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He wakes up gasping.
For a moment, all he sees is blackness, and he is searching for air that feels as though it will never again enter his lungs. He feels numbness and pain as one, terror and despair racing through his veins, and he thinks this is what it must feel like for the world to end.
He did not want to die. He is so young; there is so much left for him to do, so many people he is leaving behind. He thinks of Ned, always loyal, always by his side. Of his aunt, who will wait and wait and for nothing. Even of Michelle, who is sarcastic and course but who cares regardless, beneath that hard outer shell.
He thinks of Mr. Stark, who had been right all along. He should have stayed home. He should have stayed safe.
Would staying home really have saved him? Even from this?
Will they mourn him? Will they even remember him? If he has simply ceased to exist, will they simply forget?
The thought, as it drifts through his panic, only makes the air heavier in his lungs. He sits upright as best as he is able, gasping for air that is not there, and then there are hands on his arm and on his shoulders and he is lashing out at some unseen foe, unable to tell what is shadow and what is person in the darkness of his vision.
“Whoa there, calm down bud,” says a voice, low and rumbling, and he relaxes minimally. There is a hand rubbing gentle circles into his back, another supporting him at his arm.
“Breathe, child,” says another voice, this one lilting and smooth. They are calming voices, safe voices, and finally he slows his gasping and takes a moment to inhale deeply. This time, the air flows unhindered into his lungs, and his vision clears.
He sits in a long plane of nothingness that stretches on for eternity. Beneath him is a substance that is not quite liquid and not quite solid; everything is dark, lit only faintly by some source he cannot see. If this is heaven, he thinks, it is not how he imagined it, not how he perhaps hoped it would be.
“Where am I?” he asks. His voice sounds strange even to his own ears, like something broken and small. The hand on his back stills for just a moment before it resumes it’s steady rhythm.
“We’re not sure,” says the first voice, the one belonging to the person at his back, and finally he turns to look up into dark, tired eyes framed by long, matted hair. “But I think it might be death.”
“It is not death,” says the second voice. This belongs to a dark-skinned man with his soul in his eyes, wisdom and nobility lining his features. “I have seen death before. I have spoken to it. Perhaps your death would not look like mine, but this is not the death of my forefathers. Still, I would think it is accurate to say we are no longer living.”
“If we’re not alive and we’re not dead, then what are we?”
“Waiting.”
“It was awful,” says Peter. The others sit nearby, cross-legged in a circle like some kindergarten sharing time. He is flanked on either side by two men he thinks he would have feared once; now he only feels gratefulness, and perhaps regret. It is the Winter Soldier who had rubbed calmness against his spine, and it is the Wakandan king who had, with steady eyes, explained to him their situation.
“It was awful,” he repeats. “Everyone was disappearing and then I...it was like tingling and then like numbness and I knew I was dying and I knew we lost but...I was so far from home. I never thought I’d die so far from home.”
He at least thought he’d have a chance to say goodbye.
Bucky sighs long and hard and reaches out with his flesh hand to squeeze Peter’s shoulder. He leans into the touch, needing to feel human contact, to feel something that isn’t icy numbness. He knows they all felt what he felt. He knows he isn’t special. And yet, for the first time in a long time, he’s actually thankful that they’re treating him like a child.
He thinks he needs that right now, even if just a little bit. He needs to be able to sit down and let the adults take care of it.
“How old are you?” asks Quill, voice softer than he had ever heard it back when they were living. Peter thinks he hears guilt in that tone and he wishes he had the words to banish that guilt. No one made him get caught up in this mess. No one but himself.
“Fifteen,” says Peter, and pretends he does not hear the catch of breath that passes between them all.
“Younger even then my sister,” says T’Challa. Peter has only met the king in passing before now, and had found him intimidating, but now he thinks he sees a kindness within him, and an urge to protect that is fitting of a ruler, and fitting of an older sibling. There is safety in his presence, as there is safety in Bucky’s, and in the others.
“Why are you fighting this war?” asks Strange. He is sitting just removed from the circle, and he is looking at no one. He has not spoken much, but to reassure that things will be alright. He’d said it with such confidence, such surety of a plan, that Peter had almost believed him. (Had wanted to believe him.)
“Responsibility,” says Peter. He hasn’t the strength to elaborate, and thankfully no one asks him to. Instead, Bucky shifts with a sigh and says, “I know how that feels.”
Peter’s not sure what motivates it, but somehow he finds himself leaning back into Bucky’s presence. He is startled by his own action, and at first he fears he overstepped, but then Bucky wraps a careful arm around his shoulders and holds him tight enough for his world to stop spinning.
No one says anything. No one has anything to say.
“I hate this,” murmurs Peter into the silence. “I should have just stayed home.”
“If everyone stayed at home,” says T’Challa quietly, “then we would have no need of war.”
Peter closes his eyes and very carefully does not cry.
(Bucky is the only one who feels the tremble of his shoulders, the stutter of his chest. The others do not notice, or at least pretend not to, for his sake.)
There are others, of course. Millions of them, strewn about the plane, stretching on and on and on.
But they are the heroes, fallen in combat, and so they must remain together.
(Peter, at least, can take consolation in the fact that theirs are the only faces he knows.)
“I can offer only a brief glimpse, with my remaining power,” says Doctor Strange. “And only once.”
The correct thing would be to look for the battle. The truer thing would be to look for those beyond their reach.
They all have loved ones that they left behind. They all feel the loss on both ends. No one’s right exceeds another.
“Give it to the boy,” says T’Challa. The others hum in agreement; there are no protestations, no debates.
Peter almost cries.
“Where do you wish to look?” asks Strange, but what he’s really asking is who do you wish to see?
And Peter knows that there is a right answer and a true answer. The right answer, of course, is to look for the battle; that is where their loved ones are. That is where their last hope flickers.
“Go on,” says Wanda softly. “Don’t worry about us.”
Peter wipes at his eyes. His fingers come away wet and he can only hope the others do not notice. He does not want to seem weak, even as much as he longs for their reassurances.
He chooses the answer that is true, even if it is not right.
“Can you show me May Parker?”
May looks haggard, and tired, and old. The lines on her face run deeper than usual, worry-worn caverns through her skin.
Peter wants so desperately to reach out and touch her. He wants to hold onto her and never let go, to feel her arms around him like he is still a child. “May,” he says, even though he knows she can’t hear him, and even on that one word his voice breaks. “May. It’s Peter.”
She does not move. She simply sits there, looking spent, looking sad. She’s on the couch, legs tucked up beneath a blanket—his blanket, stolen from his bed, oh god— and her eyes are glued to the television.
A world in chaos, is the headline on the screen. The reporter is speaking, face drawn and hands moving in frantic, worried movements, but through the connection Peter cannot hear a word.
The connection begins to fuzz. Peter sucks in a breath that feels like daggers. “No,” he whispers. “May. May! It’s me, I’m here, it’s….May!”
The image dissipates and Peter crumples. It is T’Challa who catches him, lowers him gently to the ground. Peter finds himself staring directly into the dark eyes of a king, breath tight in his throat as he struggles to hold back the sobs that thunder through his chest.
“Let go, Peter Parker,” says T’Challa softly. “There is no shame in tears.”
The dam breaks and Peter cries.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Wanda’s voice is a surprise. She has been so quiet, so solemn, sadness dripping from her eyes, but when she looks at him her gaze is strong.
“What?”
“Sometimes,” she says, “I find it helps to talk. It lessens the pain. Talking about someone makes the missing go away; it brings them closer, somehow. For a long time, I would not talk about my brother. But Vis…” She falters, and perhaps that means something, but even if there is some hypocrisy in her words, no one will call her out on it. If there is loss there, it is too fresh for her to speak of it. “Talking about Pietro helped. It brought him closer.”
Peter sighs. He thinks about May, alone in their apartment, eyes glued to television. He thinks about Ned. Michelle. Even Flash.
“She’s my aunt,” he says. “She and my uncle took me in after my parents died. He, um. He died a few years back, so it’s just been the two of us. And it’s hard, sometimes, money is tight, but...she’s always been there, you know? She’s always been there.”
“Does she know?” asks Bucky. “About Spider-man?”
“She found out. I meant to tell her, but...she found out before I could.”
He had been such a coward. Why had it been so hard? Why had it been so much harder than admitting to failing a class, harder than crying with her about Ben, harder even than coming out? Why had it been so difficult to say, “I’m Spider-man,” when he’d already asked for his name to be Peter?
“Sometimes,” says Bucky. “There are secrets that are impossible to tell.”
And Peter wants to say that he’s already confessed an impossible secret, but then he thinks of the fierce way Captain America had defended a man the rest of the world thought a villain, of the time period in which Bucky had grown up, and he thinks, maybe he already knows what it is like to tell an impossible secret.
And it’s childish, and pathetic, and he really shouldn’t say it, but:
“I want to go home.”
“I know, bud,” says Bucky, running his thumb in comforting circles on the back of Peter’s shoulder. “I know.”
It is difficult, when it happens, to tell whether the world grows brighter or dimmer. Perhaps the shadows grow longer, perhaps the sky-that-is-not-sky grows lighter, perhaps the air is filled with a hum of something . It is hard to say for certain, but there is a definite shift, and they all feel it.
“What’s happening?” asks Peter, standing, and the others rise with him.
“Things are moving,” murmurs Wanda, and she exchanges a look with Strange. Perhaps it is their ability to see beyond the skin of the universe, to bend reality in their fingers like soft, warm wax. Peter cannot see what they see or feel what they feel, but the hairs on his body are standing on end.
Something is happening.
“Is it time?” asks T’Challa.
Strange nods, hands raised before him in complicated gestures. He stares at nothing, eyes seeing beyond the void. “Yes,” he says, and the corner of his lips are turned upwards. “They found the solution.”
“The solution?” asks Peter, and he is not proud of the tremble in his voice.
The doctor turns on him with a gleam in his eyes and an expression that means hope. “I held the time stone. You think I did not use it to search for the best outcome?”
“So you knew,” says Wanda. “You knew that they would win.”
“I knew that we would win,” corrects Strange. He is smiling.
Peter leans into Bucky’s grasp and does not cry.
In the end, it is a brightening. The void drips away in segments, in blinding shards of light. Peter feels himself crumble, but unlike last time it is not a disintegration; now, it feels more like becoming whole again.
“Chin up,” says Bucky, and for the first time he does not look so tired. He smiles, and Peter smiles back, and then everything is a wash of light.
He wakes up in the dirt.
He blinks back the afterimage of brightness and peers upwards into a red sky speckled with distant stars. The sky, a true sky, and a ground beneath his back that is solid and uncomfortable and oh, so real.
He sits up with a gasp. He hears his name as if from a distance and then Quill is at his side, gripping his shoulder, holding him steady.
“You alright there, kid?” asks Quill. He’s smiling, and Peter finds that he is smiling too. A laugh escapes his throat, high and hysterical, and then they are both doubled over with giddy, ecstatic laughter, revelling in the wonder of being alive. The others join, Quill’s team and Strange, and they laugh and laugh until they cry.
After what feels like an eternity but is not, is only the ordinary passage of time, Quill clambers to his feet and holds out a hand to help Peter up.
“Come on, kid,” says Quill, gesturing with his chin towards his battered ship. “Let’s get you home.”
He steps out of the spaceship onto a Wakandan battlefield.
The first person he sees is Bucky, grinning ear to ear with one arm tucked lazily over the Captain’s shoulders. The other one, the metal one, is raised high above his head in a casual sort of greeting.
The second person he sees is Mr. Stark. The man’s eyes are wide and full of sadness and exhaustion and guilt. Peter’s not sure what it is he feels guilty for, but he knows better than to ask. And anyway, questions are so far from his mind in this moment.
He is moving before he even realizes it. He is practically flying down the ship’s ramp, cheeks already wet with tears he doesn’t remember shedding. He is fumbling over his own feet, nearly falling, and then Mr. Stark catches him and holds him close and this is exactly how it was before he—
(Before he died.)
“I’m sorry,” says Peter, because Mr. Stark feels guilty and he knows it’s because of him. “I’m sorry I couldn’t stay, I’m sorry I couldn’t help—”
“Shut up, kid,” says Mr. Stark, voice rough. “It wasn’t your fault.”
Peter says nothing. He just holds on tight.
The door has never looked so welcoming. It swings open, creaking on its hinges—he needs to oil those—and then he is there, stepping into a familiar apartment, breathing in the same air he has breathed for so many years.
May rounds the corner. Her face is pale and drawn.
“Peter,” gasps May.
They collide in the middle of the hallway. She is holding him, stroking his hair, whispering soft comforts into his ear, just like when he was small. He is crying, apologizing, promising to never disappear again.
“I’ll never leave you alone again,” he swears. “Never.”
“Shh,” she says. “I know you won’t. You’re safe now. You’re home.”
Peter laughs, broken and hoarse but happy nonetheless. “Yeah,” he says, and the void slips away. “I’m home.”