Chapter Text
Peter was having what most would call a rough couple of months.
And by “rough,” he meant: the whole universe forgot he existed.
He didn’t regret his choice—great power, great responsibility, blah blah, heroic sacrifice—but wow, did this particular outcome suck.
MJ and Ned could pass him on the street and have zero clue he was once their best friend, giving him nothing more than a polite nod you’d give a stranger holding open a door.
No spark of recognition. No annoyed groan at his lame jokes. Nothing.
He tried once, talking to MJ.
She’d been behind the counter at her new coffee shop job, hair tied back, sleeves dusted with espresso grounds, smiling at a customer in a familiar way Peter felt in his ribs.
It had been only a week since he’d moved into his shoebox apartment, and the loneliness had hit him so hard he’d practically stumbled inside just to hear a familiar voice.
He hadn’t planned to speak to her.
(Okay, he had. He very much had. He’d rehearsed a whole speech in the mirror. Twice.)
But when she looked up at him, all warm-eyed and polite in that stranger’s smile, the speech died in his throat.
He asked for a coffee instead, she told him it would be $3.75, and that was that.
The guilt gnawed at him afterward, the way guilt always does when Peter Parker tries to do the right thing and ends up bleeding for it. Doing what was best for her meant staying away, letting her move on. Keeping her far, far away from the danger that came with Spider-Man.
Didn’t make it hurt any less.
Then there was May.
Peter didn’t like thinking about her—about losing her in a way that still felt unreal, like his brain kept glitching any time he got too close to the memory.
If he kept moving, swinging, talking, joking—if he kept filling the silence—maybe the rest of the world wouldn’t notice that she was gone too. Maybe he wouldn’t notice either.
But grief didn’t work like that.
Sometimes he’d catch himself turning to tell her something—some dumb observation, some story about a guy who tried to mug Spider-Man with a baguette—and the realization would hit him so hard he’d forget how to breathe.
He'd spent weeks mastering the art of Not Thinking About It™.
He missed her laugh, missed her stubbornness. He even missed her catastrophic attempts at cooking anything more advanced than toast—the smoke detector had honestly seen more action than most small-town fire departments.
So when he woke to the heavenly smell of absolutely nothing—no breakfast, no burnt eggs, no apologetic May frantically waving a dish towel under the alarm—it was just another day in his new miserable routine.
His apartment smelled like dust instead, fragranced with stale air and the laundry he kept forgetting to rotate. Honestly, it was impressive how fast a place could start embodying your emotional state.
His stomach growled loudly enough to echo off the sad, peeling walls.
“Yeah, yeah,” Peter muttered, rubbing the heel of his hand over his eyes like he could erase the last eight hours. “I’m getting to it, hold your horses.”
He shuffled across the single strip of floor not currently buried under unfolded laundry or what he liked to call the Camera Graveyard—also known as the pile of gear he kept meaning to fix but absolutely would not be fixing today.
His toes brushed a lens cap, a sock, something that might’ve once been a granola bar wrapper.
He swung open the fridge and was greeted by: one hefty box of baking soda, an apple that had clearly seen some things, and a gallon of milk that had evolved into its own hostile ecosystem.
“Cool,” Peter sighed as he stared into the fridge. “Totally cool.”
He grabbed his off-brand cereal and poured it into a chipped bowl. Then he poured water over it, and tried not to visibly recoil as little cereal flakes bobbed to the surface like doomed survivors on an iceberg.
He shoveled a spoonful into his mouth and grimaced
Right. Groceries. He was supposed to get groceries yesterday. But instead of doing that, he’d been slightly preoccupied saving people from a burning building, which had taken priority over buying milk. And then there was the hour he’d spent coughing up smoke in an alley while trying to convince himself he wasn’t dying.
He could still taste soot on his tongue.
Peter sighed and pushed his curls out of his face, feeling the faint ache behind his eyes that always showed up when he'd burned through too many calories—Spider-Man metabolism was fun like that.
He poked the cereal with his spoon.
It poked back. Or maybe he hallucinated that. It was hard to tell these days.
But hey, he was trying to stay positive
He had, against all odds and basic zoning laws, managed to find a decently priced apartment. Sure, it was cheap, his neighbors were loud, it was slightly leaning to the left, and almost definitely shaped like a broom closet someone had slapped a lease onto.
But it had a door. And walls. And electricity on most days. So honestly? A win.
He paid for it with his brand-new, super glamorous job taking photos for the Daily Bugle—run by a man whose primary personality trait was yelling, followed closely by yelling louder, and rounding out the trifecta with creative, deeply personal insults about Spider-Man.
Which was hilarious if you ignored the fact that Peter was Spider-Man.
His voicemail light blinked furiously from the kitchen counter, personally offended he hadn’t checked it yet.
Blink. Blink. BLINK.
Peter eyed it warily, already resigned and groaning.
He pressed play.
VOICEMAIL 1:
“PARKER, WHERE ARE MY PICTURES? The people deserve the TRUTH about Spider-Menace—”
Peter hit delete.
VOICEMAIL 2:
“Parker, I know you can HEAR these calls—”
Delete.
VOICEMAIL 3:
“PARKER!”
Delete. Delete. Delete.
Peter winced sympathetically—for his future self, who’d have to deal with that in person.
J. Jonah Jameson wasn’t exactly what Peter would call an ideal boss.
Ironically, the man who once dedicated an alarming portion of his life to trying to ruin both Peter and Spider-Man was now the only reason Peter’s lights stayed on.
Character development for JJJ? No.
Poor life choices for Peter? Absolutely.
He shut off the voicemail screen and exhaled a sigh that felt bigger than his whole body.
Time to get ready for another thrilling episode of Peter Parker: Underpaid, Underfed, Overqualified.
He peeled off his sleep shirt and tugged on the familiar red-and-blue fabric hanging from the back of a chair. The suit clung to him like a second skin, a comforting, reliable one that didn’t forget him.
He inhaled once, grounding himself.
Spider-Man was easy.
Spider-Man made sense.
Then he shrugged into civilian clothes over the top. Adorning a faded hoodie, jeans that had seen better centuries, and sneakers whose soles were holding on through sheer determination and the grace of physics.
He slung his camera bag over his shoulder, the weight settling against him like a reminder of all the deadlines he was absolutely not going to meet. He found his jacket, patted his pockets for keys he’d definitely misplaced twelve times, and finally grabbed the sad apple from the fridge—hesitated—then put it back. Even he had standards.
Peter toed the door open, wincing as it squeaked in protest.
“Me too, buddy,” he agreed with the hinges.
Then he stepped into the morning air—cold, noisy, smelling like hot dog water and ambition—and locked the door behind him.
New York buzzed around him as cars honked, vendors shouted, the usual orchestra of the city’s people. Above it all, Peter’s mind whispered its steady mantra:
Rent is due in three days, JJ’s on voicemail forty, all you need is one decent incriminating photo of yourself.
Somehow harder than quantum physics.
He ducked into an alley, checked that no one was watching, and suited up.
Goodbye Peter Parker, chronically underpaid menace.
Hello Spider-Man, chronically unpaid menace.
The mask slipped on like second skin.
“Okay, big guy,” he told the camera he’d webbed to a lamppost. “Action shot. Something dynamic. Something JJ won’t fire me over.”
He leaped into a perfect, acrobatic swing—knees tucked, line clean, form immaculate—
Click!
—just as a pigeon kamikaze’d directly across the lens.
Spider-Man froze and sent an accusing look its way.
“Dude. Really?”
The pigeon cooed, clearly mocking him.
Peter swung back, reset the camera angle, and tried again.
Click!
This time, he was half out of frame.
“Okay. Maybe he won’t notice?”
(He absolutely would.)
One more attempt.
Big arc. Good lighting. Chin up. Shoulders heroic.
Click!
Peter was sure it was the one until he saw a glowing, overexposed blur that suggested Spider-Man was made of pure light or possibly disintegrating.
He dangled upside down from a fire escape, staring at the camera like it had personally betrayed him.
“Why,” he groaned to no one, “is photographing myself harder than fighting aliens?”
The universe, rude as ever, offered no response.
Instead, his spider-sense detonated behind his eyes.
Not a polite tingle.
Not even a “Hey, heads up!”
No, this was a full-blown, skull-rattling alarm, like someone had struck a tuning fork made of pure dread at the base of his brainstem.
Danger. Not safe? Panic. Danger!
Peter sucked in a breath, muscles locking on instinct. The world around him tilted, then sharpened—colors fading, edges glowing, sound narrowing into one perfect, horrifying focus.
His fingers clenched around the webline mid-swing as the hairs on his arms stood upright like tiny panicked soldiers.
“Okay,” he muttered to himself, heart rate skyrocketing. “Hate that. What is—?”
Then he heard it.
Real screams, pitched high, terrified, human.
Sirens wailed as somewhere several blocks over, something exploded—loud enough that the shockwave rippled along the metal fire escapes.
“Oh no,” Peter breathed, blood going cold in a way that had nothing to do with the January wind knifing through the alley. Already scrambling forward, he practically shoveled his gear back into his backpack.
Voice pitching upward the way it always did right before something exploded or caught fire or tried to eat him, he whispered, “That’s bad-bad.”
He didn’t hesitate.
Spider-Man vaulted from the fire escape, webline firing with a crisp thwip that reverberated in his bones.
The tug of momentum hit a heartbeat later, swinging him high above the street, body slicing through cold air like he’d been born in it.
He arrowed toward the smoke blooming above the skyline—toward the sounds of crashing metal and panicked shouting, toward the danger his spider-sense was still shrieking about.
Rent could wait.
JJJ could wait.
Breakfast could wait.
But someone needed him now.
And needing to be needed was the one thing he had left.
He found the threat in the heart of downtown and immediately wished he hadn’t.
Reality was breaking?
Not metaphorically. Not like “wow, rent is high and the MTA is collapsing,” but literally—reality itself seemed to be folding in on the street.
Cars hovered mid-air, metal crumpling inward like someone had balled them up in a fist. Streetlamps bent at angles that would make geometry professors weep. The asphalt rippled, soft as water. Light fractured in the air like a glitching video game frozen right before the final crash.
Peter landed on the crushed hood of a taxi, boots slipping on warped metal as he took in the nightmare.
“Hi there! Quick Question!” he called out, raising one hand like he was trying to hail a cab from the Twilight Zone. “Did somebody wake up on the wrong side of the bed this morning?”
The man in the center of the utter destruction of the street corner turned to greet him.
Slowly.
Not like a person noticing a noise—more like something colossal changing its focus. His shoulders rolled back first, the long dark coat he wore rippling in the warped currents of air. Fabric snapped and fluttered as if the coat were trying to escape his body and the gravity around him wouldn’t let it.
His hair, long, uneven, and hanging in damp-looking strands, shifted with the distortion winds. There was an oily sheen to it, like he’d stepped out of a lab explosion and forgot basic personal hygiene somewhere along the way.
But his eyes—God. His eyes were wrong.
They weren’t glowing the way villains typically glow, not neon or radioactive or magically illuminated. No—these glowed like something alive was moving behind them. There had to be a second pair of eyes watching from deeper inside his skull.
And worst of all?
They held recognition.
A bone-deep, soul-level recognition Peter had not seen since before the spell.
“Finally,” the man breathed. His voice shook, not with fear, but with delight. Peter hoped—really, truly hoped—that he heard him wrong.
“My Spider.”
Bad. Danger! Run. Bad. Bad!
His spider-sense screamed so loud it felt like someone was scraping a knife along the inside of his skull. Something cold and electric crawled down his spine, pooling in the base of his stomach.
Great. Fantastic. A stalker.
“Uh,” Peter tried, raising both hands in the universal gesture of please don’t murder me during business hours. “Just—checking here—have we met? Because you’re giving me strong ‘I’ve definitely tried to maim you before’ vibes, and I feel like I’d remember that?”
The man stepped forward.
Reality stepped back.
The pavement rippled under his foot as a traffic light bent sideways like a flower bowing to him. The air itself recoiled, shimmering with fractures Peter didn’t have the brain cells to explain.
Like the universe didn’t want him here.
Like he didn’t belong.
“I’ve met you,” the man said in an eerily calm manner, seeing as Peter had not met him once, he felt inclined to call him a liar. It made him want to climb the nearest skyscraper and file a permanent change-of-address form for the roof.
“Dozens of you. Hundreds.”
His smile twitched upward—too sharp, too stretched, delighted in the wrong places.
“A thousand variants,” he whispered, eyes burning with an obsession so intense Peter genuinely wondered if his bones could physically climb out of his body and run away without him.
“And every single one of you—”
He leaned forward, spine creaking like an old floorboard.
“—gets in my way.”
Peter blinked once. Twice. A third time for good measure.
“Oh,” he said brightly, because his brain liked to combat mortal peril with the emotional toolkit of a part-time retail worker. “So you’re, like—insane. Cool, cool. That’s cool.”
Move! Jump!
His spider-sense shrieked, and the pavement beneath him crumpled inward, collapsing into a swirling mini-singularity where his feet had just been. Peter launched himself backward, hit a street light, ricocheted off it, and skidded across the asphalt until his knees stung through the suit.
A smoking crater yawned where he’d stood.
His chest heaved. His lenses widened.
“Uh, rude.” He panted, dusting off his shoulders, lenses glaring at the guy for dramatic effect.
“You’re earlier than expected,” the man added, head tilting in a perfectly wrong angle, still making zero sense. He drifted a step closer, not nearly enough distance between them now. “Fresh. Untouched by interference yet. You do not know of me.”
“Right—introductions! Love those.” Peter snapped his fingers, still hanging upside down from the traffic light he’d instinctively clung to. “You obviously already know me. So, care to share your name with the class?”
The man’s smile stretched, pleased in a way no smile had the right to be.
“I’ve had many names across many worlds,” he said, voice vibrating like a plucked wire in the walls of the atmosphere. A nearby streetlamp folded inward as he spoke, metal screeching like it was trying to crawl away.
“But here, they called me Dr. Veyl.”
His gaze sharpened—razor-thin, unblinking—and pinned Peter like a specimen slide.
“And you, little spider, you’ve delayed my work long enough.”
Spider-Man pointed at himself, glancing down like maybe he’d find a “Hi, I’m the Problem” sticker on his chest.
“Me? Personally?”
Veyl didn’t blink, didn’t breathe, but it was clear the question incensed him. “Yes,” he hissed, adamant and crazed. “You. And every version of you.”
Absolutely not. Peter would like a refund, a manager, and possibly a cosmic HR representative.
He opened his mouth, but the ground buckled again, forced into a violent shockwave that nearly clipped him off the surface he was still clutched tightly on. Peter flipped backward and landed on a sideways bus, panting, eyeing escape routes for fleeing civilians.
“I think it’s innocent till proven guilty, Doctor!” he called, immediately firing webbing to catch a falling street sign before it pancaked a woman crawling for cover. “Y’know, Hippocratic oath? Do no harm? Maybe ring a bell?”
Veyl’s smile coiled tighter, almost predatory—too wide, too sharp, stretching like it wanted to split his face in half.
“Your humor,” he murmured, “is always wasted on terror.”
A shard of warped concrete snapped into existence beside Peter’s head, giving him only seconds to duck on sheer instinct.
Crack!—It embedded itself into the brick wall behind him like a spear.
Peter coughed, because the alternative was scream-laughing and adding “unhinged” to his growing reputation.
“Yeah, well,” he called, flipping backward as a sliver of rebar sliced the air where his legs had been, “I know a doctor, actually—”
He shot a webline to yank a falling fire escape out of a family’s path—
“—and he would be very unimpressed—”
Wham! A lamppost bent into a U-shape and whipped toward him like a metal snake. Peter somersaulted over it, boots brushing the top of the arc.
“—with how you’re practicing medicine right now!”
Veyl didn’t blink, uninterested in Peter’s protests, and continued on his path of trying to destroy everything in sight.
Three manhole covers ripped from the street, spinning like buzzsaws.
“I'd give you zero stars,” Peter yelped, cartwheeling between two of them as the third sailed past his ear with a vicious shink. “Possibly jail! Definitely should've already lost your license!”
He flicked his fingers. On cue, a fire hydrant imploded, tearing inward as though crushed by invisible jaws, then shot toward Peter like a cannonball.
Peter webbed it mid-air, diverted it over a parked taxi, and shouted:
“Also—throwing government property is very illegal, in case you care about that sort of thing!”
He knew Veyl did not.
The man’s expression remained serenely delighted, as if Peter were the punchline to a joke no one else understood.
Behind him, another portal cracked open like a glowing wound. The supposed Doctor stepped closer, voice soft and ruinous.
“You make this entertaining,” he murmured, as the world twisted in on itself. “But entertainment never saves you.”
Space shivered as both of his hands raised, arcing down in a fluid motion that promised nothing short of annihilation.
A portal rippled into existence behind Peter, and he dove sideways just in time—rolling to his feet and webbing a young couple away from a collapsing billboard.
Peter shot a webline to a fire escape, launching himself upward. “Okay, this feels personal, man! Can we—”
Veyl appeared above him, reality bending like a bad TV signal.
“—talk about your boundaries?
Eyes flashing with something dark, Peter could only decode it as recognition, annoyance, and joy all braided into one wrong emotion.
The man extended his hands, and the portals around him tightened, crackling with vicious energy that made the wind surge rapidly in the tiny, covered space of the intersection.
It was peculiar, the way this guy moved. Peter was already reeling from the headache of nonsense this person was spewing, but the speed and familiarity of his movements made it ten times worse.
He dodged his webbing before Peter fired it.
He flipped away from blows as though he’d memorized them.
He countered swings like he’d sparred with Spider-Man for years.
Peter backed up onto a flipped bus, panting. “Alright. One honest question. Why do you move like you’ve fought me before? A lot?”
Veyl tilted his head, uncanny, deranged in a way that reminded Peter of someone who has lost all their humanity intentionally.
“I have fought you,” Veyl whispered. “Again and again. Across worlds, across possibilities.”
His smile widened, carved too deep, stretching like someone had drawn it on with a box cutter.
“And every time, Peter,” Veyl whispered, savoring the name like a victory he’d already won, “I killed you.”
Peter’s stomach didn’t just drop—it evacuated, plummeting somewhere around Times Square and leaving the rest of him hollow.
His vision stuttered like a buffering video, and it took him a full, horrified heartbeat to register the worst part:
He was still wearing his mask.
His mask.
His mask.
He felt the blood drain from his face, a cold, buzzing numbness crawling beneath his skin.
No one knew him, no one remembered him, that was literally the whole point.
That was the sacrifice. That was the deal he’d made with the universe.
MJ didn’t know him, Ned didn’t remember him, Doctor Strange had tied reality in a neat little bow specifically so this could never, ever happen again.
And yet—
Veyl didn’t just know Spider-Man.
He knew Peter Parker.
A new portal tore open behind him, a jagged maw of white-hot light, splitting the air with a sound like metal being peeled apart.
Peter barely had time to flinch before heat spiraled up his spine.
The blast forming in Veyl’s hands was coming from the right, bright and lethal and aimed directly at him.
Logic said right.
Sight said right.
Everything said right.
But the supernatural ability he was somehow graced with very decidedly deemed that to be false.
LEFT. MOVE LEFT.
LEFT LEFT LEFT LEFT—
“What—?” Peter choked, body teetering, panic buzzing under his skin like electricity. “But the hit is coming from—whatever, fine!”
He abandoned logic, trusted the instinct that never lied, and jumped left—
—and the attack passed straight through an illusion, a trap meant to shove him into oblivion.
Instead, Peter plummeted into the rift, Dr. Veyl’s furious shouting followed him into the void he was hurtling through.
The world went white.