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He doesn’t try to go back to the apartment.
He’s pretty sure it won’t be his – if May is gone and everyone forgot he existed, then maybe it was never a Parker family residence at all. Or maybe May is on the record as a woman who lived there alone, once, and moved out a few months ago. He’s not sure.
And anyway, his new apartment is what he needs – four walls and a roof. He spends his first day as a renter scouring Facebook Marketplace for free stuff and ends up swinging across the city and back a few times. Instagram lights up the next day with videos of Spider-Man awkwardly flying across the city with a worn mattress. Someone comments that he must be helping out at a homeless shelter.
Once he has a lamp, a fridge, and the mattress, plus a hot plate, he’s satisfied.
***
He doesn’t have to worry about money – yet. For some reason, his debit card still has twelve and a half thousand dollars left on it, remnants from Tony’s will. Most of it had gone to May’s charity, but she’d held some back for tuition at Midtown. His apartment – granted to him by a definitely sketchy landlord who’s never going to pay back his security deposit – is twelve hundred dollars a month.
If he’s smart, maybe that twelve thousand can cover six months. Maybe. But his metabolism is fast, too fast, and Spider-Man needs more tech and bandages than your average New Yorker.
***
May is buried by her coworkers. Peter gets in a round of studying for his GEDs in the morning and turns up half an hour late on purpose, blending in with a crowd of mourners. Standing a hundred yards away in a trench coat mysteriously holding an umbrella would probably be more conspicuous than not.
It’s a small but tasteful event, full of pastel flowers and cursive fonts. Someone Peter recognizes vaguely from some event or other gives a speech about May full of vague praise for her generosity and not about her terrible cooking skills or her out of date music taste or her habit of swearing and then swearing at herself for swearing. As the funeral’s organizers throw white roses onto the casket, someone asks him who he is.
“I’m… her nephew,” he says. “From out of town. Estranged. Well, she was, from my parents.”
They bury his aunt in the corner of a quiet cemetery across town that he had no say in choosing, and he walks back to his apartment.
***
He spends two hundred dollars on his first new suit. Peter hasn’t made his own since just after the spider bite, not really – Stark technology was a hell of an easy upgrade. He hauls a shopping cart through Jo-Ann Fabrics with one hand and flips through a shopping list with the other; the lead cashier looks at him sideways while he asks questions about chafing and flexibility and heat.
Sewing machines are expensive, so he takes to the task with a needle and thread while speeding through YouTube history about himself, which he keeps having to click off of to go back to a tutorial about how to hand sew spandex. There’s no mention of Mysterio, predictably, but he’s surprised to learn that Spider-Man still saved the entire Midtown Tech debate team twice and had to clear his name after being accused of being a fraud by Mysterio. The rules of the spell seem to follow some sort of pattern of Occam’s Razor: the most convenient explanation is the one it skirts to hide his identity. Weirdly, Flash Thompson still claims Spider-Man fame. The spandex is proving annoyingly inconvenient to stitch together. He wonders how put-together New York needs Spider-Man to be. Happy would know, or make some sort of trite comment about it.
It’s around three in the morning, when he’s blasting ABBA and layering up on sweatshirts to beat the cold in his apartment from the broken heating system, trying to hot glue webbing onto a shoddy impression of a mask on a duct taped mannequin, that he loses it.
He’s going to run out of money. He’s going to run out of money and then he’s going to freeze to death in this apartment, and when he does the only person who will care is his landlord, who probably just doesn’t want a body stinking up the apartment.
He crashes on the floor while the chorus of Chiquitita bounces off the plaster. In the morning, he pulls himself together, goes out, and buys a sewing machine. Nothing is better, but it hurts less.
***
At five thousand dollars left, he passes his GED exam. Peter auto-applies for online jobs with one hand and swings across the city with another.
His first job is janitorial work, mopping the halls of a local high school for minimum wage four times a week. He swings in and out three or four times every night to break up a gang battle or thwart some rogue’s plans and goes home at six to get in several hours of sleep until his phone starts buzzing again. The science classroom is cold and dirty and he tries not to think very much when he’s picking gum out from underneath the desks.
Then the Scorpion and his gang hit an apartment building, clawing through metal and concrete and innocent families to get to a safe in a penthouse thirty-five floors up, and he’s gone until five A.M. dodging the stinger. Management finds forgotten soda stains in the hallway, and suddenly Peter’s applying for jobs again.
Late one night, he blinks and finds himself halfway through the application form for Empire State, writing about particle physics and his aunt’s death in the application essay. He hasn’t had to say anything about himself to anyone for months, and it reads as vague. He thinks it probably happened to someone else.
Financial aid is hard to get for someone without an existing birth certificate anyway, and he doesn’t have the time.
***
MJ’s Instagram doesn’t update for a long time. She had never been one to post, even before his life blew up, because Meta was running a psy-op, but occasionally there was the photo dump, with a caption like “update for the stalkers” or something. He checks it every night – and every day, and every hour probably, for weeks.
Ned posts over the years, all the time, about MIT and new tech happenings and cute dogs and Star Wars. Peter hasn’t been able to have enough time to watch anything longer than a twenty minute sitcom episode once a week, but he knows the entire plot of Andor back to front.
MJ’s first post after, on a July night when the AC is out again and he’s sweating through his sheets, is a sketchbook drawing of herself taken in the mirror. She’s holding the same pose she’s holding in the image.
“I burn my decency for someone else’s future!” yells Ned to his camera, flourishing a bathrobe dramatically to his iPhone camera ten feet away, a terrible impression of Stellan Skarsgard. “I burn my life –” the phone falls over – ”to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. And the ego that started this life will never have an… uh, what is it – mirror, or an audience, or –”
killer instinct, MJ’s caption reads.
Peter rolls over and feels both like he’s falling in an endless void and like he’s unable to move in any way that would matter at all.
***
He’s down to seven hundred dollars.
Peter googles “ways to make money near me fAST” and finds a plasma donation center nearby, then spends an afternoon with EV running his blood through a centrifuge to make sure he doesn’t accidentally give a random New Yorker the sudden ability to crawl up walls and eat their way through double their grocery budget. They promise him six hundred and fifty dollars if he gives eight times in the first month, and so he starts going in those early mornings on the walk back from the cemetery, trying to will the needles to break through his skin without first bending to the continued bafflement of the overworked nurses. It works, mostly, although he misses out on the last hundred dollars when he has to rip the IV out and scramble because Shocker is trying to rob the same bank for the third time in two weeks.
It’s freezing outside four donations before that when he meets Gian. Gian is probably in his forties and wears the same unreasonably looking fluffy red sweatshirt to every donation, which he insistently lends to Peter after watching him shiver his way through saline pumping back into his body. They don’t speak much of the same language, but they do both follow basketball, and they’re both there every Tuesday and Thursday morning, and soon they’re talking about the Knicks and arguing about local matches with hand gestures just as much as spoken words.
On Thanksgiving, they both turn up at the same time when the clinic is emptier than usual, and that’s when Peter knows Gian wouldn’t be here unless he was desperate. Later that day, Spider-Man comes to Gian’s apartment window with a turkey for the family.
He’s on a late night patrol a week later, trying to get the shakes out of his hands from drinking a four pack of Red Bull to stay awake, when he gets an alert.
By the time it’s at the apartment, it’s already in flames and Tarantula is holding Gian’s entire family hostage, trying to get some high-security prison codes or something. Peter doesn’t entirely remember. Or no. I care.
“That’s the problem with you, Spider-Man,” the villain laughs, after Peter’s pinned him to the wall and ushered the entire family out into the hallway while Gian’s wife bursts into tears, sobbing about eviction and not having insurance. “You don’t think like us. It’s why, no matter how fast you are, we’ll always have the edge.”
He doesn’t go back to the plasma clinic on Tuesdays or Thursdays again after that.
***
When he’s exhausted from running Doordash across the city all day, hanging onto three hours of sleep and four days late on rent, he goes back to May’s apartment.
It’s still there, which shouldn’t be jarring but somehow is, probably because he’d been trying very hard to pretend it was never there at all. A lamp is on in his old room, next to the brick wall he used to crawl up every night to sneak in – the day Ned found out – and there’s a little boy, building LEGOs.
It’s freezing outside, and his lip is cracked open from crashing into the side of a taxi earlier that day mid-swing. He doesn’t entertain the idea of going in, but he does pick a scab on his arm and imagine using his spare key in the door, walking in on people opening presents, the utter bewilderment and maybe a call to the cops. It is funny, that the spell had taken his photos and most of his stuff but not the spare key. Maybe he should interrogate it and ask it if it’s a sadist.
Peter wipes the blood off his lip. Some Christmas.
***
Sometimes, between exhausting shifts at jobs he’s always a few weeks away from losing, while eating ramen or hot pockets alone in his apartment or realizing even his local college applications would come out to jack shit because he doesn’t have a single extracurricular to his very insignificant name or driving a needle through his own skin to stitch his wounds shut at four in the morning or watching his teeth turn yellow in the mirror in the absence of any dental plan or trying not to disturb the attic asbestos and then googling the effects of asbestos thirty minutes later after inevitably crashing into it on his way through the window, he just thinks about how nice it was to have money. He knows he shouldn’t, because so many other people have it so much worse, so many other people haven’t even ever had enough money to miss having it, but he did and he does. He thinks about Tony, and then Happy, and he’s angry with both of them, and he knows Happy doesn’t even know he exists and his anger is irrelevant to him anyway, and Tony’s been dead for years and is buried out on some lake upstate, and Peter can’t even pay fifty dollars for a bus ticket or take the time to swing all the way there to tell him how angry he is. It’s not even their fault, anyway, it’s his, and it’s not even like it started with them, it started with May having enough to take care of him, and they never had a lot but it was enough to get him into Midtown on a scholarship, because he was smart, and he had records, and he was being taken care of, and he was someone, anyone at all.
***
Peter saves people. He saves cats out of trees and toddlers from burning buildings and pedestrians from New York taxis and street artists from subway tunnels and depressed people from sharp drops. He webs villains to cars and dodges police reports and cracks corny jokes to inquiring news cameras and tries to get straight answers out of henchmen behind bars.
None of it stops him from seeing them in his dreams every night. Ned trades handshakes with him and drowns in turns, or burns alive. MJ trips off the edges of buildings, gets shot, cracks dark one liners about the Black Dahlia murder, smiles sideways at him on the roof, kisses him, makes him promise to find her. He says he will. He promises.
“‘He told me that Spider-Man told him that there was a certain degree of responsibility for his own actions — that not to act was essentially to be credited for the outcome.’” Pepper Potts is on 60 Minutes in a pearl necklace, reminiscing. “‘I don’t know if that’s true, but I always thought it was noble.’”
May just dies, over and over and over again, except for when she looks at him coming through the window and asks him where he’s been, if he’s okay, what’s going on.
If you’re nothing without the suit, Tony said, then you shouldn’t have it.
Peter thinks that this probably isn’t what he meant.
He falls through New York sleet and tries to finish disappearing. His fingers press the web shooter instead.
***
Things get better. It takes time, but things get better. Peter learns how to manage a bank account that constantly wavers between being broke and almost broke, learns to get in at least six hours a night instead of four, invests in things like glass cleaner and remembers to periodically keep his place clean enough before he hits a bad spot and lets it all go again.
He gets way better at being Spider-Man, too — he’s not insecure in the suit any more, and he’s proud of it. He learns to throw quips at villains as fast as his webs and starts to look forward to fights with certain recurring felons, probably because that’s the only meaningful social interaction he has all day, but he’ll take it. It stings less to be fired at your job when you know it’s because you saved the entire store from one hooligan or other during your off hours. And he likes saving people. He does. He loves his city, which is why she can never know him enough to love him back.
His fears fade slowly. He’s faced almost everything life can throw at him at this point, and he’s still here, and if he dies it’ll probably be fast and violent instead of on the streets somewhere after getting kicked out of his apartment. Plus, Spider-Man can always start a GoFundMe even though it would probably break Peter’s ego. He hasn’t had to yet — he doesn’t want people like Gian thinking about his rent — but if he had to, he could.
He can handle almost anything life throws at him, and with that knowledge comes the realization that no matter what he loses, he’ll still be here, and it’ll never end.
He knows he can handle it, which is maybe the worst part.
***
“I don’t have anybody.”
***
He wonders what the line is between everybody forgetting he existed and just never having existed at all.
***
“You have me.”
***
Right after the universe had zippered shut again and an infinity of yellow light swallowed the world whole, he found himself standing on a street corner in Queens in his winter coat. He limped to the nearest bench and sat, staring into traffic, waiting for phone calls that never came. Later, he took the train to Coney Island, stared out at the ocean, ate a bodega sandwich.
Once, he'd tagged the Vulture to the wreckage of a plane here. The fire had felt like the end of the world. He misses it now. MJ told him once about Dante's Inferno, about the lowest layer of hell being frozen over, and he thinks he understands what she meant while he watches seabirds wheeling in the air.
If he's honest with himself, even then, before the letter and the coffee shop and everything that came after, he knew it was over.
When the bullet goes in, he feels like a loose end being tied off, but Jean is looking at him with huge blue eyes and he thinks that maybe he’s missing something.
Everything finally ends, and then it starts over. There’s a long night, and he sleeps, and then it’s morning.
***
When he limps back to his apartment, after the hospital, it’s just as quiet as it was before.
Peter looks at the light drifting through the window, dust specks dancing in the air – at the accumulated piles of trash and takeout boxes, the mattress on the floor, the mold in the corners of the room.
He sits down in the middle of it, in nowhere in particular, and breathes.
An hour or two later, there are several trash bags in the hallway and the floor has been swept. Peter is back in the middle of the room, building an X-Wing out of a brand new LEGO package, nursing a bullet wound, alive. He is half of what he used to be, but he thinks there might be another half of him there somewhere, waiting in the air of a summer alone on a rooftop to meet him. Maybe it already has.
***
When he looks out over the city, watching the sunset, he is lonely, and he is not alone.