The next day passed in the same haze of numbness. It was still raining, but this time he had no motivation to go out. He had no motivation to get out of bed at all. He had plans today. He needed to get food, his stock was getting dangerously low with only two muesli bars and a single apple left.
But he didn't feel like eating, so what was the point of forcing his tired body to get out of bed and out to the shops. And yet something in him wanted to get up. But the cries to find people, to call Steve, Bucky, Gwen or even Weasel and tell them he needed help was quickly squashed by a feeling Peter struggled to explain.
It was almost like he felt, nothing. Nothing at all. And yet he felt everything, so much. His feelings screamed at him, overlapping, fighting for dominance. Fighting to be heard and understood. But the sounds mixed together until the overbearing sound of yelling that hurt Peter's ears became one noise, which eventually became white noise. Playing on repeat in his mind until it slowly fizzled away.
He felt everything so much, and yet he felt nothing at all.
I need to eat, Peter tried to reason with his mind, to eat we need to move, he pleaded with his body. But both ignored him. He just wanted the yelling to stop. He wanted to know what he felt, he wanted his life to make sense. He wanted the pain to finally end.
Peter traced the cracks in the wall next to his bed with his fingertips. Grazing over the exposed brick that made up his wall. Peter tried to focus on it, to make it all he felt. The wall was coarse, and a sharp edge cut his finger causing it to bleed. A small drop of blood ran down his finger, then his hand until it finally dropped down to the floor. And yet he couldn't find it in him to care.
His stomach growled, he didn't care.
His finger bled, he didn't care.
He had things to do, places to be, he didn't care.
He should care, but he didn't.
What was the point of caring? His hope and wishes for things to be one way wouldn't change the outcome. The rain didn't stop because he loved the sun more.
Oh, the sun.
Peter glanced at its reflection that shone in the broken window near his bed. It was shining bright despite the pouring rain. It always shone, even when it's covered.
Did you know the sun is almost entirely made up of hydrogen and helium? Peter remembered the day they first started studying stars and the sun in his primary school science class. He remembered learning that the sun was just a big ball of burning gas 149 million miles away, and it just shines a light onto everyone. And the longer it burns, the more it will exhaust the atoms necessary to burn—and one day it will implode. It will have nothing else to give.
Peter remembered one of the kids asking why the sun stayed so far away if it was so important. They were children then, they didn't understand that the sun didn't choose where it sat. So instead, their teacher had said;
"It stays so many miles away because if anything gets too close it will die. It's protecting everything it helps because it knows getting close will kill them so it burns itself up to help others from afar."
It sounded like the start of a sad, forbidden love story. Like Romeo and Juliet, only the world and the sun as the protagonists.
The memory got Peter thinking, no one really talks about the sun and how much the world needs it, because it's always just there. It's always there and the world won't realise how much it needs it until it's gone.
Maybe that's people Peter thought, maybe some people are just so good that they are the sun. They think they will hurt those who get close so they burn themselves up to give life and light from afar.
But why do people do that?
Why did he do that?
Why do people push themselves away from people they need help from? Why do we all think we are terrible people who don't deserve love? Or are some people just destined to give love and burn themselves up for the world without anyone noticing or getting any love back?
Cause that's the other thing about the sun, it doesn't look like it's slowly dying—but it is, that's a fact, scientifically proven. And people are too, Peter thought. Everyone just smiles and laughs like they are all completely fine, but no one is fine. But no one wants to talk about it.
Is that because we all think we are supposed to be the sun? Because we think letting others in will only end in them burning to death, so no one thinks they deserve to be happy or to let people in?
And then there is the moon.
People always notice the moon because it is so bright at night but it isn't the one really shining. No, it only reflects the bright glow from the sun when people can obviously see they need light. But during the day, when there is no praise to be sung, the moon is gone. And sometimes people are moons, getting all the praise for light that isn't theirs.
What was Peter? Was he a moon tricked into thinking he could be a sun? Did that make him a bad person? Was he a bad person? Did he deserve the chance to go back to a time before the shit of the world he came from? What did he ever do to deserve it?
He didn't save Mr. Stark, he was a coward. He always messed things up. The ferry, the Vulture, Thanos, Uncle Ben. Did he deserve to be alone?
Peter's thoughts spiralled. He was stuck in the prison of his mind, a prison he had built from his own guilt and loneliness. Trying to claw his way out with his own hands. His mind was a cage.
He should want to get up.
He should want to do something.
And yet he didn't. He had no energy to find the help he probably needed. He had nothing but his thoughts. Thoughts and unanswered questions.
"Why me," Peter asked, out loud into the emptiness. "Why am I always the one left to try and fix everything. When is it my turn to rest?"
His voice started to waver, the emotions he still didn't understand finding their way into his words. Peter knew he was talking to air, he didn't expect a response.
"It is you because it has to be."
Peter shot up and looked around the room, still sitting on his bed. That was the voice, the voice that started this all. The voice that ripped him from his time and sent him here, alone.
"What does that mean!?" Peter cried out.
Suddenly, Peter's world went black. His eyes sunk back into his head. He expected to feel the cushions he was lying on as his body fell back, but the impact never came. Instead, it felt as though his body was floating. Something was holding his eyes shut, a tiny pressure on his eyelids he couldn't explain.
Until, the very pressure that held Peter's eyes closed ripped them open. Taking a deep breath as his eyes were forced open, Peter looked around at the place he had been dropped into.
It looked like the night sky?
The entire world around him was a dark, almost black, navy blue that was littered with what Peter could only describe as stars. He wasn't standing on the floor either, he was floating in the middle of the stars, or at least it looked like it. It felt like he was standing on an invisible marble floor.
Peter's whole body was frozen in place, where was he?
"I am sorry, Peter Parker, that you have lived a life of sorrow. I am sorry to have added to your pain, but it was necessary," the voice called out. Unlike the other times Peter had heard it, it wasn't a whisper in his ear but an overpowering, thundering voice. And yet, despite its volume, the voice still somehow came across as sincere and almost soft.
"If you have the power to send me back, why not fix things yourself?" Peter growled bitterly.
"It is not my place to choose what changes–" the voice began, only for Peter to cut it off, screaming into the void.
"Bullshit! You chose to change my life! You can choose to change everyone's life!"
There was a moment of silence, as if the voice didn't know how to respond. In those moments of silence, Peter worried that he was simply imagining all of this. That this place, this voice, was just a delusion created by his brain to try and give him a sense of purpose.
"It matters not now, what's done is done. Now you must live to fix the pains you and the world lived through," the voice finally called out. Its voice was calm and seemingly unbothered by Peter's emotions.
"My pain? No, I have been sent to fix everyone else's! If this was meant to fix mine, my family would know who I was, my parents would be alive. I wouldn't live in an abandoned building, living off of the few bits of food I can barely afford and getting beat up in alley ways!" Peter screamed, he was done pretending everything was ok, nothing was ok. Why didn't this entity see that?
"It may not seem like a good thing now, but it is necessary. Living like this–"
"If this is living then I don't want to live!" Peter screamed, tears pooling in his eyes. He fell to his knees, cradling his body with his arms in an attempt to comfort himself, "I don't want to live like this."
Peter couldn't take it, tears started to stream down his cheeks. Dripping down his face then falling and disappearing into the void. He didn't want the burden anymore. He had carried enough in his lifetime.
Was he destined to be Sisyphus? Forever pushing a rock, his burdens, up a hill only to end up back where he started.
"Please, just send me home. I want to go home. Please," Peter whispered out, his gaze dropping to the floor.
"For what it is worth, I am sorry. But there are some things that even I cannot change. You cannot be sent home until your deed is complete," The voice spoke back. Peter dared to say that it sounded sincere. Peter thought he heard the sound of wind blowing past his ears. He looked up through his messy hair.
In front of him, stood something Peter had never seen before. Considering Peter had fought aliens, people dressed as vultures and mad titans, that was saying a lot. It looked like it had the shape of a human, and yet it was entirely made of a grey smoke.The figure leaned down and placed its hand on Peter's cheek, tilting his head up to look at them.
"You must strive to live," the voice spoke.
"What if I fail?" Peter asked, unable to meet the hollow eyes of the voice.
"I don't know, for that reason alone, you must not. The fate of a world rests on your shoulders. Find the people who will help you bear the burden, or collapse under its pressure." the voice concluded.
Peter noticed that the hand on his cheek had left. Looking up, the voice's smoke-like body was starting to disappear. Peter stood up, looking at the evaporating smoke.
"No, no, no you can't leave. I have so many questions!" Peter pleaded.
"And yet, I have very little answers and even less time," it answered back as it began to fade.
"Will we speak again?" He asked as only the shoulders up of the body remained.
"I don't know, will we?" The voice said before completely disappearing into the void.
Peter cried out for it to come back, to answer his questions. To save him. But the voice didn't return. Peter began to feel suffocated by the deafening silence of the emptiness.
But Peter was alone. Again.
He tried to wipe away his tears with his hand. When Peter blinked, he was back in his bed, in his home.
He would make it a home. He had to. He had no choice. He couldn't go back to the place he once called home, so he would have to make his own.
He wasn't the sun, or the moon. He was a person. And that wasn't bad. Peter wasn't better or ok, he wasn't sure he ever would be. In fact, he was so sure he was going to crack under the weight of his burden before he ever got the chance to say he was ok and mean it.
If he waited to be ready, he would wait forever. Perhaps he had to start letting people in, slowly.
Maybe it was time to be a hero again.