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Oh, Ms. Believer, my pretty sleeper
Your twisted mind is like snow on the road
Your shaking shoulders prove that it's colder
Inside your head than the winter of dead
I will tell you I love you
But the muffs on your ears will cater your fears
Please, take my hand, we're in foreign land
As we travel through snow
Together we go
-twenty one pilots, Oh Ms Believer
May didn't set out meaning to date the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. As a matter of fact, if you had told her a few months ago that that was where her future was headed, she likely would have run screaming. Who in their right mind would ever invite that sort of chaos and scrutiny into the lives of you and your nephew?
But May hadn’t had that as a possible option. She’s a widow who just cracked fifty with a demanding job and a teenager in the apartment. That’s not exactly prime cradle-snatching material, as CEOS tend to aim for. She is long past Leonardo-Dicaprio’s age limits.
And she has always liked that. She never aimed to date someone for wealth or power. What she had with Ben was something that she didn’t anticipate repeating, and she didn’t need to. She had a life that she loved, with a nephew who could be a bit of a teenager at times, but who by and large is one of those kids that is kind of all that she could ask for: curious and intelligent, well-mannered, eager to learn and sure, a bit enthusiastic at times, but who wouldn't want that in their life?
(He had a teacher in sixth grade who told her and Ben that he would be too much of a handful to deal with, and May had laughed right in the man’s face. Yes, Peter is brilliant beyond anything she could ever work towards, the sort of prodigy that would have had colleges swarming their doorsteps by now if he had ended up anywhere but Midtown, where their scholarship program has allowed him to maintain at least a little sense of normalcy, and he’s got some sort of undiagnosed ADHD, she’s sure, because it’s hard to get a diagnosis that won’t automatically trip up the educational requirements for special education, but at the end of the day, he’s her kid. He’s her kid, and he’s easy to love, because he’s hers. Because she made the choice to stand by him, to love him, and she does it every day without regret.)
But then came along Pepper Potts.
God, and then came along Pepper Potts, and the flash of copper hair in the corner of May’s eyes, Titian-red glory, and the splash of coffee soaking her scrubs.
May had thankfully been on the way out of a shift rather than into one, or she thinks that she might have lost her mind just a bit.
Instead, she’d stood there for just a moment, staring down at her cup, calculating whether or not she wanted to deal with the cost of buying a new coffee before she sat with cold coffee on her chest to ride the subway home.
And then Pepper Potts was grabbing for napkins and towels and offering them up to May, pure apology in her voice as she said, “Let me help you with that. It's my fault, Jesus—can I pay for new scrubs for you?"
And May blames the fact that she was walking off of a ten-hour shift for the fact that her mouth moved without permission to say: “Trust me, I'm all fine, don't worry—I don’t need a pretty woman to replace my scrubs."
And then Pepper Potts had smiled, her eyes crinkling with laughter lines that May never would have expected one of the most famous women in New York City to have failed to botox away. “Then how about at least allowing me to pay to replace your coffee? And maybe we can talk a bit about what such a gorgeous woman might be doing in a cafe?"
May's breath catches in her throat, at the warmth in Pepper's smile, in the way that her own chest responds like a star has gone supernova directly in front of her.
---
Dating Pepper Potts is an exercise in getting used to an entire world of dating that May Parker never would have thought to even imagine before.
Their first date is kind of a disaster, because Pepper immediately takes May to a fancy Michelin-starred restaurant that Pepper doesn’t even blink at the prices of, and May doesn’t know what to do with this. She never learned where your forks should go or what the dress code is at a place this fancy.
Sure, she wears her nicest blouse and slacks, and Pepper looks at May like she’s a supermodel instead of a single aunt trying her best to clean up after a week of hard shifts, but she still feels incredibly out of place. She’s more familiar with pizza and pad thai and takeout and larb than she is with Michelin stars.
It’s not that May doesn’t appreciate good food, of course; it’s just that she prioritizes comfort when she’s off work. She likes sweats and leather jackets and comfortable blouses over getting dressed up for the sake of appearances and elegance.
But god, if Pepper doesn’t look stunning, all copper finger waves and dark blue dress and striking heels and the like. It's enough to make a girl swoon.
Just looking at Pepper, talking about work, exchanging life stories—the conversation is easy even if the restaurant is so far from May’s comfort zone as to be somewhat absurd.
And it's a bit of a surprise, that. The last time that May was seriously dating someone was three decades ago. She and Ben were together for over twenty years, and they were friends for years before that point. Sure, she’s gone on a date or two since Ben died, but they’ve always crashed and burned in spectacular fashion.
For a moment, as the appetizers come out and the bites are fancier than anything that May’s had since her goddamn wedding, May is sure that this date is going to go the same.
But Pepper, to her shock, recognizes her discomfort, and offers, "You want to get out of this place?" with a sparkle in her eye, and May can't help but grin in response.
So they ditch the restaurant after their appetizer—Pepper makes sure that the tab is covered, of course, she's not an asshole—and they end up on a walk around Queens, a brisk wind playing with their hair, and May never would have thought that the woman that she has seen looking perfectly poised on the cover of magazines next to cash registers at the grocery store would be giggling and at ease in the wind sweeping her hair—though it is clear that Pepper is shivering a bit thanks to leaving her coat with the check, so May is chivalrous and offers up her own. She has a long-sleeved blouse on underneath, after all, and she's not one to leave a lady hanging.
They end up eating street food on the steps of May’s apartment, May’s leather jacket draped around Pepper Potts’ shoulders, and for a moment in time, she feels nineteen again, the same age she met Ben, giggling and a bit tipsy and eating her weight in pizza and gyros and the like.
She never in a million years would have guessed that Pepper Potts would be down for something like this, but—
“Before I was dating Tony,” Pepper says, and there is something wistful in her voice, “When I was going to school, I would work late nights and all the restaurants would be shut down by the time I got out of my shifts. So—street food it was. I made Tony try it, too, once we started dating.”
There is something about that that speaks to May. That grit. That desire to prove yourself, no matter what. To be more than what you were given.
May’s been like that since she was young, taking on a part-time job the moment she was legally able to (and maybe before that) to help support her grandmother, who’d raised her after her parents had died, and she’d worked her way through college back in the day, pulling all-nighters and surviving off of ramen and street food and dreams.
(Some things never change, it seems.)
“And nowadays, now that our relationship is over, now that we’re both trying new things,” Pepper says, and there is something that aches in her voice, something that May understands far too well, the ache over a relationship that ended up crashing, the ghosts of things that once were that you once loved more than even yourself. “It’s nice to remember what it was like to taste the future.”
God, if that doesn’t make something in May’s chest crack open.
She’s been doing her best to make things work with Peter after Ben’s death. To have a chance at keeping things as steady as possible—no kid deserves to go through that level of loss so young.
And May never would have predicted that Pepper Potts might understand her, and yet, it seems as if they might have more in common than she'd first thought.
So May does something that she hasn't done in ages. She follows her aches and her instincts and tosses her inhibitions to the side. She cups Pepper Potts’ cheek in her hand and leans in and presses their mouths together. Pepper kisses back, chasing May's mouth, and it turns out that Pepper Potts tastes of alcapurrias and laughter and second chances.
For the first time in a very long time, May doesn’t end a date with the knowledge that this couldn’t work, that there is too much separating her out from men who can’t understand what it’s like to be her, to be a widow, to feel half a ghost at times.
There are so many ways that this could go wrong, May knows. There are so many ways that she could find herself staring down the barrel of a gun, the remnants of her heart shattered on the cobblestones.
But god, if she doesn’t want to try. If she doesn’t want to see if she and Pepper could actually work.
---
It’s hard, sometimes, fitting in dates around her shifts and Peter’s school engagements and Pepper’s meetings and the like, but they make it work.
During her shifts, she finds herself planning for the evenings, thinking about Pepper on the other side of New York City, going about her job, attending meetings with clients that May couldn't begin to dream of, but Pepper texts her throughout the day, sends her photos when she leaves town, tells May that she misses her even when it's just been a few days since they last saw each other, and it's hard not to be swept up in all of it.
Because god, May hasn’t felt about someone like this since Ben. Hasn't felt like the branches of spring flowers are reaching out, the flowers asking if they can finally bloom after the winter of grief that has settled over her.
---
It's not hard to notice that Pepper brings up Tony Stark every so often. Even though they're broken up, it's hard not to mention him, considering the fact that they work together, and it's not like anyone else in May's life is casually mentioning spending time with a billionaire.
But it's not like May doesn't get that Pepper has priorities outside of their relationship, and Pepper, in turn, understands why May kept Ben’s last name. She understands that Peter is May’s number one priority. May expresses that on Date Three—though considering how much May gushed about Peter and his Academic Decathalon victories at that first encounter at the coffee shop, she thinks that Pepper understood it from the first.
And after they’ve been dating for two months, May sits Peter down and asks him if he wants to meet her girlfriend.
It’s only after Peter arches an eyebrow and asks, “Girlfriend?” that she remembers that she doesn’t think she’s ever come out to him. Oops.
May Parker has been out as bisexual since she was still May Reilly, the daughter of an Italian-American mother and a New Jersey working-class father, with parents who were confused but supportive of the girl who watched the stories about AIDs come through the news and felt some sort of kindred grief, who marched in her first pride parade in college, who clutched onto a community when she moved hours away from home in order to study nursing, who met Ben as the best friend of the butch college roommate who helped found their school’s Gay-Straight alliance. The fact that she was dating Ben—and then, eventually, married Ben—never got rid of her bisexuality. After all, the love of her life being a man didn’t make a difference as to how it felt to finally find herself.
Now, her parents are gone, same as Ben, but she supposes that she hasn’t been that loud about her sexuality in a hot second. It kind of faded into the background considering the fact that she was married, and sure, sometimes she and Ben would watch a movie together and have fun talking about how hot they both found Keira Knightley and Lucy Liu and the like, and sure, she has a blanket in the colors of the bisexual flag in her and Ben’s room, but if you didn’t know what you were looking for, you’d miss it entirely.
Life just sort of…happened. And she got older. Ben died, and a hollow carved itself out of May’s gut, and she hasn’t really thought about officially coming out since she met Peter, because it’s been a part of her down to her bones for so long that she hasn’t thought about stamping a flag down into the cobblestones and declaring it again, not when there were so many more pressing matters at hand, like rent and academic decathalons and the like.
(Although, sometimes, when she’s wearing her leather jacket, when she’s wrapped up in that blanket, when she’s kissing Pepper on the stoop right out on the street where anyone could see them—she feels the same sort of brave that she did back in the ‘90s, when her world was opening up in front of her for the first time.)
But before she has the opportunity to wonder if her nephew is going to be accepting, Peter just grins. “If she makes you happy, I’d love to meet her.”
May steps forward and throws her arms around Peter’s shoulders, and he laughs as she kisses his forehead and says, "God, I larb ya, kid."
---
It’s only when the doorbell rings and May is in the kitchen, staring at a burnt chicken, realizing that she might need to order takeout for dinner tonight, that she hears Peter’s voice go high as he calls out, “May, Pepper Potts is at our door?” voice going high at the end in question, and she realizes that she forgot to mention that her Pepper was The Pepper.
And, well, shit.
May skids into the room with all the grace that her fifty-year-old bones can give her, hoping to avert some sort of crash, but Pepper is there with a bag in hand and a smile on her lips.
May had told Pepper early on that she didn’t want gifts, that she didn’t care about Pepper’s money, that she didn’t want Pepper to lavish her with the sorts of trinkets that other millionaires and billionaires might give people.
May guesses she should have said the same thing about Peter. May doesn’t want Pepper to try and buy her way into Peter’s heart, after all.
But there’s something in her chest that flips when Pepper hands Peter a box of Legos that May had mentioned him liking, as well as a copy of a scientific journal—a battered copy, a little bit used, clearly loved.
It’s not a Starkphone. It’s not something that May could never buy in a million years.
It’s something that Peter could appreciate, because it comes from the heart, especially when Pepper says, “Your aunt mentioned that you were a big fan of legos, so I consulted the biggest Lego fan I personally knew and got the one that he thought you would like. The same goes for the scientific journal—Tony loves this one, and I thought you’d appreciate it, too.”
Peter still looks a bit suspicious, but his smile is breaking out, because she paid attention, because she brought him something that he cares about, and probably, just a little bit, because it has the Tony Stark stamp of approval, something that May would have considered impossible just a couple of months ago.
And the fact of the matter remains as true as it always has been: there’s nothing May wouldn’t do for that kid.
So she allows herself to smile, because she really does love Peter, and it says something about the fact that Pepper cares about all aspects of May that she’s accepted the fact that Peter will always be part of the discussion when it comes to May’s life and has actually embraced it.
---
After the take-out arrives—Thai food, Peter and May’s favorite, and Pepper is more than happy to try—dinner is a bit awkward at first, what with Pepper Potts trying to connect with a teenager and May having to figure out how to bridge the gap between her new girlfriend and her nephew, something she’s never tried before, because Ben was the reason she knew Peter in the first place and she’s never had to introduce him to anyone since, but Peter is excited—not about the money, or the business, but gushing about scientific breakthroughs, and Pepper smiles at him and actually engages with his scientific talk.
Sure, the exact intricacies of certain scientific theory are as beyond Pepper as it is May, but Pepper spends her day entrenched in a scientific company, talking about the importance of innovation and clean energy and the like, especially when it comes to arc reactor and its possibilities, so she and Peter are able to engage about that, and it’s more than May ever could have dreamed of, when it came to a potential partner, to have someone meet Peter where he’s at.
And it does something dangerous to May’s chest, she knows, to watch the two of them together, to see how they interact, these two people who are rapidly becoming the two most important people in May’s life.
Because the thing is—before Pepper met Peter, there was always the possibility that things would go wrong. That when they met, May would have to choose between the two of them, and she’d pick Peter, of course she would, but it would still break her heart, just a bit.
To see that the two of them get along well. To see that Pepper laughs at Peter’s terrible science puns, that Peter is warming up enough to Pepper Potts to be comfortable rambling with her without being worried about being judged—
It does something to May. It makes her heart shudder inside of her chest in a way that she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to easily turn back.
---
At the end of dinner, they go to part at the door, and Peter gives Pepper and May a chance to have a private conversation to themselves by heading to the kitchen and starting up the washing and drying of the dishes that he and May normally do together on the rare night that they don’t eat directly out of take-out boxes.
Leaning against the doorjamb for just a moment, Pepper says, “Y’know, he reminds me of Tony a lot—though only the good bits, don’t worry. You have a really great kid on your hands, dear.”
As much as May’s heart blooms to hear the pet name from Pepper’s ears—seems as if there’s never an age where sweet things stop making your heart beat like a teenager’s—there is something wistful in Pepper’s smile as she says it, and it’s only now that May really starts to think about the fact that it really does seem like her girlfriend is in love with two people at once.
See, it’s not like May and Ben. Ben is dead and gone.
Tony is right there, and yes, Pepper and him are broken up, but she’s learned enough about their relationship by now to know that their relationship goes through cycles like this, where they break up due to superhero-related issues but that they’re always, inevitably, drawn back to each other, because they love each other too much to let go.
And May can’t begrudge Pepper from having a heart large enough to love two people, can she?
(What she can be worried about, though, is something similar happening to Pepper as happened to her. Losing the ones she loves to danger and superheroes and the like. May would never want Pepper to have her ghosts like May does.)
Pepper leaves with a kiss at the door, the sort of kiss that tastes just a bit of new beginnings as it does of endings, of nebulae as much as supernovas, and May heads back to the kitchen, where she finds Peter helping wash the dishes.
May doesn't want to admit how her heart is in her mouth as she says, “So, what do you think, sweetheart?”
There is a reassurance on the tip of May’s tongue: I’m not trying to replace Ben. She’s never going to replace him, not really. But she makes me happy, and so do you, and—
“I like her,” Peter says, “She makes you laugh.”
And something aches in May’s chest as she leans in and kisses his forehead, hiding the burning in her eyes.
It’s not fair, that he’s the same height as her, that he’s going to be taller than her within the year, she’s sure.
May's kid is growing up. He's getting so much bigger.
But he's never gonna stop being her kid. Never gonna stop being the little boy that she and Ben brought home from school one day, whose eyes went big at the Stark Expo, who has always had a heart bigger than his chest.
---
For awhile, life looks good. Really good, in the sort of way that May once thought she would never get to have. She’s dating someone who doesn’t just care about her, but about her kid. She's dating someone that she thinks she might be able to say that she loves.
She goes to visit Ben’s grave and she lays flowers down there, where his ghost might find them, and she says, “You’d be really proud of our kid, Ben. He's doing so well at school, and his Decathalon team is doing great, and sometimes, he comes home a bit late from spending afternoons or evenings with friends, but that's honestly good, that he's starting to stretch his wings."
And all of those things are normal, are things she updates him on whenever she gets the chance, but this time, she wants to tell him about something else, as well.
"I still love you. Pepper will never take your place in my heart. But she—she’s really lovely, she is. And I really do love her. And there are some days when I wake up dreaming of you, but I also dream of waking up with her, and I think she’s taught me that it’s possible to love two people at the same time. That I don’t have to feel guilty about allowing someone else into my heart.”
The breeze blows through the graveyard, caressing May’s cheek, and she’s been agnostic since she walked out on her Confirmation class as a kid, but there’s some part of her that thinks that somewhere out there, Ben might be happy about her being happy.
At least, that’s what she wants to believe.
---
Pepper says that her and Tony have broken up, but it’s clear that she loves him.
And May knows a thing about having two great priorities in her life. Two people that she loves more than anything.
And after visiting Ben, after greeting her ghost, after getting the reminder that she would have done anything to have another twenty years with him, and then another twenty years after that—
May doesn't want Pepper to have to deal with what she does.
And so at a date one night, May says, “I know you still love him.”
And Pepper startles, eyes go wide. “I’m not," she protests, immediately pushing back, and May believes her as she says: "I'm in love with you, May, darling—"
It does something sweet to May's chest, fertilizing the flowers seeking to bloom between her ribs, to hear Pepper say I love you, but that's not what's at stake here.
May laughs. “I’m not an idiot. You’re still pining over him. I know that look on your face, because I have it when I’m looking at photos of Ben. But Ben, he’s—" Her voice chokes up, for just a moment, and Pepper reaches across the table and takes May’s hand in hers. Pepper’s touch is warm as the spring against her hand, and some part of May that was born and raised on the stones of this city, some part of her that is still buried in that graveyard with Ben, cannot help but indulge in it. In the warmth. In the beauty. “He’s not here anymore. And I love you, I want to be with you, but I think—you can be with two people, if they both love you. We only have one life and I don’t want you to waste it holding back."
There are tears in Pepper's eyes as Pepper offers her a wet, wan smile. “You’re better than I ever could have expected."
May shrugs. "I am pretty great, I know."
Pepper grins and she leans in and pulls May into a kiss right there in the booth, and May doesn't mind PDA at all, but the way that things are going—
May takes Pepper home, because it’s a night that Peter’s over at Ned’s, as he often is nowadays, and she has Pepper Potts kissing her against the pillows of her bed in her tiny apartment, Pepper’s copper hair entwined between her fingers, Pepper's hand dipping below her waistband, and May thinks—
My life is about as perfect as it could get, nowadays. I never dreamed it could be like this.
---
But that’s the last night that things are easy.
---
May arrives home to a letter from the landlord. The rent’s getting raised.
The rent’s getitng raised, and they were already living paycheck to paycheck, were already struggling to make ends meet. They have been since Ben died. They have been since the graveyard became a place as visited as the library.
What the fuck is she supposed to do now? She’s only one person, and like hell is she going to ask Peter to get a job to help support them.
She shoves the letter away, tucking it into her jacket pocket—she knows that Peter won’t snoop in her things, he’s a good sorta kid—already running numbers that are never going to add up as the door opens to Peter coming home.
Peter comes home, and he’s clearly struggling over something happening at school—maybe bullying, maybe a rough teacher, May can’t tell, just that she knows the way that he bites his lip, the way that his shoulders slump, all of those tell-tale signs of something going wrong and him pretending like it isn’t. Others might not clock that something was off, but he’s her kid. She’s known him since he was a toddler getting brought over by Richard and Mary for vacations, and she’s known him entirely since he was seven blinking at them from the principal’s office at school, wondering if his parents were ever going to come home from their business trip.
No, she and Ben had to tell him, home is with us, now, because your parents are never coming home.
Now, all May and Peter have is their ghosts and each other. Richard, Mary, Ben—they’re all gone. They’re all the Parkers that are left.
She pulls him into a hug, wraps her arms around his shoulders and asks him how his day is going, and she resolves to never let him know about the letter in her pocket. About the numbers that might never add up.
She just starts to pull a few extra hours a week. That can make things work, right? This is how she can make ends meet.
Some voice in the back of her head finally pipes up during dinner and says just ask Pepper. If you had two incomes, you could make this work. You could divide things like you did with Ben.
But Ben is gone, and Pepper lives somewhere else, and May isn’t going to ask her to help take care of an apartment and a home that Pepper doesn’t even live in.
May Parker isn’t a sugar baby. She isn’t going to rely on her rich girlfriend to take care of her—especially when she knows all too well what will happen if push comes to shove and something terrible happens that leaves Pepper not an option anymore.
May can’t be dependent on someone that might leave, whether because the relationship falls apart or because something happens to Pepper. Not when she has Peter on the line.
With Peter in her life, everything becomes so much more complicated. So much more real. The fallout from rent, from relationships, from the world going wrong, and hell, even not from the Peter point of view—
May just told Pepper that she could date Tony again literally last week. If she comes to her with a question about money, then it might look like she’s leveraging their relationship to manipulate Pepper into giving them money, when that has never, ever been what this is about.
May’s relationship with Pepper, over and over again, has been about May trying to make sure that they are equals. That Pepper Potts wanted her for her, and vice versa.
But at the end of the day, she has just been completely ignoring the elephant in the room, pretending that Pepper fucking Potts isn’t a millionaire in her own right, with plenty of stocks in the bank, with a fucking billionaire as her boyfriend.
May is a single aunt, a widow, who has always been struggling to make ends meet. Who has been avoiding the looming problem that her apartment isn’t rent-controlled, that it has always been just her and Peter and it will always be her and Peter.
So May does what she’s always done.
She puts Peter first, just as she did before Pepper came along, and sure, she lets Pepper bring over take-out, especially because Peter likes Pepper, and because this is the only justification she can give herself to make things work.
If it’s a date, she can let Pepper pay. She can stop fighting for the bill. Because if it’s a date, it feels like something separate.
May can take home leftovers and leave them for Peter, because leftovers aren’t something that are relied upon, they are something they can survive without if they disappear, they aren’t the same thing as begging Pepper for money, because May won’t ask Pepper for money. She won’t.
May can make this work. She has always made this work. She’s made it work since Ben died, since Ben left her behind, since she became the only adult in Peter’s life, since she swore that she was going to be the person that Peter could rely upon no matter what.
That will not change. May will not become a ghost. For all that it would break May’s heart to lose Pepper, she will not end up in a situation where she becomes reliant on Pepper. Where Peter’s safety depends on a woman as busy and successful and possibly likely to leave as the CEO of a Fortune 500 as Pepper actually staying.
As long as May keeps them dependent only on themselves, Pepper Potts can come and go and they can stay safe.
So that’s how May budgets. That’s how she divides the food while still managing to cut back on it. Food goes to Peter more and more, and as for May—
The hunger crunches her stomach. Threatens to devour her whole.
But May is familiar with how it feels to push yourself to the limit to take care of other people. She’s a nurse. She’s an aunt. She’s someone who puts aside so that other people can have better.
Ben is dead. She is all that Peter has left.
And Pepper—Pepper is busy, with work, with whatever feelings she has lingering for Tony Stark, and May knew, when they started dating, that all of this was there, that all of these things were going to conflict, that she would never get all of this to work as she wanted it to, but the world still weighs heavier and heavier on her with each day that passes, as she works longer hours and sets aside more food for Peter, and only really indulges when on dates with Pepper, and wraps herself up in sweaters when they’re in the apartment, and she makes do.
She makes fucking do.
---
New York freezes over during the wintertime. Paying the heating bill has always been the priority. Has always mattered the most. If you’re not warm, you’re shivering. If you’re shivering, you might die.
May has always wanted to keep the hearth warm for Peter. Has always wanted to give him a home that he wouldn’t have otherwise.
She chose this. When Ben asked her if she was willing to take in his nephew, she chose Peter in an instant. She chose the sleepless, freezing nights, she chose the aches, she chose the responsibility, she chose the nightmares and the guilt and the regrets.
Because more than anything else, before anyone else, she loves that kid. On the coldest nights of the year, when the walls in New York apartments feel thinner and draftier than paper and they snuggle up on the sofa in front of the TV in order to make sure that they’re both warm, it is the closest she has felt to the family that she promised him.
So she ignores the way that she can’t seem to stay warm, the way she can’t sleep well, the way that she shivers in the night.
May Parker is a nurse before she is anything else. She will push and push and push in order to take care of others before she even begins to stop and take care of herself. That’s how she works. That’s how she’s always worked.
---
And then she enters the room to find Peter in that fucking superhero suit—and one not just cobbled together by pajamas and fabric in his room, but something that is hi-tech, something that has garnered Spider-man the name Iron-Spider in the newspapers that aren’t run by J. Jonah Jameson over the past few months, and May never really paid much attention to what was going on with superheroes that weren’t dating her girlfriend, but now she can’t look away.
May Parker can’t look away from the train crash in front of her—the train crash that Spider-man stopped last week—as May feels her entire world slipping out from between her fingers like sand on the Coney Island Beach that she and Ben used to take Peter to when he was younger, before he became obsessed with spending his summers with Ned and tinkering with stuff he dug out from the dumpsters.
Because she has done everything she can to keep him safe, to keep herself from losing yet one more person that she loves, and he was—he was risking his life as a superhero—
“What the fuck?” May gasps, and her breath feels tight in her chest.
“Wait, wait,” Peter says, “I can explain. It’s just a costume, I put it together—"
But May isn’t an idiot. She knows that there’s no way that what he’s wearing is made of fucking pajamas and whatever else he’s going to try to tell her that he pieced the thing together out of.
There’s some part of her brain that registers the fact that the suit is pristine. That the colors match, everything’s symmetrical, and it's made of perfectly cut mechanical parts that Peter never could have done without the proper tools.
And May can’t believe it takes her exhausted brain an extra second to put the pieces together, to realize that even her genius of a nephew couldn’t put together enough dumpster-dived pieces to have something like that. “Who gave it to you? Who paid for that? Who encouraged this? Did Pepper risk your life—"
“No, wait, don’t blame Pepper,” Peter hastens forward, and there’s some part of May’s chest that almost warms at the fact that Peter is ready to defend Pepper, that he’s attached to Pepper, but some of other part of her thinks—
“Then where did you get a suit like that?"
Peter swallows and winces. "Mr. Stark did, but—"
Tony fucking Stark?
“Tony Stark fucking knows?” May hisses.
It is one thing, to accept that her girlfriend has enough room for two people in her heart. It is something else entirely to find out that the man on the other side, a man she's never met, has been encouraging her nephew to risk his life—
May is shaking.
Her head is pounding with fury.
How dare Tony fucking Stark do this? How dare he put her nephew in danger like this?
And how did Peter trust some stranger over her?
May has done everything she possibly could to keep Peter safe over the past decade. Everything she possibly can to keep her kid alive and well and taken care of. Sacrificed money and food and time and sleep, when he was sick, when he was busy, when he was stressed, when he didn’t trust her enough to tell her that he was enhanced—
May is a nurse. She’s read the papers on enhanced people. On their metabolisms. On their hunger.
Peter must have been aching with hunger, from not enough food, and he didn’t even tell her.
“He has been putting you in danger,” she argues, protests, because it's not fair, none of this is fair, she has been doing everything she can and it's all been undermined at every turn, the slow death of starvation averted only for Peter to throw himself into the line of every gun barrel in Queens—
“I put myself in danger first,” Peter says, “Mr. Stark just helped me with the suit when he saw that I wasn’t going to stop. Because I couldn’t stop, y’know, because like Uncle Ben says, with great power comes great responsibility, and I couldn’t just let the little guy suffer—"
The backs of May’s eyes are burning. Everything that she’s done, every hollow she's carved out of herself, and he's throwing himself onto the fucking sword despite the fact that he is fifteen and he never should have had to—
“You’re the little guy, Peter,” May argues, “You’re my baby boy. You’re not supposed to be put in danger, that’s supposed to be my job as your guardian, how dare Tony Stark encourage this—"
“I’m not a little kid anymore, May,” Peter argues, but he is. He’s fifteen. He’s hers, and after everything that she’s done to keep him safe, he’s throwing that in her face. “You can’t keep me safe forever. And Mr. Stark, he didn’t encourage this—I told him that I was going to do it whether he liked it or not, and so he, like, put a Baby Monitor Protocol on the suit, to make sure that I didn't do anything I wasn't supposed to, because I couldn't let what happened to Ben happen to someone else—"
But that's the thing, isn't it? By trying to protect someone else, he is letting the ghosthood happen to him.
There is something so determined burning in Peter’s eyes, the sort of righteous care that she remembers seeing in Ben’s eyes, and Peter’s quoting Ben’s words back at her, and it’s too much, to see the ghost of her husband in her nephew’s eyes, all that Parker stubbornness that got Ben killed—
And May can't stand it. "I will not lose the last person I have left," May says, "I can't have one more ghost—"
Peter's lips twist in frustration and he opens his mouth to argue, she's sure, but then he stops, expression crumbling. “May,” he says, “You’re crying.”
May’s hand raises to her cheek to check, but her hand is trembling, she is shaking, she is exhausted, she doesn’t know how to keep it all together even though she knows that she has to, she has to deal with this, she has to take care of Peter, she has to take care of everything herself—
She's not just shaking out of anger, is she?
Her vision is blurring. Silver is flashing over her eyes, fractals of snow collecting in the corners of her vision, and she’s exhausted. So exhausted. She’s been holding it together for so long, since Ben died, since she lost the man that she said that she would love until death do us part, until she became the one living person that Peter has left in the world, the only non-ghost who loved him—
But she feels more ghost, more snow, than person right now.
“Your heartbeat,” Peter says, reaching out toward her, and he sounds half-horrified, but his voice also sounds like she’s hearing it from across Jamaica Bay. Like she’s hearing it from across the fucking ocean.
He’s so far away, and she’s so stuck here, and he’s swinging through the city, above the skyscrapers of New York City, and she’s—
The world feels—
The world feels aching.
She is cold. So cold.
She is freezing. She is falling into the snow. She is the snow.
May needs to stay standing. She needs to outlast everything that has been thrown at her. She needs to be more than the world.
But she doesn’t—
She doesn’t know how to do that anymore.
She doesn’t know how to stay up any longer.
The building crumples beneath the weight of the blizzard.
May’s knees go out from under her.
And the last thing she feels is Peter’s arms catching her, her nephew begging through tears, “Stay awake, May, god, please—"
May wants to respond yes. She wants to do this for Peter. She wants to stay.
But she’s been holding on for so long. She’s been staying for so long.
Can’t she—can’t she let go? Can’t she fly? Can’t she float away? Can’t she—
God, can’t she rest?
Shame sours her throat, but she has to give in. She has to fall asleep.
The force of gravity is too much to withstand. The ache in her bones is begging her to just give in.
So May falls, her body falling to dust and snow, the darkness coming up and cushioning her fall—
---
May wakes, briefly, to a world that is quiet and slow and dark. There is something heavy laying across her chest, but it is something heavy and warm.
God, when was the last time that May Parker was warm?
Was it when Ben was still alive? Was it when she didn't have ghosts haunting her every step, freezing her from the inside out?
She wants nothing more than to snuggle in close. Wants nothing more than to bury herself in the warmth.
God, her bones have been so aching and cold for so long. She’d almost forgotten what this felt like.
Something cold pokes at her mouth and May cringes back. She doesn’t want the cold. She doesn’t want the ice and the snow.
May wants the springtime. She wants the beach. She wants more than a flash of copper hair haloing a moon-pale face as a familiar, beloved voice begs, “Please, dear. Please, take the nutrient pills. Trust me, they work. We’re gonna have to take you to a hospital otherwise—"
A hospital should be comfortable. She works in one, after all.
But all she can see is blood on her hands. Ben being declared dead on the steps of the hospital, because the ambulance didn't come fast enough, and everything that May loves slipping out of her fingers.
All she can see is her own exhaustion, the fluorescent lights too-bright overhead, draining all life from the people that the hospital is supposed to cradle and keep safe.
All she can see is her own despair.
“No hospital,” she protests, and there’s a murmur of conversation beyond her, on the other side of the world, on the other side of her ache, that she can’t catch, that snatch of worried words, all of it drowned out by the heat.
May is warm. So warm. So warm it fucking burns.
The heat seeps into her veins, into her aching head, into the hollow places inside of her where her ghosts dance—
And some part of her wants to embrace the heat. Wants to throw herself into the incinerator. Wants to lose herself in the first time that she’s felt really, truly warm since Ben died.
But cold is touching her mouth. Ice chips smacking against her tongue. Strange-tasting water alongside it, something that makes some sluggish part of her brain register electrolytes. “Fine,” says the voice of an angel, “No hospital. As long as you take the medicine.”
But May’s mind is already skipping forward, a stone across a river. “Peter,” she mumbles, because she needs to know that somewhere deep in the muffled voices and the dim lights is her nephew. Is her boy. That if she’s laying out, he’s safe. That someone is taking care of him.
And there, alongside the copper-flashing, are Peter’s bright eyes.
And May can’t be sure if that’s him. If it's her boy that says, "Take it, please, May," what sounds like tears in his throat.
But she knows that she can’t join her ghosts just yet, not when Peter might be the one asking.
So she obeys the angel. Obeys the saints. Takes the offering upon her tongue. Lets the cold slide inside of her, coating her tongue, relieving some measure of fever.
Someone says, what sounds like tears in their throat: “Get some rest, May. We’ll be here when you wake up.”
And so she lets the darkness take her again.
---
May wakes to warm lamplight.
She is able to register what she couldn’t when she woke up into a dream, her brain half-knitted back together from the hurricane that it suffered from.
She is laying on the sofa, not on her bed, but she’s propped up by cushions, wrapped in blankets.
The curtains are drawn across the windows, but even with that, May can tell that the sun has already set outside of the apartment windows. The only light is the lamplight diffusing through the apartment, a relief for her aching head.
And there are three people in the apartment, warm light haloing all of their heads.
Not just the copper-flashing of Pepper’s hair, her bright eyes clear in the lowlight as she sits at the end of the sofa by May’s feet, tapping away at her tablet, a casual knit sweater and slacks on. She’s in socks, but she’s shoeless, because out of the corner of May’s eyes, she can see two pairs of shoes by the doorway, tucked alongside hers and Peter’s—a pair of heels and a pair of sneakers, both of which are designer, May is sure, but they have been carefully tucked away next to their shoes, her place and things given respect.
Because it's not just Pepper and Peter in here, but there is a third person in her apartment.
It takes a moment for May’s vision to clear enough to focus on who she’s seeing over the edge of the sofa speaking to her nephew in the kitchen, the New York accent and brash voice clear to anyone who’s had access to a TV in the past two decades.
Tony fucking Stark is cooking in her kitchen—and from the smell of it, he’s making homemade soup.
What the actual fuck.
May opens her mouth, as if to protest, but she feels the dry scratch of her throat, and she looks around at the apartment around her.
She sees her own apartment.
Pepper and Tony Stark didn’t barge into her apartment with billionaire’s money and drag her out, to a hospital, to some sort of Stark Tower med bay.
She’s still here.
She’s still home, with all of its knicknacks, and yeah, it's cramped, but it's still hers and Peter's. The only real difference is that she can see, just over the top of the sofa, bags of groceries on the counter. There’s likely more food in the fridge that she can’t see, too.
Tony and Pepper and Peter did what they had to in order to take care of her.
The cold recedes, for just a moment. Spring slowly steals its way through the bricks of the apartment, warmth flooding her bones.
Because despite everything, whatever is happening, she is surrounded by people who seem to have made it there mission to take care of her—
"Oh my god, she’s awake!” comes Peter’s voice sweeping over her, absolute relief in his voice, head whipping around, because somehow, despite the fact that he is in the kitchen, he is the one who clocks that she is awake.
(Enhanced senses, some part of her thinks.)
In an instant, Pepper's tablet is dropped on the coffee table and she is at May’s side, her hand cupping May’s cheek, eyes searching over May’s face, nothing but gentle concern in her gaze.
And Pepper’s hand is a shock of warmth against May’s skin. It burns.
May’s first instinct is to lean away from it, but another part of her wants to lean in to touch. To be touched by the fire.
“Peter made us promise not to take you to a hospital unless your vitals crashed,” Pepper says, “But know that Tony was a snap of the fingers away from summoning one of the suits to take you to the medbay at the tower in an instant. We managed to talk him down to just him going to get groceries and medicine and make you soup, but it was just so."
May’s gaze snaps up to Tony Stark, who is talking with Peter in the kitchen over a pot of soup, his voice low, as if trying to make sure that she doesn't get disturbed, and it's so antithetical to every press conference she's ever seen of Tony Stark and Iron Man, and yet—there was, once, a press conference that Peter couldn't stop showing her, in which Tony Stark declared that Stark Industries was trading in weapons for renewable energy and arc reactors, and Pepper loves him, and—
“I know that this matters to you,” Pepper says, and there is something pinching in her expression, something aching in her eyes. “But know—god, May, if I had lost you—"
Her mouth twists, and May knows a thing or two about ghosts. She knows that Pepper knows a thing or two about them, too. That once upon a time, she was left staring at a screen for months when Tony was in Afghanistan, no idea if he was going to come home.
And if May didn’t feel like she’d been run over by a semi-truck, then she would be leaning up to cup Pepper’s cheek and pull her down into a kiss, to taste Pepper’s mouth, to breathe air into her lungs.
Because of all of the things that have gone wrong in the past few days, the past few weeks, Pepper is the least guilty of the three people involved.
As a matter of fact, now that everything’s out on the table, all the cards spread so her hand is revealed—
Some part of May aches that she didn’t tell Pepper before now about what was going on. About the cold that spread through her gut until she couldn’t find a single part of her that wasn’t being bitten by the frost.
"You didn't," May says, and she knows that that isn't enough reassurance, but it is some reassurance, and it's the most that she can give right now.
"But we came so close to it," Pepper says, "Because you didn't feel like you could come and talk to me about the rent."
May's heart skips a beat inside of her chest. "How do you know about—"
"Peter found the letter on the counter when he was helped Tony put the groceries away," Pepper says, "And I know you’re not used to having people take care of you," Pepper says, "But—"
But May can't let her finish.
Because Pepper’s voice is sweet. Sympathetic. Pitying.
May can’t do with pity.
Her relationship with Pepper was the one place that she could feel normal. The one place where she could feel like she wasn’t failing.
The one place where she was an equal, no matter what happened, but May is tired. She is tired, and she is hungry, and the gorgeous smell in the apartment is making her stomach rumble, and she doesn't know what to fucking do with the hollow inside of her.
There has always been a ghost in the room, the entire time that they’ve known each other. And that is never going to go away.
“Because people die,” May snaps, “I have lost everyone that I care about. I am the last one left. I am the one who takes care of things, because who else is left to take care of them? Who is left to take care of my kid?”
Something hits the counter with a clatter, and out of the corner of her eyes, in the kitchen, she sees Peter’s back freeze, and she thinks enhanced.
She thinks he heard me.
And May’s heart freezes and falls to the ground, shattering into a million fractal fractures.
That’s not—
He wasn’t supposed to hear—
What has he heard me say? He’s not supposed to worry.
And she immediately goes, “Peter, sweetheart, c’mere, I didn’t mean—"
Peter does follow her instructions to come close, and he’s not supposed to sit on the arm of the chair but he perches on the back in the sort of way that makes her think—he’s part spider now, and how will that affect healing, how will that affect his anatomy, she’s going to be making sure to study everything she possibly can about enhanced bodies so that she can take care of him properly—and she’s able to take his hand in hers. His hand feels just a little bit cooler than normal, but maybe that’s her having a fever or maybe that’s her finally registering what effect a spider’s genes are supposed to have on a teenage boy.
(Speaking of which—how in the fucking world did he become enhanced in the first place? A simple run back of the last year shows that it was likely that week that he got really sick and she had to sacrifice sick hours to take care of him, which she did gladly, but he emerged without asthma and not needing his glasses anymore—which should have been a massive tip-off, looking back, but in May’s defense, she was busy taking care of fucking everything.)
“But you did, though,” Peter says, and his voice is soft, quiet in the sort of way that has both Pepper and May looking at him with gentle concern in their eyes. “Because they’re all dead. That’s not gonna change.”
“But you’re not,” May says, “You’re here. You’re here, and you’re alive, and that’s—that’s all I could ask for.”
“All of us are,” Peter says, and he sound wiser than his years, and she wonders if that’s what happens with superheroes, when you have the world on your shoulders, when you feel responsibility for everyone. “We’re all alive, and we’re all here for you, May.”
With great power comes great responsibility, Ben had said, and he was right, but May kind of hates him for it, just a little bit, because it’s what led Peter to swing through the air, what led Peter to be sitting here, Tony Stark and Pepper Potts in their apartment, a superhero with super levels of ache.
“He’s right, May,” Pepper says, taking May’s hand in hers, rubbing at her knuckles, the sort of pressure that both burns and soothes, like sipping hot chocolate after a long, cold winter’s day outside as the snow comes down. “We’re all here for you.”
But Peter is the one frowning. “I’m sorry, for everything—"
“What the hell are you apologizing for?” May asks, instinctively. “If it’s about being Spider-man—"
But Peter shakes his head, his expression crumbling. “You weren’t eating because you wanted to make sure I had food, right? Me and my metabolism.”
May wishes that she could lie. That she could wipe that look off his face. That she could tell him that he’s wrong.
But there is some truth in it. Of course there is. It’s what’s powered her for so long.
"It's my job to help you," May says, "To take care of you. I'm your aunt. Your guardian. You're my kid."
And Peter's face screws up. "But that doesn't mean I want you to die for me."
May opens her mouth to protest. She wasn't going to die—
But Peter's eyes shine, on the verge of tears. "Your face went white as a sheet, May. When you fell, I thought—"
Pepper nods, reaching across May with her free hand to give Peter's wrist a small, reassuring squeeze. Peter offers her up a small, wet smile. “The best way to keep the ghosts at bay is to let other people help,” Pepper says, “There was a moment, there, when Peter called, that I thought that I’d lost you. And I—" She swallows, hard, her fingers squeezing May’s, and it makes something in May ache, makes something in May’s chest crack, the ice thawing, the icicle breaking from the balcony and shattering on the sidewalk beneath. "I don't know what I would have done if I'd lost you. If there had been one more ghost in Peter's life. In my life. I—" She swallows, hard. "But we—we can live, right? All four of us." Pepper looks to Peter. "Both of us are here for both of you. And we will be, no matter what. I promise that to you."
It's the sort of promise that May knows that no one can truly keep, not when death is always lingering, waiting to strike, and yet—
May looks to Pepper and she wants to say yes. She wants to embrace this strange, beautiful life that she has found herself in. She wants to step into the spring and spread her arms open and accept the fact that her nephew and her girlfriend and her girlfriend’s boyfriend are people that she can open up to.
But she has to know. She has to ask.
“Did you know?” May asks. “Did you know that he was Spider-man?”
Because she thinks she can accept the fact that Tony Stark knew and didn’t tell her. She kind of hates it, but if somehow Iron Man found out the truth and didn’t tell her, then it feels different than her girlfriend knowing and not telling her. Tony Stark’s never stepped foot into this apartment before. He’s never eaten dinner and kicked his heels off for movie night with her and Peter here and kissed her on the front stoop, Puerto-Rican street food on their mouths.
“I didn’t know,” Pepper says, and Peter and Tony both nod in agreement, and something in May relaxes, because Pepper didn't betray that trust in her. “I know what it’s like to wait for the person that you love to come home. I know what it’s like to not be sure if they will come home. And I—I can’t stop Tony or Peter, and I don’t know if I’d be able to, but I would have told you in an instant.”
“She reamed me out on our way over here,” Tony says, helpful as can be, digging his own grave without regard for how much May Parker might just kill him for it. “I think we might be broken up, but I’m not quite sure. Might have to check back in after all this.” There’s a certain cheer to his voice that May can’t quite parse out, as if keeping himself light for the conversation at hand.
But May looks at Pepper and she thinks—
You waited for him to come home for months. You know what it’s like to accept that there is a ghost and then what it feels like to have the breath be put back into your lungs at the end when they come home.
May remembers, a year or two ago, about Peter getting really excited over the news of Stark Industries and some retired naval engineers developing a method for unmanned aircraft to land on moving ships. May could have sworn that something like that they would have developed ages ago, but apparently, this is something that was new. Unprecedented. The idea of crafts coming home, in some small way.
Ben never came home, but both Tony and Peter can.
And then Pepper goes back around to her initial point. "Please, let us help you both. Not because it’s charity, not because you're afraid that we might leave, but because we care, May, and that’s what family does.”
And as if to punctuate the point, Tony Stark ladles soup into a bowl and carries it over to her on the sofa, where Pepper and Peter both help her sit up to take the bowl in her hands and eat. The warmth of the bowl is a shock to her system, but a welcome one, after so long in the cold.
“Listen, May,” Tony says, and there is an uncharacteristic sincerity to his voice that she doesn’t know what to do with. Tony Stark is someone that is supposed to be more myth than man, more tabloid fodder than truth. (But there has to have been a reason why Pepper fell in love with him, and May is starting to realize that maybe it isn’t just a genius intellect or a big pocketbook.) “My parents died when I was a lonely teenager, and I was responsible for the funeral arrangements, and it was the first time that I was responsible in my life, but I didn't want to be. After that, I was never responsible like you. For decades, all I did was party and waste my life away, just so that I didn't have to think about life, think about what I was missing, think about what I could have had. But after Afghanistan, I realized that I had a lot of responsibility on my hands, and that I could do good things instead of just wasting my life away. I could help people rather than building weapons that hurt them. And I wanted to do that. I wanted to be better than I had been before. And I’m not very good at it, a lot of the time—case in point, with your nephew, and how things went down with Spider-man and everything—but I’m trying. I want to help people that I care about, and Pepper really cares about you—"
“Mr. Stark, am I just chopped liver?” Peter grouses.
Tony rolls his eyes fondly. Pepper doesn’t look away from May, doesn’t stop rubbing May’s knuckles, but the corner of her mouth quirks upward, and some part of May realizes—these people love her nephew. They care about him.
There are more than just ghosts in his life.
“But my mother—she wouldn't have wanted me to waste my life. She would have wanted me to live. And so you gotta live, and let people in.” Tony offers out the soup, and there is something uncharacteristically vulnerable in his eyes as he says, “Mother’s recipe.” He grins, this much more normal expression on his face, but still something fond as he says, “For what it’s worth—and I get it, if it’s not worth much—she would have liked you.”
Tony is right in that it shouldn’t, logically, mean much. May has no connection to a billionaire’s dead mother.
But there is something human about being cooked someone’s family recipe that means something. Some sort of connection that feels like more than just her girlfriend's boyfriend, some random man she's only ever seen in press conferences and has apparently been her nephew's superhero mentor or something of the sort.
Something about someone taking time out of their busy schedule to take care of her—
“Wait a moment. Don’t both of you have jobs? A fucking billion-dollar company?”
“Language,” Tony Stark says with a grin, as if he knows how hypocritical that is.
May rolls her eyes. “First off, I’ve seen one or two of your viral press conferences. Second, my house, my rules.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Tony says, and the corner of May's smile curves upward.
“And as for why we’re here—family emergency, we told the board,” Pepper says, and something in May’s chest warms, almost impossible to comprehend.
Family.
For a year and a half, now, May’s entire family has been Peter, and that's it. No parents, no Ben, no nothing.
But now, impossibly so—
“So, let us help you out, okay? We’re not gonna ask you to move into the Tower," Tony says, "Pepper made sure to let me know that that would be a hard overreach of boundaries, and all that."
Pepper nods. “You deserve your own space. To keep Ben and all the rest. But—let us alleviate your burden, okay? We have the money, and we want to take care of you.”
“We?” May emphasizes with an arch of the eyebrow.
Tony smirks. “What, don’t think I can be generous?”
“C’mon, May, let Mr. Stark throw his money around,” Peter says, and wait, that’s not how May raised him—“It’s kinda hard to stop him,” Peter says, somewhat sheepish. "I tried to push back against the Iron-Spider suit for ages but he insisted on the Baby Monitor Protocol and all that."
"Baby Monitor Protocol?" May asks, arching an eyebrow, and Peter lets go of her hand in order to start talking with Tony, arguing back and forth about what is necessary security for a fourteen-year-old who wants to fight crimes and rescue cats from trees and help old ladies across the street.
Meanwhile, Pepper doesn't let go of her hand. Pepper stays close, supporting May as she takes a sip of soup, as she steps forward toward what it feels like to be not just warm, but full.
---
Two weeks after the night that May wakes up in the apartment, two weeks of Peter being good but antsy without going out as Spider-man, two weeks of May recovering and starting to eat more normally, Tony sits May down and gives her a full run-through of every safety protocol in the suit, and with each thing that he runs through, she feels more and more comfortable with what's going on.
And it's now, after she sees the ways that Tony has supported her nephew, the way that he promises to look out for Peter and make sure that he's taking care of himself, that Peter will always have a place to come home to, no matter what, that May lets Peter back out onto the field.
Because Peter is right. It is a good thing that he's doing.
May just wants him to be safe. And she knows that she can't cushion him entirely, but she can at least make sure that he knows that he is supported and that he has a place to come home.
"Just—just let me know when you're leaving and when you're coming home, okay, sweetheart?" May asks the first time she watches Peter click on the Iron-Spider suit.
"I promise, May," Peter says, and she believes him. She believes the sincerity in his voice, the promise that he makes, the idea that Peter will always do his best to come home.
May gives him a hug, unheeding of the cold, hard planes of the suit between them, and then she holds her breath as he swings out into the city, sunlight glinting off of the red and gold and blue lines of his suit.
May takes a deep breath as Pepper wraps her arms around her waist from behind. "Peter is going to do great things," Pepper murmurs into May's ear, "But they'll be just as much from college as from the skies. And we'll be there for him no matter what."
May smiles as she feels Pepper's mouth kiss the shell of her ear.
---
Tony and Pepper both start coming over for dinner, and eventually, May lets her and Peter both get invited to the Tower for dinner, as well. Because yes, it's hard to let Pepper and Tony pay for things, but the Tower is home for them, and that's what you do when you have a family, right? You find a home wherever they call home. You allow yourself to enter their space as much as they enter yours.
Sometimes, when Pepper and May spend the night together, May gets used to the idea of Peter having sleepovers at the Tower. Of spending time in the lab with Tony. Of allowing their family to grow and for her to trust Tony and Pepper to be guardians as much as herself.
Eventually, May takes Pepper to the graveyard to meet Ben.
There are flowers blooming along with the spring showers and the warmth starting to flow through New York as Pepper Potts sets a bouquet down on Ben Parker's grave.
"Thank you, for having such a good kid," Pepper says, "And thank you for letting me love your nephew and your wife. It's the greatest privilege I ever could have earned. And wherever you are out there—I hope you're at peace."
May places her own flowers and presses a kiss to the gravestone, then holds Pepper's hand as they leave the graveyard, the sun over the hill catching the copper-halo of Pepper's hair as they make their way home.
Ben would have wanted her to live. To love. To be more than a ghost haunting his gravestone.
To let herself be taken care of, to be supported, to let both her and Peter have a family instead of just each other.
May can hold both Pepper and Peter's hands. She can accept soup made by Tony's hands. She can allow this life to course through her, warm and flavorful and comforting as Tony's soup.
She has a family and it's small and ragged and strange in shape at times, filled with as many ghosts as living souls, but it's still good.
And she can't help but think that Ben would love that for her and Peter.
Spring spills over the graveyard, flowers blooming among the stones, and May heads home to her nephew, life in her hands.
I'm tired of tending to this fire
I've used up all I've collected
I have singed my hands
It's glowing
Embers barely showing
Last year, I needed change of pace
Couldn't take the pace of change
But this year, though I'm far from home
In Trench, I'm not alone
-twenty one pilots, Leave The City