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It’d been three months since he almost died from a gunshot wound in Jean Grey’s arms—and if you’d told him in that moment that in several months time, they’d all be stood round an elaborate cake on a table in MJ and Ned’s apartment, singing ‘Happy Birthday’ for him, he probably would have laughed in your face.
When he’d walked back to his apartment after having left the hospital, he’d not known what to expect for his future. A world in which him and Frank Castle had acknowledged each other as friends, where he’d gotten a glimpse under the mask. A world in which MJ knew his name again, knew him as Spiderman, and didn’t—couldn’t—love him. A world where looking at the Department of Damage Control building made him feel sick.
And then as he’d walked into his apartment block, waiting in the reception area was Jean Grey herself. She’d been leaning against a wall, and had stood up when she saw him.
He’d stopped still, not knowing what to do. “Frank—-Frank said you’d gone.”
“I thought about getting on a bus. But when I went to go and buy the ticket, I realised I didn’t actually have anywhere to go. And after making sure you’d hang on long enough to get to live, it seemed stupid to up and leave before knowing you were ok. I know that New York is—arguably the worst place for me to be right now, and your apartment is probably one of the worst places in the city for me to be but…”
He didn’t make her ask, knowing instinctively that she wouldn’t want to. “Stay as long as you like.”
And like that, he’d gotten a new roommate.
His reality had shifted enormously in the following months. Instead of a solitary existence, where no one knew his name, or anything about him, living half a life, he had meaning again. There was no longer just Spiderman—there was weekly dinners with Ned and MJ, and getting to hear about DeWolff’s children and bickering with Frank (that hadn’t changed all that much, but the guy looked at him differently now he’d saved his damn life). There was using his scraps in saving to make sure Sara could have a grave that Jean could visit, and him and Jean connecting through their shared grief. Hundreds of thank-yous from Jean for taking a bullet for him, and a similar number of thank-yous in return for keeping Peter alive long enough to get him to hospital and make it through what was a likely-fatal gunshot wound. They'd connected over the half-lives they’d spent years enduring.
There had been many nights that, as he’d swung across the city of New York, Peter had thought about swinging himself into the sky and never catching himself on a web, plummeting towards the ground. Letting that be the end. There had been four years of bleakness, where his life had been meaningless, where he’d only been keeping going because of Spiderman's duty of responsibility to protect the city of New York. The only thing Peter Parker had had going for him was the scraps of life that he’d gotten to see through Ned’s Instagram story.
Instead, he got to actually become a part of the lives he’d longed to be a part of, to realise those wishes every time he got to hang out with them.
And it wasn’t the same. Of course it wasn’t the same—they didn’t remember, not in the way Peter had desperately hoped would happen if they ever crossed paths in reality, had clung to as a last hope to get him through dark nights. The thought that one day, they might bump into each other, and everything would come flooding back. Or that Doctor Strange would somehow remember, and would put a stop to all of it. But what he'd clamoured for Strange to do—wiping everyone’s memories of Peter Parker to save the universe from collapsing in on itself—was exactly what had happened.
But. From the second he’d reached over to shake Ned’s hand, and pulled him into their old handshake instead, there had been a sense of familiarity, muscle memory. His mind had forgotten, but something in him remembered the handshake he’d done hundreds of times as a teenager. He could see it in his eyes that it wasn’t the Ned who remembered being his best friend. But Ned was still the Ned Leeds who had figured out how to deactivate half of his suit protocols back in the day, and he was an MIT graduate. He wasn’t stupid, he could put the pieces together. It had been easy for him to connect the dots that the Peter who had appeared in his life for a housewarming party, oh so interested in Ned’s Spiderman board, was that same superhero who’d also graced his apartment within the same week. Not to mention MJ letting his name slip as he’d left through their window. It was all too much of a coincidence.
And as it turned out, it had actually solved a query that both MJ and Ned had been wondering for years.
“We both felt something was missing. Wrong, even. There were always times where we would be halfway through explaining high school memories to college friends and then we’d suddenly pause because we knew something was wrong with the story, but couldn’t figure out what it was.” MJ had explained to him.
“We could never figure out a reason for it, until, well, all of this.” Ned had smiled at him.
It explained the muscle memory—how Ned still remembered, instinctively, the handshake, even if he didn't remember who he'd done it with. How MJ could draw his face perfectly from scratch after only seeing it one time. Because they'd both spent years doing those things.
It hadn’t been easy. There had been a lot of graciousness on Ned and MJ’s end—a lot of tears, a lot of asking Peter why, and how could he. A lot of conversations about agency, and the importance of taking people at face value when they tell you to do something, rather than abandoning their wishes because of a bandaid. It had been weeks before MJ had been able to look at him without a slight hint of betrayal. Peter still couldn’t look at her without feeling an ache in his chest, either, at the conversations they’d had, and the choices he’d made.
Ned had been easier. MJ had been right when she’d said that he could handle it. The first few hours, when Peter had sat him down and explained it to him, his jaw had dropped at the idea that he’d spent his high school life acting as Spiderman’s guy-in-the-chair. He'd been in awe at the idea that it had been his life. The hurt came eventually, later, after enough memories had been shared and the whole story had become less of a movie plot and filtered into being his reality.
“Even without knowing,” Ned shook his head, tears flooding down his face. “I spent all this time trying to track you down. I didn’t even really know why finding Spiderman was so important to me, but it just was. Intrinsic. And—all this time, I was just trying to find my way back to my best friend.”
All of it made Peter cry, too, aching sobs in the middle of the night. The idea that even though Ned hadn’t known what it was he was missing, he’d been searching for him anyways, despite it all. The idea that he'd never get his Ned back.
“And those videos. MJ kept asking me who I thought was watching them, why I was making them. What was the point, when it became clear I wasn’t going viral. I didn’t have a good reason for that, either. Something just compelled me to keep recording them, keep posting them.”
The videos had probably been what had kept him alive, but that was too intense of a thing to actually admit to out loud, so he kept it to himself.
Which became somewhat of a trend, as they tried to shift into a new reality. It turned out that after being alone for four years, it was actually quite difficult to let people back in, accept help, and be the friend he’d once been to both Ned and MJ.
The first time Ned had offered to bring groceries round and cook him a meal after a long week of hunting down a mob boss, Peter had freaked out and shut him out for a week, ghosting all of his calls and messages in favour of focusing on his hero duties. The idea of offloading a task like that onto someone else, even though Ned was very happy to do it, felt deeply wrong. He was self sufficient—he could keep himself alive, he’d proved that.
And when they asked how he was doing—his default reaction was to tell them that he was fine, even if he’d just come back from seeing May’s grave, and absolutely wasn’t fine. Or if he’d gone to make an inside joke that neither of them would understand and it had made him realise that even though things were a million times better, it still wasn’t his Ned and MJ. The reality in which they’d all lived together at college—done the stupid things like beer pong, and staying up all night to complete an assignment—together, was dead. Ned and MJ had done those things without him. They knew he wasn’t fine, but they didn’t know how to ask him, and he didn’t know how to be honest.
There was a lot of new things to adjust to in his own life, too. It turned out that having the heightened arachnid hormone levels wasn’t too bad, after some time had passed where he got used to it. Sure, there were shitty days where he couldn’t get out of bed because of the sensory overload, or found himself in a cocoon of webs, and those days were certainly something. He’d never had headaches that had confined him to a dark room with no light or sound before, but he often frequented r/migraines for random tips and tricks. He’d even gone to the optometrist to get glasses—his sight had gotten worse with the hormone shift, and that had seriously helped with the headaches. He was learning how to live with his new physical changes. It wasn’t all pain—some of it was just crazy interesting. He’d figured out that he’d become allergic to mint, which made for a bit of a struggled search for non-mint-flavoured toothpaste. When he’d had a cold, he found himself curled up in the recovery position, even if it was just a mild illness. His temperature fluctuated a lot more, too. It felt like going through a second puberty—which he supposed, he kind of was.
Regardless of the bad aspects, he was learning to be kinder to himself about it all. He’d scrapped the inhibitor technology, had completely shut down the machine that had enabled him to make a universal inhibitor, having been shown the consequences of it falling into dangerous hands. Peter was changing, and he was going to try to embrace those changes, rather than blocking them. He was getting much better at swinging using organic webs, and deeply wished he’d had more time to ask details about Peter 2’s abilities as well rather than having just been disgusted at it.
Jean was a great roommate through it all, too. She was a fugitive, sure, which made things a little complicated because she could hardly ever go outside without a heavy disguise, but having her around made all the difference. She was planning how to take revenge on the Department of Damage Control—but through legal means, this time. Like, actually legal—she was planning on suing them for torture and wrongful death of Sara. She was a voracious reader, and when she wasn’t spending time reading as many books or legal cases as she could to help Sara’s case, she could be found sat at Peter’s sewing machine, falling back into her old hobby of designing and making clothes. There were a lot of sketches across the apartment of pieces she wanted to make a reality. Peter was just glad she had things to do, and wasn't going stir crazy stuck in his apartment.
It wasn't easy, though. He was very forgiving of people and their mistakes, and it helped that she recognised that her actions at times went beyond being…well, grey. She’d hurt people—killed people. And it made MJ nervous having her around, someone who could do mind control and take away people’s agency at will—especially as Jean had literally done that to MJ. But she’d promised not to use it on them, and not to harm people. Maybe he was too forgiving, too generous (Frank thought so, but that was Frank) but Peter trusted her.
They didn’t have a long-term plan for how to protect her from Department of Damage Control, but she didn’t seem too bothered by it. Peter figured they both could probably use some time to settle down and lay low before enacting the next stage of their plan. Focus on building back their lives before sweating the 'big potato' stuff.
Peter had also been getting into an old hobby of his own: photography.
It was something he’d done with Ben, prior to getting bitten by the spider. They’d used to sit around a computer, talking about editing pictures of the city, analysing in detail what made each picture worthy of printing, and which to delete. After he’d died, picking up the camera had reminded him too much of Ben, so his photography hobby had faded into disuse as his life became a whirlwind of grief and fighting crime. Ben’s old camera was one of the only things he’d kept in the memory box of the Parker’s belongings when he’d moved. Peter Parker may have faded from memory, but him and May’s apartment had remained, not that he could’ve stayed there without any income.
He’d picked the camera back up when he was sorting through the box, and decided that maybe it was time to start being creative again, taking inspiration from the fashion designs and the sketches that he’d seen MJ draw. His outlet became photography, and he found that he was especially good at taking skyline shots of New York. It helped having such easy access to rooftops. He laboured over the editing of them, hearing Ben’s voice in his head, recommending what to change, which wants to print. He had a collection of his favourites up on his wall: a love letter to his New York.
When he’d had MJ and Ned over to his apartment after putting up the pictures, Ned had whistled after hearing that they were his pictures. “You’ve got some talent, man. You could sell these.”
Peter shook his head. “C’mon, dude, no one wants pictures of the New York skyline taken by an amateur. I think there’s enough of those out there, the market is pretty saturated.”
“Ned,” MJ said slowly, looking between the pictures on Peter's wall and the Spiderman mask on his desk. “Didn’t your buddy at the Daily Bugle say they’re always looking for photographers who can take pictures of superheroes?”
And that was how he became a freelance photographer in his spare time, to get a bit of income and to keep him busy. There had been no way he’d have been able to find a 9-5 job without getting fired during the first week for abandoning his shifts to deal with a robbery, or something similar. But freelance photography, he could do. Besides, it was remarkably easy to take pretty stellar pictures of Spiderman, which were high in demand for a lot of papers, not even just the Daily Bugle. Shocker.
It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was something. It helped pay the bills, and helped him set some money aside, as well. For an idea that he’d tossed aside long ago, which MJ had convinced him otherwise about. The idea of college.
It had come up whilst they were discussing the technology behind the inhibitors, and some of the other technology that Peter had worked on in his years alone. Hibernation years, he was thinking of referring to them as.
“You’re smart enough to go to MIT,” MJ had told him. “I know you’ve been out of education for years now, but your capability hasn't faded. The way you talk about it…”
He knew how he talked about science, about the technology he’d engineered. He knew it lit up his body with passion, mimicking the way that blood pumped through his veins when he swung through the city. It was a light switch turning on in his brain. When he’d spent time discussing the inhibitors with Bruce Banner, he’d felt it too. He knew he was smart, knew that problem solving came to him in the same way that saving people did, too.
“I know,” Peter replied quietly.
MJ bit her lip, glancing up at him. “You could go. You could apply.”
Peter shut it down immediately, bristling at the idea. “No. I can’t leave New York.”
It was anchored in reality, not just a refusal. He literally could not leave New York. He’d tried, once. He’d gone to Philadelphia, to try to get out of the city, to see if the rest of the world held any more appeal than his hometown. If it sparked some new life back into him. What it had done instead was just create an overwhelming sense of panic inside him, that something was going to happen in New York and he wasn’t going to be there for it. He’d spent the entire day in that state of panic, his heart tight and senses too alert to get any joy out of being in Philadelphia. He hadn’t left the city again since then, not for two years. Even the idea of leaving made his hands shake.
The dream of college in Boston had died its death long ago, back with the original memories of Peter Parker. He’d known Boston wouldn’t be a tangible reality for him after his Midtown High school records had vanished. Even if he'd them, he didn’t think he could recover enough to move to Boston for college. Spiderman was too tethered to his identity, and besides. Everyone he loved lived in New York. They’d only just moved back, and he wasn’t going to leave just as they'd returned after four years of being away.
“Well,” MJ said, slowly thinking it over. “It doesn’t have to be MIT. You could go to college in New York. They have a great physics programme at ESU, and engineering. It’s not MIT, but…”
There were a million sentences on the tip of Peter’s tongue at that idea—that he couldn’t afford it, that he didn’t even want that. But he couldn’t voice them because—well. His whole life couldn’t just be being Spiderman. And the freelance photography gig was good, but he wanted to do more, wanted to learn, wanted to use that education to do something beyond just putting criminals behind bars.
He’d always been so attached to the idea that it was MIT or nothing, that he had never really stopped to consider other options. But college in New York. A world in which he could still be the friendly neighborhood hero, see Ned and MJ regularly, be there for Jean…and still spend his time studying at Empire State University. It was an idea he couldn’t fault. Maybe he did actually want that.
“ESU do scholarships,” MJ cut in, as if she could see the hesitation on his face, as she watched him dwell on the idea rather than shutting it down immediately. “And I bet Banner would give you a good reference, once he’s out of hospital. It might do more than you think. Just...consider it.”
It was only the beginning of an idea, and Peter hadn’t progressed it much further since their initial discussion, beyond saving as much as he feasibly could. There was no guarantee that he’d get in, or that he’d be able to afford it at all. Maybe it wasn’t the right path for him, but it was a path to work toward, and it made all the difference.
MJ had found a job working for a green energy non-profit, which suited her perfectly. Her major had been aerospace, but after weeks of interviews at tech companies where something in her gut told her it wasn’t right, she’d switched to looking at renewable energy jobs, and it had clicked.
So with both of his friends in jobs, with Jean figuring out the best way to sue a government department, and Peter himself working towards college, there were some loose ends to still tie up, but they each had an overarching plan. It felt—for the first time, like Peter could take a breath. Like he could crack a smile and have dinner with his friends, or celebrate his birthday without feeling like he wasn’t abandoning the citizens of New York. He could take a moment to just be Peter Parker.
Ned had baked a two-tier chocolate cake, decorated with raspberries and chocolate fudge icing, and they were singing Happy Birthday to him at Ned and MJ’s apartment. Jean were there, tentatively stood in the corner, singing along too. Peter was smiling, and had to stop himself from welling up at the small birthday celebration.
He blew out the candles when the song finished, and thanked Ned yet again for the cake, picking up the knife next to it. “Shall we have some? I can cut it.”
There was collective agreement, so Peter started cutting slices and passing them around. When he handed one to MJ, she took it, but wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“Who wants a drink?” She blurted out, placing her plate on the table. “Ned—lemonade?” Before he could say anything, MJ kept talking. “I think we’re out. I’ll go get some.”
Peter blinked, watching as she jumped out of her chair and raced towards the door, only stopping to slide on shoes and grab a key for the apartment. Not even checking to see if they had any lemonade.
His eyes cast over to Ned. “Don’t you guys have like, a litre of Minute Maid in the fridge still?”
Ned nodded silently, looking at his cake.
“Is she…okay?” Peter asked.
Ned paused, glancing at the door that MJ had just left from, hesitating. It was obvious he wanted to say something, but didn’t know if it was his place. “She broke up with Paul today. But she didn’t want to tell you in case it…got your hopes up, or something.”
“Ah.” Peter thought that that news would make something light up in his chest—her breaking up with her boyfriend on his birthday would have seemed like a good sign, three months ago. But it didn’t make him feel like that anymore.
He was still in love with her—he was pretty sure he always would be. He’d been in love with the version of her he’d known in high school, and he was quickly falling in love with the MJ he now knew four years on, the one he was still becoming friends with. Because they were different people, and he knew that.
The reality was, he wasn’t expecting anything from her. He just didn’t know how to tell her that, and he felt bad about it. Because for MJ, it must feel like he was just waiting for her to change his mind, to realise that they were meant to be together just because of their past history. But he wasn’t.
He’d love it if they could get to that stage. But he didn’t want MJ to choose to be with him just because it was what he wanted, or because it was how the past had gone. Because that wouldn’t be love. That wouldn’t be them. He wanted her to be able to choose him of her own will, because it would be right for her.
Peter would always miss the version of them that existed in the reality before Strange’s spell. Their relationship had been perfect, formed over years of friendship. But it was over, and it had been over the second he’d decided not to tell her about the memory wipe at the donut shop. It had been his decision, his fault, and he could handle the consequences of that.
It would be too early for them to be jumping into anything beyond friendship, in reality, so the news didn’t affect him the way he thought it might have. Peter was too damaged to be in a relationship. If he struggled to even entertain the idea of someone buying him groceries, a relationship wouldn't be good for him. It wouldn’t have been fair on either of them. And MJ was still reeling from finding out about a partner she’d been forced to forget about, the half of her life she’d missed out on knowing for the last four years all because of Peter. She still wore the black dahlia necklace he'd gifted her, but it had to be confusing working through all of the feelings there. There was no way any romantic relationship between them would have been healthy at that stage.
If she never developed any feelings for him other than long-lasting friendship, he’d be okay with that too. He had both her and Ned back in his life, and he had Jean, and Frank, and DeWolff too. He had more avenues of support than him a year ago could have dreamed of having. So, truly, he was okay with it.
His eyes cast over to the collection of cards by the cake, which he opened beforehand—one from DeWolff, addressed to ‘Spiderman’ and full of doodles by her kids. Yelena Belova had sent him a scribbled card made out of an A4 sheet of paper, wishing him a birthday that didn’t include dealing with small potato stuff, and a gift card to the spa that doubled as her office.
Frank hadn’t sent him a card. Frank had sent him a ticket to visit the Botanical Garden on Staten Island, because even though he’d goddamn shot Peter and then dragged him to hospital to make sure he lived, he still hadn’t stopped talking about the fucking Staten Island incident. He’d been invited to Peter’s birthday celebration, but had had to bail, citing that he was “Busy chasing a mobster, and that he was handling it his way, but that Peter could join him for chilli another time”.
There were more people he knew he needed to reach out to, as well. Part of his old support network, from before. Dr Strange, for one. Happy Hogan, too. To connect with them again—they’d been there for him once, and he knew they would be again. But for now—for now he was pretty damn happy with his ‘small potato’ life, with the group of people he had around him, as he learnt how to trust again. It was enough. More than enough.
“How’d ya like the cake?” Peter asked Jean, tactfully changing the subject from MJ and her relationship.
“Best chocolate cake I've ever had,” Jean smiled, lifting her fork. “Amazing job with the texture, by the way. Gluten free flour is normally not this forgiving.”
Ned let out a loud sigh of relief. “Oh thank god. It was my first time using it, and let me tell you, I’ve been stressing for the past week that you’d hate the texture.”
Peter smiled at the pair of them as they started chatting about gluten-free food, and some of the random food ingredients that ended up having barley or wheat in them even though it made absolutely no sense for them to. It didn’t take long for MJ to return with another litre bottle of lemonade, and they all acted as if it had been perfectly normal for her to pop out for it.
After everyone had finished with the cake, Ned’s eyebrows quirked up. “Anyone fancy Mario Kart?”
Peter made a similar expression in response to the suggestion. “Oh, yeah? Wow, get ready to lose.”
Ned scoffed, and MJ just laughed at the bantering. They’d had an ongoing Mario Kart tournament every week at the dinners that Peter had at Ned and MJ’s apartment—a shared love of Mario Kart and Star Wars Lego was what Ned and Peter were bonding over. Peter was losing very badly—he’d been quite out of practice, whilst Ned apparently had been crowned King of Mario Kart at MIT, having beat an entire party of physics nerds at the game.
“Please. If we’re all playing Mario Kart, the only person who’s going to be winning…is me,” Jean told them. She’d only ever played for the first time two weeks ago (Ned and Peter’s jaws had dropped in shock when they’d found out she’d never played as a kid), but she was like, insanely good at it. No mind control, no nothing, just crazy reflexes. It had been wild watching her play for the first time and beat Ned without even understanding half of the rules.
“You’re on,” Ned threatened, relocating to the couch to turn on the TV. “Whoever loses has to get pizza for everyone.”
Peter shared a grinning glance with MJ, who just smiled back at him. It was clear from her expression that she knew that Ned had told him what was going on with her, but she didn't seem worried about Peter doing or saying anything, so he relaxed. They were okay, and she was going to be okay.
It had been the first time Peter Parker had had a birthday cake for years, but he hadn’t found himself wanting to wish for anything as he'd blown out the candles—not even that he’d get into college. He had just shut his eyes and been grateful that he’d finally let people back into his life. Everything had changed since he was eighteen—some of those changes for the better, some for the worse—but he didn’t have to lose himself in it in the way he had spent his early adulthood. The changes made him who he was, the metamorphosis fundamental to being able to handle whatever would come next. He knew that now—and more importantly, as he sat on the couch trying to beat his friends at Mario Kart as if it was his biggest worry in life, he knew that he didn’t have to do it alone.