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Breathe.
That's what he said to her that day.
Kneeling on the glass-strewn ground, chasing the vestiges of warmth as it slowly dissipated from the unmoving ivory husk in his arms, cradling her as if she was his everything—and she was. All the galaxies the universe could ever hold, his sun and moon in the nucleus of his heart—a scarred, imperfect, puny thing that could never hold a wisp of smoke to the monument of beauty and intelligence and good that was her.
She was his everything, and maybe that's why he begged, why he screamed and cried and beat against the window of destiny, as though if he hit just right, then it might shatter, because all Peter ever wanted was to stand over her and let his bloody back shield her from the raining shards.
He did bleed, and she did, too, and his lungs contracted for dust-pervaded air, and none of it mattered after all, because the sky was bright on the day of her funeral and she wasn't there to see it. Because the sky did not mean a thing, not to him, not when he would drag himself along through the rocky ground for a single flash of blonde hair. Not when he would give his all to switch places, to take his rightful home in a soil-covered coffin and accept flowers as the only grace he would ever deserve.
The sky did not mean a thing to him, but it meant the world to her. And maybe that's why he kept going, why he did not sever all his webs and take the final plunge—because he wanted to be with her more than he wanted to live, and he knew that he would not be wanted in death, either. She was dead and she died for nothing, and so would he, and she asked him to hold on to hope, and he would burn alive before he let go of her final wish.
He should have stopped breathing that day.
He inhaled spikes instead.
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Breathe.
That's what he says to the other, younger him.
Not directly, because who is he to grant air when he himself lives in the soulless vacuum where all good goes to die? But this other Peter—he doesn't deserve this. Doesn't deserve to know what void feels like, what it's like to live nothing and die nothing and be nothing with all your seconds branded by the dark, damp, bitter realisation that everything you ever do will only ever amount to nothing.
So instead of stumbling over a wasted plea, he trips and swerves around the truth and eventually lands right in the crux of it all, anyway, with the words I lost Gwen hanging over his head the way she did, twisted and bent and broken and all his fault.
Tearful eyes that are his own glare at him from below and he speaks, because there's nothing to do, because it's either this or watching as another person falls and doesn't get back up, and maybe Gwen wasn't the only one who fell that night, and he couldn't save her. His words walk him into a history of sorrow and of failure, and still, he carries on.
And when his throat feels like it might collapse on itself, embedding all his regrets into the abraded and rotting epithelium, he continues to speak—to stammer out sentences that never held more than shame in their colour, but might now be of value simply because, for once, they're not for him.
I got rageful, he says, and neglects to mention that all the rage his meritless bones ever held has only ever been directed at one person—the person who long ago lost the will to resist. Who utters confessions in the night, hoping that maybe he can be of value, as well, if only as a lesson on what not to do and a tragedy of human lows.
I just don't want you to end up like me, he admits, and it might be the most honest thing he's ever said out loud.
Because the other him doesn't deserve this.
But he does.
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Breathe.
That's what his mind yells at him as he falls—
Breathe.
As he grabs her—
Breathe.
As he secures a web overhead and lands on the ground, Gwen MJ safe in his arms, alive.
He asks her if she's okay and his voice flies in the fire-painted gust and so does his mind. He asks her if she's okay and does not look, can't look when she replies in the affirmative, and won't admit that it wasn't his powers that let him know exactly what to do. He crumbles, imagines the same high voice that shone through in every dream, and for the first time since spinning cogs and ticking hands, he can allow himself to truly breathe.
She asks him then, if he's okay, and he can't—
Breathe.
He nods, and maybe he's a liar, and maybe he's not, maybe he's just lost, lost the way Gwen is, the way she was and always will be. But he nods, and in that moment he means it, and maybe that means something more than all his papery skin and scars that never healed beyond red and blue lights, and maybe it means nothing—but maybe it doesn't have to.
Behind him, phantom arms snake around his star-kissed neck. It's deliverance and damnation and he thinks, maybe this is where he ends. And he thinks, maybe that's okay.
All he has to do is just—
Breathe.