The Cloak
Months later, at the Sanctum Santorum…
Strange watched silently from his window as a familiar shape slipped away into the night. His sharp eyes followed it into the clouds until it vanished from sight, moving away from Manhattan. He wasn’t alarmed or particularly worried, but he was definitely puzzled.
“You’ve noticed, too, huh?” came a gruff voice at his door.
Strange turned to see Wong leaning against his bedroom doorframe, still rubbing sleep from his eyes. “What, did you want me to report it to you or something, boss?”
Wong frowned and put his hand on his hips. Strange internally groaned, bracing himself for another lecture.
“You don’t think it’s newsworthy when your cloak sneaks out in the middle of the night? It’s stealing books from the library and carrying them to who-knows-where-“
“It’s not my pet,” Strange responded with a frown of his own, “I don’t control it, it has a will of its own. You know that.”
“But those are our books carrying millennia of knowledge, what if it’s just dropping them in the hands of an enemy-“
“No,” Strange responded quickly, turning his attention back to the window. It was a moonless night, and it seemed like his cloak preferred to sneak out during those nights where it was less likely to be spotted. “The cloak is loyal to me. It would never betray us.” His tone left no space for debate.
Wong’s brow furrowed and an unspoken question hung in the air. How do we know?
Strange sighed. “It comes back in the morning, it always has. It only leaves when it thinks I’m asleep and it even returns the books that it borrowed from the library. Do you think it’d take all those precautions if it wants to hurt me, or hurt us?”
Wong mulled this over, nodding a bit to himself as he considered the facts. “…Where do you think it’s going then?”
Strange shrugged. “If it keeps going in that direction? Queens, probably.”
Peter’s spider-sense gave him a split second warning, but he still startled out of light sleep at the polite knock on his window. He glanced at his window and a (now-rare) grin broke out on his face.“Cape-buddy!” He rolled out of bed, rushed to the window and slid up the bottom window pane to allow the familiar red cloak to fly in. “You brought me something else tonight?”
The cloak obviously didn’t answer, but it drifted to the middle of the room and dropped a heavy weight on the middle of the floor. It landed with a loud whump and sent papers -covered in hand-written diagrams and messy notes- flying in all directions.
Peter cringed as the mess on the floor got exponentially worse. He really needed to buy some tape and start using the walls. “Oh no please don’t do that, man, the neighbors are going to file another noise complaint.”
The cloak did a little twirl in midair, as if to say ‘too bad, not my problem’.
Peter approached the large tome cautiously and reverently picked it up, blowing dust off the front cover. “Wow, this is… Er, well, I have no idea what this is, but I guess it must be useful, huh?”
It felt weird talking to a floating cape thing, but he didn’t have anyone to talk to lately, so it felt… nice. It had been the biggest relief to realize Strange’s spell only affected living beings and not sentient objects. Not that he had a long list of sentient objects to befriend, of course, he just had this one -this big, red cloak that was far too big for him and only showed up once a month to drop a book for him to read in the middle of the night.
Peter didn’t understand, at first, but the cloak had a way of making him understand with nonverbal cues. It kept pointing to the books and then pointing to the ring that Peter had hidden under his pillow. It did this repeatedly until the boy understood that the cloak wanted him to learn how to use the ring.
Now they had developed this… unique friendship, of sorts. Arguably, it was the only friendship Peter had left.
Flipping on his one light -which was little more than a single light bulb in the ceiling- Peter settled on to the floor with the large tome on his lap. The cloak silently settled around his shoulders and wrapped itself around his body like a blanket.
Peter realized -after a few seconds- that the cloak was hugging him. The sensation made something crack inside him and he suddenly felt very small, vulnerable and weak. With shaking hands, he gently squeezed the cloak back. “Thanks,” he whispered, trying to take in the words of the book as tears blurred his vision.
It had been an incredibly lonely few months and it seems like the cloak knew and understood that, somehow. It offered hugs when no human would give it, and for that, Peter was infinitely grateful.
He knew the cloak would be gone in the morning so he had to cherish these short few hours when he could. He never got to keep the books, so he had to write down what he needed to remember before the cloak returned it to the Sanctum. Rubbing at his eye and accepting that he’d get no sleep this night, the boy reached for a new stack of papers and began to write.
As a different Peter Parker and Mary-Jane settled on to their sofa to relax, Peter suddenly bolted upright, his grey eyes wide with alarm and confusion.
His wife stiffened next to him. They might have been together for more than half their lives at this point, but his spider-sense still caught her off-guard sometimes. Cautiously, she settled a warm hand on his forearm. “Peter… what is it? Is it your back?” She doubted it -he healed fast- but she still couldn’t shake off the memory of when he materialized in front of her a few months ago with blood pouring from a gushing wound in his back. He saw the horror on her face and immediately tried to reassure her that he’d live, but it was yet another traumatic memory to add to her long list of shit-to-put-up-with-when-married-to-Spiderman.
Peter didn’t answer her but whipped his torso and head around to look behind their couch. Mary-Jane cautiously followed, internally dreading what she was going to see.
A small circle of sputtering embers seemed to sprout out of nowhere against their wall, then got larger and larger until it expanded into a spinning circle large enough to fit a grown man. On the inside -other side?- of the circle, a slender young man in a shockingly-similar Spiderman suit stood with his arms outstretched, one hand bearing a large gold ring and the other moving rapidly in a circle. Notebooks, diagrams and messy notes littered his feet and it was immediately evident that he had been trying to pull this stunt for some time.
“H-Holy shit,” the new Spiderman breathed, voice cracking, “I did it. I finally did it!”
In an instant, Peter crossed an arm in front of his wife, squinting suspiciously at the figure. The suit looked like his, but it wasn’t his, and it was a different shade of blue. “Who-“
“It’s me!” the kid squealed, pulling off his mask to reveal an unfamiliar, round-faced, curly-headed boy. “Peter-One!”
Mary-Jane was speechless as the kid moved with lightening speed into their living room, taking only a few running steps to clear the distance. He flew over the back of the sofa and tackled her stunned husband in a bear hug.
Grunting at the impact, Peter used his leg strength to catch them before they both went tumbling to the floor. He switched from battle mode to relaxed mode in the blink of an eye and was soon hugging the boy back, chuckling into the mop of messy hair as he wrapped his arms around the excited figure. “How did you-I didn’t think we’d-“
The joy soon dissolved into confusion as the kid launched into rapid-fire explanation, word vomiting his story into the older man’s shoulder without releasing him from his desperate hug. Something about the spell erasing his identity and nobody remembering him except the wizard’s cape and how the cape spent months sneaking away from Dr. Strange to try to communicate with him nonverbally and then they had to learn how to magic and-
“Whoa, whoa, Peter,” the older Peter murmured, rocking the boy back and forth. He shared a concerned look with his wife, who cautiously scooted closer as she tried to take in this shocking turn of events. “Listen, you’re here with me and MJ and… and you’re safe. We have a soup going, you can tell us over dinner, okay?”
The boy in his arms stilled, then pulled out of Peter’s arms in sudden embarrassment. He shyly lifted his eyes to look at the red-haired woman who was staring wide-eyed at him. “I-I’m sorry, that was really rude of me. You’re…his MJ?”
Mary-Jane smoothed her shocked face into what she hoped was one of warmth and compassion. She smiled, showing her dimples. “That’s me. My husband has told me a lot about you, I was hoping I’d meet you one day.” She hesitated. “Are you… alright?”
The kid clearly wasn’t alright, but he looked at her with awe and wonder and carefully extended a spandex-covered hand. “It’s really nice to meet you,” he said, and she believed every word he said. “Your husband-“ he glanced back at the older Peter with a degree of surprise, “-told us about you, too.”
“Only good things, I hope,” Mary-Jane quipped, shaking his hand and then cupping it gently between her own. She looked at him quietly, studying his tear-streaked face and wild hair that looked like it had been uncut in some time. “Do you need something? Anything?”
The teenaged Peter seemed stunned by her question, then shrank a little, hunching his shoulders. “I could… use a hug from a MJ right now,” he whispered, his voice so faint that she could barely hear him.
“Oh hon,” MJ breathed, immediately reaching out to envelop him in a hug of her own. He was bigger than her -because he was Spiderman, of course he was- but she was struck by how bony he felt. Her own husband was slim but felt like a rock because he had years of muscles honed from battle.
“This is nice,” the kid breathed, relaxing against her like putty.
He’s… so young. MJ heard about that from her husband, but seeing the child in person made her incredibly aware of the age difference between him and her Peter. She glanced at her husband, her heart clenching at the sad, pained look in his eyes. She reached out with her free arm and gently patted his knee to get his attention. “Go set up the table,” she whispered.
“I’ll set it for four,” he confirmed, standing to do so.
The younger Peter pulled away from MJ in surprise. “Four?”
The older Peter put his hands on his hips and looked down at him with a dry smile. “It’d be rude to eat without the whole family, right? Let’s go find the other Peter.”