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The Multiverse is kind, and She does Her best to make right in every world. Stephen Strange does not know this. He cannot see Her. Sometimes, he hears Her breathe, and he startles like an alley cat at the clang of a back door opening and often tries to plug his ears with all manor of fancy spells, unaware that She handed him the earplugs when She dropped him on Sorcerer Supreme’s doorstep and allowed him access to fancy toys like a sling ring and a mirror dimension and that cape he clings to like a toddler’s blanket. She is kind, but Stephen Strange is sometimes the creator of the mess when he claims to be cleaning one up. Closing up dimensional rifts when She had just opened them for him, zipping people in their home universes without even a chance to explore—really, like a timid child slamming the door in the face of every new playmate She tries to introduce him to. She’s sure that if alien interaction hadn’t already been established by the time he got his powers, he would have tried to shut them out too.
But the Multiverse is kind, and She loves him with his timidness and his mistakes, and She always, always, always gives more chances.
And so She will this time too—especially when Stephen’s new chance will save someone else’s life. But Stephen Strange cannot see Her, and often tries to plug his ears when he even hears Her breathe, and so the Multiverse allows a mother to come back from the dead to speak to Stephen Strange on Her behalf.
From Stephen Strange’s perspective, what happens is he has the most horror-striking, bed-wetting, pants-shitting dream he has ever had, in which May Parker sits him down for tea in a dismal apartment that is mostly just a bed and a sink and then spends twenty minutes screaming at him for dragging her nephew into this shit and by god or whomever Stephen better drag Peter back out of it or she will ask that nice god lady for permission to have a corporeal body and beat the shit out of him.
And then Stephen Strange wakes up in a cold sweat in his bedroom at the Sanctum and remembers only auburn hair, crows feet, and someone screaming the name Peter Parker. Stephen wipes at his face with the hem of his shirt and checks his phone. It’s three in the morning and he has six missed texts from Wong.
Beyonce: u feel tht
Strange
ffs I know ur awake
u were sorcerer supreme and u sleep thru one of the biggest cosmic tremors in ur lifetime
im replacing u with a trainee
WHAT THE FK R U GENUINELY SLEEPING THRU THIS?
Strange: im awake now
Why do you text like a toddler
Beyonce: ill stop if u change my contact name in ur phone
Stephen changes into pajamas that are less sweat-soaked and steps into slippers (the snow from Siberia may be gone, but the floors are still freezing) and drags himself downstairs. Wong has a cup of tea and is staring intently at his phone, scrolling through social media and switching back to a text chain intermittently.
“What happened?” Stephen asks.
Wong shrugs, still staring at his phone. “Nothing.”
“Then why did you blow up my phone at three in the morning,” Stephen says, “Something about one of the biggest cosmic tremors in my lifetime?”
Wong nods, but doesn’t look up. “Yes, there was one, but nothing happened. I’m contacting other Sanctums and sorcerers across the world. All of them felt it, but nothing happened. No reports of strange phenomena online either.”
Stephen’s face scrunches and he settles into a chair next to Wong at the kitchen table. “So, a 9.0 earthquake and no buildings fell over?”
“Doesn’t look like even a flower was disturbed,” Wong mumbles. “But cosmic tremors don’t happen for no reason. There’s always a reason.”
“So we have lost the spider,” Stephen chuckles.
“What?”
“The spider—you know, if you can see the spider, at least you know what you’re dealing with, but when you can’t see the spider anymore, that’s when you’ve got a problem.”
Wong looks unimpressed with the allegory.
Stephen throws his hands up, “It’s a meme!”
Wong frowns. “Since when do you look at memes?”
“You know, that kid showed ‘em to me.”
“What kid?”
And Stephen stops. Because that sentence came out like muscle memory, but Stephen can’t remember personally knowing a child in his entire life. He can’t put a face or a name to any kid, past or present. He doesn’t associate with children. They’re a handful, and they’re annoying, and messy, and they cause all kinds of problems and they break shit—Stephen hates kids. When he was a surgeon he would go out of his way not to operate on them.
So what the fuck kind of Freudian slip was that?
“I’ve gotta go,” Stephen says, already heading out of the kitchen towards the front door.
“Where are you going?” Wong asks. Stephen tells him some stupid lie. Wong calls after him, “In your pajamas?”
Stephen stops. He breathes in a way that he might be able to construe as a put-upon sigh if he rolls his eyes effectively enough. He twiddles his fingers and then he’s dressed (the perks of magic! Your blunder of nearly leaving the house in pajamas is no longer about how panicked you were by your ludicrous nightmare! With magic as an excuse it becomes your clumsiness and dependence on your abilities! A much more palatable flaw because it is fake).
Wong’s expression is not convinced, but he goes back to his phone and says, “You better be out checking on the general welfare of the local human race. This is your blunder we’re dealing with the aftermath of.”
“My blunder!?” Stephen asks, stopping again and whirling around back to the entryway of the kitchen. He’s not that forgetful. If he fucked up big enough to cause cosmic tremors being felt globally, he would certainly remember it at least. But he doesn’t remember any such thing. And from Wong’s expression, neither does he. Another Freudian slip.
Wong puts his phone fully down, opens his mouth, and Stephen waves a hand to stop him in his tracks. And then Stephen leaves the Sanctum to get some fresh air so his brain is at maximum capacity to figure this shit out.
Spiderman swings overhead as he steps outside, and Stephen gives him a courtesy wave. No matter what Jonah J Whatever-His-Name-Is says, Spiderman does some good work. He keeps the little guys at bay so the Avengers and the Sorcerers can focus on real threats. Spiderman can handle the bank robberies while Stephen handles dimensional tears from stupid kids in over their heads about college applications.
No, see, that’s the thing. Stephen doesn’t know any kids! Much less any kids applying to college! Why does his brain have these little inside jokes prepped for him when Stephen himself doesn’t understand the punchline!
This has something to do with Peter Parker, Stephen is sure of it. Whoever that lady was in his dream, it’s no coincidence she was there at the exact same time as a cosmic tremor, which means this is all, probably, Peter Parker’s fault. Whoever that is.
Time to find Peter Parker.
Meanwhile, Tony Stark wakes up from a terrifying dream where he was dead and finds his wife sleeping in next to him. It’s nearing 9am and after a nightmare like that, there’s nothing for it better than a cup of decaf coffee (Pepper hasn’t let him have caffeine in years, and he doesn’t try to sneak it because she’s like a goddamn bloodhound and can smell it on him up to three hours later. He did an experiment to check).
He wanders to the kitchen, pours himself a cup. That picture of him and Parker is gone from the shelf. Sometimes Morgan takes it and pretends to have tea parties with him—Pepper told her once that the picture was of “someone your daddy misses very much” and so Morgan got it in her head that if she entreated the picture with enough tempting plastic snacks, he might pop out of the frame. Sweet sentiment, but Tony has a hard time watching her play that game. Or, at least, he did before everyone got unsnapped.
That dream had been gnarly. The coffee isn’t helping. Tony sits at the counter and tries to recount how things had actually gone in that final battle with Thanos. Darkest hour. Heroes return. He grabbed the gauntlet. Snapped. Right, that’s how it went. How is he not dead then? Even Big Boy Bruce in all his green glory got scars to rival a burn victim. Tony, impressive as he may be, is just some guy. Even if the suit took a bunch of damage, he should still be dead or close to it.
Something feels off.
Morgan wanders into the kitchen dragging her stuffed dinosaur. She looks at Tony. Stops walking. Stares directly into his soul (Tony returns the stare because sometimes toddlers just Do That and you have to be cool with it or they develop mental illness or something. He read a paper or six about it). When she has stared sufficiently long enough she sprints up to him and wraps her arms around his legs and screeches, “Daddy, you’re back!” She starts jumping up and down while holding his legs and chanting, “You’re back, you’re back! I knew Mommy was lying!”
On the scale of one to The Exorcist, this isn’t so bad, but it’s definitely unnerving when Tony hasn’t gone anywhere.
He picks Morgan up. “What are you talking about, monkey?”
She squirms in his lap to pat the sides of his face while she explains, “You took your Iron Man out to play and then we put you in a box for a nap and Mommy said you weren’t gonna wake up, but I knew she was teasing.”
Pepper is not the teasing type, as far as parenting, and this is Tony’s first clue. The second clue comes several seconds later when he realizes his daughter described his funeral. Which Tony does not remember being a part of. Probably because he was dead.
Either he and his daughter had an uncannily similar nightmare, or Tony needs to start making phone calls.
He debates telling Pepper. No. If he’s died recently then she’s been stressed as hell grieving and parenting singly. The fact that he and Morgan both remember means the time has passed and his death was retconned somehow, but that means Pepper sleeping in isn’t a fluke, it’s because she’s exhausted. He’ll let her sleep and then tell her what he’s found after he’s found it. Spare her the gory details of uncertainty. Apparently, he’s died on her, and that’s already too much stress to put her through.
Instead, he shoots her a text saying he’s taking Morgan out to play and leaves a note saying the same thing on the kitchen counter in case she’s having one of those “Mindful Mornings” she’s been trying to get him into (with moderate success). Then he and Morgan put on clothes (she artfully selects a princess dress that’s supposed to be a Halloween costume) and get in the car.
He calls Cap first.
Steve Rogers wakes up with an achey feeling in his chest. He’s getting a phone call, and he answers it before looking at the caller ID.
“Hey, Capsicle, is this phone call a surprise to you?”
Steve pulls the phone away from his face, checks the time, and then tells Tony, “No, why?” It’s nine in the morning. Steve is confused as to how he managed to sleep past his alarm, but Tony Stark has never really been a class act for predictability, so the phone call is not surprising. He’d been having the weirdest dream though. He was back with Peggy, lived a whole life with her. She had died and he was left alone, with nobody else because everyone else was either half his age or dead. Tony and Nat and Vision were all among the latter.
Tony says, “According to my five-year-old, I’ve been dead for a year.”
“Bad dream?” Steve replies, despite the fact that there’s no way anyone calls Steve Rogers (or Captain America, for that matter) for a toddler’s nightmare.
“Nope. I also remember dying.”
Steve sits up. “If you want to get someone moving, maybe start with that next time.”
“Noted. Headed to you, assuming you still live at the compound. Wake the rest of the gang up, will you? No, honey, we don’t have time for McDonalds. So do I. You are definitely my kid. Rogers, you there?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t bother with breakfast. I’m doordashing McDonalds.”
And then Tony hangs up.
So Steve throws on his dayclothes and heads out to the main hallway of the Avengers compound dormitories, knocking on doors as he goes. By the time he gets to the kitchen, he’s followed by a sleepy crowd of Carol, Bruce, Bucky, and Sam, plus Vision who is as sleepy as someone who doesn’t sleep gets, and Nat, who is not even a little asleep and is actually more pacing than walking.
Bucky reaches the kitchen first, only because Vision is doing that weird thing where he calls someone’s phone in his head and Nat is yelling at Barton on the phone.
He sits heavily at a barstool, rubbing his head. Steve asks, “What’s wrong?” because that posture means something is.
Bucky shrugs. “Nothing. Just,” he trails off, waving a hand. When Steve sits next to him at the counter, he admits, “Whenever HYDRA would wipe me, I’d get this weird tingle in my head for a few days. Felt like having your shoes on the wrong feet. Just feels like that today.” Steve must pull a face, because Bucky shrugs and chuckles and says, “Sorry, a lot to drop before breakfast. It’s just a PTSD thing. It’ll wear off.”
Steve does not immediately tell him that he probably was mind-wiped (along with, apparently, everyone except Tony Stark’s five-year-old), only because Nat storms into the kitchen and plants both hands on the counter.
“Good morning. I died last night,” she says sharply, “for six years.”
And Bucky blinks at her in a way appropriate for hearing that first thing in the morning (probably the same way Steve blinked into the phone receiver when he woke up), but Steve nods. “It’s going around. Vision too probably.”
“This is true,” Vision says, scaring the shit out of everyone present by phasing through a wall. “I just got off the phone with Wanda. She doesn’t seem to remember I died, but she can’t remember why she started teaching at the Westchester School for Gifted Youngsters either.”
“I just apologized to Clint for killing myself in front of him and he asked if I’d hit my head lately!”
“Killing yourself—what!?” Sam rubs his eyes and tries to get a grasp of the shitstorm he’s wandered into.
Nat is still going, “Yeah, I did hit my head, when I fell to my death to get you assholes the soul stone! Six! Years! Ago!”
Bruce and Carol meander in as well. “Who’s killing themselves?” Carol asks.
Nat looks at Carol. “Since when do you live here!?”
“Huh? Since Fury convinced me to stay at the funeral.”
“Who’s funeral?” Natasha demands.
Carol opens her mouth to answer. Shuts it. Scratches her mullet. Says, “You know, I’m really not sure.”
Bruce looks nervous. “You know, that’s usually not a great sign. Not being able to remember a funeral. Did we know someone who died recently?”
“Me!” Natasha cries. “Six years ago!”
“I also died.”
“So did Tony, apparently,” Steve adds. “He’s headed here with his daughter to talk it out.”
The security system alerts them that Tony Stark and guest have entered the premises. Within a minute, Tony and a very chipper Morgan are greeting everyone and saying, “Until we get this figured out, if Pepper asks, it’s Bruce’s birthday.”
“Dad doesn’t wanna stress Mommy out.”
“Correct. You’re mother has had quite enough of me almost dying, I think she might divorce me if I did die. Hello everyone—oh god, Natasha Romanov you are… alive?”
“I am. Which is news to me.”
“I am alive as well.”
“Vision is alive too? My son?”
“Please, don’t call him that,” Sam says. “This whole situation is already weird enough.”
Tony ignores him to check his phone (an ungodly amount of McDonalds has arrived at the compound), then clap his hands together and say, “Bruce. With me. We’re grabbing the breakfast. Bucky, I leave you in charge of my child.”
“Why me?”
“Because you feel bad enough about killing my parents that you will let her ride on your shoulders.”
Meanwhile MJ and Ned are sitting together in physics with their phones out. It’s a free study period (the teacher peed his pants. It’s a long story), so there is nobody to stop them from doing this out in the open or talking freely about it.
“All of last week is normal for me,” Ned says. “I definitely remember going to all of these places.”
MJ nods, corroborating. They are searching through their phone’s location history to see if they can find a missing link. They have agreed that something is missing, and it’s chunks of time. This started because last week, Ned’s grandma told him no more sneaking out, and he asked her when he had sneaked out ever, and she said he snuck out all the time, and Ned doesn’t talk back to his grandma but he sat with that and chewed on it because he really hadn’t ever snuck out. Who would he sneak out with? MJ is his first friend pretty much ever, and he only met her this year, and he’s not crazy enough to sneak out with a girl.
So after like a week of chewing on it and thinking, really thinking, he called MJ in for backup. She confirmed that her parents kept accusing her of shit too. Sneaking out. Having a boyfriend (though they immediately recanted that, saying they must have misremembered, but why would they misremember something that never happened). Getting into dangerous situations. MJ tried to ask them about that, what dangerous situations has she gotten into, but they didn’t have an answer for that either.
So yesterday they compared notes, and all night they kept themselves up thinking about that missing gap in conversations, in their parents expectations, in their lives, it felt like. Ned remembers building Legos, but he doesn’t have any of the sets he remembers building. MJ remembers looking at flowers on her windowsill in her room, but doesn’t remember who got them for her.
And today they realized that it has to have something to do with that morning they woke up on Liberty Island with no clue how or why they were there. When they realized it, it felt surreal. How could they have forgotten that morning? But the whole thing is so fuzzy in their heads, they would suspect drugs if either of them were the type to ever, ever, in their lives do drugs.
So now, in physics free study period, they are poring over their phone’s location history, trying to find locations they don’t remember going to, and figure out how they got to Liberty Island that morning.
“Okay, so this is weird,” MJ says, pointing to her screen. Ned leans over. One location ping at 177A Bleaker Street. They were apparently there for most of the day. “You remember this?”
Ned shakes his head. “Nuh-uh. What even is that building?” He looks it up. It’s owned by some weird culty group called Masters of the Mystic Arts. Not much info about them online.
“Let’s go see what they’re about.”
“And get kidnapped into a cult?” Ned retorts. “Nuh-uh, not me. No brainwashing, please and thank you.”
“Ned,” MJ says, “they might have already brainwashed us. Let’s at least see if we can find anything about them.” This is very convincing because she and Ned are both 17 with undue amounts of confidence in their abilities to escape a hypothetical fight with a cult.
So, after school they tell their respective parents that they are going to study at the café and they take the metro to 177A Bleaker Street and they knock on the door and they wait. And they wait.
And eventually Dr. Strange answers the door looking more than a little annoyed. But they recognize him and spend a minute tripping over themselves on introductions and placations and, “We’re uh, um… MJ?”
“We were here ten days ago,” she says, because this guy is a literal superhero, if anyone is safe to tell, it’s this guy, “but we don’t remember it. Did we talk to you?”
Dr. Strange appraises them slowly. “No,” he finally answers. And then, carefully, “Do you know a Peter Parker?”
“Peter Parker?” Ned echoes, thinking.
But MJ remembers, “Oh, yeah. He’s uh, he comes through the café I work at sometimes.”
And Dr. Strange swings the door wide open and invites them in by walking off and gesturing for them to follow. They go up some stairs and down the hall the door shuts itself, which they try to be cool about, and they sit down in a little study and Dr. Strange hands them each a can of coke. Ned takes a sip. It refills. They try to be cool about that too.
“Tell me what you know about Peter Parker.”
“Why?” MJ asks. Ned elbows her. She shrugs. She’s not a narc, and this guy’s a regular. She wouldn’t sell him out to the first caped crusader that asks.
Dr. Strange does not care at all, today, about telling two teenagers this much. “There was a cosmic tremor last night powerful enough to be felt globally, but nothing happened.”
“So?” Ned asks, looking both inattentive and intrigued.
“So, I woke up this morning and could only remember the name Peter Parker, but when I go looking there’s nobody by that name at all.” He is leaving out the gaps in his memory and his conversations with Wong, because that might worry teenagers, and the last thing he needs is worried teenagers. Spouting nonsense on social media. Or something.
“He just comes in and orders coffee,” MJ says.
“And stares at us sometimes,” Ned adds. “He’s never there for longer than, like, ten minutes.”
“He’s been looking a little rough lately,” MJ says. “I think he sprained his ankle or something.”
“And he had a black eye last time, remember? I told him about my grandmas bruise cure.”
“Right, yeah. I think he might be broke, actually. He only gets the cheapest thing on the menu. And he pays in exact change like an old man—no offense.”
Dr. Strange processes for a moment that she meant him. Bigger fish. “None taken,” he bites out, and vows to go get his grays taken care of. Fuck aging gracefully or whatever Wong calls it. He is not going to be called an old man by some high schooler. Stephen takes a breath. Bigger fish. Bigger fish.
After thinking for a moment, he says, “Do you know where he lives?”
Ned laughs. “Why would we know that.”
It was a long shot. “Do you know anywhere else he hangs out? Parks? Libraries? Other cafes?”
They both shake their heads.
Dr. Strange thinks for a moment. “I would like to see where you work.”
“Are you gonna sting op him?” Ned asks, looking both excited and nervous.
“Ye—no. No. I’m not a cop.” Stephen says, “I can’t arrest him, even if I wanted to. Which I don’t, for the record. I think.” He’s getting skeptical looks from the teenagers. What kind of ex-sorcerer supreme can’t even inspire confidence in two teenagers? “I just want to talk to him.”
He does, in the end, manage to convince them to let him tag along to MJ’s shift that evening. They give him an address and tell him to be there 4-7. It’s a short shift, and in exchange for their help they want to be there for the whole thing, so if Stephen takes Peter Parker anywhere else, they get to come even if Stephen has to use magical help to get that to happen. He agrees because there are no records, written or digital, anywhere at all related to anyone named Peter Parker, and so this is the only lead he has.
Meanwhile, the Avengers are sitting around the lounge in the compound trying to figure out why some people came back from the dead, and why nobody else seems to remember them being dead at all. Clint and Wanda were called in from home and work, respectively, because apparently Natasha and Vision were dead, and their presence seemed pertinent.
“Alright, Bruce, we spend time together, when’s the last time you saw me?” Tony asks.
Bruce pulls a face. “Yeesh, uh. Well.” He thinks. He thinks harder. He’s a pretty intelligent green giant, so it shouldn’t be so hard to remember. “Um…”
“Alright, don’t hurt yourself, big guy. Barton, Ms. Romanov seems to know you and your brood pretty well, when was the last time she was over?”
Clint opens his mouth confidently, but can’t supply an answer. He shrugs.
“And Wanda, when’s the last time you and Vision went on a date?”
Wanda seems to have bigger gaps than others. She remembers being married to Vis. Having twins. Watching them grow up. Having it all stripped from her. She also remembers talking to Clint next to a lake at a funeral. She remembers bringing Thanos to his knees for killing Vis. Except Vis never died? Or he did die? When did she start teaching at the school? She shakes her head.
“So, nobody thinks it’s strange we’re alive, but they also don’t have any memories to mask when we were gone,” Vision concludes.
“But who would do this?” Sam asks.
“I’m more worried about why,” Natasha mutters. “And what the ramifications are.”
Steve asks, “What do you mean?”
“I died to get you guys the soul stone,” Natasha reminds him. “If I never died, did we get the soul stone? If we did, then how am I back? That red skull guy was pretty specific about it being a one-way street. If we didn’t, then how did we beat Thanos?”
Everyone looks at each other. Tony asks, “Does anyone else remember us beating Thanos?” He remembers, because he died doing it. He remembers Pepper holding him in her arms and telling him to rest. He remembers crying, because Morgan was going to grow up without a father. He remembers Parker crying—oh, shit, has that kid still been on a Stark internship this whole time?
“Hey, anyone remember what happened to the kid?”
Bucky reminds him, “She’s still in the other room playing with the plastic version of my arm.”
No. Tony knows where Morgan is. The other kid. “Peter Parker. Who’s got eyes on Spider-Man?”
“Why would we keep tabs on Spider-Man?” Sam asks.
“We have a file on him,” Clint offers, but Clint seems to know where this is headed. “And surveillance keeps tabs, like any other enhanced.”
“He just does local stuff,” Steve says.
Natasha raises her eyebrows at him. “Does ‘local stuff’ include kicking your ass in the parking lot of a foreign airport?”
The look Steve gives her indicates that, no, his definition did not include that.
Tony gets nervous. “Raise your hand if you remember Peter Parker.”
Natasha and Vision raise their hands. Everyone else looks at him like he’s insane.
“What was so special about this kid?” Bruce asks.
“Spider venom. Weird physiology. Homemade superhero,” Tony answers hurriedly. “He had an internship with me. So I could kinda, yanno, teach him the ropes.”
“A protégé?” Steve distills. “You wanna check on him real quick?”
Tony is already flipping through his phone. So is Natasha. And Vision is doing something on the internet in his head.
And Clint’s trying to be comforting, “His memory probably got wiped too, if all ours did. He must think the internship ended a year ago after you died.”
Nodding absently, Tony scrolls and scrolls. His phone, which has not been updated since his death, thank god, has an auto-notification for everyone in his life. The tracker chip in Morgan’s left shoes, the ring he got Pepper (she knows there’s a tracker, and actually suggested the ring format), and any Spider-Man suits that Tony had any hand in. Tony knows Peter wouldn’t go anywhere without a suit, but there’s no activity in the tracker app for those suits since a few months after Tony’s death. Why would he stop using them then? Did he make himself a new suit? How? Why? A pit starts to grow in Tony’s stomach.
Natasha’s face is doing that thing that means something is wrong. “Yeah, Tony, I can’t find the kid anywhere online.”
“Nor I,” Vision adds. “I’ve begun searching government databases for his legal records.”
“He has family, right?” Carol asks.
“An aunt. May Parker.”
Bruce settles his chin on his fist. “Wait, if you had an internship with this kid before you died, I should remember that, right? I was around all the time.”
“You don’t!?” Tony cries. “You met him! He helped you with some organic chemistry experiment! You took blood samples and studied them for a month!”
Vision pipes in, “I’m not sure that this is relevant, but May Parker died ten days ago.”
“You think that’s connected?” Steve asks.
Bucky answers, “Does a one-legged duck swim in a circle?”
Neither Clint nor Tony get to make a joke about one-legged ducks and one-armed super soldier retirees because Morgan comes waddling in with Bucky’s plastic (and designated least dangerous) arm pretzeled into a heart shape. Bucky cringes thinking about an arm attached to his body being bent like that, but Tony accepts it when she hands it to him and studiously admires her handiwork. After several seconds of disturbed quiet, Tony hands the arm to Steve on his left, who passes it left again to Bucky, and then hefts Morgan into his lap.
“You wanna go on another field trip?”
She seems torn between excitement and skepticism. “Another?”
“Yep.” Without ceremony, he stands, and the rest of the Avengers start to follow. “We’re going to play Where’s Waldo.” He turns back. “Vision, you remember the kid and have a brain hardwired into the internet—mind scanning whatever visual feeds you can get your hands on for Parker?”
Vision agrees, glad to have a task to help him cope with the discomfiting experience of reanimation (animation was discomfiting the first time. Doing it again feels excessive). Wanda links their arms so she can walk him around with the group as he searches.
“Why are you all following me?” Tony asks. “My car fits four comfortably. I count eleven.”
There’s some bickering. For practicality purposes they either have to be on a group call or in the same vehicle, and Pepper has expressly forbid being on the phone in the car, so they pare the group down to the people who remember who Peter Parker is, Tony, Natasha, and Vision, plus Morgan (not leaving her recently revived father’s side for anything), Wanda (Vision’s guide-girlfriend at the moment), and Steve (feels bad about forgetting Peter, who he has picked up is a child, an enhanced, and possibly an orphan now). They take a compound car, which is much roomier than the car Tony brought, and drive toward where Tony remembers Peter living last time he checked.
They don’t even make it halfway there before Vision tells them to change direction and head toward 177A Bleaker Street.
Meanwhile, at 4:03 pm, Stephen Strange enters Peter Pan Donut & Pastry Shop in civilian clothes and orders a latte and a croissant and sits at a table in the corner and waits. Spider-Man swings by at one point, patrolling probably, around 4:30 or so, and Stephen watches him idly before returning to scrolling through his phone like any other civilian. Dr. Strange is known, but not so well known as to alert any of the other coffee-enjoyers to his presence when he’s not wearing a cape and the whole wizard getup. Ned, at his usual spot at the counter chatting with MJ between customers, keeps glancing at him nervously.
There’s not a lot to look at on his phone. Tony Stark recently released a line of women’s self-defense tools marketed at elementary schoolers. Bulletproof backpacks, kiddie-safe tasers (although how kiddie-safe can a taser be? Apparently, Stark Tech. has figured it out). Spider-Man is clocked stopping an attempted sexual assault around 5:00 pm on Twitter. Nothing else very noteworthy.
Neither MJ or Ned have given Stephen a signal to indicate that a particular patron is Peter Parker, and Stephen is starting to wonder if he’s been duped.
Then, around 5:30, as MJ is starting to set up for close, a teenager hobbles in with, as described, a black eye and a probably-sprained ankle. He’s got a little blood in his hair, but MJ and Ned miss that, which is probably good for their fragile, teenager mental health, since they have never been surgeons and might freak out at the sight of blood in someone’s hair. Stephen is totally cool about it though. He definitely isn’t wildly worried in ways he isn’t sure how to process (because Aunt May’s ghost is clinging to him and oozing her worry all over him).
MJ gives Ned and look, and Ned looks at Stephen and gives him a subtle thumbs-up below the counter to signal, as if it might be unclear, that this is Peter Parker. So Stephen stands up and tries to be super cool about approaching him while on his phone, not looking up, and then he “accidentally” bumps into Peter once he has his (true to MJ’s word, cheapest on the menu coffee and spills it. The plan was to spill it on Peter’s clothes and then offer to walk him to a laundromat or let him borrow a sweater or something, but the kid has weird-fast reflexes so the cup drops a little, spills a bit on the floor, and then the kid catches it with his other hand.
“God, sorry about that,” Stephen says, as if he is at all good at acting, “here, let me buy you another cup,” as if any significant amount was spilled.
And Peter Parker stops dead-still. Slowly, like a deer in the headlights more focused on feeling the terror than not being hit by a car, he looks up at Stephen. “You shouldn’t--
he stammers, “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Why not?” Stephen asks. Definitely the right guy. This kid is suspicious as fuck. Stephen has encountered criminals less suspicious. Is Peter Parker a criminal? Did he wipe Stephen’s mind? No, because everyone else has missing memories too—did Peter Parker wipe all of New York’s mind?
And Peter clams up. Grips his coffee close in his bloody knuckles and says, “Oh, um, my bad. I, uh, I thought you were someone else! Yeah, I know a guy. It’s a long story. Sorry. Sorry about that.” He’s backing out as he says it, and he almost gets out the door but Stephen has his wrists bound in the sorcery equivalent of a straight jacket instantly.
MJ and Ned are both yelling at him in the same second.
“Hey, that’s fucked up!”
“You said you just wanted to talk!”
And this Peter Parker kid looks like he wants to cry—his eyes are watering like he actually might let the waterworks loose—but he, and Stephen nearly shits himself when it happens, breaks out of the sorcerous bindings with a grunt and a push and practically trips out the door.
Stephen gives chase. Ned and MJ, incensed that Stephen would go after their beloved cryptid, chase Stephen. The kid is fast (even on a probably-sprained ankle), and Stephen is old (even if he is aging gracefully), so there’s no way he can keep up. He calls in the cape. The cape swoops down like a bird of prey and suspends the kid in the air like a squirrel from its talons, so he’s stuck.
As Stephen gets closer, the kid is also fully crying. This is not great for Dr. Strange’s PR. He portals the kid and the cape to the Sanctum. Ned and MJ can come too, so they don’t report him for kidnapping.
They are all portalled into chairs in a study in the Sanctum. Because Stephen would like to avoid anyone running away again, they also all have drinks. Ned and MJ have coke again, and Peter has a black coffee, because Stephen feels kind of bad for interrupting the guy’s coffee break with all this, even if he is suspicious.
Stephen, still in his casual sweats and now with a steaming mug of tea, sits in the only chair left in the room. Ned and MJ are making all sorts of pointed eye contact, with each other, with Peter Parker, with Stephen. Peter Parker looks like a drowned kitten, big wet eyes and all. “I just want to talk,” he tells everyone. “Please do not run away, so that we can talk.”
He gets three very nervous nods.
“Great,” he says. “First things first, let me see that head wound.” He sets down his tea and leans toward Peter Parker.
“Huh?” Peter tries to lean away. “No, I’m fine, Mr. Dr. Strange, really.”
When he doesn’t lean away, MJ and Ned both stand up, and Stephen gets the hint and backs away.
“I’m a real doctor, you know,” he tells them. “I’m not going to hit him or something.” He looks back to Peter. “I want to make sure you’re not concussed. This conversation is going to require some mental acrobatics you might not be capable of normally, much less concussed.”
Peter giggles at that. Weird little unhinged giggle. Stephen does not like that, but Peter does afterwards lean his head forward for inspection, and Ned and MJ both sit back down.
There’s no major swelling on the cranium. The blood seems to be coming from a scabbed-over cut on Peter’s forehead, just under his hairline. “No concussion, but you might want to throw some hydrogen peroxide on that sometime aoon.”
Peter seems bewildered. It takes him a second to answer. “Uh, yes, sir. I will.”
“Eugh, don’t call me ‘sir.’ It’s weird.” Peter Parker’s eyes well with tears again, which Stephen does not want to deal with, so he moves right along. “Alright, Peter Parker, who are you?”
“What?”
“I know you have some kind of connection to all the superhero stuff,” Stephen tells him, and Ned and MJ are trying so hard to remain cool about it, “so let’s hear it.”
Peter squirms in his seat and clutches his coffee a little closer. “I don’t think I’m allowed to tell you that.”
“Says who?”
He squirms more. “I don’t think I’m allowed to tell you that either.”
Stephen squints at him. He is being incredibly patient, in his own opinion, by not shaking the answers out of this guy. “Are you being threatened?” he asks, because with so many little injuries something like that isn’t out of the question.
Peter says, “No! No, I’m fine.”
Ned says, “You don’t look fine,” which MJ corroborates with a pointed look that brings Peter closer to that teetering edge of tears.
“Who do you live with?” Stephen asks.
“I live alone,” Peter squeaks. He looks up at Stephen suddenly. “Am I in trouble? Did I do something wrong, because if not you’re, uh,” he glances at MJ, which is weird. Why does he think the coffee counter girl is getting him out of this.
She supplies, “Unlawfully detaining him. And us.” It’s even weirder that she goes along with it. That’s weird, right? Even MJ seems confused.
Stephen raises one eyebrow. “Right. Well, I’m investigating a cosmic tremor that happened last night. All I have to go on is your name.”
“You shouldn’t know my name,” Peter says. To his credit, he seems to realize immediately how suspicious it is to say that. He tries to talk over it. “I just mean, um, I’m nobody. Nobody knows my name. I’m a pretty unremarkable guy, you know. You’re the ex-sorcerer supreme! You keep the whole multiverse in line. I’m just some guy.”
And there it is. “The sorcerer supreme isn’t public knowledge,” Stephen tells him, and the poor kid blanches like a goddamn sheet. “So tell me again, who says you aren’t allowed to talk to me?”
Peter shrinks in his chair, coffee shaking in his hands. This kid has intel he shouldn’t. That means someone gave it to him. That means, more likely than not, he’s a spy. Stephen tries not to feel to bad about intimidating him.
Peter squeaks, “You did.”
The tense air of the room cracks. “No, I didn’t.”
Peter nods. “On Liberty Island. There was a, um, an issue? It was my fault, and you said this would fix it.”
“Said what would fix it?” Stephen asks. His brain is trying to build the picture from half the puzzle pieces, and it’s taking shape, but not fast enough. The front doorbell rings. Stephen pulls out the app on his phone for the camera and sees, of all people, the Avengers (or, a few of them), on his doorstep. He stands, says, “I’ll be right back.”
As he shuts (and magically seals) the door behind him, he hears MJ say, “Do we know you?” and decides that he can interrogate all three of them on that when he gets back.
Downstairs, he opens the door to Natasha Romanov, Steve Rogers, and Tony Stark (plus his child, being carried in a princess dress). “Where’s the international security threat?” he asks.
Tony answers, “We sent her and her boyfriend home to catch up on missed time. Where’s my intern?”
Steve, straightforward as can be expected of the guy who is literally in PSAs, explains, “We’re looking for a Peter Parker, do you know him?”
Oh. This might have explained a lot if it was five minutes ago and Stephen was wondering how Peter Parker was connected to superheroism. This only adds more questions now that Peter Parker has admitted that Stephen himself was the one who told him to keep secrets… from Stephen himself.
Still, he has three avengers on his doorstep, which, plainclothes or not, draws a lot of attention to the Sanctum, so he lets them inside. “He’s upstairs. Is he late for his internship?”
Natasha laughs, which is not a very happy sound at the moment. “No,” she says, “his boss is. A year late.”
The child says, “Daddy was asleep for a long time.”
And now they’re just being cryptic assholes, so Stephen leads them upstairs. It’s only been a minute or so, but there’s already yelling happening inside. Stephen unseals the door, opens it, and finds MJ and Ned and Peter all standing and yelling at each other.
“We do know you, don’t we!” Ned cries.
“No! No, no, you don’t. We have never met! Ever!”
“What about the coffee shop?” MJ prods.
“Except there. We have met there, and nowhere else.”
“And school,” MJ adds.
And Peter says, “And school. But that’s it--!”
“You liar, you don’t go to school with us!” Ned shouts.
“Enough!” Stephen cuts in. Everyone does shut up. And they look over. And they see the avengers (plus child).
And Peter Parker, finally, breaks down crying. Big fat jellybean tears and sniffling and the whole thing. “Mr. Stark? Am I dead?”
Tony seems relieved by this response, as if it at all normal. “No, but your gonna be if you don’t tell me where your custom Stark Industries suit is.”
Peter cries harder. Stephen is not sure if he is witnessing workplace harassment or not. Labor laws still apply to the avengers, right?
“It broke,” Peter sobs. “There was this guy, and he broke it.” He tries to scrub the tears from his eyes. This is actually getting hard to watch. Stephen is tempted to apologize. “I’m sorry,” he says, fully covering his face.
MJ and Ned would probably be jumping to their local cryptid’s defense if they weren’t trying to piece together why on this wonderful green earth some maybe-homeless guy has a Stark Industries anything, much less a suit?
“Should civilians be here for this?” Steve asks.
The child says, “I’m a civilian!” which, while true, is not what Captain America probably meant. A homeschooled five-year-old is much less of a security risk than two highschoolers who don’t seem to have much respect for authority or privacy.
Tony says, “Those two work with him all the time as Spider-Man, what’s the big—”
“Mr. Stark!” Peter shouts, and it is a shout. Loud enough to make the child squirm. Loud enough to startle the room. Peter’s face is ghostly. “You can’t tell them,” he mutters.
The cat is already so far out of the bag.
“You’re spiderman!?” Ned squeals. “Oh my god. That is so cool. I love Spider-Man, can I have your autograph—”
He’s still going, but Tony asks, “What the hell happened here? Rogers, hold my child.” He passes the child to Steve, who holds the kid as if he’s been holding them for decades. To Peter, Tony says, “Alright, lay it on me.”
And Peter, who is still crying for what it’s worth, does.
“You were dead and Happy was helping sometimes and Aunt May and MJ and Ned too, and it was fine. I mean, it wasn’t fine, because you were dead, and everyone was gone, but it was fine. But then Mysterio told everyone I was Spider-Man, and then me and my friends got rejected from MIT because of it and everyone was being super weird, so I asked Dr. Strange to help, but then a bunch of other Spider-Men came from other universes on accident because I messed up the spell and they all brought bad guys with them too. Big bad guys. But they were just sick—and sad—and disabled? Anyway, I tried to help them, and I did help some of them! But they killed Aunt May and then the universe started… breaking?” He looks at Stephen, as if Stephen has any recollection of this. “And Dr. Strange said it would all get fixed if he made it like I didn’t exist, and here he slows, stops, finishes, “so I told him to do it.”
Everyone takes that in for a second. Chews on it. Swallows it. Digests it.
And then they all start yelling at each other.
Starting with Stephen. “You were dead!?”
Then Tony. “You decided to make the whole world forget about my intern!?”
Then Steve. “And didn’t leave any safeguards for an unattended minor!?”
Then Natasha. “Does this kid even know how to rent an apartment!?”
Then MJ. “He definitely does! He’s doing alright for himself!”
Then Ned. “Right, what she said! He’s already having a rough day!”
And they all keep yelling, and Peter keeps crying, and Morgan manages to slip out of Steve’s arms in the chaos and waddle over to Peter and pull on his pant leg and he squats down next to her and she says, “Do you want a French fry?” and when he doesn’t immediately answer, she pulls three out of her pocket and sets them gingerly in his hand and says, “They always make me feel better.”
“Thank you, Morgan,” Peter sniffles.
“You’re welcome. We should go play outside while they yell.”
“I don’t think that would be a great idea. Your dad would be very worried.”
“Worried!” Tony cuts in from above, “Worried doesn’t even cover it! I come back from the dead to find that some wizard is leaving children alone in sketchy apartments after dropping out of high school because he didn’t have the foresight to get some paperwork ready!?”
“Don’t forget the dead aunt,” Ned adds. “Sorry, Peter.”
Stephen retorts, “I had a lot on my mind, probably!”
Natasha sighs. “Tony, let him off, it’s not like he remembers doing it.”
“I still get to be pissed at him,” MJ says, with Ned staunchly backing her. “We were there. We were friends with Peter Spider Parker Man. Why did we have to get wrapped up in the forgetting spell?”
Stephen throws his hands up, “I don’t even remember what happened! Maybe it was important that they forgot!”
“It was!” Peter cuts in, defending Stephen. “If they still remembered I was Spider-Man, then they wouldn’t have gotten into MIT.”
“I could make a phone call and MIT would beg to let them in,” Tony says.
MJ interjects, “Nepotism!” but Ned reminds her this nepotism would mean they get to go to MIT, and that it isn’t like they didn’t already get in on their own merit anyway, and MJ recants her statement and apologizes shortly for getting caught up.
Peter is still sitting on the floor crying, and Morgan is still handing him French fries from her pocket at regular intervals. Both Steves are starting to feel bad about this whole thing, but Rogers beats Strange to the punch of saying, “Listen, why don’t we all sit down and discuss how this is gonna go from here?” And because so much of this has been a few forty-year-olds yelling at each other, and because it’s getting about dinner time, he says, “Dr. Strange, do you have a room with a few more chairs? We could go to a restaurant instead.”
They end up going for schwarma.
They decide that Peter Parker’s identity will be kept closely guarded as a secret in the best interest of galactic security.
Ned and MJ ask if Peter can resume going to school with them, since he apparently used to and maybe it would jog their memories. Natasha points out that if it can jog theirs, it can also jog anyone else’s at that school, so no he cannot. As a compromise (and something like an apology) Stephen says he can try fiddling with a few spells to un-erase their memories in particular, as long as there’s no chance of it expanding beyond them and a select few avengers.
“You’ll have to do Pepper too,” Tony says after dinner has been fully consumed.
“What, why?” Stephen asks.
“I’m not letting my intern live alone in a shady apartment owned by a landlord with the prior fraud convictions? Plus, we have a casita that needs using.”
“I think that used to be where you and Ms. Natasha and Vision’s memorial was,” Peter says quietly.
Everyone makes a face at that. And then they quickly move on. “Much better use now then,” Steve covers quickly.
“Morgan, what’s in the casita now?” Tony asks.
“Mommy said it should be a pool house.”
“We don’t have a pool.”
“She also said we should have a pool.”
“Well, Mommy has a lake and a she-shed, so she can wait just a bit on the pool.”
This seems to matter very little to Morgan, who is coloring all over the kids menu.
“Just one more thing,” Stephen says, “if my spell made everyone forget Peter Parker, why did it also bring people back from the dead?”
It’s a great fucking question. Honestly, certain things would have been revealed if it had been asked earlier, so they won’t be revealed for at least another half an hour.
Ned asks, “What exactly did he say?”
And Peter is the only one present with a functioning, unaltered memory who wasn’t deceased at the time, so he thinks, thinks, and eventually realizes, “He said it would be as if I never existed.”
And everyone thinks, thinks, and then Natasha and Tony both realize, in their own separate ways, oh god, oh fuck, oh jeez, this kid was kinda instrumental in that whole Thanos debacle. If Peter wasn’t there, it would be as if the whole thing never happened, because he was too closely related for the spell to fully edit him out. So it just undid it all.
Which means Thanos is alive somewhere.
Meanwhile, Gamora wakes up on the ship she lives on with her crew screaming bloody murder about being murdered bloodily and then forces them to drive to some desolate planet with nothing but plants, where they find Thanos gardening in what he believes to be the afterlife, and they take him by such surprise that he doesn’t even see them coming before he has been incinerated by the ship’s laser canons.
And then they call down to the avengers because Thor, who is on board for reasons nobody quite remembers, insists that they’ll want to know.