CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
There's Always Tomorrow

━━━━━━🕷━━━━━━

A DISCUSSION QUESTION THAT often comes up for philosophers, psychologists, and drunk college students at three in the morning goes as thus: if you knew you were going to die tomorrow, what would you do? The idea is to make you wonder how many changes you would make from the life you have now if it would come to an end in only twenty-four hours. Have you been living in a loop, where every day is the same and your only respite comes from dropping into your bed? Have you been slogging through your existence on autopilot, going through the motions only mechanically, with no real thought behind it? And would this be something you wanted to change if you knew you would soon be exhaling your last breath?

Philosophical discussions aside, though, not many people are fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on who you ask) to know when their last day is going to be. They believe they have so much time they can bury themselves in it, throw it around, waste it. At least, right until the rogue car going one too many miles above the speed limit comes barreling into them while they're crossing the street, or their heart decides that this is the day their bad diet catches up to them. One minute, they're here. The next minute, they aren't.

Cecelia Olivier was one example.

The day before she (and quite a lot of other people, too; more than could be comprehended by any one individual without the magnitude or mind power of a Celestial) died, she wasn't staring at the ceiling and being consumed with the futileness of her existence (at least, no more than she usually did). She didn't hug her family members extra tight, take a day off school, or visit places she'd never thought to explore before. She didn't breathe in as much air as she could, oodles and oodles of it; didn't go for walks in the forest and surround herself completely with nature. She didn't appreciate the uniqueness of each individual that walked past her in the street, all of them with rich inner lives as vivid as her own.

Instead, she did the same thing she'd been doing most days for the past year and a half: tinkering in Tony Stark's personal lab.

Located in the Avengers Compound in upstate New York, the lab was, if Cecelia was being honest, a complete marvel. It was a far cry from the space she'd previously worked in, a gritty warehouse where everything was homemade. Here, Cecelia quite literally had anything and everything money could buy, donated by a billionaire with enough in his pocket to purchase the Moon. Robot assistants—real robot assistants, not mechanical arms that took twenty minutes to maneuver with a remote control—scurried to and from her lab station, fetching the materials she required (well... most of the time. DUM-E's name wasn't exactly a coincidence). The tools here were the real deal, not whatever her uncle could purchase for the cheapest price. The materials were practically endless—Cecelia had worked with vibranium before. She never had to worry about dumpster diving to get what she needed.

To make things even better, she wasn't alone. In the old warehouse, she used to spend hours by herself at her station with only the music pumping through her headphones keeping her company. But in Mr. Stark's lab, she could wheel herself on her rolling chair over to his station or Peter's to ask them about a design choice, or a calculation even she was having difficulty puzzling out. And in the rare case that both of them were busy, she always had F.R.I.D.A.Y—Mr. Stark's AI that had been hardwired into every inch of the Avengers Compound—to consult.

So, here Cecelia was, twenty-four hours before she died, goggles over her eyes and her hands encased in gloves. Grease was smeared upon the lab coat she wore over her Cage The Elephant shirt (unlike Mr. Stark, she actually cared about getting things dirty) and her hair was pulled into a haphazard ponytail. Back In The Saddle by Aerosmith played through F.R.I.D.A.Y's speakers, her hands were severely cramping up, and she'd shifted from sitting like a normal person to becoming a kind of goblin on her chair.

"I've almost finished, old man," she called out, spinning once in a circle. The world before her—the clustered space she now spent every Thursday in—blurred. Her ponytail tickled the back of her neck. "What about you?"

"Way ahead of you, slowpoke," Tony Stark responded, standing up from his own station. He stretched out his back, sending a series of pops down his spine, and pretended to yawn. "Seriously, Olivier, I've been asleep over there for the past ten minutes."

Cecelia raised a particular finger at him, and he clutched his chest in the exact spot his arc reactor used to reside. "You did not. You were just swearing at DUM-E two minutes ago."

"That's actually true, Mr. Stark!" A chipper voice rang out from another corner of the room, and the rumble of wheels announced that Peter Parker had scooted his way over. His goggles were pushed up on his forehead, sending his hair sticking up in all directions, and his lab coat was open, revealing yet another corny T-shirt (Do I know any jokes about sodium? Na). His face was flushed, and there was just a smidgen of oil on his jaw. He managed to look both stupid and amiable at the same time. "I heard you! You know, I'm not sure May wants me to be around someone with such bad language."

He was completely serious, which made Cecelia snort. Peter was just so... polite. He was probably a lot of parents' dreams—minus the whole Spider-Man thing—with his excellent manners, willingness to hold doors for strangers, and relatively clean mouth. He'd told Cecelia that it had been his aunt and uncle that had raised him that way. Cecelia had shot back that he had the perks of being an only child.

Mr. Stark levelled a glare at Peter. "Whose side are you on, kid?"

Peter shrugged.

Cecelia suppressed a smile—she was not some sort of grinning dope—and looked back down to her work. If she moved a few wires here, and rerouted the circuit here...

"Give me two minutes, tops," she said, fingers moving quickly despite their fatigue. Back In The Saddle changed to Highway to Hell by AC/DC (Peter still thought it was Led Zeppelin), and Dum-E nearly knocked over a shelf. Mr. Stark leaped to his feet, practically tearing out his hair.

Even though it had only been a year and a half since Cecelia had officially started the Stark Internship—something she'd originally thought would just be a cover for superhero activity (which... yeah. She was technically a superhero now)—as she sat there, it was almost as if she'd gone through today a thousand times. Not that she minded. She genuinely enjoyed being here, even when Peter wasn't around. It managed to fill up the void in her life that her departure from Richard's company had left.

Still, if she'd known that it was the day before she died, perhaps she'd be interested in changing things up.

"Whatever you say, Olivier," Mr. Stark responded. "I'll be over here, resting my old, tired eyes while you do that."

Cecelia snorted.

It was... weird, to say the least, having such a casual camaraderie with Tony fucking Stark. Especially since both Richard and history had taught her to hate him. He was a billionaire who'd inherited a weapons development company, known to be someone who slept around and partied a little too hard (and here, Cecelia thought specifically about the party in which he'd famously pissed in his suit and nearly destroyed his Malibu mansion). Sure, he was Iron Man, superhero extraordinaire, the one that had technically saved the lives of her parents and siblings when he'd flown that nuke into the wormhole (Cecelia had been in Orlando at the time, watching everything on the shitty television in the living room of her latest foster home). And sure, he was making leaps in the clean energy department, but he was the reason that her uncle and Toomes had been out of a job.

(That had been back before Cecelia knew they'd turned down the services offered to them, of course.)

But now... well, it had been the natural progression of things, hadn't it? Tony Stark had offered her an internship solely based on what Peter had told him about her and what he'd seen in a brief meeting at a police station. That had led her to afterschool sessions every Thursday—which was a lot more reliable than Richard's impulsive text messages—in his personal lab. When you were one of three people in a confined space together—Peter had been invited, too, even after turning down Mr. Stark's offer to be in the Avengers—you were bound to get closer.

It was still super damn surreal, though.

Then again, so was Cecelia's friendship with Peter. They'd started off as enemies who hadn't even known each other's identities. Back then, they'd just been strangers behind masks doing everything in their power to sabotage each other's plans.

Things had happened, though, and identities had been revealed, and now... well, Cecelia wouldn't call herself closer to Peter than she was to Christine and Alex, but he was her only confidant in all things Phantom. His aunt may have figured out that he was Spider-Man—probably because he'd put on his suit with the door to his room open—but Cecelia had kept her identity a strict secret from her own family. Not because she didn't trust them, but because she wasn't ready to tell them yet. Richard may have been long since locked away in prison, but some of his words still wafted into Cecelia's mind at the worst opportunities.

So, when it was something related to either patrols or superpowers, Cecelia went to Peter (and occasionally Ned). She could just shoot him a text, and he'd be outside her window in a minute, waiting for her to leap through the glass in order to meet him.

It was... nice. And strange. But then again, Cecelia's life had been strange since the day the West River Sioux Reservation exploded and killed her entire family.

Huffing out a relieved breath, Cecelia connected the last wire, and the motherboard sparked back to life. When her eyes darted down to her watch, she'd found she'd underestimated herself when she'd said two minutes—only a minute and a quarter had gone by.

"Done," she announced triumphantly. "Here's your damn board, Mr. Stark."

"Yeah, yeah, whatever." Mr. Stark headed over to her station to pick it up. He held it up to the light, inspecting it for flaws. His shoulders slumped when he realized there were none. "All right, fine. Good job, kid."

"Yeah, I know."

Peter laughed. "She's going to be faster than you one day, Mr. Stark!"

"Just you wait," Cecelia said.

(And Tony would. Five years had never seemed so long before.)

Peter stood up suddenly. "I don't know about you two, but I am hungry," he said. "Do you think we could order some food, Mr. Stark?"

"Didn't you eat two footlong Subway sandwiches like, an hour ago?" Cecelia asked.

"Yeah, but that was an hour ago."

"I'm gonna have to agree with Nyota Uhara over here," Mr. Stark said. "Just because you've got a freaky metabolism doesn't mean we all do. Us normal folk are stuffed as turkeys on Thanksgiving Day."

"You know, I actually don't mind that nickname," Cecelia said. "She's cool."

"Check the mini fridge," Mr. Stark said. "We might have something in there."

"Okay!" Peter shifted past Dum-E and pulled off his gloves. Cecelia pulled her goggles up and took a sip from the can of Coca-Cola perched at her station. She listened to him rifle through the fridge's contents and come out with a bag of sandwiches. They were probably meant to last a few days, but Peter just tore it open and started scarfing them down one by one.

It was just like a thousand days before it, so naturally, Cecelia expected a thousand more. She finished her drink and flexed out her fingers, checking her watch again. She still had an hour left before she and Peter went on patrol. She might as well use that time to tinker with one of Mr. Stark's old suits again.

She wouldn't finish tonight, but that was okay. She would always have next week.

"SO, ARE YOU EXCITED for the field trip tomorrow?" Peter asked, swinging over the streets of Queens like a bullet. Cecelia, the thrusters on her boots fully activated, was keeping a steady pace beside him, though likely exerting herself far less. Mr. Stark definitely knew what he was doing when he built the Iron Man suit.

"I mean, I guess," Cecelia responded, clicking through the settings on her stunners. That had been a recent upgrade—the ability to control the power. Sure, sometimes she wanted to shoot someone halfway across New York, but other times, it would do well to just knock them out. It depended on the kind of enemy. "It's just a museum, though. It's not like we're going back to DC."

"Are you kidding? It's MoMA! One of the most influential museums of modern art in the world! I went there with my aunt and uncle when I was younger, but I haven't been back since. I'm really excited."

"You get excited over everything. You got excited last week when that house caught on fire."

"It gave us something to do!"

"Yeah, yeah, whatever."

The car that they were currently tailing—the one police reports had accused of going over sixty miles above the speed limit and firing off the occasional shot—roared to the right, and Cecelia and Peter followed. Perhaps they should have been more focused on the actual chase they were currently engaged in, but hurtling through the air in silence wasn't as cool as it was in the movies. Unless they put on a kickass playlist—which was a bad idea, given that Cecelia had once nearly lost an earbud while flying—there was nothing to do but talk.

"All right, let's cut this guy off," Peter said. "CeCe, if you go left and I go right, he'll only have Ocean Avenue to turn onto. Then he'll be reined in on both sides."

"Good idea," Cecelia said. Underneath her hood, she gave him a nod. She split off from him, going one way while he went the other. Through the earpiece fastened to her ear, Peter gave her a steady stream of directions—courtesy of Karen; Cecelia really needed to make her own AI soon—which she followed until she caught sight of the bright blue vehicle again. Like Peter had said, it had turned right onto Ocean Avenue. She sped up, continuing to follow it, waiting for the flash of red that announced Peter's arrival.

She didn't have to wait long. Peter came flying in quickly, swinging at top speed before taking a dive towards the car's front. He fell freely for a moment, picking himself up at the last possible second and swinging onto the hood. He landed in a crouch, and it didn't take long for the driver to roar to a stop, nearly bucking him off. Cecelia, sensing her moment, blasted her way over and dropped onto the back. While Peter webbed up the tires, she began intangible, slipping into the backseat and crossing her legs.

The driver, an older white man with a potbelly, combed back grey hair, and a slightly lumpy nose, moved to open his door, gun clutched in one hand. However, he only managed to brush the handle before two twin stunning beams burst free from Cecelia's wrist and hit him square in the back. He slumped over immediately.

"That was easy," she muttered. Then she reached across him to unlock the door.

The douchebag wasn't even wearing a seatbelt, so he fell out. Figures.

Peter, still on the car's hood, noticed that Cecelia had finished and leaped down. "Huh. I expected that to be harder than it was."

"I guess after you defeat a man with razor-sharp wings that calls himself 'the Vulture', everything else is a piece of cake," Cecelia replied.

"Did you at least say something snappy to him?"

"Like what?"

"I don't know. 'I don't know if you ever learned to read, but the speed limit here is fifty-five miles per hour!'"

"That's dumb."

"Like you have any better ideas."

"I don't. It's not in my nature to make friendly conversation with literal criminals."

"You're so boring," Peter moaned, then shot another burst of webbing at the man on the ground, plastering him down. The wailing of sirens that had been steadily occurring in the background got closer, and he tilted his head. "Do you think we should stay, or get out of here and leave a note?"

"Leave a note," Cecelia responded. "It's not like we just saved another coffee shop. We're not going to get free drinks if we stick around."

He tilted his head. Under his mask, Cecelia imagined him grinning. "Was that a joke?"

"Huh?"

"'Stick around'?"

Cecelia rolled her eyes. "In your dreams, Spider-Boy. You got any Sticky-Notes left?"

"Yeah. A whole pack. I was supposed to use them to annotate Wuthering Heights, but whatever."

"You're reading Wuthering Heights? We're reading The Kite Runner."

"Ugh, that sounds so much better."

"Yeah. Far fewer white people."

The background sirens were now accompanied by flashes of red and blue, and Cecelia realized that if they wanted to leave, they should do it now. "Okay. Sticky-Note, Spider-Man, now."

"Right."

They scribbled down a quick message—Caught the guy you were after! -Spider-Man and Phantom—and took off right as the police arrived. Laughing, they drifted over Queens, getting higher and higher until the passersby below shrunk to mere specks. Peter ran along the side of a building, then flipped into the air and caught himself with a web. Cecelia swung herself through a couple poles, becoming solid only when her boots began to sputter.

She could tell that a few people below had gotten their phones out at the sight of the vigilantes, capturing the sights before them to either share with their friends or the internet. In fact, a few months ago, a sister account to Spidermansightings on Instagram had formed—Phantomsightings. Already, it had amassed nearly as many followers as the original account.

Even though it had been a year and a half, Cecelia still hadn't completely gotten used to being a sort-of superhero yet. The idea of people actually liking her and relying on her was an idea that she would have never dreamed of as a fourteen-year-old, when she'd been nothing but Richard's secret weapon. Now, though, whenever she went out in costume, she was treated by the people of New York as a hero.

Sometimes, people talked about her in school. When there was a particularly intense mission she and Peter went on—like that time they'd stopped a man in a rhino suit from robbing a bank—Cecelia's peers—sometimes even her friends—would trade stories, speaking in hushed voices like they knew Phantom and Spider-Man were walking behind them. It was such a contrast to who she'd used to be that sometimes she had to do a double take.

Still... even though Cecelia would deny it if you asked her, there was a part of her that loved the attention. No wonder stuttering Peter Parker turned into a smooth wisecracker every time he put on the mask—Cecelia's anonymity gave her leagues more confidence than she'd ever had before. Sure, her anxiety still got its claws around her on occasion, but most of the time, Cecelia managed to get through conversations with either the police or a fan without breaking a sweat.

Though that might have been because of her new therapist, too. Dr. Patel, who also happened to be the therapist of Mr. Stark and Pepper Potts, was a no-nonsense woman who had barely blinked when Cecelia had confessed everything about her past (she hadn't been worried about her identity leaking. Mr. Stark had gotten Dr. Patel to sign so many NDAs that if she even thought about telling the world who Phantom was, she'd spend most of her life behind bars). She'd forced Cecelia to confront the truths she didn't want to admit and confront the guilt she harboured about the explosion in the West River Sioux Reservation. And she'd made Cecelia run through so many practice social situations that it was just a matter of memorizing the script laid out for her now.

So there was therapy, lab sessions, patrol, and late-night conversations with Peter Parker. It was such a new life for Cecelia, but honestly, she didn't mind it. In fact, it was easier to wake up in the morning, now.

"Do we have time for anything else?" she asked Peter, running on the roof of a lower skyscraper and leaping into the air again. The thrusters on her boots roared to life, picking her up in moments. "Mission-wise, I mean. We're definitely getting coffee and sandwiches tonight."

"Curfew's in an hour," Peter said. "So yeah, we've got time. Karen, what are we looking at?"

He went quiet for a moment while his AI responded. Cecelia spread her arms wide, a bird taking the sky as her own. The wind waved the hood of her jumpsuit.

"Okay," Peter said eventually. "Apparently there's a drug deal in process a few blocks away."

"Hard drugs?" Cecelia asked. She wasn't going to send anyone to jail for, like, marijuana. There were already too many Black men serving life sentences for that.

"Yeah. Something called Third Eye. It's new. According to Karen, it's a pill that causes hallucinations, abnormally high blood pressure, and liver failure. Not something we want to be getting out there."

"Perfect," Cecelia said. "Let's bust some dealers, then."

THE CLOCK WAS TICKING. Every second that went by brought Cecelia one step closer to tomorrow, to the battle that would lead to her death. To the moment where she would stumble, then lurch, then disappear, fragments of her body flaking off until nothing but ash remained.

Still, Cecelia didn't know. Not that the universe would be halved, not that her family would be halved. She didn't know that everything that she took for granted today would be something she'd lose tomorrow.

No one knew. Otherwise they would have done everything in their power to prevent the catastrophe before it happened. Not after.

So this was how Cecelia spent her last night alive: she arrived home a minute before her curfew, face flushed and eyes bright, stomach full on her usual order from Delmar's Deli-Grocery. Mom and Dad were watching a documentary about Madagascar's wildlife with Jules. They invited her to join, but Cecelia declined, citing her homework as an explanation. It wasn't a lie—she really did have to finish reading chapter fifteen of The Kite Runner and work on her Physics assignment—but she could have done that tomorrow, too. She just preferred getting ahead of things.

(But if she'd known, she would have stayed. She would have snuggled in beside her parents like she had when she was eleven, finally used to calling them 'Mom' and 'Dad'; would have breathed in the scents of Dad's aftershave and Mom's favourite perfume. She would have planted kisses all over Jules's cheeks, even though he was nine years old now and therefore too old to be babied.)

Then she passed the kitchen, where Alex was playing The Sims 4 on his laptop and eating pretzels. He actually took his headphones off to greet her, and she ruffled his hair, grinning at the annoyed reaction it elicited. There were perks of being one month older than him.

(If she'd known, she would have sat down beside him, stealing his pretzels, and watched him make all of the Avengers—even the war criminals—in Sims form. She would have leaned her head on his shoulder, even though she'd always thought that was stupid, and laughed until she cried when Mr. Stark and Captain America accidentally fell in love.)

She headed into her room to change into her pajamas and settle into bed. Eva was there, watching a movie on her phone, barely suppressing her giggles. Cecelia didn't greet her—she was always so moody when she got distracted—and just grabbed her pajamas and headed into the bathroom.

(If she'd known, she would have slid in beside Eva, even though she hadn't done that since Eva was eight and had a nightmare, and just held her little sister, realizing how lucky she was to be so close to her.)

When she emerged, with her teeth freshly brushed and her face scrubbed until it was red, Cecelia sat down at her desk and pulled out her copy of The Kite Runner. Pulling her headphones over her ears, she turned on her study playlist—which mainly consisted of classical music—and dove into the story, taking notes where it was needed.

(Because she didn't know. It was just another night, after all. Not the final one before her life as she knew it would come to an end.) 

━━━━━━🕷━━━━━━

HAVEN: me when i finally make cecelia happy and then rip it all away from her lol

uhh. this is gonna be way shorter than act one. we're getting right into the action next chapter! featuring the DILF dr. strange (no, i won't apologize), "uh, he's from space. he came here to steal a necklace from a wizard", and tony being a dad to cecelia!! i hope you're excited!

thanks for reading!! <333