Chapter Text
Patrol was wrapping up when Peter heard E.V.'s alert that there were familiar physical anomalies occurring nearby. He crawled up the side of the building he was at, then waited.
There was only one person whose movements he'd be notified of. Peter immediately unstick from the wall as soon as he saw a lone woman walk inside the alley.
He landed with a soft thunk, along with a wave. "So… how's it been?"
The face of the woman—of the person Jean possessed at the moment—scrunched up in disgust. Her nose was all wrinkled, not liking Peter's sarcastic, chipper tone.
"It's going," was all Jean said.
It sure was going. Going poorly, he meant.
All of it was his fault, and he knew it. Jean knew it. The entire world basically knew it, but not for the reasons they thought. Damage Control came out with a universal inhibitor that they claimed to have created and patented to help ease the world's fear of mutants.
There wasn't any fear until the DODC started to talk about the inhibitor. Damage Control said they made it to restrain dangerous, hostile mutants who terrorized the world.
Spider-Man wasn't on that list of miscreants—he was in the public eye and beloved by most of New York, if not large parts of the world. However, every other mutant that didn't work for Damage Control was in the crossfire.
Jean happened to be one of the bounties that the DODC had released recently. She was a wanted man, and instead of being upset about it, she tended to laugh it off. She was the one who hunted them first, after all.
Others weren't so lucky. Peter was receiving a lot of heat, especially once he admitted that he was the original creator of the inhibitor. After the first bad reaction to his truth, Jean made him not tell it anymore. It only caused strife when there were better things to worry and plan for.
Such as whatever Jean called him out here to talk about tonight.
"Any updates?" he asked.
Jean shook her head. "I have an idea of where to investigate next, but that's it. They're—" meaning the DODC, "—smart enough to cover their tracks. Figures, huh?"
"Frank's uncovered conspiracies before. I can ask him for a favor—"
"You've used up all your favors with him," Jean rebutted. "Even guilt-tripping him over—" she waved her hand around, "—y'know won't be enough. When you cashed in your last favor over him buying you a sandwich from Delmar's, he said that was it. No more. The line was drawn."
Y'know, meaning that time Frank nearly killed Peter. It wasn't Frank's fault, but Frank didn't see it that way. Neither did Jean. They were both self-conscious about it, even though it had been months.
But there was something else that stuck out to him about her words.
"Were you there?" Peter asked, only slightly confused. "I cashed in the sandwich favor over a month ago. How on Earth did you hear about it?"
Jean didn't speak; she chose to stare. And she continued to stare, not answering his question. Her eyes were doing that wide-open thing that meant she felt trapped and didn't know how to get out of a situation.
Peter knew when to drop a subject. He waved it off, then said, "Alright, alright, I'm getting off track." He breathed in and out, cooling his nerves. "What's this place you want to investigate?"
"Right behind you," Jean said, standing up straighter with a smirk.
Peter turned slightly, peeking at the building he was previously using as a resting spot. He eyed it, not sure what could be going on inside to make Jean suspicious of it. He turned back toward her, but the body Jean was possessing was already walking toward him.
"Hey, hey—" Peter tried to stop her from speeding this along, but she was hearing none of it. "I can do reconnaissance—how about we do a stake-out instead, eh? We can buy snacks and soda and—"
Jean turned toward him, tilting her head slightly so her chin was up. "I've already been scoping out the place. Today's when all employees are gone. It happens once every 3 weeks. We only have until 5 A.M. tomorrow, or else they'll be back."
"I don't like that you were surveilling this place without me."
"Feeling territorial?" Jean teased, her lips twisted up into a smirk. "It's Brooklyn, not exactly your backyard."
Queens was the main area he focused on, yes, but he was all of New York's protector! Yes, there were other street-level vigilantes—even ones not as violent as Frank—but they didn't have the time to do what Peter did. Or was doing. Peter had pulled back on his patrolling hours a lot in an attempt to 'resocialize', but honestly, he kept finding an excuse to ditch his plans.
"I—" Peter couldn't find a way to explain how he felt without being blunt. "I don't want you doing that stuff without backup. You could get hurt."
Jean leveled a 'are you serious' look at him. "I am currently 40 miles south of here. You don't have to worry about me, sunflower. You're the only one of us who might be injured or maimed tonight."
Muttering under his breath, Peter scoffed, "Why'd you have to pick up Frank's nicknames?"
Jean ignored him. She was good at doing that when it suited her.
The building was empty, just like Jean said it would be. Peter listened for heartbeats before he let Jean open the door with telekinesis. She rolled her eyes as he focused on the sounds nearby, and then gladly bashed open the door with a wham.
They entered silently, with Peter taking the lead because he was the adult, not Jean. She wasn't even 18 yet, but she held more power in her hands than he'd be comfortable with anyone else having. If he didn't know Jean, he would be terrified.
Even knowing her, he got on edge sometimes. The days of Jean plaguing him through civilians on the street, through his loved ones too, numbed him. Sometimes, he still heard her words about him being a monster ring in his head.
But then he actually looked at her, and just saw a scared, vengeful kid who wanted answers to her sister's whereabouts. Peter couldn't be upset when he looked at Jean, but apparently she could be upset at him.
"Why are you just standing there? Get a move on." Jean bypassed him, feeling no sense of fear. "I want to see if their lab has a basement."
It was nice to be so trusted with her safety, but honestly, it was more nerve-wracking than he'd admit. Jean never not trusted him to look out for her. He trusted her with her friends, with her powers, with knowledge she wouldn't spill to anyone else.
Peter quickly picked up his steps so he could follow by her side, but that's when an alarm bell rang in his head. Well, it wasn't a bell. It was more of a soft tingle, one that he couldn't ignore, no matter how small it was.
He shifted on his feet, and pulled Jean toward him. Jean immediately slapped his hands and tried to escape, but he only walked backwards, dragging her with him.
"What the hell are you doing?" Jean cursed at him. "The information we need is further inside, Peter! We can't stop now—"
She might've felt it, too. Or maybe she recognized the tension he held in his shoulders.
Jean fell silent, looking out toward the direction that caused Peter's unordinary sense to go off. His tingle wouldn't go away. It was a soft alarm, but dangerous.
"It's… Something dangerous is ahead." Peter told her. "If we continue on—"
"If?"
"—you'll remain calm and tell me the moment you feel or notice that something's wrong. Deal?"
Peter knew that Jean, when she was looking down at him, could see through the white eyes of his mask. She'd understand that he was serious about that. He wouldn't take any chances, not when she was possessing an innocent, harmless person.
"… Deal."
"Okay, good." Peter released Jean, but shifted her slightly off to the side. He shook his finger toward her, and she seemed annoyed about it, but gave in anyway. "We do this my way, or we don't do it at all."
"I can hold my own," she argued.
Peter knew that, but he wasn't going to stake either of their lives on it. It didn't help that he always remembered Jean as the girl who sat on his bed and spoke to May. Jean was in possession of powers that would be terrifying to hold, just like Peter was. They had to do better—they had to be better—than everyone else.
He stepped forward, taking the lead. If there was a threat deeper into this building, he'd be the one to deal with it. Peter could take a hit, but a normal human body had less odds of survival.
His spidey-sense continued to go off to an unsettling degree, seeing as there was no noise he could hear.
He opened the door where the ringing in his head came from most. Jean peeked at the room from above his shoulder. It looked like a normal lab, all things said. It was rudimentary compared to Tony Stark's lab, but that wasn't anything surprising.
Stepping forward carefully, Peter entered first. He cautioned Jean to follow, who did so quietly as a mouse. They made their way through the counters with only their breaths echoing in the humid air.
However, when they turned to go toward the back of the room, the warnings practically blared in his head. He threw himself against the body Jean possessed to protect her from it, but the invisible waves through the air were faster.
"Peter—!?"
Was it radiation? He didn't know. It was something, and his spidey-sense was screaming for him to run away from it as fast as possible.
There was a clump of glowing matter on the ground. It had no smell but as soon as Peter saw it, he knew it was going to cause irrevocable harm.
He tried to shield Jean from it, but they had already been exposed. His thoughts swirled in the few moments before he felt his vision white out before going blank.
Was this a set-up? A trap? Did the DODC know that Jean was investigating this lab? It couldn't have been a coincidence. There was no such thing where Damage Control was concerned.
But none of his questions were answered. Darkness took him before he could second-guess what happened.
Waking up in a cocoon was not on Peter's list of wants. He'd already done it once, and doing it again… He didn't want to. This wasn't on his bucket list at all. One time was enough.
The world hated him.
He was free-falling down a skyscraper because—somehow—his body decided that the top of the Chrysler Building was where he felt safest to be.
The webs around him tore apart as soon as his consciousness came to him. He hadn't even gotten a hand free before the rest of his body fought against gravity and lost. He couldn't even yell, his breath stolen from him in the wind.
Peter felt the air whooshing around him, could hear the way it spun his hair around and forced his suit to press hard against his skin. He quickly analyzed which building to aim his webs at, and then shot forward, barely scraping above a transit bus.
When he landed on the sidewalk a moment later, his legs woozy, he decided that it'd never happen again. He knew he'd have little choice in it, but he wanted his feelings to be known.
Peter glanced around the city. It looked… upbeat. Carefree. Not completely—ever since the 2012 alien attack, New Yorkers held fear in their eyes—but there wasn't a weight of loss on the shoulders of the world.
It made Peter feel like he stuck out in a crowd, a singular entity who felt betrayed by the universe. He was the only person who hunched his shoulders and tried to fade into the distance, which was a hard thing to do when he was wearing a bright blue and red suit.
He tried to get E.V. to give him an update, but it was like the AI was offline. He tried to reconnect to the network, but there were 'unidentified technical issues.' Peter scoffed and began to swing home.
Only, he arrived at his address, to see nothing there.
His apartment building was missing. There were no bricks, no drywall, and no shitty elevator. No window to sneak through or roof to lay on. His home was gone.
"Alright, I'm officially freaking out," he murmured, only half-joking as sanity left his body.
Peter paced on the sidewalk in front of the empty lot where his apartment should have been. He tried to rationalize why it wouldn't be there, but any ideas he had sounded farfetched and insane. Even if he did misremember his specific address wrong, the rest of the street looked eerily similar yet off, so he knew he was in the correct area.
Park Luck had struck again, hadn't it?
He knew he shouldn't have investigated the lab. All labs were sketchy as hell in the first place. He should have been a responsible adult and told Jean that they shouldn't go inside. She trusted him to keep her safe—and she was nowhere in sight.
In a time of the unknown, Peter did what he was taught: research.
He asked to borrow the phone of the first person he saw. The kid blew a bubble of gum at him, blew it until it popped, chewed it again, then said, "Fine."
Even the model of the phone sent little alarms off in Peter's head, but not his supernatural alarms. This was his own messed-up sense. This was an out-of-date smartphone, years upon years behind any current tech.
And when he looked at the weather app—and therefore the date—he learned why.
September 19th, 2017.
He was in the past. Nearly a year after he fought Liz's dad, but over an entire year before Thanos would snap his fingers and Blip half the world from existence.
Was he allowed to pass out again? He preferred it when he didn't know that he had broken nearly every rule that Dr. Strange warned him about. Peter already did so much, but time travel? He'd never done that!
Oh, god, was Peter going to break the universe again? He wasn't like the Avengers, who went on a mission through time for the sake of the world. This was all an accident—constructed by Damage Control—but still, this couldn't have been the outcome they expected!
Peter shoved the phone back at the kid, and raced off. He needed information. He needed to confirm so many things.
Was May alive? Was Mr. Stark? Did Peter replace this timeline's Peter Parker, or was it something else? Was he actually in his world, or was this a different world? Peter 2 and Peter 3 confirmed the multiverse theory!
He was standing outside of the building that he called home, but anywhere where May was, that was his home. Peter hadn't taken off the suit—hadn't had time or the means to. He didn't care that people stared and pointed at him.
He shot his webs upward, pulling himself above the fifth floor. He then let go of the web to crawl until he was just a little taller against the side of the building.
With his back flat against the side, knees bent, and feet sticking to give him balance, he honed in on his senses.
Peter could hear his own heartbeat. The way it thudded in his chest, overexcited and too eager, made it hard to hear anything else. He slowed his breathing until his heartbeat returned to a normal pace, and then he tried to pick out the closest voices.
He ignored the sound of a scraping pencil against paper, and the squeak of shoes against metal. He focused, instead, on Aunt May's breath that used to help him fall asleep. He'd spend hours up late at night worrying about the future, and only May's presence could calm him.
That's when he heard her laughter.
"Jeez, Peter, why don't you just get out of here if you're going to be like this? Work off your energy somewhere else." May said it, but it wasn't in a harsh tone. She was teasing Peter—the young version of him—about avoiding his homework. "If you're too restless, just patrol for an hour, then come back."
"You're giving me permission to ignore my homework?" Pete—Peter's new nickname for his younger self—asked. He was grinning ear to ear in disbelief. "I'll, uh, I'll be back soon, alright? I'll return just in time for dinner."
"You better!" May called out after him.
Peter quickly flattened himself against the building, moving quickly to hide from Pete's sight. Thankfully, Pete didn't notice a thing. He was too naive in that way. He shot out toward the night in the suit Tony made, and didn't look back.
Peter's mouth was dry as he climbed the rest of the way up the building, landing on the roof with a heave.
His younger self was still here. His younger self, Pete, was all of a junior at Midtown. He probably didn't even think about anything other than homework and late-night patrol. He had everything he loved within his grasp.
Peter looked down at the streets below, feeling more alone than he had in months.
This wasn't something he could easily fix. He'd have to go to Dr. Strange—or he'd have to decide something else. Something more insane than time travel.
Like deciding to actually mess with the events instead of being sent back to where he belonged.
If it was 2017, then he was over 10 years in the past. The war with Thanos hadn't been put into center focus. There was no Blip. There was no Spider-Man identity reveal by Beck, either. There'd be no multiverse mishaps.
If Peter was here, then he could change what happened completely. He could ensure that Thanos never killed anyone on Earth.
He could help a different version of himself live without the burden of the uncertainty on his shoulders. There was no death to live up to—no hero to replace because they were gone.
Here, Peter Parker was just a random vigilante who helped the elderly cross streets and webbed criminals to walls. He didn't deal with aliens, the DODC, or fight the Hulk.