"Peter!"
The call of his name froze Peter halfway through the front door, his body curling in on itself with a guilty wince.
"H-hey Aunt May," he called hesitantly. "Sorry I'm late…?"
"Peter Benjamin Parker where have you been?" his aunt asked, stepping breathlessly around the corner into the main room with her arms wrapped around her middle and a hand clutched to her necklace like she was trying to hold her heart in her rib cage.
Her eyes were red along the bottom lid like she'd been crying, and Peter immediately felt the pit of his stomach twist in guilt.
She'd been worried sick.
"I'm home…?" he offered sheepishly.
"You've been missing for two days, Peter. Days!" she emphasized. "I have been calling every police department and hospital looking for you...have you even seen what they're showing on the news?!"
"I know, Aunt May, I-"
"I thought you'd been killed, Peter!" she said, trying and failing to hold back her tears as they pooled along her bottom lashes. "You vanished without a word, you didn't pick up my calls, every number for Tony Stark led straight to a full voicemail...I had no idea where you were or what had happened to you…"
"I was fine, I promise," he reassured her quickly, but his aunt shook her head.
"And how was I supposed to know that?" she countered, a little waver in her voice that just destroyed him to hear. "I haven't heard anything from you since you left on Tuesday, Peter. Nothing! I called you almost forty times!"
Peter cringed hard at that.
He hadn't even looked at his phone since he'd suited up yesterday morning.
Peter had known that he was heading into potential danger - that there was a very good chance that he wouldn't actually make it back alive - he should have found a way to text her. Unfortunately, without the buzz of his phone in his pocket as a reminder, he hadn't even thought to send her a message to let her know he was okay.
He'd been far too concerned with being Spiderman.
"I lost track of my phone," he murmured pathetically. "And...and my backpack."
"Mr. Stark didn't have a phone that you could borrow?" she asked, incredulous.
He couldn't even lie and say no. It was too ridiculous to even consider, Mr. Stark had about three phones built into his daily attire alone...there was no way Peter could claim that the billionaire didn't have a single device that Peter could borrow for five minutes to make a phone call to his family.
"I...I didn't ask…" he whispered, feeling like an idiot; feeling vile that he'd made her worry so much with his carelessness.
"You could have told me where you were," she scolded, but her teary voice sounded more like a plea. "Or at the very least let me know that you were okay…"
"I-" he started, his tense throat strangling the words halfway up his throat. "I'm sorry, Aunt May…"
His words sounded shallow and pathetic, even to his own ears, but Peter didn't have a better way to voice the dark, sickening guilt that he felt throbbing in the pit of his stomach.
She had thought that he'd died. He'd left her here, for almost two days, feeling that same horrible, helpless feeling that he could still remember clearly from when Uncle Ben had passed away.
And all he could do was to say those same two stupid words over and over.
"I'm sorry… I'm so, so sorry…"
Peter began to creep forward, desperate to chase the tearful, worried expression from his aunt's face, and he breathed a deep sigh of relief as Aunt May quickly scooped him into her arms to hug him tight, her cheek leaned against the top of his head.
"I was so worried," she whispered, the uncertain tremble of her words tightening around his throat like a vice and strangling his next "I'm sorry" into little more than a croak.
Peter took a slow breath, trying to check his emotions as he struggled to find the right words for what he needed to say, but his aunt beat him to it.
"I was so terrified that I'd lost you," she breathed, her voice soft and watery, and the pain in the words absolutely did Peter in.
His next inhale caught hard, wracking his body in her gentle hug, and he closed his eyes tight as he felt tears welling up.
"I'm sorry, Aunt May, I'm such an idiot," he said, his voice bordering on a sob.
"I'm just glad that you're okay," she replied, a little sniffle catching the tail end of her words. "Oh Peter…"
Peter buried his nose in the collar of her shirt, letting the familiar scent soothe away the tension in his shoulders. But all too soon his aunt was drawing away again.
"What have you been doing all this time, anyway?" she asked, her hands sliding from around him but settling on his shoulders, not yet willing to let him go.
"T-training," he lied on instinct. "With Mr. Stark."
"Peter, you promised me," she pressed gently. "No more secrets."
"I know, I know, I just-" he broke off, sighing sharply as his shoulders sagged in defeat. "I don't want to worry you."
"Peter, I worry far more when I don't know where you are, or if you're okay," she explained gently, leaning close and reaching a hand to brush his hair back from his face.
Peter looked away, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth, but Aunt May was quick to draw his attention back.
"I promise you, I always prefer knowing the truth, to not knowing what's happening," she said, moving to clasp his hands in between hers as her eyes darted, taking in his face.
Peter swallowed hard, trying to work out some way to lessen the enormity of information that he was about to drop in her lap, but not able to find a way to tell her partial truths without leaving gaping holes in his story.
So he decided to tell her all of it.
"I...I wasn't actually training with Mr. Stark," he admitted at length."He had a mission that he needed help on, because aliens were coming to attack the planet. And one of them is this crazy-powerful guy named Thanos who got a hold of a bunch of galactic chaos emeralds like he's Dr. Eggman from Sonic, and he's trying to collect the rest so he can kill half of all life, everywhere."
Aunt May, for her part, simply nodded back at him a little, blinking hard as she tried to take everything in.
"And we were fighting him, but we were losing, then he got one of the stones from the Vision guy, but then the Maximoff girl did something with her magic, and half of the Avengers vanished, and so did all of the stones, and Dr. Stooge sent me back here to keep an eye on New York while they try to find everyone who went missing before the alien dude attacks again."
Peter let his last few words hang in the air for a long second before he dared glance up at Aunt May, hesitantly judging her reaction.
His poor Aunt looked rather shocked at the sudden revelation, however she was surprisingly quick to take it in stride, giving her head a little shake to clear her troubled expression before fixing her gaze back on Peter with an air of slightly-forced calm.
"So you're to stay here until they find the missing Avengers, doing what exactly?"
"Erm. Well, Dr. Range was a bit vague with the details...but I think it's kinda what I was doing before. Just helping people around the city while everyone is freaked out, and keeping an eye out for more of those alien weirdos."
"And who exactly is this new man you keep mentioning?" she asked slowly. "I don't recall hearing his name listed with the Avengers before."
Peter gave a little shrug, feeling his face heat up.
"Oh, the Doctor guy? I'm not sure. He really looks more like a wizard than a doctor," Peter shrugged. "And I can't quite remember his name. But it was definitely something strange."
Aunt May nodded a little, looking less than convinced.
"He, ah...he kinda took charge since Captain America vanished and everyone else was arguing too much to do anything," Peter explained with an embarrassed flinch. "He's an Avenger, I guess? Or something? But like, on reserve for when stuff really gets crazy. Or...something..."
If he was being honest, he really had no idea what the man did. But he'd seemed like he knew what he was doing, so Peter had gone along with it.
Aunt May had the oddest look on her face, like she'd either bitten her tongue or found a little seed stuck in a back tooth, and Peter offered her a helpless little shrug.
"I'm not super great with all the details yet…"
"Well," Aunt May sighed at length, planting her hands on her hips and staring off into the bottom corner of the room the way she was wont to do when considering something. "I suppose...we will just have to work with the details that we have, then."
Peter glanced up sharply at that.
"You're still going to let me be Spiderman?"
"Peter," Aunt May sighed, opening her arms to him once more and hugging him tight when he stepped into her embrace. "Spiderman is part of who you are. I'm not going to tell you to stop being yourself...not even if you scare me half to death with it. Though we're absolutely going to have to find where you lost your cell phone, because if you vanish for two days again without so much as a phone call, I swear I will 'accidentally' find some way to dye your spider-suit pink in the wash."
The absurdity of her threat shocked a laugh from Peter's throat, and once he started, he couldn't seem to make himself stop. All of the stress of the past two days, coupled with the threat of certain death that had been hanging over his head like an executioner's axe ever since he'd found out about Thanos, and even the guilt of what he'd put Aunt May through with worrying about him, felt like they'd been somehow wiped away in the level-headed, calming presence of his aunt. She gave him a feeling of safety that not even two-dozen fully-armed superheroes could.
He felt almost giddy.
Peter stood there in the living room for a long while, giggling like an idiot in sheer, utter relief; hugging his aunt as tightly as he dared, and never wanting to leave again.
Author's Note: So I finally got around to watching WandaVision, and I am legit fuming at how close my plotline for this fic got to a lot of what they are doing on the show. It's a little scary, to be honest. So I'll just put it out there that anything that comes up plot-wise in this was written prior to the series, and you can call me a liar but I have the timestamps in Google Docs to prove it. XD Mainly I'm kicking myself for not pounding out more of the early chapters back in 2017 so I could get it all posted before the series dropped. Live and learn, I suppose. *shrug*