Central Park greeted Peter by depositing him in a knee-high snowbank. Powdery snowflakes clung to his jeans as he stepped out onto the paved walkway. Bright street lamps glowed on either side of the path, directing him back down a rolling slope in one direction and around a bend in the other.

How far backwards had he blipped this time? It had to be a backwards jump, they were the only ones that felt like anything anymore.

The vibrations were getting worse. Peter knew it, even though no one seemed willing to tell him as much. As his quantum frequency destabilized more and more often, stepping in and out of time became as seamless as moving between rooms. Jumping forward felt like blinking, utterly unnoticeable if it weren't for the reactions of the lab outside.

Dr. Pym had taken to asking him for the date at random intervals. Peter didn't remember anymore, he'd stopped trying to keep track. Minutes went by in hours, days went by in minutes, hours went by in days. Time had become incomprehensible.

This was the first blip to feel significantly different since he'd been to 2012. The nausea was long gone, dizziness too. He had been unsteady on his feet for a few seconds, felt lightheaded, then fine. How long, Peter wondered, until jumping back years felt like nothing at all?

And how long after that until he became dust scattered through time?

Choosing between right or left was the easiest decision Peter had made recently, mostly because his choice felt inconsequential. A pattern had emerged in his blips, one that the Pym-Van Dyne's weren't tracking because he still hadn't told them about it. But it was there and he knew, deep in his gut, that the pattern would hold.

Peter chose to go left, walking round the curve in the road with his hands in his coat pockets.

He wasn't surprised to see Quentin Beck. Admittedly, he was a little startled to find him kicking the life out of a snowman, but he wasn't surprised to see him.

The years had been good to Quentin. Even driven to disarray by his fury, he cut an attractive image. There was more bulk to him, a broader chest and wider shoulders. Both his suit and coat were tailored to his figure, done in rich blues and grays that must bring out his eyes.

The snowman crumbled, leaving Quentin with nowhere to redirect his anger. Clouds of steam formed before him with each heaving breath, his whole body held so tense he was quivering. In the half-shadows he looked sharper, hungrier.

Peter approached slowly. For the first time since meeting Quin, his spider-senses were trying to forewarn him of impending danger. Of course they were. With a few more years and self-discipline to match that anger, it could have been Beck standing in front of him.

But it wasn't. Not yet.

"Hey Quin."

Quentin whirled to face him, eyes wild pools of icy blue almost devoid of pupil. He had the look of a starved animal, jagged and just one step from unhinged.

"You!" Quentin snarled, lips peeling back from his teeth. Peter had never noticed how sharp his canines were before.

The instinct to flee grappled with an urge to run up to him and demand to know where the impish boy he knew had gone. Peter came to a stop, close enough to see the tears on Quentin's cheek and the angry flush beneath them, but far enough to be out of arm's reach.

"Back to haunt me again, are you?"

Before he could reply, Quentin barked a hollow laugh.

"Of course you are! You always do!"

"I'm not a ghost, Quin." Peter frowned.

Another laugh echoed from between sharp teeth, this one bordering on hysterical.

"No, you're a fucking nightmare." Quentin's face twisted into a sneer. "Always with that stupid fucking nickname, showing up when I've finally stopped thinking about you!"

I could say the same, Peter thought.

He risked a step forward, but Quentin reared back from him as though he were brandishing a weapon.

"You stay away from me."

"No." Peter replied, frown deepening. "You can't expect me to walk away when you're upset, Quin."

"Why not? All you ever do is leave."

The accusation stung. It must have shown on his face, because Quentin's mouth curled at the edges with satisfaction. His spider-senses were a siren warbling in the back of his mind, chanting Beck, Beck, Beck until his ears rang.

"I never left because I wanted to."

"Have you ever actually tried to stay?"

Peter wanted to say yes, he really did, for the sake of the Quentin he met last if nothing else. His silence seemed to speak for him.

It wasn't that simple. Trying to stay in the past and wanting to were two separate things, neither of which he could find the words to explain. He had wanted to stay with Quin and Henrietta in their narrow house, and he had wanted to meet Quentin on the street corner in Manhattan and get coffee. But had he tried?

No, of course not, because he belonged in the present no matter what he wished otherwise.

"You're unbelievable." Quentin said derisively.

"I'm not the one kicking the shit out of a snowman." Peter snapped without thinking, his own temper beginning to flare.

Eyes flashing, Quentin snarled; "Fuck off."

He turned away from Peter and began walking, taking long strides to put as much distance between them as he could. Peter followed, quickening his own steps to keep up.

It would be easy to just let him walk away. Maybe even the wiser thing to do in this situation. There was no reason Peter couldn't just let Quentin Beck disappear into the night and never see him again. None of this was his responsibility, not Quin's pain or Quentin's expectations. He could walk away.

Could, but wouldn't. Peter had faced Beck when he was ruled by his rage, Quentin was almost his spitting image. The difference between them was that when Quentin spat venom and hissed viritol, he did so with pain in his eyes.

If Peter walked away, their paths would cease to cross, he just knew it.

So he followed.

"Are you deaf?! I said fuck off, Peter!"

"No."

"I finally want you to leave and now you won't?!" Empty laughter. "You're something else, you bastard."

"Calling me names isn't going to make me go away."

As if taking this to be a challenge, Quentin wrenched a clump of frozen snow off a bench as he passed and turned to hurl it directly at Peter's head.

Peter dodged easily, which seemed only to incense Quentin further. He veered sharply and stomped off the path, into the snow and away from the cool lamplight.

The broad expanse of his retreating back made a perfect target for a well-aimed snowball.

Quentin froze on impact. He turned, slowly, and for a moment Peter could see emotions warring inside him. Sorrow and fury, hatred and surprise, pain and confusion. He settled on rage.

Peter ducked beneath the hard ball of snow that came flying at him, impacting with far too much force on a nearby lamppost. The snow had been packed too tightly, with the intent to harm, but he didn't care. Beck had held a gun to his head. This was nothing.

The next snowball went by his ear, then another flew past his right side. As Peter weaved away from the incoming projectiles, he scooped up his own snow and packed it into a looser ball, flinging it back at Quentin.

His struck, smacking into the enraged man's chest.

Snowball fights were the stuff of childhood, a play-battle between friends. This one felt more like going toe to toe with a supervillain, only fractionally less deadly.

Fractionally.

Quentin's aim improved with each throw, leading Peter to more and more complex maneuvers to avoid being hit. He ran, leapt, ducked, rolled, jumped over logs and wove between trees. Returning fire quickly became less important than evading the onslaught.

All it took was one poorly executed feint to remind him why he needed to pay attention to his surroundings as well as his opponents. His foot sank deeper than he expected, unbalancing him, and he went toppling over into a snowbank with a yelp of surprise. Peter emerged sputtering and shaking his head, vision clouded by snow, and Quentin laughed.

It was possibly the best sound Peter had ever heard.

The tone of their game changed. A volley of snowballs flew through the air from either side, targeted at first, then flung hastily and without much regard for how far they went or where they landed. Snowballs became handfuls of powder, which did nothing but fill the air with flurries of snow.

Peter wasn't sure how long they kept at it. By the time they stopped his hands were numb and his jeans were soaked from the knees down. They stood there catching their breath, faces rosy and coats dusted with white. Quentin looked especially worn, but he wasn't looking at Peter like he wanted to strangle him anymore either.

The droning whine of his spider-senses had gone quiet. Peter sighed.

"Do you want to talk about it now?"

Quentin swallowed and rubbed the back of his hand against the frozen tear tracks on his face.

"Yeah." he said thickly. "Yeah."

The night was still and silent save for the sound of their feet crunching through the snow as they trudged back towards the walkway. They found a dry bench beneath a streetlamp and settled on it, close enough their knees brushed. Quentin stared sightlessly into the distance, wringing his hands together for warmth or from nerves. Peter knocked their legs together more firmly and waited.

For a while, Quentin was quiet, gathering his thoughts. When he was ready, he opened his mouth and told a story Peter could have never anticipated.

Having spent his life idolizing Tony Stark, Peter knew most technologies Stark Industries had produced in his lifetime. Binarily Augmented Retro-Framing wasn't new to him. It was one of those technologies that Peter rarely thought about, having considered it neither the best of, nor worst of, Stark Industries' productions.

Some of that probably had to do with Spiderman's nearly concurrent debut during the fight that left Captain America a fugitive. Peter hadn't really had time to delve into B.A.R.F, too busy fighting Avengers and scrambling to keep up with Tony Stark himself. He'd forgotten about it, mostly.

Before there was Binarily Augmented Retro-Fitting, there had been Augmented Reality Imaging, and Quentin Beck had designed it.

He told Peter everything, starting back in his junior days at Stark Industries, when he worked tirelessly to get A.R.I considered for development. There had been hoop after hoop to jump through, countless hours spent trying to prove that advanced augmented reality on a large scale was possible, imminent, even. Back then, CGI had only just passed the uncanny valley and the idea of real-time projections was unheard of.

And finally, he'd gotten approval.

Quentin headed research and development for the project, which had quickly grown from a small team to a whole lab as he began to produce results. It was more than just years of his life he'd sunk into A.R.I; the impassioned rise of his voice, his fevered hand movements, told Peter that he had cared. A.R.I was his life's work.

When A.R.I was complete, it was meant to be something revolutionary. A multi-purpose, completely unique tool with applications from the mundane to military. The possibilities were endless.

Part of why A.R.I's development had taken so much of Quentin's time at Stark Industries had mainly to do with the fact that the technology just didn't exist yet. The framework was there, but CGI was a slow and laborious process and projection technology ran with delays. A.R.I was unfinished, a work in progress waiting for just a few more minor breakthroughs.

And yet a month earlier, Tony Stark had premiered B.A.R.F during a presentation at MIT.

"I get it, I get it!" Quentin insisted. "I work for Stark Industries, so they own what I develop, I get it, it's all in my contract. I know what I signed. But Tony, Stark, he just... Just..."

He gestured emphatically, caught somewhere between heartbreak and anger again.

"Just took it, when it wasn't even done yet, there was so much more I needed to get right! But he took it anyway, rushed the presentation, made all these adjustments and additions and rebranded it as some mental health bullshit no normal person could afford anyway and-!"

Quentin buried his face in his hands, breathing harshly. Peter watched as he shook, frustrated and hurting so deep that he couldn't contain it. He pushed his hands up, back through his hair, and there were tears brimming in his eyes again.

"He didn't tell me. About the changes. No one told me about the changes. The name, the function, fucking- God. Shit. My name isn't even on the fucking packaging anymore."

He laughed, the hollow and broken.

"And y'know, maybe, if he'd take the time to just tell me what the fuck he was thinking, maybe I'd get over it! But no! No, I'm not good enough to warrant the attention of the great Tony Stark. Can't have one sit down conversation because he's too busy running around being Iron Man, never mind the rest of us!"

Quentin hung his head, crossing his fingers over the back of his neck.

"Fuck." he rasped. "I just... I'm so fucking- I hate feeling like this. I hate being this angry all the time, I hate caring so fucking much."

Peter's lips twitched into a sad smile.

"You wouldn't be you if you didn't care."

That's who Quentin Beck was, a man of passions. Everything he did became an emotional investment, something that he tied himself to so closely it may as well have been an extension of himself. Peter knew firsthand how ugly such strong emotions could be, he'd seen them eat Beck alive.

He pried Quentin's fingers from his neck and pulled him against his front instead. Immediately, arms wound around his middle. Trembling hands fisted in the back of his coat. Quentin buried his face against his shoulder and there was a choked sob.

Quentin broke down.

Holding him together was like trying to stop a glacier from cracking, or halt an avalanche halfway down a mountain. His emotions were a force of nature and Peter was one person trying to bottle a storm. It killed him to see Quentin teetering so close to the same edge of madness he was headed for years from now. Maybe that was inevitable, but in this moment, he didn't care.

Someone had to be here for him. Someone had to let him cry and tell him that the world was more than the pain he was feeling. Peter hadn't had the words for it after Henrietta died and Quentin had walked away instead, left them both halved and questioning. This time, he held on tight and refused to shy away from his feelings.

"I know this is hard," he said, voice low. "You're angry, you wanna scream. Probably punch Mr. Stark really, really hard."

And, Christ, that wasn't something Peter wanted to think about. Tony Stark occupied a complicated tangle of emotions in his chest and this latest revelation was just going to have to wait. Quentin Beck was falling to pieces in his arms and damnit, Peter wanted to help him.

"You've gotta be better than that, though, Quin. I know it seems like everything's out to get you, but I swear that's not it."

"Isn't it?" Quentin laughed wetly.

Peter tugged his hair until Quentin sat back enough for their eyes to meet. He was a mess, red-eyed, wet cheeked and miserable. So painfully, honestly human that it was beautiful in the most tragic way.

"It's not." Peter insisted fiercely.

Both hands cupped Quentin's messy cheeks, freezing cold against his warm skin. They were so close together that Peter could count his eyelashes and see the flecks of silver in his blue, blue eyes.

"Talk to , ask him why he did what he did. A.R.I was your baby, you deserve answers!" Peter paused to take a breath, startled by his own burst of outrage. Calmer, he said; "Promise me you'll try to talk to him."

Quentin stared at him wonderingly, as though he were seeing him for the very first time. A stray tear rolled down his cheek and Peter thumbed it away thoughtlessly.

"Say you'll try, Quin."

"I will." he replied, voice raw. "I promise."

Then, Quentin laughed, quick and sharp.

"What?" Peter frowned.

"Nothing, it's nothing. You're just..."

He laid a palm over the hand on his cheek, holding it still as he turned his head and pressed a tender kiss against Peter's palm.

"You're like a daydream, Peter." Quentin sighed against his skin. "Always there when I need you the most, and then you're just... gone."

Peter didn't know what to say. It felt like someone had stolen the breath from his lungs and tossed pop rocks in where his heart was meant to be. After everything Quentin had screamed at him earlier, it would be so easy to accuse him of lying. If only he weren't still pressing his mouth to his skin, smiling where only Peter could see it.

"I don't mean to be." There or gone? Even he wasn't sure.

"But you are."

But he was.

In the midst of a temporal crisis that could very well kill him, time and space kept aligning to drag Peter right back into Quentin's orbit. The why and how didn't even matter anymore. Whether there was an explanation or it was just fate, who cared? The universe clearly wanted him here, now, with Quentin.

And, unbelievably, there was nowhere Peter would rather be.

"I believe in you, Quentin. You know that, right?"

"I do."

He pulled Peter's hands from his cheeks, holding them close and laying kisses along his knuckles. With each press of his lips, another scar on Peter's heart healed. In his head, the ghost of Beck began to fade.

"Thank you, daydream." Quentin murmured.

Peter kissed him.

It was quick and clumsy, too forceful and sudden to be romantic, but no other kiss could compare. Their kiss under the mistletoe was a pale imitation of the lightning storm that passed between them in the span of one quick liplock.

When he sat back, Quentin was grinning.

"You can't just... call someone that." Peter blushed.

"Sure I can, daydream."

"Quin!"

Quentin's laugh echoed in the quiet night.

They parted ways more than an hour later, finding excuses to linger side by side until the hour grew too late to justify being out in the cold.

Peter watched Quentin Beck walk away and blipped before he could see him turn back around.