Chapter Text
Peter once thought the worst thing in the world was to be alone. He’d lost his parents and he was terrified about where he’d end up. He remembers nightmares he’d had in those first few weeks after their death; shut up in a house trying to make breakfast for himself. The walls had seemed so much taller, the counters too high for him to reach, the door to the fridge too heavy to open. No one was around to help. He had to do it for himself, and he couldn’t. He spent those weeks plastered to Ben’s side. They would stay up and watch old baseball games, until Peter fell asleep on the couch. They did this until Ben’s night shifts picked back up again.
He remembers sitting against his bedroom door the first night Ben wasn’t home, sniffling to himself and trying to steel himself into spending the night alone. Checking, double checking and triple checking his nightlight, testing which blankets blocked out the view of his new room but let through enough light. He hated every moment of it.
Being alone was the worst thing that could happen to a person. He’d decided it that very evening.
May had knocked on the door and brought him some hot chocolate. It’d marked a new tradition, one that carried on long after Ben was no longer around. Both he and May were a little lonelier but they weren’t alone. They had each other.
They were hurting and aching and missing an integral piece of themselves and the home that was already missing huge chunks, but they weren’t alone. Handling all that and being alone would have been the worst thing in the world, but they weren’t.
Peter once thought the worst thing in the world was to be alone.
He’d ripped the multiverse apart to try and keep his people close, but now he knows that isn’t true. Not when his very existence is a danger to everything he touches and everything he loves. He was so very wrong.
Not as he’s given a reminder of his impact on the people he loves. Not that it’s a thing he can forget when he no longer smells peppermint tea every morning or when he’s having to get his breathing in check because he missed his alarm and there was no knock on his bedroom door to get him up. When there’s no one waiting for him when he gets in after patrol – the electricity in the apartment long shut off. When there’s no hot chocolate. He knows now just how wrong he was.
He stares at the bandage on MJ's forehead. His heart breaking at the memory of the cut he saw there. It doesn’t hurt now , but it had hurt. She’d lied to him, told him she was okay, but she was hurting.
She’d been hurt, and it was his fault.
Both she and Ned had fallen, and it was his fault.
Ned had come away unscathed physically. Peter looks over to him now, sitting in the Donut shop with no memory of him. He had no clue if he had memories from that night. Would it be better if they didn’t?
He looks back to MJ.
MJ hadn’t come away unscathed. Debris cutting her forehead as she slipped through his fingers, nd fell-
Fell.
Fell.
They were lucky that was the worst of it. It could have been so much worse. Only a few hours prior it had been.
Peter once thought that the worst thing in the world was to be alone, and he’d been wrong. He isn’t happy being alone. Then again, as he stares at the cut on MJ’s forehead and slips the note back into his pocket, he wonders if happiness is really something he gets to have, knowing how badly he can hurt people. If he can it won’t be in the way he’d once hoped he’d have it. It takes a different shape now, one more like relief in the shape of heartbreak.
It is something he can give to other people, though. It’s a freedom that he can grant them by slipping the note back into his pocket and walking away. He can give them happiness with the distance and his silence.
Happiness is in the breaking of one promise hut the keeping of another, a newer one, one he’d made to himself in that moment. Happiness is in him being alone, and if they were safe then it couldn’t be the worst thing in the world, could it?
Peter Parker cannot keep his loved ones safe as things were. A solution was presented that allowed him to do that so he took it. He is not proud of his decision; he can imagine May giving him an unimpressed look and a lecture. He can picture the words so clearly in his mind that he thinks he can hear them.
Peter’s glad that the memory of her voice hasn’t faded, even if the words she’s saying are filled with worry he isn’t sure he deserves, but she’d offer anyway.
Ben's voice is more an imitation of the real thing. He can’t have that happening to the sound of May’s voice. He just can’t.
Peter keeps walking down the street, he doesn’t look back at the diner even though the May in his head is telling him to.
He lets himself into an empty apartment and worries himself packing his few things; May tells him that he should take the night and go back again tomorrow, that he shouldn’t be alone right now.
May isn’t around right now though. She has no real say in his choices.
This might be a bad one, but it keeps MJ and Ned safe. May’s lecture echoes in his ear the entire evening.
There is one thing that he can protect as himself.
It’s just you and me.
His hands have led to so much destruction, but he can keep this one thing safe and sound, and if he does it right then it will be a single drop in a rippling ocean, just as she would have wanted.
When you help one person, you help everybody .
It takes a few tries. Elsewhere he doesn’t have the luxury of mistakes, but here he can take his time. So long as his face is covered when he goes out, so long as he sticks to the shadows and people still believe that he’s out there, whether they actually see him or not so they too feel safe and keep that little beacon of hope that lights up the city streets, he can indulge in the time it takes him to make a new suit.
He can sit with the nausea that had swept him through him the first time he pulls out the carcass of his old suit. Now a kaleidoscope of his own invention, Tony’s tech and Parker blood – He never did learn how to clean it the way May did – it is a reminder of everything he has done and everything he couldn’t do.
Peter’s hands shake the first time he touches it.
He thinks he’s going to throw up when he finally manages to strip the lenses from the suit, accepting that the rest of it is useless.
It is a symbol of a time gone by and not one he wishes to bring forward. He isn’t that person anymore and needs something to reflect that. Clinging on to the past when there was nothing to anchor him there was a bad idea.
May wouldn’t want that.
He’s listening to her this time.
Peter’s stitched a few things before; hemmed jeans and patched holes. May was the seamstress between them, years of thrift shop upcycling from necessity and then enjoyment gifting their apartment with a constant sound of a machine humming. The steady pound of the needle, the churn and gurgle as thread got caught in the plate. It all became white noise to him, a way for him to tell if she was home on weekend mornings as he lay there still half asleep after late patrols.
When he’d first moved in with May and Ben, it’d startled him up after sleepless nights in a bed and room that didn’t quite feel his own. While they’d been staying at Happy’s it’d been a comfort he didn’t realise he’d grown to need, helping him claw back a few hours of much needed rest with the August sun warming his toes as he lay out on the couch.
His apartment doesn’t feel like his own once again. His name is on the lease, his limited possessions are scattered around it, but it doesn’t feel like home. Maybe it never will, but that’s not the worst thing in the world.
The first time he turns that machine on, letting it run as he begins to sew a hem, he fucks it up. His foot clamping down on the pedal and hands dropping the fabric. It goes awry and he breaks the needle. The fabric is all chewed up, the stitching bunching and curling around itself. It’s a mess.
He could fix that though. It’s one of the few things he can.
It takes some time, but he’s got time. It’s not like he has any other obligations now. He’s just got this, this one duty, this one responsibility. He’s stepped away from the rest of it. The rest of it all has simply fallen away.
So long as he keeps his face covered, he can take his time getting this right.
He’s got a chance to reinvent himself and create a version that’s better than he was before, that can keep a beacon, built from a single woman, lit.
He unpicks the stitches that ball the fabric. He buys a new piece when he can, because some holes can’t be repaired. That takes time, too because funds are limited and between food or suit repairs, he does actually need sustenance. He sacrifices his hot water to cover the new fabric.
When the time finally comes, he closes his eyes, takes a breath and presses the pedal again.
Home doesn’t feel so much like a place anymore. It’s a person that he’s carrying with him, even now that they’re gone. Home doesn’t feel some much like a place, but with the sound of his sewing machine, old and far too loud, his apartment starts to feel a little more his own.
It takes time, and it takes tears.
He’s got time and he’s to plenty of tears to shed. One good thing about being alone is that he doesn’t need to choke them back. He doesn’t think he could cry again if Ned or MJ were here, not after what he’d put them through.
It takes time, and it takes tears, but the suit gets finished, and with it so does a chapter in his life. Peter Parker was no more. He was a non-entity that didn’t exist to the people he loved.
That was okay.
They were safe.
He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath and dives out the window.
He swings by Times Square, no longer needing to stick to the shadows. His face is still covered and people know for certain, Spider-Man is here.
I remember tears streaming down your face
When I said I'll never let you go
When all those shadows almost killed your light
I remember you said don't leave me here alone
But all that's dead and gone and passed tonight