Work Text:
Peter was trying to make eggs.
This was, in the grand tradition of things he attempted after midnight, going about as well as expected. He had two eggs, a heel of bread that had crossed from stale to hostile sometime that afternoon, half a bottle of hot sauce that had probably been in the fridge longer than he'd had the apartment, and the kind of butter that came in a tub and probably wasn't butter. The pan was a thrift store find that heated unevenly and had a handle that got hot because the silicone grip had partially melted off during an incident he preferred not to revisit.
Patrol had been three hours of nothing followed by twelve minutes of a lot. Two guys trying to strip a catalytic converter off a Honda on 43rd, which had ended with one of them webbed to a fire escape and the other running down the block screaming about excessive force while his buddy dangled three stories up yelling about due process. His left side still pulled when he twisted, but the wound had closed to a tight, itchy line that mostly bothered him when he forgot about it and then remembered. He was getting better at forgetting. He was getting worse at most other things.
His mask sat on the work surface, connected to the laptop while E.V. ran a post-patrol diagnostic.
He cracked the first egg one-handed because his left arm was holding his phone, scrolling through nothing. The shell gave along the fracture line before it opened - he always knew exactly how much pressure something needed before it broke, which was less a superpower than a permanent background calculation. The egg hit the pan and immediately started doing that thing where the white went lacy at the edges and stayed raw in the middle because the pan was hot on the right side and ambient temperature on the left. Peter turned the burner down with his elbow. The second egg cracked clean, but a piece of shell dropped in and he spent fifteen seconds chasing it around the pan with a fork while the first egg committed fully to the lacy-edge situation.
His phone buzzed.
The number was the one he'd saved after the first call. He'd typed it in the morning after, sitting on the edge of his bed with the prepaid number still in his recents, and spent about thirty seconds deciding what to name the contact before landing on Jean and moving on with his life. He'd thought about it roughly four more times that day, which was fewer than he'd expected and more than he wanted to admit.
Phone calls were like punches. His body answered them before his brain showed up.
E.V.'s privacy indicator lit on the laptop as the call connected.
"Hey."
"Did I wake you up?"
"No."
"You sound like I woke you up."
"I sound like this because I'm cooking."
"You cook?"
"I'm standing near a hot pan with food in it. Whether that qualifies is an open question."
Her breathing was steady on the other end. No rush behind it.
"This isn't-" Jean started.
"An emergency. I know."
A beat.
"That was fast," she said.
"You don't sound like you're running. Nobody's yelling in the background. And you called from the same number, which means you still have the phone, which means nobody took it." He paused. "Okay, that still sounded like a scan."
"A little."
"I'm working on it."
Peter leaned back against the counter and switched the phone to his right hand. The eggs were developing a crust on the bottom that suggested he should be paying more attention to them and less attention to this conversation, but the conversation was winning, and that wasn't a high bar, but still.
"So," he said. "What's up?"
"Nothing."
He waited.
"Literally nothing," Jean said. "Nothing is up. I have no emergency, no crisis, no federal agents at my door, and no update on anything you'd need to know about. I'm calling because..." She paused. Her voice when she came back was flatter, more careful. "I'm calling."
Peter looked at the eggs. He looked at the pan. He looked at the wall. He waited for the part of his brain that solved emergencies to accept that there wasn't one.
"Okay."
"You don't have to do the scan."
"What scan?"
"The one where you decide I'm lying about being fine."
Peter opened his mouth. Closed it. Every denial sounded fake even to him.
"That's... fair."
"I know."
He let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. The crisis-response part of his brain stood down reluctantly.
He poked at the eggs with the fork. They'd gone from lacy to something closer to rubber on one side and still vaguely underdone on the other. He turned the burner off, scraped them onto the bread carefully - the fork was thin and he'd already bent two this month - and looked at the plate. Tried to feel like a person who fed himself real meals at reasonable hours and had his shit together.
"How's your week been?" Jean asked.
The question landed wrong. Not because it was pointed or mean but because he genuinely didn't know how to answer it. He could hear the building around him while he tried - the compressor in the basement cycling on, someone in 4B dropping something heavy and swearing about it. None of it helped.
His week had been: patrol, sleep, patrol, eat something standing over the sink, patrol, stare at the ceiling, try to fix the hot water, fail, patrol, think about buying groceries, think about it again, buy four things from the bodega and call it progress, patrol. He'd pulled up Ned's contact twice and gone on patrol instead.
MJ had left the drawing. She had not texted. Peter was trying not to turn either fact into something it wasn't.
"It's been fine," he said.
"That's the least convincing thing you've ever said to me, and you once told me you healed very fast while actively bleeding."
"My week was uneventful."
"For a normal person or for you?"
"For me."
"So nobody tried to kill you."
"Not this week."
"That's your bar for a good week?"
Peter sat on the edge of his bed with the plate balanced on his knee. The eggs looked worse from this angle.
"My bar for a good week is complicated."
"Mine's a door that locks and running water."
"You have those?"
"Currently."
He heard it in her voice. Not distress, not fear. A flatness behind the word that her breathing didn't quite match. The sound of someone describing a situation that could change without notice. He wanted to ask where she was, what the place looked like, whether the lock was any good, how long she planned to stay. He didn't ask any of it. She hadn't offered and he wasn't going to turn a phone call into a debrief.
"The bodega near me has this cat," Peter said.
He was saying it before the decision to say it had finished forming.
"A cat."
"Orange. Enormous. Sits on the counter next to the register like he owns the building. Delgado - the guy who runs the place - his name is Mister Business."
"The owner's name is Mister Business?"
"The cat's name is Mister Business."
"Obviously."
"He weighs about twenty pounds and he bit me last week. My spider-sense went off. I thought he was bluffing."
"You got ambushed by a bodega cat."
"I got bit by a bodega cat. There's a difference."
"What's the difference?"
"An ambush implies planning. Mister Business doesn't plan. Mister Business simply acts."
Jean laughed. It wasn't controlled or rationed the way her near-smile in his apartment had been. This was startled out of her, something that had gotten past whatever she usually kept between herself and the world. Peter's hand tightened on the phone and he made himself loosen it before the case cracked.
"You have a nemesis," she said. "And it's a cat named Mister Business."
"I have a complicated relationship with a cat named Mister Business. Those are different things."
"They're really not."
He took a bite of the eggs. They were worse than they looked, which was an achievement. He ate them anyway because the alternative was admitting defeat to an egg, and he'd been shot two weeks ago, so his pride had a floor.
"Can I ask you something?" Jean said.
"Depends."
"What do you do when nobody needs Spider-Man?"
Peter stopped chewing. He swallowed.
"I make bad food and talk to people who call me at unreasonable hours."
"Peter."
"That wasn't entirely a joke."
"Which part?"
He put the plate down on the work surface carefully - it was ceramic, and he'd already lost one of his original four to a badly judged landing - beside the discharge papers he still hadn't thrown away. His apartment was quiet except for the guy two floors up who played old Knicks games at full volume on his laptop and either didn't own headphones or had a philosophical objection to them. Peter could hear the play-by-play clearly enough to know the Knicks were losing, which didn't narrow down the decade.
"Honestly?" he said. "I don't know."
"That's your answer?"
"That's my honest answer. You asked for one, so that's what I've got." He leaned his head back against the wall. The pipe that dropped down the wall beside his bed was warm against his shoulder. "I got good at filling the time. Patrol, repairs, more patrol. And now there's all this... space. And I don't really know what goes in it."
He heard how that sounded after it was already out. He glanced at the pan sitting on the dead burner. He should wash that.
"Sorry. That was-"
"I asked, Peter."
Peter rubbed his face with his free hand, careful with the pressure the way he was careful with everything. His wound pulled at the motion and he let it. He was tired in a way that had nothing to do with patrol.
May would have known what to say. She'd have sat at the kitchen table in the old apartment - the real one, with windows and a door that didn't stick and a kitchen where two people could stand without bumping elbows - and told him something that sounded simple and turned out to be exactly right three days later when he was swinging between buildings and it suddenly clicked.
He missed her in a way that had gotten quieter but hadn't gotten smaller.
"My aunt used to make this thing," he said. "Eggs and rice and whatever was in the fridge. It was never the same twice but it always tasted right. I've been trying to do it and I keep getting it wrong."
He hadn't meant to say that. He definitely hadn't meant to say it to Jean Grey on a phone call at 1 AM that neither of them had a reason for. But it was out, and Jean was quiet on the other end. She did not rush to fill the silence.
"I eat gas station food," Jean said.
"What?"
"That's my thing. The thing I do. I eat gas station food and I walk around towns I don't plan to stay in."
"That's what you do?"
"I watch a lot of cable TV in motel rooms. I read whatever's in the lobby. Last week I read an entire book about competitive fishing and I want you to know that was voluntary."
"Competitive fishing."
"There's prize money, Peter. It's a whole world."
"I'm not judging."
"You're absolutely judging."
He wanted to argue, but she was right, and anyway his opinion of competitive fishing was not the point of this phone call. He wasn't sure what the point of this phone call was. He was starting to suspect that might be the point.
He was smiling. He could feel it. The kind that happened without any decision behind it, the kind that used to happen around Ned when they were building Lego sets at 3 AM on a school night and everything was stupid and simple and nobody had been forgotten by anybody.
The eggs were cold. The bread was still on the plate with one bite out of it. He checked the time and realized he'd been on the phone for forty-seven minutes. He could hear the Knicks still losing upstairs, and on Jean's end a low mechanical hum - a vent or a window unit - and beyond that the faint sound of wind finding gaps in a building. The pipe beside him had gone from warm to hot. He should move. He didn't move.
"It's almost two," Jean said.
"I know."
"Don't you have... things? In the morning?"
"Like what?"
"I don't know. Normal people things. A schedule. Errands."
"Define normal people hours. Because I don't think either of us has a working definition."
"Fair."
Quiet again. He could hear her shift on her end - a mattress, a headboard, the small sounds of someone settling. Somewhere outside New York, she was making do. Peter knew something about that.
"You should sleep," she said.
"You called me."
"You answered."
Peter looked at his cold eggs and his cramped apartment and the black hoodie thrown over the back of the chair where he'd dropped it after patrol. His left side ached in the way it did when he'd been in one position too long and the healing tissue had gone tight.
"Yeah," he said. "I did."
"Goodnight, Peter."
"Goodnight, Jean." He paused. "And for future reference, normal people hours are between eight AM and ten PM."
"I'll take that under advisement."
"You absolutely will not."
"Goodnight, Peter."
The line went dead. Peter held the phone for another second, then set it face-down beside the cold plate.
"Your eggs are cold," E.V. said from the mask on the work surface.
Peter looked at the plate. "You couldn't have told me that thirty minutes ago?"
"They were not cold thirty minutes ago."
Peter looked at the mask. "I walked into that."
He scraped the rest of the eggs into the trash, rinsed the plate, and set it on the rack where his other two plates lived. He'd buy real groceries tomorrow. He'd probably say that again tomorrow too.
The apartment settled into the kind of quiet it only managed after 2 AM, when even the Knicks guy upstairs had finally surrendered to a loss that sounded like it had been recorded before Peter was born. He pulled off his shirt, turned off the light, and got into bed. His left side pressed against the mattress with a slow burn that was becoming familiar enough to almost pass for comfortable.
He lay in the dark and thought about competitive fishing and gas station food and the sound of Jean Grey laughing like she'd forgotten she wasn't going to.
He thought about calling Ned. Not texting, where he could edit and delete and rebuild every word until it stopped sounding like someone who'd ruined a friendship and started sounding like someone who deserved one, but actually calling. The way Jean called him. No emergency, no reason, no guarantee the person on the other end wanted to hear from him.
Tomorrow. Maybe. Or the day after.
The pipe ticked as it cooled. Peter closed his eyes.