“Really, Carol, I expected more from you.”
“Are you being serious right now? How is anyone supposed to be good at this?”
“Literally all you have to be able to do is press a few buttons simultaneously.”
“I can’t, apparently.”
Carol could see Peter take his eyes off the tv screen briefly, just long enough to glance over at her and snort. “You can lift airplanes but you can’t swing a digital lightsaber.”
“Hey!” Carol took a hand off her controller to point a finger at Peter’s chest. She turned away from the television screen where her and Peter’s game avatars were slicing through an army of stormtroopers to invade an Imperial base. Peter chose Luke Skywalker and his iconic green lightsaber— he always did. He was a sucker for the classics. But Carol liked switching between characters, and this round she’d gone with Anakin. Even in digital form he was a solid piece of eye candy. “Says the kid who can catch buses with his hands but sucks absolute ass at pinball.”
Unlike his movie counterpart, Carol’s Anakin was standing in the middle of the conflict swinging his lightsaber aimlessly. So far all she’d been able to do was knock over some crates and get herself killed repeatedly.
“Carol! Why did you—Grab the controller! Great. Great! We died again.” Peter threw his hands up in defeat as Luke and Anakin were overwhelmed by the troopers. A barrage of glowing red blaster fire took them down and the screen faded to black. “That’s the fourth time we’ve died on this level.”
“Is that a problem?” Carol asked innocently, placing her controller in Peter’s outstretched hand so he could hook it up to the charger and turn off the game console. They’d been playing for a couple hours already and she could tell Peter was anxious to get out on patrol before the sun set.
“Yeah. It means we won’t beat the game until I’m eighty.”
“Nothing wrong with being an old man who’s great at Galactic Force 2.”
“I’m hoping I’ll be an old man who’s great at Galactic Force 3. I’m probably gonna switch this one off two-player and finish it myself before Ned gives me the third one for my birthday next week.”
There was a metaphorical record scratch. Carol blinked a few times. “Your birthday is next week?”
Peter nodded as he worked his way around the room, tidying up the snacks and blankets on the floor from their gaming session. They’d been camped out in his living room for most of the afternoon, making the most of the sweltering summer Tuesday. Peter being on break from school meant Carol’s Tuesday visits could have a lot more time and activity variety than they did during the academic semester. His senior year of high school started in early September, just a couple weeks away, and they were making the most of the free time he had left.
Peter had spent much of today’s visit trying and failing to teach Carol how to play Galactic Force, some geeky game based off of the Star Wars movies. Carol blamed her lack of competency on having not played video games for years, but Peter liked to joke that she was just too prideful to admit that despite being all powerful, she’d finally found something she wasn’t good at. He was more right than she’d like to admit. It had been a long time since she faced a physical problem she couldn’t solve.
“Why didn’t you tell me your birthday was coming up?”
“I don’t know. Just didn’t really think about it, I guess.”
“How old are you gonna be? Twelve?”
Peter rolled his eyes and grabbed a stray potato chip off the floor. Carol dodged the starchy projectile and it flew past her head, landing somewhere on the rug behind her. “Ha ha. Hilarious. I’ll be seventeen.”
Carol whistled. “Dang. The big one-seven. One year away from being able to buy lottery tickets.”
“And vote,” Peter added.
The two of them made their way to the kitchen with used plates and cups. They met at the sink and Peter started hand washing the dishes. The Parkers’ dishwasher quit a few weeks ago. Carol had walked into the apartment to see May and Peter scurrying around with towels and trying to stop the thing from leaking all over the floor. She’d offered to buy them a new one and Peter had just looked at her like he’d rather have his head bashed in by one of the goons he swings around fighting every week. “ No thanks, ” he’d said plainly, “we’ll manage. ”
Carol handed Peter the next dirty plate and he started scrubbing. “Have any plans for the big day?” Carol asked with calculated nonchalance. She knew Peter hated making anything about himself, but there was no way she was letting the kid get away with ignoring his own birthday.
“Ned and MJ might come over. And May usually has a cake for me. I assume it’ll be the same this year.”
Carol’s eyebrows rose toward her hairline. “May’s baking you a cake?” May Parker was an amazing woman with a wide range of talents, but she’d proven time and time again that food preparation of any kind was not one of them.
Peter turned away from his soapy hands to look at Carol like she was insane. “ God, no. There’s a bakery down the street she knows I like. She’ll probably just order one.”
“Okay, good. I was worried for a minute.”
“The second that woman turns the stove on I’m calling you for an immediate air evacuation. Fly me far away from here. And come back for the rest of the block. They might end up needing saving too.”
“Got it. I’m good to go. Just call me when things start smelling like burnt freezer pizza.”
Dishes finished and apartment cleaned, Peter followed Carol to the door so he could lock it behind her after she walked out. She took her time lacing her tennis shoes, and Peter was polite enough not to rush her.
She grabbed the doorknob as she straightened and prepared to step out of the apartment, but something made her pause and toss a last look over her shoulder.
Peter stood there in his socks and sweatpants, hands tucked into his pockets. He looked so normal like this; like a regular teenage kid hanging out at home and having fun over summer break. Playing video games and throwing potato chips and generally making a mess of himself until September returns and he’s thrown back into the cesspool that is the daily life of a high schooler.
He was so unassuming. He wasn’t tall, he wasn’t exceptionally confident or flashy. He didn’t even have visible muscle, really, despite the hidden strength that Carol knew ran through him. He just looked like a regular kid.
But tonight he’d slip on the Spider-Man suit and hop out his bedroom window, probably swing uptown or downtown or wherever the most pressing crime might be, and throw himself into a fight that was never his in the first place. Peter Parker had been to space and back, had seen life and death in its rawest forms, all before the age of seventeen.
And Carol hated it for him. Having to grow up too soon was one of the universe’s greatest crimes against humanity.
“Is everything okay?” Peter asked, noticing the way Carol’s eyes were surveying him from head to toe. Almost like she was making sure he was in one piece.
“Yeah. Everything’s fine.” Carol stepped backward through the doorway and into the hall beyond. “See you next Tuesday?”
Peter nodded and smiled a genuine, toothy smile. “Of course. Next Tuesday.”
Group message title: Friends of Spider-Man (F.O.S.)
Carol Danvers:
You guys are so fake
Carol Danvers:
Why did no one bother to tell me that Peter’s birthday was next week
Michelle Jones:
Figured you’d know.
Ned Leeds:
Oh my goodness
Ned Leeds:
I’m so sorry
Ned Leeds:
I thought you’d know
Ned Leeds:
Do you need help finding a gift?
Ned Leeds:
I can totally help you find him a gift
Michelle Jones:
kiss-ass
Carol Danvers:
Yes, please, oh my god. I have no idea what to get him
Carol Danvers:
I’ve heard him talk about stuff he thinks is cool but he never acts like he actually wants any of it
Carol Danvers:
What’s an appropriate gift for an enhanced seventeen-year-old that has a million dollar supersuit and lots of trauma????
Ned and Michelle gave Carol a few ideas, but none sounded as good as the gifts they’d already bought for Peter.
True to what Peter had said earlier, Ned got his best friend a brand new copy of Galactic Force 3. Michelle bought him a new Erlenmeyer flask set along with some of the more easy to find ingredients he used in his web fluid. Both were well thought out gifts that Michelle and Ned knew their friend would love or genuinely use.
Sure, Carol had ideas. A state-of-the-art first aid kit? That would be useful, right? After all, the first time Carol met Peter he was patching up a bullet wound. Some hoodies? A new pair of sneakers? Maybe a couple dozen backpacks since he was always losing his? None of her possible gifts seemed right. All were lackluster and devoid of any real meaning.
Over the last several months, Peter Parker had become the little brother Carol never knew she wanted (and more than she liked to admit, never knew she needed). He was a ball of energy and sharp as a tack but had a serious knack for getting himself in trouble, and to anyone with eyes, Peter’s goofball aura was nothing but endearing.
Carol considered Peter a friend. Maybe even family, if you asked her on the right day.
She’d fought with him against Thanos at the Avengers compound upstate. Had been in his apartment. She’d seen Peter swinging around town fighting bad guys, operating at his best, and she’d seen him so deep in his own head and stuck in his trauma that he could barely pull himself out of bed. Peter and her were anything but strangers. So why did Carol suddenly feel like she barely knew him?
So, after hours of mindless scrolling on Amazon and endlessly trying to get Mittens, Carol’s lovable but hyperactive tabby cat, to stop walking across the keyboard, she gave up and closed the computer.
Carol sat at her kitchen table in the dim but homey kitchen of her Brooklyn brownstone and tried to channel her inner genius. She’d always been great when it came to picking out presents for Monica, her goddaughter and best friend Maria Rambeu’s little girl. Granted, that little girl was in her thirties and working for S.W.O.R.D. now, and the two of them hadn’t spoken in years, but back in the day her and Carol had gotten along great.
Where was that engrained gift-giving ability now? If only Peter was into Barbies. Or Converse high tops.
Actually, the shoes aren’t a bad idea. Peter’s were always getting either trashed or stolen thanks to his Spider-Man misadventures, so a new pair of kicks couldn’t hurt. But the idea sounded lame and uninteresting after only a few moments of contemplation (Carol imagined Peter unwrapping Galactic Force 3 and then suffering the disappointment of it being succeeded by a fresh pair of New Balances ) and she rejected the plan almost immediately.
“Alright, Mittens,” Carol said to her cat, who was now walking across the table top and batting dangerously at Carol’s glass of water with her paw. “We’re out of options. I think we’re gonna have to consult the big guns.”
Mittens only looked at Carol for a moment, tilted her little head, and knocked the water glass off the table.
Carol just looked at the water on the floor, some of which had caught the toe of her sock in the process, and sighed deeply, then turned back to the cat, who proceeded to jump into Carol’s lap and curl up like she’d done nothing wrong.
“This feels like a metaphor for something. I’m not sure what. But it does.”
Carol did, in fact, consult the big guns, who said they’d be free to meet the next day after they got off work.
So taking into account the fact that Peter had Academic Decathlon practice on Wednesdays and wouldn’t notice that his aunt would be home late, Carol and May Parker agreed to meet at a diner down the street from May’s work.
May Parker was the biggest gun of them all. Carol didn’t think she’d ever met someone as level headed or down to Earth as May. She was simultaneously politely curious and all-knowing, and Carol could think of no one better to ask about potential birthday gift ideas for Peter. Not to mention that May had literally raised the kid and probably knew best what sort of present he’d like.
Carol had time to kill and chose to take the subway instead of flying to Queens. It was by no means a short ride, but she appreciated the mundanity of waiting for a train and feeling like she was making progress every time she got off and switched lines. Sometimes soaring everywhere at the speed of sound just wasn’t as satisfying as swiping her metrocard at the station turnstile.
She beat May to the diner, as she’d expected to, so she went ahead and grabbed a booth and menus for the both of them. A cursory glance told Carol that it was a classic diner with classic diner food— burgers and fries, milkshakes, patty melts. An all-day breakfast menu that Carol was absolutely going to order off of.
It was a cute neighborhood sort of joint that seemed to have been around for years, telling in both the wear of the red leather booths and the barrage of family photos covering the surface of every wall. The entire place was papered with them, an array of different people immortalized by a photo of them sitting on a swivel stood at the bar or sucking down a milkshake like they had no idea they were on camera. Carol couldn’t find a single picture where the subject didn’t look happy.
She was too distracted surveying the photos on the wall to see Peter’s aunt enter the restaurant.
“I’m so sorry I’m late,” May Parker said suddenly, sliding into the booth across from Carol. “Work ran over and I got caught up.”
Carol tapped her phone screen to check the clock. It was only 5:35pm, exactly five minutes after their agreed upon meeting time. She had to hold back a snort. Now she knew where Peter got his perfectionist streak from, though his translated into academics instead of punctuality. “It’s no problem at all. I haven’t been here long. But I gotta say, I love the place.”
May smiled and grabbed her own menu, only giving it a quick once-over before pushing it aside. “I don’t know why I looked at that. I always order the same thing. But it’s nice isn’t it? Peter and I have been coming here for years. His uncle used to love it.”
Ah. The afformented Uncle Ben, a man whom Carol had heard little about but whose death had affected Peter in more ways than one. “Gotta love a place with sentimental value.”
May’s eyes circled the restaurant once, as if she were recalling a memory of the very same place from a very different time, and she ended the motion with a sigh. “That’s the truth.”
The waitress, whose name tag read Glenda, came by before either woman could say more. She greeted May by name and the two spoke casually for a moment before Glenda pulled her notepad from her apron and asked for food requests. May ordered a double stack of pancakes with a water and a vanilla milkshake, and Carol went with a grilled cheese and a soda. She wasn’t much of a sugar person and knew that whatever May had ordered, despite sounding delicious in theory, would just make her sick. Even superpowered people had indigestion.
“So Carol,” May said, “You’re having trouble finding Peter a birthday gift.”
“Like, so much trouble. How could this be so hard?”
May laughed. “It’s probably not. If I had to guess, you’re overthinking it.”
“Well what did you get him?”
“Money. That’s what he asked for.”
“You had it easy! I gotta find something fun and creative that his friends haven’t already gotten him.”
“Well what did his friends get him?”
“Galactic Force 3 and web shooter supplies.”
“Oh, damn. Those are good.”
“Exactly! And now I have no idea what to do.”
“Like I said, Carol, don’t overthink it. Peter’s an appreciative kid. Almost overly appreciative. Anyone going out of their way for him means something.”
Carol picked at her grilled cheese. It was cooked to perfection, bread just crispy enough and cheese just melty enough, but for some reason she’d lost her appetite. May wasn’t wrong; Carol had never met a kid more aware of the sacrifices people made for him. Peter felt so bad about people caring for him that he usually tried to do everything on his own, and more often than not it resulted in him making a fool of himself or getting seriously injured.
So what could Carol get him that would make him feel worthwhile? Make Peter feel loved without him thinking he’d inconvenienced her?
Carol’s eyes were once again drawn to the family photos on the wall. “You said you and Peter used to come here a lot.”
May took a bite of her pancakes and tilted her head. “Yeah, why?”
“Do you guys have a photo somewhere?”
May’s straw made a weird noise as she slurped her milkshake, but she didn’t seem to notice. “You know,” she said after a particularly long sip, “I actually think we do. The owner took one when we came for Ben’s birthday one year. I think it’s over…”
With little pretense May pushed her milkshake aside and slid out of the booth. She took off toward the other side of the restaurant. Carol realized May might have intended for her to follow and tried to stand straight up. Of course, she forgot she was in a booth, so she immediately smacked the tops of her thighs against the bottom of the table and had to stifle a long string of expletives.
“W-what?” Carol managed to spit out as she limped over to May’s position.
May’s eyes were scanning the wall next to the diner’s front door. “If I remember correctly, it should be...Ah, yes, there it is.” She tapped her finger against a photo of a young man and woman, probably in their thirties, with a boy sitting between them. The kid was obviously Peter. The fluffy brown hair and crooked smile were dead giveaways. But he was obviously much younger than he is now, and his eyes were stuck behind a thick pair of tortoiseshell glasses.
The man, whom Carol assumed was Ben, looked calm and happy. His smile didn’t show teeth, but it wasn’t any less genuine than those of Peter or the woman next to him. Logically Carol knew it was May, but Peter’s aunt looked different back then. Still beautiful, but less tired. The lines beneath her eyes weren’t so deep.
“It’s a good picture,” Carol pointed out, not sure what else she could say.
May nodded. “It is.”
Something clicked into place within Carol. She’d had so many gears turning the last few days that she almost felt tired, but the Parker family photo centered her. Peter wasn’t materialistic; Carol knew as much. So why had she been so focused on getting him the perfect gift when she could make the perfect gift?
“I know what I’m getting Peter for his birthday.”
As expected, Peter’s birthday was a tame affair, the only invitees being Ned, MJ, and Carol herself. Peter and his friends planned on having a movie night after dinner and cake so Carol didn’t plan to stay long. Just long enough to drop off her gift.
Her, Peter and his friends sat around the Parkers’ dinner table as May passed out Thai food that she’d bought from a joint down the street and portioned out on their best plates.
“Extra sticky rice pudding for the birthday boy,” May said with a smile, sliding a large bowl of the stuff in front of Peter, who was holding a fork in each hand and looked like he was about to bend both utensils in half if he didn’t start eating soon. “May. You know I love you, right?”
May winked and went back to the kitchen to grab the last of the plates. “Wait until you see the cake.”
Dinner was great, mostly because May didn’t cook it. Everyone talked and told their favorite stories about Peter, several of which contained Spider-Man related incidents like the time he stumbled out of a porta-potty in costume with toilet paper stuck to his shoe, or the time he ripped a hole in the ass of his suit because he swung a little too close to one of the fence posts around Trinity Church. May told an excellent one about a time when elementary school Peter was making “potions” with cleaning supplies and accidentally blew a hole in their best kitchen pot.
Carol decided to catalogue that one into her mental library permanently. She planned to hold it against Peter every time he wanted to try something new with his web shooters. (The webs had a delicate formula; Carol had been around for more than one failed experiment. One time Peter used her as a test subject for a new web variation, and her hand ended up stuck to the back of his door for an hour. She would have just broken herself free, but she didn’t want to ruin the door.)
But after dinner came cake, and the cake was a sight to behold. So was Peter’s face when May set it down in front of him with seventeen individual candles lit across its surface.
Michelle looked at the blue and red icing and started laughing so hard that she almost extinguished the candles. “ Priceless,” she said between breaths, holding her stomach like she was getting a cramp, “Absolutely priceless.”
“Oh man, this is awesome! When you cut it can I have the torso piece? I want the spider emblem.” Ned was leaning so far over the cake that Carol thought he might lose his grip on the table and fall face first into the frosting. “Though I’d be cool with the mask too. But it’s Peter’s birthday, so he can have the mask. I’ll take the boot.”
“How did you even get them to make this?” Peter asked incredulously.
“Reference pictures,” May said simply.
Peter looked at his aunt like he was horrified.
May rolled her eyes. “From the newspapers, Peter. Chill out.”
Sitting in front of Peter was a surprisingly detailed cake in the shape of New York’s Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.
Peter slumped in his chair. “This is cruel and unusual punishment.”
“Don’t be so dramatic. When I asked if the bakery could do it they said it would be the third Spider-Man cake they’ve done this week.”
Suddenly Peter didn’t look so embarrassed. He unconsciously squared his shoulders and Carol tried not to snort. “Wait, seriously?”
“Seriously. So swallow your pride and eat the cake. People actually like you in this town.”
“Huh,” Peter said simply, still staring at the cake. He smiled a little. Carol could tell he was trying to smother how satisfied he was with the idea that somebody wanted him on their birthday cake. “People like me.”
Carol couldn’t blame him. He’d long suffered at the hands of J. Jonah Jameson and about half of NYC’s general public for simply trying to help. But for every person that hated Spider-Man, someone out there loved him. Had been saved by him. No matter what Peter thought, he had people that appreciated the work he did and the sacrifices he made.
Maybe they didn’t appreciate all of the sacrifices. He’d made an awful lot of those.
Michelle bumped Peter gently with her elbow. She was trying to look tough by keeping a straight face, but Carol could see how amused she was. “Blow out your candles, Peter,” Michelle said. “Or I’ll do it for you. I’m ready for some cake.”
“Are we gonna sing?” Ned asked.
May clapped like that was the best idea she’d ever heard. “Yes! Yes, let’s sing. On three, everyone.”
Carol pulled her phone from her pocket and hit the record button. Peter saw her filming and rolled his eyes.
“One, two…”
One shaky rendition of Happy Birthday later (Michelle was actually pretty good, but Ned could have shattered glass), Peter was pausing to make a silent wish and blowing out his candles.
May tugged the cake toward her and started cutting. Per Ned’s request, he got the torso piece. “What did you wish for?”
Peter dug into his piece immediately. He already had frosting smeared across his top lip. For a kid with supernatural reflexes, he still had the dexterity of a toddler when it came to eating. “You know I can’t tell you that. It won’t come true.”
“That’s true,” Carol said. “Gotta keep the wish a secret or the wish fairies will steal it and carry it away.”
Peter pointed his fork at her and spoke with a mouthful of cake. His lips were tinged purple from the red and blue icing mixing together as he scarfed down his birthday dessert. “What she said.”
So Peter kept his wish to himself and everyone at the table talked and ate and generally had a good time in each other’s presence. It wasn’t lost on Carol that her being there might have made Ned and Michelle uncomfortable (she tended to have that effect on people who knew she could leave the upper atmosphere without a space suit) and she appreciated the fact that neither of them said anything. Ned tried glancing at her a few times, but she kept catching him and throwing up finger guns in his direction. He just grinned and shook his head and mumbled “ So cool.”
After cake came presents, and Peter was just as touched by and excited for his friends’ and May’s as Carol expected him to be.
He’d opened Ned’s gift last purely by chance, and he was holding onto his new copy of Galaxy Force 3 so hard that Carol thought the packaging might crack. “Dude,” Peter said, “We gotta play this, like, now.”
Ned nodded his agreement. His hair flopped into his eyes and he tried to brush it back, but accidentally dragged a smudge of blue icing across his forehead. Michelle rolled her eyes but looked mildly excited herself.
“That sounds like a great idea,” Carol said. She’d been hoping for an opportunity to hand off her present without an audience, and this seemed like the right time. “Why don’t you guys go get it set up in Peter’s room? I’m leaving soon. I’ll send him your way when we’ve said our goodbyes.”
It wasn’t that her gift was cheap, or embarrassing, or awful. At least, she hoped it wasn’t awful. But Carol knew Peter and how he liked to hide the super sensitive parts of himself. Her gift had significant meaning. If Peter was going to get emotional, she wanted to give him the chance to do it in private.
“Yeah,” Michelle said, looking from Carol to Peter and back, realizing that whatever Carol wanted to say required some space. “C’mon, Ned. Bring the console with you. I’ll get the cords and the game.” Peter’s two friends made quick work of unhooking the game system from the living room television and wandered off down the hall toward Peter’s bedroom. Ned almost dropped the console and Michelle gave him a look that, had she been powered, would have turned her friend to stone.
After realizing that Ned had not, in fact, ruined his console, Peter stopped rubbernecking the almost- accident and turned back around in his chair to face Carol. “You didn’t have to get me anything,” Peter said immediately, eyeing the gift bag Carol had pulled out from beneath the table and was now sliding toward him. Peter took the ribbon handles with tentative fingers.
“I’m going to go clean up,” May said casually, shooting Carol a smile of support before sweeping the dirty dishes off the table and retreating to the kitchen.
“Of course I did,” Carol said. She smiled back at May, hoping her gift would make Peter happy like May said it would, opposed to sadly reminiscent. “You don’t turn seventeen every year. Congrats, Peter. You can officially practice magic outside of Hogwarts.”
Peter chuckled and started pulling tissue paper from the bag. He set it aside with a care that Carol had never seen a child use when confronted with something as exciting as a birthday present.
There was no card; Carol thought they were pointless. The gift itself should be enough explanation of the gifter’s intentions. Cards were just a waste of four dollars and perfectly good pasteboard.
The last of the paper was out, and Peter stalled when his eyes hit what was at the bottom of the bag. “Where?” Peter pulled the scrapbook from the bag slowly, almost like it might crumble to dust if he wasn’t careful. “Where did you get this picture?”
The cover of the book had a small viewing window for a single eight-by-five photo, a place to indicate what else was being held within. It had taken time and consideration, but Carol knew that using the picture of Peter and Tony Stark posing together after Peter received his Stark Industries internship certificate was the right move. Both of them looked so carefree, Tony’s middle and index fingers bunny-eared behind Peter’s head, Peter’s smile wide and its wearer seemingly unaware that his certificate was held upside down.
“Asked Pepper to take a look through the ol’ files. See what she could dig up.”
“I’ve never seen this one.”
“Because it wasn’t in a file. It was framed in the kitchen of the Stark cabin upstate.”
Peter just kept staring at the picture, head minutely shaking, like he couldn’t imagine that someone would have wanted to preserve such a thing. After looking his fill he opened the front cover and was immediately met with the scrapbook’s first page.
“Two tickets to MoMA,” Peter said.
Carol nodded. “Because your field trip was interrupted by a UFO and you ended up getting dragged to space before you could see the Automania exhibit.”
Peter turned to the next page. “Yankees tickets.”
“You said you hadn’t been to a ball game since you started the Spidey gig.” His actual wording had been something akin to since my Uncle Ben was killed, which was around the same time Peter got his powers, but Carol didn’t feel like that was necessary to say at the moment.
Peter kept turning pages to the next, and the next, and the next, seemingly more caught off guard every time he saw what Carol had placed beneath the laminate guard on each one.
Things had been going relatively well until the book’s last page, where Carol had stuck a Visa gift card and that picture of Ben, May, and Peter from the diner down the street (which Carol had taken her own picture of and had copied for the book. There was no way she was letting that memory get papered over by other people’s random family photos on the diner wall).
It had taken some major consulting with May and hours upon hours walking around town to find the right tickets and events and locations, but by the time Carol was done, she’d effectively compiled an entire scrapbook of activities that Peter Parker had missed out on in the last few years. Why? Because he was so busy taking care of other people. He’d been forfeiting life’s simple pleasures purely because he was making sure other people lived long enough to see their own. Spider-Man was important, a pillar of strength to New York City, but he was also just a guy. Peter was just a guy. He deserved leisure and fun and memories just as much as anyone else. His youth was stripped away from him the second he donned the mask. Carol just wanted to give it back.
“I had a feeling you hadn’t been back there in a while,” Carol said a bit nervously, “purely to sit around and enjoy it.” Peter still hadn’t looked away from the diner picture. He was moving a finger across the page as if mentally pointing out every detail of the image and committing each to memory. “I thought you and I could go back sometime. Or just you. That’s why I left the gift card. You can take whoever you—“
Carol had been focusing so hard on not making eye contact that she hadn’t seen Peter sprint around the table and trap her in a bone crushing hug.
It was so far out of the realm of affection either person had ever shown the other that Carol didn’t think to raise her arms and return the gesture until she felt Peter taking labored breaths against her shoulder. “Peter? Are you okay?”
He finally pulled away, releasing some of the pressure on her extremities, and hurriedly wiped away a tear with his shirt sleeve. “This is...It’s everything I’ve wanted to do since—“
“Since you started sacrificing your spare time to save innocents?”
Peter laughed through his silent cries, hiccuping around a hitched breath. He turned to the book on the table and stared. It was full of museum tickets, park maps, restaurant gift cards, each one representing a place or activity Peter loved or had wanted to try but never got around to because he was so busy being self-sacrificial. Carol made sure each page had meaning. The diner page, a change to reminisce on his life before Uncle Ben passed. Tickets to some Broadway show Carol had never heard of, because according to May, despite living in NYC his whole life, Peter had never gone to see a musical. A visitor’s pass to Stark Industries so Peter could admire the science and innovation of it all without having to walk the Avengers compound halls and be reminded of the mentor he couldn’t save.
“This is too much. You don’t have to give me all of this.”
“It’s not, and I am. You deserve it, Peter. It all just gives you some time to just appreciate what the world has to offer. It shouldn’t always be about what you can offer the world.”
Peter hugged her again, whispered a quiet but sure “ thank you, Carol” under his breath, and gave one quick squeeze before he attempted to collect himself and flipped back to a page somewhere near the front of the scrapbook. “Fine. But I’m taking you to this Yankee’s game. We’re gonna wear the jerseys and everything.” He looked excited. Actually excited about something as mundane as a baseball game. Carol sometimes had trouble figuring out how to act around Peter, which buttons she could and couldn’t press and how far into his past she could delve before he clammed up. But she knew deep down that she’d done something right this time around.
“Hey, man, fine with me. But you’re buying the popcorn. Those tickets were pricey.”