbled down his chin from a split in his skin, and bruises not only marked his face but all down his bare arms.
And Happy stared at the injuries, noted the foreign soccer t-shirt, and the scruffs in their pants, all the while an unsettling feeling traveling up his spine. For the first time in a while, Happy looked at Raleigh and Peter exactly as they were—two sixteen-year-old kids, who were in trouble.
"Peter. Raleigh. You guys have to tell me what the hell is going on here."
Authors Note
A short chapter before the chapter that I have had planned since the very beginning. I'm gonna go ahead and give a content warning since a depiction of an anxiety attack is within the chapter. I'm giving the warning before the chapter, too, but thought I'd warn here as well for good measures. It's gonna be based on my personal experience so hopefully, I write it appropriately. If you see anything you find wrong or offensive, let me know.
Anywho, has anyone seen the new WandaVision show? (three episodes are out thus far). It's definitely weird, but I think I'm enjoying it; and even though it's bizarre, thanks to the internet, I think I'm piecing together how the story is gonna go. Nice to know S.W.O.R.D. is a thing though, well it was mentioned in a deleted ending scene for Thor, but ya know. The MCU is just getting bigger!
Let me know what you think of WandaVision and what you thought of this chapter! Thank you for reading!!