Chapter Text
Few were the places where Peter could achieve a truly calm state as he did when working in his basement, methodically refilling his web cartridges like he had done a hundred times over. The web formula he knew by heart, invented by his father (and tweaked and modified over and over by Peter himself until it was just right for his Spider-Man purposes), had to be carefully contained in the small, pressurized canisters. It wasn’t a complicated task for Peter—he could do it in his sleep by now—but it certainly took its time. It was almost one in the morning, and if Peter had been more aware of the time, he would have been unsurprised by the knocking on the basement door and the warning that came from upstairs.
“Peter! Don’t stay up too late!”
“Okay!” he yelled back, startled, and started working as fast as he could.
“I mean it! Don’t make me go down there, kiddo!”
“Okay!” he yelled again. Suddenly a stray thought caught him, and he stopped what he was doing to muse to himself, “I wonder if that would speed the polymerization…”
Gently, he put down the cartridge he was refilling and the aerosol he used to pressurize (both joint at the nozzles by a makeshift thin tube) and picked up a notepad full of molecular drawings, reaction equations and other various calculations and scribbles. He searched through it purposefully, going as far back as to his earliest annotations.
“…But I can’t speed it up too much or I clog the nozzle…”
There was another knock on the door before it creaked open.
“I’ll go up in just a minute, uncle Ben!” Peter promised just as he heard the door, picking up a pen to write down something in a margin of an already-full page of notes.
“Peter,” a stern but gentle voice said, and he felt a hand pat his shoulder. “It’s getting late.”
“Just a minute—I’m almost done here…” Peter said, solely focused on his work.
“Kate’s calling you.”
“What?!” Glancing at the phone on his desk for just a moment to confirm there were no missed calls, Peter asked, “What do you mean? Phone’s not ringing…”
“I think you should go see her, Peter.”
“But… it’s one in the-?”
Peter finally looked up to his uncle with a bewildered look. Just as he did, the last word died in his throat.
There was no bullet wound this time—his head was still intact. No bloodstains on his shirt. Still, that wasn’t the look of a living person—darkened—bluish—bloated—yet wrinkled at the same time.
But Ben hadn’t died from drowning, Peter thought. And what was with his clothes, so full of mud and grime…?
Ben’s upper—purpled—lip twitched up in a shadow of a kindly smirk. “Peter… I think you should wake up.”
Suddenly, all of Peter’s muscles felt exhausted. He didn’t want to wake up, he wanted to rest for a whole day—or even a whole week, perhaps.
“Peter…”
What would he wake up to? Nothing but a tomb of rubble… But there had been voices, hadn’t there? Wasn’t one of them calling him just now? Perhaps if he awoke, he would find out.
“Peter!”
That voice wasn’t his uncle’s. He was sure of it. Suddenly he didn’t feel like resting anymore—he felt like waking up, like reuniting with her.
The basement rumbled. It was only then he noticed the huge cracks running through the walls and ceiling, cracks that were growing quickly—to the building’s breaking point. The form of his uncle stood still as the whole house fell down on them.
“Ben!” Peter yelled as he jerked awake.
He was still exhausted, and starving, and his body ached all over—but he was wide awake and breathing rapidly. He felt something uncomfortable on the back of his hand, finding it was an intravenous line connected to a bag of saline solution. He sat up—he had been laid on a stretcher—and feeling nude he looked down to see only a paper-thin gown covering his body. A blanket had also been covering him up until he had sat up; now it was bunched over his waist and legs. Just then someone at his side yanked him into a tight hug, quietly sobbing his name to his shoulder.
He grunted a little in pain but pressed her closer. “K-Kitty…”
“Peter… Oh, I thought I…”
“I’m fine,” he lied. Over her shoulder, he looked around: they were inside a field hospital—a SHIELD field hospital, he noticed, spotting the symbols on the security personnel and medics around.
“You’re not!” Kitty leaned back just enough to look him in the eyes, hers puffy and reddened. She was wearing her Shadowcat black-and-yellow suit, her mask lowered and bunched at her neck. “I thought you died! Everyone thought you-”
“Everyone…? Wait! My aunt—Gwen—MJ—Kenny… Are they okay?” Peter asked, a heavy weight in his stomach. “Don’t tell me-”
“They’re safe. Oh, they’re going to be so happy…”
Peter let out a sigh of relief. Sensing there was a lot he had missed since being buried in rubble, he asked, “What’s happened?”