Chapter Text
"Cindy?" Mr Harrington asked.
"Here, sir."
"Abe?"
"Present."
"Peter?"
Silence.
"Peter?! Oh, not again. Ned, do you know where he went?"
"No, sir."
"Did anyone see where Peter went? Anyone? Oh lord, please don't let me lose another one!"
"Sir, what do we do about the alien ship?" Someone asked nervously.
"Nothing we can do," Mr Harrington said matter of factly as the giant black donut began to rise back into the sky. "It's leaving now anyway. But where has Peter gone? We're on a bus, there's nowhere to go!"
Ned gazed out of the window at the spaceship, and crossed his fingers that his best friend wasn't on it.
The trip was interesting enough, but nobody could focus on work when videos of the fight that had just occurred were going viral all over the internet. Ned watched one on his phone as he pretended to read an exhibit, and winced as he saw the red blob clinging to the side of the ascending ship. Apparently Iron Man had gone up too.
Ned prayed he'd see his friend again.
They went back home, Mr Harrington still making frantic phone calls to try and locate his missing student, but in vain. They went home, and the next day they went back into school. Still no word from the missing student, or any sign of Iron Man's return. To take the student's minds off it, as it was obvious nobody was going to concentrate in class, the school hosted a football competition, complete with brass band.
Before the game could even start, a mad titan snapped his fingers and half of all life in the universe was wiped from existence.
In the chaotic and miserable five years that followed, Peter's mysterious absence in the days before the event that was come to be known as the Snap, was completely forgotten.
However, five years after their disappearance, everybody who'd been gone was Snapped back into existence, exactly as they had left it. For those who returned, the absence of their classmate was fresh in their minds, and those who had stayed were quickly reminded of it when he still didn't show up for the mandatory reorientation classes in the days after the return. Mr Harrington, who had thought he'd gotten away with the whole ordeal, began to despair for his career.
There were some conspiracies that Peter had never been Snapped, and had been living his life in exile in Peru all these years. Ned's worried theory was a lot darker - they'd still heard nothing concerning the Avengers other than that only Iron Man had returned from space during the five-year interlude - but Spider-Man had not been seen again. Ned had no idea whether his friend was even still alive, or stranded in the depths of space somewhere, dying.
One week and three days later, Peter showed up in the school corridor with red eyes and Ned practically squeezed the life out of his best friend. Nobody said it to his face, but the whole school was whispering about where he'd been all this time. Several teachers pulled him aside to ask if he was okay, and he just nodded and smiled weakly and moved on.
A large hotel on the edge of the city had offered to temporarily house those displaced by the blip. Ned's dad hadn't been snapped, so he could still live in his old house, but an elderly couple had moved into Peter's apartment during his absence, so like many others in a similar situation, he and May were living in the hotel.
Decathlon was surprisingly still a thing, although Peter didn't attend it the first week he was back. They did no work; all anyone could think about was Peter.
Naturally, Betty had volunteered to head the school's effort to make sure everybody had somewhere to live, which meant she had access to certain data from the hotel. "He's registered there, but he's only checked in twice," she told them excitedly. "His aunt is always checked in overnight, but Peter often isn't, and once he checked in at 3 in the morning."
"So where is he staying?" Was the big question. Only Ned knew the answer - he'd been spending a lot of extra time on patrol to clear his head, or staying with Pepper and Morgan.
However, life was pretty crazy and they all found more pressing matters to concern themselves with, at least for a couple of months. By then, the governments of the world had partially pulled themselves together and were making use of the thousands of cameras that had been installed almost everywhere in the past five years to sort out disputes over property rights and housing shortages. They were requesting that anyone who was notified that their location upon being Snapped back was not documented was to inform their area official of wherever it was.
Betty, being Peter's area official, was ecstatic. She even created a new club for the sole purpose of basically stalking Peter. It had all the same members as Decathlon, apart from Ned, Flash and obviously Peter.
"So today I had to go around finding everyone who wasn't registered and asking them to tell me where they were when they snapped back," she explained. "The fact that Peter's on that list is insane - there are cameras everywhere these days, he must have been somewhere super obscure!"
"Don't you know where he was then?" Somebody asked, confused. Betty shook her head.
"He was one of only two people who didn't tell me immediately. Of course, eventually the government will trace the footage back to the last known sighting, but it'll be faster if they know where to start."
"So what did he say?"
"He said he needed to check with someone, and he'd tell me tomorrow."
The next day, they reconvened at the same spot.
"So?" Someone asked apprehensively.
"Okay, I have big news, and I'm not sure how to process it," Betty said slowly.
"Where was he?" Somebody said eagerly.
"Still don't know."
"What?!"
"He said he'd gotten in touch with people and it had all been sorted out. About ten minutes later I got a call and was told to cross Peter off my list."
"How-?"
"That's not even the strangest thing. You know how I had access to the records for the refugee hotel? Well, I pulled some strings and managed to see them again. Peter's aunt was there from before we left school yesterday until it started this morning, but he didn't go home all night. So it must have been someone else he 'got in touch' with."
"Should we tell someone about this?" Someone fretted. "If Peter's dodging the system..."
"No," Betty shook her head. "We need solid proof. Once I chase up the last guy who wouldn't tell me where she was, I'll be going to a meeting with the district supervisor. I'll see if I can get any information there."
Betty's meeting was a week later, and she texted them all an hour afterwards telling them to meet her in the computing room after school.
"Okay, so this might be slightly illegal, so we need to be fast," she said quietly. "The supervisor was really friendly, answered all of my questions including some slightly classified ones, but when I mentioned Peter she totally clammed up. When I pressed her, saying I was concerned about him, she admitted that she didn't know much at all, only that someone important had contacted her boss's boss's boss and she was told they had sufficient evidence and to cross him off the list with immediate effect."
"What?" Everyone was wide-eyed.
"And here I thought he was just sneaking off to stay with a secret lover or something."
"Yeah, this is deep. Really deep. I'm not sure I want to know."
"So what do we do now? Do we just have to accept that we'll never know?"
"About that..." Betty winced and pulled out a memory stick. "I may have slightly stolen the supervisor's files."
"WHAT?!"
When they all calmed down, they agreed that they needed to know. They plugged the stick into a laptop and pulled up the files of everyone in the district with minimal difficulty. Betty selected one to see the layout. The folder contained a scan of a birth certificate, passport photo, and any other important documentation, as well as a video. Betty opened it. It was clearly from a camera on a street corner, so the angle was bad, but the footage zoomed in on one of the many people reforming. It was time-stamped, and there was no volume. There was a caption with the camera's ID code and location, and the clip only lasted about 30 seconds.
Betty exited the folder and pulled up a search for Parker, P. To their slight disappointment, his file looked just like all the others. Betty double clicked on it, and it opened. Peter's passport photo stared back at them, alongside a file named Birth Certificate, and a video file named 'Post-blip location'. Just the same as the other folders.
"Well?" Abe asked. "Are we going to look at the video or not?"
Pretty much everyone in the room had a sinking feeling that they'd let their paranoia and conspiracy get ahold of them, and that feeling only grew when the video started playing to show Peter outside his apartment door, knocking. It opened, revealing an old lady, who was pushed out of the way by his flustered aunt, who hugged Peter tightly and pulled him inside. The clip ended.
"Oh." Betty exited the video player, and sat staring blankly at the screen. "well."
"No," Abe shook his head suddenly, breaking out of his disappointment. "If this was real, why wouldn't he just tell you?"
"He hasn't exactly been himself lately, maybe he just-"
"No. Open the video again."
Betty did as she was told, then moved out of the way so Abe could take a look. He pulled up the code and scrolled through it, squinting, for several minutes. The others started murmuring conversations, which were interrupted by Abe's frustrated grunt.
"There's nothing there," he said incredulously. "The whole file's clean, it hasn't been tampered with at all. There has to be something we're missing..." His gaze drifted across the screen again, then he leapt up.
"What is it?" MJ asked from the back of the group where she'd been reading.
"What time was everyone blipped back?" Abe asked.
"Thirty three minutes past two in the afternoon, everyone knows that," Betty said. "Why is that important?"
"Look at the time stamp," Abe pointed at the screen. The image was slightly smaller due to the window of code at the side of the screen, but the writing was still clear.
"14:46," Betty read. "So? He must have just reformed outside of a camera zone and this is the first recorded footage. He must have been really nearby, you can't get far in 13 minutes, and some people took longer to blip back than others."
"No," Abe shook his head. "Look at the date."
They did, and there was a collective gasp. The clip was dated two days after the blip happened.
"Curiouser and curiouser," someone muttered.
"What now?" Cindy asked. "This was our last resort."
"I don't know." Betty hit the back button, taking them back to Peter's file page. She went to hit back again, but Abe said,
"Stop!"
Betty froze. The code was still open at the side of the page, and Abe peered closer. "There," he said, leaning in and pointing. "There's a recently deleted file."
He pulled the keyboard towards himself and started typing furiously. A few minutes later, the file had been recovered, and without any encryption due to it having been deleted, they were able to open it immediately. It was another video file, this one much larger. When opened, it displayed a screen recording of a PC of some description. The mouse moved around a bit, but not much else happened.
"Is there volume?" Cindy asked. They turned up the speakers as loud as they dared, and started it from the beginning. A bored voice started narrating.
"Worker 479, starting post-blip footage search for Mr Peter Parker. First identifiable sighting so far, two days after the blip on camera 97567." The clip they'd just watched was pulled up on screen. "Scanning clothing, searching perimeter cameras ten seconds previously... Match found, camera 97565." The screen switched to a street view of Peter, his face partially obscured by his hood, walking into the building. "Searching perimeter cameras..."
The clip continued in this way, tracing Peter's route backwards to the train station, then on a train until he got on, and then back to him getting out of an expensive looking car. The car was traced along the roads, the routes getting smaller and more obscure as they neared the beginning of their journey, until there was a distinct sound of a phone ringing.
"Yes?" The on-screen voice asked, pausing the repetitive search. "Yes, sir. Pardon me, sir? Oh. Yes. Where was he, then? Oh. Why not- Yes, no, I understand. Thank you, sir." The phone was put down and the tabs on the screen began to close. "Search for Mr Peter Parker terminated with immediate effect."
The video ended.
Every stared, not entirely sure what they'd seen.
"Where was he?" Evidently he hadn't been in some drug den or hiding out in a basement - that car had looked very expensive, and he'd come a long way.
"There's nothing out there," Cindy frowned, pulling up the Google maps site for the last area Peter had been tracked to and scrolling along in the direction the route he'd been taking would have come from. "Just a bunch of fields."
Betty sighed. "I need to take the stick back tomorrow, so I guess we'll just never know."
"Hang on... When do you need to take it back?" Abe asked slowly.
"The follow-up meeting is after school, why?"
"Can I keep the files until then?"
Abe worked all night and through some of school the next day, but finally he ran up to Betty at the gates at the end of the day.
"Here, I've done it," he said. Betty thanked him and went to her meeting.
The next day, Abe texted the group telling them to come to his immediately.
"It's been plugged in," he said with a wild look in his eyes. "I'm in the system." He showed them his laptop, where he'd been able to access the files on the computer the virus had been plugged into, and with some work, the network.
"Do a search for the whole server for Peter Parker," Charles pushed.
Abe nodded and did so. There were hundreds of results, but a few extra filters and they had it narrowed down to recent files. He navigated into a file similar to the one they'd seen before, but with considerably more information. Several of the files were labelled as classified and were password protected, but they ignored those in favour of opening the Post-Blip folder. Inside were the videos they'd seen before - labelled 'Official_Post-Blip_location' and 'Searchforpostbliplocation_TERMINATED'. Below these were three other files: a text file, a video and a photo.
Cindy commandeered the mouse and tried to open the file called 'Actual_Post-Blip_location.txt'. It took all of their expertise and over an hour to get past the encryption, but finally the file was opening.
It was a text file, completely blank but for one word in capitals: TITAN.
"Titan?" Betty repeated. "Is that some kind of code name?" The other shook their heads, equally puzzled. All that encryption - for what? One cryptic word?
"Try the video," Charles encouraged. Abe shook his head at the screen as the new encryption page came up.
"We can't hack this. It's next-level."
"Maybe we can't... but I know someone who might be able to."
Whilst they were waiting for Ned to reply, they noticed something else.
"Is that... SHIELD's symbol?" Betty gasped, pointing. At the corner of the password window was a small image of a bird.
"It is! Didn't they disband? And what would they have to do with Peter's file?"
Cindy's phone pinged and they all leaned over to see Ned's reply.
Hi Cindy!
It's great to see you're trying something new and this is really complicated stuff you're doing :O
Not sure how well it'll work without more specifics about the project, but here's the code you need:
"Yes!" Abe punched the code into the computer and they watched in anticipation as a series of warnings flashed up one after the other.
SHIELD: TOP SECRET
WARNING: Highly Classified
Clearance Level K ONLY
Finally the file opened and began to play. It appeared to be a CCTV camera, looking out on part of what appeared to be a large white room, with one wall of glass in the corner of the screen overlooking a large grass area.
Abe turned up the volume and checked the video was actually playing. Nothing happened for a few seconds, then there a flash and suddenly the area was dark. The camera was cracked and fuzzy but still filming, and the audio had cut out completely. A white time stamp appeared, overlaid on the original footage. 2:41pm on the day of the blip. Avengers Compound CCTV, camera 12.
"What the..." someone breathed.
For a few minutes, there was minimal movement on the screen, then something must have shifted, because the murky darkness suddenly fell away to reveal a landscape of rubble and chaos. If the camera had been in the Avengers Compound, then the building had been completely decimated. There was movement, and an indistinguishable figure appeared in the distance mid-screen.
"There must have been a mix-up with the files," someone murmured. "No way this has anything to do with Peter."
Nobody else dared to breathe. This was footage of the events that had taken place right after the Blip. They knew they shouldn't be seeing this, but it was spectacular. Because of the way the camera had fallen, they had a view of almost the whole battlefield. The person stood for a moment, looking at something they couldn't see. The unmistakable silhouettes of Captain America and Iron Man joined him from behind. Cindy sucked in a breath - seeing the hero mere minutes before his death was a shock.
A minute passed, then lightning flashed, revealing the first person to be Thor. The next few minutes consisted of the three heroes battling something just off-screen with everything they had, and failing. Iron Man fell first, then Thor. Captain America kept running in and getting thrown back. Finally he stood up, looking defeated but determined. An orange sparkle appeared in the air beside him, and became a glowing portal. Three figures walked through, too far away to be clear. Everybody watched, barely daring to breathe. Despite knowing what was going to happen next, they could not stifle the sense of awe that rose inside them as portal after portal began to appear, until an entire army was stood behind the three Avengers.
The two armies charged towards each other, and in the commotion a piece of rubble was knocked over the camera, obscuring the view. Abe groaned, and skipped forward through the video until there was movement again. There was a blinding flash, then the rubble was knocked sideways as a pale Iron Man stumbled into a sitting position less than a metre from the camera, half of his face burnt-looking. Betty put a hand over her mouth to cover her cry, and Charles looked away, shaking his head, "I can't watch this."
A metal suit of armour appeared in front of the hero, faceplate retracting to reveal it was War Machine. The man knelt before his friend, saying something, hand going out to support Tony's head. Cindy blinked away tears, but they were all watching when Colonel Rhodes moved back and Peter's dirty face appeared in his place. The image wasn't great and the movement blurred it when Abe lunged for the pause button, but it was unmistakably their classmate.
On the battlefield.
With the Avengers.
"What?" Cindy breathed, eyes wide. It hadn't all been a mistake. There was something going on here. Peter had been there when the Avengers defeated Thanos. When Iron Man died. How???
With a shaky breath, Abe pressed play again. Peter kept talking, seeming to cry over the dying man. The could see he was wearing some kind of turtleneck and his arm when it was in shot was covered in what seemed like armour, but it was only when blue-armoured hands found his shoulders and Pepper Potts-Stark gently but firmly pulled the boy away from the camera did they gain perspective on what it actually was.
Several people swore simultaneously.
Standing on the screen was Peter Parker, face contorted with grief and wearing the Iron Spider suit.