Work Text:
“ Parker, get in here!”
Peter doesn’t startle at the boom of the voice, filtering out of the office to his right and vibrating the concrete under his feet where he sits, bouncing the knee opposite to the one on which he jots down the seventh version of the same copy.
… a pillar of her community, she led the organization FEAST to help more than…
He scratches it out, blue pen smearing across the side of his hand, the curse of left-handed-dom. He scratches it out and stares at it, flips back through the last three versions for a word or collection thereof that will get to the enormity of this situation. This life.
And then he heaves out a sigh because nothing ever could, could it? Nothing can capture it, no matter how well he knows himself to realize he’s going to keep trying, sitting in this hall, lined with framed P-1’s from the top-selling issues of the print version of the paper and watching a passing intern with their face in their phone absentmindedly straighten one that’s been knocked off-kilter by the constant shouting just on the other side of the wall.
J. Jonah Jameson is a fear monger of a journalist, and only a journalist on a technicality at that.
He is difficult to work for and borderline verbally abusive to his staff, but what Peter realizes within a week of starting his freelance position is that for as much as Jameson threatens to fire every single person under his employment on a regular basis, he never actually does.
Jameson is a fear monger and spouts falsities with a fervor that should probably be illegal or something, but he takes one look at Peter’s absolutely garbage! photographs and pays him fifty bucks on the spot.
Which is the reason why Peter is back, or at least half of it, because he’s been promised the money will get better for more highly sought after photos and because, quite frankly, no one can fill the niche of acquiring rare Spider-Man photos in quite the way that he can.
It’s a good feeling, to be irreplaceable. It’s a feeling he hasn’t felt recently, finding a fresh superpower in his newfound invisibility.
“Parker, what are you waiting for?!”
Jameson’s head pokes out of his office, brow perpetually furrowed in a way that’s almost comical if not also terrifying when the entirety of Peter’s current livelihood depends on this man not actually following through on one of his endless threats to have Peter barred from the building if he doesn’t catch Spider-Man in the act sometime soon.
The act of what, Peter isn’t sure, but he also doesn’t really care. If he needs to get it to keep this job then he’ll fuck his public image all the way into the grave. Not a pretty metaphor, but nothing really ought to be these days.
Not when the other half of his reason for staying here is because he needs some way to be able to afford the cost of an obituary.
“Are you deaf?” Jameson levels Peter with a fierce sort of disbelief that anyone would ever keep him waiting, and Peter actually does startle this time. Startles out of his own head where he has gotten accustomed to spending most to all of his time in recent weeks, voice going hoarse with disuse and forgetting how to speak without a thin veil of fabric between his breath and the world.
“Sorry, sir, I was–”
“I don’t care, Parker,” Jameson strides back into his office, forcing Peter to jump to his feet and scurry after him. “Just show me what you’ve got.”
Peter startles out of his own head and back into a reality in which he needs something from this man. Needs something because Peter has very few avenues to take in the ways of asking for help and needs something because as much effort as he’s willing and able to put into separating himself from the before, and as much as he’s tried to convince himself to take a step back from this, to not tie himself to her in any way that could sully her memory or put his identity in danger, he can’t.
It doesn’t matter that he had made a promise to himself on that afternoon when he stepped out through the door of a bakery and never looked back, redefining Peter Parker in the process. It doesn’t matter because this new version of himself can do a lot that he had never thought himself capable of, but he can’t do that. Can’t let her go from the world let alone the inside of his own head.
(That place that he lives these days, voice going hoarse with disuse.)
He is Peter Parker, still of Queens but a different part, high school dropout in the process of getting his GED and no current plans for any sort of higher education, at least until he can get his feet back under him.
Peter Parker with no family to speak of, no friends either unless you count Missus Oga, his elderly neighbor who knocked on his door to make sure he hadn’t been murdered after, presumably, hearing the way he’d been sobbing loudly and without abandon the night before.
Peter Parker, Daily Bugle photographer and bane of J. Jonah Jameson’s existence.
“None of these are remotely usable,” he grouses, grabbing the top of his monitor and spinning it to face Peter. “Look at that–” he jabs his finger at the image, “you think that looks menacing? You’re falling into his trap, Parker, and I’m gonna need a whole helluva lot better from you moving forward.”
“It’s kinda tricky to spot him doing anything– menacing– in public,” Peter furrows his brow, pushing back while simultaneously trying not to poke the bear too hard. “I think he, like, doesn’t want people to see that– side of him. Not that it’s not there, obviously.”
It’s true at least, Peter recognizing that side of Spider-Man as the burning ember of something desperately angry that still grows hotter at the center of his chest whenever he thinks about that night, that man, that dark and burning lobby.
Even still, though, something small releases in his chest every time he gets to tell an honest truth, head growing heavier on his shoulders in the meantime. A give-and-take in which Peter never wins and an angry voice in his head always does.
“Well, you’re just gonna have to figure it out,” Jameson tells him staunchly before waving him off and turning his monitor back to face himself. “Go to payroll to get your check for these.”
Peter takes a step backwards, makes to leave, really would like to leave and shake off the reminder of blood on concrete and whispered apologies, but something stops him in his tracks. Because he had a plan coming in here today. He had had a plan and that was half the reason he’s still doing this whole thing, a plan from which he can’t step back.
The old Peter Parker needs Jameson’s help, and he needs this new guy to open his mouth and ask for it.
“Um, actually,” Peter clears his throat, out of practice in such a thing, a thing he hadn’t even been good at before he’d stumbled into a life of complete isolation. “I was hoping– Well. Hm.”
“Spit it out, I haven’t got all day,” Jameson scowls, but he leans back in his chair, chews on the end of a pencil, looking like he has just about all the time in the world.
Perks of being the boss, Peter supposes.
“I was just going to ask– for my payment this time around,” Peter clears his throat again, nothing to swallow except his own grief, “I was wondering if you’d mind– giving me a slot in the obit section and just taking the cost out of my earnings. Sir.”
Jameson looks at him, and for a beat it’s like the man has short circuited or something because Peter has never seen him at anything but a full-blown ten up until this point. Just observing Peter in a steady once-over for a whole beat and a half in which Peter is just about ready to take it back, not risk losing his job over something that is– okay, it’s very, incredibly, unbelievably important to him, but also maybe not worth losing his apartment over.
She wouldn’t want him to be homeless for her sake, even if Peter is beyond willing to do so.
“Fine,” Jameson speaks up, gruff and flat before Peter can even open his mouth and sitting forward in his chair again as he begins to type.
“You– Really?” Peter balks, unable to help himself.
“You know where Grant’s office is? He’s obit editor,” Jameson explains simply. “Give him your write-up when you’ve got it. Get your check from payroll.”
“Grant, yeah, okay,” Peter nods, a little dumbstruck but not questioning it, not when Jameson’s tone is already dismissing him. “Thank you, Sir. I– Just, thank you.”
But Jameson isn’t listening anymore, or has at least already moved on, pressing down the intercom button on his desk phone and barking for something, someone new, the next item on his schedule after Peter.
It’s well enough that Peter’s able to escape without further questions, that he’s able to step away from this part of it at least, if not the rest. He will carry his grief on his own two shoulders, bring it with him atop his own two feet, but he doesn’t have to face the pity and forced sympathy of the rest of the world.
He doesn’t have to pull himself together for the sake of people that will never, never fucking understand.
Not even for the sake of those who might.
Peter walks out wondering whether this is what a win feels like or if he’s just become so pathetic that even the local no-sympathy scrooge can’t deny him a little bit of extra help.
Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore.
***
The knowledge that he has a slot in the paper does nothing to ease the strife of trying to put one word after another, Peter carrying his little pocket-sized steno around with him for the following three days as he tries to come up with a way to say it all without saying any of it.
How does he honor the mother she had been to him without revealing his own relation to her? How does he make people understand all of the sacrifices she had made, even that of her life, without bringing himself into it?
He patrols the streets of his neighborhood, stopping periodically atop snow-covered roofs to jot down a thought, a memory, another useless series of words that only have him sink heavier into his own shoes, and he thinks against his better judgment about a personal essay attached to his application to MIT.
He swings through brisk air, his new suit a touch too thin for the cold weather, the coat he wears over it not nearly enough to cut the wind, and his movements become absentminded as he thinks about that other version of Peter Parker.
There’s a boy sitting in the past, the glow of his phone illuminating a dim kitchen, a piece of lined scratch paper covered in a messy scrawl of notes on the table before him. This boy, living in the past, has rewritten his personal essay three times now, and the girl shining bright through the glow on his phone is the only reason he hasn’t given up entirely.
“You’re overthinking it,” she tells him, blunt and gentle in equal measure. “You just have to get something down on paper, Pete.”
“I don’t, though,” he smiles, humorless and sardonic. “I’ll be lucky to get into one of my safeties at this point, let alone MI-fucking-T.”
“When have the odds ever stopped any of us before?” she fires back, a challenge in her eyes, but a hopefulness too.
There’s a boy sitting in the past and he hears her, hears her words for what they’re worth and for what they really mean– we will not be defeated by this. There’s a boy, and where he sits in the past is a fork in the road with limited options, but options nonetheless, and there’s a young man mere months later who finds himself coming right up to that fork once more.
Sitting atop a lamp post, just across the street from a little bakery boasting the name of a boy from the past who never has to grow up, who gets to stay in a place with options, who gets to rot without ever having to move forward.
Peter hadn’t meant to come here, gray skies turning a deep blue as the sun, already enveloped by clouds, sinks behind buildings too, but the warm orange glow emanating from the front windows of this place is so inviting that the numbness in his very fingertips subsides, even if only in his head.
He convinces himself that it’s okay to stay for a moment, considering the fact that he can’t even see all the way inside of the building from the angle at which he is perched, the high-up viewpoint from which he should feel guiltier than he does for claiming.
Guilty because of a promise to which he is the only witness, a promise to people who do not remember his name and a promise to himself, the young man rather than the boy from the past that might have just burst through the doors and tried to fix it now, right now, right here– whatever fixing means.
There is a boy sitting in the past, but it isn’t his hope that overcomes Peter when the bell on the door rings softly below and a dark mop of hair steps through, a blue uniform standing in the doorway to watch him leave.
“Text me when you’re off– I wanna look at dorms.”
“You know we don’t get much of a choice in where we live, right, Nedward?” she pokes her head out, the hair falling in her face blown aside by a gust of wind that slices straight between Peter’s ribs up above.
“Oh, ye of little faith,” Ned responds with a grin, walking backwards down the sidewalk and making a motion with his hands like he’s typing, a guy in the chair set free out in the world to chase his own adventures rather than tagging along on the coattails of another’s.
Michelle laughs and it’s bright, warm enough to reach its hands deep under Peter’s coat. She waves and Ned waves back before hurrying away and it is warm, it is so warm Peter feels damned by it, feels a little bit like he deserves some sort of punishment for how much life he gets out of watching just those few seconds of interaction.
A creeper with a bird’s-eye-view, some stranger relishing in their love for one another because it had once been a love that included him too.
There’s a boy at a kitchen table in the past, the glow of a cell phone illuminating his so-young face, and he is tangled in a web of his own making.
“The odds aren’t just against me, Em,” he says, hand scrubbing down his face, only pausing to pinch at the tender spot across the bridge of his nose, “they don’t even include me in their calculations.”
“I don’t know about that,” Michelle responds, hair pulled back off of her face, eyes open wide.
“I do,” Peter insists, the future coming backwards to slam into any remaining optimism he might carry, this boy.
But he’s not alone here.
Not for now.
Not yet.
“There’s something to be said, I guess,” she shrugs, the only bright thing in her dark room, shadows filling the corners of the screen not occupied by her face, “for still trying when no one could possibly expect you to.”
There’s a young man perched atop a lamp post when the door to a bakery swings shut with a tinkle of bells. He watches until a shoulder turns and a faint, fond smile disappears from view.
***
Upon first moving into his new home, Peter had been afraid to put up any photographs that could tie the small collection of people he has left to him.
He had been terrified, really, of doing anything that might put them in danger, and he still is, but the longer he sits on this new life he’s trying to build for himself, the more he realizes that there is very little indeed, essentially no danger of anyone gleaning anything from an apartment in which he alone resides.
No visitors to poke around in his belongings, no one coming by to check on him except for Missus Oga when he knocks over a stack of books upon climbing back in through his window at the end of patrol.
And so he’s allowed himself one minor indiscretion in the way of two small photographs taped to the wall beside his bed.
Ned and Michelle, a yellow dress that matches a yellow boutonniere and dual smiles on the first of what is now going to be endless nights that Peter will miss out on for the sake of a responsibility beyond what he has a say in.
And beside them a polaroid, faded at the corners from years of love, an aunt and an uncle and a boy no older than eleven with a front tooth missing in an unencumbered grin.
Two photographs, one family, laid out for him to mourn on otherwise empty walls of an empty apartment. A young man lives here, still partially out of boxes he keeps under the bed and stealing wi-fi from his downstairs neighbors for the sake of the pirated movie playing on his phone, propped up against his sewing machine as he hand-mends a tear in his suit.
The blinds on the window are crooked, letting in a slant of city light that mingles across his desktop with the yellow glow of his lamp and the walls are empty save for two photographs, one family, a life that never was.
There’s a pocket-sized steno pad by his elbow that Peter leaves open to the most recent page, needle between his teeth as he ties off a piece of blue thread.
… widowed after the loss of her husband, she took her grief and put it into doing good…
… those who loved her knew her to be more than just a helper, but also…
… there are no words to describe the strength of…
Peter tosses his suit to the floor in a heap of cheap fabric, snatching the steno off the desk and tearing out that most recent page. And then the one before it. And the one before that.
Tears burn at the backs of his eyes as he does so, overcome by a vision of two young people looking towards the future, their own adventures, their own good, happy, full lives. Peter’s shoulders ache with the weight of a promise to which he is the only witness and he tears up every page of scrawled, scratched-out notes in a single stack, letting the pieces fall at his feet as he spins away from the mess.
Heels of his hands digging into the sockets of his eyes, he tries to breathe deeply, tries to find the space to stop choking in that too-small space with four empty walls (save two photographs) and he curses the boy sitting in the past to whom he had made this promise because he hates having to keep his word.
Peter hates it, hates himself for needing to do the right thing, hates Stephen Strange for making all of it possible, hates the power that he holds and the responsibility wrapped within.
He hates it all, because it means that none of this matters– the words and the searching for them, the asking for help from a man behind a desk– none of it matters because he can’t do it. Peter had made a promise to that boy sitting in the past, to the young woman behind a counter and a young man with magic at his fingertips in more ways than the one, but he had made a promise to her too.
To May.
To the very memory of her and the legacy that she created in this world, even the one that does not know Peter’s name.
He breathes in sharply through his nose, swallows tears that threaten to develop into a burgeoning breakdown and drops his hands from his face with a harsh exhale of breath. There is something about having very little left to lose that makes it all the more important that he doesn’t take a single risk of wrecking it.
The lives still being built elsewhere in this small, growing-bigger city, and the lives lost that deserve nothing less than to rest peacefully without the scrutiny of being connected to a fighter without a face.
There's a part of Peter that wonders if it had all been a mistake, putting himself in this position, and there's a second part of him that knows that to some degree it is. There's a third part that realizes maybe one day he'll regret it, after time and acceptance and the normalization of grief rather than the sharp, everyday pain of it.
But for now all Peter can process is that he has made this decision, there is no going back on it, and his only options are to live with it or not. His only options are to accept the responsibility of his promise, or lose the small sliver of self that he has left.
When Peter gets into bed, he faces away from the spot on the wall with an old world held up with two pieces of tape.
A pile of torn-up paper remains on the floor when he falls into a restless sleep.
***
“You sure about this? I can keep the spot open ‘til right before we go to press if you need the time.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m sure,” Peter clears his throat, hands in coat pockets to keep from fiddling with them. “Someone else got to it before me, so don’t need to do it anymore. Plus, could use my full paycheck,” he laughs, but even Grant in Obits doesn’t seem to believe there’s any amusement behind it.
“I mean, cost was covered already,” Grant tells him with a shrug.
“Really?” Peter pulls his brow together in the middle, ghost of a pseudo-smile still gracing his lips and bringing all of the muddled feelings right out onto his countenance.
“Boss man came down, something about– I dunno, I only really listen to about half of what he says,” Grant brushes it off, “but he paid for it.”
And Peter can’t be sure how he responds to that, can’t be sure that it’s remotely eloquent or even coherent because he finds himself a minute and a half later tucked around the corner into an oft-ignored corridor that leads to a storage room and a bathroom that’s been out of order for as long as Peter has worked here.
He leans back against the wall and breathes deeply enough to keep himself from punching something, not sure what to do with this feeling of being taken care of and not sure that he even particularly cares for it. There’s a chance that he’s lost the taste for it, in just the time that he’s been on his own already, and there’s the chance that once upon a time he had had too much of a good thing, spoiled his dinner with all the sweets he’d eaten in the form of unmitigated, no-holds-barred love.
The pity or soft-spot or earnest care of the hardest heart Peter knows, Jameson’s assistance in this moment isn’t something he’s earned, and Peter is shaking his head as he pushes off the wall, as he steps out from around the corner and back into the very edge of the crowded, bustling newsroom.
He is inside of his own head, squeezing at his own heart to wring out all the excess vulnerability, only for it to all slam right back into him, stop him in his tracks at the breakthrough of one voice at the other end of the room.
“You can’t tell me you actually want to stay here full time, Betty.”
And then two voices.
“It’s not a bad place to start, get some experience. Come on, you know how hard it is to come across a good internship, Ned, tell her.”
“Okay, sure–” and finally three voices, “but how is this gonna look on a resume when you try to go somewhere that does, y’know, real journalism?”
Three voices and a deadpanned snort of quiet agreement from a young woman with a piece of hair blocking half of her face from his view, but it’s all it takes for Peter to take three hurried steps backwards, shoulder blades slamming back into the same wall where he had been leaning and super hearing blocking out the rest of the commotion from this floor in favor of cluing in on voices.
One, two, three of them.
“Experience is experience when you’re a brand new,” Betty scoffs, all of that self-assuredness holding strong and wrapping a firm grip around one of Peter’s rib bones. “I have to start somewhere, and honestly the reputation that interning at the Bugle gives you is, like, kinda badass survivor you know?”
“Fair enough,” Ned laughs. “If you quit instead of getting fired by that guy I guess that’s probably pretty telling, huh?”
“Exactly,” Betty responds definitively. “See, MJ? Not a bad move at all.”
“Alright,” Michelle acquiesces, “I guess there’s something to be said for keeping going when no one could possibly expect you to.”
Peter stops breathing.
But his heart keeps beating, despite the fact that even he himself can hardly expect it to at this point.
Peter Parker, this new version of him who has lost more than he had ever had a chance to prepare for, watching the light leave May’s eyes doing more to him than he can even begin to put to words and now watching a new light get struck in these new people.
It’s a light that makes him ache, a light that makes him angry, and a light that makes him feel deeply and perpetually lucky despite it all. Because she is gone but they are still here, they are still breathing, they are still out there doing the good that he knows they are capable of and finding love in a world that has been too cruel to them for too long.
Almost entirely because of him.
And it’s then that it hits him, those words from atop that tongue, the breath from those two lungs, it all tells him what he’s been ignoring this entire time. It pushes his own motivations right in front of his face where he can no longer avert his gaze, forces him to see that half the reason he has been so intent on this job, the half that included not being able to afford an obituary, has been totally and entirely selfish.
He had made a promise once, to which he is the only surviving witness after the loss of a boy in the past, but in writing notes out on his pocket-sized steno and planning with his whole chest to publish them in the paper he has been going back on that promise. Because Peter would be lying to himself if he tried to claim that none of it comes from a selfish place, that none of it comes from a back-of-the-brain desire to be seen.
To be heard.
Just one last fucking time, for the world to listen to Peter Parker and maybe, just maybe, for a couple of kids from a photograph taped to his wall to notice something missing, and to notice it in an obituary for a woman they remember even if they don’t remember him.
So, selfish. Self-serving.
Breaking a promise even though he knows he doesn’t actually want to no matter how much he wishes to, the difference being in how much of a fairy tale each version encapsulates.
May had instilled in him a responsibility and that includes not just protecting the people that he has the power to help, but also protecting the people that, if given the chance, he knows would try to help him too.
That’s how he lost her after all, and that alone is enough to solidify his decision more staunchly in his chest, rib bones bending with the pressure of words trying to get out. She had known him, and she had loved him, and she had helped him, and so she had died.
Peter takes a deep breath, deep enough to hurt, and looks around the corner one final time. Three voices at the other end of the room, laughing and talking over a copier where Betty Brant does grunt work that she adores, getting advice and support from friends on their own paths towards their own passions.
He takes a deep breath.
He had loved her and it hadn’t helped.
She had loved him and so she had died.
This time, when Peter Parker walks away from his friends, it is with the knowledge that there is no returning home. Not to this home, anyway, not to these voices and these arms, these children sitting in the past before any of it dragged them here.
This time, when Peter Parker walks away, it’s for the last time.
He loves them, and so they will live.
***
The ground is soft with mud from the first rain of the new season, Peter’s boots sinking and squelching as he makes his way across the grass. The time for snow has passed, but the cold lingers on the wind, cutting through his coat and wrapping around each individual finger where he holds a bouquet of three roses he had spent too much of his paycheck on.
The time for snow has passed but the cold still lingers in his chest as he reaches his destination under a gray sky.
There is a boy in the past, holding his aunt’s hand as they stand in this very same cemetery, in front of another grave– one, two, three of them– that bear the same name as this one. That boy is learning how to be strong and he is learning how to hold her up by holding himself up. He is learning to let her do the same for him in return.
Just the two of them, now. Just the two of them, forever.
Just the two of them, even as a young man crouches down and places too-expensive flowers just underneath a too-short life engraved in stone. Stays there. Breathes her in, this feeling that she spent so many years instilling in him.
A trust that she will always have his back, that she will always be on his side, and that she will always, always love him.
“Hey, May,” he says, just under the chill of the wind, “I um… I was going to write something. Something for you.”
It feels strange to talk to her, as though she’s listening. He likes to hope that she is, he likes to believe that somewhere out there she can hear him still. One person, hearing him still, he’d be honored for it to be her.
“But then I realized that it was mostly for– for me,” he clears his throat, voice hoarse not entirely from disuse, body aching with a want for one of her hugs. No, wishing for it.
Peter looks up to the sky as his eyes begin to burn, the bare branches of the tree hanging above him going fuzzy around the edges as he breathes around the grief stuck in his throat, the only thing left for him to swallow.
He wants to tell her so much, about how she made him the man that he is becoming, this new Peter Parker with direction if not certainty in it. He wants to tell her that his heart survives because of how she taught him how to protect it and open it in equal measure.
He wants to tell her all about every individual lesson that he carries with him and he wants her to understand that he is nothing without her. He is nothing because she was everything and he is sorry, he is sorry, he is so, unbelievably, sorry–
A shaky breath erupts from his lungs without his permission, the beginnings of a sob that he sucks back in with a harsh sniff as he brings his gaze back down to Earth, to a too-short life engraved in stone, a message of help and the way hands reach out, and a boy standing beside him in the past.
Two men, standing beside him across the walls of worlds.
Two friends, standing beside him in his heart, despite the distance created by memory.
“It’s hard, it’s– so hard,” his voice cracks, trembling on his breath as he starts again, starts anew, right in the middle. “It’s impossible to be here without you, but I… I’m gonna keep going, May, I promise. I’m gonna keep going because I know that even if no one else could possibly expect me to– you would.”
There’s something to be said for keeping going when no one would expect it, but Peter presses the tips of his fingers to cold stone, lets tears slip down his cheeks and his ribs pull themselves apart, all the way away from his aching, bleeding heart, and he knows that there’s something to be said, too, for the reason behind such a thing.
No one keeps going without a reason, without something pushing their feet forward one in front of the other, keeping their lungs inflating again and again and again.
There is a boy in the past learning to keep going from a woman who has survived, who will keep surviving even after the end, because he will keep her with him for as long as his feet remain on this Earth. One after the other.
There is a young man crouched in a cemetery.
He loves her.
And so he keeps going.
