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Well.
He’d done what Wade and Matt had told him to. He’d written everything out. Tallied everything up.
There were only two things left to do.
He stuck his head into the living room.
“Parental Unit?”
May stopped picking at her noodles on the couch to give him an expectant side-eye.
“Dependent,” she acknowledged.
“How do you write a resume?”
Apparently, such questions merited only further eye-squinting and suspicion.
May had a lot of questions about what exactly had happened with Mr. Stark to make Peter choose this particular path of resistance, and he could answer, like, most of them. The one he could answer for sure was the last one.
“Are you sure, Peter?” May asked sitting cross-legged across from him on the couch.
Yeah.
Yeah, he was sure.
He might not have Mr. Stark or the Avengers after tomorrow, but he had May. And Matt and Wade. And MJ and Ned. And his new pal Johnny who had a thing for the Statue of Liberty. Matt told him that as soon as he snipped that last thread, he’d also have Matt’s people. That meant the Defenders—Danny Rand, Luke Cage, even Jessica Jones.
Wade tipped his head back and forth over the length of that same training session, and just when they were about to leave, carefully said that, while he couldn’t offer Peter a team like Matt’s, he could offer a network—whatever that meant.
Matt had seemed shocked. So Peter presumed that whatever it was, it was an unheard of type of offer.
“So Spiderman’s going rogue,” May said. Her tone made Peter’s heart skip. He looked up from his ankles and saw the smirk on her face and warmth bloomed across his eyes and his chest.
“This could get interesting,” May said.
He bowled her over with a hug and nearly took the two of them off the edge of the couch.
She was laughing.
May said that she was cool with him getting a job, but that she didn’t want it to be another internship.
“You’ve done your time in the exploitation arena,” she told him seriously.
He wondered when all the adults in his life had started talking like this. Exploitation this, capitalism that. Unions, unions, unions.
Like, logically he knew what all those things were, but he wasn’t 100% sure he knew what they meant in real life.
“Exploitation,” Foggy told him over the lunch that May had told Peter to invite him out for, “Is when someone profits off your labor more than you do. Whether that’s emotional labor or physical labor or intellectual labor—if you’re working hard and someone else is hardly working, then you, my friend, have an exploitation situation.”
“But what if they aren’t my boss?” Peter asked, dipping a trio of fries into ketchup.
Foggy dropped his chin onto his palm with a raised eyebrow.
“Right, so. Let’s say it’s your coworker,” he said. “They’re the laziest coworker in the history of existence. And while their name is not Owen Porter, the demon of basement room 12 at Landman and Zack, they do similarly spend all day answering two emails and asking for your help with a couple of clients. You, in the meantime, continue to do your regular workload. Do you get paid for the work that you did for that person?”
“No,” Peter acquiesced, “But they aren’t my boss, right? They aren’t making money off of me. And I should want to help them, shouldn’t I?”
The wrinkles in Foggy’s forehead suggested very strongly that this was not the correct answer.
“Or…not?” Peter tried.
“Or not,” Foggy said. Then sighed and sat back in his chair. “It depends on the coworker, of course,” he said while tapping at the side of his drink, “You’ll have newbies who you’ve gotta train and then well-meaning folks who really do need the help. But what you’re looking for, Pete, is a pattern. How many days are you answering this person’s questions and picking up their slack? Are we talking every so often or every time you work with them? And even then, kiddo, think about it like this: when you do that stuff for them day in and day out, are you being paid the percentage of their work that you’re doing?”
“Uh, no?”
“Who’s being paid for that work, then?” Foggy pressed.
This.
Was kind of disheartening.
“They are,” Peter said.
Foggy could read the defeat in his tone.
“A lot of folks don’t mean to do this,” he said a little more sympathetically. “And a lot of folks don’t mean to submit to it. They think that they’re helping someone out and, hey, the work needs to be done anyways, right? Or they’ll think that things will just go smoother and faster if they just take care of something themselves. But at the end of the day, if you carry on doing that, then you go home having done your job and half of someone else’s with only your wage in your pocket. They, on the other hand, get to go home with their full wage, despite having done only half of their work and without having learned the skills which would help them do it. And no matter what, your boss still gets his targets met. So yes. Exploitation can happen up high, and certainly that’s where we hear about it most, but it can also happen between people at the same level.”
Damn, this was complicated.
Not to mention shitty.
“Shitty, yes,” Foggy said, “But it doesn’t have to be. You don’t have to go into a situation expecting to be exploited, but you should go into it being aware that that is a possibility. You just need to keep your eyes open for patterns.”
Peter stirred the bubbles out of his soda.
“I can do that,” he said. “But why did May want me to talk to you about it?”
Foggy chuckled and picked up the other half of his sandwich.
“Because I’m a lawyer,” he said, “And because Matt is physically incapable of not flipping tables when the topic comes up.”
Yeah, okay. That was fair.
“Wade, how do I write a resignation letter?” Peter asked Ellie. Well, Wade, but in Ellie’s direction. Ellie didn’t care if he was talking, Ellie was finger-painting and needed Peter’s hands to do that, apparently. The paint felt kind of nice on his skin.
“For Stark?” Wade asked from over in the kitchen.
He was in Dad-mode. Peter wasn’t sure what to make of Wade in Dad-mode. He chilled way the fuck out. Didn’t yell or throw his circular mind-fuck logic at you.
He didn’t say that he was trying to teach Ellie to be kinder to humanity, but the way that he’d winced when Ellie told the otters at the aquarium that they were ‘pathetic’ strongly suggested that he was leaning in that direction.
“Yeah,” Peter said. He watched Ellie pour the whole pot of blue paint on top of his knuckles. Wade had covered the whole table in paper. It was probably fine.
“Easy,” Wade said without looking up from his laptop screen. “Dear Asshole, I am writing to inform you that I am resigning from my position of research intern due to the unfortunate circumstances which have occurred over the last year. My last day in this position will be ASAP. Thanks for the opportunity, dipshit. Love, Peter.”
Peter blinked.
“It’s that easy?” he asked.
“It don’t gotta be harder,” Wade said.
“For real?”
“For real.”
Ellie introduced her Wolverine figure into the action taking place on Peter’s hands. That was going to need confiscating before he got unanticipated air-time.
“But don’t you have to like, say why you’re leaving?” he asked.
Wade finally emerged over the top of his screen to sniff derisively.
“You can,” he said. “But why the fuck would you give someone the opportunity to argue with you like that? Or hell, why would you sit back and rehash whatever trauma you’ve endured for the last year for the sake of someone’s fuckin’ HR team? Like. No. Fuck that. Don’t give ‘em that kind of power, Pete. If you’re resigning, 9 times out of 10, you tried to make shit work and your employer knows damn well why you’re packin’ your cookies.”
Ellie went still in Peter’s arms and then stared soulfully up into his eyes.
“No cookies,” he told her. “It’s an expression.”
“I’m an expression,” Ellie whispered.
Dude, what?
“She thinks she’s an emoji,” Wade said flatly.
Uh?
“The angry one.”
Uh??
“Also the Hulk one.”
UH.
“The point is,” Wade emphasized as though his daughter was not functioning on a separate mental plane from the rest of humanity, “You don’t gotta be especially specific about this shit. They know what they did. Just say you’re leaving due to ‘unforeseen circumstances’ or ‘personal circumstances’ or ‘an unresolved conflict which hinders your performance or personal safety’ or whatever and move on.”
Woah.
Wade knew how to speak adult. And not in a playful kind of way—in a real kind of way.
“Well, yeah, kid. You gotta know the system to fuck with it,” Wade huffed. “And anyways, there is nothing better than resigning from McDonalds due to ‘irreconcilable creative differences.’ I’ve done it twice now. Talk about brightening a bad day.”
Ah, yes. There it was.
Peter realized that Ellie was staring at him again.
“No McDonalds,” he said.
She scowled.
“But how do you write one?” he agitated Matt. Matt’s crossed arms and tapping foot said that he was not interested in entertaining this line of questioning. It also said that he wanted Peter to stop trying to escape the inevitable and to get the fuck back into the ring already.
“I don’t write resumes, Peter,” Matt growled. “I’m a lawyer. I’m more concerned with CVs.”
Peter waited. Spun a little in the meantime.
Matt sighed.
“Get down here—”
“Okay, so what’s a CV, then?” Peter interrupted.
Matt’s fingers flexed. He glared up just past Peter’s shoulder.
“It’s a fancy resume. Down.”
“Okay, but like. What goes on it?”
“DOWN.”
Peter waited until Matt had gotten the fight out of his system before rolling over on the mat and tucking his chin in between his palms.
“So,” he said. “CVs.”
Matt made a noise of disgust and made to leave, but Peter caught a hold of his ankle before he could escape.
“I need a new job. May gave me the okay, but I’ve never made a resume and I have zero skills and experience,” he blurted out. “So please? Resume? Or CV?”
Matt cycled through his usual rage emotions, but eventually came to a sigh. He removed Peter’s hand from his ankle and grumpily settled back down with his legs crossed on the mat.
“Not a CV for you,” he relented. “You don’t have the experience or skills to fill out a CV. You’re better off with a resume. And as long as you don’t go into academia or major leadership roles, you’ll probably just stick with that for most of your career.”
Yes, yes. Peter could have googled this. That wasn’t the main problem here.
“Okay, so resume,” he said. “But I have no skills. Or experience. I have nothing. I have like, one internship and an AcaDec award.”
Matt rolled his shoulders and then his head up at the rafters. The gym was ages old. There was a poster on one of the walls that had Matt’s dad’s name on it. He never mentioned it.
“That’s not true, kid,” he said. “You’ve got loads of skills.”
“Punching people’s lights out is not a marketable skill,” Peter reminded him.
Matt snickered, evidently trying to imagine all the ways he could sneak that one onto his CV. He shook his head.
“You’re thinking about skills all wrong,” he said. “You gotta think about them differently. Like, think about it like this—when you were at SI, what was it that you were doing?”
Ehn. Well. Mostly working on tech.
“Be more specific,” Matt said. “What specifically were you doing?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Peter huffed. “People don’t care about that—yeah, I can use a screwdriver. Who cares?”
“Do I care? Answer the damn question.”
Well. Someone was grumpy today.
“You want my help or no?” Matt demanded.
UGH. Fine.
“Why don’t we try AcaDec?” Matt suggested, seeing as he wasn’t getting anywhere with anything Stark-related. “What did you do in AcaDec?”
“Memorized a fuckload of information,” Peter grumbled.
“And?”
Peter panicked a little, trying to think of what the hell else he’d done with his Tuesdays and Thursdays for the last four years.
Matt huffed.
“Think broader,” he said. “What were you doing while you were memorizing shit?”
“Doing team…work?” Peter tried.
The tension in Matt’s shoulders settled somewhat. Right answer, then. Keep going.
“Teamwork and uh, learning concepts?”
“What did people expect from you when you came to practice?” Matt asked smoothly and much less irritably than before.
Peter squirmed up off his belly and emulated Matt’s cross-legged stance.
“They expected me to be prepared,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“I had to do the assigned reading and bring all my flashcards and binders and shit with me to practice.”
“Then what? What did you do once you’d done that?”
Peter frowned and thought about it.
“We—well, we split into groups and practiced, I guess,” he said. “And when we were done practicing, we came back together and did a run-through or played a couple of games and that was it.”
Matt hummed.
“So you’re saying to me that you are able to work in small and large groups?” he asked.
“Yes?” Peter tried.
“And you’re also saying to me that you’re able to take in large amounts of information and then break that down into more manageable concepts, which you then apply to other situations and information?”
Where the fuck had he learned to phrase shit like this? Was there a class or something?
“Peter, think about it, kiddo. What you’re talking about here is discipline. You’re talking about being part of a team and contributing to team goals by meeting agreed upon expectations. You’re talking about being able to synthesize large amounts of information in many different ways, and then being able to report back to the group accurately on that information. Analyzing, actually. That’s analysis. And given that this is a competition you’re involved in, you’re talking about being able to do all this on a strict and tight timeline. These are skills, Spidey. Skills. Not everyone can do them. And they’re applicable to a variety of situations.”
A certain kind of self-conscious warmth wormed across Peter’s chest at the realization.
“I guess,” he said. “But like, how was I supposed to know that? I mean, obviously, you’re here and you know how to translate all this stuff into professional-speak but like? I can’t do that by myself. I don’t even know the right words to use.”
Matt scoffed.
“Who the fuck said that you had to write your resume on your own?” he asked.
What?
Oh.
Oh.
“Break it down,” Matt said more kindly this time. “For every thing you’ve done, ask yourself, ‘what did I do in that role?’ and once you’ve written out all of your responsibilities, like, figure out which of those are technical skills that are applicable to whatever job you want and which of them are softer skills—communication, critical thinking, time management—that kind of thing. There are loads of lists of this shit online if you can’t think of the words you need. And once you’ve done that, fuck, kid, just throw it all on paper in bullet points and you’re halfway there.”
It was…that easy?
“Well, it’s not easy,” Matt said. “But you don’t have to kill yourself over this kind of thing. Millions of incompetent people write resumes and get hired every day, surely semi-competent you can do it.”
You know what?
That was kind of comforting.
“I want it by Friday,” Matt decided apropos of nothing.
“What?”
“Friday. You know. Homework. On my desk by Friday, Spiderling,” Matt said. “Pick a job, write a resume, give it to Michelle who—might I say, has a stunning one graced by the name of yours truly—she will get it where it needs to go.”
That was not part of this deal. Peter needed Matt to understand that this was a purely hypothetical situation they had been working with.
Matt ignored him and started nattering on about how shitty his left hook was.
This was Matt-speak for ‘fix-it or suffer the consequences,’ which meant that really, Peter had double homework here.
That was just unfair.
He went home and over dinner May asked him how the transition stage was going for him. He explained his trauma at Matt’s hands and she laughed. She also told him that if he was feeling overwhelmed, it was probably because he still hadn’t finished the first thing he’d started.
“It’s hard to get a new start without settling the old one,” she said. “Send Mr. Stark your resignation letter first. It’ll make it easier to write the resume.”
That was probably true. It would also give him a moment to breathe and start looking for a job he wanted to apply for. Wade texted him with a temporary one which took the form of minding his monster child for a couple of hours while Wade convinced a businessman to give up his endeavors to buy out the entirety of his rival’s stock at knifepoint.
Ellie was helping. Or she thought she was, at least.
“Say, ‘Mr. Stark, you’re mean, you got a bad attitude, and I don’t like you. We aren’t friends ‘nymore. Kay, bye bye. Sincerely, Uncle Peter.’”
Peter was torn between gushing over this kid and informing her that she was never getting him or herself hired by anyone anywhere, ever again.
“How about, ‘Dear Mr. Stark--” Peter dictated as he typed. “--I am writing to, uh—”
“Bounce,” Ellie said firmly.
Peter stared at her.
“Daddy says ‘we gotta bounce,’” she explained.
Wade. Where have you been taking this child?
“Imma go with ‘resign’—wait no. ‘To inform you of my resignation.’ That’s better. Is that better?”
“I like it,” Ellie informed him with complete and total seriousness. “You sound like a gangster.”
A…?
Leaving that. Not touching that. That was none of his business.
While Ellie did a terrifyingly spot-on impression of a 1930s gangster from the worst part of Jersey, Peter noticed that his palms were sweaty even though the tips of his fingers were cold. He could feel his pulse in the side of his throat. His muscles felt weird, trapped in that place between fight and flight—a jittery type of feeling.
He knew what this was. It had been happening more and more lately.
May told him that he got it from her and his mother: anxiety. She told him to breath. She always told him to breathe.
He sucked in a deep breath, counting.
1
2
3
It is okay to leave things, people, and places, he told himself.
1
2
3
It is okay to not want to feel exploited.
1
2
3
It is okay to move on.
1
2
3
He opened his eyes.
Dear Mr. Stark,
I am writing to inform you of my resignation. I am unable to continue in my current role due to personal circumstances beyond my control. These you are aware of. My last day in the position of SI Research Intern will be Friday, April 14.
Thank you for the last two years. I wish the best to you and the larger team.
If you need me, you know where you can find me.
Regards,
Peter Benjamin Parker
Send.
1
2
3
It is okay to leave things, people, and places, he told himself through the sudden ache in his throat and burn in his eyes.
1
2
3
It is okay to not want to feel exploited.
What had he done?
Was this worth it?
“Uncle Peter?”
Was it worth it?
Was this stupid?
Was he just being stupid? Childish? Irrational?
1
2
3
Is it okay to move on?
Was he really ready to move on?
There was no turning back now, he’d hit ‘send.’
He could apologize.
He could say it was all a mistake. A misunderstanding.
“Uncle Peter?”
He was alone now.
This was it.
This was him.
Alone.
“Tío?”
He wiped at his face and caught Ellie’s soft, warm fingers with his own.
“I’m okay,” he told her.
Ellie frowned up at him, then looked down and swallowed. She was upset by Peter’s upset. Fuck. He needed to sort himself out. He needed to—
“Tío, be brave,” Ellie said, looking back up to him. “You’re Spiderman. Be brave.”
Peter was taken aback.
Be Spiderman, she said. Be brave? What did that even mean? This girl never made sense. She’d inherited her dad’s weird, circular logic. He could never understand what Wade was trying to tell him. It was always wrapped up in some kind of secret.
“Honey, I don’t understand,” he sniffed, unable to come up with anything else to say to her.
Ellie hummed.
“Tío’s brave,” she said, “So Spidey can be brave. So when Tío can’t be brave, Spidey can for him. They share.”
They share.
They.
Share.
Fuck. Yeah, alright. He could be Spiderman. He was great at being Spiderman.
And Spiderman could bear this burden for Peter Parker. He was brave enough. Always had been. Always would be.
And if Spiderman was looking at someone else in this moment, he’d feel like they were doing the right thing. He’d tell them that they were doing something that was really, really hard. Letting go of a certainty. Falling back into the unknown. All by their own hand.
That was a hard thing to do.
But, Spiderman would say, from here, there is only forward.
Be brave. And move forward. Letting go is the hardest part. You still have a safety net around you. You have friends and family and friends who are family. You have the love of people you don’t even know. You have skills. Talent. A strong, steady heart. And you never needed someone to tell you how amazing you were, anyways.
Deep down, you already knew.
“Hey, Ellie,” Peter said down into his lap. The space in his throat feel like it was widening. It hurt a bit but talking was easier. Swallowing was easier.
“Yeah?”
“You’re so fucking smart.”
Ellie went rigid, then stopped fucking around with Peter’s keyboard to wriggle around to glare at him.
“Duh,” she said. “I’m Deadpool.”
He laughed.
It felt like a weight had lifted.
Wade came in about fifteen minutes later and froze upon Ellie scrambling out of Peter’s lap and jabbing a finger his way.
“Dad, Uncle Peter’s sad!” she declared. “Fix him!”
Wade glanced at Peter. Noted the red eyes and said nothing.
“I’m good,” Peter told him with a most-probably very watery smile. “Just having a moment.”
Ellie glued herself to Wade’s in-seam to ensure his maximum discomfort and ergo his maximum participation in Peter-saving efforts.
“Good one or bad one?” Wade asked as he extracted his wayward child and dumped her on her belly on the counter. This pleased her to no end. She shrieked in delight.
“It’s more of a spiral,” Peter amended.
Wade nodded in understanding.
“It happens,” he said. “You resign?”
Yeah.
“Good.”
Yeah. Good.
“You look older already, Pete.”
Peter scoffed.
“Yeah, that’s ‘cause your daughter can talk like Danny DeVito. What have you done to her?”