Chapter Text
Please make it stop. I don't want any of this!
How about another? Gaze into an unthinkable future.
The Mind Stone flared.
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This was all too cliche. I lay half dead in the ruins of my own floating fortress. The former Red Room was a perfect secret base, the ultimate castle. If I knew it would end the same way as the original, I would have never set foot here.
"It's over now. You're done Luke." The shrill, exhausted voice of Peter Parker, New York's Spider-Man, rang dully in my ears. He was only a few feet from me, standing tall above me with a gun stretching to my head.
"Not Mr. Brighton anymore? I guess I deserve that." I coughed out, tasting iron. "This isn't the way I wanted it to turn out. Peter."
"You don't get to call me that. Not after everything you've done." The big white eyes of his mask were narrow. His mask was expressive for a piece of cloth.
What I'd done. It was a lot to think about. I had done plenty since I'd been transported here in 2008. I sometimes forget why I had gone about everything the way I did, but I never lingered on it long. Something always came up.
Now is a good time for reflection. Maybe the last time for it as well.
"I didn't want everything to turn out this way. If you hate me for Tony I—"
"May is dead!" He screamed.
"She is dead?" I asked numbly. I hadn't even once thought of his sweet aunt who had been nothing but kind to me.
"It's your fault! Your men, those poor, brainwashed goons!" He sniffled through the mask. "Did you think May wouldn't protect me?! Wouldn't she try to help other people? Isn't that what you said you admired about her? About me?!"
I'm sorry, Peter. I didn't have the strength to say it aloud.
"What about everyone else?" He continued, his voice ragged. "Did they all mean nothing to you?!"
"That's not it." I croaked. "I wanted only the best for everyone."
"Then what was it all for then!?" He erupted. I could see the whirlwind of emotions through his mask. The hate, anger, righteous fury, sadness, and hurt all at once.
He discarded the gun he had been holding to my head. "I don't need this. I'm not like you!"
My body started to slowly patch itself together. Functionally, I was just a torso with a head. My legs and arms were gnarled and in tatters. The warmth of Extremis was overworked and exhausted to its limit. It confirmed what I knew in my heart.
I was dying.
"You aren't a murderer, Peter. You could never be like me."
Looking back, when I had been offered this power, I was certain power would be the key to all my problems. In a world like this one, the ones who saved the world had power. The ones who made decisions only knew power.
"Don't pretend to comfort me!" He yelled right back.
"I wish I could've met your uncle sooner." The whites of his mask widened as I spoke. "Maybe then I would have been more careful."
"Don't you dare bring him up!"
"I thought power was exactly what I needed. That I had a responsibility to the world to do my best to protect it. Great power comes with great responsibility. Isn't that right, Peter?"
"How do you know that?" He let out in shock.
"It doesn't matter." I wheezed. "I had a large burden I placed upon myself, and yet I let that burden make me lose sight of everything else important."
What was it all for exactly? I had a goal in mind, and yet I can't place it no matter what. Even Ellen left far too early to consider her.
"Is that how you justify everything you've done? It's not an excuse." He growled.
"Yes. That's exactly right. Everything I've done. To you, to my friends, to the world. It was all to prevent a great calamity. In the end, I succeeded. Trillions of lives were saved, but that hardly matters now, does it?"
"You can't mean that." He grabbed my shoulders. "You are just a power-hungry monster who would control even your family to get what you want! Don't tell me you've been fighting some altruistic battle against evil or anything now!"
"That'd be convenient." I muttered. "It wouldn't change things. Your aunt and my friends can't come back no matter what I do."
He took his mask off at long last. His eyes were red from tears, and his look wasn't the usual Peter Parker friendly face. He wanted nothing more than to kill me.
"Will you still use your ability on me? Even now that it's all over?" He stared into my eyes. "Will you take away my own mind and make me save you?"
"What's the point." I tried to shake my head. "Extremis is a miracle, but it has its limits as well. Besides, I had an unusual moment of clarity."
He glared suspiciously at me. I chuckled as best as I could. "You won Spider-Man. I've nothing more to say."
Where did it all go wrong?
Maybe it was trying to work outside the system instead of through it? Could I have just gone to Fury from the start? Was it my power? Is that the source of all this suffering? No.
It probably went wrong when I first got here. When I approached Aldrich Killian with nothing but a hopeless dream.
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No more! It won't happen!
I don't believe you. One more.
The Mind Stone flickered again.
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