Peter didn't really recognize himself in the mirror. Not anymore. The mirror in front of him was dirty and chipped around the edges. It sat precariously up against the wall, propped up on the back of the 'sink'. When he stared into it what looked back wasn't some 16 year old over his head in shenanigans, or over his head in some grand globe trotting mission. It was empty.
It had been three years after homecoming, two years after Tony died. Two years after May died.
When he tried to think about what happened it was like looking at someone elses life. Peter had to guess it was someone else that it happened to anyway. In his mind, everything had just moved so fast back then. It was like he blinked and they were gone and it was all gone.
He'd had to leave the apartment pretty quick after May died. Back then he was just barely out of high school and he didn't really have the money to afford a New York apartment on his own (even though it was really just a studio apartment). He'd sold most of the furniture, all of which Ben and May and Peter had spent years curating and carefully picking up at second hand stores around New York. Gone so quick. Peter wouldn't let himself sit and think about how fast any trace of the Parkers disappeared, just another Tuesday to the world. It was an aching cavern in his chest.
A deep black maw yawning through his lungs, anytime he prodded at it the grief was still raw. Still untouched.
He'd given up on school pretty soon after leaving the apartment. Maybe "given up" was too harsh - he'd postponed school. His senior year got pretty fucked up what with moving and all that, and in the disorganization he'd missed the SAT.
He thought he could play it off at first, then spent the next few years banging his head against any and all walls he could find about it. Turns out you just don't get scholarships if you don't take the SAT. How could he have known?
The plan was to work for a few years, make some extra money, then figure it out from there. Night school or something like that.
Ned and MJ had gone on to Harvard and Sarah Lawrence, respectively. They'd stayed in contact pretty well for a few months, way longer than most people their age had managed. But as Ned and MJ's lives grew and Peter's shrunk the conversations just got more and more uncomfortable. When Peter shut off his phone he didn't remember to tell them beforehand, and then he blinked and he hadn't spoken with them in years.
Fast forward to present day and he was living in some dingy studio apartment of a studio apartment. For all intents and purposes, it was a room with a small bathroom. The walls were yellowed, it smelled like cockroaches and piss and despair, and if you asked Peter he couldn't honestly tell what the exact address was. But that part wasn't the fault of the shitty, run down building, that part was on Peter.
He just didn't recognize much anymore.
Time was like chewing gum - sometimes it stretched on and on, taut and spread thin and driving him fucking insane, other times he'd lose focus for a moment and it was gone. Peter's days were split between delivering pizzas for Joe's around the corner and conjuring up any photos he could around town. It had been both a century and a day since he started living his life like this.
Of course, any spare moments were spent in the suit.
He'd never tell anyone, but the Spider-Man suit was just red on it's own now. No dye necessary, no sirree. More than that, something had happened a while back. In some scuffle that he really should've been able to handle faster, Peter got hit in just the right spot and Karen went out.
He'd been meaning to get into the suit and fix it for a while, but the thing is he'd sold his old shitty laptop for some grocery money a few months ago too. It was surprising how quickly he forgot about Karen then.
And that was just life for Peter Parker. The thing about life that he had come to realize as an adult was that things fall away if you don't cling to them for dear life. The truth of life is you have to sink your fingers into anything that matters, be constantly vigilant, beat back the "I'll handle it tomorrows" or "I'll text them later"s, or else they're gone. The things, the people, the places, they collapse over time.
Life after everything is just a constant grind, and in the simultaneous whirlwind and sinkhole he'd forget about sleep or eating or patching his shit up. It could always wait for later, he always had a shift to get to or a robbery to stop or this or that.
Turns out life isn't really like the movies afterall.
Sometimes, if he had some extra time and his feet hurt too bad to go do Spider Man, he'd lay down on his twin size mattress with no bed frame or bed sheets, stained brown by old rusted blood, and he'd stare up at the ceiling covered in stains, and he'd wonder what Tony would think of him now.
He really wasn't much of anything special after all.
Life goes on.