She carries the act so convincingly,
The fact is sometimes she believes it,
That she can be happy with the way things are,
Be happy with the things she's done...

Peter isn't a quiet child. He knows what he wants and he isn't afraid to ask for it; in fact, when his vision begins to blur and his eyes ache every time he pretends to read the newspaper just like his daddy, he is the first to speak up and ask for glasses.

Mama takes him on a special trip the next day. The new glasses are difficult to adjust to and he keeps knocking them off for the first few days, but his mother buys him strawberry ice cream in a waffle cone, so he does not complain.

The children at school laugh at him. "Girls don't make passes at boys who wear glasses."He doesn't know what it means, but it leaves him feeling ashamed.

Daddy doesn't come out of his lab much. Peter doesn't mind it. Sometimes when he's alone in his room, he'll speak to his action figures and he'll set up his notebook to look like a laptop, and he'll pretend to be his father.

His daddy doesn't wear glasses, and neither does his mama, but daddy says that they suit him, and he does that wonderful gesture where he rakes his fingertips through Peter's bangs.

Peter smiles because he feels warm, and loved, and safe. Everything is alright.

He is six years old when the plane goes down and Peter experiences true loneliness for the first time.

Aunt May is unfamiliar as a parental figure. She bakes too many sweets and gives too many kisses on his cheek when he goes off to school. Uncle Ben is too much like his daddy, in mannerisms, in speech, but he has too many wrinkles and too much grey hair, and he spends too much time with Peter to truly be his daddy.

Uncle Ben takes him to baseball games, but Peter has a bigger interest in spending his days indoors and looking through old science magazines.

His new parents buy them for him without question.

Junior High is hell. Peter is in seventh grade the first time he tries to tell a girl he likes - Judy Randall, freckled and dark-haired and with a gap between her teeth - that he likes her.

She blushes and snorts a laugh and pushes him until he lands in the bushes. He is picking splinters out of his fingertips for weeks.

At thirteen years old, Peter is certain that he alone has discovered masturbation. It is only when the jokes at school begin to make sense to him that he realizes how stupid he really is.

Peter has the top grade in his science class, and his peers call him names.

The summer before freshman year, Mary Jane Watson moves next door. Mrs. Watson makes quick friends with Aunt May, and so of course Uncle Ben expects him to speak to her. "She has a great personality," he says. Ugh.

He expects someone as gawky and awkward as the girls he sees around town, when he does go downtown. Instead he meets a girl with almond-shaped eyes and hair so red it hurts his eyes to look at.

She smiles at him. "Mary Jane." Introduction.

The only sound he can manage is "Uhh."And then, horrified with himself, he makes his way inside and buries his face into his pillow in embarrassment.

The only students allowed to go on the field trip to the new laboratories are the ones with the top scores on a particular test. It is meant to make students work harder, but Peter suspects he and Harry and Eddie and Mary Jane Watson are the only ones trying anymore.

Peter makes it into the top ten. It is a contest he only later regrets ever entering.

The spider bite doesn't take immediate effect.

It itches for the first day as just a tiny red bump on the skin of his palm. On the second day, he is light-headed and feverish, wondering if it is the heat or the bite making him so. By the third day, Uncle Ben is cussing and threatening to sue the school as Aunt May tries to dial the hospital.

On the fourth day, Peter is literally walking on walls.

Mary Jane likes boys with cars, so it is clear what he has to do.

By now, his powers - are they powers? He wonders about political correctness only briefly - are clumsy and barely controlled, and he cannot do much but stick to walls and lift refrigerators. It is enough to enter a spontaneous contest in an attempt to impress the girl of his dreams.

Cage wrestling really isn't ideal for a fifteen-year-old boy, explains the manager. Peter is angry when the full amount of money isn't received. The office of the manager is robbed, and instead of stopping the burglar, he glowers into the office-

-and steps calmly out of the way.

He is still angry after arriving home, but when he finds his house surrounded by policemen and with a sobbing Aunt May on the couch, all he can do is drop his bag and stare.

One of the last things Ben says to him is, "With great power comes great responsibility."

Power is all he understands when he pulls his makeshift mask over his face and finds the man he is looking for in an abandoned building. The man is bleeding beneath him by the time he finishes with him - "Do you know Ben Parker? Do you know what you've done?"- and then Peter chokes and he leaves the man dangling from homemade webs outside the window.

He tries to understand responsibility. He fails.

Peter is the man of the house. He grieves as he has never grieved before and refuses to let Aunt May care for him.

Peter Parker takes the name "Spider-Man" because he is fifteen and thinks it sounds cool. He beats up bad guys and is rarely home before curfew, still has his pathetic crush on Mary Jane Watson (who hasn't spoken much to him outside of "I'm sorry about what happened to your uncle"), takes up a job as a photographer with the Daily Bugle, and lets the boys at school throw him into trash cans.

The nickname "Puny Parker" spreads around the school like a wildfire. He wishes they knew his other one.

Mary Jane has a crush on Spider-Man. He's seen the key chain hanging from her backpack - They make key chains now? Already?- and his heart won't stop hammering.

The school quarterback is an asshole. But today at lunch, Johnny Storm speaks to him, and the cafeteria goes almost dead silent in the shock of a football player sitting willingly with Middleton High's champion geek. He asks Peter not to tell anyone what he saw, and Peter was never planning to.

Peter agrees to tutor him if Johnny will give him advice about girls (advice about MJ, who Johnny says is "out of his league"), and they eat Aunt May's apple fritters together on the bleachers.

Friendship isn't unfamiliar to him. He has Harry Osbourne and Gwen Stacy to speak to. He doesn't expect this to be anything more than mutual bribery, in the long run.

Johnny doesn't speak to him in front of others for a while, especially not around his jock friends. Peter doesn't mind it, surprisingly. Especially not when the said jocks start laying off.

Aunt May bakes them cookies and brownies and other various treats for when Johnny comes over. May begins to ask more frequently when he will invite Johnny over again. A warm feeling curls into his heart and he eats lunch with Johnny more and more often.

They become fast friends, even if Johnny still calls him "Petey" and "four-eyes." And soon enough, with Harry growing more and more distant, Johnny is the best friend Peter has ever had.

A week later, Peter asks Mary Jane Watson out on a date. She says yes.

Harry Osbourne's father is killed in what is described as a "freak lab accident." Peter is the only one who knows what really happened the day he meets the Green Goblin. Harry no longer speaks to him, even on the days he bothers showing up to school at all.

"You keep defending Spider-Man," Harry tells him when Peter finally corners him outside of third period, "when that bastard murdered my father."

Peter is at a loss for what to do or what to say. Johnny is of surprisingly little help.

Peter has lost his best friend.

Johnny finds out. Their bond grows stronger, if possible.

He tells Mary Jane. She treats him like a rock star and somehow, their kisses are less chaste than normal.

Gwen Stacy catches his eye in a romantic manner. Mary Jane accuses him of cheating.

When the news is out that Gwen's father was murdered by a man in a Spider-Man costume, Peter does nothing but offer her his home and his food until she can find her feet again. Hatred boils in her voice whenever the costumed hero is mentioned, and Peter feels a little sick every time she asks how he can manage to even photograph him anymore, after what he did.

He tries to tell her that Spider-Man wouldn't have done that. They argue for hours until she winds up sobbing against his chest and it is all he can do to choke up and hold her.

Gwen holds a gun to him when she discovers the truth. "I never would have shot you for real," she tells him later, and he believes her.

When Mary Jane leaves him and Gwen dies, Peter blames himself. All he can do is curl around a bottle of Aunt May's wine and wait for Johnny to put him back together.

Peter had sex with Mary Jane once. Somehow what he's done with Johnny tonight is different, as he yawns out a soft "sleep, hothead"into Johnny's feverish skin.

He has wet dreams about it for years to come.

Space goo is officially the coolest shit ever. Peter has to beg Dr. Connors to let him in to see it; it's like something straight out of a science fiction movie.

"Nothin' but a bunch of gunk," Eddie jokes with him, and Peter tells him to shut up when he takes one of the tongs to poke it and watch the black mess squirm.

"Do you know what a breakthrough this is?" Peter is rambling and he half recognizes the fact. He wonders if he should call Johnny, but decides against it - sure, his friend may have gone into space at the age of 16, but Peter is touching space goo. It has to be infinitely cooler, or at least he hopes so.

"God, bro, you're such a geek."

"Don't tell me you're not excited. I saw the look on your face when we came in. Don't deny it."

He is rewarded with a light punch to the shoulder. He and Eddie have been friends since childhood. The plane crash that had taken Peter's parents took Eddie Brock's as well. They speak less and less often lately, but they still call each other "bro" whenever possible, and Eddie likes to tease him about his height or his glasses or anything else he can tease.

They both love science. They both love to read, even if Eddie is built more like a jock than he thinks even Johnny is. In short, Eddie is the closest thing Peter has ever had to a sibling.

There is a news bulletin that the space goo has been stolen, even with no evidence of a break-in into the labs. Peter suspects Black Cat, unaware of the small patch of black gunk attaching itself lovingly to his ankle.

The black suit is a good look, Peter thinks. A really good look.

He has never been one to be conceited, never thinking of himself as anything more than average, 5'6" and brunette and brown-eyed (Uncle Ben used to joke with him that his eyes were brown because he was full of shit clear up to his forehead), but even he has to admit that he looks better in black than he ever could in red and blue.

It is too easy to envy men men like Johnny - tall, recklessly confident, heavily armored with his muscle and gleaming with internal and external heat and brilliant fashion sense. Few men and women are resistant to the entwined lust and resentment Johnny inspires, and certainly not Peter himself.

There are days when Johnny's very existence feels like an unspoken criticism of Peter's smaller frame and drab color. Johnny fights on the front lines with the Fantastic Four, shouting insults and tackling serious villains from the air while Peter is forced to do his work with sarcastic comments, shadows, attacking small-time crooks and lab accidents.

It is an ugly feeling, unworthy of one calling themselves a superhero.

"Sure, he gets all the attention," Mary Jane had tried to tell him one night over beer, "but that's his job. Last time you fought - when you were tackling all of those super-apes or whatever, how many did you, personally, take down?"

"Five," Peter answered without hesitation. Mary Jane had told him that Johnny had only nabbed himself two, and that Sue had had to spend a good amount of time lecturing him as she repaired his arm.

Now, standing before his mirror, he turns to admire how the suit clings to him so naturally, so simple in design but so...

For the first time in a long time, Peter feels good.

The room is crowded with the bodies of unconscious thugs. They were meant to be fighting Kingpin and goons, Peter and the Fantastic Four side-by-side, but Peter has managed it alone. Peter can do anything alone. Peter can do anything.

When Peter is caught straddling a thug's waist and beating his face in until it turns sickly purple and teeth are strewn about the floor, it is Johnny who catches his arm. The flames that lick up Johnny's wrist do not hurt Peter. Nothing can hurt him anymore, and he throws Johnny off of him only to have Johnny grab him from behind and hold him too tight to breathe properly.

"What the hell is wrong with you? Calm the fuck down!"

"Revenge is a poison, Peter. If you let it consume you... it can turn you into something ugly."

The suit refuses to come off by the time Peter realizes he needs to get rid of it. It follows him home and seems to whisper into his mind to open his arms for it to take him again, blissful and powerful and erotic all over again. He refuses it as many times as he can take before he has to use force.

His fingernails are blunt but they still scour the back of his own neck as he tears the suit from his body. A sob escapes his throat and he slams himself against walls, rails, anything that will make enough clamor and noise and dissonance to get the thing off of him.

The suit claims Eddie Brock. The new monster it creates - lovingly named "Venom" - not only doesn't trigger his spider sense (it was part of you, once, wasn't it, Peter, and oh, it was good, it was good), but it teasingly calls him "bro."

"Johnny-"

"It's alright, Petey. You're fine."

"Johnny, god, I'm- what did I-"

"Shh. Hey. You're alright. It's gone. Everything's going to be okay."

Peter is nearly killed when a hired assassin shoots him through the chest. A through-and-through wound, entry and exit, just to the left of where his heart rests in his chests.

Johnny kisses the scar every time he sees it, as a reminder that Peter is alive.

There is a war somewhere on the horizon. It is a natural decision, when the Avengers ask him to join them, to say yes.

It is less than a year later when Peter is standing at the altar with Mary Jane Watson, now Mary Jane Parker, with a shiny new gold ring around his finger. Tony Stark is the best man, and thus has paid for the reception almost in its entirety; Peter is smiling and laughing with the rest of them until he sees Johnny.

Johnny is looking down into his glass of champagne when Peter strolls over to him. Johnny isn't smiling, and Peter finds it odd, since he's always thought that Johnny's smile is one of his best attributes. "What's wrong, matchstick?" he asks him with a friendly slap to the shoulder. A slap that Johnny inches away from.

Peter expects an excuse, but instead he hears the soft, "I guess you're not little Petey anymore, huh?"

"Guess not." Peter is still shorter than him, although he is older by a little more than a year. His hair is softer to the touch than Johnny's is, and his frame is slighter, and his features rounder. Johnny is built like a jock even still, and Peter is built like a runner or a swimmer, muscled but lean.

It has been years since Johnny has pulled him in for a hug - Peter remembers the last time they hugged without falling into bed together, and it had been when that suit had nearly eaten him alive - and the one Peter receives now is warm but off. Everything about Johnny is warm; his skin, his suit, the ashy smell of his hair like one of Ben's burnt-out cigars. Peter can't help but lean into it, instinctively.

"Is this what you want?" Johnny asks him. "Is this what makes you happy?"

Peter brings a hand up to rest at Johnny's lower back. "Yes," he says. "Yes, of course it is- of course I am."

There is a small silence before Johnny holds him tighter, and Peter feels Johnny's nose press into his hair.

"I'm so fucking proud of you, Petey."

It sounds more broken than he's sure Johnny means it to.

Mary Jane says she loves him. She kisses his collarbones and puts her hands on his hips and holds his wrists to keep him from running off on her. She wraps her arms around his waist and rests her head against his chest so her hair spills over his skin when he lies, panting and spent, beneath her.

Mary Jane runs her fingers up his spine and sends chills through his skin.

There are bruises along his ribs from where Otto Octavius had gripped him with a firm metal claw and crushed him while Mary Jane screamed. She kisses those bruises now and it leaves him feeling empty, like he had not been there on time to stop it happening in the first place.

He is becoming sickly, pale and cold, and they are fighting more and more as the years pass by.

"I'm pregnant," she tells him with a smile to cut his heart out. "It's a girl!"

He suddenly forgets how to breathe.

Peter would have named the baby May, after his aunt, had the baby not been a miscarriage. Too much radiation in his blood.

The divorce is brutal, and MJ takes everything.

Peter crashes with Johnny for long enough to regain control over his life. He tries to give up the suit again, but Johnny makes him hold onto it, even if he is nearly thirty now and beginning to find it silly. He has his career to think about, the kids he teaches, but he supposes the city needs him still as well.

Together, he and Johnny cause as much trouble as they had when they were kids. Peter helps Johnny walk on the ceiling in a failed attempt to be romantic. Johnny teases him daily about his genius brain not offering him any knowledge in the way of seduction, and Peter is almost always lured into that back bedroom like a fly into the spider's web, their roles reversed, so that Johnny can kiss him breathless and fuck him so thoroughly that he forgets his own name.

Mary Jane still calls and Peter still picks up, and the two still fight until one of them is hoarse, and Johnny often has to unplug the landline to get Peter to let go of the argument.

But things are good again. He hopes.

Foolishly, Peter remarries MJ. He cannot keep away from her.

When the Mutant Registration Act is passed, Peter at first thinks that he has gotten off Scott free. He wishes that were the case now as he stands before the press in his Spider-Man outfit, the new one Tony has given him that Johnny says doesn't look like him at all, and suddenly finds himself feeling sick to his stomach.

Tony has already unmasked himself, and pleads with Peter to do so as well.

"Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for being here tonight. I'm... I'm here because- well, because... I have a very important announcement to make. My name is Peter Parker. And I have been Spider-Man since I was fifteen years old."

Things are being kept from those heroes who have so bravely unmasked themselves. Peter is fed up with secrets. By the time the Punisher finds him, broken and bleeding and cursing Registration and Stark in the sewers, he has given up hope of ever winning.

Steve Rogers takes him in. The resistance movement has only now truly begun.

Surrender, Peter supposes, is something he should have seen coming.

Their entire fight has been for nothing. Peter's old red and blue suit is ruined now, torn to pieces like the rest of this resistance, and he is looking into the faces of friend and foe alike. Men he used to call his friends, anyway. He's not sure anymore who is on whose side.

Under the helicopter search lights, Steve Rogers' heavy hands lift in an even heavier surrender. Peter follows suit because while he has always been stubborn, he has never been stupid.

Aunt May has been more of a mother to him than any other woman he's ever known, and that is why he feels as though it were himself that were shot, and not her.

She is alive, but barely, the injury critical. Doctors tell him that she might not make it through, and that she is old, and that these things happen. Peter's heart is whispering "no no no no" like the ticking of a metronome, and his body feels like it's crumbling under the weight of so much loss.

He isn't sure how long, exactly, Aunt May is unconscious. He simply knows that sometime between him visiting her in the hospital for the first time and him visiting the Kingpin in prison, has has once again donned a black costume.

Wilson Fisk will pay in blood.

Captain America is dead. Peter breaks down entirely and makes an utter fool of himself as he clings to Johnny's shoulders and shudders with silent sobs against him. He has lost too much, and he feels so old.

Aunt May is dying. Peter surrenders what is beginning to feel like a hollow and empty love with Mary Jane in order to save her. Mephisto is happy to comply.

"Please. I can't lose her too. Not after everything else."

It is not until Peter is approaching forty years old that he tells Johnny he loves him.

They are drinking beer on Peter's couch, watching a terrible science fiction movie that Peter insisted they watch together, a little too dizzy and a little too much of a mess, the both of them.

Johnny takes him to the bedroom and kisses his way down all of Peter's scars and bruises with promises that Peter doesn't think he can truly keep.

Johnny has always been there for him. After Aunt May's death, after Mary Jane left, after his life fell apart and he left his old suit lying in the trash can where it belongs - Johnny has been there. Those hands and those lips have touched him, kissed him in ways and places he never knew could be reached. Those eyes told him everything that words couldn't. Those arms held him closer than anyone ever has before, in the times that Peter had lost faith.

Now his best friend is kissing away his doubts and then, eventually, his tears. Even though Peter is aching all over and can feel himself aging faster than he should, Johnny is here with him, brushing his tears away, calling him "four eyes" and holding him while he starts to shake.

It has been a long twenty years of nothing but struggle, and Johnny has held him like this for the entire time.

So Peter starts to bury his face in Johnny's neck and murmur "I love you, I love you"over and over, because he means it, even if he has never bothered to say it before. It means more now than it ever would have as a boy. Johnny's kisses almost burn his cheeks; he feels so cold suddenly.

"I love you too, Petey," and Peter breaks.

I feel like I'm the flower trying to bloom in snow,
The danger and the power,
The friend and the foe.