Chapter Text
Peter knew he shouldn’t have gone to the party.
Following Ned back to his apartment had been stupid and selfish. He had allowed himself to get too close to them again, even though he knew better.
All Peter ever did was hurt the people he cared about.
Ned and MJ were better off without him. They were safe and happy. Peter knew from the moment he walked into Peter Pan Donuts and saw the bandage above MJ’s brow four years ago that telling them the truth would only put them in danger no matter how much it killed him.
But he had wanted so desperately to talk to them one more time.
He wanted to hear Ned’s voice rise as he started talking too quickly about Star Wars or Legos. He wanted to see MJ tuck her hair behind her ear while pretending not to smile at something she found funny.
He knew he had no right to interfere with their lives. They didn’t need him bringing his problems back into them.
But God, those four years had been lonely.
And Peter was so tired. He had dedicated every waking hour of his life since the world forgot him to being Spider-Man until there was barely any Peter Parker left at all. He barely ever slept anymore, and he only worked to pay for food, rent, flowers for May, and Spider-Man tech.
In the end, he had only managed to hurt his own feelings.
Of course MJ had a boyfriend. She didn’t remember Peter, and even if she did, they had dated for less than a year; who was he kidding? It was only logical that she would move on.
Peter wanted her to be happy.
He repeated that to himself as he watched her kiss someone else, even as something inside his chest seemed to fold in on itself.
So here he was, swinging through Manhattan in the rain without his suit, on his way home to cry himself to sleep.
The headache that had been lingering behind his eyes since the party had only gotten worse. What had started as a dull, familiar pressure had slowly tightened around his temples until every gust of wind and distant car horn seemed to drive it deeper into his skull. Peter tried to ignore it as best he could; he didn’t have his mask to dampen the sensory input, and he had been ignoring headaches like this for months; this one would pass eventually, just like all the others.
With every thwip of his web-shooters, Peter waited a little longer to catch himself, allowing the weightlessness of freefall to hold him for several seconds before instinct finally took over and he released another web.
He couldn’t let himself think too deeply about what that said about his mental state; he just couldn’t bother caring about what would happen if he didn’t didnt release a web at all.
It didn’t matter anyway; it’s not like anyone would miss him.
The rain hid the tears running down Peter’s face as he swung, both of them gathering in his lashes until the city ahead dissolved into blurred lights and indistinct shapes.
The more he swung, the more he realized that he needed to get home, like yesterday. His head felt like it was actively going to explode; every headache that he had had up until this point pales in comparison to this one. Is he dying? Is this what dying really feels like, not like how it felt when he died the last time? That was weird magic dying; this feels like real dying. Permanent dying.
Holy fucking shit! Ouch!
Why isn’t it going away? All the other times, the headaches only lasted for a couple of minutes at most. And if the skull-crushing pain in his head wasn't enough, his wrists were throbbing as well, like a muscle cramp dialed up a million percent.
If this doesn’t stop right now, Peter is going to have to park himself on a random roof and wait it out because he doesn’t know how much more of this he can handle.
If he was actually dying, he was going to need the process to hurry the hell up because whatever this was was taking too damn long. Peter had been through a lot of shit; he had broken more bones than he could remember, gotten stabbed and shot countless times, and he's even been hit by a train twice, and somehow this was worse.
As Peter swerved midair to avoid hitting the fire escape of an apartment building he got too close to in his pain-fueled daze, something weird happened.
The night sky opened up in front of him in a burst of white light, bright enough that Peter flinched and squeezed his eyes shut. Spots flickered behind his eyelids, and the headache that had been building all night suddenly sharpened until it felt like something was pressing against the inside of his skull.
The sudden movement threw off his aim. His next web missed the building entirely.
By the time Peter forced his eyes open again, the pavement was rushing toward him, and the glowing tear in the air was already too close. He tried to twist away, reaching for another building, but there was nothing he could do before his momentum carried him straight through it.
After free-falling through the portal for what could only have been a few seconds, Peter was thrown back into gravity with enough force to knock the air from his lungs.
His shoulder struck something solid first, followed quickly by the rest of him, and he hit the wooden floor in an awkward heap before sliding into the leg of a nearby table. Something fell from above him and shattered, but the headache had grown too intense for him to care what it was.
Peter remained on the floor for several seconds, struggling to breathe as his mind tried to catch up with what had just happened.
He quickly realized that it was no longer raining.
Instead of wet pavement and the constant noise of Manhattan traffic, he could feel warmth against his skin and hear the quiet crackle of a fire somewhere nearby. The room smelled faintly of woodsmoke and coffee, and when Peter finally managed to lift his head, he found himself staring into a living room he had never seen before.
Large windows stretched across the opposite wall, revealing nothing but trees and darkness beyond the glass. A couch sat near the fireplace, surrounded by scattered books, tools, and what looked like a child’s drawing left on the coffee table.
Peter blinked, taking in his surroundings all at once.
He had been swinging through Manhattan. He had fallen through some kind of portal, and now he was lying in the middle of someone’s house with no idea where he was or how he had gotten there.
“What the hell…” He murmured under his breath, slightly shivering. The comforting warmth of the unfamiliar room caused Peter to realize how cold he was in his soaked clothes.
He tried to push himself upright, but the second he moved, the pressure behind his eyes sharpened so violently that his arm gave out beneath him.
Peter fell back to the floor with a strangled gasp. Both hands flew to his head as pain tore through his temples and settled behind his eyes, pulsing in time with his heartbeat. He curled in on himself, pressing his palms against the sides of his skull in hopes of lessening the head-splitting pain radiating through his body.
Each crackle and pop of the fire sent shockwaves of anguish through his head, the sound so incredibly loud that Peter was surprised it wasn’t blasting through speakers all around him.
Everything was so loud; even his own breathing seemed to echo inside his head, and his racing heartbeat boomed all around him.
Peter clamped his hands over his ears, desperate to block out some of the noise, only for both wrists to spasm beneath his palms. A sharp pain shot up his arms, tearing a cry from his throat.
Peter squeezed his eyes shut as tight as he could, barely noticing the approaching footsteps until a painfully familiar voice broke through the noise.
“What the fuck?”
Peter froze in place; all the sounds pouncing around his skull formed a high-pitched ringing noise as he mustered the strength to open his eyes and look up.
No.
No, no, no.
It couldn’t be. This wasn’t real.
Tony Stark stood several feet away, staring down at him with an expression Peter couldn’t begin to understand. He looked almost exactly as Peter remembered him, though his hair was longer and there was more gray around his temples. He was wearing one of his old Ac/Dc shirts and baggy jeans. He smelled like cologne and motor oil.
Peter couldn’t breathe.
He had watched Tony die. He had literally heard Tony's heart stop as he exhaled for the last time.
He couldn’t forget kneeling in the dirt beside him as the light faded from the arc reactor. The memory haunts him in his dreams.
He was hallucinating. He had to be.
Maybe he had hit the floor harder than he thought. Maybe the pain in his head was causing him to imagine things. Maybe he passed out on a rooftop, and all of this was a fever dream.
Tony took a cautious step toward him.
Peter tried to move away, but his arms trembled beneath him, and another wave of pain drove through his skull, leaving him barely able to hold himself upright.
Still, he couldn’t look away.
“Mr. Stark?” He whispered. The words came out small and broken, almost lost beneath the ringing in his ears.
Tony stopped.
For one endless second, he simply stared at Peter, his face going pale as his eyes moved over every familiar feature as though searching for proof that he wasn’t seeing things too.
“Kid?”
Something in Peter’s chest gave way at the sound of it. He tried to answer, but the room tilted sharply before he could force any words past his throat. Tony’s figure blurred at the edges, the room stretching across Peter’s vision as the strength drained from his arms.
The last thing Peter felt was himself beginning to fall.
Then everything went dark.