Chapter Text
“Strange!”
Peter watched him collapse to the earth. He’d seen that dazed look before, the intense flashing in his eyes. It was something between the look in Ned’s eyes when he pulled an all nighter to study for the chemistry final and the look in the eyes of people on the street when he pulled them out of the way of some criminal running towards them - dazed, exhausted.
It was the look Peter saw in the mirror after he came home from fighting Liz’s dad and realized, looking at the black charred marks on his smoke smelling suit and the black eye puffing out on his face, when he realized that everything was going to change, that everyone else who knew the Vulture was going to target him now, take him seriously, could come any time now, and he wasn’t ready for them. And he couldn’t tell anyone, not completely, because they’d be in danger too. He was all alone and there was nobody left to help.
“Strange!” Mr. Stark was looking Dr. Strange (what was his real name, anyway?) in the eye.
“I went forward in time,” he gasped, “to see all the possible outcomes of the coming conflict.”
You could hear a pin drop. Peter was breathing heavily.
“How many do we win?” asked Mr. Stark, and for the first time Peter thought there was a bit of a tremor in his voice.
It was a moment before he answered, and in the reply Peter heard the echo of the tremor shake louder.
“Two.”
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
“You should,” rasped Thanos, voice dead, axe in his chest, “have gone for the head.”
It was if he was frozen. Thor (Thor? Bucky thought, still mildly confused if it was actually some kind of god or just if that was his alias, although the talking raccoon kind of threw logic out the window) just stood there, chest heaving, face half twisted in confusion, as the giant purple monster raised his fingers and snapped.
And then Thanos was gone, the blue particles of portal flickering through the air, and the portal closed like it was never there. There was a light wind under the trees. Bucky imagined the grass stirring on the fields a mile away.
Well, we all know what happened next.
The one he saw first was the man in the suit. It came crashing down behind him, a twisted mesh of brash red and gold metal.
“Bruce?” yelled Steve loudly, and went running. “Bruce. Are you alright?”
The thing was face down on the ground. Bucky seized it with his arm and twisted it upwards. There was nothing inside the broken glass, no light, no movement, no Bruce.
“What the…” He turned.
Steve was crumpling onto the ground like a can being crunched, ash spreading outwards. It all took less than three seconds.
“Rhodes! Rhodes!”
And then there was Sam, running into the clearing, half carrying, half dragging the suit of silver armor. It was a strange party in that room, three humans and three hunks of metal - the huge and small broken suits with the bright, false, hopeful veneer; the black and white corpse of a dead android.
Bucky looked at the woman on the ground, slumped over the colorless wreck, red hair contrasting with the black and white, looking too close to corpse-like herself. Her shoulders were shaking violently. Something flickered around her skin, the flashing of red magic. Sticks on the ground were three feet in the air, shaking and cracking themselves apart in midair. Leaves were pulled violently from tree branches and crushed by some unseen force.
And then the king of Wakanda was running in, face ashen, and the talking tree was screaming, not even attempting to use the few words in his vocabulary, and as Bucky sat on the ground in a blind daze with one distracted hand on the red woman’s shoulder and the other picking at the bits of dust that used to be his best friend, he couldn’t shake the thought of what a bizarre disaster his entire life was.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Michelle Jones’ not-death went about as you would expect.
She’d seen Peter swing out of the window of the bus - after all, who wouldn’t, unless they weren’t completely losing their minds in a panic? She smiled slightly at Ned, who had a poorly disguised expression of rapturous joy on his face as he caused a panic, and was about to go back to her book when she noticed the flying space donut over New York and frowned.
The students of Midtown Tech were all familiar with the Battle of New York. At the ages of nine and ten, most leaned out their apartment windows to watch giant, armored creatures cascade through rubble and the fire of exotic weapons, the sky ripped open like Zeus stuck his finger through the concept of spacetime. They had seen Captain America throw his shield and watched Hawkeye shoot arrows down from the top of their buildings, glistening bolts racing each other past the overwashed windows of penthouses and other upper floors where the sort of parents who sent their children to Midtown Tech went. Some were doubling back on the fear they felt in the midst of the battle, hands pressed to the window, recollections of shaky news feeds and streets cracked open hitting them like bombs.
MJ, who watched the entire battle in 2012 out of her bedroom window with curious eyes and a small sketchbook, was looking for the small form of (maybe? It had to be) Peter Parker as it disappeared behind the skyline. She grinned and felt something else stir inside her chest, but ignored it.
Ned Leeds, having succeeded in his distraction, was just about to sit down again when MJ pushed her way across the chaotic cabin and planted herself in Peter’s old seat. She almost laughed at the dawning horror on his face and instead directed his attention out the window. “So...what do you think that is?”
“I don’t know,” said Ned, completely earnest, some of the quick panic disappearing from his face, replaced with slight worry.
“Probably aliens,” she replied, deadpan.
“Uh huh…” and she knew he was thinking about Peter too, wondering where he was. “So, uh, do you think we’ll turn around?”
Of course, the bus driver did what every inefficient school chaperone did in a time of crisis, which was nothing. The bus of newly anxious teenagers plowed right off the bridge and straight to MOMA, where Mr. Harrison waded through clusters of whispering people and tried to calm them down to absolutely no effect. The news was on in the broad foyer, but as the newscasters clearly had no idea who was where or what was going on and Erica Kim, Channel 5’s hair was getting more and more pulled from her head as the day’s events went on, they let it go.
In the MOMA foyer, Michelle Jones did not yet know what was going to happen to half of her classmates in less than five hours. But she did see the half donut of whizzing light disappear into space, Spider-Man desperately clambering on between several (oh gosh is he going to die is he going to die) rather despairing moments. She saw the tight, pinched look on Ned Leeds’ face, a kid she barely knew except as Peter’s best friend, and she decided that if something truly devastating was going to happen, she could do with sacrificing her chances of being wrong and his own dignity. So she grabbed his sweaty hand and held on tight. In front of them, over the heads of teenagers panicking, teenagers on their phones, teenagers trying to catch a nap in the screen for another thirty seconds, he only noticed enough to look confused after the screens cut back to Erica Kim, Channel 5’s mental breakdown.
“It’s Peter.”
He nearly jumped out of his skin. “What? Uh, no. Uhm.”
Her voice was quiet and even, above a whisper. “I mean, if it wasn’t, um, this wouldn’t make a lot of sense.”
“I don’t know, uh, exactly what you mean -”
“Peter is Spider-Man.”
To his eternal credit, Ned Leeds cared enough about his best friend to refuse to give up his identity entirely. But there’s only so much stammering before you know that you’ve lost.
They spent the rest of the day in MOMA. While the other sophomores lingered in the lobby to watch the shaky cam feeds or vlog the entire experience, they wandered empty halls and stared at all of the art, because it turned out MJ had more than a casual hidden passion for modern art that was coming out in all the gulping bursts someone having a serious cry would normally exhibit and Ned really, really needed to be distracted. So they examined it all - The Persistence of Memory and Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Christina’s World while somewhere hundreds of millions of miles away Peter was trying his best to yank a large gold gauntlet off of a large and arrogant space philosopher, The Dream and The Lovers and with the bitter laugh of anything that seems insubstantial Campbell’s Soup Cans as the news kept playing in the background and Thanos crashed down in Wakanda with the crushing Bifrost.
It was the middle of the night in MOMA when they reached it, sitting, like all the paintings in there, lonely on the blank wall. If she ran the place, MJ would have put some more color in there, or at least more interesting floors.
Somewhere, at the exact same time, Wanda Maximoff was giving it her all, was screaming in pain and rage while somewhere deep inside a witch stirred in her sleep on a bright Wakandan afternoon. But here it was night, and she was tired, and there was more night before her. There were no windows in MOMA but the ones made from paint.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
Starry Starry Night sat before their eyes, looking so small without the banter of ten thousand art critics or classmates to buoy it. The little swirls of yellow on mixed blue. Ned was staring at it, eyes wide.
“I mean,” he said, as if he’d just realized the void of awkward silence, “I’ve never...really...seen it.”
“I know what you mean,” she said.
“Like, I’ve seen pictures,” he muttered, like it was the most important thing he’d ever said. “But never the real thing.”
“It’s kinda ironic, isn’t it?” she said.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just something I say,” she replied, fast, hesitant, twisting her hands behind her back. “To lighten the mood, when I get uncomfortable, I sorta, I do stuff like that, and yeah.”
“It’s ok.”
So they sat, and they stared very hard at all the stars on a night much brighter than their own, and MJ thought about how there was no room for cynicism, not at the end of the world (maybe).
Is that what it’s like, thinking you could die? No room for anything but what really matters.