Chapter Text
Peter tightened his grip on the gauntlet as he ran, gasping for breath.
He tried not to throw up at the sound of agonized screams around him and the overwhelming smell of blood that saturated the entire battlefield. Even after everything he had seen before—despite the red staining his mechanical arms—the air felt too heavy to breathe.
Was it because the pools of blood were evaporating?
Could he make it to the van with the gauntlet without getting injured?
And the others…?
Was Mr. Stark alive?
He had seen many aliens die. But he had also seen many heroes get wounded.
When all of this was over… would they be able to return to normal lives?
Peter kept shooting webs to the highest points he could reach and dodging the alien attacks. The more creatures that noticed him, the harder it became. Soon they would reach him.
How had things even come to this?
For the first time since the battle began, one of the aliens managed to get close to him. His spider-sense was nearly useless now—warnings screamed from every direction, doing nothing but making his head spin.
Before Peter could even fully process it, one of his mechanical arms shot forward, piercing through the alien’s face at the tiny unarmored spot it had.
“Be more careful, Peter.”
“T-thanks, Karen.”
Right, it was still in kill mode.
It didn’t sound nearly as cool as it had the first time he heard it.
How had he ended up killing so many people?
The van was still far away, and Karen was slaughtering aliens Peter either couldn’t—or wouldn’t—handle. As he rushed past, he caught a brief glimpse of someone on the ground.
A woman he didn’t recognize.
He had never heard her name, never seen her before. But he knew she was a hero.
He could tell from her absurd costume. From the way her skin had been torn apart. From the fact that she still held onto her weapon even in the most horrific death.
Maybe, if her face hadn’t been mangled beyond recognition by a creature’s claws, her expression would have told the same story. Maybe the other bodies—those that would grow cold within the next hour or two—would leave the world with the same unreadable expressions.
How had so many people died?
The screams around him grew louder.
He wasn’t sure if it was the silence of death closing in… or if his ears were bleeding.
He wasn’t sure he could keep running along this road of corpses toward the van.
He wanted to stop.
He wanted to throw the gauntlet to someone else and run.
He didn’t want the responsibility anymore—didn’t want to carry the fate of nearly the entire universe on his shoulders.
Sixteen years old, blood in his nose, screams in his ears—Peter Parker was tired of being a hero.
But he was one.
So he asked himself a question.
“How could someone like me—a teenager who can only stick to walls—fix something like this?”
And in that moment, realization struck him. The thing in his arms—the gauntlet decorated with six stones of infinite power—could give him the power to do so. Could give him the power to fix everything.
All the deaths.
All the wounds.
All the trauma.
Every eye that would never see again. Every nose that would never smell anything else. All of it could be undone.
And so Peter made a decision.
Maybe he had replaced a terrible future with something even worse. But he didn’t have the strength left to care.
He moved with nothing but a desperate instinct to save people—and the overwhelming desire to be anywhere but here. There was nothing else in his mind.
He scanned the battlefield and noticed a small hill that very few people had stepped on. Pushing his mechanical arms to their limits, he rushed toward it before the aliens could reach him.
His spider-sense screamed louder than it ever had before, shrieking like something tearing his ears apart. But this wasn’t a warning of an attack. It was something else.
His instincts told him he was going to die in seconds.
Every cell in his body knew it—just like it had five years ago.
Maybe this time… he could change fate.
He took a deep breath.
He lifted the gauntlet from his arms and slowly brought it toward his hand. Before his awareness of the battlefield faded, he saw everyone looking at him. Before the screams and battle cries dulled into silence, he heard Mr. Stark shout—
“PETE!”
Before the metallic smell of blood finally faded from his aching nose, he caught the foul scent of the alien creatures approaching him.
As his vision dimmed, he slid the gauntlet onto his hand.
Power surged through his veins.
But there was nothing magnificent about it. Nothing worth killing for.
This power was killing him.
And if he didn’t hurry… he would sacrifice himself for nothing.
He forced his eyes open and looked at the golden fingers of the gauntlet.
They felt impossibly far apart.
As the power consumed him, Peter wondered if he could even do it. But—
“No.”
He took another deep breath.
And just moments before his fingers snapped together, Peter thought:
“I want to fix everything, and the power to be able to do that.”
A moment after the snap came the answer.
Accepted.
________________________________________
When he woke up, his mind was confused—yet strangely calm.
He was inside an abandoned warehouse. He lay on a filthy mattress tossed carelessly onto the floor, the stains suggesting that an alcoholic had probably used it before him. Most importantly, when he looked out the warehouse’s broken windows—
No one was fighting outside.
There was no smell of blood, no screams.
Slowly, Peter pushed himself off the dirty mattress. Considering how much pain his body was in, he tried not to worsen his injuries.
Once he managed to sit upright, he looked down at himself. Instead of the Iron Spider suit he had worn during the battle—the one that had killed people—he was wearing a clean white T-shirt and comfortable pants.
No stains, no armor.
He had no accessories. In his pockets, he had two things. An ID for a Peter Parker born in 1993. And 50 dollar cash.
It was almost as if someone expected him to run from the government.
He couldn’t get his mind straight enough to think about what that meant. So, ignoring everything else, Peter lifted his shirt slightly.
The wounds looked decades old.
Bruised, yes—but none of the injuries he knew he had taken recently were there anymore.
After examining himself and carefully prodding his skin, he realized something stranger.
His right hand—the same one he had snapped his fingers with—now bore oval burns shaped like the Infinity Stones. They were too large and covered most of his hand, making them impossible to recognize unless you already knew what they had once been.
But there was no mistaking it.
Now with a new sense of dread, he forced himself to his feet despite the lingering headache and fogginess.
He needed to answer the biggest question of all.
Where was he?
He began exploring the building, searching for an exit. After passing a small area that looked like a kitchen, he found the door leading outside.
He hesitated for a few seconds.
Then he pushed down the handle.
The first thing he saw outside—
was a Harry Potter movie poster.
The poster for the final film.
A movie that had come out thirteen years ago.
A poster saying a film released in 2011 was currently in theaters.
Peter ran to the nearest convenience store, grabbed a newspaper despite the owner shouting at him, and checked the top corner.
December 4, 2011
Did fixing everything include going back to before the Battle of New York?