Chapter Text
There was a time when I was alone.
Nowhere to go and no place to call home.
My only friend was the man in the moon,
And even sometimes he would go away, too.
Then one night, as I closed my eyes,
I saw a shadow flying high.
He came to me with the sweetest smile,
Told me he wanted to talk for awhile.
He said, "Peter Pan, that's what they call me,
I promise that you'll never be lonely."
And ever since that day…
THE SHADOW
The day that changes his life is a Thursday.
It's a day that's only ever remarkable because the next is Friday, and then comes the weekend.
But not this one.
This Thursday is the beginning of everything, but he doesn't know that yet.
Instead, he's watching the second hand of the clock mark the passing of time, waiting for the next. And the next. And the next.
"Dude, are you even listening to me?"
Peter blinks. Blinks again. "Yes." Ned raises an eyebrow. "No."
"Peter."
"I'm sorry!" Peter stabs the straw into his juicebox with more force than required, the coated cardboard losing its shape. "Sorry. I uh, I didn't sleep well."
Ned finishes chewing his lukewarm pasta. "I would accept that excuse if you ever slept well."
Peter grimaces. Ned watches him fiddle with the stalk of his apple.
"'Sup, dorks." Michelle Jones falls into a seat a few spaces away, simultaneously dropping her bag on the table and collecting a book from inside. She kicks her feet up onto the chair beside him, her face disappearing behind the green hardback.
Ned and Peter stare at her, mouths gaping.
The reason is this: While Michelle had lurked at their table for a while in sophomore year, it's the first time she's been here in two years.
"Hey, Michelle," Ned says slowly, getting over his surprise quicker than Peter. He regards her suspiciously.
Michelle does not look up from her page as she snags his bag of carrot sticks.
"Hey!" Ned protests, despite having already offered them to Peter earlier. "What gives?"
"I'm hungry." Michelle produces a sleeve of cookies seemingly from thin-air, placing them in front of her but angled forward, like a silent offer. "Eating is a necessary function of the human experience to fuel the body in all aspects, including growth, cellular regeneration—"
"I'm stealing these," Ned says, pulling the packet closer. Michelle snaps a piece of carrot in half with her teeth, and her lack of objection makes his best friend increasingly nervous. "Are these poisoned?"
Michelle sighs loudly, the book landing on the tabletop with a heavy thump. "Yes, Edward. I woke up today and thought, you know what would be fun? Taking out two of my classmates right before graduation."
When Ned still looks doubtful, Peter grabs a cookie and pops it whole into his mouth.
(They're his favourite, and he can't resist. If the last thing he ever tastes is this, it's well worth the ending.)
He doesn't begin to froth at the mouth, so Ned dives in the packet and resumes his discussion of… something. Peter's still not entirely sure what he's talking about.
He looks back to the clock. Fifteen minutes left until the bell.
The ticking of time no longer seems to be sufficient, so his eyes drift around the room.
Even if he hadn't just spent two years with this new graduating class, he'd be able to identify them from the crowds congregating in the cafeteria. It's like they're vibrating at a different frequency, or perhaps more saturated in colour than the monotonous tones of those still destined to be trapped here another year.
There are three weeks left of high school. Three weeks and then they're done: Just like that.
Do people look at him and see a boy drenched in the rainbow? Or, perhaps, the bland, dreary tones of an overcast day at the end of Winter?
Do they see the lie or the truth?
Something moves in his peripheral vision, and when he turns he sees Michelle shifting in her chair. Her eyes flicker from her book to Peter, skittering away when she finds him already looking. She crosses her ankles, looks at him again, then puts her book facedown in her lap.
“You look like shit, Parker,” she finally says, “Did you guys stay up playing something overtly violent last night or…?”
He doesn't really know what kind of answer to give, but Ned jumps to his defense—something he's been doing a lot of since losing the role of the oldest brother, always so protective of him.
“Why are you being nice to us?” Ned asks, squinting, skipping over how she’d guessed their evening plans so easily.
Michelle shrugs, twirling the last carrot stick between her slender fingers. “I am nice.”
“You’re a lot of things, but nice isn’t one of them.”
“Ned, did you order the special edition discs yet?” Peter asks when he sees Michelle’s mouth downturn at his comment. Ned shakes his head, sufficiently distracted. “Dude, come on; the plan!”
Ned happily chats about their month-long plan to watch every franchise worth bingeing, a ridiculous summer pursuit they’ve been planning since freshman year—it had started as a joke but now it's an excuse to be together, to enjoy the last of their time as a pair before Ned packs up and goes to college hundreds of miles away.
Michelle leaves wordlessly after a few minutes, but he doesn’t think much of it until he’s at his locker later on, grabbing his Chemistry textbook. It's dog-eared and falling apart, but it doesn't matter; there are only three weeks left of school. Ever.
He's fine. Dealing with it appropriately.
No existential sense of dread and foreboding here.
"Hey, loser. I have a proposition for you."
Peter flinches in that way he always does when something hasn't been picked up by his heightened senses—that is, he flails and stumbles. A lot of the time this involves the girl beside him.
Her expression is completely blank, except for the arched eyebrow that indicates he's already taking too much time to answer her.
"God, Michelle, way to sneak up on someone." Peter closes his locker quickly to hide the mess inside and leans against it. The eyebrow rises higher. "What's up?"
"Proposition. For. You." She rolls her eyes. "Are you in?"
"I can't agree until I know what you're proposing."
Michelle looks irritated with him. "Part A of the proposition is for you to skip Chemistry."
Even though there are three weeks left and the classes are basically useless, he still promised his Aunt May that he'd go to all of his classes this year after… well. There's only so many field trips you can skip out on before your guardian puts her foot down.
"What's Part B?" he asks anyway.
"That requires you to enact Part A."
"Can't you just tell me Part B after school, therefore keeping me out of trouble with my Aunt?"
"Nope." She smirks. "Only through your willingness to enact Part A can you unlock Part B."
All of this A and B stuff is giving him a headache. He rubs his forehead and considers it for about four seconds, because really, what else does he have to do? Learn something? Please.
"Okay, I'm in. Where are we going?"
“Forget them Wendy. Forget them all. Come with me where you'll never, never have to worry about grown up things again.”
COME AWAY, COME AWAY!
They end up in the library. Not really worth skipping Chemistry for, but then he knows this is a sacred place for Michelle.
Not that he knows much else about her, though—could probably count the facts on one hand: She prefers to be alone, she's dazzlingly smart and ran their decathlon team like a well-oiled machine. She likes reading and sketching. He knows she was Blipped, and that she appeared to be about as fazed by that as they all were by Flash continuing to be as much of an asshole as he was before Thanos—
That… That's still a sore spot. Better to move his thoughts on quickly.
But Michelle has been more secluded since. She stopped sitting at the end of their table, her sporadic commentary not something he and Ned realised they would miss until it was gone. She doesn't even voluntarily go to detention anymore. She's become somewhat of an enigma, though since everything that happened he's not had much energy to try and solve it.
Michelle sits on the opposite side of the table to him, hoisting her heavy bag onto the chair beside her. From inside, she pulls out the book from earlier. When he looks closer, he sees the title.
"You're reading the original Peter Pan?" he asks, just a little (a lot) impressed.
Michelle says nothing, stares stoically at him until he shifts uncomfortably.
"Are you going to tell me your proposition or…?"
She stares a touch longer, her cheek twitching like she's enjoying his discomfort, then relents. "I think we should go somewhere."
"We? As in, us? Like, together?"
"I don't see anyone else here." She rolls her eyes. "Yes, I mean you. And me."
He's quiet for a very, very long moment. "Are you… asking me out?"
"No."
Peter tries to not be completely devastated at the level of disgust in that single word. Surely he's not that bad a prospective date?
He pulls himself together and mulls over her words again. He'd asked the wrong question, clearly, so he tries to find the right one. "Go where?"
"Away."
Peter can only stare at her incredulously. What does she mean, 'away'? They're just about to graduate. Plus, they're barely even friends. Half the time when he passes her in the hallway, she flips him off instead of smiling back. The other half, she just flat-out ignores him. What could she possibly want to do with him?
"Can y—can you be more specific?" Peter's fingers tap a quick rhythm against the table, his other hand sticking to the cheap laminate. Michelle is perfectly still, her book forgotten, arms crossed as she watches him fidget.
"No. Just... away. Take off and see the world. That kind of away." He can hear her heel bumping into the table leg, over and over, as she fails to make direct eye contact.
"Like… a vacation?"
"Not exactly," she hedges, and Peter all of a sudden goes pale.
No. Surely not.
"You mean, run away? What are you—Are you serious right now? You want to run away?! Why would you possibly want to—"
"Would you, please, shut up?" she hisses at him, leaning forward like she's panicking, and he realises he'd gone from quiet, appropriate library level of talking to a level of screeching that possibly only dogs could here.
"I'm not suggesting running away," she says exasperatedly, hands waving around in a way that was more like him than her, "It's more… It's half road trip, half…"
"Running away?"
She snarkily pokes her tongue out at him. "You haven't said no."
"I assumed that was implied with the very minor freak out at your proposition."
"Okay." Michelle stands up and shrugs. "Bye."
She's walking away, the shiny letters of his name on her book glinting in the overheard lights, a tension in her shoulders that contradicts the easy tempo of her steps, getting further and further away.
The anxiety crashes into his chest a little heavier than usual, stealing his breath.
Michelle is smart—not just clever but smart, and for some reason she'd made a choice to come to him with this preposterous plan of doing something really stupid. He wants to know why; he wants to know more. Even though entertaining the notion is ridiculous, dangerous, like a temptation so specific that it's designed just for him—Peter Parker, nearly 19 years old, enhanced human being with terrible mental wellbeing.
"Wait! Don't go. Just… Don't go."
Michelle turns around, a smirk lighting up her eyes. "You're interested. Excellent."
He's not. He has no reason to be. His life isn't that bad; he has his Aunt May and Ned, and he likes to visit Morgan on the second weekend of the month and she'll be upset if he doesn't show up to let her demolish him at Mario Kart again. He's got plans for that epic movie marathon with Ned; Star Wars (because it's amazing), Lord of the Rings (to mock it), Harry Potter (for nostalgia), all in one go, right after graduation.
Graduation! And prom. And college, eventually, probably. He hasn't got it figured out yet, opted to take a year out, but that's almost definitely the plan. All he has to do is some major mental health overhaul. That shouldn't be too difficult. Little bit of nightmare solving, a smidge of fixing those damn anxiety attacks, easing some of the PTSD left over from—
Oops, lets not let that get out of hand.
Michelle's smirk fades, her brow furrows, and she sits back down, this time beside him. Her warmth is oddly comforting and he closes his eyes, letting her presence wash away the tightness in his lungs.
When he looks at her again she's staring at her book without reading it, her free hand lying next to his on the table. She's looped their pinkie fingers together; he can feel the jagged edge of her nail against his knuckle. He's never noticed that she bit them before.
"I—I—I didn't say I was interested," he says, as though the last few seconds didn't occur, "I just, I have some questions."
Her smile is small but genuine, withdrawing her hand to reach for a slip of paper in her top pocket.
"Meet me here at 5. I'll bring the binder."
***
The address is for a tiny, hole-in-the-wall café, and that night they formulate a plan.
He feels dizzy with this sudden opportunity to press eject on his life; to be who ever he wants to be, where ever he wants to be it. It seems too ridiculous to be true, like Michelle will come to his locker tomorrow and announce he's on the revival of that old show with Ashton Kutcher.
But then he looks at her, and the crease between her eyebrows shows just how serious she is as she lays out the remarkable amount of information she's already collected—how long has she been planning this exactly? There's different coloured tabs and leaflets and print outs, some stained with mug rings and charcoal fingerprints, highlighted in pastel shades of green and blue.
Only when his Aunt has called three times do they leave. Michelle complains but ultimately allows him to walk her home.
“A moment after the fairy's entrance the window was blown open by the breathing of the little stars, and Peter dropped in.”
THE CHILDREN ARE CARRIED OFF
He writes three letters.
One for Morgan, promising to send her postcards and chocolates, and could her mother work out some kind of sub for Spiderman while he's gone? One for Ned, telling him he'll be back in time for their movie marathon before he goes to MIT, though it'll probably have to be more of a weekend thing. Maybe they could skip one of the franchises? Ned will probably be more outraged by that than by his disappearance, but that's likely a good thing for him.
The last one is for Aunt May, which he spends twice as long on trying to articulate why the hell he has made this ridiculous decision, and that he hasn't really run away; he's honestly fine, and to call him any time, but also he's an adult now and needs to make his own decisions, which apparently include chickening out of talking to her about this first and instead just sneaking out on prom night.
She's probably going to kill him. He deserves it.
***
So. Prom night.
May helps him get ready, fusses over his hair and the tie she got him as an early birthday present.
Guilt rolls in his stomach, but this way is probably for the best. Still, he knows how angry she's going to be; how much she's going to yell and scream and cry when she finds his letter and calls him.
She drives him to the school, and he gives her one last extended but too short hug. When she lets him go, she strokes a hand fondly over the lapel of his jacket and he walks towards the school until he hears her drive away to work. Then, he makes his way back to the road and around the corner, where he finds Michelle leaning against the hood of his car.
The car seemed completely ridiculous at the time, but Pepper had insisted on it as a present for his 18th birthday, talking about how he was going to take the world by storm, and to do that he needed transportation.
So really, he's just following her advice.
That's his justification for it, anyway.
By her feet, there's two coolers and a large suitcase, and she's wrapped in a thick jumper with the hood covering most of her face despite the warmth lingering in the summer night air. When he reaches her, she pulls the headphones out of her ears and gives him a tight smile.
He wonders if she has that feeling in her gut too, like a lion trying to break free of its cage.
"Hey, dork. You didn't have to dress up for little ol' me."
Peter brushes a hand down his Uncle's favourite suit. "You should always dress appropriately for momentous occasions. Like prom, or—"
"—running away?" she teases, straightening up, then pointing to the cool boxes. "I've got about a week of supplies for a normal person, so I think we'll make it at least the night with these."
"Only one suitcase?" he questions. "You know the plan is for three months, right?"
She shrugs. "I don't have much anyway. I'll be fine."
Her answer makes him frown, but before he can comment she's taking the keys from his hand and putting her suitcase in the back with his own three, the coolers on the back seat.
He sheds his blazer and the tie, loosens the buttons on his shirt, and gets behind the wheel. Michelle slides into the passenger seat, and this is it - this is the moment that counts. This is the moment they can't turn back from.
He puts the key into the ignition, turns it, and they speed off into the night.
“Come with me where dreams are born and time is never planned.”