Queens, New York — November 12, 2012
He should have stayed.
That's the thing about it. The argument had been — he'd been angry, not irrationally, the thing he'd said to Ben was the kind of thing you say when you're fourteen and furious and you don't know yet that some words have weight beyond the moment. But even if what he'd said had been justified, he should have stayed.
Ben had said: "You have an obligation to the people in front of you. Not to the mystery behind you."
And Peter had said something cruel about obligations being easy to talk about when you were the one who got to stay.
He'd regretted it the moment the door closed behind him.
He'd regretted it harder when he was two blocks away and the Spider-Sense fired — not at him, not nearby, but in a direction that registered as wrong, as someone else's danger, as a thing happening that you cannot fix by being here—
He'd run.
He'd been too late.
[First-person narration — Peter, age 14]
The briefest description I can give you, because I can't give you the long one without coming apart at the seams even now:
A man robbed a convenience store two blocks from our apartment. The same man I'd let go. I'd watched him run past me and I'd thought: not my problem. Because I was angry and tired and I wanted to go home.
He ran into Ben, who had come outside after hearing the noise, who intervened because that's what Ben Parker did — he stopped. He helped. He kept going.
One shot.
I was there for the last three minutes.
He said my name. He said May's name. He didn't say anything about what I'd said, not because he hadn't heard it, but because that's who he was — the kind of person who, in his last three minutes, used them to say the thing that mattered rather than the thing that hurt.
He said: "You're so good, bud. You're going to be so good."
He wasn't wrong. He also wasn't talking about the powers. He didn't know about the powers. He was talking about me. The person he'd carried upstairs at six years old and covered with blankets and fed coffee that was too strong because that's how he made coffee.
He died on a pavement in Queens on a November night while I held his hand.
I was fourteen years old.
*[No thought bubbles here. No chibi. No fourth-wall break. Just the city, and what it costs to live in it, and the weight of a specific choice that cannot be unmade.]
The man who killed Ben was not caught for six months. When he was, he was already in prison for three other things. Peter had stopped looking for him at month two, because finding him — in the several moments when he could have found him — hadn't made anything better, and the thing he understood, slowly, painfully, was that revenge was not responsibility.
What Ben's death made: a wall, around the desire for revenge, carefully built and maintained, labeled this is not what that was for.
And inside the wall: something else. Quieter. The sense that the powers weren't a gift for him to do what he wanted with. They were a resource that came with context. A person had died because Peter hadn't intervened when he could have. The specific grammar of that: could have. Could have but didn't.
He would not build his life around could have but didn't.
If he could help, he would help.
Always.
The rest would figure itself out.
He made the suit over three weeks — properly this time, not a hoodie. A real suit. He made the mask last.
He put on the mask for the first time in his room and looked at himself in the mirror, and the person looking back wasn't Peter Parker. Or rather: it was Peter Parker, but it was also something else. The two of them — him and the mask — looking at each other.
"Okay," he said to the mirror.
Okay, the mask said back.
He went out.