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Chapter 51: Hook, Line, and Parker
The employee dorm.
Peter Parker lay on his back staring at the ceiling with the expression of someone who was not entirely sure whether he was awake or had started dreaming early.
He had not gone back to Aunt May's tonight.
In fact, barring some specific reason to go, he suspected this was going to become the new default. Here was the new base of operations.
Everyone had that thought at some point. Having a space that was entirely your own, with no one to check in with or answer to. Peter was having it now, lying in a clean single-occupancy apartment room with the utilities included, and it felt more or less exactly like he had imagined.
A phone went off in his pocket.
He looked at the screen.
Aunt May.
He picked up immediately.
"Hey, Aunt May."
"Peter. How's it feel spending the night out there?"
The warmth in her voice did the thing it always did.
"Really good. The dorm here is its own apartment unit. Single occupancy. Utilities are covered." He was trying to keep the show-off out of his tone and not entirely succeeding. "And the cafeteria. They brought in a chef from a five-star hotel. If the company let you take food home I'd have brought you something to try."
"Oh, Peter. That sounds wonderful."
She meant it completely. He could tell. She had always been like that with him, never performing it, just feeling it and letting it come out. He was not her biological child, but she had never once acted like that distinction existed.
"Knowing you're happy out there puts my mind at rest." A small pause. "Peter, if you need anything. Money, or—"
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Three knocks on his door.
"Sorry, Aunt May, something's come up. I'll call you back in the morning."
"The pay here is really good, so don't worry about the money side."
"All right. Get some rest then."
"You too. Goodnight, Peter."
"Goodnight, Aunt May."
He hung up and covered the distance to the door in a single stride.
The latch clicked.
Angela was standing in the doorway in pajamas, one hand holding a bottle of brandy by the neck. Her hair was loose, slightly damp.
"Nothing going on after hours. Want a drink?"
She tilted the bottle with a raised eyebrow.
Peter processed this for a moment.
The close proximity reintroduced itself to his senses. Whatever she was wearing smelled like something that briefly made coherent thought take a back seat.
"S-sure." He got it out.
First time a girl had knocked on his door and asked.
Angela stepped past him into the room without any visible hesitation, set the brandy down, and disappeared briefly before returning with two slices of pizza, fried chicken, and fries from her own room. She arranged everything on the table with the easy familiarity of someone who had done this a hundred times and settled into a chair.
Peter stood for a moment, recalibrated, and sat down across from her.
Angela poured first.
"How was your first day? Honest answer."
Peter nodded quickly. "Much better than it would have been without your help. I made a lot of mistakes."
That was accurate, not flattery. He was barely out of high school, the actual work was new to him, and the learning curve had been steep. Angela had quietly absorbed the fallout when things went wrong, walked him through corrections without making it a thing, and kept it moving. In his experience of school, the social infrastructure around mistakes had generally involved other people noticing them loudly. This was different.
"I really appreciate it."
"Don't mention it." She picked up her glass and looked at him over the rim. "So. Midtown High. Is Mr. Miller still talking through every class?"
Peter's face changed in the direction of genuine amusement. "Worse than before, actually."
"I knew it."
"And the principal's car, the one that hit the lamppost, he got a new one about two years ago. Then hit a different lamppost within the month."
Angela put her glass down to laugh properly.
"That poor lamppost."
Two glasses of brandy in, Peter noticed that the characteristic constraint he operated under in most conversations had gone somewhere. He was not sure where exactly, but it was no longer present in the room. He was asking questions as well as answering them. He was landing jokes. Angela was laughing. Not the polite kind. The kind that came out before she had a chance to manage it.
At some point, the conversation had stopped being something he was navigating and started being something that was just happening.
Some time after that, he put his arms on the table and his head on his arms and closed his eyes, and a smile arrived on his face from somewhere and stayed there while he slept.
The alarm he had set went off.
Peter came up from a very good dream and blinked at the ceiling for a few seconds before reality assembled itself.
He was in bed. He had not been at the table when he went to sleep, which meant she had moved him at some point. The room smelled faintly of brandy and something else.
He turned toward the table.
What had been empty and slightly disordered last night was now completely clean. On the cleared surface: a glass of hot milk, bacon and eggs, whole wheat toast.
And a small card.
He picked it up.
Peter, don't skip breakfast.
Your team leader, Angela
In the bottom right corner, she had drawn a small cartoon of herself, two or three centimeters tall, waving.
Peter looked at the card for a while.
Last night was still very present. The lamppost story. The part where she had laughed so hard she had to set her glass down. The part where he had not felt like the person in the room who needed to be managed.
Something moved in the area of his chest.
The face that had been his reference point for what a girl could be, Mary Jane, since before he'd had any real framework for why, had quietly shifted in the landscape of his thoughts, making room for something new.
Angela's private assessment, from across the building: mission accomplished. The high school goddess type was structurally incapable of competing with the older-sister type when deployed correctly.
Meanwhile.
In Matthew's office, Eleanor stood with the expression she used for delivering substantive information.
"Sir. Peter Parker's test results are back. His genetic profile is confirmed to differ from baseline human in several significant ways."
Matthew had expected this. He was still reading it in her face.
"Take me to the lab."
The research floor.
The team assigned to Peter's samples had been at the sequence data for hours. The door opened behind them and they turned to find Matthew, which prompted an immediate clearing of the center aisle.
Matthew moved to the front of the room without preamble.
"What have you found so far?"
He looked at the lead researcher's badge.
"Dr. Martin."
***
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