Chapter Text
If you had to ask Peter Parker what he was thinking right now, it was that his luck was absolute garbage.
Maybe it deserves its own category. Parker Luck has a nice ring to it, he thought dryly, while he inspected — for the fourth time now — the room he’d woken up in.
The last thing Peter remembered before his current situation was that, after the wish that made everyone forget who he was, he’d spent five years cleaning up the streets of New York (alone, though he wouldn’t admit that out loud) and earning himself the title of the city’s savior.
Hell, they’d even given him the key to the city.
Getting back to what he remembered: the last thing that happened was an incident with Damage Control. At first he thought there was someone out there who could get inside people’s heads and control them, someone who wanted to rob them and tear up the city. Eventually he found out he’d read it all wrong, and that he’d handed a defenseless girl with powers over to scientists and researchers who, in the name of “progress,” wouldn’t hesitate to do whatever it took.
Eventually the girl, Jean Elaine Grey, somehow amplified her powers and took control of everyone in a massive radius. That alone should have been enough to teach Peter to be careful and plan things out better.
But he’d known the moment he saw the girl’s eyes. There was pain in them. Pain and loneliness.
He’d be lying if he said he didn’t see himself in those eyes. He’d spent five years running from his girlfriend (ex) and his best friend out of fear of facing the reality that they’d forgotten him, choosing self-imposed exile instead.
The short version: he’d wanted to stop Jean, to get her to let go of her need for revenge (against the people who’d killed her sister, if he understood right), and he’d let her into his mind, trusting that the memory of the most important woman in his life, Aunt May, might bring her back to her senses.
Which worked when, on top of that, he promised he’d be there for her whenever she needed him. After all, it wasn’t like his social circle was big these days. You could probably call it nonexistent.
Up until then it had all felt like a movie. Save the city, help the villain who turns out not to be much of a villain, and it all ends with the two of you going out for burritos as new partners protecting the city (Peter had hoped, anyway).
And then his spider-sense went off like a fire alarm, and experience told him something was about to hit Jean, and he moved almost on instinct to shove her out of the way and take the bullet instead.
He remembered cursing his luck right then, too. He tells a person he’s going to be there when she needs him, and then he’s going to die with a hole in him?
Anyway. The last thing he remembered before his current situation was telling Jean to run, while she begged him, sobbing, to stay with her, trying to keep him from dying.
And now there was this: a perfect view of his bedroom from twelve years ago (counting the five he’d lost to Thanos’s snap) seen from the bottom bunk of his bed, and his hands, which he’d already looked at five times, were smaller and in much better shape than the rough, calloused ones he remembered from barely an hour ago (or however long he’d been out).
So either this was some kind of dying hallucination, or everything that had happened was a dream. Peter honestly couldn’t decide which of the two options was more absurd at the moment.
But he didn’t get any more time to think it over, because his bedroom door opened, and he found himself looking at a person he’d expected never to see again outside of his dreams.
“Pete, sweetheart, breakfast is ready.” A brown-haired woman called to him with a bright expression and a calm smile on her face, one hand still resting on the doorknob.
“A-Aunt May… you’re…” Peter would be lying if he said this wasn’t a dream he’d had dozens of times. Waking up with Aunt May calling him down to breakfast was such an ordinary thing, and yet something he’d dreamed about so many times, that he forced himself to hold back his reaction — settling on the dying-hallucination theory — out of fear that it would all end.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Pete, and I’m not that old.” Joking about the look in her nephew’s eyes, the brown-haired woman spoke as she crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed, her gaze shifting into something compassionate and worried. “Did something happen, honey? Bad dream?”
Peter had to take a couple of deep breaths to steady himself, and it took a little longer once May’s left hand came to rest on his back, rubbing slow circles — a gesture that, if he didn’t remember her dying in front of him, would have been a comfort.
“Am I… am I dreaming, Aunt May?” he asked between breaths.
Peter wasn’t willing to accept another vivid memory of May. He loved seeing his aunt alive again, but the number of times (more than usual lately, thanks to a certain telepath) that he’d had a vivid memory of her was frankly too many for him.
Which was why, to his own regret, if this was a dream, he was ready to wake up.
His resolve vanished the second he felt a sharp pain in his right side, courtesy of a pinch from that same May, who was looking at him with a cheerful smile.
“Ow! Why did you—”
“Did that feel like a dream to you, Pete? Now come on, your breakfast is getting cold. We already talked about this — being on vacation doesn’t mean I’m going to let you sleep in on weekdays.” Brushing aside her nephew’s worries, gently, May spoke as she ran a hand through Peter’s hair and stood up, heading back toward the doorway.
There she turned to give him one last look.
“Come on, Peter, don’t make me repeat myself.”
With that final warning the woman finally left the room, leaving the Parker alone. Trying to clear his head, he sat on the edge of his bed and rubbed his right side.
So this really isn’t a dying hallucination? Everything that happened was a dream?
Peter didn’t believe the last seven (twelve) years of his life had been a dream, so he simply didn’t understand his current situation. Still, ruling out the idea that this was some kind of hallucination, all he could do was let out a heavy sigh, clean himself up and get dressed to go have breakfast with May.
Jean Elaine Grey sat bolt upright in bed, like someone who’d been drowning, or like someone who’d just had a bad dream.
That was what she remembered. A bad dream.
“Pe—!” She was about to scream the name that filled every last inch of her head to the four winds, and forced herself to stop when she registered where she was.
It was her house. The house from her childhood and her teenage years, where she’d lived with her mother and her sister before the Blip, before the two of them came back from the dust five years later and their powers woke up, before their own mother disowned them and they started a life of drifting.
What the hell is going on? was the question that turned over in her head, while she remembered, with painful clarity, the last thing she’d seen before this.
Peter Parker, AKA Spider-Man, dying in her arms after taking the bullet that had been meant for her.
After telling her he’d be there for her.
After she’d threatened to kill thousands of people.
And even then, he’d told her he’d be there for her, that the only thing she had to do was not let herself be dragged along by everyone else’s hatred, not let herself be eaten alive by the injustices of life, to accept that—
With great power comes great responsibility. She turned the words over in her mind, knowing they hadn’t been meant for her (and at the same time that they had). They were something May, Peter’s aunt, had said to him when he was a teenager, and something he’d chosen to show her when he gave her permission to walk around inside his head.
She’d stayed there, inside Peter’s memories, while in the real world a bullet had been fired with the intent to kill her, and Spider-Man had put himself in front of it, and he was bleeding out.
She didn’t want him to die. She wouldn’t accept that the one person who’d said he’d be there for her after her sister disappeared would die barely moments after walking into her life.
And that’s it. That’s the last thing she remembered before the present: the view of the bedroom she shared with Sara Grey, her older sister, and the reason she’d gone looking for — and eventually found — Spider-Man.
“Jean, God, are you okay?” A worried voice reached her ears, and the recognition made her whip her head around as fast as her neck would allow, to confirm what she’d already decided was impossible.
There she was. Sara. Her sister. The woman she’d searched for for so long, and who she’d finally been told was dead — alive, in the past (?), and breathing.
Looking at her with an enormous, overwhelming amount of concern.
“Eep” was the small squeak her sister let out when Jean, unable to hold back the impulse, launched herself off the bed to hug her, to bury her face in her neck and press hard, as if she were afraid of easing up, as if the moment she relaxed the girl would disappear.
“Sara! Sara! Sara!” Letting the tears run freely, Jean couldn’t stop repeating it while she kept holding on to her sister, who awkwardly returned the hug, stroking her tangled hair.
“Sounds like you had a nightmare, Jean. Want to tell me exactly what you dreamed about to get you like this?”
Those words pulled Jean partway back to reality, and she started to actually think. What happened?
Closing her eyes and concentrating, she sent a psionic pulse through herself — something her sister, the one she was hugging right this second, had taught her to do whenever she was stuck in a nightmare she wanted out of.
Nothing happened.
Not the familiar tug behind her eyes, not that soft vertigo of a dream’s layers peeling away one after another. Just the real weight of Sara against her chest, the smell of the same cheap shampoo as always, and the sound of her breathing, which was too detailed, too specific to be something her head had invented.
Dreams didn’t have texture. Dreams didn’t have the small scratch on Sara’s collarbone that she had completely forgotten about until this precise second.
So it’s not a dream.
“Jean? Hey, seriously, you’re scaring me.” Sara spoke into her hair, in that big-sister voice that tries to sound calm and doesn’t quite get there. “Is it the exam thing again? Because I already told you, if you fail it’s not the end of the world. Mom will yell for three days and then she’ll get over it.”
“No… it’s not that,” she managed, and her own voice surprised her: high, young, without the edge that had been building up in her throat over years of sleeping in gas stations and stolen pickup trucks.
Her brain, meanwhile, had shifted into working mode.
Okay. Not a dream. What else can it be?
An illusion. Someone inside her head, the same way she got inside other people’s. It was the most obvious option and she ruled it out almost immediately.
They’d locked her up with people who had spent a long time trying exactly that on her sister, and there was no sign they’d ever gotten what they wanted — if the fact that they were trying it on her too meant anything.
And if someone had the power to build all this for her, they wouldn’t have left the scratch on Sara’s collarbone. Nobody fabricates what they don’t know exists.
A coma, then?
Possible. She’d been shot… no, not her. Peter had been shot. She’d been on her knees on the ground with her hands soaked in something she didn’t want to remember, and she didn’t remember any second bullet.
“…and anyway Mom said that if you got below an eighty she wasn’t going to say anything, so—” Sara was still talking, and Jean realized, several seconds late, that she hadn’t answered.
“Mm-hm,” she said.
“‘Mm-hm’? Jean, I just told you I’m selling your bike.”
“Mm-hm.”
“Unbelievable.”
Jean blinked and let out a wet, short laugh she had no idea where it came from. Sara pulled back far enough to look at her face and wiped her cheek with her thumb, with that affectionate roughness Jean had spent eight years trying to remember exactly, and that was now just there, free, without her having to do anything to earn it.
What if I went back in time?
The idea came in so cleanly and so absurdly that she nearly said it out loud.
But it wasn’t impossible. She’d lived in a world where half the universe turned to dust and came back five years later without aging a day. She’d heard, and seen on social media, stories about a man who could shrink and another who’d made more than a hundred people vanish into shadows. Compared to that, going backward was almost modest.
And it explained the collarbone. It explained the shampoo. It explained why her voice sounded like someone who hadn’t learned to lie well yet.
“Sara,” she started, and had no idea how to finish. “What day is—”
“Girls?” The door swung open.
Jean froze.
Elaine Grey stood in the doorway with her robe on inside out and the phone still in her hand, wearing the face of someone who’d just run up the stairs. Red hair, the same red Jean saw in the mirror, tied back any which way.
“I heard a noise, did something fall?” Her mother’s eyes moved from Sara to Jean, and stopped there. “Jean. Sweetheart, you’re crying.”
And Jean, who less than an hour ago had frozen a large chunk of New York with nothing but the force of her rage, shrank back.
It was automatic. It was the body before the head. Because the last thing Jean remembered about that woman was a face of fear, followed by a trip to an unknown place that turned out to be a home for abandoned children, from which she ended up fleeing together with Sara as well.
Don’t come any closer.
But Elaine was already crossing the room and sitting on the edge of the bed, and her hands — warm, dry, smelling like the same lotion as always — took Jean’s face with a worry so completely honest that something in Jean’s chest came apart.
Because this woman hadn’t done any of that yet.
This woman didn’t know. This woman had no idea that in less than twelve years she was going to look at her daughters and see something that wasn’t human. Right now she was just a mother with her robe on inside out, scared by a noise at seven in the morning.
“A nightmare,” Jean said, and this time she didn’t have to fake the shaking in her voice. “A really bad one.”
“Oh, honey.”
And when her mother hugged her, Jean didn’t pull away.
They stayed like that a while. Sara ended up climbing in too, complaining that they were crushing her, and Elaine made the usual joke about how they were going to have to buy a bigger bed, and Jean laughed into the gap between her sister’s neck and her mother’s shoulder — laughed for real, for the first time in more years than she wanted to count.
“Downstairs in twenty minutes,” Elaine said finally, standing up and straightening her robe. “And Sara, for the love of God, your laundry is not going to wash itself.”
“It’s vacation.”
“It’s laundry day.”
The door shut behind the two of them.
Jean was left alone, sitting on the edge of the bed, hands open on her knees. Small hands. No scars.
She reached toward the nightstand and found the phone exactly where her memory told her it would be: a model that had already been old back then, with the pink case she herself had hated.
She unlocked it.
Thursday, April 7, 2016. 7:14 a.m.
Jean read the screen once. She read it twice. She did the math three times, because the five years of the Blip always threw her count off.
Twelve years.
She’d gone back twelve years.
Peter Parker walked toward the living room with his hair still damp and the strange feeling of wearing a borrowed body.
Everything was wrong in exactly the right measure. The kitchen smelled like slightly burnt eggs. There was a magnet from the Coney Island aquarium on the refrigerator door that he remembered throwing in the trash, in another life, along with almost everything else.
May had her back to him, fighting with the toaster, and the small TV in the corner was on with the volume low.
Peter sat down and looked at the screen without much interest.
“…marking nearly a year since the events in Sokovia. The official casualty count remains unchanged, while several governments continue to push for a legal framework to regulate the activity of enhanced individuals…”
Archive footage. An entire city in the air. Debris falling out of the sky like the sky itself was coming apart.
Peter set down his fork.
There had been a time, once, when he’d watched footage like that and thought only awesome. And there was another version, the one sitting here right now, that saw a lot of very powerful people making enormous decisions in five seconds, without anyone above them ever asking and what if you’re wrong?
He had been wrong. He had handed a girl over to a laboratory because he was sure, absolutely sure, that he was doing the right thing.
Nobody had stopped him. Nobody had even tried.
Maybe there should be rules. Or at least a procedure…
The thought tasted horrible. He thought it anyway.
“Peter, eat, it’s getting cold.”
“May,” he said, and it came out flatter than he meant it to. “What day is it today?”
May turned around with the pan in her hand and that raised eyebrow of hers.
“Oh, sweetheart, don’t tell me you’ve already lost track of time. It’s a vacation, not a sensory deprivation experiment.”
“No, seriously, what day is it?”
“Relax, you didn’t sleep more than a day, your record’s still intact.” May set the pan down on the placemat, wiped her hands on her apron, and pointed with her chin at the calendar stuck up next to the phone. “Thursday, April seventh. Two thousand sixteen. And you have an appointment with the garbage cans in exactly ten minutes.”
Peter looked at the calendar.
He looked at his aunt.
He looked at the calendar again.
…shit.
Those words were aimed, of course, at his newly christened Parker Luck.