{Author's Note: Surprise! Another update, but only because this chapter is so short, so don't get too excited, but maybe get a little excited because we've finally reached the scene that motivated me to make this story more than a one-shot. Warning for some mild gore, and also, thanks for all the comments on the previous chapter!}

Peter should have gone back to the school with the others when they'd grown bored of throwing cards, but he wasn't ready to be cooped up for the night in a house filled with sleeping bodies, so he stayed outside by the pond instead and let the breeze hit his face and remind him of a long ago trip to the sea.

That was his first mistake.

His second was believing if he ignored a problem it would go away.

The third wasn't his fault.

Not really.

It was simply a result of who he was and always would be, even if he didn't know it.

Although he seemed to have been inexplicably drawn to it, for reasons he didn't dare voice out loud, he didn't venture close enough to the water to look down at it directly. Eventually, he left the edge of the pond and wandered with only a vague destination in mind, a destination he typically avoided—the woods. Normally, if he was going to venture far, he'd walk (or run) close to the edge of the school grounds, rather than step foot in the woods, but it seemed his feet had a mind of their own that night. Even now, he still didn't enter the woods—perhaps part of him was fighting the force that pulled him to it in the first place—staying on the path just short of it.

As he walked toward the tree line, the darkest part of night arrived, as it always did, and he was once again awake to see it. He might not need sleep, but that didn't mean he reveled in the dark. He wasn't afraid of it exactly, but there was still a primal fear that came with being alone in an expanse of blackness, which was why he normally avoided the woods, where the childish part of him always felt that something sinister lurked, but he didn't let that fear keep him far from the woods that night, not when a much deeper fear, born of visions seen in daylight, forced him away from the water.

Peter paused on the worn dirt path leading into the dark. The tape in his Walkman was sticking again. Jim Croce's voice had become stuck on Tomorrow's Gonna Be a Brighter Day and just kept repeating 'lonely-lonely room,' which was a bit depressing.

Frustrated, he pulled out his headphone, and ejected the tape, thinking he would try the age-old and fool-proof trick of blowing on the cartridge, and if that failed, he would try twisting the tape with his finger and hope he didn't accidentally rip the film.

He held the tape up close to his eye, trying to see what was wrong with it.

And that's when he heard it.

A crunch of a leaf.

Like a footstep . . . in the woods.

Another followed it, and Peter looked up toward the source, not yet truly frightened. Lots of things could make noise in the dark, things that were completely unfrightening in the light of day. It was only the unseen part that made them frightening. But when another crunch followed, it didn't matter if the source was from something completely innocent because there was no light to dispel the fear creeping up along the back of his neck, built on a thousand years of instinct passed down to him in that moment.

So, without consciously deciding to do so, Peter took a step back.

And then another.

He should've run then. He should've listened to his instincts and kept moving backward. He should've high-tailed it out of there as fast as he could and locked himself in his room for the foreseeable future or, better yet, some place without mirrors or windows or any possible reflections.

But whether by his own accord or some external force, he stood, frozen to the spot, as the steps emanating from the woods, from the dark, came closer . . . and closer . . . until the thing from which they came, stepped into the moonlight.

He would never truly be able to describe the horror of it, of what he saw that night, of what stood before him now, but he would hold the picture of it in his mind forever.

It was alive, but not.

Human, but not.

Recognizable, but terrifyingly altered.

A walking corpse.

Decomposing.

The skin—if you could still call it that—falling off the bone.

The clothes were in better shape, but that only added to the horror of it. Because looking at them, he could in fact tell you exactly how long the thing had been in the ground down to the day, the hour, perhaps the minute, even.

This ability was not due to some third latent mutant power, however. No, it was because the Peter Pan collared dress (that she hated), the boots (that she loved), the necklace (that mirrored his own though he never wore it) all belonged to his sister.

His twin.

They were the clothes she'd been buried in, and that meant, that the unrecognizable face that gazed at him with its glowing red eyes from within what was little better than a skull . . . had once belonged to his sister.

Sometime between the thing emerging from the woods, Peter recognizing these things, and the vomit that had become stuck somewhere between his stomach and his mouth, it reached him.

It stood but a foot away. He should've run. He ab-so-lute-ly should have. But sometimes, when you are put in situations of life and death, sometimes you fight, sometimes you run, and sometimes you realize that you are neither brave nor smart, sometimes you are only so terrified that your breath is caught in your chest and you wonder if you are already dead.

And so, when the thing reached toward him, he couldn't move. He couldn't even manage to scream. The only sound was that of his Walkman and its tape slipping from his hand and hitting the ground with a soft thud.

And then he was falling . . . falling through darkness.

Falling through chaos.

Falling through a multiverse of madness.

Falling from one universe to the next.

Escaping one reality, into another.

Leaving a Walkman and a cassette tape lying alone and broken on the ground.

{Author's note: Welp. Wanda finally figured out how to get to Peter—just go all walking dead on him. Nbd. I don't know if the level of decomposition on Wanda's corpse is realistic because I'm a little afraid to google that topic, but we'll pretend it is. Also, shout out to the person who made a comment about Peter's Walkman way back when. You've got some mad foresight.}