Peter 1

I learned a long time ago that it's pointless to hope for a normal day.

Being Spider-Man ensures that it will be anything but normal.

Today started out great.

I was keeping up with my bills, my article got published on the Daily Bugle website, I saved a school bus, and I got a letter from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, telling me that I got accepted.

But when I went on my weekly Peter Pan run, that's when things started getting weird.

Doctor Strange was there and after seeing him again in the alleyway, it was obvious that he was looking for Peter Parker. Or Spider-Man. Or both.

For the past four months, I had isolated myself from everybody.

After what happened with May, I decided against relationships.

Everyone who Spider-Man tries to connect with gets hurt.

Everyone who Peter Parker tries to connect with stays alive.

But nobody remembers Peter Parker and Spider-Man couldn't risk putting others in danger.

So I had gotten used to this life of coming to an empty apartment and having no one to talk to about how lonely I was.

But when Doctor Strange showed up today asking way more questions than he should have, it was like he had broken a hole through that wall of loneliness.

That hole promised hope and a world where I didn't have to do things solo.

But I was afraid, so I didn't go through that hole.

I unlocked my door with the bag from Peter Pan's in my hand.

MJ had given me three muffins and two doughnuts for free.

Did she know that I had been skipping meals to afford material for my web shooters?

Probably not, but she must've noticed that my clothes had gotten shabbier and I had become skinnier.

This fragile and awkward connection with my old girlfriend was one of the most valuable things I had. It was what gave me the strength to keep on going.

So I walked into my apartment in a good mood.

I set the bag down.

For the first time in a while, I would actually get to eat breakfast tomorrow and I was looking forward to it.

And then I looked into the living room and jumped almost five feet in the air.

In hindsight, I had met Mr. Stark the same way.

He just showed up at my apartment without warning.

Just like Doctor Strange was doing right now.

"Hello, Peter." he said casually standing in the living room.

I clutched my heart and leaned against the wall, trying to calm down.

Lately, I had been really in tune with my spider-tingle and now it decided to bail out on me?

"Don't do that." I gasped out.

"You said we would meet again. Is now too soon?" he asked.

"I said hopefully. I didn't know you were going to break into my apartment."

"Technically," he said, walking over to me. "I didn't break in. I just stepped in."

Strange observed all the spider-man tech I had strewn about.

Instead of having a couch and tv like normal people did, I had a cluttered workbench with a wobbly stool.

There were ten new batches of web fluid on the workbench and my red, black, and gold suit lay waiting for me to finish the repairs on the fabric.

"You know, if I didn't already put the pieces together, this gives it away." Strange said.

"Yeah. That was the way Mr. Stark found out too." I said, grabbing trash and kicking it under my work bench.

"You were close with him, weren't you?" Strange asked, peering down at a picture frame on my workbench. It was me and Mr. Stark holding my Stark Industries internship certificate.

The certificate was upside down and we were both trying to photobomb each other.

Technically, Strange already knew this. But for him, it was like he was meeting me for the first time.

I picked up a picture frame and showed it to him.

"The Internship was a cover-up so he could take me to Germany and fight the other Avengers. And when Thanos came, he actually made me an Avenger."

Strange looked at me like he was sorry for me.

But these memories weren't sad. They were good.

"You were there on the spaceship when he made me an official member." I added.

Strange blinked several times.

"I know what you're saying is true and I know I remember it, but nothing comes to mind."

I shrugged.

"It's fine. Who knows? Maybe it'll wear off."

I stopped.

"Wait, can it? Because I don't know the rules for the memory wipe spell. Do people's memories come back slowly or can they even come back immediately."

This had the opportunity to fix and ruin everything. Everyone would remember who I was, which would be bad, but that also included MJ and Ned and the Avengers.

"Peter-" Doctor Strange said. But the gears in my brain were already turning and hope was rising.

"Oh, man. So if I just fess up to MJ right now about the whole thing, then we could get back together again?" I grinned. "That means-"

"Peter!" Strange said a little louder.

I stopped.

"Listen to me, I'm sorry. But that's not how memory spells work. They're virtually foolproof. Once the spell is casted, you don't remember what happened."

He was right. I was stupid for ever getting my hopes up.

This was what I wanted, right?

To keep my friends and family safe, so I could keep being Spider-Man?

At least, that's what I had been telling myself all this time. It was what I told myself so I could pretend that this whole twisted arrangement was great for me.

I hadn't agreed to the memory spell because of that. I agreed to it because we were running out of options and the multiverse was in danger.

If everyone who ever knew that Peter Parker was Spider-Man came here, our world would be in trouble.

Who knows? Maybe there was a universe where Thanos armed with an infinity

gauntlet knew who I was.

"Hey, it's alright." I kept my eyes to the floor. "This was my choice. I came up with the idea and asked you to cast it."

I gestured to my empty apartment and gave a weak smile.

"And it worked. Everybody went back to their universes. The multiverse is safe. Yay."

This was just getting depressing. I was beginning to think that Strange should've never come here. But I wasn't gonna tell him that because I really liked that he was here.

I sat on the stool. He awkwardly pulled up the only other chair and sat down next to me.

Once upon a time, Tony Stark had awkwardly sat next to me when we first met.

That day felt like another lifetime.

"It's been lonely for you. Hasn't it?"

"It has."

I was done with dwelling on the sadness of the past few months.

Doctor Strange came here for a reason and knowing him, I doubted it was to provide a shoulder to cry on. But it did really help.

I turned to him.

"Earlier today, you said that the multiverse is in danger and you needed to talk to Spider-Man about it."

He nodded.

"I've had dreams of…well, it's easier if I just show you."

Before I knew what was happening, Doctor Strange had his hands on my temples.

"Wait, what?"

There was a loud crack and suddenly, I was transported to a completely new landscape.

There were storms all over the place.

Huge tornadoes and cyclones picked up debris and chucked it thousands of yards away.

People were screaming in terror.

They were trying to escape, but it looked hopeless.

Monsters came out of portals from other dimensions.

They began wrecking havoc with long tentacles and huge, scary teeth.

But for some reason, instead of being scared, I just felt annoyed.

A cavalry of soldiers showed up and began firing at the monsters. Even though it was incredibly brave of them, it wouldn't be enough against the multiversial onslaught.

A big gust of wind knocked me face down into the mud.

I yanked my head up.

"I hate this." I grumbled loudly.

A woman grabbed me by the wrist and wrenched me onto my feet.

She wore a dark red suit and a pointed tiara.

She began wiping the mud off my spider-suit.

"Okay, we need to regroup and come up with a new plan." she said.

"Yeah." I panted. "Because this one really isn't working."

She shrugged defensively.

"Well, it wasn't mine."

"It wasn't mine either."

A voice popped up in my comms device.

"Bad news, guys. The fort got overtaken."

"Yeah." the woman said. "We noticed."

"It's alright." said another voice. "We just have to improvise."

"Who the heck is planning this thing anyway?!" I shouted over the wind.

Suddenly, there was a loud shriek.

The biggest and scariest monster of the bunch was barreling right towards us.

It wasn't even a living thing, really. It was just some kind of nightmarish entity of fire and smoke.

"Peter, get behind me!" the woman shouted.

She raised her hands and projected a powerful force shield.

That didn't slow down the monster one bit.

He slammed straight into the force shield.

The impact was so powerful, I was thrown into the air and landed hard.

I tried to make myself get up, but I couldn't.

We were losing the battle.

Trillions of innocents would suffer and we would die along with them.

There was a loud whoosh.

My eyes snapped open.

I wasn't on that freakish battlefield anymore. I was in my apartment. With Doctor Strange.

"That was so real." I said in between gasps of breath.

I gripped onto the edge of the workbench for balance.

"I'm sorry. I should've given you a better warning." he apologized.

"It's okay." I panted. "That wouldn't have been the first time."

"What?"

"Yeah…." I stood up and leaned against the workbench. Was getting surprised by wizards gonna be an everyday thing for me?
"...About a day before the whole Liberty Island Multiverse thing, you kicked me out of my- what was it called again? Astral projection. It totally took me off-guard."

Strange looked at me, surprised.

"Why did I do that?"

"We had a disagreement." I said casually. "I took the magic box from you, you kicked me out of my body, you pulled us into the mirror dimension, then I trapped you in the mirror dimension…"

I rubbed my temples. Strange looked even more taken aback. But I was still recovering from that dream-sharing thing.

"That was insane." I muttered.

"But you saw yourself in the dream, right?"

I shook my head.

"I was in the dream. Wait, when you were dreaming, were you dreaming that you were me? Because that'd be weird."

"No. I saw you and I knew that you were the key to whatever this mass destruction was." He said.

I shook my head.

"You weren't in the dream."

"What?"

"No. Wanda Maximoff and I were together. Everything was really crazy and chaotic. She pulled me up from the mud. There was someone on coms telling us about a hangar. And we were losing the battle."

I didn't know how I didn't recognize Wanda in the dream, but now I did. Maybe it was because of the new outfit and hair.

There was also something familiar about that voice on coms.

"That's not what I dreamed about." Strange said.

"Weren't you trying to show me your dream?"

"No. It must've shown itself differently to you for some reason."

When I visited Ned and MJ at the bakery, there were things about them that made it seem like they still remembered something about me.

Like MJ wearing the Black Dahlia necklace. Or Ned watching Star Wars on his phone, which I had introduced him to.

Strange had just said the memory spell was pretty foolproof.

Now I was getting a completely different version of Doctor Strange's dream when I shouldn't have.

And when Doctor Strange kicked my soul out, my body still moved.

Even he was surprised about that.

Was I becoming an exception when it came to magic spells?

"Well, whatever the reason the dream is different, the multiverse being destroyed stays the same. You want to save the multiverse? Finding Wanda Maximoff is your best bet."

I grabbed my empty web-shooters and began filling them with cartridges.

Doctor Strange stood up.

"Alright. I have an idea of where she might be. Thanks for your help."

"Thanks for coming, Strange." I looked up at him and smiled. "Good luck with saving the multiverse and everything."

He opened up a portal into the Sanctum.

"And hey-" I said.

He turned around.

"If you need help with anything superhero-related, don't hesitate to call."

The younger me would've wanted to go straight into whatever adventure Doctor Strange was doing, but I was just happy to wait on the sidelines until he really needed me.

He smiled. "Good to know."

Strange was about to step into the portal when he stopped.

"Hold on, what did you say?"

I looked at him blankly.

"Don't hesitate to call?"

"No. About the multiverse."

"Good luck saving it?"

He stepped away from the portal.

"No. From earlier. Everyone got sent back to their universes. Who are the others?"

I told him about the five spider-bad guys and the two other Spider-Men.

His eyebrows went up.

"Two other Spider-Men?"

I nodded eagerly. "Yeah. Two Peter Parkers. We only knew each other for a few hours and now we're like brothers."

I sure did miss those guys. Maybe Doctor Strange would get to meet them on his multiverse quest.

He held up his hand.

"You're saying that you met and interacted with two variants of yourself in the same universe?"

I looked at him uneasily. This reminded me of when I had to explain to Strange that I went to him to erase everyone's memory instead of pleading my case to MIT.

What did I do wrong this time?

"Yeah…."

"That shouldn't even happen, Peter."

"I know! That's what you said when you trapped the Lizard in the Sanctum. But it did!"

His eyes widened in horror. I had freaked him out even more.

"What else did we do in those twenty-four hours? Tell me everything."

I had to start from the beginning.

I explained how Mysterio revealed my secret identity to the entire world and how it messed up my life and my friends and family so much that MJ, Ned, and I couldn't even get into MIT. So I came to Doctor Strange, asking him to erase everyone's memory of me being Spider-Man.

Then because we messed up on the spell, it brought all these spider-man bad guys to our dimension. Strange wanted to send them back where they would die, but I wanted to cure them, then send them back and give them a chance.

I trapped Strange in the mirror dimension and tried to cure the spider-man bad guys, but then Green Goblin went rogue. I decided to leave out the part where he killed Aunt May. That was too painful to talk about.

Instead, I told him that Ned brought the two other Spider-Men; Peter 2 and Peter 3.

We all met and cured the bad guys, but not before Green Goblin planted a bomb in the magic box that would send everyone home.

It exploded and almost broke the multiverse, so I convinced Strange to finish the spell, but this time, make everyone forget Peter Parker existed.

It took about a half hour telling him everything.

He sank into the chair.

"Strange?"

I started towards him. Was he about to have a heart attack? Because by the look on his face, it was like I practically gave him one.

He shook his head like he was in denial.

"I'm sorry, Peter. I dragged you into all this with that spell."

I knew what he was going to say next. He needed my help. Not backup for later, but now.

Part of me didn't want to go with him. The mind-wiping spell had changed my life so much already. I wasn't ready for more.

But people were in trouble in that dream and I had the power to stop them from getting hurt.

With great power comes great responsibility.

"What do you need me to do?" I asked.

Doctor Strange looked up at me.

"I can't promise you anything, Peter. I don't know whether this will be an investigation lasting one day or a full-on mission that will take several years. But we need to find Wanda Maximoff and get to the bottom of all this."

I smiled.

"If you need me, I'll come with you. I've got nothing left to lose now. I'm ready."

Thanks for reading, guys! The next chapter is coming soon. Thanks for the likes and reviews. And happy fourth of July if you live in the USA.