The people of the world had forgotten Peter Parker, but the beating heart of New York remembered him.
On the Highline, stencil graffiti of Spider-Man faced down an imitation Basquiat of Thanos. Atop the Midtown High homepage, a Thank You, Spider-Man! banner rotated amid finals announcements and bake sale flyers. On a sidewalk in Bushwick, a busker whom Peter once shielded from an oncoming spin-out now coaxed his violin into the melodies of Itzhak Perlman. In the Peter Pan Donut & Pastry Shop, Ned and MJ remained safe and happy and loved.
Peter found little pieces of himself all over the city, proof of his existence embedded in the very concrete, and took strength from them.
It helped him through the worst days. Funny how the realization that he was not alone in the multiverse, that he shared kinship with an infinite number of Peter Parkers across time and space, had been followed so immediately by such brutal solitude.
The parameters of the memory spell as Peter understood them seemingly fluctuated to match demand. His name and photograph were gone from Midtown High's honor roll, but a Google search still displayed Spider-Man's rescue of the Academic Decathlon team. His personal laptop still contained every essay he'd submitted since freshman year, but login attempts to Midtown's email platform and electronic blackboard consistently resulted in error messages.
His old Reddit page was gone from the Wayback Machine, as were his second-place accolades for the CoderZ League Tournament in freshman year. His cell phone data plan no longer worked. Also gone was his online banking access.
This was not the hard part.
After scouring the internet and local newsstands, it seemed that the invasive paparazzi shots of Peter's loved ones had also disappeared. That was a blessing. There were no TMZ pages dedicated to documenting his relationship with MJ, no forum threads doxxing Ned's extended family. No death threats discussed casually on talk radio. There was no arrest record for Peter Benjamin Parker at all, because Peter Benjamin Parker did not exist.
The accusations against his masked persona still remained, of course, as did the spillover of arguments onto Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal, Reddit, Tumblr, Quora, YouTube, TikTok….
After the Blip, after battling Thanos's invading hordes from the edges of space, returning to patrol on the streets of New York had been a comfort. It had been a warm October evening when Peter finally suited up again, and the setting sun had striped the asphalt with shadows like a modern henge as he swung across Seventh Avenue. From the bustle of commuters rushing home below had come a swell of whoops and cheers as the city welcomed him home.
That atmosphere of ease was long gone, and the fallout from Liberty Island had shifted it even further.
The straw-haired Prime Minister of England was still in the news every week making noise about extradition, reparations from the American government, and funding for repairs to Tower Bridge. Rumors that Stark Industries was in negotiation to cover partial reconstruction costs swirled briefly, then were drowned by a flood of Twitter comments inquiring when, precisely, the embattled PM planned to issue reparations to the Indian subcontinent and Great Britain's other former colonies. The conversation only derailed further from there.
It took a little while for Peter, weeding carefully through pages of vitriolic debate, to figure out the new state of public opinion. Spider-Man, anonymous vigilante, seemed to have fewer outspoken defenders than Peter Parker, honor roll student. On the same token it appeared that Spider-Man, anonymous vigilante, was also a less exciting murder suspect without the unmasking. The Daily Bugle's broadcast of Mysterio's accusations had still made news worldwide, but in the Wikipedia subarticle on NYC superheroes accused of mass murder, Spider-Man was now a distant fourth to the Devil of Hell's Kitchen, the Hulk, and Captain America's best friend.
The axis of the conversation was turning, slowly.
By mid-November, Mysterio's tape had been tentatively proven false by DoD-approved VFX experts and E.D.I.T.H. was firmly in the possession of Damage Control.
By the end of December, Peter's ribs had healed and his finger bones had knit new growth across their hairline fractures. The burst blood vessels in his eye had faded to a pallid green and international attention had turned, at long last, toward Mysterio's crimes and the current whereabouts of his crew.
This was also not the hard part.
The hard part, Peter discovered in the immediate aftermath of Liberty Island, was this:
On the internet, the scanned obituaries for Mary and Richard Parker no longer mentioned a son. Uncle Ben's tombstone in Maple Grove, immortalized by the photos that May posted to her Facebook just last spring, no longer read Beloved Uncle . In fact, the entirety of her Facebook albums from the last decade - which teasingly documented her nephew's growth spurts and holidays and accomplishments - no longer existed at all.
The moment of this discovery was when Peter Parker, age seventeen, closed his laptop, put his head between his knees, and had the first in a series of very small panic attacks.
F.E.A.S.T. News
Remembering Maybelle Parker
November 15, 2024
Today we salute Maybelle Parker, longtime F.E.A.S.T. volunteer of NYC, who passed away this spring due to senseless vigilante violence.
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Julie M. 12 minutes ago
I worked with her, and we all adored her. She was always a bright spot in her neighborhood. They examined the surveillance tape and believe that one of the killers followed her home from the shelter where she worked. So dreadful. This is why, for occupations like this, it's critical to employ the buddy system, yet she was a widow who lived alone. We miss her terribly. They need to track down the perpetrators.
Going back home that first morning had been the worst.
Of course, revisiting Happy's midtown Manhattan high-rise had never even been an option. It was completely destroyed, fire-damaged and swarming with law enforcement. Peter's school computer had been smashed when the apartment blew out, his wallet under several tons of rubble and clothes likely burned.
And even if it hadn't been a smoking wreck, the idea of going back to the place where Aunt May had - had - the very concept of returning to the place where he'd left her -
Anyway, the old Forest Hills apartment had been Peter's only real choice.
Peter and May hadn't lived there for weeks by the time Stephen's final spell took hold, only too happy to flee public scrutiny for the refuge of camping in Happy's living room. But May's name was still on the old lease, and they'd always meant to come back someday. They'd always meant to start their lives again, together, when the ruckus died down.
The building was quiet, now. Before moving out, they could hardly sleep for the helicopters circling and news stations interviewing F.E.A.S.T. employees on their mascot being accused of cold-blooded murder. After the spell, no paparazzo had any interest in following a widowed community organizer back to the place where she lived alone.
Peter had been pretty mercenary in his plan. Slip in, take thirty minutes filling the cardboard boxes he'd picked up from the dumpster behind Delmar's, and haul ass in the first cab that would take him before the cops started swarming.
"Stay in school, kid, stay in school," Mr Delmar used to tell him, but Mr Delmar didn't know that he existed anymore, so it was fine.
Everything was fine.
Nothing could have prepared him, though, for how the tight emptiness of his chest would briefly ease upon coming home.
Home was in the pattern of the wallpaper, the precise creak of the living room floorboards, and the crooked angle of the light-faded curtains. It smelled like safety. It felt like childhood birthday parties, like skinned knees under bright bandaids, like late night study sessions with Ned.
And it wasn't Peter's. Not anymore.
Standing there in sunbeam dust with the sounds of mid-day traffic filtering through the window, Peter suddenly couldn't remember a single thing from the Get Ready For College! Here's What You Need To Pack So You Won't Die! prep pamphlets he'd read. For a fleeting, ludicrous second he wished one of the other Peters was there to ask for advice, and then pushed the thought aside.
He started in the kitchen, with a new plan: Walk systematically from room to room and shove things in boxes. Utensils, a frying pan, packs of pasta, the blanket from the couch, the first aid kit under the sink. Random novels from Aunt May's big white bookcases, a table lamp shaped like an anteater, rolls of toilet paper. An old photo album with dozens of polaroids of his aunt, uncle, and a blank space where a tiny cheery boy used to sit at their knee. That was fine. He still wanted the album.
Peter did most of this packing while crying a little, which was also fine, because no one was there to see him do it.
There was a photograph on the fridge, too, of Aunt May and Happy. He took that one with him as well.
May's bedroom was harder.
Peter pulled a few of his uncle's old things from hangers, stalling, taking a coat and a pair of oxfords and the suit he'd almost worn to homecoming. Then, before he could second-guess himself, he added the bright winter scarf that his grandmother had knitted Aunt May for Christmas one year, long before his birth. It still smelled like dried oranges and evergreens.
Aunt May's box of emergency cash was next, in the highest dresser drawer where it had always been. Peter mechanically pulled out the money and spare banking card, then stopped. Felt like he was robbing her. Put it back. Took it out again.
Also in the box were papers for a secondary bank account. A small one, with some scraped-together money meant for Peter's college fund. He hadn't been supposed to know that it existed. Now, in a world where Peter Parker had no electronic footprint, the account had become a generic rainy day fund in May Parker's name, he supposed.
It was fine .
Re-entering his bedroom wasn't.
Peter had braced himself, he really had, before pushing the door open. Then he stood there for three full seconds, four, five, before sliding down very quietly to sit on the carpet.
It was his room and it was not.
Things were missing from the walls and closet and bookcase, seemingly at random. MJ's sketch of Mr Harrison from third period was still tacked above the desk, but the silly caricature that she'd drawn of Peter was gone from its place in the frame of the standing mirror. The faded and tattered set of Astro Boy comics he'd inherited from his grandfather still sat on the shelves, but not the engraved prize he'd won for a math competition in the third grade. His monogrammed gym clothes had disappeared from the closet floor, but Lego Palpatine still stood on the windowsill.
Peter couldn't follow the logical through-line there and hated magic more than ever. Was it because he hadn't bought Lego Palpatine himself? Star Wars had been Aunt May's thing, originally, more than his own. They'd watched the original trilogy on the couch when he was eight years old, and Jedi daydreams were the first thing he ever bonded over with Ned.
Would Ned even remember knowing Aunt May? If he saw that Lego on the windowsill, would he wonder how it got there?
Peter wiped his face, quietly furious with himself. There was no going back. He couldn't beg a wizard to rend open the universe again just because he was being a freaking baby about this. He'd already said goodbye.
This was just damage control. This was just the aftermath.
"C'mon, Spider-Man," he said to the listening room. In the still air, the words felt like a little prayer.
Then he took a deep breath, got up, and finished packing.
When Peter left, Lego Palpatine went with him, tucked safely into the pocket of his jeans.
He would never see the apartment again.
That same night he would also go back, just one last time, to Midtown Tech, riding the local E train toward 36th Ave late in the evening and slipping inside through the loose window in the boys' bathrooms. The building was dark and silent as he padded along the familiar hallways toward his locker.
"I'm probably never gonna come back here," he'd once told Ned, an exciting world of superheroing ahead of him. Schoolwork had seemed like a silly, childish thing that day.
"You don't wanna be a high-school dropout," Ned had responded, horrified.
Now Peter's locker was mostly empty, impersonal, except for a small stack of generic senior-year textbooks with no student name on the inside cover.
Peter took them anyway.
Later he would thumb through them and wonder if the pages felt worn or new, if the paper was familiar under his skin, if it remembered the imprint of his fingertips.
Probably not.
The first day of senior year at Midtown School of Science and Technology had been hell.
From the moment he entered the school doors to the moment he left, Peter accomplished exactly zero studying - but then, it was the same for everyone else. First period, then second, third, were spent with all eyes on him. He kept his head down, taking notes when he could and scribbling nonsense when he couldn't, just to avoid eye contact.
The teachers weren't much better. Ms Warren seemed to try the hardest to have a normal class, pulling Peter's schoolmates back in line when attention drifted and plowing through the syllabus with determination. She also didn't call on Peter once for the entire class, though, which was somehow worse than if she'd hauled him up front for an interrogation.
It got bad enough that the end of third period was followed by a stern loudspeaker announcement about targeted harassment in the school hallways. Mr Harrington followed this up by putting a hand on Peter's shoulder and declaring, loudly enough to be heard by half the student body, that Spider-Man was his personal hero and was not to be disrespected in his presence. Peter thanked him robotically then walked into the boys' bathroom, locked himself in a stall, and put his head in his hands until Ned came knocking.
He had to quit the AcaDec team, obviously. Most of the original crew was gone anyway, with Cindy, Abe, Sally, and Murphy all having survived the Blip and graduated. Peter wondered if things would have been different, had the group he'd saved in the elevator - the people he knew best outside of Ned and MJ - still been in school. If they would have looked at him and only seen the stupid things they had lived together, like arguing with Tiny McKeever over homework or buying previously-tiny Brad Davis extra packs of tissues for his nosebleeds before every tutoring session.
Abe Brown and Charles Murphy had even sent him supportive texts before Peter had been forced to change his phone number, Abe with a short but surprisingly heartfelt message and Murphy with a few bro-fist emojis. Cindy Moon was posting videos about the Mysterio situation to her TikTok daily, all of which Peter hadn't had the courage to look at. Sally Avril's parents had withdrawn her younger brother from enrollment at Midtown before the semester even started.
Peter wondered what Liz was thinking, wherever she was now. She'd pretty much cut off contact when she left, defriending no one but privatizing most of her social media accounts. He didn't even know if she'd been Snapped or not. If only he'd had the guts to tell her -
In the end, it didn't matter. There was no turning back time.
Out of every class on that torturous first of September, P.E. was possibly the worst. Coach Wilson made allusions to Peter's "criminal activities" at every opportunity and snorted loudly when he spotted Peter going through their fitness warm-ups the same way as usual; slowly, like a normal human.
"So you've been, like, totally faking it this whole time, huh," Jason Ionello panted as they completed a turn on the track, Peter sticking to Ned's side the entire way. "'Cause we've all seen you run for real on YouTube, dude."
"I just don't like gym," Peter said, pasting a bright expression on his face and turning to face his classmate. He couldn't quite get his smile to loosen. "Who likes having to run around, right?"
"I guess. So how fast can you go, anyway?"
There was a sudden hush as everyone around them leaned in to listen.
"Never timed it," Peter lied with that same fixed smile and a tight shrug.
"Coach Wilson?" That was Ned's voice from beside him. "Coach Wilson, I think I twisted my ankle on that last round. I need someone to help me to the nurse's office? Like I need Peter, specifically, because he can carry me?"
Peter loved Ned so, so much.
His one place of unexpected solace, amid Mr Harrington's fanboying and Coach Wilson's aggressiveness and Mr Dell's awkwardness, was Principal Morita.
He pulled Peter into his office toward the end of that first day, shut the door, sat down across from him and said very calmly, "Do you know who my grandfather was, Peter?"
"No, sir," said Peter, already sweating in the chair.
"His name was Jim Morita," the principal continued, "and back in '45 he was a Howling Commando under the command of Captain America." He pointed causally over his shoulder to a framed photo that Peter had never noticed before, black and white newsprint of a group of scruffy men holding firearms and grinning widely.
"Oh. Oh!"
"I only met Captain Rogers once, not long after he came out of the ice. Grandad had passed on already, but he still wanted to see my dad. He was probably the most polite and the saddest person I'd ever met."
"He was from Brooklyn," Peter said, thinking of the first and only time that he and Cap had really interacted prior to Mr Stark's funeral. Of a wild brawl on an airport tarmac in Germany, back before Thanos, before everything had gotten complicated. "He was - he seemed really nice."
"Yeah, he was. And granddad used to say how crazy it got, you know, with the video cameras and the politicians and the other enlistees. There was a whole circus around Captain America, even though Cap was just trying to do his job.
"Look, Peter. I'm sending a letter home with each student about targeted harassment and the use of cell phones in the hallways, but I want you to tell me personally if there's anything else I can do to help, okay? It's my job to be someone you can trust."
"Okay," said Peter, and almost meant it.
But he'd trusted Nick Fury, who the cops now said hadn't been on earth for an entire year, and then he'd trusted Mysterio, who'd turned out to be a liar and a psychopath. He'd also trusted Mr Stark - he'd loved Mr Stark - but Mr Stark was dead now. Uncle Ben was dead. Karen was, in her own way, dead too.
Peter hadn't been able to save any of them, and none of them were here to protect him now.
Peter's half-sketched plan for moving forward with his life almost fell apart before he could implement it.
Sitting alone with his cardboard boxes in a cold metal storage unit, padlock key in hand and late-autumn wind skittering the leaves outside, the situation became painfully clear.
Peter had no place to live, except for an apartment under the name of a dead woman that he could never return to. He had no real money, except for whatever he could withdraw from May's account every day until the bank did whatever they did when customers died and Peter was locked out for the rest of forever. He also had no social security card, no birth certificate, no passport, no school ID, no documentation of any kind.
Peter did not, legally, exist.
Shit.
He needed a laptop. He needed money and new IDs. He needed a steadying hand from a half-dozen people who were now dead, or couldn't remember him, or lived literal universes away.
"I have some pull at MIT," Mr Stark had told him once. Peter had been too furious and too heartbroken to hear it at the time, but in a world where Tony Stark was still alive today, everything would have been different now.
If only.
If only Ms Potts had still been CEO of Stark Industries - if only Peter and Happy had gone to her for help - if only he'd known that the admissions office at MIT might listen to his pleas to reconsider.
But Peter had grown up a working-class kid in a working-class household. He might have tested into the 99.995 percentile for the state, but he never would have thought that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would just answer his calls .
At least now his most drastic measures couldn't hurt anyone that he loved.
Peter went from the storage facility straight to the local library, where he took a free computer guest pass from a tired clerk in a cardigan and soon found himself immersed in a listing of the cheapest and shadiest roommate ads on Craigslist. Here was a lesson that Peter Parker, age seventeen, had only very recently learned in life:
In the city of New York, there was not a single apartment for rent that didn't require proof of employment and a credit score check and references from all previous residences and multiple pay stubs and tax returns proving that he earned at least forty times the monthly rent, what the hell ?!
In times like these he missed Karen's soothing voice in his ear, felt her absence like a real death and wondered if the days would be less empty with her to speak to.
He tried not to think about how her destruction meant one less person on earth to remember the real Tony Stark, or how she had been the last in a dying breed of artificial intelligence. Her loss marked the end of a technological era, now that the genius who'd once birthed them all was gone.
Shortly into the school year, Seymour O'Reilly was handed a two-week suspension for streaming blatantly on TikTok during school hours and narrating loudly as he followed Peter from classroom to classroom. Seymour's parents gave an interview on the morning news about the dangers of allowing a living weapon to interact with unarmed children, then promptly withdrew their son from the school.
Flash Thompson mostly left Peter alone these days unless there were news cameras nearby, but continued to give enthusiastic interviews to the Daily Bugle in promotion of his bestselling book. Peter hoped that his ghostwriter, wherever they were, was getting paid enough to make it worth it.
Either way, neither of these came as a surprise.
Betty Brant's betrayal, on the other hand, completely blindsided him. As the lead presenter of Midtown News, she was one of the few students still allowed to operate a camera indiscriminately on school grounds. It was always her microphone following Peter from place to place, her camera trained on him as he walked past the protestors and the police line and through the school doors.
She did try to defend him to Jameson, Peter knew. But she still took that internship at the Daily Bugle and still went back to their offices each week, excited at every opportunity they handed her to launch a real career. She never really saw how those two things - standing up for Peter and working for Jameson - couldn't coexist.
Ned tried to intervene more than once, as her ex, as her friend. By the end of October they weren't speaking any longer.
Worse was Liz Allan, found by paparazzi while walking to her Ivy League campus and eventually cornered in a deserted stairwell. They burst unceremoniously into the new life she'd carved for herself, surrounding her with microphones and flashing lights. They got the soundbites they'd been looking for.
Liz's mother was currently in the process of suing over those People Magazine covers and the few quotes they'd dragged from her daughter, but without much hope of winning. Liz herself took a leave of absence from Berkeley for the rest of the semester.
Three thousand miles away, watching the updates on his phone from Happy's apartment, Peter silently apologized to and forgave her in the same breath.
Julie Moreno had been working with F.E.A.S.T. and its associate shelters for eight years and three months when she saw the boy walk in, the last of dozens in line to seek assistance from the late afternoon shift.
He wasn't so different from the transitional types they usually saw pouring off of Canal Street, with a knitted beanie and oversize blue coat that made his childish face look particularly glum. The faint shadow of healing bruises dusted his pale cheek and brow.
He was younger than most of the others in line that day, but F.E.A.S.T. had seen plenty of teenage runaways over the years, and no doubt would see more in years to come. They were usually marked by clean faces, decent clothing, too few belongings, and that slightly shell-shocked look of suppressed panic. Some, like this one, showed signs of recent violence. Some of them were struggling with mental illness, some with addiction, and some had simply aged out of the foster care system or fled abusive households.
No way to tell which until you talked to them right, and today Julie was here to do her job until the clock ran out, not to fix a stranger's baggage. That was how she planned on making it to nine years as a counselor without top-to-bottom emotional burnout or being stabbed to death.
It had been a hard week.
"- your ticket for the food bank," she continued to explain, pushing a pack of xeroxed papers across the wooden table into the kid's hands. "It's around the corner and three blocks east. First meal is at seven, second is at five, and we usually recommend people get in line at least an hour before that. It's been hard, with the Blip.
"As for the bed, you got lucky today. Normally you'd need to be signed in by noon if you wanted to grab the last lottery spot, but one of our regulars didn't show today, so we have one bed left. Rules are on the wall; no weapons, no alcohol or illegal substances, and doors are locked at 7 PM. Everyone leaves in the morning. Okay?"
"Okay." The kid glanced up at her before looking down again. His pale hands were fidgety, folding the meal vouchers into increasingly smaller squares as he nodded along.
"Everyone's required to shower - we provide soap and towels - before staying in any of the beds. The showers are communal, no stalls. Anything you bring into the building will also have to be searched before we can let you keep it overnight, and items that violate shelter rules go in the amnesty box. Is this all of your belongings, here?"
The kid's Bambi eyes were pretty much at full power at this point. His hands were still now, arms tight around the backpack in his lap. "Yeah."
"Okay." It was only two more hours until end of shift, Julie reminded herself. Then she could go home and lock her deadbolt. "All of this is also in the pamphlets - these, here and here - but we do have an assistance program that helps pay for storage spaces, short-term rental containers…?"
"No! No, I, uh. I got boxes at a place on 47th. The card on that's probably gonna run out in a few days, but, um. It's okay for now."
That mostly sounded like the credit card was stolen, but either way it wasn't her business.
He's just a kid, Julie reminded herself. It's not his fault your friend is dead and you're overworked.
More gently now, she continued, "No problem. You can also check the pamphlets on our other programs, if you like. They cover what we can offer in terms of financial assistance for housing costs and food insecurity, as well as transitional programs for those in temporary crisis. Food and lodging are the most important things to have while you get back on your feet, right?"
"Right," the boy nodded, now looking more determined and less overwhelmed.
"Until then, our last bed here is yours for the night." Julie started pulling out the paperwork and fished for a pen that the ink hadn't yet run out on. "This is a pretty safe place, but you do need to remember that we're a low-barrier shelter. Our counselors are here all night, but we remind everyone to be on the lookout for theft and sometimes even violence. You're pretty young and pretty small, so I just want to make sure you know that bust-ups can happen in here."
For the first time since walking through their doors, the kid smiled at her faintly. "No, I'll be okay."
Julie looked at him, at the genuine flash of amusement in his eyes, and wondered for the first time how badly she was misjudging the situation. Nearly a decade in the industry had taught her again and again that appearances meant very little, and that repeat offenders came in all ages and sizes. Being young and short didn't mean the kid was incapable of violence. There were boys and girls his age, right now, in jail for premeditated murder.
It's not his fault, she reminded herself again, that your friend is dead because a man from the food bank followed her home and now you have to leave for the subway in pairs every night because you're terrified that you're next. You know what May would say, even now, even after that.
"Alright. Name?"
The boy seemed to hesitate, then said with determination, "Peter. My name's Peter Parker."
Julie ignored a twinge on hearing that answer. It was a common enough surname. "Right. Then to sign you in, I just need some ID."
The silence that greeted those words told her everything that she needed to know.
"It doesn't have to be a driver's license or passport," she continued breezily. "Any kind of state-issued identification will work. We take school badges, birth certificates, anything you have."
"I have a birth certificate," Peter said, looking more panicked by the second. "I mean, of course I have one. I just don't have one… right now. On me. Um."
Keep him calm. This was part of the job. "Lost in the Snap? Don't worry, it's put a lot of other people in the same position. The whole Office of Vital Statistics is still a mess, believe me. Do you know your social?"
"Yeah. Yeah, of course, I just don't know if it… still works." The kid rubbed his face furiously, as if to scrub away the illogic of that statement. "Um, F.E.A.S.T. still issues temporary ID cards, right? Just names and faces on laminated paper? I kind of used to help out with the photos sometimes…."
"You used to volunteer here?" Shit. She didn't recognize him, but some of their previous at-risk youth were their most enthusiastic volunteers, officially and otherwise. A few of them did fall back into hard times after months or even years of stability, and it could prick their pride to come asking for help again.
"Yeah, just a little when I was younger, with my... my friends."
"Then we owe you thanks for your help," Julie said firmly. "You don't need to be a superhero to make a lasting impact in this place, am I right? Yes, we do still issue emergency IDs. You would need to have the shelter listed as your temporary address, but it would work as a platform to getting the rest of your identification papers in order.
"On rare occasions that a resident was born completely off the grid," Julie continued, carefully not checking his reaction, "and has no government-registered presence whatsoever, the process gets a little more complicated. Applying for a social for the first time ever used to involve an interview process and a lot of documentation, but after the Blip, New York State rolled out additional pilot programs with paths to citizenship.
"Registering for a birth certificate is harder. You'd need to submit information on your parents, your birthplace, your school or medical records. They also accept sworn statements or affidavits from those who were present with your mother in the hospital. Anyone who remembers your birth, anyone at all, would be helpful."
Peter was looking fidgety again, so she continued, "The majority of our country's social support systems require your ID. Almost all federal, state, and county agencies rely on them. You need ID in order to have a place to live, a bank account, a SNAP card, or a job."
"...Or to go to college. Oh, man." Here the kid put his head in his hands. "I wouldn't be able to vote, either. MJ would kill me."
Julie didn't know who MJ was, but she admired their civic spirit. "Ever since the Snap resources are stretched pretty thin, but we have lots of counselors and social programs who specialize in replacing lost identification cards and smoothing re-entry to independent living. We can connect you to our social work intern in the morning; she usually comes through on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but she might have space to get some of your paperwork started."
"Okay." Looking up, Peter's eyes were red and his fingers clenched somewhat bloodlessly around each other, but he seemed calmer for having a plan. "Yeah, I would like to do that, please, ma'am."
In the next moment of silence, both of them glanced down at the blank intake paperwork that Julie's pen had been hovering over for the last five minutes.
"So I'll just go," said Peter quietly. "For tonight, I can find someplace…."
"It's going to be cold tonight," Julie said briskly, making up her mind as she said it. "We'll ignore the ID section for now and get you started tomorrow."
"Oh my God, thank you. Thank you so, so much. Not just for this, for everything that all of you do here."
And there it was, really. There was May's legacy, embedded in the very bones of the organization even when the woman herself was gone.
"No problem," said Julie, and for the first time that day, she meant it.
Interview: Virginia Potts on the Passing of a Titan
December 21, 2024 5:01 AM ET
To some, the young billionaire industrialist Tony Stark embodied the principles of a bygone America: Brilliant. Patriotic. Innovative. And above all else, devoted to safeguarding America's freedoms through strength of arms.
The son of legendary weapons developer Howard Stark, as well as CEO and head engineer at tech conglomerate Stark Industries, Tony Stark once oversaw the most lucrative arms manufacturing deals in America outside of Lockheed Martin. In fact, after years of nipping at their competitors' heels, Stark Industries was just accelerating into first place on the global security market when everything changed in the spring of 2008.
The world knows what happened next.
Sixteen years later, that first chapter of Stark's life has been relegated to the footnotes of his biography in favor of new descriptors: Iron Man. Nobel Peace Prize nominee. Superhero. The face of American imperialism. Avenger. The biggest name in the clean energy industry. Vigilante.
He was also referred to as a failure in the five years following what is colloquially referred to in the west as 'The Snap.' Then as a martyr to his cause, after the Blip, and a hero.
Tony Stark is no less controversial in death than he was in life. Stark Industries, like the manufacturing and tech empires of Stark's peers such as Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg, saw partial collapse after the Snap that it is only now rebuilding from.
With its leading innovative mind long-buried and America's new post-Snap billionaires, drone controversies, and cults of personality baying for its blood, the tech and aerospace corporation remains vulnerable. Currently kept afloat by its continued technological superiority and the good will of the Avengers' triumph over the forces of evil, it remains to be seen where the next decade will take Stark's legacy.
Pepper Potts, wife of Tony Stark and former CEO of SI before taking a leave of absence to raise her daughter, remembers the man instead of the public figure. More than a year since her husband died in the battle against Thanos, she is encouraging Americans to remember what he stood for, and of his hopes for a world that would never repeat his own mistakes.
[...]
"We might need to thank Spider-Man for saving the universe," Potts says. For the first time during our interview, her sharp gaze is unfocused. "I never understood why Tony trusted him. We never knew who it was under the mask, even though the Accords should have demanded it. Maybe Tony did know and just never told the rest of us. One in a hundred little things that don't make sense, looking back.
"But I remember that Tony was incredibly fond of him. I think he knew that Spider-Man was young and I think he felt responsible for him, wanted to look after him just like Spider-Man looked after the city."
Outside the idyllic cabin that she and Stark built together, birds are chirping. It's difficult to remember at times that the full flora and fauna of our planet earth only exist because one man, one group of extraordinary individuals, kept fighting until they accomplished the impossible.
"Tony never really talked about what happened to him on Titan, right before the Snap, but I know he was with Spider-Man when it happened. I know that that loss, that particular grief, never really left Tony. One of the things I'm so grateful for is that they were able to reunite on the battlefield before Tony… before he passed."
[...]
Anthony Edward Stark was born on May 29, 1970, and died on Oct. 15, 2023.
Nessa Siu for NPR. (Archived)
The number of items on Peter Parker's to-do list seemed, at times, to be ever-growing.
Patrol. Study for the GED. Talk to that social worker. Fill out the paperwork. So, so much paperwork. Figure out where to live. Find a place to put your money until you have a bank account. Look for jobs that don't require documentation. Don't think about how easy the GED prep materials are, how this is leagues behind MIT, how your future is never going to be what you planned. Write down what you're going to say to Ned and MJ. Actually talk to Ned and MJ. Break your promise, give up on your plan. Go back to visit them anyway, again and again.
And then there was the matter of Peter's birth certificate, which he most definitely did not have.
The thing was, Peter had spent years patrolling the shadier parts of his city. He'd been down dark alleys, he'd brushed elbows with criminals of every conceivable type, and seen dozens of fake IDs while escorting drunk frat guys safely back to their homes at night. He absolutely, one hundred percent knew how and where to procure fake documentation.
It just felt hypocritical, was all. It felt like he deserved to web himself up and present himself on the steps of the nearest police precinct, apology note in hand.
In the end, it was a choice between hypocrisy and the prospect of months - maybe years - of homelessness and joblessness. So here he was in Brooklyn on a Saturday morning, bouncing nervously on his toes and ringing the doorbell of a known criminal.
Aaron Davis opened the door and looked immediately unenthused to see him.
"Look kid, I'm not buying girl scout cookies, alright? Whatever trouble you're bringing, I got my nephew in here, so. Come back tomorrow."
"I'm not here for trouble," said Peter hurriedly, hands out of his pockets and fingers spread wide. "I'm not, I swear. I just. Look, I got Snapped and then I got into some legal issues and all my stuff is gone and I don't have any family left so if I don't get ID of some kind I'm going to be homeless forever and you wouldn't remember this but you were pretty nice to me once when you didn't have to be? Um."
For a moment they just looked at each other, the hallway silent except for the sound of video games coming from the far end of the apartment. Davis's eyebrows were raised very high.
"Do I know your voice from somewhere?" He asked eventually, squinting. "You're not a narc, are you? You would be, like, the worst narc ever."
Calm down, Peter told himself as though his heartbeat wasn't belying his panic. Davis had heard Spider-Man's voice both under the bridge and in that parking garage, but it had been years, at this point.
"I'm not with the cops," he said. "You wouldn't remember, but we kind of helped each other out a long time ago and I just really, really need a good fake ID or I can't live anywhere or work a job or get my GED."
"...You know about, like, the internet, right? Kids your age usually get fake licenses and shit off Reddit so they can go drinking."
"It's a little more complicated than that," Peter said, falling back on honesty as his refuge. "And I've just never done this before. I can pay you, I promise. This is just really important to me."
Davis rolled his eyes, and all of a sudden Peter was reminded forcibly of Peter Three. A doormat in an East New York high-rise was miles from a scaffold on Liberty Island, but the sarcasm felt similar. The buried warmth did, too. "Fine, I might know a guy to call. But your ass stays out here in the hall and you don't talk to my nephew."
Peter ended up glimpsing the nephew anyway, just briefly as they both left under the fading daylight. He was a bright-eyed, sweet-faced teenager with bouncy hair twists and red Jordans. He was younger than Peter, but already taller. He gave Peter a brief once-over as he walked past, clearly found him wanting, and threw him a sarcastic little wave goodbye.
Peter awkwardly waved back. Then he forgot about the incident entirely until, years later, Miles Morales crashed back into his life like fate on a pendulum.
That night, Peter still did his daily swing by the Peter Pan Donut & Pastry Shop. He listened to the generic Christmas music already blasting from the speakers overhead and watched MJ chat with Ned, who was playing Beast Slayers on his laptop. Then Peter bought his coffee and left.
The two of them hadn't met his eyes once.
MJ had never been a sociable person at the best of times, Peter knew. He had been suddenly and sharply reminded of this on the third occasion he showed up to the cafe, a stuttering mess as usual, and watched her body language grow more and more tense the longer he talked.
It was the kind of body language he saw on women walking home alone at night when a jogger got too close, and he'd not seen it on MJ in years.
He had to fix that, but not today. It was just one more thing on the ever-growing agenda.
The final item on Peter's to-do list was the vaguest and most difficult; make everyone believe I'm not a murderer . This item had no sub-categories or strategies scribbled next to it, partially because the circumstances around it seemed to vacillate daily.
By the time December rolled around, Peter needed a chart to keep track of Spider-Man's hypothetical and actual legal troubles. Even without the complicating factor of his secret underage identity, which had previously swayed public opinion both for and against him, there was no end to the mess.
Mr Murdock, Aunt May's friendly and terrifyingly competent pro-bono lawyer - and there was another thing Peter had been meaning to check out, because the brick catch had been straight-up weird but then about eight hundred other things had happened - was no longer around to detangle things into layman's speak.
The best that Peter could remember, the solution to his legal troubles had mostly come down to Mr Stark officially deputizing him under the Sokovia Accords for that airport fight in Germany, which had been hastily signed off on by Secretary Ross. This had arguably authorized Peter to continue operating under supervision within the borders of the United States, but then there was the Blip, and London, and Mysterio's accusations, and Peter's age, and the Department of Damage Control, and it had all gotten very confusing.
At least there were no more grown firefighters literally bursting into tears when Spider-Man showed up, or paramedics trying to keep him out of danger just because he looked just like their kid back at home. One cop had asked, in low but urgent tones, if Peter wanted to date his daughter, and then threatened to arrest him when he said no. A graffiti artist tagging an alley wall with "Believe Mysterio!" had seen Peter watching and immediately asked for an autograph. That same week, a drug dealer had tried to invite Spider-Man in for soup because she thought he looked too skinny.
Stuff had just started getting really weird.
Outside of the day-to-day, things had been no less confusing. Spider-Man was officially banned from Europe for property damage and vigilantism, which seemed unfair but was better than the alternative of about five hundred years in jail. The Friends of Mysterio, a short-lived political party, campaigned on an anti-vigilantism platform. The mayor of New York officially requested of the World Security Council that Spider-Man be allowed to continue patrolling, which had caused tension between the WSC and the United Nations, as well as between the mayor and his constituents. The evening news that night featured cell phone footage of AOC verbally body-slamming a fellow congresswoman who had seen fit to question Peter's moral character on the basis of Aunt May's low income bracket. The video had ten million views on YouTube.
In the end, E.D.I.T.H. turned out to be both a legal nightmare for Stark Industries and an unexpected miracle for Peter. The glasses had recorded everything they witnessed onto private Stark servers, which the Department of Damage Control had finally gained access to after months of negotiation.
In doing so, they had effectively proven Spider-Man's innocence. This much Peter knew.
What he did not know was that during this investigation an extra file had been discovered amongst the archives. A digital file, a video recording made by Tony Stark in his comfortable countryside home not days before his death.
The official transcript of that video ran like this:
[File Start]
Entry for the day. The glasses are almost done.
Well, I say almost. Last thing I have to do is add a biometric lock, so no one like SHIELD can get their dirty paws on 'em. I'll finish it after we're done with all this time travel shit, if the world doesn't end. Again.
And I've decided that I'm leaving them for the kid.
I know that if we were going by Cap's righteous moral code, he'd say nobody should have 'em at all. Hell, in an ideal world they wouldn't exist. But our little planet is far from paradise, so. Maybe we need this. For if Thanos ever happens again. Do or die, and all that.
I know, I know, we tried this before. Suit of armor around the world didn't really work out. But if we face another purple-alert-level threat someday, we might have to sacrifice a little more integrity to stop the murder of even more trillions. And if it needs to be my integrity, that's fine, so be it. I can take that.
So yeah, if this mission gets the kid back, if we get him back, then E.D.I.T.H. will go to him. For when he's older, obviously, though God knows he's - he was - wiser than I was at sixteen. Peter Parker had a fucking heart of gold, and if I hadn't fucked up so bad, if we hadn't….
It doesn't matter. What matters is that I know he'd have grown into a better man than I've ever been, and I would have trusted him, in the face of an impossible choice, to err on the side of compassion.
It's all anybody could ask, I guess.
Again, someday. If this works and he lives to see the other side of puberty.
Okay, that's enough navel-gazing for now. Signing off.
[File End]
Peter would never see this recording. The DDC had never shown it to him, and after the last magic spell was complete, the file no longer existed.
"Hey Michelle, heads up." Dana was MJ's only tolerable co-worker, the one who had first shown her the ropes of the job with equal amounts of kindness and exhaustion. The one with whom MJ had eventually bonded over mutual hatred of their current jobs in particular and human beings in general.
Neither of them were precisely made for customer service.
"The weird kid is back," Dana said now, tossing a look toward the door. Sure enough, there he was; pale and short, with a nervous gait and neatly parted hair just starting to curl around his ears. "You want me to run him off?"
Dana was probably capable of bench-pressing the Weird Kid - who was actually around MJ's age and whose name was Peter Parker, something they all knew and refused to use, because encouraging stalkers was bad policy - and in fact offered to on a daily basis.
MJ had thus far declined the offers. Mostly because their boss would fire them both, and partially because she'd always had a weird fascination with people in crisis. The Weird Guy definitely had the general vibe of being on the borderline.
She kind of wanted to draw him and hang the charcoal caricature in her bedroom. She also kind of wanted to report him to the police, but he'd been genuinely harmless so far and besides, cops were bastards.
Today the Weird Guy seemed even more nervous than usual as she approached, standing first on one foot and then the other in front of her counter.
"Hi," he said in that high, rough voice she'd come to recognize. Then he took a deep breath and met her eyes firmly. "I'm not here for coffee, I'm actually - I'm here because I wanted to apologize. To you."
MJ kept her face blank and reminded herself of the location of the panic button. "Oh?"
"Uh, yeah. Um, look, I know I've been weird a lot of the time when I come in, and I'm sorry. You - I had a bunch of really awful stuff happen a few weeks ago, and I'm not complaining or anything, I'm not making excuses, just. A few people I was really close to kind of died, and you remind me of one of them a lot." He looked away before swallowing and turning back at her with clear determination. "And I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be weird about it, you deserve better than that. Especially at work. Uh. I know that creepy guys often break social rules in order to take advantage of customer service professionals in the workplace, and that's not okay."
And that last bit was weird, because MJ had said the exact same thing many times, almost word-for-word. That was twice this guy had basically plucked a thought straight out of her brain.
Maybe she was a lot like his dead friend after all.
"It's fine," she said finally, mostly meaning it. It wasn't the first time a guy got creepy from across the counter, and it wouldn't be the last. Besides, if he was telling the truth then he was just an innocent, stealthy-cute dude having a really, really bad end to his semester.
Peter Parker nodded back at her, visibly reining in his own relief. "Right. Okay. Cool."
"And I'm sorry," MJ added before she could think better of it.
"Sorry?"
"For your loss," she expanded, and watched all the little ways his face changed upon hearing it. Still in crisis, definitely. "Just don't get weird on me again."
Then she brought him a hot tea on the house.
The Puzzling Case of the Three Spider-Men
17.3M views · Jan 13, 2025
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What really happened during the Battle at the Statue, is the multiverse real, and who were the mysterious new villains who appeared so fleetingly to challenge the Big Apple's most controversial Avenger?
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41,761 Comments
BettyOnTheReady 15 hours ago
I'm surprised you guys didn't cover the two MIT students who were found at the scene. They were Midtown Tech grads, the same class that was saved by Spider-Man in Washington AND ALSO in Europe and their stories to LE were super shady. I think one of them is one of the non-OG Spider-men (or women!) from the fight that night. Whoever they are, I firmly believe they saved the city and have nothing but thanks for them. #PostMortem
rhondajams 2 hours ago
"most controversial avenger" the hulk broke harlem are you guys on crack
The seasons changed, pulling a chilly autumn firmly into early winter, and Peter walked through the city of New York alone. He slept on a second-hand mattress in his run-down apartment alone, cooked reduced-price meals in his single pot on a broken stovetop alone, and every morning chased several enterprising rodents from his kitchen cabinets alone. He thought about getting a cat, then imagined it abandoned to die if he failed to come home from patrol someday and never looked at the local pet shelter listings again. He tried, through all of this, to remember that Peter Parker had spent his entire lifetime beloved, even if those who once loved him were now either dead or no longer recognized his name and face.
He also thought of the other Peters, back at home in their own worlds, and wondered if they still felt his presence in a corner of their chest the same way he still felt theirs. Wondered what they were doing with their lives and if they remembered anything of the night that Aunt May died.
Most of Peter's early mornings were taken up with volunteering at the F.E.A.S.T. food bank on the edge of Chinatown, helping to carry delivery boxes and dish out hot soup and scrub the bathrooms with bleach. Ms Moreno greeted him each morning with hands on her hips and a verbal to-do list, and Peter got to spend just a little more time each day thanking her for all that she'd done. It was worth it, even if he had to walk past their framed photo of May behind the front desk every single time. Even if he had to ignore the all other employees' conversations every time they spoke about her.
A few days into volunteering, Peter worked his first evening shift and finally noticed that it was policy, not preference, for F.E.A.S.T. employees to leave for the subway in pre-decided pairs each night. Tension was high every time they prepared for the commute home. There were training videos that he was forced to watch, too; how to notice if you are being followed in a public area, how to call the authorities, how to maintain clear boundaries between yourselves and the shelter residents, how to ensure that your private address was not easily available on the internet.
And, well. Spider-Man wasn't the official F.E.A.S.T. mascot anymore - without May's connection to her nephew, it was more practical to separate themselves from his now-controversial endorsement - but the least Peter could do was keep them all safe. He changed his volunteer schedule to pre-noon hours and now Spider-Man started every evening patrol by shelter-hopping, trying to remain unseen while ensuring everyone boarded the subway unharassed.
In early afternoons, Peter made a lunch of store-brand peanut butter sandwiches and tap water, and worked over the GED handbooks he'd already memorized back-to-front. On late nights he bought groceries at the corner bodega with the calculator app open on his phone, totaling every single thing he put in his basket until it hit the monthly budget of his SNAP card. After a week of dropping into the Best Buy on Queens Boulevard, he finally found a FreedomPop calling plan that fit his budget of exactly zero dollars per month. And all hours of the day he scrolled through dozens of job applications, all of which required a minimum of two personal or professional references. Piled under sweatshirts and blankets in his drafty room, he watched YouTube tutorials about sewing machine care and waited for his identification paperwork to come in.
Life continued on.
Jonah Jameson was still shouting his gripes daily, of course, and was still richer than Peter would ever be. With little new to report on, though, his viewership was steadily dropping. The Daily Bugle scrambled, turned to other hot topics in the political discourse, and found itself in a lose-lose turf squabble with InfoWars that would still be in litigation months later.
In desperation Jameson returned to his roots, dragging Spider-Man's name every hour, then tried to tangent into spearheading a class-action lawsuit against the Avengers for failing to have stopped the Snap. A popular topic for discussion immediately post-Thanos, the tide of public opinion had since swayed massively back in the Avengers' favor following the Blip, and accordingly Jameson now faced an upswell of public opposition. Sponsors began to drop his show in dribs and drabs. A YouTube segment, featuring Legal Eagle mercilessly ripping the filings apart alongside special guests Matthew Murdock and Hbomberguy, made circles on TikTok and Reddit.
Then in late December an office intern publicly accused Jameson's lead producer of improper sexual conduct and was promptly fired, resulting in an explosive lawsuit. Three other female employees walked out in solidarity. Betty Brant was one of them.
Peter watched the proceedings on his busted cell phone, taking advantage of the local library's free WiFi and biding his time in its warmth until closing. Then he scraped together some change and left a tiny gift basket on the intern's Brighton Beach doorstep.
It was a super adult thing to have done, he thought as he swung away. He was doing really well, all things considered. Most days he totally didn't even cry anymore.
Then the sky cracked open into screaming purple cosmic space over Bleecker Street, and everything was a mess of battle magic and giant tentacle monsters and searing pain -
The air blurred and rent and Peter found himself falling upward into the void. Just before the darkness poured in, he found himself wishing that someone would catch him.
Raising Peter Parker had never been a particularly easy task for May and Ben.
As an infant and then a toddler, their nephew had been a delight; giggly and sweet and easy to care for. Smart just like his parents, too, in a way that May hadn't known one could see in a child that young.
As his fourth birthday passed, and then his fifth, it became clear that Peter was other things too. Shy until he warmed up to you, and then a real chatterbox once he did. Often obedient. Always eager to please.
Mary Parker nee Fitzpatrick in particular had always doted on him, and he'd loved her in return as fiercely as a small child could. He'd inherited much of her personality, if few of her hobbies; in her adolescence she had been a painter and also a dancer, neither of which young Peter took much interest in. Years later, though, May would wonder if there wasn't something tying Peter's photography to his mother's art, or if the camera was simply a tool for a boy who felt more comfortable documenting the world than participating in it.
But it was Richard, Peter's eternally heroized father, who had been nearest to the kid in spirit. Richard had been the star of the Parker family since infancy and was smug about his fancy education to boot, to hear Ben tell it. But little Peter trotted happily after his father whenever possible, cherishing the weekend mornings spent in Richard's home office. They seemed to enjoy nothing more than cracking open picture books about engines together, or chess boards, or ten-and-up chemistry sets.
Even in those early years, it was sometimes hard for Ben-the-dropout and May-with-her-GED to connect with their nephew.
On sleepover weekends, they could only listen and hope they were expressing appropriate interest as Peter chattered away. Over the years, he would proceed to academically outstrip his classmates before he had even graduated pre-school. He was already reading at a fifth grade level. His preliminary test scores, Mary once told them, always put him in the 99th percentile. They hadn't IQ tested him yet, but he was probably a member of Mensa, whatever that was, like his father.
He was five years old.
Still, Peter and Ben had always been like two peas in a pod. Ben knew how to get on his level without talking down to him, and also how to be strict when necessary. He spoke to Peter about his building projects, about the technicalities of construction, and their nephew absorbed it all like a sponge.
Meanwhile, although it was May that Peter came to for hugs and good cooking and she loved him dearly, she found little else to connect over. It didn't help that she'd never entirely felt that she knew her husband's brother. Whether this was because of his classified work or his close-mouthed personality, something that changed only in the presence of his gregarious wife, May couldn't say.
Anyway, on news of Mary and Richard Parker's death, May's first and most selfish thought had been panic. Panic that she would have to be a mother, something she'd never wanted to begin with, to a little boy she didn't entirely understand.
It hardly mattered. The Peter Parker they went on to raise, the one who'd lived through his parents' deaths, bore only partial resemblance to the boy they'd known before.
If only they had died when he was younger, May would think desperately during that first year, and then again when he turned twelve, and again at seventeen. If only he barely remembered Mary and Richard -
But he did remember them, and that void was hard to fill. It took May and Ben months, alongside some well-placed words from a social worker, to realize the magnitude of what was expected from modern parents. The books, the parenting classes, the child psychology courses. She and Ben went through adoption classes at the local community center together, overwhelmed to be students again on top of everything else.
The problem was that they had expected the sadness from Peter, of course, but not the hurt. Or the anger. The social withdrawal. The sense of abandonment, because he was old enough to remember that his parents had chosen to leave him the night before they died.
So with everything in mind, May spent most of those early months cursing Mary, Richard, and their damned secrets every evening before bed.
Of course, she would eventually be forced to acknowledge that she felt guilty, too.
Guilty because they were accidentally killing the legacy Peter's parents had left, the future they had planned for their son, a little more every day. Hell, by Peter's final year of elementary school they couldn't keep up with his equations any longer.
Guilty also because they knew Peter's mother had been Jewish, knew Mary and Richard had been raising him to keep the customs and holidays, but May and Ben celebrated Christmas and Easter and didn't know the first thing about where to start with anything else.
Guilty because they had never meant to be parents, dammit.
May wasn't alone, of course. Ben was struggling with his grief, and also struggling with his anger toward Richard for leaving the kid behind. For not being with them, day to day, to see what the loss had done to his child.
It made talking to Peter about his parents difficult, over the coming years. It was easier to focus on youthful escapades and child-friendly anecdotes like Mary's famous holiday roast or Richard's nerdy jokes. Ben had treated those stories as tiny gifts, wrapped up and parceled out for Peter, who took them preciously and was always hungry for more. They were all afraid of that well running dry.
The Parkers' one saving grace through all this had been little Harry Osborn, whose richer-than-God father owned the company Richard had worked for, and whom Peter had first met when they were toddlers at their mothers' hips.
May was never sure that she liked Harry - even as a child there was something sharp about his gaze that never let her forget he came from money - but she did love him. He was the first person to make Peter laugh again after his parents died, and the only one whose sharp wit could distract him when his temper flared. The two of them shook each other up, with Peter keeping Harry grounded and Harry coaxing out Peter's own whipcrack sense of humor.
Then Harry Osborn was shipped off to boarding school under the disapproving eye of his father, and they never saw him again.
Nearly all of the progress that May and Ben had made was undone that summer.
But Peter was their boy, May thought sometimes, hers and Ben's in every way that mattered. It was her arm that he fell asleep on after a goodnight story, and it was her chair that he stood by on sunny weekend afternoons, helping to chop carrots with his thin, careful fingers. She could see bits of Ben in him too, in the way that he naturally looked out for people. In the way that he noticed tiny injustices in the world around them every day.
So Peter grew up changing light bulbs for Ben and programming new cell phones for May, still sweet under that layer of glum, even if he had trouble meeting strangers' eyes now. Even if that stutter got worse, and then worse again, throughout grade school. Peter was whipcord thin and uncoordinated, terrible at sports to Ben's great dismay, and happiest when in his room alone. Along with the reading glasses and the braces, it didn't exactly help him make friends.
But all of that restless energy had to go somewhere. First it was roller blades, which he took to far faster than May's nerves were prepared to handle, and then skateboarding; something about the smoothness of the motion, the solitary nature of it, and the way he could speed through the city fast enough to see everything but interact with nothing. He'd always liked to fly.
Once high school started and the braces came off and the glasses had been switched for prescription contacts, Peter finally showed hints of growing into a handsome kid someday. He still moved on the edges of society looking in, though. When they asked him about friends, he would shrug and say, "I had Harry," then go lock himself in his room. What he did in there was mostly a mystery to May, who didn't have much to do with the World Wide Web aside from sending the occasional email. She assumed that he was "hacking" things, listening to rock n' roll and building gadgets until late in the night, which accounted for the ever-present shadows under his eyes.
"Depression" wasn't a word that had been allowed in her own mother's house. Likewise, being picked on at school, failing to be one of the boys or - God forbid - deciding you liked boys when you were one yourself, these were all topics that May hadn't the faintest idea how to handle.
She would have asked him about any crushes at school, but even after his third year at Midtown Science, she was worried that his answer would be the same: "I had Harry."
Then one day in Peter's senior year the water heater flooded their basement, bringing with it the ghost of Richard Parker and his damned job. After that, it was like something had gotten its hooks into Peter and wouldn't let go.
And May had thought she'd seen the last of the damage Richard's secrets could do.
The night that Peter came home so obviously strung-out, so obviously high, May sat in the living room and cried after he went up to bed. Ben held her and gently stroked her back. She knew that he was cautiously amused by the whole situation, and had gotten into plenty of light, mostly harmless trouble himself as a teenager. He'd worked out that marijuana was probably involved here, even as May was still wringing her hands about alcohol. But it still felt like a shock to her, this hint that she knew her nephew so little. Only the day before she'd have sworn up and down that Peter would never have touched the stuff.
Things snowballed quickly after that. Peter grew forgetful, angrier and more insolent, increasingly getting into trouble at school and skipping class. It felt like they were losing him as surely as they'd lost his parents. May grew more stressed. Ben stopped finding it funny.
And then Ben was dead.
May had hoped, when she could finally feel anything other than numb grief, that this might at least bring her and Peter closer together. Instead he was more antisocial than ever, his bedroom door locked each night and the room beyond it so silent that May began to suspect it was empty.
The whole apartment felt empty, now.
When May finally caught her nephew in the kitchen, scavenging for food late one night, he had bruises down his face and blood in his hair that no skateboarding accident could explain. It hurt to see. He also wouldn't tell her what was happening, or whether it was happening with his consent, and that hurt worse. Peter was 130 pounds soaking wet; he couldn't possibly start a fight without getting broken in half.
At least he didn't seem to be noticeably under the influence anymore, but she saw him so rarely that it was hard to tell.
The weeks passed torturously. Sitting up alone in the early morning chill as she waited for her last living relative to come home, the kitchen light buzzing and the city too quiet outside, May wondered if it was the beginning of the end for what remained of her family. Wondered if there was a way back from this place, or if her boy was already gone, destined to end up another statistic on the NY1.
Years later, after the reveal of so many secrets, after Spider-Man, after Gwen, she still wouldn't be entirely sure of the answer.
The first thing that Peter saw after opening his eyes was a painfully bright blue sky. As he blinked through cosmic dust and fleeting nausea, his other senses brought the world in more slowly; the bustle of a busy street, the smell of exhaust, and the feel of rough cement under his back.
Peter groaned a few times, clutching his head. When his gaze finally focused, a nimble form in red and blue spandex was crouched by his side.
"Hey buddy. You alright there?" The figure was leaning over him with obvious concern.
"Ugh," Peter managed. He shoved himself into a sitting position, waiting for the ringing in his head to settle. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw the sky flicker purple.
The city around them was both familiar and not. They were on a Fifth Avenue rooftop, wedged between a low retaining wall and a cluster of interested pigeons. Peter recognized the streets below and the architecture that surrounded them, but not the skyline. The Avengers Tower was gone from its prized place over Grand Central. Instead a towering structure rose from somewhere around 57th Street, taller even than the Trade Center, all sharp angles against the skyline. As Peter's vision cleared further, the emblazoned word "Oscorp" swam into focus along the building's side.
A gloved hand waved in front of his face. "Hey, how many fingers am I holding up?" The costume was familiar enough, a funhouse mirror copy of the one Peter pulled on every day before patrol, but the form it was fitted to seemed taller and lankier.
"Hey Spider-Man," Peter said in greeting, and then stopped. There was no non-insane way to ask,"Are you one of the Peter Parkers that helped me fight a dinosaur on the night my aunt died? And if so, do you remember me? Or are you, like, a totally different me and this is a totally different world?"
Seemingly unbothered, the other Spider-Man looked Peter up and down and said, "Peter One, right? I love the new suit, man!"
"...Peter Three?" The ambient pain in his body was beginning to localize as the shock wore off, but that was unimportant right now. "You remember me?"
The man in the large-eyed mask - Peter Three, almost definitely - cocked his head to one side. "Why, should I not?"
"Uh, no reason." Peter One swayed slightly. Someone in the universe still remembered him. "Things got a little complicated after you left. The fabric of reality from cracking, so we basically had to do a memory spell -"
In the street below there was an eruption of screeching brakes, honking, and coarse words. Peters One and Three watched from the edge of the roof as the incident quietly resolved itself, all parties going their way uninjured. In the distance the sky was still a mottled purple over Greenwich Village. The air was chilly and the rooftop smelled of pigeon poop.
Peter One was happier than he had been in weeks.
"Anyway," He finished, turning back to their conversation. "It's fine, no big deal."
"Yeah, yeah, no big deal, got it. Your foot is leaking so much blood, dude. Hold on."
Before Peter One could answer, Peter Three had snagged him around the waist, swung them both into an empty alley, and plopped them down on a rusted fire escape. After scanning for cameras and signs of life Peter Three pulled his mask off, leaving it half-nested in his hair, and leaned forward. "Tell me what happened."
The sight of a friendly face from before, the first one after so long, was a little hard to bear.
Peter One shrugged, then reluctantly pulled off his own mask and leaned back against the fire escape. "It's just like I said. The fabric of reality was cracking, people from all sorts of universes were going to start pouring in because they knew me. Because they knew Peter Parker. So we just made everyone on the planet forget that I exist."
"Wh- everyone on the planet? What about Ned? Peter, what about MJ?"
Peter Three was looking at him with wide eyes, mouth slightly parted and eyebrows askew in - surprise? amusement? concern? His face was the least familiar out of the Peters Cubed, slightly foreign where Peters One and Two could have been mistaken for son and father. And whereas Peter Two had seemed calm, reserved, with a flash-in-the-pan kind of anger rather than a slow brood, Peter Three's expressions ran wilder, sadder, more impish.
It was as though all the years that Peter One had spent laughing with Ned over Saturday morning cartoons and watching the sky with wonderment as the Avengers saved the earth, Peter Three had been living a very different childhood.
For just a moment, Peter One wished that Aunt May could have met him, too.
"Politeness and a smile, Peter. No matter where these people come from or what choices they've made, they deserve a kind start to their day."
Peter One had been a little kid when Aunt May first said it to him, just inching past shoulder-height and already helping her shift boxes of canned goods from F.E.A.S.T. truck to shelter pantry on weekends. She'd never stopped being that kind of selfless, even as she lay shocked and bleeding in his arms.
Stop it. Peter One closed his eyes, allowing himself just one second to get it together. Just stop thinking about it.
"She's safe. They're both safe now. The point is that I just didn't think you'd still remember me, I guess."
"Okay." Peter Three squinted, looking him up and down. "But I'm not from your planet, right? We - we haven't exactly been able to focus test this branch of quantum physics, but a spell cast on earth would have affected you as the epicenter, not fundamentally changed those of us in our own space-time. Besides, did you forget about yourself?"
"No," said Peter One, realizing it as he said it.
Peter Three shrugged back at him, a little smile on his lips as if to say, well, there you go. Then, pulling a faintly beeping gizmo from the underside of the fire escape and tossing it in one hand, "So how'd you get here? There's been crazy energy readings across the city since last night, cosmic radiation, you name it. Been tracking it all day, gave me an excuse to screw around with polynomial-time algorithms. I found you after the last spike and swung you over here, but another one is building already. Looks like the apex basically marks wormhole portals between worlds. God, that's awesome."
"Yeah, I think there's an interdimensional rift over the Sbarro in Greenwich now."
"Cool, cool, cool. So what's the deal?"
Peter leaned his head back against the chilly brick and tried to think. "There's probably a battle raging downtown in my 'verse, and I think they could use my help. I really hate magic."
"Magic," Peter Three said wistfully, in the tones of a small child pressing their face to the car window while passing a chocolate factory. "Was it the asshole with the cape again?"
"Stephen's really nice," Peter One said uncertainly, which wasn't a denial. His memory from before the rift was muddled, but the octopus monster had been kind of a lot. "And I do need to get back. I'm sorry, I don't know what's happening and he probably needs me."
"Uh huh. On a scale of one to ten, how bad is that leg hurting you right now?"
"What leg?" Peter One crossed his arms over his chest and almost instantly heard a voice in his head echoing, "You need to get better at this part of the job."
"C'mon, Peter. The interdimensional Sbarro rift is on track to open again in about six hours, at a guess." Peter Three shook the gizmo as it made a whirring sound. "I can get you patched up, fed, and back here in time to catch your ride home. Sound good?"
"Six hours. You're sure?"
Peter Three just shook the gizmo again, reassuringly.
"Right. Okay. So." This was already the longest conversation that Peter One had had outside of the mask in weeks. Between falling through a cosmic rift and the shooting pain in his leg, none of it felt entirely real. "Now that I'm here, can I, like, help you out, or…? I won't mess up your universe and I won't make trouble 'til I've got to go back, I promise."
Peter Three squinted at him again. "Yeah," he said slowly. "Yeah, I definitely need help with - with - with -" He gestured vaguely with one hand.
"That's great!" Peter One could help instead of needing to be rescued this time, and maybe prove himself to his older - self? - instead of ruining everything, always, forever. "So are we just patrolling the streets, or?"
Peter Three quirked a weird little smile at him before standing up, pulling his mask on, and yanking a full-stuffed backpack from the underside of an air conditioning unit above their heads. "It's Peter Parker stuff, actually."
They leaped out of the alley, paused to give an elderly woman directions in broken Spanish - she seemed to take the costumes completely in stride and gave Peter One a very sweet pat on the shoulder before shuffling toward the subway - and then swung onward.
Their first real stop was at a brick-faced veterans' counseling center on the lower east side, guarded by a cold little waiting room and a number of colorful pamphlets by the door.
The Peters Squared sat side-by-side in the lobby, thoroughly ignored by the receptionist in favor of her magazine. Patients came and went, easy listening music played overhead, and Peter Three fiddled with a thick white envelope in his lap as he watched the clock. They had both changed into civvies behind the nearest dumpster, and Peter One was now wearing a borrowed hoodie and frayed sweatpants that were far too long for him. His red Spider-Man boots peaked out the bottom, and he felt weirdly naked dressed so casually in public. He had grown up in button-ups and sweaters; MJ had once called it a natural product of being raised by an older couple, but she hadn't minded. She hadn't cared that he didn't look cool.
The lobby clock ticked toward the hour.
Visitors passed by in a trickle; a young woman with a dog in a red vest, then a middle-aged man with a pinned-up sleeve, then an elderly gentleman wheeled up to the double doors by a sturdy-looking caretaker. Peters One and Two nearly tripped over each other as they leapt to hold the doors open, calling him "sir" and the nurse "ma'am " in near unison.
The clock over the reception desk struck noon, and in a growing swell of noise, men and women began streaming out of the opposite hallway. The final man to walk into the lobby was tall and blocky, with close-buzzed hair and a smile that lit up his face as soon as he saw them.
"Yo, Parker!"
"Hey, Eugene." Peter Three stood.
"And who's the kid?"
"I'm Pe- Peter. Peter's friend. I'm Peter's friend, uh, Steve. Rogers. Nice to meet you, sir."
"Shit, Parker, you got friends?" Eugene gave 'Steve's' shoulder a friendly slap that probably would have bowled him over if he hadn't been Spider-Man. "I'm kidding. Any friend of this guy's is a friend of mine, alright? He and I go way back. Parker, you got the photos?"
"Yeah, right here. The paper's a little crinkled, but they should be fine. I sent the JPGs to Copeland, too, for the next issue. Sorry it took so long."
"No problem, man. Glad to see you around more again. And hey, how's the big guy doing? Taken any pictures of him lately?"
"He's not bad, not bad. We don't really talk, but I think he's doing alright."
Peter Three was, Peter One noted, a far more casual and comfortable liar than he himself had ever managed to be. He wondered if it came with age.
"You tell him he always had a fan in me, yeah? I'm still rooting for him."
"Next time I see him, I promise." Peter Three had a hand half-raised in farewell and was already edging back toward the door, as if trying to head off -
"- And think about coming to a session sometime, okay? I know, I know, don't give me that look. Can't stop trying. You know it's going to be ten years on -"
"Yeah, gotta run. Always a pleasure, Thompson."
The doors shut behind them with a click.
"So," said Peter One, limping to join Peter Three on the freezing sidewalk. "'Thompson.' Is there any chance he used to bully you when you guys were my age?"
"Oh fuck, no way?"
"Yeah. ….Did he ever call you 'Penis Parker'?"
"Hah! Nah, he wasn't much for alliteration in high school. One time he kicked me 'til my ribs bruised, though."
"...Shit."
"Yeah. You up to run one more errand?"
"Yeah, of course," said Peter One, still standing on glass and feeling his blood trying to clot around the wounds.
"Great, great." Peter Three started leading them toward the subway. "Look, I'm just gonna - I don't know if I'd want to, if it was me, but I'd want to know that - uh, it's Aunt May. She's alive, here. She still lives in Forest Hills on the other side of town."
Peter One was vaguely aware that he'd stopped dead in the street. A pedestrian banged into his shoulder and went stumbling, not having expected the teenager a foot shorter than her to be as immovable as a mountain.
Peter Three was watching him carefully. "She doesn't look like your May at all, but I thought you should know. I was supposed to pick some stuff up from her after she gets off morning shift, but if you can't do this right now, I'll just tell her something came up. She won't exactly be surprised."
The wind kept battering at them and Peter One still stood in place, trying to shrug off the phantom comfort of Ned and MJ's arms around his shoulders. This was neither the time nor the place for another panic attack, so he focused on little things: The cars passing by, the blinking of the street lights, the faded brick of the building face. The window of the counseling center had so many flyers taped to it that most overlapped; disability education, support numbers, national hotlines. Grief circles.
"I mean, you need to do your errand, right?" Before he even began to speak, his feet were already moving.
The Forest Hills apartment was a two-story walk-up and didn't look anything like the high-rise Peter One had known since childhood. The brick facing was familiar but there was white trim around the doors and windows, more greenery along the sidewalk, and no tower of other floors above or below.
The sounds of the block were textured and live and real around them. The speeding of a bicycle, the chattering of pedestrians from a block over, the R Train rumbling distantly below their feet as it trundled back westward. Somewhere in the neighboring unit a TV buzzed, and the smell of baking bread floated from an open window.
It all seemed very far away.
They had swung as far as Manhattan Bridge and then hopped on the subway for a free ride across East River to get here, but Peter One couldn't make himself take the next few steps.
Instead he watched as Peter Three went first, opening the storm door and using his body as a doorstop while he knocked above the doorbell. His posture had changed since they arrived, less of the casual grace that Peter One remembered from Liberty Island and more hunched, casual, like a lanky teenager still learning his own limbs. In one hand he held a white plastic shopping bag that he had fished from the depths of his backpack.
The inner door was pulled open and Peter One's heartbeat ratcheted up accordingly, but from this angle he still couldn't really see her; just the wave of her hair, shorter and grayer than his own aunt's had been. She seemed to be standing with arms crossed, looking silently at her nephew. He met her eye contact with a sheepish grin.
"Surprise?" He lifted the bag. "June from the hospital sent another pie over, texted me about it in case I'd be swinging by. Said the diner's been collecting customer donations for the kid's ward?"
"'Swinging' by." And there was her voice, deeper and dryer than the one that had awoken Peter One on school mornings and comforted him after childhood nightmares. The unimpressed tone, though, was not dissimilar.
"Yeah." Peter Three was grinning at her, more natural now. "Y'know, swinging around the neighborhood. Uh, and there's somebody here that I wanted you to meet. Not like that," he added hurriedly, when his aunt responded by leaning half her body out the door like she'd been told there was a unicorn on the sidewalk. "Can we do this inside, please?"
The inside of the house was, like the neighborhood, slightly more suburb than city. It had a comfortable sense of well-kept wear and tear. Peter One entered slowly, fists clenched in his pockets, trying not to stare at the lined face of the woman now interrogating her nephew in the kitchen.
"- and I don't hear from you for months. Months, Peter! Months on end - you drop a birthday card under the door and don't show me hide nor hair of you until that crazy phone call weeks ago, which you still haven't explained. I haven't heard you cry that much since - since Gwen."
The undercurrent of desperate worry in her voice was the first thing Peter One found unimpeachably familiar.
"I know you sneak out of this house every night," May had told him once, tears in her eyes and near out of her mind from fretting all day. "Peter, you have to tell me what's going on. C'mon, it's just me and you."
"It's just me and you."
He'd been such a stupid kid.
"- know how much the cops hate me, Aunt May, I couldn't give them any reason to -"
"And why is that, do you think?!" She was standing with her hands on her hips now, and her voice was raised. "You know what watching the news has been like? For years, Peter, and you've never denied any of it to me. Have you read the warrant from last spring? No, stop trying to hand me pie. Put it on the counter - no, to the right. Are you staying for lunch?"
"We're not having lunch, we gotta go soon. And I'm fixing it, alright? I'm working on it, I promise, the police, everything, I swear. Look, we can talk about this later - I will come back so we can talk about this later - but I really need you to meet someone first, okay?"
That sharp gaze and all its scolding energy, careworn and humorless compared to the Maybelle Parker of Peter One's childhood, swiveled around and leveled itself at him. He was not even slightly ready. "And who are you?"
"Uh." C'mon. You've faced down Thanos's whole army. You can do this.
"He's my younger brother," Peter Three said with a grin and a happy shuffle.
Peter One swung around to stare at him, eyebrows high, and he wasn't the only one.
"He didn't," May said, turning back to Peter Three with wide eyes. "Not Richard. I know he didn't, I'll raise him from the dead and kill him again myself."
Peter Three, far from being alarmed, was giggling at her, relaxed. "I love you, you know that, right Aunt May?" He swooped down to kiss her on the cheek. "Don't worry, he's not a blood brother."
Right. That was the cue.
"Hi. Uh, I'm Peter." Breathe, you dingus. "Ma'am. Peter Parker. I'm really sorry to just show up and bother you like this."
May was frowning, glancing back and forth between him and her nephew. Peter One's vision blurred as he watched them whisper furiously at each other, and this had been a bad idea, why did he do this, he had to go , he wanted to bust the door down but oh God he couldn't break Aunt May's door he needed to get out -
"Peter?"
Peter One froze, his hand on the worn plastic of the door handle. There were footsteps behind him and then a gentle hand on one shoulder. Slowly he turned, more terrified to look at her than he had been to see Thanos's flagship open fire on a crowded battleground.
"My boy says that you lost someone recently." Up close her eyes were hazel. The line of her mouth was the same as in the old photos of Peter One's grandmother. She was the same height his Aunt May had been. They looked nothing alike. He couldn't stop staring at her. "I'm not your aunt, Peter, but my nephew tells me that you could use a hug."
Peter One spent exactly eight minutes crying into May Parker's hair while her thin arms cradled his shoulders.
They stayed for lunch.
Gwen Stacy's friends had never really understood the Peter Parker thing. But then, sometimes Liz wondered if they'd ever really known Gwen herself, either.
The two of them had been in all the same classes since second grade, orbiting each other in the arena of competitive report cards and bright futures. Two gir ls with high-powered fathers and ambitious mothers, they'd mostly bonded over the stress, in retrospect. The stress of their parents' jobs, of their own need for perfection. Of the hundred things they occupied themselves with daily, in order to avoid thinking about anything else.
Gwen, especially, never seemed to let herself rest. She was the prospective valedictorian, the student government representative, the Debate Team captain, the girl who never slept and never partied and always had her nose in a book.
AP English Literature and Composition. AP Macroeconomics. Study Hall; Columbia Academic Year Immersion Program (Online). AP Bio. Lunch; National Honor Society Advisory Meeting (Skype). AP Calculus BC. AP French Language and Culture. Debate Team meeting. Pick up Phil from Young Scholars After-School Prep. Oscorp internship. Volunteer tutelage of Grade Recovery Program students. Homework. Dinner. Advise Howard on project (diorama?) for school. Edit presentation to State Board of Ed. Go to bed.
From the outside Gwen Stacy's life looked intense, but never chaotic. She was always collected, from the expensive clothes to the blunt-edge bangs and color-coded time schedule. Even years later, after Gwen was dead and forever preserved in memory as that teenage girl with a bright future, Liz would wonder how someone so vibrant and funny could have fit her life into such neat little boxes.
Gwen had had other friends too, obviously. Jill, Amita, Corn, Evelyn. So many of them that her funeral had spilled onto the sidewalk, the crowd swollen with kids from Midtown Science, from the Oscorp intern group chat, from the New York chapter of the Oxford International Students' Network.
She'd been friendly with absolutely everyone and close with none of them, until she attracted a tall skinny shadow one day and apparently invited him to stay.
Peter Parker didn't fit into Gwen's boxes or any other. Peter Parker was bad at talking, prone to staring at people, and poorer than just about anybody at Midtown Science except Flash Thompson, who wore it so aggressively that it just made him cooler. Peter Parker would never be cool because everyone remembered the thick-rimmed glasses and elastic-band braces he'd borne in middle school.
He was also the only person in the graduating class as smart as Gwen, but he wasn't involved in any of their early-entry programs for college. He didn't intern anywhere and hadn't joined them at the NGA Conference for high schoolers in STEM. He was just Midtown Science's biggest disappointment, grades skating effortlessly behind first place but with little else to fill out the CV of a proper Ivy League prospective.
Even once he and Gwen started dating - and that was weird for Liz, her most sensible friend blushing over some guy - he'd never exactly been in the friend group. At best he'd give Liz and the rest a funny little wave when he showed up to walk Gwen home, and at worst would scowl at them unconsciously before looping his arm around Gwen's and leading her away. He remained an oddly skittish, stuttering sort of person through high school, even if puberty had finally matched his height to the size of his ears.
Gwen dating him had seemed a little like her tutorship of Flash, at first; the shoe-in valedictorian operating at 110% at all times, being all things to all people, filling every moment of the day with academic achievements and good samaritanism.
Still. Gwen and Parker had been so obviously, stupidly in love with each other. She would giggle when she saw him, and he'd aim his big brown eyes and slow smile at her, and it would be like no one else was in the room.
Liz's dad being good friends with Gwen's mom, it hadn't taken long to learn that the Stacy family didn't exactly love their daughter's new boyfriend. Or rather, Gwen's mom didn't love him. Captain Stacy may have been actively contemplating how to frame him in a drug bust.
It was sort of hilarious, the image of this straight-laced WASPish family worrying about their daughter being swayed by the local bad boy. Gwen was too fiery to ever have been 'swayed' a single day in her life, and Parker too socially awkward to be bad at anything but gym class.
So they all had just continued on, plowing through life in their different social circles, existing together through vigilante chaos and George Stacy's death and whatever on-again, off-again mess Parker and Gwen eventually devolved into. And then Gwen died alone in the wee hours of a late August morning, aged eighteen, all details redacted by the NYPD.
Nothing was really the same after that.
The mystery was the worst part, on top of the horror. On top of the tragedy of her youth and the sight of her widowed mother, face bloodless, clutching her three remaining children as her daughter's coffin was lowered into the ground.
Years later Liz would catch mention of it on Unsolved Mysteries and be rooted to her couch in the awfulness of memory for the rest of the night. The details of Gwen's demise had been officially censored by the authorities, the narrator assured her. Cops swarmed Oscorp for weeks afterward as their stock plummeted. Spider-Man had been there - that much was known for certain. He'd been witnessed fighting a pair of superhumans before all the nearest cameras fried or blew out. No one ever knew how Gwen had gotten between them, or why.
There were other things that Liz knew, which the narrator didn't.
One was that they - herself, her friends, even Flash - had thought that Peter Parker died too, for a while, either in some accident or by his own hand. He was there at the funeral, of course, looking like he would fly apart if someone laid a hand on him, his eyes wet and dark and dead.
After that he completely fucking disappeared for days. Days became weeks, then months. He didn't answer calls or texts, not from Mrs Stacy or anyone else. He dropped off the face of the earth until Amita saw him at a downtown bodega in early October, unshaven, dark circles under his eyes. Alive, then, and handling it about as well as the rest of them.
It turned out that life gets very fucked when your friend dies at eighteen.
Liz took a leave of absence from Stanford, delaying her freshman year until she could get her mind right. She went to therapy. She got her feet under her. She also went down an internet conspiracy rabbit hole and had a hard time surfacing for air again.
As it turned out, a number of analyses had been made on the webbing that Spider-Man left all over the city. Preliminary reports suggested it was highly similar to a material called Biocable, apparently of Oscorp make. The two substances weren't an exact match - there were guesses that it had been tweaked or even reverse-engineered - but the discussions still prompted an Oscorp intern to hack the list of purchase orders and dump it onto the dark web. He was spectacularly fired and threatened with legal action, of course, but it turned out to be a dead end anyway. If the Biocable really was the key then it had either been stolen from the manufacturing facility, nabbed at a construction site from an industrial supply, or ordered under the name of someone now deceased.
Still, the connection stuck in Liz's mind after. Oscorp and the concept of scientific genius both still meant Gwen to her, even years later.
There were plenty of testimonials for encounters with Spider-Man, too, most of them with conflicting reports of the superhero's appearance. Several used the words "skinny" and "local accent," which seemed to match what video clips and cell phone footage existed online. From there it got more complicated.
Two first-hand accounts that had been widely downvoted on r/conspiracy - one from a now-deleted Twitter and the other from a YouTube re-upload - mentioned a kid who'd apparently half-trashed the compartment of a late-night R Train back in senior year. One of them described a white, black-haired male who had backflipped onto the ceiling, pulled a woman's shirt off, and then ripped out a steel-bolted grab bar with his bare hands. The other, from a passenger admittedly very drunk at the time, just said that a kid had beaten the shit out of everyone and run off at Rego Park. No gender, no other descriptors.
Skipping forward a few months, a poster on r/fiveboroughs said that she had once been in the process of getting mugged and seen a blonde girl staring at her from the open end of the alley, books clutched to her chest like she was walking home late from school. The victim had blinked, the girl had disappeared, and mere seconds later Spider-Man had swooped in to save the day.
And there was Dr Connors' attack on the school, too. He had been Gwen's old mentor, and she'd disappeared, hadn't she, during the school evacuation -
Then the final battle at Oscorp, the place where Gwen used to intern, the place where Gwen's dad had been killed. Why had he been there, anyway, why had he rescinded the arrest warrant on Spider-Man so suddenly -
Why had Gwen been in the middle of the fight that had killed her that night, what had she been doing stepping into a battle between superheroes -
Gwen was Spider-Man, obviously.
This was the theory among Liz and her friends, at least briefly. The math checked out, and they'd always been good at math. Spider-Man had fought two monsters to save the city. Gwen had died in that fight. Spider-Man had disappeared. One plus one equals two.
Gwen Stacy, superhero. Over-achiever right to the fucking end.
Eventually, after long months of rising crime, Spider-Man had returned and the others dropped that theory, but Liz didn't.
The thing was, New York's home-grown superhero came back a little different. Spider-Man had less patience with violent criminals now, seemed angrier. Like a teenage boy grieving the loss of his girlfriend, to be presumptive about it. Like someone determined to carry on the life mission that his loved one had sacrificed herself for, but utterly furious at the world that he had to.
Time passed. Months, then years.
A decade on, Liz had graduated Stanford, joined a massive tech company, gotten engaged and then un-engaged. She changed jobs, married, had her first child.
Some nights she would still see that red-and-blue figure swinging through the streets, but her feverish theories had faded to quiet musings.
The dead rested peacefully.
The lock to the apartment door clicked open, followed by the quiet grinding of a secondary mechanical device sliding away. Peter One caught a glimpse of it attached to the door - bundles of wires and little blinking lights connected to a home-made backup lock - then walked through and into the shadowy room.
In his extremely inexperienced estimation, Peter Three's apartment was more of a dump than Peter One's childhood home with May had been, but less of a disaster than his own shelter-subsidized studio was now. It had the slightly chaotic vibe of a bachelor-pad-mad-scientist combo, with little in the way of homemaking or decoration. A shoe rack stood lopsided by the door, covered by a mountain of worn and colorful Converse. There was no television, but a folding table held two separate computers, one of which looked home-built. There was a pile of dishes in the sink.
Peter Three ushered him further inside, clicking lights on as they went.
Through an open door just opposite Peter One could see a small, sparse bedroom. There was a mattress on the floor, heavy black curtains over the windows, and a collection of faded movie posters on the wall half-covered with photographs of city landmarks. An overburdened desk by the bed sagged under a jumble of wires and equipment.
On the adjacent wall Peter One could just make out, blurrily, a single polaroid photo of a laughing blonde girl. There was a half-burned white candle on the bedside table below it.
"Sit, sit. You should put that foot up, too."
Peter One sat, found the threadbare living room couch to be more welcoming than it had looked, and propped his aching leg on the cushions in front of him. Peter Three shoved a pillow under his knee and then spun off to the kitchen to boil water.
It was silent for a moment as they waited, with only the sound of traffic drifting through the windows. Peter Three tapped away at a work laptop that had been charging on the nearby counter, clicking through a bundle of emails from what seemed to be the local technical college. There was a brief on new safety procedures, a weekly newsletter, and an introduction to a new part-time staff member named Michael Jones. The rest of Peter Three's browser was overrun with tabs for AAAS, Google Scholar, JSTOR, and random playlists.
Peter One looked away before he could pry any further, scanning the rest of the living room and doing a double-take at a corner workstation overflowing with half-used Spider-Man suit materials.
"If the feds ever bust in here you are so screwed, dude."
"I'll have you know that I'm on record as an avid costumist, actually. Entered a contest at the last Comic Con and everything."
"Not bad, not bad." Peter One felt light-headed and giddy, exhausted by lunch with not-Aunt-May and desperate to fill the silence. "No Christmas tree?"
"Jewish," replied Peter Three in slightly surprised tones. He shut off the bubbling kettle and walked toward the open door of his tiny bathroom. "My mom, anyway. Uncle Ben and Aunt May had a tree sometimes, but. Not you?"
"I don't think so? Aunt May did a lot of social work with the church when I was younger, but then a swarm of aliens invaded New York and I think it got, y'know. Complicated."
"Yeah, I bet. You said they were purple?"
"Oh, no, that was later. There was just the one purple guy, actually."
"Just the one, huh?" A laugh echoed from the bathroom. "Well, we got time. Tell me about all the aliens, man."
It took nearly an hour to complete the first aid process on Peter One's shrapnel-covered microwounds. The sunlight streaming through the windows faded. The clock ticked on. The floor in front of the couch steadily accumulated field dressings and emergency care products, from soiled alcohol swabs to the home-made saline solution which, cloudy red and still steaming, now filled the apartment's largest cooking pot.
Peter Three sat on the floor cross-legged, patiently yanking glass out of the meat of Peter One's foot with large tweezers. He wasn't particularly nice about it, as if his first aid experience came largely from rushed self-care. Still, he managed to be both firm and kind as he worked on the lacerations, ducking to peer at them through black-framed reading glasses and a magnifying headset like Mr Stark used to use.
"You're an engineer?" Peter One asked, leg muscles tensing against the sofa as the tweezers came close again. "Funny how we all have the same hobbies but also kind of don't. Ouch. "
Through a hiss of sympathy, Peter Three said, "Aw, man. We should've talked about it more that night. What's your focus?"
That night.
"In school? Math, chemistry. I was good at comp-sci but Ned - Ned was better."
"But you built your webshooters, right?"
"Yeah, in robotics lab. I mean, I'm pretty good at it, I always did fine in shop class and stuff, but it's not like… my main thing."
There was a clink as a tiny piece of glass dropped onto a waiting dish.
"Weird. You do photography?"
"Um, not really. I did marching band for a little while, but being outside wasn't exactly my thing until I got bitten. You?"
"Just skateboarding," Peter Three said with a little shrug.
"Dude," Peter One said mournfully. "That is so cool."
Peter Three sent him a scrunched-up look, like a skeptical shrug with his face, and changed the topic. "Seriously though, that thing Max said about the energy being different in your world, about the differences in technology - I can't get enough of it. I must have written a dozen research papers in my head by now that I can never show anybody. What is it about your universe, intrinsically, that makes magic real, you know? Is it the same stuff that gave you a different face from me? That brought aliens to earth?"
"Maybe? I know that Wakanda has all that vibranium and Mr Stark actually invented a new molecule when I was in elementary school, so maybe that's it."
Peter Three silently mouthed " Wa-kan-da," then said, "We should take samples next time, if there's a way - if - if there's actual different molecules on the other side of each rift, my God that'd be so cool." He dropped the newest bloody piece of glass on the dish, a slightly distant grin on his face. "I bet Peter Two would know. He mentioned having a doctorate in physics, though I don't know if he does much with it. Oh man, if we could ask him…."
He sounded a little bit like Ned used to when they were planning sleepovers in middle school, and Peter One suddenly wondered where this 'verse's Ned was. This didn't seem like the kind of apartment that often had guests, was the thing.
Then Peter One reminded himself that he should shut up, because he didn't have a Ned anymore either.
"So, how about you?"
"Uh, bioengineering," said Peter Three, swabbing antiseptic over the bloody foot. "I'm in grad school. Again. It's, uh, it's complicated when you miss half your workdays. My advisor probably thinks I'm in a fight club or doing so many drugs, but he's really great about it, only threatened to fire me twice. And I tried photography as a minor for a while, too, but aside from side-gigs for Jameson it never - anyway."
Jameson. Peter One shifted involuntarily. Don't think about him.
"Yep, okay, I can't find any more shrapnel in here so think that's you done. Lemme get -"
Peter One sat as his foot was wiped down and then wrapped in a careful layer of bandages.
"Thank you," he finally told his older - self? brother? - as he flexed his toes. "Really, you don't know how much this meant. Again."
Peter Three gave a little shrug as though rolling the compliment down off his back. "We should be just in time to hit the rift spike. Your boots are fucked, but you can wear an extra set of my Converse if you don't mind the sole is trying to fall off. You a size ten, eleven?"
"Uh, eight-and-a-half."
They looked at each other for a moment and then, at the exact same time, muttered, "Weird."
The swing back to Bleecker Street was easy enough, and as the evening air split open to reveal fractured purple and gold, Peter One was conscious of two things:
That this detour hadn't been so bad, after all.
And that it was a pity they hadn't had a chance to see Peter Two again.
There hadn't been time to think as the girl fell.
He couldn't even see her. Not really. He couldn't remember her name, or hear the battle around him, or sense whether his brothers were still alive.
All he could feel was the echo of absolute anguish inside his head. All he could see was the reflection of a thousand night terrors over the last decade unfolding before him.
The dream was always the same. It never changed.
She always died.
There was no waking from that part.
And now, as if out of memory - before his waking eyes - in an alien universe - at 1:21 AM - on Liberty Island - beneath the clock tower - the girl was falling.
As he launched off the platform, little things came to him in the hyper-awareness of a battle state:
The flex and push of his feet before they hit the air. The wind in his face. And his arms out, seeking.
In a way, everything about this strange new world had been wild and wondrous. The magic. His new family. The confirmation that he wasn't alone in the cosmos and never had been.
Of course he'd wondered, before this. Of course he'd read Susskind's papers and attended Tegmark's cosmology lectures at MIT and watched shitty rips of CERN conferences on quantum gravity and string theory from YouTube. And if he fell back into obsession with the MWI of quantum mechanics every time he lit that yarhtzeit candle in Gwen's name, if he sometimes imagined a universe somewhere in the cosmos where Gwen was still alive because he'd successfully died in her place -
That wasn't what he'd found here, but maybe he'd found something else that he needed. Maybe they had even needed him too -
Contact. The warmth of a person in his arms, snatched from cold air and cradled close. The sharp thwip and snap of a web seeking, then finding, purchase against the scaffolding.
All of it, the weight of the girl against him, the flex of his knees when he landed, seemed to be happening to someone else.
His vision was too blurry. He couldn't see her. All he could see was Gwen, heavy in his arms, her back all wrong, her chest still. There were pebbles on her gravestone and slick grass under his fingers and wilted flowers blowing away in the wind.
In his arms, Gwen Stacy lay dead.
He needed to know. Please, please, please -
"Are you okay?"
In his arms, Michelle Jones took a shuddering breath.
Friday night, for Peter Parker, was date night.
He and MJ had made it a routine of sorts, back when they were first trying to iron out their lives. In the years since, between the fights and deaths and reconciliations and complications, it was something that they still stuck to. Whether it happened at his place or hers. Or most recently, theirs. Whether they were friends or dating or engaged or un-engaged again. It didn't matter. The two of them kept their standing appointment, with joy and with grim determination.
Peter loved these nights. He loved that it was time for just the two of them, plus a big bowl of pasta and, on special days, a few glasses of wine.
There were Rules involved, as well. No shop talk. No fighting. No phones. Just reconnecting, talking, reminding each other that it was still worth it.
Also, no answering the doorbell during dinner unless someone was on fire. That was Rule Number Five.
On this particular night, with late-December drizzle turning to frost on the ground, the doorbell rang, then rang again. It rang three more times before Peter and MJ shared an exasperated look and rose to politely shoo away whoever had come to bother them.
"Hi!" Peter Three was standing on the doorstep in civvies, his arm wrapped around a bedraggled Peter One. He greeted them with a wide grin and a funky little wave. "Sorry to crash in like this, but we're stuck here for about the next five hours and Peter One's pretty injured, so."
"Right," said Peter Two to no one in particular.
On one hand, the both of them looked cold, wet, and tired. On the other hand, date night.
"Oh, Peter," came the voice of the best woman in the world as she pressed against his shoulder to see outside properly. "It's two of you."
Peter Two turned to Mary Jane, who Peters One and Three were now looking at with undisguised curiosity. She was wearing the same gentle, slightly bittersweet smile that always appeared when the odder edges of Peter Two's life crashed bluntly into the one they were trying to share together. There was a metaphor here, if Peter Two cared to dig.
"Let 'em in, honey," MJ said, removing her hand from his elbow and slipping back into the house. "I'll set two more places for dinner."
"Oh wow, food," said Peter One with wide eyes, and the deal was sealed.
Peter Two's younger selves followed him into the house, their thank yous and apologies sincere enough to have made Aunt May proud. Then everyone was pulling off their shoes - Peter One was wearing oversize sneakers with his suit, for some reason - and hanging up their coats and looking around at the faded wallpaper like it was the most interesting thing they'd ever seen. Their eyes stopped on Aunt May's old embroidered tablecloths, the framed poster from MJ's most recent off-Broadway triumph, and the little fake Christmas tree in the corner, twinkling with lights.
"Huh," muttered Peter Three, squinting at this last item for a moment before turning away and venturing toward the open kitchen.
The Peters to the Third Power ended up crowded around the stove in an awkward bustle, and under MJ's direction found themselves pulling plates down, hunting for utensils, and scooping pasta.
The kitchen had never been so full before. It was nice. Peter Two would need to put time aside later to think about that.
"So," Peter One started nervously, filling four water glasses with singular determination. "Uh, you're Mary Jane?"
"That's me," she replied, delicately taking the cups from him and setting them on the table. He seemed to have trouble meeting her eye. "It's good to finally meet you, Peter and Peter."
Peter Two loved her so, so much.
"It's very kind of you to let us stay," said Peter Three, affectedly casual as he carried a stack of dishes to the dinner table. "We appreciate it."
The pasta was a hit. Less because of the quality, Peter Two suspected - together he and Mary Jane made one sort-of-fine cook - and more because of the quantity.
"This is amazing." Peter One was shoveling it into his mouth with the enthusiasm of a kid living on instant noodles and gummy worms from the corner bodega. "I love pasta. Do you do this for a living?"
"Hardly, but I've worked in enough restaurants between jobs to do a basic fettuccine by now," MJ laughed.
"MJ is an actress," Peter Two said proudly, their hands clasping briefly over the table.
"Oh, no kidding?"
"Wow!"
"Yeah, she's great. She was in the Little Shop of Horrors revival last year."
They both made appreciative noises, and Peter Two's last sliver of resentment at having his romantic dinner interrupted faded completely.
"What about you boys? You're still in high school right, Peter? Gosh, it's like looking back in time."
Peter Two smiled at her. "You mean except for how I was incapable of talking to most people. Peter here actually has some really great friends. Your buddy's name was Ned, right? A lot of your classmates were on TV too, I remember."
"Um, I sort of had to drop out, actually," said Peter One through his spaghetti. "I'm working on my GED now, though."
"You know that school is still important, even with Spider-Man," Peter Two frowned, aware of how much he sounded like Uncle Ben in that moment and not sure how to stop.
"Yeah, Peter's going through some stuff right now." Peter Three waved a chunk of garlic bread. "Tell 'em, Pete."
After the last of their amazing dinner had been scraped away and every plate enthusiastically washed and dried, after Peter One had explained everything to his - older brothers? - and they'd all cried a little, Mary Jane pulled a carton of ice cream from the freezer and forcibly turned conversation to a lighter topic.
That topic was going better for some of them than it was others.
"...You didn't hang out with anyone?"
"Nah, not, I mean. Uh. Not really?"
"...After-school activities?"
"I was in the Yearbook Club!" Peter Three was looking slightly hunted. "Technically. I took photos for them every semester, it was - whatever. People, you know?"
Peter One was hit, quite suddenly, by a sense of resemblance to Michelle. He could picture the two of them together, handsome figures in oversize clothing hunched alone at a school lunch table. Both furious believers in justice and endlessly kind once you got past the prickles, but most people didn't.
"How 'bout you, tiger?" Mary Jane had a teasing note in her voice now as she turned to her - boyfriend? husband? "What'd you do in high school?"
"Mooned over this one girl, mostly," said Peter Two, grinning back at her. The two of them were so perfect together that it hurt to watch. "Got my head dunked in the toilet sometimes."
Peter Three made noises of agreement here, pointing his ice-cream spoon at them. "D'you know a guy named Thompson?"
"Yep. He was the one doing the dunking."
"The Flash I know is mostly just super rich and a jerk about it," Peter One offered. "We were on the same Academic Decathlon crew, though."
"You were actually on a school team?"
"Yeah! Robotics Lab, too, but that was mostly because I was trying to figure out my web shooters."
"You had so many friends in high school." Peter Three looked slightly awed. "Are you secretly cool?"
"You're both pretty cool," Peter Two said, and didn't even sound like he was joking.
Peter Three waved those words away as though swatting a fly, then continued, "Why quit Robotics Lab? You don't like building stuff? The news had crazy videos of your suit -"
"Those legs," Peter Two agreed, before turning to Mary Jane to explain. "They were big mechanical spider legs that came out of his back. Really awesome."
She made a polite noise through her ice cream.
"I do like building things," Peter One muttered, mostly meaning Legos. "It's just that until recently all the fancy stuff came from Mr Stark."
"That's the billionaire in the red metal suit, right? There were memorials for him all over the city."
"Yeah. Anyway, he was the one who introduced me to the Avengers in sophomore year."
"Not a rock band," Peter Three said, nodding sagely.
Peter Two was frowning slightly. "I remember. You called them 'Earth's mightiest heroes.' Are they all your age?"
"Uh, not really? They're mostly older guys. Well, Thor's about a thousand and he's from space, so I don't know if he counts… anyway. They had a big fight in Germany over the Sokovia Accords, which were this whole thing about oversight and accountability to the UN? Mr Stark needed backup, so we pretended to Aunt May that I'd gotten an internship and he flew me out there."
Peter Three's head whipped around. "He what?"
"It was really cool," said Peter One, trying to focus on the awesome experience of flying on a private plane instead of the very shitty experience of remembering that Mr Stark was dead. "They were mostly super nice, even when we were fighting."
"You were fifteen and he took you out of the country to fight in a war?" Peter Two's voice was very even.
"Not a war," Peter One said hurriedly, deciding not to clarify that he'd actually been fourteen. "It was more like a friendly… giant brawl with explosions. I didn't really understand what was going on, but Mr Stark gave me super clear orders to just jump in and distract some people and then stay out of range. It was fine, nobody got hurt that bad."
"I thought you just said it was all about accountability," said Peter Three, looking increasingly heated.
"And nation sovereignty, yeah. It was complicated."
"But he deputized you for that fight by appealing to your personal sense of civic responsibility," Peter Two said slowly, nodding at their middle brother in agreement. "And didn't tell you what you were fighting for. And then he brought you to a different country. When you were fifteen, Peter."
"Hey." Peter One didn't realize that he'd raised his voice until the room went silent. He took a deep breath, then forced himself to meet their eyes. Neither of them looked angry or condescending, just worried. Okay. C'mon, Spider-Man. Find the words. "You don't understand. He saved the world. Mr Stark saved the universe and trillions of people. He took care of me and gave me my suit, and he always told me to stay away from things that were too dangerous and it was me that didn't listen, and he's dead now. I watched him die, so please, just. Please don't talk about him like that."
"Peter." Mary Jane's voice was gentle and hard to read.
"It wasn't my intention to offend," Peter Three said immediately, raising his hands as if in surrender. "We'll - we'll drop it there for tonight, yeah?"
"We weren't trying to insult your friend," Peter Two agreed, glancing at Mary Jane across the table.
"Okay." Peter One finally relaxed his grip on the dessert spoon. It was bent just slightly in the middle.
The silence stretched, then they all jumped as Mary Jane stood and began stacking bowls as noisily as possible. "Let's get the dishes, boys, and I think I could use a little drink. Wine, anyone?"
The tension in the room eased slightly.
"I don't drink," said Peter One, eyes perfectly round. He wasn't even eighteen yet. He wasn't allowed .
Peter Three rocked back in his chair, hands up again. "I'm a maudlin drunk, none for me, thanks."
The odd little group of them eventually migrated into the living room, Mary Jane and Peter Two with little glasses of wine like real grown-ups, and the last of the friction in the air finally dissipated.
The room was cozy and traditional and a little worn. Peter One left the other three and walked slowly beside the walls on aching feet, scanning the pictures above the mantle. The wallpaper was covered in photographs of an elderly couple that he didn't recognize, as well as scattered graduation certificates and rave reviews of Mary Jane's performances from the local paper.
"...so interesting to me, how you just have the instinct to do that," Peter Two was saying.
Peter One turned, scanned the room for Peter Three, and found him cross-legged and upside-down in the far ceiling corner. His hair was falling straight down from his forehead and he looked perfectly comfortable. "Oh! Wow."
"What, you guys don't do this when you're nervous, or whatever?"
Peter One collapsed onto the battered couch, feet askew. "Not really?"
"I guess it's an other-universe thing," Peter Two mused, frowning into mid distance. "Imagine how many Peter Parkers out there enjoy sitting on ceilings, how many of them have really amazing hair…."
"If there really are other universes," Mary Jane perked up suddenly, "then wouldn't one of them have a Spider-Man who's not Peter Parker? Or a Peter Parker who's not Spider-Man, or maybe a Spider-Woman…."
Peter Three was fiddling slightly with his hands now. "Do you guys remember anything about your dads? Or either of your parents, what they were working on before they died, anything like that?"
"I was around three years old, Uncle Ben said," Peter One replied. "I have pictures, but I can't remember them much. Why?"
Their middle brother just shook his head. "There's so much I'd like to do if we had time. A comparative blood test, for one. Might answer the question you just had, Mary Jane."
"I have a few samples from years ago," Peter Two offered, "but even the mutations I found can't explain everything we do. The webs, the spider-sense…."
"Tell me about it. Doctor Connors had so many theories about gene splicing when I met him, about how the instincts and behaviors of one species might dominate another. And then I had my own research and my parents', and then - and then I go to Pete's world and there's actual, real magic, so."
"It kind of raised more questions than it answered," Peter Two agreed.
"Yeah. Hey, have either of you guys, like, ever wanted to eat a fly?"
Peter One sat bolt upright on the couch, eyebrows hitting his hairline as Mary Jane choked on her wine.
Peter Three glanced down to find them staring and clarified, "I mean, I mean - not have you eaten a fly, like, that'd be weird, I mean have you ever felt like you had the instinct -"
Out of all the things that Peter One may have expected to witness when arriving on the doorstep that evening, the sight of Peter Two laughing so hard that he began weeping into his own hands hadn't precisely been numbered among them.
"Oh man, I didn't know your face could do that." Peter Three was fully grinning now as he felt around in his pockets for his phone.
Peter One found it on the nearby end table, opened the camera app and tossed it up to him. He felt sleepy and happy. "Y'know, if I'd been actually gonna hypothesize about dominant genetic traits and stuff, I'd have assumed that the guy with the organic web blood…."
"I can promise I've never seen him consume any insects," said Mary Jane, still wiping her own eyes, "but I'm not around all day..."
"Please stop talking about this," Peter Two muttered into his palms wetly.
There was the click of a fake shutter noise and some breathy giggling from the ceiling corner. "Alright, alright. No actual non-human instincts with you guys, got it."
"Once in elementary school I tried cat food on a dare," Peter One offered, and then they erupted again.
A little hand-cranked alarm clock chimed on the counter, marking an hour until Peters One and Three would have to leave for the rift spike on Bleecker Street.
The last of the laughter finally faded.
"We should pack up to go," Peter Three said reluctantly, finally dropping down from the ceiling. He moved across the room, scanning and touching the hanging picture frames along the walls as though trying to commit them to memory. "Is that your Aunt May and Uncle Ben in front of the '73 Olds?"
"Yeah."
"Back when we first met, you said that you found the guy who killed him. I never did."
"It was… complicated." Mary Jane's hand moved briefly to Peter Two's shoulder, here. "But the guy we thought had done it… yeah, he died. He was just a carjacker, and Uncle Ben was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Freak accident."
"Huh. We didn't have a car, so my uncle, um. There was a thief, and he was armed, and Uncle Ben was the only person standing between the guy and some young family down the street, cops said. So Uncle Ben stepped in and went for the guy's gun, I guess."
There was a silence.
"Mine was a drunk driver," said Peter One. It felt strange, to revisit this older hurt when there had been so many new ones. "I think I was younger than you guys, when it happened? I don't know."
Peter Three kept scanning the photos, finally tapping the last one above the mantle. "Who's this?"
"That was Harry," Peter Two said. He sounded tired, mostly.
Peter Three's fingers withdrew immediately from the frame. "Is he your friend?"
"He was."
"Oh. Sorry. How'd he die?"
"In my arms, after trying to kill me. He came around again, just before the end. I had hoped, when we saw the others that night… but if Norman returns to his universe of sane mind, then hopefully Harry never has to meet the same fate."
Peter One tried to think if he'd ever met anyone named Harry and came up blank.
"I told Ned, your young friend in the lab, about this," Peter Two said now, looking over at him. "He loved you, you know. They both loved you a lot."
"I know. I know, but I made a promise to myself that I'd keep them safe by staying away, so that's what I've gotta do, right?"
Peter Three snorted. He was still moving through the room, touching and poking at things, not quite meeting their eyes. "Yeah, you're gonna break that promise someday, trust me. You love them too much."
"And I loved Harry," Peter Two said, neither quite an agreement or a rebuke.
"Yeah, well. Me too." Peter Three was picking the label off of the empty wine bottle now, still not quite looking at either of them.
"Harry… Osborn?"
Peter Three shrugged. "Harry Osborn was my best friend in elementary school, and he's - he's in the hospital in a coma. Has been for fifteen years. I put him there," and for this he briefly lifted his chin to look at them both, nodding, before turning back to the label. "After he killed Gwen. I put him there and thought - he was lucky to get off that lightly. Fuck."
"Hey," said Two gently. "Don't do that. You don't have to hide all of that, not from us."
"Yeah. Yeah, no, I know."
"I guess that's why he didn't show up," Peter One said. "That night when we tried to help everybody else." He tried gingerly levering himself to his feet again. The cuts were still throbbing, but not as badly as before. It felt healthier, at least, his healing factor able to work now that all of the shrapnel had been cleaned out.
"Yeah, I thought about that. I thought about trying to fix him, when I got back here, too. But I don't know the formula for the Goblin serum, and even if I did, giving him that antidote would probably kill him. You can't fix brain damage with a cool gadget."
"Maybe." Peter One was pacing now, trying to walk out the limp. His mind was stuck on the image of the three of them sneaking into Midtown Tech that night. Of two geniuses in coats and gloves and goggles doing miracle science with him until the moon rose. Of Peters Two and Three, there to help him just because he'd asked. "We still have some time, right? Before the portal goes? And we've got all three of us together, right here, right now. Maybe it's impossible, but. Don't we owe it to your friend Harry to try?"
Peter Three made an odd movement with his head, first shaking it and then nodding as if against his own better judgment. "We do. We should, yeah."
"I think.…" Peter Two trailed off.
The silence lasted for so long that Peters One and Three swiveled around to look at their eldest brother. He had his whole mouth pursed, like some huge emotion would come spilling out if he tried to speak too soon. His eyelashes were wet. He looked like a kid, suddenly, for the first time, rather than the put-together adult they'd first met. Mary Jane's hand looked almost painfully tight on his shoulder.
"I think," he tried again, "I wouldn't mind attempting the impossible if it meant giving Harry Osborn another chance at life."
"Okay." Peter One felt light, like his head was buzzing, like he had unintentionally sipped from that bottle of wine.
They could do this. He could do this, for them, after they had given him so much.
"So where do we start?"
Ned Leeds had seen a lot of pretty wild stuff in his eighteen years. There had been alien invasions, superhero battles, the Snap and the Blip. He'd made friends with the surliest girl in school, witnessed the rampant ballooning of Flash Thompson's ego, clashed with a few really giant subway rats, and survived the Great Midtown Tech Cafeteria Scandal of 2k18.
Not much phased Ned Leeds anymore, which he figured was pretty much normal for anyone who lived in New York. The sky splits open and starts raining aliens and you realize that you might as well just go with the flow.
These days, part of going with the flow was the realization that somewhere along the line, Ned had maybe become friends with Spider-Man.
Well, sort of. The whole thing was kind of complicated, and if you actually asked Spider-Man he probably wouldn't say that they were friends, but whatever.
Spidey was a hometown hero in Queens, where the most common back alley graffiti was still the slogan, "FUCK THE DAILY BUGLE." Spidey had saved Ned's homeroom class from certain death twice. Spidey had almost definitely saved the entire city on Liberty Island, even if Ned couldn't remember precisely what lead him and MJ to wake up there the next morning. And Spidey -
- was literally right now falling out of a purple rip in the sky, missing the nearest hot dog stand by mere inches and cratering directly into the sidewalk, oh shit, oh God.
The cement cracked, dust clouded the air, and New York's friendliest neighborhood hero groaned.
"Hey," Ned shouted, looking up and down the street. Most people were running from the purple sky thing, which was fair. "You okay, Spider-Man?"
Spider-Man pushed himself out of the rubble, turned to face Ned and nearly tripped over his own feet. After a moment, he tentatively pointed at his own chest with one gloved hand. "You're talking to me?"
"Uh, yeah?" If Ned hadn't just seen him drop out of the sky, he'd have assumed this guy was one of the Times Square impersonators. "You see any other Spider-Men around here, dude? Sorry, not dude. Sir."
"...Other Spider-Men? No, um, not right now," Spider-Man said. It was hard to tell through the mask, but that sounded like laughter. "And oh my God, please don't call me 'sir.'"
"Sweet! So what's the purple thing, Spider-Man?"
They turned and looked at it together. Somewhere a few blocks over there was a screeching sound, and giant tentacles flailed up over the skyline before disappearing again. In the distance, something was definitely on fire.
"Uh, don't worry about it. I better go get that, though. You stay clear of it, alright? And you tell everyone the same." Spidey was already backing away as he rattled off a list of instructions. "And if you've got your laptop, you can probably track the portal's energy signature. Let everyone know which streets are safe. There's going to still be people trying to get home, so."
"Hell yeah! Say no more, man, I am so on it. And can I just say? You're not alone out there, dude." Ned gestured, and in the motion his arms encompassed both himself and the absent figure of MJ beside him, the pedestrians running desperately uptown and the fire trucks now shrieking their way south, the full stretch of the city from Brooklyn to the Bronx. "You've got all of us."
"Yeah." There was a little pause. "Yeah, I know."
Then Spider-Man turned, shot out a web, and swung away toward the battle.