A/N: INFINITY WAR SPOILERS AHEAD. I'm sorry about the formatting earlier, hopefully it's fixed now. If it's still weird, this is posted on my Ao3 account as well.
When Peter wakes up, his eyelids are heavy, like they've been sewn shut.
He's tired, he just wants to go to sleep, but vaguely in a space in the back of his head, a voice warns him to get up, open your eyes.
But he's exhausted, sleepy, nauseous, and just so tired.
The space around him is silent. He can't hear his own breathing either, he's not sure if he's breathing at all. Not even white noise exists in this void.
A sharp, constant pain is pulsing through his body, but it hurts so much that Peter can't pinpoint where exactly the pain is coming from and it makes him want to curl up into a tight ball and hide from the world. Hide from the responsibilities.
Sleep.
His mind wavers between the conscious and the subconscious. Both his mind and his body is floating and weightless, distantly aware that he is no longer on Earth, or Titan. He doesn't exist anymore, and now he's in a limbo between existing and not existing, drifting further and further into the nothingness, but then a strange feeling pricks at the back of his neck. Peter's senses are so disoriented in this plane of non-existence that he doesn't even realise that it's his sixth sense screaming at him. Strange, that shouldn't be able to happen.
Peter tries to open his eyes again, and as expected, he's drifting in an ocean of pitch blackness.
A woman stands before him, and he instinctively knows that he has reached the point of no return. This woman is the one thing that all his instincts fight to protect him from.
Death.
But she's beautiful.
The most beautiful thing Peter has ever seen in his entire existence.
Her appearance is constantly shifting – a flawless porcelain doll in one moment, a whole skeleton the next, but in Peter's dream-like state the thought never registers in his mind. Peter doesn't understand why he has been trying to avoid her this whole time.
He can't move a single muscle, can't even twitch his fingers, but when his eyes land on her, the one coherent thought that forms in his mind is that he must reach her, touch her, stare into those dark, beautiful eyes for eternity. He tries to conjure up explanations, descriptions, pictures, anything, to ingrain her into his mind forever, but his brain is already beginning to shut down.
Nothing else in his plane exists nor matters – not Tony, not the Avengers, not Aunt May, not Uncle Ben, Gwen, or the countless people she had forcefully and heartlessly taken away from him forever, because in this space, it is just Peter, alone, staring into the eyes of Death. He clumsily reaches out to Her, his want – no, need to touch her overwhelming his senses so much that it engulfs him and becomes the one thread holding together his whole existence – Everything that made Peter Peter. Even just a brush of his fingertips against her hair, her skin, anything would be enough to ground him, satisfy him, confirm that yes, She's there.
Peter drifts closer to Her, until the markings on Her face come into focus. The sharp and dull and hot and cold pain engulfing his whole body begins to numb. No thoughts, and no feelings fundamentally identical a tiny ragdoll, its fate held in the hands of its puppet master. It's a beautiful, addicting feeling, as the pain morphs into something akin to pleasure and comfort, like feeling the sun on his face, or falling into a great pile of soft blankets and feathers after a long day. Peter's so exhausted from all the events today that he can't recall anymore, and all he wants is for someone else to take control over his own body. He just wants rest, even if his thoughts are becoming less coherent, even if the words in his head are becoming more and more jumbled the closer he gets. Closer.
Closer.
She stands still, carefully watching and considering him. Peter tries to speak out, selfishly make her acknowledge his presence, but no words enter his mind. With a small jolt, Peter realises he can't remember how to speak English, his own name, how to open his mouth. He dimly remembers that there is a reason why he's reaching out to Her, but he doesn't remember how to speak, how to think, how to listen, how to see. He's falling asleep; his existence is fading away like dust in the wind, like…
Like…
He struggles to make any coherent noise, but Death herself is the one who speaks first. The movement of her jaw registers in his head first, and Peter revels in the simple movement alone, the precision as her mouth shapes and manipulates a single, clear sound to form a word – no, a sentence – and the sound resonates not from her, but within Peter's head. It echoes, not quite coming from anywhere, but… there.
"It is not your time yet."
The very tip of Peter's finger very gently brushes her cheek, as soft as a butterfly's kiss, then, with a lurching abruptness, Peter is being pulled back violently, falling back into the darkness, so quickly that he can't even catch a final glance at the beautiful woman standing alone in the darkness.
The sharp, throbbing and unbearable pain comes back all at once in explosions, and suddenly voices are clashing in his brain, the smell of dust is choking his nose and his mouth, gravity is pulling his body in all sort of directions, he feels nauseous, his lungs are threatening to collapse under the sudden force of gravity, stabs of pain are assaulting his eyes, head, arms, torso, legs, everywhere.
Peter – My name is Peter – is suddenly choking, crying, spasming, and the sheer weight of existing is too much, too much, Oh my God, make it – make it stop , too much, it's too –
"Peter. Peter. Oh my God. Stay with me. Peter. You're going to be fine, you're fine, you're –"
Peter's eyes fly open, and the first thing he sees is Tony Stark.
"Come on, Peter. Breathe with me. Come on. You're okay."
His vision is blurry with tears and he can barely hear his mentor over the sound of his own choking and gasping, but he focuses on one point on Tony's face and his breathing gradually slows. He can hear his own deafening heartbeat in his ears that is loud as hell, but – but there. He's alive.
Peter blinks, then the rest of the world comes into focus. He's surrounded by rubble and dust, and the sky glows an ethereal orange. He's still on Titan, where – where he should have been turned to dust, but there was something, something that Peter had forgotten, an important detail, something he saw…
"Mr. Stark?" He whispered.
In one rare moment of vulnerability, Tony rests his head on Peter's chest. He inhales deeply once – exhales – then inhales.
He sits up, and Peter feels a hand running through his hair.
"Come on, kid. That's enough space touring for a lifetime, don't you think?" He stares blankly at his mentor, his mind still struggling to catch up with the simple burden of existing, but Tony's face is filled with warmth and patience.
"Let's go home."
A/N: I think Thanos' snap removed people from reality itself so that they never existed in the first place, but since people still have a memory of them I imagine that they were killed on the spot rather than just… disappeared.
Death wasn't impressed by Thanos deleting half the universe so I thought that she should be able to send people back into the world of the living if she decided that it was wrong to let them die and upset the existing order of the world idk.