Archive of Our Own

Before there was a porch, or a boy, or a name they fought over for a week, there was a rooftop in the town of Timely and a gun pointed at Jean's back.

She didn't see it coming. That was the strange cruelty of Battleworld—her power, muffled to almost nothing under Doom's law, had made her slower than she'd been in her life and she didn't feel the shooter's intent the way she would have anywhere else.

She felt Peter's hand instead, shoving her sideways hard enough to put her on the ground and by the time she understood what was happening, he had also gone down.

The bullet hit him high in the chest, under the collarbone.

She would relive the next four minutes more times than she could count. That was only the start of it.

The sound she made—an endless and soundless scream. Her hands pressing over a wound that kept opening under her palms no matter what. The ground underneath cutting her knees. His face going the color of ash. His voice, stupid and still joking—tell my aunt I said the web-swinging was—worth it—and then not finishing the sentence and her screaming his name into a face that had nothing left in it to answer.

Then she had felt it. Her power had been dampened but it hadn't been erased.

In that alley, she found the bottom of what was left and used it—not to heal him but to hold him. To reach into the drowning dark and refuse to let go of whatever parts of him she could grab onto.

There were no words for what it was to keep a mind tethered to a body by force while the body tried to quit. She only knew that it took hours. That her nose bled the whole time. That by the end of it she couldn't have told anyone her own name. And that when the town doctor finally got the wound closed and Peter's pulse steadied, she put her face against his shoulder and cried in a way she hadn't since she was nineteen years old.

She understood then exactly how much she loved him.

She didn't tell him that.

It took him a month to walk without wincing. It took her four years after that to say anything about what she did but even then it wasn’t the whole truth, only the plain reality of the fact that she gave him life (his words, not hers)—half a bottle of terrible wine into a night on the crooked porch, their boy asleep inside.

He went quiet and then said, simply: 

“I know. I could feel you in there. The whole time. Like a lantern in the dark.”

That was the last conversation either of them needed to have about it, because after that there wasn't a question left of whether they loved each other.

There was only the ordinary, extraordinary work of building a life around that.

The sky tore, a seam giving way in slow motion and the light that came through the tear was the wrong colour for any sky either of them had ever stood under. Around them, they could see buildings folding, the district's borders unravelling at the edges like a map catching fire from the corner in.

Peter found her in the wreckage of what had been a street market that morning, blood at her hairline, both hands raised from whatever she'd just spent the last of herself throwing.

He didn't ask if she was hurt. He already knew the answer would be a lie.

He got his arms under her and pulled her up against him. Above them the tear widened and the wrongness of the light made everything look like a photograph already fading.

"Hey," he said, into her hair, because it was the only word small enough to fit through what he was feeling. "Hey. Look at me."

She did.

"Wherever this puts us," he said, "I'm going to find you. Every universe there is, every version of this that gets written—I will find you, Jean. I found you the first time by getting shot. I'll do it a thousand times if I have to."

"Don't you dare," she said, half a laugh breaking through the wreck of her voice and kissed him like it was the last time she would be allowed to.

Then there was only dark.

The official story—the one that filtered down through careful channels—was that the incursions had been stopped, the multiverse patched, a new Earth stitched together from what was left behind after Doom's crusade.

Everyone who had lived on Battleworld came back with a vague, bruise-colored awareness that precious things had happened and no way to recall them. All those different lives, lost with the last vestiges of the power Victor had stolen from the Beyonders.

But not everyone had the privilege of forgetting. Jean kept everything. Maybe it was her telepathy. Maybe it was whatever the Phoenix Force had seen in her. Or maybe it was Victor’s final cruelty towards one of the people who'd dealt the last blow.

She woke up in a vast crater, filled with debris and fragments of other worlds that were no longer more real than passing dreams.

Peter was six feet away, blinking at an unfamiliar sky, reaching for a memory and coming away with nothing but a frown and a hand pressed absently to his collarbone, like he was checking for a mark upon his soul.

The heartbreak didn't take long to arrive. Her habit of brushing her fingers against his psyche whenever he needed her, hadn't faded with the rest of it—and when she reached, gently, the way she'd done a thousand times without either of them noticing, there was nothing on the other side that recognized her touch.

He doesn't remember.

She started sobbing to herself.

I can carry it for the both of us.

She told herself that this was mercy.

He tried, in the beginning. He really did.

She hated him for it. She loved him for it. To get to see him, even for a second—even though it tore her apart after the fact—filled her with enough joy that she could have spent the rest of her life chasing that high.

He came by the mansion for the first time with a bag of bodega coffee and the hopeful stubbornness of a man who didn't know why a door had closed.

They were friends. One could even say best friends. What changed?

She let the texts go unanswered. She told herself it was her responsibility—he had a life reassembling itself around him with frightening ease, MJ, Harry and Gwen, restored to him, whole.

He came back the second time, coffee again in each hand.

"Before you say anything—I know it's terrible coffee. I'm hoping if I keep bringing it, you'll eventually admit we're friends out of sheer pity."

"That's not how it works."

"I'm open to other suggestions." She almost smiled.

He looked so much like himself. Not the man from before, not the one who'd put their boy to sleep every night—but close enough that some traitorous part of her kept mistaking the resemblance for the real thing.

"How is everyone?" she made herself ask. He beamed at the opportunity of a proper conversation with her.

"Good. Harry's trying to talk me into a bigger apartment. Apparently a toaster doesn't belong next to a shower."

"That does sound sensible."

"I have my own system."

He smiled at her and her heart gave up.

She could tell him. Right here, right now.

She could say we were married. She could say his name the way she used to, in the dark of the night, under the covers, clinging to his warmth.

Instead, she heard herself ask, "Are you happy?"

He considered it honestly, which was so like him it hurt.

"Yeah," he said. "I think I am. It's complicated. But yeah."

"Good," she said and meant it.

He waited for her to continue but she stepped back instead.

"You should go, Peter."

His smile faltered. "Did I do something?"

"No."

"Then why?"

She looked at him for a long moment and said nothing at all.

"Okay," he said quietly and left.

She stayed in the doorway until he'd rounded the corner, then closed the door and leaned her forehead against it.

The third time he came, Gwen was there too.

Jean hadn't expected that. She liked Gwen, which made it worse, standing in the mansion's front hall with a woman who had no idea she was being measured against a life that had never officially existed.

"He thinks it's his fault," Gwen said, arms crossed.

"He's been going out of his mind about it for a month. I'm not asking you to explain yourself to me. I'm asking you to at least tell him it isn't him, because right now it's eating him alive."

"It isn't him," Jean said. It was never him.

It was everything about him.

"Tell him—please tell him he didn't do anything. Tell him some people just aren't good for each other, even when they want to be."

Don't leave. Don't leave me alone. I would give anything to be allowed to want you here.

"That's not really an answer," Gwen said, watching her more closely than Jean liked. "You look at him like you're grieving him, you know that? Not avoiding him. Grieving him."

It landed too close and Jean did what she always did when that happened: she got cruel instead of honest.

"You don't know anything about it," she said, colder than she meant to, or maybe exactly as cold as she meant to. "His parents were gone before he could walk. His uncle bled out in his arms. Everyone who gets close to that man ends up carrying something they didn't sign up for—so before you come here and tell me how he looks at me, you might want to ask yourself whether you've thought about what you're signing up for."

Then came the final blow.

"Your own father's also on the list, isn't he? That's what loving Peter Parker costs."

It was a low blow and she knew it before she'd finished saying it—dragging his dead into an argument that had nothing to do with them.

Gwen's face went very still. "How dare you, do you even—" she caught herself.

She didn't raise her voice; she didn't need to. "For the record—I came here because he's my friend and he's hurting and I thought you might actually care about that. I was wrong."

She left.

Peter, waiting on the mansion's front steps, must have seen both their faces on the way out, because he didn't come back for two more weeks after that and when he finally did, it was for the last time.

"I don't know what I did," he told her, baffled. "Whatever it was, I'm sorry. I'm gonna stop bugging you about it."

You didn't do anything, she wanted to say. You lost the best thing that ever happened to either of us and you don't even know its name.

What she actually said was, "Goodbye, Peter."

She started seeing Scott four months after that. Peter started seeing Gwen—despite everything—around the same time. Jean made herself glad about it, because gladness was the only feeling she was allowed to have about it and be able to live with herself.

The X-Men's stock, as Jubilee liked to put it, kept rising. A year and a half after the reset, the mutant coalition had grown loud enough and visible enough that somebody threw a gala for it—donors, press, a step-and-repeat with the X-Men's name on it in gold letters.

Scott, who had never in his life turned down a chance to be photographed defending mutantkind's right to exist in public, kissed her on the red carpet in front of eleven cameras and half the hero community, because the coalition needed the optics of two mutants choosing to build a life instead of just a war.

It wasn't a bad kiss. Scott had been good to her and she'd tried—really tried—to build something with him in the life she'd been given. It just wasn't the life she'd lost. She didn't let herself think that thought all the way through.

For half a second, eyes closed, it wasn't Scott's mouth at all. It was a lopsided grin that showed up crooked on the left, a scar through one eyebrow, brown eyes gone happy and stupid with how much he loved her—and then the blank horror of it hit her and she shoved it down so fast and so hard that by the time she opened her eyes again there was nothing on her face.

Peter was there too, in costume, an Avengers liaison thing, handshakes and quotes, standing near the back of the room with a glass of wine he couldn’t get drunk on. The place was a sensory assault: perfume layered over sweat, music beneath conversation, flashes bursting white across his vision. His hands kept twitching at harmless things—a tray carried too close, a shoulder brushing his, the sudden crack of laughter behind him—until he had to remind himself that none of it meant danger.

When Scott reached for Jean and the swooning cheers rang out, a poison went through him that he had no name for and no right to.

Not jealousy, he told himself, because jealousy would have required some claim he didn't have. Just—wrongness. A flinch in a place he couldn't locate.

His stomach turned over first, underneath it—the sense he'd spent a decade trusting with his life, screaming at him about a threat that wasn't there, a threat that didn't have a direction. Just a warning radiating off the whole room.

He set the glass down before his hand could give him away.

Scott found her near the windows a while later, after Peter had left.

"You okay?"

"Fine."

"You don't have to say fine every time."

His eyes followed hers as they searched, towards the empty hallway. "Peter?"

"He's an old friend," she said, too quickly.

"I know that."

"Then why ask?"

Scott was quiet a second. "Because you seem to be looking for him."

Her throat closed around whatever she might have said to that as the cold air coming in, hit her with full force. "I'm not."

He nodded, unconvinced. His tactical mind didn't let him push even though he wanted to.

Peter, meanwhile had made it as far as the service hallway behind the kitchen before he was sick, one hand braced against the wall, his whole body shaking with an adrenaline that had nowhere to go.

Stephen found him there, which was its own kind of strange, since nobody had sent for him.

"You're not sick," Stephen said, without preamble, crouching a careful distance away. "I'd know sick."

"Bad shrimp."

"There wasn't any shrimp, Peter." He studied him—a look Peter had never liked being on the receiving end of. "There's a snag on you. Has been for a while, actually. I felt it twenty minutes ago and I've been trying to decide whether it's any of my business."

"I don't know what that even means."

"A place where the pattern doesn't sit flat. I get them too, since the incursions—threads that don't finish healing right." He said it lightly, but something in his face didn't match the tone. "I can't read it. That's the part I don't love telling you. Usually I can at least tell what a thing is. But yours.... I can't even get that far with."

Peter didn't answer. His fingers ghosted over his collarbone again without his permission.

"If it gets worse," Strange said, standing, "come see me. Don't wait until it's convenient." He left the way he'd come, which was to say not through the door.

Sam caught him later, star-spangled and glorious. Peter was still somewhere else behind the eyes.

"So Strange might have told me a thing or two." Sam said.

"Of course, he did." Peter said, as he nursed another migraine.

"He doesn't do house calls for nothing, Parker." Sam sat down across from him.

"You gonna tell me what's actually going on, or am I gonna keep finding out sideways?"

Peter didn't have an answer that wasn't a lie or wasn't nothing, so he gave him nothing and Sam let him.

The Richmond County Fair happened every August, an hour from his apartment and Peter had been going since he was nine years old, dragged there by Aunt May for the pie contest she swore, every year, she was one bad blueberry crop away from winning.

It was a great place to take Gwen on a Saturday—funnel cake, a Ferris wheel with a view of nothing, the low-stakes charm of a date that didn't require any superheroes for four hours.

He did not think, taking her there, that it would mean anything to anyone but the two of them.

Jean went to the fair that same weekend for a reason she barely let herself examine.

She wouldn't have been able to say, if asked, why the smell of fried dough and hay made her chest hurt in a way that had nothing to do with the present moment. She only knew that every August since the reset, she had been pulled towards the fair the way a compass pulls towards north.

It wasn't nothing in particular. It just wasn't from here.

Timely had had a fair too—a strange, cobbled-together version of one. There had been ginger beer that tasted of somewhere neither of them had ever been. A whole roast pig turning slow over a fire pit that shouldn't have existed in a place like that. A puppet show behind the grain stall that told, badly and with too much enthusiasm, a story about a spider and a bird that sounded way too familiar. They'd gone every year they could, the two of them and then the three of them, their boy on Peter's shoulders eating cotton candy that turned his whole face blue, Jean laughing at a joke that was definitely not that funny.

All of it, somehow, had left a groove in her that this fair—real and ordinary—kept catching on anyway, like a veteran finding a scratch in a record he had loved since he was sixteen.

She was standing at the ring toss booth when she saw Peter across the midway with Gwen's hand in his, sugar on Gwen's chin and the pull that had brought Jean to this fair suddenly had a shape and the shape had a knife in it.

She didn't approach. She didn't need to.

Peter's spider-sense, snagged faintly on her presence and he turned and saw her standing thirty feet away with an expression on her face that he had never once, in two years, seen her wear.

His knees actually went—a half-second buckle he caught by grabbing the fence rail beside him, hard enough that Gwen's hand slipped out of his and she said his name, startled. It wasn't a physical blow. It felt like one anyway, like the ground had dropped an inch under him without moving.

It was grief. Naked, the kind a person wears when they think no one who matters is looking.

"Jean?" Gwen followed his gaze.

By the time either of them took a step towards her, Jean had already turned and started running,

Peter didn't sleep that night. He kept circling the question—why that fair, why that face, why does some part of me feel like I should already know—and getting nowhere.

He didn't tell Gwen what he was thinking as she snored beside him.

Peter got the Avengers card back eighteen months in, one crisis at a time, until nobody remembered there had ever been a question.

The X-Men, meanwhile, got bigger, better, more visible and more resented—a world class mutant school and a public, growing uneasy at the edges, that the X-Men answered to nobody but themselves.

Jean was at the center of most of it, not because she sought it but because Omega-level telepaths tend to end up load-bearing whether they want to or not and because the work was the only thing that reliably drowned out the life she didn’t want to think about.

Scott noticed the signs first after a mission that put them against Sinister, the two of them walking back to the jet a few paces behind the others.

"You were somewhere else back there," he said.

"What?"

"You almost missed the second shot. That would have—"

She stopped walking. "I didn't."

"I'm not starting anything." He looked away, then back. "I just—" The sentence didn't finish.

She waited. He didn't try again.

I'm thinking about a man who doesn't remember me.

"I'm tired," she said instead, which was true in a way he couldn't unpack even if he tried.

"Yeah," Scott said. "I know."

He didn't. He could never know. She let him think he did still.

Then there was the joint operation that should have been simple—a Bring-Your-Kids-To-Work day at a chemical plant in Queens gone horribly wrong, with mutant and civilian casualties both. Both teams called to the same signal by two different chains of command that hadn't bothered to communicate.

It went badly in more ways than one and by the debrief nobody in the room was much interested in being fair about whose fault that was.

"You had five of us inside evacuating civilians and your people were running crowd control on the outside with no idea we were even in the building," Scott said, flat and dangerous instead of shouting.

"Because your lot went in ten minutes before the perimeter briefing even started," Steve said back, just as level. "You didn't clear it with command, Scott. We didn't miss you. We didn't even know to look for you."

"We didn't have ten minutes to spend on your paperwork. There were kids on the third floor," Ororo chimed in.

"And Danvers pulled two of our people out of a collapse because one of you tried to outrun the fire by going through a support wall," Natasha said. "Nobody in this room is the villain."

That should have ended it. It didn't.

Old grievances that had nothing to do with Queens got dragged into the room and set down in the middle of it like evidence and both sides left more certain of their own righteousness than they'd walked in.

Jean didn't say much. She just watched it happen, feeling the temperature of the room rise in a way that had everything to do with twenty minds deciding, in real time, which side they were really on.

Peter sat near the back, holding an ice pack against ribs that had cracked pulling Warren out from under a collapsing gantry, after he had clipped his wind on the edge of a rebar. He'd suffered for it as he always did—a face gone purple down one side, breath that hurt when he moved too fast.

Afterward, in the hallway, half the room found their way to him one at a time. Steve went first, a hand on his good shoulder and nothing that needed saying out loud. Natasha didn't say much either—a nod, a squeeze of his arm, which from her counted as a speech. Carol told him flatly that what he'd done was stupid and also the only thing that would have worked, which was as close to a compliment as she handed out. Clint left a truly terrible vending-machine coffee on the table by his good hand without stopping to talk. Sam sat with him the longest, saying nothing useful but staying anyway. Even Ororo, stone-faced through the whole debrief, stopped long enough to say, quietly, "Warren's not going to forget that. Neither am I." A couple of the younger X-Men, kids barely out of the school, told him it was the bravest thing they'd seen all year and parted with selfies.

Jean lingered, watching him take the praise with the same wincing half-smile she knew and waited for him to find her over someone's shoulder the way he always did.

He didn't.

For the first time in a long while, he didn't look back at her. He was too busy being handed water and told he was a hero by people who, six months from now, might be trying to arrest him.

It was such a small thing to break on.

Later, in the infirmary, after the corridor had emptied and the Night Nurse had made her last round, Jean let herself in.

Peter was asleep, ribs taped, one arm in a sling Tony had made after he'd tried to talk his way out of the last one.

She stood over him for a long minute, doing nothing, just looking and hated herself for it.

Then she leaned down, careful not to jostle the tape and kissed his forehead.

"I am so proud of you," she whispered, so quietly it barely disturbed the air, tears she didn't bother to wipe running down onto the pillow beside his ear. "I am always so proud of you."

She was gone before he stirred and if some fragment of the moment reached him anyway—a warmth on his forehead he couldn't place, a dream he wouldn't remember by morning—neither of them would ever know it happened.

It started with a kid who hadn't done anything wrong.

The Red Hook containment op was supposed to be routine—a mutant teenager, newly manifested, losing control of a power nobody had briefed the responding team on. Property damage, no fatalities. The kind of call SHIELD farmed out to whoever was free.

The Avengers got there first. The kid's power had already put one agent through a parked car and set a fire escape half-melted before anyone got a hand on him—which was the last thing that happened before he stopped fighting, went quiet and let them get the restraints on.

Nobody updated the second agent, the one who'd pulled the car-agent out from under the wreckage himself ten minutes earlier and hadn't stopped shaking since. By the time Kitty phased through the wall, the kid—seventeen, compliant now—was on his knees with his wrists zip-tied behind him and that agent's rifle-sight still trained on the back of his skull, because as far as he knew, compliant was a thing that could change in half a second.

"He's a child," Kitty said and nobody on the Avengers' side would later be able to agree on who moved first—only that a shove became a grip became a fist and somewhere in the middle of it the agent holding the kid let go, not out of mercy but because his jaw had just been rearranged.

The Avengers and X-Men came to blows before anyone had even managed to get the kid safely out of the situation.

It lasted less than five minutes.

It was enough.

Three weeks of escalation followed, each one smaller and stupider than it should have been and each one making the last one look worse in hindsight—press conferences that turned into accusations, a Senate hearing that mostly just gave everyone a bigger microphone to be furious into, old wounds from rockier months dragged back into daylight by people with every incentive to keep both sides bleeding.

By the time it collapsed into open conflict, nobody serious pretended anymore that this was about one scared kid in Red Hook. It had stopped being about him ten headlines ago.

It was about who got to decide what mutantkind's future looked like and both sides had convinced themselves, with real conviction, that the other side's answer was unbearable.

Peter did not want to be a part of this.

He went anyway, because refusing felt like abandoning the only structure that had made sense to him since he woke up missing a part of himself. He did not let himself think about which name on the other roster he was most afraid of finding.

The Avengers had been told to apprehend the X-Men's leadership. He'd laughed when Sam told him—a short, disbelieving bark until he saw Sam wasn't laughing.

"Sam, tell me this isn’t true."

Sam had looked at him for a long moment. "It is. But she's your friend."

Peter debated the truth of that statement with himself. "Yes."

"Then maybe you can talk her down."

Peter had wanted to believe that. He had wanted to believe there was a piece of whatever they used to be before, that had survived the schism.

Scott came to her two nights before the chains tore through, in the war room at two in the morning, both of them too keyed up to sleep and pretending it was strategy that had them still awake.

"Are you with me, Jean? Not in this. With me," he said.

She could have lied. Two years of practice had made her fluent. But she found, with a battle bearing down on both of them, that she didn't have it in her anymore.

"I don't know," she said and watched his expression settle—like a man feels when a diagnosis finally matches symptoms he's had for a year.

"I've been trying to be, Scott. I want you to know that much. I just don't think I can anymore."

"Yeah." He nodded slowly, jaw tight. "I've known that for a while, if I'm honest.”

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Be sure, next time you tell somebody you're with them." A beat. "We're done, Jean. I don't want to deal with this mess still pretending to be your boyfriend. Go fight your battle. I'll fight mine."

He left before she could decide whether to be relieved or devastated and found, in the silence after, that she was both.

Gwen ended it the same week, in her own way, over coffee she barely touched.

"You are somewhere else," she said, rather plainly. "I don't know where. I don't think you know either, not all the way—but I saw your face at that fair, Peter and I've been waiting for you to catch up to what I already clocked way back then."

"Gwen, that's not—"

"I'm not mad." And she wasn't, not really, or not only; mostly she just looked tired like someone carrying hope carefully so it wouldn't bruise. "I like you. I like you a lot, actually, which is the annoying part. But I'm not doing however-many more months of being whoever you're not letting yourself miss. You don't even know what that is yet. Which—yeah. Not great, for me."

"I don't—I don't know what you mean."

"I know you don't." She stood, gathered her jacket and softened, on her way to the door. "Go figure out what you're missing, Peter. I hope you find it. I just don't think I'm supposed to be standing next to you when you do."

She was gone before he could find an argument that could keep her there and he wasn't even sure he wanted to.

She wore black—not the bright yellow and blue of the X-Men uniforms, not the green and gold she'd worn occasionally. When her eyes found him, neither of them moved.

"Peter," she said. He couldn’t tell whether he detected relief or resignation.

Her saying his name was worse than he'd expected.

"Hey." He tried to smile. It didn't work. "You look good."

She blinked, thrown by it. "What?"

"Sorry. That was weird. I just—"

"Peter."

"Right. Sorry." He took a step forward. She took one back and it hurt more than he could account for. "Jean, what is going on?"

"You should not be here."

"That's not really an option. Cap and Scott are at each other’s throats. Everything’s going to hell."

"But you can leave."

"What the hell does that mean?"

She closed her eyes. "Please."

There was a rawness in her voice, something that made him want to stop being angry before he'd even let himself start. He took another step anyway.

"I still don't know what happened between us and I don't know why you're doing this. But we gotta stop."

For a second, when she opened her eyes, he thought he saw it—the truth surfacing and gone again almost before he could name it.

"You don't know anything," she said.

He flinched. "Okay."

"I'm sorry."

He readied himself, urged on by the familiar tingle at the back of his skull. "Yeah. Me too."

The rooftop exploded a breath later. She came at him out of the smoke like a myth, hair loose, green eyes gone that particular blown-out gold and his instincts recognized her intent before his eyes caught up.

"Get out of my way, Peter."

"Fat chance." He was already dodging a telekinetic swipe that took a chunk out of the concrete behind him.

"Get out of the way!"

"No, actually." Two years of unexplained ache came up through his teeth as anger instead of hurt. "I've been trying to figure out for two years what I did to make you look at me like a stranger, Jean. I let it go, figured maybe I didn't deserve to know. But I saw your face at that fair. I saw you kiss Scott and felt like somebody'd hit me with a car. You don't look like you hate me. You look like someone who's scared. And I want to know why!"

"Stop."

"Was it me? Was it someone else—"

"Stop!"

The fire that answered him burned blue, curling in ribbons around her as she rose off the rooftop. He threw himself backward on instinct; a blast shattered the concrete exactly where he'd been standing.

"Jean!"

She didn't answer. He shot a web at her wrist and for one impossible second, they were connected—and then she pulled and he went flying, twisting to land hard against a water tower before launching himself straight back at her.

"Okay!" he shouted, tanking another swipe that sent him through a brick wall. which was already turning into rubble. "So we're doing this! That seems excessive, by the way!"

The gold in her eyes was already bleeding into red and he launched himself towards her. She hit him again and this time he barely got his arms up before the force sent him skidding across the roof. His spider-sense screamed a half-second before a chunk of concrete came down where his head had been; he rolled clear on pure reflex.

"Jean!"

She was crying—he could see it even through the smoke, tears cutting tracks down a face that had gone somewhere he couldn't follow.

He leapt. She caught him midair and he hung there, arms and legs spread, staring into eyes gone entirely red.

"Let me go," he said. She shook her head. "Jean, this isn’t you!"

"Please stop."

"Then stop trying to kill me!"

Her expression crumpled. "I am not—"

"Could've fooled me!"

She flinched and he regretted it instantly without knowing why—only that the person in front of him was someone he had loved once. Or maybe he hadn't. Maybe that was the whole problem. Maybe he had imagined the entire thing.

"Why?" he demanded. "Why are you doing this? Why won't you talk to me?"

She looked away. "You don't remember."

"What?"

"You don't remember."

"WHAT DON’T I REMEMBER?"

“ENOUGH!"

It came out of her less as a word than as a detonation. He slammed into the side of another building—a wave that didn't hit him so much as pass through him and for one disorienting half-second he had the memory of a gunshot, her voice screaming his name—and then the world went dark.

A bone-deep scream tore out of him when he awoke still airborne, every nerve lit up like the spider bite all those years ago. His hands found a web-line on pure instinct, trembling and he was gone before he'd consciously decided to move.

Jean stood over the space where he'd been, chest heaving and felt the gravity of what she did land two seconds behind the act. 

What did I just do.

The blast itself had been nothing—a warning shove, the kind of thing she could throw in her sleep. What had ridden in on top of it was her all-consuming anguish at losing the person who mattered most to her.

Around her the fighting had gone strange and uneven, other combatants staggering, catching stray edges of a wave that hadn't been aimed at them at all. She was already running towards where he'd went before she let herself think about what she might have just put into him.

He came back to himself in his apartment, the only safe haven he had left.

He had barreled through the window, glass shattering and collapsed on the flooring nearby, silhouetted by a sky that wasn't torn and for a long, strange moment he didn't know which sky he was looking at.

He tried to stand. The world didn't oblige.

Pain, enormous. A hand he could hold onto in the dark. Not his own. Hers. Reaching into wherever he was drowning and refusing, with a stubbornness that had nothing rational left in it, to let him go under. Hours of it. Her voice, saying his name over and over like an anchor line. Her nose bleeding onto his collar. The gratitude of being kept alive by a woman—and the four years after that it took her to say anything about it anyway, their boy asleep inside a house that didn't exist anymore.

I know exactly how much I loved you, because I found the bottom of myself holding onto you in that alley and I never told you, because I didn't have the words then.

It kept coming, out of order, immersion instead of narration—their first kiss, months after the alley, in a rainstorm, her palm cold on his jaw and her mouth tasting like the tea she always drank too much of, both of them laughing into it because it had taken so unbearably long to happen. A wedding that was really just four people and a magistrate and Jean's hair coming loose from its pins. The boy's first word, which was—infuriatingly, gloriously—not "Mama" or "Papa" but "up," because he'd wanted to be carried. A fair they never got to visit together.

Peter understood.

He had spent two years furious at a woman for protecting him from a grief she'd decided—alone—that he wasn't strong enough to carry. And underneath that, that she had loved him first with her hands full of his blood and her power burning itself down to nothing to keep him breathing and had gone on loving him ever since.

"Oh, God," he said and it wasn't relief. It couldn't have been.

She found him on his knees, both hands pressed to his face.

"Peter." Her voice cracked on it. "Peter, I—"

He looked up at her. Away from them, a battle was raging on, distantly, a fact belonging to some other version of this afternoon.

"You held me together," he said. "With your bare hands—Jean, you loved me before I even knew how to see it and then we lost all of it and you let me think—"

"Don't." She was already crying, her walls coming down at once. "Don't, please, I can't—"

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because you were happy!" It tore out of her. "You had your people back and none of them remembered any of it and I thought—I thought if I told you, I'd be handing you grief you didn't need to carry, just so I wouldn't have to carry mine alone. I couldn't do that."

"Jean." He was in front of her now, close, both of them a little bloody. "I would've rather stayed with you every single day than spent all this time thinking you hated me. I would rather have known about our life than gotten to be happy without knowing it."

"I didn't—I couldn't let myself believe that. I couldn't see you hurt because of me."

"But I was hurt."

He said it gently, but he said it. "It was the loneliest thing either of us has ever done. Both of us. For nothing."

“I missed you so much.” She said after a beat, letting herself believe in his presence.

Around them, the fighting was guttering out—word of the psychic shockwave rippling backward through both rosters, commanders calling retreats, the eerie quiet that follows any battle nobody actually wanted. It wasn't only Peter who'd felt themselves come undone. Across the battlefield, a dozen combatants had gone down on one knee at the same instant, holding their heads, chasing after fragments that didn't belong to their own lives. None of them would ever be able to say what they'd almost remembered.

Peter didn't care about any of it.

He reached out and when she didn't pull back he put his arms around her and felt her come apart against him.

"I remember his name," he said, quiet, into her hair.

"I never let myself say it out loud again. Not once."

"Say it now."

She did. Ben.

She pulled back to finally look at his brown eyes, the way she had wanted to, for so long.

"I loved you before Battleworld," she said. “I loved you when you called me at two in the morning because you couldn't sleep. I loved you when I thought you were going to die. I loved you when you forgot me—and I loved you when I thought you were happy without me."

He took her hand. "I was happy for a while," he said.

She nodded. "I know."

"But I wasn't whole." He reached up, touched her cheek, kissed her forehead. "I wasn't whole."

She folded into him. He held her and cried into her hair while she cried against his chest and they stayed like that until the city, somewhere far below them, stopped screaming.

It didn't fix anything, not really. There was a war cooling into an uneasy stand-down around them beyond the broken window. But there was also the fact that whatever they shared now, wouldn’t stand on lies anymore.

The kid from Red Hook went home to an aunt in New Jersey seven hours into the ceasefire, quietly, with no press and no ceremony, which was the only mercy anyone managed to arrange for him.

The end was a mess. It was complicated. It was imperfect. It was, in other words, the sort of thing Peter Parker was used to.

But it held. For reasons nobody involved found especially noble. Scott negotiated it, hollow-voiced and thorough. Gwen sent Jean a single text, weeks later—heard. glad you're okay. take care of him—and never answered when Jean tried to write back.

There was no parade. There was a joint statement and a grudging quiet that both sides agreed to call peace.

Jean moved into his apartment not long after. It was too small—the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom, built for one person who'd never planned on sharing—and they loved it anyway. They loved it because it was theirs.

Because there was a window over the kitchen sink that looked out over the whole ugly, beautiful city. Because Peter hung fairy lights around the bedroom without asking and Jean painted the walls a colour he insisted, was "aggressively beige." They argued about the thermostat for three days. She won. He claimed he had allowed her to win because he was generous.

They loved it because they were together and because they were alive and because, after everything, those two facts no longer felt they had to be earned.

It took a week—Jean refolding laundry like she did for a nursery that didn't exist; Peter going quiet on the subway over a stranger's kid, dark hair, unruly, the wrong kind of familiar—before either of them said his name out loud on purpose.

"He was three," Peter said, staring at his hands. "I remember him being three."

Jean looked up. "Yeah."

"I remember him asking to be carried. I remember—" He stopped, covered his face and when he lowered his hands again his eyes were wet.

"Yes."

"And he's gone."

She didn't try to soften it. "Yes."

He was quiet a long time. When he spoke again his voice had gone rough. "Tell me about him."

So she did. She told him about the stubborn cowlick no amount of water would flatten. About the delighted shriek he made at thunderstorms, more thrilled than scared. About the way he said Peter's name before he'd mastered anyone else's, all wrong, more vowels than consonants and how proud of himself he'd looked every single time.

Peter cried without trying to stop it, which she'd learned, in two years, was rare for him.

He took her hand. "I don't know how to be the man I was before this."

"You don't have to be, you never had to be."

He looked at her.

"Good," he said. "Because I want to be the man I am now."

She closed her eyes.

"And I want you with me," he said. "Whatever that ends up looking like."

They named the grief together, finally, for a boy who had never technically existed and had simultaneously been real enough to break both their hearts. The days stretched on, each day becoming a little easier, falling into old habits, stolen kisses and secret rituals that gripped them like muscle-memory.

One night, Peter woke in the dark and found her asleep beside him. He looked at her—her bright hair, her serene face, her soft fingers—and let himself remember, the life they'd never technically had and then the life they had now, which was smaller in some ways and larger in every way that mattered. The distinction didn't crush his lungs anymore.

He turned onto his side and reached for her hand. She stirred.

"Peter?"

"Hey."

"What is it?"

He smiled in the dark. "Nothing, I just missed you."

She looked at him for a second and knew—she always knew—and squeezed his hand.

"Hold me."

"Thought you'd never ask."

He bundled closer, kissed the top of her head and squeezed back.

They lay there, together, with their breaths in sync and hearts in recovery.

They let that be enough.