The maple tree outside Peter's apartment window kept track of the years better than he did.
Bare branches became green buds, green buds became thick summer leaves, and by the time they turned gold and began gathering on the sidewalk below, another year had passed.
Six this time around.
Peter leaned against the sink, staring out the window as a handful of those leaves drifted past. Six years since the world forgot him. Sometimes that number felt impossibly small, and others it felt so big he could barely breathe around it.
He was older now. Older and grown in more ways than the version of himself that stood outside MJ's coffee shop could ever have imagined. He'd lived entire lives since then. Finished one degree, started another. Worked half a dozen jobs. Moved twice. Made friends, lost some and kept others. Came close to falling in love again, before the fear won out.
And still, some mornings, it felt as though he could walk into the next room and find everyone there waiting for him. May in the kitchen, MJ with a book in her lap, Ned sprawled across the sofa—a snapshot in time, a life unlived.
Peter shook off his scheduled bout of melancholy, drained the last of his orange juice, and set the glass in the sink.
Enough of that—he had somewhere to be. Or rather, somewhere he absolutely should not be, but was definitely headed to anyway.
His group therapy session originally ran on Tuesday nights, which had worked well enough until work started scheduling him for evening shifts, so he'd switched to the Thursday afternoon group instead.
It was disconcerting spending an hour trauma dumping with a dozen other strangers, only to emerge into bright sunshine at four-thirty in the afternoon. But, despite this, he'd kept coming back and while he didn’t want to admit it, the real reason wasn’t his fucking work schedule.
It was because of who else attended the Thursday sessions.
Bucky Barnes. The goddamn Winter Soldier. A blast from Peter's own past and from actual history.
The first time Peter saw him sitting a row down from him, he'd spent the entire hour staring down at the floor and trying not to vibrate out of his skin. Then Bucky showed up again, and again, and eventually, they'd even exchanged an awkward word or two over the stale doughnuts and shitty coffee at the back of the room.
Bucky didn’t remember him, of course, he’d never even known Peter personally back when Spider-Man and Winter Soldier had a reason to interact—though he was sure to have seen his face when it was plastered all over the city—but he was still friendly enough to the stranger in his therapy group. They'd spoken again while waiting out a thunderstorm just inside the front doors of the building, and soon enough began to gravitate toward one another to sit side by side and exchange the occasional glance when someone said something particularly egregious.
Then he'd seen Bucky jogging.
Peter had been walking home from work when he spotted him down by the river, legs eating up the miles at a steady pace, long sleeves anonymizing the metal arm. He'd watched him disappear around a bend and felt something shift.
Three days later, Peter bought running shoes.
Now he found himself kneeling outside the front entrance of his building, those golden leaves crunching underfoot as he tightened his laces.
This was a healthy hobby! Who didn’t need more exercise and fresh air? It was a perfectly normal thing for a person to start doing, and he wasn't trying to run into Bucky; he wasn't tempting fate; he wasn't digging up the past.
He certainly wasn't stalking a former Avenger because he happened to be one of the last living connections to a life Peter could barely think of without a stab of grief so intense it felt like a physical pain.
Peter stood and brushed his hands off on his shorts. "This is fine,” he said up to the tree overhead, frowning up at its familiar branches. The statement sounded unconvincing even to him.
He'd spent six years avoiding his past out of fear of reliving it, and what had it bought him? A semblance of a life, an empty apartment, friends who didn't know all of him, a job he didn't hate but sure didn't love. Was that enough? Was being Spider-Man enough to fill the void Peter Parker carried around?
Would he be out here, looking for a glimpse of those familiar shoulders if it were?
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