There was ginger in his lunch again. In his sandwich. Hidden there, nestled in among the greens like some kind of sweet-spicy violent weed.
MJ.
There was no question. It had to be MJ.
He took a moment to chew a few times to try to figure out if maybe he could make this work. Ginger-tuna salad? Couldn’t be the worst right? Sounded more or less unthreatening.
Mmmmm.
Mmmmm.
Okay, no. Not happening.
He delicately spat the bite out into a napkin and then dumped the whole thing, foil and all, into the trash. He had a yogurt. Man could live on yogurt alone if the need called. He was fairly sure of that.
Laurie at the desk adjacent gave him an eyebrow and then went back to crunching through bagel chips and hummus with her other hand occupied with adjusting contrast levels. Peter sat back down heavily next to her, peeled the foil lid off his yogurt cup and joined back in on the fun.
He’d go for taped-over Tupperware next time so he’d know if there was tampering.
MJ announced that she was cooking dinner the following night and Peter feared for his life for a moment. She wasn’t an amazing cook to begin with, having no conception of salt or spice. She went whole hog in either way, but had yet to find that sweet spot in the middle. She also lacked imperative knowledge of the sweet spot of knowing when things were done. Not raw, not burnt, just done.
He loved MJ with his whole damn heart. She could not cook to save her goddamned life. And Thursday night was just another example of this.
She made chicken tenders and garlic fries. Peter noted a lack of vegetables and said nothing. He knew what was good for him about two times a year.
The tenders were scorched and the kind of salty-dry-chewy that was typical of frozen meat. Tolerable, anyways. For MJ? This was a high A in terms of effort and preparation. The garlic fries, meanwhile, were certainly…garlicky.
He’d bought a jar of minced garlic a while back to chuck in salad dressings and marinades when he was too tired and too beat up to do much mincing. It had a certain, squidgy kind of texture to it and it burned like nothing else, but whatever. Sometimes, you’re allowed to cut corners.
MJ appeared to have deposited half the jar on some once-crunchy, fairly decent potatoes. But this had not been enough. Peter was pretty sure he was detecting some garlic-salt somewhere in the mush, but this was hard to find underneath the raw garlic and the small forest of parsley which sat atop it.
MJ ate without saying a damn word, eyes forward, watching Patsy Walker tell them all about the latest scoop in the entertainment world on tv.
He followed suit and surreptitiously brushed his teeth three times before bed.
MJ tried to poison him again a few days later.
Okay, so maybe ‘poison’ was a bit extreme, since she more or less stood over him and explained to him exactly what he was taking and why. But still.
Zinc.
Why zinc? Peter’s diet was fine. Peter’s diet was about 2 to 3 times that of a normal person. There was no way he was not getting enough zinc in his diet.
MJ shook the tablets at him and glared.
And he loved her.
So he took them.
The kids did not understand why he was always tired. They thought that he went out Spiderman-ing more than they did and in that, they were correct. Peter did at least one patrol per night, even if it was out of the suit. Just walking home from work or riding the train was a type of patrol for him.
Ever vigilant, unfortunately.
He couldn’t turn Spiderman off anymore. Hadn’t been able to for years.
He could probably use some type of therapy to help him with that, mindfulness or CBT or something, but alas. They had to save their health insurance to pay for other things these days. Namely the barrage of tests that they were both having done at MJ’s behest.
Gwen was the one who noticed the bandage bulge in his elbow that weekend and she blinked up at him in confusion.
“Did you give blood?” she asked.
Ha. Not willfully.
“Yeah,” he said.
Miles lit up in interest.
“We can give blood?” he asked.
Peter had no clue. As a rule, he did not. Who knew what kinds of mutations lurked in his veins.
“For labs,” he clarified before the kids got ahead of themselves and rushed off to their local clinic.
He got blank stares all around.
“Are you sick?” Gwen asked. Peni peeked out from behind her shoulder in concern.
“No, don’t think so,” he said. “Just checkin’, though. Wife’s going through a health kick.”
The others relaxed again and went back to their chattering. Peter watched them and felt fond and old and distant, right at the top of his chest, in his sternum.
MJ got her results back first and didn’t cry, and Peter thought that was horrendously brave of her. Nothing was more important to her these days than this. It had, after all, torn them apart and then brought them back together.
She held his hand as tight as she could on the subway home, clenching it as though she was afraid he’d let go again and never come back.
He wanted to tell her that that was nonsense.
He wanted to tell her that this meant nothing.
He wanted to tell her that she was more than a vessel for other beings and that he’d never loved her because of what she could do. He loved her because of who she was and the decisions that she made and did make.
She didn’t need to be pregnant for him to love her. That had never been a condition of this whole deal they had going on.
She lasted until bed, unusually quiet. She waited until he’d tucked his chin into her neck to squeeze at his hands around her waist and, then, finally, she huffed just the beginning of a sob. But then, like the champion she was, she swallowed it back and set her jaw. He felt it against his own.
“It’s okay,” she said into the dark.
“I love you,” he told her.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“There’s not need to be sorry over something that you can’t control,” he told her.
“Am I bro--?”
“MJ, what would you tell someone else in your shoes?” he asked before the self-loathing could start.
Silence.
“Nothing has changed,” she murmured.
“Nothing has changed,” he agreed.
Except it kind of did when he got his results back.
“Okay, so this is not ideal,” MJ said, giggling.
Not ideal?
Understatement.
“Maybe that’s why we were drawn to each other,” MJ postulated, still grinning at his pout, “Like attracts like?”
“That’s not how it works, babe,” he grumbled.
She thought she was hilarious.
“Our crops are doomed,” she murmured to herself. “We couldn’t even grow a carrot between us if we wanted to.”
He sat down heavily on the couch next to her but didn’t uncross his arms. Not even when he shoved her with his elbow and she shoved him back with twice as much effort.
“We couldn’t grow a carrot because you’d kill it immediately,” he snipped.
She shrieked in delight at the idea. Shamelessly honest about her string of stone-cold plant murders. The only reason the herbs in the kitchen were still alive was because Peter felt bad for them being held hostage there by his wife and so watered them when their soil started to feel a little dry.
MJ helped by buying them all little pots shaped like hyper-realistic pigs.
They now had an issue to deal with which was taking more thought and consideration than they had anticipated.
“We could adopt?” MJ suggested over her painstaking cutting on the floor of their living room. She’d dragged out her craft mats from the closet and had decorated the floor with those and her fat quarter collection.
“Or foster?” Peter tried. “You know, there are lots of kids who need a stable place for a few months or a year.”
“My heart can’t handle that,” MJ said without looking up. Her scissors made a little grinding sound as they munched through fabric.
“Alright fair. Maybe not.”
Peter was technically already fostering a bevy of reckless kittens in his spare time anyways.
“We’ll adopt then.”
“Yeah, we’ll adopt.”
“What do you mean, you can’t have a baby?”
Gwen was more devastated for him than he’d expected. Miles, too. All of them actually. It made him want to stand up a little straighter. Defensive.
He couldn’t help that, but he made himself shrug.
“Sometimes folks can’t have kids,” he said. “Turns out me and MJ won that lottery twice over. Neither of us is fertile.”
“Can’t you do IVF or something?” Gwen asked.
“Ehn, we could. But it’s not really something we’re into,” he said. “If we can’t do it, we figure we probably aren’t meant to do it, and I’m already a freak of nature, so maybe it’s for the best. Besides, there’s loads of kids in the world who need folks.”
Miles perked up a little at this.
“So you’re gonna adopt?” he asked.
“Yeah, I think we’re gonna try to adopt.”
It felt kind of nice saying it out loud. Warm in his chest where he’d once felt all that distance. Maybe he was proud?
MJ was the one who ended up finding her. They’d spoken to an agency and gotten all these books and talked about their apartment and all this other shit Peter hadn’t even thought he’d have to do or justify. But in the end, the universe didn’t fucking care.
It saw all their efforts and said, ehn, nah. Here’s another one just for you, Parker.
She was a beautiful little thing. Cold. Hungry. Wet and unhappy and just generally puny and weak.
MJ found her outside a church’s back door on her way home from work. That church had been out of commission for years by then. Whoever had left her there must not have been from the area. She didn’t have a name. Didn’t have a note. Wore a tiny beanie and some mittens, the kind the hospital put little ones in before they put them in warm boxes and rooms.
She couldn’t be more than a week old.
MJ already loved her with her whole heart, even though she kept telling Peter, the baby, and anyone who would listen that she was trying not to get attached. She made Peter hold her, while police officers buzzed around them, when she got too overwhelmed by emotion.
Baby opened bleary dark eyes up at Peter and frowned and pouted before settling back at his gentle bouncing. She was a warm, nothing-weight in his arms. He looked up, dead fucked.
“Girl, take her from me,” he told the wall in front of him at the police station as flatly as he could.
“I can’t, I won’t,” MJ said, refusing to look at either of them.
“I can’t look at her or I’ll die,” he said.
“’s fucking tough shit, ain’t it, Parker?” MJ said with hands over her face in the same direction.
It didn’t take long to find Baby’s mama. She had two young kids, one just barely 18 months old. She cried when she saw Baby. Cried like someone who knew exactly the decision she’d made and for whom that act had been a sacrifice.
She didn’t say as much, but Peter suspected that Baby was the product of an unhappy union, maybe even a nonconsensual one. Evidence of this woman’s pain and suffering. A living testament to her survival and strength, but one which she could not afford to keep in addition to her other little ones.
She had already lived through so much pain, this woman. And she was already working her ass off to support the babes in her arms and Peter might have had a different opinion of this whole thing back when he was a kid and justice appeared in blacks and whites. But he was older now and justice was gray and pain was sometimes the only thing people saw when they closed their eyes.
So he did the only thing Spiderman could do.
He lied.
Told the officers that there appeared to be a misunderstanding. There was a fire station on the other side of the church and this lady must have thought that the church was the back of that building. She must have been trying to relinquish the child under the Safe Haven law. He stared at this women in the eyes and asked her if that had been what she’d been trying to do.
She must have seen something in his face because she got it right away.
Yes, she told him.
Then it wasn’t a crime, Peter explained to the officer. Just a misunderstanding. Just a misunderstanding, that was it.
The police didn’t like it. Really didn’t. But Peter had the advantage here of being a tall-ass, big-ass, white male and by god, if he had this privilege, he ought to use it.
It worked. Of course, it worked. These people were tall-ass, big-ass white men, too.
Baby was taken back into custody, safe and sound. When the cars had gone, Peter and MJ turned to the mother and swore that they did not blame her. She told them that she hadn’t slept. She’d made up her mind and she’d gone back to the church later that night, but by then, Baby was gone. Gathered up by MJ on her way home.
MJ couldn’t stop apologizing.
The mother’s name was Renée, and she said that sometimes, things happen for a reason and maybe this was the best thing that could have happened to all of them.
A few weeks later, proved this to be true. Baby came back to Queens to say hi to Renée, then she went home with Peter and MJ and dum-duh-duh-dah!
They had a baby.
Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?
Miles got so emotional over Baby that he hugged Peter and didn’t let go for a long time. Peter couldn’t decide if it was because he was happy for him or because Baby was half Puerto Rican like him.
Miles told him later that it was a bit of both. Furthermore, Peter needed to teach Baby Spanish or Miles was never speaking to him again. Peter tried to point out that that would require he himself or MJ to know Spanish and the look of supreme judgement that followed did not merit further discussion.
They would learn Spanish.
At any rate, getting Baby back from Miles proved a challenge. One only MJ could seem to manage.
Baby for her part, slept through the majority of her meetings with the spider kids. She was the chill-est kid Peter had ever had the opportunity to engage with, although she emphatically did not like her toes to be cold and she very emphatically did not like him to put her down between the hours of 8 and 10, am and pm.
Peter could work from home, unlike MJ, and found himself in the somewhat confusing role of stay-at-home Dad.
Editing took twice as long with little Gabrielle in the house. Although little Gabe was a fantastic passenger on photography excursions out into the big wide world. She slept through most of them and wisely chewed on only the strings of Peter’s cameras when she didn’t.
Ehn. Well. They needed a cleaning anyways.
Gabe was about four months old when Peter noticed that she fucking hated Spiderman. God, she hated Spiderman, more than anything she’d hated in her brief but busy existence.
She hated Spiderman more than she hated baths and that was truly saying something there.
The Spiderkids thought that shit was amazing. He and MJ in the meantime, played a great game called ‘bait and switch’ which involved Peter making a show of putting Gabe to bed and being very tired, wow, so tired. Mommy, why don’t you come finish this up for me, I’m just so tired.
At which point, MJ would come in and make a fuss and Gabe would mostly not notice Peter scrambling out the window in his suit.
Mostly.
Like, 6 out of 10 times.
She was, MJ lamented, truly a daddy’s girl.
At about 7 months, Peter decided that he didn’t fucking need sleep anyways. Fuck it. He’d gotten through his teens and early-twenties with no sleep, he’d get through these next few years just fine, too. MJ functioned very poorly with little sleep. But she tried, bless her.
Miles turned fourteen and demanded to see baby Gabe. To inspect baby Gabe. For Peter to bring baby Gabe for the inspection of his mama, which was terrifying on a level Peter hadn’t been expecting.
MJ was loathe to relinquish her child for another dimension.
Gabe was stoked.
Her favorite almost-words were ‘Dada,’ and ‘ball,’ which Peter had to explain was not a ball, but which was his camera lens which she was damn sure was a clear ball-pit ball, stuck in the beastly device. She loved to get her sticky little fingers on that thing. He carried around lens wipes like some kind of dealer these days.
Gabe demonstrated this for Miles’s mom, which she thought was just about the most charming thing she’d ever seen.
Then Miles kidnapped her to go hoard her in the living room and protect her from Gwen and Peni, and all the adults were left in the kitchen, wondering if he had some kind of early-onset paternal instincts.
“Maybe it’s because he doesn’t have siblings,” Rio thought. Jeff gave her a meaningful look which told Peter that this had not been for a lack of trying on someone’s part.
Gabe maybe had some separation anxiety. A little. Just a hint.
MJ told Peter that this was a direct result of him spoiling her.
He pled the fifth.
MJ told him to stop giving her everything she wanted, and it was hands-down the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life.
It was a simple relationship between the two of them in his head. Gabe said, ‘Dada—afel.’ And Peter gave her whatever the fuck she was pointing at and told her she was brilliant.
He didn’t see how this had to be any more complicated. But MJ said things like ‘social skills’ and ‘prolonged separation’ and ‘delayed gratification’ and yadda yadda yadda.
So he added a layer to their interactions. Now things went like this: Gabe said ‘Dada—afel.’ And Peter said, ‘Okay, but you gotta wait a minute, baby girl.’ And they waited and she shrieked and once she was done with that, he gave her whatever the fuck she was pointing at.
See?
Complex.
MJ told him she was getting him a ‘Worst Dad Ever’ mug. She followed through, too.
By the time Gabe was ten months old, she’d decided that Spiderman was acceptable in their household, but only from the neck down. She hated his mask. She told him that it was ‘’caree.’
MJ told him that if he even thought about taking her out with him on one of his runs, she’d mount his head on a pike.
It was a tough line to toe.
Gabe was two before she really started to understand that Daddy was Spiderman. No, the real one. Not the one on lunch pails, the one on tv. Naturally, she told everyone in her pre-school class. Naturally, no one believed her.
Until she took one of his fucking webslingers to school with her to show her favorite teacher.
The fucking police were pounding on their door that same evening and he then had to explain that no, officer. He was just a Spiderman enthusiast. Yeah, you know. You work for the papers, take enough pictures of the guy, you start kind of daydreaming about what it would be like to be him, you know? Maybe do a little cosplaying here and there. Really, that was all to it, officer.
They laughed. They left.
Peter turned towards his child.
His child screamed and threw herself into the hall.
She started to get the hang of secret keeping a little bit better after that.
When she was four, she started to demand to see Miles on the regular. She said that he was her favorite Spiderman and Miles was so proud of this.
Gwen huffed and told her that that wasn’t very feminist of her.
And before he knew it, Peter was mediating a breakdown because Gabe couldn’t understand that she could, in fact, have two favorite Spiderpeople. He decided to leave the fact that neither of them were him for another day, preferably year. Preferably a teenage year, when the mere mention of it would embarrass the ever-loving fuck out of her.
He resolved that to make this dream come true, he’d cut back on some of the more death-defying stunts where possible. He had, after all, a prom to see and a few graduations to go to.