IronDad/SpiderSon One-shots

Autumn without You

Third Person POV:
Word Count: 1,601
Spooktober Day Ten: Ooze

Autumn. The season of sweaters, scares and soup. It was everyone's favorite season. Well, a lot of people's favorite season. There were odd people in the world that liked the frigid months better or the season of allergies. There were also the occasional people who loved the season of melting popsicles. Those people had more hope than those who preferred Winter or Spring.

In the Parker household, Autumn was their season. Ben and May loved autumn, which instilled a love for Autumn in Peter. Every year, they made an event of decorating the apartment with fake pumpkins and fake leaves. They pulled out their apple cinnamon and fall leaf scented candles and placed them throughout the apartment. They pulled out their ghost and bat blankets and placed them all over the apartment. They stalked the fridge with apple cider and the cabinets with hot chocolate. They baked pumpkin rolls, pumpkin cookies, and anything else pumpkin related. Then, at the end of the day, they would curl into the couch with their blankets and watch fall movies, varying from Coraline to Edward Scissorhands.

This year, though, things were different. There was an unpleasant chill to the air as the apartment was left undecorated. The fake pumpkins were left packed away in boxes and the fridge empty of Apple Cider. The apartment smelled of the air freshener plug in scent they bought from the dollar store a few months earlier and nothing like Apple Cinnamon or Fall Leaf. There were no spooky movies nor pumpkin flavored foods. It was just... the apartment. And there was no sort of autumn spirit in the air.

Both May and Peter felt it. They had known that things were different when May announced she was working a double on the 21st of September and Peter announced that he had something with his internship anyway, so it was good. Almost three weeks later and the boxes were still packed away and the apartment still felt nothing like it should in the fall. Neither of them talked about it. Neither of them brought it up.

This was the first Autumn without Ben, and neither of them knew what to do.

They mainly just avoided it. They ignored the stale air. They ignored the dead spirit. They ignored the empty fridge and the blanket-less couch. They ignored it all.

Until May couldn't. She couldn't do it anymore. She missed Ben so much. She missed him every single day. But, she missed him even more without the touch of Autumn. She missed him when she stepped on a crisp leaf on the way to work. She missed him when she saw a pumpkin pie at the grocery store. She missed him and ached for him to be there, so she was going to bring him back. Well, not him. But, his Autumn spirit. Because this dull, dead spirit was not something she could tolerate anymore.

So, May called off work for the day. She made her way to their storage closet and pulled out all the Autumn decorations and started decorating the apartment. Before she started unpacking the boxes, she went to the closest grocery store and grabbed a gallon of apple cider and a box of hot chocolate. She also grabbed some stuff to make some tomato-basil soup. Soup made things more autumn-y, right?

Once she had all the things she needed, she went back to the apartment. She saw Peter's shoes in the door, so she knew that he was home. She was half tempted to ask him to come out and help decorate, but she decided she wanted to do this on her own. Besides, Peter was in the weird 'I'm gonna stay in my room all the time' teenager phase (a/n: doesn't she wish that's what it was). So, she got to it.

She started off with putting the soup together and setting it on the stove to simmer. That took about a half an hour. When she finished with that, she started to unpack the boxes of decorations. She started small, putting the little pumpkins all around the apartment in their usual places. She then grabbed the blankets from the box and had them lay down along the back of the couch and the chairs surrounding the apartment. She grabs out the scented candles and puts the Apple Cider into the fridge.