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The left pocket of his suit is rumpled.
Every ounce of composure escapes Peter in a second; his shoulders drop and his head falls back, eyes to the sky. Is this a sign? Is this a sign of an epically bad idea?
He jabs the handle of the bouquet between his thighs and brushes furiously at the creases, muttering "No, no, no," as if it’ll magically smooth in ten seconds of elbow grease.
A shadow passes behind the door and he jolts upright. He runs a sweaty hand through his done hair, and angles the bouquet of flowers a little bit to the left, shooting a final glare at his pocket.
Why is he— he shouldn't be this nervous. Chill, Parker.
Oh, god. Flowers? Really? Flowers?
Peter’s heart rate skyrockets as the shadow stops behind the frosted glass and the lock unlatches. His fist tightens around the bouquet and he knows his face is already flushing.
MJ opens the door, and Peter's mouth falls open.
She— wow. She looks amazing.
Peter waves, grinning. “Hey. Hi.”
MJ’s smile comes easy. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and says, “Hey hi yourself, hero.”
“I, uh, I…”
Your hair smells like coconuts and love, he wants to say.
MJ’s smile falters just a tad. “Do you… wanna come in?” she asks gently.
I miss you so much, he wants to say.
Peter nods with a pinched smile and brushes past MJ's outstretched hand into the entryway, soaking in the familiar sights and smells. The blue-painted staircase, the picture of MJ and May hanging on the wall beside the front door, the candle burning in the kitchen.
“This is for you,” he says as he turns to face MJ, extending the bouquet.
MJ takes the flowers and shuts the door. She tilts her head, scanning over the bouquet, and says, “Thanks, Peter. They’re very… pink.”
He throws his hands up exasperatedly. “Knew it! I knew the flowers were a dumb idea. I called it. Such a bad move.”
MJ laughs and brings the bouquet up to her nose, and just like that, the tension breaks. Peter chuckles at her laughter, softening, and his hands stop acting like Niagara Falls.
She sniffs a little after smelling the flowers, and her nose twists in the way it does when she fights against a sneeze.
Peter's heart rolls over in his chest.
“Oh, man,” he murmurs, still smiling.
“What was that?”
“Nothing. Nothing.”
Peter bites the inside of his cheek in an attempt to smooth over his smile, trying to tear his eyes away from MJ’s nose. He blinks rapidly and shifts focus to the oak door behind her, before swallowing once and turning his attention back to MJ.
“Can we talk?” he asks at the same time MJ asks “Did you want something?”
“You go first,” they both say again.
Peter breathes pointedly and anxiously taps his hand against his thigh, and MJ presses her lips together. The awkwardness peaks back in, and he wants to get ahead of the pressure before he loses his nerve.
“I'll go first,” he says after a beat. “Look, I'm really sorry about what happened with us. About my… choices.”
“Oh.” Her face falls. “Yeah, I. Um. Me too.”
“I think I'm ready now,” he blurts. “For kids.”
MJ recoils, surprise coloring her face.
“Not like, now now, like right this second now,” he continues. “But I'm—I'm ready. I'm good. I met this great kid and—.”
Peter takes a breath. He takes in her expression, the hesitation.
“—and I'm not scared anymore. I know what I want. And I want it with you.”
Something minute in her face switches, and she reaches up to rest her hands on his shoulders. His hands instinctively go to her waist, and MJ kisses his cheek lightly.
“Wanna stay for lunch?” she asks. “I’m making pasta.”
/
Peter snaps his newspaper open, sighing contently as the spread unfolded against the sky.
“Governor, soda pop stocks falling, yeah, yep. Where’s the—oop—” Peter's eyebrow pops up with a happy grin and he trades his coffee mug for a pencil, “—crossword. Bingo.”
He wiggles happily on his griffin of the Chrysler Building, humming to himself as he works through the crossword.
“Oh yes,” he mutters. He sips his coffee, solving 11-down. “Cornhole. Amazing. I'm on a roll.”
It takes all of twenty-seven minutes for him to finish the crossword.
“Tuesdays,” he scoffs. “Too easy.”
He refolds the newspaper, wedging the corner under his coffee mug, and leans back on his arms to take in the city in front of him. Sunrays peak through the pollution fog. The racket is less concerning than usual; no mass screaming or crashing trains, so Peter marks it as all good in his books.
A surge of protectiveness washes over him.
And a realization hits him like a bucket of cold water.
He can’t leave this city.
Peter jolts upright and rises to his feet, curling his fists protectively.
Oh. Oh, ew. No.
He shakes his head once at his behavior and folds back down like a scolded dog.
“That was mildly humiliating,” he says to himself. He points to his coffee mug. “You saw nothing.”
Yeah, there are a ton of other heroes and vigilantes around to support New York. Daredevil, the Hawkeyes, the Four — they’re all there. Present. Ready to help.
But Peter's lost so many friends as well. So many . And he’s witnessed the fallout, the fear, the chaos.
He saw the looks on people’s faces when the death of blond Peter was announced.
Restlessness gets to him, and Peter can’t sit still anymore. He picks up his things and nosedives off the Chrysler, catching himself on a web at the last second and launching himself high in the air.
He can’t die. Especially without someone like Miles ready to step up and take over. The thought of it just hurts his chest in a way that makes it really difficult to concentrate, and he’s not ready for that right now.
The whole dimensional travel thing was a real wake-up call for him. Like, it’s getting existential.
A buzz breaks him out of his soon-to-be-breakdown trance, and he scowls knowingly. He recognizes that buzz.
Specifically, he recognizes that buzz on this street.
Peter webs his paper and mug to his thigh and does a quick 180 while he’s swinging, scanning for the source of the sound. The fact he can’t place the sound — it’s actually, genuinely bugging him.
He faces back to the front. A drone is six inches from his face.
Peter shrieks a little and catches the drone in one hand, effectively stalling the flight, and all the fury of a personally wronged, mentally struggling middle-aged man erupts.
“ Hell. No. Nope. Not this time,” he growls, and tosses the drone up and smacks it towards the ground with all his strength.
It hurdles to the feet of an indie-looking twenty-year-old guy with a flabbergasted expression on his face.
“I can get your license revoked for that!” Peter yells. “That's unsafe practice! Do better!”
Drone-flying indie-looking guy sucks. Peter decides at that very moment that he’s one of the reasons Peter wouldn’t mind dying.
/
“You know, I met this… incredible kid.”
Peter gets comfortable, cracking his neck before settling against a sturdy oak. The sun beats down on his shins, and slivers of light shine through the leaves above him, patterning his arms and hands.
“I met a couple, actually,” he says. His brows twist at the phrasing, and he can basically feel Gwen's unimpressed stare. “Not that they’re a couple, I just mean, like, two of them. Individually. Three. Three and a robot.”
A young lady walking by catches his eye, and he watches silently as she makes the trek through the cemetery. She's carrying a small bouquet and a father’s day card with her, and Peter's heart aches for her.
May's headstone stays silent. The ceaseless buzzing of crickets fills the space between his words, and a strike of grief sinks through his chest.
“But yeah, uh.” Peter pressed his thumb and forefinger into his eyes, refusing to let himself get misty. “It helped. Me and MJ are on the mends now.”
He wags his finger disapprovingly. “No bun in the oven, if that’s what you’re thinking. Mind out of the gutter, May Parker.”
Laughter bubbles up out of nowhere. He leans forwards off the tree as his shoulders start to shake, and the sun is only just a little blinding.
“I'll be honest, May — I don’t know how you guys did it,” he cackles. “Raising me like that. Kids are scary. They scare me.”
He sobers up quickly, the laughter dying out as fast as it appeared. “And I don't want to hurt MJ again.”
Peter's eyes trace around the letters engraved on May's tombstone. Burned into the back of his eyes is his own name, flashing every time he blinks.
“When the other Peter died—.” He sighs and massages his forehead. If he keeps going like this, a stress migraine is going to pop up. “It really hurt her when he died. It was hard to see. You know, I’m almost—“
He stops. Swallows.
Almost glad you went first. Glad you didn’t have to suffer like the other May.
The weight of that thought presses into his shoulders. It’s hot and heavy, digging its claws into the muscle there, and he realizes this weight feels a lot like grief.
Peter drags in a deep and stilted breath, and his head hits the tree.
In for four, out for four. Wash. Repeat.
Talk it out, Peter.
“Seeing the other May was hard. I’ve…” He pauses and laughs, a little wetly. “I've been hurting every day since we came back.”
He sighs deeply.
“But, I spiraled once already over you and I'm not gonna do it again. So. Time has passed, yadda yadda.”
Peter taps his fingers against his leg and shakes his shoulders out. He forces a smile, changing topics in hopes that it’ll become genuine.
“Did I tell you about Miles?” he asks brightly. “Lemme tell you about Miles. Great kid. You’ll love him.”
/
Spider-Man is old news in his universe (ha — in his universe. He gets to say that now. It’s craziness.). There are no shiny invisibility powers, or shock powers, or robot shuttles for tween girls, or annoyingly well-spoken and rain-smelling men.
He’s old enough news that, instead of constantly flying around looking for fights to pick or animal-themed villains to stop, he can stop for a truly rancid hotdog and ‘hang.’
So old, in fact, he’s sitting here, essentially on the sidewalk, saying all of this to Liana. Who’s just sitting there silently, staring at him. Not cool, kid.
(So old, he just said hang. Unironically.)
Liana slowly raised her hotdog to her mouth and took a giant bite.
“Er,” she says dryly after she swallows. “No.”
“No?”
“Spider-Man is not ‘old news,’ he’s just old,” she elaborates. “You’re old. I can hear your knees creak and back pop every time you breathe.”
He glares at her from under his mask. The execution is perfect, built from many, many years of practice.
“Oh yeah?” he challenges. “You wanna hear it when I get over there and—?”
“Can’t you retire by now?” She ignores him and takes another bite. “Spend some time with your significant other that I’m… not entirely sure exists? Start a business selling bath salts?”
“Whoa whoa. Back up. She totally exists, thank you very much. And we’re very happy, actually.”
Liana grimaces, but the corners of her eyes pinch in the way he knows she’s playing around. “If you say so.”
Heatwaves radiate from the bodega curve they’re sitting on. Peter is sweating a semi-embarrassing amount in the balmy temperature, and the heat’s springing a headache up behind his eyes.
He opens his mouth to say as much.
Liana smirks at him.
His mouth snaps shut, and he rolls his eyes.
Peter shoves the rest of the hotdog in his mouth, wincing a little at the taste, and talks through his food. “Yikes. You treat all your friends like this?”
Liana snorts and squeezes another line of mustard on her hotdog, the bottle whistling pathetically as it lays out the last of its contents.
“I can't believe you’re still eating that. Seriously. I used to not believe that food could actually go bad, but these hotdogs? I'm a believer. As your friend, I'm gonna have—” Peter plucks the hotdog out of the wrapper and tosses it over his shoulder, sinking it in a trashcan, “—to stop you from doing that to yourself. You’re cut off.”
Liana flops dramatically against the wall of the bodega, tossing an arm over her eyes. “You couldn’t even take my trash,” she bemoans and crumples the hotdog wrapper into a loose ball. “Terrible friendship etiquette. Dropped the ball.”
Peter rolls his eyes and crosses his arms, leaning back against the wall with her. The traffic on the street in front of them is stop-and-go, and he’s half-anticipating having to break up a street fight sooner or later if it keeps going like this.
“You lost the beer gut,” Liana remarks and sits up.
Peter sighs, rubbing his hands over his stomach reminiscently. “That I did, my friend. That. I. Did.”
It only took him a couple of weeks to work off the depression-pizza-pounds. The whole thing was actually surprisingly easy; he just had to get back in the swing of actually swinging places instead of taking the bus.
“Good for you, man,” she says.
He sits up a little straighter, proud.
“Thank you, Liana,” he says.
She shoots him a rare, genuine sorta-smile, and holds her balled wrapper up to the sun.
“And in honor,” she says proudly, “I propose another round of hotdogs.”
“Oh, yeah, no, have fun with that kiddo.” He smacks her on the back and stands up, stretching out his hips. “See ya, Li.”
“Obligated to tell you I hated that!” she yells as he swings into the air.
Peter laughs, spinning upside down on his web as he glides between the buildings. He waves indulgently to a couple of little kids on the way back to the Hudson shore.
Maybe two or three more sweeps of the city before he goes back home? He takes a quick glance at the sky, clocking the sun. Yeah, that should work. He'll be home in time for date night tonight.
“Hey there,” he calls amiably as he passes over the heads of a familiar group of teenagers, saluting to the one with an open duffle full of cans of spray paint.
They wrestle the bag closed just a tad and salute back, grinning.
Peter fights back a smile, slowing his swing just a little.
“Remember, youngins,” he says loudly. “No identifying marks. I saw nothing.”
The sun beats down on his head and shoulders as he swings through his regular path. One of the comments Liana made resurfaces as he passes by another hotdog stand after a couple blocks.
“I'm not retiring,” he says to himself. He grimaces at the thought of leaving New York without another Spider-Man.
He shivers, actually. Shivers.
“Retirement is a big nope. Major pass. Real estate value in Chinatown practically depends on me.”
Peter pauses for a breather on one of the taller apartment buildings, sitting on the thin edge of the roof and planting his feet against the reflective walling. A couple of clouds pass over the sun, and there might just be a whiff of rain in the air.
“No retirement,” he mutters. His feet shift and he props his arms up on his knees.
His left arm and lower back ache harshly and suddenly, and his whole body stiffens instinctually. Oh yeah. It’s definitely raining later.
So no on the retirement. But baby steps. That's what he and MJ agreed on, right?
Baby steps.
Maybe he could put some feelers out at some high schools.