Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Polly sat on the windowsill of her sixth-floor walk-up, one foot hooked beneath the other knee, the hem of her baggy sweater slipping halfway down her thigh. The sweater was navy, maybe. Or black. Hard to tell anymore - like it had absorbed too many years and too many moods to stay loyal to a single color.

Outside, Manhattan hummed its usual dirge: sirens wailing two blocks east, someone arguing below in the street like heartbreak was a full-body sport, the faint rumble of a passing train underfoot. But the height dulled it. Up here, everything felt a little further away - and that was the point.

She took a slow drag from the joint smoldering between her fingers, held it in until the sting pricked her lungs, then let it go. The smoke curled into the cold evening air through the window, its spiral briefly visible in the orange glow of a streetlamp before it vanished.

Sometimes, she needed it - not to chase a high, but to come down. 

The noise in her head didn’t switch off on its own.

Her fingers twitched. She flexed them out of habit. The sensations today had been heavy. The spirit of a man crying on the subway so hard he’d left a griefprint on the seat. A woman in the bodega who’d walked through Polly like fog, trailing the confusion from her death three days ago.

Polly hadn’t said anything. She never did anymore.

She exhaled again, slower this time.

“Really?” said a voice, close behind her. “That’s what you’re going with? Emotional damage and a blunt?”

She didn’t scream. Just blinked, once, and took another drag.

"You're new," she said. Voice even, though the hairs on her arms stood up beneath the wool.

He was standing by her bookshelf like he’d just wandered in, casual as anything. Not quite touching the floor. He looked exactly like he had in all the old footage: tousled hair, a week-old beard trimmed too precisely to be accidental, and a tailored sense of self that radiated off him like cologne.

Only... dimmer. Like someone had turned the saturation down on reality.

“Tony Stark,” she said, not moving. 

He gave a little half-bow. “In the flesh, so to speak.”

“Do you know you’re…?”

“Dead? Do I seem surprised?”

Polly tipped her head slightly, studying him. The thing about ghosts - real ones, not the psychic bruises most people called hauntings - was that they didn’t always know. Not at first. Some showed up mid-sentence from a life they no longer had. Others wandered in weeping. Most didn’t linger.

But he wasn’t flickering. He was anchored.

“Usually,” she said slowly, “they don’t talk this much.”

“I was never great at shutting up.”

She stubbed out the joint on the inside lip of a cracked saucer and slid off the windowsill before padding barefoot into the kitchen. The cracked tiles were cool underfoot, grounding. Behind her, the silence shifted as he moved - or tried to. The energy in the room had thickened, like static before a storm.

She filled the kettle from the tap - slowly, as if trying not to startle whatever thread of reality had unraveled. The thin roar of the water covered the silence for a moment. Then she placed it on the stove and clicked the switch. The blue light blinked on. Familiar. Earthly.

Behind her, his presence hadn’t moved.

“I’ve seen you before,” she said, quietly. “On screens. Billboards. Interviews with subtitles. Didn’t expect you to show up here.”

There was a pause. The kind of pause people made when they wanted to say something clever, but couldn’t quite summon the energy.

“Yeah,” he said eventually. “Gotta tell you, I didn’t exactly plan this visit. Just sort of ended up here.”

She turned around. He was examining her bookshelf, fingers drifting near the spine of a battered Penguin paperback. The air around his hand shimmered faintly, like heat off pavement.

“You’re not like the others,” she said.

He glanced at her sidelong. “Because I’m charming?”

“Because you’re here. Most of them just flicker through. Like echoes. But you’re holding.”

He gave her a look. “Holding what?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Whatever’s left of you.”

Tony smirked, but it didn’t reach his eyes. He leaned closer to the shelf, curious. His hand moved toward a ceramic cat figurine - and just as his fingers grazed it, the object shot sideways like it had been slapped. It ricocheted off the table leg and skittered under the couch.

He jumped slightly. “Jesus.”

Polly didn’t flinch. She just stared at the space where the cat had been. Then she looked at his hand.

“Okay,” he said. “That was new.”

“That was an heirloom.”

“Then I’m extremely dead and extremely sorry.”

She didn’t respond. Just pulled her sleeves over her hands and leaned against the counter, watching him.

“You don’t seem especially freaked out,” he said.

“You don’t seem especially ghostlike.”

“Well, I was known for cutting edge innovation.”

There was a beat of silence. Not awkward - just thin. Suspended.

“Are you stuck?” she asked.

He tilted his head. “In your apartment?”

“In whatever this is.”

He didn’t answer right away. Just looked at his hands, then at the kettle, then at her. Like he wasn’t sure which of the three scared him more.

“You tell me,” he said finally. “You’re the ghost-whisperer.”

“I’m not,” Polly said. “Not really. I don’t summon. I’m just... open.”

“Psychic?”

“Sometimes. Depends what’s bleeding through.”

Tony nodded slowly, as if filing it away. “So you’re like a radio picking up dead air.”

“More like dead static.”

“And you think I’m the static?”

“I think you’re tuned to something that hasn’t finished transmitting.”

He smiled at that. Almost wistfully. “Sounds like me.”

The kettle began to rumble. Steam hissed faintly at the spout.

Polly turned away to grab a mug. When she turned back-

He was gone.

No dramatic exit, swirl of light, or spooky wind. Just an absence, like the breath had gone out of the room.

The kettle shrieked.

She clicked it off, slowly. Then walked to the couch, crouched, and reached under. Her fingers found the ceramic cat. It was intact, mostly - one ear chipped, the glaze scuffed.

She placed it back on the shelf then stood there for a moment, fingers lingering on the cool glaze of the figurine before turning back to the kitchen like nothing had happened.

The kettle had stopped screaming, but it still gave off a faint hiss, steam ghosting from the spout like breath from a dying thing.

Polly poured the water into a chipped mug - chamomile, the kind that tasted mostly like wet paper but didn’t clash with whatever fog had settled behind her eyes. She didn’t bother with honey. She stirred it with a spoon that had long since lost its shine.

It should’ve rattled her. A dead man in her apartment. That dead man. But somehow, it didn’t.

She’d seen things - flickers of past lives, people still clutching the shape of their grief like a coat they didn’t know how to take off. Most didn’t stay long. They passed through. Echoes.

But this?

This had been different. Clearer. Like he’d stepped out of a dream she hadn’t been having.

And weirdly... normal.

Not peaceful. Not comfortable. But there was something mundane about it, in the way that déjà vu sometimes felt ordinary. Like she was remembering something forward instead of backward.

She carried the mug back to the windowsill and set it down beside the saucer, the joint still resting there, half-smoked and patient. She picked it up and lit it again, shielding the flame with her hand. The orange tip flared, then dimmed to a soft, steady glow.

The city lights glittered far below like static pretending to be stars. Her breath fogged faintly as she exhaled.

Polly leaned back into her corner of the sill, knees drawn up under the oversized fall of her jumper, the joint between her fingers and the taste of smoke and tea on her tongue.

“Of course it’s Tony Stark,” she muttered to herself.

Then she closed her eyes, not to sleep, but to listen.

Just in case the static decided to speak again.

Chapter Text

The guy from 5B came over because it was a Thursday and she’d texted “You up?” at the exact window between his shift ending and his shower beginning. They didn’t kiss much. He was good with his hands, respectful with his silences, and didn’t ask why she sometimes flinched when he touched the small of her back.

Now he was in the shower, humming something tuneless through the thin bathroom wall. Polly lay on her stomach, face smushed into the pillow, one knee angled out, her naked skin cooling against the soft sheets. The room smelled like eucalyptus soap, latex, and whatever incense she’d burned yesterday to chase out a weeping ghost who refused to leave.

Polly exhaled into the pillow. Her limbs were pleasantly heavy even if her brain was not.

“You know,” said a voice from the corner of the room, “this is not how I imagined my second visit going.”

She didn’t startle. Instead she muttered into the linen, "How long have you been loitering?"

There was a pause. Then Tony Stark, utterly unapologetic, said, “Oh, well I have no concept of time anymore, but I think I arrived just after your, uh… friend put your ankle over his shoulder and said something about ruining you.”

Polly groaned so hard it vibrated the mattress.

“Are you kidding me?”

She reached for the baggy t-shirt bunched near the bed.

Behind her, Tony drifted closer to the dresser, one hand reaching absently toward a mug sitting on its edge. His fingers hovered inches from it - not quite touching, not quite trying. Just tracing the memory of motion.

“You’d think I’d stop trying to pick things up,” he muttered, mostly to himself. “It’s like the muscle memory’s still loading.”

“You couldn’t wait until he left?” Polly muttered, tugging her tee over her head without sitting up.

Tony lifted a hand, palm out. “In my defense, I was trying to figure out if I could leave.”

She propped herself up on her elbows and gave him a flat look. “You really choose your moments, you know?”

Tony gave her a once-over. Not lascivious, more… observational, like he was reading her temperature. “You know, Polly, as a semi-qualified ghost and former mess of a man, I feel honor-bound to tell you that your coping mechanisms are a little textbook.”

She narrowed her eyes at him, “I never gave you my name.” 

“No,” he said. “But Prince Charming did. Several times. With feeling.”

She stared at him, deadpan, ignoring the heat creeping up her neck at the implication of what he’d overheard. 

“It’s Apolline,” she deflected, “ only people I know get to call me Polly.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I don’t count after what I just witnessed?”

Polly groaned again and climbed off of the bed. She padded past him to the kitchen barefoot and filled the kettle from the tap before flicking it on. He followed her - or appeared beside her - with that same effortlessness that made her skin crawl and her brain twitch.

The apparition of Tony Stark looked faintly amused as he leaned partway against - and partly through - her kitchen counter, watching her closely as she moved. She rolled her eyes, grabbed a mug, and set it down a little harder than she meant to.

“Don’t start judging me now.”

“Oh no, please. By all means,” he replied, “emotionally detach through casual sex and sarcasm. Very healthy. A+ grief strategy.”

“And what was yours? Drinking, deflection, and a billion-dollar guilt complex?”

Tony raised a hand like, fair.

“Touché,” he said. “But at least I built things.”

“I’m building a perfectly manageable life where I sleep with men I don’t love and smoke weed to avoid crying on the subway.”

“Very millennial of you.”

“Very dead of you to judge.”

He laughed. It was short and real.

They stood there for a moment in the soft kitchen light, surrounded by the buzz of old pipes and the faint hiss of the heating element in the kettle. It felt strangely domestic. She hated how not-weird it felt to have him there.

The water stopped running. Pipes groaned. Tony tilted his head toward the sound.

“Should I vanish for this part or do we all just... coexist awkwardly?”

She shrugged. “As long as you don’t make any noise, I don’t think he’ll notice.”

“Noted.”

The bathroom door opened and a moment later her neighbour walked out of her bedroom, flushed and easy in his skin. Damp hair towel-dried, shirtless, casual as anything. 

He leaned in and pressed a kiss to her mouth. 

“You want breakfast?”

“Nah,” she said softly. “Thanks though.”

He kissed her again, slower this time and then pulled his shirt over his head as he moved to the apartment door. She smiled at him when he glanced back over his shoulder as he left.

The door shut behind him with a click. A beat passed, then Tony let out an exaggerated gag. 

“God. You’re soft with him. I’m traumatised.”

“You’re incorporeal,” she said, picking up her mug and moving towards her sofa. “You don’t get to be traumatised.”

“I watched you spoon.”

He hovered by the window now, arms folded. Looking at her like she was a puzzle with half the pieces still flipped upside-down.

“Maybe that’ll teach you to knock.”

He scoffed as she moved across the room and curled up on the couch, lighting what was left of last night’s joint. 

“So,” he said, leaning against the window frame like gravity only half-applied. “Why am I here?”

“Mmm. You tell me.”

“I don’t remember deciding to show up.”

“Yeah, that’s not so unusual,” she said. “Spirits usually come through for one of three reasons - they’re in distress, they’ve got unfinished business, or they’ve got a message for someone.”

Tony was quiet.

“I’ve got a lot of messages,” he said finally. “None of them easy.”

He paused, eyes unfocused. For a second, it looked like he was trying to remember something - or maybe push it away.

“There’s… one I keep thinking about,” he said quietly. Then blinked, shook his head. “Never mind. You don’t want ghost therapy.”

She shrugged, drawing in smoke. “Well, you’d better think carefully before you pass one on. Once it’s spoken, it’s mine to carry. And if I walk up to someone and tell them ‘By the way, your dead friend says sorry for being an emotionally distant asshole ,’ you’d be surprised how often they punch me.”

Tony blinked. “Seriously?”

She exhaled slowly, eyes watching the smoke for a moment before finding him again.

“Grief doesn’t always want company. Especially uninvited.”

He looked at her for a long moment. Less solid than before. The edge of his form stuttered like light beneath water - and for a moment, he wasn’t in the room at all. Just a shape reflected in the window, distorted by glass and city light. 

Then he was back, like nothing had changed.

“Maybe I’m not ready,” he said. “To pass anything on.”

“Then don’t,” she replied. “Not yet.”

Tony didn’t answer right away. He just stood there, gaze drifting to the mug she’d left half-full on the table, then back to her. There was something in his expression now - not sadness exactly, but the space after it. Where guilt goes to ache in private.

Polly leaned back against the arm of the sofa, the joint still burning low between her fingers.

“I’ll deliver them,” she said, voice softer now. “However many you’ve got. I don’t mind.”

His eyes met hers.

“But…” she went on, “you should think about who actually needs a message. Versus who you’d just like to give one to.”

He frowned.

“Because sometimes,” she added, “a message is more about the sender than the receiver.”

That one landed. He didn’t flinch, didn’t joke. Just looked at her like he saw her fully for the first time.

“You’re not what I expected.”

“Neither are you,” she replied.

A pause followed. The city buzzed below them, distant and endless.

Tony opened his mouth, then closed it again. Whatever he’d meant to say fell between dimensions. He blinked, and his outline flickered again. 

“I should go,” he said finally.

Polly nodded. “You’ll be back.”

He gave a small, rueful smile. “Yeah. Probably.”

Then, “Hey, Apolline.”

She raised her brows.

“I’ll try to earn Polly,” he said.

And then he was gone.

No sound, no shimmer, no dramatics, or fanfare. Just the absence, again.

Polly didn’t move. Just sat there for a while in the silence, the faint cherry glow of the joint still pulsing between her fingers.

Then she stubbed it out, curled deeper into the sofa, and closed her eyes. Not sleep, exactly. But something close enough.

Chapter Text

She was always presentable. That was the deal.

You couldn’t stop the ghosts, but you could moisturise. You could iron your collar. You could leave the house with clean lines and steady hands, even if the rest of you was one bad conversation away from crumbling.

Her grandmother had taught her that. A soft-voiced woman with calloused fingers and too many locked drawers, who always smelled like lavender and camphor and don’t tell your mother.

“We don’t scare people, Apolline. We give them no reason to worry. We keep our voices level and our cuffs clean. That’s how you stay out of hospital wards and whispered stories.”

Polly had her first full apparition at fourteen - a drowned man in the high school cafeteria, dripping lake water no one else could see. She’d come home shaking, convinced she was losing her mind.

Her grandmother had run a bath, lit a candle, and told her stories that didn’t sound like stories at all.

“You don’t have to open the door every time something knocks. Learn the difference between hearing and answering. Between noticing and welcoming.”

Polly learned. She didn’t always obey - but she remembered.

And so now, years later, she still left the house with clean skin and polished boots. Her blouse was tucked in. Her lipstick was subtle. She looked like someone with a calendar and a therapist.

More importantly, she looked like someone who was fine .

The streets vibrated in that way cities do - somewhere between heartbeat and hum. Polly kept to the edges, letting the current of people move around her. She had headphones in, but nothing was playing. It helped muffle the static.

She walked east, past the bakery that always smelled like cinnamon even though it hadn’t been open in two years, past the shuttered bookstore with hand-painted signage she liked to pretend she remembered from her childhood. She didn’t. But grief and nostalgia lived in the same part of the brain, and hers often got their wires crossed.

She wasn’t walking anywhere in particular. That’s what she told herself.

But when she reached the gate of the cemetery on 78th, she didn’t hesitate.

It wasn’t a famous one. No statues of angels with chipped noses. No historical plaques. Just rows of modest stones and a line of trees that stayed bare longer than they should in spring. The kind of place people passed without thinking, until they needed it.

Polly stepped through the iron gate with a practiced ease, the way you learn to enter a room full of people who might already know your name. She followed the gravel path, counted four rows, and turned left.

The headstone was small. Unpolished. A little moss gathered along the base where the lawn trimming didn’t quite reach. She knelt down, pulled a tissue from her coat pocket, and wiped it clean before placing the flowers.

Yellow roses. Fresh, slightly bruised. She never brought red. It felt too dramatic. Too final.

She didn’t speak. She never did. The woman in the ground hadn’t liked speeches.

Instead, Polly rested her hand briefly on the top edge of the stone, let her fingers feel the cool of it. Then she stood, stepped back, and turned slightly to glance across the cemetery.

They were watching.

Not close. Not yet.

Figures in the distance, just at the edges of the trees. Pale outlines. Shadows shaped like people who had nowhere else to be. One stood still. Another paced. One looked directly at her and tilted its head, as if listening for a name it almost remembered.

Polly didn’t stay.

The trick wasn’t in seeing them. That was easy. The trick was not letting them feel seen.

She walked out with the same grace she’d entered, hands in her pockets, eyes forward. The moment she stepped through the gate again, she exhaled like she’d been underwater.

She didn’t head straight home. Something about the silence in her apartment had started pressing against her ribs - and besides, she had homework.

That’s what she’d started calling it: the light research she sometimes did when a ghost became a frequent flyer. It wasn’t for them. It was for her. A way to contextualise. To keep the boundaries straight. Names and dates helped.

And Tony Stark? He had a Wikipedia page longer than most obituaries, but his memory also lived on in the city streets too. 

So instead, Polly cut across two blocks and down the side of a deli that always smelled like oil and wet cardboard. She kept her head down, only half-watching the people who passed her. Noise rolled off the traffic like steam: engines, conversation, someone busking with a cracked guitar and a voice that didn’t know it was beautiful.

Halfway down 72nd, she saw the table.

One of those makeshift tourist stalls, set up on the corner with uneven legs and plastic crates to hold it steady. The usual suspects were spread across it - knockoff sunglasses, skyline postcards, laminated subway maps.

And then, in the centre, a stack of folded zines beneath a cardboard sign:

TONY STARK: THE HERO WHO SAVED US
$2 or pay what you feel.

There was a mural on the side of the building behind it. Ironman’s helmet in profile, brushed gold, red background faded from too many winters. Someone had tagged over part of it - a rude word, half-cleaned - but you could still see the original text beneath:

Thank you for everything

Polly hesitated. 

Then she dug into her pocket, pulled out a crumpled five, and dropped it into the tip jar.

She picked up the top zine. The paper was soft with ink, staple-pinned, the kind of thing someone had printed in batches at the local library and handed out at vigils. Inside there was a timeline of his life. Childhood photos she doubted had been authorised. Quotes that felt pulled from soundbites, not memory.

She flipped through it as she walked, one page after the next.

Philanthropist. Genius. The man who saved New York twice and the world once.

We owe him everything.

None of it sounded like the man who had leaned against her kitchen counter and told her off for emotionally detaching by sleeping with her neighbour.

She paused at the end of the block, the zine still open in her hand. One last quote in bold italics caught her eye - something about legacy, or sacrifice. It didn’t sound like his voice either but she had to remind herself that technically, she was speaking to a dead man while reading the words of one who was still alive.

Death changed people. 

With a quiet breath, she folded the pages in half and slipped the zine into her tote.

It wasn’t much. But it was a start.

She kept walking - not fast, just steady. Letting the day guide her. A few blocks later, the old bodega came into view. Unchanged. Still waiting on the corner like it always had.

It was the same one she’d been going to for years - faded awning, handwritten signs in the window, the bell above the door that never quite rang right. The produce was overpriced and always bruised, but they carried her oat milk and the woman behind the counter never tried to make conversation.

The real one, that is.

Behind her, on a low plastic stool tucked just beside the lottery display, sat the ghost of the woman who used to run the place.

She’d died three years ago, but hadn’t quite left. Polly had first seen her the week after the funeral - perched exactly where she’d sat in life, cardigan buttoned wrong, glasses sliding down her nose. Still muttering about receipts. Still telling off rude customers, who of course didn’t hear her.

She was doing it now.

As Polly dropped a bag of apples and a carton of oat milk on the counter, the old woman’s ghost leaned forward, squinting at a man thumbing through a tabloid near the drinks fridge.

"Don’t bend the pages if you’re not going to buy it,” she snapped. “This isn’t a library.”

The man didn’t look up. Just kept reading. The ghost huffed, muttered something in a language Polly didn’t know.

Polly didn’t speak to her anymore. She’d tried once, early on. It took weeks to shake the others who thought she might listen.

She paid in silence, nodded to the cashier, and turned to leave.

As she stepped through the door, the ghost behind the counter called out - not to her, not really. Just to the air, like she always did.

“Tell your mother I said thank you for the peach cobbler.”

Polly didn’t look back, just adjusted the weight of the bag on her arm and kept walking.

The stillness of her apartment was welcoming when she stepped inside.

She dropped her bag on the kitchen counter, peeled off her coat, and moved through the motions without thinking. She put the apples in the bowl, the milk in the fridge. Lit a candle out of habit. 

She pushed up the window to let the air move and fluffed up the worn out cushion tucked into the corner of the sill. It lived there, a perch for when she read, smoked, watched the city blur into itself.

She climbed up and sat cross-legged. One hand held an apple and with the other she flipped open the zine and read about Tony Stark.

About MIT at seventeen. About the weapons contracts and the clean energy pivot. The press conferences. The tower. The suits. The snap. His daughter. 

“He saved everyone.”
“He gave everything.”

She didn’t know what page she was on when the feeling caught up with her.

It wasn’t grief. Not exactly. Just a sense of being too full . Of the day pressing in - too many names, too many faces, too many echoes clinging to her sleeves.

She set the zine down on the windowsill - the half eaten apple beside it.

Then she stood, slowly, and peeled her jumper over her head, she began walking through her apartment towards the bathroom. She unbuttoned her trousers. Stepped out of them. Left them in a soft trail across the floor, her bra followed, then her underwear and socks.

The bathroom light was sharp and clean.

The shower steamed up fast but she didn’t bother waiting for it to settle. Just stepped in, bare feet against cold tile, hot water cascading over her skin like it might rinse the rest of the world away.

The steam curled in her lungs. She leaned her forehead against the tile and let the heat chase her skin pink.

Her grandmother would’ve said: We don’t scare people, Apolline.

Polly wasn’t trying to scare anyone. She just didn’t want to feel like she was disappearing.

Not tonight.

So she scrubbed the day off. Put her head back and let herself breathe.

Chapter Text

She slept on the sofa again.

She hadn't meant to - not this time. The TV still flickered against the far wall, casting shadows that danced like second thoughts. A half-finished cup of tea had gone cold beside her elbow. The blanket had slipped down to her knees.

Somewhere between one breath and the next, the air changed.

It wasn’t a sound that woke her. Not really. Just… a presence . Like someone opening a book you thought you’d finished.

Polly stirred, lashes fluttering against her cheek. At first she thought she was still dreaming.

The room didn’t look like her own. Or maybe it did - but older, dust-soft, lit from nowhere. Everything held the soft, overexposed haze of memory. She could feel heat behind her eyes, like she’d been crying. Or maybe someone else had.

And then he was there.

Not standing. Sitting.

Across from her on the other end of the couch, elbows on his knees, eyes on the floor like they might hold some kind of answer.

Tony Stark.

Not ghost-Tony, not the flippant apparition who rifled through her cupboards and made sarcastic commentary on her sex life. This was someone else. Or maybe the same man with the weight finally visible.

He looked tired. Not physically - something deeper. Something threaded into the way his shoulders curled inward, like a collapse in progress.

"Hey, Apolline," he said, voice rougher than before. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”

She blinked. The light in the room didn’t seem to come from anywhere. Her throat felt dry.

“Are you-” She stopped. He looked up at her then.

“Yes,” he said, pre-empting the question. Then smiled faintly. “Still dead. Don’t worry.”

The silence stretched, but it didn’t feel awkward. Just full . Like the air itself was listening in.

“You okay?” she asked softly.

“Not really,” he said, and dragged a hand over his face. “But I’m not here for me.”

That was when she saw it - the tightness around his eyes, the quiet urgency just beneath his voice.

“I have to ask you for something,” he said. “A favour. A message.”

Polly nodded once. “Okay.”

He didn’t look at her when he spoke.

“His name’s Peter Parker.”

A beat.

“He’s a-” He stopped. Pressed his lips together. “He was my kid. Not literally. But close. Closer than I ever thought I’d let anyone be again.”

Polly sat up, legs tucked beneath her. The blanket fell fully to the floor, but she didn’t reach for it.

“I need you to tell him something.”

She waited.

Tony’s hands were clasped between his knees now, knuckles pale with effort. He wasn’t flickering anymore - not like the other times. He seemed more anchored, more real . Like this moment was costing him something.

“They forgot,” Tony started, then swallowed. “The world moved on around him. He didn’t. Someone has to remember.”

His voice cracked.

“He’s trying so hard to carry it all, and they don’t even know . Not really. They forgot me , sure - murals fade. Streets change. That’s normal. But Peter - he gave up everything, and now he’s alone , and it’s not fair.”

He looked at her then. Direct. Steady. “His name is Peter Parker and he’s also Spider-Man.”

The air shifted. Like the room itself took a breath.

“No one remembers. Not who he is, not what he’s done. That was the cost. He gave up being known so everyone else could live. I remember him. And I can’t carry it. But maybe… maybe you can.”

Polly’s stomach tightened. This wasn’t homework. This was a responsibility.

“You want me to find him?” she asked softly.

“Yeah. And when you do,” Tony said, his voice quieter now, “tell him this. “Tell him… he was always more than the suit. That I meant it when I said, ‘If you’re nothing without this suit, then you shouldn’t have it.’ I took it away because I knew he could do it without me. And he did. God, he did.”

Say that exactly. He’ll know.”

He hesitated, then smiled, worn and grateful. “And tell him I was wrong about the training wheels protocol. He didn’t need it. Not really.”

Polly’s voice came quiet, but sure.

“They didn’t forget you.”

Tony’s head lifted.

She went on. “You said murals fade, people forgot you. But the world remembers. Not every detail. Not the man who got coffee at two in the morning or built things just to see if he could. But they remember what it meant. You became something more than yourself. And people feel that.”

She paused. “I think they try to honour it in the choices they make. The good ones, anyway.”

His expression softened. Just a little. Enough that the lines on his face eased.

“You think that matters?” he asked.

“I think so, yeah,” she said. 

They sat in silence for a long moment. The kind that doesn't ask to be filled. Eventually, Tony leaned back. “He might not believe you.”

“Then I’ll say it again,” she said. “Until he does.”

He looked at her, really looked. The way people do when trying to decide what they’ll carry with them.

“You’re good at this.”

“Comes with the territory.”

“Yeah. I guess it would.”

Another silence followed, neither really sure what to say next. Polly broke it.

“You can call me Polly,” she added gently. “If you ever want to visit again.”

His eyes crinkled. “Was wondering when I’d earn that.”

“You just did.”

Tony reached out, almost hesitantly - and his fingers brushed hers.

It wasn’t cold. It wasn’t anything, really. Just a weightless warmth. The kind that leaves no mark but changes you anyway.

“Thank you,” he said.

And then he was gone.

Not vanished, not blinked - just absent . As if he’d stepped into another room, leaving the air behind him quieter than it had been.

Polly stayed where she was, hand still resting palm-up in her lap, like she might feel it again.

The blanket was forgotten. So was the tea.

After a long moment, she whispered to the dark, “I’ll find him.”

Chapter Text

Peter Parker had no right to be here.

He hadn’t meant to follow her. That was what he told himself, anyway. It wasn’t planned. No mask. No suit. Just Peter Parker in a hoodie that didn’t quite fit and sneakers worn too thin at the soles. No plan except find out who she is .

She’d appeared three times now - always in his periphery, never quite close enough to corner. Once, she’d tried to speak, but the words hadn’t made it past the static in his head. ‘ I have a message’ - that’s what she’d said, or something like it. The kind of thing that would have sounded completely benign to anyone else. But Peter had learned not to trust when strangers said they knew him. Not after… everything .

He’d brushed her off. Turned away.
But she kept appearing. Not chasing, exactly - just showing up . Unassuming. A quiet constant. 

So he’d followed her. Shadowed her from two blocks back, down through the Lower East Side, watched her step inside a building with paint peeling off the brick and a busted intercom panel held together with duct tape.

He didn’t like the idea of sneaking into her home but he couldn’t afford to be wrong about her. Not now, not again. Not with what he was carrying. So he didn’t hesitate. The next day he returned, and six floors worth of fire escape later, he was inside her apartment.

It was quiet.

Not suspiciously clean but lived-in. A bowl of apples on the counter. A mug with something dried at the rim, like she'd abandoned her tea halfway. A cushion on the windowsill, dented from recent use.

She hadn’t locked the window. That’s how he’d gotten in. Through the fire escape, like a cliché, shimmied the wooden frame of the window up and ducked through.

Peter moved slowly. He didn’t touch much. He’d never admit it, but the place made him nervous. Not because it felt dangerous, but because it didn’t.

Because it felt… sad.

The kind of quiet that didn’t settle - it pressed.

There was a scarf tossed over the back of a chair. A postcard taped to the fridge. Books stacked unevenly beneath the window like makeshift furniture. A life lived quietly, but fully.

Then he spotted the zine on the windowsill.

Folded once down the spine, still open to a page that showed Tony Stark smiling in profile, probably mid-speech. A halo of blur in the background - some conference crowd. A quote beneath it. Bold. Likely misattributed.

Peter stared at it for a long moment.

Then the front door opened.

He moved without thinking - backed up into the shadow of the hallway, silent against the wall. Breath low. Muscles coiled, ready.

She entered like someone who had nowhere else to be.

No music, no phone in hand, no sigh or stretch or greeting for a pet. She just stepped inside, closed the door behind her, and leaned her back against it like the day had taken too much.

Even from here, Peter could see the tear tracks on her face. She stood still for a long time, eyes closed. Then whispered something that might’ve been ‘ okay, okay ,’ like she was trying to convince herself.

She didn’t notice him until she turned into the kitchen.

Her eyes locked on him immediately - not with surprise, but with something slower. Recognition, yes. And fatigue. Like she’d expected this eventually.

She didn’t speak, just stood there in the half-lit doorway, keys still in hand, eyes rimmed red. Her expression wasn’t angry or shocked. Just… tired. And not surprised.

Peter blinked. He took half a step back, suddenly aware of the way he must look - halfway between guilty and guilty-but-caught, one hand still hovering near the zine he’d just put down.

“I-” he started, but stopped. No idea what he was going to follow that with.

Then, finally, she said, “You let yourself in?”

It wasn’t accusatory. Just curious. Like she was cataloguing the moment instead of reacting to it.

Peter’s hand fell to his side. “The window was open.”

She nodded, like that tracked somehow. For a second, the silence between them felt like static, and alive. But not hostile exactly. 

“You’ve been following me,” he said.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” she replied.

That startled something out of him - not a laugh, but the muscle memory of one. He looked at her properly now: the dark rings under her eyes, the crumpled edge of her collar, the faint shine on her cheeks.

She wasn’t some ominous stranger anymore. She looked… normal. Sad, even. A person. Maybe a little younger than he’d guessed, early twenties. Few years older than him. And now that he was seeing her clearly, it felt weirder that he’d broken into her place than it did that she kept turning up in his life.

He dropped his eyes.

“I wasn’t sure you were real,” he said.

She moved past him, slow but without hesitation, and set her keys on the counter.

“I get that a lot.”

Peter hesitated. “Look, I just wanted to know what you wanted. You kept trying to-”

“I have a message,” she said quietly.

His head jerked up. She wasn’t facing him, just reaching into the cupboard above the sink. 

“What?”

She pulled down a chipped mug. Then another. Moved on instinct, like she’d already decided the script for this part.

“I have a message,” she repeated. “I’ve been trying to tell you. I didn’t mean to freak you out.”

“You did a pretty good job of it,” Peter muttered, then flinched at himself.

She didn’t seem offended.

“I was sent by the ghost of Tony Stark,” she said plainly. “As cliché as that sounds.”

Peter stared at her like she’d grown another head. She kept her back to him, filling the kettle. Click. Hum. Steam would come next.

“I see dead people,” she added, glancing over her shoulder at him sideways. “It’s a whole thing. They come to me when they’re stuck. Or when they want something. Or when there’s… unfinished business.”

The mug in her hand trembled slightly as she placed it on the counter. He didn’t think she was afraid of him. More like she was afraid of what he might do with what came next.

“Tony came to me three times,” she said softly. “He wanted me to tell you something. I promised I would.”

Peter’s throat was dry. His hands curled in at his sides.

“This some kind of joke?” he asked. “Because if it is-”

“It’s not.”

She finally turned to face him fully. She looked like she meant it. All of it. And for some reason, that scared him more than if she’d been lying.

“I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “I thought maybe you’d want to know. That maybe you needed it.”

Peter’s voice caught in his chest. “What did he say?”

Polly hesitated. Her gaze didn’t waver.

“He said... the world forgot you. That you gave everything, and no one remembers who you are. That it isn’t fair. That you’re still carrying it, and it’s too much.”

Peter’s heart slammed against his ribs.

She went on, quietly, “He told me your name. Said you were Spider-Man. Told me about the choice you made.”

Peter squeezed his eyes shut for half a second. The room tilted.

“And then he said to tell you… that you were always more than the suit. That he meant it when he told you, ‘If you’re nothing without this suit, then you shouldn’t have it. ’ He said he took it away because he knew you didn’t need it. That you could do it without him.”

A long pause.

“He said he was proud.”

Peter opened his eyes. There were tears there, now. He didn’t wipe them away.

“He said you’d know he meant it and something about how he was wrong about the training wheels.”

Silence followed. The kettle clicked off behind her.

“I’m going to make tea,” she said. Her voice was hoarse, but calm. “You can sit and have some, or you can leave while my back is turned. It’s up to you.”

Then she turned away again, reached for the mugs.

Peter didn’t move.

He didn’t trust his voice. Didn’t trust the air. Didn’t trust the fact that she was the first person to say his name and mean it in what felt like forever. So he just stood there. Shaking. Watching her make tea like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

And for the first time in a long time, something in him cracked. 

He didn’t leave.

The kettle clicked off. Polly poured the water slowly, hands steady even though the room still felt like it might tip sideways. She didn’t ask how he took it - just set one mug down in front of him and slid the sugar across the table in case he needed something to do with his hands.

Peter didn’t sit right away. He stood behind the chair for a moment like he wasn’t sure if the invitation extended that far. Then, carefully, he pulled it out and sat. The scrape of wood against tile felt louder than it should.

Steam curled up from the mugs in soft spirals. No one spoke.

Polly wrapped her hands around her cup. She didn’t look at him. Not yet.

“I don’t usually do this,” Peter said at last. His voice was quieter now, like it had burned out a little after everything in the living room. “Break into people’s apartments.”

She gave a small huff, not quite a laugh. “I don’t usually have people break into mine.”

A beat passed. Peter stared into the tea like it might rearrange itself into answers.

“I thought you were some kind of stalker,” he told her, breaking the silence that had settled between them.

“I know.” She didn’t sound offended. Just tired.

He glanced over at her. She met his gaze this time, and the room steadied.

“You said his name like you knew him,” Peter said.

“I did. Sort of.”

Peter frowned slightly at that. “He visited you. Three times.”

“Yes.”

“You really see ghosts?”

“As cliché as it sounds.”

Another pause. She took a sip of her tea. 

“Does that make you… like a medium, or something?”

“I don’t do readings,” Polly said. “I don’t call them up. But sometimes, they come. When they need to.”

Peter rested his elbows on the table, shoulders hunched slightly like he was still trying to make himself smaller. He stared down at the chipped edge of the mug in front of him, fingers ghosting the ceramic.

“So… when he came to you,” he said slowly, “what was he like?”

Polly didn’t answer right away. Her thumb traced a circle on her mug. “Different each time,” she said at last. “First, he was curious. A little confused, honestly. Like he didn’t expect me to see him. Second time… well, he was a little smug about something he interrupted, curious about why he was even here in the first place.”

Peter’s throat worked. “And the third?”

She looked at him then. Really looked. “He seemed more real than before. He knew why he was there. There was a gravity to him. He knew your name and he remembered you like you were still right there beside him.”

The words settled heavy in the air. Peter pressed a fist to his mouth for a second and nodded, like that might stop whatever cracked along his spine.

Polly didn’t reach out. She let him have the silence, the space.

“Everyone forgot,” he said eventually. “That was the whole point. I made them forget. That’s what saved them.”

“He didn’t forget.”

He looked at her sharply.

“He remembered you,” she said, quiet but steady. “Even when no one else did, and when I told him to think carefully about who he might want to pass a message onto, he came back with his decision and it was you.”

Peter’s fingers curled around the mug. He didn’t drink.

“Can I ask,” he said, voice rough at the edges, “why you did it? Why you tracked me down? You don’t know me. You don’t owe me anything.”

“I owed him,” she said. “Because he asked, he said it mattered, and I think I believed him.”

Peter exhaled slowly. The kind of breath you let out when there’s too much inside you.

“I didn’t want anyone to know,” he said. “After. I didn’t want anyone to remember. But I think… I think I needed someone to.”

Polly nodded. “Well there you go. Now someone remembers.”

Another beat of silence.

“Are you okay?” he asked. He didn’t know why the question came out now, except that she looked tired in a way he recognised - tear tracks on her cheeks, the distant glassiness that grief left behind.

Polly blinked once, then looked away. “Just dead people stuff.”

Peter almost smiled. “Right.”

They sat a while longer, not drinking, not speaking. Just two people quietly holding the edges of something bigger than both of them.

When the moment felt full enough, Polly stood and made her way to the small kitchenette.

“I’m starving,” she told him. “I’m gonna make toast,” she said, “you ate?” 

Peter shook his head and watched as she wordlessly set down a second plate. Then, after a moment he asked, “What’s your name?”

She hesitated for a beat as she pressed down the lever of the toaster before moving to sit back at the table with him. 

“Apolline.”

Peter raised an eyebrow. “That’s… different.”

She smiled slightly at that, picked up her mug and took another sip. “My grandmother was French. Believed in the old names, but you can call me Polly.”

Peter didn’t say anything right away. But he looked at her differently now. Like maybe he was seeing her for the first time - not just the strange woman who kept showing up, but the person underneath.

“Okay,” he said softly. “Polly.”

Chapter Text

It was just after five when Polly caught him lurking again.

He was across the street, leaned up against the brick wall of the old laundromat that hadn’t been open for five years. Hood up. Hands jammed deep in his pockets. Pretending he wasn’t there on purpose.

Polly didn’t call out. Just crossed the street slowly, her coat loose around her shoulders, boots scuffing the pavement. She stopped a few feet away and looked at him like she was trying to decide what to do with a stray dog.

“You’re getting bad at hiding,” she said.

Peter blinked, caught like a kid who’d been caught raiding the cookie jar. “I’m not hiding.”

She glanced at the rust-streaked wall behind him. “This your favorite wall?”

Peter’s mouth opened, closed. His brain stumbled for a better excuse. “It’s a decent wall.”

She turned and started walking back toward her building. After a few paces, she looked over her shoulder.

“You coming, or are you gonna sulk out here until the rats get curious?”

He followed. He always did.

Her apartment always smelled the same - like books, warm wood, and some kind of tea that changed depending on the day. Today it was something spicy and unfamiliar. Cinnamon, maybe. He’d never asked what the blends were. Part of him didn’t want to know. They seemed like hers - like magic or medicine, depending on the mood.

She didn’t say anything as she moved around the space. Just shrugged off her coat, flicked the kettle on, and started pulling down mugs.

Peter stood in the middle of the room, arms folded. He didn’t know what to do with himself when she didn’t ask why he was there. And she rarely did which somehow made it worse.

“You want tea or are you going to be weird about it again?” she asked eventually.

“I’ll take the weird tea.”

“That’s what I thought.”

He drifted toward the stack of DVDs under the TV. The corner of Unsolved Mysteries peeked out from the shelf like a dare. He crouched, pulled the case free, and held it up.

“Don’t you dare,” she said without looking.

He slid the disc into the player anyway.  By the time she turned around with two chipped mugs, the intro music had started. She gave him a flat look but didn’t comment. Just handed him a mug and sat down beside him.

Peter sipped carefully. Too hot. Too floral. He didn’t mind.

“You know,” she said, “this is becoming a habit.”

He glanced sideways. “Is that a bad thing?”

“No. I get it," she paused as she shifted in her seat slightly. "I know I’m the only person you’ve met who knows…”

That landed harder than he expected. It was true, and hearing her say it out loud made something twist behind his ribs.

“You’re welcome here,” she added, “but if you ever put on Unsolved Mysteries again without asking, I’ll kick you out.”

He smiled - sheepish, boyish, smaller than he meant it to be. “Duly noted.”

They didn’t speak for a while after that. Just watched the screen as a gravel-voiced narrator told them about a man who’d vanished while hiking in Montana. Walked off into the trees and never came back.

Peter sat with the mug warm between his hands, eyes half on the screen, half on the way Polly curled her knees up under her oversized hoodie. She looked like she belonged here- not just in the apartment, but in the silence. Comfortable in the quiet in a way Peter hadn’t been since before the dust. Since before everything.

“He just wanted out,” she said halfway through the episode. “Sometimes people disappear on purpose.”

Peter didn’t answer. He didn’t know how to.

A breeze rattled against the windows. Somewhere below, a car backfired. The world hadn’t stopped, but in here, in her space, it somehow felt paused. Like the second between inhale and exhale.

He liked it too much.

That was the problem.

He stayed through the next episode. And the one after that.

Polly didn’t comment. Just refilled the teapot and brought a tin of biscuits to the couch without asking if he wanted any. They watched a segment about a haunted diner in Ohio. Polly snorted once and called the ghost a drama queen under her breath.

Peter laughed. Real laughter, low and quiet. It surprised them both.

He wasn’t sure when he started looking forward to this. The silence. The tea. The way she didn’t expect anything from him. She never pushed. Never pressed. And somehow, that made him want to tell her everything.

When the sky outside started to darken, Polly reached over and clicked on the lamp. Warm yellow light pooled around them, soft and uneven.

Peter stared at the empty mug in his hands, then set it down on the coffee table with a muted clink.

“I should go.”

But he didn’t move.

Polly raised an eyebrow. “You’ve said that before.”

He exhaled through his nose. “Yeah.”

She tilted her head slightly, watching him. Not prying, just watching.

“You can’t haunt my apartment like a stray cat,” she said.

Peter ran a hand over the back of his neck. “I’m not staying. I just didn’t want to be alone.”

There. That was too much. He knew it as soon as it left his mouth. He saw the flicker in her eyes - not pity, something else. Something more careful.

She didn’t answer right away, just adjusted the lamp again like it mattered.

Peter stood slowly, stretching like someone waking from sleep. He gathered their mugs, carried them to the sink and gently placed them into the bowl of soapy water.

“I’ll come by again,” he said, still facing the kitchen.

Polly’s voice was quieter this time.

“You always do.”

He didn’t say goodbye, just walked through the hallway and let the door close softly behind him.

He’d gone to her apartment because Tony told him to.

Not in so many words - Tony never appeared to him and said “ go find the girl who sees ghosts and makes weird tea blends and will let you sit on her sofa without asking questions.”  That wasn’t his style. He’d instead led Polly to him, like it mattered that she saw him. 

Peter hadn’t expected this. Hadn’t expected her.

Polly hadn’t given him instructions. Neither had Tony. No map. No grand mission. No “save the world” or “avenge me.” Just a thread, left dangling, and a quiet voice saying remember.

Peter had followed it and held onto it with every ounce of strength. 

He thought, for a while, that maybe Tony had led him there to tie up loose ends. One last errand. One more thing to check off the impossible list of grief. That something would emerge that would make it obvious why Peter met Polly. 

But that wasn’t it.

There was no warning. No message of cosmic importance. Just... her. This strange girl in an oversized sweaters with too many ghosts and not enough furniture, who looked at him like he wasn’t broken in all the ways he thought he was. 

Tony could’ve said be careful. Could’ve said don’t get attached. But he didn’t. He just led them to one another from beyond the grave, and Peter wondered if maybe that was the point. If that was the intention.

Not a mission. A mercy.

Maybe this was what Tony had left for him - not closure, but companionship. A thread back to the living. Something quiet and real and ordinary, tucked between cups of tea, toast, and unsolved mysteries.

Peter didn’t know if he could handle that. Friendship. Not the pretend kind. Not the surface-level, text-you-back-next-week kind, but something that sat across from you on the couch and saw the cracks and didn’t flinch.

He wasn’t sure he was allowed it.

Not after what he’d done, and what he hadn’t been able to stop. Not after everyone he’d lost.

But still… Tony had known, and Tony had sent him here.

And maybe that meant something. Maybe it meant he wasn’t supposed to ignore it, and that he wasn’t as alone as he thought.

Chapter Text

She hadn’t seen Peter in days, which wouldn’t be odd, except that it was.

He’d fallen into the habit of dropping by unannounced, usually around the same time - early evening, just as the city began to press in. She’d hear the soft thud of sneakers on the stairs, then the knock - two short, one long. Always the same, like a secret handshake in knocks.

But not this week.

She told herself not to care. She hadn’t asked him to keep coming. Hadn’t expected it. Wasn’t sure she even wanted it, even, but his absence rang louder than his presence ever had. The apartment felt too quiet again. Too small. The kettle took longer to boil. The shadows from the streetlight seemed harsher.

He’d been here last… when? Five nights ago? Six?

She thought back. It had been a Thursday. She remembered because she’d been tired, and he’d picked up on it. Asked her what was wrong without using the words. He had a way of looking at her - not intense, exactly, just tuned-in, like someone who’d memorised the emotional weather of a person and was waiting for the next storm.

He hadn’t stayed long that time.

There had been that moment near the kitchen. The men's jacket draped over the chair. Left accidentally by her neighbour, Drew, after one of his visits. Peter had noticed. She could tell. He didn’t ask, but the air shifted. His eyes lingered too long and he sat stiffly on the edge of the sofa. Left early, saying he had somewhere to be. She hadn’t asked where.

And he hadn’t been back since.

Now, she sat in the same room, TV playing to no one, a cup of tea cooling in her hands. She was supposed to be writing - a transcript of one of her client sessions, the usual psychic detritus - but she kept circling the same sentence.

He wasn’t jealous. He didn’t have that in him. But he was… sensitive to patterns. Disruptions. Emotional static. And Drew - well, that was the opposite of static. That was simple. Uncomplicated. No ghosts. Just sweat and skin and forgetting.

Peter was harder to forget.

She took a slow sip, then set the mug down. The jacket was gone, returned to its owner with a brief, awkward conversation at the door. She wondered if Peter had seen them speak. Wondered if he’d watched from somewhere just out of sight.

He would, wouldn’t he?

Not out of malice. Just that quiet gravity of his. The part that never stopped scanning, like he was always looking for signs of a fault line before it cracked open beneath someone.

Maybe he thought she was slipping...

Maybe he was right.

But he hadn’t come back and she wasn’t going to chase him. The few people in her life that she had grown close to over the years always distanced themselves in the end. Drifted away..

Ghosted her, ironically enough. 

She could keep up appearances in public, work hard not to scare strangers with the weird edge that made her feel wrong if you looked too close. But once people became something other than strangers, once they got close, too close… it was only a matter of time before they nope’d back to normality. 

Apollina stood and crossed the room, reaching for the remote. The TV screen went black. She caught her reflection on the darkened surface of it - tired, soft around the eyes. Not haunted, not exactly. Just a little hollowed out. Like someone who’d made room for something she hadn’t expected.

And now there was space again. 

That was the thing about people like Peter. You got used to the noise of them, and when it was gone, the silence felt personal. She didn’t know if he was done with her, or if he was just giving her space. But something had shifted. 

Maybe he thought he’d seen enough. Maybe he had.

But she’d seen him, too, and that wasn’t something she could forget.

Chapter Text

The cemetery was nearly empty by the time Polly arrived. The air held the brittle sharpness of early spring - not quite warm, but just soft enough to forget winter was still clawing at the edges of the earth. Gravel crunched underfoot as she made her way past the high wrought-iron gates, hands deep in her coat pockets, gaze fixed somewhere distant and down.

Rows of white and grey monuments stretched quietly into the tree line. Marble angels with weathered wings. Polished obelisks like punctuation marks. The wind moved slowly through the leaves overhead, rattling dry blossoms across the path like bones in a jar.

She had waited all day. Until she was sure the others had probably come and gone already. She’d read the obituaries, the posts, the memorial announcements. Watched a short clip of Pepper’s speech online, muted. She had no desire to meet the press or the fanboys or the grief tourists on the anniversary of his death.

Polly stepped off the path near the edge of the Stark family plot, boots sinking slightly into soft earth. Her breath caught slightly when she saw the silhouette ahead.

Peter stood with his back to her. Shoulders drawn tight. No suit or mask, just a black hoodie, jeans, and a pair of scuffed sneakers that looked like they were holding on by threads.

For a moment, she almost turned around. But he must have heard her footsteps, or maybe sensed her presence because he turned to glance at her over his shoulder.

Their eyes met. He didn’t look surprised.

Neither of them spoke initially. The silence stretched, not empty but full. Full of the ghosts that brought them both here. Full of what they hadn’t said.

Polly stepped closer and Peter stepped to the side to allow her space at the plot. 

The gravestone was simple. Anthony Edward Stark. Beloved. Brilliant. The words said nothing about the suit, or the end of the world. The sacrifice that cut short a proper chance of redemption, the people whose lives were set adrift by his death. Or those whose lives his death had saved.

Just a name. A lifespan. A bouquet of white flowers already browning at the edges.

The odd pair stood side by side in silence for a long time.

Polly watched the shadows drift across the grave, the way the late light caught on the carved lettering. She wanted to say something - to Tony, maybe. But the words stayed locked behind her teeth.

“He would’ve hated this,” Peter murmured finally.

She turned her head toward him.

“All the marble. The flowers. The speeches.” His jaw tightened. “He didn’t like being turned into a symbol. And now…”

He trailed off. The wind answered for him.

Polly’s voice was soft. “I think he knew it would happen anyway.”

Peter gave a quiet, bitter laugh. “Yeah. Probably.”

Another beat passed.

Polly shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “I didn’t mean to run into you here.”

“Me neither,” he said. Then, softer, “But maybe he meant for it.”

She didn’t answer, not right away. The wind tugged a strand of hair across her face. She didn’t brush it away, even as it stuck slightly to her lip balm. She just stood still.

“You’ve been quiet,” she said finally.

Peter’s gaze didn’t leave the headstone.

“You ever talk to him?” Peter asked. 

She frowned at the change in topic but didn’t press any further. 

“No,” she said quietly. “It doesn’t work like that. Not with him.”

“Why not?”

“He moved on. Properly. Didn’t leave anything behind.”

Peter nodded, like he already knew. But there was something clenched in the line of his jaw.

“I didn’t come to talk either,” he said. “I just… didn’t know where else to go today.”

Polly studied him from the side. His eyes were dull, his posture all wrong. Everything about him looked like it had been folded inward. Not grief, exactly. Something more tired. Something ground down. Like he hadn’t slept in a long time. 

“Are you okay?” she asked.

He let the silence stretch. Then, tentatively asked, “Did I so something?” 

His brow furrowed. “No.”

“You stopped coming around.” 

She let it hang there, gave him space to answer. He didn’t, so she filled it. 

“If it’s because of my neighbour-”

Peter stiffened and looked up sharply, “What?”

“It’s just a thing,” she said quickly. “Casual. It’s not important.”

Peter’s expression shifted - something like pain blooming just behind the eyes.

“That somehow makes it worse,” he said after a moment.

She frowned, “Why?”

He shrugged, but the movement was too sharp. “I just didn’t think he seemed…”

Peter rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s not even something that makes you happy. Someone so much older than you, like that… who doesn’t even see you properly-”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know what it looks like.”

Polly crossed her arms. “And what exactly does it look like?” 

Peter stared at the headstone. “Like something that’s not good for you.” 

Her laugh came out sharp, “You don’t get to decide that.” 

“I’m not trying to-” 

“Yes, you are. You’re… judging me.” 

Peter exhaled, shaking his head. “I’m not-” he tried, but she talked over him.

“You think it’s messed up? Fine. People aren’t exactly lined up to hang out with someone like me. So when someone’s warm and present and doesn’t ask too many questions… sometimes you say yes, just so you’re not invisible for a while.”

Her voice cracked, but she didn’t back down.

“I know it’s none of my business,” Peter said. “I just… I shouldn’t have gotten close.”

That silenced her. He sounded almost ashamed.

“I mess things up when I get close,” he added, eyes still on the stone. “People get hurt.”

Polly’s arms stayed folded, but her shoulders slumped.

“They also get hurt when you disappear,” she said quietly. “When you let them think maybe they aren’t alone, and then vanish.”

He looked away.

“I didn’t mean to…” he started, voice low. But whatever he meant to say got swallowed in the space between them.

Polly’s arms had folded tight across her chest, bracing against something she couldn’t name. She glanced away, blinking hard. The cemetery was heavier now. Not just with silence, but with presence . The quiet wasn’t empty anymore. It felt crowded - pressed in from every side. Spirits stirred, drawn to her emotion like moths to a wound. Her chest felt tight with it.

“You were the first person who ever saw the weird, haunted part of me and didn’t flinch,” she said quietly. “I didn’t realise I’d let you that close until you pulled away.”

Peter looked at her then. Really looked. His eyes were wet, but he said nothing.

The pressure settled on her chest - familiar and cloying. The sensation of being watched. Not by Peter, not by the living. Her eyes glanced sideways at two spirits hovering on the gravel path, their pale faces looking at her with questions on their brows.  

“I have to go,” she whispered, not looking back at the man in front of her. “They’re… I can’t stay.” 

Peter’s brow creased like he wanted to ask her to wait but he didn’t move, didn’t even speak, just watched as she turned and walked quickly down the path. 

By the time she reached the gate, the sun had started to dip. She paused, glancing once more toward the grave. Peter was gone. 

The street beyond looked dimmer than it had before. The city beyond that, too. Like everything had shifted one degree to the left.

She pulled her coat tighter. 

There were still ghosts at home. But she knew now that it wasn’t the dead who’d leave her cold.

It was the living.

And the shadows weren’t done with her yet.

Chapter Text

Polly wasn’t sleeping. Not properly. She drifted sometimes - brief, brittle lapses into blackness, only to be jarred back by creaking floorboards or the flicker of movement where there shouldn’t be any. She kept the bedside lamp on. The dim amber glow didn’t do much, but it softened the corners of the room, took the edge off the shadows.

The spirits weren’t yelling. That would’ve been easier to deal with. No, something was whispering. Humming. Tapping a rhythm only they knew against the seams of her awareness. Flickers in the mirror. Weight in the air. Just enough to keep her teeth clenched and her shoulders up near her ears.

She ignored them hoping they’d leave but they didn’t. By morning, she gave up pretending. The kettle clicked once, then again, as if uncertain about finishing its job. She poured the water anyway, into a mug she forgot to sweeten, left to cool untouched beside the sink.

She wandered the flat barefoot, aimless. Curtains drawn. Phone untouched on the sideboard. She didn’t want to check messages. She didn’t want to see the lack of contact from the lack of people in her life. Didn’t want to see that Peter had still not reached out. 

She came to a still in the centre of the room, arms folded, as if that could make her smaller. Less detectable. Less available. 

The static that danced along her nerves and never quite left made her feel nauseous. It pulsed at her temples, throbbed in the veins in the crook of her arms, brushed her skin like the memory of cold breath. Familiar, but louder than usual. And more insistent. A pressure in the air that wouldn’t fuck off.

Her grandmother’s voice rang in her memory, uninvited and firm: “Don’t let it make you feel special, child. Don’t mistake the dead clinging to you for love.”

Polly sat down on the edge of the sofa and pressed her thumbs into her eyes until stars bloomed behind the lids. 

She should have known better than to allow someone in. This was all her own fault.

She got dressed like it mattered.

A soft copper cardigan over a faded floral dress - not quite spring, not quite formal, just… nice. Ordinary. Pretty in a way that wouldn’t raise questions. Her black Vans were scuffed near the toe, laces knotted from repeated fraying. Someone seeing her on the street might think she was just a student. Someone tired, maybe. A little pale. But if they looked too long - really looked - they’d see it in the set of her shoulders, the distance in her gaze. The crooked, unspoken thing coiled beneath her skin. A woman quietly twisted. 

Still, the clothes helped. They made her look like she belonged somewhere. Like she hadn’t spent the last three nights listening to the dead trying to chat to her when she didn’t want to listen.

By midday, she was out in the city. Walking just to feel distance beneath her feet. Past shuttered cafés and half-lit shop windows, the unchanging buzz of neon signs in off-brand colours. Her cardigan was pulled tight, hands firmly in the pockets, yet still her skin crawled.

She walked into a shop that sold expensive soap and candles and just wandered in the twilight hush of the displays for a while. She couldn’t afford anything there but it was a pleasant change of scenery. Later she walked aimlessly through the public library, poured ice-cold water from a dispenser into a paper cup, and sat and sipped it slowly. 

A woman sat nearby humming to herself as she read - except it wasn’t her. Polly could hear the echo just behind her shoulder. The ghost of a woman still reading a newspaper, decades after death. She didn’t speak to her. Not today. She didn’t have the bandwidth to untangle other people’s unfinished business. 

Her own was stacked too high.

Later, in a secondhand bookshop, the light above her flickered hard enough to make her wince. She was holding a novel she’d already read, staring at the cover like it might offer a way back into calm.

The bell over the door jingled - sharp and brittle. She looked up instinctively, half-hoping - but it wasn’t him.

Of course it wasn’t, stupid girl .

After she left the bookstore, as she was walking home, she passed a construction site behind chainlink fencing. A half-built apartment block full of echo and stillness. As she passed, she noticed that someone had scrawled across the hoarding in thick black marker: DON’T GO BACK.

One of the O’s had been scratched out and rewritten three times. Polly stopped walking and stared at it. She noticed the faint chill crawling over her arms and folding them over her chest. It was just graffiti, she told herself. Not a message or a warning…

Still, she took the long way home.

When she finally reached her building, she stood on the bottom step for a long moment. Keys clutched tight in one hand. Something about the air felt wrong - like it had shifted in her absence. She glanced over her shoulder at the empty street, then up at her own windows. 

Nothing obvious…

She shoved the key into the lock, forced herself up the stairs.

Each step dragged. Her limbs felt heavy, like the marrow had been replaced with wet cement. She didn’t bother turning on the light in the hallway - the flickering bulb always made her feel like she was on the edge of a bad dream.

Inside, her flat was quiet. Still. But the static was louder than ever.

She toed off her Vans by the door, kicked them half-heartedly toward the corner where they landed crooked - one upright, the other on its side like it had given up. Her keys went on the bookcase with a dull clatter.

The cardigan slid from her shoulders as she walked through the room. She let it fall over the arm of a chair. Her dress clung slightly at the hem, twisted by the long day and the shape of her slumped posture.

She collapsed backwards onto the sofa, arms splayed, legs still hanging over the edge. The ceiling stared down at her, cracked in one corner. Her eyes didn’t blink. Her chest rose and fell slowly, like the rest of her hadn’t caught on that she’d finally stopped moving.

She wasn’t crying. Wasn’t numb, either. Just hollow in that strange way - where you’re still full of something, but can’t name what. Heavy with nothing.

The cushion beneath her head smelled like lavender from the spray she used sometimes when sleep got impossible. It hadn’t worked in weeks.

Her phone buzzed in the silence, a sudden insect hum against the couch cushion next to her. Polly rolled her head to the side, eyes heavy, and read the screen without picking it up.

[Drew, 9:41 PM] you up

Just those two words. No punctuation. She could picture the way he leaned against his doorframe when he sent it, casual as ever. She could almost smell him. 

And she knew what it meant. Knew what it would feel like - his weight, the sweat, the breathy nothings he always whispered. 

It would be easy. It would be good.

She thought about texting back, about pretending the static behind her ribs was just muscle tension. That if she let someone close, it might drown out the ache for a little while.

But it wouldn’t. Not this time.

She typed a quick reply: busy right now

Then she locked the screen, dropped the phone on the floor beside the couch and curled tighter on her side, letting the static buzz louder and louder in the hollow of her chest.

There was no comfort in the silence. But at least it was honest.

Chapter Text

Peter didn’t mean to patrol this part of the city.

Not tonight.

He told himself that as he swung low past the silent overpass near 6th, trailing through a stretch of air so still it felt like the city had forgotten to breathe. As he landed on the edge of an office building and crouched, one knee down, listening, his breath puffed into the cool dark like a held thought escaping.

The wind was crisp - not cold, but sharp in that early-spring way that felt like it was trying to cut winter loose. Traffic hummed a few blocks away. A bus hissed to a stop. The city hadn’t gone quiet yet, but it was getting there - that liminal stretch between night and late, where even the bars start to empty out and the noise pulls back like a tide.

He rolled his shoulders. Flexed his fingers in the gloves, feeling the faint catch in the fabric near his thumb where the seam had started to fray. He’d repair it later. 

He should’ve been two neighborhoods over. That was the plan, but his route kept bending. His loops getting tighter. His excuses flimsier.

And now here he was - a ten-minute swing from the graveyard, and less than five from the coffee shop Polly sometimes visited on restless nights.

Not her block. Not her building.

Just… the area.

It didn’t count.

Right?

He launched again, not high this time - just a low, practiced arc between buildings. The kind he could do in his sleep. He landed on the fire escape of a brownstone with a rhythm that had been trained into his bones. Hands. Heels. Soften the landing. Absorb the force. Breathe.

Usually, patrol helped.

The motion. The clean air in his lungs. The constant recalibration - micro-adjustments in tension and weight and timing - it gave his brain something to do. It quieted the storm.

But not tonight.

Tonight, his head was full of her voice. Not just what she said at the cemetery - though that lived behind his eyes now - but from before. From the beginning. From that weird, wrong-feeling night in her apartment.

From the moment he stepped through her window, half-expecting a scam artist or a trap, and instead got caught in the act and offered tea and toast, and a message he couldn’t shake.

“He wanted me to tell you something. I promised I would.”

Then she gave him Tony’s message.

No letter. No recording. Just the familiar words, passed through someone else’s mouth. Hers. A stranger’s.

“He said he was proud.”

Peter had stood there blinking in the low light of her living room, pretending it didn’t matter. Like those words hadn’t just kicked the floor out from under him. Like he hadn’t needed to hear them every damn day since May died.

Polly hadn’t tried to explain it. She didn’t offer proof.

She just told him she was turning her back and he could stay or leave while she brewed tea.

And he’d stayed.

He landed on another rooftop with a soft thud and crouched low, fingertips brushing the gravel surface. Still no signs of trouble. Just his own breath and the distant buzz of a neon sign blinking red and white, its hum like a broken lullaby.

He stayed there, one hand braced against the roof like the building might shift under him.

She was supposed to be a one-time thing.

A message carrier. A glitch in the system. Some weird spiritual errand Tony had set in motion with whatever leftover scraps of himself he’d tucked into the world.

Typical Stark. Still meddling. Still planning five moves ahead, even from beyond the grave.

Peter had tried to let it be that.

But Polly didn’t stay in the file marked weird psychic messenger . She kept surfacing.

He kept thinking about her. The way she said he was Spider-Man like she wasn’t afraid of it. The way she watched him without looking for the suit. Without waiting for a punchline.

And now - the neighbor.

He wasn’t jealous. That wasn’t it.

Not really.

It was the sick feeling in his chest when he imagined someone else holding all the quiet parts of her. The way she said “ Just so I’m not invisible for a while ” - like she didn’t think she deserved more than that.

It sat wrong in him. Turned over slow like a shard of glass in his chest.

Because he knew that feeling. Too well. And the thought of someone taking advantage of it - of her - made him want to swing through a wall.

Or at least scream.

But he didn’t scream. He moved.

Peter shifted and swung to the next block. Smooth, practiced, but a little faster now.

He wasn’t following her. Wasn’t looking for her. 

He didn’t even know where she was tonight. For all he knew, she was asleep. Or sketching. Or talking to someone dead.

But his breath was tight in his chest, and his skin itched like something wanted out. He needed air. He needed space. He needed… something.

Distance, maybe.

Except the city kept folding inward.

Streets narrowing. Shadows deepening. Buildings looming like the world had been slanted slightly, subtly, to pull him closer.

He thought of Tony again. Thought of what it meant to get a message like that from beyond.

Not I love you . Not goodbye .

Just:
Proud.
Remembered.

It should’ve been enough.

But all it did was make Peter realise how much he missed being seen. Not by the world. Not as a symbol, but as a person.

And somehow, impossibly, Polly had done that without trying, and without wanting anything in return. Without even knowing what it meant to him.

He paused on a rooftop near the park. Something prickled at the base of his neck.

Not danger. Not yet. 

Just… a shift. A stillness that didn’t belong. The hush before something broke.

Then - a sound.

Too sharp, too fast. Sneakers on pavement. A voice raised. 

Peter turned before his brain caught up. Web shot. Forward momentum. The wind gently caught the edge of his mask as he swung into the dark.

The thread had pulled taut.

Chapter Text

Polly walked and walked, determined to delay returning home for as long as possible. Spirits had been interrupting her sleep and daily routine for six days now and she could feel the tiredness in her bones. She figured that if she walked for a while, maybe until her feet hurt, her body would have no choice but to just sleep . Deeply, just for a few hours. 

She had her hands in her coat pockets, head slightly bowed against the wind, too tired to register the shape of the streets beyond the blur of neon and grime. There was no destination, only distance - as though walking far enough could unstick the thoughts looping in her brain. About Peter. About the message she’d delivered. About what had followed. She hadn’t planned for anything after that. It was meant to be like all the others: a message passed on, a thread snipped clean. She hadn’t expected the recipient to linger. To text her. To come back. To matter .

She should have known better than to lower her guard around him.

Her grandmother had warned her, years ago, back when Polly still thought being able to talk to ghosts was a kind of magic. Don’t make yourself too easy to reach, she’d said. 

And don’t mistake being a messenger for being important. People - the living and the dead - got greedy when they saw someone who listened too well. They asked for more. And when they took it, they didn’t always give anything back.

Be careful who you let see the real you, her grandmother told her once, sharp-eyed over a mug of nettle tea. And don’t ever think someone will thank you for it.

Polly had promised she would be careful. But she hadn’t been. Not with Peter.

She’d let him in. Let herself believe - even for a moment - that maybe she could be known and not be punished for it. And now, she couldn’t stop replaying the look on his face as she walked away.

The thoughts crowded her all at once, like static: noisy, senseless, unrelenting. Her awareness dulled with the volume of it. She stopped scanning the shadows, stopped listening for danger. Her instincts numbed under the weight of everything else.

She turned a corner onto a quieter block. The city faded behind her - no more music, just the faint rush of cars three streets over and the wind slipping through old brick.

This street didn’t have working lamps. Just the yellow haze of distant light pooling against a broken curb. Her boots clicked softly on cracked concrete, steady at first, then uneven as something crawled up the back of her spine. A chill that didn’t match the weather.

Then she heard the footsteps.

Fast. Close.

She stopped and they stopped too.

A slow dread settled into her ribs as she turned to find a man stood less than a pace behind her. Hoodie up. One hand shoved in his jacket. The other already holding the knife.

“Wallet,” he said.

Polly blinked. Her mouth opened like it might ask are you serious? but no words came. Just air.

“Don’t make me ask again.”

The knife caught the dull glow of a far-off streetlamp as he raised his voice in warning. It wasn’t dramatic or cinematic. Just a thin, practical line of steel that said I’m not here to scare you. I’ll just do it.

She nodded. Swallowed. Her mouth was dry.

Moving slowly, she slipped the strap of her bag over her head. Her fingers shook as she extended it toward him. The strap caught on her shoulder, jerked, and for a second she thought he might lunge - but he didn’t. Just stepped forward.

“That’s it,” he muttered. “Nice and easy.”

And then-

Pressure. Wind. A blur.

Polly flinched as something brushed her hair across her face - wind displaced by something faster than thought. The man was gone from her view, replaced by motion and air and a noise she felt more than heard. 

There was a shout, a thud , and the unmistakable thwip of webbing. She turned to see the mugger stuck seven feet up against the nearest wall, limbs webbed into immobility. Gasping.

Then Spider-Man landed between them.

His silhouette rose, sharp against the distant streetlight, chest heaving beneath the suit. His silhouette was all tension and shadow. He didn’t speak right away. Just looked at her, like he was counting her limbs, checking for blood.

“You okay?” he asked.

The voice was his - but different. Strained. Like something had cracked.

She nodded, even though it wasn’t entirely true. Her hands were shaking now and her knees had locked. He took a step forward but stopped short. His fingers flexing slightly at his sides, then stilled.

“I got here as fast as I could.”

That did it - that voice, low and ragged. It undid her. Not into tears, but into something softer. Something real.

She looked at him properly. Not Spider-Man. Not the suit. Just the man underneath. Twenty years old and trying to hold the world together with webbing and bruises and hope.

Polly opened her mouth to say something, but no sound came. Her throat closed up. So she nodded again.

That, at least, was true.

He hovered for another moment, as if unsure whether to stay. Then he nodded back before he turned and moved away - not into the shadows, but into the sky, slinging toward the next corner. Gone.

Polly stood in the silence he left behind.

She looked down at her bag. Still clutched in her hand. Then up, toward the wall. The mugger glared at her from within the webs. She didn’t flinch.

She turned toward home, breath hitching against the cold. She’d left her apartment to get away from the ghosts - but now, returning, she realised they weren’t the scariest thing in the city.

She walked faster, hands in her coat pockets, her breath hitching against the cold.

The ghosts she’d fled had never really left - but she’d come to see they weren’t the ones worth fearing. Not tonight.

Besides, she knew that somewhere behind that quiet door waited something stranger. Not a phantom, but a man still tethered to his pain.

And if there was one thing she understood, it was how to sit beside the haunted.

Chapter Text

Her apartment door clicked shut behind her as she stepped inside. 

Polly stood motionless for a moment, keys still in hand, her breath just beginning to slow. Her palms stung from where she'd gripped the strap of her bag too hard. Her knees felt unsteady, like her bones hadn’t quite caught up with her escape. 

The smell of chamomile still lingered faintly in the air from a forgotten mug. The apartment was dark except for the dim orange glow of the streetlamp below filtering through the window blinds, striping the floor like prison bars. She didn’t turn on the light.

Peter was already there.

He sat on the floor with his back against the wall, mask off, suit rumpled, knees pulled up like he couldn’t quite stretch out. Curls sweat-damp against his forehead, face flushed with adrenaline and something else harder to name.

The heels of his palms pressed into his eye sockets. 

At the sound of the door, he looked up. Watched as she stepped inside like she’d forgotten how. Slow, hesitant. Her coat still clung to one shoulder, her keys dangling loose in her hand.

Peter’s breath caught. He should’ve said something. Should’ve stood. But instead he just watched her. The way her posture folded in, the way her mouth moved like she was repeating something silently to herself. A mantra or a memory.

She was okay. She was here. But there was a tremble under it all - not fear exactly, just frayed edges. 

He almost said her name. Almost reached out. But what would he even say? Sorry I didn’t get there sooner? Sorry I was weird? Sorry you got dragged into this?

He said nothing. Just watched as Polly crossed the room, letting her coat fall from her arms as she moved. She didn’t sit, just sank to the floor beside him like her limbs had finally given up.

He shifted, made space, and after a beat, pulled her gently against his chest. 

She let him.

There was a stillness to it - not frozen, but tender. Like the moment wasn’t made of adrenaline anymore, just gravity. His arms wrapped around her, one across her shoulder, one around her waist. She felt him exhale against the top of her head.

They stayed like that for a while. Breathing. Real and, importantly, alive.

This apartment, usually silent in a way that pressed down on Peter’s ribs, felt different now. Still muted, still small, but not so hollow. The kind of quiet that didn’t ask anything of you. The kind that let you rest.

He could hear the radiator ticking faintly behind them, the low hum of pipes somewhere in the wall. The world hadn’t stopped - but it had paused. Just long enough to let two tired people sit still for a moment and not fall apart.

Her voice, when it came, was quiet.

“I won’t go out at night again.”

Peter’s brow furrowed. His arms tightened slightly - not enough to hurt, just enough to make sure she knew he’d heard her.

“Don’t do that,” he murmured.

“He had a knife.”

“I know. But don’t change your life because of one guy.”

“It was really stupid of me.” 

He felt the way her shoulders tensed against him.

“You should get to walk at night,” he said, more firmly. “Go wherever you want. That’s… that’s the whole point of me.”

His voice cracked a little on the last word. She didn’t comment.

They sat for another stretch of silence, then she shifted slightly, cheek still pressed to his shoulder.

“…So,” she said slowly, voice scratchy but dry, “did that stuff come out of your hands?”

Peter blinked. Then laughed - a short, stunned breath that startled even him.

Polly sat back a little, enough to look at him.

“What?” she said. “I’ve seen some weird shit. I’m allowed to ask.”

“No, no, it’s fair,” he said, wiping his eyes with the back of one gloved hand. “It doesn’t. Come out of my hands, I mean. It’s tech.”

He raised his wrist and tapped the web shooter embedded in the fabric. The little metal nozzle gleamed faintly.

“Built it when I was… younger. Before everything went to hell.”

She leaned forward, eyes narrowing in mock scrutiny.

“Looks like a stapler.”

“Wow. Okay. Rude.”

“A stapler taped to an Apple Watch.”

Peter shook his head, but he was smiling now - real, lopsided, worn-out and real.

She reached for his wrist before he could lower it, fingers brushing over the edge of the device. Peter stilled, watching as she touched it like something half-sacred, half-silly.

“It really does look like it’s made from stapler parts,” she murmured, turning his wrist in her hands.

Peter huffed. “It’s custom.”

She examined the seams with mock reverence. “Is this gum?”

“It’s not gum,” he said, scandalised. “It's a composite polymer. Industrial-grade.”

She shot him a look. “It’s giving kindergarten craft project.”

He narrowed his eyes, but the corner of his mouth twitched. “You’re holding the technological key to New York’s web-based safety net, and you’re mocking it?”

She looked the device over once more, thumb brushing the outer case delicately. Then, with care, she let go of his wrist. 

“It’s cool,” she admitted.

Peter slid it back into place beneath his sleeve like muscle memory. “Thanks,” he said dryly. “I live to impress.”

They didn’t speak after that. The silence folded around them again - not awkward, just... full.

“You okay?” she asked after a moment.

He nodded, swallowed before he spoke, “Yeah.”

Her eyes moved across his face, as though she were reading him like a book. Which he realised she might actually be doing.

“You lying?” she asked softly.

Peter exhaled, soft and rueful. “Yeah,” he admitted.

“Want some tea?”

There was a beat where he almost laughed again - just a puff of breath through his nose. Because of course she was offering tea. That was her answer to everything, wasn’t it? She saw ghosts. She delivered messages from the dead. She got held at knifepoint in the street. And her answer was always: tea. 

A blend for everything, too.

And the strangest part?

He always drank it.

Peter tilted his head back against the wall and turned toward her, just enough to see the slope of her shoulder, the stray hair stuck to her cheek.

“Yeah,” he said. “But… can we just stay here a minute?”

Her brow furrowed faintly, but she didn’t move away. He reached out - tentative but sure - and wrapped an arm around her again, drawing her in with a quiet, instinctive pull. And she folded into him like it was second nature. Like she’d done it before, maybe in another life.

He held her close, one hand cradled behind her shoulder, the other resting gently at her waist. She was warm against him. Steady.

Peter let his eyes fall closed.

There was something strange about being seen like this. Not by a crowd. Not by a news camera or a villain with a grudge. But by one person. One girl in a rundown apartment, who could see ghosts and handed him tea like it was medicine.

He hadn’t meant to care. But he did.

He hadn’t meant to need this. But he did.

It scared him, a little - how fast the warmth had found its way in. She was strange and guarded and had too many ghosts. But she looked at him like he wasn’t one of them.

Outside, the wind shifted. The street lamp flickered again - once, twice, and held. Peter stayed still, eyes half-closed, his hand curled lightly against Polly’s side. The city would go on. Morning would come, loud and bright and busy. But here, in this dim apartment, everything slowed.

The silence between them wasn’t heavy anymore. It was soft. Lived-in. Like a blanket worn down to the threads but still warm.

He didn’t know if they were friends or something else or just two lonely people who’d happened to cross paths because of a friendly ghost, of all things. He didn’t know what tomorrow held - whether she’d pull away or pull him closer - but it didn’t matter. The silence wasn’t heavy now. It was shared. And in the glow of that quiet, he felt something he hadn’t in a long time. The city could forget. The world could move on. But here, in this room, he was inexplicably real.

And he wasn’t alone anymore.

Not tonight.

Not here.