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It isn’t the first thing he does when he gets home, but its close.
The first thing he does is get himself out of this itchy, stifling, insufferable suit. He showers, makes an attempt at making the bed, then collapses into it.
He wakes up at a normal hour, which is strange these days. He stands by the window and watches the morning traffic below and he knows he has to do it. Wants to do it. Even still, when he taps her number on his phone screen, there’s that terrifying flash of what-if that thrums through him.
“Peter?” she answers.
He can’t tell if its worry or surprise. Both?
“Hey, yeah… Sorry to call you so early.” He leans forward to press his forehead against the glass. “I know you’re probably getting ready for work.”
She’s probably ready already. She always liked to have a nice, healthy, productive morning before work. Make the bed, tidy the kitchen.
“That’s ok. Is everything...ok?” There’s a quiver in her voice that gives away words she doesn’t speak.
“Yeah. Yeah, everything’s fine. I’m fine. Just…” He pushes away and stands alone, practically frozen in place in the center of the encumbering chaos of his living room.
How do I know...?
You won’t.
He takes a deep breath. “I would really like to see you. I have a lot of time I need to make up for, and… I’ve just… thought about a lot of things recently, and… I’d just really like to see you? If that’d be ok?”
There’s a long, heavy pause.
“But, you know, there’s no pressure, and if you don’t want to, it’s totally understandable so…”
He should stop. He should definitely stop. He should just hang up because obviously this was a mistake and...
“Ok.”
That pinch is still there in her voice, but this time its a little different.
“Huh?”
“I said ok. Sure.” He hears the smile, that fluttering-eyelash thing she always does when she's nervous.
“Oh. Uh… great. That’s… great.”
“You want to come over for dinner?”
“Dinner?”
Her place. Their old place.
“Tomorrow?”
“Ok. Yeah. Tomorrow. Wh-What... like what time tomorrow?” He moves for his desk in one swift stride and starts shoving away the clutter into indiscriminate piles, as if she can see it through the phone. Under a forgotten Chinese takeout box is the old agenda he used when he worked at the university. He should write this down; she’d like it if he wrote it down.
He isn’t going to write it down…
“Six?”
“Six. Perfect. I’ll be there.”
“Great. See you then.”
“Ok.”
“Bye, Peter.”
“Bye…”
She hangs up, and the tightness in his chest wanes just a little.
“...MJ…”
-
He pulls a suit jacket from where it slouches on its hanger, irons a shirt, and shaves. He feels surprisingly...good. Confident? Excited? Alive?
He takes the subway to her place, catching several looks on the train from the ear-to-ear grin he has plastered on his face.
But the buzz of courage fizzles away by the time he’s at her door, the same one he stepped through for the last time six months ago. Six months and three days? Does time travel count? He’s trying to calculate the hours that might’ve lapsed while he was gone when she answers the door.
She wears a simple blue sweater and slacks—probably the same thing she wore to the office, but she doesn’t look at all like she’s just worked a full day. Granted, a full day for him and a full day for a journalist at the Daily Bugle are two very different things.
“Hi,” he says, sounding completely stupid, fingers flexing clammily around the bouquet he carries.
“Hi.” She tucks a piece of hair behind her ear, smiles in that shy way that still makes his heart catch.
“Brought you these,” he tries again, stepping up to the top of the stoop.
“Thank you. They’re pretty,”
Her fingers brush over his—and not accidentally—when she reaches to take them. But it isn’t necessarily affectionate. Just a little touch, a reminder of sorts, that grounds him. When he looks up into her eyes, his worry fades, replaced by that familiar ease of what it’s like to just be with her.
-
One of the best things about her is that she’s never asked him to make promises. Never given him an ultimatum. The choice has never been her or Spider-Man.
He’s enough of a non-asshole to know that showing up to a date in his suit is a no-no. And if he’s going to be late, he sends her a text as soon as he can. Most of the time she understands, and if she is upset, it isn’t directed at him.
It wasn’t even the nature of the job. More often than not, she understood the duty and responsibility he held more than he did.
The problem—how they’d ended up like this—was his actions, or lack thereof. Somewhere along the way, playing the hero got old. It wasn’t who he felt he was, not when he’d missed his chance to save the person who had always, always been there for him. And as things went on, the feeling only compounded into guilt.
He grew passive, with everything from her heart to their money. He got scared. Scared of failing, scared of disappointing. Scared that he already had.
But she was always there. Never letting him hide behind the mask.
She always held him accountable, even to desperate measures.
Now by some miracle, she’s back. Giving him a second chance. Even when he still manages to screw up and stand her up at a friend’s birthday party she’d invited him along to.
These things are going to happen, he knows she knows. But he just wishes they wouldn’t happen at the worst possible times.
In the past, he would’ve retreated, blown it off, pulled the superhero card to deflect the fact that maybe missing dates fed a deeper hurt.
This time he owns up to it and reaches out to ask her to coffee the following morning.
This time, he’s going to do more than make it work. He’s going to make sure it works.
-
“Typical superhero. Brooding on a rooftop all by himself.”
He turns and watches her approach. She settles next to him on the edge, their feet dangling, and he instinctively touches a hand to her elbow. Just in case.
“Not brooding. Thinking. And how’d you know I was up here?”
“Let’s say I just had a sense.” She throws him a smirk.
“It's dangerous up here,” he points out, still clad in his suit, the mask tossed aside.
“I can handle it.”
It’s his turn to smirk. He gazes back out over the cityscape, cool night air catching both their hair.
“So. What were you thinking about?”
“Eh…” He tenses up.
It’s a leap of faith.
“Just…things.”
She snorts. “Things?”
“Things… I want to say to you.”
He looks up and catches her shy smile. “Like what?”
“Like ‘thank you.’”
Her smile gets a little wider; she doesn’t think he can see.
“And like… thanks for going shopping with me after telling me you’d never want to be seen with me wearing sweatpants in public.”
“Peter, it was awful.” She laughs.
He echos her, reaches out for her hand when they quiet, meets her eyes for a long moment, but then ducks his chin.
“I’m sorry… if you ever thought that I was putting you second. I never intended to.”
“I know,” she says.
She leans close and her soft hair tickles his neck when she lays her head on his shoulder.
He wraps an arm around her to pull her in closer.
They sit for awhile, just watching the city lights glint.
“Do you think we could… try again?” he chances, after a moment. Though they’re sitting still, he feels woozy like he’s falling for the first time all over again.
She laughs under her breath. “I thought we already were.”
He smiles to himself and pulls her impossibly closer, resting his cheek against the crown of her head.
-
He moves back in about a month later. They work together to start paying off his debt. He starts going to the gym, and finds that it actually helps his mood and his outlook on his job, too. He’s faster, has more clarity.
He remembers who this guy used to be, but even so he’s already different. Wiser this time. The best part is that he knows she see it too.
On a whim he checks the job boards at some schools and finds a position for a physics teacher.
He likes it. He likes it a lot, actually. Better than the university. The kids take to his dry, ad lib style and are ten times more curious than any college kid he ever had.
And he finds, when the first call comes, that he doesn’t take this for granted so much anymore. It feels worthwhile for the first time in a long time, and coming home to her is more than enough reward.
-
“Hey.”
He pauses at the open window, the sticky summer air already pooling inside.
She steps into view, bare feet on the wood floor. The glow of the city casts a blue tint over her hair, her skin, her soft red pajamas.
He smiles.
“Didn’t mean to wake you up,” he says through the mask.
“It’s ok.”
She steps in closer and reaches to pull herself into him, resting her cheek against his chest, her hands clutching his shoulders. He turns his head to bury his face in her hair, but just like that she’s pulling away and then…
Her fingers push up the material of the mask, just enough to uncover his chin, his lips.
She kisses him, soft and a little sleepy.
He smiles, and this time she sees it.
“Come home,” she says.
He leans down and presses a kiss to her cheek.
“I always come home.”
And he’s gone, wind whistling through his ears, the rush of free fall in his veins. He doesn’t remember to right his mask until he's already hiding in the shadows, on the scene.
-
For someone who did their best work hanging by a thread, the possibility of being catapulted to his death is commonplace. And he’s gotten quite accustomed to being boldly confronted with some of the scariest stuff known to man… or alien, for that matter.
But twenty-two years of crime fighting can’t prepare him for the bewildering, nauseating, dizzying experience of the birth of his daughter.
It’s like falling from the Empire State Building for thirty hours nonstop, and at the bottom of this drop is the singular most important thing in the entire universe. There isn’t a precedent for this. No guidebook. No Spider-Men in any other universe to help him out on this one. Well, maybe there is. Could be. He doesn’t know, and that’s not really the point.
This is a leap of faith.
He gets that familiar sense of quiet panic as he stands by the nursery window next to Aunt May, points her out, holds her for the first time.
And Mary Jane is just so ridiculously remarkable and radiant and happy.
He can’t believe he was ever scared, even though somehow he still is.
He knows by now that he can’t escape it, from whichever direction it comes, whichever microcosm of his life it will affect.
He greets it, because contrary to what he’s conditioned himself to believe, he now knows one thing is true, no matter what world he’s in.
He knows he isn’t alone.