Chapter Text
The Sanctum Sanctorum had never felt quite so desolate, nor had the air seemed so thick with the burden of untimely loss. The vast space, once a fulcrum of study and mysticism, now stood in disarray. Scrolls and tomes, ancient relics of forgotten realms, lay scattered across all surfaces. Strange was attempting to find something, anything, to fix what had been done. The walls were cracked, their jagged edges catching the light in a way that mimicked the newly fractured state of existence itself. Within this crumbling expanse, the Sorcerer Supreme found himself on the precipice of an inconceivable decision.
He stood before an altar, hands quivering as they forged sigils in the air, wielding threads of golden enchantments that tugged at the very fabric of reality. The lucent green waters before him scintillated with unnatural life and an eerie glow. The air encircling it thrummed, charged with a vitality that felt both foreign and ancient.
Strange's spell had gone awry; the multiverse had shuddered, and the consequences were unfolding beyond the walls of the crumbling sanctum, quiet, insidious, and unrelenting. Peter Parker's body, gaunt and still, lay motionless upon the altar. With harrowed realisation, Stephen had known that if he did not intervene at once, Peter would remain forever untouched by the passage of time; his hands trembled.
Doctor Strange cast his eyes upon the Lazarus Pit, its eerie, viridescent glow pulsing with the force of something arcane and enigmatic. He had always known it was here, buried beneath the Sanctum Sanctorum, hidden behind a door.
Its threshold had always foreboded a warning, and Strange had never dared approach it. Even the most seasoned sorcerers among them, those who had walked through the halls of the Sanctum for many years, kept their distance; they respected the dark force that radiated from within, but were afraid to venture too near its unrelenting grasp.
It was a room of abhorrence, a place in which the most disciplined minds could lose themselves. But in this moment, this unbearable instance of loss, all of that fear, all of those long-held cautions, slipped away. He could not stand the thought of Peter Parker being gone, his bright, young flame extinguished before it had had a chance to truly burn. Strange knew little of the Pit’s inner workings; he had never studied it in detail, had never wished to unravel its ambiguity. Its magic was... wrong, but in his desperation, he found himself standing before it, willing to reach beyond his understanding.
The price of ignorance seemed small, almost insignificant, compared to the gnawing emptiness of what he was about to lose. And so, without hesitation, he moved Peter, whose unseeing eyes were already lost to the world, into the depths of the green glow.
Peter Parker, Spider-Man. The name would be as foreign to him as a language he had never heard. Strange had seen the damage; he had felt it in the tremors of the universe, in the way reality bent under the pressure of a truth that no longer held. No one would remember Peter Parker, not even Strange himself. The very essence of Peter would be erased from the minds of every living soul. His friends, his enemies, gone, as though he had never existed. A spectre in a world that could no longer recall his name.
‘Forgive me, Peter,’ Strange had whispered, the sound lost in the expanse of the Sanctum. ‘Forgive me for this.’
The words were hollow. Even now, as the reality of what he was about to do, of what he had already done, settled over him, Strange could not quell the gnawing feeling that something irreplaceable had been lost. But there was no turning back.
The initial spell was designed to be a memory charm, to carve a person from the collective memory of the world. The spell required precision, words not simply spoken, but felt. It drew on the caster’s understanding of the subject's identity, not just their name, but the very weight of who they were in the lives of others. It meant unthreading those memories delicately, like pulling a single strand from a web without bringing the whole structure down.
But Peter Parker was too deeply woven. His name was not just spoken, it was believed in. He had been loved, hated, mourned, and admired. To remove him from the world’s memory was not like dousing a candle; it was akin to snuffing out a star. Every person who had known Peter Parker as Spider-Man, every friend, enemy, ally, even those across distant universes, acted as a tether, anchoring him in place. Strange had underestimated the strength of that connection. He had tried to modify the spell on the fly, bending reality without a net, not realising the multiverse was splintering under its pressure.
And so the spell, intended to quietly erase, to gently sever, shattered. Its edges turned jagged, cutting through dimensions with surgical precision. Strands of fate snapped. People who had known Peter across infinite Earths began creeping from their worlds. And Peter, standing at the centre of this occult maelstrom, bore the brunt of the collapse. His body failed, not from trauma or injury, but from the sheer metaphysical toll of being forgotten, of being overwritten. The spell worked, in the end. Though the world had not simply forgotten Peter Parker, it had ended him; much like the star, it had snuffed him out.
It should never have been cast, not in its raw, undisciplined form. But desperation breeds recklessness. It was meant to seal the rift, to contain the knowledge of Peter Parker, Spider-Man, erase it cleanly from the minds of all who had ever known him. But the magic, volatile and burdened by grief, faltered under its own weight.
The multiverse convulsed. Time stuttered. And in a cruel twist of fate, it was Peter who paid the price; his body had collapsed under the strain of existence itself, as though the universe had tried to forget him in too many ways at once. His heart stuttered, then slowed. The breath left his lungs not with violence, but with absence. He was not simply dying; he was being overwritten. He perished before Strange’s eyes. Not heroically, not theatrically, but quietly. And despite the death of the boy, the universe still threatened collapse. Despite everything, the boy still needed to be forgotten. But there was no reason why he could not be known elsewhere. Strange could not bear it; he could not bear the part he had played in the young hero’s death. He would not accept it; if Peter must be forgotten, let him at least live, let him at least be loved. And so, he brought him before the Lazarus Pit, taboo and unstudied.
Strange was resurrecting the boy in order to cast him into another universe, one in which he belonged, one where he could live without invoking dire cosmic consequences. A world where, by some strange mercy, a family awaited him.
He had seen it, its shimmering akin to a mirage, an image flickering in the dark recesses of his mind, an image of a world where Peter Parker would not be alone. A world where he had a family. A future. A place where his pain could be mended.
Strange's hands trembled once more, and with a final breath, he cast the final incantation.
The Lazarus Pit erupted, its green glow consuming and dispersing the air around them. A deep, resonating hum filled the room, vibrating through the bones of the Sanctum as the Pit's power surged with the force of a current, dragging Peter’s body further into its depths.
Peter stirred. His fingers twitched, then his eyes fluttered open, pupils dilated and unfocused. He did not scream. He did not struggle. Confused and disoriented, he took in the shimmering green water surrounding him, as if searching for an answer that eluded him, then quickly withdrew with an instinctual terror. Peter recoiled, forcing himself to the edge of the pit, hands splayed against its verge.
He stumbled out, crawling away, disoriented, the world around him spinning in fractured hues of uncanny green. The air felt thick, he choked on it. Something was different, something was wrong.
Peter’s breaths came in frantic, jagged gasps, the acrid, metallic taste of the Pit’s waters lingering on his tongue. His fingers dug into the cold stone floor, and each pulse of his heart sent a fresh jolt of agony through his veins. His mind thrashed against his skull, pushing against the edges of his consciousness, desperate for something familiar. He looked down at his hands, trembling and pale, wet with the viscous, awful residue of the strange Pit, veins glowing faintly beneath his skin. For a moment, his breath caught, a strangled, panicked sound; he could not speak. He staggered back, pressing his back against the cold stone wall, eyes wide with the echoes of countless half-formed memories clawed at the edges of his mind, slipping away before he could grasp them.
One moment, he had been escaping the ghastly viridescent gleam of the water, cold stone against his back; the next, he was falling. His extra sense, that constant, invisible premonition of danger that had saved his life more times than he could count, screamed in protest, a sharp, piercing chord reverberating within his skull. But his mind was lethargic, searing with confusion and half-formed memories. He could not react. He barely understood.
Wind tore his skin like whips, and then, impact.
A rooftop was the first thing to break his descent, bricks crumbling beneath him, but it did not halt his fall. Peter’s body crumpled against the edge of a high-up windowsill, his face bounced hard off a rusted pipe. Then, he slammed into the bars of a fire escape, each collision stealing breath and clarity. He did not scream. He barely gasped. Gravity showed no mercy. He hit the pavement below with a wet, sickening smack, the kind that silences a crowd, and for a moment, all was still.
He lay there in the alley’s contour, half-curled and unmoving, as he burned with a white-hot agony. No human would have survived this impact, and Peter caught himself, for the briefest moment, as he writhed in pain, wishing he had not been the exception. His spider sense thrummed at the nape of his neck; danger was not imminent, but looming, as though it were bound into the very foundation of his surroundings, of the unfamiliar city that crowded him. The world around him was wrong. Too quiet. Too dark. The ether above was hazed with city smoke and drowned out stars. It was not familiar. The name was not yet known to him, and its weight settled over him like ash. Rain began to fall, soft and reluctant, diluting the blood seeping into the crevices beneath his body.
‘Where... am I?’ Peter's voice was hoarse, barely more than a whisper; it came out in a choked gasp. He was not quite sure when the pit had vanished or how the aging ground beneath him had become wet stone, only that it had. His eyes darted around a sombre city landscape, searching for something, anything, that might anchor him.
But the faces, those he had once known, were absent. There were no familiar walls, no comforting presence of loved ones, nor the quiet companionship of his friends. There was only an alley, vast and strange, stretching before him.
His thoughts were tangled. The memories of his life had begun to blur at the edges. He remembered his Aunt May, his Uncle Ben, and the sting of loss that had shaped him. He remembered New York, his city. He recalled Queens, his home. He saw flashes of blue and red, and yearned for the sensation of swinging through he air. But beyond that? A dark, cavernous gap. The time before this moment, this strange awakening, was a void. A blank space in his mind that gnawed at him, leaving only fragments in its wake. He remembered being Spider-Man. He remembered the weight of that responsibility, the sense of duty that bound him to the world.
But the road that led him here, to this moment, to this strange place, was lost.
He crawled further down the alley, wincing with each movement, his heart pounding in his chest. Was he dying? Was he hallucinating? Was this a fever dream, a trick of his fractured mind?
Peter pulled himself to his feet, his knees shaking beneath him. The world around him twisted and shifted, as though it were a dream just beyond the edge of his comprehension. The air smelled of something both metallic and damp, and as his eyes adjusted, he could see shadows dancing across the spires and gargoyles of Gothic architecture. It was unlike anything he had ever known.
The air around him felt alive, a damp, cloying thing that clung to his skin like smoke. It tasted of rust and oil, of rainwater filtered through decades of corroded metal and cracked stone. The distant wail of a siren cut through the fog, sharp and shrill, its echoes twisting through labyrinthine laneways, chased by the faint, irregular pulse of helicopter blades. A loose gutter somewhere above him clanged against brick with each restless gust of wind. The ground beneath him, wet and uneven, smelled of stagnant water and mildew, every fractured paver a monument to the city’s neglect. His every breath felt polluted, thick with the abiding remnants of exhaust fumes and industrial waste, the scent deeply woven into the fabric of the urban sprawl. Even the shadows felt heavier here, dense and unyielding, Peter could feel their weight upon his shoulders. What was this place?
He stumbled further forward, his body aching, his mind lost in the fog of a fragmented existence. He did not understand how he had gotten here, or why, but as the rain continued to fall, cold and relentless, he knew one thing for certain: he was alone. And for the first time, in this strange world that seemed to want nothing more than to swallow him whole, Peter Parker, the boy who had never been sure of his place, somehow felt as though he had descended even further.