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and i can’t take / one more moment of this silence
the loneliness is haunting me / and the weight of the world’s getting harder to hold up
—drown, bring me the horizon
*
A ray of light swallows the sky, and any trace of Peter Parker along with it.
*
From the sidelines, Peter watches Happy make arrangements for May’s funeral service. Her will makes no mention of Peter; everything she owns goes to F.E.A.S.T., and that’s where she wants to be in her last moments, surrounded by the people she swore to help.
Peter listens to her eulogy from outside the shelter, perched on a leaky corner of the roof as Happy opens with May’s own words: when you help someone, you help everyone.
She’d been meaning to fix that roof.
Everything May ever wanted in life was to help make the world a better place. He probably gets it from her, this constant need to do better, to do right.
It never mattered that they weren’t related by blood.
He was too young to remember his parents’ death, and too young to remember when May lost her husband—though he carries his uncle’s name with him—but, for as long as he can remember, it’s been the two of them.
It’s not fair, that she’s gone.
Inside, there’s only the muted sound of Happy’s voice, but blood is rushing loud enough in Peter’s ears that he can’t make out the words; a constant, throbbing pain in his head as he bites back tears.
He should’ve done better. Been better.
The noise quiets, eventually, along with the familiar rustle of the city. The guests have gone home, and Happy steps out to take a call.
Peter slides in through an unlatched window and makes his way across the ceiling to her casket, dropping to the floor in skillful silence.
“I’m so sorry, May,” he whispers, touching his gloved hand to hers. She would smile, tell him it’ll be okay. He’ll be okay. Peter pulls his mask off, wipes the wetness off his cheeks, and presses a kiss to her forehead. Her pale skin doesn’t respond under his lips. “I love you.”
*
It’s almost Christmas.
The season’s first snow leaves his hair damp as he makes his way down a cold Brooklyn sidewalk.
Hi, my name is Peter Parker and I… echoes endlessly in his head, and then he’s inside, holding the speech in his hand, and the question he was about to ask all but disappears.
MJ is watching him intently, a polite smile on her lips, eyebrows high on her forehead; waiting. Peter’s brain twists itself into knots. He’s pretty sure he forgets how to breathe.
“I would like a coffee. Please,” he says, instead, and the breath comes, painful and broken in his lungs.
“Okay. No problem, Peter Parker,” she says, and only then does he realize he said the first part out loud and she’s looking at him like he’s grown a second head.
And it’s okay, it really is; he’s used to that. But he’s also used to her looking at him like he’s the only person in the world that matters. Like she’s afraid if she looks away for a second, he’ll vanish into thin air.
Like she loves him.
Peter closes his eyes, tries to remember the words he meant to say. His mouth forms around empty air. He opens them to catch MJ making her way to Ned. She delivers him a donut and a dry joke. Smiles. Ned smiles back.
They look… happy. Normal.
Peter’s coffee comes, and he snaps out of his thoughts at the sound of his name. He makes small talk just to hear her speak, tries to commit every subtle twitch and sound to memory.
She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, exposing the cut right above her eyebrow, safely hidden under a bandage.
It’s been weeks since it all happened, but the consequences of his actions slap him across the face as if it were yesterday.
“You okay?” he asks, gesturing at his own face for effect.
“Doesn’t really hurt anymore.” She breathes out a weak chuckle, looks away, dragging her teeth over her bottom lip. Peter’s heart kicks in answer. “Is there anything else?”
Breath caught in his throat, Peter shakes his head. “No,” he mutters, holding back tears. God, that’d be embarrassing. He wets his lips and forces out a smile. “Thank you.”
“No problem.”
Peter casts one last look at Ned, then her. “See you around.”
He leaves with his coffee, and gives it away to the first person who looks like they need it.
*
The walls of May’s apartment stare at Peter in silent condemnation.
Most of her things are still there, packed up in boxes and scattered around the living room, waiting to be given away. Some, Happy already has.
Peter keeps her old suitcase. Filled with a dozen changes of clothes and mementos from a life that no longer exists outside of that bag.
Happy doesn’t realize he’s staying there. His bedroom has turned into a guest room with an empty closet. Barren walls, a desk, and a bed. He uses it to sleep at night, after swinging through the city on the lookout for anything to stop his mind from reeling, in a suit he doesn’t feel he belongs in anymore.
Happy stays, some nights. Sitting on the couch, unable to catch a second of sleep, and when he cries, he doesn’t make a sound. Peter sneaks out through a window and doesn’t come back until his muscles are aching and his body begging for rest, and Happy is gone.
He sleeps, then, in the bed that’s no longer his. Dreams of MJ, of fading right in front of her eyes until he’s only a speck of dust in the light.
Sometimes, he dreams of May, and blood. Of color draining from her face, her eyes falling shut as she collapses in his arms, and he wakes up drenched in sweat, a cold in his stomach that makes him want to vomit even though he hasn’t eaten in a day.
The air remains still, and the quietness is suffocating.
He leaves to see May. Brings a single white rose; her favorite.
It sits in his hand for a long time, his thumb pressing hard against the nub where a thorn used to be. Her grave is covered in mismatched bouquets, bright against the gray backdrop of her tombstone.
He swallows, rolling the rose between his fingers. His feet refuse to move.
A breeze sweeps a flurry of dead leaves.
“I saw MJ yesterday,” he says, eventually. The ridiculousness of talking to May’s grave only a small flutter at the pit of his stomach. “I couldn’t tell her. I wanted to, I really did. But I just—I just couldn’t do it.” Peter closes his eyes, pictures the empathetic crease in May’s brow, the warm hand that would reach for his. Clear as day. “She looked happy, May. She looked safe. And I—I couldn’t take that away from her.” His eyes flit open and linger on the browning grass beneath his feet for a long moment. “I miss you.”
Gathering the courage to take another step forward, he deposits the rose in the center of the headstone. Exposed to the harshness of the New York winter, all of these flowers are going to wither and die. The wind will blow away the dead petals and leave behind only empty vases and naked stems.
And one day they’ll remain there, forgotten.
Like him.
Peter draws in a harsh breath. The presence that approaches him is immediately recognizable.
“How’d you know her?”
Casting a sidelong look in Happy’s direction, Peter swallows dry. He doesn’t lie, but he can only tell one version of the truth.
“Through Spider-Man,” he says.
It soothes him, to talk to someone that loves May even a fraction as much as he does. Through them, maybe she can live on. Maybe it’ll be alright.
Slowly, Peter backs away, leaving Happy to mourn her loss in privacy, and silently vows to always remember her.
*
Peter has enough cash on hand for a pre-war apartment that he finds in the smallest, most economical ad he’s ever seen in the Daily Bugle.
The landlord—a large, bearded man that eyes Peter from head to toe—asks for three months upfront, and nothing else.
“Rent is due on the first of the month.” The man grabs Peter’s hand and drops a flimsy set of keys in it. “Don’t be late.”
It’s small, smells like moisture, and the dark, stained walls show its age, but for a place that was suspiciously advertised in the newspaper that arguably ruined his life, and is probably illegal, it’s not all bad.
Peter remembers to count his blessings, which, considering recent events, haven’t been many.
This beats squatting in May’s apartment, surrounded by the painful echoes of her life, expecting to see her face every time he swings open the door.
It’ll be okay. You’ll be okay.
Eyes watering, Peter inhales, and smiles.
*
It’s a short walk across the bridge from his apartment in Queens to the donut shop.
Peter doesn’t try to convince himself he’s not going there again because of MJ. He is.
(It really doesn’t sound as creepy when he rationalizes it in his head.)
Her presence is a comforting reminder that he made the right choice in letting her go. She can have a normal life, away from the consequences of his bad decisions and interdimensional supervillains.
Except to order, he keeps to himself. Tries not to bother her. He’s happy to just sit, sipping his coffee and working on his laptop, listening to the familiar sounds of her voice and her footsteps as she takes and brings out orders.
Ned also swings by fairly regularly.
In the course of a week, Peter overhears them discussing the move to MIT, their majors, minors, and the new Star Wars TV show coming out in a month. MJ affectionately labels Ned a nerd, but promises to power through it for his sake.
Peter smiles, bittersweet.
It shouldn’t be long now, before they’re gone to start their new lives; without him.
“Can I get you anything else?” MJ asks, hours later, pulling Peter’s attention back to her. “It’s the end of my shift.”
Peter alt-tabs away from his suit’s updated prototypes and feigns a smile, fights the urge to reach for her hand when she drums her fingers against her side of the counter. “Uh, no,” he says. “I’m good. Thank you.”
The door dings, welcoming a tall, older woman—Gloria, her name tag says—who apologizes for being late and hurries inside.
MJ watches her go, then turns back to Peter. “Great,” she says, returning the smile. “Have a good one.”
*
There’s a full-page ad in the Bugle offering a sizable cash payment for professional quality, exclusive pictures of Spider-Man.
Peter tries his best with his two-generation-old phone; his best being a picture of Spider-Man swinging across the oversized tree at the Rockefeller Center, half-obscured by a close-up snowflake and a cacophony of Christmas lights.
The woman in charge of handpicking prospects peers at him over dark-rimmed glasses, tapping the end of her pen to the blurry picture.
“It’s certainly exclusive,” she says. “Though far from professional.” She regards Peter for one long, uncomfortable second before smacking her cherry-red lips together. “We can’t pay more than a hundred for this. Take it or leave it.”
Peter sighs. A man’s gotta eat.
“I’ll take it.”
*
The pain in Peter’s rib cage, courtesy of a scuffle with a couple of bad guys trying to rob his local bodega, has gotten marginally better since the other night.
Peter had turned to make sure the bodega cat was unharmed when one of the perps managed to sucker punch him right in the kidney, a push dagger hidden between his fingers. It slashed right through Peter’s new suit, piercing skin, before he managed to web them up to a shelf full of Cheetos.
If May were here, she would tell him to go to the hospital and get it checked out: I don’t care if you regenerate like a big human gecko, okay? We’re going. But he can already feel the cells migrating and forming healthy patches of skin.
He’s fine. Really. It could have been worse.
Alternatively, what’s not fine is his suit.
He knows it’ll never reach the same level as its predecessor, but if he could just find a way to integrate the same composite from his webs into the fabric, it could at least block a stab to the kidney.
In theory.
Except, well.
He’s been sitting here for the better part of his day, staring blankly at his laptop and… nothing. The formula keeps giving him an error, every single time. At this point, he wouldn’t be surprised if it developed some kind of sentience and smacked him across the head to see if it could shake something loose inside.
“Dude, are you okay?”
A beat.
“Yeah, you’re making really strange noises.”
It takes Peter a moment to realize Ned and MJ are talking to—and staring at—him. He straightens his back, eyebrows twitching up in his forehead.
“Oh, um. Sorry,” he says, gesturing toward the screen with the hand that’s not cradling his middle. “I’m just trying to figure out how to increase the viscoelasticity of this polymer so it can be woven into a semi-synthetic fiber composite, but it keeps giving me an error,” he blurts out, earning a stunned look from both of them. Did he say something he shouldn’t have? Cautiously, he asks: “What?”
Another beat, and Ned gestures for Peter to hand him his laptop.
He takes a moment to study it, then begins to tap away on the keyboard. Thirty seconds later, he shoves it back toward Peter.
“Your caps lock was on,” he says, matter-of-factly. “I’ll gladly accept payment in donuts.”
Containing a chuckle at his own stupidity, Peter orders one jelly donut with enough jelly to feed a small family. Ned’s favorite, always has been. “Actually, make that two,” he tells MJ.
Ned narrows one suspicious eye at Peter. “How did you know to order that? Has MJ been spilling my secrets?”
“I, um, had a friend who swore by them,” Peter says.
“Had.” MJ squints down at him. “Did he die?”
“No!” exclaims Peter. “No, he didn’t.” He fidgets under her scrutiny, opens his mouth. Closes it. “He, um, he moved away. To college.”
A moment passes before Ned and MJ nod their heads in synchronicity, their mouths shaped around a silent, sympathetic ‘oh’. Peter breathes out in relief, amazed at his own quick-thinking, and quietly goes back to work.
It’s not long before MJ announces she’s about to head home. Peter raises his eyes to catch a glimpse of her as she switches places with Gloria and disappears in the backroom. She comes out in an oversized winter coat and follows Ned toward the exit without another look in Peter’s direction.
Just as the door swings shut behind them, Ned shouts through the glass: “Thanks for the donuts, man!” and they disappear from Peter’s field of vision, leaving only a scurry of snow in the wind.
“Thanks for the help,” Peter whispers, to no one in particular, and turns back to his laptop.
*
Peter has just finished moving the last of his clothes from May’s old suitcase into a brand-new, secondhand dresser he scored for free on Craigslist when a ping echoes through the apartment.
He reaches for his phone and skims over the email; a weekly newsletter about free events and courses in the city over the weekend. Meditation in Central Park. Amateur badminton. Emo karaoke night.
Photography 101.
Peter’s thumb hovers over the screen.
You’re almost there! Tell us your name and we’ll see you at the event.
He glances at the newly emptied suitcase tucked in the space between his dresser and the wall, the initials BFP—Benjamin Franklin Parker—staring back at him in quiet contemplation.
He types in a name.
Confirm attendance?
Tap.
Yes.
*
The next time Peter swings by the shop is supposed to be in the middle of MJ’s usual Monday shift.
Gloria is there instead, preparing a series of elaborate drinks for a group of preteens chatting at the counter. They all turn to Peter as the door announces his presence, and she smiles up at him.
“Hey, Gloria,” he says. “Is MJ not working today?”
“Oh, honey. She moved to Massachusetts yesterday,” Gloria says, giving him a sympathetic look. “She’s attending MIT this year, isn’t that wonderful?”
Peter smiles past the sinking feeling in his stomach.
“Um, yeah. Yeah, that’s—” he trips over the thought, his brain catching up with the fact that the last manifestation of Peter Parker’s life is actually, truly gone. It shifts the axis of his world a little off-balance. “That’s great.” His fingers curl tightly around the strap of his backpack, one knuckle cracking loudly. “I, uh, I gotta go. See you around, Gloria.”
The walk home is a blur.
Trembling hands reach for his keys, drop them twice before he forgoes the lock and kicks the door in. There’s no rhythm to his breathing; raw mouthfuls of air are fighting for space in his lungs.
It’ll be okay. You’ll be okay.
Peter sags against the closed door as his vision blurs around the edges, the hairs on his arms standing to attention. Blood shifts to his fingers as they close into fists, leaving only a chill in his stomach.
It’ll be okay.
He barely remembers to breathe.
One, two, three. One, two—
when he was four and he would wake up screaming and crying, sleep interrupted by dreams ending in agony and death, May would come rushing into his room. I’m here, sweetheart. Breathe. Just breathe with me. One, two, three. She would sit there, watch over him until he’d fallen back asleep, and he would wake up with his hand still loosely clasped in hers as she rested against the headboard
—three.
No matter what happened, May was always there for him. Always. She was there for his first loss, his first crush, his first broken heart. It took him a long time to let other people in, to allow himself to be vulnerable to the possibility of losing someone like he lost his parents.
Ned wasn’t let in as much as walked in on his own and made himself comfortable in Peter’s life. He was instantly the best friend Peter could have asked for; a part of Peter’s existence that was warm and comfortable.
Peter drags his knees up to try and stop shaking. He thinks of Tony.
Like May, Tony filled the shoes of a parent Peter never got the chance to have. He gave Peter purpose. Gave Peter the chance to fight for something bigger than himself, to be more than Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. Made him think his powers had meaning beyond just being a once-in-a-lifetime glitch in the matrix.
He remembers the cold, when they fought Thanos in space and it felt like the world was ending. It crept up his spine and chilled every bone in his body, and he remembers clinging to Tony as words stumbled out of his mouth, against Tony’s shoulder: I don’t wanna go, sir, please. Please. I don’t wanna go.
Panic took over, then, much like it is now. The warmth of Tony’s hand on his back had faded into nothingness, and Peter could only think, before he lost consciousness, that he should have done better. He deserved a chance to do better.
The golden hue of an alien planet had greeted him back and, when the cold was finally gone, he tried. He tried to do better, tried his best. They defeated Thanos and saved half of the universe, but then Tony was gone as suddenly as he had waltzed into Peter’s life.
Gone, like May. Like Ned, and MJ. Like everything else. Gone from a life that now lives only as a ghost in the dark corners of Peter’s apartment.
Peter wraps his arms more tightly around himself, around his knees, drags them up as far up his chest as they’ll go, and closes his eyes.
Just breathe with me.
Maybe, just maybe, when he opens them again, he’ll be given another chance.
*
It’s early February and the sun is beaming down on Peter’s head as he waits to cross the street, peeking out from behind the clouds after a week of snowstorms.
Beside him, a newsstand displays an array of celebrity gossip magazines. One catches his eye, screaming in bold, yellow letters: WILL BILLIONAIRE HUNK AND THE GOOD DOCTOR FINALLY TIE THE KNOT? Dr. Christine Palmer discusses ex-boyfriends, being in the spotlight, and what comes next!
Behind it, lies the frontpage of today’s Daily Bugle. Peter moves the magazine aside to read the headline, sitting above a perfectly-framed, expensive shot of Spider-Man: WHO IS THE MASKED MENACE?
He buys a copy and leafs through it on his way to the GED testing center, skims the article denouncing Spider-Man with a quirk on his lips as he waits in line for his turn.
It moves fast, and Peter is halfway through the page when a voice breaks his concentration: “Name and ID.”
Peter fumbles with the paper for a good ten seconds before managing to chuck it in the recycling. The woman is staring blankly at him, one hand held out in front of her.
“Right, um, sorry. Here,” he says, fishing his wallet out of his front pocket and sliding a perfectly forged driver’s license across the counter. He smiles. “My name’s Ben. Ben Reilly.”