Chapter Text
One does not spend eons with a Celestial and emerge untouched.
Mantis is the first to manifest, weeks later than the rest of the dusted, and she falls to her knees on the desolate, still smoking ground.
She reaches out for something to feel: there is nothing. The silence overwhelms, and she starts to scream.
Her screams end long before anything new appears to take their place.
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The death of a parent does not excise themselves from their offspring.
Peter Quill gave up the universe in his anger, and it almost doesn’t give him back for it.
The dust finally throws him out after two months of clinging to his light-tinged blood – twelve days, three hours, twenty-six minutes after Mantis was freed, but she didn’t keep count – and he is remade quickly.
He groaned when he was erased and he shakes as he stares as his rebuilt hands.
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Oscorp’s spider bite was laced with more things than its host knows.
Peter Parker arrives mere hours after Quill, reforming slower than everyone else, just as in pain as he left.
He’s sobbing, pleading for his Aunt and Tony and Ned and MJ, but none of them can hear- anyone who could track his suit’s signal is busy, oblivious, or dead.
Quill freezes in guilt when he sees him and Mantis joins his cries.