Chapter Text
Peter Parker travels through time. He spends seconds in hours of the past and it’s as disorientating as it is daunting. There’s a thrill to it and so much riding on this that it should overwhelm his senses, but it doesn’t.
There’s a list of names, every second a new one gets added to it when he blinks or breathes. He doesn’t even know them all – they’re just people taken too soon. They’re people who others have lost and have started to grow around the shape of; hurt and healing. Each and every one of them is important.
There’s a list of names in the list.
He thinks of Betty.
He thinks of MJ’s parents.
He thinks of Gayle.
He thinks of India’s parents.
He thinks of all the people who worked and lived on the same block as Rich.
There’s so many names, but he keeps coming back to one. He cannot stop thinking about it. He’s back in space. He’s with Nebula and Rhodey and he’s terrified they’ll get stuck there again. His suit is designed for space. There’s plenty of oxygen and they have a route back thanks to the Pym particles if all else fails. Still, his breath catches. He hiccups silently, trying to remember where and when he really is, trying not to be scared.
Peter steps away from the cockpit, moving to the window to stare at the expanse of space. It doesn’t feel as cold this time around, but the hairs on his arm raise, goosebumps forming on his skin. His senses know this isn’t where he’s meant to be.
In retrospect, he should have listened to that.
He closes his eyes just for a brief moment, thinks of that list and thinks of her name.
Out the window, they pass planets he knows absolutely nothing about. Purple and blue hues intertwine, speckled in the distance by stars and other worlds. Closer to them there's dust and particles dancing together creating grainy filter to the view. Peter wishes he had his camera. He’s got his suit, it’s recording constantly for the sake of prosperity, but there is a catharsis that would only come from pressing the shutter button himself and how methodical he’d need to be to get the framing right.
Peter has always been running, trying to make up for something or to get back lost time. He’s late and plays catch-up. He’s constantly a step behind his friends and where a lot of people thought he would be. That only spurs him on to try and run faster – he slips up more.
He’s lucky enough that he’s got people willing to help him keep pace. Those people who are willing to love him enough to help him get back up, they’re patient. They try and teach him the art of slowing down, but he’s yet to really get it. There’s always too much to do, but sometimes – on rare occasions – Peter finds a way to take a moment.
He doesn’t have his camera with him now, but he stares out into the dark and takes the time to envision himself lining up the shot. He double checks the framing and the angle, the aperture. He breathes out slowly, imagining himself steadying his hold and taking the shot.
Click.
Peter is still in space, but that imaginary flash in his mind switches the scene before him. Gentle waves rolling towards a wooden Dock, spring sun cutting between the sparse clouds, warming the water and the grass. There’s chatter in the distance, life continuing on despite the loss. Beneath the water, it's dark and murky. The temperature shift sharp and sudden, forcing him to take a deep breath when he resurfaces and focuses on the woman sat at the end of the Dock, feet in the water, enjoying the sun and the quiet. Her head is turned towards the light, eyes closed and breathing.
She looks happy. Despite everything. She’s happy. Or at least trying to be.
In the present, he’s reliving the worst day of his life, facing the man that infected his city and brought the worst out in Peter. He’s trying to outrun the man that took his early twenties and the young adulthood of his friends and twisted it into something they felt they had to endure rather than experience, beat him at his own game before he can even think of playing it. He has do many things going around in his head that it’s a little murky until he thinks of that list, until he gets back to her name again.
MJ.
He is still scared and they are still doing the impossible and the battle is still far from over, but he borrows a little of her bravery and trust. He thinks of May and her perseverance through , not just this but all of it – from the loss of his parents to Peter’s decision to travel through time. He rolls his shoulders back and lifts his head.
He’s focused. He’s ready. He’s got a date to keep. He can tell her all about this view then.
They get the stone.
They get back on home.
They’re so close to the finish line.
Peter’s senses are still screaming at him. He blames it on the fact that spider bite let him do a lot of great things but even radioactive mutations weren't prepared for quantum displacement.
He finds that he can’t stop looking at Nebula.
He should have paid attention to that more.
Peter doesn’t want to think of the fight. He doesn’t want to recall the battle for Earth and how they played keep away with the only beacon of hope for the universe.
He doesn’t want to think about how he watched his childhood heroes be battered over and over again. The anger and fear that he’d been trying so desperately to keep on lock leaking out, his punches breaking bone and parts completely gone from his memory because of how desperately brutal he got.
He doesn’t want to think about how he should have seen it all coming or seen the signposts to Tony’s decision long before he made it. He doesn’t want to think about what might have happened if he had been the one to snap his fingers instead. It left Tony weak, barely alive, his body a network of seared tissue, his suit melted and gone.
It’s all he can think about when he’s rushed into emergency care. His wounds treated and kept away from Tony while Pepper holds back her fear and tries to think of their child. Rhodey makes a promise to tell Peter if there’s any changes or updates. His eyes are just as haunted. He’s scared too.
They saved the world.
There are twice as many people on hand now to help Tony, help the survivors of the battle and treat them all.
They are all scared and confused, but they’re doing their part for now.
Throughout the makeshift medbay that’s been erected in the far side of the compound, damage from the fight and the chaos but structurally sound enough to keep the wounded, Peter can hear phones ringing, sobs and heavy breaths as people compose themselves.
Just as before, this isn’t over.
The world is saved. People are still scared. There is so much he couldn’t do so much he should have done. Only a few remain that he actually can do.
One month later
“What about this?” MJ tilts her tablet a little more for him to see. His head tilting as he looks at it. She’s still getting used to drawing digitally. He’s not even sure that she's allowed to have the software installed on it considering it’s from her work. They won’t care. Their office has only just reopened and even then only half the staff have gone back in. MJ’s doing three days a week for the meantime.
It’s a hobby she’s picked up in the last couple weeks.
Something new.
Her parents and her sister, still cramped in MJ’s tiny studio, living on top of one another, can ask about it. A brief reprieve from trying to catch them up on the last two years.
Something new.
They can’t go back and pretend the time they missed never happened. They can’t recreate what they had either. Not yet. There’s still too much pain and confusion around their return, they’re still struggling to find their feet.
They’re some of the lucky ones. MJ had barely touched the money she’d made from the house sale, there’s still a little bit of their old accounts left because she’d managed to get access to them. Financially, they’ll be okay while the government handles distributing support. However, the housing market is a mess. People have been displaced and for all the empty lots, it’s still chaos trying to get people in.
MJ doesn’t mind sharing her space for the meantime. For the first week she’d been glad to, hardly leaving her apartment and sleeping on her couch pressed against her sister’s side. Now, it’s claustrophobic and packed, the initial wave has broken and she needs the space she’d been living with for so long again.
She sleeps with Peter most nights, heading back to her place in the morning for breakfast with them. It's a rocky schedule in a weird world.
MJ’s trying something new to cope with it all. She sits in bed and plays around with the settings, tapping and dragging her stylus across the screen. First it was little sketches over flowers then she turned to people – Ned in the kitchen, her parents on the couch, too many of Peter. There’s one ongoing project she’s been doing since he got back.
Having returned to the city, he checked in with May and then made his way to MJ’s. She had pulled away from her cramped position on the couch at her sister’s side and they’d sat on the floor of her kitchen, sharing hushed words until his head dropped against her shoulder and he slept for a few minutes.
As happy as it should have been, it was a bad night for him.
He’s had a lot of bad nights since.
It’s hard to see his home struggling again. Harder to know that once again he’s played a role in it – jumped the gun too quickly, left them all unprepared. Harder still to know that Tony trusted him to do this. He wouldn’t have snapped his fingers, taken an unknown risk and taken himself off the board if he didn’t think there were people who would make this world something he’d be happy with Morgan growing up in.
They still don’t know if Tony will succumb to his injuries and Peter refuses to leave the clear-up to someone else.
It’s just... a lot of pressure.
He’s doing his best to remember everything he learned before, yet he still has bad nights. Sometimes he doesn’t say a word, but it’s easy to seek out comfort for them when he can hear Ned’s heartbeat across the hall, knows that May is just a phone call away at FEAST and has the weight of MJ’s head on his chest grounding him in the moment.
On those bad nights, where he can’t talk but he wants to say something, isn’t trying to block her out – they do this. He describes what is saw out the window of that ship; blue and purples mixing together, stars scattered in the distance, the floating debris, the planets unknown. She draws it. He gets to watch her excitement grow when she tries a new brush or a new texture, finding something good amongst something that had scared him so. Talking about the journey to the stones gives her a guess where his head is at without him needing to give a voice to the memories that keep him awake. It’s a small and tiny way to let her in until he’s ready for more.
“It was brighter here.” He murmurs, pressing a kiss against the top pf her head. He struggles to fight back the smile, burying his face in her hair as he feels her shift in his arms.
“I thought you couldn’t see the sun?”
“Maybe I want there to be a sun.” He replies. She’s right. She’s memorised every tidbit and scrap of information he’s shared about that day. Of course, she’s right.
He’s just learning to let go a little. There is so much going on in his life and in the world that sometimes he has to embrace the absurdity of it all because otherwise he’d drown. He has to give into these little moments where he just wants to sit with MJ, hold her against his chest while she draws and remember that they’re alive.
That’s terrifying but they’re doing it.
“We haven’t gone on that date.” Peter says around his toothbrush. A drop of toothpaste falls from his mouth and on to his shirt. He groans, resting his hip against the sink and trying to wipe at it.
“We’ve been a little busy.” MJ replies, glancing back at through her reflection in the mirror. She’s bent close, gently dabbing her eye cream on. She’s meeting with some real estate agents today along with her parents. He’s waiting for her to break, just a little about them leaving her space so soon after returning to it.
He won’t push, but he does feel a little selfish knowing how little they’ve talked about this part. The next steps. The way it keeps on going on and how they can get prepared for it.
“Spidey's had a packed schedule and my mind’s been elsewhere.” She continues, leaning back and looking over her shoulder. “You’re going to need to change. That won’t come out just rubbing it. It’ll stain.”
“But you like this shirt.” He mumbles, half hoping that she picks up what he was trying to imply. They hadn’t had the time nor the capacity to have their proper date and by this point they’re way past making it a ‘thing’.
Only a few restaurants have opened back up again, food suppliers have been overwhelmed by demand. It’s unlikely they’d get a table.
But Peter is getting sick of waiting for the ‘right moment’, realising now better than ever that it doesn’t exist. He’s heading to FEAST both to volunteer and to shoot some pictures of the city’s ongoing support for one another – Jameson might hate Spider-Man but he’s more than happy to showcase the ‘real heroes of the city’, it’s one of the rare times that their opinions coincide.
He’s planning on making a couple extra sandwiches and has a bottle of fresh orange juice hidden away in one of the staff fridges. It’s nowhere near perfect and he should feel a little worse about the strings he had to pull to get the carton, but he thinks it suits them and this version of them. It’ll just be a small lunch to surprise MJ with after her busy morning.
It’s not an impossible promise he set himself and can’t keep, but it’s something. He’s listening and he’s trying.
He had wanted to look good.
“Your wardrobe hasn’t been updated since Midtown and most of your clothes run a little too tight.” MJ points out. Peter’s forehead creases. “I like all your shirts.”
“I’m just a piece of meat to you, huh?” He asks, taking his toothbrush from his mouth and stepping forward, smirking at her in the mirror.
“Exactly.” She smiles, turning and wiping her thumb along the corner of his mouth before she kisses his cheek. “When are we doing this?”
“Hmm. Central Park, today, lunchtime?”
“Very cliché.” She notes but she’s smiling. He would do anything and everything for that smile.
He already has.
He’s just setting himself a promise to keep at it. He had a list of names he hoped would be there when he returned from space, that turned into a list of names he wanted to bring back and now he has a long list of things to do, to make up for, things to carry on his shoulders so no one else has to, ways to make the world better and more liveable for them.
It’s a lot of pressure.
Right now, starting his mornings off by ticking this one thing off that list, seeing MJ smile, he thinks he can make a start on all the rest.
They continue getting ready. MJ has a drawer in his room that’s quickly expanded into half the dresser. She has shampoo in the shower and her things along the window ledge. She has a portion of Ned’s leftovers marked especially for her because his mom knows exactly what she likes now. Her favourite tea still has it’s place on the shelf. She's been forced to make a mark on their apartment, but neither Ned nor Peter would change her presence there.
A lot of things have changed; the new is good, but it’s nice to keep some reminders of what has happened, what they survived around.
“Hey.” He calls out to her when she’s halfway out the door, running late (somehow it’s Peter’s fault. He doesn’t know how, but he won’t argue).
“Yeah?”
“I love you.”
Despite the rush she’s trying to leave in, he watches the rise and fall of MJ’s chest as she takes a breath. His face matches hers as it breaks into the smallest of smiles, her whole expression softening as she looks back at him.
“I love you too.”
The door closes behind her with a definitive click. Alone in the apartment, Peter takes another breath for himself – a moment of calm before he faces the chaos of the city. FEAST has been overwhelmed. Rich has opened up the shop as a ‘coffee and connection’ point – an extension of the shelter so people have a place to go if they’re still looking for their families.
People are panicked. Crime is on an uptick again as desperation is starting to rise – the help they’re getting not enough to cover it all or worse, people trying to make a quick buck off the chaos.
The subway is constantly packed even with a return to the old schedule and it’s increased frequency.
The world is still spinning.
He can do this.