Chapter 1
There is a subtle comfort in death, a swift and suddenness to its stride. Its soft around the edges, which is, in it's own way, suffocating.
His hands confusedly find their way to his own abdomen, aware of the pain but not entirely feeling it. He grips the soft skin and his blood quickens as he feels the wetness. Hot, gushing blood, pouring out of him like a tired firehose. Peter pinches the side of his stomach, trying to staunch the flow, but he knows, even as he does it, that it will not work.
Noises shift and scutter behind him in the convenient store. Broken glass crunches under Mr. Stark's shoes. He sees the man come into view behind weak eyes. He can't focus, can't center in on one exact thing. Except the crying, he can hear that. Maybe he's the one crying, he's not sure.
He thinks he whispers an apology, but everything is numb and tingling, the edges of his mouth fuzzy like cottonballs. It's the bloodless, and he knows it. Blood pumps out of him so rapidly that he's suprised he's still conscious. He wont be for long. Peter gives up trying to save himself and brings one of his hands to Tony's neck, smearing blood from his jaw to his collarbone as the fingers slowly descend back onto his own chest. His strength has given out. The empty dark embraces him, and he slips away.
But then- then, he doesn't. He does in his own way, an evaporating and a reforming, particles stretching and breaking and forming something entirely new. A new body, which to him, looks quite the same as the one that lays in a pool of blood on the concrete- sans the blood- but soft and painless like a drifting cloud in a clear sky.
Peter takes his first breath in his new body and finds that it doesn't bring him any true feeling. No physical rush of air in lungs, no throbbing pulse at his neck. Not a terrible feeling, but it is strange, new. He's the fullness at the center of something hollow, empty, space taken away and replaced with a thick, blank thing. The terror of that reality brings him instant panic, and he is back in reality. Still away and out of his body, but now, an observer without any real power.
Tony lifts the body in a swift swoop of adrenaline, slinging the limp body across his arms and against his shoulder. He whispers to the dead body as he carries him, "It's okay; you're going to be okay.", and he won't be, because he's already away but not away. Peter tries to reach out and grab him, but Tony passes through him without any effort.
"Mr. Stark!" He cries, watching his own corpse swing against his mentor's body with a heaviness it never had in life. Tony doesn't hear him and Peter should know this, should understand that he is here but not here, and he shouldn't be. Memories of church and high ceilings, statues of the Virgin Mary and the infant Lord, a promise of Heaven if you tried hard enough. May was never about that lifestyle, but his mother had been. He remembers it clearly and deeply, and wonders if he wasn't a good person, and that is why he has not gone to Heaven.
Tony takes him to the motel across the street, Peter's lifeless limbs swaying with the movement. The kid follows him, and watches as he frantically bangs on one of the doors. It opens, and a woman stands confusedly beyond the threshold. Theres no time to explain, so Tony pushes past her and darts to the bathroom, clinging to Peter's body and hyperventilating.
"Who is that? Should I call the police?" She screams, terrified. She backs away, fearing that something is wrong with Tony, and for a moment, Peter thinks that she's going to grab some sort of a weapon, but no, it's a phone. She dials 911. "Is he breathing?" She shouts, and there's a pause on Tony's end. Peter follows cautiously the man's footsteps to the restroom.
He's got the body in the shower-bath, water running red around his body. Tony's cleaning the wound, searching for where it starts and where it ends; the largest wound Peter has ever seen. He recoils away from his own corpse. Even had he been taken to the hospital, this is and was a fatal injury. Mr. Stark works, despite this, to save him.
"What's your name?" Asks Tony to the woman, who enters the room with her cellphone in hand. She clicks it off.
"An ambulance is on it's way. I'm Amanda."
"Amanda," Stark orders, "do you have Tampons?" An odd question. Were it not for the situation, Peter would be laughing.
The woman shuffles to her medicine cabinet and pulls out a small box of Tampax Supers. She hands them to Tony, who pulls out a handful and rips them open with his teeth. He plunges the cotton tube out of the tip with the applicator and repeats this with three others, and he inserts them into the wound.
It almost works for a minute. The blood slows, only a few droplets drain from the laceration down the side of the tub and into the drain. Tony uses the time wisely. He shakily runs a bloody hand across his brow, smearing the stuff all over his skin.
"A sewing kit. Do you have a sewing kit?"
The woman falters. "I don't, but I could ask the guy next door."
"Do that!" He commands.
As soon as she leaves, he weakens a bit, a muted scream leaking from the back of his throat. It's the sound a lost child makes when a mother or father slips out of sight. He jolts, then, clambers over the side of the tub and and feels for a pulse. None, which Peter knows and expects, but it breaks his heart all the same to watch this wonderful man fall apart at the edges despite his best efforts.
"Come on Pete," he ushers, leaning over the tub and shaking his shoulders. Peter watches in agony.
Compressions start slow and unsure, an inexperienced stand-in paramedic, trying and failing to revive his kid. "Peter," he sobs, heaving over the body as he attempts to resuscitate the boy. "Please don't do this."
"I'm sorry." Peter whispers behind him, wishing that he could do something to help him. And he wants to live, too, but there is some resistant acceptance that he is coming to find in being dead. To reverse it now would change him, leave him differently than he's always been. He is dead, and there is no changing that.
It takes twenty minutes for the ambulance to arrive. It's also the same time Amanda returns with a small sewing kit, hoping and expecting to help save the boy. She stops in the doorway at the sight of Tony Stark, sitting in the wet and bloodied tub, a dead boy with four tampons lodged in his abdomen, limp, wrapped tightly in a shaking embrace.
When the EMTs try to take Peter from him, he refuses to let go. And in truth he's not sure if he ever can.