End Note: I have had so much fun writing and posting this story. It's a little rough around the edges and you can tell it wasn't beta read, but I'm proud of it anyway. The community here was so interactive and thoughtful with the comments throughout that I know it improved the quality of the story. You all made me think about things from different directions that I might not have otherwise. So thanks for all the comments and questions and passionate reactions.

It is against the terms of service on this site to post an appendix, but there will be an appendix produced and put at the end of the AO3 copy of the story, mainly to discuss the Klyntar in more depth. If you really want a copy of the text of the appendix. PM me and I'm happy to send it to you.

Also, it would surprise me greatly if I didn't write in this universe again. There are a wealth of possible oneshots though I have no bunny for a full on multi-chartered sequel at this time.

Thanks for reading along!

Epilogue

Inside the Avengers compound in a familiar war room, an oblong table was still woefully understaffed. Tony Stark slouched low at the head of the table, his sunglasses in place, ensuring that the virtual conference members wouldn't be sure if he was actually conscious. He let them discuss the now defunct Sokovia Accords that had been struck down by legal challenge in all but two of the member nations. Tony sat up straighter and raised a hand, waving it back and forth until the virtual conference members noticed and stopped chattering. "Gentlemen, ladies, forgive me for interrupting, but I'd like to make a motion."

"I wasn't entirely sure you were awake, so why not," Secretary Ross commented from his video screen.

"Considering that the document that formed this committee was nullified by the U.S. Supreme Court, I move that we disband immediately. Call me when we pass new legislation or sign a new treaty that requires that I sit through more meetings." Stark's hand hovered over the disconnect button.

"You baffle me, Mr. Stark. You supported the Sokovia Accords from the beginning," Ross said. "As soon as they are in practice you obfuscate every issue. You don't know where the fugitive Avengers are though they escaped from lockdown with a set of security codes that should have been impossible for them to have. Of course you executed the mutated cannibal monster, but you never produced a corpse for the CDC to study. The anomaly on Benham Street was 'handled' but never actually explained."

"That sounds terrible. I suppose when you fill out my end of year evaluation, you'll have to mark me as unsatisfactory?" Tony disconnected the conference call.

Once he was behind closed doors and beyond the possibility of any prying eyes, he took off his glasses, his sports coat and clicked off a complex device about the size of a quarter that had been projecting a holographic disguise. Like flipping a light switch, Tony Stark became Bruce Banner. "F.R.I.D.A.Y. how is our project coming?" he asked, the vocoder still transforming his voice to Tony's. He scratched that device loose from his throat and coughed a couple of times. "Better."

"All projects have been suspended, Dr. Banner until Mr. Stark can be brought up to speed."

Bruce stumbled and turned a slow circle. "Tony is back? Seriously? Thank God. Where is he?"

"Mr. Stark is in the living quarters, having a meal. He is expecting you."

Rather than wait for the elevator, Bruce took the stairs. Tony Stark, prodigal billionaire, was seated at the table with an impressive spread of food, chicken and potato salad and a basket of rolls. From the look of him, he needed the calories. A few months in space and he looked like he'd lost twenty pounds. "Tony, you're back. You look terrible."

"Thanks, I feel pretty good. I watched the meeting. Your impersonation wasn't bad. If you're faster on the disconnect, Ross wouldn't have gotten that dig in at the end." Tony nodded to a seat. "Want some chicken? Space food was shit."

"Well, you know if you wanted more input on my impersonation, you might have given me a heads up that you were going to 'ask' me to do it." Bruce quietly filled his plate with food. "You're just lucky that I didn't have anywhere to be right this second."

"Thanks, not just for the impromptu impersonation," Tony said. "F.R.I.D.A.Y. has been filling me in on everything—the accords, the pardons."

"You said in your letter that you couldn't be objective and you didn't want to try, but that I should use my best judgement and handle the situation while you were gone. I assumed you meant the Avengers since you filled the dossier with all that information. For the record, the accords failed on their own. I just let the legal challenges follow their course." Bruce nervously attacked his meal, waiting to see if Tony was going to flip out over the decisions he had made in his name. Seeking pardons for the Avengers hadn't been a decision he came to lightly. He reviewed everything Tony had left and done a bit of investigating of his own and while he understood why Tony couldn't be objective, he had felt it was the right thing to do.

"You did what I asked you to. I already said thank you, but I don't want to talk about it." Tony took a long drink of water and smiled. "It's good to be home."

"What happened up there? Did the kid make it?" Bruce asked.

"The kid made it home. He gave me a few scares, but he's tough. Turns out that the symbiont that he bonded with is sort of parasitic royalty. It's very important to their race and incredibly difficult to find viable hosts for. Now that they're convinced he is a good host, Peter is suddenly the last unicorn. They tried to convince him to stay on a planet where they had stronger diplomatic ties, but Peter wanted to come home. No one argued, they just started working on making it safer for him. They sent a babysitter. She's an annoying shade of pink. We'll be babysitting the babysitter here. They're planning to make diplomatic overtures to humanity as soon as they can work out the political details."

"Okay, well humanity is so far from a unified group, that should be complicated," Bruce said.

"These space politicians have perfected complicated." Tony waved a chicken leg for emphasis. "We should have a few years before we hear from them. We spent two months in limbo with the galactic council while they interpreted conflicting laws and treaties to determine if the symbionts had broken any of ten dozen treaties in retrieving their children and displacing myself and Peter temporarily from Earth."

"They have treaties about Earth?" Bruce asked. "How are there treaties about Earth when we aren't active in the galaxy?"

"Oh Bruce, we're a protected species, intelligent enough to allow to develop but not yet developed enough to culturally survive contact with the rest of the space faring civilizations. There are races that don't care and would love to just burn us to the ground and use our resources, but the ones who are protecting us are powerful and have powerful friends, primarily the Asgardians. Remind me to thank Point Break next time I see him."

"Where were our powerful friends when the Chitauri tried to take us out? I mean Thor was here, but he's one man," Bruce asked.

Tony laughed. "Funny you should mention that. I looked into it, and the Chitauri are a locust species. They don't follow any treaties or take on allies. So they're functionally able to fly in, wreck a world and get out before the galactic council decides how to handle them most of the time. If we hadn't handled the invasion ourselves, we would have been swimming in help in a month or six."

"That fast. I'm suddenly not impressed with our powerful allies."

It wasn't a complete shock when May unlocked the door to her apartment and found Peter sitting at the kitchen table. She had fooled herself dozens of times, thinking she saw him around the apartment or the city streets. She had once even run up to a kid walking along listening to a pair of white earbuds, certain that it was him. So she closed her eyes to give her traitorous mind and eyes a moment to stop lying to her.

"May?"

Her eyes flew wide and May had her nephew in a tight hug in three strides. "You're back, thank God."

"Yeah." The hug was easy and reassuring. Once it ended, Peter didn't know what to say. "Are you angry with me?"

"Right now, I'm just glad you're alive." May pushed Peter back to his seat and settled across from him. "I want to hear it, everything. That was our deal right. You follow the rules unless its life or death to do so and when you come home, you tell me about what happened. Is Cuddles still with you?"

Peter nodded. "Cuddles is still here and I understand him a lot better than I did before." He laid a hand flat on the table and generated passable tiny avatars of Greer and Cuddles. "We met an old black symbiont, Cuddles' dad actually. He showed us what it means to be the black symbiont and host for their society."

"This old symbiont showed you?" May asked. "Don't keep me in suspense. What is your special role?"

"The black symbionts are all about history. Humans write books and teach history in classes. The symbionts don't write their history down. When they have a child, that egg has the memory of its ancestors locked inside it. Those memories wake up as they get older. Most of their family lines have forgotten the distant past, only remembering things that were most useful to them from life to life. The black symbionts remember it all, more than two hundred generations of memories. Cuddles and I will unlock them over time." While talking, Peter had generated a small forest of symbionts and hosts, not true representations of the memories he would awaken and the forms they had taken in life, but an illustrative imagining. Peter had always had a vivid imagination. "It's literally living history."

"That sounds overwhelming," May let the little sculpted Cuddles walk onto her hand. "You're just sixteen. I would have thought, they would have taken Cuddles back if he was so important, given him to someone older and better equipped, someone who chose to be a host. Peter it sounds like too much to ask of you."

"It's not. The symbionts live life in two phases, the first is the host's time. That would be now for us. I get to be a teenager and go back to high school and hang out with my friends. I even get to be Spider-Man. A human has never been a Klyntar host before, but they estimated that the host time for me will be a couple of centuries anyway. That's fair, right?" May didn't look convinced so Peter told her more of the truth than he'd planned. "They could have taken Cuddles and he would have been fine, but it would have killed me. I didn't want to go crazy and become a monster like the white symbiont, so I faced that judgement knowing it was be found capable of this bond or die trying."

May looked sick to her stomach at that. "If you had died, I don't know what I would have done."

"We got lucky," Peter said.

"No, those symbionts took one look at you and saw what I've been seeing for years. Peter Parker, you are an exceptional young man. I knew that when you were six years old, before any old spider bit you or symbiont bonded to you. So you get cleaned up and clean this up." May gestured to the small army of tiny symbionts he had molded. "We're celebrating tonight. I'll cook anything you want or we can go out. What do you think?"

"Spaghetti would be really great." Peter had reabsorbed the fully animated symbiont army in a matter of seconds and headed for the bathroom. "Something chocolate for desert?"

"You never ate a sweet before Cuddles came along," May said. "What does he want?"

"Really, anything chocolate would make him happy." Peter paused and groaned. "I'm going to have to repeat junior year. I missed the rest of it."

"Who's fault is that?" May asked.

Hands freshly scrubbed, Peter came back to the kitchen. Without prompting, he pulled the lettuce and vegetables for a salad out of the refrigerator and started putting them together. May brought Peter up to speed on what had been happening on Earth while he was gone, at least as much as she knew about it. "The Decathlon team didn't make it back to nationals this year. Ned told me it was a private school in Westchester that knocked them out."

"No way." Peter shot May a quizzical look. "Not that school?"

"It's a small world," May said.

By the time dinner was on the table and they were eating, it felt almost normal, or at least the new normal they had figured out before the field trip to space. Peter helped clear the table and wash the dishes. Once everything was in its place, he held up his phone and nodded toward his bedroom. "I really need to call Ned and MJ so they know I'm alive. Do you mind if I go do that?"

Of course Peter had returned to the planet, plugged in his cell phone and then greeted his aunt. He was a teenager. It wasn't until she retreated to bed after watching the late news, that May found the present Peter had left her. A simple box covered in plain brown paper, she opened it up. Inside was a small black bracelet with a shiny stone mounted in it. A folded sheet of lined paper covered in Peter's neat crawling handwriting accompanied the odd jewelry.

Dear May,

Worrying you is not something I take pleasure in and I'm really sorry for all the stuff I've put you through. You have always been wonderful to me and this present is hopefully going to help you not have to worry quite so much.

Cuddles and I are learning new things every day and we perfected this skill a couple of weeks ago. The bracelet is polymer plastic that should last forever, but the part that looks like a stone is actually a tiny bit of Cuddles. No matter where we are, be it Queens or somewhere across the Galaxy, that piece of Cuddles will always be in contact with us. If you're worried, just touch it and you'll know that we're alive and if we're okay.

Love,

Peter (and Cuddles)

May slid the bracelet on and tentatively touched the shiny part. Like the other times she had communicated directly with the symbiont, Cuddles showed her an image, Peter sitting on his top bunk having a group call with Ned and MJ.

It was just like Peter to try to fix what was broken in the world whether it was a lost pet or an alien invasion. His Aunt May worried about him when he was beyond contact, so he found a way to make sure they would never be truly beyond contact again.

May crawled into bed, still worried and a bit unsettled by everything Peter had taken on as Cuddles' host, but also relived to have her family home and back under the same roof. Hugging her pillow, May fell asleep thinking about Peter's future. Her Peter was going to live for centuries. He was going to return to space and be the keeper of an entire civilization's history. But first he was going to be sixteen and go to college and have friends. He would get a chance to live a human life.

If May had anything to say about it, it was going to be a full one.

Additional End Note: As of 6-16-18 Sequel in progress.