Chapter Text
Peter should have known better than to have expected that anyone he loved would have survived the war.
Peter should have held May a little tighter on the way out the door, should have committed the moment to some more sacred part of his memory. Should have told her to move inland, away from the city, away from coastlines. Should have said goodbye to Ned and MJ in person, and told them how much they meant to him, how much they always would.
But before it was a war it was an adventure. It was a harried, heartfelt goodbye to his aunt and a brand new tricked out suit in his duffel bag and a string of spaceship and star emojis in the group chat.
It was goodbye, but it wasn’t supposed to be goodbye. Now, standing in the ruins of what used to be his apartment complex, on what used to be his street, in a city left to survivors and scavengers with nowhere else to go, he knows that no “goodbye” could ever have cut it.
He can’t reach anybody by phone. They don’t have that kind of technological capability anymore; in the wake of the mass destruction, the planet’s essentially been knocked back 100 years. He tells himself (or tries to, at least) that they defended the earth the best they could. If it weren’t for them, nobody would be here. But that does nothing to lessen the grave weight of the literal billions of deaths.
Seventy percent of the earth’s population — gone.
And Peter still here.
Peter still here, when nobody else is. Peter still here, because Big Peter found him in the rubble in the aftermath, surrounded by the corpses of what were once his fellow Avengers — for those few brief, impossible weeks when he was one of them , counting himself among legends — and dragged his ass home.
But home is gone.
“Stick with us,” Big Peter had told him, a few minutes after they landed in what was essentially a wasteland. He’d borderline begged him. “You can’t be serious about staying.”
Peter blinked back at the man who saved him. “I have to be here,” he told him.
“There is no here.”
The grief felt separate from him, like something that could weigh him down without touching him; a shadow overhead, pulsing and alive, following his every step.
It focused him. It gave him a grim kind of strength.
“But there will be,” Peter said. “We’re going to rebuild. Start again.” His throat was thick. “I’ll make sure of it.”
May is dead. Died in the first round of fighting, when the army landed on New York’s soil and just about leveled everything within a ten mile radius of Manhattan. Peter assumes Ned and MJ and everyone else he knows are gone, too.
He can’t start here. He doesn’t have any resources. He finds a car that looks somewhat salvageable, jumps it, and drives the empty roads upstate.
The compound looks virtually untouched, suspended in time. It is then that, for the first time, Peter is slammed with a grief so intense that he feels dizzy with it. Like he might just open the car door and throw up what little food he has in him on the lawn. How ridiculous that six months ago he was bounding up in this building like it was playland. Bothering Tony in his lab. Training with Natasha. Thinking about his college apps and prom and his painfully swelling crush on MJ.
He squeezes his eyes shut and forces himself to breathe. Then he gets out of the car.
FRIDAY lets him in.
“Miss Potts is waiting to receive you in her office.”
Peter flinches like he’s hearing a ghost. “Miss Potts?” he says. His voice sounds strange to him, echoed back in these old familiar walls. “She’s alive?”
FRIDAY doesn’t answer. For all Peter has been through, he doesn’t consider for a moment that it might be a trap; he runs.
He all but bursts through the open door of the office, and there . There she is. A person that Peter knows, a person who made him pancakes, a person who is breathing and existing and somehow —
She turns in her chair, then, and Peter reels. She is ghastly pale and frighteningly small and … and there’s a baby in her arms.
“Peter,” she says, her voice hoarse. The relief in her eyes is palpable, almost painful to look at. “You’re ... “
“Tony’s dead,” Peter blurts. Jesus. He didn’t mean to say it like that. He shouldn’t have said anything at all. He can’t remember how he’s supposed to be, how he ever was.
But Pepper doesn’t react. She already knows. “I thought all of you were dead.”
Peter’s throat tightens. “Well.”
“Just you, then?”
Peter’s eyes fall to the floor, but not fast enough to brace himself. It’s been weeks since the final battle, but in some ways it’s still happening. In some ways it always will be. He doubts if there will ever be a moment, for as long as he lives, that he won’t see the light dying in the eyes of his heroes. The eyes of his friends.
His voice is a whisper. “Just me.”
Pepper nods. “I’m sorry, Pete.”
Peter shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I’m the one who’s …”
Sorry doesn’t even begin to cut it. Peter shouldn’t be the one standing here. Of all of them, he should have been the last on the priority list for survival. He’s just a stupid kid with no clout, no resources, no options.
It’s why he’s here. First because he had no place else to go. And second, because if there is anyone left in the world who knows how to fix what’s left in it, then they’re here.
“Peter … I don’t have much time,” says Pepper. She extends her arms out weakly, and Peter realizes that she means for him to take the sleeping bundle of baby from her. He freezes for a moment, staring at her, staring at it.
“His name is James,” says Pepper. “He’s my son. Tony’s son.”
Another wave of nausea so intense that it almost cripples him. “Tony’s son?” he manages. Tony, who protected him time and time again; who tried to become a human shield when he couldn’t do anything else; who would certainly not have been so reckless with his life if he had known what was waiting for him at home.
“Take him, please,” says Pepper.
Peter almost shakes his head. But her eyes are pleading, her arms are quaking. He steps forward, somehow understanding the irreversible course it is setting him on as it happens. Almost feeling the way the universe seems to peel some part of itself back, pushing him into yet another reality he could never have anticipated.
Pepper settles the baby into Peter’s awkward, stilted arms. The baby burrows into him forgivingly, eyes still closed, blissfully unaware of the world shifting under Peter’s feet. .
“It probably doesn’t surprise you to know that Tony left the company to you,” says Pepper. “That is, in the event that the two of us …”
Peter doesn’t want to hear this. “Pepper, we’ll get you help. I have a car — ”
She cuts him off with one quick shake of her head. “It’s radiation poisoning, Pete. Irreversible. I’m going to die. Soon.”
He wishes some part of his heart had hardened by now. Isn’t that what he deserves? If this is going to keep happening, if he’s going to keep losing everyone, shouldn’t it hurt a little less when it happens one more countless time?
But his eyes are burning with tears, his chest aching. “No,” he says, feeling stupid, feeling like the child he was just a few months before.
“Peter, I need you to listen to me.”
His heart is hammering in his ears, his eyes burning. The baby is wriggling in his arms, its weight unfamiliar and warm and oddly comforting, like some sort of tether to the earth — some kind of tether to Tony, to the world that was before — that Peter never thought that he’d have again.
“Stark Industries is yours and yours alone. I’ve left the beginnings of plans for — for ways we can help. For ways we can fix this. But after that … I’m afraid it’s all going to be on you.”
Peter follows her eyes to the stack of papers in front of her, all handwritten. He doesn’t know what he’s agreeing to, only knows that there was never a choice.
“Okay.”
“And Peter,” says Pepper, and only then do her eyes start to stream, does her frail body start to shake. “I need you to take care of James.”
Peter stops breathing in that moment, staring at her, stricken.
“You’re the only one that I trust,” she says, her voice breaking. “The only one Tony would have trusted.”
I’m sixteen, says some unhelpful reflex in the back of his brain. The baby squirms again, this living, breathing, pudgy little thing that doesn’t know its whole tiny world is being upended right now. That his whole fate is being put into the hands of someone who, in some other, better world, would be in the middle of a calculus exam right now, wondering what excuse for food Midtown High is serving today for hot lunch.
“Please, Peter,” Pepper is asking him. “The two of you are all I have. I want you … I need you to stick together.”
And Peter almost loses it at this. That she is putting Peter on the same level as her own flesh and blood. That she sees him as every bit a son as the one Peter is holding in his arms.
He should be used to this by now. He’s lost two mothers already. Too many fathers to count.
“Of course,” says Peter. Before she can ask it — or maybe she never was going to ask it, because she already knows — the words are tearing through his throat: “I promise.”
Pepper closes her eyes and smiles so earnestly that for a moment Peter can see her the way she was when he left — radiant, sharp, effervescent. He pulls James closer to his chest, asks her if there’s anything he can get her, anything he can do, and she says yes. She tells him to grab her one of the bottles of water from the kitchen. She murmurs a thank you, and Peter shifts the baby in his arms, some tender part of his heart he’d forgotten about cinching in his chest. By the time he comes back with the water bottle, Pepper’s eyes are closed, her body slack in the seat. By the time he comes back, Pepper is dead.
The first week is terrifying. Peter can’t even remember ever holding a baby before, and James can’t be any more than a few months old. Pepper left a detailed record for taking care of him, but it doesn’t account for the beats in between, the terrifying moments when the baby screams or hiccups weirdly and nothing Peter says or does will do anything to calm him down.
Peter doesn’t think he sets the baby down for the whole first month for more than a few minutes at a time — he’s terrified something will happen to him. He’s terrified that he’ll lose someone else. He’s terrified that even in death, he’ll let Tony down.
But it’s startling, how quickly the baby goes from being Tony’s baby to being James. From being James to being the strange epicenter of Peter’s otherwise uncertain, rocky, unbearable world.
Peter doesn’t sleep much for those first few weeks, getting his bearings. By some miracle some of the tech at the compound is still working on reserve battery, enough that Peter can get somewhat of a bird’s eye view on how catastrophic the damage has been, where the most vulnerable areas are, and some idea of where he should start a grand master plan that is so much bigger than him it’s too scary to fathom.
In those moments, when it all seems to swallow him, there is something mercifully grounding in the little things — in the feedings, the diaper changes, the board book reading, the regular wakeup calls in the middle of the night. Things Peter can manage; things Peter can fix.
“I’m always gonna be here,” he tells a slumbering James fiercely, on one of those first nights. He’s sleep-deprived and overly emotional and feeling the bite of his grief in the darkness, but they only make his resolve more resolute than ever: “I will never, ever leave you alone.”
And he means it.
He lets the world think Spider-Man is dead. There isn’t even a moment of doubt; the world doesn’t need Spider-Man. The world needs … the world needs Tony Stark. But they can’t have that, so they get Peter Parker instead.
Granted, nobody knows who he is, and at first it doesn’t matter. There’s nobody to question him. He has the authority to put Tony’s resources to good use and a plan, and that’s more than any of their scattered, fallen government agencies can do right then.
So Peter sets out at sixteen, pledging his life to two causes and two causes alone: James, and saving the world.
He starts with the plan Pepper started mapping for him before her death: allocating resources in across the most devastated regions, temporary relief that will save lives but won’t stabilize them. Once that preliminary phase is executed, Peter takes James down to Washington, D.C. and tirelessly vets and assembles a team, training them to use the Iron Man suits that Tony left behind to assist in the reconstruction of major cities. Peter talks to representatives available from every city that suffered the most brutal ends of the war, assesses their needs, and unintentionally becomes the leader of a global relief effort with an infant strapped to his chest the entire time.
Once the first round of relief plans gets set into motion, Peter travels to the cities himself, he and James a two person mission on a tour through the wrecked coasts, the battered midwest, the broken states in between. He only stays domestic because of James, but he has eyes on every other city, eyes everywhere that he possibly can. And eyes always, always, always on one James Stark Potts Parker.
Everyone assumes he is Peter’s son, and Peter does nothing to correct them. He figures it’s safer that way. At some point, he reasons, someone will do the math and figure out he’s not even of age; if that happens, at least he’ll be able to have legal claim on James if he says he’s his biological son.
And in every regard other than that, James is. He can’t even explain it; how in the storm of his despair, there is this eye, this one good, calm, untainted thing that makes it all worth enduring. Peter didn’t even know it was possible to love someone this much. He thinks it might have scared him if he had. In truth, there isn’t a single person on earth Peter wouldn’t lay his life down for — a quality that Tony constantly harped on, lectured on, and eventually screamed at him for — but for James, he will do more than that.
For James, he will rebuild the whole goddamn human race.
And it’s the promise of that world that presses Peter forward. It’s the promise of a normal life for James that wakes Peter up in the morning, that fuels the long, impossible days working through wreckage and enduring a hundred thousand heartbreaks from strangers in their midst, that pushes Peter through the exhaustion and the grief and the literal wounds from the war that, despite his abilities, refuse to fully heal — the ache in one of his legs that gets worse by the day; the pain in his chest that gets more acute every time he strains himself; the long scar from Thanos himself that winds from the top of his forehead, interrupted by his left eye, and courses through his cheek all the way down to his chin.
Peter Parker: Meet The Boy Who’s Saving The World, reads the headline on the front page of the New York Times, the first day they manage to publish again.
Peter crumples it in his hand. The image accompanying it is a picture of him directing relief workers in the wreckage of Boston, with James in plain view strapped to his chest.
The world explodes a little bit after that. People want interviews. At a few wreckage sites, he’s accosted in the streets. They want to know how old he is, who James’s mother is, how he survived as a New Yorker during the attacks.
Peter goes back to D.C. People are getting too damn close for comfort.
“I’m so sorry, James,” he says, sitting with on a chair in a flimsy room in a freshly constructed building, the whole city still stale with the smell of death. What he means to say, of course, is the thought that has been on a constant loop since Peter woke up in the Guardians’ ship: I’m so sorry, Tony.
He presses a brief kiss into James’s forehead as the baby’s eyelids sink closed and his weight gets warmer on Peter’s chest. Peter waits until he’s certain he’s asleep to put him in the little crib, then flips open his laptop and settles into another long night of emails, supply allocations, strategizing, and phone calls.
Sometime around five in the morning, there’s a knock at the door.
Peter freezes. The hairs on the back of his neck don’t prickle, but that doesn’t mean anything, really. It’s been so long since he’s used his abilities for anything other than construction work that he wouldn’t be surprised if they’d faded away altogether. There’s enough spotlight on him now as plain old Peter Parker that he knows he could never risk it by exposing himself as the former Spider-Man, too. Not with James’s safety on the line.
“Peter, I swear to fucking god. If that’s you in there, you’d better open the door.”
Peter is certain in that moment that he is hallucinating. It wouldn’t be a stretch; he has dreams now, vivid, awful, excruciating dreams about the people he lost. He dreams about picking apart old ‘90s tech with Ned. He dreams about the books he borrowed from Michelle, with her tidy, thoughtful notes scrawled in the margins. On the worst nights, he dreams that he wakes up in his old apartment in Queens, May peering down at him with that loving kind of concern, letting him know that he’s late for school; dreams that all of this was just a nightmare, a few minutes worth of elaborate stress dreams and nothing more.
But then he wakes up to the sound of James’s whimpers, or fighting in the streets, or a construction crew outside his window, and just like that, it’s gone.
“Peter?”
James starts to fuss then, and Peter pulls himself out of his haze and goes to him. There’s another knock on the door.
“Peter. Peter.”
He holds James close to his chest, bracing himself as he opens the door. He is expecting his eyes to open, expecting that he fell asleep over his laptop and this will be the end of his dream. Instead he finds himself staring into the eyes of one ragged, exhausted, but very much alive Michelle Jones.
“MJ,” he breathes.
He remembers the hardness in her eyes, the sharp sweep of their angles, the way he used to swell whenever she looked his way. They are the same eyes, but they aren’t. There is a depth in them, a fear, an openness he isn’t expecting; he is trapped in them for a moment, seeing some reflection of himself he’d forgotten, ripping open a wound he hadn’t even had enough time to heal.
And then her eyes are watery with tears she doesn’t shed, looking at him, then down at James, and back at him.
“I heard Spider-Man was dead,” she says.
Peter still can’t decide if she’s real or not. He eases James into the crook of one arm and lifts the other, putting a hand on MJ’s face, skimming her cheek with his fingers. Warm. Alive.
The tears start tracking down her face in an instant.
“And then,” she says, shaking his hand off of her cheek, “I hear all these rumors. These — these reports, about someone named Peter, someone who took over Stark Industries. And I tell myself, There’s no way. There’s no …”
“I thought you were dead, too,” says Peter.
“No shit,” she says, “because if there’d been one fucking moment you knew I was alive and didn’t try to find me, I’d have … I’d have …”
James starts to squirm in Peter’s arms, and they both blink away from themselves for a moment, their focus shifted.
“Can you come in?” Peter asks.
MJ doesn’t answer, because she’s already shutting the door behind her. James wakes up then, letting out a shrill whine, and MJ extends her arms out to take him.
“Wh-what? No, no, I’ve got him,” says Peter, who is still reeling. Because this can’t be happening. Good things don’t happen to him anymore, don’t happen to anybody. He is lucky enough to have James, when so many have nothing else; lucky enough to have someone to call family at all.
This — this is a trick. One more thing the universe will taunt him with and rip away from him. He knows it. He’s sure of it. And then —
And then MJ is sliding her arms under Peter’s, and easing James into her chest. Her warm skin grazes against his and the relief of it is so debilitating that Peter just about collapses right there.
“I have a — had a niece,” MJ explains, mistaking the disbelief on his face for something else. In that moment he can feel the rawness of her pain so viscerally that it might be his own; like there might not be any physical space or skin or bones between them, but just a shared, open, gaping wound of understanding.
The understanding of a person who survived, when too many others did not.
Peter finally finds enough air to say, “I missed you. I’ve missed you every day.”
She looks up with haunted eyes, like she might say something that breaks whatever fragile thread between them is keeping them both from falling apart. Instead, she says, “Peter, where the hell did you get this baby?”
So Peter tells her. He tells her everything — well, he tells her the parts that he can. The war itself is too fresh, too unbearable to think about. He has to push it somewhere else if he wants to exist in this world, if he wants to pull himself out of the selfishness of his own hatred for himself to properly take care of James.
But he tells her about Pepper and Tony, tells her about his plans to rebuild, tells her about James. And she, in turn, explains her own past year — how she left New York the day of the attack to visit her grandmother in Ohio, and was among the few survivors of the subsequent earthquake that leveled most of Cleveland. She, too, made her way to D.C., on hearsay that they were better off than New York, and has been on the ground helping with rehabilitation ever since.
“We must have just missed each other,” she figures out, as they trace the cities they’ve been helping reconstruct over the past few months.
They’re sitting on the edge of the bed now, James asleep in MJ’s arms, Peter so close to her that their shoulders and knees are touching. He relishes the feeling of it, but not in the old way — not in that thrilling, pubescent, rattled way, but in some profound and almost heart-wrenching way. He wants to put his hands on her face, on her shoulders; wants to listen to her breathe. You’re here. You’re here. You’re here.
“Peter,” she says, cocking her head at him. “When’s the last time you slept?”
“Huh?”
“You look … terrible. Really, truly terrible.”
“I think the scar makes me look manly,” he says. It’s not even really a joke, but it’s the closest he’s come to one since he got back to Earth. He can’t decide whether he likes the feeling or not.
She reaches up and thumbs it, tracing the line so gently that Peter feels his throat tighten, feels his heart squeeze in his chest. It’s been so long, so long since anyone has touched him, since anyone has cared. So long since he has felt any kind of connection between the person he used to be and whatever the hell he is now. At first his entire body wants to reject it, wants to avoid the flood of what comes with it, pulsing in his ribcage and aching in the unhealed injuries and pounding in the headache that never seems to go away.
“Peter,” says MJ quietly. “You’re limping. This scar never healed. What happened?”
He casts his gaze to the floor. “I don’t know,” he says, because it’s true. “My healing factor … it just didn’t work on whatever happened to me out there.”
He doesn’t say the rest because he doesn’t want to scare her, or maybe because he doesn’t want to admit it to himself: In fact, it’s only getting worse.
She narrows her eyes at him. He’s never been able to hide anything from her for long.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” she says. “You’re going to let me take care of this tyke for a few hours, and you’re going to sleep.”
The fear that seizes his heart is so irrational that he hates himself for it. It’s a trick. She’s not real. She’s — she’s a bot, or another reality created by the mind stone, some test to see if he’ll let his guard down.
He won’t survive it, he thinks. If this isn’t real — if something happens to James —
A hand is on his shoulder. “Parker. You’re shaking. And you’re kinda freaking me out.”
He doesn’t mean to say it. He’s gone so long burying everything else, though, that he can’t help this one fear from slipping through the cracks: “I — I can’t. I can’t sleep. I don’t … “ I don’t want you to be gone when I wake up.
MJ lowers the hand on his shoulder, pressing into his arm and squeezing, the gesture saying the words that are too absurd to say out loud: I’m here. It’s me. We’re real.
“Listen, Peter. I don’t say this very often, because it’s bullshit most of the time,” she tells him. Then her eyes lock on his, with that new weight in them that stills and captivates him, and says, “Everything’s going to be fine.”
Later she’ll tell him that he slept for fifteen straight hours without so much as flinching; later she’ll mention in passing, without quite keeping the nervousness out of her voice, that she thought for a few times he might even be dead. But Peter only remembers waking up to the sight of MJ at his laptop, scrolling through his inbox, James propped on her shoulder with a curious fist bunching and un-bunching in her hair.
It takes her a moment to turn and see that he’s awake. If she notices that he’s staring like the sight of her is the most beautiful thing his eyes have ever seen, she doesn’t say anything about it.
“Okay,” she says, “I think I’m up to speed on your … ridiculously ambitious plan here.”
“You are?”
“I am,” she says, shutting the laptop, “and I’m in.”
Peter blinks. “You’re — you’re what?”
“I’m the Vice President of Stark Industries,” she informs him. “As of approximately six and a half hours ago.”
For the first time in months, Peter smiles. Not the kind of smile he smiles for James’s sake, when he’s telling stories or tucking him in or soothing some of his little baby whines, but an actual smile. It hurts. He doesn’t mind it.
MJ’s entire face goes red. “Yeah, yeah, I needed a job anyway, so. Unemployment rate is … y’know. Through the roof.”
“I love you,” Peter blurts.
She doesn’t even flinch. Just looks over at him and holds his gaze. He eases himself out of the bed, and for once he can ignore the ache in his leg, that pain in his chest, all the little things that plague him.
“I’ve loved you for a long time,” he says. The words are so easy and natural coming out of his mouth that it seems absurd to him that he was ever scared to say them. Absurd that he could even imagine wasting one more moment of not saying it ever again. “I should have told you when we were kids.”
They are kids, he realizes belatedly. He can still kind of feel it sometimes. In the very sixteen-year-old way his palms start to sweat and his heart starts to race. In the very sixteen-year-old way MJ’s mouth has come slightly unhinged, her eyes widening just slightly, some part of her face coming alive the way he is certain it hasn’t in over a year.
She looks away from him for a moment, only to gently ease James back down into his crib. She waits a beat, and when he doesn’t fuss, she turns around with a determination that almost scares him — scares him in that old familiar, impossible, MJ kind of way — and all but slams her body into his, kissing him, hard.
“I love you too,” she tells him.
And the next kiss, the softer, fiercer, shorter kiss is less like a kiss and more like a promise, one that they both intend to keep: I’m never letting you go.