Chapter Text
Stephen Strange had borne witness to countless oddities throughout his life. Medicine alone had taught him that fate was never as linear as textbooks insisted—that a routine procedure could devolve into a bailout before anyone realized they were losing the patient, that a conversion from a minimally invasive operation to an open surgery was often the difference between life and death. Years spent beneath the unforgiving glare of operating lights, from sleepless nights as an intern to the steady precision expected of a surgeon whose name had become internationally renowned, had conditioned him to anticipate the unexpected.
Then came the Mystic Arts.
If medicine and logic was a book of reality, magic would have torn the very pages off of its leather straps and thrown each page throughout time and space.
Dimensions folded over one another like paper. Time bent, fractured, and occasionally obeyed. Gods bargained. Demons negotiated. Souls wandered. Death itself had proven less absolute than any physician dared to believe.
Stephen had long since assumed there was little left capable of shaking him.
He had been wrong.
His hands trembled. (Trauma alert *buzzer buzzer*)
Not from the lingering damage of nerve injuries, nor from fatigue, nor age. (it's because you didn't drive the car properly 😒)
They simply... shook.
It was an absurd betrayal. Those hands had once stitched severed arteries beneath impossible odds. They had navigated bailout procedures that should have ended in failure, adapted to emergency conversions with practiced confidence, and later woven eldritch sigils intricate enough to reshape reality itself.
Yet now, they refused to obey. (Y'know... Like when the accident first happened?)
Because at the other end of the glowing portal lay the still body of a child.
Peter Parker.
A boy who had, somehow, nestled himself into Stephen's carefully guarded affections with the effortless persistence only Peter possessed. Bright-eyed questions that never ceased. Tangents spoken with such infectious enthusiasm that even Stephen's exasperated sighs had become little more than ritual. A gangly, skittering arachnid of a child who had climbed over every wall Stephen had erected around himself, all without realizing he'd been scaling them.
Magic was meant to defy explanation.
Peter, however, had always been magical in an altogether different way.
No incantation could manufacture hope the way that boy carried it so naturally. No relic could imitate the warmth of his laughter echoing through the Sanctum. No spell Stephen had ever mastered could replicate the impossible feat of making the world's greatest cynic believe, if only for a fleeting moment, that perhaps everything would be all right.
Now there was only silence.
Wrong.
Everything about it was wrong.
Peter Parker was never still.
Not while speaking. Not while thinking. Not while breathing. Even asleep, he fidgeted incessantly, one foot hanging off the bed, fingers twitching as though his dreams demanded motion. He existed in perpetual movement, kinetic energy given human form.
The boy lying on the floor before him possessed none of it. His limbs rested with unnatural compliance.
His chest did not rise.
His face—usually animated by a grin, a grimace, or an apology offered a heartbeat too late—had settled into a dreadful stillness.
Stephen's mind rejected the image with almost surgical precision.
This wasn't Peter.
It couldn't be.
Every instinct, every irrational fragment of denial buried beneath decades of clinical discipline rebelled against the conclusion his eyes demanded he accept.
Because Peter Parker, for all the trouble he attracted, simply did not stay still.
Not for the life of him.
And that singular, impossible truth settled like lead in the pit of Stephen's stomach as his gaze drifted past the child—
To Tony Stark.
Tony was on his knees, oblivious to Stephen's arrival, cradling Peter against his chest with desperate hands that never stopped moving. He rubbed warmth back into limbs already surrendering it, chafing cold forearms and clasping tiny fingers between his own as though friction alone could reverse biology.
His voice was hoarse from speaking, yet he never once paused.
"You're freezing because your thermoregulation's shot, that's all, kid," he murmured, more to himself than anyone else. "Shock does that. C'mon, Pete, don't make me look stupid in front of the wizard."
His laugh cracked into something unrecognizable.
"You always run cold after missions. Remember? You complained my hoodies were warmer than your suit. That's all this is, Roos."
He rubbed harder.
"You just need to warm up."
Stephen had watched families bargain with cardiac monitors before. He had seen spouses insist a flatline was merely a malfunctioning lead, parents plead with ventilators as though machines could be persuaded by love alone.
He knew denial.
He had never imagined witnessing it in Tony Stark.
Tony refused to look at Peter's unmoving chest.
Refused to acknowledge the silence where a heartbeat should have been.
Instead, he kept talking to him with infuriating normalcy, smoothing unruly curls away from Peter's forehead as though the boy might grumble about being fussed over at any moment.
"You hear me, Bug? You're grounded after this."
Another pause.
"We're gonna argue about this later. Spiders are arachnids, not bugs and you'd be mad all over again because I called you Bug..."
Silence answered.
Tony swallowed hard and smiled anyway.
"You hate being grounded."
Stephen had performed enough pronouncements in his former life to recognize the choreography of grief before it unfolded. The denial. The bargaining. The refusal to relinquish physical contact with the deceased, as though warmth could be coaxed back into tissue already surrendering to postmortem cooling. It was a sequence as familiar to him as a trauma protocol, rehearsed countless times beneath fluorescent hospital lights, though never any less devastating.
His hands moved almost instinctively.
Not as the Sorcerer Supreme.
As a surgeon.
He crouched beside Tony, every movement measured and deliberate, slipping one hand beneath Peter's shoulders while the other supported the back of his neck, careful to preserve the natural alignment of his cervical spine despite knowing there was no longer a neurological function left to protect. Years of muscle memory refused to distinguish between a salvageable patient and one beyond every intervention medicine—or magic—could offer.
He could have levitated the body.
The Cloak twitched, sensing the intention before he dismissed it.
No.
Peter deserved gentler hands than magic.
He eased the boy from Tony's trembling grasp with the same reverence one might reserve for lifting a sleeping child, though the absence of even involuntary muscle tone made the task heartbreakingly effortless.
"Where are you taking him?"
Tony's voice cracked around the question.
Stephen looked up just long enough to find frantic eyes searching his face for an answer that did not exist. Tony reached instinctively for Peter again, fingers brushing empty air before Steve Rogers quietly caught his wrist.
"The med bay," Stephen managed, the words catching painfully in his throat.
He prayed Tony wouldn't ask why.
Despite the obvious absence of spontaneous respirations, despite fixed stillness where a pulse should have been, despite every clinical indicator already screaming the conclusion, protocol remained protocol. A physician would have to perform the official pronouncement. Time of death would need documentation. The body would require forensic examination, an autopsy if jurisdiction demanded it, before finally being released for funeral arrangements.
The paperwork never ended.
Not even for heroes.
Especially not for heroes.
Peter Parker would be remembered as the boy who remained when everyone else had been forced to retreat. The tsunami that swallowed New York had rendered even Earth's Mightiest nearly helpless. Johnny Storm's flames could not survive the relentless surge. Captain America couldn't outmuscle an ocean. Hawkeye's arrows vanished beneath walls of water before finding their marks. Even Valkyrie's mount struggled against currents that cared little for legends.
Peter had stayed anyway.
Web after web anchored collapsing structures long enough for evacuation routes to open. Again. Again. Again.
Until the final building came down.
Hulk himself had later admitted that, by the time he'd reached the district, there had been no one left to rescue except the boy who had ensured everyone else escaped first. Kitty Pryde had spoken through tears about finding survivors in places that should have been impossible to reach, all because Spider-Man had bought them precious minutes. Tony had never spoken publicly at all.
A city survived.
A child didn't.
"He'll be okay... right?"
The question was barely louder than a whisper.
Steve helped Tony to his feet before the engineer could follow, one steady hand braced against his shoulder in anticipation of the inevitable moment denial finally fractured beneath reality's weight.
Steve's smile trembled with the strain of holding itself together.
"Yeah," he said softly. "He'll be good as new. You know Queens. Kid's too stubborn."
Stephen remained silent.
He knew this script.
He had delivered variations of it himself years ago, standing outside operating theatres with blood still staining his gloves, reassuring families that everything possible had been done, that their loved one hadn't suffered, that they weren't alone. Sometimes the words were true.
Sometimes they merely softened the impact enough for the mind to absorb what the heart refused to accept.
This time, they lodged in his own throat like broken glass.
Peter had never been his patient.
Never will be.
He had been an eager student who somehow convinced Stephen to teach him the fundamentals of emergency medicine after one disastrous battle left hospitals overwhelmed beyond capacity. Peter had absorbed anatomy, triage, suturing techniques, and surgical principles with frightening speed, filling notebooks with meticulous sketches and asking questions faster than Stephen could answer them. Aunt May's years as an emergency room nurse had already given him a respectable foundation; Stephen had merely refined it.
Two years.
That was all it had taken for the boy to become another fixture in the Sanctum's halls, another bright soul Stephen found himself quietly looking forward to seeing.
Potential.
It radiated from Peter in impossible abundance.
Not merely intelligence, though there was plenty of that. Not simply talent, though it seemed everything the boy touched flourished. It was something far rarer—that relentless, incandescent goodness that refused to diminish no matter how cruel the world became.
Souls, Stephen had learned, possessed a luminosity all their own.
Peter Benjamin Anthony Stark-Parker's had always burned brighter than most.
Now, as Stephen carried the unnaturally light weight of the boy toward the med bay, that radiance felt impossibly faint.
Like the last ember of a firework that had painted the night sky with breathtaking brilliance—
Only to vanish far, far too soon.