Work Text:
There were thousands of them, after the blip was reversed. After a while, they all blended together. A mass of humanity, confused and displaced, all of them waiting in the endless line to talk to her.
Alejandra didn’t know why this boy stood out from the rest of the crowd.
Maybe it was the way his polite smile contrasted with his exhausted eyes. Maybe it was his threadbare “Massachusetts Institute of Technology” sweatshirt, a strange sight in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
“Um, sorry, I was just wondering…” he began awkwardly, fidgeting with his hoodie strings when she impatiently called him up to her desk. “...are you guys hiring at all?”
Maybe that was what really caught her off guard. This was a social services center. Most of the people who came in were looking for food or clothes or a place to stay, or help tracking down their missing family members.
She shook her head. “We aren’t.”
The boy’s shoulders slumped. “Okay, well...thanks, anyway. Have a nice day.”
He turned away, but then he turned back to her, biting his lip. Normally, she would glare at him and tell him to get back into the line if he wanted more help, because she had worked her ass off to get a master’s in social work and now she was stuck sitting behind this desk twelve hours a day and making barely over minimum wage and managing a caseload of thousands of people who needed help with just three other social workers employed in this godforsaken aid center.
But something about him reminded her of her little brother, Ty, who was sixteen and living with their parents back home in Sacramento. Maybe it was the curly hair or the baby face.
Ty had been one of the ones who disappeared in the blip.
She hadn’t gotten any time off to go home and see him since he’d returned, because the second biggest disaster in the history of social work conveniently occurred the month after she graduated with her master’s.
This was probably why she let the kid come back to ask another question.
“This is going to sound weird,” he started hesitantly. “But I need a really huge favor. Are you originally from Albuquerque? Does your phone number have this area code?”
She blinked at him, confused. “No,” she said slowly, unsure if she was revealing something that she shouldn’t. “I’m from Sacramento.”
She leaned forward, intrigued now. “Why?” She asked, narrowing her eyes at him.
“Er...is there any chance I could make a phone call with your cell phone?” He seemed to realize that this was a peculiar request, because he frantically held his hands up in a gesture of innocence. “You can stand right here and make sure I don’t steal your phone, of course. I just...really need to call someone without them knowing where I actually am.”
He shifted from foot to foot, his expression the picture of earnestness.
She had planned to go into youth services, before half the world’s population reappeared overnight. She remembered her classes about being an advocate and empowering teens who found themselves in an undesirable situation. If this kid was running away from home, he probably had a good reason.
For the first time since the blip’s reversal, she felt the familiar rush of excitement and passion she’d once held for the field of social work return.
“Okay,” she told him slowly, hoping she wasn’t making a massive mistake. “Stand right here where I can see and hear you. And make it quick.”
She held out her phone, and he grasped it like it was a lifeline, quickly pulling up the keypad and typing in a number. She didn’t recognize the area code.
He hunched in on himself as soon as he hit the call button, his expression sad and nervous.
She could faintly hear the phone ring a few times before it went to voicemail.
“Hi May,” he said in a low, tense voice. “It’s me. I’m sure you’re panicking, and I don’t blame you. I just...couldn’t be in the city after what happened. I really hope you can understand. I love you so, so much and I really miss you. I borrowed someone’s phone to make this call—please, just...don’t look for me, okay? Just for a while.” He subtly wiped at his eyes with one trembling hand. “I hope you’re okay. I’ll be in touch when I can. I larb you, May. Please be safe.”
He hung up and quickly shoved the phone back into her hand.
“Thank you,” he said softly. She frowned as he turned to shuffle away. It had been hard to get a read on that call. It didn’t sound like he was fleeing an abusive situation as she’d expected, but something big had definitely made the kid leave home.
Well, she didn’t really have the time or bandwidth to worry about it anymore. The next person, an exhausted middle-aged woman with two preteens in tow, was walking up to the counter. As always, Alejandra tried to clear her mind of her past interaction and pretend she was a blank slate.
This was something that she’d learned over the past month since this mess began. You couldn’t care about them all, all the time. If you did, you’d just be paralyzed by the weight of everyone’s grief and loss and broken dreams. You had to divorce yourself from it.
Like when a man had come in looking for his five-year-old daughter two weeks ago, and she’d had to break the news to him that his daughter was on the list of bodies who’d been identified after the mass return. She was a kindergarten student, and she’d been getting off the school bus when the blip occurred. She’d reappeared in the middle of a busy street and died almost instantly.
One of her coworkers had taken over her desk so that she could have a ten minute break after that conversation, and it had been just enough time for her to go out back, smoke three cigarettes with shaking hands and stave off a panic attack. Then she’d returned to her desk and calmly helped a woman whose home had been sold while she’d been dusted.
“Hey, kid,” she called before she could really think about it. “We’re not hiring, but there’s a diner next door. They’re always looking for help, and they pay cash under the table to their workers.”
For the first time since she’d laid eyes on him a few moments ago, the boy’s posture relaxed. “Thank you,” he said, relieved. For an instant, she could see the carefree boy he’d probably been before this whole mess started. Then she blinked and a grief-stricken, world-weary teenager was there in his stead again, just one of the many waiting in line at Albuquerque Post-Decimation Aid Center 4.
***
The boy was named Ben. He was from Maryland, he was 18, and Alejandra was 100% certain that none of these things were true.
For one, she’d watched enough Law & Order SVU to know what New Yorkers sounded like. For two, he couldn’t be older than 16, by her estimation. And as for the name, well, she couldn’t prove anything, but he just didn’t seem like a Ben.
She often grabbed dinner at the diner when her shift was over. The food wasn’t great, but it was cheap, and it saved her from having to cook and wash dishes when she got home. Ben had gotten a job as a server, and it seemed to suit him pretty well. She watched from the corner booth as he politely interacted with customers, who were instantly won over by his curls and his smile. He also appeared to have the ability to juggle more plates than was humanly possible, always loping through the restaurant with an odd sort of grace.
“Hey,” she called after observing him at work for several minutes. “I’ve got a bone to pick with you!”
He looked over at her, concerned, before his eyes widened with recognition.
“Hi, Miss Alejandra!” he said, carrying three plates and four cups over to a nearby table. “It’s good to see you. I’ll be over in a second.”
“I’m 27,” she said flatly. “No ‘Miss’ Alejandra.” Secretly, however, she was flattered that he remembered her name. She thought that the people she helped sometimes forgot she was a human too, with a trusty old Toyota Camry and an unhealthy obsession with crappy reality TV and a bone-deep love of mystery novels.
“Sorry, ma’am,” Ben apologized, wiping his hands on his apron and coming to stand in front of her table.
“‘Ma’am’ is even worse, kid,” she groaned, pointing to the bench opposite her. “Sit for a minute.”
He glanced around nervously.
“Come on, kid, the dinner rush is already over, and you owe me.”
This mild blackmail apparently did the trick, because he slid reluctantly across from her.
“So? How’s the diner?” She asked, genuinely curious. He looked too thin, she noted. Thinner than the first time she’d seen him a few days ago.
He grinned at her, the smile not quite reaching his eyes. “It’s great, um. Alejandra.” He peeked up at her anxiously through his bangs, as though it killed him to call her by her first name.
Yet more proof that this kid was not eighteen yet.
“Everyone treating you okay? Darius isn’t being a dick?” Darius was the head server, a tall guy around her age, and she’d gotten into it with him a few times when he charged her for coffee refills (which were listed as free on the menu!).
“No, Darius has been fine.”
“Where are you sleeping?” She asked bluntly, hoping to catch him off guard and startle him into an honest answer.
“They’ve got a cot in the back that they’re letting me use,” he said, and fortunately, she didn’t sense that he was lying.
“If you ever need somewhere else to crash, they can always cram one more bed in at the Center,” she told him. Feeling that she had fulfilled her role as a social worker, she now turned to the real issue she wanted to address.
“Hey, kid. Whoever you called the other day—they keep calling me. Like five times a day. I’ve got…” She quickly swiped through her phone to check the number. “I’ve got fifty-two voicemails sitting on here.”
All from the number with the unfamiliar area code.
Ben’s face paled. “Oh my god, I’m sorry! I totally didn’t think about that. You can just...um, block the number.” He winced, as though the idea of blocking the woman—had he called her May?—on the other end was particularly painful.
“You sure? You want to listen to any of these messages?”
He shook his head fervently, although he glanced at her phone with a slightly wistful expression. “No, just delete them, please. I’m really sorry.”
“Hey, no questions asked here,” she shrugged, blocking the number and deleting the voicemails. She hadn’t listened to any of them out of respect for the kid’s privacy.
“Thanks,” he said softly. She nodded, and they both lapsed into awkward silence for a moment, staring at the TV hung above their heads.
After the blip had been reversed, the diner had stopped playing the 24-hour news cycle, which was chaotic and overwhelming at even the best of times, and switched to westerns.
“You want some of my fries?” Alejandra asked, idly watching as John Wayne hopped on his horse in The Searchers.
Ben looked hesitant, but when she shoved the entire basket of fries at him, he took one. And then another, and then another, until he’d wolfed down the entire thing. He looked up at her nervously then, but she just ordered another basket.
They became friends after that.
***
Tony Stark was alive and in critical condition.
They announced it on the radio as she drove to work one morning, about five weeks after the reversal of the blip.
Everyone had thought he was dead. They’d all seen the footage and the pictures from the battlefield. The moment that he’d put the gauntlet on and snapped had been captured by the recording mechanisms on some of the superheroes’ suits, and the full videos had been accidentally leaked to the public in the aftermath.
Alejandra hadn’t watched the full footage. She didn’t give a shit about Iron Man or the Avengers. New York and their little world was half a universe away, as far as she was concerned. She had more important things to think about than superheroes, like how New Mexico’s education system was one of the worst in the country, or how the reservations lacked access to good social services.
She was thankful to Iron Man and the Hulk for bringing Ty back and defeating the purple alien guy, but she didn’t want to dwell on it. There was enough death and misery to be found in her daily shift at work, thank you very much.
Plus, she knew that Iron Man had a daughter. They’d all seen the occasional paparazzi photo over the past few years, a sweet little girl with Tony Stark’s eyes and dark hair. There were enough dead fathers at Albuquerque Post-Decimation Aid Center 4, and she preferred to pay attention to those men instead, who received no murals or memorials or recognition of any kind.
But now, Pepper Potts-Stark was on the radio issuing a statement saying that her husband was alive and in a coma. They’d kept it quiet because it had been so touch and go at the beginning, but they were feeling more confident about his odds of recovery now. He was being treated in Wakanda by the best doctors in the world. She thanked everyone for their support, and then, oddly, when the radio host thanked her and wished her a good day, she cleared her throat and kept going.
“Actually, if I could add one thing…”
“Oh...of course, Mrs. Potts-Stark,” the radio DJ fumbled awkwardly. As if he was going to say no to the most powerful woman in the world, Alejandra thought, rolling her eyes.
“Spider-Man, if you’re out there listening to this, I know you thought that—well, you know what you thought. I’m so sorry for the misunderstanding. Please come to Wakanda.”
She was silent for a few seconds, as if weighing what else she could say.
“That will be all. Thank you.”
Well, that had been incredibly cryptic. Alejandra flipped to the oldies station with a shrug. What did she care about some rich people on the other side of the country, anyway?
***
It had been a bad day. A horrible day, in fact.
Her boss, Mr. Ignace, had called her into his office and lectured her on her “atrocious conduct” at the city council meeting the night before. So she may have lost her cool when they announced that they were giving the mayor a raise and cutting the Child and Family Services budget. Maybe she’d raised her voice a little bit. Yes, it probably could’ve been construed as “yelling” by the uneducated viewer. Who cared?
Apparently Mr. Ignace did.
“No matter your personal feelings on the matter, it’s not a good reflection of our Center and our mission, Alejandra,” he told her, frowning severely at her. “I’m very disappointed to see you act like this.”
By the time he’d dismissed her from his office, she’d been torn between bursting into tears and punching a hole in the wall.
Then her coworker Martin had put a sympathetic hand on her shoulder and told her that Mrs. Santos, one of her favorite old ladies who was staying in the shelter part of the Center, had died the night before of a heart attack.
And then, to top it all off, her coworker June called in sick and she had to stay four hours late to cover for her.
So she’d done the only thing anyone could do in such a situation: when her shift was over, she climbed onto the roof of the Center, rolled a joint, and started plotting out her two weeks’ notice speech.
She had just gotten to the part where she complained about the mediocre insurance plan when Ben suddenly scrambled over the ledge of the roof, appearing out of thin air.
“What the fuck,” she gasped, clutching her chest. “Whoa. How the hell did you get up here?”
He looked just as caught off guard as she felt.
“Uh...the same way as you?” He said hopefully, and it sounded more like a question than an answer.
“You used a staff building key to open the door on the third floor that leads up here?” She asked skeptically.
“Um. No. I—I just wanted to see if I could climb up here. It was, uh. A dare. From one of the other servers.”
She peered over the edge of the building that he’d hopped over. “There’s no footholds anywhere, and we’re up three stories. How the fuck—”
“Okay, the truth is that I just wanted to get away from everyone for a bit. I used to go climbing a lot back home. Um...you know, like urban parkour and stuff.”
“Aren’t you from Annapolis? I thought they didn’t have skyscrapers there. My mom had this postcard—”
Ben laughed nervously. “Right, um. My friends and I used to visit Baltimore—”
Maybe it was the fact that she was high or the awful day she was having, but she let the matter drop, not in the mood to poke holes in his shitty cover story and watch him scramble to respond. “Yeah, whatever. I come here when I want to be alone, too. I’ve never seen anybody else up here, though.”
“Sorry, I can go if you want. You sounded, um, busy.”
She huffed out a morose sigh and flopped onto the gravelly rooftop surface. “Practicing my resignation speech.” She took another puff and held the joint out to him. “You want some? Yeah? Well, you can’t have any. You’re too young.”
He let out a startled laugh. It made him sound about twelve. “That’s okay, I don’t want any. You know, you kind of remind me of—”
He stopped himself mid-sentence.
“My aunt,” he concluded after a pained pause, before quickly changing the subject, his eyes narrowing in concern. “And what do you mean, your resignation speech? You’re quitting?”
“I don’t think I’m cut out for this, Ben,” she confessed, scrubbing a hand over her face. “It’s really getting to me. I yelled at the City Council meeting last night. There’s this old lady, Mrs. Robinson, who has dementia, and she comes in every single day and asks me the same questions about her social security benefits and it takes like 15 minutes and it drives me crazy. Nothing I do makes any difference, poverty still exists, and this blip reversal thing is insane.”
“You helped me,” Ben pointed out earnestly. “It made a difference to me.”
She snorted. “I let you borrow my phone.”
“No, you looked at me. I was on the road for two weeks before I made it to Albuquerque, and you were the first person who even glanced at me twice.”
“Great, so I helped one kid.”
“No, you’ve helped hundreds of people like me. You just don’t usually get to talk to them after the fact.” Ben’s expression was oddly knowing when he looked at her. “But...I know how you feel. My uncle used to always say that with great power comes great responsibility. But sometimes it would be nice not to have the power in the first place, right?”
She blinked at him.
“You’re a weird kid, you know that?”
He laughed again, hopping to his feet and extending a hand to pull her up. “Come on, the cook made too many enchiladas earlier. I bet I can get you some for free.”
She was starving now that the high had hit. She accepted his help and tabled her resignation speech for later review.
***
She stopped by the diner a few days later to give Ben a cupcake as a thank-you for the pep talk.
“I asked the bakery to write ‘Thanks for not telling my boss I was smoking weed on the roof,’ but they couldn’t fit it all on there,” she shrugged.
“What a shame,” Ben grinned. “Thanks!” He exclaimed, with all the eagerness of a golden retriever puppy. He took a giant bite, smearing frosting all over his chin. “This is so good. Did you end up resigning?” He mumbled curiously.
She shook her head. “Nah. Um. You know, I figured, tough job market out there right now. Might as well hold onto this gig until something better comes along. And...I think you were right. About helping people. Maybe. I don’t know. The jury is still out.”
“Well, if you ever need me to talk you off the roof again, you know where I am.”
“Ditto, Mr. Urban Parkour.”
He blushed. “Ugh. Can we just forget that I said that?”
“Hell no,” she told him. “Come sit at my booth during your break; they’re going to play The Good, The Bad and The Ugly on the western channel.”
***
She first noticed it right before the final duel scene of the movie. Ben’s dinner break was long over, but it was a slow night, so he’d been able to watch most of the movie with her. He was wiping up tables, but he’d been going slowly, so captivated by the movie that he often paused for moments between moving his washcloth halfheartedly.
“I still can’t believe you’ve never seen this before,” she remarked, turning to shake her head disbelievingly at him.
She saw that he’d stopped watching the movie, however, and fixed his gaze on a table on the other side of the diner.
“Ben?” She called. “Everything okay?”
She followed his gaze but didn’t see anything remarkable about the table. By all appearances, it was just a teenage boy eating dinner with his dad.
“Ben!” She tried again, raising her voice a little. “You’re missing the best part of the movie.”
Ben flinched and glanced back at her, almost as if shaking himself out of a trance.
“What?” He said, his gaze faraway and his hands shaking slightly.
“Hey, you okay? What’s going on over there?”
“It’s...nothing,” Ben muttered. “Nothing.”
But she noticed that his gaze drifted back towards the father and son, as though he didn’t want to look but couldn’t stop himself.
As they both watched, the boy showed his dad something on his phone, and the two of them burst into laughter, unaware of their audience. The dad reached out and wrapped an arm around his son’s shoulders, and they kept watching whatever the boy had pulled up on his phone like that, heads bent close together.
When she glanced back at Ben, he was stark white and not breathing.
She jumped into action, her training kicking in. “Hey!” She exclaimed, standing up and approaching him carefully. “You’re okay, Ben. You’re having a panic attack. You have to breathe, okay?”
She grabbed his hand and placed it over his chest. “You have to breathe. In and out. There—like that, feel your chest rising and falling? Good. Keep going.”
She talked him through it, and it took a few minutes, but eventually some of the color returned to his cheeks and his breathing, though still a bit too shallow and rapid, returned to normal.
“Sorry,” he gasped, stumbling over to the booth and collapsing onto the seat. “Sorry.”
“You’re fine,” she assured him. “It happens.”
“Sorry,” he repeated helplessly. When he looked up at her, his eyes were full of tears.
“You want to talk about it?” She asked softly.
He drew in a shuddery breath. “My, um, dad-mentor guy...person." He made a vague gesture to accompany this confusing designation. "He and I used to do this thing when I couldn’t sleep. We’d get in one of his cars, and we’d drive to this little diner that was open 24 hours. And we’d order all this random food in the middle of the night and we’d eat it all, and then I always fell asleep on the car ride back.” He shook his head, and a single tear slipped down his cheek.
He swiped at it angrily. “He died,” Ben sniffed. “When the blip was reversed. I was one of the people who was gone, and when I came back, I wasn’t...safe. He saved me, but he died doing it.”
Alejandra exhaled heavily. “Jesus, Ben. That’s horrible.” She felt empathetic tears prick her eyes, but she held them back.
“That kid and his dad...just reminded me, I guess.” He abruptly jolted to his feet, clearly itching to escape. “Anyway, I have to finish cleaning.”
He ducked his head and hastily retreated to the kitchen area of the diner, and she stared thoughtfully after his retreating back, a plan taking root in her mind.
***
Tony Stark was awake, and he was looking for his son.
Every radio station was talking about it, much to her annoyance. She flipped through, trying to find a station that was playing some actual goddamn music, to no avail.
“According to Stark, Peter is sixteen, about 5’8” tall, and he has brown hair and brown eyes.”
“Oh, great,” Alejandra scoffed. “That really narrows it down.”
“The family is offering a reward of $100,000 for locating Peter.”
“Is he a criminal fugitive, or a sixteen-year-old?” She muttered, honking at some jerk-off who cut her off as two lanes merged into one.
“My question is,” another radio personality was saying on the next station she tried, “why have we been hearing about Morgan Stark for the past four years, but we’ve never heard of Peter before today?”
“My guess is that he’s a secret love-child,” the co-host replied, his tone full of intrigue.
She rolled her eyes and shut the radio off. They were vultures, all of them. Peter was probably just some kid like Ben, lost and grieving and running from a difficult past.
When she got to work that day, she made sure to change the news station to the game show channel and hide the remote so nobody could change it back. Better to watch people utterly fail at guessing how much a vacuum cleaner cost than to have to listen to the speculation about the Stark heir. Better to suffer through the stupidity of Judge Judy than to have to see what Tony Stark’s missing kid looked like.
She knew if she saw him, she’d only be able to see Ty and Ben and that kindergarten girl who’d died in the street.
***
Alejandra knocked on the back door of the diner. It was Saturday, and both she and Ben had the day off.
Darius answered, raising one eyebrow when he saw her. “Back to complain again?”
She scoffed. “As if I would waste my day off talking to you. Where’s Ben?”
“Here!” He called cheerfully, appearing almost suspiciously quickly, as though he’d already known she was there.
She pointed at Darius. “You. Stop overcharging people for coffee.” Then she pointed at Ben. “You. Come with me,” she waved him over. “I’m going to show you a secret.”
“Um, I’m pretty sure I watched some stranger danger videos about this exact scenario in school,” Ben joked.
She poked him on the arm indignantly. “Okay, fine, then stay here and have a boring day off by yourself.”
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” he huffed, tugging his sweatshirt on and following her to the car.
“So, the mountains here are different from your East Coast mountains, right?” She said when they had gotten on the road.
Ben had his face pressed up against the passenger window, taking in the scenery with wide eyes. She supposed he probably hadn’t gotten to see much of New Mexico, since he didn’t have a car and he lived in the back of a diner.
“Way different. Much bigger. And, I mean, obviously it’s all desert-y out here,” he said, waving one hand vaguely at the brownish peaks surrounding the city.
“Is that the official term for it, Mr. Future Scientist?” She teased. “Desert-y?”
“You know what I mean,” he grumbled. “And I want to be a chemist, not a geologist.”
He gasped eagerly, shifting from sullen teenager to seven-year-old boy in seconds. “Is that the Rio Grande?”
She nodded. It was kind of nice to see the city anew through someone else’s eyes.
“Is that what you wanted to show me?”
“Nope, we’re getting out of here. You ever heard of the Cibola National Forest?”
He shook his head.
“Okay, well, just keep looking out that window and you’ll know when you see what I’m talking about.”
Looking intrigued, he obediently turned back to the vista, humming along quietly to the radio as they left the city and began to climb up through the mountains.
His posture stiffened suddenly. “Hey!” He exclaimed. “It’s so...green. What happened to the desert?”
She laughed. “That’s the secret. The front of the mountains is dry and arid because they don’t get much rainfall. But back here, it’s full of trees and life.”
She pulled down a side road and put the car into park near her favorite overlook.
“It’s beautiful,” he said, a faraway look in his eyes as he stared out at the breathtaking peaks in front of them. “But why did you bring me up here?”
“I used to come up here...after the blip. My little brother was one of the ones who disappeared. It helped a lot.” She shrugged. “I’m not really sure why. Sometimes I’d write a letter to him and come up here and read it. Other times I’d just come up here and scream. The mountains have been here for millions of years, you know. They don’t care one way or another.”
“Your brother’s back now? He’s okay?” Ben asked anxiously. She’d noticed that about him. He thought of others before himself and his own pain.
“Yes, he’s back. We talk on the phone all the time. Can’t visit him because of how busy the aid center is, but maybe sometime in the next few months I’ll get to see him. Not to mention how expensive flights are right now. $2,000 just to fly from Albuquerque to Sacramento, can you believe it? Fucking capitalism. Half the world’s population disappears and then reappears, and the rich get richer.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. She reached into the center console and pulled out a worn notebook and a purple gel pen. She flipped past all her letters to Ty to the next clean page and handed both items to Ben wordlessly.
“I'll be hiking towards the west,” she announced. “There’s a path that’s about a mile long. It usually takes me about an hour.”
Then she ducked out of the car and set off, giving Ben some privacy.
***
When she returned, the sun had almost set. Ben was sitting on a cliff, his arms wrapped around his knees. She could see tears still glistening on his cheeks as he stood and walked over to meet her at the car.
“How was it?” She asked, turning the engine on and flipping the radio to a classic rock station.
Ben shrugged. “Exhausting. Sad. I screamed after I read the letter, just like you suggested. It was kind of nice.” His hoarse voice and puffy eyes made it clear that he’d been crying heavily, but he seemed a little lighter, as if he’d left some of the weight he was shouldering behind on the mountaintop.
He handed her the notebook. “Thanks,” he told her shyly. “This was...weird, but good.”
“We need to get you some tacos,” she decided, tapping absentmindedly on the steering wheel. “There’s this place not too far from here. You in?”
“Hell yeah,” he grinned.
She shoved the notebook back in the center console. “You want me to rip your letter out for you?”
To her surprise, Ben shrugged. “No. You can read it; I don’t care. I kind of like the idea of my letter next to all your letters. I mean, if you got through it, so can I, right?”
“The secret is giving in whenever you feel the urge to eat tacos,” she advised him wisely, turning the car around and following the course of the setting sun.
***
She forgot about the letter for a few weeks, until she was on the phone with her dentist’s office on her drive home from work and she needed to make a note of when her next appointment was.
She had a separate notepad where she wrote stuff like this down, but she couldn’t find it, and the awkward silence on the phone call with the receptionist was growing too long, so she grabbed her “letters to Ty” notebook instead, flipping to the first blank page.
She jotted down the appointment information, hung up, and her eyes immediately landed on Ben’s note, written on the opposite page.
She hadn’t intended to read it, but once she started, she couldn’t stop.
Tony,
He’d addressed the note to somebody at the top of the page, but then he’d crossed the name out so thoroughly that she couldn’t read it. It was short, and it seemed like it began with a T. Or was it an F?
She didn’t spend much time trying to decipher it. Just because Ben had told her that he didn’t care if she read it didn’t mean that she had to invade his privacy.
The rest of the letter was written in the untidy scrawl that all teenage boys seemed to share.
Do you remember my favorite rooftop in Queens?, it said. I used to sit there on nice evenings in the summer and you’d come and join me sometimes, remember? And there would be this moment when the sun was setting and every single building in the city would turn golden, and you’d be there right next to me, and I felt so safe. Sometimes I used to pretend that you were my dad, and that we were just a normal father and son, watching the sunset together.
I never said that out loud, though, and it seems stupid now. I love you, I love you. I would say it a million times if it could bring you back. But I can’t, so I guess I’ll just shout it at the sky.
The sun is setting right now where I am. On a mountain in Albuquerque. Weird, I know, right?
I don’t feel safe anymore. Not when you’re gone. I never wanted you to sacrifice yourself for me. Sometimes I wish we never met. Maybe you’d still be alive then.
If you were here, I know you’d be telling me to eat more and put a jacket on, for Pete’s sake. “For Pete’s sake,” was a really lame joke, just so you know. I’m not sure why you always thought it was so funny.
I miss you.
I miss you.
I miss you.
Wherever you are, I hope there’s a fully stocked lab. Save me a workstation next to yours.
Peter
Alejandra sat in her car for a long time after that before she put the notebook away and went inside her house.
***
It was a perfectly normal day, but Ben had been oddly twitchy ever since she’d shown up at the diner after work.
He kept stopping in the middle of whatever he was doing—talking to customers, carrying trays of food, joking around with Alejandra—and staring out the window at the Center, scratching the back of his neck nervously.
“What’s going on with you, man?” She heard Darius ask him.
“Nothing,” Ben murmured, but he still didn’t tear his eyes away from the building.
She was in the middle of eating her salad when a resounding crash rang out through the diner. She turned around to see Ben, frozen, a plate of food shattered on the floor next to his feet.
“Something is wrong,” he announced gravely. He turned and looked around the diner at everyone. “Stay right here, all of you. I mean it.” And then he suddenly vaulted over one of the booths and disappeared into the back of the diner, leaving a bewildered-looking Darius to apologize to all the customers.
The first shot rang out just a moment later.
***
Ben had specifically looked at her when he’d implored everyone to stay in the diner, but she wasn’t about to take orders from a kid, especially when it had to do with the safety of her coworkers and the people who visited the Center.
She jumped out of the booth and ran to the door of the diner.
“Alejandra—” Darius tried to say, but she cut him off.
“You can’t stop me from going over there, Darius, so get out of my way.”
He was silent for a second and then he stepped aside. “I’m coming with you, then,” he announced, pushing the front door to the diner open.
She didn’t have time to argue with him, so she just followed him across the parking lot. Her heartbeat thudded in her ears, and it seemed strange that the afternoon sun could still be shining when someone dangerous was in the Center.
She used her ID badge to scan her way into one of the side doors.
“Come out this way,” she hissed to the terrified people cowering in the back office area, most of whom were random civilians who were meeting with social workers or filling out paperwork. “Come on, get out.”
The people scattered obediently into the parking lot. “You,” she said, grabbing a man’s arm as he fled with his teenage daughter. “Call 9-1-1.”
Her coworker June was the only person who didn’t leave. “There’s a shooter in the front room of the Center. One man. He started shouting at Martin about how his house was stolen from him while he was blipped, and now he doesn’t have anything, and we didn’t help him when he needed help.” Her eyes filled with tears. “He shot a woman in the leg. Said it was a warning. I feel horrible. I heard it all, Alejandra, but there was nothing I could do from back here—”
“Stay here, June,” she instructed her coworker impatiently. This was no time for crying and apologizing. “If you see anyone else, get them out that back door.”
She sprinted down the hall before June could say anything else, peering through the window in the door that led to the front of the Center. She could see the four desks where social workers sat, at the back of the room, close to her. Martin was the only one at his desk, and he was frozen in place, his hands lifted in surrender.
There were maybe twenty or thirty people who had been waiting in the line to be seen, and they were assembled in a tense, silent crowd near the front doors. She could see the woman who’d been shot lying on the ground, and at the center of it all was a nondescript middle-aged man wielding a gun. A toddler in the crowd burst into tears then, and his father began to frantically shush him, holding a hand loosely over the little one’s mouth to muffle the sound of his wailing.
“Shut him up or I’ll do it for you,” the gunman said to the terrified man.
Alejandra had pushed the door open before she was even aware of what she was doing. She ignored the strangled noise that Darius made behind her and stepped into the room.
“Leave him alone,” she said, amazed when her voice didn’t shake with fear.
The man whirled around to face her. He was sweating heavily, and his eyes darted around, full of paranoia.
“He doesn’t work here. None of these people do. Let them go, and I’ll talk to you.” She kept her chin held high, even though she could feel nervous sweat dripping down her back.
“I’m done talking!” The gunman shouted, sounding completely unhinged. “I came here and filled out form after form, and nobody helped me! I lost everything!”
She caught a flicker of motion from the corner of her eye, and glanced up at the ceiling to see—a person?
There was someone wearing some kind of suit on the ceiling, poised right above the gunman. He shook his head frantically at her, but whether he was telling her to stop confronting the gunman or just not to call attention to his position, she couldn’t be sure.
“This isn’t the answer to your problems,” she said calmly. “And we’re not your enemy. We’re here to help, even though bureaucracy sometimes limits what we can do for you.”
The man pointed his gun at her and her mind went blank.
She was going to die. She saw it all. He was going to fire the gun, she would be too slow to dodge it, and she was never going to see Ty—
Several things happened at once, then. The figure on the ceiling shot some kind of string at the wall above her head, and then he swung from his position on the ceiling towards her, throwing his body in front of her protectively just as the sound of the gun went off.
She felt a different hard body collide with her from behind—Darius, she realized belatedly—tackling her to the ground. The bullet that had been intended for her hit the swinging person in the side.
She caught a flash of blue and red, and the emblem of a spider. She recognized the suit from the news, she realized. But what the hell was Spider-Man doing in Albuquerque?
All of this seemed to happen in a split second, but it could’ve also been an hour, and she’d have no way of knowing.
Although Spider-Man had been hit, he didn’t go down. He shot another web and neatly pulled the gunman’s weapon out of his hands, and then he webbed the man to the nearby wall. The man shouted profanities and spit at the crowd, but he was trapped, and he knew it.
“Spider-Man, are you okay?” She asked faintly, feeling shock beginning to set in.
Spider-Man looked at her for a second, and then he swung back up to the ceiling and ducked out of the window without saying anything.
“Alejandra!” Darius was shouting frantically near her ear. “Are you hit? Are you okay?”
“I’m—I’m okay,” she stammered, looking down at herself to confirm that it was true. No blood. Not even a scratch. Maybe a small bump from when Darius had tackled her. “Uh, thanks,” she said, suddenly feeling oddly shy as Darius helped her up, concern painted across his features.
***
She gave her statement to the police as quickly as she could. Her concern for Spider-Man was probably the only thing that was keeping her from lapsing into complete shock and becoming useless.
She knew the bullet had hit him. But now she had to find him. Where would an injured superhero go? Spider-Man was from New York, everyone knew that. He was the “darling of Queens,” as the news had liked to say ever since Spider-Man was spotted fighting against Thanos in the final battle.
Was he visiting family or something? It seemed surreal to think of a superhero having aunts and uncles and cousins. She had a cousin named Manuel, and the bravest thing Manuel had ever done was eat an entire bag of Warheads candy in one go.
She walked in circles around the Center and the diner, calling out softly and feeling kind of stupid. Fortunately, night was falling, so nobody could see her.
She was about to give up and hope for the best when the answer occurred to her. It was so obvious that she didn’t know why it had taken her so long to realize—the roof.
After all, Spider-Man had some sort of super-ability to stick to surfaces and climb things. It would only make sense for him to hide somewhere up high, especially since he’d swung out of the window on his way out.
She buzzed back into the dark building, stepping over the crime scene tape and taking the stairs two at a time to the third floor door that led up to the rooftop.
Sure enough, there was a red and blue lump huddled in the corner of the rooftop. Her heart rate sped up, and Spider-Man weakly lifted his head, as if he’d heard it.
“Alejandra!” Spider-Man moaned, reaching out one hand to her when he saw her.
Her mouth dropped open. She recognized that voice.
“Please, don’t let them find me!” He begged. “Please, please. You have to promise me. They’re going to track the suit; they’re going to show up here—”
He trailed off, rocked by a spasm of agony.
“It’s going to be okay, Ben,” she soothed. She picked up his hand, unsure of what else she could do. “We’re going to get you to a hospital—”
“No!” He gasped, the white eyes of his suit opening again. “No, no hospital! I have super healing, Alejandra. Promise you won’t take me to the hospital!” His grip on her hand tightened, as if he was drowning and he was entreating her to save him.
“Okay,” she said, uncertain of whether she should believe him or not. It seemed absurd not to take somebody who’d been shot to the hospital, but several other absurd things had transpired in the past few hours. “Okay, then you have to get in my car, Ben. I’ll take you to my house.”
He nodded, his fingers relaxing. With his other hand, he reached up and shakily pressed against the spider emblem on his chest. Instantly, the suit loosened and hung off of him.
“Gotta...leave it here,” he panted, struggling out of it. She could see the puddle of blood growing on his t-shirt, and she had to look away, feeling sick to her stomach. It reminded her of when Ty had fallen out of a tree and broken his wrist when he was 10. When she’d heard him screaming and ran over to see what was wrong, his hand had been bent at a funny angle, and she’d nearly thrown up. Their parents had been at work, so she’d held his good hand in the back of the ambulance and helped him pick between a green and a blue cast at the emergency room after his surgery.
If Ty was alone and needed a stranger’s help, she hoped someone would help him.
She grabbed Ben’s suit and shoved it behind some of the HVAC stuff on the roof, and then she helped him stagger to his feet, down the stairs, and into the backseat of her Camry.
“Sorry about the mess,” she said, because it was easier than saying, Are you going to bleed out on my backseat? Am I making the right decision by taking you to my house right now instead of the hospital?
Ben laughed weakly. “Sorry about the blood. I’ll pay for you to have it cleaned.”
“Don’t worry about that right now,” she muttered, fixing her attention on the road. “Who are you running from? Do you need me to call the cops?” She found herself nervously glancing in the rearview mirror, as if some kind of evil villain might be trailing them.
“No,” Ben sighed. “It’s...it’s nothing that dramatic. Just my family. I left because I needed some time to myself, to grieve and make sense of everything. They’ll be able to track the suit, and then they’ll come looking for me, and I don’t want to scare them or anything by running, but...I just...don’t want to be in my own life right now.”
Alejandra could understand that. She’d applied to grad school in Albuquerque the year after Ty blipped, just wanting to get far away from Sacramento and all the memories there.
Instead of asking the millions of questions that came to mind or offering platitudes about how his family probably wanted what was best for him, she changed the subject.
“So, are we going to talk about how you tried to convince me that you were a fan of ‘urban parkour’ from Annapolis? Or are we just going to ignore that?”
Ben threw an empty diet coke can at her head, which she took to be a good sign for his chances of recovery.
***
It was the day from hell that would never end. After tossing and turning for hours, plagued by nightmares, she had finally fallen into a decent sleep, only to be jolted awake by someone pounding on her door.
Her adrenaline spiked sharply for the second time in the past twelve hours. She was going to have plenty to talk to her therapist about at their next appointment, that was for sure.
She clambered off her couch and stumbled to the peephole. There were two men on the porch, which was not a great sign at this hour. She kept a knife in the end table by the door, but she couldn’t remember where her pepper spray was.
Plus, she’d plugged her phone in to charge in her bedroom and she’d left it there behind a closed door. Her house was tiny; just over 600 square feet. There was nowhere to hide.
One of the men knocked again, rapping firmly on the front door. She flinched back and looked uncertainly towards her room, where Ben had been dead asleep since after he’d pulled a goddamn bullet out of his side and stitched himself up, which had been fucking disgusting and also kind of cool. He hadn’t stirred since then, probably as a result of his healing mojo, or whatever it was called.
He’d probably still be able to defend her if it came down to it, but she wasn’t entirely sure he’d wake up right now if she called for him.
“Open the door, please,” the man who’d been knocking called. He sounded desperate. “I don’t mean you any harm. I just want to talk to Peter.”
Alejandra debated her next move. She had a feeling that pretending nobody was home wouldn’t work with these guys. And if she left the room to grab her phone and call the cops, they could kick the door down.
“I’m calling the cops,” she yelled, her voice sharp with fear. “And I’m armed. I don’t know who Peter is, but you’re at the wrong house.”
Through the peephole, she could see the desperate man pull out his phone and check something. “This is definitely the right house,” he muttered to the other man before turning back to the door.
“I promise I don’t want to harm you! You have my kid. I just want to see him. I need to see him. There’s been a terrible mix-up—”
It slowly occurred to Alejandra that this man’s voice was familiar, somehow. She flicked the porch light on so that she could see the intruders’ faces better.
“Oh my god,” she gasped, several pieces of a puzzle she hadn’t even known existed abruptly falling into place.
Pepper Potts-Stark, delivering a mysterious message to Spider-Man on the radio: Spider-Man, if you’re out there listening to this, I know you thought that—well, you know what you thought. I’m so sorry for the misunderstanding. Please come to Wakanda.
Ben, explaining that his "dad-mentor guy...person" had died when the snap was reversed.
Ben, writing a letter in her notebook to a man whose name started with the letter T.
Tony Stark, his voice on every radio station in the country, searching for a boy named Peter, who was 5’8” and had brown hair and brown eyes.
***
“Wait here,” she instructed the richest man in the world, who glared like he’d rather chop off his other arm than listen to her.
To be honest, Stark looked like he should still be comatose in a hospital bed in Wakanda. His usually perfectly-groomed hair and goatee were overgrown and a total mess, his eyes were bloodshot, his left arm was completely gone below the shoulder, and there were nasty-looking chemical burns along the left side of his face and neck. He was clutching Ben’s bloody spider suit in his good hand.
His friend, who she recognized vaguely as another superhero, the war one—War Man? War Machine? Roberts? Rhodes? Ryans?—was continuously shooting concerned glances at his friend, who was swaying slightly where he stood in Alejandra’s doorway.
“Let me at least give Ben some warning,” she told them firmly.
“Ben?” War Machine turned to Stark questioningly.
Stark’s eyes slid shut. “That was his uncle’s name. God, poor Pete.”
“He didn’t want you to come here, you know,” she felt compelled to tell them. “He panicked when he had to use the suit, but he did it to save me and my coworkers and all the displaced people at the Center. But he didn’t want you to track the suit and find him here. If he doesn’t want to see you, he has that right.”
“He’ll want to see me,” Stark said confidently.
She couldn’t help but roll her eyes at him. Just as arrogant as the media was always saying, then—
“He thought I was dead,” Stark explained, locking eyes with her and not looking away, his expression oddly pleading. “That’s why he ran. My heart stopped on the battlefield, but the Wakandans brought me back. Peter woke up in the hospital a week later thinking I was dead, and he climbed out a window and disappeared. Nobody except his aunt heard from him since then. All she got was a voicemail from a number in Sacramento. By the time I woke up, it was too late to trace where the call had come from.”
His voice devolved into an exhausted rasp by the end of this speech, and she noticed that he was holding onto the end of her couch to keep himself upright and staring longingly at the closed door of her room.
“That was my phone,” she confessed.
“You’ve been helping him?” Stark asked, returning his intense gaze to her.
“Just here and there,” she shrugged. “I didn’t know the backstory. You’re his dad?”
“Not biologically,” he shook his head. “But...otherwise, yeah. I am.”
“I’ll go wake him up,” she said softly, convinced in spite of herself. “But it’s still his choice if he wants to see you or not.”
“Thank you,” he said fervently, looking like a dying man who’d been led out of the desert and offered a well full of cool, fresh water. “For everything. Thank you.”
***
For a moment, she simply stood at the foot of the bed, absorbing everything she’d just learned. Ben wasn’t Ben, he was Peter Parker. He was Spider-Man and he was Tony Stark’s surrogate son.
This was a happy ending, perhaps in such a picture-perfect way that it felt impossible. But it was still heavy, the weight of what she was about to tell Ben—Peter. Like when she’d first heard the news that people were reappearing, and her cell phone had gone off, showing that her dad was calling, and then her dad, who she’d never heard cry before, had been sobbing on the other end, and it had taken several moments before he could compose himself enough to say, “He’s back. He’s here,” over and over again.
“Peter,” she called, gently shaking the kid’s shoulder. He looked even younger than usual in sleep, hunched over protectively, a frown line in between his eyebrows.
“Peter,” she repeated, until he flinched and sat bolt upright, staring at her in confusion.
“What did you call me?” He asked, looking endearingly disheveled.
“Peter,” she said again.
His face paled. “You know. They’re here, aren’t they?” He scrambled out of the bed, wincing when his feet hit the floor. She was pretty sure that people who had been shot eight hours earlier shouldn’t be standing or walking around.
“Who is it, May and Rhodey? Or May and Happy?”
“Who? No—look, it sounds like there’s been some kind of misunderstanding—” She tried to explain.
Peter’s face suddenly went whiter than the moon, and his trembling fingers latched onto the sleeve of her t-shirt.
“Wh-what?” He whispered in utter disbelief, frozen in place. His head was cocked to one side, as though he was listening intently to something that only he could hear. “What the hell is that sound?”
She listened, but she could only hear the quiet shuffling of footsteps right outside the door. Stark had obeyed her warning to wait in the other room, alright, but he had obviously planted himself as close to his kid as possible.
“What sound?” She asked.
He let go of her sleeve and shakily inched forward, almost like a clumsy little doe learning to walk for the first time. She was startled to see that he was already crying, even though she hadn’t told him the news yet.
“Tony?” he whimpered into the quiet room, and that was all it took for the spell to be broken.
At the mention of his name, Stark flung the door open. Peter stumbled forward and then suddenly the two of them were meeting, right by the foot of the full-size bed frame that she’d bought from IKEA two summers ago, two of the most powerful men in the world collapsing into a heap on her bedroom floor as she watched in bewildered amazement.
“Tony,” Peter sobbed, his face pressed against Stark’s good shoulder. “Tony.”
Stark’s voice sounded hoarse when he responded. “I know. I know. I’m so sorry, Pete. I’m so sorry.”
“But...you died!” Peter choked out between gasping, hysterical breaths. “Your-your suit’s arc reactor went out. Your heart stopped! I-I h-heard it!”
“The Wakandans saved me, Pete. You left the hospital before anyone could tell you, bambino. Didn’t you see the news? We’ve been making announcements like crazy, trying to find you.”
Peter just shook his head and buried his face deeper into Stark’s neck. “I didn’t know,” he whispered. “I didn’t know.”
Stark dropped his voice too. “I know, buddy,” he murmured tenderly, rearranging himself so that his back was resting against the bed frame and Peter was safely folded into his embrace. He continued to whisper an inaudible string of endearments to Peter, who seemed to be growing more and more limp and relaxed in his arms by the second.
Feeling like she was intruding, Alejandra took that as her cue to leave. She slipped around the pair and joined War Machine in the living room, shutting the door behind her.
“Thank you,” he said, looking exhausted but much brighter than when he’d first stepped into her house. “What was your name, again?”
“Alejandra Salazar,” she told him.
“I’ll pass that along to Pepper. She’ll make sure you get the reward money, Ms. Salazar.”
She couldn’t help but glare at him. “I didn’t help Ben for reward money, Mr. War Machine. I did it because I’m a social worker and a big sister and it was the right thing to do.”
He blinked at her. “I’m sorry,” he said respectfully. “That was poorly said, on my part. I didn’t mean to insinuate that you only helped Peter because of the reward money.”
An idea struck her then. “Can you ask her to donate it? To Albuquerque Post-Decimation Aid Center 4?”
“I’ll make a note of it. And Ms. Salazar? I’m pretty sure there is nothing Tony would refuse you right now, if you asked for it.”
“Thanks, Mr. War Machine,” she told him confidently, thinking about Ty and Ben—Peter, both missing for five years, and now home once again. “But I already got everything I needed from Stark.”
***
“...And that was the last time I saw him,” she concluded, popping a french fry into her mouth.
“Wow,” Darius said, shaking his head in awe. “So...what, Iron Man just whisked Ben away? Back to New York?”
“Yeah, he and War Machine carried him to their jet a few minutes after that, and they disappeared,” Alejandra explained, taking a sip of her milkshake to hide how her eyes misted over with tears. She’d been texting with Peter ever since he woke up back in New York, but it wasn’t the same as seeing him at the diner each afternoon.
“It’s okay, though,” she clarified, clearing her throat. “That’s how social work is. You hope that you never see your clients again, at the end of the day, because it means that they’re living happily and independently.”
To her surprise, Darius shook his head. He wasn’t that bad, now that she knew him a little better. His smile was kind of attractive, now that she thought about it, and it was nice that he’d shielded her with his body when the gunman attacked.
“But he wasn’t your client, Alejandra,” he reminded her gently. “He was your friend.”
***
Mr. Ignace was thrilled that she’d somehow managed to attract a $20 million donation from the Stark Foundation.
“Take the week off, why don’t you?” Mr. Ignace told her, adjusting his tie happily as they watched the workers who were renovating the place swarm around like worker bees.
She glanced askance at him, hope rising in her chest. She’d fall behind in her rent payments if she bought a plane ticket home, but it would be worth it to see Ty.
“Seriously?” She asked, crossing her fingers behind her back for good luck.
“Of course,” Mr. Ignace boomed jovially. It was a strange look on him—he’d once lectured them all about not using so much toilet paper because of the expense, but here he was, encouraging her to take non-sanctioned time off.
“Before you go, Alejandra—you had a gift delivered here today, actually,” June said, a mysterious smile gracing her face.
“Stark sent it,” Mr. Ignace confirmed.
“A gift?” She echoed curiously.
“Close your eyes,” June urged. “And count to three.”
Blinking dubiously at them, Alejandra complied.
“Three,” Mr. Ignace and her coworkers chanted. “Two, one!”
Alejandra uncovered her eyes. She was expecting there to be a wrapped box or a gift bag in front of her or something, but it was just her coworkers standing in a semicircle, the same as before. She looked up in confusion, only to catch a shadow move in the doorway.
All the sound in the room seemed to fade away then, and her coworkers parted to give her an unobstructed view of Ty, suddenly just ten feet away from her.
“Ty?” She breathed, her voice cracking. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be.
“Hi, Ali,” he said, smiling at her. God, she had forgotten that he was slightly taller than her now, and the way his cheeks creased with dimples when he smiled. It was one thing to know that he was alive and walking around the world somewhere, and it was a completely different thing to suddenly see him standing in front of her.
She ran to him, and everything seemed to happen in slow motion. She thought about all the days she’d mourned him. All the nights she’d cried herself to sleep. She thought about running in the sprinkler with him during hot summer afternoons when they were kids. She thought about holding him in the hospital on the day he was born.
He smelled like the coconut oil that their mom always bought, and his arms were strong when they closed around her.
“Ty,” she cried. “Ty.”
“Hi, big sis.”
After they broke apart, Ty poked her on the arm, just like he always used to do to annoy her.
“So...not that I’m not thrilled to be here, because I am, really,” Ty began. “But why the fuck did Tony Stark send his personal jet to pick me up in Sacramento? I thought I was being abducted by aliens or something, to be honest.”
She laughed wetly and poked his shoulder. “It’s a long story. C’mon, there’s a diner across the way. I have so much to tell you! And you have to tell me if you think the lead server there is cute or not. I can’t quite tell, but he did save me from being shot, so he has that in his favor.”
“Ew, Ali, no boys allowed.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right, I forgot that you’re only 16. How does it feel to know that you’re eleven years younger than me now instead of six years younger, baby bro?”
“Yeah, well, how does it feel to have wrinkles, Ali? Got any gray hairs you’re hiding in that braid?”
She punched him on the arm. Ty squared off with her and they burst into a spontaneous fake-boxing match in the parking lot of the diner, until Darius poked his head outside and yelled for her to stop scaring the customers away and to come inside because he saved her the last cheeseburger.
Later that night, she sent Peter a selfie of herself and Ty at the diner. She smiled at Ty, who had passed out on the couch, and she draped an extra blanket over him before turning off the light and heading to bed.
When she checked her phone in the morning, Peter had sent a picture of his own, of himself and Morgan Stark with a large, furry animal behind them.
Is that a fucking llama?? God you rich people are weird. Miss you, kid, she texted him.
She showed Ty the picture over breakfast.
“Looks like I have competition for the spot of favorite baby brother,” he remarked.
She rolled her eyes. “No competition. Peter is obviously my favorite.”
Ty stuck his tongue out at her.
“Hey, Ty,” she said, feeling strangely shy. “I love you. You know that, right?”
They’d never said it before the blip. They just weren’t that kind of family. But after everything—
“Of course, Ali. You know I love you, too.”
They grinned at each other.
“Okay, that was fucking weird,” Ty said. “Can we talk about something normal now? Like, what we’re going to do today? I was thinking we should find a pool somewhere, because I got all gross and pale when I was trapped in that stone thingy for 5 years.”
“I don’t know what you're talking about; you’ve always been gross and pale,” she retorted.
Ty threw a grape at her head, and the moment was so perfect that she almost burst into tears. She smiled instead, though. There had been enough tears in the past. Today, she didn’t have to be Ms. Salazar, the social worker, or Alejandra, the only remaining child of Samuel and Camila Salazar.
She was just Ali, Ty’s big sister.
“Hey, why don’t you ditch this hellhole and move back to Sacramento?” Ty asked her, his expression serious. “You almost got shot last week, for one. We all miss you, for two. And, I mean, what’s really keeping you out here now?”
She tilted her head to the side, considering. The thought had certainly crossed her mind many times in the past two months.
But if she left, who would take care of elderly Mrs. Robinson? Who would play soccer with the kids in the back parking lot on Wednesdays and Fridays? Who would show up to city council meetings to complain about the pitiful Child and Family Services budget? Who would bicker with Darius about the diner’s menu? Who would visit her mountain and scream at the sky when things got bad?
As much as she complained about her job and as many times as she’d contemplated quitting, she had been willing to take a bullet for every single person in the Center on the day the gunman attacked.
“No,” she said slowly, shaking her head. “I mean, I definitely want to visit home more often. But you know, this place has really grown on me. There are lots of people who need my help, and I want to stay and help them.”
She was surprised to find that she actually meant it.