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“Will you shut the door?” Raymond snapped as he was wiping down his station.
Like most times, Simon paid him no mind. He stood in the fire-door scanning the alley for any sign that someone had been out there – even just briefly.
However, there was nothing.
No webbing, no stray shoe, no coat with an ironed on name tag that he’d purposefully avoided looking at, no backpack. Nothing. Just the dumpsters and some rats.
“Letting in the cold isn’t going to be doing your joints any good.” Raymond huffed again. From behind, Simon could hear him, throwing his cloth down and footsteps approaching.
It wasn’t the cold that was worrying him.
The kid had been crawling around this alley for months now. He was almost a fixture to Simon’s tick list for closing: clean the kitchen, take the trash out, see Spider-Man, give him a few chores, go in, finish up and head out.
Suddenly, nothing. Kid’s not been around in weeks.
Kid’s not been anywhere in weeks. He knew that for a fact. With how short staffed they’d been in the lead up to the holidays, he’d been covering the counter. The photo he’s got of Spidey up behind the cash register usually sparks a comment of ‘haven’t seen him in a while you know’ from each customer.
His memory hasn’t been great lately. The blip and age starting to catch-up to him. Can’t remember why he even put the poster up. No idea what the kid did to warrant Simon declaring the restaurant ‘Supported Spider-Man’, but the confirmation it’d given him that the kid was missing from the city was enough motivation to keep it up.
A hand clamped on his shoulder, squeezing.
“He’ll be back around soon. Kid probably just doesn’t want to swing in the snow.” Raymond said. “Hearing you died of frostbite isn’t gonna make him feel any better when he does.”
He knew Raymond didn’t care as much, only liked the kid because he was carried their old fryer out the kitchen. Still, he appreciated the sentiment.
“He’s Spider-Man, Si. He'll be back. He’s the only one who knows how to fix up Gloria’s junction box, so he’s gotta come back. Wouldn’t leave us hanging.”
Simon hummed again, still not convinced but seeing the point that Raymond was trying to make. Spider-Man had become a fixture to the city. In his eyes, more so than the Avengers ever had been.
He would be back, and with how hard the snow had been the last couple days, it might be for the best that he’s not been spotted out.
“Shut the door.” Raymond said again, squeezing his shoulder one last time before walking away. This time, Simon listened, but not before adding a note to the outside of it, laminated in tape from the office:
Spider-Man - free hot drink. Just knock.
If he did come around while the snow lingered, least Simon could do was remind him that the city was glad to see him again. Give back, just a little.
Something told him it was the least they could do.
It’s their first Christmas together again after everything. Her weird little family are together for the holidays and they’re pretending that everything is normally even though it’s definitely not.
Her husband has his arm around her while they look up at the tree at Rockerfeller Centre. Somewhere on the ice is her son, laughing as he makes the memories he was robbed of with his father. Jack is being tugged along by Liam, putting on a brave face and avoiding looking their way too much.
She know that as happy as he is for her to have found someone in those years, he wishes it could be different.
Truth be told, sometimes Lorraine did too. At least then it’d be easy. It would be one of those happy stories that she’d seen plastered over the news about couples and families re-uniting. They’d fit so perfectly into the ‘return to normal’.
They couldn’t be that though, because as much as she loved Jack. She loved Henry too. Liam did as well. Lorraine and Liam had a life with Henry, one crafted around the absence of Jack and forged into something a little hopeful.
He’d blipped while out of state. Confirmation of his death never reached them; just another number to add to the statistics. An ‘unknown’ because everything was such a mess that death certificates weren’t filed and finding any news about people within their own city was hard enough let alone trying to manoeuvre departments in other counties or states.
Trying to find him again upon his return was just as hard. They had no idea where his last known location was exactly, they had no idea if he even had blipped. It was chaos.
Lorraine had changed her name since, remarried. She had a new number, finally after years of holding on to her old one in just hopes that it might ring and Jack might be on the other end.
It took months for them to reconnect.
Everyday was hard. From Jack staying with them while he got back on his feet, Liam’s confusion about who Jack was to him and how that worked given Henry’s place in his life too – Lorraine feeling like a failure for not preparing him for this even though it’d been impossible to. Then to long buried feelings buried feelings making themselves known and feeling as though she was questioning everything again. Then to yet another shift once Jack moved out.
Everyday was hard.
They kept going though. For Liam.
For themselves. Half the tensions between them all, based in the amount of love they had for the other person hurting.
She didn’t even want to be here tonight, but Jack claimed he wanted to make a tradition for them. Ice skating at the Rockfeller Centre. It was new. None of them had done it before, so it wasn’t treading on anyone’s toes. Except with how crowded it was it felt like that was all she was doing.
Across the ice she saw Liam look up, his jaw agape and staring at the sky.
She tried to follow his gaze and saw Spider-Man swinging above them.
Part of her braced for a glare from Jack, mentally thinking of a rebuttal to a forthcoming snarky comment about Henry’s influence on Liam. The trade union Henry was a part of was pretty fond of the webslinger. Jack was a cop. That was all that needed to be said.
Lorraine tightened her grip on Henry’s hand, expecting something to remind her how different things were and how even this time of year they couldn’t just be easy.
But.
Jack followed where Liam was pointing, feigning shock and awe along with his son, and looking their way and-...
He smiled.
Lorraine looked back up to the sky, watching the hero dive down before throwing out another Web. She understood why Jack hated the guy. She understood why Henry liked him – after the battle of New York, he was just pointed and told what to fix. Never saw the ones that’d made the mess out there with them.
Apparently Spider-Man wasn’t like that. He hung around, talked to people. Helped out with the little things like helping to pull machinery that’d gotten stuck or empty out construction sites that’d been taken over by dumb kids who wouldn’t listen to just anyone about safety.
She still thought he was in over his head. Even if all he did was stick to the neighbourhood. The world was a little too complicated for kids in spandex. It’d been too complicated even for the heroes in fancier suits and who’d been on the scene for years.
The guy’s out here though. He’s got that paper breathing down his neck and little co-operation from the cops, but he’s still out on the streets, watching over them.
It might have just been the time of year that was making her sappy, but she thought that maybe seeing him was a sign. This Christmas had been hard, and she was sure they were probably doing something wrong – there wasn’t any guidebooks on Christmas with the blipped (there had been a few advice columns and plenty of segments on Little Women, but none felt right. There wasn’t a one-size fits all answer to it).
At least they were giving it a go, and that had to mean something. Especially with how wide Liam’s smile was.
“Nice to see him back out again.” Henry commented from her side. She glanced and saw him still looking in the direction Spider-Man had swung off too.
“There’s a give-a-coat-take-a-coat thing happening.” Spider-Man said from the lamppost.
“Hmm.” Lennie grunted, looking down at the fraying sleeves of his jacket. It’d done him well. A Hardy thing that had seen him through both this winter and last. Plus the many more before he'd started pushing it to it's limits without much of a break.
He’s not so interested in getting a new one. Sentimentality wanting him to cling on to this one, but at the very least... someone there might be able to patch up the few holes that had started to wear into the back.
“At the place you normally send me?” He asked.
Spidey shakes his head.
“N-No. Place on 30th. Uh. I think FEAST run their stuff on the weekends. More volunteers on hand. Or.” He paused, doubtful of himself. Which was odd. All the times that the kid’s sent him that way in the past he’d had the calendar memorised. Reeling off facts and dates and members of staff to talk to.
It made sense with the number of photos that featured him littering the walls.
He knew better than to think the kid was too young to have used FEAST’s services, or at the very least, he knew someone who had. Lennie thought it was nice that he kept up with it.
“They used to. I don’t know about now. Might be different.”
There was a story there. One he doesn’t press for, guessing that the admission was hard enough from the way that the kid’s head hangs a little – like he’s ashamed of it.
A breeze blows through. Lennie tucking himself into the hood of his jacket a bit more. It stops the cold biting into his skin as much.
Up on his perch, Spider-Man shuddered, curling in on himself just that little bit more.
“Maybe I’ll see you there.” Lennie called out to him. “Looks like you could use a coat.”
Spider-Man chuckled.
“I’ve got thermals on. Don’t worry about me.” He brushed off.
Lennie continued to look on in apprehension. He hardly knew the guy. The pair only interacting when he’d swing-by with food parcels or when he was exiting the alley that Lennie was about the enter.
Honestly, Lennie thought that he’d only ever spoken to him to check he hadn’t seen anything. Not that he’d tell a soul if he had, but rumour was Spidey did it pretty often.
Simon, who ran the grease trap a few blocks over, said that he’d spoken to the kid a few times after catching him climb the walls there, bringing in the backpacks that fell from the dumpster when his webbing dissolved.
Apparently he started checking in there more. Soon, the things that went under the radar on the block – petty thefts and issues with junction boxes that they could never get anyone out for, started being resolved.
He never asked for anything. Just did his bit and left. Every person that mentioned him saying something similar Spidey never asked anything of them. Just did his bit then left.
He supposed that he was just doing what everyone else – looking after his own. Just... the whole city seemed to be Spidey’s thing. Never had Lennie heard of him refusing anyone or walking away.
The things Lennie knew about him could be counted on one hand, but he knew he was a kid, and kids didn’t have common sense to put thermals on in the cold.
Not when they wore getups like he did and did the things he did.
Spider-Man laughed. Lennie assumed it was because of his reaction. Hard to tell what he was looking at with that mask. “Trust me.”
“Just drink something warm when you get home, okay?” Lennie huffed, sensing a losing battle here. “For my peace of mind.”
“Aye, aye, Captain!” Spider-Man saluted. “You head to that shelter. It’s meant to get cold again.”
Not that it’d ever really gotten warm, but he appreciated the sentiment nonetheless.
Lennie nodded to him and watched as Spider-Man got ready to jump away. This conversation no different to how their others had gone in the past.
“Nice to have you back, kid.” He found himself saying before the kid can leap off his post.
He faltered. “What?”
“You were gone for a while there. Nice to see you again.”
“You noticed?” The kid replied, catching himself a moment later with a stutter like he didn’t mean to sound so surprised or desperate. The way he said it telling Lennie that there’s more of a story there than anyone suspects.
His tone too similar to how he's sounded in the past.
He said it like he was grateful just to have been seen and to be remembered. Lennie feeling the same type of way when Cara at the van remembers to leave the onions off even when he forgets. Or the few times he’s popped by Sydney between job interviews and she asked him how the last one went even though they were months apart.
“Hard to forget a guy who stops by with wheatcakes.”
“They’re hearty,” The kid defends himself.
The eye lenses don’t widen anymore. They remain static. It’s a little creepy, if he’s honest to himself, makes it feel like he’s another step removed from being human, ominous and foreboding, a little threatening if he holds your gaze for too long - that is until he opens his mouth or you took a look at the rest of his suit. The reflective blue and the red looking a little cartoonish but suits him more than the black and red number he used to wear... It feels approachable.
“And... kinda all I know how to make.” His voice getting a little smaller.
Lennie sighed. More of the story unravelling at that tiny admission. He knew the kid was young. Hard not to notice it when his voice had been a little higher when they’d first met and the way he held himself.
The kid was young. And alone.
“You know Simon, right?”
Spider-Man paused, slowly nodding.
“Ask him to write you down a couple things. Guy might love his fryer but he does know how to cook.” He explained. “And for cheap too.” He added on.
Gotta take care of their own.
Peter Parker is no more, but Spider-Man lives on...