Ben takes a breath. "I want you to know," he says, "that's okay. And if you're feeling sad, you can tell me… you can tell me before it gets bad. My feelings won't be hurt. In fact, it would make me really happy to know you can trust me. Would that be okay?"
Peter pretends to consider the question for a minute, but really he's just biting down until the razor in his throat goes away and he's able to smile, just a little.
"You're a weird guy, Uncle Ben."
Ben hugs Peter to his side.
"Sure am, Pete."
Peter sort of expects Ben to ease off after their talk, but instead he digs in.
"Are you happy?" he asks, when Peter is putting the final touches on his science fair project.
"Are you happy?" he asks, when Peter emerges, red-eyed, from a particularly long shower.
"Are you happy?" he asks, nearly every day when he arrives home from work.
At first, Peter just shrugs. Ben never pushes, at least not in the moment. But the question always comes back, and after a while, without thinking about it, Peter starts to answer honestly.
"I don't know," he says over dinner, because he isn't sure why the smell of mac and cheese makes him want to run to his room (he will figure out, later, that it's because his mom only made mac and cheese when he was sick, or for his birthday).
"Not today," he says, on a day when Flash stuffed him in a locker after gym, even though Ned rescued him pretty much instantly.
"No," he says, on the first anniversary of his parents' death.
He says it a lot around that time.
But the anniversary passes. Things keep moving. He grows out of all of his old clothes, but he discovers he really likes the ones Ben buys as replacements, which are covered in science puns. Flash continues to torment him—after one particularly illuminating health class, he dubs him "Penis Parker," and unfortunately it sticks—but he and Ned get closer, enough that Ned, whose mom is strict, as he puts it, starts spending most afternoons at the Parker apartment. Ben gets better at cooking spaghetti, graduates to burgers and, eventually, can even make a slightly-blackened chicken parm.
"I'm not so bad," says Peter, when Ben asks after he wins an award for his essay on Bridge to Terabithia.
"I think so," he says, on his first day of middle school, and Peter tries to pretend he doesn't notice how hard Uncle Ben is trying to control his expression as he waves goodbye.
Over winter break that year, Ben takes him to Rockefeller center to see the tree, and to ice skate. Peter's never been—when he was little he would get sick every time he stayed outside for more than fifteen minutes in the winter. But he's grown a lot in the last year, even though he's still the smallest kid in his class, and he's only had a few colds since summer. He's hardly had to use his inhaler in the last six months, either, and it's this improvement that makes Ben take the risk, though he still bundles Peter up until he looks like nothing so much as the Stay-Puft Marshmallow man from Ghostbusters (one of their favorites) before taking him out.
Peter is… not a great ice-skater. Ben, who played hockey in college, tries his best to coax him through the basics, holding his hands and dragging him upright every time he stumbles, but, unsurprisingly, the general gracelessness with which Peter lives the rest of his life extends to the ice rink, and by the time they break for lunch he's covered in a symphony of little bruises in spite of his fifteen layers of clothing.
"We can go home," Ben offers, approaching Peter where he's waiting on a bench and handing him a cocoa and a hot dog. "I promise I won't be offended if 'Olympic figure skater' isn't written in the stars for you."
Peter has been looking at the tree, which has to be five stories high and is glittering with gold and silver tinsel, brilliant even though it isn't lit. His gaze goes to a family on the ice as he takes the food. The dad is skating backward, dragging his son around while his mom and sister cheer from the sidelines. Me and Ben looked like that, Peter thinks, and even though there's no mom and sister there to clap for him, it doesn't make him want to cry. In fact, it makes him smile.
He looks at his uncle as Ben takes a seat next to him, puffing into his mittened hands.
"Hey, Ben?"
"Yeah, bud?"
"I'm really happy."
He doesn't mind when Ben looks away, coughing groughly. He knows, finally, that tears aren't always bad.
Uncle Ben was married once.
Peter remembers Ben's wife, who was his aunt for a while. He remembers that for a long time she would come with them to all the carnivals and movies, and they would all laugh when either she or Ben tried to make dinner because they were both such bad cooks. He remembers that Ben smiled a lot when she was around—more than he smiles now, even though things are getting easier since the accident. Peter liked her a lot too, but she was gone before Peter came to live with Ben.