There was smoke.
No, not quite smoke. More like dust, billowing up in huge clouds from the rubble of what was an apartment complex minutes before. It choked Peter through his mask, invaded his nose and mouth and dried out the layer of mucus from his throat all the way to the bottom of his lungs.
Even so, he soared through the dust and dirt with three blood soaked and mud caked people clinging onto each arm. He deposited them a few feet away from the first ambulance he saw and swung away towards the ruins without looking back.
Through the dust he saw bodies trapped beneath stones. He saw men and women struggling to keep their children above the water that had begun to flood the basement, unable to escape the concrete blocked the door. It blurred the scenes of horror, and Peter was almost grateful that he didn’t have to fully see the confused eyes of a toddler whose mother’s lungs had been crushed by a steel beam.
Fires charred the bones of the elderly. Dirty water filled the chests of nearly fourty people. And too many people, hundreds upon hundreds, were crushed and choked by thousands of tons of cement and metal all collapsing over them.
Hours passed as Peter evacuated what must have been a thousand people. God, how could one building hold so many victims?
Finally, with no real memory of how it happened, Peter was standing next to the police and watching the machines carefully lift away the heaviest of the rubble, the chunks of concrete even he couldn’t move.
He didn’t have to close his eyes when the corpses came. They were nothing more than splatters of blood and pulverized bone.
Night fell. The sky turned red. A police man turned to him. “Spider-Man,” he said, “you can leave now. The only people we’re gonna find now aren’t gonna be alive. Thank you for what you did.”
Peter, though, shook his head, looking on the as clusters of reporters and civilians swarmed around the scene like ants. “No. Something worse is coming. I can feel it.”
”...Feel it?”
”Are you really going to question a guy who can climb walls and lift half of a building?”
The man went silent. Peter turned his attention back to the remains of the building. Nerves buzzed throughout his body like an electric current. He wanted to leave, to go home and eat pizza with May, but something rooted him to the spot.
Then, Peter saw it. A collapsed window frame was lifted from the ground and a single body was revealed underneath it, twisted and contorted in a way no human should ever be. Long brown hair was matted with blood, cracked pink glasses lay discarded to her side. None of this was troubling, though.
Peter was only concerned when he saw a tattoo on the corpse’s wrist, one he had seen a million times before. A bluebird, one May had drawn herself, one May had been wanting to show her best friend for months and who she had finally visited in her apartment that night.
May Parker lay beneath the rubble, pale and broken and dead.
Peter didn’t stop to tell the officer where he was going. He briefly heard his nickname being called out from behind him but he was already sprinting to the machinery, leaping over chunks of concrete and spots of what was once bone but was now dust. He disregarded the shocked shouts of workers and onlookers as he rushed to that splotch of blue on olive.
He skidded to his knees next to her and felt broken glass carve into his skin but he didn’t care. He was finding it hard to breathe. It must have been the dust, he thought, finally filling his lungs to capacity and rendering oxygen obselete.
Up close he could see the details, the dried string of blood from her nose, the bends in her arms that were in all the wrong places. He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to have to watch this again. Not again.
Peter’s gloved hand shook as he brushed a stray hair off of May’s pale face. Her brown eyes, usually so full of warmth, stared unseeing, directed straight at his face. He cringed and looked away.
He began to release little choked whines with every exhale, small noises of dispair that could never scale up to the crumbling inside of him. He had missed this part of the building, he had checked it over but May must have died recently, maybe minutes ago, alone and cold and in pain and trapped beneath tons of rubble and bodies, waiting for his nephew to save her.
”May,” he whispered as tears began to wet the red fabric over his face. He felt like he was choking, he couldn’t breathe for the wet dust blocking his mouth. He ripped the mask halfway up his face to rest just below his nose, and he could breathe a little bit better between sobs that he hadn’t even realized were coming.
”May,” he said again, louder, like if he called enough times she’s might wake up and take him home. “May, May, May!”
And he was shouting now, no real words, just an extended cry of anguish ripping from his raw throat. He gasped, drawing in a shuddering breath that was more dirt than air, and continued his hellish wail, louder then when he had tried to plug up Ben’s bullet hole, lower than when he watched the doctors pry his parents out of the metal rod that impaled both of their stomachs on Channel Seven News.
It was then that he noticed the people staring at him, millions of eyes trained on the tears dripping past his lips and mingling with blood on his chin. He no longer felt the gashes on his skin nor the biting cold around him. People were staring at him, at his aunt, who they never knew and had absolutely no right to know now.
He shot up from where he sat and a good bit of the crowd jumped backwards, fear overcoming their pity. He stood uncertainly for a few seconds, his feet planted but ready to run. He debated; he couldn’t leave May here at the mercy of the people, for the government to show away in some community morgue, but how could he take her home without revealing his identity? And what kind of funeral could he give her with his fifteen-dollar-bank-balance?
He made a split second decision. He shot a web to the nearest lamppost and swung away in any direction but home.
——
Later, he would change into civilian clothes and stumble into a cafe, where every person and every television tuned into his grief. They covered their mouths with their hands as tears slipped down their faces and he had to hold his own back. He saw for the first time what he looked like to an outsider; tear-stained, deranged, screaming and clutching onto a random dead body that the world would never understand his relationship to.
Later, Tony Stark would receive word that Peter was alone and rocket to his apartment, only to find it empty. He would search the city but never find Peter. No one would, not for a few months when a lone fisher caught his hook on something much too large to be a fish.
Later, Peter Parker would stumble off of the side of some deep canal. It would be an accident, a mistake blurred by tears and shrouded by misery. And yet, as his body would slam into the hard surface of the dark water he would not regret it. He would wonder if this was how May felt as she disappeared, when she heard the crack of concrete overhead. If this was how Ben felt when the bullet entered his abdomen, how his parents felt when the plane entered turbulence.
Then, he wouldn’t wonder anything at all.
He would just
simply
dissapear.