Chapter Text
At 3:00 a.m., Peter Parker’s laptop blasted “Back in Black” by AC/DC while he stared through the eyepiece of a microscope.
At this point, he had been in the lab for who knew how long. Six hours, maybe. Twelve. But, you know what, time is just a construct, so Peter continued to study the sample in spite of the fact that a yawn kept pushing against his lower jaw, and every couple of minutes, Peter had to remind himself to stay focused when he started nodding off.
He blinked hard, adjusted the focus, and forced himself to keep looking at the cells on the slide.
Peter swallowed and wrote down another observation.
The truth was, Peter had been avoiding sleep like the plague, because sleep meant dreams, and dreams meant remembering May and Tony and MJ and Ned. Sleep meant May breathlessly imparting her last words to Peter as she died in his arms. Tony’s lifeless, half-burnt face as his arc reactor dimmed. MJ almost falling to her death on the statue of liberty, while Peter reaches desperately, unable to save her. Ned and Peter’s last handshake as he said goodbye to them forever.
Suddenly, Peter became aware of the AC/DC playing from his laptop, of the hum of the fluorescent lights, of the soft fabric of Tony’s old MIT sweatshirt against his skin. The sweatshirt was worn down from years of use, but it no longer smelled like motor oil and cologne the way it used to. Now it just smelled like detergent, lab air, and Peter, yet another thing the universe had taken from him.
He blamed the tears prickling in his eyes on exhaustion.
It had been five years since the Statue of Liberty. Five years since the memory spell went wrong. Five years since Doctor Strange had looked at him like there was no kind way to say goodbye and sent him into another universe.
The shift had been weird at first. Like culture shock, but dialed up by about a hundred percent. When Doctor Strange told him the only way to save the universe was to send Peter to another universe, he mentioned there would be some differences. He had not mentioned that the universe he was sending Peter to had no heroes, no magic, and no Spider-Man.
It made Peter’s original universe seem like something out of a comic book.
At first, Peter had thought that would make things easier. Just a normal Earth full of ordinary people living ordinary lives.
Except Peter had never been normal.
Strange had also forgotten to mention that this universe was three years behind his own, and that when Peter arrived, his body had somehow been reversed to his fourteen-year-old self. This especially sucked because Peter was stranded in a foreign universe, completely alone, and then had to undergo the extremely painful, traumatic spider-bite transformation all over again.
Not great.
Peter’s hand tightened around his pen.
He had survived it once.
He had survived it again.
He built an identity from scratch, piecing together a life in a world where Peter Parker had never existed, and forged the identities of his dead parents. Somehow, for whatever miraculous reason, Peter avoided the system. For once in his life, Parker luck had finally spared him. School quickly became his anchor. It was easier to bury himself in his studies than in everything he had lost.
After discovering that Wakanda did not exist here, which was another fun little surprise from the universe, Peter got into Columbia at fourteen with his “discovery” of vibranium. MIT was too much for him to face. From there, he threw himself into his studies, majoring in biophysics and molecular biology while taking courses in physics and engineering alongside his primary fields.
By sixteen, he had graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and physics.
By nineteen, he was at Caltech, earning a PhD in genetics and writing research on gene editing, evolution, and radiation.
Peter didn’t go to parties; he didn’t make friends; he didn’t talk to anyone he didn’t have to; he worked and worked and worked, living day to day, barely sleeping, and only eating when necessary. If you could describe him with two words, it would be a complete mess. His hair was habitually messy, his brow curls disheveled from repeatedly wringing his hands through it, and dark circles permanently occupied his undereyes.
Still looking at the cell sample through his microscope, Peter reached for his half-empty room-temperature monster. As he straightened his back and sipped the neon blue can of mango juice, the best monster flavor he might add, his spider sense pinged at the back of his neck.
Someone is coming.
Blinking the sleep out of his eyes, Peter looked around and focused his hearing toward the hallway outside of this particular lab space on the Caltech campus. His lab was the last room at the end of the hall, so whoever was coming could only be approaching from one direction.
He couldn't tell if this person was dangerous, but a couple of seconds later, Peter picked up the clicking sound of a woman’s heels on the linoleum floor. A middle-aged woman with strawberry-blond hair and a serious expression entered the lab. She was wearing a dark grey turtleneck and a black wool coat, even though it was too hot for California weather. She must have been traveling.
After briefly surveying her appearance, Peter addressed her.
“Can I help you?” he inquired.
She eyed him up and down and responded curtly, “My name is Eva Stratt, I’m a representative of the Petrova task force, and I need your help.”
Peter paused. So his first assumption had been right. Ms. Stratt was German. He quickly tried to formulate a response while simultaneously pausing his music, but his sleep-deprived brain just stuttered out, “ummm, what?” and his finger missed the pause button, instead pressing ‘play next’. As if the situation wasn’t painfully awkward enough already, Peter’s broke ass can barely afford to eat, let alone pay for Spotify Premium, so an ad for deodorant starts blasting from the Laptop Speakers.
Wincing, Peter finally manages to pause the music.
She repeated herself, “My name is Eva Stratt, I’m a representative of…”
“Yeah, no, I got that. I guess my question is… what are you doing in my lab at 3:00 a.m., and why are you here?”
The exhaustion must really be getting to him because Peter would normally never be that blunt and rude. God, he sounds like Tony.
The look in Ms. Stratt’s eyes in that moment of silence before she responded told Peter everything he needed to know. It was a look of despair, laced with regret and sadness; a pleading expression, as if she were clinging to a final shred of hope. Such a look was foreign on her face; she seemed someone who had never placed her faith in others, and this last act of vulnerability felt almost unimaginable.
Peter didn’t have to hear what she was about to say because he knew whatever she was going to ask of him, she would only ask because she had no other options.
She passed him a tablet displaying data as she explained, “The sun is dying, a single-celled micro-organism called astrophage evolved to survive on stars all across the galaxy and feed on their energy to expel it for propulsion. We discovered that they emit infrared light and are heading to Venus to breed.”
She paused, then began again slowly, “In the next 30 years, the Earth will cool 10 to 15 degrees, and eventually we will all starve to death, that is assuming the world's governments will share and ration food, which we all know they won't.”
Peter swallows. That's not good, actually, that's bad… very, very bad.
She continues, “For an unknown reason, Tau Ceti is unaffected by the astrophage, so the world's governments have worked together to make a ship and send four astronauts to discover why it's unaffected and hopefully find a solution.”
“But that's further than any human has ever gone in space. Tau Ceti is like 12 light-years away.” Peter interjects.
“The problem is not the ship, it's the astronauts. We only have enough fuel to send the four of them there, not back, so the plan was for them to record their findings and send them back on probs.”
Peter’s head shot up, eyes wide and brows furrowed. The knot in Peter’s stomach tightened as he began to speak.
“So you're sending 4 people to their death on a mission with no guarantee of success. A suicide mission.”
Ms. Stratt’s face tightened, though whether in frustration or grief, Peter couldn’t tell.
Her piercing gaze focused on Peter.
“Yes,” she replied after a moment. “A suicide mission.”
The words landed heavily between them. Somewhere in the background, the fluorescent lights buzzed faintly overhead while the paused AC/DC track sat frozen on Peter’s laptop screen, the progress bar unmoving. For a second, neither of them spoke, and Peter found himself staring back down at the tablet in his hands, trying unsuccessfully to reconcile the horrifying normalcy of the lab around him with the data in front of his eyes.
“So humanity’s plan,” he repeated, “is to send four people twelve light-years away and hope they somehow figure out how to stop an alien microorganism from eating the sun.”
For just a moment, something shifted in her expression. It wasn’t quite annoyance, nor defensiveness. If anything, she looked tired. Peter could only sit and stare down at his hands.
“Dr. Parker,” she began evenly, her thick German accent unintentionally emphasizing the seriousness of each word as she spoke, “do you know what happens when governments realize there will not be enough food for everyone?”
Peter's jaw set, and the silence between them threatened to choke him.
“They stop cooperating, borders close, and resources are hoarded. Eventually, wars begin, and entire economies collapse long before the actual famine does.” Her gaze remained steady on his. “This mission is Earth's only shot at surviving. There is no other option."
She tried to conceal the exhaustion laced in her voice, the kind of exhaustion that came from one person carrying the responsibility for too many lives at once. Guilt twisted painfully in Peter’s chest. He knew all too well what that was like.
His fingers blanched as his hands tightened around the tablet. The deep-rooted shame of leaving his Earth behind and failing the people who needed Spider-Man choked him like a noose. Peter wanted to throw up.
His eyes drifted absently toward the microscope still sitting in front of him, the unfinished sample beneath the lens forgotten now. Beside it sat three empty Monster cans, a half-eaten pack of sour gummy worms, a pile of marked-up research papers, and a notebook filled with cramped handwriting that grew increasingly illegible the further down the page it went. The entire desk looked like the physical manifestation of a nervous breakdown.
“You still haven’t explained why you’re here,” Peter said quietly.
Ms. Stratt glanced toward the whiteboard at the far end of the room. Equations covered nearly every inch of it, layered over one another in red and blue marker, arrows and annotations squeezed wherever he could find space.
“Hail Mary is set to launch in eight days. It is imperative that the ship leaves then, or it will miss the launch window.”
She hesitated, and in that brief moment, Peter knew what she was about to ask of him. “Yesterday, an astrophage measuring mistake caused an explosion that killed sixteen employees, including the primary and secondary Science Specialists crew members, Dr. Martin Dubois and Dr. Annie Shapiro. We have found a replacement for Dubois, but the ship cannot leave without an additional scientist to replace Shapiro.”
“Peter Parker, the world needs you. I know what I am asking of you, but I hope you understand that I would not ask this of you if not for the dire circumstances.”
His breath hitched. Suddenly, Peter wasn’t in the lab anymore but on Titan, begging and pleading for his life. Suddenly, Peter’s atoms were being ripped apart, falling into dust as his healing factor desperately tried to stitch him back together. Suddenly, Peter was whispering a final apology to Mr. Stark, the penultimate time they would both see each other alive.
He doesn't know whether to laugh or cry at the irony that Peter Parker would die in space twice, saving the world before he's twenty
.
After a couple of minutes of consideration and a near panic attack, Peter questions, “But why me? I’m just... I’m just Peter Parker. I’m not who you want. He paused tentatively, looking down. “Trust me.”
He couldn’t save the world the first time around, so what would make him think this time would be any different?
“Your published research regarding extremophile cellular adaptation brought you to our attention,” she said.
Peter blinked. “My dissertation?”
“Your theories regarding accelerated evolutionary response under prolonged radiation exposure were compelling.”
A strange discomfort settled in his chest. Peter felt suddenly exposed in a way he hadn’t experienced in years.
It reminded him, horribly, of the weeks after Mysterio revealed his identity, when every stranger’s glance carried recognition behind it, when cameras followed him through the streets and in the hallways of midtown. The constant scrutiny of reporters dissected his life as if it were a specimen under a microscope.
Peter hated how quickly his body remembered that feeling. The instinctive tightening in his chest. The urge to retreat inward before someone could pull too much out of him.
For five years, he had worked carefully to build a life where nobody looked too closely, where he could be another overworked graduate researcher buried beneath deadlines and sleep deprivation.
Peter leaned back farther in his chair, arms folding tightly across his chest as though that could somehow shield him from the conversation. “There are people way more qualified than me.”
“There are people older than you,” Ms. Stratt corrected. “That is not the same thing.”
Peter opened his mouth to argue, but she continued before he could.
“You earned degrees in biochemistry and physics before most students finish secondary school. Your doctoral research at Caltech has already been circulated internationally among geneticists studying radiation adaptation. One of your professors described you as ‘deeply concerning but unfortunately brilliant.’”
Peter winced.
This universe was supposed to be Peter’s fresh start. The opportunity to live his life as a normal person and forget all the things that leave Peter screaming in the night, gasping for air, and crying for all he has lost.
After everything he’d lost, after five years spent building a fragile imitation of a life from absolutely nothing, Peter still couldn’t kill the instinct that told him if people needed help, then he had to try.
Even if trying destroyed him.