Peter Parker being utterly terrified of small spaces after what happened in Homecoming, but he never says it to any of the Avengers because he can’t have weaknesses, he can’t be afraid of anything, none of them are- they’re only going to be reminded of how childish he is if he admits something like that.
Except one night they’re all eating take-out in the compound, and for the life of him Peter can’t remember how they managed to get onto the topic, but they start talking about fears. At first, Peter just shakes his head, denies it, he’s Spiderman, he’s not afraid of anything– but then he hears Steve speak, really quietly, and admit that he can’t stand being in water. Not after the plane crash.
And then Thor speaks up. He tells them all that he’s absolutely terrified of being alone. He can’t stand it, and sometimes it takes as little as a day of solitude before he has to find someone, anyone to talk to, or he feels like he can’t breathe.
Then Natasha tells everyone she’s afraid of dogs, her face blank, her fists slightly clenched, and she doesn’t explain any further, and no one asks. Clint tells them all he has a horrible fear of needles. Every time he needs an injection, he vomits. Bruce? Bruce has panic attacks in large crowds. He tells them all he has to skip out on charity galas and parties because he’s so terrified, sometimes.
Then Peter looks at Tony, and expects nothing, because really, it’s Iron Man. He’s been through everything, and he doesn’t even bat an eye at any of it. He’s the one Peter could never have finding out about his own weakness. Because Tony trusts him, Tony respects him, and if he knew Peter was so afraid of something so trivial, he’d surely-
“I’m scared of the dark,” Tony shrugs, looking down, and Peter just… stops.
The dark. Something as simple as the dark, and Tony is… Tony is afraid of the dark.
Iron Man is afraid of the dark.
Tony raises an eyebrow at Peter, and he realizes he’s staring. He looks down quickly, feeling like his heart is about to beat out of his ribcage.
That’s the day that he discovers something very, very important.
He’s can be scared, and still be a hero.
fucking ow
Before Peter’s brain catches up with his mouth, he blurts, “I’m afraid of small spaces.”
His knees pull in to his chest before he can command himself to stay relaxed, and he throws a quick look at Tony before continuing. “When I— when I was fighting Vulture, he— he dropped a building on me, and—“
A sharp “What.” sounds from his left but he presses on, feeling his heart leap into his throat and tears pour down his face.
“I couldn’t get out at first. And it was scary. And no one could hear me.” He sniffles a little and wipes his nose, staring down at his take-out with shaky hands. “I never told anyone. Not until today.”
He feels eyes on him and something tells him it’s Tony. The hairs on his neck prickle, telling him a building is going to fall on him again, or something just as bad— and his face crumples, so he hides between his knees and sobs into his thighs. “I’m sorry!” He warbles, shoulders shaking. “I’m sorry I never told you!”
“Peter, I— it’s okay.” Tony’s hand rests lightly on his shoulder but still he flinches before leaning back in, too embarrassed to look his mentor in the eye. “You— you told me now. And you got the bad guy. Pete, I’m not mad.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispers anyway. “I’m sorry for crying.”
Tony throws an exasperated look at the Avengers before pulling Peter in for a sound hug, putting his chin on top of his head. “Stop being sorry, Pete. I’m not mad. I’m just glad you’re okay.”
Peter’s body trembles still, and he feels far too tired to lift his arms to hug him back. “Okay.”
Natasha crawls over, food forgotten. “Petey, it’s okay to be afraid. There isn’t a hero in all the world who hasn’t been scared before.”
Sam ruffles his hair in lieu of confirmation with a smile. “She’s right for once, kiddo.”
Bucky and Steve hum in agreement and Natasha punches Sam’s shoulder. “I’m always right, asshole.”
I am a single adult human living in a house with two corgis. Got Girldog from a shelter when she was about a year, year and a half old maybe; got Boydog a few years later as an 8-week puppeh. And let me tell you something, from Day One, this has been a three-way psychological experiment. I no longer know who is manipulating who on a daily basis.
One of the first things I trained Girldog to do was not to bark at the dinner table; if she barked at me while I was eating, I put her in The Quiet Place (her crate) where she couldn’t see me. She learned almost immediately to subvocalize her barks, to let out a breath with just enough vocal cord vibration that I wouldn’t QUIIIITE consider it a bark and move her further away from the food. It’s a sound like this: “Hrrrr. Hrrrr. Hhhrahhh.” I didn’t realize how odd this was until my aunt came over and said, “That dog hissed at me.” “Yes,” I said, “she does that.”
Boydog learned to do tricks by watching Girldog. I never taught him to sit. He learned by watching Girldog get a treat for sitting. Once, I told both dogs to sit at the same time, while I held a treat in each hand. When Girldog didn’t sit quick enough, Boydog put his paw on her butt and pushed her down.
I hung a bell on the door and taught Boydog to ring it when he wants to go out. Girldog sees no reason she should ring the bell, as it is beneath her dignity, and she can get her way by barking instead. Boydog, however, will ring the bell for Girldog when she lurks around by the door, although he has no interest in going outside himself. Girldog has made Boydog her personal slave in this matter.
Boydog rings the bell when he doesn’t need to go out but thinks I have been at my computer too long. By the time I get to the kitchen, he’s nowhere near the door, but hey mom, as long as you’re up, let’s play! He obviously does not believe I can see through this extremely clever ploy.
Girldog once climbed onto a sofa, crossed the back of it, leapt from the sofa to my desk chair, leapt from the chair to the desk, and knocked all my stuff off the desk. (I wasn’t there, but it was obvious from the trail of destruction what route she had taken.) Then she got down and proceeded to ignore the bag of corn chips she’d encountered and focus her attention on biting my phone charger in half, chewing up a USB memory stick, and eating a pen. I still have no idea how she could be so smart and so dumb at the same time.
Boydog will chase a laser pointer (not uncommon for dogs introduced to them as puppies! Pro tip) but only when Girldog is not around, because she hates it for some reason and will tackle him for it. Girldog also likes to be outside while I want to be in, and Boydog prefers to have us both inside. Boydog will lead me to the laser pointer, pester me until I get it down, and then run around chasing the laser and barking madly. No matter how stubborn Girldog has been about staying outside, she wants to know what he’s barking at and immediately comes inside. (It is always the laser pointer he’s barking at, Girldog. Always.)
There is a chair in my bedroom that I cannot sit on. The dogs take turns sleeping on it, depending on who gets there first. The only hard and fast rule is that if the human sits on the chair, they will both lose their cool. The chair is for dogs only. I have not even tried to sit on the chair for about six months now.
I suspect I’ll be adding more of these as the three of us continue to train each other.
When my pet rat was young, I had to train her to not try to eat ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING, like my shirt while I’m wearing it and she’s sitting on my shoulder. Before I got to this point, I managed to train her to get into the cage when we got near it by giving her a piece of popcorn, which she would then take to a safe spot on the cage to eat it.
For the “don’t eat my shirt” training (and house-training too), whenever she tried to eat something she shouldn’t eat (or peed/pooped anywhere not in the cage), I would immediately pick her up, tell her “NO”, and take her back to the cage and not give her the popcorn like I normally would. She caught on within a week or two regarding what she shouldn’t chew on and where it was okay to go to the bathroom.
And then she started chewing on my shirt again. But it wasn’t really chewing, per se. She would grab my shirt with her teeth, pull like she would if she was trying to get a piece to eat, and then I’d take her right back to the cage like usual. Except sometimes I’d be lazy and not take her to the cage, I’d just say “no” and push her away a bit. And she’d do it again.
That’s right, MY PET RAT TRAINED ME to take her back to the cage when she tugged on my shirt, because she would get bored of sitting on my shoulder or running around on my bed and want to go home.
When my dog was a puppy, she used to play with her water bowel when it was empty, which would make a lot of noise, so I’d get up and fill it so she’s stop doing that. She very quickly taught herself to play with the water bowl when it needed refilling, and then to actually bring us her food or water bowl when it was mealtimes.
We have cats now, and we wait to feed them until they’re not meowing or bugging us so that they don’t harass us about food (at least until we’re actually doing the mealtime thing).
But my dog still does the food bowl thing, and as my dog has a much better handle on when meal times actually are this is a nice reminder to me. She’s an old lady now, though, so if she’s napping or comfortable she sometimes won’t bother to grab her bowl and get my attention until she’s actually ready to get up.
One of my cats figured out that bugging her makes her get up, and that when she gets up she sometimes gets her food bowl, and when she gets her food bowl I initiate ‘feed the pets’ time. So sometimes he’ll just start meowing insistently and wrapping himself around her and following her from room to room on the off chance it will make dinner happen sooner.
This is how my cat learned to beg my dog for food.
This is Arwen, she’s a Husky/Kelpie mix and a little Asshole:
“I wonder if she can jump?” my dad asks the first five minutes we have her. She perks up at the word, and clears a six-foot fence form sitting on the ground. “Oh.” Says dad. “Shit.”
Later that night she got up on the counter and ate three pounds of corned beef in roughtly 68 seconds but this was considered part of the learning curve of having a new dog.
I wake up at 4 AM to the sound of the toilet being flushed repeatedly in the hall bathroom, and assume plumbing is now posessed by angry and wasteful ghosts. I get up to disconnet it and find her in the Bathroom, standing to flush the bowl, then shoving her head in to drink the running water. I’m not totally awake, so I stand there like an idiot trying to understand this, and my sister gets up to see what the noise is, sees the same thing and also stands there. Fiance notices my absence and does the same. Mom eventually wakes up and finds us standing around like very confused zombies and almost joins the parade of baffled zombies before shreiking “THE WATER BILL!” We got her a circulating water bowl after that.
My parent’s don’t have AC, but they haveone of those “fridge on top, pull-out-freezer below” fridges. Last summer, we were remarking that we might need to shave her so she didn’t get heatstroke, to which she looked up and made a disgusted noise at us. …Then got up, used the dishrag to pull open the freezer and climbed on top of the frozen vegetables, stretching out and sighing contentedly. “Arwen,” Mom began, but was interrupted by a loud ‘WHAAAaaaaarrr?” from Arwen. “Ok you can stay there for now but we’re getting you a kiddie pool so you have to get out when we get back. Don’t eat anything.” She ate a bag of frozen green beans and farted for three days straight.
Took her walking along the lake with the long lead so she could sniff things to her hearts content. She went about shoving her head in the undergrowth, usually coming up with her head covered in leaves and pollen.
Except for the bush where she came back out with a 7-foot Bull Snake wrapping itself around her ehad and neck, trying it’s best to strangle her before she can eat it. She immediately ran back to me, the parts of her face not occupied with the snake arranged in a gleeful expression of “Look! I found Snacks!”
I screamed, not immediately regognizing that it wasn’t a rattler, and fell, splitting my knee on a rock. The screaming made her let go of the snake, but I still had to grab her and wrestle the snake off her because it lacked the sense to just scuttle away. I finaly got it lose from her (Despite her best effort to continue trying to eat it and turned around to fling it off the trail-
-And directly into the face of one of my 90-year-old neighbors who’d come out to see what the screaming and profanity was, making her collapse.
I’m pretty sure being told “I accidentally threw a snake at my neighbor.” was the highlight of that EMT’s day. Dottie was unharmed but she still doesn’t speak to me.
One day, we left her in a Harness and overhead tether in the (at the time) unfanced back yard so she could enjoy some relatively free-range outdoors time. I walked by the window not a minute later to find her completely GONE, and race out to the yard to find her. It took me a good heart-pounding five minutes to realize the overhead tether was goign UP into the ancient silver maple and realized that 1. Arwen can apparently do something really weird with her shoulders where they pop out sideways, allowing her to bear-hug the tree and 2. climb a good 40 feet into the three to fight 3. A porcupine, which i didn’t even know LIVED out here.
Fortunately, Porcupines weigh considerably less than Awen and she couldn’t get a good enough foothold to get all the way up to it, but I still had to climb up there and lower her down, barking dog profanities at the porcupine the whole way.
My parents recently acquired a mechanized recliner which has been instumental inmom’s hip surgery recovery. Execpt that Awen Also likes lounging on the furniture, and is more than capable of hitting a large, elder-friendly button with her paw. So now when she gets back from a walk or the dog park she makes a beeline for the living room, get in the recliner and pushes the button until it’s flat and stretches out in it.
My parents didn’t have a problem with this because she gets out of the chair when they ask her (Mom even tells her “Go get my chair ready” in winter because she does a good job pre-warming it), until last winter when Arwen taught my dog Charlie, another devoted couch animal how to do this.
One afternoon there was a tremendous outburst fo barkign and snarling from the living room and we rished in to find both dogs in the recliner, Charlie on the fully-reclined back and Arwen on the elevated seat and foot rest, bellowing at eachother for control of the recliner, thier movments having pitched it back to it’s two hind feet, the device swaying to and fro like a leather covered boat upon the high seas, a furry mutiny on board. Neither dog was willing to yeild the plush throne, nor to listen to the humans yelling at them to knock it the hell off, until Arwen tackled the usurper, kocking him off and managing to cantaleiver the recliner clean over, flipping it into the hall, both dogs and all humand miraculously unharmed.
She still doesn’t let him sit in it.
I love her so much.
(If you got a laugh out of this, please consider donating to my Tip Jar or Paypal to get Arwen (and Charlie!) nice treats)
Evening reblog with an additional Shenanigan I just remembered:
One of the regulars at the dog park was an unfixed basset hound with an obnoxiously indifferent owner. “Brad” shows up pretty much to smoke weed and let “Bojangles” harass the other dogs, in spite of regular complaints about Bo starting fights and trying to mount every dog, leg, and toddler in sight.
One evening, Bo was particularly interested in Arwen, aggressively following her, nipping her heels and trying to mount her, even after her usual wolverine-like Snap’n’Snarl, which has tended to discourage unwanted suitors before. Brad was Too Damn High to notice, as usual, but mom knew that if Arwen actually bit Bo, Arwen would be the one in trouble and was trying to call her when Bo made yet another attempt and Arwen finally had it.
Instead of rightfully tearing his face off, Arwen instead did what Mom described as “A Judo-style front-flip” that pulled Bo clean off the ground and threw him on his back, Arwen landing on her feet like a cat. Bo’s stubby little legs didn’t allow him to right himself before Arwen jumped on him, front paws slamming into his saggy basset balls, squatted over his face, and peed on him.
“ARWEN NO!!” howled my mother as nearly everyone else present laughed, but having made her point, Arwen daintily got off Bo, and trotted to the gate, ready to go home. Bo yelped but got up and skulked away, only moderately bruised, cowering under the bench by Brad, who finally noticed something might be amiss.
Mom remembers hearing “Dude, why is my dog all wet?” right as they were leaving. Apparently nobody told him what happened, becuase Brad still brings Bo to the park, but Bo has much better manners now.
I read this whole thing to my mom and upon reading the end part she was like “OH MY GOD! Our dog Lady once flipped another dog and I didn’t know it was a thing dogs could do!!”
So there’s that.
Update: Arwen was at the vet’s office for a check-up and daycare, and decided partway through the afternoon that the other two kelpies were annoying her, but she didn’t want to go inside to be kenneled for a nap, so she instead…
…ninja’d her way onto the vet’s roof despite there being three people in the yard watching the dogs and no clear way up there. She had a pleasant hour of watching the vet staff try to figure out how she did that and how they were going to get her down before mom came to pick her up.
“Arwen, get your furry butt down here!”
At which point Arwen obidently got down by jumping into a nearby tree that’s technically inside a neighboring house’s yard, shimmied down that like a bear, then walked out of their side yard and back around the block to come sit at Mom’s feet, putting her paws up like she expected a treat.
That tree is not accessible from the daycare yard. We still have no idea how she got up there.
Shine on you beautiful bitch.
This just gets better and better every time i see it
I…
I have fostered doggos for a good majority of my life and my brain simply cannot process half of the bullshit in this post…
1. She’s a mix of two extremely smart breeds 2. She’s a mix of two extremely energetic breeds 3. The inmates trained her to do lots of “Extracirriculars” like veritcal leaps, how to climb chain-link fence, agility courses, physical-comedy type tricks becuase they finished teaching her the regular Service Dog Cirriculum and wanted to keep working with her. 4. Due to said Extrcirriculars, she doesn’t have any fear of heights, strangers, animals, or the nonsense of other dogs.
She does do the Professional Service Animal thing when we put her vest on, but then she’s working and has things to do like teaching social skills to people or being a living stress ball to someone having a bad time, so all that brains, energy and training can be put towards a productive end, but if she hasn’t got an active job, Shenanigans Ensue.
I love everything about this omg
Update:
She ate a four inch hole in the carpet because someone dropped a pork chop there. She’s completely fine, it all passed without so much as an upset stomach on her part.
-also ate the garden hose because we weren’t spraying her with it.
-conned one of the guys that installed the AC out of his sandwich by pretending to bark at something on the other side of the house, and doubling back when he came to investigate.
-is back on the therapy circuit helping kids in a summer school program get better at reading by having them read books to her. Her favorite student right now is a boy from Venezuela who is still learning English who gives her a big hug every morning. She doesn’t normally like hugs but she puts a paw on his back to hug him back.
