It was unusually humid for a September afternoon in upstate New York.
Michelle had elected to wear her hair down, for once— the wrong choice. The curls were stuck to her neck in clumps, stray pieces springing up like they always do when the weather is particularly muggy. She brought hair ties, but they were back at the cabin and she didn’t feel like walking all the way across the pasture to get one. Plus the tequila was kicking in, and everything was starting to feel pleasantly heavy. All she wanted to do was lay back in the too tall grass and let her eyes slip closed.
Peter sat next to her, his own half-empty bottle of cheap vodka clenched in his fist. Michelle had only needed a few shots to be on her way to non-sobriety, but Peter’s super metabolism made getting drunk much harder than it should be. She knew that half a bottle of anything wouldn’t do it for him. Unless he was drinking on an empty stomach, he’d need to finish the bottle before things got wobbly.
The nighttime heat was evident on Peter as well; his shirt clung to his chest and his hair was the slightest bit damp above his ears.
It was a different image of her boyfriend than Michelle was used to. Usually if he was sweaty, he’d just returned from pummeling some half-rate goon attacking the city. Peter’s hair would be wild and tangly from ripping his mask off. There’d be a definite sheen of sweat and dust across his forehead, dotted on his cheeks. He might have a split lip or an already darkening black eye. Battle-worn Peter was beautiful and heart wrenching in his own right.
But this Peter Parker, the Peter that paid upperclassmen too much money for shitty alcohol and drug his girlfriend to an upstate cabin for the weekend, was one Michelle didn’t see often.
He’d come to her apartment one weekday afternoon to hang out. The two of them were just sitting around, half-heartedly studying and stealing glances at one another, and he pulled a carefully folded piece of paper out of his pocket. “I got this in the mail last week.”
It was a handwritten letter from Tony Stark. Which was confusing, because Tony Stark was dead.
Michelle only skimmed the letter. There was a lot of stuff about Peter’s getting on with his life, and “taking up the mantle,” and how much he meant to Tony, even while he was gone for those five years that Thanos halved the universe. She felt guilty reading any of it in depth. It was from Tony to Peter. The last words of a man who, apparently, expected to die in the near future. Sadly enough, he’d been right about his own fate.
“I got a call from his estate lawyer yesterday,” Peter said flatly, taking the note back and slipping it back into his pocket. “Tony left me his cabin. Somewhere upstate. Will you come with me?”
Michelle looked into Peter’s eyes. Gauged the intensity of the shadows behind them. “Are you sure you’re up for that?” Stark’s death was a devastating blow for Peter. She didn’t realize how deeply it had cut him until he broke down after the Europe trip and explained everything, how he was lost and confused and had watched another father figure die in front of him.
Peter nodded solemnly. “I need to, I think. He left it for me. I can go visit. I can give him that.”
She gave his hand a sure squeeze. “Then yeah, of course. We’ll head up this weekend.”
Michelle’s parents had been surprisingly okay with the trip, considering two seventeen year olds wanted to spend a weekend away together. May must have worked some of her magic and warmed them up to the idea.
When Peter mentioned a cabin upstate; Michelle expected a two room wooden structure with a fireplace and a gas stove. She did not expect a two story, modernized log home with modern amenities and a gorgeous view of rolling property. The farmhouse sat on several acres, the front windows facing a large lake that glittered in the daylight. The back of the house sat on a wide pasture, maybe used for livestock years and years ago, but now it was just overgrown grasses and a little pond in the back corner.
That’s where Michelle and Peter were now, sitting with their bare feet in the pond and listening to the cicadas. They’d tried hanging out in the cabin for a while, but she recommended they go outside after Peter found a picture of him and Tony on a kitchen shelf. It was framed, the image of the two of them smiling like idiots while Peter held an internship certificate and Tony gave him bunny ears forever immortalized on photo laminate paper. They tried sitting in some lounge chairs on the lake dock, but Michelle could tell Peter’s heart wasn’t in it. Something was eating at him.
So they dug the alcohol Peter had bought from one of his senior friends out of his backpack and lugged it out to the pond. They’d been there since sunset. Barely talking, just listening to the wind whistle through the trees. The leaves crackled and rubbed together on their branches; fall would be along soon, and they were just dry enough to rustle pleasantly when the breeze hit them right.
Michelle heard Peter take a particularly deep breath, then heard the sloshing of the vodka in his bottle as he took another sip. She had no idea how he drank it straight. She always has to mix her drinks or she couldn’t get them down.
She reached over lazily and let her hand land somewhere on Peter’s arm.
“This is where they held his funeral,” Peter said quietly. Michelle didn’t know if it was the alcohol or the emotion, but his voice was raspy. “Back at the lake. We all just stood there while they threw a wreath in the water.” Peter made a noise Michelle wasn’t familiar with. At first she thought he’d started crying, but then she realized it was a scoff. He was laughing, but there was no mirth in it.
“What kind of send off is that, huh? For a man who saved the world? A wreath on a lake? While thirty or so of his random associates stand around and watch it sink?”
Peter took another swig and emptied the bottle. He looked like he wanted to throw it, but deciding against the violence, just dropped it in the grass beside him. “Lord knows it couldn’t have been open-casket. Not with how he looked after...after the…”
Michelle had been right; it took the entire bottle, but Peter was identifiably no longer sober. It wasn’t just his quickly derailing train of thought, though. The release of tension in his shoulders, the definitive lack of a crease in his brow. The moon was full tonight, and it illuminated the pasture well enough for Michelle to really see his silhouette beside her. When he twisted in her direction, the celestial light was turning the wetness of his eyes silver. “He had so much life in him. He did so many things, helped so many people. And now his ashes are floating in the Pacific Ocean somewhere. I think that’s where Pepper spread them. I don’t know. I felt bad asking.”
Peter’s openness was a result of the alcohol. He told her things, told her about his fears and struggles, but never like this. Half the time he sugar coated everything for her sake, caring more about her feelings than his even when he was the one in pain. But none of those reservations were in place, now. The angst on his face was real, raw. Michelle’s muddled brain was working double time to keep up through her tequila haze.
“We all go at some point, Peter.”
“Yeah, I know.” He knows better than most. “I just… He seemed so invincible. He was Iron Man! He had the money and the suit and the swagger, and I adored him! And now he has what? Some murals? A plaque with his name on it?”
Michelle pulled herself off her back into a sitting position and scooted closer to Peter. It was still hot outside despite daylight being far gone, maybe a bit too hot for her to be sitting so close, but neither of them really cared. Her head felt too heavy for her shoulders, so she rested it on Peter’s. “He’s got a daughter. A wife who loved him. A legacy, full of all the amazing things he did.”
Peter sniffled. “But now they have to live without him.”
“They’ll always have him. Just not...physically.”
It was hard for Michelle to be eloquently spoken when her tongue refused to move.
“Sometimes, this terrible little part of me hopes I die young.”
That was as sobering a statement as Michelle was going to get. She pulled herself together enough to put her hand on Peter’s cheek and pull his face toward her. “Peter, what? How could you say that?”
Michelle’s heart was beating terribly against her sternum. “How could you want that?”
Peter shook her hand off his face but didn’t push her away. His feet were still in the pond. He kicked one of them up and sent an array of water droplets into the air. Something hiding in the grass started at the noise and scampered away. “I don’t have a death wish or anything. I don’t want to die. I like being alive.” His eyes were trained on the sky, now. Michelle knew he was cataloguing the constellations. I love astronomy, he’d told her once, but New York City really isn’t great for stargazing. “But sometimes I think it would be easier on everyone if I did. Die, I mean. I’d go before anyone got too attached to me, before I did anything too big. That way, when I’m gone, I don't take anyone down with me.”
It took her longer than it should have, but Michelle was finally putting the pieces together.
Peter wrapped an arm around Michelle’s back and pulled her into his side. “I can’t really imagine myself growing old, anyways. Can you? With how often I get thrown into brick walls, I imagine myself living to thirty. Thirty five, tops.”
Michelle finally understood. She’d known Peter was carrying something heavy since Stark’s death, but the complexity of his guilt was stifling. “Is that really how you feel, Peter? Like Tony left you behind?”
He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, Michelle could barely hear his voice over the sounds of the countryside. The cabin was just a speck on the dark horizon. “I feel awful about it. About being mad at him. Because I am, a little bit. He was here, and he was invested, and he cared about me, and then he was gone before I even got to say goodbye. I feel like I never get to say goodbye to them.”
Michelle could guess who them referred to, but she wasn’t going to say it out loud. Peter could keep those ghosts to himself if he wanted to.
“I know it wasn’t his fault, that he wouldn’t leave Morgan or Pepper or me or anyone else if he didn’t have to.” Peter hiccuped, but it wasn’t because he was crying. He only cried when the emotions overwhelmed him, strangled him. When whatever was in his heart was threatening to burst free, and he refused to let it. This was the opposite of that— Michelle had never heard him be so open. “ But he’s gone. And now I have to figure out how to be okay without him.”
“You don’t have to be okay,” Michelle said slowly, not because she was drunk, but because she wanted Peter to really hear her. “Ever. You may not ever be completely alright again, and that’s okay. And I know I don’t need to tell you this, but it’s not Tony’s fault.” She swallowed against her dry tongue and continued. “Blame Thanos, blame modern medicine, blame fate. But don’t blame him, because then you’ll lug around the weight of your anger toward him and your own guilt over that anger, and that’s just too much for any one person to bear.”
Michelle’s right hand travelled to Peter’s torso, hand sliding beneath his shirt and palm flattening over the middle of his chest. Despite his distress, his heart beat a sturdy rhythm, alive and sure as anything. The force of it was grounding. When Peter tightened his arm around her, she knew it did the same for him. “So how do I stop? How do I stop blaming him?”
“By remembering that he’s not really gone.” His name, his legacy, it was woven into Peter’s very world, into the worlds of hundreds of thousands of other people. Anyone who was saved by his technology. Anyone who was brought back by the snap. Any child who read comic books about Tony Stark before bed and dreamt of Iron Man saving the day, just like he always does. Anyone who watched that funeral wreath float across the lake and knew it was still down there somewhere, gracing the murky depths with nature’s beauty and Tony’s mechanical livelihood.
Proof That Tony Stark Has A Heart.
“He’ll always be here, Peter. Everywhere. In everything. So you don’t have to be mad at him for being gone. Because he never really left.”