Peter Parker Imagines Book

What Hurts The Most

32. "I wasn't ready to say goodbye."

Thank you 1-800-Confusion for originally requesting this very angsty prompt, and iloveyou3000peter for reminding me to get a move on with writing the idea I had for it. I was originally going to have this prompt in a crossover fic, but I realized it was taking me way too long to finish writing because of its length, and decided to go with this instead!

Warning(s): 3k pile of Angst. A lot of it. Just prepare yourselves. It's... please tread carefully.

Your alarm had gone off twenty minutes ago, but you were still lying in your bed, unmoving.

You hadn't gone back to sleep, no. It was another bad day. A day where the past did nothing but haunt you. A day when your thoughts drifted back to the horrors of five years ago. A day where you mourned for what was and what could have been. You weren't closing your eyes anytime soon. It would only make things worse.

Days like this brought you back to the beginning of what everyone thought was the end. It completely numbed you.

You weren't sure why it affected you more than most just as much as you knew why. Just like the hundreds of thousands of people in New York alone, you lost. You lost your family. Your friends. Your...

Being admitted into the foster care system at sixteen was the second hardest thing you had to live through. The world was a wreck. No one knew exactly what had happened. Just that for the first time, the Avengers couldn't save them.

No one had wanted you. You bounced from foster home to foster home, but like most kids old enough to understand what had happened to the world, to feel the heavy weight of grief, you had a lot of baggage. Still do. And you're not sure you'll ever completely recover.

You had watched as your entire family disappeared right in front of you. Turned to dust in merely a blink. You had desperately called Peter Parker one last time. And through tear filled eyes, you prayed his aunt would pick up the phone.

They never did.

In that moment, you knew you were truly alone. Left to cry in your empty apartment, the only sign you weren't the only one left in the world the sounds of anguish distant around you. From the other survivors.

You grew up closed off and distant. You couldn't move on, like a lot of kids could. Not in this world, where everyone close to you was gone. None of your family had survived. None of your friends. And according to the news, the Avengers themselves - the ones that came back, that is - were radio silent, having given up. School became your crutch. Something to completely take up your focus. Because if you weren't doing something, all you felt was pain.

This morning was just a remnant of the hurt you tried so hard to work through these last five years, but it was enough to kill any sort of positive feeling you could have possibly had.

You were quiet as you sat up. You could only hear the traffic outside. A sign that the world had adapted. Gone back to normal - or at least as close as normal as it could be. Today, you were a piece of the past. The memories of that day brought forth fresh as if they just happened yesterday.

You were glad that you had laid instead of getting up. It gave you an excuse to panic; to rush to get ready so you wouldn't be late. It distracted your brain.