Batman Incident (Complete)

"You mean, there's something wrong with the reactor in Mr. Stark's chest?" Peter asked, looking at Yinsen.

"Peter, you're very smart..." Yinsen put his arm around Peter's shoulder, turned to look at him and said, "Even if you just think about it for a moment, you should understand how dangerous it would be to have an energy source that works on this principle embedded in your body."

Peter said with great concern, "What should we do then? Shouldn't we be able to develop something new to replace that thing?"

"Of course, Tony is a genius. If he really wants to do something, he can succeed. But what if he doesn't want to?"

"How could he not think about it? This is a matter of his own life..." Peter stopped short of saying this. Yinsen said, "You should have noticed that Tony's mindset is a bit negative now. He's always thinking about dying like a hero instead of thinking about how to live well."

Peter recalled Stark's resolute flight towards the Highland Tower, refusing to stop no matter how Stark tried to dissuade him. This posture, besides being heroic, did indeed have the air of rushing towards death.

Peter sighed, sat down in his chair, put one arm on the table, and said, "I heard from Doctor Schiller about what Mr. Stark has been going through lately, and frankly, it must be very sad."

"What do you think I should do?" Peter spread his hands and said, "I want to help him, but I probably can't be of much help technically."

"Stark doesn't need anyone's technical help. I think you could try to persuade him."

Yinsen leaned against the lab table next to Peter and looked at him, saying, "Haven't you noticed? Stark treats you differently. We're his friends, but there are some things he never listens to his friends' advice on. But you might be different."

After Yinsen left, Peter, alone in the lab, stood there in a daze, reminiscing about the moments he had spent with Stark.

Initially, at the top of the New York Tower, Stark told him about his experiences in Afghanistan.

That day, when they were still strangers, Stark told Peter that wanting to be a hero would hurt.

It wasn't until later that Peter realized Stark wasn't someone who would easily cry out in pain.

Peter could imagine that having a reactor embedded in his chest, no matter how powerful it was or how strong the mech it could power, would be an unpleasant experience for the body's owner.

The laboratory was dimly lit, with only the light from the instruments intertwining on the floor. Spider-Man wasn't immune to fatigue; in this environment, Peter, who had been fighting all day, also felt tired and sleepy.

In a daze, he seemed to see Stark sitting on the ground in front of him, leaning against the experimental table, holding a model of a reactor in his hand.

Peter remembered asking Stark what the model that always sat on his desk was. Stark remained silent for a long time, but finally only said one name— Howard.

Peter had vaguely heard the name from others. For example, Steve told Peter that Howard was his old comrade-in-arms, a genius, but also a womanizer.

Natasha seemed to have mentioned the name as well, but she didn't say anything nice about it. Nick also mentioned Stark's father, but he didn't offer any comments that would impress Peter.

Just like his own father, Peter thought, all he ever heard from Uncle Ben and Aunt May was a name and some vague description.

Father, Peter thought, that word was really far removed from him.

Peter grew increasingly drowsy, as if in a dream. He saw Stark put down the model, then close his eyes, just like he was asleep.

On every such late night, in the deserted laboratory of Stark Tower, Iron Man does indeed feel pain.

He always said that Howard wouldn't be the person he should think of when he was in pain, but no one knows who Iron Man actually thinks of in the dead of night.

In Peter's deeper dream, he dreamed that Stark became his father.

This dream lacked the Stark Industries's advanced equipment and luxurious environment, and it contained none of the unimaginable extravagance of a wealthy family that Peter not comprehend.

His childhood was still confined to that old house, and his memories are still of clothes that were neither new nor old, toys that could not fill a box, and storybooks that had been turned to crease.

But the only difference is that he has a father, a father who takes apart toy cars with him and builds all sorts of machines with building blocks.

Together, they treated marbles as planets, arranging them on the somewhat old floor to form a map of the Solar System. In the cramped room, the setting sun shone on these rather simple toys. Tall Stark and young Peter stared intently at the glass marbles on the floor, as if the father and son possessed the entire universe.

The two men's appearances began to change. Peter saw that Stark had become Howard, and he himself had become a young Stark.

Howard gently flicked the marbles, and countless mysteries of the universe flowed from his mouth. The light from those glass marbles began to grow brighter and brighter, becoming increasingly dazzling.

Peter saw a father and son standing hand in hand above the Earth, controlling all the planets in the Solar System. Even the sun obeyed the father's command and dimmed its light. The planets kept rotating, and countless lights flickered.

Mars, Venus, Jupiter...

Those profound facts for children echoed in the silent universe.

Before Peter's consciousness went dark, the last thing he remembered was Stark handing him the first Spider-Man suit. Stark's visor rose up, and his brown eyes, illuminated by the sunlight, looked as rich as melting honey.

Peter was certain that he saw two completely different emotions in those eyes: the weariness of a father and the innocence of a child.

As the night grew deeper, Stark lay in his hospital bed. He was indeed exhausted, but his biological clock, honed by years of staying up late, still prevented him from falling asleep.

Just as he was feeling a little uncomfortable and wanted to turn over, he heard the doorknob move slightly. He turned his head with difficulty and saw that the door had been opened a crack, and the light from outside poured in. Peter squeezed through the crack and then gently closed the door.

Peter turned around and saw Stark's somewhat gleaming eyes staring at him. He seemed startled, then said somewhat awkwardly, "Uh... Mr. Stark, you're still awake? I thought..."

What are you doing here now? Aren't you going to sleep?

"I... I have a bit of insomnia, I just can't fall asleep. Uh, actually I've already slept, but I just woke up suddenly..."

"Has anyone ever told you that when you lie, your speech is always incoherent?"

Peter said dejectedly, "I knew it. I've never been able to lie since I was a child."

"So what are you doing here? If it's anything related to the experiment, we can talk about it tomorrow morning."

"I was almost asleep." Stark turned over, his Facing Away Peter, indicating that he was going to sleep.

Peter lowered his head, didn't turn on the light, and walked to the chair next to the hospital bed and sat down. He remained silent for a long time, so long that he thought Stark was asleep.

Then, as if possessed, he said, "Mr. Stark, could you tell me about your father?"

Stark remained silent, and Peter felt he had gone too far, but he still said, "I didn't mean anything by it, it's just... you know, I've never met my father. When people hear about my background, they never mention their parents to me again, not even Gwen..."

Stark, curled up on the hospital bed, stirred slightly. He heard Peter say, "Well, actually, I just had a dream, which is why I can't sleep. I dreamt about my father, but maybe it wasn't really him, since I've never met him, right?"

Finally, after a long silence, Stark sighed, turned over, stared straight at the ceiling, and said, "Howard is an alcoholic, he's drunk every day."

"When he's drunk, he curses everything and is a rude bastard. When he's sober, the sentence he says to me most often is, 'You don't understand anything.'"

"Of course, I didn't understand anything at all; I was only a few years old then."

"I have a natural interest in cars and I like to tinker with those metal parts, but when I make something, he never praises me. He just says it's a pile of junk."

"Alcohol burned out his prized brain," Stark scoffed, "So much so that he didn't produce any decent inventions in the final stages of his life."

"Look at me now! Stark Industries is better than ever, and I've come up with even more world-changing inventions!"

"He's wrong, terribly wrong. It's not that Stark Jr. is clueless; the one who truly knows nothing is him, Howard Stark..."

Looking at the silent Peter, Stark turned his face away and said, "You didn't hear the story you wanted, did you? What did you expect to hear? Our deep father-son bond, or him teaching me knowledge, guiding me in invention from a young age?"

Stark lowered his eyes, and when he squinted, his long eyelashes always cast deep shadows in his brown eyes.

Peter lowered his head, crossed his hands, covered his chin, and said, "Before, I had never dreamed of my father, nor had I ever thought of him, because I had never seen him, there was nothing about him in my memory, and I couldn't even dream of him."

Stark glanced at him and said, "Well, maybe there were some good times, maybe... a long, long time ago, so long ago that I can't even remember, I remember we were standing together at the lab table, we... I don't remember exactly what we were doing, but there were times like that..."

Stark turned his head to look at Peter, but he didn't see any sadness on Peter's face. In Peter's still somewhat childish eyes, there was no loneliness or sadness as he had imagined.

Stark thought that perhaps this was normal; Peter had been living like this for over a decade, with his uncle playing the role of a father figure in his life, but perhaps only to a part of it.

Ben Parker was an ordinary man who did his best to pass on his best qualities—strength and kindness—to Peter.

But Peter is a genius, Stark knows that all too well. Geniuses need resonance, they need to communicate with worthy opponents, and they need the collision of sparks of thought.

When Peter and Stark looked at each other, they both realized that this truly proved the saying: geniuses are always lonely.

Stark saw Peter's gaze fall on the reactor in his chest. He lowered his head and continued to stare at the ceiling, watching the flashes of light outside the window leave various shapes on the ceiling.

"If this reactor problem isn't fixed, you'll die, right?" Peter asked him. "That's what Yinsen told me."

"They always make a mountain out of a molehill. Actually, I have nothing wrong with me, I..."

"You have no idea how I felt when I saw your death in my Spider-Sense," Peter said.

Stark detected a slight tremor in his voice.

"... The Stark Tower's laboratory equipment is very advanced. I really like the environment here. The decoration is also very luxurious. I have never lived in such a good place before."

"But more importantly, no one had ever taught me the knowledge of manufacturing equipment or the methods of experimentation before. No one had ever been with me on the lab bench, assembling those parts and testing those finished products together..."

"When my Spider-Sense told me that this was all going to end, I just couldn't accept it..." Peter's voice trailed off, the last syllable falling to the ground, almost crumbling at the slightest touch.

Stark closed his eyes, his Adam's apple bobbing, and said, "What do you want me to say? Let me tell you myself, in a year and three months, perhaps it will all be over."

In Stark's pitch-black vision, he still began to recall those days that were so distant he could hardly remember them, searching for those barely perceptible fragments of memory.

He wanted to reminisce about the good times he had with Howard.

That very night, as he painstakingly pieced together these fragments of memory from the cracks in the wall, Stark finally admitted that he was missing them.

Tonight, his pain was more intense than ever before, and so was his longing.

Howard wasn't the person he should think of in his moments of pain, because those good times would never come again, because his father was dead.

It was only then that Stark realized that when he went from being a son to a father, he understood that any father would rather live a long, long life than have his child think of him on painful nights, and for the good times to never end.

Stark felt his will to survive had never been stronger—he didn't want to become Howard, the person he hated most.

I don't want his child to be constantly reminded for the rest of his life that those good times are gone forever and will never come back, through an abrupt death.

So his children were forced to forget, to tear apart the happiest and most glorious days of their lives, to hide them in the deepest corners of their memories, and to deny their existence.

In the stillness of the night, no one saw that as Stark slept, his fingers, etched with the lines of his no-longer-young skin, gripped the bed railing tightly, just as he had held that model on countless nights.

No one knew that in Peter's next dream, he saw that unfamiliar night sky again, and those lingering memories became clear in the dream. He heard two gunshots and saw a string of scattered pearl necklaces.

In his hazy dream, the previous dream seemed to return. Peter saw another world, another father and son, holding hands, slowly walking towards the universe.

He saw it, behind that dark tide, those good times that perhaps even the bat itself couldn't find.

22600001-R: The Batman Incident (The End)

Today's 10,000-word article is delivered!

The first major Marvel event is finished! Feel free to leave your thoughts and suggestions in the comments section; the author will read them all!

Please vote and tip!