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Peter thinks he might have been watching Friends when it happened. Something about Chandler and Joey and an apartment and getting married — or maybe it was Phoebe? — either way, it led him here.
It’s a haze, really, half-blacked-out in a way he knows he’ll still remember in the morning, even though he can’t remember it now. That’s all he wants; the not remembering, the freedom of being able to live a life that’s wholly his own.
He doesn’t remember how he ended up in the pool, but it’s nice. He feels… good, maybe. Probably. Peter can’t quite figure it out, doesn’t have the words or the brainpower to find them. He takes another swig of the vodka in his hands, feels it burn as it goes down. He nearly chokes on it as it goes down, throat too unused to the sensation. His nose scrunches up, his shoulders tense, but his body isn’t tingling like usual, burnt away by the bitter taste of old liquor.
In the water of the pool, for the first time in however long, there is only Peter Parker. Spider-Man is gone, here, leaving only one nonexistent boy in a motel pool. There’s a spell all of his own in his hands, growing more chlorine-tinged by the minute. The memory of him is gone, but the sting of that forgetting is burnt away by the sting in the back of his throat. On the scorched earth left behind, there is nothing but the distinct lack of a bone-deep ache. There’s the absence of something more that he can’t remember, the memory of it turned to ash on burnt ground. Still, the echo lingers, and he can’t quite pin it down. It doesn’t make him hate the spell in his hands, though. He just looks at it differently.
He remembers this, though: May hated when Ben drank. He didn’t drink often for that very reason. She probably would have hated to see Peter right now, face-up in a pool with vodka on his teeth and hard truths ringing in his ears. May would have hated this, hated him.
MJ might have flipped him off, might have dragged him out of the motel pool and wrapped a towel around his shoulders and let him sit in the cold to think about his actions. She might have jumped in the pool with him, told him that she was just in here to make sure you don’t drown, because Peter told her he hadn’t learned how to swim until he was eight and hadn’t swam much since, and she liked to make fun of him for it. She would laugh and it would add a whole new person to the room, and Peter wouldn’t even care that she’s laughing at him.
But it’s just Peter and the stars right now. Part of him is grateful for that — they shouldn’t see him like this, as much as he wishes they could.
Peter’s mind wanders to the season, then the year, then a rundown of questions to ask a concussed victim. What year is it? What month is it? Who’s the president?
Peter doesn’t know, doesn’t know, doesn’t care. Peter Parker can’t vote. Peter Parker doesn’t exist.
The stars, in their infinite mercy, give him the answers. Vega shines, sharp white against an inky, endless black. Peter doesn’t know how it cuts through the New York smog, just that it does, somehow. Peter’s eyes flick down to Altair, then left to Deneb. He draws his finger up along the lines — May’s voice in his ear, it’s more fun when you trace them out, making constellations out of stars that were actually satellites — and traces out the triangle. It’s summer, then. June. How can it be June? Wasn’t it snowy a few weeks ago? Weren’t the leaves crunching under his feet yesterday?
Time isn’t real, Peter resolves. Still, it’s June.
MJ and Ned should be graduating soon. He should have been graduating soon. The sky should be bright blue, the hazy stars should be dark blue caps, and he should be happy.
Instead, he’s warm from the liquor and cold from the water. Instead he’s just here, and it’s somehow June, and the Summer Triangle is here and May isn’t there to trace it out with him and MJ isn’t here to tell him it’s okay and no one is going to step into this pool and remember him. There is no miracle coming for Peter Parker.
There is Jessica Jones, though. She’s talking to the manager of the motel now. The words are hazy too, just like the stars. It’s the first time he’s hated the vodka all night.
What was he thinking about again? Oh, right. Vega, Altair, Deneb. Summer Triangle. More fun when you trace them out.
Peter tries to trace it out again, but his hand shakes and his head threatens to capsize with the shift in weight. When his arm drops, unable to support its own weight, it makes a splash that reaches the stars. He laughs, and he laughs and he laughs and he laughs so hard he cries, and then he’s just crying. Or maybe his face is just wet from the pool? It doesn’t matter now. It’ll be July in a blink.
He blinks, and it’s still June, but Jessica is here now. Maybe if he blinks again he’ll be eighteen, and he’ll be the only person in the world who knows.
“Kid.” Part of him is grateful he’ll be the only one who knows. They won’t stop calling him kid then, won’t stop giving him second chance after second chance just because they don’t think he should know better by now. “You look like an idiot.”
“You’re the one who came.” Peter hates how mean that sounds, but he knows it isn’t coming from him. The vodka made Peter and his mouth separate entities, each uncontrolled by his brain. There’s still a second chance waiting for him. The fuzz at the edge of his mind washes out the shame that comes from accepting it.
“Trust me, I don’t want to do this either.”
“But you still came.” It’s a perplexing thing, really. Why would someone do something they don’t want to do? Peter had done it over and over again, and it didn’t lead him anywhere good. Look where it got her, sent on babysitting duty with an idiot that doesn’t even exist.
“I’m not listening to criticism from a guy wearing a hoodie in a motel pool.” Is he really — huh, he is wearing his red hoodie. Where did he get this hoodie from again?
He got it from MJ. It’s the hoodie she got from when her family went up to Lake George when she was a kid. Peter remembers, now, past the scorched earth — she had fallen out of the canoe and they bought it for her because she was crying.
Maybe she’s the one who didn’t exist. Maybe the idea of a life with her was inseparable from fantasy, something that he couldn’t touch to the ground to make it real no matter how hard he tried. A flare of indignation runs through him at that — at the idea that Spider-Man and Peter Parker were never something that could co-exist, and that Spider-Man would always have to come first. Spider-Man is the first thing he touched to the ground and made real, the first thing he seized from that bit of fantasy at the back of his mind. It was his way of not running anymore, of finally finding a way to help, to save, that he couldn’t do with Ben.
“Then why haven’t you left yet?” In a part of his mind that’s floating away in bubbles, he realizes he sounds sad. Why does he sound sad? Why is there a thickness at the back of his throat? He dips his head back in the pool on impulse, letting the water flow in between his ears as he submerged his head. Jessica only speaks again once he comes up for air.
“Never said I’d leave,” Jessica says, and the vodka takes a backseat for a moment so he can figure out what that means, “just that I wouldn’t listen. We’ll sit here all night and be bored out of our minds.” She sounds tired as she says that, tired as she crouches and sits on the aggregate surrounding the pool. She’s tired because of him, he knows.
May was right to not let Ben drink. Drinking doesn’t burn the empathy out of him, just burns away the parts of his brain that lets him use it properly — that makes sure he doesn’t have to use it at all. Part of him wishes the vodka had burned out less. Part of him wishes it had burned out more. Part of him is just scorched earth with nothing more to be grown. He takes another sip of the vodka. It burns when it touches the split on his lip, burns when it hits his tongue, burns as it goes down his throat, burns once it hits his veins. It tastes vaguely of chlorine, but Peter doesn’t have the brain to mind.
“‘You not learn ‘sharing is caring’ in kindergarten?” Jessica says, words impatient but voice lacking its usual bite. Faintly, it reminds him of MJ.
Peter takes another swig before he hands the bottle over to Jessica. She merely holds it, turning the near-empty bottle over in her hands. Did he drink that much?
Oh, shit, enhanced metabolism. He’ll probably be hungover within a half hour — that’s probably why he’d been drinking to stave off a headache ten minutes ago. Or maybe it was five minutes ago? Blink and it’ll be an hour later, maybe Jessica will be gone and just the headache will be left.
Maybe that’s why Ben didn’t drink. Too many people coming and going, too much time slipping between his fingers like sand.
“It’s June,” Peter says, rather dumbly, if the two cells left in his brain capable of feeling embarrassed have anything to say about it.
“Yeah,” Jessica says, like she’s trying to entertain a toddler, “I know. Wild, right?” It’s sarcastic, but Peter doesn’t catch it in time. His mouth is already moving. If only he could just catch it, make it fit back into his brain. Maybe if he had shut his damn mouth, none of this would have happened.
“Yeah,” his mouth says, because it isn’t listening to his brain. “Y’ know what’s wilder? I was supposed to be goin’ to MIT.” He turns over in the pool, eyes wide, feet treading water.
Vaguely, he considers how easy it would be to just stop kicking. There’s lights around the edges of the pool, illuminating exactly where the water starts and ends. He used to make games of sitting at the bottom of the swimming pool, seeing how long he could take the pressure building on his ears. He could sit there, pressure finally equaled out, carbon in his veins, and just sit in the light. It’ll be the first time anyone really sees Peter Parker. Maybe it’ll be a new kind of baptism, drowning his sorrows like a priest washes out Original Sin.
His mouth keeps going as his mind wanders. “I was smart enough to get into M-I-freakin’-T.”
“And now you’re in a motel pool.”
“And now I’m in a motel pool. ‘You ever think of going to MIT? You’re smart enough.”
Jessica snorts, grip around the neck of the bottle shifting as if she’s going to take a swig of her own. She doesn’t. “Why didn’t you go?”
“You wouldn’t believe me.”
“I know that you’re a teenager with no digital footprint — something that should be impossible for anyone. I know that you have a fake ID that says you’re nineteen and not twenty-one, unlike everyone else your age. I know that you can stick to walls . Try me.”
“I had a wizard erase any memory of my existence from the entire universe. Full scrub. Peter Parker’s life just went,” Peter makes a shoom noise, moving his arm in an arcing motion to mimic a plane before crashing it into the water with a splash. He makes some explosion noises for effect.
Jessica hesitates for a moment, and Peter’s stupid, drunk mind thinks she’d somehow believe him. “How much have you had to drink?”
“Told you.” He wonders if he had been drunk when he told MJ and Ned he’d come find them. That’s the only way he could have been so dumb, to make a promise he couldn’t keep. “I knew it wouldn’t make sense.”
He reaches for the bottle, eager to just let the memories burn, burn, burn. Jessica pulls the bottle away from him, eyes locking on his. This is a serious conversation now, he recognizes. His mouth decides that now is the perfect time to reconvene with the rest of his body.
“You can’t do that,” Jessica says.
“Why not?” Jessica opens her mouth to say something, but Peter keeps talking. Vodka burns at his brain, the water cools it down, turns it to fuzz. He doesn’t wait for the second chance, doesn’t deserve it now, didn’t deserve it ever. “MJ isn’t here, Ned isn’t here, May isn’t here, Ben isn’t here, my fucking parents — they aren’t here.” The water isn’t cooling anything down anymore, but the vodka’s still burning, burning, burning, and he wants it to stop. Every vowel feels too long, every word feels too sharp, all sitting in his mouth until they rot and fall out. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”
The words rot further as Jessica lets them hang, leaving Peter alone with the stars and a burn that won’t go away. “Do you want me to leave?”
“No,” he says, almost immediately. It’s the fastest his brain has worked all night.
“So, me staying. That matter to you?”
I’ll go if you want me to, Ned had said, because Ben was dead and Peter was still in that stupid black suit and tie and he was visibly restraining himself from yelling at the one kid who wasn’t an asshole about it. Because grief is an ugly thing, and because Ned didn’t care about the way his words rotted out of his mouth like old teeth.
I don’t want you to, Peter had said, because it sounded less pathetic than please don’t go.
And then Ned paused, because they were both just kids who didn’t know what to do with all of Peter’s decay around them, before he said, So, Lego Batmobile?
“Yes,” Peter says, if only because the vodka hasn’t burned away all his memories like the spell burned out theirs.
In a sick way, he prefers that it was him who had to live with forgetting. Let the amnesiacs live their lives. He’s part of the city, bound to it in ways he can’t imagine forgetting. It still gets to be a part of him this way — they still get to be a part of him, this way, even if it’s a part he’s been burning out for the last however-many-blinks.
It’s the second time he’s hated the vodka all night.
“There’s something that matters. The fact that you care enough about me that you want me to keep sitting here, that matters. That means that I matter to you, for some reason. That means that people matter to you, Peter.”
“So? That matters to everyone. I’m not special.”
“You’re really going to make me say it, huh?” Peter turns her head towards her, aching for words he can’t blink away. “Damn it kid— you matter. Okay? I don’t care what wizard bullshit may have happened. That doesn’t erase that you — Peter Parker, kid from Queens, better than Nancy Drew, hates pineapple — you matter, Peter. You’ve gotta remember that.” Jessica looks like she wants to vomit after saying something other than sarcastic jabs for more than thirty seconds, but Peter can’t bring himself to care. It makes something warm settle in his chest. It’s different from the burning in his throat, though, welcome and comforting like a hot chocolate in yesterday’s winter.
The silence hangs in the air, and Peter just wants to find a way to break it. He doesn’t quite think about the implications of it when he says, “What case are we working?”
“ You’re the case, kid. I got sent on a wild goose chase looking for you. I had a peanut vendor tell me you were headed towards Staten Island.”
“Don’t you have a cop you could go to if you wanted to locate me?”
“Why would I… have a cop? Who has a cop?”
“Every vigilante has a cop buddy.” After a pause, Peter lets a disbelieving laugh slip through his throat. “Holy shit, they’re buddy-cops .”
Jessica just sits in silence, eyebrows raised and mouth slightly opened with no words coming out. Peter doesn’t like it. There’s too much hanging in the air now, too much for his addled mind to process. His brain works through hazy memories before settling on something recent, something not so blurry. In the however-many-blinks-long stretch of silence, he processes what Jessica had said earlier.
“Why would I ever go to Staten Island?” He asks.
Jessica seems eternally grateful for the subject change. Peter is happy to oblige.
“That’s what I said!” Peter laughs, and there’s a vague flash of memories running through his mind. He can’t pin them down, each one too blurry and moving too fast for him to properly see them, to properly remember.
He wants to remember, now. He doesn’t want to blink until so much time has passed he ends up forgetting. What is there to remember?
Vega, Altair, Deneb. Summer Triangle. More fun when you trace them out. Blink, and May’s right next to him.
“Ya know,” Peter says, his voice thick and head heavy, “my aunt used to make up constellations with me. Made up stories for them too.” He laughs, and it’s a wet, choked-off sound, but it’s there. A leaden arm lifts up, one finger pointed at the sky.
Peter traces out lines between a couple of stars, connecting the dots like he had with May outside his bedroom window. He turns to Jessica, who looks like she’s debating arranging a psych eval.
“Those aren’t stars, Peter,” Jessica says. As quiet as she is, it still pounds against the headache. Peter can’t bring himself to resent it — the burn is ebbing, now, cooled even without the water equalizing out all the pressure.
“But they could be.” The thickness in his throat is back, but he doesn’t dip his head underwater again to erase the feeling. Still, his face is wet.
“You’re weird, kid.” Peter has the gall to look offended at such a thing. For once, he doesn’t think of Ned when he opens his mouth to defend himself. Whatever defense he may have had crumbles, though, as he’s interrupted by a, “don’t read into it, man. Just get up.” Her arm is extended out, but she’s too far away for it to be to pull him up.
It’s a hug, idiot, you hit your head during gym or something? MJ’s voice in his ear, something to remember, something to remind him.
Blink, and he’s in Jessica’s arms. Blink, and he’s still there. Jessica Jones is carding a hand through his wet hair, and Peter is allowed to hold on to her as the ground shifts beneath him.
Blink, and Peter Parker exists.