I wake to the hum of a ceiling fan and the cotton weight of a comforter that smells like detergent and sun.
For a while I don't move. There's a quiet I remember only from snow mornings—muffled, careful, as if the house is tiptoeing around me. The fan wobbles on its lazy orbit. A rectangle of warm light lies across my legs, and when I follow it back to its source, I find a window propped open with a paperback. Pages ruffle in the breeze like a sleeping creature breathing.
My body… feels wrong. Or rather, it feels startlingly right in all the places where it shouldn't. No ache in the knees when I bend them beneath the covers. No stiffness in the fingers when I flex. My chest rises and falls without the hitch I carried for years, without the weight that made stairs a negotiation.
I lift my hand into the gold light and stare at it. The skin is smooth. There are faint needle-moon scars in the crook of my elbow, a map of old IV ports. On the back of my wrist, a faint medical ID stamp ghosts purple. I know the kind: temporary ink from a recent hospital stay. A sticky square of residue on my chest suggests I used to be tethered to monitors.
And yet—my lungs draw air like open fields. There is energy in my limbs, bright and strange.
Someone has placed a glass of water and two pill bottles on the nightstand. A coil of clear tubing dangles from a portable oxygen concentrator, unplugged and silent. Next to it sits a thin blue wallet, the kind libraries give you when they trust you with their books. I recognize the blue before I process the shape. Some part of me aches in recognition.
Down the hall, a coffee maker clicks. A radio murmurs. A woman says, "Mark, let him sleep. The doctor said sleep is healing." A man answers in a low rumble I can't catch.
I inhale. The air smells like toast and lemon cleaner and something savory—bacon, maybe. Beneath it: a thread of rubbing alcohol, the scent that lingers in houses where sickness has pitched a long camp.
I push the covers back and stare at legs that should be thin from disuse but look… normal. There's a constellation of scars on my left shin and a healing scrape on my right knee. When I sit up the room tilts, then settles. The wall above the desk is papered with postcards: libraries and lighthouses, all blues and whites, angles and spines. Someone has arranged them in straight lines. The top row is perfectly level; the bottom row cheats a little.
On the dresser: a stack of paperbacks rubber-banded together, a clamshell flip phone, a plastic inhaler with my mouthpiece marks worn into the rubber. A framed picture of three people on a boardwalk under a gull-blown sky. The boy in the middle is fifteen and trying too hard not to lean into the woman's arm. Dark hair. Brown eyes. A dimple that appears when he's caught laughing. My face.
The woman has a nurse's posture—shoulders like a rampart, eyes like a lighthouse. The man is taller, with a grin that shows too many teeth and a baseball cap that reads Mets.
I know the picture before I know the names. I know what it is to be loved in a way that survives long winters. When I say it in my head—Mom—it rings like a struck glass in an empty room. The echo is a surprise.
A shadow darkens the doorway, then withdraws. The floorboard outside my room betrays a careful weight: someone who knows where the creaks live. The carefulness hurts me with its kindness.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed. The floor is cool wood. The oxygen tubing ghosts across my ankle. I don't need it. The not-needing feels like a stolen thing, bright and fragile.
A blue rectangle peeks from under the flip phone. I draw it out with reverent fingers.
New York Public Library.
Name: Elias Ward.
A barcode. Smudged edges from being held too often.
"Elias," I say, and the room seems to listen. I roll the name in my mouth like a new verse of an old hymn. There's no wrinkled baritone; the voice that returns is light and young and mine in a way I do not understand.
The door opens three inches. "Buddy?" my father says—my father, a word that arrives with both warmth and uncertainty. "You awake?"
"I think so," I say, and I do.
The door opens the rest of the way. He's in his work shirt—collar flattened by time, sleeves rolled, a stain he already tried to scrub out but didn't have the heart to fight. He is large in the way of men who lift more than they should and love more than they admit. His eyes do a quick, practiced sweep: color in my cheeks, the unneeded oxygen cannula slack, the relaxed rise of my ribs.
"You look good," he says, which is man-code for I have been afraid every day for a year and I would like today to be different. "How do you feel?"
"Hungry," I say, stunned by the truth. "And… light?"
His smile falters, then finds its footing. "That tracks. You slept fourteen hours. Doctor said the fever breaking might give you some juice. Your mom's making eggs. You want—?"
"Yes," I say too quickly. A ridiculous fear stabs me: if I say no, the eggs and the morning and the light will be taken back. "Yes, please."
He disappears and returns with a sweatshirt because fathers translate hunger into logistics. "Take it slow," he adds, which is another code: Don't scare us by falling down. He offers an arm. I stand without needing it. We both notice. He covers it by adjusting the concentrator that doesn't need adjusting.
We shuffle to the kitchen together.
The kitchen is small in the way of Queens apartments that have raised armies. There's a calendar with baseball games circled and dental appointments star-stickered. A stack of medical bills sits under a magnet shaped like a slice of pizza. The table is laminated wood, its edges worn smooth by elbows. Sunlight tongues the tile floor.
My mother—Angela—is at the stove. She turns when the floorboard betrays us and her face changes in that way faces do when joy ambushes them. It is not the wide, sudden grin of a TV mother. It's quieter, more desperate. Relief looks like someone taking off a backpack full of bricks and discovering their spine still works.
"There's my boy," she says softly, which is code for I don't want to scare you by crying.
"Hi, Mom," I answer, and suddenly I want to cry, too. Because the word fits. It is both costume and skin.
We eat like a sacrament. The eggs are perfect in the way simple food can be. The toast is too dark on one corner. The bacon is crisp and defiant. I drink orange juice and it tastes like a new idea. They watch me not-watching them, measuring my breath, counting my bites. My father pretends to read the sports section and fails. My mother pretends not to hover and fails better.
"How's the head?" she asks finally. "Any dizziness? Chest tightness?"
"Not right now," I say. "I feel… good." The word feels like a betrayal of a ghostly version of me who fought for breath at three a.m. while monitors sang.
"Good is good," Dad says gruffly, as if praising the concept will bring bad luck. "Let's not sprint. We can call Dr. Keane later to check in."
A radio plays low on the counter, tuned to a local news station because silence is dangerous in houses where illness lives. They flick between traffic and the mayor and a story about a weapons expo in California. A name hops the air and lands on my plate with the yolk: Stark Industries.
It is nothing, I tell myself. Of course Stark exists. He's a comic-book name folded into real headlines when you live in certain kinds of dreams. But then the anchor says WHIH World News when the ad break returns, and I freeze. WHIH, not CNN, not local. The letters thump like footsteps in a hallway I'm not supposed to be in.
I keep my fork moving. "What day is it?"
"Wednesday," Mom says. "May fourteenth. You know that." She says it lightly; we all pretend fever never steals days.
"Two thousand three," Dad adds, a casual kindness meant to cover any soft spots. He points his fork. "Mets lost last night, in case you're nostalgic for suffering."
2003. Five years before a man in a cave builds a heart out of light. Five years before a hammer falls. Before shields fly. Before streets split under alien feet.
I swallow. The toast is suddenly sand.
"Can I—" I start, then stop, because I don't want to sound like I'm sprinting again. "Do we still have the computer set up? For school stuff?"
Dad chuckles. "You mean the dinosaur? Yeah. It boots if you beg. You sure you're—"
"I'll sit," I promise, because promises are currency and we are all broke from the last year.
The computer lives in the corner of the living room on a desk that used to be a sewing table. A beige tower hums. The monitor blinks awake with stubborn kindness. The wallpaper is a photo of the boardwalk picture, me caught just before the dimple, Mom's hair caught mid-laugh. I touch the screen and leave a print.
The browser is set to the ISP's home page. I type slower than this body wants to. Stark Industries news. The results are a slurry of sales reports, defense contracts, a charity gala where a younger Tony Stark smirks in a tuxedo, all jaw and ease and danger. Links to WHIH segments. A press release about an Advanced Weapons Expo in the desert this summer. A smaller story about a minor lab accident at a Roxxon facility across the country. The logo looks like a scab.
I open a map and zoom out, because zooming out is how you keep panic from eating you. Queens is a hive. The city is an organism. The world is big and I am one cell with more oxygen than expected.
A private message window is open at the bottom of the screen—the ghost of a chat with a friend named Benji. The last line reads: you'll be fine for finals. i'll bring notes. promise. There's a timestamp from two weeks ago. The cursor blinks like a tiny heartbeat.
I don't respond. Borrowed friendships feel like sacrilege.
I open a new tab and hesitate, because I can't type marvel cinematic universe without breaking something inside me. Instead I type fanfiction. The page loads with portals to forums and archives and story summaries written by insomniacs and saints. I know this landscape; I spent my old-late nights wandering these aisles when the body I had then wouldn't let me sleep. People telling stories about stories because real life didn't give them enough room.
I search self-insert marvel 2003. The results are a chaos of bad grammar and bright hope. Tropes parade: prepare for five years, buddy up with SHIELD, don't meet Stark too soon, invest in Apple, don't time-travel before coffee. I catch myself smiling. Then I catch myself believing any of it might apply.
"Whatcha reading?" Mom leans in the doorway with a dish towel slung over her shoulder like a truce flag.
"Just… forums," I say. "Notes for school. Stories." I wince; too much truth always sounds like a lie.
"Remember the rule." She points the towel like a sword. "No deep dives when you're this fresh. Your brain needs gentleness."
"I'll pace myself," I promise, then, because honesty feels like armor, I add, "I was checking news. Stark's in the headlines."
Dad snorts from the kitchen. "Tony Stark's always in the headlines. He buys ad space on the weather."
Mom rolls her eyes. "Don't turn my son into a cynic before noon."
I close tabs. I open a blank text document. The blinking cursor is a confession booth. I type:
Rules
1. Don't make assumptions.
2. Don't say impossible out loud.
3. Don't scare Mom.
4. Don't let Dad pretend he's not scared.
5. Eat when food is put in front of you.
6. Breathe.
7. Observe.
8. If the world is what I think it is, there's time. Five years is a library.
I save the file under a name that will look like homework if anyone stumbles across it: Civics_Notes.doc.
The day moves like a gentle hand on my back. I shower sitting down because habit is heavier than water. I catch sight of my body in the fogged mirror and learn its coastlines: narrow shoulders, a rib that sticks a little, a constellation of moles like a secret map. I brush my teeth and gag on the taste of mint because my mouth has been an occupied country for too long. I dress in a T-shirt that smells like the sun and a pair of jeans with frayed knees. They fit. The fit feels like a gift and a debt.
In the afternoon, Aunt Jo stops by with a casserole and medical advice she refuses to charge for. She squeezes my face in her hands and studies me like a painting that has been restored imperfectly but mercifully. "Color's back," she declares. "Eyes are brighter. If God did this, tell Him I said thank you. If it was antibiotics, tell them too."
I laugh, and it startles all of us because we haven't heard me laugh like that in too long. The sound feels like slipping into a room I thought had been rented to someone else.
I nap because the doctor ordered it and because my parents will hover like frightened angels if I don't. I dream of paper turning into wind. In the dream the wind smells like old ink and fresh rain, and a blue card glows in the dark like a lighthouse for things that don't have shores. When I wake, the card is in my hand though I don't remember picking it up. I lay it on the nightstand gently, as if it could bruise.
Evening brings the Mets game and the language of sports radio—hope and statistics and curses that go soft around the edges when my mother is within earshot. Dad yells at the television the way men yell at fate: performative, impotent, satisfied anyway. I sit on the couch with a blanket across my knees for show, feet tucked under me because this body is new and needs instruction. The game goes the way games go. We eat spaghetti off plates that have seen a thousand noodles. We load the dishwasher in a choreography so practiced our hands don't need our eyes. For twenty minutes the house is only a house, not a hospital annex or a war room.
Later, I retreat to my room with the flip phone and the blue wallet. I slide the library card out again and let it rest in my palm. A compulsion pads forward soft as a cat: go. Not tonight, but soon. The branch on 86th Street that smells like dust and pencils and summer programs. The place where I learned the difference between quiet and silence.
I open the flip phone and peck out a text to Benji: hey. awake. thanks for notes. i owe you a pizza when i can eat a whole one alone. I hover over send. I don't know if the me that wrote to Benji used lowercase like this. I send it anyway. The reply comes three dots at a time, then all at once: BRO. YOU LIVE. caps for emphasis. i'll bring math tomorrow. rest or my mom will fight your mom.
I grin like a kid. I am a kid. I am an old man. I am a book with a new cover.
The house settles around me. Pipes talk. Someone down the hall sneezes. A car alarm wails then thinks better of it. In the distance a train lays its steel ribbon of sound across the night. I think about the news again—the WHIH logo, the Stark segments, the Roxxon item like a splinter. If this is the MCU, it's the beginning when everything is still pretending to be normal.
I open the browser one last time and type Culver University physics department. The results are ordinary: faculty pages, grant announcements, a lecture series. Nothing glowing yet. I search Norway hammer myth real and get travel blogs and legends. I search Howard Stark archival footage and get a museum page, a foundation, a black-and-white photo of a man with a jaw built to cut ribbon on history.
I close the laptop. Enough. The line between research and spiraling is a fine thread tonight, and I have a family that deserves a son who doesn't vanish into the screen on his first good day.
Before bed, Mom knocks twice and peeks in. She carries a fresh set of sheets that smell like line-dry and stubbornness. "Tomorrow," she says, "if you feel steady, we walk to the corner and back. No heroics."
"I'll bring my cape," I say. She snorts, then sits to watch me change the pillowcase because love is sometimes a surveillance state. Her hand finds my hair and smooths it out of my eyes as if I haven't been taller than her since last winter. I let her. Some rituals you don't outgrow.
"Do you remember," she says softly, "the summer you read all the library's dragon books and then tried to roast a marshmallow with a candle?"
"I do not," I admit, smiling despite myself. "But it sounds like something I'd do."
"You did," she says, laughing into her fist. "Your father saluted the smoke alarm and said, 'At ease, soldier.' I threatened divorce and then made s'mores on the stove."
We sit in the warm quiet that follows a shared story. She kisses my forehead and leaves the door cracked three inches. The fan goes on being the small sun of my ceiling. The window breathes.
I lie awake a long time and listen to my body not struggle. It is a miracle so constant it becomes an ache all its own. Gratitude burns hot and a little mean because I know what it's like to be denied and now I have been given. I try to make a vow out of it, something tidy: I will not waste this. But vows are brittle on first days. Instead I promise something smaller: I will pay attention.
Somewhere past midnight, a breeze stirs the paperback that props my window open. Its pages lift and settle. The sound is ordinary and I make it stay ordinary by refusing to assign it meaning. Even so, a thread of scent unspools—dust, ink, and something like rain on hot stone. Imagined, I tell myself. Exhaustion's trick. The word library glows at the edge of sleep.
Just before I go under, I add one last line to the document in my head:
9) If stories are doors, knock before you open.
The fan hums. The city purrs. I sleep.