Carol was the sort of person that appreciated simplicity.
Her life was so, so complicated. Had been since she accidentally obtained her powers and spent the succeeding decades fighting intergalactic space battles and oh, you know, saving entire planets.
Sometimes the pleasantries of humanity were lost on her. It had been a long time since she truly felt like Carol Danvers from Boston. The fact that she hadn’t taken the time to visit the place of her birth was borderline criminal; she spent enough time in the American Northeast to have justified a trip, seeing as New York was constantly under attack for some reason.
That’s where she was now, had been since the final snap and Thanos’s demise. New York had grown on her like a smelly, overpopulated, culturally diverse fungus. A middle-floor apartment in a Brooklyn Brownstone had been her refuge since the start. Her cat, Mittens, a tabby she’d found limping down an alley, was great company and reminded her just enough of Goose to give her the sort of sentimental ache you got when you were reminded of someone long gone.
It was a Tuesday morning, a snowy one, thick flakes falling from the sky in a slow cascade. You would think with the way she could traverse space without a proper suit she’d be impervious to the cold, but her toes were still numb inside her boots. She’d spent a good majority of the morning jumping from bookstore to bookstore and stocking up on used copies, the ones with yellowed margins and permanently dog-eared pages. She had a decent haul and the tote bag on her shoulder bumped against her hip as she walked.
She could go for a bite to eat, something sweet, maybe something to force some warmth into her veins. There were a few good options; a Starbucks on the corner, a convenience store to her right, a sit-down restaurant of some sort to her left.
A bell jingled somewhere up the block and Carl watched as a couple walked out of a small diner she hadn’t noticed before, to-go cups of coffee clutched in gloved hands. The windows were covered in drawn-on designs depicting a christmas tree, a menorah, a string of lights, some other symbols representing the joy of the season. Carol approached the windows. It wasn’t busy. There were several booths open along the walls, the stools at the bar almost completely unoccupied except for a young man with dark hair talking to the teenage-employee behind the counter. It also looked warm, and that above all else is what coaxed Carol into the restaurant and into a booth in the far corner.
The girl behind the counter must have been the only person working in the dining room, because she motioned to her friend that she’d be back in a minute and made her way over to Carol’s seat with a menu.
“Hi,” the girl said, voice low and monotone but not unpleasant. Just straight-to-business. “I’m Michelle. Welcome in. Can I get you a drink?”
“A coffee with cream would be great,” Carol said, eyeing the menu and picking something at random so she could make this girl’s life easier and order everything in one fail swoop. “And I’ll have the pancake breakfast. The regular sides are fine.”
Michelle took the menu from Carol’s outstretched hand. “Gonna warn you right now, Antonio is on the griddle and he cross contaminates like crazy. The eggs always taste like the sausage patties.”
Carol laughed, and the corner of Michelle’s mouth twitched upward. “Fine with me. It’s all going to the same place.”
“Alright, then. It’ll be out soon.”
“Thank you.”
Michelle returned to her place at the counter and her conversation with her friend. They talked animatedly, the boy laughing at whatever joke she’d just told and responding with wide, swooping hand gestures.
For a while Carol just enjoyed the ambiance of the place. The leather of the booths was worn, the air smelled strongly of coffee, and the music playing quietly from a single speaker in the corner reminded her of her high school years. She allowed herself to zone out and stare at a string of obviously dying Halloween lights hung above the cash register, ones with little witches in pointed hats.
She chose a book from her bag at random, Dune, a sci-fi one a shop owner recommended to her, and flipped to the first page. Eventually her coffee and food came, and she was reading while simultaneously taking a careful sip of her freshly brewed coffee when the bell above the door jingled and a customer walked in.
they approached the counter with familiar ease. Michelle met them at the register and said, “The usual, Peter?”
The patron, Peter, offered a closed-lipped smile. “Yes ma’am, thank you.”
She entered the total into the till and the cash drawer popped open. Peter handed her his money, some crumpled paper bills, and she gave him his change. “I’ve got a name tag for a reason, Peter. You’re allowed to call me Michelle.”
“A-alright then, Michelle.”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t sound so afraid. You’re here every day. You’ve earned use of my name.”
Michelle left Peter at the register to go prepare his order. He stood by, hands in his pockets, eyes roving the restaurant to pass the time.
Eventually his eyes skimmed over Carol and his calm, if not a bit awkward, demeanor instantly flipped. He looked nervous.
Carol was suddenly aware of the fact that she’d been staring like a creep and quickly looked away, making her seem even more creepy, and tucked into her eggs. Michelle was right– they tasted strongly of the sausage on the other side of her plate.
Footsteps sounded, sneakers squeaking against tile, and Carol looked up to see Peter standing a few feet away from her table. “Dune, huh?”
She just looked at him, questioning, then realized he was referring to the book she had propped open with a pepper shaker.
“Oh, uh, yeah. It’s been–”
“Horribly confusing?” Peter asked with a huffed laugh. He seemed to recognize that he’d interrupted her and tried to play it off.
He’d been eyeing her since he walked over. Not in a rude way. More like he was taking in the pieces of her, forming a coherent picture, making sure she was real. His flustered demeanor was sort of endearing. She knew he was just trying to make conversation and appreciated the effort. “Definitely. I’m not one to judge a book from its start but this one isn’t making it easy.”
“I’ll never turn down a good book but I’m more of a movie person, I think,” Peter said. “I’ve seen Star Wars more times than I can count.”
Carol…Carol felt…weird. Off-kilter. Like she’d been here before, had this conversation already. “Oh yeah? I have too, I think, but now that I mention it, I can’t quite remember the last time I sat down and watched them all.”
Peter nodded and tugged absentmindedly on the strap of his backpack. He was still looking at her but now it was with a slightly drawn face. He seemed to be reliving something that wasn’t entirely pleasant.
“Peter,” Michelle called from the register, a cup of coffee and a bagged muffin held high. “Order’s up.”
“Ah, right, okay! I’m…I’m coming.” He turned back toward the table. “Nice talking to you, Carol.”
“Yeah, you too.”
He offered a stiff wave and went to grab his food from Michelle.
There was something about him that wasn’t sitting right. Maybe it’s that someone so young was mature enough to start a polite conversation with a stranger. Maybe it’s that a teenager had ordered a plain black coffee. Or maybe it was the way that, despite the snow quickly piling up outside, he was wearing nothing for the weather but a threadbare knitted cap and a thinning coat that had obviously seen better days.
He grabbed his order and left the diner without much fanfare. The hanging door bell signaled his exit.
Nice talking to you, Carol.
It wasn’t until the door shut behind him that Carol realized he knew her name.
She never told him her name.
The urgency that slammed down into her gut was heavy. She had to catch up to him, talk to him, ask him what the hell was going on and why she felt like he’d suddenly filled a gap in her brain she hadn’t even realized was there.
She scrambled out of her booth and was making her way to the door when she remembered she had a plate of uneaten and unpaid food sitting on her table. Michelle looked at her like she was crazy when Carol slammed her wallet down on the counter, said, “Collateral, I’ll be right back,” and bolted outside onto the sidewalk.
Peter was walking east, backpack slung over a shoulder. He took tentative steps on the ice slicked sidewalk and his slow pace gave Carol plenty of time to jog toward him.
She felt a little bad when she planted herself in front him so quickly that he choked on his drink.
“Oh! Uh, hi! C-can I help you?” He wiped some coffee from his lip with the sleeve of his coat.
“You’re Peter.”
He blinked. “Yes?”
“You don’t sound sure.”
“I am, I am. But, uh, why do you ask?”
Carol’s powers had always been a swirling mass within her, around her. Summoning them was like breathing—natural, and comforting. They were hers. Belonged to her in an instinctual way.
That’s how Peter felt. Like he was a piece of something she used to have but didn’t. The empty hole he once occupied sat in that place in her mind where her powers and her biology and her memories combined. There was Maria, hers and Carol’s nights at the bar. There was Goose tearing apart mouse shaped toys with strength a cat shouldn’t have.
And there, right in the inbetween, was something missing. Someone took it from her.
“I know you. Or did, at one time.”
Carol didn’t expect for the fall of Peter’s face to be so obvious. He looked crushed. His polite curiosity dropped to a gutted grimace.
He managed a small, weak smile. “No, I don’t think so. It was nice talking to you, Carol, but I really need to—“
“See? There! You know my name.”
“You’re kind of a superhero. A lot of people know your name.”
“No, no, they don’t. Especially not my first name. Not unless we worked together. Or fought together.”
“I’m sorry, please, just let me pass.” He was pleading with her. Not pushing, not getting angry.
Carol crossed her arms. “Tell me the truth. The honest truth. And I won’t bother you again, alright? Who are you?”
He just looked at her, a thick aura of defeat surrounding him. “I’m Peter Parker. But I don’t suppose that’ll mean anything to you.”
Smoke. A lot of it. Clashing, never-ending noise. Bellowing voices and screaming and armor against armor and fallen soldiers and good men and women laying down their lives to get the gauntlet away from Thanos. A game of hot potato, passing it back and forth and up and around, doing everything possible to keep it away from him.
Carol joined the fight late. Landed to find a young, bloodied boy huddled in a blown out rock with the gauntlet clutched in his arms. He almost looked crazed; exhausted, probably in pain, trying to sort out who was enemy and who was friend. After all, he was holding the literal fate of the world in his hands. Hey, Peter Parker. You got something for me?
This...This was Peter Parker. Spider-Man Peter Parker. She knew him, knew his apartment, his aunt, his struggles with mental health, his solar system project for science class.
“Oh my god. You’re Peter Parker.”
“Yeah, that’s what I— oh, uh, okay.” His breath left him in a mighty huff as Carol wrapped him in a hug, trying her best not to spill the coffee he was still holding.
“I remember,” she whispered over his shoulder. They were the same height now. He’d grown. “I remember you.”
Peter pulled back out of the hug to search her face for signs of a lie. He apparently found none. “You do?” He looked up into the gray winter sky, brown eyes trained on the heavens like he expected them to break open and something to crawl out. “This isn’t some sick cosmic punishment, right? Because I can’t take it.”
“No, no, it’s real, it’s real. Oh my god, Peter, where have you been? Why didn’t I remember you?”
“Because no one does. You’re not even supposed to remember me.”
Carol took a step back. “I don’t understand.”
“Yeah,” Peter said, smiling in a frozen sort of way that implied he was so freaked out he didn’t know what to do with himself. “Me either. I mean, seriously. No one remembers me. But you see me once in a diner and all the memories come back?”
“You still haven’t told me why they left in the first place.”
Peter ignored her. “I was under the impression the memories aren’t just suppressed, they’re erased. Poof!” He threw his hands out to his sides. His coffee sloshed out of the small opening in the lid. “No more Peter Parker in history, this one or any others. But here you are after a year of living in a world where I didn’t exist until now, and suddenly, of all people, you know who I am.”
Carol was too stunned to properly formulate a response. “We, uh,” she said dumbly, “worked on your science project together.”
Peter laughed. It was sort of hysterical. “I can’t, I don’t know. I don’t know what’s happening.”
In an attempt to ground Peter just as much as herself, Carol laid a solid hand on his arm and squeezed. The motion caught his attention and he finally made eye contact. Carol made sure to let him see the sheer openness there. “That makes two of us. How about we go back to the diner and figure it out. Okay? Just you and me and eggs that taste like sausage.”
Peter wrinkled his nose. “What?”
“You haven’t had the cross-contaminated eggs?”
“I can barely afford the coffee and the muffin.”
“Well I’m telling you now that it’s a surprisingly good combo. C’mon, I’ll give you a bite of mine.”
Despite the fact that Peter looked like he needed a good meal, he only pushed the sausage flavored eggs around the plate of leftover food Carol gave him. She didn’t blame him; after the lengthy story he just told, she wouldn’t feel like eating either.
“So you’re telling me,” Carol said, palms flat on the table in a pointless effort to stabilize herself, “Your identity was exposed.”
“Yeah.”
“And because of that, you and your friends didn’t get into MIT.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And that somehow led to Doctor Strange having to wipe the memory of Peter Parker from the minds of everyone in the multiverse who knew who you were.”
“Basically.”
“Peter, thats…”
He dropped his fork and held up a hand. “Don’t say it. I know I messed up. Big time.” He glanced over his shoulder where Michelle was wiping down the counter with a rag that had seen better days. “I don’t need to be told that.”
“I was going to say that’s lonely. God, Pete.”
His cheeks went red. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“No, but it doesn’t mean you deserved it.” She took in the way he hunched in on himself. It had probably been a long, long time since someone truly cared about his well-being. “What’ve you been doing all this time?”
“Spider-Man stuff, mostly. Studying for the GED. I take it in a couple weeks.”
Carol’s heart shattered in her chest. Even as a teenage vigilante, Peter Parker was a star student. And because some crazed villain screwed him over he didn’t even get to graduate high school? “Aren’t you some sort of super genius? Why do you need to study?”
“It’s not about the test content, Carol, it’s about the format—“
“Okay, okay, whatever. I get it.”
Neither of them spoke for a moment. Peter kept sneaking glances across the table at her like he couldn’t believe she was really there, that he was speaking to someone who remembered him.
She had so many things she wanted to ask him. They all formed a congealed ball of speech on her tongue and the only thing she could push out was, “Where have you been staying? Surely not with May, if she doesn’t know you anymore.”
Whatever tenuous friendly atmosphere they’d created shattered. The sheer mourning that emanated from Peter was a slap to the face. “May, um. God, I don’t think I’ve ever said this out loud. May—“
“You don’t have to, I think I—“
“No, no, it’s alright, I have to.” Peter took a deep breath. “May died. The night Strange erased everyone’s memories. I held her as she went.”
“I’m...I’m so sorry.” She was probably the only person who’d said that to him. Said it recently, at least. She didn’t bother telling him things would get better, because they wouldn’t. A death like May’s would eat at him. Create a gaping hole in his chest he’d just have to learn to live with.
Peter nodded, like he couldn’t bring himself to say anything else. “Anyways, no, obviously not living with May. I’ve got a place.”
Carol’s eyebrows shot upward. “You do?”
“Not too far from here.”
“Can I see it?”
“It’s really nothing special.” Peter finally took a bite of the eggs. “Wow. These are basically just egg shaped sausage.”
“I’m not expecting a luxury high rise. I just want to see it.”
“Why? What does it matter? I’ve got a roof over my head. That’s enough.”
Twenty minutes later the two of them were standing in the doorway of Peter’s studio apartment.
A roof over his head was the only qualification she could give the place.
“I have a couch,” Carol said without thinking. “A really comfortable couch. Lots of leg room.”
Peter groaned and stepped inside. “This is why I didn’t want to show you. I knew you’d have something to say.”
“What? I can’t tell you I have a couch?”
“You’re only telling me because you think this place is a dump and you want me to abandon it for your sofa!”
“No I’m not, that’s…” That’s exactly why she told him that.
He motioned her forward. “Can you move so I can shut the door? You’re letting in the cold. Boiler’s broken.”
“It’s supposed to snow more tonight.”
“I have lots of blankets.”
“Peter.”
“Carol, stop, please.” He motioned to the apartment at large. Carol could see every wall from her place by the door. “This place isn’t exactly a gem. I know that. But it’s mine. So little is mine anymore. Don’t you see? I lost everything! My family, my friends. My home. This is the one thing I have for myself aside from Spider-Man. I’m not just going to leave because someone offered me a bed that wasn’t bought from Goodwill.”
He was right. He didn’t have much sense-of-self anymore, considering the fact that he was the only one who remembered himself and his achievements. Carol’s blatant disrespect of what had probably been a hard home to procure at seventeen years old wasn’t what he needed to hear.
“You’re right. I’m sorry. It really is impressive, Pete. That you put this together on your own.”
He bristled under the sudden praise, tense anger draining from his shoulders. He poked holes in the side of his now empty coffee cup.
“I’m proud of you. For having this place. And for fixing your mistakes, for still living a life.”
Suddenly there was five-feet-seven-inches of brunette teenager barreling into her. His arms wrapped around her back and she returned the hug in earnest, tucking her chin over his shoulder.
“You’re not supposed to remember,” he said into her coat. “Why do you remember?”
“I don’t know. But now that I do, you aren’t alone anymore.”
He squeezed her a little tighter. It was fine. She could handle it.
“Still proud of you and all, but please crash on my couch tonight. The temp’s gonna drop into the negatives.”
“Only if I get to cuddle with Mittens.”
“I offer you my couch and you steal my cat? Cruel, Parker.”
“No Mittens, no deal.”
“Fine. But I’ll warn you, she’s a morning ankle-biter.”