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“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel” - Maya Angelou
Here’s the thing about magic. It’s an exact science. It requires incredibly specific intentions and wording to work. And “Everyone will forget Peter Parker”? Yeah, that’s a pretty vague spell. Maybe it was an accident - Stephen Strange was pretty new to the ways of magic, even as Sorcerer Supreme. Or maybe, just maybe, he left a loophole. Something that would solve the multiverse problem, but give Peter a chance at bringing his loved ones’ memories back. No one knows whether it was on purpose, but this was the result:
The morning after the battle, as the world scratched their heads at the Statue of Liberty mess, there were those that woke to an inexplicable feeling of loss.
Pepper Potts broke down crying when her daughter wandered into the kitchen for breakfast. She didn’t know why, exactly. The hole in her chest felt like she was missing a child, but Morgan was their only kid. She made a double batch of pancakes out of habit, only for most of them to remain uneaten. Why had she done that? When she went into the guest bedroom to look for a charger, nausea churned in her stomach at the sight of the bare walls and empty desk. She plugged her ears at the loud music in Tony’s lab, for some reason feeling like the music should be much quieter - a stupid thought, given Tony’s preferences. Why have the music soft when he could blow out his eardrums instead?
At 2:10, an alarm went off on Happy Hogan’s phone. He couldn’t for the life of him figure out what it was supposed to remind him of, even as he was filled with the sense that he should be doing something. He chalked it up to having the day off “to process his grief” as Pepper ordered. Happy spent most of the day laying on the couch, wishing he was working so he didn’t have to think of the fact that May was well and truly gone. How had they met, again? He couldn’t remember, and he hated that. He wanted to remember every part of her, but his memory was riddled with unexplainable holes.
Ned Leeds kept finding himself reaching for his phone to text someone…but he didn’t know who. He didn’t think it was MJ, even though she was his closest friend. Why were they friends again? He didn’t know. He found his Spider-Man poster in his closet and hung it back up. Why had he taken it down in the first place? Spider-Man was the best. Ned ignored the weird pang that shot through him every time he saw the image of the webby hero.
MJ spent the day with tears running down her cheeks. That was strange. She hadn’t cried since second grade. She tried not to think about the emotions swirling through her. It was just a bad day, that was all. At school, people came up to her in the halls like they expected her to say hello. She didn’t know why they remembered her to be more personable than she was. MJ thought about asking Ned, but he spent the day obsessively watching Spider-Man videos.
Tony Stark sat in his lab, staring at the second work bench and wondering why he felt so lonely; why his lab sounded so quiet even with his music blaring; why he felt like there was something he should be doing, someone he should be…teaching? He questioned the presence of the lightsaber, the rudimentary robots displayed proudly, the Star Wars posters, and the handwriting covering his blueprints that wasn’t his own. There was something wrong; he knew it. And there’s nothing Tony Stark hated more than an unsolved mystery.