Chapter Text
It was funny, almost. A few minutes ago, he’d been in space, on a low-gravity moon where everything felt loose and untethered. Just before that, he’d felt his body literally come apart at the seams, had watched particles of himself drift into dust. Hours earlier, he’d fallen, gasping, from the side of a spaceship leaving Earth’s atmosphere, tumbling into freefall. This was his first moment on familiar ground all day – but it had never felt less real. Physics didn’t matter, time was broken, gravity was something he’d imagined.
This morning he’d been on a school bus heading to MOMA, a few hours ago he’d been in space, and this afternoon he’d watched Tony Stark die.
Peter sat in the smoking rubble of the battlefield where the Avengers compound used to be. He might as well have still been on Titan, for all it resembled Earth. The ground was a wasteland. Monoliths of rebar and concrete jutted from the dirt as though the ground had tried to swallow them. Smoke and ash still hung thick in the air, filtering the sunlight to a murky grey-gold, somehow both painfully bright and too dim to see clearly by.
He leaned into the slab of concrete at his back, where Captain America had sat him down, gently, saying something that sounded kind (Peter couldn’t remember what, the words had reached him as though over a great distance and a bad connection) before leaving to manage the aftermath of everything. He stared at his hands, still in the protection of the Iron Spider suit, without seeing them. He knew he should feel pain, exhaustion. In the span of a few hours (which, according to Dr Strange, was also somehow five years, something his brain kept trying to parse then bouncing away from, unable to process the meaning or consequences of) he’d been through two fights for his life against, apparently, two versions of the same self-righteously enraged grape from two separate timelines, had turned to ash, had UN-turned to ash, and had played the world’s worst game of keep-away with an entire army of aliens. Even the armor of the suit could only go so far. He knew he’d be carrying a mess of bruises and not a few hairline fractures underneath. But he felt none of them. He felt, strangely, nothing.
The weird golden light flickered and shifted above him as a presence passed near. Peter gradually became aware that someone had sat down beside him. He looked over, and even though they were close enough he could feel the warmth of their body, it was like looking through a tunnel at someone a hundred miles away (physics was broken, light was broken, Mr Stark was dead)
“Hey there, Peter Parker.”
It felt like he’d stared at her for an age before managing, “…hey.” He suddenly felt very aware of the crust of dried tears and snot tracking through the dirt and blood on his face, and turned away.
She shifted next to him and looked back out over the smoking battlefield. “The captain’s sorry he had to leave you here. I know he would’ve stayed if he could.”
Peter nodded dumbly.
“Hope you don’t mind my company. I know our first introduction was a little… rushed. I’m Carol. Don’t worry if you forget, I won’t be offended.You’ve got enough else going on.”
He nodded again, gaze still down. He mostly wondered why his hands and feet felt like they belonged to another body. It wasn’t unlike disintegrating again, like feeling his body drift away from itself in pieces. But this time, it stubbornly refused to go. This time Mr Stark wasn’t there to catch him. He never would be again.
“Hey now.”
A hand on his back, warm and steady. He realized through the black spots nibbling at the edges of his vision that he’d been breathing too fast and shallow. Everything felt like it was humming, buzzing, his fingers tingling and halfway numb. He twitched upright, like puppeting a body that didn’t belong to him, and tried to come back.
“I – I’m okay, I’m okay,” he stuttered. “I’m okay.”
“You’re okay,” Carol affirmed, her hand still strong at his back.
Peter’s next breath felt thick in his throat and his eyes stung. “I – I’m sorry, you – it’s okay. You don’t have to – to babysit me or anything.” He swiped a hand across his nose and tried to even out his breathing. “You seem, uh. Important.”
Carol shrugged, keeping her hand on his back. “Well, so do you.” She quirked a half smile. “You know, I found him – out in space, after the snap. When I got him home, you were the first one he told Cap over there about. You were important to him. And I’ve come to think his judgment was pretty good.”
Every past tense stung, in almost equal measure with the reminder that somehow, inexplicably, Tony and everyone else had lived through five years of something in what for him was the anesthetic second between I’m sorry and What the hell just happened. Peter’s shoulders tightened and he clenched his fists, fighting the sob he felt pushing against his throat. He thought he had cried himself numb. Now the breaking feeling in his chest was returning, and he wished very badly that he could go back to feeling nothing.
“He—“ his voice cracked on the first word. Taking a deep breath and holding back tears, he tried again. “You found him?”
“Sure did. Him and Nebula. Blue robot gal, you met her? They were the only ones left after your scrap on Titan. Found them stranded, got them home.”
“Was he… were they okay?”
“It wasn’t easy on either of them, but they made it through alright. Nebula and I teamed up a few times, running missions in territories that’d be rough on the others. And I dropped in on Tony last year.”
“Last year…” Peter repeated. “I missed – I missed a lot. I guess.” The tears were threatening to spill over again. He sniffed and looked down, unable to meet her eyes. “He was doing good?”
“Real good. He and Pepper found a place by a lake, way out in the woods. They had a daughter, I think she’s about four now.”
Peter’s head shot up. “They – He has— had—“ he couldn’t finish the sentence. Carol’s eyes met his, filled with a gentle regret, and he felt himself crumble. The pressure in his chest cracked and he sobbed, head pressed to his knees, arms wrapped around himself like he’d been wounded. It was like he felt him die a second time, at the sudden memory of being small and hearing that his own parents would never be coming home. There was a kid somewhere, right now, Tony’s kid, who didn’t know yet that she’d never see her dad again. That she would be staring down the barrel of a lifetime of wondering what could’ve been.
Somehow, between this morning’s field trip and a five-year blink, the potential (now unfathomably real) pain of losing Tony had magnified a hundredfold through the lenses of a home, a daughter, Pepper, peace – a whole life that Peter had missed. A whole life that had bloomed in the heartbeat he’d been gone.
And Tony had given it up to save him. To save everyone.
Peter shuddered in a breath, even dizzier and shakier than after the first round of stricken crying, when Cap had had to pull him away from where Pepper took his place. He gradually realized that Carol’s hand on his back had become her whole arm around his shoulders, holding him firm and gentle. She radiated a warmth that drained the shaking tension out of his muscles and made his body feel less brittle. He sniffled in a way he’d have been embarrassed about under any other circumstances and let himself lean in to her.
“You’re glowing, right?” he said into her shoulder, unable to keep the quaver out of his exhausted voice. “I’m not totally losing it?”
“Yep, to the former.” She patted her knee in his line of sight with her free hand, lightly disturbing the golden aura surrounding her body. “Don’t worry, it’s safe. I can pull it back if you like.”
“No, no, it’s… it’s good. Thanks.”
They sat there for a few minutes as the hitches in his breathing slowed and the flow of tears dried to salt on his skin. A few Wakandan soldiers passed nearby, their soft leather boots quiet on the tumbled earth, the odd murky-gold light glinting off of the vibranium and silver woven into the hems of their shield cloaks. Peter didn’t look up enough to see their faces, but could feel Carol nod to them above his head. There were subdued sounds everywhere as people picked up, debriefed, reunited, began to understand.
Carol gave his shoulder a squeeze and a little extra glowing warmth. “Got anyone waiting for you, Pete?”
He felt almost weightless for a second, like he’d stepped off a cliff, because although his brain had begun to process that the Avengers (Tony) had lived through a five-year ordeal after he and half the universe turned to ash — moving past that to anyone else, to the rest of the world, hadn’t happened yet. He still defaulted to having seen May this morning before school. Ned on the bus. MJ in English, raising her hand and her eyebrow to decimate Flash’s analysis of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. And in the terror and mess and shattering grief of this one awful afternoon, he’d forgotten that all this applied to them, too.
He shot up abruptly. “Oh my god. Yeah. I do. I –“ he didn’t wan’t to finish the sentence but his mouth ran on ahead of him like it always did. “- at least I think I do, I wasn’t thinking, I didn’t realize – I don’t know if they got – got – if they skipped ahead, you know, like me and the rest? It was half, wasn’t it, what he wanted to – But I don’t know if they’d –“ Peter was a smart kid, and his brain, up til now occupied with survival and shock, did that thing where it saw a puzzle and started building out the logic around it. Five years. Fifty percent of all living things. Governments collapse, infrastructure shuts down. Violence, chaos, change, denial, and because time and human beings are what they are, moving on with life, building new systems, finding new families (Tony has – had – a daughter). If they’d… stayed… Ned and MJ would be in college, May would be – where? Would she have moved (survived)? If his friends hadn’t vanished had they lived as orphans, did they have homes, did they miss him, had they changed? If May hadn’t vanished, would she be alone, hurt, elsewhere, would she -
“We can go,” Carol said, cutting through this new flood of unthinkable but suddenly possible terror. He stared at her.
“We…?”
“Sounds like you have people to find.”
The thought of May pulled on him like an anchor, like it was the only solid thing left in the universe.
“Can we?” he asked. He didn’t even care how nakedly pleading his voice sounded, didn’t care that it was written across his face that he needed a hand to hold until he could find what’s left of his family. He was a kid again and someone wouldn’t ever be coming home. But if May was there – maybe the way light seemed to stretch the world away from him would stop, maybe time would fall back into place. Maybe there would still be gravity.
“Yep,” Carol nodded, and it was easy and kind. “You ok here for a sec? Just gotta let Cap and the others know.”
Peter hesitated for a fraction, then nodded. With one last squeeze, Carol stood and headed off. Peter curled in on himself, hugging his knees, already feeling cold without her warmth. Time didn’t make much sense any more, but either his brain shut down for a while or Carol was really efficient, because it felt like only seconds later that he was looking not just as his own knees but Steve Roger’s feet. He blinked upwards and realized Cap had taken a knee to meet him at eye level.
“You can stay with us, you know,” Cap said. “It might be hard to find your people out there, at least for a while.”
Peter saw a mirror of himself in Cap’s face: exhausted, tracked with blood and dirt and tears. He knew that the soft warning came from a place of understanding, of shared grief. And he could see, in the tired lines under his eyes, that Cap already knew his answer. He was offering just to let him know – he had a place.
Peter said it anyways. “I can’t not look for her. Not now.”
Cap bowed his head, and Peter could see the way his shoulders hunched for a moment against the same waves that kept breaking across his own body (disbelief, pain, terror, relief, exhaustion, loss, loss, loss). Then he stood. Carol, next to him, reached out a hand and helped Peter to his feet. He swayed, but before he could stumble Cap’s hand was on his shoulder, pulling him in to a hug.
“Go find her,” he said. And with a nod and the ghost of a smile, he was gone.
Carol’s glowing hand was back on his shoulder, just enough to steady him. “Where we headed?”
“Queens.” His voice cracked.
“Roger that. Might want to get your mask on. And uh – hope you don’t mind a bridal carry.” She held her arms out almost sheepishly, and for a second he almost laughed as I always knew I’d find someone to sweep me off my feet bubbled involuntarily from some back part of his brain that never, never managed to shut up. But before the laugh could crack through and become more tears, the world swam and light shifted and his body hummed and Carol looked really far away again. So he jerked his head in the little nod that drew the mask of the Iron Spider suit over his head, wrapped his arms around Carol’s neck, and let her carry him into the sky.
-
Carol was pretty clearly not from the neighborhood, so he gave her directions as best he could. South, following the major highways from the air. Tracing the route Happy always drove on the weekends when he was invited to hang out and work at (Mr Stark’s lab) the compound. It was fresh in his mind because his most recent visit had been last Sunday. Five years ago last Sunday, now.
They were over the Bronx when Peter realized he didn’t have his keys to the apartment. They were in his backpack, which he’d webbed to a fire escape on his way to Central Park to help Mr Stark fight the giant hammer-chain alien dude. This morning, five years ago. The webs would’ve dissolved in a few hours. The backpack would’ve been stolen. He wondered, distantly, if those stupidly overpriced textbooks were still worth anything to anyone after the snap. If someone had found and used the earbuds and cracked old iPod he’d left in the front pocket.
“Just, uh, a little left – east – and over the water,” he pointed as he felt Carol start to slow down. They had been flying pretty high up til now, but as Carol brought them down to skim closer to the tops of the buildings below, they started to hear it, and see it: the streets were full of people. At windows, on rooftops. If Peter had needed proof that Dr Strange was telling the truth, this was it, because he’d never in seventeen years living in New York seen every front door open. He’d seen mayhem, aliens, and superhuman fight scenes throw parts of the city into chaos, but nothing had changed the fundamental hard-shelled nature of things here – living shoulder to shoulder with a couple million strangers of all stripes meant you had to guard what little space was yours. But this, now, was the city cracked open.
People ran through doorways, leaned into neighbors’ windows, held each other on thresholds. Peter’s arm tightened where he’d slung it around Carol’s neck and he felt her grasp him tighter and inhale a long, measured breath as they both heard the shouts below: a growing tide of cries and laughs and screams full of a kind of disbelieving joy. The breaking of a five year dam of resignation and grief, denial and anger and acceptance. Peter glimpsed a family, limbs tangled, laughing and crying and clutching one another in the open door to an apartment building, a bewildered but smiling father wrapped in the arms of two kids and a sobbing woman with a streak of grey in her hair. Neighbors ran past them up and down the stairs, in and out, calling to one another, asking, searching. Among the many in the streets, a woman sprinted in stockings and a once-neat pencil skirt, stumbling to brace herself against stopped cars and call out a name before running onwards, until up ahead a teenage girl jogged around the corner and they both stopped dead. The woman closed the distance faster than Peter had ever seen anyone run barefoot in business casual, and buried the girl in an embrace that made his throat tighten. It was the same hug Tony had given him when he’d stepped through the portal. Tides of other searchers and searched-for flowed around the woman and the girl, everyone crying, finding, being found.
Peter felt Carol give him a squeeze and the glow surrounding her flared softly, like a little sun. She didn’t say anything but he knew what she meant: this is what they all put their lives on the line for. This impossible joy. The stitching back together of a decimated world. She didn’t say this is why it’s ok, she didn’t say his life was worth it. Peter was grateful, because, as Carol seemed to know, in the fresh raw pain and confusion of his own small world being ripped apart, he couldn’t weigh one against the other. He was still spinning, lost, around a sudden void. What was good made as much sense (none) as what was light, and time, and gravity.
He guided her over a few blocks and they hovered above and across from his apartment building. He’d spent most of the journey here focusing on directions and trying desperately not to think at all, but now he could feel his heart hammering in his chest and his arms shaking around Carol’s neck.
“I forgot my key,” he croaked. “But uh – that’s my window.”
She flew them down, and as they got close he jerked his head slightly to remove the nanobot mask. It was only when she stopped, hovering, that he realized he was staring at Carol’s shoulder, involuntarily terrified what he might see when he finally looked through the window. His skin shivered cold and his heart hammered. May might’ve been snapped, and their apartment taken by a stranger. May, his only hope of finding land, might be just be… gone.
He turned his head.
The window was flung open – and through it he could see his bunk bed. His desk. The wall still papered with Star Wars posters and pinned-up photos of his and Ned’s best LEGO builds. Still shaking, he unwound himself from Carol’s neck to perch on the windowsill. Closer in, he could see the layer of dust blanketing every surface. A slightly musty smell hung in the air, but he could see a track of footsteps across the carpet, leading to the window from his open bedroom door.
“All this yours?” Carol, still glowing, has leaned her elbows on the windowsill next to him. He couldn’t speak, because he was staring at the dust, and the footprints. May. He nodded. Carol floated up and clapped him on the shoulder. “Get in there,” she nudged. He did.
Peter felt, suddenly, like he was stepping into his own tomb. For the first time, Dr Strange’s ‘five years’ felt not just real, but right. After the battles, after space, after Tony – he might not have lived the five years the other half of the universe had. But he’d aged them. The look of abandonment, like his whole life had been sealed into a time capsule and jetted away from him, fit. Dazed as a sleepwalker he crossed the carpet, footfalls soundlessly lifting little clouds of dust in his wake.
“Pete –“ Carol had leaned a little further in the window. “I can stay out here or I can come in with you. Whatever feels right.”
He only hesitated a heartbeat – they both knew that Carol was about to be a stranger intruding on something raw and private. “It’s cool,” he said. “Come in.” His voice cracked on the last syllable but he managed a half smile with it. Carol floated in and settled back on her feet. She followed a few paces behind as Peter went through his open door to the rest of the apartment.
Evening sun poured in the west-facing windows of the living room. A pile of books by the couch had been knocked over; a few mugs of half-drunk coffee perched on the end table and the dividing wall between the front door and the couch. A rumpled blanket draped over the armchair by the TV. Among the familiar bits of mess were unfamiliar touches: bundles of drying herbs hung from the lintel of the door into the kitchen, and light refracted through the slightly cloudy water of a vase of sunflowers sitting on the kitchen table. He could see a scatter of papers by it, sketches or notes of some kind, a little crumpled as though touched by that hurried bright energy May threw at everything she did.
Suddenly, more than anything, Peter wanted to get out of the suit. He might not know where May was, but she was here, the feel of her and of home and of this morning, before space and Titan and five years and Tony; he wanted to shed it all like a snake sloughing off its skin and just be here, with her.
“Hey, uh,” he turned to Carol. “I’ll be right back, sorry, do you mind just…”
Carol was already settling in to a corner of the couch. “All good. I’m here if you need me.”
Peter almost ran back to his bedroom. Trying not to linger in the dust (now stirred by a light breeze from the still-open window) he grabbed a t-shirt and pajama bottoms, ignoring the mildewy smell as he opened each drawer, and dashed to the bathroom. Sun filtered through the turtle-pattern shower curtain, so familiar after everything that wasn’t. He looked down at himself and realized he didn’t know how to take this suit off. He didn’t even know how to put it on. It had (Tony had) saved his life mid-air as he fell, half-conscious, through the upper atmosphere. He summoned the mask back on.
“Karen…?”
“Yes Peter?”
She walked him through the steps (“Double tap firmly here and here,” she said, highlighting the spots through his HUD). The suit retracted smoothly into the center body of the spider insignia on the front, where it clung to his chest like Tony’s arc reactor. He’d also completely forgotten that he’d been wearing his original suit underneath the new one. He deactivated it, let it slip to his feet, and stood, shaking and mostly naked. The suits, engineered to the nines, had kept him clean, if not unhurt. The only dirt and blood was on his face, in his hair. His reflection looked bizarre, and he quickly ducked his head to the sink, splashing water on his face, to avoid looking at what seemed to be a head from another body attached to his own at the neck. At least the dark bruises blooming over his ribs felt familiar. If not for his face, he could’ve just gotten back from a particularly tough night patrolling.
He avoided the mirror still as he pulled on the soft pajama bottoms. The t-shirt was halfway over his head when he heard her voice. He couldn’t make out what she was saying but the tone and cadence were like an arrow to his chest. He fumbled the shirt the rest of the way on at the same time as he wrenched the door open (he felt it crack off it’s hinges; he forgot to control his own strength and he doesn’t care). He was back to the living room in a single, stumbling bound and –
May stood there, bathed in the evening light. The dust motes winking in the beams from the window swirled around her, still flying in the aftermath of a sudden entrance. There was a little more grey in her hair, a few more lines on her face, and she looked worn in a way Peter had never seen before. But the way her eyes widened and the cell phone dropped from her hand, the way she was literally pushing Carol (who was halfway through a “I promise I’m harmless” gesture) aside in a rush forward, everything about it, about her, was May.
She stopped abruptly in front of him and held his face in her hands.
“Oh,” she said. “You’re back.” Her voice broke into a squeak and Peter felt his face crack into a smile through the tears he hadn’t even realized had started again.
“Yeah. Yeah I’m back.”
May choked on a laugh, tears pouring down her own face, and crushed him into a hug. “You’re back.”
He buried his face in her hair, nodded into her neck, and something deep in the world settled, like a compass needle finding north, like a beam of light splashing across a wall, like gravity.
“I’m back.”