Peter bought the cumin himself.
He stood in the spice aisle of the grocery store on Queens Boulevard for eleven minutes, which was nine minutes longer than any reasonable person should spend choosing cumin. There were four brands. He picked up each one, read the label, put it back, picked up a different one. The woman stocking shelves three aisles over glanced at him twice.
He was stalling. He knew he was stalling. The cumin was a prop, a reason to be standing in a grocery store at 2 PM on a Thursday instead of sitting in an underground chamber learning an alien language while a countdown ticked toward the end of everything familiar.
Three and a half days.
He bought the most expensive cumin. May would notice. She'd say something like "since when do you buy organic" and he'd say "since now" and she'd give him the look, the one that meant I know you're doing something weird but I'm going to let it slide because you're my nephew and I love you even when you're being strange.
Strange. The word hit differently now.
He also bought onions. Fresh bread from the bakery section, the kind with the hard crust that May liked to tear apart with her hands instead of cutting. A pint of Half Baked ice cream because they'd finished the last one and he wanted it to be there, in the freezer, waiting.
At the register, the cashier scanned his items with the mechanical efficiency of someone who had been doing this for eight hours and had three more to go. Peter watched her hands move. Scan, bag, scan, bag. The beep of the barcode reader. The rustle of plastic.
Ordinary sounds. Ordinary movements. The choreography of a world that ran on grocery stores and barcode readers and people who showed up to work every day because the bills didn't pay themselves.
He was going to miss barcodes. That was a thought he hadn't expected to have.
"Sixteen forty-two," the cashier said.
Peter paid. Took the bag. Walked out into November.
---
He took the long way to May's.
Not the subway. Not swinging. Walking. Through Queens, in the afternoon light, carrying a grocery bag and wearing the buffalo-check flannel that May had given him.
The neighborhood unfolded around him in its usual rhythms. The dry cleaner on the corner with the neon sign that buzzed at a frequency only he could hear. The basketball court, empty today, puddles from last night's rain sitting in the low spots of the asphalt. Mrs. Delgado's flower shop, closed for the season, the window display replaced with silk arrangements that looked almost real until you got close.
Peter got close. The silk roses were a very convincing shade of red. The stems were wrapped in green tissue paper. A small card in the display said Brighten someone's day in cursive script.
He thought about buying flowers for May. Decided against it. Flowers were a goodbye gesture, and he wasn't saying goodbye. He was having dinner. Normal dinner. Lentils and bread and ice cream and the specific gravity of a Thursday evening in his aunt's kitchen.
If he made it special, she'd know something was wrong. And if she knew something was wrong, she'd push. And if she pushed, he'd break. And if he broke, the last three and a half days would be spent in May's apartment crying instead of in Strange's chamber preparing.
Normal. Keep it normal.
He walked past the alley where he'd caught his first mugger. The dumpster was different now, green instead of blue, but the fire escape was the same. The ladder he'd clung to while his hands shook and his heart hammered and the mugger ran and the victim thanked him and Peter had thought, for the first time, with crystalline clarity: I can do this. I'm supposed to do this.
Fourteen years old. Three weeks after the bite. The moment Peter Parker became Spider-Man, not in costume or in name, but in the decision. The choice to use what he had for someone who needed it.
He'd been making that choice every day since.
In three and a half days, he'd make it for an entire world.
He kept walking. The grocery bag swung against his leg. The bread shifted inside, the crust crackling faintly. The cumin rattled in its jar.
May's building appeared at the end of the block. Five stories. Brick. The buzzer that didn't work. The fire escape where Peter had sat on summer nights listening to the neighborhood breathe.
He pressed the buzzer anyway. The broken crackle. The arthritic lock. He pushed through.
The stairwell smelled like floor cleaner and someone's dinner. Not Mrs. Gutierrez today. Someone else. Something with garlic and tomato and the heavy sweetness of slow-cooked onions.
He climbed. Second floor. Third floor. The loose handrail on the landing. Fourth floor.
May's door.
He knocked.
---
"You brought cumin."
May stood in the doorway holding the jar, reading the label with the expression of a detective examining evidence.
"Organic cumin."
"Is that okay?"
"Peter. This is seven dollars."
"It was on sale."
"This was not on sale. I know what cumin costs. I buy cumin regularly. This is the fancy cumin."
"Maybe I wanted the fancy cumin."
"You have never in your life cared about the quality of cumin." She looked at him over the jar. The assessment. Quick, thorough, inconclusive. "What are you up to?"
"I'm bringing my aunt ingredients for dinner. That's allowed."
"It's suspicious."
"You're suspicious of cumin."
"I'm suspicious of you buying cumin. There's a difference."
She stepped aside. He walked in. The apartment was warm. The familiar warm, the specific thermal signature of a space heated by old radiators and a stove that was already on and the ambient body heat of a woman who had been cooking since noon.
"You started already," Peter said.
"The lentils take time. You said you wanted them, so I started early." She followed him into the kitchen, put the cumin on the counter, and resumed stirring. The wooden spoon with the scorch mark. The Dutch oven. The steady, rhythmic scrape of metal on metal.
"Can I help?"
May's spoon stopped.
She turned around.
"You want to help cook."
"Yeah."
"You. Peter Parker. The man who once burned water."
"You can't burn water."
"You found a way. There was smoke. The fire department was discussed."
"I was twelve."
"The pan never recovered."
Peter took off his jacket. Hung it on the back of his chair. Rolled up his sleeves. The flannel bunched at his elbows, red and black check against pale forearms.
"Teach me," he said.
May studied him. Longer this time. Not the quick assessment. Something deeper. The look of a woman who had raised a boy through grief and puberty and superpowers and was now watching him stand in her kitchen asking to learn how to cook lentils, and something about the way he was standing, the particular quality of his attention, the unusual weight behind a simple request, was tripping wires she couldn't name.
"Okay," she said softly. "Come here."
She taught him.
Not the way a cooking show teaches. Not with measurements and timers and precise instructions. The way May cooked, which was by feel and memory and a kind of intuitive chemistry that no recipe could capture.
"You start with the onions. Always the onions. Low heat. Patient heat. If you rush the onions, you ruin everything."
Peter sliced onions. His enhanced senses made his eyes water worse than a normal person's, the sulfur compounds hitting his olfactory receptors at amplified intensity. He blinked through it. Kept cutting.
"Thinner," May said. "You want them to melt, not sit there in chunks."
He cut thinner. The knife was dull. He adjusted his grip, used less force, let the blade's weight do the work. A principle from physics applied to cooking. Mass times gravity. Even a dull knife cuts if you let gravity help.
"Good. Now the oil. Not too much. Just enough to coat the bottom."
He poured oil. May corrected him. "Less. You're making lentils, not a swimming pool."
He poured less. The oil shimmered in the pan. He added the onions. They hissed. The smell rose, sweet and sharp, the most basic chemical reaction in cooking: sugar meeting heat, browning, caramelizing, transforming.
"Now you wait," May said. "Stir occasionally. Don't hover."
"What do I do while I wait?"
"Talk to me."
Peter stirred the onions. They softened, turned translucent, began to brown at the edges. The kitchen filled with the smell that meant home.
"I've been working on something," Peter said.
"The project with your friend. The one whose phone you borrowed."
"Yeah."
"Is it going well?"
Peter watched the onions. Stirred them. The wooden spoon traced circles in the pan.
"It's going. I don't know about well."
"Dangerous?"
She asked it casually. The way she always asked it. The tone they'd developed together over years of living with his secret, the tone that allowed them to discuss life-threatening situations over dinner preparation without anyone breaking down. A negotiated emotional register. Calm on the surface. Deep water underneath.
"Maybe," Peter said.
"More dangerous than usual?"
The onions browned. Peter added the cumin. The organic, seven-dollar cumin. The smell changed, deepened, became something warm and ancient and earthy.
"It might take me away for a while," he said.
May's hand, reaching for the salt, paused in midair.
"How long is a while?"
"I don't know. Could be weeks. Could be longer."
"Longer than weeks."
"Maybe."
"Peter."
He kept stirring. The cumin darkened in the oil. The onions were perfect now, soft and golden, the kind of base layer that made everything built on top of it better. He was aware, with the heightened perception the device had given him, of May's heartbeat. Elevated. Eighty-nine beats per minute, up from her resting rate of seventy-two.
He was scaring her.
"I can't tell you the details," he said. "Not because I don't want to. Because I genuinely can't explain it in a way that would make sense. But I want you to know that I'm choosing this. Nobody's forcing me. I'm doing it because it needs to be done and I'm the person who can do it."
"That sounds like something Ben would say."
The words hit him in the sternum. Not because they hurt. Because they were true.
"Yeah," Peter said. "It does."
May took the spoon from his hand. Not a taking-over gesture. A connecting gesture. Her fingers brushed his. She held the spoon and his hand at the same time.
"Ben used to do this thing," she said. "When he had to tell me something hard. He'd cook. He'd stand in this kitchen and he'd make something, usually badly, and he'd talk while he cooked because it gave him something to do with his hands. He couldn't look me in the eye and say the hard thing, but he could stir a pot and say it."
Peter looked at the pot. At his hands. At May's hand on his.
"I didn't realize I was doing that," he said.
"I know you didn't. That's how I know it's real."
She squeezed his hand. Once. Brief. Then she took the spoon and added the lentils to the pot and poured in the broth and set the whole thing to simmer with the practiced efficiency of a woman who had made this dish a hundred times and would make it a hundred more, God willing, whether her nephew was there to eat it or not.
"Whatever this is," May said, not looking at him, watching the lentils instead, "you come back from it. That's the deal. You do what you need to do and you come back. That's the only thing I'm asking."
"May..."
"That's the only thing I'm asking, Peter."
He stood in the kitchen. The lentils simmered. The cumin smell filled the apartment. The radiator hissed under the window. Outside, Queens went about its Thursday evening, traffic and voices and the distant howl of a siren, a world that didn't know it was being held together by sixty-one failing anchor points and a kid from this neighborhood who was trying to learn how to cook.
"Okay," he said. "I'll come back."
"Promise me."
"May, I can't..."
"Promise me."
He looked at her. She was still watching the pot. Her jaw was set. Her eyes were bright but dry. The stubbornness. The strength. The refusal to accept any outcome that didn't include her nephew walking through this door again.
"I promise," Peter said.
She nodded. Didn't look up. Kept stirring.
The promise sat in the kitchen between them like a third person at the table. Heavy. Real. Possibly a lie. Definitely necessary.
Peter picked up the knife and started slicing bread.
---
They ate at the table.
The lentils were better than last time. The fancy cumin, probably. Or Peter's onions, cut thin like May taught him, melted into the base layer until they were invisible but essential. The crispy onions on top were golden and salty. The bread was warm and the crust shattered when you tore it.
Peter ate slowly.
He'd never eaten slowly in his life. His metabolism made meals a race against caloric deficit, shoveling fuel into a body that burned through it like a furnace. But tonight he chewed. Tasted. Noticed.
The lentils had a texture he'd never paid attention to before. Soft but not mushy. Each one distinct, holding its shape even as it gave way under his teeth. The cumin was warm and slightly bitter, threading through the earthiness of the legumes like a bass line under a melody.
The bread was dense and yeasty, the crust pulling away from the soft interior in layers. He dipped it in the broth at the bottom of his bowl. The bread soaked it up, turned dark, became something new.
May watched him eat the way she always watched him eat: with satisfaction and mild alarm.
"You're eating slowly."
"I'm savoring."
"You don't savor. You inhale. It's been a consistent behavioral pattern for twenty years."
"Maybe I'm growing as a person."
"Peter Parker, growing as a person, at my dinner table. I should document this."
He smiled. She smiled back. The smiles were real but thin, stretched over something heavier, the way ice forms over moving water. Solid from a distance. Fragile up close.
They talked about other things. May's work at the shelter. A new volunteer who was "very enthusiastic and completely useless" but improving. Ramirez's latest cooking experiment, which had involved fish sauce and chocolate and resulted in a smell that cleared the building.
Peter talked about the project. Vaguely. Carefully. He described Strange as "a colleague" and the work as "research" and when May asked "research into what?" he said "structural engineering" which was technically true if you defined "structure" as "the fabric of reality" and "engineering" as "desperately trying to prevent everything from collapsing."
May accepted this with the practiced skepticism of a woman who knew she was getting ten percent of the truth and had decided, long ago, that ten percent was enough. She trusted Peter. Not to tell her everything, but to tell her what mattered.
He'd told her what mattered. I'm choosing this. I'll come back.
The rest was detail.
After dinner, they washed dishes.
Peter washed this time. May dried. A reversal of their usual arrangement. May raised an eyebrow but didn't comment. Peter ran the water hot, let it fill the sink, submerged his hands.
The heat felt good. The water was soft. The soap smelled like lemon.
He washed each dish individually. The bowls. The pot. The Dutch oven with its weight and history. May's wooden spoon, the one with the scorch mark, held under the water and scrubbed gently because it was old and irreplaceable and some things needed to be treated with care.
"You're washing that spoon like it's a Fabergé egg," May said.
"It's a good spoon."
"It's a spoon, Peter."
"It's your spoon. It's the spoon you've cooked with my entire life. Every lentil, every soup, every questionable casserole..."
"My casseroles are not questionable."
"The tuna one was questionable."
"The tuna one was experimental."
"The tuna one was a crime against cuisine."
"That's hurtful."
He dried the spoon. Handed it to her. She took it and put it in the drawer, the specific spot where it always lived, handle facing left, because some things in a kitchen are sacred and their positions are fixed and you don't argue with the woman who decides where the spoon goes.
Peter dried his hands. Looked at the kitchen. Clean. Warm. Complete.
"Ice cream?" May said.
"Please."
---
They ate ice cream on the couch.
Half Baked. The new pint he'd bought, fresh from the freezer. May had the blanket, the brown-and-orange afghan, pulled over her legs. Peter sat beside her, close enough that their shoulders touched.
She didn't put on a movie this time.
They just sat. The TV was dark. The apartment was quiet except for the radiator and the occasional car outside and the soft sounds of two people eating ice cream and not saying much.
Peter looked at Ben's chair.
The empty chair by the window. The cushion faded. May's sweater draped over the back. The space where a man had sat every evening for years, reading the paper, drinking coffee, laughing at his own jokes while May rolled her eyes and Peter pretended to be embarrassed but secretly loved it.
The chair was empty. Had been empty for six years. Would be empty for the rest of May's life unless she moved or replaced it, and she would never do either because the chair wasn't furniture. It was a monument. A placeholder. A way of saying: he was here. He mattered. He is not forgotten.
Peter thought about what it would be like to be another empty chair.
Not sitting in Ben's chair. A different absence. A nephew-shaped hole in a kitchen that already had one hole too many. May cooking for one. May eating at the table alone. May washing dishes in a silent apartment, drying them, putting them away, the spoon in its sacred spot, the routine preserved but hollowed out, the choreography of a life that used to have a partner and then had a nephew and then had no one.
The image was so vivid, so specific, that Peter's throat closed.
He ate his ice cream. Swallowed past the tightness.
"May."
"Hmm?"
"If something happens. If I'm gone for a while and you can't reach me."
"Peter."
"Just listen. Please. If you can't reach me, don't panic. Go to 177A Bleecker Street. Greenwich Village. Ask for Stephen Strange. He'll know what's happening. He'll be able to tell you... he'll know."
May set her ice cream down.
"177A Bleecker."
"Yeah."
"Stephen Strange."
"Yeah."
"And he'll explain what you can't explain to me right now."
"He'll tell you what he can. He's not great at the personal stuff, but he'll try. He's... he's a good person, May. Underneath the arrogance and the magic stick collection."
She didn't ask about the magic stick collection. She didn't ask about anything. She sat with his words the way she sat with everything he couldn't tell her. Holding the shape of the unknown in her hands, feeling its weight, choosing to carry it without demanding to see what was inside.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay?"
"Okay. 177A Bleecker. Stephen Strange." She picked up her ice cream. Took a bite. Chewed slowly. "But you're coming back."
"I'm coming back."
"You promised."
"I promised."
She looked at him. Straight on. No sidelong assessment, no casual evaluation. The full force of May Parker, undiluted, aimed directly at his face with the precision of a woman who had spent twenty years learning to see through every shield he'd ever built.
"I believe you," she said.
It was the most generous thing anyone had ever said to him.
Because she didn't. Not entirely. She believed in him, which was different from believing his promise, which was different from believing he'd be safe. She believed that he would try. That he would fight. That he would do everything in his power to walk through her door again.
And she accepted that his power had limits.
That was the thing about May. She didn't need the lie. She needed the intent behind it. The promise wasn't a guarantee. It was a declaration. I will fight to come back to you. And that was enough.
"Eat your ice cream," she said. "It's melting."
He ate his ice cream.
---
He left at ten.
The same doorway. The same goodbye choreography. Jacket zipped, collar straightened by May's automatic hands, the touch so ingrained in their routine that it was less a gesture than a reflex.
"Thursday?" she said.
He wanted to say yes. Wanted to promise another dinner, another evening, another plate of lentils and another pint of Half Baked and another quiet hour on the couch with their shoulders touching.
"I'll try," he said.
Not a promise. An honest answer. The best he had.
She heard the difference. He saw it in the way her eyes changed, the slight contraction of the muscles around them, the involuntary response to a small pain that she absorbed and filed and carried without comment.
"Okay," she said. "Try hard."
"I will."
She kissed his cheek. He hugged her. Longer than usual. Long enough that she hugged back with the kind of force that said everything she wasn't putting into words.
Then she let go.
"Be safe."
"Always."
She closed the door.
Peter stood in the hallway. The fluorescent light buzzed. The building settled around him, pipes and wood and old concrete doing what they did at night, contracting, cooling, making the small sounds that you only hear when everything else goes quiet.
He didn't go downstairs. Not yet.
He climbed to the roof.
---
Queens lay beneath him in its nighttime configuration. Streetlights. Windows. The distant geometry of Manhattan across the river, all glass and ambition. Closer, the low rooftops of the neighborhood, water towers and satellite dishes and the clotheslines that nobody used anymore but nobody took down.
Peter sat on the edge. Feet dangling. The concrete lip rough under his palms. The air was cold. Real cold now, not November teasing, December arriving early.
He pulled out his notebook.
Turned past the Atlas lexicon. Past the map coordinates. Past the survival protocols and the signal analysis data. To the back pages. The ones he'd reserved.
He took out the pen. The same ballpoint. Blue ink. The kind that skipped if you wrote too fast.
He'd tried this before. On this same roof, nine days ago. He'd written Dear May and stalled. The words too big. The page too small.
Tonight was different. Tonight the lentils were still warm in his stomach and the cumin was still on his fingers and May's voice was still in his ears saying you promised and the weight of everything he needed to say had compressed into something hard and specific and ready.
He wrote.
Dear May,
If you're reading this, I didn't keep my promise. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for every lie I told you by omission and every truth I kept behind my teeth and every Thursday dinner I won't be there for.
I need you to know some things.
The lentils tonight were the best meal of my life. Not because of the fancy cumin, although the fancy cumin helped. Because you let me cook with you. Because you stood next to me and showed me how to slice onions and when to add the spice and how to wait. You've been showing me how to wait my whole life. I'm not very good at it. But I'm trying.
Ben's chair is empty and I know what that costs you every single day. I know because I've watched you set the table for two and glance at the third place setting that isn't there and keep going. The bravest thing I've ever seen isn't anything I've done in the suit. It's you, sitting down to dinner at a table with an empty chair and choosing to eat anyway.
I didn't tell you where I was going because I couldn't bear to put that weight on you. That was selfish. I know that. I was protecting myself as much as I was protecting you, because if I'd seen your face while I explained it, I wouldn't have been able to leave. And I had to leave. Not because the world needed me, although it did. Because I'm your nephew. Ben's nephew. And you both taught me that the right thing and the hard thing are usually the same thing.
I'm leaving this letter with Stephen Strange. He's at 177A Bleecker Street. He's difficult and brilliant and he drinks terrible tea and he cares about me more than he'll ever admit. Trust him. He'll tell you what happened. He'll tell you everything I couldn't.
If I don't come back, please don't wait for me the way you waited for Ben. Don't add another empty chair. Live, May. Cook your lentils. Yell at the TV. Let Ramirez put fish sauce in things. Take the trip to Costa Rica that you've been talking about for six years.
Live. That's the only thing I'm asking.
I love you. I've loved you every day of my life and I will love you in every world I ever stand in, however far away, however long.
Your nephew,
Peter
He set the pen down.
Read it once. Didn't edit. Didn't revise. The words were imperfect and unpolished and exactly right, and if he touched them again he'd lose the raw, ragged honesty that made them true.
He tore the pages from the notebook. Folded them. Twice. Put them in the envelope he'd bought at the CVS along with the notebook, nine days ago, when he'd first known he'd need to write this letter.
He wrote MAY on the front.
Held the envelope in both hands.
The wind picked up. Cold. November becoming December. The city hummed beneath him, vast and indifferent and alive.
He didn't cry.
He wanted to. The pressure behind his eyes was enormous, a physical force, his body's attempt to process an emotion too large for the available channels. Tears were a pressure valve. A release mechanism. His body wanted the release the way a boiler wants a vent.
He didn't let it.
Not because he was strong. Not because men don't cry or heroes don't break. Because if he started, he wasn't sure he'd stop. And he had three and a half days left and he needed every hour of them and he couldn't afford to spend any of them on the floor of this rooftop dissolving.
Later. He could cry later. After the displacement. After the arrival. After the snow and the cold and the wrong stars. When he was alone in a world that didn't know his name, in a forest that had never heard the word Queens, with nothing but a leather bag and a magic stick and a letter he'd never send.
Then he could cry.
For now, he put the envelope in his jacket pocket. Stood up. Looked at the sky.
The real stars. His stars. Orion. The Big Dipper. The faint, reliable glow of Polaris, pointing north.
In three and a half days, he'd be under different stars. Wrong stars. A crown of seven. A sweeping chain. A lonely star burning in the dark.
"Okay," Peter said to the sky. To Queens. To the city and the night and the woman sleeping four floors below him and the empty chair and the photograph in his pocket and the machine beneath Manhattan that was counting down to the end of his life as he knew it.
"Okay."
He climbed down.
Walked to the subway.
Rode the train home.
Didn't sleep.
[END OF CHAPTER FOURTEEN]
---
🌟 Shout-Out Section 🌟
A huge thank you and warm welcome to our amazing Patreon supporters! 🙌
Your support means the world and helps keep this story alive and growing.
This chapter's shout-outs go to:
Kobe Robertson
Thank you for believing in the journey and being part of this adventure from behind the scenes. 💫
More exciting things are coming your way!
PlotArchitect ©