His girlfriend was missing.
Not missing, exactly. Missing implies that they had no idea where she went. Missing refers to things like that one sock that always finds its way behind the dryer, or the piece of homework you swear you turned in but the teacher never graded. Missing doesn't apply to a person.
It's especially not true in the case of Nora, because they knew exactly where she went. She left enough breadcrumbs, both in her internet history and in the notes she left behind for everyone she thought she should say good bye to. Aunt May finds one tucked in the bottom of her purse addressed to him, and he got another sent to his email a day after she went disappeared.
I had to try.
I know you don't get why I thought I had to do it alone. And I know you wish I never tried. But you told me yourself: when you've got the opportunity to help, and you let the bad things happen anyways, then it's like a small part of them happened because of you.
I can't take thinking that this is happening when I could try to stop it. It's going to kill me, to have that weighing me down for the rest of my life. And this is my fight, too, one of my battles that I have to win.
None of us are going to be safe unless we finish this, once and for all. I'm doing this to protect myself, too, don't think I'm not.
I've got a plan. It's not a good one, but it's the only one I've got. Fury's in on it. Pepper isn't. And I had to leave you in the dark because I knew you loved me too much to let me go through with it.
But I have to go through with it, because there are people I love that in danger all the time. Because I love you, and they know it. Because I loved Tony, and they promised to let him go if I showed up.
I'm hoping that's true. I'm hoping I can come back to you. Maybe I won't. But I'm going to try. that's all any of us can hope for, anymore.
Peter's read it over so many times he had it memorized. The techs from Stark industries went through it, and said that she had it on a delayed timer. Like, if she didn't log in within the next 48 hours, then all these instructions would be sent out. Passwords changed, good bye notes sent.
MJ was with him when he read it for the first time. She had her own letter, but that one had come in the post the old fashioned way. It was all about how she was going to change the world, and that MJ was a hero, too. Just because her battles were quieter doesn't make them any less important.
You guys are going to change the world, Nora had written, and MJ let Peter trace the indentations her letters had left, choking back tears over the curl of the g and the tilt of the t's. I just hope I'm here to see it.
"She's going to come back." MJ had said, in that voice she had. She's told him a lot of things in that voice, like we're going to win the decathlon again even if I have to do it myself or she's going to say yes to prom or everyone's going to find out you're Spider-Man eventually, you might as well rip the band aid off now. She was one of the smartest people that Peter had had the fortune to meet, and she had yet to be wrong when she told him something in that voice. That voice meant a promise, and MJ had yet to break her promises.
"How do you know that?" He was crying, tears slipping down his cheeks and his breath coming in ragged bursts. It was worse that MJ got the paper letter, because he can see where Nora's pen pressed harder into the paper or where that water spot meant she was crying. Thanks to his spidey senses, he could even smell her, just a faint trace of the perfume she always wore.
"She's Nora, remember? She's the girl who walked away, and kept walking." MJ had both her hands on the sides of Peter's face, forcing her to look at him. "The one who saved that little girl as she was falling through the sky, and just kept saving people- you, me, those kids at Disney, and now she's going to save her father. She's stronger than any of us give her credit for."
"But what if she's not strong enough?"
MJ wasn't there, the first time. She didn't see Margot, the stiffness that seemed to turn every bone in her body to steel, who was incapable of compromise. She hadn't met those guards, who always wore brass knuckles when they hit them and had tobacco stained skin, the ones who were there because they were paid and liked pain. She hadn't seen the money and the power that dripped from every inch of that place, how even when they tried to burn it all to the ground it had stayed standing, the foundations strong.
And those foundations rebuilt, better and even more unbreakable than the first time, and they came for Nora.
"Because she has to be." MJ was crying now, too. It hurt Peter to see that, because in a different world, the one that he had been heading towards, it would have been the two of them that loved each other and no superheroes to care about and only normal people pain, the kind that comes when your girlfriend's parents never come home and the kids at school make fun of you. He can still see that life in his head, but it wasn't the one they were given.
In this one, he's a superhero who doesn't know how to save the people he cares about and his girlfriend goes missing, and this time there's no guarantee he's going to be able to find her, even though he and Ned and MJ haven't stopped trying.
"Because she loves you, and you love her." MJ reached over to grab his phone, closed the tab so Nora's words disappeared. "And she's not going to walk away from that."
Nora's famous again, and by extension so is Peter.
People are always talking about them, because she's Tony's daughter and he's Spider-Man, but it hadn't been at this level in a while. Now, her face was painted across every magazine and newspaper and every news channel was reporting the nonexistent updates on her story, making little details sound like improvements when everyone knew that they were no closer to finding her or Mr. Stark than they were in the beginning.
"Maybe you shouldn't watch this." Aunt May said, when Peter had traded doing his homework for searching the web for any story that has had to do with Nora. He's collecting information, stockpiling useless facts that he's convinced himself might help later. Pictures, locations, family ties, people of interest. They're taking up all the folders in his filing cabinet, and the back wall of his closet has been transformed into a map of leads that take him no where. "It can't be good for you to listen to all this."
Aunt May didn't know how to help. Peter had been used to being able to turn to her for anything, to fix any problem, but it seems they have finally reached a place where he would have to do it on his own. "I have to." He spins around in his chair, from her to the keyboard and back again, not sure what to do but knowing his has to do something. "I'm going to find her."
"Honey." Aunt May had that sad smile on her face, and he knew what she was going to do. He's been sad enough times around her that he knows the routine, how she's going to come and smooth down his hair and tell him everything he's going to be okay, and normally he would feel better, but not this time, because now things are not going to be okay unless he makes them that way. this time, it is up to him and him alone. "Have you started thinking that maybe this time, she's not going to come back?" Aunt May sat down on his bed, preparing for one of their talks, where she is the adult who knows better and he is only a kid who has to listen.
But he's not a kid anymore. He's seventeen, which isn't much but is older than he was. He's Spider-Man. He's fought alongside Iron Man and held his own against Captain America. He's formed a web solution that's stronger than any rope or wire ever produced. He's fallen from skyscrapers and stopped inches before the pavement, stopped muggers and rapists and robbers and never asked for a thank you. He's been a hero, and now it's time for him to step out from the shelter that was Mr. Stark and stand on his own.
This time, he was going to have to save the day by himself.
(Like, not really by himself, cause Ned was helping and MJ was popping into different news agencies and law enforcement headquarters and pretending to be a student who wants information, but more alone that he had been.)
"She's not like you." Aunt May was crying. He wanted that to stop, too, because she's always crying and he's pretty sure it's his fault. "She's only human."
"I know she's not like me. There aren't many people in this world like me." He was human, too, and the girl he loves has gone missing. He's human, but he's more than that, which means he would break the city apart until he found her. "Thanks for the pep talk, Aunt May, but I think I've got this."
He doesn't.
Peter hasn't given up hope, exactly, but he has stopped thinking that he's going to be the one that finds her and moved his faith to the hands of SHIELD and the FBI instead, because they've got a bigger data base than he does. He can't save her, he knows, but he can save everyone else, which mean that he's tripled the amount of time that he spends being Spider-Man, swinging through the streets and stopping every crime he sees.
So far, he's tied three rapists to a tree and didn't tell the police about it until the next morning, shut down a puppy mill, helped a guy get away from his abusive boyfriend and back to his parents house, and shut down a drug deal that happened to involve Flash, which meant he had a perfectly good excuse to throw Flash into a dumpster.
Twice.
Part of him knows that he's only doing this to distract himself. The other part just keeps moving through it, like he's doing it all so that when Nora comes back he can tell her all about it, prove to her that even if he couldn't find her, at least he was doing something. That he was trying to be a hero, even if it wasn't the one he needed.
One thing about being outed as Spider-Man: people start to look for him.
He's gotten used to running intro crazy fans when he's out on patrol, girls that want to take a picture with him or guys who want to fight him to prove something to their friends, kids who hang out on the streets just on the off chance that he might swing by and say. It's why he doesn't think much of it, when he sees the girl the first day and the second. But by the third, when she's proved herself to have an uncanny knack for guessing which street he's going to be on and showing up one step ahead of him no matter how hard he tries to lose her, he's starting to get suspicious.
So he watches. He's hiding up on a fire escape, so Peter's pretty sure that she can't see him, but he can see her, the way her figure cuts through the crowd milling in the streets. She moves with purpose, dressed all in black despite the heat wave the city was going through. Each time he's got sight of her, she's dressed like she's expecting people to look at her and wants them to know that she's prettier than they could hope to be, in an effortless sort of way.
She also looks like she could kill him without any powers, which is why he starts to think she's a superhero. It's the only reason he follows her, memorizing the way she moves and how no one she passes ever seems to remember her other than a vague memory of what might have been a flash of red and black moving through the crowd.
Red hair, black clothes. Like Natasha, he thinks, and that's really the only reason he figures it out. So the next time she passes by an alleyway, he reaches out a grabs her, drags her back into the shadows and trying not to think of the headlines if anyone had seen.
"What are you doing here?" He throws her into the wall, pinning her there right above the trash bags. She's laughing, and that annoys him, so he hits her, even though he promised himself he would never hit a girl.
When he lets go, she doesn't get her feet underneath her in time to catch herself, so she falls into a heap on top of the trash bags. "Jesus, Peter." She coughs, rubbing at her neck until she can breath again. "Didn't think you had it in you."
"Where is she?" It's not a coincidence, that Nora would disappear that and then she would show up trailing his heels. "What'd you do to her?"
"Who said I did anything to her?" She smiled, and he could see the blood that was staining her teeth. Peter couldn't tell if she was actually thought this was funny or just trying to make him feel bad for how hard he hit her. Probably both. "I'm a SHIELD agent now. Maybe Fury put me on your tail."
"Bulllshit." He was shaking, he realized, seconds away from punching her so hard that her teeth would scatter through the alley. Everything that had happened was her fault. Her fault that he and Nora had got taken after Prom, her fault he was outed as Spider-Man at all, and now it was her fault Nora was gone, even if he couldn't prove it. "You know where she is."
"Yeah." Then she winces, rubbing at her shoulder, and in spite of himself he relaxes, because even if they had found themselves on opposite sides, Peter knew that neither of them really wanted to hurt the other. She had saved both him and Nora, in the end. "I mean, no. I know where she went, but not where she ended up."
Peter stared at her, and then ripped the mask off, because it was starting to make him feel stupid to have it on. "That doesn't make any sense."
"I know. I tried to help her, but I think we screwed up and I don't know how to fix it." Evangeline pushed herself up and away from the wall, and it helped Peter a bit to see how much she hadn't changed. She still expected everyone to fall into line behind her.
"Why should I trust you?"
Evangeline smiled for real, then. "Because you don't have any other choice."
Peter stared down at the work table in front of him.
"A suit?" Up until this moment, he had been half expecting someone to jump out and try to kill him. It would have been a nice change, to have something to fight. "What for?"
"For Nora." Evangeline spun around in her chair and wheeled over to him, holding out a notebook. "I thought you were smart, Peter."
"If she had a suit, why's it here?" It was just a hunk of metal, now. There wasn't even an AI telling him what to do. "Why wouldn't she take it with her?"
"If she had it, they wouldn't have taken her to Tony. She knew they weren't going to let either of them go, so she was going to bust both of them out." Evangeline flicked a finger of the suit, and it barely moved. "The plan was to have this attached to sensors, and then she would call for it."
"Where are the sensors?"
"With her." Evangeline winced. "In her."
Peter punched the wall so hard that dust fell from the ceiling. He wasn't used to being the kind of guy who punched things, but it was either the wall or Evangeline. And from the look on Evangeline's face, she knew what he would rather be hitting.
"And what happened?" He stared down at it. "Why didn't it go?"
"I don't know. Everything was fine, and I expected it to fly away at any moment, but then around five hours after I left her, it just...." She shrugged. "Went dark. Dead. And it stayed that way."
Peter nodded, and then tossed his phone at her. She caught it, looking surprised. "Call for Chinese." It's what Tony always did, when he was looking at a long night. "It's going to be a while."