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He remembers darkness. A numbing void of nothing and then a warm, brilliant light guiding him back to his body. Whatever magic— the stones are nothing short of that— builds his body back together, he feels it. He feels every fiber reattaching, every stitch of skin sowing together, every memory being reformed and tucked safely into his heart where he holds them.
And the last memory that slots back into place is her face.
Then, the agony of life. His nerve endings are sharper than he remembers, his senses dialed to eleven. The world is too bright and smell is too intense and the world he comes back to, Titan, is not his home.
He aches for May.
Instead, when Peter is brought back to life he is welcomed by a tear stained mentor that leaps over a hulking scrap of metal to yank him into his arms. Peter stalls. It takes him a moment before he exhales, “Tony.” And another before he asks, “What happened?”
“We got you back,” Tony explains, and he is so free with his affection Peter wonders if the stones have worked extra magic on his mentor. Tony is not a hugger. Peter remembers drinking up every piece of fatherly affection Tony threw his way like a dog, and he remembers how the closest to a hug he had ever been granted was a firm pat on the back after Coney Island.
The hug is almost as terrifying as disappearing into the ether, again.
Except that’s not true. Ceasing to exist is haunting. It will visit his dreams as an unwelcome visitor for years and years and years. He knows he will wake up in the middle of the night screaming, reaching for his arm or leg or face to make sure he is still real. He is still there.
Peter finds his voice as the other space team has their own reunion feet away from him, “How?”
“The time stone. We turned back time. And it brought us back to this moment. The moment you all disappeared.”
Peter wants to ask a hundred questions, but his vision blurs with her face. Again, her face.
He needs to get back to Earth. Now.
“Tony,” Peter swallows. He does not have any qualms about calling his mentor by his first name now. Nothing will ever be as scary as what he already has lived. Or not lived. He was never dead.
Just gone.
“Where is Thanos?”
As they rush back to Earth to join the final fight in the Guardians spaceship the other Peter is eerily quiet. Starlord sits in a corner shrouded in darkness and he clings to a metal sword, running his thumb over the handle again and again.
Peter sits beside the sad, older man and quietly admires the craftsmanship of the imposing weapon, “It’s a beautiful sword.”
Quill puts effort into not crying, Peter is familiar with the sound a voice makes when it’s almost breaking, “Its not fair. Why am I here and not her?”
“Maybe the time stone—,” Peter begins, wading through his own devastation to offer a kernel of hope.
“No,” Quill says roughly, turning his shoulder away from Peter, “She’s dead.” Maybe he imagines it but Peter thinks he hears Quill whisper, “I told her to go right.”
Earth is burning.
The Avengers have led Thanos and his army away from Wakanda into the middle of the desert. The sorcerers manage to lift the battle from one location to another to protect as many innocent lives as they can.
And all Peter can think about is Queens.
He wonders if May and his friends are alright. He wonders how many people he knows were sucked into the void and if they remember the darkness the same way he does or if time rewinding had erased their torment like it had never happened at all.
And, in the end, it’s Quill that kills Thanos.
In the light of all of the violence Peter has endured the last few years, he still looks away from the final blow. There is a fury in Quill, an all-consuming anger, that terrifies the seventeen year old. Peter believes Quill does not just kill Thanos.
He destroys him.
With her sword. Gamora.
Peter does see what is left of Starlord wipe the bloodied blade clean on his pants and holster it into his belt. He also sees him pocket an orange stone before the man from Missouri climbs back aboard his ship in silence.
No one believes the battle is over, even after Quill retreats with his team. Everyone waits for Thanos’ eye to open and the world to shake and end.
They all wait around for nothing because Thanos never awakens and only when four hours pass do they finally start to attend to their dead. They lose so many people, Peter does not bother counting them. But he does know that he is left and Tony is not.
And he has to tell Pepper on the flight back to New York with Tony’s body stowed somewhere below deck that her fiancé is never coming home. She does not wail or shout or curse. Pepper Potts is silent for a long time until she finally requests, “Bring his body home.”
May is waiting for him at the compound when the remainder of the Avengers touch down in upstate New York. Peter is still covered in dirt and his body is bruised under the metal bindings of his new suit. His aunt pushes through the small crowd of loved ones waiting for their fallen superheroes to get to her nephew.
She collides into him and pulls him in for a suffocating hug. Peter’s arms hang loosely at his sides. He does not have the energy to hug her back, but he does collapse his chin into her shoulder. “I’m so tired, May,” he admits.
May brushes his hair back affectionately with the one hand that is not holding him and rocks him back and forth like she did when he was a kid, “It’s okay, Peter. You’re safe. You’re home.”
Queens is mostly untouched from Thanos’ treachery. Manhattan received the brunt of his fury when his children touched down in New York. His home is like an oasis. And Peter is so thankful.
Then, he wonders how many of his friends had crumbled to dust when the universe tore them from existence. He wonders if they remember being sucked into the vacuum of nothing and all the lights going out like a snap of some vindictive God’s fingers. He does.
And he learns he is alone in remembering.
As the world recovers from the attack, Peter learns from Doctor Strange that the green stone, the time stone, has a interactive magic. Those that were in contact with the stone before Thanos turned the world to ash remember the version of the world where it ended, where Thanos wins. Which means the Avengers and the Wakandan army remember the void and the rest of the world does not.
Peter is not sure if his friends and family were ever erased from existence, crushed down into dirt and stamped into the Earth like they were never anything at all. They could have been. And if they had been, they don’t remember. He is burdened with knowledge. He is shackled to memory.
Now that Tony is dead and Quill is gone, the only person that remains from that final fight on Titan is Doctor Strange. Peter spends a lot of time on trains as the world recovers from its latest alien attack heading to the sanctum where Doctor Strange lives. Peter asks the doctor all kinds of questions about time and perception and reality. It is not therapy, but it is the closest thing the seventeen year old has and it helps quiet his brain when it has a dreaded flash of that other place— the darkness.
Peter settles into one of the plush chairs in the sanctum and Strange makes a soothing cup of tea magically appear in Peter’s hand. The teenager buries his nose in the warm steam, “Do you think real death is like that place?”
Strange brushes his cloak aside when he sits in the chair across from him, “I don’t know.”
“How can you not know? You’re the time wizard person.” It feels like if anyone should know the ins-and-outs of the universe it should be him. Doctor Strange was introduced to Peter Parker as an all-knowing sorcerer and so he expects him to be all-knowing.
The doctor smoothes out his facial hair, “Death is beyond what even I can see. But I hope it’s peaceful. I imagine death must be as challenging and terrifying and beautiful as life. That place, the disappearing, it was not death. You cannot let it consume you, Peter.”
“Is that your professional opinion, Doc?” Peter frowns deeply. He already knows that the disappearing cannot consume his second chance, but it does. It is a sickness that spreads seemingly without a cure. Memory has no medicine.
She looks the same, but he cannot stop seeing her collapsing into ash as if she had never existed. Michelle may have died, or she may have made the cut for humanity’s culling but he will never know. And he is not sure why he cares so much about one girl that, on their best days, is his sort-of-friend.
But he remembers so clearly being born again and so he cannot forget her face because it had appeared so clearly to him in his mind’s eye. The last memory to return to him was her laughing. Ned had said something outrageously silly on a decathlon trip to Florida and MJ had laughed so hard that Peter suspected at the time she had no expected to even smile. It was a bright, sunny smile that contained fractured crystals.
He had never really looked twice at her, then.
He looks at her now. Peter watches her chew on the tip of her pen as the teacher tries to grasp at straws of normalcy. There is no normal anymore—not since a gigantic purple alien touched down on Earth and set it aflame— but all of the adults try and pretend. It infuriates him because they do not remember. The horror of the second attempt of reality was not compared to the ether, the darkness, the ash.
But chewing on a pen feels like it should be normal, like perhaps it was something teenagers did before the world stole their innocence. Or, at least, what Peter did before the universe crushed his into dust.
And yet, she still looks the way she did before he hurtled himself out of a bus and it fills him with a feeling. It is a new and overwhelming one that floods him with terror and wonder.
He reminds himself it is better not to care about people because people die, he knows that better than anyone now, but she smiles at him around the tip of her pen and it sends electricity to his fingertips.
Peter wants to smile back but instead he looks away.
Aunt May tries to console him.
Ned tries to distract him.
Doctor Strange tries to philosophize at him.
He hates every attempt to fix him. He cannot be fixed. He starts to think when the stone was piecing him back together that it forget an essential part of him. He is incomplete.
Michelle does not stop smiling at him. It is not always around the tip of a pen. Sometimes she smiles at him over the top of her coffee, or behind a book in the library. He tucks each smile away safely in his heart and they never fail to make him feel warm. She never gives him a smile head-on. They are always smiles hidden behind a book or a coffee cup and so he starts to dream about smiles that are not concealed.
These are short, vibrant dreams between horrible flashes of the ether. His dreams feel like drowning. The brief imaginings of her smile become his only source of oxygen when the darkness threatens to pull him under.
He wants to thank her for her smiles.
She has no idea that she is saving his life.
He has a panic attack.
They are in chemistry and their teacher decides to burn a strip of paper, turning it to ash. It happens for Peter in slow motion. The paper curls in on itself (I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go) and starts to turn to ash slowly, then all at once until the paper is gone and the ash is all that remains of its memory.
Sound zeroes into pounding in his ears and his vision narrows and it becomes nearly impossible to catch a deep breath. He knows he is alive because he can feel pain, but he cannot help but think that maybe he is becoming ash, again. And this time there is no Tony to hold him while he goes. He is alone.
The stool he is sitting on gets kicked aside and Peter is on the floor. He is clutching his chest trying to feel his heart beat but his head is racing so fast he cannot focus on anything. He could be dying. He feels like he is dying.
Two warm hands cup his cheeks and whisper soothing words, “Breathe with me, Parker. In and out. In and out.” The voice is so soft and welcoming that he listens. He breathes with it.
It feels like an eternity before the world stops shaking and his eyes can focus on his surroundings again. The first thing that snaps back into clearness is Michelle’s worried, doe-like eyes. He has never seen her look as terrified as she does now, not even that day in DC when the elevator failed.
He cannot pretend anymore that he is fine.
He is not fine.
But he is so tired, so he collapses his forehead into Michelle’s shoulder and he feels her tense underneath him but then she starts to scratch his back soothingly with her nails, “It’s okay. You’re okay.”
She becomes his protector after the panic attack. She no longer sits ten feet away at the lunch table and she does not act aloof around him in classes. He knows she is keeping a watchful eye on him like he is a flight risk, like she can almost tell that he could fall apart at any minute. He wants to be furious that she thinks he needs a guardian angel, but he is too tired to pretend he doesn’t.
And her watchful eye does help. He does not feel like he has to pretend to be strong anymore. He has a support system and it feels good.
May and Ned all try to help him but he does not want to talk about it. They do not remember and if they somehow did fade to ash, he does not want to spark some deeply rooted memory of their own disappearing. He carries the memories alone.
With Strange, Peter’s sadness is dismissed. He knows the Doctor tries to help in his way but time is such a relative thing to Strange that Peter suspects this is not the first time Strange has experienced a loop of events. Alternate realities are commonplace for the Doctor. Nothing frightens him. And for a man that fears nothing, he cannot hope to console a drowning teenager.
So Michelle becomes his silent rock.
They do not talk about the shift in their friendship, or the smiles she offers to only him, or the one time on the bus she holds his hand when he looks out the window half-expecting to see a spaceship in the sky. These are Michelle’s heroic gestures that he thinks are better left unsaid. He is not sure what will happen if he asks her about them and he is afraid she will ask him questions, too.
He is not ready to talk yet.
But he does want to hold her hand. Every minute. Of every day.
Peter wonders when he flips through pictures of her on his phone, she has slowly become his favorite subject, if this new feeling is love. And sometimes, when he is too tired to lie to himself, he wonders if he loved her long before now.
Her face was the last thing he saw before he came back to his body when the stone turned back time. Her face. Her eyes. Her nose. Her lips.
“Michelle,” he breathes, and makes his favorite picture of her the background to his phone. She is biting the end of her pencil and her hair is falling like ripples of curls over most of her features. The one eye that is visible is looking at him and it is a look he wants to bottle up and keep hung on a necklace just above his heart.
The next day at school she sits beside him at lunch, Peter intertwines their tentative fingers under the table. He waits for a heartbeat for her to yank her hand away or for her to shoot him a scalding look, but she does not visibly acknowledge the hand that is grasping hers under the table. She continues her conversation with Ned.
But then, she squeezes his hand.
It is all the encouragement the seventeen year old needs.
By the end of sixth period, he is restless at his desk. He checks the clock like time is the enemy and waits for it to run down the school day. Peter misses four questions on his lab worksheet eighth period and does not stay behind to finish. He bolts out of his chair and rushes to her locker.
She has barely unlocked the combination when he skids up beside her. Michelle clutches her books to her chest and raises a marginally startled eyebrow at him, “Yes?”
“Let me just-“ He begins, clasping her face between his hands, “-try something.” He leans up, because she has always been a smidge taller than him, and waits for her to stop him, to pull away, to say no. When she doesn’t, he takes the leap and slants his mouth over her own.
The crowd of students all shuffling to their own lockers to head home for the end of the day, briefly glance over at Peter and MJ. Then, return to their business.
Even when Michelle clutches the back of his shirt and pulls him impossibly close. Peter backs her against her locker and kisses her deeper and deeper and deeper and—oh— this is what being alive felt like.
He had forgotten.
It had been stolen away.
She opens her mouth as an invitation and he does not squander the opportunity to ravage her senses. She is ruination and salvation all in one kiss.
Against his feverish mouth she asks the question he dreads the most, “What happened to you?”
He barely manages to retract the monster that is heating up his blood and whispering all kinds of devilish ideas of what he could do to this absolutely extraordinary girl against her locker.
He hates it. The truth.
He wants to spare her from it.
But when he pulls away and meets those same terrified, doe-like eyes that had searched for his after his panic attack, Peter’s resolve crumbles. He has been silent for too long. It has eaten away at him.
He needs someone to talk to— he needs her.
Without another word, he grasps her hand and kisses the back of it. She raises a curious eyebrow but she does not fight him when he starts to guide her outside to the bleachers on the football field.
Only when he is certain they are alone, does he begin, “I’m Spider-Man and I fought Thanos. And lost.” He tells her everything— about going into space, about meeting Quill, about dying— all of it. And when he is done, he waits for her to crumble into ash. Like a nightmare.
But she is solid and strong and she kisses his brow. It does not feel like weakness when he collapses in her arms and cries. It feels like relief.
And while the memories of Titan never go away, neither does she.