Peter Parker looked as if the passenger seat had accused him of a crime.
He sat upright in Michael's sports car, both hands locked around the seat belt while Queens drew closer in a blur. Every hard acceleration pressed a sound out of him that he swallowed before it became either a laugh or a scream.
Michael eased off the gas. "You can breathe. The car isn't offended by enthusiasm."
"I am breathing."
"Once every three blocks doesn't count."
Peter managed a weak smile. Grief returned as soon as the joke lost momentum.
"Ben was a good man," Michael said.
He knew it from the story he remembered and from the ache Peter failed to hide. The body offered him no personal memory of Ben.
"He was," Peter said. "He always knew what to say. Even when I didn't want to hear it."
Wind and engine noise carried them through the next stretch of silence.
Michael glanced at him. Peter had reached an isolated estate without a car, yet he was barely winded. That suggested an answer Michael knew was possible. It proved nothing.
Guessing that a teenager was Spider-Man also meant guessing he had spent his nights being shot at.
He kept the question to himself.
***
Inside the genetic sandbox, Michael's absence meant nothing. Accelerated ages passed without his eyes upon them.
The first moving creatures were gone. Ice had buried their remains, and the pine-like growths had changed around the pressure that killed everything else.
Their outer layers thickened. Some split open and released blue-bodied descendants with limbs, heavy jaws, and shells that resisted the cold.
They crossed the glaciers in groups, tearing through ice in search of food. Beyond the frozen ridges, the enclosed lawn rose around them like an impossible country.
One of them learned to wonder.
He called himself Nakfoji.
He remembered no moment before his name. There had been hunger, cold, and the closeness of others. Then there was choice. He organized the scattered creatures and drove them toward ground that seemed less barren.
Their journey ended beneath an apple tree.
To Nakfoji, its trunk was a pillar wider than any path. Its branches vanished into a height he could not measure, and its roots broke the frozen earth with the authority of mountains. A few patches near the trunk offered shelter from the worst wind.
This, he decided, was the tree that held the world together.
He stationed part of the tribe beneath it. None of them could know that their world tree had once been ordinary landscaping.
***
Michael recognized May Parker's house before Peter pointed it out.
He had seen versions of it in stories. The actual place was smaller, warmer, and more vulnerable than memory made it. Peter jumped out before the car fully settled and hurried to the door.
"May!" he called. "You won't believe who I found."
She appeared in the doorway with tired eyes and the rigid posture of someone determined not to be caught falling apart. Then she saw Michael.
"Michael?"
The word broke whatever control she had assembled. She crossed the walk and held him as if the years of silence were another loss she could not afford.
"I didn't think you'd come," she said against his shoulder. "After what happened—"
Michael felt the missing history between them. It remained missing. He could have offered a convenient explanation, but convenience would have been another lie built on her grief.
"Peter came to get me," he said. "I'm sorry it took that."
May pulled back, wiped her face, and looked toward her nephew. Peter suddenly found the porch rail fascinating.
"You went behind my back," she said.
"Technically, I went across town."
"Inside. Both of you. Have you eaten?" May stepped aside before either answered.
They stayed through lunch and well past it. May spoke about Ben in fragments: habits that had annoyed her, repairs he had promised to finish, the quiet when she expected to hear him in another room.
Peter contributed stories, then retreated whenever one came too close to the last day.
Michael mostly listened.
He could not replace the husband May had lost or the man Peter had trusted. He could, at minimum, occupy the chair of the relative who had finally shown up.
By dusk, May had regained enough of herself to worry about him.
"You shouldn't drive back alone this late," she said.
"I'll survive Queens."
"That confidence is usually what gets men into trouble."
Michael thought of the accelerated winter waiting behind a membrane on his lawn. "I have something at home that needs supervision."
It was the truth, stripped of every useful detail.
May made him promise to call. Peter walked him to the car and thanked him in a voice too low for her to hear.
Michael drove away with the uncomfortable sense that the system had given him more than an identity. It had given people a claim on him.
***
Night had settled by the time a streak of fire dropped toward the road.
Michael saw it in the windshield and had just enough time to decide that reincarnation had been oversold. The red-and-gold armor arrested its fall inches above the hood. Repulsors blasted heat across the paint and left a black scorch behind.
The faceplate lifted.
"Tony?"
"Michael?"
Tony Stark landed badly, caught the side of the car, and used it to remain upright. His skin was pale. Thin dark veins climbed his neck from beneath his shirt.
Michael got out. "You look terrible."
"You always know what to say." Tony draped an arm over his shoulders. "Drive. Your place. Alcohol. Preferably in that order."
"If this is a proposition, I should warn you that near-death pallor isn't my type."
Tony's mouth tightened, but the joke did not hide his exhaustion. Michael's attention returned to the veins.
"Palladium poisoning," he said.
For a moment, Tony stopped leaning on him.
"I told you leaving research was a waste," Tony said. "I've tested every existing element that might replace the core. Nothing works."
Tony's jab at Michael for leaving research belonged to a friendship that predated him. Michael had since offered Tony ideas about armor, guided by the shape of stories he remembered. Tony had mistaken direction for expertise often enough to make it flattering.
Michael searched that incomplete memory now. "There may be a compound that could ease the symptoms. Lithium dioxide, perhaps. That's not a cure, and I wouldn't trust my recollection without testing it."
"Comforting. I'll put 'perhaps' on the prescription bottle."
"Then do the obvious thing," Michael said. "If no existing element can replace palladium, make one. You're Tony Stark. Act like the name means something."
The sarcasm vanished from Tony's face. His eyes shifted, calculations beginning behind them before Michael finished speaking.
Michael felt a small, guilty relief. Tony had heard a possibility in the challenge; the risk of testing it would be his.
The armor sealed around him.
"If you were a woman," Tony said, rising on repulsors, "I might be in love with you."
"Is there a woman you haven't said that to?"
Tony considered it. "No. Drive slower."
He shot into the night.
Michael stared at the scorched hood. "We're discussing the paint bill," he called after Tony.
The road gave him no answer. Ahead waited the dark manor, the frozen sandbox, and whatever unattended evolution had decided to become while he was trying to behave like family.