the one-way ticket (petermj)

i don't know how i messed up doing nothing, but i think i did

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

Peter's laughing softly at something Ben said to MJ when he arrives back at the small Parker apartment. It's late now, though, and his two kids are barely managing to walk in a straight line at this point because they're so tired. He ushers them off to bed, them not even asking for stories tonight. He can practically hear them flop onto their beds, and he silently laughs. He can hear May's small breaths from her bedroom too, courtesy of his super hearing.

Then he notices that something's off about the amount of breathing in the apartment. He knows something's off because, sometimes, when he can't sleep, he listens to the soft breathing of his family and, most of the time, it's enough to lure him to sleep.

Well, he already knows about the two coming from his kids, and he knows May is sleeping soundly in her bedroom, so that's three. Then there's the sound of his own breathing, so there's four. But it sounds almost like . . . like there's two more?

His Peter-tingle- er, spidey-sense isn't tingling, but his body's made up his mind and is now on the defensive. MJ isn"t here, and they're not being robbed .  . then he sees it.

Paige and her "friend from school" are on the couch.

"What the heck-?"

"Peter?" Aunt May's voice comes from his right, and he whips his head to her bedroom door, where she's leaning against the doorframe. The door had fallen off long ago, before Uncle Ben, and they'd never bothered to fix it. "I thought I heard you come in. Everything okay?"

"Yeah, everything's fine, just . . . surprised and a little confused, 's all."

"Perks of being a parent." May tells him. "Which kid said what this time?"

"It's more of 'perks of being a big brother' this time."

"Oh, did I not tell you? Paige is staying here the next few nights."

"No, you didn't tell me that, and it's okay. But . . . what is this other dude doing on the couch with her?"

May walks over to him, wraps an arm around him and starts rubbing his own arm. She leans her head over to rest on the side of his shoulder. "So it's 'perks of being an overprotective big brother', then?"

"I . . . have no clue what you're talking about."

"Oh, come on." May laughs. "You've always been protective over her, even when she was just a newborn. You must have been, like, three or four." she smiles. "Sometimes, you wouldn't let her out of your sight . . . and then, with your parents . . . it was so hard on all of us."

"Yeah, but what's that got to do with now?" he asks. He remembers the day they took Paige away from her and Ben . . . it was just a couple weeks before he'd died. He doesn't like to think about that day. "She's on the couch with some dude I've never even met, only heard about. And suddenly he's staying in our apartment?"

May chuckles. "As much as you want to deny it, Paige is an adult now, just like yourself. She grew up a lot during those five years. She was about eleven or twelve when she found Tony."

"I know," Peter smiles sadly. "After those years, we kept having to explain why there were four years between us but looked like twins. Eventually we moved to 'it's complicated' and then to 'yes, we're twins' because it was funny. We would pretend to be fraternal twins."

May chuckles at that. "Believe me, I remember that. When I moved Paige to Midtown from being homeschooled, the teacher told me you had been talking all about your twin sister. It took me forever to convince your principal that you weren't fraternal twins."