Chapter Text
It happens so quickly that even his enhanced senses don’t quite pick up when it begins. One moment, Peter is throwing a laptop bag over his shoulder, pushing the door with his hand to leave the doctoral advisor’s office while simultaneously saying goodbye. And then the world implodes. Everything is both dark and painfully bright, and he is falling for what feels like forever.
Around him is nothing, and when he wants to open his mouth to shout 'what the fuck?!', he finds no mouth, no vocal cords, and no body of his own. What feels like a fall pulses, like a heartbeat, but he has no heart to beat, no eyes to see, no skin to feel. He is a thought, a memory, a mind only, and this mind is falling and falling through everything. It might as well be centuries or no time at all, because he both exists and doesn’t at the same time.
He could be fast asleep and dreaming, tired and wired, so when he hears a name, his name, it first barely registers.
“Peter,” he hears, and the voice is familiar, only it isn’t quite a voice, not really, but a thought that isn’t his own. “I am sorry, Peter. Protect it.”
The voice, the thought, becomes rapid, too loud, and he blacks out for what feels like a decade, only to wake up, to muster enough sense of self to understand: he needs to protect it. The “it” is pain, raw and so incredible that it chokes him, if he could choke – if enough of him existed. In the back of his mind, he is flooded with images. He sees Dr. Strange, and the man is looking at him, talking to him through the still, odd, messed-up slow motion. Strange’s lips are moving, each syllable a year long:
“There is no other way. I wish there was. I am sorry, Peter, I really am.”
The words are an echo now; they are beating against Peter’s mind, cracking it, making it feel like he is about to explode or whatever it is that could be so entirely final. Only neither happens, and more images flood, more memories. They rush through him so fast it’s like a reel. He reaches for the reel without his hands, without a physical shape to touch, to grab the images, the sense of him that is disappearing, but the reel is too fast and Peter thinks he is dying, really dying, until he knows he isn’t there anymore.
It’s like a ripple in the water that he splashes into, and he is ripped out. Erased. Gone. Bewildered, he watches, thinks, the moments of his life that made him – well, him. He sees Aunt May and Uncle Ben without a nephew. His friends without him by their side. He flips through his past and he just isn’t there anymore. He grasps at the reel, trying to, but the movie playing out about his life is so completely and utterly void of him that he no longer has a right to be in the credits.
As he falls in this odd, absolutely bizarre limbo, he flicks the switches in his mind on and off. Through the moment he was bitten by a spider, through the first steps as a wannabe superhero who did, in fact, end up saving the world quite a bit, through all of the 24 years of a life that didn’t happen.
He is a Jenga piece that has slid out without even a shake, and Peter feels angry, sad, and a hundred other things, because to him it seems like nothing he has done, nothing that he was, has impacted anything. The world, the universe is fine, perfectly well without him, and Uncle Ben still died, and Tony Stark still saved them all and is gone also, and every person Peter Parker or Spider-Man has helped and carried out of danger, protected, is still where they are meant to be, doing whatever it is they should be doing. Even with him not ever existed. And it’s fine. Fine.
It’s totally fine, he thinks, and it’s annoying, because it has been a millennium and he is still falling. It’s totally OK, how could it not be? And somewhere where his heart should be, but isn’t, he is devastated, heartbroken, and relieved at the same time. He is so tired, so tired, he was so tired for what feels like a thousand years, so maybe it’s finally time to take a break and relax. Kick back a bit, you know? Maybe it isn’t so bad after all? He’s sure there is a grand design in play of some sorts. It’s Dr. Strange, of course, there is a reason. Right?
Only he can’t relax, because he has no body, and over impossibly long or maybe impossibly fast whatever it is that is fucking going on, he is frustrated to no end. So he pulls his invisible, non-existent hands to the reel that is still scrolling, replaying the movie that he was cut from, and he wants it off. He is so fed up with it that it isn’t funny anymore. It’s like they don’t care, none of them. His family and friends, his co-workers and classmates, his boyfriend for crying out loud – none of them care that he is gone, that he never was.
“Mr. Stark would care,” he finally says, and he hears himself speak, feels his lips move, senses the breath as he talks. He is imploding like a dark star and the wooden Jenga piece that he is makes a sound of wood being plopped on top of the tower.
The sound is more like a scream however. A rather girly one actually. With some considerable relief he notes that it isn’t his, because he hears his own “Whoa!” as it happens.
There are screeching wheels on the pavement, a few more screams, a “Jesus fucking Christ!” thrown in and Peter falls. Well, more like lands, because he is done falling and thank fuck that he did because it was getting a bit old, you know. To not exist for so long.
“Tony!” the girly scream is panicked. Peter wants to put his hand up and say something that sounds like it is under control, but he is sort of wedged between some feet in a backseat of a car that smells new and expensive, and his nose is pressed against a rather nice shoe with a pointy nose and a sharp heel.
“Tony, what’s going on!?” the voice repeats and Peter scrambles, bends a bit, flips over on his back, with what appears to be a sharp end of his laptop pressed against it now, his own feet ungracefully sticking out between two people.
He blinks then, opening his eyes properly, his senses screaming loud and clear: he is alive, he’s here, uncomfortable here actually, but it’s all good. It’s all going to be just honky dory, because he sees who is in front of him and his body deflates, folding itself neatly into a messy heap.
“Oh! Hey, Pepper! How are y…”
He passes out then, without finishing the sentence to the shocked look on Pepper’s face, god she is pretty. It’s fine, it’s alright, he thinks to himself in that moment, because right next to Pepper, sweet amazing Pepper, is Mr. Stark, still somehow holding a burger with a pickle sticking out from between the buns.