Chapter 1

Peter crouches on the edge of a dusty ruin, watching Quill and Tony discuss (well, ‘discuss’) plans for taking on Thanos. It seems to be going well, but they’re just out of reach of his super hearing to really tell. At the very least, no one looks like they’re going to start throwing punches again.

A shadow falls across him, and he looks up. “Oh. Hey, Dr. Strange.”

“Mr. Parker,” Strange says with a gentle nod, coming up to stand beside him. He’s been withdrawn and resigned since he looked into the future. Quiet, almost humbled. It’s a drastic change from the aloof sarcasm from when they first met.

“Are you okay?” Peter asks, looking up at him and tilting his head. “You seem a little not okay after that time thing.”

“I’m as well as can be expected. I’ve been preparing some spells ahead of the battle. That’s always somewhat draining,” Strange says, distracted. He pauses, then looks at Peter. “Can I ask a favor of you?”

“Um, yeah, of course,” Peter says, standing up from his crouch. There’s a weight to the sorcerer’s gaze that he’s never seen before. “What do you need?”

“Hold out your hand, please.”

Peter does so, curious as to what the sorcerer could possibly need from him.

Strange pulls out a piece of paper thick enough to qualify as parchment and places it in Peter’s hand. It’s folded in half and sealed with an honest to god wax seal. Peter’s thrown by it’s sudden appearance until he realizes that this is probably one of the simpler tricks the sorcerer has up his literal sleeve. He takes a moment to admire it; the paper is almost clothlike, and the wax seal glows with a subtle power that presses against his hand, even through the suit.

And then it disappears in a green flash. Peter stares at his hand in disbelief.

“Um?”

Strange, for his part, doesn’t seem surprised or even upset. “Excellent. Thank you, Mr. Parker.”

“You’re welcome?” Peter says, looking at his hand. “I’m not going to sneeze out a letter in three weeks or something, am I?”

“Something like that,” Strange says, far too casually for Peter’s liking. “Are you prepared for this?”

“The fight? Yeah! I mean, as well as I can be, I guess.” Truth be told, he’s a little freaked out. Titan had once been like Earth and now it’s nothing but dust and ruin. If they don’t stop Thanos here, there won’t be a home to go back to. He’s glad Tony’s here; without him, they wouldn’t stand a chance. “I’m ready, Dr. Strange. Promise.”

Strange nods, watching him thoughtfully. He holds Peter’s eyes for a moment, hesitates, and then says, “A bit of advice?”

“Sure,” Peter says. This is the longest conversation he’s had with Dr. Strange. The man had all but ignored Tony and Peter on the ship during their flight towards Titan. This sudden interest and oddly friendly conversation is, well, strange.

“No great thing can be done without sacrifice,” Dr. Strange says.

And then he walks off.

Peter stares after him, thoroughly confused.

---

Thanos arrives and he’s much bigger and much more terrifying than Peter expected. They subdue him in seconds, but it’s a near thing.

Peter puts his hands over the jewels slotted into place on Thanos’ gauntlet and finds his grip just near the biggest one set below the four others. The orange-gold one. It fairly thrums with power, like Tony’s arc reactor, pushing out unseen waves of heat that run along the length of his arm. He starts to pull.

Something cracks beneath his hand.

There’s a weight in his hand that disappears the second it lands there. Something bright, something gold, he thinks, but he can’t think of why it would be gold. It isn’t in his hand when he looks, so whatever it is, he must’ve dropped it. Thanos must have invested in some pretty cheap metal for this gauntlet.

“Kid, focus!” Tony grits out.

“Right! Sorry–“

Peter resumes pulling at the gauntlet. He doesn’t notice that half of the Soul Stone is missing.

Quill drops from the sky and approaches Thanos.

Everything goes wrong after that.

---

Thanos disappears through the portal. And almost immediately things feel wrong.

“Something is happening,” Mantis says.

He doesn’t know what happens after that. He hears Drax ask for his friend. He hears Quill mutter a quiet ‘aw, man.’ He knows they’re dead. He can’t hear their heartbeats anymore. And then–

Then it happens to him. His spider senses are absolutely screaming at him. The fear is all encompassing. The pain is more than that. Every nerve ending is on fire.

“I-I don’t feel so good,” Peter mumbles, staggering towards Tony. He trips and catches himself against the man, can feel him wince. “I don’t know what’s–I don’t–“

Something is trying to tear him apart. But he can fight it. Barely. It takes almost all of his concentration, all of his willpower, but he fights it back. For a bit.

All it does is make the pain last longer.

At the edges of his consciousness, he can hear other, distant voices. It sounds like they’re coming from a tunnel far away from him. He babbles at Tony, begging for help or comfort or something; things the man is thoroughly incapable of providing for him.

“Why is it taking so long for him?” Quill’s voice asks.

“Nick, was it like this for me?” another asks.

“No, it happened instantly,” Nick, whoever that is, answers.

“I don’t wanna go–” Peter pleads, half hugging, half clinging to Tony as they’re both dragged to the ground. Tony, by his wound and Peter’s unexpected weight; Peter, by his rapidly disintegrating legs and feet.

Tony still finds the strength lay him out relatively gently. His voice is calm and reassuring, in contrast to the despair and panic just behind his eyes. “You’re alright. You’re okay.”

“Jesus,” a voice quietly says. It’s one he heard before. The Falcon.

“I’ve got you,” Tony says, gripping Peter’s shoulder. He looks away briefly, his eyes meeting with the blue alien woman who rammed a ship into Thanos. When he sees the vaguely shocked and defeated expression on her face, he turns back to Peter. “I’ve got you. You’re alright–”

He isn’t. He’s slowing it down, yes, but that’s a losing battle. Even if Tony could stop it–

Well. His legs are gone. The pain is crawling up his stomach, up his spine, and it’s starting to gain speed. He reaches up to grab Tony’s shoulder, and his crumbles inside the suit. The suit collapses around him, giving off the illusion that he’s deflating. Ash seeps out of the edges of it like water.

“You’re okay,” Tony repeats. He’s trying to make it easier for Peter.

And all Peter can hear is ‘if anything happened to you, I’d feel like that was on me’ in the back of his mind.

“What the hell? Did you guys just hear that?” Quill asks.

“It’s a memory,” someone else says in a quiet, withdrawn and decidedly Sokovian accent.

The pain has reached his chest now. His lungs. He can’t fight it anymore. He looks up at Tony, and whispers, “I’m sorry.”

The last thing Peter sees is Tony’s horrified, heartbroken expression leaning over him. The guilt in his eyes is almost worse than the burning pain that’s taking Peter apart piece by piece. The world starts to go dark.

There’s a flash of gold and green. For one moment, he finds himself standing amongst the Guardians and others; Falcon, the Winter Soldier, Scarlet Witch, Black Panther and Princess Shuri, others he doesn’t recognize–they all stare at him, some confused, others concerned. And then there’s Dr. Strange. The look he gives Peter is pure pity, and more than a little guilt.

And then darkness again. It feels like blinking; an extended period of nothingness that ends as abruptly as it begins. One moment there’s nothing, the next there’s light.

A dingy, yellow light that covers brick walls, cement floors, and an obscene machine that he’s been attached to. Reality crashes upon him with all the subtlety of an asteroid strike. Sights, sounds, smells–his senses come alive all at once, overwhelming him. The first thing he feels is an agonizing, white hot pain, as if every cell in his body is being torn asunder piece by microscopic piece and put together again.

The first thing he hears is his own screams of pain. He can’t stop them; frankly, he’s barely aware of them. He’s trapped inside something. A tube? Smaller. A glass coffin maybe; he isn’t sure. He knows he’s trapped, he knows he’s alone, and suddenly he’s back at the warehouse again. He starts to fumble inside the glass tube, hits it once, twice, and shatters it from the inside with a heavy, desperate flail of his hand. Glass falls to the dingy floor beneath him, and he can hear things now. People are nearby, speaking to one another.

“Is that a kid?” a voice asks, deep and tinged with worry. Whoever it is, they’re close.

Peter ignores them completely; he hauls himself out of the machine–some sort of strange pod thing–and takes stock of himself. He’s not in his suit. Why isn’t he in his suit? He braces himself against the machine and tries to calm his breathing. God, his head hurts. His face is covered in dirt, grime, and dried blood and his clothes are covered in the same. It looks like he just crawled out of his own grave. Honestly, it feels like it, too. His body shakes and trembles with phantom pain from whatever Thanos did.

The room he’s in is in full chaos as he hauls himself up. There’s cries, shouts, gunfire, and sounds of fighting. It starts to die down, and he realizes he should probably not stand in the middle of a gunfight where one side is clearly losing. He shudders, staggering forward, and trips over his own feet–

He’s caught by a strong pair of hands and gently lowered into a sitting position on the ground. His spidey sense isn’t going off, which is a good thing. He’s weak as a kitten right now. He won’t be able to defend himself.

“Easy,” a woman says. Her words are gentle, and carry a slight accent that he can’t place.

He looks up at her, blinking at her owlishly. She’s wearing armor from toe to neck, all of if in a style that vaguely reminds him of Thor’s Asgardian armor, but also clearly follows a different aesthetic. Something closer to Greek myth, he thinks. She’s easily just as strong as Thor, too. She handles his weight as if he weighs no more than a feather.

She watches him carefully, sharp blue eyes looking him over from a beautiful face framed by black hair. Her eyes soften just a bit.

“Easy,” she repeats, pressing a hand on his shoulder when he tries to stand. “Don’t try to move too much.”

Peter nods dumbly, slumping back against the wall. The room spins on a tilted axis, and his ears ring.

“Hold this for me,” the woman says, handing Peter a golden rope. Peter takes it on autopilot and looks it over. It feels heavier than a regular rope, and there’s a strange tingling sensation along his arms when he grabs it. She relaxes slightly when he takes the rope without question.

“What’s your name?” she asks.

“Peter Parker.”

“I’m called Wonder Woman,” the woman says. She motions towards a man standing in a blue super suit with a red “S” stenciled across an almost ludicrously muscled chest. “This is my friend, Superman. Is it okay if we ask you a few questions about what happened here?”

Who? “Um, sure. I’m kind of confused right now, though.”

“That’s fine. It won’t take long.” She stops, considers him, and her expression softens again. “We’ll get you somewhere safe after we’re done here. I promise.”

Peter believes her. And hopes she isn’t evil.

The man in the suit with the red S across his chest asks, “Were you the one inside the machine?”

“Yeah,” Peter answers, almost without realizing it. “Yeah. It hurt.”

An odd look is exchanged between the two of them before the woman speaks again. She motions towards the unconscious men on the ground.

“He’s not what I was expecting,” Superman says quietly in the background, half to himself.

“Do you know any of these people?” Wonder Woman asks.

Peter stares at the unconscious bodies strewn across the floor. They look odd; half human at best, with batlike features. “No, not at all. I have no idea where I am. I don’t think I’m supposed to be here. I don’t even know where here is, and Tony’s going to be worried–”

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Wonder Woman asks.

“Dying,” Peter says immediately. The memory rises up, and his eyes glaze over. He can almost taste the dust in his mouth, in his throat– “Tony was trying to help, but I was…I was already dying. And I didn’t want to, because he always said if anything happened to me, he’d blame himself but I–I–and there was this dust and-and he looked so scared but he was trying to keep from showing it because he knows I freak out when he does–”

“That’s enough, Peter,” she says, gently gripping his shoulder.

Superman frowns, looking at the machinery around the room. “I think they actually pulled it off. They brought someone back from the dead.”

“But why him?” Wonder Woman asks. “He’s clearly not associated with them.”

“To test it, most likely,” Superman replies. “They weren’t going to try it on their cult leader right away. Most of them didn’t think it would work.”

“That’s not what they said last time we broke into one of their hideouts. They found their leader’s body. They had it ready. And now the machine is destroyed, and they used it on a kid? It doesn’t make sense,” Wonder Woman insists. “We need to bring Batman into this.”

“I tried to call him, but he didn’t answer. Something’s happening in Gotham–” Superman starts.

“There they are!” a voice cries out.

The sounds of boots pounding the ground soon follows, and dozens of men charge into the room, some armed with rifles, others with decidedly more esoteric weapons.

Wonder Woman snaps into action, turning to face the new threat head on. She shifts her stance, placing herself firmly between Peter and the flood of bad guys.

A man in shifting dark armor, brimming with dark energy, grins at Wonder Woman, squaring up to face her. Purple lightning crawls down his arms and hands, gathering in his palms.

“Hello,” he hisses. “I’d like a rematch.”

“Peter, stay down,” Wonder Woman orders, pulling the shield off her back.

“Yeah, uh. You got it.” He should get up and help. He can’t. He’s close to blacking out.

Wonder Woman leaps into battle, trading blows with the man. She has the upper hand, constantly beating him back and away from Peter and the weird machine he’s leaning against. The two move so quickly that Peter loses track of them completely. Superman is handling his own foes, and the only thing slowing him down are the sheer number of bad guys.

Yeah, he needs to get up and help. He centers himself, braces himself, and stands up. Doing the one thing Wonder Woman told him not to do.

And he does it just as the man in dark armor lets loose a blast of eldritch energy at Wonder Woman. The spell misses her completely. It does, however, hit Peter full force in the chest. It’s a bit like taking a Hulk sized kick straight to the stomach, and he flies backwards. A second errant spell, this one aimed at Superman, clips against one of the eldritch machines behind Peter, knocking a lever into place. A black and purple portal tears itself open in behind Peter, and he flies through it.

The world shifts around him. The portal collapses. He flies into a dirty brick wall, bounces off of it, and lands hard on his hands and knees. Since he’s barely recovered from dying(?), it hurts worse than it should, and it takes him a minute or two to gather his wits. It takes him five more to stand up and brush himself off. His clothes are covered in ash and dust.

He stumbles out of the alley into the fading evening light and braces himself against a street sign near one of the only functioning street lights. Park Row. He doesn’t recognize the street. He looks up and down the block and realizes he doesn’t recognize that either. The skyline is all wrong for New York; no Stark Tower, no Empire State building, or anything he can recognize from here. So he definitely isn’t back home, which is a shame. And also very typical for his luck.

He sees a man across the street, standing outside a garage door, smoking a cigarette. The man looks exhausted and irritated; probably a cab driver. Peter’s never met a happy cab driver in his life.

“Hey!” Peter calls out. His accent comes out thicker than intended; normally he has a good handle on it, but his head is still throbbing. “Where am I?”

“Gotham, New Jersey, you goddamn idiot!” the man calls back. He huffs, tosses his still lit cigarette on the ground in front of himself and mutters, just loud enough to be heard, “Fucking New York tourists.”

Why the hell is he in New Jersey, Peter wonders, casually flipping the man off and walking away. Is this one of Dr. Strange’s tricks? It must be. He must have done something, cast some sort of spell, that interrupted Peter’s death and sent him here.

And here appears to be Earth, but not the one he’s familiar with. An alternate Earth, then. Is that what happened to everyone who got dusted? A part of him hopes so, because right now, standing alone in the bad side of town in Gotham City, he’s completely out of his depth.

A newspaper machine, half broken, catches his eye. Gotham Times is stenciled along the sides of the machine itself. The paper inside shows the headline Mayor Approves Controversial Truancy Law. Beneath that, another: Teens Beware: Truancy Will Take You To Juvie. A few other articles pepper the front of it; a stark rise in crime, something about a Wayne Juvenile Defense fund being formed in response to the new, and finally, a weather report. The sun isn’t due to shine in Gotham for the next two weeks, apparently.

Great.

Here’s where things get odd: the date in the corner is two and a half months after the fight on Titan. It’s late summer edging into fall right now. Dr. Strange didn’t just send him into an alternate timeline. He sent him through time, as well. Which would make sense; he is a time wizard. Or, rather, he was a time wizard. Peter has the distinct feeling that Dr. Strange didn’t survive Titan.

He doesn’t want to think about Titan right now.

Peter sighs, fidgeting in place. His headache has not lessened at all. It’s only getting worse. He ducks inside the nearest building–a half burned restaurant, judging by the rusted signs bolted to the concrete walls–and stops to take stock of himself and his situation.

“Right. Okay. No food. No money. No phone. Absolutely no clue where I am. The only new part of that is having no idea where I am. I can handle being homeless. I’ve done that before,” Peter mutters to himself, pacing around the fire station office.

And he had been homeless before. For a brief time with May, when they’d been evicted from their apartment after Ben’s death. The ambulance and funeral bills had devastated their finances and the landlord was less than sympathetic to their situation.

“What would Iron Man do? What would Tony do?” The immediate response to that triggers a visceral memory. He pauses, frowns, and reconsiders.

“Okay, what wouldn’t Tony do, then.” That brings him even less options. He groans in frustration, rubbing his eyes. “Captain America’s PSAs never covered this.” And then, in near perfect mimicry of Steve Rogers’ voice, “So, you’ve died and come back to life in an alternate universe where no one knows who you are and all of the superheroes have really obvious names.”

Okay, focus. He’s getting away from himself. He covers his face with his hands, blocking out the evening light coming in from the window and takes a deep breath before letting it out slowly.

“What would Rhodey do?” he asks. And then, as if the man is standing right beside him, he can hear: It’s common sense time with Uncle Rhodey: If you’re lost somewhere without help, get the basics first. Shelter, water, and food, in that order. The rest can wait.

Right. Shelter first. He can’t just wander around in what is obviously the bad side of town at night, in the rain, and expect to get out of it unscathed. He needs to find some place to hunker down until someone can find him.

Peter takes a deep breath, and steps back out into the Gotham night.