Chapter Text
The sound of the universe tearing apart was not what Peter had imagined. It wasn’t a boom, but a sharp, perpetual whistle, like the screech of a billion nails against an endless chalkboard.
Then, the void. A coldness that wasn’t temperature, but absence. Absence of light, of sound, of sensation.
For a moment, Peter felt like dust in the cosmic wind, disintegrated, forgotten.
“PARKER!”
Doctor Strange’s voice cut through the nothingness like a knife. A sound that struck directly at his soul, urgent and desperate. But Peter could only think of Tony, holding him while he faded away.
“Tony… Mr. Stark… I’m sorry. I don’t feel so good.”
That was the last thing he clung to of what had once been Peter Parker. The image of the man who had been like a father to him, his face twisted in a pain that went beyond the physical, was his final anchor to existence.
“There’s no time! He protected you! He chose you! Grab my hand!”
A titanic force, a vortex of arcane and dimensional energies, wrenched him out of the quiet nothingness of non-being. He was no longer dust. He was a human projectile, hurled through the very fabric of reality. Universes rushed past like flashes of impossible colors and unknown sensations. He felt the expansion of entire galaxies and the whisper of civilizations that would never exist, all in a nanosecond.
And then, the impact. He felt as if he had fallen straight from the sky.
⋆༺𓆩🕷𓆪༻⋆
The world returned in jolts, in an assault of brutal and discordant sensations.
First, he smelled it. Everything reeked of rancid sourness. Of stale sweat, rotting food, chemicals, and mold. A stench that clawed at his throat and carved into his brain.
He felt the damp coldness on his back. Filthy, sticky linoleum under his fingers. A sharp, deep pain all over his body, as if every cell had been dismantled and forcibly reassembled.
Then he heard the steady drip of a leaking faucet. The distant rumble of traffic from a city that was definitely not New York. And closer, a ragged, panicked breathing.
Peter forced his eyes open. His vision was blurry. The neon lights of a half-broken sign outside filtered through a grimy window, staining the room with an intermittent, hellish red.
“No… it can’t be…” A shaky male voice mumbled at his feet.
Peter tried to sit up. His arms trembled with weakness as he pushed against the floor, his head spinning. Where was he? What had happened? Was this the afterlife? It smelled far too foul to be heaven.
“I stabbed you!” The voice shifted, now high-pitched with uncontrolled hysteria. “I stabbed you! The blood… there was so much blood!”
Peter’s vision slowly sharpened. Kneeling before him, eyes wide and skin waxy pale, was a man in his fifties, thin, wild-eyed, and unhinged. His trembling hands were smeared with dark, viscous red. On the floor beside him lay a kitchen knife, its blade streaked with crimson, a line of blood connecting it to the dark pool spreading across the floor.
The same blood puddle where Peter had just awakened.
His spider-sense, which had been a low, steady hum in the background, suddenly shrieked into a deafening scream inside his skull. DANGER. DEATH. BLOOD.
Peter glanced down at his torso. His shirt—cheap, faded, and definitely not his—was torn across the stomach. The fabric was soaked in something wet and dark. He pressed his hands against himself frantically. No wound. No pain. Just intact skin, tender to the touch, like a fresh bruise. He had been stabbed. Or, more precisely, the body he was in had been stabbed.
“What…?” Peter rasped, his voice hoarse and strange to his own ears.
The sound shattered the terrified trance holding the kneeling man. His panicked expression twisted into pure, undeniable supernatural horror.
“But you… you…” he whispered, pointing at Peter with a trembling finger. “You’re supposed to be dead. I killed you! I checked!”
The man was Skip Westcott, Peter realized with a jolt of recognition from his own world. Skip scrambled backward, slipping in the pool of blood he’d created. He crashed into a low table, sending an ashtray full of cigarette butts and several empty pill bottles clattering to the floor.
“Stay away from me!” Skip shrieked, crab-crawling toward the door. “Stay in hell where you belong! Don’t follow me!”
Fueled by pure panic, he leapt to his feet, yanked the door open, and bolted into the hallway, his screams fading into the distance.
Peter was left alone, kneeling on the cold floor, gasping for breath. The red neon flickered, casting its hellish glow over the bloody apartment. His mind, still fogged from the interdimensional journey, struggled to make sense of what had just happened.
He was alive. In another place. In another body. A body that had just barely survived an attempt at murder.
“He protected you. He chose you.” Strange’s words echoed in his mind. Tony… Tony must have asked Strange to save him somehow. And Strange had done it—by casting him into this. Into a body already burdened with its own mortal troubles.
A wave of nausea and vertigo tore through him. He braced his hands against the floor, fighting the urge to vomit. He needed to get out. Skip could return with friends or a shotgun. His spider-sense wouldn’t stop screaming.
With effort, he got to his feet. His legs wobbled beneath him. He looked around. The apartment was a sty. Dirty clothes everywhere, dishes stacked with moldy leftovers in the sink, an aura of neglect and despair that was almost tangible.
Then he heard it. A groan. Low. From another room. Peter froze. Someone else was here? Another witness? Another victim?
Cautiously, every muscle tensed, he edged toward the half-open door. The stench of drugs and sweat intensified. He pushed the door open slowly.
The room was dim. On an unmade bed with filthy, tangled sheets lay a woman. Her brown hair was matted with sweat, her face worn and aged by a hard life yet hauntingly familiar. It was May. His Aunt May.
But not his May.
This woman was pale, gaunt. Her breathing shallow and uneven. One arm dangled off the bed, a rubber tourniquet and a dirty spoon lying just out of reach. The air reeked of vomit and a metallic, sickly sweetness Peter recognized with horror from his patrols in Queens: heroin.
She hadn’t witnessed anything. She hadn’t heard the shouting, the struggle, or Skip’s frantic escape. She was unconscious, lost in a chemical haze, utterly unaware that her real nephew had technically been murdered only feet away.
Peter felt his world collapse. There was no comfort here. No warm hugs or words of encouragement. Only blood on the floor, the stench of death and drugs, and the ghost of a boy no one had protected.
The buzzing in his skull swelled, urging him to move, to get out. Without a second thought, Peter spun on his heel. He didn’t look back. He bolted for the front door, into the dark, foul-smelling hallway, and raced down the stairs, driven by panic and a crushing grief.
He burst into the cold night of a city he didn’t recognize, lungs burning, heart shattered. The skyscrapers were not sleek and friendly but gothic, menacing, jagged teeth of black stone against a sky tainted orange by light pollution.
High above, among the gargoyles, a dark silhouette watched the streets. It didn’t see the boy fleeing from the apartment building. But that night, Batman would hear the reports of a new sound on Gotham’s rooftops: not the flutter of a cape, but the thwip of something sticky and the soft landing of agile feet that shouldn’t be there.