Archive of Our Own ^beta

“We’re all in pain. All walking wounded. You think love is the answer. I’ve learned that the only true answer is power.  

Go home, my dear old friend.

It’s too late for love.”

- Harry Osborn, The Spectacular Spiderman #200, (DeMatteis/Buscema)

—

michelle.

—

“It has to be you.”

Michelle’s hands are shaking.

The echo of Tony’s voice rings in her ears as she checks the navigation on her phone to make sure the cab is taking the shortest route, and she can’t stop her fucking hands from shaking.

“They won’t let anyone else in there with him, and he’s not working with my guy, who is getting paid way too much for the shit job he’s doing—”

“Right here,” she tells the driver, and he immediately pulls over into the bike lane in front of the 106^th precinct.

Michelle doesn’t count the money she hands him—she probably could give him her entire wallet and wouldn’t even realize it, but he makes a satisfied noise and so she assumes it’s enough.

“Eight hours, maybe? Eight and a half? I was stupid and too far behind it, and by the time I realized he wasn’t going to karate-kid his way out of there, the vultures already had hold of the story.”

Those “vultures” are what block her now as Michelle straightens her shoulders and strides forward directly into the throng. Her hands are shaking but her gaze is steady on the doors in front of her as she expertly dodges reporters and cameras, using her leather case as some sort of battering-ram through their suffocating questions and flashing lights. She thanks god in some distant, disconnected part of her brain for the Hildebrant case she’d worked a few months ago, the one that had exposed her to the ugly reality of a private matter made public.

Normally, there is a whole bit at this point, where the receptionist might try to delay her and Michelle will act like she doesn’t realize it’s happening, but she can hear the screaming through the walls and she knows exactly where she needs to be.

Muffled yelling. It reminds her of the before, of their assignment in their first acting for non-majors class.

Immediately, Michelle chides herself.

Not yet. Not until she’s finished what she came here to do.

“Ma’am, this room is closed-questioning,” the officer apologizes as she attempts to stride past him toward the yelling. It is harsh through the walls, and she can hardly focus on what he’s saying until he’s physically stepping in front of her, blocking her path.

“I’m his lawyer,” she snaps— and he’s probably just trying to do his job but she doesn’t give much of a fuck right now, not when— she takes a deep breath. “Get out of my way.”

The officer swallows. He’s young and it’s one-thirty in the morning, which means he’s probably new, and Michelle decides quickly that he isn’t worth her time. She cleanly side-steps him in her sensible, work-appropriate, two-inch heels and continues quickly down the hallway toward that goddamn shouting.

She takes a deep breath to steady herself because appearances are important in situations like this, even if they shouldn’t be. Her fingers still shake when she reaches for the doorknob, but this is what Michelle Jones-Watson does. This is what she's good at. This is how she can help on this fucking terrible night.

—

“Who are you?” the big officer barks, the second she walks through the door.

Michelle takes quick stock of him and files the information away. Plainclothes but a regulation haircut—clearly an officer, but not one who was on duty at the time of Spider-Man’s arrest. He’s high up the food chain, probably, and she’d guess from his posture that he probably has some sort of personal stock in this case, but she only spares him a second of her thought before her eyes find what they’re really looking for.

She is trained not to react bodily to images like this. Images like Spider-Man slumped over himself with handcuffs over his wrists, looped through an iron hook on the table that she knows he could break through like it’s nothing but toilet paper.

Michelle is trained not to let it show on her face, her reaction to images like this because, technically, the law is a standard set of rules but the practice of it is more of a chess game, and she’d begun to make a name for herself only three years out of law school in this world by being the observer in these situations, not the observed.

But there is blood on his suit.

There is blood on his suit and Michelle doesn’t know if it’s Peter’s or if it’s his, she is trained not to react bodily but she can’t help squeezing her eyes closed for just a moment against the reality of Spider-Man curled over himself in this freezing-cold questioning room covered in blood that has long-since dried— blood that she knows in her gut doesn’t belong to him.

The lawyer that she assumes is Stark’s first attempt vacates his seat for her immediately.

“Spider-Man will not be answering any more questions.”

Michelle doesn’t even bother opening her briefcase. She read his statement of charges and forced all her feelings into a small box in her stomach as Tony briefed her over the phone on the plane, and six hours of frantic review about litigation in the state of New York has left her feeling hollow and prepared for whatever these men throw at her.

(There were sixty-seven charges on the statement.)

At the sound of her voice, Peter turns, and he’s not wearing the mask that blinks and shows his facial expressions because he’s always thought it looks dumb, but Michelle can tell from fifteen years of knowing him that he’s barely in the room with them right now.

She and Tony had a plan. Michelle would come in, figure out what was going on and how the police were keeping him here, and then she’d text Tony and he’d send someone in with their gun’s blazing.

But stupidly, stupidly because of the fact that this was Peter Parker, neither of them had considered that maybe he was staying of his own free will.

Michelle takes a deep breath before she returns her attention to the officer, steeling herself because the end goal of this night—to get Peter out— is still the same, but the journey there is going to be different, now, and it’s not going to rest on some super-powered or super-suit clad hero.

It’s going to rest on her.

“With all due respect, ma’am,” the plainclothes officer says in a tone that is anything but, “a man is dead and thirty eye-witnesses place your client at the scene. You’ll forgive me if I ask a few more questions.”

Michelle clocks the refusal to refer to Peter as Spider-Man. She notes the lack of any shadow under this man’s eyes despite the fact that they’ve been there for—

“It’s been seventeen hours of questioning, officer,” Michelle says, bluntly. “Are you trying to tell me that you haven’t had ample opportunity to wrack Spider-Man’s brain?”

She watches the man’s tongue as it travels across his teeth beneath is lips. It’s a gamble, but it’s one that will pay off because Michelle knows Peter and she knows his family, and even in his current state, May Parker’s nephew is too well-trained to say a word to the police.

Which leaves Officer whatever-his-name-is with two choices. Admit out loud, in front of his colleagues, that no, he hasn’t been able to crack Spider-Man in the near day he’s had him sitting here, pliant and docile, or submit to her request.

He nods, once, and then leans back from where he’d been leering down at them over the small metal table.

There’s no thrill of satisfaction or victory.

“We’d like to counsel privately.”

Now the officer snorts, and one of the other guys in the room does as well, and it’s at that moment that Michelle is made bone-chillingly aware of the semi-automatic pointed directly at Peter’s back.

It’s still not keeping him here. She’s seen him stop a tank before while barely breaking a sweat.

That doesn’t stop the sight of it from sending a shiver down her spine.

“A private discussion?” The officer that was leaned up against the wall scoffs. “Why, so he can jump out the window? No way in hell.”

Michelle glares. The sheer stupidity is astonishing and the disregard for the fact that a human being sits in front of them is astounding, and she can hear all the hatred that she holds for these people that she normally suppresses in favor of keeping her cards close to her chest leaking out into her words.

“This is textbook excessive force. Get that thing out of here immediately. My client—” she hates this, but that’s what he is right now, he’s her client— “has been nothing but civil.”

She prays that she’s right.

“Protections against excessive force don’t count when you can break a bus in half with your bare hands,” Plainclothes practically growls, and Michelle’s response is quick and deadly, deadly soft.

“Careful, Officer,” she cautions. “You wouldn’t want to imply that our rights apply differently based on our physical characteristics or abilities, would you?”

He glares at her, and she stares condescendingly back with muscles that she must force to work manually, because her real focus is on the heart beating less than a foot to her left.

Peter probably would’ve refused medical care, even if they offered it.

They get their attorney-client privilege.

It’s a fluke, the same way this entire thing is a fluke because every officer, lawyer, and guard in the questioning hold knows that the only reason Spider-Man is still chained to this table is because he’s actively choosing to be. It’s why his mask is still on despite charge thirty-four— Resisting and obstruction of Officer L.R. Colton, a public officer of New York City, New York, Police Department by repeatedly refusing to identify self (unlawful self-appointed enforcer known as ‘Spider-Man.’).

They’re scared to touch the fabric on his face and Michelle is glad, Michelle is thankful that he has a reputation of protecting his identity so fiercely that they are frightened, because it means that none of the wolves surrounding them realize that if they were to reach forward right now and rip it off his face, Spider-Man probably wouldn’t even register the mask coming off.

He is no threat to them right now, and any of them could’ve noticed but they didn’t, and his mask is still on, which means Michelle’s hands can stop fucking shaking.

The second the officers and that damn gun are out the door, she turns to him, leaning forward to cradle his face in her hands. She should probably be gentler, because he makes a sound that means he’s probably hurt, but she needs to feel the structure of his face under that stupid mask and know that he is here, that he is okay, that he is breathing.

Michelle runs her thumbs across where his cheekbones should be, letting out a breath of relief, and his hands are still chained but he leans into her touch.

“Em.”

His voice is hoarse. “Em—he’s—”

“I know.”

Her emotions are locked in a box in her stomach. They are not allowed out yet. She can’t talk about it with Peter here, not now, because once she’s let the feelings out, they aren’t going back in, and she has a job to do.

“How long have you been here?” she murmurs.

He shrugs. A flake of something that she refuses to identify falls off of his suit.

“Did they fingerprint you?” she presses, because the fact that they didn’t touch the mask doesn’t mean they didn’t get the rest of him, and there’s a procedure that’s supposed to be followed. She asks because it’s important, and his head isn’t on straight, of course it’s not, not after—

Peter shakes his head and moves to resume his slumped-over position. “They tried. Machines were broken.”

A bit of Michelle’s faith in Tony is restored. She trusts that he wasn’t lying about there being no microphones, no cameras, because he’s the only person she can think of who could break enough of the police department’s random computers to somehow put the 106^th precinct’s paper and ink fingerprinting system out of commission.

“Pete.”

She whispers it so low that even she can’t hear it, but his head turns toward her a fraction of an inch, consciously or not.

“What are we doing here?”

Michelle knows that his eyes are closed the same way that she knows those handcuffs are too tight on his wrists.

His voice is dull. Numb.

“This where you go when you kill someone.”

Michelle shuts her own eyes, then, against the all-encompassing ache that rolls over her, even though it shouldn’t, because her grief and shock are supposed to be locked in a box in the pit of her stomach until she’s finished what she came here to do.

She promised herself not feel it, not yet, but Peter’s suit is covered in blood that has long-since dried.

And Harry Osborn is dead.

—

When Michelle Jones-Watson was twenty-five years old, she’d taken an oath to defend the United States Constitution.

She’d hated the wording and particularly the use of the word “defend,” and she’d told Peter so because even if they’d broken up five months earlier so that she could reach for bigger dreams out west, he was still one of her best friends, and she knew that his private, constant run-ins with law enforcement meant that he got it in a way that no one else quite seemed to.

“Don’t think of it as being an oath to the government,” he’d suggested through the phone. “Think of it as like…a promise to the people the Constitution is supposed to protect.”

“I don’t really think you’re supposed to just change the wording of the oath in your mind before agreeing.”

There was a muffled sound through the phone. “Harry says it’s fine. And he’s like, a millionaire, and they’re super honest with the law, and stuff, so he’s probably— ouch, man, I was kidding—”

And Michelle had laughed, and for a moment she wasn’t worried about whether or not she was selling her soul to the devil.

—

Arraignments are a mind-fuck.

They’re Michelle’s least favorite part of the litigation process, partly because usually she’s only at them due to a frantic phone call that pulls her out of bed at two a.m. from one of the partners at her firm and partly because she hates witnessing the manipulation tactics used to draw out a guilty plea in order to save the state a couple bucks.

She glances over at Peter where he stands with hands cuffed behind his back, and she notes the way that he sways on his feet and for a minute she hates this system, hates that she has any part in it, and hates most of all watching the full-body tremor that travels through him when they bring back in that god-forsaken gun in the “interest of the judge’s safety.”

Michelle puts her phone down from where she’d been coordinating with Tony for the after, because it’s stupid that they’re here and it’s stupid that Peter won’t leave and either way when this part is over they are going home, but Harry Osborn is dead and Peter Parker is guilt reincarnate and she has a job to do, right now.

“You will not plead guilty,” she had whispered to him, as they’d been unceremoniously led out of the questioning room an hour after she’d arrived.

Peter hadn’t acknowledged that he’d heard her, and so she’d had to stop him with a hand on his bicep, much to the annoyance of the officer escorting them.

There was already a handprint there, on his arm, and for a moment Michelle felt nauseous, but there was only enough space for Peter’s grief in the room with them right then, and so she pushed it aside and clutched him harder.

“There will be time later,” she’d said, even though there was no way in hell they were ever coming back here. “You can always change it to guilty later.”

Peter’s plea wasn’t really important. They were leaving. They were leaving and Harry was gone, and Michelle had taken an oath to uphold the United States Constitution but now her phone buzzed with texts from a war criminal, and all she can focus on is not letting Peter do this.

Not letting him make it official.

Not letting them print “HE ADMITS IT” in the morning edition of The Bugle.

“This is where you go when you kill someone.”

Peter stands, now, and they read out sixty-seven charges and the last one is first-degree murder.

The first-degree murder of his oldest friend.

(A cane on her carpet and showtunes in her car.)

Michelle is furious at them. She is furious that they pulled Peter off of Harry’s body, put him in a squad car, and brought him here. They screamed at him for seventeen hours that he had done it, that he’d set out with the express intent to kill, and that now Norman Osborn’s son was dead because of it.

The reason she’s furious is that they didn’t have to do any of it. Because he is Peter Parker, and Michelle knows that he will never forgive himself for this night.

When he glances back at her through the mask, she tries to tell him with her eyes that she loves him. That they only need to be strong for a little bit longer.

That after this, she will take him home, and they will carve out a place for this new hurt somewhere within ghost-filled hallways.

—

“I’m not telling him.”

Michelle fixes him with a look over the top of the script that he’s supposed to be helping her memorize on the bottom floor of the ESU library. “Harry.”

He crosses his arms. “It’ll just freak him out. And somehow he’s going to make the entire thing his fault.”

Michelle puts the script down. “Remember when you broke up with me?”

Harry rolls his eyes. “You’re still on that?”

“It was only four months ago, dickwad.”

“Well, it was the right thing to do."

“That’s not the point. The point is that it’s better to tell him the real reason, rather than give shitty ones like ‘I need to focus on school,’ and then dropping out two weeks later.”

Harry winces. “Not my best work.”

She nods in agreement. “It’s a good thing you quit acting when you did. Tell him.”

“I can’t. He couldn’t have known that his fucking Tylenol would mess with the new meds like that. But he’ll think he should’ve.”

She doesn’t disagree.

“So, maybe we can we keep this one just between us?” Harry practically begs.

Michelle sighs. He's so stupid. “Fine, whatever.”

—

Peter’s bail is set at five hundred thousand dollars.

The prosecutor tries to argue that it shouldn’t even be posted, but the judge seems like a sharp enough woman and even she seems to recognize that Spider-Man will only be staying until he no longer wants to anymore, and it’s less embarrassing for the courts to act like they are in control of this situation.

It’s a political statement and it is fuel for the bloodhounds waiting to mob them outside. It is five hundred thousand dollars and Michelle makes one phone call and it is paid.

(She doesn’t tell Peter that sixty-seven charges mean it should be more.

That five hundred thousand is usually the amount specified for murder.)

—

They finally get the stupid cuffs off of his wrists and they return his belongings, or, more accurately, belonging, because it’s nothing more than an Oscorp Guest Pass, but Peter nearly doubles over at the sight of it and Michelle steels herself, then uses shaking hands to place it in her own case.

Her breath catches in her throat for a moment as she looks down at the blood speckled across the bottom of the white piece of plastic, and she is so close to being done and being allowed to break into a million pieces where no one can see, but not yet.

Not quite yet.

“Where do you want me?”

Happy’s voice rings through her phone and Michelle holds onto Peter’s forearm with one hand, as if she’s scared he’ll wander off. Really, she thinks she might be grounding herself in the moment more than she is him.

“Around back?” she suggests, looking to Peter for confirmation before she remembers that he is a million miles away. “I think maybe there aren’t as many…of them. Back there.”

Happy texts her that he’s right outside and Michelle takes a deep breath before pushing the door open, only to freeze in place, overwhelmed by chants of “Spider-Man!” and the neon posters flashing above the crowd at two o’clock in the morning.

She is frozen because the name Harry Osborn is falling from their lips, and how dare they, how dare they, when he is dead on a rooftop somewhere, when he’d spent his whole life dodging their talons and their cameras and now he’s dead and they still can’t leave him in peace—

“Come on, Jones.”

It is a gruff voice forced gentle, and Michelle allows Happy to wade through the crowd for them, following listlessly. Without fanfare, he manhandles Peter into the backseat and she follows in after him, and only once the noise has died down behind them can she breathe.

(A cane on her floor and showtunes in her car and a script on the table that she can’t remember whether or not she landed the part for back during their sophomore year.)

“Are we good, Happy?” she asks, and he seems to understand the question because when they get to a red light, he taps the screen in the console and then gives her a thumbs up.

Immediately, Michelle unbuckles her seatbelt and slides across the space between her and Peter, then re-buckles the one in the middle because Harry Osborn is dead and Michelle won’t be the one to give Peter another reason to mourn, not if she can help it.

She gently reaches towards him and slips her fingers under the mask where it meets his suit, and slowly, painfully, she peels it away.

It sticks to the open wounds on his face that should’ve already healed but instead have just dried, but it is him, underneath the layers of grime and blood.

Hey,” she whispers to him, hoarsely. “There he is.”

She raises her hand to cup his cheek and Peter closes his eyes, leaning into her palm.

The shadows under his eyes are deep and dark, darker than seventeen hours.

She wonders, distantly, in some recess in her brain, how long he’d been tracking Harry before this night where everything had gone wrong.

Wonders if he’s slept at all, this week.

“He’s dead, MJ.”

She watches Happy’s fingers tighten on the wheel and this time the pang that she feels threatens to make it out of her stomach, and soon it will be okay for her to break, soon she is allowed to cry, soon she can sit in this feeling.

Soon.

“I know,” she says, instead, swallowing down the tightness and the ache.

“I killed him.”

And Michelle doesn’t argue with him because he is testing her, even if it’s unintentional, weighing her reaction to his words to try and validate whatever he is feeling inside of him in his tangled-up web of grief and guilt and pain.

He didn’t plead guilty, but she knows that he wanted to.

Right now he won’t listen. He won’t listen until they’ve repeated it to him one hundred times and he’s worked through it with Dr. Solace and even then he will always partially blame himself, but one hundred times starts with once.

“It wasn’t your fault, Pete,” she says. “None of this is on you.”

He closes his eyes as if she’s physically insulted him and brings a hand up to hold her wrist where it still cups his face for a moment, before a dry sob shakes his entire body and he crumples, leaning forward into her.

An oath to the United States Constitution when Michelle was twenty-five.

A cane on the carpet of an ESU dorm room when she was eighteen.

Peter Parker’s head in her lap at twenty-seven, because all she can do for him in that moment is make sure that he is held.

—

“MJ, I’ve got him.”

Ned’s voice is firm but his eyes are gentle, and he takes the weight of Peter Parker from her by taking his arm and placing it around his own shoulder.  Somehow, the forty-minute nap must’ve reminded Peter's body that it had just been through a gruesome battle, and he hadn’t been able to walk himself in from the car.

Or maybe he just hadn’t wanted to.

“Just…take a second, okay?” Ned tells her. “You did it. He’s safe. You can go take a second.”

Ned takes him from her and leads him away, down the halls of the penthouse, with an arm around Peter’s waist and soft, comforting whispers in his ear.

And Michelle is alone until Tony Stark is there, with bags under his eyes that he can’t hide as well anymore, not since one arm and fifteen years of fatherhood, but he squeezes her shoulder and shows her where she’s staying without asking her a single question, and she is grateful.

The door shuts behind her, and finally, Michelle sinks to the floor.

—

When Michelle was eighteen years old, she lost her virginity to the heir of the Osborn Corporation.

She hadn’t even known that’s who he was at the time, she didn’t know that he was Peter’s Harry until an awkward dining-hall-run-in a few months later, but he was cute and she had a thing for guys who wanted to make the world a better place and seemed a little unsure about the best way to do so.

They went slow, because next to her bra on the carpet there was a cane, but they were still in the before of words like “terminal” and “inoperable” and so even if he had to take a few breaks to catch his breath, it was okay.

“That was better than I thought it would be,” she admits, once she’s gotten rid of the condom for him and used the bathroom, like Gayle always told her to.

Harry grins sleepily at her, raising his eyebrows. “Thought you’d have to fake it?”

“I mean,” she teases, “It did only take you—”

“Hey,” he cut her off, with a half-hearted attempt to hit her with his pillow. “I’m sick so you have to be nice to me, and tell me that my performance left nothing to be desired—”

“The best I’ve ever had,” she deadpans, with a roll of her eyes that turns into a grin when he pulls her against him.

And it didn’t matter that they broke up three months later when he’d learned just how sick he really was and had to move back home, because in that moment his skin was warm beneath her fingers.

—

Michelle cries until she nearly throws up, and even then, the knot in her chest doesn’t loosen.

—

ned.

—

Tomorrow, Ned’s Lola turns seventy-five.

There’s going to be a party full of cousins and cake, and Ned’s supposed to bring the pictures from her eighteen-year-old debut back in sixties, the ones that Peter’s been helping him restore, so that they can hang them on the walls.

He needs to text Isa and tell her to grab the photos from his apartment.

“Those for me?”

Ned jumps, so lost in his head that he hadn’t registered the shower turning off.

“Yeah,” he nods, holding up the stack of clean clothes. “May’s stopping by your apartment, but this was the best I could do for now.”

Peter nods his thanks and reaches out to take them, but holding out his arm seems to knock his balance off and he stumbles forward a step, catching himself on the bed. From the new angle, Ned can see clearly the mottled purple and green stretching over any part of his stomach and chest not covered by his towel.

“Jesus, dude,” he mutters, standing quickly to help Peter sit down on the bed. “It’s a miracle you didn’t drown in there.”

Peter doesn’t answer and Ned knows why, knows that drowning probably would have been easier than this, than sitting with this all-too-familiar ache.

(Mary Parker was thirty.)

Now that Ned’s really looking in the dim lighting of this guest bedroom, he’s realizing there’s blood on the towel, and wounds that were originally hidden by grime and blood that wasn’t his own are coming into sharper focus all across Peter’s skin.

“I’ll be right back, okay?” he says, standing. “Don’t…go anywhere.”

He doubts Peter could if he tried, but if Ned had a nickel for every time Peter Parker had slipped out the door while his back was turned for some emergency or another, he’d be able to buy this penthouse.

There’s a closet in the hallway that Ned knows from experience is stocked to bursting with all sorts of fancy toiletries and shit, and he rummages through it a few seconds later, searching for first aid supplies that he’s too familiar with for someone with a cushy job as a software engineer.

On his way back, he’s stopped by the sound of a broken sob. It’s not from Peter’s room, and it’s one he recognizes from the (honestly, very few) times that he’s heard it before.

MJ.

Ned doesn’t stop and he doesn’t knock on her door, because he knows from thirteen years of friendship that she needs this moment alone.

Another sob, and for a moment, he hates himself.

Tomorrow, Ned’s Lola is turning seventy-five.

Peter doesn’t look up when he opens the door, and Ned takes a few steps forward to practically slap his own phone out of his hands.

“Dude. Don’t look at that shit.”

Maybe Peter needed a distraction. The Twitter threads speculating about what had gone down on the roof of Oscorp that night were not where Ned was going to let him find one.

Peter lets out a hollow laugh, wincing as he sits back on his hands. “They’ve got it right this time, though.”

“No, they don’t, and you know they don’t.”

“I did it, Ned. It was—”

“Pete.”

The deja-vu is insane, really, because they’ve been here before. Ben Parker was forty-one, and Ned and Peter had only been friends for a year when it happened, but new wounds can reopen old wounds and Ned can’t help but compare the experiences in some twisted way.

When Ned thinks of grief, when he remembers the haze of the few weeks in the after of Ben Parker, what comes to mind is the energy.

His mom had called it “helplessness anxiety” and Ned thought it applied pretty well to that feeling of a racing heart and a need to do, a need to fix, a need to help in any possible way that he could.

He couldn’t stop Ben Parker from bleeding out on the street, but he and Lola could make sinigang and bring it by after school.

He couldn’t fix the fact that it had happened on the same block as their synagogue, but he could google the customs for shiva and stop by every day that week.

He couldn’t get rid of every gun on the fucking street but damn if he didn’t do Peter’s entire AP U.S. History project on second amendment rights a week before he even came back to school.

And Ned doesn’t get it. He hates himself sometimes because tomorrow his Lola is turning seventy-five, and Richard Parker had been thirty-one, but he gets this.

“Ned, it’s alright, you don’t have to—”

“Peter, just—” Ned lets out a shaky sigh, looking up from where he’s cleaning a particularly nasty gash across his best friend’s bicep. “You’re hurt and you’re literally, actively bleeding and just…just let me do this, okay?”

He can hear the desperation in his own voice.

Just let me do something. Just let me fix something.

After a second Peter nods, looking so, so tired, and Ned wonders, for a moment, if Peter hates him, too.

Because there had been someone else here, when it happened last time.

—

Ned met Harry Osborn when he was fifteen.

He’d heard about him, heard so much about him that there might’ve been a little kernel of jealousy already planted within his heart, though he never would have admitted it then. It had taken Ned fifteen years to find someone who got him the way Peter got him, and the idea of Peter already having that person around all along put the irrational part of his brain on guard.

“Harry, Ned. Ned, Harry. Skyrim?”

And Ned had looked at Peter, then, because they’d finished the game weeks ago, but Peter wasn’t looking back. And maybe his heart had dropped a little bit. And maybe Harry had demanded most of Peter’s attention in a way that made sense when Ned looked back at it as an objective twenty-seven-year-old and knew that Harry and Peter only got to see each other two or three times a year, but as an insecure fifteen-year-old, yeah, it had smarted.

“You alright, dude?”

  Ned frowns. Harry's gone and there isn't exactly something wrong, but it doesn’t really feel right, either, and he isn’t quite sure how to phrase it.

“You and I already finished Skyrim.”

Peter Parker isn't really known for his emotional intelligence, but he seems to get it, then, and a wave of something that looks annoyingly (and familiarly) like guilt seems to cross his face.  

“Shit,” he says, dropping into the chair across from Ned. “I’m sorry, dude. I didn’t—” he pauses. “Harry doesn’t get to do stuff he…likes,” Peter tries to explain. “Very often. Like, random video games, you know? And the other day we were texting, and he said it sounded cool and I—” he lets out a breath. “Sorry. I should’ve asked what you wanted to do.”

And Ned had felt like a jerk, then. Like a little kid in the sandbox who was mad because someone else had asked to borrow the shovel for a couple minutes because they needed it more, and he’d quickly assured Peter that it was fine, and they were fine, and that Harry seemed cool.

“You like him?” Peter’s face lit up. “Thank god, man. I’ve been stressed.” 

“Shit,” a much older Peter mutters, now, in the dim light of the sun that was just beginning to peek through the blinds.

“Sorry,” Ned breathes, as he throws away the last anti-septic wipe. “All done.”

He goes to clean up the rest of the supplies while Peter gets dressed, and pretends he can't hear the labored breathing as Peter tries to slip his shirt over his head or leans over to put the random pair of Tony’s socks on.

Peter is lying on the bed when he gets back from washing his hands, and without a word, Ned sits down at the end of it, reaching out to place a comforting hand on Peter’s ankle. There’s no awkwardness in it, this sitting in pain, because they have been here before.

“Ned, right?”

Ned nods, arms full of papers from school and letters from teachers that he knows Peter won’t be reading anytime soon, as Harry Osborn steps back to let him into the apartment.

There’s a stillness in the air that Ned had never associated with the Parkers, and it could be the residents having lost their desire to do anything other than sit, even now that shiva was over, but Ned thinks it’s more likely the lack of Ben Parker that makes the place feel so empty. 

“He’s in his room,” Harry says, leading Ned like he hasn’t been here at least three times a week since he was fourteen, but Ned doesn’t have the energy to care. Jealousy seems so juvenile, now, in the after, when the sounds of the dirt from Peter’s turn to shovel hitting Ben’s casket echo around in his head.

Harry opens the door slowly, and Ned doesn’t understand the reason why until he starts whispering, and Peter having migraines is news to Ned, but clearly not to Harry.

Ned isn’t as observant as the girl named Michelle from AcaDec is always claiming she is, but he doesn’t miss that the side of the bed without a Peter in it is unmade, and Harry’s hair is mussed.

And maybe Ned starts to understand a little bit better.  

“I brought you these,” Ned whispers, setting the stack of papers on the nightstand, on top of the ones from two days ago. He has a report on second-amendment rights with Peter Parker’s name on it in his backpack, and Peter turns over to squint at him, smiling slightly.

“Thanks,” he croaks. “There’s some of that chocolate stuff from Mrs. Sbvorksi in the fridge. May and I won’t eat it, so you guys can have it.”

Ned recognizes the dismissal for what it is, and Harry seems to as well, and so for the first time, Ned finds himself alone with Harry Osborn, and he has no clue what to do about it.

Harry seems a little more at ease, and Ned wonders if that’s something that comes with being the heir to a multi-million-dollar company or if it’s just the way he is.

(Ned will learn later that it’s a familiarity with grief. Not a comfort with it, but a knowledge of and an understanding of how to navigate the unthinkable.)

“Is he okay?” Ned asks, to fill the silence.

Harry sighs, leaning forward over the counter. “He’ll be fine. It used to happen a lot, when we were younger.”

A reminder of a shared history. Of a younger Peter who had already done this by the time he was eight years old, while both Ned’s parents waited for him at home.

Harry must read the look on his face, because he gives him a shrewd smile. “Peter’s tough, you know? He’ll make it.”

Ned nods. The way Harry says Peter’s name makes him think of the way May says Ben’s. “He will.”

—

Ned never got to know Harry all that well.

He’d gone to MIT while Peter and MJ had decided on ESU, where Harry ultimately ended up as well. Ned’s experience with him was limited to once-a-year interactions at Christmas, if that, and then Ned moved to Jersey for work and pretty much never saw him again.

Ned wonders, as Peter’s healing factor finally forces him to sleep, if he’d cursed him by not getting close enough.

Because Harry Osborn was twenty-six.

And he will be forever.

—

Ned asked Tony to spare him the gory details, but he wonders, now, reading through Twitter threads that he’d expressly forbidden Peter from touching, if he should’ve been a little braver.

Because if these things are true, if @normiesaur is correct and Harry Osborn was killed by Spider-Man pushing him off of the roof and onto the balcony of the floor below, Ned’s not sure that he’ll ever be able to sleep again.

And once Peter’s woken up from his healing-induced coma, he’s not going to be the only one.

There are pieces missing. Ned knows there was a bomb. He knows that Harry hasn’t been right for weeks, from the pieces he’s been able to string together between the texts from Peter and the phone calls with MJ.

He knows that Peter Parker would only strike Harry Osborn if it was the absolute last resort.

—

Ned gently extricates himself from where he sits at the bottom of the bed and instead goes to sit on the top of the stairs, because his back is hurting and Peter will be out for hours.

He should text Isa. Tomorrow his Lola is turning seventy-five, and he won’t be there for the party.

Ned straightens up at the sound of a door opening down the hallway, and one puffy-faced and expressionless MJ Watson appears a few seconds later, still in her slacks and untucked collared shirt.

“Sorry,” she croaks, as he scoots over to let her down, but then she pauses, as if frozen.

Ned’s never experienced this type of grief, but he is very experienced in holding people through it.

He tugs her hand and she follows him down to perch on the carpeted step next to him, where he wraps an arm around her shoulder and after a moment, she lets her head fall onto his.

“Is he okay?” MJ asks, and there is a pang in Ned’s heart as he remembers a conversation with a dead man when he was fifteen.

“No,” he says, honestly. “He’s sleeping.”

MJ nods, then goes quiet. On one of Peter’s particularly bad days in the months after Ben, May had explained to Ned the idea of “breathing around it;” of the waves of sorrow so overwhelming that the only thing you can do is make room for the oxygen to squeeze by until they subside.

Ned’s never experienced it, though, and sometimes he hates himself.

Ned doesn’t want his Lola to die. Obviously he doesn’t, of course he doesn’t, but in what world is this fair? In what world does it make sense that Peter Parker has lost as many as Ned hasn’t, in what world is it fair that Harry Osborn is eternally twenty-six and Ned still has every friend he’s ever made and every parent he’s ever loved?

It isn’t. None of this is fucking fair, and the oxygen is entering and exiting his lungs just fine.

All he can do is hold MJ.

As she breathes around it.

—

tony.

—

Morgan’s going to be taller than him, soon.

Tony stands in her doorway in a way she’d probably tease him for, if she were awake, watching all fourteen years of her as her diaphragm slowly contracts and loosens.

She takes after him more, in looks, but they’ve known since she was two years old that lengthwise, she’s a Potts through and through.

What a privilege Tony hadn’t fully understood until tonight— watching your child grow.

Or maybe he’d learned it years ago, when eighteen-year-olds with no business fighting in a war turned to dust beneath his fingertips and parents across the world cried out for his head, but he’d forgotten it, in the years since.

In the years of quiet and healing and being one step removed from it all, up here in his house in the sky.

He has to turn his body around completely to shut the door, because when he’s stressed the tugging from his prosthesis is worse than normal, so he doesn’t wear it, and if there ever was a day to be fucking stressed—

Tony exhales slowly when it’s shut.

Now that he’s certain she’s breathing.

—

“Can I make you a sandwich, Jones?”

Michelle looks up at him, confused, and she has every right to be, honestly, because Tony liked her fine but had always been under the impression she hated him, a little bit, and then she and Pete had broken up and he hadn’t seen her much since.

“What?”

Her eyes are red and though she isn’t actively crying, Tony clocks the shaking hands and the fact that she’s still wearing the same clothes she was in when she arrived. He raises his eyebrows.

“Sandwich. I’m planning on ham and cheese with everything on it, and I’m willing to cut you in.”

Michelle’s red eyes find the microwave clock. “It’s five a.m.”

Tony shrugs, something he enjoys more with only one arm, purely for the uncomfortable looks it gets, but there’s not much humor in it, tonight.

Norman Osborn’s son is dead.

“Clearly,” Tony says, clearing his throat a little and opening the fridge, “you haven’t spent enough time with eccentric, retired superheroes.”

“War criminals,” she corrects, dully, and he nods.

“That, too. Five o’clock sandwiches are kind of a thing for us.”

Michelle doesn’t say yes but she doesn’t say no, and so Tony makes two sandwiches with one arm in a dark kitchen, twenty-two hours after Norman Osborn’s son took his last breath.

When he places it in front of her, Michelle regards it with wary eyes for a moment, but eventually uses one of those shaking hands to lift it to her mouth.

It doesn’t take long, after that.

(She probably hasn’t eaten since he called her.)

“Is it true?” she demands of him, when she's finished. “He really—Peter really—”

Tony places the rest of his sandwich on his plate, appetite gone.

He doesn’t know the kindest thing to do, here. When Tony’s parents had died, he’d been in college, and he’d done everything in his power to ignore the details, to numb the feelings, to push out the thoughts.

He’d learned the truth anyway.

“Yeah,” he says, as gently as he thinks himself capable. “But it wasn’t his fault.”

“Of course it wasn’t,” she snaps. “He would never— Harry—”

Saying his name seems to do something to her, and she raises a hand to her mouth, blocking out a sob.

Tony doesn’t say anything until she’s pretended to collect herself, and then he speaks as evenly as he can.

“It was the ‘cure,’” he tells her, regret laced through every syllable. “They were trying to increase the blood flow to his limbs. In the end it just…” Tony swallows, and because he’s a coward, looks away from her. “It made him thrombocytopenic.”

She goes still. Absolutely still.

Michelle Jones-Watson might be a hot-shot lawyer climbing the west coast ladders, but Tony remembers her back when she was an undergrad at ESU.

“Peter, it’s not going to work.”

“You don’t know that, Em, he’s still—”

“His toes are so white they’re nearly green, Pete. I don’t think they’re going to call off a surgery that’s been planned for two months because you had a hunch.”

Tony knocks on the door of his own lab, and they stop their bickering immediately, turning to him.

“Hey, Tony,” Peter greets.

He strides over like he owns the place, which he does, and it isn’t the first time that Peter’s snuck in to work on a project after the ESU lab had closed for the night but it was the first time he’d brought Michelle with him, and Tony peers over his shoulder at the diagram on his computer.

“That certainly doesn’t look like engineering.”

Peter sighs, reaching over to close the laptop. “Tony—”

“It isn’t,” Michelle interrupts him. “It’s biology.”

“Why would a mechanical engineering major be studying embryonic cell regeneration?”

Peter exhales again, shooting Michelle a glare that Tony had never seen pointed at anyone other than him. “Because I’m not doing engineering anymore. I’m doing bio.”

Tony raises his eyebrows, not bothering to hide his surprise. It’s not like he has any real stock in Peter’s major choice, but he’d always assumed the kid liked engineering. It seemed like he did, anyway.  

“And you, Miss Jones?” he asks, because he’s courteous like that. “Any crises within the chosen major?”

“She’s bio now, too,” Peter mutters, turning back to open his computer. “And we have like, a really important project due next week. So.”

Tony puts his hand in the air as if surrendering. “I wouldn’t want to interrupt your studies. In, you know. My lab.”  

“Thanks,” Peter says, clearly not listening. “Appreciate it.”

Michelle Jones-Watson might have gone to law school, but she’d taken an unconventional way there.

“You mean,” she whispers, now, with wide eyes, “Peter didn’t mean—”

Tony shakes his head, closing his eyes for a moment against the ache. “It shouldn’t have killed him. Pete probably just meant to knock him away from the triggering device. It was only ten feet, maybe, but—”

“But he was basically on blood-thinning steroids,” Michelle finishes, in a numb-sounding way. “He hit his head and he— he just bled out too fast.”

Tony nods, bringing his hand up to rub at his jaw. “It’s also a possible explanation for all the…” he points to his own forehead. “You know. Strange blood flow in the brain.”

Michelle’s face is blank. She stares at her empty plate, unmoving, and Tony kind of wishes that anyone else were here, Ned, maybe, he’d always seemed pretty emotionally intelligent—

“How do you know all this?” she asks, finally. “When you called me I didn’t—but you hadn’t talked to Peter, so how—”

“Hacked the Oscorp cameras. And their medical records. And some of Osborn’s personal files.”

Michelle nods, like she doesn’t approve, but isn’t surprised.

“And I’m… sorry about that, by the way,” Tony says, because he is, even if there was no other way. “It was never my intention to—” he sighs. “To drag you into this, it just—"

“Shut up, man,” she says, in the weary tone no one in their twenties should be capable of, yet. “No offense, but I don’t have the…the fucking energy to think about you right now. Or me. Or…” she lets out a laugh that’s bordering on manic. “Or anything, because what the fuck? What— he was just, I talked to him two weeks ago on the phone, and he was as fine as he can be at this point and he just, what? He took a fucking serum and felt like he had to blow up a building?”

Tony half-rises from his seat, unsure what to do, definitely not feeling like he has the clearance to hug her but not wanting to let her sit there and break into pieces alone—

“May Parker has requested garage access.”  

The voice of FRIDAY rings across the room, and Tony is sure his sigh is audible.

The second May is there, Tony is not. He leaves the crying mess that is one of the strongest people he’s ever met wrapped up in her arms in the kitchen, and he slips quietly out into the living area.

The live feed of Oscorp tower is still pulled up on the holo-table.

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters, because leave it to him to forget the three-foot image that is sure to be an instant trigger in the middle of a home where the grief is beginning to suffocate from every side. He shuts it down, but as he does so, he glances at the south balcony.

There is still dried blood on the cement.

And the thing is, Tony’s never liked Norman Osborn. They’re competitors, sure, but he thinks maybe the real issue is that if he studies Osborn’s face hard enough it starts to look more like a mirror, and perhaps the only difference between them is that Tony makes an effort to clean up the messes he creates, rather than just sweep them under the rug.

He wonders, sometimes, if between the two of them, they’d caused the citizens of New York more pain than protection.

Giant man-lizard downtown? Must’ve been a Tuesday at Oscorp.

Genocidal artificial intelligence system trying to take over the world? Stark’s been messing with shit he doesn’t understand, again.

“Take this down, FRI,” he says, before collapsing into one of the easy chairs.

They both have children, Tony and Norman.

For the past fourteen years, Tony has been watching his grow.

For the past six, Norman has been watching his wither.

Tony buries his face in his hand.

—

“Stark.”

Tony jerks his head up to meet the gaze of May Parker, who is no longer wearing her cardigan. He’s certain that it’s wrapped around one Michelle Jones, because that is the way of a Parker, to give and give and expect nothing back and then to have it all taken, anyway.

They are better than him and all he can do is offer them a moment of breath in this house in the sky, away from the vultures that circle below and J. Jonah Jameson calling for Spider-Man’s head on every screen in the city.

“You made it okay, then?”

May gives him a curt nod, hefting a duffle over her shoulder that reminds Tony they are still in the five a.m. hour and she’s been driving all over the state and maybe he’s out of touch with the world but he knows she must be exhausted.

“You’re up the stairs,” he informs her. “First door on the left.”

She nods her gratitude. “And Peter?”

“Right across the hall.”

Because even if your child is twenty-seven, watching them breathe is a necessity, after a night like this.

—

may.

—

When May Parker was thirty-three years old, she became a mother.

He was unexpected and he was unplanned but he was never unwanted; never unloved. May looked into the eyes of an eight-year-old boy on one of the worst nights of his life and suddenly he was hers, and she broke down in private but knew she would spend the rest of their lives making sure that little boy knew he was loved.

School was already hard for Peter, who’d been small and uncoordinated and a little too smart for his own good, and May and Ben had worried. They’d talked about it, argued about it, even, late into the night, about their boy whose teachers called him a delight but who cried every day before the bus picked him up from the stop closest to their old home in Forest Hills.

“He’ll adjust,” Ben had said, gently but certainly. “It’s only been four months, May. Give him time.”

“He’s lonely,” she had argued. May wasn’t concerned with his grades or the fact that he used his notes the doctor had given him for migraines that were getting better but still hadn’t stopped to get out of gym. She cared that every day he got off the bus without waving goodbye to anyone and that he had to clear his throat before speaking when she asked about his day.

May wanted to put him a new school. One that would engage him a little more; maybe make it a little easier to connect with kids of similar interests.

Ben said they couldn’t afford it. He was right.

And so, every day May picked him up and she prodded about if he’d played with anyone new at recess and the answer was no. It was no and it was no and it was no until one day—

“I did the swings today.”

May tries to keep her excitement contained to the inside. She tightens her hand around Peter’s and forces her voice to stay even, like this was any other day walking home five-and-a-half months after the unthinkable.

“Yeah?” she presses, lightly. “By yourself?”

Peter shakes his head. It knocks his glasses that have always seemed a little too big for his face loose, and they need to get him new ones but replacing things Richard and Mary had bought him always seems to trigger a breakdown, and so they’ve been putting it off.  

“No,” he says. “With Harry.”

May’s heart jumps. “I don’t think I’ve met Harry.”

Peter is quiet. When Ben and May had visited Richard and Mary in the before, Peter’s mouth had often traveled faster than his brain; fast enough that following his stream of consciousness sometimes felt like an extreme sport. It was happening again now, sometimes, when he was particularly excited about a lego set or a new comic book, but usually the words took a little longer than they used to.

She gives him the time. They’re not in a hurry.

“He’s nice,” Peter says, finally. “He’s in Ms. Lambert’s class, but we sit with them at lunch.”

May squeezes his hand to show that she’s listening. That she’s proud of him. “Do you think you guys will do the swings again, sometime?”

Peter nods and looks up at her through those too-big glasses that they need to replace. “Yeah. I think we can be friends because Harry’s sad, too.”

Is it possible, for a heart to simultaneously mend and break?

May pauses at the top of the stairs, now, squeezing her eyes shut.

“May?”

She turns, finding herself face-to-face with Ned Leeds. He looks tired but not as tired as MJ, and he immediately gathers her into a hug, though the bag between them makes it a little bit awkward.

“How’s he doing?” she asks when they break apart, and he gives her a wry smile.

“Still sleeping. How are you doing?”

May smiles, tiredly. “As well as I can be.”

He nods understandingly, and then gestures to the door on his left. “That’s him.”

“Thank you.”

She pauses, once Ned’s footsteps have retreated, before going in. She wouldn’t if he was awake, but he isn’t, and so she can take a moment for herself. To grieve personally, the boy she’d known almost as long as Peter had been hers.

May knows that after Harry Osborn’s mother died, he’d never gotten quite enough love. She’s only met Norman a handful of times, and even that was a sign, given how much time Harry and Peter spent together, that he was loved in word but maybe not always in action.

Norman was the strong, silent type, the type that loved his son but had always left the actual raising of him to his mother, and when she was gone, he seemed to think that his own grief was too large to try and reckon with an eight-year-old’s as well.

And the Parkers weren’t rich— they had a modest home and slightly too-worn clothes and Peter’s comics were always used, but love?

They’d always had that in abundance.

May hugged Harry Osborn every time he came over and she gently encouraged Norman to do the same whenever she saw him, and she thinks he got better at it, toward the end.

Toward the end, when he learned his son, the boy he’d been grooming from the age of six to take on his legacy, was terminally ill, that it was the same thing that had killed his wife, that there was nothing he could do.

May’s grip tightens on the doorknob.

Of course Norman hadn’t accepted there was nothing they could do. She doubts she could’ve, either, if the roles were reversed.

When May Parker was thirty-three, there was a boy who made her boy feel seen. A boy who spent the rest of his life making sure hers didn’t feel alone.

And she prays—god, she prays—that Harry Osborn died knowing he was loved.

—

There are too many mirrors in this house.

For some reason, May latches onto that one specific detail as she sits, watching Peter’s bruised face as his chest rises and falls.

When Ben died, they sat shiva. She hadn’t been sure if it was even something she was supposed to do because May was raised Catholic, for god’s sake, and the “Jewish presence” in their home had bled out on the street five hours ago, but she’d come home from the police station numb with disbelief, gripping the hand of a fifteen-year-old boy that hadn’t spoken a word since he’d deliriously muttered her name in that cold waiting room, and their mirrors were covered.

A friend, probably, had let themselves in and done it, and so for seven days after the funeral she and Peter sat and they mourned and they breathed around it.

May thinks it was helpful, probably, even if that time is a little foggy in her mind. She knows Peter and she knows his habits and how hard it is for him to force himself to sit and process, and looking back on that week with the knowledge she has now, she wonders if the tradition had saved him from making (needlessly) reckless, grief-stricken choices with his shiny new spider powers.

But this house? This mansion in the sky?

There are too many mirrors for it to make sense to cover them. And Harry wasn’t Peter’s spouse; he wasn’t May’s child. According to custom, there’s no reason for them to sit.

May taps her fingers on her knee. Lets her eyes trace the outline of Peter’s face in the sky that is now more light than dark.

Gets to her feet.

—

“I need a sheet.”

If Pepper’s surprised, she hides it well. “I’ll be right back,” she says, and she returns a couple of minutes later with arms full of bedclothes that probably have a thread count higher than May’s bank account balance.

“Thank you.”

Pepper gives her shoulder a comforting squeeze.

—

“May?”

She looks up at him over her laptop, raising her eyebrows. In her fifteen years of knowing him and her six and a half years of raising him, May’s never known Peter Parker to beat around the bush, but his voice sounds hesitant and halted, and, honestly, she’s curious as hell.

“Yes?”

“I think—” he hesitates, again. “I kissed someone.”

Her eyebrows raise higher. Peter’s coming to her, not Ben, which means he’s probably looking for a little advice and a little reassurance, not just jokes and a distraction.  

“You think you kissed someone?”

Peter laughs, a little nervously, running a hand through his hair that he’d finally decided to let grow out past the tips of his ears. “No it— it was definitely a kiss.”

“Okay,” she says, a million fears running through her head about fucking this one up, because there’s a little voice always telling her she’s not meant for this and maybe this is the time she screws him up for good. “How do you feel about it?”

His face scrunches. “About kissing?”  

“About that kiss,” May corrects. 

Peter slumps a little in his seat. “I don’t know.”

That worries her, a little, because Ben likes to tease that his full name should be Peter Parker the People Pleaser. “You weren’t sure you wanted to kiss them?”

He shakes his head. “No, it wasn’t— I did. I was the one who, like,” he huffs out a sigh, falling backwards against the couch. “Initiated,” he says, muffled by the hands covering his face. “Or whatever.”  

“So, you’re worried they didn’t want to kiss you,” she tries.

Again, Peter shakes his head. May can see the tips of his ears turning pink as they stumble through this new territory as parent and child, but this is how they’ve always done it, haven’t they? Hand in hand, walking back from the bus stop with all the time of the world?

“No,” he manages. His ears have graduated past pink and into red, and May forces herself not to laugh as he talks into his hands. “It was— They were—”  

“Into it?” she asks, trying and failing to keep a straight face.

“May,” he groans, dragging out her name and rubbing his eyes underneath his glasses.

“I’m sorry!” she says, raising her hands in surrender. “If you’re going to make me twenty-questions it—”

“It was Harry,” he cuts her off, abruptly, finally uncovering his face. “It was— I kissed Harry. We kissed. When we went to Coney Island on Friday.”

A beat.  

“Woah,” May says, trying to keep her tone conversational. “That’s new.”

“Yeah,” he mutters, and he’s only been fifteen for two weeks but May wonders for a second when he’d gone from being eight years old on the swings to fifteen on the Ferris Wheel. When had they graduated from messy feelings like grief into messy feelings like crushes?

“So, what’s the problem?” she prods, gently. “Sounds like it was something you both wanted.”

“It was.” He pauses. Fifteen is still fifteen, and these feelings are hard to make sense of, and May gives him the time. “It…I think it is. But it’s like, it’s Harry.”

Peter looks up at her, then, as if begging her to understand, begging her to look into his mind, but in all her years of growing together with this boy that is more a young man than a child, she hasn’t quite mastered that one, yet.  

“What if I messed something up?” he asks, with eyes full of something that isn’t quite fear but is definitely close. “I can’t—I can’t lose him, you know?”

May chooses her words very, very carefully. “You and Harry have been friends for a long time, kid.”  

Peter nods, looking relieved that she understands.

“Do you think a kiss can undo the entire before?”

Slowly, he shakes his head. “No. But if we—” he starts to blush again. “If it keeps going—”

“You mean if you date?”

He nods.

“And then break up. You’re not sure you’d make it through?”

“Right.”

May closes her laptop so he knows he has her full attention. “Peter,” she says. “I know it doesn’t feel like it, but you two are young. So, so incredibly young. If you want a crazy old lady’s advice, I don’t think you should be rushing into anything, not dating, not breaking up, not sleeping together—”

Peter jumps. “May!” he hisses, clearly scandalized. “I’m like, ten!”

She snorts. “And don’t you forget it. I’m just saying, this isn’t a decision you need to make right now. Kissing doesn’t mean you’re dating. You’re Harry and Peter, right?”

He nods.

“You’ve got time, kid. You can let it breathe.”

—

She can hear him stirring minutes before he actually opens his eyes.

May knows as well as Peter does the specific feeling of waking up to a heart that is missing a piece, and she gives him a moment before rustling around to make it obvious she’s there, even if they both know that with his super-hearing, he’d registered her sitting by his bedside the moment he’d slipped into consciousness.

“Hi there,” she whispers, helping him sit up once he’s finally opened his eyes. The marks on his face look a few-days healed, even though she assumes they’re from last night, and he only grunts softly as he scoots back to rest his head against his headboard.

“May,” he whispers, brokenly. It takes her back to a police station and fifteen-year-old hands covered in blood, because new wounds can reopen old wounds, but she pushes past it in favor of getting him a cup of water.

“Did you hear?” he asks, staring at the glass with empty eyes. “Did you hear what I—”

“I heard about how Spider-Man saved hundreds of Oscorp employees from certain death,” May says, firmly. “I heard about a man who did everything in his power to make things right.” 

Peter looks up at her. He’s been sleeping for hours but there are still shadows under his eyes, and he’s wearing a t-shirt that she’s fairly certain belongs to Michelle, and she wonders when they will be allowed to exit this relentless carousel called loss.

May knows the answer is never. It is never because every person stays with them, every wave of sorrow hits just as intensely if less often, every smile they will never see again is added to the tally of angels that sit on their shoulders.

“I didn’t mean to,” Peter says to the water. “I don’t know how it—there was so much blood, May. It was more than it—” he closes his eyes, and her heart aches as she watches a tear trace his cheek and catch in the slight stubble growing there. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Of course you didn’t,” she whispers. “He knows that you didn’t.”

“I told him I was sorry,” he says, still with his eyes closed. May is not privy to the memory that plays across the back of his eyelids, and a part of her hopes she never will be. “I told him—I tried to tell him—”

“I know,” she says. She tugs his arm to pull him out of bed and he follows woodenly, only for her to lower them both to the floor.

There are too many mirrors in this home that towers over New York City, but in this room there is only one, and Peter must catch sight of the sheet covering it because he gives a watery snort that turns into a sob. He lets her situate them so that his head rests on her shoulder and their hands are clasped where they sit, leaning against the bed.

Like they did when he was eight.

When they had all the time in the world.

—

peter.

—

They met on the swings.

That’s what Harry always told people, anyway, even though they’d been orbiting each other for months at that point, because kids and teachers alike seemed to think the two lonely orphans would get along swimmingly, and neither of them wanted to prove them all right.

“I’m Harry.”

Peter squints. “Yeah. I know.”

“My mom died right after Christmas.”

Peter nods, kicking his toe across the woodchips so his swing will sway. He knows that, too. Adults seemed to think that just because he didn’t talk all that much it meant that he wasn’t listening, either, but he knew about Harry Osborn’s scary dad and dead mom.

Everybody knew.

Harry has a blue coat and what look like brand-new sneakers. They look kind of like the sneakers Peter’s dad had for when he mowed the lawn.

Today it’s a feel-good memory, but tomorrow it might be a feel-sad one.

“I like your shoes,” he blurts out.

Harry smiles. “Thanks.” He walks the swing back as far as he can before lifting his feet. “My dad said I could choose the color, so they’re red because my mom liked red.”  

Peter’s throat feels tight. He’s not sure if it’s in a feel-good way or a feel-bad way, yet, but he kicks off the ground a little harder so that he can match the arc of Harry’s swing.

“My dad liked red, too,” he says.

—

“I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to be asleep.”

Peter shuts his eyes in exasperation. “I wish people would stop saying that.”

“Because you don’t like hearing correct things from people who care about you?”

Tony’s voice is deceptively innocent, but Peter’s known him a little too long and been manipulated a few too many times to not hear the undertones.

The undertones that scream May’s and Ned’s names.

“Because waking up is the worst part,” he mutters, turning back to the hairdryer of Morgan’s he’s been messing with for the last hour.

Waking up is remembering all over again that he is gone, that Harry swung up and out of sight and is never coming back down, that Peter is alone.

Again.

Tony walks around the bench, gently reaching forward to take the hairdryer using his flesh-and-blood arm. He regards it with raised eyebrows. “You did a number on this.”

Peter sighs, collapsing down onto the stool behind him. “I’m sure you can afford to get her a new one.”

The hairdryer is a mess of exposed batteries and broken plastic, and the original plan had been to find the short and fix it, but somewhere along the way Peter’s stupid, broken brain had gotten confused and decided the best thing to do would be to start the whole thing from scratch.

To go back to the beginning.

Two boys on the swings.

Gently, Tony places the hair dryer on the work bench and leans forward, forcing Peter to meet his gaze. “Look, Pete, I’m going to level with you. They’ve recruited me. Me. To try and get you up into that bed. If this doesn’t work, I’m not sure what other options they have, and I’m terrified to find out.”

Peter doesn’t smile, doesn’t riff back. “I’m an adult. I’m twenty-fucking-seven. I’ll sleep if you’ll let me go home, but you all insist on this fucking house-arrest—"

“Because it’s been two days,” Tony argues, “And the vultures want you—”

“They can have me. I’ll give them something to write about.”

Tony shakes his head. “I don’t mean Spider-Man.”

Peter stills. “What?”

“They want Peter Parker,” Tony says, in a voice that doesn’t match their general playful banter. “Harry was a big name, even if he tried to act like he wasn’t. They want to hear what his closest pal has to say.”

“Fuck them,” Peter says, bitterly. “Fuck them all, they never gave a damn about him when he was sick and they don’t give a shit now. He’s a story to them. A fucking—an entertainment column.”

He wishes Tony would disagree with him just to give him someone to fight, but he just nods. “Like I said. Vultures.”

Tony pulls the hair dryer towards himself and begins to undo the damage that Peter’s wrought, even though the thing was probably thirty dollars and it would be ten times easier to just buy a new one.

Peter watches him, hands him the screwdriver he’d been using as more of a chisel to pry out the battery. The feelings are a little easier to sit with when he has something else to focus on.

“Now you snap the back on,” Tony says, twenty-some minutes later when he’s repaired everything but the handle, which he’d deemed “unsalvageable.”

Peter clicks the little plastic piece that had somehow evaded his warpath back onto the battery cover of the hairdryer.

“Good as new.”

Peter snorts, because the thing is still missing a handle and Morgan Stark would kill him for this if he didn’t have the "dead best friend" pass, but he’ll admit that there’s something therapeutic in the image of it, of this broken thing made not whole, but functional.

The metaphor is a little too heavy-handed, a little too soon for him to be willing to hear it, because in his mind there echoes a memory of two little boys on the swings, and right now Peter is still in pieces on the work bench.

“I think it’s bedtime,” Tony says, patting him on the shoulder. “Even for twenty-fucking-seven-year-olds.”

—

He used to get migraines.

May and Ben took him to the doctor, but all she’d been able to do was tell them that it was common for kids who were going through a hard time.

She didn’t say grieving, but Peter understood anyway, even at age eight.

She meant kids who cried.

Kids who cried at night when they woke up from strange, colorful nightmares or cried in the morning because Dad used to drive them to school and now they had to take the stupid bus, or sometimes cried for no explainable reason at all in the middle of the afternoon.

Peter would cry and it would make his head hurt and that would make him cry more, but eventually it got a little better. Once he got used to May holding his hand as they walked to the bus stop and Ben taking him out to buy some new glasses that didn’t fall of his face quite so often and Harry at recess on the swings, it got a lot better.

And you’d think that a radioactive spider would solve the reoccurring headache issue, but then Peter’s world came crashing down again and along with the tears came the familiar feeling of a knife through the top of his skull.  

“Do you need anything else?”

Peter didn’t bother to open his eyes. He knew that Harry wasn’t going anywhere.  

“I don’t think so,” he mutters, because he already feels ten times better with the light off and, though he’s not going to say it out loud, the subtle smell of Harry’s stupid, expensive hair gel in his nose.

“You really don’t have any medicine, or anything?”

Peter did, actually, but with how he’d been burning through ibuprofen ever since “the thing,” he doubted it was going to help.

“I’m poor, Har, remember?” he tries to joke. “We’re a single-income household, now.”

Harry doesn’t laugh, and Peter forces his eyes open a fraction of an inch to find that he’s not just not laughing, he looks upset.

“Seriously?” Harry asks, forgetting to whisper. “Pete, I’ll buy it for you, that’s not—”

Peter laughs. It’s nice to realize that he still knows how. “No, man, I was joking. I have some, somewhere, but I haven’t used it since I was like, ten. It’s definitely expired.”

“Might still work,” Harry suggests, once again dropping his voice. “I bet it’s a scam from pharmaceutical companies. So you have to buy more.”

He crosses the room and plops himself down on the bed, nudging Peter over with his hip.  

Peter obliges, holding the covers open in an invite that isn’t quite as innocent as it once was, back before Coney Island and pink cheeks and the few moments they’d acknowledged it, since.  

“That’s what they’re training the gremlins at Oscorp Medical in these days, huh?” Peter asks. “Pharmaceutical fraud?”

“Probably,” Harry mutters, dropping the comforter over his legs. “That or like, testing chemicals on bunny rabbits, or something.”

Peter closes his eyes, focusing on the sound and the smell of Harry to try and calm his head. With his new crazy super-hearing, he can make out his heartbeat.

He freezes at the feeling of Harry’s hand on his back, where he begins to trace small patterns. Stars, Peter thinks.

“It’s going to be different when I’m running it,” Harry whispers, all fifteen-year-old certainty and in a clear attempt to keep Peter’s mind from wandering to gunshots outside of a bodega and blood on his hands. Harry didn’t like to talk about Norman’s plans for his future when it was the two of them hanging out.  

Stuff like that didn’t get to touch them, here.

“We’re not going to do any more super-animals or like, energy races with Stark Industries.”

“So what are you going to do, then?” Peter mumbles, letting his eyes fall closed.

“Healing,” Harry says, simply. “Bioengineering plants and disease research. Stuff like my mom always wanted us to focus on.”

Harry traces a pattern on his back that Peter recognizes as the Oscorp logo. He wonders if it was even intentional.

“That sounds cool,” he says, earnestly. “Maybe I can work for you.”

“You’ll have to get a Ph.D. since you don’t have nepotism on your side,” Harry teases. “But then you can like, be my partner. We’ll have adjoining offices.”

Peter snorts into his pillow. That was two laughs that belonged to Harry Osborn during this week where he’d been pretty sure he’d never laugh again.

“I guess I should probably start doing some of that homework Ned dropped off, then.”  

Peter feels rather than sees Harry shake his head. “Mandatory time off. Your future boss says so.”

“I thought you said we were future partners.”

“You still gotta start in the mailroom, Parker.”

—

Peter’s never been to a funeral like this before.

He’s been to a lot of funerals but they were always Jewish and always relatively small, there were never paparazzi at the door of the church or bodyguards surrounding the deceased’s father where he sat in the second-from-front pew.

“What a zoo,” MJ mutters, from where she sits on his right.

Peter nods, agreeing but not even really processing what she’s saying. His gaze is on Norman, a man he’d been afraid of for so long and always hated a little and wasn’t sure about now. Peter blamed Norman for Harry’s poor self-esteem, Norman blamed Peter for Harry’s rebellious streak in high school because he refused to accept the fact that his son had his own life and his own personality.

They both loved him fiercely.

Peter doesn’t blame Norman for the “cure,” even if he wishes he could. He’d tried, too, for years, until Harry had begged him to stop.

“Healing. Stuff like my mom always wanted us to focus on.”

It becomes painfully clear painfully quickly that this funeral is not for them. It is gaudy and stuffy and it’s so, so ridiculously un-Harry that Peter wants to laugh. When the Chief Financial Officer of Oscorp Industries gets up to say a few words, he actually does.

He is silenced by May squeezing his hand, trying to ground him in the moment, but it is too late.

Peter is back on the swings.

He is drifting off to sleep while someone traces stars on his back.

—

“—after Ben. But with his parents, it happened a couple of times.”

Peter blinks, heart jumping into his throat as he takes in his surroundings. Not tied up, a little groggy, maybe drugged—

“Peter?”

That voice belongs to May, and for the hundredth time in the past week, his world comes crashing down.

The waking up has always been the hardest part for Peter. That moment when you’re still sorting through the nightmares conjured up by your own head and the ones that are your reality, when the world is a little bit fuzzy and then all of the sudden painfully, crystal clear.

“I’m here,” he mutters, lifting his head that feels heavier than it should once again into a world that no longer contains Harry Osborn. “What happened?”

There are three sets of eyes staring back at him.

May. MJ. Ned.

“Some light depersonalization,” May says, keeping her voice airy. “Probably.”

“More like full-on dissociation,” MJ mutters into the ground. She isn’t looking at him. “If you can’t remember.”

Peter can’t. He was at the funeral and then he was above it, and then he was nothing.

He scrubs a hand down his face. “Shit.”

“We left before the interment,” Ned informs him. “The whole thing was…”

“Fuel for a fucking celebrity blind-item,” MJ snaps, standing up like she can’t bear to spend another second holding still. “The most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen.”

Peter snorts.

Harry hadn’t minded the press much, when they were younger. They were always kind of there, a permanent fixture in his childhood, even, that made them more annoying than perceived as an actual threat.

Harry hadn’t minded the press, much.

Until they got older.

“This is stupid.”

“It’s not stupid, Pete. It’s smart.”

“My toes are freezing.”

“Well, the alternative is our picture plastered across the fourth page of People, so, you’ll have to decide what’s more important, your little piggies or—”

“Or what, Osborn?”  

Harry glares at him. Peter grins.

“So my two options are a, go into the heated movie theater and actually watch the movie I bought a ticket to see, or b, kiss the heir to the Osborn Corporation behind the dumpster, in the cold.”

To Peter’s surprise, Harry swallows, takes a step back. “Right. Sorry, I didn’t mean—”

Oh, fuck this. Fuck the fact that every time they see each other they have to start all over, that every three months, when Harry finally convinces Norman to let him visit Queens, Peter spends the entire time trying to prove to him that some people actually do want the real version of him around.

He reaches forward, gently tugging Harry back to him by the sleeve of his coat.  

“It’s, like, not even a fair fight, man,” Peter says, placing his hands on Harry’s waistline in a way that’s bordering on the concept of “bolder” they’ve been inching towards for months. “Unless they were showing, like, the extended cut of The Fellowship of the Ring, or something. Then maybe you’d have competition.”

“You’re such a nerd, Pete.”  

Peter doesn’t feel cold for much longer.

—

They never quite figured it out, Peter and Harry.

They saw each other three or four times a year all through high school, if they were lucky, and they kissed and they did more than kiss and when Harry came to Peter’s graduation they went all the way on that tiny bottom bunkbed they’d shared so many times before, and they were both going to ESU that fall and maybe it was finally going to line up—

And then the world turned to dust.

And maybe they came back wrong, because suddenly the risk of losing each other seemed real, and that reality simply wasn’t an option.

And so, they put a pause on it. A pause on the idea of them, the idea that they needed to be anything more to each other than what they had always been.

Two little boys on the swings.

They dated other people. Peter had some hook-ups, Harry had MJ, and whatever their “break-up” was didn’t undo the entire before. They were still Peter and Harry.

Then Harry got sick.

It’s just Peter, now.

—

He resumes Spider-Manning immediately.

Dr. Solace calls it a coping mechanism and Ned calls it self-flagellation, but it’s what he’d done after Ben and it had worked then— the feeling of the wind through his mask had kept him grounded, kept him present in moments that he desperately wanted to slip out of.

The doc tells him to call his friends and family. To sleep.

All Peter wants to do is talk to a dead man.

He settles for beating up a creep who’d been following a girl in red sneakers, instead.

—

“How have you been sleeping?”

“Better.”

They’ve been doing this long enough that she knows he’s lying and Peter knows that she knows, but he keeps coming every week because it gets May off of his back and makes Ned feel like he’s accomplished something by convincing him to sit on her couch.

Dr. Solace cocks her head at him. “The other guy’s been active, lately.”

Peter shrugs. “I don’t have to go back to work for another week.”

“So, you’re cutting Spider-Man’s hours after Monday?”

He shrugs again. “Probably.”

Dr. Solace regards him over her bifocals. She reminds him a little of May, and he thinks that might be the reason he’s still willing to come back to her, over and over again, every time the Parker Luck strikes.

“I hear that Spider-Man might need to fire his PR team.”

Peter sighs, leaning back in his chair. She knows him too well and he’s a coward, so he pretends that he doesn’t understand the real question. “Pepper did the best she could.”

He doesn’t say that it’s a relief to hear it. The jeers, the headlines that scream he’s a monster, that if it wasn’t for him, Harry Osborn would still be alive.

As long as they say it, he can keep believing it. It’s not just in his head, if they’re all screaming it, too.

“Spider-Man could tell them all what really happened,” Dr. Solace says, gently.

Peter knows she’s not really suggesting it— she knows there’s no world in which Peter lets Harry take the blame for what happened on the roof of Oscorp that night. She’s just reminding him, gently, that maybe he was leaning too far into a narrative that wasn’t necessarily false, but definitely wasn’t quite true.

“I’ll try to sleep,” Peter promises her.

He’d rather talk about that.

—

“It’s not a major surgery, Pete.”

Peter rubs his eyes, glancing over where Harry stands, leaning heavier on his cane than he normally did.

“It’s amputation, Harry,” he says, a little too harshly because how does Harry not get it? How is he fine with it, with the idea of removing three of his fucking toes, when every option hasn’t yet been exhausted? 

“Peter.”

He turns to accept MJ’s reprimand, because she’s better at these types of things than him, and maybe reminding Harry that he’s going under the knife in a little under sixteen hours isn’t the best way to take his mind off of things, like they’d planned.

“Sorry,” he mutters, scrubbing a hand down his face. “I’m just—sorry, Har.”

Harry flashes them a wry grin. “It’s all good. I would say let’s get a drink, but tomorrow they need me all dried out. So, let’s just get out of here.”

“Sounds good,” Peter agrees. “Let me grab my coat.”

He takes a moment in the other room, breathing around the fact that maybe they don’t have all the time in the world.

That maybe this was real. That maybe one day, this stupid universe was going to take Harry from him, too.

—

Peter waits almost five and a half months before visiting the grave.

Going back to work helps a little, more than he’d expected it to, except that he has to quit the team researching genetic degenerative diseases like Harry’s because every time he reads the words “blood flow” he has to fight himself to stay grounded within his own body.

He works on the plants, instead.

Feeding the world.

It hadn’t been Harry’s main goal, but it’d been on the bucket list. Peter tells Dr. Solace that he thinks he would’ve approved, and she agrees.

“Hey, man,” he mutters to a marker that will soon become a gravestone. It will be larger and more ornate than Harry would’ve wanted, but situated in the correct place, right next to his mother.

Peter takes a moment to look around. You’re never alone in Lower Manhattan, not even in a cemetery, and there are others scattered throughout the grassy field that’s just begun to turn green again.

They talk in whispers to friends and family that haven’t heard them in years, and Peter finds comfort in the knowledge that he isn’t the only one who wishes for the chance to say what he never got around to, during the before. 

“We dedicated a room at FEAST to you,” Peter tells the not-yet-settled grave. “May asked your dad if it was okay. He never emailed back, so she just did it anyway. We felt like doing it behind his back was probably, like, the most genuine way we could have done something in your honor.”

The grass Peter’s sitting on is a little bit wet, and it begins to seep through his jeans. He doesn’t move.

They’ve got all the time in the world.

Peter watches a young girl chase her sister around a few of the headstones in the distance, pondering about little boys on swings and kisses behind dumpsters and frantic apologies whispered into bloody hairlines.

“I’m a little pissed at you,” he says, turning back to the marker that isn’t yet a gravestone. His throat feels tight and he is angry, angry that these words can only exist here falling on dead ears, but mostly he’s so fucking sad.

Stars traced on his back, tugging him closer by the coat behind the dumpster.

A warm summer night in Coney Island.

“What if I messed something up? I can’t—I can’t lose him, you know?”

“You’ve got time, kid. You can let it breathe.”

Peter sniffs, raising his head up to look at the sky as if maybe gravity can force the tears back down into his eyes.

“I’ve just been so mad at myself, you know?” he asks the dead man below him. “And I still am, I don’t— I don’t think it’s going to go away, ever. But what the hell, Har? Why didn’t you tell me it had gotten that bad? You didn’t think I deserved to know that it was almost over? You didn’t think I wanted to be with you when—” he pauses, swallowing the emotion back.

“Jesus,” he mutters. “I miss you, man. And right now, thinking about you makes me feel like I need to shoot myself in the head.”

They’re not feel-good memories, yet. Peter thinks they will be, one day, because he’s been here before, but not yet. It’s taking a little longer, this time, than it had with Ben.

Maybe because not stopping the gunman isn’t quite the same as pulling the trigger yourself.

The idea of closure is fake. Peter knows that, he’s known it ever since fifteen and gunshots and brand-new spider powers that made tracking the guy down easier than it should’ve been, but a part of him had hoped that maybe sitting here and facing him would make waking up in the morning a little bit easier.

He’s annoyed and not surprised that if anything, his head just feels a little heavier.

And then he hears her heartbeat.

Peter doesn’t turn, just waits as she makes her way over to him through the grass. He can hear her heels sinking slightly into the soft earth and the smell of her perfume invades his senses, and his shoulders begin to relax against his will.

“Hey there, Tiger,” she greets.

Peter smiles. “Em.”

She sits gracefully, and she’s smarter than him, so she has a blanket to perch on so the mud doesn’t ruin her slacks, and for a moment they just sit there in silence.

“I didn’t know you were coming here yet,” she says, finally, after the two little girls in the distance have gotten tired of running around and have returned to their mother.

Peter just nods. “First time. I didn’t know you were in town.”

He turns to look at her, and she holds his gaze for a second before looking away. “I’m not, technically. Work trip.”

Peter’s heart falls a little. “Oh.”

“Yeah. Thought I’d stop by and, you know. Say hello.”

He nods. “Right.”

“Real life just doesn’t feel real anymore, you know?” she says, gaze fixed on the marker that will soon be a headstone. “Like, I’m at work but I’m just pretending. I talk to clients and it’s all playing dress-up.”

“May likes to call that living in the after,” Peter says, a bit dully. “And then the after starts to feel real, and that makes you feel guilty, too.”

“Cheery,” MJ deadpans, adjusting the tie on her coat.

Peter snorts. “Sorry.”

MJ reaches over and covers his hand with hers. She’s on a blanket and he’s in the mud, but she doesn’t seem to mind the possibility of dirt on her blazer. “It’s alright.”

More sitting. More remembering. It’s easier with her hand on his.

“I’m thinking about moving back,” she says, after a few more minutes.

Peter whips his head over faster than he’d intended. “What?”

She smirks at him. “I just…I’m at a good place, now, with work, but I think—” she sighs, turning to take in the cemetery as a whole. “I think maybe I’m ready to come home. My nephews are here, and Ned, and—”

“Anyone else?” Peter teases. “An old college flame, maybe?”

She rolls her eyes and he laughs. It’s nice to realize he still knows how.

“Maybe,” MJ settles on, still not removing her hand from over his. “He’s gotta stop getting the shit kicked out of him on purpose as a punishment for something he didn’t do, first.”

That sobers Peter up, quickly.

The Spider-Man hate had begun to die down, just like Pepper had told him it would. Some news anchors and podcasters think it was a freak accident, many still believe he was some sort of hired assassin. The craziest explanation Peter’s heard so far was a guy at work who, not realizing Peter was behind him, theorized that Harry had hired Spider-Man on his deathbed to put him out of his misery.

Peter threw up in the bathroom, after that.

“I’m working on it.”

He is. Last week, he told Dr. Solace he still wasn’t sleeping well. She’d known for months.

It still felt like a victory.

It is the best Peter can promise her, right now, and MJ seems to accept that, drifting once again into silence.

—

“That’s Harry? Like, your Harry, Harry?”

Peter glances at her, confused. “Yes?”

MJ looks like she’d rather be anywhere else. “Shit.”  

Harry catches sight of them and waves at Peter from across the crowded dining hall, only for his face to twist in confusion when he notices Michelle. Peter grabs her arm and tugs her behind the line for drinks.

“What does ‘shit’ mean?” he demands. “What’s going on?”

MJ drags a hand down her face, peeking at him through her fingers. “I hooked up with that guy.”

Peter blanches. “You hooked up with Harry?” he whisper-hisses. “My Harry?”

“I didn’t know he was yours!” she fires back. “We all went and got food after rehearsal and it just—it’s not like he’s wearing a collar with your name on it, or something!”

“Jesus Christ,” Peter mumbles, glancing over his shoulder back to where Harry is waiting for them.  

“I’m so sorry,” MJ says, looking truly apologetic. “I didn’t realize—”

Peter snorts. “Em, I don’t care that you slept with him.”

She pauses. “You don’t?”  

“No, I— good on you, you can’t do much better, either of you, but I kind of wanted us to be able to all be friends, and now—"

“Wait.” MJ stops him, raising her hands. “I thought you two had like, you know…” she motions around, vaguely.

“We did,” Peter shrugs.

MJ raises her eyebrows. “And you’re not…” she waves her hand again.

Peter’s eyebrows scrunch in confusion. “We’re not what?”

She snorts, letting her hand fall to the side. “You know what?” she asks, patting his chest, “I actually don’t think this is going to be a problem at all. Let’s go find Harry.”

MJ leaves him to trail after her, confused as hell.

—

A piece of his heart is missing.

That’s what it comes down to, Peter thinks.

He goes to work and he goes out as Spider-Man and he lets Morgan interview him about his work with genetically modified corn for her school project, and slowly, he gets used to living in the after.

New things are hard. They were with his parents and they were with Ben and he thinks they probably will be after whatever next devastating loss the universe decides to slap him with, but Peter ends up moving apartments so that he can no longer see Oscorp Tower in the distance. He lets May and Ned help him carry his new stuff in, because he knows they’ll let him cry over stupid shit like the fact that Harry’s never going to see this couch in this living room.

When Dr. Solace asks if he is sleeping better the answer is yes, but it’s not because the hole in his heart is smaller, it’s because he’s getting used to the shape of it.

Peter thinks, sometimes, that he handed a piece of himself to Harry Osborn that day on the swings, that the piece has always been missing but now it is gone, and sometimes he shuts his blinds and he lays in his bed and he tries and fails to breathe around it.

A kiss on Coney Island and stars on his back.

Heavy breaths behind a dumpster and Skyrim with Ned.

A bomb on the roof of Oscorp Tower.

Blood on his suit.

“I love you.”

At least he told him.

At least Peter told him, before he was gone.

He cries himself to sleep and is on time to work the next morning.

—

“Can I see it?”

Peter nods, swallowing, and tugs his t-shirt over his head.

MJ inhales sharply, and Peter cranes his neck to try and see the tattoo, scared that it’s already gone; that his super-freaky healing had rejected the ink.

He can’t see it, though.

It’s intentional. Stars on his back that are there even if he can’t see them, even if it will be three months before Norman lets him come back and visit again.

MJ reverently reaches her hand out, tracing over the largest one, right between his shoulder blades. “It’s not fair that you get to skip the hard part.”

“I mean, they did still stab me with a needle. Hundreds of times.”

MJ waves him off. “You know what I mean.”

Peter pulls his shirt back over his head. “Yeah. I was worried they were going to realize something was up when it started healing right in front of them, but the guy was pretty fast.”

MJ leans back against the couch in his not-quite-so-new apartment, placing her feet in his lap. “Can I ask why stars?”

She’s back, now, for good, it seems. Having her so near makes him try harder, makes him push himself with Dr. Solace and hold himself back when he’s out as Spider-Man.

They don’t have all the time in the world, and Peter doesn’t want to wait a second longer than he has to.

He thinks about her question. It’s not a feel-good memory or a feel-bad memory, but something else. Something that hovers right on the line between pain and fondness.

“Sure,” he tells her, softly.

Something as simple as death doesn’t undo the entire before.

—

"You haven't had an easy life...neither have I...and god knows, neither has Peter.

But the one thing that holds any of us together—keeps us going— is our love for each other.

He misses you. Misses everything you once were to each other.

And he'd give anything to have you back."

- Mary Jane Watson, The Spectacular Spiderman #200, (DeMatteis/Buscema)