Pete and Pete
"Yeah he does, I mean it's no wonder people can't really get good pictures of the guy." Peter huffed just a little, but then that had always been the point, especially in the beginning, when he was still young and figuring things out. He didn't want people to track him down, and find out that Spider-Man was actually a teenage Peter Parker. So yeah, the fast had been important, and no pictures also important. But then of course he'd figured out that he could use that. "The trick is to know what he's going to do and make sure you've got it all set up before hand so you can really get the timing just right." He explained, this felt a little bit like Peter-101 teaching some younger version of himself how to be himself without actually spelling it out for him? And he really hoped that this Peter did a better job of being Peter than he ever had, but you know - they all learned right?
"Back home? I was in the uh... volunteering business?" He said fishing for the right way to describe it, because maybe it was a cruel sort of thing not to have just walked right up to Peter and said 'hi, my name is Peter Parker and I am also Spider-Man, but older' or something like that, but now that he hadn't he was kind of committed to keeping it up. "Here though? Mostly it's just keeping things going at the bar, makings sure we've got stock to keep things going, and of course cooking cleaning, no one warned me that running a business was gonna be so much work, but here I am." He held out his hands a little helplessly, like what can you do.
Peter got it eventually, figured out the connection and what he'd been talking about and apparently it was a lot for him.
But when Peter drew a blank about MJ it left him unsure about how to proceed with that, was there some kind of rule for that sort of thing? Did he tell Peter that in most of other universes he and MJ were sort of a thing? Or did he just.... not? Would that be influencing him too much? Was he going to have some other path? "Oh, oh no - no, no nothing happens to MJ." Peter said first, because regardless of how exactly he planned on handling that, it felt important that Peter know that wasn't one more thing for him to worry about. "She's just someone who is important to us, me and the other Peter's I've meet." He explained, he nearly mentioned that Gwen knew an MJ too but decided that might be one step too far. "You know? Like May and Ben. She's just in our orbit."
The thing was Peter had been in town for months now, getting close to a year which was kind of a horrifying thought if he inspected it a little too closely but there wasn't much to be done about that now. "So that - that didn't really happen where I'm from. The whole thing with Thanos," Because the name doesn't weigh as heavily on him, "We beat him, stopped him before he ever got the chance to do anything where I'm from. But he was different, it wasn't like where you're from, it was a different sort of fight." He didn't want Peter thinking they'd done something wrong, or that what happened to him could have been stopped because these dimensions didn't really work that way. "It's not always about fixing things," He told him gently, "Sometimes it's just about getting back up again, that's something we're good at. It's something in you, I know it doesn't feel like it right now, but this will get easier to carry."