Chapter Text
The last memory was one of sacrifice.
Even in the darkness that followed, even through the strange blank silence that came after the spell, that moment refused to disappear. It lingered at the edge of Peter’s awareness like the last frame of a film burned into the projector — sharp, vivid, impossible to forget. He could still see them if he tried hard enough: the broken crown of the Statue of Liberty rising against the night sky, the scaffolding shaking under the strain of a battle that had torn reality itself open, and two familiar figures standing only a few feet away from him, both wearing the same red and blue he had worn for years.
Peter 1 had been watching him carefully, as if he already knew what Peter was about to say. There had been something in his expression — not fear exactly, but understanding. The kind that came when someone recognized the weight of a choice before it was spoken aloud. Peter 2 had looked less calm. His shoulders had been tense, his jaw clenched like he was fighting the decision even before it existed, and yet he hadn’t said anything either. They had both simply waited, the same way everyone else had waited: Doctor Strange, exhausted but still holding the unstable threads of the spell together; MJ and Ned somewhere behind them; an entire world hanging on a fragile line between disaster and repair.
Peter 3 had known, even then, that there was only one answer.
“Make them all forget me.”
The words had not sounded heroic when he said them. They had not echoed dramatically across the battlefield or carried the kind of grand weight that speeches in comic books always seemed to have. If anything, they had sounded strangely small, almost quiet compared to the chaos surrounding them. But they had been enough. Doctor Strange’s eyes had widened just slightly before he nodded, and then the spell had begun in earnest.
Magic, real magic, had never looked simple. It spread through the air like living light, curling and twisting into patterns too complicated for the eye to follow. Golden strands spiraled upward from Strange’s hands, weaving together into something vast and intricate that seemed to stretch far beyond the sky itself. Peter had watched it grow, feeling the wind whip against his face as the fabric of reality began to pull apart and stitch itself back together at the same time. The spell was enormous, far larger than he had imagined it would be, and for a moment he had wondered if something so big could really be built from such a small request.
But that was the point, wasn’t it?
Sometimes the smallest decisions reshaped the largest things.
He had taken one last look at the others then. At the two other Spider-Men who had stood beside him through the chaos of the multiverse, at the friends who had believed in him long after the world had turned against him. The thought had crossed his mind, briefly and painfully, that this would be the last time any of them remembered him. That every joke, every shared battle, every quiet moment on rooftops and subway trains and school hallways would simply vanish from their lives as if it had never happened.
Oddly enough, the realization hadn’t hurt as much as he expected.
Maybe it should have.
Maybe it would have if he’d had more time to think about it.
But the truth was simple: if this fixed everything, if it closed the doors between universes and sent everyone home safely, then it was worth it. Spider-Man had always been about responsibility. About doing the thing that needed to be done even when no one else wanted to do it.
So he had stood there and watched the spell expand, golden light filling the sky in spiraling arcs until it seemed like the stars themselves were caught inside it. The air had begun to twist, bending inward as if reality had suddenly remembered it was only loosely held together. Somewhere nearby, something metallic had collapsed with a loud crash, but the sound had been distant, muffled beneath the growing roar of magic.
And then the spell had reached its peak.
The golden threads folded inward.
The sky itself seemed to tear.
For a single instant, Peter had the strange sensation of falling in every direction at once.
Then there was nothing.
No light.
No sound.
No feeling.
Just a blank emptiness where thought itself seemed to dissolve.
Time stopped existing there. Or maybe Peter simply stopped existing with it. It was impossible to tell. There were no dreams in that place, no sense of motion or rest, only the vague awareness that something had ended and something else had not quite begun yet.
Then, suddenly, something pulled him back.
Peter two woke like a man being dragged violently to the surface after drowning.
His body jerked before his mind caught up with it, muscles convulsing as instinct forced him to breathe. Except when his lungs expanded, the thing that rushed into them was not air but a thick, bitter liquid that burned its way down his throat. The shock of it was immediate and overwhelming, sending a wave of panic through him before he was even fully conscious.
His eyes snapped open.
Green.
The world was green.
At first that was the only detail his mind could process. Everything around him seemed to shimmer through a murky haze, shapes and shadows drifting slowly past as if the room itself were underwater. For several seconds he simply stared, disoriented, trying to understand what he was seeing. Bubbles rose lazily in front of his face. His hair floated around his head in slow strands. His body drifted in the center of a cylindrical glass chamber filled with thick fluid that pressed coldly against his skin.
Then his Spider-Sense exploded.
The sensation hit him like a siren going off inside his skull. For weeks it had been restless, humming quietly in the background during the chaos of the multiverse as if reality itself had been wrong in some subtle, constant way. But this was different. This was not a warning about danger nearby or an incoming attack.
This was something deeper.
Something fundamental.
Every nerve in his body screamed the same message at once.
Something is wrong.
Peter’s mind lurched fully awake.
He tried to inhale again and choked immediately, the liquid flooding deeper into his lungs. Panic surged through him as instinct took over. His arms shot outward, hands slamming against the curved surface of the capsule surrounding him. The impact sent a dull vibration through the glass but nothing more.
For a moment that confused him.
Normally that should have shattered it.
Even tired, even injured, he could break ordinary glass without thinking about it. He had punched through car windows, concrete walls, and steel doors before. The weakness in that impact felt wrong in a way he couldn’t immediately explain.
His Spider-Sense screamed louder.
He kicked.
The movement sent his body spinning awkwardly in the thick fluid, limbs flailing as he tried to orient himself. Everything about the motion felt strange, clumsy, as if his body no longer obeyed him in the way it always had before.
Then he noticed something else.
His arms looked… smaller.
For a second his brain rejected the idea outright. That made no sense. But the evidence was right there in front of him — thin forearms, narrow shoulders, fingers that seemed too short and too soft to belong to someone who had spent years swinging through cities and punching super-villains.
Confusion cut through the panic long enough for a single thought to surface.
That wasn’t right.
But the immediate problem was still survival.
Peter forced himself to focus the way he always did in the middle of a crisis. Panic never helped. Panic got people killed. He had learned that lesson too many times to forget it now. So he drew his legs upward toward his chest, curling his body inside the cramped cylinder until his feet found purchase against the opposite side of the glass.
The position was familiar. He had used it before in worse situations.
Leverage mattered.
Momentum mattered.
Strength wasn’t just about muscle — it was about how you used it.
He pushed.
The capsule groaned.
A thin fracture appeared in the glass directly in front of him.
Hope surged through him like adrenaline.
He pushed again.
CRACK.
The sound echoed through the silent laboratory beyond the glass. The fracture spread outward in a spiderweb pattern as the structural seal of the capsule began to fail. Peter’s lungs burned as he fought the instinct to breathe again.
One more push.
The glass shattered outward with a violent hiss as the chamber depressurized.
Fluid rushed past him in a sudden wave, dragging his body with it as gravity reasserted itself. He tumbled out of the broken capsule and slammed hard onto a grated metal floor, coughing violently as the last of the liquid poured from his lungs.
Cold air filled his chest.
It hurt.
Every breath felt raw and sharp, like inhaling frost.
Peter rolled onto his side, gasping and choking while his body tried to remember how breathing was supposed to work. The lab around him was silent except for the steady drip of green liquid from the shattered capsule behind him.
The air was freezing.
It smelled faintly of rust, ozone, and old chemicals.
And somewhere in the back of his mind, his Spider-Sense was still screaming that something about this place — and about himself — was terribly, impossibly wrong.
For a long moment Peter simply stood there, staring through the glass at the sleeping child inside the capsule, trying to convince himself that what he was seeing actually made sense. It didn’t. Nothing about the situation made sense if he thought about it for more than a few seconds, and yet the evidence was floating right in front of him, suspended in thick green liquid like some strange scientific experiment that had gone very, very wrong.
The boy inside the chamber looked about six years old.
Younger than Peter now appeared to be, but old enough that the resemblance was unmistakable once you looked past the distortion of the glass and the fluid. The shape of the nose, the angle of the jaw, even the slightly messy way the brown hair refused to stay flat against the boy’s head — it was all familiar in a way that made Peter’s chest tighten uncomfortably.
He had seen that face before.
Not in a photograph or a reflection.
In another universe.
The memory rose slowly in his mind, bringing with it the distant sound of wind roaring through broken scaffolding and the glow of unstable magic tearing open the night sky. He remembered standing on the Statue of Liberty beside two other men wearing the same symbol he had worn for years. They had all been older then, all carrying the quiet exhaustion that came with living the life of Spider-Man for far longer than anyone should have to.
One of them had been younger than him.
Sharper, quicker to talk, a little more restless in the way he moved.
Peter had joked with him about their web-shooters while they prepared to fight a group of villains who should have been impossible. They had shared stories about loss, about mistakes, about the strange weight that came with trying to do the right thing even when it never seemed to work out the way you hoped.
Peter- three
Peter blinked slowly, leaning closer to the glass as if getting a better look might somehow change the conclusion his brain had already reached.
Except now peter looked six years old.
The thought would have been ridiculous under normal circumstances, but after everything that had happened with the multiverse, ridiculous had stopped being a reliable way to measure reality.
Peter lifted a hand and pressed it lightly against the side of the capsule. The glass was cold beneath his palm, vibrating faintly with the quiet hum of whatever systems were still keeping the chamber sealed. For a brief second he considered trying to break it open the same way he had shattered his own capsule.
Then he hesitated.
Breaking the glass had nearly drowned him the first time.
If the fluid inside these chambers worked the same way, then shattering it too quickly might force the liquid into the kid’s lungs before he had time to react. The idea made Peter wince slightly. The last thing he wanted was to accidentally hurt someone who was already stuck in this situation.
Especially someone who was technically… him.
His eyes shifted to the row of capsules beside him.
There had been three Spider-Men on the Statue of Liberty.
Which meant there should be three of them here.
Peter stepped away from the glass slowly, his bare feet making soft metallic echoes as he moved toward the final intact chamber at the end of the row. The red emergency lights flickered slightly overhead, casting uneven shadows across the floor as he approached.
The last capsule was smaller than the others.
At first Peter assumed it was just positioned farther away, but when he leaned closer to look inside the reason became obvious immediately.
The figure floating inside it was tiny.
Not just small.
Tiny.
Peter felt his stomach drop.
The child inside the chamber couldn’t have been older than three years old. The little body drifted gently in the fluid, limbs loose in the careless way only toddlers seemed capable of sleeping. Soft curls of dark hair floated around the child’s head, occasionally brushing against the inside of the glass as the liquid shifted.
For several seconds Peter simply stared, unable to process what he was looking at.
Because the baby had his face too.
Younger, rounder, softer in the way toddler features always were, but the resemblance was still obvious enough that there was no room for doubt.
Three Spider-Men.
Now three kids.
One ten.
One six.
One three.
Peter leaned back slowly, running both hands over his face as the full weight of the situation finally caught up with him.
“Okay,” he muttered quietly to himself, the sound echoing faintly through the silent lab. “So… either Strange’s spell went catastrophically wrong…”
He paused, glancing between the two capsules again.
“…or the universe decided to play the weirdest joke ever.”
The six-year-old Peter drifted slightly in the fluid behind him, bumping gently against the side of the glass as a small cluster of bubbles rose toward the top of the chamber. The movement drew Peter’s attention again, and he frowned as he studied the capsule more carefully.
The fluid level looked unstable.
Not leaking exactly.
But shifting.
The same faint tremor he had felt in his own capsule earlier was running through this one now.
Peter’s Spider-Sense tingled faintly.
Not danger exactly.
More like urgency.
He moved quickly to the control panel attached to the side of the chamber. The screen was dark, the interface covered in dust and faint cracks that suggested the system hadn’t been used in years. Still, when he brushed his fingers across the surface, a weak flicker of power sparked through the display.
Old systems sometimes had backup power.
If he was lucky—
The capsule behind him suddenly hissed.
Peter spun around.
A thin line of bubbles rushed toward the surface of the liquid as the seal at the top of the chamber began to loosen with a mechanical click.
Peter’s eyes widened.
“Oh… that can’t be good.”
The chamber started opening.
And this time…
Peter had no idea what was about to happen.
POV: Peter Parker (10 peter two)
Peter barely had time to process the faint mechanical hiss behind him before the capsule released a sharper burst of pressure, the sound echoing through the silent laboratory like something ancient suddenly waking up after years of sleep. The thick green liquid inside the cylinder began to churn as bubbles rushed toward the surface, and the upper seal unlocked with a heavy metallic click that made Peter’s heart jump. For a brief second he simply stared, frozen between instinct and confusion, but the moment the glass panel began sliding open he moved without thinking, crossing the short distance just as the chamber finished releasing its contents.
The liquid poured out first, thick and cold as it spilled across the metal floor, carrying the small body of the six-year-old with it. Peter reached forward on reflex and caught him before gravity could do the rest, stumbling slightly as the kid’s weight dropped into his arms. It wasn’t heavy—far from it—but the sudden motion still forced him to take a step back to keep his balance.
The reaction was immediate.
The younger boy began coughing violently the moment air reached him, his small frame shaking as his lungs fought to clear out the fluid. Peter supported him awkwardly, one hand steadying his back as the coughing continued in short, desperate bursts. He remembered the burning in his own lungs when he had broken out of his capsule, and the memory alone was enough to make him stay patient while the kid struggled to breathe.
After a few long seconds the coughing finally slowed.
The child inhaled sharply.
Then his eyes snapped open.
For a moment neither of them spoke. They simply stared at each other, the quiet of the laboratory pressing in around them while the six-year-old tried to focus on the face hovering above him. There was a moment—just a small one—where recognition began forming behind those eyes.
The kid blinked once.
Then twice.
“Okay…” he rasped finally, his voice hoarse but already carrying that quick, analytical tone Peter remembered from the battle. “Either I hit my head really hard…”
He glanced around the lab, then back at Peter.
“…or the multiverse just got even weirder.”
Peter let out a slow breath that was dangerously close to a laugh.
“Yeah,” he admitted quietly. “That’s… pretty much what I was thinking too.”
Before either of them could figure out what to say next, another sound interrupted the moment.
A softer click echoed from the far end of the row of capsules.
Both of them turned their heads at the same time.
The smallest cylinder in the room had begun to unlock.
Unlike the previous one, the mechanism moved slowly, as if the old machinery was struggling to complete the process after years of disuse. The seal released with a quiet hiss, and the green liquid inside the chamber began draining downward in uneven currents. Neither of the older boys moved at first, watching silently as the fluid level dropped lower and lower until the tiny shape floating inside finally became clear.
The figure was much smaller than either of them.
Too small.
When the panel finally slid open, the little body inside tipped forward slightly with the shift of gravity.
Peter reacted immediately, stepping forward and catching the toddler before he could fall.
Up close, the kid looked impossibly young. Damp curls clung to his forehead while his small chest rose and fell unevenly, as if he were still adjusting to breathing real air again. Peter instinctively shifted his grip to support him more securely, holding the toddler carefully while the tiny body stirred in his arms.
The baby coughed once.
Then again.
A moment later he let out a small, confused whimper.
The sound echoed softly through the lab.
Peter felt the six-year-old beside him go completely still.
Both of them stared down at the toddler now blinking groggily up at the dim red emergency lights, his expression unfocused and sleepy in the way only very young children could manage.
For several seconds none of them spoke.
The abandoned laboratory remained silent around them, illuminated only by the dull glow of emergency lighting reflecting off rows of empty capsules and rusted machinery. In the middle of that forgotten room stood three children who, only hours earlier, had been three different Spider-Men fighting side by side across collapsing universes.
Now they were ten.
Six.
And barely three years old.
Peter shifted the toddler slightly in his arms to keep him from slipping, his mind still trying to catch up with the absurdity of the situation.
He had expected a lot of things when the spell was cast.
This definitely hadn’t been one of them.
Somewhere in the distance, deeper within the abandoned facility, an old piece of machinery emitted a faint mechanical hum as dormant systems slowly came back to life.
And standing there between two younger versions of himself, Peter suddenly realized something that made the entire situation feel even stranger.
Whatever had happened to them…
They're not in Kansas anymore