Work Text:
There is a notepad on the kitchen counter.
A legal pad, stolen from FEAST, unmoved through the months that had followed the return from dust and subsequent return to it in every way that mattered for May Parker.
Three days before Peter leaves for a school trip that will kill the version of himself that believes in things like the future or the Point Of All This, he watches as May doodles absent-minded flowers in the corner of the top sheet of the notebook, chatting with a friend on the phone about some FEAST event or another.
Then, with a quick wave goodbye, he waltzes out the front door to meet Ned, because he never learns his goddamn lesson and this is the one parent he hasn’t killed just yet.
There are still a million flowers left for her to draw.
---
He can’t find a job, and he has a feeling it would be hard even with a government-issued ID or social security number, but the lack thereof certainly isn’t helping.
Peter knows he looks like trouble, knows he’d have better luck if he just laid low for a few days and let the goddamn bruises heal, but he just-- can’t.
The suit is the only thing that gets him out of bed most mornings, these days.
---
“Why aren’t the lamps on?”
Ben raises his eyebrows, pulls Peter closer to him by a calloused hand on the shoulder among the throng of late commuters pushing up and around them.
“The lamps?” he asks, like he always does, like Peter’s questions are the most important thing in the world.
The Peter of eight years old shrugs, gesturing up to the dull streetlight. “The sun went down like, ten minutes ago. But it’s still light out here.”
He’s right. The sun is gone but the light is not, the pale blue sky still visible if not quite so vibrant as it had been an hour earlier.
There’s a pause, like there always is. Because at eight years old Peter already knows he’s the type of kid who asks the head-scratchers, and while he’s learning to love an aunt and uncle who had been more of a three days during the holidays sort of deal up until his parents’ plane hit the water, he still misses the quick, confident explanations his mom and dad always seemed to have sitting at the ready.
“Well,” Ben recovers, with a sigh that turns into a puff of late-October steam, “Seems like it’s just-- leftover, to me.”
“Leftover?” Peter laughs. “Like, old meatloaf?”
“Just like.”
“I don’t think that’s right, Ben.”
“Who’s the adult, here?” Ben asks, squeezing his shoulder, offended but not really, Peter knows. Not when his eyes are twinkling like that. “Who’s spent the last forty years unlocking the secrets of the universe, huh?”
Peter snorts, which makes Ben grin. He always grins when Peter laughs.
“Old meatloaf,” he repeats. "Secret to the universe." And, “make sure you write that one down.”
With a roll of his eyes Peter promises, and the two of them make the rest of the way home by that fading, leftover light.
---
Roger’s Grocery is on fire.
Peter knows this because he was at Roger’s Grocery, comparing prices on canned soup and trying his damndest not to let his internal sobs eek their way out through his eyes as he crunched the numbers in his head, when all of the sudden--
A siren. And some loud fucking screaming.
“Spidey!” one of the Jakeys calls at him from the ground, waving his arms like he’s worried that Peter has somehow missed the flaming fucking building. Like Peter hadn’t just pulled a quickchange in the bathroom of an actively collapsing grocery store, failed to find anyone who needed help on that same floor, and then swung back out here to get the better view.
“Talk to me,” Peter commands, landing heavily atop one of the minivans in the parking lot and not taking his eyes off the store, off the exits that are damningly clear of people fleeing for their lives.
“Alarm activation call,” the guy starts rattling off, immediately. He’s young, and clearly team Spidey. Which. Peter can’t say isn’t nice to stumble across, even given the circumstances. “Bottom floor is clear, but the west exit on level two--”
A boy from Queens shoots a web and is off before the fireman has finished his sentence, because when you can do what he does, and then the bad things happen?
They happen because of you.
---
His homemade suit is not fireproof, and it never will be.
In the four months since Strange and the spell and a hundred armfulls of decisions he’ll never be quite sure if he regrets, Peter’s already discovered it’s not knife proof, not bullet proof, and-- during one story he’d have been excited to tell if he was still the kind of guy who got excited or had people to tell stories to-- not rhinoceros-proof.
His suit is not anything proof, but that’s a good thing, okay? Gives him something to do, when it needs repairs. Something to focus on, when nightmares propel him back to wakefulness in a cold sweat and a colder apartment.
Something to feel, when flames lick their way up his arm and remind him that being forgotten isn’t actually the same as being dead, despite the way it may seem.
---
Peter knows death, is the thing.
He knew it before he was eight years old, looked into its unforgiving eyes at age fourteen in front of a corner bodega, sixteen on a battlefield with blood in his mouth and dust in his eyes, and seventeen with his aunt’s hand in his.
The bodies started piling up for Peter Parker before he’d grown old enough to realize he was supposed to be trying to remember things about his parents, before old friends started saying things like, “That’s the Richard in you,” and nodding fondly while Peter tried his best to puzzle out what the hell sort of response they wanted from him after a bombshell like that.
Peter knows he’s not dead, because dead is a limp hand in his or an officer at the door or so many gruff pats on the back he stops feeling them.
He’s not dead because when something is dead, you’d give your left fucking arm to have it back and if present-day-Peter ran into past-Peter on the street, he thinks he’d try to wring his own damn neck.
It’s okay to laugh. It’s funny, after all. The last Parker standing, and it’s all he can do sometimes not to wish he was in the ground with them.
---
Two boxes of off-brand minute rice, weighed in calloused hands.
$6.84.
One goes back on the shelf.
---
A memory. One that floats around in Peter’s head when he’s patrolling in a distinctly unheated suit, one that follows him into a coffee shop and back out again.
Two boys from Queens sit on the floor of a third grade classroom. The back center delineated by bright orange tape, Peter’s favorite because there’s usually nobody there and Ned’s choice on his first day at William Howe Elementary because Legos are a comforting familiarity in a whirlwind of new.
Ned says, “Are you using all of these?” and Peter says something like, “just the gray ones,” to which Ned replies, “Oh. cool.”
And then, he sits.
And Peter learns how to make a space for Ned Leeds in the back center, among the mess of Lego and bright orange tape.
---
Spider-Man meets Daredevil the first day of Ned and MJ’s term at MIT, when he patrols from sun-up to sun-down and back around again in an attempt to tire himself out to the point of achieving what will hopefully be a dreamless day’s sleep.
It’s higher-level stuff than Peter’s used to dealing with post-spell, a weapon-and-other-shit ring that-- were Peter still a kid with stars in his eyes and a reason to fear things like bullets to the lungs-- he’d probably think twice about taking on with no backup.
Or, at least. A guy in the chair.
But that’s the Peter-of-the-past, the Peter-with-people-left-to-lose, the Peter who has the option of backup on the rare occasions he has his head on straight enough to ask. That’s a boy from Queens doing his best to make the neighborhood a better, safer place.
This is Spider-Man, on an endless quest for redemption.
Daredevil’s on Peter’s perch by the time Peter gets there, head tilted like he hears him coming despite the fact that Peter is lighter on his feet than Murph on Delmar’s shelves.
You know Daredevil. The demon of Hell’s Kitchen, the urban legend made of teeth and terror and blood-red leather, the man who had single-handedly crippled the Kingpin back when Peter had still been tripping over his own feet and was down only one set of parents, not two.
Never meet your heroes, Ben had winked at Peter once, back when he was still alive to do it.
Then Tony Stark dropped out of the sky and into the Parker’s apartment like a bad omen and without so much as a hello, and sometimes Peter still wonders how different everything would be, had he taken his uncle’s advice.
So. It’s hard to untangle the knot of equal parts wariness and awe currently sitting leaden in his stomach.
“Um,” says Peter.
“Spider-Man,” Daredevil greets, cocking his head, slightly.
Peter crawls across the roof to crouch next to him, lowering his voice to a murmur as to not the disturb the--
“Fucking hell,” he says, tiredly.
Daredevil gives an amused snort. “Definitely enhanced,” he agrees, using his pinkie and index finger in a sort of “love” symbol to point at the two biggest of the brutes, standing guard over the doors of the building Peter’s narrowed down over the past month to be the hub of operations for this particular ring.
No shit, Peter thinks. The two guys look like they got three shots of whatever Steve Rogers was on, plus, you know. The several guns each of pants-pissing size.
“Good thing we’ve got you then.” Daredevil claps Peter on the back with a grin so sharp it’s the slightest bit terrifying. “If the stories are true.”
Peter lost that fight. Nobody won that fucking fight. Germany is red in all of their books, and Peter wonders if he’ll ever help enough little old ladies across the street to make up for the fact that Colonel Rhodes had been falling, falling, falling and nobody had been there.
Always netting a negative, isn’t he? Always owes more than can ever realistically be paid.
Peter shakes his head, shakes it off, and then follows Daredevil over the ledge.
---
Three loaves of bread.
$11.96.
He asks the cashier through flaming cheeks if he can please get his change back.
---
“Sorry, hon,” the woman at the counter says, kindly. “Applications are online-only.”
“Right,” Peter gives her a tight smile, hands flat against the counter to keep from curling them into his hair in frustration. A required SSN, then. A photo ID. “Thanks. I’ll-- send one in.”
“You have a name?” The woman clicks her pen, smiling. “I’ll watch for it.”
“Oh-- uh. Yeah.” He casts his eyes around, desperately. “It’s, um. Ben. Ben-- Leeds.”
“Ben Leeds,” the woman repeats, scribbling something on a sticky note. “Perfect, I’ll keep an eye out.”
Peter thanks her, and spends the next week patrolling in a suit that hasn’t been properly patched since he ran out of fabric in February.
---
He steals the notepad with the flowers, the night he leaves that apartment that still smells like May Parker despite the vacuum left in her place.
He takes it and places it gently under his GED study book, found at a thrift store and soon to be coated in a thick layer of dust with the few times he’s glanced at it since.
Peter doesn’t want to take it from this place, doesn’t want to take her from this place, this home built from scratch where she belongs and would be returning to, were it not for Peter and his shortcomings, him and a suit he already knows he will never don again in its current form for all the ghosts trapped in its seams.
May Parker belongs here in this kitchen, doodling flowers on a notepad while simultaneously planning the FEAST fundraiser for next fall.
But this boy from Queens is more selfish than he lets on, and May Parker died on the ground with her hand in his, and she is never coming back.
So, Peter takes the notepad. She has no use for it anymore.
---
There’s another fire. It’s three in the same number of months, and Peter and the Daily Bugle are, for the first time in his eighteen years of life, on the same wavelength.
“Seemingly-serial arsonist strikes again,” Jameson’s brusque voice cuts through the static of Peter’s souped-up radio. “Police are scratching their heads as this, the most deadly of the fires, claims three lives, including that of one fireman. Spider-Man appeared at the scene earlier than most first responders, prompting questions from citizens everywhere regarding the masked menace’s involvement in the starting of these--”
Peter smacks the “off” button, fist clenched. Same wavelength, his ass.
He smells like smoke and he looks like he just lost a fight with a burning building, and his rent is due by midnight. He knows before even counting what he has left that it isn’t enough, but he scoops every last quarter he can find into a little white envelope that becomes immediately smudged with soot anyway because MJ had once told him that presentation matters with shit like this about their college apps and he’d branded it on his heart, held it to his chest like every other word she’d ever thrown his way.
Slumping almost unconsciously onto his bed, suit still on and smoke still burning in his lungs, he dreams of collapsing warehouses and the feeling of a girl’s dust-covered lips against his.
---
“Kid! Alive in there?”
Peter stumbles to his feet, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes as he fumbles for a t-shirt off the ground and a pair of sweats from his dirty laundry basket to slip over the suit.
It’s a terrible idea, sleeping in the suit. Peter knows this. He’s defenseless when he’s unconscious, he smells like something crawled up his ass and died, he’s--
Well. He’s asking for a situation just like this, isn’t he?
The shirt has blood on it and so he casts it aside, opting to instead just pull the whole thing off and don the sweats. It’s a sort of Guns ‘N Roses vibe that would’ve made Ben guffaw and May roll her eyes.
“Sorry,” he grimaces, pulling the door open for Mr. Garcia. “I’m so sorry, I know it’s due, I fell asleep--”
Mr. Garcia’s arms are crossed over his chest. He looks unamused.
Peter deflates. All of him, all at once.
“I’ll just go, go grab it,” he says, turning hurriedly.
Yeah, Parker. Go grab the late rent. Maybe the small stack of Hamiltons got real chummy last night and managed to multiply into a less pathetic showing.
He does his best to wipe last night’s soot from the envelope, but only succeeds in crinkling the paper. On the way back out, he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror above the sink, of the dried blood caking a path from one of his nostrils to his mouth and only partially rubbed clean by what must have been his pillow.
Spider-Man is more of a menace these days, Peter hears. Be careful not to catch him on a bad night because he isn’t pulling his fucking punches anymore, not when you’ve got an old man cornered in an alley and a gun to his head. He’s running around with the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen and no one knows how to make heads or tails of that, nevermind the major trafficking ring they’ve managed to dual-handedly take out of commission in the past month.
Never mind three nights ago, the six month anniversary of May’s funeral, when Daredevil had said, sharply, that’s enough, Spidey, and been so right that Peter hadn’t patrolled the next day, choosing instead to wander the city until his hands stopped shaking and he could trust himself to swing home.
The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, the man famous city-wide for his ability to somehow break both ribs and teeth in the same blow, pulling Peter off a thug with wide-blown eyes and blood streaming freely from both his nose and lips, flowing over teeth and drip, drip, dripping to the ground.
“He’s done, kid,” Daredevil had said, certainly. Firmly. Not judgemental, just--
A little surprised. Peter could tell, from the way his voice clipped at the end.
Peter-in-the-world stares at Peter-in-the-mirror, and he realizes with a scrff of the envelope crackling in his fist that he has never hated anyone so much as he hates himself in that moment. Not Beck, not Thanos, not Adrian Toomes. No one compares to the drippy-nosed, soot-covered kid in front of him, this-- this boy from Queens who becomes less of a boy and more of a thing with each passing day.
Every problem in Peter Parker’s life can be tied back to one person, and that person isn’t some wannabe super villain or Tony Stark or even that goddamn spider on a school field trip from hell.
Peter Parker asked Dr. Strange to cast that spell. He-- he brought his aunt into Norman Osborn’s line of sight, he led Ben Parker to a corner bodega and then his subsequent grave because he was a teenaged ass who thought invincibility was God’s personal apology for the shit he’d been through up to that point.
Peter Parker stands in that mirror and wishes with everything that he is that he’d never been born, or maybe that he’d gone down in that same plane as his parents, all those years ago. He wishes that he could scoop out his own insides and lay them down on the operating table, would dig out every piece of DNA that made him Peter and not just Spider-Man and flush them down the toilet until he was clean of every mistake and every fucked-up relationship and every early grave.
Peter Parker was a son and then he was a nephew, a friend and a classmate and then, then he was nothing at all. Peter Parker isn’t any--
“Kid?” Mr. Garcia calls, sounding truly annoyed now, and Peter jumps.
Swiping at the rest of the blood on his face with a wince, trying to school his expression into something resembling that of a normal late-on-rent person, he hands the envelope to Mr. Garcia. His monthly debt, sans, oh, two hundred dollars? Three? He can’t even remember how short he is, and isn’t that the perfect wrap-up to his little stint as a real-life adult?
He holds his breath as Mr. Garcia flips a thumb through the bills, at the thick brow furrowed as he gets closer to the end of the tens and it becomes more and more apparent that, however much is in there, it’s not enough.
When it’s confirmed, he raises curious eyes to meet Peter’s.
And, like, what is Peter supposed to say?
Sorry, man. Rough month at the office. Haha no, I won’t have the rest soon. Possibly not ever. Hope that’s chill.
So he just. Stands there.
Mr. Garcia’s eyes slide over his face. Peter sees them falter at his nose, at the crusts of blood that must still be hanging on. On the soot, still smeared across his forehead. They drop, momentarily, to the very visible ribs poking at the inside of his stomach and then back up and over his shoulder into the barren apartment.
Peter straightens. He’s the last Parker standing, and a Parker takes it on the chin. Ben and May taught him that, and Peter may be forgotten but he will not forget.
And then, something very strange happens.
“The heater’s broke in this unit, yeah?” Mr. Garcia says, in a different voice than before.
Taken aback, Peter says, “Oh. Uh-- yeah. But I, I didn’t break it. Promise.”
Mr. Garcia waves him off. “‘Course you didn’t. Asswipe before you turned it off when he left for Majorca. Damn thing froze over.” He looks thoughtful. “Forgot about it until now.”
“It hasn’t been… a problem?” Peter assures uncertainly, despite the fact that he’s actively shivering and it is definitely, definitely a problem. But it’s a weird line of questioning for one guy who should be throwing another guy out on his ass and is instead still looking so weirdly…thoughtful.
“Been a cold spring. You must’ve been freezing your nuts off most nights, kid.”
“‘S not too bad.” Peter shrugs, before he can stop himself. “I’ve got a system worked out.”
A system that mostly includes, you know. Not being home at night. Keeping the blood pumping by launching himself off the highest buildings he can find and not stopping until sweat is frozen to his forehead and he’s too exhausted to notice the cold.
“Tell you what,” Mr. Garcia seems to decide, pulling the envelope back out of his coat pocket and licking a finger to thumb more easily through the bills. “We’ll call it a discount. I won’t fix the heater, and you’ll get--” he hands Peter nearly half the wad of bills-- “this, back each month.”
Stunned, Peter curls his fingers around the cash. It’s sweaty under his fingers.
“That work for you?” Mr. Garcia pushes, smiling a bit, now. “I could get it in writing--”
“No,” Peter cuts in, immediately, “No, that’s-- yeah. That’s uh, good for me.” He swallows. “Thank you, Mr. Garcia.”
His landlord winks at him. “You take care of yourself, Parker.”
And then he’s back down the hall, walking a little taller than he’d come in, looking a little lighter than Peter ever remembers seeing him before.
Peter-in-the-world stares at Peter-in-the-mirror for a long moment, sweaty fist of ten-dollar bills in hand.
“What the hell?” he whispers, to just himself and his ice cold apartment.
---
It goes like this:
A boy from Queens walks into a coffee shop.
He walks out, and leaves the two last living pieces of himself inside, because what the fuck else is he supposed to do?
---
Peter catches the arsonist-- no thanks to the Devil, thank you very much-- and in the process burns his suit to such a crisp that it’ll be a miracle if he’s able to save even a scrap of it.
“You okay, Spidey?” one of the EMTs calls after him, as his first attempt to shoot a web at the nearest building falls limply through the air and onto the empty street.
“All good,” Peter returns dizzily, trying for a smile just in case the mask is shredded enough for his pearly whites to peek through.
“Come and get checked out,” she offers. “You can keep the mask on.”
And that’s-- tempting. Peter’s exhausted, and has inhaled more smoke over the last month than the average person could handle in a lifetime. He hesitates, for a fraction of a second.
The woman’s concerned face swims in front of him, a warm and steadying hand on his bicep that he can barely feel.
“Spider-Man?” she asks, and then, over her shoulder, “I need help over here!”
Peter stumbles back, shakes his arm and shakes her off.
“I’m good,” he assures her, unconvincingly. “I think I'm perfect, actually. Just--“ he casts his eyes around, finds a building with a roof just this side of tall enough, and lines up the shot-- “got a little dizzy, there, for a second. You know how it is.”
The whoosh and subsequent squish of a web finding its target slices through the air, and the EMT’s face turns from disapproving to straight-up alarmed. She opens her mouth, but Peter’s already gone.
Up and over, till he’s collapsing onto the roof of Ralph’s Auto Shop and stripping off the mask, trusting his spidey sense to alert him to any unwelcome visitors or cameras as he breathes in long, hacking breaths and sinks truly down onto all fours, out of sight of anyone other than an unlucky pigeon or two.
The last Parker standing, right up until he’s just out of view.
---
Another memory. A different memory. One that tugs at Peter’s brain when he’s on patrol and slides its fingers over the creases of his mind as he stocks shelves at the smoke shop around the corner from the first grocery store fire. The manager goes giddy with laughter at how little Peter’s willing to work for, but they pay in cash and don’t even ask his name, so. Marlboros on the left, Camels on the right. Welcome the fuck in, sir, how can we help you?
It’s an old memory, a warm memory, a memory that has no place in this version of Peter Parker’s life, in this smoke shop when he’s had enough smoke to last him a lifetime, inside this boy from Queens who feels much more like a man these days, with a paycheck to collect and rent to pay and a few still-healing burns criss-crossing over the skin of his back.
This recollection is of May and Ben, swaying slowly in the kitchen. They are bathed in the golden light that illuminates all childhood memories and there is no music, no rhythm to it other than that made by Ben’s work boots, tapping on the vinyl floor.
Peter was supposed to be in bed an hour ago, but he’s not sleeping much. Not then, not yet, not two months post-plane crash. It’s all still too fresh.
So he just. Gets out of bed sometimes. Peeks around the corner.
Watches, as they gently sway.
He can’t remember his real parents ever doing anything like that.
Peter-of-the-present never realized before, just how little alone time Ben and May must’ve had that first year. How many moments had to be stolen in a quiet kitchen, through the car window in between school and work drop-offs.
Another thing he never thanked them for. Another thing he’ll never get the chance to.
Click goes the box cigarettes, sliding into place.
A man and woman dance in the golden light of the neon smoke shop open sign, and a boy from Queens watches them in his mind’s eye and wonders if he’ll ever stop feeling so goddamn sorry.
---
He finds himself wondering if Ned’s AP calculus credit was accepted at MIT.
They’d been stressed about that, the two of them. Back when a high school diploma was a certainty.
Back when it wasn't even the type of thing worth worrying about, really.
---
In the past, there lives a boy.
He lives in the past and he’ll die in the past; Peter will kill him over and over again in his mind because he’s never been more simultaneously jealous of and angry at a boy in all his life. That boy with the dead parents and smart fucking brain, that boy with an origin story so tragic and future so bright that enough adults started holding him up as their own little personal inspiration poster for it to make him uncomfortable, make him start keeping the orphan status to himself whenever he was possibly permitted.
“Whoa,” Ned Leeds says, that day on the third grade playground where Peter finally fumbles the words out, all genuine surprise and first reactions. “That sucks, dude.”
Peter laughs, startled and real. “Yeah. It-- yeah. It does.”
That boy that lives in the past, that boy from Queens, that not-quite-carefree kid with his best fucking friend-- Peter hates him. He shouldn’t have gotten close. Should’ve known, even at age ten that it was doomed, that they were doomed. That Peter would fuck this one up too, would fuck up and then fuck off because he will not bury Ned Leeds.
That boy in the past wakes up in the present with wet eyes and a heart still thump, thump, thumping in his chest, and rededicates himself to a daily promise, made first in a coffee shop all those months ago.
---
It all starts to change, a year after May Parker goes in the ground and never comes out again.
Peter knew it would, has braced himself for it, even, but it’s still disconcerting, to wake up some mornings without her as the first thought in his head, to make it halfway through a patrol before swinging past her favorite Thai place and feeling that first truly deep ache of the day for May Parker and all the grief and and love that mingles in his rib cage at the sound of her name.
Peter Parker grows one year older if no wiser and May Parker stays in the ground, and the way he’s missing her is different now. Closer to how it feels to miss Ben, if not quite there, not quite yet.
MJ and Ned have started their sophomore year at MIT, and Peter knows this because he looks them up exactly one time, when the leaves start changing color and anniversaries of complicated decisions pass by in a blur of red and blue exhaustion.
One look, that’s all he’ll allow himself, scared that if he flies any closer to the sun it’ll cause him to do something stupid like-- calling them, maybe. Sending an email. Liking a picture.
He imagines it sometimes.
In his mind, on the good days, it goes like this:
Peter Parker gets on a bus to Boston, Lego Palpatine clenched in one hand and a few leftover shards of a Black Dahlia necklace in the other.
He finds them in the quad, or maybe in the dorms, or maybe in a lab that he imagines resembles Tony’s in the tower.
“I’m Peter Parker,” he says, this time.
All it takes is that. The spell breaks. Ned’s face splits into a grin; MJ’s into a confused sort of smile. They throw their arms around him and everything is golden light and orchestral symphonies, and Peter hears his name spoken fondly by the only two people left in the world who care enough about him to do so.
On the good days, that’s the end. On the good days, Peter slips back through the window of an apartment that’s beginning to grow cold again, and his head is on straight enough to realize that May Parker wouldn’t have wanted this for him, this impenetrable wall of loneliness that won’t be broken down because he won’t goddamn let it be.
On the bad days, the fantasy follows him into sleep.
Bang, goes the dream. MJ falls into his arms, eyes wide open because Peter Parker knows death, and his subconscious will spare no expense when it comes to a nightmare such as this.
Bang, goes the next bullet, echoing through the MIT quad. Ned collapses in a heap of himself.
And Peter screams and screams and screams, because he’s already too late.
---
He gets…good.
At this. At Spider-Man, now that he spends more time in the spandex than he does his civvies.
It’s more of a surprise than it has any right to be, the way the muscle multiplies on lithe limbs now that he’s getting more to eat than a bowl of minute rice each night before patrolling, or the fact that stopping an armed burglary turns into more of a line on the to-do list than an actual, noteworthy part of his day.
Peter gets better because he puts in the reps, because he internalizes the work that goes into scrapping yourself and starting over, re-forging dregs of baby fat and golden memories into something sharp and strong and lethal.
Spider-Man is better, now, and Peter finds solace in that on days when his voice grows rusty from lack of use. In finally becoming what this city has always needed him to be, in finally settling into a body that hasn’t felt like it was truly his since that spider on that linoleum floor.
Spider-Man is better, and that’s why the first fist to the nose comes as something of a surprise.
“Wath yourselfth,” he bites, words coming out muffled and wet as the front of his mask begins to warm with blood. “You could hurt some--”
The rest of the (admittedly, weak) quip is lost as he’s yanked from behind, no preamble before he’s crashing head-first into a wall of trash cans that clatter in a cartoony sort of way down the alley behind him.
Which is just-- fuck. He sighs.
He’s going to have to clean that up later.
Getting quickly to his feet, Peter vaults across the ground and lands with two legs around the throat of the guy who’d thrown him, using his momentum to twist mid-air and bring them both crashing down into the asphalt.
“Thtay down,” he commands, choking on his own blood before standing and spinning blindly to try and find where the second guard had scampered off to.
This was supposed to be a simple deal. One of the last straggling stations in the trafficking organization he and Daredevil had been working for the better part of a year, no active hostages and, therefore, supposedly empty.
Daredevil had promised. No guards. Quick stop. For Christ’s sake, kid. Just put their communications out of commission and split, alright?
As two more super-soldiers round the corner of the warehouse-- women this time-- Peter thinks to himself that the next time he runs into the Devil of Hell’s kitchen, he’s going to knock his teeth in. Preferably with a hammer, but he’s not too picky about the logistics.
He swerves and ducks, webs and dodges and throws punch after punch after punch, and somewhere he’s distantly aware that whatever he’s stumbled into must be big, with this much hired muscle and firepower securing its perimeter. Must be something pretty fucking important, as goon after goon spills out of the open warehouse doors and onto the no-longer-silent docks.
The first webshooter to go is his right. Always is. There’s an damning click sound like a bullet echoing in an empty chamber and Peter has just one second to think, shit, and then he’s in the air again, tossed unceremoniously back to the ground with a sickening crack and even more sickening cackle from somewhere above him.
Dazed, he lifts a hand to his head. It comes away bloody through the mask. Bad sign, probably.
And then they’re on him. Too many to count, too many to fight. Legs and arms and skin like steel and too many of them, and Spider-Man is stronger these days but he also is almost certainly suffering from a bad concussion, not to even mention the empty webshooter hanging like dead weight on his wrist.
Faces blur and blood clogs his throat as he claws and twists and keeps throwing punches, but all it takes is one stumble and he’s on the ground yet again, curling a protective knee to his stomach to protect the fleshy softness of it and gritting his teeth to keep from letting out a scream.
The super-somethings kick like mules, and Peter doesn’t have to be a genius of a high-school dropout to know that a healthy human body does not make sounds like the ones currently being dragged from his.
The last Parker standing, facedown in the mud.
The one thing left he’s still good for, and he can’t even remember to replace the fucking web cartridge after patrol.
He hears Daredevil before he sees him, feels the brutal beatdown coming to an end not because the pain lessens, but because it can only truly and fully blossom once the steel-toed boots have been distracted, caught up with a newer, shinier, less pitiful mouse to chase.
Peter blinks what might be sweat but is most likely involuntary tears out of his eyes and rises shakily to his knees. Distantly, he processes that Daredevil is-- not winning, exactly, but certainly holding his own against what’s left of the warehouse guard.
And Spider-Man? That pillar of the community, that beacon of hope, that veteran of a war fought side by side with the likes of Iron Man and Captain America?
He fucking legs it.
---
“What the fuck is that?” Peter laughs, disbelieving as MJ tugs a first aid kit the size of a suitcase free of the shelves above her dresser.
He’s shirtless in her bedroom, something that would be more exciting under different circumstances, if they’d been dating any longer than three days and he hadn’t already managed to take a set of brass knuckles to the side.
“They had it on sale,” she says, deadpan. “Lucky thing, too.”
And he doesn’t even wince, when she runs a gentle finger over the area surrounding the bruises.
His skin is too warm for that.
---
Out of all the places Peter Parker has very nearly died, his shower has to be the worst.
It had seemed like a good idea at the time, some half-baked plan about clearing away enough blood to actually get a half-decent look at the damage, but he’d forgotten a couple of important steps like-- removing the suit. Or turning on the tap.
It’s cold tile floor and a space too cramped for the laying that he is currently doing, and Peter thinks with a resigned sort of relief that his eyes are too heavy to deal with this right now.
Because what is a day in the life of Peter Parker other than a nightly decision to face it all in the morning, a mission renewed each day and a pile of bruised and battered limbs collapsing onto a twin bed each night?
It’s May’s mouth speaking the words, lips quirked in half a smile over a second-grader’s forgotten science fair project.
We’re all gonna get some sleep, and then we’re going to deal with this in the morning, yeah?
And even if this boy from Queens can’t trust himself, he can certainly trust May Parker.
So he lets his eyes fall closed, and Peter floats.
---
“Christ, Matt-- he’s freezing his tits off-- it’s-- ”
---
“-- just you and me, okay? Just-- ”
---
“-- think maybe he’s coming around-- yeah, Matt, get over here-- ”
Peter blinks once, twice. He tries to lift himself on an elbow only to find himself pushed back down by a soft hand, a woman’s voice telling him firmly to lie still and unknowingly triggering his chronic condition of doing-the-opposite-of-whatever-he’s-told-itis.
“‘S going on?” he asks through a mouth full of cotton, batting the woman’s hand away gently and rising into a shaky sitting position. Pain flares up his ribs and back and he gasps, a much rougher hand grabbing his shoulder this time as the woman inhales sharply.
“Sit,” a man’s voice says, firmly.
And all at once, Peter’s smart fucking brain returns from sabattical.
“Fucking-- fuck,” he curses, shrugging himself free of Daredevil’s grip despite the pain sparking through every one of his joints.
He finds himself unable to stand but can’t stop himself from trying, collapsing back into the couch behind him instead and lifting both hands to his face, as if that can stop the damage that’s already been done.
His identity is a more fiercely guarded secret now than it ever had been before, a counterintuitive truth given that the only person the deception now protects is himself.
A counterintuitive truth, but a truth nonetheless. Peter might be a fuck-up, but even he only needs one experience breaking the multiverse into hundreds of pieces to decide that when it comes to the fabric on his face, the better side to be erring on is that of caution.
“Don’t worry,” Daredevil says, shrewdly. “I have no idea what you look like, but Karen says you’ve got a kicked-puppy vibe going when you sleep. So there’s that.”
And that’s--
Peter squints, turning to take this on the chin, only to find himself face to face with Matthew Murdock.
His heart stutters like it always does when he brushes paths with someone from before-- because it’s a big fucking city and somehow contains more old friends of Ben and May Parker than it does actual strangers-- and the way Murdock tilts his head, it’s almost like he hears it.
“Interesting,” he says, simply.
“What?” the woman asks, sharply. “What’s interesting?”
Matt jabs his chin in a small motion, gesturing towards Peter. “He recognizes me.”
Peter shakes his head, a snort bubbling out of his nose before he’s fully processed anything about this cozy little apartment or the woman called Karen who certainly did get the more traditional identity reveal, if the way her eyes jump between he and Matt are any indication.
Really good lawyer, his ass.
Peter is, all of the sudden and all at once, more fatigued than he’s ever been in his life. Which is strange, given the fact that from the taste in his mouth, he’s fairly certain he’s been asleep for the better part of the last twenty-four hours.
“I think,” he sighs, sinking back into the couch and in more words than he’s had to speak unbroken since his shift at work two days ago, “That maybe I need to re-examine some of my personal biases.”
That gets half a huff of laughter out of Matt. “You’re one to talk? The twelve-year-old kid in full lycra, hemorrhaging on my good friend’s couch?”
“Glass houses, hornhead. Glass fucking houses.”
Karen snorts, then tries to cover up that she snorted, and Matt turns toward her in mock-offense.
“You said you liked the suit. You promised me.”
“I do,” Karen assures him. “I do. It’s so-- red. Just. So red.”
“Foggy said red is good,” Matt defends. “Red is striking.”
“So striking,” agrees Karen, with a meaningful look at Peter. “But the kid’s right. It’s a definite pot-kettle sort of situation.”
Peter, who will be fully twenty years old in three months and never a kid again rolls his eyes, but a smile pulls at his cheeks for the memory the good-natured barbs ignite, of a May Parker finger shaken in one Tony Stark’s face that Peter hadn’t appreciated at the time for the loving gesture it was.
He thinks of that wagging finger, of Tony’s chastened expression, and tries not to think of how those faces looked several years and no time at all later, on empty battlefields and with emptier eyes.
“I’ve got some sweats you can borrow,” Karen Page offers, snapping Peter back to the present moment and their conversation, which seems to have taken on a more serious note in his absence. “And then maybe we can-- debrief?”
Matt nods. “Alright with you, Spidey?”
And Peter says, without thinking or maybe thinking more clearly than he has in the past two years:
“It’s-- uh. Peter. Actually.”
Goddamn it.
---
It goes kind of like this:
Matt Murdock can hear, can smell, can taste practically everything. That sandwich he had for lunch yesterday, the click of the lock in Karen’s car door outside as she fiddles with her key fob, even the dumpster Peter fell in last week, despite three washes of his suit since.
Peter, with senses just this side of strong enough himself to leave him dizzy on the average day, winces in sympathy as Matt outlines the basics, as he chronicles a cup of a childhood that Peter is selfishly grateful passed from him.
It had never struck him as the type of thing one should be grateful for, until now. God not siccing that spider until he’d already reached his early teens.
Peter’s blood dripping onto his shower floor was loud as a drum in Matt’s ear, even from a block and a half away, Matt says.
Peter had it handled, Peter says.
Peter did fucking not, Matt says, voice maddeningly even.
This is when Karen cheerfully chimes in that she is in no way a medical professional, that everything they did to patch Peter up came from Matt listening to his organs, and that she has two experienced lawyers on retainer should Peter ever choose to sue.
To which Peter responds, faintly, “I think I’m ready to go home.”
And he expects-- pushback, if he’s being honest. Something, at least, from his years of experience fighting wars alongside real-life adults, of “training wheels” protocols and patrol curfews because he still forgets, sometimes, that he’s expected to be the real-life adult now, out in the real-life world.
A young man from Queens. The last Parker standing.
Pushback is to be expected, but he doesn’t find any in Matt Murdock because Peter knows even from just one year of knowing and-- inadvertently befriending-- this man, that seeing his own reflection in the shine of Matt’s glasses is a lot more like looking into a funhouse mirror than he wants to admit.
The fucked-up part in Peter’s brain that sends him running around in spandex each night recognizes the fucked-up part in Matt’s that chose leather, because real recognizes real.
Or maybe broken recognizes broken.
Either way, Matt Murdock doesn’t argue. Just says, “You got a phone?”
And when Peter collapses onto his own bed that night, he’s got Daredevil’s mobile and work cell numbers punched into the discount Nokia he’d found at a parts shop and a stomach full of Karen Page’s signature (if very burnt) Kraft macaroni and cheese.
---
Peter fixes his own heater. Listens to music while he does it.
Uses the extra cash from this month’s rent return to buy Mr. Garcia a thank-you card at the bodega and cashes in his “employee discount” for the first and only time to buy a few packs of cigarettes he knows are the man’s favorite for the way the smell of them lingers in the air outside Peter’s door each first of the month.
He writes a thank-you card, and he fixes Mrs. Giofretti’s broken shower rod, because May Parker taught him to pay it forward.
---
A girl with dark hair and green eyes stops him on the street the day after he turns twenty, pausing what’s been an uneventful patrol with a wildly waving arm and a yell of “Spider-Man!” that makes Peter laugh, lightness exiting his lungs in a sensation that still feels foreign most days even if it’s becoming less so each time he allows it to roll through him. Every time he forgets to get in his own way.
It’s something lot easier said than done, but at least he is saying it. Or at least, whispering it. On the good days. Days when he finds it in himself to stop by FEAST for an hour or two and can leave feeling a little bit more like the type of kid May Parker would be proud of.
“Ina Cabrera,” the girl introduces herself, MIT sweatshirt a bit out of place in the city’s late-summer heat. She’s about Peter’s age, and his eyes trace the letters on her sleeve unbidden, black against cardinal red and every two-year-old mistake resurfacing in the threads of Engineer silver.
Peter traces the letters in his mind and he experiences a hundred memories at once, of laughter and lego sets and buzzing whispers long after lights out, but he doesn’t ask.
It’s a big campus anyway, right? Chances they’ve met are slim to none, and Peter won’t risk Ned’s safety by inquiring after him while wearing the suit that’s already put two of his loved ones in the ground.
And plus, he’s trying not to-- dwell. As much. These days. Bad for his complexion, he’s decided, basking in all those what-ifs.
So he just smiles beneath the mask and says, “Something I can help you with?” and Ina Cabrera pauses for a moment. Falters, over an explanation of what, exactly, it is that she needs from Spider-Man.
Then, with a puff of air from her lungs, “You don’t happen to be, like, a vigilante in STEM, do you?”
---
The leaves change again, and Spider-Man pulls longer patrols, and Peter Parker tries not to dwell.
That doesn’t stop the way it all comes rushing back.
---
It happens like this:
Peter Parker wakes up four days before the second anniversary of the death of May Parker, and for the first time in three weeks he is not covered in the cooling sweat of an inescapable nightmare.
It is a dream of golden light, of kitchens and legos and fingers interlocked with his, and when Peter wakes from it he realizes, with the dawning clarity of a soft orange sunrise, that all of these memories live inside him and him alone.
May Parker and her flowers, Ben and his brown work books. Two boys on bunkbeds and a first kiss buried somewhere in the rubble of a London drone-war.
And once he realizes it he, he can’t un-realize it. Peter almost died five months ago, alone in his shower, a terrible thank-you gift to be for Mr. Garcia when the smell finally got bad enough for the neighbors to complain.
Peter almost died five months ago, was dragged back to life by two people who didn’t have to give a fuck but did anyway, and the memories would’ve died with him. The true version of things, that family from Queens and those boys climbing up fire escapes and through each other’s windows on Friday nights just for the thrill of it, when they could just as easily have taken the stairs.
All gone, like blood down the drain of his shower.
His family lives in the past-- dead and alive, forgotten or not-- and at the same time lives on in Peter Parker’s skin.
It’s a big realization, a big responsibility, too big of a risk when Peter Parker is still fighting each day to keep his head above water, to not lose himself to the Spider of it all on nights where the shadows stretch long and deep and every creep he apprehends starts to look less like a person and more like a punching bag.
May wouldn’t like him, on nights like that.
When we help someone, we help everyone.
Peter Parker stopped giving much of a fuck about the safety of Peter Parker around the time his aunt’s last breath started gargling in her throat, but he won’t let them die with him. The memories claw at his throat, at his eyes, at every soft place inside of him, and a desperate urgency awakened in one moment after two dormant years sinks its teeth into his adrenal glands like all it had been waiting for all this time was for Peter to notice its presence.
He’s up and out of bed, crossing the room and reaching for the box above his kitchen sink before he’s thought about why.
And then it’s in his hands.
The legal pad, corners curling with blue-ballpoint flowers, first page disfigured by two years spent suffocated under layers of books and miscellaneous wires and spare cigarettes that he’s supposed to give out as “free samples” but doesn’t because he looked it up and the whole thing is, like, insanely illegal, actually. Peter has enough qualms about his role in the lives of lung cancer patients everywhere without attempting to actively push the product, thank you very much.
He carefully tears the corner off the page, folding the flowers one, two, three times into a small triangle. May Parker’s final composition, the type of thing that should be hung in a museum but will have to be content with the inside pocket of Peter’s wallet, lest the ink smear and the flowers droop.
His twin bed squeaks with the weight of him as he reoccupies it, as he fumbles through the backpack on the floor in search of a pen.
The room holds its breath as he brings point to paper, past to present. He hesitates, momentarily. Unsure where to start.
English class was never Peter Parker’s strong suit, and he’s certain that what little poet’s skill he’d managed to acquire at Midtown School of Science and Technology has long since atrophied. His hands are made of all the wrong kind of muscles for delicate things these days, things like ballpoint pens and paper flowers and the memory of May Parker’s blood-soaked hand in his.
There is an epiphany hanging heavy in the room and the tools are in his hands, but Peter Parker doesn’t know if he can do this any better than he can keep himself from bleeding out on his shower floor.
Pen in his hand, no clue where to start, he takes a deep breath in. A deep breath out.
Then, he catches sight of the small Lego Palpatine figurine standing sentry on his dresser, dusty but sturdy, two years spent holding up fistfulls of lightning and the last thing Peter sees before he goes to sleep most nights, even if he no longer registers it.
Even if he’s moved on from those things that can be moved on from, even if he’s accepted that these memories will forever be just that.
On a squeaky twin bed in the middle of a no-longer-barren room, Peter Parker takes another breath.
And then he starts not at the beginning, but with two boys on the floor at the back of a third grade classroom.
---
It becomes an obsession.
Peter fills the notepad in one morning, pulls gloves over ink-stained fingers for the quickest patrol he’s had in months and then stops at the store and forks over enough for a real-life notebook and a whole pack of pens.
He writes: Old meatloaf.
He writes: Never meet your heroes.
He writes: We’ll face it in the morning.
He writes: I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
I’m so sorry.
---
It’s grief and it’s love, it’s the hemorrhaging of two-year-old wounds, it’s therapy in no form he’s ever heard of and it’s every last page, every last pen.
When Peter is done, sleep itching at his eyes and mouth tacky with how long it’s been since he last ate or drank, he surveys his work.
A legal pad and a notebook, words that start shaky and grow steady and shaky again with each chronicled bang, bang, bang. Every lesson he can ever remember May Parker teaching him, every mission spent supervised by a guy in the chair.
A kiss illuminated by a golden sunrise.
And he never-- he never writes Ben or May’s final bits of wisdom, never puts the ink on paper, the shaky scrawl of them, but as Peter skims, rereads, stumbles over run-on sentences and comma splice after comma splice after goddamn comma splice, he knows he doesn’t have to, because they’re everywhere. In every I’m sorry, in every reverently recounted memory of a kind EMT or forgiving landlord or college student on the corner waving him down with a project that will light up his brain in ways he hadn’t even realized he was missing.
Peter hadn’t seen it at the time, too lost in a haze of grief and self-flagellation, but they’re there.
With great power comes great responsibility.
When we help someone, we help everyone.
Peter knows. Two years down and who knows how many more to go, and he thinks he might finally get it.
But there’s still one more call to make before bed.
---
“Webs?” Matt Murdock’s brow furrows, like he hadn’t heard Peter coming from three blocks away. Peter appreciates the little game. Matt's a good actor, and it makes the fact that he can hear the instant ramen Peter had scarfed down before heading over sloshing around in his stomach a little less freaky.
“Nelson and Murdock,” Peter says, no preamble. “You do-- estate planning?”
Matt’s brows furrow further. He says, carefully, “You want to write your will?”
“Need to,” Peter corrects, cheerfully. “As soon as humanly or inhumanly possible.”
Matt cocks his head as if listening for something concerning. Which. Peter supposes is fair. He must pass the test, though, because the Devil of Hell’s kitchen leads Peter into his own kitchen, flicking the lights as he goes for only one of their benefits.
“You know this is a suicide warning sign,” he informs Peter, flatly. “A sudden and immediate desire to get your affairs together.”
“Are you still mad that I woke you up?”
Matt deigns not to respond, which is answer enough.
“Look man,” Peter sighs. He drops the legal pad and notebook on the kitchen counter. “I’m really sorry about-- dropping in. I just need these out of my apartment. I need-- I need to know they’re safe.”
His family, preserved in paper and ballpoint pen. All that leftover light of them, bound and compiled straight from his heart.
The last Parker standing, without all the weight and responsibility of such a thing.
There is a boy from Queens living within these pages of the past, and he’ll be safe there until Peter figures out what to do with him.
Matt must hear something, the scratch in Peter’s throat or the steady thrum of his heartbeat, the earnestness in his breath. Broken recognizes broken, after all, and so Matthew Murdock takes the books off the counter and weighs them in his hands, slowly shifting them from left to right.
He can probably smell the ink on Peter, can probably hazard a snowball’s guess at what lies within these pages.
“Foggy handles estate stuff, mostly,” he finally says. “That okay with you?”
Peter grins. “I was hoping.”
“Brat. I know when you’re lying.”
“Was I?”
Matt pauses for a second. Then, with a face like he’s just bit down on a particularly sour lemon, “no.”
Peter’s still laughing as Matt shuts the door with a definitive click behind him.
---
He returns to his apartment a round hour after he leaves it, finds it as warm as it had been then with a heater clunking steadily if a bit loudly, a window rattling in its own part to hold together this place, this home. Built from scratch and where he’ll keep returning, up until the day that he can’t.
Peter still isn’t-- scared. Of it. You can’t know death the intimate way he does and not also know the absolute inevitability, the when not if of it all.
But Peter thinks he’s okay here, for a while and god-willing. Here, surrounded by the Mr. Garcias and Mrs. Giofrettis and those middle school kids who have turned trying to sneak a fake ID by him at the smoke shop into some sort of daily after-school game.
Here, with memories safely stowed away and more to make.
A boy-- a kid-- a young adult and technically, a man-- from Queens collapses into bed right as his police scanner goes off, and just this once, he doesn’t go to check it.
Just this once, he decides he’ll face it in the morning.