Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

January, 1 month since Peter’s disappearance

MILES:

It started snowing around sunset. Not the fun kind either, the sky just cracked open and dumped a gray sheet over Brooklyn like it was trying to smother the city quiet.

Miles sat perched on the corner of a fire escape five stories up, hood up, mask pulled halfway off, steam rising off his breath. He watched people shuffle below, heads down, not looking up. They never looked up.

His ribs still hurt from last night. Some idiot with shock gauntlets tried knocking over a bodega in Flatbush, and Miles had gotten there too late to stop the windows from shattering or the clerk from catching a punch. He still stopped the guy. Tied him up with webbing that didn’t hold half as well as Peter’s used to. He told the cops his name was Spider-Man.

The look they gave him said otherwise.

He hadn’t slept. He hadn’t really eaten. But the city didn’t care about that, the sirens kept wailing, and the streets kept needing him. So he kept moving. Even if it felt like he was chasing a ghost.

A flash of red and blue in a cracked window made him flinch. For a second, he thought it was Peter. Just for a second.

He hated that second.

He checked his phone for the fourth time in an hour. Nothing. No text. No signal. No “Hey, kid” from a number that never sent emojis.

That first week, Miles stayed up every night waiting for the tracker in Peter’s suit to ping. He tried to retrace his last patrol. He even swung by the Bugle, just in case someone there knew something, but all he got was Jameson on a podcast rant calling Spider-Man a coward for vanishing.

Coward.

Miles wanted to punch something. Instead, he just sat there, fingers twitching against cold metal, listening to the wind knock loose a broken Christmas banner from a lamppost.

He didn’t tell his parents the truth. They still thought he was “staying late at art school” or “volunteering with that science program.” If they knew he was out here, they’d ground him until graduation. If they knew Peter was gone, they might actually worry for real.

But someone had to do this.

Someone had to try.

He tugged his mask back on, stood up on the railing, and launched himself into the night. His webs caught, most of the time. His landings were still clumsy. His swing had rhythm but no flow.

He didn’t feel like Spider-Man. Even if Peter had told him he was the last time he saw him. 

But he was all the city had.

And if Peter was still out there somewhere, Miles was going to be the kind of Spider-Man he could be proud of.

Even if it hurt.

The decorations felt wrong this year.

Brooklyn lit itself up like always, candy-cane lights strung across intersections, inflatable Santas slouched on brownstone stoops, fake snow sprayed on store windows. People smiled, but it felt thinner, like they were all going through the motions. Miles tried to feel it too. Tried to pretend December didn’t feel broken.

Peter had disappeared the week after Halloween. One day he was swinging alongside Miles, teasing him about web angles and backflips. The next day? Nothing. Not a sound. Not a body. Just silence.

The city had gotten real quiet about it, too. No official statements. No funerals. No masked vigils. It was like people were afraid to admit he was gone. Like saying it out loud might make it real.

So they didn’t say anything. They just hung wreaths and played “Jingle Bell Rock” like Spider-Man hadn’t vanished into thin air.

Miles crouched on the edge of a rooftop, watching kids play on a sidewalk below. One of them had a plastic Spider-Man mask on. Red and black, his colors. Not Peter’s. The kid spun around, shooting imaginary webs at his friends, giggling like he wasn’t pretending to be someone missing.

That made Miles feel sick. Or maybe just tired. He couldn’t tell the difference anymore.

He remembered something Peter once said, during one of their rooftop crash-courses back when Miles first got his powers.

“When I started, there was no one. No one like me. I had to figure it all out by messing up, getting hurt, and doing it again anyway. You got this.”

Peter’s hand on his shoulder felt grounding. His smile was sincere and heartfelt. 

“Thank you, Peter.” Miles had told him.

At the time, it sounded cool. Brave. Heroic. Now it just sounded… lonely. Miles never wanted to do it alone.

Peter had nobody when he was 15. And still, he showed up every day. Still swung into burning buildings and took punches that should’ve killed him. Still cracked dumb jokes while bleeding out because the city needed him to be okay.

Miles wasn’t sure he was that strong.

He didn’t want to be alone in this.

But he was.

He dropped down into an alley, peeled off his mask, and leaned against a wall. The cold bit into his skin. Lights from a menorah display blinked across the street. A couple walked by laughing, wrapped in one scarf. A store speaker played “All I Want for Christmas” on loop like it was trying to break him.

He hated feeling weak. He hated feeling like the whole city was staring at him, waiting for him to fail.

He hated that he needed Peter. And that Peter was gone. And that maybe he was never coming back.

Miles clenched the mask in his fist. It still smelled like Peter’s old suit, whatever fabric spray he used that always reminded Miles of sweat and peppermint gum.

He wanted to scream. Or cry. Or swing until his arms gave out.
But Spider-Man didn’t do that.

At least, not where anyone could see.

The police scanner buzzed in his ear. Armed robbery, Upper East Side. He sighed. Pulled the mask back on.

His voice came out quieter than usual when he whispered to himself,

“Okay, okay. One more time.”

And he leapt into the air, the weight of a city, and a missing mentor, clinging to his back like a cape he’d never worn.

Chapter Text

June, 6 months since Peter’s disappearance

MARY JANE:

The buzz of the fridge was the loudest thing in the apartment.

Mary Jane sat cross-legged in the middle of her living room, surrounded by the wreckage of what used to be a normal life. Cold coffee sat half-finished on a windowsill. Empty takeout boxes leaned against the wall. The floor was blanketed with newsprint, red string, and unanswered questions.

The walls were covered in maps. Spider-Man sightings, suspected locations, last known coordinates. Photos paper-clipped together. Grainy screenshots from Reddit. Blog posts. Police blotters. A printout of a Daily Bugle op-ed: “Spider-Man Abandons NYC: Coward or Conspirator?” circled in thick red marker. Underneath, MJ had scribbled LIES so hard the pen had torn through the page.

She hadn’t slept in over thirty hours.

Outside, the city baked under June sun. Inside, she was freezing.

The string made her look crazy. She knew that. She didn’t care.

Everyone else had moved on. Time heals, they said. No body, no crime, some muttered, as if Peter had just ghosted the city on a whim. No one said what MJ knew in her bones:

Peter wouldn’t have left. Not without saying something. Not without her.

She had a system. A new one. She was running pattern analysis, breaking Spider-Man sightings into a heatmap of likely patrol routes. Cross-referencing with satellite images. There had to be a clue somewhere. A shadow. A footprint. A whisper.

He was somewhere.

Or someone didn’t want him to be found.

She reached for her cup, drank stale coffee like it was medicine, and winced. Then the knock came.

Two short knocks. No follow-up. Quiet.

She froze.

For a second, a wild, electric second,  her heart punched into her throat. What if…

She raced to the door, didn’t even check the peephole, yanked it open–

Nothing.

No one there. Just her coffee order, still warm. A sticky note clung to the side of the cup.

“Please call me, I’m worried. - Harry”

Her hand shook slightly as she peeled it off. She stared at the note like it might rearrange itself into something else. Something from Peter.

She sank down to the floor with the cup, leaned her head back against the door.

Harry had been trying to reach her for weeks. Voicemails, texts, even emails, MJ ignored them all. What was she supposed to say? “Hey, sorry I bailed on brunch, I was cross-referencing Spider-Man sightings with traffic cam data?”

She couldn’t pretend anymore. Couldn’t talk about him in past tense. Couldn’t accept that the man she loved was just gone.

Peter’s mask sat on her kitchen table, the spare one he left at her place sometimes when he came over late and forgot it in the morning. She stared at it.

“You wouldn’t leave me,” she whispered.

She didn't sound sure anymore.

The knock, the coffee, the note. It broke something loose in her. She walked to her laptop, clicked open a folder marked "From PBP" with shaky fingers.

Inside: dozens of voice recordings. Peter’s voicemails. From months before. She played the last one.

“Hey MJ. Sorry I missed you. Late patrol. I’ll come by tomorrow, we can talk about that trip you wanted, I promise. I love you.”

Click.

Silence.

She sat in it for a long time.

Then she grabbed her phone, stared at Harry’s name in her messages.

Maybe it was time.

Maybe she couldn’t do this alone anymore.

The bathroom light was too bright.

MJ squinted against it, flicked the switch back off, and let the muted gray-blue of the cloudy afternoon filter in through the window. She turned the tap, let the water run cold, and stared at herself in the mirror.

Bloodshot eyes. Smudged eyeliner. Hair pulled up in a bun that had stopped being cute sometime last week. She looked exactly how she felt: cracked at the edges, running on caffeine and raw nerves.

She splashed water on her face, once, twice  then reached into the cabinet behind the mirror. The orange bottle was already there, waiting.

Adderall.

Her name on the label. The prescription was renewed 2 weeks ago and the bottle was almost empty. It was supposed to help her stay focused, organized, “level,” whatever that meant. It used to help. Before.

She tapped two pills into her palm.

Held them there.

The glass sat on the sink, half-full. Her hand hovered. The moment stretched.

Her breath caught.

She didn’t want to feel focused. She didn’t want to keep going like this was normal.

She wanted answers. She wanted Peter.

Her hand trembled. She looked down at the pills, her other hand gripping the glass like a lifeline. Then, with a quiet sigh, she tipped her palm over the sink and poured them back into the bottle.

MJ sank to the tile floor, knees folded under her, hands gripping the edge of the sink. The cold porcelain pressed into her skin. She dropped her head. Tried to breathe.

Then she cried.

Not loud. Not messy. Just soft and shaking, like a pressure valve finally giving way. She tried to keep it quiet, like Peter might hear her from wherever he was and she didn’t want him to know she’d broken.

How could you do this?

The thought hit before she could stop it. It made her flinch.

How could you leave us like this?

May, who still checked your bed every morning.
Miles, who was out there every night, bleeding to live up to a legacy.
Harry, who kept calling like it was still her job to hold everyone together.

She pressed her forehead to the cold porcelain, whispered into the silence:

“If you’re dead, just be dead. If you’re not… what the hell, Peter?”

Her voice cracked on his name.

She didn’t want to blame him. But she had to. Just a little. Because the alternative, that something terrible had happened, that he never had a choice would crush her.

Blaming him gave her a reason to stay angry. And anger kept her upright.

She stood slowly, wiped her face with a towel, and looked at herself in the mirror again.

Mirror in perfect condition but the reflection still cracked, but standing.

She picked up her phone. Stared at Harry’s not again. Then, finally, clicked messages, searched for Harry Osborn, and tapped out a reply:

Okay. Let’s talk. Tomorrow. Noon. My place.

Chapter Text

December, 12 months since Peter’s disappearance

JOHNNY:

The kitchen was filled with the kind of quiet that only happens when no one wants to be the first to speak.

Ben stirred a pot of chili on the stove, mumbling to himself about seasoning. Reed was tinkering with something small and metal at the table, not because it was urgent, but because his hands didn’t know how to be still anymore. Sue was setting the table, careful, methodical.

Johnny leaned against the counter, arms folded, watching them all move like planets stuck in orbit, the kind of rhythm that forms after loss, when everything else has kept turning.

No one mentioned the date. No one had to.

Twelve months since Peter disappeared. A year since he swung off into the city like he always did, except that time, he didn’t come back.

The world kept spinning, like it always does. Villains didn’t pause. Buildings didn’t stop burning. People still needed saving.

But something had shifted in the air, in the way time passed.

Peter had always brought light into a room, not the kind that flashed or demanded attention, but something warmer. A steady burn. You only noticed it when it was gone. Like realizing you were cold and not knowing when the heat shut off.

They still talked about him sometimes. Quietly. Jokes passed between bites of dinner, memories wrapped in soft laughter. No one said “he’s gone.” They didn’t have to. The silence said it louder than words ever could.

Johnny found himself smiling at a story Sue told about Peter trying to explain TikTok to Reed like it was a physics experiment. Ben laughed, shaking his head, muttering “Kid was a dork,” and everyone nodded, and for a moment, Peter was here with them again, right there, sitting in the empty chair, rolling his eyes and pretending to be offended.

That’s what they had now. Echoes of what it was like when Peter was here with them.

Later, after the others had drifted off to their own corners of the night, Johnny stood in his room, bathed in the soft glow of city lights leaking through the window.

He opened a drawer he hadn’t touched in months.

It was buried at the bottom, under old t-shirts and workout gear, folded like it still mattered.

Peter’s shirt.

He held the shirt for a long time before putting it on.

It was thin, soft, stretched out from too many nights on Peter’s back. One of those Midtown High band tees, long out of rotation, barely holding together at the seams. Faded lettering across the chest, a rip at the collar, Peter had worn it every time he crashed at the Baxter Building. Said it was the only shirt he ever actually relaxed in.

Johnny pulled it over his head, smoothed it down.

It didn’t smell like Peter anymore, not really. Just dust and drawer-lint. But it still felt like him.

Still felt like back then.

He stepped onto the balcony. The December wind bit at his arms, and without thinking, he sparked. Flame ran up his legs and across his shoulders in a low burn, enough to lift him, not enough to scorch.

He took off into the night sky, flying low over the river. Past bridges, rooftops, a hundred places he and Peter used to race through like kids in a playground built for gods.

He was halfway to the statue before he smelled it.

The faint, bitter tang of melting fabric. The tight tug of scorched cotton against his ribs.

He looked down mid-flight and saw the shirt disintegrating in pieces, wind and fire tugging it apart thread by thread. He could’ve extinguished himself. Could’ve dropped altitude, gone cold, flown slower.

He didn’t.

He just closed his eyes and kept going. Tears never materializing due to the heat.

By the time he landed on the Statue of Liberty, the shirt was gone. The last wisps of it had burned away in the wind, left behind somewhere above the East River, scattered across the skyline like ash.

He stood there, bare-chested and still glowing faintly in the cold.

For a moment, he didn’t move. Didn’t speak.

Then he looked up, out into the sky, and whispered

“Where are you, Peter?”

Silence. Just wind through scaffolding and steel.

His voice cracked as he said it again, softer this time.

“You didn’t even say goodbye.”

He sank down onto the edge of the statue’s crown, arms wrapped around his knees, fire fading from his skin.

The cold air nipped at his now shirtless torso.

Maybe the burn hadn’t been an accident. Maybe he needed it to happen.

Because something had to give. Something had to let go.

And if it had to be that shirt, that last piece of memory, so be it.

He didn’t have answers. He didn’t have closure. But he had this.

The wind, the cold, the quiet. And the memory of Peter’s laugh still echoing in his head.

Chapter Text

June, 18 months since Peter’s disappearance

MAY:

It was a clear day, which felt wrong somehow.

May Parker had spent months waiting for the sky to mourn. For a thunderstorm. For rain that stung like consequence. But today, the sun came out, unbothered. The sky was soft and blue. The air held that early-summer warmth that made the city feel like it was waking up again.

Peter would have made a joke about that. Something like “Good weather for a funeral, huh?” with that crooked half-smile of his, the one that always came just before he tried to pretend he wasn’t hurting.

The service was held in the small park near Queens Boulevard, the one Peter used to run through as a kid, before school, after patrol, whenever he needed to breathe. It was small and quaint. Not too popular amongst the locals. May had picked it for him. Not a church. Not some massive stone structure with marble columns and flags at half-mast. Just a large patch of grass and trees, the sound of traffic in the distance, and some of the people he helped sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with the people who tried to save him.

It didn't take long for some to connect the dots about Peter and Spider-Man. A hot shot photographer who would take up close pictures of a particular masked vigilante gone the same day as the aforementioned Spider-Man. A few select, intelligent few who had reached out to May.

They were all there. Mary Jane, red-eyed but solid. Miles, sitting stiff in the front row, hands clenched in his lap. Gwen, quiet, hair tucked behind her ear like she was trying to disappear. Johnny and Sue. Reed and Ben. Tony, with sunglasses that didn’t hide the shame in his posture. A few other Avengers. 

The few civilians that had figured Peter and Spider-Man out, enough to count on one hand, were here as well. Which she hadn't expected given the fact she hadn't really advertised at all, The family physician Peter once pulled from a burning building, Peter’s physics teacher from Midtown High, the teenage girl from downstairs, clutching a worn Spider-Man plush she had crocheted after Peter saved from an assault. 

Most of the crowd was other heroes, out of costume.

And Harry. Standing off to the side, hands in his pockets, like he wasn’t sure if he had the right to be here at all.

When May stepped up to speak, the breeze settled. The air changed. Not a silence of respect, something more electric. Like the city itself was holding its breath.

She didn’t have a speech prepared. That wasn’t her way. She looked out over the crowd, saw familiar faces, and then saw the gaps between them. The ones who should’ve been there. The ones who never were.

Her voice was steady.

“Thank you all for coming. I know how hard it is to show up for something you hoped you’d never have to.”

She paused. Looked at the grass. Looked back up.

“It’s been a year and a half since my nephew, Peter Parker, disappeared. Eighteen months without answers. Without confirmation. Without peace. Some of you might think it’s too early, or too late, to be doing this. Maybe you’re right. But I needed to say goodbye. And I needed to do it properly. For him.”

She swallowed, breath catching just once.

“Peter didn’t want a legacy. He didn’t want statues, or headlines, or medals. He wanted to help people. That was it. That’s what made him special. Not the suit. Not the powers. Him. He was kind, even when the world wasn’t. Especially when the world wasn’t.”

Her eyes scanned the crowd. Some people looked away. Others stared at her, bracing for what they knew was coming.

“He carried so much. Most of you will never understand how much. He fought battles none of us ever saw, and still showed up to class on time. Still called me after a long day to say goodnight. Still made sure the people around him laughed, even when he didn’t feel like laughing.”

“Peter helped people. All kinds. Big and small. Rich and poor. Super or not. And he did it alone for almost 5 years.”

There was a beat. Just long enough to sting.

“But when he needed help… a lot of you weren’t there.”

The words landed like a pin dropping in a silent room.

She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t have to. It was the quiet that made it hurt.

“He never blamed you for that. Never said a word. Not to me. Not to anyone. He just kept going. Kept helping. Because that’s who he was. Your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.”

The words cracked at the edges. She let them.

“He believed in you. All of you. Even when you didn’t believe in him.”

Tony Stark’s jaw flexed. Reed lowered his head. Steve’s lips pursed.

“You might’ve treated him like a kid when it was convenient. Maybe like a soldier when it wasn’t. You gave him just enough to keep him going and never asked what it cost him. And now…”

She shook her head. Her voice softened.

“Now he’s gone. Maybe not dead. Maybe not gone forever. But gone, just the same.”

The wind moved again, light and restless.

“I know some of you are still hoping he’s out there. That he’s hiding, or healing, or working on something bigger than we can understand. And maybe that’s true. Maybe he’s still helping people, in his own way. Maybe not as Spider-Man. Maybe just as Peter.”

Her voice caught again, then steadied.

“But whatever the truth is… I know this, my boy is resting now. Whether that means he's at peace, or just taking a breath somewhere far from here… I know he’s not hurting. I have to believe that. Or I won’t be able to breathe either.”

She took a step back from the podium, letting the silence stretch.

“He was my son. Maybe not fully by blood, but by love. And he deserved better than what this world gave him. But I’m proud of him. More than I could ever say.”

Her fingers curled around the edge of the podium.

“Thank you for coming. I hope you carry him with you. I hope strive you do better daily, for the next kid who wears a mask trying to help people.”

She looked in Miles’s direction quickly, giving him a small discreet smile.

And with that, she stepped away. No tears. No collapse. Just quiet strength, the kind Peter inherited from her without even realizing it.

The people stood in stillness. The sky remained clear.

No thunder. No lightning. Just silence.

And a city that would never forget the boy who gave everything and asked for nothing.

After the crowd had dispersed, there were some remaining folded programs no one quite knew what to do with, May stood alone beneath the elm tree near the edge of the park.

She was watching the wind move through the leaves when she heard footsteps behind her, deliberate, measured. She didn’t turn around. She knew who it was.

Steve Rogers stopped a few paces back, posture straight, hands clasped in front of him. Tony Stark stood beside him, silent, sunglasses off now, the lines in his face drawn tight.

It was Steve who spoke first.

“May… I just wanted to say how sorry I am. For everything.”

Tony cleared his throat, eyes downcast.

“Me too. I… I should’ve done more. I should’ve been looking out for him more.”

May didn’t answer right away. She looked out over the park, where Peter’s makeshift memorial now sat, candles, flowers, photos, a drawing of Spider-Man in crayon taped to a park bench.

“You’re not the only ones,” she said quietly. “But I appreciate the honesty.”

Steve stepped forward, not too close.

“He was a good man. Brave. Selfless. Smarter than most people in the room. I think…we forgot he was just a kid.”

“We didn’t forget,” May said, turning toward them at last. “We knew.”

Tony flinched, but didn’t argue.

“You let him carry a lot of weight because he was willing. I understand.” She whispered.

Her voice wasn’t sharp. It wasn’t angry. It was just tired. Honest in a way that made Tony shift in place and Steve lower his eyes.

“Apologizing to me doesn’t help Peter,” she added. “But I understand. Guilt has to go somewhere.”

The words hung heavy in the space between them. No one moved.

“He would’ve forgiven you,” she said. “He’d look at you, at both of you, and tell you it was okay. That you did your best. That you were good men.”

She looked straight at Tony now.

“He would’ve meant it.”

Tony swallowed hard. His voice, when it came, was raw.

“We were supposed to protect him.”

“Yes…maybe,” May said gently, nodding. “You were should’ve acknowledged him. The protecting part… Peter had that handled mostly on his own.”

Steve nodded slowly, hands still folded, like he was standing at attention at a grave that hadn’t been dug.

“If there’s ever anything we can do—”

May shook her head.

“Keep going. Like I said before. That’s all. The next kid. The next quiet one who shows up, wants to help, and doesn’t ask for anything in return. Look out for them.”

She didn’t wait for their reply. She turned back toward the elm tree and walked toward the bench beneath it, where someone had left Peter’s old camera. She picked it up gently, brushing dust from the lens.

Behind her, Tony and Steve stood in silence.

Chapter Text

December, 2 years since Peter’s disappearance

HARRY:

Peter’s name didn’t come up much anymore.

Not on the news. Not in late-night conversations. Not even among the people who used to orbit him like satellites. Somewhere along the way, the silence had become routine. The world had moved on, gently, quietly, without fanfare.

There was a new Spider-Man now, younger, sharper, still learning but confident in a way that made the city believe again. The one who used to swing beside the other one. The one he knew to be Miles Morales. Filling shoes no one said out loud were once Peter’s. But everyone knew.

And Harry? Harry was… happy.

That surprised him sometimes.

He was two years older. Running Oscorp now, really running it. The board answered to him. He’d cleaned house, shut down the shady R&D projects, redirected funding toward medicine, green energy, clean tech. He had a team of engineers working on a limb regeneration program that could change lives. Was changing lives.

People looked at him now like he was doing something good. Something real. And for once, he believed them.

And then there was MJ.

They’d been together for three months. It happened slowly, then all at once, coffee that turned into a walk, that turned into dinner, that turned into her sleeping over and waking up in his arms like it had always been that way. They were careful at first. Careful not to name the thing between them. Careful not to say what they both knew.

That Peter had loved her. That she had loved him. That maybe she still did.

Harry didn’t pretend otherwise. He’d loved Peter too. Not the way MJ had, maybe. But fiercely. Deeply. The kind of love that tangled with resentment, with competition, with history. The kind of love that left a crater in your chest when it was gone.

There were nights he watched her sleep beside him, her hand resting lightly on his chest, and felt like a thief in someone else’s house. Like he’d broken in and made himself comfortable in a life that was meant for someone else.

He never said that out loud. He didn’t need to. She understood. And maybe that was why it worked. Because there were two Peter-shaped holes in their hearts, and they fit together in the middle.

They never tried to fill them. They just carried them.

Harry stared out the wide windows of his Oscorp office, the skyline stretching out like a painting. The city below bustled on as usual, never slowing down, never looking back. Just like everyone else.

He sipped his coffee and pulled up a quarterly report. Green numbers. Upward trends. Praise from the board. Mentions in Forbes and Wired. A legacy being built, one that wasn’t tied to his father, or to Peter. Something his.

And still, sometimes… it didn’t feel like enough.

There were moments when he’d catch a glimpse of red and blue against the sky and his chest would tighten instinctively,  a flicker of hope that never stopped flickering. He knew it wasn’t Peter. He knew Peter was gone. But knowing didn’t stop the reflex.

Maybe it never would.

But he was okay now. Really okay.

He loved Mary Jane. And she loved him.

Oscorp was a force for good.

He hadn’t had a drink in over a year.

He went to therapy. Once every 2 weeks. He talked about the guilt, the anger, the loss. He talked about Peter. About their childhood. About all the times he thought Peter would come back, just show up one day, suit half-ripped, eyes tired, with some excuse and a dumb grin.

He talked about the moment he stopped waiting.

He talked about what came next.

That evening, he walked home with flowers in hand. MJ liked lilies. Not roses, too dramatic. Too much pressure. Lilies were quiet and graceful and didn’t demand attention. She once said they felt “human.” He didn’t ask what that meant, but he never forgot it.

She met him at the door with bare feet and her hair up, soft music playing in the background. He kissed her cheek. She smiled like she meant it. They ate dinner on the couch, her feet tucked under his legs, and talked about nothing.

And when she looked at him that night, her eyes glassy but full, he felt it again, the weight, the love, the absence, all folded into one long breath.

They didn’t talk about Peter. They didn’t have to.

But when they fell asleep that night, Harry whispered something into the dark. Not to MJ. Not to himself.

To Peter.

“I’m happy. Just thought you should know.”

And he meant it. He really did.

Even if it still hurt.

Chapter Text

June, 2 years and 6 months since Peter’s disappearance

GWEN:

Gwen Stacy never expected to be her own boss by twenty-four.

But here she was, standing in a minimalist office with her name on the wall and a prototype cube freezing a human organ sample at precise preservation temperature in a climate-controlled display case. The press had eaten it up. Stacy CryoTech is the future of biomedical logistics. Stark-backed startup making preservation affordable. Words like genius and trailblazer had started getting thrown around.

She didn’t flinch at them anymore. She earned this.

Her startup was real. Her product was real. Her ethics were written into the contracts and signed in ink. No price hikes. No patents hoarded by corporations. Medicine saved lives. It shouldn’t bankrupt the people it was supposed to save. That was the promise she made in every pitch. That was the line she didn’t let anyone cross. Not Stark. Not the investors. Not herself.

She was proud of it.

And she hated how finding one old file could bring all of that pride to a halt.

It had been a long day. She’d been clearing space on her laptop, deleting backups and archived docs, when she stumbled on a folder buried in her high school drive.

Cryo Core – Concepts.

Inside were dozens of early notes, sketches, scanned equations scribbled on notebook paper. Some of them were hers. Most were Peter’s.

She froze.

There, in messy handwriting and half-baked math, was the thing they worked on for two weeks straight their junior year. After school, in Peter’s bedroom, late into the night with her legs curled up on his bed and him typing on his cracked laptop, muttering about ice conductivity and storage decay. It was all right there.

Notes on thermal disruption. Her comments in the margins. His responses. And then, in bold: Stability component, ask Bobby?

Gwen blinked.

She hadn’t known then. Hadn’t made the connection.

Peter meant Bobby Drake. Iceman.

Peter knew mutants. Trusted them. Worked with them. He’d kept that part of his life compartmentalized. Not because he didn’t trust her, but because he was always trying to protect people. Even from the truth. Even from himself.

The screen blurred a little. She wasn’t crying. Not yet. But it felt like time had folded in on itself. Like she was seventeen again. Like she could look up and hear Peter’s laugh and see him balancing a cup of instant noodles on his chest while ranting about cryogenic latency curves.

God, she loved him.

So much. So fully. She’d never said it enough.

Then she remembered the bridge.

She remembered the snap. Not her spine, thank God, but something in her back. Sharp and white-hot as she was thrown from the arch and caught mid-fall by the wrong angle of a web line. It wasn’t Peter’s web that hurt her. It was Norman’s impact. The Goblin. His madness.

She was lucky to walk again.

Luckily her compressed vertebrae had healed, her legs had come back to her.

But Peter never forgave himself.

He stayed with her through the worst of it. Physical therapy. Recovery. The long months of limping and stretching and relearning balance. And then, one day, ten months in, he was gone.

He broke up with her in her living room. Said he couldn’t do it anymore. He explained that he was scared he’d get her hurt again. She’d called him a coward. Told him loving meant more than a potential risk. He’d nodded. Then left anyway.

He moved on to Mary Jane before the next winter.

That part had stayed with her. Not because she hated MJ. She didn’t. But because it felt like proof that Peter didn’t leave her to protect her. He left her because he couldn’t handle the guilt.

It may have been unfair to Peter to think of it that way, but at the time she couldn’t care less.

She tried to move on. She really did everything she could to not think or dwell on what could have been.

But then he disappeared.

And the closure she thought she might one day get vanished with him.

No answers or apologies. Just lingering silence that permeated through her mind.

That was the worst part. Not the heartbreak or the resentment. The unfinished sentence of it all.

She stared at the screen. At Peter’s notes and her own notes. Side by side.

And then she saved the file to a new folder. “Legacy Notes.”

She didn’t want to pretend it hadn’t happened. She didn’t want to erase him. She just didn’t want him sneaking up on her anymore. She wanted a place to keep him that made sense. A folder she could choose to open. Not one that opened itself or by accident.

She leaned back in her chair and let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

Outside, the sun was setting. Humid. Quiet. Clean. The kind of June that made the city feel like it was trying to start over.

She smiled a little.

Peter would have loved that.