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“Hey, Spider-Boy. Wall-crawler.” Tony pitches the nearest clementine at Peter’s head. When the kid simply catches it in his left hand without so much as glancing up, the man huffs out a heavy breath through his nose. “Peter Picked a Peck of Parkers.”
That finally seizes the boy’s attention, and he jerks his head up with his classic wide-eyed, clueless look.
“Stop cuddling your boyf for a second and come help me look this over.”
“We’re not cuddling,” Peter quibbles, even as he tosses his half of the fuzzy blanket off himself and disentangles his legs from Ned’s. “We’re conserving heat.”
“Peter, if Iron Man says we’re cuddling, then we’re cuddling.”
Peter rolls his eyes. “What happened to Mr. Iron Man Tony Stark Sir?”
The other boy sticks out the tip of his tongue. “Don’t be too long, babe.”
“Or what? You’ll drown in your own tears?”
“Spider-Man can’t swim, so no, that would not be the best dudebro in distress situation.”
“Stop exposing me, man.”
“I personally fished your floppy body out of a lake that one time, so you’re only exposing yourself,” Tony interjects in a supremely bored tone from the doorway. He peels himself from the lintel and unfolds his arms to beckon to Peter. “C’mon, chop chop. May’ll be here any minute now and this has to be perfect.”
“You become such a perfectionist when you’re high on caffeine and sleep deprivation, Mr. Stark.”
“Oh, boo-hoo, my secret’s been found out.” Tony’s hand comes down heavily on one of Peter’s shoulders to steer him toward the man’s private suite next door. He snatches up a half-empty resealable bag of dried blueberries and walnuts resting on the nearest nightstand and starts munching. He raises a brow at Peter in silent inquiry before tossing a blueberry his way too.
Peter sticks out his tongue to catch the next couple of nuts and berries that come flying in his direction. “Not that I don’t appreciate the subtext of puppy imagery in this whole...setup, Mr. Stark, but you only start compulsively eating and littering the place with snacks when you’re nervous.”
“Me? Nervous? Bah. Have you ever considered I might be eating snacks because I’m hungry and trying to be healthy?” As if to prove his point, Tony flings himself backward onto the queen bed and opens up another drawer in the other nightstand to reveal an energy bar.
Peter raises both brows at his mentor’s self-contradiction.
After half a second of their impromptu staredown, they find themselves twitching with the beginnings of laughter. Peter catches the next thing Tony throws at him--a smooth lump of gunmetal gray, the size of a large egg--and turns it over in his hands as he bites back another giggle.
“Thanks, Mr. Stark, but I don’t think swallowing large objects is listed under my cool radioactive spider powers.”
Tony clicks his tongue at the kid with a finger gun. “I was not asking for disturbing or reptilian images of any kind when I called you up here, but thanks. So what do you think?”
Peter tests the heft of the thing in his hand with another light toss. “It’s a--it sure could conk out Mr. Rogers in a game of catch, I bet.”
“Not that I don’t find a weird amount of satisfaction from that mental image,” says Tony, blowing out a breath between his teeth, “but it’s for May.”
Peter stares at him, nonplussed. “Is there some kind of weird subtext going on here? Like--I know her hard-boiled eggs come out kinda prehistorian, but is this really necessary?”
“Hey,” says Tony. “Her eggs may be prehistorian, but she boils them with all the love in her funky Italian heart.”
“I somehow get the feeling you’re recording this conversation to show to her and win brownie points for yourself.”
“I was simply expressing my unconditional love and support for the woman who raised you, which apparently you don't appreciate.”
“Oh my God,” Peter says. “How do we always end up at this point.”
“It’s the ADHD,” Tony says flippantly. “And our dire need to be hilarious so we can be needed and affirmed.”
Peter starts knocking his knees childishly against the foot of the bed. “Somebody’s been listening in therapy.”
“Yeah, well, I pay for that shit, Pete.”
The kid snorts. “Okay. So what really is this egg thing?”
“It’s a hologram simulator. Double-tap the dimple on the base. No, yeah--the wide end.”
Peter does as he is told, and after a whirr so soft that only his superhuman ears can detect it, the heavy metal egg in his palm heats up and projects a blue aura into the room around him. A menu pops up on the hologram in front of him a second later.
“Pick any album you like,” says Tony generously, giving a languid stretch. But the way he sits up and takes a swift peek at the door to make sure it’s closed clues in the kid to how nervous the man is. “Well, maybe not the third album. Or the sixth. But any other album you want.”
Peter scrolls. “‘What Am I Gonna Do with This Kid’?” he reads aloud. “That’s the third--why don’t you want me to open this one?”
Tony sits up alarmingly fast and shuffles forward on his knees across the bedspread to scroll further down the menu through the hologram. “Nope, no, keep going, keep going, nothing to see there.”
“But if May has access to this stuff, then why can’t--”
“Zip it, Tighty-Toes, I’m the inventor, you’re the guinea pig.”
Peter obliges with a patented eye-roll and, with a highly affected gesture, selects the last album on the list, titled “Christmas Highlights 1.”
“Imaginative,” Peter comments. “Does this include the time you draped a sweater over my face?”
“It would, if you had stopped being a little shit in the moment and let me realize it was gonna be a classic memory in our relationship.”
Peter snorts, but he sounds soft, almost distracted, and the lump in his throat can’t quite hide itself in the sound of his acknowledgment. There are many fond memories he and Tony can take away from that first Christmas together, but neither of them are emotionally vulnerable enough on a normal day to just bring up their conversation from that time about Peter and May’s previous stint with homelessness. Tony had walked in on Peter and Ned and MJ packing up sweaters and care packages for the homeless camp a couple blocks away from the apartment, and one thing had led to another, including Peter alluding to his and May’s campouts in their car shortly after Ben’s death and their eviction.
“I remember this,” Peter says instead, to fill the gap after Tony’s quip that is too pregnant with all the things between them that are unsaid. He turns the egg a bit so Tony can see the hologram better of Ned and MJ posing with their peppermint sticks touching in the air to form a lopsided heart. “They went out pretending they needed to replenish our stash of peppermint. I think MJ just wanted to get away from the feelings.”
“Don’t make an emotional constipation joke about me and her, kid, for the love of God.”
“I don’t have to,” Peter says, all sweetness, “’cause you just made it yourself.”
Tony scowls. His facial expression only makes Peter snicker harder, being marred by the glowing lines of the hologram projected between them.
“Seriously, though, this is so cool,” Peter admits. He swipes through a couple more holograms. “How much time did it take to come up with everything to--to make these pictures move?”
“To get down to work on it? Like pulling Thor’s teeth. That man has a skull of--never mind.” Tony waves a hand at the curve of Peter’s brow. “To come up with the concept, though, just seconds. Believe it or not, I pay attention sometimes during your magic-kid-wears-goggles-and-faints-everywhere movie marathons.”
“Harry Potter, Mr. Stark. The franchise is old enough now that you can say its name without losing your cool points.”
“Fine, so Harry Potter clued me in on this nifty idea. You know that scene where the kid’s parents show up in a moving picture?”
Pete’s already nodding before Tony’s done speaking. “Yeah, it’s a magic thing in the wizarding world, where all the photos move and stuff.”
Tony snaps his fingers at him. “Exactly.”
“I still don’t get how you applied that to real life. Like, what was the whole coding behind that? It must have taken massive amounts of looping commands.”
Tony spreads out his arms. “I’m here to provide the miracles, Parker. You’re there to admire and not to question.”
“This is why I stopped going to Mass,” Peter grumbles.
Tony cuffs him lightly on the shoulder. “As much as I enjoy a new ex-Catholic joke like the rest of you kids, I think I hear your boyfriend chattering in the lounge. Your aunt’s here. Quick, gimme the egg. And don’t look suspicious.”
“Doesn’t it have a name besides egg?”
“Nope,” Tony says, snatching the aforementioned device from the kid’s hands and pocketing it. “Whatever gave you the impression that I’m the kind of guy that plans ahead?”
“Oh my God,” Peter intones, as Tony herds him out the bedroom door and fusses over the collar of his plaid shirt which definitely doesn’t need fussing over. “I can’t believe you once held the fate of the entire universe in your hands.”
--
“May,” Tony greets the woman in the lounge with all the booming charm that his greasy overshirt and half-cuffed jeans can muster. “May Parker, apple of my eye, Linetti of my life, co-wrangler of spiderlings--”
“If you keep going with that sentence, I’m going to suspect that you set something on fire and you’re trying to get me on your side before Pepper arrives,” says May, setting down her Kipling hobo by the coffee table and laying a playful hand on her hip.
“Have I mentioned how dazzling you look with these new highlights?” Tony goes on.
May lifts a brow in his direction--reminding Tony how eerily genetic the resemblance seems between her and Peter, really--and takes two steps toward him and pulls the empty lollipop stick from between his teeth, nibbled down to a pulp. She inspects it briefly and then chucks it into the nearest trash can. “You’re nervous. Why are you nervous?”
Tony throws up his hands. “Just because I’m having candy doesn’t mean I’m nervous.”
Peter shuffles from the bathroom into the lounge at that moment, wiping his hands on the thighs of his jeans. May glances over at him. “Baby, isn’t Tony nervous?”
The kid flashes both adults a traitorous grin. “That’s his third sweet in the last hour. He’s definitely nervous, May.”
Tony points at him. “I can’t believe I used to think I’d trust you with my life.”
“It’s the eyes, sir,” Ned butts in with a holler from the kitchen bar. “Make you trust him forever. That’s his real superpower.”
“Aww, babe,” says Peter.
“Cut it out, Stark,” says May. “What did you do this time?”
Tony clears his throat. “What you should be asking me instead is what didn’t I do this time.”
“Dress up for the party, apparently,” Pepper’s voice cuts in smoothly from the doorway.
Tony grins winsomely and opens his arms wide for her to step into. Pepper leaves her block heels by the side table and pads across the carpet to him to reward him with a full five-second hug and a kiss to the side of his head.
“You still smell like motor oil, Tony. You’re not getting out of this one.”
May says, “The decorations look great, though. If this is what you were up last-minute doing, I don’t mind the mechanic look.”
Peter and Ned join the small group back in the lounge, Peter nursing a slightly worrisome heap of popcorn in a bowl hugged to his chest and Ned slinging a six-pack of Mountain Dew over his shoulder. “Actually, I was the one who hung up the lights. Mr. Stark just sat back and criticized, as usual,” says Peter brightly.
“I was delegating,” says Tony. “There’s a reason I’m the adult in this relationship.”
“Oh-kay,” May intervenes, ever the pragmatic in these types of situations. “Pete, don’t think I don’t see you sidling by with junk food just half an hour before we’re about to eat. Ned, hi, come give me a kiss. Tony, go shower.”
“And don’t forget to text Rhodey,” Pepper reminds him.
Tony gives a two-fingered salute to Pepper, then to May. “Yes, missus. Yes, missus two.”
Peter affects a shudder in the direction of the man’s retreating figure down the hall toward the elevator. “They do say never meet your heroes.”
Ned slings his free arm around Pete’s shoulders. “And they also say hindsight is 20/20,” he singsongs.
“Dude,” says Peter.
May gives Pepper a quick hug and a kiss and calls over her shoulder to her nephew, “So, hon, what was Tony really nervous about?”
“Uh, nope? Nuh-uh. I’m contractually obligated to silence.”
Pepper grins and flops onto the loveseat, already switching out her crinkly trench coat for the light cashmere cardigan she had folded over the arm. She crosses her legs and leans her cheekbone against her knuckles in amusement. “It’s no use getting it out of him, May. They’re statistically in cahoots with each other at least ninety percent of the time.”
Peter raises a finger in objection. “Technically, I’m in disagreement with him, like, at least fifty-six percent of the time.”
“We know, darling, you try so hard,” May snickers. She brushes past her nephew and his boyfriend to retrieve her purse on the floor and digs around in it for two oddly wrapped Christmas packages, then crosses the lounge again to shove them up against the growing pile underneath the silver-lit tree.
Peter sniffs, as if he’s beyond done with responding to these quippy adults around him. He perches on the coffee table and turns to Pepper instead. “So, how was the Philippines, Mrs. Pepper?”
She sits up immediately. “Hot. Friendly. The food was amazing and about eight out of ten people can sing. The other two can tell a mean joke, and nobody can do the Heimlich maneuver on you when you end up choking…”
--
Two hours later, long after Tony has descended to rejoin the group in a breeze of his favorite Tom Ford scent and his most casual baby blue non-iron shirt which definitely does not have a tell-tale hundred-dollar sheen to it, everybody has migrated to different corners of the second lounge room with their dinner plates balanced on their knees and FRIDAY’s speakers pumping Ned’s carefully curated holiday playlist at a low volume. Rhodey is still running late and Happy’s slated to come by in another hour after fetching two of that mean pecan pie that he always claims his favorite aunt makes but Peter suspects he’s taken to baking himself. Pepper has shucked off her overly formal cardigan and undone the knot in her silk blouse. May is flopped onto her side, Cleopatra style, unapologetic in her 90’s jeans and (extra) ugly Christmas sweater. Well, semi-apologetic. She did still keep the chambray shirt on over it. Peter’s the real heathen around here wearing his matching sweater without an ounce of shame and having Ned take as many selfies with him decked out in the abomination.
May ends up excusing herself at some point from the half-friendly, half-ruthless game of Catan going on to head to the bathroom. On her way back to the lounge area, she stops by the kitchen for a drink and is positively jumpscared by the silhouette slumped over the island.
“Fu--God,” she yelps, hand over her collarbone.
FRIDAY’s gentle pin lights come on at the sound of her voice. Tony straightens with a look of guilt that May would later call cartoonish, once she knew exactly what’s gotten him in a state like this.
“Don’t scare me like that,” she breathes.
He holds up his hands in apology. Points at the ceiling. “Motion detectors. FRIDAY. Got a mind of her own. Sorry ’bout that, May, didn’t mean to skulk around in my own house.” He tacks on a lopsided smile.
She waves him off and opens the fridge to scrounge around for something cold to drink. “Eggnog?” she inquires over her shoulder.
There’s a shuffling noise and the unmistakable sound of Tony clearing his throat. Instead of answering her, he taps the top of the open fridge door by her head.
May turns. Straightens quickly, knocking her head against the bottom of the freezer door on her way up, because Tony fucking Stark is standing in front of her holding out a fucking steel egg.
She serves him a look, entirely unimpressed. “I said eggnog, Tony, not stegosaurus egg from the Smithsonian.”
He shrugs with far too much faux casualness. “Not that I couldn’t--hypothetically--get that for you if that’s what you really wanted. And that’s a no on the eggnog--glasses in the top right cabinet, though. And, well.” He shrugs again and thrusts the egg out further in her direction. “This was for you.”
May takes it. She’s about to open her mouth--to sass him, to question him, to wonder aloud if he’s officially gone off his rocker--but he raises a finger to silence her protests and turns over the egg, taps the bottom, and places it back in her palm. The familiar cerulean glow of his AI technology fills the dimly lit room.
May is quiet as she studies the hologram in front of her. It’s a photo of her, Peter, Tony and Pepper back from when they went to Legoland, but it’s moving somehow. A menu pops up over the bottom portion of the hologram, and instinctively she swipes through it with her right index finger. May and Peter’s Best Moments, Tony Embarrassing Himself, What Am I Gonna Do with This Kid, May and Pepper’s Camping Adventures...the titles are descriptive enough to jog her memory and make her smile. But then she gets to the bottom, and everything blinds her and she can hardly swallow around the hardness stopping up her throat.
Ben and Jerry’s, 1982-2015.
Tony coughs and clears his throat into his fist. “I may or may not have snuck into you and the kid’s box of albums. Totally inappropriate. Inexcusable, really. I’ve been told I have a pathological problem with privacy. Sorry. I promise you, though, I didn’t ask the kid what the title meant.”
May’s face hurts, high and fierce in the bridge of her nose.
“That was me and Ben’s nickname for ourselves,” she says, all nasal all of a sudden. “The J was for my middle name. Which wasn’t--which wasn’t Jerry, obviously.”
In the periphery of her vision, May can see Tony holding up his hands in surrender. “Thought never even crossed my mind.”
“Not even Peter knows my middle name,” she warns him. Her eyes are still fixed on the hologram menu. She’s incapable of looking up at Tony now, or moving, or swiping forward in the album titles. An infinitesimal shaking has started at the root of her toes, and it almost grounds her in a messed up kind of way.
Tony doesn’t take the jab. “Hey,” he says softly. That pulls May’s gaze up to his, reluctantly. She feels small, so very small right now, even though they’ve always been almost eye to eye even when she’s in nothing but her threadbare socks.
Tony shuts the fridge door behind her. The stream of cold air at her back stops.
“I can...jet off and give you some privacy. Uh. If that’s what you want.”
The shaking has not left her. Robotically, May swivels on her heel and clambers onto the bar stool so she can set the projector on the granite countertop. She lays her hands palms down against the stone, absorbing the shock of cold into her fingertips to wake herself up.
“I’m sorry,” Tony says. His eyes are swimming with a depth of guilt May can’t define. She guesses it runs in their family, DNA or not.
“I mean, nobody’d really be happy with somebody rifling through their pictures, but you fished my son’s ass out of the river a bunch of times, so I think it’s a long ways yet until the scales tip,” May says drily.
He tries a wobbly grin. “I was more of referring to the whole digging up traumatic wounds and shoving salt into them without your permission for Christmas thing, but I’ll take your advanced forgiveness.”
She grins back. Crazed, wet, unstable and hurting but in the best way possible. She flaps her arm at him. “Get outta here, Stark.”
He tips an imaginary brim at her. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Tony.”
“Yeah, yup?”
“Get the kids some eggnog. They’re gaga over the brand you buy and they can only get it when they come over at Christmastime.”
“That would be because I get it handmade from Vermont.”
“Ew, rich folk,” May says brightly through her teeth, torn between mirth and the tears she’s staving off. “But bring them some, please. And thank you.”
“You don’t even have to ask.” Tony grabs the half-gallons from the fridge and shuts the door with a wink at her.
The moment Tony disappears around the corner of the hallway, May sags against the kitchen bar and faces the hologram again. Her finger hovers over the menu.
Well, here goes nothing.
She’s braced herself enough to meet the first photo without a stab of pain going through her chest right away. She knows the order of the pictures in the album like the back of her hand, anyway, and this one has always been first. It’s from their third date, back when they were nineteen and May was in her second year of college.
Ben is seated in a wide-legged stance on the bench outside Steak N Shake, the red paint flaking where his knee rests, while May is perched on the top of the bench by his head. One arm of Ben’s is slung over the back of the bench and May’s got his other hand captured in his, pressing an ironic kiss to his knuckles. The smirk is evident in the half-scowl on Ben’s face that he can’t wipe away, no matter how hard he tries.
May feels a little bad that she can’t remember if it was Vinny or Janice who took the photo of them that day. There’s the shadow of a finger in the bottom corner of the lens, so she’d make a decent bet that it was Jan. Some of the grainy charm of the original picture can still be found in the light and shadows around them, but by some miracle Tony’s made the picture come alive.
When she looks hard enough, the corner of Ben’s mouth quirks upward. The breeze ruffles May’s over-teased hair, tugs her bangs over her eyes. And loops back again.
May remembers Ben moved shortly after the photo was taken to lean over and tuck the end of her bang behind her ear. The wind renewed its vengeance on her and blew it free again, sending them both into a laugh.
“M’lady,” May snickered, to which Ben wrinkled his nose and shot back, “M’lord.”
The year was 1982, and they were both stupidly in love and even more stupidly in denial. They dragged Vinny and Janice around with them everywhere on double-dates-that-were-not-double-dates. May wore a blond streak in her bob behind her right ear, and Ben’s hair was creeping down to his shoulders almost long enough to be tied back in a ponytail. May remembers weaving tiny braids into the top of it whenever they were in the car in front of her dorm and they didn’t want to leave the warmth of his dinky little Beetle just yet, and they just talked and talked until the street lights came on and the click of people’s heels on the sidewalk gathered into a blanket of noise to remind them of the real world waiting outside.
The second picture is from three weeks before Christmas of that same year. Ben snuck up the fire escape of her dorm and cacaw’ed like a fucking crow at her window until she fell out of bed and stalked over to jerk the window open. She was only wearing her Heart band tee on over a pair of ridiculous shorts, and her bangs were in rollers, for Christ’s sake.
“What the fuck, Benji,” she whisper-yelled at him.
“I’ve got Danish cookies,” he said. He rattled the round tin in his hand for good measure.
“What the fuck, what the fuck,” she kept hissing at him, as she yanked him inside and slammed the window shut. It was freezing.
She leaned up on her toes to smosh a messy kiss on his mouth. “You smell like the subway.”
“And you smell like--what the hell is that on your head.”
She snatched the rollers out of her hair, snagging the ends of her bangs on the way. “Beauty is pain, Parker.”
“I’m--pretty sure it’s the other way around. Hey, hey, easy on the locks, I kinda like them attached to your head, y’know?” He grabbed her wrist to keep her from fumbling, and with his other hand gently worked the plastic monstrosity out of her bangs.
“Thanks,” she said grudgingly. She popped open the tin. “I get the pretzel-shaped ones.”
He flashed her a grin. “And I’ll get the wreaths.”
“Because you’re prickly and ubiquitous?”
He popped a cookie in his mouth. “And that’s what you love about me.”
Her heart started up a wonky, totally annoying and uneven beat. “Uh-huh,” she said, lightly.
“And you’re the pretzel because you’re pretty to look at and way too complicated to figure out,” he went on, nudging her in the side, “but I still wanna try.”
“I’m not complicated, Parker.”
“Yeah, you are, Linetti.”
“I’m Italian. I like pasta way too much to care about the stereotype. And I love kicking your ass at everything.”
“Which you do,” he said solemnly. “Routinely. Hence, you shredding on the guitar.”
She scrunched up her nose. “Debatable.”
“You do hate uptown cops, though.”
“I do hate uptown cops. See? Uncomplicated.”
He gave her a funny look then, like he was about to say something that she would laugh in his face about, one of his rare moments when he bothered enough to articulate one of his astute observations. She wanted to tell him to just open his mouth and say it. That she couldn’t promise she wouldn’t laugh at him, but she only did it because she loved him. God, she loved him. The idiot.
“Complicated or not complicated,” he said slowly, “I want you to come over for Hanukkah with my family next week.”
May crunched down inelegantly on the shortbread in her mouth. “What.”
“Mami already knows about you. And I’ve told Dad now, I promise.”
“Yes, but--telling dad about me is a bit different from seeing all…” May gestured up and down her person. “This.”
Ben grinned. “All of what? Painted jackets and platform boots?"
"Don't forget the hoops. You abhor them."
He feigned a gasp. "Excuse me, I do not. They're more of an...acquired taste."
"I can't promise I won't say something outrageously liberal at dinner."
"That's part of your charm. What's gonna come out next from Maybelle Linetti's mouth? Who the fuck knows. It's a thrilling saga."
May slapped him on the shoulder. Stupid witty handsome hunk. "I'm serious."
"And so am I. Besides, dropping a carton of eggs on your mom's shoes is kinda hard to beat, so I'm pretty sure you're good."
She leaned up to narrow her eyes at him. His smile only widened the longer she tried to hold her glare.
"Fine," she relented. "Fine. But only if you come to Christmas dinner with us."
"Oh, no," he intoned around his uncontrollable, shit-eating grin. "Is your mom gonna make me sort through all the saints on the candles?"
"I'll have her make you light them and recite their names, too, if you don't stop smiling like that, Parker."
He leaned forward with his hands on either side of her hips on the bed to box her in. Breath ghosting over the tip of her nose, he mused, "Is that a threat, Linetti? Am I turned on?"
May sat deathly still, rooted to the bedspread, even as her heart decided to jackhammer out of control. Ben's eyes were dark, pupils blown, lips parted and lashes fluttering as his gaze dropped from her eyes to her mouth.
"Yeah," Ben whispered, choked off and breathless. "I'm turned on."
May combed her left hand upward through the side of his hair. It was soft, a little unwashed, but so him. She closed the gap between them in a familiar clash of teeth and tongue.
"You really--really...like doing that to my hair," Ben got out between kisses and heavy breaths.
May yanked on his hair in her hand in response. "Shut up."
Twenty minutes later, they would be tipped over onto their sides on the bed, with one of May's pillows kicked to the carpet and their legs tangled inconveniently together. Her shirt would be riding up over her hips and his would be unbuttoned to somewhere well below a casual point. Ben would be flat on his back with one arm underneath May's head and the other across his stomach, eyes filled with that self-satisfied smirk that only May and nobody else in the world knew was a veneer for the gallop in his chest. She could feel it even now under the gentle pressure of her fingertips on his skin.
After a moment's hesitation, she reached for her camera on the nightstand behind her and snapped a picture of him.
He pretended to wince at the flash. Behind closed eyes, he mumbled, "If I don't show up on the cover of the next Vogue, I'm suing."
"With that attitude, you're gonna have to settle with the middle piece for the up-and-coming designer."
The corners of his eyelids crinkled.
The photo came out blurry later on, of course, because as May had learned early on in life, the universe doesn't like letting us have nice things. Still, nothing stops up the emotion that still obstinately wells up at the way Tony managed to code this thing to animate the details that actually mattered: the tiny lopsided pull of Ben's mouth on a loop, the shadow thrown by the lamp flickering on the wall, the fingers of his hand rubbing up and down his own chest. The mass of his hair flopping back into the bedspread and getting lost in a messy, glorious dark heap.
May flips on through the holograms. She know what's coming up, even if she hopes against hope Tony didn't find it, and she still braces herself fruitlessly for the impact even though she's had decades of practice to get the pretense down pat whenever anybody goes through the album with her at their side.
March 1983. On the rooftop of the parking garage across the street from her apartment complex. Her hands gripping the jagged edges of the concrete railing.
The funny thing was that she'd heard the phone ringing inside her apartment before she came up here. She'd been just outside her front door, curled up in the hallway, legs splayed across the filthy carpet and her eyes lost in the nothingness of the ceiling. She'd known with certainty that it was Benji calling. Her suspicions had been confirmed when the phone rang again three more times. She left it unanswered.
And then she was here--there--she didn't know. Somehow she crossed the street, and this happened. This was happening.
She always figured she'd be drunk to oblivion if she ever decided to do this, not stone-cold sober.
She was only in her socks and the iciness of the concrete was starting to bleed through into the soles of her feet as she leaned over the edge to study the lights below and breathed through her nose. She would've thought she'd grab the picture frame of her and Mom from the TV stand, be all dramatic about it. But she guessed the fog in her mind didn't care for a show. She didn't even bring her keys or slippers with her. No coat, no pot of Vaseline lip balm that she always had in her pocket that Ben laughed at a lot.
She was used to people leaving. God, she was so used to it, it was like a bad gag by now in the equally bad script of her life.
The lights below her beckoned to her with the way they shimmered and streamed, unstable. Inviting irresponsibility. She thought about how the last thing she was doing before tonight was rolling up Mom's nightgowns in those tight little cylinders in boxes the way Mom always liked them. She thought about how she was studying for her physics final in her dorm room when the phone rang with the news. She thought about how a week after putting her mother in the ground, she was pulling on an apron and walking twelve blocks down to the greasy joint to sling meatballs and make a living.
She thought about how it was all bullshit.
She thought about how she didn't use to think God existed, but now she was convinced he did, because somebody had to be in charge of this shitshow to make it so purposely tortuous for everyone involved.
Maybe she should have smashed those candles with the saints smiling beatifically on the glass jars. Maybe it would have made her feel better, if only for a season. But May knew herself, and she knew that running and running from the urge to smash herself instead into nothingness would amount to nowhere unless she stood still and turned around and faced it head-on.
So here she fucking was.
"May?"
And now she was hallucinating.
May hung her head and shut her eyes. Her knuckles tightened on the concrete. Go away, go away…
But the air shifted with the unmistakable movement of him crossing the roof until he stood a few feet to her side. She couldn't deny it.
"May," he tried again.
"Benji," she said. "Stop."
"I haven't even…" He cut himself off. "I tried calling."
Words and words. May was tired to her bones.
"How'd you even find me," she said flatly, still not looking up at him. What she really meant was: I never meant to be found.
"I came by and I saw the apartment was empty. And then I got this--thing in my stomach, like--I had a feeling."
May stopped for a moment to consider the tremor in his voice. He was always good at concealing it, so she wondered what depths of nameless things were shaking him now. Maybe she ought to feel a little bit sorry for it, too, but in this moment she had only space and breath to barely consider the invitation of the lights below.
"May," Ben whispered again. "Come over here, please."
Salt sprang to her eyes behind her lids. Her nose stung, everything stung. She screwed her eyes shut further and shook her head.
"Then I'm coming over there."
His shoe scuffed against the concrete. He moved closer.
May opened her eyes just a fraction, a slit, and from the corner of her field of vision she could just make out the toe of his Converse. Everything still felt off-kilter and unreal. She almost wanted to burst out laughing, but instead she felt awash with nausea.
"I'm coming for you," he said again softly. And then he was there: his arms, scent, chest.
He grabbed her, not too gently in his desperation, and still her hands would not uncurl themselves from the railing so he stood there with his arms wrapped around her torso from the side. He buried his smoke-and-subway-smelling face in the tangle of hair at the crook of her neck.
"Honey, I'm here."
She looked at him then. "I'm not."
And then she began to cry.
She'd never hated herself more than in this moment. The hitch in her lungs and the stone in the pit of her chest wouldn't let her breathe, or think, or be. She was all tears and snot, and screams she never voiced, and shattering on impact in an eternal loop. A fall that never ended.
Ben curled one palm at the back of her neck and gripped it almost as if she might come unanchored if he didn't hold her in a death grip now. With his other hand he prised her fingers one by one from the railing. He didn't say a word about how her hands were like ice. He unzipped his jacket and placed her hand palm down on his chest, against his shirt, where she could feel the thump, thump, thump, thump behind his skin.
At some point she began to breathe more normally. Through her ugly hiccups, May made out Ben unzipping his jacket fully and maneuvering it around her to get it over her shoulders. She didn't hesitate this time and wrapped her butter-cold arms around his waist. He smelled like a twice-worn shirt and coffee. She missed him. She missed him.
She missed them.
"Aren't you cold?" she said hoarsely.
He crushed her closer to himself. "Not as long as you need to be up here."
They must have stood there on the parking deck for half an hour, maybe more. Then they were moving in a disjointed knocking of knees down the stairs, with Ben guiding her by the shoulders, and crossing the street and saying goodbye to the lights which turned out to be nothing but fleeting cars and lonely street lamps. All familiar in their aloneness. May was done with being alone.
They got to her apartment door and Ben fumbled in the pocket of her sweatpants for the keys.
"I didn't take them," said May.
Ben looked at her like this, of all things, made him want to cry. He didn't say anything. He bent down instead and retrieved the spare key from under the doormat, the same key he'd used to let himself in and lock up after himself.
Ten minutes later, over a scalding cup of black coffee because she was out of hot chocolate and she hadn't planned to stay alive long enough to restock her creamer, May said, "I don't think I'm ever having kids."
Ben's grip on his mug stiffened infinitesimally. "Why's that?"
"It's not fair," she said. "Not to them, especially when I end up leaving."
Ben's jaw moved, like he was unsure either of them were in the right state to be having this conversation right now. But in every late night trek to the rooftops and breakdown in another's arms, there is an unwritten contract that the person who almost died got to talk about whatever the hell they wanted, and they didn't have to swear an oath to it, no matter if it was the only moment in their life they spoke the truth.
"You won't leave," Ben said quietly.
May sipped her coffee and ignored the burn. "That's what they always think, the ones who leave."
"But not you."
She picked at a nick in the dinette with the corner of her thumbnail. "You don't know me, Benji," she said with a sad little smile.
"I'm sorry," is what he said, of all things.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I guess I was the pretzel after all."
"You say that like it's a bad thing."
She looked up at him through her bangs and indecision, like isn't it?
"It's okay, honey," he said with a hand over hers. She didn't know when that got there. That was Ben: he didn't creep up on you, he was just there, like one moment he wasn't in your life and the next thing you knew he existed all around you.
"We don't have to have kids, if that's what you want. It's really okay."
She looked at him again, struck dumb this time by the sound of his we and all the chords it tugged within her.
"Thank you," she whispered, and she leaned all the weight of her into those two words to make him understand the breadth and depth of it all.
Later, when she changed into a clean outfit and stepped out into the gloom of the hallway, she saw his pensive silhouette--broad shoulders, rough ponytail--ringed by the moonlight in the living room where he stood by the sliding doors. She picked up her camera from her dresser and snapped another shot of the back of him.
--
He applied to the police academy that summer. When she asked him when was the first time he'd considered doing it, he'd said March 17th, 1983.
She didn't fully understand until the first time he came home years later with a fever in his eyes, and he'd told her through the wetness behind his eyelids that a seventeen-year-old kid had climbed up on the bridge and it had taken him an hour to talk him down.
--
May shudders through another breath in her chest and sets the egg back down on the countertop. The last photo in the album was projected in front of her: Ben and fourteen-year-old Peter curled up in the open trunk of the station wagon in the sticky June heat.
"Ben," she says. "I guess we, uh...we really did end up having one hell of a kid after all, huh?"
She scrapes the beveled edge of the counter with her fingernail: for old habits die hard.
She casts Ben a lopsided smile. "Did you know he ended up being--Spider-Man?" She nods. "Yup. Damn kid. I always knew since we started taking him to ballet lessons that he wouldn't be able to keep away from the leotards."
Down the hallway behind her, she can make out the muffled and raucous laughter of the game still going on.
"I'm sorry I said those things," she whispers. "I know you all never meant to leave...you wanted to stay. God just didn't let you. And I don't fucking know why, but I guess that's not for me. Not for a long while. But I know you wanted to stay. You would have stayed."
In the moving hologram, Ben and younger Peter knock their knees together.
"You'd be so proud of him," May gasps out. "You'd be so fucking proud."
--
Tony steps back into the little kitchen with a rustle and a rattle. May looks up from the bar, and she almost chokes on her spit laughing from the irony.
Tony raises a brow at her, setting down the open tin of Danish cookies on the counter with a clink. "What?"
She almost tells him, but then her gaze dips down and she finds the paper cup of pretzel-shaped shortbread is still full. The one with the wreaths is almost empty, no doubt gobbled up by Peter. "Nothing," she says instead with a shake of her head as she takes a pretzel one and presses it against her tongue. "Tony--thank you."
"I promise you these were straight from Costco, not handmade in Vermont or some shit, so I dunno what you're talking about."
"Tony," she says again in that particular tone she reserves for him. That shuts him right up.
He clears his throat. "I, uh...I take it I'm forgiven for digging around in your pics?"
She heaves a very put-upon sigh but smiles. She becomes acutely aware then that her cheeks are still stained with the salt traces of her crying, but tonight she has stopped caring. Somehow, a part of her understands that Tony Stark is the last of men who will ever judge her.
"Yes," she says. "That was...fruitful. I think. There were some things that needed to be remembered and some things that...ultimately needed to be said. Stuff I guess I've been holding on to for a while now."
Tony's gaze flickers for the briefest of seconds to the hologram of Ben and Peter in the station wagon. Something in him lights up in recognition at the car.
May doesn't need to look back over her shoulder at the picture to hazard a solid guess at what's going through his mind. "It's been probably a decade since we replaced the thing, but...some things are hard to let go."
"I bet."
She trembles and takes the plunge. "I mean, even if it's filled with some really hard memories...it still smells like him sometimes." She ducks her head and looks away.
Tony sniffs. He averts his gaze to the cookie tin and roots around for one of the rectangular ones.
"Pete might have...accidentally mentioned some of these, uh, difficult memories in the car."
May looks deep within herself and finds she doesn't mind. The old, ugly little cloud of shame is absent from the center of her chest.
"Yeah," she says softly, "it's true." And then she falls silent, because the remembrance of sleeping in the driver's side with one hand on the door handle and the other on the steering wheel, while her fourteen-year-old nephew curled up in the back with his arm trailing over stacks of boxes, is something that no one person can put into words. And Tony may be good to the core of him, and smart enough to understand, but that swoop in her stomach as she blinked up at the 3 a.m. moon and realized she was dragging down her kid into a river of street lights and instability--it is a terror no one needs to resurrect and name. Not tonight, not now.
"Hey," Tony says, shaking her out of herself. He nods at the egg. "You know you did one hell of a fine job on him, don't you? I mean. Never met the other half, but I'm a hundred percent sure the two of you worked together like a dream. Pete's really glad to have you around."
It's a little funny, hearing Tony Stark of all people eulogizing her to her own face and speaking on behalf of her own kid, but they've all lived through stranger times. She gives him a crooked smile. "Yeah, well. I'm really glad I stayed."