Peter shut the front door behind him with the heel of his foot and shucked off his jacket, tossing it onto the arm of the couch as he carded a hand through his hair. Spending the day with Ms. Domin—Neena, oh, wow, it was really Neena now, huh—had been a lot of fun. Less on the gun thing and his identity getting unintentionally outed by May, more on the burgers and stories he got to hear about her travels.

Being a merc sounded pretty cool if he completely ignored the whole point of the job, and he purposefully willed himself to not think about all the dead bodies traded in for stacks of cash.

(It bothered him in the beginning. Being surrounded by people with blood on their hands and guns tucked in their waistbands and spare magazines hidden in the linings of their winter jackets. But then he thought about how New York was just New York, and if he even tried to stop them all there would still be a million other people in a million other cities doing what he tried to stop.

Maybe it was a mistake figuring out that all the killers he knew were still people, too. But that was Peter Parker, not Spider-Man, and that was something Peter Parker could live with.)

He pried off his shoes without untying the laces and pushed them to the side of the doorway right next to May's nice tan heels, just shy of being a tripping hazard. As he shuffled to his room, he snatched a half-full bag of chips from the kitchen counter and popped a chip in his mouth as he pushed through his bedroom door. Maybe he'd take a look at his web shooters to see if they needed any—

"Did you take these photographs?"

"Holy—!"

The chips slipped from his grasp and his foot kicked out instinctively, sending them flying to the other side of the room in a rain of crumbs. Loki, watching the aluminum bag land with a crinkle with his hands clasped behind his back, raised a brow.

"Good evening, Peter," he greeted smoothly, a hint of amusement at the corner of his lips. "How was your day?"

"Oh, um, uh, good? How'd you even get in here?"

Loki kept his eyebrow raised.

"Right. Alien God. Dumb question." Peter took one look at the spilled chips on the carpet, thought about it, really thought about it, and resigned himself to shoveling them back into the bag. "Sorry, uh, what were you asking about?"

He glanced up, and Loki looked like Loren today. His walnut brown pants donned a faint windowpane pattern and matched the neatly-folded blazer draped across the back of the desk chair. His light pink button up was rolled and cuffed to his elbows with his wine red tie held down by a simple silver tie bar.

Brown hair, brown eyes, brown glasses.

Like this, Peter thought he could see a little bit of himself in his mother.

"The photographs you have posted on your wall." Loki gestured to the prints of sunsets and skylines taken at dizzying, impossible angles—Peter wondered if he could get away with saying he used a drone to snap those shots—and pointed to one in particular that was a clash of oranges and pinks and blues and golds. "Are they yours?"

"Yeah! Sometimes I like to walk around and take pictures with Ben's old camera. Uh, the scratched up Nikon next to all my books." The teen pushed as much of the bigger chips into the bag as he could before he strode over to his desk. He was careful not to think too much about how standing so close to his mother made his stomach feel light. "The model's, like, super old, but I was able to fix it up enough for it to work like brand new."

"Regardless of the apparatus you used, your images are magnificent. Well done."

Warmth shone behind that magic that turned Loki's eyes brown. Peter ducked his head to hide the flush in his cheeks.

"D-Do you take pictures like this on Asgard?"

"Asgard tends to root themselves in traditional art; portrait, sculpture, prose. Photography of this nature is one of mankind's better inventions that Asgardians hadn't the opportunity to take up. A shame, really, that we Gods do not think completely of a more proper preservation of memory." Loki unfurled his crossed arms. "Though... there is one I have kept all this time."

He reached into his blazer pocket and plucked out a slim black wallet, pristine with a small gold symbol shining on the bottom right-most corner. It barely cracked open when pale fingers pulled out a small photo, glossed and slightly worn around the edges. Peter peered down at it.

A baby with chubby cheeks. A gummy smile.

"Is that...?"

"You were six months old." Loki smiled a bit. "There were some nights when you could never manage to fall asleep no matter the sort of Midgardian playthings I had given you or whatever lullabies those compact discs sung. But the one thing that always ended in your enjoyment were the illusions I crafted to tire you out." His thumb ran across the picture. "Snakes were always your favorite."

Peter peeked up through the floppy fringe of his hair. When May talked about Lora for that short moment when she gave him the box, he thought it was obvious about the type of person his mother would be. Cold. Aloof. Intense. Maybe not to him, but definitely to everyone else. Even when they first met back at Sister Margaret's he thought Loki had probably once stabbed someone with a stiletto.

But now? With that faraway look he had when looking at that baby photo? Peter didn't see even a little of the God that destroyed New York.

(Or maybe he was just biased.)

"Snakes are pretty cool," Peter admitted quietly. Loki roused himself from wherever his head went to and cleared his throat.

"I would conjure slettsnok and huggorm—never the real sorts, though the buorm was your preference; little grass snakes that would curl around you as you slept." He tucked the photo into its rightful place in his wallet and slid it back into his blazer. "Do you keep any creatures of your own?"

"Nah, I don't know if I have the time to take care of one between school and work and decathlon and stuff. Plus I don't think the apartment allows any pets, even though I'm pretty sure Mr. Koval's got like, fifteen tarantulas in the apartment right above us." Peter stuffed a handful of previously-floor-chips into his mouth, missing the quick scrunch of disgust that flashed across his mother's face. "And when Wade gets back I'll be going to the gym again, and I think I have to fit time in with Neena some days? Oh geez, I forgot about that. I'll make it work. I just need a calendar I won't forget about? I'll make it work. Probably."

Loki tilted his head. "Neena?"

"She's one of Wade's friends."

"Ah, the elusive Wade." A picture had been building in his mind since the first mention of the man, someone loud and brash and violent. Some who, all too curiously, seemed to be a good friend of his child's. "I do hope for the opportunity to meet him."

"That should be fine since you already met Mr. Weasel, but, uh, don't mention this to May? Please?" Peter's smile turned sheepish, even a tad guilty. "She thinks I work at a pub and would freak if she found out I'm actually working at an Amazon for mercs."

With a mental note to look up Amazon later, Loki leaned forward. "Are you admitting to deceiving your aunt to participate in illicit affairs in a tavern where blood spilled onto your slacks is commonplace and where others come in to request killers that you, my young bairn, help assign to them?"

Peter blinked, trying to chew his chips as quietly as possible. Well, when it was put like that, "... yes?"

Loki grinned, amusement bright around his eyes. "Delightful." He raised a hand to place on one of Peter's shoulders, but paused for a moment before drawing it back and clasping it with the other behind his hip. "No need to delve in your worries. May will hear nothing from me."

"Do you, uh, do you want to meet up with May? You probably haven't seen her since, y'know..."

"Soon, perhaps." Loki looked back at the pictures tacked up on the wall. "But not now."

And Peter got that. Ever since May brought up the box and 'Lora Olstad' and how Mary had never been his biological mother all this time, they hadn't talked about it much. He wore the necklace every day and kept the box on the corner of his desk, and whenever May thought he wasn't looking he'd watch her stare at him, or the box, or both, and he knew that they'd have to bring it up again some day.

But he remembered how she got about Spider-Man and even if she told him that she'd come to peace with her spider kid, he also knew that on the nights he swung around the skylines were the nights she spent pressed up against the windows waiting for him to come home alive.

Now he was half a space alien whose mother used to be Earth's Most Wanted until their death was officially declared, except the death part wasn't true, and he worked at a mercenary dispatch and was apparently so deep in the mac and cheese that he had contract immunity on the East Coast.

There was no way in heck she'd be okay with any of this.

Loki hummed suddenly. "Ah, yes. I had another reason for my appearance besides checking on your well being." Out of his pressed pants pocket he took out a case-less smartphone. Not a StarkPhone. Yeah, Peter should've expected that. "Simply an exchange of a series of numbers, correct? Which will allow an open channel of communication between us?"

"Yup, pretty much. Here, I'll send a text to my number."

As Peter swiped open the phone and reminded himself to teach his mother about at least password security, he thought about installing all those programs and fixes he and Ned had worked into his own phone. He figured Loki would appreciate it too considering, well, he was still a criminal even if everyone else thought he was dead. Best to keep him off all potential lists and tell him about burners if things got serious.

"It'll take a week or something, but I can add a few bugs onto your phone. It'll notify you of any potential trackers, let you know if phone calls are being recorded, maintain a fake but believable GPS trail if necessary, and send out alerts to designated contacts if you put in a certain code in the keypad," he said, handing the phone back after feeling a short buzz in his back pocket. "And I got a list of prank numbers I can put in your contacts, so that's cool."

Loki observed the phone with a sort of quiet consideration. He couldn't have completely understood all that his son had just said, but after a beat he met those bright eyes and smiled. "Brilliant."

(He hoped Peter knew he wasn't talking about the phones.)

::

"Belarus. Byelorussa. Belorussia. Bordered by Russia and Ukraine and Lithuania and Latvia with the darned cutest capital of Minsk, population one million—"

"Fucking alright, you want to bone Belarus 'til you snap the headboard, I GET IT." Weasel slammed down the glass he was wiping. "I haven't had a fucking geography class since tenth grade and I'd like to keep it that way."

"Oh sure, just because you got a degree in alcohol content—"

"It was a doctorate in computer science with a minor in software engineering, jerkoff—"

"—you think you're too good to hear about Belarus? Belarus? That BITCH is CUTE you four-eyed manufacture error of a knock-off Ken doll!"

"What the hell does that even mean?!"

"Maybe she's born with it, Maybelline, but you'll never pull your honeyed locks over my eyes." Wade lifted his glass and threw it back in one gulp, Deadpool mask unpeeled over the bottom half of his face, before leaning over the counter and dropping his voice to whisper, pointing to the seat next to him in a way that was definitely subtle. "And be nice. Between you and me, I'm still tryna convince Josephine over here that she's in good hands."

"Good hands? I once watched you fish days old steak out of a dumpster, say that it was just like Rotten Flesh in Minecraft where the only possible consequence was 80% chance of hunger and losing a couple of hearts, then eat the whole thing."

"So?"

"You were late to a rendezvous point because you were organizing the chunks of your puke in the gutter."

"Wease, be honest. If I had hair like yours, would you have held it back for me?"

"Fuck off."

Weasel tosses the drying rag across one of his shoulders as he stores the glasses, passing the small clock under the bar that read 6:32 PM. It was Christmas Eve with still about an hour and a half until opening, and he hoped all the extra plates and glasses he stocked up would be enough to replenish all the broken ones that would come when one of these assholes would inevitably waltz in dangling a mistletoe.

Honestly, he was surprised that Wade wasn't the asshole that had it planned.

"What, and do it four years in a row?" the asshole in question huffed. "Please. I have class."

"A Class A medical condition."

"Maybe so." The white eyes of the red mask narrowed. "But the only condition I'm suffering right now is HUNGER and I'm seven whole noodles away from going to the fucking falafel truck down the street—"

Peter's voice filtered out from the kitchen mixed in with the faint sounds of frying oil and clanging pans. "If you can survive the flight from Belarus to New York, you can wait another few minutes for me to finish!"

"Finish what?"

"It's a surprise!"

Wade thumped his head onto the bar. "UggggggggggGGGHHHHHHHHHHH."

"Kid's been here for over a couple hours now. Rushed straight into the kitchen with an armful of grocery bags, so whatever he's been doing he should be done soon," Weasel shrugged. "Hey, Boy-Wonder! Why the hell're you coming in on Christmas Eve, anyway? I could've cleared you 'til you got back to school."

"Yeah, but I don't really have anything going on. My Aunt picked up a lot of the shifts people are giving up for the holidays and Spider-Man goes out in the day. Since I've already finished all my homework for winter break, I thought I'd help out."

"No friends to hang out with?" Wade piped up, his forehead still smooshed against the polished wood.

"I am hanging out with friends!"

"Friends your age, Gerber Baby."

"Ned's in the Philippines and MJ's in Florida."

"What about the Katie McGrath look-a-like?" Weasel asked as he was elbow deep in the unopened bottles of liquor to restock his shelves. Wade mouthed Katie McGrath look-a-like with two parts confusion and three parts sparkling interest before his friend waved him off in a motion for 'later'.

"She said she's walking me home after my shift today." Peter backed up through the swinging white doors of the kitchen and spun on his heel to face them. There were a few more stains on his apron and a tray in his hands that held the plates he slid down the bar.

Weasel stared dumbly at his plate of potato wedges and a really good looking chicken fried steak swimming in gravy. Wade was equally as quiet, goggling down at his own plate of a three chimichanga stack smothered in sour cream and beans.

"I didn't know what to get you guys for Christmas, so I hope it was okay that I made your guys' favorite food?" Peter piped up. His shoulders hunched when he didn't get a reply. "Um—"

Then, Wade straight up wailed.

"This is the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me!" He shoveled a bite into his mouth with his gloved hands instead of using the fork that was literally right there and sobbed even harder. "It's so good. So—" sniff— "good."

"What the hell is this?" Weasel mumbled. His hand gripped his chest like he was having a heart attack. "Am I feeling things? Oh god, I'm feeling things. It's not stopping. What the fuck? Wade—Wade, shoot me!"

Wade didn't shoot him. Instead, he didn't stop crying or eating and looked exactly like that meme of that kid on a cooking show flipping something with his tongs.

Peter grinned with what he took as success, or as much of a success as he was going to get, and thought about bringing down a new box of napkins from the store room because when Wade cries, he cries—tears and snot flying like the bullets from Space Invaders.

He glanced at the seat next to Wade and backtracked into the kitchen. "Oh yeah!" He popped back out in tandem with the outward swing of the door and presented a small bowl of cut grapes with a flourish. "How could I almost forget the lovely Josephine?"

Josephine the Blue Orpington Chicken Stolen From Belarus As A Souvenir clucked and pecked at her meal.

Wade drew in a huge sniffle as he stood up and whisked Peter in a great big bear hug, crying into the teen's shoulder and swinging him side to side.

"You're an angel," the merc sobbed, "like those tree ornaments when they hold their dumb little trumpets and—what the god-given fuck happened to your face?"

Three whole potato wedges in his mouth, Weasel raised his head.

When Wade finally set the kid down and he could get a good look, he first spotted the enormous bruise along one of Peter's cheekbones, splotches of angry reds and wine purples rudely decorating his skin. A cut hid on the side of his head, scabbed over and half-hidden by a curl of brown hair, and another bruise drew its unflattering yellow-green mass across his jawline. Several other faded lines dotted his face, more than likely fixed up by his enhanced healing, but the scrape across his nose and specks of dried blood on his forehead were clearly visible.

Peter shrugged as if his face didn't look like a messed-up church mosaic. "Just ran into something I wasn't supposed to. One of the dudes had muscles the size of my head and had a mean crowbar." He waved it off. "But it's healing! By noon tomorrow, my cheekbone should be just a little brown."

Weasel chewed and swallowed his ridiculously delicious potatoes. "You know this is fucked up, right?" He pointed with his fork. "If I were a good boss, I would say that you should at least be an adult to start getting crowbars to the face. But I'm not, so, you got the bad guy?"

"Heck yeah!"

"Huh. Hell of a Christmas gift, I guess. Good job."

Wade had just about sucked down his second chimichanga before pointing towards the kitchen. "Petey, get an ice pack or something. That face isn't a good look."

"But I'll heal—"

"Ice, child! Chop chop! Chip chop! Clip clop!"

Peter rolled his eyes, but he dragged himself back into the kitchen.

For the moment the kid—just a fucking kid—rifled through the freezers for ice that wasn't gross or smelled like meat, Weasel and Wade met each other's eyes. Uncharacteristically quiet, uncharacteristically serious.

Peter Parker. Some kid, wasn't he?

Wade inhaled the rest of his food before licking the plate clean and crouched down to dig through the duffel at his feet. The package he took out had been secured with about three rolls of duct tape and top-tier pizza wrapping, and when he dropped it on the bar, it landed with nothing more than a soft thud. Mostly from the weight of the duct tape.

He looked up. "Do you have any ribbons?"

"Do I run a fucking Hallmark?"

"I was just asking. Maybe you've got a couple bows hidden in a stash like the squirrely motherfucker you are—"

Peter slipped back into the main room holding a ziploc bag of ice chunks up to his cheekbone and plopped down on the stool at Wade's unoccupied side. He set down a stack of quesadillas in front of him, something he knew he could only get away with before Ms. Granny came in and demanded he eat something with more 'substance' to start the night.

"What do you need ribbons for?" he asked.

"For your Christmas gift."

"For my—huh?"

The pizza package was dropped on his lap and nearly slid off if he hadn't caught it between his knees. Peter forced down his bite of quesadilla and put down his ice bag. "You... You got me a gift?"

"You think I'd let my favorite taco buddy off without a gift from yours truly, the Pooliest?" Wade scoffed. He flipped his nonexistent hair over his shoulder. "Blasphemy! It's like saying Belarus isn't bordered by Russia and Ukraine and Poland and Lithuania—"

Weasel balled up his towel and chucked it right in the center of the merc's face. "The gift's from the both of us, by the way. He got it made, I chipped in and made sure it was Ferret-appropriate."

"I wouldn't have gotten anything Ferret-inappropriate!"

"Uhuh. Yeah. Sure."

But Peter only lent half an ear to the banter as he gently took the box in his hands and brought it closer, his lips quirked up at the realistic pepperonis.

Christmases with Ben and May had always been small. Not that he minded—they were warm and cozy and they always managed to put up a small plastic tree and strung up rainbow-colored lights all over the living room. He was never the kid with piles of presents to open Christmas morning, but rather the kid who got a present from Ben and May each and loved whatever they got him, whether it was that cool Star Wars sweater he'd seen at the comics store or a new Lego set he and Ned would drool over when they got the chance.

When he got a little older, he and Ned started to exchange gifts too.

When he was a little older than that and Ben passed, May and Ned were the only ones he'd get presents from and give presents to, and that was just how it was.

"—pen it!"

Peter shook his head. "Sorry, what?"

"You should open your gift!" Wade repeated. Josephine clucked and hopped onto the bar to inspect the shiny wood, sending Weasel skittering back a few steps. "Better do it before opening too, 'cause I think you'll agree that it's a big no-no to show the rest of Sister Margaret's assholes."

"Why the fuck did you phrase it like that," Weasel muttered as he eyed the chicken distrustfully.

Peter, always bright-eyed and always full of energy, could barely mask his excitement as he popped off the scotch tape at the weirdly neat folds and slid the box out of the wrapping paper. His boss was halfway to reaching for the jack knife he kept in his front pocket to help cut away the layers of duct tape surrounding the box, but he was stopped short as he watched the teen's fingers dig into the material and tear it away.

"Jesus fuck," Weasel gaped. "I know you're the mini-Hulk, but goddamn."

Beneath the gray tape was an oddly fancy black box, like one of those suit boxes from those high end stores.

A suit box. That wasn't quite wrong, actually.

Because when Peter took off the top of the box, his eyes grew impossibly wide.

It was a Spider-Man suit.

The material wasn't as thick or as rough as the Deadpool suit, less kevlar-ish and more suited to dodging and flexibility than Wade's favorite straight-into-the-salsa tactics, and was a solid bahama blue—dark enough to blend in with the night, bright enough to glare like a warning if hit with headlights or flashlights. The StarkSuit was worth millions, so it was no stretch of the imagination that the threads woven into it was made with some off-market fabric that was both knife and scratch resistant. This suit, this new suit, made up for its vulnerabilities with what had to be military-grade black padding that covered the upper biceps, elbows, forearms, backs of the hand, knuckles, knees, calves.

Then, there was the spider. Its cephalothorax started at his Adam's apple and its abdomen ended at the middle of his chest. The bottom set of legs ran down the sides of the suits' torso and ended just at the hips; the set of legs just above that ran along the collar bone down the outside of the arms, ending at the elbow pads. The top two sets of legs, however, reached around the neck and crawled down the back just past where the shoulder blades would sit.

A deep, carmine red spider.

"When we were talking the first time I took you by the gym, it got me thinking about that suit you always wear," Wade started up. "The StarkSuit must be pretty cool being Starkified and all that, but you shouldn't feel uncomfortable, so I went ahead and called up some peeps I knew—don't worry, it was totally off record, no questions asked at risk of losing their dangly bits—and got you this suit! Remember when Wease asked you to come in to get measured 'cause another merc your size needed a fitting? Yeah, so that was a lie."

"I had to bribe Wade with three bags of tacos to get him to admit what the hell I needed to do that for," Weasel deadpanned.

"Apparently 'for a good cause' isn't an explanation, which is bullshit because it is, but he should've believed me when I went ahead and got Super-Boy the best. Blue in HEX #006090, red in HEX #AE0020, I went on Google and everything! It's all yours to customize to what your little nerd heart desires—the PeterSuit 3000! Whattya' think?"

Peter tugged out the mask at the bottom of the box and took it into his hands. It was the same blue as the rest of the suit and the lenses were white, carmine red lining the edges.

It looked different from the StarkSuit. It felt different from the StarkSuit.

It wasn't the StarkSuit.

Tears pricked the corner of his eyes.

"... Oh my god he's crying. He's crying. I made him cry." Wade grabbed Weasel's shirt and hauled him forward until they were nose to nose, the latter sputtering and the former failing to not panic. "I DIDN'T WANT TO MAKE HIM CRY."

"Let me fucking go—!"

"HE HATES IT!"

"Fucking—WADE—"

"Thank you," Peter sniffed. The commotion stilled as all the attention swiveled over to him and his tear-streaked face. He wiped at his eyes with the sleeves of his hoodie, careful not to brush against the ugly bruises that throbbed as they healed.

When he admitted his feelings to Wade about the StarkSuit, guilt came for him later that night. He had no right to complain, did he? Mr. Stark spent millions on a suit just for him and at first, it was great. More than great. Awesomely amazing! It was like he was at the top of the world swinging above the streets in the suit made by his life-long hero. But since the ferry incident and since the realization that the suit wasn't truly his, every single time he put it on it felt like it didn't belong.

Millions of dollars spent on just another teenager in Queens.

Don't get him wrong, he wasn't ungrateful! It had been a major upgrade to the old sweats he tried to pass off as a first suit. With the new safety measures, features, his very own AI and the friend he made in Karen... It was incredible.

But it was handed to him on a silver platter with things like the Baby Monitor Protocol embedded in the functions.

Maybe Mr. Stark would never see him as anything but a kid who could pick up entire cars, but Wade and Mr. Weasel...

He looked back at the new suit—the PeterSuit 3000, he thought with a watery chuckle, and tried not to get overwhelmed with tears.

"I love it," he chokes out. "I love it so much."

Peter wrapped his arms around Wade and buried his face into his bicep. And, faintly, he felt the hesitant, careful pats against his back as he held on.

::

"Hey, Happy. I know it's late, or early, but Merry Christmas!"

A quick flash of Peter's watch told him it was only a few minutes after 2:30 AM closing and his hearing granted him the knowledge that pretty much all of the patrons had cleared out for the night save for Wade and Mr. Weasel. Neena had stopped by around midnight just to say hi before heading out for a job that would keep her out of the city for a couple weeks. Before she left, though, he'd been able to give her a gift of homemade oatmeal raisin cookies and a to-go box of extra-charred chicken wings.

She cried only a little bit, then punched out the guy who called her out on it.

"Sorry if I haven't called in a while. I know I've been kind of off and on with reports after Spider-Manning but uh, I guess if it's in the day there's a better chance to catch me on Twitter or something like that. Do you have a Twitter?"

He convinced Ms. Granny to take an early off, especially since it was Christmas and she'd been telling him how her and her sister were going to spend it getting drunk and watching old sitcom reruns. So at around one when she was putting on her heavy coat, he gave her the gifts he'd hid on the highest shelf she couldn't reach: the softest throw blanket he could find and a 3-in-1 taser/switchblade/flashlight.

She laughed, planted a huge kiss on his cheek, and made him promise to get home safe.

"Anyway, I was thinking of stopping by the Tower one of these days? I just—I wanted to bake some things for you guys for Christmas? I get it if you guys are super busy this week with New Years coming up and any events you and Mr. Stark do, but, um, if you're totally okay with getting apple pie or fudge or something, let me know!"

Peter untied his apron with the hand that wasn't holding the phone and hung it on the hooks by the rear exit. In the main room he heard the front door open and close, the sound of heels on wood and Wade noisily turning his attention towards the newcomer.

Politely tuning out the ensuing conversation, he ran a last check of the kitchen to make sure all the stove burners were off, the oven was cold, the fryers weren't bubbling, the fridges were shut, and all the dishes were washed, dried, and put away.

No blood stains, no food stains, no problem.

Peter nodded to himself and pushed through the swinging doors—

"So, no updates really, but—"

—and walked in to see his mom throw Wade across the bar and through the pool table.