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Jean knew it was going to be a hard day before Peter said a single word, because he made her waffles. Peter did not make waffles.
Peter made eggs, a furnace's worth of them, and he stole bites of hers and mocked her syrup habit with real love, and that was their whole domestic liturgy, established and sacred. So when Jean padded out into the greenhouse that morning and found him already up, already dressed, standing at the counter with a waffle iron he'd bought without telling her and a look on his face like he was trying very hard to be fine, she knew.
"Happy birthday," she said carefully.
Peter's smile flickered. "You remembered."
"You told the group chat three weeks ago and then made Frank promise not to make a thing of it, which of course meant Frank immediately made a thing of it." She came and wrapped her arms around him from behind, her cheek against his back, and felt how tight he was holding himself. "I made him a spreadsheet of low-key birthday options. He rejected all of them and bought a single candle. It's in the van. He calls it 'the arrangement.'"
That got a real laugh out of him, small but real, and she felt some of the tension go. But not all of it. Never all of it, not today, she could tell.
Birthdays, she was learning, were a specific kind of grief for a person like Peter. Most people got to grow up watching the same faces sing to them across the same cakes, year after year, an accumulating archive of being loved.
Peter had that archive. He remembered every one of them. He just lived in a world where not one of the people in those memories remembered him back.
He'd spent four birthdays alone in a city of eight million, carrying an entire history of being celebrated that existed now only inside his own skull, and Jean understood, holding him at the counter while the waffle iron ticked, that a birthday for Peter Parker was less a party than an anniversary of everything he'd given up to keep the people he loved safe.
"You didn't have to make waffles for me," she said gently.
"I wanted to. You love them." He turned in her arms and cupped her face and kissed her forehead, and then he took a breath, the specific breath she'd come to know meant he was about to be brave about something. "Jean. Can I take you somewhere today? It's, it's kind of a big ask, and you can absolutely say no, and I'll understand, and we'll just eat waffles and watch a movie, and that'll be a perfect birthday, honestly."
"Peter." She put her hand over his. "Where do you want to take me?"
He looked at her for a long moment, and his brown eyes were wet at the edges, and he said, in a voice she had to lean in to hear:
"I want you to meet my Aunt May."
The cemetery was in Queens, a modest green place hemmed in by the city, and it was warm and clear, the kind of August morning that felt like an apology for the rest of August. Peter parked a few blocks off, and they walked in, and he carried a small bunch of flowers he'd picked up on the way, nothing fancy, the kind you got from a bucket outside a bodega, and Jean understood without being told that they were the kind May would have liked, that fancy would have embarrassed her.
He got quieter the closer they got. His hand held onto Jean's and held it too tight, and she let him, because she had walked her own long roads to graves that weren't graves, cell floors and bus stations and a peeled sticker in her pocket, and she knew there was nothing to say on this walk that was better than a hand.
They came to a simple headstone in a row amongst many, and Peter stopped, and Jean read it.
MAY PARKER. 1964 - 2024. And under them, in the words she had lived by, the words that had quietly become the whole engine of the man kneeling beside her: When you help someone, you help everyone.
Jean read it twice, and felt it land somewhere deep, because it was, she realized, the exact creed she had chosen for her own life without ever once knowing whose words they were. May had been teaching her how to live long before Jean knew May had ever existed.
Peter knelt and set the flowers down and brushed a few fallen leaves off the stone with a tenderness that broke Jean's heart clean in half, and he said, quiet and easy, like he was picking up a conversation he'd never really stopped having, "Hey, May. It's me. It's your birthday boy." He touched the top of the stone. "Twenty-five today. Can you believe it? You always said you couldn't wait to see the man I'd turn out to be, and, well." His voice cracked, and he laughed through it, wet. "I'm trying. Every day. I'm still trying to be worth what you thought I'd be."
Jean stood a step back, giving him the space, her own eyes stinging, and she thought of back to the girl in a cell watching a peeling sticker on a vent, and understood that she was watching a person do the thing she did every single day with her thumb in her pocket, keep talking to someone who could no longer answer, because loving them was a habit the body would not give up just because the world had made it impossible.
Then Peter looked up at her, and he held out his free hand, and said, "Come here. I want to introduce you."
Jean came and knelt beside him in the grass.
"May," Peter said, and his voice was steadier now, formal and shaking and radiant, "this is Jean. Jean Grey. She's… God, May, she's the one. She's the whole thing. She's brave and she's funny and she's been through more than anybody I've ever met and she came out of it wanting to help people, she's going to be a psychologist, she's going to spend her whole life helping people put down the things that are too heavy for them, and I love her so much I don't have words that are big enough, and I wanted, I needed you to meet her. I needed her to meet you." He pressed his lips together. "You'd have loved her. You'd have taken one look, adopted her on the spot, and told me not to screw it up. I know you would."
Jean was crying now, openly, and she reached out and laid her own hand flat on the warm stone next to his, and she said, to a woman she had never met, in a voice thick with tears, "Hi, Aunt May. It's really nice to finally meet you. He talks about you all the time. You did an incredible job with him. He's the best person I know, and that's you; that's all over him, everything good in him has your fingerprints on it." She swallowed. "Thank you for raising the person who saved my life. In every way, there is."
For a while they just knelt there, the two of them, in front of the headstone, and the city hummed on around them, uncaring and beautiful, and a nearby tree moved a little in the warm wind.
And then Jean, who had spent her whole life terrified of what her gift could take, understood that today, maybe for the first time, it could give something instead, something no one else on earth could give this grieving boy on his lonely birthday, and she turned to him and said, very carefully, "Peter. I want to offer you something, and I want you to think about it before you answer, and it's completely okay to say no."
He looked at her.
"You've told me so much about her. But you've never gotten to introduce her to anyone in our new family, and she's gone, and a birthday is just you carrying all of it alone." Jean's heart was pounding. "I can go in. Into your memories. If you let me, if you invite me, all the way, no taking, only what you show me, I can see her. Not a story about her. Her. The way you remember her. I can actually meet your Aunt May, Peter. Through you. If that's a thing you'd want. If it wouldn't hurt too much." She held his gaze. "You'd have to trust me with the most precious thing you have. And I know, I know exactly what I'm asking, given what I am, given what I've done. So if it's too much, it's too much, and we never speak of it again."
Peter stared at her. And Jean watched the offer land, watched him understand it, watched four years of unbearable solitary grief look up and see, for the first time, a door where there had only ever been a wall.
"You could do that," he whispered. "You could actually. I could show you her. And you'd see her."
"I'd see her. The real her. As real as you remember her, which, Peter, is going to be very real, because you loved her with everything you have."
His breath shook. "It won't hurt you? Going into. Some of it's really bad, Jean. The end of it is really, really bad."
"I've held worse, my love," Jean said gently. "I’ve held you on death’s door; I can hold your grief. That's what love is, I think. Being trusted to hold you up during your heaviest moments." She took both his hands. "But only if you want it. This is your most sacred place. I will not set one foot in it without you opening the door yourself."
And Peter Parker, on his twenty-fifth birthday, kneeling in the grass in front of the woman who raised him, looked at the woman he loved, and made a decision that Jean would understand for the rest of her life was the greatest gift of trust anyone had ever given her.
"Come meet my aunt," he said with a big smile. "Come on. I want you to get to know her."
Jean had entered a great many minds in her life. She had done it to steal, and to hurt, and to survive, and she had learned to hate the ease of it, the way a person could be a door you simply walked through. She had promised herself she would never do it again except to save a life.
This was nothing like any of that.
Peter opened the door for her. That was the whole difference, and it was everything. She did not push. She did not take. She laid her hand against his cheek and closed her eyes and reached, gently, the way you'd take an offered hand, and Peter, on the other side, held it wide open and drew her in, and it was not an invasion, it was an invitation, it was a boy taking the woman he loved by the hand and saying come inside, come see, this is where I keep her.
And then Jean was standing in a small apartment in Queens that smelled of cinnamon and old books and something baking, and it was so vivid, so complete, so soaked in love that she nearly staggered, because this was not information, this was not a fact about a place, this was a home, remembered by someone who had been happy in it, every detail lit gold by the particular light of being loved.
And there, at the stove, humming to a radio, was May.
Jean's breath caught. She was warm, and moving, alive in the way only the deeply remembered are alive, with silver in her dark hair and laugh lines around her eyes and an apron with a faded print, and she turned, and her face was the kindest face Jean had ever seen, open and quick and full of a love so unguarded it made Jean's chest ache.
She was not a photograph. She was not a story. She was a whole person, reconstructed out of nothing but how completely one boy had adored her.
"That's her," said Peter's voice beside her, and Jean turned, and he was there too, the two of them standing together inside his own memory, watching. He was crying and smiling at once. "That's my Aunt May. That's, that was breakfast. Saturdays. She'd make wheatcakes and burn the first one every single time and give it to me anyway and call it 'the sacrifice cake,' and I'd eat it, and it was terrible, and I miss it so much I can't breathe."
Jean laughed, wet, watching May at the stove. "The sacrifice cake."
"There were rules about the sacrifice cake." Peter's voice was thick. "You had to eat it with dignity. She'd watch to make sure."
And the memory shifted, the way memory does, not a cut but a dissolve, and now it was night, and a much smaller Peter, a kid, was crying on a worn couch, and May was holding him, this small woman with her whole self wrapped around a grieving child.
Jean did not need to be told whose funeral it had been, she could feel it, the haunting empty shape of his Uncle Ben, and she heard May murmuring into the boy's hair, over and over, "I've got you, I've got you, we've still got each other, I've got you," and Jean understood in a single devastating instant exactly where Peter had learned it, the thing he did, the thing that had saved her life, the putting of himself between people and their grief.
He had learned it here. On this couch. From this woman. She had held him through the worst thing, and he had grown up and spent his whole life holding everyone else through theirs.
"She taught you that," Jean whispered. "The catching people. That's her."
"Yeah." Peter wiped his face. "Everything's her. That's what I keep trying to tell people who don't remember. Everything good, it all came from that couch."
The memories came faster now, because he was letting them, because it turned out that once you opened the door, four years of grief that had had nowhere to go came pouring through it toward the one person finally there to receive it.
Jean walked through all of it, hand in hand with the boy she loved, inside the life that had made him. May teaching him to ride a bike and running behind him longer than she needed to, just to be near. May at a kitchen table helping with homework she didn't understand and refusing to let him quit.
May's laugh, huge and honking and completely without vanity, the laugh of a woman who had decided joy was worth looking silly for. May crying at his eighth-grade graduation like it was a coronation. May's hands, always moving, always working, always reaching out to fix his collar or push his hair back or cup his face.
Then, the next memory came: the same moment she saw in the DODC facility when she had her first heart-to-heart moment with the man that she would eventually fall so deeply in love with. May sat next to the two of them, squashed into the little bed; this time she had each hand on each of their laps as she spoke, “You’re both really special people. And I would hope that that will always make you feel really great about yourself… but I know sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you’ll be really lonely; just remember you have each other now.”
Jean didn’t realize until that moment that the memory of May was speaking to her as well, tears rolled down as she embraced this version of Peter’s Aunt May, a woman who could never have known her, and yet spoke to her so earnestly. She held Peter’s hand as the memory of May continued.
“Sometimes, because you’re both so special, people can and will do dark, monstrous things to you both. This is what I want you both to know: you’re beautiful, and the people who love you - your team, your family, each other… we love you not because you’re special; we love you because you are you. I want you both to remember that. Even when it feels like you’re totally alone. That’s your deepest responsibility. Never forget that, no matter how powerful you both become,” and with that, May gently stood to her feet, leaned down, and kissed Peter’s forehead, then Jean’s.
Then she vanished back into the air, leaving the pair of them sobbing in the memory, clutching each other as though they were each other’s anchors to life.
Jean thought of herself imprisoned in the DODC research facility, certain she was the most dangerous thing in every room. She thought of what it would have meant, at any point in her whole terrible life, to have one person look at the most dangerous thing about her and say I'm proud of who you are. And she understood, standing in Peter's memory of his aunt, why he had been able to do that for her.
He hadn't invented it. He'd inherited it. He was passing down to Jean the exact grace May had taught him.
"She'd have adopted you on the spot," Peter spoke through hiccups and tears, "and made you eat the sacrifice cake, and told you that you were good, and meant it, and you'd have believed her, because everybody believed May." He was smiling through his tears. "That's why I brought you. Not just so you could meet her. So you could see that the thing I keep telling you, that you're not a monster, that you're a miracle nobody taught to land, that's not just me being in love with you. That's the truest thing I know. And I know it because she taught it to me. I'm just, I'm handing you what she handed me."
And then Peter stood and walked forward, into the memory of the golden kitchen, and he stood beside the remembered May at the stove, and he said, his voice breaking on every word, "Aunt May. I know you can't really. I know this is just how I remember you. But I needed to do this once, even if it's only in here, even if it's only me. May, this is Jean. This is the woman I love. This is who I turned out to be. I turned out to be somebody who loves, as you taught me to love."
He pulled Jean forward. "Jean. This is my Aunt May. This is the person who loved me. I wanted you two to be in the same room, just once, even if I had to build the room myself."
Jean stepped forward into the gold light, into the imagined impossible introduction, this grieving boy's homemade miracle, and she looked at the woman who had raised the love of her life, this warm ghost made of nothing but devotion, and even knowing it was memory, even knowing May's kind eyes were only kind because Peter's love had painted them so, Jean felt something pass between them that she would never be able to explain and would never once doubt.
"Hi, May," Jean said. "I've got him now. I promise. I'll hold him the way you did. I'll catch him when he falls, and I'll make him eat his vegetables, and I'll love him for exactly who he is, every single day, the way you taught him to love me." Her voice broke. "Thank you for raising him. Thank you for all of him. He's the best thing that ever happened to me. He is your legacy, still walking around out there doing good. You didn't just love a boy. You built a man who's going to spend his whole life loving the world better because you loved him first."
And the remembered May, in the golden kitchen, in the space of Peter's own devotion, turned from the stove and looked at the two of them standing hand in hand, and smiled, and Jean knew it was Peter's imagination, knew it was grief building the thing it needed most, and it did not matter, it did not matter at all, because the love in it was real, was the realest thing in the room.
May stepped forward towards the pair of them, and simply put a hand on Jean’s cheek, and said, “I’m glad he found you; he deserves the best.” Then she turned towards Peter, pulling him into a bear hug, ruffling his hair, and whispered to him, “Happy birthday, Peter. I love you. I’m proud of you, and you better treat this girl well, because she’s a real keeper.”
The imagined room filled with a joy so complete that both of them, a Spider and a Phoenix, standing inside his own broken open heart, wept for the sheer weight of the moment.
They came out slowly, the way you surface from deep water, and Jean opened her eyes to find them still kneeling in the grass in front of the headstone, the flowers Peter had brought bright against the gray stone, the tree continued to sway in the warm wind, the ordinary world exactly where they'd left it.
Peter was sobbing. Not the tight, held, four-years-alone grief she'd watched him carry to the grave. Something a bit looser. Grief that had finally found somewhere to go. She gathered him up and held him the way May had held him on that couch, the way he'd held her in a van in the dark, the way this whole strange family held each other, and she said, "I've got you, I've got you," and did not let go, and let him cry it all the way out, every unbearable birthday of it, into the summer afternoon.
"Thank you," he said, when he could, wrecked and light at once. "Thank you. I've never. Four years, Jean. Four years I couldn't share her with anyone. And you just. You met her. Somebody finally met her."
"She's extraordinary," Jean said, and meant it in the present tense, because May was, still, walking around in the shape of the man in her arms. "Peter, she's the most extraordinary woman. I understand you completely now. I understand where all of it comes from."
They knelt there a while longer, until his breathing evened out, until the worst of it had passed through and left the good clean ache behind, the kind that means you finally had enough to grieve with. And then Jean reached into her pocket and took out the VentMax sticker, the one she carried everywhere, the last thing her sister ever saw, and she looked at it for a moment.
"Can I introduce you to somebody too?" she said quietly. He nodded eagerly.
Jean opened up her own door and let him in, showing him Sara. Not the facts; he knew the facts. She shared the real Sara with him. How their temporary home had windowsills with something green in them. The way Sara used to sing off-key on purpose to make Jean laugh. The way she'd braided Jean's hair too tight and called it "integrity."
The two dying syllables sent across the dark. Everything. She showed Peter her sister the way he'd shared with her his aunt, and Peter received Sara the way Jean had received May, with his whole heart open, and by the end the two of them were laughing and crying at once, trading the dead they loved back and forth in the sunshine like the most precious things they owned, which they were.
"Sara and May," Peter said, wiping his face, looking up at the sky. "God. Can you imagine those two in a kitchen together?"
"They'd have run the whole world," Jean said. "We'd never have gotten a word edgewise in."
"We have been so loved."
"We have been so loved," Jean agreed, and leaned her head on his shoulder, and the two of them sat in front of a stone that said When you help someone, you help everyone, carrying their loved ones a little more lightly now that they carried them together, and the city hummed on, and the tree moved in the wind, and neither of them, for once, was alone with any of it.
That night, back in the greenhouse, Peter ate the terrible birthday waffles he insisted on remaking, and Jean lit Frank's single candle and stuck it in the top one, and made him make a wish, and did not ask what it was, and did not need to.
Her phone buzzed. The family, of course. Frank had, despite the single candle and the arrangement, organized something after all, a photo of a truly enormous cake in the lair with TWENTY FIVE, KID scrawled on it in Frank's own blunt hand, and Karen's message underneath, come over you idiots we made a cake and Jessica says if you don't come she ate your slice already, and Matt's voice memo, happy birthday spider comma the family requests your presence comma there is cake and jessica is a liar the cake is intact for now.
Peter looked at the photo, and then at Jean across the candlelight, and he was crying again, but the good way now, the way that means you have too much rather than too little.
"Best birthday I've had in four years," he said.
"Best birthday you've had since the sacrifice cake," Jean corrected gently.
And Peter laughed, and reached across the table for her hand, and said, "Yeah. Yeah, since then." He squeezed it. "She'd have loved you so much, Jean."
"I know," Jean said, because she did, now, all the way down, and it was the warmest thing she owned. "I got to meet her. I know exactly how much."
They blew out the candle together and headed out to be loved by the rest of their new family, and behind them the plants breathed green in the dark of the greenhouse, kept alive on purpose, the way the people worth keeping always were.