I Can't Make You Love Me || Peter Parker x OC

Chapter 35: Truth Be Told

⚠️Content Warning⚠️

Descriptive conversations about sex and rape. PTSD and other anxiety-type issues.

#PeterParkerNeedsAHug

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Peter's perspective

Despite the fact that there were 3 other people in here with me—well, 5 depending on how you looked at it—the room could not have possibly been anymore dead. I knew that I was not in the wrong here, every single person that I've spoken to so far has reaffirmed that for me, but now that I was faced with the people that I loved, not just some random agents, I was hit with a whole lot of nerves and misplaced anxiety.

Pepper sat next to Dad against one of the walls, both of them being closer to my side of the table. It was relieving to have them here with me, but also more nerve-wracking because whatever I said would now be taken on with a different filter, a more personal one. In all the time alone that I had to rethink and reprocess everything that happened between Anneliesa and I, I came to a lot of conclusions that I still wasn't quite sure how to feel about.

By the time that I got Anneliesa back to her penthouse, it was already beginning to grow dark, and there was too much information to process all at once, so we went our separate ways and dealt with them independently. Anneliesa's parents took her to a hospital, despite her insisting that she was fine, and Dad and I went to the compound. I barely got sleep that night, not only from the waking nightmares of what happened, but also from the constant questioning that I got from everyone once I got back.

We didn't get back there until after midnight, and we left before 5am to make it to the SHIELD facility in Manhattan. I was running on less than empty, both mentally and emotionally. The tears that I shed in the warehouse when I first found Anneliesa were the only ones that came for a while, but as soon as Dad and I were in the car, I broke down sobbing, and just never seemed to stop. Even now, sitting in this room a full three days later, the only thing holding me back from sobbing is dehydration.

"I know you've done this a million times already, but what exactly did those tapes say?" Maria asked as she pressed a button under the table that I knew acted as a sort of intercom system to allow others, probably Fury, to hear our conversation as well.

Tentatively, I raised my arm to bring my new watch into view. After my suit was hacked, Dad and I decided that there was no benefit to keeping it around and risking any further damage being done. We salvaged what we could from her files, but my suit, and Karen as I knew her, was effectively dead. Luckily, much of it was able to be scrounged together, and with a bit of help from an AI that I have been working on for the past year, we were able to resurrect all of Spider-Man, and then some. Virtually nothing was changed, but it was still weird having to say a new name every time I needed something, even after the modifications that I made to it. 'Ethan' just didn't have the same ring to it.

Even Tony Has A Heart, or Ethan as I've opted to call him, is an safety firewall that I designed to protect information shared on the internet. He started out as a school project that Ned and I had to do, little more than a concept that got glorified, simplified, and thrown onto a Google Slides presentation. After a lot of thinking and late nights, I came to the decision that something like that ought to exist in real life as well. So I got to talking with Dad and Dr. Banner, and, a few weeks later, we were already started on him. By the time that all of this disaster started, Ethan was already in a state that was able to be used on the first video that I was sent. The finer details of everything are just one massive headache, but Ethan was my pride and joy, and I knew that he would help a lot of people someday.