Chapter Two: Hope is What We Crave

A/N: So, according to an internet quiz, Thanos killed me. It is really very unbelievable and makes me doubt what I read on the internet, but it also makes it weird for me to be writing this fanfic and even weirder for you to be reading it. Maybe we can all be in denial and pretend the internet is wrong? (So that you can keep reading this fanfic.) Those screenwriters better bring everyone back in the next movie. Chapter title from 4K&C. Posted August 21, 2018.

"Time to get up, Miles," his dad said, shaking his twin-mattress.

"Da-a-ad…," Miles mumbled stuffing his pillow over his head.

"You're getting up. You know the bus doesn't come by here yet and I have to get to the station." Miles' dad was Sergeant Davis of the NYPD. Usually Miles mom would get him up, but she'd disappeared into dust two months ago – along with half the world's people and consequently Ganke and half of the high-schoolers in New York City. To save costs, the city had closed half the schools. Miles' school was closed and he was re-assigned to a school that focused on journalism. This was bad, very bad for a secretly super-powered teenager who was still getting used to his powers and feared being discovered.`

Three months ago, he'd been bitten by a spider at his Uncle Aaron's place and seemed to have similar powers to the Spider-man. He could stick to walls and was super-strong but he didn't have webbing. He could also shock people with spider-venom from his fingers and camouflage himself to be semi-invisible, but he had a very hard time controlling it. The other week he'd accidentally shocked someone's pet cat, and after that he was afraid to touch anybody else.

Miles dad pulled the blanket off the bed. "I'm getting up, I'm getting up." Miles said, yawning.

"I'll believe that when I see it," His dad retorted. His dad strode over to the window and threw open the curtains. "This city's too quiet, now, it feels tense."

"Guess so," Miles said, stretching.

"I mean, it's like something worse is going to happen. Miles, you need to be careful. Anticipate what could go wrong and make plans ahead of time. Do that –"

"-Because that's what you would do," Miles said, rolling his eyes. "Yes, I know, but it's your job to worry."

"I just want you safe."

"I know, I know," Miles said grabbing his clothes from the clean-clothes pile in his closet and scooting off to the bathroom.

"Meet me in the car in five minutes. I'll bring those nachos you didn't eat last night."

"'kay."

Miles hurriedly finished in the bathroom, and was washing his face when the towel started sticking to his face because of his not so always awesome spider powers. He yanked it a couple times before it came off, leaving lint stuck to his face. He wondered if the Spider-man had these sort of problems. No one had seen him since he was seen hitching a ride on a space-rocket, but he'd be the perfect person to ask about his new spider-powers. He was probably in Wakanda with all the other superheroes thinking of their next plan.

Meanwhile, Miles felt like he was wasting everything. What if there was some way he could help the Avengers? There had to be something they could do: half the world couldn't just stay dead. But here, after the initial shock wore down, the common advice was to just accept that everyone was gone and just press on. "It will be easier this way," television personalities insisted. Motivational speakers tried to get by telling people that if they'd survived all this, they definitely couldn't give up now. For Miles, it was hard to believe his mother was dust as no one had actually seen her disintegrate. Miles grabbed his book-bag and went down to the car. The traffic wasn't too bad, which was the only upside of this whole tragedy.

Miles' didn't hear his dad wish him a good day, he didn't hear the dribbling of the basketballs around the side of the school, and he barely heard the chatter of kids waiting on the steps of the school for the doors to officially open because he was so deep in thought. Classes passed by in inane blur as the time dropped down one second at a time.

Then he went to government class. It was speech week and the students were giving, or trying to give, ten minute presentations. Miles' presentation was at the end of the week, so he felt he could just ride this class period through, but he was wrong.

A girl – Trish Morevend – he thought (it was hard to remember everyone's names what with the schools being mixed up) began talking about the tragedy.

"What we need is to just go ahead and redistribute the property of those that were turned to dust. I know, property redistribution sounds heartless; but if you think about it, you'll agree with me. There are a number of houses and apartments sitting empty in New York, with no one left to live in them. There are also a large number of people currently living in substandard, old housing. It will be years before the courts are able to figure out who is the closest living relative to inherit these houses. I propose, that we make things fair. We shouldn't wait. When we wait, no one benefits. We should give these houses to those that are currently in bad housing arrangements, that way things are more equalized between the rich and the poor."

"Socialism," said the teacher. "Supports you, but you will need more to your argument for people here to vote for it. Also, a lot of people still believe that the people that turned to dust will come back to life."

"That's what the Avengers say," Trish said. "But they haven't brought them back yet. The missing people are dead. This childish belief that everything can be perfect in a blink of an eye is not helping us. We need property redistribution today."

Miles blinked hard to keep a tear away. He'd heard some passing references to things like this on the television, but somehow hearing his classmate's adamant assertion that his mother was dead and not coming back brought it home. Then he heard a snap, he looked down and saw that he'd broken his pencil in two and that he was unconsciously holding his hand in a fist. He opened his hand and the pieces fell onto the desk. It was bizarre how strong he'd become without even realizing it. Maybe he should be out there, being a spider-man, but he didn't know what he was doing and wasn't very sure of his own superpowers yet. What if he beat a bad-guy up really bad? He just wanted to stop the bad guys, not kill them.

What he needed was advice. The original Spider-man was missing in action and the Avengers were not answering their phones. Miles had called a couple of times just to get a standard voice-mail asking if he wanted to speak to a Stark Industries representative. To tell the truth, he hadn't really been following the superhero news. Some little kids wanted to be superheroes when they grew up, Miles had never wanted to. His parents had been very practical and told him to use his brain over brawn when it came to a career. So Miles had no idea how to be a Spider-man.

School came to an end. Miles started walking to the library to do his homework until his dad picked him up after his shift at the police station (the buses at this new school didn't run to Miles' neighborhood), but then something changed his mind. Glancing over his shoulder he heard another teen's phone chirping something about Tony Stark coming back from space. There wasn't any excuse to put it off any longer, he sneaked back into the now empty school gymnasium and started practicing action moves he thought were spider-mannish; a lot of jumping onto and off walls and climbing on the roof. One thing he couldn't practice, though, was working with webbing. Try as he might, he couldn't get webbing to shoot out of his wrists. He couldn't be a Spider-man without his own webbing, he'd be more like "Gecko-man" and that wouldn't scare bad guys at all. Maybe the Avengers would know what to do. He decided that somehow, someway, he would contact them.

〇

May Parker had been waiting.

She'd been waiting ever since she overheard her co-workers talking about the spaceship floating by New York City and the superheroes that had been seen going towards it.

She waited for Ned Leeds to finish her banana nut bread she'd brought when she picked him up from school and he explained when he'd last seen Peter. She'd driven Ned to his apartment only to hear from his dad that he'd barely made it through their front door before turning into dust.

And now, as soon as she had heard that Tony Stark had crash-landed in Australia and was coming back to New York, she drove up to the Avengers' Complex upstate. She tried to ignore the gnawing logic in her brain that Tony Stark wasn't answering his phone because he only had bad news.

One of Stark's employees offered her something to eat… but she couldn't eat it. Instead, she sat in the Avenger's den flipping through the magazines that lay on the coffee table but not really reading any of them.

Time passed so slowly…

She heard the screech of the Quinjet landing outside.

She took some deeps breaths, not that they'd help, but she'd been told in the past that she didn't come off well when frustrated. She got up and started pacing, she couldn't see the runway outside so she couldn't see who had gotten off of that plane.

Her tension built while she waited, it was like she had tunnel vision. She sat down, she needed to distract herself and keep it together.

Then Tony Stark walked into the room alone.

He wasn't wearing his typical business suit or his cold iron armor, he was dressed in a pullover and sweatpants. His hair was shaggy and he wore the beginnings of a beard to rival Captain America's.

He sat stiffly on the sofa.

"I'm sorry, May," he cleared his choked up throat. "Peter's gone."

He winced as Aunt May jerked a hand over her mouth.

"You saw the news… about half the population disappearing… There was this alien, Thanos, we were trying to stop him, but we lost and he became powerful enough to kill people with the snap of his fingers."

Tony almost felt that he was making it worse, by explaining these things to her. He tried to tell himself it had to be explained. He subconsciously scooted closer to her tense corner of the sofa.

"Peter disappeared too." Tony's eyes drifted, his mind still far away on the planet Titan. "It was… he was… I think with his spider-powers, he lasted a little longer than the others we were with."

"Where were you?"

"A planet called Titan. Peter had followed me onto that ring spaceship that invaded New York. It landed on Titan."

Tears welled in her eyes and Tony's red eyes re-stung, he put an arm over her shoulder, cringing as his mind flashed back to a year ago when he'd been joking that he hoped she was wearing something inappropriate. He looked at her face now and realized she was more than that; she was crying but she was also brave.

And that's why when bad things happened, Peter Parker never gave up – because his aunt wouldn't either.

May Parker was a rather determined woman, and she had lost others before now. They sat for a few hours as Tony Stark recounted everything he knew. He knew that for everything he told her, she probably had ten more questions, but she deserved to know and that this was her way of coming to grips with the tragedy.

Later Tony realized recounting and putting into words what he had wrestled with for the past two months had helped him too. Even though Peter and his aunt weren't related by blood, there was something about them that was the same. Speaking with her was almost like hearing her say, "I can take it, give me a chance. It will be okay."

But how could Tony Stark believe it was okay? That's what he'd told Peter, and now, Peter wasn't coming back.