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~
His parents were connected by a short red string.
Peter was four when they died, but the image of their red string stayed strong in his mind. In kindergarten, he drew a picture of his family for a project, and with a thick crimson crayon he meticulously drew in the red line. He looked around as he drew. No other kid drew their parents with a thread joining them, even though Peter had seen that several of their parents had matching strings. The rest had strings that zoomed off in different directions like starbusts, a spray of red in every direction.
His teacher Ms. Roberts thought the red line represented love, and Ms. Roberts teared up and mentioned she knew his parents, back when. Back when? Peter asked, but she just wiped a tear away and pinned the picture up high.
~
Uncle Ben and Aunt May had a string, but it was longer than his parents had been, and it was a little thinner. It got tangled up around the house, snagged on corners and wrapped around furniture. Peter trailed the string around the house, laughing when he walked through it. He tried to avoid the strings when outside the house, because they were everywhere, and while he could walk through them, Peter didn't like to do that. It was easy to avoid them. Most of them went off into the sky. Only a few got in his way, and they were stretched between people, either short like his parents' string had been, or complicated tangles that made Peter's stomach hurt to look at.
Peter didn't have a string at all. Everyone else did. The kids at school were right. Peter was a freak.
~
"What happened?" Uncle Ben's voice was thick with disappointment.
Peter swung his legs under the chair and listened through the door carefully.
"There was... an altercation," Ms. Roberts said.
"Peter wouldn't have started it," Aunt May said. "Not my Peter."
A loud sigh from Ms. Roberts. "I'm afraid he did."
It was a lie. Harold started it. Peter just asked about the strings, and why Harold had two strings, one on each hand. Harold called him crazy and a son of a bitch for lying. Peter had to punch him, in his mother's honor. He had to.
But then the rest of the school formed a circle around him, and Harold - blood running down his face - started telling everyone that Peter was hallucinating things and needed to be sent to a hospital.
It turned out that no one else in the whole school could see the strings. Not a single person.
Freak.
~
During one fourth period on a Monday, sixth grade, Ms. Roberts' red string snapped and turned black. Peter's teacher flinched, but carried on teaching them. Later, Peter saw the police come to the school, and Ms. Roberts started crying, and crying. It looked like she didn't know how to stop. She never came back.
Peter was finally glad he didn't have a string. If you didn't have a string, it couldn't snap.
~
Peter met a woman once with skin the color of fall leaves who told him the truth about the strings. She walked the same way he did, ducking around the people with entwined strings, and stopping, every now and again, to stare wistfully at a string arching high into the clouds.
She didn't want to talk long, but she left him with some truths:
The red string of fate connects lovers, Peter Parker. Only very few can see them. And you can't see your own, or the thread of who you're bound to, it's against the rules.
And don't bother telling people you can see them. You'll be locked up, Peter Parker. Locked up into the darkness and they'll throw the key away, and that's if you're lucky.
Her string was bright and pointing to the east. When Peter told her, she just looked sad, and said one more thing:
The strings are strings, fragile and impossible. Think of them as a guideline not a rule, and maybe you'll do better than I did.
~
When Peter turned fifteen, he accidentally ended up with spider-like superpowers. He wondered if there were different color strings connecting people to incidents that changed their lives forever. He wondered what color those strings would be. He hoped his was red and blue.
~
Even swinging across the rooftops of New York, he couldn't escape from the strings. Sometimes Peter wondered about his love of space. Was it because of the infinite possibilities of things lost among the stars? Or was it just that maybe he wanted to find somewhere where he couldn't see the strings every moment of every day, couldn't see the visual reminder of how much a freak he was?
~
They said Uncle Ben was dead.
Dead.
Peter screwed up his eyes. He didn't want to look. He didn't want to believe it.
He looked up. Aunt May had the ends of a black thread trailing from her right hand pinky finger. The end was slightly scorched. Uncle Ben was gone.
Peter threw up.
~
Superheroing was tiring work, and it didn't pay well.
Peter didn't want to do it alone.
The Fantastic Four were-- they were a dream. Reed and Sue were bound together by a red string that wrapped around them again and again, knotting and twisting, surrounding them in shifting crimson. Ben had a red string that Peter followed once to a blind artist living near the Baxter building called Alicia. They hadn't met yet. Maybe they never would. Johnny was Peter's age, and Johnny didn't have a string at all.
Peter remembered how devastated Aunt May had looked after losing Uncle Ben. He remembered Ms. Roberts, crying and crying.
Johnny was lucky.
~
Gwen Stacy didn't have a string either.
At first they didn't get on, and Peter almost wondered whether some people just didn't get a soulmate because some people were meant to be alone. Peter's disappearances to save the day as the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man didn't help their initial clashing, but as careful animosity grew to acceptance and love, Peter had begun to wonder and to hope.
He couldn't see his own string -- maybe that really was the rule, or maybe it meant he didn't have one. Or maybe it meant he did have one and it was connected to Gwen.
~
He found out the hard way that Gwen didn't have a string because some people were just meant to die without a soulmate.
Maybe that was Peter's lot too.
~
The one thing that got Peter through Gwen's death: Johnny Storm.
Johnny thought it was his wit, and their reluctant and burgeoning friendship, that had cheered up a grieving Spider-Man.
Really, it was determination.
No thread meant death, and Peter would not let anyone else around him die. Not if he could stop it.
Johnny didn't have a string, so it meant he was supposed to die.
Peter clenched his fist. Not on his watch.
~
Johnny seemed awfully good at putting himself in the way of dangerous things. Peter's patrol at night had to double in length in order to cope with Johnny's daredevil tendencies. Keeping him alive was exhausting. Hanging out with him more was the only way to manage keeping him safe.
They became friends, through sheer amount of time spent together, and hijinks enacted together, and every day, Peter looked at Johnny's string-free finger and sighed.
Keeping Johnny Storm alive was a full-time job.
~
Sue and Reed's thread got thinner at one point, during the war they never talked about. It never untangled, though. They spun apart, but the string reeled them back in, tighter and tighter.
~
It was too difficult saving Johnny's life day after day and maintaining his secret identity.
Peter was forced to intervene in an attack at his school where bad guys thought bringing guns to a school assembly being led by the Human Torch was a good idea.
Johnny shook his head a lot, but then hugged him, and forgave him for the necessary lie of it all.
Peter wondered whether Johnny would forgive him for knowing that the universe intended Johnny to die.
~
When it happened, Peter wasn't there.
He thought-- He'd tried--
Dammit, he just wasn't strong enough. Or quick enough. Or good enough.
The strings didn't mean squat when it came to love. Peter had seen plenty of marriages without strings over the years to know that love happened with or without soulmates being involved; maybe the soulmates tended to be in the third of marriages more likely to survive, but sometimes non-soulmate love was enough.
He'd been too busy trying to save Johnny's life to realize the truth.
Sue threw her arms around Peter and they wept together, and Peter felt nothing but guilt, weighing him down, down, down. He knew Johnny was going to die. He should have told everyone, so they could have been more careful. Instead, Peter had kept quiet, and Johnny was gone, and Peter was heartbroken
~
Of course, Johnny had been annoying in life and he was annoying in death. The idiot wouldn't even let him grieve and sulk like he wanted to. Peter wanted to bury his head in the sand for about a million years.
Instead, Johnny willed Peter his place in the Fantastic Four, forcing him to take on Johnny's burden of saving lives and looking after his family.
It was infuriating. It was incredible. Johnny trusted Peter with everything that he loved and cared about.
Peter had let him down by not saving his life, but he wouldn't let him down now.
Spider-Man would keep going, the Fantastic Four would keep going, and Peter would save a thousand lives in Johnny's name or he would die trying.
~
Looking after Johnny's legacy was a vow Peter took seriously, and it wasn't long until Sue gave him regular babysitting duties while she worked with the rest of the Future Foundation.
Val liked to steal Peter's teacher log-in to all the newest science journals. Franklin was happier with art materials and getting to hang out with his idol, Spider-Man. They were good kids. Johnny would be so proud of them. They didn't even need that much. Val liked to argue science. And Franklin liked someone to admire his pictures.
Franklin slid a new one in front of Peter, a wash of white, black and red.
"I drew just the close family," Franklin said, "because otherwise there are just too many kids in this place."
Peter also spent time training with the Foundation kids. He still had a lump on his head from the altercation when Bentley tried to tell a joke about Leech's lack of a nose ("how does he smell?" "terrible".) The whole lot of them were going to wreak holy terror on the supervillain community -- well, all of them would only be a correct prediction if Peter and Sue could work out how to pry Tong, Turg, Mik and Kor away from their campaign to steal all of Ben's socks.
"Close family?" Peter prompted, because Franklin was an enthusiastic artist, but he wasn't always an accurate one.
"Yeah," Franklin said, and pointed at his picture from left to right. "Mom, dad, me, Val, Uncle Ben, Uncle Johnny and you, Spider-Man."
Peter stared at it. There was a red string between Reed and Sue, a tangled whirl of a string.
And between Peter and Johnny, there was a thick red line. Taut, like his parents had been.
Peter's heart thumped painfully.
No.
No.
He lowered his voice. "Franklin... have you always been able to see the red strings?"
Franklin shrugged. "Leech says a lot of the other mutants can see them too, but he says I'm short-sighted, because I can only see them for people I love. So that's why I can see mom and dad's, and yours. Val can't see them, though." Franklin smiled. "I like yours the best, it's so red and it leads down to dad's lab."
Peter stared. Led was past tense, and death was all about past tense, but... "Leads?" he repeated, incredulous, as Franklin nodded and pointed the way.
Leads was present tense.
~
Peter stayed by the negative zone portal every day after that. Sue and Reed thought he'd gone mad. Peter shrugged them off.
Franklin pointed out that Peter's thread went into the closed doors, and although it occasionally wavered, it was still there. Still red.
It could only mean one thing.
Johnny was alive.
Somehow, somewhere, his soulmate was alive.
~
The Kree invasion happened (Peter had given up numbering them), and Peter was right by the gate; he should have been able to protect it, but he failed.
He failed, and perhaps that was actually okay this time, because the gate opened. The gate opened wide, and Peter's heart thumped in his chest, and when he hugged Johnny, held him high, he thought for a moment that he could see it, the small thread that connected them. Vibrant, taut, red like blood, and thrumming with energy. Almost alive. Not a promise, but potential: that when Peter managed to find the words to tell Johnny what he felt-- that maybe Johnny would say he felt the same things too.
~
One day, and Peter didn't have to wait long, Johnny did.
~
Peter took Johnny down to meet his family, the neat gravestones with their names on. They weren't too far from Johnny's parents, which was nice, in a gloomy way.
Peter told Johnny about the strings, but more importantly, about how he loved him before he even knew they were connected. Johnny listened, and listened, and didn't call men in white coats to take him away. He told Peter a story about their grandmother, before she passed away, and how she told the story about the red strings of fate. She could see them too. She told him that they weren't guarantees, but if you found someone that could see them, then you were lucky, that you'd better grab that person and hold on tight. His grandfather would grab her at that point in the tale and hug her until she couldn't stop laughing in pure joy. Johnny had always wanted a relationship like that. And now he had one.
~
"It's ironic, really," Johnny said, "that you ended up with spider powers."
"Huh?" Peter said, because he always thought it was less ironic, and more irritating. "How so?"
"Well, with all the strings you see," Johnny said, pointing up at the sky. "It's gotta look like some sort of web."
Peter had never thought of it that way, but when he followed Johnny's finger and stared upwards, he could see the patterns forming a crimson web, criss-crossing across the clouds, connecting people across the globe. He looked back down at Johnny's empty finger, no thread in sight, and he reached forward, lacing their hands together, holding on tight.
~
~