Work Text:
Us In Every Universe
Earth-120
Jean Elaine Grey absolutely hated her life.
First of all, she and her sister had to move from their comfortable life from Upstate New York to follow their mom who was assigned at a new hospital in the city.
Second of all, Sara was sent to another high school all the way across the city because her grades were higher and the special private high school wanted an achiever like her to be in their midst.
Third of all, Jean was pretty much all alone in this godforsaken place for what probably would be the next three stupid years of her life. Jean Elaine Grey was new to Midtown High and granted she never had a lot of friends back upstate, but at least those that she had were real with her. Unlike these girls who had way too much makeup on their faces that seemed as though they plopped their faces down on some makeup kit and never came up for air.
And fourth of all, the absolute cherry on top of this miserable sundae, the school guidance counselor had assigned her a "peer ambassador" to show her around, as if she were a lost puppy who couldn't read door numbers.
"And over here is the chemistry lab," a energetic voice chimed beside her. "Mr. Harrington runs it. Great guy, awesome teacher, though he did accidentally set his tie on fire during the exothermic reactions unit last semester. But honestly? It built character for all of us."
Jean didn't even turn her head. She just kept her eyes locked on the scuffed linoleum floor, her hands shoved deep into the pockets of her oversized, faded denim jacket. She dragged her feet, letting the rubber soles squeak against the floor in a subtle, passive-aggressive rhythm.
"Look, Peter, right?" Jean interrupted, her voice dropping into a flat, icy monotone that could freeze a radiator. "You don't have to do this. I'm sure you have a club to run, or a Lego set to build, or whatever it is kids like you do. Just give me a map, tell me where the nearest exit is, and we can both pretend this tour went fucking fantastic."
Peter Parker stopped dead in his tracks, blinking at her from behind a pair of slightly askew glasses. He was holding a stack of beat-up textbooks in one arm, wearing a soft, faded blue hoodie under a slightly worn thrift-store jacket. He looked entirely unimpressed by her attempt to blow him off. In fact, a small, ridiculously genuine smile tugged at the corner of his lips.
"First of all, it's Peter. Second of all, I do have a Lego set waiting at home, but it's a Death Star and it takes time," Peter replied smoothly, stepping back to walk alongside her, completely unbothered by her prickliness. "And third of all, if I abandon the new kid on day one, Principal Morita puts me on cafeteria cleanup for two weeks. And trust me, Jean, you haven't seen true horror until you've scraped mystery meat off a tray at 3:00 PM."
Jean finally looked at him properly.
He didn't look like the glitz-and-glamour Manhattan snobs she’d seen strutting down the hallways earlier. His hair was messy, his shoes were worn down at the heel, and he was looking at her not with pity or fake popularity, but with a warm, easy humor that felt... weirdly familiar. Like a song she couldn't quite name, lingering just at the back of her mind.
"I hate it here," Jean muttered under her breath, though the razor-sharp edge in her tone slipped just a fraction.
"I know," Peter said softly, stepping ahead to push open the heavy double doors leading out toward the courtyard. The crisp September wind swept through the archway, catching her auburn hair and tossing it across her face. "New York City is loud, it smells like hot dog water in the summer, and people talk too fast, like way too fast. But... give it a chance. The roof of the science wing has the best view of the skyline. When everything gets too loud, it’s pretty quiet up there."
Jean paused in the doorway, tucking a strand of red hair behind her ear, her cerulean eyes fixing on his face.
For a second, a strange, electric static buzzed in her ears, not power, not magic, just an inexplicable, bone-deep sensation that she had known this boy with the messy brown hair before, she just wasn’t sure where.
"The roof, huh?" Jean asked, crossing her arms, a tiny, almost reluctant smile breaking through her defensive wall for the very first time that day.
"Yeah," Peter smiled back, holding the door open for her. "Come on. I'll show you."
Earth-9201
Dr. Peter Benjamin Parker had seen it all from his nearly six years of being in the field of medicine, but this was the first time he has seen someone survive a car crash as devastating as the one he was told about.
The patient was being wheeled at breakneck speed as he looked over his chart.
Patient was behind the car, she three years younger than him, her elderly parents were on the wheel for whatever reason.
The emergency room doors burst open with a deafening crash, drowning out the ambient hum of heart monitors and the low rumble of hospital chatter.
"Dr. Parker!" Nurse West called out, matching his swift, practiced stride as the gurney rattled over the metal floor seams. "Victim is Jean Grey, twenty-four. Head-on collision with a semi on Route 9. Extrication took nearly forty minutes. Paramedics reported complete vehicle crushed frame, both parents expired at the scene, DOA. Pulse was thready in the field, but she suddenly stabilized right before arrival."
Peter barely heard the trauma stats. He was already running his gloved hands over the patient's neck and chest, feeling for structural instability while eyeing the telemetry monitor.
The report made no sense. Looking at the photo attached to the incoming paramedic dispatch, the sedan had been reduced to a flattened accordion of twisted steel. Human bodies didn't survive a hundred-mile-per-hour kinetic impact like that without catastrophic internal hemorrhaging, crushed rib cages, or massive cranial trauma.
Yet as Peter looked down at her face through the clear plastic oxygen mask, he stopped.
She was covered in shattered auto glass, coal-black soot, and dried blood, but her chest rose and fell in a steady, unbroken rhythm. Long, brilliant strands of deep crimson hair swept across the white trauma pillow like spilled ink. But what made Peter's pulse skip a beat wasn't her miraculous lack of broken bones.
It was the sudden, inexplicable prickle that flared along the base of his spine.
It wasn't a medical reaction. It was an instinct, a strange, phantom alarm, a ghost-faint tremor of recognition that vibrated through every nerve in his hands. He felt an overwhelming, bone-deep certainty that he knew this woman. That he had held her hand somewhere far away from these sterile lights, beneath a sky painted in shades of red velvet and city smoke.
"Dr. Parker?" the resident beside him asked, holding up a penlight. "Pupils are equal and reactive. Do we order a full-body CT or head straight to trauma bay two?"
Peter blinked, tearing his gaze away from her face to focus on the chart. "Trauma bay two," he ordered, his voice shifting effortlessly into the crisp, commanding authority that twenty years of medicine had forged. "Get a chest series, baseline labs, and prepare a central line just in case. And get a trauma team on standby for neuro."
As the nurses expertly transferred her onto the examination table, Peter stepped in, gently sliding his fingers beneath her jawline to feel her carotid pulse. Her skin was unusually warm, vibrating with a subtle, electric heat that felt almost like a static charge humming beneath her flesh.
Suddenly, Jean’s eyelids fluttered open.
Her cerulean eyes were wild, unaligned, and clouded with the agonizing fog of shock and sudden, crushing grief. She didn't look at the bright overhead surgical lamps. She didn't look at the nurses bustling around her, cutting away her torn jacket.
Her eyes locked straight onto Peter.
Her hand shot up from the gurney with surprising, unnatural strength, her slender fingers tightening like a vise around Peter’s wrist, right over his pulse point.
"Doctor..." she gasped, her voice raw, scraped hollow by smoke and tears. She didn't ask about her parents. She didn't ask where she was. She stared at Peter’s face, at the faint silvering at his temples and the quiet, tired kindness in his brown eyes, as if recognizing a lighthouse through a blinding storm. "...you're here."
Peter didn't pull away. He leaned down closer, covering her cold, trembling hand with his own, his thumb smoothing over her knuckles in a gesture far too personal for a doctor meeting a patient for the first time.
"I'm here," Peter said softly, his voice an anchor in the chaotic room. "My name is Peter. You're at Metro General, Jean. You're safe now."
A single tear cut a clear line through the soot on her cheek as her grip slowly loosened, her body finally giving in to the heavy sedatives flowing through her IV line. As her eyes drifted shut and her breathing leveled out into deep sleep, Peter remained standing beside the bed, his hand still resting over hers.
Earth-7892
“Jean, don’t run too far from view!” Her mother called out as she adjusted Sara’s little skirt that was drooping.
“Okay, Momma.” The little five-year-old redhead called out as she stopped in the sandbox prepared to build the highest sand castle she could make, only to stop when there was a boy who looked to be around eight or nine building the weirdest thing on her sandbox.
Jean marched right over, her small pink sneakers sinking into the loose sand. She planted her hands on her little hips and frowned down at the intricate structure taking shape in front of her. It wasn't a standard tower, and it definitely didn't look like the bucket-molded castles the other kids made. It was a sprawling, geometric complex of arches, angled walls, and interconnected bridges, all crafted from wet sand smoothed over with painstaking precision.
"That doesn't look like a castle," five-year-old Jean declared, tilting her head. "Where are the pointy flags?"
The boy looked up, wiping a streak of damp sand off his nose with the back of his forearm. His brown hair was a wild mop of curls, and his knee-high socks were pulled up unevenly over scuffed shins. He blinked at her through a pair of wire-rimmed glasses that were entirely too big for his face, sliding down the bridge of his nose every time he tilted his head.
"It's not a castle," the boy explained with extreme, solemn authority, pushing his glasses up with one finger. "It's a structural bridge model. See, if you curve the arch under the main walkway like this, it holds more weight without collapsing. A castle is just a big box with holes in it."
Jean stared at the elaborate bridge. She didn't really understand what "structural model" meant, but she knew she didn't like being told her castle idea was just a box.
"Well, my castle is gonna have a dragon," she stated stubbornly, plumping herself down in the sand right across from him. "And a big wall to keep the monsters out."
"Dragons aren't real," the boy pointed out, though he didn't sound mean, just way too practical for a kid his age. "But if you build a moat around your wall and fill it with water, it acts as a natural barrier. That's how castles actually defended against sieges in medieval times."
Jean narrowed her bright blue eyes at him. "How do you know so much stuff? You're not even that big."
"I'm eight," he said proudly, sitting up a little straighter. "My name's Peter. My Uncle Ben took me to the library on Saturday and we read three whole books about architecture and bugs." He said as he pointed to his Uncle Ben who was chatting with who she thinks was his aunt as well just a few feet away.
"I'm Jean," she said, picking up a bright yellow plastic shovel and scooping up a big mound of wet sand. "And my sister Sara is seven, but she doesn't know anything yet."
Peter watched her carefully as she dumped the sand right next to his carefully engineered bridge. He didn't yell or tell her to go away like the bigger kids usually did. Instead, he reached out with his own small, red plastic trowel and helped her smooth the edges into a curved hill.
"If we connect your dragon wall to my bridge," Peter suggested, his brown eyes lighting up with genuine excitement, "we can make a giant fortress. The bridge can be the secret escape route."
Jean looked from the wet sand up to his face. A sudden, warm feeling bloomed in her chest, a strange, giggly spark that felt like drinking fizzy soda too fast. She didn't know why, but sitting in the middle of a noisy public park in Queens with this boy felt like the safest place in the whole world.
"Okay," Jean giggled, leaning forward to pack down the moat. "But I get to be the queen of the fortress."
"Deal," Peter smiled, his whole face crinkling with easy warmth. "Queen Jean."
A few yards away, Mrs. Grey looked up from adjusting Sara's floral dress, expecting to see Jean arguing over toys as she usually did with new children. Instead, she paused, a soft smile spreading across her face.
Jean and the young boy were sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, completely engrossed in their shared creation, their small hands working together in seamless, instinctive harmony.
Earth-2004
On second thought, having a full on make out session in the janitor’s closet at the end of first period of their first week at MIT was not the type of “recklessness” that Peter had in mind. But when Jean entered the campus with that white summer dress that contrasted her usual denim drip made him salivate and couldn’t contain himself.
It turned out that Jean couldn’t contain herself either.
The closet smelled faintly of lemon-scented industrial floor wax and dusty mops, but neither of them cared in the slightest. Peter’s back was pressed flat against the metal shelving units, a row of stacked paper towel rolls vibrating softly behind his head every time his heart slammed against his ribs. His hands were buried deep in Jean’s auburn hair, his fingers tangled in the soft, fragrant silk of it, pulling her closer while her arms wrapped tightly around his neck.
Her lips were soft, warm, and utterly devouring, tasting faintly of cherry lip balm and cold iced coffee. When she pulled back just a fraction of an inch to draw a ragged breath, her cerulean eyes were dark, heavy-lidded, and practically glowing in the dim stripe of light filtering through the door’s narrow louvers.
"A white dress, Parker?" Jean whispered against his lips, her voice a sultry, dangerous murmur that sent a shiver straight down his spine. "You're that easily distracted?"
"It's... highly effective psychological warfare," Peter choked out, his hands slipping down from her hair to rest on her waist, his thumbs tracing the smooth, crisp cotton of the dress. His pulse was hammering so loud he was pretty sure the entire hallway could hear it. "You can't just... show up looking like a summer commercial and expect me to remember AP Physics formulas, Jean. It's literally against the laws of nature."
Jean let out a low, throaty laugh, leaning forward to bite his lower lip gently before soothing it with a lingering kiss. "Good. I spent twenty minutes ironing it just to see if I could make you trip over your own locker door."
"Mission accomplished," Peter groaned, resting his forehead against hers, his breathing heavy and uneven. "I dropped my calculator three times before home room even started."
Outside, the harsh, shrill blare of the second-period bell echoed through the corridors, followed immediately by the thunderous shuffle of hundreds of sneakers rushing down the hallway toward their respective classes.
Neither of them moved.
Peter’s fingers tightened around her waist, pulling her flush against him once more, entirely unconcerned with the tardy slip that was almost certainly in his immediate future. Jean smiled against his cheek, pressing a soft kiss right beneath his jawline, right over the erratic pulse beating in his throat.
Earth-76142
Thanos… he did it. The desolate terrain of Titan never seemed vaster coupled with the knowledge that they failed. All Peter wanted to do was wallow in his sorrows and just collapse on the ground. A warm hand grasped his, alleviating the cold that was surrounding him.
She didn’t speak, she didn’t need to, she just needed to be with him.
They looked at each other and gave one another a small smile of comfort, those smiles would be lost however when their newest ally, Mantis, said, “Something’s happening.” And a second later, she vanished in a cloud of dust, as if she was never here in the first place.
Panic, cold and sharp as a razor, cut through the quiet despair clinging to the dusty, rust-colored soil of Titan.
Peter’s head snapped toward the spot where Mantis had been standing just a second ago. There was nothing left, only a fading drift of ash catching the dry, alien wind.
Beside him, Drax was looking down at his own hands, his thick skin flaking away like burnt paper. "Quill?" he rumbled, his voice hollow, before he too dissolved into the rust-red atmosphere.
Quill stared at his empty hands, his face pale with utter disbelief. "Oh, man..." he breathed, collapsing into ash that blew away across the dead plain.
Peter’s chest seized. The air felt thick, impossible to pull into his lungs. The faint, phantom prickle at the back of his neck flared into a deafening, agonizing scream, a visceral, soul-crushing warning that the universe was tearing itself apart at the seams.
He spun around, his eyes frantically searching the desolate horizon until they locked back onto Jean.
She was standing just a few feet away, her red hair catching the dim light of the dying sky. But her hands were trembling. She looked down, her cerulean eyes widening in silent horror as her fingertips began to break apart, turning into tiny, glittering particles of grey dust.
"Peter..." Jean whispered.
The sight broke through Peter's terror, replacing it with an absolute, desperate fury. He didn't care about Titan. He didn't care about Thanos or the Infinity Stones or the fact that his own body was starting to feel light, numb, and wrong. He lunged forward, closing the distance between them, and threw his arms around her.
He pulled her against his chest with every ounce of strength he had left, burying his face in the crook of her neck. He held her so tight it felt as if he could physically bind her atoms together through sheer, unyielding force of will.
"I've got you," Peter gasped, his voice breaking, tears cutting clean lines through the alien dust on his face. "I've got you, Jean. Stay with me. Please, please stay with me..."
Jean wrapped her arms around his shoulders, her grip tightening as her body slowly lost its density, flaking away against the fabric of his suit. But she didn't scream. She didn't panic. She just held him, her chin resting against his shoulder, her breathing steadying as she looked up at the vast, empty cosmos.
"It's okay, Peter," Jean murmured softly into his ear, her voice fading like a gentle breeze across the red dirt. "It's always you. In every universe... it's always you."
Peter squeezed his eyes shut, pressing a final, lingering kiss against her cheek just as her weight completely vanished from his arms. The ash brushed against his face, soft and warm, before floating up toward the starry expanse.
A second later, Peter looked down at his own hands, watching the edges of his gloves disintegrate into the wind. He didn't fight it anymore. He just looked up at the sky where her dust had gone, a small, sad, but unshakeable smile touching his lips.
He wished they were back on that bus heading to school like any other day.
He wished she was teasing him while they were on that bus ride.
He wishes they would continue their subtle flirting sessions like they always do.
He wishes he didn’t push them both to that battle that brought them here.
"I'll find you," Peter whispered to the quiet dust, closing his eyes as he, too, dissolved into the titan wind. "I'll always find you."
Then… nothing.
Earth-616
“Peter, I swear to God, if you took the last tea bag, I will end you.” Jean called out as she was on top of the counter and rummaged through their cabinets to find her favourite tea, Barnaby beside her letting out a helpful little meow.
Peter poked his head out from the living room, wiping his wet hands on a dish towel, a guilty, incredibly boyish grin plastered across his face.
"Okay, first of all, good morning to you too," he said, stepping over to the counter and looking up at her with exaggerated innocent eyes. "Second of all, Barnaby is clearly an accomplice because he watched me take it and did absolutely nothing to intervene. He’s dirty."
Barnaby gave a sharp, offended mew, turned his back on Peter, and meticulously began washing his front paw.
"Trailing evidence, Parker," Jean said, dropping her hands to her hips and glaring down at him from her perch on the countertop. Her auburn hair was a tangled, beautiful mess from sleep, falling loosely over the oversized grey Midtown High hoodie she had stolen from his closet three months ago. "I checked the tin. It's empty. That chamomile was my last line of defense against another morning of listening to you talk about Lego instructions in your sleep."
"Hey! Building the Avengers Tower is an intricate process that requires mental prep," Peter defended, leaning his hips against the counter right between her knees. He reached up, placing his hands gently on her waist, looking up into her cerulean eyes with a soft, effortless warmth that felt older than time itself. "And for the record, I didn't take the last tea bag to hoard it. I used it to make you a cup."
He gestured with his chin toward the dining table, where a single ceramic mug was steaming softly next to a fresh plate of buttered toast.
Jean blinked, the faux-annoyance melting off her face so fast it was almost comical. She looked from the mug back down to Peter, her expression softening into that quiet, radiant smile that always made his heart skip a beat.
"You're ridiculous," Jean murmured, leaning down and wrapping her arms around his neck, letting him lift her effortlessly off the counter. Her feet touched the hardwood floor, but she didn't pull away. She just buried her face in the crook of his neck, breathing in the familiar, comforting scent of rain, soap, and home.
"I'm proactive," Peter corrected softly, his arms wrapping tightly around her waist, anchoring her against him. He pressed a gentle kiss into her hairline, feeling the steady, rhythmic beat of her heart against his chest. "There's a difference."
Jean let out a quiet, contented sigh, her fingers tangling in the soft hair at the nape of his neck.
A quiet sort of calm settled around them. It was just a faint, echoing hum across space and time. A whisper of a rainy rooftop in Midtown, a sterile hospital room in Metro General, a dusty sandbox in Queens, a cramped closet at MIT, and the orange, wind-swept plains of a distant planet.
In every life, in every story, through every crash and every dusting of ash, the universe always brought them back to this exact same quiet kitchen.
Jean pulled back just enough to look at him, her thumb gently tracing the faint line of a fading bruise on his jaw from last night's fight. Her eyes were clear, bright, and completely free of shadows.
"What?" Peter asked, offering her a crooked, curious smile.
"Nothing," Jean whispered, stepping up on her tiptoes to press her lips to his in a soft, lingering kiss that tasted like warm tea and sweet promises. "Just... thank you for finding me."
Peter’s smile widened, deep and unshakeable, as he held her close under the bright morning sun streaming through their Queens window.
"Always," Peter said. "In every universe."