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Five months after Peter Parker gets shot and wakes up in hospital, it's Father's Day.
Father's Day is always a weird one. For as long as Peter can remember Mother's Day was for May, and he still keeps up that tradition, but he's never had a dad. Patrol comes up quiet, the heat keeping even criminals off the streets, so Peter ends up puttering around his apartment, halfheartedly cleaning out his desk drawers. And that's when he finds the letter.
It's dated June 21st, 2015. The opening lines read:
Dear Future Peter,
Hi! It's me, you from the past. Though you should know that, unless someone has invented time travel and changed the past so you don't remember writing this letter. But then I guess it shouldn't exist at all, so you couldn't be reading it? Geez, that would really screw up the space-time continuum.
Anyway. Today is Father's Day, and I guess I was kind of bummed out about not being able to write anyone a card. May said I should write a letter to my future self instead, so one day I could look back and see how far I've come. She called it an "exercise". I pointed out to her that an exercise comparing my future self to a father figure seems like kind of a lot of psychological pressure for a traumatized 15-year-old orphan, and she told me to save the smart-assery for decathlon. LOL.
I'm still writing it though, 'cause I have a super important secret and I NEED to tell someone before I EXPLODE. Are you ready for this? Here goes. My secret (which once again you should already know because you're me from the future) is: I'M SPIDER-MAN!!!
Peter turns over the page, unable to help the chuckle that escapes him. The rest of the letter is filled with rambling accounts of his first few weeks as a vigilante, punctuated with demonstrative doodles and way too many exclamation marks. It all overflows with an optimism that seems so far away, but there's something there that still lives within Peter, one connecting thread: the sheer joy of being New York's friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. These days that thread's been battered beyond belief, but it hangs on.
This is the most exciting thing that's ever happened to me, Past Peter writes, I just hope I don't screw it up. Any pointers, future me?
Oh kid, Peter thinks, you have no idea.
Before he knows what he's doing, he's pulled up a chair, tearing a sheet of paper from his latest notebook on Kingpin. Dear Past Peter, he writes, and then stops.
Where the hell would he even start?
Peter leans back, tapping his pen on the desk. His eyes dart to the calendar on the wall. June 18th.
Dear Past Peter,
Happy Father's Day. Here's some pointers.
***
UNCLE BEN was his dad's younger brother, so most of Peter's memories of him involve a shared grief. Other than that, what he knows comes from the photos May used to hang in the hall, the home videos on her ancient PC. Her favourite was always the one she filmed of the two of them in Central Park. Peter, just old enough to walk, toddling through the winter slush in bright red booties, clinging to Ben's hand. His uncle was laughing, teaching him to catch snowflakes on his tongue. In the month that contained the anniversaries of both Ben's and Peter's parents' deaths, May would stay up late, playing that video over and over again. Peter always left his bedroom door open just a crack. He would lie there for hours, listening to the recorded sound of his uncle's voice filtering from the other room. Sometimes May would start crying, softly, and he listened to that too.
Ben died when Peter was four. Growing up, the biggest impact he had on his life was the reaction Peter would get whenever he told anyone. The abject horror on their faces, as if losing his uncle was somehow worse than losing his parents. Oh my god, said his teachers, his counselors, the nice lady next door. Him too? You poor thing. To have one set of dead guardians, it seemed, was an everyday tragedy, but one and a half was unimaginable. Eventually Peter learned to shrug it off. It's okay, he'd say, with as best a smile as he could manage, I don't really remember any of them.
Peter is twenty-two now. He has two sets of dead guardians.
He sits forward, puts pen to paper, and starts to write. Number one. You're gonna spend a lot of your life feeling like you're missing out. To be honest, that's because you are. You think you're used to it now, with the whole orphan thing, but it always finds a new angle. Spider-Man isn't gonna help.
It's fine. I mean, it's not, it sucks, and it's gonna keep sucking. But ultimately it doesn't matter if you have less family than other people, or if your life is less normal. 'Cause what you do have is working her ass off to make up for it and she's the best. Go thank May for telling you to write this letter, and then give her a hug. Two hugs. One for me.
The harsh truth is, you're always gonna have less family than other people. But that doesn't mean you're less loved. And looking back, I wouldn't change a single thing. You have everything you need. And trust me, you're gonna need it.
***
TONY STARK picked him up from school on the last day of sophomore year, in a car that was discreet by his standards but still managed to be the flashiest one on the block.
"Yeah, she's a classic," he said flippantly when Peter complimented it. "Why, wanna give your friends a ride? I'll warn you, Happy charges a pretty steep hourly rate."
Happy, in the front, said nothing. Peter blushed.
"Uh, no thanks, Mr Stark," he stammered, "but thanks for the offer. I mean, I'm sure they'd love it. But it's fine."
Tony eyed him for a moment over the edge of his dark glasses. Then he said, "'Kay," and the car peeled away from the sidewalk. It didn't occur to Peter until Midtown High was out of sight that Tony might have wanted Peter to say yes, to show him off.
The summer after the whole deal with Vulture, Tony had given Peter an actual internship. It was based at the old Avengers Tower in New York. The building had since been converted to an SI research facility, but Tony still kept an office there, as well as a private lab. "Just as a New York base," he told Peter as they drove. "Seeing as it seems to be alien invasion ground zero."
Peter was supposed to be interning with the robotics team, but he ended up spending most of the summer with Tony. He'd been allowed to look at schematics for the Iron Man suits, as well as design new prototypes for his own. Tony even let him help upgrade Colonel Rhodes' prosthetic braces. At the end of every evening, they'd climb back in the car with Happy to send Peter home. Tony always came along, but he never got out of the car when they arrived.
"Good work, kid," he'd say, "say hi to your aunt for me. One of these days we'll all go out for a drink, alright? On me."
It was a joke, one that Tony repeated often. Happy didn't like it. Happy didn't like much of anything back then, but this especially always made him twist around in his seat, shooting Tony a significant look. Peter would awkwardly remind him that he still wasn't legal, and Tony would wave them both off, saying they were no fun. And then the car would drive away, and Peter walked up the four flights of stairs to his and May's apartment, wondering if one day he really would go for a drink with Tony Stark.
He never did. It wouldn't have been possible anyway, Pepper told him sometime after the funeral, because Tony had been sober for over ten years and FRIDAY was programmed to call her if he ever tried to go to a bar. Her voice was flat. She didn't like him. Happy assured Peter she was just grieving, but in the few minutes he got to spend with Morgan before her mother called her away, the girl whispered in Peter's ear that she recognized him from the picture her dad kept in the kitchen. It wasn't hard to piece two and two together.
When Peter first got the "Stark internship", MJ sent him a bunch of articles about Stark Industries' history as an arms manufacturer and their contribution to conflicts around the globe. It was kind of passive aggressive, but when Peter finally read them, a long time later, he realised she was also right. It re-contextualized things. The frantic energy Tony always had as he buried himself in his projects, like he was being hunted. The look he got whenever Peter said he wanted to be like him, and the step back he always took afterwards. Whatever Pepper might think, Peter knew Tony died for the world, not for him, but maybe in the end it all amounted to the same thing.
He thought about it again the night he destroyed the EDITH glasses. For all the advancement of the technology, it wasn't hard. Peter simply swung up to the rooftop where the graffiti portrait was, turned them over in his hands one last time, and then crushed them under his heel. He loved you, Happy said, May reassured, Pepper admitted. Peter believed them, and he still does, but now that belief comes with a memory from Berlin. He'd sat across from Tony and Natasha Romanoff in the car to the airport, desperately trying not to throw up. Natasha noticed his nerves and said, don't worry kid. At the end of the day, no one here is really out to hurt each other. Tony, staring out the window, cut in: I wouldn't be so sure. And then he'd turned his gaze on Peter, looking him up and down as if trying to imagine how Captain America's shield would hold up against his ribs.
Peter stares down at the page. In the years since his death, public opinion of Iron Man has gradually mellowed from the polarities it once thrived in and settled on a more holistic middle ground. Ask the average individual what they think of Tony Stark these days, they'll call him a hero despite. Genius, billionaire, Avenger, mass murderer. Peter's understanding of him is like this: to the daughter with her father's eyes goes the lake house with the garden full of toys and the billion-dollar company that produces renewable energies. To the kid genius from Queens goes the iron suit, the invention of time travel, and the network of armed surveillance drones.
Number two. This is gonna sound crazy, but one day you're gonna come home from school and Tony Stark will be in your living room. He's gonna ask you to come with him to Germany. Don't go. He won't tell you what the fight is really about, and when you find out a long time later you'll realise you were on the wrong side.
Tony is gonna help you a lot in the next few years. I'd be dead without him. He'll be your friend, ally, mentor, and sometimes he'll jokingly call himself your dad. Don't read too much into it. He's intense in all directions, like an explosion. By the time he figures out how to contain that, you'll have gone your separate ways.
Heroes are heroes 'cause that's what we call them. You're gonna learn that that word can mean a lot of things, and that sometimes it means nothing at all. Focus on doing good instead of being good. Trust me, there's a really big difference, and one of them will get you stuck in your own head. If you ever start getting confused between the two, go rescue a cat out of a tree.
Just because you love someone doesn't mean you have to be like them. I guess that's what I'm really trying to say.
***
QUENTIN BECK was definitively the worst thing to ever happen to Peter in his entire life. He was also the person with whom Peter tried his first beer.
He hated it, just as much as the vodka he once sipped at Liz's party, but it still seemed to mean something. Beck laughed when he started to cough, clapping him on the back.
"Ah, don't worry about it," he grinned, eyes glinting, "a good kid like you shouldn't drink anyway."
And Peter had been — tired, and confused, alone in a foreign country with a new suit that didn't feel right and Nick Fury at his heels. Beck had a charming laugh and dark hair that framed his jaw in a goatee. Good kid was a moniker he'd started to outgrow, but in that moment it sounded familiar, comforting, like rediscovering an old blanket long lost beneath the bed. Later Peter would realise that the physical resemblance was entirely intentional. Even Beck's facial hair had been nothing but another minute detail in the illusion, masterfully nudging him to hand over those glasses.
Defeat he was used to. It was the humiliation, hot and awful in his chest, that Peter remembered.
In the days and weeks after he didn't leave the house. May, Ned and MJ took turns sitting at his side as he laid in bed, curled up tight, head stuffed under his pillow as if it stood a chance at muffling enhanced hearing. Someone touched him and he flinched. Someone tried to speak to him and he stared blankly at their face, fighting the urge to reach out and see if they flickered away into light under his fingertips. Eventually May let his lawyer into the room with a whispered string of apologies. Peter listened to the click of his cane. The man spoke calmly, quietly, using phrases like preliminary hearings and specious evidence and murder. Peter stared at the wall and thought about how it felt to be run over by a train. The overwhelming roar of noise and sensation before darkness.
Going back to school was hell. A thousand hostile pairs of eyes prickling at the back of his neck, senses screaming at him with every step he took. He wanted to jump out the nearest window. He wanted to put a fist through the wall and see if it held. He wanted to drop everything and scream I know it's you, I know you're there, I know none of this is real and I never really got away. He took deep breaths instead, eyes closed, listening for the telltale hum of electricity.
Peter Parker was Spider-Man and Peter Parker was terrified. Peter Parker closed his eyes at night and dreamed of iron gauntlets clawing their way out of a grave, flickering blue lights in a chipped red-and-gold mask, before all of it melted away and it was Beck again and it was Beck all along and he reached out and ripped open Peter's suit, a jagged tear right down the middle exposing skin, and then he shoved his hand into Peter's chest and unspooled the arachnid from his DNA thread by thread, taking the powers, taking everything, and then he kept pulling and pushing and unwinding until there was nothing left of Peter Parker at all.
His pen trembles in his hand and he exhales slowly to steady it. Number three. You are gonna have some really fucking bad days. You are gonna make some really fucking bad choices. You are gonna do stupid, reckless things, because you're a stupid, reckless person, and also because you're human and sometimes you get tired and sad and desperate. You are gonna try too hard to be someone else, or someone else's, and you are gonna have to live with the consequences.
Just — get through it. Second by second. You're gonna live a dozen days where it feels like the world is ending, and not a single one of them is actually going to end the world. Even when you kind of wish they would.
Forgetting and forgiving your own mistakes is something you'll always find impossible. Try spending less time on them instead. Keep doing new things, better ones, until you're far enough away to look back. Stop trying to find a reason for the bad things that happened to you. Sometimes they're just that. Stop thinking that people are the answer to the messed-up things inside you because often they're not. In the end you have to save yourself. Stop looking everywhere but inwards for the strength to do so.
As shocking as it might be, you've got what it takes. This is something you're always gonna learn the hard way. But hey, at least it's true.
***
FRANK CASTLE is a father, which is something Peter learned from Daredevil one night as they sat on a rooftop recovering from a long patrol, but he is most definitely not Peter's father.
Come on, the guy's a mess. And a criminal. And a pain in the ass.
Still, when Peter blinked blearily to consciousness in that hospital ward and took in the familiar face at his bedside, when Frank huffed out a begrudging chuckle and called him a nice kid, there was a trickle of warmth that made its way into Peter's chest. Old habits.
He's run into Frank quite a few times since then, usually when Kingpin made an appearance. Peter likes Frank, despite everything. He likes how when Frank calls him kid it's usually preceded by a fuck you, he likes yelling at Frank so hard his accent thickens, he likes how Frank hangs around after a fight anyway, the gruff way he asks if Peter got his thick skull bounced off the sidewalk again. Frank never tries to teach him any lessons or tell Peter he's proud of him. But when Peter had to break back into the Department of Damage Control to gather evidence for DeWolff, a few weeks after he got out of hospital, Frank drew fire from security to buy him enough time. That's all Peter needs, really. Of the messes Tony left behind for other people to clean, the DODC has to be one of the most exhausting.
His phone pings. It's a text from Jean, undoubtedly sent from her new place in Harlem that Peter helped her find. Pizza? It reads, followed by an eye emoji.
Peter smiles and turns back to finish his letter. Number four. You've always tried to see the best in others. That's good and you should keep doing it, but also know that sometimes a person's best still contains a good amount of asshole. That's okay. People are gonna be people at the end of the day, and as much as you might try to deny it, you need them. Not to fight your battles for you, but to patch you up afterwards. There will be plenty of moments in life where you feel like you're alone, and maybe even think that it's for the best that you are. But it isn't, and you're not.
Keep caring about people. Keep loving things. At some point it's gonna bring you a world of hurt and you're gonna curse me to hell and back for this advice, but still. It's never not been worth it. And you wouldn't be the person you are otherwise.
Finally, get into the habit of stretching before and after patrol. I know you think the mutation makes that kind of thing unnecessary but you're just fifteen. TRUST ME. I will thank you for it.
Go get 'em, Spider-Man. I'll see you on the other side.
Love, Future Peter.