Chapter Text
What no one tells him is that ending the apocalypse is only the beginning.
Peter stares out at the window at the endless black. The image before him is probably some kind of metaphor for hopelessness. Just pure darkness stretching out beyond his eye and continuing well on past that. It isn’t as bright as the last time he was in space. There were so many stars before, and isn’t that the issue?
Before when the world was ending, at least they had the stars. It was kind of hard to be terrified when he looked up on a foreign planet and saw a sky full of light not so different from his own (but he had managed - he was sort of an overachiever in that regard). Well, they’d figured out the whole ‘life disappearing’ due to an insane maniac schtick but they’d lost the light along the way.
Considering his luck, he really should have guessed it wouldn’t be so easy. Truly, it was sort of ignorant for him to assume that having half the Earth turn to dust for five years then bringing them all back with a simple snap (and a long, enduring, bloody battle) would be it - that the work would be done.
In a way, it's almost funny. Maybe ironic. MJ would know, but MJ wasn't here, so the only person who could enjoy his poor sense of humour was himself.
From ashes to ashes. From dust to space dust.
The joke falls flat even in his own head as he reminds himself that the astrophage isn't actually dust. They're small, barely a spec, little beautiful, disastrous fuckers. They are alive and love to breed in the right UV conditions and are actively ruining his life.
It's like no one gave them the memo that destroying the universe was so five years ago.
Heh.
Peter exhales, listening.
Waiting.
Silence.
No one laughed at that one the last time either.
–
“Okay! So, who bets that the water will spill over the edge of the glass?” Peter shouts to his class. A few hands tentatively raised with squinted frowns since every kid there knew better than to trust their teacher when he was shouting so gleefully.
“Oh come on, a few more of you can express some faith. Look, you can basically see the water at the top of the glass. It’s an easy bet to win.”
“No prize.” Jacob called from the back, ever the interrupter.
Oh. Oh. Peter had been waiting for this one.
“Fine. You’re right. How about this… If the water spills, I will mark all your recent assignments for Monday and remove the pop quiz from Wednesday's class.”
“Not much of a pop quiz now, is it?” Caleb scoffed.
“Because I’m nice and want you to do your best regardless.” Peter told him as an aside, focusing back on the broader room. “But! If I add another droplet and it doesn’t spill, you guys owe me this snazzy little worksheet on my desk by tomorrow lunch, ‘kay?”
Scepticism is evident on each and every one of their faces. The deal sounds too good to be true, and every kid in the room is far too used to that; they were promised a blissful life when their friends and family returned and instead they got the joy of being held back years and travel restrictions and a life so different to the one they’d known for the last five years – or so entirely different to the one that they had left five years ago. After the blip, kids weren’t as trusting or naive as they used to be.
Call him immature, but Peter really does hope that with dumb little bets like this, he’s encouraging a little more youthfulness back into his kids. He owes it to them.
“Come on… This is an easy bet to win… I’ll even sweeten the pot… No homework for a week.”
His words hang in the air, a few heads turn to one another. A few muttered whispers.
Silence.
Then.
“Sure! I’ll take that bet.”
Oh Jacob, Peter thinks with a broadening grin, you beautiful disturbance.
“Come on up then Jake, let’s have you do the honours so we know it’s a fair test!” Jacob walks up. He takes his position by the sink, turns on the tap and lets a big droplet fall into the glass. He has his face turned towards Peter with a smug grin that only falls when the echoing groans of his classmates ring in his ear.
Not a single drop spilled.
“Well… That’s too dang bad, Jacob. Seems you have some homework you owe me. Now, why don’t you go take your seat again and I can tell you all why you lost that bet… surface tension!”
The groans echo louder. “Was this a lesson the whole time?!”
“Considering we’re ten minutes into class, you absolutely should have seen that coming.” Peter says as he scrawls the lesson’s topic across the board. “Tell you what… to cut the tension between us– heh. Why don’t I get those papers marked anyway?”
“You mean doing your job?!”
“Hey now!”
Peter likes his kids. Even the annoyingly disruptive ones like Jacob. He adores them. They might be one of his favourite parts of the day. They’re loud and imaginative, and so fucking smart that he often feels as though he is on the backfoot.
Like everyone else in the world, they’ve had a rough run of it the last couple years. In Peter’s eyes, they’ve had it worse. Everyone else could think to when it was easier, when it was better, when it was different. These kids– so much of their childhood has been defined by the blip– whether they were the portion that got to stay or they were among those who dusted, it didn’t matter. This was definitive. They could never look back at their youth and not see the damage that had been done. Yet, they came to shool everyday and still put a smile on his face.
He thought that was kind of magical.
Teaching hadn’t been his first career choice. Truthfully, by the time he got to his Senior Year of High School, he had stopped planning that far ahead and had started focusing on just making it to the next milestone - college admissions, graduation, orientation, then assignments. Teaching just sort of… happened.
After college and some— unfortunate circumstances, he needed a stop-gap job and a substitute position seemed suitable. It wasn’t– turns out even as a sub, the principle gets pissed if you skip out halfway through a day.
But, it’d woken something up in him that he hadn’t felt in a longtime.
Everyone– MJ, May, Ned– they’d all said it was obvious.
He wishes they had said something sooner because maybe he could avoided the whole Doc Ock debacle if he hadn’t been his lab assistant. He could have been doing teacher training instead of chasing ole tentacles around the financial district.
Now twenty-seven and more settled, he thinks that maybe things worked out exactly as they should have but he stopped believing in fate long ago.
All this to say that maybe his lack of training, the blip making his kids a little too cautious and curious, and a variety of other reasons is why he is entirely unprepared for Louisa’s question at the end when he asks;
“Any final questions before bell?”
Her hand shoots up immediately, lip caught between her teeth and looking every one of those fourteen years that she is.
“Is the sun really dying?”
“The Danvers' Line isn’t very catchy.” MJ muses as she rests her chin on Peter’s shoulder, reading the article on his phone.
“That’s your issue with this?" He asks, utterly appalled by her nonchalance. "Not the fact that we have new space dust just… floating up there, making a direct line to our sun? We’re literally connected to the broader universe right now and you’re worried about the name?”
"We were always connected to the broader universe. This is a very self-centered view. Plus, isn't space like completely made of dust? You're the scientist here. You should know about the big bang."
Peter taps the screen with his finger, hoping that the sound of his nail against the glass draws her attention back to the important things.
MJ shrugs, reaching around him to guide a spoonsful of his cereal into her mouth, purposefully chewing right into his ear in a way that she knows he hates. For some reason though, his chest fills with a warm sort of fondness. It reminds him of before the blip, when they were living together in their shitty apartment and were grabbing moments with each other where they could – even if that meant stealing a sip from each other’s coffee or a bite of their sandwich. It was a moment and it was theirs. Since the blip, their apartment had been sold while they were both dusted, and while Peter’d managed to find work again fairly quickly, MJ is still struggling – the arts weren’t well invested in before, and it’s taking time for studios to invest in newer talent again now that some of their ‘greats’ are back on the scene – so they’re both back living with their parents for the moment, blessed in a way that those homes hadn’t fallen out beneath their feet like so many others.
Still. Though. He might appreciate if she took her moments just a few inches further away from his ear.
“She didn’t even technically find it. She just… elaborated on it. And she leaves a streak of light when she flies anyway, like… that’s more the Danvers Line.”
“Only idiots are calling it the Danvers Line. Which is why it’s in the Bugle. It’s called the Petrova Line.”
“And the Bugle is reporting on it because…” MJ gently prompts, arms moving to his middle. “It’s becoming a bigger problem than you first estimated?”
“I didn’t estimate anything. I don’t do space.”
“You went up there once.” She points out unhelpfully.
“Yeah. Once. Involuntarily. I was babysitting a wizard and got kidnapped. I know jackshit about space, but I do know that when space dust appears and the sun apparently starts cooling, we might be facing a bigger problem than just ‘ooh look, pretty line in the sky that no one should worry about’. You know for someone who frequently attends Climate Protests, and did a whole research project on the increased danger of it on low income communities, you’re being extremely calm and rather obnoxious about this if you don’t mind me saying. This is serious. Could be serious. This is– discussion worthy at the very least!”
“You’re panicking.”
“A normal amount.” He counters but the break in his voice gives him away.
“I’m worried. I understand that space dust–”
“--astrophage–”
“Dimming our sun could be catastrophic, but you look and sound like you’re ready to take a one way ticket up there yourself and beat the living shit out of it. One of us needs to remain in the here and now, because Pete, you can do a lot but right here, right now– we have secondhand research that has been carefully shared with the public. You could be spiralling over something they’re already solving.” She says with the kind of levelheadedness and pragmatism that simultaneously drives him mad and he loves deeply. "Dust is very hard to punch."
“This could be bad.” He says, thumb furiously swiping through the article on the Bugle’s website that is full of fearmongering clickbait wording but emphasises everything that he has read in every other journal – Captain Marvel’s expedition had proven one thing, that the Petrova line was leading towards Venus– and that the line itself had only appeared in infra-red imagining since after the blip. It was being heralded as another small mistake from the Avengers– that is what most people were clinging on to– that they’d brought more cosmic entities closer to Earth, seemingly ignoring the other statements that addressed how solar flares were beginning to dim since its appearance.
“Could be, but– hey, greatest minds of our generation saved the world once, they’ll do it again.” She says with a level of optimism that feels unbecoming for his– his eyes flick down to her hand where a ring is still not present– girlfriend.
Peter tilts his head back to look at her. “That’s a lot of faith in the Avengers from you.” Who are either dead, retired or dealing with the broader repercussions of half the population coming back to life.
MJ presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth.
“I wasn’t talking about the Avengers. I was talking about Miss Petrova and scientists and experts and people that don’t wear spandex for a living.”
The tension in his shoulders loosens just ever so slightly. She’s evidence that everything worked out. Her warmth behind him is evidence that the worst thing in the world can happen and things can still right themselves. There might be a small chance he is catastrophizing. There might be a small chance that his brief dabble in universal heroics has given him delusions of grandeur that every problem is one he needs to worry about. If he had a therapist, they might call that some kind of PTSD, but he has a teacher’s salary and mounting student debts so he does not have a therapist and certainly does not need to worry about anything other than the woman who is holding him close.
“I don’t wear the spandex for a living. That would mean I get paid.”
MJ hums, kissing him again. “So maybe, just this once, leave it to the ones that are. World’s not ending just yet, but if you keep having the heebie jeebies, call Stark. I’d like more of a heads up on my apocalyptic end this time around.”
“The sun isn’t dying, per se.” Peter explains to Louisa. “And I think that’s more of a conversation to have with your parents not me.”
“My parents don’t wanna talk about it.”
“Yeah, I don’t either.” Peter murmurs under his breath, hands bracing back on his desk as he lifts his head towards the ceilings and considered what his job was here. As a teacher he– he had a responsibility to tell them the truth, didn’t he?
“Right. We’ve got ten minutes to talk you all down from the world ending. Let’s talk about the Petrova Line and get to know Astrophage. Please remember, I am no expert.”
He steps out of his class, shrugging on his jacket. Despite it being late May, there's a chill in the air that he is trying hard not to think about. It isn’t his problem. It isn’t his responsibility. Climate change, whatever the source, was a little bigger than the neighbourhood.
Peter starts towards the subway's direction, distracting himself with thoughts of dinner. Fridays were always busy of an evening - the weekend had everyone excited, even the weirdos in costumes, but MJ was due to come over on a rare night where he had the apartment to himself. She deserved something special, right?
He could maybe think about skipping patrol just this once - he had helped save the world, no, the universe (albeit five years later and only appearing for the final fight but it definitely still counted. It should count.) - he was owed a couple nights off to spend with his girlfriend, right?
(He'll mull it over the entire ride home and put the suit on anyway.)
For a moment, he thinks that he has been beaten to the punch of a surprise when he hears wheels crunching up on the asphalt behind him. He's half turning to tell MJ that the parking lot was for staff and students only when a voice halts him in place.
“Need a ride, kid?”
All the air in Peter’s chest leaves. Slowly, he turns to face the car and leaning out the window is Happy Hogan. He jerks his thumb towards the back; “His words. I wanted to let you walk.”
Peter swallows, throat dry. He can make assumptions why Tony isn't saying them himself; too difficult to get out the car, too hard to lean too far on either side of his body - they might not have spoken much since the battle but Peter saw the extent of his injuries. Tony was too human to cover from that without a lasting impact. He didn’t have serum pulsing through his veins or radioactive blood and he had taken the risk anyway.
Peter can't decide if it was brave or foolish, only knowing it is the same choice he would have made - probably an indicator of the idiocy.
“Feel like I'm in trouble with the principle.” He tries to joke, not making any movements towards the car. “I wasn't even tardy today. It was a great day. No call outs. Debbie in period three aced her test - was really kind of huge if you knew her. Got a new kid in robotics club. I'm thinking of ordering in for dinner and staying off the streets–”
Happy grimaces at him from the window and looks to the back of the car.
Peter deflates, shoulders hunching and begins to stalk to the left side of the car, opening the door and sliding in.
“We're not going to Germany again, are we? Because I've got papers to mark. Kids are expecting them Monday. Sorta made big promises about my time management.”
He is rambling because he knows why Tony is here and what he wants from Peter, but he can't quite bring himself to accept it because he was meant to have done his part. They all were. He'd been told five years ago that space wasn't within a spider's jurisdiction and hey - you know what - after dying on a different planet, he actually agrees. Peter knows jackshit about the sun and how he could fucking help.
Tony’s scarred cheek twitches.
“Little bigger than that, kid.” He says, words staccato and Peter can’t quite tell if that is on purpose, pointedly trying Peter to understand the scale of the issue or if it’s the lasting damage done to his vocal chords since the snap. Some scars run deep. “Call your girlfriend.”
“Fiancé.” Peter corrects on instinct, somewhat proud that it manages to circumvent the sinking in his gut.
“Oh?”
“Well. Maybe.”
“Hm. Not asked?”
“Not answered. MJ didn't like the whole ‘we died, we came back, we should get married’ thing.”
Tony goes quiet beside him, eyes pinned forward on the dark glass in front of them. “No, I imagine she didn't.” He hums. “Call her anyway.”