Buns in the Oven Ch. 19
And the long-overdue Chapter 19 is finally here! Sorry about some formatting issues; Tumblr’s changed some things since I last had a chapter to post, so I can’t quite put it in the same way that I used to. Just so you know what to expect, I only have three more plot points to cover before this story’s complete, though there’s a good chance one or two of them might take more than one chapter to cover. We’ve got the next chapter (in which I’m hoping to have some interaction between Peter and Harry, among other things), the Johnny POV chapter, and some certain surprises. That’s it. This rollercoaster ride’s almost at the end, and it’ll be longest thing I’ve ever finished when we get there, but we’ve still got a few bumps to get through before the end.
Edit: Oops! I forgot to mention it before, but a portion of this chapter is written while Peter is asleep with his eyes open. I tried to base it on my own experiences, but it's been a fair few years since I slept with my eyes open, so my depiction of mental lethargy might not be entirely accurate.
It turned out that Peter’s freak out about two of the most important ladies in his life meeting the newest addition to that line-up was a teeny bit premature.
As it happened, the FF did not, actually, have spare heat suits for May or MJ just lying around.
Like space suits, the heat suits were tailored for a specific person’s proportions, and neither of them were close enough to borrow any of Sue’s. MJ was too tall to fit in the suit, and May was so slender that the suit would bunch up and potentially cause problems with heat dispersal and the suit’s protective integrity.
So, he had a small reprieve overnight, while the fabricators in the lab made appropriately-sized suits.
Wisely, he spent this time showering the two of them with apologies amidst his recap of the whole birth event… not just what had apparently been caught by a news helicopter on its return trip from a hostage situation at the Bank of America, appropriately resolved by Captain America a few minutes earlier.
His daughter had essentially been born on live TV.
It took May bemoaning the reports alleging Spider-Man’s involvement in the ‘mysterious occurrence on the roof of the Baxter Building’ – why hadn’t he texted her earlier that Johnny wasn’t feeling well, poor dear, that she had to hear about it from the news, Peter, even Spider-Man knew before she did, and he wasn’t even a member of the Fantastic Four or Johnny’s boyfriend, Peter – for Peter to realize that the baby wasn’t the only thing exposed for the helicopter to pick up on.
He hadn’t had his mask on.
Frantically, he’d watched the news footage from the birth to see if his unmasked face was legible in any of it. Luck was on his side this one time, it seemed, because between the light thrown off by Johnny’s ‘solar flares’ overexposing most of the footage and the helicopter hovering on the wrong side of the rooftop for him to be in their line of sight, there wasn’t a lot of footage where he was even partially distinguishable. Sure, there was an arm here or a leg there, but the closest they seemed to have gotten to his face was a partially blocked still photo of the back of his head. With how often people tried to take his head off with a single punch or swipe of their hand/weapon/interdimensional gravity lemur, it wasn’t exactly a secret anymore that he had brown hair.
Whoop-dee-doo.
So… he could manage this. He would manage this, considering there were still three babies to go.
And anyway, if someone really was determined and clever enough, they could probably make a reasonable composite of his face from all the times his mask had been ripped, or he’d been caught eating a bagel or something, and then –
Nope. No more thinking about that.
He didn’t want to jinx it.
At some point, he’d let the two of them get some sleep for the ‘big day’ tomorrow and awkwardly stretched himself out over all the chairs in the observation room pushed together. Really, it wouldn’t have been too bad, if not for the chairs under his shoulders and knees rolling in opposite directions every time he so much as wiggled.
He had a surreal dream at one point where Ben appeared to give him a bowl of cold lo mein and disappeared, then the world went fuzzy while he struggled through molasses to eat it until Ben reappeared carrying Johnny. Some of Johnny’s edges flickered, and Peter just watched, transfixed. Ben said something to him he couldn’t make out, then disappeared again, and the only thing that made sense to do was to finish the food, because maybe if it disappeared too he could go with it to wherever Johnny was, not losing Johnny was important, but the world went too fuzzy before Peter could be sure he succeeded.
Peter woke with a start when something clattered to the ground nearby even though his spider sense was conspicuously silent, then pulled himself upright from his half-sprawl over only two chairs. The rest had rolled across the room in all directions during the night. How they managed to pull that off, Peter didn’t know; one of them would’ve had to roll around a table, just… casually arcing across the floor, as you do apparently.
He was still really tired, and now his bed had run away.
Absolutely not sulking at all, he rubbed at his unusually dry and gummy eyes to try to jumpstart his brain, then paused mid-rub as he remembered what was on the agenda for the day.
Right. Baby visits. With May and MJ.
No sweat.
He stood up with a stretch, and then turned to look at the observation monitor, accidentally kicking an empty bowl and fork in the process.
Idly wondering how a bowl had gotten into the observation room and what it could be doing on the floor, he scanned over the baby’s vital signs and video feed. Some of those numbers seemed awfully low – or in the case of things like her heart rate, awfully high – but he’d figured out early on yesterday that that was only because of how small she was instead of anything abnormal.
More abnormal, anyway.
The whole ‘conceived through the unsolicited-but-well-meaning intervention of benevolent reptilian aliens’ thing put everything a little bit off the beaten path.
He debated the merits of putting the heat suit on for an early morning visit while the camera cycled back to a view of the entire room. Almost through the doorway to the airlock, heat suit already pulled up to his waist, he quickly doubled back into the room to check the monitors again.
Baby’s vitals. Johnny’s vitals. View of the room –
He’d almost missed it the first time around, already in the airlock mentally if not physically, but the chairs around the baby’s bed were empty.
Johnny wasn’t there.
He probably just needed the restroom or something, he tried to convince himself. Absolutely no reason to be panicking, for sure.
Even though he distinctly remembered Johnny being there when he laid down to sleep and now –
But. There had been that weird dream, though.
By this point in his completely calm evaluation of the situation, the monitor had cycled back to the view inside the room, and he registered that the remote surgery apparatus had been wheeled back in at some point.
Peter kind of hated that thing, just a little bit; he associated it with Johnny in pain and/or danger, and it was currently making his daughter look so, so fragile and small.
One arm of the machine was stretched out to hover above the bed, a small blowtorch nozzle spewing out a mostly-steady stream of orange flames into the air above her head. This steady stream of fire and head only varied when the flames pulled away downward, like dripping paint instead of fire, absorbing into the baby’s yolk sac like Johnny’s flames had been doing yesterday.
The whole setup was clearly deliberate, and seeing that he actually recognized the apparatus, Peter finally heaved a deep, calming sigh.
Maybe his dream had been real.
Either way, he waited until the monitor showed Johnny’s and the baby’s vitals again, and then looked them over more critically.
Most of Johnny’s readings looked pretty normal to him, maybe on the low side of normal, but nothing alarming. His heart rate and breathing were awfully slow, though.
Asleep.
Johnny was sleeping somewhere more sensible than in or on a chair. That made sense.
Torn between the urge to verify Johnny’s location and not leaving their daughter unguarded, Peter dithered in the airlock doorway for what felt like an eternity, until Sue appeared in the observation room.
“Good morning, Peter,” she greeted him warmly, despite the lingering signs of recent sleep deprivation around her eyes.
“Morning,” Peter greeted lamely, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, antsy. “Do you maybe know where Johnny went? He was still inside when I fell asleep, I think, but…”
“Ben took him to the recovery room last night so he could get some proper rest,” Sue supplied when it was clear Peter wasn’t going to be finishing that sentence. She looked over the readouts and room controls with a critical eye as Peter processed that, then nodded.
“Oh. Okay. I was just wondering.”
“You’re welcome to get more rest, yourself,” Sue pointed out. “I’m going to be here for a while, giving the little miss a check-up, so you don’t need to worry about her being alone.” She nodded significantly toward Peter’s feet, which were still shuffling restlessly.
He immediately stilled. “Nah, I’m all right. I probably couldn’t sleep more if I tried, right now.”
“Oh?” Sue asked, brushing past him to reach her own heat suit. “Why’s that?”
“My aunt and my friend will be here in...” Peter looked around for a clock. “About an hour, to see the baby. I tried to convince them to come this afternoon, but MJ has work, so…” He shrugged.
“Then you might want to get a shower and change your clothes, at least,” Sue pointed out, checking the seal on her suit’s gloves.
“That… is actually a good point,” Peter conceded, eying the mangled and half-melted top to his Spider-Man suit that he was still wearing. “I should definitely change before they get here.”
“Don’t forget the shower; it’ll help you feel more awake and look more presentable,” she prompted him, then deliberately turned away to grab some hand tools.
“Yeah, sure,” Peter replied distractedly, trying to shimmy out of the lower half of his heat suit as he made for the door. He dropped the suit in a semi-organized heap by the door, then paused. “I’ll be back in just – wait.”
He looked over his shoulder at her.
“Hm?” Sue asked, carefully not looking at him as she grabbed her helmet.
He squinted at her, exaggerating his suspicion. “Are you telling me I stink?”
Sue sealed her helmet over her head with a drawn-out sigh of relief. “Yes. Yes, I am.”
Sue swiftly keyed the airlock door shut. He cupped his hands around his mouth to shout “Rude!” at her, then stomped off to find a spare change of clothes and a shower, apparently.
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Freshly shaved, showered, and dressed in a spare button-down and khakis that he’d left with Johnny following the Creamsicle Pants incident, Peter waited with his hands in his pockets by the elevators in the main lobby of the Baxter Building while his aunt and MJ checked in.
He’d offered to meet up with them sooner so he could escort them to the building itself, but MJ had shot him down by unilaterally deciding to treat May to breakfast, with vague promises of ‘pooling blackmail ammunition together’ before they came to visit. Sensibly, Peter was a little terrified of what the two of them could do by banding together.
Taking over the world would be child’s play for those two, if they ever felt so inclined. Worse than that, though, is they’d somehow rope him into helping, Peter was sure of it.
“What are these two visions walking toward me,” Peter announced overly-loudly as soon as they passed into hearing range with a fresh pair of visitor passes. He gestured at the two of them, then swooned dramatically into the elevator doors, clutching at his chest. “My heart, it just can’t take it.”
May tittered while Mary Jane rolled her eyes with a smile. “Hey, Tiger; I didn’t know they let doofuses guard the elevators, here.”
“Hey, I resemble that remark,” he faux-protested, pushing himself back upright so he could give them each a hug. Once he’d finished with that and called the elevator, he rubbed his hands together. There were so many things that he needed to go over with them before they got to the observation room, he wasn’t sure where to start. “So…”
“How’s Johnny holding up, dear?” May interrupted him, which was just as well because Peter’s brain had sort of… stalled out before really going anywhere. MJ made an inquiring noise which was quickly followed by the tone of the elevator’s return, so May waited until they were all situated inside and facing each other before continuing. “Peter’s told me how hard this has all been on him. And, I didn’t want to say anything at the time, but he looked like he’d been put through the wringer when I first met him, the poor dear.”
“Real people don’t look like Ruth’s magazines,” Peter pointed out, and MJ nodded along knowingly.
“He also might have been nervous about meeting you for the first time,” she chimed in, then continued while May’s face shifted into a slight, doubtful frown. “I’ve only met him a handful of times at different events, but he always struck me as the sorta guy that wanted to be liked by everyone. And of course, there’s always that fear that your significant other will leave you if their family disapproves.”
Peter didn’t catch May’s response, focused as he’d become over MJ’s last comment – it had sounded a little personally-informed. He almost asked about it, before it occurred to him that he didn’t know for sure if she was seeing anyone, currently.
He was kind of a bad friend, wasn’t he?
Well, his life had been kind of hectic, lately…
Resolving to try and spend more time with MJ—and his other friends—in the near future, Peter honed back in on their conversation, which seemed to have shifted toward the pressures and expectations of celebrities’ dating and personal lives—which was another concern he’d set aside for now—and reinserted himself into the conversation.
“Sorry to interrupt, but there’s a few things I should probably go over with you before we reach the baby’s hospital room…”
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Peter helped secure the last seal on Aunt May’s gloves, then looked around at the three of them. “We all set?”
“Feels like I’m about to go to the moon, hit it,” MJ joked, flashing him a thumb’s up.
“All right, then,” Peter sighed, giving the two of them one last critical look over before initializing the airlock’s inward adjustment cycle, hand hovering over the emergency cancel in case of any signs of distress from the two women. Other than some curious looks around when the air recirculators spooled up and the room’s lighting shifted toward red, nothing happened, though.
A smooth, metallic ‘shlonk’ sounded from the inner door as the recirculators and heating elements wound down to the minimum needed to maintain the high temperature of both rooms, then the door slid open.
Sue was in the process of awkwardly making adjustments to the blowtorch’s flame with the thick fingers of her own suit’s insulated gloves when they walked in. Idly, Peter wondered why she wasn’t using a forcefield, but decided not to ask. It seemed kind of rude, and May and MJ’s presence loomed large behind him.
He straightened up a bit more. “Hey, Sue.”
“Peter, welcome back,” She turned to face them, then walked around the baby’s bed to greet them, hand extended. “You must be Peter’s family; welcome to the Baxter Building. I’m Sue, Johnny’s sister”
“Thank you for opening your home to us,” May replied, shaking the offered hand with only a little difficulty from the gloves. “I’m May, Peter’s aunt.”
“Technically I’m not family, but I’ve known Peter for a long time, now – Mary Jane Watson,” MJ added, when it was her turn to shake hands. “MJ, for short.”
“I think we might’ve met once before…?” Sue recalled hesitantly, then took a step to the side now that introductions were over, gesturing toward the bed. “Anyway, I believe you’re here to see this little girl, so I won’t keep you any longer.”
Peter hung back as the two ladies moved to either side of the bed, murmuring in low, soothing tones. He looked at Sue, then tilted his head toward the bed. “How is she?”
Sue blew out her cheeks, then tipped her head from one side to the other. “It’s hard to say, but she seems to be doing well.” She must have seen something in his expression at her answer, because she continued. “With the exception of the yolk sac for—for obvious reasons—and advanced brain and lung function to support herself outside of the womb—er, egg—she’s on par with a fetus around 17 weeks.”
“She’s so small,” MJ piped up, apparently listening to their conversation.
“142 grams and 13 centimeters,” Sue confirmed, then offered the Imperial equivalents at the generally uncertain looks that got her. “Slightly over 5 inches and 5 ounces.”
Peter saw MJ’s eyebrows raise in surprise. “I think I have a tea cup you could fit in, Little Miss,” she remarked, turning back to the baby, hand hovering several inches away from the yolk sac, fingers curled in slightly in hesitation.
“I should leave you to it, see if I can catch Johnny and convince him to try and eat a smoothie before he comes back in,” Sue said after a few minutes of silence, moving toward the door.
“What’s her name?” May asked, looking toward Peter. “You had some picked out, didn’t you?”
“That’s right; I was going to ask you last night; Johnny said you already had it picked out,” Sue paused by the door, and suddenly all three women were looking at Peter expectantly.
“Her name…” Peter trailed off, making his way to the foot of the bed, MJ on one side and May on the other. He reached forward, just barely brushing the bottom of one tiny foot with his finger. “Is Gale.”
“Gale May Storm.”
He cut his eyes up just enough to see May’s hands against her helmet, covering her mouth.
“That’s a lovely name,” Sue murmured, and Peter heard footsteps moving further away after a moment, and the door shut.
As soon as the door shut, MJ lost her composure, and started to snicker.
“Gale Storm, huh, Tiger?” She grinned at him, even as her shoulders still shook with laughter. “It’s perfect.”
“Yeah,” Peter smiled down at his daughter like a sap. “She is.”
