Monday morning, only a few hours after giving May the check.
They had gone to the bank together once dinner was finished, and emerged roughly an hour later with a considerably lighter financial situation and a May who moved through the rest of the evening with the specific energy of someone who has just had a weight removed from their shoulders that they had been carrying for long enough to forget it was there.
Of the twenty-five thousand dollars, they had kept five thousand back.
The rest had gone directly to the house bills. It was good they had done it when they did, because late payments were already accumulating interest and the numbers were only going to get worse from here.
That was Monday.
This was now Tuesday, early morning, and Peter was in the kitchen making breakfast.
What he was making was not complicated.
Simple, the kind of food that gets a person through a morning without requiring a great deal of either preparation or cleanup.
But he was not just cooking. Propped open against the fruit bowl beside the stove was a book he had bought with his own money, and not a light read either.
The book was by Anthony Stark.
It was about artificial intelligence.
Specifically its capabilities, its theoretical limits, and the existing frameworks for thinking about what it could and could not do.
What it did not contain was enough detail on the actual creation process to be immediately useful, which was clearly intentional.
Stark had given the world just enough information to be interesting and not nearly enough to be dangerous, and whether that was calculated caution or simple professional protectiveness was genuinely difficult to say.
Either way it was the right call, because the alternative was a world in which Hydra had access to the technical specifications for a functional AI, and Hydra had already demonstrated that it took them a significant amount of time to accomplish things that should have been straightforward.
The serum situation had made that clear. Still. No need to accelerate their timeline by leaving a published blueprint lying around.
What surprised Peter was that none of the other geniuses in this world had gotten there first.
Then he thought about Reed Richards and remembered the man's track record with completing things, and the surprise faded.
What Peter wanted was not a JARVIS.
A JARVIS was a tool, however sophisticated, and what he had in mind was something different in kind rather than just degree. To get there he needed two things developed in parallel.
The first was a device capable of reading, copying, and transmitting memories from one point to another without altering the source.
Not a mind-swapper in the Otto Octavius sense, nothing that rewrote or replaced what was already there.
Just a reader and a transmitter.
If Otto from the Marvel's Spider-Man game series could build a full mind-swapping apparatus at roughly Peter's current age, then building something that only read and copied without interfering was not an unreasonable target.
The second was a mental defense.
Something equivalent to what certain characters in the comics described as a Player's Mind, a mechanism for controlling emotional output at key moments and more importantly for blocking telepathic intrusion regardless of the strength behind it.
He had been thinking about a device he had seen in a film called Upgrade, which was not the direction he intended to go but contained the idea of an germ he could develop in a very different way, something that would give him the protection he needed while also serving as the connection point between himself and whatever AI he eventually built.
He was still working through the architecture of it when May walked in.
"Good morning, Peter." She dropped into a chair at the kitchen table with the specific sleepiness of someone who was not yet fully awake, pulling her robe tighter and yawning without ceremony.
"Good morning, May," he said, flipping the omelette without looking away from the page.
"I am still not used to this," she said, watching him.
"To which part specifically?" He set the book down, poured a cup of coffee, and placed it in front of her along with a plate.
"Seeing me cook, or the fact that I am more independent than I used to be, or the fact that the bills are paid and you no longer have to think about the house, or the part where I can bring in a significant amount of money for both of us more or less whenever it becomes necessary?"
May looked at her breakfast and then at him, and the expression on her face was one that had not fully decided what it wanted to be.
"All of it," she said quietly. "I never expected this. You bringing in that much money overnight and clearing the accounts that had been worrying me on the same day. I just.... I cannot believe it."
"You will have to start getting used to it." He sat down across from her. "The games were a good start but they were not the ceiling. Once I get the Baxter position confirmed and show them what I have been working on, the number will go up considerably."
That was not even the full picture.
When the money reached a level that made it realistic, he intended to buy a new house for both of them.
This one had history attached to it, the kind that lived in walls and corners and the particular creak of certain floorboards, the kind that was specifically about Ben, and a change of scenery might do more for May than she would ever say out loud.
The small things he was doing already seemed to be shifting something. A new house would shift it further.
May put her hand over his on the table and smiled at him, warm and genuine, and then the smile went slightly strained at the edges.
"Mmm," she said.
"Is something wrong?"
"No, it is just...." She looked away. "Should you not be wearing something?"
Peter looked down at himself. He had come back from his morning run, showered, and come straight to the kitchen when he realized it was nearly time for May to wake up.
He was wearing shorts. Yes that was all there to it.
"I am wearing shorts," he said. "It is not as though I am standing here with nothing on. Does it bother you?"
"No!....I mean yes! Could you not at least put on a T-Shirt?"
"I had just finished a run," he said reasonably, standing to pour himself a coffee. "I showered and came straight here because it was time for you to wake up. I did not want breakfast to be late."
He glanced back at her over his shoulder, catching her eyes very quickly redirecting from somewhere around his shoulder blades. "It is not as though I am unpleasant to look at, is it, May?"
"No...." She rested her chin on her hand and murmured something that was not quite audible.
"Did you say something?"
"Nope!" She looked down at her plate.
"Breakfast is delicious, by the way." She paused for a moment before adding softly, "You're going to make someone a wonderful husband someday."
"Thank you, May," he said, in a register that was approximately half a step lower than his normal speaking voice, leaning slightly toward her as he passed behind her chair.
He sat back down and looked at her across the table. She was looking at her coffee with great attention.
"Ahem." She straightened. "So. How has school been these past few weeks? We never really got into it properly."
"Everything is fine," he said, eating.
"And those new friends you mentioned?"
"They are genuine friends and we get along well. One of them is second in her class. The other is very strong in History and Geography and we have several things in common. Their names are Gwen Stacy and Missy Kallenback."
"I see." May looked interested. "And what is this Missy like?"
"You should meet her. We both like pop, rock, classical music, and a few other things. Art, for instance.
She is also genuinely fascinated by engineering even though she does not fully understand it yet. I have explained things to her on a few occasions. She has a real passion for medicine as well. There are many things we overlap on. She is fantastic."
"That does sound nice," May said, with a smile that was approximately ninety percent genuine and approximately ten percent something else. She muttered something under her breath that sounded something like lucky bitch
"Sorry?"
"I said she sounds like a lucky girl."
"Trust me," he said, picking up his plate and heading to the sink, "I am the lucky one." He laughed and set the plate down. "Right. I need to go change or I will be late."
He walked past her chair, leaned down, and placed a kiss on her cheek close enough to the corner of her lips to qualify as a deliberate choice rather than an accident. He could feel her go very still as he straightened and headed for the stairs.
When he glanced back from the bottom step she had her eyes closed.
He went upstairs.
A few minutes later he came back down dressed for school, found May at the sink washing dishes with the particular concentration of someone who is using a task to get their expression back under control, and grabbed his board from beside the door.
"I am off, May..... Have a good day at work.... Love you."
"Likewise! I love you!"
The door closed behind him. He put his headphones on, found a song, pressed play, and walked.
Today he wanted to walk rather than skate. He had left early enough to make it on foot without rushing.