Chapter Text
The first sensation was weight.
Something pressing in from all sides, crushing his chest before he could even think about breathing. When air finally entered his lungs, it did so violently, tearing at his throat with an old, rusted pain.
He didn’t know who he was.
He only knew he shouldn’t be awake.
His fingers moved against a hard surface, and when they did, something crunched—not the wood, but him. His body protested, stiff and uncooperative, as if it had been forgotten for far too long.
There was a smell. Earth. Dampness. Something thicker that filled his nose and made his eyes burn.
Panic.
He had no name for it, but he felt it swell in his chest as he pushed upward, breaking whatever had been holding him in.
His hands moved first—clumsy, desperate. His fingers struck the wood again and again until the blows turned into scraping, nails dragging against a surface that refused to give. The pressure in his fingers was unbearable, as if each one were about to break on its own.
Something gave.
Not immediately. Not cleanly.
The wood splintered beneath his small hands, and the impact traveled up his arms in a dull ache. His nails caught in the cracks and lifted, separating from the flesh with a hot, alien sensation. The skin of his fingers, fragile, split as it stretched beyond what it could endure, tearing without resistance, as if it were already tired of holding itself together.
He didn’t scream.
The sound died in his throat as he pushed with everything his small body had, even though he didn’t know where the strength came from. His hands no longer felt right—they were pressure, burning, something broken that kept working simply because it didn’t know how to stop.
The coffin lid creaked again.
And this time, it split apart.
Getting out of the coffin wasn’t standing up.
It was falling.
His body slid out of the shattered box and hit the damp earth with a dead weight that didn’t match the movement he had tried to make. The impact knocked the air from lungs that had barely learned how to breathe, and he lay there, half in and half out, gasping in uneven pulls, as if each breath were a decision his body hesitated to make.
The dirt clung to his skin.
Cold. Heavy. Working its way into the cracks of a body that had no business dragging itself forward—yet did anyway. His arms stretched out first, clumsy, digging into the ground to pull the rest of him along. His legs responded late, stiff, scraping against the splintered wood of the coffin as they slid free, as if they didn’t remember they were part of him too.
Every inch hurt in an imprecise way.
Not like a fresh wound, but like something old, poorly repaired, protesting at being used.
When he lifted his head, the world didn’t fit.
One eye saw Gotham’s night blurred, distorted by moisture and shadow. The other—white, opaque—also saw… but not in the same way. Shapes overlapped, depth was wrong, and some objects felt too close, in ways that didn’t correspond to anything real. It was like looking through something that had never finished forming.
He blinked.
Nothing cleared.
His mind was the same.
Thick, sluggish thoughts sliding over one another without becoming memories. He knew what dirt was. He knew what breathing was. He knew that what he felt was fear.
But he didn’t know who he was.
A sound slipped from his throat when he tried to speak. Not words. Not a name. Just a rough, low noise, closer to a wounded animal than a human voice. His throat burned when he tried again, and the sound died before it could
escape.
He couldn’t.
Not yet.
That was when his gaze—the one that saw and the one that didn’t—stopped on the stone in front of him.
The tombstone jutted from the earth, tilted, worn, old. His trembling fingers left the ground and touched the cold surface, tracing the carved letters without knowing why. He felt them before he understood them.
A name.
He read it without remembering it.
Peter.
He felt no sense of belonging.
No recognition.
Only a strange pressure in his chest, as if those letters were trying to claim something he couldn’t give back.
That name was the only thing he had.
And he didn’t even know if it belonged to him.
He tried to take a few steps forward. He still didn’t know where he was going—only that he had to move. His knees clicked as if something were shifting back into place. His body worked, but it didn’t cooperate. Nothing seemed completely broken, but nothing was right either.
His body was too small to feel this heavy.