Something From Nothing

Chapter 28 - Cause For Celebration

[A/N: Sorry for taking so long to update, but I hope you enjoy this chapter. More notes at the end.]

Dinner with Phil had been a pretty tame affair considering all of the horrible scenarios Peter had managed to imagine beforehand. They had talked about a lot of things, but perhaps most notably they discussed Peter's plan to join the SHIELD Academy and what alias he should use. In the end, he decided to just apply as Peter Parker, after all, it is the name he enjoys using the most and since not much is known about him anyway, it should be easy enough to keep SHIELD out if his business.

Originally he was going to use a fake name (well, another fake name technically) but he has spent enough of his life having no real sense of identity, now that he finally has one, the thought of having to go by anything else in his day to day life (not including missions of course) leaves a bad taste in his mouth.

And thats how three months after that dinner, Peter Parker, the 19 year old kid from Queens with 2 PHDs and counting, finds himself standing in the SHIELD Academy of Operations, looking at the wall of valour.

When he applied to Ops, many of the people on the committee who select who actually gets the opportunity to attend, had tried convincing him that he was better suited to the Sci-Tech Academy. As if somehow his 2 PHDs would make him incompetent at anything except science.

He had shown them.

You see the SHIELD Academy has pretty tough entry requirements. By normal people's standards that is. 6 weeks of training designed with the sole purpose of weeding out the weakest among them, and getting them to crack. In the end only the strongest of them survive the whole six weeks and actually earn the chance to attend the academy, where things will only get tougher.

They expected him to wash out within the first week.

He finished top of the class.

It has been a month since then and he seems to have earned the grudging respect of most of his instructors, even if most of the other cadets resent him. That is, most of the cadets in Ops resent him. He has actually become rather well liked among the cadets from Communications and Sci-tech.

Despite having only been there less than a month, he even sometimes finds himself attending classes in the other academies in his free time.

He loves it.

He feels more comfortable here than he feels anywhere else (except of course being with Natasha, but that is to be expected) and he for the first time in a long time finds himself acting like himself in public. Of course he plays down his physical abilities a little, but he can actually embrace all of his skills here and people don't judge him for it. At least, not in a bad way.

Since he is on the younger side compared to a lot of the other cadets, he had found himself on the receiving end of a number of pranks, but he couldn't find it in himself to mind, nobody had really pranked him before and it was actually kind of refreshing. Although he did shut down some of the pranks that were meant to be cruel rather than funny. He wasn't going to take shit from people just because they were jealous, but those stopped after some retaliation that showed why it is a bad idea to start a prank war with someone with 2 PHDs. Some of his methods were, shall we say...creative.

After the cruel pranks stopped, the pranks that were intended in good fun continued, and Peter wouldn't have it any other way. And if he got into trouble after some of his...messier pranks, it is totally worth the hours of clean up (even if glitter is still being found in random places weeks later).

The thing is though, it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. This might come as a surprise to you (it really should not) but Peter Parker is a loner. Sure he can socialise with people when it is necessary...but that doesn't mean he has to like it.