Chapter Text
The desolate plain of Titan is a chaotic battlefield of dust and noise. The fight had ended too abruptly. After the titan got his hand on the time stone, he left to only god know where. There’s an empty feeling amongst them, the mark of a miserable defeat for them. Filling the entire space is unnatural silence casting shadow onto the orange dirt.
Peter felt like his abdomen was stabbed with something. Or at least, there gotta be bruises blooming anew. Because even with his enhanced healing, it is painful. Peter let out a low grunt as he gets on his feet.
He looks around and finds the others are sprawled on the dirt.
Peter went to Mr. Stark whose iron suit is absolutely wrecked. He quietly walks to him and watches his mentor tap the reactor on his chest twice, the nanotech retract into it. That is crazy cool.
Peter held out his hand to Mr. Stark. His mentor looks at his hand for two seconds before accepting it.
As Peter helps Mr. Stark stand up, he heard the bug lady behind him whispering, “Something is happening.”
Her large eyes widen in profound confusion before she turns into ash then scatters with the wind.
What.
Bafflement is all over everyone’s face. Peter’s painfully aware of everything. He heard the ragged breaths of his comrades. Their hearth pound louder and faster as seconds ticks.
Then, the big tattooed guy catches the red jacket guy’s eyes. He murmured a name as his figure dissolved into nothing but greyish smoke before he could utter a full word.
Peter’s spidey-sense is screaming in a loud frequency of pure terror into his nervous system. What’s happening, he questions himself. He turns. Peter can feel loose gravel beneath his boots, it fails to anchor him. He frantically looks around.
Peter saw the red jacket guy looking down on his own trembling hands. Mr. Stark said to him, “Steady, Quill.”
Peter inhales sharply as he helplessly watches the guy crumble and turn into ash.
He whipped his head again fast. He spotted Doctor Strange. The sorcerer was slumping against a shattered piece of alien masonry. He looked up, his gaze locking entirely onto Mr. Stark. Peter could only find a tragic resignation within those eyes.
“Tony,” Strange said, his voice eerie and calm against the howling wind. “There was no other way.”
He, too, vanished into a column of grey dust.
Then. He saw Mr. Stark freeze, his steps stuttered as he was trying to reach Peter. Peter practically launched himself to catch Mr. Stark. Nowhere found the usual confidence and suave Peter is more familiar with. Peter cradles Mr. Stark as he slowly lowers them both down to the dusty floor of Titan.
In that very instant, the pieces finally fell into place in Peter’s mind. He remembered Thanos and his monologue about ‘balance’, about the goal he referred to as his ‘life’s calling.’ It looks like the titan had succeeded in gathering all the stones. And people were vanishing.
Peter felt a sense of emptiness at his inability to do anything.
“Peter,” Mr. Stark whispered. A small, low voice calling his name. Mr. Stark never call him by name.
Dread filled Peter’s entire being. Peter struggled to open his mouth. “No- Mr. Stark-”
“I am sorry.”
For what. Why are you sorry-
Mr. Stark’s body rapidly disintegrate. The ash, fragments of his mentor touch his face, on his skin, then turn into nothingness. In seconds, the body he held close, turning into ashes and fly away. Just like dandelions leaving with the wind. Gone.
There is nothing on Peter’s embrace. As if he never held Mr. Stark’s body in the first place.
Gone.
Peter waits and waits for the universe to take him as well. He holds his breath, expecting to feel each cell of his body died and left. But seconds pass, then minutes, and peter is still kneeling on this dusty land.
He feels something heavy looming over him like a slow descending curse.
“He did it,” someone said behind him.
He couldn’t breathe. The air on Titan tasting of sulphur and iron, unfamiliar in any way. But it is not the air that makes his lung constricted and refuse to function. There’s a loud ringing in his ears. For what feels like an eternity, Peter could not hear even a whisp of sound beyond it.
Mr. Stark is gone, his mind told him needlessly.
He died.
They lost and now Mr. Stark is dead.
With the realization, grief come in a full force, crushing his bones. It is suffocating. He choked, a raw, ugly sob tearing from his throat.
A heavy, metallic hand settled onto his shoulder.
He flinched. His spider-sense flaring with a dull, useless thrum. Through his blurred vision, Peter the cold blue plating. Peter does not remember her name. Her cybernetic eyes stared down at him. Peter finds hollow exhaustion in those dark eyes. Mirroring the suffocating silence of the dead planet around them.
Nebula. Peter learns her name.
Titan was uninhabitable, especially at night; the barren landscape could kill them with its unpredictable nature. So, Peter forced himself to move. He briefly scoured the area of their battle, searching for any memento of Mr. Stark to keep. Then find himself failed miserably.
No body to bury, no memento to keep.
Peter then followed Nebula onto her spaceship, Benatar. It has a name, as it turns out.
This was Peter’s second time inside a spaceship. He surveyed his surroundings and studied the array of buttons, cables, and machinery within its structure. It was truly a marvelous piece of technology. As a man of science, he found himself appreciating the beauty, despite everything. Especially the fact that this spaceship was somehow still intact after the chaotic battle with Thanos.
He’d love to talk to his mentor about it.
Peter force back a heavy wave of sorrow onto the furthest end of his mind.
“So, uhhh, perhaps we should check if the ship alright?” he asked Nebula. She’s fiddling with some buttons three steps ahead of him. Nebula looked at Peter as if she hadn’t expected him to strike up a conversation with her. She then nodded in agreement.
Nebula showed him around the ship. She not exactly a mechanic, thus wasn’t familiar with how these things were made. However, she certainly is familiar enough. Nebula ran the Benetar’s self-diagnostics. Peter watched silently as the program progress slowly.
Within five minutes, the screen in front of them displayed a report. Peter’s eyes quickly skimmed over it.
Some fuel cells were cracked during their battle. Must be when the mad titan threw a literal moon on them.
Nebula’s expression is something between annoyance and loss.
“Let’s see if its fixable,” Peter murmured. Nebula sigh.
“To the engine then.”
Nebula led them down. The engine room, like any ship, was a cramped, unventilated space filled with various machines, cables, and pipes.
Peter tapped the arc reactor on the iron spider suit still attached to his body. The nanotech used in the suit then retracted into it, leaving Peter with the old version of the Spider-Man suit he’d worn before attaching himself to Squidward’s spaceship.
He heard Nebula say beside him, “That’s such a cool costume.”
Peter took the compliment and grinned, “I know right!”
He then also unzips the old version of the Spider-Man suit from his torso, leaving him in a white tank top.
“Now, let’s figure these things out.”
They manage to reverse the ion charge. Definitely not the best way to fix it, but at this moment that is the best they can do. It managed to buy them some time. Nebula set the course to Earth and they left Titan atmosphere. Around 48 hours later, its floating dead like a plastic in the ocean.
Day 7.
Peter didn’t know how exactly to describe his feelings right now.
At loss? Probably?
Things went terribly wrong the moment he stepped off that school bus. He hijacked a spaceship, ended up fighting a Mad Titan on another planet, lost his mentor, and is now helpless in space.
He’s practically doomed at this point.
The oxygen on the ship will run out at some point. He and Nebula haven’t found an alternative way for the Benatar to move. So, yeah, maybe Peter will meet his end here.
Somehow, there’s a side of him who held on hope, though. That somehow, all of this can be fixed. That Mr. Stark will somehow return and greet him with quips as usual. Then Peter will be back on earth and writing boring report for school tomorrow. Although, nothing about those optimism makes sense.
The other part of him is not any better. It is a mess. He mourns, then silently curser his survival, resent the part where he’s the one who survived.
On the desk with six seats, Peter and Nebula sat across from each other. He was chewing on some kind of dry food ration. It’s his only food for the next twenty-three hours or so, because they had to ration and conserve supplies for as long as they could. Nowhere near enough for someone with fast metabolism like him.
Nebula is fiddling with her fingers. Even though her face wears a stiff, impassive expression, Peter knows she is anxious.
“So,” Peter said in-between his chews, “Have you ever played paper football before?”
Day 13
“Excusez-moi?” Peter’s face twisted in surprise, “he is your what?”
Nebula facepalmed, which sounds impossible, but he swears to god the lady facepalmed and then rolled her eyes. They were sitting next to each other and exchanging stories when Nebula decided to drop a fucking bomb of a lore on him.
She looks like she does not want to say it again. However, Peter’s scandalous expression probably convince her.
“Father,” she said through gritted teeth before adding in more emphasis, “adopted.”
Peter let out a huff of breath. “I bet you need a lot of therapy for that?”
Nebula gave him a long, unimpressed look.
Outside the window, Benatar drifted in the dark, its lights scattered across the enormous skull like stars caught in bone. Somewhere down the corridor, a machine gave a tired mechanical groan before settling back into silence.
They had been sitting on the floor for almost an hour, backs against the wall, sharing the last of a bag of dried fruit Peter had found in the kitchen. It was hardly a place for confessions. Peter had been telling her about Earth. Like, about Star Wars (which amuse Nebula so much), music (the guy named Quill apparently listen to old music a lot), and the stupid things he used to do. Nebula had been answering in her own peculiar way, offering little pieces of herself whenever she felt like it.
Then she’d mentioned Thanos.
Nebula looked down at the half-eaten piece of fruit between her fingers. Her metal thumb turned it over once, twice, as if examining it for flaws.
“I do not know,” she said.
Peter’s brows pulled together. Wait. Is therapy an earth exclusive concept?
“About the therapy?”
“About whether it would help.”
Peter shifted against the wall. He looked at her properly for the first time since she’d said it. The scars were easier to notice in the dim light. He had seen them before, of course. Everyone had. But there was a difference between seeing someone’s scars and knowing there was a story underneath every one of them.
He looked away again.
“Yeah,” he murmured. “Fair.”
Nebula dropped the fruit back into the bag.
For a while, the only sound between them was the distant hum of Benatar’s machinery.
Peter rubbed his palms against his knees. He had the sudden, uncomfortable feeling that he’d wandered into a room he wasn’t supposed to be in.
“So,” he said eventually, quieter this time, “you and this lady named Gamora.”
Nebula’s expression tightened.
“She’s my sister.”
Day 18
The first time Peter speak of Mr. Stark out loud after the whole ordeal is when Nebula asked about his iron spider armour.
It was spread across the workbench in pieces, red and blue plating catching the dull light above them. Peter had been pretending to repair it for nearly an hour, although he’d spent more time turning the same piece over in his hands than actually fixing anything. There was a small dent near the shoulder and a web-shooter that needed recalibrating. None of it was particularly difficult.
Other than that, the suit is practically fine and functional.
“Cool costume,” Nebula commented as she walked to his side. “You made it?”
“No, Mr. Stark made it for me.” A small smile graces Peter’s lips.
His mentor’s name filled the silence. The syllables left a bitter taste in his tongue. Peter can see Nebula hesitating to ask more.
Day 21.
As it turns out, being stranded in space is not a good way to end your school trip. -3000/10, wouldn’t recommend.
The thought drifted through Peter’s sluggish brain, dry and hollow.
The ship’s primary console chimed a dull tone. The warning light painting the freezing cockpit in a steady, pulsing crimson. The air inside the cabin was projected to run out entirely in less than fifteen hours.
Peter lay on the floorboards of the pilot’s seat, wrapped in a thin, metallic thermal blanket that did nothing to combat the absolute zero seeping through the glass. His limbs felt like lead weights. Every shallow breath he managed to drag into his lungs felt like inhaling shards of dry ice.
He observes the stars. They were perfectly still, watching him fade far from his home. A strange, heavy peace began to settle over his chest, overlapping the raw misery of his starving muscles.
Peter realized, with a faint clarity, that his death wouldn’t hurt. Unlike what Aunt May has always been scared of, it wouldn’t be like a building collapsing on him or a blade cutting through his suit. He was just going to go to sleep. He would close his eyes, fall into the dark, and simply never wake up again.
And god, he was so, so exhausted.
“Here you are,” Nebula joined him sitting there.
Peter did not answer. He nod his head a little, his movement is so faint it barely visible.
“Go to sleep,” she said, “I’ll wake you up in an hour.”
Could she though?
Yet, Peter still let his eyelids fall. He curled his gaunt frame tighter under the metallic sheet as he let his head rest against the base of the seat. He let go of his grip on reality, letting his consciousness slip away into the quiet, painless numbness of the dark shroud.
But.
White.
Peter’s eyelids violently flared, his pupils contracting instantly as a sudden, cataclysmic brilliance shattered the darkness. The freezing shadows of the cockpit vanished, replaced by a blinding, radiant light flooding through the glass windshield. The dead metal of the hull began to vibrate.
Through the blinding glare, a silhouette emerged in the vacuum of space. A woman. It was a women floating effortlessly among the stars. Her body completely enveloped in a blazing, golden aura of stellar fire. As her cosmic light locked onto the Benatar and began to push the ship forward, Peter was violently yanked back from the edge of the peace he had just claimed.