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An eye for an eye, he chanted inside of his head. A life for a life.
He knew he was going to kill Norman Osborn.
He had felt warmth enveloping him these last few months, she brought him back from the edge of a dark precipice he toed the edge of, overlooking blackness.She was a delicate sweet notes of music, a sunset beaming in a room, gently wrapping around him.
Now she’s lifeless, sedate and unsteady from her usual passionate self. She’s his literal sun, now she’s the rain falling from the sky, the song’s chords cut like actual cords, severed from the world. His eyes are stinging, but he doesn’t have time to mourn Gwen right now.
He hears police turning a corner, and he’s standing on the rooftop with Gwen in his arms, watching the water next to the dock swirl, and he can imagine a dark gaping, tsunami waves merciless, a sea monster reaching out to tug him down. He can hear the traditional condolences already, and towards his other side he hears the crackling of radios reporting explosions and the Green Goblin tormenting his city’s people, attempting to destroy pillars on the George Washington bridge. He is a nightmare come to life, conniving teeth sticking out, an insult to him, an insult to his people, calling himself a fucking goblin.
Peter seethed.
He outright denied Gwen’s lifeless body, he knew if he started compressions he could bring her back. Her cells haven’t committed suicide, her body was still warm. He wouldn’t let this anti-semitic murderer get away.
His webs were volatile, she’s merely in a state of shock from falling from the ceiling and almost landing in the sea of sharks, he could save her, his stupid fucking spider-powers are false right now, he doesn’t want her to be dead. He can hear May preparing to console him, but no, he hasn’t fucking lost Gwen.
Doesn’t Gwen see?
He caught her. His webs caught her before her imminent death to the sharks, the black sea, he wouldn’t allow the billow to drag her away into the cold, unknown.
“I saved you!” a scream rips from Peter’s throat, and he thinks he’s going to vomit from the force of his screams, each black coil of anger rising as bile, ready to jump out. He shakes Gwen.
He yells towards the Goblin, pushing off the NYPD. How dare they touch Gwendy right now? How dare they speak in tongues, accusing him of killing Gwen.
“Shut up,” Peter yells behind the mask, “You’re going to pay, Goblin!”
The NYPD shuffle around him, attempting to cuff him and tackle him, and he shoves them all off, reaching out for Gwen and the paramedics hiding her body. “I killed her! It’s all his fault, Spider-Man is a murderer.”
He’s hysterical, he’s dizzied, he’s going to find Goblin and make him pay, he’s going to faint from rage that turned from a spark to a blazing fire and he will smolder the entire city to get Goblin to die.
“What did you just say?” the nearest cop asks, grabbing onto his arm. He’ll be sorry for this later, but he strikes two punches, earning the crowd gathering to gasp, the city’s fucking menace strikes the innocent NYPD. He can already picture the headlines JJJ is going to print for the Bugle.
“I said, Green Goblin is going to die.”
Peter felt emptiness, more alone than ever before, and his haunted form entered the apartment doorway. There is no doubt he’s startled May by now, shaking, his keys falling to the ground in front of him.
He sees May illuminated by the golden sunset behind her, and it’s like he’s 16 years old again living with May. He shouldn’t have come here, the fear streaked across May’s face unsettles him, he’s a coil of limbs and numbness pinpricks him. He thinks he hears May talking to him past the ringing in his ears, his thoughts metamorphosing into reality, every fear embedded into his brain gives him intense pains, his heart aches the most. He had caught sight of his own face through windows when searching for alleyways, and hadn’t missed the purple bags under his eyes and the eyes streaked with vengeance.
He had been around each borough, each alleyway, each street today as it snowed, an unletting downpour, weighing him down and dragging him under, the snow ready to kill him. He remembers visiting the Bugle office in a murderous haze, he thinks, and he hopes his Spider-Man mask was covering him, but he doesn’t care right now.
He had called Gwen a paltry existence, occupying space like she didn’t deserve to, she was the fucking sun—
May watches him, and for a second he thinks she can read his mind.
“MJ called,” she whispers into the empty apartment, the empty space between them the size of a warehouse. He isn’t safe, warm, or enveloped in the sun, the music notes aren’t intertwining around the apartment. “I’m so sorry, baby—“
He cuts her off, unwilling to hear her voice crack and break apart, “I shouldn’t have fucking come here.”
His eyes are stinging, and the warmth of the pooling tears doesn’t equate to Gwen, he bites his bottom lip. The only time Peter had heard May choke up this badly was the night Ben died and those were the most depressing months of their lives following suit. They didn’t have family to mourn with them, nobody to participate in their Judaism customs, and his heart broke for the second time. He was unsure it could ever be fixed again, but May was his steady needle and thread, stitching his broken glass pieces together.
“‘M sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,” he says too quietly.
He backs away towards the door to avoid looking at her, because he’s stupid and she knows this pain. His body trembles, snow clings to him with a desperacy he feels inside, replaying the parts of his last moments with Gwen.
He had caught Gwen, and her body couldn’t bear the webs. His own creation betrayed her. His own carelessness lost her, and he grips onto her pumpkin handbag he found at a thrift store a year ago when they first started dating. He hears the swik of her body, her spine. He’s cut to bits, he still feels Norman’s hands on his own throat after he choked him, the several fights between them over the last year, each time had a new way of torture he prepared specificlly for Peter.
His suit is torn up in his backpack, he thinks, and it’s as bad as the night he got crushed by a building and yanked a pane out of the fucking sky that had crashed and burned into the Coney Island beach and he could never look at the amusement park the same way.
He’s sobbing openly now, collapsing onto his knees against the hard wooden floors, with the blood stains from each night he limped his way back in and crashed in the living room. He sounds like glass shards cut his throat, and he wants May to hold him, her arms are made to hold him. He wants familiarity right now, the foggy haze of vengeance and murder clears, the gaping emptiness replaces it.
He wants Tony right now, he wants his older mentor to tell him how the fuck to get through this right now, and he’d hear the familiar heartbeat from years ago, wishing they’d never drifted from each other after the man brought him and the world back to life. He wants to blame him for funding his personal vendetta in New York, though he knew he’d never listen if he hadn’t pushed away from the Avengers.
He wants Matt Murdock, a mentor with different mechanisms. He hadn’t attempted to fix him, to turn him into a puppeteer for the world to ogle at, he was safe. Matt was a home, safe inside the city, the devil of Hell’s Kitchen turned out to be a literal angel. He wants Matt, he wants to be held, he feels like a fucking teenager all over again, clinging to anybody and everybody around him. Matt had found him after he lost his first life as Spider-Man, how he wasn’t enough once again , he made a promise to himself it wouldn’t happen again. If Matt wasn’t there to show him the ropes of being a vigilante, of holding him and telling him yes, he may not have been fast enough at the moment in time, the person died, but Matt was proud of him. And it’d hit him like a ton of bricks,
He doesn’t care about inhibitions anymore, he wants to hold everybody he loves close and for somebody to offer repentance for what he’s thinking about doing to Norman. For what he’s planning.
May catches Peter before he slips away, being dragged down by the vines crawling out of the floor, and he lowers him into her lap, “I’ve got you, Peter, it’s okay,” she whispers shakily, “Good job, baby. I’m right here. You aren’t alone.” He can feel the vomit ready to spill. “I’m not going anywhere, I promise. I’m right here.”
“May,” Peter whines.
He knows she’s repairing herself trying to repair him, the familiarity of Ben lingering in their apartment in every picture, sweater, blanket that smells like him, he was too young to die, and so was Gwen.
He let May hold him, and he doesn’t remember what he mumbled for in between wracking sobs, but his chest and throat were stitched together by the end of the night, and the snow fell inside the apartment. The roof was ripped off, he could see the sky, lifeless, invisible of stars like Gwen, but the snow fell all around him. He shivered.
The next few days of Peter’s life were laden with grief. He didn’t eat when hungry, his senses dulled down, but he doesn’t think he trusts his senses anymore. He hasn’t checked his phone for a few days.
He blinks blearily at his bedroom ceiling, peeking over at his window. It’s dawn, and his room looks blue from frost. The coldness seeps in, strangling him. Strangling him like Goblin’s hands, and he thinks he’s irreparable.
He’s disorientated, forgetting how many days it’s even been. He hasn’t messaged any of his professors, and it’s too close to finals. He’s an adult, but he hasn’t had the strength to pull out his phone to message anybody. He’s supposed to be tough and resilient. He isn’t supposed to be burdening May with all of this, he’s 21.
His heart thrums wildly when his door squeaks open, because what if Goblin comes back for some sick, twisted reason, ready to kill him after killing the love of his life.
“Honey?” May asks, oblivious to his inner turmoil, despite his chest seizing of any movement. He puffs out a breath, looking up at her. She’s wearing a white robe, her hair is held behind a red hairband, and the bags under her eyes look like charcoal. Unthreatening. “I brought you hot chocolate. I know you probably want coffee, but—“
“No, May, it’s perfect,” he manages to say, his voice scratchy and his chest feels like it’s going to collapse at any moment. She steps forward, and the scorching mug of hot chocolate doesn’t warm up the room as much as he’d hoped.
“Here,” she sets it down onto his bedside table, but he makes no move to get up. She doesn’t care, she sits down on the edge of his mattress until he makes space for her. He huffs out a breath miserably, just like when he was a petulant kid. May and Ben would shuffle into his room Saturday mornings, jostling his sides until he’d giggle under his covers. She reminds him of the babka on the kitchen counter, but they make no move to get it.
“I’ll do whatever I can to take away from this tragedy, baby.”
The words are sudden, and leave her lips slowly. And he’s on the edge of a snowy precipice, a gust of howling wind ready to shove him into the inevitable, the words settling in deep inside his bones. “It’s gonna hurt. A lot. But don’t you forget I’m here by your side.”
May must notice he’s frozen, his cheeks burning with the ache of tears building. He tries his hardest not to cry, staring at the Baby Yoda blanket in his lap that May gave him as an early present.
Peter avoids her eyes, because if he looks at her, each small wrinkle mapped out on her forehead, smile lines around her mouth, the look of solace that she must’ve had time to practice, he’ll see Ben’s familiar face in hers. The face that he misses just as much right now.
May leans in to gently push his head into her shoulder, scratching through his unruly hair. Her nails dig softly, and he immediately melts into May’s arms.
After losing his parents, he never spared a hug. He’d always felt guilty, seeing Ned’s confused and twisted face after each rejected hug, which eventually turned into insincere half-hugs. Each day spent with May and Ben, they mapped their ways through each other’s life and mapped their way inside each other’s lives. Each touch, sending waves of love through his body, he learned to accept.
May and Ben were patient, always offering hugs when he needed. He never expected to become physically affectionate himself, but he doesn’t mind it and doesn’t mind holding everyone he loves.
“I think I want to quit, May,” he whispers, frowning at his own admission into the dark bedroom.
She must be closing her eyes right now, he thinks, and they both sigh and watch the clouds drop snows of flurry onto their city.
She knows he won’t quit.
Ned and MJ pull stools up to the yellow countertop of the apartment, watching May bring groceries in from the front door, preparing for their unofficial fourth day of Shiva.
They’re dignified kids, members of this family, their family, so naturally they hassle Peter for not helping May. And right now, he doesn’t know if he quite regrets letting them into their family.
“Hey, hey,” Peter begins, grabbing all 8 bags of groceries and balancing them on one wrist, “I think I deserve a tiny break after breaking my challah, okay?”
May laughs the loudest, bringing smiles to all of their faces.
Peter feels the chills in his bones from the night before, but it’s not truly his body temperature that’s bothering him. He snuck out in the Spider-Man suit in the middle of the night, watching the snowfall and blanket his city, perched on the Presbyterien Queens hospital sign.
He’d been with Gwen there, waiting for the physicians to pronounce her dead, like he already knew she was.
The sign from the light hummed and matched the colors of the white snow on the ground, too soft and pure in the middle of the night. The sounds of snowfall and wind was hypnic, almost at a frequency he could put to the back of his mind. He watched the heavy snow fall onto the white sign and melted immediately, defeated.
He’d felt as defeated as the melted snow, wondering how he’d managed to find so much death.
It found him, creeping around him from every corner.
He’d held the responsibility on his shoulders, and years later— it’s been nearly 7 years— it was a good burden. It was a necessity, and he loved his city. He’d find more like him along the way, but like that night it hadn’t felt enough.
Daredevil had startled him, actually, nearly losing his balance on the sign ledge. He hadn’t thought that anybody could reach his height from the ground, no matter what vigilante they were, but he was mistaken.
Daredevil had his suit on, he must’ve been patrolling and had made his ways to Queens. Maybe he knew Peter would be there, after he had left the older man cryptic texts in response to him asking if he was okay.
Daredevil had never quite learned Queens as well as Hell’s Kitchen, but he was a native to New York, and knew his way around the borough’s. He knew in the back of his mind DD had found him, but he honestly didn’t mind. It mended a jarring pain inside of him, patching up a metaphorical hole in his heart.
“Hey, mini-red,” Matt said. “Don’t be creeped out, please, I’m trying here, bud.”
Spider-Man lifted his head off of the wall he leaned against, definitely intrigued now, and felt warmth bubble up inside of him. Matt held out a mini-box in his palm that he took out from behind his back, he had managed to balance himself on a railing.
He reached for the box, nearly bursting into tears. His face was too cold, stuck together from grief and below-freezing temperatures, but he grabbed the box from the senior vigilante. “ Matt.”
Inside, held a sufganiyot, and he must’ve searched every bakery in every borough for this treat. He’d mentioned years ago to Matt he never found a bakery that sold these, but the circular treat had been perfect for Shiva. And Matt knew it. He’d learned his favorite treats, memorized it, like mishpocheh does, and brought this to him.
“Look, kid,” Matt had begun to console, already laughing once he realized Peter’s face twisted in his uplifted mask, “It’s not much. It’s a condolence gift that I hope, shit, I know you’ll accept, please don’t cry--”
If they hadn’t been perched a hundred meters off the ground, Peter’d have tackled him, but instead he opened his arms and had graciously reveled when he accepted the offer. Matt had been one of the elders in his lives he could trust with his life, especially when he understood Spider-Man and acquired his own moniker.
“It’s perfect,” Peter had sobbed through his snot, and he wished that was something new between them.
When Matt had found him as a teenager, and once he realized the adult was trustworthy, he latched onto him and never let go. Matt had always been perceptive to his emotions, probably his extra senses had the ability to hone in specifically on him. His skills as a lawyer sometimes irritated him, because he could transcribe each of his feelings before he could.
But that had made him a mentor he could trust, sought solace in, and treasured.
“You know, you’ll never be able to live this down, right?” Peter sniffled into Matt’s shoulder, joking.
“Never, kid,” Matt replied, rubbing small circles onto his back. “Foggy is better at this emotions stuff than I am, hell, Karen is, too. But you’ll owe me.”
Peter snorted, “Never.”
After silence, except for the breeze, Peter whispered, “I love you, Matt.”
It was true. He had been his older brother for years, now. He had also been part of May’s family, and that was difficult to forge your way into.
Matt had turned his head dramatically, earning an annoyed laugh from Peter while they were away from all civilian life except the MedSurg floor with an empty room behind them. “I love you, too, kid.”
“I wish Mr. Stark was here. He would’ve bought us an entire bakery,” Ned finally says with a sigh.
“ Ned, ” May huffed, laughing. “We don’t invite guests merely for the treats.”
She had paused, glancing around the room. “But for your information, he is invited to Shiva tomorrow.”
Once their laughter quieted down, the silence felt comfortable and enveloped Peter. Each word spoken wrapped around him, comforting every chilled crevice of his body. Ned had questioned his deliberate choice of two pairs of socks, sweatpants, a crewneck, and turtleneck on top, but shook his head and offered a hug instead.
It was jarring, now, remembering their childhood and teenage years compared to now. Ned looks a little bit older, as does he. MJ does, too, and grew even taller since sophomore year. They fit like a puzzle inside of this kitchen, some visits good, some bad like when one of them needed to drag an injured Spider-Man home to find the extra med kit.
They were now four hours apart from each other, and they had made this special trip out to honor Gwen and spend time with him. He spoke earnestly about Gwen, while Ned retold the story of winter break in freshman year that ended up with burnt challah for Hanukkah, but Gwen came in to save the day. They’d been burnt out from school, had taken hours of train rides, were sick of finals, but he had finally introduced Gwen to his friends.
Peter wants to keep them in his corner for every waking moment of their lives, and he will. He promises himself that.
And he wishes he could form attachments that were distant, but that isn’t allowed with this lifestyle.
MJ yells at Ned when he reaches his eager fingers into the oven, oven-mit-less, earning a warning from May on the living room couch with a book on her lap. They had been eating too much challah early, despite being halfway baked. This is their trial run, so it didn’t matter anyways.
“You know, if it weren’t for me, I think this apartment would be in flames right now,” MJ hisses, decorating their pain of latkes. Ned gasps and runs from the small kitchen table in the corner to the wooden counter, knocking furiously.
“ Knock on wood ,” he solemnly gasps out, sliding down the cabinets and falling dramatically to sit on the floor. MJ puts the finishing touches of dill on the latkes, joining in on Ned’s side. They both wiggle and make space away from the oven, allowing Peter to squish himself into the middle.
They fit perfectly, Ned and MJ’s heads falling onto Peter’s shoulders. He takes each of their arms, resting his chin on top of Ned’s head. It was an unspoken moment, a familiar memory takes reign over them, and it was just like the first time they began their pact as teenagers on the same kitchen floor.
It was after a fight with Mysterio, and they then realized the intensity of Peter’s responsibility to New York and the world.
“You all better be done baking within the next couple of hours, you’ve been at it all day,” May calls from the living room, probably unable to see them in the kitchen. “You all need sleep.”
Ned sighs aloud, he’s now used to Aunt May’s lectures. Peter shifts his head to MJ’s, feeling her soft curls under his cheek. “Yes, Aunt May. We know the drill.”
“Yeah, May, I’ll make sure these two kids get the sleep they need,” MJ jokes, betraying him.
“Hm. I think I’ll need a lullaby to get myself to sleep tonight. You know, the usual reinforcements,” Peter says.
“In your dreams, baby,” May sing-songs, “ in your dreams.”
Various friends from FEAST pay a visit after dinner, offering even more baked goods for them. They offer to come visit during the day over the weekend, not wanting to impose during the week.
They do come to also visit for Hanukkah, warm light from the hanukkiah illuminating their apartment. May learned Hebrew from Ben, and he closes his eyes, reminiscing in Ben’s old Hebrew readings. He’d wished to share this again with Gwen this year, and felt selfish when he’d wished to be in Ben’s arms again during prayers.
Ben would have been proud of their mishpocheh, each puzzle piece may find time to shift into the right place, but they eventually get it. Family and religion had been important to him, and he remembers their first Hanukkah together. He’d been too verklempt to explain the meaning of family and how he knew they’d become the best one. A loving one.
He’d never settled for family, and told Peter to never settle for a putz . You find a loving nudnik who fights right into your family and you secure them, loving them, being responsible for each interpersonal relationship.
He’d always melodramatically lay a hand over his own heart, then on Peter’s, relaying there’s no use for our heart to beat if we won’t use it.
Peter wished he listened more to Ben back then, but he loved his family so much and knew what Ben meant.
He’d gotten his mishpocheh in the end, even if some puzzle pieces were forever missing.