Chapter Text
Here’s the thing: Peter’s no stranger to his own death. He’s seen it played out in his mind a hundred different times, a hundred different ways.
But never like this.
He stumbles forward. Something snares him before his knees strike the ground—Mr. Stark. “Please,” he gasps, chin clanking against an armored shoulder as Mr. Stark’s arms hold him tight.
But not tight enough.
“Please,” he says again, pleading, because he’s slipping, he can feel it, can feel every inch of his enhanced DNA waging war for its own existence—can feel it losing—I don’t want to go I don’t want to go please I don’t want to go—
Mr. Stark is saying something, but the words reach him distorted, garbled, like he’s already hearing them from somewhere else—somewhere far away—beyond—his breathing shallows as he clutches desperately at the torn metal of Stark’s suit, as if that could somehow ground him, save him—
“You’re okay, you’re alright, you’re okay.” Stark’s words finally reach him and Peter nods, sliding softly to the ground. He’s okay. Mr. Stark wouldn’t lie to him. Mr. Stark wouldn’t lie to him—
—I don’t want to go not yet please not yet—
—Come on, Spiderman—
His eyes slide to the side. The landscape smolders, smoke swirling in hazy drifts as embers rise and fall like stars. Like angels.
He thinks: I’m okay, I’m alright. Then his mind crumbles to ash, and he thinks no more.
***
When Peter comes to, his mouth tastes like soot.
He runs his thumb across his knuckles, the last fuzzy moments of half-sleep curling around him like warm steam. He’s got a few minutes, he figures, before Aunt May barges in and tells him to get his ass to school, because if he comes home with one more tardy slip Lord help her she’ll—
He blinks. That’s not right. He already woke up for school, got there early, even, because he sure as hell wasn’t gonna miss the field trip—the field trip. The bus. That thing, that massive gray wheel hanging low in the sky, the electric thrill through his veins as he swung towards it—towards danger, yes, but also towards something really fucking cool. Eyes still shuttered, he grins, picturing the look on Ned’s face when he tells him all about the space ship—
It hits him like a bulldozer to the chest.
Thanos, their almost win and abject failure, all of it—that was real. And that means—that means—
His eyes fly open and he bolts upright, fingers scrambling at the ground beneath him. Dead. He’s….dead, for real this time, not like the time he passed out on the first day of Anatomy Lab and woke up blinking at the prettiest girl he’d ever seen, convinced he‘d died and somehow wrangled his way to heaven (Liz was almost pretty enough to keep him from immediately swearing off “squishy science” and transferring to an engineering track—almost.)
No, he thinks, digging his nails into the soft flesh of his palm. He feels almost normal, but...he recalls the way that very same palm had crumbled and blown away, a sandcastle under a cyclone, torn apart by some unseen force—and he feels it in his bones (he still has bones, right? Ghost bones?), that this time, he’s dead for good.
He almost laughs, or maybe cries—the difference between the two suddenly seems meaningless. There’d been a time when he’d gone to bed every night wishing to wake up where he is now, when he’d’ve done almost anything to follow his parents. And now—seriously, fuck whatever divine dickhead controls the universe, fuck it—now that he’s got Ned and MJ and Spiderman and Mr. Stark and the Avengers, now that he’s finally happy—now is the time the universe finally decides it wants him dead?
“Great freaking timing,” he says aloud, and kicks at the ground, vicious and swift. Clouds of ash scatter in his wake, and he stops, taking in his surroundings for the first time.
The world is a picture of gray. Gray haze fills the air, gray ash blankets the ground, gray figures stumble in the distance—wait. Figures? He squints, but can’t make out any details. Shrugging, he starts toward the closest one. A part of his mind informs him that maybe approaching mysterious figures in a deathscape might not be his smartest bet, but he shoves the thought aside. He’s already dead, after all—what else does he have to lose?
The figure is getting clearer now, though the fog obscures most details save the four-legged silhouette. His pulse quickens and he plows through the ash, wondering suddenly if he still has his superpowers as a dead person. With luck, it won’t come to that.
But lately, luck hasn’t been something he can trust.
At last, he gets close enough to see the figure and falters in surprise. Concern sloshes away his leftover anger and he rushes forward, kneeling in front of it—her, for it’s not a four-legged beast after all, but a woman. Her palms splay on the ground as she rocks forward on her knees, chest quaking with sobs.
“Miss?” Peter says. “Miss, are you alright?”
The woman says nothing, only shakes harder.
“Miss,” Peter tries again, “I can help you.” Can I? “I can help you,” he repeats, firm but soothing, “but you need to tell me what’s wrong.”
The woman slowly lifts her head. Tears carve trails down her face, pearly with dust. “My baby,” she chokes out.
“Your baby?” Peter scans the immediate area, but finds nothing. “Is it here?”
The woman shakes her head. “No. No, I can’t...my baby, she’s all alone, and I have to get to her, but I can’t, I can’t—”
“Can you breathe with me?” Peter interrupts before she works herself into more of a spiral. “In through the nose, out through the mouth. That’s it. In, out.” In, out, he repeats to himself, as much for his sake as for hers, because a sick coil in his gut tells him where this is going.
“In my apartment,” the woman starts again. “She was on my hip while I cooked. Spaghetti-o’s, again, because they’re her favorite, and I can get ‘em cheap at the supermarket, and I’d just—I’d just turned on the burner, and then my hand—it just disappeared. And Lily was crying and then suddenly I dropped her, only I didn’t drop her, she just fell—and now I’m here—and there’s no one to take care of her, and oh God the oven—” The woman breaks off into sobs, and Peter sits back on his heels.
He has to say something, has to help her, help them, somehow, but—he’s at a loss. Helpless. He feels small, like a child at the base of a skyscraper.
A wail cuts through his thoughts. He looks to the woman, but she seems just as confused as him—and then the wind shifts, unearthing a squalling baby from the ash.
“Lily!” the woman cries, scooping the baby into her arms. She holds her to her chest for a long moment, tucking her nose against the baby’s forehead. Finally, the woman turns back to Peter, her eyes shining. “Thank you. I don’t know how you did it, but—thank you.”
“Wait, no, I didn’t—” Peter protests, but the woman’s already gone, cradling her child and walking onward into the mist.
His head reels. That baby—he knows what her presence here means, but from the look on her mother’s face when they reunited—he can’t bring himself to wish it were otherwise. The ethics of the situation turn his mind into a swamp. He tries to sift through it, but only one clear thought emerges—Thanos.
It wasn’t the universe that had wanted him dead, he realizes. No, that blame belongs to Thanos alone, Thanos and his sick scheme that ripped apart families and stole lives--his life, too, though he’s beginning to see that this is a whole lot bigger than him.
He watches the woman’s retreating form until it blurrs indistinguishably into the mist. He wonders where she’s headed, whether she’ll find any peace in this place. He hopes so.
For his part, Peter isn’t looking for peace.
He’s looking for justice. For him, for the woman and her child, for the billions torn from their lives, from everything they love.
And one way or another, he’s going to find it.