here i am: alive.

This is his fault.

Peter knows it, because who ELSE’S fault would it be? Except for Beck, but the thought of him still makes the kid’s hands shake and his heart sink, makes everything around him feel all the more suffocating and causes him to question every little thing. He doesn’t want to keep thinking about Beck. And besides, if Peter had just REALIZED he was being tricked, or thought about how to prevent something like this…it wouldn’t have happened.

And now, everyone knows who he is, they think he’s a CRIMINAL, and Peter doesn’t know what to do. He faces the other in front of him, and he’s lost for words. He doesn’t want to be stuck here anymore, doesn’t want to deal with all of this– he’s EXHAUSTED, why can’t he catch any kind of break?

But when the older gives him a solution…Peter can’t accept it.

He shakes his head, mouth dry and stomach twisting with nerves. “No– you can’t….I can’t just– let you do that. This…” He breathes in for a moment, resisting a sudden sick feeling. “It’s– it’s my fault, and I don’t wanna…let someone else take the blame for it.” He can already feel the guilt creeping up on him.

“Don’t.”

An acrid bitterness sits on Peter’s tongue as he clamps his jaw shut tight to stare at the boy. To see him like this tears him up inside; it feels like razor-wire constricting around his withered heart. And the last thing he wants to do is lose his cool; make things worse. So when he’s sure he won’t lash out in frustration, Pete allows himself to open his mouth again and lets his tongue click loudly--disapprovingly--in the process.

“How is it your fault? Beck tricked you. He used you. He saw the desperation, loyalty, and loneliness in you and decided to twist it to his own ends.”

It’s strange to be able to point this out to a different version of himself. Deep down, he knows he does this himself; knows he lets himself be pulled in and manipulated by all of feelings that get knotted up inside his chest. But it’s easier to try to help this other Peter than it is to help himself. He’s too far gone.

“Let me do this,” he insists, crowding into the younger Parker’s space and setting his hands on the boy’s shoulders. His grip is tight, trying to get his point across that this is serious. “I’ve actually done some of the shit they’re blaming you for.”

From the second he rips his mask off, any of the last shreds of Tony’s hope disappears. He wasn’t sure how he was justifying peter suddenly being eighteen in twenty seconds, but this guy —- he’s clearly older than that. 

And then he talks, and while his story is simple enough, it also tells Tony plenty. No mention of Thanos, of space or Titan or Strange. If that had been the last thing Peter saw, he would mention it, right? 

The panic is instantly recognisable — he’s never seen it in Peter, not personally, but in himself enough times. He knows that feeling. “Peter—- Peter, hey, kid, come on, look at me. Breathe, alright? You gotta breathe.” He lets the entire suit fade away now, resting a gentle hand on Peter’s arm. “Let’s just take a moment, okay. We’ll figure it out.”

Letting his hopes die allow the pieces to click together, at least. Wormhole, he said. Tony tilts his head back to look at the blue sky ( a portal he can still see in his nightmares ) and curses under his breath. in his experience, wormholes are just portals. Like the one in New York, all those years ago. Jane Foster’s Einstein-Rosen bridges. That portal Bruce had described over the planet he was stuck on. 

But Tony knows the theory. He’s good at quantum mechanics. The idea that wormholes could transport you through time or space or across dimensions, it’s the stuff of science fiction —- but so is the rest of his life.

Time travel seems unlikely, not if peter doesn’t remember any of this. ( Anyway. Peter’s dead. ) Alternate dimension, somehow, seems the most likely option.

Christ, sometimes Tony hates his life. 

Let’s test this theory. “Okay. Stupid question, but what do you think the date is?” 

Locking eyes with Tony as the older man speaks, Peter nods continuously to himself in agreement. He does need to breathe; to come down or through or out from under this wave of panic that’s consumed him. So he does what he’s been asked and takes his time consciously leveling himself out, little by little.

That anxiety doesn’t exactly leave--how could it?--but it shrinks itself and becomes bearable, more of a distraction than the crushing, inescapable force it had been before. And the hand on his shoulder seems to help, too.

(He thinks of Otto before he can stop himself, and he has to look away before Stark can read the extent of the pain in his eyes.)

“Okay. Yeah. We’ll figure it out.”

The second task--recalling the date--is a simple one indeed, but with all the thoughts and worries crowding his head it takes a great deal of focus to sort through the mess. Still, he tries, his eyes wandering up and to the side as he tries to remember the date he’d only just glanced at in passing when he’d woken up that morning. 

“February the… twelfth? I think?” He pauses. Frowns. Decides he needs to address the whole two years situation. So, hastily, he adds: “Twenty-twenty.”

Something terrible occurs to him, as unlikely--impossible, even--as it is, Peter finds himself biting his tongue as he again looks out over the broken, half-abandoned city. It almost looks familiar, the longer he stares at it. In a way, it reminds him of the aftermath of chaos Li and Octavius had unleashed.

“This wasn’t Devil’s Breath, was it?” He asks in barely more than a whisper, wearily pushing a hand out in front of him to gesture at the mess. “The antidote-- It took, it worked. People got better, I saw it.”

Unseen, a knife twists itself deeper into Peter’s gut. If the antidote hadn’t worked, all of his struggles and Aunt May’s death had been for nothing. It had to have worked. But what else could have caused such a large scale calamity?